Remember This: 350 Parts Per Million

[This is quite an interesting article, however the one confusion that i have is the distinction between CO2 and CO2e. I thought that the Stern report and other reports have indicated the need to stabilise CO2e to approx 450ppm to avoid anything more than a 2degC temp increase? Yet here it talks about 450ppm in terms of CO2 (only). Perhaps someone reading my blog can help?

Nonetheless i think the last point is the key one, i.e. the analogy with Cholesterol. What we need is a qualitative change in the way humanity interacts with nature, that is - to stop climate change we need social change. The key question for environment activists is how are we going to acheive it? Well to borrow a phrase from Lenin, without Marxist theory you can't have proper practice.

I hope to write about this question soon, as i feel there is an ever pressing need to outline some of the key tasks of eco-socialists, such as the need for a class analysis of society, what specific features of capitalism are responsible for climate change, how democratic centralised planning of socialised means of production can avert the crises (and even achieve negative GHG emissions reductions), the need to connect the organised sections of the working class with the environment movement, and the vital role a Leninist Party can play in leading the environment movement to achieve its necessary tasks - putting the strategic (and polluting) industries under control of the world's working people.

But in the meantime to borrow another phrase from Lenin (although he also borrowed this one from Napolean) we need to "engage and then see", throw ourselves into the environment movement and then see what the key problems are and how we can assist.]

Bill McKibben, December 28, 2007, Washington Post

This month may have been the most important yet in the two-decade history of the fight against global warming. Al Gore got his Nobel in Stockholm; international negotiators made real progress on a treaty in Bali; and in Washington, Congress actually worked up the nerve to raise gas mileage standards for cars.

But what may turn out to be the most crucial development went largely unnoticed. It happened at an academic conclave in San Francisco. A NASA scientist named James Hansen offered a simple, straightforward and mind-blowing bottom line for the planet: 350, as in parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It's a number that may make what happened in Washington and Bali seem quaint and nearly irrelevant. It's the number that may define our future.

To understand what it means, you need a little background.

Twenty years ago, Hansen kicked off this issue by testifying before Congress that the planet was warming and that people were the cause. At the time, we could only guess how much warming it would take to put us in real danger. Since the pre-Industrial Revolution concentration of carbon in the atmosphere was roughly 275 parts per million, scientists and policymakers focused on what would happen if that number doubled -- 550 was a crude and mythical red line, but politicians and economists set about trying to see if we could stop short of that point. The answer was: not easily, but it could be done.

In the past five years, though, scientists began to worry that the planet was reacting more quickly than they had expected to the relatively small temperature increases we've already seen. The rapid melt of most glacial systems, for instance, convinced many that 450 parts per million was a more prudent target. That's what the European Union and many of the big environmental groups have been proposing in recent years, and the economic modeling makes clear that achieving it is still possible, though the chances diminish with every new coal-fired power plant.

But the data just keep getting worse. The news this fall that Arctic sea ice was melting at an off-the-charts pace and data from Greenland suggesting that its giant ice sheet was starting to slide into the ocean make even 450 look too high. Consider: We're already at 383 parts per million, and it's knocking the planet off kilter in substantial ways. So, what does that mean?

It means, Hansen says, that we've gone too far. "The evidence indicates we've aimed too high -- that the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2is no more than 350 ppm," he said after his presentation. Hansen has reams of paleo-climatic data to support his statements (as do other scientists who presented papers at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco this month). The last time the Earth warmed two or three degrees Celsius -- which is what 450 parts per million implies -- sea levels rose by tens of meters, something that would shake the foundations of the human enterprise should it happen again.

And we're already past 350. Does that mean we're doomed? Not quite. Not any more than your doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high means the game is over. Much like the way your body will thin its blood if you give up cheese fries, so the Earth naturally gets rid of some of its CO2each year. We just need to stop putting more in and, over time, the number will fall, perhaps fast enough to avert the worst damage.

That "just," of course, hides the biggest political and economic task we've ever faced: weaning ourselves from coal, gas and oil. The difference between 550 and 350 is that the weaning has to happen now, and everywhere. No more passing the buck. The gentle measures bandied about at Bali, themselves way too much for the Bush administration, don't come close. Hansen called for an immediate ban on new coal-fired power plants that don't capture carbon, the phaseout of old coal-fired generators, and a tax on carbon high enough to make sure that we leave tar sands and oil shale in the ground. To use the medical analogy, we're not talking statins to drop your cholesterol; we're talking huge changes in every aspect of your daily life.

Maybe too huge. The problems of global equity alone may be too much -- the Chinese aren't going to stop burning coal unless we give them some other way to pull people out of poverty. And we simply may have waited too long.

But at least we're homing in on the right number. Three hundred and fifty is the number every person needs to know.

Marx and the Global Environmental Rift

John Bellamy Foster, November 28, Monthly Review

Ecology is often seen as a recent invention. But the idea that capitalism degrades the environment in a way that disproportionately affects the poor and the colonized was already expressed in the nineteenth century in the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Writing in Capital in 1867 on England's ecological imperialism toward Ireland, Marx stated: "For a century and a half England has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without even allowing its cultivators the means for replacing the constituents of the exhausted soil." Marx was drawing here on the work of the German chemist Justus von Liebig. In the introduction to the seventh (1862) edition of his Organic Chemistry in Its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology Liebig had argued that "Great Britain robs all countries of the conditions of their fertility" and singled out Britain's systematic robbing of Ireland's soil as a prime example. For Liebig a system of production that took more from nature than it put back could be referred to as a "robbery system," a term that he used to describe industrialized capitalist agriculture.1

Following Liebig and other analysts of the nineteenth-century soil crisis, Marx argued that soil nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) were sent in the form of food and fiber sometimes hundreds and thousands of miles to the cities, where, instead of being recycled back to the land, these nutrients ended up polluting the urban centers, with disastrous results for human health. Meanwhile, faced with an increasingly impoverished soil, Britain, as Liebig pointed out, imported bones from Napoleonic battlefields and from Roman catacombs together with guano from Peru in a desperate attempt to restore nutrients to the fields. (Later on the invention of synthetic fertilizers was to help close the nutrient gap, but this was to lead to additional environmental problems, such as nitrogen runoff.)

In addressing these environmental issues Marx took over the concept of Stoffwechsel or metabolism from Liebig,2 describing the ecological contradiction between nature and capitalist society as "an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism." Indeed, "capitalist production," Marx explained, "only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth -- the soil and the worker." This rift in the metabolic relation between humanity and nature could only be overcome, he argued, through the systematic "restoration" of the metabolism between humanity and nature "as a regulative law of social organization." But this required the rational regulation of the labor process (itself defined as the metabolic relation of human beings to nature) by the associated producers in line with the needs of future generations. "Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together," Marx stated, "are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household]."3

Marx's ecological discussions, coupled with those of Engels, therefore went well beyond the general understanding of his time. Today the ecological issues that Marx and Engels addressed (albeit sometimes only in passing) read like a litany of many of our most pressing environmental problems: the division of town and country, the degradation of the soil, rural isolation and desolation, overcrowding in cities, urban wastes, industrial pollution, waste recycling in industry, the decline in nutrition and health, the crippling of workers, the squandering of natural resources (including fossil fuel in the form of coal), deforestation, floods, desertification, water shortages, regional climate change, conservation of energy, the dependence of species on changing environments, historically-conditioned overpopulation tendencies, and famine.

Marx saw the materialist conception of history as related to the materialist conception of nature, the science of history as related to the science of nature. He filled his natural science notebooks with studies of geology, chemistry, agronomy, physics, biology, anthropology, and mathematics. He attended the lectures at the Royal Institution in London of the Irish-born physicist John Tyndall. Marx was fascinated by Tyndall's experiments on radiant heat, including the differentiation of the sun's rays.4 It is even possible that he was in the audience in the early 1860s when Tyndall presented results of his experiments demonstrating for the first time that water vapor and carbon dioxide were associated with a greenhouse effect that helped to retain heat within the planet's atmosphere. (No one at that time of course suspected that the greenhouse effect interacting with carbon dioxide from the human burning of fossil fuels might lead to human-generated global climate change -- a hypothesis not introduced until 1896 by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius.)

Today the dialectical understanding with regard to nature-society interactions that Marx and Engels embraced is increasingly forced on us all, as a result of an accelerating global ecological crisis, symbolized above all by global warming. Recent research in environmental sociology has applied Marx's theory of metabolic rift to contemporary ecological problems such as the fertilizer treadmill, the dying oceans, and climate change. Writing on the social causes of the contemporary "carbon rift," stemming from the rapid burning up of fossil fuels, Brett Clark and Richard York have demonstrated that there is no magic cure for this problem outside of changes in fundamental social relations. Technology is unlikely to alleviate the problem substantially since gains in efficiency, according to what is known as the "Jevons Paradox" (named after William Stanley Jevons who wrote The Coal Question in 1865), lead invariably under capitalism to the expansion of production, the accompanying increases in the throughput of natural resources and energy, and more strains on the biosphere. "Technological development," Clark and York therefore conclude, "cannot assist in mending the carbon rift until it is freed from the dictates of capital relations."5

The only genuine, i.e. sustainable, solution to the global environmental rift requires, in Marx's words, a society of "associated producers" who can "govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature."6 The goals of human freedom and ecological sustainability are thus inseparable and necessitate for their advancement the building of a socialism for the 21st century.


Notes

1 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1976), 860; John Bellamy Foster, Marx's Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 164. See also Erland Mårald, "Everything Circulates: Agricultural Chemistry and Recycling Theories in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century," Environment and History, vol. 8 (2002), 65-84.

2 As indicated in the editor's notes to the Penguin/Vintage edition of Capital, vol. 3: "Liebig is referred to several times in both this volume and Volume 1, and it seems that Marx took from Liebig the concept of metabolism (Stoffwechsel) that he applied there, suitably transformed, to the analysis of the labour process (Chapter 7)." In Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (New York: Vintage, 1981), p. 878.

3 Foster, Marx's Ecology, 155-70. See also Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999); Paul Burkett and John Bellamy Foster, "Metabolism, Energy, and Entropy in Marx's Critique of Political Economy," Theory & Society, vol. 35 (2006), 109-56.

4 Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 3-4; Y. M. Uranovsky, "Marxism and Natural Science," in Nikolai Bukharin, et. al., Marxism and Modern Thought (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1935), p. 140. In 1865 Engels reported that a chemist that he had just met -- probably Carl Schorlemmer, who was to become one Engels and Marx's closest friends, a Fellow of the Royal Society and the first individual in England to occupy a chair in organic chemistry -- had explained to him Tyndall's "sunbeam experiment." See W. O. Henderson, The Life of Friedrich Engels (London: Frank Cass, 1976), vol. 1, p. 262.

5 Brett Clark and Richard York, "Carbon Metabolism: Global Capitalism, Climate Change, and the Biospheric Rift," Theory & Society, vol. 34 (2005), p. 419. For further work on the metabolic rift and global ecological crisis see Rebecca Clausen and Brett Clark, "The Metabolic Rift and Marine Ecology," Organization & Environment, vol. 18, no. 4 (2005), pp. 422-44; Philip Mancus, "Nitrogen Fertilizer Dependency and its Contradictions," Rural Sociology, vol. 72, no. 2 (June 2007).

6 Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 959.

John Bellamy Foster John Bellamy Foster is professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, author of Marx’s Ecology and Ecology Against Capitalism, and editor of Monthly Review.

If socialism needs a prefix, it should be ‘revolutionary’ rather than ‘eco’

Pinched from climateandcapitalism.blogspot.com

“Shaking off the productivist dross of Marxism”

Ecosocialism or Barbarism. Edited by Jane Kelly and Sheila Malone. Published by Socialist Resistance, London, 2006. £10, €15, ISBN 0-902869-97-3. 130 pages

Reviewed by Helen Ward.
from Permanent Revolution, Autumn 2007

Environmental challenges such as climate change have finally come to the top of the political agenda, with everyone from the Women’s Institute to George Bush putting forward their plans to save the planet. This book is the response from Socialist Resistance.

The timing of its publication is no accident. Both Socialist Resistance and their international organisation, the Fourth International, are in the process of a radical re-think with proposals to change their “political programme, perspectives and public profile towards being an anti-capitalist, ecosocialist organisation”.[1]

This move is based on a new perspective of catastrophic social and ecological crisis that demands an urgent response. “At the core of this change is the contention that free-market, privatising neoliberalism has over 20 years arrived at a new and deadly phase – what we call ‘savage capitalism’.” The book compiles a set of arguments for ecosocialism, ending with the eco-socialist manifesto drafted by Joel Kovel and Michael Löwy in 2001.[2]

Much of the book is a useful description of environmental problems, with a consistent argument that these are inherent in the capitalist mode of production and that they can only be resolved by a socialist solution rather than a series of reforms within capitalism. This argument is used to challenge the leadership of the environmental movement, in particular the various Green Parties.

“It is not a matter of contrasting “bad” ecocidal capitalist to “good” green capitalists; it is the system itself, based on ruthless competition, the demands of profitability, and the race for rapid profit, which is the destroyer of nature’s balance…Partial reforms are completely inadequate.” (p6)

In common with left greens including Joel Kovel [3] and Derek Wall [4], the book includes visions of a future without capitalism where people live in harmony with the environment, a transition,

“not only to a new mode of production and an egalitarian and democratic society, but also to an alternative mode of life, a new ecosocialist civilization, beyond the reign of money, beyond consumption habits artificially produced by advertising, and beyond the unlimited production of commodities, such as private automobiles, that are harmful to the environment.” (p7)

This green and pleasant vision is fine but why a new label, ecosocialism, to sum it up? It suggests that Marxist socialism per se is not “eco” and that ecologism is not “socialist”. The first article from Michael Löwy, an academic and long-standing member of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) the French Section of the Fourth International, is called “What is ecosocialism?”:

“It is a current of ecological thought and action that appropriates the fundamental gains of Marxism while shaking off its productivist dross.” (p4)

The charge of productivism is the one constantly levied at socialists by Greens and ecologists. But is it true? Two examples are usually cited. First, that Marx described a fundamental contradiction in capitalism between the forces of production and the social relations of production, with the latter acting as a brake on the former; more specifically, that private capitalist property relations impede the rational, optimal exploitation of nature.

Marx argues for an expansion of the forces of production to be able to meet widespread need. This can clearly be interpreted as “productivist”, but that ignores both the context in which Marx was writing, and his related discussions of the way production should be used to meet human need rather than constantly expand capital and profit.

Indeed, as Löwy himself points out, “For Marx, the supreme goal of technical progress is not the infinite accumulation of good (“having”) but the reduction of the working day and the accumulation of free time (“being”).”

Marx is also accused of conflating expansion of productive forces with progress, but taking his writings in historical context this seems an unfair critique. There was a desperate need to expand production to meet the very basic needs of humanity. We can see how expansion of productive forces under capitalism has been contradictory, with the production of goods for profit rather than need, the expansion of unnecessary things that advertisers then have to persuade us that we need, and the production of luxury goods for a decadent layer of society. Nonetheless, the development of the productive forces, through computing, for example, does have huge potential for reducing the working day – but capitalist social relations obstruct this use of new technology.

The second example Greens cite of socialism’s “productivism” is the Soviet Union, China and other “socialist” states. Yes, the Soviet Union was “productivist”, with maximum volume of the goods being integral to their planning system than quality or usefulness of these products. But we need to reassert that this was not socialist – it was a distortion in which the transition to socialism was blocked by a brutal and bureaucratic dictatorship.

It seems that this charge is one of the reasons for the adoption of the “eco” label. The second is the primacy the ecological question attains for the FI in a set of catastrophist perspectives.

Löwy argues: “The ecological issue is, in my opinion, the great challenge for a renewal of Marxist thought at the threshold of the 21st century.” This, taken together with the prediction of imminent environmental collapse, leads them to adopt the new turn, and the addition of eco- is a way of signalling a break with the past.

Many Greens also think that Marxism has scant regard for the eco-system, a criticism linked to the idea of productivism. In fact Marx and Engels both had quite a lot to say about the way capitalism mis-uses non-renewable resources and degrades the environment. But for Marx it was capitalism itself – a system wedded to accumulation for its own sake – that was responsible for this state of affairs and this puts an unbridgeable gulf between him and those Greens who believe that a benevolent form of capitalism can be built that lives in harmony with people and nature more generally.

Forerunners of Socialist Resistance have often promoted a red-green alliance, part of a rainbow coalition, but now propose a more strategic amalgam. “The convergence of these movements could form a new vision for society – ecosocialism”. And failure to advance ecosocialism will, the book argues, lead to barbarism.

So what new strategy and programme is being advanced to avert the possibility of barbarism? There are some good sections outlining the need to link the struggle for immediate reforms to the goal of revolutionary social change. Jane Kelly and Phil Ward correctly criticise the Green Party, arguing that “…the Greens do not differ fundamentally from social democracy in the belief that capitalism can be reformed”. (p51) They also recognise that the revolutionary programme for the environmental change is not well thought through – a position we would agree with, including in our own tendency historically.

In an attempt to start that programmatic re-elaboration, they look to ways to link socialist and green demands. At the heart is the idea that we strive for production for need rather than exchange – a basic socialist goal and one not possible to achieve under capitalism. But reforms are also needed in the short term: to reduce carbon emissions, promote renewable energy, insulate homes etc. The key programmatic question is how to apply the transitional method to achieve these. Kelly and Ward agree that transitional demands are needed, arguing that immediate reforms cannot be fully achieved “without the control of ordinary working people; issues of workers’ control, workers’ democracy and socialist solutions are paramount.” (p54) They also refer to the way that many socialist goals, such as socialisation of domestic labour through a revolution in the way we live, would be much more environmentally sustainable than the individualised consumption under capitalism.

But the laudable aim of developing a transitional programme is unfortunately not achieved either in the ecosocialist manifesto (pages 116-120), the resolution of the International Socialist Group from April 2006 (pages 68-73); nor in the recent Socialist Resistance conference document.

All of these programmes and manifestoes are actually limited to a progressive goal (socialism, or rather ecosocialism) and a series of mostly fine reforms, such as an end to airport expansion, “an international treaty that goes well beyond Kyoto”, “global action to help third world countries in sustainable development”.

But how? This is where transitional method should come in, but is lacking. At the heart of transitional demands is the linking of struggles for reforms with the struggle for power. The struggle for power is a fight against capitalism, which will be a vicious fight given the strength and resources of the state and international organisations that will defend their power to the death. This will take a revolution – a violent overthrow of the old order to have any hope of moving to the goal of socialism.

A transitional programme embeds this struggle in the fight over reforms. For example, the correct demand for cheap and integrated transport systems needs to be elaborated to include the role of workers in transport industries taking control of the planning and investment of their companies. They should link to local workers and users of transport to determine priorities.

These action committees would inevitably come up against the owners of the transport companies and the state that backs them up, and to win the battle the workers would need to take on larger issues of ownership and planning and, eventually, control over the local state.

Revolutionary socialists differ from reformist Greens and even the most militant eco-warriors on two key questions. The first is the question of the state. We understand that the state is not neutral and will have to be smashed. The Greens want to reform it and the eco-warriors want it to go away but are not in general willing to see the need for another form of power to replace it.

The second is the role of the working class. The most left of the Greens will see the workers’ movement having a role in eco struggles, but also see the obstacle of workers with vested interests in many polluting industries. “Ecosocialists know that the workers and their organizations are an indispensable for any radical transformation of the system,” writes Löwy. (p5) But that is not the same as understanding the primacy and centrality of the working class; the working class not as a constituent part of the ecosocialist coalition but as the leadership of it.

The lack of a discussion of the state in relation to revolutionary strategy, and of the centrality of the working class in any socialist movement is a major weakness in the ecosocialist project since it is on these issues that there will be most disagreements with many “greens”. Any new international party or movement for socialism, with or without a prefix, needs to be founded on a shared understanding of the state and the working class, otherwise it will shatter at the first test of real struggle where a choice between the interests and organisations of the working class is pitted against the corporations and institutions of the capitalist state, be they neo-liberal or even reforming “Green” liberals.

Developing a practical, working class response to climate change and other environmental threats is one of the most important challenges facing the left today. But we are certain that if socialism needs any prefix, it should be “revolutionary” and not “eco”.

Footnotes
[1] Socialist Resistance. “Savage Capitalism – The Ecosocialist Alternative”. IV Online magazine: IV392 - September 2007, on http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1311

[2] The manifesto is also available online www.iefd.org/manifestos/ecosocialist_manifesto.php

[3] Kovel J (2002) The Enemy of Nature. The end of capitalism or the end of the world?. New York: Zed Books

[4] Wall D (2005) Babylon and Beyond. The economics of Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Globalist and Radical Green Movements. London: Pluto Press

Organising Ecological Revolution

John Bellamy Foster, October 2005, Monthly Review

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)