Treadmill of Production: Injustice and Unsustainability in the Global Economy by Gould Kenneth A. Schnaiberg Allan. Pellow David N

Author:Gould, Kenneth A.,Schnaiberg, Allan.,Pellow, David N.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317250135
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Picking the Right Targets

The last point that we will make regarding environmental justice studies and the treadmill is the overemphasis on environmental policy making to the neglect of the more deeply rooted problems of class domination and institutional racism that allow capitalism to thrive. While it is certainly logical to target those institutions making environmental policy in this nation, Gould (2006) points out that eliminating environmental racism would alleviate only a portion of the problem because racial discrimination pervades all American institutions and racism in education, labor and housing markets, and elsewhere would continue. Racism and class inequality together create forces of oppression and barriers to environmental justice that should reveal to critical scholars and activists one conclusion: environmental justice is fundamentally incompatible with the logic of capitalism (see Benford 2005; Gould 2006). Or, conversely, environmental injustice is a normal consequence of the way capitalist/market economies function. That is, the treadmill of production produces widespread social and environmental inequalities as a matter of course. Pathologically, a sign of capitalism’s health and robustness is how poorly the working classes and ecosystems are faring. Unlike most environmental sociologists and environmental justice scholars, we have no hesitation reaching this logical conclusion, which virtually all environmental justice studies implicitly support.

Thus, in such a system, poor people and people of color encounter “multiple jeopardies” (Collins 2000) because they enjoy few of the benefits of the economic system and endure its associated environmental harms. Changing this system would require enduring, disruptive, and sustained political conflict, which would involve collaboration between the poor/lower/working and middle classes (Gould 2006; Schnaiberg and Gould 2000). Clarke (1996) argues that even before we can talk of a long-term vision of sustainability and social justice, we must reclaim “popular sovereignty”—those basic rights such as access to food, water, education, health care, and a clean environment, all of which have been codified in various international conventions, yet all but ignored by many nation-states and transnational corporations. Revival and recognition of these rights would, in itself, constitute a repudiation of capitalism and a discursive call for revolution.

Choosing the right targets also means broadening our understanding of politics and the political opportunity structure beyond the state (Tilly 1978) to include the power of private capital and its ongoing impact on governance (Pellow 2001). As a South African environmental justice activist told us recently, “One of our primary goals is to weaken the power of corporations over the state, because for too long they have had an enormous influence over government policy making.” Activists around the world are making the same point and focusing their energies on corporate-state alliances that continue to produce “low road to development” (Harrison 1994) models, free trade agreements, and environmental inequalities on all geographic scales. Scholars of social movements and environmental justice have yet to theorize about the profound impact of growing transnational private capital on states around the globe. The treadmill of production model provided a foundation for this kind of thinking more than two decades ago (Schnaiberg 1980) and refined itself over the years (Schnaiberg 1994; Schnaiberg and Gould 2000; Gould, et al.

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