https://socialistaction.org/2019/01/16/challenges-posed-by-the-green-new-deal/
Challenges posed by the ‘Green New Deal’
/ 2 days ago
jan. 2019 sunrise pelosi sit-in
In November, members of the Sunrise Movement, joined by newly elected
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, sat in at Rep. Pelosi’s office to demand a Green New
Deal (Photo: Sunrise Movement)
By KAMRAN NAYERI
The fanfare about the UN Conference of Parties (COP) 24 in Katowice,
located in a coal-mining region in Poland, that the diplomats from some
200 countries have “struck a deal after an all-night bargaining session”
that may advance the fight against the unfolding catastrophic climate
(The New York Times, Dec. 15, 2018) rings hollow if we recall that just
10 days earlier the same newspaper reported that two years after the
Paris Agreement greenhouse gas emissions accelerated like a “speeding
freight train” in 2018.
Two months earlier, on Sept. 9, the United Nations secretary general,
António Guterres, held a press conference in New York telling the world
that if the world governments “do not change course by 2020, we risk
missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change.” Let’s
remember that is only two years from now. Clearly, the world is facing a
climate emergency, and so far none of the world’s major polluters are
doing anything close to what is needed to avert the impending catastrophe.
The ecological and social crises the world faces today are actually two
aspects of the crisis of the anthropocentric industrial capitalist
civilization.
To resolve the crisis, humanity must chart a course towards an
ecocentric socialist future. Thus, all attempts to reform the present
day civilization to address various aspects of the ecosocial crisis are
bound to fail if they are not part of an ongoing and deepening struggle
waged by working people ourselves—armed with an action program and a
strategy to build a self-organized and self-mobilized movement—to
achieve an ecocentric socialist society.
The Sunrise Movement in the United States poses an important set of
opportunities and challenges for the climate justice movement and its
small ecosocialist component. While its stated purpose is to combat the
climate crisis, the group has not absorbed a key political lesson
apparent in the spontaneous Yellow Vests protests in France—the existing
political parties are not to be trusted.
Thus, the Sunrise Movement supports the agenda of Democratic Party
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez: a Green New Deal to be foraged
by the formation of a Select Committee for a Green New Deal in the
legislative session beginning this month. It has used lobbying, albeit
through a protest at the halls of the U.S. Congress, to demand
legislative action to stop the climate crisis.
Some climate justice groups and a few small labor groups, as well as
two-dozen current and just-elected Democratic members of Congress, have
signed onto Ocasio Cortez’s proposal.
This development is not surprising. The main groups in the labor and
climate justice movements have been working through the Democratic Party
all along and essentially have embraced a parliamentarian and reformist
approach to climate change policy.
Again unsurprisingly, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—with
its ranks swelled with thousands of new recruits, including former
supporters of Bernie Sanders’ 2106 Democratic Party campaign—has decided
to run candidates in the 2018 elections as Democrats. This follows the
reformist tradition of the U.S. social democrats and Stalinists (mostly
the Communist Party U.S.A.) since the 1930s. In their view, the task is
not to overthrow U.S. capitalism but to reform it by “pushing” the
Democratic Party “to the left.”
I need not remind the reader that this “strategy” has a decades-old
track record of failure, as can be verified by the dissolution of all
progressive movements in the United States that followed a similar
course. Just consider the history of the labor, Black, and women’s
liberation movements over the past several decades and how such
once-powerful movements have been reduced to a shadow of their former
selves, a price they paid for being in the Big Tent of the Democratic
Party, attempting “to push it to the left” instead of building
self-organized and self-mobilized anti-capitalist movements and a
fighting labor party to pursue their respective demands.
Impervious to such lessons of the modern political history of the United
States, Ted Franklin, a leader of System Change Not Climate Change
(SCnCC) who is also a member of the East San Francisco Bay DSA,
celebrates Ocasio Cortez’s reformist course. He writes:
“The quasi-magical arrival of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez on the political
scene has given climate activists new hope that a program big enough to
address the danger will become an actual subject of national debate in
the time frame necessary to give us a fighting chance against climate
catastrophe.
Her proposal for a Select Committee for a Green New Deal … is gaining
momentum as the highly energized progressive base of the Democratic
Party confronts the triple obstacles of the Republican neofascist party,
the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party, and the establishment
progressives who are now running to the left but still beholden to
corporate interests” (Franklin, 2018).
As someone who has been an active member of the national SCnCC network
for about three years, and came to know and respect Franklin, his
embrace of Ocasio Cortez’s reformist course comes as a surprise to me.
To be clear, revolutionary (eco)socialists are not opposed to reforms.
Thus, I have spoken in praise of the Oakland No Coal Coalition in which
Franklin has played a leading part. But reforms can only be sustained if
they are won by the organized and mobilized masses of the working people
as a way to enhance our self-confidence and as a stepping stone towards
other victories in the direction of an ecocentric socialist future.jan.
2019 climate emergency (takver-flickr-cc)
The political course proposed by Ocasio Cortez, and following her the
Sunrise Movement, and now Franklin, is the exact opposite. It
mis-educates and confuses any radicalizing youth or working person by
suggesting that working through the capitalist Democratic Party, not
building our own bottom-up anti-capitalist organization, and eventually
a revolutionary labor party based on our own transformed mass
organizations, such as unions, is the way to fighting the systemic
climate crisis.
Thus, while the defeat of the Democratic Party incumbent, Joe Crowley,
by Ocasio Cortez in the Democratic Party primaries registered the
movement of the electorate to the left, her decision to run as a
Democrat and her subsequent course to campaign for reforming the
Democratic Party is entirely damaging to the cause of working people to
organize and mobilize independently of the American capitalism and its
two-party system.
Reality vs. fantasy: the Select-Committee
Franklin seems to pitch his political support for the Ocasio Cortez’s
course on the premise that short of a mass movement of the working
people fighting for a program to stop and reverse the climate crisis,
the next best option is to work through the Democratic Party to get a
national discussion on a Green New Deal to avert the crisis. So, let us
consider his argument in some detail.
Like all others in the history of labor and socialist movements who have
pursued shortcuts in revolutionary politics, sometimes with disastrous
results, Franklin bends reality to fit his fantasy. To begin with, he
assumes that because Ocasio Cortez has floated the idea of a Select
Committee to forge a Green New Deal, both of these are already facts.
It should be noted in the first place that the likely Democratic Speaker
of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has already asked Florida Representative
Kathy Castor to lead a “special committee on climate change” in the new
Congress that will reinstate the same committee that was dissolved by
the former Republican Speaker John Boehner. While both Pelosi and Castor
have included references to “thousands of green jobs” they hope to
create, they have set aside any mention of a Green New Deal, and it is
not even clear if Ocasio Cortez would be assigned to Castor’s climate
change committee.
In fact, Castor has already disputed the suggestions that
representatives who have received financial contributions from the
fossil fuel industry should be barred from serving on her committee, on
the grounds that it would be unconstitutional because it would violate
their First Amendment right to free speech, a fossil fuel industry legal
argument.
Evan Weber, the political director of the Sunrise movement, responded to
the announcement by saying: “Nancy Pelosi has the power to determine
whether or not the Select Committee for a Green New Deal lives or dies.
… Sunrise Movement’s position is and will continue to be that it’s not
over until she makes it clear that it’s over” (reported in Other News:
Voices Against the Tide, January 2019). This is a sad statement of utter
powerlessness of climate justice activists who place their hope in the
Democratic Party.
Reality vs. Fantasy: a timely national debate on climate change and a
Green New Deal?
With Ocasio Cortez’s proposed Select Committee blocked by the Democratic
Party leadership, it would seem the rest of Franklin’s rosy projections
are also no more a possibility. But let me consider them as if they
were, in fact, to materialize as Franklin hopes.
If we are to believe United Nations Secretary General António Guterres
that the world’s governments will run out of time to stop the runaway
climate catastrophe if they do not act by 2020, it should be abundantly
clear that we are already out of time to act to stop the worst of the
climate crisis.
Still, Franklin imagines not only that the Democratic Party will move
swiftly to form Ocasio Cortez’s Select Committee but that this committee
will hold speedy hearings and formulate a Green New Deal, and that this
will ignite a national debate that presumably improves the final
legislation, and a similar bill will pass the Republican-controlled
Senate and will be signed by President Trump before we run out of time!
That is in one year’s time!
Of course, Franklin forgets, and I do not wish to belabor the point,
that the climate crisis can only be resolved on the world scale with the
top polluters taking the lead. So even if this fantastic scenario plays
out as Franklin imagines it, the crisis will become unstoppable if China
and the European Union fail to follow. In fact, Franklin himself cites
formidable obstacles to any speedy and effective legislation to become
law by counting some of the obstacles, including “the neoliberal wing of
the Democratic Party,” its “progressive establishment,” and the
“neo-fascist” Republican Party. Yet, he still presents Ocasio Cortez’s
proposal as a viable option!
The Green New Deal is neither new nor a radical idea. In fact, in all
its varieties it is some form of Green Capitalism, which has been
criticized by revolutionary ecosocialists, including in the System
Change Not Climate Change network.
The neoliberal Democratic New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman
first proposed it as a way to stop the climate crisis almost 11 years
ago (The Times, Jan. 19, 2007, and April 15, 2007). Friedman is a big
promoter of the magic of technology and capitalist markets, around which
his idea of the Green New Deal was built, and he has influenced the
climate justice movement. Earth Justice interviewed him about his Green
New Deal, and the Green Party picked up the idea, adding on its own
formulations.
And now Congresswoman Ocasio Cortez has made the idea “her own,” and
some climate justice groups and small labor groups have supported the
idea. Meanwhile, there has been no questioning of how and why the U.S.
Congress, one of the three constitutional seats of power of U.S.
capitalism, would somehow legislate a Green New Deal that would actually
stop the crisis and the U.S. president would sign it into law without
any resistance by the same economic, social, and political forces that
have blocked a serious discussion of the crisis for decades without a
massive mobilization of the working people!
There is nothing in Franklin’s essay that even hints at who could stop
climate change—capitalist politicians or the U.S. and world’s working
people.
Climate change mitigation as big business
To understand the capitalist climate mitigation debate, we must
understand the ongoing discussion in the capitalist policymaking circles
about reforming capitalism to function more efficiently. Health-care
policy debates provide an excellent recent example. As a health policy
scholar in the early 1990s, I had the opportunity to document and
demonstrate in detail how the liberal and conservative health-care
reform proposals were framed by concerns about the profitability crisis
in the U.S. capitalist economy. Would the discussion on climate change
in the U.S. Congress be any different?
Just as the Democratic and Republican policymakers refused to frame the
health care reform debate in terms of health care as a human right,
there is no reasons to believe that their debate about the Green New
Deal would be any differently framed—to put humanity and life on Earth
at the center of policymaking deliberations instead of better oiling the
capitalist profit-making machine.
Already, a long list of luminaries from both Democratic and Republican
parties have spoken out in favor of some form of capitalist climate
mitigation policy. Just last September, California’s Governor Brown held
the Climate Summit that came on the heels of the May 24, 2017, “Climate
Change is Big Business” conference in San Francisco, in which he was its
invited keynote speaker.
On Dec. 13, 2018, John Kerry, another strategic thinker of U.S.
capitalism, wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times complaining
about the heat waves that are “stealing 153 billion hours of labor,”
about how tropical infections are moving north, and about falling crop
yields in more than two dozen countries: “By 2050 the Midwestern United
States could see agricultural productivity drop to its lowest level in
decades.” New York State’s right-of-center Democratic Governor Cuomo has
called for a Green New Deal for New York.
It is also useful to place the original New Deal in its historical
context. Contrary to the reformist fantasy that it was all thanks to the
presidency of FDR, “the man of the people,” similar attempts in the
1920s and 1930s were undertaken by other leading capitalist rivals. The
fascist Mussolini government embarked on a public works project to
recast Rome in its historical glory by building statues and arenas to
help whip up Italian nationalist fervor. Hitler built the autobahn
system, and when he found it empty of cars, he ordered the design and
mass production of Volkswagen Beetle (“people’s car”).
Churchill oversaw the reworking of the earlier welfare programs, such as
unemployment insurance, to build the British welfare state. Needless to
say, all the key capitalist rivals were also busy rearming themselves to
the teeth.
Today’s world is similar in important ways. The American imperialist
hegemony that grew out of the ashes of World War II is ending. By some
accounts, China is already the largest capitalist economy in the world,
with the most modern infrastructure and cutting-edge technology, and
even in military terms has become the undisputed power in the Pacific.
The rise of Donald Trump is another sign of the slow decline of American
imperialist power and its leadership crisis. Thus, his “make America
great again” campaign, which appeals to the nostalgia of sections of
U.S. ruling class and working people. His contentious relations with the
U.S. key allies and his trade war moves similarly reflect a desire by
the same laggard section of the U.S. elite to use raw American
imperialist power to maintain its ebbing hegemony in world affairs—but
to no avail.
The more forward-looking section of the U.S. capitalist class, mostly in
the Democratic Party, aims for rejuvenation of the economy based on new
products and new industries, which include “green technologies.” That is
what the real Green New Deal is about, the kind that Friedman talks
about. Even Paul Krugman, a smart liberal Democrat and Keynesian
economist, has come out in favor of redesigning the U.S. economy as a
mixed-economy: “You could imagine running a fairly efficient economy
that is only 2/3 capitalist, 1/3 publicly owned—i.e., sort-of-kind-of
socialist” (The New York Times, Dec. 22, 2018). Is there any doubt that
at best they all are talking about Green Capitalism, not the kind of
ecosocial transformation that is needed to stop and reverse the climate
crisis?
From the perspective of averting the climate catastrophe, as well as
the Sixth Extinction and the threat of nuclear war (the U.S. rulers,
both Democrats, and Republicans, are already working on a
multi-trillion-dollar nuclear rearmament; don’t fool yourself into
thinking they would not use it!), and the entire host of ecosocial
crisis the world faces, none of these capitalist policy wonks have
anything close to a solution.
Neither does Congresswoman-elect Ocasio Cortez. Otherwise, she would
have made that program her election campaign platform and would have
educated the Sunrise Movement activists in that program and a
working-class strategy to fight for such a program. Instead, she has
decided to run as a Democrat and to spend her energy to push the
Democratic Party to the left (whatever that means). And when the
Democratic Party captured the majority in the midterm elections and
Nancy Pelosi, who a year earlier told a student that the Democratic
Party is the party of capitalism, became again the most likely candidate
for the Speaker of the House, she simply set Ocasio Cortez to the side
with a stroke of her pen.
A key difference between a liberal and a working-class revolutionary is
this: The former sees power emanating from the “voter” while the latter
sees it coming from the self-organized and self-mobilized working people.
Ocasio Cortez is a liberal, not a revolutionary. She has no program,
strategy, or set of tactics informed by them to help mobilize
independent working-class action to transcend the anthropocentric
industrial capitalist civilization in the direction of an ecocentric
socialist future. Franklin, on the other hand, considers himself to be a
Marxist. Should he not tell the Sunrise Movement activists that to
overcome the climate crisis we should not look up to the Democratic
Party, the U.S. Congress, or any capitalist institution but to the power
of working people ourselves?
Of course, I do not deny that humanity is staring at possible extinction
if we cannot undertake a massive reversal within a very short time
frame, a very unlikely outcome. But let me ask Franklin why humanity is
in such a predicament if not for decades upon decades of reformist
betrayal? Is it not time perhaps to confront liberalism and reformism in
the labor, climate justice, and (eco)socialist movements?
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January 16, 2019 in Environment. Tags: climate
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________________________________________________
Jules Verne
“ Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add
nothing to them. ”
― Jules Verne