Hot off the press

Tim of the estimable Democratic Left Infoasis made some interesting comments in response to this post from Friday which mentioned the planned concert to promote awareness of global warming. I started to answer in comments, but I realized both that I wanted to give a couple of the points he raised a fuller response and that the points themselves deserved more attention. So I'm moving it things up to a post.

In what follows, you should realize that I have just pulled out the two quotes to which I'm responding; they do not constitute Tim's entire argument. To really get that, you should read the comments at the linked post and follow the links he provides.

But - with that in mind, here is what Tim said to which I wanted to respond:

I think it's highly mistaken to believe elite global warming critics like Al Gore who may lead people to believe that this is a problem of individuals' "lifestyles". There are those of us out here who don't get our voices heard very often in the corporate media who contend that global warming and other ecological crises are also systemic and will likely require more profound remedies than Gore and big business green washers will admit. ...

I am interested in the thinking of John Bellamy Foster that "By recognizing that it is not people (as individuals and in aggregate) that are enemies of the environment but the historically specific economic and social order in which we live, we can, I believe, find sufficient common ground for a true moral revolution to save the earth."

I wouldn't be a democratic socialist if I didn't rather strongly doubt that capitalism can ultimately deal with issues of the environment and justice. In fact, even in theory capitalism struggles to deal with pollution issues: It will always be more profitable in the short run to externalize costs of pollution, so in their own economic self-interest producers should seek to do so.

The usual response to this is that the market will force more responsible choices if enough people want them, that is, corporations will be more environmentally responsible if there is enough of a market demand from consumers that they be so. However, at least initially those more responsible products and/or services are going to cost more than less responsible ones due to the costs of investment in pollution controls or other forms of amelioration. So for there to be such a market demand, a sufficient number of consumers have to be paying a premium for a non-quantifiable benefit, that is, acting against their own economic self-interest - and we're back where we started: Capitalism as expressed in theory cannot in the long run deal with environmental issues because doing so requires producers and/or consumers to act against their own short-term economic self-interest.

(I suppose it's worthy of a parenthetical note to say that therefore, the fact that a market for more expensive "green" products exists, which it does, is empirical proof that theories of pure capitalism simply cannot explain actual consumer behavior.)

However, I say the statement of John Bellamy Foster which you quote is wrong in three ways:

One, it treats people and that economic/social order as if they were two completely disconnected entities. But they aren't. They can't be. That order, any order, is, at the end of the day, nothing more than a summation of the accepted rituals and beliefs of that society, the ones commonly (and often unconsciously) held and that one generation seeks (again, often unconsciously) to pass on to the next. Or, as I said one time,

every system has a few basic preconceptions of reality on which that system is based. A few preconceptions about the proper order of things; in a sense, a few prejudices, prejudices in the sense that they are so rarely challenged and indeed can't be challenged without threatening the existence of the entire system.

As a result, that socioeconomic order can be analyzed as an aggregate of the population, that is, as if it were a single entity, in the same way that the behavior of a fluid can be analyzed and predicted without reference to the individual molecules that comprise it. But that is only for analysis - neither system nor fluid can be said to exist independently of their constituent parts.

Two, by making that separation between people and the socioeconomic order in which they live, Foster does indeed absolve individuals of any responsibility for their environmental impact. "Oh, it's nothing to do with me or what I do, it's the system." In fact, it's nothing to do with what a lot of us do, even with what all of us do. It's "the system." The only way to maintain this is to say that we as individuals are slaves to that system; indeed, less than slaves, rather automatons, incapable of action in violation of its dictates. But even as it remains true that our lifestyles are largely driven by "the system" in which we live and to which we are socially trained, it also remains true that we are not automatons and we are capable of independent, even contrarian, action. Yes, the impact of one individual's actions are tiny, negligible even - but as I've noted before, it's a very rare occasion when you are the only one acting and it's the sum total of actions that matters.

Three, it strongly implies that it is only under capitalism that the issue arises. To be sure, not as stridently as the woman some years ago who responded to my extending my criticism of nuclear power to the then-Soviet Union by saying "socialist power plants do not emit pollution," yet the implication is surely there.

But history denies that notion. There are numerous cases of early civilizations that fell at least partly (in some cases indirectly) due to a lack of environmental stewardship. Writing in "Harper's" magazine in June 2003, Jared Diamond lists

such otherwise dissimilar ancient societies as the Maya in the Yucatán, the Anasazi in the American Southwest, the Cahokia mound builders outside St. Louis, the Greenland Norse, the statue builders of Easter Island, ancient Mesopotamia in the Fertile Crescent, Great Zimbabwe in Africa, and Angkor Wat in Cambodia. These civilizations, and many others, succumbed to various combinations of environmental degradation and climate change, aggression from enemies taking advantage of their resulting weakness, and declining trade with neighbors who faced their own environmental problems.

(In fairness, I hasten to note that in some of those cases, particularly Easter Island, the assertion that environmental damage, especially the self-inflicted kind, was a significant factor in the decline of the civilization has come under challenge. But in others the case remains strong.)

The present day provides examples, as well. Not quite a year ago, the director of China's State Environmental Protection Administration said

China must sharply improve environmental protection or it could face disaster following two decades of breakneck growth that have poisoned its air, water and soil....

"Facts have proved that prosperity at the expense of the environment is very superficial and very weak," Zhou Shengxian said at a news conference during the annual meeting of China's parliament. "It's only delaying disaster."

China's cities are among the world's smoggiest, and the government says its major rivers are badly polluted, leaving hundreds of millions of people without clean drinking water.

Now, again in fairness I'll note that some will argue that this is actually the result of China becoming more capitalist, but I would remind those people that when the push for rapid growth began, it was celebrated as proof of the dynamism of a "socialist economy."

My bottom line here is that, contrary to John Bellamy Foster, there is no either/or here, no "not this, but that." Certainly the socioeconomic order in which we live pushes us to consumption; it promotes profit as a controlling value and growth as a central organizing principle. All of that is harmful to our present and dangerous to our future. But that does not absolve us as individuals of our responsibility to do what we can. As long as the imperatives of corporate America remain unchanged, what we as consumers can do is inadequate to the task. But that does not mean it is either unhelpful or, worse, unnecessary. As I said in my first comment on the original post, "the old bumpersticker 'Live simply that others may simply live' still has relevance, even in this different context."