My subject—organizing ecological revolution—has as its initial premise that
we are in the midst of a global environmental crisis of such enormity that the
web of life of the entire planet is threatened and with it the future of
civilization.
This is no longer a very controversial proposition. To be sure, there are
different perceptions about the extent of the challenge that this raises. At one
extreme there are those who believe that since these are human problems arising
from human causes they are easily solvable. All we need are ingenuity and the
will to act. At the other extreme there are those who believe that the world
ecology is deteriorating on a scale and with a rapidity beyond our means to
control, giving rise to the gloomiest forebodings.
Although often seen as polar opposites these views nonetheless share a common
basis. As Paul Sweezy observed they each reflect “the belief that if present
trends continue to operate, it is only a matter of time until the human species
irredeemably fouls its own nest” (Monthly Review, June 1989).
The more we learn about current environmental trends the more the
unsustainability of our present course is brought home to us. Among the warning
signs:
There is now a virtual certainty that the critical threshold of a 2° C (3.6° F)
increase in average world temperature above the preindustrial level will soon be
crossed due to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Scientists
believe that climate change at this level will have portentous implications for
the world’s ecosystems. The question is no longer whether significant climate
change will occur but how great it will be (International Climate Change Task
Force, Meeting the Climate Challenge, January 2005, http://www.americanprogress.org).
There are growing worries in the scientific community that the estimates of the
rate of global warming provided by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), which in its worst case scenario projected increases in
average global temperature of up to 5.8° C (10.4° F) by 2100, may prove to be
too low. For example, results from the world’s largest climate modeling
experiment based in Oxford University in Britain indicate that global warming
could increase almost twice as fast as the IPCC has estimated (London Times,
January 27, 2005).
Experiments at the International Rice Institute and elsewhere have led
scientists to conclude that with each 1° C (1.8° F) increase in temperature,
rice, wheat, and corn yields could drop 10 percent (Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, July 6, 2004; Lester Brown, Outgrowing the Earth).
It is now clear that the world is within a few years of its peak oil production
(known as Hubbert’s Peak). The world economy is therefore confronting
diminishing and ever more difficult to obtain oil supplies, despite a rapidly
increasing demand (Ken Deffeyes, Hubbert’s Peak; David Goodstein, Out of Gas).
All of this points to a growing world energy crisis and mounting resource wars.
The planet is facing global water shortages due to the drawing down of
irreplaceable aquifers, which make up the bulk of the world’s fresh water
supplies. This poses a threat to global agriculture, which has become a bubble
economy based on the unsustainable exploitation of groundwater. One in four
people in the world today do not have access to safe water (Bill McKibben, New
York Review of Books, September 25, 2003).
Two thirds of the world’s major fish stocks are currently being fished at or
above their capacity. Over the last half-century 90 percent of large predatory
fish in the world’s oceans have been eliminated (Worldwatch, Vital Signs 2005).
The species extinction rate is the highest in 65 million years with the prospect
of cascading extinctions as the last remnants of intact ecosystems are removed.
Already the extinction rate is approaching 1,000 times the “benchmark” or
natural rate (Scientific American, September 2005). Scientists have pinpointed
twenty-five hot spots on land that account for 44 percent of all vascular plant
species and 35 percent of all species in four vertebrate groups, while taking up
only 1.4 percent of the world’s land surface. All of these hot spots are now
threatened with rapid annihilation due to human causes (Nature, February 24,
2000).
According to a study published by the National Academy of Sciences in 2002, the
world economy exceeded the earth’s regenerative capacity in 1980 and by 1999 had
gone beyond it by as much as 20 percent. This means, according to the study’s
authors, that “it would require 1.2 earths, or one earth for 1.2 years, to
regenerate what humanity used in 1999” (Matthis Wackernagel, et. al, “Tracking
the Ecological Overshoot of the Human Economy,” Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, July 9, 2002).
The question of the ecological collapse of past civilizations from Easter Island
to the Mayans is now increasingly seen as extending to today’s world capitalist
system. This view, long held by environmentalists, has recently been popularized
by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse.
These and other warning bells indicate that the present human relation to the
environment is no longer supportable. The most developed capitalist countries
have the largest per capita ecological footprints, demonstrating that the entire
course of world capitalist development at present represents a dead end.
The main response of the ruling capitalist class when confronted with the
growing environmental challenge is to “fiddle while Rome burns.” To the extent
that it has a strategy, it is to rely on revolutionizing the forces of
production, i.e., on technical change, while keeping the existing system of
social relations intact. It was Karl Marx who first pointed in The Communist
Manifesto to “the constant revolutionizing of production” as a distinguishing
feature of capitalist society. Today’s vested interests are counting on this
built-in process of revolutionary technological change coupled with the
proverbial magic of the market to solve the environmental problem when and where
this becomes necessary.
In stark contrast, many environmentalists now believe that technological
revolution alone will be insufficient to solve the problem and that a more
far-reaching social revolution aimed at transforming the present mode of
production is required.
Historically addressing this question of the ecological transformation of
society means that we need to ascertain: (1) where the world capitalist system
is heading at present, (2) the extent to which it can alter its course by
technological or other means in response to today’s converging ecological and
social crises, and (3) the historical alternatives to the existing system. The
most ambitious attempt thus far to carry out such a broad assessment has come
from the Global Scenario Group (http://www.gsg.org), a project launched in 1995
by the Stockholm Environmental Institute to examine the transition to global
sustainability. The Global Scenario Group has issued three reports—Branch Points
(1997), Bending the Curve (1998), and their culminating study, Great Transition
(2002). In what follows I will focus on the last of these reports, the Great
Transition.*
As its name suggests, the Global Scenario Group employs alternative scenarios to
explore possible paths that society caught in a crisis of ecological
sustainability might take. Their culminating report presents three classes of
scenarios: Conventional Worlds, Barbarization, and Great Transitions. Each of
these contains two variants. Conventional Worlds consists of Market Forces and
Policy Reform. Barbarization manifests itself in the forms of Breakdown and
Fortress World. Great Transitions is broken down into Eco-communalism and the
New Sustainability Paradigm. Each scenario is associated with different
thinkers: Market Forces with Adam Smith; Policy Reform with John Maynard Keynes
and the authors of the 1987 Brundtland Commission report; Breakdown with Thomas
Malthus; Fortress World with Thomas Hobbes; Eco-communalism with William Morris,
Mahatma Gandhi, and E. F. Schumacher; and the New Sustainability Paradigm with
John Stuart Mill.
Within the Conventional Worlds scenarios Market Forces stands for naked
capitalism or neoliberalism. It represents, in the words of the Great Transition
report, “the firestorm of capitalist expansion.” Market Forces is an unfettered
capitalist world order geared to the accumulation of capital and rapid economic
growth without regard to social or ecological costs. The principal problem
raised by this scenario is its rapacious relation to humanity and the earth.
The drive to amass capital that is central to a Market Forces regime is best
captured by Marx’s general formula of capital (though not referred to in the
Great Transition report itself). In a society of simple commodity production (an
abstract conception referring to pre-capitalist economic formations in which
money and the market play a subsidiary role), the circuit of commodities and
money exists in a form, C–M–C, in which distinct commodities or use values
constitute the end points of the economic process. A commodity C embodying a
definite use value is sold for money M which is used to purchase a different
commodity C. Each such circuit is completed with the consumption of a use value.
In the case of capitalism, or generalized commodity production, however, the
circuit of money and commodities begins and ends with money, or M–C–M. Moreover,
since money is merely a quantitative relationship such an exchange would have no
meaning if the same amount of money were acquired at the end of the process as
exchanged in the beginning, so the general formula for capital in reality takes
the form of M–C–M´, where M´ equals M + m or surplus value.* What stands out,
when contrasted with simple commodity production, is that there is no real end
to the process, since the object is not final use but the accumulation of
surplus value or capital. M–C–M´ in one year therefore results in the )m being
reinvested, leading to M–C–M´´ in the next year and M–C–M´´´ the year after
that, ad infinitum. In other words, capital by its nature is self-expanding
value.
The motor force behind this drive to accumulation is competition. The
competitive struggle ensures that each capital or firm must grow and hence must
reinvest its “earnings” in order to survive.
Such a system tends toward exponential growth punctuated by crises or temporary
interruptions in the accumulation process. The pressures placed on the natural
environment are immense and will lessen only with the weakening and cessation of
capitalism itself. During the last half-century the world economy has grown more
than seven-fold while the biosphere’s capacity to support such expansion has if
anything diminished due to human ecological depredations (Lester Brown,
Outgrowing the Earth).
The main assumption of those who advocate a Market Forces solution to the
environmental problem is that it will lead to increasing efficiency in the
consumption of environmental inputs by means of technological revolution and
continual market adjustments. Use of energy, water, and other natural resources
will decrease per unit of economic output. This is often referred to as
“dematerialization.” However, the central implication of this argument is false.
Dematerialization, to the extent that it can be said to exist, has been shown to
be a much weaker tendency than M–C–M´. As the Global Transition report puts it,
“The ‘growth effect’ outpaces the ‘efficiency effect.’”
This can be understood concretely in terms of what has been called the Jevons
Paradox, named after William Stanley Jevons who published The Coal Question in
1865. Jevons, one of the founders of neoclassical economics, explained that
improvements in steam engines that decreased the use of coal per unit of output
also served to increase the scale of production as more and bigger factories
were built. Hence, increased efficiency in the use of coal had the paradoxical
effect of expanding aggregate coal consumption.
The perils of the Market Forces model are clearly visible in the environmental
depredations during the two centuries since the advent of industrial capitalism,
and especially in the last half-century. “Rather than abating” under a Market
Forces regime, the Great Transition report declares, “the unsustainable process
of environmental degradation that we observe in today’s world would [continue
to] intensify. The danger of crossing critical thresholds in global systems
would increase, triggering events that would radically transform the planet’s
climate and ecosystems.” Although it is “the tacit ideology” of most
international institutions, Market Forces leads inexorably to ecological and
social disaster and even collapse. The continuation of “‘business-as-usual’ is a
utopian fantasy.”
A far more rational basis for hope, the report contends, is found in the Policy
Reform scenario. “The essence of the scenario is the emergence of the political
will for gradually bending the curve of development toward a comprehensive set
of sustainability targets,” including peace, human rights, economic development,
and environmental quality. This is essentially the Global Keynesian strategy
advocated by the Brundtland Commission Report in the late 1980s—an expansion of
the welfare state, now conceived as an environmental welfare state, to the
entire world. It represents the promise of what environmental sociologists call
“ecological modernization.”
The Policy Reform approach is prefigured in various international agreements
such as the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and the environmental reform
measures advanced by the earth summits in Rio in 1992 and Johannesburg in 2002.
Policy Reform would seek to decrease world inequality and poverty through
foreign aid programs emanating from the rich countries and international
institutions. It would promote environmental best practices through
state-induced market incentives. Yet, despite the potential for limited
ecological modernization, the realities of capitalism, the Great Transition
report contends, would collide with Policy Reform. This is because Policy Reform
remains a Conventional Worlds scenario—one in which the underlying values,
lifestyles, and structures of the capitalist system endure. “The logic of
sustainability and the logic of the global market are in tension. The
correlation between the accumulation of wealth and the concentration of power
erodes the political basis for a transition.” Under these circumstances the
“lure of the God of Mammon and the Almighty dollar” will prevail.
The failure of both of the Conventional Worlds scenarios to alleviate the
problem of ecological decline means that Barbarization threatens: either
Breakdown or the Fortress World. Breakdown is self-explanatory and to be avoided
at all costs. The Fortress World emerges when “powerful regional and
international actors comprehend the perilous forces leading to Breakdown” and
are able to guard their own interests sufficiently to create “protected
enclaves.” Fortress World is a planetary apartheid system, gated and maintained
by force, in which the gap between global rich and global poor constantly widens
and the differential access to environmental resources and amenities increases
sharply. It consists of “bubbles of privilege amidst oceans of misery....The
elite[s] have halted barbarism at their gates and enforced a kind of
environmental management and uneasy stability.” The general state of the
planetary environment, however, would continue to deteriorate in this scenario
leading either to a complete ecological Breakdown or to the achievement through
revolutionary struggle of a more egalitarian society, such as Eco-communalism.
This description of the Fortress World is remarkably similar to the scenario
released in the 2003 Pentagon report, Abrupt Climate Change and its Implications
for United States National Security (see “The Pentagon and Climate Change,”
Monthly Review, May 2004). The Pentagon report envisioned a possible shutdown
due to global warming of the thermohaline circulation warming the North
Atlantic, throwing Europe and North America into Siberia-like conditions. Under
such unlikely but plausible circumstances relatively well-off populations,
including those in the United States, are pictured as building “defensive
fortresses” around themselves to keep masses of would-be immigrants out.
Military confrontations over scarce resources intensify.
Arguably naked capitalism and resource wars are already propelling the world in
this direction at present, though without a cause as immediately earth-shaking
as abrupt climate change. With the advent of the War of Terror, unleashed by the
United States against one country after another since September 11, 2001, an
“Empire of Barbarism” is making its presence felt (Monthly Review, December
2004).
Still, from the standpoint of the Global Scenario Group, the Barbarization
scenarios are there simply to warn us of the worst possible dangers of
ecological and social decline. A Great Transition, it is argued, is necessary if
Barbarization is to be avoided.
Theoretically, there are two Great Transitions scenarios envisioned by the
Global Scenario Group: Eco-communalism and the New Sustainability Paradigm. Yet
Eco-communalism is never discussed in any detail, on the grounds that for this
kind of transformation to come about it would be necessary for world society
first to pass through Barbarization. The social revolution of Eco-communalism is
seen, by the Global Scenario Group authors, as lying on the other side of Jack
London’s Iron Heel. The discussion of Great Transition is thus confined to the
New Sustainability Paradigm.
The essence of the New Sustainability Paradigm is that of a radical ecological
transformation that goes against unbridled “capitalist hegemony” but stops short
of full social revolution. It is to be carried out primarily through changes in
values and lifestyles rather than transformation of social structures. Advances
in environmental technology and policy that began with the Policy Reform
scenario, but that were unable to propel sufficient environmental change due to
the dominance of acquisitive norms, are here supplemented by a “lifestyle
wedge.”
In the explicitly utopian scenario of the New Sustainability Paradigm the United
Nations is transformed into the “World Union,” a true “global federation.”
Globalization has become “civilized.” The world market is fully integrated and
harnessed for equality and sustainability not just wealth generation. The War on
Terrorism has resulted in the defeat of the terrorists. Civil society,
represented by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), plays a leading role in
society at both the national and global levels. Voting is electronic. Poverty is
eradicated. Typical inequality has decreased to a 2–3:1 gap between the top 20
percent and bottom 20 percent of society. Dematerialization is real, as is the
polluter pays principle. Advertising is nowhere to be seen. There has been a
transition to a solar economy. The long commute from where people live to where
they work is a thing of the past; instead there are “integrated settlements”
that place home, work, retail shops, and leisure outlets in close proximity to
each other. The giant corporations have become forward-looking societal
organizations, rather than simply private entities. They are no longer concerned
exclusively with the economic bottom line but have revised this “to include
social equity and environmental sustainability, not only as a means to profit,
but as ends.”
Four agents of change are said to have combined to bring all of this about: (1)
giant transnational corporations, (2) intergovernmental organizations such as
the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade
Organization, (3) civil society acting through NGOs, and (4) a globally aware,
environmentally-conscious, democratically organized world population.
Underpinning this economically is the notion of a stationary state, as depicted
by Mill in his Principles of Political Economy (1848) and advanced today by the
ecological economist Herman Daly. Most classical economists—including Adam
Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and Karl Marx—saw the specter of a
stationary state as presaging the demise of the bourgeois political economy. In
contrast, Mill, who Marx (in the afterword to the second German edition of
Capital) accused of a “shallow syncretism,” saw the stationary state as somehow
compatible with existing productive relations, requiring only changes in
distribution. In the New Sustainability Paradigm scenario, which takes Mill’s
view of the stationary state as its inspiration, the basic institutions of
capitalism remain intact, as do the fundamental relations of power, but a shift
in lifestyle and consumer orientation mean that the economy is no longer geared
to economic growth and the enlargement of profits, but to efficiency, equity,
and qualitative improvements in life. A capitalist society formerly driven to
expanded reproduction through investment of surplus product (or surplus value)
has been replaced with a system of simple reproduction (Mill’s stationary
state), in which the surplus is consumed rather than invested. The vision is one
of a cultural revolution supplementing technological revolution, radically
changing the ecological and social landscape of capitalist society, without
fundamentally altering the productive, property, and power relations that define
the system.
In my view, there are both logical and historical problems with this projection.
It combines the weakest elements of utopian thinking (weaving a future out of
mere hopes and wishes—see Bertell Ollman, “The Utopian Vision of the Future,”
Monthly Review, July-August 2005) with a “practical” desire to avoid a sharp
break with the existing system. The failure of the Global Scenario Group to
address its own scenario of Eco-communalism is part and parcel of this
perspective, which seeks to elude the question of the more thoroughgoing social
transformation that a genuine Great Transition would require.
The result is a vision of the future that is contradictory to an extreme.
Private corporations are institutions with one and only one purpose: the pursuit
of profit. The idea of turning them to entirely different and opposing social
ends is reminiscent of the long-abandoned notions of the “soulful corporation”
that emerged for a short time in the 1950s and then vanished in the harsh light
of reality. Many changes associated with the New Sustainability Paradigm would
require a class revolution to bring about. Yet, this is excluded from the
scenario itself. Instead the Global Scenario Group authors engage in a kind of
magical thinking—denying that fundamental changes in the relations of production
must accompany (and sometimes even precede) changes in values. No less than in
the case of the Policy Reform Scenario—as pointed out in The Great Transition
report itself—the “God of Mammon” will inevitably overwhelm a value-based Great
Transition that seeks to escape the challenge of the revolutionary
transformation of the whole society.
Put simply, my argument is that a global ecological revolution worthy of the
name can only occur as part of a larger social—and I would insist,
socialist—revolution. Such a revolution, were it to generate the conditions of
equality, sustainability, and human freedom worthy of a genuine Great
Transition, would necessarily draw its major impetus from the struggles of
working populations and communities at the bottom of the global capitalist
hierarchy. It would demand, as Marx insisted, that the associated producers
rationally regulate the human metabolic relation with nature. It would see
wealth and human development in radically different terms than capitalist
society.
In conceiving such a social and ecological revolution, we can derive
inspiration, as Marx did, from the ancient Epicurean concept of “natural
wealth.”* As Epicurus observed in his Principal Doctrines, “Natural wealth is
both limited and easily obtainable; the riches of idle fancies go on forever.”
It is the unnatural, unlimited character of such alienated wealth that is the
problem. Similarly, in what has become known as the Vatican Sayings, Epicurus
stated: “When measured by the natural purpose of life, poverty is great wealth;
limitless wealth is great poverty.” Free human development, arising in a climate
of natural limitation and sustainability is the true basis of wealth, of a rich,
many-sided existence; the unbounded, pursuit of wealth is the primary source of
human impoverishment and suffering. Needless to say, such a concern with natural
well-being, as opposed to artificial needs and stimulants, is the antithesis of
capitalist society and the precondition of a sustainable human community.
A Great Transition therefore must have the characteristics implied by the Global
Scenario Group’s neglected scenario: Eco-communalism. It must take its
inspiration from William Morris, one of the most original and ecological
followers of Karl Marx, from Gandhi, and from other radical, revolutionary and
materialist figures, including Marx himself, stretching as far back as Epicurus.
The goal must be the creation of sustainable communities geared to the
development of human needs and powers, removed from the all-consuming drive to
accumulate wealth (capital).
As Marx wrote, the new system “starts with the self-government of the
communities” (Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 24, p. 519; Paul Burkett,
“Marx’s Vision of Sustainable Human Development” in this issue). The creation of
an ecological civilization requires a social revolution; one that, as Roy
Morrison explains, needs to be organized democratically from below: “community
by community...region by region” (Ecological Democracy). It must put the
provision of basic human needs—clean air, unpolluted water, safe food, adequate
sanitation, social transport, and universal health care and education, all of
which require a sustainable relation to the earth—ahead of all other needs and
wants. Such a revolutionary turn in human affairs may seem improbable. But the
continuation of the present capitalist system for any length of time will prove
impossible—if human civilization and the web of life as we know it are to be
sustained.
Notes
* The authors of the Global Scenario Group’s Great Transition report are Paul
Raskin, Tariq Banuri, Gilberto Gallopín, Pablo Gutman, Al Hammond, Robert Kates,
and Rob Swart.
* Much of Marx’s analysis in Capital is concerned with where )m or surplus value
comes from. To answer this question, he argues, it is necessary to go beneath
the process of exchange and to explore the hidden recesses of capitalist
production—where it is revealed that the source of surplus value is to be found
in the process of class exploitation.
* On Marx’s relation to Epicurus see John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).
