WHY?

A Sustainable Future?

The problem of working for a sustainable future –or there will be no future –cannot be reduced to a single formula (or a single struggle).

54. To slightly modify a famous remark made by André Malraux: “The third millennium will be spiritual or there will be no third millennium.”

André Malraux

We should accustom ourselves to the likelihood that there will be no victors or vanquished, and no monolithic leaders. Although currents exist that have committed themselves to the single-minded pursuit of justice, health or freedom on specific fronts, it seems evident that our problems are multiple and that we have to try to think multi-dimensionally. 6 interlocking contradictions are referred to below, not all of which have been mentioned above; this list is not intended/likely to be exhaustive, all-embracing, etc. It is a provisional list, a list for debate. The six interlocking contradictions are:

1. Mass poverty vs. scientific/technological development (Human Reality vs. Potential)
2. The Rich and the Poor (Distribution of Income)
3. Slavery to the machine vs. liberation by the machine
4. Production and the Restriction of Production (Freeing of Resources vs. Monopolization of Resources)
5. Short-term Potential Production/Consumption vs. Sustainable Production/Consumption (Ecology)
6. Population Growth vs. Productivity Growth

This essay has not, for example, addressed itself to the ecological limits (number 5).

55. ”(It) is simply impossible for the world as a whole to sustain a western level of consumption for all. In fact, if 7 billion people were to consume as much energy and resources as we do in the West today we would need ten worlds, not one, to satisfy all our needs,” former Norwegian premier Gro Harlem Brüntland at the symposium, Sustainable Consumption, Oslo, January, 1994.
Of course, he was only repeating, in his own way, what was already well known within ecology circles about the effects of exhaust from petrol-driven engines, etc.

However, this should be looked at in qualitative rather than quantitative terms. In this respect we should first ask what is being produced and how, rather than how much, before addressing ourselves to the ecological limits (see section XX above). More important still is to ask why what is being produced is being produced (still being produced despite years of exposures of the harm done to nature); in other words, we should be looking at “use-values”, not simply in the immediate sense of fulfilling individual needs, but in a more profound sense of the way they mold society to the designs of capitalist property, i.e. of Power.

56. “Who instructed Intel to program digital IDs into their new Pentium III computer CPUs? Was this something they came up with independently, or was it done in furtherance of a larger agenda? Who instructed all four of this nation’s banking regulatory agencies to simultaneously propose ‘Know Your Customer’ identification regulations coincidentally at the very same time that lawmakers in other countries were also instituting KYC policies? Did all of these entities propose nearly identical laws and regulations at the same time just by chance, or did someone plan and orchestrate the event?
“Whatever you believe, you should not dismiss the fact that plans are presently being made and implemented on the global scale which will ultimately determine how you conduct business – possibly all business -in the future. The fact that plans are underway is no secret; however, the precise details are very secret. The overall plan has been made public; but the intricacies will not become public until the necessary national laws and regulations are securely established, and the agreed upon technologies have been incorporated.
“The establishment of a global framework under which all business will eventually be conducted is every bit as profound as the establishment of the Federal Reserve Banking system here in the U.S. in 1913, which placed total control of this nation’s economy solely in the hands of a few, un-elected individuals. (From: “Global Electronic Commerce Plan Hits Public Acceptance Snag”, “Fight the Fingerprint” Action Items as reported in the “Scan This News” 1/31/99:)

N.B. The imposition of Mexico’s Finance Ministry’s single number credential scheme (the so-called CURP) which was began during Ernesto Zedillo’s Presidency and the failed smart-card vehicle registration plan, due to be resurrected at some stage by the Fox government.

Thus the armaments industry swallows up enormous amounts of resources (including labor) and is used to destroy enormous amounts of resources, and yet it goes on pumping out guns, bombs, tanks, and hi-tech weapons. The steel/oil/autos nexus prevents the development of alternative transportation and fuels –the “I’ll-allow-the-petrol-driven-engine-to-be-replaced-over-my-dead-body” syndrome, accredited to the assembly-line time-and-motion genius and financial backer of Adolph Hitler, Henry Ford.

Henry Ford with V8 engine

57. This was reported by the New York Times (February 8, 1923): “The Bavarian Diet has long had information that the Hitler movement was partly financed by an American anti-Semitic chief who is Henry Ford…Herr Hitler openly boasts of Mr. Ford’s support and praises Mr. Ford not as a great individualist but as a great ant-Semite.” This matter is also referred to by George Seldes in “Facts and Fascism” (1943) and by Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn in “The Great Conspiracy” (1946).

Population and productivity

The question of ecological sustainability should also be seen in connection with the correlation referred to in contradiction number 6: population growth and productivity growth. Between the 19th and 20th centuries, world population has grown rapidly. For example, between 1850 and 1991, world population probably grew by nearly 5 times.

58. See U.S. Bureau of the Census and various historical estimates of world population. According to these, world population in 1850 is estimated at between 1.128 billion and 1.402 billion; in 1991, it stood at about 5.3 billion. World population roughly doubled from 1950 to 1988, i.e. in less than 40 years. Annual population growth rates reached a peak in 1962/3 (2.19% per annum), since when they have declined continuously to 1.29% in 1999, and are expected to go on declining to the year 2049 (est. 0.43%). World PopClock (WPC) and U.N. estimates say the world population reached 6 billion between June (WPC) and October (UN), 1999, which estimates world population as of July 1, 2001, at 6,157,400,560. By 2013, world population is expected to cross the 7 billion mark, by 2028 it will cross the 8 billion mark, and by 2048, it will have crossed the 9 billion mark. Thus world population is expected to double between 1981 and 2048, i.e. in more than 60 years (U.S. Bureau of the Census).

Meanwhile, estimates of productivity growth over the same period (i.e. mid-to-end 19th century and mid 1990s) are much greater. For example, the renowned management science expert Peter F. Drucker notes that from 1881 to 1994 “the systematic study of work, tasks and tools raised the productivity of manual work in making and moving things by three to four percent compound on average per year –for a fifty-fold increase in output per worker over 110 years.” (“The Age of Transformation, Atlantic Monthly, 1994”) This is about ten times greater than population growth.

Clearly, neither population nor productivity grew or grows homogeneously. Rather than going into a quantitative (country-by-country, region-by-region, etc.) comparison, we can go straight to the qualitative question. Productivity growth has certainly affected all fields of human endeavor, including those areas that are most obviously related to poverty, e.g. food. Food productivity, certainly in the industrially developed regions, has been particularly impressive. According to Marshall Martin, head of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University in the United States, U.S. farm labor productivity rose seven times from the end of World War II to the 1990s, whereas non-farm business sector labor productivity grew by 2.6 times. (Purdue News, March 1997)

Average U.S. corn yields more than doubled in 30 years, from the 1960s to the 1990s. In the 1930s, it took about an hour of farm labor to produce a bushel of corn. By the 1990s, it took less than a minute of farm labor (ibid.).

The potential is clearly enormous. Of course, the question arises: what sort of productivity is this? It is well known that much of the productivity pursued and put into effect by the industrialized states has been highly contaminative and wasteful, monopolistic and soil-erosive, etc.

59. According to John Seymour (author of ‘The Ultimate Heresy’ and books on self-sufficient farming), “the topsoil of the eastern Great Plains of North America is eroding down the great rivers so fast that nobody knows what to do about it. In the western Great Plains the topsoil all blew away in the dust-bowl period in the early nineteen thirties. But it is now in the East, with its better rainfall, that there is most concern. The high price of maize, wheat and soya, and also cotton, led to continuous cropping, with no legumes grown to provide nitrate, because the nitrate all comes out of the bag, with no animals because the animals have all gone to the dry West, and so no manure to stabilise the soil. And the soil is just going. Most experts I spoke to agreed that by 2020 most of the topsoil of the eastern Great Plains would have gone.” From: Nicola Jones, “Harvest for the few”, New Scientist (February 24th 2001).

But to use this to deny the possibility of science being applied to feed the planet is as absurd as the reckless agricultural development we have seen since at least the 1950s. (It is also worth noting that the productivity growth, to say the least, mentioned above could well be reversed if soil erosion continues as it has in the past century.)

This is also just one example of how the potential of the question “why” is expressed. The question, why such development, yields the answer: because it serves the chemicals, oil, farm machinery and other transnationals, plus the big banks.

60. At the core of the so-called “Green Revolution” of the 1950s (during the Mexican presidency of Miguel Aleman) was the ubiquitous Rockefeller Foundation. The seeds associated with this program could only be used to “produce notably higher yields when integrated into a technological ‘package’ including chemicals, fertilizers and insecticides, and the provision of moisture to the soil in precise amounts and at specific times.” “Programs such as Plan Puebla, begun in 1967 by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) with Rockefeller Foundation funds, are desiged to provide credit, manufactured inputs, high-yielding or improved seeds, and technical assistance to minifundistas and ejidatarios in hitherto forgotten regions, in the hope of raising farm income and purchasing power…(But) this is very likely to impoverish near-subsistence communities further, while strengthening the relations of ‘internal colonization’ which already link these farmers to the wider economy.” See: Cynthia Hewitt de Alcántara, “The ‘Green Revolution’ as History: The Mexican Experience”, 1973.

A photograph of Castle Thunder,
a Confederate prison-factory 1865

Paul Lafargue pointed out that Power demanded its factories be used rather like prisons (and since his time there have been plenty of examples where prisons are used like factories). If the breakthroughs in science and technology were able to keep people occupied until the Second World War, later developments clearly have not. People have been (and continue to be) pushed out of productive work. From the 1950s, the service sector took up part of the slack, but since the 1970s the informal sector and unemployment have been growing dramatically. Poverty has become a prison for billions of people. Section XVI indicates what the next step might be. However, what we should be clear about is that such a step would be impossible if we were not already dependent on Power; we have to break with the increasing growth of dependence that every new application of science by Power leads to.

Von Hayek

Economics ask questions about what, how and for whom things are produced, but tends to skirt around the question of why they are produced, usually on the assumption that “everything is determined by the market”. Nearly 70 years ago, Keynes questioned the wisdom of leaving the market to determine everything. Hayek was among his fiercest critics. But even Hayek (in 1944) clearly did not take his religious belief in the “invisible hand” as seriously (or as cynically) as his supposed present-day followers.

61. “There is no reason why in a society that has reached the general level of wealth which ours [Great Britain] has attained, the first kind of security [i.e. against physical privation, the certainty of a given minimum sustenance] should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom…there can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody. Indeed, for a considerable part of the population of this country this sort of security has long been achieved.” (F.A. Hayek: Chapter IX, Security and Freedom, The Road to Serfdom.)

Friederich von Hayek

Perhaps, then, Hayek would have welcomed the movements that sprang up again in Europe and elsewhere since the 1960s, calling for a basic wage for every citizen from birth paid for by the State and independent of any work carried out by the person involved.

62. Some of these organizations are: AIRE, Basic Income Euopean Network (BASIC) and CORI in Ireland. The idea of a basic income independent of work is not a very new idea and can be traced back to Thomas Paine in the 18th century. It re-emerged in France in the 1930s, with Jacques Duboin (“L’économie libérée” and “Les yeux ouvertes”) and again in the 1980s with the Charles Fourrier Circle in Belgium See: Chantal Euzéby, “Pistas para una revolución tranquila del trabajo”, Le Monde Diplomatique, May 15, 1998.

Also of interest in this context is the Santa Barbara (California) Declaration made in 1964 by a group of American academics and trade unionists who, in the light of the advance of automation, called for a guaranteed annual subsistence income to be established as the right of every US citizen regardless of work. (See: Sam Gordon’s speech on Paul Lafargue)

Thomas Paine

The absurd view promoted by London School of Economics director Anthony Giddens and British Prime Minister Tony Blair that neo-liberalism could feed the poor by creating more wealth, rather than redistributing what exists, contrasts with the lessons of reality. Neo-liberalism never intended to feed the poor, but only to increase their numbers (oil companies never intended to reduce pollution; anti-virus computer companies never intended to stop viruses; a privatized medical service and the drug companies never intended to rid humanity of illness, etc.). Giddens’ recent remorse that neo-liberalism has not solved the problem of poverty is on a par with the decades-long assurances by the World Bank that its mission is to do just that, when experience has shown that its mission is indeed the opposite.

So much for Hayek (although it should be remembered that he is said to have been one of the few economists who correctly predicted the 1929 Wall Street Crash). However, at the beginning of the 21st century, Ravachol’s and Lafargue’s observations are even more true than they were when they were made in the 19th century, as the contradictions between human poverty, material wealth and scientific potential have increased many times since the 19th century –and as labor productivity has increased far more explosively than exponential (yet slowing) world population growth, while the pinched surpluses that do not serve the needs of the military-industrial complex have been left to rot or hidden away from the eyes of “happy children” in accumulating rubbish tips, further poisoning the environment. The massive development of technology has been oriented increasingly towards a death mission (one that is not and, by its very nature, cannot be entirely under control), but it has been impossible to conceal the great potentials science and technology hold for humanity and for life.

We shall not attempt to provide any ambitious solutions to our predicament here. The question why would seem a good place to start; an immediate objective, debate.

Mexico City July/August, 2001