"It feels like the inevitable march toward disaster," said Maureen E. Raymo, a scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a unit of Columbia University.
“The only alternative - impossible as this may seem right now - is to overthrow this global economic system and all of the governments of the 1% that prop it up and replace them with a global economic democracy, a radical bottom-up political democracy, an ecosocialist civilization...we are witnessing a near-simultaneous global mass democratic "awakening...these movements are still inchoate, still mainly protesting what's wrong rather than fighting for an alternative social order. Like Occupy, they have yet to clearly and robustly answer that crucial question, "Don't like capitalism? What's your alternative?" Yet they are working on it, and they are for the most part instinctively and radically democratic. And in this lies our hope...
... Thesis One CAPITALISM IS, OVERWHELMINGLY, THE MAIN DRIVER OF PLANETARY ECOLOGICAL COLLAPSE
From climate change to resource overconsumption to pollution, the engine that has powered three centuries of accelerating economic development revolutionizing technology, science, culture and human life itself is today a roaring, out-of-control locomotive mowing down continents of forests, sweeping oceans of life, clawing out mountains of minerals, drilling, pumping out lakes of fuels, devouring the planet's last accessible resources to turn them all into "product" while destroying fragile global ecologies built up over eons....giant corporations are wiping out life on Earth in the course of a routine business day. And the bigger the corporations grow, the worse the problems become....
....Thesis Two SO LONG AS WE LIVE UNDER CAPITALISM, ECONOMIC GROWTH HAS TO TAKE PRIORITY OVER ECOLOGICAL CONCERNS OR THE ECONOMY WILL COLLAPSE
We all know what we have to do: suppress greenhouse gas emissions. Stop overconsuming natural resources. Stop the senseless pollution of the Earth, its waters and its atmosphere with toxic chemicals. Stop producing waste that can't be recycled by nature. Stop the destruction of biological diversity and ensure the rights of other species to flourish. We don't need any new technological breakthroughs to solve these problems. Mostly, we just stop doing what we're doing. But we can't stop because we're all locked into an economic system in which companies have to grow to compete and reward their shareholders and because we all need the jobs... There's no technical solution to this problem and no market solution either. In a very few cases - electricity generation is the main one - a broad shift to renewables could indeed sharply reduce fossil-fuel emissions in that sector. But if we just use "clean" "green" energy to power more growth, consume ever more natural resources to produce more and more junk we don't need, then we would solve nothing and still would be headed to collapse....But not one of these people stops to ask the obvious question: Where are all the resources going to come from to support insatiable consumption on a global scale? In the capitalist lexicon, there is no concept of "too much."...No one stops to ask "what's it all for?" Why do we "need" all this energy? Why do we "need" all the stuff we produce with all this energy? It's high time we start asking this question. Economists tell us that two-thirds of America's own economy is geared to producing "consumer" goods and services. To be sure, we need food, clothing, housing, transportation, and energy to run all this. But as Vance Packard astutely observed half a century ago, most of what corporations produce today is produced not for the needs of people but for the needs of corporations to sell to people.
Thesis Three IF CAPITALISM CAN'T HELP BUT DESTROY THE WORLD, THEN WHAT ALTERNATIVE IS THERE BUT TO NATIONALIZE AND SOCIALIZE MOST OF THE ECONOMY AND PLAN IT DIRECTLY, EVEN PLAN MOST OF THE GLOBAL INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY?
This section of the article is perhaps the weakest and reveals Richard Smith’s confusion presenting his wish-list of reforms. He appears to be calling for both state-ownership and smaller-sized self-managed capitalist enterprises as a solution and neither these option either separately or together are a solution. We can, however agree with his observations that “We need a comprehensive global plan, a number of national or regional plans, and a multitude of local plans – and we need to coordinate them all...Today, there's more than enough wealth and productive capacity to provide every person on earth a very satisfactory material standard of living....Quantifying human needs, global resources and global agricultural and industrial capacities is, I would think, a fairly pedestrian task for today's computers, with all their algorithms.”
Thesis Four RATIONAL PLANNING REQUIRES DEMOCRACY: VOTING THE BIG QUESTIONS
...Let's put the big questions up for a vote. Shouldn't everyone have a say in decisions that affect them all? Isn't that the essential idea of democracy? The problem with capitalism is that the economy isn't up for a vote. But it needs to be.... Why shouldn't we have a say in these decisions? We don't have to be experts; corporate boards aren't composed of experts. They're mainly made up of major investors. They discuss and vote on what they want to do, then hire experts to figure out how to implement their decisions. Why can't we do that - for humanity's interests?....If corporations and capitalist governments can't align production with the common good and ecological rationality, what other choice is there but for society to collectively and democratically organize, plan and manage most production themselves? To do this we would have to establish democratic institutions to plan and manage our social economy. We would have to set up planning boards at local, regional, national/continental and international levels. Those would have to include not just workers, the direct producers, but entire communities, consumers, farmers, peasants, everyone. We have models: the Paris Commune, Russian soviets, Brazil's participatory planning, La Via Campesina and others. Direct democracy at the base, delegated authority with right of recall for higher-level planning boards. What's so difficult about that?
Thesis Five DEMOCRACY CAN WORK ONLY IN CONTEXT OF ROUGH SOCIO-ECONOMIC EQUALITY AND SOCIAL GUARANTEES.
“If we want democracy, we would have to abolish "the great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few." That means abolishing not just private property in the means of production, but also extremes of income, exorbitant salaries, great property, and inheritance. Because the only way to prevent corruption of democracy is to make it impossible to materially gain by doing so - by creating a society with neither rich nor poor, a society of basic economic equality.”
This thesis from Smith also lacks coherence and is simply another call for re-distribution of wealth as a palliative. But we can fully accept it when Smith writes “...Freeing ourselves from the toil of producing unnecessary or harmful commodities - the three-quarters of current US production that's a waste - would free us to shorten the work day, to enjoy the leisure promised but never delivered by capitalism, to redefine the meaning of the standard of living to connote a way of life that is actually richer, while consuming less, to realize our fullest human potential instead of wasting our lives in mindless drudgery and shopping. This is the emancipatory promise of ecosocialism....”
Thesis Six THIS IS CRAZY, UTOPIAN, IMPOSSIBLE, NEVER HAPPEN
"...Perhaps. But what's the alternative? The specter of planetwide ecological collapse and the collapse of civilization into some kind of Blade Runner dystopia is not as hypothetical as it once seemed....Economic systems come and go. Capitalism has had a 300-year run. The question is, will humanity stand by let the world be destroyed to save the profit system?.."
When Richard Smith in his article asks “That outcome depends to a great extent on whether we, on the left, can answer that question - "What's your alternative?" - with a compelling and plausible vision of an eco-socialist civilization - and figure out how to get there....”
The World Socialist Movement, who have also been described as demanding the impossible, can answer, without wanting to sound too sectarian and too arrogant, Richard, we are further along the path to eco-socialism than you are and have seen that some of your proposals are side-tracks and dead-ends. But Richard, at least you are on the right road. Common ownership and production for use, and the complete and utter destruction of all capitalist relations is the only solution.
Click here for the full article by Richard Smith
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