Abstract
According to Boris Frankel, contemporary capitalism is in serious trouble. Economic stagnation, growing opposition towards the globalized corporate order from various quarters, and accelerating economic crises are combining to place a question mark over the future of economic and political business as usual. The problem facing ‘pro-capitalist’ forces today is whether they attempt to humanize capitalism or consolidate their power, potentially in anti-democratic directions. He flags the latter possibility as a topic for another volume (Frankel, 2020). This book mainly examines the intellectual landscape of those attempting to achieve sustainable and socially just futures.
In this vein, the book contains a wide-ranging critique of various proposals to find a way out of immanent ecological catastrophe. These proposals range from further technological innovation to ‘Green New Deal’ policies, degrowth, as well as anti-capitalist demands for social revolution. The purpose of the book is to carefully examine the ecological, economic, political, and cultural feasibility of these proposals. Ultimately, Frankel finds that most rest upon ‘fictional expectations’ that underestimate either the acuity of crises or the difficulties (political or cultural) involved in implementing their proposed solutions. The book is therefore an exercise in what could be called utopian realism. It asks how we might envision the kinds of futures that give us plausible and actionable goals rather than naïve hope. In this respect, things are not looking great.
According to Frankel, most environmental commentary is still focused on how to steer growth in a more sustainable direction. Those who want more sustainable capitalist growth are split between various camps. Leaders of international policy bodies, such as the UN or WTO, foresee environmental crises being managed through the existing mechanisms of the capitalist system, like trade, conflict resolution, financial policies, and environmental regulation. The idea that continuing with business as usual will address the problems of the capitalist system is dismissed by Frankel as naïve and wishful thinking.
By contrast, various libertarians and tech gurus think that governments should take a hands-off approach and allow ‘innovators’ to develop technological and commercial solutions to sustainability problems. The trouble with this idea, as Frankel argues, is that it is little more than an ideological myth. With research becoming increasingly complex and internationally connected, many of the most important technological developments of the last century have been state-sponsored. States play a crucial role in funding, coordinating and promoting R&D, and the idea that reducing their role would promote innovation makes little sense.
‘Neo-Schumpeterian idealists’ are somewhat more ambitious and considered than the above, in that they think if policy-makers learnt the lesson of the 2008 global financial crisis and embarked upon ‘green growth’ pathways, then not only could we return to growth, but we could do so in environmentally sustainable ways. Many advocate a Green New Deal, which would retool the real economy and give the former industrial working class, currently threatened by deindustrialization and automation, new high-tech jobs in sustainable industries. The state’s role is to promote and invest in this because big business has become short-termist – focused on financial gains from derivatives, acquisitions, mergers, and tax cuts rather than embarking on risky and long-term R&D. Consequently, much of this neo-Schumpeterian discourse revolves around the idea of definancialization of the economy, with the state using corporate taxes to fund Keynesian growth and research.
A major problem with these Keynesian-style green growth policies is that they tend to ignore the fact that past Keynesian regimes still fell into economic crises. They are also somewhat naïve about the political prospects of achieving their desired reforms. How is this going to happen in economies and governments currently dominated by neoliberals? Advocates of green growth tend to underestimate the challenges of pivoting towards long-term planning to decouple growth from unsustainable practices in a society dominated by powerful interests, who got there through short-term, self-interested gains. The reality is that the profitability of existing capitalist industries deeply depends on environmentally unsustainable forms of production, and attempts to change this through electoral politics will be met with significant resistance. Furthermore, the configurations of political and economic interests around these questions have become increasingly messy. Over the last decade, for example, various novel alliances have arisen between fossil fuel industries, trade unions, and even indigenous groups to protect their mutual interests in an extractive economy and oppose green growth strategies.
What all the above proposals share is a commitment to increasing aggregate demand as a panacea for environmental crises. The socialist left also shares this commitment in the sense that they assume further industrial modernization will be the path to progress and sustainability. Where they differ from pro-capitalists and Keynesians is on questions such as ownership and distribution. They still remain committed to the 19th-century Marxist notion that any material scarcity is reducible to social relations rather than being related to ecological limits. They have not yet accepted that achieving a sustainable future will require rejection of consumerism-based growth.
There are diverse perspectives on how to achieve degrowth. When it is seen as an individual lifestyle choice or moral responsibility, the prospect of achieving significant change in the patterns of global production and consumption appears vanishingly unlikely. The reality is that environmentally conscious eco-lifestylists in the Global North still engage in consumption habits that are far less sustainable than many of those living in the Global South. Genuinely reducing carbon emissions would likely require a sacrifice of luxuries like international airline travel. Would affluent people in the Global North be willing to accept the loss of such privileges? It is far from clear that they would.
Proponents of ‘zero marginal cost society’ like Jeremy Rifkin and Paul Mason see peer-to-peer file sharing and 3D printers as a model for how the economy can both decentralize and decouple from natural limitations. Yet they gloss over the very serious question of how the hardware or energy required to sustain a high-speed knowledge economy can be produced without increasing our ecological footprint. They peddle a myth of there being ‘free stuff’, with the only obstacles to abundance being political. Consequently, their view of the world is skewed to the Global North, where people are already technologically connected. They are also silent about goods that cannot be shared online or 3D printed. They have almost nothing to say, for example, about the scarcity of water, food, and energy experienced by people in the Global South.
A major problem with degrowth as a political objective is how to achieve it without further worsening the inequalities already dividing the Global North and South. This problem props up throughout this book, and is probed with an admirable level of sophistication, but it proves a very difficult problem to address. It is increasingly clear that it would not be sustainable for the whole of the world’s population to achieve the levels of affluence currently enjoyed in places like North America, Europe, and Australia. Current production and consumption practices are projected to last another 60 years before there are major shortages due to depletion of soils and loss of biodiversity. Despite this, people living in developing parts of the world will probably need to increase their ecological footprint before they can attain a quality of life that is socially just. In particular, the livelihoods of rural populations around the world depend on agriculture, and efforts to reduce carbon emissions by increasing fuel prices or reducing fuel availability would lead to their further disadvantage and would be contested.
One concept of degrowth, that is considerate of global inequalities, is to advocate small-scale community-led initiatives in producing goods or extracting resources in the Global South as an alternative pathway to globalized development. This can, many academics claim, raise people’s quality of life without ensnaring them in the political and economic forces of globalization. This position goes hand-in-hand with denunciations of state-led developments such as roads or water infrastructure, as these are seen to be forms of Western colonialism. Any grassroots alternatives to such infrastructures are therefore characterized as acts of resistance.
However, there are many problems with seeing small-scale projects as a viable solution to global environmental crises. For one, they remain minor interventions that are isolated to local communities, and therefore have little impact on the global patterns of production or consumption that are driving sustainability. Furthermore, it is also likely that something as politically contentious as degrowth would require a centralized democratic decision-making process. Not only should the state play a role in coordinating and resourcing community-level initiatives, but it should also forestall the risk of inequalities and conflict developing between local communities.
Any attempt at wide-scale definancialization and degrowth would need majority democratic consent of populations. If managed poorly, degrowth policies – like, for example, abolishing all oil extraction – risk throwing millions of people into unemployment or poverty and creating shortages in essential resources. This is likely to be resisted, not only by capitalists but also by workers. There is therefore need for long-term and well-thought-out strategies that work at the international, national and community level.
What Frankel suggests is a ‘social state’, through which the state provides a universal guarantee for essential services as well as providing full employment. At the same time, the state manages the transition to a post-carbon, sustainable economy. A social state would also promote community-level solidarity and a degree of self-governance to encourage innovation of decommodified and sustainable forms of production and services at the local level. Such a plan amounts to extending the spheres of decommodification within capitalism, rather than smashing capitalism all at once. Yet as Frankel notes, this would be resisted by conservatives, businesses, and workers who do not want to pay higher taxes for decommodified goods. Moreover, extending this strategy across the globe would require the Global North to subsidize the social states in the Global South, potentially creating political opportunities for the nativist far-right.
Overall, this is a very sophisticated and well-reasoned book, which should be of interest to anyone studying environmental politics or global political economy. The book is also interesting to consider in the context of COVID-19, especially the dynamics of public opposition to and/or compliance with unprecedented population-level public health strategies. We may end up thinking of the COVID-19 pandemic as a dress rehearsal for the kinds of radical, coordinated action necessary to achieve a level of environmental and economic sustainability. Ultimately, Frankel’s sobering analysis raises many more questions than he is able to answer, but it does go a long way towards sharpening our critical faculties about what will surely become some of the defining political issues of the 21st century.