The American system and change

The economic system we live in, capitalism, it uses these means. But it is dedicated to taking these means of life and turning them into money, in the process restricting access to them and killing them. Ultimately all of these things, the fisheries, the forests, the oil and minerals in the ground, people’s time and lives and sweat, they become money – paper or blips in bank accounts. We are asked to go along with this, and in return we get – stuff. I don’t think it is a good trade. How did it happen?

This is actually the American system, and it had some progressive aspects. When the twentieth century, also called “the American century”, started, there were several rival projects in the world. One was socialism, which was based on economic equality and solidarity and came to be associated with dictatorship and the Soviet Union. It is too bad, because there is no reason that economic equality and solidarity have to go with dictatorship, and I think they could exist with democracy. Many working people in Europe and elsewhere, even in America, stuck in poverty and debt at the bottom of a very rigid class hierarchy, came to believe in socialism and struggle for it. The American system offered a different solution, but like those who struggled for socialism, believers in the American system were also betrayed.

The American system was supposed to work like this. Instead of a rigid class hierarchy, there was some class mobility. Instead of mass poverty, there could be mass consumption. Good wages, plenty of jobs, low prices, lots of stuff, and the chance to rise in status, privilege, and education.

Anyone watch ‘The Wire’? I discovered it late and I’ve been devouring it over the past three weeks, wondering why on earth I find myself liking a cop show. Then I read that its creator says it’s not a cop show but a show about the betrayal of the working class, and I thought, ah, that’s why I like it. When people talk about the betrayal of working people in this country, they are talking about the erosion of the American system. Technological advances weren’t used to make workers more comfortable, but to automate jobs, move them offshore, unemployment increased, wages went down or stayed static, prices for stuff stayed cheap but prices for education and housing made class mobility less likely. This happened because of decisions by elites, not environmental limits. Naomi Klein writes about it in her book, ‘The Shock Doctrine’.

But as the system reaches environmental limits, the environment will become the scapegoat for the end of a system of mass consumption and mass privilege and its replacement with a system of elite privilege, in which access to nature will itself be a privilege from which most people are excluded. This kind of argument was used in forestry, for example, on the West Coast of the US during the Clinton years. The media presented a conservation plan as ‘jobs versus owls’. But the job losses weren’t coming from conservation. They were coming from automation. It was a false dichotomy then. But the idea was that either the environment or working people would have to suffer, so that elites could continue to profit. That is how it was presented and how it will continue to be presented, although the last part, “so that elites could continue to profit”, is never explicitly stated, just an invisible assumption.

I know this is not a catholic church, but my family background is catholic, and I am an environmentalist, so I know a lot about guilt. Environmentalism is too often about guilt. But, as environmentalist writer Derrick Jensen points out in his fine book, ‘Endgame’, being guilty about consumption choices or lifestyles confuses what we have choices about and what we don’t have choices about. The system we live in constrains our choices. We can feel guilty for not understanding or trying to change that system, but we shouldn’t forget how constrained our choices are.

I think that a defense of life, changing our society so that it allows people to work towards real ends and preserves and enhances the means of life, will have two steps. The first step, the harder step is to stop the system from destroying what is left and taking control, actual democratic control, of our societies. This is hard because, as insane as this ‘death project’ is, those in power and those who identify with it will defend it, and so turning it around will require a lot of thinking, a lot of courage, a lot of persistence and action. The second step will be, once we have the power to decide, to decide to be a part of a society that provides its members with health, freedom, knowledge, safety, comfort, relationships, and meaning, in ways that do not destroy the means of survival for us and other species.

--Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer and activist. He teaches at York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies. His blog is www.killingtrain.com

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