[Marxism] From socialism to eco-socialism. (Was: Investment, investment, investment)
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Ralph, thanks for your clarification and apologies for mis-interpreting your passage where you counterposed the possible versus the impossible. A reduction in the consumption of stuff and a return to a simpler life closer to nature can be promoted on several different levels. For this, some anecdotal evidence: When I was teaching Marx's Capital to undergraduate students, it seemed to me that they felt as bad about being too much in love with consumer goods as about being exploited. I tried to explain that Marx's concept of commodity fetishism is not the same as modern consumerism. They simply didn't believe me and said, yes commodity fetishism (as they understood it, i.e., consumerism) is bad, and they are guilty of too much consumerism. I inherited some money and am using it to subsidize local young people, many from working class families, whose passion is urban farming. I live an easy bike ride away from downtown in a working class area of Salt Lake City where the lots happen to be big and real estate prices low. I purchased old houses with big lots near my home when they became available and am renting some of this real estate at low rates to young farmers, who happily grow vegetables and chickens and meat rabbits on their half acre lots while enjoying the easy commuting distance to downtown and the University. In two cases now I gave bridge loans so that young families could purchase a run-down house with a big lot, then fix up the house and then re-finance. (Banks will not give mortgages on run-down houses.) Some of them work for a CSA, or grow vegetables for high-end restaurants, others work for the bicycle collective which promotes sustainable transportation and makes, among others, refurbished old bicycles available for the homeless. I discovered to my surprise that almost everybody lived for some time in the Anarchist Boing! collective in SLC, that is how they knew each other and how they congregated on this particular area of the city. Some of them go on intercontinental airplane trips in winter, which of course effaces all their carbon savings. Things are self-contradictory, but for most of of them the environmental catastrophe is an issue. The popularity of Niko Paech among students in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, and the entire de-growth movement in Europe, originally coming from France, are also signs that the lifestyle which you call self-immolation has appeal to today's youth. If you look at the Videos of the De-Growth conference in Leipzig in 2014, it was organized and attended by people who look like students (over 3000 people attended). Religion is also important here, the pope's encyclical is amazingly radical. Also the Unitarians and other religions say that a lifestyle which damages the planet is immoral. If you really think that all humans are equal then you must live with a carbon footprint of 2.3 tons of CO2 per year or similar. Also the entire transition town movement. Even in my own community, a cohousing community, retired people or empty nesters are passionate about gardening. They love working the soil and seeing things grow. These are all examples of movements promoting frugal lifestyles. This cannot be the whole solution, we also have to make political changes. But living on a leaner carbon footprint is something almost everybody can do and activists must be able to give guidance how to do it. It is radical because it requires a break with the culture and the ideas of a good life and even the self-identity of many people, based on the expectation that we can continue to live with dozens so-called energy slaves. Instead of dreaming to be astronauts, people have to dream about sustainable year-round urban farming systems with aquaponics :) It is already happening in subcultures, the question is how to generalize it quickly enough. There are also efforts to make coalitions between the labor movement and the environmental movement. This is a different important area of work. Hans G Ehrbar _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] From socialism to eco-socialism. (Was: Investment, investment, investment)
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Hans Ehrbar wrote Ralph said, among others (here is my paraphrase and elaboration): if we sacrifice, we do what capital wants us to do anyway, the only way to win against capital is to demand the impossible -- Rather than and instead of that, here is what I said: "The only agency of successful change is plainly still the working class. That includes change from a system no longer able to cope to a system where it might be possible to save ourselves and our environs. And that change only will come through a deep understanding of the context in which we act. Which to me includes, romantically enough, the whole metabolic capital system and within it the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Which with its preamble surplus extraction only from variable capital is essential to maintaining our bearings. That to me - tangentially and maybe oddly enough - includes support for any activity which appears likely to be in the interests of all of us, as workers in an antagonistic, life-or-death confrontation with capital - including a Bernie Sanders-warts-and-all but with a lifetime in the political muck making demands, in a way which obtains for his message the maximum practicable hearing, in which all are able to recognize themselves and their lives and, for reasons we can all sooner or later appreciate, which capital can no longer accommodate and is therefore seen as wanting." Since that was not clear, let me apologize and try to elaborate: Sanders has tasked himself to make demands which, in the main, are social-democratic, and are not too different from Eisenhower-era welfarism, before Reagan's attack on the working class, but which capital as presently constituted can no longer accede to, including as we know: a full-on assault against the 1%, and against the corrupt campaign contributions system; we have no difficulty following that, and what it means for our life chances; a Medicare-for-all, single-payer health care system; the "health care" and pharmaceutical industries own the Congress, and this for capital and its legislative servants is a non-viable demand, but one that resonates widely with all in the working class; a "living wage", $15 an hour for now; the corporate Congress of course can't allow that either. If you can't build a movement to get a $15 minimum wage, you don't have any hope to get anything more radical than that. But to demand it is to test the system. If it can't deliver, that is there for all to see; in the most unlikely event that a compromise raise well below that modest figure were even reached by this Congress and the executive, it would serve as the floor for further demands that cannot and will not be met, but which, if Sanders pushes, are perfectly fair and just to most; free education for all through college, as a right for all; not affordable by the corporate state any longer in its stage of over-stretched indebtedness, its increased dependence on the credit economy - a protracted, stagnating, unstable economy, in which college-age indebtedness has become institutionalized. But millions of younger people are affected, and are or soon will be in debt bondage for life. The demand for tuition-free education therefore will be fought by capital tooth and nail as well, exposing the system for its failure; "decent" jobs, including repatriation of jobs lost overseas; also not deliverable by capital, when the trend is toward part-time, just-in-time, unpaid overtime, automation, offshoring, and benefits trending downward as a result; expansion of social security; capital is gung ho to destroy it, to privatize it; a third rail as is said, which capital in its drive for sources of profit and a more favorable return on investment seemingly cannot resist; more importantly, in his agenda for change Sanders advocates selectively, not jumping too far ahead of where most people are, but in the main and where feasible focusing on demands which capital cannot meet, and with which people can identify. Which earns him bad press which we all may well be seeing through as we hear his message elsewhere and connect more and more dots. And when his demands (including others I haven’t mentioned such as those concerning the banks) are rejected, it is the system he attacks, and no longer just its corporate personifications and its political satraps, that is seen to be failing all the rest of the people. How can we find fault with that? How much farther than that can we expect to go at this time? How far is that from helping to generate organizing that goes beyond the circus-atmosphere of the 18-month long
Re: [Marxism] From socialism to eco-socialism. (Was: Investment, investment, investment)
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Hans Ehrbar wrote Here is a new start in my attempts to communicate with you what I consider the main oversights of the socialist movement today. == You speak of pyrrhic action when the imperative practicable appears to be absent, use “only bicyle, foot,and train", "since nationalization of the polluting energy sector is not achievable, we have to aim for the second best, namely, their regulation”, "explain to the masses in the rich countries that they must learn to live well with less, and that it is possible to meet all their needs with much less stuff". I don't dispute this. The situation is so dire that I see running out and shouting the alarm on the highway as not even inappropriate. I'll wander a bit here: In 1957 I with about a dozen and a half or so others piled into cars and vans from LA and SF and went to ground zero, some fifty miles above Las Vegas, in order to be at that spot when a nuclear weapon test was scheduled to explode. It was all very choreographed; we were led by A.J. Muste of the Committee for Nonviolent Action (Dorothy Day of Catholic Worker was for some reason stuck in NYC), who conferred with Atomic Energy Commission officials, informing them of our every move, so that we would not be stopped unnecessarily on the ground that we were trespassing on federal restricted property conspiratorially, and thus subject to felony prosecution. Of course, when we had gone a distance toward the Nevada test site sufficient to invoke security all were arrested, and later released and charged with misdemeanors. It felt good, and noble. Needless to say, Gandhi was largely our inspiration, and E.P. Thompson and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament did similar things later at Aldermaston. We affected a small number of others at best as I was later able to see. We had nothing like the greater effect of many others, such as SCLC and SNCC actions against racism later. I am no longer a pacifist nor particularly an anarchist except as I believe in their not-often-enough-invoked precept that in our relations with one another, in all meetings and actions, in our lives generally, all proceedings in so far as possible take place under open democratic and egalitarian conditions, respecting the opinions and rights of all (as was the case with Occupy for the most part). And that our actions embody the principle expressed in the name, "an-" as against and "-archy" as domination. No "vanguard" in any "small group knows best how to impose the line of march" manner. So, I wonder still and yet. What do we learn from our history? How and with what means and forces do we affect the otherwise inexorable course of capital in current history? Is it by demanding the impracticable and the improbable, or the impossible? Is it by precept and parable, by pyrrhic sacrifice? From starting from where we are with the do-able? And then, who the hell are WE, until we are recognized by others as a WE bearing along with us some perceived usefulness? And I feel in a way as though we are all on this planet in a small canvas craft, and that, given our condition of privatism/individualism/no-tomorrowism/"let-the-other-guy-as-leader-figure-it-out-ism", in the context of our capitalist surroundings, we don't perceive the danger to us all until it is lapping at our wales and thwarts and threatening each personally. Whereupon we bail, for dear life, perhaps too late. But I can have no quarrel with a watch on the prow with a scope on the horizon while we paddle and bail. And that to me is what people like Michael Roberts are doing - seeking to find our bearings in a sea of capital predation so that we might conceivably reach the shore - or not. The only agency of successful change is plainly still the working class. That includes change from a system no longer able to cope to a system where it might be possible to save ourselves and our environs. And that change only will come through a deep understanding of the context in which we act. Which to me includes, romantically enough, the whole metabolic capital system and within it the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Which with its preamble surplus extraction only from variable capital is essential to maintaining our bearings. That to me - tangentially and maybe oddly enough - includes support for any activity which appears likely to be in the interests of all of us, as workers in an antagonistic, life-or-death confrontation with capital - including a Bernie Sanders-warts-and-all but with a lifetime in the political muck making demands, in a way which obtains for his message the maximum
Re: [Marxism] From socialism to eco-socialism. (Was: Investment, investment, investment)
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * All these issues are taken up in Climate & Capitalism frequently: http://climateandcapitalism.com/ But I'd add a few comments: (1) One of the complications of the 'nationalisation' demand is that power industries targeted are not ensconced in an expanding market as there is a profit damaging shift to renewables. In effect you'd take over zombie capital. We do need renewables but the key reclamation is the grid and not the power stations. And even there, there is a community shift to localised energy production that is outside the national grid. So 'nationalisation' kinda doesn't say it all.It obscures the reality. (2) '*Green illusions: The dirty secrets of clean energy and the future of environmentalism', *by Ozzie Zehner tackles the consumption issue with some good research. http://links.org.au/node/3750 (3) The challenge with green politics is engineering demands that will mobilize millions --that register in consciousness and suggest activity. And that's a hard ask. In part that's why the scam carbon tax or market registers because it seems concrete. (4) While we want a huge investment in renewables and public transport we want that from the state. We also need retrofitting of housing for sustainabilityetc But unless we can sponsor the jobs growth in new climate/sustainability industries you won't win the 'reduce consumption' argument without the job security in place. (5) That said: I think there is another focus that socialist tend to neglect -- and this is being debated in GLW at the moment. We neglect agriculture. The Socalist Alliance has a very good ag policy platform: http://socialist-alliance.org/sites/default/files/policy/Agriculture.pdf But i reckon another demand we can bandy about is to raise the national soil organic matter (SOM) by a clear percentile. France has just adopted a 0.4% target per year https://theconversation.com/france-has-a-great-plan-for-its-soil-and-its-not-just-about-wine-47335 Indeed if there is any 'reform' campaign that can impact on pace of the climate change express train it lies with fiddling with agriculture rather than projecting immediate changes to consumption. After all you can still produce junk with solar energy. The food and agriculture focus also opens up a whole sway of alliances such as with outfits like La Via Campesina and draws folks attention toward the collective -- Ist and 3rd world -- nature of the climate challenge http://viacampesina.org/en/ dave riley _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] From socialism to eco-socialism. (Was: Investment, investment, investment)
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Patrick is asking who must reduce consumption. Not those living from pay check to pay check but everybody else, both in the rich countries and the emerging elite in the BRICS countries. My inspirations are Econ Prof Niko Paech in Germany, the climate scientist Kevin Anderson in the UK, the activist/communicator George Marshall in the UK, the scientist and government adviser John Schellnhuber from Germany. Niko Paech is perhaps the most consistent, he only uses bicyle, foot, and train. Has no cell phone, always wears the same suit. He often gets invited by students to German speaking Universities and speaks to overflow crowds. Those who understand German should listen to his talks and interviews on YouTube, he has interesting and very radical ideas. Dividing the global carbon budget for staying below 2 centigrades by the number of people alive on this planet he says that our goal must be a CO2 footprint of 2-4 tons per year per person, instead of right now Germany having 11 tons and the US having 18 tons per year. Although this is a radical decrease in consumption in the rich countries, students gobble it up, and debates how best to live with minimal carbon footprint are usual occurrences in German TV or on German speaking youtube. Paech is not the only one who says we have to get down to 2-4 tons of CO2 per year. Hans G Ehrbar _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] From socialism to eco-socialism. (Was: Investment, investment, investment)
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Hi comrades, Persuasive! I've been hanging out more in Johannesburg (I'm moving full-time to a university there in May, from my Durban base the last dozen years where I developed more of the eco-socialist angles especially on climate). And in Joburg I find this is the direction taken by the city's leading socialist trade unionists (e.g. in the metalworkers - people like Dinga Sikwebu), NGO activists (e.g. Womin in Mining which combines eco-feminism, anti-extractivism and socialism), and intellectuals (e.g. in the Democratic Marxism series of Wits University Press, edited by people like Vishwas Satgar, Jackie Cock and Michelle Williams). Your argument will fall on fertile soil here. A couple of nuances, though: On 2016/02/21 06:15 PM, Hans G Ehrbar via Marxism wrote: ... The biggest shift which socialists have to make, in my view, is to explain to the masses in the rich countries that they must learn to live well with less, and that it is possible to meet all their needs with much less stuff. This is important to adjust, in my view, so that the "with less" applies not mainly to the "masses" but to the over-consumptive classes (as well as those in the South, such as myself). Would you not make the distinction between whatever level (top 20%, 30%?) should pare down consumption (especially carbon footprint-related) and the majority who if they lost a month's pay might be deep in the red? There's a video whose network I was involved in for awhile, which has been seen by 50 million people (I helped on the version fighting carbon trading and even that obscure topic attracted more than a million views, with its attack on banksters doing climate policy): http://www.storyofstuff.org ... and I haven't seen anything more powerful than Annie's analysis of the entire system of capitalist circuitry from production to reproduction, across extraction through to disposal. Have a look and see if this is the sort of eco-socialist messaging you have in mind. At the time, I had hoped that movements like Occupy - and now the Sanders campaign - would start to make anti-capitalist and even explicitly socialist narratives more palatable in these sorts of projects. Maybe in future that can be done with increasingly clever media innovations. Is there anything you have in mind, Hans, that's a model for reaching out to the masses in your neighbourhood? The second biggest shift is that even the most revolutionary socialists must embrace reforms. We in the US, Europe, Canada, Australia do not have the power to overturn the capitalist regime quickly enough to implement the necessary changes in time. We must try to build the necessary structures within capitalism. On Feb 17, Raghu said on Pen-l that, since nationalization of the polluting energy sector is not achievable, we have to aim for the second best, namely, their regulation. This should not be dismissed but discussed seriously among socialists. Yes, that's why I appreciate so much the debate Joseph Green introduced me to, about the carbon tax proposals of Jim Hansen and others /only working at the margins - /i.e. achieving incremental changes by adjusting consumption, depending upon price elasticity - when we need full-fledged regulation. The standard historical comparison is to FDR's takeover of the auto industry for war production purposes. The EPA is probably sufficiently empowered to "regulate" the polluting coal-fired powerplants and coal mines /by shutting them down. /That's the kind of firm, radical reform that anyone doing climate activism would agree is now necessary. Andre Gorz distinguished between reformist and non-reformist reforms. In South African social policy debates, these distinctions are often vital. Cheers, Patrick _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] From socialism to eco-socialism. (Was: Investment, investment, investment)
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Here is a new start in my attempts to communicate with you what I consider the main oversights of the socialist movement today. Many people are concerned about environmental degradation, almost every week there is new alarming news, from record low maximum arctic sea ice to the ominous "cold blob" in the North Atlantic to the melting of Antarctica to a super El Nino. People look around to see who can give them leadership. They are overwhelmed because many changes are necessary for the social order, which has been optimized over the last two centuries to promote capitalist profits, to switch over to today's urgent task of building a sustainable economy. If the socialist opposition wants to become this leader, they must change along with pretty much everything else in society. Socialism must become eco-socialism. Traditionally, socialists are trying to heal the class-based rifts in society. This is not identical to, although it is highly related with, what is on the agenda today, namely, healing the rift between humans and the rest of nature. The biggest shift which socialists have to make, in my view, is to explain to the masses in the rich countries that they must learn to live well with less, and that it is possible to meet all their needs with much less stuff. The second biggest shift is that even the most revolutionary socialists must embrace reforms. We in the US, Europe, Canada, Australia do not have the power to overturn the capitalist regime quickly enough to implement the necessary changes in time. We must try to build the necessary structures within capitalism. On Feb 17, Raghu said on Pen-l that, since nationalization of the polluting energy sector is not achievable, we have to aim for the second best, namely, their regulation. This should not be dismissed but discussed seriously among socialists. Another big shift is the following: from many decades of losing battles, we socialists have come to expect that capitalism is incredibly resilient and popular. This is no longer the case. The ecological catastrophe is a huge blow to capitalism. The entire system is becoming more and more like a paper tiger, people are clamoring for alternatives. This is why capitalists are so afraid of reforms and regulation: they know this is the beginning of their end. Many socialists do not recognize that capitalism right now is deeply on the defensive, because the blow which put them on the defensive did not come from the working class. The falling rate of profits is the textbook example of an inner contradiction. Marx was of the view that capitalism would be able to overcome and integrate every exterior obstacle, the only thing which will topple it is its inner contradictions. We know now that Marx was wrong: environmental catastrophe cannot be overcome by capitalism, and it is not a reliable source for profits because the pie is shrinking. If Michael Roberts defends the falling rate of profits today, i.e., if he concentrates on the inner contradictions of capitalism instead of investigating the exterior crash between capitalist growth and the limitations of our planet, he is faithful to Marx but he is conducting yesterday's battles. His time series are nice for understanding the past, but they are irrelevant for the future because the future will be different from the past. Insurance companies know this, socialists should know this too. Hans G Ehrbar _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
