A
version of this essay was presented at the Ecological Challenges
conference in Oslo in September 2014. It has now been published as a chapter in the
compendium Social
Ecology and Social Change, just released by New Compass Press.
One of the animating beliefs
of twentieth century social ecology was that capitalism had tamed its dangerous
contradictions. “The unprecedented fact remains that capitalism has been free
of a ‘chronic’ crisis for a half century,” wrote Murray Bookchin in his 1989
essay, Radical
Politics in an Era of Advanced Capitalism “Nor are there signs that we
are faced in the foreseeable future with a crisis comparable to that of the
Great Depression,” he went on. “Far from having an internal source of long-term
economic breakdown that will presumably create a general interest for a new
society, capitalism has been more successful in crisis management in the last
fifty years than it was in the previous century and a half.”
Indeed, a robust, incessantly
growing capitalism, shorn of past weaknesses and instabilities, was precisely
the nub of the problem. With the help of the state and Keynesian economic
innovations, capitalism had subdued its internal contradictions. But this
success left in place a “new, perhaps paramount” external contradiction. The “clash”, as Bookchin put it, “between
an economy based on unending growth and the desiccation of the natural
environment.”
It is true that social ecology
did not exclude the possibility that capitalism could relapse into a chronic
stagnation nor believe that the system’s contradictions had somehow vanished.
Bookchin regarded capitalism as “one of the most unstable economies in history”
and inherently unpredictable. But the “traditional radical notion” that
periodic or chronic crises would unfailingly occur was “uncertain”, he averred,
and the prospect of capitalism sinking into a “major chronic crisis” remained
unexpected.
I think we need to face the fact
that the unexpected has happened, and both capitalism’s internal and external
contradictions have come to the fore. I believe the economic events of the last
few years have demonstrated that, in the advanced capitalist countries, rumours
of the death of capitalism’s contradictions have been greatly exaggerated. The
crisis that has emerged is unmistakably chronic in character and cannot be
mistaken for a periodic downturn. This has important implications for how a
post-capitalist, ecological movement relates to masses of people whose material
underpinnings are declining and unstable.
But it is equally important to
recognise that, contrary to the hopes of leftists in previous eras, crisis and
stagnation does not mean that capitalism is about to self-destruct. Nor are
there legions of class-conscious proletarians ready to, in Marx’s famous words,
“expropriate the expropriators”. What makes this crisis unique is that it has
emerged after capitalism has vanquished all meaningful opposition, borrowed
deeply into society, and expanded across the globe.
I would like to proceed from
an agreement as to what capitalism is. In line with social ecology, I’d argue
that capitalism is primarily a system in which money is invested to make more
money, and so on ad infinitum. This creates an insatiable necessity for growth.
Zero-growth capitalism is a contradiction in terms. “To keep to a satisfactory
growth rate right now would mean finding profitable opportunities for an extra
$2 trillion compared to the ‘mere’ $6 billion that was needed in 1970,” says
Marxian geographer David Harvey. “By the time 2030 rolls around, when estimates
suggest the global economy should be worth more than $96 trillion, profitable
investment opportunities of close to $3 trillion will be needed.”
But in the core, advanced
capitalist countries – the US, Western Europe and Japan – the growth rate,
though still positive, has not been satisfactory for some time. Between 2001
and 2011, the rate of economic growth in the US was 63% below that
of the 1960s. In Japan, growth between 1973 and 2008 was just one quarter
of the level it reached between 1950 and 1973. In Western Europe, it has
contracted by more than half. In
the UK, the rate of GDP growth was 2.7% in the 1980s, 2.2% in the 1990s, 1.8%
between 2000 and 2010 and 1.3% between 2010 and 2014. In the core
countries, decline is in evidence virtually everywhere.
There are differing theories
as to what lies at the root of this stagnating growth. One culprit that looms
large in many explanations is a drop in the purchasing power of the mass of
people. A 2011 report from the UK Resolution Foundation, Painful
Separation, describes an extreme “decoupling” of average incomes from
the rate of economic growth. Since the 1970s, the report says, median pay has
grown at less than half the rate of economic output in the US, Canada and
Australia. In Britain, France and Germany, median pay tracked economic growth
for a long period, but, in the past decade, has increased by less than half the
growth rate. Only in Scandinavia and Japan has the divergence between economic
growth and average pay been “mild”, the report concludes. In recent years, this
contraction of wealth has been intensified. According to the US Russell Sage
Foundation, the net wealth of the typical American household declined by a
staggering 36% between 2003 and 2013. In the UK, real wages, the value of
wages when you factor in the effect of inflation, have
dropped by 8.5% since 2009, the largest fall since the 19th
century.
Four out of ten of the new jobs ‘created’ in Britain since 2010 are
self-employed and well-paid managerial posts are being replaced by more
‘elementary’ jobs such as cleaning.
So you are left with a
stand-off between two intractable features of the economy. On the one side, a
‘wall of money’ (as one English economist, Harry Shutt, puts it), demanding
more and more profit-generating opportunities and, on the other, the declining
purchasing power of the majority of people. This is not a recipe for economic
health. The unavoidable consequences are, in the absence of productive
investment for which demand is lacking, an increase in speculation (the buying
of assets, currency futures or collaterized debt obligations for example, in
the hope their value will rise), and spiralling household debt. These are both
prime underlying causes of the 2007-9 economic crisis, and revealingly, nothing
that has happened subsequently has done anything to ameliorate them. It can be
argued that privatisation, which began in the 1980s, was another way to utilise
all this ‘surplus capital’. But state-owned services and assets are obviously a
finite resource. And despite the best efforts of governments like that of the
UK, the gravy train cannot go on forever.
It is very hard to escape from
this situation. To do so would require reversing the war on organised labour
that has occurred since the 1970s, and I can sense no appetite among employers
to do this, or placing restrictions on credit and raising interest rates, which
though they may reduce household debt, would have the unfortunate side effect
of sinking the economy.
Given this, the official
government reaction has been to put the economy on life support through the
printing of enormous sums of money (officially known as Quantitative Easing), pioneered
by Japan and now part of the economic toolkit of the US, UK and most recently,
the European Central Bank. This is done in conjunction with near zero interest
rates, which makes the borrowing of money incredibly cheap. Meanwhile, the
political and economic authorities feel they have no option but to reboot and
reinstall the casino economy.
But if nothing is done to
change the underlying conditions which brought forth economic crisis, merely a
smoothing over of the cracks, then the extreme likelihood is that further
crises will erupt in the near future. In fact, the current crisis has yet to
play itself out fully, as the economic torpor in the Eurozone aptly
demonstrates. Not for nothing is this called ‘the Great Recession’. The
economic engine of capitalism is clearly sputtering, despite huge government
action and financial rescues. The successful “crisis management” that, at the
end of the 1980s Bookchin credited capitalism with, has been transformed into a
series of desperate measures. Capitalism’s contradictions, thought to have been
banished to the history books, have emerged resurgent.
However, there are important
caveats to be made before we become engrossed in making comparisons with the
last great crisis of capitalism, the Great Depression of the 1930s. The first
concerns poverty. The inhabitants of the wealthy core capitalist countries are
clearly getting poorer but, in the main, they cannot be classed as poor.
Contrary to the predictions of Marxism, the working class in these countries enjoyed
burgeoning wealth throughout most of the twentieth century, particularly in the
decades after the Second World War. According to the economist Thomas Piketty,
whose book Capital
in the 21st Century predicts growing inequality in the
coming decades, the emergence of what he terms a “patrimonial middle class” in
the 20th century should not be underestimated. Tens of millions of
individuals in Europe or 40% of the population, says Piketty, “individually own
property worth hundreds of thousands of euros and collectively lay claim to
one-quarter to one-third of national wealth: this is a change of some moment.”
These people are not destitute and “do not like to be treated as poor”, Piketty
asserts. Despite the fact that the 1%, and especially the 0.1%, seem to inhabit
a different universe, both materially and spiritually, to the rest of us, we
haven’t suddenly jumped in a time machine and travelled back a hundred years to
an era when the top 10% owned virtually everything and the bottom 90% nothing.
So Bookchin was not being blinkered when he noted in the 2002 essay The Communalist Project that “almost 50%
of American households own stocks and bonds, while a huge number are
proprietors of one kind or another, possessing their own homes, gardens and
rural summer retreats.” It is just that, many millions of people in the wealthy
countries are now going, in the words of one recent book, “down
the up escalator”.
The second qualification is
that low growth and recurrent economic crises are malaises that seem peculiar
to the wealthy capitalist countries. Yes, China was affected by the global
financial crisis and economic growth slowed there, but it still reached over 7%
in 2012. China, with its chronic air pollution reducing life expectancy, is
contending with problems generated by a vigorous capitalism, not a faltering
one. Likewise, the Turkish economy expanded by 8.5% in 2011. So called
‘emerging markets’ have the advantage of increasing populations and a rising
middle class. Economically speaking, they are more sustainable.
But the most important caveat
to understand is that a dysfunctional capitalism displaying contradictions that
are harder and harder to hide, is not simply going to disappear. Bookchin’s
departure from the Marxist orthodoxy of the early twentieth century stemmed
from an exasperation with the idea that, because of its internal development,
capitalism would inevitably collapse and give way to socialism. This old
leftist conviction was entwined with a resolute faith that a class conscious
working class would be ready and willing to take over when capitalism faltered,
and guide society to a communist future. “For generations,” Bookchin wrote in
his 1989 book, Remaking
Society, “radical theorists
opined about the ‘inner limits’ of the capitalist system, the ‘internal’
mechanisms within its operations as an economy that would yield its
self-destruction. Marx gained the plaudits of endless writers for advancing the
possibility that capitalism would be destroyed and replaced by socialism
because it would enter a chronic crisis of diminishing profits, economic
stagnation and class war with an ever-impoverished proletariat.”
What makes the current period
of economic stagnation and chronic capitalist crisis unique in historical terms
is that, in the palpable absence of a revolutionary alternative, capitalism
shows no signs of self-destructing or meekly conceding to “socialism”. It was,
ironically, Lenin who remarked that there were no “absolutely
hopeless situations” for capitalism. And the present situation is far from
hopeless. Capitalism will, despite its attendant shocks and contradictions, and
despite growing evidence in its heartlands of stagnation and decline,
inexorably go on. There is no such thing as a “last stage” of capitalism while
capitalism still exists. The last stage can only be identified retrospectively
when, and if, it is replaced by
another economic system. The system will not jump, it has to be pushed. And
no-one is pushing.
The fact is that the
overwhelming majority of people, even in the wealthy countries, are wage and
capital dependent. They need jobs and money and a functional economy. This
means that they have a clear interest in re-installing the economic system
whenever it breaks down. “So long as the basic
institutions of capitalism remain in place, it is in rational self-interest of
almost everyone to keep the capitalists happy,” wrote American mathematician
David Schweickart in his 2002 book, After
Capitalism. “Economic growth is in the immediate interest of virtually
every sector of society – growth in the straight-forwards sense as measured by
GDP”.
This truth holds in spite of low growth and recurrent recessions
or crises. Consider the clamour to do ‘whatever it takes’ to restore business
as usual after the 2008 crash when the system really did threaten to break down
and there was the immediate danger of ATM machines not dispensing cash and
companies not being able to pay their workforce. With no alternative on the
horizon, political elites were always going to intervene with trillions of
dollars of taxpayers’ money. That is why it’s presumptuous to describe any of
capitalism’s increasingly visible contradictions as fatal. The aforementioned
David Harvey, lists 17 contradictions of capital in his latest book, but
maintains only one of them is “potentially fatal”. “But it will turn out so,”
he elaborates, “only if a revolutionary movement arises to
change the evolutionary path that the endless accumulation of capital dictates.
Whether or not a revolutionary spirit crystallises out to force radical changes
in the way in which we live is not given in the stars. It depends entirely on
human volition.”
So is
there any value in being aware of capitalism’s resurgent contradictions if they
are probably not fatal and even if they result in economic breakdown, simply
produce a clamour on the part of the public as well as elites to restore the
system to, if not health, at least basic functionality? The point, I would suggest,
is that there is a crying need for a post-capitalist, ecological movement to
articulate an alternative to a capitalism that is seriously not delivering for
millions of people, and not delivering in a way that hasn’t been true since
before the Second World War. I was brought up with the idea that, although
capitalism may have terrible side effects, it delivered the goods in terms of
rising wealth and consumerist distractions. That, from where I’m sitting, is
simply not the case anymore. Whereas, not so long ago, politicians promised a
better future, however much those promises were empty PR flannel, now their
message is conspicuously negative. Politics has become nasty and vicious (and
in its treatment of the unemployed and the disabled verging on the sadistic)
and all about adapting to the demands of a creaking economy. Forget the sunlit
uplands, the future comprises differing gradations of pain.
I
believe a social ecology and assembly democracy movement that wishes to thrive
and become a genuine rival to capitalism has to respond to this new situation
and mood. If I were to crudely summarise the message of social ecology up to
this point, it is along the lines of capitalism incessantly grows, creating
soulless and energy draining urbanisation and megacities. And at the same time
as it destroys the natural environment and pollutes, the market economy
steadily remakes society in its own image, commodifying more and more aspects
of life and imposing a buyer-seller relationship. But explicit within the concept
of ‘post-scarcity’ was the assumption that the material foundations of people
in wealthy capitalist countries were assured.
The post Second World War era, Bookchin wrote, was infused with “a
buoyant sense of promise” and this feeling of optimism was “clearly
materialistic. A radical ethic developed, he asserted in Remaking Society, possessed of “the reasonable certainty that the
abolition of oppression in any form – of the senses as well as of the body and
mind – could be achieved even on the bourgeois
grounds of economic instrumentalism.”
The trouble with the capitalist machine, as well as its potential, was not
its internal contradictions, but that it had become remarkably stable and
successful. I am not arguing that capitalist growth is no longer a problem.
Even during the ‘crisis years’ of 2008 to 2012, the advanced capitalist
countries grew by around 1% a year, which is high by long-term historical
standards. Economic stagnation in Japan has been accompanied by a rise, not a
fall, in carbon emissions. And commodification has, if anything, intensified
post-crash as the rich countries try to resuscitate growth. However, what
cannot be ignored is that capitalism is no longer the prosperity machine of old
for millions of people in the rich countries. A growth in absolute poverty,
mass unemployment, under-employment, low-paying self-employment, declining
incomes, housing precarity and evictions, and a disavowal of responsibility to
vulnerable people dependent on vanishing state welfare benefits, are all features
of this new landscape. The buoyant sense of promise Bookchin discerned in the
spirit of the 1960s has been transformed into virtually its polar opposite – an
atmosphere of dread and fatalism.
What
this signifies is that if social ecology wishes to really make headway as a
movement for ecological transformation, it needs to invigorate its social
dimension. It is revealing that, Kurdistan aside, the outbreaks of assembly
democracy that have occurred in recent years have all taken place in countries suffering
from economic breakdown and trauma – namely Argentina, Greece and Spain. In addition to assemblies of indignatos,
co-operative economic alternatives, in energy, food and housing, for example,
have flourished in Spain post-crash, partly for the prosaic reason that the
dominant capitalist economy has simply ceased to be a reliable presence in
people’s lives. If capitalism fails, alternatives will happen, that is an
absolute guarantee. The question that remains is what will be the relationship
of the economic alternatives to the popular assemblies that also spring up. As
a theory, libertarian municipalism, the
political dimension of social ecology, is strong on how political power can
be reclaimed from the state, but less so about how it can be wrested from
capital. There is little doubt that representative democracy has failed. It has
exposed itself as simply a component in the economic and political oligarchy
that rules Western societies. But to take on that oligarchy requires an
assembly democracy to, for example, provide public oversight of and control
over a new public system of credit and banking. And even if it is agreed that
that state is the crux of the oligarchy, the issue remains that millions of
people are dependent on state public services and benefits. To merely leave
them to the wolves in an existential rejection of the state and all its works,
is not an option. A post-capitalist movement must be defensive as well as
creative.
Despite
the proliferation of sages, no-one really knows what will happen to capitalism
in the wealthy countries in the coming decades. The only certainty is that we
are in a period of uncertainty. “The validity of a theory and a movement will
depend profoundly on how clearly it can see what lies just ahead,” Bookchin
said in 2002. Yet what lies just ahead
is far from clear. It is quite possible that a new and overwhelming financial
crisis will occur, leaving the state unable to bail out financial institutions
and other corporations and thus precipitating a wave of bankruptcies and a
destruction of capital value comparable to the Great Depression of the 1930s.
This will leave some form of state capitalism as the only possible option and
create millions more ‘superfluous’ people – superfluous in capitalist terms. Capitalism
is no longer capable of playing the role assigned to it by social ecology in
the past: that of well-tuned, efficient machine that spews out endless change
in all directions, from compound growth to urbanisation, from work to climate
change, from ethics to popular culture, while itself remaining free of
volatility and disequilibrium. The machine itself is now malfunctioning. This
changes everything.
