posted over the pdxbikes mailing list, author and columnist Jim Kunstler wrote a piece titled, Commentary on the Flux of Events in which he outlines how the “economy” is not a static, external thing, but a dynamic relationship we ourselves make. it’s a cool idea, but i have to take issue with a few crucial points:
In America of 2003, our economic relations are based on incessant motoring, the servicing of motoring infrastructure, and commerce in foreign-made goods bought with hallucinated wealth.
hallucinated wealth is an interesting idea, but not quite on the mark. first, the wealth is real. the goods, the capital, and importantly the means of production which were built on the backs of poor people and people of color are quite tangible indeed, as is the historical reality of those elements being controlled by a truly boring and hideously ravenous white/male supremacist owning class. while cars and roads and gasoline and suchlike play a central role in the dominant political economy, they don’t drive it. (ahem.) rather, the economy is based on racism, sexism and other forms of exploitation that are crucial components of a centuries-old campaign of (dare i say imperialist) wealth accumulation Kunstler blanches in his introductory remarks.
let’s be clear. cars do indeed suck. car culture is 15 kinds of off-the-scale, very foul crap. yet Kunstler’s blame-it-on-the-car stance is, i think, misdirected. cars, and their sequella of fossil-fuel and asphalt madness, are indeed a crucial means by which capital screws people and the planet, but they are not the engine. it’s just as possible to exploit folks and rape the earth using bikes, solar power, wind, water, and such. just because a given technology may be less harmful for soil, air, oceans, and critters does not guarantee it’s use in a just or democratic fashion. that cop car coming to arrest you for the hemp? the bulldozer wreaking havoc on a pristine ecosystem? betcha a beer that tomorrow they’ll be running on “clean” fuel. scapping the car itself just is not going to help bring human rights, social justice, and environmental sanity. we have to scrap the system which uses the car for the nefarious and greedy project of expansion and accumulation it was carrying out long before the car was even in blueprints and which it will be carrying out (or trying to carry out) long after the car is a quaint memory.
let me be clear that “scap the system” here is short hand for a protracted process of naming, isolating, dethroning, and otherwise completely transforming particular institutions of governance and economic relations which are run by particular individuals. and this brings me to probably my greatest peeve with Kunstler’s piece: while i like that he says
The social institutions and commercial relations that used to add up to more than the sum of their parts — that is, living organisms called communities — lie in wreckage around us under a smokescreen of distracting infotainment.
i take issue with:
Meanwhile, Americans lead frantic lives of anxiety and depression in places that are not worth living in, with all our collective wealth invested in depreciating cars, appliances, gadgets, McHouses, and all our hard-won social capital squandered. We’ve indentured our work-lives to hyper-mega corporations who have little to no investment in our home places and no concern for our well-being.
well, i think it’s safe to say that some of us lead those kinds of lives and some of us don’t. some wealth is invested in the death culture, and some of it’s not. some folks’ lives are indentured to the big bad, and some are living against it in truly significant ways. more often that not, i think, many of us live a mix of these: sometimes we are indeed anxious, depressed, and indentured. and sometimes we are radically calm, ecstatically engaged, and unfettered by the financial ties to the man.
and here is where he really gets my undies in a bundle:
Since I am not a conspiratorialist, I don’t believe that these conditions were deviously imposed on us by cliques of scheming elitist villains. We’re completely responsible for adopting the behaviors that put us in this predicament. We’re a people who, for decades, haven’t been challenged by anything more serious than what TV channel to select. At least two generations have not moved themselves to rethink the assumptions underlying our economic behavior.
um, jim, where ya been dude? who taught you history? how did you just miss the widespread, diverse, deep-seated, lively, ass-kicking movements which did indeed rethink all kinds of assumptions underlying our economic behavior, as well as so many other assumptions. and not just that, they took that rethinking out into the street and made real change! “We” are not completely responsible for adopting the behaviors that put us here. Individuals who designed and fueled and maintained systems and institutions of exploitation are (and they of course continue to do so). think about the the low-income person of color you are blaming for their “behavior.” didn’t mean it that way? well, that’s the majority of the “we” you are talking about. you are blaming folks for driving a gas-guzzler and eating junk/fast food and buying crap they don’t need made in sweatshops and so on, but “we” would not be doing so absent a coherent economic project to limit options and define the landscape of goods and services in the most destructive terms.
people are not born wasteful and uncaring. those economic relations are socially enforced. toxic waste, oil spills, clearcutting, impoverishment, and mass imprisonment aren’t going to go away because we, having read guilt-pushing admonishments such as this, suddenly realize that we were so bad and will now stop buying junk and riding our bikes and recycling. they will stop because extremely powerful, yet relatively easily identifiable networks of rich white dudes whose greed makes these activities and others like them social imperatives will be unseated, defrocked, and otherwise made completely irrelevant. and despite their more recent decisions that it is politically more tenable to let some women and brown folks join the lower ranks of the club, these networks remain firmly entrenched.
Kunstler finishes off with this liberal (i.e. self-inflated) tone of derision and cynicism:
The saddest part of all this is that there is not one American political figure with the courage to inform our citizens that its about how you live, stupid.
first i have to ask, on which planet is this country you speak which has no political figures with such courage? i could never begin to name them all. every day, more are coming to the fore, borne from every kind of grassroots movement, union struggle, artistic collaboration, and school of liberation known to humans. for Kunstler, is a “political figure” someone with more power or stake in the “political” system, the bankruptcy that it is? second, it’s not about how i live or how you live or how we live. it’s about the particularly anti-democratic methods (imbued with generations of sexism, racism, homophobia, and class bias) that they use in governing and the exercise of social and economic control. third, look, jim: don’t call me (or my bike-riding, eco-freaky, struggling-for-justice, queer-as-fuck, radical-scholar, hard-working, disillusioned-but-joyful pals - or any of us for that matter) stupid. mmmk? k.
