The following is an abridged and adapted version of an
article by Richard Smith an economic historian and author of an up-coming book
called ‘To Save the Planet, Turn the
World Upside Down’. The World Socialist Movement cannot fully agree with
everything he says and actually would apply some of the criticisms he makes of
Klein to himself, such as his belief that some sort of hybrid small-scale capitalism
can survive alongside a socialized economy. Nevertheless he makes many
pertinent observations that require repeating and deserving of a wider audience.
"The American way
of life is not negotiable." George
H.W. Bush, 1992 Climate Summit
Climate scientists are telling us that unless we suppress
the rise of carbon dioxide emissions, we run the risk of crossing critical
tipping points that could unleash runaway global warming, and precipitate the
collapse of civilization and perhaps even our own extinction. These climate
scientists warn that we're "running out of time," that we face a
"climate emergency" and that unless we take "radical
measures" to suppress emissions very soon, we're headed for a 4-degree or
even 6-degree Celsius rise before the end of the century. And not just climate
scientists have made warnings, but also mainstream authorities, including the
World Bank, the International Energy Agency (IEA) and others. Yet despite the dire
warnings and despite record heat and drought, super-storms and floods, and
melting ice caps and vanishing glaciers, "business as usual"
prevails. Industrialized and industrializing nations are ravenously looting the
planet's last resources - minerals, forests, fish, fresh water, everything. If
we don't stop looting the world's resources and poisoning the air, land and
water with every manner of toxics, what kind of world are we going to leave to
our children?
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China is now consuming half the world's coal, more than half
the world's steel, cement, copper and vast quantities of other resources, to
build unnecessary industries, unnecessary and dangerous dams, forests of
useless vanity skyscrapers, to blanket the country with nearly empty high-speed
rail networks and empty national expressways systems. It has built millions of empty apartment
blocks, even entire cities complete with shopping malls, universities,
hospitals and museums - but no people. By one estimate, China's builders have
put up more than 64 million surplus apartments, enough new flats to house more
than half the US population, and they're adding millions more every year.
Around the world, resource consumption is growing at several
multiples the rate of population increase, driven by the capitalist engines of
insidious commodification, incessant invention of new "needs," daily
destruction of existing values by rendering more and more of what we've already
bought disposable and replaceable, and, of course, by the insatiable appetites
of the global 1%. Today, the global rich are devouring the planet. Consumption
by the global rich is beyond obscene. In the United States houses today are
more than twice the size on average of houses built in the 1950s - even as
families are shrinking. Most come with central air, flat-screen TVs in every
room and walk-in closets the size of 1950s spare bedrooms. And those are just
average houses. McMansions offer breathtaking extravagance and waste: swimming
pools in the basement next to the bowling alleys next to the home theater next
to the gym, the bar lounge and game rooms. And those are just the basements.
Upstairs there are the Elle Décor floors and furnishings of tropical hardwoods,
Architectural Digest kitchens in marble and stainless steel, Waterworks
bathrooms, "bedroom suites" the size of small houses, lighting and
audio "systems" and on and on. Americans are said to use more
electricity just for air conditioning than the entire continent of Africa uses
for all purposes.
Given that we live under capitalism, we're all more or less
locked into this lemming-like suicidal drive to hurl ourselves off the cliff.
Whether as CEOs, investors, workers or governments, given capitalism, we all
"need" to maximize growth, therefore to consume more resources and
produce ever more pollution in the process - because companies need to satisfy
the insatiable demands of investors and because we all need the jobs. That's why
the environment is invariably sacrificed to growth. So long as we live under
capitalism, today, tomorrow, next year and every year thereafter, economic
growth will always be the overriding priority. According to Jonathon Porritt,
former Green Party co-chair and director of Friends of the Earth, and Tony
Blair's environment czar, "Logically, whether we like it or not,
sustainability is therefore going to have to be delivered within that
all-encompassing capitalist framework. We don't have time to wait for any
big-picture successor." He seeks reform of capitalism, and declines to
advocate the revolution to remove it even as his own studies demonstrate how
market-driven out-of-control growth is burning up the planet. The world's
preeminent climate scientist-turned-activist James Hansen can't bring himself
to to think outside the capitalist box, to abandon his doomed-to-fail carbon
tax scheme and join the struggle against the economic system that is destroying
the future for his grandchildren. Bill McKibben, the world's premier climate
protest organizer, won't challenge capitalism because he's not a socialist and
because he doesn't want to alienate his liberal base and wealthy foundation
funders. From the perennial boosters of "green capitalism" and
tech-fixits like Lester Brown, Al Gore, Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman, to
the apostles of "degrowth" like Tim Jackson, the New Economic
Foundation's Andrew Simms, and Serge Latouche, for decades, mainstream debate
has been confined to hopelessly discredited, self-contradictory and empirically
implausible save-the-planet strategies - held in check by their protagonists'
fear of challenging the principal driver of global ecological collapse,
capitalism.
However, Naomi Klein places the cause of the environmental crisis
where it lies: "Our economic system and our planetary system are now at
war…What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity's use
of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered
growth . . . ". But for all of that,
it's not clear that she has an alternative to capitalism. Since she doesn't
call for "system change" to, say, eco-socialism, it's hard to see how
we can make the profound, radical changes she says we need to make to prevent
ecological collapse. Klein calls for "managed degrowth" of the
"careless" economy of fossil-fuel "extractivism" - offset
by the growth of a "caring economy" of more investment in emissions
reduction, environmental remediation, the caregiving professions, green jobs,
renewable energy, mass transit and so on. But how can we change these
priorities when the economy remains in the hands of huge corporations who want
to keep the priorities just as they are?
Here and there she argues for economic planning and
democratic control of the economy. She says we need a "comprehensive
vision for what should emerge in place of our failing system, as well as
serious strategies for how to achieve those goals," "we need an
entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet". She
says the "central battle of our time [is] whether we need to plan and
manage our societies to reflect our goals and values, or whether that task can
be left to the magic of the market", and "a core battle must be the
right of citizens to democratically decide what kind of economy they need".
But since she does not explicitly call for abolishing capitalism, socializing
the economy and instituting society-wide, bottom-up, democratic economic
planning, how is society supposed to democratically decide what kind of economy
they want? Under capitalism, those decisions are the prerogative of corporate
boards. We don't get to vote on the economy, but we need to.
She calls for "slapping the invisible hand" of the
market and "reining in corporate greed". But she does not call for abolishing
private property and replacing it with socialized property. She rejects
"the reigning ideology," the "economic model" of
"market fundamentalism" and "neo-liberalism". But that's
not the same thing as rejecting capitalism. "Slapping the invisible
hand" of the market system is not the same thing as replacing the
invisible hand of the market with the visible hand of generalized economic
planning. She rejects the "free" "unfettered" market, but
she does not reject the market system per se.
She supports feed-in tariffs "to ensure that anyone who
wants to get into renewable power generation can do so in a way that is simple,
stable, and profitable" . She calls for reviving industrial planning to
prioritize public transit and smart grids, returning some utilities to the
public sector, taxing the rich to pay for more public spending, and
decentralizing and localizing control over utilities, energy and agriculture.
And she supports decentralized local planning and state industrial policy to
generate "green" jobs. But this is all within the framework of a
standard capitalist economy. She does not call for generalized economic planning.
In her vision of the future, it appears that corporations will still run the
world's economies and capitalist governments will still run politics.
When New York bankers replied to the Occupy movement in
2011, "Don't like capitalism? What's your alternative?" for all its
audacity and militancy, Occupy had no alternative to offer. We can't build much
of a movement without something to fight for, not just against. Klein herself
says, "saying no is not enough. If opposition movements are to do more
than burn bright and then burn out, they will need a comprehensive vision for
what should emerge in the place of our failing system, as well as serious
political strategies for how to achieve those goals. Klein doesn't articulate a
vision of an alternative economic system to replace our failing system,
capitalism. She hopes that mass mobilizations, protests and blockades will be
enough to "bend the rules of the market," to force corporations to
change enough to save the humans. But these problems are not going to be solved
just by protests. But these problems are not going to be solved just by
protests. They require the abolition of private property in the major means of
production, the abolition of the market domination of the economy, the
institution of generalized, direct economic planning, and the institution of
economic democracy across the entire economy not just local communities,
because at the end of the day, corporations can't "bend the rules of the
market" enough to save the humans, and still stay in business in a
competitive market economy. If Naomi Klein really means to call for a mass
movement to degrow the economy within the framework of capitalism, that sounds
like a non-starter.
The fact remains that we can't save humanity unless we
radically degrow the over-consuming economies but the only way to get
"managed degrowth" without ending up in another Great Depression, is
to do so in an entirely different, non-market economy. We need to completely
abolish all kinds of useless, wasteful, polluting, harmful industries and also
need to grow other parts of the economy: renewable energy, health care, public
transit, durable and energy efficient housing, durable vehicles, appliances and
electronics, environmental remediation and reforestation - the "caring
economy" Naomi Klein talks about. But the problem for Klein and the similar
proponents of the de-growth school, is that - given private property in the
means of production, given the anarchy of production for the free market, given
the "iron law" of priority to profit maximization and given the
imperatives of competition - there is just no way to prioritize people and
planet over growth and profits in a market economy. The only way to rationally
reorganize the economy, to deemphasize the "careless" industries and
emphasize the "caring" industries, is to do this ourselves, directly,
by consciously, collectively and democratically planning most of the industrial
economy, even closely coordinating most of the world's industrial economies. Klein
is rightly skeptical about "energy nationalization on existing
models," because Brazil's Petrobras or Norway's Statoil are "just as
voracious in pursuing high-risk pools of carbon as their private sector
counterparts." But that's because they
operate in is the capitalist world economy - so even if they're state-owned,
they still need to abide by the rules of the market. This only underlines the
eco-socialist argument that the only way we can stop global warming and solve
our many interrelated environmental crises is with a planned, commonly owned, non-market
economy. Four hundred million Indians lack electrical service. Most of the
developing world still lacks basic infrastructure, schools, health care, decent
housing, jobs and much else. So the large areas and large populations certainly
needs "development," but if it is developed on the basis of
capitalism this will only wreck the world faster.
In the last analysis, the only way to save the planet is to
stop converting so much of it into commodities. Leave the coal in the hole, the
oil in the soil, the gas under the grass - but also leave the trees in the
forests, the fish in the sea, the minerals in the mountains, and find ways for
our billions to live lightly on the earth. We are not suggesting we abandon
modernity and go back to living in some pre-industrial state. any modern
ecological society will still have some cars, planes, chemicals, plastic, cell
phones and so on, though much less and many fewer of them. The problem is that
so much of what we produce today is so unnecessary, harmful and unsustainable.
Even though an ecological society would still need some cars, for example, to
supplement expanded public transportation, it would not need hundreds of
millions of new models every year. That's unnecessary waste. Cars could easily
be built to last practically forever to be repairable and upgradeable. And why
can't we car-share when we need a car instead of having millions of privately
owned cars parked on the streets most of the time?
The same goes for many other things. If Apple's brilliant
engineers designed iPhones to last decades, to be upgradeable and completely
recyclable, this would save lakes of petrochemicals, heavy metals, rare earth
metals, not to mention improve the quality of life for Foxconn workers who jump
out of their dormitory windows to their deaths in despair over the insane pace
of production, the boredom of 8 to 16 hour days of repetitive work, and the
hopelessness of their assembly-line future but, needless to say, if Apple did
this it would go out of business
tomorrow if it couldn't sell millions of "new" iThings every year. So
which is it to be? We save Apple or we save the humanity. This is the tragedy
of capitalism versus the environment. What we need to do to save the humans
tomorrow means economic collapse and mass unemployment today. That's why we
have to fight for an eco-socialist economy.
Eco-socialism is based on planning, democracy and common
ownership is the only path to a sustainable economy and society. Corporations
can't change much because they can't afford to put themselves out of business
to save the humans, but only society as a whole can afford to reorganize the
system of production. An eco-socialist society would free us from the endless
treadmill of consumerism, the rat race of competition, the mindless drudgery of
commodity production, the 24/7 work-life, enabling us to take pleasure in
unalienating work for our own enjoyment, and for the good of society, to
develop our many capacities and talents in our work lives and also to shorten
the work day and year so that we can enjoy the leisure once promised but never
delivered by capitalism. All the social and environmental problems are systemic
and the system that causes these problems is capitalism. Our true wealth is in
our minds and in the wonders the natural world about us. No model that includes
capitalist ideals will ever succeed. Capitalism has become a threat to
ourselves as a species. Capitalism must go.
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