You Can’t Always Get What You Want

Yesterday I went to the Fight for Fifteen rally in Federal Plaza, Chicago. The usual suspects were in attendance, from  labor activists from Action Now and Jobs with Justice to a few rogue Wobblies and the inevitable Revolutionary Communist Party literature table. Participants were color coded by shirt. Workers gave uplifting testimony, Democratic legislators talked about how much they had learned from the workers, and the ceremony ended shortly after musical performances by an electro-traditional Mexican folk group and four break dancers. Media trucks with massive antennas broadcast their coverage, captured from cameras in the back. Police presence was constant but subdued until thirty minutes before the rally’s end time, when fifteen CPD on bikes approached on the sidewalk, stopped, turned, and waited for the event to end.

If you, like me, have been to rallies and protests and marches before, none of the above will surprise you—but then, and as others have already noted, the rally’s purpose was not to surprise or mobilize but to publicize. The control exercised on the demonstrators by the SEIU-based campaign made this abundantly clear. Yet though it was obviously a publicity event, when I tried to describe the rally to friends outside the left I found myself struggling to answer as basic a question as “Who’s the target?”

We must go global: the case of South Korea

If we don’t go global, we can’t win.

Consider, for example, recent developments in South Korea around temporary employment (covered here at the Financial Times, behind a paywall). The rise of temp work in the US and other developed countries is symptomatic of neoliberalism. And as with other neoliberal trends, it is intensifying as the neoliberal economy breaks down. We might be familiar with hand-wringing on the subject in popular press in the US, but it is a global phenomenon (see also France, Germany, Japan, etc.).

South Korea has been hit especially hard by this trend, and has one of the highest rates of temp employment in the OECD, but it is now reversing the trend, thanks to some of the most militant labor unions in the world. Led by temporary workers, unions have taken up the cause of ending temp employment. Sustained labor unrest has resulted in billions of dollars in losses for major corporations, and tens of thousands of temp workers at Hyundai and other major corporations have been granted permanent status (or other benefits and contract improvements in lieu of permanent status).

The Moral Imagination of Neoliberal Society

In an interesting essay on the Jacobin website, David V. Johnson describes the perils of moral sentimentalism, "an excessive, even obsessional tendency to view the world through the narrow lens of the moral." As described by Johnson, moral sentimentalism is a debasement of complex social and political issues into a simple matter of proper conduct, implying that any such problem can be boiled down to personal failings. This distracts attention from the systemic nature of serious social problems and acts as a powerful block to effectively addressing them through political projects that might hold a real potential to change the world.

Johnson tries to describe moral sentimentalism as something more than a ploy on the part of the rich to confuse the poor about their true interests. He stresses that moral sentimentalism "offers the fantasy of feeling empowered, of taking pride in their own individual conduct as all that really matters." Despite his gesture towards the very broad appeal of this world view, I don't think that Johnson convincingly shows that moral sentimentalism is anything other than a key stratagem in a class struggle rendered in mechanistic terms of economic interest. In other words, Johnson describes moral sentimentalism as part of the upper class's attempt to trick the poor into perpetuating their own class domination, but this does nothing to explain the way that these classes come into being in the first place.

Johnson is also attempting to draw a distinction between moral sentimentalism and genuine moral claims, and cautions against moral sentimentalism "because it ultimately serves immoral ends." But I'm skeptical that this distinction can be sustained. It's hard to argue against Johnson here because apart from noting that he "take[s] moral claims seriously," he doesn't define what real morality actually is. I would like to suggest that what Johnson is describing as moral sentimentalism might best be understood as the variety of morality that is most at home in our neoliberal society. The examples of moral sentimentalism that he gives are particularly debased, but I think that even very serious contemporary moral thinking partakes of a similar logic that I will try to begin teasing out in this post.

Neoliberalism and the “carbon bubble”

In an earlier post I argued that overcoming neoliberalism is the key to saving humanity from climate apocalypse, based on the thought that the necessary political actions (examples: “heavy-handed interventions by the state into the economy, including a massive expansion of the public sector, and coercive intervention into the financial industry, agricultural industry, and manufacturing industry”) are incompatible with neoliberalism. In this post I want to address another consideration that leads to the same conclusion: the carbon bubble.

The math behind the notion of the carbon bubble is probably most familiar to climate activists from an article published a year ago by Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone entitled “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math”. This article is a call to arms in which he declares that the the fossil fuel industry “is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization”, which means that the task of the climate movement must be to destroy the industry’s political power. The piece went viral, and subsequently led to his Do the Math tour and 350.org’s “Fossil Free” divestment campaign.