The End of Growth?: The Capitalist Economy and Ecological Crisis

By Conor Payne and Chris Stewart

Republished from Socialist Alternative.

Many ecologists, activists and academics argue that an obsession with economic growth is the cause of our current ecological crisis and a commitment to “degrowing” the economy is the solution.

Too often, however, this discussion lacks a sufficient class or anti-capitalist content and workers are blamed for our supposedly destructive “consumption patterns”. Instead, socialists should be clear that the cause of the climate crisis is the capitalist system and its incessant drive to accumulate profits, and that the only way to solve the crisis is to struggle for a socialist world where human need, including a sustainable relation to nature, comes before private greed.

Capitalism’s “boom and bust” cycle

Under capitalism, the driving force of the economy is the pursuit of profit. The competition between companies and even different capitalist powers for markets and resources means that this drive for profit is relentless and expansive. Therefore, capitalism also involves a continuous quest for economic growth.

At the same time, these companies will seek to “externalize” the cost of their activities, to leave them to be paid by someone else. The capitalist firm doesn’t care on what basis it grows; whether its products are useful or cause harm, or if its activities are environmentally sustainable.

Capitalism is a system of contradictions. The capitalists get their profits by exploiting workers, as well as the resources extracted from nature in the labor process. The constant need to accumulate more profits means capitalism extracts more and more resources in increasingly destructive ways, ultimately leading to the depletion of soils, minerals, forests, the life in our oceans etc — which undermines the system’s own sources of wealth.

Capitalism is increasingly coming up against the ecological barrier to its unrestrained development, as seen in mounting natural disasters, the recent shutdown of the power system in Texas, and a global pandemic, all at least partly attributable to humanity’s increasing incursions into nature.

As well as this, capitalism is a system that primarily organizes investment through the chaos of the stock market, where investment is motivated only by the pursuit of profit. Today, capitalists increasingly choose to speculate with their wealth through complex financial products that have little relation to actual value in society – what Marx termed “fictitious capital”. This is because they can make more short-term profits here than they can through actual productive investment.

At the same time, the desire of the capitalists to drive down the share of wealth that goes to the working class means that workers collectively are not able to buy all the goods the capitalists put to market. This is one way that capitalist growth eventually comes up against its limits and throws the system into crisis and recession. We are now experiencing this process of crisis in Ireland and internationally for the second time in just over a decade.

When growth has been rooted in productive investment, it has often led also to increases in working class living standards, although workers’ gains are usually dwarfed by those of corporations and the rich. Periods of economic growth, for example in the decades following World War 2, were also sometimes used by capitalist governments to grant social reforms in the interests of working people, such as pensions, public health and education services, welfare protections etc. This was done not out of any innate kindness but as a mechanism to stave off potential revolutionary challenges to the system from the working class.

However, in the preceding decades of neo-liberal capitalism, the basis for growth has been precisely the reduction of the share of wealth going to the working class. Capitalism has suppressed wages, gutted public services, eroded economic security. Inequality has exploded as the gains of economic growth congealed at the top. At the same time, the capitalists have promoted more and more consumption fueled in significant measure by debt. This means that today capitalist economic growth often means little real gain for working class people.

The recovery from the great recession of ’08 was largely a joyless one. This was illustrated graphically here in Ireland in the 2020 election when the establishment did not benefit from any “feel good” factor whatsoever — in fact suffering a historic defeat. This was despite nominally impressive growth rates in the preceding years. The recovery did not alter the reality of low pay, precarity and housing distress. In Britain, the Office of National Statistics found that, despite a decade of “growth”, real wages only recovered to the level of 2008 at the end of 2019 — just in time for the next crisis! At the same time, the numbers on zero hours contracts were the highest on record, at just under a million workers.1

Meanwhile, the mounting burden of ecological breakdown will not be shared equally; as those with wealth move to insulate themselves from the consequences of the economic system they have profited from. As unprecedentedly low temperatures drove catastrophic power outages in Texas, working-class, poor and minority neighborhoods bore the brunt of the power cuts while empty skyscrapers lit up the city skyline.

Karl Marx said that under capitalism: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.”2 This sums up the capitalist economy today. At the same time, of course, workers are still liable to pay the price when the system goes into recession. The reality is that at no stage in its cycle of boom and bust, does the capitalist economy operate in the interests of the working class.

An economy for need, not greed

While economic growth undoubtedly drives carbon emissions and all forms of environmental destruction, contraction on a capitalist basis does not deliver an equivalent let up in environmental intensity. According to one study, examining 150 countries over the period of 1960-2008, a 1% increase in GDP meant on average a 0.73% increase in carbon emissions, while a 1% decline in GDP meant only a 0.4% decrease in carbon emissions.3 This is because the environmentally inefficient goods and infrastructure created during a boom generally continue in use during a downturn. Less consumption in itself can never deliver the necessary reduction in carbon emissions. Instead we need a fundamental change in how we produce.

This means that without a planned transition to a sustainable means of life the tendency will be for ever increasing emissions. So the debate about growth and degrowth is useless unless linked to the need to bring an end to the chaos of the capitalist market.

The purpose of the capitalist economy is to deliver increased profit for the bosses. The purpose of the economy under socialism would be to fulfill human need in a sustainable way. This means taking the key sectors of the economy out of the hands of big business and bringing them into public ownership, under democratic control. This means we can reorganize the energy industry, transport, agribusiness and production overall on a planned basis, in the interests of both people and the planet.

Socialists want a better life for the vast majority on this earth. We know many, even in the richer countries, are in poverty or barely keeping their heads above water, do not have access to decent housing or healthcare, or have no economic security for the future. We believe this to be completely unjustifiable in a world of incredible abundance. For this reason, we reject attacks on working-class living standards, even those that are introduced with an environmental veneer, e.g. water charges, or carbon taxes.

The vast majority of the world’s population is responsible for very little in terms of carbon emissions. A recent UN report shows that globally the top 1% of earners are responsible for a yearly per capita average of 74 tons of C02 per year. Meanwhile for the bottom 50% of earners the figure is 0.7 tons.4 In much of the world a socialist system would need to increase production on a sustainable basis and redistribute wealth. Even in the wealthier capitalist countries many sectors that are not prioritized for capitalist investment would need to be expanded under a socialist system, not reduced — healthcare, housing, renewable energy for a start.

A world of waste

At the same time, capitalist production involves enormous waste. We should not underestimate the extent of this:

• 690 million people around the world went hungry in 2019, with the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation projecting that the impact of the pandemic could add a further 132 million people to that number.5 Yet, during the pandemic, the closure of restaurants and other disruptions cause the widespread dumping of perfectly good produce. Even in “normal” times, while the world already produces enough food to feed everyone, a minimum of one third of this food is lost or wasted. Many things cause this but the status of food as a commodity to be sold for profit is at the centre of the problem. Agribusiness leaves food to rot in the fields to keep prices high, supermarkets throw out edible food they don’t think they can sell, good food is even discarded because its size or shape makes it “unmarketable”.6

• In 2020, approximately $569 billion was spent on advertising, projected to grow to $612 billion this year.7 You can add to this, the resources spent on sales promotion, public relations, “direct marketing” and other forms of corporate self-promotion. The vast bulk of this money is wasted, spent not to inform us but to convince us to buy as much as possible or to buy one identical brand of a product over another, often preying on our anxieties and insecurities in order to create false needs in our minds that can be “solved” through consumption.

• Because capitalism doesn’t produce for need but for profit, advertising and marketing become bound up with the process of production itself. The packaging industry is now the third largest on earth and much packaging is not mainly functional but a form of product promotion. Packaging costs amount to somewhere between 10% and 40% of total product cost.8

• Planned obsolescence means that products are consciously not built to be durable and must be frequently replaced by consumers. This includes fast fashion made from low quality material and electronics with batteries that can’t be replaced, contributing to 500 million tonnes of E-waste in 2019.9

• There are a plethora of other industries and products of no use to working-class people: from the armaments industry producing weapons of death, to luxury goods like private jets — an industry which has benefitted from a raft of new, wealthy customers seeking to avoid commercial flights during the pandemic. As a result of yet another capitalist speculative bubble, the cryptocurrency Bitcoin now consumes more energy than all of Argentina, a country of 45 million people.

• Competition between firms means that research and development efforts are often duplicated.

As we can see, the mountains of waste produced under capitalism are not a product mainly of the demands of consumers, but instead serve the needs of capitalist profiteering. The structure of capitalist society itself also partly conditions our consumer needs. Those who don’t live near reliable public transport “need” to buy cars, people on low incomes will “choose” to buy fast fashion etc.

To create more and more products that aren’t needed or will be sent rapidly to landfill, or to generate more and more artificial demand is all “growth” in capitalist terms, but it isn’t human progress. A democratic, planned economy could do “more with less” as part of a planned ecological transition — retooling useless or destructive industries, eliminating duplication, overproduction and planned obsolescence, focusing on fulfilling needs not generating artificial wants and transforming agriculture, transport and energy production on a sustainable basis. In such a system whole industries, communities and cities would be planned democratically and on a completely different basis, putting an end to capitalist overproduction and waste and allowing for a more rational allocation of resources.

Sustainable future means socialist planning

Some argue that a simple transition to renewable energy will solve the ecological problems we face. This transition is both necessary and possible, but won’t be done under capitalism that will extract every source of fossil fuels down to the last, so long as there is profit to be made from them.

But even if this were achieved, we would still face a range of looming ecological catastrophes. The fact is that capitalism is already exceeding a number of planetary boundaries for safeguarding a safe environment for human civilization on earth.

These include species extinction, soil degradation and deforestation, to name only a few. Their common source is the increasing scale and intensity of humanity’s incursions into nature, which are now undermining the basis of our own existence on the planet.

Nor will technological changes alone solve the problem of a sustainable relationship with nature. Under capitalism, the opposite is the case: while technological changes result in the more efficient use of energy, this then creates the basis for further expansion and so paradoxically technological development often results in a net increase in the amount of energy used.10

While technology may alter to some degree what the limits are, we have to accept the reality that “you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet”. Capitalism means an increasingly destructive and frantic search for resources that can be extracted and land which can be developed, with the benefits of this activity more and more concentrated in the hands of the few.

Socialist planning can ensure the rational development of the quality of our lives without increasing environmental intensity. Only on this basis can we restructure our society around need, not profit, creating countless socially necessary jobs in pursuit of building a sustainable system.

Socialists stand for massive investment in low carbon jobs and sustainable infrastructure, as well as the introduction of a four-day work-week with no loss of pay. This would not only solve the problem of permanent unemployment under capitalism by distributing work to all those who need it, but would also free workers up to participate in political and economic decision-making, and would achieve a better balance between work, our social lives and leisure.

This will still pose complex questions about how products, industries and practices can be maintained, but these are best resolved on the basis of democratic discussion in a society founded on equality and solidarity.

Notes

1. Richard Partington, Feb 18, 2020 “Average Wages Top Pre-Financial Crisis Levels”, The Guardian, www.theguardian.com 

2. Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, www.marxists.org

3. Richard York, Oct 7, 2012, “Asymmetric effects of economic growth and decline on CO2 emissions”, Nature Climate Change, www.nature.com

4. UN Environment Program “Emissions Gap Report 2020”, Dec 9, 2020 

5. UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, July 13, 2020, “As more go hungry and malnutrition persists, achieving Zero Hunger by 2030 in doubt, UN report warns”, www.fao.org

6. Andrew Smolski, Mar 29, 2017, “Capital’s Hunger in Abundance”, Jacobin, jacobinmag.com

7. Brad Adgate, Dec 14, 2020, “Ad Agency Forecast: Expect The Advertising Market To Rebound In 2021”, Forbes, www.forbes.com

8. John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, 2020, The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift, Monthly Review Press, p. 364

9. John Harris, Apr 15, 2020, “Planned obsolescence: the outrage of our electronic waste mountain”, The Guardian, www.theguardian.com

10. Foster and Clark, 2020, p.352-3.

One Small Step for Man, One Giant Stumble for Mankind

By Peter Fousek

A few weeks ago, Sir Richard Branson of Necker Island (a home selected, by his own admission, for purposes of tax avoidance) launched himself and into suborbital flight, thereby winning the so-called billionaire space race that he, Jeff Bezos (who has since gone to space himself), and Elon Musk have spent billions on over the past few years. This comes on the heels of headlines (including that of Bezos’s own Washington Post) announcing the staggering loss of life that the Pacific Northwest has experienced as a result of the recent heatwave, the latest in an ever-expanding list of tragic disasters brought on by climate change. Branson’s triumphant flight took place a week after the world watched a truly apocalyptic video of the Gulf of Mexico on fire following yet another pipeline rupture. The billionaire space race has unfolded while developing nations of the global South have already been forced to grapple with devastating droughts, floods, and famines, brought on by the pollution produced as a byproduct of profits accumulated largely in the West.[1] As the planet continues to burn, as countless people continue to suffer and die, the wealthiest members of our species spend fortunes to escape the Earth. I cannot emphasize enough how terrifying of a prospect that is—we, the 99%, those without the means (or interest) to pursue such a planetary exit, should be deeply, deeply concerned. As the effects of climate change continue to unfold, the future looks increasingly grim; nonetheless, as this latest, sickening display of wealth makes clear, those individuals with the economic power to perhaps pull us back from the precipice, are instead happy to watch as we continue to slip closer to unfathomable disaster.

In economics, an externality is an effect or consequence produced by an action, that is felt by people other than the actor responsible for it. The inequitable distribution of the impacts of climate change is a heartbreaking example of a negative externality. For years, the people of developing countries have borne the consequences brought on by practices that they have no hand in. In these countries, many of which continue to suffer from the lasting impacts of colonialist extraction and (economic and militaristic) imperialism, decades of ecological devastation have long since made it abundantly clear the threat posed by the climate crisis is truly existential. And the responsibility for that destruction has not been in question. As disaster after disaster has been endured, there has been an overwhelming, consistently growing collection of evidence supporting the consensus that rising sea levels, ozone depletion, extreme weather, mass extinction, and countless other forms of geological violence, are the direct result of industrial practices ranging from the burning of fossil fuels to the overconsumption of beef cattle.

So why haven’t we stopped? Why do we continue to increase the rate at which we pollute, while the planet itself cries out for help? The answer is largely a function of the aforementioned externality: those who pollute have not yet felt the heat. That isn’t to say people in countries like the United States or Canada (both among the top 20 CO2 producers per capita) aren’t experiencing adverse effects of the climate crisis—as the recent heatwave makes clear, they certainly are. But, while the ordinary United States citizen likely drives a car, eats beef, and engages in any number of other practices that increase the global emission output, they are nowhere close to being major polluters. That status is reserved for those individuals, corporations, states, and institutions who possess economic power over the production of pollution. It is the auto-manufacturer who is responsible for the destructive impacts inherent to the car, not the wage worker who needs it in order to drive to work. It is the natural gas conglomerate and the utility provider who are at fault for the fuel burned to power the generator of a regional electric grid, not the family who has no choice but to use that grid for their electricity. Those who are to blame, who have reaped obscene profits while jeopardizing the future of our world, are continuing to do so, because they can afford not to care.

As mountains of evidence demonstrating the harm caused by industrial pollution have continued to pile up, billions have been spent on lobbying to block policies that would address the causes of climate change. Forbes reports that oil and gas companies alone spend $200 million annually on such efforts.  In comparison to the quarterly earnings they make as they continue to ravage the planet, that cost is negligible. And, while a 2019 study by the Pew Research Center found that 62% of Americans believe the federal government should do more to address the unfolding crisis, it is becoming increasingly evident that our political apparatus has already been bought and paid for, and that any effort on their part do undo the damage done will be far too little, far too late. Rather than act in accordance with popular interest and take measures to address climate change, our “representatives” would prefer to represent those whose substantial contributions will help ensure their reelection. Free market fundamentalists are quick to argue that the profit incentive drives all human innovation; while I disagree with them there, it is clear to see the profit incentive drives our legislation. As a result, those with the power and privilege to do so will continue to exploit the planet and its population, amassing enough wealth to insulate themselves from the consequences of their own actions.

In my previous article, Their Freedom and Ours, I argue that liberty in the United States is increasingly a function of wealth. The implication of freedom’s financial underpinning is that those without money are less valuable than those who possess. Whether in a pandemic or an ecological disaster, this means that our institutional authorities are willing to sacrifice the wellbeing, and even the lives, of the working class, for the sake of the interests of the wealthy. The climate crisis stands only to exacerbate that dynamic of legally and institutionally backed inequality and injustice. We have already witnessed that to be the case, as disaster and devastation have been thrust onto millions of geopolitically marginalized people. Going forward, like the billionaires currently occupied with shooting themselves into space, the wealthy elite will continue to shield themselves from the byproducts of their own greed. Make no mistake: if the more profitable move is to watch the world burn while continuing to add fuel to the fire, they will do so. The economically marginalized and oppressed must recognize their potential ability to ensure that the continued callousness of the wealthy is anything but profitable.

I stated earlier that we should be terrified. More importantly, we should be livid. Those who have reaped the benefits of longstanding destructive practices will gladly watch the rest of us suffer in order to continue down their gluttonous path. What could be more despicable, more utterly inhuman, than that? I also wrote that the average American is not at fault for the crisis. That is not to say that we don’t hold responsibility—we very much do. As consumers, we drive gas powered cars, eat food shipped hundreds of miles from industrial farms, order plastic wrapped plastic products from Amazon, and so much more. As workers, we act as the multitude of miniscule but integral cogs in the economic machine of our late capitalist dystopia, filling the many roles and executing the countless tasks necessary for major corporations to continue functioning. Thus, for the same reasons that we hold a share of the responsibility for the future of our planet, we also hold incredible power.

Consider the lengths that this nation went to, to ensure that our economy never came close to completely shutting down in the face of the deadliest pandemic in a century. Without our continued cooperation as both consumer and producer, the economic system of this country would fail to function—those all-important profits would disappear. Corporate propaganda has tried to convince us that individual consumer choice (e.g. recycling and using paper straws) would be our salvation. That is a lie intended to shift blame away from the corporation to the individual. However, the collective choices of many individuals, acting together for a shared goal, can certainly have a transformative effect. The influence and interference of wealth in U.S. politics and culture has resulted in numerous legal and social barriers to mass strikes; while strikes, legal or otherwise, remain one of the most important political and economic tools held by the working class, we cannot rule out the other elements at our disposal as we strive towards the level of organization and engagement necessary for a general strike. The power of a widespread boycott, for example, is immense. Ours is a consumer economy, in which consumption accounts for nearly 70% of GDP. With sufficient organization, the impact of a well-planned boycott could be monumental, and help pave the way for other mechanisms to enact meaningful political change.

Still, taking action is difficult, even in the best of times; that difficulty is certainly exacerbated by the sheer magnitude of the obstacles that we see stacked against us as we endeavor to confront the climate crisis. Between being indoctrinated into pacifying illusions, and being overwhelmed by the desperate struggles of the day to, the very need to engage in such a pressing struggle can become all but obfuscated. Moreover, it is truly daunting to even consider the economic and political fortitude of those entities that have sent us hurtling down this dark path, against whom we stand opposed. As a young person whose short life has been relentlessly punctuated by reminders of the dire situation we’ve landed in, I’ve often found myself dealing with depression brought on by the existential dread of our historical moment. Because, as we watch countless innocent people suffer and die, as we watch the natural beauty and splendor of our world decimated, as we bear witness to the slaughter of the last tigers, we see a profound tragedy unfolding before our eyes. I believe, however, that our best, and ultimately our only course of action in the face of such cataclysm is to act, and act boldly. Now is not the time to lose hope—the situation is too pressing for that. Instead, it is the time to plan, to organize, and ultimately, to take a stand and advocate for ourselves, each-other, and our planet.

Organizations like the Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL) are already well underway with such efforts. Despite the attempts of corporations and investors to turn the mechanism of government into an oligarchy, the CCL has a track record of success on pushing important, progressive climate legislation through at both state and federal levels. Along with other likeminded organizations, the CCL offers an opportunity for all of us to engage in meaningful activism by compelling our institutional authorities to act in our interest, and the interest of the planet on the whole, rather than for the sole benefit of the most wealthy among us. Moreover, these organizations act as vehicles for collective, large scale strategizing and mobilization—an incredibly important role when we consider the steps that will be necessary to prepare for any economic mass-movement of resistance and dissent that we hope to undertake in the future. That kind of economically mediated activism, a general strike in the long term and widespread boycotts in the nearer future, represents our most substantial mechanism of sociopolitical influence. The power of the investor class to shape the politics and law of this country stems from their instrumental use of economic power; when working in unison towards a collective goal, the working class, as producers and consumers, possess a nearly limitless degree of such power.

We cannot allow ourselves to be the frog who sits patiently in the pot, waiting for the water to boil. We must act before it is too late. While we should have acted sooner, efforts of corporations to conceal the consequences of our consumption coupled with our own desire for comfort and convenience, and in doing so kept us complacent. Now, that complacency must end—those conveniences and comforts come at too high a cost. Now is the time to organize, to join organizations working to address the crisis that we are facing, and to help build a movement capable of enacting the degree of transformative change necessary to combat these challenges. Now is not the time to give up hope, but rather to fight, against all odds, quite literally to save the world. That task, like so many of the most pressing that humanity has faced throughout modern history, is left in the hands of the working class. It is our privilege, our historical mission, to answer the call: “do not go gentle into that good night!”

Notes

[1] I do not dismiss China’s recent and substantial greenhouse gas emissions; nonetheless, the duration of Western contributions to emissions, and the continued magnitude of our pollution on a per capita basis, is astronomical, even in comparison to China. Additionally, it’s worth considering that a substantial portion of Chinese emissions are produced by Western-owned corporations.

Degrowth: An Environmental Ideology With Good Intentions, Bad Politics

By Collin Chambers

Republished from Liberation School.

The planet is experiencing multiple environmental crises: biodiversity loss, deforestation, increased rates of pandemics, chemical pollution, soil depletion, water contamination and shortages, runaway non-renewable energy consumption, and climate change. “Degrowth” is an environmental ideology that arose as a political response to these compounding crises. Degrowth was originally termed by André Gorz in 1972. Gorz argued that global environmental balance, which is predicated upon non-growth (or “degrowth”), is not compatible with the capitalist system, which requires “accumulation for the sake of accumulation” [1]. Degrowth, according to Gorz, is thus a challenge to capitalism itself.

Degrowth has become increasingly popular among many environmentalists and leftists. There are some who even call themselves “degrowth communists” [2]. Thus, it’s important to have a clear understanding of exactly what degrowth is and whether it has the potential to advance or hold back the class struggle.

Jason Hickel, a prominent proponent of degrowth, defines it like this: “The objective of degrowth is to scale down the material and energy throughput of the global economy, focusing on high-income nations with high levels of per-capita consumption” [3]. The degrowth perspective asks why society is so obsessed with “growth” (measured by Gross Domestic Product) and seeks to deconstruct the entire “ideology of growth.” The “ideology of growth” is used by the capitalist class to argue that more and more growth is needed to overcome poverty and to create jobs. This is bourgeois ideology in the sense that capitalism relies upon and produces the artificial scarcity to which we’re subjected.

The reality is that, in developed capitalist countries like U.S., there is an overabundance of material wealth and that scarcity is socially produced by the capitalist market and private ownership. Degrowth is correct on the point that if wealth were redistributed then there would indeed be abundance. However, even though proponents of degrowth are well intentioned and truly want to solve environmental crises, the political-economic methods and solutions that degrowth calls for actually work against creating the critical mass necessary to make a socialist revolution here in the U.S. I address each of these below by showing how 1) degrowth reproduces Malthusian ideas about so-called “natural limits;” 2) it’s anti-modern and anti-technological orientation lacks a class perspective; and 3) there are key practical issues with deploying degrowth ideas in the class struggle itself.

The Connections between Thomas Malthus and Degrowth

Thomas Malthus was an aristocratic political-economist who did much of his work before the development of industrial-scale agriculture. In his 1798 book, An Essay on the Principles of Population, Malthus argued that in every geographic region there are particular resource limits or “carrying capacities” [4]. Malthus’ so-called “law of population” says that unchecked population growth will outstrip this carrying capacity that eventually leads to a “natural check” in the form of massive deaths from starvation and disease to bring the population back under the carrying capacity. Malthus blamed poor people for “unchecked” population growth and argued against policies to alleviate people from abject poverty because it delayed the inevitable: the “natural check” of overpopulation. Rising wages, Malthus said, led to workers having more children and thereby creating overpopulation. He blamed workers themselves for economic crises, with a convenient argument against rising wages. Marx rebuffed Malthus’ erroneous theories, clarifying that “every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population,” and that crises were caused by capital, not by workers [5]. (This is also a point on which he diverged from Darwin, who adopted Malthus’ ideas of population).

Much of this same Malthusian discourse continues to exist today as an explanation for problems such as environmental degradation and poverty. However, the development of industrial agriculture and the production of increasingly higher crop/food yields proved much of Malthus’ theories incorrect.

Malthusianism focuses on “overpopulation” as a main cause of environmental degradation. Degrowth actually reproduces this faulty notion through the proposition that once resources and wealth are equally redistributed (which degrowth rightly wants to do), there must be some “check” on population because, as population grows without any added economic growth, people will eventually have access to fewer and fewer resources. For instance, Giorgos Kallis, another major proponent of the movement, says that “degrowth envisions radically reducing the surplus” and advocates so-called “self-limitations” where there are “collective decisions to refrain from pursuing all that could be pursued” [6]. Rather than the typical Malthusian “natural” external limits, degrowth goes a step further: it calls for a collective enforcement of the internalization of Malthusian ideas of limits and constraints.

The target of degrowth, Kallis declares, is “not just capitalism, but also productivism” [7]. Proponents of degrowth argue that any type of “economic growth is ecologically unsustainable—whether it is capitalist growth or socialist does not make a difference” [8]. In doing so they artificially equate the two antagonistic systems and abstract away from the qualitative differences between socialist and capitalist growth. Kallis justifies this claim by arguing that if we did not change consumption levels in a post-carbon energy regime, then nothing would really change in terms of environmental destruction because “the manufacturing of renewable energies requires lots of earth materials. And the fact that they cost more than fossil fuels might have something to do with their lower energy returns and higher land requirements” [9]. Thus, degrowth does not really have an ecological theory of capitalism, but an ecological theory of accumulation. For degrowth, any type of accumulation is bad and requires increased “material throughput.”

False equivalences between different social systems

But do proponents of degrowth know what accumulation entails? Accumulation simply means reinvesting the surplus back into production (either to expand or repair existing means of production). The accumulation of a surplus is necessary in any society. In his discussions of the reproduction schemas in the second volume of Capital, for instance, Marx writes that there has to be some sort of accumulation in order to reproduce existing society, to replace and repair fixed capital like machinery and roads, societal infrastructures, to care for those who can’t work, and so on. There also has to be surpluses for, say, pandemics and droughts.

The difference is that accumulation under socialism is guided by the workers themselves who collectively determine what and how much surplus to produce and how to use it. Under capitalism, accumulation happens for accumulation’s sake, without a plan, and purely in the interests of private profit. Under socialism, accumulation benefits society as a whole, including even the ecosystems we inhabit. When workers are in control of the surplus, will we not develop and grow the productive forces to make life better and easier for ourselves and more sustainable for the earth and its inhabitants? Wouldn’t we especially grow green productive forces to build more (and better) schools, public transportation, etc.? Shouldn’t socialists in the U.S. strive to repair the underdevelopment of imperialism by assisting in the development of productive forces in the formerly colonized world? While there are sufficient surpluses of, say, housing in the U.S., there are certainly not surpluses of housing in the entire world.

Since the rise of neoliberal capitalism, the size of the working-class stratum composing the “labor aristocracy” has substantially reduced. Whom exactly are we telling to “self-limit” what we consume and live at a time when most workers in the U.S. are living paycheck to paycheck, and accumulating more and more debt? Wages have remained stagnant since the 1970s while prices have increased over 500 percent. Who exactly is supposed to limit themselves, and to what? Isn’t the problem that the masses are limited by capitalism?

Degrowth is, in essence, a form of ecological austerity for working-class people [10]. Stated simply, by focusing so much on the consumption habits of workers within capitalism and so little on the conditions and relations of production, proponents of degrowth end up reproducing Malthusian ideas of “natural limits.” 

We must analytically evaluate production and show how production “produces consumption” itself [11]. The wasteful and environmentally unsustainable consumption patterns of the working class are not produced by “personal” choice but are system-induced. Every day, millions of workers in the U.S. commute to work in single occupant vehicles not because we “choose” to drive. It’s because public transportation is so unreliable (if it exists at all), jobs in the labor market are so unstable and temporary that few workers are actually able to live close to work, and the rents around major industries tend to be unaffordable for our class.

Then there is planned obsolescence, such as when commodities like cell phones are produced to break every two years. When capitalism is overthrown and replaced with socialism, we can produce things that are “built to last” because our aim is to satisfy society’s needs and not private profit. Indeed, Marx argues that capitalist production in itself is wasteful, even in its “competitive-stage:”

“Yet for all its stinginess, capitalist production is thoroughly wasteful with human material, just as its way of distributing its products through trade, and its manner of competition, make it very wasteful of material resources, so that it loses for society what it gains for the individual capitalist” [12].

Degrowth is antithetical to Marxism

Proponents of degrowth argue that there are absolute “planetary limits” and a fixed “carrying capacity” that cannot be surpassed by humans if we want to avoid ecological collapse. This is not only pessimistic in that it dismisses the idea that, under socialism, we could figure out new sustainable ways to grow, but it’s also completely devoid of class analysis. There’s no distinction between socially-produced limits and natural limits.

Degrowth is anti-modern, anti-technological, and anti-large scale production and infrastructure. Kallis argues that “only social systems of limited size and complexity can be governed directly rather than by technocratic elites acting on behalf of the populace… Many degrowth advocates, therefore, oppose even ‘green’ megastructures like high-speed trains or industrial-scale wind farms[!]” [13]. 

The same can be said about degrowth solutions to the problems the capitalist agricultural system creates. Proponents of degrowth propose small scale (both urban and rural) methods of agriculture production to replace industrial-scale agriculture. They, in fact, glorify and romanticize “peasant economies.” 

Despite the problems of capitalist industrial agriculture, there are two main benefits of industrial-scale agriculture. First, it has drastically increased yields. At the present moment, there is enough food produced to feed 11 billion people. Second, industrial farming has thoroughly decreased the backbreaking labor needed for agricultural and food production. In 1790, 90 percent of the U.S. workforce labored on farms. In 1900, it was 35 percent At the present moment, only one percent of the U.S. workforce works on farms [14]. 

Certainly, in any just society we would want to spread out food production more evenly amongst the population. But getting rid of industrial-scale agriculture and reverting to small-scale peasant and small landowner agriculture would require massive numbers of workers to go back to the land and perform backbreaking agricultural work. Such a transformation would inevitably reduce agricultural yield substantially, increasing the possibility of food insecurity and hunger among vast swathes of the population. And what would we do with the commodities and infrastructure we’d have to destroy to create such plots of land? Moreover, such a vision necessitates the redistribution of land from private ownership of large landholders. Is this achieved through revolution or through governmental reforms? In either case, if we’re struggling to reclaim land then why not broaden our horizons and redistribute land in the interests of the environment and the people, including Indigenous and other oppressed nations in the U.S.?

Degrowth is, furthermore, idealist and divorced from the material reality within which U.S. workers currently live. Matt Huber, a Marxist environmental geographer, argues that a “truly humane society must commit to relieving the masses from agricultural labor,” and that we cannot act as if “small-scale agricultural systems are much of a ‘material basis’ for a society beyond industrial capitalism” [15]. This is not to say that small-scale and urban farming are undesirable, but that they’re insufficient in a country like the U.S. The Cuban model of urban farming and agriculture–which is a heroic achievement of the Cuban Revolution–can’t simply be mapped onto this country or the rest of the world.

Additionally, we shouldn’t forgo modern technologies that already exist just because they are “large scale” or because they currently contribute to environmental degradation within capitalist society. Doing so would in effect produce more ecological waste!

In an important piece on capitalism and ecology, Ernest Mandel writes: “it is simply not true that modern industrial technology is inevitably geared towards destroying the environmental balance. The progress of the exact sciences opens up a very wide range of technical possibilities” [16]. Increased rates of pollution and environmental degradation occur because capitalists pursue profits at the expense of the environment, not because of the technologies themselves. Socialists have to distinguish between instruments of production and their use under capitalism.

Degrowth and building the class struggle

In the U.S., degrowth remains an ideology that is relatively socially isolated but gaining influence among environmentalists and some on the left. It’s an ideology of guilt rather than revolutionary action. The ideas from degrowth will not appeal to masses of exploited and oppressed people who actually need more, not less. Imagine, for example, canvassing and talking to people in working-class neighborhoods, trying to get them on board with a degrowth political platform. How do degrowth proponents think workers in oppressed neighborhoods respond if they were told they needed to consume less to fight climate change? Many of us already wait as long as possible in the winter to turn on our heat! As organizers, we would not get the time of day, and we wouldn’t even believe ourselves. Can you imagine organizing homeless and unemployed workers around a program of less consumption? Degrowth is an ideology fit for the privileged, and if they want to consume less, they should.

From the perspective of the practical class struggle, degrowth is particularly problematic. Degrowth has a rhetorical strategy problem. In an unequal country such as the U.S., is the discourse of less and “self-limitation” realistic and inspiring? Is this tactic energizing, does it speak to the needs of the exploited and oppressed, can it mobilize people into action?

Rather than limit everything, we actually need to grow certain sectors such as green infrastructures and technologies. Our class doesn’t need a political platform that calls on us to give up the little pleasures we might have–if any at all–for the sake of the environment. Our class needs a political platform that states clearly what the real problem is and how we can solve it to make life will better.

Degrowth takes a non-class approach towards consumption and production. It is true that some of the more privileged sectors of the working class, particularly in imperialist countries, consume excessively and wastefully. Degrowth, however, fails to account for the class that takes wasteful consumption to almost unimaginable levels and the system that produces these production and consumption patterns. An increasing portion of the labor of the working class is wasted on supporting the consumption habits of the numerically small capitalist class. No amount of preaching self-limiting morality is going to convince the capitalist class to consume less, expropriate less, or oppress less. Once we can get rid of the parasitic imperialists, then human needs and desires can be met through a planned economy led by the working class.

Thus, the solution to these multifaceted and compounding environmental crises is not “degrowth”, but rather, as Mandel formulates it, “controlled and planned growth:”

“Such growth would need to be in the service of clearly defined priorities that have nothing to do with the demands of private profit…rationally controlled by human beings… The choice for ‘zero growth’ is clearly an inhuman choice. Two-thirds of humanity still lives below the subsistence minimum. If growth is halted, it means that the underdeveloped countries are condemned to remain stuck in the swamp of poverty, constantly on the brink of famine…

“Planned growth means controlled growth, rationally controlled by human beings. This presupposes socialism: such growth cannot be achieved unless the ‘associated producers’ take control of production and use it for their own interests, instead of being slaves to ‘blind economic laws’ or ‘technological compulsion’” [17].

References

[1]“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! ‘Industry furnishes the material which saving accumulates.’ Therefore save, save, i.e., reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value or surplus product into capital! Accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the sake of production: this was the formula in which classical economics expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie in the period of its domination.” Marx, Karl. (1867/1976).CapitalVol 1(New York: Penguin Books), 742.
[2] Hansen, Bue Rübner. (2021). “The kaleidoscope of Ccatastrophe: On the clarities and blind spots of Andreas Malm.”Viewpoint Magazine, April 14.Availablehere.
[3] Hickel, Jason. (2019). “Degrowth: A theory of radical abundance,”Real-World Economics Review87, no. 19: 54-68. “Throughput” is the flow of energy and materials through a system.
[4] Malthus, Thomas R. (1789/2007).An essay on the principle of population(New York: Dover).
[5]Marx,Capital, 784.
[6] Kallis, Giorgos. (2018).In defense of degrowth: Opinions and manifestos(UK: Uneven Earth Press), 22, 21.
[7] Ibid., 24.
[8] Kallis, Giorgos. (2019). “Capitalism, socialism, degrowth: A rejoinder.”Capitalism Nature Socialism30, no. 2: 189.
[9] Ibid., 194.
[10] See Phillips, Leigh. (2015).Austerity ecology & the collapse-porn addicts: A defense of growth, progress, industry and stuff(Washington: Zero Books).
[11] See Karl, Marx. 1993.Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy (rought draft), trans. M. Nicolaus (New York: Penguin), 90-98.
[12] Marx, Karl. (1991.)CapitalVol 3 (New York: Penguin), 180.
[13] Kallis,In defense of degrowth,21.
[14] The World Bank. (2021), “Employment in agriculture (% total employment) (model ILO estimate),” January 29. Availablehere.
[15] Huber, Matt. (2018). “Fossilized liberation: Energy, freedom, and the ‘development of the productive forces.’” InMaterialism and the critique of energy, ed. B.R. Bellamy and J. Diamanti (Chicago: MCM’ Press), 517.
[16] Mandel, Ernest. (2020). “Ernest Mandel on Marxism and ecology: ‘The dialectic of growth.’”Monthly Review, June 17. Availablehere.
[17] Ibid.

Economic and Social Crises Keep Deepening: 48 Points That Will Shape the Future

By Shawgi Tell

Not only have the policies of the rich at home and abroad not stopped economic and social decline, the rich are actually taking social irresponsibility to new levels and making things worse worldwide. They are unable and unwilling to solve serious problems plaguing humanity. Opening the path of progress to society is not on their agenda.

Connecting just a few dots in an intelligible way produces a clear picture of the destruction unfolding worldwide. It is no accident that more people are writing about a miserable dystopian future where people will have to develop new creative ways of defending the rights of all. The information below is especially timely given the cheap euphoria displayed recently by the short-sighted rich and their political and media representatives about the “solid” 850,000 jobs the U.S. economy “added” in June 2021.

1. Inflation is increasing rapidly at home and abroad and the dollar’s purchasing power is still falling.

2. Globally, supply chains affecting many sectors are not operating smoothly; many are worried about contrived and non-contrived disruptions lasting for months, even years.

3. Ransomware incidents and major cyberattacks are not diminishing.

4. Millions of U.S. workers are misclassified as contractors, which means that they do not have (generally weak) protections.

5.  Thousands of companies at home and abroad are “zombie companies”—i.e., they don’t make a profit after paying down their debts, they just live a dead life.

6. Student debt in the U.S. keeps soaring.

7. College tuition in the U.S. and elsewhere keeps climbing.

8. Marriage rates in the U.S. are at an all-time low.

9. Birthrates are declining globally.

10. The U.S. experiences a higher infant mortality rate and a higher prevalence of obesity compared with most OECD member countries.

11.  The number of Americans who have moved back in with family or friends over the past 18 months is extremely high.

12. Homelessness is high nationwide and increasing significantly in some major U.S. cities; crime is also up.

13. Various “reforms” in countless sectors in many countries are superficial, phony, and non-substantive.

14. Anxiety and depression remain widespread worldwide.

15. Anti-depressant use remains high.

16. Mass murders and killings have increased in recent years in the U.S.; so have social and civil unrest.

17. Everyone everywhere is skeptical of the mainstream media and struggling not to be confused, ambushed, and humiliated every hour.

18. Around the world hundreds of millions have joined the ranks of the poor over the past 18 months.

19. Globally, well over ten million business have disappeared permanently and thousands more will disappear in the next five years.

20.  Leading economic experts and officials have no real solutions for anything and people continually have low levels of trust in “experts” and government; the rich continue to operate with impunity.

21. There is more polarization, division, and anger in society.

22. Poverty and inequality keep growing worldwide; wealth concentration is staggering and unprecedented.

23. Digital addiction and attendant problems won’t stop increasing.

24. More U.S. college and university administrators, trustees, and leaders are abandoning the intellectual mission of colleges, restricting faculty voice, and turning college into Disney and fun.

25. Getting simple things done is taking longer and becoming more convoluted and frustrating, especially when dealing with retailers, companies, and various agencies.

26. Surveillance and police-state arrangements are multiplying rapidly and becoming more diverse and sophisticated at home and abroad.

27. The media blackout on thousands who continue to experience serious side effects from vaccines continues.

28. Newly-elected “progressive” politicians in the U.S. and elsewhere are proving to be as ineffective as the “old guard.”

29. Privatization and deregulation keep increasing and wreaking havoc worldwide.

30. Anglo-American imperialism thinks that constantly treating China and Russia as bogeymen will keep fooling the gullible and divert attention from deep problems in the Anglo-American world.

31. The unionization rate of American workers is at a historic low, which is bad for all workers in all sectors.

32. More than 130 million working Americans can live off their savings for six months or less before going broke.

33. Mergers and acquisitions continue apace in 2021, concentrating even more wealth in even fewer hands.

34. Central banks around the world keep printing phantom money while stock market bubbles grow larger.

35. The U.S labor force participation rate remains low.

36. The number of long-term unemployed (27 weeks or more) in the U.S. is still increasing.

37. Millions of Americans have started to lose their jobless benefits.

38. More than 40% of Black families and Latino families in the U.S. have no access to an employer-sponsored retirement plan.

39. Black and Latino Americans are experiencing the biggest decline in life expectancy in decades.

40. In recent years, overall job quality for Americans has deteriorated significantly.

41. At least thirty million Americans lack access to high-speed internet.

42. The U.S. opioid overdose crisis, which pharmaceutical companies were recently found guilty of sponsoring, persists.

43. In Africa, nearly 40% of employed youth are considered poor.

44. Around the world, nearly one out of ten people experience hunger and the number of undernourished people has grown by millions in recent years.

45. The official unemployment rate exceeds 10% in at least 12 countries in (Western and Eastern) Europe. Fourteen countries fall into this category for North and South America. The real numbers are higher.

46. More than 27% of youth in Central Asia and Southern Asia are not in employment, training, or education.

47. In the past five years more countries have experienced violent conflict, while violent crime across the world has also increased.

48. Despite endless happy economic news in the mainstream media, economies around the world are far from recovering; many never recovered from the Great Recession of 2008 and mass vaccinations will not solve deep structural economic problems.

The list goes on and on. This is the tip of the iceberg. Numerous problems persist on all continents. The facts above do not paint a picture of a bright and promising future for humanity. Widespread destruction prevails in the obsolete neoliberal world.

But there are also openings and contradictions that people from all walks of life are being compelled to harness in order to advance the public interest and restrict the illegitimate control and authority of major owners of capital. The desire for real progress is palpable and growing; it emerges from the concrete conditions as they present themselves today. The international financial oligarchy cannot provide any solutions to the problems plaguing humanity today, they just have more catastrophes in store for everyone and are blocking the empowerment of the people. None of these serious problems can be solved, however, so long as the people remain marginalized and disempowered. A new direction, orientation, and public authority are urgently needed.

Humanity is entering a new and deeper crisis with qualitatively different and more dangerous features. Crisis is a turning point that contains both peril and opportunity. Crisis is not always just a negative thing; it means things cannot continue in the old way and something significant is going to have to eventually give. It usually takes a serious crisis or trauma to catalyze and propel much-needed change. In this way, crisis overcomes stagnation and complacency and sets the stage for something new. The negation of the negation operates with a greater vengeance in such defining moments, giving rise to a new synthesis, a new equilibrium, which gives rise to yet another dynamic which must assert itself sooner or later. The dialectic lives and cannot be extinguished. What comes next in the complicated here and now is unfolding consciously and spontaneously.

The pace and rate of change today is exhilarating and people’s desire to protect the social and natural environment is growing. The trial of strength between capital-centered forces and human-centered forces is bound to increase because conditions are demanding a new authority that affirms the rights of all. An alternative is necessary and possible. What this will look like is in the hands of the people themselves. Only they can be relied on to usher in a bright future for humanity free of privileged private interests wrecking the social and natural environment.

Shawgi Tell, PhD, is author of the book “Charter School Report Card.” His main research interests include charter schools, neoliberal education policy, privatization and political economy. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu.

Imperial Roots of the Global Food System: A Review of Chris Otter's 'Diet For A Large Planet'

By Amy Leather

Republished from Climate & Capitalism.

Why do we eat what we do? This is the question Chris Otter seeks to answer in Diet for a Large Planet. It is very timely. In recent years there has been growing anger and horror at a food system that delivers both unhealthy and environmentally destructive diets. Food has become deeply politicized.

In 2019 the medical journal The Lancet published what it called a “planetary health diet.” Their conclusion was that “the world’s diets must change dramatically” to save the planet and ourselves. They argued that a Great Food Transformation is required — a move away from what is often called the Western Diet, high in red meat, refined grains, saturated fat and sugar, to a more plant based diet.

This is not in fact a new argument. Otter’s title deliberately echoes Diet for a Small Planet, first published 50 years ago, in which Frances Moore Lappe blamed a diet rich in meat and refined carbohydrates for environmental and health problems.

But when looking at today’s food systems most commentators tend to focus on the post war period, and in particular the role of the US in driving a model of industrialized food production and agriculture. This is a model epitomized by the ascendancy of processed foods, the growth of the fast food giants and supermarkets, and the scale and dominance of agribusiness.

However, Otter argues that “in order to understand the deeper history of today’s global food situation, it is necessary to explore post-1800 Britain.” He argues that “Britain laid the foundations for contemporary food systems. It was the nineteenth century’s dominant world power, controlling immense global resources, and creating long distance food chains to supply vast quantities of meat, wheat and sugar.” This is a good starting point. Locating our current food systems in a wider political and historical context, very much bound up with the development of capitalism and colonialism.

What stands out in the book is just how early the internationalization of food production developed for Britain. Britain was sourcing foods from round the globe in vast quantities from the mid 1800s, importing grain, meat and dairy products.

Otter shows this with a vast array of statistics. He outlines how “the volume of British food imports rose almost eightfold between 1850-52 and 1910-12, by which time they represented around two fifths of all British imports by value. Over four fifths of bread consumed in Britain came from imported grain by 1909.”

Initially Ireland had contributed much of Britain’s imports of grain, meat, butter and livestock but Britain soon became the world’s richest single consumer market for food and raw materials. In 1860 Britain received 49% of total Asian, African, and Latin American food exports. In 1930 with just under 3% of the world’s population Britain imported 99% of world’s exports of ham and bacon, 63% of its butter, 62% of its eggs, 59% of its beef, 46% of cheese, and 28% of its wheat and wheat flour.

Otter looks in detail at how Britain came to import so much meat, grain and sugar. For example, during the 1800s farmers in Britain had experimented with selective breeding to produce the cows and other animals ideal for meat production, such as short horn cows and Herefords. It soon became more profitable to ship these types of livestock out to new areas of the globe, such as the United States and Argentina, to be bred and reared on their huge pastures and their meat imported back to Britain.

Such outsourcing, as Otter calls it, meant a vast infrastructure was built in these areas. As he outlines “there were nearly 70 million cattle in the US by the early 1930s. This heavily capitalized industry with its vast ranches and industrialized meat packing, operated on a much larger scale than Britain’s.” It’s not hard to see how this paved the way for the great acceleration of meat production after 1945 in the US.

There was a massive increase in the amount of wheat bread consumed in Britain between 1771-1879, and by 1911 wheat bread provided around half the working class calorie intake.

Otter outlines how Britain had been self-sufficient in wheat until about 1850. However, at that point wheat production started to become unprofitable and so grain began to be drawn from different and shifting areas of the globe, including Australia, India, Argentina and North America. By 1909 over 80% of British bread was made with imported grain.

Alongside meat and bread, sugar also became central to the British diet. In a short period of time it went from being a luxury to an essential. Otter makes the point that it became a cheap “fuel food” for the working class in Britain. By the late eighteenth century Britain consumed nearly half of all the sugar reaching Europe, and British consumption levels were over ten times higher than those in the rest of Europe. In 1750, the average Britain received 72 calories daily from sugar, by 1909-13 this figure was 395. Sugar still provides 12-15% of Britain’s calories.

Such cheap calories were a consequence of colonialism and slavery. Portuguese, Spanish, French and British colonial systems created a sugar industry linking Europe to the Caribbean and parts of South America. For Britain Barbados became particularly lucrative, with sugar becoming the island’s most important export by 1650. Jamaica was colonized from 1664, and by 1805, it was the world’s largest sugar exporter. By the 1830s Britain was using some two million overseas acres for sugar production.

Alongside exploring the internationalization of food production, Otter also shows how mass production techniques and food processing are not just a postwar invention. For example, the mass production of bread began in the 1870s. Traditional milling methods in Hungary and the US were replaced by roller milling and then introduced into Britain. It is fascinating to note that factory made American cheese was already cheaper than British cheddar in the 1860s — and arrived in Britain in increasing quantities. Mass production techniques meant that Britain was producing some 300,000 tons of biscuits by 1939 while sweets we know today such as fruit pastilles and fruit gums have been industrially produced since the late 1800s.

However, Otter seems to argue that this internationalization of food production or outsourcing was a consequence of what he terms a “large planet philosophy.” He defines this as “the premise that the entire earth was a potential source of material wealth and capital investments.”

The implication throughout the book is that the idea of sourcing food from across the globe was the driving force behind the developments rather than the dynamics of capitalism. Here the book is at its weakest. While Otter references Marxism in his introduction as a framework he will draw on, there is virtually no discussion of how the development of capitalism turned food into a commodity. There is nothing about how the competitive accumulation and the drive for profit at the heart of capitalism impacted on food production, including its expansion across the globe.

As Martin Empson points out in Land and Labour, “Marx understood how the development of industrial capitalism in one part of the world had the effect of shaping the agricultural economies of the rest of the world.”

In Capital, Marx writes that, “large scale industry, in all countries where it has taken root, spurs on rapid increases in emigration and the colonization of foreign lands, which are thereby converted into settlements for growing raw material of the mother country…. A new and international division of labour springs up, one suited to the requirements of the main industrial countries, and it converts one part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of production for supplying the other part, which remains a pre-eminently industrial field.”

Diet for a Large Planet often reads almost as a summary of political thought and as though food production was shaped by a battle of ideas. Of course there were competing ideas, for example over free trade, a requirement that underpinned cheap food imports. But these reflected real class interests, as well as divisions within the ruling class themselves. The battle over the Corn Laws of 1815 exemplified this — with the established landowning class wanting to keep grain prices high while the rising class of industrialist capitalists wanted cheaper grain, so they could pay their workers less.

Without such a framework of understanding the dynamic of capitalism, the drive for profit at the heart of it and how different class forces asserted themselves, the central arguments the book seeks to make are weakened.

While Otter makes some interesting points about food, power and racism, he downplays the centrality of slavery to the development of capitalism. And although he explores the Irish and Bengal famines he doesn’t emphasize the fact that food was exported from these countries during those famines.

The book contains a wealth of detail and a vast array of facts and figures, covering everything from imports to the size of working class kitchens, from animal slaughter techniques to historical records of calorific intake and tooth decay, from the working of grain elevators to the specifics of the sugar extraction process and beet production, and much more. This makes the book a useful resource, but at times I felt that the detail drowned out the big picture and obscured explanation and analysis.

Overall, Diet for a Large Planet is a useful, and at times thought provoking, contribution to the discussion of food systems, but I finished it with unanswered questions.

Their Freedom, and Ours: A Case Study on Morality, Inequality, and Injustice Amid a Pandemic

Photo: Stacey Wescott / Chicago Tribune

By Peter Fousek

David Hume opens his essay “Of the First Principles of Government” with the statement that “Force is always on the side of the governed.”[1] Though she uses different terminology, Hannah Arendt’s understanding of power is analogous to Hume’s “Force.” In On Violence, she asserts that “[i]t is the people’s support that lends power to the institutions of a country, and that this support is but the continuation of the consent that brought the laws into existence to begin with.” Both accounts consider social power to be something fundamentally popular, rooted in collective action undertaken in accordance with a shared will. Thus, “[a]ll political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power,” which “petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.”[2] This understanding of power is consistent with the nature of the social world: institutions do not come into existence of their own accord, but are created and maintained by the actions of people. Laws do not exist as natural truths—they are established in accordance with shared beliefs and modes of understanding, and retain their jurisdiction only insofar as people assent to them. Therefore, those social structures and formations which hold significant influence over our world, do so because they have substantial, popular support underlying their authority and answering their commandments with corresponding action.

Given this notion of power, “[n]othing appears more surprising…than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.”[3] If the governed possess a constitutive power over their social world, how is it that institutional authority so often supersedes the will of the masses with that of its ruling contingent? I will argue that this counterintuitive state of social organization, in which the few hold dominion over the majority, must rely on an imposed, hegemonic system of belief capable of convincing the general population that their oppression is just and their liberation villainous. Such a system of belief, while certainly instrumental in the maintenance of totalitarian states, is especially important in the context of ostensibly representative systems of government like that of the contemporary U.S.

In these contexts, voters must be convinced not that it would be amoral for them to overthrow their rulers, but rather that it is moral for them to continue to formally reproduce the power of those rulers year after year, by way of the voting booth. In the United States, that process of coercion has proved quite successful. According to exit polls, over 42% of voters with household incomes under $50,000 per year voted for Donald Trump, despite his promises to cut taxes for corporations and the super-wealthy while defunding already limited social services; in 2020, that contingent rose to 43%.[4] Over half of the Kentuckians in that income bracket voted to reelect Mitch McConnell in the same election cycle.[5]  In a country where well over half of the population has a household income of under $75,000,[6] our governing authorities consistently promote the aims of the wealthiest few, often at the expense of the many. While the United States incarcerates more people than any other country, and while 969 people have been killed by U.S. police this year alone,[7] the State does not rely solely on such direct repressive force to achieve its inequitable ends. As the electoral data shows, the electorate consents to its own socioeconomic oppression; with shocking frequency, we as a nation “resign [our] own sentiments and passions to those of [our] rulers.”[8]

What system of belief is responsible for convincing American citizens, whose collective sovereignty is systematized in electoral systems, to continue voting directly against their economic interests? If we are to build a better world by overcoming the oppressive systems and structures of the established order, we must first understand the mechanism by which that implicit consent of the oppressed is elicited. A society designed to pursue the aims of a small and exclusive minority at the expense of the majority cannot rely on force alone to sustain itself, since institutional authority possesses the apparatus of force only so long as a substantial contingent of the people are willing to follow its orders. Instead, it requires the tool of an official moral framework capable of securing the popular mandate upon which its dominion is established. It is possible for a small ruling class to maintain its jurisdiction over a much larger oppressed one only when the dominant segment promotes its ends as necessary, and thereby convinces its society that anything which goes against those ends is immoral. The ruling class perpetuates its existence by convincing the ruled majority that their subjugation is just, according to supposedly universal moral precepts.

That moral indoctrination is possible because, to use Marx, the economically dominant class “rule also as thinkers and producers of ideas and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age. Their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.”[9] Therefore, the ruling class is able to disseminate its own beliefs and understandings as comprehensive fact, absorbing, in the words of Barthes, “into its ideology a whole section of humanity which does not have its basic status and cannot live up to it except in imagination.”[10] The universality of the established ruling order and its corresponding cultural norms supersede any alternative worldviews or systems of belief, and thereby create the illusion that the entire social formation lacks meaningful class differentiation (the absence of ideological stratification is implied as evidence that social class does not cause a fundamentally different experience of the world). So, using its near monopoly on the dissemination of far-reaching ideas and discourse, through channels including broadcasting companies, social media platforms, and the national political stage, the economically dominant class convinces its entire social world that its particular morality, corresponding to its particular class interests, is in fact universal, natural moral law, obligatory for all.

Any system of official morality imposed on a society is necessarily repressive on account of that claim to universality. Morality is the product of social development in the same sense that the institutions, laws, and norms of our societies are, as Arendt notes, the products of beliefs held by the popular masses. As social institutions etc. exist to achieve defined ends, such as the preservation of property rights and relations, morality also serves social interests. We see this to be the case in moral precepts as basic as the commandment that “thou shall not kill,” which provides a foundational basis for social cohesion by establishing a normative framework in which a might-makes-right paradigm becomes condemnable. Nonetheless, even so fundamental a moral tenet as that one fails to prove universally applicable in the context of the real and dynamic world. History shows that societies which condemn killing in times of peace often herald it as the most honorable task of their soldiers in times of war. Therefore, the presentation of any system of morality as something universal, and so too ahistorical, is deceptive, given the necessarily specific and dynamic nature of moral analysis (and thus the impossibility of truly natural and universal morality).

Still, such universal moral precepts do serve social interests, even if those interests differ from those which the popular majority perceive as the purpose of their moral laws. The imposition of a particular morality onto the whole of society establishes a moral hegemony, wherein only that which promotes the aims of the social class who defines the moral system is considered right and just. Such a process serves the social interests of the dominant class, allowing the many to be subjugated by the few: the universal application of specific moral norms is all too often employed to prevent the oppressed from striving towards their own liberation. During times of relative historical calmness, that morality-mediated oppression may be concealed to the point of near-invisibility. In the United States, a nation satiated with spiritual and secular prosperity gospels, whose popular consciousness is inundated with myths of the American Dream predicated on the principle of productivity (the notion that an individual’s success is the reflection of their efforts), the illusion that social mobility is always possible—if only for the “most industrious” among us—lends credence to a moral framework that condemns the poor as lazy people suffering from self-imposed shortcomings, while celebrating the wealthy as tenacious and driven individuals whose opulence is merely the manifestation of their moral virtue.

On that basis, cycle after cycle Americans vote against their economic interest, without even understanding that they are doing so. When we are taught that poverty is personal iniquity embodied, and wealth the reflection of the opposite, then those who are not wealthy must identify “not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires,”[11] if they are to consider themselves virtuous according to the official moral framework. Thus, as they have for decades, millions of working-class Americans continue to vote for “representatives” who facilitate their exploitation for the sake of the wealthy elite. When we fail to recognize the foundational social power we hold as a class, or even our position as members of the working class as such, we unwittingly provide consent for our continued oppression. The underlying misconception of the meritocratic nature of our society is bolstered by the perception that our political and legal institutions are egalitarian, and therefore that all members of our citizenry have an equal shot at financial success, free from any undue external influence or restriction. In other words, we are told that the official morality of our society is just, because all members of our society share equal freedoms under the law. However, I will argue that even if we use that politically conservative understanding of freedom, labeled negative liberty by Isaiah Berlin (that is, the understanding of freedom as freedom from interference in an individual’s exercise of her rights), supposedly universal freedom is not, in fact, shared universally across class divisions.[12] For that reason, the official morality imposed by one class onto all cannot validly substantiate its claims to universality, and can only be understood as a repressive apparatus implemented to ensure the continued self-subjugation of the oppressed. 

The contradictions of normative morality often appear more sharply when contrasted against a backdrop of historical tumult and upheaval. Such has been the case over the past fourteen months, as the national response to the pandemic in the United States has exposed the degree to which our official morality is willing to sacrifice the wellbeing, and even the lives, of the working class, in order to promote the interests of the possessing one. In this time, it has become clear “that lack of money implies lack of freedom,” even in the sense that it is defined by Berlin and the political Right, as “the absence of obstacles to possible choices and activities.”[13] This inequitable distribution exposes the class-interestedness of an official morality which heralds such freedom, by which is meant, for the most part, negative liberty, as the most just and morally virtuous ideal to be promoted by our norms and institutions. Our socioeconomic order is one predicated on the value of individual productivity and wealth accumulation. Resultantly, the freedom of the individual to exist in such a way that they might promote their own wellbeing without restriction by external influence is foundational to the American sociopolitical psyche. Hence Berlin’s explanation of the moral condemnation of the poor, whose wellbeing, we are told, is not our concern, since “it is important to discriminate between liberty and the conditions of its exercise. If a man is too poor or too ignorant or too feeble to make use of his legal rights, the liberty that these rights confer upon him is nothing to him, but it is not thereby annihilated,” (Cohen 4). According to the Right, that is the freedom of which this nation’s founders wrote, the liberty to which the United States declares its dedication, our ultimate moral value: the nominal liberty to act without restriction in pursuit of a given set of possibilities, with no guarantee to the outcome or ease of such a pursuit.

In times of crisis, like that brought on by the pandemic, the most crucial exercise of such freedom involves the liberty to protect oneself and one’s family from immediate threat of harm. The relative ability or inability of American citizens to do so, depending on their socioeconomic status, provides a tragic illustration of the fact that in the United States, “lack of money implies lack of freedom.”[14] In contemporary America, as in any capitalist society, right (as either or both ownership and access) to any object or pursuit is conferred largely by money. This claim is exceedingly apparent: for example, one does not have the freedom to sleep in a hotel room that they have not paid for, and their attempt to do so would likely be met with interference regardless of their otherwise complete ability, will, and legal allowance. In Cohen’s words, “when a person’s economic security is enhanced, there typically are, as a result, fewer ‘obstacles to possible choices and activities’ for him.”[15] Even under the dictum of nominal or negative freedom, an individual’s liberty is largely determined by their wealth. During the COVID crisis, the limits to liberty begotten by poverty have become a visible, existential threat to the marginalized poor.

In the early months of the pandemic, when we knew little about the life-threatening contagion sweeping the globe, many state and local governments to attempted to secure the safety of their citizens through mandatory stay-at-home orders and economic closures. However, the Trump administration, along with countless others in positions of power and influence, were quick to employ the tools of their official morality to an antithetical end. Mask mandates designed to promote some degree of communal security were decried as unjust, immoral attacks on freedom,[16] and as to shutdown orders, these guarantors of liberty held at best that it is the prerogative of an individual to stay at home if she so chooses, but that the State should have no say. As a result, sections of the country opened prematurely, well before the prevalence of testing, much less the existence of a vaccine.[17] Even in places where that was not the case, the categorization of almost 74 million working class Americans as “essential workers” forced them and their families into positions of very real, potentially life threatening, risk.[18] That undue burden placed on the working class was deemed the necessary condition for the restoration of moral equilibrium, according to the language of negative liberty. The resultant dichotomy of freedom as a function of wealth is substantiated by New York Times polling. Higher earners, far more likely than their lower-income counterparts to hold substantial savings, were largely free to continue working from home without risk of job loss or pay cuts. Lower earners were not afforded the same security, financially or otherwise.[19] In this, we see that the working class were compelled to observe moral norms established by the investor class, and thereby to sacrifice of self in accordance with precepts that the wealthy members of our society did not observe themselves. Through the mechanism of universalized official morality prescribed by the dominant contingent, the subjugated were convinced to accept their own suffering while those who demanded their sacrifice refused to do the same.

And to what end? While many essential workers were employed in healthcare or public infrastructure fields, millions of others included members of the food service industry,[20] Amazon warehouse laborers,[21] Tesla factory line workers[22]—in short, the exploited employees of massive, profit-seeking firms focused solely on their goal of increasing shareholder’s returns. In pursuit of profit, these firms compelled countless workers, for pitifully inadequate wages and often without even the most basic protective measures, to sacrifice their safety,[23] and in many cases even their lives.[24] These efforts by executives for the sake of their investors certainly did pay off: according to Inequality.org, “between March 18, 2020, and April 12, 2021, the collective wealth of American billionaires leapt by $1.62 trillion, or 55%.”[25] All this, as thousands died preventable deaths and millions in the world’s wealthiest country faced hunger and eviction. But what of the workers’ freedom? Surely, they were not literally forced to come into their workplaces. The answer to that depends on how we define force. Essential workers, as well as employees of businesses allowed to preemptively reopen, were barred from receiving unemployment benefits if they refused to work, as our legal framework for employment regulation deemed such refusal voluntary even when motivated by fear of death.[26] So, these workers, many of whom would have received more money through unemployment insurance than they were paid at their “essential” jobs,[27] were compelled—quite literally under threat of starvation—to put themselves and their families in harm’s way so that the rich were able to continue amassing wealth at as aggressive a rate as possible.

The hypocrisy of the official morality, and thus its repressive class-interestedness, is evidenced by the fact that this shockingly inhumane restriction of the right of the working class to self-preservation was undertaken under the guise of “freedom,” and thereby given a “moral” justification. In April 2020, Congressman Trey Hollingsworth echoed widespread convictions with his statement that “in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life of American lives, we have to always choose the latter.”[28] That stance was, and remains, a truly popular sentiment—protests in opposition to shutdowns were prevalent across the country last spring, populated largely by working class Americans who had been convinced that economic closures represented government overreach and a restriction of individual liberty.[29] To foster that sentiment, members of the investor class funded media campaigns to promote the notion of the shutdowns as morally wrong[30] These campaigns serve as a tragic example of the investor class forcing its ends onto the whole of our society, portraying anything that interferes with the pursuit of those ends as morally condemnable. The campaigns, of course, concealed their class interestedness to preserve the supposed universality of their precepts. In their polemics against “unfreedom,” they were careful to omit the fact that the “immorality” of the shutdowns, the restriction of liberty which they constituted, was a restriction of the freedom of wealthy firms to force their workers into life-threatening conditions for the sake of profit margins.

Only in being justified by the official morality of the dominant class was such blatant disregard for human life allowed to occur. During the initial months of the COVID pandemic, the foundational social power of the working masses could have been utilized to substantial and life-saving effect, if only there had been sufficient organization for the development of a collective will to do so. Consider the power represented by the opportunity of essential workers to join together in a general strike in protest of unsafe conditions, or in opposition to unjust regulations which cut them off from unemployment insurance if they refused to work. Consider the power of the voting population to hold their elected officials accountable for refusing to put such protective measures in place, or that of the consumer base to boycott companies engaged in blatantly exploitative and dangerous labor practices. These collective actions were not taken because the iniquity of the situation was masked by a veil of official morality, which labelled the direct repression of the working class—the elimination of its most basic liberties—as itself a crusade for freedom. Such “moral” manipulations enable the paradox of power noted by Arendt and Hume, in which “the living power of the people,”[31] despite its foundational importance, is restrained and left unrealized by the amplified repressive force of a small but economically dominant social contingent.

It is important to note the role of the State in this process of moral imposition on behalf of the ruling class. By debating and legislating in accordance with the official morality, institutional authority reifies it, providing those precepts of ruling class interest with an appearance of naturalness and thereby working to validate their claims to universality. Representative Hollingsworth was not alone in expressing the sentiment that the flourishing of the stock market is more important than the lives of American workers; instances as brazen as the vehement attempts of conservative politicians to prevent an increase in food stamp funding despite the staggering number of children going hungry represent efforts to embody the official morality. [32] The success of such reification is heartbreakingly clear: ours is a country in which Nobel laureate economist Angus Deaton “explained the anomalous mortality rates among white people in the Bible Belt by claiming that they’ve ‘lost the narrative of their lives’,”[33] having failed to realize their own “moral value” in the terms imposed on them, unable to earn anything above a starvation wage regardless of their efforts.

Such is the outcome of the ruling class indoctrinating “into its ideology a whole section of humanity which does not have its basic status and cannot live up to it,”[34] using the apparatus of authority as an aid in its illusion. The supposed truth of the official morality, that most insidious of the “ruling ideas”[35] disseminated by the dominant class, holds a devastating weight in the popular psyche because it is manifested by our systems of power and thereby made to seem concrete. To that end, our political representatives, armed with the formalized consent of their constituents, speak and legislate in a manner that serves to enshrine official morality in the rule of law. In the face of the pandemic, they declared that the just action on the part of the working poor was to accept their loss of liberty for the sake of their country. And, faced with that reactionary mandate justified by an apparently eternal morality, we chose not to oppose oppression, but instead to clap for the essential workers as they made their way home.

“The price of obedience has become too high,”[36] writes Terry Tempest Williams, following a vivid illustration of the destruction wreaked by U.S. nuclear arms tests in the Southwest on American lands and American people. Such state-sanctioned harm is the norm, rather than the exception, as we have seen in examples ranging from the Tuskegee Study to the COVID pandemic response. It is enabled by the “inability to question authority,”[37] on account of its justification by official morality, which would have a repressed populace rather accept the rule of their oppressors than challenge it in the hope of change. But this does not have to be the case; ours could be a better world. A governing body loses its legitimacy if its commands are not carried out; its orders are not heeded if the popular masses refuse to recognize its sovereignty. Strikes, protests, and other acts of defiance, in which participants utilize their communal power by refusing, in unison, to conform to the commands of their oppressors, demonstrate the ability of an organized populace to make authority impotent and annul its influence. That transformative kind of resistance is only possible when the official morality which condemns it is recognized as a tool of reaction, when the oppressed declare a morality of their own, oriented towards the liberation and collective betterment of the social world. “[A]nd even then, when power is already in the street, some group…prepared for such an eventuality is needed to pick it up and assume responsibility.”[38] These tasks: the revocation of repressive morality, its replacement with a conviction for true justice, and the development of leadership capable of organizing such a movement, are all possible. It is imperative that we undertake them if we are to liberate ourselves by realizing our collective power.  

References

Arendt, H. On Violence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1970.

Barthes, R. Mythologies. Trans. Jonathan Cape. Paris: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1957.

Blake, A. “Analysis | Trump's Dumbfounding Refusal to Encourage Wearing Masks.” The Washington Post.      Washington, D.C.: WP Company, 25 Jun. 2020: Digital Access.

Cohen, G.A. On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Scholarship Online, 2011.

Collins, C., Petergorsky, D. “Updates: Billionaire Wealth, U.S. Job Losses and Pandemic Profiteers.” Inequality.org. Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 29 Apr. 2021: Digital Access.

DeParle, J. "As Hunger Swells, Food Stamps Become a Partisan Flash Point." The New York Times. New York: The New York Times, 6 May 2020: Digital Access.

Desilver, D. "10 facts about American workers." Fact Tank. Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2019. Aug. 2019: Digita Access.

Diaz, J. “New York Sues Amazon Over COVID-19 Workplace Safety.” The Coronavirus Crisis. Washington,     D.C.: National Public Radio, 17 Feb. 2021: Digital Access.

“Essential Workers and Unemployment Benefits Do Not Go Together.” Occupational Health & Safety. Dallas: 1105 Media Inc., 7 May 2020: Digital Access.

“Fatal Force: Police Shootings Database.” The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: WP Company, 22 Jan.        2020: Digital Access.

Flynn, M. “GOP congressman says he puts saving American ‘way of life’ above saving lives from the coronavirus.” The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: WP Company, 15 Apr. 2020: Digital Access.

Hume, D. “Of the First Principles of Government.” Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. Hume Texts Online,   2021: Digital Access.

“Kentucky 2020 U.S. Senate Exit Polls.” CNN. Atlanta: Cable News Network, 2020: Digital Access.

Maqbool, A. “Coronavirus: The US Resistance to a Continued Lockdown.” BBC News. London: British         Broadcasting Corporation, 27 Apr. 2020: Digital Access.

Marx, K. Selected Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1994.

McNicholas, C., Poydock, M. “Who Are Essential Workers?: A Comprehensive Look at Their Wages,             Demographics, and Unionization Rates.” Economic Policy Institute. Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy             Institute, 19 May 2020: Digital Access.

Nuttle, M. “Essential Workers Accounted for 87% of Additional COVID-19 Deaths in California, Data         Shows.” abc10.com. 30 Apr. 2021: Digital Access.

Reinberg, S. “Nearly 74 Million Essential Workers at High Risk for COVID in U.S.” U.S. News & World        Report. Washington, D.C.: U.S. News & World Report, 9 Nov. 2020: Digital Access.

Siddiqui, F. “Hundreds of Covid Cases Reported at Tesla Plant Following Musk's Defiant Reopening, County            Data Shows.” The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: WP Company, 13 Mar. 2021: Digital Access.

Tankersley, J. "Job or Health? Restarting the Economy Threatens to Worsen Economic Inequality." The New York Times. New York: The New York Times, 27 Apr. 2020: Digital Access.

Tempest Williams, T. "The Clan of One Breasted Women." Psychological Perspectives (23): 123-131. Los Angeles: C.G. Jung Institute, 1990.

“U.S. Income Distribution 2019.” Statista. Statista Research Department, 20 Jan. 2021: Digital Access.

Vogel, K. P., et al. “The Quiet Hand of Conservative Groups in the Anti-Lockdown Protests.” The New York Times. New York: The New York Times, 21 Apr. 2020: Digital Access.

Wright, R. A Short History of Progress. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2004.

Wronski, L. New York Times|SurveyMonkey poll: April 2020. New York: The New York Times, 2020: Digital Access.

Zhang, C. “By Numbers: How the US Voted in 2020.” Financial Times. London: Financial Times, 7 Nov.        2020: Digital Access.

Notes

[1] Hume, 1

[2] Arendt, 41

[3] Hume, 1

[4] Zhang

[5] “Kentucky 2020 U.S. Senate Exit Polls.”

[6] “U.S. Income Distribution 2019”

[7] “Fatal Force: Police Shootings Database.”

[8] Hume, 1

[9] Marx, 129

[10] Barthes, 140

[11] Wright, 124

[12] G.A. Cohen provides a proof of this in his essay “Freedom and Money.” 

[13] Cohen, 9

[14] Cohen, 9

[15] Ibid., 10

[16] Blake

[17] Tankersley

[18] Reinberg

[19] Wronski

[20] McNicholas

[21] Diaz

[22] Siddiqui

[23] McNicholas

[24] Nuttle

[25] Collins

[26] “Essential Workers and Unemployment Benefits Do Not Go Together,” 1

[27] Ibid.

[28] Flynn

[29] Maqbool

[30] Vogel

[31] Arendt, 41

[32] DeParle

[33] Livingston

[34] Barthes, 140

[35] Marx, 129

[36] Williams, 128

[37] Ibid.

[38] Arendt, 49

Workers and Communities Must Control COVID Relief Funds: A View From Detroit

By Jerry Goldberg

Republished from Liberation News.

The Biden Coronavirus Relief Bill offers significant funding that could alleviate at least in part the poverty faced by millions of people in the United States. An article in Bridge Michigan summed up the potential benefits for poor people in Michigan.

• An estimated 1.97 million children under 18 in Michigan — and 65.7 million across the United States — could benefit from the expansion of the child tax credit. This constitutes 92% of all children in the state.

• The bill includes an $880 million increase for food assistance, including a 15% increase in food stamp benefits. This potentially could help alleviate hunger for the more than 430,000 adults in Michigan who reported they can’t afford food to adequately feed their children.

• Some $25 billion in rental assistance and housing vouchers could provide assistance to the 139,000 families at risk of eviction in the state.

• There is $25 billion in aid to help child-care providers reopen safely and $15 billion in additional child-care assistance to help families return to work, as well.

All these benefits will be squandered if the workers and oppressed people rely on the capitalist state, a state set up to serve the interests of the corporations and the rich, to deliver these benefits to the people for whom they are intended. This is especially so in oppressed cities like Detroit.

Detroit’s poor completely alienated from capitalist state apparatus

In Detroit, years of grinding poverty and austerity imposed by finance capital have deprived hundreds of thousands of people of the resources to know about and take advantage of benefits, on the rare occasion when they are offered. The following statistics bear out the depth of poverty and lack of accessibility from any basic resources for tens of thousands of Detroiters.

• In Detroit, 40% of the population has no access to any type of internet, 57% lack a high-speed connection, and 70% of school-aged children have no connection at home.

• A 2011 report noted that 47% of Detroiters were functionally illiterate. In 2020, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held that Detroit schools deprive their students of basic access to literacy.

• The median household income for Detroiters in 2018 was $31,283 compared to $61,973 nationally.

The effect of this lack of online access and basic literacy among Detroit’s poor means that even when grandiose programs are announced, those who could benefit the most are not in a position to take advantage of them.

• While Detroit’s Black community suffered some of the highest COVID rates in the state, only 34.5% of Detroiters have been vaccinated compared to 54.5% of the statewide population.

• As of January 2020, 11,297 homes lacked water service. Despite a plan being announced to restore service after the pandemic hit in March 2020, in fact there were only 1,250 water restorations as of May 17, 2021.

• Between 2011 and 2015, one in four properties in Detroit was foreclosed on for unpaid property taxes by the Wayne County treasurer.

• A survey conducted in 2019, found that of the 25,000 homeowners behind on paying their property taxes, 55% were unaware of the Homeowner Property Tax Assistance Program tax exemption, a program which exempts families earning less than $26,780 per year from paying any property taxes. And in 2017, only 197 families benefitted from the $760 million in federal hardest hit funds given the state to stop foreclosures. Instead, $380 million of the funds were diverted to contractors to tear down homes in a program laced with corruption.

Let the workers and community run things

One of the aspects of the Coronavirus Relief Bill is that it is expected to provide $10 billion for governments across Michigan: $4.4 billion for local governments plus another $5 billion for the state. The City of Detroit will be receiving $826.7 million. These funds must be spent by 2024 or be returned to the federal government.

The people must organize to make sure these funds aren’t squandered as they too often are in the capitalist United States, diverted to crony contractors and nonprofits. Instead, these funds should be used to set up community centers in every neighborhood of cities like Detroit, staffed and run by residents from the communities they serve.

The centers should have computer stations, and aides trained in helping individuals learn about and get access to all benefits they are entitled to. They should sponsor literacy classes. They should employ workers who go out into the community every day, to make sure those who are homebound are reached out to.

The workers and community members staffing these centers should be from the communities they are serving where they are known by their neighbors. They should take stock of basic items like access to electricity, heat and safe non-lead-poisoned water, so families are not afraid to report the lack of basic necessities for fear of having their children taken away.

They should also make sure that undocumented workers, who often are afraid to request aid for fear of deportation, get the services they need regardless of their so-called “residency status.”

Each center should include a health clinic, staffed by doctors, nurses and medical students who live in the community and can provide holistic and environmentally sensitive healthcare that really meets people’s needs.

Cuba shows the way

A model for community-based services can be found in socialist Cuba. An article by Ronn Pineo published in the Journal of Developing Societies described Cuba’s community-based health care system. As early as 1984, Cuba began implementation of its “one doctor plus one nurse team” approach — called Basic Health Teams — with each team unit caring for 80 to 150 families. The healthcare teams live in the communities that they serve so that they can better understand the local health issues.

The doctor/nurse/public health official teams are supported, in turn, by local Group Health Teams, which meet regularly to scout for common issues facing the populations they serve, keeping very careful records of their findings and reporting to the Ministry of Public Health.

Rather than waiting for people to get sick and come into doctors’ offices — the common practice elsewhere in the world — the Cuban doctor/nurse/public healthcare worker groups spend their afternoons walking about their assigned districts, medical bags in hand, dropping in unannounced on the homes of those living in the communities. As a result, they are in a position to notice medical conditions of the people they serve before most afflictions can grow to become too serious. The teams use their house calls as opportunities to remind residents to take their medications — supplied free or at very low price-controlled costs — to exercise more and usually quiz their patients closely about their daily diets.

Demand worker/community control the of relief funds

For the Coronavirus Relief Bill to really make a dent in poverty, hunger and homelessness, it will be up to workers and oppressed people to organize to demand control of the funds to ensure they serve the people for whom they are supposed to be intended. We cannot leave it to the capitalist state, an organ for repression of the people on behalf of the corporate elite, to do the job.

Ultimately, the only way to take the vast wealth of U.S. capitalism, produced by the working class and stolen by the bosses, is to overthrow this rotten system and replace it with a socialist system where the needs of the people in the United States and worldwide could easily be met.

The Desire To Get Back To Normal Post-COVID-19 Ignores Black Girls

(Mike Siegel/The Seattle Times)

By Chetachukwu Agwoeme and Christopher M. Wright

In the past year, we have dealt with a global pandemic as well as the violent murders of Black people at the hands of law enforcement. In response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and countless others, activists, and organizers have rallied people to the streets to protest for justice and awareness to the terrorism Black people face in America, and ultimately a call to defund the police. As a result of these protests, there are calls to adopt an ideology of anti-racism. For example, there have been posts of Black squares in “solidarity” with Black Lives on social media, as well as a surge of corporations suddenly advocating for “Black Lives Matter.” Although institutions, including schools, have pledged a commitment to anti-racism, things have not fundamentally changed, specifically for Black girls.

Black girls — who have experienced multiple forms of vanishment, violence, and utter disregard in schools — are now having to face another form of harm in the school building, COVID-19. This crusade to “get back to normal” ignores yet again how harmful our “normal” has been for Black girls in schools. As Black men, we believe it is important to focus on Black girls, because of the multiple forms of violence they face due to their intersecting identities that are overlooked with a “race first” analysis of Blackness.

The desire to get back to normal not only shows how Black girls’ experiences are ignored in what is considered “normal”, but also reveals a lack of attention on how COVID-19 has impacted the Black community. According to the CDC, Black people are 1.1x more likely to catch the virus, 2.9x more likely to be hospitalized by it, and 1.9x more likely to die from it.

The vaccine rollout has also worked to expose inequities in public health. The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) found that in every state in the U.S., Black people are getting vaccinated at rates significantly lower than their white counterparts. The lack of access to the vaccine while schools continue to open presents larger realities of public apathy for Black people by school policy makers. Protection and safety for Black children are not being considered when reopening schools because it was never considered prior to the virus. Therefore, “getting back to normal” as a process means to resume the physical and spiritual violence in the lived experiences of Black girls in schools.

In January of 2021, a Black girl was tased in a high school in Florida by a school resource officer (SRO) in the attempt to break up a fight. In the same week, another Black girl was body slammed head first into the concrete by a school resource officer in a separate Florida school. These examples of violence against Black girls by SROs are unfortunately not new. In 2015, a SRO body slammed a 16-year-old Black girl in a South Carolina high school for refusing to leave the classroom after being accused of classroom disruption by her teacher. In 2019, a 16-year-old Black girl in Chicago was pushed and dragged down a set of stairs by police officers before being punched and shocked with a stun gun multiple times by officers because the girl was accused of being disruptive by her teacher. These instances of violence that have happened pre-and post COVID-19, are not only assaults on the bodies of Black girls, but on their spirits.

Spirit Murdering, a term coined by legal scholar Patricia Williams and expanded to the field of education by Bettina Love, refers to the complete denial of inclusion, protection, safety, nurturance, and acceptance —all things a person needs to be human and to be educated—due to systemic forms of racism undergirded by antiblackness. In schools, SROs participate in the systemic, institutionalized, anti-black state-sanctioned violence that damages the souls of Black girls. With SROs as part of the school environment, this extends the prison state, leaving Black students vulnerable to state sanctioned violence under the guise of student safety. SROs are law enforcement officers who are often not trained to work in school contexts. Because of this unfamiliar environment, SROs force the school environment to adapt to the needs of law enforcement, thus opening a learning space to security cameras, metal detectors, and drug-sniffing dogs.

The forms of violence Black girls face in schools are unique because of the intersecting oppressions they face due to their race and gender. In Monique Morris’s “Pushout,” she found Black girls were punished for displays of Black girlhood and overall agency. Things such as falling asleep, standing up for themselves, asking questions, wearing natural hair, wearing “revealing” clothing, and in some cases engaging in traditional teenage angst resulted in their punishment. When Black girls display behaviors typical of all youth, it is viewed as threatening or disruptive by teachers because of the lack of understanding of Blackness or Black girlhood.

Blacks girls get framed as “loud,” “ghetto,” and “thirsty for attention” by teachers and fellow peers, which trivializes the violences they face in schools, thus positioning Black girls as the problem. When framed as “problems,” Black girls are then adultified. The adultification of Black girls is a form of dehumanization rooted in anti-blackness, intentionally meant to rob them from their girlhood — often leaving them unprotected. When robbed of this crucial milestone of growth, Black girls are vulnerable and unequipped to deal with adult forms of punishment at such a young age.

Overall, we need to be critical during this moment of transition, and ask ourselves what are the non-negotiables that must be attended to in order for us to send our Black girls back into schools? What is “antiracist” about getting back to normal? What does this mean when “under normal circumstances” Black girls experience violence in their schools by SROs, teachers, and fellow students? As we’ve mentioned, schools were already enclosures of anti-blackness through their punitive policies and practices. Is the desire to get back to normal worth the sacrifice of Black girls’ safety? This moment is one for deep reflection, reimagining, and organizing around these questions so that we can chart a path of resistance for Black students and their education. With a path toward resistance against this desire for normalcy, we must center Black girls who are often invisible and ignored. While the rest of the world is looking to rebuild the world they knew, Black people must continue to resist the violence that necessitates this rebuilding.

Chetachukwu U. Agwoeme, MA is a PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh studying Urban Education. Chetachukwu’s scholarship is dedicated to interrogating our current practices around school safety in regards to Black students. Ideally, he wants to change schools (which have been sites of suffering for most minoritized students) to places where students learn how to free themselves and free each other. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Maryland, College Park respectively.

Christopher M. Wright is a PhD student in the Urban Education program at The University of Pittsburgh. His research centers Black spaces as geographic sights of political struggle and worldmaking. He engages patterns of Black displacement and Black organized struggle. Chris holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from The University of Oklahoma.

Calling On Action: A Review of Henry Giroux's 'Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis'

By Yanis Iqbal

Henry Giroux’s new book “Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis”, published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2021, is an informed, impassioned and insightful response to the politico-economic conjuncture in which we are living. Organized into four sections, the book discusses a variety of things: the significance of the COVID-19 pandemic for neoliberalism, the phenomenon of Trumpism, the continued relevance of fascism, and the role of education in bringing about a new world. Operating with a whole network of organically interpenetrating concepts, Giroux does not content himself with isolated terms and one-sided definitions. He is always trying to integrate the totality of particular points and phases in a dynamic movement without suppressing the existential vitality of the individual elements. It is this internal characteristic of the book which makes it a worthwhile read.

Pandemic Pedagogy

Pandemic pedagogy is one of the central themes of the book. It serves as a concentrated expression of the multiple modalities through which neoliberalism has created a reactionary ideological configuration to stabilize pandemic profiteering. Giroux writes: “Pandemic pedagogy is the enemy of critical pedagogy because it is wedded to reproducing a debased civic culture while renouncing democratic social and political relations. It is a pedagogy for which power functions in the cultural sphere to depoliticize people while replacing democratic forms of solidarity with a social order invested in ultra-nationalism, social atomization, hyper-masculinity, a war culture, and an unbridled individualism”. Pandemic pedagogy emerges directly from the various ways in which the pandemic has mapped onto existing inequalities and social injuries plaguing the American society.

Unlike liberals who consider the pandemic as a “great equalizer”, Giroux says that “Its disproportionate effects on the poor and vulnerable, especially black and brown communities, pointed to the widening chasm between the rich and powerful wealthy few and the vulnerable and precarious majority. The inequities that this crisis revealed made clear how disasters unfold through relations of power, making it easier to challenge the myth that major catastrophes such as pandemics that affect everyone equally.”

According to Giroux, the necropolitical reality of neoliberalism is concealed through the deliberate individualization of social problems: “As a politics of control, neoliberalism privatizes and individualizes social problems, i.e., wash your hands, do not sit on toilet seats, and practice social distancing, as a way to contain the pandemic. In this instance, we learned how to be safe while being depoliticized, or uninformed about the role that capitalist economies play in producing a range of ideological viruses that gut the social welfare state and public health systems, if not resistance itself”. Pandemic pedagogy is present at every level of society and has morphed into a seemingly unshakeable “common sense”. An example of this “common sense” is the discourse on pandemic education which, as Giroux says, “is dominated by a technocratic rationality obsessed with methodological considerations regarding online teaching and learning.”

Afraid that deteriorating material conditions would increase the appeal of socialist politics and strengthen the class cohesion of the proletariat, pandemic pedagogy uses conservative ideological tools to discursively decompose class. Trumpism is an example of such a tool wielded by the ruling class to continue to maintain a gap between the objective structure of class and its self-conscious subjective awareness among the people belonging to that class.

Trumpism

Giroux conducts the analysis of Trumpism in two steps. First, he posits that Trumpism is integrally interlinked to neoliberal capitalism. While reflecting on the movement of the pandemic through the medium of neoliberal social relations of production, Giroux writes: “neoliberalism could not be disconnected from the spectacle of racism, ultra-nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and bigotry that dominated the national zeitgeist as a means of promoting shared fears rather than shared responsibilities. Neoliberal capitalism created through its destruction of the economy, environment, education, and public healthcare a petri dish for the virus to wreak havoc and wide-scale destruction.”

The dense feeling of alienation engendered by the intensifying capitalist crisis provides the soil on which Trumpism grows. As the distinction between consumers and citizens is increasingly blurred by the marketization of each sphere of life, people become culturally deracinated. In a situation like this, Trumpism promised to supply these alienated masses with an identitarian anchorage, a cultural fixity witch which they can associate themselves. Insofar as Trumpism aims to satiate the emotive needs of its support base, it is based on irrationalism. Giroux delineates how such irrationalism manifests itself in Trump’s everyday performative politics: “Trump’s…language exhibited a mounting compulsion and hyper-immediacy that flattened out and vulgarized any viable notion of communication…Trump employed a pandemic pedagogy in which language became unmoored from critical reason, informed debate, and the weight of scientific evidence. Instead, it was tied to pageantry, political theater, and the consolidation of power, as well as the dictates of violence.”

Situating Trump’s politics within a wider panorama of historical processes allows us to confront it not as an individual problem but rather as a symptom of a sick society. As Giroux writes, “Cruelty is not something that can be simply personalized in the figure of Donald Trump. Neoliberalism produces its own forms of institutional cruelty through its austerity measures, its decimation of the welfare state, and its support for racialized mass incarceration.” Insofar that Trump is enmeshed in the structural conditions generated by neoliberalism, his authoritarian politics can neither be eliminated through the simple transfer of executive and legislative power to a thoroughly corrupt and corporate Democratic leadership nor through an impeachment process. Commenting on the latter, Giroux says: “The impeachment process with its abundance of political theater and insipid media coverage mostly treated Trump’s crimes not as symptoms of a history of conditions that have led to the United States’ slide into the abyss of authoritarianism, but as the failings of individual character and a personal breach of constitutional law.”

To prevent people like Trump from capturing power, we need to build robust movements capable of uprooting the conditions which make people vulnerable to the propaganda of demagogic leaders. Giroux is forthright in acknowledging this: “the criminogenic response to the crisis on the part of the Trump administration should become a call to arms, if not a model on a global level, for a massive international protest movement that moves beyond the ritual of trying Trump and other authoritarian politicians for an abuse of power, however justified. Instead, such a movement should become a call to put on trial neoliberal capitalism while fighting for structural and ideological changes that will usher in a radical and socialist democracy worthy of the struggle.”

Second, Giroux frames Trumpism within the problematic of fascism. It is important to note that Giroux does not interpret fascism in the narrow way of the setting up of a police state. Instead, he perceives it as “a particular response to a range of capitalist crises that include the rise of massive inequality, a culture of fear, precarious employment, ruthless austerity policies that destroy the social contract, the rise of the carceral state, and the erosion of white privilege, among other issues.” Since fascism is invariably tied to specific social conditions, it will not be homologous to the state structures established in interwar Italy and post-WWII Germany. Giroux is spot-on here: “Fascism does not disappear because it does not surface as a mirror image of the past. Fascism is not static and the protean elements of fascism always run the risk of crystallizing into new forms…comparisons to the Nazi past withered in the false belief that historical events are fixed in time and place and can only be repeated in history books”.

Another important feature of Giroux’s conception of fascism is its dynamic nature. He writes: “Fascism is often an incoherent set of assumptions combined with anti-intellectualism, ultra-nationalism, and a demonizing rhetoric aimed at a group singled out as different and undeserving of human rights…Fascism does not operate according to an inflexible script. On the contrary, it is adaptive, and its mobilizing furors are mediated through local symbols, as it normalizes itself through a country’s customs and daily rituals”. This argument resembles Jairus Banaji’s assertion that “fascist ideology is actually only a pastiche of motifs, it is a pastiche of different ideological currents, it has very little coherence on its own.”

When the aforementioned two aspects of Giroux’s analysis of Trumpism are combined, we are presented with the concept of “neoliberal fascism” - “a new political formation…in which the principles and practices of a fascist past and neoliberal present have merged, connecting the worst dimensions and excesses of gangster capitalism with the fascist ideals of white nationalism and racial supremacy associated with the horrors of authoritarian states.” Neoliberal fascism is not the apogee of an empty struggle between authoritarianism and democratic ideals. Rather, it is a “fierce battle on the part of demagogues to destroy the institutions and conditions that make critical thought and oppositional accounts of power possible.” With this statement, Giroux delves into an incisive study of the deep impacts of neoliberal fascism on agency.

Agency and Hope

Agency, defined as conscious, goal-directed activity, is heavily impacted by neoliberal fascism. Agency is the condition for every struggle and hope is a prerequisite of agency. With the arrival of neoliberal fascism, “the connections between democracy and education wither, hope becomes the enemy of agency, and agency is reduced to learning how to survive rather than working to improve the conditions that bear down on one’s life and society in general.” The overwhelming of hope by “the sheer task of survival” is elaborated in the book “Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously”, where Brad Evans and Julian Reid develop the new category of resilience to capture the broad contours of neoliberal asociality and passivity. Resilience, the authors say, is not about overcoming or resolving a crisis but about the ways and means of coming to terms with it. They argue that resilience teaches us to “live in a terrifying yet normal state of affairs that suspends us in petrified awe.”

The re-molding of agency and loss of hope is fundamentally aided by ignorance which renders us incapable of problematizing our structural conditionedness and piercing through the open-ended nature of history. According to Giroux, “Ignorance has lost its innocence and is no longer synonymous with the absence of knowledge. It has become malicious in its refusal to know, to disdain criticism, to undermine the value of historical consciousness, and to render invisible important issues that lie on the side of social and economic justice. Ignorance has become the organizing principle of a pandemic pedagogy that collapses fact and fantasy, truth and lies, evidence and opinion.” Ignore needs to be combated by the constant utilization of history which will make it possible to de-naturalize hierarchies and intensely engage in a movement for social justice. Whenever history is used as a terrain of struggle for hegemony, as a space for opening up to a contextualized understanding of world and as a lens to re-think and constantly evolve our own views, a new politics of memory is developed. Memory becomes an act of moral witnessing and helps to counter what Giroux calls the “bankrupt white supremacist notion of nostalgia that celebrated the most regressive moments in U.S. history.”

Need for Action

Throughout his book, Giroux refers to the imperative need for concrete action. He is not satisfied with a mere shift in consciousness or an educative endeavor aimed at empty verbosity. He is unfailingly dedicated to the construction of a movement capable of fighting against the state’s repressive and ideological apparatuses.

In an extremely important passage, Giroux writes: “I do not want to suggest…that the strength of argument can change the political balance of power exclusively through an appeal to interpretation, rationality, and the force of dialogue… Ideas gain their merit, in part, through the institutions that produce them, and as such merit the importance of recognizing that the knowledge/power/agency connection is both a battle over ideas as well as over cultural apparatuses and institutions, and the power relations that create them…Matters of critique now merge with the imperative of actions bringing together not merely critical ideas and balanced judgment, but theory and informed action.”

 A major takeaway from Giroux’s book is that the politico-strategic logic of hegemony should occupy a central position in socialist organizing. Mere academicism is totally incapable of overthrowing the bourgeois state. What is needed is the constant re-interpretation of the world in the context of struggles. Whether this re-interpretation is correct or not is decided from the practical consequences that might conceivably result from that intellectual conception. In sum, knowledge and pedagogy need to be dialectically located in the ecology of struggle where they get endlessly embodied in concrete consequences and thus, help in consolidating the dynamic of action and reflection in conversation with each other. Giroux’s book is an example of precisely that kind of knowledge-in-struggle which is singularly committed to the goal of socialism.

Forcing the Vote on Medicare for All: A Proven and Imperative Strategy

[Photo credit: CNN]

By Karthik Pasupula

Republished from Michigan Specter.

14.6 million. That’s the lower estimate of the number of Americans who have lost their health insurance during this pandemic. Want to guess the number of people in the same situation in other developed countries? Zero if you live in Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Denmark, Finland, Norway, etc.

You’ve probably seen the polls. More than 70% of Americans believe that the government should be responsible for insuring all Americans, with around 88% of Democrats supporting a single-payer system. Support for government healthcare has risen across the board, presumably because pandemic-induced mass unemployment has exposed the folly of employer-based insurance.

Yet, the fight for Medicare for All isn’t happening in the halls of Congress right now. And that is a huge mistake. National media is dominated by coverage of an inept administration whose will to govern has been broken by the (un)dynamic duo of Senators Manchin and Sinema. The constant ceding of ground must end. It’s time to #ForceTheVote in order to put public pressure on establishment politicians and get them on the record.

Ever since the emergence of “The Squad” in 2018, interest in Medicare for All (M4A) has soared. This is especially relevant to Michigan voters, since 16% of residents live in poverty, including one in four children and 17% of senior citizens. These problems are especially bad in Detroit where around 30.6% of people live below the poverty level — the highest among big cities. The insane grip that corporate health insurance companies have on America harms more than just America’s very poorest. One in five voters struggle to pay their medical bills and one in three fear that they won’t be able to pay for healthcare. In order to pay those bills, they have to resort to extraordinary measures: dipping into savings, borrowing money, selling jewelry, crowdsourcing, etc. This would not exist under a single-payer system.

A single-payer healthcare system would also set prices for each service. This solves one of the biggest problems of our healthcare system, which is the variety in rates for different services. An appendectomy, for example, can cost anywhere from $1,529 to $186,955. Under single-payer, that rate would be much lower and consistent across hospitals. Administrative costs for doctors and hospitals would also go way down due to the reduction of negotiation costs. As of 2017, administrative spending made up 34.2% of total health expenditures in the United States. That is more than twice what Canada spends.

But how do we win a cheaper and more efficient healthcare system? The strategic and principled move is to demand a floor vote from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. This would prompt an “on-the-record” vote on M4A from all representatives. Right now, there are 221 Democrats in the House and 211 Republicans (and three vacancies). There are more than enough progressives to threaten the stoppage of any legislation Democrats propose. And they could use that leverage to demand a vote on M4A. But one of the main arguments against a floor vote for M4A is that it would just be an immediate flop.

So? When M4A polls so well, why should we be worried about if it flops or not? The viability of a piece of legislation is in the hands of the people, and the people have spoken: they support M4A. Putting elected representatives on the spot and showing how they’re actively voting against their constituents is absolutely crucial. If the bill fails, then it immediately lets progressives know which representatives they need to primary.

Opponents of this strategy have said that we can just look at the cosponsor list to ascertain who supports M4A. Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris have both cosponsored an M4A bill. But, when pressed on the issue during the Democratic presidential primary, they immediately backed down. It would be reasonable to assume many other cosponsors would do the same if forced to vote.

Moreover, a message that certain representatives argued against healthcare coverage for Americans during a pandemic would help progressives in future elections. With our healthcare system absolutely failing during this crisis, American citizens will be more open than ever to healthcare reform. With media coverage of liberal representatives voting to deny them coverage, voters will be reminded of the necessity to elect more progressives to Congress.

Historically, the president’s party tends to lose seats during midterms. Obama lost 63 House seats in 2010, the largest loss since FDR, after his Wall Street bailout. Forcing a vote on M4A would make it much easier to capitalize on dissatisfaction with the president’s party during the midterm elections. 2022 would be the perfect time to campaign against incumbent Democrats, as history shows they are weaker during midterms.

Not only that, but forcing a vote on M4A would use the exact same tactics the Tea Party used to ultimately excise former House Speaker John Boehner. The Tea Party tried to repeal Obamacare numerous times, to no avail, but they rode the enthusiasm from those failed attempts to enormous wins and quickly became a force to be reckoned with in Congress. By blocking nearly every piece of legislation, and thereby tying Boehner’s hands behind his back, the Tea Party effectively forced him to resign. In short, Boehner stepped down because the Tea Party used the leverage they had. Progressive Democrats should use similar leverage to bring Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to their knees.

If you disagree with forcing the vote, then what is your plan to bring M4A into effect? What do you think we need to do before getting a vote on M4A? How do we do this, and what is the timeline? These questions are not being answered by sitting politicians. All we have are ideologies; not action on those ideologies. Denying this strategy means denying that the Tea Party was successful in being a commanding presence, and that is verifiably false. The incremental approach that doesn’t utilize the bully pulpit is failing. Everything that Biden “compromised” with progressives on during the campaign trail is falling dead in its tracks: $15 minimum wage (God save the Parliamentarian), ICE detention facilities, $2,000 checks, foreign policy, etc. Playing nice with the establishment does not work and that has been proven time and time again.

Democrats in Congress argued that we needed to impeach Donald Trump to hold him accountable for inciting the Capitol riots. Even though they didn’t have the votes to convict, I agreed with the motivations behind impeachment because it’s a moral imperative to get every single representative and senator on the record to keep them and Trump accountable. The same reasoning applies to forcing a vote on M4A.

Even recently, vote-forcing strategies have been successful at putting pressure on establishment politicians. Senator Bernie Sanders recently forced a vote and got eight senators, all of whom caucus with the Democrats, on the record as opposing a $15 minimum wage.

At this stage, opponents of this strategy complain that there is not enough thought given to step two. However, there’s a clear plan. We get politicians on record, and then exert political pressure on a popular issue. In this way, even if the bill fails, the issue only gets heightened. Just one piece of evidence is the huge outcry and shaming of Senator Sinema for her thumbs-down vote.

And what comes after this, you ask? The ammunition to primary these corrupt individuals is readily provided on an issue that the vast majority of Americans have a solid stance on. Denying a living wage is one thing, but denying healthcare during a pandemic will carry even graver consequences for Democrats who take that stance.

Something I’m completely against is calling opponents of this strategy corrupt. AOC and other members of “The Squad” have said that they are against forcing a vote on M4A because of aforementioned counterarguments, but they aren’t corrupt like the majority of DC. Progressives do NOT take money from super PACs, and that’s the main separator. We won’t always agree on everything, but we will agree on basic, reasonable political positions.

The foundations of #ForceTheVote are both principled and strategic. It’s principled because we’re fighting for something at a time when people need it most. Even if it’s “doomed to fail,” fighting for something that you believe is right is simply the morally principled action. And it’s strategic because, even if the vote fails, it gets representatives on the record as denying basic improvements in quality of life. That sets us up well to pressure incumbents and mount serious primary challenges against them.

The 2020 election showed that anti-Trump rhetoric by itself does not work. Democrats lost seats in the House and Biden won by smaller margins in swing states than Trump did in 2016. Sticking with their tradition of strategic cluelessness, the DNC recently announced that their primary focus will be on QAnon next election cycle.

Enough of this culture war bullshit, it’s time to fight for real policy. We need to have substantive arguments and a floor vote provides us with the ammunition, especially if it fails. The failure will not fall on progressives, it will fall on Democrats who voted no and they will be punished for it through democracy. There is nothing to lose from this strategy.

Keep in mind the 14.6 million people who have lost health insurance. Keep in mind the huge number of people who were already uninsured or underinsured. Keep these things in mind while consistently calling out politicians, so we can keep them accountable when the opportunity arises.