While Marxists and others on the Left are correct to point out that many college-educated progressives are themselves part of the working class — even many lawyers and doctors must work for a paycheck to survive, after all — the key to socialist political strategy is uniting the whole working-class around a majoritarian agenda. For a civilizational challenge like shifting away from fossil fuels, only broad-based working-class power is capable of achieving what planetary systems require. To build that power, we need to understand why we are failing to win many workers to our politics, and how we can change that.
The “punk” part ain’t no joke
I think that the everyday material concerns are indeed key, and there might be some fairly “easy” victories in the fields of affordable energy, housing and public transport. However, I think there is a real clash between the current desire of the working classes to accelerate their consumerist lifestyles, and the ecological boundaries. For all their sins, the predicament is not just the fossil fuel industry being evil, it’s bigger than that. Getting the obvious things sorted out is a beginning in the right direction, but actual sustainability requires a deeper change of orientation.
I don’t believe we’ll get very far in this transition in the next decades unless we begin to break capital’s control on all the essential aspects of our lives. The accumulation of capital would continue to drive the resource allocation, the political system and the meaning we grant our own existence, to the detriment of life upholding earth systems and the majorities of the world. And there will be no political consciousness to break the control of capital in a consumerist society where people are estranged from how life is recreated and upheld, where democracy means just voting in an election and where work is done just in exchange for a paycheck.
How can this begin to change? Heron, Millburn and Russel have one pretty convincing proposal and example in their book Radical Abundance. An intentionally designed institution that brings workers, local communities and the public sector together to deliberate on and control matters of production and consumption that are directly relevant to the participants.
The best part? It does not require prior legislative or electoral victories to start building these kind of institutions. It would directly counter some growth dependencies. Ideological motivations are not assumed to be the driver of participation. The hardest part? To get people involved and organized of course. But it starts from seeing the promise in this kind of action.
While there are so many different tracks of action required, this is one with great promise, that I’ve seen too little discussion and action on.
https://fojournal.org/interview/radical-abundance/