The “green” and the class struggle
I won't entertain you for long and I'd rather not entertain you at all. Unfortunately, however, on the one hand I cannot take it for granted that the obvious is obvious for everyone, and on the other I get annoyed when some belated enunciator of the obvious is brought up on the shields like a new Keynes (or Marx, or Smith). I therefore feel the obligation this evening to succinctly state the obvious to you.
A policy proposal that provides on the one hand massive public subsidies to companies to support their profits, and on the other an erosion of the real wage, achieved by forcibly inducing workers to purchase more expensive goods, determines in re ipsa a redistribution of income from work for capital, and it is therefore the good old reverse class struggle that we had learned to recognise, in a different context, in the genetic post of this blog .
Green is this: subsidizing, in the name of a higher goal, companies that have no market, and compressing, in the name of a higher goal, the real wages of workers by diverting spending on more expensive products (either due to technological innovations – off the market – which they incorporate, either due to the inflationary tension that the excess demand for some raw materials necessarily determines and will determine).
It can be argued that this leads to a better world, in particular that in the long run, when you are all dead, this will lead to a world of easy, cheap energy, the Earthly Paradise. Someone might be interested in discussing it but I'm not interested in discussing it here and now. Here I am only interested in highlighting the fact that the green proposal as it is articulated today translates into a highly regressive redistributive policy, which damages the weaker classes and benefits big capital. This is why the WEF likes it so much, certainly not the devotion to the Big Goat or other social methane bubble nonsense.
For those who are here these should be #lebbasi, the tools of the trade!
In the nineteenth post of this blog we highlighted the link between ecologism and austerity, and what we wrote in that post which caused a lot of discussion at the time remains valid. Tout se tient : Ursula's savior gatekeepers were also those of degrowth and biowashball . The invitation to compress consumption in the name of a higher goal was closely connected to the need to make consumption compression policies socially acceptable (in the name of a higher goal), that is, precisely, austerity, the destruction of necessary internal demand to rebalance our net position (less income, less consumption, less imports, less foreign deficit).
The green is just an exasperated and in some ways caricatural version (from the austerity of the degrowthist Savonarolas to the braids of the climate activist girl) of the same story.
This is not to deny anything. Simply, we want to point out that, as was already the case with the euro, the know -it-all "progressive" idiots are the useful idiots of a regressive project that first strikes the social classes that the "left" was born in some way to protect, a project that presents significant margins of irrationality within its own metrics (if the problem is CO2, then let's calculate how much an electric car produces in its life cycle), a project that would have alternatives that no one wants consider, and which are the ones I spoke to you about in The Sunset of the Euro :
The second point on this list is what is now called "mitigation", a path that no one wants to undertake because it is made up of public investments spread across the territory and which generate employment: but for large companies the subsidies (which have a concentrated and direct impact in their profits) are much more convenient than investments (which have a widespread impact on the territory), and therefore the prevailing discussion is oriented in the way we know: that of a new green and ESG command economy whose aim is to re-propose, in other and more noble green robes, what Warren Buffet said to the useful green idiots would seem unacceptable (but they are the first to contribute to its concrete realization)! Once the discourse is oriented in this way, politics has difficulty in giving a different course, even if it wanted to, and in any case it cannot easily do so, not in a colony governed by a barrage of directives and regulations decided elsewhere (an elsewhere where the citizens have largely busted their balls and are proving it, moreover…).
As Carlo Cipolla explained to us, you can be stupid in an infinite number of ways, and therefore, as if to say: take a seat, hospitality is sacred! However, I urge you to avoid a particular way of being stupid: telling me that I am a denier. I'm not talking about the problem here, but about the solutions, indeed, about the only solution that is proposed, and I'm telling you that this proposal redistributes money from your pockets to those of those who already have them full (and I'm also telling you that it doesn't would be the only proposal, and that there would be fewer regressive ones in terms of income distribution).
Anyone who denies this simple economic fact is not a denialist: he is an idiot. And as my grandmother used to say, for the sick there is no cure, for the green there is no medicine!
And now have your say, I've put mine in the minutes.
PS for the next day: I'm spamming all the comments that suggest the professor's unmissable video. Shapiro of Chattanooga University who would demonstrate that etc. (naturalistic nonsense to taste). Here the theme is different and I am grateful to those who stick to it.
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2024/02/il-green-e-la-lotta-di-classe.html on Mon, 05 Feb 2024 21:37:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.