Charles writes
"How much different is that" - Jim H. :Who are you - or I - to say what people ought or ought not to be spending their money on? - "than saying for whom people should vote, or whether they should struggle for socialism?"
Quite a lot different, I'd say.
Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> writes:
"If you think, as I do, that waste spewed by cars is harmful to the earth and the creatures who live on it, then reducing auto use is rather urgent."
When you say "the waste that is spewed out by cars" what you really mean is people. Like the Victorian Patrician of old you imagine you can see a miasma rising up from the stinking masses and wafting your way. (strangely air quality in more car owning countries is a great deal better than those owning less).
"Driving a mile or five just to get a quart of milk - a not unusual experience in the American suburbs - can't, over the long term, just be a concern to the driver."
No indeed, the nervous bean-counter must deplore this gross profligacy amongst the working masses. A quart of milk no less! Don't we give them water?
You started this parsimonious tutting with the statistic 14 journeys (a week, I'm guessing, though you did not say). In all likelihood, what is that? five journeys to work, five back, one to the supermarket on a Sunday, and another back, one to church, or grandma's on a Sunday and one back. Ordinary people's lives, you call a waste, like some Nietszchean looking down on the worthless masses.
And what, you've never been caught without milk last thing at night? I have, and if I had to I'd drive out to get it.
Doug:
"Even bourgeois economics has room for externalities. James Heartfield seems not to - it's all just me & my car, and the hell with everything else."
Socialist economics once was concerned with transforming the wage labour-capital relationship in the favour of the former, instituting workers control of industry, who knows maybe even socialising domestic work. Taxation, we dreamed, could be made into a weapon to 'squeeze the rich until the pips squeaked'.
But today, what do Doug and Dan Lazare consider the pressing demand to be not an attack on capital, but one on labour. Not macro-economic management of the economy, but micro-management of the family income. Not progressive taxation of industrial profits, but regressive tax on individual's purchases.
As if we'd never heard of this cheese-paring before. In the 1930s and again in the 1970s European governments often promoted these campaigns to reduce consumption (so that wages could be held down). Slogans like 'Is your journey really necessary?', 'make do and mend', 'holidays at home', 'dig for victory', 'save it' and 'put that light out' were standard fare in government information films.
Government ministers appeared on television and radio to advise people to put a brick in their cisterns to save water, how to make 'nettle pie' (that delicious recipe courtesy of Stafford Cripps), to bathe in no more than six inches of water, or to break the miners' strikes in the 1970s by cutting electricity use.
As to my being right-wing because I am 'populist', isn't that the problem: that radicals, who once identified with popular self-advancement, have surrendered that ground to the right, and today cast themselves as critics not so much of capitalism, as of consumption. Little wonder that the arguments of the right are popular. Consider the radical programme of today: vote LBO, cut your living standards, give up your car! -- James Heartfield Sustaining Architecture in the Anti-Machine Age is available at GBP19.99, plus GBP5.01 p&p from Publications, audacity.org, 8 College Close, Hackney, London, E9 6ER. Make cheques payable to 'Audacity Ltd'. www.audacity.org