Herbert Marcuse speaks from the grave!

Having recently quoted Huxley's Brave New World on consumerism, here's an equally compelling statement of the situation, from the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse:

Tolerance toward that which is radically evil now appears as good because it serves the cohesion of the whole on the road to affluence or more affluence. The toleration of the systematic moronization of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda, the release of destructiveness in aggressive driving, the recruitment for and training of special forces, the impotent and benevolent tolerance toward outright deception in merchandizing, waste, and planned obsolescence are not distortions and aberrations, they are the essence of a system which fosters tolerance as a means for perpetuating the struggle for existence and suppressing the alternatives.

From Marcuse's Repressive Tolerance.

Well, for people of my generation it's an interesting quote. Marcuse was one of the intellectual stars of the Left during the Sixties, so for old times' sake...

Al Gore, Kurt Vonnegut and the siren voices

At the very start of his 2009 book, Our Choice, Al Gore, Nobel Prize winner and darling of so much of the environmental movement, quotes the message Kurt Vonnegut suggested we should leave behind for any passing aliens who may happen upon the wreckage of planet Earth. ‘Carved in great big letters on a Grand Canyon wall’, it would read:

We probably could have saved ourselves, but were too damned lazy to try very hard… and too damned cheap.

When you have stared at our current environmental problems for long enough and marvelled at how little we seem to be willing to do to save ourselves or our children, it is tempting to go along with Vonnegut. But both he and Gore are wrong. We are not too lazy or too cheap and the solutions on offer from Mr Gore will not solve our problems. Neither the problems we face nor the solutions that will deliver us have much to do with technology or making business and governments account for the true cost of energy, manufacturing, agriculture, transport, etc., mass individual action, or any of the other things Gore advocates. Yet it is in many ways a very good book.

The real problem is not our inability to understand or act upon our present problems. It is rather that we are already committed to another way of doing things that prevents us from taking up any of the credible solutions to our environmental problems. Perhaps it’s worth quoting Aldous Huxley again here:

In the nurseries, … the voices were adapting future demand to future industrial supply. ‘I do love flying’, they whispered, ‘I do love flying, I do love having new clothes, I do love…’

The siren voices of growth, consumption, free markets, entrepreneurship and all the rest are busily pointing us in quite the wrong direction. The resources and system needed to fix our problems are under the control of processes, systems and institutions and in the hands iof nterests that would be completely undone by actually carrying the solution.

So the political powers-that-be, who have spent the last three decades abandoning the idea that the world could be a better place only if it were a different place, would have to perpetrate a genuine revolution to get us onto the right track.

Perhaps the single most important thing is to stop thinking of the problem as primarily reflecting personal selfishness (even of investment bankers). Personal actions are certainly part of both the problem and the solution, but it will only have a peripheral effect so long as we fail to also think of both problem and solution in systemic terms. Vonnegut was writing as a novelist and entitled not to be read too literally. But those who fail to understand the nature of our economic system, and the necessities and pressures it places on individuals, institutions and other systems (e.g., the entire social and political systems) are merely standing on the beach trying to bail out the ocean while the tide is coming in faster and faster.

Remember, Odysseus was forced to listen to the Sirens only because there were no other options open to him. Likewise we have few options that will in any way improve our environmental predicament - unless we change our ship and the ocean we sail. Likewise, even our most venal bankers were only following the system. Given a different system, they might not have had the option of running the ship onto the rocks (oops, different part of the Odyssey).

Consumerism, 1932

I re-read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and what do I find?

In the nurseries, … the voices were adapting future demand to future industrial supply. ‘I do love flying’, they whispered, ‘I do love flying, I do love having new clothes, I do love…’

A momentary lapse into defeatism

I have always felt very ambivalent about the 10/10 campaign. It seems so very unambitious. Most people can reduce their carbon footprint and general environmental impact by 10% by little more than scrutinising their current lifestyle and cutting out the worst excesses. Turn the thermostat down a couple of degrees too high, stop wearing flimsy clothes on cold days, fix poor insulation for a small outlay, stop buying gadgets, fashion, trinkets, food from the other side of the planet, drive more thoughtfully (and if possible stop driving altogether), turn off unused lights (and stop squandering electricity for pointless lighting in the first place), remember to turn the PC off, and so on. 10%? A piece of cake.

What is more, I have probably managed 10% with disproportionately little sacrifice. It took me seconds to reset the thermostat and turn off the radiators in areas I barely use. It took about a week to get used to rooms a couple of degrees cooler. It took not time at all to remember to turn off lights and shut doors. It will take a lot longer to step back from impulse buying and toys, but it’s not impossible – I’m not so addicted to consumerism that I have to go along with the entire glitzy, grubby farrago. Nothing too it, if you really want to make a difference. 10%? Why so little?

But that isn’t the problem I have with 10/10, or any of the many other exhortations to us (as individuals) to use less. 10% is a nice idea, but the correct answer is something like 85%. So if we achieve 10% in 2010, will we achieve another 10% in 2011, and then another in 2012? It’s not inconceivable, given a truly impressive level of sign-up (which has not, as far as I can see, happened so far).

But even 30% is long way from 50%, let alone 85%. Read George Monbiot’s Heat or David McKay’s Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air for a sense of just how far we really have to go. At that level, the only sensible answer is to look seriously at our core social, political and economic systems to see how they need to be changed to deliver the goods. Or rather, stop delivering them.

But especially since Copenhagen I feel like we not only still have a very long way to go but that we have taken completely the wrong road. Down this road, no matter what a few individuals do, things do not get better – no, they get only worse.

I’m not too worried by the flagging public confidence in the reality of global warming or the tiny holes knocked in the credibility of individual environmental researchers - not even the IPCC. Such upsets will be transient and have a marginal impact. Much more serious is the decision by so many national governments to do what can only be summarised as - nothing. For how else can we understand Copenhagen (which left the world’s environmental strategy even weaker than after Kyoto), or the news that the UK government plans to take its expenditure on environmental projects in the developing world from existing budgets, or Obama’s evident fear of doing anything whatsoever about his environmental promises for the foreseeable future, or the Chinese government’s unwillingness to make any significant contribution to climate change (other than to make it much worse, of course)?

But why is this so much more important than persuading individuals to make a start on their personal environmental impact? Because the number of individuals who were ever likely to take that road was never more than a small – perhaps tiny – minority whose collective actions would have no significant effect on our fate. To have a wider impact, they had to serve as a catalyst, as a demonstration to governments that the environment was a vote-winner. Only when they had learned that would governments start to take the action needed to transform not just the footprint of individual households or even a Transition Town but the collective footprint of (in the UK’s case) 60 million people or more.

And not just 60 million individuals. Unlike you and me, governments can directly transform the country’s physical infrastructure on a national scale, coordinate similar actions on an international scale, force big business to mend its ways, and all in all make the systematic changes that no assembly of individual persons can ever bring about. Even 60 millions individuals could not change the public transport system without government action, nor how we generate electricity, nor how developing countries go about achieving a civilised level of development, nor any of the rest.

But after Copenhagen? Nothing can expected from governments any more. Or at least, far too little even to deflect the crisis by more than a smidgen. Even worse, not only have they decided against going beyond Kyoto but they have plainly decided that the only solution to the world’s economic woes is to restore the economic system that got us into our current mess – economic and environmental alike. The only adjustments they plan to make are trivial, serving only to make the economic system a little less dangerous in narrowly economic terms, without any thought for the environmental consequences of a capitalist ‘business as usual’.

In such a situation, what is the point of an individual making a personal commitment to reducing their environmental impact? Does it make sense for individuals to take action off their own bat if the great majority are not only not doing practically nothing (a situation I can live with for a decade or two) but major organisations (political and economic) are never going to be moved in an environmental direction, and have in fact decided to head straight back down the road we all know leads only to global warming, ecosystems collapse and resource wars? What can we claim that individual environmental self-control can achieve after that – that we will succeed in putting off the evil day by 10 minutes?

So even if I do manage a 10% - or 25% or 100% - reduction, exactly what have I accomplished? On a personal level, perhaps it is still a lot. At the very least, if I can get my footprint down to a sustainable level (not a very meaningful proposition while I remain a member of such a destructive society), I can say that at least it wasn’t me, guv. But on a higher level? What have ‘we’ accomplished? In the absence of a broader, systematic impact on the whole way we (at worst) conceive of the environment and (at best) the way we manage our economy, a lot less than we might imagine.

Where does obsessive growth come from? Well, not consumerism, that's for sure

Contemporary society is widely described as consumerist, and when politicians and pundits are asked how we can control the endless expansion of the economy, their first hand-wringing response is that what ‘the consumer’ (a group that seems to have superseded ‘the voter’ as the arbiters of political policy) want is simply ‘more and more’. So growth is the only game in town.

The environmental implication of this frozen staring into the contemporary economy is simple: nothing can be done. Nothing can be done to prevent us driving right over the CO2/ resource/ ecosystem cliff, because ‘the consumer’ is king and ‘the consumer’ would not stand for not having more stuff, more holidays abroad, more everything.

This is mythology at its most deceitful – and, given its environmental implications, most disastrous.

Look at how the economic process that links consumers to the economy really works. Somewhere out there is someone – some billionaire, some bank – with a lot of money to invest. They build/buy a factory that makes some consumer goody – iPods, perhaps, or ‘designer’ jeans’, or the latest ‘taste sensation’. The new owner invests millions, maybe billions. They’ve invested millions in creating the product, millions more in setting up production, millions more paying managers and production line workers, millions more for natural resources and energy, millions more to create the supply chain that gets it into the shops.

The sole reason all this investment takes place is to make money – lots of money, and certainly more than the millions invested. Otherwise there is no profit. So they need people to buy their product. You and me. Hence the endless orgy of marginally differentiated goods and services, the interminable and increasingly in-your-face advertising, marketing, the lobbying, the focus groups, the viral messages.

Consumerism exists not because consumers want to buy but because companies need to sell. If they don’t invest more and more in manufacturing, services, energy, transport, and so on, there will be no returns on their capital. They go bankrupt. But if they do invest, then there must be sales. It is not consumerism that drives growth but capital’s need for a return - endlessly.

But why does this lead to growth rather than simply a ‘steady state’ economy in which we can continue to have what we have now? Or if we must expand, why can we not expand in directions that contribute to the sustainability and equity so many commentators – Nicholas Stern, Jonathan Porritt, George Monbiot, and many more - insist must be the goals of the 21st-century economy? The answer is quite simple: there are plenty of mechanisms built into the contemporary economy that enforce growth - whether or not we want it - but none of then involve doing anything for developing countries – unless, that is, they can pay as well as developed countries can.

Ironically, one of the key mechanisms for ensuring that growth will happen is the very efficiency improvements that so many pundits are relying on to reduce future growth. From society’s point of view it makes sense that, if we can produce the same goods and services by using less energy, less resources, with less damage to the atmosphere and the environment, then surely this is the way we should be going.

But from a capitalist perspective, there reverse is true. If I – just me, rather than my rivals – can use the same resources to produce more, then I will. I will not – could not – simply produce the same in a more environmentally benign way - the assumption of the pundits – because the goals of investment is to maximise profits, not minimise total costs. Given that I have already invested hugely in plant, resources, supply chains, marketing, and so on, many of my costs are already fixed, regardless of how much I actually produce. As a result, if I want to maximise my profits the only rational thing to way to exploit improved efficiency is to use the same investments still more intensively.

After all, I will still be paying fixed rent on my factory and offices, still paying the same fixed interest on my loans, and so on. The main variable costs come from the inputs (labour, materials, energy, transport, and so on) that I use to create actual goods and services. So if I want to maximise the profit I make from this enterprise, simple arithmetic dictates that I should increase the amount of stuff I make (i.e., increase my investment in resources, labour, energy, etc.), because the same fixed costs will now be spread over more units. That will minimise my unit costs, and so (other things being equal) increase my profits. Hurrah!


This logic becomes more compelling the more capitalism matures. History as a whole can be seen as humanity building and rebuilding society with more and more fixed capital – roads, education systems, hospitals, technology, and so on – so that each generation is blessed with a greater stock of means to its ends. In a rational universe this would lead to societies in which, having satisfied its ‘basic’ wants, humanity might not ever quite lose its appetite for progress, but it would at least be able to decide exactly what progress meant.

In our present position, this would surely mean the very commitment to sustainability and equity referred to above. But again, capitalism bucks the trend. As the level of fixed investment needed even to join the game grows – the size of a new car plant, the cost of R+D, and so on – the more fixed costs dominate, the more units that must be sold to cover them, and the more compelling the need to grow becomes.

There are whole countries devoted to this model. China, for example, has put overwhelming emphasis on manufacturing for export – feeding the West’s addictions before developing its own. But there is little reason to believe that even China’s authoritarian government will be able to resist the logic of capitalist investment. And no doubt the boys from Goldman Sachs – or whatever their Chinese incarnation turns out to be – will, for a handsome fee, show them how to lock the handcuffs on themselves.

So growth won’t be ending any time soon. On the contrary, there is only acceleration ahead. Our despoliation of the planet won’t be quite as rapid – those efficiency gains are real (because they are profitable) and neither public nor governments are quite helpless. But until we recognise exactly what the link between capitalism, growth and our all too unpleasant environmental fate is, there is no turning back.

Welcome to the machine.

Funding clean development in developing countries

Anyone with a sense of decency and proportion about humanity’s current environmental predicament understands and sympathises with the claim by developing countries that the developed countries should actively support developing countries’ contribution to controlling global warming by technology transfers, improved terms of trade and direct funding. Conversely, as India and China’s own governments have pointed out, the attitude of the governments of developed countries to their position is hypocritical at best and shameless at worst.

But at the same time, is it really clear exactly what would be accomplished by such support? Just as the justice of their cause is clear to anyone with half an eye, so the dubiousness of their chosen route to development is obvious to anyone with half an ear for the brilliant but discordant disharmonies of their emerging industries and agricultures. For both India and China (and most other developing countries) have certainly set themselves on a strictly capitalist road to industrialisation, and it is exactly this that undermines their claims to the sympathy and assistance of developed countries. That way lies not socially intelligent development but endless, inexorable growth of all kinds, guided not by whether it is of social value but solely by whether it is profitable – a completely different motive, and largely contradictory criterion to social responsibility.

Not that developed countries are any less culpable – after all, we invented capitalism, we made sure that most developing countries (with the notable exception of China itself) would adopt a capitalist strategy for economic development, and we have wilfully turned a blind eye the environmental (not to mention social, cultural, political and psychological) consequences of our own road to wealth. But to support the industrialisation of any country on the same basis would only be more of the same problem we already have. Indeed, capitalism’s incessant demand for growth and more growth, coupled with the lower ‘carbon efficiency’ of less developed countries’ industries, would actually make the problem disproportionately worse. So even if the environment at large could countenance the rapid doubling and trebling of the global economy, the environmental impact is likely to be much worse than that.

So what is the answer? Beats me. But it isn’t capitalist development, because that can only lock us – and in this case it really is us all – into a worse and constantly worsening problem. Nor will it solve developing countries’ developmental problems, given that they are far more likely to suffer from the resulting climate chaos, resource depletion and ecosystems damage than their more developed neighbours.

China shakes the road

China has certainly bought into consumerism in a big and perhaps irreversible way. General Motors has sold off now its Hummer division to a Chinese buyer, the Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company. Tengzhong’s CEO is quoted int eh New York Times as saying that:

‘The Hummer brand is synonymous with adventure, freedom and exhilaration,
and we plan to continue that heritage’.

Plainly he hasn't heard of peak oil.

One might take issue with this interpretation of such ‘a symbol of gas-guzzling, road-hogging American excess’ (as the FT's correspondents put it), but it is hard to avoid also seeing it as yet another symptom of China’s growing environmental impact still farther. And contrary to China’s stated defence of its unwillingness to impose carbon emission limits on itself, this is hardly the kind of development that a poor country needs to create a decent standard of living for its people.