Will capitalism survive climate change?

I was rather hoping, chief interlocutor, that you, or someone, was going to say that a reading of the April 3 article suggests that one should NOT separate politics, economics and environment.

I stil can't believe that such a seminal question goes undebated!

The historic approaches to questions of either politics or economics, dealt with them under the heading of political economy. That went out of fashion gradually - the U. of T. held out longest in maintaining a department of political economy, but finally capitulated to the econometric bean counters ("scientists").

Environment is the new ingredient, of course, although old F.Engels said in reply to a friend's letter (about Malthus) that when the western hemisphere and eastern European lands were all taken up - that would be the time to sound the alarm.

Could we not take a shot at dealing with the April 3 article question with all three perspectives in mind? Place our political parties against that question and rank them?

NOT reduce to a peurile back and forth in the frustration that must come from statistics and polls among the great unwashed?

Will capitalism survive and what do we do without it?

Would the wartime economy work? Is there any other answer?

Etc.

Okay FM.
We agree that capitalism is the "biggest and most resolute obstacle" to dealing with climate change causal factors.

And we know that not all folks out there are in agreement with us (but concensus builds).
What do we have to offer them (and let's not forget us) as a way out, once the believers are in the cat bird's seat?

To break the ice:
In September of 1939, the political parties of Canada, Australia and the mother nation had to begin to decide to act as one - in the name of survival - and that is where we are going to have to go again, in the not too distant future.
And looking at the activities of political parties up to that time - and for a year or so into the war there was still some restiveness - one could not have imagined societies pulling together in that fashion. But look at the historical accounts!

The article by Walden Bello is a very precise Marxist evaluation of the economic situation facing us. But, unfortunately, he hints at a class struggle to come in the face of Apocalypse.

I believe we can leave that imagined scenario in favour of tried behaviour, control of those means of production, consumption, and, yes, distribution (recall the Bevridge Report of 1943 tht gave us social welfare).
We've built some additional dependencies vis a vis capital accumulation in the intervening half century, but a command economy can find means of social support not available in "the market".

That is, we could not all begin to take in each other's washing (that famous nonsense example of a solution to unemployment and sagging economic growth)_but we could quickly learn to accept (then enjoy?) the production of the necessities again.

It would not be a return to some ancient capitalism, 500 Apples. Adam Smith (then Marx) showed us how capitalism imposed itself on mercantalism. Smith and Hume and their cohort (see "How the Scots Invented the Modern World")gave us an understanding of modernity based on changes in production etc. etc. Gotta be precise, even if we don't agree completely with their 18th Century conclusions.

And I'm sorry I missed your posting, M.S. I'm realy doing not too badly for an old born again Luddite on these infernal machines.

Would love to hear something of the institutional needs of a society needing to bring this off. And dramatic changes will obviously be needed. But this isn't composing science fiction. It's coming at us down the pike, and today's radical thinking will be tomorrow's orthodoxy.But it's gonna hafta go beyond party battles for the hearts and min..well, the hearts of the great unwashed. That's a never-ending merry go round without some input into what they read and hear. Chomsky's concern.

Better stop for a mo' before the chief reminds us that this thread started out trying to determine its parentage.

And is it an orphan?Is the discussion legitimate?

"Silly" and "wishful thinking", of course, must apply to anyone who heard the leading executives of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (the biggest industrialists) admit last year that climate change has to be the first concern of Earth's inhabitants - and then suggest that it's all part of a plot to destroy capitalism.

Or to someone who professes a knowledge of science that surpasses that of the vast majority of scientists (Exxon-supported cranks and contrarians excepted)who think differently.

One can appreciate such chutzpah, but can the NDP and "socialism" survive it?

Remember, so far, we come here, not to praise Walden Bello's position but to bur...to appreciate it for analysis that gives empirical grounding of our economic condition - but not necessarily for the implied resolution in revolution.

Hang in there friend and see what we can come up with? [img]wink.gif" border="0[/img]

Well FM, the optimism ebbs and flows, depending on whether I'm reading James Lovelock or Tim Flannery, James Howard Kunstler or George Monbiot.
They come to mind immediately, pairing as being more or less "optimistic" or its opposite.
You'll hafta pardon the book references - I'm a library board member and promoter of old-fashioned sources of knowledge.

If you've read Kunstler, you'll know he's more "end of oil" than CO2 inspired, and his latest little novel, World Made by Hand, is a nice little, not too nasty bit of futurism.

You're right. The major parties, including the Greens of course (see the Green candidate's ad at the bottom of this screen yesterday!!!) see capitalism surviving end of oil and CO2 saturation, but the statistics you've put forward - and Lovelock said it 25 years ago - are incontrovertible. They will come to be accepted across the board by the sheltered unread. And then what?

That's what this little exercise in thought provocation is all about. Monbiot has done it rather brilliantly in Heat, of course. But in Canada we have an extra stair to climb as Tim Flannery points out in his first chapter of An Explorer's Notebook, "Outside Canada Looking In". Canada is as bad as they get.

Of course, it has to do with the gutting of the top third of Alberta. And that, as we "eastern bastards" have come to understand, is a particularly intractable political problem. I began fomenting about western oil in the early 70s. A bit early for political audiences even from a simple conservation perspective, as it turned out. :-)

Western alienation and farm grievances everywhere equals political stasis.

But here in enlightened (and dependent) old Ontariario, we can try to sail around the ad-dependent media to get the message out. (I was asked recently by the library board chair and CEO if I "really felt that library board membership" was a comfortaable fit for my interests.)

But, of course, that's where we're at. The library board members are not about to read the heavy stuff. Avoid it like the plague. Denial comes in many forms.

But "the message" can't be just a litany of woe.
Neither must we allow the Greens to get away with a simple message like "leave it up to the market". I told Jim Harris last fall just what a copout that was. No wonder they rise in the polls. Just leave it to God and "the market". Oh, and as Monbiot points out, ignoring the poor who can't pay those carbon prices just isn't going to (and shouldn't) fly.

"Change must come from below?"

My, how nice that would be. But I'm afraid it's the "belows" who are considered most problematic each time the leadership and candidates of any party consider what they can safely get away with. Same with the media.

That's why it's taken us until now to begin to formulate real political agendas. And science itself is just catching up to the leaders like Lovelock, who only a decade back convinced the world's leading biologists that his account of Earth's ability to provide a thermal balance for the biosphere was correct. He went from "that GAIA guy" to world leading scientific innovator.

But look at how his acceptance of nuclear energy is still treated by Greens and New Democrats, who are in a neck-and-neck race for the fealty of the 21st Century's beautiful people (sans flowers).

But we beaver away on the edge of things, making ourselves a pain in the derriere (hope that's roughly the spelling and area of the anatomy) to both the status quo and the great unread. Not ready to just sit in The Wasteland (in April or any other month).

Optimistic? We can't know, to what degree. Not just yet, eh? One does what one can, my new friend?

[ 14 April 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]And again five minutes later on another name. Must check the glasses.

[ 14 April 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]