Tunisia, Egypt, and the Big Picture: Egypt lies on the fault lines of the convergence of global ecological, energy, and economic crises—and thus, on the frontlines of deepening global system failure.
by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Yes Magazine
The toppling of Ben Ali in Tunisia in the wake of mass protests and bloody street clashes is likely to signify a major transformation in the future of politics and geopolitics for the major countries of the Middle East and North Africa. The Tunisian experience triggered the escalation of unprecedented protests in Egypt against the Mubarak regime. The question is: ‘Will events in Tunisia and Egypt have a domino effect throughout the Arab world?’
The potential fall of Hosni Mubarak is serious stuff. Egypt is “the most populous country in the Arab world,” viewed by the United States, Britain and the West as “a strategic pivot” and a “a vital ally” in the ‘War on Terror’. No wonder then that activists across the world are holding their breath in anticipation that one of the world’s most notorious dictators, and one of the West’s most favored client-regimes, might be overthrown.
The eruption of political unrest in Egypt and elsewhere cannot be fully understood without acknowledging the context of accelerating ecological, energy, and economic crises.What is happening in Tunisia and Egypt is only a manifestation of a deeper convergence of fundamental structural crises, which are truly global in scale. The eruption of social and political unrest has followed the impact of deepening economic turbulence across the region, due to the inflationary impact of rocketing fuel and food prices. As of mid-January, even before Ben Ali had fled Tunis, riots were breaking out in Algeria, Morocco, Yemen, and Jordan. The key grievances? Rampant unemployment, unaffordable food and consumer goods, endemic poverty, lack of basic services, and political repression.
Global food crisis
In many of these countries, certainly in both Tunisia and Egypt, tensions have simmered for years. The trigger, it seems, came in the form of food shortages caused by the record high global prices reported by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in December 2010. The return of high food prices two to three years after the 2008 global food crisis should not be a surprise. For most of the preceding decade, world grain consumption exceeded production—correlating with agricultural land productivity declining almost by half from 1990–2007, compared with 1950–1990.
This year, global food supply chains were again “stretched to the limit” following poor harvests in Canada, Russia and Ukraine; hotter, drier weather in South America cutting soybean production; flooding in Australia, wiping out its wheat crops; not to mention the colder, stormier, snowier winters experienced in the northern hemisphere, damaging harvests.
So much of the current supply shortages have been inflicted by increasingly erratic weather events and natural disasters, which climate scientists have long warned are symptomatic of anthropogenic global warming. Droughts exacerbated by global warming in key food-basket regions have already led to a 10–20 percent drop in rice yields over the last decade. By mid-century, world crop yields could fall as much as 20–40 percent due to climate change alone.
But climate change is likely to do more than generate droughts in some regions. It is also linked to the prospect of colder weather in the eastern United States, east Asia, and northern Europe—as the rate of Arctic summer sea ice is accelerating, leading to intensifying warming, the change in atmospheric pressure pushes cold Arctic air to the south. Similarly, even the floods in Australia could be linked to climate change. Scientists agree they were caused by a particularly strong El Niño/La Niña oscillation in the Tropical Pacific ocean-atmospheric system. But Michael McPhaden, co-author of a recent scientific study on the issue, suggests that recently stronger El Niño events are “plausibly the result of global warming.”
The global food situation has been compounded by the over-dependence of industrial agriculture on fossil fuels, consuming ten calories of fossil fuel energy for every one calorie of food energy produced. The problem is that global conventional oil production has most likely already peaked, having been on an undulating plateau since 2005—and forecast to steadily and inexorably decline, leading to higher prices. Although oil prices dropped after the 2008 crash due to recession, the resuscitation of economic activity has pushed up demand, leading fuel prices to creep back up to $95 a barrel.
The fuel price hikes, combining with the predatory activities of financial speculators trying to rake in profits by investing in the commodity markets, have underpinned worldwide inflation. Just as in 2008, the worst effected have been the poorer populations of the South. Thus, the eruption of political unrest in Egypt and elsewhere cannot be fully understood without acknowledging the context of accelerating ecological, energy and economic crises—inherently interconnected problems which are symptomatic of an Empire in overstretch, a global political economy in breach of the natural limits of its environment.
To Read the Rest of the Essay and Access HyperLinked Resources
Showing posts with label Ecology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ecology. Show all posts
Sunday, February 06, 2011
Sunday, July 04, 2010
Tell Somebody: Helen Caldicott - Nuclear Weapons, Nuclear Power, & Kansas City; Ivory Mae Thomas - Exposed to radioactive promethium; Jason Klumb
Tell Somebody (KKFI: Kansas City)
Dr. Helen Caldicott - Nuclear Weapons, Nuclear Power, & Kansas City
Caldicott, a pediatrician, has, according to her biography at If You Love This Planet, "devoted over 35 years to educating the public and policymakers about the medical hazards of nuclear weapons, nuclear energy, and ecological collapse, and the necessary remedy of citizen participation."
To Listen to the Episode
Exposed to radioactive promethium - Ivory Mae Thomas
A little over twenty years ago, Ivory Mae Thomas was at work on the night shift cleaning offices at the Kansas City branch of the US nuclear weapons complex when someone came to her and said "I've got bad news for you. ...our machine had a little leak, and we discovered you stepped in radiation." They took her to an emergency room at the plant, took her clothes, scrubbed her down, and came to her house in the middle of the night and scrubbed it down. Thomas says she was never told exactly what she had been exposed to until a local television reporter dug it out with FOIA requests twenty years later.
To Listen to the Episode
Jason Klumb - Regional Administrator, General Services Administration
Jason Klumb, Administrator for the Heartland Region of the General Services Administration, sat down with Tell Somebody in his south Kansas City office to talk about how he called in doctors from the Centers for Disease Control to look into health concerns among former and current workers at the Bannister Federal Complex.
To Listen to the Episode
Dr. Helen Caldicott - Nuclear Weapons, Nuclear Power, & Kansas City
Caldicott, a pediatrician, has, according to her biography at If You Love This Planet, "devoted over 35 years to educating the public and policymakers about the medical hazards of nuclear weapons, nuclear energy, and ecological collapse, and the necessary remedy of citizen participation."
To Listen to the Episode
Exposed to radioactive promethium - Ivory Mae Thomas
A little over twenty years ago, Ivory Mae Thomas was at work on the night shift cleaning offices at the Kansas City branch of the US nuclear weapons complex when someone came to her and said "I've got bad news for you. ...our machine had a little leak, and we discovered you stepped in radiation." They took her to an emergency room at the plant, took her clothes, scrubbed her down, and came to her house in the middle of the night and scrubbed it down. Thomas says she was never told exactly what she had been exposed to until a local television reporter dug it out with FOIA requests twenty years later.
To Listen to the Episode
Jason Klumb - Regional Administrator, General Services Administration
Jason Klumb, Administrator for the Heartland Region of the General Services Administration, sat down with Tell Somebody in his south Kansas City office to talk about how he called in doctors from the Centers for Disease Control to look into health concerns among former and current workers at the Bannister Federal Complex.
To Listen to the Episode
Sunday, June 06, 2010
Hannah Holleman and Rebecca Clausen: Biofuels, BP-Berkeley, and the New Ecological Imperialism
(From 2008, very interesting in the context of recent events...)
Biofuels, BP-Berkeley, and the New Ecological Imperialism
by Hannah Holleman and Rebecca Clausen
Monthly Review
British Petroleum, Beyond Petroleum . . . Biofuel Promoter, Biosphere Plunderer. Regardless of what the BP abbreviation actually stands for, one thing is clear: this oil giant knows a good deal when it sees one. For a relatively small financial contribution, BP appropriates academic expertise from a leading public research institution, founded on 200 years of social support, to maximize its return on energy investments. These investments, in turn, are focused primarily on promoting the market for biofuel, the newest darling of those in power who stimulate change while maintaining "business as usual." This means working-class people in the core developed countries will subsidize the extraction of even more ecological goods from the developing world to serve elites, who never mind taking food out of the mouths of people to put gold in their pockets. Socializing the costs for private economic gain is not a new phenomenon in the capitalist system. However, this case represents a new twist in the combination of debunked science, ecological imperialism, and the sophistry of "sustainable development."
New Fuel, Old Barrels
In February 2007, BP announced plans with the University of California (UC) at Berkeley, in partnership with the University of Illinois and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to lead the largest academic-industry research alliance in U.S. history. The $50 million-a-year bone that BP will throw to Berkeley will create the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), primarily focusing its research on biotechnology to produce biofuels. "In launching this visionary institute, BP is creating a new model for university-industry collaboration," said Beth Burnside, UC Berkeley Vice Chancellor for Research (quoted in Sanders 2007). In light of the historic record of capitalist accumulation, this "new model" for university-industry collaboration looks like old wine in a new bottle: appropriate a social good (public university), privatize the property (intellectual development), and commodify the output (energy-intensive products). And in this instance, BP has recruited a public institution to be its profit-making subsidiary.
Appropriating Academia
This is not the first time UC Berkeley fed at the corporate trough, and as government expenditures for social goods continue to decline relatively, it is likely that it won't be the last. Berkeley entered into a research deal with the seed giant Novartis ten years ago, after which an external review of the UCB-Novartis interaction recommended avoiding such partnerships (Altieri and Holt-Gimenez 2007). Nevertheless, on November 15, 2007, BP, the UC Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announced the signing of a controversial ten-year pact forming the Energy Biosciences Institute. The current deal with BP is ten times larger than the Novartis deal. A brief description of this BP partnership follows:
As part of its continuing drive to find longer term commercial alternatives to oil and gas, BP announced in 2006 that it would invest $500 million over the next 10 years to establish the institute, the first public-private institution of this scale in the world. The institute's emphasis on new fuels meshes with UC Berkeley's and Berkeley Lab's research aims to develop sustainable sources of energy and the University of Illinois' efforts to develop biofuel feedstocks. The three academic institutions formed a strategic partnership to submit to BP a proposal that was selected in February 2007 from among five international proposals. (Burress 2007)
As details of the final contract came to light, the public learned of how BP will gain profit-making technology and expertise by externalizing much of the cost of research and development. The benefits to BP include access to leading scientists and laboratories, first rights for patent negotiations, and the rubber stamp of academia and science on its new projects. The benefit for the university is purely financial, though at least one third of the money goes to BP's own private projects on campus. The benefit for the public is hard to find. Politicians, university officials, and pro-market pundits laud this public-private partnership, while those critical of the "prostitution" of the university, including experts on biofuels' social and environmental impacts, are marginalized. This is not surprising given the undemocratic nature of the process whereby the details of the deal were negotiated without any public input.
Private (Intellectual) Property
Jennifer Washburn, examining the corporate corruption of higher education, explains that the deal with BP will expand the control that private firms wield over university agendas (Washburn 2007). Indeed, as scientists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin point out in their most recent book, Biology Under the Influence (2007), so-called public-private partnerships are on the rise, and funding, an important factor in guiding research, is increasingly determined by the needs of private industry with the backing of governments. These "partnerships" are ideologically accepted and promoted, as were the earliest land enclosures and contemporary privatization schemes, as a natural and inevitable evolution of society's institutions.1 Debates concerning the cultural, political, and technological viability of market-based solutions to environmental and social problems are directly influenced by how science interacts with dominant ideology to mold and reinforce decisions that affect the world. The seemingly natural process of the degrading trends of capitalist development must be confronted.
No Free Lunch in Crop-Based Biofuels
Like the Aesopian rhetoric used under capitalism to promote war and imperialism in the name of democracy, the way in which the 10-year plan to "research" (aka promote) biofuels blatantly dismisses potential ecological damage is unsettling. There is no evidence that biofuels can actually satisfy the energy appetite of capitalism -- they have so far only helped to destroy both ecological and social relationships. This critique does not only come from those who suffer the immediate consequences of biofuels' advance, but also from ecologists within UC Berkeley's ivory walls. Dr. Miguel Altieri, agroecologist, explains:
By promoting large-scale mechanized monocultures which require agrochemical inputs and machinery, and as carbon-capturing forests are felled to make way for biofuel crops, CO2 emissions will increase not decrease. The only way to stop global warming is to promote small-scale organic agriculture and decrease the use of all fuels, which requires major reductions in consumption patterns and development of massive public transportation systems, areas that the University of California should be actively researching and that BP and the other biofuel partners will never invest one penny towards. (Altieri 2007) 2
The damages from biofuel production are growing. For instance, a recent UNEP/UNESCO report projects the loss of 98% of Indonesia's forests by 2022, due in large part to land cleared for plantations of palm trees to produce biofuel (Nellemann and Virtue 2007: 6). Indonesia is home to one of the largest rain forests in the world and a repository of a great deal of the world's biodiversity. Along with deforestation, habitat destruction, decreased biodiversity, and increased industrial mono-cropping and agricultural inputs (including fertilizer, herbicide, genetically modified seed, and water), we see the removal of sensitive lands from conservation programs and more water pollution.
So, BP-Berkeley project's claim of ecological concern raises many questions.3 Not least is BP's own track record of environmental destruction. And "alternative" fuel represents only the most publicly discussed venture of the new institute. Other research endeavors include: "the conversion of heavy hydrocarbons to clean fuels, improved recovery from existing oil and gas reservoirs and carbon sequestration" (Brenneman 2007). Given this research agenda, it is easy to see why environmentalists, farmers, and other critics around the world understand that the main thing "green" coming out of the EBI will be money.
To Read the rest of the Essay
More resources:
Now compare to the BP corporation's current attitude concerning the devastating Gulf oil spill:
Yves Smith: "On BP’s Many Forms of Less Than Artful Dodging."
Biofuels, BP-Berkeley, and the New Ecological Imperialism
by Hannah Holleman and Rebecca Clausen
Monthly Review
British Petroleum, Beyond Petroleum . . . Biofuel Promoter, Biosphere Plunderer. Regardless of what the BP abbreviation actually stands for, one thing is clear: this oil giant knows a good deal when it sees one. For a relatively small financial contribution, BP appropriates academic expertise from a leading public research institution, founded on 200 years of social support, to maximize its return on energy investments. These investments, in turn, are focused primarily on promoting the market for biofuel, the newest darling of those in power who stimulate change while maintaining "business as usual." This means working-class people in the core developed countries will subsidize the extraction of even more ecological goods from the developing world to serve elites, who never mind taking food out of the mouths of people to put gold in their pockets. Socializing the costs for private economic gain is not a new phenomenon in the capitalist system. However, this case represents a new twist in the combination of debunked science, ecological imperialism, and the sophistry of "sustainable development."
New Fuel, Old Barrels
In February 2007, BP announced plans with the University of California (UC) at Berkeley, in partnership with the University of Illinois and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to lead the largest academic-industry research alliance in U.S. history. The $50 million-a-year bone that BP will throw to Berkeley will create the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), primarily focusing its research on biotechnology to produce biofuels. "In launching this visionary institute, BP is creating a new model for university-industry collaboration," said Beth Burnside, UC Berkeley Vice Chancellor for Research (quoted in Sanders 2007). In light of the historic record of capitalist accumulation, this "new model" for university-industry collaboration looks like old wine in a new bottle: appropriate a social good (public university), privatize the property (intellectual development), and commodify the output (energy-intensive products). And in this instance, BP has recruited a public institution to be its profit-making subsidiary.
Appropriating Academia
This is not the first time UC Berkeley fed at the corporate trough, and as government expenditures for social goods continue to decline relatively, it is likely that it won't be the last. Berkeley entered into a research deal with the seed giant Novartis ten years ago, after which an external review of the UCB-Novartis interaction recommended avoiding such partnerships (Altieri and Holt-Gimenez 2007). Nevertheless, on November 15, 2007, BP, the UC Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announced the signing of a controversial ten-year pact forming the Energy Biosciences Institute. The current deal with BP is ten times larger than the Novartis deal. A brief description of this BP partnership follows:
As part of its continuing drive to find longer term commercial alternatives to oil and gas, BP announced in 2006 that it would invest $500 million over the next 10 years to establish the institute, the first public-private institution of this scale in the world. The institute's emphasis on new fuels meshes with UC Berkeley's and Berkeley Lab's research aims to develop sustainable sources of energy and the University of Illinois' efforts to develop biofuel feedstocks. The three academic institutions formed a strategic partnership to submit to BP a proposal that was selected in February 2007 from among five international proposals. (Burress 2007)
As details of the final contract came to light, the public learned of how BP will gain profit-making technology and expertise by externalizing much of the cost of research and development. The benefits to BP include access to leading scientists and laboratories, first rights for patent negotiations, and the rubber stamp of academia and science on its new projects. The benefit for the university is purely financial, though at least one third of the money goes to BP's own private projects on campus. The benefit for the public is hard to find. Politicians, university officials, and pro-market pundits laud this public-private partnership, while those critical of the "prostitution" of the university, including experts on biofuels' social and environmental impacts, are marginalized. This is not surprising given the undemocratic nature of the process whereby the details of the deal were negotiated without any public input.
Private (Intellectual) Property
Jennifer Washburn, examining the corporate corruption of higher education, explains that the deal with BP will expand the control that private firms wield over university agendas (Washburn 2007). Indeed, as scientists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin point out in their most recent book, Biology Under the Influence (2007), so-called public-private partnerships are on the rise, and funding, an important factor in guiding research, is increasingly determined by the needs of private industry with the backing of governments. These "partnerships" are ideologically accepted and promoted, as were the earliest land enclosures and contemporary privatization schemes, as a natural and inevitable evolution of society's institutions.1 Debates concerning the cultural, political, and technological viability of market-based solutions to environmental and social problems are directly influenced by how science interacts with dominant ideology to mold and reinforce decisions that affect the world. The seemingly natural process of the degrading trends of capitalist development must be confronted.
No Free Lunch in Crop-Based Biofuels
Like the Aesopian rhetoric used under capitalism to promote war and imperialism in the name of democracy, the way in which the 10-year plan to "research" (aka promote) biofuels blatantly dismisses potential ecological damage is unsettling. There is no evidence that biofuels can actually satisfy the energy appetite of capitalism -- they have so far only helped to destroy both ecological and social relationships. This critique does not only come from those who suffer the immediate consequences of biofuels' advance, but also from ecologists within UC Berkeley's ivory walls. Dr. Miguel Altieri, agroecologist, explains:
By promoting large-scale mechanized monocultures which require agrochemical inputs and machinery, and as carbon-capturing forests are felled to make way for biofuel crops, CO2 emissions will increase not decrease. The only way to stop global warming is to promote small-scale organic agriculture and decrease the use of all fuels, which requires major reductions in consumption patterns and development of massive public transportation systems, areas that the University of California should be actively researching and that BP and the other biofuel partners will never invest one penny towards. (Altieri 2007) 2
The damages from biofuel production are growing. For instance, a recent UNEP/UNESCO report projects the loss of 98% of Indonesia's forests by 2022, due in large part to land cleared for plantations of palm trees to produce biofuel (Nellemann and Virtue 2007: 6). Indonesia is home to one of the largest rain forests in the world and a repository of a great deal of the world's biodiversity. Along with deforestation, habitat destruction, decreased biodiversity, and increased industrial mono-cropping and agricultural inputs (including fertilizer, herbicide, genetically modified seed, and water), we see the removal of sensitive lands from conservation programs and more water pollution.
So, BP-Berkeley project's claim of ecological concern raises many questions.3 Not least is BP's own track record of environmental destruction. And "alternative" fuel represents only the most publicly discussed venture of the new institute. Other research endeavors include: "the conversion of heavy hydrocarbons to clean fuels, improved recovery from existing oil and gas reservoirs and carbon sequestration" (Brenneman 2007). Given this research agenda, it is easy to see why environmentalists, farmers, and other critics around the world understand that the main thing "green" coming out of the EBI will be money.
To Read the rest of the Essay
More resources:
Now compare to the BP corporation's current attitude concerning the devastating Gulf oil spill:
Yves Smith: "On BP’s Many Forms of Less Than Artful Dodging."
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster: What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism
What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism
Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster
Monthly Review
...
Another Economic System Is Not Just Possible—It’s Essential
The foregoing analysis, if correct, points to the fact that the ecological crisis cannot be solved within the logic of the present system. The various suggestions for doing so have no hope of success. The system of world capitalism is clearly unsustainable in: (1) its quest for never ending accumulation of capital leading to production that must continually expand to provide profits; (2) its agriculture and food system that pollutes the environment and still does not allow universal access to a sufficient quantity and quality of food; (3) its rampant destruction of the environment; (4) its continually recreating and enhancing of the stratification of wealth within and between countries; and (5) its search for technological magic bullets as a way of avoiding the growing social and ecological problems arising from its own operations.
The transition to an ecological—which we believe must also be a socialist—economy will be a steep ascent and will not occur overnight. This is not a question of “storming the Winter Palace.” Rather, it is a dynamic, multifaceted struggle for a new cultural compact and a new productive system. The struggle is ultimately against the system of capital. It must begin, however, by opposing the logic of capital, endeavoring in the here and now to create in the interstices of the system a new social metabolism rooted in egalitarianism, community, and a sustainable relation to the earth. The basis for the creation of sustainable human development must arise from within the system dominated by capital, without being part of it, just as the bourgeoisie itself arose in the “pores” of feudal society.54 Eventually, these initiatives can become powerful enough to constitute the basis of a revolutionary new movement and society.
All over the world, such struggles in the interstices of capitalist society are now taking place, and are too numerous and too complex to be dealt with fully here. Indigenous peoples today, given a new basis as a result of the ongoing revolutionary struggle in Bolivia, are reinforcing a new ethic of responsibility to the earth. La Vía Campesina, a global peasant-farmer organization, is promoting new forms of ecological agriculture, as is Brazil’s MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra), as are Cuba and Venezuela. Recently, Venezulean President Hugo Chávez stressed the social and environmental reasons to work to get rid of the oil-rentier model in Venezuela, a major oil exporter.55 The climate justice movement is demanding egalitarian and anti-capitalist solutions to the climate crisis. Everywhere radical, essentially anti-capitalist, strategies are emerging, based on other ethics and forms of organization, rather than the profit motive: ecovillages; the new urban environment promoted in Curitiba in Brazil and elsewhere; experiments in permaculture, and community-supported agriculture, farming and industrial cooperatives in Venezuela, etc. The World Social Forum has given voice to many of these aspirations. As leading U.S. environmentalist James Gustave Speth has stated: “The international social movement for change—which refers to itself as ‘the irresistible rise of global anti-capitalism’—is stronger than many may imagine and will grow stronger.”56
The reason that the opposition to the logic of capitalism—ultimately seeking to displace the system altogether—will grow more imposing is that there is no alternative, if the earth as we know it, and humanity itself, are to survive. Here, the aims of ecology and socialism will necessarily meet. It will become increasingly clear that the distribution of land as well as food, health care, housing, etc. should be based on fulfilling human needs and not market forces. This is, of course, easier said than done. But it means making economic decisions through democratic processes occurring at local, regional, and multiregional levels. We must face such issues as: (1) How can we supply everyone with basic human needs of food, water, shelter, clothing, health care, educational and cultural opportunities? (2) How much of the economic production should be consumed and how much invested? and (3) How should the investments be directed? In the process, people must find the best ways to carry on these activities with positive interactions with nature—to improve the ecosystem. New forms of democracy will be needed, with emphasis on our responsibilities to each other, to one’s own community as well as to communities around the world. Accomplishing this will, of course, require social planning at every level: local, regional, national, and international—which can only be successful to the extent that it is of and by, and not just ostensibly for, the people.57
An economic system that is democratic, reasonably egalitarian, and able to set limits on consumption will undoubtedly mean that people will live at a significantly lower level of consumption than what is sometimes referred to in the wealthy countries as a “middle class” lifestyle (which has never been universalized even in these societies). A simpler way of life, though “poorer” in gadgets and ultra-large luxury homes, can be richer culturally and in reconnecting with other people and nature, with people working the shorter hours needed to provide life’s essentials. A large number of jobs in the wealthy capitalist countries are nonproductive and can be eliminated, indicating that the workweek can be considerably shortened in a more rationally organized economy. The slogan, sometimes seen on bumper stickers, “Live Simply so that Others May Simply Live,” has little meaning in a capitalist society. Living a simple life, such as Helen and Scott Nearing did, demonstrating that it is possible to live a rewarding and interesting life while living simply, doesn’t help the poor under present circumstances.58 However, the slogan will have real importance in a society under social (rather than private) control, trying to satisfy the basic needs for all people.
Perhaps the Community Councils of Venezuela—where local people decide the priorities for social investment in their communities and receive the resources to implement them—are an example of planning for human needs at the local level. This is the way that such important needs as schools, clinics, roads, electricity, and running water can be met. In a truly transformed society, community councils can interact with regional and multiregional efforts. And the use of the surplus of society, after accounting for peoples’ central needs, must be based on their decisions.59
The very purpose of the new sustainable system, which is the necessary outcome of these innumerable struggles (necessary in terms of survival and the fulfillment of human potential), must be to satisfy the basic material and non-material needs of all the people, while protecting the global environment as well as local and regional ecosystems. The environment is not something “external” to the human economy, as our present ideology tells us; it constitutes the essential life support systems for all living creatures. To heal the “metabolic rift” between the economy and the environment means new ways of living, manufacturing, growing food, transportation and so forth.60 Such a society must be sustainable; and sustainability requires substantive equality, rooted in an egalitarian mode of production and consumption.
Concretely, people need to live closer to where they work, in ecologically designed housing built for energy efficiency as well as comfort, and in communities designed for public engagement, with sufficient places, such as parks and community centers, for coming together and recreation opportunities. Better mass transit within and between cities is needed to lessen the dependence on the use of the cars and trucks. Rail is significantly more energy efficient than trucks in moving freight (413 miles per gallon fuel per ton versus 155 miles for trucks) and causes fewer fatalities, while emitting lower amounts of greenhouse gases. One train can carry the freight of between 280 to 500 trucks. And it is estimated that one rail line can carry the same amount of people as numerous highway lanes.61 Industrial production needs to be based on ecological design principles of “cradle-to-cradle,” where products and buildings are designed for lower energy input, relying to as great degree as possible on natural lighting and heating/cooling, ease of construction as well as easy reuse, and ensuring that the manufacturing process produces little to no waste.62
Agriculture based on ecological principles and carried out by family farmers working on their own, or in cooperatives and with animals, reunited with the land that grows their food has been demonstrated to be not only as productive or more so than large-scale industrial production, but also to have less negative impact on local ecologies. In fact, the mosaic created by small farms interspersed with native vegetation is needed to preserve endangered species.63
A better existence for slum dwellers, approximately one-sixth of humanity, must be found. For the start, a system that requires a “planet of slums,” as Mike Davis has put it, has to be replaced by a system that has room for food, water, homes, and employment for all.64 For many, this may mean returning to farming, with adequate land and housing and other support provided.
Smaller cities may be needed, with people living closer to where their food is produced and industry more dispersed, and smaller scale.
Evo Morales, President of Bolivia, has captured the essence of the situation in his comments about changing from capitalism to a system that promotes “living well” instead of “living better.” As he put it at the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December 2009: “Living better is to exploit human beings. It’s plundering natural resources. It’s egoism and individualism. Therefore, in those promises of capitalism, there is no solidarity or complementarity. There’s no reciprocity. So that’s why we’re trying to think about other ways of living lives and living well, not living better. Living better is always at someone else’s expense. Living better is at the expense of destroying the environment.”65
The earlier experiences of transition to non-capitalist systems, especially in Soviet-type societies, indicate that this will not be easy, and that we need new conceptions of what constitutes socialism, sharply distinguished from those early abortive attempts. Twentieth-century revolutions typically arose in relatively poor, underdeveloped countries, which were quickly isolated and continually threatened from abroad. Such post-revolutionary societies usually ended up being heavily bureaucratic, with a minority in charge of the state effectively ruling over the remainder of the society. Many of the same hierarchical relations of production that characterize capitalism were reproduced. Workers remained proletarianized, while production was expanded for the sake of production itself. Real social improvements all too often existed side by side with extreme forms of social repression.66
Today we must strive to construct a genuine socialist system; one in which bureaucracy is kept in check, and power over production and politics truly resides with the people. Just as new challenges that confront us are changing in our time, so are the possibilities for the development of freedom and sustainability.
When Reverend Jeremiah Wright spoke to Monthly Review’s sixtieth anniversary gathering in September 2009, he kept coming back to the refrain “What about the people?” If there is to be any hope of significantly improving the conditions of the vast number of the world’s inhabitants—many of whom are living hopelessly under the most severe conditions—while also preserving the earth as a livable planet, we need a system that constantly asks: “What about the people?” instead of “How much money can I make?” This is necessary, not only for humans, but for all the other species that share the planet with us and whose fortunes are intimately tied to ours.
To Read the Entire Essay
Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster
Monthly Review
...
Another Economic System Is Not Just Possible—It’s Essential
The foregoing analysis, if correct, points to the fact that the ecological crisis cannot be solved within the logic of the present system. The various suggestions for doing so have no hope of success. The system of world capitalism is clearly unsustainable in: (1) its quest for never ending accumulation of capital leading to production that must continually expand to provide profits; (2) its agriculture and food system that pollutes the environment and still does not allow universal access to a sufficient quantity and quality of food; (3) its rampant destruction of the environment; (4) its continually recreating and enhancing of the stratification of wealth within and between countries; and (5) its search for technological magic bullets as a way of avoiding the growing social and ecological problems arising from its own operations.
The transition to an ecological—which we believe must also be a socialist—economy will be a steep ascent and will not occur overnight. This is not a question of “storming the Winter Palace.” Rather, it is a dynamic, multifaceted struggle for a new cultural compact and a new productive system. The struggle is ultimately against the system of capital. It must begin, however, by opposing the logic of capital, endeavoring in the here and now to create in the interstices of the system a new social metabolism rooted in egalitarianism, community, and a sustainable relation to the earth. The basis for the creation of sustainable human development must arise from within the system dominated by capital, without being part of it, just as the bourgeoisie itself arose in the “pores” of feudal society.54 Eventually, these initiatives can become powerful enough to constitute the basis of a revolutionary new movement and society.
All over the world, such struggles in the interstices of capitalist society are now taking place, and are too numerous and too complex to be dealt with fully here. Indigenous peoples today, given a new basis as a result of the ongoing revolutionary struggle in Bolivia, are reinforcing a new ethic of responsibility to the earth. La Vía Campesina, a global peasant-farmer organization, is promoting new forms of ecological agriculture, as is Brazil’s MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra), as are Cuba and Venezuela. Recently, Venezulean President Hugo Chávez stressed the social and environmental reasons to work to get rid of the oil-rentier model in Venezuela, a major oil exporter.55 The climate justice movement is demanding egalitarian and anti-capitalist solutions to the climate crisis. Everywhere radical, essentially anti-capitalist, strategies are emerging, based on other ethics and forms of organization, rather than the profit motive: ecovillages; the new urban environment promoted in Curitiba in Brazil and elsewhere; experiments in permaculture, and community-supported agriculture, farming and industrial cooperatives in Venezuela, etc. The World Social Forum has given voice to many of these aspirations. As leading U.S. environmentalist James Gustave Speth has stated: “The international social movement for change—which refers to itself as ‘the irresistible rise of global anti-capitalism’—is stronger than many may imagine and will grow stronger.”56
The reason that the opposition to the logic of capitalism—ultimately seeking to displace the system altogether—will grow more imposing is that there is no alternative, if the earth as we know it, and humanity itself, are to survive. Here, the aims of ecology and socialism will necessarily meet. It will become increasingly clear that the distribution of land as well as food, health care, housing, etc. should be based on fulfilling human needs and not market forces. This is, of course, easier said than done. But it means making economic decisions through democratic processes occurring at local, regional, and multiregional levels. We must face such issues as: (1) How can we supply everyone with basic human needs of food, water, shelter, clothing, health care, educational and cultural opportunities? (2) How much of the economic production should be consumed and how much invested? and (3) How should the investments be directed? In the process, people must find the best ways to carry on these activities with positive interactions with nature—to improve the ecosystem. New forms of democracy will be needed, with emphasis on our responsibilities to each other, to one’s own community as well as to communities around the world. Accomplishing this will, of course, require social planning at every level: local, regional, national, and international—which can only be successful to the extent that it is of and by, and not just ostensibly for, the people.57
An economic system that is democratic, reasonably egalitarian, and able to set limits on consumption will undoubtedly mean that people will live at a significantly lower level of consumption than what is sometimes referred to in the wealthy countries as a “middle class” lifestyle (which has never been universalized even in these societies). A simpler way of life, though “poorer” in gadgets and ultra-large luxury homes, can be richer culturally and in reconnecting with other people and nature, with people working the shorter hours needed to provide life’s essentials. A large number of jobs in the wealthy capitalist countries are nonproductive and can be eliminated, indicating that the workweek can be considerably shortened in a more rationally organized economy. The slogan, sometimes seen on bumper stickers, “Live Simply so that Others May Simply Live,” has little meaning in a capitalist society. Living a simple life, such as Helen and Scott Nearing did, demonstrating that it is possible to live a rewarding and interesting life while living simply, doesn’t help the poor under present circumstances.58 However, the slogan will have real importance in a society under social (rather than private) control, trying to satisfy the basic needs for all people.
Perhaps the Community Councils of Venezuela—where local people decide the priorities for social investment in their communities and receive the resources to implement them—are an example of planning for human needs at the local level. This is the way that such important needs as schools, clinics, roads, electricity, and running water can be met. In a truly transformed society, community councils can interact with regional and multiregional efforts. And the use of the surplus of society, after accounting for peoples’ central needs, must be based on their decisions.59
The very purpose of the new sustainable system, which is the necessary outcome of these innumerable struggles (necessary in terms of survival and the fulfillment of human potential), must be to satisfy the basic material and non-material needs of all the people, while protecting the global environment as well as local and regional ecosystems. The environment is not something “external” to the human economy, as our present ideology tells us; it constitutes the essential life support systems for all living creatures. To heal the “metabolic rift” between the economy and the environment means new ways of living, manufacturing, growing food, transportation and so forth.60 Such a society must be sustainable; and sustainability requires substantive equality, rooted in an egalitarian mode of production and consumption.
Concretely, people need to live closer to where they work, in ecologically designed housing built for energy efficiency as well as comfort, and in communities designed for public engagement, with sufficient places, such as parks and community centers, for coming together and recreation opportunities. Better mass transit within and between cities is needed to lessen the dependence on the use of the cars and trucks. Rail is significantly more energy efficient than trucks in moving freight (413 miles per gallon fuel per ton versus 155 miles for trucks) and causes fewer fatalities, while emitting lower amounts of greenhouse gases. One train can carry the freight of between 280 to 500 trucks. And it is estimated that one rail line can carry the same amount of people as numerous highway lanes.61 Industrial production needs to be based on ecological design principles of “cradle-to-cradle,” where products and buildings are designed for lower energy input, relying to as great degree as possible on natural lighting and heating/cooling, ease of construction as well as easy reuse, and ensuring that the manufacturing process produces little to no waste.62
Agriculture based on ecological principles and carried out by family farmers working on their own, or in cooperatives and with animals, reunited with the land that grows their food has been demonstrated to be not only as productive or more so than large-scale industrial production, but also to have less negative impact on local ecologies. In fact, the mosaic created by small farms interspersed with native vegetation is needed to preserve endangered species.63
A better existence for slum dwellers, approximately one-sixth of humanity, must be found. For the start, a system that requires a “planet of slums,” as Mike Davis has put it, has to be replaced by a system that has room for food, water, homes, and employment for all.64 For many, this may mean returning to farming, with adequate land and housing and other support provided.
Smaller cities may be needed, with people living closer to where their food is produced and industry more dispersed, and smaller scale.
Evo Morales, President of Bolivia, has captured the essence of the situation in his comments about changing from capitalism to a system that promotes “living well” instead of “living better.” As he put it at the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December 2009: “Living better is to exploit human beings. It’s plundering natural resources. It’s egoism and individualism. Therefore, in those promises of capitalism, there is no solidarity or complementarity. There’s no reciprocity. So that’s why we’re trying to think about other ways of living lives and living well, not living better. Living better is always at someone else’s expense. Living better is at the expense of destroying the environment.”65
The earlier experiences of transition to non-capitalist systems, especially in Soviet-type societies, indicate that this will not be easy, and that we need new conceptions of what constitutes socialism, sharply distinguished from those early abortive attempts. Twentieth-century revolutions typically arose in relatively poor, underdeveloped countries, which were quickly isolated and continually threatened from abroad. Such post-revolutionary societies usually ended up being heavily bureaucratic, with a minority in charge of the state effectively ruling over the remainder of the society. Many of the same hierarchical relations of production that characterize capitalism were reproduced. Workers remained proletarianized, while production was expanded for the sake of production itself. Real social improvements all too often existed side by side with extreme forms of social repression.66
Today we must strive to construct a genuine socialist system; one in which bureaucracy is kept in check, and power over production and politics truly resides with the people. Just as new challenges that confront us are changing in our time, so are the possibilities for the development of freedom and sustainability.
When Reverend Jeremiah Wright spoke to Monthly Review’s sixtieth anniversary gathering in September 2009, he kept coming back to the refrain “What about the people?” If there is to be any hope of significantly improving the conditions of the vast number of the world’s inhabitants—many of whom are living hopelessly under the most severe conditions—while also preserving the earth as a livable planet, we need a system that constantly asks: “What about the people?” instead of “How much money can I make?” This is necessary, not only for humans, but for all the other species that share the planet with us and whose fortunes are intimately tied to ours.
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