I keep reading things like: “In a showdown between political ideology and economic reality … you want to be betting on economic reality,” or other statements implying that capitalism and business will save us.
That makes it seem that people do think that pro-corporate organisations like the Republicans in the US, really do believe in ‘small government’ and ‘free markets’, rather than in using those words as slogans to support action in favour of established corporate power. Republicans have already changed ‘economic reality’ to reflect their position and probably will keep doing so. This is not about respecting reality, rationality or getting the best results for ‘working people’.
The new US government can, for example, encourage companies who provide grid power to charge more for connecting to places/homes with renewable power to prevent ‘freeloading’ on profits. They can tax renewable usage, or put import tariffs on essential materials or parts for renewables. They can decide renewables are dangerous to workers, hazardous to public health (wind farm syndrome, why not a solar power syndrome?), or bad for ‘baseload’, and slap difficult regulations on them. They can put taxes on the use of land for renewables. They can use infrastructure development to subsidise coal mines, fracking and gas leaks. They can use the same monies to build, or sudsidise, new coal power stations as vital to the economy. They can pretend that they already have clean coal, or give billions to research clean coal without checking that money gets spent on research (other than market research). They can remove all anti-pollution enforcement as that hinders the economy. They can decide that protestors against these moves, are more vulnerable to jail, or police beatings, or face increased and bankrupting fines; or they can legislate that protestors are terrorists. They can decide that protest should not occur on private property as that is trespassing, and that all space is private property. I’m sure they are more ingenious than me, so they can find even more reasons to hinder and halt renewables and their supporters.
If they can ignore the reality of climate change, they can skew the economy towards fossil fuels.
In terms of Ken Mcleod’s ‘fourfold’ the mythos of capitalist economics is misleading at best, and this produces misleading understanding and action and a restricted psyche.
Not only does our economics depend on the idea of individuals primarily competing with each other, it tends to make profit the only good, and usually the profit of those who are already profiting. It therefore tends to generate a plutocracy and a ‘selfish personality’ repressing human cooperativeness, or long term interest. It pretends that economic activity is not tied in with State activity and control of the State; however, in reality economics is always a political as well as a business struggle. Hence the likely possibility of Republicans acting against renewable energy, which largely involves newer companies, to support those who have already invested in their party and who already hold power in the State.
The ideology of the free market is not interested in recognizing power differentials in the market, or everyone’s survival and cannot be, because that would be to recognize that the ideology does not work in the way it claims to work – which is not to say that reasonably free markets cannot be useful, but that they get corrupted, and that they are not the only good.
If you want renewables you may need to organize, and think about new more constructive myths and economics.
