A War of Position

admin April 6th, 2009

I realize that I have neglected this space for a week or so now, but with good reason. I have tried to give myself some time away from the computer having finished my Thesis and, instead, have been working diligently in the garden.

But rainy days give me the opportunity to return again.

Some good news, an article I co-authored was recently published in the Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society. It is titled “Relocating Energy in the Social Commons.” At its heart is a critical analysis of unaddressed issues of scale and justice in the changing energy landscape. Polished visions of huge turbines in untouched green pastures are spreading, however, this future simply offers a trade of inputs. Our relationship with energy, the hierarchical systems that produce it and the blind ways in which we consume it are left intact.

Here is the abstract:

Climate change, rising energy costs, and other dilemmas raise the prospect for major change in energy-ecology-society relations. Two prominent proposals for change include: a nuclear power renaissance; and mega-scale renewable energy development. Both suggest that modern society will receive a rising stream of less CO2-rich kilowatt-hours, so that increased energy consumption and economic growth can continue. The article doubts these CO2 claims and finds both options lead to deepening unsustainability and environmental injustice. A third approach is proposed. A new institutional and community strategy called a Sustainability Energy Utility. The SEU looks to reduce energy use and seeks to support remaining energy needs by community-scale renewables. To accomplish deep energy change, the authors show how an SEU can move society from an energy commodity to energy commons regime. Commonwealth economy and community trusts are key means to significant change: a future commons is offered as the more appropriate strategy.

It can be found through SagePub here

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admin March 16th, 2009

On Friday I turned in a copy of my Thesis to my chair, and today she emailed me, saying “I think you’ve go it!” There are minor notes for my Introduction and once I’ve seen this, I will be posting the Introduction here. It provides a good overview of the impetus for this work, my underlying goals and, of course, an outline of the argument.

I have settled on a title though. Radical Green Populism: Environmental Values in DIY/Punk Communities.

Tags: Radical Green Populism, thesis

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admin March 9th, 2009

It never fails to astound me how out-of-touch the press-hound movement activists and scholars of the 1960s and 70s can be. Case in point, Barbara Ehrenreich & Bill Fletcher Jr.’s essay in the Nation, Reimagining Socialism.

The piece is a short wail and moan tract that reads something like this: This isn’t the way it was supposed to be, there was supposed to be a socialist revolution. It was supposed to be easy. Well capitalism has entered a crisis stage and ‘we’ don’t have a plan. ‘We’ need a plan. Solidarity is important, an emotional core to some larger plan that will come into being. It ends,

And we have to be serious, because the capitalist elites who have run things so far have forfeited all trust or even respect, and we–progressives of all stripes–are now the only grown-ups around. (Source)

Where to begin? There seem to be two key issues worth addressing. First, the notion that there was ‘supposed’ to be anything. Second, the view that ‘we’ don’t have a plan; who is this ‘we,’ because you and I do not have a plan, Ehrenreich and Fletcher, but me and my friends do. In fact, that is a whole lot of ‘planning’ going on that you appear unsurprisingly unaware of.

First, the idea that ‘something’ was supposed to happen. No, friends, ‘it’ doesn’t happen, you do. In fact, the implication that the flawed logic of capitalism would inevitably create a situation where, as you put it, ‘seizure’ would occur is rather lazy. Contradictions in capitalism create crises, but not the wedge needed to exploit the crises. Indeed, you cannot wait for crises, you must be prepared for them and then push for them.

So, ok, ‘we’ weren’t prepared. But who is ‘We’? I assume you are speaking to ‘socialists’ and yet, right there at the end (in the quote above) you try to link with ‘progresives of all stripes.’ But what about those progressives that take issue with activists of the 1960s and 70s stealing energy and legitimacy from today’s activism with tracts like this. You’re right, YOU don’t have a plan. Dr. Eherereich, your United Professional, a union for “white collar workers” whose mission is to “protect and preserve the American middle class,” is probably not in any shape to create the necessary institutions to support deep, radical social change. Protect the middle class in what way, support what sort of habits? The kind spread through your most beloved channels of communication: The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine and, clearly, The Nation? Yes, the advertisements for handmade hardwood kayaks, escapist ‘eco-sensitive’ log cabins and rare books are exactly what Marxist thinkers had in mind when calling for a class consciousness capable of elucidating a vision: protected white people who pat themselves on the back for things that took place a four decades ago.

The authors’ assertion that there is no plan so clearly demonstrates the disengagement and false radicalism of the Dinosaurs of the Left. No, there is no plan that includes your Audi with the ‘Fuck Bush’ sticker on it. There is also no plan that includes Obama, as you seem to suggest. In fact, this socialists support for Obama is perfect: the co-option of the farm workers’ ‘Si Se Puede’ lends radical cred to an aging hippie’s dream: ‘Yes We Can’ while sipping a nice Bordeaux in a Brooklyn loft, feeling so pleased that the soft revolution, using familiar methods in the normal routes of economic and political power rather than the ugly yet turgid with potential route it is more likely to take. I have gotten more upset about this elsewhere there (see Bakunin in NYC Part I and Part II and some of the document scans below), I will stop right there.

Fortunately, in a reply to Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher’s (E&F) that also appears in the Nation, Rebecca Solnit seems to understand the apparent willful ignorance of their position. She first points out that the authors assume that because they haven’t seen it, it hasn’t happened, pointin to multiple uprising and challenges that DO have a plan, out side of the US including the Zapatistas, Argentineans and South Africans.

Most importantly, she notes that there are changes happening here in the US. I’ll let her speak,

“Do we have a plan, people?” Ehrenreich and Fletcher ask. We have thousands of them, being carried out quite spectacularly over the past few decades, for gardens and childcare co-ops and bicycle lanes and farmers’ markets and countless ways of doing things differently and better. The underlying vision is neither state socialist nor corporate capitalist, but something humane, local and accountable–anarchist, basically, as in direct democracy. The revolution exists in little bits everywhere, but not much has been done to connect its dots. We need to say that there are alternatives being realized all around us and theorize the underlying ideals and possibilities. But we need to start from the confidence that the revolution has been with us for a while and is succeeding in bits and pieces. Enlarged and clarified, it could answer a lot of the urgent needs the depression brings.

Well put Rebecca Solnit. There are so many thing happening and it’s not like people aren’t trying to theorize them. Indeed, that has been the focus of my work for he last five years or so. It has also been the work of, to take a small slice, Uri Gordon, Chris Spannos,Chris Carlsson and, one author E&F do mention, Michael Albert. All of these people are working on those connections, so am I, so are lots of people.

Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean its not there. Indeed, a big problem is even gaining the ability to see it. To return to the beginning, part of the problem is a social movement theory and a liberal press circuit that romanticizes a largely irrelevant 1960s and 1970s. The fact that contemporary radicals, usually homogenized and labeled the Movement of Movements (MM), spent a significant portion of its early career distancing itself from the 1960s and 70s is telling. In the analytical disorder of the early 1990s, these movements were, to a certain extent, ignored; handled with the theoretical and methodological practices of the past. They did not begin to receive innovative attention until November of 1999 when images of anarchists in Seattle were seen around the world.

Since then, social movement literature has attempted to embrace these communities and movements. However, mainstream approaches have generally only modified old models or forced the movements to ‘fit’ with established theories. Early literature frequently homogenized the MM, sidelining its constituent submovements and communities; they were see as peripheral, tangential to the presumed coherent ‘movement’ that made headlines in Seattle.

Now, ten years after Seattle, the problem persists. Now more than ever there is a real need for relevant theory; activist communities are still plagued by confusion and frustration. Richard Flacks observes,

Tags: Chris Spannos, left, Movement of Movements, relevance, social movment theory, Uri Gordon

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admin March 6th, 2009

Everyday I am astounded to discover the strange and unexpected threads of journalism that are working their way into the ‘normal’ press circut. In the past four months, two of these have surprised me in particular: the running dialogue surrounding the decriminalization of marijuana and the depth of the discourse on ‘green’ social change. The marijuana debate may be something I will handle later, when the tone of the debate becomes more established; here I want to make a point about the notion of an American Green Revolution. (This article links the issues, though not to any real productive end).

Less that two decades ago, the idea that non-polluting energy sources would figure so prominently in forecasts, plans, and proposals was a fantasy. However, for all the celebration of the prominence of ‘green’ energy sources, another pervasive aspect of the debate has been overlooked: scale.

Indeed, virtually all popular discussion about the future of renewable energy is predicated upon the assumption of centralized generation by large-scale systems. For example, wind power is symbolized by images of massive farms, huge turbines dotting the coastline or prairie by both sides of the debate. Wind resisters cite noise, bird mortality, insufficient transmission capacity and, most commonly, view pollution in their arguments against farm construction; wind supporters muster ornithologists, acoustics experts and artists in their defense. The scale of the farms is not part of the debate. The same is true for nearly all of the most popular renewable energy systems. Geothermal, hydropower, hydrogen and bioenergy, the main renewables supported by US DOE grants, are all large-scale projects based upon a centralized generation paradigm, either because grants push research in that direction or because of the nature of the source, as in the case of geothermal.

In this sense, the renewable systems touted as saviors of modern society, glorified and worshipped through ad campaigns full of calming, green vistas, have more in common with coal power plants of the past than any energy independence utopia of the future. They continue the tradition of monolithic energy systems, bringing with them the attendant social and political characteristics, the political economy of the energy of the past. Langdon Winner refers to the social and political dimensions associated with a given physical energy technology as an energy regime.

To provide the variety of goods and services that sustain then, modern societies have created elaborate sociotechnical systems that link production, distribution, and consumption in coherent patterns. Within such systems, the activities of work, managcment, finance, planning, marketing, and the like are coordinated in highly developed institutional arrangements. These institutions, together with the physical technologies they employ, can well be characterized, borrowing a term from political theory, as “regimes” under which people who use energy are obliged to live. Such regimes of instrumentality have meaning for the way we live not unlike regimes in politics as such. It is possible to examine the full range of structural features contained in a particular sociotechnical arrangement and to identify the qualities of its rules, roles, and relationships.
(Winner 1982: 271)

The energy regime of the past, and the one large-scale renewables stand to replicate, is characterized by “extremely large, complex, centralized, and hierarchically managed” systems reliant on, and constantly reenforcing, a social contract that is predicated upon a highly developed technocrat class, the political will to support them and the positioning of ‘energy users’ as ‘energy consumers,’ purchasing from an amorphous energy system, “black boxes – input/output devices whose internal structure is of no particular public concern” (Winner 1982: 273;272). Winner observes that cost reductions offered by economies of scale has generated tactic support for the continuation this energy regime. Indeed, as the US electrical utility system became more centralized, the political system expanded to support it. The government response to public outcry over monopolistic utilities was a large, complex and hierarchically managed set of government programs, namely the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural Electrification Administration. The cost reductions of economies of scale meant these programs only helped to reenforce the physical and social support structures of a centralized energy paradigm through construction of massive grid networks and generation facilities. Bundled with the spread of these massive physical systems came social systems, a subliminal indoctrination that energy systems only come in ‘extra-large.’

Regime Obesity

There should be little doubt that the relatively quick realignment of social systems in order to better support a centralized energy regime is directly linked to modern notions of affluence, that is, that ‘living well’ is being materially secure with high rates of consumption. Indeed, industry lobbyists and politicians rely on images of wealthy suburban families and the fabled ‘American dream’ to encourage support for the maintenance and expansion of these regimes. This wealth-energy association sets up a kind of feedback loop: the physical processes that produce material wealth are reliant on obese energy regimes and continued growth of output; production interests push for the resources and demand needed to grow (through political action and advertising), political and consumer advertising campaigns create and reenforce social norms encouraging increased consumption in the pursuit of material wealth; increased demand encourages expansion of the physical processes that produce material wealth, and around again. In this cycle, energy systems are a means to an end; the focus is on the product rather than production. Energy is commodified and efficiency, quantity and profitability become its central benchmarks.

While this chain of events and the reflexive interplay of the material and the social are clearly visible in contemporary contexts, they have their roots in the very birth of modernity. Beginning in the Industrial Revolution, dramatic scientific and technological breakthroughs meant (for the West) longer, disease-free lives whose sustenance relies less on soil and water than chemistry and biology (Byrne, et al 2002:271). Further, more recent advances in information technology have not only collapsed space and time but also reenforced the notion that modernity (and all the material benefits it bestows) stem from this unfettered pursuit of a ‘knowledge society.’

We have inherited the energy regimes of the Industrial Revolution, the “alliance of science, capitalism and carbon power,” and we must see them as part of this history of Western knowledge production and application (Byrne, et al. 2002:267). The separation of means and ends mentioned above is simply an extension of Western civilization’s veneration of objectivity and abstraction, central tenants of its ‘reason as religion’ approach to knowledge (Alvares 1992:74). The material benefits of a ‘knowledge society’ mask and override its other impacts; this is particularly true of the social order it engenders.

Lewis Mumford famously noted the dramatic reorganization of the social order around these principles of quantification: “Quantitative production has become, for our mass-minded contemporaries, the only imperative goal: they value quantification without qualification” (Mumford 1961:57). Thus the measure of an energy system is quantitative rather than qualitative; it is judged in terms of volume and efficiency rather than social or ecological impacts, let alone questions of ethics.

The result is alienation from energy. In Marxist terms, the social contract with energy we have inherited conditions us to judge energy in quantitative terms, that is, price per unit (exchange-value). However, when we compare the exchange-values of energy sources, we are necessarily assuming they are comparable in terms of their inherent use-value. However, when we speak of needing ‘energy’ to heat our house, get to work and run our TVs, it is not oil, gasoline or electricity we want, but warm houses, vehicular motion and entertainment, ‘real things’ characterized by their end-use, to borrow a phrase from Lovins (Lovins 1977:39). The user-as-consumer aspect of the Obese Regime implores us to simply seek the cheapest input to achieve the desired goal.

Thus, when the user/consumer lines up energy sources in terms of their exchange-value in order to choose based on price per unit, they abstract the use-value of those sources. Ten watts produced with coal has the same exchange-value as one watt produced by wind; coal is power is cheaper. The fact that the processes that produced those watts are qualitatively different is unaccounted for in the calculations.

Green Titans

The predominant energy systems of the past 100 years are part of an energy regime, a particular configuration of material, social, economic, political and psychological patterns and institutions. This particular regime is typified by its complex, centralized, and gigantic physical technologies and the technocracy, commodification, and hierarchy that support and reinforce their primacy. There is constant reciprocity among these factors, each one deepening the strength and logic of the others.

Enter renewable energy systems.

Given the breadth and depth of its influence, there should be little surprise that the Obese Regime would draw renewable energy technologies into its fold. This should not necessarily be thought of as a sinister act; modern society is so ingrained with the logic of the regime that it’s difficult to even imagine a new arrangement, let alone construct one.

Consequently, renewable energy systems are ushered in in the same, large-scale, centralized and complex form as their predecessors. The technophilic awe inspired by massive coal plants and nuclear reactors in previous decades is replicated in visions of vast wind farms, huge tidal capture systems, lonely desert solar arrays, a complex hydrogen infrastructure, and so on. The old energy regime is maintained in that we are simply exchanging our sources, in the same extra-large form, while leaving the rest of the Obese configuration intact. The unique opportunity to question our relationship with energy offered by the decline of fossil fuels is lost in a seamless swap of inputs.

There is, however, a critical problem raised by the incorporation of renewable technologies into an Obese regime. The inherent commodification of an Obese regime not only alienates the user/consumers from the energy production process but also the resources consumed in that process. While the physical technologies of the past did rely on organic sources, these were discrete inputs, that is, non-renewable sources. A commodified renewable energy not only maintains the alienation of the production process, but also its resources, in this case the Earth’s renewable, organic and omnipresent resources. The problem is not that the seemingly ceaseless march of commodification continues into the realm of basic ecosystem services, but that the economic logic of the Obese regime that accompanies commodification stands to erect barriers around these most pervasive of resources, these renewable energy commons.

Some might argue that by their very nature these resources cannot be appropriated or privatized and, thus, are not susceptible to the same capitalist economic logic as fossil fuels. To be sure, it is true that, for example, wind resources are not technically excludable, in that you cannot prevent others from using them, and that they are not technically rival, in that one person’s use does not affect the ability of others to do the same. However, when government grants, investment portfolios and sheer technophilia support the development of wind farms over distributed, small, home-based turbines, the cost incentives for research effectively privatizes the commons. It is privatization through economies of scale, appropriation through (unbalanced) competition.

Here we can see clearly the issue before us: the shift to renewable technologies is seen by many as inevitable, however, these technologies are no magic bullet. They are not any more likely to free us from the technocratic managerialism of centralized energy regimes than clean coal technologies are. Of course, they do have the potential to be implemented in a decentralized manner. But it must be remembered that renewable technology “can also become a corporate technology – the bases for solar power utilities, space satellites, and an ‘organic’ agribusiness comparable only to the highly chemicalized one so prevalent today” (Bookchin 1980: 131).

But, there are, of course, bright spots. I hope to point out some of these in the next few weeks. The first, and the shortest, is Smart Metering

Google’s jump on the Smart Metering bandwagon has popularized the idea that, gasp, we should be aware of how much energy we use (Info on Google and Smart Metering and Smart Grids here and here and here). While many parts of the nation are far from achieving widespread use of such meters, it is a step in the right direction. Establishing a way to put people in touch with their energy usage can break down the user/consumer barrier and instill a sensitivity necessary for further steps.

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admin February 11th, 2009

This is it, this is the keystone in this argument.

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