By W. Ryan Wishart, R. Jonna, and Cade Jameson (the authors are doctoral students at the University of Oregon with interests in political economy and environmental sociology)
There is a great deal of well deserved excitement about the Powershift conference this weekend and its potential as a springboard for an environmental and social justice movement. Even the name “Powershift” is radical in its implication, in the literal sense of grasping a problem at its root. Who possesses power today and who needs to have more (or less) to reach our goals? Energy Action has a tradition of examining environmental problems in the light of racial and class-based power inequalities and oppression. In line with the conference’s stated goal to “Understand the magnitude of both the challenges and opportunities presented by the climate crisis and explore our own capacities to create transformative change,” we hope to contribute to this discussion of the nature of the current power structure and who must be the constituencies of a movement strong enough to “create transformative change.”
The current economic crisis has laid bare that power in society is political-economic and that the balance of power in Washington is steeply tilted in favor of hedge fund owners, not homeowners. The class struggle occurring in the fight over the big three automakers is illustrative of the “magnitude of the challenges” we face. This essay is divided into two parts. First, we examine the power structures and class struggles made more clearly visible by the crisis and introduce readers to critical political economic perspectives. Second, we use the auto bailout controversy to illustrate the importance and opportunity for interlinking environmental movements with the labor movement at the grassroots level.
Pt.2
In 1966 Baran and Sweezy argued that leadership of the U.S. business class were unwilling to allow civilian government spending to grow to a point where it threatened their private provision of goods and services and that point had been reached at the height of the New Deal in 1939. Indeed, recent analysis by Foster and McChesney has shown that although civilian government consumption and investment in most advanced capitalist nations has gone far beyond, the US has never exceeded about 15% of GDP and in 2007 it was only the same proportion as in 1939.
The reasons for this are straightforward. Beyond some minimal level, real estate interests oppose public housing; private health care interests and medical professionals oppose public health care; insurance companies oppose public insurance programs; private education interests oppose public education; and so on. The big exceptions to this are highways and prisons within civilian government spending, together with military spending.
Clearly, this politically imposed limit on non-military spending must be broken, even shattered, to deal with the social needs brought on by the economic crisis and restructure the economy to avoid climate change and ecological disaster. But how can this be accomplished? Only by a massive political mobilization that drastically reshapes our democracy and our economy. This means a merging of common struggles for justice and doing away with superficial distinctions between ecological and social components. The response of many rank and file auto workers to the crisis threatening their families demonstrates such potential. They contain a recognition of the potential for radical change lacking in centrist environmental and labor leaders.
The rank and file auto workers themselves have a proposal that is far more socially progressive, ecologically radical, and potentially effective than what is indicated in the previous example of Breakthough’s article. The organizers of the December 8th Auto Worker Caravan issued a straightforward call for a radical transformation of the industry, not simply better fuel efficiency:
Transform the Auto Industry. Congress needs to establish a new national industrial policy that will transform the auto and other industries. We need to expand our efforts to produce fuel-efficient automobiles and electric cars, green energy technologies such as wind turbines, and mass transportation such as light rail and high-speed trains.
Rather than simply replacing the private interests in charge of the industry they are demanding public funding be accompanied by public control providing the opportunity for direct representation for labor and environmental interests in company decision making:
No Investment without Representation. It’s our money, so we want accountability. The U.S. government or other levels of government should have a say, providing public control when either financial assistance or tax abatement is provided to corporations. Just as we say, “No taxation without representation,” so we should say, “No investment without representation.
They are calling for a national single-payer health care system to benefit the entire public, going far beyond a meager “Health care for Hybrids” subsidy of industry health care costs in return innovation in hybrids-which would pad auto-company profits and be swallowed up by our parasitic private health care system as much or more than it benefited workers.
Many of the Caravan’s organizers’ own words are an unambiguous call for a unified Worker-Green front against the narrow class interests represented in the boardroom and in Washington, Wendy Thompson said on Democracy Now! (Friday, December 5th):
Well, we’re going to Washington in a caravan, because we think it’s very important that a rank-and-file worker point of view come into this debate. We don’t think it’s a question of saving corporations…we think a comprehensive reformed industry has to happen…expand the industry to become transportation-based and alternative energy-based…instead of closing these factories, why don’t we start to build products like light rail for mass transit or wind turbines for alternative energy?…We think that as autoworkers, that we have to stand firmly with saving the environment and saving the planet and that if the auto corporations aren’t doing it, the people have to take control here and say this is what has to happen. And that’s the point of view we want to get across. We represent all working people.
Mark Brenner and Jane Slaughter write:
The Big Three’s too-little, too-late proposals to raise fuel efficiency and build hybrids will barely make a dent… American engineers can … develop an alternative to the gasoline engine. Mass transit, light rail and high-speed rail are also desperately needed. We could produce this century’s answer to the interstate highway system, transforming our nation’s industrial capacity in the process….By investing in vehicles that don’t run on gas, by overhauling our transportation network and by adopting universal health care we could save Detroit and the economy, securing our nation’s environment and retirement security in the process.
Such a proposal carries the advantage of directly confronting the structural irrationality of our current transportation and health care systems. Furthermore, they propose to achieve this more sweeping change by shifting control of the industries from management and Wall Street, whose interests as a class lie primarily in productivity as defined by profits and return on investments already sunk into the current pathological systems (not to mention their privileged economic and political social positions), to workers and the public whose primary common concern is meeting their needs for transport and medical care. The latter are far more compatible with the rapid development and deployment of sustainable technologies.
However, the current political establishment is in greater part governed by and for the former. Rational, democratic economic planning requires new political realities of what is possible. Workers in Chicago have fought just to be compensated for work they have already done while the public’s need for energy efficient doors and windows they produce is going unmet. Their bold occupation is already reshaping political realities, garnering widespread public support, and highlighting the irrationality and injustice of the status quo. Faced with similar circumstances workers in the Global South have long taken matters a step further: democratizing the production process with the motto “Occupy, Resist, Produce”. But as we are faced with an ecological as well as economic crisis it is also critical to gain democratic control over how the economic surplus of our society in invested so as to create new ecological forms of production-democratizing the use of unsustainable forms of production is not enough.
The rank and file caravan is a sign of potential grassroots uprising in the labor movement that is reaching across in solidarity for ecological sustainability and environmental justice. Business has successfully applied divide and conquer tactics against labor and environmental movements from the lumber yards of the Pacific Northwest to the coalfields of the Southeast largely succeeding in protecting profits at the cost of wages, job security, streams, owls, and workers’ lungs. Given this history, any proposals from the environmental side which does not include the same spirit of solidarity with labor should be viewed as grossly inadequate at best.
Curbing climate change and humanely confronting the economic crisis will require not simply ideas from think-tanks and academics to sway public opinion (as if elected officials did not regularly govern in defiance of public opinion anyway) but real political organization in workplaces and the streets capable of creating vastly different political landscape. Our ability to create programs for “green jobs” which are good jobs along with policies guaranteed to meet working people’s needs is critical to building such a movement. As Harry Hopkins said during the last Depression “People don’t eat in the long run. They eat every day.” Viewed in this way, single payer health care is an important part of gaining the political power to address climate change.
See you all at Powershift!
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