Comment (slightly revised) to Uneven Earth (Oct. 23, 2020) posting titled: “Make life, not work: democratizing, decommodifying and remediating existence”
Nov.8, 2020
This document, Work: Democratise, Decommodify, Remediate, let’s call it DD&R) was produced, I believe, by a consort of young women economists and as such it has some value as a welcome discordant note in an otherwise monotonous economic chorus of mainly male sycophants of neo-liberalism. And significantly, DDR totalizes the reality neo-liberals assiduously avoid recognizing publicly, though in private they well appreciate.
How political, economic, and environment issues are intertwined requires an astute analysis of the tangled threads that make up our reality. Pulling apart segments, like undoing a knot of rope, and labeling them only goes so far as Uneven Earth (UE) coherently critiques. This social democratic program could easily be incorporated in the current World Economic Forum’s discourse on stakeholder capitalism. Not that it would be adopted by the WEF next year at Davos, but it would be given “serious consideration” as a contribution to their attempt to essentially co-opt the widely polled worldwide discontent with capitalism.
However, there are two elements of UE’s critique that need to be queried. One may seem a trifle issue of language and the other is a major miscalculation of the socio-economic effects of climate change.
Real worker participation in the economic as explicit in the definition of democracy would require, as UE states, a transformation of enterprises along cooperative structures. However, cooperatizing gigantic multi-nationals may be problematic. I can be done, in a flawed way, as Mondragon demonstrates—the bones of the globalized firm could be maintained even with a muscle system that operates along guidelines that permit some limited worker participation.
To better understand the practice of economic democracy in its traditional radical sense as workers’ control, we need to disinvest the language of capitalism and not speak of workers owning cooperatives. Cooperatives are like commons and we don’t think of commoners as owners, but as participants. Cooperatives are defined by membership, not ownership. This may seem like a trifle, but the ethic of comming is vital to a transformed worldview necessary for any practice of radical democracy, no matter its specific organizational principles.
And expanding the notion of the commons is essential to understanding the complexities of environmental issues that will impact us as climate change continues to eviscerate our historic complacencies regarding natural phenomenon, like floods, fire, and drought.
This brings us to the other point regarding UE’s critique. Remediation addresses only part of the problem we face. It implies a massive government program to build higher levees, solar installations, oceanic turbines, tidal power, etc. etc.—essentially the program of the Green Deal. But what we face is not simply a policy issue, but drastic population upheavals—mass migrations as we already witness. How will masses of people be housed and fed if relocated? Further, if industrial agriculture can no longer exist in its current geographic areas, what will be the consequences? Vertical farms in cities already underwater?
It is too easy to imagine a universal basic income as a silver bullet to save the masses from starvation due to the dearth of jobs. More likely, to contend with the cataclysm we face we won’t have enough people to do the work that climate change will force on us. A more detailed excursion into the US Green New Deal is here: