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Capitalism must die, or we will Printer friendly page Print This
By Joe Emersberger, Telesur
teleSUR
Monday, Dec 22, 2014

Friends of the Earth campaigners protest climate change during the COP 20 summit in Lima, Peru | Photo: Friends of the Earth

There would be a lot serious problems to work on, much to struggle against, if Cuba’s system spread to the entire world, but at least humans could survive to work out those problems.

Naomi Klein, in her book “This Changes Everything”, points out that $27 trillion USD worth of fossil fuels are in the ground claimed by corporations - enough to emit 2,795 gigatons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. Unless humanity is truly suicidal, we will allow no more than 565 gigatons to be emitted by the year 2049.

Considering what global emissions were in 2011 (32 gigatons), the world is on pace to burn over twice that amount (1,216 gigatons) by 2049 and that is if the 2011 emissions remained constant. We must quickly replace fossil fuels with renewable sources of energy. An even more daunting reality, she argues, is the need to cut back on consumption.  We cannot afford to look only at the energy supply side of the problem if we are to make the massive emissions cuts that are required. She notes that only 500 million people around the world, 7% of its population, are responsible for half of the emissions that are cooking the planet. It’s a highly privileged group, based largely in rich countries but also in some poor ones like China, whose dominance over economic decisions must end.

Klein, very wisely, doesn’t waste time with arguments made by the far right that deny the basic scientific reality, but she does credit them with correctly identifying a grave ideological threat posed by that reality.  Unfortunately, she weakens her case against them by accusing them of “market fundamentalism” and “free market ideology”.  Dean Baker devoted an entire book towards explaining why the right is not the least bit devoted to “free markets”.  The opposite is true and this goes far beyond the bank bailouts everyone knows about, or even the massive government subsidies for fossil fuels that Klein mentions. Patents, for example, are government-guaranteed, government-enforced monopolies. The use of patents has exploded in the “free market” era. Dean Baker cites an OECD study that found “the number of patents per capita was the most important factor determining the extent to which income was redistributed upward from those at the middle and bottom to those at the top over the last three decades.”

Klein does a masterful job of ridiculing geoengineering schemes. They often involve plans to mimic what volcanic eruptions do to cool the atmosphere. One small problem among many: you have to keep the eruptions going or the atmosphere warms again even faster. Klein compares it to a sprinkler system in a building that must be left spraying forever to keep the building from going up in smoke. Her attack on fracking, the quest for even more destructive fossil fuels and ways to exploit them is also superb.

Oddly, Klein calls for an end to economic growth but pulls back from calling for an end to capitalism. It is only the neoliberal version of capitalism that she clearly targets. She has it backwards. A far more convincing case can be made for ending capitalism, not just neoliberalism, rather than ending what economists call “growth”. This can be seen by considering Cuba, a country she ignored entirely in her book. She discusses the poor environmental record of the defunct Soviet Union, Mao’s China, the environmental shortcomings of various leftist governments in Latin America, but a mention of Cuba is nowhere to be found.

As shown in the table below, Cuba’s CO2 emissions are about half the global level on a per capita basis. Despite already being at an extremely low level in 1995, per capita emissions fell further by 2011 even though real GDP per capita doubled over that period. GDP measures the value of economic output as determined by prices. Prices are, to a significant extent, subjective measures of value. In a capitalist economy prices are skewed to reflect the priorities, tastes and bargaining power of the very rich as is government policy generally. Drastically change power relations in the economy and you can profoundly change the correlation between GDP growth and CO2 emissions. That doesn’t mean that GDP is the ultimate measure of economic progress. Klein is correct to point out that it leaves a lot of very important things out, but the table below illustrates why calling for “degrowth” as Klein and others have done is misguided.

There are many poor countries that, like Cuba, have very low CO2 emissions per capita, but Cuba has also achieved child mortality and literacy rate that are at rich country levels. According to UNICEF, as of 2012, Cuba’s child mortality rate was lower than the USA’s. That’s an astonishing achievement for a country that has been subjected to a fierce, and illegal, US-imposed embargo for over 50 years. Cuba does not use nuclear power. It has been forced to solve many problems with a low tech approach because of the embargo. Its CO2 emissions and child mortality could be still lower if it had access to technology denied to it. 

Vandana Shiva, whom Klein cited in her book, observed that Cuba “has used the crisis of the US trade embargo to create thousands of urban organic gardens to meet the vegetable needs of each city from within its municipal limits.”

It’s understandable that progressives like Klein who call for the deep democratization of countries like Canada and USA, would be reluctant to say that a country so widely dismissed, even by leftists, as a dictatorship has many of the answers we need. Avi Chomsky, in a very probing look at the Cuban revolution, wrote that “…reading Cuban authors’ analyses of their own political system encourages U.S. audiences to acknowledge that Cuba’s political system cannot be described simply and statically, as it generally is in U.S. political discourse, as a ‘dictatorship.’ Cuban citizens nominate candidates and vote in secret ballot elections; they participate in mass organizations; they participate in neighborhood, workplace, and municipal where real problems Are discussed and debated, and decisions made.“

Dissent in Cuba is certainly constrained to prevent major deviations from the ideological path set by the top leaders. However, exactly the same thing is true in the USA. You can’t simply vote corporate dominance out of existence in the USA or Canada. There is more tolerance for dissent (though it is debatable how much more) than in Cuba but there is also a far greater willingness to disregard the priorities of the public. In fact, thanks to the delusions fostered by extreme wealth and power, the ruling elite in the USA and other rich countries are disregarding our entire species’ desire to have a future.

There would be a lot of serious problems to work on, much to struggle against, if Cuba’s system spread to the entire world, but at least humans could survive to work out those problems.  The capitalist “way of life” of Northern America, Europe and China, on the other hand, offers only very speedy death if it spread all over the world. In fact, it threatens everyone’s survival now merely by existing where it does today. I certainly agree with Klein when she says that it would be “irresponsible” to say that nothing short of total revolution is worth doing. If you aren’t winning important reforms, how can you ever build credibility to win revolution? However, I think she could have been more aggressive in her approach to capitalism – not simply the “neoliberal” or “unregulated” version of it that has run rampant over the past three decades.

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