Doug Henwood wrote:
I'd say we - capitalism, not the working class and allied intellectuals - need a new social structure of accumulation. Neoliberalism's shot. Obama et al don't seem to know that yet. With the credit system busted, you can't use borrowing to offset a further attack on living standards, so something resembling social democracy with green tech as the dynamic economic sector seems rather essential. Not that we're politically capable of getting there, of course.
JG replies:
Well, since you are a SOCIOLOGICAL political economist (and a more or less Marxist one to boot) you can see this and Roubini can't.
Let's suppose that a green tech SSA could do the job that you propose here, which is debatable. And let's focus on your claim about political improbability/impossibility, which I agree with and of course is the rub.
Even cranky leftists like yourself (among many here, myself included) were cautiously optimistic about Obama's stimulus pacakge roughly a month or a month-and-a-half ago, before he backslid to his usual gooey bipartisanship. Now the proposed allotment for alt energy, building retrofits, and grid upgrades is puny, it won't be spent immediately, and it'll be directed to private sector sub-contractors. Surely the green social democratic types (the sort you've been having on your radio show a lot recently) will be sorely disappointed, or at least will have a very hard time prettyifying an ugly picture.
We know that it was mostly the CIO labor movement that forced FDR's hand and made him and the political class of the time implement the New Deal SSA. But what is the present-day functional equivalent of the CIO that will leverage Obama and the Democratic majority to inistitute a green tech SSA? And perhaps more crucially what is today's functional equivalent of the factory occupation/sit-down strike? For the most part, polite and technocratic green social dems dare not entertain much less answer such questions. But to achieve even their modest goals they need to engage these questions and also think about how ordinary people themselves can deeply participate in green tech schemes, other than as recipients of government largesse and workers for sub-contractors. I guess this whole conjuncture is bringing out my barely suppressed O'Connorist eco-Marxist spirits...
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