It's growth that's killing us BY MURRAY BOOKCHIN

DEATH OF A SMALL PLANET
It's growth that's killing us

BY MURRAY BOOKCHIN
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/planet/planet.html

We tend to think of environmental catastrophes -such as the recent Exxon Valdez oil-spill disaster in the Bay of Alaska-as "accidents": isolated phenomena that erupt without notice or warning. But when does the word accident become inappropriate? When are such occurrences inevitable rather than accidental? And when does a consistent pattern of inevitable disasters point to a deep-seated crisis that is not only environmental but profoundly social?

President Bush was content to blame the spill of more than ten million gallons of crude petroleum off Valdez Harbor on negligence by a soused sea captain. In fact, however, it was the consequence of social circumstances far more compelling than the usual "human" or "technological" factors cited in mass-media reporting. Since the pipeline at Valdez Harbor went into service a dozen years ago, there have been no fewer than 400 oil spills in the Bay of Alaska. In 1987, the tanker Stuyvesant dumped almost a million gallons into the gulf after leaving Valdez, presumably because of mechanical failures attributed to severe weather. The environmental - protection organization Greenpeace recorded seven spills in Alaskan waters this year even before the Exxon Valdez ran aground.

Oil spills ranging from a few thousand gallons to a million or more-as well as the oil routinely flushed out of tankers to make room for return-trip cargoes have polluted vast areas of the world's ocean surface and coastline. The appalling effects of oil spills that occurred many years ago are still apparent today, and new incidents keep adding to the damage. The widely publicized 10,000-gallon spill that "mysteriously polluted the coastal areas of two Hawaiian islands a week after the Exxon Valdez ran aground was more than matched by the little-publicized 117,000 gallons that the Exxon Houston dumped off another Hawaiian coastal area some three weeks before the Valdez spill.

On a single day, June 23, 1989, three major spills--off Newport, Rhode Island, in the Delaware River, and on the Texas Gulf Coast--dumped a total of well over one million gallons of oil into U.S. waters

Many find it difficult to see these incidents as part of a continuum that has a common source. To trace a chain of events from its cause to its consequence is an unfamiliar task for people who have been conditioned to see life as a television sit-com or talk show composed of discrete self-contained, anecdotal segments. We live, in effect, on a diet of short takes, devoid of logic or long-range effect. Our problems to the extent that we recognize them as problems at all-are episodic rather than systemic; the scene dissolves, the camera moves on.

But the present crisis will not disappear with a switch of channels. It was predictable-and predicted-decades ago. There is an all-but-forgotten history of dire portents, urgent warnings, and unsuccessful efforts by an earlier generation of environmentalists to deal with the social factors that underpin environmental problems. In many instances, they predicted with uncanny accuracy the results of ecologically insane policies pursued by the corporate establishment in the West and the bureaucratic establishment in the East.

The earliest disputes around the dangers posed by the oil industry's expansion into oceanic drilling occurred even before the Arctic regions were opened to oil exploitation. They go back well into the 1950s, when larger vessels started being used to transport Middle Eastern oil. Long before spills came to public attention, environmentalists were voicing fears over hazards posed by growing tanker capacity.

No less serious than the possibility of "human error" in the operation of these huge vessels was the well-known fact that even the sturdiest ships have a way of being buffeted by storms, drifting off course, foundering on reefs in treacherous waters, and sinking. In lectures I gave decades ago on the Pacifica Radio network, I emphasized the sheer certainty of disastrous oil spills that would surely follow upon the growing size of tankers. The Exxon Valdez spill was, therefore, not an unforeseen accident but a dead certainty-and one that may yet be beggared by others to come. It was as predictable as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

No less predictable was the global warming trend. Forecasts that carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels

could raise planetary temperatures go back to the Nineteenth Century and have been repeated from time to time since then, though more often as atmospheric curiosities than as serious ecological warnings. I wrote as early as 1964 that increases in the "blanket of carbon dioxide" from fossil-fuel combustion "will lead to more destructive storm patterns and eventually to melting of polar ice caps, rising sea levels, and the inundation of vast land areas."

The possibility of acid rain and the systematic deforestation of the equatorial rain-forest belt, not to speak of the impact of chlorofluorocarbons on the Earth's ozone layer, could not have been foreseen in technical detail. But the larger issue of environmental destruction on a global scale and the disruptions of basic natural cycles was already on the radical agenda in the late 1960s, long before Earth Day was proclaimed and ecological issues were reduced to ridding city streets of cans, bottles, and garbage.

Predictions of disaster come cheap when they are not derived from reasoned analysis of the sort that has become unpopular in this era of New Age mysticism. But we have no reason to rejoice in the fact that Margaret Thatcher often sounds like an environmentally oriented "Green" in her public warnings about the Greenhouse Effect, if we bear in mind that Thatcherism in Britain can often be equated with a transition to high-technology and nucleonics.

Nor would it be particularly encouraging to learn that Mikhail Gorbachev is prepared to follow Thatcher in phasing out the older "rust-belt" industries and their fossil-fuel energy in the aftermath of Chernobyl and earlier, possibly worse nuclear "events" we haven't yet heard much about. If solutions to the Greenhouse Effect create potentially more disastrous problems like the proliferation of "clean," nuclear power and its long-lived radioactive debris, the world may be worse off as a result of this new kind of environmental thinking

Attempts by President Bush to join this chorus by revising the Clean Air Act to reduce high ozone levels, cancer-causing pollutants, and other toxic substances have earned almost as much criticism as praise. The effects of Bush's proposals which are modest enough if we bear in mind the appalling magnitude of the enviro nmental casts-will not be fully felt until the first decade of the next century. Understandably, that has aroused the ire of environmentalists. Moreover, for Bush to leave the execution of his plan to industry is to guarantee that the costs of pollution-control technology will be passed on, with some extras, to the consumer and that many of the proposals will be honored in the breach.

What environmentalists must emphasize is that the global ecological crisis is systemic not simply the product of random mishaps. If the Exxon Valdez disaster is treated merely as an "accident" as were Chernobyl and Three Mile Island-we will have deflected public attention from a social crisis of historic proportions: We do not simp1y live in a world of problems but in a highly problematical world, an inherently anti-ecological society. This anti-ecological world will not be healed by acts of statesmanship or passage of piecemeal legislation. It is a world that is direly in need of far-reaching structural change.

Perhaps the most obvious of our systemic problems is uncontrollable growth. I use the word "uncontrollable" advisedly, in preference to "uncontrolled." The growth of which I speak is not humanity's colonization of the planet over millennia of history. It is rather an inexorable material reality that is unique to our era: namely, that unlimited economic growth is assumed to be evidence of human progress. We have taken this notion so much for granted over the past few generations that it is as immutably fixed in our consciousness as the sanctity of property itself.

Growth is, in fact, almost synonymous with the market economy that prevails today. That fact finds its clearest expression in the marketplace maxim, "Grow or die." We live in a competitive world in which rivalry is a law of economic life; profit, a social as well as personal desideratum; limit or restraint, an archaism; and the commodity, a substitute for the traditional medium for establishing economic relationships-namely, the gift.

It's not enough, however, to blame our environmental problems on the obsession with growth. A system of deeply entrenched structures-of which growth is merely a surface manifestation-makes up our society. These structures are beyond moral control, much as the flow of adrenaline is beyond the control of a frightened creature This system has, in effect, the commanding quality of natural law.
  

In a national or international market society (be it of the corporate kind found in the West or the bureaucratic kind found in the East), competition itself generates a need for growth. Growth is each enterprise's defense against the threat of absorption by a rival. Moral issues have no bearing on this compelling adversarial relationship. To the extent that a market economy becomes so pervasive that it turns society itself into a marketplace-a vast shopping mall-it dictates the moral parameters of-human life and makes growth synonymous with personal as well as social progress. One's personality, love life, income, or body of beliefs, no less than an enterprise, must grow or die.

This market society seems to have obliterated from most people's memory another world that once placed limits on growth, stressed cooperation over competition, and valued the gift as a bond of human solidarity. In that remote world, the market was marginal to a domestic or "natural" society and trading communities existedmerely in the "interstices" of the premarket world, to use Marx's appropriate words.

Today, a rather naive liberal language legitimates a condition we already take as much for granted as the air we breathe: "healthy" growth, "free" competition, and "rugged" individualism-euphemisms that every insecure society adopts to transform its more predatory attributes into virtues. "It's business, not personal, Sonny!" as the Godfather's consigliere says after the family patriarch has been pumped full of bullets by his Mafia rivals. Thus are all personal values reduced to entreprenerinal ones.

It has been dawning on the First World, which is rapidly using up many of its resources, that growth is eating away the biosphere at a pace unprecedented in human history. Deforestation from acid rain, itself a product of fossil fuel combustion, is matched or even exceeded by the systematic burning that is cleaning vast rain forests. The destruction of the ozone layer, we are beginning to learn, is occurring almost everywhere, not just in Antarctica.

We now sense that unlimited growth is literally recycling the complex organic products of natural evolution into the simple mineral constituents of the Earth at the dawn of life billions of years ago. Soil that was in the making for millennia is being tunned into sand; richly forested regions filled with complex life-forms are being reduced to barren moonscapes; rivers, lakes, and even vast oceanic regions are becoming noxious and lethal sewers, radio nuclides, together with an endless and ever-increasing array of toxicants, are invading the air we breathe, the water we drink, and almost every food item on the dinner table. Not even sealed, air-conditioned, and sanitized offices are immune to this poisonous deluge.

Growth is only the most immediate cause of this pushing back of the evolutionary clock to a more primordial and mineralized world. And calling for "limits to growth" is merely the first step toward bringing the magnitude of our environmental problems under public purview. Unless growth is traced to its basic source-competition in a grow-or-die market society-the demand for controlling growth is meaningless as well as unattainable. We can no more arrest growth while leaving the market intact than we can arrest egoism while leaving rivalry intact.

In this hidden world of cause-and-effect, the environmental movement and the public stand at a crossroads. Is growth a product of "consumerism" -the most socially acceptable and socially neutral explanation that we usually encounter in discussions of environmental deterioration? Or does growth occur because of the nature of production for a market economy? To a certain extent, we can say. both. But the overall reality of a market economy is that consumer demand for a new product rarely occurs spontaneously, nor is its consumption guided purely by personal considerations.

Today, demand is created not by consumers but by producers-specifically, by enterprises called advertising agencies that use a host of techniques to manipulate public taste. Amencan washing and drying machines, for example, are all but constructed to be used communally-and they are communally used in many apartment buildings. Their privatization in homes, where they stand idle most of the time, is a result of advertising ingenuity.

One can survey the entire landscape of typical "consumer" items and find many other examples of the irrational consumption of products by individuals and small families-"consumer" items that readily lend themselves to public use.

Another popular explanation of the environmental crisis is population increase.
  
This argument would be more compelling if it could be shown that countries with the largest rates of population increase are the largest consumers of energy, raw material, or even food. But such correlations are notoriously false. Often mere density of population is equated with overpopulation in a given country or region. Such arguments, commonly cynical in their use of graphics-scenes of congested New York City streets and subway stations during rush hours, for example-hardly deserve serious notice.

We have yet to determine how many people the planet can sustain without complete ecological disruption. The data are far from conclusive, but they are surely highly biased-generally along economic, racial, and social lines. Demography is far from a science, out it is a notorious political weapon whose abuse has disastrously claimed the lives of millions over the course of the century.

Finally, "industrial society," to use a genteel euphemism for capitalism, has also become an easy explanation for the environmental ills that afflict our time. But a blissful ignorance clouds the fact that several centunes ago, much of England's forest land, including Robin Hood's legendary haunts, was deforested by the crude axes of rural proletarians to produce charcoal for a technologically simple metallurgical economy and to clear land for profitable sheep runs. This occurred long before the Industrial Revolution.

Technology may magnify a problem or even accelerate its effects. But with or without a "technological imagination" (to use Jacques Ellul's expression), rarely does it produce the problem itself. Indeed, the rationalization of work by means of assembly-line techniques goes back to such patently pre-industrial societies as the pyramid-builders of ancient Egypt, who developed a vast human machine to build temples and mausoleums.

To take growth out of its proper social context is to distort and privatize the problem. It is inaccurate and unfair to coerce people into believing that they are personally responsible for present-day ecological dangers because they consume too much or proliferate too readily.

This privatization of the environmental crisis, like New Age cults that focus on personal problems rather than on social dislocations, has reduced many environmental movements to utter ineffectiveness and threatens to diminish their credibility with the public. If "simple living" and militant recycling are the main solutions to the environmental casts, the crisis will certainly continue and intensify.

Ironically, many ordinary people and their families cannot afford to live "simply." It is a demanding enterprise when one considers the costliness of "simple" hand-crafted artifacts and the exorbitant price of organic and "recycled" goods. Moreover, what the "production end" of the environmental crisis cannot sell to the "consumption end," it will certainly sell to the military. General Electric enjoys considerable eminence not only for its refrigerators but also for its Gatling guns. This shadowy side of the environmental problem-military production-can only be ignored by attaining an ecological airheadedness so vacuous as to defy description.

Public concern for the environment cannot be addressed by placing the blame on growth without spelling out the causes of growth. Nor can an explanation be exhausted by citing "consumerism" while ignoring the sinister role played by rival producers in shaping public taste and guiding public purchasing power. Aside from the costs involved, most people quite rightly do not want to "live simply." They do not want to diminish their freedom to travel or their access to culture, or to scale down needs that often serve to enrich human personality and sensitivity.

Rambunctious as certain "radical" environmentalist slogans like BACK TO THE PLEISTOCENE! (a slogan of the Earth First! group) may sound, they are no less degrading and depersonalizing than the technocratic utopias issued by H.G. Wells early in this century.

It will take a high degree of sensitivity and reflection-attributes that are fostered by the consumption of such items as books, art works, and music-to gain an understanding of what one ultimately needs and does not need to be a truly fulfilled person. Without such people in sufficient numbers to challenge the destruction of the planet, the environmental movement will be as superficial in the future as it is ineffectual today.

The issue of growth, then, can be used either to deliver us over to banalities about our consumption patterns and technocratic passion for gadgetry (Buddhism, I note, has not rendered Japan less technocratic than the United States) or to guide public thinking to the basic issues that bring the social sources of the ecological crisis into clear focus.

In Vermont, for example, Left Greens who are seeking to radicalize the state's rather tepid environmental movement have followed the logic of diminished growth along challenging and useful lines. In their demand for a year-long moratorium on growth and a public discussion of vital needs, they have made it possible to ask key questions about the problems raised by growth control.

By what criteria are we to determine what constitutes needless growth, for example, and what is needful growth? Who will make this decision-state agencies, town meetings, alliances among towns on a countywide basis, neighborhoods in cities?

To what extent should municipalities be empowered to limit growth? Should they begin to buy open land? Should they subsidize farmers to save farms for future generations? Should they bring major industrial and commercial concerns under the control of citizen assemblies? Should they establish legal criteria to determine ecologically sound restrictions on developers and venture-capital investors?

This sequence of questions, each of which logically follows from the idea of controlling growth, can have impressive consequences.

It has forced people in Vermont communities to think through the nature of their priorities: growth or a decent environment? Centralized or local power? Community alliances or bureaucratic agencies? The exploitative use of property that involves the public welfare or the communal control of such property?

A number of Vermont towns have challenged the right of the state government in Montpelier to disregard the demands of citizens and town meetings to inhibit growth-indeed, to ignore their attempts to determine their own destiny.

New Age environmentalism and conventional environmentalism that place limits on serious, in-depth ecological thinking have been increasingly replaced by social ecology that explores the economic and institutional factors that enter into the environmental crisis.

In the context of this more mature discourse, the Valdez oil spill is no longer seen as an Alaskan matter, an "episode" in the geography of pollution. Rather it is recognized as a social act that raises such "accidents" to the level of systemic problems-rooted not in consumerism, technological advance, and population growth but in an irrational system of production, an abuse of technology by a grow-or-die economy, and the demographics of poverty and wealth. Ecological dislocation
cannot be separated from social dislocations.

The social roots of our environmental problems cannot remain hidden without trivializing the casts itself and thwarting its resolution.



Murray Bookchin lived in Burlington, Vermont, and was director emeritus of the Institute for Social Ecology at Plainfield, Vermont

He was a contributor to many publications and the author of more than a dozen books, including "The Ecology of Freedom " and "Remaking Society," published by South End Press.

Reducing production: How should socialists relate to struggles against capitalist growth By Don Fitz

sustainability, after decades of human assault on the environment, means, in my opinion, reduction overall, not 'growth'. a peaceful resolution requires considerable contraction of western economies, lowered goals for china and india, and a rise in development in some under-developed countries.

these differences would be aimed at a shared point of genuine sustainability. capitalism, along with other materialist / productivist growth oriented ideologies, is unable to moderate it's behaviours, and lionises growth, claiming the alternative is death.

well, to borrow from ed abbey, "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell". To follow that through: capitalist free market ideology and some workerist productivist ideology, leads to behaviors similar to those of aggressive metastasising cancers - they grow exponentially, by sucking up the resources and energies of the host, until the host dies... at which point the cancer too dies. In ecological terms, this requires the death, or serious destruction, of the biosphere, upon which we all depend, as this is the host for the viral cancer of productivist and capitalist growth. this puts a new spin on 'grow or die'...

'growth', if unchecked, leads to death, so, we alter the adage to 'grow & die'. an overall stasis, after a period of stabilising contraction & convergence, can manage our ecological debt and create an economy that is not stagnantly dying, but, rather, one which stays fresh, in constant need of modulation in relation to the sum of environmental and human [in nature] needs, as opposed to the free market ideologues lampoon that indicates 'stagnation and death' as the 'only' alternative to rampant growth.

- Tim

http://links.org.au/node/3275

Reducing production: How should socialists relate to struggles against capitalist growth
By Don Fitz

March 19, 2013 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- The question is not should we advocate reducing production within capitalist society but rather: How do we best relate to those struggles that are already occurring? Activists across the globe are challenging the uncontrollable dynamic of economic expansion which threatens the survival of humanity. It has never been more urgent to provide a vision of a new society that can pull these efforts together.

Climate change is justifiably the focus of concern in the early 21st century. The Earth is approaching the level of 450 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric carbon, a level which must be averted if humans are to avoid a cataclysmic turning point when climate change will loop into itself and increase even without additional industrial activity. Sanity dictates that humanity do everything in its power to roll back carbon levels to at least 350 ppm.

Yet corporate politicians shriek blindly that the only solution to economic crisis is increasing production. Incessant economic growth is causing an extinction rate unseen since the last huge meteor hit Earth. It is not limited to terrestrial life—oceanic life is threatened by acidification.

Massive industrial production spews toxic poisons that unravel mammalian existence. Since World War II, more than 100,000 new chemical compounds have been introduced. Despite Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, mountains of radioactive waste continue to climb, waiting for the day that they will cease to provide any electricity but will poison life for eternity.

“Peak everything” began with an understanding that it is not only oil but also coal and gas that are finite. Those who now write of “peak soil” refer to essentially the same concept that Karl Marx and even writers before him saw occurring.[1] Virtually every struggle over resource extraction is intertwined with “peak water” which is now threatening the lives of millions. Only a few years ago, very few had heard of “fracking” and “tar sands”, which now symbolise how the greed for raw materials pushes capitalism into increasingly destructive ventures.

Despite the centrality of growth in destroying the biology of existence, progressives often throw up a variety of objections to opposing economic expansion:

1. Reducing production would supposedly worsen the lives of working people.

2. The degrowth movement began with bourgeois liberals.

3. Since degrowth cannot occur within capitalism, discussing it should wait until “after the revolution”.

4. The concept of producing less is too abstract to build a movement around.

5. An anti-growth movement would easily be co-opted.

Let’s look at each of these.

1. Does lowering production mean a worse quality of life?

Most economic writers, even socialist ones, still seem to believe that there is a strong connection between production and consumption. Linking the words in the phrase “production and consumption” implies that they are two parts of the same process. Enormous changes during the twentieth century profoundly weakened the bond between them.

In 1880, Frederick Engels wrote:

The possibility of securing for every member of society, by socialised production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties—this possibility is now for the first time here, but it is here.[2, emphasis in original]

But capitalism would not stop expanding merely because it had the potential to meet human needs. Over a century later, Robert Bryce noted:

In 1913, America’s gross domestic product [GDP] was about $39 billion. By 2005, U.S. GDP was more than $12.4 trillion or about 300 times as much as the 1913 figure. Thus, in a remarkable parallel, that 300-fold increase in oil imports has been accompanied by a 300-fold increase in America’s economic output.[3]

How did corporations manage to continue an enormous increase in production well after the ability to meet human needs had been reached? In 1929, US President Herbert Hoover’s Committee on Recent Economic Changes announced its conceptual breakthrough: Capitalism could be saved via the manufacture of artificial needs. The era of planned obsolescence would soon be born.[4]

André Gorz describes in great detail capitalism’s designing a “material environment” of consumption. Instead of demand for needs directing supply, capitalism now creates a “subject for the object”, or consumer demands for whatever corporations want to sell.[5]

Modern Western existence rests atop a mountain of commodities that play no role whatsoever in making our lives better but do, in fact, threaten the biology of our existence.[6] Unnecessary consumer purchases caused by fabricated desires for electronic gadgets and in-style fashions create massive waste. But consumer choices are barely the tip of the iceberg of unnecessary and destructive production.

No one eats bombs for breakfast, and Americans never get to vote on the unending stream of wars and military bases which pervade the globe. Yet, this accounts for up to 15% of the US GDP.[7]

The vast majority of economic waste occurs during production processes over which workers and consumers have little to no control. Up to 85% of the energy embodied in homes is due to heating and cooling systems. For decades, we have known how to build comfortable homes without furnaces; yet architects continue to design as if there were no tomorrow. For decades, we have known how to plan walkable neighborhoods that would allow over 80% of trips to be made by bike and foot; but city planners continue to act as if adding some “green” trifling to a project has a serious impact on climate change.

The simultaneous growth of starvation and obesity is the hallmark of a food industry where the production of a speck of nutritious food is dwarfed by the gargantuan resources devoted to chemicalising, processing, packaging, preserving, transporting, marketing, sugarising, genetically modifying, discarding from grocery shelves and convincing people that they need to eat meat three times a day.

It is similar with medicine. Why does Cuba spend 4% of what the US does for each citizen’s health care when both have the same life expectancy of 78.0 years? It is much more than the 30% overhead of insurance companies. It is also because of the huge amount of over-treatment by a profit-driven industry, under-treating patients whose illnesses get worse, creation of illnesses and treatments, exposure of patients to contagion through over-hospitalisation and disease-oriented instead of prevention-oriented research.[8]

A strong connection between production and consumption has characterised previous epochs of human existence. But no longer. Capitalism is now producing an ever greater quantity of things while a decreasing proportion of what is produced actually satisfies human needs. Since the vast majority of what is produced by capitalism is useless or harmful, it is now possible to 1.) increase the manufacture of necessary goods, and simultaneously 2.) decrease the total volume of production.

2. Babies, bathwater and bourgeois liberalism

It is not unusual for the degrowth movement to be rejected for being based in the liberal ideology of personal life style changes. But people sometimes make brilliant observations even when their overall world view leaves a lot to be desired. Pointing to the philosophical weaknesses of those advocating degrowth does not disprove their concept that the global economy must shrink in order to prevent environmental disaster.

An example of such a great thinker is Ted Trainer, who does a remarkable job of debunking the fantasy that solar and wind power could ever sustain an economy of infinite growth. Unfortunately, he advocates retreating into alternative communities which practice the “Simpler Way” and emphatically rejects class (or any form of) struggle.[9]

Even if millions were to “plunge into the Transition Towns movement” in order to “build things like community gardens, farmers markets, skill banks, etc.” it would barely scratch the surface of destructive activities of capitalism.[10] My backyard garden has no effect on the quantity of nuclear warheads produced or the design of urban transportation systems or the way small farmers are pushed off their land by agribusiness. The only possible outcome of a mass march to Transition Towns would be helping the 1% extract yet more wealth from those participating in the agricultural exodus.

Leninists often heap scorn on the very idea of shrinking the economy, citing what Marx would call the “idealism” of approaches such as Transition Towns. Many object to fracking, tar sands extraction, and deep sea oil drilling, not from an understanding that they are inherently dangerous, but from a belief that they are dangerous only when done for profit. But workers control of production will not prevent the expansion of land use from causing species extinction. Nor will it render uranium non-deadly.

This indifference toward the material basis of ecological existence and hostility towards obvious truths espoused by liberal authors is very different from Marx’s approach to Hegel. As Engels wrote, “That the Hegelian system did not solve the problem it propounded is here immaterial. Its epoch-making merit was that it propounded the problem.”[11] If Marx had refused to learn from Hegel because of his idealism, Marx never would have turned Hegel on his head to conceptualise dialectical materialism.

Even more to the point is Engels’ treatment of “the three great Utopians” (Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen) in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Engels praises the contributions of each, paying particular homage to Owen:

Every social movement, every real advance in England on behalf of the workers links itself on to the name of Robert Owen. He forced through in 1819, after five years’ fighting, the first law limiting the hours of labour of women and children in factories. He was president of the first Congress at which all the Trade Unions of England united in a single great trade association.[12]

Before delving into scientific socialism, Engels rakes all three across the coals, explaining that “To all of these socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer the world by virtue of its own power.”[13] Engels held onto their goal of socialism while throwing out their method of utopian idealism.

3. Waiting until ‘after the revolution’

In contrast to those who fail to recognise the need to reduce the total volume of production, John Bellamy Foster suffers no confusion about the need not merely to slow down but to reverse the trends of capitalism.[14] His quarrel is not with the goal of reducing the enormous waste of capitalism but with the pathetic inability of “green technology” to accomplish this, and even more so, the failure of “degrowth” theorists to come to grips with the relentless drive for capital to expand. Foster observes that a movement to lower the volume of production must deal with the current crisis of unemployment, advance an alliance with workers, and address structural challenges faced by the global South.

But Foster could be used to support either of two answers to the critical question: “Should we work to lower production while living in capitalist society?” On one hand, his title “Capitalism and degrowth: An impossibility theorem” can be interpreted as implying, “No, it is diversionary to work for what obviously cannot be obtained” (a sustained decrease in the mass of production over an extended period of time within capitalism). On the other hand, he advocates a “co-revolutionary movement” which would synthesise struggles of labour, anti-imperialism, social domination and ecology (anti-growth).

The importance of developing such a synthesis cannot be overemphasised, especially for those who believe it is counterproductive to advocate (or even discuss) reducing production. Being unable to attain a goal within capitalist society is no reason to refrain from advocating it.

Ever since the beginning of the labour movement, capitalists have sought to divide workers by ethnicity and gender. Despite enormous advances, it is not possible to eliminate either racism or sexism within a mode of production that feeds on maximising of profit by dividing the labour force against itself. But it would be hard to find progressives who would abstain from these struggles because they cannot be won until “after the revolution.” Quite the opposite: a social movement changes consciousness and the new awareness of oppression plants the seeds for fully overcoming it in a post-capitalist society.

Similarly with imperialism. One of the greatest consciousness-altering epochs in US history was opposition to the Vietnam War. Though a mass movement forced an end to that war, US imperialism was hardly abolished. Lenin explained in great detail how capitalism without imperialism would have been an impossibility theorem—imperialism had become the epoch of capitalism when finance capital reigned supreme. Indeed, Lenin railed against those socialists who saw imperialism as a bad policy of one group of parliamentarians. He thoroughly denounced Karl Kautsky for suggesting that “imperialism is not modern capitalism. It is only one of the forms of policy of modern capitalism. This policy we can and should fight...”[15]

Imperialism is economic growth uncorked. Lenin saw that the merging of finance and industrial capital pushed the economic system beyond its national boundaries and forced it into other countries to increase the rate of accumulation:

The more capitalism develops, the more the need for raw materials arises, the more bitter competition becomes, and the more feverishly the hunt for raw materials proceeds all over the world, the more desperate becomes the struggle for the acquisition of colonies.[16]

Opposing imperialism can only be successful if anti-war campaigns become efforts to create a new society. Realising the possibility of one type of struggle becoming a much larger one was the reason that Lenin was so intolerant of those socialists who argued that imperialism could be ended simply by persuading politicians to do the right thing.

To state the obvious: Lenin did not use his understanding of the inherent link between capitalism and imperialism to conclude that it was pointless to oppose imperialism as long as capitalism existed. The ravages of wanton growth are leading an entire generation of environmental activists to see the intrinsically destructive nature of capitalism. Sadly, many who call themselves “Leninists” are among the last to understand the centrality of ecology for a revolutionary world view.

Imperialism and economic growth are both manifestations of the same phenomenon—the irresistible urge of capitalism to expand after basic needs have been met. Refusal to oppose growth makes no more sense than refusal to oppose imperialism. If “attainability” within capitalist society were a litmus test for supporting a movement, then virtually all progressive movements would be a waste of time.

4. Motion against growth is not an abstraction

European fur traders documented some of the first resistance to growth in North Americans. They were quite annoyed with Native Americans who would trap only the amount needed to purchase needed goods such as knives and cooking pots. Then they would stop trapping, since they had no interest in unbridled accumulation.

Fast forward several centuries. The brilliant movie Story of Stuff mirrors the massive awareness that life is not made better by throw-away junk and never-ending style changes. Everyone who has ever gone into a rant after being forced to make a pointless computer upgrade has expressed an awareness, at some level, of the idiocy of growth beyond reason. The old environmental truism “reduce, reuse, recycle” gave way to the newer, unspoken version: “Recycle first, reuse on rare occasion, and never discuss reduction.” Recycling has become the corporate means of co-opting the gut level hostility to planned obsolescence.

That hostility is intense toward the extractive industries. At the core of accumulating capital is ripping trees off the land, minerals from beneath the surface, and water from everywhere. For hundreds of years, individuals have observed the massive destructiveness of logging—from building ships for the Roman empire to constructing the housing bubble. Recent decades have seen opposition grow as fast as growth itself, whether to save the last 5% of US redwoods or to protect indigenous lands in South America and Asia.

Realisation that tar sands extraction may create the tipping point for climate change has led thousands into the streets opposing the Alberta pipelines. Many more thousands have marched, often fought and not infrequently died in battles in the global South to protect their land and communities from mining gold, silver, diamonds and coltan, to mention a very few. The fight of the Ogoni people against collusion between the Nigerian government and Shell is just one of many conflicts over oil extraction.

Industrial processes require water. Manufacture of a single car requires 350,000 liters. Water is now being pumped out of aquifers at 15 times the rate it soaks into them. Lakes are being drained and/or hopelessly contaminated.[17] When visiting Lima in December 2010, the first newspaper I ran across had a lead story documenting 250 ongoing conflicts across Peru by people seeking to protect their water supplies from contamination.[18]

Yes, indeed, there is a strong connection between imperialism and the growth economy. Imperialism and wasteful production are two sides of a corporate economy that is compelled to grow, regardless of what individual stockholders and politicians desire. Global domination is the way that corporations obtain materials to produce mountains of useless and destructive junk. Marching against endless wars to corner the market on raw materials means marching (consciously or unconsciously) against economic growth.

5. Stopping co-option by making the connections

Foster very effectively demonstrates the fallacies of Latouche, who “tries to draw a distinction between the degrowth project and the socialist critique of capitalism”.[19] Degrowth theory is weakened every time one of its advocates seeks to show that shrinking the economy is totally compatible with a market economy. This was certainly true of Herman Daly, a major prophet of the theory of a steady-state economy.[20]

Does this liberalism of many supporters make the concept of shrinking the economy in any way unique? In fact, capitalism has massive experience corrupting liberation movements. Twisting idealistic desires to improve the environment into behavior that contributes to environmental destruction is no exception.

This is blatantly the case for energy-saving gadgets. For over 150 years, we have known of the Jevons Paradox—that increases in energy efficiency tend to be followed by increased energy use. Infatuation with energy efficient homes, cars, hair dryers and such actually helps corporations increase their sales, which results in energy use going up, not down. Advocates of energy efficiency are actually encouraging the expanded use of energy.

Anyone who has ever challenged an incinerator, landfill, toxic manufacture or extraction industry has confronted the danger of stagnating in the NIMBY (not in my back yard) mentality. Politicians are quick to suggest that victims can save themselves by backing efforts to dump the toxic threat on some other community with less power. The critical factor becomes consciousness-linking: explaining that the social and ecological destruction dictated by the economics of growth cannot be resolved by pushing the problem off to another location or to future generations.

The struggle for a shorter work-day is an integral part of any effort to shrink production. But capitalism has long since figured out how to transform it into a tool for maintaining or even increasing production. Liberals often argue that being at the job for fewer hours can invigorate workers to produce the same amount in less time. Speeding up an assembly line faster or putting 20 students in a class instead of 15 both increase the rate of exploitation.

Even if bosses were to grant the same pay for fewer hours of work (such as “30 for 40”) they could cut social wages (free parks and roads, education, social security, Medicare). And/or they could increase the rate of inflation, diminishing what workers could buy with that pay for 40 hours. Most important, they could increase the rate of planned obsolescence, thereby decreasing the durability of goods and forcing more purchases. Corporate countermeasures illustrate that the same process (fewer hours of work) can have opposite effects, depending on whether it is part of a movement that accepts capitalism or is part of a revolutionary project to replace it.

No rational person would oppose shutting down toxic facilities, shortening the work day, expanding health care to the poorest areas of the globe or using technology which requires less energy. Yet, capitalism can pretend to grant each of these demands in a way that distorts the true goals of its proponents.

That capitalism could only grant a reduction of production in the most negative way does not make this demand distinctive. It verifies the desire of capitalism to transform any movement into its opposite. The central issue is how to keep a worthwhile goal from being perverted by capitalism. This can be accomplished only if the movement expands its focus from a particular struggle into a universal struggle for human liberation.

There is nothing that strikes to the heart of capitalism more than confronting its primal urge to grow. A failure to identify the culprit as capitalist growth is the major limitation of liberal movements to halt climate change, protect biodiversity, guard communities from toxins and preserve natural resources. Rather than being dismissive toward ongoing struggles against growth, socialists should enthusiastically participate and point to their anti-capitalist essence.

It makes no sense to abstain from ongoing challenges to growth with a claim that anti-growth cannot begin tomorrow. Today’s anti-extraction (i.e., anti-growth) conflicts are the most intense they have ever been. If those who stand back from supporting them claim that they wish to build a new society, the society that they would create would be one whose economy grew and grew until it made human existence impossible.

Many who participated in the Occupy Wall Street movement were well aware that the problem is not just opportunities denied the 99% but the active destruction of the planet by the 1%. The great strength of socialists is their grasp of the unique power of labour to create a new society. A movement which merged the enthusiasm of Occupy, the workplace strength of labour, and the understanding that reducing production is essential for preserving human life would be a powerful movement indeed.

[A shorter version of this article has also appeared at Climate and Capitalism, where an interesting discussion has ensued. Some of that discussion is reproduced below as an appendix. Don Fitz produces Green Time TV in conjunction with KNLC-TV in St. Louis and is active in the Greens/Green Party USA. He can be contacted at fitzdon@aol.com.]

Notes

1. For a discussion of the way Karl Marx approached soil depletion, see John Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009).

2. Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works, vol. 3, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970). In his footnote (p. 149), Engels attributes this abundance to the 386% growth of production in England between 1814 and 1875.

3. Robert Bryce, Gusher of Lies (New York: Public Affairs, 2008).

4. J. Kaplan, The gospel of consumption: And the better future we left behind. Orion Magazine, May/June, 2008. http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2962

5. G.S. Evans, Consumerism in the USA: A nation of junkies? Synthesis/Regeneration: A Magazine of Green Social Thought No 57, Winter 2012, 23–26.

6. http://www.storyofstuff.org/movies-all/story-of-stuff/

7. www.warresistors.org

8. Don Fitz, Eight Reasons US Healthcare Costs 96% More than Cuba’s—With the Same Results. (December 9, 2010). Also at http://links.org.au/node/2082.

9. http://www.grist.org/. Ted Trainer, Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society. (The Netherlands: Springer, 2007).
10. Ted Trainer, Renewable energy cannot sustain a consumer society. Synthesis/Regeneration: A Magazine of Green Social Thought No 48, Winter 2009, 19–22.
11. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 130
12. Ibid, 125.
13. Ibid, 126.
14. John Bellamy Foster, Capitalism and degrowth: An impossibility theorem. Monthly Review, 62 (8), January 2011, 26–33. Also at http://links.org.au/node/2089.
15. V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (In Selected Works, vol. 1, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970). 740.
16. Ibid, 732
17. Sam Bozzo, Blue gold: World water wars. Purpleturtle Films. (PBS Home Video, 2008).
18. Cynthia Campos & Luis Poma, El agua de la discordia. La Revista de La República, Lima, December 19, 2010. 9–12.
19. Foster, Capitalism and degrowth.
20. Herman Daly, Economics in a full world, Scientific American, 293 (3), September 2005,100–107.