The Green New Deal and Beyond. Stan Cox

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СКАЧАТЬ economy.⁴⁴ Even if there had been prophetic scientists within the growing federal bureaucracy of the 1930s sounding the alarm on future global warming, few, if any, planners would have considered holding back on carbon release before the fight against fascism could be won.

      The New Deal legacy, World War II, and a free-flowing bonanza of fossil fuels propelled the postwar U.S. economy into a long, high-glide trajectory. But they also masked an underlying drag on economic growth, according to a landmark book by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital,⁴⁵ published in 1966. The two Marxian economists saw the United States becoming increasingly dominated by shrinking numbers of giant corporations, thereby developing a long-term tendency toward stagnation. A decade in the writing, the book applied and extended Marx’s analysis of capitalism to this mid-twentieth-century phenomenon, one that Baran and Sweezy dubbed “monopoly capital.”

      The New Dealers had weakened antitrust regulation, and the concentration of economic power had continued to deepen during and after World War II. Monopoly Capital’s central idea was that in the postwar period, companies and conglomerates had become so large that they were able to transcend the meat grinder of competition. But in doing so, they were undermining the very engine of economic growth. In such oligopolies, Baran and Sweezy argue, big corporations can set prices with little concern for what their competitors charge, thereby avoiding destructive “price wars.” The big firms can also afford the kinds of technologies that allow economic output per worker—productivity—to rise faster than wages. Largely immune to competitive forces and able to churn out more of their products with a smaller payroll while charging higher prices, corporations accumulate vast surpluses of wealth that far exceed the amount that can be absorbed through investment in new capital. The force behind the growth of capitalist economies—the cycle of production, sales, wealth accumulation, reinvestment, and expanded production—gets bogged down, and stagnation results.⁴⁶

      In a world dominated by monopoly capital, therefore, economists no longer need inquire into the causes of stagnations or depressions; the question, rather, is how do mature capitalist economies manage to grow at all? After all, Monopoly Capital’s argument that there exists a long-term tendency toward stagnation was published twenty years into an unprecedented economic boom. How to explain that? Noting that opportunities for absorbing excess surplus still existed, but that powerful ones were exceedingly rare, Baran and Sweezy point to a small handful of phenomena that had created major capital-investment incentives. Most obviously, there was the war economy, which had ended the stagnation of the 1930s and, thanks to the Cold War and U.S. militarism around the globe, was still pumping adrenaline into the economy of the 1960s. Then there were the massive economies surrounding the private automobile: its manufacture and care, and the related industries that were directly enriched from it, including gasoline, insurance, and tourism. In addition to these were what Baran and Sweezy call the “sales effort,” an entire meta-economy led by the advertising and public relations industries. They warned that although these financial engines were capable of driving the U.S. economy further, they all had their own limits. Furthermore, the business cycles inherent in all capitalist economies ensured that growth would never be constant and linear. (Later, from the 1980s onward, militarism, the vehicle industry, hyper-commercialism, and mass advertising would prove to be insufficient forces for boosting mass consumption sufficiently to keep up with ballooning surplus production, so a fourth economic adjustment mechanism, the seemingly limitless growth of financial markets, emerged. The “financialization” wave, as well as those older investment mechanisms, has remained in play and, crucially, together they continue to be some of the dominant contributors to greenhouse warming. Now the nascent renewable-energy industry is being billed as yet another means of keeping economic stagnation at bay.)

      By 1972, gross national product was still growing nicely, and the United States was looking forward to the end of yet another foreign war. At that year’s Republican Convention, President Richard Nixon crowed that Americans had “more prosperity than any people in the world, [and] we have the highest rate of growth of any industrial nation.”⁴⁷ A month later, the New York Times reported on forecasts of “continued strong general economic growth” through 1973.⁴⁸

      The last thing politicians, economists, or investors wanted to hear about in 1972 was any talk of hindrance, caution, or restraint. So the publication that year of a book titled The Limits to Growth⁴⁹ was about as welcome as a bowl of prune soup at a potluck. Through the remainder of the twentieth century, the book was widely loathed and dismissed in economic, political, and scientific circles; in this century, with climate chaos making its arguments appear more and more on target, it has gained wide respect.⁵⁰

      The Limits to Growth had its roots in a 1968 meeting of what came to be known as the Club of Rome, an international collection of, in their own characterization, “scientists, educators, economists, humanists, industrialists, and national and international civil servants”; the group took its name from the city where that meeting took place. Their broad concern was, as they saw it, the global complex of economic, political, social, cultural, and environment problems.

      In the gender-hindered language of the times, Club members later decided to pursue what they called a “Project on the Predicament of Mankind.” Their analysis employed then-state-of-the-art computer models developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The models predicted the trajectories of humanity’s and the Earth’s vital signs all the way through the twenty-first century, based on several alternative strategies aimed at relieving or circumventing ecological limits and thereby avoiding economic decline or even the collapse of civilization. But every model they tested led to a dangerous “overshoot” of environmental limits. Sometimes it was because of pollution, sometimes resource scarcity, sometimes decline of food production. Any of these, the model predicted, would cut off economic growth sometime before 2100, triggering an irreversible decline. Regarding technology, for example, the book’s authors came to a grim conclusion: “When we introduce technological developments that successfully lift some restraint to growth or avoid some collapse, the system simply grows to another limit, temporarily surpasses it, and falls back.”

      Even in a model that assumed “unlimited” resources, strong pollution controls, increased agricultural productivity, and “perfect” availability and application of family planning, while using every tool at hand “to circumvent in some way the various limits to growth,” the result was still an end of growth, caused by three “simultaneous crises:” soil degradation, resource depletion “by a prosperous world population,” and dramatic increases in contaminants—among which the modelers presciently included excess atmospheric CO₂ (carbon dioxide.) They concluded that the “application of technological solutions alone has prolonged the period of population and industrial growth, but it has not removed the ultimate limits to that growth.”⁵¹

      Finally, they radically altered the model’s parameters to portray a society that chooses restraint. For example, they assumed universal access to fully effective birth control and a desired reproduction rate of two children; limits on production; dramatically increased efficiency of resource use and pollution prevention; emphasis on soil protection and universal food security; and better durability of goods and capital stock. That scenario produced not collapse but a world that ended up in an economically modest equilibrium that was adequate to satisfy human needs.

      The Limits to Growth was full of graphs depicting future rises and declines of population, resource use, agricultural and industrial production, and pollution, and included a stark warning: “We . . . believe that if a profound correction is not made soon, a crash of some sort is certain. And it will occur within the lifetimes of many who are alive today.” For years, the book’s critics enjoyed pointing out that the collapses forecasted in the business-as-usual curves had not occurred. Finally, in the early 2000s, a few analysts decided to compare The Limits to Growth’s predictions with what had actually happened so far.⁵² They found that the world’s vital signs had followed the old model’s predictions quite closely up to that time. The bad news for us, they pointed out, is that СКАЧАТЬ