(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . AntiCapitalist Chat: a Green Class Struggle means Degrowth and GND are complements, not substitutes [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-09-02 “How do you turn rubbish into money?” Movements toward degrowth are no alternative to those initiatives associated with Green New Deal legislation. Shrinking the capitalist economies is beyond counterintuitive, and the creation of Net Zero industries does not fully address the larger structural problems of carbon capitalist economies. US high speed rail in 2021 x The fact that China is not really investing in CDR, while they're building out clean energy infrastructure at an extraordinary rate, is enormously revealing. https://t.co/8uG0NWHyXy — Dr. Genevieve Guenther (@DoctorVive) August 31, 2023 The paucity of 21st Century transportation infrastructure investment is one among many short-sighted aspects of Green economy planning in the US. Below is a sampling of approaches. GOP nonsense The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. --Karl Marx Greenwashing, ... spans industries and takes many forms — from a backslapping tweet on green job creation to a slick net-zero emissions campaign that defies company practice. The strategy relies on unsupported, exaggerated or misleading claims to paint corporate action as being greener than it is. Without class struggle the emancipatory potential of degrowth will fail to be realized. A revolutionary pedagogy can help to unify them. In his recent book, Climate Change as Class War, Matthew Huber argues that the ecological crisis is primarily caused by the capitalist mode of production, especially the preponderant deployment of fossil capital, ‘the forms of capital that generate profit through emissions’. For many on the anti-capitalist left, this is a conclusion that hardly bears repeating. Nevertheless, Huber is right to centre the claim. Ecological collapse is accelerating and requires immediate action. While the global average of emissions must reach zero by 2050 to stay within 1.5–2 °C heating, in order to do this at pace, the parts of the world most responsible for emissions must reach net zero by 2030. But not only are we failing to make progress toward these goals, emissions continue to rise with no end in sight. Huber puts it bluntly: ‘We’re still losing.’ We’re still losing to capitalism—but why? Because, in the first instance, Huber emphasizes, we are not really fighting it. Capitalism is uniquely defined by its class structure: capitalists, the business owners and corporate boards of directors who organize production; and workers, those they hire to carry it out. While the capitalist class comprises a relatively tiny number of people, it dominates the working class in terms of property owned and legal authority over its use. In order to make a living, workers have no option but to sell their time to capitalists in the labor market. However, due to its relatively immense size and leverage at the point of production—through strikes and other forms of collective action—the working class has the potential to exercise its own form of power. This is where climate struggle must be located, Huber tells us: the sites of mass emissions. Capitalism can be fundamentally challenged by nothing other than class struggle, so only class struggle can fundamentally address the ecological crisis. In this historical moment, climate change is class war. www.resilience.org/... Writing in New Statesman, economist Hans Stegeman proposes that the debates between degrowth and green growth are already outdated. In the present era of low GDP growth, there is no meaningful choice between the two. Instead, at least in the absence of any radical reordering of society, economies are by default transitioning toward a post-growth model. In The New Yorker, environmental activist Bill McKibben presents degrowth as a call to reduce consumption, in contrast to the Green New Deal (GND), which emphasizes production. Evenhandedly, he opposes “endless” growth but parts company with degrowthers when they, citing the ecological costs of all the mining required, refuse to support “an all-out push for electric vehicles (EVs), heat pumps, solar panels and wind turbines.” Why not do both, he asks: Invest in renewables and EVs while also restricting “wasteful consumerism”? Jacobin is where we find the most vinegary views, adverted already in the title: “The Problem With Degrowth.” Matt Huber, a Syracuse professor whose Climate Change as Class War appeared last year, finds a few polite words for degrowthers’ critique of capitalism but rejects the rest. For Huber, degrowth is a politics of austerity. It is anti-Marxist — where Marxism is portrayed (idiosyncratically) as a program for the state-led ramping up of production and consumption. Scornful of degrowthers’ “prohibition” on technological development and their insistence on constraining energy use and material throughput, his counterproposal centers on the “massive development of the productive forces.” And whereas degrowthers perceive the transgressing of planetary boundaries as an existential threat, Huber’s stance is laid back. One of them, the ozone hole, has already been “fixed,” and so splendidly simply, with a change of technology. All the other eight — of which climate change and biodiversity disappearance are but two — can be fixed by “qualitative transformations of specific sectors of production.” To “fix” climate change, the specific sector to be transformed is energy. For the U.S., Huber borrows “prominent modeling” from Princeton’s Net-Zero America report to advocate massive investment in heat pumps and renewable energy, in carbon capture and storage (CCS), and in construction of 250 “large” nuclear reactors. He sees the Princeton program as compatible with an electorally popular GND, which he contrasts with degrowth’s lack of voter support. This last critique carries a hint of projection, given that Huber’s own manifesto, the nationalization of all private companies under a socialist planning regime, is hardly riding high in the polls. All the world-transforming causes have had to be fought for, initially against the majority tide. truthout.org/... Just as class is a feature, so is race in defining the social divisions in which a Green Class Struggle bust be defined. A Natural Resources Defense Council report issued last year, Watered Down Justice , found that race is the factor that bears the strongest relationship to slow and ineffective enforcement of the federal drinking water law in communities across the United States. x Attorneys for Flint residents in civil trials related to the city’s water crisis are asking a federal judge for a part of the interest that has accrued on portions of a $626-million settlement reached with the state of Michigan, the city of Flint, and o... https://t.co/SRzCbkmcio — The Flint Journal (@flintjournal) August 25, 2023 When we allow climate change activism to be cast solely as a white, middle class issue, we do a disservice to those communities. Consider the discussion that surrounds “permitting reform,” a catchall term for efforts to streamline siting and permitting processes to help speed the development of renewable energy projects and modernize the electric grid. Permitting reform has emerged as a focus of Washington policy makers, many of whom worry that the U.S. lacks the regulatory regime and administrative capacity to support the rapid buildout of clean energy funded by the IRA. But the discussion has been dominated by the purported evils of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), one of the best remaining tools Black communities can use to oppose toxic polluting infrastructure; almost all proposals to weaken it would remove or constrain the avenues the law provides for democratic participation in building infrastructure. Gutting NEPA has long been a goal for fossil fuel lobbyists, but since the passage of the IRA, it has also been championed by “supply-side liberals” and members of the climate movement’s green growth coalition. hammerandhope.org/... (2019) When it comes to climate change, we’re all equal, but some of us are more equal than others. Despite reports that global warming will disproportionately affect working class people and people of colour, the climate change movement and ecological activism in general is still seen as a predominantly white and middle class preoccupation. But in order for the climate change movement to actually save the world it needs to not just be accommodating to working class people and people of colour, but step aside and allow the leadership of the movement to transform completely. [...] What we can’t avoid is the fact that climate change is inherently a class issue. Environmental degradation is not only affecting poorer areas and communities more, it’s also a direct consequence of capitalism. “All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil,” Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital. “All progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the last sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, the most rapid this process of destruction becomes.” Social ecology, an ideology championed by American environmental anarchist Murray Bookchin, makes a similar point. Social ecologists trace the causes of our planet’s environmental degradation back to society’s unjust hierarchical system. Social ecologists argue that the most environmentally sympathetic form of political and social organisation is one that prioritises community and small scale systems of production. “We need to decrease inequality to achieve a habitable planet, where resources are better shared and low income communities are listened to,” Karen Bell echoes. www.vice.com/... Extinction Rebellion (XR for short) describes itself as an "international, non-violent civil disobedience activist movement" which is working to "halt mass extinction and minimise the risk of social collapse." you are addressing a room full of people. you tell them taxes turn litter into money. you try to sell your business cards to the group for $5 each. probably no takers. you offer your cards to anyone who stays to help clean up the room no takers. you then point to the man at the door with the 9mm who’s the tax collector, and no one leaves without 10 of your business cards. you then repeat the questions. moslereconomics.com/... x x YouTube Video [WARREN MOSLER:] The question is, “How do you turn litter into money?” So, I take my business cards out here, and these are twenty dollars a piece, if anybody wants to buy any. No? Any takers? No? Okay. [00:00:19] All right, well if anybody wants to stay after and help clean up the carpet and tidy up the room, I’m going to pay one per hour. Or five per hour, or whatever, one per hour. Anybody want to stay and help? Okay, not a lot of takers. [00:00:30] Then I add one more thing: Look, there’s only one way out of here and there’s a man at the door with a nine millimeter machine gun. Okay? And you can’t get out of here without five of my cards. Now things have changed. I’ve now turned litter into money. Now, you will buy these, you will work for these things if you want to get out. The man at the door is the tax man and that’s the function of taxes. Stephanie [Kelton] talked about how taxes do it. But you can recreate that… [00:01:08] So, is there an example of a currency that works like that in the real world? I mean, aside from the real world? Why yes: [WARREN MOSLER:] There’s a currency that’s circulating at the University of Missouri Kansas City that we started way back called the buckaroo because we wanted to replicate a currency for the students to understand National Income accounting and how a currency works and that it doesn’t matter if you are a small open economy and what they did is that you need something like twenty buckaroos a semester to be able to get your grades in the economics classes. [00:01:37] The way you earn buckaroos is that you can do public service, community service, at some of the local institutions whether it’s the hospital, the police department or helping out locally. And they pay one per hour. Back ten or fifteen years ago, whenever these were started, they were worth… And they were freely exchangeable. So you would have to go earn your buckaroos. You’d have to have twenty of them to pay your taxes, your buckaroo tax. [00:02:09] But you didn’t have to earn them. You could buy them from other students, you could do work for them. Nobody really cared what you did for them, you just had to somehow get buckaroos to turn in. Just like you have to pay your taxes here and whatever you do to get your money. [00:02:23] So, the students would go to work and they would earn these things and at the end of the year, the first year, I did the accounting at the Post Keynesian Conference for the buckaroos and it went something like this: The total tax was a thousand buckaroos across the classes. Students came and earned eleven hundred buckaroos. And they paid a thousand for taxes. The School ran a deficit. They spent eleven hundred but they only collected a thousand. Did that affect their credit rating with the rating agencies or anything? Of course not. I used the word “parable” quite deliberately, because my goal, readers, is to open your minds to a paradigm shift (and not to do a full-fledged, economist-style explication of the history and current operations of the U.S. financial system, which, like juggling flaming power tools, would require more practice time from me than I have right now)[2]. However, if you find Mosler’s parable illuminating, we can glean some additional insights: (1) Money (“litter”) does not emerge from barter (that is, historically, the “double coincidence of wants” is a crock). (2) Money need not be “backed by” anything (gold, for example). (3) The sovereign (whoever controls the “man at the door”) creates demand for the money it issues through taxes. (4) Taxes do not “pay for” the services the sovereign provides. That is not their function. [3] (In the news coverage of tax reform, you’ll hear that taxes “pay for” government spending constantly, expressed as a truism.) Of course, Mosler’s parable is really a thought experiment, and greatly simplified; there are no banks, and there is no financial sector. L. Randall Wray expands on Mosler’s parable and draws out some implications: In previous instalments we have established that “taxes drive money”. What we mean by that is that sovereign government chooses a money of account (Dollar in the USA), imposes obligations in that unit (taxes, fees, fines, tithes, tolls, or tribute), and issues the currency that can be used to “redeem” oneself in payments to the government. Currency is like the “Get Out of Jail Free” card in the game of Monopoly. Taxes create a demand for “that which is necessary to pay taxes” (and other obligations to the state), which allows the government to purchase resources to pursue the public purpose by spending the currency. Warren Mosler puts it this way: the purpose of the tax is to create unemployment. That might sound a bit strange, but if we define unemployment as a situation in which job seekers want to work for money wages, then government can hire them by offering its currency. The tax frees resources from private use so that government can employ them in public use. To greatly simplify, money is a measuring unit, originally created by rulers to value the fees, fines, and taxes owed. By putting the subjects or citizens into debt, real resources could be moved to serve the public purpose. Taxes drive money. So, money was created to give government command over socially created resources. This is why money is linked to sovereign power—the power to command resources. That power is rarely absolute. It is contested, with other sovereigns but often more important is the contest with domestic creditors. * * * x x YouTube Video [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/2/2190207/-AntiCapitalist-Chat-a-Green-Class-Struggle-means-Degrowth-and-GND-are-complements-not-substitutes Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/