ABSTRACT
The attitude exhibited specifically by Jeb Stuart and more generally by the environmental regulators discussed by Samuel P. Hays and Lynton K. Caldwell is rather technocratic. The most salient feature of the administrative politics that determines how the regulatory budget is deployed, is the role that regulators see themselves as fulfilling. This situation is reinforced for air pollution control in California because local politicians sit as governing boards for air pollution agencies. The existence of environmental agencies is functionally a part of the hegemony of the capitalist class. The consumer as environmental activist pays three times—for the degradation, for their own efforts to abate the degradation and for the resistance to such efforts through the purchase of commodities. The critique of the utilitarian model is that the hegemony of capitalist institutions, such as those of environmental control, are superstructural—where they do not exist to actively support the accumulation of capital, they exist to prevent the abatement of accumulation.
