Smith - Green Capitalism: The God That Failed

Green capitalism:
the god that failed

Richard Smith

About the book

This book deals with the prime threat to human life on earth: the tendency of global capitalist economic development to develop us to death, to drive us off the cliff to ecological collapse. It begins with a review of the origins of this economic dynamic in the transition to capitalism in England and Europe and with an analysis of the ecological implications of capitalist economics as revealed in the work of its founding theorist Adam Smith. I argue that, once installed, the requirements of reproduction under capitalism the pressure of competition, the imperative need to innovate and develop the forces of production to beat the competition, the need to constantly grow production and expand the market and so on, induced an expansive logic that has driven economic development, and now overdevelopment, down to our day.

In successive chapters I explicate and criticize the two leading mainstream approaches to dealing with the ecological consequences of this overdevelopmental dynamic dcroisance or degrowth, and green capitalism. I show that the theorists and proponents of no-growth or de-growth like Herman Daly or Tim Jackson are correct in arguing that infinite economic growth is not possible on a finite planet but that theyre wrong to imagine that capitalism can be refashioned as a kind of steady state economy, let alone actually degrow without provoking economic collapse. There are further problems with this model, which I also investigate. I show that the theorists and proponents of green capitalism such as Paul Hawkin, Lester Brown and Frances Cairncross are wrong to think that tech miracles, dematerialization, new efficiencies, recycling and the like will permit us to growth the global economy more or less forever without consuming and polluting ourselves to death. I show that while were all better off with organic groceries, energy-efficient lightbulbs and appliances, recycling and the like, such developments do not fundamentally alter the eco-suicidal tendencies of capitalist development because infinite growth, even green growth, is just not possible on a finite planet.

In the final chapters I argue that since capitalism can only drive us to ecological collapse, we have no choice but to try to cashier this system and replace it with an entirely different economy and mode of life based on minimizing not maximizing resource consumption, based on public ownership of most, though not all of the economy, on large-scale economic planning and international coordination, and on a global contraction and convergence between the North and the South around a lower but hopefully satisfactory level of material consumption for all the worlds peoples. Whether we can pull off such a transition is another question. We may very well fail to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a viable alternative. That may be our fate. But around the world, in thousands of locations, people are organizing and fighting against corporate power, against land grabs, against extreme extraction, against the incessant commodification of our lives. Here and there, as in Greece and China, ruling classes are on the defensive. All these fights have a common demand: bottom-up democracy, popular power. In this lies our best hope. This little book is intended as more ammunition for that fight.

A note on the texts

All but one of these essays were published previously as articles in Real-World Economics Review since 2010. Chapter 1 is based on my article The eco-suicidal economics of Adam Smith in Capitalism Nature Socialism 18:2 (2007).

About the author

Richard Smith has worked as a sailboat rigger, African expedition leader, carpenter-builder and briefly as a lecturer in history. He wrote his UCLA History Ph.D. thesis on the contradictions of market reform in Chinas transition to capitalism (1989). He held postdoctoral appointments at the East-West Center in Honolulu and at Rutgers University New Brunswick and has published articles on the Chinese revolution, Chinas road to capitalism, and capitalist development and Chinas environment for Against the Current, New Left Review, the Ecologist, and Monthly Review and other journals. He has published articles on capitalism and the global ecological crisis in the Journal of Ecological Economics, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Real-World Economics Review, Truthout.org, Adbusters, and other media. He is presently completing a book on Chinas communist-capitalism and ecological collapse.

Copyright 2015 Richard Smith
All rights reserved.
ISBN: to follow
Published by World Economics Association
http://www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/

Cover artwork: section taken from Polyphony2 by Paul Klee, 1932.

__________________
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission, in writing, from the publisher.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

How did the common good become a bad idea? The eco-suicidal economics of Adam Smith

In the midst of the record-breaking heat wave of summer 2003, George Monbiot the renowned columnist for the London Guardian penned a short but eloquent essay entitled Sleepwalking to Extinction. Monbiot wrote that:

We live in a dream world. With a small, rational part of our brain, we recognise that our existence is... destroying the conditions for human life on earth. Were we governed by reason, we would be on the barricades today, dragging the drivers of Range Rovers and Nissan Patrols out of their seats, occupying and shutting down the coal-burning power stations, bursting in upon the Blairs retreat from reality in Barbados and demanding a reversal of economic life as dramatic as the one we bore when we went to war with Hitler (Guardian, August 12, 2003).

But despite the frightening trends, despite ever more desperate pleas from the worlds scientists, the worlds corporate and political leadership showed no sign of abandoning denial and adopting reason, no sign of scrapping business as usual to mobilize against catastrophe. The ritual has now become depressingly familiar and predictable: After each new shocking report on melting icecaps, the slowing Gulf Stream Current, eco-devastation in Africa or China, and so on concerned politicians call for immediate action and drastic steps, then do nothing at all of substance.

Since the first conference in Rio in 1992, every December UN Climate Convention negotiations summit talks begin with urgent pleas from devastated third world peasants and expert scientists, then collapse in rancor and disarray over the failure of nations to accept binding limits on GHG emissions. At every turn, the priority of growth and profits overrides every ringing fire alarm and society carries on in its sleepwalk to extinction. In the 2006 rehearsal of this charade, the UN Nairobi summit collapsed into nothingness with no firm targets adopted, nothing concrete adopted, every issue of any seriousness postponed yet again. Kofi Annan decried the assembled ministers as frighteningly timid, lacking in leadership, displaying a failure of political will. One Greenpeace observer remarked that the glaciers in Greenland are moving faster than the negotiators. The Stern report came just as the International Energy Agency announced that China, which was commissioning a new coal-fired power plant every five days, surpassed the United States in 2009 as the worlds biggest emitter of carbon dioxide. Largely because of Chinas growth, the Global Carbon Project reported in the November 13, 2006 issue of