If you've never seen Sunset Magazine, picture the ultimate bougie/yuppie "lifestyle" orgy, fine wines, exotic vacations, recipes full of ingredients you'll never afford, all in a casual, attractive, relaxed celebration of the best that money can buy. But of course they have to demonstrate some environmental awareness so the latest issue (yes, I have a subscription, long story) has a piece on how the Western states are doing their bit to save us from climate change. Lots of "renewables getting cheaper" and recycling and Teslas. I especially loved the bit about turning "your next vacation into a trip that does a whole lot of good" by using travel companies that buy carbon offsets. And for every bottle of champagne you buy they will donate one to a family in Somalia. Feel better?
Over at the System Change Not Climate Change site they are clamoring for a "campaign" they can be involved in to make their title a reality. One popular suggestion is working to ban disposable plastic water bottles which to my way of thinking fits perfectly into this Green Sunset article. And in fact there are plenty of people already organized to ban the bottles. My problem with this and other such campaigns is three fold. In the first place, you quickly find radicalism and anti-capitalist critique have no place in these efforts and you will spend endless hours arguing over messaging. The second problem is becoming one of a thousand well meant reforms and finding the public thinks of them all as equivalent ( go through the list starting with food issues: GMOs, factory farms, fast food, pesticides/herbicides, packaging, move on into human rights and education and labor and guns and on and on, let a thousand campaigns blossom, each sending me a fundraising letter each month designed to pull at my liberal bleeding heart strings.) So in this sense plastic bottles and climate change and police violence all get thrown into the Great Non-Profit Blender and come out a social justice smoothie.
My third problem with single-issue campaigns is Capital loves them. They actually strengthen Capital the way resistance strengthened the Black Panther suit in the movie, absorbing the energy and storing it to throw back when needed. Yes, says capitalist ideology, you should make better consumption choices and vote with your dollars, that's how we save the planet and bring goodness: buy an aluminum bottle! Demonstrating once again how flexible and nimble capitalism is, how "green" it can be, so why on earth would you want to "change systems"? It is the same strategy they used to crush unionism; accommodation and flexibility and patience.
A Swiss Economist named Rudolf Meidner saw the whole thing play out. Sweden was a country with a powerful union movement that let their power devolve in the hands of social democratic parties, striking deals with Capital and losing the chance to achieve worker ownership. When it had all played out he said "You must have the experience of a total failure of the system. It must be clearly felt by nearly everyone that the current liberal market approach does not work."
So why prop it up?
Well said.
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