Capitalist agriculture . . . the profits of doom (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ever since Malthus, population growth has been the subject of heated controversy. By and large, disputants in the debate have tended to polarise into two camps.

For the Neo-Malthusian pessimists there is no prospect of an end to world hunger while population growth continues, indeed it could well increase as the latter begins to exceed — and thereby undermine — the carrying capacity of the land.

Then there are the Technological Optimists. For them, the concept of a “carrying capacity” is problematic; it is not something that is fixed but can be enlarged by human effort and ingenuity. Indeed, Ester Boserup has argued in her book The Conditions of Agricultural Growth that population pressure, far from being a harbinger of doom, is a prime stimulus to technological change. Thus, extensive farming practices, which become subject to diminishing returns, are abandoned and more intensive forms of land use are introduced, resulting in an increased “carrying capacity”. In fact, some of the wealthiest parts of the world — like Western Europe — are also amongst the most densely populated.

Where do Socialists stand in this debate? At first glance, we appear to side with the technological optimists in asserting that the world is not overpopulated. We base this claim on an empirical analysis of the relationship between global food demand and the global capacity to satisfy that demand. This suggests that the world could adequately feed its population. According to the World Bank in its 1986 Report Poverty and Hunger: Issues and Options for Food Security in Developing Countries, enough grain is already produced to provide everyone with 3,600 calorics per day, well above the recommended 2,400 calories for an adequate diet — though, much of this, it should be said, is (inefficiently) used to feed livestock.

The prevalence in hunger does not arise from any shortfall in agricultural potential but from the operation of economic factors which impede full realisation of this potential for the benefit of all. The objective of capitalist production is not primarily to meet human needs. Instead, human needs are only met to the extent that these are backed up by purchasing power. That is why vast quantities of food are destroyed and why farmers are paid not to produce, while millions starve because they lack the means to buy or grow food. In short, the much-vaunted productivity of capitalism has now reached the point of open and irreconcilable conflict with its social relations of production, its mode of distribution.

There is a further point on which we part company with many technological optimists. This concerns the nature of technology itself. This is not independent of, but is profoundly conditioned by, the social relations of production. In this regard we share the concern of many environmentalists about the impact of modem capitalist agriculture on the environment. It is conceivable that this, rather then pressure of population, may ultimately precipitate the doomsday scenario. Unless, that is, a socialist transformation of society — and thus of its productive methods — can intervene first.

Not neutral

Technological innovation does not occur in a vacuum; it has socioeconomic consequences in a capitalist economy which benefit some but often at the expense of others. An example is the Green Revolution initiated in the 1950s 

This represented a major incursion of an industrialised mode of fanning into Third World countries. Based on the introduction of new high yielding varieties (HYVs) of cereal crops, it sought to increase the productivity of local agriculture. However, this required the application of a whole package of inputs, around which HYVs were specifically designed having in mind, the interests of multinational conglomerates supplying such inputs. This absence of any one of these inputs meant that the expected gains in productivity would not be realised, and HYVs would tend to perform poorly compared with traditional crops. Thus, without irrigation, nutrient uptake would be much reduced, without pesticides, the very inputs, such as chemical fertilisers, that promote crop growth, will encourage a proliferation of weeds, and so on.

It is this in-built complementarity of inputs, not just the costs of individual inputs, which explains why it is mainly richer farmers, particularly in Asia and Latin America, who have benefited from “Green Revolution” technology, accentuating the process of land concentration in these countries at the expense of poorer farmers. It raises the critical threshold at which farmers are able to afford, and make effective use, of such technology.

But what of the long-term productivity of an industrial mode of fanning promoted by capitalism, i.e. its sustainability? To increase output, more land could be cultivated. However, much of this uncultivated land is ecologically marginal and would be highly vulnerable under capitalist industrial farming. Alternatively, cultivated land could be made more productive. Since the 1950s, rapid increases in output — faster than population growth except in Africa — have been based upon increasing applications of four major non-land inputs: artificial fertilisers, pesticides, irrigation and mechanisation. However, there are now growing doubts about the wisdom of such an approach. Since the 1970s, there has been a levelling-off of per capita output.

According to J. Harris in World Agriculture and the Environment, these earlier increases were made possible because they occurred in a world not yet heavily damaged by soil erosion. But today, the current annual rate of topsoil loss — 25 billion tonnes — is such that the world can expect to lose 50 percent of its topsoil by 2050. Since there is a strong correlation between topsoil depth and crop yields, this is an alarming development for the future of fanning.

Soil erosion

Applying yet more fertilisers to compensate for the loss of soil fertility will not solve the problem in long run. Indeed, US agriculture today uses five times more fertiliser than in 1947 to produce the same amount of crop, but it is not clear whether this growing demand for fertilisers — particular phosphates — can be indefinitely met. There are also many minor nutrients and trace elements, lost through harvesting, which are not being replaced by industrial fanning, but which may be essential to long-term maintenance of yields. Furthermore, excessive applications of fertilisers actually exacerbate the problem of erosion by facilitating a breakdown in soil structure — both directly, through its effect on soil chemistry and, indirectly, by allowing farmers to dispense with organic recycling, leading to a decline in humus content which binds the soil together and helps it to hold water and oxygen essential for plant growth.

A similarly worry emerges in the case of other major agricultural inputs. The narrowing down of the genetic basis of farming, typified by HYVs, and the simplification of the agro-ecological landscape associated with market-oriented monocultures, has created ideal conditions for the spread of pests. To counter this threat, chemical pesticides have been applied on an increasing scale. However, it is often the natural predators of pests which are more severely affected by this than the pests themselves which, because of their larger populations, are more easily able to develop mutations giving them resistance to pesticides. This in turn, tempts farmers to apply more frequent, and stronger, doses, but the evidence suggests that, as with artificial fertilisers, this too may be subject to diminishing returns. As a result, farmers find themselves trapped in what is aptly called a “pesticide treadmill” while a significant proportion of output — some 45 percent overall — continues to be lost through pests.

Increased mechanisation and tractorisation too contributed to soil erosion through deep ploughing, a practice that is particularly damaging when applied to the fragile soils of many tropical countries.

Sustainable

Technology, as pointed out, is not neutral; it is conditioned by the economic system in which it is applied. Capitalist agriculture is constrained by the profit system and the need to maximise output in the short-term without regard to wider consequences for the environment and society. The type of technology this entails cans only be modified with extreme difficulty. Farmers must, afterall, seek a financial return on any investment they make.

The trend towards environmental deterioration and social dislocation associated with capitalist agriculture, is likely to gather pace as recent developments in the world economy unfold. An example is the new GATT agreement which covers 90 percent of the world’s agricultural trade which will further strengthen the hand of agribusiness at the expense of many small farmers and undermine much existing environmental legislation. Similarly, structural adjustment programmes imposed by the IMF on many debtor countries to reduce their debts will increase pressure on them to expand cash crop production and to that end employ industrial methods of farming, despite the fact that the cost of these have risen far more steeply in recent years in comparison with the price of agricultural commodities.

In short, agriculture today stands at a critical crossroad; where we go from here will have profound repercussions for both urban consumers of the products of farming as well as farmers themselves who, lest we forget, still constitute a majority of humankind. We can choose to retain the status quo and risk going down the road of possible, if not probable, ruin. Or we can decide to take Earth, and all that is in and on it, into common ownership and democratic control. By fundamentally changing our relationship to one another, we shall fundamentally change our relationship to nature. You cannot do one without the other.

Freed from the constraints of market competition, we could begin to adapt our technology to suit our needs within limits imposed by nature We cannot predict precisely what this entails but we can tentatively sketch the broad outlines of a new agriculture:

• A scaling-down in the overall use of industrial inputs with some redistribution towards those parts of the world where marginal productivity of such inputs is still relatively high.
• The adoption of a more labour-intensive approach to farming, particularly in the more developed areas, where today the proportion of socially unproductive labour is highest, i.e. occupations essential to the functioning of capitalism which will disappear in socialism.
• Greater emphasis to be placed on small-scale mass-produced “appropriate technology” which would rapidly transform the situation that currently exists in the less-developed areas of the world.
• Selective reversion to traditional farming practices, such as intercropping and agro-forestry, combined with a careful "holistically-oriented” application of useful innovations in the field of biotechnology, e.g. self-fertilising crops.
• Blurring of the distinction between town and country; a huge expansion of small-scale horticulture in and around existing conurbations with the aim of ensuring a substantial and diverse supply of locally-grown food, thus incidentally reducing the costs of transportation.
• Related to the above, a massive phased programme to systematically overhaul existing urban infrastructure to facilitate the return of off-farm wastes to the land.
• Finally, to conserve ecologically marginal land by restricting the use of it to rotational/extensive farming.

To those who dismiss this, our response is quite simple: never has the need for a clear and practical alternative to the chaos of capitalism been more pressing, more vital. Only on this basis can we ensure a fruitful and sustainable future for ourselves and our children’s children. The seeds of that future lie within us; it is up to us to nurture and cultivate them.

Robin Cox

Pathfinders: David and Goliath (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Possibly one of the least attractive neologisms of the modern tech era is the word ‘enshittification’. But its coiner, science fiction author and post-scarcity activist Cory Doctorow, doesn’t much care. It’s an ugly word for an ugly thing. And once you are aware of it, you can’t unsee it, because it’s everywhere.

It all starts with a basic and age-old capitalist conundrum. How, as a manufacturer or service provider, can you come to dominate the market and crush all the competition? If you are hopelessly naïve, you might plan to do it by having the best quality product. An easier way, as practised by the likes of Amazon, Uber, Shein, Temu, and many others, is to borrow vast amounts of venture capital (VC) in order to sell at a loss, for long enough to undercut and wipe out the opposition. Then, when you’re the last company standing, the fun can really start.

Your VC-funded product doesn’t need to be perfect, just better and cheaper than the rest. People will flock to it, never suspecting a thing. After all, don’t we live in a world of limitless improvement? That’s how capitalism works, right?

And thus, you conquer the market by making your customers 100 percent happy. You’ve hit peak product. Nothing to change. Nothing more to do. Just sit back and watch the direct debits roll in.

In theory, anyway. Degrowthers and Doughnutters argue that the finite planet can’t afford infinite growth, but what if the economy could achieve a ‘sweet spot’, neither growing nor shrinking, that observes environmental boundaries? All manner of sustainable social benefits could flow from that. It’s a seductive idea. But capitalism is not a static system. It has its own laws of motion. Nobody has the choice to stand still. If you’re not racing ahead, you’re losing ground to the competition. Eat their profits, or they’ll eat yours. If the system isn’t racing ahead, there are no new profits to attract new investments. It either grows, or it withers.

And let’s not forget that you achieved peak product and market dominance at a loss. First you need to claw back those losses, and then your Silicon Valley VC investors will want a big fat return on top. But you’ve already maxed out the market. Where do you go from there? The answer, the only possible answer, is enshittification. Here’s how it works.

You’ve locked in your customers and killed the competition, so now you can price-gouge them. But it doesn’t stop there. Instead of one-off sales, you force subscription models on them so that they have to keep paying forever. If you run a streaming service, open up new income by riddling it with adverts your customers have to pay extra not to see. If it’s a social media platform, collect oceans of personal data to sell to third parties. If you own a phone product, issue updates that make it progressively ‘laggy’ until the customer surrenders and buys a newer model. If you own an electric car company, entice buyers in with fancy software services and then save money by shutting them down. If you own an operating system, design a new version that won’t work on existing computers, forcing everyone to chuck theirs in landfill and buy a new one. Cram it with unremovable resource-draining bloatware and charge extra for a ‘premium’ clean version. Build in intrusive and interfering AI that nobody asked for, with forced logins for simple desktop tools. Add a handy ‘Recall’ function that photographs their desktop every second, including all their passwords, website visits, personal messages, Tinder profiles and online banking details, and stores that information in your company servers where it’s a target for hackers. Ignore the protests. You know what your customers need better than they do. And besides, you’ve fired all your human customer service reps so now the whingers and wailers have to navigate a tortuous odyssey through concentric rings of automated responses and AI chatbots. In short, start with customer satisfaction, end with customer extraction, which Chinese scammers call ‘pig-butchering’. Lock in the suppliers too, and repeat up the chain.

Windows 11 is getting furious blowback for being enshittified. Users are turning in disgust to Linux, which is free, has no viruses and runs on any old machine with a fraction of the resource requirements. Others are resurrecting the antiquated Windows 7, now topping lists on pirate bittorrent sites. Piracy itself, once neutralised by the ease and reach of ad-free Netflix, is now resurging as the streamer market has fractured into a proliferation of platforms, each demanding your money while thrusting ads at you. The subscription model backfires as customers adopt the same cynicism as the corporations: ‘If buying is not owning, then piracy is not stealing’. The double standards are obvious to many: ‘If people downloading a song are criminals, what are the CEOs of AI companies using the entire internet to train their LLMs?’.

Last month the Norwegian Consumer Council released a video of someone cutting holes in socks, and sawing legs off tables to make them wobbly. The video was part of a global campaign to draw attention to the ‘deliberate degradation of a service or product’, urging politicians to take action against enshittification, including enforcing data protection, breaking digital monopolies, and giving consumers ‘more power to control, adapt, repair and alter the products they already own’. The council admits it’s a David and Goliath battle, ‘but… David won in the end, right?’.

Doctorow isn’t claiming he’s discovered some new phenomenon. He’s savvy enough to know how the world works. Enshittification is not just about how profit sabotages tech development, making things worse instead of better. It’s really a metaphor for capitalist production itself, which has generated eye-watering wealth yet imposes poverty on billions. In this version of the bible story, David is the bad guy, the tiny rich elite, while Goliath is the world working class, the sleeping giant that needs to wake up.

Paddy Shannon

You can have your veggies and eat them too ! (2006)

From Issue 20 of the World Socialist Review

The practice of vegetarianism — or non-practice of animarianism* — is not new to humanity. However, one could argue that it has never been more important. World hunger, inhumane and filthy methods of meat production, and the spread of livestock diseases both new and old are forcing many who would never consider abandoning sinking their teeth into a steaming hunk of flesh to give the idea a second thought. There are many kinds of vegetarians, ranging from impostors to the almost monastic avoiders of any food product of animal origin. This lifestyle is admittedly difficult; from meat-lover’s restaurant menus to relatives who have to cook me something extra (and have my eternal gratitude), to the usually absurdly high-priced products offered in the supermarkets.

I will try to show how vegetarianism in socialism makes sense and pass along some of the general benefits of the lifestyle, without attempting to convert you. There are people and organizations out there that can help you if you have questions or want more details on the nutritional aspects of meat-free lifestyles.

One of the concerns about meatless diets is protein. Actually, a balanced Western diet includes four times the recommended amount of protein for an average healthy adult, so leaving out the meat isn’t going to kill you. In fact, I don’t track where my protein comes from, and I sort of don’t care, because I know that there are sufficient quantities in many plant-based foods, the chief being the soybean. This is exactly where the herbivores get it and they do just fine.

Incidentally, this introduces an area where I think vegetarianism and socialism cross — at the cessation of the waste of matter and energy involved in transforming plants into meat. A good rule of thumb to estimate this waste is the “ten percent pyramid,” with humans on the top and the little greenies on the bottom. Only ten percent of each pound of “eaten” is successfully converted into “eater.” The rest is waste in the form of uneatable or indigestible matter and heat energy lost during chemical conversion. Therefore, it takes about ten pounds of plants to produce one pound of animal, and ten pounds of animal to produce one pound of human or other carnivore.

A Happy and Livable Planet

A little math tells me that if I was a carnivore, it would take 250 x 10 x 10 = 25,000 pounds of vegetable matter to produce a meat-eating version of me, but only 2,500 pounds to produce me as an herbivore. Abandoning meat as a food source can optimally increase the nutritive capacity of agriculture ten times, thus reducing our dependence on it! When socialism rolls around, the elimination of waste and hunger will surely be both primary goals for the creation of a happy and livable planet.

A socialist future like the one I dream about will also have a lot less pain and suffering than the current offering. I’ve done my homework, and without getting into details, I can say that there is a lot of that going on in the meat industries. Plants, in contrast, don’t feel pain. They cannot for the obvious reason that they do not have brains, or any nervous systems at all. And no, the cows and pigs are not going to reproduce out of control if we stop using them for food.

There are environmental impacts as well, the most serious of which is the pollution caused by the wastes of animals grown for food. This has to go somewhere — and usually, untreated livestock waste is dumped into the nearest body of water, unlike human waste, which is in most cases required by law to be treated before release into the environment. The impacts of farm animal waste are significant — I’m not going to quote statistics, so you can research this if you want.

The impact of fertilizer is even greater; however, this problem does not completely go away if meaty diets eventually disappear. Fertilizer will still be necessary to grow crops, but mindful socialists will not be forced by the pressure of the market to produce the most, the biggest, and the best — only that which is needed. They can take care that the effects of the fertilizer they do use are reduced and monitored by careful farming practices, efforts made easier by a cooperative agricultural model and not a competitive one. Meat processing facilities have environmental impacts as well. Since it seems impossible for capitalism to maintain clean and efficient slaughterhouses, those places remain vectors for disease and contamination. Shockumentaries still pop on the tube every once in awhile, reminding us, however ineffectively, how filthy meat processing actually is.

In sum, the benefits of a vegetarian society can go hand in hand with the desires of a socialist society. A widespread vegetarian lifestyle can play a significant role in reducing energy demands, pain and suffering, and the negative effects of agriculture on the environment. The environmental and medical impacts of a meat-centered culture are well documented even if they are generally ignored; and even though the psychological impacts may be harder to measure, they still contribute, in my opinion, to making the world a little more violent than it needs to be.

Tony Pink

* This is not an actual scientific term, but then neither am I.

The Doughnut revisited (2025)

From the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In last month’s Socialist Standard we discussed Kate Raworth’s book Doughnut Economics. As it happens, on 1 October Raworth and co-author Andrew Fanning published an online paper ‘Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries monitors a world out of balance’ in the journal Nature. This updates and widens the scope of previous work in this framework.

Things have not improved since the original work was done: ‘Billions of people are falling short of meeting their most essential needs, whereas humanity’s ecological imprint on the living planet is now overshooting at least six of the nine planetary boundaries’. Previously four of the boundaries had been crossed, ecological limits which it was essential to keep within.

The boundaries are measured in terms of indicators, with more than one indicator for some boundaries. Ozone-layer depletion has been stable since the early 2000s, but the other indicators for which information over time is available show a worsening of conditions. For instance, four indicators have more than doubled the extent to which they exceed acceptable limits: CO2 concentration and radiative forcing (both of which relate to the climate change boundary), and hazardous chemicals and phosphorus (relating to chemical and nutrient pollution).

The inner ring of the Doughnut deals with meeting people’s needs. Here two indicators have deteriorated significantly, food insecurity and the existence of autocratic regimes. Others have improved, but only slightly, with 10 percent of the world’s population being undernourished in 2021–2, compared to 13 percent in 2000-1. A rapid improvement would be needed to eliminate this problem by 2030. The proportion lacking access to safely managed drinking water only went down from 39 percent to 37 percent over the same period.

Has there been progress overall? Global GDP doubled between 2000 and 2022, but ‘only modest improvements were achieved in reducing social shortfalls worldwide, whereas ecological overshoot increased rapidly, disrupting the critical planetary processes on which all life depends’.

So the Doughnut’s method of examining whether society is coping with meeting everyone’s needs while keeping the planet in a sustainable condition shows very clearly that the present system, capitalism, is unable to meet either goal. A system based on profit cannot solve these problems, and only a change to a world based on production for use will be able to do so.

Paul Bennett

Famine in Africa (1984)

From the December 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Toyin Falola, writing about the impact of colonialism in Africa, has this to say:

The situation then turned from one of mere trading partners to one of unmitigated exploitation. Colonial rule was so successful that although nearly all African countries have now achieved political independence they remain economically dependent on Europe. This unequal partnership is a major obstacle to the socio-economic development of Africa. [1]

The problem with the theory of “neo-colonialism" is that, like all theories developed within the narrow perspective of nationalism, it tends to overlook the boundaries of class. Where it acknowledges the dynamics of class struggle, more often than not it absorbs it into the conflict between countries — between the rich industrialised North and the impoverished providers of raw materials in the South. Thus Susan George:

The present world political and economic order might be compared to that which reigned over social-class relations in individual countries in nineteenth century Europe with the Third World now playing the role of the working class. [2]

To be fair to George, she does draw attention to the existence of “local elites" in the Third World. Yet all too often with those who subscribe to this neo-colonial model of the world, it is not that such an elite exists that matters but that it should so unashamedly ally itself with its erstwhile colonial masters.

Who is this elite in Africa? According to Greg Lanning:

At independence the new rulers in Africa lacked an economic base in society and used the patronage and power of government to consolidate their own position. Partly because of this and partly because of the nature of an underdeveloped economy, “the state plays a major role in economic activity and development". The importance of the state in post-colonial Africa means that those who staff and run the state apparatus form the basis of the emergent ruling class in Africa. [3]

The dominant ideas in society being those that best serve the interests of its ruling class, it is perhaps not surprising that contemporary politics in Africa should be so receptive to Leninist ideology with its statist prescription for the management of an emergent capitalism. On the other hand, as Lanning suggests, in trying to consolidate their economic position Africa's rulers depend heavily on the revenue accruing to their national treasuries from foreign companies operating within their territories. Such a situation demands a degree of pragmatism. For a ruthless pragmatist like President Mobutu of Zaire this has proved most rewarding. With a personal fortune of about £100 million, Mobutu is one of the richest men in the world, while the average wage of a Zairean worker amounts to just over ten dollars a month. Clearly, if Africa’s ruling class chafes against the constraints of “neo-colonialism", it is also very much a beneficiary of it. While it has neither the inclination nor the option to withdraw from the interlocking relationships characteristic of an integrated world economy. Dinham and Hines point out to what extent it has been able to modify these relationships to its own advantage:

Could a politically independent state wrest economic power from the foreign companies which continued to control their export crops? The strategies open to governments were limited and experience soon showed that measures to acquire immediate control by nationalisation led to retaliation from the companies involved. Most countries opted for more modest legal and financial controls. These measures did not drive the companies out — nor were they particularly intended to do so, for the companies were by now crucial to many African economies. [4]

More recently, however, the trend has been for these multinational firms to opt out of plantation agriculture in which many of them have their roots and to move towards an arrangement known as “contract farming”. What this means is that local producers are contracted by a firm to produce a certain output which the firm then purchases at a fixed price. This has the advantage for the firm concerned in that it eliminates the risks attached to growing crops.

But while multinational firms invest less in direct landownership than they did in the past, in other respects their dominance has become more entrenched and pervasive. These latter activities include the marketing, processing and transport of agricultural products as well as the provision of agricultural inputs such as fertilisers, machinery and management or technical services. Such "vertical integration" is the hallmark of modern agribusiness corporations. In other words they are able to exercise wide ranging control over the many links that make up the food chain, from the supply of seeds to the packaging of the final product.

For the proponents of economic nationalism, this is a highly regrettable state of affairs. Not only are African countries denied greater "vertical" control over their products but are economically restricted in a “horizontal” sense as well. This is to say their structure of production is relatively undiversified. being closely aligned in most cases to a fairly narrow spectrum of external markets which absorb the bulk of Africa’s trade. According to Dinham and Hines

Twelve countries are dependent on just one main crop for over 70 per cent of their income. and a further eleven countries depend on only two crops for well over half their income. [4]

Such a highly concentrated pattern of production has a number of disadvantages built into it. In the first place, it greatly increases the risk of loss due to environmental factors. It also makes these countries extremely vulnerable to fluctuations in the price of their export crops. Just as a mining community in Britain, for example, could be devastated by the closure of a mine on which it heavily depends, so a drastic fall in the price of a single agricultural product can wreak havoc with whole regions given over to the production of this crop. In Africa’s case, probably the most extreme example of “over-concentration” is that of Gambia, where groundnuts are grown on 73 per cent of the arable land and account for 90 per cent of its export revenue.

The market economy is, of course, an inherently unstable system and within it the price of agricultural products tends to be more volatile than most. It is this very instability which adds yet another dimension to Africa’s plight in that a high proportion of its export crops happen to be slow maturing and so not readily adaptable to the vagaries of the market.

Take, for example, coffee. In at least eight African countries coffee is an important export crop grown largely by smallholders. High current prices will induce farmers to plant or expand their acreage of coffee trees. Once planted they have to wait for roughly five years for the coffee trees to mature but as Moore-Lappe and Collins point out:

By the time your first harvest of such crops is ready you might find the bottom has dropped out of the market. And it probably will have since producers in your country and others will have planted to meet the demand at the same time you did The likely result is overproduction once the new trees begin to bear more than the consumers are willing to buy even with a drop in price. [5]

In the economically advanced areas of world capitalism, governments have usually sought to cushion agriculture from the erratic workings of market forces. But this in turn has created yet another problem: periodic crises of “over-production” and chronic food surpluses. In fact so huge are these surpluses that in America alone it costs £700 million a year just to stockpile them. [6] But such stocks are by no means surplus to human requirements; they are surplus to the capacity of the market system which restricts workers’ consumption to the size of their wallet. Once again, Susan George:

As long as food is regarded as a commodity . . . you will have this scandalous situation of surpluses on the one hand and famine on the other. Because people who can’t pay. who cannot become consumers with a Capital C are not interesting to this world system. [7]

In the Third World, however, there is far less scope for governments to intervene and protect their agricultural sector in the way that the EEC or the American government can. The reason is that the subsidies paid to farmers in the richer countries represent a tax burden on other sectors of industry. But in the developing countries this is hardly a practicable course of action:

Developing countries are so called because their other industries are not developed: generally speaking, agriculture is their one main industry. Agriculture has, in their case, to support the government. Only in developed countries with prosperous industries able to give revenue to the government can the government, in its turn, support agriculture. [8]

In addition to the problems affecting African countries arising from fluctuations in the prices of their agricultural exports, there has been in the post war era a longterm tendency for these prices to drift downwards against those of imported manufactures and oil. For example, "in 1969 a coffee producing country had to sell 66 bags of coffee to buy one 16 tonne truck but by 1979 it had to sell 123 bags of coffee to buy the same truck" [4] Don Casey, in a paper prepared for the UN Development Programme, estimated that the total loss of foreign exchange earnings to Africa due to this relative fall in the price of agricultural exports in the two decades after World War Two, "exceeded all foreign funds invested, loaned or granted during that period". [5]

This "deterioration in the terms of trade" has prompted African and other Third World governments to try to secure commodity agreements through bodies like the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in order to stabilise prices or else to form producer cartels along the lines of OPEC. To date such attempts have been largely unsuccessful. Partly this is because "producer countries" are themselves no more a monolithic bloc than their customers but are deeply divided by competition over markets. When, for example, a conference was held some years ago to try to reach an International Tea Agreement, several African countries objected to the idea of fixing prices or quotas. The reason was that Africa’s share of world output was projected to grow substantially in the near future.

Faced with these increasingly stringent economic pressures, African governments have little choice but to move even further down the road that has led to the predicament in which they find themselves. To boost their revenue they must encourage commercial agriculture. In so doing they have had to turn more and more to multinational agribusiness for the necessary imports and to private banks or aid agencies for loans to finance this expansion. This of course only further reinforces the need to promote commercial agriculture. It is after all mainly from this source (apart from the mining sector in some cases) that governments can hope to raise the necessary amounts of foreign exchange that can go towards repaying the debts incurred.

For peasant farmers throughout Africa such developments translate into a mounting burden of misery. As peasant farmers they are of course mainly “self provisioning" — they produce food primarily for their own consumption — production for the market being a secondary consideration. But today this social arrangement is coming under increasing attack.

After “independence”

Julius Nyerere in his famous 1967 Arusha Declaration, remarked that

The basic difference between Tanzanian rural life now and in the past stems from the widespread introduction of cash crop farming. Over large areas of the country peasants spend at least part of their time — and sometimes the larger part of it — on the cultivation of crops for sale — crops like cotton, coffee, sisal, pyrethum and so on. But in the process the old traditions of living together, working together and sharing the proceeds have often been abandoned.

The Arusha Declaration itself was an attempt to transform peasant agriculture by reducing the influence of market forces. It sought to build a self reliant economy by raising agricultural productivity through the mass mobilisation of peasants within a framework known as the Ujamaa (meaning “familyhood”) programme. Among other things this entailed the enforced resettlement of scattered peasants into some 8000 planned villages, ostensibly to extend essential services to the rural population as a means to greater productivity.

The Ujamaa experiment is interesting because of its ideological commitment to the idea of peasant self-reliance. Its failure to live up to this commitment — for it came increasingly under the control of a burgeoning state bureaucracy — highlights all the more starkly the inherent conflict of interests between African governments generally and the peasant populations in the countries which they govern. The fact of the matter is that these governments need to further extend the influence of market forces, not to reduce it; to transform, as Marx put it. “a society in which one definite mode of production dominates even though not all productive relations have been subordinated to it" into one based more and more on purely capitalistic relations of production. In short, what the Ujamaa programme foundered on was not an ideological betrayal but the economic exigencies of Tanzanian capitalism and its heavy dependence on foreign imports and aid resulting in the need to generate foreign exchange.

How is the capitalist imperative to extract marketable surpluses from cash crop production transmitted to, and impressed on, the African peasant? In colonial times a favoured method to induce peasants to grow cash crops was by levying taxes. This remained the case after political independence. Indeed, in some cases the burden of taxation has substantially risen:

In Mali in 1929 the French levied a tax that required each adult over fifteen to grow between five and ten kilos of cotton to pay for it. By 1960, the last year of French rule, the tax had risen to the equivalent of forty kilos. By 1970. during the drought, the successor government forced each adult peasant to grow at least forty eight kilos of cotton just to pay for taxes. [5]

Generally speaking, crops that peasants produce for export are purchased by marketing boards — usually government-run and almost all monopolies — and then sold to foreign buyers for processing. The price that peasants are paid is often far less than that charged by the marketing board which in turn reflects the state of the world market. It may be deduced that the lot of the peasant might improve with an improvement in the world market. But this is not necessarily so:

A slight increase in income that peasant farmers in underdeveloped countries might acquire from a rising world price for their commodity has to be weighted against the increased threat of displacement by land-grabbing commercial farmers or corporations that see higher prices as new grounds for profit. [5]

In the post war era most countries in Africa experienced a surge in cash crop production though more recently in the 1970s output has tended to level off (partly due to the world recession). Significantly, this growth was achieved primarily not by raising yields but by expanding the area under cash crop production. Inevitably, this was at the expense of subsistence agriculture which was progressively pushed onto less productive marginal land. Since subsistence agriculture is a major local source of food, this development goes a long way towards explaining the steady fall in per capita food production in Africa over the last twenty years or so.

In the past the availability of relatively abundant land, coupled with communal forms of land tenure, tended to cushion subsistence agriculture and ensure a modicum of food security. Indeed, it was this that mainly inhibited the development of a strong indigenous landowning class. But today this picture is rapidly changing as a recent survey from the Cornell University Centre for International Studies suggests:

The study found a trend across Africa towards increasing privatisation of communal lands, growing concentration of landownership and the fragmentation of holdings, all factors further aggravating rural poverty. In some countries lands traditionally available to all tribal members are being appropriated by government officials or foreign firms, usually with the acquiescence of chiefs.[4]

It has been estimated that three quarters of Africa's population now have access to less than 4 per cent of the land [2] while in many parts of Africa “small farmers do not own enough land to occupy themselves for at least 6 months of the year”. [9] And most importantly, with the question of famine in mind, “8-10 per cent of the rural labour force in Africa is now landless and these numbers and proportions are growing rapidly". [4]

The consequences have been catastrophic for millions of peasants caught between the hammer blows of the market economy and the anvil of diminishing returns from subsistence agriculture. And as rural deprivation worsens, so the tide of migration to the cities has gathered pace. Africa may be the least urbanised continent. with less than a quarter of its people living in cities, but its rate of urbanisation is roughly twice that of its population growth. This means on current trends that the population of African cities can be expected to double every 14 years. But how can this growing population be fed when domestic food production mainly in the form of peasant farming is in the throes of decline?

The answer as far as governments are concerned is to import food, particularly cereals, from abroad. This first began on a significant scale in the 1960s when the price of cereals was low as a result of the accumulation of huge surpluses in North America and Europe. But. as Sir Fred Catherwood explained, this was by no means an unmixed blessing:

These surpluses from Europe and from America depress Third World prices; they put Third World farmers out of business, they drive them off the land and into the shanty towns and they reduce rather than increase production in the Third World. [7]

Without doubt. African governments are fully aware of this, but whether they are in a position to do anything about it is quite another matter. They have to take into account for example the likely response of town dwellers to any increase in the price of basic foodstuffs that might benefit local producers. Furthermore, as new tastes become entrenched in the urban areas it is even more difficult to break away from dependence on a particular cereal (like wheat) which for climatic or other reasons cannot be grown in much of Africa. The population of Africa may be mainly rural but political power is overwhelmingly urban-based, with consequences graphically spelt out by Basil Davidson:

So it was increasingly the towns, after independence, that dictated the priorities of economic policy; and the new demands of the towns, pushing aside the needs of the countryside, increasingly called the tune. More and more exports had to go in paying for the imports demanded by the towns . . . the towns and cities, in short, became the tail that wagged the economic dog. and the rural populations, still in most cases the great majority of all the people, had to suffer for it. [10]

When in fact big increases in food prices have been pushed through against the wishes of the urban population, this has in many countries been the prelude to serious riots and, in some cases, a successful coup d'etat. Little wonder, as Rene Dumont put it. "governments fear urban unrest far more than the dispersed and unorganised peasant farmers”. [11] Prompted by this threat—not to mention the military aspirations of rival African states — they have sought to massively arm themselves with the paraphernalia of repression: “At present governments spend an average of between 4 and 7 per cent of their budgets on agriculture — while spending 20 per cent on defence". [12]

More recently in the 1970s the cost of food imports rose substantially. For African countries this was an ominous development. particularly when seen against the background of a relative fall in the value of agriculture exports. Many governments in response to this crisis have initiated large scale (often state run) agricultural schemes in a bid to boost domestic food production by attracting foreign investment and expertise.

At first sight this might seem an unlikely area for foreign firms to invest in, for the reason so candidly explained by the Chairman of General Foods: "It is virtually impossible for a private business establishment to develop, distribute and sell enough of the kinds of food poor people need and still break even, much less look for any profit". But the role of aid has been a crucial factor in enticing agribusiness. Firms find it sufficiently lucrative to participate in large scale agricultural projects as these "attract funding on concessional terms by aid agencies" and with payments effectively guaranteed by the aid agencies concerned this eliminates financial risks to the firms themselves. In short, with the prospect of large scale schemes coming to dominate domestic food production in the 1980s this will "ensure agribusiness an increased role in Africa’s food production, thus complementing its historic control of Africa's cash crop production". [4]

Should this happen it will further erode subsistence farming, displacing peasants or driving them more and more into the market place of hunger where the economic risks are as great as the physical margins of survival are small. For increasing numbers of them throughout Africa a way of life is dying by degrees; slowly strangled, as though by a python whose length spans the circumference of the globe.

Robin Cox

References

(1) African History and Culture, edited by R Olaniyan, 1982

(2) How the Other Half Dies. S.George, 1979

(3) Africa Undermined. G.Fanning with M. Mueller. 1979

(4) Agribusiness in Africa. B.Dinham & C. Mines. 1983

(5) Food First, F.Moore Lappe & J.Collins. 1982

(6) The Observer, 1 April 1984

(7) Utopia Limited, programme notes, 1984

(8) Agriculture The Triumph and the Shame. R Body. 1982

(9) The growth of Hunger. R.Dumont & N Cohen. 1980

(10)  The Story of Africa, B.Davidson. 1984

(11)  The Guardian. 25 June 1982

(12) Newsweek. 6 August 1984

Material World: Looking inside the doughnut (2025)

The Material World Column from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Kate Raworth’s 2017 book Doughnut Economics has three main themes: the Doughnut itself, the shortcomings of mainstream economics, and reformist proposals about how society should be organised. We will discuss these in reverse order, finishing with the one that offers the most interesting ideas about humanity and the world we live in.

Most of the ideas in the book about how society should be organised are fairly standard left-wing reformist fare, such as firms being owned by their employees. In the peer-to-peer economy, everyone can become both a maker and a user. There should be community currencies, alongside national currencies. Rather than commercial banks creating money when they offer a loan (a claim which misunderstands how banks function), central banks can issue new money to every household. Tiered pricing, whereby the more people consume, the more they pay, will ration use of resources and benefit the less well-off. Economies should be regenerative by design, recycling carbon, water and so on. These schemes, however, leave capitalism in place and so will not solve current problems.

Tomelilla, a small town in Sweden, is attempting to apply some of the principles of Doughnut Economics (Guardian, 17 July). This includes, for instance, revamping an existing building rather than building a new ice rink. This is an example of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (doughnuteconomics.org), which has several hundred member organisations across the world, and is intended to put the Doughnut ideas into action. The trouble is that it all assumes the continuation of capitalism and so will not be able to go beyond a system which prioritises profit over caring for the planet and its inhabitants.

Raworth argues that economics as taught nowadays is rooted in the mindset of the 1950s and even the 1850s, with little or no discussion of what the aims of the economy should be. In reality, the free market has never existed, as markets are strongly shaped by laws, institutions, cultures and so on. Nor is there such a thing as free trade: power relations always influence cross-border flows. Unpaid labour is ignored, as is the fact that the economy exists within society and the living world. At the heart of economic theory is Homo economicus, ‘solitary, calculating, competing and insatiable’, whereas humans are in fact reciprocating, interdependent and ‘deeply embedded in the web of life.’

The book’s subtitle is Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, which would involve, for instance, acknowledging an embedded economy with social, adaptable humans which is distributive and regenerative by design and agnostic about growth. There are some good points here, but humanity would still be stuck with capitalist economics.

As for the Doughnut, this is ’the space in which we can meet the needs of all within the means of the planet.’ It is shown via a diagram of a doughnut, with two rings and an empty interior. Its inner ring sets out the basic requirements of life, including sufficient food, water, sanitation, energy, education, housing, all achieved with gender equality, peace and justice. But these are not currently being met, as millions ‘lead lives of extreme deprivation’. One person in nine, for instance, does not have enough to eat, and millions of children die each year from easily preventable illnesses. And the richest 1 percent of the world’s population own more than the other 99 percent put together.

The outer ring relies on the notion of planetary boundaries proposed by Earth-system scientists, an ecological ceiling that humans need to keep within: these include climate change, ocean acidification, chemical and air pollution, freshwater withdrawals, and ozone layer depletion. Most of these are associated with specific levels that should not be crossed. But at least four of them have already been transgressed: climate change, land conversion, nitrogen and phosphorus loading, and biodiversity loss. Biodiversity loss, for instance, is at least ten times the recommended rate, and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is above what should be aimed at.

The idea behind the Doughnut is to meet everyone’s basic needs while keeping within the planetary boundaries that will prevent environmental catastrophe. ‘Raworth’s fundamental assertion is that a sustainable and just society can be realized only if a global economic system can be put in place that will allow as many people as possible to thrive in the space between these upper and lower boundaries’ (Kohei Saito: Slow Down).

As an illustration of the problems faced by humans, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently moved its Doomsday Clock to just 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to catastrophe. This was partly because of the war in Ukraine and the risk of nuclear war, but it was also on account of climate change, emerging and re-emerging diseases, and so on.

Raworth uses an Embedded Economy diagram to illustrate how energy plus living matter and materials are employed within Earth and society, while heat and waste matter are output within the market, the state and finance. But more constructive is the idea of a butterfly economy, whereby renewable materials are used and the two wings involve regenerating and restoring (repair, recycle etc). An economy cannot be completely circular as it is not possible to re-use all materials, so speaking of a cyclical economy is more helpful. The latest Circularity Gap Report argues that the global economy is in fact becoming less circular than it was a few years ago.

The Doughnut is not a solution in itself but a framework for examining some possibilities and looking at how a system designed to meet people’s needs could work while remaining inside the limits that have been identified. A socialist world, without classes or borders or the profit motive, would be by far the best way of addressing these issues and achieving the goal of, as Saito says, thriving within the boundaries.

Paul Bennett

Blogger's Note:

Kohei Saito's Slow Down was reviewed in the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Artificial scarcity (2024)

From the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

We’re often encouraged to make changes in our personal lifestyle on the grounds that this can help change things or at least do something to help us move in the right direction. We should make sure we know, for example, where the food we eat is grown, how ‘sustainable’ its production and distribution methods are, and, if possible, to ‘buy local’. The idea is that our food buying choices will help reduce carbon emissions and contribute to the battle against ecological deterioration and global warming. It is also suggested that more radical lifestyle choices like vegetarianism or veganism can play a part in this by freeing up for direct food production land currently used for crops to feed the vast number of animals raised and slaughtered everywhere in the world.

And it’s true that, if large numbers of people made such choices, it might indeed lead to different methods and types of food production, reduce the mass slaughter of living creatures and also have some impact on climate change. But none of this would make any appreciable difference to the day-to-day problems faced by many millions of people throughout the world. These are such problems as poverty, homelessness or precarious housing, and, above all, the need for the vast majority of us to sell our energies to an employer for a wage or salary day in day out or find ourselves without the means to live decently. The fact is that, whatever the method of production or the goods produced, so long as this happens with a view to the goods being sold on the market and people needing money to buy them, we will still have the system we call capitalism and all the problems and contradictions it throws up.

The main contradiction is that we now have the means to produce enough food and all else to sustain the whole world at a decent level several times over and to do so without polluting the environment or changing the climate, yet under the capitalist system of production for profit this cannot happen. Instead it creates artificial scarcity, causing millions to go hungry and many more to live insecure or highly stressed existences. A new report by Unicef published in June this year (Child Food Poverty: Nutrition Deprivation in Early Childhood) revealed that around 181 million children worldwide under 5 years of age – or 1 in 4 – are experiencing severe child food poverty, making them up to 50 percent more likely to experience wasting, a life-threatening form of malnutrition. To make things worse, capitalism’s methods of production put massive stress on the ecosystem, fast pushing it, according to some, to the brink of collapse.

Time therefore for workers throughout the world to vote collectively to change that system and move to a moneyless, marketless society of free access and voluntary cooperation – which we call socialism. In that society people will put their natural human capacity for cooperation and collaboration to work and use the resources of the earth to secure a decent life for all while maintaining the environment so as to ensure a steady state of ecological balance.

Howard Moss

Letter: Missing something here (1995)

Letter to the Editors from the June 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

Re the editorial in the April issue. I assume that the vague reference to "the Green movement" gaining power refers to the Green Party.

What is your evidence for alleging that the Green Party is pro-capitalist? Which part of the Green Party manifesto opposes, or is incompatible with, “the common ownership and democratic control of the means for producing and creating wealth"? I may be missing something here. 

K. A. Gilchrist, 

Canterbury

Reply:

The Green Party’s general objective of a “sustainable society" is not at all incompatible with the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources. In fact it could only be achieved on this basis. The Green Party, however, does not stand for common ownership and democratic control, but for the retention of private ownership, profit-making and the market on a small-scale—in other words, for small-scale capitalism, involving small firms producing for local markets, instead of the Big Business capitalism geared to the world market that we have today.

Among the passages you have missed in the Green Party’s Manifesto for a Sustainable Society is the following on “Monetary Policy": 

"In a Green society the informal sector will eventually gain in significance so that formal transactions and money generally will have a lesser role than at present. There is however no reason why a financial system cannot be made to work in the interests of the community . . . The place of the commercial banks in financing enterprise will gradually be taken by mediating, non-profit local community banks providing low-cost finance, both at district and regional levels" (EC 640 and EC 642. 1993 edition).

Have a look too at the sections on taxation and Basic Income which also assume the continued existence of the market and monetary economy. Such an economy, even if reduced to a local scale, is incompatible with common ownership and democratic control. This is because if productive resourcesarc owned in common so is the social product and the problem then becomes not how to sell it but how to share it amongst the community on a non-monetary basis.

The market, banks, money, taxes, etc. disappear as meaningless. Instead, the principle “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" applies where each person contributes what they can to production and then has free access according to their self-determined needs to what they require to lead an enjoyable life.

Editors.

World View: Voluntary Simplicity (1996)

From the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

A large number of Americans are turning away from commuting back and forth from "stressful” and “unfulfilling" jobs and rejecting the world of consumerism in favour of environmentally friendly lifestyles. They are adopting a new set of values: "The Three S's"—sustainability, spirituality and satisfaction, while searching for “meaning" and "aesthetic expression." This is the picture presented by Duane Elgin of the "voluntary simplicity" movement in the US at a recent debate of the Oxford Centre for Ethics and the Environment. The question for debate was “Does voluntary simplicity provide a realistic path toward ecological sustainability?" Elgin’s answer to this question was “yes".

Like many in the environmental movement, Elgin talks about changing society solely in terms of the consumer’s values changing. Dr Juliet Schor, author of The Overworked American who debated Elgin argued for changing the economic structure of society. Schor who has helped set up the New Party in America, advocates a collective "downshifting” by western industrial nations. "Downshifting" is defined as making a "lifestyle decision" which reduces the amount of paid employment you do and/or reduces the money you earn in the hope of "regaining control" over your life. In a survey, 28 percent of Americans of working age said that, in the last five years, they had decided to “downshift" in this sense. Indeed. This trend among workers has been reported to have worried the stock markets, being a far broader phenomenon than that of mothers giving up work to look after children. The trend, says Schor, can be seen among both sexes, whether or not people have children and across all age groups up to those in their 50s and all income spectra.

The stereotyped view of America as a country having swallowed materialist/consumerist values whole is thus misleading, even among relatively wealthy US workers (and Schor’s statistics do not tell us how many non-downshifters remain unhappy with their “lifestyles"). Ninety-five percent of all downshifters, she explains, say they are now happier than they were before.

New Party, Old System

The ideas of Schor’s New Party are reminiscent of those of the Green Party in Britain. Schor advocates that Britain should opt for slower, “sustainable" growth (about one percent per year) and, in exchange, spend more on health and education. This assumption that capitalist economies can simply pick and choose their growth rate is naive. The economies of Britain, France and Germany, for example, are currently trying to cut back on welfare expenditure at the same time as they try desperately to boost their growth rates up and out of this current uncertain period.

Another fundamental problem with the "voluntary simplicity"/downshifting response to society’s current problems (of which the ecological crisis is just one) is obviously that most of the world’s people do not have the choice of such a "lifestyle change” open to them. Duane Elgin tells u how he was able to move to a more "modest" house in order to fund his book Voluntary Simplicity. Clearly, not everyone has a house which they can sell, or a job from which they could "downshift". Most parts of the world do not even have a welfare state that they can "downshift" into. The only kind of simplicity available to the majority of the world’s population is of an entirely involuntary nature. It involves no choice about how fulfilling one’s work will be or whether the capitalist one works for will use their resources "ethically". (It is debatable whether the capitalists have much choice about this themselves if they are to get a good return from their investments.)

The debate was billed as a confrontation of the question of how we create an ecologically sustainable society. It seems that, in answer to this, the ever-growing environmental literature, research and discussion such as that of Elgin and Schor will talk about everything other than the world’s population gaining common ownership and control over the world's resources as a necessary first step. 

Dan Greenwood

Material World: Pollution pays (2024)

The Material World column from the April 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In environmental legislation the ‘polluter pays’ principle is an attempt to force businesses to bear at least some of the costs resulting from their polluting activities. However, this runs up against the logic of market competition. That logic encourages businesses to seek ways of externalising their costs as far as possible and to resist any attempt to compel them to internalise them that would have the effect of reducing their profits.

Thus, the problem with calling on governments to take stronger measures to protect the environment (or the interests of workers for that matter) is that what governments can do, even with the best will in the world, is limited. When they do act out of sheer necessity, the response is often ‘too little too late’. Objectively speaking, the interests of governments and those of the business community (that ultimately finances governments) are inextricably intertwined and closely aligned. Penalising businesses too harshly will rebound against the government itself.

It is precisely these fundamental economic realities that make the posturing of governments in relation to such pressing issues as anthropogenic climate change, at best tokenistic and, at worst thoroughly deceitful. There can be no hope of resolving such an issue through international agreements or strident appeals to world leaders to ‘do the right thing’. That is a timewasting and pointless endeavour, doomed to disappointment and despair.

Concerted attempts to get countries to comply with international agreements concerning emissions of greenhouse gases to combat climate change have frankly descended into farce. Periodic COP summits to discuss the issue have become little more than photo opportunities for politicians to convey the impression that they are actually doing something worthwhile and to placate their critics. In the meanwhile, the problem just gets steadily worse.

A holier-than-thou attitude on the part of some richer countries that have historically contributed most to the emission of these gases and still do so to some extent, sits uneasily with poorer countries wanting to industrialise and develop themselves and feeling they are somehow being prevented from doing so by other countries that are already industrialised and developed. Accusations of hypocrisy and double standards fill the air, contributing more heat than light to the ongoing debate. As the backbiting continues so does the global temperature gauge continue to inch its way upwards. In a ruthlessly competitive market economy the chances of its rivalrous participants cooperating for the common good appear increasingly slim if not non-existent.

In the meanwhile, as the scale of the environmental costs mount so does the room for manoeuvre diminish. These costs will incrementally impact on profit margins yet, paradoxically, the more they do so, the more resistant do businesses and governments appear to become towards taking affirmative and effective action to mitigate them. In a competitive market economy the temptation is always to want to offload the costs of dealing with the problem onto someone else, rather than yourself.

This is the perverse logic that informs the system we live in. The potential, or actual, ‘resource wars’ it gives rise to over such things as mineral reserves, water supplies and fertile farmland not only exacerbate the unfolding environmental disasters but provide a further distraction from, or an excuse for not, doing anything about it. Who is going to be overly concerned with environmental quality when heavily militarised states become fixated with carpet bombing the cities of their sworn enemies?

The truth is that in a capitalist society there is nothing quite like economic distress to focus minds on the priority of profit making. Environmental standards will be surreptitiously eased by default, if not by design, for the sake of promoting economic growth.

Corporations may well fall back on that well-documented ruse called ‘greenwashing’, feigning concern while simultaneously promoting sales of their products amongst their more ‘environmentally enlightened’ consumers, even though the underlying imperative that drives them – getting consumers to consume more and more – is itself fundamentally antithetical to what a sustainable world stands for.

‘Consuming more’ is precisely what has been happening. Of course, in itself, this is not necessarily a bad thing at all if you are talking about individuals in desperate need. However, ‘consumption’ covers a multitude of things, many of which have nothing whatsoever to do with meeting human needs. What is ‘environmentally friendly’ about an M1 Abrams battle tank or a Boeing AH-64 Apache attack helicopter?

The point is that we need to disaggregate the very concept of ‘consumption’ itself instead of just vaguely talking about the ‘greening of consumption’. Consuming what and to what end? For all the growing concern about the environmental costs of consumption, consumption itself is growing.

The solution to our problems cannot lie in technology alone. It has to involve also changing our social priorities and that can only really come about by changing the kind of society we live in.

Robin Cox

Material World: The problem of plastics (2024)

The Material World column from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Plastic is everywhere. It is difficult to imagine how we could live our modern lives without it. According to UNCTAD, the UN trade and development agency:

‘Global exports of plastics or goods made from plastic has more than doubled in value since 2005, passing the $1 trillion benchmark in 2018 and reaching nearly $1.2 trillion in 2021’ (tinyurl.com/an6945me).

The use of plastic encompasses products made from plastic, products with plastic components and products wrapped in plastic.

Invented in 1907, it is a very versatile and useful product, indeed, but the sheer scale of our dependence on it has created enormous and rapidly proliferating problems. According to the United Nations Environment Program:

‘Around the world, one million plastic bottles are purchased every minute, while up to five trillion plastic bags are used worldwide every year. In total, half of all plastic produced is designed for single-use purposes – used just once then thrown away’ (tinyurl.com/5asrbmnp).

As the article says, we are choking on plastics. It gets everywhere. Its effects are multiple. It can, for example, block up rivers, slow down the flow of water and so encourage mosquitoes to flourish in stagnant pools. It can be devastating for wildlife in many ways. A vast swirling island of floating plastic has been formed in the Pacific Ocean called the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’. It is currently 1.6 million square kilometres in size and growing (by comparison the United Kingdom is a mere 243,610 square kilometres and not growing).

The durability of plastic as a product means it can hang around in the environment for hundreds of years or break down into microplastics that enter the human body via the food chain when we consume fish. Petrochemical plants producing plastic release gases with side effects that range from asthma to cancer to various hormonal disorders. Burning plastic waste can likewise pose serious health risks.

Globally just 15 percent of plastic waste is collected for recycling and only half of that actually gets to be recycled – sorted, baled up and sent to a processing plant to be melted down. Part of the problem is that much of this plastic is not recyclable anyway.

Furthermore, there are many different kinds of plastic each with a different chemical composition – no doubt, much of this diversity being in part a function of market competition. You can´t just lump together these different kinds of plastic in the process of recycling if you want to get a usable product at the end of it. It is constraints such as these that prevent recycling being anything more than just a small part of the solution.

All this plastic comes from fossil fuels like crude oil or natural gas (which is combined with other ingredients to form a resin that is then turned into pellets), fuels that we are supposed to be running out of at some point in the future. Until that happens or until the price becomes excessive there is unlikely to be any really significant move towards embracing sustainable alternatives to plastic. Alternatives are available to some extent but there are powerful commercial interests vested in maintaining a profligately wasteful and polluting way of life heavily dependent on plastic.

These same petrochemical corporations, in order to maintain the market for their products and to deflect public criticism of the environmental effects of these products, have not infrequently resorted to greenwashing tactics – for instance by providing funding for recycling campaigns. What this does is to shift the perception of who is actually responsible for such problems as plastic litter from the producer to the consumer. You can´t blame the producer, goes the argument, when it is obviously doing its best to clean up the environment as evidenced by all that money it spends on recycling campaigns. (Actually, that money is a drop in the ocean compared to the corporation’s revenue and it is good publicity anyway).

This is a tactic not dissimilar to the way Big Pharma blamed the opioid crisis in America on the users. It also overlooks the fact that most of that plastic that does happen to be conscientiously disposed of by consumers into the container for plastic will not actually get to be recycled. The fact that consumers may not be aware of this simultaneously helps to take pressure off tackling the problem at its source while ensuring the demand for more plastic just keeps growing.

While most plastic waste generated within countries tended to remain within the country concerned – buried in landfill sites, burnt, or otherwise disposed of – some of this waste is simply shipped abroad in containers. This doesn’t really solve the problem but merely relocates it and, in so doing, also perpetuates it. It also involves additional transportation costs with all that that entails for the environment. For the exporting countries (mainly in Europe and the US) it relieves some of the pressure of having to deal with the waste problem themselves and for the importing countries – particularly in the case of developing countries, it can be economically (if not environmentally) beneficial.

It is not just the disposal of plastic waste that presents a growing problem. There is also a problem of our growing dependence on plastic itself. Behind this, there are powerful commercial interests intent upon expanding the market for plastic.

Alarmingly, there are projections suggesting a fourfold increase in the global use of plastic over the next three decades. Mostly, this is predicted to occur in the Middle East and Africa, followed by Asia and China but also to a lesser extent in other parts of the world like Europe and America where already, ‘investors from those regions are currently planning to support expanded capacity for plastics-related infrastructure and production, often with government support’ (LINK).

In short, plastic as an invention has been a mixed blessing. One cannot deny the very obvious benefits it has brought when so much of what we possibly take for granted about our material reality is made of plastic – from our toothbrush to the clothes we wear to the laptop we type on. But as we have seen this also has serious drawbacks.

Minimising the latter by significantly reducing our dependence on plastic and by increasing the effectiveness of recycling, requires changing the purpose behind production away from profit-making. Do we really need all those tacky plastic tourist souvenirs that the tourist industry is so intent upon plying us? What about all those plastic toys unceremoniously dumped at the municipal tip after the novelty has all too rapidly worn off? One can multiply these examples many times, but they all point to the need for a significant cultural shift – something that can only really come about by changing the nature of the society we live in – if we are to mitigate the negative aspects of plastics.

Robin Cox

Sceptical about doomsday? (2002)

Book Review from the February 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is capitalism on an unsustainable course in terms of natural resources? Is an environmental catastrophe looming? We review a book which suggests not

The politics of the environment raises many questions, not least of which is what the facts are about the state of the planet and how they should be interpreted. Is capitalism on an unsustainable course in terms of its use of natural resources? If so, will this inevitably continue?

Prominent in the current global debate on these issues is Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute. He offers a stark warning, published in his new book Eco-Economy:

“our economy is slowly destroying its support systems, consuming its endowment of natural capital. Demands of the expanding economy, as now structured, are surpassing the sustainable yield of ecosystems.”

Bjorn Lomborg, a former Greenpeace campaigner, in a controversial book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, takes on what he sees as the scare mongering by environmentalists like Brown. So how is it that two researchers can arrive at such different conclusions?

The first reason is to do with the use of factual research. There are many examples where Lomborg attempts to find holes in the factual assertions made by organisations such as Worldwatch. For example, he rejects the widely cited claim that 40,000 species per year become extinct. Similarly, he is dismissive of talk of the risk posed by pesticides, an issue which has gained a notable amount of coverage in the British media.

The second reason is to do with the way conclusions are drawn from the facts. For example, in the issue of water resources, Brown’s discussion focusses upon particular areas where there are shortages, notably the Middle East and North Africa. Lomborg acknowledges these localised shortages but chooses to emphasise the potential global abundance of water, given improved cooperation and efficiency.

Selective references?

Since The Skeptical Environmentalist was published other environmentalists have hit back, accusing Lomborg of exactly the kind of selective references to scientific research of which he accuses them. The World Resources Institute (WRI) point out that his use of statistics such as for the global fish catch which masks the importance of the distinguishing between different species of fish, many of which have seen drastic falls in stocks(see www.wri.org). The Union of Concerned Scientists say that he misleadingly refers to the rate of tropical deforestation as 0.46 percent per year, where as this statistic is the percentage of the total area of all types of forest. Lomborg is dismissive of the implications of tropical deforestation for the preservation of biodiversity and does not consider the ecological difference between recently grown forests for timber production and long established rainforests.

Even without reading the counter-charges of environmental organisations, The Skeptical Environmentalist is noticeably selective in the use of research. In discussing endangered species, Lomborg queries the statistics on the number of species that have become extinct in the recent past, providing what he claims is evidence of past exaggerations. His dismissal of other environmentalists’ concerns about possible future extinctions is inferred from this – implying that exaggeration about the past is evidence that we need not be concerned about the future.

The optimistic picture offered by Lomborg is bolstered by his discussion of pollution, where the advanced industrial nations of the North, have seen an improvement in the past fifty years. Lomborg stresses how these improvements have been achieved while economic activity has expanded. A more critical interpretation would, of course, question whether the air pollution they experience is yet acceptable and whether much of it is a consequence of the profit-first necessity of capitalism – a question that is not addressed.

Whilst Brown and Lomborg offer different pictures of the current state of the world there is some agreement between them about likely future developments. Both recognise the importance of the growth of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power – their expanding share of the world energy supply is central to the future vision offered by both authors. Both say that redirection of subsidies is needed to achieve the full potential. The likely extent and pace of such redirection is still far from clear, given the vested interests of oil companies who currently benefit greatly from government subsidies, in particular from the US government (see www.wri.org). Solar power, in particular, offers much potential but the building of photovoltaic cells to capture the sun’s energy is still an expensive process and solar power currently accounts for just 0.009 percent of the world energy supply. Wind power is closer to becoming economically competitive but still only has a 0.04 percent share. Governments’ expenditure on renewable energy has been dwarfed (and still is) by research into fossil fuels and nuclear power over the past thirty years, even though the potential of wind and solar technology has been known throughout this time. For this reason, defenders of capitalism will hardly be able to claim the future expansion of renewables as a success for their system.

The Skeptical Environmentalist offers a less pessimistic account of the likely extent and implications of global warming, of which fossil fuel based energy is the main cause. Lomborg suggests that a 2 – 2.5C increase in temperature by the end of the century is most likely, whilst admitting that this is uncertain due to the limitations in our knowledge and the difficulties of predictive modelling. Again this has been contested by WRI who suggest that Lomborg ignores some well established research into global warming such as that by the US National Academy of Sciences. Lomborg points out that some of the consequences of higher temperatures, such as the various dangers to human health and increased flooding due to higher sea levels, will be preventable in those areas which have the resources to cope with them.

This brings us onto a final feature of the optimistic outlook of The Skeptical Environmentalist. Lomborg shifts subtly between trying to show that an environmental problem is not as bad as has been claimed by organisations such as Worldwatch and trying to show that a problem is not caused by the limitations of ecological resources themselves but the structure of society and how it allocates resources. This second form of argument means that the cause of the problem lies in the economic system rather than ecology alone. In some key areas, such as water supplies and agriculture, Lomborg’s argument is of this second type and the question of whether capitalism can achieve a better allocation of resources remains to be answered.

Beyond capitalism

For Brown, on the other hand, a profound cultural shift is necessary for achieving an ‘eco-economy’ – one where ecology takes precedence over economics. Socialists (in this journal and elsewhere) have rejected the suggestion that any goal can subsume the profit motive under capitalism. Still, socialists do take on board the concerns of the environmental movement and the material possibilities that they suggest for addressing them. Eco-Economy draws these suggestions together and offers the kind vision of sustainable production many aspects of which could be taken on board in a socialist society.

Suggestions such as improving public transport, expanding renewable energy supplies and recycling will not be news to anyone who is concerned about the state of the planet. The Skeptical Environmentalist also includes these possibilities and Lomborg actually places more of an emphasis upon the potential global abundance of key natural resources such as food, energy and water as part of his attempt to dispel what he describes as the “doom mongering” of organisations such as Worldwatch.

Brown calls for improved information and media coverage in order to encourage a redirection towards sustainable technologies. Yet Brown does not refer to the vested interests of capitalism that often stand in the way of achieving sustainability (and cause socialists to question the view that a cultural shift is enough to ensure sustainability while capitalism continues to exist).

Rather than seeing a cultural change as being necessary, Lomborg suggests that “business as usual” under capitalism already has (and will continue to) bring about improvements in environmental management. He simplistically points to the improvement in the average standard of living that capitalism has brought about as evidence that more resources will be available in future for managing the environment.

In spite of their different conclusions about the state of the planet, both Brown and Lomborg call for a redirection of resources within capitalism via subsidies and taxes. Indeed, their differing prescriptions for the future partly rest on their perceptions about how easy such a reduction would be to achieve. There may have been some problems which have been alleviated by these means, such as sulphur dioxide emissions and acid rain in the advanced industrial nations. In renewables, as we have seen, there will be some improvement, although this has been delayed, not facilitated, by capitalism. Other areas, where there is short term profit to be made at the expense of long term sustainability (fisheries, forests, agriculture), will continue to see problems. A solution (in the case of Brown) and a cause for optimism (in the case of Lomborg) is far from reassuring when it hinges upon a call for environmental subsidies at a time when global capitalism is seeking to reduce them in many areas, as can be seen from an analysis of proceedings of the World Trade Organisation and its institutional predecessors.

Even Lomborg acknowledges problems such as world hunger, over-exploitation of forests and oceans and future problems to be expected from global warming (although the argument about the scale of the problems will continue). Indeed there are issues which are not discussed by Lomborg such as nuclear waste and over-intensive farming. There are potential future environmental risks posed by fast developing, new technologies. These could arise from new means by which the genetic structures of the natural world might be altered (not to mention possible manipulation at the molecular level.) This further emphasises the need for democratic, social control of how the resources of our planet are managed. Brown is right to find cause for concern. It is telling that a such a lengthy attempt to counter warnings about the future direction of capitalism cannot convince us to think otherwise.

Dan Greenwood