Digging in a Hole

Robin Hahnel:

There are two important lessons to be drawn. (1) While socialists should not have to lead the charge for Keynesian policies to ameliorate capitalist crises, unfortunately that is the position we find ourselves in. Right now we must not only do our own work – explaining why all versions of capitalism are far less desirable than participatory, democratic socialism – but do the work of Keynesian reformers as well who have lost influence in all major political parties. (2) There is no point in trying to explain to Tories and Republicans why their policies are flawed. They have chosen to embrace ill-advised, discredited, nineteenth century economic policies because these policies serve their most important purpose – further pressing the class war they have been winning for more than three decades. Their first instinct when a crisis hits is not to search for policies that would actually solve the crisis. Instead they search their “wish list” for ways to take advantage of the crisis to press for changes that serve their class interests – further cuts in social spending, further concessions regarding wages, benefits, and working conditions, more tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, and of course more corporate welfare like the bailouts doled out to the financial industry. The fact that every one of these policies will only deepen the current crisis is of no concern to them.

And:

Unless the advanced economies do a total “make over” of our energy systems, transportation systems, industries, agriculture, and built infrastructure to render our economies carbon neutral by mid century, we risk unleashing cataclysmic climate change. Only a mad man would run that risk. The only way to meet this deadline is to launch a Green New Deal on a scale that Great Britain and the US launched to produce the war materials needed to win WW II. Since a mammoth increase in public expenditure is required to turn this recession around, this is also our best hope for putting tens of millions of unemployed people back to work. If they are working building wind mills and solar farms, not mining coal or oil, if they are refitting the energy grid to handle decentralized sources of power, not building environmentally destructive weapons, if they are working retrofitting the existing housing stock to be more energy efficient, not building new McMansions, if they are building trains, trolleys, and bikes, not gasoline powered cars, then all their work and production will be saving the environment, not destroying it.

There is only one solution for the two great crises we now face—the worst economic decline since the Great Depression, and the greatest ecological crisis in human history. The left needs to make the argument for a Green New Deal at every turn, work with others who do not yet see themselves as leftists, but who do understand the ecological dangers we face, and together force governments by whatever means prove necessary to take on this challenge without further delay.

(via Instapaper)