Second part. Read first part here.

These mostly individual activities cannot replace collective action, but they can become a nutritious side dish and keep the ‘movement of discouragement’ (of economic recovery) alive in periods of relative social tranquillity. Collective action is dependent on a logic of events: it is path-dependent, and not all events are possible at any given time, even if theoretically correct and necessary. (Maybe at this point Shakespeare could be more helpful than Marx.) But we can be confident that many opportunities soon will arise for effective collective action. All of this could lead the capitalist machine into such a quagmire that scenario A would look relatively appetising. The following proposals are all based on scenario A. Scenario B – a global showdown – could be forced upon us, though. The winning of which seems very improbable to me. The costs would be immense. It’s the old question: socialism or barbarism?

A Green New Deal would bring the state, the capitalists and the unions to a table. The central item of the Deal would be the ecological and social reconstruction of the US. The population of the United States is roughly 300 million, so we’d theoretically be dealing with 600,000 neighbourhoods, 15,000 boroughs or towns, 300 regions and 30 territories. As the territorial distribution of the population isn’t homogeneous and various geographical factors come into play, the effective numbers will be somewhat different.

The creation of 600,000 sustainable neighbourhoods based on micro-agro subsistence might cost $5 million each (not including the costs of resettling suburbanites), totalling $3.6 trillion. The establishment of lively town centres might cost $20 million each, another $300 billion. (In some towns, almost no investment would be necessary, in others hundreds of millions.) All in all, we’re talking about $4 trillion that must be invested over a number of years. Additional investment should go into the reanimation of the (sub)continental train-system. The creation or relocation of regional and territorial industries along-side train tracks would also cost billions of dollars. The insulation of buildings, local energy plants, eco-design of industrial goods would create a final micro-industrial boom before terminal stagnation.

This promise could be important to get some of the more enlightened (green) capitalists on board. As costs of living could be reduced by these schemes without any loss of quality of life, the Green New Deal programme could easily be financed out of current wages – let’s say ten percent. Of course, it could also be financed by taxes or the national debt, but this would only distort the situation, defer payment and trigger inflation. In a sense, the proletariat of the US would found a virtual cooperative that would be able to determine the use-value aspect of capitalist development.

The organisation of this cooperative would be the existing state, or the tripartite Green New Deal Board running the programme of ecosocial reconstruction – in real-political terms this is the state. The annual wages of the 100 million US workers currently total $3.7 trillion, so ten percent of this would be $370 billion a year. Within ten years, the programme could be financed without creating a new debt bubble and risking runaway inflation. Realistically, the programme would start out with a three percent contribution from current wages, increasing annually thereafter until it reaches 20 percent or more, after ten to twenty years. Industry, of course, would profit from lower wages – but it would have to accept social direction regarding what it produces (no more cars, but trains, buses, micro-agro trucks, cheap medicines etc.).

At the same time, a part of the Green New Deal fund would have to go towards similar projects in poor countries (in Africa, South America, Asia) to reduce the planetary divisions within the working class – the only hope for forming planetary-scale institutions for living harmoniously. At least $100 billion would have to be paid in ‘reparations’ each year in return for the flow of resources from global South to North over the past 500 years (in addition to current foreign aid of $20 billion). This figure seems insufficient, but if we assume that all other nations follow the US-example, poverty on the planet could be eradicated within a few years. What the currently poorer countries need, however, must be worked out more concretely.

The idea at the heart of the Green New Deal is that the goose that lays golden eggs should not be killed before it has laid its last egg. This follows Marx’s insight that the basis of a new form of society must always be created within the old. We cannot postulate an instant alternative to capitalism, jumping over the old mechanisms from one day to the next. Revolutions are just not feasible any more in our complex social systems. So, the Green New Deal programme outlined above must have the form of a genuine inter-class compromise: (small) profits will be made, wages will be earned, a green business-cycle is engineered.

It is obvious that we (waged workers, farmers and so on) lay all of the golden eggs, but at the moment we are only able to lay them under the existing conditions, not under some imaginary non-value conditions. The Green New Deal is largely non-confrontational, laws are mostly obeyed and expropriations few and far between. Property, as long as it doesn’t self-destruct (as is happening in the current financial crisis), is respected. The future is not conquered, but bought. The content of the Deal – and only this makes it an interesting deal for the working class – is the construction of the material bases of a postcapitalist global society.

For the capitalists it’s a desperate Deal, but considering the other options, it could still be their best. They always said that they’d be dead in the long run. And who knows how it’ll really turn out? It could still happen that we chip in those three percent or ten percent and get ripped off. There’s that risk in any real deal. At the end of the programme, the ex-working classes would have the material basis of the three spheres of the commons at their disposal. We can throw off the chains of waged labour, the law of value and the rule of the oligarchs (as persons, they can be absorbed into the general population and live happily ever after)…

If all goes well, of course! I can understand that my proposal of real dealing as opposed to staunch resistance looks like a form of defeatism. This is not the case. It presupposes a position of strength. To get into such a position seems optimistic, at the moment. But: there is no alternative.

Read the first part here or download the whole article (PDF). It was first published in Turbulence 5.

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