ENVIRONMENT AND ENERGY SEPTEMBER 16, 2011
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As I was watching the local New York City news coverage of Hurricane Irene before “she” made landfall, I was struck, as I have often been before, by the pleasure of the apocalyptic that the newscasters were so obviously experiencing as they reported on the storm: Potentially the first hurricane to make landfall in New York since the Norfolk and Long Island hurricane of 1821! The storm of a generation! The storm of a century! And as weathermen and women conjured up the worst-case scenario and invited us viewers to contemplate what was in store for our beloved city, they grew increasingly giddy. We were told to expect pounding torrential rains and ferocious winds lasting as long as twenty hours straight since the storm was so slow moving; we were told to expect a dramatic surge of water—seven feet of flooding into Staten Island! more than five feet of flooding into lower Manhattan!—due to the timing of the high tide, the arrival of the storm, and the narrow physical dimensions of New York harbor. We were told that there would be uprooted trees, power outages, broken glass flying from skyscrapers, devastating flooding of the subways, with the city paralyzed after the storm passes, not to mention billions in losses due to all the destruction and what would be a massive clean-up, but also because Wall Street, inundated by flood waters, might very well be shut down for days. We were implored to ready our “go-bags,” to fill our bathtubs, to stock up on bottled water, canned food, “energy bars,” radios, flashlights, and batteries, and we were shown empty shelves at markets and drugstores to drive home the point about what awaited any complacent viewer who did not heed their warnings.
I didn’t for a minute feel any pleasure in entertaining the weather forecasters’ apocalyptic visions. Rather, during the frenzied media build-up, I found myself feeling a kind of perverse pleasure in telling just about anyone who would listen that the approaching storm was good training for the world we are about to enter due to global warming—rising oceans, flooding of coastal cities and towns, black-outs, food shortages, general pandemonium. As I offered my interpretation of the coming storm, I realized—with far less pleasure—that I had been inspired by one of George Orwell’s “London Letters” to the Partisan Review that he wrote regularly during World War II. I had read them years ago but could still recall Orwell informing his American readers that the many shortages and rationing of foods and goods that Londoners were forced to endure during the war would turn out to be good training for the inevitable hard times ahead when Britain became a socialist country following the war. As I was telling this to my husband, I began to have doubts about what Orwell actually said. Luckily, I had made xeroxes of the London letters that I found most striking and was able to locate them. Sure enough, in one that was published in the November-December 1942 issue of the Partisan Review, I found what I was looking for. Orwell did say that due to rationing,
We are growing gradually used to conditions that would once have seemed intolerable and getting to have less of the consumer mentality which both Socialists and capitalists did their best to inculcate in times of peace. Since the introduction of Socialism is almost certain to mean a drop in the standard of living during the first few years, perhaps this is just as well.
While I was looking for that particular letter, I happened upon another one (published in July-August 1942) that startled me with its relevance to our own particular moment. It again concerned the prospects of socialism in England, Orwell’s belief that “we are back to the ‘revolutionary situation’ which existed but was not utilized after Dunkirk.” I hadn’t heard the phrase “revolutionary situation” for a long time, though I knew it was once a key word in the vocabulary of Marxist intellectuals. Now, of course, the idea of a “revolutionary situation” is as foreign to most of us as the idea that socialism is possible, let alone desirable. But in the bleak summer of 1942, intellectuals as acute as Orwell were able to draw parallels between the crises in the British government’s legitimation brought about by wartime defeats and the chaotic period preceding the Bolshevik Revolution during World War I. Thus, Orwell observed that from the time of the forced mass evacuation at Dunkirk “until quite recently one’s thoughts necessarily moved in some such progression as this”:
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We can’t win the war with our present social and economic structure.
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The structure won’t change unless there is a rapid growth in popular consciousness.
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The only thing that promotes this growth is military disasters.
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One more disaster and we shall lose the war.
Orwell’s disturbing progression of thought, it occurred to me, was pertinent to today’s global financial crisis, as well as to the crisis that is upon us with global warming. In imagination, I substituted “current collapse in our financial system/environmental-ecological disasters” for “war” and I found unexpected parallels between our current situation and that earlier disaster-laden one:
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We can’t get beyond the current collapse in our financial system/environmental-ecological disasters with our present social and economic structure.
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The structure won’t change unless there is a rapid growth in popular consciousness.
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The only thing that promotes this growth is financial/environmental-ecological disasters.
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One more disaster in our financial system/environment and we shall lose our world as we know it.
The final point, however, did not quite ring true to me, since we keep having violent gyrations in the stock market worldwide and repeated ecological catastrophes brought on by our insatiable appetite for energy—I thought of the BP Oil spill in the gulf coast last summer and the core meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear reactors this year—and yet our world somehow continues to go on. At the same time I was struck by another possible conclusion to this train of thought: If the global economy were to recover and prosper and produce voracious—i.e., American-style—standards of consumption worldwide, the result would be the hastening of environmental/ecological disasters.
Orwell was living through the most dire of times which no one in his or her right mind would want to live through, yet I couldn’t help envying him and his friends at the Partisan Review, as they not only had a system to help them think through the crises confronting them but an alternative to capitalism to hope for (at least during the war). And yet when I think about our current crises, it doesn’t seem far-fetched to notice that there has been at least the potential for a “revolutionary situation” in America beginning six summers ago with Hurricane Katrina—those dismal images that poured out of New Orleans of miserable men, women, and children abandoned to the full force of the hurricane without sufficient food and water, without sanitary living conditions, and most telling, without the protection of the police or the National Guard. I still feel our nation’s shame when I recall the interviews I saw with people who did not have the means to leave the city, typically African-American, all too often morbidly obese, who said they were suffering from diabetes and/or high blood pressure and had run out of the medications that they needed.
I was dumbfounded by the utter failure of President Bush and his administration to respond to this emergency—the paralysis of the “ruling class” being one of the conditions of a “revolutionary situation”—and felt there was a kind of perverse justice in the spectacle of Cuba offering aid to America. Naively, I believed we were at a turning point in our history. I was convinced that our representatives in Congress would have to drop everything and make the fight against poverty our one and only mission; that, as the saying goes, the whole world was watching and we could not simply blunder on in the old way. Hurricane Katrina laid bare the fact that we as a country had willfully closed our eyes to the disasters (natural, man-made, and terrorist-inflicted) that we all know are surely coming; and its disgraceful aftermath laid bare the fact that we as a country had willfully closed our eyes to the grinding poverty from which too many people cannot escape. I naively thought that this would be the moment that we focused our national attention on the moral imperative of creating decent, good-paying, non-polluting jobs, even consider reviving what in the nineteenth century was called “worthy work”—work that requires skill, knowledge, and experience obtained through years of apprenticeship. And given that the kinds of jobs that were to be created would prove decisive to the survival of our oceans, rivers, land, and breathable air—pollution having entered the world with the industrial factory system and concomitant de-skilling of labor in the nineteenth century—I naively thought that this would be the moment we would reconsider our uncritical allegiance to “growth without end,” no matter what the cost to the world we inhabit together and will pass on to those who come after us.
Was I ever mistaken! And yet … calamities keep mounting, climaxing, at least so far, with the breakdown of the global financial system and the nuclear catastrophes in Japan. I couldn’t help wondering why, under these extraordinary circumstances, we still have not entered a “revolutionary situation.” The “ruling class” in America, even if it was momentarily paralyzed during Hurricane Katrina, obviously does not believe that it must fundamentally change its ways—the government’s gigantic bail-out of its cronies in the banking, finance, and insurance industries under both President Bush and Obama was proof of that. But then it occurred to me that this was not quite right. A “revolutionary situation” is in the making, but I had been oblivious to it because I still expected it to come from the Left (what little remains of progressivism), when it is, in fact, coming from the other direction.
Now that I was viewing our current situation with Orwell in mind—both the World-War-II socialist and the 1984 Orwell—I was beginning to see that the angry masses who refuse to live in the old way—the “third camp”—and the “revolutionary cadre” who would lead them—both of which were required by Marxist theory for a “revolutionary situation” but failed to materialize after the war—are here now in the body of the Tea Party and they are acquiring more and more visibility and power. Newly elected congressmen and women led by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor are successfully disrupting the “ruling class,” hijacking the political system, making business as usual impossible, and they are doing so from within by employing legal congressional maneuvers. My re-worked version of Orwell’s train of thought came back to me:
We can’t get beyond the current collapse in our financial system/environmental-ecological disasters with our present social and economic structure.
The appearance of the silly-sounding Tea Party, I thought, was “the cunning of history” with a vengeance: The ever-deepening crisis of global capitalism that is destroying so many people’s lives, instead of being met with revolution by the “progressive class” is being met with reactionary cries of spend less, lay off public workers, dismantle public programs, get rid of government altogether. Again I thought of Orwell’s words:
Our present social and economic structure won’t change unless there is a rapid growth in popular consciousness.
Who would have thought that the revolutionary change in popular consciousness would be the belief that the root of all our social and economic troubles and the enemy of ordinary people is our hobbled welfare state?
Stuck in old habits of thought, I realized that I had relegated the Sarah Palins of our impoverished political world to the outer region of the not-to-be-taken-seriously bible-thumpers, that in my complacency I had failed to see that Tea Party militants were far better organized and more willing to stand up for what they believe than any Leftist these days. And who knows? Even though they speak for only a small minority, they might very well pull off their revolution. The Left has never succeeded in getting one of their own to run for president under the banner of the Democratic party—Ralph Nader had to run as a third-party candidate—but this time around the Republican establishment is fielding such bona fide right-wing radicals as Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry. It is hard to believe that someone who claims that Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme,” a “failure,” “something we have been forced to accept;” that the federal income tax was the “great milestone on the road to serfdom;” that global warming is a “contrived, phony mess;” that Ben Bernanke’s monetary policy is “almost treasonous” could be seriously offered as a legitimate candidate for the office of president, but these are the fighting words of Rick Perry and he is at this moment the most popular candidate among Republicans.
The only thing missing from the classic “revolutionary situation” is any sign that the “ruling class” is aware that it cannot live in the old way. But then I realized that even that component was now in place: Mitt Romney, who is supposed to be the “mainstream” Republican candidate, is now pandering to the revolutionary wing of his party, having made his first campaign appearance at a Tea Party rally. But even more telling of the growing consciousness on the part of the status quo that it cannot maintain its hold on power unless it changes, President Obama, as we saw during the debt-ceiling “compromise,” has adopted the Tea Party’s revolutionary tax-cutting, government-cutting program. And with the news just the other day of the President’s rejection of stricter limits on air pollution, coinciding with his much-publicized visit to victims of Hurricane Irene in flood-stricken New Jersey, it appears that the “ruling class” is now also adopting the Tea Party’s revolutionary position that jobs in the short-term are more important than the survival of a habitable world in the future.
Rochelle Gurstein, a monthly columnist for The New Republic, is the author of The Repeal of Reticence: America’s Cultural and Legal Struggles over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art. She is currently writing a book on the history of aesthetic experience tentatively entitled Of Time and Beauty.
17 comments
If there is ever a revolution in America--and I don't believe there ever will be other than in a metophorical sense--it will be a fascist revolution, not a socialist one. Americans are not necessarily democrats (little 'd'), but they believe in nothing more fervently than the Individual. Socialism therefore is anathema. The best that the Left can ever hope to do in America is gradually steer the ship of state in a more salutary direction. As for environmental collapse, it seems to me that he only rational response is fatalism. Either climate change will be bad enough to threaten civilization or it won't, but anyone who believes that global collective action of sufficient magnitude to change that outcome is even remotely within the realm of possibility lacks sufficient understanding either of group psychology or climate science or both.
- AaronW
September 16, 2011 at 12:53am
What is far more likely than either a socialist or a fascist revolution is for American cities to turn into northern-hemisphere versions of Johannesburg and Sao Paulo, with teaming slums, glittering sky scrapers, walled communities, private security forces and private helicopters buzzing over it all. For the second time today I'm motivated to write, "Welcome to the future a la Phillip K Dick and William Gibson."
- AaronW
September 16, 2011 at 12:57am
I have two explanations, which may or may not be mutually exclusive. In an advanced economy such as ours, there is no class struggle between the few who comprise the bourgeoisie and the masses that comprise the proletariat. The vast middle class, which did not exist in revolutionary Russia, more closely identifies with the bourgeoisie than with the proletariat. Indeed, the middle class believes that attaining bourgeoisie status is within reach if only the sinister forces, those leftist forces, would get out of the way; wealth and status, so close they can taste it. The other explanation, the more political explanation, is based on the failure of the left, or the progressives, to identify with the middle class. With its emphasis on protecting rights, in particular minority rights, helping the unemployed and poor, and righting the nation's past wrongs, the middle class feels ignored. The language used by Palin and others exploits this feeling to great effect. And in many respects this feeling is justified. How often does the left stand up for the middle class? Whether tax cuts or government prgrams, they are predominately targeted for those below the middle class. Indeed, I have pointed out many, many times that the middle class taxpayer pays a marginal tax rate, and often an effective tax rate, higher than the wealthiest American; heck, even Buffett makes this point. It is the middle class that carries the weight of the modern welfare state. Of course, as Republicans like to remind voters, closing the budget deficit requires tax increases (if that's the approach taken) on the middle class not just the wealthy; and, similarly, supporting the modern welfare state is a burden that must be carried in large part by the middle class. My prescription is for progressives is to target both their language and their policies to the middle class. And, sometimes, they do. But they cannot help themselves, and always fall back on the old language and the old policies that make the middle class feel ignored. I suppose my first explanation resembles the Marx (or historical materialism) explanation, and my second explanation merely looks to contemporary circumstances and political actors. There's not much progressives can do if the first explanation is correct (if you believe in that sort of thing), but it's within their control if the second explanation is correct.
- rayward
September 16, 2011 at 8:56am
You make several mistakes here. "is being met with reactionary cries of spend less, lay off public workers, dismantle public programs, get rid of government altogether. " Your first mistake is to buy-in to the Fox-News Koch-Brothers funded Tea-Party propaganda. Your so-called "reactionary cries" are simply the latest in a long line of Republican Conservative talking points, trying to overturn the New Deal since it was enacted. They are not "popular" though Fox-News would have you believe so. They are not "new" in any way. Your second mistake is to take fairly minor events, and equate them with WW-II. Your third mistake is to accept the Orwellian-distorted rhetoric of the Tea-Party as if it were true. What you percieve to be "angry masses" are in fact "a loud petulant conservative minority". You're identifying brown-shirts and their rhetoric as if they are actually addressing a REAL problem, instead of the truth. And the truth is that America's current economic crisis was CREATED by the very policies the Tea-Party is espousing. And the fix to the crisis is to IGNORE the Tea-Party as much as possible and implement the kinds of Keynesian economic build-up policies currently being blocked by the Tea-Party. Not to admire them for their apparent small-Government claims.
- AllanL5
September 16, 2011 at 9:39am
Well, it was close but the author wasn't quite able to work the word "I" in fifty times in a brief, rambling two page piece. Final count fell a bit short, only in the high 40s. Still, an impressive, if perverse, accomplishment! If TNR ever does get an editor for Marty Peretz - we can dream, can't we? - maybe she could help Gurstein with her "I" problem. That and stuff like, oh, "The structure won’t change unless there is a rapid growth in popular consciousness." (Um . . . right on, lady!") Seriously, TNR might want to reflect on its policy about editing. Try doing some.
- mtinora@me.com
September 16, 2011 at 12:20pm
I think, if I read the piece correctly, that the bullet point "The structure won’t change unless there is a rapid growth in popular consciousness" is from Orwell. So your somewhat catty parenthetical remarks mystifies me, Grimes.
- ironyroad
September 16, 2011 at 12:28pm
Sorry, remark.
- ironyroad
September 16, 2011 at 12:29pm
Regarding AllanL5's comment... in Germany, in the 30's the brown shirts were just "a loud petulant conservative minority". We all know how it worked out.
- pdobrilla
September 16, 2011 at 1:27pm
All our revolutionaries are right-wing because we're still stuck with the legacy of the Cold War, in which socialism was falsely equated with an all-powerful state. That's why I'm excited to hear criticisms of "crony capitalism" - as annoying as it is on to have that rhetoric coming from the right, we need to develop an awareness that government is a necessary, integral piece to capitalism ("possession is nine-tenths of the law"?). America's mad as hell at the bankers, and mad as hell at the state that props up those bankers. Once the Cold War generations fade into retirement, that anti-capital, anti-state attitude has a chance to become predominant (the under-30 crowd already only prefers capitalism over socialism 37% to 33%, according to Gallup). Then there's also the role of social liberals, those who pay lip service to the needs of the working class, only to reveal later that the working class is only going to get "a seat at the table." So those are my personal scapegoats - the memory of the Cold War on the right, and habitual co-optation by liberals in the center to center-right.
- whyamihere
September 16, 2011 at 2:00pm
There's something drifty about the article. It reminds me a bit of a college essay, where the first idea that comes along is the thesis. The Tea Partiers leading a "revolution?" A revolution needs a strong, charismatic leader. George Washington filled that role in the American colonies. The Tea Partiers inside and outside of Congress have the personalities of those yipping lap dogs that bite people's ankles. No grand vision there. Just a bunch of phonies lapping up every benefit in the government trough that they can get their hands on, without telling anybody about it.
- magboy47.
September 16, 2011 at 7:21pm
Hm. My experience of reading college essays (quite considerable at this stage) is that it's only the best of them that have an identifiable thesis, whether or not it was the first idea that came along. Most of the them don't even know what their thesis is, and often the best idea is the afterthought in the final paragraph. I like this piece. Yes, it's associative rather than sequential in its argument. But nuffink bleedin' wrong wiv that, as William Empson said.
- ironyroad
September 16, 2011 at 7:52pm
I like this piece too. I particularly liked Gurstein's substitution of environmental catastrophe for war in Orwell's syllogism. It's exactly right: there will be no revolution in our material conditions unless and until environmental degradation reaches catastrophic proportions at which point it will be too late for a revolution in our material conditions to make ant difference. And Allan, you may find the WW II analogy to be over the top, but I would remind you that history only becomes history in retrospect. While you're living it, it all feels banal.
- AaronW
September 16, 2011 at 11:15pm
liked
- AaronW
September 16, 2011 at 11:33pm
Ironyroad, No problem. Happy to walk you through this and, what's more, explain my snide comment that you say (albeit sarcastically) mystifies you. Okay, for starters try delving into, oh say, "I didn’t for a minute feel any pleasure in entertaining the weather forecasters’ apocalyptic visions. Rather, during the frenzied media build-up, I found myself feeling a kind of perverse pleasure in telling just about anyone who would listen that the approaching storm was good training for the world we are about to enter due to global warming—rising oceans, flooding of coastal cities and towns, black-outs, food shortages, general pandemonium. As I offered my interpretation of the coming storm, I realized—with far less pleasure—that I had been inspired by one of George Orwell’s “London Letters” to the Partisan Review that he wrote regularly during World War II. I had read them years ago but could still recall Orwell informing his American readers that the many shortages and rationing of foods and goods that Londoners were forced to endure during the war would turn out to be good training for the inevitable hard times ahead when Britain became a socialist country following the war. As I was telling this to my husband, I . . . . " (To be kind I chose a short fragment of a paragraph with only - I may be getting this wrong - eight "I"'s. No need for thanks! But, ironyroad, be sure to keep in mind "I found myself feeling a kind of perverse pleasure in telling just about anyone who would listen that the approaching storm was good training." It's leading somewhere!) As much as this article seems to be about anything it may be about: a) Viewing the financial crisis and/or severe economic problems as analogous to Orwell's viewing the trouble Britain was facing at the bleak start of the 2nd World War. ("Orwell’s disturbing progression of thought, it occurred to me, was pertinent to today’s global financial crisis, as well as to the crisis that is upon us with global warming. In imagination, I substituted current collapse in our financial system/environmental-ecological disasters” for 'war and I found unexpected parallels between our current situation and that earlier disaster-laden one.") b) The sense that the disaster (England's problems fighting the Axis powers, a hurricane we assume is the result of global warming, the economy) is, in fact, good because it may force the citizenry to face the prospect of much worse, which would make living with much worse more bearable when it came and/or maybe even lead to a desire in the citizenry to combat it. The author then lists four Orwell lines in bullet points. She then mirrors these bullet points. She then then works her own variants (in her own words) on three of them so that they're about the economic crisis or ecological crisis. She keeps one line though! That stays! So we now have that line twice: once in 1940, once in 2011, once by Orwell referring to WW 2 and, yes (this is key!) once by Gurstein referring to American now! (Confession: that's when some snark may have began to echo in my skull.) To her credit the author then dismisses - well, momentarily, at least - the idea of a "revolutionary situation" as perhaps a less pleasant prospect for TNR readers in 2011 then it may have been for socialist in 1940. But, yup, we have "The structure won’t change unless there is a rapid growth in popular consciousness." That's her keeper. (Get psyched: it's going to show up again!) Okay, then the article gets - sigh - even more confusing when in a further flurry of "I"s we veer way off track into the idea that maybe our "ruling class" is ironically creating a "revolutionary situation" (yes, this would seem to be a different use of the word "revolutionary" than a veteran of Spain and follower of the Russian revolution like Orwell would mean, but I'll leave you work that out on your own. And don't waste too much time: the new use doesn't last , though it lingers on through a permutation.) Then just when our eyes are watering over we get "Our present social and economic structure won’t change unless there is a rapid growth in popular consciousness." Yes, again! Third time! (And - as with the last- this is referring to the here and now.) That's what we need! And that third strike (after everything else) gets you a sarcastic typed "Um . . . right on, lady!" Along with the other complaints about prose and coherence. But, hey, back to the article (we've gone this far, let's finish it out) . . . okay, turns out there's an irony: this new revolution stuff, it's coming from the right. Don't feel bad, by the way, if this last part confused you. It featured among other things a sentence with six - count 'em six - dashes in it! ("Now that I was viewing our current situation with Orwell in mind—both the World-War-II socialist and the 1984 Orwell—I was beginning to see that the angry masses who refuse to live in the old way—the “third camp”—and the “revolutionary cadre” who would lead them—both of which were required by Marxist theory for a “revolutionary situation” but failed to materialize after the war—are here now in the body of the Tea Party and they are acquiring more and more visibility and power.") And then, lo and behold, we're later fully back into "revolutionary situation" in an Orwellian sense. ("The only thing missing from the classic 'revolutionary situation' is any sign that the 'ruling class' is aware that it cannot live in the old way.) But so be it. At least the sentence didn't have a half-dozen dashes or a sprinkling of "I"s. All in all, I stand by the snide. And the fact that TNR's failure to competently edit is an insult to its readership. And a disservice to at least one writer. (I'm guessing no one can do anything about Marty's rambling, name-dropping assaults on coherence and rigor of argument, but this article didn't have to be this bad. It never should've been published - even online - in this form. )
- mtinora@me.com
September 17, 2011 at 1:50am
Ironyroad, you were kind enough to correct your typo. I won't be correcting my, no doubt, numerous ones. My apologies.
- mtinora@me.com
September 17, 2011 at 1:55am
To employ an Australianism, you've done the hard yards, Grimes, I'll give you that. But while you imagine that you're objecting to Gurstein's supposed incoherence, what really gets your goat is her equation of WWII with current circumstances. To you that seems absurdly asymmetrical. I'll say just this: events of major historical importance feel like ordinary, day-to-day existence to those who are living through them. Hence the fact that in your experience the present moment seems entirely unremarkable means nothing.
- AaronW
September 17, 2011 at 11:16am
All stylistic crticisms aside, I don't see how Gurstein can construe the Tea Party movement as - in part - a reaction to the threat of global warming or ecological disaster. The Tea Party's reaction to those threats is to claim that they do not exist. Dhurtado
- NR143296
September 18, 2011 at 10:09am