Personal responsibility and systemic problems, part 2 by Ornaith O'Dowd, NYC

This is part two of a two-post sequence. The first, below, was published earlier this summer, and focused on class, race, and gentrification.

Related questions of personal responsibility arise in connection with environmental issues. Many urbanites are becoming more conscious of their impact on the environment and various changes in lifestyle that can reduce it. Many are making efforts to reduce their carbon footprint and generally consume less; they are growing their own food in private or community gardens and urban farms, or are shopping at farmer's markets, food co-ops, or joining a local CSA (community supported agriculture); they are switching to organic, non-toxic or less toxic, and/or energy efficient products. For example, I spent some of this weekend researching recipes for making cleaning products from vinegar, lemon juice, olive oil, and baking soda, and look forward to making the switch from bleaches and artificial chemical sprays; gradually my partner and I are switching to CFL lightbulbs; we now buy electricity from renewable sources. It's not enough, of course: we still contribute too much C02, too much toxic waste. Is it a matter of personal moral responsibility? Am I personally responsible for the effects of water pollution caused by the detergent I used in my laundry yesterday? I cannot deny that I put the detergent in the machine, and that detergent made its way to a river and a sea, where it is going to harm the environment. I know this, and I could have paid extra for a less polluting brand instead of buying a bottle of wine for Sunday dinner. But I didn't.

A Marxist friend chides me for this sort of talk: it's not about you. It's the system. Blaming yourself and thinking you can change things by buying "green" or even getting involved in a CSA or urban agriculture is merely a distraction from the overall task, which is to replace capitalism. Go ahead and do these things if it makes you feel good, but don't think you are thereby fulfilling a moral responsibility. If you want to really do something, get involved in revolutionary politics focused on changing the entire system.

I find myself in sympathy with both sides to some extent here. I share the Marxist view that the overall task is to replace capitalism. Capitalism is-- among other things!-- inherently unsustainable and destructive from an ecological standpoint. Merely becoming a 'green' consumer will not change the overall dynamic: it is constant growth of consumption and production for profit that is the problem. We simply cannot have a model of economic success that is based on "growth" rather than human need. What is more, capitalism distributes environmental burdens unfairly: the poorest people and the poorest countries suffer disproportionately from the effects of global warming and pollution. Wealth and privilege can, to a large extent, allow you to buy your way out of these risks (of course, things will likely reach a point where even this is not possible). Inequality produced by capitalism also means that being a 'green' consumer is a luxury. Of course, we could always just consume less, but how realistic an option is it for most working people in the US, for example, to head off to a mountain somewhere and live "off-grid"-- off the consumer society grid as well as the electricity grid? I'm not packing my suitcase just yet: I love the city, the movies, the cheap seats at the Met opera, the art, the food. If we stay on the grid, so to speak, it can be very expensive to 'consume green', and where it is cheap, it usually involves more time (either time spent researching alternatives, or time implementing the change).

In a previous Intervention, I wrote about food justice issues both globally and locally in New York City. Many people and groups have responded to the problem of unequal access to healthy food by engaging in urban farming or community gardening, by shopping at farmer's markets, or buying a share in a CSA scheme. These initiatives offer alternatives to our current, dysfunctional, TNC-mediated relationship with food. Is getting involved with these alternatives just a matter of making ourselves feel good personally, or do they at least offer the potential of being genuine responses to the problems just described, and therefore a potentially morally and politically significant kind of action? The orthodox Marxist-Leninist will say: "Join the Communist Party and organize with them to try to eliminate capitalism. There's no other game in town if you are serious about social change". I agree, as I've said above, with the aim of replacing capitalism (with some sort of libertarian socialism or anarcho-communism, if you're asking-- I'm open on models just as long as there's no wage labor, and no repression). But I disagree that Being In The Party and fighting the big, abstract fight of eliminating capitalism is the only way of doing revolutionary anticapitalist politics. Depending on how it's done, urban farming and the like can be just as much part of the struggle, as well as being genuinely valuable and morally recommendable in itself. How?

First, urban farming (for example) provides a space for conversations that would not otherwise happen; simply talking with fellow activists or urban farmers about the reasons they have become involved and the insights they have gleaned from it may be an exercise in consciousness raising (for all concerned). For some, getting involved in this sort of concrete activity may raise a lot of good questions about the broader social context. Food justice is not a discrete problem; the more one learns about it, the more one realizes that it is related to a host of other issues, with capitalism-- among other things-- underlying all of them.

Second, urban farming is one way of creating a detailed vision of how the future could be. It is all very well to talk vaguely about how great life would be without capitalism and other forms of oppression and domination. It is quite another to spell out how people could work together without it, successfully providing for the needs of their families and communities. A well-run community garden or urban farm might raise the eminently reasonable question: "Why couldn't more areas of activity be organized like this?" In the US especially, we are so used to hearing that it's not realistic to expect people to work together for common goals. It can be powerful to see an everyday, real-life, ground-level example of people doing just that.

Third, urban farming is one among many fronts of struggle against the status quo. That 'status quo' has many elements-- capitalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, environmental destruction, militarism, the security state, imperialism, etc.-- so it makes sense that the struggle against it should be just as multifaceted. The danger, of course, is that single issue campaigns will focus on solving their problem through compromise with elites-- for example, 'business unionism', mainstream liberal feminism, HRC and other gay rights groups who seem more interested in cultivating corporate partners than in making common cause with all oppressed people. There is no easy way out of this problem, to be sure; what seems important is what kind of analysis we bring to our various activities. In this sense, it's all about making connections.