Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Robert McKay, a high school history teacher who graduated from Middlebury College in 2009. He’s written for Seven Days and the Occupied Oakland Tribune, and his first book of poems came out in 2012 from HoneybeePress.org.
I recently read a stirring op-ed in favor of fossil fuel divestment by a Middlebury College alum named Gregory Dennis. Divestment, he says, is three things. One, it’s moral, like abolishing slavery (an excellent comparison). Two, it’s money-smart, because investors know climate change is bad and therefore they, too, urge divestment. (I sighed with relief: doing good won’t stop my portfolio from doing well!) Three, it’s effective, because it worked in South Africa. (ANC? Who’s that?)
As is so often the case, the comment thread was more interesting than the article. The first poster demanded that Dennis stop driving and heating his home; another complained that “Midd,” as the Midd kids call it, should lower tuition instead of splurging on greenery. Standard right-wing talking points, sure, but both reveal crucial weaknesses of the U.S. green “left,” weaknesses which Mr. Dennis’ high-minded piece on the possibility of a greener, kinder capitalism unfortunately typifies.
Dennis graciously answers the first commenter to the effect that he lives pretty green in an “imperfect world.” I’d better proclaim right now that I, too, live green: I graduated from Middlebury in 2009, resided in the environmental house, still eat local, and don’t even own a car. But I don’t think this will avert climate crisis. My upstanding consumer choices, and the low importance I assign them, have been shaped not so much by my excellent education as by what I’ve learned since my student loans went into repayment. No, this isn’t a sob story about going bankrupt (which doesn’t help with student loans anyway). It’s a story about why the right-wing trolls leering sophomorically at Dennis may be smarter than they look.
Back to my upstanding choices. I bike to work because, after several years of precarious employment, I managed to land a $25,000-a-year teaching job, for which opportunity I went a little over $20,000 into debt. At 80 percent of income, that’s considered a modest sum for my age bracket. I thank Midd’s grant aid, which I understand has since shrunk to make room for more loans, i.e., more profit for the banks.
If you don’t see any connection to climate change here, keep reading. Unlike Mr. Dennis, I don’t hold the touchingly optimistic view that a system that relies on endless growth — which monetizes water, trees, education, and its own bad loans in order to keep growing — is likely to produce sustainability on a finite planet. As the 350 people like to say, this is just math. But this crisis is more than carbon math or investment math. It’s a systemic crisis of capitalism and the state that manages it. A state owned by oil companies is incapable of computing carbon math into action. Institutional investment math could (theoretically) make it easier for big capital to shift off fossils. But we have to ask ourselves the question: shift where? Can capital really achieve both growth and greenery?
Let’s remember there’s a serious global dearth of profitable things to invest in. That’s where the right-wingers get it, er, right when they scream: “greens are scheming to destroy capitalism!” As Naomi Klein argues, it’s the greens who don’t realize that’s what their utopian dream (call it “continued-life-on-earth-ism”) in fact requires. There’s a serious case to be made that the capitalists running toward toxic debt products and extreme energy development aren’t just evil or stupid: they’re desperate.
The immediate cause of this “eco-economic” crisis is neoliberalism: the orthodox free-market regime which, since around 1980, has led to a hyper-accumulation of capital in fewer and fewer hands, to de-industrialization, union-busting and declining wages — and hence to weakened consumer demand and less profit in the “real economy” of goods and services.
Instead of “the economic crisis” and “the environmental crisis,” think of one global crisis of the relation between the “eco’s,” economics and ecology. The immediate cause of this “eco-economic” crisis is neoliberalism: the orthodox free-market regime which, since around 1980, has led to a hyper-accumulation of capital in fewer and fewer hands, to de-industrialization, union-busting and declining wages — and hence to weakened consumer demand and less profit in the “real economy” of goods and services. Hence the dramatic shift to financialization. Why did debt-packaging schemes balloon until they crashed the economy in 2008? Why did bank-owned governments ax regulations that would’ve prevented this? Because financialization is the necessary gambit of capital when it can’t realize sufficient profits from production anymore. Since the banks own the state, nothing much changed, and the same sharky packaging deals are now being applied to the trillion-and-change [sic] of U.S. student debt. Even mainstream economists say student debt could well become the next crisis — a crisis we’ll deal with on top of climate chaos.
Now on the ecological side, capital’s desperate rush toward sophisticated loan-sharking mirrors the rage for even more dangerous — and fabulously expensive — extreme energy, like tar sands and fracking. Here I’d be guilty of excessive school spirit if I didn’t mention the fracked gas Middlebury wants to pipe through its backyard, so it can feed in some biogas as part of its “carbon neutrality plan” (yes, really). Extreme energy is happening now because prices have been bid through the roof by speculators: financialization, not just declining reserves, is what’s making this junk profitable.
All this simplifies a complex political-economic story. But the broad contours are actually pretty simple, no math genius needed, and the old-fashioned folksy name for them is “class war.” As runaway climate change kicks in, this war becomes literally scorched-earth.
So what do we do? Middlebury’s greenwashing aside, divestment and neutrality are an O.K. start. But Mr. Dennis’ moral and mathematical rectitude is unlikely to force broad adoption of even these modest steps. That’s because current campus and state power structures are more or less immune to our “free speech,” however factual and heartfelt.
So I’m a doomsaying nihilist? Or a proponent of the right’s bogey, eco-Stalinist “rationing?” Not at all — I’m a believer in the old-fashioned concept of democracy: not comment threads and online petitions, but negotiating and voting institutions. I don’t mean we should all put our energy toward electing progressive Dems, those kinder faces of neoliberalism. A humane future requires very new and different arrangements. I don’t mean top-down 20th-century versions of socialism or individualist, drop-out versions of anarchism and localism. I mean social movements for mass democracy. They are our last, best hope for the political inventions we so desperately need.
According to Charlie Eaton, an astute participant in sweatshop-free campus campaigns, institutionalized democratic power for students means Europe- or Québec-style student unionism. Our unionized student neighbors have real power not to petition and suggest but to negotiate, vote, and, if necessary, go on strike. Anyone who watched the hundreds of thousands of striking students effectively topple Québec’s fee-hiking government last year knows what real student power can look like. Of course it’s not usually so dramatic: democracy is mostly the stuff of long meetings where different parties hash out the nitty-gritty math of things like tuition, debt and divestment.
Nothing remotely like democracy exists for students here in the U.S. If they want real leverage on the issues that will determine their (our) collective future, they need independent, dues-funded student unions, not the current “student government” — which my more-sophisticated Middlebury classmate once called a “puppet government to Papa [Liebowitz]’s Five-Year Plan.” Student union power would make divestment easier, while positioning us for the kind of prolonged, militant mass movement it’s going to take to fight back against the 1%’s converging crises.
Those economic and ecological crises have the same root cause: a system of hollowed-out democracy and unchecked power and wealth for a loan-sharking, gambling, bribing, extorting elite. In other words, an elite of gangsters. So while Mr. Dennis, small business owner, is emphatic that “this campaign is not anti-profit,” he doesn’t speak for all of us. What small business owners often don’t see is that their class interests are fundamentally different from those of the big capitalists. The Middlebury students Dennis quotes on the sunny prospect of oil companies becoming “profitable green energy companies” should learn to differentiate between Dennis’ profits and, say, BP’s. (“Beyond Petroleum” didn’t do much to prevent Deepwater, did it?)
I’m seeing the comment thread again: “BP’s a bad apple!” “No, all oil corps are rotten … but they’ll change once we show ’em the way!” Please, folks, save your keystrokes. That we keep saying such things after 2008 can only be due to some masochistic fantasy. Multinational capitalist firms aren’t going to act out of moral or mathematical rectitude for the same reason states and college adminstrations usually don’t: because they’re run autocratically by a cynical, disconnected elite that believes in its own superiority and desert. Let’s pretend, like small business people, that we’re the elite: while we know our line about “all boats” might not be empirically sound, we’re pretty sure the yachts in our club can ride out any rising tide or tidal wave we might create. And if the boats leak, we own FEMA and the Coast Guard, so they’ll be sure to race for the buckets and bail us out. And even though their own homes are underwater, the loyal, community-spirited taxpayers won’t even let us miss our bonuses. It’s a touching picture of life; one can see why people like Dennis, who think they’re on the same team as “profit,” are so optimistic.
The representatives of the global ruling class (Liebowitz, Sullivan, Bharucha, etc.) must not be petitioned or collaborated with. They must be exposed and opposed with disruptive direct action, as the vector of demands for institutionalized student and worker power. ASSÉ, the federation of Québec student unions that led the victorious 2012 strike, calls this philosophy “combative unionism.”
O.K., you say, let’s be radical then! Let’s name names, occupy offices and demand resignations! Let’s go to jail! Fine, let’s do that, but remember that a tactic’s just a tactic. The strategy is to build student power: lasting, institutional, boring, democratic power. Because as everyone knows who lived in a park in 2011, occupations take a lot of energy. I was one of those people. I was also an envious tourist in a quarter-million-person march in Montreal, and I can tell you that unlimited general strikes are even more awesome than occupations, but also very exhausting and hard to maintain. Plus, you’ll never be able to mount one without a long-term, institutional base of power. As long as we in the U.S. lack that base, we won’t be able to mount the kinds of sexy, dramatic, epic offensives history’s going to require of us. We’d better get ready now, so history doesn’t, you know, end for real this time. So students: plug in, read history, unionize, and get ready to shut down the 1%’s neoliberal university till your demands are met. Otherwise the 1%’s going to shut down your future — and the planet.
