Also by Boris Frankel
Democracy Versus Sustainability
Fictions of Sustainability:
The Politics of Growth and Post-Capitalist Futures
Zombies, Lilliputians and Sadists:
The Power of the Living Dead and the Future of Australia
When the Boat Comes In:
Transforming Australia in the Age of Globalisation
From the Prophets Deserts Come:
The Struggle to Reshape Australian Political Culture
The Post Industrial Utopians
Beyond the State?
Dominant Theories and Socialist Strategies
Marxian Theories of The State: A Critique of Orthodoxy
Copyright Boris Frankel 2020
First published in 2020 by Greenmeadows
P.O. Box 128
Elsternwick,
Melbourne 3185
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.
Name: Frankel, Boris, author.
Title: Capitalism Versus Democracy?
Rethinking Politics in the Age of Environmental Crises/ Boris Frankel.
Includes Notes and References and Index.
Subjects:
1. Politics of environmental sustainability. 2. Fascism, socialism and democracy.
3. Post-capitalism post-growth societies. 4. Social reform alternative policies
ISBN: (pbk) 978-0-6483633-4-7
ISBN: (epub) 978-0-6483633-5-4
Typeset in Hoefler Text.
Cover Design by Emile Frankel.
The publisher has endeavoured to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book were accurate and active at the time of going to press. However, neither the author nor the publisher has responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content has not changed since this book was prepared for publication.
Preface
This book is part of a larger project on capitalism, democracy and sustainability that has preoccupied me in recent years. My previous work Fictions of Sustainability: The Politics of Growth and Post-Capitalist Futures published in 2018, analysed the connection between environmental sustainability issues and technological innovation, economic growth, financialisation and changing relations between advanced capitalist countries and low and middle-income societies. The highly problematic responses of mainstream policy makers and radical technological utopians or greens to these major problems has often been determined by what I call analytical apartheid. A majority of both pro-market and anti-capitalist political economists ignore environmental issues or treat them as marginal problems. Conversely, many environmentalists display minimal knowledge or interest in political economy. In Capitalism Versus Democracy? I concentrate on political issues and how the dominant paradigm of capitalism in conflict with democracy has changed from the Great Depression and fascism of the 1930s to the Great Financial Crisis and the rise of neo-fascism and Green New Deals in the period from 2008 to the 2020 Pandemic. A variety of Right and Left parties, policy makers and activists continue to share a pre-environmental political consciousness. This perspective is evident in both anti-democratic authoritarian regimes in low and middle-income countries and across the political spectrum in representative democracies.
Apart from eco-socialists or advocates of degrowth, most of the anti-neoliberal Left or mainstream Greens have a circumscribed environmental consciousness. While supporting the urgent task of preventing climate breakdown, there is a tendency to either ignore or be unaware of how the larger complex problems surrounding material footprints and ecological sustainability (not just carbon footprints) affect political agendas for the good life. In fact, the vast majority of public debates on the environment are dominated by endless scientific reports on the merits of renewables versus fossil fuels, economic analyses of the cost of delaying or rapidly implementing decarbonisation. These reports and debates often mirror conventional political divisions between pro-market business and political forces and anti-capitalist parties and movements over how respective national governments are obstructing or supporting the transition to a post-carbon society.
Instead of following this familiar approach to contemporary politics, in Books One and Two I analyse how the dominant paradigm of capitalism versus democracy has evolved and outlived its capacity to explain the multiple crises we currently face. Book Three discusses why a rethink of contemporary politics needs also to focus on the multiple aspects of democracy versus sustainability. If the biophysical carrying capacity of the earth is already so seriously impacted by the current size of per capita and national material footprints of affluent populations in OECD countries, how is global equality to be achieved? This problem also affects all proposals for post-capitalist societies. Without a fundamental reconfiguring of the utopian notions of a high-tech, affluent post-carbon or post-capitalist society, we will continue to see profound domestic and global material and socio-political inequalities continue in the future. For those who do not wish to read the larger thesis presented in this book, I have also written a modified version of Book Three which is published under the title Democracy Versus Sustainability.
Completing this project during a global Pandemic has been a mixed experience. Observing the daily casualty rate and scale of unnecessary deaths across the world (more than one million to date and over 34 million reported cases) warrants the International Court of Justice in The Hague to initiate proceedings against a new category of criminals, the Covid-19 criminals. From the US, Brazil and India, to Mexico, the UK and other countries, these Right-wing elected political leaders have wilfully contributed to the enormous death rates and serious ongoing illness of millions of people. They have either failed to act in time, dismissed the seriousness of the disease or deliberately run-down health care and aged-care resources prior to the Pandemic with their pro-market attacks on necessary health and social services. Of course, if there is any justice in the world, then the International Court of Justice would also prepare proceedings against a wider range of leaders who are wilfully ignoring or delaying dealing with the climate emergency a global policy failure that unless quickly remedied will almost certainly result in untold millions of deaths in coming decades to human and non-human species. In countries with authoritarian governments, the public are severely constrained in their ability to act. However, in so-called democracies, the failure to respond adequately to the twin crises of the Pandemic and climate breakdown are occurring under the watchful or indifferent eyes of polarised electorates and governments that are sleepwalking towards disaster.
