Car import policy at odds with energy agenda - Lessons fom Southern California

Trevor Campbell, Contributor

The photo accompanying this article - capturing the gridlock on the Portmore toll road - graphically illustrates the social, spatial, environmental and political contradictions that have accompanied the private automobile-centred process of suburbanisation of the working class since the 1960s.

Of course, this development is not peculiar to Jamaica; this has been the pattern, with similar results, in many countries throughout the world. California, particularly its southern region, is the quintessential expression of this phenomenon.

I am going to spend some time discussing the impact of the automobile on daily life in Southern California as a way of providing a broader context for the conversation on transportation and energy conservation in Jamaica. This analysis is informed by 45 years of living, studying and working here.

How the auto-centric environment was created

This writer received his first lessons on how ownership of a car had become one of the basic requirements for earning a living in Southern California within days after arriving from New York City in August of 1967. The first two questions that appeared on every job application form were: Do you have a driver's licence? Do you have access to a reliable vehicle? The human resource representatives were making it abundantly clear to the prospective worker that he/she could not rely on any sort of mass transit system for the journey to and from work. In other words, no car, no work!

This was an entirely new experience for me as I had never been asked to produce a driver's licence for any of the jobs I held in Manhattan during the year I lived in the Bronx borough. Wherever one lived in New York City, there was access to public transportation (bus or train). I now had to quickly secure a California driver's licence and borrow some money from friends to purchase my first used car.

There is a widely held belief among many of the residents of Southern California, and elsewhere in the country, that General Motors - along with the major oil companies (notably Standard Oil of California, now known as Chevron) and the rubber producers (particularly Firestone) - began to conspire from the late 30s onwards to destroy the existing mass transit system in the Southern California region, which was then the largest system of 'interurbans' (heavy-duty inter-city trolleys) in the US, carrying some 80 million passengers a year in the late 1930s.

Some theoretical lessons

Based upon the process that I have just described, here are some of the conceptual points and theoretical lessons that I have tried to convey over the years to students in my class on 'The Political Economy of Scientific Research and Technical Innovations in a Capitalist Economy'.

The social and physical infrastructures that were developed to serve the needs of a particular set of industries in one period later become an impediment to the development of new industries. This is one of the objective contradictions within the historical process of capitalist accumulation. The attempts toward the resolution of this contradiction incite political struggles between those capitalists, and workers, who are tied to the older industries and who continue to receive significant amounts of subsidies from their political allies in the state bureaucracy, on the one hand, and the newer group of capitalist entrepreneurs and their intellectual allies who are associated with the emerging industries, on the other.

This is an integral part of what is commonly referred to as restructuring. This restructuring involves the shedding/destruction of the old to make way for the new. Needless to say, this can be, and is, usually a very convulsive process.

The economist, Joseph Schumpeter, termed it 'creative destruction'. The political managers of the capitalist state are then called upon to manage the social contradictions which are inevitable consequences of the process of capital accumulation.

The reader should keep in mind that I am not making a value judgement here as to whether the automobile should have been allowed to develop. I am describing some aspects of the process of how a new industry emerges within capitalist society and the complex challenges and contradictions that are associated with this process. Most academics and journalists seem to believe, or would have us believe, that technical innovations or social progress can occur without intense struggles among and between the contending social classes in capitalist society.

All of this recent fanciful talk by several of our more prominent columnists concerning whether the State should play a more activist role in economic development only serves to obscure the fact that the no-class-conscious section of the capitalist class is politically opposed, per se, to having the capitalist state assume an activist role!

The real issue is this: On whose behalf will the State play this activist role? All sections of the capitalist class are compelled to engage in a battle over where and how the taxes that are collected by the State (or the loans to the State by financial institutions) will be invested.This is part and parcel of the battle for the subsidies that are channelled into various infrastructural projects that directly or indirectly serve the needs of a particular industry or group of companies. Can it be otherwise in a capitalist society, democratic or not?

As we now know, almost the entire physical and social infrastructure of Southern California, since the 1940s, has been organised to facilitate the use of the automobile as the primary means of transporting people throughout the region, which contains roughly 22 million people. (The total population of the state is estimated to between 37 and 38 million.)

As the science and technology-based, finance and media industries developed, the price of land close to the facilities that housed these activities spiralled, and this pushed the working class, including many of its professionalised segments, further and further away from where they worked, in search of affordable housing. The only means of transport that they had to get to and from work was the automobile.

This laid the conditions for what became the legendary Southern California morning and evening freeway gridlock. It is not unusual for individuals to spend over two hours each way, to and from work. This has taken its toll on individuals' mental and physical health, as well as on family life.

A mixed blessing

While the automobile industry helped to stimulate allied industries (such as car parts, etc.) and gave birth to a host of entirely new industries (and, certainly, it has played a major role in the phenomenal expansion of the global capitalist economy in the post-World War II era), we shouldn't overlook the negative impact it has had on both the natural and built environment.

By the 1960s, Southern California had earned the unflattering title 'smog capital of the world'. The unrelenting emission of carbon dioxide related to the use of fossil fuel was a major contributing factor to the widespread pollution of the air throughout the region. The population, particularly older people and young children, began to complain that they were having problems breathing. (For an interesting commentary on the health problems associated with the use of polluting vehicles see 'Cars, Trucks, Air Pollution and Health', Environment and Human Ecology, October 2011.)

It is within this context that the emerging environmental movement of the 1970s gained traction in the Southern California region and the rest of California. This social movement forced the legislators within the state government to introduce several regulatory measures that were designed to improve the air quality in Southern California. Many of these measures were, of course, opposed by the automobile companies and their allies, who argued that they were being over-regulated, which would undermine their ability to meet the competitive challenges that were coming from their Japanese rivals.

By the late 1980s, just about all of the automobile factories (including several GM and Ford plants) had been closed. Also closing were the tyre factories and the steel plants. These were relatively well-paying union jobs. To give you an idea of how significant these highly unionised jobs were, you would have to be aware of the fact that most, if not all, of the so-called blue-collar workers in these plants were, in many cases, making higher incomes than university professors with their PhDs. In other words, they were the ones producing the enormous wealth for the owners of the means of production.

These plants were closed not only to escape higher wages but also to avoid the increasing cost of meeting the environmental standards. Many were relocated to Mexico where the standards and the wages were much lower. These closings had a devastating impact on many working-class communities throughout Southern California. Although the Southern California region still remains one of the primary manufacturing centres in the United States, most of these manufacturing entities are relatively small and mainly employ immigrants from Latin America and Asia.

TO BE CONTINUED

Trevor A Campbell is a political economist. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tcampbell@eee.org.

Source: http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20111225/focus/focus6.html

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