Capitalism, Environmental Crisis, and Socialism

A hundred years from now, humans may remember 2014 as the year that we first learned that we may have irreversibly destabilized the great ice sheet of West Antarctica, and thus set in motion more than 10 feet of sea-level rise.

Meanwhile, 2015 could be the year of the double whammy — when we learned the same about one gigantic glacier of East Antarctica, which could set in motion roughly the same amount all over again. Northern Hemisphere residents and Americans in particular should take note — when the bottom of the world loses vast amounts of ice, those of us living closer to its top get more sea level rise than the rest of the planet, thanks to the law of gravity... (Washington Post, March 16)

The latest findings on climate change reported by the Washington Post mark another step on the path toward environmental catastrophe. Apart from philistines, apocalyptists, and other celebrants of ignorance, people understand that the growing degradation of our planet promises pain in the short run and disaster beyond. When humans first emerged on the planet, the environment, the climate, and other features of the natural world presented seemingly insurmountable obstacles to survival. The pre-history and early history of humankind was a tenuous struggle to construct bulwarks against natural calumny and a desperate effort to exploit nature's meager offerings.

Nearly two hundred thousand years after the appearance of homo sapiens, circumstances have turned full circle. Humanity has found the means to dominate nature (though far from in a humanitarian way), but with seemingly little regard for the sustainability of the human project. Today, the formerly vulnerable species threatens to render the earth inhospitable to itself, a kind of mindless suicide by the only species that genuinely claims to own a mind.

For those determined to avoid this suicidal path, locating the cause and finding solutions is an urgent task.

Is “Progress” or “Growth” the Enemy?

It is fashionable in some quarters to locate the cause of the environmental crisis in the insatiable lust for “progress,” a term as elusive as it is imprecise. Harking back to the sixties and the “counter-culture” era, many envision a world where consumerism and the fetish for the new are banished in favor of a simpler life style and intellectual, spiritual, or artistic values. There is much to admire in a commitment to modest consumption and arrested acquisitiveness.

However admirable this may be as a personal choice, it is extremely short-sighted social policy. Certainly, the upper-middle classes of the developed countries could benefit the environment by exiting the insane competition for larger houses, more luxurious cars, and the latest techno-gizmo. Unquestionably, the mindless quest for more and better is neither admirable nor sustainable. But before we condemn progress or growth, we must recognize that more is at stake in rejecting progress or growth than thwarting rampant consumerism in the US and Europe or the vulgar excesses of the upper classes.

Apart from consumption madness, billions of the world's population lack even the basics of sustainable life. They barely survive in the midst of poverty, disease, and inadequate shelter, food and water. Until the material means to rectify the sorry, inhuman plight of billions is available, progress and growth must be an imperative. To callously deny them a future out of scorn for hyper-consumerism is petty and, paradoxically, selfish. They cannot be made the scapegoat for Western privileged waste and excess. Those who so easily condemn progress or growth are shamefully blind to the inequities of class, race, and nationality.

Solutions

Prospective solutions come in many forms and many shades. Individual solutions are useful and defensible provided that they do no deny the disadvantaged the opportunity to achieve standards of living reasonably commensurate with the standards of the more privileged. For example, asking people without access to modern appliances to curtail usage of inefficient technologies is both irrational and unjust. Equality of sacrifice in the face of vast economic inequities cannot be the solution to environmental degradation. While recycling, re-use, and other personal conservation projects are necessary and meaningful, they are incapable of sufficiently slowing the global expansion and exhaustion of resources. Nor do individual, personal solutions offset the major sources of environmental destruction: corporations and governments.

Conventional policy solutions cluster around market-based and regulatory approaches to the environmental crisis.

Most environmental activists see the failure of either market-based or regulatory measures as a failure of political will. They believe that politicians and political movements have yet to recognize the dire consequences we face by ignoring the environmental crisis. While this may be true, it fails to recognize the acute limitations of market-based and regulatory solutions and the impossibility of their effectiveness in a global capitalist economy.

The political will is not absent because of ignorance, but because the political system is owned and nourished by the capitalists. Moreover, the global economy-- overwhelmingly a capitalist economy-- is fueled by profits and profits alone. And profits are sustained and expanded by turning everything material or immaterial into a commodity. As a commodity, nature's resources hold no value other than what can be attached to the pursuit of profit.

It is the exploitation of human and natural resources-- labor and nature's bounty-- that is the grist for profit's mill. And capitalism puts profits ahead of nature as well as ahead of people. Both history and the logic of capitalist accumulation and expansion demonstrate the inevitability of waste and destruction. Only when environmental degradation impedes the process of accumulation and profit expansion will the capitalist system respond to the crisis; environmental scientists tell us that will be too late.

And that is precisely the point acknowledged by Naomi Klein in her recent book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Klein's anti-capitalism, like so many versions associated with the social democratic, soft-left, has been somewhat fuzzy, vacillating between rejecting the neo-liberal incarnation of capitalism and something elusive, but more daring. But her current thinking is sharper, though still short of an endorsement of a coherent vision of socialism. She concedes: “But because we have waited as long as we have, and we now need to cut our emissions as deeply as we need to, we now have a conflict not just with neoliberalism, but a conflict with capitalism because it challenges the growth imperative.” (quoted in Monthly Review, Notes from the Editors, March, 2015). For this, Klein has been criticized widely by her liberal readers still anchored in fealty to capitalism.

The editors of Monthly Review perceptively point out that “Klein’s argument here is irrefutable. To be sure, in criticizing neoliberalism for removing the tools needed to address climate change she deftly avoids the issue of whether capital as a system could ever have seriously mitigated the problem.” (op. Cit.)

Capital cannot mitigate the problem.

The MR editors go on to persuasively argue:

Klein is realistic and radical enough to realize that her recognition of this necessity, together with her readiness to act on it, puts her and the entire left climate movement that she represents in conflict with capital as a system—and not just with its most virulent form of neoliberalism. It is, as she says, a “two stage argument,” and we are now in the second stage. There is no avoiding the fact that the logic of capital accumulation must give way if we are to have a reasonable chance of saving civilization and humanity. (op. Cit.)

For “the entire left climate movement” to move beyond individual solutions, market-based answers, regulation, rejection of neo-liberalism, and even capitalism, the movement must define and embrace another goal. What would it be?

Only a system that will replace the logic of profit-before-all with the broad interests of humanity can answer the question. Only a system that can supplant the anarchy of production and distribution with rational planning could count as an answer. Only a system that can substitute forward-looking public ownership for individual short-term self-interest will cope with the crisis. And only a system that erases the existing extreme inequalities associated with capitalism and imperialism can meet our need to bring social justice to the disadvantaged.

As reluctant as much of the left is to utter the word, the answer is quite simply: socialism.

The Unseen Elephant in the Room
Lost on most of the environmental movement, including the “left climate movement,” is the role of imperialism in stoking the environmental crisis. According to Wikipedia:

The United States Department of Defense is one of the largest single consumers of energy in the world, responsible for 93% of all US government fuel consumption in 2007... In FY 2006, the DoD used almost 30,000 gigawatt hours (GWH) of electricity, at a cost of almost $2.2 billion. The DoD's electricity use would supply enough electricity to power more than 2.6 million average American homes. In electricity consumption, if it were a country, the DoD would rank 58th in the world, using slightly less than Denmark and slightly more than Syria (CIA World Factbook, 2006). The Department of Defense uses 4,600,000,000 US gallons... of fuel annually, an average of 12,600,000 US gallons... of fuel per day.

Add to this total the electricity and fuel usage of the rest of NATO, Japan, Russia, The Peoples Republic of China as well as those belligerents constantly at war with imperialism and you have uncountable and socially unnecessary waste of natural resources as well as ecological destruction.

Count the hundreds of military bases-- outposts for imperialism-- that devour resources better employed in a war to protect the environment.

Add to this total the unceasing pollution, the destruction of natural and man-made structures, the spoilage of land and water, etc. that accompany the endless use of devastating weapons.

The full effects of militarism and imperial aggression stagger the imagination.

Pentagon estimates of the production and maintenance of one weapons system alone-- the F-35-- have been reduced to over three-quarters of a trillion dollars-- an enormous unmentioned cost to the environment.

Unfortunately, far too many environmentalists are more cognizant of the environmental damage of littering than they are aware of the enormous threat to the environment of imperial design and endless war. Joining the anti-imperialist, anti-war movement, fighting for an end to militarism, is potentially a far more effective way to reverse the ecological wounds that threaten the planet than the entire bundle of liberal and social democratic panaceas that currently dominate the discussion in the environmental movement: Prius, yes, but Predator drones, no.

As the environmental movement matures, it must embrace the socialist option. It must stand resolutely against militarism and its threat to the environment. No other stance will deflect “civilization” from its determined march toward self destruction. Authentic, militant environmentalism comes with partisanship for socialism and anti-imperialism.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Imperialism's Trusted Governess

Her face is on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek (3/9-3/15/2015) next to a dramatic headline: Putin vs. the Accountant. Her name is Natalie Jaresko. And, if Bloomberg's Brett Forrest is to be believed, she and some of her colleagues may hold the fate of Western Ukraine in their hands. As the Minister of Finance, she must find a way to salvage an economy that is in free fall.

Forrest paints a flattering, sympathetic picture of a feisty expatriate determined to rescue Ukraine economically and from the clutches of the evil Putin. Jaresko is encountered visiting hospitalized Ukrainian troops wounded while attacking the resistance fighters in Eastern Ukraine or, as Forrest prefers: consoling “convalescing veterans of recent battles against Russian forces and their proxies in the Ukrainian East. 'When did you serve?' she asks, moving slowly from room to room.'How were you wounded?'”

Apart from recounting Jaresko's mimicking of the obsequious and opportunistic condescension of veterans displayed universally by Western politicians, Forrest offers a calculated adulation of the Minister that conjures many less laudatory questions and suspicions.

For someone who holds the fate of Ukraine in her hands, Jaresko appears to be somewhat of a carpetbagger. Her appointment to lead the Finance Ministry came before she was granted Ukrainian citizenship, a fact that would only be curious outside of a government where two other cabinet members were also not citizens when appointed: her counterpart in the Ministry of Economy and Trade, Lithuanian Aivaras Abromavicius, and Minister of Health, Georgian Alexander Kvitashvili. Jaresko, a US citizen, has two years to renounce her US citizenship. She and her other imported colleagues were appointed by Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsunyuk, the infamous “Yats” vetted by foul-mouthed US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland.

Obviously the US and the EU had to scramble after they encouraged and supported the coup deposing the elected President in February of 2014. They had to reach outside Ukraine to find reliable clients to support the hastily elected candy baron, Petro Pershenko. The story of the clumsy construction of the post-coup government from non-nationals, careerists, and unstable rightists would make for an entertaining episode of House of Cards if Western journalists had the spine to tell it.

So what has Jaresko done to deserve a phone call from Nuland? Er, Pershenko?

Her credentials begin with a master's degree from the Kennedy School at Harvard, a training ground for those tasked with delivering the US ruling class message to friends and foes alike. Doors opened immediately at the State Department's Soviet Affairs division. She coordinated her work at the State Department with all of the big national and international trade and economic organizations. When Ukraine left the Soviet Union, Jaresko was perfectly suited to operate on the US State Department's behalf at the newly installed US Embassy. Her position-- Chief of the Economic Section-- was a trusted position of a type often calling for close collaboration with covert agencies.

She parlayed that experience into the creation of an “investment“ vehicle for Ukrainian businesses funded by USAID, again a position of great trust and associated in many countries with US influence peddling. Documentation of the modest seed capital from USAID-- $150 million-- can be found here. One would expect that a 30-year-old entrusted with this task surely had the confidence of highly placed officials in the US government.

Her 1995 venture was absorbed by a new investment management firm, Horizon Capital, which she founded in 2006. Journalist John Helmer documents the consistent losses of Horizon Capital in his detailed report on Dances with Bears (12-03-2014). Despite his discovering only two years of modest gains in a decade, both Bloomberg and Forbes laud the success of Horizon Capital.

Helmer also discovers the fallout from Jaresko's divorce from her spouse and business partner. Her former husband, Ihor Figlus, has accused her of saddling him with debt from “improper” loans. Their contentious relationship continues. Helmer comments: “It hasn’t been rare for American spouses to go into the asset management business in the former Soviet Union, and make profits underwritten by the US Government with information supplied from their US Government positions or contacts. It is exceptional for them to fall out over the loot.”

Jaresko's own account of her recruitment bears telling: “...representatives from a headhunting firm hired by the new government, WE partners, visited Jaresko at the Horizon Capital offices. They discussed candidates for various government posts before asking her if she would be willing to serve...” (Bloomberg Businessweek)

While some may find it odd that an independent, sovereign state would engage a US-based (parent company: Korn Ferry) headhunting firm to fill top political posts, Jaresko explains: “I think the president and prime minister wanted me to bring [my] experience.”

Within a week, she was vetted and appointed.

Anticipating skepticism, Bloomberg's reporter, Brett Forrest, notes that “Jaresko's appointment... provides fuel to conspiracy theorists...”

Indeed.

His apologetics continue: “No matter their origin, these ministers-- and the numerous Poles, Germans, Canadians, and other foreigners who've joined the government in senior and mid-level positions-- are pulling the same oar.” Forrest joins a host of Western journalists and commentators who find no contradiction in a rabidly nationalistic government staffed with foreigners.

Despite generous aid from the US, the EU, and the IMF, Ukraine has experienced a 21% loss of industrial production, a 69% drop in the value of the currency against the dollar and a 6.9% decline in GDP in the last year.

Estimates of Ukraine debt go as high as $40 billion. Recently, Jaresko announced that investors should expect a “haircut” which “...will probably involve a combination of maturity extensions, coupon reductions and principal reductions.”

Compare the matter-of-fact reporting of this announcement in papers like The Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal to the hysterical media response to the faintest hint of a possible reduction in Greek sovereign debt. Clearly assuming client status, selling your sovereignty to imperialism, earns generous debt forgiveness.

Despite the media-spun fairy tales about Ukraine's struggle for democracy and independence, the facts challenge that narrative. Behind the curtain of deceit and fabrication is a motley crew of foreign agents, corrupted officials, oligarchs, and neo-Nazis. But one would never know it from the Western media.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

A Make-Believe Interview with Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman is thought by some to be the US's greatest poet, certainly the most acclaimed expression of the nation's better spirit. What follows is a fictional interview with Whitman, with the quotes drawn from his 1871 Democratic Vistas (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/whitman/vistas/vistas.html). Obviously liberty is taken with the context, though not with the text.

Mr. Whitman, would you care to comment on the current state of affairs existing in the US?

I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ'd in, (for all this hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings,) nor is humanity itself believ'd in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appaling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout.

What, in your opinion, stands behind the “hollowness at heart”?

From deceit in the spirit, the mother of all false deeds, the offspring is already incalculable. An acute and candid person, in the revenue department in Washington, who is led by the course of his employment to regularly visit the cities, north, south and west, to investigate frauds, has talk'd much with me about his discoveries. The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. In fashionable life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill time. In business, (this all-devouring modern word, business,) the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician's serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our magician's serpent, remaining to-day sole master of the field.

Our country seems bent on expanding its influence far and wide, imposing its will on others. How do you view this?

I say that our New World democracy, however great a success in uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic development, products, and in a certain highly-deceptive superficial popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary, and esthetic results. In vain do we march with unprecedented strides to empire so colossal, outvying the antique, beyond Alexander's, beyond the proudest sway of Rome. In vain have we annex'd Texas, California, Alaska, and reach north for Canada and south for Cuba. It is as if we were somehow being endow'd with a vast and more and more thoroughly-appointed body, and then left with little or no soul.

And your vision for the US?

The true gravitation-hold of liberalism in the United States will be a more universal ownership of property, general homesteads, general comfort -- a vast, intertwining reticulation of wealth. As the human frame, or, indeed, any object in this manifold universe, is best kept together by the simple miracle of its own cohesion, and the necessity, exercise and profit thereof, so a great and varied nationality, occupying millions of square miles, were firmest held and knit by the principle of the safety and endurance of the aggregate of its middling property owners.

But surely other writers and thinkers share your vision of more “universal ownership” and the “safety and endurance of the aggregate”...

But at present, (judged by any higher scale than that which finds the chief ends of existence to be to feverishly make money during one-half of it, and by some "amusement," or perhaps foreign travel, flippantly kill time, the other half,) and consider'd with reference to purposes of patriotism, health, a noble personality, religion, and the democratic adjustments, all these swarms of poems, literary magazines, dramatic plays, resultant so far from American intellect, and the formation of our best ideas, are useless and a mockery. They strengthen and nourish no one, express nothing characteristic, give decision and purpose to no one, and suffice only the lowest level of vacant minds.

Is your vision attainable? Can it be more than a vista?

It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that fervid comradeship, (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond it,) that I look for the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualization thereof. Many will say it is a dream, and will not follow my inferences: but I confidently expect a time when there will be seen, running like a half-hid warp through all the myriad audible and visible worldly interests of America, threads of manly friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long, carried to degrees hitherto unknown -- not only giving tone to individual character, and making it unprecedently emotional, muscular, heroic, and refined, but having the deepest relations to general politics. I say democracy infers such loving comradeship, as its most inevitable twin or counterpart, without which it will be incomplete, in vain, and incapable of perpetuating itself.

But the people do not seem attuned to your vision. They seem absorbed in other matters. Do you envision a change of disposition?

It really seems to me the condition, not only of our future national and democratic development, but of our perpetuation. In the highly artificial and materialistic bases of modern civilization, with the corresponding arrangements and methods of living, the force-infusion of intellect alone, the depraving influences of riches just as much as poverty, the absence of all high ideals in character -- with the long series of tendencies, shapings, which few are strong enough to resist, and which now seem, with steam-engine speed, to be everywhere turning out the generations of humanity like uniform iron castings -- all of which, as compared with the feudal ages, we can yet do nothing better than accept, make the best of, and even welcome, upon the whole, for their oceanic practical grandeur, and their restless wholesale kneading of the masses -- I say of all this tremendous and dominant play of solely materialistic bearings upon current life in the United States, with the results as already seen, accumulating, and reaching far into the future, that they must either be confronted and met by at least an equally subtle and tremendous force-infusion for purposes of spiritualization, for the pure conscience, for genuine esthetics, and for absolute and primal manliness and womanliness -- or else our modern civilization, with all its improvements, is in vain, and we are on the road to a destiny, a status, equivalent, in its real world, to that of the fabled damned.

You seem wary of destiny, empire, and indifference to a common identity.

Even to-day, amid these whirls, incredible flippancy, and blind fury of parties, infidelity, entire lack of first-class captains and leaders, added to the plentiful meanness and vulgarity of the ostensible masses -- that problem, the labor question, beginning to open like a yawning gulf, rapidly widening every year -- what prospect have we? We sail a dangerous sea of seething currents, cross and under-currents, vortices -- all so dark, untried -- and whither shall we turn? It seems as if the Almighty had spread before this nation charts of imperial destinies, dazzling as the sun, yet with many a deep intestine difficulty, and human aggregate of cankerous imperfection, -- saying, lo! the roads, the only plans of development, long and varied with all terrible balks and ebullitions. You said in your soul, I will be empire of empires, overshadowing all else, past and present, putting the history of old-world dynasties, conquests behind me, as of no account -- making a new history, a history of democracy, making old history a dwarf -- I alone inaugurating largeness, culminating time. If these, O lands of America, are indeed the prizes, the determinations of your soul, be it so. But behold the cost, and already specimens of the cost. Thought you greatness was to ripen for you like a pear? If you would have greatness, know that you must conquer it through ages, centuries -- must pay for it with a proportionate price. For you too, as for all lands, the struggle, the traitor, the wily person in office, scrofulous wealth, the surfeit of prosperity, the demonism of greed, the hell of passion, the decay of faith, the long postponement, the fossil-like lethargy, the ceaseless need of revolutions, prophets, thunderstorms, deaths, births, new projections and invigorations of ideas and men.

So you fear arrogance and locate greatness in humane values and a renewal of ideas. Does not our electoral system, our system of checks and balances give us some guarantee that we will not succumb to willful arrogance and ensure the emergence of new ideas?

Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruits in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between men, and their beliefs -- in religion, literature, colleges, and schools -- democracy in all public and private life... I have intimated that, as a paramount scheme, it has yet few or no full realizers and believers. I do not see, either, that it owes any serious thanks to noted propagandists or champions, or has been essentially help'd, though often harm'd, by them. It has been and is carried on by all the moral forces, and by trade, finance, machinery, intercommunications, and, in fact, by all the developments of history, and can no more be stopp'd than the tides, or the earth in its orbit. Doubtless, also, it resides, crude and latent, well down in the hearts of the fair average of the American-born people, mainly in the agricultural regions. But it is not yet, there or anywhere, the fully-receiv'd, the fervid, the absolute faith.

So you think...

For America, type of progress, and of essential faith in man, above all his errors and wickedness -- few suspect how deep, how deep it really strikes. The world evidently supposes, and we have evidently supposed so too, that the States are merely to achieve the equal franchise, an elective government -- to inaugurate the respectability of labor, and become a nation of practical operatives, law-abiding, orderly and well off. Yes, those are indeed parts of the task of America; but they not only do not exhaust the progressive conception, but rather arise, teeming with it, as the mediums of deeper, higher progress.

Do you find this progress embedded in those steering the ship of state, directing our institutions, or commanding our economy?

The best class we show, is but a mob of fashionably dress'd speculators and vulgarians. True, indeed, behind this fantastic farce, enacted on the visible stage of society, solid things and stupendous labors are to be discover'd, existing crudely and going on in the background, to advance and tell themselves in time. Yet the truths are none the less terrible.

Is it possible that a better world lies ahead? Perhaps one more democratic and-- in your words-- a world with “a vast, intertwining reticulation of wealth”?

We see, as in the universes of the material kosmos, after meteorological, vegetable, and animal cycles, man at last arises, born through them, to prove them, concentrate them, to turn upon them with wonder and love -- to command them, adorn them, and carry them upward into superior realms -- so, out of the series of the preceding social and political universes, now arise these States. We see that while many were supposing things established and completed, really the grandest things always remain; and discover that the work of the New World is not ended, but only fairly begun.

******************

Whitman's Democratic Vistas is a collection of rambling, often disjointed observations about the US and democracy made nearly a century and a half ago. While it hopes for future progress toward noble goals, it well anticipates a process of decay, democratic erosion, and the ill-effects of “the demonism of greed” fostered by “business.”

His expression of mindless conformity-- “generations of humanity like uniform iron castings”-- is a memorable turn-of-phrase. His term “scrofulous wealth” leaves little doubt of his contempt for accumulation. And the wonderful words “hollowness of heart” are arguably a counterpart to the idea of “alienation.”

Is there any doubt that “universal ownership” and “safety and endurance of the aggregate” count as an approach toward the idea of socialism?

Yes, the interview is fake. Yes, it rips quotes out of context. But it highlights thoughts that demonstrate the unfortunate continuity of US decadence, the course of a young nation traveling on the rails of capitalism. Whitman's fears have been unfortunately exceeded today.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com