Written by Nicole
A. Murray and first published at Partisan
How
organized labor can shift us away from dominant car culture and turn the tides
of climate crisis at the point of production.
Organized labor
is currently faced with the most consequential question of its life: are oil
and gas commodities that workers have a right to burn for their own material
benefit; or should they be left in the ground?
As an
ecosocialist, the answer is clear: no more burning fossil fuels. Organized
labor is in the unique position to both disrupt the deep systems that
perpetuate dependence on fossil fuels and the products that run on them, while
also ensuring production pivots towards the greater public good over individual
personal luxury.
One system ripe
for disruption is car dependence. Car-centric living requires millions of
gallons of fossil fuels be burned into the air, every day, just so people can
participate in society. It is a structural problem that requires a large-scale,
organized solution that is clear-eyed on both the source and the results of car
dependency.
The existing
pattern of development in the US in our urban, suburban and peri-urban spaces
reflects an intentional plan by petro-capitalists and the state to center life
around the automobile. The Federal Housing Administration subsidized
low-density suburban development from the 1930s through the post-war years.
Ex-urban homeownership, largely enjoyed exclusively by white families, boosted
demand for automobiles, consumer durables, and energy consumption, thereby
absorbing overproduction from some of the biggest industries of the time: the
oil and automotive industries.1
Indeed, the
self-reinforcing and self-reproducing system of sprawl, cars, and gas make this
system difficult to disrupt on a systemic level when the petro-capitalists are
still many regions’ top employers and tax payers.
Today,
car-centric systems seem fair and normal. Yet Americans collectively owe $1.37
trillion in auto loan debt — 10 times that of medical debt — to collectively
burn about 350 millions gallons of finished motor gasoline into the air
per day,2 dwarfing
China in terms of both per capita and total gasoline use.3 Unlike
in other sectors such as energy production, global emissions in road transportation
are projected to grow, and grow fast.
Make no
mistake: it’s the system of automobility as a whole that is
unsustainable, not individual use and consumption. Even advances in efficiency,
including electrification (electric vehicles) will be wiped out by more
widespread adoption especially as auto manufacturers open up markets in the
global south.
Historically,
there have been organized efforts to build towards structural solutions that
start at the point of production from inside the auto industry itself. While
those efforts were not explicitly in the name of ecosocialism as we understand
it today, our country’s rich labor history as it unfolded in auto plants should
not be glossed over.
Automotive
manufacturing employed one out of six Americans in the height of Motor City,4 and
about 5% of all workers globally today. Communist and socialist-led organizing
in auto plants played a crucial role in organizing industrial shops. Beyond the
shop floor, affordable cars were even crucial in the labor struggles of
Southern smallholders and tenant farmers: those who were able to purchase
vehicles were no longer beholden to a single plantation commissary and could
purchase supplies at much lower prices in the nearby urban centers.5
But take a
moment to think about those who were unable to purchase
vehicles. They didn’t necessarily benefit from their peers’ new automotive
freedom. The core relationship between capitalist and worker is not challenged
via consumer products (and more cars won’t get us out of the cycle of too many
cars). And spare a thought for Detroit today. Without worker control fully
realized, and with capital fleeing out of cities and to the global south during
neoliberalization, US auto production has been on the decline since the ’90s.6
Organized labor
can change the paradigm through direct, organized, and militant action by
demanding both a shift in production towards more buses, trains, rail and
bicycles, and also work and social lives that are decoupled from
individualized, resource and fuel-intensive consumer products.
First,
manufacturers and auto workers must push for shifting production to socially
responsible goods, ideally through direct control of the means of production.
There is precedent for this approach: The Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement
(DRUM), a 1960s radical group of Black anti-war and anti-imperialist Marxist
auto workers had no interest in making cars to turn the Big Three automakers a
profit: “DRUM wanted workers to have all the pie and to produce goods only for
social needs.”7
While their
vision was never realized, they had an unprecedented foresight into the
destructive role the auto and gas industries would have in colonization and
fascism , nevermind climate change.
The manufacture
of buses, trains, light rail, and even bicycles provides jobs across all skill
sets; these public goods move many more people using far fewer resources and
energy, without burdening individuals with the debts and risks that come with
personal cars.
Second,
organized labor across all industries can reduce our country’s
massive fuel use not through austerity or taxes, but by fighting for more
flexible work schedules that reduce the need for so much driving to begin with.
The National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS), a trade association
representing gas station convenience stores and filling stations, says they
have repeatedly found people drive less when gas prices are high enough to
become a financial hardship.8
Anyone who has
ever had to dig through their couch for coins to pay for a few more drops of
gas can attest to these findings. High gas prices mean less driving, thus less
greenhouse gasses and particulate matter, but at the cost of contraining social
and economic activity, especially by the poor: they mostly just stay home.
NACS also found
that people drive more not when prices are low, but when they
have more work, family, and social responsibilities. Reversing the atomization
and alienation of modern life has been a core goal of communist organizers and
thinkers for a century. Winning more freedom from individual responsibilities
gives workers and their families the freedom to forgo those responsibilities
only a personal car can conveniently shepherd: commuting alone many miles to
work, picking up/dropping off dependents on their varied schedules, moving
personal goods, and otherwise running themselves ragged in traffic.
These benefits
are universal, even in areas where public transportation does not (yet) exist,
and especially for those people — about 20% of Americans and 80% of people
worldwide — who do not drive a car for structural, legal, personal, financial,
or medical reasons.
The core goal
of communist organizing is that we can and must control our own futures. For
ecosocialists, that future is decarbonized, decoupled from burning excess
energy just to arrive at work, school, or care. Gasoline has a precarious
journey into our cars. Its source material, crude oil, spills out of—and
into—the jungles of Ecuador,
the shores
of the Gulf, the deltas of Africa’s rivers,
and the tundras of Alaska and Russia.
And when it’s mercifully unspilled, when it’s not poisoning
rivers and destroying
fisheries people depend on for food and water, when it’s not killing babies in the womb,
when it safely and soundly makes its way to its final destination — a gas
station in Anytown, USA — we pay the privilege of $3-$4 a gallon to burn it
into the air on our way to sell our wages.
Transportation
has been the largest consumer of petroleum products in the USA for at least 100
years.9 It’s
about time organized labor says enough.
Nicole is a
member of New York City Democratic Socialists of America Ecosocialist Working Group.
Notes
- Mattioli, Giulio et al, “The
political economy of car dependence: A systems of provision approach,” Energy
Research & Social Science, no. 66 (2020),
doi:10.1016/j.erss.2020.101486
- “How much gasoline does the United
States consume?”, U.S. Energy Information Administration, September 07,
2021, https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=23&t=10
- Wang, Shirley and Mengpin Ge,
“Everything You Need to Know About the Fastest-Growing Source of Global
Emissions: Transport,” World Resources Institute, October 16, 2019. https://www.wri.org/insights/everything-you-need-know-about-fastest-growing-source-global-emissions-transport
- Georgakas, Dan and Marvin
Surkin. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying. South End Press, 1998. 30.
- Kelley, Robin. Hammer &
Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression. UNC Press, 1990.
37.
- “U.S. domestic auto production from
1994 to 2020,” Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/184171/us-passenger-car-production-since-1994/
- Georgakas and Surkin, Detroit:
I Do Mind Dying, 44.
- “The Relationship Between Gas
Prices and Demand”, NACS, March 20, 2020, https://www.convenience.org/Media/Daily/2020/Mar/20/3-The-Relationship-Between-Gas-Prices-Demand_Fuels
- “In the United States, most petroleum is consumed in transportation,” U.S. Energy Information Administration, August 02, 2019 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=40752
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