> Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2001 16:07:04 +0100
> From: James Heartfield <Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk>
> So 'externalities' are
> generally seen as 'social costs'. But such a view assumes the reality of
> a social order outside of capitalism that must be protected. What can
> such an order be but an idealisation of capitalist society itself.
> With the concept of 'externalities' market ideologists are trying to
> integrate those costs of social stability that do not spontaneously
> beget value.
No, not necessarily, James. The project we're pursuing (http://www.queensu.ca/msp) of decommodifying--in part because the commodity form generates all sorts of externalities harmful to social, cultural and environmental reproduction--is "no idealisation of capitalist society itself" (we hope it's the opposite: the exploration of its limits and demand to transcend market determinations of distribution).
As far as externalities relate to our comrades' struggle for free basic electricity via the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, for instance, the use of cost-benefit analysis by techies doing background research is allowing us all sorts of routes into the privatisation struggle. There, several million members of the Congress of SA Trade Unions are preparing to embark next week on a two-day general strike against the partial sale of several parastatal corporations--especially the electricity company--not just because of threats to jobs (they've won concessions already), but because privatisation evaporates the possibility of cross-subsidisation.
Cross-subsidisation may in the narrowest sense be a crucial way to integrate costs of social stability not otherwise accounted for, by *social democratic* ideologists (certainly not neolibs, who HATE cross-subsidisation because it distorts the price system).
But that doesn't detract from what we think is a pretty good radical project: namely, attempting to *delink* (not integrate) the sources of social stability that do not spontaneously beget value--i.e., the sense of community hard-won during anti-apartheid struggles which involved rent/services boycotts, leaving memories which are now very dangerous to government/ANC and have led to increasingly active demobilisation maneuvres--from nationalist loyalties and fealty to the market. If our demands for 50 litres of water and a kiloWatt hour of electricity per person per day are filled (we're about half way there on water and 1/3rd on electricity, in principle), I assume that serves to allow further delinkage of workers from the labour/cash nexus in which they're trapped. (Esping-Andersen's studies of decommodifying labour power in Scandinavia point in this direction, at least.) And sure, environmental externalities--along with gender equity, public health, desegregation and even economic multipliers of various sorts--are part of the advocacy arguments we have to deploy to this end.
Sure, it's risky to play these "sustainable development" discourses with other techies, but I think it probably has to be done.
> >This leads to the first question James Heartfield asked - as to whether
> >environmentalism in inherently anti-mass and anti-worker. Obviously
> >environmentalists operating from premises I've outlined above have good
> >reason not to be anti-mass or anti-worker, and in fact good reason to
> >support egalitarianism and anti-capitalism.
> I'm sorry but this does not seem persuasive. If capitalism is wasteful,
> and resources are limited, then the logical conclusion is not a popular
> struggle against capitalism, but an elite campaign to restrict
> consumerism: environmentalism.
Come down this side before you write it off (but that film you helped out on showed me I'm several years late). About a year prior to the Rio+10 conference here, the fight for free electricity is one of 3 local projects that inspire me a great deal at the moment (two others being the fight--nearly won now--against more Lesotho dams to supply Jo'burg with expensive water, and the extremely controversial attempt to stop a major deep-water port, smelter and Export Processing Zone not far down the Indian Ocean coast from comrade Russell G, who in this rare case, I think, will agree with the eco-social struggle [http://www.coega.org]). In all three cases, we do invoke externalities, because it's one way to slow down the maniacs of big capital and big government.
So James, if by consumerism, you mean hedonistic water wastage by white Jo'burgers (double english gardens, swimming pools and artificial forests on the African highveld with no river for miles), yeah, the campaign is partly for "conservation." But it's not "elite," it's a class struggle. And I hope you also observe the attempts to reverse uneven development in the sphere of consumption by getting access to more water/sanitation/electricity consumables by the masses and workers.