The Green Party carries some fond associations for me. It was originally the party of small-scale production and relocalized economies. I have an increasingly difficult time remembering that, in the face of things like Green Presidential nominee Jill Stein’s “Green New Deal” slogan and Vice Presidential nominee Cheri Honkala’s “Turn the Rust Belt into a Green Belt” tour. The Green Party, whose industrial vision once sounded a lot like that of Ralph Borsodi and Murray Bookchin, sounds Michael Mooreish.
The original New Deal, after all, was tailored to the terminal crises of mass-production capitalism. It presupposed an economy of gargantuan, enormously expensive, capital-intensive production facilities, requiring an authoritarian distribution system to guarantee they could dispose of their output at full speed. For me, that’s about the least libertarian form of economic organization imaginable — like something out of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.”
Like the first New Deal, Stein’s Green New Deal is essentially Hamiltonian, aimed at preventing deflation. Not only does she propose solving the problem of underutilized mass-production facilities with Michael Moore’s expedient of retooling underutilized GM factories to produce high-speed trains, but she calls for an official “full employment” policy based on direct government creation of jobs on a counter-cyclical basis. At present that would mean government creating 25 million public sector jobs, with hiring administered through local employment centers, to guarantee full employment at a living wage.
This Hamiltonian approach is just the kind of thing genuine greens used to object to. It works on exactly the same principles as planned obsolescence and the permanent war economy — that is, it generates enough waste production to guarantee the existing stock of labor and capital will be fully utilized at a target price.
Such proposals are just a greenwashed version of mid-20th century, mass-production capitalism.
Capitalism’s chronic tendency toward underutilized capital and underemployment has been made far worse in recent years by technologies of ephemeralization that reduce the amount of labor and capital required to produce a given standard of living. But that’s a problem of capitalism — a system based on imposing artificial scarcity and inefficiency, and erecting barriers against competition from more effficient alternatives, in order to extract rents — itself.
The proper approach is not to generate waste production or to make production inefficient enough to soak up all the labor and capital you’ve got lying around. It’s to reduce the average work week to reflect the amount of labor it takes to produce our current standard of living, and to make sure all the productivity gains from new technology are passed on to workers and consumers rather than enclosed as a source of rent.
As for those high-speed bullet trains, the way to deal with the age of Peak Oil is not to assume existing scales of production and market areas, and replace less efficient with more efficient forms of long-distance shipping. It’s not to assume the existing model of suburban monoculture and sprawl, and sell everyone electric cars. The proper approach, rather, is to reduce reliance on transportation inputs altogether.
High-speed bullet passenger trains may be a more economical way of doing what the airlines presently do in the case of travel for pleasure (the family that visits relatives across the country every year, or goes to Disneyland every few years). But for the vast majority of long-distance travel, the real solution is to replace the movement of people with the movement of information (e.g. video teleconferencing instead of business travel).
General Motors symbolizes everything most bureaucratic and pathological about the mid-20th century model of industrial capitalism. The Green Party, increasingly, seems to be adopting Michael Moore’s nostalgic vision in which it’s good for half the economy to be owned by GM — so long as everyone belongs to a UAW local.
Instead of a Rube Goldberg economy where the government hires enough people to run in hamster wheels or dig holes and fill them back in to keep everyone employed forty hours a week, how about eliminating the part of the price of goods and services that reflects embedded rents and waste (planned obsolescence, patents and copyrights, inefficient overly-centralized production methods, etc.) so that the average person can enjoy her current standard of living with a 15-hour week?
Instead of perpetuating the job culture and relying on inefficiency to keep us all employed, how about moving to a competitive market economy where all of us — instead of just a few rentier capitalists — share the gains from efficiency?
Overall I agree with what Kevin Carson is saying in this piece about the problematic nature of the New Deal itself and the prospects of proposing and implementing a second New Deal. However, I think he is also being somewhat disingenuous in regards to the context in which the Green Party (in the form of Jill Stein) is proposing this "Green New Deal". I may be guilty of projecting my own views/wishes/desires onto Jill Stein and the Green Party, but I never thought that their position was the New Deal and an enlarged Keynesian role in the national economy as being the end that they desire. Rather, I had always interpreted this "Green New Deal" as a Keynesian kick-start of the economy by pumping money into local economies.
As Carson himself has said (http://c4ss.org/content/5884): "In the short run, Keynesianism is the only way to prevent the collapse of state capitalism. But in the long run, state capitalism is unsustainable. The only way out is to go beyond state capitalism". I had always viewed this "Green New Deal" through this lens where Keynesian funds are directed away from the existing corporate-dominated industrial complexes (military, prison, financial, etc) toward the start-up of cooperatives and other small businesses as well as the short-term expansion of public-sector employment and the modernization of infrastructure for the purpose of pulling people out of unemployment. In that sense, it is a temporary measure that may further the development of the alternative economy. That is, of course, what would further their goals for a decentralized and community-based economy.
Additionally, it is not as though Jill Stein and the Green Party are proposing this outside of our present context. For example, if Green Party was proposing this Green New Deal 15 years ago in the late 1990s when unemployment was around or below 5%, then I think Carson would have a better point. The fact that Carson doesn't mention this proposal in the context of the aftermath of the Great Recession and the staggering figures of joblessness and foreclosures is why I think what he says here is rather disingenuous.
I don't expect everyone to agree with this interpretation, and as I said I may be projecting my own wishes onto the Green Party, but I figured I would at least put a different interpretation out there.
Basically to put it a different way, it is certainly fair to criticize this part of the Green New Deal: "The right to employment through a Full Employment Program that will create 25 million jobs by implementing a nationally funded, but locally controlled direct employment initiative replacing unemployment offices with local employment offices offering public sector jobs which are “stored” in job banks in order to take up any slack in private sector employment".
But we should also be talking about this part of the Green New Deal: "Invest in green business by providing grants and low-interest loans to grow green businesses and cooperatives, with an emphasis on small, locally-based companies that keep the wealth created by local labor circulating in the community rather than being drained off to enrich absentee investors". Obviously, we shouldn't be giving money away perpetually, but on a temporary basis I think this is something that libertarians could/should get behind and at least give conditional support to the Green Party.
http://www.jillstein.org/summary_green_new_deal
Don't think he is being disingenuous; he's got his own position, namely as an anarchist, so he's going to be critical. I also think the main point of his stands, but you bring up some good points as well.
When the alternative to a green-washed New Deal looks like a black-washed version of neoliberalism (freedom of movement for information, coupled with decreased freedom of movement for labor), it's hard for me not to feel just a twinge of sympathy for even this reformist sort of Green program.
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While I am planning to never vote again. I have been following the progress of the protracted presidential season, particularly the third party candidates. But despite these third party candidates cutting to the core of the more relevant and consequential issues in society, the solutions offered by the likes of Stein and Johnson are rather weak. I mostly agree with Kevin's analysis, there is an awful lot of faith in technocratic planning and does not offer many specifics on eliminating corporate and banking monopolies. But at the same time: Johnson's plan of unleashing "benevolent" corporations to pay zero taxes and coming after "inefficient" programs like the EPA and DOE, and rather than improving, re-envisioning, or adapting them to be more successful (i.e. Scandinavian school systems), just giving them shutting them down altogether. Seems questionable to me?
Yes, you right, I do think that the solutions offered by the likes of Stein and Johnson are rather weak. I mostly agree with Kevin's analysis,
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