Monbiot Sees Mankind in a Fight for Life with Capitalism

You might not like his ideas but they're well worth airing.

Guardian enviro-scribe, George Monbiot, writes that it's time to ditch capitalism before it puts us in the grave.

Capitalism’s failures arise from two of its defining elements. The first is perpetual growth. Economic growth is the aggregate effect of the quest to accumulate capital and extract profit. Capitalism collapses without growth, yet perpetual growth on a finite planet leads inexorably to environmental calamity. 

Those who defend capitalism argue that, as consumption switches from goods to services, economic growth can be decoupled from the use of material resources. Last week a paper in the journal New Political Economy, by Jason Hickel and Giorgos Kallis, examined this premise. They found that while some relative decoupling took place in the 20th century (material resource consumption grew, but not as quickly as economic growth), in the 21st century there has been a recoupling: rising resource consumption has so far matched or exceeded the rate of economic growth. The absolute decoupling needed to avert environmental catastrophe (a reduction in material resource use) has never been achieved, and appears impossible while economic growth continues. Green growth is an illusion.

A system based on perpetual growth cannot function without peripheries and externalities. There must always be an extraction zone – from which materials are taken without full payment – and a disposal zone, where costs are dumped in the form of waste and pollution. As the scale of economic activity increases until capitalism affects everything, from the atmosphere to the deep ocean floor, the entire planet becomes a sacrifice zone: we all inhabit the periphery of the profit-making machine. 

This drives us towards cataclysm on such a scale that most people have no means of imagining it. The threatened collapse of our life-support systems is bigger by far than war, famine, pestilence or economic crisis, though it is likely to incorporate all four. Societies can recover from these apocalyptic events, but not from the loss of soil, an abundant biosphere and a habitable climate.

The second defining element is the bizarre assumption that a person is entitled to as great a share of the world’s natural wealth as their money can buy. This seizure of common goods causes three further dislocations. First, the scramble for exclusive control of non-reproducible assets, which implies either violence or legislative truncations of other people’s rights. Second, the immiseration of other people by an economy based on looting across both space and time. Third, the translation of economic power into political power, as control over essential resources leads to control over the social relations that surround them.

Monbiot has no "magic bullet" prescription. At best he tries to winkle out answers from the writings of others:

So what does a better system look like? I don’t have a complete answer, and I don’t believe any one person does. But I think I see a rough framework emerging. Part of it is provided by the ecological civilisation proposed by Jeremy Lent, one of the greatest thinkers of our age. Other elements come from Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics and the environmental thinking of Naomi Klein, Amitav Ghosh, Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq, Raj Patel and Bill McKibben. Part of the answer lies in the notion of “private sufficiency, public luxury”. Another part arises from the creation of a new conception of justice based on this simple principle: every generation, everywhere, shall have an equal right to the enjoyment of natural wealth.

One word in Monbiot's essay stuck with me - "decoupling."  Isn't that how we live today, decoupled? Have our politics not become decoupled from reality?

Is the modern petro-state not a decoupling from the reality of climate change? Is the neoliberal quest for perpetual exponential growth in a very finite planet already overburdened with rapid depletion and exhaustion of its resources not a decoupling from reality?

Very soon we'll be barraged by hollow promises of a better future from the very people bent on wrecking the future. Isn't voting for that sort of nonsense itself a decoupling from reality?

"...every generation, everywhere, shall have an equal right to the enjoyment of natural wealth." Can you even imagine something so audacious? Equal right to the enjoyment of natural wealth? The neoliberal order, our current malignancy, didn't get where it is by entertaining consideration of future generations or people who can't afford to compete with us for their own resources.

The Germans Get It. When Will We?

Sixty per cent of Germans believe that capitalism is the cause of poverty and hunger and that real democracy can't be realized under that economic system.  It seems they're not fond of market fundamentalism and neoliberalism.  In fact, they see straight through it.

You might have thought that Germans who live in Europe's economic powerhouse would be true free market capitalists.  You would be wrong.

The survey found that more than 60 percent of Germans believe there is no genuine democracy in their country because industry has too much political influence and that the voice of the voters plays only a subordinate role.

Gee, does any of that sound familiar?

How the Oligarchs Hoodwinked the American People

The oligarchs have mobilized Tea Partiers and other supporters of the far right to loathe socialism as the enemy threatening the demise of their grand "city on the hill." It's akin to a phobia with these people and it's constantly fueled by the far right media propaganda machine and public figures like Sarah Palin. They do it because it works. There are enough gullible people in the United States that freebooters like Sean Hannity and rapscallions like Glenn Beck can spin the most outrageous lies and get away with it. Droves of Americans actually believe them. Fox is the country's top cable news service.

Now these opinion-shapers know that America is hardly on the brink of a communist takeover. They know there is no looming socialist threat to American democracy. So why is so much energy invested in setting up socialism as a public whipping boy? Could it be that it serves as a handy scapegoat to mask America's real, existing and spreading threat - corporatism and the oligarchs it serves?

Corporatism, as Mussolini proudly proclaimed, is the beating heart of fascism. It was then, it is now. So long as Americans can still go to the ballot box, however, the spread of corporatism needs to be concealed and what better way of concealing something than distraction in the form of scapegoating?

It wasn't socialists after all who lurked behind the dismantling of America's once powerful manufacturing sector. That was rank corporatism. It wasn't socialists who brought America to its knees under the crushing weight of unimaginable debt. That was the handiwork of a "bought and paid for" Congress where the corporate sector, through lobbyists and cash payouts, has powerfully insinuated itself between lawmakers and the public they're supposed to serve. It wasn't socialists behind the stagnation in working wages and the demise of the middle class in an era that saw enormous wealth concentrated in the top one per cent of the American public. Somebody else must've done that. I wonder who that could be? It hasn't been socialism that kept America tightly bound to the fossil fuel industry and the military-industrial complex and the private sector war waging industry either. Halliburton, KBR and Blackwater are not socialist entities.

Few recognized it at the time but the corporatist oligarchs scored an immensely powerful victory with the demise of America's middle class. In the United States, the middle class was a creature of industrialization and, once in place, was a powerful force for stability and moderation. In its pre-Reagan form, the middle class was a force for democracy and, as such, the natural enemy of corporatism. The middle class served as a buffer between the rich and the poor and formed the vehicle for social mobility, the promise on which the entire "American Dream" is founded. It's no accident that, with the demise of the middle class, social mobility in the United States has plummeted.

The era of the middle class probably began in the Roosevelt/Truman period and extended until the arrival of Ronald Reagan and the advent of globalized, supposedly "free" trade. The beginning of the end of the middle class was ushered in with the export of America's manufacturing base and the introduction of the cancerous FIRE (finance/insurance/real estate) economy, also known as the "new economy" and, more recently, casino capitalism. The financialization of America's economy was the death knell of manufacturing and the middle class. Who wanted to invest massive amounts of money in a manufacturing plant that would produce modest returns when you could simply throw that cash into a financial bubble and reap huge profits? It was madness writ large. A massive number of Americans came to believe that owning a house, of itself, assured them of endless wealth.

The old middle class were savers and builders. When Reagan's "Age of Ruin" took hold they were replaced with a new class, borrowers and spenders. Bank balances plummeted, debt soared, notional wealth (underwritten by foreign lenders) abounded. It wasn't socialists but Ronald Reagan and his disciples who took down the United States of America and opened their country to the oligarchs.

There are anti-democratic forces at play in any democracy. They can be found in the fringes of the right and the left. It's a strong centre that keeps the radical right and radical left safely at bay but that centre did not hold in the United States allowing the radical right to amass considerable political and economic power.

There has been a powerful, even seismic shift to the right in today's America. A recent episode of Bill Maher's Real Time show discussed how Barack Obama, today lambasted as a rank socialist, would have been considered a moderate Republican in the pre-Reagan years. The astute political pundit David Gergen, who worked in the Nixon administration, warned that Nixon would be dismissed as far too left today to be considered for the Republican nomination.

So, as America has - for three decades now - drifted to the far right and fallen into decline accordingly, the public erupts in anger at supposed socialists threatening their way of life. Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and all the others have done their job.