This is a useful interview on how to deal with tech monopolies, but I think it doesn’t go far enough. The approaches that Doctrow lays out are, I think, an excellent starting place. If we want humanity to survive the next century or two, and to simultaneously build a more just and happy society, we need to be working on a whole lot of changes all at once. That means the kinds of power-building work I’ve talked about before, but it also means using the the political system we have now to make that other work easier, to whatever degree we can. That means both direct organizing, and working through our representative democracy. We have to do it all.
Under the current system, the default approach to change is a sort of timid incrementalism that always seems to treat history as a settled matter, starting yesterday. That means that when a dramatic change is made, there’s generally a great deal of opposition and complaining, but then as soon as anyone suggests changing things back, it’s treated as just as big a problem as the initial change. Change is viewed as both generally bad, and as value-neutral. The problem isn’t the kind of change, it’s the scale of that change. Taking steps to undo the damage done by “Reaganomics”, or even by the Trump administration, is met with similar or even increased level of hand-wringing, as the initial damage. It’s different people making a stink, but they make about the same level of stink, and more importantly, the media treats it as all being the same.
It’s all just a game played by opposing teams, and it’s “fair” to give both sides equal footing.
Of course, this ignores the fact that, when one side fetishizes procedure and incrementalism, while the other side is committed to getting their way no matter the cost, you get predictable results. Things either move in the direction preferred by the more committed side, or they don’t move at all.
Changes in social norms – like the gradually increasing acceptance of homosexuality – can happen under this framework, but not any real changes in how power is distributed or used.
We tend to treat it as an unassailable truth that the way we operate now is the best way to operate, and so truly systemic change is anathema. That’s why, for all the changes seen in the United States over the last century, power has continued to rest primarily in the hands of the capitalist class, which has used its power to whittle away those changes in things like labor law and social safety nets that gave more power to the working classes.
People whose primary goal is the accumulation of wealth and power will always use the wealth and power they currently have to get more. The more they have, the more they are able to reshape society to funnel more to themselves, and to prevent others from preventing that. This is a path that leads inevitably to monopoly and to oligarchy. Even if someone like Bezos or Gates were to decide that they should burn through all of their personal net worth to solve one problem or another, the end result of that is that they would lose the personal power that society gives to capitalists, and someone else would increase in power by comparison. At best, the changes made by one multibillionaire would be temporary, and rolled back by those multibillionaires who chose instead to continue hoarding power.
Ultimately, the only way out of this trap is to make it impossible for individuals to hold that level of power. Until we do that, there will always be people like the Kochs, like Bezos, like Musk, or like Gates, pulling strings around the globe for their personal benefit, and asserting control over resources that we desperately need for things like dealing with pandemics, or with global climate change.
We need to use the tools we have – taxation and regulation – to decrease the power of the ruling class, much as FDR was doing when he talked about taking power away from “economic royalists”, but we cannot simply stop there. We can’t win in a metaphorical bout of fisticuffs and then walk away having “taught them a lesson”, while still leaving them with outsized wealth and power. History has shown that they will, in general, respond by stabbing us in the back. Their goal is dominance, not winning in a fair fight.
Take away all of their power, and don’t give it to anyone else. Use it for degrowth, for new energy infrastructure, and for adaptation to coming climate change. Use it to make sure that nobody can use poverty or deprivation to force others to work FOR them.
We have to knock down the ruling class and kick them while they’re down. We have to remove that class from existence. That does not mean that we have to kill anyone, necessarily. Ideally, the “horrible fate” I want for today’s billionaires includes guaranteed healthcare, food, shelter, freedom of speech, expression, and movement, and so on. The one thing I want to take away from them is their ability to govern the lives of other people, and I don’t want that ability to go to anyone else in their stead.
We are in a fight for our lives, and for the lives of those with less power than each of us might personally be able to wield. We are fighting against people who have attained their power by exploiting every loophole and weakness they can find, and cheating every person they can. We are not in a fair fight, and we should not pretend otherwise.
If you find the contents of this blog useful or entertaining, or if you think that it’s moving in that direction, please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/oceanoxia, and/or encouraging others to do so. I’d to keep writing, and keep building this into a useful resource for those who want a better world, and to do that, I need money to survive. I’m still pulling in far, far less than minimum wage, and it’d be awesome if I could close that gap.
Hell yeah!
Nope. Fuck that.
That kind of doomerism is, in effect, indistinguishable from those who think there’s no problem at all. It’s just another way to prevent action.
Addendum: The power of the ruling class depends on the work and violence they can get others to do for them. The same actions that cause collective/distributed power to grow also cause concentrated/hierarchical power to shrink.
While they might want to have the ability to push a button and have computers wipe out everyone who opposes them, the reality is that they need people pulling the triggers, directing the robots, growing the food, and so on.
In the end their power is still rooted in getting others to uphold it, and that will always a source of weakness for them.
That, and their inability to conceive of opposition that’s not motivated by the same small-minded obsessions that drive them.
Abe
Why do we need to turn a conversation about environmentalism, climate change, and global warming into a conversation about class warfare?
I mean – I’m all for class warfare. I call myself a card-carrying Marxist.
However, we don’t need to fight the class warfare fight to take the fight to climate change. Abe, you, like most other Greens, seem to take it as given that our current problems are the result of a particular economic system. Hear me out – what if you’re wrong? What if the best and most practical solution to climate change is just to replace dirty energy generation with clean energy generation, and more recycling with clean, cheap, abundant energy, and some (major) geo-engineering schemes (also based on clean, cheap, abundant energy)? We don’t need to radically transform society in order to fix climate change.
What is it that’s more important to you? What are you fighting for? To reshape society? Or to fix climate change? One of the reasons that we’re losing the political battle on climate change is that there are too many people who unfortunately are highly resistant to the kinds of anarchist revisioning of global society that you are proposing, and this is preventing the necessary action on climate change. Could you please decouple your advocacy for stopping greenhouse gas emissions from your advocacy of radical anarchist transformations of global society? If you and the other Greens could do that, we might be able to depoliticize it a little, and we might be able to gain more allies against the remaining Greens and fossil fuel lobbies in order to do what must be done.
PS: While I call myself a card-carrying Marxist, I am still definitely opposed to your purpose of fighting against modernity, globalism, and social and technological progress. I wish we could have that fight on to the side where it wouldn’t hurt everyone else by getting in the way of fixing greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change.
How exactly, do you conclude that class has nothing to do with the situation we’re in?
People are highly resistant to ALL forms of major change. That’s part of how we got to this point. NONE of your “most practical solution” can “just happen”. Changes in power are how things like a radical overhaul of our energy system are ABLE to happen. You call yourself a Marxist, yet you seem uninterested in the power dynamics in our society, or the material relationships between the governance of our society and the changes that are and are not made.
Class politics are involved in every level of this, as much as you might wish otherwise, and leaving it out is a great way to ensure that you continue to get nowhere.
And for the last time, your final claim about what I believe and what I’m advocating for is a lie. I don’t know why you insist in making shit up about what I’m fighting for or against, but knock it off. If you’re going to insist on having arguments with people you make up in your head, then there’s no need for you to do that here.
You should see me rant for pages about the necessary reforms we need for police conduct, and how I want extremely high taxes (income, all assets, inheritance) for the express purpose of wealth redistribution for the express purpose of reducing power gaps between individuals in society.
No it’s not. Class politics has very little to do with greenhouse gas emissions. The problem is that we’re using dirty energy sources when we should be using clean energy sources. It’s really that simple. At least solving 50% of the problem – it is really that simple. The remainder 50% is not about class problems. It’s that removing greenhouse gas emissions from things like creation of concrete and steel, agriculture, and so on, is actually pretty hard. It’s also that the necessary negative emissions geo-engineering will be very expensive under any system of government and economy and thus it’s unattractive to those who don’t favor long-term thinking.
Don’t you want microgrids and decentralized means of production? That’s going backwards, not forwards. It seems that you care more about decentralizing the means of production and “going local” than you do about actually solving the problem.
In another thread you said you read everything.
That includes me talking about the need for things like indoor farming, redesigning cities for climate change, and much more. That’s going to require a mix of things, none of which mean “going backwards” with technology. I care about decentralization where it’s possible. I also talk about the need for international cooperation, solidarity, and communication. As to production, I want to decentralize CONTROL of the means, sure, and more importantly I want to end over-production. I want decentralized power generation to the greatest degree possible, but that has never meant there won’t be a need for more concentrated generation where power use is concentrated. What matters is who controls it, so you don’t have shit like corporations fucking with your thermostat during a heat wave.
Class politics has to do with how corporate power is enforced, how hundreds of millions is spent on misinformation and propaganda surrounding climate change and other issues. It has to do with how law enforcement response to things like pipeline protests. It has to do with whether people are allowed to self-isolate in a pandemic, and why America’s rail network was allowed to atrophy. It’s also how decisions get made about investing in things like infrastructure, or mandating different building materials, or changing production practices.
When I’m talking about local organizing and people looking out for each other, I’m talking about what’s needed to survive a crisis when there’s no guarantee of help coming, and what’s needed to build political power and organization to get any kind of change. Organizing locally in this case also means a network of overlapping networks that also has global connections.
If you can’t figure out what I want, then fucking ASK, don’t just make up absurd shit like “your purpose of fighting against modernity, globalism, and social and technological progress.” There is no honest reading of my work that can support that claim, ESPECIALLY when you claim to have “read everything”.
Which is damn near zero.
According to me and several leading climate scientists, including James Hansen and Kerry Emanuel, the bigger problem is the money spent by Greens on misinformation that you have been bought hook, line, and sinker, about renewables and nuclear. They are a much bigger problem than the climate change deniers. You are indirectly right that much of the Green funding is probably from fossil fuel industry. So, if you mean that class politics is behind the rise and power of the Green energy and anti-nuclear worldwide movement, then I would agree, but I don’t think that’s what you mean.
Relying on Green energy will destroy our economies and societies, and reduce us to abject poverty.
Also, don’t you regularly say that the world environment or something could not survive if all of the world’s population was raised to the standard of living of western Europe? Or am I misremembering?
Also, almost all of what you talk about is not dealing with the central problems of climate change – namely the release of greenhouse gas emissions, and the lack of negative emissions geo-engineering technology. You spend some of your time on talking about Green energy will replace fossil fuels, but most of your time is spent talking about things other than stopping greenhouse gas emissions and negative emissions geo-engineering technologies, and Green energy is largely a scam being funded by fossil fuel industry in order to protect the fossil fuel industry because Green energy people spend more of their time attacking nuclear power than they do attacking fossil fuels.
I’d like to actually fight climate change, and almost none of the things that you talk about are necessary. What we need are a fee-and-dividend approach ala James Hansen, and to redo a lot of regulations and funding to allow nuclear to thrive (and ideally make the power production into a state monopoly), and spend a lot more money on negative emissions geo-engineering. None of that requires class warfare tactics, and nor is it significantly helped by it – except to the extent that it might help us in our fight against the fossil fuel industry and their Green energy facade.
I’m focused on building the power to actually fight climate change, and I’m focused on WHY I want to fight climate change.
I want to fight climate change because I want humanity and as many of the species around us as possible to survive, adapt, and thrive.
Building the political power to change how we generate energy and use resources is a prerequisite to fighting climate change – trying to do it through neoliberalism and representative democracy has been a demonstrable failure. Leaving power in the hands of the people who brought us to this point means a majority of humanity gets screwed, which kind of defeats the purpose of the fight.
By all means, fight for what you think will work the best. I would love to be proven wrong, but I think you’re taking an extremely naïve view of where we’re at.
No, it’s not. We cannot change how we generate energy in the sense of decentralization vs centralization. There is no choice here because one of the options is not possible in the real world, as the sooner that you accept that, the sooner you can be part of the solution instead of part of the problem.
There is no alternative to centralized power generation. This is why countries and regions that share your beliefs, such as Germany and California, have made near zero progress on this issue and at great expense, compared to other countries like France and Sweden which listened to the scientists.
The future is not and will never be decentralized energy production. it’s simply incompatible with the basic facts of physics and engineering. So, you can stick your head in the sand as you’re doing right now, or you can join the reality-based community and adapt your philosophy to fit the facts.