The idea of a Green New Deal (GND) is born of this tension—and of the argu ment that the tension is unnecessary. Conflict between those emphasizing climate and those emphasizing jobs is damaging to both sides. It is not just that both are valuable and that there should be a compromise. For advocates of a GND, no compromise is needed. Stepping outside old and ideological arguments about the role of the federal government and the limits of public investment reveals ways to advance both climate and jobs agendas. Large-scale federal invest ment is key. Some stop there, but others suggest that deeper transformation is also needed and requires mobilization throughout society.
Climate change challenges the very future of human existence, and environmentalists are right to emphasize the dire situation we are in. But we will not meaningfully address this problem without also seriously addressing job loss and degradation. This is both a reality and a threat of damage to whole communities, Introduction craig calhoun and benjamin y. fong
O ver the last fifty years, concern about damage to the environment has grown dramatically. Air pollution, toxic waste, and depleted water supplies have all captured public attention. But increasingly, the focus of alarm has been human-caused climate change. During the same period, American capitalism has undergone a wrenching, multifaceted transformation. Deindustrialization, neoliberalism, globalization, and automation are its key words. Unions have been battered. Inequality has skyrocketed. Whole towns have died. Sadly, those fighting for jobs and those fighting for the environ ment have typically been at odds. Each side has argued that its issue demands priority. Climate change is an existential risk. But the loss of good jobs with benefits is, for many, an even more immediate disaster: for good reason, workers often think of climate activism as a middle-class luxury.
jeopardizing both the fabric of society and the capacity to believe in a good future. Climate change and the crisis of work and livelihoods are both urgent. Both are potentially devastating. And yet, although both have attracted the attention of activists and policymakers, neither have received the response they demand. Too often, moreover, a focus on one has seemed to come at the expense of theCallsother.for a GND are demands to overcome this impasse. They are demands, first, for action that takes seriously the scale of each threat, the human suffering it is already creating, and the likelihood of much worse. Second, and crucially, they are calls to meet both challenges at once. Indeed, the central appeal of the GND is not the boldness with which it addresses the existential threat of climate change but rather its crucial recognition that two crises of late capitalism—a crisis of nature and a crisis of work— must be addressed together, in one and the same movement, or they will not be addressed at all.
The severity and urgency of the climate crisis are increasingly, but very unevenly, shaping public consciousness. There is no longer dissent among serious scientists to give an excuse to wider denial of climate change. But controversy over response to climate change, sadly, has been integrated into culture wars and populist poli tics, even without outright denial. Donald Trump made mocking wind power a staple of his campaign speeches, suggesting farcically that it would mean losing TV reception if the wind died down in the middle of a favorite show. Strong climate action has been portrayed as a central government attack on the free dom of citizens, with restrictions on pollution and fossil fuel consumption derided alongside wearing masks to protect against the coronavirus or proposals for gun control. It’s all too easy, however, for environmentalists to focus on the issue of cli mate denialism because then they have the ultimately more straightforward task of raising consciousness rather than strategically thinking through and overcom ing the obstacles to an effective climate politics. Escalating climate disasters provide a steady drumbeat of evidence that the issue is undoubtedly real—that these are not just abstract predictions. As the New York Times put it, the evidence starts with “drought in the West fueling historic wildfires that send smoke all the way
2 Introduction
MULTIPLE URGENCIES
Introduction 3 to the East Coast” and continues with “parades of tropical storms lining up across the Atlantic to march destructively toward North America.” 1 But forcefully saying climate change is real is not by itself going to lead to climate action.
Struggling to get by on low wages or in precarious employment is every bit as immediate a challenge as coping with environmental damage. Heat waves and environmental disasters generate alarm among environmental activists, but they’re just some of the problems that face working people. Economic transformation may produce less passion but no less suffering or risk. The last fifty years have seen devastation from deindustrialization and related economic transformations. Neoliberal reforms have undermined public services. Yet at the same time, globalization and new technologies have improved many aspects of life for professionals and the upper and middle classes. Ironi cally, it was in this context that climate and environmental movements have grown—primarily among educated and well-off young people. Activists often celebrated industrial transformations that took jobs from workers and killed local communities, as Mindy Isser covers in this volume (chapter 8). They saw closure of polluting factories and mines as progress and did far too little to
As cataclysmic as climate change is becoming, action in response must none theless contend with a range of other priorities. For those who have lost work, finding a job is basic. For those unable to support their families, income is more urgent than ecology. Even for those staying tenuously afloat, the fear of sinking pushes other issues into the background. Small business owners understandably worry about going bankrupt. The coronavirus pandemic raises immediate pub lic health concerns. And there are many other issues too: debt, crime, police violence, paying for education. Many movements suffer from a tendency to assume their issues are immediately and obviously the most important and most pressing. Committed activists commonly think those not working in close solidarity with them simply have not understood the importance of their cause. This has been a particular issue for climate activism. Since climate change poses such a basic, existential challenge to humanity, this is understandable—indeed, motivational. But it is not helpful for either formulating strategy or building alliances. Climate activists are passionate because they feel so deeply the basic onto logical insecurity facing the human race.2 This has made it seem that any other view or focus for action is simply a mistake. But being unemployed or fearing material insecurity can be as profound an insecurity as facing climate change.
GND advocates stress that action against climate change need not mean sac rificing every other goal or need. Climate and environmental purists have long been committed to an ethic of personal sacrifice, austerity, and collective “degrowth.” This kind of activism is a great boon to business interests, which can simply counter that strong climate action must indeed mean killing jobs. It’s time for both unions and environmentalists to definitively move beyond the jobs versus the environment trap. To do so, we need to move out of the realm of cli mate science and into that of political economy.
Since deindustrialization gathered momentum in the 1970s, anxieties about the future of work have been widespread. They have also ebbed and flowed in mainstream public consciousness. New technologies and automation are sometimes the focus of attention, as with “microelectronics” in the 1980s and artificial intelligence early in this century. Globalization has recurrently inspired calls for protection against “unfair” foreign trade. This was a Democratic Party issue in the 1980s; Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) was a prominent voice. It has become more a Republican theme in the era of Donald Trump. Through all of this, there has been a steady transformation in patterns and conditions of work. Mining and manufacturing sectors have shed jobs. New jobs have been created in the service sector and logistics. But this description under states the depth and extent of change. Like the long transition from agriculture to industry, the neoliberal era has involved shifts in the kinds of communities in which workers lived, their relationships with nature, and their independence.4 It was not just ideology that changed but the underlying political economy. Where the rise of industrial employment helped bring well-paid jobs, work in a dein dustrialized economy has generally not been supported by unions, is not comparably well-compensated, and is less secure.
THE CRISIS AND TRANSFORMATION OF WORK
4 Introduction ensure a just transition for those who had worked in them or to create alternative economic opportunities for their communities.3 This was a gift to those who benefited from low business taxes, lax environmental regulation, and weak labor unions. They have promoted the notion that a strong climate response can only be an enemy of more jobs and better pay, reinforcing the wedge between envi ronmental and labor activists.
Introduction 5
Panic about automation has been recurrent. Automation increased throughout the industrial era. Deskilling was widespread. Rooted historically in the transition from craft to industrial production, with the division of labor Adam Smith praised, this accelerated in many fields as assembly lines controlled the pace of industrial work. Today automation has extended to management of long supply chains and significant parts of design processes. New technologies were an important part of industrial transformation in the late twentieth century. Robot hands replaced human hands for specific tasks, and computerized sys tems organized whole production processes—not just in individual factories but in supply chains managing the relations among design, production, and distribution on a global scale. This is a key reason why deals that companies struck with politicians in the name of job creation have typically been ineffective (or outright bogus). U.S. states and cities competed with each other to lure compa nies with tax breaks and other incentives. But the companies commonly employed far fewer workers as they ramped up investments in technology (see Harvey Molotch’s contribution on the illusory promises of job growth in chapter 10).
Technology mattered, but it was a tool of capital, not simply an independent driving force. After all, decisions had to be made to invest in automation. And decisions were also made not to invest in new lines of production that might have employed high-skilled workers. This was in part a conscious choice to shed the most unionized workers and those with the most knowledge of production processes. Making it easier to lay off industrial workers increased the rate at which U.S. jobs were lost to cheaper labor in other countries. As figure I.1 shows, through the fifty years of the neoliberal era, average wages stagnated while pro ductivity grew substantially and the income of the top 1 percent grew even more. This crisis, described in detail in Stephanie Luce’s contribution to this vol ume (chapter 5), is not one of masses of people out in the street but rather of the vast majority living paycheck to paycheck, grinding away at unsatisfying jobs with little hope of advancement.5 The question is not just how many jobs there are but how good those jobs are: how satisfying and how well-compensated. Of course, new jobs are always being created—and were even during years of peak deindustrialization. But overwhelmingly, these are not as well paid or secure as those lost in unionized industries. Nearly full employment masks the disappearance of well-paid working-class jobs, the hollowing out of the middle class, and the rise of a precarious “gig” economy and prevalence of hourly jobs, often without health insurance.
180%160%140%120%100%-20%0%20%40%60%80% 19791981198319851987198919911993199519971999200120032005200720092011201320152017ChangeinnetproductivityChangeinincomeforthetop1%ofearnersChangeinaveragewages I.1
One of the most basic, glaring, and often-ignored features of the service econ omy is that it employs different people from the old industrial economy, as Alyssa Battistoni details in this volume (chapter 4). To be sure, there are former steel workers now driving delivery trucks (for lower wages and sometimes no health care or pension benefits). There are former textile workers driving for Instacart (rather than, e.g., making masks to protect against COVID-19). And there are former miners working as security guards. But these jobs are not com parably well paid to those workers lost. And few former miners found new careers programming computers, despite a brief flourishing of coding boot camps.6 But overall, the workers who lost industrial jobs— especially well-paid, unionized jobs—were disproportionately white and male, compared to the Change in productivity and income since 1979.
These transformations are evident in the dramatic rise of the service sector, which has been reorganized by a shift from small, local businesses to larger, corporate employers. Only some of the growth in “hospitality” employment involves locally owned, nonchain restaurants. Much more is organized through chains of restaurants run by large corporations—not to mention Las Vegas resorts, casinos that have opened around the country (often to provide some revenue for other wise excluded Indigenous populations), hotels and motels.
6 Introduction
Sources: Lawrence Mishel and Julia Wolfe, “Top 1.0 Percent Reaches Highest Wages Ever— Up 157 Percent Since 1979,” Economic Policy Institute, October 18, 2018, https://www.epi.org / blog /top -1- 0 -percent-reaches -highest-wages- ever-up -157-percent-since-1979/; and “The Productivity–Pay Gap,” Economic Policy Institute, May 2021, https://www.epi.org /productivity-pay-gap/.
Therecontractors.10isenormous growth in what might be thought of as the logistical economy— moving things and people about. This includes some relatively secure and well-paid jobs, say, in technical support for the airline industry. Some in the industry, like long-haul truck drivers, are supported by strong unions. But there are whole armies of warehouse workers and delivery drivers whose employment is more precarious even when it is not literally gig work. Some work for mini mum wage, some for just a little above. Almost all are replaceable at will if they do not follow every management directive. And many receive no benefits like health insurance or pension support.
American population as a whole.7 Workers in the service and logistical sectors are more often female and people of color.8 Services are central to the growing “gig economy”— jobs that no one expects to be long-term or secure.9 The term gig suggests musicians or actors taking on engagements of unspecified duration as they ply their arts. But much more of the dramatic explosion in numbers came from driving for Uber and Lyft and working for giant corporations. The gig economy offers freedom—a chance to choose one’s hours driving for Uber so one could attend casting calls for one’s “real” career as an actor. But the real careers seldom panned out, and Uber found ways to demand more hours of work. The reality was not so much freedom as self-managed corporate exploitation. The companies successfully defined drivers not as actual employees (thus entitled to benefits) but as individual
In the post– COVID-19 pandemic recovery, some logistics firms, like Ama zon, are being forced to pay higher wages. But they are vigorously resisting unionization. And many join in Republican complaints that workers are staying out of the job market because unemployment benefits are overly generous. Maxi mizing profits joins with neoliberal and antigovernment ideology to keep all but the most privileged workers in the weakest economic situation possible.
The coronavirus pandemic has revealed both the fragility of support systems and institutions and the deep inequalities on lines of both class and race that
There is much work to do in America—work described well in part 4 of this volume—and the capitalist employment relationship is preventing it from being done. Basic income proposals are no more than Band-Aids. Much better would be a jobs guarantee, as Dustin Guastella argues in chapter 7. This would empower workers, not merely provide for survival (not that this is a bad thing).11 And it would get needed work done.
Introduction 7
Many have been thrown into crisis response mode, pursuing emergency mea sures without long-term thinking. Massive funding has been allocated to multiple stimulus packages, and more will likely follow. Conceived hastily, these have so far intended mostly to save or restart the pre-pandemic economy, but they could, as GND proponents suggest, be organized instead to advance green infra structure and technologies and to support transition to sustainable employment futures. The real trauma of the pandemic is not that the world will be turned upside down but rather that, in the words of Joe Biden, “nothing will fundamentally change”—which is to say, we will continue along a trajectory of decline, although perhaps now with an accelerated pace. Only massive, forward-thinking investment in green infrastructure can alter this trajectory. Would this mean saving capitalism from itself? Perhaps. But it seems to us that the alternative is not a post-work utopia but rather the slow torturous descent into oligarchy described in such frightening terms by Wolfgang Streeck in How Will Capitalism End?
This is our trajectory unless an organized opposition disrupts it. The GND seeks to shape this opposition. By creating millions of jobs with true living wages that
8 Introduction have shaped vulnerability to the virus. Attempts to contain the pandemic have brought economic upheaval: unemployment has reached dramatic levels, and— given America’s lack of a universal health care system—unemployment has meant the loss of health insurance for millions of workers and their families.
Capitalist society is disintegrating, but not under the impact of an organized opposition fighting it in the name of a better social order. Rather it disintegrates from within, from the success of capitalism and the internal contradictions intensified by that success, and from capitalism having overrun its opponents and in the process become more capitalist than is good for it. Low growth, grotesque inequality and mountains of debt; the neutralization of post-war capitalism’s progress engine, democracy, and its replacement with oligarchic neo-feudalism; the clearing away by “globalization” of social barriers against the commodification of labour, land and money; and systemic disorders such as infectious corruption in the competitive struggle for ever bigger rewards for individual success, with the attendant culture of demoralization, and rapidly spreading international anarchy—all these together have profoundly destabilized the post-war capitalist way of social life, without a hint as to how stability might ever be restored.12
Introduction 9 repair and modernize our crumbling infrastructure and dramatically lower carbon emissions in the process, it offers a capacious and concrete vision of a path beyond the crisis of work.
It is on this terrain—the crisis and transformation of work in America in the last fifty-some years, as well as worsening climate change—that the GND must make its historic intervention. Its core idea is simple: climate action must create good jobs. This is also a basis for mutually advantageous alliances between climate and labor
GND PROPOSALS
Thereactivists.isnodefinitive formulation of “the” GND. Of course, the same was true of the original New Deal developed in the 1930s. A basic direction of action was signaled when the slogan was deployed, but there was no clear master plan. What historians would later regard as the New Deal was shaped by popular pressure, legislative negotiations, and new programs added midstream. It unfolded over six years with dozens of separate acts of legislation creating numerous programs and agencies. So, too, the GND is a work in progress.
The Ocasio- Cortez–Markey resolutions define five aims of a GND: (1) netzero greenhouse gas emissions, (2) the creation of millions of high-wage jobs, (3) investment in infrastructure, (4) material security for all, and (5) justice for “frontline and vulnerable communities.” 17 Some advocates call for adding still more goals to a potential GND: universal health care, investments in pandemic resilience, and investments in education. It is true that the new deal America needs must address many issues beyond climate change and economic futures. It
A Green New Deal Task Force linked to the Green Party offered a U.S. plan in 2006.13 New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman used the phrase in a 2007 article.14 By 2008 it was picked up in Britain.15 But the GND really entered public consciousness a decade later, on November 13, 2018, when young activists from the Sunrise Movement occupied then– minority leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D- Calif.) office demanding a GND. They were joined by newly elected representative Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez (D-N.Y.), who became a leading advocate. She and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) proposed parallel House and Senate resolutions call ing on Congress to create a GND in February 2019. Although these were “messaging bills” that did not result in official policy, they gave a clear outline of what a GND might mean.16
Almost all proposals for a GND frame it centrally in terms of national policy, and this book is about the United States. This is not for lack of awareness that both climate and the contemporary capitalist economy are global. It is because nation-states are crucial centers of financial and political power with capacity to act decisively. There may and should be global cooperation. Building on the Paris Climate Accords is important. So is developing global standards for the security and well-being of workers; the International Labor Organization has made sig nificant starts. In each arena, however, global competition has tended to outstrip both solidarity and the scale of response needed.
10 Introduction is open to debate whether it is more helpful to stress the singular focus on jobs and environment or the ultimate connection of all dimensions of social life and politicalHowevereconomy.theGND
At the same time, as several chapters in this volume make clear, proposals for a GND also demand action at municipal and other subnational levels (see chapter 11 by Daniel Aldana Cohen and chapter 12 by Mijin Cha and Lara Skinner). “Bottom-up” citizen mobilizations need to inform “top-down” government action (as Harry Boyte and Trygve Throntveit discuss in chapter 15). On some dimensions, like finance, the national government has decisive advantages.
Accounts of a disastrous climate future have been repeated over and again as activists have struggled for attention and dealt with climate change deniers. But they have overwhelmed some and led many to feel that nothing they can do will matter. The combined experience of deindustrialization and loss of communities has done much the same for many workers, making it look as if there is no way to escape being the victims of economic change and political neglect rather than agents of renewal. This has fueled right-wing populism in some cases. It has also spread loss of hope. Backers of the GND seek to bring optimism to discussion of both climate and jobs.
evolves, at its center will be the effort to respond jointly to climate change and employment insecurities linked to broad economic trans formation. This is a matter of principle, of policy design, and of politics. The GND can succeed only if citizens and influential organizations are clear that both climate and employment are truly urgent concerns that demand immedi ate action and, most importantly, structural change. Individual ethical response to climate change is not enough, and, indeed, calls for alternative consumption lifestyles paper over the essential need to work together politically. The GND insists that this is less a matter of sacrifice than of building a better future.
But as Richard Lachmann argues in chapter 16, there are risks to neglecting local community. These are risks to both political cohesion and human welfare. It is sad for us to note the death of Richard Lachmann while this book was in pro duction; he was an important voice for justice.
As implemented, the New Deal included rural electrification; conservation; the creation of Social Security to support the aged; the Farm Security Administration to save family farms; the Public Works Administration to build roads, bridges, dams, hospitals, schools, and housing; programs for youth; pro grams to provide emergency help to those in need; programs to create jobs; the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission to ensure transparency and stability in the stock market; a series of acts to save the banking system—and more. The New Deal laid foundations for high levels of business-government-labor cooperation during World War II and in the boom that followed the war. Legislation to
Prioritizing the national over the local has also reduced voices of people of color in GND activism— one of the signal weaknesses of the movement. It is eas ier for better-off activists to work at a distance from their homes. It is easier for white college graduates to join a movement when it is mainly made up of white college graduates. As Olúfẹmi Táíwò argues in chapter 14, for people of color to have an effective voice, they need settings in which they have critical mass or even are the majority. Black and other minority activists have been more likely to mobilize around environmental justice issues in their communities, and these are not yet well-integrated into the GND campaigns.
Introduction 11
The phrase “New Deal” actually comes from Mark Twain, who coined it in the late nineteenth century as a call to respond to rampant inequality and economic volatility.18 Franklin Roosevelt claimed it when he became president in the depths of the 1930s Depression. At first it was just a slogan, but after Roosevelt was elected, he moved fast, aided by his famous “brain trust,” to turn the slogan into action and programs. Although the New Deal is famous as an enormous effort of the federal government, it built on local and state experiments and innovations, many shaped by the Progressive movement. The New Deal was “bottom-up” as well as “top-down.” And crucially for its contemporary echo in a GND, it necessarily responded to a range of interdependent problems at once.19
THE NEW DEAL EXAMPLE
12 Introduction
It is worth emphasizing that the New Deal was hardly an integrated package of legislation and public action. History has reinforced the sense that it was all coordinated, helped by the effective political framing done by the Roosevelt administration. But in fact, the New Deal was not simply “rolled out”; it was invented on the fly, in real time, with a pressing sense of urgency but by actors with a range of different priorities. It was a composite of dozens of different pieces of legislation, and if it is remarkable how many were passed and funded, it is also true that some failed. Some of the programs launched endure to the pres ent day; some collapsed or faded within a couple of years. The New Deal was not produced by a master plan. Still, it was shaped by years of activism and consider able analytic effort.
Somereversed.ofRoosevelt’s
New Deal policies were controversial at the time, but most commanded broad public support. Bipartisan alliances underpinned the majorities by which New Deal legislation passed in Congress. And the “orga nized capitalism” the New Deal helped to put in place (aided by the highly organized war effort that followed) was advanced through both Republican and Democratic administrations, with significant government economic engage ment complementing agreements struck between capital and labor—and often without the need to resort to strikes.
Taking their cues from the original New Deal, most visions of a GND would minimize the extent to which corporate profits, the finance industry, and asset bubbles drained resources away from both workers’ incomes and climate action. This is a matter of tax policy as much as regulation.20 GND advocates promise a new era of political mobilization that overcomes old party divisions to channel majoritarian support toward the creation of jobs and the reduction of environ mental damage. Like the original New Deal, the GND is an optimistic assertion of potential American renewal.
Likewise, there is no single master plan for a GND. Many programmatic demands will and must be made, but few if any will perfectly make their way into history. Successful action on a very large scale requires flexibility and a challenge to the traditional power structure in the United States. For this action to be democratic, it is crucial that it be open to ideas, innovations, and articulations of interests from many distinct actors. These will appear, as they did in the New
realize its program continued into the 1960s. Then, of course, during the neoliberal era that began in the 1970s, progress on this agenda was blocked and increasingly
Introduction 13
Moreover, although the New Deal created new opportunities for many Black Americans through employment in its public works programs, those same programs also suffered from segregation and discrimination in hiring. Black Americans—and many other nonwhite Americans—were blocked from proportionately reaping the benefits of the New Deal. Perhaps the most impactful of the racist decisions of the original New Deal was that of the Federal Housing Authority to refuse to insure mortgages in predominantly Black neighborhoods, a policy that led to deep geographical segregation. The GND must provide a “just transition” both for workers and frontline communities, ensuring that the racist legacies of the past are not reproduced in the present.
Deal, at state and local levels as well as national. Some will involve collaborative planning; others will mean contentious disruption. As Raj Patel and Jim Good man emphasize in chapter 3, one lesson of the original New Deal is that those in favor of progressive change need to mobilize not just to get new laws enacted but to resist backlash and countermobilization that seeks to undo the progress.
The GND hearkens back not only to the New Deal but also to the politics of A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and the Freedom Budget. They sought to extend the gains of the civil rights movement through economic, redistributive policies that would in many ways have continued the New Deal. The Freedom Budget came in the late 1960s, at the end of the era of policies shaped by the New Deal and at the beginning of both neoliberal retrenchment and policymakers’ acceptance of increased inequality. Accordingly, it made little headway in actual policy. The Freedom Budget is a reminder of the unfinished work in comprehen sive reform that remains important for a GND to achieve both economic and racial justice.
But while the GND will share much with the original New Deal, it also needs to confront new issues and new circumstances as well as the unfortunate lega cies of its predecessor. The New Deal created the Civilian Conservation Corps, which promoted conservation (not least in response to soil erosion and the Dust Bowl), and dramatically expanded national parks (see discussion in chapter 2 by Hillary Angelo). But, overall, the consumer-driven “affluent society” the New Deal helped inaugurate encouraged intensive use of natural resources and, whatever its other virtues, was not good for the environment.21 It allowed transformation of agriculture to continue in ways that are deeply problematic not only for climate and environment but for the organization of work. As Patel and Good man suggest, agriculture needs to figure centrally in the GND.
For many of the reasons listed here, some activists wish to move beyond the GND frame to talk instead in new terms—for instance, the agenda outlined in the Transform, Heal, and Renew by Investing in a Vibrant Economy (THRIVE) Act— or else simply to talk about climate-related addenda to possible infrastruc ture bills. We believe it is essential to retain the phrase “Green New Deal” because, for all its faults, there still is no better model in American history for the transformative project we need today than the New Deal, as Richard Walker lays out quite clearly in chapter 1 of this volume. The original New Deal of the 1930s sought to create jobs as well as to create compensation for job loss. To be sure, it took a Great Depression to create the political conditions for such action and mobilization for World War II to generate full employment. But the New Deal laid the foundations for the postwar economic boom and for policies ensuring that this prosperity was relatively widely shared among all Americans. Sometimes called the era of “organized capitalism,” the American economy after World War II depended on strong roles for all of government regulation, govern ment investment, and negotiated agreements between capital and labor.
14 Introduction
Since the 1970s the neoliberal era has featured reduction in each of these sta bilizing factors. This has not resulted just from “natural” change or evolution of the economy. In its shape, speed, and extent of disruption, this has been driven by active political campaigns. The economy has been privatized, agreements between capital and labor undermined, and government institutions allowed to decay or directly cut back. Inequality, which stayed relatively low through the postwar boom, has now increased to perhaps the highest level in American history.22Neoliberalism had been growing for years as both an ideology and a perspective on economic policy. It became dominant during the mid-1970s oil crisis. This was driven largely by dependence on foreign oil, although a range of other issues also mattered, from financing the Vietnam War through upheavals in global exchange rates. A key face of the crisis was simultaneous high inflation and economic stagnation. Faced with a choice between supporting workers and the owners of assets, the Federal Reserve made a firm choice of the latter. It raised interest rates, stabilized currency, and brought down demand—but also workers’ incomes.23 This helped bring the New Deal era to an end. Inflation is once again an issue, and some call for addressing it by limiting wage growth and curtailing investments in green infrastructure. Both are short-sighted proposals, and both underestimate the importance of large-scale government investment.24
The GND challenges those versions of environmentalism that focus centrally on sacrifice, austerity, and “degrowth.” Equally, it challenges the long- standing working-class and labor union suspicion of environmentalism as a job-killer.
For the sake of both jobs and climate, a GND must address energy sources, distribution, and consumption (see Clark Miller’s contribution in chapter 13). This requires transforming transportation, housing, and urban design. Employ ment and climate impacts are both shaped by movement away from industry and extraction, transformation of agriculture, and the rise of a logistical econ omy and service work, especially care work. Jobs will be created both in the manufacturing and deployment of infrastructure and in the transformation of the rest of the economy. But the new jobs will not automatically all be good jobs. This depends on both workers’ organizing efforts and government policy—from minimum wage laws to a potential job guarantee.
Introduction 15 NECESSARY QUESTIONS
Allusion to the New Deal initiated in the 1930s signals the importance of govern ment leadership and funding and the necessity of simultaneous action on many related issues. Most GND advocacy centers on decarbonization, new green tech nologies, and reversing environmental degradation more broadly. But for those without good jobs or worried there may be none for their children, there is as much a crisis of work as of climate. Moreover, the promise of good jobs is of central political importance. If environmentalists treat it as a mere political tactic, the GND will fail.
To focus on jobs raises a variety of questions. To start with, why have previous proposals to deliver jobs so often failed or been co- opted by coalitions defining economic growth in terms better for capital than for labor and communities (see Molotch, chapter 10)? And why has labor sometimes been complicit with this situation? How should it make its voice heard now (see Isser, chapter 8). How would a federal jobs program, or even a federal jobs guarantee, avoid the traditional pitfalls with the promise of jobs? What is the role of less centralized action at state or local levels and among both unions and businesses? Is a univer sal basic income also important? How should any effort to create jobs and transform the economy relate to new technologies, shifts among economic sectors, and the proportionate rise of very large corporations and decline of small businesses? How should proposals
16 Introduction for a “just transition” balance jobs in older, sometimes declining industries with jobs in service, care, and logistics (see chapter 9 by Todd Vachon)? How does it matter that the declining industries (and their unions) have been histori cally more male and white, while service and care industries employ more women, minorities, and immigrants?
It is even important to ask: should we be working more or less (see chapter 6 by Wilson Sherwin)? That is, how does the goal of creating jobs relate to the longstanding goals of shorter working hours, high enough pay to eliminate the need for second jobs, and reduction in precarious employment? Is work essential as a source of human dignity? Is it a mere necessity from which humanity should be progressively emancipated? And what counts as a “good job?” How do pay, work ing conditions, and security relate to each other? What is the role of union representation, and how can the GND strengthen the labor movement? Not least, it is important to pay close attention to participation and mobilization. This is not simply a matter of tactics—as climate activists may need the support of workers or vice versa. It is also a matter of vision. The GND is not likely to succeed as a technocratic project, but it can be as transformative as a democratic one. Can the political will be summoned to pass a GND? This will require moving forward on many distinct paths, not simply choosing among them. Energy infrastructure and transportation and housing are all important. So are minimum wages and support for public health, education and childcare. Debate in the United States since the 2020 election has been dispiriting. Arguments over cost and the desirability of bipartisanship have dominated over consideration of pub lic value. Not only has national party politics become stuck in a fruitless polarization of left and right, even progressives nominally supportive of a GND have fragmented over which strand of policy to prioritize. Social movement mobiliza tion has not yet successfully pressed legislators to agree that to be effective, GND action needs to be integrated and large-scale. There seems to be no end to the bleak period inaugurated with the COVID-19 pandemic. It is increasingly common, given the broad but directionless transformations of neoliberal capitalism, to hear talk of a present “interregnum.” Antonio Grams ci’s well-known phrase from The Prison Notebooks is often invoked: “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” The broad argument of this volume is that this moment of overlapping crises can only be overcome through large-scale public investment in long-term physical and social infrastructure that both raises
Introduction 17 living standards for working people and confronts the effects of climate change. In other words, the new can be born so long as we abandon the old, siloed forms of thinking and activism that, in a way, echo the political demobilization of the neoliberal period and instead pursue a capacious vision of economic justice that aims to rehabilitate both our planet and our democracy.
NOTES
3. The idea of a “just transition” for workers facing deindustrialization stems from proposals by union leader Tony Mazzocchi to create a “superfund for workers.” Superfunds had been created for environmental cleanup, not least for removing toxic waste from closed factories. Mazzocchi’s call to require similar investments in new futures for workers was the impetus to a wider series of proposals for just transition. See discussion by Todd Vachon in chapter 6 of this volume.
4. It has also involved recurrent disruptions. As Karl Polanyi made clear looking at the original Industrial Revolution, disruption to established communities and workplace relations is itself a cost of transformations in work, although this is ignored by most economic accounts. Classical liberals in the early nineteenth century and neoliberals in the late twentieth century treated both the transformations and the disruptions as “natural.” This ideology encouraged those with power and wealth to refuse compensatory assistance to those suffering displacement. See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon, 2001). The ideology matches the self-interest of those who might otherwise be taxed to pay for assistance. The common excuse is that aiding those who are suffering would only slow “progress” toward a better future and that, “in the long run,” wages will rise with new productivity. As John Maynard Keynes famously said, however, “in the long run we shall all be dead.” John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform (London: Macmillan, 1923), 80. And the long run can be very long. Robert C. Allen has shown that it was a century before English wages rose to the levels of those displaced by new technology in the early nineteenth century. Robert C. Allen, “Engels’ Pause: Technical Change, Capital Accumulation, and Inequality in the British Industrial Revolution,” Explorations in Economic History 46 (2009): 418– 35.
2. For Anthony Giddens, “ontological security”—a basic sense that existence has order and continuity—is essential to human life. See Anthony Giddens, Modernity and SelfIdentity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991) and later works. Ulrich Beck took up a similar argument about the ontological insecurity basic to living with and oriented to pervasive risks. See Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1992); and Ulrich Beck, Ecological Politics in the Age of Risk (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity, 1995).
1. John Branch and Brad Plumer, “Climate Disruption Is Now Locked In. The Next Moves Will Be Crucial,” New York Times, September 22, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020 /09/22/climate/climate- change-future.html?searchResultPosition = 1.
MATTHEW T. HUBER , author of Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet CRAIG CALHOUN is University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University. He was previously director of the London School of Economics and Political Science and president of the Social Science Research Council. His most recent book is Degenerations of Democracy (2022), with Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Charles Taylor.
FRANCES FOX PIVEN , author of Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America
illustration: Mona Caron printed in the u.s.a. ISBN: 978-0-231-20556-6 9 7 8 0 2 3 1 2 0 5 5 6 6
ERIC KLINENBERG , author of Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life
BENJAMIN Y. FONG is associate director at the Center for Work and Democracy and Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University. He is the author of Drugs in American Capitalism (2023) and Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism (Columbia, 2016). His writing has also appeared in Jacobin, Catalyst, the New York Times, and Damage Magazine.
“A bold and penetrating collection of essays about the most important problems of our time.”
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS / NEW YORKcoverCUP.COLUMBIA.EDUdesign: Elliott S. Cairns cover
CHRISTIAN PARENTI , author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence
“Craig Calhoun and Benjamin Y. Fong have crafted an erudite, timely, and often inspiring collection of essays about work and the Green New Deal. No other book I know looks at infrastructure and environment through the prism of labor, culture, and political economy. This will be an excellent resource for teaching, advocacy, and policy making.”
“This book is an incredible (and rare) collection from both organizers and scholars on the key challenge of the twenty-first century: how to transform the world of work toward rapid decarbonization. It contains impressive historical depth on the model of the New Deal and explores how to make the Green version a reality.”
“As a slogan, the Green New Deal can at times be extended to include almost anything on the current U.S. left’s agenda. But what might it really mean? And how would it work? This book is a welcome intervention because it explores from numerous vantage points—often in real detail and with bracing honesty—the possibilities and limits invoked by the idea of a Green New Deal. Headlines will change, new emergencies will arise and fade, but the climate crisis is not going away. That is why this sort of discussion about realistic solutions is so necessary.”
