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PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.
In New York on Friday the Left Forum will begin. It's been going on for many years,
and it's an assembly of, this year, more than 1,000 speakers on various panels dealing with
issues. But the overall theme is ecology, economy, transformation of economy, and transformation
of ecology.
Now joining us as a member of the board of Left Forum is Nancy Holmstrom. She's professor
emerita of philosophy at Rutgers University. She edited The Socialist Feminist Project
and co-authored Capitalism, For and Against: A Feminist Debate. And she joins us from New
York.
Thanks for joining us, Nancy.
NANCY HOLMSTROM: Thank you for having me.
JAY: So talk a little bit, first of all, about the main theme and why it's the main theme.
HOLMSTROM: Well, it should be the main theme. This is really the first time that the Left
Forum has focused on the ecological crisis. Not just have they not focused on it, but
we have given as a conference pretty scant attention, I would say, to this issue. In
all the years that I've been involved with Left Forum, and certainly social scholars
before that, there have been only two plenary speakers in all these years who've had, you
know, a mainly environmental focus into their work.
JAY: And why do you think that is?
HOLMSTROM: Well, that's what actually I'm going to be addressing in my introductory
remarks at the opening plenary on Friday night.
I think that part of the reason is psychological. The news is so awful from the environmental
field, with some years ago the UN report, the ecosystems report, said that two-thirds
of the resources of the world were either degraded or being destroyed. And just last
month, the percentage of carbon dioxide in the air has gone up to 400, which has not
been seen in millions of years. So it certainly should be something that we should be preoccupied
with. But it's such awful news, it is so deeply disturbing, sad, and in fact terrifying--like,
if you see that film Chasing Ice, you see the glaciers melting, breaking away in real
time.
JAY: But you've been dealing at the Left Forum with issues of war and economic crisis and
unemployment. I mean, some of the issues that get dealt with are pretty bad. It's not like
it's a good news--it's not, like, a feel-good conference up until now.
HOLMSTROM: Right. But anyway, I think this is about existence. It's--I just said partly
it's psychological, none of us really want to face it. But in addition, we on the left
have, as you said, spent years and years studying and struggling about all these other very
big disturbing issues, and to take on the environmental issue seems--you know, it would
require a shift in our expertise, in our skills, you know, our concerns, and we have, you might
say, sunk our intellectual and political capital in these other areas. And it would have to
be, it seems, like taking on something even larger.
But I think there are also political reasons. I think that this is an issue which affects
everybody. Rich and poor need clean air, clean water. And I think the left feels that there
is a danger of these more particular issues of injustice and suffering being somehow swamped
and ignored in this huge humanistic cross-class issue and think that that's a mistake because
all those injustices, all those inequalities, all those miseries are only exacerbated by
the environmental crisis. Even though the rich as well as the poor need to breathe,
they also profit from its depredations, and meanwhile they can buy biofuels for their
SUVs while people go hungry, they can keep buying water. And so they can insulate themselves.
So it doesn't affect them as much. It mostly affects poor and working-class people. And
they're the ones who have mostly been organizing around the world against environmental depredations.
Anyway, so that's a concern of the left which I think should not be a concern, should not
take us away from really facing and addressing environmental issues and connecting them to
the economy, because it's the nature of our economy which is causing this environmental
crisis.
JAY: You would think that from the point of view of a conference and people who are looking
for transformation, particularly of capitalism--that's more or less the positioning of the Left Forum,
I think--that, I mean, very little is--more reveals how capitalism can't deal with this
kind of crisis than the climate change problem, the eco problem. You know, it's--like, a couple
of years ago there was a few--maybe even around 2008, there was--the media was filled with
apocalyptic messages about climate change. And I think when they really looked at the
problem, they realized that you can't fix, deal with climate change and maintain the
current way things are owned and the way business is done and the way politics is done, and
the elites decided, well, we ain't going there, we're not going to make such fundamental changes
if that's what it takes. But you would think that kind of question would be ripe for the
Left Forum.
HOLMSTROM: Well, you and I agree on this, then. I think that's exactly right. I think
if you--I don't think there is any better argument against capitalism than the ecological
crisis and the fact that it's getting worse, not better. And all measures that they have
tried to put forward as solutions, whether it's a simpler life, just opting for a simpler
life, or green taxes, green jobs, etc., just have not succeeded and it's just getting worse.
I think that is the most powerful argument against capitalism.
Certainly the form of capitalism that we have--some would say we can have a greener capitalism.
I'm very skeptical about that. I think at the Left Forum there will be people who think
that we can do something within capitalism, but many, many others who think that we cannot,
that the crisis indicates yet again that we need to move to a system which is not based
on accumulation, accumulation, and profit.
JAY: Right. Some people I expect to make the argument that for ordinary working people
who are losing their jobs and losing their houses and their kids can't go to college
and--or if they are, they're burdened by terrible debt, will argue that, you know, climate change--and
this seems a little abstract compared to all of that, 'cause, you know, Americans aren't
getting--don't seem to be getting hit with it so much, although some of the weather disturbances
and floods and things have certainly--could be connected to it. But--.
HOLMSTROM: No, I think you're right, I think you're right that people are struggling and
it doesn't affect their immediate lives so much. But increasingly it does. I mean, in
the United States and other parts of the world, they've already been--you know, there are
ecological refugees, millions of ecological refugees. But now there are droughts not only
in North Africa but in the Midwest. There was a headline just the other day in The Times.
The rising sea levels threaten New York City. And Hurricane Sandy showed it. I saw the Hudson
River rise and, you know, come over the banks, you know, and go back, you know, a couple
of blocks. That's pretty striking. You know, Pace University, where we're meeting, wasn't--you
know, it was affected. We weren't able to meet in the spring as we usually do. And that's--we're
meeting in June. So it's starting to get to us, too. There are people who are still homeless
because of Hurricane Sandy.
So I think that, you know, when Katrina happened, people didn't want to say that increased number
of hurricanes could be caused by global warming. Now it's harder to deny. I mean, people who
don't think that the forest fires raging in Colorado have anything to do with global warming,
you know, they're pretty marginal, I would hope, from any--certainly from any scientific
viewpoint.
JAY: Now, I know the Left Forum's grappled with this question for many years, and of
course lots of people have grappled with it for many years, but the question is is: even
if one says climate change might have felt abstract to people--and maybe it's less so
now--and questions like unemployment and such are more directly affecting people, the fact
is the left is not having great success mobilizing people on those issues either, issues of bread-and-butter
issues, at a time when there's the greatest crisis since the 1930s and, you know, chronic
unemployment, ridiculous levels of student debt.
Like, I was saying the other day to someone, like, I mean, how is there not some kind of
a bigger movement--I know there is some, but why isn't it bigger--students rejecting the
levels of debt? You have Quebec, where tuitions are way lower than they are in most of the
United States. Quebec students have far, far less debt, and yet hundreds of thousands of
people in the streets, and they actually won a political victory. You don't see it here.
Like, what is holding people back here?
HOLMSTROM: I think that neoliberalism, ideologically and practically, economically, has so devastated
people's consciousness and their organizations, unions, community groups, that people feel
they--and it's to a certain extent true--that collective decisions, collective solutions
are not available. We don't have the power.
Unions have been really, really anemic, most of them, in responding to the crisis. I mean,
a few unions here and there responded positively to Occupy and got the idea that they could
be more militant, but for the most part they did not.
So people feel powerless. And to a large extent they are. And there isn't the culture, the
more collectivist culture, more communal, solidaristic culture in the United States
that there is in other parts of the world. It's individualism, individualism, I should
solve this myself, it's my fault.
So, I mean, I think that--I mean, I wouldn't write us all off yet, but I think that the
United States is harder, just much harder, for objective reasons and cultural psychological
reasons.
But I think that if you look at history, I think that the labor movement or the civil
rights movement, any significant movement of social change that did occur in the United
States was a process. You know, there were attempts and failures and then other attempts
and failures, and, you know, then people gradually got more conscious. And so that's what I'm
hoping for here.
I think the Occupy movement was very, very significant. I mean, if you look at polls
like the Rasmussen poll, you know, a country like the United States, where socialism is
supposed to be a bad word and most people have always in the United States been trained
to think that, still it was surprising the numbers of people who were sympathetic to
the idea of socialism.
Capitalism is back on [snip] And once you really start focusing on capitalism and capitalism's
failure in the richest country in the world, in the history of the world, to satisfy most
[snip] needs--and more and more people are realizing the implications of our way of life
for their children and grandchildren's way of life, that is, the ecological damage that
is coming--I think capitalism will be more and more the center of attention. I think
that's [incompr.]
JAY: Okay. Thanks for joining us.
The Left Forum's on from June 7-9.
And tell us the website.
HOLMSTROM: www.leftforum.org. And Noam Chomsky's speaking on Saturday.
JAY: Okay. Great. Thanks for joining us, Nancy.
HOLMSTROM: Thank you so much. Bye.
JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.