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Subject:     Mazzocchi, Speth and Capitalism's Future
Date:     Mon, 19 May 2008 22:21:50 -0400
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Mazzocchi, Speth and Capitalism's Future

By Ted Glick

Future Hope column, May 19, 2008

"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 them both 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 U.S. 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. 20 years ago, in 1988, he organized the first
U.S. 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 worker's 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 who 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 U.S.

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 U.S. 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 like 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, N.J.  07003.

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