A Teacher Writes to Students Series (59): How Do You Look at the World? Through Which Lenses?
Annavajhula J C Bose, PhD
Department of Economics (Retd.), SRCC, DU
Suppose you, like most students I have come across, are in favour of capitalism for ever as the world’s most successful economic system—as the time-tested double-engine for growth and prosperity. But you are somewhat different from the rabble seeking its sassy and seductive entertainment, so to say, in that you have at least started seriously looking at it by the burgeoning literature on reforming, reimagining, rebuilding or regenerating it.
In doing so, my plea to you is that you should not be deaf to the Leftist or ecosocialist voices from the Monthly Review thus:
“… establishment economists… have an outsized influence on climate policy as representatives of the dominant end of capitalist society, before which all other ends are subordinated. In sharp contrast, natural and physical scientists are increasingly concerned about the degradation of the planetary environment, but have less direct influence on social policy responses. Mainstream economists are trained in the promotion of private profits as the singular “bottom line” of society, even at the expense of larger issues of human welfare and the environment. Natural scientists, as distinct from economists, however, typically root their investigations in a materialist conception of nature and are engaged in the study at some level of the natural world, the conditions of which they are much more disposed to take seriously. They are thus much less inclined to underrate environmental problems.
Orthodox economists often project economic costs of global warming in 2100 to be only a few percentage points and therefore hardly significant, even at levels of climate change that would endanger most of the “higher” species on the planet and human civilization itself, costing hundreds of millions, if not billions, of human lives. The failure of economic models to count the human and ecological costs of climate change should not surprise us. Bourgeois economics has a carefully cultivated insensitivity to human tragedy (not to mention natural catastrophe) that has become almost the definition of “man’s inhumanity to man.” From any kind of rational perspective, i.e., one not dominated exclusively by the narrow economic goal of capital accumulation, such views would seem to be entirely irrational, if not pathological.
In order to highlight the peculiar mindset at work it is useful to quote a passage from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass: “The prettiest are always further!” [Alice] said at last, with a sigh at the obstinacy of the rushes in growing so far off, as, with flushed cheeks and dripping hair and hands, she scrambled back into her place, and began to arrange her new-found treasures. What mattered it to her just then that the rushes had begun to fade, and to lose all their scent and beauty, from the very moment that she picked them? Even real scented rushes, you know, last only a very little while—and these, being dream-rushes, melted away almost like snow, as they lay in heaps at her feet—but Alice hardly noticed this, there were so many other curious things to think about. A society that values above all else the acquisition of abstract value-added, and in the prospect lays waste to nature, in an endless quest for further accumulation, is ultimately an irrational society. What matters to it what it leaves wasted at its feet, as it turns elsewhere in its endless pursuit of more?
Like the establishment economists, with whom they are allied, the technocrats promise to solve all problems while keeping the social relations intact. The most ambitious schemes involve massive geoengineering proposals to combat climate change, usually aimed at enhancing the earth’s albedo (reflectivity). These entail schemes like using high-flying aircraft, naval guns, or giant balloons to launch reflective materials (sulfate aerosols or aluminum oxide dust) into the upper stratosphere to reflect back the rays of the sun. There are even proposals to create “designer particles” that will be “self-levitating” and “self-orienting” and will migrate to the atmosphere above the poles to provide “sunshades” for the Polar Regions. Such technocrats live in a Wonderland where technology solves all problems, and where the Sorcerer’s Apprentice has never been heard of. All of this is designed to extend the conquest of the earth rather than to make peace with the planet.”
My plea to you is also that you should not insulate your ears from Robert Reich’s social democratic Post Keynesian voice that the link between capitalism and democracy has become attenuated: “Capitalism has become more responsive to what we want as individual purchasers of goods, but democracy has grown less responsive to what we want together as citizens.” As a result, “capitalism has invaded democracy” and created what he calls “supercapitalism.”
This supercapitalism is ruled by the oligarchs so much so that Reich (2020) paraphrases the Left vs the Right conflict into Democracy vs. Oligarchy. The contest is between a small minority of the super-rich who have gained power over the system and the vast majority who have little or none. The power of the oligarchy is exercised through institutions—big Wall Street banks, global corporations, the executive and legislative branches of government, the central bank and the Supreme Court, the military, elite universities, and the media including social media as organized by Big Tech. Only when the system is seen thus in terms of wealth and power becoming one and the same, we can comprehend the bitter truth and change it for the better via the people’s movement for restoring democracy.
Reich (2017) has clearly explained the consequences of the disastrous policies of global austerity in such a system with humor, insight, passion, and warmth, all of which are on vivid display in words and pictures. Politicians bought by the oligarchs are eager to implement austerity policies (sweeping cuts to unemployment benefits and to food stamps and to social security along with tight monetary policy) but they are disastrous because they essentially “kill the economy” by drastically reducing government spending, leading to decreased economic activity, increased unemployment, and a worsening of social conditions, essentially acting as a “false snake oil” for economic recovery. Austerity as capitalist crisis management has exacerbated low pay and stagnating wages, job insecurity, unemployment and underemployment, widening income inequalities and poverty, as well as cuts to public expenditure. Sustained recovery out of recessions is only possible if the middle and working classes have money to spend and if, rather than cuts and austerity, investment in “public goods” is made a priority. There will come a tipping point when people will demand reform of the worst excesses of capitalism and when the full folly of austerity will be exposed.
Homework: Understand the statement of Clara Mattei, “Capitalism has losers and winners, and austerity experts are there to make sure that the winners are always the same, while losers are the majority.”
References
https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/capitalism-in-wonderland/
https://ssir.org/books/reviews/entry/crisis_of_democracy
https://www.phenomenalworld.org/reviews/austerity-logic/
https://revdem.ceu.edu/2023/04/27/clara-mattei-why-is-austerity-so-persistent/
Robert Reich. 2017. Economics in Wonderland. Fantagraphics.
Robert Reich. 2020. The System. Picador.
