Excellent article from Jacobin about Big Green being infected by Third Way, neoliberal responses to environmental destruction.

No Third Way for the Planet — Kate Aronoff. An environmentalism that can actually save the planet must do battle with corporations. Mainstream environmental groups have done the opposite.

Brief excerpt:

One of the biggest problems with the neoliberal wings of the Democratic Party and the environmental movement is pretty simple: They both could kill us all.

For some time, the two tendencies have run parallel to one another. During the Reagan years, just before Bill Clinton began pushing for welfare reform and expanding the war on drugs, Fred Krupp, CEO of the Environmental Defense Fund, set out to chart his own “third way” for big greens. The “Third Stage,” as he called it, would swap the “relentlessly negative” tone of “polluter-pays” environmentalism for market-based approaches and partnerships with major corporations — fossil fuel companies included.

The strategy caught on, earning him the ears of both Bush administrations and Clinton. Green organizations’ staff in DC ballooned to help lobby and curry favor with politicians. All of a sudden, big business wasn’t the enemy anymore — they were the solution.

When Democrats and mainstream environmentalists tacked rightward in an effort to capture the center, they each lost touch not just with working people, but with the ability to imagine solutions of the scale needed to curb the greatest threat to human existence ever known, climate change. To avert the latter and fight the Trumpian right, each need to shake their enduring faith in the power of free markets.

Rather than Clinton-style market-friendly technocracy, we need an environmentalism that includes redistribution. It’s our only hope for digging out of this mess.

ZN, well, we disagree a bit about possible frames, too. But, yes. Lefties definitely can disagree in good faith, etc. No worries on that part.

I, too, see Gore as preferable to Bush, and Nader as preferable to both of them. So, it’s not an issue, for me, of saying, it’s okay that Bush won, cuz both parties suck. I think Bush was among the worst presidents ever, and until Trump, I might have had him in the top three. Trump pushes him out of that now and has the top slot — at least so far.

My point is the blame game. Not who was preferable. I wrote what I wrote to try to demonstrate that lashing out at the Greens, or Stein, or Sanders, when people do that, just makes no sense. Not logically, mathematically, ethically or morally — in my book.

Zooey wrote:

And Buchanon got 449,000, and the Libertarian candidate got over 384,000. Which candidate were those votes taken from?

And beyond Florida, New Mexico, Oregon, Iowa, and Wisconsin were all decided by less than half a percent, New Mexico by less than a tenth of a percent.

Exactly.

Plus, no state can be “decisive” in our system. No one state has another ECs to do that. Bush won 30 states; Gore 20. Rather than pin it all on Nader, perhaps the Dems should consider the other ten states he couldn’t win, including his home state of Tennessee.

But the real kicker here? In Florida, 320,000 registered Dems voted directly for Bush. Last time I checked, 320,000 is a hell of a lot more than Nader’s 23,000. If we’re playing “what ifs,” that has to include those registered Dems, too, and their numbers dwarfed Nader’s.

PA Ram wrote:

This is not a “country first” nation. It is a “party first” nation. If the Clinton had won and the Republicans were in charge she would already have been impeached. However, if Clinton had won and the Dems were in charge they would no doubt cover for her. There are few true patriots in Congress and wrapping a flag around yourself does not make you one.

This is about a two royal classes protecting their own self interests. The peasants in the middle do not particularly matter.

Well said, PA.

Good article. A minor snippet from it reminds me of the ongoing attack by the Dems against the Greens, Stein, Sanders, etc. They keep bringing up Nader in 2000 and blaming him for Bush. I wish they’d go back to school and take math classes again.

In 2000, barely half the electorate showed up. Roughly 100 MILLION voters stayed home — or had their votes suppressed. Nader’s total, nationwide, was roughly 2.8 million. How on earth is it Nader’s fault when 100 million voters stayed home, and an additional 50 million voted for Bush?

Basically, it’s 2.8 million versus 150 million. And it’s all on Nader?

wv wrote:

zn wrote:

wv wrote:

But i still dont think that comes close to the present situation

Remember, what I said is, this has been happening all along. I didn’t exclude the new technology magnifying it. I just mean to point out that the history on this was deep.

It’s just that before, it was kings doing it.

=============

Yes, and I’m saying that view doesnt work for ME. I dont think i can say “well history is just continuing along its path like a river”.

To me, what we have now is something NEW. Qualitatively different. Sui Generis.

The technology-of-capitalism has changed the game into something new. A mutation has emerged. Or somethin.

w
v

I agree with this, but with a caveat. And it’s kinda weird. Cuz it’s almost like a changing river of thought from ZN to you to me. Unless I misread you guys, and it wouldn’t be the first time . . . ZN is essentially saying nothing is new except for the folks in charge. You’re saying, no, this corporatist model is brand new. It’s unique. And I’m saying, it goes deeper still. It’s the underlying system of legal forms and social relations invented for the capitalist system itself . . . the capitalist system in and of itself, its inherent, internal logic . . . that the corporatist model is just the logical progression, the natural evolution of a highly unnatural and unique economic form.

We could end the corporate model today, and capitalism would innovate and sprout something just as bad or worse tomorrow. It needs to be taken out, root, trunk and branch.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 6 months ago by Billy_T.

nittany ram wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

IMO,

Folks are missing the fundamentally revolutionary changes wrought by capitalism, when it overthrew previous economics forms — which were all local and independent of one another. No previous economic system had even tried to subsume all local markets under its umbrella, and then get governments to make all of that the only legal structure.

Well I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying about capitalism, Billy. I was speaking more in generalities though. I don’t know much about economic systems but I doubt the systems that existed in Western Europe in the 1500s were any ‘better’for the masses than what we have today.

They were rotten back then for the masses, too, of course. But within those local, independent market systems there were kernels of hope for a real revolution from the bottom up. Under feudalism, for example, the lord of the manor didn’t have legal ownership of what the people renting his land produced. Yes, they had to tithe to him. But there was not yet any strict employer/employee relationship, under the law, that said someone automatically owns everything generated by others. That came later with capitalism. It was the first system that encoded this upfront ownership of someone else’s production. And until capitalism, most people were self-employed, self-producers, small farmers, artisans, craftsmen, etc. etc. Many of them were independent of feudal lords.

Anyway . . . the bottom line is: The capitalist system, for the first time in history, primarily due to its Grow or Die imperative, subsumed local market after local market, until none were free. And it still has to do this in some form, be it into the future (debt and speculation), into the formerly public realm (privatization), or via consumer labor (self-service). It can never stop its expansion into new markets or reconfiguring old ones. This is really what threatens the planet. Its inexorable need for more and more and more. That was never an innate dynamic for any previous system.

Before capitalism, we had C-M-C and use value dominate. Commodities exchanged for money to buy more commodities we all needed.

After the capitalist revolution, that became M-C-M and exchange value. Money, purchasing labor (as a commodity) to produce commodities in exchange for more money. It no longer mattered if anything produced was needed. If they could sell shit on a stick, they did. All that mattered (and matters now) was if it could generate profits. The goal of fulfilling needs was dropped, and “sales and marketing” was established as a wing in order to create “needs” that did not exist.

Also gone forever were local, independent markets, which could function on their own, outside other dominant systems.

One of the things that keeps nagging at me about the capitalist system. As it grows, as it increases neck-breaking hierarchies — and no previous economic systems comes close to this aspect — it’s more and more as if the verticality of wealth and income corresponds to thousands of different species, not just we humans. As in, we’re paid in such extraordinarily segregated forms, with such a massive difference between top and bottom, it’s as if you have humans at the top, dogs in the middle, and worms at the bottom, plus all kinds of different species in between. There simply aren’t enough individual differences between humans to warrant the ginormous gaps. Not in intelligence, “hard work,” creativity, etc. etc.

There aren’t enough, really, to warrant more than about a 4 to 1 ratio, max. And that wouldn’t take into account all the massive advantages or disadvantages coming from the birth lottery — which, it could be argued, cancel out that 4 to 1 ratio.

The disease is capitalism itself. We need new economic forms that correspond with actual human differences, which are minimal, and much of that is due to the luck of the birth lottery itself.

The unprecedented nature of capitalism is captured brilliantly by Ellen Meiksins Wood, in her The Origin of Capitalism. My highest recommendation for that book, with the only criticism being it’s too short.

It’s the first inherently imperialistic economic system in world history. It brought us the Industrial Revolution. It must absorb all formerly independent, local economies, or it can’t grow. And its Prime Directive is Grow or Die.

The old feudal system could survive for centuries without expansion. Its local, independent markets could survive in that state for centuries — and did. It didn’t need to conquer other territories for its local markets to remain healthy. But the same can not be said for capitalism. It must destroy or absorb all independent markets, unify them, or it can’t do what it needs to do — increase profits, year after year after year. It dies if it has a static-state economy like feudalism.

To me, “corporations” are just the symptom of all of this. They aren’t the disease itself. They’re the natural result of capitalist laws of competitive motion, and those laws are killing the biosphere.

Oh, and another biggie for us back then? This was in the 1970s . . . you should never sell your paintings to a bank. Seeing it there, well, that was a sure sign you had sold out. No banks. Not ever. Never. And not just for the obvious reasons of it being a bank and all, and the apotheosis of capitalist power. Really, it was more a “taste” thing. As in, people who owned and ran banks had no taste, no aesthetic sense to speak of . . . and were barely above someone with a black velvet painting of Elvis in their basement. And they didn’t have the “class” thing going against them, etc.

I miss those days of such certainty and intellectualized scorn, that Us against the World camaraderie, in a context of heightened aesthetic awareness.

Then again, we may, um, well, have been a bit full of ourselves.

;>)

nittany ram wrote:

wv wrote:

nittany ram wrote:

I see I’m the only one who ranks as “Revolutionary” on the Societal Axis. The rest of you are merely “Very Progressive”.

Ya know I don’t think I should be hanging out with the likes of you people anymore. As often happens in relationships, one person grows while the other stagnates. It’s no one’s fault but it happens. So I’m not sure a ‘very progressive’ board like this has anything left to offer a bonafide Revolutionary like myself.

I mean, look at it from my point of view. How would it look if some of the other Revolutionaries came by and saw me slumming it up with a bunch of ‘very progressives’?

Anyhow, it’s over. We can still be friends but if you see me with other Revolutionaries for gawd sakes act like you don’t know me.

Thanks and goodbye.

==================

Well, i want to know if you are an ‘elite’ revolutionary or
just a “No.1 Revolutionary”

w
v

For your information Revolutionaries are ranked via the Scoville Heat Scale that is commonly used to rank peppers. I fall somewhere between the Zimbabwe Bird Chile and the Habenaro.

What’s your take on red peppers?

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/

zn wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

ZN,

Thanks. Do you have the admin rights to just place the graphic in the proper post?

If not, no biggie.

Yes. And I will do that right now.

You have mad skilz, ZN.

Thanks.

ZN,

Thanks. Do you have the admin rights to just place the graphic in the proper post?

If not, no biggie.

Hey, folks. Hope all is well.

This came out differently than I would have expected. I identify as a Libertarian Socialist. So this surprises me a bit:

Closest Match: Libertarian Communism

Ideological matching is a work in progress, and is much less accurate than the values and axes.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 6 months ago by zn.