>On Saturday, May 29, 1999 at 12:50:56 (-0400) Doug Henwood writes:
>>...
>>Aside from the lack of constituency (other than foundation program officers
>>and dispensers of government contracts), most of the community organizers
>>I've talked wtih have no big picture analysis at all - they only care about
>>their particular neighborhood, or issue, or demographic group. That doesn't
>>make them bad people, but it does help explain why they've been so
>>ineffective, and why they're so susceptible to co-optation.
>
>I think this deserves repeating and amplification. This is a crucial
>point: Parochialism invites co-optation. The reason is simple: you
>have a particular problem and a rich benefactor offers to help you
>solve it so you accept the help, without realizing the connection of
>the benefactor to the underlying causes of this problem and others
>like it elsewhere.
Exactly. There's also quite a positive hostility towards big-picture thinking among a lot of activists. Some years ago I was on a conference panel with a community organizer in NYC who was going on about the need for encouraging small business development in the city. I responded by saying that this reflexive endorsement of small business really needed to be thought through, since small businesses pay lower wages and offer fewer benefits than larger ones, show higher injury rates, and are less likely to offer training. His response was a plea not to get lost in "the paralysis of analysis."
About 10 years ago I did a story on a bunch of housing activists in the Bronx who were complaining about maltreatment of their neighborhood by Freddie Mac, the mortgage securitizer. I asked them if they worried about the danger of too much credit coming into the neighborhood to finance gentrification and displacement if they got what they wanted. The leader of the group told me they didn't care about that, all they cared about was the immediate matter at hand.
>[The recently maligned David Harvey has a very good paragraph on
>p. 400 of his book *Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference*
>about the dangers of parochialism which I tried to scan in, but recent
>electrical storms here have left my HP scanner catatonic.]
Ah the advantages of buried power lines! Here's the passage. Though Harvey's style is a bit windy for my taste, he does try to think seriously about the kinds of problems that activists and romantics don't like thinking about.
Doug
----
from David Harvey's Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, pp. 399-401.
But as a movement embedded in multiple "militant particularisms," it has to find a way to cross that problematic divide between action that is deeply embedded in place, in local experience, power conditions and social relations to a much more general movement. And like the working-class movement, it has proven, in Williams (1989a: 115) words, "always insufficiently aware of the quite systematic obstacles which stood in the way." The move from tangible solidarities felt as patterns of social bonding in affective and knowable communities to a more abstract set of conceptions with universal meaning involves a move from one level of abstraction - attached to place - to quite different levels of abstraction capable of reaching across a space in which communities could not be known in the same unmediated ways. Furthermore, principles developed out of the experience of Love Canal or the fight in Warren County do not necessarily travel to places where environmental and social conditions are radically different. And in that move from the particular to the general something was bound to be lost. In comes, Williams notes, "the politics of negation, the politics of differentiation, the politics of abstract analysis. And these, whether we liked them or not, were now necessary even to understand what was happening." And in the case of the environmental justice movement the constant search for media attention and an iconography of events around which to build a symbolic politics carries its own negative freight.
But it is exactly here that some of the empowering rhetoric of environmental justice itself becomes a liability. Appealing to "the sacredness of Mother Earth," for example, does not help arbitrate complex conflicts over how to organize material production and distribution in a world grown dependent upon sophisticated market interrelations and commodity production through capital accumulation. The demand to cease the production of all toxins, hazardous wastes, and radioactive materials, if taken literally, would prove disastrous to the public health and well-being of large segments of the population, including the poor (Greenpeace's parallel campaign to ban the use of chlorine is an excellent example of the contradictions in such a politics). And the right to be free of ecological destruction is posed so strongly as a negative right that it appears to preclude the positive right to transform the earth in ways conducive to the well-being of the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed. To be sure, the environmental justice movement does incorporate positive rights particularly with respect to the rights of all people to "political, cultural, and environmental self-determination" but here the internal contradictions within the movement become blatant.
At this conjuncture, therefore, all of those militant particularist movements around the world that loosely come together under the umbrella of environmental justice and the environmentalism of the poor are faced with a critical choice. They can either ignore the contradictions, remain with the confines of their own particularist militancies - fighting an incinerator here, a toxic waste dump there, a World Bank dam project somewhere else, and commercial logging in yet another place - or they can treat the contradictions as a fecund nexus to create a more transcendent and universal politics. If they take the latter path, they have to find a discourse of universality and generality that unites the emancipatory quest for social justice with a strong recognition that social justice is impossible without environmental justice (and vice versa). But any such discourse has to transcend the narrow solidarities and particular affinities shaped in particular places - the preferred milieu of most grass roots environmental activism - and adopt a politics of abstraction capable of reaching out across space, across the multiple environmental and social conditions that constitute the geography of difference in a contemporary world that capitalism has intensely shaped to its own purposes. And it has to do this without abandoning its militant particularist base.
The abstractions cannot rest solely upon a moral politics dedicated to protecting the sanctity of Mother Earth. It has to deal in the material and institutional issues of how to organize production and distribution in general, how to confront the realities of global power politics and how to displace the hegemonic powers of capitalism not simply with dispersed, autonomous, localized, and essentially communitarian solutions (apologists for which can be found on both right and left ends of the political spectrum), but with a rather more complex politics that recognizes how environmental and social justice must be sought by a rational ordering of activities at different scales. The reinsertion of the idea of "rational ordering" indicates that such a
movement will have no option, as it broadens out from its militant particularist base, but to reclaim for itself a noncoopted and nonperverted version of the theses of ecological modernization. On the one hand that means subsuming the highly geographically differentiated desire for cultural autonomy and dispersion, for the proliferation of tradition and difference within a more global politics, but on the other hand making the quest for environmental and social justice central rather than peripheral concerns.
For that to happen, the environmental justice movement has to radicalize the ecological modernization discourse. And that requires confronting the fundamental underlying processes (and their associated power structures, social relations, institutional configurations, discourses, and belief systems) that generate environmental and social injustices. Here, I revert to a key moment in the argument advanced in Social Justice and the City (Harvey, 1973: 136-7): it is vital, when encountering a serious problem, not merely to try to solve the problem in itself but to confront and transform the processes that gave rise to the problem in the first place. Then, as now, the fundamental problem is that of unrelenting capital accumulation and the extraordinary asymmetrics of money and political power that are embedded in that process. Alternative modes of production, consumption, and distribution as well as alternative modes of environmental transformation have to be explored if the discursive spaces of the environmental justice movement and the theses of ecological modernization are to be conjoined in a program of radical political action. This is fundamentally a class project, whether it is exactly called that or not, precisely because it entails a direct challenge to the circulation and accumulation of capital which currently dictates what environmental transformations occur and why.
There are signs of such a transition occurring. Here, for example, is a recent argument from the Citizen's Clearing House for Hazardous Waste's journal Everyone's Backyard:
Environmental justice is a people-oriented way of addressing "environmentalism" that adds a vital social, economic and political element ... the new Grassroots Environmental justice Movement seeks common ground with low-income and minority communities, with organized workers, with churches and with all others who stand for freedom and equality. ... When we fight for environmental justice we fight for our homes and families and struggle to end economic, social and political domination by the strong and greedy. (Cited in Szasz, 1994: 153)