Pearls and Irritations

It is becoming less and less controversial or eccentric to claim that endless economic expansion and consumption, of a sort that the United States has so successfully championed, is simply incompatible with life on a finite planet. [This is Part II of a two-part series; read Part I.]

The Club of Rome may have been a bit premature with their famous claims about the “limits to growth“, but that doesn’t mean they were wrong. What’s 50 years in the life of a planet, after all?

Either way, the evidence of humanity’s destructive impact on the natural environment has become increasingly difficult to deny, even for those with a vested interest in doing so. This won’t stop powerful fossil fuel companies from trying muddy the already polluted waters in this country as they have in the US, of course, but it shouldn’t mean that our political elites are necessarily persuaded by their arguments.

And yet it seems they are. Either that or they are incapable of grasping the immediacy of the problem or the scale of the necessary response needed to avoid catastrophe. Some of the possible remedies for our collective plight, at least in well-endowed affluent countries like Australia, are not even that outlandish or difficult to implement. The benefits of becoming a renewable energy superpower and/or electrifying the entire economy, for example, ought not to be that difficult for even the dimmest or most compromised backbencher to get their heads around.

Even these entirely plausible, relatively mainstream solutions may not be enough to save us or our declining hegemonic friend for that matter though. Something altogether more radical and fundamentally at odds with America’s individualistic culture and its very raison d’etre may be required to save “civilisation as we know it”.

It seems inescapable that any global response to the challenge of climate change will look much more like socialism than capitalism, and will involve a good deal of planning and cooperation across historically arbitrary national boundaries. Unlikely as it may sound, we know that “we” — in this case the US and its allies — can create a global regime to facilitate the interests of transnational corporations and mobile financial capital, so we ought to be able to create an institutional architecture to promote human welfare and sustainability, too.

There is a burgeoning academic literature that addresses these issues, and while it is likely to be studiously ignored by policymakers in Australia, and especially the US, it represents a serious attempt to grapple with an historically unprecedented problem that makes business as usual simply impossible. If we don’t change voluntarily, the environment will do it for us one way or another.

“Degrowth” as the name suggests is the very opposite of the continual economic expansion and resource utilisation that is the essence of capitalism. It is based on the increasingly uncontroversial suggestion that there are planetary boundaries which, if crossed, may trigger tipping points that are likely to have catastrophic consequences for even the richest and most powerful societies. As Jason Hickel, puts it, the current ecological crisis,

is not being caused by human beings as such, but by a particular economic system: a system that is predicated on perpetual expansion, disproportionately to the benefit of a small minority of rich people…the only feasible way to remain within safe carbon budgets is for high-income nations to actively slow down the pace of material production and consumption.

It’s not hard to see why political leaders, be they democrats or autocrats, have not rushed to embrace the idea. After all, even in “communist” China, the legitimacy of the regime hinges primarily on continuing to deliver rising living standards. Promising reduced consumption is not likely to win many democratic elections either. Joe Biden’s belated attempts to introduce environmentally oriented policies were ultimately predicated on delivering immediate, tangible benefits to American consumers.

Keir Starmer’s toe-curling response to a question about whether he was a socialist is a reminder of how difficult it is for politicians in the Anglosphere countries to embrace “radical” ideas, even when they represent parties that were founded on them. It is impossible to imagine that anyone in the US, or even in the Australian Labor Party for that matter, would want to be associated with a collective response to planetary problems, especially if they involved genuinely transformative changes in social opportunity and relationships.

There are, however, at least some people who are open to alternative ideas, and they aren’t all aging lefty windbags either. On the contrary, 55 percent of 18-24-year-olds think Australia should be “more socialist”. And why wouldn’t they? They can see the planet’s environmental system beginning to disintegrate before their eyes while they struggle to keep a roof over their heads and are unable to pay for the consumerist baubles that continue to distract their self-absorbed elders.

No doubt young people’s views will be dismissed as naïve, out of touch with reality and lacking the mature wisdom of the older generations who have created the catastrophe that will be their inheritance. While our leaders remain economically and strategically linked to, and dependent on, another country, however, it is difficult to imagine the necessary transition to a more sustainable, equitable and just social order taking place.

The fact that so much of “our” resource wealth is in fact owned by foreigners, primarily Americans, explains why decisions about how much to tax resource companies, or whether to develop mega projects such as Woodside’s Burrup Hub gas development, are not made in Australia’s national interest, let alone that of the rest of the world. The development of a “new carbon bomb” in the Northwest Shelf, for example, is expected to create six billion tonnes of CO2 emissions over its lifetime, which is more than “all sources in the United States, and 13 times greater than Australia’s total annual emissions from all sources”.

Even if we were a more independent sovereign state it is difficult to imagine that our current generation of political leaders might make decisions based on anything other than their own short-term political or even economic interests. Perhaps, developing the sort of change in consciousness that would seem a precondition for adequate collective action at a planetary rather than a national scale is simply beyond us, and a reflection of the pervasive influence of acquisitive social values.  As Frederic Jameson supposedly said, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Don’t blame me, I’ve only got observer status.

Read Part 1

Capitalism with American characteristics

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