Recently a theme has been going around from certain people who like to attack activists, ignore the reasons they give for their activism, and who like to attribute ugly motives to them, that driving priuses, using energy efficient lightbulbs, getting solar panels, and becoming vegetarian will solve our environmental problems. To be clear, I am for all of these things and certainly don’t reject them, but I find three things particularly interesting in arguments coming from those who would li,e to call themselves eco-activists because they give talks and sometimes make appearances on radio: 1) I find it interesting that those who argue this position provide no analysis of the economic constraints on the vast majority of people. With wages depressed for literally decades, class disparities in wealth the greatest they’ve been since the Great Depression, overall unemployment hovering around 9% and at over 16% among African Americans (curiously defenders of this line of argument tend to claim they’re arguing from a standpoint of racial equality, arguing that the left is racist in its criticisms of the neoliberal policies of the administration, even as they support and defend policies devastating to minorities, ie, they defend a purely abstract equality) electric and hybrid cars, energy efficient lightbulbs, vegetarian diets, and solar panels are expensive, and in many cases, unobtainable luxuries for many just trying to survive (often under conditions of crushing debt). Again, the point is not that such things shouldn’t be done if one is able, but that it’s curious that one would focus on such things–especially in an object-oriented framework that acknowledges objects as agencies and material conditions –without examining the economic constraints on this sort of “activism”.
2) I find it interesting that this line of argument places the onus of change on consumers and workers (or those who work for a wage), while never, as far as I can tell, addressing the role of owners and industrialists (those that invest money to make money). The role that industry and buisiness play in our environmental problems seem to go completely unaddressed in this line of thought, as if the axiom of endless annual growth in capitalist economy did not have the lion’s share of fault with respect to the destruction of our environment. Basically, then, business and industry that have produced the majority of this catastrophic destruction are to get off free, while wager earners are required to accept more austerity, more channeling of wealth to the upper two percent, less mobility and freedom, and will be required to pay for the consequences of this destruction through their tax dollars. It’s as if fighting the environmental catastrophe were merely a lifestyle problem, a style, where it’s enough to simply eat right, drive the right car, have the right lightbulbs, etc (so long, of course, as you’re an Oxford trained person that can afford to live in California who can safely condemn morally all those without jobs, good wages, sturggling to raise families on limited incomes, struggling to survive while suffering from chronic income on limited income, etc. These people just are not making the right lifestyle choice and are culpable for not having an Oxford education). The problem here is not that something is asked of consumers– that’s great and necessary –but rather that nothing is asked of business and industry. Indeed, we even repeatedly see a form of argument where wage earners aren’t even supposed to speak up because “the experts i government and business have this!” No seat at the table for these unwashed masses! What do they know about the delicate nature of economy? Of course, this comes as no surprise if you come from a privileged perspective that enables you to argue that the problem is primarily one of environmental aesthetics, of how art has represented nature– which, of course, doesn’t exist (why not instead claim that there is nothing outside nature?) –and not of real material conditions… Again, a rather luxurious position.
3) It is interesting that this position often leaves uninterrogated the relation between big money and the government. Often this position– I’ll call it the “Oxford politics” –shows a strange Oedipal faith in governmemt leadership, arguing “don’t worry, we have this”, ignoring the disproportionate power that industry and business exercise over governmemt policy rendering it disinclined to rock the policy boat in ways that might harm profit margins. Where it is acknowledged that these sorts of pressures exist for elected officials we are told nothing can be done and that the only option is to place the onus on consumers, leaving business and industry untouched, ie, we get a narrative about “political realism” and maturity. In other words, we get an inegalitarian “politics” where workers and wage earners are called to sacrifice while nothing is sacrificed by business and industry.
This is a curious politics which blames those that protest and speak out saying “we’re people too, what of our place, why do we not get a say, why do we make all the sacrifices?” rather than those in positions of governmemt power and the massive power of business and industry. It is never suggested by tye Oxford political theorists (really they try to annul politics) that people should use their people power to put pressure on business, industry, and elected officials to compel them to adopt more equitable solutions and to address the root of the problem. Indeed, those that speak up are usually condemned (generally in an ad hominem fashion that doesn’t address the points or address the question of why only wage earners must sacrifice and give up their freedoms) and the spectre of a lunatic right is trotted out to compel us to accept more austerity. The point again is not that energy efficient cars, lightbulbs, diets, etc, are not good measures, but that it is odd that Oxford politics takes all these other elements off the table, attacks those that speak up, and remains silent on the role of big money in these problems and in government inaction.
July 28, 2011 at 3:16 am
Part of the “Oxford politcs” condition seems to me to be an unstated assumption that business/industry is a mere conduit (not a mediator!) of capital from consumers to its shareholders, etc. From this (wrong) perspective, of COURSE business can only be good because it ends up paying the wages of it’s workers who get to go on and be good consumers that prop up other businesses ad infinitum and ‘That’s The Economy Stupid’. The trouble is, making invisible the internal flows of capital within a business or industry elides the siphoning off of the lions share of profits by the managerial class, leaving workers with… not very much.
July 28, 2011 at 4:08 am
Yep, despite all evidence to the contrary.
July 28, 2011 at 4:17 am
From your last two posts, I think we share something of a sense of the crisis we’re in… a time of such turbulence that reflective consideration itself comes to feel almost reactionary… how to keep up with the turn of events and maintain some sense of … I don’t even know the right word… a constant act of catching up, always two steps behind. If philosophy is a record of its own time–and the times outpaces one’s best effort to keep up… where does that leave us?
It might seem easier for a poet… after all, we’re not so shackled with all that demand for internal logical consistency etc etc…but I think the problem is not that different. What is the ‘voice’ of our time? When–if we know anything–it’s that we’re all together in a barrel rolling furiously downhill trying desperately to make out patterns that might make sense even as we tumble out of and into one after another after another… no wonder there’s a nostalgia for totalizing systems,for idealist figurations above mutable material reality.
July 28, 2011 at 4:28 am
Policy makers are ostensibly concerned with quantitative questions in regards to business and industry: how many miles per gallon should be required of semi fleets and by what date; what maximal levels of CO2 and HFC emissions are sustainable for major factories, and how soon should they retool; et cetera. You are correct that business/industry has major influence over politicians. If the US passes legislation that places its major capitalist profiteers under significant retooling constraints that are not present for competitors in China/India/Korea/Japan et al, there is the real danger that costs involved in retooling will reduce quarterly and yearly earnings for several years, which reduces stock prices, increases the retail cost of goods and services for consumers, pisses people off, which may lead them to elect different officials. I agree that with the profits these firms generate they should be willing to retool their enterprises at significant cost, but you have to appreciate also that the science & technologies we are talking about are continuously evolving at a rapid pace. If a major corporation spends billions today on a certain photovoltaic technology, for example, that technology may very well be obsolete in 7 years. In such case, their competitors gain comparative advantage in the short term from not retooling their fleets and factories, but also in the long term. That is, competitors in China/Japan/Korea/et al could retool in 7 years with a new generation of emerging technologies that have more longevity and grant them a significant market share offering goods and services to an emerging infrastructure of alternative energies that may not be compatible with the technologies of 2011. The risk is very real, and the major firms are in an unforgiving climate. Policy makers could literally implode these domestic markets and destroy these major firms through policies that shift the rules of the game. I’m not justifying the untrammeled business-as-usual forms of predatory capitalism; it’s just that the possibility of the People’s quality of life diminishing rapidly as a result of untimely policies is not just fearmongering. You probably think I’ve been compromised by the State, that’s fine. But this is real. It takes nothing away from the truth of your recent statements about the contingency of social arrangements et cetera.
July 28, 2011 at 5:07 am
Your conversation dovetails with debates in Portland about developing bike-infrastructure as an expression of institutional racism – because like the poor and their social programs, gang-reduction programs are in competition with said development projects. Impassioned critics have spoken of the whiteness of Portland’s active cycling community (and offended cyclists of color have spoken up for the diversity they see), and what people return to is the way that, given the geography of labor around the city, bicycle-commuting is called a luxury. What’s absurd about it is that it critiques bike-development as gentrification when the car and the social geography it produces is itself racist and classist.
July 28, 2011 at 11:12 am
vegetarian diets are cheaper than meat based diets. The economic problems with poor communities’ diets has more to do with access than anything else. but yes to most everything else.
July 28, 2011 at 6:35 pm
And, if governments didn’t invest significant amounts of tax money into meat production, the market cost of meat would rise significantly. I’ve seen $50-60 suggested for a standard steak. Meat is cheap for the same reason that Coke is cheap: the government pays the bulk of its cost through subsidies. Green peppers, apples and potatoes do not seem to be a funding priority for some reason.
July 28, 2011 at 8:23 pm
“…how to keep up with the turn of events and maintain some sense of … I don’t even know the right word… a constant act of catching up, always two steps behind.”
One way is to do precisely as Levi has done in this instance–surgically remove the infected area.
Another is to keep in mind that every revolutionary movement deliberately on purpose gets infiltrated by those who would slow it down, divert its resources, co-opt, if possible, its power. How many meetings on civil liberties or some other burning issue have each of us attended where right out of the playbook, 45 minutes late, someone comes sauntering in to disrupt the proceedings with a bit of demagoguery and divert the attention to some off-topic nonsense? Handling them wisely (patiently giving them enough rope to hang themselves and then pointing to the scaffold) is an important, though not easy, task of leadership.
But whether any given practitioner of Oxford politics is currently being paid to frustrate, dilute, or detain progress, or he or she is laboring (ha-ha) on spec for future reward, is immaterial. They have to be dealt with and then quickly, heads need to go back down to work pressing forward, upward and outward (until the next permutation of Power’s bell ringer is sent in, and then the next.)
July 29, 2011 at 2:55 am
I’m afraid… and strongly sense, that all of our prognostications, from whatever the political or ideological angle–all are are equally in the dark. That we’ve entered another era… like the late 20’s and early 30’s of the last century, when appeal to populist fantasies has set loose irrational forces no one will be able to control until they have exhausted themselves in blood & horrors beyond imagining.
July 29, 2011 at 2:02 pm
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/37298
July 30, 2011 at 11:37 pm
While I agree with your analysis of the classic deflection and classism inherent in the ‘go buy my green hybrid car’ argument and the large unaccountability of industrialists and government to actually fix environmental problems I have a more serious bone to pick with the bulk of environmental/ecological arguments. The elephant in the room is that most environmental destruction is rooted largely in human overpopulation. The bulk of the world population (China holds 20%) lives in ‘developing’ third world conditions and its industrialization leads to obvious pollution. First world countries produce far less pollution than they did one hundred years ago due to the completion of industrialization yet they do consume far more resources. As the third world pushes for the same lifestyles as Westerners, the environmental problem will increase. It is unlikely that leftist or non-capitalist alternatives to globalism will ever solve this situation and may likely increase the population. The other half of the problem is due to the increasing luminosity of the sun (in 1 billion years, all liquid water is predicted to be vaporized). The earth is set to be destroyed in roughly 5 billion years but will probably expire before than due to natural disasters, meteorites, etc. Lastly, it is not at all clear why humans have any obligation to save ‘nature’ (which we can, via Tim Morton, argue doesn’t exist), when nature is responsible for 100% of the problems facing humanity and all life for that matter. Earth was a suicidal teenager long before it coughed up humanity, we are just the perfect incarnation of its self-hate. Not trying to sound all contrarian and gloomy here, but I want to take a more Morton-like analysis of presumptions that underpin most environmental activists’ train of thought and present more challenging themes.
July 31, 2011 at 6:08 pm
@Drew:
If you look at demographic trends, overpopulation is not nearly as much of a problem over this next century as it seems. The reason is precisely BECAUSE of third world development. Urbanization is the single largest inhibitor of population. When people move to cities they, on average, begin having far less children. This is why you see such sharp decreases in population among first world nations which were long ago industrialized. It’s also why immigrant populations drawn from a rural environment make up the bulk of new population growth (alongside religious fundamentalists) in the United States. For the data on this you can look at the UN’s State of World Population Report — especially the 2007 report which has a section on this exact trend. Here is a .pdf of that report: http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2007/presskit/pdf/sowp2007_eng.pdf
The overall idea is that the population will peak sometime this century at either 8 billion or 9 billion, followed by a sharp decrease in world population so severe as to be a real crisis — just the opposite population crisis we were expecting. Of course, the peak itself will bring with it severe climatic problems, problems of pollution and strain on things like the world supply of fish, minerals and water. But population is certainly not the apocalyptic scenario environmentalists used to make it out to be. Unless we all become Mormons…
I also sorely hope that your mention of the increasing luminosity of the sun has nothing to do with the now-well-disproven theory arguing that this increase is the cause of global warming, rather than CO2 produced by humans. Other than that, it simply seems to be a favorite topic for religiously-minded pseudo-science.
And you really seem to be misusing Morton’s notion of an Ecology without Nature — it doesn’t mean that we have no obligation to “save nature,” since “nature doesn’t exist” it just means that we have to understand ourselves within the complex mesh of interrelationships, breaking down the either-or problems of vulgar environmentalism (either we save the spotted owl OR we save jobs in the pacific northwest). It just means that there is no way to choose humanity in opposition to “nature,” since there is no valid grounds for this separation in the first place. And how can you jump in one sentence from agreeing with the notion that “nature” doesn’t exist then immediately say that “nature is responsible for 100% of the problems facing humanity and all life”? Even the use of the term “responsible” here seems to simply harken back to an overly vitalistic view of Nature as a being with intent — a deeply unscientific bias.
August 1, 2011 at 1:31 am
Drew,
I think the issue of whether or not there has ever been a non-oligarchic society is largely irrelevant to the question of politics. Every oligarchy is contingent (though it tries to mask its contingency). Every oligarchic system establishes a distributive count that defines what is visible and invisible, what is speakable and unspeakable, how things can manifest themselves, whose speech counts, etc. Politics is that moment that contests this system through the appearance of an uncounted that both reveals the contingency of this order and initiates the building of another order. Whether or not a fully egalitarian society is eventually formed is secondary and beside the point. New oligarchies tend to emerge. What’s important though is this eruption of uncounted contingency that suggests the possibility of another counting. I like the way Zizek puts it in Living in the End Times. Zizek writes:
This is part of what I mean by “rendering possibilities available against the reigning order of anticipations” in my most recent post on Lacan and political realism. Quoting St. Paul translated for our age (I hate this trend), Zizek continues,
This is what I described as a fundamental existential orientation, a choice before any choice, in one of my earlier posts on Assange riffing on Harman. One either chooses to oppose oligarchy in principle (even if it ends badly) or chooses to side with oligarchy in principle (incrementalism and political realism). Zizek articulates this in terms of the difference between Truth and Knowledge:
The incrementalist or political realist is the one for whom no engaged truth exists and thus the one for whom nothing is possible. They are the ones who have sided, a priori, with oligarchy and for whom, as a consequence, all struggle is folly.
August 1, 2011 at 1:38 am
In short, a Zizekian political subject is a very nice example of a withdrawn object. It is an entity that’s no longer defined by its relations, but which rather posits its own ends and aims irregardless of those relations. It is precisely that which subtracts itself. Where the political realist and incrementalist says “I must do this because of the relational contexture in which I find myself!”, the political subject refuses that regime of attraction.
August 1, 2011 at 3:08 pm
@Stanley
“I also sorely hope that your mention of the increasing luminosity of the sun has nothing to do with the now-well-disproven theory arguing that this increase is the cause of global warming, rather than CO2 produced by humans.”
Not at all LOL. I’m well aware of humans causing global warming, I’m referring to stellar evolution billions of years from now. Of course, the sun still does produce about 15-20% of global warming, but yeah, I get the point. The position here is that ultimately it doesn’t seem significant whether humans destroy the planet or the sun does…its doomed either way. It doesn’t seem clear to my why humans have any kind of obligation or duty to save the blue marble.
“And you really seem to be misusing Morton’s notion of an Ecology without Nature — it doesn’t mean that we have no obligation to “save nature,” since “nature doesn’t exist””
I understand Morton’s notion, I’m trying to go beyond his teachings. Consider this somewhat nerdy but fascinating idea:
“I would go further, and say that ecological and environmental writing oscillates between two fantasies: intervention (mastery) and immersion (servitude), the latter all the better to sustain the principle of mastery in the chain of being itself. The absolute master, however, is death and sustainability is the slavish fantasy of an infinite deferral that is absolutely defined by the horizon of death whose work remains immanent to ecological desire.” –Scott Wilson, introduction to Melancology
http://kingston.academia.edu/ScottWilson/Talks/36888/Introduction_to_Melancology
“nature” doesn’t exist then immediately say that “nature is responsible for 100% of the problems facing humanity and all life”?”
Sorry, let me clarify since I am speaking in metaphors. I am not in any way suggesting that there is some thing or entity called nature that is causing all the problems in the world, that was merely tongue in cheek. Rather, I’m alluding to the fact that environmentalists want to save ‘nature’ when in fact their idealized ‘nature’ would logically be the source of its own problems if it actually existed. Instead, what we have in its place is a suicidal chaosmos of endless suffering and reproduction.
@ Larvalsubjects
I am less confused now Levi, thank you for the clarification.
1) The issue of oligarchies vs. egalitarianism is irrelevant to the discussion because….
2) The political order is contingent, not fixed or ‘natural’ – it can be altered
3) This reveals the possibility of change, as opposed to accepting the ‘way things are’.
I will still remain forever skeptical of egalitarianism, but that is neither here nor there.
August 1, 2011 at 3:09 pm
Nice, where did all my paragraph spaces go?
August 1, 2011 at 10:12 pm
Interesting point about the parallax Object. Even the very concept of ‘America’ resonates differently according to your unconscious choice;
in association with grounding fathers, who fought the british oligarches, America means: ‘I want to fight oligarches'; but again – in association with capitalism, it means: ‘I want to serve/imitate oligarches ‘ . Amercia IS this very parallax object: it is this very splitting of your choice; it returns your gaze to what you were allready before that gaze.
August 15, 2011 at 7:47 am
A complementary paper to be published : « “Sustainable consumption” as a new phase in a governmentalization of consumption », Theory and Society, vol. 40, 2011.
A version is also available at: http://yannickrumpala.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/rumpala-sustainable-consumption-as-a-new-phase-in-a-governmentalization-of-consumption-ipa-grenoble-2010.pdf