Why don't you like markets?
When i give my talk on how the global climate justice movement contains the knowledge and practices to save us from global climate chaos, and in fact are doing it already, environmental studies people often ask me, "You seem to have an aversion to markets, why?"
Thanks to Gopal Dayaneni, and the social movements, including the good folks at Global Exchange, this has been clarified for me - it's not all markets per se. It's capitalist markets and continued or increased penetration of the commodification of the sacred which the movements i work with and support are against, primarily because capitalist markets are fundamentally exploitative. It is possible to envision markets that are not fundamentally based on the commodification of nature, and on exploitative, unequal, unjust relationships, and i would like to see us collectively as a global society build on those solutions.
The problems with the continued or increased commodification of the sacred should be self-explanatory.
And then solutions? if not cap and trade and markets then what?
The Impoverishment of Our Collective Imagination and Political Will
The people who ask me, as if surprised, about what they perceive as my aversion to markets, are in fact misunderstanding: what I have is a deep and committed aversion to exploitation and injustice.
They also seem to believe that cap-and-trade is the only solution to global climate chaos that can work and they are hell bent on pushing - shoving - that policy down people's throats. What surprises me is the fact that so many environmental studies professors believe it. Unfortunately many of the so-called big environmental organizations and individuals have a fundamental conflict of interest. Many of these organizations stand to make money and profit off of a cap-and-trade and/or offsetting scheme.
In terms of mechanisms in the US that are based on some monetary incentive or penalty, but that do not increase the commodification of life and that hopefully do not create such perverse incentives such as the current options being debated at the UNFCCC proceedings, there are some more progressive solutions on the table (tax and dividend, e.g.).
If in all of human history we have only had this particular kind of capitalist market system for less than 200 years why do we think that we can't do better and/or do different?
Why would anyone think that any one single solution could ever begin to solve a problem that is as complex, far-reaching, wide-ranging and path-dependent and diffuse as global climate disruption and chaos?
Even still - we can do better. We must. Given the amazing, powerful, creative and just minds and imaginations that we have as a global human society, I trust that we can: that alternative workable solutions that meet the scale of the problems we have created already do exist.
They will be many, they will be different, they will be context-sensitive and appropriate - and that will be their power. They already are (for more, see an earlier letter to 1Sky, "Grassroots Organizing Cools the Planet.")
We can do better than just leave it to a market to work its invisible hand.
The Killing Death Grip of the Invisible Hand
And, If you happen to be a community that has been on the sharp, killing end of that invisible hand's stick, or of the weapon of mass destruction that's in the other hand that killed your people that no one talks about, then you know that capitalist greed fueled:
the expansion of the transatlantic slave trade and the horrific, insane practices that made possible markets in their commodified bodies and the commodity markets in what was produced by their labor, including cotton and sugar;
the genocide and expropriation of native lands and colonization in general fueled and grew the commodity markets in gold and silver;
the trafficking of poor irish, italian, polish, portuguese women and of poor chinese and indian men across the pacific in the same slave boats that moved Africans across the atlantic fueled and exacerbated and the markets for their labor or what they produced: cloth, clothes, railroads, electronics, food;
the destruction of forests worldwide is the result of the growth in global commodity markets for timber and pulp and paper;
the extinctions and near-extinctions of beaver, manatees, sea turtles for their meat, furs and other commodity markets;
increased asthma and childhood developmental harm in particular (racialized, poor) communities for markets in energy;
the destruction of traditional farmers, their subsequent displacement into being farmworkers and exposure to the effects of deathly poisons for global agribusiness and the development of markets in foodstuffs-become-commodities like corn, wheat, rice, soy;
the ever-increasing wealth gap and its disastrous, perverse consequences ..
Really do i have to go on?
This is why WEB DuBois, in 1910, wrote that the failure of the US democratic project was due to the combination of colonialism, racism and capitalism, and that its primary effects were felt on Black and Brown bodies and the natural environment. True then and still true now.
it is also why it is imperative that we look to the communities that have survived in these systems of domination and subordination, that have created solutions that uphold the sacredness of Mother Earth and of rights and dignity, because often, in those communities, the solutions and survival mechanisms are complex in their ability to tie and re-wind human individual and collective well-being with the restoration of the natural world.
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