"Capitalism as we know it today is incapable of sustaining
the environment."
– James Gustave
(Gus) Speth, in "The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, the
Environment, and Crossing From Crisis to Sustainability"
"In the late 1980s, Tony was arguing that
global warming might force us to fundamentally alter capitalism. He believed
that the struggle against nature was the irreconcilable contradiction that
would force systemic change."
– Les Leopold, in
"The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony
Mazzocchi"
I don’t know if Gus Speth and Tony Mazzocchi knew
each other personally. Speth’s work career has been as a co-founder and senior
attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, with President Jimmy
Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality, as founder and president of the World
Resources Institute, as administrator of the United Nations Development
Programme and, since 1999, as Dean of the Yale University School of Forestry
and Environmental Studies.
The late Tony Mazzocchi, on the other hand,
following service in the army during World War II, was completely immersed in
the world of the U.S. labor movement. He rose from the ranks to become a national leader of the Oil,
Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, and he was the founder and
leader of the Labor Party.
But as these two fascinating books make clear, their
distinct life experiences led both authors to believe that the capitalist
system which now dominates most of the world is the ultimate problem which
humanity must face up to and deal with if we are to survive and if, in Tony
Mazzocchi’s words, "people are [to be] able to enjoy the arts, relaxation,
interaction with other people, free time…. You know, there’s an awful lot of
wealth out there. If it was distributed appropriately, everyone could have a
fairly decent life – I think globally. And people could be happy transforming
the way we live. Not everyone has to live in a mansion, but everyone can live
in a decent environment. It’s all possible." (pps. 480-481)
Tony Mazzocchi died in 2002. As Les Leopold’s
well-researched book makes clear, Mazzocchi was not your typical US labor
leader. He was a visionary, while being very practical and very "close to
the ground" in his political sensibilities. He was a radical in his
political beliefs, for sure, in the best sense of radicalism as getting at the
root of things.
"His brush with heavy manual labor convinced
him that the good life required something beyond traditional work. Slowly, that
sense would crystallize into a stinging critique of the left’s obsession with
‘jobs, jobs, jobs.’ Mazzocchi would later apply his version of radicalism to
anticipate a different kind of contradiction of capitalism: He believed the
clash of capital against nature (as in global warming or environmental health)
– not just a clash over economic resources – would force systemic change."
(pps. 76-77)
Mazzocchi was likely the first labor leader, if not
one of the first labor activists, to get it on global warming. Twenty years
ago, in 1988, he organized the first US union conference on global
warming, and he was responsible for the publication and circulation of
"Global Warming Watch" by the Labor Institute’s Mike Merrill,
"certainly the first publication on the implications of climate change for
American workers." (p. 433)
Mazzocchi’s commitment to linking workers’ rights
and environmental issues was deeply grounded. As the legislative director of
OCAW, he played a major role in 1973 when 4,000 OCAW members who worked for
Shell Oil Company went on strike at eight plants and refineries around the
country. In part because of Mazzocchi, the health and safety of the workers, at
risk because of high amounts of asbestos in their workplaces, was the primary
issue of the strike.
Due to Mazzocchi’s leadership, a blue-green alliance
developed around this struggle. Major environmental groups supported the strike
and built support for a nationwide boycott of Shell products. Four months after
it began, the strike was settled. Historian Robert Gordon, writing 25 years
later, wrote of OCAW’s "remarkable progress. Almost all of the union’s
contracts with other oil companies were renewed with the strict health and
safety clause…. In addition, OCAW’s efforts heightened public awareness of
health hazards confronting millions of American workers…. Perhaps most
importantly, the Shell strike solidified the tentative labor-environmental
alliance." (p. 308)
Gus Speth appreciates the importance of such
alliances if we are to create a just and sustainable society. In the concluding
pages of his book, he says that "perhaps above all, the new environmental
politics must be broadly inclusive, reaching to embrace union members and
working families, minorities and people of color, religious organizations, the
women’s movement, and other communities of complementary interest and shared
fate." (p. 228)
Coming from someone whom Time magazine called the
"ultimate insider," Speth’s well-reasoned call for a new
environmental movement, for a new movement in which environmental issues are
central, is a welcome and much-needed contribution, particularly for the
climate and environmental movements.
It is no small thing when someone with Speth’s
background and connections writes, "My conclusion, after much searching
and considerable reluctance, is that most environmental deterioration is a
result of systemic failures of the capitalism that we have today and that
long-term solutions must seek transformative change in the key features of this
contemporary capitalism." (p. 9) Or this more stark formulation:
"Capitalism as we know it today is incapable of sustaining the
environment." (p. 63)
On the other hand, Speth makes clear that he’s no
socialist, a difference with Mazzocchi, who liked the basic idea even though he
was critical of much of "actually existing socialism" and much of the
organized socialist and communist Left in the US
Speth writes approvingly of a government-regulated
market economy, one in which environmental impacts and the "polluter
pays" principle would be paramount, essentially a form of environmental
social democracy. Included would be "policies that promote an
environmental revolution in technology … a wholesale transformation in the
technologies that today dominate manufacturing, energy, construction, transportation
and agriculture. The twentieth-century technologies that have contributed so
abundantly to today’s problems should be phased out and replaced with
twenty-first-century technologies designed with environmental sustainability
and restoration in mind." (p. 113)
Speth calls for a rejection of the necessity of
constant economic growth – a central tenet of capitalism. He calls, instead,
for policies that "strengthen families and communities,"
"measures that guarantee good, well-paying jobs," "measures that
give us more time for leisure, informal education, the arts, music, drama,
sports, hobbies, volunteering, community work, outdoor work …,"
"measures that give everyone a good education," and more. (p. 145)
He rejects "consumerism and commercialism."
Instead, "Confront consumerism. Practice sufficiency. Work less. Reclaim
your time it’s all you have. Turn off technology. Join No Shopping Day. Buy
nothing Simplify your life. Shed possessions. Downshift." (p. 163)
He is critical of corporations and wants to see the
public good come before private profit, with the implications of that for
actually existing corporations, especially the huge and powerful ones, left
unclear. He supports "ownership by workers, public ownership, and public
and private enterprises that do not seek traditional profits. They offer
opportunities for greater local control, more sensitivity to employee, public,
and consumer interests, and heightened environmental performance. Collectively,
they signal the emergence of a new sector – a public or independent sector –
that has the potential to be a countervailing center of power to today’s
capitalism." (p. 194) Left unaddressed – a weakness – is how this
"countervailing center of power" would relate to the military/industrial/fossil
fuel complex that dominates our economy and government.
Speth sees the importance of "a new
consciousness" and "a new politics" if the change needed is to
take place. He appreciates that "government is the principal means
available to citizens to collectively exercise their stewardship responsibility
to leave the world a better place." (p. 217)
He is particularly supportive of the
movement-building that is going on among young people and within the World
Social Forum process. He concludes by writing, "Our goal should be to find
the spark that can set off a period of rapid change, like the flowering of the
domestic environmental agenda in the early 1970s. In the end, we need to
trigger a response that in historical terms will come to be seen as
revolutionary – the Environmental Revolution of the twenty-first century. Only
such a response is likely to avert huge and even catastrophic environmental
losses."
One weakness of Speth’s book, highlighted by
comparison to the one on Mazzocchi, is that, while he supports
alliance-building and grassroots movement-building, he says nothing about our
corporate-dominated, two-party political system. He doesn’t address whether he
thinks it will be possible to make the changes necessary through the Democratic
Party alone and how he sees that political animal. Does he believe that we do –
or don’t – need to transform a political system that pretty much restricts
voters’ choices to Republicans and Democrats, that makes it extremely difficult
for third parties to gain a foothold and grow? What about the role of our
propagandistic, corporate-dominated mass media and our 19th century,
winner-take-all, non-proportional electoral system in suppressing popular
resistance to capitalism’s negative and destructive impacts?
Tony Mazzocchi, experiencing the relative
powerlessness of the working class, understood this in his bones, which is why
he devoted the last years of his life to efforts to form a US labor party.
A related weakness is a lack of specificity when it
comes to the tactics of struggle in the process of making the urgently needed
"Environmental Revolution." The role of direct action and nonviolent
civil disobedience – the centrality of leadership in this new movement from
historically disenfranchised constituencies such as people of color,
working-class people and women – the building of thoroughly democratic and
transparent organizations and alliances that empower grassroots people and new
members – how to counter the inevitable efforts to divide and repress a growing
movement that threatens the obscene wealth and power of those who currently
have it: these are very real issues.
Albert Einstein once said, "In everyone’s life,
at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an
encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people
who rekindle the inner spirit." Thanks to Les Leopold, many people who did
not know Tony Mazzocchi will have their spirit rekindled when they read about
this 20th century hero of our history.
And we are fortunate that "ultimate
insider" Gus Speth will continue to help lead us as we build towards the
Environmental Revolution which must occur. May "the spark that can set off
a period of rapid change" come soon.
———
Ted Glick has been active in the climate movement
since 2003 and in the progressive social change movement since 1968. He can be
contacted at indpol@igc.org or
P.O.
Box 1132
,
Bloomfield
,
NJ
07003
.
