Archive for September, 2021

Climate and Categories

September 30, 2021

George Monbiot, writes in the Guardian today about the way that the categories we use to fight climate change may in fact hinder our capacity to do anything about it, because they break up the system into tidy, non intersecting boxes, and the issue with all ecological events/processes are that they are interconnected. I’ve added a few comments in italics, but most of this is a summary.

There is a box labelled “climate”, in which politicians discuss the climate crisis. There is a box named “biodiversity”, in which they discuss the biodiversity crisis. There are other boxes, such as pollution, deforestation, overfishing and soil loss, gathering dust in our planet’s lost property department. But they all contain aspects of one crisis that we have divided up to make it comprehensible.

Monbiot. ‘Green growth’ doesn’t exist – less of everything is the only way to avert catastrophe. The Guardian, 29 September 2021

In reality these divisions do not exist, and a crisis in one ‘box’ spills over into other boxes. They make compounding crises. We cannot deal with one of these crises, without considering how they interact and how the way we respond to one box effects the ‘other’ boxes – “each source of stress compounds the others.”

Some of the crises may be separated out altogether from the problem. Therefore economic crises and political crises may not be seen in terms of the ecological crises, even though it is political and economic decisions which are making the ecological crises, and politics and economics cannot be entirely separated from ecological events. If there is a drought, supplies can get disrupted, companies can go bust, food prices increase, governments be destabilised, and so on.

He looks at the right whale: “fewer than 95 females of breeding age remain.” This comes about because:

  • Warming waters push the whales into busy sea lanes – where they get tangled in nets or injured by ships.
  • Their food source (a small crustacean) is also moving north.
  • A fishing industry has recently developed to exploit the crustacean We don’t know the effects of this on its population levels.
  • Increased ocean acidification could also impact on the crustacean.
  • Increased gas and oil exploration may add to pollution and crustacean death.

Other problems include declining birth rate of the whales which could be caused by

  • Pollution. We know some mammals are affected by pollution in that way.
  • Disruption of communication via Ocean noise caused by the shipping.

you could call the decline of the North Atlantic right whale a shipping crisis, or a fishing crisis, or a climate crisis, or an acidification crisis, or a pollution crisis, or a noise crisis. But it is in fact all of these things: a general crisis caused by human activity.

ibid

He then points out that the effects of chemicals tend to be investigated individually is if they were isolated from other chemicals, whereas they are (in the wild) constantly interacting with thousands of other chemicals, as well as thousands of other purely ‘natural’ chemical and transformative processes (such as various kinds of digestion).

Studies of bees show that when pesticides are combined, their effects are synergistic: in other words, the damage they each cause isn’t added, but multiplied. When pesticides are combined with fungicides and herbicides, the effects are multiplied again.

ibid.

As well as encountering chemicals, insects may also find their reproductive cycles no longer match plant cycles because of climate change. Even changing street lights can have unintended consequences:

The switch from orange sodium streetlights to white LEDs saves energy, but their wider colour spectrum turns out to be disastrous for insects. 

ibid.

The problems with coral reefs is not just because of bleaching through increased heat (even though people will deny this), but because of bottom fishing (dragging weighted nets along the reef and pulling them down), explosive fishing (usually illegal but still happening), fertiliser run offs, coal dust pollution, ocean acidification, and increasingly strong storms and cyclones. With decreasing fish supplies the response will probably be to increase fishing and destructive fishing techniques, which will put further stress on reefs and their inhabitants.

What would we see if we broke down our conceptual barriers <boxes>? We would see a full-spectrum assault on the living world. Scarcely anywhere is now safe from this sustained assault. 

ibid.

If we are to try and solve the current crisis through massive building projects, such as renewable farms or carbon removal:

this would demand a massive new wave of mining and processing for the steel and concrete…. The mining of sand to make concrete is trashing hundreds of precious habitats. It’s especially devastating to rivers, whose sand is highly sought in construction. Rivers are already being hit by drought, the disappearance of mountain ice and snow, our extraction of water, and pollution from farming, sewage and industry. Sand dredging, on top of these assaults, could be a final, fatal blow….

mining and processing the minerals required for magnets and batteries is laying waste to habitats and causing new pollution crises. 

ibid

His conclusion seems unavoidable.

The problems largely stem from a political conviction that endless economic growth is possible, necessary and desirable. This conception of economic growth and increasing extraction of ‘goods’ and ‘resources’ cannot be isolated from the world it occurs within and which it is destroying – “there is no such thing as green growth. Growth is wiping the green from the Earth.”

Politics and economics are not separate from the crisis.

Somehow, we have to decrease consumption per head, and that responsibility primarily falls upon the polluter elite, or that part of the population who both fund pollution through investment and pollute massively to live their lives. While most people reading this blog, are not the elite of the elite, they still probably pollute more than most of the world’s population and, through pension funds, profit from pollution, and so (even if individually, the cuts a person can make are trivial) some cutting is within your power, and if enough people do it, that could travel through the system, and help build effects, to persuade the elite of the elite that there is some resistance happening.

Tags:,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

The Generosity in Climate Generosity

September 28, 2021

I’ve previously written about Climate Generosity as a pathbreaker, or a way of doing things which has the potential to open up action, which does not wait for that action to be fair or just to ourselves, and that generosity has the capacity to build social networks of action and help people feel their actions are meaningful.

This is an attempt to look at some of the academic work on generosity and gifting, and see how it fits in, or does not fit in, with what I have been saying.

Despite the length of this blog, it is merely a sketch.

Outline

In the course of this blog post I will argue that generosity and gifting:

  • build ongoing relationships and networks, as those relationships are ongoing in cycles of gift and response,
  • distribute goods from places of plenty, to those of less plenty (temporary or otherwise),
  • form parts of other forms of exchange and are embedded in wider social life with the potential to transform that life,
  • are different from transactional exchange (such as money for items exchange), but may help support such transactions, although capitalism may also suppress such actions (directly or indirectly),
  • can be common in times of crisis or risk, although we probably cannot state in what particular circumstances,
  • build social resilience and help societies survive shocks perhaps better than those societies which do not encourage generous behaviour,
  • dampen noise, misinterpretation and disruption between groups,
  • indicate trustworthiness and build trust,
  • make the givers feel good, and gives them more social connections, and possibly more opportunities,
  • require attention to the needs and wants of others,
  • are precarious or risky, and may fail,
  • can be hostile and destructive and undermine themselves without that attention and care,

Secondarily we are left with some remarks:

  • there may be different types of gifting and generosity which require investigation to understand the circumstances in which they are appropriate and effective,
  • the impossible gift happens all the time,
  • ‘generalised’ and ‘productive’ exchange can reinforce each other,
  • extractive exchange can be destructive or harmful when the other has no way of defending themselves from the taking. This seems to be the common mode of exchange in many current societies when dealing with ecology.

I’ll now briefly cover some areas of thought about generosity and gifting: anthropology, sociology, social psychology, social geography, philosophy and ethics.

Anthropology

Anthropologists have since Malinowski and Mauss in the early 20th Century written about how stateless societies often have prestation economies, in which people exchange gifts in return for status and connection with others (both inside and outside their main groups and communities).

This exchange can be motivated by practical issues. If a group gains a sudden and large supply of meat or vegetables, they cannot accumulate it as capital (food rots) and the best way of dealing with the situation is to give it out over the relatively short period of time in which the food can be eaten, and use the giving to build relationships with others, who might respond similarly, evening out the food supply. Groups may also exchange what we might call ‘art objects,’ ‘magic objects’ or ‘persuasive objects’ with little utilitarian value, but which have acquired meaning through being old and exchanged many times with a powerful history.

To some extent the gift demands return, but the return can occur in many ways, such as respect or offering to help in some project etc. In some places gifts can be weapons, and ways of humiliating those who cannot respond equitably, as in the late versions of potlach. No one claims that gifts are inherently disinterested or purposeless.

This position was emphasised by Mauss. One possible objection to Mauss’s position is that he intends:

to isolate one important set of phenomena: namely, prestations which are in theory voluntary, disinterested and spontaneous, but are in fact obligatory and interested.

[and he asks]

what is the principal whereby the gift received has to be repaid? What force is there in the thing given which compels the recipient to make a return?

Mauss, The Gift 1954: p.1

If he only considers prestations which are obligatory and interested then the gift he will observe is obligatory and interested. By ignoring the possibility of non-obligating gifts, or ‘generous gifts’ which don’t demand return, or equal return, he is limiting the field quite drastically. Blau remarks, less limitingly, that exchange is caught between the polarity of pure calculation and pure generosity – neither of which may exist (Exchange and Power in Social Life, 1964: 112).

However, in general, gifts establish the possibility of continuing cycles of gift and receiving, obligation and acceptance. Relationships do not end when the gift is given.

gifts are in fact used to construct a wide range of possible social worlds as stable arenas for social interaction… it is a formative social process in its own right

David Cheal The Gift Economy: 126

‘Stable’ might be a bit much here, but gifts can form cycles of exchange, like many other forms of exchange, which link people who may never meet, and which can reinforce and continue the relationship.

Gifting is usually contrasted with commodity and monetary exchange, in which the exchange can end with the passing of money and the assumption of vague equivalence of exchange. As Cheal points out, reciprocity is not accounting (op.cit: 2).

Strathern reminds, that:

a culture dominated by ideas about property ownership can only imagine the absence of such ideas in specific ways…. To talk about the gift constantly evokes the possibility that the description would look very different if one where talking instead about commodities.

Strathern, The Gender of the Gift 1988: 18-19.

In reality of course, transactional exchange in capitalism can be complicated as well. People buy from favoured shops, or have relationships with shopkeepers and shop staff, and a good seller knows that keeping and soothing relationships is almost as important as sales, as it can keep sales comming. This may occasionally extend into credit, or favoured person discounts. Even in capitalism, exchange can be about relationships, rather than just rational accounting.

This all implies that climate gifting could act as a way to build relationships and alliances, between people and between groups, especially between people who are not otherwise obviously connected. It also recognises the obligation of those who have to give to those who have not – something which capitalism tends to interrupt, perhaps to help the build up of capital. It also challenges neoliberal modes of common sense, and re-establishes a more open gift economy, in which anyone can give something. In some ways generosity restores equality of interaction, in other ways it does not. However, if new and real forms of connection can be built through gifting, then they have potential to allow new forms of action and social transformation.

Sociology

What we learn from disasters is that people can pull together and help/gift strangers with relative ease, in difficult circumstances, whatever our fiction tells us differently. See Bregman and Solnit A Paradise Built in Hell.

Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot tell us about a small town which, after hurricane Katrina, helped found the ‘Cajun Navy’ rescuing people stranded in the floods. And despite a median income of less than half the average income, they provided food and shelter for about 5,000 people: “No Red Cross, No Salvation Army or Federal Funds. . . Just Friends.” This was an intense act of generosity, but people all over the USA apparently offered beds to people in trouble, and presumably did not expect much in return.

Is this unexpected? After all most societies will have experienced disruption, the irruption of weather, flood, drought or movement of earth, and it may not be good for their long term survival if they cannot help people in trouble. Michel Serres (Natural Contract: 51-3) suggests that community may even originate from out of these crises with our physical relation to Earth. This may be improbable, but never-the-less it reminds us that the response to catastrophe does not have to be the war of all against all, or descent into apathy; it can bring revitalisation.

Social Psychology

Klapwijk & Van Lange (Promoting Cooperation and Trust in “Noisy” Situations: The Power of Generosity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2009, 96(1): 83–103) suggest that generosity is important to building trust, especially when signals between people are full of disruptive (“negative”) noise, where noise is defined as “discrepancies between intended and actual outcomes for an interaction partner due to unintended errors” (op. cit: 84) such as accidentally saying the wrong thing, not responding to an e-mail because of a network breakdown, or arriving at a meeting late because of co-incidental problems.

Noise, in sense of ‘unintended’ events which add to the probabilities of miscommunication, or different framing of events, is normal in human interaction – and can lead to progressively hostile escalation, especially when there is a mixture of corresponding and conflicting interest, which is also normal.

In our current world, with the massive politicization of a significant part of the media who promote hostility towards ‘action-against-climate-change’, overcoming noise and deliberate misinterpretation and misinformation, is important to progress. Generosity seem one way of avoiding or bypassing noise problems (perhaps because it implies ‘charitable’ interpretation), even though it runs the risk of being taken advantage of.

Responding to others as you interpret them as responding to you, (tit for tat) can make things worse when noise is present. Generosity can avoid unintended combat, but may leave people vulnerable to deliberately engineered combat, so it depends on a judgement about who you are dealing with, and how generous they have been in the past.

Klapwijk & Van Lange’s experiments show

when noise was present, an unconditionally cooperative strategy was more effective in eliciting cooperation and was perceived as more moral and trustworthy and as being more inclined to make other-regarding transformations (and less inclined to make self-regarding transformations) than a tit-for-tat partner…

in a world where unintended errors (or incidents of noise) are doomed to happen, it is not advisable to adopt strict reciprocity.

[Likewise] acting less cooperatively than the partner— elicit[s] very low levels of cooperation—and fairly rapidly so….

strategies that deviate from strict reciprocity in an other regarding manner—by acting more generously—turn out to be more effective at coping with noise. Such strategies not only elicit greater cooperation levels but also tend to generate more positive thoughts and feelings by others.

ibid: 99, 101

In other words generous behaviour can produce better co-operation and interpretations, than strictly reciprocal, or punishing behaviour, at least in the cultures the experimenters were working in.

While not mentioning the above study Przepiorka & Liebe (Generosity is a sign of trustworthiness—the punishment of selfishness is not. Evolution and Human Behavior (2016) 37: 255–262) come to similar conclusions. “[P]articipants who choose a generous division of money are more trustworthy and are trusted more than participants who choose a selfish division or participants about whom no information is available.” Generosity is an effective way of signaling, and creating, good intent. The “signaling benefits of altruistic acts which accrue in social exchange can ease the conditions under which other-regarding preferences can evolve” (255-6). “[G]enerosity and cooperative intent are positively related and… observers infer cooperative intent from acts of generosity” (261).

So it appears likely that generous exchanges can create social bonds, and further co-operative action. As well they may also help to make people feel good – perhaps because of making those social bonds and co-operating.

This ability of generosity to make generous people feel good, was the finding of a large scale interview research project by the “Science of Generosity Project” at the US University of Notre Dame, reported in Smith, C., & Davidson, H. (2014). The paradox of generosity: Giving we receive, grasping we lose. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. It claims that people who practice generosity (either through volunteering, giving or relating) tend to benefit in terms of psychological and social well-being, irrespective of their incomes. The study defines generosity as the “virtue of giving good things to others freely and abundantly” (p. 4). It allows for the possibility that people with better lives tend to be more generous, but also insists that it works the other way, that generosity and a good life work together in positive feedback.

Despite the positive effects of generosity the majority of US Americans are not overtly generous, despite these obvious benefits. The researchers claim:

If the top 10 percent of most generous Americans were to stop giving money, the entire sector of society and the economy based on voluntary financial giving would simply collapse”

op.cit: 105

Usefully it gives some social explanations for lack of generosity in terms of perceived economic precarity, a sense of lack of time or time pressures, and from social world views such as think that self-interest is both normal and dominant, and apathy and anxiety as a response to crisis. Neoliberal ideologies could easily lead people to think that co-operation and generosity are foolish. Where the pursuit of ‘worldly goods’ is considered the path to contentment then it seems unlikely people will be generous.

By spending ourselves for others’ well-being, we enhance our own standing. In letting go of some of what we own, we better secure our own lives. By giving ourselves away, we ourselves move toward flourishing. This is not only a philosophical or religious teaching: it is a sociological fact.

ibid: p1

However, as a sociological fact, it seems reasonable to assume there must be recognised ways of giving, and people to give to, with whom some kind of relationship is considered possible – at least at the level that the generous know that what they are giving is useful and valued. So we can assume that building networks of generosity, in which generosity is normalised rather than marginalised or disbelieved, is as important as deciding to be generous oneself. Working to build such networks could also help people to build the habits of generosity; ‘‘repeated behaviors that involve recurrent intention and attention’’ (13).

Generosity expands the number and density of social-network relational ties, which tends to lead to greater happiness and health… Many practices of generosity involve extending and strengthening the ties that generous people have in their social networks

ibid: 78. (italics in original)

At the other end,

By always protecting ourselves against future uncertainties and mis-fortunes, we are affected in ways that make us more anxious about uncertainties and vulnerable to future misfortunes. In short, by failing to care for others, we do not properly take care of ourselves. It is no coincidence that the word ‘miser’ is etymologically related to the word ‘miserable.’

ibid: 1

This realisation is probably important in dealing with climate change. Protecting ourselves alone can lead to incapacity, and perhaps to withdrawal from the struggle. The capitalist cultural tendency seems to be to:

  • find security in material goods,
  • look after our own,
  • protect ourselves
  • separate from others, especially unsuccessful others as lack of success is contagious,
  • see only competition (perhaps outside family life) and selfishness as absolutely fundamental to human being, rather than some combination of competition and co-operation,
  • claim if people appear generous then it must be hypocrisy, or deceit, (that is everyone is really selfish),
  • want to delete ideas of generosity other than as a commercial transaction – eg buying presents.

This may suggest that capitalist societies (especially neoliberal capitalist societies) are remarkably ill placed to deal with problems that require care for others (human or non-human), or a lessening of material goods in favour of psycho-social goods. In support of this, it appears that, in general, the percentage of a family’s charitable contributions drops as income rises (104).

Finally for this section, Whitham (Generalized Generosity: How the Norm of Generalized Reciprocity Bridges Collective Forms of Social Exchange. American Sociological Review 2021, 86(3): 503–531) investigates the potential for relatively small, anonymous acts of generosity that are not directly reciprocated, or what sociologists call ‘generalized exchange‘, to build social bonds and promote contributions to the group. She concludes that “a strong norm of generalized reciprocity will activate mechanisms theorized to build strong social bonds in generalized and productive exchange systems, and will promote additional behavioral investments into the group.” Productive exchange involves pooling resources and sharing the collective benefits. The gift moves from person to group to person. For my purposes this is clearly relevant to the possible success of community energy.

Her experiments appear to show that a “strong norm of generalized reciprocity, relative to a moderate norm, has a positive effect on giving across time, but only in conditions of high risk” (520). “[P]erceived interdependence has a positive effect on trust, affective regard, and group identity” (522). That is that the more that people see themselves as interdependent, the higher the levels of trust, mutual regard and group identity. The higher the norm of generalised reciprocity, the better the social bonds. This, may again demonstrate the benefit of ecological thinking in which interdependence and interaction is taken as fundamental, and no being can be said to exist by itself.

“[G]enerosity begets further generosity, and greed begets further greed” (526). However, the more people give, the more it may be possible they need to feel they receive to feel satisfied and treated well, as opposed to feeling taken advantage of. I suspect a generalised productive exchange may diminish this side effect.

A strong norm of generalized reciprocity may effectively scale up the bonds-building benefits of productive exchange to the larger collective, such that investments made by individuals will, eventually, flow back to them, thus reinforcing the positive value of community membership and motivating further investments in the community.

ibid: 529.

Social Geography

Climate generosity involves generosity at different levels of distance. The examples of generosity I have given in my writings on climate generosity have been local. They have involved gifts by members of the community to the community. That means there is the question of whether generosity can work at a distance – say between nations, or between a community in one place and one in another.

As Barnett and Land suggest:

The starting assumption of discussions about ‘caring at a distance’ is that the sorts of virtues that people display towards loved ones, friends, neighbours, or compatriots become that much more difficult to sustain over large distances. There is, furthermore, a tendency in these discussions to run ‘distance’ together with ‘difference’ so that the problem of caring at a distance is rendered equivalent to the problem of relating to ‘Others’

Barnett & Land Geographies of generosity: Beyond the ‘moral turn. Geoforum 38 (2007) 1065–1075: 1066

This derives from an assumed common sense that you build up generosity and care in local relationships first, and any caring at a distance derives from these cares. This is pretty much David Hume’s philosophical position on ethics, and it suggests that if a person or group does not have a generous, caring locale, then they are unlikely to extend it care elsewhere – again implying the problem with neoliberalism.

Barnett & Land refer to some earlier work and suggest that care is built on four ethical capacities.

  1. the capacity to be attentive to the needs of others;
  2. the capacity of taking responsibility for meeting needs for care;
  3. the capacity to actually provide care competently;
  4. the capacity to be responsive to the ongoing needs of receivers of care.

This makes the point that Generosity is not random – we can only be generous by giving what people themselves want or need, and that requires attention, responsibility and responsiveness to feedback. It also, I would think, implies being part of a network of care exchange or productive exchange. You may not expect care at this moment, or indeed at any moment, but you are contributing to a habit of care for all within the network, including yourself and kin, should it be needed. Altruism and self-concern are not necessarily opposed [They refer to Mansbridge “On the relation of altruism and self-interest“. In: Mansbridge, J. (Ed.), Beyond Self-interest. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 133–143.] As a result, Barnett & Land suggest that base-line assumptions of “egoism and self-interest” might not be the best, or only, “starting-point from which to approach questions of practical, normative action” and that generosity is is a modality of power through which “the living together of people” is routinely sustained over time and space. Generosity could be thought of as a form of power, but as power implies ‘power over’, it is better thought of as an act of sustaining, forging and re-forging ties.

That is that caring for others, including strangers, is a normal part of life. This would appear to be relatively normal in cities, and in those customs of hospitality whereby strangers are protected and accepted for a time. These are perhaps not universal, but are common throughout the world.

Furthermore a gift, or generosity, usually has some relationship to what is valued by the recipient, or the act can misfire. Any gift can be refused. Gifting, generosity, is a potential hazard. As Mauss remarks “the veritable persona is at stake” (1954: 38). So there is interplay between altruism and self focus. If the receiver’s self focus or self enjoyment is not increased, the act of generosity fails – even though politeness may dictate that an apparently happy response is given, or needs to be given.

rather than supposing that altruism and egoism are opposed versions of selfhood, we might think instead of the co-existence of two different perspectives that go together to make up ethical subjectivity

Barnett & Land Geographies of generosity: Beyond the ‘moral turn’ Geoforum 38 (2007) 1065–1075:

generosity is necessarily a finite, partial virtue, because it is a mundane, ordinary, and everyday practice always undertaken in the company of others.

Barnett & Land Geographies of generosity: Beyond the ‘moral turn’ Geoforum 38 (2007) 1065–1075:

Philosophy

Derrida famously suggests that ‘the gift’ interrupts economic circulation as “it must not circulate, it must not be exchanged” (Given Time 1: p.7). However, the original anthropological data on the Kula gift exchange shows precisely that gifts can travel in a circle. I was once told that in Japan in the 1960s everyone had to exchange gifts, but the gifts were rarely opened and indeed circled on to the next person. There was nothing to prevent a person from receiving a gift they had once given. Derrida continues:

for there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift or debt. If the other gives me back or owes me or has to give me back what I gave him or her, there will not have been a gift….. the gift… is annulled each time there is restitution or countergift

Given Time 1: p12

Derrida implies the perfect gift cannot exist, as it would be a gift which was not noticed as a gift, that carried no obligation: “at the limit, the gift as gift ought not appear as gift: either to the donee or to the donor” (ibid: 14). “For there to be gift, it is necessary that the gift not even appear, that it not be perceived or received as gift” (ibid: 16). If there is a return there is no gift (ibid: 18). So retrospectivity destroys the perfect Derridean gift.

This seems to be setting up an idea of perfection which, in practice, few people may have. There is no reason to assume something cannot ever exist because it can be annulled. Perhaps the possibility of a gift being annulled, or rejected, makes it a gift, and this points, as emphasised previously, to the fraughtness of giving? The gift has to occur within some sequence of events and that includes events occurring after the giving, which are not determined by that giving alone. Derrida continues, by arguing that if the gift is conceptually annulled as soon as it appears then “there is no longer any ‘logic of the gift’, and one may safely say that a consistent discourse on the gift becomes impossible: it misses its object and always speaks, finally, of something else” (Given Time 1: p24).

This is defining something so that it cannot exist and then wondering why people talk about it.

Derrida illustrates his point by arguing that Marcel Mauss:

speaks of everything but the gift: [the book] deals with economy, exchange, contract, it speaks of raising the stakes, sacrifice, gift and countergift – in short of everything that in the thing itself impelled the gift and the annulment of the gift.

ibid: 24

This may be correct, but as emphasised earlier, this is the kind of gift Mauss is interested in. He is not discussing the possibility of pure generosity. Furthermore, Derrida’s realisation of fragility or impossibility is present in most anthropology. People give imperfect gifts, gifts inherently spill over into, and are affected by other parts of the relationship, other parts of society and custom, and into ‘economic’ transactions. This is not really surprising. It results from social complexity, and is not a failing that denotes unreality. Categories confining complex events are inherently lacking, just as categories such as ‘economics’, or ‘society’, are lacking and incoherent; that does not mean there is nothing to perceive. Categorical purity is perhaps impossible, but that does not mean that things cannot be.

if the gift is another name of the impossible, we still think it, we name it, we desire it. We intend it. And this even if or because or to the extent that we never encounter it, we never know it, we never verify it, we never experience it

What we can take from this is that linguistic categories are approximations; they link things which different – they may slide over difference. They may lead us to false places. Again this is not unexpected. Most human processes have the capacity to disrupt themselves. Generosity, can undermine itself, without attention and without care or if it simply acts as a prestation. Is it, for example, generous to give machetes to people who have never had steel weaponry, even if they want them, and even if you don’t expect a return?

But this is also cultural. There appear to be cultures who are aware of the ‘ungiven’ gift of life, of the gift of food, of the gift of trees and forest. Likewise, the concept of the unequitable and undeserved gift is central to the theology of St. Paul, where salvation is given unearned through generous grace, and in the Calvinist version grace is given unpredictably without regard to human effort or desire. Perhaps Derrida’s idea of gifting beyond response has a theological origin? After all, what can a self-sufficient, omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient God get back from us?

Where Derrida is useful is in his claim that what we call gifts do not have to form a coherent category to be differentiated from debt, credit, monetary transaction, (although money can be a gift), or ‘economic rationality’. That somehow the impossible gift (of existence with others) may be the origin of values – something that points beyond what appears to be happening.

However, the ideal of generosity, whatever its imperfections, is to give something of value to those being gifted, without claim on a return, perhaps not even the return of recognition, as when one gifts anonymously. Consequently for all practical purposes, generosity can flow.

Economics

In most conventional forms of capitalist economics, people work for profit for themselves, or those close to them at best. Nature is officially separated from real humans, but endlessly generous. Therefore if nature is harmed in the making of profit, there is no relevant harm. This indicates another form of exchange which we might call ‘extractive removal‘. If you take from others forcibly, then you may ‘owe’ them nothing, there is no expectation of reciprocity, there is little building of relationship. The other is just a source, a slave, a conquered object, a resource. Even people, workers, marks, etc may be treated in the same way. The extractor perceives themselves, or their group, as far more important and worthy than those who are being extracted from. There is nothing to constrain extractivism, other than the irreversible decline to non-existence, of those from whom goods can be extracted.

This is an anti-generous approach, and suggests that generosity could be subversive of this kind of capitalism in a very human way.

If there is a threshold beyond which climate change threatens to destroy ecosystems beyond recovery, then generosity stipulates that we do not cross these thresholds. This specific implication of generosity is much more demanding compared to existing concepts of sustainability, which only require that we compensate future generations by sufficient man-made capital for the loss of environmental capital to make them not worse off compared to us.

Reyer Gerlagh Generous Sustainability. Ecological Economics 136 (2017) 94–100: 100

Ethics

While generosity usually seems to be recognised as good, there is no claim that uncaring, or unaware, generosity is always good. Like all human acts in complex systems, generosity can have unintended and deleterious consequences. These have to be watched for, if we wish to be ethical. It is not enough just to give, one has to give appropriately and well.

Conclusion

Looking back to the outline, I would say that the original Climate Generosity suggestion is supported by research. However, acting generously is still not going to be simple.

Generosity is complicated, but it may open doors….

Tags:
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Pelosi and the PM

September 26, 2021

Australian Reporting

The Australian media has almost been falling over itself to note that US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has praised Scott Morrison on Australia’s climate action. The Sydney Morning Herald which is usually denounced by the Murdoch Empire as far left, had the following headlines.

Nancy Pelosi says Australia is ‘leading the way’ on climate

saying she “hailed Australia as a global leader on climate change” and “singled out Australia for praise”

and

Nancy Pelosi’s praise for Scott Morrison should terrify Labor

This article actually points out the government is not doing much, but often the headline is the take-away.

Skynews had:

Scott Morrison wraps up ‘successful’ US trip

Saying, “Absolutely no one expected Nancy Pelosi to stand there and say Scott Morrison has been a leader on climate change” predicting “some kind of deal made while he was here”

The Daily Telegraph:

Australia praised for climate change stance by Nancy Pelosi [Paywall]

This is a little bit of a beat up, It was not quite fulsome praise but hopefully it will help Morrison to move a little away from promoting gas and coal.

The PM in New York

This is what PM Morrison said in NY. This provides the context:

“our achievements in reducing emissions is an important story for Australia to continue to tell, because it’s our record of achievement that actually establishes the integrity of the commitments that we make. That we will meet and beat our 2030 targets, I was able to inform the President today. And that we will continue to work on our plan as to how we can continue to reduce emissions to zero well into the future.

As I indicated at the start of this year, it was our intention to do. Because in Australia it’s not enough to have a commitment to something. You’ve got to have a plan to achieve it. And this is an important part of the way we approach this task. You have a plan to meet your commitment. If you don’t have a plan, you don’t have a commitment.

And so we will continue to work through those issues. It was a good opportunity to discuss the important elements of that plan today, in particular technology, the hydrogen projects that we’re engaged in, which were announced particularly early this week, and the important role that hydrogen technology as well as CCUS battery technology and others are going to play, not just in advanced economies, but in developing economies as well.

We share a passion that developing economies, particularly in our region, in Indo-Pacific, will be able to develop their economies with a clean energy future, that they will be able to realise the jobs that advanced economies have, to develop their industrial base on the new energy technologies. And Australia wants to play a critical role in that. And we want to partner with countries to achieve it. This will be an important topic of discussion on Friday, particularly to the point that you’ve raised [which was, “was critical minerals and hydrogen discussed during the meeting?”]”

Press Conference Prime Minister – New York, USA 22 Sep 2021 Transcript

The fact that the Government has avoided having a plan since they came to power over 9 years ago is not entirely irrelevant to the context, but let us assume they have suddenly discovered that planning can be useful and are now engaging in it.

He is still brandishing CCS or CCUS, which is about as failed a tech as its possible to get, but helps keep us burning coal and gas….

Pelosi Comments

In my opinion, Pelosi had a choice. She could accuse him of lying and incompetence which is really bad diplomacy and likely to lock him into his current denial of a problem, or she can selectively choose his words to try and hold him too those words. This is what she said (Italics for emphasis):

Yesterday, I had the privilege of welcoming two heads of state, Boris Johnson – maybe some of you were at that presentation with Boris Johnson, Prime Minister Johnson – and then later in the day, in the morning, same morning, with Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia. Why I bring it up in association with climate is that they were so exuberant about the urgency of addressing the climate issues.

Of course, we thanked the Prime Minister of U.K. for hosting COP26.  I just had the privilege of doing that at 10 Downing over the weekend when I was at the G7 Heads of Parliament and to see what was happening there in preparation for COP26.  But then he made a presentation to our bipartisan leadership of his priorities and strongly, strongly, strongly talking about what the U.K. was doing in terms of climate. 

And the Prime Minister of Australia, Morrison, he was saying we’re not only addressing the Paris Accords, we are – our slogan is ‘We Meet It and We Beat It.’

So, they’re [Boris and Scott] leading the way, and that’s what we all have to do, is meet our emissions responsibility and our financial responsibility to other countries so that when we leave COP26, having fulfilled our obligations to the Paris Accords, and then to go further.

It’s a health issue for our children: clean air, clean water. It’s a jobs issue for our country: green technologies, being preeminent in the world on those. It’s a security issue [important in terms of the newly signed sub agreement], because security experts tell us that migrations and the rest, rising sea levels, thermal management of the planet, drying up of rivers, encroachment of deserts [All Australian concerns], the list goes on, you know what they are, I think that is cause for competition and conflict over habitat and resources.

So it’s a security issue – health, jobs, security – and, of course, a moral issue, if you believe, as I do, that this is God’s creation, and we have a moral obligation to be good stewards [appeal to Religion]. But, even if you don’t share that view, we all agree that we have a responsibility to our children, grandchildren, future generations, to hand off the planet in a very responsible way.

Transcript of Pelosi Weekly Press Conference in the Capitol Visitor Center 23 September 2021

So while Pelosi avoids criticism of the PM, and her statement does involve some praise, it seems to be more, “that’s what you have claimed to be doing, so please do it.” She also seems to praise Johnson more than Morrison.

Her approach may produce a better result than an attack, but we will have to see….

Tags:, ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Some fundamental questions: Illth

September 22, 2021

It seems to me, from what I’ve written in the last couple of posts, there are at least two fundamental questions for life on Earth.

1) Can capitalism as it is, produce prosperity without significant forms of ‘illth’, or harms, to society, personal psychology, liberty and ecology? The same can be asked of the developmental State.

2) Are pro-free market ideologies anything other than schemes to protect the dominance of the wealth elites and the illth they produce?

With these questions I’m much more interested in actually existing capitalism, than in an ideal or imaginary capitalism, in which The Market operates smoothly and only produces benefits in accordance with justice: i.e. the wealthy are virtuous and the poor are, at best, incompetent.

I have mentioned Ruskin’s concept of illth previously. It follows from Ruskin’s concept of wealth.

Definitions

Wealth, is defined by Ruskin as what makes life and health. That includes good food, pleasure, love, connection, concern, compassion, beauty, contemplation, psychological wholeness, religious experience, sharing, good work that builds a good ‘soul’ and ‘a good life’. Wealth is tied in with the cultivation of people and the provision of beauty, beneficial work and peace. Wealth involves the higher pleasures natural to humans; it is fundamentally life enhancing. We can add to this that wealth is sustainable, it exists with less destruction than can be absorbed, and transformed into wealth, by society and ecology. This is summarised in the slogan “There is no wealth but life,” adding “Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration.”

That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.

Ruskin Works 17 “Unto this Last”: 105

‘Wealth’ needs to be distinguished from ‘Riches’ and ‘illth, or there is no real economics, only encouraged destruction and tyranny.

Riches, he defines as the appropriation from another. Riches can brought about through death, power and injustice, by impoverishing and harming workers. Riches tends to be found in lots of money or possessions, not so much in real wealth. Riches can simply undermine character and soul. Riches tend to usurp, overthrown or diminish, life.

‘Illth‘ is the contrary of wealth. While wealth brings ‘weal’ (health, well-being, prosperity, plenitude or improvement) illth brings physical or mental sickness, harm, destruction, impoverishment, lack, desperation and death. Illth is anti-life.

Ruskin suggests Riches and illth go together. This coupling can be seen in despoiled landscape, grotesque buildings, sensationalist art, filth, disease and in ruined bodies and souls. Any difference between the labouring and the rich classes comes about because of this illth and their different conditions of living and working.

It is not impossible that Riches could go together with wealth, but we should not disregard the illth that also comes with riches in our current economy. Traditionally, conservatives would denounce the pursuit of riches at all costs; the cheapening of culture; the degradations of soul resulting from mass literature or TV; or the lying slogans of populism and so on. But now they seem more concerned with protecting the riches of some, than cultivating real wealth or truth. Neoliberalism may well exist to sanctify selfishness, lack of co-operation and riches for some rather than wealth for all.

Illth as ‘Externalities’

In classical economics we might identify illth with what are called ‘externalities’. That is the parts of the economic system that you can ignore, or thrust upon less fortunate others, who do not have the power to retaliate. Pollution is often classed as an externality, because it rarely enters into the costs of production, distribution or sales, unless valued people start dropping down dead. This obviously benefits the Polluter Oligarchy/Elites. And forcing them to count the illth costs of pollution would count as interfering in The Market, or at best ‘green tape’.

Riches are important to continuous illth creation, because riches can command the power, and the information channels, to classify illth as irrelevance, minor, someone else’s problem or unreal. In classical terms if the cost of illth can be dispersed onto the ‘uncomplaining’ Earth or amongst the relatively powerless, then it is ‘free’, and contributes to Riches. We should not concern ourselves with it, as it results from The Market (not from any particular people seeking riches), and if it is a problem, will be fixed by The Market and others seeking Riches.

As umair haque suggests, capitalism promotes the central idea that:

left to their own devices, self-reliant individuals in markets will expand the common good, through aggressive, crushing, competitive self-interest…. It’s led to 80% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, watching their kids be shot at school, their neighbours die and go bankrupt for a lack of basic medicine, never save enough to retire — all while the ultra-rich shoot themselves off to Mars.

umar haque The Missing Half of Economics

The other point is that it seems easier to create Riches by illth production than by wealth production. In making Riches without a concern for wealth, less energy has to be expended in exploring the harmful results, or unintended consequences, of making those Riches. With a focus on Riches, free pollution and ecological destruction is a ‘good’. This is less likely if people are focusing on wealth production. Consequently, producing Riches will tend to be more profitable than producing wealth, and hence is likely to drive wealth producers out of business.

A system which makes profit primary, will tend to ignore both illth and wealth, as it has no concern for them beyond profit, and hence produce more illth.

The battle for distinction

One of the task of people, in a functional society, may be to distinguish between wealth and illth. I would expect that this is a political battle, as those with riches will fund people to defend, ignore or deny the presence of illth, or to help confuse ‘soul-based’ illth with liberty.

I would, however, suggest that anything which, in the long term, is likely to damage land and ecology will produce illth, irrespective of any other virtues. The only excuse for it, is that it replaces some process which is even more destructive, in which case there should be ways of phasing its harms out.

Having the concept before us, it is more likely that people can see the importance of distinguishing wealth from illth, and participate in discussions. To quote haque again

Economics is there to study the question: what forms of social and political organization genuinely expand the common wealth, the human good, prosperity, possibility? If it can’t do that — it serves no purpose… at all, except as a kind of… ideological machine. 

umar haque The Missing Half of Economics

Conclusion

The distinction between wealth and illth is fundamental to the functioning of any society.

With the question of illth being put forward repeatedly, it is perhaps possible that capitalism can be altered to be less harmful. Without considering the question, then capitalism will probably be overwhelmed with its own destructiveness.

Addenda

The points about real wealth and illth, seems to me, to be as useful as when Ruskin made them over 150 years ago. I am puzzled why the idea of illth has been so thoroughly abandoned, when it seems vital to describing economic (and other) activity. I would imagine most people would want a high Ruskinian wealth and a low illth, to be part of their lives, rather than mere riches, or in general poverty (high illth, not lack of money). It is hard to talk of economic/productive/consumptive harms in general without such a term, and they occur nearly all the time.

I wonder if the idea of illth been so hard to accept because:

  • Western culture has a demand for order which causes it to ignore the disorder produced by everyday approved actions…. as I have argued on a number of occasions on this blog? Or because
  • Of the politics of capitalist domination and the politics of markets? It may be implied that riches drive the problem. Successful, well known and promoted economists will be those who tend to suggest capitalism always delivers the best possible results, and that what we observe are either a) those best possible results in action – give or take a minor tweak – or b) the fault of government.

If we talked about illth would we might have to look more closely at what drives the production of illth, and observe how that ties in with particular organisations of the economy, and work towards getting rid of them. However if we assert that markets always deliver the best results, that the wealthy are virtuous, while forgetting about illth, then we will not really criticise ‘The Market’ and its players and generators?

Tags:,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Capitalism, Profit and Transition

September 21, 2021

This is pretty much a paraphrase of a short news comment article, and an academic article by Brett Christophers, professor in the department of social and economic geography at Uppsala University in Sweden, which fits in with the last couple of posts.

It is depressing, but I think real.

Christophers suggests that it is not the cost of building energy supplies which is the issue for energy transformation but the profit margins. To me, this seems eminently plausible. Business is in business for profit, cornering the market, or social power, not for anything else.

If this is the case then the current cheapness of renewable energy is an almost irrelevant factor for commercial energy transformation.

Apparently BP, Shell and Total have all announced they are getting into renewables. They have also continued to invest in new fossil fuel fields, and I gather are not planning on cutting fossil fuels if they can avoid it. In other words, they are not in the business of reducing emissions.

Christophers writes

Crucially, all three companies agree that hydrocarbon production in areas such as oil remains significantly more profitable than renewable energy generation. Internal rates of return (IRRs) – the standard commercial measure of an investment’s profitability –are around 15% to 20% on hydrocarbons, or higher. Typical IRRs on renewables today are around 5% to 6%, although the majors think they can do better than existing renewables companies and lift returns to about 10%.

A big part of the reason for these differences, as the energy economist Nick Butler has noted, is varying degrees of competition. The barriers to entry to the renewables business are much lower than in oil and gas [Because they are so much cheaper!], thus increasing competition and depressing profitability.

As a result, all three European majors continue to invest vastly more resources into oil and gas development than renewables development. BP, for example, will start up seven major new hydrocarbon production projects in 2022, with at least three more following in 2023 or later.

Christophers Big oil companies are driven by profit – they won’t turn green by themselves. The Guardian, 25 May 2021

Conclusion

It is probable that capitalist led transitions will bog down because of the lack of imperative for fossil fuel corporations to get out of emissions production, unless profitability is removed from fossil fuel production. We can assume the Carbon/Polluter Oligarchy will fight against that.

However, this is not the case for all Renewable projects. Cheapness is vital for community based energy transformation, and so these arguments again suggest that if we want energy transformation then it has to be bottom up. It has to involve groups of people outside the commercial sphere, who do things without a basis in profit maximisation.

Tags:
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Polluter Oligarchies

September 19, 2021

Polluter Elite

Dario Kenner adds to the analysis of the Carbon Oligarchy with another exceptional book Carbon Inequality. He points out that our political and economic elites, the centres of power, are a ‘polluter elite’. Their power and wealth is also expressed as pollution.

This makes it crucial to understand the role of the richest in shaping environmental outcomes in the US and globally. In the US many of the largest fortunes were based on oil and automobiles from the 1890s onwards.

Kenner Carbon Inequality, p.5.

Wealth, power and freedom are tied up with an ability to pollute:

  • Through consumption and lifestyle. Massive air travel, private jets, private ocean going vessels, luxury imports. Energy wastage.
  • Emissions made through investments and return on investments – i.e. through investing in polluting and destructive industries.
  • Political influence and the ability to protect pollution through ‘State capture’.

We might summarise this as the polluter elites have the ‘right to pollute and poison others;’ the right to ignore harms to others produced by their own actions; the right to be unconscious of the damage they cause; the right to ignore the limits of the planet; and the right to expect the State to suppress protest against pollution with force.

These points are, if you will, the direct face of the carbon oligarchy and their violence.

Given the dominant political power of the oil & gas polluter elite the low-carbon transition will only happen on the large scale and at the rapid speed that is needed if they are weakened.

Kenner Carbon Inequality p10

Note this is not just because they are wealthy and powerful, but because as well as being dedicated to wealth and power, they are dedicated to destruction and harm in the protection of that wealth, power and liberty.

The term ‘polluter elite’ (I’d probably prefer ‘Polluter Oligarchy’) is also useful to remind us that Carbon Dioxide and Methane are only part of the pollution picture. Other forms of harmful pollution, in their origins, produced by relatively small numbers of people are also routine. Although Kenner rarely heads in that direction, it is implicit in the work.

This elite has the ability to shape the consumption choices of the general population to skew them towards lifestyles that are intertwined with fossil fuels, and other forms of pollution, so that the average citizen remains “addicted” those to fossil fuels and other forms of pollution, and they remain within an intersecting set of social systems which reinforce the pollution, and the wealth generated by pollution. Again, we need to realise that we are not just dealing with private companies, but with State owned companies, who use the State directly to support and ignore the pollution that they produce.

The Polluter/carbon Oligarchy has been in existence since at least the second quarter of the Nineteenth Century (Kenner 39), when industrialism started to render cities, atmospheres and rivers poisonous: what John Ruskin summarised in quasi-religious terms as the apocalyptic “Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century” although he did not directly tie it to industrialism, the tie is implicit as is the more obvious tie to his audience’s moral blindness and refusal to care for ecology and its beauty [12], probably because of intertwining of monetary wealth and pollution.

The Polluter/carbon Oligarchy stretches across the world. We have the polluting elites and the polluted lower classes, everywhere. It is not perhaps just a matter of the developed world vs the developing world, although it is part of that contest. The ultra rich everywhere protest against environmental protection [13], and in a plutocratic social environment their ‘vote’ counts for more than those being harmed.

A report by Lucas Chancel and Thomas Picketty from 2015 states:

Global CO2e emissions remain highly concentrated today: top 10% emitters contribute to 45% of global emissions, while bottom 50% contribute to 13% of global emissions. Top 10% emitters live on all continents, with one third of them from emerging countries…

Our estimations show that the top 1% richest Americans, Luxemburgers, Singaporeans, and Saudi Arabians are the highest individual emitters in the world, with annual per capita emissions above 200tCO2e. At the other end of the pyramid of emitters, lie the lowest income groups of Honduras, Mozambique, Rwanda and Malawi, with emissions two thousand times lower, at around 0.1tCO2e per person…

[The bottom 50% of emitters produced] 13% of world emissions

Chancel & Picketty Carbon and inequality: from Kyoto to Paris Summary.

Other research presents similar data and estimates. For example the Oxfam report, ‘Confronting Carbon Inequality,’ suggests that:

The richest one percent of the world’s population are responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the 3.1 billion people who made up the poorest half of humanity during a critical 25-year period of unprecedented emissions growth.

Between 1990 and 2015… [t]he richest one percent were responsible for 15 percent of emissions… during this time – more than all the citizens of the EU and more than twice that of the poorest half of humanity (7 percent).

During this time, the richest 10 percent blew one third of our remaining global 1.5C carbon budget, compared to just 4 percent for the poorest half of the population.

Oxfam Carbon emissions of richest 1 percent more than double the emissions of the poorest half of humanity 21st September 2020

In more detail the report states that between 1990 and 2015:

The poorest 50% have made 7% of cumulative emissions and have remained steady since 1990.
The middle 40% have made 41% of cumulative emissions and are responsible for 49% of emissions growth since 1990.
The richest 10% have made 52% of cumulative emissions and are responsible for 46% of emissions growth. The top 5% alone are responsible for 37% of emissions growth. Oxfam p3-4

Wealth asymmetry is tied up with pollution amongst other problems. Wealth asymmetry also makes change difficult. As Kenner points out:

When previous civilizations collapsed one common driver has been that the elite were able to insulate themselves from the impact of their decisions. Often the elite were motivated to seek personal profit even if in doing so they harmed the rest of society…

Mackay argues that even when societies have possessed sufficient technology and cultural knowledge, they have not used these solutions because the oligarchy has blocked them. Instead, the oligarchy has captured decision-making to enrich themselves and strengthen their own power [see 14]

Kenner, p53.

This is symptomatic of what I have called the Toynbee Cycle.

As Kenner implies, in these circumstances, the polluter elite should not be seen entirely as wealth creators but also as wealth destroyers, “where wealth is understood as the necessary conditions for a habitable planet.” (Kenner 57) ‘Monetary’ or ‘material’ prosperity (‘riches’) is not just an unmitigated good, it is (necessarily?) accompanied by destruction and harm, or by what Ruskin called ‘illth’ [15], [16]. Again resistance to diminishing the harm occurs because capital investment is sunk into harmful procedures and infrastructures such as rigs, mines, pipelines, railroads, refineries, tankers, which cannot be stopped without loss to the oligarchy (Kenner, p. 67).

The oligarchy has access to the State, it appears to be part of what keeps the State functional, and hence has access to taxpayer’s money, and this is reinforced by the neoliberal ideology that that business and the market are the main important things in life.

between early 2017 and the end of 2018 the Trump administration had successfully eliminated 47 environmental rules mainly related to fossil fuel extraction and emissions, and was trying to eliminate another 31 rules. [Popovich] The elimination of these rules helped to reduce costs for fossil fuel producers. This made them more competitive abroad which is one factor in the rise in US coal exports. Trump approved the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines. He removed regulation on leasing for oil and gas operations on federal lands. He gave the green light for drilling for oil in US coastal waters.

Fenner p.71

Noeliberalism has also led to massive tax cuts for the wealthy and wealthy organisations which has helped incapacitate the ability of those parts of the State which seek to avoid environmental disaster to act to prevent that disaster, while the dogma of growth reinforces the reluctance of the State to act against industries which have traditionally brought about employment, State revenue and cheap available energy – even if they are not currently bringing in that much revenue to the State.

Naomi Klein points out that it is often argued that fighting against climate change requires some people to engage in self-sacrifice, and this obstructs action. However, over the last 40 years most people in the West have been persuaded to engage in a self-sacrifice which has boosted the oligarchies – calls for austerity and sacrifice to support neoliberal dominance and economic stability have been successful.

we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis…. [Sensible actions] are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets….

The three policy pillars of this new era are familiar to us all: privatisation of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending.

Naomi Klein How will everything change under climate change? The Guardian 8 March 2015

They justify these lessening of people power by terms like “liberty,” “free markets” and “choice” which have, in practice, meant eliminating most restrictions on the ability of wealth elites and the Polluter Oligopoly to do as they please, and ignore the costs. We need to “shift the focus from the super-poor to the super-rich” if we are to overcome climate change

We have sacrificed for the Oligarchy, even if we sacrificed because we were deceived, now it may be time for many to sacrifice for the sake of our continuing place on Earth.

Conclusion

If we wish to survive and to limit ecological destruction and climate change, then we have to recognise the power and prevalence of the ‘Polluter & Carbon Oligarchy.’ They are not mere innocents making money and bringing prosperity, they are also stuck into bringing destruction, and issuing propaganda in favour of that destruction, or hiding that destruction. The wealth they have enables them to defend themselves and keep the destruction going. They are not just businesses, but are tied into the State, and tied into State, subsidy and protection, the more securely the more voters are convinced into abandoning the State and leaving the State to them.

At the least, we have to challenge tax and other subsidies given to the Oligarchy, challenge regulations that make it easier to pollute and destroy ecologies – such as offsets, carbon accounting and so on – and challenge imaginary technologies like carbon capture and storage, or geo-engineering, which appear to make it ok to keep pollution going on. We may need steadily increasing carbon and pollution taxes to levy revenue for the State and to compensate those among the community who face higher prices. We may also need subsidy, and plans, for communities to set up their own renewable power generation, to free them from dependence on the Oligarchy, and to make energy use, revenue and control, local and more democratic. We may need to make environmental regulation more secure, which sadly may be used to raise ill-will against the general transition.

Protests and legal challenges against expanding coal mines, gas field and oil fields – may fail, but they also keep bringing the issue into public view and they add to the costs of the Oligarchy’s operation. The more that new pollution can be delayed, the more likely that renewables will replace what was ‘needed’, and the fossil fuels become uncompetitive.

One positive sign is that in 2016-17, according to Fortune Magazine, 5 of the top six companies in terms of revenue were fossil fuel companies. Now in its August 2021 list only 2 of the top 6 are oil and gas companies, and only 6 of the top 25 are fossil fuel companies. This does not mean that fossil fuels, pollution and destruction are not important for the operation of the other companies, but that the balance is possibly changing.

But the Oligarchy is unlikely to give up without combat. This is a struggle which will not stop for a long time, but it is one we cannot afford to lose.

Tags:, ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Carbon Oligarchy and Polluter Elites

September 19, 2021

Carbon Oligarchy

Timothy Mitchell wrote a well-known book called Carbon Democracy, [1], [2], in which he argued that the organisation of coal fired energy led to democracy, because workers could relatively easily disrupt the mining of coal, the distribution of coal, and the burning of coal. Many workers were present at all points of the process, leading to a potential power over the process. For example, in 1873 over 3% of the workforce in the UK, was in coal rising to nearly 6% in 1924.

This presence gave those workers a base for a power of disruption of an essential social supply, energy, which opened up the prospect of popular representation and forced the dominant groups to listen to the workers, and try and negotiate with them in general.

In turn, this social power of disruption, lead to democracy, and to the beginnings of a relatively protective and helpful State with worker participation.

In response, or perhaps as a ‘favourable accident’, the dominant groups turned to oil, and organised oil in completely different ways to suppress the worker power found in the coal industry: “politicians saw the control of oil overseas as a means of weakening democratic forces at home” and keeping control over energy supply and use.

Oil companies worked out ways to limit control points in oil distribution. Pipelines removed mass level of worker participation in oil distribution, so workers had less power, governments were involved in enforcing oil use, and oil companies have continued to attack attempts to deal with climate change or to transition to new forms of energy.

It can be suggested that representative democracy has now been replaced by Carbon Oligarchy, which seems to have transferred power back to coal, and forward to gas.

Fossil fuels and the companies and allies behind them have lead to the disciplining of workers by industrial machines, mass production, and an international form of trade and warfare. The growth of modern economy and the modern military State has depended on fossil fuels and their organisation.

Every sector is intimately reliant on energy derived from these resources. Transportation of humans and resources depends on them. Healthcare depends on them. Food and agriculture depends on them. Manufacturing, minerals, and lumber depend on them. Access to freshwater depends on them. Retailing and service sectors depend on them. Silicon Valley depends on them. Finance depends on them. Automotive and airline industries depend on them. The vast infrastructure of a developing global economy depends on them.

Samuel Miller McDonald Fall of the Oil Oligarchy. Activist Lab 12 August 2017

Fossil fuel companies are still amongst the most wealthy and powerful transnational corporations on Earth. They have destroyed and polluted ecologies, wrecked unions, destabilised governments and reputedly sponsored wars, in order to keep the fuels flowing. They have strong political and informational contacts, and contacts with each other, so the idea of a Carbon Oligarchy ruling over dependent fossil fuel economies, states, and militaries, is not implausible.

However, the members of the Carbon Oligopoly are not necessarily capitalist; ‘membership’ can be of many forms. The biggest polluting fossil fuel organisation in the world is often estimated to be China coal. Given some responses I’ve had recently, it may also be necessary that I’m not saying the people in the Carbon Oligarchy are all individually ‘evil’. I am saying that the system tends to have expectedly harmful effects, no matter how good the individuals participating in it may be.

Hording and power

Samuel Miller McDonald then makes the point, that provided the worker participation is small, that:

Oil, gas, and coal, as resources, are easily hoarded. They lend themselves to consolidation. This makes it easy to concentrate them in the hands of a few individuals and companies.

Samuel Miller McDonald Fall of the Oil Oligarchy. Activist Lab 12 August 2017

It is the concentration of an essential energy service (from food onwards) that makes the ability of a few people to control its access an issue. Just as coal flow and energy could be controlled by workers, nowadays they can be controlled by corporate or State bureaucrats, and managers.

This then allows the increase of social power for some few groups. This is a point made by the prevalence of Oligarchies in Fossil Fuel States, such as Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, UAE. Supposed Democracies like Australia, Canada or the US, rarely have governments who are prepared to take on the Fossil Fuel oligarchy, because of the possible consequences, and because they offer tame ex-politicians good jobs.

In Australia, it is widely believed fossil fuel and mining companies were largely responsible for the overthrow of at least one prime minister. The current Prime Minister’s Chief Of Staff (John Kunkel) was Chief Adviser, Government Relations for Rio Tinto and Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the Minerals Council of Australia. And the head of the National COVID-19 Commission Advisory Board (Neville Power) was the CEO of Fortescue Metals and Deputy Chair at Strike Energy, a gas company. Power, was one of those who recommended, or cheered on, the government’s Gas led recovery from Covid.

‘Hegemony’ and Technology

The definition of hegemony is basically dominance by a small group over other groups in some social field or other – it is similar to ‘oligarchy’. The idea that dominant groups attempt ‘hegemony,’ [3], [4] economic, political, cultural and/or technological is not new and originates, in its modern form, with Gramsci [5]. The idea of Hegemony becomes even more plausible when the world has depended on a particular industry and technology for its success.

Hegemony can have technological consequences. Autonomists, for example, claim technological attempts to lower worker power is normal in capitalism. Tronti (1965) points to the “history of the successive attempts of the capitalist class to emancipate itself from the working class,” while some technologies, not only fossil fuels but supplements such as carbon capture and storage, could seem to be attempts to emancipate capitalists from the limits of ‘nature’ and the planet.

Panzieri (1981) suggests that technological innovation frequently aims to impose the dominant group’s own forms of objectivity and rationality on workers and workplaces. Mitchell also elaborates how carbon oligarchy, neoliberal theory and commercial power reinforce each other, creating modes of common sense and rationality (2013: 141ff. 197ff. 224). Walker suggests, neoliberalism, in part, has grown up to prevent environmental action from impinging on both corporate ‘liberty’ and the hegemony of fossil fuels, and therefore is incidentally a tool for Carbon Oligarchy, aiming to produce a common sense it which it seems logical to let corporations destroy the world for their profit as that is the beneficial result of the invisible and holy hand of The Market.

As implied, technology can often involve struggle between different groups of people, and different kinds of interests. The worker can try and escape the technology and organisation applied by the dominant groups, and use the technology for their own purposes, while the boss can try to use or modify the technology to suit their purposes (which are generally to discipline people, to gain power and wealth, to produce items cheaply and sell expensively, or become less dependent upon workers). As usual, we may have to be aware of unintended consequences which undermine these aims, as technologies link and alter the links between nodes in the complex system of work and society.

Think of the way the internet was initially seen as a force for rational democracy, and making work flexible for workers (it was initially largely controlled by nerds, programmers and academics) and has now become a force for ‘irrational’ authoritarianism, 24 hour availability, and commercial surveillance, as control shifted into the corporate sector.

While there are likewise features of renewable energy which open it to community control, such as cheapness, portability and modularity, there is no necessary reason to suppose that renewable energy cannot be organised to support corporate power.

Violence of the Oligarchy

The history of violence employed by the Carbon Oligarchy (corporate and State) to impose their will on oil supplying countries is well detailed by Mitchell and by other sources – although sometimes the Oligarchy may simply impose conditions in which violence against dissent against fossil fuel company action is likely [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13]. However, as Rebecca Solnit argues, while we tend to be concerned with human violence in response to climate change, we may need to admit that:

climate change is itself violence. Extreme, horrific, longterm, widespread violence.

Climate change is anthropogenic – caused by human beings, some much more than others.

Solnit, Call climate change what it is: violence. The Guardian 7 April 2014

Climate change is produced by humans who consider themselves less likely to suffer from it, and imposed on those who find it harder to resist. Part of this violence arises because of the determination, of the Carbon Oligarchy to use reserves of fuel…

Exxon says:

“We are confident that none of our hydrocarbon reserves are now or will become ‘stranded’. We believe producing these assets is essential to meeting growing energy demand worldwide….”

Exxon has decided to bet that we can’t make the corporation keep its reserves in the ground, and the company is reassuring its investors that it will continue to profit off the rapid, violent and intentional destruction of the Earth.

Solnit, Call climate change what it is: violence. The Guardian 7 April 2014

So the Oligarchy are happy to destroy the human world, or cause vast amounts of misery, to stop ‘assets’ from being stranded and profit being lost. While it is a form of violence against everyone, it is particularly a violence against the poor, who do not have the financial or informational or influencing resources to fight back, and who will suffer the most. Attempts by fossil fuel companies, and their allies, to stop the transition to new forms of energy and low emissions can also be perceived as forms of violence, against renewable businesses, as well as against those people who will suffer from climate change.

This is to a large extent invisible violence because, as Soron 2007 states, it is: “the normal, unexceptional, anonymous, and often unscrutinized violence woven into the routine workings of prevailing power structures.”

Informational Violence

Part of these prevailing power structures is the ability to control information. And thus the massive amounts of money spent lobbying and funding think-tanks that both deny and promote the violence of the Carbon Oligarchy against the world. This can be justified as free speech, when it is commandeering centres of power.

Every year, the world’s five largest publicly owned oil and gas companies spend approximately $200 million on lobbying designed to control, delay or block binding climate-motivated policy….

The most common tactics employed are drawing attention to low carbon, positioning the company as a climate expert and acknowledging climate concern while ignoring solutions. 

McCarthy. Oil And Gas Giants Spend Millions Lobbying To Block Climate Change Policies. Forbes 25 March 2019

Open Secrets claims that $112 million dollars were spent in the US alone on oil and gas lobbying in 2020.

This lobbying extended to lying about what the companies knew long ago.

In November 1965 a Report by the Environmental Pollution Panel of The President’s Science Advisory Committee described the likely impact of fossil fuel burning on the climate.

The [CO2] that remains in the atmosphere may have a significant effect on climate: carbon dioxide is nearly transparent to visible light, but it is a strong absorber and back radiator of infrared radiation, particularly in the wave lengths from 12 to 18 microns; consequently, an increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide could act, much like the glass in a greenhouse, to raise the temperature of the lower air.

The possibility of climatic change resulting from changes in the quantity of atmospheric carbon dioxide was proposed independently by the American geologist, T. C. Chamberlain (1899) and the Swedish chemist, S. Arrhenius (1903) , at the beginning of this century.

Restoring the Quality of our Environment: Report of The Environmental Pollution Panel President’s Science Advisory Committee p.113-14

They remark that some scientists have already suggested that heating is occurring (ibid: 122), and discuss the possibility of melting ice caps and rising sea levels.

By the year 2000 there will be about 25% more CO2 in our atmosphere than at present. This will modify the heat balance of the atmosphere to such an extent that marked changes in climate, not controllable though local or even national efforts, could occur. Possibilities of bringing about countervailing changes by deliberately modifying other processes that affect climate may then be very important….

Restoring the Quality of our Environment: Report of The Environmental Pollution Panel President’s Science Advisory Committee p9

The will suggest some basic geo-engineering. Perhaps even then the idea humans might slow emissions was not really conceivable (p127).

Through his worldwide industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment. Within a few generations he is burning the fossil fuels that slowly accumulated in the earth over the past 500 million years…

The climatic changes that may be produced by the increased CO2 content could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings.

Restoring the Quality of our Environment: Report of The Environmental Pollution Panel President’s Science Advisory Committee p.126-7

They hoped for better modelling to make the predictions firmer.

In July 1977 a senior Exxon scientist named James F. Black addressed an audience of company executives and told them that CO2 from fossil fuels would change the climate and might endanger humanity.

there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,

Banerjee et al Exxon’s Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels’ Role in Global Warming Decades Ago. Inside Climate News 16 September 2015

A year later he added

Some countries would benefit but others would have their agricultural output reduced or destroyed…

Present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.

Banerjee et al Exxon’s Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels’ Role in Global Warming Decades Ago. Inside Climate News 16 September 2015

In 1980, according to Barbara Freese “the science strongly suggested that either the oil industry was doomed or the world was.” This was science recognised by oil companies, and which suggested economic problems, as seven of the top 10 companies in the USA were oil companies, and two more were car manufacturers. The solution was to postpone climate action.

By the late 1980s, Exxon had begun to publicly dispute the climate consensus it once accepted, including through a highly influential business group it helped found and lead called the Global Climate Coalition (GCC)

Freese p242. See also Banerjee et al. Exxon: the Road Not Taken.

The US electrical utilities joined in with this campaign to downplay the dangers of CO2 emissions [14]. As the ‘Union of Concerned Scientists’ remarked:

For nearly three decades, many of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies have knowingly worked to deceive the public about the realities and risks of climate change.

Their deceptive tactics are now highlighted in this set of seven “deception dossiers”—collections of internal company and trade association documents that have either been leaked to the public, come to light through lawsuits, or been disclosed through Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests.

Each collection provides an illuminating inside look at this coordinated campaign of deception, an effort underwritten by ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, Shell, Peabody Energy, and other members of the fossil fuel industry.

The Climate Deception Dossiers Union of Concerned Scientists 29 June 2015

Those into conspiracy may wonder why the incredibly minor ‘Climategate’ emails got such huge publicity, and these ‘dossiers’ got so little exposure in the so-called MSM.

The fossil fuel companies formed networks, so that many different companies could co-ordinate their resistance to controls on carbon emissions, challenges to ‘assets’ and profit, and hence promote resistance to acknowledging the problems of climate change, and making that change much worse than it had to be. This action lead to the US and Australian rejection of the Kyoto treaty, “thanks to an industry coalition stressing the unfairness of exempting poor nations from emissions cuts” (Freese 245).

ExxonMobil has apparently little confidence in humanity’s ability to find ways to live without fossil fuels, but it has expressed in the past complete confidence in society’s ability to adapt to the irreversible harms associated with a destabilized climate.

Freese, p265

The violent usually think they can live with the consequences of the violence they promote.

The Oligarchy and Emissions

A Well known report by CDP states:

833 GtCO2e was emitted in just 28 years since 1988, compared with 820 GtCO2e in the 237 years between 1988 and the birth of the industrial revolution.

The Carbon Majors Database: CDP Carbon Majors Report 2017 p5

102 Organisations (41 public; 2 investor-owned companies; 16 private investor-owned companies; 36 state owned companies; and 7 state producers) have produced over half (52%) of global industrial GHG since the dawn of the industrial revolution (1751). A mere 224 companies, produced 72% of annual global industrial GHG emissions in 2015. and “Over half of global industrial emissions since human induced climate change was officially recognized [1988] can be traced to just 25 corporate and state producing entities” (ibid: p8).

The fossil fuel industry and its products accounted for 91% of global industrial GHGs in 2015, and about 70% of all anthropogenic GHG emissions

The Carbon Majors Database: CDP Carbon Majors Report 2017 p7

Likewise, a new study by Minderoo suggests that twenty large companies produce more than half of all the single-use plastic waste in the world. These plastics are made from fossil fuels.

Australia leads a list of countries for generating the most single-use plastic waste on a per capita basis…

ExxonMobil is the greatest single-use plastic waste polluter in the world, contributing 5.9m tonnes to the global waste mountain.

Laville Twenty firms produce 55% of world’s plastic waste, report reveals. The Guardian, 18 May 2021

There is a possibility that fossil fuel companies will move even more heavily into plastics if fossil fuel consumption goes down. So they are keeping profits up by moving into another ecologically polluting product.

While the products of emissions pollution are possibly mass consumed, the causers and profiteers from that pollution are very limited – profits are concentrated which gives the organisations more political force.

The next post continues the argument by looking at Dario Kenner’s idea of the ‘Polluter Elite.’

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Wealth Asymmetry as Crisis

September 13, 2021

This is just a summary of the opening chapters of a book called Ten Years to Midnight (2020), by a team of people from Price Waterhouse Coopers, who figure we have ten years to solve major global problems before the situation becomes irreparable.

Given the organisation the authors come from we would not expect them to be left leaning, so hopefully other people can take what they say about the causes of the problems seriously.

What they say is that wealth asymmetry (when a relatively small group of people own most of the wealth) is one of the fundamental problems facing the planet. Wealth asymmetry has social consequences – especially if people feel they are heading downwards, or struggling to keep up with the prosperity they used to have. I would say that wealth asymmetry affects two of the other three problems they identify: Technology destroying jobs, and political polarisation and increasing distrust.

Less than 1% of the world’s population hold over 45% of the world’s wealth. The top 10% hold 80% of the world’s wealth (p.15-16).

Growth in shareholder income has been more than double the growth in wages between 1999 and 2015 (p.16).

Money is moving from publicly listed companies to private equity markets, which limit investment to the well off. The number of people investing in publicly listed companies is shrinking (p.17-18).

In the OECD the size of the middle class has consistently shrunk since 1988. In North America, the number of people who identify as belonging to the middle class has also fallen “from two thirds to one half of the population since 2008” (p.15).

Home ownership is shrinking (p.18).

“For the first time in recent history a large percentage of parents believe their children will be worse off than they are” (p.15).

Governments collect less tax from the wealthy (p.18), and try to make it up from the less wealthy.

Globalisation, and the technology which enabled it, exported worker’s wealth and jobs from the developed world, which may have been good for the places the jobs were exported to…. but the benefits overwhelmingly went to the upper echelons, even with the revitalising of the so-called ‘knowledge industries’. Most people in the developed world were left behind.

“Unchecked, this crisis will infect (indeed it is already infecting) our social, economic and political systems” (p27).

  • One thing missing from all this analysis, is the obvious point that the greater the wealth asymmetry, the greater the power of the wealthy to influence politicians and laws, and to influence what most people believe to be true, and how they act. The wealthy can buy media, media performers and think tanks (and sometimes universities). The greater the wealth asymmetry, the easier it is for the wealthy to make sure they get more of the wealth, and disempower most people even more, making the situation much worse. It also makes it relatively easy to divide and conquer the ‘lower classes’ and get them to hate each other rather than see the problems they have in common – thus increasing polarisation and distrust.

“When the general population is not prospering, societies are in deep trouble”.

  • More accurately, I think, societies are in trouble, when people have lost a sense of things improving, or see the world as in decline.

In that situation, people don’t dream, they don’t plan, they don’t purchase things, they don’t set up businesses. Creativity declines. People may get resentful. Community participation may decline, so life gets harder for all. People may fall into drugs and related violence as distractions from their misery. They can become insular. There may be less community involvement, but others are seen as hostile. In particular the dominant groups, can be seen to be the problem. And they might well be part of that problem. People may cling to an idea of a better past, while trampling on the institutions that have failed them; thus destroying that past (p.27).

  • I’d also suggest that community can in some circumstances build up during collapse, as people withdraw from dependence on elites and come to mutual dependence upon each other. This happens in many poorer areas in the world, where they create their own economies, politics and self help. But it seems rare in the developed world, perhaps because capitalism destroys such felt interconnection – everyone fights against everyone else… but I don’t know.

Even university graduates no longer have a path to prosperity before them, in the supposed knowledge economy. They probably will not get high paying jobs, they may be expected to intern for free in the hope of a job, they will pay a large portion of their income for accommodation or live with their parents (which may not help maturation) and they will have large education debts to pay off. In the UK the education debt has almost tripled in the last 5 years (p30-31).

Older people face pension cutbacks on inadequate pensions, and those who have pension funds face market risk. If the market truly tanks, then they will loose everything. In the US, pension fraud by employers seems common, and people again lose money (p.32-3).

People in the middle of their career may have a mortgage, especially given the low interest rates we currently have. However, they may be supporting parents and children. Any rise in interest rates, or loss of job (due to automation, market crash, or managerial incompetence) would be catastrophic. They have little potential for resilience. If they fail, then their dependents fail. One estimate suggests that over 35% of existing jobs in the US are threatened by automation and artificial intelligence. So a large number of people’s survival is at risk.

From Will robots really steal our jobs? – PwC

Even if new jobs replace the ones being destroyed, then change is painful, and change does not promise success or new prosperity (p.36-39).

  • Technology is designed to render workers irrelevant to cut costs and increase employer power over the production process. This increases wealth asymmetry and occurs because of the separation between levels of wealth. Employers have little care for their workers. Eventually the current style of mass economy will collapse as fewer and fewer people have disposable income.
  • To add to this, few people are likely to think, comfortably, the world is currently stable. They likely know (even if unconsciously) jobs and homes (sunk capital) can be threatened, or destroyed, by ecological failure, storm, flood, fire and so on. This conglomeration of potential and painful disruption, makes up an existential crisis.
  • I would suspect such people would be prone to trying out fascisms that promise stability and returns to greatness. Without that they may end up with nothing. Fascisms lead to scapegoating, and internal warfare against people defined as the evil other, so they lead to increased intolerance, increased violence and increased precariousness, because you have to make sure you, personally, are never thought of as one of, or even in sympathy with, that evil other.
  • The evil other is usually promoted as a distraction from problems generated by the wealth elites. This again points to polarisation as a possible deliberate creation.

The authors of this book point (p.60-61) to the 2020 Edleman Trust Barometer which states

despite a strong global economy and near full employment, none of the four societal institutions that the study measures—government, business, NGOs and media—is trusted. The cause of this paradox can be found in people’s fears about the future and their role in it, which are a wake-up call for our institutions to embrace a new way of effectively building trust [and] balancing competence with ethical behavior….

A majority of respondents in every developed market do not believe they will be better off in five years’ time, and more than half of respondents globally believe that capitalism in its current form is now doing more harm than good in the world…

In a majority of markets, less than half of the mass population trust their institutions to do what is right.

2020 Eldelman Trust Barometer

The authors of the Trust Barometer are clear that “distrust is being driven by a growing sense of inequity and unfairness in the system.” They report that a massive:

83 percent of employees say they fear losing their job, attributing it to the gig economy, a looming recession, a lack of skills, cheaper foreign competitors, immigrants who will work for less, automation, or jobs being moved to other countries.

2020 Eldelman Trust Barometer

in capitalism, survival depends on jobs, and hence survival seems threatened – and this does not factor in the problems of climate change or pandemic.

These problems around wealth asymmetry are mutually reinforcing (p.39), and affect most people.

  • This is a crisis which seems to have no signs of getting better. And pretty much the only solution we are allowed to hear, is “leave it to the market. Don’t trust government. Don’t participate in your own government, or participate violently.” Beat people up or Give up.

Political Conclusion

The book does not recognise the politics of wealth asymmetry and its tendency to oligarchy, or the rule of the few. It does not appear to consider how the asymmetry and oligarchy has been established, and how that oligarchy makes maintaining its power more important than solving pronounced problems such as: wealth asymmetry; technological displacement of workers; or the ecological destruction which is used to generate wealth. This makes its remedies somewhat dubious.

There is one old point, usually said to have been made by US Supreme Court Justice, Louis Dembitz Brandeis (1856-1941)

We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.

Raymond Lonergan in Mr. Justice Brandeis, Great American (1941), p. 42.

Wealth Asymmetry is not a sign of social health, and that leads on to the next two posts about the Carbon or Polluter Oligarchy as the main factor in causing climate change, and in preventing us from dealing with it.

Tags:,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Capitalism, disorder, sociopathy

September 10, 2021

This is a response to a response, elsewhere online, to my definition of capitalism post.

Their argument is that the features I determined to be part of capitalism, are not part of capitalism, not found in any dictionary definition of capitalism and are found elsewhere. They argue that wealthy people are not sociopaths but quite nice, and this is backed by research…. They also say that with no profit, there is no sustainability.

I will suggest that:

  • My definition is useful and does not delete important features of capitalism as system.
  • While I am dubious that the capitalist elite are specially virtuous, I did not argue that wealthy people have to be sociopaths for them to be a problem, they just have to team up to support what they see as their own interests, and this teaming up seems obvious and ‘natural’.
  • It is useful to remember that sometimes capitalist organisations do commit crimes, and override the liberty of other people.
  • You cannot separate capitalism, capitalist government and capitalist economics. Economic action is political action and vice versa.

Defining capitalism

I agree that all the factors I have described as being part of capitalism are possibly found elsewhere. That is not the point. The point is that they are nearly all part of any actually existing capitalisms. I don’t think you can discuss the functioning of capitalism by ignoring those factors or pretending they are irrelevant. As far as I can see, no form of capitalism has ever existed without most of these factors. Certainly modern capitalism appears to hold them all, and the fact that it does hold to most of these features, means that it cannot support liberty (collective or individual), for anyone other than some of the wealth elites. Capitalism needs to be considered as a system of power as much as a system of trade. Capitalism requires a State and will take over that State, to expand its power and security.

This is why I cannot support a definition of capitalism that pretends capitalism is (for instance) just a form of private property and trade. Trade happens everywhere (even in communist States), and is no inherent sign of capitalism. There are many forms of trade which are not capitalist. Likewise, if we are going to talk about ‘private’ property as being central to capitalism (which it is), we have to talk about the different forms of property, the history of property, the history of property accumulation, the destruction of other forms of property by capitalism, and look at how private property gets selected out from general production. To understand capitalism you probably have to understand non-capitalist and stateless societies, otherwise capitalism might just seem ‘natural’ to people who have lived with it alone. It is not ‘natural’ in any sense other than it can exist.

These kinds of overly simple definitions are like saying communism occurs when the workers own and control the means of production in common and live happily ever after. It is true in ideology, but we have to ignore a lot of history, organisation, practice and failings to make it an accurate description of large scale Communism.

Capitalism is a set of variations on a form of social organisation that seems to require, and enforce, hierarchies, inequalities and destruction. Any form of analysis of, or support for, capitalism that decides these unpleasant factors are unimportant, or accidental, seems inaccurate, and is probably dangerous or ‘ideological’ because it is set on being unconscious, and is refusing to deal with the realities of actually existing capitalism.

The pretense of perfection is part of the problem

Nearly all hierarchies and tyrannical systems, I am aware of, pretend that their cruelties, obstructions, miseries, failures, inability to meet their ideals, and so on, are aberrations, or nothing to do with the ‘real’ system. The Islamic world would be in perfect peace and harmony if people were truly just obeying God’s obvious and wise laws and there were no infidels stirring up trouble – the system itself is not a problem. Communists would not require a State or a secret police if they had completely succeeded in the revolution, and these temporary necessities, will fade away when they have succeeded. They are not essential parts of communism – the system itself is not a problem. We would have a healthy, happy and peaceful Germany without the Jews, and other people who keep fighting against the true wisdom of the Führer, and who wish to hold us back – the system itself is not a problem… etc etc.

Same with capitalism, all this undesirable stuff is just an accident of history or the fault of government; it has nothing to do with ‘real’ capitalism – the system itself is not a problem. This move supports a fantasy of a capitalism which has never existed, and substitutes that fantasy for the more checkered reality.

I’m also not alleging that all monetary profit is bad (although there are other forms of profit, social, intellectual, spiritual, ecological etc, which are probably as important). I am alleging that making monetary profit the only value is quite probably harmful, as it appears to suppress other all the other values, and shuts down, or restricts, our perception of reality to what makes profit. It also makes wealth the major marker of virtue, and thus allows people to sell (or buy) anything, as their only principle is wealth accumulation, and wealth is the most all-encompassing power, as it can buy any other power. More importantly, the drive for perpetually increasing profit, is almost undoubtedly harmful and counters any sustainability criteria such as the survival of other people, or ‘nature’. It is an example of the case in which a drive might be useful at an individual level, but is harmful if everyone does it. It also becomes almost impossible to survive by not doing it, if everyone else does it – you are likely to get bought out, and either asset stripped, or converted into an increasing profit organisation.

Disorder Theory

If a system nearly always displays recurrent features or failings (no matter how unpleasant or apparently unrequired), then those features are part of the system. And if you want to describe or improve the system, you have to understand how the system really works in its total mess, recognising that everything effects everything else, and nothing in the system is isolated from the system. Accidents pass, but recurrent features are likely to be significant features.

I call this realisation ‘disorder theory’. The statement that social modes of ordering tend to produce the disordering and unintended consequences, that they consider threatening, is not popular. People will try and separate out the order which they declare ‘good’, from the disorder they ignore, declare ‘bad’ or irrelevant, or someone else’s fault – but they all occur together as part of the order.

The idea, pretty obviously, stems from depth psychology, in which it is asserted that we repress parts of our nature, inclinations and understandings (our psychological and biological systems) so as to fit in with our familial and social situation, and that this repression bites back in the forms of symptoms which disrupt our ability to fit in, or to live in any kind of satisfying sense. However, we are encouraged to pretend that these symptoms are unreal, or personal, rather than generated by the social system of order itself. No matter how common, they are said to not be essential parts of our faulty adaptation to social reality.

The Virtuous Billionaire

The connection between wealth, morals and social organisation seems complex. See these popular references with a mixture of arguments – some of which tells of the same research from different perspectives [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], [24]. There are a growing number of ethnographies of corporations and financial services organisations, which could add to our understandings of how customs and conventions can increase harmful behaviour.

However, it seems obvious that ‘dominating hierarchies’ will tend claim that their ruling elites are superior in some way, either because god has chosen them, because their rulership is natural, or perhaps because they are particularly virtuous or particularly talented. The dominant class nearly always claims to exemplify a special set of virtues.

In aristocracies, the dominant groups are said to be noble, learned, valiant, different beings to peasants, placed in power by God, and so forth.

In theocracies the dominant groups are said to be holy, knowledgeable of scripture, wise, keep to the laws rigorously, touched by god, in direct communication with god, etc.

In bureaucracies the elite have unquestionable loyalty to the state, are thorough, knowledgeable, honest, familiar with regulations, good hearted, neutral, refined etc.

In capitalism, the elites are rich, hard working, noble, trustworthy, uniquely talented, self-sacrificing for their vision and so on.

This claim can be true of some. I assume some high-up people in the Catholic Church are religious, and do live relatively holy lives. But it may not be correct about all of them. One Marcus Aurelius does not make up for loads of Commoduses, or people selected to the throne because the guard thought they could control them, or who were crazy enough to kill everyone else first. Same with capitalists. Not all billionaires have earned their wealth. Some inherited it. Some were massively lucky. Some likely destroyed or copied the work of others. Some appear massively incompetent, completely untrustworthy and are well known for ripping people off or vindictive revenge. Some might once have been reasonable people, but lost it as power and wealth corrupted them. Donald Trump should end the argument about the inherent virtue and good will of all billionaires, even if you think that Warren Buffett and George Soros may be good people. Trump’s corruption was well known to everyone who read the US business pages before his election, although this was largely ignored by the entrepreneur worshipping US corporately-owned media.

If the society is literate, there may be a whole literature teaching you how to cultivate the virtues the elite are supposed to have. This not only gives readers hope of social mobility, but it sanctifies the elite – who do this naturally, or perhaps after a sinful youth. There are hagiographic books telling you how smart, or holy, or whatever these people are; some of these get quickly forgotten when it becomes obvious their heroes were not smart or consistently good at what they do (Al Dunlap?). There are even books glorifying Donald Trump as the most talented man who ever lived and which claim to teach you the secret of rising from nothing like he supposedly did. Some books point out how he has been blessed by God, to bring righteousness to business and America. Such books should be recognised as what they are, propaganda tools, which is not to say they cannot ever be useful. Stoicism is as valid for Emperors as for the poor. And books of exposure, may attract law suits, or other forms of revenge, like Trump Nation did, so the elites are protected.

Why then do people co-operate with ‘bad’ but powerful and wealthy people? Sometimes, people may not read the business press and learn, for example, that working for Trump is only rarely a good deal. However, we can assume that more often people work for business people for the same reason they work for dictators (why did people not kill Stalin in advance?), because they hope the money and power will flow down, because the person only occasionally goes off the edge, because it seems safer to be an associate than an enemy, because you don’t recognise you are expendable, because you like being close to power and wealth, because you think you are smarter than them, because you think their selfishness will help you manipulate them, because you have seen what happens to businesses that challenge them, because they are good liars and promisers, because they are exciting, because you hope they will look kindly on you and leave you alone, and sometimes because they are well-intentioned and kind people, who kill thousands with the best intentions. Perhaps corrupt people work for corrupt people, so it becomes a self-reinforcing circle. Most people who work for them, do so because if they don’t work for them, or somebody like them, then they will starve.

In other words powerful capitalists get people to work with them or for them, just like other powerful elites get people to work for them. Politicians who lie, should lose trust, and people should abandon them, but Donald Trump again demonstrates that supporters won’t necessarily move away no matter what; they may deny obvious lies, declare the lies are unimportant, or decide the lies are true, they may argue that the person’s failures only occur because of a monstrous conspiracy. Indeed because politicians depend upon good moral standing, good interpersonal skills, being obsessively focused and productive, with an ability to deal with incredibly complex situations and balance all kinds of competing interests, that to pull political success off they must be honourable, or they will not succeed. People in the opposing parties (and their supporters) are already against them to begin with, some of their own party want to replace them with themselves, and some people are generally against successful people in any case. They have to be good. The logic is sound, but of course it is inadequate to describe reality, just as it is inadequate to describe the reality of corporate power. People get to occupy positions of power and wealth for all kinds of reasons, not least inheritance.

Sociopathy and Wealth

I’m not actually alledging anything about wealth and sociopathy, other than:

  1. Some people allege capitalist (and other) managerial structures could select for sociopathy or even create it by creating distance between people, and power over ‘less worthy people’… This is not inherently implausible.
  2. I can’t see any reason why sociopaths would not be attracted to making money, or why they would not be good at it, or again why making heaps of money would not encourage social separation, feelings of dominance, and hence what we can call ‘sociopathy’.

Now this does not mean that all the wealthy are sociopaths or psychopaths, or whatever label you want to use. I am not arguing that billionaires have to be ‘bad people,’ just that, like most humans, they will team up to bend policy and politics to favour what they perceive as their common interests. This should not surprise anyone. In a capitalist society, money talks loudly and persuasively.

To repeat, a person does not have to be a sociopath to team up with others to support what they consider to be their joint interests, dominance, security or place in ‘The Market’. It would be incredibly surprising if wealth elites did not act this way with the aim of pushing their interests in the State, and they have the money to do it successfully, especially if they team up. And this is pretty much what we observe in modern politics.

The fact that libertarians, Austrian economic theorists and so on, do not recognise this as an issue, while being fully capable of recognising that other people (workers, politicians) can team up to interfere with ‘The Market’, is interesting.

And it seems logical that people who could buy their way out of the penalties of law, or consider fines as costs, would not fear the consequences of illegal acts; consequences are for lesser people.

I just read that a family who profited from opiate addiction and death, have managed to escape prosecution through bankruptcy and largely keep their fortunes. They apparently show no remorse or feel there is any need to compensate families. Defending their wealth might come first? Sociopathy?

Likewise where I live people are being thrown out of their homes, doctors’ advice about pollution is being ignored, limits to liability are much smaller than the evidence suggests they should be, contracts being signed before Environmental inquiries held etc… all to make money for a toll road company. Let’s be clear. People will die because of this, houses have and will fall down, and there is nothing anyone could do to stop it. Protests and political campaigns were ignored. This is a bought State in action, defending profit maximisation at all costs. Sociopathy, or normality?

Most of the damage to the Earth’s ecology is owned by a very small percentage of the Earth’s population. But they get away with it, even when there is now no real excuse to pretend such damage is not a problem. Indeed we know that fossil fuel companies have been fighting against recognition of climate science for years, deliberately creating the conditions for mass loss of property and life, to keep making profits. Instead they had rather blame population growth. Sociopathy? Maybe. Capitalism, yes.

I should not need to mention:

  • Tobacco companies, and the trade in death they did quite well out of, and are still doing well out of, and still searching for new customers to kill.
  • Slave traders arguing they were civilising and rescuing savages while delivering them to kindly masters who had an interest in looking after them
  • Finance companies shifting costs on to those they ripped off, or the general behaviour of finance companies in the lead up to the crash of 2007-8, and its aftermath
  • Arms manufacturers who want to sell to terrorists
  • I’ve previously mentioned the East India Company’s plunder of India. But to add to it, they cut off the thumbs of hundreds of weavers in Bengal to maintain their profit on imported cloth, but this was more or less normal for companies
  • Other capitalists have had workers working in dangerous and unhealthy conditions, because workers may not have any alternatives. The mid to late 19th Century free market generated many quite unsettling stories and reports about this, and workers had to join together and fight hard for their safety.

Conclusion

To understand capitalism, you have to understand real, existing, forms of capitalism, not ideal forms which do not exist and have never existed, and which only exist as ideas to justify the actually existing forms of capitalism and pretend they are other than what they are.

To be able to prevent tyranny you have to be able to stop it from occurring, and that includes tyranny of the State, tyranny of wealth, tyranny of religion, tyranny of violence, tyranny of landholding, tyranny of control of communication and information, tyranny of control of energy, and tyranny of enforcing valued social categories.

If you want to stop the tyranny of the State, then you need to dismantle or inhibit the State. If you want to stop the tyranny of religion, then you have to diffuse the power of the Church, or the organisation of religions and introduce more religions…. If you want to stop the tyranny of wealth, you need to opposed the way the wealth is organised and passed on to the next generation. If you don’t then the tyranny will become established….

This sets up a paradox, that for some people to have liberty, the power of other people to deprive them of liberty must be curtailed. This can either be done by an independent power, which is likely to become arbitrary, or by attempting to set up a more participatory system of governance, by allowing such customs such as demand giving, or distribution of wealth and property at death, to non-family members, or simply destruction of that wealth.

If you cannot stop accumulation of power occurring then you have surrendered and there is no liberty. Libertarians do not acknowledge the power of wealth, or the power of organisation by the wealthy, or consider it an accident, and not part of the social functioning of wealth. They do not seem to promote limits to the authority of wealth.

Of course ‘liberty’ may not be the only social virtue to begin with.

Finally, we are in a situation in which the US political party of corporate domination, is:

1) Ignoring major problems with capitalism and ecology because it affects corporate sponsorship,
2) Pretending that the wealthy and the poor have the equal liberty to avoid a pandemic and get good treatment,
3) Preventing businesses from protecting their staff and customers from the pandemic,
4) Trying to prohibit teachers from talking about the history of race in America,
5) Lying about an election result with no evidence that will hold up in court,
6) Attempting to restrict votes that will go to their opponents, and
7) Attempting to restrict investigations into an apparent attempted coup.

Like the corporate and aristocratic backers of nazism, the right seem to be trying to hold capitalism and its hierarchy stable by cultivating an authoritarian, non-democratic State. This may be the standard capitalist response to crisis. It may not be the only such response. Again it needs thinking about.

Tags:, ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Defining Capitalism

September 5, 2021

It is hard to define capitalism rigorously without excluding some of the obvious characteristics of capitalism, or making the definition so general that it perhaps reduces capitalism to exchange, or ‘private property’ (as if there was only one kind of private property). This is too general to be useful, other than to pretend capitalism is innate. There are also varieties of capitalism [2], [3], and cultures of capitalism. Capitalism in Norway, is not the same as capitalism in the 21st Century UK, or 19th Century UK, or in the USA, or Japan, or India, or China etc.

So this definition is a definition by listing. If some economic system is described by a large number of these points, then it is strongly capitalist, if it has non of them it is not capitalist. Other systems may share some of these points as well.

  • Capitalism is a form of State sanctioned, and enforced economic hierarchy.
  • In capitalism, the majority of people have to sell their labour (physical and mental) and the products of their labour to an employer. The property resulting from labour, is generally not owned by the labourers, but by the employer prganisation. In some cases even ideas that have nothing to do with their work are owned by the workers’ employer. This general ‘alienation’ of labour may rob people of satisfaction.
  • In general capitalism attempts to make all labour wage labour. It destroys self-sufficient social groups, by making them ‘uneconomic’, taking them over and merging them into a bigger company, or through violence.
  • Most ordinary wage labour is governed by downward pressure on wages. Automation of labour, that removes the skills of labour helps to diminish the cost of labour, and make workers interchangeable and largely indistinguishable. However, wage labour closer to the top of the hierarchy may become more expensive, or prosperous.
  • Capitalism ideally gives an employer the right to dismiss any worker in any circumstance. There are few official types of continued responsibility, obligation or relationship, between bosses and workers. Capitalism breaks social bonds around labour.
  • In capitalism the power of the boss should increase, while the power of the workers is diminished. Obedience to a boss, who has no obligation to you, is one of the fundamental social relations of capitalism. It does not promote liberty.
  • Capitalist property is marked by exclusion and exclusivity. In general, the owner of property has the right to destroy that property without regard to anyone else, and to exclude anyone else from using it. On privately owned land the owner can determine, as far as their intention prevails, what happens on that land. Libertarians, for example, frequently support the right of land owners to suppress protests on their land, even if that land has been appropriated from the community.
  • The one exception seems to be that mining companies can often do what they like on your land to get at materials they have contracted from the State. This varies from place to place. If this is the case their is a hierarchy of property ownership.
  • You can ideally sign away your rights to anything for payment. Some libertarians support ‘voluntary’ slavery.
  • Capital, and property, itself grew from the plunder of colonies (or plundering of the plunder of the colonizers as with British Privateers), theft or conquest of land, dispossession of people from land, and the forced labour of human bodies. Capitalism and its property/capital is based on the products of theft, reinvested in new production. This is usually justified by instancing other forms of input and ‘improvement’ usually done by forced or wage labour. If, however, a landlord’s property is improved by tenants, then this does not apply the other way, and legally justify taking the landlord’s property.
  • Capitalism usually involves the free movement of (previously appropriated) wealth (capital), and its investment in the production of more wealth. It is an ethical question, whether capitalism and its inequalities can be abstracted from history.
  • Capitalism usually allows cheap ecological destruction and pollution, so as to maximise profit.
  • Capitalism appears to demand constant growth and expansion. Companies also seem to demand that the rate of profit continues to grow. It is not obvious, that this can keep happening forever. If expansion cannot go on forever, then capitalism is self destructive.
  • Capitalist processes tend towards concentration of wealth. While the total wealth may increase, the percentage of total wealth going up the hierarchy also increases. So inequality of prospects, action and power is magnified. If this does not happen, then the system is probably not capitalist.
  • The State in capitalism, tends to be controlled by the wealth elites. The more the wealth difference between them and the rest of the populace increases, the greater the tendency.
  • The State eventually becomes a tool, whereby capitalism, its property, regulation and inequality is protected. However, different businesses may have different ideas of protection, hence the State can still be a site of limited dispute.
  • Capitalism’s main institution is the stock (shareholder) company – which is a form of collaboration between controllers, and owners, of wealth (capital).
  • As the wealth elites own shares in many companies, and may be on the board of directors of many companies, or own those directors, collaboration between members of the wealth elites increases, at the expense of everyone else, including those who actually make the products or services the companies sell.
  • ‘Crony capitalism’ is normal and approved, as is suppression of worker associations.

General points

Contemporary capitalism has an origin in the UK sometime between the 16th and 19th Centuries. It is not natural, eternal or innate. It spread through force (East India Company, and imperialism) and also because nations wanted the same level of military might that it generated to protect themselves and gain power. States have frequently promoted capitalism, to boost their power.

The idea of the ‘free market’, acts to reduce all social and governance questions to questions of profit maximisation, and wealth increase for the wealth elites. It also tends to act as an excuse for letting ‘The Market’ determine what should be done, no matter how destructive, as long as it benefits some of those wealth elites, and dispute amongst the wealth elites does not then lead to some form of regulation to benefit (or protect) some of that elite.

Worship of the Market does not lead to liberty, because the market is regulated and patterned to favour certain groups and their existence. Liberty might be found in escape from the market.

All markets have regulation. Market activity includes politics. If people pretend markets do not include politics, then the market is probably being regulated in favour of a dominant group. There is no such thing as a ‘free market.’

As capitalism is marked by conflict between ‘workers’ and owners and controllers of employment and capital because of:

  • Alienation of labour and the products of labour
  • Destruction of self-sufficiency
  • Forcing wages down, deskilling of labour, making workers interchangeable and impersonal (dehumanisation),
  • No ties between workers and employers, other than money
  • Demands for obedience from bosses
  • Concentration of wealth
  • Control of companies being reserved for the few
  • Capitalist control of the state and increasing exclusion of non-capitalist interests, unless they support capitalist interests…

then capitalism is marked by class struggle. However class struggle is not unique to capitalism, so is not part of its definition. Also, some of this struggle can be remedied by easily available, non-policed and livable unemployment payments. These allow workers to leave bad bosses, and bad working conditions, without suffering, and can help ‘nudge’ employers into providing better working conditions and sharing more of the profit with the producers. This kind of practice increases general liberty, and so is strongly opposed by capitalists.

Tags:,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »