Commentary
The Green New Deal was always built on capitalist foundations
The unquestionable presence of market and wealth accumulation mechanisms was the presupposition to any notion that the so-called Green New Deal would actually work.
The failure of the global summits has become a showcase of our failure to respond to environmental disaster.
This failure has been compounded by a growing disinterest in the issue on the part of European countries. Now, the return of Donald Trump seems to mark the death knell for top-down environmentalist engagement, i.e. that of the ruling classes. It was a perspective that had arisen after decades of increasing pressure from below, which had led to the perception of ecological disaster as no longer only an issue for elite sensibilities, but a key one for global choices: a systemic assumption of responsibility, from which new problems and contradictions had arisen. As is often the case, the just demands coming from society were diverted to other ends in the process of institutionalization. The green option was seized upon as a necessity under the condition that it would become a new opportunity to make profits.
Some called for a Keynesian approach instead, but such an approach was constrained by the budgetary austerity that has always reigned in the background, particularly in Europe, and more generally by a supply-side strategy chosen by the state. The resources allocated were supposed to help companies produce environmentally friendly products, while making them increasingly mandatory, but without subsidizing the demand side. If you’re poor, you’ll still have to buy an electric car – at most with some incentives that were immediately neutralized by rising costs and prices. The unquestionable presence of market and wealth accumulation mechanisms was the presupposition to any notion that the so-called Green New Deal would actually work.
As André Gorz wrote as early as 1992, the adoption of ecological constraints by states (and, we would now add, by corporations) would result in a multiplicity of prohibitions, regulations, taxations, subsidies and sanctions that would have the effect of reinforcing “the regulation of society by others,” as it would have to become “more or less environmentally friendly, regardless of the social actors' own intentions.” This is precisely what was introduced 30 years later through a technocratic program run on the assumption of compatibility with the protection of profit and certain market mechanisms.
That is the reason for the growing hostility of the popular and poorer classes to such programs, as they were the first who got an understandable impression that they were the ones paying most of the price for the transition. The impression grew that the green path was merely a new gimmick for generating profits. It was a sentiment of hostility that ended up channeled through different paths: from just criticism of the limits of the Green New Deal to climate denialism.
Reinforcing this sentiment was the fact that the various options being proposed were not, in the end, of a nature to resolve the issue. For instance: electricity or hydrogen to power transport. What are the full environmental costs of such a transition? The ecological problem was reduced to the search for technical solutions that would allow all other economic and production factors to remain unaffected. For example, investment in electric cars was preferred to the development of public transport. The former is a clearly ineffective solution, but a painless one for the market. As a result, the popular discontent merged with that of the capitalist sectors that had everything to gain from a rejection of the Green New Deal.
The real theme that emerges is capitalism's profound difficulty in adapting its accumulation mechanisms to make them compatible with the goals of an increasingly urgent energy and production transition. Bulimic growth and the hunger for profit seem to be insurmountable obstacles to any breakthrough. The horizon looks bleak, with the only promising development being the end of a fundamental confusion: business is going back to pollution, and the ecological project is no longer being imposed from above. Thus, it can once again become the cornerstone of an idea of transformation from below.
This would be a project for a new hegemony, if coupled with social justice, something that the left is still not managing to think through and present as credible.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/il-default-del-green-new-deal on 2024-11-16