The letter sent February 9 to the president of the Common Market Commission by Sicco Mansholt, a Social-Democratic member of the commission, continues to make news.* It is the first time that a political leader with some international authority has publicly given voice to the fears that a series of scholars have expressed continuously for years. This gives Mansholt unquestioned value as a publicizer. The fact that he has since become president of the commission lends his act still more importance.
The Great Fear of the 21st Century
Mansholt's letter is based on the "Club of Rome Report," which in turn is an extension of the "Meadows Report" published in June 1971 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The various reports summarize the fears current today in scholarly and "enlightened" capitalist circles about the threat that present production of material goods represents for the future of humanity. (The fact that these fears may be so widely trumpeted at the moment when capitalist growth is again slowing down is not at all a fortuitous coincidence.)
The population explosion and a potentially increasing shortage of food, pollution and the rapid degeneration of the human environment, the exhaustion of certain sources of raw materials -- these are the bases of this "great fear of the twenty-first century" that is being propagated in technocratic circles. The future, even the physical survival, of the human race seems to be threatened if things keep going the way they have been.
Certainly, it is easy to underline some errors in reasoning and some doubtful, even inadmissible, extrapolations in the Meadows Report, which Mansholt has reproduced with an obvious lack of critical spirit. The Malthusian idea of a population growth that outstrips progress in food production -- propounded ceaselessly for two centuries -- has been proven false historically. There is no reason to suppose that it will be verified during the next fifty years.
The notion that the current rate of population growth can be simply extended without taking account of the radical effects that social, economic, ideological, and moral changes can have on the development of the world's population is absurd. Not only the example of Western Europe, but even that of the Soviet Union, demonstrates clearly that population growth tends to decline, and then stabilize relatively once the threshold of civilization and urbanization has been crossed.
There is not the slightest scientific basis for the notion that 500 years from now the earth will be able to sustain a population of only 500,000,000 to 1,000,000,000 human beings -- and that only at a very low standard of living. Such a notion extends present-day technology and the present lack of balance between the use and renewal of natural resources.
But to suppose that no other technology is possible is to demonstrate an appalling poverty of imagination.
In fact, the superpessimism of the Meadows Report, reproduced by Mansholt, has exactly this social root. Capitalism is obviously in the process of undermining all the bases of civilization. It threatens humanity not only with nuclear death, but also with strangulation by pollution and with the murderous waste of the fundamental sources of wealth: nature and people.
The "great fear of the twenty-first century" is based on the thesis that no social system other than capitalism is possible. If this manifestly apologetic hypothesis is abandoned, the problem changes and must be formulated as an alternative: either capitalism survives, in which case the decline of material civilization seems inevitable; or else capitalism is replaced by socialism, and then there is no reason to suppose that we are threatened by cosmic catastrophe. For a long time revolutionary socialists have formulated the problem in these terms -- socialism or barbarism. The value of the Meadows-Mansholt Report is that it fundamentally confirms the validity of this alternative.
Irresponsible Critiques
The Marxist critique of the Meadows Report and the Mansholt letter must start from the contradictory nature of their analysis, from their cowardly refusal to draw the revolutionary social conclusions dictated by capitalism's obvious bankruptcy on a world scale. Mansholt and Meadows must be reproached for not having gone very far in their critique of capitalism, of its technology, its motivations, its fatal socio-economic logic.
On the other hand, it is irresponsible -- not to say worse -- to reproach Mansholt with having "exaggerated," with having gone too far, with wanting to create an atmosphere of panic so as to "discourage" workers' struggles -- or even to see the whole business as nothing but a pretext for rejecting wage increases! Still, this is the position adopted by the representatives of various official Communist parties, particularly in France and West Germany.
This suggests an analogy with the same sort of position adopted by certain ultraleftist circles (above all, but unfortunately not only, Maoist circles) on the question of nuclear weapons. Saying that the revelation of the real threat of extinction of all advanced forms of life on earth in the event of a nuclear war is an "invention" of bourgeois ideologues aimed at forcing the masses to "capitulate to nuclear blackmail" is an irresponsibility in the same vein as asserting that the problems of the pollution of the atmosphere and the ocean "divert" from workers' struggles.
Such remarks reveal a sad reversal of responsibilities. The capitalist system and the bourgeoisie are not attacked for manufacturing genocidal arms; the capitalist ideologues -- they are bourgeois! -- are attacked for alerting public opinion to the danger of these arms. The capitalist mode of production is not attacked for threatening the survival of the human race; the scholars -- they are bourgeois! -- are placed in the dock for calling attention to the threat. A very fine way to "combat bourgeois ideology" -- hide the crimes of the capitalist system and the bourgeoisie!
Refusal to Go All the Way
The basic weakness of the Mansholt report, which in effect makes it a document without a future, lies in its refusal to go all the way in its analysis and in the solutions it proposes. In fact, after diagnosing the disease as terminal, it prescribes a few aspirins as a cure: tariffs and fiscal measures to ensure that we choke to death a few decades later!
Mansholt begins by postulating that we must plan the use of resources and the major products of consumption, both agricultural and industrial. But he refuses to ask whether such planning is possible in the framework of a system of private property, competition, and the market economy. It is not through ignorance or stupidity that all over the world automobiles and petrochemical detergents that pollute the atmosphere are manufactured, that all humanity's primary energy sources are burned up at full speed. These are iron laws of competition, of the quest of each trust, each capitalist firm for individual profit. They are forced to take this road.
To want to rationalize the use of resources and means of production without touching these bases of the disease is to want to commit suicide rationally as opposed to blindly.
In the same way, Mansholt recommends that agricultural production be increased, even when it is not profitable (which, by the way, is exactly the opposite of what the Common Market has done for nearly fifteen years); that industrial products of consumption that do not wear down so rapidly be manufactured; that collective consumption be given priority over private consumption; that scarce resources be "rationed" so as to give equal opportunity to all; that scientific research be reoriented.
But all these nice things are completely unrealizable in a system founded on the private appropriation of social surplus product, on the market economy, and on the rule of profit. This system must stimulate lack of satisfaction and permanent want in the area of material commodities; it must favor private enrichment, the struggle of all against all, and the other beautiful "values" of civilized bourgeois society. It is that society that has produced all the poisonous fruits that Meadows and Mansholt denounce. To want to proceed with the same system but under different laws is to hope that apples will produce pineapples.
Yes, economic growth is not an end in itself. Ten years ago, well before Meadows and Mansholt, we asserted this elementary truth of Marxism in Marxist Economic Theory. The aim of humanity is humanity -- and not a continually rising accumulation of less and less useful material things. The automatic and assured satisfaction of basic material needs is a precondition for the full flowering of human capacities and potentials. But the latter can in no way be confused with the former. And this has nothing in common with the Stalinist thesis, taken over from bourgeois economists, of the endlessly growing needs of humanity for material commodities, a thesis that can be based on just one thing: the impossibility of communism.
Yes, worldwide planning of resources and of the principal instruments of human production is an urgent necessity. But this presupposes the totalization of both the costs and the results on the level of the whole society, and not on the level of each factory or each company. It presupposes the suppression of the crying inequality of consumption within nations and among nations. It presupposes the ending of that monstrous waste: the underutilization of human and material resources or their use for aims that are inimicable to humanity (like armaments). It presupposes that production be no longer oriented toward effective demand, but toward previously established, rational priorities.
It therefore also presupposes that construction of reasonably comfortable housing for all not be discontinued under the pretext that there are too many unoccupied luxury apartments, or that too much is spent on constructing banks, administrative quarters, and office buildings. In other words, it presupposes capitalism's replacement by socialism, rather than partial "rationalization" of the former.
Mansholt proclaims his rejection of "state socialism," by which he means society in transition from capitalism to socialism under a bureaucratic management, such as exists in the Soviet Union. By all evidence, that society exerts no attractive power on the laboring masses of Western Europe. Mansholt, in fact, renders it more attractive when he asserts the necessity of lowering the standard of living in the West (no doubt to the level of the Russian Workers?).
But he shows his bad faith by ignoring the fact that there are other "models" of transitional society besides that in which the bureaucracy wields a monopoly of political and economic power (and in which, we might point out in passing, the principle of individual profitability of factories has resulted in pollution problems similar to those of the capitalist societies).
A strict planning of resources and economic choices such as is suggested by the "Mansholt bomb" can be completely democratic. It can issue from the masses of producers and consumers managing their own factories and their own affairs, mutually consulting to coordinate their plans and wants, establishing their priorities after wide public discussions in national congresses and international workers' councils. Furthermore, this is the only effective form of planning in today's world, the only form that can deal with competition and the market economy. And all the ills denounced by Mansholt flow in the last analysis from the market economy, from competition, and from profit -- that is, from Capital.
Notes
* Mansholt, who was formerly the Dutch minister of agriculture, advocates a "closed circuit" economy of recycled products, to be created by tax measures. He acknowledges that his plans would entail "a sharp cutback in material well-being per head of population and limitation in the free use of goods." -- IP