Cooking the Books: A capitalist own goal (2019)

The Cooking the Books column from the December 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

In July we drew attention to an article by George Monbiot in the Guardian (25 April) in which he announced that he had come to the conclusion that capitalism as such – as a profit-driven system geared to the endless accumulation of capital – and not any particular variety of capitalism, was the root cause of environmental damage.

We were not the only ones to comment on this. Apologists for capitalism sprang to its defence. Robert P. Murphy wrote an article (1 October) for the Institute of Energy Research entitled ‘No, Capitalism Doesn’t Threaten Humanity’. He picked on Monbiot’s rather daring statement, in the subtitle of his article, that ‘the economic system is incompatible with the survival of life on Earth’.

Over-interpreting this to mean that ‘capitalism, left unchecked, will cause the literal extinction of humanity’, Murphy did not have too much difficulty in refuting such a claim.

Monbiot’s statement was not based, as is Extinction Rebellion’s, on global warming eventually making the Earth uninhabitable, but on resources eventually running out due to capitalism’s imperative to pursue endless growth. We have heard this argument before as when in 1972 the Club of Rome predicted that the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, oil by 1992, and copper, lead and natural gas by 1993 (LINK).

None of this happened as there is a distinction between ‘exploitable’ resources and physical resources. The physical resources are there in the ground, but what under capitalism is exploitable depends on whether or not it is profitable, which in turn depends on the cost of extraction and the price that the particular resource can command on the market. As a resource becomes more difficult to extract and the paying demand for it continues, its price rises and it becomes profitable to extract it from places where previously it wasn’t.

What is extracted is, as Murphy pointed out, ‘only a small fraction of the physical stockpile’ in the ground because ‘at any given time, it’s only sensible to have located the precise deposits of a healthy margin of such depletable resources.’

This is why there is no danger even under capitalism of material resources becoming exhausted. Capitalism threatens humanity in all sorts of way, but this is not one of them.

So, Murphy marks a point against Monbiot but he goes on to score an own goal when he writes:

  ‘Even if we imagine a scenario—contrary to reality—where humanity did run into a crisis because of natural resource crunch, the best way to deal with the situation would be reliance on private property and market prices’.

But academic economics argues in effect that there is, and always will be, a ‘natural resource crunch.’ Because human needs are (absurdly) assumed to be infinite, its textbooks teach that resources can never be enough to satisfy people’s needs and that therefore they have to be rationed through being ‘private property’ and people having to pay for what they need.

In refuting Monbiot’s claim that if capitalism continues resources will eventually run out, Murphy is also refuting the basic tenet of economics textbooks. If only a ‘small fraction’ of resources in the ground are used – and so there is no ‘natural resource crunch’ – this means that ‘private property and market prices’ are not imposed by nature and that humanity can make other arrangements to satisfy its material needs, namely, the common ownership of resources and their use to directly meet people’s needs without the intervention of the market and money.

About Solzhenitsyn (1974)

Solzhenitsyn with Heinrich Böll in West Germany, 1974

From the April 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

So Solzhenitsyn is now able to voice his views openly. It is possible, for the first time, to see how he measures up to the problems not merely of writers in Russia, but of all mankind. What can this Nobel Prize winner tell us?

Before weighing in with criticisms of his manifesto (Sunday Times, March 3), we must make it clear, first, that we have always opposed all forms of censorship, and secondly, that in criticising his ideas we are in no way defending the Kremlinite creed, to which we have consistently expressed our hostility. But however sympathetic we may be to one who has struggled successfully and has made his views heard in spite of all the Soviet censorship and suppression machine, we cannot applaud his political views.

We should like to have greeted him as a world citizen, an internationalist not a nationalist. But his views are based on an insular patriotism and Russian Orthodox Christianity. He believes in the myth of the “national interest”: indeed he bases his argument against a Russian war with China, not on the view that working-class interests are not at stake, but simply on the calculation that Russia could not win such a war and therefore it would be against Russia’s “national interest”.

Although apparently a fervent Leninist when he started his prison career, he is now a devout believer in Orthodox Christianity. If this is the result of incarceration in those inhuman prisons and labour-camps, it would seem to be an effective practical demonstration of the truth of Marx’s words:

  Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.

On War and the Environment
In his manifesto Solzhenitsyn argues on two issues of the day. The first is the prospect of a Sino-Soviet war: he proposes that, since in his view ideology is the main cause of friction, the Russian government should abandon its ideology in the “national interest”. He seems to believe that, if this were done, there would be peace with China.

What the author of August 1914 should know is that nowhere can one find evidence of a war being fought solely because of ideology. Dogs may dislike each other’s colour or breed, but when they fight it is over a bone, or a bitch. Humans likewise don’t fight over creeds, but over markets and minerals, ports and provinces.

Solzhenitsyn’s second argument is not original and he names his sources — the Club of Rome and the Teilhard de Chardin Society. He has adopted their doomsday environmentalism, arguing against pollution and skyscraper cities and for a return to 2-storey houses and horse-transport. He sees a no-growth economy as the solution to the problems of mineral shortages, population pressures and pollution.

His argument, like that of other doomsday writers, takes no account of any possible re-structuring of society. Their computers are never programmed to tell us how world Socialism, with production for use not for profit, would employ the earth’s resources. Like the Club of Rome, Solzhenitsyn assumes that production for profit will go on for ever, and then argues that this system must be reformed to prevent it from destroying mankind’s habitat. Better surely to argue for an end to capitalism, since it is a system which generates waste and seeks constantly to increase the quantity of materials processed, year by year.

Solecisms Versus Marx
But when we come to his views on “ideology” it is plain that Solzhenitsyn has no knowledge of what Marxist theory really is. He has accepted the lies of the Kremlinites and so presents us with a distorted caricature of Marxism, a series of Aunt Sallys which he passionately shoots down in flames.

From this great sage, we learn that Marxism, “a primitive, superficial economic theory . . . declared that only the worker creates value and failed to take into account the contribution of either organizers, engineers, transport or market systems.” To start with, he ignores the fact that Marxist theory puts engineers and transport workers in the working class: they all have a living to earn, they all have to sell their labour-power. Also that in reckoning the value of a commodity, we take into account the wear and tear on machinery, the value of all raw materials used in manufacture and also any socially necessary labour time used in research and development (e.g. by engineers, organizers etc.)

The Marxist theory of value asserts simply that human labour is the sole source of value. But there is a lot more to Marxist economic theory than this basic proposition: to start with there are three volumes of Capital, and it is doubtful if even the sage Solzhenitsyn would describe them as “superficial”.

His other attacks on Marxism are similarly wide of the mark. Most of all he goes wrong on the question of revolution. According to him, Marxism “was mistaken through and through in its prediction that socialists could only come to power by an armed uprising.” Evidently Solzhenitsyn’s education in ideology did not include what Engels wrote on this subject:

  The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past.

Indeed Engels argued that for a complete transformation of society to be undertaken successfully, it must be on the basis of full participation and the support of the mass of the community.

Again, according to Solzhenitsyn, Marxism is wrong in stating that the Socialist movement will come to the fore in advanced and highly developed countries first. We have only to use our eyes, to look at countries such as Russia which claimed to be “socialist” and see that this vaunted pseudo-socialism is merely a nasty form of capitalism. In 1917 the S.P.G.B. was pointing to Russia’s backwardness as an indication that the revolution could only bring about an acceleration of capitalist development. Now in 1974 Solzhenitsyn describes how Russian technology has copied Western technology, how pollution increases due to greed for profits and how the people are oppressed by poverty:

  In practice, a man’s wage-level ought to be such that whether he has a family of two or even four children, the woman does not need to earn a separate pay-packet and does not need to support her family financially on top of all her other toils and troubles.

Russia is just as much a capitalist country as America or Britain, Cuba or Kenya. Everywhere the capitalist “mode of production” prevails: we see men and women who possess no land, no tools, nothing, who are driven by fear of want to sell their labour-power by the week or the month, mortgaging their lives in instalments so as to survive till the next pay-day. We see them producing goods galore, “an immense accumulation of commodities”, all their own work, yet they remain unable to afford most of what they need. We see human toil and human skills diverted from man’s real needs — food, clothing, health, housing, culture — to pander to the aristocracy of Big Business, the wasteful war-machine, the accountants, the luxury resorts, and so on.

This is what Marxists oppose: a worldwide system of exploitation of the many by, and for the benefit of, the few. A system which combines wanton waste with wasteful want. Shame it is that Solzhenitsyn has failed to join the movement to end it and has instead sided with those who say that authoritarianism can be made tolerable by reform. He is indeed one of those who “wear their chains with decency”.

Charmian Skelton

Letter From Europe: Enter the green reformists (1982)

The Letter From Europe column from the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent change of government in West Germany has again focussed attention on the ecologists, die Grünen or the Greens as they are called, who are expected to replace the discredited Free Democratic Party (Liberals) as the third party in the German parliament after next March’s general elections, maybe even to the extent of holding the balance of power.

But the first country in which ecologists have been elected to a national Parliament is in fact Belgium, where since the general elections of November last year they have nine representatives (four deputies and five senators). They also scored a relative success in the Belgium local elections in October, winning 120 seats, and they now take part in running Liège, the largest city in the French-speaking part of the country.

Before going on to examine the programme of these ecologists, we must say something about the word ecology itself. This is a science, a branch of biology which studies the relationship between living organisms and their natural environment. Strictly speaking then an ecologist should be somebody who studies or practices this science, not the partisan of some political movement. It is true that humans are also living organisms and that their relationship to their natural environment is another legitimate field of study for the science of ecology. It is of course because such a study reveals that this relationship is unbalanced that, by extension, those who advocate political, social or economic changes with a view to trying to restore this balance are called, or call themselves, ecologists.

In this sense socialists could also legitimately call themselves ecologists, with much more justice in fact since the change we advocate — production solely for use on the basis of the common ownership of the world’s resources — is the only lasting and effective way of restoring a proper balance between Humanity and Nature. In contrast, as we shall see, those on the political field who call themselves ecologists advocate mere reforms which would either only scratch the surface while leaving the basic problem unchanged or which are quite unrealisable within the framework of capitalism.

For the 1981 general elections the French-speaking section of the Belgian ecologist movement, ECOLO, published a pamphlet called 90 Propositions des Ecologists. Apart from the usual proposals that you would expect to find in the programme of an ecologist party — anti-nuclear, anti-motorways, consumer protection, health food, protection of the environment, anti-blood sports — the pamphlet does also attempt to provide a more global programme, of change from existing “capitalist and productive society” to an “ecological society”.

Instead of a society oriented towards “growth” they want a society in which, among other things, goods would be made to last, materials would be systematically recycled and work shared so that the working day could be considerably reduced. Whether or not these are desirable objectives, reading through the pamphlet it soon becomes clear that ECOLO takes for granted the continuing existence of wages, prices, profits, taxes, banks and so on. In other words, they don’t envisage going outside the framework of capitalism.

But capitalism is precisely a society geared to “growth” or. more accurately, to the accumulation of capital. This is its logic, its dynamic, even if this growth is not in a straight line but in ups and downs (we are currently in the middle of a down period, a state of “zero growth" which the now discredited Club of Rome used to call for). Capitalism is a system of society in which production is oriented towards the accumulation of capital through profits realised on the market. So to want to stop the accumulation of capital (“growth”) and its side effects while preserving the wages-prices-profits system which is capitalism is quite unrealistic. The political ecologists, in Belgium. Germany and elsewhere, are therefore a species of reformist and so subject to the same criticism: that they deal with the effects, not the cause, and that they divert much-needed energies from the struggle to achieve socialism (the only real ecological society possible today).

Capitalism has solved the problem of production; it has built up a stock of means of production capable of eliminating hunger and poverty throughout the world and even of providing plenty for everyone. But what capitalism has not solved, and cannot solve, is the problem of distributing this potential abundance. It is constitutionally incapable of doing this as its economic laws decree that priority has to be given to accumulating capital, or growth, as against consumption. Production under capitalism is geared to making profits, and not to satisfying needs. The only way to solve this problem is to institute production solely for use, but this can only be done on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of the earth’s resources, both those made by people and natural resources; in other words, by abolishing capitalism and replacing it by socialism.

Only on the basis of common ownership can the aims of the ecologists be achieved. Only in a society in which goods are no longer produced for profit can the problems of pollution and adulteration be eliminated. Only in a society where goods are no longer produced for sale can high-quality, long-lasting goods be produced. Only, finally, on the basis of the common ownership of the earth’s resources can humans restore the balance which capitalism has upset between them and nature and live in harmony with their natural environment, live ecologically if you like.

Adam Buick (Luxemburg)

Limits to Capitalism (1977)

From the April 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the barriers to the spread of our ideas is “the media”. This is not just because the media consciously sets out to put forward the prevailing ideas of capitalism but because, as the saying goes, “bad news is good news” and sells newspapers. An example of this is the preoccupation of the media with “doom merchants” such as The Club of Rome. Who instigated a research programme resulting in a book called The Limits of Growth, in 1972. This became world-famous for its forecast of overpopulation and exhaustion of resources, especially food.

That was the bad news. The good news, however, was completely ignored by the media. This was the subsequent report made in connection with a project on “problems of population doubling and food supply” also instigated by the Club of Rome. In this report the authors compute the “upper limit of what can be grown on all suitable agricultural land” and in so doing contradict the “Limits to Growth”.

Taking into account the possibilities of irrigation and the limitations in crop production caused by local soil and climatic conditions, the absolute maximum production . . .  of a standard cereal crop is computed as . . . almost 40 times the present cereal crop production.
(“Computation of the absolute maximum food production of the world.” Agricultural university, Wageningen, The Netherlands. P. Buringh, H. D. van Heemst and G. J. Staring, 1975.) (our emphasis)

The reason why this potential cannot be realized is purely because of “economic, social or political limitations”. Capitalism in short! The limitations of capitalism, therefore, are every reason for you to be a Socialist.

Paul Moody