Well, I wish I could claim authorship, but the argument against limits was central to the origins of Marxism in the British labour movement.
>From memory, it was in his debate with labour leader John Weston under
the auspices of the incipient Working Men's International that Marx
first rubbished the so-called 'Iron law of wages' that held the fund for
working class consumption to be fixed. It was in response to that widely
held prejudice that Marx replied the 'attempt to represent the
capitalistic limits of the labour fund as its natural and social limits'
are 'silly tautology' (Capital, Lawrence and Wishart, p572).
The politics of austerity are powerful factors in European labour's history. I cited the example of the Second World War campaign against waste that coined the slogans 'Is your journey really necessary?', 'make do and mend' and encouraged housewives to give up their pots and pans. Need it be said that these voluntary campaigns were a vicious ideological weapon in the struggle to restrict working class living standards.
You may protest that this is not environmentalism, but my point is that the contemporary environmental movement only gives a specific twist to the underlying politics of austerity that have long informed bourgeois ideology. But before you turn away, you should bear in mind that in the 1970s, when the present day environmentalist arguments were being framed they were indeed important components of ruling class thinking that were also popularised.
The 'Save It' campaign in Britain in the seventies was most certainly directed at the 'excessive' wage claims of organised labour, and most specifically was directed at the miners, since at that time most electricity was generated through coal burning. Saving energy was a direct attack on miners' bargaining power, on the ideological plane if not actually.
Environmentalists certainly understood that there programme was directed at labour. Margaret Laws Smith's pamphlet for the for the Conservation Society Towards the Creation of a Sustainable Economy (1975) wrote of the need for 'to stabilize the level of total incomes and total demand' (p7). Anticipating 'cuts in consumption' Smith proffered 'we may hope that there will be some men in the most strongly organized unions who will recognize the necessity for the conservation of scarce resources' (p9). 'Political leaders may have their work cut out for them persuading labour union leaders to exercise restraint' wrote Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute 'but at least they know what is needed' (Building a Sustainable Society, New York 1981, p122).
More than that, Marxists then understood that environmentalism was an attack on working people. Istvan Meszaros said in the Isaac Deutscher memorial lecture of 1971, that '"the God that failed" in the image of technological omnipotence is now shown around again under the umbrella of universal "ecological concern"' (The Necessity of Social Control, Merlin Press, 1971, p19). And all this with the 'additional bonus of making people at large pay, under the pretext of "human survival", for the survival of [the] social economic system' that favoured those elites (Ibid.). (See also the many pamphlets and articles produced in the revolutionary press attacking environmentalism, now long since covered up.)
To fail to notice that environmentalists have had a profound effect on the defeat of the European working class is surely to forget the key role that the Greens have played in European politics. In Germany the alliance with the Greens was a key stage in the transformation of the old Social Democratic party into a Blairite New Labour style party. Green foreign minister Joseph Fischer tipped the balance in favour of rightist Gerhard Schroeder, as the Green representation in the alliance has served as a counterweight to working class representation (even of the conservative kind it was) in the SPD.
Key Greens like Cohn Bendit, Andre Gorz and Michel Aglietta provided an alternative 'radicalism' for younger people that allied them to a programme of austerity and limits, where in previous times they would have gravitated to the left.
None of this is to say that the labour movements' own internal ideological confusion was not key in its defeat. Rather such austerity thinking rushes to fill the vacuum.
But I am surprised that you counter pose race divisions to austerity arguments. In my experience, the idea that 'there is not enough to go around' has been a key component of the anti-immigrant argument. The current environmental movement has an in-built tendency towards chauvinistic arguments, witness the growing storm of anti-American protectionism in Europe.
In message <p0501040ab6f3a7d49f07@[216.254.77.128]>, Doug Henwood
<dhenwood at panix.com> writes
>James Heartfield wrote:
>
>> >Car-hating is a progressive political emotion.
>>
>>No car-hating is a reactionary emotion. It is a sublimated form of anti-
>>working class prejudice.
>
>So what were all those American planners who looked to
>suburbanization and homeownership as fostering individualistic
>attitudes while breaking up dangerous concentrations of workers,
>agitators, and bohemians were wrong? Car-centered life really
>strengthens the working class?
I thought Yoshie's account of the theoretical weakness of American radicalism very pertinent, and, at the risk of stretching a point, you might wish to consider whether this Menken-like short-circuiting of the argument is an example.
Is it so very hard to imagine that Capitalism's influence on the working class is mixed, or even contradictory, as we used to say? For sure the improvement of working class living standards also reinforced the domination of capital over labour. But it also raised the cultural level of working people, to broaden their life-experiences.
When the European working class was placed on rations and in barracks it certainly did provoke a blunt class hatred, but you surely don't think that working people should be reduced to the level of beasts, just so that they might fulfil one's fantasies of blood revenge against the system. After all, we hardly need to campaign for a reduction in working class living standards to provoke a response, since, if I read right, the capitalist class are setting out to do just that.
More to the point why should working people respect dilettantes who want to see their cars taken away and electricity bills hiked just in the hopes of provoking them into action. (Surely it is the failure of the left to make convincing arguments for change rather than the working class's 'excessive' ((not)) incomes that is responsible for the absence of revolution.)
Lastly, it is sheer confusion to conflate the use-value car with the social relation atomisation. There is nothing intrinsically alienating about cars. Rather it is capitalist social relations that are alienating. Cars can just as easily be instruments of social solidarity as atomisation. The flying pickets of the Yorkshire miners were keen car users, as were the revolutionary hold-up artists of the Bonnot Gang, inventors of the getaway car.
-- James Heartfield