There are Marxist economists who are beginning to grapple with
environmental issues -- rather belatedly, I think, following roughly a
century of socialist thinking in which too many socialist intellectuals
took a "vulgar Marxist" position that humanity was destined to
"conquer" nature, and that human labor was supposedly the source of all
economic value.
I think it's important to recognize, as many Western environmentalists
and many socialists don't, that the mindlessly pro-growth,
pro-industrial kind of Marxist economics that took hold in Russia,
China and for that matter in some of the European social democracies
during the early 20th century was never very good Marxism.
As a German radical of the Frankfort School, I think by the name of
Hans Schmidt, observed in his copiously documented PhD dissertation
"The Concept of Nature in Marx," published in the 1960s, both Marx and
Engels had been committed enough to materialist philosophy to recognize
that "nature" is an essential prop to human civilization. And that as
Marx himself recognized in a rather notorious pamphlet called "The
Critique of the Gotha Program," which hailed the notion of proletarian
dictatorship, human labor power itself is a "force of nature," since we
ourselves are creatures of nature.
Hence to socialists who are serious about their materialist philosophy,
it's almost tautological that human beings can't really conquer nature,
and of that course we do have to take it into consideration in all of
our economic thinking.
Some socialist and Marxist writers, including James O'Connor in the
United States, have been trying to incorporate this insight into a new
kind of socialist economics that does take nature into consideration,
and does respect limits to growth. How valuable and insightful
O'Connor's work is, however, is something I find hard to gauge, partly
because I don't find O'Connor all that readable.
If you're interested, the 2007 Socialist Register, published in the US,
is now out in paperback and apparently devotes itself entirely to the
question of how socialists should think about nature, capitalism,
economic production and limits to growth. I own the book but haven't
read it yet because of other distractions.
But if this kind of venture interests you, you might want to look at
it.
Michael -- have you read "Capitalism, Socialism and the Environment,"
by the Australian social democrat Hugh Stretton? Or "Ecology as
Politics," by the French anarcho-socialist Andre Gorz? They're both
around 30 years old now and may be out of print, but I thought they
both offered some useful thinking on what a sustainable Green society
might look like.
Also worth looking at is Rudolf Bahro's book "The Alternative in
Eastern Europe," which is a bit dated because Bahro wrote it when he
was still a Communist Party functionary in East Germany in the 1970s.
In fact, I think it was writing the book that got Bahro expelled from
the party and exiled to West Germany, where he embraced the Green Party
and I think took up Taoist philosophy.
What Stretton, Gorz and Bahro all have in common, to my mind, is an
emphasis on the idea that the way to a good society may lie in the old
socialist/anarchist ideal of greatly shortening the average work week,
while reducing the amount of planned economic waste that is common to
capitalist society. In a society not dedicated to churning out
disposable products and unneeded weapons programs, the three authors
all imply, and in a society where the law guaranteed everyone a job, we
might well maintain a very comfortable lifestyle materially, but with
everyone working far fewer hours in the week. The payoff for this sort
of post-capitalist, "green" society, then, would be a striking
expansion in human leisure -- and in the sort of enhanced liberty that
goes along with the enjoyment of expanded leisure time.
But the devil is in the details, of course, and I'm not sure Stretton,
Gorz or Bahro has done much to fill in the rather sketchy picture of
human liberation and environmental sanity that they paint in their
books.
As usual, I'm very longwinded, and I suppose I should cut this short.
But I'd like to say that I agree with you completely about capitalism's
40-year time horizons stemming from the tendency of economists (and
practical people looking to make business decisions) to discount rather
heavily against the future.
To the extent that we can't or don't think about events that are
expected to occur a century from now -- well, there's an implied
humility in that that may be positive, that keeps us from leaping to
rash conclusions, but there's also a great irresponsibility embedded in
that relatively short term outlook. "Apres moi le deluge" and all
that.
For the past 20 years now, financial magazines like BUSINESS WEEK and
FORTUNE also have been criticizing another, even more virulent form of
short-term thinking that's all too common in corporate America these
days: the tendency of corporate management to take actions designed to
maximize quarterly performance date, so as to keep up stock prices on
Wall Street and prevent big institutional investors from either dumping
the stock or replacing the CEO.
Planning for the future as if the world will end in 40 years is bad;
managing a huge capitalist enterprise to meet 3 month performance goals
while ignoring the 5-year or 10-year outlook is even worse. Clearly,
both tendencies need to be correct, or capitalist corporations will
almost certainly trash the planet -- not maliciously, necessarily, but
out of carelessness.
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