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Title: A “Green New Deal”?
Author: Tom Wetzel
Date: April 15, 2019
Language: en
Topics: green syndicalism, Green New Deal, Ideas & Action
Source: Retrieved on 15th October 2021 from https://ideasandaction.info/2019/04/green-deal-eco-syndicalist-alternative/
Notes: Published in Ideas & Action.

Tom Wetzel

A “Green New Deal”?

Capitalist dynamics are at the very heart of the current crisis that

humanity faces over global warming.

When we talk of “global warming,” we’re talking about the rapid — and

on-going — rise in the average world-wide surface and ocean temperature.

Thus far a rise of 0.8 degrees Celsius (1.4 degrees Fahrenheit) since

1880. According to an ongoing temperature analysis conducted by

scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, two-thirds of

this temperature increase has occurred since 1975. A one-degree rise in

temperature might seem like no big deal. As the NASA scientists point

out, however, “A one-degree global change is significant because it

takes a vast amount of heat to warm all the oceans, atmosphere, and land

by that much.”

We know that carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels

is at the heart of the problem. For many centuries the proportion of

carbon dioxide in the atmosphere ranged between 200 and 300 parts per

million. By the 1950s the growth of industrial capitalism since the

1800s had pushed this to the top of this range — 310 parts per million.

Since then the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has

risen very rapidly — to more than 410 parts per million by 2018. This is

the result of the vast rise in the burning of fossil fuels in the era

since World War 2 — coal, petroleum, natural gas.

The problem is rooted in the very structure of capitalism itself.

Cost-shifting is an essential feature of the capitalist mode of

production. An electric power company burns coal to generate electricity

because the price per kilowatt hour from coal-fired electricity has long

been cheaper than alternatives. But the emissions from burning coal

travel downwind and cause damage to the respiratory systems of thousands

of people — including preventable deaths to people with respiratory

ailments. This is in addition to the powerful contribution to global

warming from the carbon dioxide emissions. But the power firm doesn’t

have to pay money for these human costs. If the firm had to pay fees

that would be equivalent to the human cost in death, respiratory damage

and contribution to global warming and its effects, burning coal would

not be profitable for the power company.

Firms also externalize costs onto workers, such as the health effects of

stress or chemical exposures. The “free market” pundit or hack economist

might deny that companies externalize costs onto workers. They might say

that wages and benefits paid to workers for each hour of work measure

the cost of labor. But the human cost of work can be increased without

an increase in the compensation paid to workers. If a company speeds up

the pace of work, if people are working harder, if they are more tightly

controlled by supervisors, paced by machines or software, this increases

the cost in human terms.

Toxic chemicals used in manufacturing, in agriculture and other

industries pose a threat to both the workers and to people who live in

nearby areas. Usually working class people live in neighborhoods near

polluting industries, and often these are communities of color. This is

another form of capitalist cost-shifting.

State regulation of pesticides or air pollution often ends up acting as

a “cover” for the profit-making firms. Despite the existence of

pollutants generated by leaky oil refineries and pollutants emitted by

other industries in industrial areas in California — such as the “cancer

alley” of oil refineries in the Contra Costa County area or the similar

refinery zone in Wilmington — the government agencies set up to deal

with air pollution in the Bay Area and Los Angeles County protected

polluters for years by focusing almost exclusively on pollution

generated by vehicle exhaust. In this way the South Coast Air Quality

Management District and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District

have been an example of “regulatory capture” by corporate capital.

Power firms that generate vast amounts of carbon dioxide emissions — and

firms that make profits from building fossil-fuel burning cars and

trucks or from the sale of gasoline and diesel and jet fuel — have not

had to pay any fees or penalties for the growing build up of the carbon

dioxide layer in the atmosphere. The global warming crisis thus has its

explanation in cost shifting and the search for short-term profits and

ever growing markets — features that are at the heart of the capitalist

system.

If global capitalism continues with “business as usual”, the warming

will have major impacts — killer heat waves, more ocean heat pumping

energy into hurricanes and cyclones, rising ocean levels from melting of

ice in the polar regions and melting of glaciers, destruction of corals

in the oceans, and a greater danger to the survival of many species of

living things.

Previous attempts to get global agreement to cut back burning of fossil

fuels have been ineffective. The Paris accords merely proposed voluntary

targets. NASA scientist James Hansen described it as a “fraud”: “There

is no action, just promises.” According to the UN Intergovernmental

Panel on Climate Change, the dire situation calls for “rapid and

far-reaching transitions…unprecedented in terms of scale.” The IPCC

warns that there needs to be a 45 percent world-wide reduction in the

production of heat-trapping gases (mainly carbon dioxide) by 2030 if

humanity is to avoid dangerous levels of global warming.

Clearly a global change is needed. But how to bring this about?

The concept of a Green New Deal has been proposed by Green Party

activists, climate justice groups and various radicals for some time.

The slogan is based on a comparison with the statist planning used by

President Roosevelt to respond to the economic crisis of the 1930s as

well as the vast and rapid transition of American industry to war

production at the beginning of World War 2. The idea is that the crisis

of global warming should be treated with equal urgency as the mass

unemployment of 1933 or the fascist military threat of the early 1940s.

After the election to Congress of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — a member of

Democratic Socialists of America — the Green New Deal resolution was

introduced into the US Congress by Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey.

This lays out a set of ambitious goals, such as 100 percent electric

power generation in the USA from “clean, renewable, and zero-emission

energy sources.”

Other goals include “removing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions

from manufacturing…as much as is technologically feasible” and

“overhauling” the transport sector “to eliminate pollution and

greenhouse gas emissions” from transport “through investment in

zero-emission vehicles, accessible public transportation and high speed

rail.” Along with this resolution, a letter was sent to the US Congress

from 626 environmental organizations backing the Green New Deal

proposal. These environmental groups made it quite clear they oppose any

market-based tinkering — reforms that we know won’t work — such as “cap

and trade” (trading in pollution “rights”).

Many have proposed “public-private partnerships” and public subsidies to

private corporations. Robert Pollin, writing in New Left Review, talks

about “preferential tax treatment for clean-energy investments” and

“market arrangements through government procurement contracts.” All part

of a so-called “green industrial policy.” A green capitalism, in other

words.

But workers are often skeptical of these promises. Companies will simply

lay people off, under-pay them, or engage in speed-up and dangerous work

practices — if they can profit by doing so. For example, low pay, work

intensification and injuries have been a problem at the Tesla electric

car factory which has received 5 billion dollars in government

subsidies. Tesla recently laid off 7 percent of its workforce (over

three thousand workers) in pursuit of profitability.

An alternative approach that looks to statist central planning has been

proposed by Richard Smith — an eco-socialist who is also a member of

Democratic Socialists of America. Smith characterizes the proposal by

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez this way:

Ocasio-Cortez…is a bold, feminist, anti-racist and socialist-inspired

successor to FDR…She’s taking the global warming discussion to a new

level…She’s not calling for cap and trade or carbon taxes or divestment

or other “market” solutions. She’s issuing a full-throated call for

de-carbonization — in effect throwing the gauntlet down to capitalism

and challenging the system…[1]1

Smith believes the goals of the Green New Deal can’t be realized through

things like “incentives” — and he’s right about that. He points out that

the Green New Deal resolution “lacks specifics” about how the goals will

be reached. To realize the goal of “de-carbonizing” the economy, he

proposes a three-part program:

Declare a state of emergency to suppress fossil fuel use. Ban all new

extraction. Nationalize the fossil fuel industry to phase it out.

Create a federal program in the style of the 1930s Works Progress

Administration to shift the workforce of the shut-down industries to

“useful but low emissions” areas of the economy “at equivalent pay and

benefits.”

Launch a “state-directed” crash program to phase in renewable electric

power production, electric transport vehicles and other methods of

transport not based on burning fossil fuels. Develop programs to shift

from petro-chemical intensive industrial agriculture to organic farming.

Even though “AOC explicitly makes a powerful case for state planning,”

Smith says, a weakness of the Green New Deal resolution, from his

perspective, is the failure to “call for a National Planning Board to

reorganize, reprioritize and restructure the economy.” When he talks

about nationalization, he notes “We do not call for expropriation.” He’s

talking about buying out the shareholders at “fair market value.” This

is essentially a proposal for a largely state-directed form of

capitalist economy — a form of state capitalism.

Smith’s proposal is wildly unrealistic. Are we to believe that the

corporate-media influenced American electoral scheme can be used to

elect politicians — through the business-controlled Democratic Party —

to enact a multi-trillion dollar program of seizures of the fossil fuel

industry, auto manufacturers, and chemical firms and set up a planning

board to direct the economy?

The American working class did make important gains in the Thirties —

such as the Fair Labor Standards Act (minimum wage, unemployment

insurance) and Aid to Families with Dependent Children. These

concessions were only won due to an uprising of the American working

class in a context of vast struggles around the world — a working class

revolution in Spain, plant occupations in France, a communist insurgency

in China, the Communists holding on in Russia. In that moment capitalism

faced a threat to its very existence.

The USA saw a huge working class rebellion between 1933 and 1937 —

millions of workers on strike, hundreds of thousands of workers creating

new unions from scratch, rising influence for revolutionary

organizations, a thousand workplace seizures (sit-down strikes),

challenges to Jim Crow in the south. And in 1936 this angry and militant

mood also pushed very close to the formation of a national Farmer-Labor

Party that would have been a major threat to the Democrats. Many

formerly intransigent corporations were forced to negotiate agreements

with unions. The Democrats chose to “move left” in that moment.

It’s also a mistake to romanticize the New Deal. People talk of the

1930s WPA as the model for “job guarantees” — that is, government as

employer of last resort. But there was still 17 percent unemployment in

USA as late as 1940. Workers in the WPA often had beefs such as low pay.

Communists, socialists and syndicalists organized unions and strikes

among WPA workers. The gains that working class people were able to win

in the Thirties did not simply come about through electoral politics.

Nor were the conservative, bureaucratic “international unions” of the

American Federal of Labor the vehicle either. They were more of a road

block — exactly why several hundred thousand workers had created new

grassroots unions from scratch by late 1934.

Smith is not alone in pushing statist central planning as a solution.

This concept is being talked up lately by various state socialists,

including people associated with Jacobin magazine and DSA. These

advocates often assume the state is simply a class-neutral institution

that could be taken hold of by the working class and wielded for its

purposes.

In reality the state is not class-neutral but has class oppression built

into its very structure. For example, public sector workers are

subordinate to managerialist bureaucracies just as workers are in the

private corporations. The day-to-day workings of state institutions are

controlled by the cadres of the bureaucratic control class — state

managers, high end professionals employed as experts, prosecutors and

judges, military and police brass. This is in addition to the

“professionals of representation” — the politicians — who are typically

drawn from either the business or bureaucratic control classes, that is,

classes to which working class people are subordinate.

As a top-down approach to planning, statist central planning has no way

to gain accurate information about either public preferences for public

goods and services or individual consumer preferences. Statist central

planning is also inherently authoritarian. This is because it is based

on a denial of self-management to people who would be primarily affected

by its decisions — consumers and residents of communities, on the one

hand, and workers in the various industries who would continue to be

subject to managerialist autocracy.

Self-management means that people who are affected by decisions have

control over those decisions to the extent they are affected. There are

many decisions in the running of workplaces where the group who are

primarily affected are the workers whose activity makes up the

production process. Taking self-management seriously would require a

form of distributed control in planning, where groups who are primarily

affected over certain decisions — such as residents of local communities

or workers in industries— have an independent sphere of decision-making

control. This is the basis of the syndicalist alternative of distributed

planning, discussed below.

State socialists will sometimes make noises about “worker control” as an

element of central planning, but real collective power of workers over

the production process is inconsistent with the concept of central

planning. If planning is to be the activity of an elite group at a

center, they will want to have their own managers on site in workplaces

to make sure their plans are carried out. Any talk of “worker control”

always loses out to this logic.

Statist central planning can’t overcome either the exploitative or

cost-shifting logic of capitalism, which lies at the heart of the

ecological crisis. Various populations are directly impacted by

pollution in various forms — such as the impact of pesticide pollution

on farm workers and rural communities or the impact on air and water in

local communities. The only way to overcome the cost-shifting logic is

for the affected populations — workers and communities — to gain direct

power to prevent being polluted on. For global warming, this means the

population in general needs a direct form of popular power that would

enable the people to directly control the allowable emissions into the

atmosphere.

As difficult as it may be, we need a transition to a self-managed,

worker-controlled socialist political economy if we’re going to have a

solution to the ecological crisis of the present era. But this

transition can only really come out of the building up of a powerful,

participatory movement of the oppressed majority in the course of

struggles against the present regime.

The Syndicalist Alternative for an Eco-socialist Future

The problem is not that people struggle for immediate changes that are

within our power to currently push for. Rather, the issue is how we

pursue change. Changes can be fought for in different ways.

The basic problem with the electoral socialist (“democratic socialist”)

strategy is its reliance on methods that ask working class people to

look to “professionals of representation” to do things for us. This

approach tends to build up — and crucially rely upon — bureaucratic

layers that are apart from — and not effectively controllable by —

rank-and-file working class people. These are approaches that build up

layers of professional politicians in office, paid political party

machines, lobbyists, or negotiations on our behalf by the paid apparatus

of the unions — paid officials and staff, or the paid staff in the big

non-profits.

Syndicalists refer to these as reformist methods (for lack of a better

term). Not because we’re opposed to the fight for reforms. Any fight for

a less-than-total change (such as more money for schools or more nurse

staffing) is a “reform.” The methods favored by the electoral socialists

are “reformist” because they undermine the building of a movement for

more far-reaching change. The history of the past century shows that

these bureaucratic layers end up as a barrier to building the struggle

for a transition to a worker-controlled socialist mode of production.

We can say that an approach to action and organization for change is

non-reformist to the extent that it builds rank-and-file controlled mass

organizations, relies on and builds participation in militant collective

actions such as strikes, and builds self-confidence, self-reliance,

organizing skills, wider active participation, and wider solidarity

between different groups among the oppressed and exploited majority.

Syndicalism is a strategy for change based on non-reformist forms of

action and organization. Non-reformist forms of organization of struggle

are based on control by the members through participatory democracy and

elected delegates, such as elected shop delegates and elected

negotiating committees in workplaces. And the use of similar grassroots

democracy in other organizations that working class people can build

such as tenant unions. Non-reformist forms of action are disruptive of

“business as usual” and are built on collective participation, such as

strikes, occupations, and militant marches.

A key way the electoral socialist and syndicalist approaches differ is

their effect on the process that Marxists sometimes call class

formation. This is the more or less protracted process through which the

working class overcomes fatalism and internal divisions (as on lines of

race or gender), acquires knowledge about the system, and builds the

confidence, organizational capacity and the aspiration for social

change. Through this process the working class “forms” itself into a

force that can effectively challenge the dominating classes for control

of society.

If people see effective collective action spreading in the society

around them, this may change the way people see their situation. Once

they perceive that this kind of collective power is available to them as

a real solution for their own issues, this can change their perception

of the kinds of change that is possible. The actual experience of

collective power can suggest a much deeper possibility of change.

When rank-and-file working class people participate directly in building

worker unions, participating in carrying out a strike with co-workers,

or in building a tenant union and organizing direct struggle against

rent hikes or poor building conditions, rank-and-file people are

directly engaged — and this helps people to learn how to organize,

builds more of a sense that “We can make change,” and people also learn

directly about the system. More people are likely to come to the

conclusion “We have the power to change the society” if they see actual

power of people like themselves being used effectively in strikes,

building takeovers, and other kinds of mass actions. In other words, a

movement of direct participation and grassroots democracy builds in more

people this sense of the possibility of change from below.

On the other hand, concentrating the decision-making power in the fight

for social change into bureaucratic layers of professional politicians

and an entrenched union bureaucracy tends to undermine this process

because it doesn’t build confidence and organizing skills among working

class people. It fails to build the sense that “We have the power in our

hands to change things.” Thus a basic problem with electoral socialism

(“democratic socialism”) is that it undermines the process of class

formation.

The electoral venue is also not favorable terrain for the working class

struggle for changes because the voting population tends to be skewed to

the more affluent part of the population. A large part of the working

class do not see why they should vote. They don’t see the politicians as

looking out for their interests. The non-voting population tends to be

poorer — more working class — than the voting population. This means the

working class can’t bring the full force of its numbers to bear.

A strategy for change focused on elections and political parties tends

to lead to a focus on electing leaders to gain power in the state, to

make changes for us. This type of focus leads us away from a more

independent form of working class politics that is rooted in forms of

collective action that ordinary people can build directly and directly

participate in — such as strikes, building direct solidarity between

different working class groups in the population, mass protest campaigns

around issues that we select, and the like.

To be clear, I’m not here arguing that people shouldn’t vote, or that it

makes no difference to us who is elected. Often in fact it does, and

independent worker and community organizations can also direct their

pressure on what politicians do. But here I’m talking about our strategy

for change. I’m arguing against a strategy for change that relies upon —

focuses on — the role of elected officials, a political party, or the

full-time paid union apparatus.

An electoralist strategy leads to the development of political machines

in which mass organizations look to professional politicians and party

operatives. This type of practice tends to create a bureaucratic layer

of professional politicians, media, think-tanks and party operatives

that develops its own interests.

When the strategy is focused on electing people to office in the state,

college-educated professionals and people with “executive experience”

will tend to be favored as candidates to “look good” in the media. And

this means people of the professional and administrative layers will

tend to gain leadership positions in an electorally oriented party. This

will tend to diminish the ability of rank and file working class people

to control the party’s direction. This is part of the process of the

development of the party as a separate bureaucratic layer with its own

interests. Because they are concerned with winning elections and keeping

their hold on positions in the state, this can lead them to oppose

disruptive direct action by workers such as strikes or workplace

takeovers. There is a long history of electoral socialist leaders taking

this kind of stance.

To the extent electoral socialist politics comes to dominate in the

labor movement — as it did in Europe after World War 2 — declining

militancy and struggle also undermined the commitment to socialism. The

electoral socialist parties in Europe competed in elections through the

advocacy of various immediate reforms. This became the focus of the

parties. Sometimes they won elections. At the head of a national

government they found that they had to “manage” capitalism — keep the

capitalist regime running. If they moved in too radical a direction they

found they would lose middle class votes — or the investor elite might

panic and start moving their capital to safe havens abroad.In some cases

elements of the “deep state” — such as the military and police forces —

moved to overthrow them. Most of these parties eventually changed their

concept of what their purpose was. They gave up on the goal of replacing

capitalism with socialism.

Eco-syndicalism

Eco-syndicalism is based on the recognition that workers — and direct

worker and community alliances — can be a force against the

environmentally destructive actions of capitalist firms. Toxic

substances are transported by workers, ground-water-destroying solvents

are used in electronics assembly and damage the health of workers, and

pesticides poison farm workers. Industrial poisons affect workers on the

job first and pollute nearby working class neighborhoods. Nurses have to

deal with the effects of pollution on people’s bodies. Various explosive

derailments have shown how oil trains can be a danger to both railroad

workers and communities. The struggle of railroad workers for adequate

staffing on trains is part of the struggle against this danger.

Workers are a potential force for resistance to decisions of employers

that pollute or contribute to global warming. Workers can also be a

force for support of alternatives on global warming, such as expanded

public transit. An example of working class resistance to environmental

pollution were the various “green bans” enacted by the Australian

Building Laborer’s Federation back in the ‘70s — such as a ban on

transport or handling of uranium.

A recognition of this relationship led to the development of an

environmentalist tendency among syndicalists in the ‘80s and ‘90s —

eco-syndicalism (also called “green syndicalism”). An example in the

‘80s was the organizing work of Judi Bari — a member of the IWW and

Earth First!. Working in the forested region of northwest California,

she attempted to develop an alliance of workers in the wood products

industry (and their unions) with environmentalists who were trying to

protect old growth forests against clear-cutting.

Worker and community organizations can be a direct force against fiossil

fuel capitalism in a variety of ways — such as the various actions

against coal or oil terminals on the Pacific Coast, or labor and

community support for struggles of indigenous people and other rural

communities against polluting fossil fuel projects, such as happened

with the Standing Rock blockade in the Dakotas. Unions can also be

organized in workplaces of the “green” capitalist firms to fight against

low pay and other conditions I described earlier.

The different strategies of syndicalists and electoral socialists tends

to lead to different conceptions of what “socialism” and “democracy”

mean. Because politicians tend to compete on the basis of what policies

they will pursue through the state, this encourages a state socialist

view that socialism is a set of reforms enacted top down through the

managerialist bureaucracies of the state. Certainly state socialists are

an influential element in Democratic Socialists of America.

I think a top down form of power, controlled by the bureaucratic control

class in state management, is not going to work as a solution for the

ecological challenges of the present. The history of the “communist

camp” countries of the mid-20^(th) century showed that they were also

quite capable of pollution and ecological destruction rooted in

cost-shifting behavior.

On the other hand, the syndicalist vision of self-managed socialism

provides a plausible basis for a solution for the environmental crisis

because a federative, distributed form of democratic planning places

power in local communities and workers in industries, and thus they have

power to prevent ecologically destructive decisions. For syndicalists,

socialism is about human liberation — and a central part is the

liberation of the working class from subordination and exploitation in a

regime where there are dominating classes on top. Thus for syndicalism

the transition to socialism means workers taking over and collectively

managing all the industries — including the public services. This is

socialism created from below — created by the working class itself.

Syndicalist movements historically advocated a planned economy based on

a distributed model of democratic planning, rooted in assemblies in

neighborhoods and workplaces. With both residents of communities and

worker production organizations each having the power to make decisions

in developing plans for its own area, a distributed, federative system

of grassroots planning uses delegate congresses or councils and systems

of negotiation to “adjust” the proposals and aims of the various groups

to each other. Examples of libertarian socialist distributed planning

models include the negotiated coordination proposals of the World War 1

era guild socialists, the 1930s Spanish anarcho-syndicalist program of

neighborhood assemblies (“free municipalities”) and worker congresses,

and the more recent participatory planning model of Robin Hahnel and

Michael Albert.

A 21^(st) century form of self-managed socialism would be a horizontally

federated system of production that can implement planning and

coordination throughout industries and over a wide region. This would

enable workers to:

Gain control over technological development,

Re-organize jobs and education to eliminate the bureaucratic

concentration of power in the hands of managers and high-end

professionals, develop worker skills, and work to integrate

decision-making and conceptualization with the doing of the physical

work,

Reduce the workweek and share work responsibilities among all who can

work, and

Create a new logic of development for technology that is friendly to

workers and the environment.

A purely localistic focus and purely fragmented control of separate

workplaces (such as worker cooperatives in a market economy) is not

enough. Overall coordination is needed to move social production away

from subordination to market pressures and the “grow or die” imperative

of capitalism and build solidarity between regions. There also needs to

be direct, communal accountability for what is produced and for effects

on the community and environment.

The protection of the ecological commons requires a directly communal

form of social governance and control over the aims of production. This

means direct empowerment of the masses who would be directly polluted on

or directly affected by environmental degradation. This is necessary to

end the ecologically destructive cost-shifting behavior that is a

structural feature of both capitalism and bureaucratic statism. Direct

communal democracy and direct worker management of industry provide the

two essential elements for a libertarian eco-socialist program.

[1] “An Ecosocialist Path to Limiting Global Temperature Rise to 1.5°C”

(

systemchangenotclimatechange.org

) [↩]