ISS.N 0269-3739
Environment: our common
THE GREEN movements have made an enormous contribution to raising consciousness globally around the ecological questions facing humanity.
There is not a single country or region that would come out unscathed if the rest of the world or large regions of it experience ecological collapse. The disappearance of the ozone layer will affect the whole globe, and the same goes
Indeed, only concerted action on a world scale can allow today's extremely serious ecological problems to be overcome. For example, it is no use suppressing production of toxic chemical elements in one particular country if the multinational chemicals industry just moves production to somewhere where the ecology movement is weaker. The ban has to be universal to be
Even the international bourgeoisie — or, at least, its most enlightened representatives — is beginning to understand this. The last Mohicans of unlimited growth continue to deny the scale of ecological problems, putting their faith blindly in yet-to-be-invented technological solutions, but this obscurantist attitude is now increasingly giving way to a formal recognition of the gravity of the situation. World conferences are mushrooming, whether around the questions of the ozone layer, the greenhouse effect or deforesta-
FRANÇOIS MOREAU future?
for the greenhouse effect.
elective.
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4 International Marxist Review tion. Resolutions are voted, protocol agreements adopted and undertakings made. Western governments are turning green after reading opinion polls.
The image of the Earth as a space ship, in which we are all passengers, has never been so used and so hackneyed. This is not only used as a visual presentation of the situation, but also to push the idea that all classes and nations have a basic common interest in terms of the planet's future. But, far from making social antagonisms obsolete, the threat of a planetary ecological disaster pushes them, on the contrary, to fever pitch. It was similar to the Titanic, where a specific form of class struggle broke out over who was going to get into the lifeboats: 75% of first-class passengers survived, while the same percentage of third-class passengers drowned. It will not be any different in today's situation.
We will start by looking at the first models of the world formulated at the beginning of the 1970s in order to trace out the evolution of the ecological discussion up until the publication of the Brundtland Report by the UN Environment and Development Commission in 1987, before concluding on current perspectives from an ecological and socialist point of view. The planetary limits of the Meadows Report
Up to the end of the 1960s, futurists unanimously painted a future of unlimited technological growth, continued economic expansion and a guaranteed increase in living standards for the whole of humanity in the decades and centuries to come. These projections were expressed in the most polished form in a work published in 1967 by Herman Kahn, l' An 2000 ("The Year 2000" which extrapolated the rapid economic growth experienced from 1950-1965 over several future decades.
This smug and apologetic optimism was kicked in the teeth when the Club of Rome published a report in 1972 on growth limits. It was written by a research team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), led by Dennis Meadows. Using simulation techniques borrowed from systems dynamics, the authors' goal was to determine if current developmental tendencies could continue in the future? They arrived at the most categorical of conclusions: unavoidable ecological collapse sometime in the middle of the next century if the exponential growth of population and industrial and agricultural production on a world scale was not halted as soon as possible, and at the latest before the year 2000.
The reasons for the collapse in the Meadows' team projections lie in planetary limits. The Earth contains a determined quantity of non-renewable resources, it possesses a finite amount of agricultural land and its capacity to
Environment: our common future? 5 absorb toxic waste from industrial processes is limited. Whatever progress is made in the future in terms of recycling resources, agricultural productivity or pollution control, the pursuit of industrial growth will inevitably come up against planetary limits and, still according to the Meadows' team, the whole thing will end in a global ecological collapse. All efforts to prolong the expansion by technological devices can only succeed in putting off the collapse by a few decades at the most, giving it an even more catastrophic character when the inevitable day of reckoning arrives.
Obviously, these conclusions were criticized in the years to follow. A rescarch team at Sussex University in Britain took on the task of going through the MIT group's extremely complex model with a fine-tooth comb, in order to evaluate its validity. The Sussex team believed they detected a systematically conservative bias in the MIT group's projections at several levels. They also demonstrated that it was enough in most cases to adopt a different, but just as plausible, working hypothesis to that of the Meadows' team to arrive at noticeably different results. This was contrary to the pretensions of the Meadows' team, who wanted their report's global results to remain unaffected by the initial hypotheses in terms of concrete estimations of this or that original magnitude.
The question of non-renewable resources is one example of this. In its projection, the Meadows' group did not take into account technical progress that could enable previously unusable mineral deposits to be exploited — as has been the case since the beginning of industrialization — and so they implicitly formulated the hypothesis that technical progress was now worn out. According to the Sussex group, the introduction into Meadows' model of a modest, but plausible, rhythm of technical progress (2.3% per year in the domain of extraction technologies), combined with recycling materials, would result in pushing back the exhaustion of natural resources to a point beyond the model's time-scale horizon. This is one way in which the final results quite simply reflect the conservative bias of the original hypotheses.
But the most serious critiques made of the Meadows' model do not relate to the technical aspects of the problem. They counterposed, on the one side, humanity en bloc along with its polluting industries, and, on the other, nature in the form of planetary limits. This is particularly clear through the use of world averages and additions, thus making the gulf between the industrial countries at the centre and those of the periphery totally abstract. As for the social relations of production, this is just non-existent — as if the control of a minority who own the dominant companies has nothing to do with the question of ecological balance.
The incapacity or refusal of the Meadows' icam to investigate the social dimension of the question led them to look for a technocratic solution that did not challenge the present relations of domination between classes and on a world scale. This meant that they ended up proposing a solution that is clearly unacceptable for the majority of the world's population, because the halting of economic growth in the next few decades at the latest implies a definitive sanctioning of present-day inequalities. But this "solution" was no more agrecable for the dominant classes in the developed countries, because it would put an end to the accumulation of capital without which the capital-
The most important gain of the Meadows' Report is without doubt to have highlighted the need for an overall, long-term analysis on a planctary scale, and so swimming against the tide of the inherent tendencies in modern institutional science to compartmentalize knowledge and split up the objects of research into tinier and tinier segments. On the other hand, the Meadows' team remained imprisoned in a technocratic vision of the world that prevented them from comprehending the social and political contradictions at work
The Club of Rome's second report, published in 1974 by Mihajlo Mesarovic and Eduard Pestel filled some of the holes in the first report and progressed in terms of posing the problematic of world-wide ecological balance."
trast to the Meadows' model with its global additions, the world model elaborated by Mesarovic and Pestel distinguished ten regions with particular characteristics: four developed capitalist regions; four peripheral capitalist regions; the USSR and Eastern Europe; and, finally, China. This model tried
10 grasp the dynamic of development in these ten regions, as well as how they
The simulation of this model led to a remarkable result: the first region in the world that would experience ecological collapse would be Asia and the
South-East, including above all India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. After this projection, the widening gap between demographic growth in these countries and their agricultural resources would lead to an increasing food deficit that they would be incapable of making up by imports due to lack of resources, and which would lead to a massive famine around the year 2025. A billion people would die, and eventually a new balance would be restored at much
Apart from the apocalyptic aspect of such a projection, it implies a com-
OInternational Marxist Review ist system could not keep going.
on environmental questions.
lower population levels.
The second generation of world models
In coninteract commercially, financially and technologically.
Environment: our common fulure? 7 plete overturning of perspectives concerning the relationship between levels
1 of economic development and ecological difficulties. Until then, the general tendency was to think that it would be the most industrialized countries that would experience the worst environmental problems, with pollution, industrial waste, under-utilization of water, and so on. Meadows thought that the regionalization of his world model would simply lead to bringing forward the d date of the final collapse in the developed countries where pollution is concentrated. And here was Mesarovic and Pestel's world model giving a come pletely different projection: the first region to suffer a global collapse would be, on the contrary, the poorest in the world alongside black Africa, another region that is the victim of growing ecological imbalance. This should not be surprising. The falseness of the dictum that everyone is equal before death and the tax man — the poor die younger and the rich avoid paying taxes more easily — has been known for a long time. In the same way, any imbalances in the world fall disproportionately on the dominated countries and the poorer classes, while the richest countries are able to devote bigger budgets to correcting the most acute environmental problems, and the dominant classes of k all countries have the possibility of fleeing the filth and personally sheltering themselves from toxic fumes on their private islands and their exclusive estates. It is never the possessing classes who suffer from famine. Only the poor die of hunger.
The exporting of ecological problems from the industrialized countries to d those in the capitalist periphery received a lot of publicity in 1988 around the
1odyssey of an Italian cargo ship carrying toxic waste destined for Nigeria. Il
) - is common knowledge that, with the growth of environmental protection movements in the industrialized countries, many multinationals have decided to localize the most dangerous and polluting industries in the "third d world", where the ecology movement is weaker and where they can count on more repressive governments at the beck and call of the multinationars. Then there was the catastrophe at Bhopal, in India, where a factory belonging to the US chemical firm Union Carbide billowed out highly toxic gas over hunle dreds of thousands of people living in neighbouring shantytowns. A similar catastrophe happened in Mexico. In general, the media tend to treat ecological disasters as natural phenomena: floods, droughts, landslides.... But these at
"natural" catastrophes owe a lot to human actions. The recent floods in Bangladesh are linked to the deforestation of Himalayan slopes, the source of the big rivers that cross the country. In its turn, deforestation is a result of pressure from peasants searching for new land and energy sources, wood being the only accessible fuel, particularly since the price of petrol has shot up.
1-
8 International Marxist Review Pressure on land is the result of the mechanization of big farms, who chase small peasants away and make agricultural workers redundant. The urban economy and under-developed industries cannot absorb them, above all in the context of 1980s' austerity policies. The austerity policies and industrial regression imposed for a number of years by the IMF and other agencies of international capital has only made all these problems worse.
Inequality in the face of ecological problems is only one specific manifestation of the relationships of domination that exist on a world scale between the imperialist centre and the capitalist periphery. Mesarovic and Pestel's model empirically seized on this reality and updated its eventual consequences, in the first place in terms of upsetting the balance in the Asian and South-East countries. However, they do not draw out the appropriate solutions about the social nature of existing and coming ecological crises. The relations between humanity and nature are not direct but mediated by a mode of production where humanity finds itself in a global hierarchy of dominant and dominated nations and classes. Indeed, in the so-called under-developed countries poverty is not an inherent state to be put down to too many inhabitants or to an alleged conservative hostility to technical progress. Bangladesh, for example, has already been richer than England — before becoming its colony, of course. The poverty in these countries is in large part the result of a process of under-development that owes a lot to colonial and neo-colonial structures of domination, through which a large part of the resources and riches of these countries were systematically extracted by capitalism in a process of unequal exchange between little-worked resources and manufactured goods. This increases even further the imbalance between the resources of these countries and their populations, particularly as the resources that stay in the country are monopolized by the local ruling classes who collaborate with imperialism. All of this condemns increasingly numerous populations to try to survive on the basis of diminishing resources, with all that this means in terms of deforestation, land exhaustion, over-exploitation of mines and so on. The solution put forward in the Club of Rome's second report was the perspective of balanced "organic growth" between the different regions of the world. According to the authors, this necessitates large-scale aid from developed to less-advanced countries for the latter to be able to cope with their population growth in the decades to come, until urbanization and industrialization lead to a decrease in their birthrates and, in the long-term, to a stabilization of their populations. At the same time, the Japan group of the Club of Rome, using a world model split into nine regions, proposed that the developed countries gave over
Environment: our common future? 9 around 1% of their annual income to aid without compensation to the "developing" countries, and that this aid be given above all to agriculture and light industry in the peripheral countries so as to increase their agricultural production and provide jobs for their overabundant labour. For their part, the coun tries of the centre should gradually give up their light industries and put more emphasis on their own agriculture so as to meet their own food needs without importing from the South, as is the case today. All this should allow a balanced development to be followed during the next century and avoid the massive famines projected in the first two Club of Rome reports. A new international order stillborn
The need for a "new international economic order" has become a major theme since the second half of the 1970s. In 1976, the Club of Rome published a new report prepared by the Dutch economist Jan Tinbergen, which called for better international cooperation and a transfer of financial and technical resources from the North to the South with the aim of achieving the satisfaction of basic human needs. The report differentiated itself a litile from the traditional ideology of economic growth at all cost by indicating its habitually destructive consequences in terms of widening social inequalities, and by advocating as a priority the reduction of inequalities between countries and inside each country.
But the main interest of the report is that it went so far as to raise (timidly) the need for big structural changes in order to assure viable development that would satisfy basic human needs. It talked about agrarian reform "where necessary" (where?), and about reducing military spending, considered as a crazy waste of resources in a world where there is so much to do.
The report also underlined the big fluctuations in raw material prices and their general tendency to decrease in relation to those of manufactured products. From an ecological point of view, the low prices of raw materials for industry are nothing to rejoice about. They encourage growing consumption of raw materials and discourage conservation and recycling, thus accelerating the squandering of non-renewable resources.
A convincing demonstration of this is what happened when oil prices rocketed in 1973-74 and again in 1979-80. Energy conservation suddenly became the number one priority. Although oil consumption has grown more quickly than industrial production since the beginning of the century, it has decreased by a good 25% relative to the volume of total production in the central capitalist countries during the last fifteen years because since then there has been a strong financial incentive to conserve energy. The effects of this were rap-
10 International Marxist Review idly felt, and we saw a substantial amelioration in energy efficiency in terms of production as well as of consumption.
The best thing that could have happened — as much from the viewpoint of conserving resources as from that of the financial and commercial situation of third-world countries — would have been a similar development for other natural resources. Sadly, the union of very specific interests that come together in the case of oil — between the OPEC countries and the US oil multinationals — has no equivalent for other raw materials, which have continued to be sold at bargain basement prices and to be squandered as if there was no tomorrow.
The advocates of unlimited capitalist expansion rejoice about these falling prices, which appear 1o them to refute any perspectives of a shortage of
But the Tinbergen team correctly linked this phenomenon to the functioning of international markets for raw materials, which are buyers' markets for most products. In the capitalist system, the market value of any product comes from the amount of labour necessary for its production or extraction, tempered by the relationship of forces between buyers and sellers and between the working class and the bosses. It is unimportant that nature has taken dozens, hundreds, millions or even billions of years to create these materials, which will be removed in a few hours: that is unimportant from the individual capitalist's point of view, even if it leads to the impoverishment of the whole of humanity through the misappropriation of its natural heritage.
To rectify this situation, the Tinbergen Report foresaw the establishment of a world tax on raw materials, which would be levied by an international body and which would be given over to "third world" countries to finance development projects. Raising the prices of raw materials to industrial users would force them to use them more sparingly and prolong the lifetime of reserves accordingly, in addition to transfering financial resources towards the periphery: It is unnecessary to point out that this project has remained a dead-letter because of opposition from the big capitalist powers which import raw materials, the United States heading the list. This has also been the fate of other projects for a "new international economic order", like those formulated in 1980 by the Brandt Commission. Indeed, towards the end of the 1970s, the political orientation of the Western governments has taken a sharp turn to the right, symbolized by the arrival in power of Thatcher, Reagan, Kohl and, later, Mulroney. Free-market laws have been worshipped with more devotion than ever. Keynesian (and social democratic) ideas about economic stabilization and income redistribution
Environment: our common future? 11 have been chucked out in favour of a glorification of blind competition and "natural" inequalities. All power to money! The United Nations can carry on chatting about a new international economic order: the real policies are decided at the International Monetary Fund, under the control of the big capitalist powers and for the greater glory of the banks and multinationals.
The estimate made by the Japanese group of the Club of Rome — according to which a transfer of 1% of income from the developed countries to the "third world" would be enough to keep world development on the right track — has already been mentioned. In reality, the transfer of resources happens in reverse, from the periphery to the centre, in the form of repatriated profits, interest and debt repayments which, according to the official statistics compiled by the big international bodies, represents only the tip of the iceberg. It is the direct result of monetarist policies of raising real interest rates that have been carried out since the beginning of the 1980s, and of the radical austerity policies imposed on "third world" countries by the IMF and the World Bank. The capitalist periphery is paying to bail out the centre... exactly the contrary of the Club of Rome's predictions since its second report.
Indeed, the recommendations to transfer resources from the centre towards the periphery are utopian in the context of the world capitalist system, because they go totally against the grain of the system's logical functioning, which has led to a systematic transfer in the opposite direction during the last five centuries. Today, these profits, interests and royalties levied from the periphery represent a significant contribution to the coffers of the dominant multinationals, banks or industrial enterprises, and all the stops will be pulled out to preserve and increase them.
In the same way, the recommendations intended to stabilize the level of development in the most industrialized countries in order to allow the "third world" to catch up are completely abstract in terms of inter-imperialist rivalries. There is not a single big capitalist power that is ever going to agree to deliberately slow down its own economic growth, for fear of being outdistanced by its rivals. Even if they wanted to, today's supranational bodies such as the UN could never impose such a policy on the big powers, because these latter always have the last word on crucial questions. Only a truly world-wide government could implement a real programme of massively transferring resources from the centre to the periphery, and this would mean first of all tearing state power out of the hands of big capital in the main countries and putting it in the hands of a new government that would rule in the interests of the working masses on a global scale. The complete opposite of the bourgeois United Nations of today.
12 International Marxist Review Ecological crisis and economic crisis
This leads us into asking what future perspectives are available for capitalism. In spite of their utterly different long-term predictions, the analyses of Meadows and the Club of Rome share one common point with those of Kahn and company: the absence of internal blocks in the capitalist mode of production. Thus, production will see unlimited growth, at least until an external limitation puts an end to it. For Meadows, this external limit is represented by planetary resources, and therefore (capitalist) economic expansion will end towards the middle of the next century. For Kahn, this planetary limit does not exist, and expansion will therefore be unlimited, although perhaps following a slower rhythm in the future because of a gradual saturation of basic needs.
The belief in the possibility of unlimited capitalist development — at least within some planetary limits — was an integral part of the intellectual atmosphere of the 1960s. Bourgeois economists were convinced that prolonged periods of crisis, like those in the 1930s, now belonged to the past thanks to the techniques for economic stabilization established in the Keynesian revolution. This was believed to such a point that Meadows, in his world model, treated the years 1900-1970 as a single period of world-wide exponential growth, passing over three decades of virtual stagnation in the better part of the capitalist world between 1914 and 1945. A chance mishap, undoubtedly. Even some authors claiming to be Marxists admitted the possibility of unlimited development, one example being the partisans of the state capitalist theory. Others dealt with the problem simply by denying that any expansion had taken place from 1945-1970.
However, the Marxist analysis of capitalism's contradictions should have led to the conclusion that it was impossible to support the post-war expansion indefinitely. As early as 1964, Ernest Mandel wrote that: "the long period of accelerated growth is probably going to end during the 1960s". 1° The gradual lowering of the rate of profit from its high post-war levels, the saturation of markets by a growing range of durable consumer goods and the development of excessive production capacity were the main causes for this. Within the regime of private ownership of the means of production, profit is the only motive for producing and investing, and this generates and necessitates ever-increasing capital accumulation. This is why the capitalist system can never remain stationary: it must grow or perish. Nevertheless, the system is incapable of sustaining long-term growth; it always ends up by getting bogged down in its own contradictions, as happened between the two world wars and at the beginning of the 1970s. Capitalism has to grow in an
Environment: our common fulure? 13 unlimited way, but it is incapable of doing it. The result is periodic crises that are increasingly profound and destructive, dangerous not only for humanity but also, increasingly, for the ecosystems of our planet.
Today, there is a consensus among analysts that the capitalist system entered a period of slower growth from the end of the 1960s (or the middle of the 1970s, according to different authors), although the causes of this phenomenon are more controversial. There has been a rediscovery of theories on long-term economic movements and "Kondratieff waves" which had been relegated to economic museums for over thirty years. But what are the consequences of this from the point of view of long-term ecological balance?
From a "naive" ecological point of view, if one can use the term, the marked slowing down of capitalist expansion should be a cause for celebration. Is this not exactly what the first Club of Rome report extolled? Except that this slowing down is the result of socio-economic mechanisms completely absent from the Meadows' Report, and in no way from the application of its recommendations. Effectively, the entry into a period of slower growth has already meant that the consumption of raw materials is much less than foreseen in Meadows' Report. Indeed, several metals that should have already been exhausted according to his predictions are still abundantly available, tin for example. But going from that to saying that the slowing down of capitalist growth is beneficial for the environment is a step that should not be taken.
The slowing down of growth is not the result of a conscious and wellthought out decision by anybody, but of a structural crisis whose effects weigh on the dominated classes and peoples. Increasingly big layers of pauperized masses in the capitalist periphery are reduced to living on or below survival levels. This increases the burden on the environment, notably in terms of pressure on land and forests. The forced opening to the World Bank market leads many countries onto the path of industrialization that is unplanned and destructive, both for human beings and for the environment. The draconian budgetary restrictions imposed by these same policies compromises even further the meagre resources consecrated to defending and protecting the environment.
In the developed countries, the crisis has caused ruling groups to slide to the right in their search to reestablish their rates of profit by stepping up attacks on workers' living standards. Some class-blind ecologists could celebrate the consequent restrictions of mass consumerism, and even actively support policies in this direction. They forget that nearly half of goods and resources are consumed by the richest 20%, mainly the bourgeoisie and the
14 International Marxist Review petty-bourgeois, while the poorest 50% have to share 20% of the cake, which gives them each truly minuscule portions. It is not here that waste is to be found, but it is here that austerity policies hit the hardest, leading to an even more unequal distribution of incomes...and therefore to an even bigger waste in luxury consumerism of the ruling classes. The unbelievable wealth of deluxe car manufacturers in the 1980s is a striking example.
More generally, the restoration of complete primacy for private enterprises and unbridled competition goes directly in the face of efforts to regulate in terms of the environment, from pollution to toxic waste passing by the over-utilization of resources, under the pressure of competition. Without mentioning the relaunching of the arms race, which is an integral part of the right-wing's programme and leads to monstrous diversion of precious financial, human, technical and material resources towards utterly destructive ends. Victims are guilty of overpopulation
The slide to the right of bourgeois policies during the 1980s has also been reflected ideologically by the rehabilitation of classical Malthusian theories, according to which uncontrolled world population growth constitutes the ultimate cause of the risk of ecological catastrophe. This is accompanied by a barely concealed modern version of the "yellow peril", because this growth is concentrated today in the countries of the capitalist periphery, as against the virtual demographic stagnation in the imperialist and industrial countries generally. The Malthusian theory corresponds exactly to the relations of domination played out globally between the dominant bourgeois classes in an imperialist centre comprising the developed capitalist countries on the one hand, and the poor masses in the capitalist periphery made up of the dependent countries in the so-called third world on the other. International capitalist bodies like the World Bank generally attribute the poverty of these countries to their overpopulation, from which follows in turn the lack of education, the traditionalism and so on. This contemptuous vision of the dominated peoples ignores the real reasons for high birth rates. One cause, paradoxically, is the high rate of infant mortality (more children have to be born to ensure that some will reach adulthood). Others include the absence of social security and old-age pensions, causing older people to be dependent on their children; the maintenance of women's oppression, which prevents. them from controlling their own bodies and reproductive functions; and economic insecurity, which forces families to depend on a number of incomes and, in particular, the work done by children. In these conditions,
Environment: our common future? 15 there is nothing surprising in the fact that campaigns to plan birth rates end in resounding failure: people want children because they need them! But once social structures are radically changed, all this will change very rapidly. The most striking example is in Cuba, where the revolution led to a noticeable improvement in living conditions in terms of nutrition and healthcare, linked to a big increase in both education and employment. The revolution also appreciably improved the status of Cuban women. Older people could now count on pensions. The most remarkable thing was that all this caused demographic tendencies in Cuba to come into line with those in the most advanced capitalist countries in just a few decades, to the point where now a stabilization of the population at a slightly lower level is predicted. This improves both the possibilities for increased living standards and the quality of life in the island.
China is another example of a radical change accomplished through revolution. In 1948, a Malthusian writer named Williams Vogt had predicted the inevitable extermination of tens of millions of Chinese people (out of a population at the time of 400 million), either by famine, war or epidemic. The 1949 revolution took place and China was now feeding 1,100 million inhabitants, in conditions of health better than nearly all the other third world countries and similar to those in many developed capitalist countries. That was made possible by the elimination of the land-owning class, which monopolized an enormous proportion of the land, with land being redistributed to the peasantry. The improvement was very marked, outside of a number of political errors committed by the Chinese leadership and without which progress would undoubtedly have been even bigger.
One of these errors had precisely consisted in taking completely the opposite course to the Malthusian theory, according to which all the problems stemmed from so-called overpopulation. The Chinese leaders concluded that the population was not and never would be a problem; to the point of launching policies aimed at increasing the birth rate in China as quickly as possible. The maxim that each supplementary mouth also brings two additional arms was often quoted. Unhappily, they did not also bring more cultivable land. The belated realization of this truth led to a brutal about-turn in demographic policies in favour of an authoritarian limit on births, the famous "one family, one child" policy. This could have been avoided if, from the point of view of ecological balance, the existence of an optimal population level in relation to a given technological level had been recognized, in place of blindly following a policy of maximum population growth as if things would always turn out alright. This lesson must not be lost for future revolutions.
16 International Marxist Review
Ecological crisis and social relations
The global scope of ecological problems and their social dimension were expressed most solemnly in the Brundtland Report, produced by the UN report lies not only in the fact that it represents an official recognition of the commission on the environment and development. The importance of this urgent need for concrete action on a world-scale to avoid the numerous dangers facing the environment, but also in its recognition that these dangers are rooted in existing socio-economic structures. However, all this is shrouded in the muffled language typical of international bodies and barely goes beyond the level of a liberal or social-democratic criticism of inequalities of income and power.
All the same, this was enough to provoke negative reactions from official employers' bodies. Thus, the financial editor of the Globe and Mail, the main bosses' newspaper in Canada, recently assailed the Brundtland Report for its supposedly socialist recommendations, impregnated with United Nations egalitarianism and aiming to introduce the kind of centralized planning that had bankrupted the East European countries!"
But there is no reason to worry about their point of view, because the supreme political authority still remains at the level of nation states, and the international bodies do not have any real power in the face of the strongest states. The only governments that international bodies are in a position to compel to do anything are precisely those in the weakest countries, which are in a position of commercial, technical and financial dependence in relation to the big capitalist countries. And this power is used unrelentingly to force them to adopt anti-worker, anti-popular and anti-women austerity policies that only serve to aggravate the ecological imbalances in these countries. The governments that should most be compelled to follow responsible ecological policies are precisely those over which international bodies have the least authority — those of the big capitalist countries. Indeed, the international bodies are dependent on them. The United States only has to suspend paying their dues to the UN to block decisions that they do not like. The basic problem here resides in the fact that state power in the big capitalist countries represents the interests of big capital in each of the countries concerned in terms of its competition with the big capital of other countries. But inter-capitalist competition is not decreasing, but increasing under the effects of the structural crisis of the world capitalist system since the end of the 1970s and the growth of European and Japanese capitalism that is threatening the dominant position of the American bourgeoisie in the world. In these conditions, one might as well believe in Father Christmas as hope to
Environment: our common future? 17 see wide-scale concerted action come out of international bodies dominated by these rival powers.
The ecology question dramatically confirms one of the basic principles that the Fourth International has always defended: the global character of the class struggle and the need to build a world-wide instrument to properly lead this struggle, against capitalism as well as against the bureaucratic regimes in Eastern Europe. This is what motivates the Fourth International's efforts to build a world party of socialist revolution that unites all forces active in every country inside the same movement. Only such a world perspective opens the possibility of a fundamental and lasting solution to ecological problems.
"Think globally, act locally" is one of the most well-known sayings of the ecology movement. But for thinking globally there is nothing better than a world movement that integrates contributions from its local groups everywhere, in all countries, in all regions. As for local action, to be useful it has to be part of an overall strategy that is conceived and implemented on the same scale as the problem is posed — that is, on a world scale. All together?
In fact, the Brundiland Report — as its title clearly shows — is a plea for class collaboration on a world scale and between the social forces in each country, on the basis of the supposedly common interest of all nations and all social classes of preserving the environment.
This appeal for class collaboration and international cooperation hardly pleases the imperialist hawks and the conservative Western dinosaurs, who aspire rather to unilaterally impose policies that conform to their interests by exploiting their position of strength in the system. But the green thematic can easily be taken over by classic bourgeois politicians, who read the opinion polls and know that environmental problems have become one of the main preoccupations of the masses in the Western countries, as proved by the success of the European Green parties.
The most intelligent bourgeois forces have also understood for a long time which parts of the ecology question they can use as green justifications for their capitalist austerity policies and to undermine workers' demands. What, you want to increase your consumption when the world's resources are already running out and when the majority of the planet's population already lives in abject poverty? As always, class collaboration requires the working class dropping its own demands, because it is not the bourgeois class that is going to give up defending its own interests! However, the search for class collaboration to save the environment comes
18 International Marxist Review up against the existence of fundamentally divergent class interests on this question as on others. The ultimate root of ecological degradation is to be found in the search for private profit, based on the capitalist mode of production. This creates a contradiction between the short-term profit of private firms on the one hand, and the long-term interests of humanity on the other. This contradiction becomes clear if we look at things from the point of view of a company that uses toxic chemical products. It faces two choices: either to use these products in such a way that they do not harm the environment, which puts up costs, or to throw them in the river, which costs little. There is no point in spelling out which option will be chosen. And it is not even a question of bad will: it is one of economic constraints for private businesses, because if they do not throw their toxic products in the river, their competitor will.
Here, we find ourselves in the presence of what neo-classical economists call "externalities" — that is, the costs or benefits that a given firm brings to sociely without society having any say in it. It is one of the rare cases where the adepts of traditional free-market economic policies accept the principle of governmental control, when the external costs for society exceed companies' internal benefits, pollutant in this case. This is at least the case for the classical free-marketeers, because the "libertarians" of the modern right prefer a "market" solution, with the victims of pollution paying the polluters not to pollute... logical, isn't it?
But control within a capitalist regime is never a real solution. Of course, we are for strict control over polluting industries (to take one example): we are in favour of a rigorous application of these controls. But, at the same time, when the financial incentives for polluting are so overwhelming, their ultimate ineffectiveness has to be recognized. Unless a government inspector is allocated to every industrial entrepreneur using toxic products, with a second inspector behind the first to make sure he does not start taking bribes. It is easy to see what sort of bureaucratic monster such a system would lead to. In any case, we are a long way from something like that. In Quebec, the environment minister's "Green Police" have around 60 inspectors to supervise the use of around 30,000 toxic products in 3,000 different workpiaces. Moreover, the capitalist governments themselves and their state companies are often among the worst enemies of the environment, because in the last analysis they are also subject to the same logic of private profit that drives the whole of bourgeois society. For example, it is the state-owned national company Hydro-Quebec that is the real culprit of the catastrophes of BPC at Saint-Basile le Grand, without mentioning James Bay or the Gentilly nuclear
power plant. At the most governments have limited the damage via subsidies or patch things up here and there when public indignation has become 100
But there are inspectors already cut out in every workplace that is a potential or actual polluter in every country: those who work in them. They know what is going on, they know what risks are taken with the environment because they are the daily agents of capitalist production. But they are agents subordinated to the control of those who own the means of production, whether they represent private interest groups or the capitalist state.
To tackle the problem at root it is necessary to wrest control of the workplaces from private capitalist interests and hand it over to the workers in each enterprise, in the framework of democratic management of the whole of the economy by the whole of society. This is the only way to ensure that the production methods used correspond to the real and long-term interests of the working majority, and not to the private short-term interests of a capitalist minority which carries out a policy of après moi le déluge, just like the aristocracy before the rise of capitalism. And it will literally be the deluge, with the greenhouse effect, which will cause the ice floes in the Arctic and Antarctic to melt, with the oceans rising by several metres and all the coastal regions
So the ecology question provides undoubtedly the most striking contemporary illustration of the historical alternative formulated at the beginning of the century by the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg: socialism or barbarism. Either the working class will succeed in establishing its democratic control over the economy and society, restructuring them in relation to human needs in a long-term perspective, or capitalism will wreck the future of humanity on this planet. And the days of reckoning are getting
The counter-example of the Eastern European countries
Undoubtedly, some people will retort: does not the present situation in the
USSR, China, Poland and the other so-called workers' states prove that ecological problems are not caused by capitalism as such, but simply by industrial society? Indeed, ecologist currents rejecting both capitalism and socialism as two equally harmful forms of production can easily use the example of the USSR, where some of the worst ecological disasters of contemporary history have occurred. But the USSR today and other similar regimes are precisely not models of the socialist society that we are fighting for. They are the product of a proletarian revolution that overthrew the powe e
S ever closer!
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of the planet being submerged. Environment: our common future? 19 strong and too dangerous electorally.
20 International Marxist Review er and the property of the bourgeois class in these countries, but where the working class did not succeed in installing or preserving its own democratic control over society. Real control fell into the hands of layer of privileged bureaucrats who hold onto power by every possible means, including using violence against the mass of workers and people if necessary, assuming a total monopoly at all levels — economic, political, ideological and at the level of information. These are ideal conditions for developing blind productivism and wild industrial gigantism, utterly destructive for the environment and totally divorced from the satisfaction of real human needs. This is exacerbated by the fact that the counter-weight that can exist in the capitalist countries for putting on the brakes or stopping this or that anti-ecological project or imposing this or that progressive measure does not apply (or at least has many more difficulties) in these societies, where the bureaucracy represses all types of movements.
But the Fourth International was founded precisely against this type of bureaucratic regime, in the struggle to overthrow them and to restore socialist workers' democracy in these countries, at the same time as it fights for overthrowing bourgeois power in the capitalist countries. This struggle for socialist democracy that many people think is utopian is now a burning actuality in countries like China, Poland and the USSR, and the perspective of overturning the ruling bureaucracies is now a concrete possibility.
It is interesting that the growth of movements for democratization in these countries is often accompanied, if not nourished, by increased consciousness of the ecological dramas that are unfolding and the need to stop them, given the total irresponsibility of the ruling bureaucracy. Many victories have already been notched up, such as the decision by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's political bureau to cancel an insane project to divert rivers in Siberia, or the Hungarian government's decision to cancel a dam project on the Danube following mobilizations by the green movement.
This relates to another fundamental aspect of the Fourth International's programme as against other currents calling themselves Marxist, which is its insistence on the need for socialist workers' democracy. Contrary to the point of view extolled by Stalinist currents, this is not some petty-bourgeois luxury that we can do without, if not a nuisance for "building socialism" by an enlightened leadership with the right line. On the contrary, it is vital for preserving the future, ecologically as in other spheres, by assuring that political power is really in the hands of the working masses in terms of its actions and priorities, instead of being imposed on them for better or worse, too often for the worse.
Environment: our common future? 21 The Marxist critique and the socialist alternative
Capitalism's incapacity to assure harmonious and sustained development of the productive forces has always been one of the main arguments raised by Marxists to justify its overthrow, and developments over the last 15 years have once again illustrated this. But going from that to preaching the most rapid possible development of production as the principal objective for socialism, it not even its content, is a step taken only too lightly by most of the forces calling themselves Marxist.
Since Marx' and Engels' polemic against Malthus, in general Marxists have firmly placed themselves in the camp of technological optimists, convinced of the unlimited possibilities of science. Marxism proudly claimed for itself the struggle begun by the industrial bourgeoisie for the submission of nature to "Man" with a capital M, in an unreserved scientism. One of the main critiques directed at capitalism resided precisely in its presumed incapacity to develop the production forces beyond a certain level. The socialist revolution was therefore necessary ... to open up the path of unlimited development of production under socialism.
This distortion of the original socialist project became all the more ingrained as the first proletarian revolutions happened in relatively backward countries and not in the most advanced ones, contrary to Marx' and Engels' expectations. The new workers' states therefore found themselves face to face with much more powerful imperialist states leading them to develop their productive base as quickly as possible to the detriment of other preoccupations, which in the circumstances appeared secondary. Stalinism did the rest in terms of defiguring socialism's initial objectives and replacing them with the cult of production targets. Of course, Marx, Engels and other great Marxist writers certainly wrote material that distanced them markedly from the total productivism and scientism described above. But there is no denying that this really did represent the dominant vision among Marxism's best representatives in the iwentieth century, including, of course, the Fourth International. This is what ecology movements have come to challenge by raising consciousness about the natural limits of the planet's eco-system and by compelling the socialist project to be reformulated in the light of the undeniable ecological constraints imposed on us.
But the need to revise the scientist and productivist version of socialism that has been propagated during the twentieth century provides the perfect occasion to revive the initial socialist project, that of Marx and Engels. Because the idea was precisely not that of promoting production for producLion's sake, or putting an equals sign between happiness and material con-
22 International Marxist Review sumption. The idea was to allow human beings to fully develop their potential as people by emancipating them from the dominant relations of production and the oppression belonging to class sociely, themselves based on the material constraints caused by shortages.
Marx was indeed convinced that technological progress was going to allow the full satisfaction of human leads, liberating humanity from the monotonous, repetitive, alienating and exhausting work characteristic of capitalism. After going beyond a certain point corresponding to the satisfaction of human needs, further growth of productive forces would no longer result in expanding the volume of production but in the reduction of working hours and an increase in leisure time, until ultimately production would become completely automated. Humanity would then emerge from under the rule of necessity into one of liberty.
In the face of incarnations of "actually existing socialism", we have to go back to the initial socialist project, which wanted to emancipate humanity from material constraints and abolish shortage, thus laying the material basis for a classless, free and totally egalitarian society. Marxism is only productivist in the sense that it seeks the maximum development of human labour's productive force, precisely with the goal of liberating humanity from work itself. This does not necessarily mean the maximum development of the physical volume of material production: it means satisfying basic human needs that are biologically and socially determined. Beyond this point, there is barely any reason to increase material production again, and subsequent technological progress can be consecrated to reducing working hours even further to increase leisure time, through to the total automation of work. The recent breakthroughs in microelectronics and robotics have given these projections new credibility on the technological level, but their introduction under capitalist control in a market economy framework completely reverses their liberating potential to turn them into additional instruments of subservience and alienation, as well as causes of unemployment. But it is no good reacting to these developments by relapsing into Luddism, a movement of English artisans who destroyed machinery at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is necessary to achieve is social control over technology thanks to workers' power in such a way as to draw out all its liberating potential. But it is necessary to complete this classic Marxist perspective by rethinking the models of consumption and living conditions constructed by advanced capitalism. These are centred notably around individual transport in the shape of the car, the house in the suburbs or the skyscrapers in the city centres, which are all among the most anti-ecological modes of life that could
be imagined. They are impossible to generalize to the whole planet, and even impossible to maintain in any lasting way in the developed countries alone. A massive restructuring will have to be undertaken: developing social housing, spreading out commercial or industrial activities, replacing individual cars
Ecological imperatives also mean the pure and simple banishment of a large number of products, techniques, production methods and even whole industries that are intrinsically dangerous and unviable in the long-term, the first on the list being the nuclear industry. From this flows the necessity for an energy strategy based on renewable sources and no longer founded on using up non-renewable resources such as oil. Even the whole of modern agriculture has to be reviewed, because it rests on the massive use of nonrenewable resources in the form of fertilizers and pesticides, which exhaust soils over time. A considerable amount of research is needed in order to develop viable alternatives that are both ecologically sound and valid from a
It is true that there are often tensions between the trade-union movement's immediate demands and those of the ecology movement, above all when the latter presses for the closure of a polluting factory or for banning a dangerous product, whose production means jobs for thousands of workers. These contradictions can only be resolved in the long term on the basis of complete economic reorganization, which plans for the reconversion of dangerous factories and products towards activities that are ecologically viable. But it is hardly surprising that workers want to hold onto their jobs, even if they are dangerous, because even that is better than unemployment!
Everybody has heard of the fashionable theses according to which class struggle is no more and the workers' movement has become anachronistic, if not retrograde, relative to new social movements (including of course the ecology movements) which concentrate on those things that are really at stake in the "post-modern" era. This type of thinking is quite widespread in the green movement itself, which has put up with incomprehension, if not hostility, from the big bureaucratized workers' parties and unions to ecological demands while fighting for the legitimate interests of workers working in polluting or dangerous industries. Did we not hear the leader of the Canadian green party categorically reject any support for the social-democratic NPD during the last federal elections in constituencies where there was no green candidate, because of the ND's links with ... the unions, who were surely going to oppose the closure of polluting factories?! But we should not lose sight of the face that the global restructuring of productive and consumer e n
S d h y rt y d socialist point of view.
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by public transport, bicycles and — why not — walking! Environment: our common future? 23
relations that is necessary for the survival of humanity can only be established by a political power decided in this manner. And there are not any number of social forces in a position to overthrow the bourgeoisie in contemporary society. There is only one: the working class, men and women in alliance with the other exploited and oppressed layers in society. Far from challenging this central thesis of Marxism, the ecological crisis gives it a new relevance today. Certainly, it is also necessary that socialism becomes ecologist, and the Fourth International has put this point on the agenda of its next
World Congress with the aim of updating its programme on this question, profiting from the important gains made by the ecology movement. But it is also necessary that the ecology movement becomes socialist, because this
In the short-term, in the years to come, in the centuries to come, we have to fight to preserve humanity's future on this planet in the face of the ecological devastations of capitalism in crisis. But we also have to reconsider the classical socialist project so that it also becomes an ecological project, for a world that aims to satisfy human needs by respecting the world's basic natural balance. Classical socialist demands in favour of improving living and working conditions for the toiling and popular majority have to be rethought in terms of models of consumption, looking for new ways of life that put the stress on quality rather than quantity. The technological resources wasted by military production have to be used to develop and refine products, techniques and procedures that are safer, less energy-consuming and more economic in their use of resources. In brief, the transition to socialism has to be reformulated in the sense of restoring a viable long-term balance between humanity and
Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener, I'An 2000, Marabout, Brussels, 1967. Kahn, a big pioneer of computer nuclear war garnes, was supposed to have been inspired by the character of Dr Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick's famous film of the same name.
Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William Behrens, The limits to
Systems dynamics seeks to simulate complex processes by quantitying the retrospective effects and interactions between the variables involved in these processes, in such a way as to project their most likely future evolution. These calculations can easily include hundreds of equations and thousands of parameters, and are done on computer, which enables the impact of different changes on the evolution of the phenomena being studied to nature.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
24 International Marxist Review remains the only hope for humanity.
growth, New American Library, New York, 1972.
Environment: our common future? 25 be assessed. 4. Hugh Cole, Cristopher Freeman, Marie Jahoda, Karel Pawitt, l'Anti-Malthus, Seuil,
Paris, 1974. 5. Mihajlo Mesarovic, Eduard Pestel, Stratégie pour demain, Seuil, Paris, 1974. 6. Jan Tinbergen (ed.), Reshaping the International Order, Dutton, New York, 1976.
A particularly strident exposé of this blind technological optimism and apologetic for capitalism can be found in the last work of Herman Kahn (in collaboration with Julian Simon), The Resourceful Earth, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1984. Here it is seriously argued that nuclear energy is among the safest of human activities, and that the quality of water in the Great Lakes is now "excellent" for fishing and swimming. On this, we owe a lot to the work of Immanuel Wallerstein: see Capitalisme et Economie-monde, Flammarion, Paris, 1980, in two volumes. Herman Kahn, William Brown and Leon Martel, The Next 2000 Years, William Morrow, New York, 1976. This is an attempt to refute the Meadows' Report which wallows in the most delirious technological optimism. The authors are all linked to the American military apparatus, other than Kahn who is known for his contribution to nuclear war games. Brown is a specialist in military strategy, and Martel is described as someone who has worked in military and political intelligence. Emest Mandel, "l'Apogée du néo-capitalisme et ses lendemains", in Traité d'économie marxiste, Vol. 3., 10-18, Paris, 1969, p.282. 11. Williams Vogi, Road to Survival, New York, 1948. 12. Our Common Fulure, Oxford University Press, 1987. Gro Harlem Brundtland was the social-democratic prime minister of Norway until October 1989. 13. Terence Corcoran, "Brundtland message lacks economic base", The Globe and Mail,
Toronto, June 14, 1989.
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L
1 THE FUNDAMENTAL effect of perestroika on the world political situ-
- ation has been to update the old policy of peaceful coexistence in line
• th the present relationship of forces. The agreement between the Soviet
- areaucracy and the Pentagon secks an international equilibrium that can
This policy has had very negative repercussions in Central America. The mall material weight of Central American countries is used to try to take racisions in total disregard of their rights. Running through Bush and Gorba-
..ev's thinking is the idea that they cannot allow such small countries to put
In particular, the Soviet bureaucracy is trying to take the greatest possible stance from anti-imperialist struggles in this part of the world. To this end
-ay are putting immense pressure on the Cuban government to stop political and material aid to the Salvadoran and Guatemalan revolutionaries. The Sal-
• adoran revolutionary struggle is a fly in the ointment of perestroika. Gorbahev is trying to impose a negotiated solution in the region, along the lines of
•hat has happened in other parts of the world. In the final analysis, he is
• orking towards the surrender of the FMLN and its transformation into an