I have just been reading "Ecology and Capitalist Costs of Production:
No Exit".
This was by Immanuel Wallerstein's Keynote address at PEWS XXI, "The
Global Environment and the World-System," Univ. of California, Santa
Cruz, Apr.3-5. 1997.
Wallerstein began the address by saying attitudes to eco-doom range from
complacent to panic-stricken, with most people in the middle, where he
puts himself: "the degree of seriousness of the contemporary problem ranges
from those who consider doomsday as imminent to those who consider that the
problem is one well within the possibility of an early technical solution.
I believe the majority of persons hold a position somewhere in-between."
In fact, no-one can sit in the middle between ennui and hysteria. It is
either one thing or the other. Wallerstein is actually a catastrophist,
because he thinks the collapse of world-capitalism is both inevitable
and imminent. Not bad for president of the International Sociological
Association (I think that's right) and well-funded Gulbenkian fellow.
Interestingly, tho', his version of doom is not actually ECO-catastrophist
after all. It's economic, Marxian at that: he speaks of 'deruralisation'
as capitalism's main problem, ie, the world's peasantry has become
proletarianised, and this lack of new simple-minded draftees from the
countryside puts upward pressure on the wage, squeezing profits and
leaving nothing over to finance the ecological clean-up necessary if
capitalism is to survive. This is Marxism in its purest form: the
creation of a proletariat is capitalism's historic task. It is a notion
I agree with. Then capitalism will founder, unable to satisfy rising
expectations, because it cannot raise productivity enough and will not
redistribute wealth enough (thus the Final Crisis becomes objectively
a crisis of the ruling class itself, of its displacement thru a coup
etc).
So Wallerstein is a Marxist-Leninist Gulbenkian fellow, then?
Not exactly.
It's when you come to policy that Wallerstein loses the plot. And
this is why those of us who doggedly cling to Leninist models
of political organisation and to revolutionary perspectives, are
more credible than the professors.
On Wallerstein's reading, 1917 was a century too soon, and that BTW is
mostly what Lenin himself thought as far as I can see, and that explains
its shortcomings and its ultimate fate. Only when capitalism has
exhausted the historical space available to it will its doom become
unavoidable, as Wallerstein says it now us. Capitalism is
backing into a historical impasse, torn between the inexorably rising
environmental costs of growth, and the unassuagable and
incessantly-growing expectations of the huge masses of humanity now
living under its wing. (This also explains capitalism's popularity
according to Wallerstien, and implicitly the unpopularity of socialism,
with its savour of the barracks, the soup kitchen and levelling-down
executed under dreary and watchful bureaucratic eyes).
I want to make a reservation here about Catastrophism: I am not a
Castastrophist! It's obvious enough to anyone who reads me attentively,
not that I blame those of you who don't. I have a strong belief in
capitalism's resilience. Corpocrats live in the same world we do, and
not for nothing does the Gulbenkian pay Wallerstein's wages. I just read
a report about how Dow, IBM, GM, Hoechst and other big players are
investing hugely into 'green' technologies and it's not just a matter of
cleaning up their act: they are very seriously thinking about what
'sustainable' capitalism means. They want to hang onto their privileges
and don't like the sound of historical impasses, bifurcations, nodal
points, disequilibria etc. They are not facing a wall of impotence
either. Shell are spending big money on forestry, biomass fuels,
photovoltaics and a Shell lobbyist is proposing to the British
government that all new homes must be built with solar panels enough to
provide 10% of their own electricity - which strikes at the heart of
several other Shell core businesses, showing as clearly as possible that
Shell is serious about such issues as global warming.
As usual with sociologists and people on the soi-disant left,
Wallerstein is long on big thoughts and declarations, and short on
substantiating empirical detail, which in many cases actually does not
back him up or is less supportive of the catastrophist view than you
might think.
There is one other way that capitalism can survive ALL social
pressures, apart from cleaning up its act, and that is by removing
society. This option can be less extreme than it sounds, and in any case
dead men tell no tales. Our world is built on the fragments of ruined
societies, unrecognised and unmourned. Gunder Frank does not want to
call it Capitalism any more. Let's call it Exterminism, then, as Edward
Thompson did.
The easiest way is to kill people and genocide can be silent. According
to Russian government figures, between 1990-95 3,000,000
Russian men aged between 23-40 died. This demographic catastrophe,
almost unique in peacetime history, means that the shortage of eligible
mean may reduce the Russian population by almost half in the next forty
years, to around 90m. I was in Moscow when it all fell apart, and no-one
there really noticed because of the floods of cheap EU (mostly French)
vodka (made of apples a lot of it) which came in fleets of tankers
and sold for a dollar a bottle. That's how we did them in, same we
we stole America from the First Nations, so it's not a new trick.
Such demographic disasters can and will be repeated whenever chunks of
the world system go into collapse. It can happen in China, India,
Africa. Capitalism meanwhile can be expected to roll triumphantly on,
with Wall Street singing hosannas and tolling its bells.
So Wallerstein is too fatalistic by half. No-one really knows what will
happen. My guess, and it's barely more than that despite having spent
MUCH time reading, in the past 18 months, is this: yes, world-capitalism
is in a scissors, caught between rising population, energy-shortage and
environmental default. You know what I think about oil. It won't run out
for a while, and production is rising strongly right now. The Norwegians
think they've discovered a new supergiant N Sea oilfield. But the indicators
are set this way: there is way too little oil to satisfy the burgeoning
requirements of the Third World developers. And there is no subsitute
for oil, the irreplaceable commodity on which urban industrial life
depends.
But oil is a slow-motion, chronic problem, not a catastrophe.
Unless real catastrophes occur (CATASTROPHE: great and usu. sudden
disaster: OED) like thermonuclear war or runaway global warming, then
the 'bifurcation' Wallerstein speaks of will be indefinitely postponed.
Capitalism is by nature unstable, and never more than at present, and I
think the emperor has few clothes behind the hurrah-triumphalism. But
short of some cusp-event, it will stagger on. And on.
Nevertheless, as time goes by, the probability of such events presumably
increases.
And this is where Wallerstein fails to live up to his promise (or where
he DOES live up to the promise he made to the Gulbenkian...).
Because if he really believes some such debacle is inevitable, then his
rallying cry isn't worth a hill of beans is it?
> It is here and now that
> we must raise the banner of substantive rationality, around which we
must
> rally.
>
Yes, that was always the banner I wanted to serve, that old 'substantive
rationality' one: "So comrades, come rally, to sub-STANT-ive
ration-ali-TEE."
> To be substantively rational is to make choices that
> will provide an optimal mix. But what does optimal mean? In part, we could
> define it by using the old slogan of Jeremy Bentham, the greatest good for
> the greatest number. The problem is that this slogan, while it puts us on
> the right track (the outcome), has many loose strings...
>
Poor ole J Bentham, whose bones are kept in a closet. Dem bones, dem
bones. Someone from Cambridge has had the bright idea of taking the
bones (metaphorically) to St Petersburg where a big seminar on morality
and utilitarianism will be held for the benefit of the Natives,
next month.
Never underestimate the enemy.
Mark Jones