James Heartfield wrote:
>
>
> >After all, assuring that working people would live in compact
> >geographical areas and have to use more cooperative forms of transportation
> >seems to serve both environmental ends and also to counter the corporate
> >élites' long-standing social/political strategy of pushing individual home
> >and car ownership as a way to integrate working people into a conservative
> >consensus.
>
> Are you saying that if working class people are impoverished by
> environmentalist policies that they will rise up against capitalism?
No. I do mean, however, that if people have to confront, politically, the problems of living in delimited geographical spaces where they have to use collective public transportation and not individualistic automobiles, they will find themselves confronting practical political issues that foster collectively political rather than pseudo-individualistic approaches. This is not the same as the old one of suggesting that a declining living standard will radicalize the workers. After all, does it add to one's living standard to have to personally drive hours each day to get to and from that work for which one gets paid? Isn't it equally valid to see commuting time as unpaid work time?
> Do you think that it is right that people should be dissuaded from
> owning their own homes?
Home ownership is an ambiguous advantage. IN any case, there are many forms of home ownership, including those that involve a greater population density. I live in a cooperative apartment building, for example.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema