(SORRY FOR OVERPOSTING, LAST ONE OF THE DAY)
JG said:
Let's suppose that a green tech SSA could do the job that you propose here, which is debatable.
DH replied:
Of course it's debatable. But redoing the entire energy and transportation systems, transforming existing buildings, and creating entire new industriesand occupational categories could have quite a long-term kick. Could, of course, who knows? But the potential is as big as petroleum and autos, no?
JG now says:
I used the term "debatable" not just as a throwaway line (yeah mon, like what ISN'T debatable), but to signal a deep-seated skepticism (rooted in both the labor theory of value and the second law of thermodynamics) that a capitalist long wave can be based on post-carbon technologies. This is an issue I wish I had time/energy/resolve to explore more than I have, but it's on the back-burner now. IMO Elmar Altvater is the man on this subject, though...
JG said:
Surely the green social democratic types... the sort you've been having on your radio show a lot recently...
DH replied:
You noticed. It's my obsession at the moment, since it's both transformative and not completely impossible to imagine.
JG now says:
Yes, and even the social democratic lite varieties of clean energy reforms potentially contain with them the seeds of radical ecological socialism, if the grassroots movement/green organizations knew how to conceptualize the difference between reformist reforms and radical reforms, and to plan and fight accordingly. But they don't and they won't... even though long-range planetary sanity may depend on it.
JG said:
...will be sorely disappointed, or at least will have a very hard time prettifying an ugly picture
DH replied:
They're making more noise than I would have guessed, as are the Congressional Dems.
JG now says:
Do tell. Got any hard sources/references?
JG said:
what is the present-day functional equivalent of the CIO that will leverage Obama and the Democratic majority to institute a green tech SSA?
DH replied:
Sorry to say it's probably not a popular movement, but a more enlightened (or at least appropriately self-interested) wing of the bourgeoisie. Green stuff is fading in political appeal now, as it usually does in a recession.
JG now says:
1) The bourgeoisie's enlightened self-interest rarely crystallizes (much less is satisfied) without a push from below. Now, this may not be true for some cost-cutting forms of green tech, but for those that depend on lots of social overhead expenditure, this may be true. 2) No ecological socialism in the long run, no decent human survival. (Not that it exists now in vast swaths of the peripheral world!) The only way to get the enlightened self-interest wing of the bourgeoisie to think past medium-range capitalist stability to long run planetary habitability is through red-green movement activism/red-green movement deep participation in the reformist green tech schemes. 3) Yes, the problem of declining appeal is structural to some extent, but it's also a failure of movement imagination/propaganda/organizing. (Christ almighty, I sound like a voluntarist now!) And during a period of renewed accumulation, there will be less motivation/possibility for those very instantiations of green tech that actually have ecological socialist potential. It'll be all about saving on the electricity/transport fuel bill and conforming to whatever weak version of Kyoto II is coming down the pike.
JG said:
And perhaps more crucially what is today's functional equivalent of the factory occupation/sit-down strike?
DH replied:
The factory occupation/sit-down strike. Why not?
JG now says:
I will cop out with a theoretically-driven set of parallels (some of which require blanks to be filled). In the 1930's the radicalized labor movement addressed the capitalist crisis of overproduction/underconsumption by temporarily seizing control of the tools and implements of production, taking advantage of their indispensable position in the labor process to leverage concessions from the bourgeois state. There was an inherent match between the form of power they exercised (their crucial role as surplus value producers), what compromise they got out of the struggle (a fairer share of surplus value produced), and the system-rationalizing aspects of the compromise (high-speed Keynesian growth less prone to wild business cycles). In the 2000's the radicalized ecology movement addressed the capitalist crisis of climate catastrophe (and peak oil if you buy the concept) by temporarily seizing control of the XXXX, taking advantage of their indispensable position in the XXXX to leverage XXXX concessions from the bourgeois state. (And make sure the XXXX's feature corresponding matches...)
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