The Rad Left

2021.01.03 by Just Mason

As we close the book on 2020, I can’t help feeling a bit conflicted. Sure, I’m thrilled that Donald Trump will be leaving the White House in roughly 432 hours (although I doubt we’ve heard the last of him). I’m also, like many humans, looking forward to COVID-19 going the way of smallpox; however, at current vaccination rates, it may take years before the virus is eradicated, and I can go pretend I know how to play pool again. In our haste to leave one shitshow of a year behind, I think we should consider whether our disgust for 2020 is simply lending a favorable distortion to another world of shit ahead.

In addition to the persistence of the global pandemic and the likelihood of Trump continuing to whip his followers into a frenzy by holding rallies or getting a show on OANN, we have other major concerns looming on the horizon. One is the likely economic collapse we face as President-elect Joe Biden takes office. The Republican Party has made an art out of creating a delayed economic downturn with which the Democratic successors to Republican Presidents must contend, and this one promises to be rough. On top of the usual tactics of giving tax breaks to the wealthy, subsidizing industry and expanding the already insane military budget while in control of government, then quickly changing course to cry out about the deficit as soon as Democrats take over, we also have record joblessness, unprecedented indebtedness, an over-burdened health care system, and numerous other issues that require precisely the kind of social programs which will be roundly rejected by Republican deficit hypocrites in the Senate, whether or not Democrats can eke out wins in both Georgia runoffs. Regardless of the outcome in the Senate, or the severity of the recession we face, be assured that the Republican Party will oppose any and all aid packages proposed by Democrats, except perhaps those which drastically favor Wall Street over Main Street.

Another major issue is the ever-present, overarching specter of anthropogenic climate change. This wicked problem is affected by virtually every aspect of human society, and even if the most progressive policies proposed by the incoming administration were to be (miraculously) implemented, the U.S. would still be a far cry from “the business of leading the world in global warming”, as Biden recently claimed would be the case. Perhaps the most fundamental reason that our leaders, here in the U.S. and abroad, consistently fail to address climate change in any meaningful way is that the predominant philosophy governing the behavior of all major players is neoliberalism. Worse even than the purely theoretical free market capitalism, neoliberalism is essentially the subsidizing of otherwise free market exploitation, not only allowing but incentivizing a profit-over-people approach to business across private sectors. Economist Robert Pollin describes the contradiction concisely in the following passage from 2020’s Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal:

“[W]hat really occurs in practice under neoliberalism is that governments allow giant corporations to freely pursue profit opportunities to the maximum extent. But then government fixers arrive on the scene to bail out the corporations whenever their profits might be threatened. This amounts to socialism for capitalists, and harsh, free market capitalism for everyone else.”

When applied to the issue of climate change, this neoliberal approach leads to such ineffective measures as carbon taxation, in which fossil fuel giants may simply pay the “cost-of-doing-business” in order to pursue their destructive profit-seeking behavior. Furthermore, governments are dissuaded from enacting strong policies prohibiting the exploitation of resources and externalization of costs, which are at the core of the fossil fuel industry’s business practices. What this portends for the future of our planet is a grim scenario in which greenhouse gas emissions will be allowed to continue more or less unabated (while in a few regions such as Europe fossil fuels are gradually replaced by renewable energy sources), throughout much of the world, with the carbon taxes paid by the extractors dwarfed by the externalized costs to public health, species diversity, and the quality of life of our descendants.

Neoliberal capitalism has had deleterious effects on many aspects of human society, from increased income and wealth inequality to the erosion of democratic institutions wrought by endless amounts of money being infused into the political process. For these reasons alone, we should reject the insanity of such an economic system; but for the future of our planet and the sake of our children, we simply must.