Environment versus the market
By Allen Myers
"Industry" has a bad name among environmentalists. The mental picture that most of us form when we hear the word is a chimney belching poisonous gases or a pipe pouring toxic wastes into a river. That's hardly surprising. Since the time of the "dark Satanic mills" that blighted the English environment in the early 19th century, industry — all forms of large-scale, cooperative mass production — has probably brought about more environmental destruction than all previous human activity.
In the last two centuries, human industry has poisoned vast areas with its by-products, destroying irreplaceable ecosystems and driving countless species of plants and animals to extinction.
It has turned vast rivers into little more than open sewers for chemical wastes on their way to the oceans, many of whose creatures are already being wiped out by mechanical "harvesting" of the seas without regard for the next year, let alone the next generation. In large areas of Australia and North America, its agriculture has destroyed topsoil that took millennia to accumulate.
It has saturated our surroundings with chemicals mostly unknown in nature, whose harmful effects on ourselves and other living creatures we are only now becoming aware of.
And through its direct and indirect consumption of fossil fuels, it has already altered the climate of our planet in a manner which conceivably could become a self-sustaining chain reaction.
The increase in productivity which comes from large-scale production has also made it possible for human numbers to increase at unprecedented rates. The earth's population has now passed 5½ billion — around six times what it was in 1800.
Given these realities, it's not surprising that a common response to the mess is to say: Let's get rid of industrialism, of big factories and mass production. Ted Trainer is perhaps the environmentalist best known for advocating a change to smaller-scale production.
But we face some real dilemmas here. First, small-scale production is not inherently less polluting, if we compare the amount of pollution to the amount of the product.
Of course, there are some things which could be done on a smaller and less polluting scale: it's estimated, for example, that 70% of electrical energy is lost in transmission, which suggests that there could be considerable reduction in pollution through more localised production of electricity (especially if it relied on methods such as solar energy).
But it can just as well be the case that small-scale production is more polluting than large-scale. For instance, if BHP's steel production were to switch from a few large steel mills to small backyard blast furnaces like the Chinese government promoted during the 1960s, the total amount of polluting gases and other wastes and the total of energy consumed would probably be much greater than they now are, for the same amount of steel production.
And the environmental destructiveness of organochlorine products has no relationship with the size of the factories in which they are produced, nor with whether pesticides are applied by a single operator from a truck or plane, or by individual farmers on small plots.
So those who are serious about rolling back industrial production also usually advocate a reduction in the overall amount of goods produced. That's at least consistent, but it doesn't offer a way of solving our problems.
There's a reason why human numbers have risen to 5½ billion in the modern era rather than in some earlier period. Industrial methods of production both lowered death rates through medical advances and made it possible to support such a large and increasing population.
Of course, on a world scale, the majority of people don't live very well. Things would be better if the wealth were shared more evenly, but average consumption is not very extravagant.
If you reduce production before you establish a system of equitable distribution, you're condemning large numbers of people to permanent impoverishment, and you may be condemning many to death. That is not a feasible path to solving the world's environmental problems.
For better or for worse, we are stuck with mass production. There is simply no other way of providing even the most minimal requirements of food, clothing, housing, education and health care for 5½ billion people.
If we can't do away with large-scale production, can we change its character? We'd better hope we can, because the present course is taking us toward disaster.
We tend to think of industry as material objects: factory buildings, machines and so on. But industry, after all, is something that people do; people make the machines and the factories.
Industry is a particular form of collective human activity, so why is it so difficult to change? Why does nothing happen when someone points out that toxic wastes shouldn't be dumped into streams, or that organochlorine products may destroy the ability of many species to reproduce — possibly including human beings?
The problem is that we have lost control of production. It's something we do, but, somehow, we no longer control it.
In fact, it seems rather pointless to argue whether industry should be conducted on a smaller scale. Suppose that we reached agreement on the ideal size for establishments engaged in production: how would we implement that agreement?
There are no real social mechanisms available that give us direct control over how industry is conducted. If you notice a factory pouring waste into a river, you can't knock at the door and tell whoever answers, "Look what you're doing — you'd better stop".
It's a long and difficult process to get that waste pipe plugged (even if Greenpeace comes and plugs it, the factory owners will unplug it and bring in the police to protect their pipe).
You can get good people into parliament and ensure that they pass appropriate legislation, but several years may follow during which lawyers will fight in court about whether the waste pipe is really covered by the legislation. Or perhaps you could organise a consumer boycott of this factory's products to persuade it to stop — provided you can avoid being prosecuted under the Howard government's new Industrial Relations Act.
These indirect ways of trying to change industry will be of varying effectiveness depending on all sorts of circumstances. But in general, when a factory is doing something harmful, something antisocial, there's no direct way for society to say, "Hey, stop that!" and have it stopped.
Now any economics lecturer can tell you that "of course" we don't control production directly; we leave it up to the market because this is the most efficient way, and it's always been done this way, or if it hasn't, that's only because it took a while for people to wise up. But in fact, this lack of social control of production is a recent development in historical terms.
Through most of human history, most societies have exercised a fairly high degree of direct control over how production is carried out. The medieval artisan who wanted to change the way in which something was produced couldn't do so without the permission of the guild, which was the social body that regulated production. In peasant economies, where land is held in common or periodically redistributed, there are set procedures for planting and harvesting particular crops at particular times. In a hunter-gatherer society, who hunts or gathers what, and when they do it, is a matter both of tradition and decision by the group or its elders — not the decision of each individual.
The decisions themselves may have been good or bad, and they may have been made in good ways or bad ways, but the point is that our present social arrangements, in which individuals can make decisions about production that affect the whole of society and can do so without any direct social input, is not at all "the way things have always been".
In capitalism, society hasn't ceased to exist — even if Margaret Thatcher couldn't recognise it. We are a collectivity which jointly produces all the things we consume, and we have all sorts of mutual connections which stem from that fact.
We form ourselves into countries, and we have parliaments or kings or dictators to tell us what we can and can't steal and which side of the road to drive on and whose moral principles we have to follow and who serves in the military and how many years' schooling everyone is allowed or required to have. But except in very rare circumstances, we don't let the parliament or dictator tell people or companies what they should produce or how they should produce it.
We leave all that to "the market". That is, we try to get other people to do what we want them to do by giving or withholding money. Individuals and governments are both expected to operate that way.
If the government wants less of something produced, it's supposed to put a tax on it, or raise or lower interest rates. Then it's up to the individual person or corporation to decide what to do. Individualism — "individual choice" — is supreme.
In a market economy, you don't knock on the factory door and ask the owner to stop polluting the river; you knock on the factory door and offer the owner money to stop it. Of course, if the factory owners are making lots of money by dumping their wastes that way, you might not have enough money to persuade them to stop.
The key thing about industrial production in a capitalist system is that it is controlled by those who own it. What is produced and how it is produced is their decision, and the rest of us can only try to influence their decision indirectly, through the way we spend our money.
Why should such an arrangement lead to unsustainable methods of production? After all, capitalists have to live on this planet just like the rest of us.
There's certainly no law against it — except for the laws of the market. The market rules the capitalists just as much as — perhaps even more than — the rest of us. And in the market, the only motive is money. Environmental protection is irrelevant to the market, except in so far as it affects the price of something.
The problem is that most measures needed to bring about environmentally sustainable production add to the cost of products: they are "inefficient" in terms of the market. If it costs nothing to dump your wastes into the river, it's inefficient to dispose of them in some other way; it adds to your costs and puts you at a disadvantage with your competitors.
Capitalists who remain in a competitively disadvantageous position tend to cease to be capitalists, so there's a process of "natural selection" operating here that produces capitalists who put the environment, and everything else, at a lower priority than keeping their profits up.
Is a polluting, non-sustainable way of doing things always the cheapest, the most efficient in economic terms? Of course not. There are people — e.g., Amory Lovins — who specialise in developing ways of doing things that are both cheaper and greener. A good example is better methods of insulating buildings, which are more environmentally friendly and cheaper to use because they use less energy.
But it's not very realistic to expect that there are very many new, undiscovered ways of producing things which are both cheaper for the capitalists concerned and less damaging to the environment. The capitalists are pretty good at finding cheaper ways to produce. So if cheaper methods exist, the capitalists will be using them already, regardless of whether those methods are also environmentally sustainable.
Occasionally, a greener way of doing things is cheaper. But in general, environmental sustainability and economic costs are determined by quite different, even antagonistic, factors, so there's no reason to expect cheapness and sustainability to coincide.
It's also important to ask, "Cheaper for whom?" There is such a thing as market power. In the market, lots of money is more powerful than less money.
What this means is that even if something green is cheaper for the consumer, it may not be made by capitalists. A house with better insulation might be cheaper for you to heat or cool — but if it's more expensive for builders to produce, it may not be possible for you to find one.
Even if environmentally sustainable production of something can be shown to be cheaper for society as a whole, that's not enough to cause the market to bring about a change in production methods. It has to be cheaper for the capitalist concerned, or it doesn't happen. This is why market methods are generally not very good at protecting the environment.
Politicians and governments have proposed, and begun to implement, so-called "tradeable pollution rights": if you want to destroy the environment, you have to pay to do it.
But how much should we charge for the "right" to wipe out a species of plant or animal? Presumably we should charge a very high price if the species is Homo sapiens, but what exactly should the figure be if the extinction doesn't happen immediately, but over several decades or centuries, through the gradual elimination of other species on which we depend?
All such schemes continue within the market framework of using money to alter behaviour. That's not appropriate, because the behaviour that needs to be altered is allowing money to determine what we do. What we have to do is end control by the market. To alter industry in the direction of environmental sustainability, we have to regain direct social control over it.
We have to be able to decide, collectively, what we produce and how we produce it. That means that society becomes the owner of industry — of the factories and machines and materials that we use to produce what we consume.
Some will object: "That's been tried in the Soviet Union and it didn't work".
It is true that that experience was horrific for the environment. But production in the Soviet Union was not under social control. There was control of production, and just about everything else, by a layer of privileged bureaucrats. You can't talk about social control — control by the members of the society, acting collectively — when it's not legal even to form a model airplane club independently of the bureaucracy.
Some environmentalists also object to the idea of a democratic socialism out of concern that it implies a multiplication of existing forms of industry, in order to supply a higher standard of living to those who now have too little.
This objection is based on a caricature of what the socialist project is about. It's not about producing more, or distributing more fairly what is currently produced, although such changes may be a result. It's about regaining human control of our human productive activities. Once we achieve that, a lot of other things will change as well. It will change what is produced, as well as how.
A society whose production is regulated by conscious human decisions will get rid of another major cause of environmental destruction: consumerism — the drive to buy and consume things that we don't really need.
Capitalism deliberately fosters consumerism through advertising and its attempts to make us buy, buy, buy. The death of advertising, once there are no competing capitalists to keep it alive, will dramatically reduce non-rational demand for the products of industry.
But there's an even more fundamental aspect of what we call consumerism that will change. Because our drive to buy this, that or whatever we can isn't only a product of advertising. It's created by the way in which capitalist production operates.
What is distinctive about our species, what makes us what we are, is that we produce our means of subsistence. What we are is what we do in the process of production. (The differences between nations and "races" aren't genetic: they are just results of different ways of producing what we consume.)
The act of producing collectively is the very essence of our humanness. But in capitalist economies, what we produce also belongs to someone else, the capitalist who employs us.
This production of ourselves not only belongs to another, but is also the means by which the capitalist further exploits us: what we create becomes additional capital that forces us to go on working for the capitalist. This is the essence of "alienation" — our human activity becomes the hostile property of another.
Our human activity belongs to the capitalist, and all we have in "return" is money. In capitalism, there is no way to regain our humanness except by trying to buy back our human activity, by buying its representation or result, that is, consumer items.
Social control of industry will abolish that source of alienation, and with it the illusion that living a more human life means consuming more. [Abridged from a workshop talk presented at the Actions for Sustainability Community Forum and Festival held in Newcastle during the first week of June.]