“For ourselves, we delight in the stupendously grand thoughts and germs of thoughts” {of the utopians}.

- Fredrick Engels, Socialism: Utopian And Scientific 

There is a new movement afloat. The Transition Movement (TM) blends aspects of the environment movement and broad grassroots organizing. It combines some 19^th century utopian thinking with new technology and rather daunting data about peak oil and climate change. Portland, Oregon and Oakland, California have officially declared themselves Transition Towns. What’s going on here?

TM was quite successful with some early efforts in England. Rob Hopkins, the founder of TM, has written about the basics of the movement and these early successes in The Transition Handbook – From oil dependency to local resilience, Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, Vermont, 2008-9. Peak oil is not about the last drop of oil. It is when half the reserves have been used up. New oil production is offset by a decline in production. The world as a whole peaked in oil discovery in 1965. Sixty of ninety-eight nations have peaked in terms of oil production. They use more oil than they produce. It includes the USA. To put this in perspective, consider the following. About fifty years ago, 4 billion barrels of oil per year were consumed worldwide. The average discovery rate was a whopping 30 billion barrels per year. By 2005, 30 billion barrels of oil were consumed per year but discovery was at 4 billion barrels per year. The trend continues.

Climate change, especially global warming, is now well documented. Carbon dioxide levels have increased from 278 ppm to 384 ppm leading to a 0.8 degrees centigrade global average temperature rise from preindustrial levels. Increased droughts, floods and more violent storms have been one result. Latest data show land surface covered by extreme heat in the summer has risen from less than I percent before 1980 to 13 percent in recent years.

Some areas have seen faster impacts from releasing so much carbon into the atmosphere. Alaska is a case in point. Average temperature increases are between 3 to 4 degrees centigrade there. Unstable houses and fracturing roads have been just one result. The resulting permafrost melt is releasing large quantities methane gas which is, pound for pound, 25X more powerful in contributing to global warming than carbon dioxide.

Combining peak oil argumentation to climate change data, TM is making a powerful argument for change. This more integrated approach for renewable energy, local community organic gardens with a grassroots, democratic approach, is a step above single-issue approaches tried elsewhere.

Beginning to put the brakes on climate change and the pollution from fossil fuels makes us all beneficiaries of TM. The mobilization at the grassroots is another huge plus for democracy. While effusing over these, it is important to evaluate TM’s weaknesses from a standpoint of helping this nascent movement.

A political weakness of the TM movement is its swallowing whole capitalism as a long-term solution and its focus on local markets. It calls the latter relocalization. One of its four assumptions mentions unleashing the collective genius of those around us. The political left and beyond have known for a long time that the market leads and has led to monopoly and the dominance of finance capital. The current cyclical and structural crises, led by financialization of the world economy, are just the current manifestation of this.

Art Perlo’s 6/13/12 PA piece, Austerity and the Economic Crisis spelled this out succinctly. “Marx noted the contradiction between the social nature of production under capitalism, and the private ownership and control. You can't go back, he said, to small scale, local production. The way to resolve this problem is to socialize ownership and control, as well as production. The social nature of production has multiplied a thousand times since Marx's day. This means that social -- and socialist -- solutions are increasingly necessary.”

Sharing a class analysis with this relatively new movement is crucial to its short and long-term health. One thing is for sure; there is another side in all this and it is formidable. So far, opposition to TM has been mostly of the local variety. One can only imagine what dollars of the billionaire Koch brothers would be mobilized if transitioning were to pick up steam nationally.

The tiny island town of Vinalhaven, Maine, while not declaring a formal transition, has moved in a TM direction. Its first community style farming collapsed after two years. Another organic farm is trying to pick up the ball. Its three wind turbines face legal challenges from people with deep pockets. It has already cost the communities’ electrical co-op over six hundred thousand dollars in consulting and legal fees.

By not having a national perspective, the TM movement leaves the Tea Party and other big business elements in Washington, D.C. free to attempt to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and eke oil out of tar sands with potential enormous damage to the environment.

Hydraulic fracking for natural gas is another extreme technique used to extract this fossil fuel. In a related PW article, Carrie Matsko of Ohio told of becoming ill as a result of hydrogen-sulfide fumes from a drill site near her home. Taken together, these extreme actions would have the effect of overwhelming local efforts at transitioning.

TM’s over emphasis on the power of education leaves it without a political perspective to carry the movement forward. The abolitionist movement would be a particularly good example of an indigenous, change movement for TM. Abolitionists used education along with demonstrations, marches, and active intervention with the Underground Railroad. It also took many acts of sabotage and revolts by slaves, agitation in Congress, not to mention actions like the raid on Harpers Ferry.

The following weaknesses in TM need to be addressed.

1. Lack of a class agency to carry out the transition from a material self-interested position is a weakness. Transitioning makes a good argument that combines peak oil with climate change. It does not address the need to involve the Labor Movement that has been at the center of change movements historically. The need for a new renewable nonpolluting energy source will take the minds of all our people, including and first of all, from the people who work at the point of production. In fact, here lie some of the most knotty questions facing TM such as how will fossil fuel workers be compensated as they face job displacement and need to be retrained to work in renewables? Only total emersion of the union movement with a national and international perspective will be able to grapple with these thorny questions.

2.     While Transitioning extols the role of local grassroots democracy, it does not address the United State’s multiracial, multinational makeup. Without addressing this along with class standing, TM will be only for those communities that can afford it. People of color will be left to beg for more fossil fuels, and the pollution/health problems that go with them, in an obscene display of environmental racism.

3.     Lack of a historical viewpoint further encumbers this movement. This includes previous attempts to move towards a more sustainable society.

During the aftermath of the oil embargo and long gas station lines of the 1970s, the Carter Administration initiated various renewable efforts. It was defeated by a united show of force by the oil, gas and coal oligarchs. Support for individual efforts like solar water heaters for houses was ended. Symbolically, the Reagan Administration ripped the solar panels off the White House after Carter was defeated in the 1980 election. The drying up of R and D funds for renewable energy followed.

TM repeats often that the country and the world are addicted to oil. What it has to realize is that the addiction is to oil profits by oil magnates. A clear message of this was sent from the horse’s mouth in a related industry in the 1980s. The president of U.S. Steel said emphatically that it was not in the business of producing steel; it was in the business of producing profits. If that meant throwing steel workers out of jobs in huge numbers, so be it. Concerning the oil industries’ addiction to profits, Exxon reported $415 billion dollars in profit for the last quarter alone.

This lack of a historical perspective includes ignoring international experiences. Socialist China’s experiences during the Great Leap Forward are a case in point. In the early 1960s the Chinese pushed a going local movement that included backyard iron furnaces. It failed miserably.

TMs answer to this is not to address industry at all. They simply say it is beyond the scope of the movement.  That is a cop out. In place of a resolution of the contradiction between social production and private ownership and acquisition, TM mainly projects technical fixes e.g. solar, wind, tidal. These will take massive retooling of the energy sector e.g. wind turbines at sea, and a coordinated national transport system.

In face of evidence that all current renewables used to the maximum cannot meet energy needs, TM has another simple answer. We have to accept less. We have to prepare for an energy descent.

Here TM appears to be locked into Malthusian linear thinking. Rev. Malthus, in the employ of the Dutch East India Company in the 18^th century, projected an arithmetic rise in food production that would clash with a geometric rise in population leading to mass starvation. It did not happen.

Redirecting the massive resources of national governments to not only make more efficient current renewables but also search for new sources of renewable energy, does not enter the thinking of TM presently. On this level, TM takes a nonstruggle approach. The irony of all this, including its exclusive leaning on capitalism, is the Einstein statement that TM uses as its mantra. “You can’t use the same level of thinking that generated the problem.”  A corollary to this might be you can’t expect the same class elements that generated the problem to solve the problem.

Included in bringing class struggle politics to the transition movement is another important ingredient for its and the overall peoples movements success. An ideological battle must be waged. If not, libertarians, who would bring us back to the 19th century with their magic of a market society that no longer exists, will fill the void. Worse, waiting in the wings are the extreme right wingers of the Grover Norquist type who feign a propaganda of little or no government while supporting tax cuts for the rich as a solution to the current recession.

Given all this, TMs greatest challenges lie in the ideological sphere. It is also here that the political left can be most useful.

Accompanying TM is the subliminal idea that “big” government is not needed to do all this. This includes ignoring a struggle to get state and federal support. This is illusory and is best illustrated by where TM is being tried in the USA.

In Vinalhaven, Maine, there are three land wind turbines. They are beginning to stabilize energy prices to consumers. Besides making use of an already existing energy grid, government funding was crucial. The giant GE turbines were built with a $500,000 government grant and a whopping 9 million dollar federal loan at a very low interest rate.

To a certain extent, the transition movement buys into the argumentation that big is bad. It unfortunately fits the Republican smoke screen that big government is the problem. It is right out of the Grover Norquist’s extreme right-wing playbook. This mentality is particularly rife on island communities where separation from the mainland is seen as more than a few nautical miles of water. It is in such places that “the best government is no government” is heard quite often. In fact, it is island communities that seem to have attracted some with a survivalist approach. Together they often speak of “America” as if the mainland is a separate country.

It is, in plain speak, so much hokum. The debunking of these mythical concepts is made clear in the example of Smith Island. It lays ten miles off the coast of Crisfield, Maryland in Chesapeake Bay. The island community of three tiny towns has a total population of 280.

Smith’s dependency on the mainland goes far beyond food, hardware and mail that must be delivered via boat. The island occupies 2,800 acres according to the Census Bureau. Startling is the fact that just 150 years ago it was 6,100 acres. The U.S. Geological Service estimates over 3,300 acres are now under water. Besides the important climate change implications here, note the dependency on federal agencies just to get accurate information important to the present and future of this tiny island.

There’s more. One town on the Island is the beneficiary of a new Army Corps bulkhead approaching 0.5 miles long. It is part of a massive infusion of federal funds to prevent shoreline erosion. The Island literarily owes its existence to the successful struggles that generated national government action, including in Chesapeake Bay. TM likes to say going small is inevitable. At least in the examples of Vinalhaven, Maine and Smith Island, Maryland, it appears considerable federal support is needed to maintain these small towns.

 None of this is to say that the Transition Movement should not be supported. It should be vigorously supported. Just as Fredrick Engels tipped his hat to the utopians as he criticized their approach, the peoples’ movements need to welcome TM aboard.

In fact, one of the dangers to TM is that leftists will ignore it. Similar mistakes have been made in the past. The Left was slow to support the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the 1970s pushed mainly by the women’s movement. Worried about certain provisions of ERA and also a sectarian fear of some of the forces in this reinvigorated women’s movement, the Left was slow to participate.

Another example was the impeachment movement in the early 1970s. Large sectors of the population, repulsed by the Vietnam War and other antidemocratic transgressions of the Nixon Administration, took to the streets. Again the Left was slow to respond to this broad democratic movement mainly because the Democratic Party was involved.   

If you are tired at being kept at the level of picking up litter or changing light bulbs, TM is for you. It posits that a new world is necessary. In places, it is moving the grassroots to reinvest, rethink and rebuild. To a certain extent, it builds on the hope of the 2008 election of Barrak Obama. To be sustained it needs the political strategizing of the Left and the goal of socialism to sustain both the hope and the movement.