----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris Lowe" <clowe at igc.org> To: <asdnet at igc.topica.com> Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2001 7:35 AM Subject: [ASDnet] Abundance (was Naderism)
Michael,
Thank you for forwarding the quote from Jesse Lemisch. It raises serious issues about which I'd like to hear a reasonable discussion.
In particular, as a personal favor and in the spirit of cooperative solidarity, I would like to request that anyone else interested accept that I am genuinely unsettled in my mind. My questions are genuine. I am not opposing anyone. I would appreciate not being attacked for imputed motives, psychological flaws or character defects, nor for not having made up my mind before rather than after discussion.
Green asceticism can take four politically destructive forms visible here in Oregon. Least serious is hypocrisy, or exposure to accusation of such, e.g. the SUVs with Nader bumper stickers that became a minor joke. Another submerged small issue came out briefly in Y2K debates -- a sort of green/New Age survivalism often seemed incapable of recognizing the politics of brown/apocalyptic racist survivalism.
More important is asceticism as a vehicle of closedness, of sectism. Closedness often manifests in exclusive expressive "movement cultures," marked by style -- e.g. aging & neo-"hippie," or anarcho-punk as style, or the less ascetic REI-eco-camper-I-won't-fall-in-the-crevasse-but-you-would aesthetic, (see SUVs above). Variation partly reflects more vs. less militant elements and partly college Greens vs. longer term -- though it does seem that Greens do seem to maintain an age continuum better than most socialist groups.
But the most profound problem with Green asceticism is when it embodies for tody the persistent tradition of conservationist patricianism. Remember that Robin Hood is a story about poaching on royal and aristocratic game reserves. National parks are the small r republican extension.
While Greens (rightly) argue against despoliation of a this common heritage, and the enclosure of the great remaining commons (outside of Africa) of air and water for private profit, they also often privilege certain expensive, class-bound uses of public lands over others & are willing to use monetary & hence class based exclusion methods to limit use. This is only one example of where the right then mobilizes anti-Green politics around resentment of upper-middle-class Green contempt for conservative populist leisure & consumption preferences.
Same thing with anti-smoking, which I am. But I have to recognize that this means most of the people I'm talking about are poorer than me & that I am on the same side as corporate social engineers looking to reduce benefits obligations and impose regulation on workers' private behavior seen to reduce their productivity. My concern for the health of smokers, unless they are my immediate friends, inevitably takes on a paternalist tinge.
Moreover, the point about bikes and the disabled might be extended to people who need cars to get to work. I don't mean the people who have chosen to try to pursue a bucolic (and partly Green aesthetic motivated) ex-urban existence that ironically destroys the sought-after pastoral world. I mean those who have to drive because someone closed the (often industrial, often polluting) plant that was where parents or grandparents walked to work.
All that said, Jesse Lemisch's piece as quoted so far seems psychologically reductive. Psychology is important here, but it is not all. (I will try to read the whole later.)
More seriously, in raising the very genuine problem of the loss of an idea of utopian, egalitarian abundance as a fundamental political problem for the left, in the part quoted, Lemisch does not address the equally real problem of severely dystopian dimensions to "actually existing abundance."
At a rather superficial level, the phenomenon of Ralph Nader himself as party leader itself reflects the problem -- our abundance of media is organized so that only certain figures can mobilize it apart from brute-force payment for access. So Nader gets coopted for his fame. I am curious if he is doing more to actually build Green political structure than Jesse Jackson did with Rainbow Coalition.
Yet, if we are not comfortable with the ascetic terms of "Naderism," what IS our picture of abundance, if it is also not simply agreeing that what is good for GM (SUVs) is good for America? Assuming Lemisch means something else.
Cars mean mobility, Lemisch says. Cars also, at present, mean dispersed settlement. Such settlement creates MATERIAL (not aesthetic) sustainability issues, as does the mass agriculture Lemisch also vaunts.
Further, ex-urban development causes loss of farm land for any type of agriculture, mass or not.
Dispersed, car-based settlement creates, in conjunction with TV, an entirely different social organization from that on which classical 20th c. lefts (including their utopias) were built. David Montgomery used to teach a very interesting _Monthly Review_ article from the late 70s that analyzed why separation of work from neighborhood by cars and and highways was an obstacle to unionization. The argument was that it contributed to decline of working class identity politics (aka class consciousness). Where before common work-site and community identities reinforced each other, in car-t.v. culture common work-site identities competed with home-site identities marked by "middle class" consumption preferences shared across occupational lines.
Likewise a good deal of what remains of the public planning ethos in the U.S. works through visions of the "new urbanism." This speaks in part to a truth that Lemisch does not seem to address (though I need to read the whole): that car, t.v., highway and air pollution culture are actually pretty damn alienating, at an individual level, from the physical unpleasantness of bad air to road rage.
That daily reality has something to do with mass, unorganized "greenism" -- the support of lots of people for "Earth Day" in the abstract and for opinion support of regulation of corporate abuse of the common ecoology.
Yet "new urbanist" solutions also have analogies to the problems Lemisch points to in "Naderism." A lot of people DO like their cars and suburbs. The most recent addition to right-wing populist ballot initiative "revolt" in the Pacific Northwest is the pro-highway, anti-mass transit revolt.
Meanwhile the upper-class negotiations for "new urbanist" urban renewal (it's baaack) usually involve details of the mix of mixed-use, ineffective gestures to moderate income housing (never mind low income, too many poor people around by definition means "not revitalized"), and destruction of low income housing & community displacement (too often once again "Negro removal," now extended to new immigrant communities as well).
Some of the "new urbanism" is Naderite, but lots of it is social democratic negotiation with sectors of real estate, commercial and finance capital. And it can have the same ugly class undertones as the patrician side of Naderism.
And yet I still hate it that in a few minutes I am going to go get on a bus that makes me take 40 minutes and a transfer at the apex of two sides of a triangle rather than a fifteen minute car trip on the third side, except that the suburban growth and limited number of bridges mean the rush hour car trip can get up to half an hour of stalled traffic. So I may get a bike, but probably if I do I should get a gas mask for riding alongside the nearly stalled cars on the Sellwood bridge.
And meanwhile, as in the Pacific Northwest we debate dam breaching to prevent salmon extinction vs. power generation and barge transport of grain in a context where the old railways have been torn up, due to liberal quasi-social democratic planning in the New Deal and Great Society, the Chinese are seeking to bring "abundance" by damning the three rivers and burning coal, coal, coal.
One third of Africans live in cities, their desperate poverty and the labor mobility that creates the speed of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, driven in part by the mass agricultural production Lemisch vaunts, surpluses of which drive government "free-trade" and structural adjustment policies while offering remaining family farmers prices NOMINALLY the same as fifty years age. But the real mass agriculturae is organized through corporate monopolies that are creating a new share-cropping ("contract farming") in KwaZulu-Natal and in Iowa. The same monopolies are part of the coalition seeking to create novel forms of "intellectual property" and minimally regulated rights to monkey with genetics and to use compiled biological data against us. To say nothing of bad effects of mass monoculture on soils, genetic diversity of seed lines etc. Or what a tomato tastes like.
Karl Marx saw the ultimate contradiction of capitalism as a social one, that of the tendency of capitalism to polarize two great classes. I have often wondered if the ultimate contradiction is not a material one, of capitalism's reliance on ever-expanding extraction, processing, consumption and disposal, altering the ecology. Not necessarily opposed to class polarization, of course.
But I'm not willing just to trash Naderites. Many of their foibles or problems have "old left" counterparts. "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" has its ascetic as well as its cornucopian possibilities. More crudely, if we say the right to health care should precede the right to own a big boat, and tax structures should be constructed accordingly, we get into much the same territory Lemisch complains of.
What I want to know is, can we re-imagine abundance in a sustainable way, AND persuade a large proportion of people who have one sort of concept of what makes for abundance and the good life, to think about quality of life in other ways. I don't think this has to be ascetic. I do think it probably means "less stuff" and substituting leisure, community, family and self-directed work/hobby time for paid work time to underwrite consumption.
But I don't know how to get there.
Chris Lowe
The preceding is a personal opinion. Try not to post more than daily.
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