Manufacturing scarcity in an age of abundance
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(Wed, 7 May 2008 17:11:18 -0500 (CDT)) --- Green Capitalism Manufacturing scarcity in an age of abundance
James Heartfield, 2008
B7 Chapter 1, The Age of Plenty
B7 Chapter 4, abridged, Manufactured Scarcity (from Internet page at Mute)
B7 Chapter 8, part, Environmentalists in the bDismal Scienceb
Chapter 1, The Age of Plenty
The global elite is in the grip of a terrible nightmare.
The nightmare is cornucopia. For the ruling classes nothing is more
alarming than the steady rise in mass consumerism. Across the world they
see the advance of consumer power as a drain on their precious
resources. The age of plenty is an anathema to them. Superstores, cheap
air travel, fat kids, suburban sprawl, and takeaway food fill them with
dread. Their biggest fear is that the Chinese should take to driving
cars. They dream instead of restoring strict limits on consumption. If
scarcity is in danger of being overcome, their ambition is to
artificially recreate it.
For thirty millennia mankind lived under the tyranny of scarcity. The
struggle to survive dominated human experience. Perched on the edge of
existence men were at the mercy of the elements. Droughts, famine,
floods, and disease threatened extinction. We were slaves to the
relentless cycles of night and day, high and low tide, summer and
winter. The earth only gave up the means by which we survived, food,
shelter, warmth, very grudgingly. Backbreaking toil has been the lot of
the small farmer since men first settled the land.
Hardship stunted the moral and intellectual growth of men. Dominated by
nature in fact, they were in thrall to phantoms in their imaginations.
Superstitious in beliefs, custom bound in their social lives, ignorant
intellectually b there was nothing virtuous about poverty.
Only by industry, by husbanding the soil, by honing the tools, by
storing the grain, by re-routing the waters, gathering the wood, digging
the coal, drilling the oil, smelting the iron and steel did men ever
succeed in wresting more the earth than they needed. The surplus, over
and above bare existence, is what makes us human.
But the surplus was for so long, small: little more than a grain store,
a salted ham, a barrel of apples for the winter. More than nature needs
was hard to come by.
Without enough to go around, all communal bonds, till now, have been
little more than systems for rationing the surplus. Monasteries and
castles, temples and parliaments, long-halls and pyramids - these are
the monuments left by the great class wars over the surplus product that
have raged for the last five thousand years. The prize to the victors: a
life of plenty, amid squalor. Their civilisation was not much more than
an armed stockade around the food store.
Freedom from necessity was so rare a commodity that it was concentrated
in the hands of the privileged few. The leisured classes, whether
aristocratic or priestly, warlord or capitalist have had to fight hard
to defend their privileges. Subjugation of the toiling masses was the
condition of the freedom of the elite. Human civilisation, whether
literary or scientific, has blossomed in the free time won by the few,
on the backs of many. Scarcity made the human order into a bitter war
over social product.
Throughout human history, the powers-that-be have stood on the solid
authority of scarcity. Ever since Joseph took control of the Pharoahbs
grain store, authority has meant rationing. Doling out the rations is
the first function of all authority. Whether it was wages, or benefits,
homes or health-care, the person in control of the rations has always
been the one with the whip.
Capitalism was from the outset a system of rationing.
Capitalism rations scarce goods through the market mechanism. It
disperses the weekly ration to families as wages. It recovers its costs
by limiting access to goods. It reduces us to wage slaves by controlling
access to the means of subsistence. Capitalism cannot exist without
scarcity. Scarcity is capitalismbs means of social control
But capitalism is also the system that has over time abolished scarcity.
As well as a system of social control, capitalism is a system for
producing goods. To create an ever-greater surplus, capitalism has
revolutionised technology, so reducing costs. The profit system drove
people to create abundance. In doing so capitalism has abolished the
basis for its own control.
Industrial revolution
The industrial revolution turned the world upside down. Putting a
premium on cutting wage costs, capitalism set in motion the single
greatest transformation in human history. At last, here was a system
that rewarded the abbreviation of working time: the factory system.
Begun in 1721 at the Lombe Silk Works on the Derwent, the factory system
has expanded to embrace the world. Greedily swallowing up labour power,
the factory had to be reined in by trade unions and the law.
The gains of the factory system are straightforward. As it grew, output
grew faster than the number of people. Result: happiness. In Britain
between 1801 and 1911 the population grew from 10.5 million to 41.8
million, an annual increase of 1.25 per cent, while output grew by
2-2.25 per cent a year.[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield,
2008#_ftn1|[1]]] In the last century, world population grew more than it
did in the previous 30 000 years. Happily, world output increased
faster, so that output per head grew nearly ten times, from $679 to
$6539 between 1900 and 2000.[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield,
2008#_ftn2|[2]]] Only because output grew faster is it possible that
those more than four billion new people survive.
The history of technology is a subject in itself (see appendix, The
Revolution in Technique). To abbreviate: levers, pulleys and then
machines substituted for routine human tool-use; mills and dray animals,
and then later engines substituted for human motive power; wood, coal,
oil and gas substituted for dietary calories providing warmth, light and
then, with machines, kinetic energy.
To do the same thing over and again, said Heraclitus, is not just
boredom, it is slavery. Technology, substituting for routine work can
set us free. The division of labour made dull but efficient work out of
mysterious craftsmanship. Once isolated, routine could be mechanised.
And because industry isolates the repetitive actions from the creative
side of work, it is driven by standardisation. Modern technology levels,
distilling the essence out in different circumstances.
It prefers purer energy sources like oil, and electricity because of
their universality of application, to bulky and unpredictable wood, wind
and coal.
Technology has tended to the development, not of the universal worker,
the Robot, but to the universal machine, the computer, which substitutes
more effectively for routines that lay far beyond the calculating
capacities of people.
But for the elite cultural reaction against it, todaybs era would be
known as the Age of Plastics, the universal construction materials that
have freed our goods from the constraints of natural forms (at least at
the super-molecular level).
Cornucopia
The future is here. We are largely free from the direct domination of
nature. For most of us, absolute scarcity is a thing of the past -
thanks to the revolution in technique.
The Worldwatch Institute estimated that 1.7 billion people earn enough
to buy into the consumer society. It is true that only in West Europe
and America, does the bconsumer classb approach to the whole population.
But still 29 per cent of the consumer class, 494 million are in East
Asia, a tenth in East Europe and another tenth in Latin America.[[Green
Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftn3|[3]]]
In material terms there is no basis for scarcity today. Food output b
despite the Reverend Malthusb fears b outstripped population. Good news
for most of us.
But for some, the end of scarcity is an outrage. They cannot believe
that people can enjoy the good life. For them, the very sight of other
people eating, drinking, enjoying themselves is disgusting. The puritan
ethos was a great thing, when Britons were faced with real scarcity, but
some people do not know how to let it go.
But the demand for rationing is not just a cultural reaction.
Controlling access to the means of subsistence has been the way that
society was organised since the dawn of human settlements.
Scarcity was never just scarcity. It was also a weapon in the struggle
to establish mastery. The bread-and-water diet, doling out the shipbs
biscuits, taxing peasants, land distribution, the ration-book, wage
negotiations b these were the ways that the ruling class ruled.
The super-abundance generated by modern industry calls the authority of
the powers-that-be into question.
Even modern capitalism - the system that developed industry b struggles
to justify its profits in the face of super-abundance.
The natural tendency of prices is downwards, as productivity increases.
More and more we see costs of reproduction pushed so low that they are
getting close to negligible.
That is what happened to electronically reproduced music. Here were
goods that you could take away, while leaving them there. The
commodity-form of old coincided with finite goods, whose ownership
implied they were denied to others.
Instantaneous reproduction at negligible cost threatens the very
structure of private property relations. Increasingly, profits can only
be generated through the artificial imposition of a legal title to
payment for licensed use. Naturally enough, the dependence upon the law
to enforce payments tempts teenagers to evade it.
You will not be able to download food from the internet in the
foreseeable future, but here too, the same downward trend in costs is
clear. UK households spent around one third of their income on food in
1950 and about one tenth today - thanks to the growth of factory farms
that push down prices.
Government scientist Sir David King suggests that cheap and available
food has helped make Britain overweight. Meanwhile Americans throw away
one quarter of all their food uneaten, and the figure for Britain is a
staggering 30-40 per cent[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield,
2008#_ftn4|[4]]] - modern consumers put little value on food. At the
same time small farmers are leaving the industry, as returns shrink.
Modern industry is dissolving the artificial representation of output as
discrete goods, with a price label, and laying bare its real character
as a series of developing relationships.
The growing importance of intellectual property rights is a sign that
the propertied elite is losing touch with the world of production.
Western copyright lawyers are hunting Chinabs cities for an unearned
share of their industry.
More and more capital is tied up in unproductive speculation. The
financial wizards are increasingly preoccupied with securing future
value streams independent of any kind of productive activity. Growth,
whether in housing, dot.com companies or the fine art market, generally
means asset inflation, without any corresponding increase in production.
Indeed investors prefer goods whose supply is limited, rationed, like
Britainbs over-regulated housing market, or unique goods like fine art.
Reinventing Scarcity in an age of abundance
bAllow not nature more than nature needs, manbs lifebs as cheap as
beastbsb Shakespeare, King Lear, Act II, Scene IV
In the face of real super-abundance, saving the rule of private property
means reinventing scarcity. Artificially manufactured scarcity is the
condition for the reimposition of capitalist authority.
The last nature-imposed famines were in India in the 1960s. The bgreen
revolutionb that brought high-yield crops, fertilisers and motorisation
put an end to Indiabs recurrent famines.
Since then, famines have been man-made. Starvation in Cambodia came
through a combination of American bombardment and Khmer Rouge
depopulation of the cities. The 1986 Ethiopian famine was a product of
war. Localised famines in inland Somalia were transformed into a general
collapse in output once American agricultural surpluses dumped in
Mogadishu as USAID pushed grain prices to zero, so that farmers
abandoned their plots and invaded the port.
Economist Rehman Sobhan explained why the single greatest aid recipient,
Bangladesh, was so poor: aid agencies were so numerous that they
recruited all the most talented Bengalis away from fruitful work.
Man-made famines re-establish a new ruling order. Michael Maren
described the way that aid agencies came to rule over the East African
villages he worked in. Aid workers, often young people with precious
little experience, lorded it over their black subjects.[[Green
Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftn5|[5]]]
In the developed world, too, the enemies of abundance are struggling to
reinvent scarcity.
Over and again experts have warned us that the exhaustion of natural
resources is at hand. In every case, these warnings have proved false.
In the 1970s, we were warned that oil reserves were running out. But as
prices increased those reserves were discovered to be many times greater
than previously thought. Today, again we are being told that bpeak oilb
is in sight. But these remain theoretical assertions without any
justification.
Then we were warned about deforestation. But it turned out that in the
United States forestland is growing 5886 square kilometres on average
every year. In the European Union forests are growing 486 million cubic
metres every year.[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftn6|[6]]]
Herbert Girardet warned us that our human footprint - the area of land
needed to generate the goods we consume - was getting bigger, and soon
the cities would consume the countryside. Now we know that the actual
human footprint covers fewer acres each year, as grain yields per acre
increase. In the United States, the human footprint (developed + farm
land) has shrunk by 15 per cent since 1950.[[Green Capitalism, James
Heartfield, 2008#_ftn7|[7]]]
Paul Erhlich thought that the increase in population meant that there
would be a generalised materials and goods famine by the mid 1980s. In
fact food production outstripped household demand, as raw materials did
industrial demand.
Inventing scarcity today takes a big leap of the imagination. Struggling
to demonstrate shortages in an age of abundance, the scare-mongers have
left the mundane world altogether and discovered a shortage in the ether.
Of course climate change is an important scientific question, but that
is quite a different thing from the contemporary cultural interpretation
of climate change as a coming catastrophe. Whether a warmer planet would
mean more goods or less is a moot point. What is certain is that those
who need to believe in scarcity will discover it in climate change.
Climate change scare mongering is the final etherialisation of scarcity.
What needs to be explained is not the natural limits to growth. What
needs to be explained is the determination in some quarters to believe,
despite the evidence to the contrary, that we have reached the natural
limits to growth.
The green capitalistsb a priori belief in limits is independent of any
empirical substantiation. It is the prejudice of an elite that can only
exercise authority by controlling the rations. These are the prejudices
that laid the basis for a new kind of capitalism - green capitalism. And
the first stage in the genesis of green capitalism is the retreat from
production.
Chapter 4, Manufactured Scarcity
The Profits of Deindustrialisation
bOf course companies that sell climate change solutions stand to benefit
as greenhouse gas emissions come to bear a price tag.b b Daniel Esty
Hillhouse, Professor of Environmental Law, Harvard University [[Green
Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftn8|[8]]]
The corporate raiders of the 1980s first worked out that you might be
able to make more money downsizing, or even breaking up industry than
building it up. It is a perverse result of the profit motive that
private gain should grow out of public decay. But even the corporate
raiders neve dreamt of making deindustrialisation into an avowed policy
goal which the rest of us would pay for.
What some of the cannier Green Capitalists realised is that scarcity
increases price, and manufacturing scarcity can increase returns. What
could be more old hat, they said, than trying to make money by making
things cheaper? Entrepreneurs disdained the bfast moving consumer goodsb
market.
Of course there is a point to all this. If labour gets too efficient the
chances of wringing more profits from industry get less. The more
productive labour is, the lower, in the end, will be the rate of return
on investments. That is because the source of new value is living
labour; but greater investment in new technologies tends to replace
living labour with machines, which produce no additional value of their
own.[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftn9|[9]]] Over time the
rate of return must fall. Business theory calls this the diminishing
rate of return.[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftn10|[10]]]
Businessmen know it as the brace for the bottomb b the competitive
pressure to make goods cheaper and cheaper, making it that much harder
to sell enough to make a profit. Super efficient labour would make the
capitalistic organisation of industry redundant.
Manufacturing scarcity, restricting output and so driving up prices is
one short-term way to secure profits and maybe even the profit-system.
Of course that would also mean abandoning the historic justification for
capitalism, that it increased output and living standards.
Environmentalism might turn out to be the way to save capitalism, just
at the point when industrial development had shown it to be redundant.
From megawatts to negawatts
One of the most destructive examples of manufactured scarcity is bclean
energyb and Californiabs bNegawatt Revolutionb.
In 1997 the Club of Rome collaborated with Amory Lovins of the Rocky
Mountain Institute to launch a new report Factor Four that promised to
bhalve resource useb while doubling wealth. The message was that you
could get rich saving the planet. A privileged few did indeed double
their wealth; but for the rest it was just a case of halving resources.
Immodestly, Lovins made his own California energy scheme the main
example of savings in Factor Four. His well-paid advice to the state of
California was that it was a big mistake to adopt a system that rewarded
increased electricity output with increased profits. Such a system would
naturally tend to boost output. Instead rewards for cutting energy use
were needed. Rather than getting paid for additional megawatts the
utility companies should be rewarded for saving power use: negawatts.
The impact of Lovinsb model on energy generation in California was
decisive. bAround 1980, Pacific Gas and Electricity Company was planning
to build some 10-20 power stationsb, according to Lovins.
bBut by 1992, PG&E was planning to build no more power stations, and in
1993, it permanently dissolved its engineering and construction
division. Instead as its 1992 Annual Report pronounced, it planned to
get at least three quarters of its new power needs in the 1990s from
more efficient use by its customers.b[[Green Capitalism, James
Heartfield, 2008#_ftn11|[11]]]
Of course the PG&E was not getting three quarters of its new power needs
from anywhere: it had just reduced its output. But manufacturing energy
scarcity did indeed grow somebodybs cash wealth: Enronbs. With these
artificial caps on energy production the generating companies could
start to hike up the charges to utility companies, including PG&E, now
unable to meet its own customersb demands. Those energy companies were
owned by Enron.
Chief Executive Kenneth Lay turned Enron from a company that made its
money generating power into one that made its money trading finance.
Whatever else it was doing, there was no denying that Enron was cutting
back its own CO2 emissions and getting rich doing it. One company memo
stated that the Kyoto treaty bwould do more to promote Enron's business
than will almost any other regulatory initiativeb.[[Green Capitalism,
James Heartfield, 2008#_ftn12|[12]]]
Amory Lovinsb negawatt revolution in California was Enronbs wet dream.
Having shut down its own generation capacity, PG&E was at the mercy of
Enronbs market manipulation. Buying surplus electricity on the open
market PG&E was royally fleeced, losing $12 billion. Utility bills rose
by nine times. Enron took advantage of the restricted market and cut
electricity to California. They even invented reasons to take power
plants offline while California was blacked out. Enron official joked
that they were stealing one million dollars a day from
California.[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftn13|[13]]] The
PG&E that Lovins held up as a model went bankrupt and had to be baled
out by the state of California.
The negawatt revolution in California was supposed to reward savings and
alternative energy generation. In the event manufacturing scarcity only
rewarded Enronbs crooked speculators, while penalising consumers.
Sadly, the lessons of the bnegawatt revolutionb have been buried in the
outrage about Enronbs fraudulent market manipulation. Few people noticed
that Enronbs executives were taking advantage of an artificial scarcity
in energy supply engineered by Amory Lovins and the PG&E all the time in
close association with Enronbs favourite green lobby, the National
Resources Defence Council.[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield,
2008#_ftn14|[14]]]
Few of Enronbs critics noticed that it was the very model of an
environmentally friendly, post-industrial company and one that had taken
Amory Lovinsb goal of doubling wealth by halving resource use to heart.
Saving energy is of course good sense b as long as that is done by
resource efficiency. The Club of Romebs claim that manipulating market
prices to create incentives for reducing energy output can create
efficiency is confused. All that achieved was an artificial shortage b
the condition for ramping up utility bills.[[Green Capitalism, James
Heartfield, 2008#_ftn15|[15]]] The market incentive for energy
efficiency comes with reduced bills from savings in raw materials and
generation. Normal prices would give customers the incentive to reduce
their electricity consumption in turn.
But amazingly the Enron-Lovins model of restricting supply is the one
that is being adopted around the world. Utility companies are rewarding
consumers for reducing their consumption from central power stations and
encouraging domestic-sited energy generation, through windmills and
solar panels. Playing on Californiansb distrust of the power companies
the Environmental Protection Agency is planning to add solar power to
one million new homes b paid for by another surcharge on utility bills.
In Britain, the government is introducing regulations to make all new
homes carbon-neutral. The current goal of carbon-neutral homes reverses
the division of labour that saw specialised energy producers distribute
electricity, turning it into an 18th-century cottage industry. The
simple economic lesson that mass production avoids reproduction of
effort has been lost. Nothing could be more wasteful, or more guaranteed
to create new scarcity.
Californiabs bnegawatt revolutionb is only one of the more extreme
versions of the way that green priorities work in tandem with profiting
by manufacturing scarcity. South African radical Dominic Tweedie argues
that recent electricity blackouts there happened because of ba campaign
to impose artificial scarcityb. The failure to build power stations to
meet the growing demand from South Africabs black townships was not
recognised as a problem by activists there because they bought into the
green prejudice that social aspirations could be met by redistribution
alone, at the expense of increased output. Now supply companies are
hiking up prices to the people who can least afford them.
From negawatts to nega-nosh
Elsewhere, food supplies are failing because the European Union and the
United Nations have pursued a 20-year policy of retiring land from
production to arrest the fall in farm prices.
Engineering the retirement of farmland is largely a way of easing small
farmers (who had been protected under the old Common Agricultural
Policy) out of farming altogether. It has not hurt the larger
agribusinesses, which are thriving. Not surprisingly, farm goods are a
target for speculators, like b70s corporate raider, Jim Slater, whose
new Agra Firma was started up to take advantage of booming prices. The
reduction in excess output has in the last few years pushed prices up
again, after long decades of falling food prices. In Italy, consumers
boycotted pasta because prices rose so high; in Mexico, Tortilla Rallies
protested against price rises, and in India there have been onion
demonstrations.[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftn16|[16]]]
The Economist estimates that food prices rose by one third in the year
to December 2007 (having fallen by three quarters between 1975 and
2005).[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftn17|[17]]] According
to the mainstream media, the pressure of biofuels and global warming are
to blame for the shortfall in crops b as if governments had not been
involved in a twenty-year programme of retiring land from production.
Todaybs scarcities have been engineered, in the name of saving the
environment, but in fact to defend the livelihoods of big agriculture.
Setting caps on energy production, industrial output, car transport and
house-building in the name of saving the environment all have the effect
of damaging peoplebs standard of living. But as we have seen, that does
not stop individual businesses from making big profits out of those
caps. Trading in carbon rights, making windmills, carbon offsetting
schemes, and organic food are all ways of making profits out of
artificial limits set upon growth.
Chapter 8. Environmentalists in the bdismal scienceb
Latter-day environmentalists are irritated with economics. They object
to the cost-benefit analyses that do not account for nature. They attack
the bWashington Consensusb of free market economists working at the
World Bank and the International Monetary fund. The Washington
Consensus, according to todaybs environmentalists is making a fetish out
of runaway growth that is trashing the environment.
But mainstream economics (sometimes called bneo-classicalb economics,
for its return to the ideas of Adam Smith) is not really
growth-oriented. Like environmentalism, neo-classical economics takes
scarcity as a given. According to Lionel Robbinsb much-lauded account
bEconomics is the science which studies human behaviour as a
relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative
uses.b[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftn18|[18]]]
Neo-classical economics is interested first and foremost in equilibrium
or balance. The central claim of neo-classical economics is that the
unimpeded market is a self-equilibriating system. Prices carry
information that allows the equilibrium to reassert itself. Where supply
is too great in relation to demand, prices fall, and producers reduce
output; where supply is too small, prices will rise and producers
increase output. Any disturbances or disproportionalities are quickly
overcome as long as markets are free, according to the theory.
Taking equilibrium as its essential grounding, neo-classical economics
has no room for growth in its theory. Growth is an external factor to
neo-classical economics.[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield,
2008#_ftn19|[19]]] The nearest thing to growth in the neo-classical
theory is the welfare gains that come with the optimum distribution of
goods. Production remains a technical factor external to the subject of
economics proper, market exchanges. Productivity growth is fundamentally
a disturbance to the market equilibrium.
Though the greens have forgotten today, ecological theory was largely
cribbed from economic theories of equilibrium. The word ecology was
popularised by the now-discredited biologist Ernst Haekel (1834-1919),
who thought that all nature was united in one self-correcting system,
and that even politics was bapplied biologyb. In the nineteenth century
defenders of the status quo insisted that the distribution of property
between rich and poor was a law of nature that could not be broken. In
books like Social Statics and Physics and Politics (bthe application of
the principles of natural selection and inheritance to political
societyb,) Herbert Spencer and Walter Bagehot made the case for what
they called bSocial Darwinismb.
The economistsb belief that social stratification was ordained by nature
mirrored the early ecologistsb belief that nature itself was in a state
of equilibrium. Elaborating on geologist Eduard Suessbs demarcation of a
bbiosphereb and Arthur Roy Harrodbs ecosystem, ecologists like Arthur
Tansley argued that bmature well-integrated plant communities had enough
of the characters of organisms to be considered as
quasi-organismsb.[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield,
2008#_ftn20|[20]]] In 1979 James Lovelock took the argument one stage
further, saying that the role that organic life played in sustaining the
atmosphere indicated all the features of intelligence. Lovelock called
this intelligence Gaia, after the Greek goddess of life. But Lovelock
was making use of a poor definition of intelligent life as
self-correcting feedback mechanisms, taken from cyberneticist Norbert
Wienerbs theory of artificial intelligence. In truth such
self-correcting mechanisms, as most biologists agreed, were simply
stochastic, or chance occurrences.
Still, pre-modern, holistic ideas of a natural balance, that project an
imaginary totality onto manifold nature are well entrenched in the
popular mind. What is more, it is widely assumed that human industry is
increasingly out of balance with nature, and even in some quarters that
naturebs equilibrium will reassert itself in mass human extinction. To
some misanthropes, mankind is even seen as a human plague.[[Green
Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftn21|[21]]] More acceptably, it is
common to treat the interchange between man and nature as if it were a
market exchange, subject to the laws of equilibrium. So eco-spokesman
Michael Jacob suggests that bthe natural environment performs the
function of a capital stock for the human economyb as a preamble to the
argument that beconomic activity is currently running down this
stockb.[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftn22|[22]]]
Despite past hostilities, ecologists and neo-classical economists are
busy re-discovering their common ground. Bank of England economist Sir
Nicholas Sternbs report on the presumed costs of climate change was a
turning point for the suits. Having shed the view of unkempt green
slackers, free market ideologues like Newt Gingrich are telling us that
they always believed in keeping a proper balance with nature.[[Green
Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftn23|[23]]]
And, being essentially systems of rationing, many environmental policies
give more than a passing nod to the science of rationing, neo-classical
economics. London Mayor Ken Livingstone admitted as much when he
conceded that his congestion charge was drawn from an idea of the free
market ideologue Milton Friedman. One unique contribution of
environmentalism to the bdismal scienceb of economics has been in the
theories of bexternalitiesb b which is a fascinating insight into the
way that capitalism projects social goals that are increasingly at odds
with the outcome of market exchanges b and in that of bnatural
capitalb.
[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftnref1|[1]]] Paul Kennedy,
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, London, Fontana, 1990, p.197
[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftnref2|[2]]] bEstimating
World GDPb Brad DeLong,
ml
[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftnref3|[3]]] Worldwatch
Institute, State of the World, London, W. W. Norton, 2004, p 7
[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftnref4|[4]]] Guardian 15
April 2005
[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftnref5|[5]]] Michael Maren,
The Road to Hell, New York, The Free Press, 1997; Julie Hearn, bAfrican
NGOs: the new compradors?b Development and Change, Volume 38 Issue 6
Page 1095-1110, November 2007
[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftnref6|[6]]] Office of
National Statistics, Britain 2000, London, HMSO, p.463
[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftnref7|[7]]] Wendell Cox,
War on the Dream, Lincoln, iUniverse, 2006, p. 73
[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftnref8|[8]]] The Green
List, The Guardian supplement, p.29, 5 November 2007
[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftnref9|[9]]] See Karl Marx,
Capital, Volume Three, bThe law of the tendency of the rate of profit to
fallb, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1959, pp. 211-240.
[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftnref10|[10]]] 'The Origin
Of The Law Of Diminishing Returns', Edwin Cannan, 1813-15, Economic
Journal, vol. 2, 1892.
[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftnref11|[11]]] Amory
Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins and Ernst von Wiezsacker, Factor Four: Doubling
wealth, halving resource use, London, Earthscan, p. 160.
[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftnref12|[12]]] How
Environmentalists Sold Out to Help Enron, PR Watch Newsletter, Third
Quarter 2003, Volume 10, No. 3.
[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftnref13|[13]]] 'Tapes Show
Enron Arranged Plant Shutdown', The New York Times, 4 February 2005.
[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftnref14|[14]]] PR Watch
Newsletter, op.cit.
[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftnref15|[15]]] The
Guardian, 6 August 2004.
[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftnref16|[16]]] Jonathan
Watts, bRiots and hunger feared as demand for grain sends food costs
soaring,b The Guardian, 4 December 2007.
[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftnref17|[17]]] bCheap no
moreb, The Economist, 6 December 2007
[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftnref18|[18]]] Lionel
Robbins, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science,
London, Macmillan, 1945, p. 16
[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftnref19|[19]]] Economic
theories of growth were awkwardly grafted onto neo-classical economic
theory, by J.M. Keynes, W.W. Rostow and John Hicks b usually in a
defensive reaction to the rise of the Socialist and Third World
nationalist movements.
[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftnref20|[20]]] bin the same
way that human communities are habitually considered sob, Arthur
Tansley, bThe use and abuse of vegetational concepts and termsb,
Ecology, Vol. 16, No. 3, July 1935, p.290
[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftnref21|[21]]] See John
Gray, Straw Dogs: thoughts on humans and other animals, London, Granta, 2003
[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftnref22|[22]]] The Politics
of the Real World, London, Earthscan, 1996, p.17
[[Green Capitalism, James Heartfield, 2008#_ftnref23|[23]]] See Newt
Gingrich, A Contract with the Earth, Baltimore, John Hopkins University
Press, 2007
Riaz K Tayob (riazt@IAFRICA.COM).
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