Welcome to Bookmarker!

This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

Source code on GitHub (MIT license).

18

Victory Over the Sun

Friends & Foes

by Connor Kilpatrick

0
terms
2
notes

a biography of Tony Mazzocchi, head of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International union in the 70s. he married the environmental movement and the labour movement in the US, recognised that classic environmentalism often neglected class

Kilpatrick, C. (2017). Victory Over the Sun. Jacobin, 26, pp. 18-24

22

But when workers heard the ruling class say “tighten your belts,” they correctly understood that such a program was never going to apply to the wealthy. It would always mean: lower your expectations. And accept a worse tomorrow for your children. The entire history of the labor movement was clear: it was the class enemy who told them to do more with less. In 1980, the Democrats’ share of the union-family vote dropped from 63 percent to 50 percent. Reagan won with Morning in America while Carter lost with his Protestant hand-wringing over decadence and materialism.

Volcker and Carter weren’t environmentalists (nor were they anti-environmentalists), but their belt-tightening policies fit all too neatly with an environmentalism increasingly focused on consumer cutbacks. And the corporate drive to make such regulation a matter of voluntary consumer choices quickly made it a middle-class lifestyle, the antithesis of Mazzocchi’s vision. As companies moved jobs overseas to cut down on labor costs, it was all too easy to blame environmentalists and diffuse the power of the environmental-labor united front.

re: Carter exhorting the American public to embrace environmental austerity in 79 (fewer trips, less heating, etc)

—p.22 by Connor Kilpatrick 6 years, 6 months ago

But when workers heard the ruling class say “tighten your belts,” they correctly understood that such a program was never going to apply to the wealthy. It would always mean: lower your expectations. And accept a worse tomorrow for your children. The entire history of the labor movement was clear: it was the class enemy who told them to do more with less. In 1980, the Democrats’ share of the union-family vote dropped from 63 percent to 50 percent. Reagan won with Morning in America while Carter lost with his Protestant hand-wringing over decadence and materialism.

Volcker and Carter weren’t environmentalists (nor were they anti-environmentalists), but their belt-tightening policies fit all too neatly with an environmentalism increasingly focused on consumer cutbacks. And the corporate drive to make such regulation a matter of voluntary consumer choices quickly made it a middle-class lifestyle, the antithesis of Mazzocchi’s vision. As companies moved jobs overseas to cut down on labor costs, it was all too easy to blame environmentalists and diffuse the power of the environmental-labor united front.

re: Carter exhorting the American public to embrace environmental austerity in 79 (fewer trips, less heating, etc)

—p.22 by Connor Kilpatrick 6 years, 6 months ago
23

That McDowell coal miner might be skeptical about climate change but that’s only because those are the cards (and the economy) capitalism has dealt him. Instead of trying to get him to #FuckingLoveScience, we should be trying to organize him into a socialist program of full employment and democratic control of production to rebuild the country and the world with an eye on radically lowering emissions.

—p.23 by Connor Kilpatrick 6 years, 6 months ago

That McDowell coal miner might be skeptical about climate change but that’s only because those are the cards (and the economy) capitalism has dealt him. Instead of trying to get him to #FuckingLoveScience, we should be trying to organize him into a socialist program of full employment and democratic control of production to rebuild the country and the world with an eye on radically lowering emissions.

—p.23 by Connor Kilpatrick 6 years, 6 months ago