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Title: An Anarchist FAQ — Section E Language: en
This section of the FAQ expands upon section D.4 (
"What is the relationship between capitalism and the ecological crisis?"
) in which we indicated that since capitalism is based upon the
principle of "grow or die," a "green" capitalism is impossible. By its
very nature capitalism must expand, creating new markets, increasing
production and consumption, and so invading more ecosystems, using more
resources, and upsetting the interrelations and delicate balances that
exist with ecosystems. We have decided to include a separate section on
this to stress how important green issues are to anarchism and what a
central place ecology has in modern anarchism.
Anarchists have been at the forefront of ecological thinking and the
green movement for decades. This is unsurprisingly, as many key concepts
of anarchism are also key concepts in ecological thought. In addition,
the ecological implications of many anarchist ideas (such as
decentralisation, integration of industry and agriculture, and so forth)
has meant that anarchists have quickly recognised the importance of
ecological movements and ideas.
Murray Bookchin in particular has placed anarchist ideas at the centre
of green debate as well as bringing out the links anarchism has with
ecological thinking. His eco-anarchism (which he called social ecology)
was based on emphasising the social nature of the ecological problems we
face. In such classic works as Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Toward an
Ecological Society and The Ecology of Freedom he has consistently argued
that humanity's domination of nature is the result of domination within
humanity itself.
However, anarchism has always had an ecological dimension. As Peter
Marshall notes in his extensive overview of ecological thought,
ecologists "find in Proudhon two of their most cherished social
principles: federalism and decentralisation." He "stands as an important
forerunner of the modern ecological movement for his stress on the close
communion between humanity and nature, for his belief in natural
justice, for his doctrine of federalism and for his insight that liberty
is the mother and not the daughter of order." [Nature's Web, p. 307 and
p. 308] For Proudhon, a key problem was that people viewed the land as
"something which enables them to levy a certain revenue each year. Gone
is the deep feeling for nature." People "no longer love the soil.
Landowners sell it, lease it, divide it into shares, prostitute it,
bargain with it and treat it as an object of speculation. Farmers
torture it, violate it, exhaust it and sacrifice it to their impatient
desire for gain. They never become one with it." We "have lost our
feeling for nature." [Selected Writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, p.
261]
Other precursors of eco-anarchism can be found in Peter Kropotkin's
writings. For example, in his classic work Fields, Factories and
Workshops, Kropotkin argued the case for "small is beautiful" 70 years
before E. F. Schumacher coined the phase, advocating "a harmonious
balance between agriculture and industry. Instead of the concentration
of large factories in cities, he called for economic as well as social
decentralisation, believing that diversity is the best way to organise
production by mutual co-operation. He favoured the scattering of
industry throughout the country and the integration of industry and
agriculture at the local level." His vision of a decentralised
commonwealth based on an integration of agriculture and industry as well
as manual and intellectual work has obvious parallels with much modern
green thought, as does his stress on the need for appropriate levels of
technology and his recognition that the capitalist market distorts the
development, size and operation of technology and industry. Through his
investigations in geography and biology, Kropotkin discovered species to
be interconnected with each other and with their environment. Mutual Aid
is the classic source book on the survival value of co-operation within
species which Kropotkin regarded as an important factor of evolution,
arguing that those who claim competition within and between species is
the chief or only factor have distorted Darwin's work. All this ensures
that Kropotkin is "a great inspiration to the modern ecological
movement." [Marshall, Op. Cit., p. 311 and p. 312]
As well as Kropotkin's work, special note must be made of French
anarchist Elisee Reclus. As Clark and Martin note, Reclus introduced "a
strongly ecological dimension into the tradition of anarchist and
libertarian social theory". He made "a powerful contribution to
introducing this more ecological perspective into anarchist thought," of
"looking beyond the project of planetary domination and attempting to
restore humanity to its rightful place within, rather than above,
nature." Reclus, "much more than Kropotkin, introduced into anarchist
theory themes that were later developed in social ecology and
eco-anarchism." [John P. Clark and Camille Martin (ed.), Anarchy,
Geography, Modernity, p. 19] For example, in 1866 Reclus argued as
follows:
"Wild nature is so beautiful. Is it really necessary for man, in seizing
it, to proceed with mathematical precision in exploiting each new
conquered domain and then mark his possession with vulgar constructions
and perfectly straight boundaries? If this continues to occur, the
harmonious contrasts that are one of the beauties of the earth will soon
give way to depressing uniformity . . .
"The question of knowing which of the works of man serves to beautify
and which contributes to the degradation of external nature can seem
pointless to so-called practical minds; nevertheless, it is a matter of
the greatest importance. Humanity's development is most intimately
connected with the nature that surrounds it. A secret harmony exists
between the earth and the peoples whom it nourishes, and when reckless
societies allow themselves to meddle with that which creates the beauty
of their domain, they always end up regretting it." [quoted by Clark and
Martin, Op. Cit., pp. 125-6]
"Man," Reclus says, can find beauty in "the intimate and deeply seated
harmony of his work with that of nature." Like the eco-anarchists a
century later, he stressed the social roots of our environmental
problems arguing that a "complete union of Man with Nature can only be
effected by the destruction of the frontiers between castes as well as
between peoples." He also indicated that the exploitation of nature is
part and parcel of capitalism, for "it matters little to the
industrialist . . . whether he blackens the atmosphere with fumes . . .
or contaminates it with foul-smelling vapours." "Since nature is so
often desecrated by speculators precisely because of its beauty," Reclus
argued, "it is not surprising that farmers and industrialists, in their
own exploitative endeavours, fail to consider whether they contribute to
defacing the land." The capitalist is "concerned not with making his
work harmonious with the landscape." [quoted by Clark and Martin, Op.
Cit., p. 28, p. 30, p. 124 and p. 125] Few modern day eco-anarchists
would disagree.
So, while a specifically ecological anarchism did not develop until the
revolutionary work done by Murray Bookchin from the 1950's onwards,
anarchist theory has had a significant "proto-green" content since at
least the 1860s. What Bookchin and writers like him did was to make
anarchism's implicit ecological aspects explicit, a work which has
immensely enriched anarchist theory and practice.
In addition to pointing out the key role ecology plays within anarchism,
this section is required to refute some commonly proposed solutions to
the ecological problems we face. While it is wonderful that green ideas
have becoming increasingly commonplace, the sad fact is that many people
have jumped on the green bandwagon whose basic assumptions and practices
are deeply anti-ecological. Thus we find fascists expounding on their
environmental vision or defenders of capitalism proposing "ecological"
solutions based on expanding private property rights. Similarly, we find
the notion of green consumerism raised as viable means of greening the
planet (rather than as an addition to social struggle) or a focus on
symptoms (such as population growth) rather than root causes. This
section refutes many such flawed suggestions.
A key concept to remember in our discussion is that between
environmentalism and ecology. Following Bookchin, eco-anarchists
contrast their ideas with those who seek to reform capitalism and make
it more green (a position they term "environmentalism" rather than
ecology). The latter "focus on specific issues like air and water
pollution" while ignoring the social roots of the problems they are
trying to solve. In other words, their outlook "rest[s] on an
instrumental, almost engineering approach to solving ecological
dislocations. To all appearances, they wanted to adapt the natural world
to the needs of the existing society and its exploitative, capitalist
imperatives by way of reforms that minimise harm to human health and
well-being. The much-needed goals of formulating a project for radical
social change and for cultivating a new sensibility toward the natural
world tended to fall outside the orbit of their practical concerns."
Eco-anarchists, while supporting such partial struggles, stress that
"these problems originate in a hierarchical, class, and today,
competitive capitalist system that nourishes a view of the natural world
as a mere agglomeration of 'resources' for human production and
consumption." [The Ecology of Freedom, pp. 15-6] This means that while
some kind of environmentalism may be possible under capitalism or some
other authoritarian system, an ecological approach is impossible. Simply
put, the concerns of ecology cannot be squeezed into a hierarchical
perspective or private property. Just as an eco-system cannot be
commanded, divided and enclosed, nor can a truly ecological vision.
Attempts to do so will impoverish both.
As we discuss in the
, for anarchists the root cause of our ecological problems is hierarchy
in society compounded by a capitalist economy. For anarchists, the
notion of an ecological capitalism is, literally, impossible.
Libertarian socialist Takis Fotopoulous has argued that the main reason
why the project of "greening" capitalism is just a utopian dream "lies
in a fundamental contradiction that exists between the logic and dynamic
of the growth economy, on the one hand, and the attempt to condition
this dynamic with qualitative interests" on the other. ["Development or
Democracy?", pp. 57-92, Society and Nature, No. 7, p. 82] Green issues,
like social ones, are inherently qualitative in nature and, as such, it
is unsurprising that a system based on profit would ignore them.
Under capitalism, ethics, nature and humanity all have a price tag. And
that price tag is god. This is understandable as every hierarchical
social system requires a belief-system. Under feudalism, the
belief-system came from the Church, whereas under capitalism, it
pretends to come from science, whose biased practitioners (usually
funded by the state and capital) are the new priesthood. Like the old
priesthoods, only those members who produce "objective research" become
famous and influential – "objective research" being that which accepts
the status quo as "natural" and produces what the elite want to hear
(i.e. apologetics for capitalism and elite rule will always be praised
as "objective" and "scientific" regardless of its actual scientific and
factual content, the infamous "bell curve" and Malthus's "Law of
Population" being classic examples). More importantly, capitalism needs
science to be able to measure and quantify everything in order to sell
it. This mathematical faith is reflected in its politics and economics,
where quantity is more important than quality, where 5 votes are better
than 2 votes, where $5 is better than $2. And like all religions,
capitalism needs sacrifice. In the name of "free enterprise," "economic
efficiency," "stability" and "growth" it sacrifices individuality,
freedom, humanity, and nature for the power and profits of the few.
Understanding the social roots of the problems we face is the key. Many
greens attack what they consider the "wrong ideas" of modern society,
its "materialistic values" and counter-pose new ideas, more in tune with
a green society. This approach, however, misses the point. Ideas and
values do not "just happen", but are the product of a given set of
social relationships and the struggles they produce. This means that it
is not just a matter of changing our values in a way that places
humanity in harmony with nature (important though that is), but also of
understanding the social and structural origins of the ecological
crisis. Ideas and values do need to be challenged, but unless the
authoritarian social relationships, hierarchy and inequalities in power
(i.e. what produces these values and ideas) are also challenged and,
more importantly, changed an ecological society is impossible. So unless
other Greens recognise that this crisis did not develop in a social
vacuum and is not the "fault" of people as people (as opposed to people
in a hierarchical society), little can be done root out the systemic
causes of the problems that we and the planet face.
Besides its alliance with the ecology movement, eco-anarchism also finds
allies in the feminist and peace movements, which it regards, like the
ecology movement, as implying the need for anarchist principles. Thus
eco-anarchists think that global competition between nation-states is
responsible not only for the devouring of nature but is also the primary
cause of international military tensions, as nations seek to dominate
each other by military force or the threat thereof. As international
competition becomes more intense and weapons of mass destruction spread,
the seeds are being sown for catastrophic global warfare involving
nuclear, chemical, and/or biological weapons. Because such warfare would
be the ultimate ecological disaster, eco-anarchism and the peace
movement are but two aspects of the same basic project. Similarly,
eco-anarchists recognise that domination of nature and male domination
of women have historically gone hand in hand, so that eco-feminism is
yet another aspect of eco-anarchism. Since feminism, ecology, and peace
are key issues of the Green movement, anarchists believe that many
Greens are implicitly committed to anarchism, whether they realise it or
not, and hence that they should adopt anarchist principles of direct
action rather than getting bogged down in trying to elect people to
state offices.
Here we discuss some of the main themes of eco-anarchism and consider a
few suggestions by non-anarchists about how to protect the environment.
In
, we summarise why anarchists consider why a green society cannot be a
capitalist one (and vice versa).
presents a short overview of what an ecological society would be like.
refutes the false capitalist claim that the answer to the ecological
crisis is to privatise everything while
discusses why capitalism is anti-ecological and its defenders,
invariably, anti-green. Then we indicate why green consumerism is doomed
to failure in
before, in
, refuting the myth that population growth is a cause of ecological
problems rather than the effect of deeper issues.
Obviously, these are hardly the end of the matter. Some tactics popular
in the green movement are shared by others and we discuss these
elsewhere. For example, the issue of electing Green Parties to power
will be addressed in section J.2.4 (
"Surely voting for radical parties will be effective?"
) and so will be ignored here. The question of "single-issue" campaigns
(like C.N.D. and Friends of the Earth) will be discussed in
. Remember that eco-anarchists, like all anarchists, take a keen
interest in many other issues and struggles and just because we do not
discuss something here does not mean we are indifferent to it.
For anarchists, unless we resolve the underlying contradictions within
society, which stem from domination, hierarchy and a capitalist economy,
ecological disruption will continue and grow, putting our Earth in
increasing danger. We need to resist the system and create new values
based on quality, not quantity. We must return the human factor to our
alienated society before we alienate ourselves completely off the
planet.
Peter Marshall's Nature's Web presents a good overview of all aspects of
green thought over human history from a libertarian perspective,
including excellent summaries of such anarchists as Proudhon, Kropotkin
and Bookchin (as well as libertarian socialist William Morris and his
ecologically balanced utopia News from Nowhere).
The dangers associated with environmental damage have become better
known over the last few decades. In fact, awareness of the crisis we
face has entered into the mainstream of politics. Those who assert that
environmental problems are minor or non-existent have, thankfully,
become marginalised (effectively, a few cranks and so-called
"scientists" funded by corporations and right-wing think tanks). Both
politicians and corporations have been keen to announce their "green"
credentials. Which is ironic, as anarchists would argue that both the
state and capitalism are key causes for the environmental problems we
are facing.
In other words, anarchists argue that pollution and the other
environmental problems we face are symptoms. The disease itself is
deeply imbedded in the system we live under and need to be addressed
alongside treating the more obvious results of that deeper cause.
Otherwise, to try and eliminate the symptoms by themselves can be little
more than a minor palliative and, fundamentally, pointless as they will
simply keep reappearing until their root causes are eliminated.
For anarchists, as we noted in
, the root causes for our ecological problems lie in social problems.
Bookchin uses the terms "first nature" and "second nature" to express
this idea. First nature is the environment while second nature is
humanity. The latter can shape and influence the former, for the worse
or for the better. How it does so depends on how it treats itself. A
decent, sane and egalitarian society will treat the environment it
inhabits in a decent, sane and respective way. A society marked by
inequality, hierarchies and exploitation will trend its environment as
its members treat each other. Thus "all our notions of dominating nature
stem from the very real domination of human by human." The "domination
of human by human preceded the notion of dominating nature. Indeed,
human domination of human gave rise to the very idea of dominating
nature." This means, obviously, that "it is not until we eliminate
domination in all its forms . . . that we will really create a rational,
ecological society." [Remaking Society, p. 44]
By degrading ourselves, we create the potential for degrading our
environment. This means that anarchists "emphasise that ecological
degradation is, in great part, a product of the degradation of human
beings by hunger, material insecurity, class rule, hierarchical
domination, patriarchy, ethnic discrimination, and competition."
[Bookchin, "The Future of the Ecology Movement," pp. 1-20, Which Way for
the Ecology Movement?, p. 17] This is unsurprising, for "nature, as
every materialist knows, is not something merely external to humanity.
We are a part of nature. Consequently, in dominating nature we not only
dominate an 'external world' – we also dominate ourselves." [John Clark,
The Anarchist Moment, p. 114]
We cannot stress how important this analysis is. We cannot ignore "the
deep-seated division in society that came into existence with
hierarchies and classes." To do so means placing "young people and old,
women and men, poor and rich, exploited and exploiters, people of colour
and whites all on a par that stands completely at odds with social
reality. Everyone, in turn, despite the different burdens he or she is
obliged to bear, is given the same responsibility for the ills of our
planet. Be they starving Ethiopian children or corporate barons, all
people are held to be equally culpable in producing present ecological
problems." These become "de-socialised" and so this perspective
"side-step[s] the profoundly social roots of present-day ecological
dislocations" and "deflects innumerable people from engaging in a
practice that could yield effective social change." It "easily plays
into the hands of a privileged stratum who are only too eager to blame
all the human victims of an exploitative society for the social and
ecological ills of our time." [The Ecology of Freedom, p. 33]
Thus, for eco-anarchists, hierarchy is the fundamental root cause of our
ecological problems. Hierarchy, notes Bookchin includes economic class
"and even gives rise to class society historically" but it "goes beyond
this limited meaning imputed to a largely economic form of
stratification." It refers to a system of "command and obedience in
which elites enjoy varying degrees of control over their subordinates
without necessarily exploiting them." [Ecology of Freedom, p. 68]
Anarchism, he stressed, "anchored ecological problems for the first time
in hierarchy, not simply in economic classes." [Remaking Society, p.
155]
Needless to say, the forms of hierarchy have changed and evolved over
the years. The anarchist analysis of hierarchies goes "well beyond
economic forms of exploitation into cultural forms of domination that
exist in the family, between generations and sexes, among ethnic groups,
in institutions of political, economic, and social management, and very
significantly, in the way we experience reality as a whole, including
nature and non-human life-forms." [Op. Cit., p. 46] This means that
anarchists recognise that ecological destruction has existed in most
human societies and is not limited just to capitalism. It existed, to
some degree, in all hierarchical pre-capitalist societies and, of
course, in any hierarchical post-capitalist ones as well. However, as
most of us live under capitalism today, anarchists concentrate our
analysis to that system and seek to change it. Anarchists stress the
need to end capitalism simply because of its inherently anti-ecological
nature ("The history of 'civilisation' has been a steady process of
estrangement from nature that has increasingly developed into outright
antagonism."). Our society faces "a breakdown not only of its values and
institutions, but also of its natural environment. This problem is not
unique to our times" but previous environmental destruction "pales
before the massive destruction of the environment that has occurred
since the days of the Industrial Revolution, and especially since the
end of the Second World War. The damage inflicted on the environment by
contemporary society encompasses the entire world . . . The exploitation
and pollution of the earth has damaged not only the integrity of the
atmosphere, climate, water resources, soil, flora and fauna of specific
regions, but also the basic natural cycles on which all living things
depend." [Bookchin, Ecology of Freedom, p. 411 and p. 83]
This has its roots in the "grow-or-die" nature of capitalism we
discussed in
. An ever-expanding capitalism must inevitably come into collision with
a finite planet and its fragile ecology. Firms whose aim is to maximise
their profits in order to grow will happily exploit whoever and whatever
they can to do so. As capitalism is based on exploiting people, can we
doubt that it will also exploit nature? It is unsurprising, therefore,
that this system results in the exploitation of the real sources of
wealth, namely nature and people. It is as much about robbing nature as
it is about robbing the worker. To quote Murray Bookchin:
"Any attempt to solve the ecological crisis within a bourgeois framework
must be dismissed as chimerical. Capitalism is inherently
anti-ecological. Competition and accumulation constitute its very law of
life, a law . . . summarised in the phrase, 'production for the sake of
production.' Anything, however hallowed or rare, 'has its price' and is
fair game for the marketplace. In a society of this kind, nature is
necessarily treated as a mere resource to be plundered and exploited.
The destruction of the natural world, far being the result of mere
hubristic blunders, follows inexorably from the very logic of capitalist
production." [Post-Scarcity Anarchism, pp. viii-ix]
So, in a large part, environmental problems derive from the fact that
capitalism is a competitive economy, guided by the maxim "grow or die."
This is its very law of life for unless a firm expands, it will be
driven out of business or taken over by a competitor. Hence the
capitalist economy is based on a process of growth and production for
their own sake. "No amount of moralising or pietising," stresses
Bookchin, "can alter the fact that rivalry at the most molecular base of
society is a bourgeois law of life . . . Accumulation to undermine, buy
out, or otherwise absorb or outwit a competitor is a condition for
existence in a capitalist economic order." This means "a capitalistic
society based on competition and growth for its own sake must ultimately
devour the natural world, just like an untreated cancer must ultimately
devour its host. Personal intentions, be they good or bad, have little
to do with this unrelenting process. An economy that is structured
around the maxim, 'Grow or Die,' must necessarily pit itself against the
natural world and leave ecological ruin in its wake as its works it way
through the biosphere." [Remaking Society, p. 93 and p. 15]
This means that good intentions and ideals have no bearing on the
survival of a capitalist enterprise. There is a very simple way to be
"moral" in the capitalist economy: namely, to commit economic suicide.
This helps explain another key anti-ecological tendency within
capitalism, namely the drive to externalise costs of production (i.e.,
pass them on to the community at large) in order to minimise private
costs and so maximise profits and so growth. As we will discuss in more
detail in
, capitalism has an in-built tendency to externalise costs in the form
of pollution as it rewards the kind of short-term perspective that
pollutes the planet in order to maximise the profits of the capitalist.
This is also driven by the fact that capitalism's need to expand also
reduces decision making from the quantitative to the qualitative. In
other words, whether something produces a short-term profit is the
guiding maxim of decision making and the price mechanism itself
suppresses the kind of information required to make ecologically
informed decisions.
As Bookchin summarises, capitalism "has made social evolution hopelessly
incompatible with ecological evolution." [Ecology of Freedom, p. 14] It
lacks a sustainable relation to nature not due to chance, ignorance or
bad intentions but due to its very nature and workings.
Fortunately, as we discussed in
, capitalism has rarely been allowed to operate for long entirely on its
own logic. When it does, counter-tendencies develop to stop society
being destroyed by market forces and the need to accumulate money.
Opposition forces always emerge, whether these are in the form of state
intervention or in social movements aiming for reforms or more radical
social change (the former tends to be the result of the latter, but not
always). Both force capitalism to moderate its worst tendencies.
However, state intervention is, at best, a short-term. This is because
the state is just as much a system of social domination, oppression and
exploitation as capitalism. Which brings us to the next key institution
which anarchists argue needs to be eliminated in order to create an
ecological society: the state. If, as anarchists argue, the oppression
of people is the fundamental reason for our ecological problems then it
logically follows that the state cannot be used to either create and
manage an ecological society. It is a hierarchical, centralised,
top-down organisation based on the use of coercion to maintain elite
rule. It is, as we stressed in
, premised on the monopolisation of power in the hands of a few. In
other words, it is the opposite of commonly agreed ecological principles
such as freedom to develop, decentralisation and diversity.
As Bookchin put it, the "notion that human freedom can be achieved, much
less perpetuated, through a state of any kind is monstrously oxymoronic
– a contradiction in terms." This is because "statist forms" are based
on "centralisation, bureaucratisation, and the professionalisation of
power in the hands of elite bodies." This flows from its nature for one
of its "essential functions is to confine, restrict, and essentially
suppress local democratic institutions and initiatives." It has been
organised to reduce public participation and control, even scrutiny.
["The Ecological Crisis, Socialism, and the need to remake society," pp.
1-10, Society and Nature, vol. 2, no. 3, p. 8 and p. 9] If the creation
of an ecological society requires individual freedom and social
participation (and it does) then the state by its very nature and
function excludes both.
The state's centralised nature is such that it cannot handle the
complexities and diversity of life. "No administrative system is capable
of representing" a community or, for that matter, an eco-system argues
James C. Scott "except through a heroic and greatly schematised process
of abstraction and simplification. It is not simply a question of
capacity . . . It is also a question of purpose. State agents have no
interest – nor should they – in describing an entire social reality . .
. Their abstractions and simplifications are disciplined by a small
number of objectives." This means that the state is unable to
effectively handle the needs of ecological systems, including human
ones. Scott analyses various large-scale state schemes aiming at social
improvement and indicates their utter failure. This failure was rooted
in the nature of centralised systems. He urges us "to consider the kind
of human subject for whom all these benefits were being provided. This
subject was singularly abstract." The state was planning "for generic
subjects who needed so many square feet of housing space, acres of
farmland, litres of clean water, and units of transportation and so much
food, fresh air, and recreational space. Standardised citizens were
uniform in their needs and even interchangeable. What is striking, of
course, is that such subjects . . . have, for purposes of the planning
exercise, no gender; no tastes; no history; no values; no opinions or
original ideas, no traditions, and no distinctive personalities to
contribute to the enterprise . . . The lack of context and particularity
is not an oversight; it is the necessary first premise of any
large-scale planning exercise. To the degree that the subjects can be
treated as standardised units, the power of resolution in the planning
exercise is enhanced . . . The same logic applies to the transformation
of the natural world." [Seeing like a State, pp. 22-3 and p. 346]
A central power reduces the participation and diversity required to
create an ecological society and tailor humanity's interaction with the
environment in a way which respects local conditions and eco-systems. In
fact, it helps creates ecological problems by centralising power at the
top of society, limiting and repressing the freedom of individuals
communities and peoples as well as standardising and so degrading
complex societies and eco-systems. As such, the state is just as
anti-ecological as capitalism is as it shares many of the same features.
As Scott stresses, capitalism "is just as much an agency of
homogenisation, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the
state is, with the difference being that, for capitalists,
simplification must pay. A market necessarily reduces quality to
quantity via the price mechanism and promotes standardisation; in
markets, money talks, not people . . . the conclusions that can be drawn
from the failures of modern projects of social engineering are as
applicable to market-driven standardisation as they are to bureaucratic
homogeneity." [Op. Cit., p. 8]
In the short term, the state may be able to restrict some of the worse
excesses of capitalism (this can be seen from the desire of capitalists
to fund parties which promise to deregulate an economy, regardless of
the social and environmental impact of so doing). However, the
interactions between these two anti-ecological institutions are unlikely
to produce long term environmental solutions. This is because while
state intervention can result in beneficial constraints on the
anti-ecological and anti-social dynamics of capitalism, it is always
limited by the nature of the state itself. As we noted in
, the state is an instrument of class rule and, consequently, extremely
unlikely to impose changes that may harm or destroy the system itself.
This means that any reform movement will have to fight hard for even the
most basic and common-sense changes while constantly having to stop
capitalists ignoring or undermining any reforms actually passed which
threaten their profits and the accumulation of capital as a whole. This
means that counterforces are always set into motion by ruling class and
even sensible reforms (such as anti-pollution laws) will be overturned
in the name of "deregulation" and profits.
Unsurprisingly, eco-anarchists, like all anarchists, reject appeals to
state power as this "invariably legitimates and strengthens the State,
with the result that it disempowers the people." They note that ecology
movements "that enter into parliamentary activities not only legitimate
State power at the expense of popular power," they also are "obligated
to function within the State" and "must 'play the game,' which means
that they must shape their priorities according to predetermined rules
over which they have no control." This results in "an ongoing process of
degeneration, a steady devolution of ideals, practices, and party
structures" in order to achieve "very little" in "arrest[ing]
environmental decay." [Remaking Society, p. 161, p. 162 and p. 163] The
fate of numerous green parties across the world supports that analysis.
That is why anarchists stress the importance of creating social
movements based on direct action and solidarity as the means of enacting
reforms under a hierarchical society. Only when we take a keen interest
and act to create and enforce reforms will they stand any chance of
being applied successfully. If such social pressure does not exist, then
any reform will remain a dead-letter and ignored by those seeking to
maximise their profits at the expense of both people and planet. As we
discuss in
, this involves creating alternative forms of organisation like
federations of community assemblies (see
) and industrial unions (see
). Given the nature of both a capitalist economy and the state, this
makes perfect sense.
In summary, the root cause of our ecological problems likes in hierarchy
within humanity, particularly in the form of the state and capitalism.
Capitalism is a "grow-or-die" system which cannot help destroy the
environment while the state is a centralised system which destroys the
freedom and participation required to interact with eco-systems. Based
on this analysis, anarchists reject the notion that all we need do is
get the state to regulate the economy as the state is part of the
problem as well as being an instrument of minority rule. Instead, we aim
to create an ecological society and end capitalism, the state and other
forms of hierarchy. This is done by encouraging social movements which
fight for improvements in the short term by means direct action,
solidarity and the creation of popular libertarian organisations.
Some environmentalists argue that the root cause of our ecological
crisis lies in industry and technology. This leads them to stress that
"industrialism" is the problem and that needs to be eliminated. An
extreme example of this is primitivism (see
), although it does appear in the works of "deep ecologists" and liberal
greens. However, most anarchists are unconvinced and agree with Bookchin
when he noted that "cries against 'technology' and 'industrial society'
[are] two very safe, socially natural targets against which even the
bourgeoisie can inveigh in Earth Day celebrations, as long as minimal
attention is paid to the social relations in which the mechanisation of
society is rooted." Instead, ecology needs "a confrontational stance
toward capitalism and hierarchical society" in order to be effective and
fix the root causes of our problems. [The Ecology of Freedom, p. 54]
Claiming that "industrialism" rather than "capitalism" is the cause of
our ecological problems allowed greens to point to both the west and the
so-called "socialist" countries and draw out what was common to both
(i.e. terrible environmental records and a growth mentality). In
addition, it allowed green parties and thinkers to portray themselves as
being "above" the "old" conflicts between socialism and capitalism
(hence the slogan "Neither Right nor Left, but in front"). Yet this
position rarely convinced anyone as any serious green thinker soon notes
that the social roots of our environmental problems need to be addressed
and that brings green ideas into conflict with the status quo (it is no
coincidence that many on the right dismiss green issues as nothing more
than a form of socialism or, in America, "liberalism"). However, by
refusing to clearly indicate opposition to capitalism this position
allowed many reactionary ideas (and people!) to be smuggled into the
green movement (the population myth being a prime example). As for
"industrialism" exposing the similarities between capitalism and
Stalinism, it would have been far better to do as anarchists had done
since 1918 and call the USSR and related regimes what they actually
were, namely "state capitalism."
Some greens (like many defenders of capitalism) point to the terrible
ecological legacy of the Stalinist countries of Eastern Europe and
elsewhere. For supporters of capitalism, this was due to the lack of
private property in these systems while, for greens, it showed that
environmental concerns where above both capitalism and "socialism."
Needless to say, by "capitalism" anarchists mean both private and state
forms of that system. As we argued in
, under Stalinism the state bureaucracy controlled and so effectively
owned the means of production. As under private capitalism, an elite
monopolised decision making and aimed to maximise their income by
oppressing and exploiting the working class. Unsurprisingly, they had as
little consideration "first nature" (the environment) as they had for
"second nature" (humanity) and dominated, oppressed and exploited both
(just as private capitalism does).
As Bookchin emphasised the ecological crisis stems not only from private
property but from the principle of domination itself – a principle
embodied in institutional hierarchies and relations of command and
obedience which pervade society at many different levels. Thus,
"[w]ithout changing the most molecular relationships in society –
notably, those between men and women, adults and children, whites and
other ethnic groups, heterosexuals and gays (the list, in fact, is
considerable) – society will be riddled by domination even in a
socialistic 'classless' and 'non-exploitative' form. It would be infused
by hierarchy even as it celebrated the dubious virtues of 'people's
democracies,' 'socialism' and the 'public ownership' of 'natural
resources,' And as long as hierarchy persists, as long as domination
organises humanity around a system of elites, the project of dominating
nature will continue to exist and inevitably lead our planet to
ecological extinction." [Toward an Ecological Society, p. 76]
Given this, the real reasons for why the environmental record of
Stalinist regimes were worse that private capitalism can easily be
found. Firstly, any opposition was more easily silenced by the police
state and so the ruling bureaucrats had far more lee-way to pollute than
in most western countries. In other words, a sound environment requires
freedom, the freedom of people to participate and protest. Secondly,
such dictatorships can implement centralised, top-down planning which
renders their ecological impact more systematic and widespread (James C.
Scott explores this at great length in his excellent book Seeing like a
State).
Fundamentally, though, there is no real difference between private and
state capitalism. That this is the case can be seen from the willingness
of capitalist firms to invest in, say, China in order to take advantage
of their weaker environmental laws and regulations plus the lack of
opposition. It can also be seen from the gutting of environmental laws
and regulation in the west in order to gain competitive advantages.
Unsurprisingly, laws to restrict protest have been increasingly passed
in many countries as they have embraced the neo-liberal agenda with the
Thatcher regime in the UK and its successors trail-blazing this process.
The centralisation of power which accompanies such neo-liberal
experiments reduces social pressures on the state and ensures that
business interests take precedence.
As we argued in
, the way that technology is used and evolves will reflect the power
relations within society. Given a hierarchical society, we would expect
a given technology to be used in repressive ways regardless of the
nature of that technology itself. Bookchin points to the difference
between the Iroquois and the Inca. Both societies used the same forms of
technology, but the former was a fairly democratic and egalitarian
federation while the latter was a highly despotic empire. As such,
technology "does not fully or even adequately account for the
institutional differences" between societies. [The Ecology of Freedom,
p. 331] This means that technology does not explain the causes for
ecological harm and it is possible to have an anti-ecological system
based on small-scale technologies:
"Some of the most dehumanising and centralised social systems were
fashioned out of very 'small' technologies; but bureaucracies,
monarchies, and military forces turned these systems into brutalising
cudgels to subdue humankind and, later, to try to subdue nature. To be
sure, a large-scale technics will foster the development of an
oppressively large-scale society; but every warped society follows the
dialectic of its own pathology of domination, irrespective of the scale
of its technics. It can organise the 'small' into the repellent as
surely as it can imprint an arrogant sneer on the faces of the elites
who administer it . . . Unfortunately, a preoccupation with technical
size, scale, and even artistry deflects our attention away from the most
significant problems of technics – notably, its ties with the ideals and
social structures of freedom." [Bookchin, Op. Cit., pp. 325-6]
In other words, "small-scale" technology will not transform an
authoritarian society into an ecological one. Nor will applying
ecologically friendly technology to capitalism reduce its drive to grow
at the expense of the planet and the people who inhabit it. This means
that technology is an aspect of a wider society rather than a socially
neutral instrument which will always have the same (usually negative)
results. As Bookchin stressed, a "liberatory technology presupposes
liberatory institutions; a liberatory sensibility requires a liberatory
society. By the same token, artistic crafts are difficult to conceive
without an artistically crafted society, and the 'inversion of tools' is
impossible with a radical inversion of all social and productive
relationships." [Op. Cit., pp. 328-9]
Finally, it should be stressed that attempts to blame technology or
industry for our ecological problems have another negative effect than
just obscuring the real causes of those problems and turning attention
away from the elites who implement specific forms of technology to
further their aims. It also means denying that technology can be
transformed and new forms created which can help produce an ecologically
balanced society:
"The knowledge and physical instruments for promoting a harmonisation of
humanity with nature and of human with human are largely at hand or
could easily be devised. Many of the physical principles used to
construct such patently harmful facilities as conventional power plants,
energy-consuming vehicles, surface-mining equipment and the like could
be directed to the construction of small-scale solar and wind energy
devices, efficient means of transportation, and energy-saving shelters."
[Bookchin, Op. Cit., p. 83]
We must understand that "the very idea of dominating first nature has
its origins in the domination of human by human" otherwise "we will lose
what little understanding we have of the social origin of our most
serious ecological problems." It this happens then we cannot solve these
problems, as it "will grossly distort humanity's potentialities to play
a creative role in non-human as well as human development." For "the
human capacity to reason conceptually, to fashion tools and devise
extraordinary technologies" can all "be used for the good of the
biosphere, not simply for harming it. What is of pivotal importance in
determining whether human beings will creatively foster the evolution of
first nature or whether they will be highly destructive to non-human and
human beings alike is precisely the kind of society we establish, not
only the kind of sensibility we develop." [Op. Cit., p. 34]
As we noted in
, eco-anarchists contrast ecology with environmentalism. The difference
is important as it suggests both a different analysis of where our
ecological problems come from and the best way to solve them. As
Bookchin put it:
"By 'environmentalism' I propose to designate a mechanistic,
instrumental outlook that sees nature as a passive habitat composed of
'objects' such as animals, plants, minerals, and the like that must
merely be rendered more serviceable for human use . . . Within this
context, very little of a social nature is spared from the
environmentalist's vocabulary: cities become 'urban resources' and their
inhabitants 'human resources' . . . Environmentalism . . . tends to view
the ecological project for attaining a harmonious relationship between
humanity and nature as a truce rather than a lasting equilibrium. The
'harmony' of the environmentalist centres around the development of new
techniques for plundering the natural world with minimal disruption of
the human 'habitat.' Environmentalism does not question the most basic
premise of the present society, notably, that humanity must dominant
nature; rather, it seeks to facilitate than notion by developing
techniques for diminishing the hazards caused by the reckless
despoliation of the environment." [The Ecology of Freedom, p. 86]
So eco-anarchists call the position of those who seek to reform
capitalism and make it more green "environmentalism" rather than
ecology. The reasons are obvious, as environmentalists "focus on
specific issues like air and water pollution" while ignoring the social
roots of the problems they are trying to solve. In other words, their
outlook "rest[s] on an instrumental, almost engineering approach to
solving ecological dislocations. To all appearances, they wanted to
adapt the natural world to the needs of the existing society and its
exploitative, capitalist imperatives by way of reforms that minimise
harm to human health and well-being. The much-needed goals of
formulating a project for radical social change and for cultivating a
new sensibility toward the natural world tended to fall outside the
orbit of their practical concerns." Eco-anarchists, while supporting
such partial structures, stress that "these problems originate in a
hierarchical, class, and today, competitive capitalist system that
nourishes a view of the natural world as a mere agglomeration of
'resources' for human production and consumption." [Op. Cit., pp. 15-6]
This is the key. As environmentalism does not bring into question the
underlying notion of the present society that man must dominate nature
it cannot present anything other than short-term solutions for the
various symptoms of the underlying problem. Moreover, as it does not
question hierarchy, it simply adjusts itself to the status quo. Thus
liberal environmentalism is so "hopelessly ineffectual" because "it
takes the present social order for granted" and is mired in "the
paralysing belief that a market society, privately owned property, and
the present-day bureaucratic nation-state cannot be changed in any basic
sense. Thus, it is the prevailing order that sets the terms of any
'compromise' or 'trade-off'" and so "the natural world, including
oppressed people, always loses something piece by piece, until
everything is lost in the end. As long as liberal environmentalism is
structured around the social status quo, property rights always prevail
over public rights and power always prevails over powerlessness. Be it a
forest, wetlands, or good agricultural soil, a 'developer' who owns any
of these 'resources' usually sets the terms on which every negotiation
occurs and ultimately succeeds in achieving the triumph of wealth over
ecological considerations." [Bookchin, Remaking Society, p. 15]
This means that a truly ecological perspective seeks to end the
situation where a few govern the many, not to make the few nicer. As
Chomsky once noted on the issue of "corporate social responsibility", he
could not discuss the issue as such because he did "not accept some of
its presuppositions, specifically with regard to the legitimacy of
corporate power" as he did not see any "justification for concentration
of private power" than "in the political domain." Both would "act in a
socially responsible way – as benevolent despots – when social strife,
disorder, protest, etc., induce them to do so for their own benefit." He
stressed that in a capitalist society "socially responsible behaviour
would be penalised quickly in that competitors, lacking such social
responsibility, would supplant anyone so misguided as to be concerned
with something other than private benefit." This explains why real
capitalist systems have always "been required to safeguard social
existence in the face of the destructive forces of private capitalism"
by means of "substantial state control." However, the "central questions
. . . are not addressed, but rather begged" when discussing corporate
social responsibility. [Language and Politics, p. 275]
Ultimately, the key problem with liberal environmentalism (as with
liberalism in general) is that it tends, by definition, to ignore class
and hierarchy. The "we are all in this together" kind of message ignores
that most of decisions that got us into our current ecological and
social mess were made by the rich as they have control over resources
and power structures (both private and public). It also suggests that
getting us out of the mess must involve taking power and wealth back
from the elite – if for no other reason because working class people do
not, by themselves, have the resources to solve the problem.
Moreover, the fact is the ruling class do not inhabit quite the same
polluted planet as everyone else. Their wealth protects them, to a large
degree, to the problems that they themselves have created and which, in
fact, they owe so much of that wealth to (little wonder, then, they deny
there is a serious problem). They have access to a better quality of
life, food and local environment (no toxic dumps and motorways are near
their homes or holiday retreats). Of course, this is a short term
protection but the fate of the planet is a long-term abstraction when
compared to the immediate returns on one's investments. So it is not
true to say that all parts of the ruling class are in denial about the
ecological problems. A few are aware but many more show utter hatred
towards those who think the planet is more important than profits.
This means that such key environmentalist activities such as education
and lobbying are unlikely to have much effect. While these may produce
some improvements in terms of our environmental impact, it cannot stop
the long-term destruction of our planet as the ecological crisis is
"systemic – and not a matter of misinformation, spiritual insensitivity,
or lack of moral integrity. The present social illness lies not only in
the outlook that pervades the present society; it lies above all in the
very structure and law of life in the system itself, in its imperative,
which no entrepreneur or corporation can ignore without facing
destruction: growth, more growth, and still more growth." [Murray
Bookchin, "The Ecological Crisis, Socialism, and the need to remake
society," pp. 1-10, Society and Nature, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 2-3] This can
only be ended by ending capitalism, not by appeals to consumers to buy
eco-friendly products or to capitalists to provide them:
"Accumulation is determined not by the good or bad intentions of the
individual bourgeois, but by the commodity relationship itself . . . It
is not the perversity of the bourgeois that creates production for the
sake of production, but the very market nexus over which he presides and
to which he succumbs. . . . It requires a grotesque self-deception, or
worse, an act of ideological social deception, to foster the belief that
this society can undo its very law of life in response to ethical
arguments or intellectual persuasion." [Toward an Ecological Society, p.
66]
Sadly, much of what passes for the green movement is based on this kind
of perspective. At worse, many environmentalists place their hopes on
green consumerism and education. At best, they seek to create green
parties to work within the state to pass appropriate regulations and
laws. Neither option gets to the core of the problem, namely a system in
which there are "oppressive human beings who literally own society and
others who are owned by it. Until society can be reclaimed by an
undivided humanity that will use its collective wisdom, cultural
achievements, technological innovations, scientific knowledge, and
innate creativity for its own benefit and for that of the natural world,
all ecological problems will have their roots in social problems."
[Bookchin, Remaking Society, p. 39]
Given what eco-anarchists consider to be the root cause of our
ecological problems (as discussed in the
), it should come as no surprise that they think that the current
ecological crisis can only be really solved by eliminating those root
causes, namely by ending domination within humanity and creating an
anarchist society. So here we will summarise the vision of the free
society eco-anarchists advocate before discussing the limitations of
various non-anarchist proposals to solve environmental problems in
subsequent sections.
However, before so doing it is important to stress that eco-anarchists
consider it important to fight against ecological and social problems
today. Like all anarchists, they argue for direct action and solidarity
to struggle for improvements and reforms under the current system. This
means that eco-anarchism "supports every effort to conserve the
environment" in the here and now. The key difference between them and
environmentalists is that eco-anarchists place such partial struggles
within a larger context of changing society as a whole. The former is
part of "waging a delaying action against the rampant destruction of the
environment" the other is "a create movement to totally revolutionise
the social relations of humans to each other and of humanity to nature."
[Murray Bookchin, Toward an Ecological Society, p. 43] This is one of
the key differences between an ecological perspective and an
environmental one (a difference discussed in
). Finding ways to resist capitalism's reduction of the living world to
resources and commodities and its plunder of the planet, our resistance
to specific aspects of an eco-cidal system, are merely a starting point
in the critique of the whole system and of a wider struggle for a better
society. As such, our outline of an ecological society (or ecotopia) is
not meant to suggest an indifference to partial struggles and reforms
within capitalism. It is simply to indicate why anarchists are confident
that ending capitalism and the state will create the necessary
preconditions for a free and ecologically viable society.
This perspective flows from the basic insight of eco-anarchism, namely
that ecological problems are not separate from social ones. As we are
part of nature, it means that how we interact and shape with it will be
influenced by how we interact and shape ourselves. As Reclus put it
"every people gives, so to speak, new clothing to the surrounding
nature. By means of its fields and roads, by its dwelling and every
manner of construction, by the way it arranges the trees and the
landscape in general, the populace expresses the character of its own
ideals. If it really has a feeling for beauty, it will make nature more
beautiful. If, on the other hand, the great mass of humanity should
remain as it is today, crude, egoistic and inauthentic, it will continue
to mark the face of the earth with its wretched traces. Thus will the
poet's cry of desperation become a reality: 'Where can I flee? Nature
itself has become hideous.'" In order to transform how we interact with
nature, we need to transform how we interact with each other.
"Fortunately," Reclus notes, "a complete alliance of the beautiful and
the useful is possible." [quoted by Clark and Martin (eds.) , Anarchy,
Geography, Modernity, p. 125 and p. 28]
Over a century later, Murray Bookchin echoed this insight:
"The views advanced by anarchists were deliberately called social
ecology to emphasise that major ecological problems have their roots in
social problems – problems that go back to the very beginnings of
patricentric culture itself. The rise of capitalism, with a law of life
based on competition, capital accumulation, and limitless growth,
brought these problems – ecological and social – to an acute point;
indeed, one that was unprecedented in any prior epoch of human
development. Capitalist society, by recycling the organise world into an
increasingly inanimate, inorganic assemblage of commodities, was
destined to simplify the biosphere, thereby cutting across the grain of
natural evolution with its ages-long thrust towards differentiation and
diversity.
"To reverse this trend, capitalism had to be replaced by an ecological
society based on non-hierarchical relationships, decentralised
communities, eco-technologies like solar power, organic agriculture, and
humanly scaled industries – in short, by face-to-face democratic forms
of settlement economically and structurally tailored to the ecosystems
in which they were located." [Remaking Society, pp. 154-5]
The vision of an ecological society rests on the obvious fact that
people can have both positive and negative impacts on the environment.
In current society, there are vast differences and antagonisms between
privileged whites and people of colour, men and women, rich and poor,
oppressor and oppressed. Remove those differences and antagonisms and
our interactions with ourselves and nature change radically. In other
words, there is a vast difference between free, non-hierarchical, class,
and stateless societies on the one hand, and hierarchical, class-ridden,
statist, and authoritarian ones and how they interact with the
environment.
Given the nature of ecology, it should come as no surprise that social
anarchists have been at the forefront of eco-anarchist theory and
activism. It would be fair to say that most eco-anarchists, like most
anarchists in general, envision an ecotopia based on communist-anarchist
principles. This does not mean that individualist anarchists are
indifferent to environmental issues, simply that most anarchists are
unconvinced that such solutions will actually end the ecological crisis
we face. Certain of the proposals in this section are applicable to
individualist anarchism (for example, the arguments that co-operatives
will produce less growth and be less likely to pollute). However, others
are not. Most obviously, arguments in favour of common ownership and
against the price mechanism are not applicable to the market based
solutions of individualist anarchism. It should also be pointed out,
that much of the eco-anarchist critique of capitalist approaches to
ecological problems are also applicable to individualist and mutualist
anarchism as well (particularly the former, as the latter does recognise
the need to regulate the market). While certain aspects of capitalism
would be removed in an individualist anarchism (such as massive
inequalities of wealth, capitalist property rights as well as direct and
indirect subsidies to big business), it is still has the informational
problems associated with markets as well as a growth orientation.
Here we discuss the typical eco-anarchist view of a free ecological
society, namely one rooted in social anarchist principles.
Eco-anarchists, like all consistent anarchists advocate workers'
self-management of the economy as a necessary component of an
ecologically sustainable society. This usually means society-wide
ownership of the means of production and all productive enterprises
self-managed by their workers (as described further in
). This is a key aspect of making a truly ecological society. Most
greens, even if they are not anarchists, recognise the pernicious
ecological effects of the capitalist "grow or die" principle; but unless
they are also anarchists, they usually fail to make the connection
between that principle and the hierarchical form of the typical
capitalist corporation. The capitalist firm, like the state, is
centralised, top-down and autocratic. These are the opposite of what an
ecological ethos would suggest. In contrast, eco-anarchists emphasise
the need for socially owned and worker self-managed firms.
This vision of co-operative rather than hierarchical production is a
common position for almost all anarchists. Communist and non-communist
social anarchists, like mutualists and collectivists, propose
co-operative workplaces but differ in how best to distribute the
products produced. The former urge the abolition of money and sharing
according to need while the latter see income related to work and
surpluses are shared equally among all members. Both of these systems
would produce workplaces which would be under far less pressure toward
rapid expansion than the traditional capitalist firm (as individualist
anarchism aims for the abolition of rent, profit and interest it, too,
will have less expansive workplaces).
The slower growth rate of co-operatives has been documented in a number
of studies, which show that in the traditional capitalist firm, owners'
and executives' percentage share of profits greatly increases as more
employees are added to the payroll. This is because the corporate
hierarchy is designed to facilitate exploitation by funnelling a
disproportionate share of the surplus value produced by workers to those
at the top of the pyramid (see
) Such a design gives ownership and management a very strong incentive
to expand, since, other things being equal, their income rises with
every new employee hired. [David Schweickart, Against Capitalism, pp.
153-4] Hence the hierarchical form of the capitalist corporation is one
of the main causes of runaway growth as well as social inequality and
the rise of big business and oligopoly in the so-called "free" market.
By contrast, in an equal-share worker co-operative, the addition of more
members simply means more people with whom the available pie will have
to be equally divided – a situation that immensely reduces the incentive
to expand. Thus a libertarian-socialist economy will not be under the
same pressure to grow. Moreover, when introducing technological
innovations or facing declining decline for goods, a self-managed
workplace would be more likely to increase leisure time among producers
rather than increase workloads or reduce numbers of staff.
This means that rather than produce a few big firms, a worker-controlled
economy would tend to create an economy with more small and medium sized
workplaces. This would make integrating them into local communities and
eco-systems far easier as well as making them more easily dependent on
green sources of energy. Then there are the other ecological advantages
to workers' self-management beyond the relative lack of expansion of
specific workplaces and the decentralisation this implies. These are
explained well by market socialist David Schweickart:
"To the extent that emissions affect the workers directly on the job (as
they often do), we can expect a self-managed firm to pollute less.
Workers will control the technology; it will not be imposed on them from
without.
"To the extent that emissions affect the local community, they are
likely to be less severe, for two reasons. Firstly, workers (unlike
capitalist owners) will necessarily live nearby, and so the
decision-makers will bear more of the environmental costs directly.
Second . . . a self-managed firm will not be able to avoid local
regulation by running away (or threatening to do so). The great stick
that a capitalist firm holds over the head of a local community will be
absent. Hence absent will be the macrophenomenon of various regions of
the country trying to compete for firms by offering a 'better business
climate' (i.e. fewer environmental restrictions)." [Op. Cit., p. 145]
For an ecological society to work, it requires the active participation
of those doing productive activity. They are often the first to be
affected by industrial pollution and have the best knowledge of how to
stop it happening. As such, workplace self-management is an essential
requirement for a society which aims to life in harmony with its
surrounds (and with itself, as a key aspect of social unfreedom would be
eliminated in the form of wage slavery).
For these reasons, libertarian socialism based on producer co-operatives
is essential for the type of economy necessary to solve the ecological
crisis. These all feed directly into the green vision as "ecology points
to the necessity of decentralisation, diversity in natural and social
systems, human-scale technology, and an end to the exploitation of
nature." [John Clark, The Anarchist Moment, p. 115] This can only be
achieved on a society which bases itself on workers' self-management as
this would facilitate the decentralisation of industries in ways which
are harmonious with nature.
So far, all forms of social anarchism are in agreement. However,
eco-anarchists tend to be communist-anarchists and oppose both mutualism
and collectivism. This is because workers' ownership and self-management
places the workers of an enterprise in a position where they can become
a particularistic interest within their community. This may lead to
these firms acting purely in their own narrow interests and against the
local community. They would be, in other words, outside of community
input and be solely accountable to themselves. This could lead to a
situation where they become "collective capitalists" with a common
interest in expanding their enterprises, increasing their "profits" and
even subjecting themselves to irrational practices to survive in the
market (i.e., harming their own wider and long-term interests as market
pressures have a distinct tendency to produce a race to the bottom – see
for more discussion). This leads most eco-anarchists to call for a
confederal economy and society in which communities will be
decentralised and freely give of their resources without the use of
money.
As a natural compliment to workplace self-management, eco-anarchists
propose communal self-management. So, although it may have appeared that
we focus our attention on the economic aspects of the ecological crisis
and its solution, this is not the case. It should always be kept in mind
that all anarchists see that a complete solution to our many ecological
and social problems must be multi-dimensional, addressing all aspects of
the total system of hierarchy and domination. This means that only
anarchism, with its emphasis on the elimination of authority in all
areas of life, goes to the fundamental root of the ecological crisis.
The eco-anarchist argument for direct (participatory) democracy is that
effective protection of the planet's ecosystems requires that all people
are able to take part at the grassroots level in decision-making that
affects their environment, since they are more aware of their immediate
eco-systems and more likely to favour stringent environmental safeguards
than politicians, state bureaucrats and the large, polluting special
interests that now dominate the "representative" system of government.
Moreover, real change must come from below, not from above as this is
the very source of the social and ecological problems that we face as it
divests individuals, communities and society as a whole of their power,
indeed right, to shape their own destinies as well as draining them of
their material and "spiritual" resources (i.e., the thoughts, hopes and
dreams of people).
Simply put, it should be hardly necessary to explore in any great depth
the sound ecological and social reasons for decentralising decision
making power to the grassroots of society, i.e. to the people who have
to live with the decisions being reached. The decentralised nature of
anarchism would mean that any new investments and proposed solutions to
existing problems would be tailored to local conditions. Due to the
mobility of capital, laws passed under capitalism to protect the
environment have to be created and implemented by the central government
to be effective. Yet the state, as discussed in
, is a centralised structure unsuited to the task of collecting and
processing the information and knowledge required to customise decisions
to local ecological and social circumstances. This means that
legislation, precisely due to its scope, cannot be finely tuned to local
conditions (and so can generate local opposition, particularly if
whipped up by corporate front organisations). In an eco-anarchist
society, decentralisation would not have the threat of economic power
hanging over it and so decisions would be reached which reflected the
actual local needs of the population. As they would be unlikely to want
to pollute themselves or their neighbours, eco-anarchists are confident
that such local empowerment will produce a society which lives with,
rather than upon, the environment.
Thus eco-communities (or eco-communes) are a key aspect of an ecotopia.
Eco-communes, Bookchin argued, will be "networked confederally through
ecosystems, bioregions, and biomes" and be "artistically tailored to
their naturally surrounding. We can envision that their squares will be
interlaced by streams, their places of assembly surrounded by groves,
their physical contours respected and tastefully landscaped, their soils
nurtured caringly to foster plant variety for ourselves, our domestic
animals, and wherever possible the wildlife they may support on their
fringes." They would be decentralised and "scaled to human dimensions,"
using recycling as well as integrating "solar, wind, hydraulic, and
methane-producing installations into a highly variegated pattern for
producing power. Agriculture, aquaculture, stockraising, and hunting
would be regarded as crafts – an orientation that we hope would be
extended as much as possible to the fabrication of use-values of nearly
all kinds. The need to mass-produce goods in highly mechanised
installations would be vastly diminished by the communities'
overwhelming emphasis on quality and permanence." [The Ecology of
Freedom, p. 444]
This means that local communities will generate social and economic
policies tailored to their own unique ecological circumstances, in
co-operation with others (it is important stress that eco-communes do
not imply supporting local self-sufficiency and economic autarchy as
values in themselves). Decisions that have regional impact are worked
out by confederations of local assemblies, so that everybody affected by
a decision can participate in making it. Such a system would be
self-sufficient as workplace and community participation would foster
creativity, spontaneity, responsibility, independence, and respect for
individuality – the qualities needed for a self-management to function
effectively. Just as hierarchy shapes those subject to it in negative
ways, participation would shape us in positive ways which would
strengthen our individuality and enrich our freedom and interaction with
others and nature.
That is not all. The communal framework would also impact on how
industry would develop. It would allow eco-technologies to be
prioritised in terms of R&D and subsidised in terms of consumption. No
more would green alternatives and eco-technologies be left unused simply
because most people cannot afford to buy them nor would their
development be under-funded simply because a capitalist sees little
profit form it or a politician cannot see any benefit from it. It also
means that the broad outlines of production are established at the
community assembly level while they are implemented in practice by
smaller collective bodies which also operate on an egalitarian,
participatory, and democratic basis. Co-operative workplaces form an
integral part of this process, having control over the production
process and the best way to implement any general outlines.
It is for these reasons that anarchists argue that common ownership
combined with a use-rights based system of possession is better for the
environment as it allows everyone the right to take action to stop
pollution, not simply those who are directly affected by it. As a
framework for ecological ethics, the communal system envisioned by
social anarchists would be far better than private property and markets
in protecting the environment. This is because the pressures that
markets exert on their members would not exist, as would the perverse
incentives which reward anti-social and anti-ecological practices.
Equally, the anti-ecological centralisation and hierarchy of the state
would be ended and replaced with a participatory system which can take
into account the needs of the local environment and utilise the local
knowledge and information that both the state and capitalism suppresses.
Thus a genuine solution to the ecological crisis presupposes communes,
i.e. participatory democracy in the social sphere. This is a
transformation that would amount to a political revolution. However, as
Bakunin continually emphasised, a political revolution of this nature
cannot be envisioned without a socio-economic revolution based on
workers' self-management. This is because the daily experience of
participatory decision-making, non-authoritarian modes of organisation,
and personalistic human relationships would not survive if those values
were denied during working hours. Moreover, as mentioned above,
participatory communities would be hard pressed to survive the pressure
that big business would subject them to.
Needless to say, the economic and social aspects of life cannot be
considered in isolation. For example, the negative results of workplace
hierarchy and its master-servant dynamic will hardly remain there. Given
the amount of time that most people spend working, the political
importance of turning it into a training ground for the development of
libertarian values can scarcely be overstated. As history has
demonstrated, political revolutions that are not based upon social
changes and mass psychological transformation – that is, by a
deconditioning from the master/slave attitudes absorbed from the current
system – result only in the substitution of new ruling elites for the
old ones (e.g. Lenin becoming the new "Tsar" and Communist Party
aparatchiks becoming the new "aristocracy"). Therefore, besides having a
slower growth rate, worker co-operatives with democratic self-management
would lay the psychological foundations for the kind of directly
democratic political system necessary to protect the biosphere. Thus
"green" libertarian socialism is the only proposal radical enough to
solve the ecological crisis.
Ecological crises become possible only within the context of social
relations which weaken people's capacities to fight an organised defence
of the planet's ecology and their own environment. This means that the
restriction of participation in decision-making processes within
hierarchical organisations such as the state and capitalism firms help
create environmental along with social problems by denying those most
affected by a problem the means of fixing it. Needless to say, hierarchy
within the workplace is a prerequisite to accumulation and so growth
while hierarchy within a community is a prerequisite to defend economic
and social inequality as well as minority rule as the disempowered
become indifferent to community and social issues they have little or no
say in. Both combine to create the basis of our current ecological
crisis and both need to be ended.
Ultimately, a free nature can only begin to emerge when we live in a
fully participatory society which itself is free of oppression,
domination and exploitation. Only then will we be able to rid ourselves
of the idea of dominating nature and fulfil our potential as individuals
and be a creative force in natural as well social evolution. That means
replacing the current system with one based on freedom, equality and
solidarity. Once this is achieved, "social life will yield a sensitive
development of human and natural diversity, falling together into a well
balanced harmonious whole. Ranging from community through region to
entire continents, we will see a colourful differentiation of human
groups and ecosystems, each developing its unique potentialities and
exposing members of the community to a wide spectrum of economic,
cultural and behavioural stimuli. Falling within our purview will be an
exciting, often dramatic, variety of communal forms – here marked by
architectural and industrial adaptations to semi-arid ecosystems, there
to grasslands, elsewhere by adaptation to forested areas. We will
witness a creative interplay between individual and group, community and
environment, humanity and nature." [Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism,
p. 39]
So, to conclude, in place of capitalism eco-anarchists favour
ecologically responsible forms of libertarian socialism, with an economy
based on the principles of complementarily with nature; decentralisation
(where possible and desirable) of large-scale industries, reskilling of
workers, and a return to more artisan-like modes of production; the use
of eco-technologies and ecologically friendly energy sources to create
green products; the use of recycled and recyclable raw materials and
renewable resources; the integration of town and country, industry and
agriculture; the creation of self-managed eco-communities which exist in
harmony with their surroundings; and self-managed workplaces responsive
to the wishes of local community assemblies and labour councils in which
decisions are made by direct democracy and co-ordinated (where
appropriate and applicable) from the bottom-up in a free federation.
Such a society would aim to develop the individuality and freedom of all
its members in order to ensure that we end the domination of nature by
humanity by ending domination within humanity itself.
This is the vision of a green society put forth by Murray Bookchin. To
quote him:
"We must create an ecological society – not merely because such a
society is desirable but because it is direly necessary. We must begin
to live in order to survive. Such a society involves a fundamental
reversal of all the trends that mark the historic development of
capitalist technology and bourgeois society – the minute specialisation
or machines and labour, the concentration of resources and people in
gigantic industrial enterprises and urban entities, the stratification
and bureaucratisation of life, the divorce of town from country, the
objectification of nature and human beings. In my view, this sweeping
reversal means that we must begin to decentralise our cities and
establish entirely new eco-communities that are artistically moulded to
the ecosystems in which they are located . . .
"Such an eco-community . . . would heal the split between town and
country, indeed, between mind and body by fusing intellectual with
physical work, industry with agriculture in a rotation or
diversification of vocational tasks. An eco-community would be supported
by a new kind of technology – or eco-technology – one composed of
flexible, versatile machinery whose productive applications would
emphasise durability and quality . . ." [Toward an Ecological Society,
pp. 68-9]
Lastly, we need to quickly sketch out how anarchists see the change to
an ecological society happening as there is little point having an aim
if you have no idea how to achieve it.
As noted above, eco-anarchists (like all anarchists) do not counterpoise
an ideal utopia to existing society but rather participate in current
ecological struggles. Moreover, we see that struggle itself as the link
between what is and what could be. This implies, at minimum, a two
pronged strategy of neighbourhood movements and workplace organising as
a means of both fighting and abolishing capitalism. These would work
together, with the former targeting, say, the disposal of toxic wastes
and the latter stopping the production of toxins in the first place.
Only when workers are in a position to refuse to engage in destructive
practices or produce destructive goods can lasting ecological change
emerge. Unsurprisingly, modern anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists have
been keen to stress the need for a green syndicalism which addresses
ecological as well as economical exploitation. The ideas of community
and industrial unionism are discussed in more detail in
along with other anarchist tactics for social change. Needless to say,
such organisations would use direct action as their means of achieving
their goals (see
). It should be noted that some of Bookchin's social ecologist followers
advocate, like him, greens standing in local elections as a means to
create a counter-power to the state. As we discuss in
, this strategy (called Libertarian Municipalism) finds few supporters
in the wider anarchist movement.
This strategy flows, of course, into the structures of an ecological
society. As we discuss in
, anarchists argue that the framework of a free society will be created
in the process of fighting the existing one. Thus the structures of an
eco-anarchist society (i.e. eco-communes and self-managed workplaces)
will be created by fighting the ecocidal tendencies of the current
system. In other words, like all anarchists eco-anarchists seek to
create the new world while fighting the old one. This means what we do
now is, however imperfect, an example of what we propose instead of
capitalism. That means we act in an ecological fashion today in order to
ensure that we can create an ecological society tomorrow.
For more discussion of how an anarchist society would work, see
. We will discuss the limitations of various proposed solutions to the
environmental crisis in the following sections.
Environmental issues have become increasingly important over the
decades. When Murray Bookchin wrote his first works on our ecological
problems in the 1950s, he was only one of a small band. Today, even
right-wing politicians have to give at least some lip-service to
environmental concerns while corporations are keen to present their
green credentials to the general public (even if they do not, in fact,
have any).
As such, there has been a significant change. This is better late than
never, considering that the warnings made by the likes of Bookchin in
the 1950s and 1960s have come true to a threateningly worrying degree.
Sadly, eco-anarchist solutions are still ignored but that is
unsurprising as they go to the heart of the ecological problem, namely
domination within humanity as the precondition for the domination of
nature and the workings of the capitalist economy. It is hardly likely
that those who practice and benefit from that oppression and
exploitation will admit that they are causing the problems! Hence the
need to appear green in order to keep a fundamentally anti-green system
going.
Of course, some right-wingers are totally opposed to ecological issues.
They seriously seem to forget without a viable ecology, there would be
no capitalism. Ayn Rand, for example, dismissed environmental concerns
as being anti-human and had little problem with factory chimneys
belching smoke into the atmosphere (her fondness for chimneys and
skyscrapers would have have made Freud reach for his notepad). As Bob
Black once noted, "Rand remarked that she worshipped smokestacks. For
her . . . they not only stood for, they were the epitome of human
accomplishment. She must have meant it since she was something of a
human smokestack herself; she was a chain smoker, as were the other
rationals in her entourage. In the end she abolished her own breathing:
she died of lung cancer." ["Smokestack Lightning," Friendly Fire, p. 62]
The fate of this guru of capitalism is a forewarning for our collective
one if we ignore the environment and our impact on it.
The key to understanding why so many on the right are dismissive of
ecological concerns is simply that ecology cannot be squeezed into their
narrow individualistic property based politics. Ecology is about
interconnectiveness, about change and interaction, about the sources of
life and how we interact with them and they with us. Moreover, ecology
is rooted in the quality of life and goes not automatically view
quantity as the key factor. As such, the notion that more is better does
not strike the ecologist as, in itself, a good thing. The idea that
growth is good as such is the principle associated with cancer. Ecology
also destroys the individualistic premise of capitalist economics. It
exposes the myth that the market ensures everyone gets exactly what they
want – for if you consume eco-friendly products but others do not then
you are affected by their decisions as the environmental impact affects
all. Equally, the notion that the solution to GM crops should letting
"the market" decide fails to take into account that such crops spread
into local eco-systems and contaminate whole areas (not to mention the
issue of corporate power enclosing another part of the commons). The
market "solution" in this case would result in everyone, to some degree,
consuming GM crops eventually. None of this can be fitted into the
capitalist ideology.
However, while vocal irrational anti-green perspectives lingers on in
some sections of the right (particularly those funded by the heaviest
polluters), other supporters of capitalism have considered the problems
of ecological destruction in some degree. Some of this is, of course,
simply greenwashing (i.e., using PR and advertising to present a green
image while conducting business as usual). Some of it is funding think
tanks which use green-sounding names, imagery and rhetoric to help
pursue a decidedly anti-ecological practice and agenda. Some of is, to
some degree, genuine. Al Gore's campaign to make the world aware of the
dangers of climate change is obviously sincere and important work
(although it is fair to point out the lack of green policies being
raised during his 2000 Presidential election campaign and the poverty of
his proposed solutions and means of change). Nicholas Stern's 2006
report on climate change produced for the UK government is another
example and it gives an insight into the mentality of such
environmentalists. The report did produce quite an impact (plus its
dismissal by the usual suspects). The key reason for that was,
undoubtedly, due to it placing a money sum on the dangers of
environmental disruption. Such is capitalism – people and planet can go
to the dogs, but any threat to profits must be acted upon. As the
British PM at the time put it, any Climate Change Bill must be "fully
compatible with the interests of businesses and consumers as well."
Which is ironic, as it is the power of money which is causing the bulk
of the problems we face.
Which is what we will discuss here, namely whether private property can
be used to solve our environmental problems. Liberal environmentalists
base their case on capitalist markets aided with some form of state
intervention. Neo-liberal and right-"libertarian" environmentalists base
their case purely on capitalist markets and reject any role for the
state bar that of defining and enforcing private property rights. Both,
however, assume that capitalism will remain and tailor their policies
around it. Anarchists question that particularly assumption particularly
given, as we discussed in
, the fundamental reason why capitalism cannot be green is its
irrational "grow-or-die" dynamic. However, there are other aspects of
the system which contribute to capitalism bringing ecological crisis
sooner rather than later. These flow from the nature of private property
and the market competition it produces (this discussion, we should
stress, ignores such factors as economic power which will be addressed
in
).
The market itself causes ecological problems for two related reasons:
externalities and the price mechanism. It is difficult making informed
consumption decisions under capitalism because rather than provide
enough information to make informed decisions, the market hinders the
flow of relevant information and suppresses essential knowledge. This is
particularly the case with environmental information and knowledge.
Simply put, we have no way of knowing from a given price the ecological
impact of the products we buy. One such area of suppressed information
is that involving externalities. This is a commonly understood problem.
The market actively rewards those companies which inflict externalities
on society. This is the "routine and regular harms caused to others –
workers, consumers, communities, the environment." These are termed
"externalities" in "the coolly technical jargon of economics" and the
capitalist company is an "externalising machine" and it is "no
exaggeration to say that the corporation's built in compulsion to
externalise its costs is at the root of many of the world's social and
environmental ills." [Joel Bakan, The Corporation, p. 60 and p. 61]
The logic is simple, by externalising (imposing) costs on others (be it
workers, customers or the planet) a firm can reduce its costs and make
higher profits. Thus firms have a vested interest in producing
externalities. To put it crudely, pollution pays while ecology costs.
Every pound a business spends on environmental protections is one less
in profits. As such, it makes economic sense to treat the environment
like a dump and externalise costs by pumping raw industrial effluent
into the atmosphere, rivers, and oceans. The social cost of so doing
weighs little against the personal profits that result from inflicting
diffuse losses onto the general public. Nor should we discount the
pressure of market forces in this process. In order to survive on the
market, firms may have to act in ways which, while profitable in the
short-run, are harmful in the long term. For example, a family-owned
farm may be forced to increase production using environmentally unsound
means simply in order to avoid bankruptcy.
As well as economic incentives, the creation of externalities flows from
the price mechanism itself. The first key issue, as green economist E.
F. Schumacher stressed, is that the market is based on "total
quantification at the expense of qualitative differences; for private
enterprise is not concerned with what it produces but only what it gains
from production." This means that the "judgement of economics . . . is
an extremely fragmentary judgement; out of the large number of aspects
which in real life have to be seen and judged together before a decision
can be taken, economics supplies only one – whether a thing yields a
profit to those who undertake it or not." [Small is Beautiful, p. 215
and p. 28] This leads to a simplistic decision making perspective:
"Everything becomes crystal clear after you have reduced reality to one
– one only – of its thousand aspects. You know what to do – whatever
produces profits; you know what to avoid – whatever reduces them or
makes a loss. And there is at the same time a perfect measuring rod for
the degree of success or failure. Let no-one befog the issue by asking
whether a particular action is conducive to the wealth and well-being of
society, whether it leads to moral, aesthetic, or cultural enrichment.
Simply find out whether it pays." [Op. Cit., p. 215]
This means that key factors in decision making are, at best, undermined
by the pressing need to make profits or, at worse, simply ignored as a
handicap. So "in the market place, for practical reasons, innumerable
qualitative distinctions which are of vital importance for man and
society are suppressed; they are not allowed to surface. Thus the reign
of quantity celebrates its greatest triumphs in 'The Market.'" This
feeds the drive to externalise costs, as it is "based on a definition of
cost which excludes all 'free goods,' that is to say, the entire
God-given environment, except for those parts of it that have been
privately appropriated. This means that an activity can be economic
although it plays hell with the environment, and that a competing
activity, if at some cost it protects and conserves the environment,
will be uneconomic." To summarise: "it is inherent in the methodology of
economics to ignore man's dependence on the natural world." [Op. Cit.,
p. 30 and p. 29]
Ultimately, should our decision-making be limited to a single criteria,
namely whether it makes someone a profit? Should our environment be
handed over to a system which bases itself on confusing efficient
resource allocation with maximising profits in an economy marked by
inequalities of wealth and, consequently, on unequal willingness and
ability to pay? In other words, biodiversity, eco-system stability,
clean water and air, and so forth only become legitimate social goals
when the market places a price on them sufficient for a capitalist to
make money from them. Such a system can only fail to achieve a green
society simply because ecological concerns cannot be reduced to one
criteria ("The discipline of economics achieves its formidable resolving
power by transforming what might otherwise be considered qualitative
matters into quantitative issues with a single metric and, as it were, a
bottom line: profit or loss." [James C. Scott, Seeing like a State, p.
346]). This is particularly the case when even economists admit that the
market under-supplies public goods, of which a clean and aesthetically
pleasing environment is the classic example. Markets may reflect, to
some degree, individual consumer preferences distorted by income
distribution but they are simply incapable of reflecting collective
values (a clean environment and spectacular views are inherently
collective goods and cannot be enclosed). As a result, capitalists will
be unlikely to invest in such projects as they cannot make everyone who
uses them pay for the privilege.
Then there is the tendency for the market to undermine and destroy
practical and local knowledge on which truly ecological decisions need
to be based. Indigenous groups, for example, have accumulated an
enormous body of knowledge about local ecological conditions and species
which are ignored in economic terms or eliminated by competition with
those with economic power. Under markets, in other words, unarticulated
knowledge of soil conditions and bio-diversity which have considerable
value for long-term sustainability is usually lost when it meets
agribusiness.
Practical knowledge, i.e. local and tacit knowledge which James C. Scott
terms metis, is being destroyed and replaced "by standardised formulas
legible from the centre" and this "is virtually inscribed in the
activities of both the state and large-scale bureaucratic capitalism."
The "logic animating the project . . . is one of control and
appropriation. Local knowledge, because it is dispersed and relatively
autonomous, is all but unappropriable. The reduction or, more utopian
still, the elimination of metis and the local control its entails are
preconditions, in the case of the state, of administrative order and
fiscal appropriation and, in the case of the large capitalism firm, of
worker discipline and profit." [Op. Cit., pp. 335-6] Green socialist
John O'Neill provides a similar analysis:
"far from fostering the existence of practical and local knowledge, the
spread of markets often appears to do the opposite: the growth of global
markets is associated with the disappearance of knowledge that is local
and practical, and the growth of abstract codifiable information . . .
the market as a mode of co-ordination appears to foster forms of
abstract codifiable knowledge . . . The knowledge of weak and marginal
actors in markets, such as peasant and marginalised indigenous
communities, tends to be lost to those who hold market power. The
epistemic value of knowledge claims bear no direct relation to their
market value. Local and often unarticulated knowledge of soil conditions
and crop varieties that have considerable value for long-term
sustainability of agriculture has no value in markets and hence is
always liable to loss when it comes into contact with oil-based
agricultural technologies of those who do have market power. The
undermining of local practical knowledge in market economies has also
been exacerbated by the global nature of both markets and large
corporate actors who require knowledge that is transferable across
different cultures and contexts and hence abstract and codifiable . . .
Finally, the demand for commensurability and calculability runs against
the defence of local and practical knowledge. This is not just a
theoretical problem but one with real institutional embodiments. The
market encourages a spirit of calculability . . . That spirit is the
starting point for the algorithmic account of practical reason which
requires explicit common measures for rational choice and fails to
acknowledge the existence of choice founded upon practical judgement.
More generally it is not amicable to forms of knowledge that are
practical, local and uncodifiable." [Markets, Deliberation and
Environment, pp. 192-3]
Thus the market tends to replace traditional forms of agriculture and
working practices (and the complex knowledge and expertises associated
with both) with standardised techniques which aim to extract as much
profit in the short-term as possible by concentrating power into the
hands of management and their appointed experts. That they cannot even
begin to comprehend the local conditions and practical knowledge and
skills required to effectively use the resources available in a
sustainable manner should go without saying. Unfortunately, the economic
clout of big business is such that it can defeat traditional forms of
knowledge in the short-term (the long-term effect of such exploitation
is usually considered someone else's problem).
So, given this analysis, it comes as no surprise to anarchists that
private property has not protected the environment. In fact, it is one
of the root causes of our ecological problems. Markets hide the
ecological and health information necessary for environmentally sound
decisions. Ultimately, environmental issues almost always involve value
judgements and the market stops the possibility of producing a public
dialogue in which these values can be discussed and enriched. Instead,
it replaces this process by an aggregation of existing preferences
(shaped by economic pressures and necessity) skewed in favour of this
generation's property owners. An individual's interest, like that of the
public as a whole, is not something which exists independently of the
decision-making processes used but rather is something which is shaped
by them. Atomistic processes focused on a simplistic criteria will
produce simplistic decisions which have collectively irrational results.
Collective decision making based on equal participation of all will
produce decisions which reflect all the concerns of all affected in a
process which will help produce empowered and educated individuals along
with informed decisions.
Some disagree. For these the reason why there is environmental damage is
not due to too much private property but because there is too little.
This perspective derives from neo-classical and related economic theory
and it argues that ecological harm occurs because environmental goods
and bads are unpriced. They come free, in other words. This suggests
that the best way to protect the environment is to privatise everything
and to create markets in all areas of life. This perspective, needless
to say, is entirely the opposite of the standard eco-anarchist one which
argues that our environmental problems have their root in market
mechanisms, private property and the behaviour they generate. As such,
applying market norms even more rigorously and into areas of life that
were previously protected from markets will tend to make ecological
problems worse, not better.
As would be expected, the pro-property perspective is part of the wider
turn to free(r) market capitalism since the 1970s. With the apparent
success of Thatcherism and Reaganism (at least for the people who count
under capitalism, i.e. the wealthy) and the fall of Stalinism in the
Eastern Block, the 1980s and 1990s saw a period of capitalist
triumphantism. This lead to an increase in market based solutions to
every conceivable social problem, regardless of how inappropriate and/or
insane the suggestions were. This applies to ecological issues as well.
The publication of Free Market Environmentalism by Terry L. Anderson and
Donald R. Leal in 1991 saw ideas previously associated with the
right-"libertarian" fringe become more mainstream and, significantly,
supported by corporate interests and the think-tanks and politicians
they fund.
Some see it as a deliberate plan to counteract a growing ecological
movement which aims to change social, political and economic structures
in order to get at the root cases of our environmental problems.
Activist Sara Diamond suggested that "[s]ome farsighted corporations are
finding that the best 'bulwark' against 'anti-corporation'
environmentalism is the creation and promotion of an alternative model
called 'free market environmentalism.'" ["Free Market Environmentalism,"
Z Magazine, December 1991] Whatever the case, the net effect of this
reliance on markets is to depoliticise environmental debates, to
transform issues which involve values and affect many people into ones
in which the property owner is given priority and where the criteria for
decision making becomes one of profit and loss. It means, effectively,
ending debates over why ecological destruction happens and what we
should do about it and accepting the assumptions, institutions and
social relationships of capitalism as a given as well as privatising yet
more of the world and handing it over to capitalists. Little wonder it
is being proposed as an alternative by corporations concerned about
their green image. At the very least, it is fair to say that the
corporations who punt free market environmentalism as an alternative
paradigm for environmental policy making are not expecting to pay more
by internalising their costs by so doing.
As with market fundamentalism in general, private property based
environmentalism appears to offer solutions simply because it fails to
take into account the reality of any actual capitalist system. The
notion that all we have to do is let markets work ignores the fact that
any theoretical claim for the welfare superiority of free-market
outcomes falls when we look at any real capitalist market. Once we
introduce, say, economic power, imperfect competition, public goods,
externalities or asymmetric information then the market quickly becomes
a god with feet of clay. This is what we will explore in the rest of
this section while the
will discuss a specific example of how laissez-faire capitalism cannot
be ecological as proved by one of its most fervent ideologues. Overall,
anarchists feel we have a good case on why is unlikely that private
property can protect the environment.
No, it will not. To see why, it is only necessary to look at the
arguments and assumptions of those who advocate such solutions to our
ecological problems.
The logic behind the notion of privatising the planet is simple. Many of
our environmental problems stem, as noted in the
, from externalities. According to the "market advocates" this is due to
there being unowned resources for if someone owned them, they would sue
whoever or whatever was polluting them. By means of private property and
the courts, pollution would end. Similarly, if an endangered species or
eco-system were privatised then the new owners would have an interest in
protecting them if tourists, say, were willing to pay to see them. Thus
the solution to environmental problems is simple. Privatise everything
and allow people's natural incentive to care for their own property take
over.
Even on this basic level, there are obvious problems. Why assume that
capitalist property rights are the only ones, for example? However, the
crux of the problem is clear enough. This solution only works if we
assume that the "resources" in question make their owners a profit or if
they are willing and able to track down the polluters. Neither
assumption is robust enough to carry the weight that capitalism places
on our planet's environment. There is no automatic mechanism by which
capitalism will ensure that environmentally sound practices will
predominate. In fact, the opposite is far more likely.
At its most basic, the underlying rationale is flawed. It argues that it
is only by giving the environment a price can we compare its use for
different purposes. This allows the benefits from preserving a forest to
be compared to the benefits of cutting it down and building a shopping
centre over it. Yet by "benefits" it simply means economic benefits,
i.e. whether it is profitable for property owners to do so, rather than
ecologically sensible. This is an important difference. If more money
can be made in turning a lake into a toxic waste dump then, logically,
its owners will do so. Similarly, if timber prices are not rising at the
prevailing profit or interest rate, then a self-interested firm will
seek to increase its profits and cut-down its trees as fast as possible,
investing the returns elsewhere. They may even sell such cleared land to
other companies to develop. This undermines any claim that private
property rights and environmental protection go hand-in-hand.
As Glenn Albrecht argues, such a capitalist "solution" to environmental
problems is only "likely to be effective in protecting species [or
ecosystems] which are commercially important only if the commercial
value of that species [or ecosystem] exceeds that of other potential
sources of income that could be generated from the same 'natural
capital' that the species inhabits If, for example, the conservation of
species for ecotourism generates income which is greater than that which
could be gained by using their habit for the growing of cash crops, then
the private property rights of the owners of the habitat will
effectively protect those species . . . However, this model becomes
progressively less plausible when we are confronted with rare but
commercially unimportant species [or ecosystems] versus very large
development proposals that are inconsistent with their continual
existence. The less charismatic the species, the more 'unattractive' the
ecosystem, the more likely it will be that the development proposal will
proceed. The 'rights' of developers will eventually win out over species
and ecosystems since . . . bio-diversity itself has no right to exist
and even if it did, the clash of rights between an endangered species
and multi-national capital would be a very uneven contest." ["Ethics,
Anarchy and Sustainable Development", pp. 95-118, Anarchist Studies,
vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 104-5]
So the conservation of endangered species or eco-systems is not
automatically achieved using the market. This is especially the case
when there is little, or no, economic value in the species or eco-system
in question. The most obvious example is when there is only a limited
profit to be made from a piece of land by maintaining it as the habitat
of a rare species. If any alternative economic uses for that land yields
a greater profit then that land will be developed. Moreover, if a
species looses its economic value as a commodity then the property
owners will become indifferent to its survival. Prices change and so an
investment which made sense today may not look so good tomorrow. So if
the market price of a resource decreases then it becomes unlikely that
its ecological benefits will outweigh its economic ones. Overall,
regardless of the wider ecological importance of a specific eco-system
or species it is likely that their owner will prioritise short-term
profits over environmental concerns. It should go without saying that
threatened or endangered eco-systems and species will be lost under a
privatised regime as it relies on the willingness of profit-orientated
companies and individuals to take a loss in order to protect the
environment.
Overall, advocates of market based environmentalism need to present a
case that all plants, animals and eco-systems are valuable commodities
in the same way as, say, fish are. While a case for market-based
environmentalism can be made by arguing that fish have a market price
and, as such, owners of lakes, rivers and oceans would have an incentive
to keep their waters clean in order to sell fish on the market, the same
cannot be said of all species and habitats. Simply put, not all
creatures, plants and eco-systems with an ecological value will have an
economic one as well.
Moreover, markets can send mixed messages about the environmental
policies which should be pursued. This may lead to over investment in
some areas and then a slump. For example, rising demand for recycled
goods may inspire an investment boom which, in turn, may lead to
over-supply and then a crash, with plants closing as the price falls due
to increased supply. Recycling may then become economically unviable,
even though it remains ecologically essential. In addition, market
prices hardly provide an accurate signal regarding the "correct" level
of ecological demands in a society as they are constrained by income
levels and reflect the economic pressures people are under. Financial
security and income level play a key role, for in the market not all
votes are equal. A market based allocation of environmental goods and
bads does not reflect the obvious fact the poor may appear to value
environmental issues less than the wealthy in this scheme simply because
their preferences (as expressed in the market) are limited by lower
budgets.
Ultimately, market demand can change without the underlying demand for a
specific good changing. For example, since the 1970s the real wages of
most Americans have stagnated while inequality has soared. As a result,
fewer households can afford to go on holidays to wilderness areas or buy
more expensive ecologically friendly products. Does that imply that the
people involved now value the environment less simply because they now
find it harder to make ends meet? Equally, if falling living standards
force people to take jobs with dangerous environmental consequences does
than really provide an accurate picture of people's desires? It takes a
giant leap of faith (in the market) to assume that falling demand for a
specific environmental good implies that reducing environmental damage
has become less valuable to people. Economic necessity may compel people
to act against their best impulses, even strongly felt natural values
(an obvious example is that during recessions people may be more willing
to tolerate greenhouse gas emissions simply because they need the work).
Nor can it be claimed that all the relevant factors in ecological
decision making can take the commodity form, i.e. be given a price. This
means that market prices do not, in fact, actually reflect people's
environmental values. Many aspects of our environment simply cannot be
given a market price (how can you charge people to look at beautiful
scenery?). Then there is the issue of how to charge a price which
reflects the demand of people who wish to know that, say, the rainforest
or wilderness exists and is protected but who will never visit either?
Nor are future generations taken into account by a value that reflects
current willingness to pay and might not be consistent with long-term
welfare or even survival. And how do you factor in the impact a cleaner
environment has on protecting or extending human lives? Surely a healthy
environment is worth much more than simply lost earnings and the medical
bills and clean-up activities saved? At best, you could factor this in
by assuming that the wage premium of workers in dangerous occupations
reflects it but a human life is, surely, worth more than the wages
required to attract workers into dangerous working conditions. Wages are
not an objective measure of the level of environmental risks workers are
willing to tolerate as they are influenced by the overall state of the
economy, the balance of class power and a whole host of other factors.
Simply put, fear of unemployment and economic security will ensure that
workers tolerate jobs that expose them and their communities to high
levels of environmental dangers.
Economic necessity drives decisions in the so-called "free" market
(given a choice between clean air and water and having a job, many
people would choose the latter simply because they have to in order to
survive). These factors can only be ignored which means that
environmental values cannot be treated like commodities and market
prices cannot accurately reflect environmental values. The key thing to
remember is that the market does not meet demand, it meets effective
demand (i.e. demands backed up with money). Yet people want endangered
species and eco-systems protected even if there is no effective demand
for them on the market (nor could be). We will return to this critical
subject in the
.
Then there are the practicalities of privatising nature. How, for
example, do we "privatise" the oceans? How do we "privatise" whales and
sharks in order to conserve them? How do we know if a whaling ship kills
"your" whale? And what if "your" shark feeds on "my" fish? From whom do
we buy these resources in the first place? What courts must be set up to
assess and try crimes and define damages? Then there are the costs of
defining and enforcing private rights by means of the courts. This would
mean individual case-by-case adjudications which increase transaction
costs. Needless to say, such cases will be influenced by the resources
available to both sides. Moreover, the judiciary is almost always the
least accountable and representative branch of the state and so turning
environmental policy decisions over to them will hardly ensure that
public concerns are at the foremost of any decision (such a move would
also help undermine trial by jury as juries often tend to reward
sizeable damages against corporations in such cases, a factor
corporations are all too aware of).
This brings us to the problem of actually proving that the particles of
a specific firm has inflicted a specific harm on a particular person and
their property. Usually, there are multiple firms engaging in polluting
the atmosphere and it would be difficult, if not impossible, to legally
establish the liability of any particular firm. How to identify which
particular polluter caused the smog which damaged your lungs and garden?
Is it an individual company? A set of companies? All companies? Or is it
transportation? In which case, is it the specific car which finally
caused your cancer or a specific set of car uses? Or all car users? Or
is it the manufacturers for producing such dangerous products in the
first place?
Needless to say, even this possibility is limited to the current
generation. Pollution afflicts future generations as well and it is
impossible for their interests to be reflected in court for "future
harm" is not the question, only present harm counts. Nor can non-human
species or eco-systems sue for damage, only their owners can and, as
noted above, they may find it more profitable to tolerate (or even
encourage) pollution than sue. Given that non-owners cannot sue as they
are not directly harmed, the fate of the planet will rest in the hands
of the property-owning class and so the majority are effectively
dispossessed of any say over their environment beyond what their money
can buy. Transforming ecological concerns into money ensures a monopoly
by the wealthy few:
"In other words, the environment is assumed to be something that can be
'valued,' in a similar way that everything else is assigned a value
within the market economy.
"However, apart from the fact that there is no way to put an 'objective'
value on most of the elements that constitute the environment (since
they affect a subjective par excellence factor, i.e. the quality of
life), the solution suggested . . . implies the extension of the
marketisation process to the environment itself. In other words, it
implies the assignment of a market value to the environment . . . so
that the effects of growth onto it are 'internalised' . . . The outcome
of such a process is easily predictable: the environment will either be
put under the control of the economic elites that control the market
economy (in case an actual market value be assigned to it) or the state
(in case an imputed value is only possible). In either case, not only
the arrest of the ecological damage is – at least – doubtful, but the
control over Nature by elites who aim to dominate it – using 'green'
prescriptions this time – is perpetuated." [Takis Fotopoulous,
"Development or Democracy?", pp. 57-92, Society and Nature, No. 7, pp.
79-80]
Another key problem with using private property in regard to
environmental issues is that they are almost always reactive, almost
never proactive. Thus the pollution needs to have occurred before court
actions are taken as strict liability generally provides after-the-fact
compensation for injuries received. If someone does successfully sue for
damages, the money received can hardly replace an individual or species
or eco-system. At best, it could be argued that the threat of being sued
will stop environmentally damaging activities but there is little
evidence that this works. If a company concludes that the damages
incurred by court action is less than the potential profits to be made,
then they will tolerate the possibility of court action (particularly if
they feel that potential victims do not have the time or resources
available to sue). This kind of decision was most infamously done by
General Motors when it designed its Malibu car. The company estimated
that the cost of court awarded damages per car was less than ensuring
that the car did not explode during certain kinds of collusion and so
allowed people to die in fuel-fed fires rather than alter the design.
Unfortunately for GM, the jury was horrified (on appeal, the damages
were substantially reduced). [Joel Bakan, The Corporation, pp. 61-5]
So this means that companies seeking to maximise profits have an
incentive to cut safety costs on the assumption that the risk of so
doing will be sufficiently low to make it worthwhile and that any
profits generated will more than cover the costs of any trial and
damages imposed. As eco-anarchist David Watson noted in regards to the
Prudhoe Bay disaster, it "should go without saying that Exxon and its
allies don't try their best to protect the environment or human health.
Capitalist institutions produce to accumulate power and wealth, not for
any social good. Predictably, in order to cut costs, Exxon steadily
dismantled what emergency safeguards it had throughout the 1980s,
pointing to environmental studies showing a major spill as so unlikely
that preparation was unnecessary. So when the inevitable came crashing
down, the response was complete impotence and negligence." [Against the
Megamachine, p. 57] As such, it cannot be stressed too much that the
only reason companies act any different (if and when they do) is because
outside agitators – people who understand and cared about the planet and
people more than they did about company profits – eventually forced them
to.
So given all this, it is clear that privatising nature is no guarantee
that environmental problems will be reduced. In fact, it is more likely
to have the opposite effect. Even its own advocates suggest that their
solution may produce more pollution than the current system of state
regulation. Terry L. Anderson and Donald R. Leal put it this way:
"If markets produce 'too little' clean water because dischargers do not
have to pay for its use, then political solutions are equally likely to
produce 'too much' clean water because those who enjoy the benefits do
not pay the cost . . . Just as pollution externalities can generate too
much dirty air, political externalities can generate too much water
storage, clear-cutting, wilderness, or water quality . . . Free market
environmentalism emphasises the importance of market process in
determining optimal amounts of resource use." [Free Market
Environmentalism, p. 23]
What kind of environmentalism considers the possibility of "too much"
clean air and water? This means, ironically, that from the perspective
of free-market "environmentalism" that certain ecological features may
be over-protected as a result of the influence of non-economic goals and
priorities. Given that this model is proposed by many corporate funded
think tanks, it is more than likely that their sponsors think there is
"too much" clean air and water, "too much" wilderness and "too much"
environmental goods. In other words, the "optimal" level of pollution is
currently too low as it doubtful that corporations are seeking to
increase their costs of production by internalising even more
externalities.
Equally, we can be sure that "too much" pollution "is where the company
polluting the water has to pay too much to clean up the mess they make.
It involves a judgement that costs to the company are somehow synonymous
with costs to the community and therefore can be weighed against
benefits to the community." Such measures "grant the highest
decision-making power over environmental quality to those who currently
make production decisions. A market system gives power to those most
able to pay. Corporations and firms, rather than citizens or
environmentalists, will have the choice about whether to pollute (and
pay the charges or buy credits to do so)." [Sharon Beder, Global Spin,
p. 104]
The surreal notion of "too much" clean environment does indicate another
key problem with this approach, namely its confusion of need and demand
with effective demand. The fact is that people may desire a clean
environment, but they may not be able to afford to pay for it on the
market. In a similar way, there can be "too much" food while people are
starving to death simply because people cannot afford to pay for it
(there is no effective demand for food, but an obvious pressing need).
Much the same can be said of environment goods. A lack of demand for a
resource today does not mean it is not valued by individuals nor does it
mean that it will not be valued in the future. However, in the
short-term focus produced by the market such goods will be long-gone,
replaced by more profitable investments.
The underlying assumption is that a clean environment is a luxury which
we must purchase from property owners rather than a right we have as
human beings. Even if we assume the flawed concept of self-ownership,
the principle upon which defenders of capitalism tend to justify their
system, the principle should be that our ownership rights in our bodies
excludes it being harmed by the actions of others. In other words, a
clean environment should be a basic right for all. Privatising the
environment goes directly against this basic ecological insight.
The state's environmental record has often been terrible, particularly
as its bureaucrats have been influenced by private interest groups when
formulating and implementing environmental policies. The state is far
more likely to be "captured" by capitalist interests than by
environmental groups or even the general community. Moreover, its
bureaucrats have all too often tended to weight the costs and benefits
of specific projects in such a way as to ensure that any really desired
ones will go ahead, regardless of what local people want or what the
environmental impact will really be. Such projects, needless to say,
will almost always have powerful economic interests behind them and will
seek to ensure that "development" which fosters economic growth is
pursued. This should be unsurprising. If we assume, as "market
advocates" do, that state officials seek to further their own interests
then classes with the most economic wealth are most likely to be able to
do that the best. That the state will reflect the interests of those
with most private property and marginalise the property-less should,
therefore, come as no surprise.
Yet the state is not immune to social pressure from the general public
or the reality of environmental degradation. This is proved, in its own
way, by the rise of corporate PR, lobbying and think-tanks into
multi-million pound industries. So while the supporters of the market
stress its ability to change in the face of consumer demand, their view
of the alternatives is extremely static and narrow. They fail,
unsurprisingly, to consider the possibility of alternative forms of
social organisation. Moreover, they also fail to mention that popular
struggles can influence the state by means of direct action. For them,
state officials will always pursue their own private interests,
irrespective of popular pressures and social struggles (or, for that
matter, the impact of corporate lobbying). While it is possible that the
state will favour specific interests and policies, it does not mean that
it cannot be forced to consider wider ones by the general public (until
such time as it can be abolished, of course).
As we discussed in
, the fact the state can be pressured by the general public is precisely
why certain of its secondary functions have been under attack by
corporations and the wealthy (a task which their well-funded think-tanls
provide the rationales for). If all this is the case (and it is), then
why expect cutting out the middle-person by privatising nature to
improve matters? By its own logic, therefore, privatising nature is
hardly going to produce a better environment as it is unlikely that
corporations would fund policies which would result in more costs for
themselves and less access to valuable natural resources. As free market
environmentalism is premised on economic solutions to ecological
problems and assumes that economic agents will act in ways which
maximise their own benefit, such an obvious conclusion should come
naturally to its advocates. For some reason, it does not.
Ultimately, privatising nature rests on the ridiculous notion that a
clean environment is a privilege which we must buy rather than a right.
Under "free market environmentalism" private property is assumed to be
the fundamental right while there is no right to a clean and sustainable
environment. In other words, the interests of property owners are
considered the most important factor and the rest of us are left with
the possibility of asking them for certain environmental goods which
they may supply if they make a profit from so doing. This prioritisation
and categorisation is by no means obvious and uncontroversial. Surely
the right to a clean and liveable environment is more fundamental than
those associated with property? If we assume this then the reduction of
pollution, soil erosion, and so forth are not goods for which we must
pay but rather rights to which we are entitled. In other words,
protecting species and ecosystem as well as preventing avoidable deaths
and illnesses are fundamental issues which simply transcend the market.
Being asked to put a price on nature and people is, at best,
meaningless, or, at worse, degrading. It suggests that the person simply
does not understand why these things are important.
But why should we be surprised? After all, private property bases itself
on the notion that we must buy access to land and other resources
required for a fully human life. Why should a clean environment and a
healthy body be any different? Yet again, we see the derived rights
(namely private property) trumping the fundamental base right (namely
the right of self-ownership which should automatically exclude harm by
pollution). That this happens so consistently should not come as too
great a surprise, given that the theory was invented to justify the
appropriation of the fruits of the worker's labour by the property owner
(see
). Why should we be surprised that this is now being used to appropriate
the rights of individuals to a clean environment and turn it into yet
another means of expropriating them from their birthrights?
So far in this section we have discussed why markets fail to allocate
environmental resources. This is due to information blocks and costs,
lack of fully internalised prices (externalities) and the existence of
public goods. Individual choices are shaped by the information available
to them about the consequences of their actions, and the price mechanism
blocks essential aspects of this and so information is usually partial
at best within the market. Worse, it is usually distorted by advertising
and the media as well as corporate and government spin and PR. Local
knowledge is undermined by market power, leading to unsustainable
practices to reap maximum short term profits. Profits as the only
decision making criteria also leads to environmental destruction as
something which may be ecologically essential may not be economically
viable. All this means that the price of a good cannot indicate its
environmental impact and so that market failure is pervasive in the
environmental area. Moreover, capitalism is as unlikely to produce their
fair distribution of environmental goods any more than any other good or
resource due to differences in income and so demand (particularly as it
takes the existing distribution of wealth as the starting point). The
reality of our environmental problems provides ample evidence for this
analysis.
During this discussion we have touched upon another key issue, namely
how wealth can affect how environmental and other externalities are
produced and dealt with in a capitalist system. Here we extend our
critique by addressed an issue we have deliberately ignored until now,
namely the distribution and wealth and its resulting economic power. The
importance of this factor cannot be stressed too much, as "market
advocates" at best downplay it or, at worse, ignore it or deny it
exists. However, it plays the same role in environmental matters as it
does in, say, evaluating individual freedom within capitalism. Once we
factor in economic power the obvious conclusion is the market based
solutions to the environment will result in, as with freedom, people
selling it simply to survive under capitalism (as we discussed in
, for example).
It could be argued that strictly enforcing property rights so that
polluters can be sued for any damages made will solve the problem of
externalities. If someone suffered pollution damage on their property
which they had not consented to then they could issue a lawsuit in order
to get the polluter to pay compensation for the damage they have done.
This could force polluters to internalise the costs of pollution and so
the threat of lawsuits can be used as an incentive to avoid polluting
others.
While this approach could be considered as part of any solution to
environmental problems under capitalism, the sad fact is it ignores the
realities of the capitalist economy. The key phrase here is "not
consented to" as it means that pollution would be fine if the others
agree to it (in return, say, for money). This has obvious implications
for the ability of capitalism to reduce pollution. For just as working
class people "consent" to hierarchy within the workplace in return for
access to the means of life, so to would they "consent" to pollution. In
other words, the notion that pollution can be stopped by means of
private property and lawsuits ignores the issue of class and economic
inequality. Once these are factored in, it soon becomes clear that
people may put up with externalities imposed upon them simply because of
economic necessity and the pressure big business can inflict.
The first area to discuss is inequalities in wealth and income. Not all
economic actors have equal resources. Corporations and the wealthy have
far greater resources at their disposal and can spend millions of pounds
in producing PR and advertising (propaganda), fighting court cases,
influencing the political process, funding "experts" and think-tanks,
and, if need be, fighting strikes and protests. Companies can use "a mix
of cover-up, publicity campaigns and legal manoeuvres to continue
operations unimpeded." They can go to court to try an "block more
stringent pollution controls." [David Watson, Against the Megamachine,
p. 56] Also while, in principle, the legal system offers equal
protection to all in reality, wealthy firms and individuals have more
resources than members of the general public. This means that they can
employ large numbers of lawyers and draw out litigation procedures for
years, if not decades.
This can be seen around us today. Unsurprisingly, the groups which bear
a disproportionate share of environmental burdens are the poorest ones.
Those at the bottom of the social hierarchy have less resources
available to fight for their rights. They may not be aware of their
rights in specific situations and not organised enough to resist. This,
of course, explains why companies spend so much time attacking unions
and other forms of collective organisation which change that situation.
Moreover as well as being less willing to sue, those on lower income may
be more willing to be bought-off due to their economic situation. After
all, tolerating pollution in return for some money is more tempting when
you are struggling to make ends meet.
Then there is the issue of effective demand. Simply put, allocation of
resources on the market is based on money and not need. If more money
can be made in, say, meeting the consumption demands of the west rather
than the needs of local people then the market will "efficiently"
allocate resources away from the latter to the former regardless of the
social and ecological impact. Take the example of Biofuels which have
been presented by some as a means of fuelling cars in a less
environmentally destructive way. Yet this brings people and cars into
direct competition over the most "efficient" (i.e. most profitable) use
of land. Unfortunately, effective demand is on the side of cars as their
owners usually live in the developed countries. This leads to a
situation where land is turned from producing food to producing
biofuels, the net effect of which is to reduce supply of food, increase
its price and so produce an increased likelihood of starvation. It also
gives more economic incentive to destroy rainforests and other fragile
eco-systems in order to produce more biofuel for the market.
Green socialist John O'Neill simply states the obvious:
"[The] treatment of efficiency as if it were logically independent of
distribution is at best misleading, for the determination of efficiency
already presupposes a given distribution of rights . . . [A specific
outcome] is always relative to an initial starting point . . . If
property rights are changed so also is what is efficient. Hence, the
opposition between distributional and efficiency criteria is misleading.
Existing costs and benefits themselves are the product of a given
distribution of property rights. Since costs are not independent of
rights they cannot guide the allocation of rights. Different initial
distributions entail differences in whose preferences are to count.
Environmental conflicts are often about who has rights to environment
goods, and hence who is to bear the costs and who is to bear the
benefits . . . Hence, environmental policy and resource decision-making
cannot avoid making normative choices which include questions of
resource distribution and the relationships between conflicting rights
claims . . . The monetary value of a 'negative externality' depends on
social institutions and distributional conflicts – willing to pay
measures, actual or hypothetical, consider preferences of the higher
income groups [as] more important than those of lower ones. If the
people damaged are poor, the monetary measure of the cost of damage will
be lower – 'the poor sell cheap.'" [Markets, Deliberation and
Environment, pp. 58-9]
Economic power also impacts on the types of contracts people make. It
does not take too much imagination to envision the possibility that
companies may make signing waivers that release it from liability a
condition for working there. This could mean, for example, a firm would
invest (or threaten to move production) only on condition that the local
community and its workers sign a form waiving the firm of any
responsibility for damages that may result from working there or from
its production process. In the face of economic necessity, the workers
may be desperate enough to take the jobs and sign the waivers. The same
would be the case for local communities, who tolerate the environmental
destruction they are subjected to simply to ensure that their economy
remains viable. This already happens, with some companies including a
clause in their contracts which states the employee cannot join a union.
Then there is the threat of legal action by companies. "Every year,"
records green Sharon Beder, "thousands of Americans are sued for
speaking out against governments and corporations. Multi-million dollar
law suits are being filed against individual citizens and groups for
circulating petitions, writing to public officials, speaking at, or even
just attending, public meetings, organising a boycott and engaging in
peaceful demonstrations." This trend has spread to other countries and
the intent is the same: to silence opposition and undermine campaigns.
This tactic is called a SLAPP (for "Strategic Lawsuits Against Public
Participation") and is a civil court action which does not seek to win
compensation but rather aims "to harass, intimidate and distract their
opponents . . . They win the political battle, even when they lose the
court case, if their victims and those associated with them stop
speaking out against them." This is an example of economic power at
work, for the cost to a firm is just part of doing business but could
bankrupt an individual or environmental organisation. In this way "the
legal system best serves those who have large financial resources at
their disposal" as such cases take "an average of three years to be
settled, and even if the person sued wins, can cost tens of thousands of
dollars in legal fees. Emotional stress, disillusionment, diversion of
time and energy, and even divisions within families, communities and
groups can also result." [Global Spin, pp. 63-7]
A SLAPP usually deters those already involved from continuing to freely
participate in debate and protest as well as deterring others from
joining in. The threat of a court case in the face of economic power
usually ensures that SLAPPS do not go to trial and so its objective of
scaring off potential opponents usually works quickly. The reason can be
seen from the one case in which a SLAPP backfired, namely the McLibel
trial. After successfully forcing apologies from major UK media outlets
like the BBC, Channel 4 and the Guardian by threatening legal action for
critical reporting of the company, McDonald's turned its attention to
the small eco-anarchist group London Greenpeace (which is not affiliated
with Greenpeace International). This group had produced a leaflet called
"What's Wrong with McDonald's" and the company sent spies to its
meetings to identify people to sue. Two of the anarchists refused to be
intimidated and called McDonald's bluff. Representing themselves in
court, the two unemployed activists started the longest trial in UK
history. After three years and a cost of around £10 million, the trial
judge found that some of the claims were untrue (significantly,
McDonald's had successfully petitioned the judge not to have a jury for
the case, arguing that the issues were too complex for the public to
understand). While the case was a public relations disaster for the
company, McDonald's keeps going as before using the working practices
exposed in the trial and remains one of the world's largest corporations
confident that few people would have the time and resources to fight
SLAPPs (although the corporation may now think twice before suing
anarchists!).
Furthermore, companies are known to gather lists of known
"trouble-makers" These "black lists" of people who could cause companies
"trouble" (i.e., by union organising or suing employers over "property
rights" issues) would often ensure employee "loyalty," particularly if
new jobs need references. Under wage labour, causing one's employer
"problems" can make one's current and future position difficult. Being
black-listed would mean no job, no wages, and little chance of being
re-employed. This would be the result of continually suing in defence of
one's property rights – assuming, of course, that one had the time and
money necessary to sue in the first place. Hence working-class people
are a weak position to defend their rights under capitalism due to the
power of employers both within and without the workplace. All these are
strong incentives not to rock the boat, particularly if employees have
signed a contract ensuring that they will be fired if they discuss
company business with others (lawyers, unions, media, etc.).
Economic power producing terrible contracts does not affect just labour,
it also effects smaller capitalists as well. As we discussed in
, rather than operating "efficiently" to allocate resources within
perfect competition any real capitalist market is dominated by a small
group of big companies who make increased profits at the expense of
their smaller rivals. This is achieved, in part, because their size
gives such firms significant influence in the market, forcing smaller
companies out of business or into making concessions to get and maintain
contracts.
The negative environmental impact of such a process should be obvious.
For example, economic power places immense pressures towards monoculture
in agriculture. In the UK the market is dominated by a few big
supermarkets. Their suppliers are expected to produce fruits and
vegetables which meet the requirements of the supermarkets in terms of
standardised products which are easy to transport and store. The
large-scale nature of the operations ensure that farmers across Britain
(indeed, the world) have to turn their farms into suppliers of these
standardised goods and so the natural diversity of nature is
systematically replaced by a few strains of specific fruits and
vegetables over which the consumer can pick. Monopolisation of markets
results in the monoculture of nature.
This process is at work in all capitalist nations. In American, for
example, the "centralised purchasing decisions of the large restaurant
chains and their demand for standardised products have given a handful
of corporations an unprecedented degree of power over the nation's food
supply . . . obliterating regional differences, and spreading identical
stores throughout the country . . . The key to a successful franchise .
. . can be expressed in one world: 'uniformity.'" This has resulted in
the industrialisation of food production, with the "fast food chains now
stand[ing] atop a huge food-industrial complex that has gained control
of American agriculture . . . large multinationals . . . dominate one
commodity market after another . . . The fast food chain's vast
purchasing power and their demand for a uniform product have encouraged
fundamental changes in how cattle are raised, slaughter, and processed
into ground beef. These changes have made meatpacking . . . into the
most dangerous job in the United States . . . And the same meat industry
practices that endanger these workers have facilitated the introduction
of deadly pathogens . . . into America's hamburger meat." [Eric
Schlosser, Fast Food Nation, p. 5 and pp. 8-9]
Award winning journalist Eric Schlosser has presented an excellent
insight in this centralised and concentrated food-industrial complex in
his book Fast Food Nation. Schlosser, of course, is not alone in
documenting the fundamentally anti-ecological nature of the capitalism
and how an alienated society has created an alienated means of feeding
itself. As a non-anarchist, he does fail to drawn the obvious conclusion
(namely abolish capitalism) but his book does present a good overview of
the nature of the processed at work and what drives them. Capitalism has
created a world where even the smell and taste of food is mass produced
as the industrialisation of agriculture and food processing has lead to
the product (it is hard to call it food) becoming bland and tasteless
and so chemicals are used to counteract the effects of producing it on
such a scale. It is standardised food for a standardised society. As he
memorably notes: "Millions of . . . people at that very moment were
standing at the same counter, ordering the same food from the same menu,
food that tasted everywhere the same." The Orwellian world of modern
corporate capitalism is seen in all its glory. A world in which the
industry group formed to combat Occupational Safety and Health
Administration regulation is called "Alliance for Workplace Safety" and
where the processed food's taste has to have the correct "mouthfeel."
Unsurprisingly, the executives of these companies talk about "the very
essence of freedom" and yet their corporation's "first commandant is
that only production counts . . . The employee's duty is to follow
orders. Period." In this irrational world, technology will solve all our
problems, even the ones it generates itself. For example, faced with the
serious health problems generated by the industrialisation of meat
processing, the meatpacking industry advocated yet more technology to
"solve" the problems caused by the existing technology. Rather than
focusing on the primary causes of meat contamination, they proposed
irradiating food. Of course the firms involved want to replace the word
"irradiation" with the phrase "cold pasteurisation" due to the public
being unhappy with the idea of their food being subject to radiation.
All this is achievable due to the economic power of fewer and fewer
firms imposing costs onto their workers, their customers and,
ultimately, the planet.
The next obvious factor associated with economic power are the pressures
associated with capital markets and mobility. Investors and capitalists
are always seeking the maximum return and given a choice between lower
profits due to greater environmental regulation and higher profits due
to no such laws, the preferred option will hardly need explaining. After
all, the investor is usually concerned with the returns they get in
their investment, not in its physical condition nor in the overall
environmental state of the planet (which is someone else's concern).
This means that investors and companies interest is in moving their
capital to areas which return most money, not which have the best
environmental impact and legacy. Thus the mobility of capital has to be
taken into account. This is an important weapon in ensuring that the
agenda of business is untroubled by social concerns and environmental
issues. After all, if the owners and managers of capital consider that a
state's environmental laws too restrictive then it can simply shift
investments to states with a more favourable business climate. This
creates significant pressures on communities to minimise environmental
protection both in order to retain existing business and attract new
ones.
Let us assume that a company is polluting a local area. It is usually
the case that capitalist owners rarely live near the workplaces they
own, unlike workers and their families. This means that the decision
makers do not have to live with the consequences of their decisions. The
"free market" capitalist argument would be, again, that those affected
by the pollution would sue the company. We will assume that
concentrations of wealth have little or no effect on the social system
(which is a highly unlikely assumption, but never mind). Surely, if
local people did successfully sue, the company would be harmed
economically – directly, in terms of the cost of the judgement,
indirectly in terms of having to implement new, eco-friendly processes.
Hence the company would be handicapped in competition, and this would
have obvious consequences for the local (and wider) economy.
This gives the company an incentive to simply move to an area that would
tolerate the pollution if it were sued or even threatened with a
lawsuit. Not only would existing capital move, but fresh capital would
not invest in an area where people stand up for their rights. This – the
natural result of economic power – would be a "big stick" over the heads
of the local community. And when combined with the costs and
difficulties in taking a large company to court, it would make suing an
unlikely option for most people. That such a result would occur can be
inferred from history, where we see that multinational firms have moved
production to countries with little or no pollution laws and that court
cases take years, if not decades, to process.
This is the current situation on the international market, where there
is competition in terms of environment laws. Unsurprisingly, industry
tends to move to countries which tolerate high levels of pollution
(usually because of authoritarian governments which, like the
capitalists themselves, simply ignore the wishes of the general
population). Thus we have a market in pollution laws which,
unsurprisingly, supplies the ability to pollute to meet the demand for
it. This means that developing countries "are nothing but a dumping
ground and pool of cheap labour for capitalist corporations. Obsolete
technology is shipped there along with the production of chemicals,
medicines and other products banned in the developed world. Labour is
cheap, there are few if any safety standards, and costs are cut. But the
formula of cost-benefit still stands: the costs are simply borne by
others, by the victims of Union Carbide, Dow, and Standard Oil." [David
Watson, Op. Cit., p. 44] This, it should be noted, makes perfect
economic sense. If an accident happened and the poor actually manage to
successfully sue the company, any payments will reflect their lost of
earnings (i.e., not very much).
As such, there are other strong economic reasons for doing this kind of
pollution exporting. You can estimate the value of production lost
because of ecological damage and the value of earnings lost through its
related health problems as well as health care costs. This makes it more
likely that polluting industries will move to low-income areas or
countries where the costs of pollution are correspondingly less
(particularly compared to the profits made in selling the products in
high-income areas). Rising incomes makes such goods as safety, health
and the environment more valuable as the value of life is, for working
people, based on their wages. Therefore, we would expect pollution to be
valued less when working class people are affected by it. In other
words, toxic dumps will tend to cluster around poorer areas as the costs
of paying for the harm done will be much less. The same logic underlies
the arguments of those who suggest that Third World countries should be
dumping grounds for toxic industrial wastes since life is cheap there
This was seen in early 1992 when a memo that went out under the name of
the then chief economist of the World Bank, Lawrence Summers, was leaked
to the press. Discussing the issue of "dirty" Industries, the memo
argued that the World Bank should "be encouraging MORE migration of the
dirty industries" to Less Developed Countries and provided three
reasons. Firstly, the "measurements of the costs of health impairing
pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and
mortality" and so "pollution should be done in the country with the
lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages." Secondly,
"that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted,
their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los
Angeles or Mexico City." Thirdly, the "demand for a clean environment
for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income
elasticity." Concern over pollution related illness would be higher in a
country where more children survive to get them. "Also, much of the
concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility
impairing particulates . . . Clearly trade in goods that embody
aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While
production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable."
The memo notes "the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste
in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that"
and ends by stating that the "problem with the arguments against all of
these proposals for more pollution" in the third world "could be turned
around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for
liberalisation." [The Economist, 08/02/1992]
While Summers accepted the criticism for the memo, it was actually
written by Lant Pritchett, a prominent economist at the Bank. Summers
claimed he was being ironic and provocative. The Economist,
unsurprisingly, stated "his economics was hard to answer" while
criticising the language used. This was because clean growth may slower
than allowing pollution to occur and this would stop "helping millions
of people in the third world to escape their poverty." [15/02/1992] So
not only is poisoning the poor with pollution is economically correct,
it is in fact required by morality. Ignoring the false assumption that
growth, any kind of growth, always benefits the poor and the utter
contempt shown for both those poor themselves and our environment what
we have here is the cold logic that drives economic power to move
location to maintain its right to pollute our common environment.
Economically, it is perfectly logical but, in fact, totally insane (this
helps explain why making people "think like an economist" takes so many
years of indoctrination within university walls and why so few achieve
it).
Economic power works in other ways as well. A classic example of this at
work can be seen from the systematic destruction of public transport
systems in America from the 1930s onwards (see David St. Clair's The
Motorization of American Cities for a well-researched account of this).
These systems were deliberately bought by automotive (General Motors),
oil, and tire corporations in order to eliminate a less costly (both
economically and ecologically) competitor to the automobile. This was
done purely to maximise sales and profits for the companies involved yet
it transformed the way of life in scores of cities across America. It is
doubtful that if environmental concerns had been considered important at
the time that they would have stopped this from happening. This means
that individual consumption decisions will be made within an market
whose options can be limited simply by a large company buying out and
destroying alternatives.
Then there is the issue of economic power in the media. This is well
understood by corporations, who fund PR, think-tanks and "experts" to
counteract environmental activism and deny, for example, that humans are
contributing to global warming. Thus we have the strange position that
only Americans think that there is a debate on the causes of global
warming rather than a scientific consensus. The actions of corporate
funded "experts" and PR have ensured that particular outcome. As Sharon
Beder recounts in her book Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on
Environmentalism, a large amount of money is being spent on number
sophisticated techniques to change the way people think about the
environment, what causes the problems we face and what we can and should
do about it. Compared to the resources of environmental and green
organisations, it is unsurprising that this elaborate multi-billion
pound industry has poisoned public debate on such a key issue for the
future of humanity by propaganda and dis-information.
Having substantial resources available means that the media can be used
to further an anti-green agenda and dominate the debate (at least for a
while). Take, as an example, The Skeptical Environmentalist, a book by
Bjørn Lomborg (a political scientist and professor of statistics at the
University of Aarhus in Denmark). When it was published in 2001, it
caused a sensation with its claims that scientists and environmental
organisations were making, at best, exaggerated and, at worse, false
claims about the world's environmental problems. His conclusion was
panglossian in nature, namely that there was not that much to worry
about and we can continue as we are. That, of course, was music to the
ears of those actively destroying the environment as it reduces the
likelihood that any attempt will be made to stop them.
Unsurprisingly, the book was heavily promoted by the usual suspects and,
as a result received significant attention from the media. However, the
extremely critical reviews and critiques it subsequently produced from
expert scientists on the issues Lomborg discussed were less prominently
reviewed in the media, if at all. That critics of the book argued that
it was hardly an example of good science based on objectivity,
understanding of the underlying concepts, appropriate statistical
methods and careful peer review goes without saying. Sadly, the fact
that numerous experts in the fields Lomborg discussed showed that his
book was seriously flawed, misused data and statistics and marred by
flawed logic and hidden value judgements was not given anything like the
same coverage even though this information is far more important in
terms of shaping public perception. Such works and their orchestrated
media blitz provides those with a vested interest in the status quo with
arguments that they should be allowed to continue their
anti-environmental activities and agenda. Moreover, it takes up the
valuable time of those experts who have to debunk the claims rather than
do the research needed to understand the ecological problems we face and
propose possible solutions.
As well as spin and propaganda aimed at adults, companies are
increasingly funding children's education. This development implies
obvious limitations on the power of education to solve ecological
problems. Companies will hardly provide teaching materials or fund
schools which educate their pupils on the real causes of ecological
problems. Unsurprisingly, a 1998 study in the US by the Consumers Union
found that 80% of teaching material provided by companies was biased and
provided students with incomplete or slanted information that favoured
its sponsor's products and views [Schlosser, Op. Cit., p. 55] The more
dependent a school is on corporate funds, the less likely it will be to
teach its students the necessity to question the motivations and
activities of business. That business will not fund education which it
perceives as anti-business should go without saying. As Sharon Beder
summarises, "the infiltration of school curricula through banning some
texts and offering corporate-based curriculum material and lesson plans
in their place can conflict with educational objectives, and also with
the attainment of an undistorted understanding of environmental
problems." [Op. Cit., pp. 172-3]
This indicates the real problem of purely "educational" approaches to
solving the ecological crisis, namely that the ruling elite controls
education (either directly or indirectly). This is to be expected, as
any capitalist elite must control education because it is an essential
indoctrination tool needed to promote capitalist values and to train a
large population of future wage-slaves in the proper habits of obedience
to authority. Thus capitalists cannot afford to lose control of the
educational system. And this means that such schools will not teach
students what is really necessary to avoid ecological disaster: namely
the dismantling of capitalism itself. And we may add, alternative
schools (organised by libertarian unions and other associations) which
used libertarian education to produce anarchists would hardly be
favoured by companies and so be effectively black-listed - a real
deterrent to their spreading through society. Why would a capitalist
company employ a graduate of a school who would make trouble for them
once employed as their wage slave?
Finally, needless to say, the combined wealth of corporations and the
rich outweighs that of even the best funded environmental group or
organisation (or even all of them put together). This means that the
idea of such groups buying, say, rainforest is unlikely to succeed as
they simply do not have the resources needed – they will be outbid by
those who wish to develop wilderness regions. This is particularly the
case once we accept the framework of economic self-interest assumed by
market theory. This implies that organisations aiming to increase the
income of individual's will be better funded than those whose aim is to
preserve the environment for future generations. As recent developments
show, companies can and do use that superior resources to wage a war for
hearts and minds in all aspects of society, staring in the schoolroom.
Luckily no amount of spin can nullify reality or the spirit of freedom
and so this propaganda war will continue as long as capitalism does.
In summary, market solutions to environmental problems under capitalism
will always suffer from the fact that real markets are marked by
economic inequalities and power.
the ecological crisis?
No a word, no. This is another key problem associated with capitalism's
ability to deal with the ecological crisis it helps create. Due to the
nature of the market, firms are forced to focus on short-term
profitability rather than long-term survival. This makes sense. If a
company does not make money now, it will not be around later.
This, obviously, drives the creation of "externalities" discussed in
previous sections. Harmful environmental effects such as pollution,
global warming, ozone depletion, and destruction of wildlife habitat are
not counted as "costs of production" in standard methods of accounting
because they are borne by everyone in the society. This gives companies
a strong incentive to ignore such costs as competition forces firms to
cut as many costs as possible in order to boost short-term profits.
To give an obvious example, if a firm has to decide between installing a
piece of costly equipment which reduces its pollution and continuing as
it currently is, then it is more likely to do the latter. If the firm
does invest then its costs are increased and it will lose its
competitive edge compared to its rivals who do not make a similar
investment. The "rational" decision is, therefore, not to invest,
particularly if by externalising costs it can increase its profits or
market share by cutting prices. In other words, the market rewards the
polluters and this is a powerful incentive to maximise such activities.
The market, in other words, provides incentives to firms to produce
externalities as part their drive for short-term profitability. While
this is rational from the firm's position, it is collectively irrational
as the planet's ecology is harmed.
The short-term perspective can also be seen by the tendency of firms to
under-invest in developing risky new technologies. This is because basic
research which may take years, if not decades, to develop and most
companies are unwilling to take on that burden. Unsurprisingly, most
advanced capitalist countries see such work funded by the state (as we
noted in
, over 50% of total R&D funding has been provided by the federal state
in the USA). Moreover, the state has provided markets for such products
until such time as markets have appeared for them in the commercial
sector. Thus capitalism, by itself, will tend to under-invest in long
term projects:
"in a competitive system you do short-term planning only . . . Let's
take corporate managers, where there's no real confusion about what
they're doing. They are maximising profit and market share in the short
term. In fact, if they were not to do that, they would no longer exist.
Let's be concrete. Suppose that some automobile company, say General
Motors, decides to devote their resources to planning for something that
will be profitable ten years from now. Suppose that's where they divert
their resources: they want to think in some long-term conception of
market dominance. Their rivals are going to maximising profit and power
in the short term, and they're going to take over the market, and
General Motors won't be in business. That's true for the owners and also
for the managers. The managers want to stay managers. They can fight off
hostile take-over bids, they can keep from being replaced, as long as
they contribute to short-term profitability. As a result, long-term
considerations are rarely considered in competitive systems." [Noam
Chomsky, Language and Politics, p. 598]
This does not mean that firms will not look into future products nor do
research and development. Many do (particularly if helped by the state).
Nor does it imply that some industries do not have a longer-term
perspective. It simply shows that such activity is not the normal state
of affairs. Moreover, any such "long-term" perspective is rarely more
than a decade while an ecological perspective demands much more than
this. This also applies to agriculture, which is increasingly being
turned into agribusiness as small farmers are being driven out of
business. Short-termism means that progress in agriculture is whatever
increases the current yield of a crop even if means destroying the
sources of fertility in the long run in order to maintain current
fertility by adding more and more chemicals (which run off into rivers,
seep into the water table and end up in the food itself.
This kind of irrational short-term behaviour also afflicts capital
markets as well. The process works in the same way Chomsky highlights.
Suppose there are 3 companies, X, Y, and Z and suppose that company X
invests in the project of developing a non-polluting technology within
ten years. At the same time its competitors, Y and Z, will be putting
their resources into increasing profits and market share in the coming
days and months and over the next year. During that period, company X
will be unable to attract enough capital from investors to carry out its
plans, since investors will flock to the companies that are most
immediately profitable. This means that the default position under
capitalism is that the company (or country) with the lowest standards
enjoys a competitive advantage, and drags down the standards of other
companies (or countries). Sometimes, though, capital markets experience
irrational bubbles. During the dot.com boom of the 1990s, investors did
plough money into internet start-ups and losses were tolerated for a few
years in the expectation of high profits in the near future. When that
did not happen, the stock market crashed and investors turned away from
that market in droves. If something similar happened to
eco-technologies, the subsequent aftermath may mean that funding
essential for redressing our interaction with the environment would not
be forthcoming until the memories of the crash had disappeared in the
next bubble frenzy.
Besides, thanks to compound interest benefits far in the future have a
very small present value. If $1 were left in a bank at 5% annual
interest, it would be worth more than $2 million after 300 years. So if
it costs $1 today to prevent ecological damage worth $2 million in the
24th century then economic theory argues that our descendants would be
better off with us putting that $1 in the bank. This would suggest that
basing our responsibility to future generations on economics may not be
the wisest course.
The supporter of capitalism may respond by arguing that business leaders
are as able to see long-term negative environmental effects as the rest
of us. But this is to misunderstand the nature of the objection. It is
not that business leaders as individuals are any less able to see what's
happening to the environment. It is that if they want to keep their jobs
they have to do what the system requires, which is to concentrate on
what is most profitable in the short term. Thus if the president of
company X has a mystical experience of oneness with nature and starts
diverting profits into pollution control while the presidents of Y and Z
continue with business as usual, the stockholders of company X will get
a new president who is willing to focus on short-term profits like Y and
Z. As Joel Bakan stresses, managers of corporations "have a legal duty
to put shareholders' interests above all others . . . Corporate social
responsibility is thus illegal – at least when it is genuine." Ones
which "choose social and environmental goals over profits – who try and
act morally – are, in fact, immoral" as their role in both the economy
and economic ideology is to "make much as much money as possible for
shareholders." [The Corporation, pp. 36-7 and p. 34]
In general, then, if one company tries to devote resources to develop
products or processes that are ecologically responsible, they will
simply be undercut by other companies which are not doing so (assuming
such products or processes are more expensive, as they generally are as
the costs are not inflicted on other people and the planet). While some
products may survive in small niche markets which reflect the fact that
many people are willing and able to pay more to protect their world, in
general they will not be competitive in the market and so the
ecologically damaging products will have the advantage. In other words,
capitalism has a built-in bias toward short-term gain, and this bias –
along with its inherent need for growth – means the planet will continue
its free-fall toward ecological disaster so long as capitalism exists.
This suggests that attempts to address ecological problems like
pollution and depletion of resources by calling for public education are
unlikely to work. While it is true that this will raise people's
awareness to the point of creating enough demand for
environment-friendly technologies and products that they will be
profitable to produce, it does not solve the problem that the costs
involved in doing such research now cannot be met by a possible future
demand. Moreover, the costs of such technology can initially be quite
high and so the effective demand for such products may not be
sufficient. For example, energy-saving light bulbs have been around for
some time but have been far more expensive that traditional ones. This
means that for those on lower-incomes who would, in theory, benefit most
from lower-energy bills cannot afford them. Thus their short-term income
constrains undermine long-term benefits.
Even if the research is completed, the market itself can stop products
being used. For example, the ability to produce reasonably inexpensive
solar photovoltaic power cells has existed for some time. The problem is
that they are currently very expensive and so there is a limited demand
for them. This means that no capitalist wants to risk investing in
factory large enough to take advantage of the economies of scale
possible. The net effect is that short-term considerations ensure that a
viable eco-technology has been margainalised.
This means that no amount of education can countermand the effects of
market forces and the short-term perspective they inflict on us all. If
faced with a tight budget and relatively expensive "ecological" products
and technology, consumers and companies may be forced to choose the
cheaper, ecologically unfriendly product to make ends meet or survive in
the market. Under capitalism, we may be free to choose, but the options
are usually lousy choices, and not the only ones potentially available
in theory (this is a key problem with green consumerism – see
).
The short-termism of capitalism has produced, in effect, a system which
is "a massive pyramid scheme that will collapse somewhere down the line
when all the major players have already retired from the game. Of course
when the last of these hustlers cash in their chips, there won't be any
place left to retire to." [David Watson, Op. Cit., p. 57]
In a word, no. Here we explain why using as our example the arguments of
a leading right-"libertarian."
As discussed in the
, there is plenty of reason to doubt the claim that private property is
the best means available to protect the environment. Even in its own
terms, it does not do so and this is compounded once we factor in
aspects of any real capitalist system which are habitually ignored by
supporters of that system (most obviously, economic power derived from
inequalities of wealth and income). Rather than the problem being too
little private property, our environmental problems have their source
not in a failure to apply market principles rigorously enough, but in
their very spread into more and more aspects of our lives and across the
world.
That capitalism simply cannot have an ecological nature can be seen from
the work of right-"libertarian" Murray Rothbard, an advocate of extreme
laissez-faire capitalism. His position is similar to that of other free
market environmentalists. As pollution can be considered as an
infringement of the property rights of the person being polluted then
the solution is obvious. Enforce "absolute" property rights and end
pollution by suing anyone imposing externalities on others. According to
this perspective, only absolute private property (i.e. a system of
laissez-faire capitalism) can protect the environment.
This viewpoint is pretty much confined to the right-"libertarian"
defenders of capitalism and those influenced by them. However, given the
tendency of capitalists to appropriate right-"libertarian" ideas to
bolster their power much of Rothbard's assumptions and arguments have a
wider impact and, as such, it is useful to discuss them and their
limitations. The latter is made extremely easy as Rothbard himself has
indicated why capitalism and the environment simply do not go together.
While paying lip-service to environmental notions, his ideas (both in
theory and in practice) are inherently anti-green and his solutions, as
he admitted himself, unlikely to achieve their (limited) goals.
Rothbard's argument seems straight forward enough and, in theory,
promises the end of pollution. Given the problems of externalities, of
companies polluting our air and water resources, he argued that their
root lie not in capitalist greed, private property or the market
rewarding anti-social behaviour but by the government refusing to
protect the rights of private property. The remedy is simple: privatise
everything and so owners of private property would issue injunctions and
pollution would automatically stop. For example, if there were
"absolute" private property rights in rivers and seas their owners would
not permit their pollution:
"if private firms were able to own the rivers and lakes . . . then
anyone dumping garbage . . . would promptly be sued in the courts for
their aggression against private property and would be forced by the
courts to pay damages and to cease and desist from any further
aggression. Thus, only private property rights will insure an end to
pollution-invasion of resources. Only because rivers are unowned is
there no owner to rise up and defend his precious resource from attack."
[For a New Liberty, p. 255]
The same applies to air pollution:
"The remedy against air pollution is therefore crystal clear . . . The
remedy is simply for the courts to return to their function of defending
person and property rights against invasion, and therefore to enjoin
anyone from injecting pollutants into the air . . . The argument against
such an injunctive prohibition against pollution that it would add to
the costs of industrial production is as reprehensible as the pre-Civil
War argument that the abolition of slavery would add to the costs of
growing cotton, and therefore abolition, however morally correct, was
'impractical.' For this means that the polluters are able to impose all
of the high costs of pollution upon those whose lungs and property
rights they have been allowed to invade with impunity." [Op. Cit., p.
259]
This is a valid point. Regulating or creating markets for emissions
means that governments tolerate pollution and so allows capitalists to
impose its often high costs onto others. The problem is that Rothbard's
solution cannot achieve this goal as it ignores economic power.
Moreover, this argument implies that the consistent and intellectually
honest right-"libertarian" would support a zero-emissions environmental
policy. However, as we discuss in the
, Rothbard (like most right-"libertarians") turned to various legalisms
like "provable harm" and ideological constructs to ensure that this
policy would not be implemented. In fact, he argued extensively on how
polluters could impose costs on other people under his system. First,
however, we need to discuss the limitations of his position before
discussing how he later reprehensibly refuted his own arguments. Then in
we will indicate how his own theory cannot support the privatisation of
water or the air nor the preservation of wilderness areas. Needless to
say, much of the critique presented in
is also applicable here and so we will summarise the key issues in order
to reduce repetition.
As regards the issue of privatising natural resources like rivers, the
most obvious issue is that Rothbard ignores one major point: why would
the private owner be interested in keeping it clean? What if the rubbish
dumper is the corporation that owns the property? Why not just assume
that the company can make more money turning the lakes and rivers into
dumping sites, or trees into junk mail? This scenario is no less
plausible. In fact, it is more likely to happen in many cases as there
is a demand for such dumps by wealthy corporations who would be willing
to pay for the privilege.
So to claim that capitalism will protect the environment is just another
example of free market capitalists trying to give the reader what he or
she wants to hear. In practice, the idea that extending property rights
to rivers, lakes and so forth (if possible) will stop ecological
destruction all depends on the assumptions used. Thus, for example, if
it is assumed that ecotourism will produce more income from a wetland
than draining it for cash crops, then, obviously, the wetlands are
saved. If the opposite assumption is made, the wetlands are destroyed.
But, of course, the supporter of capitalism will jump in and say that if
dumping were allowed, this would cause pollution, which would affect
others who would then sue the owner in question. "Maybe" is the answer
to this claim, for there are many circumstances where a lawsuit would be
unlikely to happen. For example, what if the locals are slum dwellers
and cannot afford to sue? What if they are afraid that their landlords
will evict them if they sue (particularly if the landlords also own the
polluting property in question)? What if many members of the affected
community work for the polluting company and stand to lose their jobs if
they sue? All in all, this argument ignores the obvious fact that
resources are required to fight a court case and to make and contest
appeals. In the case of a large corporation and a small group of even
average income families, the former will have much more time and
resources to spend in fighting any lawsuit. This is the case today and
it seems unlikely that it will change in any society marked by
inequalities of wealth and power. In other words, Rothbard ignores the
key issue of economic power:
"Rothbard appears to assume that the courts will be as accessible to the
victims of pollution as to the owner of the factory. Yet it is not
unlikely that the owner's resources will far exceed those of his
victims. Given this disparity, it is not at all clear that persons who
suffer the costs of pollution will be able to bear the price of relief.
"Rothbard's proposal ignores a critical variable: power. This is not
surprising. Libertarians [sic!] are inclined to view 'power' and
'market' as antithetical terms . . . In Rothbard's discussion, the
factor owner has no power over those who live near the factory. If we
define power as comparative advantage under restricted circumstances,
however, we can see that he may. He can exercise that power by
stretching out the litigation until his opponent's financial resources
are exhausted. In what is perhaps a worst case example, though by no
means an unrealistic scenario, the owner of an industry on which an
entire community depends for its livelihood may threaten to relocate
unless local residents agree to accept high levels of pollution. In this
instance, the 'threat' is merely an announcement by the owner that he
will move his property, as is his right, unless the people of the
community 'freely' assent to his conditions . . . There is no reason to
believe that all such persons would seek injunctive relief . . . Some
might be willing to tolerate the pollution if the factory owner would
provide compensation. In short, the owner could pay to pollute. This
solution . . . ignores the presence of power in the market. It is
unlikely that the 'buyers' and 'sellers' of pollution will be on an
equal footing." [Stephen L. Newman, Liberalism at wits' end, pp. 121-2]
There is strong reason to believe that some people may tolerate
pollution in return for compensation (as, for example, a poor person may
agree to let someone smoke in their home in return for $100 or accept a
job in a smoke filled pub or bar in order to survive in the short term
regardless of the long-term danger of lung cancer). As such, it is
always possible that, due to economic necessity in an unequal society,
that a company may pay to be able to pollute. As we discussed in
, the demand for the ability to pollute freely has seen a shift in
industries from the west to developing nations due to economic pressures
and market logic:
"Questions of intergenerational equity and/or justice also arise in the
context of industrial activity which is clearly life threatening or
seriously diminishes the quality of life. Pollution of the air, water,
soil and food in a way that threatens human health is obviously not
sustainable, yet it is characteristic of much industrial action. The
greatest burden of the life and health threatening by-products of
industrial processes falls on those least able to exercise options that
provide respite. The poor have risks to health imposed on them while the
wealthy can afford to purchase a healthy lifestyle. In newly
industrialising countries the poorest people are often faced with no
choice in living close to plants which present a significant threat to
the local population . . . With the international trend toward moving
manufacturing industry to the cheapest sources of labour, there is an
increasing likelihood that standards in occupational health and safety
will decline and damage to human and environmental health will
increase." [Glenn Albrecht, "Ethics, Anarchy and Sustainable
Development", pp. 95-118, Anarchist Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 107-8]
The tragedy at Bhopal in India is testimony to this process. This should
be unsurprising, as there is a demand for the ability to pollute from
wealthy corporations and this has resulted in many countries supplying
it. This reflects the history of capitalism within the so-called
developed countries as well. As Rothbard laments:
"[F]actory smoke and many of its bad effects have been known ever since
the Industrial Revolution, known to the extent that the American courts,
during the late – and as far back as the early – 19th century made the
deliberate decision to allow property rights to be violated by
industrial smoke. To do so, the courts had to – and did – systematically
change and weaken the defences of property rights embedded in
Anglo-Saxon common law . . . the courts systematically altered the law
of negligence and the law of nuisance to permit any air pollution which
was not unusually greater than any similar manufacturing firm, one that
was not more extensive than the customary practice of polluters." [Op.
Cit., p. 257]
Left-wing critic of right-"libertarianism" Alan Haworth points out the
obvious by stating that "[i]n this remarkably – wonderfully –
self-contradictory passage, we are invited to draw the conclusion that
private property must provide the solution to the pollution problem from
an account of how it clearly did not." In other words 19th-century
America – which for many right-"libertarians" is a kind of "golden era"
of free-market capitalism – saw a move "from an initial situation of
well-defended property rights to a later situation where greater
pollution was tolerated." This means that private property cannot
provide a solution the pollution problem. [Anti-Libertarianism, p. 113]
It is likely, as Haworth points out, that Rothbard and other free
marketeers will claim that the 19th-century capitalist system was not
pure enough, that the courts were motivated to act under pressure from
the state (which in turn was pressured by powerful industrialists). But
can it be purified by just removing the government and privatising the
courts, relying on a so-called "free market for justice"? The pressure
from the industrialists remains, if not increases, on the privately
owned courts trying to make a living on the market. Indeed, the whole
concept of private courts competing in a "free market for justice"
becomes absurd once it is recognised that those with the most money will
be able to buy the most "justice" (as is largely the case now). Also,
this faith in the courts ignores the fact suing would only occur after
the damage has already been done. It's not easy to replace ecosystems
and extinct species. And if the threat of court action had a "deterrent"
effect, then pollution, murder, stealing and a host of other crimes
would long ago have disappeared.
To paraphrase Haworth, the characteristically "free market" capitalist
argument that if X were privately owned, Y would almost certainly occur,
is just wishful thinking.
Equally, it would be churlish to note that this change in the law (like
so many others) was an essential part of the creation of capitalism in
the first place. As we discuss in
, capitalism has always been born of state intervention and the
toleration of pollution was one of many means by which costs associated
with creating a capitalist system were imposed on the general public.
This is still the case today, with (for example) the Economist magazine
happily arguing that the migration of dirty industries to the third
world is "desirable" as there is a "trade-off between growth and
pollution control." Inflicting pollution on the poorest sections of
humanity is, of course, in their own best interests. As the magazine put
it, "[i]f clean growth means slower growth, as it sometimes will, its
human cost will be lives blighted by a poverty that would otherwise have
been mitigated. That is why it is wrong for the World Bank or anybody
else to insist upon rich-country standards of environmental practices in
developing countries . . . when a trade off between cleaner air and less
poverty has to be faced, most poor countries will rightly want to
tolerate more pollution than rich countries do in return for more
growth." ["Pollution and the Poor", The Economist, 15/02/1992] That
"poor countries" are just as state, class and hierarchy afflicted as
"rich-country" ones and so it is not the poor who will be deciding to
"tolerate" pollution in return for higher profits (to use the correct
word rather than the economically correct euphemism). Rather, it will be
inflicted upon them by the ruling class which runs their country. That
members of the elite are willing to inflict the costs of
industrialisation on the working class in the form of pollution is
unsurprising to anyone with a grasp of reality and how capitalism
develops and works (it should be noted that the magazine expounded this
particular argument to defend the infamous Lawrence Summers memo
discussed in
).
Finally, let us consider what would happen is Rothbard's schema could
actually be applied. It would mean that almost every modern industry
would be faced with law suits over pollution. This would mean that the
costs of product would soar, assuming production continued at all. It is
likely that faced with demands that industry stop polluting, most firms
would simply go out of business (either due to the costs involved in
damages or simply because no suitable non-polluting replacement
technology exists) As Rothbard here considers all forms of pollution as
an affront to property rights, this also applies to transport. In other
words, "pure" capitalism would necessitate the end of industrial
society. While such a prospect may be welcomed by some deep ecologists
and primitivists, few others would support such a solution to the
problems of pollution.
Within a decade of his zero-emissions argument, however, Rothbard had
changed his position and presented a right-"libertarian" argument which
essentially allowed the polluters to continue business as usual, arguing
for a system which, he admitted, would make it nearly impossible for
individuals to sue over pollution damage. As usual, given a choice
between individual freedom and capitalism Rothbard choose the latter. As
such, as Rothbard himself proves beyond reasonable doubt, the extension
of private property rights will be unable to protect the environment. We
discuss this in the
.
No, it will not. In order to show why, we need only quote Murray
Rothbard's own arguments. It is worth going through his arguments to see
exactly why "pure" capitalism simply cannot solve the ecological crisis.
As noted in the
, Rothbard initially presented an argument that free market capitalism
would have a zero-emissions policy. Within a decade, he had
substantially changed his tune in an article for the right-"libertarian"
think-tank the Cato Institute. Perhaps this change of heart is
understandable once you realise that most free market capitalist
propagandists are simply priests of a religion convenient to the
interests of the people who own the marketplace. Rothbard founded the
think-tank which published this article along with industrialist Charles
Koch in 1977. Koch companies are involved in the petroleum, chemicals,
energy, minerals, fertilisers industries as well as many others. To
advocate a zero-pollution policy would hardly be in the Institute's
enlightened self-interest as its backers would soon be out of business
(along with industrial capitalism as a whole).
Rothbard's defence of the right to pollute is as ingenious as it is
contradictory to his original position. As will be discussed in
, Rothbard subscribes to a "homesteading" theory of property and he
utilises this not only to steal the actual physical planet (the land)
from this and future generations but also our (and their) right to a
clean environment. He points to "more sophisticated and modern forms of
homesteading" which can be used to "homestead" pollution rights. If, for
example, a firm is surrounded by unowned land then it can pollute to its
hearts content. If anyone moves to the area then the firm only becomes
liable for any excess pollution over this amount. Thus firms "can be
said to have homesteaded a pollution easement of a certain degree and
type." He points to an "exemplary" court case which rejected the
argument of someone who moved to an industrial area and then sued to end
pollution. As the plaintiff had voluntarily moved to the area, she had
no cause for complaint. In other words, polluters can simply continue to
pollute under free market capitalism. This is particularly the case as
clean air acts would not exist in libertarian legal theory, such an act
being "illegitimate and itself invasive and a criminal interference with
the property rights of noncriminals." ["Law, Property Rights, and Air
Pollution," pp. 55-99, Cato Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1, p. 77, p. 79 and p.
89]
In the
, we showed how Rothbard had earlier argued that the solution to
pollution was to privatise everything. Given that rivers, lakes and seas
are currently unowned this implies that the current levels of pollution
would be the initial "homesteaded" level and so privatisation will not,
in fact, reduce pollution at all. At best, it may stop pollution getting
worse but even this runs into the problem that pollution usually
increases slowly over time and would be hard to notice and much harder
to prove which incremental change produced the actual quantitative
change.
Which leads to the next, obvious, problem. According to Rothbard you can
sue provided that "the polluter has not previously established a
homestead easement," "prove strict causality from the actions of the
defendant. . . beyond a reasonable doubt" and identify "those who
actually commit the deed" (i.e. the employees involved, not the
company). [Op. Cit., p. 87] Of course, how do you know and prove that a
specific polluter is responsible for a specific environmental or
physical harm? It would be near impossible to identify which company
contributed which particles to the smog which caused pollution related
illnesses. Polluters, needless to say, have the right to buy-off a suit
which would be a handy tool for wealthy corporations in an unequal
society to continue polluting as economic necessity may induce people to
accept payment in return for tolerating it.
Turning to the pollution caused by actual products, such as cars,
Rothbard argues that "libertarian [sic!] principle" requires a return to
privity, a situation where the manufacturers of a product are not
responsible for any negative side-effects when it is used. In terms of
transport pollution, the "guilty polluter should be each individual car
owner and not the automobile manufacturer, who is not responsible for
the actual tort and the actual emission." This is because the
manufacturer does not know how the car will be used (Rothbard gives an
example that it may not be driven but was bought "mainly for aesthetic
contemplation by the car owner"!). He admits that "the situation for
plaintiffs against auto emissions might seem hopeless under libertarian
law." Rest assured, though, as "the roads would be privately owned" then
the owner of the road could be sued for the emissions going "into the
lungs or airspace of other citizens" and so "would be liable for
pollution damage." This would be "much more feasible than suing each
individual car owner for the minute amount of pollutants he might be
responsible for." [Op. Cit., p. 90 and p. 91]
The problems with this argument should be obvious. Firstly, roads are
currently "unowned" under the right-"libertarian" perspective (they are
owned by the state which has no right to own anything). This means, as
Rothbard has already suggested, any new road owners would have already
created a "homesteading" right to pollute (after all, who would buy a
road if they expected to be sued by so doing?). Secondly, it would be
extremely difficult to say that specific emissions from a specific road
caused the problems and Rothbard stresses that there must be "proof
beyond reasonable doubt." Road-owners as well as capitalist firms which
pollute will, like the tobacco industry, be heartened to read that
"statistical correlation . . . cannot establish causation, certainly not
for a rigorous legal proof of guilt or harm." After all, "many smokers
never get lung cancer" and "many lung cancer sufferers have never
smoked." [Op. Cit., p. 92 and p. 73] So if illnesses cluster around,
say, roads or certain industries then this cannot be considered as
evidence of harm caused by the pollution they produce.
Then there is the question of who is responsible for the damage
inflicted. Here Rothbard runs up against the contradictions within wage
labour. Capitalism is based on the notion that a person's liberty/labour
can be sold/alienated to another who can then use it as they see fit.
This means that, for the capitalist, the worker has no claim on the
products and services that labour has produced. Strangely, according to
Rothbard, this alienation of responsibility suddenly is rescinded when
that sold labour commits an action which has negative consequences for
the employer. Then it suddenly becomes nothing to do with the employer
and the labourer becomes responsible for their labour again.
Rothbard is quite clear that he considers that the owners of businesses
are not responsible for their employee's action. He gives the example of
an employer who hires an incompetent worker and suffers the lost of his
wages as a result. However, "there appears to be no legitimate reason
for forcing the employer to bear the additional cost of his employee's
tortious behaviour." For a corporation "does not act; only individuals
act, and each must be responsible for his own actions and those alone."
He notes that employers are sued because they "generally have more money
than employees, so that it becomes more convenient . . . to stick the
wealthier class with the liability." [Op. Cit., p. 76 and p. 75]
This ignores the fact that externalities are imposed on others in order
to maximise the profits of the corporation. The stockholders directly
benefit from the "tortious behaviour" of their wage slaves. For example,
if a manager decides to save £1,000,000 by letting toxic waste damage to
occur to then the owners benefit by a higher return on their investment.
To state that is the manager who must pay for any damage means that the
owners of a corporation or business are absolved for any responsibility
for the actions of those hired to make money for them. In other words,
they accumulate the benefits in the form of more income but not the
risks or costs associated with, say, imposing externalities onto others.
That the "wealthier class" would be happy to see such a legal system
should go without saying.
The notion that as long as "the tort is committed by the employee in the
course of furthering, even only in part, his employer's business, then
the employer is also liable" is dismissed as "a legal concept so at war
with libertarianism, individualism, and capitalism, and suited only to a
precapitalist society." [Op. Cit., p. 74 and p. 75] If this principle is
against "individualism" then it is simply because capitalism violates
individualism. What Rothbard fails to appreciate is that the whole basis
of capitalism is that it is based on the worker selling his time/liberty
to the boss. As Mark Leier puts it in his excellent biography of
Bakunin:
"The primary element of capitalism is wage labour It is this that makes
capitalism what it is . . . The employer owns and controls the coffee
shop or factory where production takes place and determines who will be
hired and fired and how things will be produced; that's what it means to
be a 'boss.' Workers produce goods or services for their employer.
Everything they produce on the job belongs to the capitalist: workers
have no more right to the coffee or cars they produce than someone off
the street. Their employer, protected by law and by the apparatus of the
state, owns all they produce. The employer then sells the goods that
have been produced and gives the workers a portion of the value they
have created. Capitalists and workers fight over the precise amounts of
this portion, but the capitalist system is based on the notion that the
capitalist owns everything that is produced and controls how everything
is produced." [Bakunin: The Creative Passion, p. 26]
This is clearly the case when a worker acts in a way which increases
profits without externalities. The most obvious case is when workers'
produce more goods than they receive back in wages (i.e. the
exploitation at the heart of capitalism – see
). Why should that change when the action has an externality? While it
may benefit the boss to argue that he should gain the profits of the
worker's actions but not the costs it hardly makes much logical sense.
The labour sold becomes the property of the buyer who is then entitled
to appropriate the produce of that labour. There is no reason for this
to suddenly change when the product is a negative rather than a
positive. It suggests that the worker has sold both her labour and its
product to the employer unless it happens to put her employer in court,
then it suddenly becomes her's again!
And we must note that it is Rothbard's arguments own arguments which are
"suited only to a precapitalist society." As David Ellerman notes, the
slave was considered a piece of property under the law unless he or she
committed a crime. Once that had occurred, the slave became an
autonomous individual in the eyes of the law and, as a result, could be
prosecuted as an individual rather than his owner. This exposed a
fundamental inconsistency "in a legal system that treats the same
individual as a thing in normal work and legally as a person when
committing a crime." Much the same applies to wage labour as well. When
an employee commits a negligent tort then "the tortious servant emerges
from the cocoon of non-responsibility metamorphosed into a responsible
human agent." In other words, "the employee is said to have stepped
outside the employee's role." [Property and Contract in Economics, p.
125, p. 128 and p. 133] Rothbard's argument is essentially the same as
that of the slave-owner, with the boss enjoying the positive fruits of
their wage slaves activities but not being responsible for any negative
results.
So, to summarise, we have a system which will allow pollution to
continue as this right has been "homesteaded" while, at the same, making
it near impossible to sue individual firms for their contribution to the
destruction of the earth. Moreover, it rewards the owners of companies
for any externalities inflicted while absolving them of any
responsibility for the actions which enriched them. And Rothbard asserts
that "private ownership" can solve "many 'externality' problems"! The
key problem is, of course, that for Rothbard the "overriding factor in
air pollution law, as in other parts of the law, should be libertarian
and property rights principles" rather than, say, stopping the
destruction of our planet or even defending the right of individual's
not to die of pollution related diseases. [Op. Cit., p. 91 and p. 99]
Rothbard shows that for the defender of capitalism, given a choice
between property and planet/people the former will always win.
To conclude, Rothbard provides more than enough evidence to disprove his
own arguments. This is not a unique occurrence. As discussed in the
he does the same as regards owning water and air resources.
No. This conclusion comes naturally from the laissez-faire capitalist
defence of private property as expounded by Murray Rothbard. Moreover,
ironically, he also destroys his own arguments for ending pollution by
privatising water and air.
For Rothbard, labour is the key to turning unowned natural resources
into private property. As he put it, "before the homesteader, no one
really used and controlled – and hence owned – the land. The pioneer, or
homesteader, is the man who first brings the valueless unused natural
objects into production and use." [The Ethics of Liberty, p. 49]
Starting with the question of wilderness (a topic close to many
eco-anarchists' and other ecologists' hearts) we run into the usual
problems and self-contradictions which befalls right-"libertarian"
ideology. Rothbard states clearly that "libertarian theory must
invalidate [any] claim to ownership" of land that has "never been
transformed from its natural state" (he presents an example of an owner
who has left a piece of his "legally owned" land untouched). If another
person appears who does transform the land, it becomes "justly owned by
another" and the original owner cannot stop her (and should the original
owner "use violence to prevent another settler from entering this
never-used land and transforming it into use" they also become a
"criminal aggressor"). Rothbard also stresses that he is not saying that
land must continually be in use to be valid property. [Op. Cit., pp.
63-64] This is unsurprising, as that would justify landless workers
seizing the land from landowners during a depression and working it
themselves and we cannot have that now, can we?
Now, where does that leave wilderness? In response to ecologists who
oppose the destruction of the rainforest, many supporters of capitalism
suggest that they put their money where their mouth is and buy
rainforest land. In this way, it is claimed, rainforest will be
protected (see
for why such arguments are nonsense). As ecologists desire the
rainforest because it is wilderness they are unlikely to "transform" it
by human labour (its precisely that they want to stop). From Rothbard's
arguments it is fair to ask whether logging companies have a right to
"transform" the virgin wilderness owned by ecologists, after all it
meets Rothbard's criteria (it is still wilderness). Perhaps it will be
claimed that fencing off land "transforms" it (hardly what you imagine
"mixing labour" with to mean, but never mind) – but that allows large
companies and rich individuals to hire workers to fence in vast tracks
of land (and recreate the land monopoly by a "libertarian" route). But
as discussed in
, fencing off land does not seem to imply that it becomes property in
Rothbard's theory. And, of course, fencing in areas of rainforest
disrupts the local eco-system – animals cannot freely travel, for
example – which, again, is what ecologists desire to stop. Would
Rothbard have accepted a piece of paper as "transforming" land? We doubt
it (after all, in his example the wilderness owner did legally own it) –
and so most ecologists will have a hard time in pure capitalism
(wilderness is just not an option).
Moreover, Rothbard's "homesteading" theory actually violates his support
for unrestricted property rights. What if a property owner wants part of
her land to remain wilderness? Their desires are violated by the
"homesteading" theory (unless, of course, fencing things off equals
"transforming" them, which it apparently does not). How can companies
provide wilderness holidays to people if they have no right to stop
settlers (including large companies) "homesteading" that wilderness?
Then there is the question of wild animals. Obviously, they can only
become owned by either killing them or by domesticating them (the only
possible means of "mixing your labour" with them). Does it mean that
someone only values, say, a polar bear when they kill it or capture it
for a zoo?
At best, it could be argued that wilderness would be allowed if the land
was transformed first then allowed to return to the wild. This flows
from Rothbard's argument that there is no requirement that land continue
to be used in order for it to continue to be a person's property. As he
stresses, "our libertarian [sic!] theory holds that land needs only be
transformed once to pass into private ownership." [Op. Cit., p. 65] This
means that land could be used and then allowed to fall into disuse for
the important thing is that once labour is mixed with the natural
resources, it remains owned in perpetuity. However, destroying
wilderness in order to recreate it is simply an insane position to take
as many eco-systems are extremely fragile and will not return to their
previous state. Moreover, this process takes a long time during which
access to the land will be restricted to all but those the owner
consents to.
And, of course, where does Rothbard's theory leave hunter-gatherer or
nomad societies. They use the resources of the wilderness, but they do
not "transform" them (in this case you cannot easily tell if virgin land
is empty or being used). If a group of nomads find its traditionally
used, but natural, oasis appropriated by a homesteader what are they to
do? If they ignore the homesteaders claims he can call upon the police
(public or private) to stop them – and then, in true Rothbardian
fashion, the homesteader can refuse to supply water to them unless they
pay for the privilege. And if the history of the United States and other
colonies are anything to go by, such people will become "criminal
aggressors" and removed from the picture.
As such, it is important to stress the social context of Rothbard's
Lockean principles. As John O'Neill notes, Locke's labour theory of
property was used not only to support enclosing common land in England
but also as a justification for stealing the land of indigenous
population's across the world. For example, the "appropriation of
America is justified by its being brought into the world of commence and
hence cultivation . . . The Lockean account of the 'vast wilderness' of
America as land uncultivated and unshaped by the pastoral activities of
the indigenous population formed part of the justification of the
appropriation of native land." [Markets, Deliberation and Environment,
p. 119] That the native population was using the land was irrelevant as
Rothbard himself noted. As he put it, the Indians "laid claim to vast
reaches of land which they hunted but which they did not transform by
cultivation." [Conceived in Liberty, vol. 1, p. 187]. This meant that
"the bulk of Indian-claimed land was not settled and transformed by the
Indians" and so settlers were "at least justified in ignoring vague,
abstract claims." The Indian hunting based claims were "dubious." [Op.
Cit., vol. 2, p. 54 and p. 59] The net outcome, of course, was that the
"vague, abstract" Indian claims to hunting lands were meet with the
concrete use of force to defend the newly appropriated (i.e. stolen)
land (force which quickly reached the level of genocide).
So unless people bestowed some form of transforming labour over the
wilderness areas then any claims of ownership are unsubstantiated. At
most, tribal people and nomads could claim the wild animals they killed
and the trails that they cleared. This is because a person would "have
to use the land, to 'cultivate' it in some way, before he could be
asserted to own it." This cultivation is not limited to "tilling the
soil" but also includes clearing it for a house or pasture or caring for
some plots of timber. [Man, Economy, and State, with Power and Market,
p. 170] Thus game preserves or wilderness areas could not exist in a
pure capitalist society. This has deep ecological implications as it
automatically means the replacement of wild, old-growth forests with, at
best, managed ones. These are not an equivalent in ecological terms even
if they have approximately the same number of trees. As James C. Scott
stresses:
"Old-growth forests, polycropping, and agriculture with open-pollinated
landraces may not be as productive, in the short run, as single-species
forests and fields or identical hybrids. But they are demonstrably more
stable, more self-sufficient, and less vulnerable to epidemics and
environmental stress . . . Every time we replace 'natural capital' (such
as wild fish stocks or old-growth forests) with what might be termed
'cultivated natural capital' (such as fish farms or tree plantations),
we gain ease of appropriation and in immediate productivity, but at the
cost of more maintenance expenses and less 'redundancy, resiliency, and
stability' . . . Other things being equal . . . the less diverse the
cultivated natural capital, the more vulnerable and nonsustainable it
becomes. The problem is that in most economic systems, the external
costs (in water or air pollution, for example, or the exhaustion of
non-renewable resources, including a reduction in biodiversity)
accumulate long before the activity becomes unprofitable in a narrow
profit-and-loss sense." [Seeing like a State, p. 353]
Forests which are planned as a resource are made ecologically simplistic
in order to make them economically viable (i.e., to reduce the costs
involved in harvesting the crop). They tend to be monocultures of one
type of tree and conservationists note that placing all eggs in one
basket could prompt an ecological disaster. A palm oil monoculture which
replaces rainforest to produce biofuel, for example, would be unable to
support the rich diversity of wildlife as well as leaving the
environment vulnerable to catastrophic disease. Meanwhile, local people
dependent on the crop could be left high and dry if it fell out of
favour on the global market.
To summarise, capitalism simply cannot protect wilderness and, by
extension, the planet's ecology. Moreover, it is no friend to the
indigenous population who use but do not "transform" their local
environment.
It should also be noted that underlying assumption behind this and
similar arguments is that other cultures and ways of life, like many
eco-systems and species, are simply not worth keeping. While lip-service
is made to the notion of cultural diversity, the overwhelming emphasis
is on universalising the capitalist model of economic activity, property
rights and way of life (and a corresponding ignoring of the role state
power played in creating these as well as destroying traditional customs
and ways of life). Such a model for development means the replacement of
indigenous customs and communitarian-based ethics by a commercial system
based on an abstract individualism with a very narrow vision of what
constitutes self-interest. These new converts to the international order
would be forced, like all others, to survive on the capitalist market.
With vast differences in wealth and power such markets have, it is
likely that the net result would simply be that new markets would be
created out of the natural 'capital' in the developing world and these
would soon be exploited.
As an aside, we must note that Rothbard fails to realise – and this
comes from his worship of capitalism and his "Austrian economics" – is
that people value many things which do not, indeed cannot, appear on the
market. He claims that wilderness is "valueless unused natural objects"
for it people valued them, they would use – i.e. transform – them. But
unused things may be of considerable value to people, wilderness being a
classic example. And if something cannot be transformed into private
property, does that mean people do not value it? For example, people
value community, stress-free working environments, meaningful work – if
the market cannot provide these, does that mean they do not value them?
Of course not (see Juliet Schor's The Overworked American on how working
people's desire for shorter working hours was not transformed into
options on the market).
So it should be remembered that in valuing impacts on nature, there is a
difference between use values (i.e. income from commodities produced by
a resource) and non-use values (i.e., the value placed on the existence
of a species or wilderness). The former are usually well-defined, but
often small while the latter are often large, but poorly defined. For
example, the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska resulted in losses to
people who worked and lived in the affected area of an estimated $300
million. However, the existence value of the area to the American
population was $9 billion. In other words, the amount that American
households were reportedly willing to pay to prevent a similar oil spill
in a similar area was 30 times larger. Yet this non-use value cannot be
taken into account in Rothbard's schema as nature is not considered a
value in itself but merely a resource to be exploited.
Which brings us to another key problem with Rothbard's argument: he
simply cannot justify the appropriation of water and atmosphere by means
of his own principles. To show why, we need simply consult Rothbard's
own writings on the subject.
Rothbard has a serious problem here. As noted above, he subscribed to a
Lockean vision of property. In this schema, property is generated by
mixing labour with unowned resources. Yet you simply cannot mix your
labour with water or air. In other words, he is left with a system of
property rights which cannot, by their very nature, be extended to
common goods like water and air. Let us quote Rothbard on this subject:
"it is true that the high seas, in relation to shipping lanes, are
probably inappropriable, because of their abundance in relation to
shipping routes. This is not true, however, of fishing rights. Fish are
definitely not available in unlimited quantities, relatively to human
wants. Therefore, they are appropriable . . . In a free [sic!] society,
fishing rights to the appropriate areas of oceans would be owned by the
first users of these areas and then useable or saleable to other
individuals. Ownership of areas of water that contain fish is directly
analogous to private ownership of areas of land or forests that contain
animals to be hunted . . . water can definitely be marked off in terms
of latitudes and longitudes. These boundaries, then would circumscribe
the area owned by individuals, in the full knowledge that fish and water
can move from one person's property to another." [Man, Economy, and
State, with Power and Market, pp. 173-4]
In a footnote to this surreal passage, he added that it "is rapidly
becoming evident that air lanes for planes are becoming scare and, in a
free [sic!] society, would be owned by first users."
So, travellers crossing the sea gain no property rights by doing so but
those travelling through the air do. Why this should be the case is hard
to explain as, logically, both acts "transform" the commons by "labour"
in exactly the same manner (i.e. not at all). Why should fishing result
in absolute property rights in oceans, seas, lakes and rivers? Does
picking a fruit give you property rights in the tree or the forest it
stands in? Surely, at best, it gives you a property right in the fish
and fruit? And what happens if area of water is so polluted that there
are no fish? Does that mean that this body of water is impossible to
appropriate? How does it become owned? Surely it cannot and so it will
always remain a dumping ground for waste?
Looking at the issue of land and water, Rothbard asserts that owning
water is "directly analogous" to owning land for hunting purposes. Does
this mean that the landowner who hunts cannot bar travellers from their
land? Or does it mean that the sea-owner can bar travellers from
crossing their property? Ironically, as shown above, Rothbard later
explicitly rejected the claims of Native Americans to own their land
because they hunted animals on it. The same, logically, applies to his
arguments that bodies of water can be appropriated.
Given that Rothbard is keen to stress that labour is required to
transform land into private property, his arguments are
self-contradictory and highly illogical. It should also be stressed that
here Rothbard nullifies his criteria for appropriating private property.
Originally, only labour being used on the resource can turn it into
private property. Now, however, the only criteria is that it is scare.
This is understandable, as fishing and travelling through the air cannot
remotely be considered "mixing labour" with the resource.
It is easy to see why Rothbard produced such self-contradictory
arguments over the years as each one was aimed at justifying and
extending the reach of capitalist property rights. Thus the Indians'
hunting claims could be rejected as these allowed the privatising of the
land while the logically identical fishing claims could be used to allow
the privatisation of bodies of water. Logic need not bother the
ideologue when he seeking ways to justify the supremacy of the ideal
(capitalist private property, in this case).
Finally, since Rothbard (falsely) claims to be an anarchist, it is
useful to compare his arguments to that of Proudhon's. Significantly, in
the founding work of anarchism Proudhon presented an analysis of this
issue directly opposite to Rothbard's. Let us quote the founding father
of anarchism on this important matter:
"A man who should be prohibited from walking in the highways, from
resting in the fields, from taking shelter in caves, from lighting
fires, from picking berries, from gathering herbs and boiling them in a
bit of baked clay, – such a man could not live. Consequently the earth –
like water, air, and light – is a primary object of necessity which each
has a right to use freely, without infringing another's right. Why,
then, is the earth appropriated? . . . [An economist] assures us that it
is because it is not INFINITE. The land is limited in amount. Then . . .
it ought to be appropriated. It would seem, on the contrary, that he
ought to say, Then it ought not to be appropriated. Because, no matter
how large a quantity of air or light any one appropriates, no one is
damaged thereby; there always remains enough for all. With the soil, it
is very different. Lay hold who will, or who can, of the sun's rays, the
passing breeze, or the sea's billows; he has my consent, and my pardon
for his bad intentions. But let any living man dare to change his right
of territorial possession into the right of property, and I will declare
war upon him, and wage it to the death!" [What is Property?, p. 106]
Unlike Locke who at least paid lip-service to the notion that the
commons can be enclosed when there is enough and as good left for others
to use, Rothbard turn this onto its head. In his "Lockean" schema, a
resource can be appropriated only when it is scare (i.e. there is not
enough and as good left for others). Perhaps it comes as no surprise
that Rothbard rejects the "Lockean proviso" (and essentially argues that
Locke was not a consistent Lockean as his work is "riddled with
contradictions and inconsistencies" and have been "expanded and
purified" by his followers. [The Ethics of Liberty, p. 22]).
Rothbard is aware of what is involved in accepting the Lockean Proviso –
namely the existence of private property ("Locke's proviso may lead to
the outlawry of all private property of land, since one can always say
that the reduction of available land leaves everyone else . . . worse
off" [Op. Cit., p. 240]). The Proviso does imply the end of capitalist
property rights which is why Rothbard, and other right-"libertarians",
reject it while failing to note that Locke himself simply assumed that
the invention of money transcended this limitation. [C.B. MacPherson,
The Political Theory of Individualism, pp. 203-20] As we discussed in
, it should be stressed that this limitation is considered to be
transcended purely in terms of material wealth rather than its impact on
individual liberty or dignity which, surely, should be of prime concern
for someone claiming to favour "liberty." What Rothbard failed to
understand that Locke's Proviso of apparently limiting appropriation of
land as long as there was enough and as good for others was a ploy to
make the destruction of the commons palatable to those with a conscience
or some awareness of what liberty involves. This can be seen from the
fact this limitation could be transcended at all (in the same way, Locke
justified the exploitation of labour by arguing that it was the property
of the worker who sold it to their boss – see
for details). By getting rid of the Proviso, Rothbard simply exposes
this theft of our common birthright in all its unjust glory.
It is simple. Either you reject the Proviso and embrace capitalist
property rights (and so allow one class of people to be dispossessed and
another empowered at their expense) or you take it seriously and reject
private property in favour of possession and liberty. Anarchists,
obviously, favour the latter option. Thus Proudhon:
"Water, air, and light are common things, not because they are
inexhaustible, but because they are indispensable; and so indispensable
that for that very reason Nature has created them in quantities almost
infinite, in order that their plentifulness might prevent their
appropriation. Likewise the land is indispensable to our existence, –
consequently a common thing, consequently unsusceptible of
appropriation; but land is much scarcer than the other elements,
therefore its use must be regulated, not for the profit of a few, but in
the interest and for the security of all.
"In a word, equality of rights is proved by equality of needs. Now,
equality of rights, in the case of a commodity which is limited in
amount, can be realised only by equality of possession . . . From
whatever point we view this question of property – provided we go to the
bottom of it – we reach equality." [Op. Cit., p. 107]
To conclude, it would be unfair to simply quote Keynes evaluation of one
work by von Hayek, another leading "Austrian Economist," namely that it
"is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a
remorseless logician can end up in bedlam." This is only partly true as
Rothbard's account of property rights in water and air is hardly logical
(although it is remorseless once we consider its impact when applied in
an unequal and hierarchical society). That this nonsense is in direct
opposition to the anarchist perspective on this issue should not come as
a surprise any more than its incoherence. As we discuss in
, Rothbard's claims to being an "anarchist" are as baseless as his claim
that capitalism will protect the environment.
No. At best, it can have a limited impact in reducing environmental
degradation and so postpone the ecological crisis. At worse, it could
accelerate that crisis by creating new markets and thus increasing
growth.
Before discussing why and just so there is no misunderstanding, we must
stress that anarchists fully recognise that using recycled or renewable
raw materials, reducing consumption and buying "ecologically friendly"
products and technologies are very important. As such, we would be the
last to denounce such a thing. But such measures are of very limited use
as solutions to the ecological problems we face. At best they can only
delay, not prevent, capitalism's ultimate destruction of the planet's
ecological base.
Green consumerism is often the only thing capitalism has to offer in the
face of mounting ecological destruction. Usually it boils down to
nothing more than slick advertising campaigns by big corporate polluters
to hype band-aid measures such as using a few recycled materials or
contributing money to a wildlife fund, which are showcased as "concern
for the environment" while off camera the pollution and devouring of
non-renewable resources goes on. They also engage in "greenwashing", in
which companies lavishly fund PR campaigns to paint themselves "green"
without altering their current polluting practices!
This means that apparently "green" companies and products actually are
not. Many firms hire expensive Public Relations firms and produce
advertisements to paint a false image of themselves as being
ecologically friendly (i.e. perform "greenwashing"). This indicates a
weakness of market economies – they hinder (even distort) the flow of
information required for consumers to make informed decisions. The
market does not provide enough information for consumers to determine
whether a product is actually green or not – it just gives them a price
supplemented by (often deliberately misleading) advertising designed to
manipulate the consumer and present an appropriate corporate image.
Consumers have to rely on other sources, many of which are minority
journals and organisations and so difficult to find, to provide them
with the accurate information required to countermand the power and
persuasion of advertising and the work of PR experts. This helps explain
why, for example, "large agribusiness firms are now attempting, like
Soviet commissars, to stifle criticism of their policies" by means of
"veggie libel laws." These laws, which in 2001 had been passed in 13
American states ("backed by agribusiness") "make it illegal to criticise
agricultural commodities in a manner inconsistent with 'reasonable'
scientific evidence. The whole concept of 'veggie libel' laws is
probably unconstitutional; nevertheless, these laws remain on the
books." [Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation, p. 266]
We should not discount the impact of PR experts in shaping the way
people see the world or decide to consume. A lot of resources are poured
into corporate Public Relations in order to present a green image. "In
the perverse world of corporate public relations," note critics John
Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, "propagandising and lobbying against
environmental protection is called 'environmental' or 'green' PR.
'Greenwashing' is a more accurate pejorative now commonly used to
describe the ways that polluters employ deceptive PR to falsely paint
themselves an environmentally responsible public image . . . Today a
virulent, pro-industry, anti-environmentalism is on the rise . . . PR
experts . . . are waging and winning a war against environmentalists on
behalf of corporate clients in the chemical, energy, food, automobile,
forestry and mining industries." A significant amount of cash is spent
(an estimated $1 billion a year by the mid-1990s) "on the services of
anti-environmental PR professionals and on 'greenwashing' their
corporate image." [Toxic Sludge is Good for You!, p. 125] See the
chapter called "Silencing Spring" in Stauber's and Rampton's book Toxic
Sludge is Good for You! for a good summary of this use of PR firms.
Even apparently ecologically friendly firms like "The Body Shop" can
present a false image of what they do. For example, journalist Jon
Entine investigated that company in 1994 and discovered that only a
minuscule fraction of its ingredients came from Trade Not Aid (a program
claimed to aid developing countries). Entine also discovered that the
company also used many outdated, off-the-shelf product formulas filled
with non-renewable petrochemicals as well as animal tested ingredients.
When Entine contacted the company he received libel threats and it hired
a PR company to combat his story. [Stauber and Rampton, Op. Cit., pp.
74-5] This highlights the dangers of looking to consumerism to solve
ecological problems. As Entine argued:
"The Body Shop is a corporation with the privileges and power in society
as all others. Like other corporations it makes products that are
unsustainable, encourages consumerism, uses non-renewable materials,
hires giant PR and law firms, and exaggerates its environment policies.
If we are to become a sustainable society, it is crucial that we have
institutions . . . that are truly sustainable. The Body Shop has
deceived the public by trying to make us think that they are a lot
further down the road to sustainability than they really are. We should
. . . no longer . . . lionise the Body Shop and others who claim to be
something they are not." [quoted by Stauber and Rampton, Op. Cit., p.
76]
Even ignoring the distorting influence of advertising and corporate-paid
PR, the fundamental issue remains of whether consumerism can actually
fundamentally influence how business works. One environmental journalist
puts the arguments well in his excellent book on "Fast Food" (from the
industrialisation of farming, to the monopolisation of food processing,
to the standardisation of food consumption it). As he puts corporations
will "sell free-range, organic, grass-fed hamburgers if you demand it.
They will sell whatever sells at a profit." [Eric Schlosser, Op. Cit.,
p. 269] He complements this position by suggesting various regulations
and some role for trade unions.
Which, of course, is true. It is equally true that we are not forced to
buy any specific product, which is why companies spend so much in
convincing us to buy their products. Yet even ignoring the influence of
advertising, it is unlikely that using the market will make capitalism
nicer. Sadly, the market rewards the anti-social activities that
Schlosser and other environmentalists chronicle. As he himself notes,
the "low price of a fast food hamburger does not reflect its real cost .
. . The profits of the fast food chains have been made possible by the
losses imposed on the rest of society." [Op. Cit., p. 261] This means
that the idea that by using the market we can "reform" capitalism is
flawed simply because even "good" companies have to make a profit and so
will be tempted to cut costs, inflict them on third parties (such as
workers, consumers and the planet). The most obvious form of such
externalities is pollution. Such anti-social and anti-ecological
behaviour makes perfect business sense as prices fall when costs are
passed on to others in the form of externalities. Thus firms which
employ debt-slaves in sweatshops while polluting the atmosphere in a
third-world dictatorship will have lower costs and so prices than those
employing unionised workers under eco-friendly regulations.
The amazing thing is that being concerned about such issues is
considered as a flaw in economics. In fact, seeking the lowest price and
ignoring the social and ecological impact of a product is "considered
virtuousness" by the market and by economists for, as green economist E.
F. Schumacher, pointed out "[i]f a buyer refused a good bargain because
he suspected that the cheapness of the goods in question stemmed from
exploitation or other despicable practices (except theft), he would be
open to criticism of behaving 'uneconomically' which is viewed as
nothing less than a fall from grace. Economists and others are wont to
treat such eccentric behaviour with derision if not indignation. The
religion of economics has its own code of ethics, and the First
Commandment is to behave 'economically.'" [Small is Beautiful, p. 30]
And, of course, such a consumer would face numerous competitors who will
happily take advantage of such activities.
Then there is the issue of how the market system hides much more
information than it gives (a factor we will return to in
). Under the price system, customers have no way of knowing the
ecological (or social) impact of the products they buy. All they have is
a price and that simply does not indicate how the product was produced
and what costs were internalised in the final price and which were
externalised. Such information, unsurprisingly, is usually supplied
outside the market by ecological activists, unions, customer groups and
so on. Then there is the misinformation provided by the companies
themselves in their adverts and PR campaigns. The skilfully created
media images of advertising can easily swamp the efforts of these
voluntary groups to inform the public of the facts of the social and
environmental costs of certain products. Besides, any company has the
threat of court action to silence their critics as the cost in money,
resources, energy and time to fight for free speech in court is an
effective means to keep the public ignorant about the dark side of
capitalism.
This works the other way too. Simply put, a company has no idea whether
you not buying a product is based on ethical consumption decisions or
whether it is due to simple dislike of the product. Unless there is an
organised consumer boycott, i.e. a collective campaign, then the company
really has no idea that it is being penalised for its anti-ecological
and/or anti-social actions. Equally, corporations are so interlinked
that it can make boycotts ineffective. For example, unless you happened
to read the business section on the day McDonalds bought a sizeable
share in Pret-a-Manger you would have no idea that going there instead
of McDonalds would be swelling the formers profits.
Ultimately, the price mechanism does not provide enough information for
the customer to make an informed decision about the impact of their
purchase and, by reducing prices, actively rewards the behaviour
Schlosser condemns. After all, what is now "organic" production was just
the normal means of doing it. The pressures of the market, the price
mechanism so often suggested as a tool for change, ensured the
industrialisation of farming which so many now rightly condemn. By
reducing costs, market demand increased for the cheaper products and
these drove the other, more ecologically and socially sound, practices
out of business.
Which feeds into the issue of effective demand and income limitations.
The most obvious problem is that the market is not a consumer democracy
as some people have more votes than others (in fact, the world's richest
people have more "votes" than the poorest billions, combined!). Those
with the most "votes" (i.e. money) will hardly be interested in changing
the economic system which placed them in that position. Similarly, those
with the least "votes" will be more willing to buy ecologically
destructive products simply to make ends meet rather than any real
desire to do so. In addition, one individual's decision not to buy
something will easily be swamped by others seeking the best deal, i.e.
the lowest prices, due to economic necessity or ignorance. Money
(quantity) counts in the market, not values (quality).
Then there is the matter of sourcing of secondary products. After all,
most products we consume are made up of a multitude of other goods and
it is difficult, if not impossible, to know where these component parts
come from. Thus we have no real way of knowing whether your latest
computer has parts produced in sweatshops in third-world countries nor
would a decision not to buy it be communicated that far back down the
market chain (in fact, the company would not even know that you were
even thinking about buying a product unless you used non-market means to
inform them and then they may simply dismiss an individual as a crank).
So the notion that consumerism can be turned to pressurising companies
is deeply flawed. This is not to suggest that we become unconcerned
about how we spend our money. Far from it. Buying greener products
rather than the standard one does have an impact. It just means being
aware of the limitations of green consumerism, particularly as a means
of changing the world. Rather, we must look to changing how goods are
produced. This applies, of course, to shareholder democracy as well.
Buying shares in a firm rarely results in an majority at the annual
meetings nor, even if it did, does it allow an effective say in the
day-to-day decisions management makes.
Thus green consumerism is hindered by the nature of the market – how the
market reduces everything to price and so hides the information required
to make truly informed decisions on what to consume. Moreover, it is
capable of being used to further ecological damage by the use of PR to
paint a false picture of the companies and their environmental
activities. In this way, the general public think things are improving
while the underlying problems remain (and, perhaps, get worse). Even
assuming companies are honest and do minimise their environmental damage
they cannot face the fundamental cause of the ecological crisis in the
"grow-or-die" principle of capitalism ("green" firms need to make
profits, accumulate capital and grow bigger), nor do they address the
pernicious role of advertising or the lack of public control over
production and investment under capitalism. Hence it is a totally
inadequate solution.
As green Sharon Beder notes, green marketing aims at "increasing
consumption, not reducing it. Many firms [seek] to capitalise on new
markets created by rising environmental consciousness" with such trends
prompting "a surge of advertisements and labels claiming environmental
benefits. Green imagery was used to sell products, and caring for the
environment became a marketing strategy" and was a "way of redirecting a
willingness to spend less into a willingness to buy green products."
This means that firms can "expand their market share to include
consumers that want green products. Since manufacturers still make
environmentally damaging products and retailers still sell non-green
products on shelves next to green ones, it is evident that green
marketing is merely a way of expanding sales. If they were genuinely
concerned to protect the environment they would replace the unsound
products with sound ones, not just augment their existing lines."
Moreover, green marketing "does not necessarily mean green products, but
false and misleading claims can be hard for consumers to detect" while
the "most cynical marketers simply use environmental imagery to conjure
up the impression that a product is good for the environment without
making any real claims at all." Ultimately, green consumerism "reduces
people to consumers. Their power to influence society is reduced to
their purchasing power." It "does not deal with issues such as economic
growth on a finite planet, the power of transnational corporations, and
the way power is structured in our society." [Global Spin, pp. 176-80]
Andrew Watson sums up green consumerism very eloquently as follows:
"green consumerism, which is largely a cynical attempt to maintain
profit margins, does not challenge capital's eco-cidal accumulation, but
actually facilitates it by opening a new market. All products, no matter
how 'green', cause some pollution, use some resources and energy, and
cause some ecological disturbance. This would not matter in a society in
which production was rationally planned, but in an exponentially
expanding economy, production, however 'green', would eventually destroy
the Earth's environment. Ozone-friendly aerosols, for example, still use
other harmful chemicals; create pollution in their manufacture, use and
disposal; and use large amounts of resources and energy. Of course, up
to now, the green pretensions of most companies have been exposed
largely as presenting an acceptably green image, with little or no
substance. The market is presented as the saviour of the environment.
Environmental concern is commodified and transformed into ideological
support for capitalism. Instead of raising awareness of the causes of
the ecological crisis, green consumerism mystifies them. The solution is
presented as an individual act rather than as the collective action of
individuals struggling for social change. The corporations laugh all the
way to the bank." [From Green to Red, pp. 9-10]
"Ethical" consumerism, like "ethical" investment, is still based on
profit making, the extraction of surplus value from others. This is
hardly "ethical," as it cannot challenge the inequality in exchange and
power that lies at the heart of capitalism nor the authoritarian social
relationships it creates. Therefore it cannot really undermine the
ecologically destructive nature of capitalism.
In addition, since capitalism is a world system, companies can produce
and sell their non-green and dangerous goods elsewhere. Many of the
products and practices banned or boycotted in developed countries are
sold and used in developing ones. For example, Agent Orange (used as to
defoliate forests during the Vietnam War by the US) is used as an
herbicide in the Third World, as is DDT. Agent Orange contains one of
the most toxic compounds known to humanity and was responsible for
thousands of deformed children in Vietnam. Ciba-Geigy continued to sell
Enterovioform (a drug which caused blindness and paralysis in at least
10,000 Japanese users of it) in those countries that permitted it to do
so. Many companies have moved to developing countries to escape the
stricter pollution and labour laws in the developed countries.
Neither does green consumerism question why it should be the ruling
elites within capitalism that decide what to produce and how to produce
it. Since these elites are driven by profit considerations, if it is
profitable to pollute, pollution will occur. Moreover, green consumerism
does not challenge the (essential) capitalist principle of consumption
for the sake of consumption, nor can it come to terms with the fact that
"demand" is created, to a large degree, by "suppliers," specifically by
advertising agencies that use a host of techniques to manipulate public
tastes, as well as using their financial clout to ensure that "negative"
(i.e. truthful) stories about companies' environmental records do not
surface in the mainstream media.
Because ethical consumerism is based wholly on market solutions to the
ecological crisis, it is incapable even of recognising a key root cause
of that crisis, namely the atomising nature of capitalism and the social
relationships it creates. Atomised individuals ("soloists") cannot
change the world, and "voting" on the market hardly reduces their
atomisation. As Murray Bookchin argues, "[t]ragically, these millions
[of "soloists"] have surrendered their social power, indeed, their very
personalities, to politicians and bureaucrats who live in a nexus of
obedience and command in which they are normally expected to play
subordinate roles. Yet this is precisely the immediate cause of the
ecological crisis of our time – a cause that has its historic roots in
the market society that engulfs us." [Toward an Ecological Society, p.
81] This means that fighting ecological destruction today must be a
social movement rather than one of individual consumption decisions or
personalistic transformation. These can go on without questioning the
ecocidal drive of capitalism which "will insidiously simplify the
biosphere (making due allowances for 'wilderness' reserves and theme
parks), steadily reduce the organic to the inorganic and the complex to
the simple, and convert soil into sand – all at the expense of the
biosphere's integrity and viability. The state will still be an
ever-present means for keeping oppressed people at bay and will 'manage'
whatever crises emerge as best it can. Ultimately, society will tend to
become more and more authoritarian, public life will atrophy."
[Bookchin, "The Future of the Ecology Movement," pp. 1-20, Which Way for
the Ecology Movement?, p. 14]
All this is not to suggest that individual decisions on what to consume
are irrelevant, far from it. Nor are consumer boycotts a waste of time.
If organised into mass movements and linked to workplace struggle they
can be very effective. It is simply to point out that individual
actions, important as they are, are no solution to social problems. Thus
Bookchin:
"The fact is that we are confronted by a thoroughly irrational social
system, not simply by predatory individuals who can be won over to
ecological ideas by moral arguments, psychotherapy, or even the
challenges of a troubled public to their products and behaviour . . .
One can only commend the individuals who by virtue of their consumption
habits, recycling activities. and appeals for a new sensibility
undertake public activities to stop ecological degradation. Each surely
does his or her part. But it will require a much greater effort – and
organised, clearly conscious, and forward-looking political movement –
to meet the basic challenges posed by our aggressively anti-ecological
society.
"Yes, we as individuals should change our lifestyles as much as
possible, but it is the utmost short-sightedness to believe that that is
all or even primarily what we have to do. We need to restructure the
entire society, even as we engage in lifestyle changes and single-issue
struggles against pollution, nuclear power plants, the excessive use of
fossil fuels, the destruction of soil, and so forth. We must have a
coherent analysis of the deep-seated hierarchical relationships and
systems of domination, as well as class relationships and economic
exploitation, that degrade people as well as the environment." ["The
Ecological Crisis, Socialism, and the need to remake society," pp. 1-10,
Society and Nature, vol. 2, no. 3, p. 4]
Using the capitalist market to combat the effects produced by that same
market is no alternative. Until capitalism and the state are dismantled,
solutions like ethical consumerism will be about as effective as
fighting a forest fire with a water pistol. Such solutions are doomed to
failure because they promote individual responses to social problems,
problems that by their very nature require collective action, and deal
only with the symptoms, rather than focusing on the cause of the problem
in the first place. Real change comes from collective struggle, not
individual decisions within the market place which cannot combat the
cancerous growth principle of the capitalist economy. As such, ethical
consumerism does not break from the logic of capitalism and so is doomed
to failure.
The idea that population growth is the key cause of ecological problems
is extremely commonplace. Even individuals associated with such radical
green groups as Earth First! have promoted it. It is, however, a gross
distortion of the truth. Capitalism is the main cause of both
overpopulation and the ecological crisis.
Firstly, we should point out that all the "doomsday" prophets of the
"population bomb" have been proved wrong time and time again. The dire
predictions of Thomas Malthus, the originator of the population myth,
have not come true, yet neo-Malthusians continue to mouth his
reactionary ideas. In fact Malthus wrote his infamous "Essay on the
Principles of Population" which inflicted his "law of population" onto
the world in response to the anarchist William Godwin and other social
reformers. In other words, it was explicitly conceived as an attempt to
"prove" that social stratification, and so the status quo, was a "law of
nature" and that poverty was the fault of the poor themselves, not the
fault of an unjust and authoritarian socio-economic system. As such, the
"theory" was created with political goals in mind and as a weapon in the
class struggle (as an aside, it should be noted that Darwin argued his
theory of natural selection was "the doctrine of Malthus applied to the
whole animal and vegetable kingdom." [quoted by Peter Marshall, Nature's
Web, p. 320] In other words, anarchism, indirectly, inspired the theory
of evolution. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in the form of Social Darwinism
this was also used against working class people and social reform).
As Kropotkin summarised, Malthus work was "pernicious" in its influence.
It "summed up ideas already current in the minds of the
wealth-possessing minority" and arose to combat the "ideas of equality
and liberty" awakened by the French and American revolutions. Malthus
asserted against Godwin "that no equality is possible; that the poverty
of the many is not due to institutions, but is a natural law." This
meant he "thus gave the rich a kind of scientific argument against the
ideas of equality." However, it was simply "a pseudo-scientific"
assertion which reflected "the secret desires of the wealth-possessing
classes" and not a scientific hypothesis. This is obvious as technology
has ensured that Malthus's fears are "groundless" while they are
continually repeated. [Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow, p. 77,
p. 78 and p. 79]
That the theory was fundamentally ideological in nature can be seen from
Malthus himself. It is interesting to note that in contrast, and in
direct contradiction to his population "theory," as an economist Malthus
was worried about the danger of over-production within a capitalist
economy. He was keen to defend the landlords from attacks by Ricardo and
had to find a reason for their existence. To do this, he attacked Say's
Law (the notion that over-production was impossible in a free market
economy). Utilising the notion of effective demand, he argued that
capitalist saving caused the threat of over-production and it was the
landlords luxury consumption which made up the deficit in demand this
caused and ensured a stable economy. As Marxist David McNally points
out, the "whole of this argument is completely at odds with the economic
analysis" of his essay on population. According to that, the "chronic .
. . danger which confronts society is underproduction of food relative
to people." In his economics book, the world "is threatened by
overproduction. Rather than there being too little supply relative to
demand, there is now too little demand relative to supply." In fact,
Malthus even went so far as to argue for the poor to be employed in
building roads and public works! No mention of "excess" population
there, which indicates well the ideological nature of his
over-population theory. As McNally shows, it was the utility of
Malthus's practical conclusions in his "Essay on the Principles of
Population" for fighting the poor law and the right to subsistence (i.e.
welfare provisions) which explained his popularity: "he made classical
economics an open enemy of the working class." ["The Malthusian Moment:
Political Economy versus Popular Radicalism", pp. 62-103, Against the
Market, p. 85 and p. 91]
So it is easy to explain the support Malthus and his assertions got in
spite of the lack of empirical evidence and the self-contradictory
utterances of its inventor. Its support rests simply in its utility as a
justification for the inhuman miseries inflicted upon the British people
by "its" ruling class of aristocrats and industrialists was the only
reason why it was given the time of day. Similarly today, its utility to
the ruling class ensures that it keeps surfacing every so often, until
forced to disappear again once the actual facts of the case are raised.
That the population myth, like "genetic" justifications for race-,
class- and gender-based oppression, keeps appearing over and over again,
even after extensive evidence has disproved it, indicates its usefulness
to the ideological guardians of the establishment.
Neo-Malthusianism basically blames the victims of capitalism for their
victimisation, criticising ordinary people for "breeding" or living too
long, thus ignoring (at best) or justifying (usually) privilege – the
social root of hunger. To put it simply, the hungry are hungry because
they are excluded from the land or cannot earn enough to survive. In
Latin America, for example, 11% of the population was landless in 1961,
by 1975 it was 40%. Approximately 80% of all Third World agricultural
land is owned by 3% of landowners. As anarchist George Bradford
stresses, Malthusians "do not consider the questions of land ownership,
the history of colonialism, and where social power lies. So when the
poor demand their rights, the Malthusians see 'political instability'
growing from population pressure." [Woman's Freedom: Key to the
Population Question, p. 77] Bookchin makes a similar critique:
"the most sinister feature about neo-Malthusianism is the extent to
which it actively deflects us from dealing with the social origins of
our ecological problems – indeed, the extent to which it places the
blame for them on the victims of hunger rather than those who victimise
them. Presumably, if there is a 'population problem' and famine in
Africa, it is the ordinary people who are to blame for having too many
children or insisting on living too long – an argument advanced by
Malthus nearly two centuries ago with respect to England's poor. The
viewpoint not only justifies privilege; it fosters brutalisation and
degrades the neo-Malthusians even more than it degrades the victims of
privilege." ["The Population Myth", pp. 30-48, Which Way for the Ecology
Movement?, p. 34]
Increased population is not the cause of landlessness, it is the result
of it. If a traditional culture, its values, and its sense of identity
are destroyed, population growth rates increase dramatically. As in
17th- and 18th-century Britain, peasants in the Third World are kicked
off their land by the local ruling elite, who then use the land to
produce cash crops for export while their fellow country people starve.
Like Ireland during the Potato Famine, the Third World nations most
affected by famine have also been exporters of food to the developed
nations. Malthusianism is handy for the wealthy, giving them a
"scientific" excuse for the misery they cause so they can enjoy their
blood-money without remorse. It is unwise for greens to repeat such
arguments:
"It's a betrayal of the entire message of social ecology to ask the
world's poor to deny themselves access to the necessities of life on
grounds that involve long-range problems of ecological dislocation, the
shortcomings of 'high' technology, and very specious claims of natural
shortages in materials, while saying nothing at all about the artificial
scarcity engineered by corporate capitalism." [The Ecology of Freedom,
p. 350]
In a country that is being introduced to the joys of capitalism by state
intervention (the usual means by which traditional cultures and habits
are destroyed to create a "natural system of liberty"), population soon
explodes as a result of the poor social and economic conditions in which
people find themselves. In the inner-city ghettos of the First World,
social and economic conditions similar to those of the Third World give
rise to similarly elevated birth rates. When ghetto populations are
composed mostly of minorities, as in countries like the US, higher birth
rates among the minority poor provides a convenient extra excuse for
racism, "proving" that the affected minorities are "inferior" because
they "lack self-control," are "mere animals obsessed with procreation,"
etc. Much the same was said of Irish Catholics in the past and, needless
to say, such an argument ignores the fact that slum dwellers in, for
example, Britain during the Industrial Revolution were virtually all
white but still had high birth rates.
Population growth, far from being the cause of poverty, is in fact a
result of it. There is an inverse relationship between per capita income
and the fertility rate – as poverty decreases, so do the population
rates. When people are ground into the dirt by poverty, education falls,
women's rights decrease, and contraception is less available. Having
children then becomes virtually the only survival means, with people
resting their hopes for a better future in their offspring. Therefore
social conditions have a major impact on population growth. In countries
with higher economic and cultural levels, population growth soon starts
to fall off. Today, for example, much of Europe has seen birth rates
fall beyond the national replacement rate. This is the case even in
Catholic countries, which one would imagine would have religious factors
encouraging large families.
To be clear, we are not saying that overpopulation is not a very serious
problem. Obviously, population growth cannot be ignored or solutions put
off until capitalism is eliminated. We need to immediately provide
better education and access to contraceptives across the planet as well
as raising cultural levels and increasing women's rights in order to
combat overpopulation in addition to fighting for land reform, union
organising and so on. Overpopulation only benefits the elite by keeping
the cost of labour low. This was the position of the likes of Emma
Goldman and other radicals of her time:
"Many working-class radicals accepted the logic that excessive numbers
were what kept the poor in their misery. During the nineteenth century
there were courageous attempts to disseminate birth-control information
both to promote lower population and to make it possible for women to
control their own reproductivity and escape male domination. Birth
control was the province of feminism, radical socialism and anarchism."
[Bradford, Op. Cit., p. 69]
Unlike many neo-Malthusians Goldman was well aware that social reasons
explained why so many people went hungry. As she put it, "if the masses
of people continue to be poor and the rich grow ever richer, it is not
because the earth is lacking in fertility and richness to supply the
need of an excessive race, but because the earth is monopolised in the
hands of the few to the exclusion of the many." She noted that the
promotion of large families had vested interests behind it, although
working class people "have learned to see in large families a millstone
around their necks, deliberately imposed upon them by the reactionary
forces in society because a large family paralyses the brain and benumbs
the muscles of the masses . . . [The worker] continues in the rut,
compromises and cringes before his master, just to earn barely enough to
feed the many little mouths. He dare not join a revolutionary
organisation; he dare not go on strike; he dare not express an opinion."
["The Social Aspects of Birth Control", Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma
Goldman's Mother Earth, p. 135 and pp. 136-7] This support for birth
control, it should be stressed, resulted in Goldman being arrested.
Malthus, like many of his followers "opposed contraception as immoral,
preferring to let the poor starve as a 'natural' method of keeping
numbers down. For him, only misery, poverty, famine, disease, and war
would keep population from expanding beyond the carrying capacity of the
land." [Bradford, Op. Cit., p. 69]
Unsurprisingly, Goldman linked the issue of birth control to that of
women's liberation arguing that "I never will acquiesce or submit to
authority, nor will I make peace with a system which degrades woman to a
mere incubator and which fattens on her innocent victims. I now and here
declare war upon this system." The key problem was that woman "has been
on her knees before the altar of duty imposed by God, by Capitalism, by
the State, and by Morality" for ages. Once that changed, the issue of
population would solve itself for "[a]fter all it is woman whom is
risking her health and sacrificing her youth in the reproduction of the
race. Surely she ought to be in a position to decide how many children
she should bring into world, whether they should be brought into the
world by the man she loves and because she wants the child, or should be
born in hatred and loathing." [Op. Cit., p. 140 and p. 136]
Other anarchists have echoed this analysis. George Bradford, for
example, correctly notes that "the way out of the [ecological] crisis
lies in the practical opening toward freedom of self-expression and
selfhood for women that is the key to the destruction of hierarchy." In
other words, women's "freedom and well-being are at the centre of the
resolution to the population problem, and that can only be faced within
the larger social context." That means "real participation in social
decision-making, real health concerns, access to land, and the overthrow
of patriarchal domination." [Op. Cit., p. 68 and p. 82] Bookchin makes
the same point, noting that population growth rates have fallen in
developed countries because "of the freedom that women have acquired
over recent decades to transcend the role that patriarchy assigned to
them as mere reproductive factories." ["The Future of the Ecology
Movement," pp. 1-20, Which Way for the Ecology Movement?, p. 19]
This means that an increase of freedom will solve the population
question. Sadly, many advocates of neo-Malthusianism extend control over
people from women to all. The advocates of the "population myth," as
well as getting the problem wrong, also (usually) suggest very
authoritarian "solutions" – for example, urging an increase in state
power with a "Bureau of Population Control" to "police" society and
ensure that the state enters the bedroom and our most personal
relationships. Luckily for humanity and individual freedom, since they
misconceive the problem, such "Big Brother" solutions are not required.
So, it must be stressed the "population explosion" is not a neutral
theory, and its invention reflected class interests at the time and
continual use since then is due to its utility to vested interests. We
should not be fooled into thinking that overpopulation is the main cause
of the ecological crisis, as this is a strategy for distracting people
from the root-cause of both ecological destruction and population growth
today: namely, the capitalist economy and the inequalities and
hierarchical social relationships it produces. As such, those who stress
the issue of population numbers get it backward. Poverty causes high
birth rates as people gamble on having large families so that some
children will survive in order to look after the parents in their old
age. Eliminate economic insecurity and poverty, then people have less
children.
Some Greens argue that it is impossible for everyone to have a high
standard of living, as this would deplete available resources and place
too much pressure on the environment. However, their use of statistics
hides a sleight of hand which invalidates their argument. As Bookchin
correctly argues:
"Consider the issue of population and food supply in terms of mere
numbers and we step on a wild merry-go-round that does not support
neo-Malthusian predictions of a decade ago, much less a generation ago.
Such typically neo-Malthusian stunts as determining the 'per capita
consumption' of steel, oil, paper, chemicals, and the like of a nation
by dividing the total tonnage of the latter by the national population,
such that every man, women, and child is said to 'consume' a resultant
quantity, gives us a picture that is blatantly false and functions as a
sheer apologia for the upper classes. The steel that goes into a
battleship, the oil that is used to fuel a tank, and the paper that is
covered by ads hardly depicts the human consumption of materials.
Rather, it is stuff consumed by all the Pentagons of the world that help
keep a 'grow-or-die economy in operation – goods, I may add, whose
function is to destroy and whose destiny is to be destroyed." ["The
Population Myth", pp. 30-48, Which Way for the Ecology Movement?, pp.
34-5]
Focusing on averages, in other words, misses out the obvious fact we
live in a highly unequal societies which results in a few people using
many resources. To talk about consumption and not to wonder how many
Rolls Royces and mansions the "average" person uses means producing
skewed arguments. Equally, it is possible to have more just societies
with approximately the same living standards with significantly less
consumption of resources and less pollution and waste produced. We need
only compare America with Europe to see this. One could point out, for
example, that Europeans enjoy more leisure time, better health, less
poverty, less inequality and thus more economic security, greater
intergenerational economic mobility, better access to high-quality
social services like health care and education, and manage to do it all
in a far more environmentally sustainable way (Europe generates about
half the CO2 emissions for the same level of GDP) compared to the US.
In fact, even relatively minor changes in how we work can have
significant impact. For example, two economists at the Center for
Economic and Policy Research produced a paper comparing U.S. and
European energy consumption and related it to hours worked. They
concluded that if Americans chose to take advantage of their high level
of productivity by simply shortening the workweek or taking longer
holidays rather than producing more, there would follow a number of
benefits. Specifically, if the U.S. followed Western Europe in terms of
work hours then not only would workers find themselves with seven
additional weeks of time off, the US would consume some 20% less energy
and if this saving was directly translated into lower carbon emissions
then it would have emitted 3% less carbon dioxide in 2002 than in 1990
(this level of emissions is only 4% above the negotiated target of the
Kyoto Protocol). If Europe following IMF orthodoxy and increased working
hours, this would have a corresponding negative impact on energy use and
emissions (not to mention quality of life). [David Rosnick and Mark
Weisbrot, Are Shorter Work Hours Good for the Environment?] Of course,
any such choice is influenced by social institutions and pressures and,
as such, part of a wider social struggle for change.
In other words, we must question the underlying assumption of the
neo-Malthusians that society and technology are static and that the
circumstances that produced historic growth and consumption rates will
remain unchanged. This is obviously false, since humanity is not static.
To quote Bookchin again:
"by reducing us to studies of line graphs, bar graphs, and statistical
tables, the neo-Malthusians literally freeze reality as it is. Their
numerical extrapolations do not construct any reality that is new; they
mere extend, statistic by statistic, what is basically old and given . .
. We are taught to accept society, behaviour, and values as they are,
not as they should be or even could be. This procedure places us under
the tyranny of the status quo and divests us of any ability to think
about radically changing the world. I have encountered very few books or
articles written by neo-Malthusians that question whether we should live
under any kind of money economy at all, any statist system of society,
or be guided by profit oriented behaviour. There are books and articles
aplenty that explain 'how to' become a 'morally responsible' banker,
entrepreneur, landowner, 'developer,' or, for all I know, arms merchant.
But whether the whole system called capitalism (forgive me!), be it
corporate in the west or bureaucratic in the east, must be abandoned if
we are to achieve an ecological society is rarely discussed." [Op. Cit.,
p. 33]
It is probably true that an "American" living standard is not possible
for the population of the world at its present level (after all, the US
consumes 40% of the world's resources to support only 5% of its
population). For the rest of the world to enjoy that kind of standard of
living we would require the resources of multiple Earths! Ultimately,
anything which is not renewable is exhaustible. The real question is
when will it be exhausted? How? Why? And by whom? As such, it is
important to remember that this "standard of living" is a product of an
hierarchical system which produces an alienated society in which
consumption for the sake of consumption is the new god. In a grow-or-die
economy, production and consumption must keep increasing to prevent
economic collapse. This need for growth leads to massive advertising
campaigns to indoctrinate people with the capitalist theology that more
and more must be consumed to find "happiness" (salvation), producing
consumerist attitudes that feed into an already-present tendency to
consume in order to compensate for doing boring, pointless work in a
hierarchical workplace. Unless a transformation of values occurs that
recognises the importance of living as opposed to consuming, the
ecological crisis will get worse. It is impossible to imagine such a
radical transformation occurring under capitalism and so a key aim of
eco-anarchists is to encourage people to consider what they need to live
enriched, empowering and happy lives rather than participate in the rat
race capitalism produces (even if you do win, you remain a rat).
Nor it cannot be denied that developments like better health care,
nutrition, and longer lifespans contribute to overpopulation and are
made possible by "industry." But to see such developments as primary
causes of population growth is to ignore the central role played by
poverty, the disruption of cultural patterns, and the need for cheap
labour due to capitalism. There are always elevated birth rates
associated with poverty, whether or not medical science improves
significantly (for example, during the early days of capitalism).
"Industrialism" is in fact a term used by liberal Greens (even when they
call themselves "deep") who do not want to admit that the ecological
crisis cannot be solved without the complete overthrow of capitalism,
pretending instead that the system can become "green" through various
band-aid reforms. "Controlling population growth" is always a key item
on such liberals' agendas, taking the place of "eliminating capitalism,"
which should be the centrepiece. "Population control is substituted for
social justice, and the problem is actually aggravated by the Malthusian
'cure'," points out feminist Betsy Hartmann. [quoted by Bradford, Op.
Cit., p. 77]
After all, there is enough food to feed the world's population but its
distribution reflects inequalities in wealth, power and effective demand
(this is most obviously seen when food is exported from famine areas as
there is no effective demand for it there, a sadly regular occurrence).
The "myth that population increases in places like the Sudan, for
example, result in famine" can only survive if we ignore "the notorious
fact that the Sudanese could easily feed themselves if they were not
forced by the American-controlled World Bank and International Monetary
Fund to grow cotton instead of grains." [Bookchin, Remaking Society, p.
11] Hence the importance of class analysis and an awareness of
hierarchy. We can hardly talk of "our" resources when those resources
are owned by a handful of giant corporations. Equally, we cannot talk
about "our" industrial impact on the planet when the decisions of
industry are made by a bosses and most of us are deliberately excluded
from the decision making process. While it makes sense for the ruling
elite to ignore such key issues, it counter-productive for radicals to
do so and blame "people" or their numbers for social and environmental
problems:
"The most striking feature of such way of thinking is not only that it
closely parallels the way of thinking that is found in the corporate
world. What is more serious is that it serves to deflect our attention
from the role society plays in producing ecological breakdown. If
'people' as a species are responsible for environmental dislocations,
these dislocations cease to be the result of social dislocations. A
mythic 'Humanity' is created – irrespective of whether we are talking
about oppressed minorities, women, Third World people, or people in the
First World – in which everyone is brought into complicity with powerful
corporate elites in producing environmental dislocations. In this way,
the social roots of ecological problems are shrewdly obscured . . . [W]e
can dismiss or explain away hunger, misery, or illness as 'natural
checks' that are imposed on human beings to retain the 'balance of
nature.' We can comfortably forget that much of the poverty and hunger
that afflicts the world has its origins in the corporate exploitation of
human beings and nature – in agribusiness and social oppression." [Op.
Cit., pp. 9-10]
Looking at population numbers simply misses the point. As Murray
Bookchin argues, this "arithmetic mentality which disregards the social
context of demographics is incredibly short-sighted. Once we accept
without any reflection or criticism that we live in a 'grow-or-die'
capitalistic society in which accumulation is literally a law of
economic survival and competition is the motor of 'progress,' anything
we have to say about population is basically meaningless. The biosphere
will eventually be destroyed whether five billion or fifty million live
on the planet. Competing firms in a 'dog-eat-dog' market must outproduce
each other if they are to remain in existence. They must plunder the
soil, remove the earth's forests, kill off its wildlife, pollute its air
and waterways not because their intentions are necessarily bad, although
they usually are . . . but because they must simply survive. Only a
radical restructuring of society as a whole, including its
anti-ecological sensibilities, can remove this all commanding social
compulsion." ["The Population Myth", pp. 30-48, Op. Cit., p. 34] A sane
society would not be driven by growth for the sake of growth and would
aim to reduce production by reducing the average working week to ensure
both an acceptable standard of living plus time to enjoy it. So it is
not a case that the current industrial system is something we need to
keep. Few anarchists consider a social revolution as simply
expropriating current industry and running it more or less as it is now.
While expropriating the means of life is a necessary first step, it is
only the start of a process in which we transform the way we interact
with nature (which, of course, includes people).
To conclude, as Bradford summarises the "salvation of the marvellous
green planet, our Mother Earth, depends on the liberation of women – and
children, and men – from social domination, exploitation and hierarchy.
They must go together." [Op. Cit., p. 68] By focusing attention away
from the root causes of ecological and social disruption – i.e.
capitalism and hierarchy – and onto their victims, the advocates of the
"population myth" do a great favour to the system that creates mindless
growth. Hence the population myth will obviously find favour with ruling
elites, and this – as opposed to any basis for the myth in scientific
fact – will ensure its continual re-appearance in the media and
education.