The Worldwatch Institute just came out with the 1998 edition of the "State
of the World: a Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society." The
Institute is a mainstream environmentalist organization that gets funding
from the Rockefeller Foundation and Pew Charitable Trust. The executive
director is Lester R. Brown, who has held posts at the UN and the
Department of Agriculture.
The best way to describe the report is as an expert, high-level briefing on
capitalism's ecological contradictions. It proposes solutions that fall
squarely within the capitalist system. For those of us who believe that
these contradictions can only be resolved through a socialist
transformation, the information is particularly valuable. Proof that the
ruling class wanted the straight poop from the Worldwatch Institute
researchers can be found in the radical credentials of a few of them,
including Michael Klare, a frequent contributor to the Nation magazine and
Phyllis Bennis, Pacifica's UN reporter and an ex-leader of a defunct Maoist
group called Line of March.
I found two items of particular interest. One deals with declining fish
stocks. The other deals with water pollution produced by the modern
capital-intensive livestock industry. Although the report does not come out
and say it, the only conclusion one can draw is that these problems are
rooted in the anarchy of the capitalist mode of production itself.
The report states that according to the Food and Agriculture Administration
(FAO), a US agency, the present capacity of the world's fishing fleets is
200% of the world's available fisheries. Over the past 50 years,
technological breakthroughs in the fishing industry have far exceeded
nature's ability to reproduce itself. The biggest change has been the
introduction of sonar, a wartime innovation. Many of the first new fishing
trawlers were actually converted WWII submarine hunters.
In the early 1950s, new ships were built from the ground up that could
catch 500 tons of fish a day. Huge trawl nets brought the catch on the deck
and dumped it into onboard processing and freezing facilities. In the past,
ships had to return to port quickly before the fish spoiled. Now equipped
with freezers they could spend months at sea, sweeping up vast quantities
of fish. They roamed the planet in search of profits. In 1970 the tonnage
of all fishing boats was 13,616. In 1992 it was 25,994, a 91% increase.
Capital simply flowed to the profitable fishing industry with little regard
to the long-term consequences.
One of the consequences of the industrial trawling model is that
large-scale production techniques generate huge amounts of waste. The nets
draw unwanted species that are simply discarded. The FAO estimates that
discarded fish total 27 million tons each year, about 1/3 of the total
catch. This includes sea mammals, seabirds and turtles. While Greenpeace
activists fight for the life of the unfortunate porpoise, many other
species are disappearing without fanfare. The loss is serious since all of
these species interact with each other in the marine ecosystem and make
natural reproduction possible.
A similar sort of contradiction occurs in the livestock industry where
technological breakthroughs accelerate production but at huge and possibly
fatal costs to the environment. The Worldwatch Institute identifies
fertilizer and cheap transportation as the main culprits.
Cheap transportation makes it possible to separate the ranch and the feed
supply from each other across huge distances, even overseas. This means
that while it can be profitable to locate a cattle ranch, poultry or hog
farm near large metropolitan markets, the organic waste the animals produce
is not easily recyclable. Most of these animals are not raised on the open
range, but in huge buildings where excreta flows from the pens into drains
that lead to rivers or underground water supplies.
In Europe, for example, the livestock industry purchases feed from Brazil,
Thailand or the USA. But the industry has outgrown the capacity of nearby
lands to absorb the manure. The Netherlands was home to a 40 million ton
mountain of cowshit earlier in the decade. Coupled with heavy fertilizer
use, the end result has been a serious pollution problem.
The same problem exists in the US, especially in North Carolina. Farmers in
the Corn Belt produce grain for chickens and hogs in the eastern seaboard
state, but the waste product is not recycled. It is dumped in the state's
rivers and lakes. The EPA estimates that 25% of all water pollution in the
USA comes from such sources. In North Carolina, over 6 major spills from
farms into public waters were reported in 1995. In one case, 95,000 cubic
meters of waste was involved, enough to fill more than 60 Olympic sized
swimming pools.
To keep up with the demand for livestock feed, single-crop farmers in the
Midwest turn to intensive, industrial farming that makes heavy use of
inorganic fertilizers. These substances leak into rivers, lakes and bays
with disastrous results to fish and other wildlife. The report states that
"So extensive is the agricultural pollution of the Mississippi River--the
main drainage conduit for the US Corn Belt--that a 'dead zone' the size of
New Jersey forms each year in the Gulf of Mexico, the river's terminus."
The increased vegetation that the fertilizer produces has killed vast
stocks of shrimp and other valuable fish.
Can the capitalist system resolve these problems? This is a theoretical
question that has challenged a wide variety of thinkers. David Harvey's new
book "Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference" argues that it can.
He scolds Michael Perelman, John Bellamy Foster and other ecosocialists for
having a naïve belief that we are headed for catastrophe. Capitalism, he
told a NY audience that I was part of, is extraordinarily "resilient." In
the 19th century, there were also great fears that the planet was doomed
because of resource depletion. We must be Marxists, not Malthusians, said
David Harvey.
The only problem with this sort of remonstrance is that leaves the
Marx-Malthus debate on the same terms that existed one hundred years ago.
Is it Malthusian to be concerned about the 200% ratio between industrial
capacity and available fish stocks? Also, the answer to Malthus, as most of
us know, has been greater agricultural productivity. But at a certain
point, the traditional methods of guaranteeing such productivity entail
steep environmental costs.
Is it doom-mongering to speak in terms of "The End of Nature," as Bill
McKibben does? Should Marxism prevent itself from thinking in apocalyptic
terms? In the Junius Pamphlet, Rosa Luxemburg wrote:
"Shamed, dishonored, wading in blood and dripping with filth, thus
capitalist society stands. Not as we usually see it, playing the roles of
peace and righteousness, of order, of philosophy, of ethics--as a roaring
beast, as an orgy of anarchy, as a pestilential breath, devastating culture
and humanity--so it appears in all its hideous nakedness."
A couple of months ago, I posted a 3-part NY Times article that reported
that more Asians die each year from air pollution than died during the
Vietnam war. It's odd how inured we are to these kinds of reports, but how
ready we are to march against war in Iraq. Is this because we have some
sort of deeply ingrained belief that industrial society entails these sorts
of assaults on life and health? Is breast cancer the price that women in
Long Island have to pay for a life of suburban ease?
Today I received e-mail from two friends who were despairing about the
apathy that prevails in American society. Leaving aside the splendid
spontaneous protest in Ohio State University, I am encouraged by one recent
event. Television superstar Oprah Winfrey was found not guilty of defaming
the beef industry when she told her television audience that she would not
eat hamburger after hearing about the dangers of Mad Cow Disease. Beef
industry stocks plummeted by 10% after the show was aired.
Oprah Winfrey reaches the masses, not us. Her concerns should be the same
as ours, however. If the Worldwatch Institute report is to be believed, the
contradictions of a system based on private profit will create more and
more threats to our health in years to come. The conception of radical
politics that many of us have inherited comes from the 1930s. We are always
thinking in terms of sit-down strikes by auto workers in overalls. One of
the reasons that we examine the East Asia economic crisis with such
intensity is that we have expectations--even hopes--that a financial
meltdown will lead to a new 1930s. No doubt this hope is held most
passionately by David Harvey, who told a NY audience that the "primary
contradiction" of worker versus boss at the point of production is what
counts most.
The problem is that the class struggle does not appear in a predictable
form. What moves people into opposition against the system is not some
Marxist pamphlets or depression-era novels by John Steinbeck. The
contradictions might be felt in an entirely different manner. They may
involve health and quality of life, instead of wages and working
conditions. We have to be on the alert for these developments, or else face
irrelevancy. With all the problems facing Marxism since the collapse of the
Soviet Union, it would make sense to not squander opportunities when they
arise. Our class enemy is infinitely more aggressive and opportunistic
after all.
Louis Proyect
