Max Bound
My view is that an important, even vital, aspect to success in the struggle to end the current rush to self destruction is the need to get at least a substantial section of the Trade Union Movement involved in cooperation with the environmental movement. Major issues confronting modern societies include the need to make much more democratic the procedures of deciding how we manage technological innovation. How we decide what should be produced, what technologies should be developed and utilised and how the development of appropriate technologies can be utilised to benefit people, including industrial workers. Currently what technologies are developed is in real terms decided by a few in control of large private corporations and new technologies become a way of making more workers un or underemployed to the end of increased profit for a few. As is pointed out in my above mentioned article there can be alternatives to these injustices.
I consider that the major factor in what Chris calls our “collective failure” has been/is the failure of those of us working in the Union movement to win enough support for building a sustainable future. More on that later in this article. At the same time I believe that some positions in the Green/environmental movement have made this problem much more difficult.
YES we do need to take “a breath” and a “distant perspective”
IN HIS response to John Bigg’s excellent article on “Hegemony” Chris Harries calls for a discussion. Chris ends his response with the following sentences “ In this post I have been surmising the main causes of our collective failure. I am sowing seeds that’s all. There may be more important factors than those mentioned. The most important thing is that we understand why.
What I am concerned about is that every now and then it is good to stop and take a breath and take a distant perspective. To do so could mean we take up necessary new challenges and strategies that fit this critical time in our history.”
I agree with Chris, there is need for concern, serious thought and discussion. I suggest the discussion needs to be penetrating as well as open and frank. In part my article recently pasted on Tas. Times under the title “Consequences of large company accumulation of Capital— Alternatives are possible” I believe opens up some issues that are critical to understanding why despite that particular struggles on some important aspects of issues have been won by environmental activists our forests, for example, continue to be destroyed.
My view is that an important, even vital, aspect to success in the struggle to end the current rush to self destruction is the need to get at least a substantial section of the Trade Union Movement involved in cooperation with the environmental movement. Major issues confronting modern societies include the need to make much more democratic the procedures of deciding how we manage technological innovation. How we decide what should be produced, what technologies should be developed and utilised and how the development of appropriate technologies can be utilised to benefit people, including industrial workers. Currently what technologies are developed is in real terms decided by a few in control of large private corporations and new technologies become a way of making more workers un or underemployed to the end of increased profit for a few. As is pointed out in my above mentioned article there can be alternatives to these injustices.
I consider that the major factor in what Chris calls our “collective failure” has been/is the failure of those of us working in the Union movement to win enough support for building a sustainable future. More on that later in this article. At the same time I believe that some positions in the Green/environmental movement have made this problem much more difficult.
The fact that the deeply faulted viewpoint quoted immediately below is still being paraded in the name of Environmental Economics as the green position by sections of the environmental movement is, I believe, a serious negative in terms of the struggle to develop an ecologically and socially sustainable economy.
“Environmental economists argue that market systems provide more flexibility which will optimise efficiency in society. The flexibility is two fold: producers would continue to have and incentive to produce even when conditions change, while individual consumers can choose to respond according to the rationality of the response from the producer”. This quote is taken from an article by Warwick Moss in“Green Pages Directory” a book handed to the very large numbers of people who paid to view a display of Green Options in Glenorchy/Hobart on April 25-26 /2009). What follows is not aimed at the people who gave of their time and energy in organising the well attended and in balance very positive April 25-26. display.
However, for Warwick Moss it appears responsibility for the ills we are now facing rests on ordinary people whereas governments and particularly the powerful corporations that control our economy can be excused from blame.
Internationally renowned environmental thinker and writer Dr. Peter Hay in his “Main Currents in Western Environmental Thought” addressing the problems with the view Moss advocates quotes and paraphrases from C. Hamilton a setting out of the approach- “The task that environmental economics has set for itself’ writes Hamilton, is to develop analytical and practical means of internalising environmental costs that fall outside the orbit of the markets’ (1997 46-47)’ The user should pay, then, and one way this might be done is via the creation of ‘real’ markets for environmental services so that private decision makers determine pieces through supply and demand’” (Hamilton 1997:42) Hay then comments “This is an emphasis within environmental economics that points away from environmental imperatives and back towards the vision of the market as prior and supreme.” ( Hay Peter 2002 p222 -pub. UNSW Press)
The Market has a place but is unable to cope with environmental concerns
To continue let me quote economists rather more celebrated than is Warwick Moss on the subject of the market economy and the environment. In 1989 Herman E. Daly, then Senior Economist with the World Bank’s Environmental Division, wrote “…. the market cannot find an optimal scale anymore than it can find an optimal distribution. The latter requires the addition of ethical criteria; the former requires the further addition of ecological criteria.”
….Economics has tried to reduce scale issues to matters of allocation (just to get the prices right) and has thereby greatly obscured the relation between the economy and the environment.”
Daly argued that present day economic analysis is lacking in that it virtually ignores the “one way through put of matter”.
His further comment was: “It is as if biology tried to understand animals only in terms of their circulatory system with no recognition of the fact that they also have digestive tracts… The digestive tract firmly ties the animal to its environment at both ends.” ( i e human production activities uses up natural resources and effects the air and soil we rely on, and the water we drink and bathe in.)
Daly also argued that “…the concept of through put of matter-energy …. has implications that are unfriendly to the continuous growth of industry.” And “Growth of the economic organism means larger jaws and a bigger digestive tract”. He also argues that “limits to growth do not imply limits to development” . (Daly, Herman E, “Sustainable Development: From Concept and Theory Towards Operational Principles”, Paper forPopulation and Development Review, Hoover Institution Conference, 1989.)
In his above mentioned book Hay quotes Daly on a further essential point “the fish catch is not limited by fishing boats, but by remaining populations of fish in the sea’ (as in Hay 2002 see p 214) And ‘unless the underlying growth paradigm and its supporting values are altered, all the technical prowess and manipulative cleverness in the world will not solve our problems and, in fact will make them worse’ (as in Hay 2002 see p 206) Hay is well worth a read or reread for people who want to get their heads around the pros and cons of environmental economics and to wrestle with reasons why environmental considerations are proving so difficult to promote.
Meantime the views of the faith in the market economists who deny or avoid discussion of the power corporations have are challenged by other important economists as I point out in my above mentioned recent article pasted on Tas.Times. Further as J. K. Galbraith remarks “As earlier indicated, environmental concerns, both those which are contemporary and those affecting future generations, especially the latter, are inherently in conflict with the motivating force of the market economy…” (Galbraith J. K.”The Good Society” 1996 p84 )
Perhaps people who take the above quoted Warwick Moss seriously ought to consider the remarks of “distinguished Canadian writer and thinker” , John Ralston Saul, who also has qualifications in the study of economics when he says in the published version of his 1995 Massey Lectures – “If economists were doctors , they would today be mired in malpractice suits.” (Saul J. R. Penguin Books 1997 p 4).
As Science writer and Al Gore presenter, Peter Boyer so apply puts it –“We have been had. There we were, thinking that modern economic theory, after the odd minor glitch such as the Great Depression, had it all worked out.” (Hobart “Mercury April 28, 2009 P 24)
From Lake Pedder on Unions and the Environmental Movement
If we reflect on at least some aspects of the history of earlier stages of the Green Movement in Tasmania it could also help to come to grips with the issues involved. The leaders of the campaign to save Lake Pedder and particularly the founder of the Green Movement in Tasmania the late Dick Jones saw the importance of cooperation with the Union movement. (The Pedder campaign was a major influence on my own thinking on environmental issues.) And I well remember, for instance some years later, how easy it was to liaise between Dick Jones and the Seamen’s Union members who imposed a “Blue Sea Ban” in protest at the pollution of the lower reaches of the Huon River. Bob Brown followed the earlier established tradition of a realistic approach to resolving environmental issues as far as was possible by among many other things encouraging cooperation with Green Bans leader Jack Mundey and by overcoming reluctance, on the part of one then Green minder, to enable a meeting of Tasmanian Green M P’s with a group of Union Officials. Christine Milne in particular took this cooperation further as has Bob Brown himself.
Those of us who were working at developing Union Green cooperation from within the Union movement met strong opposition led by several Union and Labour council Officials. ( I am now almost two decades retired) In some cases the officials concerned were in bed with the forest corporation and others were merely unable to see beyond keeping up their particular union’s membership, in the short term, and thus keeping their own paid jobs as Union Officials. Going back several years, to when two of us as delegates to what was then the Hobart Trades Hall Council spoke in support of saving Lake Pedder support for what we argued whilst present was quite limited. The union movement was bitterly divided and the atmosphere was to say the least rather tense.
A little over a decade later we were in a much better position but still in the minority. Then Hawke and Keating began to increasingly move the Labor Party to becoming more openly a party of business, or to be a little more precise a party more open to recognising donations and favours from large companies and corporations. Simultaneously the blue collar workforce began to decline in industries where the left had had some influence and the whole political spectrum shifted to the political right. Paul Lennon was the representative of the extreme right wing when he became secretary of the immediate forerunner of Unions Tasmania namely the Tasmanian Trades and Labour Council. While Lennon’s role as Labour Council Secretary is perhaps not widely known his role as Premier and the reasons he had to resign are much wider public knowledge.
Our inability to break through in the Union movement was/is major but not the only part of the problem of the “collective failure” Chris Harries writes of.
The other part of the problem was/is, as indicated in the above, in some attitudes within the Green Movement itself and the contradictory positions within the Green and wider Environmental movements indicated above. The divisions between many workers and environmentalists have been deliberately created by corporations and their yes people operating in society at large and particularly in major political parties, media and unions and people’s movements.
Working on ways to mend the divisions between workers and environmentalists, all people with common interests in a new direction, are paramount issues. Doing more towards developing an inclusive dialogue could have positive results in the situation we are now in as result of the new troubles for people the set of crises capitalism and particularly the all powerful corporations and their ‘yes people’ in governments and elsewhere have created.
Max Bound
