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.
