How real is green capitalism, and what does it mean for the precarious?

Below is a large extract from an interesting political thoughtpiece from Alex Foti:

“The issue of the distribution of productivity is crucial. The structural cause of the Great Recession lies in the failure of neoliberalism to distribute the productivity growth afforded by the digital revolution to large strata of society, who then had to take on debt to finance consumption of the new informational goods and services. Green capitalism wants to solve the economic crisis via green jobs and a new welfare system, but it will succeed in its task, only if it manages to widely redistribute what Negri and Hardt call “common wealth” i.e. the backlog of collective inventions, creations, relations and desires presently appropriated by Gates, Murdoch, Berlusconi, and the like.

The debate is open among leftists about whether green capitalism is economically sustainable (possibly so), and if so, if will lead to ecological sustainability (hardly so). Ecomarxists, for whom the labor theory of value is dogma, believe that the ecological crisis entails a squeeze in the rate of surplus value and thus a tendency for the rate of profit to fall*. Empirically, if productivity declines because of the ecological crisis, due to increases in the cost of energy or to the internalization (inclusion in the business cost of products and services) of the environmental damages caused by the economic process, then ecomarxists are right and green capitalism is unsustainable due to falling profits. If, conversely the ecological crisis triggers a green technological revolution, the rate of profit can stay equal as wages rise, so that green capitalism can create its own demand. In simpler words, if green capitalism is just greenwashing, i.e. marketing hype unsupported by hard facts, ultimately the ecological crisis will end up endangering capitalist accumulation leading to the the common ruin of today’s contending social classes: the global élite and the transnational precariat. If, on the other hand, green capitalism is the harbinger of a fourth industrial revolution (first: steam and textiles; second: electricity, steel, chemicals; third: electronics, networking; fourth: genomics, greenomics), productivity will rise and this would create a favorable context for victories on wages and labor conditions, as well as ease political resistance to income redistribution via progressive taxation (when taxes hit the rich proportionally more than the poor; under neoliberalism taxation has instead been regressive). Another way of looking at this is to consider the fact that the price of a good is equal to the wage rate divided by productivity (production per hour worked) multiplied by one plus the rate of profit, the margin that rewards the entrepreneur and pays interest to the banker. At constant prices, if productivity increases because of a rise in energy efficiency, either the wage rate rises or the rate of profit must increase, or a combination of the two factors§.

Contrary to what Marx predicted, improvements in wages and living standards have been made possible under capitalism thanks to the combination of much-sweated technological innovation and hard-fought social redistribution. Have these improvements come at the cost of bankrupting the biosphere? It will end up like that if social resistance to capitalism is not strong enough to decarbonize the economy. In other words, if climate anarchists lose the incipient struggle with green capitalists. If movements lose the fight for climate justice, Earth might become like Venus. From the experience of the poor and precarious of New Orleans, we know the horrors that lie in store when climate disaster strikes a class-polarized urban society. The climate question conceals a social question, because the precarious stand to lose the most in the biocrisis. On the other hand, precarious need to be empowered to be effective antagonists to global financial élites; only if they secure income and leisure, they can have the freedom to erect the postcapitalist society. Precarious-to-precarious community solutions to urban habitats, energy, food production and social housing will have to become increasingly common as answers to unemployment and environmental crisis. Whole cities can be redesigned by expanding self-organized groups of precarious ecohacktivists living from their collective labor and the sharing of what’s produced and exchanged in their social networks.

If climate justice movements lose the battle that is taking tens of thousands to Copenhagen in December and thus fail to impose their collective will onto government and corporate technocrats, then by the middle of this century most of us will be either drowned or toasted. What’s at stake is neither the survival of capitalism nor industrialism, but of digital civilization and the promise of the universal access to information, knowledge and culture that the switch to postindustrialism has made possible.

Industrialism, informationalism, green capitalism

Green capitalism cannot be simply liquidated as a marketing ploy. It embodies the faction of the global bourgeoisie that understands the reality of climate change and of its own declining political legitimacy in the face of the banking crisis and the consequent end of neoliberal/monetarist hegemony. Capital does seek now to be submitted to a light top-down, as opposed to bottom-up, form of regulation, which, while warranting the survival of megabanks and megacorporations, tries to accommodate ecological imperatives and social needs. Fossil capitalism, on the other hand, is purely reactionary. It has long denied the existence of man-made planetary heating and it is now lobbying to seize upon the spaces opened by geopolitical (Iraq, Sudan etc become up for grabs) and ecological (the North-East and North-West passages are open) disasters. It has spawned the growth of an oil-military complex that is the biggest threat to the peace and welfare of humankind. The open defeat of Bushism by Obama’s civil society (young, women, Blacks, Latinos, churches, unions, community movements) signals the decline of petromilitarism and the rise of green capitalism. The new US administration is a definitely a friend of global capitalism and to ensure its viability is putting forward a set of policies amounting to eco-keynesian regulation lite, to salvage what’s left of the hegemony of US banks and corporations over the world economy. Obama’s economic policy is keynesian because it provides a demand stimulus via deficit spending: in a deep recession, banks are not lending, firms are not investing, consumers are not spending, so the state must step in to provide spending power and capital for investment. But it is eco- in the sense it provides incentives to augment energy efficiency of the economy and de-carbonize part of its power production.

Original Fordist keynesianism was incredibly wasteful in energy terms. Oil was made so cheap and consumer goods so abundant that the biosphere was trashed in the short space of three decades (1945-1975). The Soviet bloc, placing an increasingly oblolescent emphasis on heavy industry and lacking societal counterbalances to communist policies of industrial might, was proportionally more wasteful, producing a larger share of nuclear and environmental disasters. In their ideological competition, both the US and the USSR strove to empower their working classes as loyal citizens, producers and consumers. Industrialism was their common structural base. However, it will be wrong to look at the present ecological crisis as the crisis of “industrial society”. In fact, over the last three decades, informationalism has replaced industrialism as the dominant system of accumulation. Indeed the failure of command economies to perform the transition from industrialism to informationalism, from the electrical engine to the electronic chip, is viewed by contemporary sociology as the structural reason behind the implosion of the Soviet Union. Now the inherited neoliberal form of informational capitalism is morphing into green capitalism. The evidence for this is mounting: from Silicon Valley becoming a hotbed for solar to green sectors soon surpassing aerospace and defense in economic weight, according to a recent study made by the international bank HSBC. Industrialism is dependent on oil, coal and other hydrocarbons in a way that informationalism is not. Steel needs coal, the Net doesn’t. The problem with green capitalism is that the scale effect is likely to more than offset any improvements in energy intensity, so that emissions continue rise. Left to its own instincts, green capitalism would be ecologically unsustainable. A steady-state market economy can only come into being through extreme regulation from below and above.

Yet, economic growth only has a meaning if measured in money terms, not in physical terms. So, in principle a socially regulated form of capitalism can be envisaged that still grows in dollar terms (and this overcomes the economic crisis), but not in entropic terms. A stage of the economy where immaterial growth becomes the norm, along with the maximization of collective knowledge and social well-being, rather than corporate profit or private wealth. An economy where people mostly exchange immaterial services rather than material goods. In other words, a world where there’s money to be made in the economy, because informational as well as green jobs are available in large and increasing numbers. The question of growth must be reconsidered, and is in fact being reconsidered by economists and politicians in the light of the crisis: GDP will be soon replaced by alternative indicator of economic performance and socio-environmental progress.

Today, the décroissance approach is likely to fall on deaf ears, because it preaches parsimony to a population which is being precarized by the global recession. Climate justice is definitely a stronger rallying cry for all the forces resisting capitalist domination today, one that already resonates from North to South. If the overdeveloped North must certainly decrease material consumption, the recovery from the crisis can only occur if there’s more effective demand in euro, dollar, yuan terms in the hands of those with less money in their pockets and thus likely to spend it when given the opportunity: the poor, women, precarious and/or immigrant youth. Social regulation must ensure that this extra money is not spent at the mall but in ways that are thermodynamically sound: into sustainable mobility, local agricultural produce, reforestation, and renewable energy deployment, for example. Social spending must be used to strengthen the social networks of solidarity within and across generations and lands. The precarious strata and the informal, marginal sectors of society are the ones that stand to benefit the most from fiscal redistribution. Only generalized conflict can emancipate the precarious and lead to sharp increases in social spending.

Like the wobblies a century ago, the precarious must organize across genders and ethnic groups to create their own unions and fight for a much larger slice of the pie. If the pie’s shrinking like Latouche wants, as people save more and consume less, many more will be made jobless and the precariat is gonna end up in an even more precarious condition than under neoliberalism. It’s true that capitalism is addicted to growth, but this is monetary growth, not necessarily an increase in the amount of “stuff” produced.

The distinction between bounded material growth and unbounded immaterial growth is useful to conceive a social scenario that is postcapitalist and progressive. Politically, this would also be a society where the different aims of anarchosyndicalists (constructing a postcapitalist egalitarian commonwealth) and anarchogreens (creating a thermodynamicist society of peers on a biodiverse planet) can be reconciled. It’s a social scenario where the autonomous, pirate, queer practices of the immaterial precariat are able to defeat the political offensive of green capitalism and drive the transition toward postcapitalism, an economy meeting ecological and social targets where grassroots experimentation is encouraged and regulation is horizontal and bottom-up, rather than vertical and top-down. To address both the economic and ecological crisis in my view we would have to push for a service, relational, commons-based peer-production economy, whose aim is the growth in knowledge, leisure and culture as opposed to the growth of goods and material wealth. This would be a society based on ecological remediation, immaterial accumulation and the maximization of happiness among its participants, rather than on material opulence for a minority of people.

Synopsis so far: we have an economic and ecological crisis of capitalism where class and climate struggles become central. The social actors of class struggle are new, since capitalism is no longer industrial, but has become informational. They are the precarious, those whose rights and talents have been immolated on the altar of labor flexibility and financial profit. The precarious in the informational economy must embrace the climate question, because the solidaristic postcapitalist welfare society they demand can only be achieved if the ecological struggle fought by the climate anarchists is won. Since the precariat is the new anticapitalist social subject, radical ecology shall become its ideology.”

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