Thankyou Sam for taking the trouble to provide us with Richard Smith's paper
which was very interesting.
I have selected a passage below which sums up the dilemma:
Quote:
We in the wealthy industrialized countries should emphatically demand
that our governments and corporations transfer the latest clean
technology to Third World countries as quickly and cheaply as possible.
But neither we nor the Chinese should tolerate the Chinese
leaders' fraudulent claim that they do not have the cash to clean up
their mess.
Furthermore, China's leaders have militantly resisted international
efforts to persuade their country to set quotas for pollution
reduction. As recently as April 1995, at the first follow-up to the Rio
confer-ence, the Chinese delegation to the First Conference of the
Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change in Berlin, China's
representative, Liu Daquan, insisted that 'My delegation is firmly
opposed to any attempt to impose limitations or reduction obligations on
the developing country parties at this stage'59 Li Junfeng, a senior
energy-researcher for the State Planning Commission, has put the matter
even more bluntly: 'It is just as hot in Beijing as inWashington, DC.
You try to tell the people in Beijing that they cant buy a car or an
air-conditioner because of the global climate change issue. If we
reduce our emission of gasses it means we must reduce our energy
consumption. When people get rich, they want to buy an air-conditioner
or a car; that will increase energy consumption."6o
In sum, China's leaders seem to think that they-and the rest of the
developing world-have the right to develop and to pollute with the same
profligacy as the advanced industrialized nations have done-and damn the
consequences. Of course, there is nothing to stop them from operating
on this principle. But if they do so, and
if the industrialized countries also remain hell bent for growth
regardless of the consequences, there seems little prospect of slowing
the increase, much less reducing, emissions of carbon dioxide and other
substances without which global climatic disaster looms as a real
threat.
Unquote.
This describes one of the classic consequences of competition often called
'the hidden pay-off'. In continuing competition, both sides can continue to
serve their own short-sighted self-interest and each is buttressed in that
conclusion by the other's on-going behaviour. In other words, competition is
destroying us and, at the same time, both compels us and gives us the excuse
to continue doing so. It's therefore a kind of dictatorship over which no
one has control. And that, I believe, is a dictatorship we are all subject
to on all levels of society and in all parts of the world - call it
'globalization' if you will.
In such circumstances, failure to compete is tantamount to suicidal because
you are positively punished for doing so. That applies to individuals,
corporations, politicians, nations - i.e. to all of us in one way or
another.
So if there is a way out of this global dilemma, that solution must allow us
to continue competing whilst, at the same time, negotiating - on the
appropriate basis - for a cessation of competition and commencement of
cooperation. If we can do that, we can then start to solve China's problems,
our own and the rest of the world's. If that rings any bells with you, you
might care to take a look at the Simultaneous Policy website at
www.simpol.org.
best wishes
John Bunzl
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sam Pawlett" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, August 04, 2000 7:28 AM
Subject: [CrashList] China Part3
> VII. Development Without Destruction?
>
> Today, when industrial power has outstripped what once seemed
> inexhaustible limits, is it still reasonable to equate living standards
> with, consumerism? Today, even the World Bank-which in the name of
> development has dammed up, cut down, polluted and paved over np small
> portion of the planet for forty years -now concedes that 'If the
> benefits from rising incomes are offset by the costs imposed on health
> and the quality of life by pollution, this cannot be called
> develodment." But what, then, should we mean by development? And how do
> we measure higher living standards? Are the living standards of a
> family in Bangkok raised, for example, when their cash income rises
> enough so that they can purchase an automobile-when the pleasure of car
> owner ship is offset by the loss of free time caused by the need to work
> more hours, or even take a second job, to pay for the car and all its
> attendant costs, by the longer commuting time caused by other motorists
> exercising their freedom, by lung cancer, by the generalized urban
> blight jammed roads, car parks, petrol stations, used-car lots, drive-in
> fast-foc franchises, brown skies and howling car-alarms? Is this a
> higher standard of living? Evidently not just bourgeois economists but
> even market socialists and many Marxists think so, for few bother to
> question the nature of development per se.
>
> Obviously, the Chinese need to develop their economy in order to raise
> living standards. It is also obvious that virtually any human economic
> activity must have some deleterious impact upon the environment. Even
> organic farming produces methane gas, a contributor to global warming.
> Yet the impact of development upon the environment is highly variable.
> So it matters a great deal which technologies the Chinese adopt to
> further their development.
>
> The Advantages of Backwardness
>
> As we have seen, China stands at a crucial historical juncture. It
> could actually take advantage of its backwardness and underdevelopment
> and avoid repeating many of the pitfalls and disasters of capitalist-led
> economic development in the West, and to take advantage of the most
> advanced scientific knowledge and technology currently available.
>
> I see no reason why the Chinese cannot modernize and adopt the most
> scientifically rational and environmentally benign technologies. One
> the huge advantages of 'combined and uneven development' is precisely
> that late developers have the chance to skip technological stages the
> industrialized countries have already gone through. The Chinese could
> for example, largely skip over the auto-industrial stage and, taking
> advantage of their existing system, based on bicycles and trains, move
> directly to a modernized bicycle, train, and bus system. The Chinese
> could also modernize their still heavily organic argiculture and so
> avoid the destruction of topsoil, the pollution, the health costs the
> loss of biodiversity resulting from chemical-intensive agribusiness.
> They could likewise reduce their reliance on coal and take advant of the
> latest advances in solar, wind and other non-polluting ene sources. And
> they could develop their legendary tradition of conservation and
> recycling instead of adopting the staggeringly wasteful system of
> throw-away consumerism. By implementing a scientifically, economically,
> and ecologically rational strategy of development, China could provide a
> rising standard of living, indeed, a qualitatively better stand of
> living for all, while minimizing pollution.
>
> But the problem is that they cannot do any of this if they let the free
> market reorganize their economy. What is needed to halt, or even to
> slow ecological degradation is incompatible with a market organization
> of economy. The essence of the market system is, of course, precisely
> its lack of planning, indeed its single-minded focus on the individual
> pursuit of profit with total disregard for all other externalities. An
> ecologically sound economy requires precisely the opposite: intelligent,
> comprehensive, economically, socially and environmentally rational
> planning based on considerations other than profit. Such calculations
> take place on a much broader set of criteria than are considered by any
> private corporation, however massive.
>
> With the collapse of communism, carpet-bagging Western corporations have
> descended on China to sell everything from Pampers to power plants. In
> the process, the Chinese are, no doubt, getting many things that they
> really do need, like working telephones; but also lots of thing they do
> not, like disposable plastic containers, American junk food, and an
> over-abundance of private cars. And they are buying some items, like
> nuclear power plants and chemical pesticides, that by any rational
> scientific assessment ought to be banned from production. By turning
> over the economy to capitalists, corporations and the free market, what
> gets developed is simply what is profitable, with no concern for society
> or the environment.
>
> Peoples'Car, Ecological Disaster
>
> Mass transportation provides a striking example of these issues. have
> noted that the current system is based around the bicycle and the
> train. Now this combination is the most energy efficient as well the
> least polluting method of urban mass-transportation yet developed. 6'
> The rudimentary train-bicycle-bus system the communists built in the
> Post-revolutionary period is technically outdated because it relies
> largely on antiquated trains many of them steamtrains, trucks and buses
> Of 1940's design, and heavy, forty pound bicycles. But remarkably, in
> many respects this system is more economically and environmentally sound
> than those found in most advanced capitalist countries. Just look at
> Taipei, an environmental disaster zone in large part because of the
> introduction of automobiles and motorcycles on a mssive scale. Or at
> Bangkok, once dubbed the 'Venice of Asia' but now reviled as Asia's Los
> Angeles because the government paved over most of its beautiful canals
> only to end up with gridlock and such appalling air pollution that some
> foreign investors are now pulling out of the country.
>
> Yet despite such examples, China, like the rest of Asia, is headed down
> the road to capitalist anarchy, and its transportation system is being,
> shaped accordingly. Most notably, in accordance with the prevalent
> anti-government hysteria and glorification of individualism, China's
> public transport systems are being short-changed to make way for the
> auto-industrial age. The government has, to be sure, undertaken
> significant upgrading of the national rail system adding new trains, new
> lines, electrifying some existing lines, and double- or triple-tracking
> some single-track lines. Just two years ago the government also
> announced ambitous plans to spend some 200 to 300 billion yuan ($24 to
> $36 billion) to build 145 kilometres of metro and light-rail network in
> twenty cities by the turn of the century. (At present there are only 6o
> kilometres subway in operation in the whole of China-in Beijing, Tianjin
> and Shanghai. China has no light-rail service). Construction began in
> Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou but projects for Nanjing, Tianjin, at
> Qingdao, along with surface light-rail lines for Shenyang and other
> cities, were halted in December 1995 due to insufficient state
> funding.Only subways in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou will go ahead,
> but even these will be stretched out over a decade or more and scaled
> back to single lines. Instead of investing in mass transit, the lion's
> share of China's current investment is flowing into motor vehicles and
> roads.
>
> In 1994, as part of their drive to make car production one of the
> countries four pillar industries, China's leaders called for the
> development of their own Volkswagen-a Chinese 'peoples' car'compact and
> cheap enough for most Chinese families to own. Up to I979, China
> produced abo 6o,ooo motor vehicles per year (excluding farm machinery),
> with trucks and buses accounting for over go per cent of this output.
> In 1995 China produced I .4 million cars, buses and trucks, of which a
> third were passenger cars. In 1995, $3. 1 billion worth of motor
> vehicles were sold in China. China's car industry proposes to invest $I
> 7.6 billion to expand production during the Ninth Five-Year Plan
> (i996-2ooo). By 2010 Chinese and joint venture factories aim to produce
> more than six million motor vehicles per year, of which four million
> will be passenger cars. That will make China
> the third largest automotive manufacturing nation, after the US and
> Japan. The Chinese estimate that if incomes continue to grow by 20 per
> cent per year, by 2000 some 4 to 4.7 million Chinese families will be
> able to purchase a people's car, with the number rising to 16 to 17
> million by 2005, and 38 to 41 million by 2010. China is already the
> world's leading producer of motorcycles (7-8 million in 1995) and plans
> to double the number on the road by the turn of the century. Parallel
> with these developments, the government is also engaged in a frenzy of
> road building. Even in the early I950s, paved roads were rare in China,
> and trains were virtually the only form of inter-city surface transport,
> and still are for the most part. But in the last decade, the government
> has built dozens of periurban ring roads and short stretches of modern
> freeways-and built them mostly over some of the best remaining alluvial
> land around the cities. Yet these peter out in a rural landscape where
> dirt paths and farm-to-market lanes still predominate. Today China
> still has only some 5 7 5,000 miles of paved roads, as against 34,000
> miles of railways. This is about as many miles of road as existed in
> the US at the end of the nineteenth century. But this will soon
> change. In 1994 at a cost of $ 1.1 billion, Hong Kong hero-entrepreneur
> Gordon Wu of Hopewell Enterprises built China's first six-lane super
> highway from Hong Kong to Guang-zhou, and he wants to build a 400 mile
> stretch from Guangzhou to Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province in
> central China . The government plans to build 3,000 kilometres of
> expressways in 20 provinces and municipalities by the end of this
> century, in addition to another 18,500 kilometres of highways. If Wu's
> project is any indication, the investment needed to create a national
> highway network in China will be stupendous indeed. And this is to say
> nothing of the gas stations, strip malls, repair garages, parts shops,
> parking lots, used car lots, junk yards, and drive-in fast-food
> franchises that will, inevitably, folloW. Can car alarms be far behind?
>
> What is behind this shift in policy which can hardly be based on any
> rational assessment of transportation needs? In the first instance, the
> push for cars came from China's new bourgeoisie-the
> communists-turned-capitalists who wish to trade in their antiquated
> Party-issue Red Flag limos for new Mercedes and Lexuses, and the new
> private entrepreneurial class who look to flaunt their wealth and
> distinguish themselves from their wage slaves. The car craze recalling
> that of america in the 1950's, is the latest product of the Communist
> Party' s deliberate promotion of individualism, entrepreneur worship,
> consumerism, and lifestyle. In some cities, Chinese school-children
> reportedly memorize specifications of car brochures as American
> youngsters do baseball cards. The first Ferrari was sold in China in
> I994 to a Chinese who already owned two Mercedes. Even Chairman Mao's
> grandson Xiaozhi, told an interviewer that he dreamed of owning a car
> someday. The push for the automobilization of China also came from
> Western car makers who, facing saturated markets at home, see China as
> the largest untapped market in the world. And it came from China's
> leaders who since the Tiananmen uprising of 1989, have been pushing
> consumerism to distract China's mutinous masses from political issues.
> In a revealing comment on how and why economies get built the way they
> do, journalist Pat Tyler reports that China's leaders 'are eager for a
> giant internal market to move to the next stage of materialism.
> Sustained growth is an urgent political requirement for the leadership
> whose legitimacy flows from the ability to deliver prosperity to the
> masses.' Pushing the people's car, 'China's leaders overcame all
> arguments about traffic, Pollution and mass transit to endorse even
> greater automobile production.' Accordingly, the government plans to
> encourage families to buy cars by offering bank loans and instalment
> plans.
>
> Contradiction Development
>
> The dawn of the auto-industrial age in China is doubtless good news for
> Chrysler, Mobil, Hopewell Enterprises and similar far-sighted firms.
> But is it good news for China? Right now, China has roughly one car for
> every 8oo Chinese, compared with the US which has about one car for
> every two Americans. Since market advocates think the solution China's
> environmental problems is ever more development, which presumably must
> include stepping 'up' from bicycles to automobiles, one should ask, what
> will China look like when I.2 billion Chinese approach the standard of
> living of contemporary Americans and put, say, 400 to 500 million cars
> on Chinese roads?
>
> The 500 million or so motor vehicles which currently exist pump out
> two-thirds of the carbon monoxide, one-half of the nitrous oxides,
> two-thirds of the carbon particulate emissions from human sources
> world-wide. What will happen when this number of vehicles doubles? In
> China's cities, air quality has palpably worsened with the huge
> increase, in motor vehicles in recent years. In cities like Guangzhou,
> Beijing and Shanghai, cars add so much pollution to the soupy haze that
> 'normal hangs over these cities, that vehicle emissions now account for
> more than one half of all urban air pollutants. The impact on public
> health is rapidly being felt.
>
> The government reports that in China's twenty major cities as a result
> of air pollution some 3 million people have died of chronic bronchitis
> in the last two years. And deaths from lung cancer which were 12 out of
> each ioo,ooo in 198o, rose to 58 in I994. And what about lndia's 9oo
> million or Indonesia'S 200 million or Nigeria's 12 million? Don't they
> deserve 'people's cars' too?
>
> Pollution is only part of the problem. Car-based transportation
> network: are also far costlier to build and operate, and waste vastly
> more space that mass-transit systems. In the US, which has less than
> 200 million cars or the road, almost two per cent of arable land is
> taken up by auto infrastructure. Each mile of roadway requires 25 acres
> of land. About half of all urban space in the US is devoted to
> auto-centred transport. In Los Angeles, two-thirds is devoted to auto
> use, and the average car uses up to eight parking spaces daily.77 But
> China can hardly afford to waste land in so profligate a fashion.
> China, which has almost exactly the same land area as the US, has four
> times as many people living on it. Since such a large proportion of
> China is either desert or mountains, its population is crammed into
> dense concentrations around the great river valleys. As a result, the
> country must feed more than one-fifth of the world's popula tion on less
> than one-fifteenth of its farmland.
>
> Given these constraints, is it really economically or environmental
> rational to let the mindless free market guide development, to let
> vehicle makers and importers produce and sell all they can, to pave over
> so much of the little land China still has for arable and dwelling
> space? Ever though China has few cars compared to the US, the country
> already has world-class traffic jams. Traffic speed in cities like
> Beijing has slowed to an average ten miles per hour, while on China's
> few inter-city roads, grid-lock can literally last for days. And what
> solution do China's forward-thinking market reformers propose to solve
> this problem? As in Los Angeles in the past, to build ever more roads
> and highways. They have even proposed to open up clogged city streets
> to cars by banning bicycles! Guangzhou has banned bicycles from eleven
> main streets during rush hours, Shanghai has banned bicycles from the
> Bund, and other cities are following suit. Currently, bicycles account
> for 33 per cent of passenger load in Guangzhou, but officials aim to
> reduce this to 13 per cent by 20io' as the city 'modernizes'.
>
> Now some Chinese and Western experts, drawing on the experience of
> what happened in the US and other industrial natios, think thr shift to
> private cars is a monumental mistake. China's scientific community has
> criticized the government's car fetish. In a 1994 report scientists
> stated that 'It would be inappropriate for China to encourage the use
> of family cars on a large scale in the next few years becasue of the
> country's serious shortage of land, oil, and other resources and its
> huge population.' It recommended instead 'a public transportation system
> that is complete and radiating in all directions.' One of China's best
> physicists, Professor He Zuoxiu, who has thrust himself into the
> transportation debate says that 'China simply cannot sustain the
> development of a car economy."' Vaclav Smil puts it bluntly: 'The
> automobile cannot be extended to 1.2 billion Chinese, not even to 100 or
> 200 million. That is an insane route. There is not a single Chinese
> city that does not suffer from gridlock already.' Moreover, China has
> already become an importer of oil as domestic production has failed to
> keep up with demand. Smil points out that '40 per cent of United States
> energy consumption goes into private cars, and the United States is
> importing its oil... If the Chinese try to model themselves on the
> United States, Japan or South Korea, there is simply not enough crude
> oil on the market for them to import and, of course, it will speed up
> the arrival of the oil crisis."' Gao-cang Huan, an economist for J.P.
> Morgan 1 remarked that 'If China only worries about production, without
> overall transportation planning, then China is headed for big trouble."
>
> The automobilization of China is a typical example of how the transition
> to capitalism is simply replacing old problems with new ones. The
> pattern is evident today throughout the Chinese economy: glass and other
> reusable containers are being displaced as Coca Cola and the rest push
> 'convenient' disposable plastics which more and more litter public
> spaces. Organic agriculture is being steadily abandoned as chemically
> intensive cultivation and husbandry takes over-even as, in the West
> organic agriculture is enjoying a powerful revival. Western, especially
> US and Taiwanese, junk food and junk culture is invading the country.
> Procter and Gamble is pushing Pampers-typically 3,000 are used in the
> first year at a cost Of $570-to China's wannabe-yuppies, whose ancestors
> managed all those centuries without diaper services. With some sixteen
> million Chinese children born each year, Procter and Gamble can hardly
> contain its glee. But have Procter and Gamble's'far-sigted' executives
> given much thought to where 45 billion soiled disposable diapers are
> going to be dumped each year?
>
> ix. No Plan, No Future: Capitalist Barbarism or
> Socialist Democracy
>
> While free-market ideologues dance on the grave of communism, China's
> entrepreneurs and their multinational corporate partners, each pursuing
> their own rational self-interest, each acting without a coherent plan or
> any assessment of economic, social or environmental impact of those
> decisions are systematically and inexorably driving China toward social
> and environmental disaster.
>
> But what is the alternative? In an earlier era, socialists had a ready
> answer. They would have said that within the framework of capitalism
> China's interrelated social, economic and environmental problems are
> unresolvable. Capitalism cannot generate full employment. It cannot
> provide more than temporary prosperity for some sectors of the working
> class. Free markets cannot control pollution. Socialists would have
> said that a rational economy is inconceivable on the basis of production
> for market. What is needed is production directly for need, not for
> profit. A rationally planned economy, socialism, is required, and to be
> rational, to give due weight to all the numerous externalities, planning
> must be democratic, it cannot be made by a self-interested bureaucracy.
>
> Today, more and more scientists are calling for government and
> multi-national government intervention against the rapacity and
> destructiveness of the global market economy, through treaties to
> control ozone emission, carbon dioxide emissions, over-fishing, and Many
> other envi-ronmental problems. In effect, this amounts to calling for a
> planned rational use of global natural resources. (This is,
> incidentally, why some extreme right-wing US Congressmen rail even
> against the 1987 Montreal ozone treaty which they see, not incorrectly,
> as the thin wedge of 'One World Government'.
>
> But feew scientists address the economy or the profit system directly.
> One who does is the ecologist Barry Commoner who argues that
> 'significant environmental improvement depends on social rather than
> private governance', that decisions which affect the entire society
> cannot be left to the whim of corporations, that society itself should
> have some democratic over the economy, via 'the public weighing of
> alternative choices of reproduction technology' and 'by socially
> mandated choice of technotogy.' What Commoner is proposing is that the
> public be able to deliberate and vote on, say, whether paper mills that
> leach dioxin into the water supply, whether pharmaceutical companies can
> genetically alter our food supplies, and whether oil companies can drill
> in Alaskan nature refuges. That is, to be sure a radical conception of
> democracy-one that would give voters real lives for a change, and so one
> to be feared by the power that be.
>
> Given the currently fashionable repudiation of 'government
> intervention', planning is derided as empirically impossible and
> totalitarian even by many socialists. Even reason and rationality are
> passe concepts for some New Age postmodernists. After all, Stalin, Mao
> planned their economies-and that was the problem. But economies were
> planned by and for bureaucrats themselves, free from public
> accountability or control from below. Is there any wonder such planning
> did not meet the needs of society? But why are those historical
> experiences grounds for rejecting planning by democratic vote I, for
> one, fail to see the connection.
>
> The Fraud of Free Market Environmentalism
>
> Given the failure of communist planning, pro-market economists claim
> that capitalism can solve its own environmental problems if only
> everything could be privatized or at least subjected to market prices
> and freed from 'government regulation'. Thus Francis Cairncross, World
> Bank, and Lester Brown all advocate market strategies and green taxes
> as the solution to the global evironmental crises. The problem is, where
> do these have your cake and eat it too fantasies exist? There is no
> evidence that such market incentives have altered industrial production
> in any fundamental way.
>
> In her book Costing the Earth, Frances Cairncross assembles 'a chechlist
> for companies' admonishing them 'to consider ways to reduce the erials
> you use that could do environmental harm': 'Do you really so many toxic
> chemicals?', 'Think about the materials in your product.If you had
> responsibility for disposing of it when your customers threw it out,
> could you do so? In an environmetally benign way? If not consider
> changing the design and materials you use.' And so on. Cairncross is
> impressed by 'the radical corporate thinking on the environment' taking
> place in the headquarters of such putative 'green leaders' as Du Pont,
> Monsanto, Dow, Hoechst and others. So Du Pont, Cairncross assures us,
> 'has promised to cut emissions by 90 per cent by the end of the
> century.' Union Carbide 'stipulates that its facilities in Africa stick
> to standards consistent with America's Clean Water Act, even though
> there is no such act in Africa.' Du Pont, which used to dump thousands
> of tons of noxious waste chemicals from its plastics production, has now
> 'discovered a market for [its wastes] in the pharmaceuticals and coating
> industry.' BMW'S clever engineers have designed cars that are 90 per
> cent recyclable. Even Shell Oil comes in for praise for 'making
> strenuous efforts to improve [it's] environmental image'-though this
> might now need some touching up.
>
> But, how much difference does it make if BMWs are recyclable? The real
> problem is that there are too many BMWs, too many cars on the roads
> today. What the world needs is fewer cars. But what conceivable market
> incentives are going to persuade car-manufacturers to produce fewer
> cars? Recyclable cars, yes. Electric cars, maybe. But fewer cars?
> How could such a proposal be justified to stockholders even if the
> stock-holders were the workers themselves?
>
> A Disposable World
>
> It is good that Dow Chemical and Du Pont have stopped dumping some of
> their hideous chemicals in our creeks. But how much difference does
> this make in global terms? The problem is not so much how they produce
> as what they produce. What real difference does it make if Dow Chemical
> manufactures its silicone breast implants, and manages not to foul the
> local rivers in the process, when the product itself is causing untold
> pain, suffering and death to thousands of women? What real difference
> does it make if H.B. Fuller shares profits with its employees and gives
> endowments to universities, winning it rave reviews from the Socially
> Responsible Investment community, when one of its main products is a
> shoemakers' glue laced with the neurotoxin toluene that has addicted
> millions of Latin American street children, causing neurological damage,
> kidney and liver failure, paralysis and death? What real difference
> does it make if Du Pont uses 'clean production' techniques to produce
> its Express herbicide, marketed in China, when this herbicide is classed
> as a human carcinogen?
>
> Chemicals, pesticides, plastics, disposable cameras, nuclear reactors,
> cars, books-on-CD ROM, 'Mortal Kombat', junk food, MTV-whole slabs of
> global industry are geared to produce unnecessary, unhealthy, dangerous,
> destructive, anti-social, redundant or superfluous junk. Much of it is
> designed to fall apart or become obsolete 'to be consumed and discarded
> at an ever-increasing rate so the cycle can on endlessly'
>
> Its not just the externalities, but teh very nature of production for
> the market which is the problem. As Paul Hawken, mail order impresario
> and New Age scribe, put the matter succinctly:
>
> Despite their dedicated good work, if we examine all or any of the
> businesses that deservedly earn high marks for social and environmental
> responsibility, we, are faced with a sobering irony: If every company on
> the planet were to adop the environmental and social practices of the
> best companies-of, say, the Body Shop, Patagonia, and Ben and
> Jerry's-the world would still be moving toward environmental degradation
> and collapse. In other words, if we analyze environmental effects and
> create an input-output model of resources and energy, the results do not
> even approximate a tolerable or sustainable future. If a tiny fraction
> of the world's most intelligent companies cannot model a sustainable
> world, then that tells us that ... what we have is not a management
> problem but a design problem.
>
> Karl Marx could hardly have said it better. The problem, as Hawken sees
> it, is that 'over-consumption' is built into the logic of the market
> economy, which is driven by competition and profit seeking to
> overproduce. And Hawken ought to know since he's done his bit to destroy
> forests of Southeast Asia flogging teak garden furniture to
> over-consuming Americans.
>
> Furthermore, pace John Roemer et al., these contradictions are not built
> into any conceivable 'market socialism'. For what difference do make if
> firms are owned by the workers? They still have to compete, have to
> maximize production, still have to cut costs, still have to create new
> products and sell their stuff whether anybody needs it or not, have to
> advertise, still have to cut down trees to make junk mail, and have to
> fill up the airwaves with commercials-so on and on it goes. The problem
> is only partly about ownership. The main problem is an unplanned,
> chaotic, crisis-ridden nature of production for the market -- the
> invisible hand.
>
> But what of the alleged impossibiliy of planning. Alec Nove was a
> brilliant and witty critic of the irrationalities of Stalinist command
> economies. But in his zeal to ridicule Stalinist economics he vented
> much steam concocting problems which were not really problems. Nove
> liked to ask, how can workers vote on how many ball-bearings to produce,
> or what kinds? Or on how much sulphuric acid, and by when? And so on.
> 'Obviously', said Nove, the centre can never know all the myriad needs,
> as well as capacities at the base, or know them in time. So rational
> planning cannot be top-down, by command. It requires constant feed-back
> from the base, information on productivity and changes in capacity. It
> requires, furthermore, unplanned spontaneous initiative at the
> grass-roots to constantly correct central planners. In short , the
> centre does not know just what it is that needs doing, in disaggregated
> detail, while management in its situation cannot know what it is that
> society needs unless the centre informs it. So economic planning must
> inevitably founder on this intractable epistemological dilemma.
>
> Yet the problem Nove identifies is not epistemological but social and
> political. Under the Stalinist system, the lower levels knew very well
> what their needs and capacities were, and they were perfectly capable of
> sending this accurate information to the centre. But in such a
> bureaucratic, class-divided system it was not in anyone's interest to
> convey accurate information. On the contrary, given this structure,
> everyone from Number Two on down systematically lied, and mendacity
> became institutionalized as a way of life. The Czech economist Ota Sik
> has described the situation well:
>
> The enterprises were transformed into cogs in the economic machine, to
> be manipulated by men at the centre and forced to provide the highest
> output at the lowest costs-without regard, naturally, for the end
> effect. So they adopted the most obvious mode of defence: they
> understated their potentialities and overstated their needs ... And
> there evolved a mechanism for deception on a grand scale, of not showing
> one's hand, and this was the only sphere in which people's initiative
> would really develop to the full. The consequence was that the
> Czechoslovak economy lost its last asset--objective information about
> needs, reserves, and potentialities.
>
> In my view, the main barrier to rational economic planning is not
> really, or at least not mainly, a problem of knowledge. The real
> problem is to
> devise means of voluntary active cooperation between planners, producers
> and consumers. For this to work there must be a coincidence of interests
> between between these groups, which can only be based on a democratic
> management of the economy.
>
> Nove is certainly right that the centre should not have to micromanage
> every detail of the economyspecifying every journey of every lorry.
> That would be absurd. But an intelligent, informed citizenry can vote
> on broad priorities-whether to build nuclear power or take stronger
> measures to conserve power. Whether to make private cars or public
> transit the mainstay of urban transport. Whether to fish tuna to
> extinction. Whether to cut down the last of the forest to make cedar
> decks for suburbanites, disposable chip-board furniture, paper towels
> and phone books. I see no practical reason Why ordinary citizens
> cannot make such decisions. To plan in this way does not require that
> ordinary citizens have total and instant knowledge over every aspect of
> an impossibly complicated economy. They can vote on the priorities and
> leave the details to technicians-that's what capitalists do.
>
> What evidence do I have that such democratic planning could work.
> Little, to be sure. But the problem is not that democratic planning
> 'failed'. The problem is it's never been tried. The failure of
> Stalinist planning does not disprove the possibility of democratic
> planning. When was the economy ever been put up for a vote in any
> society? When has there even been any balanced and considered public
> discussion of an important economic issue that has not been massively
> distorted by big money for special interests'? Nevertheless, there are
> important examples that I am looking at. One place to look is at the
> growing efforts by local communities to demand democratic control over
> toxic polluters. These raise serious challenges to the prerogatives of
> corporate power and private property.
>
> Save the Humans!
>
> In an age when technologies from nuclear power to biotechnology produce
> profound and unknown consequences for the entire society, is it not
> more obvious than ever that decisions about such large-scale hazardous
> technologies should be made by all those affected and not just by those
> who profit? There is a powerful case for the imperative need for a
> radical democratization of economic decision-making-a step in the
> directic of democratic planning.
>
> Of course, such a society would certainly make mistakes. Jobs might
> well be favoured over environmental concerns by most Chinese people.
>
> Supposse the Chinese could vote on whether they want private or light
> rail as the mainstay of public transport. Given the current deluge of
> advertising and promotion of consumerism they might well vote cars. But
> would the citizens of Los Angeles have voted for cars and freeways in
> the late 1940s if they had been warned that in twenty years the San
> Gabriel mountains would be lost from view on all but a few days per
> year, or that the average speed on the freeways would be no more than 30
> mph and it would take them longer to get to work than in the I940's?
> Would they have voted for cars as the main means of conveyance if they
> had been warned that they and future generations would suffer from lead
> poisoning, lung cancer, and many other illnesses because of car
> pollution? Most, if not all, of these consequences were predictable in
> the 1940s. But the economy was not up for a vote.
>
> If the Chinese-and we-leave such decisions to the chaos of the market
> and the bias of profit-seeking capitalists, such 'mistakes' become
> systematic and inevitable. Given the huge size of China's industrialize
> economy, and its consequent impact upon the global environment,
> capitalist development holds out the prospect of ever more devastating
> environmental disasters, if not global catastrophe.
>
> How would a truly democratic society do worse? Given current trends, it
> seems hard not to draw the conclusion that, very likely, there will not
> be democratic socialism, anywhere-in which case eco-rationality, if not
> humanity, are probably doomed. That may be our fate. Human societies
> have collapsed before. But it would be helpful if intellectuals who
> call themselves socialists stopped pandering to the prevalent market
> idolatru abandoned such oxymorons as 'market socialism, turned their
> energy to criticizing the irrationality and cruelty of the free market,
> and help to build the case for a radical democratization of the economy
> and society-democratic socialism.
>
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