Look, it's one thing to be unaware, but for you it has taken the form of a personal cause. I can give you a reading list if if would be helpful. But I gather that you have decided that you wish to remain in the dark. Knock yourself out. Just don't waste our time as you muddle along. CK
----- Original Message ----- From: "James Heartfield" <Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Friday, April 06, 2001 3:23 PM Subject: Doug's points
> In message <p05010406b6f39c43e6cc@[216.254.77.128]>, Doug Henwood
> <dhenwood at panix.com> writes
> >James Heartfield wrote:
> >
> >>In point of fact, they very rarely have a direct effect on consumption
> >>but serve the ideological purpose of persuading people to take personal
> >>responsibility for capitalism (not nature)'s limits. Once softened up,
> >>all are prepared for cuts in wages.
> >
> >I'd love to know what evidence you have for this. In the U.S., which
> >saw the sharpest fall in real wages of any First World country from
> >1973-1995, people have been "persuaded" to accept them out of
> >economic desperation; blinkered political possibilities, constrained
> >by both structure and ideology; wretched labor laws; fear of job
> >loss; weak and unimaginative unions, a working class divided by
> >ethnicity, region, sector, and gender, etc. As far as I can tell -
> >which may not be much, since I only live here and follow this stuff
> >kind of obsessively - green concerns have contributed almost nothing
> >to the situation.
>
> 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