The problem of "silos"

When pressing issues that demand cooperative engagement are kept separate even as they are hopelessly intertwined we call that putting things in “silos.” A good example of that was a lead story last week in the NY Times on a the recent UN report on climate change.. This NY Times report like so many others before it tried to impart the gravity of the global warming crisis in their usual measured language. Interestingly in the same paper was another article entitled Was Marx Right? It was one of their panel discussions. The subject this time was on the wobbly state of the global economy and whether Karl Marx maybe got it right after all - that global capitalism will eventually self destruct.

The new UN report from the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) had the usual grim litany of impending disasters. There will be a disastrous sea rise that will flood coastal zones leading to mass population migrations (and lost expensive beach homes.) Unstoppable feed back loops will be set in motion especially involving methane gas. Frozen arctic tundra along along with massive chunks of frozen methane on the ocean floor will melt releasing large bursts of methane creating even more rapid warming as methane is many times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. As warming becomes ever more pronounced whole sheets of ice will slide off off Greenland warming and redirecting Atlantic ocean currents that have kept Europe out of another ice age. Doomsday stuff (we've even seen the movie.)

Already we have dying coral reefs, increasing ocean acidification and ever more erratic weather. Soon there will be mass extinctions, global food shortages and ever more political upheaval. It's all bad. Those already being affected are the long suffering “wretched of the earth.” people living on $2 a day or less, who never dreamed of buying any Ford F-250 or a Lincoln Navigator or flying to Cancun for spring break.

Then in the very same edition we have the Times reconsidering Karl Marx and his prognostication regarding the fate of capitalism. The Times invited a cross-spectrum mix (left,center, right) to proffer their views on the subject (however no eminent Marxists were included.) The discussion yielded a typical college history of economic theory course's acknowledgment of Marx's contributions to classic economic thought with the usual caveats – the shortcomings in his labor theory value, failures of working 'class consciousness' to properly evolve as their living standard rose and its composition evolved, and so forth. But always like a dark shadow looming, assumed but not explicitly mentioned, is the perceived failures of fully non-capitalist economies to date. Yet none of the participants could deny the Marxist view of the inherent instability of capitalism - its boom and bust nature and the social havoc that its so-called “creative destruction” produces.

But most importantly not one these worthy thinkers mentioned the relationship between the required need of capitalism for ever expansion and the impact that ceaseless growth has on a finite planet. In other words they all ignored the dynamic relationship between the natural world we rely on and the eed for the entire capitalist edifice to ever expand ("good") or shrink ("bad".) So no one on the panel mentioned the impending catastrophe of global warming. Therefore no one brought up the obvious observation that it was industrialization driven by capitalism that has both caused global warming and is preventing any effective mitigation. Their focus was myopic. Historically the 'free market' has allowed manufacturers to avoid the full cost of production. Manufacturers traditionally have been allowed from the onset of the industrial revolution to lower their costs and thus the commodity's selling price by off loading the useless byproducts of the production process, the waste, on to the land, into the lakes, rivers, the ocean and of course the atmosphere. Only in the last half century was that “externality”even recognized and somewhat addressed (and of course resisted.) But the final irony is the artificially high profits derived from fossil fuel extraction and energy sectors partially due to offloading the full cost of pollution now gives these industries the political and financial wherewith to fund a robust effort to resist addressing this grave problem in any comprehensive way. The world is wedded to a mode of production that not only is exploiting the planet's workers, it is killing the planet's very life support system.

What many have yet to recognize is that Marx had already been there. In the 1850s he was already concerned about what he called “the metabolic rift,” the drive of capitalism to sacrifice natural ecological relationships to the demands of industrialized production. (See Marx's Ecology by John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review Press.) Of course massive amounts of CO2 had not yet accumulated to dangerous levels in the atmosphere. But other mismatches between natural ecological relations and for profit mass production were already evident. For instance he observed that the natural fertilizers were so depleted in the agricultural sector that guano had to be imported from the tropics to artificially compensate. While at the same time sewage disposal was a serious problems in the growing cities where the former farming population had migrated and were now living in urban squalor. 

 

These two pieces may or may not have been intentionally run same day. But it was left to the citizens in the Comments section to each article to make the connection - not the experts. A basic problem with so many issues is that professionals feel locked into their area of specialization and are reluctant to make connections 'outside their silo.' Of course ordinary schmucks have no such reservations. So a good number brought up the direct relationship between climate change and capitalism's need to ever expand. It's too bad the economists, left, right and center, didn't. It is true of so many things. We zero in on one concern at a time in isolation whereas everything is interconnected. And time is running out.