Sarthak's Blog.

I learned yesterday that Mike Cooley had passed away almost a year ago. Ever since I came across his work in the mid-2010s it has shaped my social thinking and activity in definitive ways. He along with Seymour Melman and Tony Mazzocchi was a pioneering example of what the intersection of engineering, labour organizing, demilitarization, and radical environmental and health activism ought to look like.

The value of this intersectional politics has increased multifold during our period of chronic emergency – from covid to daily and diverse impacts of climatic collapse, from dismantling of standard employment structures to the historic rise in unemployment. Mike was instrumental in preparing the Lucas Plan. A corporate plan that aimed to transform the war economy to civilian economy and produce socially useful products under worker control.

Mike summed up what socially useful production sought to achieve like this: “We have, for example, complex control systems which can guide a missile to another continent with extraordinary accuracy, yet the blind and the disabled have to stagger around our cities in very much the same way as they did in medieval times.”

Now we have vehicles that can “see” but the disabled, because they are not a profitable market, still await the 21st century. This is not due to technological insufficiency or unavailability but due to capitalism’s preference for profitable and wasteful production, just like it was not profitable for capitalist institutions to fund preventive research on the coronavirus when epidemiologists started warning in 2016 or even produce ventilators or hospital beds.

If the military spending and the incalculable cost of what our society has to forego to sustain it continue to increase at the same pace there is no way to transform our economy to an even a version of capitalism that can prevent irreversible dive toward uninhabitable earth.

But we can neither progress towards producing and constructing what the degrading environment demands nor cut military budget nor prevent job loss because these are not technocratic matters that some right kind of corporate or political leadership or some technological breakthrough can realize. As Mike always noted that these demands are a direct threat to corporate and political managerial power over society. They can only be won by power struggle – by class struggle.