Date: Thu, 19 Feb 1998 02:32:33 +0000 From: "M.A.&N.G. Jones" <Jones_M-AT-netcomuk.co.uk> Subject: M-I: [Fwd: Is growth still making us better off?] This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------CA847506D2FEFDBC4FF92B4E Sustainable-economics is debating the latest Richard Douthwaite book, amid the usual talk about the 'irrelevance' of Marxism, so I posted this and for good measure a classic of Lou P's ('Ecology and the American Indian'). Mark --------------CA847506D2FEFDBC4FF92B4E Message-ID: <34EB91CC.6B7CFC19-AT-netcomuk.co.uk> Date: Thu, 19 Feb 1998 01:58:36 +0000 From: "M.A.&N.G. Jones" <Jones_M-AT-netcomuk.co.uk> X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.04 [en] (Win16; I) To: sustainable-economics-AT-csf.colorado.edu Subject: Re: Is growth still making us better off? References: <199802181923.TAA19603-AT-mail.iol.ie> A similar debate to this has been going on on the Spoons Marxism lists. It began when one member of the Marxism-International list, who is connected with the journal Living Marxism, began to defend LM's authorship of a notorious anti-environmentalist TV programme shown recently on the UK's Channel 4 TV. The programme was called 'Against Nature'. The show, like LM, supported the kind of ideas normally associated with Fred Singer the climatologist and global-warming denialist, and the late Julian Simon. Thus, ultra-right wing ideas were garbed in a kind of pseudo- marxist productivist rhetoric. Not only were the programme scripts posted and critically destroyed, a wide-ranging debate started on green issues. Thus we have been discussing on Marxism-International the work of James O'Connor, whose new book 'Natural Causes: Essays in ecological Marxism' (Guilford Press) is just out, and of John Bellamy Foster and other 'red-greens'. We have exhaustively posted and talked of, the work of Pimentel, Gretchen Daily, Herman Daly and other mavens of ecol-econ -- and we are about to make a start, I suspect, on Richard Douthwaite. What is interesting is that these kind of debates go on everywhere, but on parallel lines, in hermetic compartments. In the discussions on this seminar there is an easiness about writing off Marxism as a philsophical tradition and a politics which simply does not reflect the strenghths of that tradition not merely as a culture of activism with successes as well as failures, but as a radical analysis of industrial society and capitalist economy which simply cannot be ignored. Ralph Chipman, of the UN's curiously (and I would argue, oxymoronly) named Sustainable Development Division, has given us the anti-radical argument in its most extreme form. There is much to argue about here. It would be nice to take issue with anyone who can be satisfied with a definition of a poverty income of $1 a day, for instance. I'm not clear how one even, in practice, establishes the existence of such an income. Beyond definitions, there is a need to question the kind of judgments made. Ralph says health and welfare has improved but there are issues involved for example in the uncritical use of UNFPA demographic reports and projections. I have been digging in the data myself, and the brief version of my scepticism is this: when the UN says that life expectancy in China in 1950 (for example) was 30 years, who actually was doing the counting in China, one year after the Communists came to power, and what anyway is the meaning of comparing fifty years of peacem, with the previous fifty years of civil war, famine, Japanese genocide etc? So I have a lot of doubts just about the raw data of the many alleged 'improvements' in longevity, mortality, morbidity etc which Ralph mentions. To take another example, Ralph says: 'A recent survey of the environment in Europe indicates that forest area is increasing.' But the reason forest cover has returned to parts of Europe and New England, for example, is because we don't use wood for fuel any more (there are other reasons to do with changed land use, but that's primary). Instead, we use fossil fuels, and the amount of energy we humans use that way exceeds the total amount of energy trapped by photosynthesis by the entire European and North American biomass each year. That is radically unsustainable. There is a report in Scientific American about impending conventional oil shortages, so the unsustainability is not just because of greenhouse or other eco-impacts, either. It's economic. Since most of the benefits the world's population have allegedly known since 1945 have been the result of increasing energy-intensity and the conversion from a mainly coal to a mainly oil (and now gas) energy base, and since it is clearly going to be extremely difficult for what are still primarily industrial economies to make the transition to non-renewables, there is much less reason for complacency or self-congratulation, and much more reason for alarm, than Ralph Chipman allows. On a seminar like this, none of this perhaps needs spelling out, although obviously one could say much more in each specific case. In particular, it is not at all clear to me or most people just how the 'reductions in energy consumption and changes in consumption patterns [which] appear to [Ralph to] be essential' can actually be achieved without precisely the 'revolution in thinking and lifestyles' which Ralph says 'are not realistic in this context.' Two things seem clear: if the optimists of liberalisation, globalisation and big capital have got it wrong, and Bill Gates cannot save it for us, then the world is in for a lot more of what has happened to S E Asia, which anywat follows what happened to Latin America and Africa in the seventies and eighties and Eastern Europe in the 90s. Clear that China and India are not going to make it. Clear too that growing energy-entropy and systemic and environmental shortfalls will continue to make it hard even to sustain existing living standards in the rich North, as has been true since the mid-70s if one used any measure except GDP. Maybe disaster will still be staved off. The FAO, we know, is confident that food supplies will be adequate even if the world population doubles by 2050, given a continuing 1.8% pa increase in grain supplies. >From my reading of the literature, by now extensive, not many experts share all of that optimism and some, e.g. David Pimentel, are gloomy about the prospects. They have two kinds of reservations: first, the FAO's view on food security is based on its optimism about energy-security, and this is a lacuna given that most people even in the oil industry believe that oil will run out by 2050 or before, and oil is the essential input, for primary motive power, chemical feedstocks, fertilisers, just about everything. Without oil, modern agribusiness will collapse. It lay behind the Green Revolution. But at the end of that epoch, the sustainable albeit subsistence farming which the Green Revolution replaced, will be gone forever. In its place are likely to be large masses of people huddled in the cities where they were shepherded to make way for capitalist agriculture. They will not be able to feed or support themselves adequately. The land they used to work will be too degraded to support a sustainable 'subsistence' farming, so there will be nor return. These vast semi-proletarianised masses will depend on food exports from the temperate capitalist north, which may indeed continue to produce surpluses, as long as it hogs the last oil to itself. Or it may not, as Pimentel suggests, in which case the South will starve. Unfortunately, major systemic shocks, as Douthwaite says, are more likely than not. Even if they weren't, we should need theoretical anmtidotes not merely to the over-optimism of parts of the UN or of Western governments, officially at least. We will ened to vigorously challenge 'alternative' critiques which actually entrench the cource of the problems, and I'm thinking here of attempts to put a price tag on 'natural capital', ie, to value eco-services ostensibly as a way to make our use of them cost-effective, or anyway to show that ecosystems are not cost-free. This, like the profound immorality of marketing disaster by, for example, trading carbon licences, only help eternise in our minds and in reality they very thing we need to question, namely the idea that capitalist economy can be made 'sustainable'. It seems clear that while most of on this seminar agree on broad definitions of what is wrong, there is no consensus about policy prescription and there is also genuine anguish about what we may all have to give up in order to create a truly sustainable world. Despite Ralph Chipman's Brundtland-style optimism, it is misleading and disingenuous to speak of 'development' in the context of 'sustainability', when even a cursory inspection of the evidence shows that there is no scientific or technical basis for economic development which is truly sustainable, ie, not dependent on fossil fuels). All of which brings me back to Marxism. First of all, Soviet communism was hardly a paradigmatic example of Marxist social theory in action. Secondly the relevance of Marxism as an analysis of capitalism AND ITS TENDENCY TO CRISIS will remain as long as capitalism itself exists. It is sometimes forgotten that what Marx undertook was not utopic visions of post-capitalism, but the analysis of capitalist-economy itself. What our own debates on Marxism-International and Marxism-Thaxis have shown, if they have shown anything, is Marxism's continuing relevance as the only social theory which demonstrates the futility of any schemes for reform which do not acknowledge the deep underlying laws of motion of the the world capitalist system. As an indication of the high levels of debate which this recognition can take us, I am taking the liberty of forwarding to the seminar a posting by my friend and co-thinker, Louis Proyect. It bears directly on any debate about sustainability which takes as a starting-point the true significance of autarky and community. Mark Jones --------------CA847506D2FEFDBC4FF92B4E-- --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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