Capitalism Abandons Ship

Presented on the Old Mole Variety Hour, January 14, 2019

Once upon a time, when I was a boy in the 1950s and ‘60s, we all took it for granted that every part of the world was in some stage of an unstoppable world historical process called “progress,” or “modernization,” characterized by what we would now call “globalization.” Concretely this meant integration of the world economy under the “the free market”: free trade, open borders and international travel, faster and easier communication, constant technological innovation, equality (at least in theory), and cheaper and universally available consumer goods. It also meant cultural assimilation: that non-Western peoples and cultures would become “civilized”.  They would accept Western rationalism, and “primitive” practices and “superstitious” beliefs would gradually fade away. There were some obstacles such as communism, Beatniks and Hippies, unreasonable demands of labor, the Peace movement, and premature demands of blacks for full integration and equality. For the ruling class–the owners and managers of capital–– progress and modernization meant paying relatively high wages and taxes to keep peace with workers and to make possible, or at least believable, “The American Dream.”  All this maintained the ability of at least the upper layers of the working class to be consumers of an increasing cornucopia of commodities.

However, beginning around the time of the Viet Nam war, several things happened to weaken the support of capitalists for this system. Capital began to run out of profitable investment opportunities for at least two reasons. First, the demand for consumer goods that had been starved during WWII became saturated. Second, the recovery of the production systems of Germany and Japan from the destruction of the war gave US firms more competition, cutting into profits. So US capital faced a crisis of surplus productive capacity. And if that were not enough, by the 1980s, ruling elites were beginning to read the writing on the wall–that is, the work of scientists warning of what would happen to the planet if capitalist production continued to pour increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. In his newest book Down to Earth, Bruno Latour makes clear how this problem played out politically. Not only did a warming planet mean that capitalists could not expect to go on profitably producing more and more stuff and employing an expanding workforce, but that at some not-too-distant time, the whole fabric of society would probably come undone. At some point, not too far way, heat waves, drought, floods, and crop failures would mean massive and chaotic dislocation of the population. Governments would fall, meaning no state protection of the money and property of wealthy individuals, families, and corporations.  The costs of preventing all this by moving to carbon neutral forms of production and transportation would be enormous, and in fact, would require a degree of state intervention that would probably mean the end of capitalism, that is, of the private ownership and control of production. So they renounced any idea that they were part of a system of world-wide progress and adopted the ideology we now call neo-liberalism. Rather than capital having any obligation, moral or contractual, to workers and their dependents, every individual was to be responsible for him or herself, ready to move at short notice to another employer or even assume, like an Uber driver or an adjunct university professor, the status of an independent contractor. Corporations and the politicians dependent upon them loosened and removed regulations that had provided some protection for the people from the ups and downs of the capitalist economy. Business, and increasingly the state, no longer assumed any responsibility for the well-being of all the people. As science began to warn the public that human (i.e. corporate) caused climate change posed a serious threat to all  life, the industries most responsible for generating CO2,  sowed a propaganda of denial and doubt aimed at undercutting sustained public demand for adequate action. The plan of the ruling class is now to suck the system dry with massive transfers of wealth from the poor to the rich by privatization, complex credit instruments, and changes to tax laws favoring corporations and the rich. They are getting while the getting is good, while building their private luxury bunkers in isolated places.  The American Dream has lost its credibility, leading George Carlin to assert, “They call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

As Bruno Latour nicely sums it up,

…All this is part of a single phenomenon: the elites have been so thoroughly convinced that there would be no future life for everyone that they have decided to get rid of all the burdens of solidarity as fast as possible––hence the deregulation; they have decided that a sort of gilded fortress would have to be built for those (a small percentage) who would  be able to make it through–hence the explosion of inequalities; and they have decided that that, to conceal the crass selfishness of such a flight out of the shared world, the would have to reject absolutely the threat at the origin of the headlong flight––hence the denial of climate change. (p. 18, original emphasis)

So on this analysis, Latour claims (p. 3), it is now obvious that “the climate question is at the heart of all geopolitical issues and that it is directly tied to questions of injustice and inequality.” We can, says Latour, thank Donald Trump for making this clear, for he is the shameless cheer leader and facilitator for climate denial, deregulation, and the explicit refusal of the rights of immigrants who are fleeing the consequences of colonial and post-colonial oppression–and, increasingly, of drought and crop failure. But seeds of opposition adequate to the situation are being sown: the Green New Deal, the upcoming October Earth Strike, and Extinction Rebellion.

Capital would like us to go on “cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling” (to quote from Richard Powers’s wonderful novel about trees and forests called The Overstory).  The alternative is to get on board with a deeply ecological and political movement, one that, like the ones I just mentioned, goes beyond mere gradual and market-based reductions of greenhouse gases.  The movement we need, in order to survive, is one that  understands that we do not just live in a place we call the environment, but are now woven inextricably into the warp and woof of the thin and delicate layer of soil, air, plants, and animals that constitute life on the Earth.