Well, they wouldn't respond well. Um, I also try to critique Bill McKibben quite a lot in the book as sort of the epitome of this professional class approach to climate politic that makes it all about the science, and, acting like 350 is the most important number. Because of parts per million in the atmosphere. And to act like that is going to be the mobilizing issue. To me, it's a blunder. It's hard to understand how that kind of science-based math politics could really appeal to a country in which 63% of people don't even have a college education and are just struggling to get by.
Hawkins:
But how do we get to democratic socialism when we need three jobs to get by and go home worn out? We can't seem to get there because we can't seem to find a way to figure out how to make that change. You can't trust Biden because Biden's from Delaware, which has more registered corporations there than there are people. It's the home of credit card debt slavery.
And, you know, that's probably where he's coming from politically. He's a debt slaver. And, you know, he doesn't really care that if he can't really pass student loan forgiveness, which is a big deal. As you pointed out, a lot of people don't have university educations, but also a lot of people can't pay the loans. So, we're trying to figure out how we can get together. How do we get there? That seems to be the main thing your book addresses.
Huber:
Like I said, the working-class power has been crushed for the last several decades. So, we're not in a very good place in terms of an actual organized left and organized power to confront capital. That's clear. But I do think, actually, that climate change itself is such a complex and all-encompassing crisis that it actually creates a political logic for democratic socialism just by its mere existence.
I've been making this analogy to the 19th century when cities filled with waste and water pollution and people getting sick from all this pollution in the cities. It was a public crisis that everyone sort of realized had to be solved through public investment in the sewer socialism where built up public sanitation infrastructure had to make cities liveable for working class people. And, now we're dealing with a crisis of the atmosphere and this large public crisis again will require large scale planning and long-term infrastructure investment.
And that's one part of what democratic socialism is: To move the economy towards planning and towards public investment. So, to me, climate change is just crying out for that approach to the economy, which democratic socialists would advocate. Now, that's all good and well, but we actually would need to build more popular support for that kind of program. And I don't think that the existence of climate change is going to automatically create that popular support.
So, what I argue in the book is that we need planning, we need public investment. But if we pair that with programs that were aimed towards actually improving the lives of the majority, such as with public power that would actually be cheaper energy, public housing, public transit. These are the very sectors we need to dramatically transform to solve climate change. So why not transform them in a way that would actually benefit people and get them excited about a climate program?
Again, that would take time, right? It would take real organizing to build the kind of institutions that can credibly convince working class people that if you join this movement, we're actually going to deliver a Medicare for all or Green New Deal. These things that Bernie Sanders was promising but couldn't deliver because he didn't have the power to actually deliver these things. But the worse climate change gets, the more the need for democratic socialism will become apparent. But the question is when?
There have been massive transformations on the scale of what we need to see for climate change. I mean, you can maybe say abolition of slavery was the sort of revolutionary transformation of a production system. And I'm an energy scholar, so it's actually an energetic system to exploit the bodies of slaves as an energy source. And some have pointed out that we need to sort of channel that history of abolition to a kind of carbon abolition movement that says we need a revolution over our energy production system again, but this time moving off from fossil fuel based power.
The 1930s was a moment in which you got workers not just having protests, but going on strike all across the country and creating huge crises and shutting down entire production systems that forced politicians to actually respond, and so, you get during that period, FDR comes out with a much more radical New Deal program in 1935, after the whole country went on strike in 1934. And you get this sort huge restructuring of labor law. You get massive commitments to welfare state type investments, but also you get things like the Tennessee Valley Authority, a huge investment in building energy systems to deliver to poor people in rural areas that private capital thought were unprofitable to serve. And you get this massive sort of public investment building program, so that whole moment of restructuring capitalism towards the interest of the working class was not something that FDR just was enlightened to deliver, [that he was forced he was pushed.] There's a myth that FDR was in a meeting with some union leaders about some policy, and he said to them you need to to force me to do it; I'm not going to do it on my own.
The 1960s also have these dramatic stories of activists that are actually doing like disruptive actions, like the sit-ins, like the boycotts. That are actually, again, through disruptive action, really forcing elites to have to pay attention to a set of demands. So, unfortunately, these examples are deep in history now. They're long ago, but there's a lot of similarities to the society in which we live today that we can learn from -- that history of how disruptive political movements have been able to create, as John Lewis said, create trouble, necessary trouble that that force elites to actually have to respond to demands. We've kind of forgotten how to create that kind of trouble for many decades, but it's only a matter of time between before. History shows that people can only be downtrodden for so long, and they have to wake up eventually.
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