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RED/GREEN ALTERNATIVES: BREAKING WITH GROWTH AND NEO-LIBERALISMCOPENHAGEN MARCH 12 2016Seminar 2: BREAKING WITH CURRENT POLICIES AND DEVELOPMENTS Nancy HolmstromMy remarks will fit very well with the 2 speakers this morning; in fact they overlap somewhat. Though I will end with some hopeful signs, I have to begin on a very pessimistic note. Because never in my lifetime - indeed, I think, in history - has there been such a gap between what is necessary for the sake of humanity and the forces, movements ready to bring that into being. Many times throughout history, to be sure, there have been huge gaps and so, among other catastrophes, we had WW I and WW II, not to mention genocidal wars in Africa. But today, in addition to extremes of poverty and inequality, we have the dangers of nuclear proliferation and multiple ecological crises. So today our struggle is about our very existence.Nevertheless, the left has been slow to give the ecological crisis the centrality it should have in all our practice. There are many reasons for this I think, from the psychological denial so tempting to us all, to habits of mind and intellectual/political capital built around other subjects, to understandable concerns that the universal nature of the ecological crisis will take us away from the particular struggles of class, anti-militarism, anti-racism and sexism. But more and more the left is coming to understand that the ecological crisis includes all of these issues, that poor people around the globe and in each society, particularly women and people of color, are the worst victims of both the economic and ecological crises, which inevitably lead to wars. Indeed, as this conference exemplifies, the left has begun to realize that the ecological crisis is the most powerful argument against capitalism that there is. Our most urgent task to learn how to integrate the ecological issues with anti-capitalist struggles of all kinds.“Breaking with current policies and developments” is the name of our seminar but I will focus first on necessary changes in consciousness that underlie current policies, first at a very abstract level and then I will turn to some promising signs of changed consciousness in the United States. On the abstract level, I want to challenge two dominant notions that underlie our current system and ways of thinking about it: the first regarding property and the second regarding rationality. In both cases, the individual is prioritized over the collective. I will argue that they should be reversed. “Public goods,” “common or collective goods”, the “commonstock” or “the commons” are different terms for describing what is essentially the same idea. Historically, “the commons referred to land on which commoners had the right to graze their sheep, cultivate their crops or collect firewood. They lost these centuries-old rights through the process called the enclosure movement when the commons land was made private – enclosed by fences and hedges and enforced by violence. Not surprisingly the commoners saw the enclosures as theft of their land; each one of them lost his/her individual right to use the land. Similar processes occurred around the world then and today as people lose access to lands that had been held communally for centuries. The fact that common property involves an individual right to property is obscured by the widespread equation of property with private property. But property is not a thing (consider property in stocks), but rather a set of rights. The defining right of private property is the right to exclude others, hence enclosures.Today we see the term “commons” used not only for land and other natural resources, but for cultural/intellectual products as well – communicative space like radio waves and the Internet, scientific knowledge, art, literature and music, all part of our common human heritage, contributed to- and created – by countless people around the globe, building one upon the other. Hence they are all collective human products, whatever the individual effort contributed most recently. The core idea in all these examples called the commons is of some good accessible to all. So when something that has been or could be accessible to all is made private, whether it be water or seeds, medicine or music, this can be conceived as an enclosure too – and some would call it theft. The fundamental question is who should have the right to use and control these goods. And then there are public goods and services like schools and medical care, not public by nature, but as a result of hard fought struggle. They should be seen as great cultural achievements of the human race, much like great works of art.While almost every one would grant there must be some public goods, the dominant assumption is that everything that can plausibly be a commodity should be (consider this water bottle in my hand); only the remainder that are impossible or too difficult to commodify should be public. The political continuum from conservative to social democrat is differentiated according to where on the continuum they would draw the line. I would reverse the priority and make public goods/commonstock the default. There are several reasons: first of all the pragmatic one that this is the only way these goods can be preserved from profit-driven development. But there are also logical, political and moral reasons. When the question of privatizing something is raised, what is being considered is commonstock, so logically - and temporally – commonstock is prior. Furthermore a commitment to human equality and democracy favors taking commonstock as the norm. Recall that the essence of private property is the right to exclude others. Since all human beings are equal from a moral point of view, shouldn’t the basic assumption be in favor of equal access to the Earth’s resources? And equal right to decide how they are used? And hence shouldn’t the burden of justification be on those who would exclude, i.e. defenders of private property? Though this may seem hopelessly utopian, a commitment to common property as the default can arm us ideologically and justifies civil disobedience against actions harmful to the environment. Some recent court cases in the US appealing to the public trust doctrine have presented protestors as law-enforcers, rather than law-breakers.Now I will address the other core concept of Rationality:Given the importance of public goods – sometimes life and death importance – it would seem the most rational thing in the world to work together to achieve them. Yet paradoxically, the conception of rational motivation dominant in economics, especially in the US, entails that this is not so. According to this view, (called Individual Utility Maximization or IUM), when an individual’s behavior is rational, she aims to maximize her own utility, whatever that might be. (The theory applies also to the behavior of individual corporations or countries). It claims that most people act this way most of the time, so it’s descriptive, and it’s also a normative notion in that behavior that does not fit the model is deemed irrational. Notice this entails the absurd conclusion that both smoking and ceasing to smoke are equally rational - because both are maximizations of individual utility. This IUM conception generates problems of how collective action ever takes place, and how it can be rational. What is called the free rider problem goes as follows: since achieving a goal such as protecting the environment does not depend on the efforts of any single individual and since he/she will get the benefits anyway, it is not rational for an individual to contribute. Yet if many act rationally, i.e. free ride, the result is that no one will get what will benefit them all. In my opinion this theory of rationality has been thoroughly refuted years ago – and yet it persists. Amartya Sen titled his classic critique “Rational Fools.” I would just add that rationality is the chief evolutionary advantage humans have, so the fact that this model of rationality entails that thoroughly rational behavior will lead to the destruction of the species ought to count as a reductio ad absurdam of the theory. Instead of starting from the standpoint of individual utility (or profit) maximization, it is more rational - not just more moral, as many would grant - to start from the social standpoint, i.e. what is rational from the collective point of view. Clearly capitalism does not, and cannot, do this.................................II. Though the United States is the most individualistic and is the only developed country without a major socialist movement, nevertheless, there are some promising signs of a radical change in consciousness. I am thinking particularly of the Presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders’ – a self-declared “democratic socialist.” As he defines this it is hardly revolutionary, but for the United States in this period, it almost is. The US does have some socialist tradition, there were socialist mayors here and there..., but in the past several decades it has been forgotten and the word is used as a pejorative. So it is especially significant that nevertheless surveys show 39-56% of Democrats called themselves socialists. And back in 2011 49% of Americans under 30 had a favorable view of socialism vs 47% of capitalism. ....... How did that happen?What exactly “socialism” means to the respondents is not clear. For Sanders, it is an expanded New Deal or welfare state capitalism of the kind that is under attack and shrinking around the world, including Denmark. It is even illegal according to various trade pacts. Is it realistic to think we could bring it back? Probably not likely, as the causes go very deep and global, as Western labor movements have been weakened by transplanting jobs to low wage countries, or threats to transplant them. Whatever exactly the polls regarding socialism signify positively, it is clear what they signify negatively – that is, a deep disillusionment with capitalism and the so-called democracy that goes with it. This is hardly surprising, since neo-liberal capitalism has been very hard for the majority of Americans and young people face a precarious future.The Sanders movement did not come out of the blue. The Occupy Wall St movement, the Black Lives Matter movement against racist police practices (despite our black president), the women’s and LGBT movement - all have had some effect on younger Americans’ understanding – and evaluation of – the society in which they live. When a left movement takes shape again in the US, it is much more likely than in the past to be a broad inclusive multi-dimensioned one – and one that is likely to have the ecological crisis integrated with the others. Recently a poll showed that 1/6 of Americans would be willing to break the law to protest something damaging to the environment.Now it is unlikely that Sanders will get the nomination and even if he did, the history of the Democrat Party is to drown left movements. Attempts to transform it to a social democratic party some decades ago, (a strategy known as “realignment”), failed, and it has become more and more a centrist party, beholden to the capitalist class. Nevertheless it is Sanders’ support - especially among the young - black as well as white, women as well as men – that is so very heartening. White working class men, particularly unionized workers, also respond favorably to his class politics. Interestingly, many white working class men also support Donald Trump, whether for good reasons or bad, it is not clear. Because it is difficult to know exactly what Trump really believes as he is so opportunistic. It’s clear he is deeply racist and misogynist, and no doubt some of his support comes from this. But he is less conservative both on social and economic issues than the other Republican candidates, and though a billionaire himself, often rails against the effect of globalization on American workers, against the trade pacts that Clinton supports, against the political establishment, and though he is a hawk, he has also denounced the war in Iraq – all reasons the Republican establishment doesn’t like him. If the labor unions, most of which support Clinton, including the supposedly progressive Service Employees International Union, had instead supported Sanders, this could have undercut Trump’s appeal among blue-collar workers. They could have exposed his hypocrisy and inconsistency on economic reasons and punctured the fantasy of some working class men that they too can get rich. But the unions are weak and fearful and most are too tied to the Democratic Party establishment to use their imaginations and break from business-as-usual. There are some hopeful new labor struggles e.g the Fight for 15 (a higher minimum wage), some new labor unions, especially among the poorest like home health care workers, most of whom are non-white, which promises more intersectional struggles uniting economic with anti-racist and anti-sexist issues. Whatever happens in the US election, the popularity of both Trump and Sanders expresses the deep alienation of the US population, especially the youth, from the political and economic status quo. So there is potential here. The challenge for the Left is how to develop this dissatisfaction into a broad, anti-capitalist and truly inclusive eco-socialist movement. But who is the Left in the US? There is no broad left party, only tiny revolutionary socialist groupings and radical movements around specific issues. So we have to look for new movements from below which surprise us, like Occupy Wall St and Black Lives Matter. No matter who wins the Presidency, we should expect more protestors in the streets, whether against a President Clinton or the Republican, than we have seen during Obama’s presidency when people were reluctant to protest Obama. In the unlikely event of a Sanders presidency, we will see people in the streets supporting him against Congress. Can such a broad, anti-capitalist and truly inclusive eco-socialist movement be developed? What form will it take? And will it be in time??? Who knows...; I try to live by Gramsci’s pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. For what else can we do?.... ................
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