Bill Neal's notes

These notes by Bill Neal came my way as part of a discussion of the talk I'll be giving in L.A.:

"There has been a sea change around the question of global warning over the last year. The media no longer considers denial as credible and major outlets are running significant series on aspects of environmental destruction. NPR has a year long series partnering with National Geographic that has been powerful, if weak on solutions. Two major movies have been released and the Al Gore one has become a major framework for the debate. Meanwhile, the US Congress has done nothing, the White House continues to stalemate efforts that don't go after China and India, and the models being put forward are overwhelmingly focused on consumer solutions ( i.e. the light bulbs and Prius solution). What all this means is that given current trends there is no way permanent, irreversible environmental destruction that threatens human existence will NOT happen.

I don't think we can fully grasp what this means. The world depression in the 1930's became the dominant geopolitical factor in international politics. The threat of nuclear annihilation dominated the politics of resistance in the post WW2 1950's Cold War framework. Similarly, environmental concerns are going to be forced to the center of geopolitics in the coming era and reshape perspectives, politics, and even theory.

No one is better positioned to provide a framework for explaining the crisis and putting forward the best solution than Marxists. Ultimately this talk is about the theory of accumulation for accumulations sake, and the nature of competition under capitalism, the alienation of the working class, and the inadequacy of reformism to solve the problem. The anti-human, destructive aspects of capitalism are laid bare when exposed to a Marxist analysis. The long term unworkability of capitalism becomes evident, and the sobering reality of the need for revolution becomes clearer. The only question is 'will it be too late?'

Along the way questions are raised that are complex and difficult for socialists, and ones which we all too infrequently discuss. Why can't reforms work, surely it is also in capital's interest to defend the health of the planet? What drives accumulation for accumulations sake? Can't it be modified by state oversight? Is the post-industrial economy a good thing because it will lower pollution? What is wrong with consumer solutions and are socialists actually against them? Then what can individuals do other than wait until it gets worse? What are working class solutions to the problem? Aren't worker's interests counter-posed to the environment because they depend upon the jobs industry provides? What is the socialist strategy for reforms? What guarantee is there that socialism will be better? Haven't socialist countries have been some of the worst polluters? What replaces accumulation and competition under socialism? What would socialist production look like? How can we galvanize working people around a socialist vision of production? We have a lot to learn about economics, explaining economics, arguing reform or revolution in this context, agitating for demands that the working class can rally behind, explaining socialism, and making environmental arguments part of our repertoire.

By the way, there is nothing inevitable about the Socialist solution winning out in this struggle. That brings up the question of organization and class politics. I think this kind of talk gives people the kind of big picture/scale of the crisis/urgency of socialism framework that would flow into the rest of the day well."

Blurb for Talk at SoCal Socialist Conference

I'll be speaking at the Southern California Regional Socialist Conference in Los Angeles on Saturday the 17th. Here's the flyer copy I submitted (before the fires):

Global warming. Dying oceans and disappearing lakes and rivers. Spreading deserts, shrinking forests, and poisoned farms.

Can natural capitalism and green consumerism solve the most urgent problems of the 21st century? Are there market solutions to unnatural disasters like Hurricane Katrina or global epidemics of cancer, asthma, and other environmental diseases?

Socialists believe that if we want to save the earth, we need a completely new kind of society with a new relationship with nature. We need to build a world where healthy people and a thriving planet matter more than corporate profits and power.

Mike Davis on the San Diego Fires

Mike Davis on the San Diego Fires, November 1, 2007
Complete playlist

Alienation from Nature

Marx meant two things when he said that working for wages alienates us from the product of our labor. In part, it's a purely economic fact: we don't own what we make and we encounter it in the market as a commodity, an alien object. But it's also about the way capitalism stifles the creative potential that lies at the heart of our "species being." Under capitalism, most humans (the making animals) cannot form fulfilling personal connections to the beautiful things they (could) make.

Marx doesn't develop the idea that our human nature also includes the potential for accruing intimate knowledge of nature by mixing our labor with it. Capitalism distorts this feature of our species being too. Enclosure and urbanization remove us physically from the land. As a result, we face natural environments as alien spaces. And our capacity to understand and interact with richly complex ecosystems ends up being refocused on the comparatively simple second nature of the suburbs and the slums. Marxism, in other words, concretizes the fuzzy environmentalist idea that we have "lost touch with nature."

Mike Davis points out that that "the idea the labor is doubly alienated from its 'art' and from the natural world is William Morris's fundamental contribution to Marxism, however clad in gothic romanticism. Patrick Geddes, influenced by Kropotkin's insight that new forces of production (electricity) would make industrial spatial centralism and pollution unnecessary, developed a very complex, and still not fully appreciated (partially because Lewis Mumford, his brilliant but unradical protege, was the principal transmission belt for his ideas) conception of a sustainable relationship between city-region-wild nature. This tradition, of course, fertilized the garden city idea, originally a socialist utopia, spreading through labor zionism in Palestine and influencing some of the German/Austrian social democrats and some of the Constructivists." (Correspondence, November 2, 2007)

Concierge-Level Fire Protection

In an article headlined, "Another way the rich are different," the LA Times reports that American International Group offers "concierge-level" fire insurance to homeowners in Southern California's richest neighborhoods. About 2000 clients pay more than $10,000 a year to insure their multi-million dollar homes built in fire-prone coastal sage scrub and grasslands. If a fire threatens one of the properties they insure, AIG sends private firefighters employed by Firebreak Spray Systems to the scene, where they spray the home and grounds with Phos-Check fire retardant. Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, told the Times, "What we have is a dangerous confluence of events: underfunded states, increasingly inefficient disaster response, a loss of faith in the public sphere ... and a growing part of the economy that sees disaster as a promising new market."

Another way the rich are different: 'concierge-level' fire protection

Real Estate Millionaires Welcome Fires

After ten flat years, the San Diego real estate market exploded in 1998 and posted double digit increases for eight years in a row, reaching its peak in 2006. This has been one of the hottest real estate markets on the planet. At the height of the boom, speculators bought homes like commodities futures. They snapped up units in subdivisions that still only existed on paper because they could count on reselling the properties just a year later, realizing tens of thousands of dollars in profit on each one. The median price of a single-family home rose from about $200,000 to more than $600,000 in less than a decade.

In the last year and a half, prices have begun to fall, though not as steeply as elsewhere in the country. When variable rate mortgages began to index higher, more and more homeowners defaulted on their loans and inventories grew, slowing the rise in prices. Then the credit squeeze precipitated by the sub-prime mortgage crisis drove many buyers out of the market, turning a slowdown into a decline. Still, home prices remain astronomical, with fewer than ten percent of families in the county able to afford the average-priced home. As a result, the rate of sales has declined sharply, throwing the industry into a crisis. There have been massive layoffs in the real estate finance and construction industries. And sales at big-box home-improvement stores have declined sharply.

In this upside-down world, the firestorm of 2007 came as a breath of fresh air. Less than a week after the fires were out, San Diego economists and market prognosticators started flogging the theory that the destruction would be good for business. Kelly Cunningham, an economist with the San Diego Institute for Policy Research told the Union Tribune, “from an economic standpoint, the negative impact from disasters usually isn't long-lasting. Things look negative right now, but there will be a dip and then a rebound. Rebuilding spurs the economy.”

This is wishful thinking at best. The 1700 houses that burned represent about .34 percent of the nearly 500,000 housing units in the county. Meanwhile, the unsold inventory of houses and condominiums has reached nearly 16,000 units, nearly four times what was was available just three years ago. Most of the homeowners who were burned out will rent for a year or two while rebuilding on their own lots. In other words, the fires will do nothing to increase demand for ridiculously overpriced houses. Nor will they loosen lending policies at banks carrying billions in worthless loans. If anything, they will drive up rental prices and displace working class families, pushing some onto the streets where they will join the city's 10,000 homeless scrambling for just 2,000 beds in shelters.

Rebuilding expected to spur economy

A Window of Opportunity

One of the most fundamental ideas in the socialist tradition, beginning with the utopian socialists who preceded Marx, is this: Because capitalism is so dynamic, constantly expanding and revolutionizing the means of production in the quest for competitive advantages, it makes a new kind of society possible. Capitalism produces an unprecedented abundance of food, clothing, shelter, and the other fundamental requirements of life. For the first time in human history, it becomes materially possible to eradicate hunger, homelessness, and poverty. And in a world of plenty, for the first time, it becomes possible to build a truly democratic society. What stands in the way is property, the concentration of abundant social wealth in the hands of a tiny class of owners whose main goal is profit, not human happiness.

The global environmental crisis, created by capitalism's fundamental need to constantly expand production, has now added a new wrinkle to this basic socialist idea. We may have a relatively brief window of historical oppportunity in which to transform capitalism into socialism. Now that is has created the material conditions for a new kind of society, capitalism may destroy them again. It may even destroy the basic material conditions of human life itself.

No Thanks, Blackwater

Blackwater Worldwide, the North Carolina-based mercenary organization notorious for gunning down unarmed Iraqi civilians, hopes to build a training facility on an 800-acre former ranch in Potrero, a tiny town about 40 miles east of San Diego. Blackwater's Christian fundamentalist CEO, Erik Prince, wants to position the company for a role in immigration enforcement along the Mexican border. Prince is a billionaire thanks to the sale of his family's company, which manufactured lighted vanity mirrors for cars. His shadowy company's headquarters are located on a 6000-acre tract in North Carolina's ecologically precious Great Dismal Swamp, now ravaged by off-road vehicles and live fire exercises. There has been angry and well-organized opposition to the company's plan for a Potrero base, both from local residents worried their town will be overrun and from anti-war activists opposed in principle to the for-profit militarization of the San Diego back country.

When the Harris fire burned thousands of acres and dozens of homes near Potrero, Blackwater representatives toured the area in company Humvees and saw a golden opportunity. They announced that the company would donate a tent city to house displaced residents. Two days later, climate-controlled military tents, along with toilets, showers, generators, and televisions arrived on flatbeds from North Carolina. They were erected on a half-acre lot at Barrett Junction and opened for business the next day. But the locals hate Blackwater so intensely that, a week later, only one person had taken them up on their offer.

Tent city for fire victims is going up near border
'Tent city' for 200 built near Dulzura
Barrett Junction tent city hopes to attract fire victims

A Bonfire of Right-Wing Vanities

The Santa Ana winds have died out, but the smoke of the October 2007 San Diego firestorm still hangs in the air outside. The fires have been contained for a week now, but a thick dust of ash still coats everything and swirls into drifts in the light breeze. 369,000 acres burned, along with nearly 1700 houses. Half a million people evacuated their homes, many escaping just minutes ahead of the flames. By the time the cost of the fires has been tallied, it will exceed $2 billion.

As soon as the fires became national news, Republican politicians began scrambling for photo ops. Mayor Jerry Sanders, who stonewalled the San Diego City Fire Fighters when they pushed for a raise in 2005, now spent his time racing from press conferences to interviews where he praised the fire fighters and cajoled the city to remember, “We’re all in this together.” California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger flew into town for a series of staged tours of smoking homes. Bizarrely, a set of free weights lay in the ashes of one, so the Governator picked up a barbell and curled it a few times for the cameras. President George Bush, who had surveyed the destruction of Katrina from the safety of Air Force One, now put on his best set of rolled up shirt sleeves for a tour of the Republican stronghold of Rancho Bernardo. The presidential motorcade tied up traffic for hours, just as evacuated residents began trying to return home.

As Mike Davis argued a few days later, opportunistic Republicans were ravenous at the political opportunity offered by the fires. The local media tagged right along, glorifying San Diego's leaders as heroes and crowing about how the evacuation was orderly and civilized. After all, just one couple died in their home, trying to open a garage door that was disabled when the fires knocked out the electricity. News anchors and pundits compared the scene at Qualcomm Stadium with the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina, gloating about plentiful food, free massages, and the Spiderman movie playing on the giant screen. They even explicitly contrasted Mayor Sanders to Ray Nagin in New Orleans, whom they accused of "losing his head."

But Sanders and his developer cronies are directly responsible for the pro-sprawl policies that have sited huge sub-divisions in the middle of natural fire zones. Instead of acknowledging that they set the stage for an unnatural disaster, they've spun the disaster as a triumph of Republican values. In reality, it's a bonfire of right-wing vanities.

A SoCal Perspective

Southern California offers a crystal-clear case study in the hard logic of modern capitalism. A huge triangular metroplex has exploded into life in just one century, spanning 150 miles of coast from Santa Monica to Tijuana, reaching inland 100 miles to Riverside. The region reached an official population of nearly 18 million in 2005, making the region home to one of every 17 Americans. SoCal is U.S.'s gateway to the Pacific Rim and it sits on the border with the country's third largest trading partner. With a gross regional product of nearly one trillion dollars per year, SoCal is one of the largest economies on the planet. It is a land of shining contradictions, with the world’s densest concentration of millionaires living alongside millions of undocumented immigrants, many getting by on a few dollars a day. Writing from SoCal makes it possible to think globally from a sharply focused local perspective.