The Political Economy of Global Warming: The Terminal Crisis 9780415811774

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
The Political Economy of Global Warming......Page 2
Title Page......Page 6
Copyright Page......Page 7
Dedication......Page 8
Table of Contents......Page 10
List of figures and table......Page 12
Foreword......Page 13
Preface......Page 15
Acknowledgements......Page 17
Part I The state of the world......Page 20
1 Introduction......Page 22
2 State of the planet, Kyoto and technical fixes......Page 33
3 Emission trading schemes, financialisation and green capitalism......Page 61
4 The global political economy and global warming......Page 74
Part II African studies - a reflection of the global political economy......Page 114
5 Africa......Page 116
6 South Africa......Page 132
7 South African electricity: a capitalist hub......Page 158
Part III To have a future......Page 172
8 Alternative futures......Page 174
9 The principles underpinning future societies......Page 188
10 Getting to the future......Page 201
11 Conclusion......Page 213
Notes......Page 217
Bibliography......Page 223
Index......Page 240

Citation preview

The Political Economy of Global Warming

Humanity is facing an unprecedented global catastrophe as a result of global warming. This book examines the reasons why international agencies, together with national governments, are seemingly unable to provide real and binding solutions to the problems. The reasons presented relate to the existing dominant global economic structure of capitalism as well as the fact that global warming is too often seen as an isolated problem rather than one of a suite of exceptional, converging and accelerating crises arising from the global capitalist political economy. This book adopts a political economy framework to address these issues. It accepts the science of global warming but challenges the predominant politics and economics of global warming. To illustrate the key issues involved, the book draws on South Africa – building on Samir Amin’s thesis that the country represents a microcosm of the global political economy. By taking a political economy approach, the author provides a clear explanation of the deep and pervasive problem of the denial which fails to acknowledge global warming as a systemic rather than a market problem. The book will be of interest to students and scholars researching climate change, environmental politics, environmental and ecological economics, development studies and political economics. Del Weston (1950–2012) held an Adjunct Researcher Position with Curtin University, Australia, an Honorary Research Associate position at the University of Tasmania, Australia, and was a Visiting Scholar in the Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.

Routledge Explorations in Environmental Studies

Nuclear Waste Management and Legitimacy Nihilism and responsibility Mats Andrén Nuclear Power, Economic Development Discourse and the Environment The case of India Manu V. Mathai Federalism of Wetlands Ryan W. Taylor Governing Sustainable Urban Renewal Partnerships in action Rory Shand Employee Engagement with Sustainable Business How to change the world whilst keeping your day job Nadine Exter The Political Economy of Global Warming The terminal crisis Del Weston Communicating Environmental Patriotism A rhetorical history of the American environmental movement Anne Marie Todd Environmental Justice in Developing Countries Perspectives from Africa and Asia-Paci¿c Rhuks Temitope Ako

Climage Change and Cultural Heritage A race against time Peter F. Smith A Global Environmental Right Stephen Turner The Coming of Age of the Green Community My neighbourhood, my planet Erik Bichard Fairness and Justice in Environmental Decision-Making Water under the bridge Catherine Gross Carbon Politics and the Failure of the Kyoto Protocol Gerald Kutney

This page intentionally left blank

The Political Economy of Global Warming The terminal crisis

Del Weston

First published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN And by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © Del Weston The right of Del Weston to be identi¿ed as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identi¿cation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weston, Del. The political economy of global warming : the terminal crisis / Del Weston. pages cm 1. Energy policy--South Africa. 2. Global warming--South Africa. 3. Energy policy. 4. Global warming. I. title. HD9502.S56W47 2013 363.738'745610968--dc23 2013000910 ISBN13: 978-0-415-81177-4 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-06896-0 (ebk) Typeset in Times by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

“To my darling Gavin To my children Katherine, Nicolau and Alexander And to my grandson Reuben”

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

List of ¿gures and table Foreword Preface Acknowledgements

ix x xii xiv

PART I

The state of the world

1

1

Introduction

3

2

State of the planet, Kyoto and technical ¿xes

14

3

Emission trading schemes, ¿nancialisation and green capitalism

42

4

The global political economy and global warming

55

PART II

African studies ± a reÀection of the global political economy

95

5

Africa

97

6

South Africa

113

7

South African electricity: a capitalist hub

139

PART III

To have a future

153

8

155

Alternative futures

x

Contents

9

The principles underpinning future societies

169

10 Getting to the future

182

11 Conclusion

194

Notes Bibliography Index

198 204 220

Figures and table

Figures 2.1 2.2 4.1 5.1 8.1 8.2

Inequality of consumption CO2 emissions and global warming Income discrepancy Estimated deaths attributed to climate change in the year 2000 Champagne-glass distribution of global wealth World oil depletion curve

16 23 90 101 162 163

Table 7.1 South Africa Electricity: production, coal and carbon

143

Foreword Noel Nannup

In early December 2012, Del Weston contacted me explaining she had heard me speak about how important the natural environment is to my Australian Aboriginal people. Del said she had read some articles that I had published and asked me if I would consider writing the foreword for her new book The Political Economy of Global Warming. I am the ¿rst to concede that I am no authority on politics, the economy, or global warming. I was in the process of considering this request when I, like many other people, was shocked to learn that Del and Gavin had lost their lives. In honour of Del and at the request of her children, Katherine and Alexander, I ful¿l Del’s wish. I know Del has written about South Africa. We are in a similar situation here in Western Australia. We struggle to adapt to the constant stresses, strains and unrelenting total disregard for our spiritual well being, as we witness the destruction of our Mother Earth/Homelands. My heart aches for my people and my land. Thank goodness for people with intestinal fortitude like Del Weston, they restore my faith in humanity. When I was young my parents told me that the pen is mightier than the sword as they prepared me for a life of hope and a life ¿lled with looking for the good in everything. Del points out that there needs to be a radical rethink of how societies operate in the effort to restore a balance between man and the natural environment, and between rich and poor nations and peoples. At the heart of this rethink is the appreciation of ancient and indigenous ways of thinking and viewing the world. We have to act now and stop taking from the Earth. We have to give something back. In the pursuit of material things and technological advancement we have forgotten some of the fundamentals of life, such as caring for each other and our planet. I constantly have to go back to a reference point in my life where my father told me that Australia’s greatest asset is its natural vegetation, as everything else depends on it. And this was the night after we had spent all day following bulldozers that towed heavy chains that smashed trees, plants, birds and animals to pieces.

Foreword

xiii

I always have to call on my parents steely resolve to cope with all that life sends my way. I never underestimate the power of the spirit. I know that this book will inÀuence and inspire many others, as well as those who reference Del’s thinking in their own writings. One thing that is absolutely certain, Del Weston has left her mark.

Preface

It requires not only courage but also a lot of ¿ne analysis to tackle a topic such as the political economy of global warming. Del Weston does this in a manner that combines critical theory, vigorous research and, most importantly, strong advocacy for a change in the way the global economy has affected the fabrics of society and the Earth’s atmosphere. She exposes the truth about the South African reality around the minerals-energy complex as an example of how things can go wrong with capitalist development and as ‘a microcosm of the global system. You have everything that exists anywhere and usually the worst of everything!’ (Amin, 1997: n.p.). This powerful work is informed by historical materialism within a Marxist tradition. It explains the unrestrained exploitation of the natural environment as a result of the existing capitalist social relations of production giving rise to the metabolic rift (Foster, 1999; McClintock, 2010) that affects the connection between people. This global rift has divided the rich from the poor and created the enormous ecological debt that the industrialised countries owe to the other parts of the world. A further consequence is the carbon rift (Clark and York, 2005) which describes the dominance of humans over the biosphere and affects all species on the planet. Del Weston’s life was cut short and the book that you are holding in your hands is the last thing she wrote. It is now left to other thinkers to explore the myriad of symptoms of the crises caused by capitalism and to look for possible solutions. Her work, however, is a major stepping-stone in this analysis and is done with a vigour and passion that are inspirational and encouraging for others to follow. It in many ways signi¿es what Del stood for in her life and what she represented. I did not know Del as a mother and wife, but I have had the privilege to supervise her work as a Research Master with Training (her thesis was ‘Democracy and political economy of genetic engineering’) and Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) student. The topic of her PhD ‘The political economy of global warming’ (Weston, 2012) is the basis for this book. I was also blessed with her friendship, support and insights on politics and community life. She was a gentle soul but an enthusiastic ¿ghter for giving everybody a chance in a system that favours the privileged. Her ideas about community power and the wisdom of

Contents xv ordinary people in making decisions that could change the course of global events were inspiring. People trusted her as they could see competence, con¿dence, optimism, hope and inspiration. Del’s unique personal qualities are part of this book. Her style is easy to follow, insightful, enthralling and compelling. It triggers emotional responses but also captivates the imagination. By linking the problems surrounding global warming, together with their supporting scienti¿c evidence, with the dominant sociopolitical context within which they have emerged, she argues that single-issue solutions, such as carbon tax, emissions trading schemes or the clean development mechanism, would not be able to solve the deeply rooted crises related to the general health of the planet. There are however alternatives to this dominant paradigm and the book presents some persuasive examples. Its message is that the sooner we reject the need to follow the established capitalist model and start looking for ways to achieve a systematic transformational social change, the more hope there would be for the future. For those who have never met Del, her words will open up a new world of critical thinking and also optimism, possibilities and dreams. We are all lucky to have the chance to envisage, create and live in such a better world and hopefully some will leave behind a legacy as strong as what Del has done for us… With love and gratitude Dora Marinova Professor of Sustainability Curtin University, Perth, Australia 15 May 2013

References Amin, S. (1997) Samir Amin’s 1997 Babu Memorial Lecture on 22 September 1997, in Pambazuka News, 451, 2009-10-08, http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59324 [accessed 15.05.2013] Clark, B. and York, R. (2005) Carbon metabolism: Global capitalism, climate change, and the biospheric rift, Theory and Society, 34: 391–428 Foster, J. B. (1999) Marx’s theory of metabolic rift: Classical foundations for environmental sociology, American Journal of Sociology, 105(2): 366-405 McClintock, N. (2010) Why farm the city? Theorising urban agriculture through a lens of metabolic rift, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economics and Society, 3(2): 191–207 Weston, D. (2012) The political economy of global warming, PhD thesis, Curtin University, Perth, Australia

Acknowledgements

A number of people have assisted me in writing this book. Foremost are the many people whose names I have now forgotten but who had such a big inÀuence on me and motivated me to write the book – from Zimbabwe, Burundi, the Congo, from the Horn of Africa – people my husband and I picked up from the sides of roads as we travelled through South Africa; people making the long trek across the African continent as refugees to ¿nd a small corner in a country on the planet where they could stop, erect some insubstantial shelter and hope to eke out a living. At one point, Gavin, my husband, and I stopped the car to pick up a woman and her two children from the side of a highway at Messina near the border with Zimbabwe, a route lined for miles with refugees. As we stopped the car and indicated to the woman and her children to get in, someone jumped out from behind a bush and grabbed the woman’s small bag. The only possession she had in the world. Gone. It included her identity papers, without which she could go neither forward nor return to where she came from. We gave her some money and left her there to a fate that could hardly be more cruel. A crowd of refugees moved forward, all desperate to take her place. We plucked two young women and their babies from the crowd. The women had been walking for days; they were dirty, hungry, tired and their babies smelt terrible. One had had to choose between her two little ones as she could not work with two babies on her back. I will never forget them. Beautiful, articulate, brave women; we sang the songs of Rod Stewart as we hurtled down the freeway to an unknown fate for them in Johannesburg. The pain of their lives was unbearable. Gavin and I sat in the car and cried after we had dropped them off. No-one knows how many people set out on the dangerous and arduous trek across the African continent in search of safety and security; or how many die in the attempt. That it happens on a large scale is a fact; that it will happen on a yet larger and harsher scale as a result of global warming is also a fact. It is unseen by us in wealthy countries, but it is consequence of our failure to address global warming, our failure to address the structural and historical causes of inequality and injustice, our failure to address the exploitation and the Àow of wealth from South to North. Our current trajectory of growth and consumption is laying the foundation for large-scale ecocide in Africa.

Acknowledgements xvii I spent nine months over three years to 2011 in South Africa – a country where, without fail, people were hospitable and unstintingly helpful. So many í from refugees to those living in shacks in Khayelitsha, to workers hitching rides whom we picked up on our travels í these ordinary ‘little’ people í the unemployed, the black poor, the exploited and marginalised of South Africa – people who were so generous and so prepared to give us a glimpse of their lives and the hardships and humiliations that they endure in a country heralded as the ‘rainbow nation’. Such a rich tapestry of South African life; such an indictment of the wealthy and powerful of that country. It was so often said to us that white people don’t normally stop and pick up blacks. This is not surprising in a nation which has failed so desperately to live up to the promises of the anti-Apartheid liberation struggle; a country where power and wealth remain ¿rmly in the clutches of the mostly white elite, built on the backs of the mostly black, poor. From Cape Town – a city of gross inequalities – I have many to thank. Nkwame Cedile who introduced me to Khayelitsha and to local activist groups. Tinashe Njanji, a refugee from Zimbabwe, nearly dying from tuberculosis, who survived xenophobic attacks and still joins the struggle for justice. Tinashe, now a good friend, continues to send me information on current events that are often below the radar of mainstream media. There are Richard and Mowjumba and sons Nashir and Bashir from Burundi; and Henry from the Congo – all caught up in the growing xenophobia that is a continuation of the deep racism, poverty and inequality of South Africa today. Wonderful people who continue to struggle to survive in a world which holds them captive to the violence and injustices of a system built on dispossession, exploitation and inequality. All victims of economic policies which enrich the already rich and impoverish the already poor; resilient people who have shared a part of their lives with me. To all of you, I say thank you. You gave a moral purpose to my book and have motivated me to want to try to make a contribution to changing the world in which we live. I would like to thank Richard Spoor, a South African civil rights lawyer who gave so much time and valuable information about mining conditions for labourers – including foreign labourers. Thank you. A big thank you to the Health Economics Unit (HEU) at the University of Cape Town for so generously providing me with a computer, of¿ce space and very warm hospitality on each of my visits to South Africa. Closer to home, I would like to thank Peter Boyer for the very generous editing, and Margaret Steadman for your helpful advice on the book. Neither Peter nor Margaret is responsible for any shortcomings in the end product. I want to thank Gavin, my husband, for his unwavering support. Since beginning on this journey, you have been unstintingly supportive, encouraging and helpful. You have done everything from touring coalmines to providing thought-provoking conversations and been prepared í with a cup of tea at 2 o’clock in the morning í to discuss everything from Marx to urban agriculture, while preventing me from becoming too despairing about global warming. Finally, I would like to thank Routledge for the wonderful opportunity to publish this book.

This page intentionally left blank

Part I

The state of the world

This page intentionally left blank

1

Introduction

The omens are not good for the future of human civilisation. We have reached a historical juncture whereby we must either dramatically change course or face widespread and irreversible human catastrophe: the collapse of our institutions and the death of millions and eventually billions of people. Civilisations have collapsed before. We now face the prospect of another imminent collapse, but this time, on an unprecedented scale of suffering. Dr Rajendra Pachauri, Scientist and Economist, then Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said in 2007 that ‘if there’s no action before 2012 [when the Kyoto Protocol ran out], that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the de¿ning moment.’ I am writing this book in the belief that it is not too late, that we still have a small window of opportunity to change the current course of human history, and that we have a moral imperative, given the potential scale of suffering, to act. So, while there is no longer any doubt that human-induced global warming is occurring, what is not known is the timing and magnitude of effects and at what junctures irreversible tipping points will be passed, taking the planet on a warming trajectory which will be catastrophic for humans and most species. It is the greatest issue facing humanity. The key factors in the evidence of its existence are presented but this book is not about global warming per se. It is about the political economy of global warming. To be more accurate, I have argued in this book that it is necessary to see global warming as one of a suite of problems arising from the system of capitalist political economy – a system which is particular and also, now, globalised. The term ‘political economy’ requires immediate de¿nition. It has been chosen because it involves an insightful approach to understanding society – particularly in relation to power, class and ‘the social relations of production’ (see below) which are issues of particular concern in analysing the structural dynamics relevant to global warming. Weingast and Wittman (2006: 3) summarise the range of interpretations of political economy as follows: For Adam Smith, political economy was the science of managing a nation’s resources so as to generate wealth. For Marx, it was how the ownership of the means of production inÀuenced historical processes. For much of

4

The state of the world the twentieth century, the phrase political economy … had contradictory meanings. Sometimes it was viewed as an area of study (the interrelationship between economics and politics) while at other times, it was viewed as a methodological approach. Even the methodological approach was divided into two parts – the economic approach (often called public choice) emphasising individual rationality and the sociological approach where the level of analysis tended to be institutional.

For this book, I have drawn on the de¿nition from Munro (2004: 146–7): Political economy is ¿rstly a study of society and social processes. It focuses on ‘material production’ in two senses: (i) how the creation, distribution, exchange and consumption of goods, services, income and wealth occurs, and (ii) how the organisation and imperatives of material production inÀuence almost all of society’s other institutions, be they political, civil or cultural. Second [political economy] has analysed the nature of economic growth and change and how the prior distribution of resources (such as land, labour and capital, and the conÀict between the respective classes) affects economic change. Third [political economy] is a social science both in terms of its social content (the study of how people, classes, social systems, institutions, gender, etc., produce and reproduce the material bases of societies), its use of scienti¿c methodologies (whether empirical, historical materialist, deductive, etc.) and its self-reÀexive and self-critical nature. Fourth, the values inherent in political economy reÀect its status as a child of the Enlightenment. Finally, the founders of political economy were political activists who saw government as a fundamental (if Àawed) buttress of the economy. Ballaam and Veseth (2005: 5) add some points which are relevant to the use of the term in this book. In this, political economy is ‘necessarily international in context’ and looks at the ways that ‘individuals, states, and markets of the world are connected to one another and the arrangements or structures that have evolved to connect them [reÀecting] culture, history and values’. It involves explicit analysis of power structures and an understanding of the power of ideology. There is no pretence in the philosophical neutrality of political economy. This book will be drawing on Marxist theory (which ¿ts well within the critical political economy approach) to take a critical and analytical approach to the structures underpinning global warming and the neoliberal solutions to this problem. For this book, political economy has considerable relevance in addressing the practical problem of global warming, situating it not as the central problem í albeit one that requires immediate attention í but a historical and material symptom of a political and economic system that is in crisis. The book draws on the methodology of political economy and critical theory (discussed in more detail below) to examine both the causes of and the possible solutions to global warming. The defence of such a methodology, if defence is needed, is

Introduction 5 that the debate about the causes of and solutions to global warming is strangely de-contextualised from broader social, economic and ecological crises, and largely ‘a-theoretical’. It must also be recognised that the debate about global warming and its solutions has to be political. This is where the political economy of global warming, while drawing on environmentalism, at the same time has to challenge that body of knowledge. It is a point made by Rosewarne (2002: 180): ‘if the engagement of political economy with environmentalism is to be one of substance, it must be more than an intellectual excursion through competing paradigms. The intellectual task must also have a political edge to it so that it engages with environmentalism politically.’ In terms of the road travelled by this book, as it turns out, it is very much guided by what Rosewarne (ibid.: 181) then adds: ‘A political economy of the environment [and I would add global warming] should look towards identifying and critically engaging with the social forces that can create the transformation necessary for effecting a sustainable future.’ A second key concept for the book is the ‘social relations of production’. I am using this in a Marxist sense. Marx (1894: n.p.) wrote: The speci¿c economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its speci¿c political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers — a relation always naturally corresponding to a de¿nite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity — which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding speci¿c form of the state. Further, on the social relations of production, Marx (1847: 207) wrote that the ‘relations of production in their totality constitute what is called the social relations, society, and, moreover, a society at a de¿nite stage of historical development, a society with peculiar, distinctive characteristics’. In other words, humans’ impact on the environment is determined by the particular social structure of the society, the social relations amongst people and the material/social relations of people with the broad ecology. Within the capitalist social structure, the ecological conditions of social reproduction have been largely ignored with the natural environment being treated as a free and limitless resource for the economy, until more recent decades when various ecological crises have forced a reassessment. A political economy approach is based on the centrality of the social relations of production; it takes into account the class structure of society, as well as exploitation – of humans and nature í and hence social or class conÀicts. It also takes into account the role of institutions, including the state as a

6

The state of the world

political institution, recognising the inseparable relationship between institutions and power relations. The Marxist political economy approach is methodologically, theoretically and historically useful in answering the question: ‘can the problem of global warming be solved within the globalised capitalism political economy framework?’ This book is built on the premise agreed by all the major national and international scienti¿c institutions, that human-induced global warming is occurring, and occurring at an accelerating rate. The book departs from this consensus, however, by maintaining that global warming is just one, although a profound, symptom rather than the fundamental issue. That fundamental issue is that the globalised capitalist economic system of production, with its imperatives for growth and expansion, for consuming land, water, and all parts of the biosphere beyond the capacity for regeneration, is taking the planetary system to the point of ecological collapse and the biosphere to a new geological era not conducive to human and other species’ life. We now have to choose between maintaining the globalised system of capitalism or restoring the planet to a stable state conducive to human civilisation. We have to choose between an immediate, planned and orderly transition or chaos, barbarism and large-scale destruction. The fact of global warming has been known for a number of decades with almost twenty years of fruitless international negotiations around seeking a solution. The failure to agree to a real solution serves to legitimise the denial of the gravity and urgency of the situation. National political narratives that reach the world stage are congruent in their absence of attention to global warming. Our electronic media are almost mute on the subject; our print media run an occasional story around particularly devastating cyclones or Àoods or droughts with the occasional link to global warming. The global elite continues to add to its overÀowing coffers from investments in the fossil fuel industry; our political leaders make at best the odd mufÀed noise seeking to establish, amidst conservative opposition, ineffective market mechanisms to tackle ‘the problem’, reassuring us that we can not only maintain our lifestyles but look forward to improvements. At the same time, our political leaders continue to ‘lock in’ decades more of dependence on fossil fuels. The 2012 US Presidential election saw barely a mention of global warming – until the election process itself was gatecrashed by the enormous scale of Hurricane Sandy that hit the nerve centre of US wealth and ¿nancial power. The wealthy and middle classes in industrialised countries continue to buy petrol-guzzling SUVs bearing stickers saying ‘carbon neutral’; while the unions and their members, reÀecting the economistic imperatives of the wider society, ¿ght to keep coal-¿red power stations and coal mines open and forest logging unrestricted, so that their jobs are protected. There is a disconnect in high-income countries between today’s struggle for jobs and livelihoods and the fundamental need to have a planet ¿t for human life. Meanwhile carbon emissions continue to rise, and at an increasing rate. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 400 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere at Barrow, Alaska in May 2012 – the ¿rst time such a high monthly reading has happened on the planet (NOAA 2012). This reading

Introduction 7 presages more global readings at this level by 2016. This is far above the normal range over the last 650,000 years. By 2008, the UN estimated over 300,000 people had died as a result of global warming (Vidal 2009), a ¿gure which will rise exponentially, perhaps to billions of people, with numbers bunching towards the end of this century. And global warming is just one of a number of converging and accelerating symptoms of a planet plundered beyond its capacity to repair, regenerate and sustain life and civilisation as we have known it over the last 10,000 years of the Holocene epoch. Global warming is a symptom illustrative of the inability of national governments to deal with the multitude of crises of the capitalist system. Our governments are products of the system that has given rise to the problems. At some level, our political leaders must know that really to tackle global warming, they will need to alter our economic trajectory radically and to depose themselves and the institutions they serve. Powerful political elites do not like to lose their power. Instead, confronted by the scienti¿c evidence of global warming, they opt for carbon markets, ‘green’ capitalism, and green technologies – all of which will continue to grow the economy and exacerbate the problem, fooling compliant populations into believing that sensible action is being taken, and our non-negotiable lifestyles and values can continue without disruption, and perhaps, as some of the messages imply, be better than before. Even the big fossil fuel polluters can continue business as usual, with a frenetic rush to invest billions of dollars in new infrastructure to extract coal, oil and gas from increasingly fragile, risky and polluting areas. Our political elites reward this activity with billions of dollars each year in subsidies to some of the most powerful, richest and polluting corporations in the world. The total value of conventional global fossil fuel subsidies has been estimated by The Worldwatch Institute1 to be between $775 billion and more than $1 trillion in 2012. If even a third of the projects now in the ¿nancial pipeline of the fossil fuel industry were to come to productive fruition, it would be game over for humanity. On the other hand, if the projects in this ¿nancial pipeline were closed down, as the science demands, it would make the global ¿nancial crisis (GFC) which began in 2007 and continues to have repercussions look like a hiccup, as our globally entwined ¿nancial systems would be hit with a massive drop in the valuation of some of the biggest and most powerful corporations on the planet. And yet, despite the predictions of impending profound catastrophe, national and international governance institutions have not addressed the problem in any meaningful or substantive way. The closest international institutions have come to ¿nding a solution was in the internationally binding United Nations Kyoto Protocol, adopted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Kyoto, Japan in 1997 and which came into force in 2005. The Kyoto Protocol ¿rst commitment period expired in 2012 after not only failing to result in any reduction in carbon emissions, but presiding over a period of increasing carbon emission growth. It has not to date been replaced by any globally binding agreement. The Kyoto Protocol, despite being fundamentally Àawed, represented something of a beacon of hope, at least around the ability

8

The state of the world

of governments world wide (with the signi¿cant omission of the United States) to act together for the common good of humankind. The global ¿nancial crisis which began in 2007 has continued to overshadow the state of the biosphere, and the imperative for economic growth, notwithstanding the very close correlation between growth and carbon emissions, continues as the predominant economic concern of governments. The plethora of environmental agreements signed by governments over the past forty years since the ¿rst Earth Summit in 1992 has achieved little and the health of the biosphere continues to deteriorate. By the time of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, known colloquially as Rio+20, held in Brazil in June 2012, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels had increased by 40 parts per million since the ¿rst Rio Summit in 1992.2 Biodiversity loss has increased by 30 per cent. Yet Rio+20 produced no binding agreements or any clear path forward. US President Obama, German Chancellor Merkel and UK Prime Minister Cameron did not even attend. Such a vacuum provided the perfect environment for the ever adaptable, ever opportunistic and ever expanding forces of capital. ‘Green’ capitalism moved seamlessly to the lead role on the UN’s premier global climate stage. In the absence of governments engaging with UN climate mitigation, corporations are to be the new forces for driving climate mitigation strategies through green public–private partnerships, commodifying nature and natural processes and turning them into another component of capital accumulation. The fox is now well and truly in charge of the chickens. This book provides answers as to why there has been such complete failure at the international governance level on an issue that is of profound importance to every human being. It goes beyond the science, the technical and market solutions, to an understanding of the power and economic structural reasons behind the lack of real action in addressing global warming. It seeks to spell out that a world based on new economic principles is not only desirable but essential for the survival of humanity. The capitalist system must go if humanity is to continue. It begins with the issue of how we conceptualise global warming, arguing that, while this is not usually made explicit, this conceptualisation is profoundly political. It is an issue encapsulated by the rhetoric and economic structures supporting the vested interests of the wealthy and powerful in globalised society. How we conceive of global warming determines how we tackle the problem. It is dif¿cult to see the world differently from the way we are socially conditioned to do so, how it is presented every day through particular concepts and cultural framings. We need tools to assist us in this quest to adopt another view. This book challenges the current dominant conceptualisation of global warming by drawing on the tools of political economy and critical theory, enabling us in the West to step outside (and see) the ideological straitjacket by which we are so ¿rmly constrained. In this way we can examine with fresh eyes and insight what has proven until now to be an intractable problem for our governments and international institutions. I argue that what is needed is a critical examination of the particular globalised capitalist system – for the world order, and our worldviews, are in large part determined by this system and the ideology this has spawned and

Introduction 9 within which we and our thought processes are (largely unwittingly) captured. While concluding that the models presented by the repressive and unsuccessful state socialist experiments of the twentieth century provide no answer, and in readily recognising the validity and desirability of a diversity of epistemologies in seeking alternatives for the future, I have drawn on Marxist theory in exposing some of the key aspects of capitalism relevant to this issue. I have done so because Marxism provides a critical framework which is explicit, is historically contextualised, and goes to the very root and substance of how capitalist societies have formed and developed through history to the point that the capitalist economic system is now taking the planet beyond its capacity to support human and other species’ life. This book argues that it is important for us to understand the global political economy system. It is this which underpins the global warming problem. The subsequent global institutional inaction is born of and embedded in the same capitalist structure, a structure that has wrought a deep rift in the relationship between nature and society. The capitalist system has been in existence for some 500 years (as merchant capitalism for 250 years and industrial capitalism for 250 years í a relatively short time in the 150,000-year history of modern humans) and today is globalised. Despite its omnipresence economically, politically and ideologically, particularly since the 1970s and the neoliberal era, we have stopped naming this system as capitalist, speaking rather about ‘the market’, a concept which is more neutral, without the baggage of history, particularly the history of colonialism and imperialism, historical phenomena which can shed much light on the causes of global poverty and inequality, ecological debt and environmental destruction – issues which are inseparably entwined with global warming. In recent years it has become contentious to acknowledge that we live in a capitalist system, as if society has been whitewashed and depoliticised and ‘just is’. If we do not name the system, it remains the elephant in the room in looking to the causes for the failure in ¿nding real solutions to global warming. And whilst all environmental and social ills cannot be attributed to this particular political and economic system of production and social reproduction, it has been a dominant driving force. There are in addition certain characteristics of this system that make it unsustainable, inequitable and destructive of the biosphere. The book goes further. It argues that climate change now forces humanity to choose between capitalism and the planet; that nothing less than transformative, structural political economy change will enable us to avert planetary chaos. The book argues that global warming is one of a suite of crises arising from the global capitalist system. It may well be the ¿nal nail in the cof¿n for human civilisation as we know it. To treat it as an isolated, silo issue does not just divert humankind from seeing the systemic nature of the problem. It is effectively a strategy to divide, obfuscate, disempower and conquer in order to prevent transformative change. Even if not orchestrated, with such a myriad of human rights and environmental issues for socially concerned activists and NGOs to tackle, from saving ¿sheries, whales, forests, rivers, orang-utans, supporting independence

10

The state of the world

movements, opposing uranium mining, refugee rights, indigenous rights, and so on, many of which have their roots in the same global system of capitalism, such a strategy divides and dissipates energies and diverts attention from the systemic structural political economy roots common to many of the issues. Political and social activists are ensconced in so many worthy causes that sight of the big picture is lost and energies and resources are consumed on the myriad of symptoms rather than the underlying structural causes. Very often, activists and NGOs are brought into the fold, skilfully turned from being radicals and antiestablishment ¿ghters to salaried activists, dependent on and compromised by the very system which has created the problem. For global warming, the dominant thinking underlying global economics has given rise to a pervasive and dangerous denialism which sees climate change as being not only a neo-classical economic problem but one that has a neo-classical economic solution, arguing that a new form of ‘green’, ‘sustainable’ capitalism will solve the problem. Rio+20, in June 2012, witnessed some of the more frightening expressions of this belief, with ¿nancial institutions signing up to The Natural Capital Declaration (NCD) – a ‘¿nance led initiative to integrate natural capital considerations into investment, banking and lending decisions’. As the NCD stated: ‘[e]cosystem goods and services from natural capital are worth trillions of US dollars per year and constitute food, ¿ber, water, health, energy, climate security and other essential services for everyone’3 – leading to ‘¿nancial risks but also to relevant business opportunities’. From Kyoto to Rio in 2012, the rich countries have pursued the notion of the Green Economy, whereby market mechanisms involving ever-further commodi¿cation and ¿nancialisation of nature are the major policy levers proposed for tackling climate change. The book will return to the question of how governments and international institutions, even the UN, have been bought and hijacked by narrow and powerful corporate interests and vacuous economic theory, and how the growing ¿nancialisation of the global economy exacerbates this trend. It exposes the fraudulence of the seeming opportunities open to this sector to provide global warming ‘solutions’ and how this translates into growing wealth gaps, declining levels of democracy and a deteriorating biosphere, all increasingly tied to the speculative derivatives market and the priorities of capital accumulation. There is no future for humanity in this scenario, for such accumulation can only lead to the dispossession of the very basis of life for the majority. While capitalism has enormous dynamism, Àexibility, creativity, adaptability and the ability to seem to be all embracing, irrespective of whether the national political masters espouse fascism, military dictatorships or democracy, there is one thing capitalism cannot do: that is to provide a political economy framework for a just and sustainable world, a world that remains within stable biospheric conditions in our current geological epoch which has been supporting the intricate ecological web that has been intimately entwined with the development of our human civilisation since the beginning of humankind. The ¿rst aim of this book is thus to show that we have reached a particular historical juncture in the history of human civilisation. Here we must change our

Introduction 11 political economy trajectory or perish. Capitalism is no longer an option for the human species if we want to survive. Global warming alone, although just one of the suite of crises arising from capitalism, demands that we plan and implement urgent transformative political economy change. The secondary aim is to show that there is enormous potential for alternative and diverse political economies, based on different social relations of production, supportive of a diversity of cultures and species, of deep democracy, justice and equity, and conducive to a planet with a stable biosphere.

Map of the book Part I provides an overview of the state of the world, both in relation to the biosphere, but also some aspects of the contemporary global political economy which are relevant to global warming. Chapter 2 summarises the state of the planet, beginning with the human context before turning to the myriad of other indices of a planet in crisis – climate change; disappearing species; stratospheric ozone; land use change; freshwater use; biological diversity; ocean acidi¿cation, nitrogen and phosphorus inputs into the biosphere and oceans; aerosol loading and chemical pollution; food security; disappearing languages and cultures; inequality and poverty; land grabs; economic crises. Here I have drawn on work by the Stockholm Resilience Centre,4 which has brought together international scienti¿c research on a broad range of ecological issues and which constructs a picture of the biosphere’s ‘planetary boundaries’. As part of this global picture, the chapter then provides a summary of the evidence of climate change, using the most recent scienti¿c research literature including that which contributes to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. The chapter then provides an account of the global institutional response to global warming to date, including Kyoto through to Rio+20. This chapter also covers the importance and limits of renewable energies and technologies such as carbon capture and storage, geo-sequestration and biofuels. Chapter 3 explores some of the ¿nancial aspects of global warming ‘solutions’. Here, the focus will be on carbon emissions trading schemes, the asset values of fossil fuel companies and the growing presence of ¿nancial institutions involved in the ‘solutions’ to climate change including the new green capitalism. Chapter 4 introduces aspects of the global political economy of global warming. It clari¿es the distinction between positivist and critical theory, arguing that this is particularly important in relation to such ideologically anchored issues as global warming. Much of the global warming debate is contextualised within the positivist framework that is allied to the hegemonic ideology of capitalism; it presents the world as if it is ‘how it is’, the one and only reality and possibility for human development. This chapter shows how theory provides frameworks for interpreting and making sense of the world. By making the theoretical framework explicit, we hone the tools for a more critical understanding of reality, and thus can begin to construct alternative paradigms. I have adopted a Marxist framework here, arguing that it provides a broader theoretical and conceptual framework for

12

The state of the world

cutting through the microscopic and obscuring preoccupations of the majority of contemporary economists and political commentators who see little more than the All Ordinaries Index, growth, the national de¿cit, jobs and interest rates, despite the fact we are facing an unprecedented threat to our very survival. Marxist theory enables a clear linking of global warming to the many other crisis issues arising from the globalised capitalist system. In Part II, the book turns to Africa and South Africa to provide case examples of facets of the global political economy that reveal the global systemic nature of global warming. Chapter 5 looks at Africa as a continent at the forefront of global warming and the continental context for South Africa. Africa and, in turn, South Africa represent ‘a kind of microcosm of the world capitalist system’. That is, the continent and country capture and reÀect the global social relations of production, exemplifying the ecologically exploitative and destructive nature of the capitalist political economy. The continent and country capture the history of capitalism, global class divisions, the convergence of crises arising from colonial history, neoliberal development, the resources curse, governance issues, poverty and inequality, population growth, de-peasantisation and urban slum growth – all of which will intersect with global warming, with catastrophic consequences. In the words of South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the 2° C of warming agreed to by the international community means the incineration of Africa. The eminent medical journal The Lancet predicted that the loss of healthy life years as a result of global warming would be 500 times greater in African populations than in European populations (Costello et al. 2009). In the West when we are busy devising climate change adaptation policies, we are effectively turning our backs once again on this continent and continuing to allow the alignment of forces which will lead to large-scale genocide. Chapters 6 and 7 focus on South Africa. For this book, South Africa demonstrates the symptoms of the classic Marxist ‘metabolic rift’ í that is, the rift between the ecological and economic reproductive dimensions of society. It demonstrates the imperative for the expansion of capital (and the failure of trickle down); and the convergence of interests of global elites. It demonstrates the corrupt and congruent interests of both powerful corporate bodies and global institutions such as the World Bank. South Africa shows that the poorest people are already, and will continue to be, the ¿rst and worst affected by global warming, are increasingly having their limited, fragile, adaptive capacities destroyed and yet are those least responsible for the problem. Solutions to climate change cannot be found without addressing issues of poverty and inequality. Chapter 7, in getting to the root causes of poverty and inequality, focuses on the history of capitalist expansion – imperialism, colonialism and ecological debt. It then turns to contemporary globalisation processes which are driven by the core capitalist countries and are based on free trade, de-regulation and privatisation. It examines how these doctrines further dispossess the poorest people and make the rich even richer. This chapter argues that any real solution to global warming demands that we address colonial history, slavery, land dispossession, and continuing economic exploitation around

Introduction 13 minerals, fossil fuels and ¿nancial plunder. It is also proposed that reparations need to be made for the ecological debt incurred as a result of centuries of colonialism and post-colonial exploitation. The chapter looks at the consequences of neoliberal models of development on peasant societies in Africa and how this ‘development’ is contributing to vast and growing numbers of impoverished and unemployed dispossessed – a vast reserve army of labour, swelling the already huge urban slum populations; as well as undermining food security and adaptive capacities of populations in a global warming world. Part III turns to the future, exploring the question of whether there is a way forward other than simply in principle. Chapter 8 looks at the question of different worldviews and what some of the constraints are in developing ideas and models of social organisation for the future. Chapter 9 outlines what the book argues are essential principles for developing resilient and just future societies. Chapter 10 looks at the question of whether there are real-life examples of socioeconomic models that have been adopted by communities or nations in building more equitable, sustainable societies. Can we learn from these not only how we might proceed with transformative economic and social changes but also how to acknowledge their limitations vis-à-vis these changes? This chapter looks at some examples of how another way is possible; that some people not only have or have had visions of sustainable societies but have also been successful in transforming a part of their world into something more just, more resilient and enduring. This chapter also outlines some of the key principles and values, structures and institutions for such societies, arguing that we urgently need to build new and diverse narratives around the social relations of production and humanity’s relationship to nature. We need to begin planning and implementing the transition to this brave and better new world order. The ¿nal chapter concludes by bringing together the key points of the three sections of the book: the state of the planet, the attributes of the dominant global political economy system which has given rise to both ecological and social crises, and a way forward for humanity, that while promising to be dif¿cult, at least offers hope of a future.

2

State of the planet, Kyoto and technical ¿xes

This chapter provides an overview of the state of the planet. It begins with a summary of the human condition, for it is the human condition that gives the anthropocentric context to global warming. One dominating aspect of this context is global inequality. Global inequality is inseparable from global warming, both in its causes and consequences. The chapter will then turn to the state of the biosphere, touching on the myriad of indicators of the planet’s ill-health, before focusing on global warming. It then provides a summary of the main international responses to climate change to date, particularly the history of the Kyoto Protocol. The chapter then assesses the potential for technologies such as carbon capture and storage, geo-sequestration and biofuels as global warming solutions, as well as providing an evaluation of the role of renewable energy in addressing the problem of global warming.

Social problems Compounding the biospheric problems encompassing the planet are the social problems facing humanity. Parallel to, inseparable from and compounding the crises of the biosphere, are the social crises – poverty, growing numbers of refugees, food and water insecurity, growing numbers of young people with little chance of ever ¿nding employment, growing numbers of elderly dependent on deeply indebted nations. This is all occurring in a world that is increasingly interdependent, complex, and dependent on sophisticated technologies, and increasingly controlled by governance institutions or corporate bodies over which there is no democratic control; a world in which the wealth and power of multinational corporations and a small elite are greater than that of most nations and the majority of people. A critical and growing problem is inequality. We live on a planet that is quite remarkably unequal amongst its dominant species, homo sapiens, and that inequality has grown both within and across nations, particularly since the advent of neoliberalism in the late 1970s. Inequality has profound implications for global warming. There are many different data sets relating to inequality. The World Bank estimates that 2 per cent of the world’s adult individuals have more than half of

State of the planet, Kyoto and technical ¿xes 15 the global household wealth. The richest one per cent controls 40 per cent of total global assets. The poorest 50 per cent of the world’s population controls barely one per cent of global assets.1 In OECD countries, for example, the Gini coef¿cient, the standard measure of inequality, increased from the mid 1980s to the late 2000s by almost 10 per cent to 0.316 (OECD 2011). Globally between nations, this trend is also reÀected, particularly between the rich nations and Africa, and to a slower extent, between the rich nations and Latin America and the Caribbean. One particularly revealing analysis is that from Denis Kellecioglu (2012) who looked at the Forbes annual lists of the world’s billionaires. Starting there he calculated as follows: According to World Bank data there were about 1.3 billion people in extreme poverty (de¿ned as living on less than $1.25 a day2) and about three billion people in poverty (de¿ned as living on less than $2.5 a day). If the number of people are multiplied with the $ per day ¿gures and 365 days, we obtain the following results: The ‘annual wealth’ of people in extreme poverty is about USD 600 billions, while it is about USD 1.5 trillion for the 1.7 billion people in poverty, totalling to about USD 2.1 trillions for the three billion group. Summing up the top wealth bracket reveals that the wealth of the 17 richest individuals is enough to reÀect the ‘annual wealth’ of the 1.3 billion poorest people (17 = 1 300 000 000). At the same time, summing up the wealth of the richest 140 individuals (or ‘families’ in few cases) is enough to mirror the combined ‘wealth’ of all the three billion people in poverty (140 = 3 000 000 000). He goes on in addressing these issues: The three billion people in poverty would have been in a much better situation if they had meaningful opportunities to ful¿ll their lives. The billionaires would not have faired as good if they were not nurtured and prioritized by an elitist and aggressive governmentality throughout the world. Surely an inclusive, participatory and democratically functioning economy is the ideal alternative. The real challenge is … how to get there (the transition), especially considering the necessary process of empowerment and disempowerment. Such extreme and growing levels of inequality are reÀected also within countries such as India and South Africa for example. In India, a nation with 1.2 billion people, the 100 richest people own assets equivalent to one-quarter of the gross domestic product (GDP) (Roy 2012). This is in a nation where 250,000 debtridden farmers have committed suicide in recent years and 800 million people live on less than 20 rupees3 a day (ibid.); people who are not only bypassed by the bene¿ts of neoliberal capitalism, the opening up of markets, deregulation,

16

The state of the world

¿nancialisation of the economy, patented seed stocks and the enclosure of commons, but are dispossessed, excluded, entrenched in inescapable poverty and inequality. There is a further dimension to this enormous inequality: the inequality of consumption and its implications for the planet. Consumption is undermining the biological basis of life, placing yet greater stresses on the poorest people while at the same time it is exacerbating inequalities – a dynamic that is accelerating and will lead to yet greater suffering and greater social instability. It is clear from the World Bank data that it is not, as is often argued, population growth that is the biggest problem; rather it is the inequitable distribution of wealth and the high consumption levels of the wealthiest population decile.

59.0

60

consumption (%)

Share of World’s private

50

40

30 17.6

20 8.1 10

4.8 1.4

1.9

1.9

3.3

0.5

1.0

1

2

3

4

5

6

0 7

8

9

10

World Population Decile (e.g) 1 = poorest 10%, 2 = poorest 11-20%)

Figure 2.1. Inequality of consumption. Source: Adapted from World Bank Development Indicators 2008.

From the World Bank Development Indicators 2008 (Figure 2.1) ¿gures reÀecting the global inequality in consumption show that the wealthiest 20 per cent of the world accounted for 76.6 per cent of total private consumption. The poorest 20 per cent account for just 1.5 per cent of total private consumption. Breaking that down slightly further, the poorest 10 per cent accounted for just 0.5 per cent and the wealthiest 10 per cent accounted for 59 per cent of all the

State of the planet, Kyoto and technical ¿xes 17 consumption. Inequality has grown since these ¿gures were produced in 2005. For example, from the Forbes annual list of the world’s billionaires (2012) we can see that the richest group, despite some temporary reductions in wealth during 2008 and 2009 (during the global ¿nancial crisis), are now signi¿cantly wealthier than ¿ve years ago. In the 2012 Forbes list, the world’s billionaires came from ¿fty-eight countries, reÀecting the trans-national nature of class divisions. Not unrelated to consumption levels, are global priorities that are heavily skewed away from bene¿ting the poorest people. For example, more is spent on cosmetics in the United States than is required to meet the costs globally of basic education for all; more is spent on ice-cream in Europe than it would cost to provide basic water and sanitation for all; more is spent on pet foods in Europe than it would cost to provide basic health and nutrition for all. All of these amounts combined, however, are a minuscule fraction of what goes into military spending globally. (For ¿gures, see the United Nations Human Development Reports since 1998.) These issues are not going to get any better with the advent of global warming which will add to inequality and, with the continuation of the West’s indifference in colonial and post-colonial times to the plight of the poorest (as identi¿ed in Chapters 5 to 7 on Africa), there is little prospect that the rich and powerful will address this inequity. As global warming hits home and threatens the whole planet the experiences of Africans over the last few centuries clearly suggest that the West at least will simply ‘pull up the drawbridge’ on Africa and other poor nations. The implications of this increased inequality and poverty are dire. Currently, as philosopher Thomas Pogge (2008) reveals: Many more people – some 360 million – have died [prematurely] from hunger and remediable diseases in peacetime in the 20 years since the end of the Cold War than have perished from wars, civil wars, and government repression over the entire 20th century. And poverty continues unabated, as the of¿cial statistics amply con¿rm: 963 million human beings are chronically undernourished, 884 million lack access to safe water, and 2,500 million lack access to basic sanitation. 2,000 million lack access to essential medicines. 924 million lack adequate shelter and 1,600 million lack electricity. 774 million adults are illiterate. 218 million children are child laborers. Roughly one third of all human deaths, 18 million annually, are due to poverty-related causes, straightforwardly preventable through better nutrition, safe drinking water, cheap rehydration packs, vaccines, antibiotics, and other medicines. It is also signi¿cant that these are largely preventable. Poverty and such causes of death will be compounded with global warming.

The biosphere While humanity is heading toward a global population of nine billion by mid-century, it is also seemingly hell bent on destroying the very biophysical

18

The state of the world

basis upon which the human race depends. A major root cause of the problem is the globalised economic system of production based on pro¿t, waste and greed rather than one based on meeting human needs in an equitable and ecologically restorative way. This phenomenon is best seen in terms of the ‘metabolic rift’, the contradiction between on the one hand capitalism and its imperative for growth and over-exploitation, and on the other, nature with its imperative for restorative relations between human society and the environment. The global capitalist economic system is consuming resources faster than they can be regenerated and polluting the environment with wastes faster than these can be recycled and restored. Thus the balance in nature between what is produced and what society consumes has been broken. There are many indicators of the growing rift between society and nature. These include the planetary boundaries outlined by the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden, and the ecological footprint data from the Global Footprint Network. Global warming is just one indicator of the systemic nature of the disjuncture between global economic processes and nature, and of the devastating impact of the capitalist system on the health and wellbeing of the majority of the planet’s people and on its ecology. It is not just the atmosphere that has been used and polluted beyond its capacity to remain stable within the conditions of the Holocene period. The extinction rate of species is the highest since the time of the dinosaurs; ¿sh stocks are collapsing; topsoil is being eroded; fresh waters polluted; coral reefs are dying; and the list goes on. Scientists at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (Rockström et al. 2009) have identi¿ed nine planetary boundaries that, if transgressed, may be devastating for human survival. The factors involved are climate change, stratospheric ozone, land use change, freshwater use, biological diversity, ocean acidi¿cation, nitrogen and phosphorus inputs into the biosphere and oceans, aerosol loading and chemical pollution. The Centre suggests that the factors are interconnected and for three of them í climate change, biological diversity and nitrogen input to the biosphere – the boundaries have already been crossed, thus threatening the ability of the other indicators to stay within their boundaries. There is also a range of additional indicators predicting that the Earth’s biosphere is being irretrievably degraded to a point where it will no longer be capable of regenerating or supporting human and other species’ life. One particularly useful measure of how the human species has taken the planet to the physical brink is the ecological footprint – that is, how much of the biosphere is required to produce and reproduce the conditions of life enjoyed by individuals, communities, countries and global society as a whole. This is measured in global hectares, giving an indication of the biological capacity of the Earth compared with what humans extract from the biosphere. The Global Footprint Network’s (2010) Living Planet Report states that this ecological footprint has more than doubled since 1966. In a 12-month period in 2001, humanity used the equivalent of 1.5 planet Earths to support its activities. By 2030, it projects that humanity will require the capacity of two Earths to absorb carbon dioxide wastes and keep up with natural resource consumption and waste absorption.

State of the planet, Kyoto and technical ¿xes 19 Global warming The term ‘global warming’ refers to the increase in global atmospheric temperatures as a result of increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.4 Global warming is just one of the major indicators of the over-use of the Earth’s natural resources. Every internationally reputable scienti¿c research institution supports the claim that anthropogenic global warming is occurring. The science is unequivocal. Today, the Earth’s biosphere is approaching global warming tipping points5 that, if passed, will be irreversible, taking the planet on a trajectory to a new geological era unsuitable for human life. Possible tipping points include the melting of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets; the melting of the Siberian permafrost, which stores 1,600 billion tonnes of carbon and could be releasing 30–60 billion tonnes of carbon a year by 2040;6 the collapse of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation system; and dieback of the Amazon rainforest. While there is a large degree of uncertainty about the scale and timing of tipping points, evidence now indicates that things are happening faster and more violently than had been predicted.7 Thus within a short space of time we are facing the very real possibility of irreversible global warming tipping points being passed. These are critical thresholds beyond which the warming process is reinforced by feedback mechanisms to the point that global warming takes on a momentum independent of human activities (Lenton et al. 2008). There are already a number of positive feedbacks in the climate system with the potential to cause a rapid acceleration of warming, and because of their delayed effects, scientists are concerned that we are underestimating warming that may occur in the future. To date, as we have witnessed around the planet, the number, strength and scale of unusual weather events – droughts, Àoods, ¿res and cyclones – have increased along with more subtle season and temperature shifts. With warming oceans the world’s net global heat content is increasing at an accelerating rate (Boyer 2012); the Arctic is warming twice as quickly as was projected in the worst-case scenarios in the IPCC 2007 Report; Arctic Ocean sea ice in the summer of 2012 was at its lowest ever recorded; both Greenland and Antarctica are shedding land ice at an increasing rate – in parts at an all-time record rate; extreme weather events, including the large-scale droughts in the US and Russia, and Àooding in Europe, Pakistan and China in 2012, have been attributed in part to the loss of ice in the Arctic; and the world is now in its ¿fth year of global food crisis, a crisis which is in part at least attributable to global warming. Climate science shows us that the ¿rst decade of the twenty-¿rst century was the hottest in recorded history and was marked by freak and extreme weather events. Global average temperatures have risen considerably since measurements began in the mid 1800s with the total increase in global surface temperature being estimated at 0.76° C ± 0.19° C (IPCC 2007a). The warming of the oceans since 1955 has accounted for more than 80 per cent of the increased energy in the Earth’s climate system (IPCC 2007a: 47). The IPCC (2007b) projected a further increase of 0.4° C in warming during the next two decades. This warming is already locked into the system. However, some scientists have since

20

The state of the world

revised this ¿gure upwards (Meinshausen 2012) predicting that with the current emissions trajectory, surface warming will pass 2° C (the temperature agreed by world leaders in 2010 to be the danger threshold), by 2040. Already, signi¿cant geophysical changes are occurring as a result of the current temperature increase í from subtropical deserts expanding hundreds of kilometres pole-wards, Arctic sea ice shrinking at an unseasonal and unprecedented rate, species moving pole-wards or to higher ground and mountain glaciers receding í such as in the Himalayas, Andes and Rocky Mountains (glaciers which together provide fresh water for a billion people) (IPCC 2007a; Hansen et al. 2008). In the most extreme forecasts of the last 2007 Assessment Report, the IPCC projected that Arctic latesummer ice would almost entirely disappear by the late part of the twenty-¿rst century. Changes are occurring much faster than most climate scientists had predicted. In 2012, the melting of Arctic sea ice had already broken the record set in 2007 with the daily rate of loss now 50 per cent higher than it was then. Now some scientists are projecting that late summer sea ice will disappear almost entirely within the next two decades. The Arctic has been warming roughly twice as quickly as the rest of the northern hemisphere because climate breakdown there is self-perpetuating. As the ice melts, exposing the darker sea beneath, heat that would previously have been reÀected back into space is absorbed. These events are precursors of worse to come. This is all occurring with the current global temperature rise being 0.8° C above pre-industrial levels. We are already locked into further temperature increases. Due to the thermal inertia of the oceans, it takes approximately twenty-¿ve years before emissions take full effect. Compounding this, we are continuing to emit greenhouse gases at an accelerating rate. ‘The analysis suggests that despite high-level statements to the contrary, there is now little to no chance of maintaining the global mean surface temperature at or below a rise of 2° C above pre-industrial levels í with 2° C representing the threshold between “dangerous” and “extremely dangerous” climate change’(Anderson and Bows 2011: 20). While the precise time frame available for reversing this trend is uncertain, it was argued in 2008 that this was very possibly less than ten years (Hansen et al. 2008). Bearing in mind not just the inertia in the climate system, but also the inertia built into our economies, infrastructures and institutions, we will be committing collective suicide if we do not act now. In early 2011, Hansen concluded as a result of new research, that warming of just 0.8° C above the pre-industrial baseline meant that no ‘cushion’ is left to avoid dangerous climate change and setting the limit at 2° C and CO2 levels of 450 ppm, was a prescription for disaster (Hansen and Sato 2011). In early 2012, the conservative International Energy Agency (IEA) warned that the door to a 2° C trajectory was about to close and the possibility of a safe climate was about to slip out of reach (Reuters 2012). There has been growing consensus that the impacts associated with 2° C have been revised upwards, suf¿ciently so that 2° C now more appropriately represents the threshold between ‘dangerous’ and ‘extremely dangerous’ climate change. For many species and vulnerable people in poor countries, the impacts are already extremely dangerous.

State of the planet, Kyoto and technical ¿xes 21 Hansen, Sato and Ruedy (2012) argue that if global warming approaches 3° C (which they maintain will most likely happen before the end of the century), 21–52 per cent of the species on Earth will face extinction. Meinshausen (2012) predicted surface-warming temperatures would pass the 5° C level by 2100. A World Bank Report (2012b), released in November 2012 and titled 4° Turn Down the Heat, states that scientists are almost unanimously predicting a 4° C warming by the end of this century unless there are signi¿cant policy changes. That 4° C is an average ¿gure: it could mean in parts a 10° C increase. The World Bank Report predicts a ‘cascade of cataclysmic changes that include extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, and a sea level rise affecting hundreds of millions of people’ (World Bank 2012a) and massive disruption to some of our most basic systems unless the global community acts on climate change. The report (World Bank 2012b: v) states that the 4° C scenarios are devastating: the inundation of coastal cities; increasing risks for food production potentially leading to higher malnutrition rates; many dry regions becoming dryer, wet regions wetter; unprecedented heat waves in many regions, especially in the tropics; substantially exacerbated water scarcity in many regions; increased frequency of high-intensity tropical cyclones; and irreversible loss of biodiversity, including coral reef systems. It continues that ‘most importantly, a 4° C world is so different from the current one that it comes with high uncertainty and new risks that threaten our ability to anticipate and plan for future adaptation needs’ (ibid.: v). PricewaterhouseCoopers (2012), the largest multinational professional services and accountancy ¿rm, in a report for businesses called ‘Too Late for 2°?’ (published in November 2012), states that businesses, governments and communities across the world need to plan for a warming world í not just 2° C, but 4° C, or even 6° C. So even the bastions of the global status quo predict what is potentially global catastrophe. There have been a number of scienti¿c papers published since 2005 predicting ‘tipping points’ in the global warming process. If it has not already happened, it is now almost certain that within several years we will have set in motion suf¿cient feedback mechanisms so that humans will be powerless to stop the Earth’s change to a new climate, and possibly a new geological era, which will not be conducive to human life – even if we were to stop emitting greenhouse gases (GHG) now.8 While there is political agreement among 194 countries that we should limit global warming to less than 2°C, it is increasingly being accepted in the scienti¿c community that two degrees of warming is too much. However, to begin the process of getting agreement amongst the 194 countries for a downwardly revised temperature increase target, even if it more accurately reÀects that required by science, would in itself be a time-consuming and dif¿cult activity. Even if no more CO2 were emitted, the emissions of global warming gases that have already occurred will cause at least a further 0.5° C warming and have

22

The state of the world

consequences for another two hundred years. To have a chance of avoiding warming above 2° C, emissions would need to peak before 2020 and decline rapidly thereafter to zero by 2050. Global carbon emissions have risen by about 50 per cent in the past twenty years since governments have been engaged in the UN climate process. Emissions continue to increase, and are increasing more rapidly, and the world is currently on track to raise global temperatures by 6° C this century, with catastrophic consequences for all. On current trends, the world’s carbon budget will be used up by 2025. The world’s known economically recoverable remaining fossil fuels amount to the equivalent of 3,500 GtCO2, and the race by governments and corporations to extract these fossil fuels is not only unabated, but is speeding up; governments are continuing to build fossil fuel infrastructure, locking economies into fossil fuel dependence for decades. For example, in Australia, a country which is the highest per capita carbon emitter in the developed world and amongst the OECD countries, there is a frenetic rush to export as much coal as can be dug out of the ground as fast as possible, compounded by a growing frenzy of destructive fracking with its unknown quantities of fugitive GHG emissions. Against this background it is clear that the reputability of the research and evidence on global warming remains of the highest importance. The largest and most comprehensive body of evidence to date is that collected by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,9 (IPCC), from research bodies from all around the world and produced in its Assessment Reports, the fourth and latest being Climate Change 2007, the Fourth IPCC Assessment Report.10 This UN body is widely considered to be the most authoritative source on climate change science, with two provisos. First, its data are out of date due to the delay created by the peer-review process and the governments’ approval processes – relative to the rapidity of changes to global warming evidence. Second, the data are ‘conservatised’, due to the requirement for unanimity amongst world governments in signing off on the reports. In fact, in 2009, a group of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) concluded from the most comprehensive climate modelling that they had ever done, that not only was the IPCC too optimistic in its reports, but that the scienti¿c consensus was much too optimistic and the situation is much more dire than what is being reported. They conclude, that unless we stop the use of fossil fuels almost immediately, it will be too late – it’s ¿nished. ‘It’ being us, the planet in the Holocene epoch. Furthermore, the consequences will be irreversible (Chomsky 2010). The strength of the IPCC reports, however, is that, for evidence which has enormous international political, economic and social signi¿cance, these publications follow internationally agreed, strict procedures and involve hundreds of experts and thousands of scientists producing rigorously peer-reviewed literature. The author teams reÀect a range of views, expertise and geographical representation. Furthermore, each report has to be unanimously approved by 154

Emissions (GtCO/yr)

State of the planet, Kyoto and technical ¿xes 23 60

Possible Future without Climate Policy

Fossil CO2 Emissions

40 20

1000 GtCO, until 2050

0 7

Global Mean Surface Warming (°C)

6

Global Warming Probability of exceeding 2°C No climate policy 100% Emission budget of 1000 GtCO2 until 2050: 25%

Possible Future without Climate Policy

5

4

3

Max 12°C

2

1 1000 GtCO, until 2050

0

1900

Past observed Temperatures

1920

1940

1960

1980

2000

2020

2040

2060

2080

2100

Date

Figure 2.2 CO2 emissions and global warming. Source: Adapted from M. Meinshausen et al. (2009) www.pik-potsdam.de/news/press-releases/ archive/2009/on-the-way-to-phasing-out-emissions-more-than-50-reductions-needed-by-2050-torespect-2b0c-climate-target.

Two possible futures: One in which no climate policies are implemented, and one with strong action to mitigate emissions. Shown are fossil CO2 emissions (top panel) and corresponding global warming (bottom panel). The shown mitigation pathway limits fossil and land-use related CO2 emissions to 1,000 billion tonnes CO2 over the ¿rst half of the twenty-¿rst century with near-zero net emissions thereafter. Greenhouse gas emissions of this pathway in year 2050 are ~70% below 1990 levels. Without climate policies, global warming will cross 2° C by the middle of the century. Strong mitigation actions according to the blue route would limit the risk of exceeding 2° C to 25 per cent. For more details, see Figure 2 in Meinshausen et al. (2009). M. Meinshausen et al. (2009)

24

The state of the world

governments, including the United States and oil- and coal-producing countries í a major challenge and one that it would be reasonable to claim would result in an over-conservative interpretation of report ¿ndings. That conservatism, however, means that the 2007 report, the latest available, has attracted criticism from leading climatologists themselves, who see it as underestimating the risks of global climate change.

Carbon emissions and economic growth There is a high correlation between global warming and economic growth with the compounding factors of the increasing carbon-intensity of the economy and the reduced and declining capacity of the land and oceans to absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Furthermore, the relationship between economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions is asymmetric: emissions grow proportionately with economic growth, but fall by less than the rate of economic decline (PWC 2012). The principal human-induced causes of global warming are fossil fuel extraction and consumption, land use (industrial agriculture) and deforestation. The declining ability of the ‘sinks’ (oceans, forests and land) to absorb carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases exacerbates the warming cycle and at the same time increases the uncertainty in modelling predictions.11 Industrialisation (including deforestation, industrial agriculture and land clearing) has resulted in growing amounts of greenhouse gases, including CO2, being emitted into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels in which carbon has been stored in an inert form for millions of years. Around 97 per cent of the CO2 emitted by Western industrialised countries comes from burning coal, oil and gas for energy (Global Carbon Project 2010). Before the industrial revolution, CO2 levels in the atmosphere were around 580 billion tonnes of carbon. In 2007, the ¿gure was close to 750 billion tonnes, 90 per cent of it emitted by the rich industrialised countries (Lohmann 2007: 6). CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning and industrial processes have accelerated globally, an average of 1.1 per cent per annum for 1990–1999 to more than 3.3 per cent for 2000–2006, spiking to 5.9 per cent in 2010 (Global Carbon Project 2010). Global economic growth, the energy intensity of growth and the carbon intensity of energy in the early part of the twenty-¿rst century have all been exceeding the forecasts that were built into the key assessments of climate change (such as those from the IPCC and the 2003 Stern Review). Further it has been assumed this trend will continue (Worldwatch Institute 2009). At the same time, until recently, half of the global emissions of CO2 were being absorbed by land, forests and oceans with the other half remaining in the atmosphere (Miller 2008). Over the years these sinks have been responsible for removing 55 per cent of the carbon emissions from human activities – with land and forests removing 30 per cent and the ocean 25 per cent. Fifty years ago, for every tonne of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere, natural sinks removed 600 kg (Canadell et al. 2007; Global Carbon Project 2010). That ¿gure has fallen to 550 kg and is falling further (ibid.).

State of the planet, Kyoto and technical ¿xes 25 While the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has increased by 35 per cent, the level of atmospheric methane has risen much more, by 151 per cent, mostly from agricultural activities such as raising cattle and growing rice (Canadell et al. 2007; Global Carbon Project 2010). Methane is much more potent and problematical as a greenhouse gas than is CO2. Claims by the gas industry that coal seam gas (CSG) and lique¿ed natural gas (LNG) are more ef¿cient fuels per weight than coal are being challenged by recent research in Australia. For example, estimates of fugitive emissions from coal seam gas wells in Australia use a factor of 0.12 per cent as the percentage of methane leakage during production. However, in 2012 researchers at Southern Cross University in Australia recorded elevated levels of methane in the air above the Tara gas ¿eld in Queensland, Australia. The research indicates that the greenhouse impacts of coal seam gas production could well be many orders of magnitude worse than earlier estimates. Also research indicates that the high short-term climate impact of methane negates much or all of the bene¿t of coal-gas switching for the ¿rst two or three decades after it occurs – a very critical period in climate mitigation terms. Over a 100-year period, the IPCC’s estimate is that methane has twenty¿ve times the impact on temperature as carbon dioxide – and most of that is over that ¿rst few years. Over a shorter 20-year period, it has about seventy-two times the impact. Methane is at least twenty-one times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. Fugitive emissions on the scale foreshadowed in this study would dramatically increase the climate change impacts of CSG, making it potentially far more polluting than coal. Currently the amount of fossil fuel carbon emitted into the atmosphere each year is greater than for the most fossil-fuel intensive of the IPCC emissions scenarios developed in the late 1990s (Canadell et al. 2007). With respect to big emitters, in 2007 China passed the United States as the top emitting country due to its rapid growth (Vidal and Adam 2007) and, on a per capita basis, now surpasses the European Union’s per capita emissions which stand at 7.2 tonnes per person – still well below the per capita carbon emissions of the United States and the developed world leader, Australia, which produces around 19–20 tonnes per capita. Claims of carbon emissions reductions by rich countries since 1990 have been cancelled many times over by the outsourcing of emissions by, for example, the importing of goods that were high carbon emitting in their production, from countries that were not required to cut emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. The United States, Europe and Australia have also been burning fossil fuels, and hence ¿lling the ‘sink’ for 150 years; China, Brazil, India and other developing countries have begun doing so in a signi¿cant way only in the last two decades. Corporate responsibility must also be noted here. For example, ExxonMobile has contributed three times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over its 120-year lifetime, as the current annual emissions of all fossil fuels. Per capita emissions in the poorer, less industrialised countries remain well below those in industrial countries (Global Carbon Project 2010). No region is decarbonising its energy supply. Global energy consumption is expected to grow

26

The state of the world

by 50 per cent by 2030 (from 2008) (Hightower and Pierce 2008: 285). The combustion of fossil fuels, primarily coal, oil and natural gas, accounts for about 74 per cent of all CO2 emissions and for roughly 57 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions globally (ibid.). The International Energy Outlook (EIA 2010) projects world energy-related carbon dioxide emissions will grow from 29.7 billion metric tonnes in 2007 to 33.8 billion metric tonnes in 2020 and 42.4 billion metric tonnes in 2035. Greenhouse gas emissions in 2010 were reported to have increased to 30.6 gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon dioxide, up 1.6 Gt on the previous year, resulting in the highest carbon emissions in history (Harvey, F. 2011). A signi¿cant dimension of energy use is the so-called ‘carbon intensity’ of the global economy. This is the amount of carbon emitted to produce one dollar of wealth. Even in its most conservative projection, the IPCC assumed that the trend of decreasing carbon intensity would continue. This has ceased to be the case. After almost 100 years of improvements, since 2000 the long-term trend of declining CO2 emissions per unit of energy has reversed (Global Carbon Project 2010). Additionally, what has happened is that, as Li (2008: n.p.) writes, falling energy intensity (resulting from rising energy ef¿ciency) has translated into more rapid capital accumulation (economic growth) and has rarely led to absolute declines in energy consumption. This is known as the ‘Jevons Paradox’, named after the nineteenth-century British economist William S. Jevons (1866) who ¿rst noted this perverse effect.12 Since 1750 developed countries, with less than 20 per cent of the world’s population, have been responsible for 80 per cent of the atmospheric CO2 accumulation (Global Carbon Project 2010). The world’s poorest 800 million people have contributed less than 1 per cent. Yet the latter are the most vulnerable to the effects of global warming. It has been the use of fossil fuels by the industrialised countries which has raised atmospheric CO2 to its current level. Today however the rapid, coal-dependent development of China and India is the most important driver of growth in global carbon dioxide emissions. Between 2000 and 2007, carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion worldwide increased 22 per cent to an estimated 8.2 billion tonnes per annum (Flavin 2008 from the Worldwatch Institute). China produced 57 per cent of the growth in emissions during this period; India contributed 8 per cent, the United States and Europe 4 and 3 per cent, respectively (ibid.). The ratio of per capita emissions for Americans and Chinese is more than 4 to 1; compared to Indians more than 13 to 1; and to Africans 18 to 1, not taking into account the amplifying effect of carbon emission outsourcing. The only industrialised countries which reduced their carbon emissions during the 1990s were the Soviet Union, due to the collapse of its economy; France, because of the signi¿cant growth in reliance on nuclear power; and the UK, with the opening of the North Sea oil and gas ¿elds and the politically motivated closure of coal mines (Lohmann 2007). As already stated, there is a high correlation between economic growth

State of the planet, Kyoto and technical ¿xes 27 and energy consumption, with world economic growth being one of the best predictors of global energy consumption (Stern 2003). Now, as access to oil and gas fossil fuels becomes more dif¿cult, the use of more carbon-intensive fuels is growing. Energy intensity can vary dramatically across types of fuel. The combustion of coal for example generally releases 1.8 times as much carbon dioxide per unit of energy as natural gas does and 1.3 times as much as oil but a complete lifecycle analysis may show different ¿gures (Worldwatch Institute 2011). There is also considerable variation. For example, the production of oil from Canada’s tar sands emits up to three times as much carbon as producing conventional oil (Worldwatch Institute 2007). The search for and extraction of fossil fuels continue at an unprecedented rate, fuelled in part by anticipated shortages, increasing prices and corresponding growing investments. For one example, an Arctic land grab is under way by the ¿ve countries with Arctic coastlines: Russia, Denmark, Canada, the United States and Norway. It is ironic that the thawing of the Arctic that has happened because of global warming is seen as a boon to enable access to huge oil reserves. As Gare (2008) argues, the environment is de¿ned by its exchange value and environmental destruction increases pro¿ts; when there are shortages, prices rise and the greatest pro¿ts are made. While the scienti¿c evidence of anthropogenic global warming is incontestable, most of the consequences are in the future and the course of global warming remains uncertain. For some of the low-lying coral atoll islands such as Kiribati in the Paci¿c Ocean, for low-lying coastal regions such as the Bay of Bengal, Pakistan’s Indus Valley which suffered devastating Àoods in 2010 and 2011, for some drought-stricken areas of Africa, the 2012 droughts of north America and parts of Russia, the early effects of global warming are here now, and already severe.

Responses to global warming A brief account of global warming solutions proposed to date reveals that these fall into three broad categories: market, technical and biological (or biofuels). I will refer in general to these three categories as neoliberal solutions, as they have developed out of the dominant neoliberal form of capitalist political economy. I have only brieÀy touched on nuclear-powered energy (a fourth solution) as a substitute for fossil fuels as, while there has been a revival of arguments used in favour of nuclear power (including from Hansen and Lovelock), these do not stand up to examination and have been dealt with extensively elsewhere.13 There has been enormous energy, much political grandstanding, billions of dollars of public and private money and much precious time (one could argue in excess of ¿fteen years for Kyoto’s carbon markets) devoted to neoliberal solutions to global warming. Yet global emissions continue to increase. To settle for any of the options discussed here and to indulge in the degrees of optimism surrounding their effects might just possibly be justi¿ed if we were here dealing with the prevention of some relatively insigni¿cant adverse event and if time

28

The state of the world

were not of the essence. We are not; we are seeking to address the greatest threat humankind has ever faced, not in generations but in less than a decade. It is a time not for optimism but for realism. I have restricted discussion of technical solutions to the realm of power generation – leaving aside problems of carbon emissions from deforestation, land use and transport. This is because each category of emission source has its own complexities, but to some extent power generation is a carbon emitter that is representative of these other sources – all of which arise from a particular economic structure. I will return to land use later and cover the issue of how the uses of the land under different technologies and different social relations of production have the potential to reduce carbon emissions from this source. To gain some sense of why our current global institutions cannot tackle global warming requires a brief historical overview of climate mitigation strategies. During the second half of the twentieth century, two broad families of international institutions (the United Nations and the Bretton Woods ¿nancial institutions) were developed to facilitate various aspects of international relations and governance. Both branches have approached the world through a Western perspective. Perhaps more importantly, both families of institutions have long since adopted the political economy models of capitalism. The ¿rst step in creating modern international ¿nancial institutions was made at Bretton Woods in July 1944, heavily inÀuenced by British macro-economist, John Maynard Keynes. The Bretton Woods institutions were to promote international ¿nancial and commercial relations between the major industrialised nations and to create a new international economic order. Keynes’ vision was of a global macroeconomic and ¿nancial system of management, a global currency and a world central bank that would maintain full employment and provide the liquidity required for these purposes. This vision is unfortunately so very different from what has emerged in practice. The multilateralism of Keynes was replaced by the global economic dominance of the United States and the other G8 countries.14 The United Nations was founded after the Second World War to promote world peace and facilitate co-operation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress and human rights. It is a much more genuinely international organisation based on one member (nation), one vote, although this arrangement is also not without its limitations. While the Bretton Woods institutions were envisaged as specialised agencies of the United Nations, today, the UN secretary-general is not even allowed to address the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank. Raffer and Singer (2001: 7) write that the UN was not to be trusted with the hard instruments of development such as ¿nance and macroeconomic policy making; that was to be the preserve of the Bretton Woods institutions with their system of weighted voting and ¿rm control by the Western industrialised countries. The UN was to be put in charge of the ‘soft’ instruments, such as food aid, technical assistance, children, women, social policy and more recently, the environment.

State of the planet, Kyoto and technical ¿xes 29 The political economy rules of the Bretton Woods institutions today have, according to Raffer and Singer (2001: 9), resulted in a ‘constant tendency to transfer income from poorer to richer countries [offsetting] much of the Àow of aid and investment into poorer countries’. This has been further augmented ‘by enforced country-by-country stabilization and structural adjustment programs’ (ibid.: 9). The Bretton Woods institutions have become immensely more powerful than the UN, giving more leverage to the interests of the world’s rich and powerful, who have withheld energy and resources from the UN and invested them instead in the IMF and the World Bank (ibid.: 10). The world’s most powerful countries, representing less than 20 per cent of the world’s population, have a hugely disproportionate inÀuence on the Bretton Woods institutions because of the membership, chairmanship and voting system (one dollar, one vote, as compared to the UN, one country, one vote). This is the setting for international environmental governance. The environment is a ‘soft’ issue (at least until now when its market potential has been recognised) and hence comes under the United Nations institutions with considerably less power and inÀuence than the World Bank, the IMF, the G8, all institutions which are opaque and democratically unaccountable, all institutions which play key roles in supporting the global economy status quo. The raison d’être of these latter institutions is economic growth and capital accumulation. As environmental justice group Global Exchange (2008) claims, for example, the WTO is used by corporations to dismantle hard-won local and national environmental protections on the grounds that they are barriers to trade. The history of global environmental efforts can be traced back to the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972. This was succeeded by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) (1983–85), chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former Norwegian Prime Minister and Minister for the Environment. It was this Brundtland Commission which set the contemporary environmental agenda. The Brundtland Report (1987: 43) focused attention on the idea that economic growth was sustainable provided it was brought about largely through improved technologies, thereby avoiding destroying or depleting natural resources but also ensuring a redistribution of resources towards poorer nations. The call for economic growth at that Stockholm Conference was purportedly made in the interests of developing nations. The notion however that the afÀuent nations reduce their own growth to make room for the growth of poorer nations was not raised, nor were the structural, historical or political economy issues of environmental degradation and poverty. In the 1980s, scientists with the World Meteorological Organisation became concerned at potential global warming as a result of the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Consequently, in 1988 the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC was and is built on a peer review process that is exhaustive, both a strength in establishing the credibility of the research, but also a weakness, as ¿ndings become outdated before ¿nal reports are published.

30

The state of the world

In the wake of the Brundtland Report (and the establishment of the IPCC), the United Nations General Assembly set up the Rio Earth Summit for June 1992, to examine progress on the Report. International discussions to control greenhouse gas emissions which had began in the early 1990s under the auspices of the United Nations, resulted in a treaty being established at this Rio Earth Summit: the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change, the purpose of which was to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere by proposing voluntary limits on greenhouse gas emissions. One outcome of the Treaty was to establish national inventories of GHG emissions that were used to create the 1990 benchmark levels for developed countries. This Earth Summit was signi¿cant not in what it achieved, which was remarkably little, but in that there was at least an appearance of global co-operation. That so many powerful institutions participated, including many multinational corporations, in particular the fuel and vehicle sectors (which were anxious about the direction in which UN environmental conferences were heading), indicates that there was also a rising awareness amongst the rich and powerful sectors of society that global warming, or its solutions, potentially threatened the status quo. It is signi¿cant that at about this time the US-based Global Climate Coalition (GCC) was formed as a powerful lobby group of car manufacturers and oil companies. Members included the American Petroleum Institute, Chevron, Chrysler, Cyprus AMAX Minerals, Shell Oil, Exxon, Ford General Motors, Texaco and the United States Chamber of Commerce. The GCC was involved in aggressive lobbying at international climate negotiation meetings, including in the lead-up to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, where it persuaded the US government to avoid mandatory emissions controls. It is also signi¿cant that at the same time the ink was drying on the Rio Earth Summit’s UNFCCC, the negotiations on the Uruguay Round of the general agreement on tariffs and trade (GATT) were proceeding. This led to the formation of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which in many cases overrode national governments’ attempts at environmental protection laws. Signi¿cantly, in the past ¿fty years, world leaders have signed up to 500 internationally recognised United Nations environmental agreements including 61 atmosphere-related; 155 biodiversity-related; 179 related to chemicals, hazardous substances and waste; 46 land conventions; and 196 conventions dealing with water issues. The environment is now the most common area of global rulemaking after trade (Vidal 2012); however, unlike the rules emanating from the WTO, remarkably few environmental agreements have been rati¿ed and implemented by national governments. The overriding signi¿cance of Rio was, however, that, for the ¿rst time, governments acknowledged the threat of the ecological crisis and the need to establish a framework for tackling global warming. The Earth Summit resulted in two very signi¿cant international environmental laws: the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It produced the Rio principles, including the Precautionary Principle and the Polluter Pays Principle. It also drew attention to the fact that excessive

State of the planet, Kyoto and technical ¿xes 31 consumption by the afÀuent was placing stresses on the environment, and established that economic decisions had to take environmental impacts into account. There was further a clear recognition that fossil fuels were linked to global warming. It failed however to recognise the signi¿cance of the historical, material and structural underpinnings of environmental problems such as global warming, or that inequality and poverty grew out of the same global political economy and could not be separated from environmental issues. At the same time as this conference was being planned and executed, the IMF, the World Bank and various free trade agreements were busily restructuring global trade, banking and investment rules and driving these matters in the completely opposite direction to the rhetoric of the Rio Summit. It is signi¿cant that three years after Rio, the World Trade Organisation was established (in 1995), the rules of which were written by global corporations, rules which undermined global and national environmental rules. This created a tectonic shift in the power balance between environmental issues and the imperatives of corporate interests. Where Rio was driven by the values of ecological health, social justice and equity across the globe, the WTO established the supremacy of global corporate rule. It drove the agenda of neoliberalism: ‘free trade’, a euphemism for global corporate rule; deregulation, privatisation, ¿nancial liberalisation, the cutting of public spending and increased labour ‘Àexibility’, that is, an erosion of the power of labour. The WTO has consistently skewed trade bene¿ts to the North and undermined UN environmental governance efforts. The WTO has been highly inÀuential in shaping the world economy by promoting the free trade of goods (and later services) across national borders and adversely affecting national environmental governance structures where they have existed and placing barriers to their formation, where they have not. Free trade encourages and even obliges countries to ignore their commitments to environmental obligations, national economic priorities and security, and human rights. The Rio Earth Summit, with its inclusive and grand motherhood statements, was no match for the cut and thrust of the global capital accumulation imperatives of the hard-headed and powerful global economic institutions. Kyoto When the UNFCCC voluntary emission targets failed to reduce emissions, renewed negotiations led in 1996 to the IPCC concluding in their Second Assessment Report ‘that the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human inÀuence on global climate’ (Bolin et al. 1995: 4). This led to the development of the internationally binding Kyoto Protocol, adopted by the UNFCCC in Kyoto, Japan in 1997 and which came into force in 2005. Most countries signed, but some, such as the United States and Australia (prior to the Rudd Labor government ratifying in December 2007), chose not to ratify it. Emissions have continued to rise. Kyoto has failed. It is however an important policy event in the history of global warming action internationally and deserves some further attention.

32

The state of the world

The Kyoto Protocol set GHG emissions reductions at 5.2 per cent below 1990 levels – a very inadequate target resulting from pressures by the United States – for the 2008–2012 period for all industrialised countries. The principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibility (CBDR) was adopted at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and is a central principle of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol. It recognises the historical differences in the contributions of industrialised and non-industrialised nations to global environmental problems, and differences in their respective capacities to respond to these problems. The implementation of the Kyoto system consisted of two main thrusts. First, governments of industrialised countries provided free tradable permits to large industrial polluters to emit a certain level of carbon dioxide; and second, trading schemes between GHG polluters were set up with additional pollution credits being obtainable by companies investing in the South in projects that would emit less carbon than if the investment had not been made. The Kyoto Protocol developed three mechanisms whereby signatories could meet their GHG reduction obligations: (1) Emissions Trading in an emissions trading scheme; (2) the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM); and (3) Joint Implementation (JI). These are described below. Under Kyoto, developed countries (labelled Annex 1) could use an emissions trading system to help meet their emissions targets. In such a scheme, countries could allocate permits to individual companies for the emission of a particular quantity of greenhouse gases. The level of permits decreased over time. If permits were issued to a level equal to or below the assigned amount, then, in principle, a country could meet its Kyoto commitment. If a country was incapable of meeting its target, it could buy permits from countries that were under their targets. Similarly, for companies within a country, a trading of permits was allowed for excess (or conversely reduced) amounts of carbon emissions produced. The Clean Development Mechanism, under Article 12 of the Kyoto Protocol, allows a developed country with an emissions-reduction commitment to implement an emissions-reduction project in a developing country in addition to what would have occurred in the absence of the certi¿ed project activity (Article 12, paragraph 5.2 of the Kyoto Protocol). Such projects could earn saleable certi¿ed emission reduction (CER) credits (by the sponsoring country/company) that could be counted towards meeting Kyoto targets. The idea of the CDM is that it seeks to support sustainable development and emissions reductions in non-industrialised countries, while allowing industrialised countries Àexibility in how they meet their emissions reductions. The UN estimates that between 40 and 70 per cent of CDM projects are fraudulent or ‘non-additional’. That is, they do nothing to mitigate global warming (Dorsey and Bond 2012). The third market mechanism under the Kyoto Protocol was Joint Implementation (JI) where industrialised countries could invest in projects in other industrialised countries (Article 6 of the Kyoto Protocol). This allowed a country with an emission commitment under the Kyoto Protocol to earn emissions reduction units from an emissions-reduction project in another Annex B Party (for example, a

State of the planet, Kyoto and technical ¿xes 33 poorer Eastern European industrialised country making a transition to a market economy), each equivalent to one tonne of CO2 with this being counted towards meeting its Kyoto target. The idea is that JI offered parties Àexible and ef¿cient means of meeting their commitments, with the host party bene¿ting from foreign investment and technology transfer. The Kyoto Protocol during its ¿rst commitment period to 2012 accomplished little more than introducing emissions trading, which effectively meant paying, not punishing, the polluter. The biggest polluters were ¿rst paid through the allocation of permits that gave them private rights to the atmospheric commons. Since then they have pro¿ted from carbon trading: pro¿ts increased and emissions increased (of which more in the next chapter). Carbon trading was more about protecting the economy and economic growth, not about protecting the environment. However, even for the believing protagonists, carbon trading was never originally intended to be the main tool to tackle climate change under Kyoto, but rather a ¿rst small step in the move to cut greenhouse gas emissions. However, a critical assessment of carbon trading is important as such trading is the only mechanism to date which has had any large-scale uptake. There is a body of well-documented research on carbon trading which is unanimous in its conclusions that carbon trading is ineffective, inequitable, inef¿cient and unjust and not only has the potential to exacerbate the problem it is designed to ¿x but effectively delay real action. Carbon trading is a form of ‘grandfathering’, where future emissions were tied to past emissions. In other words, the biggest polluters in the past got the most permits to pollute in the future. It is another form of colonialism – its success depends on undeveloped countries’ failure. It has been called a form of ‘eco-enslavement’ (O’Neill 2011). For example, for Australia to achieve even a very modest 5 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, it will not do so by reducing emissions in Australia, but by buying other countries’ and people’s low-carbon lifestyles, ‘and using that to offset Australian people’s high-carbon lifestyles’. O’Neill continues that this is the ‘essence of modern-day environmentalism, whose adherents are so concerned with easing their eco-burden, with assuaging the guilt that comes with having a good, middle-class lifestyle, that they are happy to encourage the Third World hordes to continue living in poverty’. There are many problems with emissions trading schemes. Foremost of all is that emission reductions are based on the assumption that the measures of emissions were accurate and honestly recorded – which has clearly not been the case. Additionally, companies and countries could sequester carbon by, for example, growing forests and restoring vegetation. However, accounting for the carbon sequestered in forests is fraught with dif¿culties for a number of reasons. These include the variation from impacts of wider environmental conditions on the capacity of trees for absorbing carbon, the drying effects of plantations on soils (thus releasing carbon from the soil), the different stages of tree development absorbing and emitting different levels of carbon, the longevity of the plantation, the impacts of global warming on forests, and so on. The social impacts of tree plantations for carbon sequestration have also been signi¿cant to date with land

34

The state of the world

being taken from poorer communities for plantation use. In short, the largest and most stable carbon sinks are in fossil fuels left deep in the ground – coal, oil and gas – the very fuels that power the current global economy. Perhaps the strongest argument against carbon trading and emissions offsetting as a solution to global warming is as Lohmann (2008) emphasises, that it is aimed at the wrong target. It does not address global warming. To do so, we need to keep most remaining fossil fuels in the ground. Carbon trading is built on the premise that we need to keep the fossil fuel industry going for as long as possible. Its targets are set in easy terms because governments worry about only the short term. No real effort is put into what sorts of structural changes are needed to run future economies in such a way that most remaining fossil fuels can remain in the ground. Additionally problematical to offsetting are biological constraints. The hydrocarbons taken from deep within the Earth’s crust are in a very stable environment where there is little contact with the atmosphere. This is very different from the carbon being stored in trees at surface level – a very unstable environment – where it can quickly re-enter the atmosphere at the point of death of the tree. As Lohmann (1999) says, keeping a tree from dying and the carbon being released into the atmosphere for a century or more would require forms of biological, political and economic policing unknown in human history. Compounding this is the exporting of the problem to a poor, Third World country. In the case of trees being grown to offset carbon emissions, for example, ef¿ciency demands that they are grown on the cheapest land available, which then is located in peripheral countries (peripheral to the centres of capital that is) and locations, competing with other land (and water) uses and with people with fewer resources and power – no match for rich, powerful, polluting corporate bodies. It is, in effect, an extension of the principles of colonialism. Compounding this, it does nothing to reduce the carbon emissions at source. There is also the question of the effects of Kyoto on development. In an article titled ‘The Great Asian Carbon Swindle’ (Smith 2008), the merits of the CDM are questioned on two grounds: in its failing ¿rst to achieve its objectives of development for Third World countries; and second to implement the carbon emission offsetting it is supposed to provide for an industrialised country. The article claims that ‘this market was worth US$17.5 billion [in 2008], a 200 per cent increase in market value since 2006’. Some CDM projects not only do not contribute to development; often the recipients are large polluting industries with a negative impact on local communities. As an example it is shown that CDM money is being used to support the palm oil biofuel industry in Indonesia, an industry that has attracted global attention for its devastating impact on Indigenous people’s livelihoods and the forest environment. The transparent accounting of offsets in CDM projects is so important. To date too little effort has gone into addressing this issue. Given the scale and scope for fraud with CDMs, it is dif¿cult, if not impossible, to devise a monitoring mechanism that will allow this problem of accountability to be resolved. The Kyoto Protocol awarded rights of emissions per capita on what could only be described as an inequitable basis. The countries awarded the greatest

State of the planet, Kyoto and technical ¿xes 35 rights are those which are the most inef¿cient users of energy. Australia for example is one of the most carbon-inef¿cient countries in the world.15 Yet it was granted emissions rights amounting to around 27 tonnes per capita. Countries such as Namibia, Laos, Nepal and Bangladesh, ranked 1st, 5th, 18th and 23rd respectively, received zero tradable rights (Lohmann 2007: 119). These countries have never used the ‘carbon sink’. Further if they sought to follow the course of economic development promoted by Western neoliberal capitalist institutions, there is now no space or resources for them to do so. This conclusion however needs to be set in the very speci¿c context of what success might have meant for the Kyoto Protocol. At best, it would have been only a very modest symbolic ¿rst step in slowing global warming. Kyoto was aimed at a stabilisation of greenhouse gas emissions at around 5 per cent below the 1990 levels. Its target, even if it were to be successful, would thus fall very far short of the massive cuts in emissions (at least 60–70 per cent) that world climate scientists have repeatedly insisted are necessary to stave off global warming. The problems with Kyoto can largely be attributed to the fact that carbon trading became the unintended centrepiece of Kyoto. Yet the Kyoto Protocol (and in turn carbon trading) dominated discussions around ¿nding solutions to global warming. So much time, money and effort went into the development and defence of this scheme. The problems and uncertainties surrounding Kyoto, in addition to its fundamentally Àawed economic presumptions regarding saving the planet through the market, made it a deeply Àawed mechanism. What has happened since Kyoto, at Copenhagen 2010 and beyond, however, does tend to make one look back at Kyoto with a certain degree of fondness! Most economies are expanding with correspondingly growing carbon emissions. More and more people around the world aspire to the idealised, highconsumption lifestyles projected on globalised television programmes. The prices of energy commodities have risen thereby encouraging further investment and exploration in carbon fuels and the rush for oil, coal and gas continues to gather momentum. Since 1997, the system of carbon trading has usurped the great bulk of the UN’s work on climate change. That system has rewarded the worst polluters and deprived climate friendlier enterprises of both money and human brainpower. It undermined the impetus for regulation, taxation and reduced consumption. It provided and continues to provide a green-wash for climate unfriendly practices. Perhaps most importantly, carbon trading bene¿ts and empowers mainly those institutions most active in blocking and interfering with low carbon systems and climate friendly structural change. The second commitment period of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol took effect on 1 January 2013. Its protagonists see it as the last opportunity for a seamless transition from one Kyoto period to another. Other solutions There are three broad categories of possible technological solutions to reducing CO2 from power generation: carbon capture and storage; nuclear power; and

36

The state of the world

electricity generation from renewables such as solar, wind, geothermal, tidal waves and ocean currents. Additionally biofuels have been proposed as a partial solution. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a technology favoured by the coal industry. In principle carbon dioxide is captured from fossil fuel power stations, compressed into a dense liquid and then pumped deep underground. It differs from other abatement methods in that it does not seek to avoid emissions of CO2 but to prevent the gas from being released into the atmosphere. Considerable amounts of money are being invested in researching this technology. The United States alone has spent $3.4 billion (with an additional US$3 billion in the pipeline in 2012) developing CCS technologies (Sourcewatch 2010). Australia, Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, China and Japan are planning carbon capture and storage tests. Carbon capture and storage technology is experimental, as yet unproven and has a number of very signi¿cant technical problems. For example, the United States would need to provide CCS for the 40,000 oil and gas wells drilled each year in the US alone at a cost that ‘could easily top $1.5 trillion per year’ (Xie 2008). Additionally, for this number of oil and gas wells, CCS would require the drilling of over 100,000 (and perhaps up to three times that number) of so-called injection wells, to inject enough carbon dioxide to keep total emissions at 2005 levels (quoted in Sourcewatch 2010). The US Department of Energy has stated that the costs and scale required of CCS are prohibitive, as would be the cost of retro¿tting existing coal plants with CCS (Ho 2008). Then there are the geopolitical issues, such as monitoring, standards, locations and liability (in the event of leakages), as well as the need to ¿nd appropriate geological sites. Perhaps most problematical is the fact that the solution will have to provide secure storage facilities for thousands of years. No one knows if this can be done, as it is a completely untried concept. The concept is based on leaving the burden of our current energy-intensive lifestyles to future generations to solve. It is also estimated that it would add signi¿cantly to the cost of energy production and if it did work, would substantially increase the capital cost of electricity generation and reduce energy ef¿ciency. Even under the most optimistic projections, it will be decades before this technology can make a signi¿cant impact on carbon emissions. Thus, there appears to be a raft of unresolved and probably irresolvable issues around carbon capture and storage technology. At the very least, their resolution is beyond the time frame in which we have to dramatically reduce carbon emissions. I have indicated earlier in this chapter that there is a plethora of information on the costs and bene¿ts of nuclear power. In brief, there are many reasons why nuclear power does not provide an option for future energy, including the radiation risks it poses for human health, of both workers and public, and for the environment. It is a counter-democratic technology, not only through its centralisation of ownership, control and governance, but because of the security

State of the planet, Kyoto and technical ¿xes 37 issues associated with it. For example, the most lethal radioactive waste needs to be insulated from the environment for 244,000 years – a proposition which alone should preclude its adoption, given current levels of global economic and political stability, stability which will deteriorate as global warming steps up. Nuclear power is hugely expensive in both building the power station and sourcing its fuel, but also in terms of the opportunity cost of forgoing investment in renewable energies. It is also not a carbon-free technology – in terms of mining and transport alone. The experience of Japan as a result of an earthquake and tsunami in which three reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant were seriously damaged in March 2011 is a warning of the types of issues which rule out nuclear power as a viable, sustainable option for power generation. Fig (2009) argues that nuclear power opens up the potential for the proliferation of nuclear weapons. If one adopts the precautionary principle and the sustainability criterion of maintaining the planet for future generations, the evidence around environmental and safety problems associated with nuclear does not make this a viable option for energy production. Furthermore, uranium is a ¿nite resource which, it is suggested, would be in short supply by 2020, if this option were adopted (Energy Watch Group 2006). There is much valuable work being done on renewable energies. Heusemann (2003), for example, claimed an experiment sponsored by the German government intended to show that a network with 61 per cent of electricity from wind, 14 per cent from solar photovoltaics and 25 per cent from biomass, could meet up to 100 per cent of electricity demand. While wind, wave, tidal, solar, hydro and geothermal power are proven technologies, there are still many questions regarding how much energy such renewables can provide, and what impact the development of such energy systems will have on the environment (for example, the toxic effects of mining rare earths and the amount of land required for positioning windmills, solar panels, and so on). Jacobsen (2008), a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, conducted the ¿rst quantitative, scienti¿c evaluation of the main proposed energy-related solutions to global warming and energy security. His study assessed their potential for delivering energy for electricity and vehicles, their impacts on global warming, human health, energy security, water supply, water pollution and wildlife, as well as their space requirements, reliability and sustainability. He found that the options of coal, nuclear and biofuels were getting the most attention and yet were 25–1,000 times more polluting than the best available options of solar, wind and water. While renewables have to be the energy source to transition to, there is no possibility that they will be able to sustain the continually growing, high production and consumption lifestyle that characterises the global capitalist system. Renewables can achieve a reduction in the amount of environmental impact per unit of production; however, the scale of economic growth will override any energy or environmental savings. The transition to renewables also doesn’t tackle the myriad of interrelated environmental and social crises arising from the capitalist system – crises that require more than a technical ¿x.

38

The state of the world

Furthermore, the transition to renewables and a lower-carbon economy will take decades and alone will not lead to a reduced consumption of materials. Currently, somewhere between 1 and 10 per cent of global energy comes from renewables, but a large proportion of these ¿gures is biofuels which are problematical and will be covered shortly. Simms and Johnson (2010a), in a New Economics Foundation report The Great Transition, after reviewing all the existing models proposed for dealing with global warming and energy use (including renewable, nuclear, geo-engineering, carbon capture and storage), maintain that these are ‘potentially dangerous distractions from more human scale solutions’ and that there are no ‘magic bullets’ to save us. They conclude that even if we were to transition to an entirely clean energy-based economy, this would not suf¿ce as we are consuming nature’s absorption and regeneration services 44 per cent faster than nature can regenerate and absorb them. Simms and Johnson (2010b) argue that what is urgently required is a new macro-economic model that enables humans to live within the constraints of the biosphere. Global warming is a systemic problem, and it can only be ¿xed by ¿xing the system. Finally, there are the much-heralded biofuels. A biofuel is derived from biological matter, e.g. biodiesel, biogas and methane. Proponents of biofuels (such as the International Energy Agency) see them as part of the solution both to declining fossil fuels and rising carbon emissions from fossil fuels. However, an increasing number of studies are calling into question the use of biofuels as a solution to fossil fuel production of carbon emissions. Sanderson (2006) reports on studies that compare the energy that goes into making ethanol, expended during the harvesting, fertilising and transporting of corn to re¿neries, and then re¿ning it, with the energy that is released when it is routinely burned. These show that the net gain is at best small. In another study by Scharlemann and Laurence (2008), it is claimed that biofuels are not superior if their production, which results in environmental destruction, pollution and damage to human health, is taken into account. Likewise, Searchinger et al. (2008) cast doubt on the claim that substituting biofuels for fossil fuels will reduce greenhouse gases. This is because biofuels sequester carbon through the growth of the feedstock needed to produce them. This study showed that such arguments have not considered the consequences of not counting the carbon emissions that occur as farmers worldwide respond to higher prices and convert forest and grassland to new cropland to replace the grain (or cropland) diverted to biofuels. There are also grave social justice concerns about the growing use of biofuels í the opportunity cost in terms of food. According to an Oxfam Report (2008) titled Another Inconvenient Truth: How biofuel policies are deepening poverty and accelerating climate change, 30 per cent of price increases during the previous year were attributable to biofuels, suggesting that these have endangered the livelihoods of nearly 100 million people and dragged over 30 million into poverty. A report by Catanzaro (2008: 7) claims that the growing biofuels industry is expected to consume 400 million tonnes of grain by 2020. Goklany (2011), in drawing on ¿gures from the World Bank and the World Health

State of the planet, Kyoto and technical ¿xes 39 Organisation (WHO), writes that biofuel production may have resulted in at least 192,000 excess deaths and 6.7 million additional lost Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) in 2010 due to increased food prices as a result of the growing of biofuels. He suggests these estimates are conservative and exceed the WHO’s estimated 141,000 deaths and 5.4 million lost DALYs attributed to global warming. The 2008 Oxfam report called on governments in the developed world to urgently halt and review their current biofuel policies due to the severe impact they were having on the poor in the developing world and that they were actually accelerating climate change and deepening poverty and hunger. This is because biofuels are causing the price of food to rise. The report argued that, thanks to generous subsidies and tax breaks, land used previously for food crops was now being used for fuel crops. Rich countries were supporting their own biofuel production through targets, subsidies, tax breaks and tariffs – what was described by Oxfam as a new tax on food. Rich countries spent up to $15 billion in 2005 supporting biofuels while blocking cheaper Brazilian ethanol, which is far less damaging for global food security – though not for the environment. ReÀecting on the motives driving biofuel production, biofuels are not saving the planet from global warming but are instead a new way of capital accumulation. One clear implication of this is that with respect to the question of land for biofuels versus land for food, there are major distributional effects. It is the poor who are most adversely affected by rising food prices. It is the afÀuent who will bene¿t most from biofuels production. With global warming exacerbating the already growing concerns about world food security, biofuels are not an ethical option.

Current realities Nearly all governments and the mega fossil fuel corporations have joined the frenzy to extract the world’s remaining reserves of fossil fuels with new sources such as shale gas and oil, and technologies such as gas fracking and deep ocean bed operations being employed despite the new and additional risks such technologies bring to the ¿eld. The Worldwatch Institute (2012) projected that the total value of conventional global fossil fuel subsidies in 2012 was between $775 billion and more than $1 trillion. On the other hand, subsidies for renewable energy stood at $66 billion in 2010, with two thirds of these subsidies going to renewable electricity, the remaining third to biofuels. Companies and countries are poised to begin oil and gas extraction in the frozen Arctic regions, regions that ironically will become accessible as global warming brings increased melting of the Arctic ice. In 2008, James Hansen et al.wrote: Our home planet is dangerously near a tipping point at which human-made greenhouse gases reach a level where major climate changes can proceed mostly under their own momentum. Warming will shift climatic zones

40

The state of the world by intensifying the hydrologic cycle, affecting freshwater availability and human health. We will see repeated coastal tragedies associated with storms and continuously rising sea levels. The implications are profound, and the only resolution is for humans to move to a fundamentally different energy pathway within a decade. Otherwise, it will be too late for one-third of the world’s animal and plant species and millions of the most vulnerable members of our own species. (Hansen et al. 2008: 7–8)

In the year 2013, we have already lost ¿ve years of this critical decade. According to the IPCC (2007a: 72), there are a number of uncertainties that if resolved, ‘could lead to new robust ¿ndings’, meaning in essence that their projections would be yet more alarming. These uncertainties include the magnitude of CO2 emissions from land use change; the scarcity of data from some regions, particularly poor countries; the analysis and monitoring of changes in extreme weather events; and ‘how development planners incorporate information into their decisions’ (ibid.). Juxtaposed to this critical situation has been the inability of the global and nation-state institutions even to begin to take appropriate action. In a paper presented in the Geophysical Research Letters, Weaver et al. (2007) argue that even with a 90 per cent global cut in emissions by 2050, the 2° C threshold would eventually be broken. That paper suggests that to stabilise temperatures at 1.5° C above the pre-industrial level requires a global cut of 100 per cent, in other words a complete decarbonisation of the economy. World population is growing. So too is the global economy and the latter is much more of a problem, especially as, at the very core of the global market economy, is the fundamental principle of economic growth which is dependent on fossil fuels. This is not news. That issue was central to the deliberations of the Club of Rome in 1972, published in the report Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972). Yet in the intervening four decades, the issue has been very largely ignored. As economic growth occurs in carbon-based growth economies, the demand for fossil fuels rises as well as the emissions of greenhouse gases. Neither increased energy ef¿ciency using existing energy sources nor renewables can do much to arrest this process. While the industrialised nations are calling for cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in the rapidly industrialising Third World, such development is strongly predicated on fossil fuel energy. For example, in just one of a number of such projects, in 2008 the World Bank underwrote a $4.1 billion, coal-powered Tata Ultra Mega plant in Gujarat in western India which would emit 25.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year making it one of the world’s ¿fty largest greenhousegas emitters (Nace 2008). The Tata plant was to be classi¿ed under the Kyoto Protocol as a ‘Clean Development Mechanism’ development because it would be using ‘super critical coal technology’, a technology that would produce slightly higher energy ef¿ciency from the coal than average. Lohmann (2007) argues that despite the World Bank’s involvement in carbon trading initiatives, such as the Clean Development Mechanism and Prototype Carbon Fund, from 1992 to 2004

State of the planet, Kyoto and technical ¿xes 41 it approved $11 billion in ¿nancing for 128 fossil-fuel extraction projects in 45 countries, projects which will ultimately lead to more than 43 billion tonnes of carbon-dioxide emissions, a ¿gure hundreds of times more than the emissions reductions that signatories to the Kyoto Protocol were required to make between 1990 and 2012. Since 2004, World Bank ¿nancing for fossil fuel projects has continued, as will be shown in the chapters on South Africa.

Conclusion Even if global warming were treated as an isolated and contained issue, technical and market solutions would not ¿x the problem. The only way of preventing further global warming is to stop emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases at the source. That is the biosphere system’s imperative for human and other species’ survival. However, the globalised capitalist economy is dependent on carbon fuel and on growth. For centuries capitalism has Àourished but at the expense of building a debt against future generations and a stable biosphere of which global warming is symptomatic. International institutional solutions to global warming do not challenge the global economic system, the imperative for this system to continue to grow or the values and lifestyles of a high consumption minority. Yet over half of the world’s population are very poor, some so poor they eat mud and sell their children into bondage (Younge 2008). The enormous growth spurts in China and India are being accompanied by growing inequalities while creating high consuming middle classes and very wealthy elites. Just as markets and technology never have and never will address the deep levels of poverty and inequality, the unsustainability of high consumption lifestyles of growing middle classes and new elites, they will never address global warming. The obverse is the case. Just as global capitalism and its markets continue to expand and push the poorest further into the quicksand of pauperism, it is also pushing us ever closer to extinction, destroying the conditions of the Holocene epoch, dismantling natural protections and (climate) adaptive capacities. The science is clear. Global warming is happening and threatens the very existence of life on the planet. The causes are very much a function of the global system of production which depends on growth, over-production and overconsumption, the use of increasing quantities of fossil fuels and the decreasing ability of ‘sinks’ to cope. The world is heading into very dangerous territory in terms of the survival of species. It may well be already in territory from which there is no return.

3

Emission trading schemes, ¿nancialisation and green capitalism

If anyone has doubts that human-induced climate change is occurring, they only need to look at activity in the ¿nancial sector to know that it is real. While the ¿nancial sector recognises the risks of global warming, that very sector is adopting risk-reduction strategies, but also developing business strategies to be key stakeholders in its (pro¿table) mitigation measures. There are numerous aspects to the implications of the ¿nancial economy for global warming. Here, the focus will be on three aspects: carbon emissions trading schemes, giving Australia as a case example of a country that has introduced a carbon tax and will begin an emissions trading scheme (ETS) in 2015; the asset values of fossil fuel companies and the growing presence of ¿nancial institutions involved in the ‘solutions’ to climate change; and the growing push for the protection of the environment and climate to become new sources of pro¿t – a new green capitalism.

Carbon emissions trading schemes There are a couple of key points to ponder when considering carbon trading as a possible resolution of global warming. First, there is little evidence to show that emissions trading schemes work. For example, the EU’s carbon trading scheme, which is the one held up by proponents as the best to date, is not delivering. Second, an integral part of emissions trading schemes, such as Australia’s and Europe’s, is to provide for the use of carbon-offset credits to allow for continued emissions in industrialised nations. For example, cheap offset credits have been developed by creating conservation areas in rainforest nations in what is known as REDD offsets (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation). Such offsets have been shown to have enormous impacts on the livelihoods of local and Indigenous peoples – and in short, amount to a new form of ecological imperialism. Such trading displaces the burden of responsibility from wealthy nations to poorer nations and people in the South. These can never be a secure, long-term form of offsetting. The whole process, which is furthering the ¿nancialisation of economies, shows how little the world has learned from the global ¿nancial crisis. Carbon trading is essentially a tool to foster capital accumulation. This is a market solution geared

Emission trading schemes, ¿nancialisation and green capitalism 43 towards not only maintaining ‘business as usual’ but even expanding business by privatising the last remaining commons – the atmosphere. As Lohmann (1999: 13) writes: in [a] …wrenching, contradictory process, a ¿ction called ‘tradable carbon’ is today being worked up which is loftily indifferent to the local social, political, photosynthetic, geological, or combustion circumstances surrounding various aspects of the carbon cycle. The market can do many things, but one thing it cannot do is to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere or even to save the planet from increasing carbon emissions. Despite the global ¿nancial crisis, the fallacy of perfect markets (which are a ¿gment of the imagination of neoclassical economists but on which an effective ETS depends), and the many failures of the capitalist market system in providing for the world’s people, neither the Stern Review nor the Garnaut Review1 (Garnaut 2008) questions the merits of the market in looking for solutions to climate change. Despite the inability of market prices to bring about structural change, prices can reveal some interesting issues within the market context. For example, at the outset, the allocations of emissions permits for the European Union’s emissions targets were largely based on estimates prepared by the corporations themselves, resulting in permit allocation levels that, in some industries, exceeded real carbon emissions by up to 50 per cent. This meant that many companies were not forced to make emissions cuts nor to purchase pollution permits. Once the extent of the permit surplus became public knowledge, the price of permissions to emit 1 tonne of CO2 collapsed from a peak of 33 euros to 0.20 euros! Between January 2005 and August 2007, emissions from installations covered by the ETS actually rose by 0.8 per cent. Compounding the unsuitability of emissions trading schemes is the further major issue of the failure of rigorous regulatory frameworks for carbon trading schemes leading to considerable creative accounting. For example, a company selling carbon credits generated by a tree plantation established in a poor country can use the ‘future value accounting’ method based on predictions of future pro¿ts (as failed mega-corporation Enron so calamitously did) to claim that a certain amount of CO2 emissions has been neutralised and that this has happened immediately. The reality of course is that this will not occur for several decades – and then only if everything goes as planned, something that requires not only political and economic stability, but stable weather patterns, temperatures, rainfall etc. – impossible criteria to meet today. Further, this is a situation that cannot be monitored. Again, as Beder (2006a: 214) points out, the use of plantations to create carbon offsets occupies millions of hectares of land in poor countries. This extends the ecological footprint of afÀuent nations and people at the expense of other nations, effectively imposing intergenerational inequity ‘by allowing this generation to park carbon in trees and on paper to meet their reduction commitments, while leaving the responsibility for permanent reductions in greenhouse

44

The state of the world

gas emissions to future generations’. Meanwhile, these same carbon credits can be used by coal-¿red power stations to continue its pollution. Some sections of the corporate sector are aware of the fundamental problems of carbon trading. A report by Standard Life Investments on Carbon Management & Carbon Neutrality in the FTSE All Share Index warned that such schemes ‘have the capacity to disguise the failure to achieve actual reductions in overall greenhouse gas emissions’ (Smith 2007: 6). Citigroup’s Peter Atherton indicated that the EU ETS had done nothing to curb emissions and additionally had acted as a highly regressive tax (Smith 2007). The Wall Street Journal in March 2006 claimed emissions trading would make a lot of money for some large corporations but do little about global warming. Newsweek in March 2007 (cited in Bond 2007: 8) claimed that carbon trading through the Clean Development Mechanism was not working and furthermore represented a grossly inef¿cient way of cutting emissions in the developing world. It was argued that the trade is a game that had (by 2007) transferred $3 billion to some of the worst carbon polluters in poor countries. Lohmann (1999: 7) further maintains that emissions targets are inequitable: any measure requiring all countries to reduce emissions by similar percentages, for example, would allow the US to go on producing roughly one quarter of the greenhouse gases released yearly, even though it has only four per cent of the world’s population. Similarly, North–South ‘carbon trading’ suggests that it is legitimate for rich countries or companies who already use more than their share of the world’s carbon sinks and stocks to buy still more of them – using cash which has itself been accumulated partly through a history of over-exploiting those sinks and stocks. Beder (2006b: 214) also argues that the ‘commodi¿cation and privatisation of forests can turn ecosystems which some 100 million people depend on for food, medicines, fuel, water and other services into a resource that is owned or managed by corporations for its carbon storing potential’. The other worrying aspect of carbon trading is that the ‘players’ in these schemes are not always those you might think of. As Walker (FOE 2009: 3) writes: ‘The majority of trade is carried out not by polluting industries and factories covered by carbon trading schemes but by banks and investors who pro¿t from speculation on the carbon markets – packaging carbon credits into increasingly complex ¿nancial products similar to the “shadow ¿nance” around sub-prime mortgages which triggered the recent economic crash.’ Walker (ibid.: 2) goes on to argue ‘[t]he credit crunch has taught us that Governments, not markets, are best placed to safeguard our future í at this critical point in the ¿ght against climate change, Ministers must step in and lead the way with a new direct approach to tackling carbon emissions’. Walker’s faith in governments however assumes that they are genuinely seeking to reÀect the wishes of the critically informed people and to look to the long-term interests of the planet. That faith seems misplaced given the history to date of governments’

Emission trading schemes, ¿nancialisation and green capitalism 45 inaction on global warming in general and the inÀuence on governments of the market and the interests of capital accumulation. Friends of the Earth emphasise the way in which carbon trading has boosted the ¿nancialisation of economies in a report titled ‘Subprime carbon? Re-thinking the world’s largest new derivatives market’. It is worth quoting the relevant comments at some length: The buying and selling of carbon is fundamentally derivatives trading. Currently, most carbon is sold as futures or forward contracts, a type of derivative. These contracts contain promises to deliver carbon allowances or credits in a certain quantity, at a certain price, by a speci¿c date. Today’s carbon markets are small, but if the United States adopts carbon trading on the scale envisioned by most federal cap-and-trade bills, carbon derivatives will become what Commodities Future Trading Commissioner Bart Chilton predicted would be ‘the biggest of any derivatives product in the next four to ¿ve years’. (FOE 2009: 2) The report adds: Today speculators do the majority of carbon trading, and they will continue to dominate as carbon markets grow. In fact, about two-thirds of carbon investment funds by volume were not established to help companies comply with carbon caps, but rather for capital gains purposes. (FOE 2009: 4) The ¿nancialisation of carbon trading is placing the future of the planet in the realm of an unstable, unregulated, speculative, casino economy that has no end other than to make increasing pro¿ts for decreasing numbers of people. Such ¿nancialisation has no connection to the lives of the great mass of people, other than to siphon off increasing percentages of their share of the world’s wealth. Carbon trading is anti-democratic, given the ‘international capital markets’ [ability to] place serious limits on state authorities to regulate their economies’ (FOE 2009: 87). The idea that the future of the planet might rest with derivatives is truly alarming. Ferguson (2008) reports: ‘In 2002, legendary investor Warren Buffett warned that derivatives were time bombs and “¿nancial weapons of mass destruction” that could harm not only their buyers and sellers, but the whole economic system.’ He was proved right. Buffett (2002) also said: The derivatives genie is now well out of the bottle … Central banks and governments have so far found no effective way to control, or even monitor, the risks posed by these contracts. Closing down a derivatives business is easier said than done. The reinsurance and derivatives businesses are similar: Like Hell, both are easy to enter and almost impossible to exit.

46

The state of the world

There is little evidence to suggest that these derivatives markets are any more controllable now than then. Yet it is this ‘time bomb’ that is the ¿nancial basis of the carbon trading in which so many governments want to place their faith to save the planet.

Australia’s carbon tax and ETS Amidst a frenzy of outrageous claims by the Conservative opposition, the Australian Labour Government introduced a carbon tax on 1 July 2012, as part of what it labelled a ‘Clean Energy Future’ package. The tax began as a ¿xed price of A$23 a tonne of CO2-equivalent.2 The government’s plan is to reduce Australia’s emissions by 5 per cent below 2000 levels by 2020 in the absence of a coherent international agreement on emission reduction levels. In introducing the tax, Australia joins ¿fty other jurisdictions that will have emissions trading schemes by 2013 covering a combined population of more than 850 million people. In 2015 Australia will transform the scheme to a fully-Àedged emissions trading scheme and will link to the European emissions trading scheme – creating the world’s biggest emissions trading market. It is also linking Australia’s carbon market into the economic turmoil of Europe – turmoil that looks like another tentacle in the crises of capitalism. Other jurisdictions that have emissions trading schemes include ten US states, including California; China has seven pilot schemes in provinces and cities, forerunners to a national Chinese scheme to be introduced by 2015. South Korea will begin an emissions trading scheme in 2015 at which point twenty-seven out of the thirty-four OECD countries will have a national carbon price. One of the most successful emissions trading schemes, which gets the most praise from proponents of carbon trading schemes, is the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme. Thirty countries are linked to this. However, it is notorious for being mired in corruption. On top of this, there are many accounting problems. For example, according to Friends of the Earth, the industrial gas projects comprising 80 per cent of European offsets have been shown to have no ecological integrity. This aside, as the Sandbag Report3 (Morris and Worthington 2010) indicates, over its 5-year life to 2012, the EU ETS would result in carbon ‘savings’ amounting to less than one third of one per cent of total emissions, and it is likely that even this small result had more to do with the economic downturn of the global ¿nancial crisis than any savings from the ETS itself. Since the European ETS began in 2005, its carbon permit price has shown extreme volatility, going from a high of €30 in April 2006 to three cents by the end of 2007, to €35 in the 2008–12 period; falling again to €6.04 in April 2012, and up again to €9.80 in August 2012. Europe’s offset credits have been dubbed the world’s worst performing commodity, falling from €20 in 2008 to €3.48 in April 2012 (rising later in the year to €9.80). Continuing on the back of the huge surplus in tradable permits in Europe, about half of the 20 per cent reduction in emissions by 2020 will be from ‘banked’ permits that do not represent real

Emission trading schemes, ¿nancialisation and green capitalism 47 emissions cuts. If you then add the international offsets and somewhat suspect permits available from Eastern Europe and Russia, Europe could meet its 2020 target without having reduced a single tonne of carbon inside its own borders! During the ¿rst phase from 2005 to 2007, emissions rose by 7.5 per cent, dipping by 12.5 per cent from 2008 to 2011 (and thus adding even more excess permits to the system), due at least in part to the global ¿nancial crisis. Furthermore, the EU Climate Action Commissioner Connie Hedegaard was reported in 2011 as conceding that 80 per cent of the international offsets credited under the ETS had ‘a total lack of environmental integrity’ (Hedegaard 2011). In a 2008 report by the WWF and Point Carbon, it is estimated that in just ¿ve European countries, windfall pro¿ts of between €23 and €71 billion will be made by power companies. The Swiss bank UBS claimed in 2011 that the EU ETS had cost Europeans $287 billion but had done nothing to cut emissions. The bank stated that it would be much better to phase out the biggest emitters rather than continuing with the zero impact of emissions trading (Climate Change Social Change 2011). The third phase of the EU ETS, beginning in 2013, is supposed to rectify the ‘teething problems’ that have led to the failures to date, but according an EU corporate watchdog,4 it will follow the same pattern of subsidising polluters and assisting them in avoiding meaningful action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon Trade Watch has indicated that linking carbon trading schemes across the globe will increase the potential for fraudulent trading because it will involve exchanges of permits that are subject to different ¿nancial and environmental rules. In summary, the European Emissions Trading Scheme has been plagued by fraud, consumer rip-offs and massive over-allocation of free permits and, most importantly, has both failed to reduce emissions and delayed investment in real action. Australia is set to join this debacle. As the developed world’s highest per capita carbon emitting country, Australia’s ambitions of emissions reductions targets are, to say the least, very modest. Just as signi¿cantly, they are lacking in integrity. Australian scholar Guy Pearce, quoted in Spratt (2012), estimated that Queensland alone has so many new coal mines planned that together they will cause eleven times more pollution than the carbon tax is supposed to reduce. Australia is the world’s biggest exporter of coal and iron ore and has growing oil and gas fracking (hydraulic fracturing)5 and natural gas resources sectors, each of which produces enormous and hugely underestimated quantities of fugitive emissions, including the powerful greenhouse gas, methane. In Queensland alone, there is a likelihood that the Coal Seam Gas industry will drill up to 40,000 wells by 2030, each well ‘consuming’ a minimum of one hectare of prime agricultural land and having a devastating effect on artesian water – and global warming. Additionally, Australia’s bona ¿des in its emissions reduction targets comes into question in that it will allow for half of Australia’s recorded emissions reductions to occur offshore through offset projects in developing countries.

48

The state of the world

Financial institutions and solutions to global warming Various statements made by or around the ¿nance sector by a number of ¿nancial institutions, while not necessarily fully reÀecting the severity of the global warming situation, go much further than our governments and global institutions. Perhaps this is inevitable as they are seeking to build into their forecasts the threat to their pro¿ts. Let me recap here some of these ‘¿nancial’ observations in relation to global warming. A joint report produced by the Allianz Group and the World Wide Fund for Nature (2005: i)) begins by saying: ‘Climate change poses a major risk to the global economy: It affects the wealth of societies, the availability of resources, the price of energy and the value of companies.’ The report continues: the changes are principally man-made. The issue has become urgent because the pace of change is accelerating … Europe is not only warming 40 percent faster than the world as a whole, but has already sustained severe damage from climate change. Storms in 1999 and Àoods in 2002 each cost 13 billion euros, while a heat wave in 2003 cost 10 billion euros. Although no precise estimate of all future costs can be made, a European Commission paper puts the future cost of all the potential cumulative global damage at 74 trillion euros at today’s value if effective action is not taken … Globally, climate change already results in about 160,000 deaths a year, and this is likely to rise sharply because of increasing shortages of food and water. The extraordinary heat wave in 2003 caused 27,000 deaths in Europe and disrupted agriculture, inland shipping, and electricity production. Huge swathes of forests covering a total of 5 per cent of Portugal’s surface area were destroyed in a loss put at one billion euros. By the end of this century such a summer could be routine. Mediterranean agriculture might be in a state of collapse. Everywhere in Europe rainfall will be more intense. The number of major Àoods in Europe has already risen from one per year to 15 in recent decades. In the UK, the annual cost of Àooding this century will rise to as much as 30 billion euros… (ibid.: v) In a similar vein, in a 2008 report produced for the banking sector by Ceres and commissioned by RiskMetrics Group (Cogan 2008: 11), an international risk management body, states that: There is now overwhelming scienti¿c evidence that worldwide temperatures are rising, glaciers are melting, and drought and wild¿res are becoming more severe. Scientists believe most of the warming in the last 50 years is humaninduced. This conÀuence of evidence has galvanized public attention and governments worldwide to take action to avert a possible climate catastrophe. This report is a comprehensive assessment of how 40 of the world’s largest banks are preparing themselves to face the colossal climate change challenge.

Emission trading schemes, ¿nancialisation and green capitalism 49 With nearly $6 trillion in market capitalization, the global ¿nancial sector will play a vital role in supporting timely, cost-effective solutions to reduce U.S. and global greenhouse gas emissions. As risk management experts, it is essential that banks begin now to consider the ¿nancial risk implications of continued investment in carbon-intensive energy technologies. It continues: For a global economy already faced with $100-barrel oil and a projected 50 percent increase in energy demand over the next 25 years, the climate change ‘mega-trend’ may bring the global economy to a historic tipping point. While globalization and the spread of market-based economies have created wealth for a fast-growing human population, they have also hastened a day of reckoning when fossil fuel shortages and excess climate-changing emissions could combine to spawn a global climate and energy crisis. As Theodore Roosevelt IV, a managing director for Lehman Brothers, stated recently, ‘The economic transformation driven by climate change, we believe, will be more profound and deeper than globalization, as energy is so fundamental to economic growth.’ (ibid.: 11) When institutions that are at the very heart of the capitalist system are making such statements, it is dif¿cult to understand why governments are not acting more decisively. If one looks further to the fossil fuel business sector, it appears we are on an unstoppable trajectory. There is an enormous gap between what even the ¿nancial institutions are saying and the reality of what is happening in the world of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels do not just provide the material energy that drives the globalised capitalist system; they also command a dominant position in our economic system. To give some indication of this, 20í30 per cent of the market capitalisation of the stock exchanges of Australia, London, Moscow, São Paulo and Toronto are connected to fossil fuels. A team of ¿nancial analysts released a report for the Carbon Tracker Initiative6 titled ‘Unburnable Carbon – Are the world’s ¿nancial markets carrying a carbon bubble?’ showing the risks that climate change poses to investors. While the more conservative sectors of the science community are saying there is room only for a further 565 Gigatonnes of carbon to be released into the atmosphere (some members of the science community are saying there is no more room), the amount of carbon contained in already proven coal, oil and gas reserves of fossil fuel companies is 2,795 Gigatonnes. This does not include the carbon stored in unconventional, but increasingly attractive, energy sources such as shale gas. While this coal, oil and gas are still to be mined, they are already in the economic system. They are economically ‘above-ground’, factored into asset valuations, share prices, budgets, companies have borrowed against them and so on. It is what gives the companies their value (McKibben 2012). If these companies were not able to extract the coal, oil and gas, their company

50

The state of the world

values would plummet. On today’s market value, JP Morgan calculates that the 2,795 Gigatonnes of carbon emissions are worth US$27 trillion. If only 20 per cent of this could be brought above ground, it would wipe out US$20 trillion from the global economy, plus incalculable Àow-on costs. By comparison, the global ¿nancial crisis saw a guesstimated loss of approximately US$19.2 trillion in total lost household wealth – a loss that led to enormous suffering, set off the European Union’s ¿nancial woes, resulted in a loss of many millions of jobs in Europe and Africa, and so on. And a US$20 trillion loss from the global economy would be just the ¿rst card in a pack of fossil fuel-related industry cards. US climate activist and writer Bill McKibben (2012: 3) argues that the fossil fuel industry is a ‘rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth’ and where ‘wrecking the planet is their business model’. McKibben writes: If Exxon burns its current reserves, it would use up more than seven per cent of the available atmospheric space between us and the risk of two degrees. BP is just behind, followed by the Russian ¿rm Gazprom, then Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell … Taken together, just these six ¿rms … would use up more than a quarter of the remaining two-degree budget. Severstal, the Russian mining giant, leads the list of coal companies, followed by ¿rms like BHP Billiton and Peabody …. this industry alone, holds the power to change the physics and chemistry of our planet, and they’re planning to use it. Billions are being spent in the search for yet more reserves of fossil fuels. It is an industry with enormous wealth – and with enormous political lobbying power. In the US, the Koch brothers, for example, who made much of their combined wealth of $50 billion from fossil fuels, planned to spend $200 million on the 2012 US Presidential elections. There is currently a boom in exploration and extraction of shale gas, in the United States particularly, but also in Australia, South Africa, China, India, Canada, Mexico, Russia and Saudi Arabia – all of which have signi¿cant reserves. It is argued that despite the environmental impacts of fracking, gas may be a transition fuel to a low carbon economy. However, recent research done in Australia reveals potentially serious underestimation of the amount of methane gas lost to the atmosphere as fugitive emissions from coal seam gas exploration and recovery activities (Grudnoff 2012).

The ¿nancialisation of the global economy The economic trajectory that we are currently on in the global capitalist system is driven by the imperative for competition and accumulation. This trajectory is gathering momentum and ¿nding new domains for accumulation. One of these new domains is that of ¿nancialisation, whereby an increasing percentage of the (global) economic activity occurs in the non-productive ¿nancial sector. This phenomenon has particular signi¿cance for climate change, both directly (speci¿cally in terms of

Emission trading schemes, ¿nancialisation and green capitalism 51 increasing inequality and declining democracy), but also less directly because of the implications it has for emissions trading schemes (as discussed above). One indicator of the degree of this shift from productive economic activity to the ¿nancial sector is the amount of funds raised on international ¿nancial markets as a percentage of world exports. This rose from 0.5 per cent in 1950 to over 20 per cent in 1996 (Baker et al. 1998 quoted in Epstein 2006: 4). More recently, ¿nancial institutions’ share of corporate pro¿t has burgeoned since the 1970s with the era of neoliberalism and deregulation of the market. This trend is particularly pleasing to those with concentrated wealth and privilege and is supported by the vacuous neoclassical economic theories (aka ideology) of market economics. Particularly germane to global warming are several factors. First, the consequences of this ¿nancialisation have been ‘highly detrimental to signi¿cant numbers of people around the globe’ (Epstein 2006: 5), further siphoning wealth from the poorest to the richest. It has meant growing inequality, nationally and internationally, and an increase in the percentage of national incomes going to capital (see graph from Ruccio 2010: 90), as well as the centralisation and concentration of capital. Financialisation has resulted in a growth in power of ¿nancial institutions and a consequent decline in the power of labour unions, whose links to the economy are through the production process. As the ¿nancial sector is separated from both the means and modes of material production, this is a double alienation of labour: ¿rst from the environment, and second from the means of production. It has also meant growing exploitation of the environment, with ¿nance-driven economic growth demanding greater extraction of material resources. While the ¿nancial crisis can to some extent be tackled through tax-funded bailouts as happened in the 2008 ¿nancial crisis in the US (although ¿nancial crises may also reach the point where signi¿cant institutions and infrastructure collapse completely) there is no one who can bail out from the effects of the destruction of the environment if we pass tipping points leading to irreversible trajectories of ecological collapse or global warming. On the other hand, in a paper for the International Labour Organisation, Rossman and Green¿eld (2006: 9) wrote: ‘The last quarter century of “deregulation” involved the introduction of a vast array of new legal mechanisms and regulations by national governments to protect the interests of investors and shareholders.’ National governments are intimately involved in the control and regulation of labour – its movement, remuneration and so on. Conversely, national governments have, particularly since the beginning of the neoliberal era in the 1970s, increasingly absconded from the regulation of capital to the point today that capital, particularly that of mega-corporations, has unprecedented power and freedom to move globally, in and out of economies according to the interests of pro¿t rather than the interests of nations, the planet and its inhabitants. The impetus and rationale of ¿nancialisation is tied up in short-term, highly pro¿table returns, a logic that runs counter to any nation’s wellbeing or the natural cycles of reproduction and environmental reparation. This then serves to exacerbate the rift7 that separates humans from nature as humans seek to

52

The state of the world

produce their living. It is this ¿nancial sector that neoliberal institutions – national governments, the Kyoto Protocol, the IMF and the World Bank í will be further enhancing through the climate change ‘solution’ of emissions trading schemes. It is this ¿nancialisation of economic activity and the predominant motive of pro¿t that drives, for example, the glaring contradiction of the World Bank’s position as chief overseer of climate change ¿nance at the same time as being the world’s largest lender for the construction of coal-¿red power stations (Redman 2008a, 2008b). There is a deep disjuncture between the real economy and ¿nance, as we saw in the 2007–2008 global ¿nancial crisis. This contributes to an increasingly unstable and complex pack of cards which, when one card falls, risks leading to chaos. Add in climate disruption and we risk unprecedented chaos and human suffering.

Green capitalism Neoliberal capitalism is characterised by the deregulation of ¿nancial markets and trade, privatisation, weakening the power of labour, and the reduction of government services such as health, education and social welfare – services which most bene¿t the poor. At the same time, institutionally it seeks to strengthen the role of the market and de-unionise labour. It results in a shift in emphasis to the individual, the consumer, the ‘rule of the market’ and the minimisation of the concept of public good and community (Harvey 2005; Simon and McBride 2007). Deregulation in this context normally refers to the weakening or removal of regulation at a national level. Internationally, however, with the globalisation of the capitalist economy, international and undemocratic institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO have become the controlling bodies, regulating trade and investment in the interests of global elites and capital, not the planet and its people. Driven by the neoliberal capitalist ideology, these international organisations, it can be argued, are primarily under the control of the rich, the powerful and the large private, corporate bodies; what the Occupy Wall Street protesters have labelled the ‘1%’. Finally, the ¿nancialisation of the accumulation process results in increasing irrationalities including ‘drawing ever more destructively on the limited resources and absorptive capacity of nature, as the economy continually grows in scale in relation to the planetary system. The result is emerging and expanding ecological rifts that are turning into planetary chasms’ (Foster et al. 2010: 29). These chasms are not only causing the collapse of many of the ecosystems upon which the human species is dependent but also moving planet Earth onto what has the potential to become an unstoppable trajectory into another geological era not conducive to human civilisation. This is the economic milieu in which the concepts and practice of ‘green’ capitalism are being gestated. While dif¿cult to pin down precisely, this ‘green economy’ broadly means internalising environmental externalities through the commodi¿cation of ecosystems í including their services (such as carbon emission absorption). These newly objecti¿ed services can then become ¿nancial

Emission trading schemes, ¿nancialisation and green capitalism 53 commodities, to be privatised, bought, traded or securitised like any other commodity. However, evidence indicates that such market-based solutions have both weak environmental bene¿ts and strong social impacts. For example, between a third and two thirds of CDM projects have not delivered the promised emissions cuts. In countries in Africa, the Indian sub-continent and other parts of the world, poor rural dwellers who are the most dependent on the free ‘services’ provided by nature – e.g. fresh water, food, ¿rewood, medical plants – lose access to those services. The use then of those services, through deforestation for example, might be slowed down or contained, but the avoided emissions are then exchanged and traded for continued emissions in the developed country. So this results in no gains for the environment but a de facto transfer of rights and properties from the poor to the rich. It is an expansion of the ecological footprint of the rich. This is an attractive ‘solution’ to those wanting to maintain the status quo and who see the potential for expanding markets in solving global warming. This is the green capitalism that has taken root as a result of the complete failure of the Rio+20 Summit in 2012 and the vacuum in global warming governance policy. Now corporations see the pro¿t potential in commodifying the ecological functions and services that nature provides. Needless to say, the parallel People’s Summit which ran concurrently with the Rio+20 Summit rejected the green capitalist economy. The protagonists of this push argue that once nature, or what is now termed ‘natural capital’, is included on company balance sheets, chief executive of¿cers (CEOs) and policy makers will adopt greener practices. Economist Sam Fankhauser from the London School of Economics argues that if natural capital accounting is seen as an investment rather than a cost, under such a framework, corporations would husband resources better (Pearce 2012). One of the protagonists in leading the charge to capture green business is the Chairman of the Bank of America and a former president of the DuPont Corporation, Chad Holliday. That corporation is best known for its production of the toxic Agent Orange chemical sprayed in Vietnam that has had long-term devastating environmental and health consequences for that country. It is a company that has a huge control over the world’s food supplies: it is the largest seed company in the world; it is involved in genetically modi¿ed seed production and control and in global food and technology cartels; it owns over 20,000 patents and has been involved in biopiracy (Corporate Watch 2002). It has a very long list of crimes against the environment and humanity (ibid.). Former DuPont executives are not the sort of people to be trusted to play a role in saving the planet. Aligning the values and motivations of such companies and their of¿cials with those needed for saving the planet is not possible. Aligning their actions with carbon emissions trading, the trading of rights to forests and offsetting schemes is another step in what could turn into a Frankenstein world of green capitalism: a world of fascist environmentalism in which only the most wealthy and powerful have any hope of surviving. This is the sort of world onto which some of the bizarre and high-risk geo-engineering experiments will be thrust as the scale and severity of global warming consequences leave little room for manoeuvre.

54

The state of the world

Green capitalism can only be seen for what it is: a further extension of the capitalist system’s need to grow and accumulate, with such growth and accumulation always accompanied by dispossession, impoverishment and environmental destruction. According to the Asian Movements’ Statement on the Green Economy, it is an economy ‘premised on a highly inequitable and undemocratic structure where a few control a vast portion of resources … it upholds pro¿t generation as the main motivation for economic undertakings, aggregate growth as the main measure of success, and markets as main determinants of what goods and services are sold and who can buy them’.8 It is a case of the interests of capital accumulation replacing the rights of nature and people, creating an ever deepening chasm between society and the ecology. Life as we know it on planet Earth cannot survive any deepening of planetary chasms. To repair these chasms and to solve global warming, we need to look beyond treating it as if it is an isolated, self-contained problem which can be ¿xed by a tweaking of the current global political economy, introducing green capitalism, growing the ¿nancial sector or even, alone, by the introduction of renewable energy sources. To resolve the problem of climate change, we need ¿rst to examine and second change the global political economy system that is the predominant driver of the multitude of interrelated crises facing humanity. We are now confronted with having to make the choice between capitalism and the planet.

4

The global political economy and global warming

Introduction Slovenian scholar, Slavoj äiåek (2009) observed that ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’. This is the reality of what we are facing as the accelerating and converging crises of capitalism force ever deeper rifts between human society and the Earth’s bio-capacity to regenerate. And yet, the contemporary political framework for viewing the world has become so contracted and so dominated by the powerful and pervasive ideological grip that capitalism holds on the collective worldview, that it has obscured the possibility of imagining alternative political economies. This ‘reality’ captures the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, it is ‘how it is’. There is no alternative. If this were the case, then humanity and civilisation would be doomed. The reality of the multiple, escalating and converging crises of capitalism, and most urgently, the crisis of global warming and the inevitable disruption accompanying it, is that we must, if human society as we know it is to continue, ¿nd alternative models of political economy. In doing so, we must also ¿nd a way of ending the capitalist system without falling into a state of chaos, brutality and destruction. A dif¿cult call. This will only be possible if the transformation is planned, solidly and genuinely democratic, recognising the restorative capacity of nature and the absolute requirement for equitable outcomes. People need to be critically informed and engaged about the reality of the multiple crises. To become critically informed about why the continuation of the capitalist political economy is not a viable, sustainable option for the future, it is important to understand some of its key inherent structural faults. While recognising the importance of the diversity of worldviews to the future of humanity, in this chapter I will draw on particular aspects of a Marxist theoretical framework to shed critical light on the capitalist system and the historical, structural and systemic causes of global warming. This Marxist framework is a useful tool, ¿rst, for breaking through the dominant and established reality that obscures the lifethreatening attributes inherent in capitalism, and second, allowing recognition of the possibility that there are other ways of social reproductive organisation.

56

The state of the world

For those of us privileged members of the human race who only see the bene¿ts of capitalism, that 20 per cent of humanity who consume 75 per cent of all resources and produce 75 per cent of all waste, it is a risky and challenging task to want to change the world we now live in, a world in which we are used to a high level of security, certainty and comfort. This is a world in which we are led to believe we are entitled to consume endlessly, at least in relation to our income, that we can express our individual personalities through free choices of schools, housing, fashion; what and how much we buy and all the other accoutrements of wealthy consumerist society. We do not see ourselves as having more than our fair share of the Earth’s resources, or that we are consuming others’ shares, that we are living off the backs of the poor and marginalised or those of future generations, or indeed, in any way responsible for the destruction of the biosphere on which we all depend. The reality is that, if we do not change the economic trajectory we are on, our civilisation will collapse and we and our children, along with billions of others, will die or become climate refugees. It is now quite probable that we too (or our already born offspring) will at some point face large-scale and possibly terminal catastrophe. In laying the foundation for the search for alternatives, this chapter begins by arguing that capitalism is only one political and economic system, albeit one which has expanded to encompass the majority of the world over the last few centuries. It is a political and economic system which has not only bene¿ted a minority of the world’s people, perhaps as little as 20 per cent, and which now threatens the future survival of humanity. It is also a system that has given rise to a particular and narrow worldview, a speci¿c ideological framework that excludes other worldviews.

Positivism and critical theory The most important question today is ‘can the problem of global warming be solved within the global capitalist political economy framework?’ Capitalist hegemonic ideology precludes such a question being asked by the dominant governance and research institutions in ¿nding solutions to global warming. However, global warming is a subject of such profound consequence and importance í intersecting with all other aspects of human society; it is an equity and justice issue; an issue which illustrates urgently and graphically the chasm between the economics of globalised society and the survival of humanity; the chasm between the rich and powerful and the poor and powerless. Methodologically, it is a subject that illustrates the distinction between a positivist and critical theory approach. I place the discussion of global warming into a critical theoretical framework. It is to the signi¿cance and centrality of critical methodology and theory that I now turn because this is at the very centre of why real solutions to global warming necessarily represent a fundamental challenge to the political, economic and ideological status quo. It is particularly important to establish the signi¿cance of Marxist critical theory in discussing such a complex and ideologically anchored issue as global warming

The global political economy and global warming 57 as this phenomenon is increasingly being conceptualised in normative terms as no more than a market failure requiring market (including technical) neoliberal solutions. Such ‘solutions’ will not work but will serve to further entrench the current status quo – continuing to grow the (already unsustainable) economy and drawing the biosphere into an ever downward-spiralling entwinement with the economy. Currently, the majority of the global warming discussion is contextualised within the global neoliberal capitalist framework, presenting the world as if it is ‘how it is’. The Western ‘modernisation’ project, which was spread to most corners of the globe throughout the Age of Empire, has been hugely successful in transforming not only economies, but also ideologies, values and aspirations. Finding alternatives that are legitimate is dif¿cult, but one potential source lies in digging below the hegemony of the dominant elites in Third World countries or the Islamic world. We rarely get to glimpse into the epistemologies of such ‘others’ – other than as spectators viewing what is then perceived as an inferior, undeveloped, backward world. To help break out from this, it is useful to turn to explicit theoretical concepts that provide frameworks for interpreting and making sense of the world. For many researchers and academics in the West, who are deeply ensconced in and/or are beholden to the institutions and ideology of capitalism, a critique of the system and its theoretical underpinnings is essential groundwork for bringing new understanding to society and problems such as global warming. This is a prerequisite to the construct of alternative paradigms. Western epistemology includes two broad schools of theory – positivism and critical theory. The positivist school was born of the work of early nineteenthcentury French philosopher, Auguste Comte (Zalta 2010), who developed a secular approach to knowing the world around reason and logic and the notion that sense perceptions are the only credible basis of human knowledge and meaningful thought. Positivism attempts to equate the understanding of social reality with the scienti¿c explanation, prediction and control of natural reality as practised by the hard sciences of chemistry, physics and biology. Social and natural realities are conceived by the positivists as objectively quanti¿able and measurable. What appears on the surface is conceived as the full extent of reality. Juxtaposed to this is critical theory that involves an approach to knowledge that questions interpretations of the world, particularly in relation to the political or power dimensions of society and our lives as socialised beings. The central tenet of critical theory is that all knowledge is historically contextualised and political in nature. Thus critical theorists contend that knowledge is shaped by a society’s institutions, its culture, its underlying political economy structures and its interests. Critical theory provides the methodology, framework and analysis for a more detached view of contemporary society, its political economy structures, power relationships, institutions and epistemologies. It was in the early philosophical manuscripts of Karl Marx that a critical theory of society ¿rst emerged. It did so against the background of the class struggles and social revolutions occurring in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century when class antagonisms between workers and capitalists intensi¿ed. At this time,

58

The state of the world

workers encountered conditions of profound exploitation and inadequate wages to meet their survival needs – a factor in providing the fertile ground for the development of critical thinking about society and its social relationships as a whole. Critical theory is the dominant framework within the discipline of political economy. Certainly theories of history and the notion of telos or goals of human society existed long before Marx, for example, going back to the time of Plato. However, prior to the advent of critical theory, critiques of society had been essentially of the state and the laws of the state. What Marx did was to develop a critical and social theory based on the alienating relations of humans in capitalist society. Thus in his early work, Marx (1963) was concerned with the release of humanity from the alienating and exploitative relations of production. Marx considered that the whole of society was alienated from the human actors who produced and reproduced it and was therefore beyond the control of the very human beings who made up the society. This contrasted with the positivist schools that saw society in a-historical terms and simply as a description of its component observable parts. Subsequent Marxists, such as Marcuse (1964), explained the central importance of critical theory in a way that brings out its relevance to issues such as global warming today. He proposed that truth lay in the attempt to go beyond what appeared as reality by critiquing that apparent reality, while committing to attempt to change the world into a better place – a world beyond injustice, racism, wars and so on. In this framework, critical analysis is seen as useful in trying to make the world a more humane place in which to live. The political signi¿cance of the difference between these two approaches can be practically illustrated by, for example, the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These read like a wish list. For example, one MDG is to halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day. This is a neatly positivist approach to tackling poverty and inequality. It is a-historical. It describes but leaves unattended the structural and historical causes of such phenomena. This approach matters not least because development institutions from the World Bank down create knowledge within the con¿nes of this positivist framework. Criticism of the MDGs is voiced by Navarro (2002: 473) at a more general level when he writes that the ‘international agencies are masters of depoliticising what is profoundly political’. A critical theoretical approach to poverty and inequality would seek to understand their institutional and historical causes, thereby providing a basis for changing the structural and institutional bases. Critical theory presents ‘facts’ and ‘reality’ as the historical products of humans with the aim of making humans conscious of their social products (Kirkpatrick et al. 1978) and therefore better placed to be able to change them. Critical theory enables us to analyse and understand how particular ideologies serve particular social classes and how this is tied to concepts of power and hegemony. Critical theory challenges the status quo in terms of the establishment’s responses to global warming which are not only inadequate but an extension of the climate change denialism supported by the right. This is particularly important

The global political economy and global warming 59 at this historic juncture when humanity faces a perilous future. It is essential we turn to critical theory ¿rst to interpret and then to change this world. Critical theory and critical research focus on the need and potential for transformative social change that can empower the marginalised, oppressed and exploited. It provides the tools, for example, for building critical democracy (Fiske 1993), and critically conscientising subjects rather than providing a ‘banking’ education for consumers of education (Freire 1970). Gramsci’s (1971) notion of hegemony is central to critical theory and research. He argued that the dominant powers of the twentieth century were not exercised just by physical force – although that too – but by complex sociocultural and economic factors and institutions such as schools, the media and churches. Universities, once the site of more critical reÀection and discourse, have increasingly been brought into this hegemonic milieu with, on the one hand, increasing dependence on corporate funding and, on the other, the marketisation of education with university ‘outputs’ being quanti¿ed and streamlined to meet the needs of the economic system. One institution that has come to the fore, perhaps above all others in creating the dominant ideology in the Gramscian sense, is the institution of the market. Polanyi (1944) wrote before the era of neoliberalism of the irrationality and ideological nature of market liberalism. As a central and dominant institution of capitalism, the market acts as an agent in the reproduction of capitalism, with people í individuals í being reduced to consumers and where, as Margaret Thatcher infamously claimed, there is no such thing as society. This is the ‘Washington consensus’ model (Williamson 1993), the neoliberalised capitalism which creates an economic order whose market mechanism dominates in the determination of the fate of human beings and the environment, resulting in the devaluing of, or even disintegration of, society. Market solutions to global warming are an example of the irrational and ideologically captured framework within which the global warming ‘debate’ takes place. Crucially, critical theory questions the assumptions of this dominant system and its hegemonic ideology. Critical theory thus provides the overarching framework for political economy. Further, critical theory questions assumptions such as that ‘the British way of life’ (or the Australian, or US’s or Western European countries’ way of life) is at the apex of a human development trajectory and ‘non-negotiable’. It challenges the idea that such countries are unproblematically democratic models for the rest of the world to follow. Critical theory is concerned with the principles of justice, issues of power, ideology, class, oppression and exploitation, of how the world developed historically to the point it has reached today, where the richest 10 per cent control 85 per cent of global wealth while the poorest 50 per cent own only 1 per cent (World Bank 2010); where the damage from human activities to the environment has become so great as to threaten the survival of all human and other species. Importantly, critical theory is not just concerned with abstract academic research but focuses on the need, potential, tools and processes for transformative social change, led by those who have been critically conscientised, empowering the impoverished and the marginalised. It seeks to enable the

60

The state of the world

building of a diversity of societies and cultures that are enduring and in harmony with the biosphere. Thus the role of critical theory regarding the question of global warming is to make the theoretical approach used here politically explicit í a clear statement of what is a very political, not just market or technical, issue. Global warming is not an isolated problem to be solved through technical or market solutions, arising from the same alienating social relations of production as ‘the problem’. It is born of a particular system of political economy, with particular, unequal power relationships that are integral to the system, from particular modes of production and consumption, from particular industrial technologies, from particular relationships between the market and science and technology and from the marketisation of the broad ecology – including humans. Global warming is one of a suite of problems arising from capitalism. The sources of both the denial of and the proposed market solutions to global warming are embedded in positivist neoliberal ideology. This is not to argue that the capitalist system has an exclusive claim to being a destructive, unsustainable, exploitative system, but because of its globally hegemonic position, it is the system most urgently needing to be discarded. Clearly the dominant neoliberal paradigm ¿ts into the positivist school. It has been moulded by Western institutions that have played a causal role in the climate crisis. Mullard (2004: 87) notes that in most discussions of globalisation, the market economy and neoliberalism are presented devoid of ideology and questions of power. There is an absence of questioning. It represents ‘a surrender to what is seen as the implacable and irreversible logic of social reality. It is a project in which market liberal ideas have a life of their own – dif¿cult to challenge and dif¿cult to dislodge’ (ibid.: 107). Mullard continues: ‘Most [market] economists think ideology has no role in their thinking. Market liberalism is presented as the only viable alternative that can protect individual rights and democracy is linked to free markets as if the two were inextricable’ (ibid.). There is no discussion of an alternative because there is no need for such a discussion. Neoliberalism is the ideological summit (Fukuyama 1992). It is thus argued there is nowhere better to go í although there is no end to the trajectory of progress and development, growth and consumption and hence ecological destruction. This positivist, neoliberal worldview hides the fact that issues such as global warming and solutions such as carbon trading are political in nature. The positivist approach springs from the theoretical paradigm that underpins the status quo and, in doing so, prevents the emergence of real solutions to the complex problems of our global society, including global warming. It breeds and feeds both the extreme form of denialism that fails to acknowledge that global warming is happening, as well as a more general malaise of denialism in which there is refusal to address the systemic causes of global warming. Both create barriers to a questioning of the development trajectory that has given rise to it in the global institutions charged with addressing the problem and in public discourse more generally. This general malaise is perhaps the more dangerous because it is so deep, pervasive and unrecognised within the con¿nes of positivist theory, thereby diverting from the possibility of addressing the systemic causes of global warming. It results

The global political economy and global warming 61 in a protecting of the capitalist system rather than the biosphere. The neoliberal conceptualisation of global warming frames it as a single, separate, economic and technical issue to be ¿xed by market and technological mechanisms, rather than envisioning it as a part of the crisis of civilisation resulting from the destructive features of the capitalist system.

A Marxist perspective It is further argued here that adopting a particular perspective on history matters. In the context of this book, the Marxist historical account of the development of capitalism is critical to an understanding of the political economy of global warming. This is for three interrelated reasons. First, to understand the inseparable dichotomy between accumulation and dispossession and to address this division so there can be justice for all impoverished peoples around reparations for ecological debt1 í a prerequisite to any solution to global warming. Second, as a basis for understanding and changing the systemic structural underpinnings of global warming. Third, to enable the development of new political economy structures which avoid the pitfalls of capitalism. One can only understand the causes of global warming by understanding and then critiquing its political economy. Then one can begin to build alternatives that address the causes of global warming and not just those of selective symptoms. There is a need however to be wary of a form of exploitation and alienation, that of adopting a wholly Western philosophical basis for this discussion. While Marx saw the superstructure of society, which arises from the economic sub-structure, as containing the cultural aspects of society, he did not develop the concept of cultures and cultural diversity, omissions that now need to be addressed because of their importance in today’s globalised world. Certainly in the English language world which has dominated global dialogue during the nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty-¿rst centuries, the world has been conceptualised in terms formulated by the educated and afÀuent in Europe and North America. In this world, there is little recognition of the historical consequences of the global expansion and domination by the West, in particular in relation to authority, exclusion and inclusion, and the hegemony by the metropolis over the periphery. The eminent Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm wrote: The world economy of capitalism in the Age of Empire penetrated and transformed virtually all parts of the globe … Whatever the economy, the wealth, the cultures and political systems of countries had been before they came within reach of the North Atlantic octopus, they were all sucked into the world market, insofar as they were not dismissed by Western businessmen and governments as economically uninteresting, even if colourful, like the Bedouin of the great deserts before the discovery of oil or natural gas in their inhospitable habitat. (Hobsbawm, 1994: 204)

62

The state of the world

Third World elites have adopted similar perspectives and values to those of the elites of the metropolises. It is no accident that many of these developing country elites were educated in London, Harvard and other universities in the metropolises, ensuring the economic models and epistemologies adopted were aligned with those of their former colonial masters. Very few could resist the pull of projected Western superiority. Of the very few who did, India’s Mahatma Gandhi is perhaps one; Ghanaian Dr Kwame Nkrumah, who led African independence struggles, another. The common and fragile bond between Third World elites and the masses in newly independent nations often arose in response to the racism of the colonial masters. Needless to say, worldviews, which are built on the experience of and for the advantage of the minority 20 per cent most privileged people, cannot provide an adequate account for the remaining six billion. It is beyond the scope of this book to explore the enormous world of epistemological diversity; it is important, however, to recognise its existence and its very great relevance to today’s world. So before leaving the views of the majority world, it is worth turning to Indian writer and scholar, Ashis Nandy (1987: 22), who argues that oppressed people and cultures, in resisting oppression, have to have some resistance to modernity and to the ‘connotative meanings of concepts such as development, growth, science and technology, history and revolution’. Such concepts, he suggests, are a new form of ‘the state’ and can represent a form of violence and injustice. Nandy believes the theories of the oppressed must also encompass the connections between cultural survival and the global structures of oppression and the West. Likewise, we in the West who are searching for new ways of living, of new political economies and social organisation, have to question the beliefs and foundations of the society in which we are enmeshed. In particular we need to acknowledge that the capitalist model of growth and development has meant violence, poverty, humiliation, suffering and death for so many over the last several centuries. For the majority who live outside the experience and hegemony of Western ideology and the material lives of Western industrial society, there is inevitably a very diverse and different worldview of global warming. This is not given the status of theory in industrialised societies’ arenas of scholarship. It is shaped by non-industrial/non-scienti¿c modes of subsistence and the very intimacy and interconnectedness of the relationship between humans and their environment. While visiting the north of Ghana in 2011, I was told of how local farmers who for centuries had sustained themselves from the land, in suffering the consequences of the changing weather patterns, attributed this not to global warming caused by the industrialised countries, but rather to their own failure to properly recognise their gods after their conversions (during the colonial era) to Christianity. They believed they were now being punished, for the seasons were changing, the northern desert was moving relentlessly south, the dust storms from the north were getting longer and stronger, the rainfall later and less, and their crops and grasses increasingly failing. Their fragile existence with its ever-solight carbon footprint will soon be confronted by a form of ecological genocide not of their making. At a school in Navrongo in the north, I was greeted by a

The global political economy and global warming 63 classroom packed full of beautiful smiling intelligent and conscientious children whose hopes and dreams will wither on the vine if we do not change our system of production and consumption, our use of fossil fuels. As the children stood to greet me with such warmth and courtesy, I could not respond as I fought to keep the tears from my eyes. Their future is not in their hands. No matter how hard they study, what enormous strides they take from such rudimentary facilities, how much they work in jobs carting water, tending goats or selling small items in road-side stalls to collect small amounts of cedi2 to pay for additional classes, the hopes of these children will be crushed with more than 1° C of global warming. The globalised capitalist system has swept away many peoples, cultures, languages and knowledges over its 500-year history. An incalculable loss to all humanity. One aspect of this loss is something we could do well to draw on in this critical hour of human survival – that is, the very close relationship between humans and the rest of nature. The intimate relationship between humans and nature has been expressed by many Indigenous people. In one, it is captured by the words of Australian Aboriginal Mick Dodson (1997, quoted in Connell 2007: 195): Everything about Aboriginal society is inextricably interwoven with, and connected to, the land. Culture is the land, the land and spirituality of aboriginal people, our cultural beliefs or reason for existence is the land. You take that away and you take away our reason for existence. We have grown the land up. We are dancing, singing and painting for the land. We are celebrating the land. Removed from our lands, we are literally removed from ourselves. Thus in examining different epistemologies and the purpose of theory, it is important to recognise that the concepts used in the development of theory operate within linguistic structures, sets of meanings, which are largely formed by the society in which it is held í the dominant values of society are embodied in the linguistic and structural assumptions by which discourse proceeds. Where the exchange is between classes or between rich and poor states, the most powerful parties will do their utmost to ensure that it is their language, their values, which are seen as ‘natural’, as possessing ‘sense’ and as being obviously ‘right’. (Middleton and O’Keefe 2001: 20) The disappearance of so many languages over the last three to ¿ve hundred years has meant a shrinking of perspectives and bodies of knowledge about the world. Today there are somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 languages remaining plus, often within each language, a number of dialects. Many of these languages are facing extinction and then another thread in our knowledge and interpretations of the world will disappear, for each language reÀects a cultural community’s way of solving its problems in seeking their livelihoods. Many of the threatened

64

The state of the world

languages reÀect a deep and intimate knowledge of the natural world. Many contain a system of philosophy and cultural practice which is not only of intrinsic value, but may also contain some of the keys to the future of humankind. For example, the Seris of El Desemboque in Mexico are disparaging of unshared individual wealth and consider possessions as burdens. They have a saying that ‘when the Seris become rich, they will cease to exist’. Perhaps the clearest exposition of the signi¿cance of different worldviews can be gained by juxtaposing Indigenous epistemologies to those of industrialised capitalist society: in the former, there is an holistic and pervasive framework which places humans intimately within the ecology with an inseparable ethic of stewardship and knowledge of the environment; in the latter, humans are above and separate to the ecology which is there as a resource to be exploited for human ‘progress’ and ‘development’. People socialised within the capitalist system cannot transform to Indigenous epistemologies and means of social reproduction as too many of the intricacies of such systems have been destroyed and lost. We can still, nevertheless, learn much from intact Indigenous societies, particularly about stewardship, our place in the broad ecology, that other valid and life-af¿rming values and social relationships can provide the need for human satisfaction, sense of belonging, meanings and contentment. At the heart of Western material and ideological dominance are science and technology. These have come to dominate our worldviews, the social relations of production, and the ideology of progress. However, they are not politically, socially or economically neutral. Nandy (1987) critiques the culture of science on the basis of its isolating mechanism, the psychological separation of cognition from affect. He writes that the culture of the West was de¿ned by a contractual, competitive individualism and that an ‘utter loneliness Àowed from this’ (ibid.: 50). He links the entwinement of science and powerful technologies with the interests of the state and ruling elites, arguing that science has become a key to the dominant ideology of the post-colonial state, legitimising the violence that is done in the name of economic development. It is thus necessary to draw attention to the role science plays in rational, industrialised society and in the justi¿cations for Western ways of constructing frameworks, conceptualising and changing the world. The predominance of science, and the inseparableness of science from the economy, the state and power relationships, accord it special attention in considering issues such as global warming and humanity’s future. At the very least, science is a two-edged sword; as Indian physicist, activist and author Vandana Shiva (1988: 232) writes: ‘The nexus between modern science and violence is obvious from the fact that eighty per cent of all scienti¿c research is devoted to the war industry.’ She continues (ibid: 232) that the reductionist nature of science supports an economic structure ‘based on exploitation, pro¿t maximisation and capital accumulation’ and proposes that the global, multidimensional ecological crisis is an ‘eloquent testimony to the violence that reductionist science perpetrates on nature’ (ibid.: 233). In similar vein, Austrian-born philosopher Ivan Illich, who wrote in the 1970s critiquing modernisation, the role of institutions and formal

The global political economy and global warming 65 education, in 1981 labelled industrialised economic development that is based on science and technology, a war activity. Such perspectives encourage us to see that it is the sum total of all of the parts of the capitalist system that are in need of deep and critical analysis. The purpose of theory in this book is thus to enable us to see better and at a deeper level where this coming together of the state, the corporation, and the capitalist relations of production, is leading humanity – and to help to see a way to build a different future. While recognising the importance of the diversity of epistemologies to the future of humanity, I will draw on particular aspects of a Marxist theoretical framework to shed critical light on the historical, structural and systemic causes of global warming. I have turned to Marxism as it provides a historical, materialist and critical analytical framework to the understanding of history and contemporary society – a framework that goes beyond the limitations of a positivist, descriptive approach to issues such as global warming. It enables us to break through ‘established reality’ (Marcuse 1964: 80). Additionally, as Marcuse (1967) argues, for the rich in Western society ‘it appears crazy at ¿rst to want a revolution for we have whatever we want.’ However, he adds that the aim is ‘to transform the will itself so that people no longer want what they now want’ (ibid.). This was written over forty years ago when Marcuse almost certainly would not have been thinking of global warming. The need to ‘transform the will’ is echoed in this book in seeking to create a conceptual framework that gives us hope of alternatives to the capitalist system destroying the planet. Critical theory and methodology provide the tools to build that conceptual framework. So while this book does not advocate state socialism as a solution to the converging crises of capitalism, Marxist theory does provide a critical perspective to these problems, which in turn enables us to take a new approach to solutions beyond the market and technologies. I begin this by unpicking some of the key components of the capitalist system which underpin its inherent unsustainability from a Marxist perspective. In doing so and in linking the crisis of global warming to the nature of capitalism, as already indicated it is important to acknowledge that the ¿rst major fallacy in the conceptualisation of global warming is that it is an isolated, solo problem. Rather it is one of a series of interconnected, converging and accelerating crises with a common structural, political economy cause, that is, the political and economic system of capitalism.

The metabolic rift In a general sense, the metabolic rift refers to a disruption between social systems and natural systems, leading to ecological crisis. In Marxist ecological theory, humans exist in a ‘metabolic’ relation with nature that is fundamental for survival. The metabolic relation is people’s labour, the material process by which humans transform the raw materials of nature to meet their material needs. ‘Labour is, ¿rst of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself

66

The state of the world

and nature’ (Marx 1976: 283). Marx saw the rift in the pre-capitalist forms of social metabolism as being due to the expansion of the capitalist modes of production, rising urbanisation as a result of industrialisation and the removal of small-scale agriculturalists. The emergent capitalism gave rise to an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of metabolic relationship between nature and society, as societies transformed into the capitalist system of production. The metabolic rift permeates our dominant and pervasive acquisitive and technocentric thinking whereby human beings are conceptualised as being apart from nature, exempt from nature’s laws, where it is believed that science and technology and human activities can dominate, manipulate and control nature, and that we ¿nd expression and satisfaction through external, material goods. The metabolic rift goes further than the ecological dimension in that it also denotes the rift between classes when the ruling classes exploit the producer classes – an extension of humans’ exploitation of nature. This metabolic rift is at the crux of Marx’s ecological critique of capitalism, denoting the disjuncture between social systems and the rest of nature. It is an inherent part of the capitalist social relations of production and is found, for example, in expressions of capitalism’s relationship to soil fertility, in the relationship of capital to labour, and in the imperialist nature of capitalism. Marx wrote (1976: 283) ‘[l]abour is, ¿rst of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature’. With the introduction of the capitalist system of production, this close relationship between humans and nature was broken. At this same time there was a breaking of the relationships between humans with the formation of classes, with one class having power over another. Society then developed in such a way that inequality became an integral part of the political economy structure. The metabolic rift thus refers to a rupture in the metabolism of the whole ecological system, including humans’ part in that system. The concept is built around how the logic of accumulation severs basic processes of natural reproduction, leading to the deterioration of the environment and ecological sustainability and disrupting the basic operations of nature. It neatly captures the lack of balance between ‘expenditure and income’ in the Earth’s metabolism under the capitalist system. In theorising on this, Marx goes to the very basis of society, how humans interact with the environment, socially and materially, to provide their means of survival. It is from this most fundamental relationship that the ecological contradictions inherent in the very speci¿c mode of production found in the capitalist system, the foundation for the growing disequilibrium in the biosphere and the pending demise of human civil life, are to be found. In developing the theory of the metabolic rift, Marx maintained that capitalism generated an unhealthy circulation of matter from urban industry and industrial agriculture, which damaged the reproductive capabilities of both human labour power and the land (Marx 1954). Whereas Marx saw that humans’ pre-industrial interaction with nature enabled harmonious and sustainable production, capitalism was not able to maintain the social relations (ibid.: 533) or the conditions for the recycling of nutrients back to the soil. Thus was born the metabolic rift.

The global political economy and global warming 67 In forming this theory, Marx built on the work of the German chemist, Justus von Liebig, who published groundbreaking work in the middle of the nineteenth century on the consequences of intensive farming practices which were being introduced at that time in the transition from feudal to industrial farming. Liebig, in a pioneering work Organic Chemistry in its Application to Agriculture and Physiology, argued that British high farming methods were a ‘robbery system’, which were opposed to rational agriculture (Liebig 1862, quoted in Foster 2002). The new farming methods involved the transportation of food and ¿bre over long distances from country to city, breaking the natural and restorative recycling of nutrients such as phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium which instead ended up in urban pollution in the form of human and animal wastes. Liebig saw this as part of a larger-scale process in which, under imperialism, the soil of whole countries was robbed for the bene¿t of Britain. He argued, for example, that England was able to maintain its industrialised capitalist agriculture by importing guano (bird droppings) from Peru. However, even with the imported fertilisers, the soil condition and productivity declined, leading to the need for increasing the size of landholdings and the concentration of agriculture among smaller numbers of proprietors. The cycle of restoring to the land what was taken from it was broken. Liebig argued that rural areas were in essence exporting the fertility of their land. Today, this rift has grown both in dimensions and complexity, to the point where the economic activities of human society are causing an unprecedented change in the Earth’s biosphere, its lands, forests, water and air, potentially bringing to an end the Holocene era as a result of anthropogenic global warming. The rift between humans and nature (and humans as nature) is manifested in many different ways. Socially, inequality is one expression. For example, 2 per cent of the world’s adults own more than half of global household wealth; the richest 1per cent owns 40 per cent of total global assets, while the poorest 50 per cent of the global population has only 1 per cent; 75–80 per cent of all resource use and waste is attributable to the wealthiest 20 per cent of the global population. Such divisions are not only unjust, but are unsustainable. Another expression of the rift can be found in the most fundamental of human needs, food. Food security is a major issue and growing concern for all societies and is already being exacerbated by global warming, the onset of increased frequency and intensity of droughts and Àoods and the conversion of crops for biofuels. For most of human history, people have had a direct relationship to and control over their food production. Food is increasingly controlled by megacorporations which dominate the agri-food complex, the super-exploitation of labour involved in food growing, picking and processing, the elongated transport routes for food delivery, de-peasantisation and the trans-border land grabs that are now taking place for food and biofuel production with huge levels of food wastage on the one hand, and famine on the other; and, as Marx saw from Liebig’s work, the destruction of soil fertility. Today, we may have irretrievably tipped the balance in terms of the soil’s fertility and its ability to continue producing adequate food for the global population, with some 75 millions of tonnes of topsoil lost globally each year and more than 80 per cent of the world’s farming

68

The state of the world

land affected. Compounding this food insecurity is the intersection of the ¿nance sector with food, and the cumulative and accelerating extraction of minerals, the mining of coal, oil, and gas and gas fracking in food producing areas, leading large areas to be left as unrecoverable, barren wastelands. Since the 1990s, banks, sovereign wealth funds and hedge funds have been increasingly involved in speculation and futures trading in food staples, hoarding and manipulating stocks and driving up the prices of food and all of this while people starve. The New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), based in Cambridge, has predicted that if the practice of arti¿cial maintenance of food prices through speculative trading is continued, riots and revolutions will go global sometime between July 2012 and August 2013 (Kaufman 2011). In addition to the regulatory processes that govern the complex interchange between humans and nature, speci¿cally with regard to nutrient cycles, the second part of the metabolic rift involves a wider, social meaning, which concerns the institutional norms governing the division of labour and distribution of wealth. In this, Marx both anticipates and attributes environmental crises to the division of workers into classes and, in particular, their separation from the land as well as from the other conditions of production, explicitly linking these with social issues in the analyses of environmental concerns. The concept of the metabolic rift embraces both these meanings. In describing the metabolic relationship between humans and between humans and nature, Marx is able to express the idea of alienation in two forms: alienation of humans from nature; and, in relation to the productive process, the alienation of labour. As Marx writes, in Grundrisse (1973: 489): It is not the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature, which requires explanation, nor is the result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labour and capital. Marx takes us back to the historical beginnings of capitalism, that is, the transition from feudalism, a process which occurred over centuries, to understand the metabolic rift more fully. In this transition process, the bourgeoisie developed from the feudal economy, with the transformation of the feudal mode of production to the capitalist social relations of production to form the capitalist system. This in turn changed the relationship of the workers to the land, replacing what had been a direct relationship in the agrarian feudal system between labour and rights to the commons and access to feudal lords’ lands to grow supplementary food. Marx wrote in Capital Vol.1 (1954: 715) that ‘the economic structure of capitalistic society’ grew out of the decline of ‘the economic structure of feudal society, when the labourer only had his own labour to dispose of after he had ceased to be attached to the soil and ceased to be the slave, serf, or bondman of another’. This was the starting point for the creation of the wage labourer, the

The global political economy and global warming 69 de¿ning element of exploitation under capitalism and the capitalist. Within this framework, the exploitation of people goes hand in hand with the exploitation of nature. Through the expropriation of the commons during the enclosure movement of the ¿fteenth to eighteenth centuries (in Britain), formerly agrarian workers were dispossessed of common land for the production of food, or access to feudal lands for the same, and forced to move to towns, with nothing to sell but their labour for their sustenance, causing not only the robbing of the soil, but also the exploitation of the worker and the establishment of capitalist class relations. Marx writes: In the sphere of agriculture, modern industry has a more revolutionary effect than elsewhere, for this reason, that it annihilates the peasant, that bulwark of the old society, and replaces him by the wage-labourer. Capitalist production completely tears asunder the old bond of union which held together agriculture and manufacture in their infancy. Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centres, and causing an ever increasing preponderance of town population, on the other hand concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, i.e., it prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil. By this action, it destroys at the same time the health of the town labourer and the intellectual life of the rural labourer. (Marx 1954: 504) Marx wrote further of the agricultural labouring population being a surplus that is constantly at the point of becoming the urban proletariat, reduced to the minimum of wages and ‘always stand[ing] with one foot already in the swamp of pauperism’ (Marx 1954: 642). This process of ‘annihilating the peasant’ continues today in those countries in the periphery of the global capitalist system, through the industrialisation of agriculture and the growing presence of agribusinesses; in the Third World land grabs and dispossession of lands from subsistence farmers to grow biofuels and food for export; with the displacement of the Indigenous peasants, subsistence farmers and herders, and accompanied by the destruction of local economies and cultures, livelihoods, food security and the environment. The industrialisation of agriculture and the displacement of small-scale producers from the land has a particular signi¿cance and momentum today in terms of food security, burgeoning unemployment and the corresponding explosion in urban slum dweller populations. Foster et al. (2011) discuss this destruction of the peasantry and the weakening position of labour as a part of the new twenty-¿rst-century imperialism. They argue that this destruction of the peasantry is amongst the numerous forces impacting on the material basis by which multinational capital weakens labour. For example, Foster et al. (2011: 2) write that the ‘vast “internal reserve army” within the developed capitalist countries, constituted the real material basis

70

The state of the world

on which multinational capital was able to internationalize production í creating a continual movement of surplus population into the labour force, and weakening labour globally through a process of “divide and rule”.’ There are many compounding factors to the deepening of this particular aspect of the metabolic rift including the growing ¿nancialisation of the global economy, the global concentration and centralisation of production, and the polarisation of wages í the ‘race to the bottom’ í all of which are linked through the global reserve army of labour. The huge numbers of unemployed in the Third World have grown signi¿cantly in recent decades resulting in a massive removal of peasants from the land, and an explosion in the population of urban slums. Foster et al. (2011: 3) maintain that between 1980 and 2007, this de-peasantised labour force grew from ‘1.9 billion to 3.1 billion … with 73 per cent of [it] … located in the developing world’. Samir Amin (2004) maintains that ‘modern capitalist agriculture, encompassing both rich, large scale family farming and agribusiness corporations í is now engaged in a massive attack on third world peasant production’, replacing worldwide in excess of three billion rural workers by twenty million new modern farmers. This is the capitalist model of development supported by global institutions such as the WTO, the World Bank and the IMF, and by national governments pressured, through structural adjustment programmes, development and aid programmes and free trade agreements, to believe that this is the only form of development which will secure the future of their nations. The dominant ideology maintains that the displaced rural workers and peasants will be absorbed by industry in urban centres as, it is falsely maintained, supposedly happened in the history of the developed capitalist countries. However, the reality for European countries during the ‘de-peasantisation’ and industrialisation periods is that many millions of surplus people were transported or emigrated to other parts of the planet í a phenomenon which is not possible today. Foster et al. (2011: 22) argue that the current de-peasantisation process is equivalent to ‘mass genocide’, given that no amount of economic growth can possibly absorb the billions of peasants in the world today into employment. Already, there are three billion plus people concentrated in massive cities and slums in the South í the ‘dumping grounds’ for surplus population (Foster et al. 2011: 23). The end result of this phase of imperialism is that ‘the share of wages in total world output decreases, while the rate of exploitation worldwide rises’ (ibid.: 24). This phenomenon characterises the capitalist neoliberal model of development that is now sweeping throughout Africa. For a global warming world, this phenomenon of de-peasantisation is catastrophic, as it goes hand in hand with the growing slum/urbanised populations who have no access to basic services, no room to grow food and no place in the global economy. They simply join the growing numbers of feet in the increasingly inescapable ‘swamp of pauperism’. Returning to the historical beginnings of this process, the transformation from feudalism to capitalism also meant a transformation from the direct connection of labour to land in producing livelihoods, thus tearing asunder the close

The global political economy and global warming 71 and intimate connection between labour, land and livelihood and laying the foundation for human alienation. It is here that the social aspect of the metabolic rift is found. The labour process is one in which humans interact with nature to produce their livelihoods. Labour is the key to this process. The use value of labour in the production process is nothing other than the result of the transformation of matter and energy, that is, the transformation of nature. This is the core of the humanínature metabolism and it is the disruption of this link that gives rise to the second sense of the metabolic rift, the disjuncture in relations between humans and the environment, due to the social relations of production within the capitalist system, speci¿cally, the division between labour and capital, and the alienations to which this gives rise. The history of the Middle Ages in England shows clearly this transformation from feudal society to capitalist society and the violent process of primitive accumulation. Marx considered the ¿rst ‘law of motion’ of the capitalist mode of production to be the compulsion for the capitalists to step up constantly the rate of capital accumulation through the production of new goods, new methods of production and the conquest of new sources of raw materials. The inner logic of capitalism is to work for not only pro¿t but also capital accumulation. Capitalists are compelled to act in that way as a result of the need to grow and accumulate or to be taken over by the accumulation processes of others. At the beginning of the industrial revolution in England, much of the labour from the land became the labour for the factories in the newly industrialising societies. While the industrial revolution began in Britain, the effects spread, both in the industrial mode of production and the accompanying social relations of production. Through colonialism and imperialism and the insatiable appetite for resources of the industrial centres, the peripheral states in turn were robbed of their resources, the people dispossessed of their lands, enslaved, impoverished or exterminated. The ‘constant generation of a relative surplus population … keeps wages low corresponding with the wants of capital’ (Marx 1999). The labourers’ dependence on capital is ‘guaranteed in perpetuity by the conditions of production themselves while the bourgeoisie … uses the power of the state to “regulate” wages, an essential element of the so-called primitive accumulation’ (Marx 1954: 737). This relationship of labourers to capital is structural; the power imbalance is evident in the vast supplies of unemployed labour found in slums and the ‘informal economies’ such as in Africa today. There the abundant supply of cheap, exploitable and exploited labour underpins the ¿rst world economy of the city centres, the elite and the state institutions relevant to the business sector. Thus was born the metabolic rift on a global scale, and the foundation of the ecological debt the North owes to the South, the rich to the poor. Marx’s exposure and analysis of the metabolic rift associated with capitalist industrialisation is taken further when he analyses the origins of agricultural land rent in Capital Vol. 3 (1981: 949), arguing that: Large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial

72

The state of the world population crammed together in large towns: in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country.

The need for larger tracts of land for agricultural production meant the superÀuous labour also had to move off small land holdings which merged into larger holdings. In turn they had to move to the towns, compounding the problems of the division of labour, the separation of humans from nature and the alienation of humans from directly producing their food and ¿bre and being transformed into alienated labour. As alienated labour, workers began working for exchange value rather than use value. Exchange value becomes increasingly important, driving yet further the material processes of production, the elevation of the market and money as the predominant social institutions, and hence the expansion of capitalism and, its converse, the decline of communities, the commons and the environment. Thus, the metabolic rift, caused by the taking of food and ¿bre from the countryside to the town, was exacerbated by the building in of yet further rifts including the second aspect of the metabolic rift, which for Marx was inextricably linked to the labour process. This capitalist system worked because of the incessant process of accumulation, resulting in ever more alienated and divided human beings, as well as a globally destructive and divisive intrusion between humans and nature. The conquest of nature became also the conquest of human. As Foster (2008) writes: this dialectic of domination and destruction is now spiralling out of control on a planetary scale. Economically, overall inequality between the centre and periphery nations of the world system is increasing together with the intensi¿cation of class inequality within each capitalist state. Ecologically, a process of runaway global warming is transforming the world’s climate and the life-support systems of the entire earth. The rift, or breaking of this humanínature metabolism that is found in the disruption of the cycle of soil–nutrients–produce–consumption–waste–soil, is found again in the carbon cycle and the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a result of burning fossil fuels, industrialised agriculture and industrial forestry practices. In the aeons preceding industrialisation, carbon was stored through geological processes as concentrated and stable energy in the form of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas, effectively removing large quantities of carbon from the biosphere. It was these geological processes which made the biosphere eventually conducive to the evolution of humans and other species. The carbon cycle involves the whole biosphere with carbon moving through air, water, soil, all living things, the oceans and so on, in a cyclical process. The various components of the carbon cycle contribute to the complex relationships of exchange and regulation of carbon

The global political economy and global warming 73 throughout the biosphere. The global carbon cycle involves both the geological cycle, which operates over millions of years, and the biological/physical cycle which is observable as a continuous process, operating at shorter time scales (minutes to thousands of years). It is the changes to the geological cycle that are experienced as anthropogenic global warming. For the past 400,000 years, the climate system and the carbon cycle have operated in a manner that has sustained an even temperature on the planet suitable for humans and other species. Since the beginning of the industrial era, the concentration of carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) in the atmosphere has increased signi¿cantly, the rate of increase is growing, and the balance that had prevailed is now out of kilter and the climate system is changing. This constitutes the carbon rift. If this is not restored in the very near future, probably in less than ten years, it will deepen inexorably, crossing tipping points and setting in motion an irreversible process of change to the biosphere that will be out of the control of humans. Herein lies the key to global warming, its cause and, from an understanding of this, the beginnings of a possible solution if the rift has not become unbridgeable. Thus, Marx, in building on the work of Liebig, developed a theory of capitalism that explains how it has given rise to this schism between humans and nature. The consequences of this are clear. Climate change and the metabolic rift cannot be resolved by mechanical solutions, such as carbon trading, carbon taxes, geo-sequestration and renewable energy. There must be a transformation of the very basis of humans’ relationship with the environment in how we produce our means of survival. This means a different economic structure. The metabolic restoration of the environment can only be fully achieved outside of the capitalist relations of production. We need to develop a new political economy that is harmonious, restorative, that anchors humans in a cyclical relationship both as part of nature and as actors upon nature, so that we can restore the metabolic balance, including the balance in the carbon cycle and in the social relations of production. Hence, if irreversible tipping points have not been passed, in any small window of opportunity for change, it is possible for society to transform and achieve a systematic restoration of its reproductive metabolism with the land. I will now turn more speci¿cally to one of the consequences of the metabolic rift – that of alienation í which helps to reveal some of the inabilities of societies to address the various contemporary ecological crises and to continue consuming endlessly, despite human societies being on the precipice of their extinction.

Alienation The issue of alienation is important both for understanding and solving the problems of global warming and the myriad of other ecological and social problems faced in a capitalist world. Foster et al. (2010: 14) write: ‘[t]he planet is now dominated by a technologically potent but alienated humanity, alienated from both nature and itself and hence, ultimately destructive of everything around it. At issue is not just the sustainability of human society, but the diversity of life on Earth.’

74

The state of the world

It is important here to note how humans have got to the point of being so destructive of the world around them; destructive of peoples, cultures, the land, oceans and rivers, forests, the Earth’s crust and the very biosphere; through wars, resource extraction, and ‘development’; in ever more technologically powerful and sophisticated ways, to, in essence, ensure the continuation of consumer lifestyles for only 20 per cent of the world’s people. As indicated, the humanísocial relationship to nature is central to the metabolic rift and it is at this very point that alienated labour mediates the relationship within the capitalist relations of production. Mészáros’ Marx’s Theory of Alienation (1970) describes the double alienation of humans in the complex relationship between humanity, labour and nature. Marx, and Hegel before him, treated human labour as fundamental and the particular labouring relationship of humans under the capitalist system as the basis of class relations and the source of alienation of humans from one another (as alienated labour) and from nature. The idea of the alienation of labour stems from Marx’s conception of the human condition as being in essence alienated labour under capitalism. Marx’s economic analysis of capitalism is based on his version of the labour theory of value, a theory that he shared with earlier classical economists such as Adam Smith (1976), although Marx placed different signi¿cance on that theory. Most commonly Marx’s labour theory of value is interpreted as meaning that the value of a good is based or is to be based on the socially necessary amount of labour needed to produce it. While there has been much criticism of this interpretation, there are others. Marx’s main use of it was to explain the origin and size of pro¿ts and the rate of pro¿ts in the capitalist mode of production (Harcourt and Kerr 2009). It is of note, however, that Joan Robinson (1972: 38), who was a keen contributor to Marxist thought, argues that ‘commodities normally exchange at prices proportional to their values in this sense [i.e. their labour values]’. She notes that we do not have to test such a proposal because ‘we know in advance, and Marx also knows, that it is not accurate’. What she goes on to suggest is ‘that labour has the right to the whole product’. This is the key for Robinson. The really central issue here is thus not about the relationship between value and price but rather goes back to Marx’s view of value as a relation between persons expressed as a relation between things. This point is ampli¿ed by Maurice Dobb: Such an approach serves also to explain the place assigned [by Marx] to labour as human productive activity: why it is natural for Marx to place it in the very centre of the stage. Implied in this is a virtual de¿nition of productive activity in the sense of the annexation or receipt of part of the fruits of production by those who have contributed no productive activity and lack any personal participation in the process of production per se. As such ‘exploitation’ is a factual description of a socio-economic relationship. (Dobb 1973: 145)

The global political economy and global warming 75 Braverman (1974: 51) adds emphasis to the human dimension of labour, as seen by Marx: ‘for humans in society, labour power is a special category, separate and in-exchangeable with any other, simply because it is human’. Alienation is a historical and systemic problem arising from capitalist social relations. That is, the capitalist social relations of production do not just produce more wealth for the capitalist, but institute a system of domination and exploitation in which the worker is robbed of his/her autonomy, sense of community and humanity. Marx wrote that in capitalist society, labour was organised in such a way as to make work involuntary for the vast majority of the population. Workers were wage slaves who had to work in order to eat. According to Marx: The worker feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless. His work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labour. It is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying other needs. Its alien character is clearly shown by the fact that as soon as there is no physical or other compulsion it is avoided like the plague … the external character of work for the worker is shown by the fact that it is not his own work but work for someone else, that in work he does not belong to himself but to another person. (Marx 1963:125) This alienated labour results in the degradation of human life in exchange for the things necessary merely to survive. Human beings are thus alienated from their social nature as species beings (Marx 1971). It was the liberation from this alienation that Marx saw as the central historical problem of human existence and it is this historical problem that is now also central to a solution to global warming. As Burkett writes: The structural powerlessness of working people vis-à-vis the capitalistically developed conditions of production helps explain the limited ability of non-class political and ideological struggles to defend pro-ecological values against the market … these struggles will remain rear-guard actions as long as they do not strive toward a dis-alienation of working people and their communities vis-à-vis the main conditions of production. This systemic/ structural problem explains why non-class political and ideological struggles are unable to ‘save the planet’ from ecological destruction. (Burkett 2006: 88) The very lack of political and ideological struggles in the rich industrialised world can also in part be attributed to a new type of alienation of workers, with the middle class having ‘completely recast even the notion of work as the activity that provides individual motivation, social integration and systemic reproduction … what has become central is consumer sovereignty and freedom in the market’ (Chachage and Annan-Yao 2004: 334). These are powerfully seductive and

76

The state of the world

alienating phenomena. There would be much consensus that alienation is a pervasive malaise in contemporary society. Indeed while he does not label it as such, Taylor (1991) perhaps has this in mind when he writes of the ‘malaise of modernity’. This he describes as ‘the dark side of individualism’ with its ‘centring on the self, which both Àattens and narrows our lives, makes them poorer in meaning and less concerned with others or society’ (Taylor 1991: 4). In addition to the structural aspects of alienation, there are now cultural and technological aspects that compound the original source of class alienation. Human alienation on all levels has a synergistic effect on humans’ ability to tackle issues such as global warming and other ecological problems. Levels of alienation of humans as species beings are compounded by, for example, information technologies, to the point where it was reported that a young Japanese man married his cyber bride (BBC News 2009) and, again, a Korean couple were so addicted to a cyber-game around rearing a child, that they failed to feed their real human baby daughter (Daily Mail Online 2010). While these examples are at the extreme end of the spectrum of consequences of information technologies, such technologies appear to have had a pervasive pacifying effect on populations. There is a separation in reality of humans from nature that is deeply Àawed and contrary to the pursuit of sustainable living. This alienation is explored by Rutherford (2008) in The Culture of Capitalism in which he argues that, under the sustained afÀuence in the West, there is a powerful trend toward a liberation ethic of self-expression. Within this culture ‘the ideological weapon of neo-liberalism and the new technologies of information and communication [are] key resources for creating the new regimes of capital accumulation’ (ibid.: 9). He continues: ‘the fastest growing economic sector [in the UK] during the 1990s was the cultural industry – advertising TV and radio, music, publishing, ¿lm and video, design, designer fashion and computer and video games [and] indicative of the rise in an experience-oriented consumerism whose ends are aesthetic pleasure and self-ful¿lment’ (ibid.: 12). Thus technology and the market are creating new kinds of commons and opportunities for capital to commodify such cultural practices. There is thus a move to what Rutherford calls ‘desiring consumers’ and the ‘economic sphere expands as production conscripts the thinking, imagination and sensibilities of individuals’. He argues that we have a new kind of capitalism that seeks to enclose new commons í ‘the cultural and intellectual commons – the commons of the human mind and body, and the commons of biological life’ (ibid.: 13). This culture of capitalism is pervasive, including in our education systems where the cultures of schools and universities have been transformed to meet the needs of the market, where individuals are conditioned to meet market criteria. What is valued and rewarded is the individual’s economic potential in the market. People are not valued as citizens active in forming society and determining its direction, but as consumers – of education, of healthcare, of entertainment, and so on. Political choices have been reduced to Tweedledum and Tweedledee and who can promise the most from the market. This is the colonisation of people’s minds by the market with manifest implications for a deep alienation and disconnection in people’s social and ecological

The global political economy and global warming 77 relationships. This is deeply problematic if we are going to solve the problems of global warming, poverty and inequality; problems which require us to take a more holistic and outward-looking examination of our society, an examination which requires critical thinking, human solidarity and a recognition of our being both a part of and interdependent with the broad ecology and the human community. The liberation from this alienation is critical to the transformative changes needed to solve the problem of global warming and the myriad of other social problems, of ¿nding a way to create the level of critical awareness necessary to transform society to one that is sustainable and in which humans live in harmony with the environment, recognising their interdependence as social actors.

Capitalism, growth and capital accumulation Economic growth is an inherent part of capitalism. It has given rise to unsustainable over-production and over-consumption, to imperialism and globalisation. Twenty per cent of the world’s population is living at levels of afÀuence, and hence resource use, way beyond what the planet can support and at a standard of living that is not possible for all to share. Needless to say, consumption levels within this 20 per cent are heavily skewed. Global warming is just one symptom of this over-production and over-consumption. The major goal of most political parties, governments and international governance institutions, however, is sustained, or increased economic growth – without end. Economic growth is the raison d’être of economic policies; it is the only way. Economic growth is at the very heart of capitalism. Growth is essential for capital accumulation and for the system to survive. There are no limits to this growth, no ¿nal point, no objective other than to accumulate. It is the ‘elephant in the room’ for proposed solutions to global warming. Capital accumulation and growth imperatives have overridden all other social and political economy objectives. Within the capitalist system, when economies contract, chaos and suffering ensue. It is clear, however, that even the current levels of production, consumption and resource use are not sustainable, let alone increasing these levels. Indicators, such as the global ecological footprint (Global Footprint Network 2010) attest to this. The contemporary expression of the imperative for continuous growth and accumulation is the equating of the concept of economic growth with that of human development. Thus Beckerman (1974: 9, quoted in Fig 2007: 227) states: ‘a failure to maintain economic growth means continued poverty, deprivation, disease, squalor, degradation and slavery to soul-destroying toil for countless millions of the world’s population’. In reality, however, capitalism is not concerned with the eradication of poverty or deprivation. In fact, capitalism has given rise to poverty, inequality and soul-destroying toil for countless millions. As Amiya Bagchi writes: [t]he twentieth century and its young successor have witnessed … the condemning of perhaps three to four billion people to a subhuman existence

78

The state of the world because of their lack of access to the basic necessities that make a human life worth living. (Bagchi 2005: 337)

Given the increased awareness today by the world’s poor that their impoverishment exists alongside the afÀuence elsewhere in the world, such poverty is a source of humiliation, despair and anger. Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk (2001: 12) states: ‘at no time in history have the lives of the rich been so forcefully brought to the attention of the poor through television and Hollywood ¿lm. But far worse, at no other time have the world’s rich and powerful societies been so clearly right, and “reasonable”.’ Pamuk continues: Today an ordinary citizen is aware of how insubstantial is his share of the world’s wealth; he knows that he lives under conditions that are much harsher and more devastating than those of a ‘Westerner’ and that he is condemned to a much shorter life. At the same time however, he senses in a corner of his mind that his poverty is to some considerable degree the fault of his own folly and inadequacy, or those of his father and grandfather. (Pamuk 2001:12) This for many is the pain of capitalism. Particularly given the world’s demographics and environmental status, capitalism is a far from rational system. Capitalists have gone beyond a concern to produce commodities to satisfy basic human needs such as food, shelter and clothing. The growing waste and irrationality of capitalism is taking the demands of consumer society beyond the capacity of the planet to replenish nature and absorb wastes. The use value of commodities has become subordinated to the exchange value for the sake of pro¿t, with the actual use of the goods being produced becoming increasingly immaterial, a problem overcome by advertising and the marketing industry which, in addition to persuading people to buy useless items, convince people that such buying is an essential expression of one’s democratic rights and a way of building an identity in today’s society. Growth in capitalism does not bene¿t everyone – the theory of ‘trickle down’ is simply a fabrication. The violent birth of capitalism was a precursor to the events which occurred during imperialist expansion and colonisation. Contemporary Marxist theorists such as Ernest Mandel (1979: 68) have developed the theory of primitive accumulation to include the ‘law of combined and uneven development’. This seeks to explain the process involved in the expansion of the capitalist economy on a global scale under imperialism, which has in turn led to the under-development of peripheral countries and regions. Mandel also distinguished between the primitive accumulation of money capital and the primitive accumulation of industrial capital, using the example of the enormous capital value to Europe of the slave trade during the sixteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries that underwrote the development of industrialising

The global political economy and global warming 79 countries. In a similar vein, Harvey (2003), in The New Imperialism, develops Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation and introduces the term ‘accumulation by dispossession’. Harvey argues that this form of accumulation is a continuing process, within capital accumulation on a global scale, and now also includes such dimensions as intellectual property rights and patents. This is particularly important in considering neoliberal solutions to global warming, such as carbon emission trading schemes, which are simply market solutions seeking to justify the privatisation of the atmosphere. This means in effect that the atmosphere becomes another site for capital accumulation. A part of the balance sheet which is obscured in the capital accumulation process and which intersects with the problem of global warming is the issue of ecological debt. The use of the term ecological debt here refers to the environmental destruction and plunder of the South that continues today as an extension of the legacy begun ¿ve hundred years ago and which gathered momentum during the colonial era. It is the transfer of wealth extracted from the South to the North through the use and taking of anything of value – spices, plants, gold, silver, land, minerals, germplasm, slave and cheap labour. The increasing wealth of the North during this time was built on this plunder; conversely the impoverishment of the South occurred. Industrialised countries were built on this Àow from the periphery (of globalising capitalism) to the industrialising centre. Ecological debt is hard to accurately quantify. One part of it, the climate debt or use of the atmosphere to dump greenhouse gas emissions, shows that most African countries are creditors rather than debtors, and within those countries with high carbon emissions such as South Africa, the debt is owed by the wealthy corporations and minority elites. There have been no reparations for this Àow from poor to rich countries. There can be no solution to global warming without a cessation of this practice and some redress of the historical expropriation and exploitation. The South’s demands for climate justice are a part of the process of addressing ecological debt.

Power: class and imperialism For Marx, capitalism and capitalist history are driven by contradictory structural relationships based on antagonistic class relations around over-production and the expropriation of surplus value; by competition between capitals that imposes the need for further competition, accumulation and growth; by the relationship between the forces and relations of production and between relations of production and the land and soil. At the heart of these are class relations which are fundamental in capitalism. They are the social relations of exploitation of one group of people by another. At the global level, there is the division between North and South, centre and periphery, rich and poor countries. At the very basis of these divisions however is the division of class. Within the globalised economy there is a hierarchy of states, and a regionalisation of economic activities around a dominant state. In Europe, for example, it is Germany; in Asia, Japan but with China rising (Navarro 2007: 19). The US is currently the most dominant state of

80

The state of the world

all, with its position being maintained by class alliances with the dominant classes in other states. As Navarro (2007: 19) argues, ‘[n]eoliberal ideology provides the linkage among these classes’ with the commonality of ruling-class interests outweighing the tensions of difference. The ruling classes therefore are transnational; likewise the exploited classes, although the inequalities in the exploited classes are deep and systemically divided and robbed of the opportunities and culture of international solidarity. The signi¿cance of class to global warming is profound. The incessant drive for growth for the bene¿t of ruling class-based pro¿ts and capital accumulation is directly linked to the exploitation of both labour and land. Capitalism’s inherent need to grow and accumulate is directly linked to the economic impoverishment of capitalism’s periphery – what are known as the Third World or peripheral countries, in order to supply the material needs of the centre. The nature of imperialism has changed over its 500-year lifetime. Today, the needs of the core countries are largely met through trade, and the rules of trade are set today by capitalism’s undemocratic institutions such as the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the world’s largest economies, dominated since the second half of the twentieth century by the imperialist triad of the United States, Europe and, Japan, and entering the fray more recently, China. For the last ¿ve centuries, nations surrounding the North Atlantic have depended on military combat and political hegemony, the conquest of territories and peoples, the ruthless super-exploitation of labour including through the slave trade and the use of indentured labour, and the unlimited extraction of resources, to build their wealth and maintain their hegemonic power. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, competing nations at the centre of capitalism established colonies to ensure their control over certain territories. Today, the rules of trade, backed when necessary by military force, particularly US military force, maintain the Àow of wealth from the periphery to the centre, in no small part through the structures of multinational corporations, including the banking sector. The rules of trade are dominated by the ideology of ‘freedom’ and the ‘free market’, a market that removes restraints on the movement and actions of capital, but heavily regulates and restrains labour. Thus the pillage of the periphery continues, and the economies of the periphery are structured to meet the needs of the core nations, the transactions being carried out by multinationals in the framework set by the core-country arbiters. The imperative for accumulation is gathering momentum and new ways of expanding are bringing new forms of alienation and exploitation, leading to a deepening of the metabolic rift. One of these new forms of capital accumulation is ¿nancialisation. This phenomenon has particular signi¿cance for global warming, both directly but also less directly because of its implications for proposed carbon reduction strategies such as emissions trading schemes.

The global political economy and global warming 81

The ¿nancialisation of capital ‘If Marx had one big idea, it was that capitalism was the rule of money which was itself the expression of greed’ (Muller 2002: 191). This rule of money was fundamentally immoral because it deprived the vast majority in a capitalist society of their humanity. This is central, particularly given the shift in the nature of capitalism during the last three decades from the monopoly capital of the real economy, i.e. from the material, tangible goods, services and resources produced and exchanged to monopoly ¿nance capital – what Harvey (2001: 15) refers to as an ‘unprecedented autonomy of money capital from the circuits of material production’. This shift, in the late twentieth and early twenty-¿rst centuries, the era of neoliberalism, was a major factor in the 2007–2009 (and many would argue, continuing) crisis of capitalism but it also contributes to other ongoing problems: of class differences, the disenchantment with democracy and the more general environmental crisis. Prior to the era of neoliberalism, however, ¿nance capital has played a major role in extracting wealth from the peripheral countries. Peripheral countries were enticed into debt by proactive and generous Northern governments, banking and ¿nancial institutions. On being unable to repay their debts, often incurred by corrupt puppet and Western-backed governments, such countries came under the control of European ¿nancial institutions and the IMF for bailout funds. The result was not just indebtedness. The terms of loans have forced disadvantageous domestic deÀationary policies, the cutting of service sectors and the opening up of markets – all of which contributed to increased unemployment, reduced healthcare and education spending, and the ruination of small-scale business and agricultural production. The era of neoliberalism since the late 1970s, however, has seen the ¿nancialisation of the economy move to new heights. Neoliberalism came to dominate ideological and political struggles for the hearts and minds of people. Despite the fact that neoliberalism resulted in a harsh and violent struggle for millions if not billions of people around the world, it also successfully entrenched the idea that the market was the only legitimate currency for social interaction. It brought to the fore the notion, particularly amongst governments and ¿nance ministers, that pro¿t, stocks, individualism and ¿nance capital were the unchallengeable goals of society. The move toward proportionally greater economic activity in the ¿nancial sector rather than in the productive sector has reinforced the role being played by ¿nancial markets and institutions. This has enormous implications for democracy, with elite ¿nancial interests being more closely served by chauvinistic, anti-worker, anti-environment policies developed in closed boardrooms. Palley (2007: 2) describes this ¿nancialisation as ‘a process whereby ¿nancial markets, ¿nancial institutions, and ¿nancial elites gain greater inÀuence over economic policy and economic outcomes. Financialisation transforms the functioning of economic systems at both the macro and micro levels.’ He argues that it has three main impacts: to ‘(1) elevate the signi¿cance of the ¿nancial sector relative to the real sector, (2) transfer income from the real sector to the

82

The state of the world

¿nancial sector, and (3) increase income inequality and contribute[s] to wage stagnation’ (ibid.: 2). It means increasing political and economic power of a particular class grouping í the rentier class (i.e. people who live on income from property or investments). The extent of the momentum of this ¿nancialisation is apparent in the ¿gures from the Bank of International Settlements, showing that the volume of foreign exchange transactions rose from $570 billion per day in 1989 to $1.9 trillion per day in 2004. Put another way, funds raised on international ¿nancial markets as a percentage of world exports rose from 0.5 per cent in 1950 to over 20 per cent in 1996. The consequences of this ¿nancialisation have been ‘highly detrimental to signi¿cant numbers of people around the globe’ (Epstein 2006: 5). It has meant a growth in power of the ¿nancial institutions and a consequent decline in power of labour unions, whose links to the economy are through the production process. As the ¿nancial sector is separated from both the means and modes of material production, this is a double alienation of labour; ¿rst from the environment, and second from the means of production. It has also meant growing inequality, nationally and internationally, and an increase in the percentage of national incomes going to capital (see graph from Ruccio 2010: 90), as well as further centralisation and concentration of capital. Bagchi (2005: 319) writes that ‘[o]ne of the central tendencies of the move toward liberalization is to throw all the assets into the casino of the stock market’. This metaphor captures the irresponsibility and unaccountability of the ¿nancialisation of the economy.3 The logic of ¿nancialisation is tied up in shortterm returns, a temporal logic that runs counter to the logic of natural cycles of reproduction. This then serves to exacerbate the metabolic rift and is a dynamism which makes impossible the protection and reparation of the environment. Of particular concern is that the ¿nancialisation of the economy siphons wealth from the poorest to the richest. It also further weakens democratic processes, both by being beyond the governance of nation states and by increasing the vulnerability of the poorest and weakest and conversely increasing the power of the largest conglomerates. The consequences of free ¿nancial movement can be seen in Africa for example, where foreign debt increasingly becomes dif¿cult to tackle because of large-scale capital Àight. If due weight were attached to this capital Àight, many sub-Saharan African countries would likely be net creditors rather than debtors. Certainly ¿nancial liberalisation has increased the size and ease of this capital Àight. Conversely, as Painceira (2009: 7) shows, ¿nancialisation since 2000 has resulted in the absurd situation of the poor ¿nancing the rich in the world economy and in ‘Àows of capital to the USA’ because of the ‘role of the dollar as international reserve currency’ which ‘has allowed the USA to run very large trade de¿cits throughout this period’. In a paper for the International Labour Organisation, Rossman and Green¿eld (2006: 9) write with respect to ¿nancialisation: ‘[t]he last quarter century of “deregulation” involved the introduction of a vast array of new legal mechanisms and regulations by national governments to protect the interests of investors and shareholders.’ These national arrangements to protect capital, they suggest, need

The global political economy and global warming 83 to be dismantled and mechanisms and regulations need to be introduced to subordinate investment capital to democratic interests and controls. Financialisation increasingly underpins an insecure global economy at the same time as it promotes an increasingly unstable biosphere. Much ¿nancial activity is carried out by unregulated, non-transparent, complex and secretive investment partnerships. That carbon emissions trading schemes have become a growing part of the territory of this ¿nancial world does little to encourage faith in any ETS. At the same time this ¿nancial sector removes ETSs from any semblance of democratic control or direction, dangerously increasing the rift between humans and the environment. This deep disjuncture between the real economy and ¿nance is compounded by the additional factor of the proliferation of easy credit encouraging citizen consumers to live beyond their means and encouraging patterns of unsustainable consumerism. Banks, for example, are increasingly drawing on wage earners’ incomes through mortgage, loans, credit card and other forms of consumer debt. This supports more destructive over-production and consumption of wasteful and irrational products, and thus energy, material throughputs and waste, making ever deeper the ecological rifts confronting human civilisation. This is the social and material crux of the carbon rift. As we glimpsed in the global ¿nancial crisis, all of this contributes to increasing instability. It can be argued that ¿nancialisation was the root cause of the GFC. Predictions of an even greater ¿nancial crisis coming out of global capitalism and the European Union’s current ¿nancial woes are prevalent. There has been a spate of books on the predatory nature of the global ¿nancial oligarchs, and the machinations of the global triad of most powerful nations í the US, Japan, the European Union and, most recently, also China.4 It is beyond the scope of this book to delve into the world of greed and corruption found in the highest echelons of the ¿nancial sector that has become the powerhouse of the capitalist system. It is also a complex world that requires a high degree of economic and ¿nancial literacy, a literacy that the vast majority of people lack. To provide a brief example, however, the US dollar is the principal reserve currency of the international trading system. Since the beginning of the GFC in 2007, the US has been driving and intensifying currency wars under the banner of ‘Quantitative Easing’ under which the US dollar is devalued and other ¿nancial measures taken which bene¿t the wealthy as a way of pumping money into the US ¿nancial system. This has enabled the US banks to boost pro¿ts, ‘primarily not by lending to businesses and consumers in the real economy, but by boosting net returns on proprietary trading of ¿nancial instruments and commodities, selling worthless assets at face value to Federal Reserve, and investing in non-US-dollars denominated assets, interest rates and acquisitions of companies and resources in foreign countries’ (Campbell 2012). What this is doing in short is to bene¿t further the global oligarchs, the top one per cent (ibid.). As Campbell (2012) writes, ‘[i]n the past, despite the transnational interests of this one per cent, national chauvinism and capitalist competition precipitated war.’ Examples of this given by Campbell include the sanctions and low-intensity war against Iran, the wars in Pakistan and Afghanistan, all wars that could spin out of control.

84

The state of the world

Drawing on the history of comparable behaviours in the twentieth century, Campbell (2012) warns that it is important to remember that the relationship between the ‘currency wars – competitive devaluations, trade wars and actual warfare … cascaded into the global war called World War Two’. All of these events – from the manipulations in the ¿nancial sector for the bene¿t of the one per cent to the wars – are prejudicial to the interests of ordinary citizens the world over. Such ¿nancial manipulations by the speculative activities of the megabanks determine the economic health of countries; their employment levels, mortgage levels, pension funds, the availability of resources for services, health, education budgets and so on. The consequences of these ¿nancial activities have already become tactics to divert from real and consensual action to save the planet ¿t for the 99 per cent. Further, in this world of ¿nance carbon emissions trading pulls us ever further away from a just, equitable, democratic and sustainable future. The oligarchs, the powerful one per cent, will never take action on climate change and will do everything possible to avert action that will jeopardise their drive for power and wealth. This one per cent has to be dethroned if we are to save the planet from global warming and the other converging crises. Inseparable from global warming is food security. The impact of the growing ¿nancialisation of the economy is felt nowhere more than in the agricultural/food production sector. As Rossman (2010) writes, ‘[t]he fate of agricultural workers, a large percentage of the nearly 1 billion women and men who are now chronically hungry and malnourished, is increasingly linked to movements on commodity exchanges thousands of kilometres from the farms and plantations on which they work. This is the reality of ¿nancialisation.’ The growing ¿nancialisation of the economy is linked to capitalist expansion through another dimension central to this book, the demand and supply of fossilfuelled electricity. As McDonald (2009: 5) writes, [e]lectricity may not be an innate feature of capitalist modes of production but it has become an essential one upon which to build new production systems and products that lend themselves to the rapid pace of change in contemporary global markets as the capitalist centre of gravity shifts towards the services sector (particularly ¿nance), electricity becomes an even more indispensable input, heightening pressures for cheap and reliable supplies of electric power from the ‘commanding heights’ of this new global economy and the transnational elites that run it. Thus, with growing ¿nancialisation, we can see the increasing dependence on electricity and a growing role for ¿nance capital in national political decisionmaking. Growth in the ¿nancial sector results in turn in a rising dependence on fossil fuels. Financialisation brings with it a degree of control over the Earth and over global governance institutions by corporations which is neither understood nor adequately scrutinised. In the face of such corporate power, democratic institutions have lost all semblance of being truly representative of the interests of

The global political economy and global warming 85 their constituents who in turn have been moulded by the hegemony of corporate ideology. How can global institutions, which are themselves members of a political economy structure which is so dominated by the interests of capital accumulation, be expected, or entrusted, to formulate solutions to global warming?

The state In examining corporate power and the corporatisation of the state, that is, how the state has aligned its interests to parallel those of corporate conglomerates, I begin by looking at the state. Anarchist Michael Bakunin (front page of Chomsky 2003a, For Reasons of State) wrote: The State is the organized authority, domination, and power of the possessing classes over the masses … the most Àagrant, the most cynical, and the most complete negation of humanity. It shatters the universal solidarity of all men on the earth, and brings some of them into association only for the purpose of destroying, conquering and enslaving all the rest. This Àagrant negation of humanity which constitutes the very essence of the State is, from the standpoint of the State, its supreme duty and its greatest virtue … Thus, to offend, to oppress, to despoil, to plunder, to assassinate or enslave one’s fellowman is ordinarily regarded as a crime. In public life … it is all transformed into duty and virtue … There is no horror, no cruelty, sacrilege, or perjury, no imposture, no infamous transaction, no cynical robbery, no bold plunder or shabby betrayal that has not been or is not daily being perpetrated by the representatives of the state, under no other pretext than those elastic words, so convenient and yet so terrible: ‘for reasons of state’. In Marxist theory, the state plays an important role. Unfortunately, and somewhat oddly however, Marx left no coherent body of theory of the state. The state, its role in governance in relation to global warming, and ideas of the social contract around citizens, are all highly relevant to solving our current crises. The role of the state is effectively ambivalent under the capitalist system, although citizens look to the state to take care of them, particularly if potentially catastrophic events such as global warming should befall them. The state has access to the best scienti¿c resources and has the responsibility both to keep citizens informed and to act on potential threats to citizens’ wellbeing. The state, however, has the dominant role in de¿ning the terms of this relationship and often chooses to pursue ends that are not necessarily in the best interests of the majority. There is a wide range of views regarding the ways in which states are formed and how they act. Broadly, it is often assumed people give up individual or local group sovereignty to receive certain bene¿ts, such as social order, various infrastructures and security. From the concept of the social contract arises the notion that legitimate state authority is derived from the consent of the governed. Philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such as Thomas

86

The state of the world

Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau built on the ideas of the social contract, thereby providing the theoretical groundwork for constitutional monarchies, liberal democracies and republicanism respectively. In democracies, such as South Africa, for example, the legitimacy of the state is theoretically grounded in its constitution, its citizenship through the election process and the principles of accountability, transparency, freedom of speech and equality of opportunity. In reality the power-elite perpetuates the belief in the national ‘we’, drowning out any critique of the inherent conÀict between the different class interests in society. Thus on the one hand there is the political economic elite which owns and controls both the means of production and controls the dominant ideology and, on the other, the people. The elected representatives, the parliaments, are presumed in democracies to represent the interests of the citizens. Wright (2010) maintains that representative democracy has been a critical source of social stability in advanced capitalism. He draws on the work of Przeworski (quoted in Wright 2010: 281) who analysed both the ‘dynamic reproductive effects of capitalist democracy’ and the ‘mechanism by which capitalist democracy channels social conÀicts in ways that tend to reproduce capitalist social relations’. The dilemma faced by socialist parties to avoid marginalisation was to participate in electoral competition, where, to win, they had to support policies that would attract middle-class voters, and if they won and wanted to remain in power, to pursue policies ‘which would foster robust capital accumulation’ (Wright 2010: 282). While elections by the people are a fundamental principle of democracy, the entwinement of the political elite with the economic elite and corporate interests constitutes a major departure from democratic rule by the people. We need to look no further than the power of undemocratic bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, institutions that are able to exert far-reaching power over the nation states. Eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, economist and free market advocate, Adam Smith, recognised the potentially subversive inÀuence of the state. He wrote: ‘[c]ivil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor or of those who have some property against those who have none at all’ (Smith 1976: 149). This is also true of the global capitalist political economy in which the elite in the South has joined the elite of the North in furthering their common interests against the interests of the poor and working classes the world over. Certainly at a national level, the state is where there is a huge concentration and convergence of economic, political, social and cultural power. Globally the site of power can be the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank or countries that are members of the G20;5 this power is supported by political, economic and ideological forces, but also vast military forces. The power of large corporations is entwined with these forces. Capitalism both spawns and depends on this concentration of power. Power matters. In the context of global warming and the myriad crises of capitalism, it follows that there is a need to focus on the sources of power in a society and how that power is reproduced. Navarro (2002) argues that, while

The global political economy and global warming 87 these sources are multiple, class provides the frame within which the various power matrices – race, gender, national, regional and so on í operate. ‘Class power is based primarily on the ownership of resources, be they the means of production, knowledge or organisation’ (Navarro 2002: 465–6). Thus while power is reproduced in many different spheres, state power and class power are often related (ibid.). As Navarro writes (ibid.: 466) ‘[c]lass power is realized through the expression of political projects’. The obfuscation of not only the evidence about global warming, but also the required solutions, to it, is a political project, for it is not only the planet’s natural system that is at stake, it is also the structure of class interests. Writing on the power of the state, Harvey (2001: 14–15) maintains that there is a ‘dramatic asymmetry’ with the nation state being, on the one hand, the fundamental regulator of stateílabour relations but, on the other, unable to regulate global ¿nancial capital. The state is now often the agent only of large multinational oligopolists. Harvey (ibid.: 14) argues that the idea that the power of the state is ‘dwindling or disappearing as a centre of authority in the age of globalization is a silly notion’. He writes that this ‘distracts attention from the fact that the nation state is now more dedicated than ever to creating a good business climate for investment, which means precisely controlling and repressing labour movements in all kinds of purposively new ways: cutting back the social wage, ¿ne tuning migrant Àows, and so on. The state is tremendously active in the domain of capital labour relations’ (ibid.: 14) and in fact in all aspects of production and consumption. He points out, however, that in the relations between different forms of capital, the state has no power to regulate. This is because, since the 1970s, global ¿nancial Àows have been beyond the domain of national regulation, affording money capital ‘unprecedented autonomy’ from the cycle of material production (ibid.: 15). Harvey writes of the ‘ubiquity and volatility of money as the impalpable ground of contemporary existence’ (ibid.: 15). This can be taken further. There is a lack of independence of the state from capital not only in regard to the regulation of labour (where the state also acts at the bidding of the corporate sector) but also on policy issues, such as are seen in relation to global warming, including regulating (or not regulating) carbon emissions, phasing out fossil fuel energy, coal mining and increasing corporate taxes. An inherent contradiction exists in the power of the state, in so far as it is the ruling class ruling, while at the same time it is argued by the state (i.e. the ruling class) that it is ruling in the interests for and of all. Concepts such as the ‘national interest’, ‘national identity’ and state-fostered common ‘enemies’ (such as ‘terrorists’, the Taliban, ‘illegal boat people’) build a vacuous national solidarity and help in this obfuscation of who holds power and in whose interests. In issues around global warming, when the power of corporations is beyond the governance and control of governments or when governments and ministers of government are so captured by the interests of corporations, the system is, and will remain, unable to act democratically, appropriately or decisively in the interests of the people.

88

The state of the world

Corporate power I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country; corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. (US President Abraham Lincoln 1864, quoted in Shaw 1950) Abraham Lincoln’s prescience is remarkable. The granting of the rights (in 2011) of unlimited lobbying power by US corporations during US elections, by the US Supreme Court, is a harbinger of yet greater power to corporations and, conversely, a further de-legitimising of the state as a people’s democratic institution.6 Today corporations represent a supreme vehicle for capital accumulation and power which they are able to exercise in, through and over the state. The convergence within the state of the enormous powers of the political and capitalist elite enables them to steer the state in the direction of that elite’s interests. The objective of corporations is to maximise pro¿t. The rising power of the corporate sector and, conversely, the weakening, corporatisation and/or sidelining of democratic states and international institutions, such as the United Nations, are the consequences of a number of factors. Most signi¿cant are the hegemonic ideology and economic principles of neoliberal capitalism and the growing wealth and power of the mega-corporations and oligopolies. Both a cause and consequence of this rising corporate power are the declining legitimacy of the state as a democratic institution and the exercise of a very thin concept of democracy in democratic nations. These are crucially important factors in any challenges to the status quo. The state and international institutions today do not serve the interests of the majority of the billions of people on the planet. In this context, it is to be noted that Stiglitz (2003: 105), having left the powerful post of senior vice-president and chief economist of the World Bank and co-winner of the 2001 Nobel prize in economic science, argued that the centrepiece of the WTO’s policies – the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) ‘reÀected the triumph of corporate interests in the United States and Europe over the broader interests of billions of people in the developing world. It was another instance in which more weight was given to pro¿ts than to other basic values, like the environment, or life itself.’ In a biosphere-constrained world, the conjunction of corporate and state/international organisations presages disaster. Mega-corporations are a major, pervasive and growing inÀuence on humanity and the planet. They are major holders of global wealth and power and touch on almost every dimension of our lives from education to healthcare, from controlling global food production and distribution to ‘¿xing’ global warming

The global political economy and global warming 89 and moulding an ideology to embrace all the dimensions of life. Fossil fuel corporations are immensely wealthy and powerful, and are sitting in the driver’s seat in determining strategies for global institutional climate action – or rather, non-action. How did corporations arise and become so powerful? In neoclassical economic theory, there is a benchmark of the perfect world of perfect competition where commodities are produced by many ¿rms, each accounting for only a small part of total output. This then leads to competition and in turn ef¿cient use of scarce resources. The competitiveness of commodities in the market place depends on their relative cost, hence the cost of labour and its productiveness and in turn the scale of production. Marx, however, recognised both the instability of any economy based on such an assumption and its impossibility in anything other than theory. He saw that there was an imperative in a competitive market to cut costs and expand production, a process that required constant accumulation of capital and ever-new technologies. In Capital, Vol. 3 (1970), Marx shows that through the twin processes of centralisation and concentration of capital, monopolies are formed. To explain, the concentration of capital refers to the process where individual capitalists accumulate more and more capital, thus increasing the absolute amount of capital under their control. Centralisation of capital is a complementary process which occurs when this capital rests in fewer and fewer hands, for example, through mergers and acquisitions when larger ¿rms take over smaller ¿rms. By these processes, continually repeated, corporations end up capturing larger and larger shares of the market, leading to a growing concentration of capital. While the twin processes of mergers and acquisitions have ‘waxed and waned’ throughout history, ‘in the last quarter of the twentieth century the process of centralization of capital [has become] much more powerful than that of its concentration, but both processes have contributed to an enormous increase in the concentration of economic power among a handful of [transnational corporations]’ (Bagchi 2005: 38). One material expression of this is the rate of transfer of wealth from workers to corporations which has increased exponentially.7 Figure 4.1, from Ruccio (2010) and the Real World Economics Review, captures one aspect of this in the growing income difference between workers and top executives. In the early 1960s executive compensation, including salaries, bonuses and option grants, began to rise faster than the earnings of most workers. Compensation for the most highly paid executives has grown the fastest (ibid.). The concern about the growth in power of the corporations is echoed by Soederberg at two levels: ‘the ¿rst is the tremendous power that corporations wield over all aspects of everyday life; the second is the dramatic rise of mass ownership [in the North] of these corporate behemoths’ (Soederberg 2009: 3). Given the key role that corporations play in destroying the ecology, she suggests ‘it is imperative that we identify and transcend the ideologically laden and class led nature of the corporate governance doctrine and begin to question critically who bene¿ts’ (ibid.: 159).

90

The state of the world

700 700 times the pay of the avaerage worker

600

500

400 In 2004, the top 10 percent of executives earned at least 350 times the average worker’s pay, up from 122 times in 1990 and 74 times in 1950.

300

200

Top 10% of Executives

In 2004, half of executives earned more than 104 times the average worlers pay

119 104

Top 25% MEDIAN

55

56

MEDIAN 25%

34

27

33 25

BOTTOM 10%

1940

1950

1960

Figure 4.1 Income discrepancy. Source: Adapted from Ruccio (2010).

1970

1980

1990

2000

100

The global political economy and global warming 91 Drawing on a Marxist-informed framework, Soederberg (2009) shows how the doctrine of corporate governance has become obscured from view, in large part because of its very power and pervasiveness. The principal feature of corporate governance is its legal obligation to return the highest level of pro¿t to shareholders, putting it in clear conÀict with the imperatives of democratic institutions, the environment and the interests of the majority of the Earth’s inhabitants. Corporations, in liaison with the state, have in effect depoliticised the structural relations of corporate domination and delinked, in the public mind, these relations from the wider power and conÀicts inherent in capitalism. Soederberg claims that the part ownership of corporations by the working class, especially through pension funds as part of global institutional investments, has tied Main Street to Wall Street, with Main Street increasingly dependent on and in turn supportive of Wall Street. The pensions market of countries in the OECD was valued at a massive $24.6 trillion in 2006 (OECD 2007: 3). It is however a tying-in only materially or ¿nancially and not in terms of power; and a tying-in that still excludes the vast majority of people on the planet. As was very well demonstrated in the GFC, it does nothing to shift the balance of political power to Main Street but captures and embeds the interests of small-scale investors in the status quo. These, often transnational, corporations are huge and become self-contained economies in themselves with enormous political power. The power of corporations can be envisioned and interpreted in many different ways. The ¿rst is that the corporation is best seen in the context of class relations. Corporate power cannot be separated from the wider struggles and contradictions of capitalism. Second, explanations of the source of corporate power cannot be or at least should not be limited to the bounds of the doctrine of corporate governance. Part of the social legitimisation of corporate power is a result of the links that corporations have forged with the state and vice versa. It is a two-way street. This results in both the corporations and the state pursuing the interests of the dominant classes in society and what amounts to the corporatisation of the state. One particularly explicit facet of this is the so-called ‘revolving door’ syndrome in the United States, where millions are spent by corporations on lobbying the US government, and leading government and corporate heads to move almost seamlessly between high government of¿ce and high corporate of¿ce. The capitalist state plays a central role in mediating, naturalising and depoliticising the corporate-¿nancial nexus. This it achieves through the mantra of freedom, the free market, free trade and the freedom of movement of capital (but not labour – particularly if they are refugees). The state ends up defending the freedom of the market at the expense of the principles of freedom of the citizen, equality and openness. As Klein (2007: 15) argues, there can be no more pro¿table way for corporations to exercise and shore up their power than to be involved in organising society by seeking to erase the boundaries between the state and the corporations. This is what Klein describes as the ‘triumph’ of corporations under neoliberal capitalism. In The Shock Doctrine (2007), she highlights the collusion between

92

The state of the world

the neoliberal doctrine, the interests of the leading capitalist economies and corporate accumulation. She writes of the policy trinity of neoliberalism: ‘the elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending’ (ibid.:15). One important aspect of corporate power and the elimination of the inÀuence of the public sphere lies in the capture of universities under neoliberal governments. Historically these institutions have been a site for independent reÀection and critique of society. With increasing corporate funding of research at universities, these once independent institutions of research, learning and scholarship are increasingly being transformed by the corporate sector. An added dimension of this is that corporations not only fund research in areas that are related to the environment and global warming but are then the major employers of environmental science graduates – thus ensuring students’ research doesn’t delve too deeply into environmentally damaging practices of their future employers. Of a major coal exporting country such as Australia, Hamilton and Downie (2007) write: ‘In Australia over the last decade the fossil fuel industries have become steadily more involved in Australian universities. Fossil fuel industry associations and fossil fuel companies have spent millions of dollars funding research projects and sponsoring university chairs, academic posts and even entire schools. (Hamilton and Downie 2007: vi) They go on to point out that in 1999 ‘the Minerals Council of Australia set up the Minerals Tertiary Education Council with $15 million to achieve cultural change in universities’ (ibid.: vi). These resources show the extent of the close relationships between the universities and the fossil fuel corporations, using examples from the University of Queensland, the University of Western Australia and Curtin University of Technology. However, more than simply inÀuencing what is done in universities (as Hamilton and Downie also identify), they likewise inÀuence how it is done, as managerialism, corporate governance and market objectives become the dominant driving values and objectives of these institutions. Beyond the dominance by corporations over key sectors in the economy, they also wield enormous power over the basic needs of human survival. This is at the very core of the metabolic rift where food, essential for human survival, is controlled by organisations that are undemocratic, unaccountable and far removed from people’s control. Through ownership and control over all aspects of food production, from the ownership of genes, seeds, pesticides, and fertilisers, through to land ownership to the grain elevators, processing facilities, transport companies, grocery stores and advertising, corporations now have a very significant and growing inÀuence over global food supplies. A number of contemporary Marxists shed light on aspects of the growth of power of corporations and of monopoly capitalism more generally. Amin

The global political economy and global warming 93 (2006: 4), for example, suggests that, after the Second World War, various powers came together to form a collective imperialism, the triad (USA, Europe and Japan) effectively transforming the global competitive conditions in which large corporations operated. Earlier, corporations ‘waged their competitive battles essentially on national markets’, whereas today they require markets of ‘500 to 600 million potential consumers’ (ibid.) and their competitive battles are now fought on a global stage. Amin (ibid.) continues: ‘[t]ransnational corporations have common interests in running the world market [and the] dominant segments of transnational capital in all the partners of the triad have a real solidarity with one another that is expressed in the rallying to globalized neo-liberalism’. The neoliberal state is no longer the state of Keynes, a capitalist state but one which nevertheless did incorporate a degree of social welfare support for citizens. Under Keynesian capitalism, the state had the role of duty of care for its citizens and used public expenditure to promote the wellbeing of the less well off. Such state roles have been eroded and replaced by the market, as virtually the only basis for the allocation of resources. Thus the interventions by various governments in the wake of the global ¿nancial crisis through stimulus packages may have appeared Keynesian in nature, but this in fact marked one of the greatest transfers of wealth from the working class to the ruling class in human history. This to some extent demonstrates the degree to which the state has been captured by the private corporate sector and the interests of capital. The various state responses to the GFC show clearly that the interests of the capitalist elite override the interests of the majority and there is no reason to believe the state will act otherwise as the effects of global warming are increasingly disruptive. The key agents of both the rapid expansion of industrial capitalism and a direct and major cause of global warming are fossil fuels: oil, gas and coal. While the peaking dates8 of coal, oil and gas production are not of such relevance to global warming, the projected peaking dates are a further reason why governments should be urgently taking steps to transform economies from their reliance on fossil fuel energy. The implications of not beginning the process of making transformative structural changes are profound and will have a major adverse effect on fossil fuel-dependent economies as early as the next decade. Marx emphasised the crucial enabling role of power supply and transmission in the industrial revolution. The mechanisation of tools meant that capitalists were freed from the limitations imposed by workers’ labour power as the direct motive force. The replacement of that power with other motive forces graduated from the use of animals, water and wind to coal-driven steam engines and electric power (Marx 1976: 496). Since this time, fossil fuels have been an integral aspect of capitalist production and expansion.

Conclusion The problems of global warming and the other crises of capitalism have their embryonic roots in the earliest stage of capitalism and primitive accumulation. This continual process of accumulation throughout the whole history of

94

The state of the world

capitalism has exacted an enormous cost on so many populations and environments. That history of ongoing crises, geographically separate but connected through the never-ending growth and thrust of a particular political economy throughout the past four centuries, has resulted in a convergence of crises that is taking humankind to a critical threshold for survival. Of course, Marx and Engels could not be expected to reach into the future, our present, and foresee the detailed complexities that have arisen around, for example, the corporate/state power nexus, ¿nancialisation and the various technologies and social relationships which have subsequently developed. Nevertheless, Marx’s work and Marxism provide the key elements of a guiding theoretical framework for understanding contemporary capitalist society and its crises, and in particular the developments that are encapsulated under the heading of the political economy of global warming. That body of work however in my view falls short of allowing adequate sight of the way forward from here in dealing with the threat of global warming. In looking to the future, a Marxist framework may not continue to be the most relevant nor at the same time will it necessarily be wholly redundant. Relevant here in this shift from past to future is what Bolivian President Evo Morales (2009, quoted in Bond 2011: 13) stated before the World People’s Conference on Climate Change:9 we can’t look back; we have to look forward. Looking forward means that we have to review everything that capitalism has done. These are things that cannot just be solved with money. We have to resolve problems of life and humanity. And that’s the problem that planet earth faces today. And this means ending capitalism. Ending capitalism is the goal and thus I endorse Morales’ words. The mechanisms for the ending of capitalism are currently far from clear. Marxism provides only partial answers. There are various signs in the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement10 and the fact that so soon after the global ¿nancial crisis of 2008 we are facing another with the political stalemate to deal with the economic crises in the Eurozone.

Part II

African studies ± a reÀection of the global political economy

This page intentionally left blank

5

Africa

Introduction Given the reality of global warming, this book is deeply concerned with the contemporary and future situation of Africa and Africans. This cannot be understood without delving into the continent’s history during the last ¿ve hundred years. By turning to the African continent, we can get a better understanding of the material realities of the global political economy of global warming. Only by placing Africa into its historical context can there be any hope of ¿nding solutions to the problems confronting the continent, and the world, today. Africa provides a transverse section through human history over the last ¿ve hundred years. It is a continent which encapsulates a whole series of contradictions and the convergence of the multiple, intractable and compounding crises of capitalism. Five centuries of colonialism and neo-colonialism; of the continuing history of accumulation by dispossession on a continent on the periphery of the capitalist system and the resulting poverty and inequality; the growing rift between humans and the environment; the disappearance of unknown numbers of species from the continent; wars, militarisation, capital Àight, and now what is shaping up to be for many, the terminal crises of global warming into the mix. The global capitalist political economy, the principal even if not the sole driver of the destruction of African peoples, cultures and economies, is now destroying many of the remaining structural frames for potential climate adaptation, such as smallpeasant farmers who for aeons have been a source of food security í growing a diversity of crops, or herding goats, sheep or cattle, across the African continent and feeding themselves. Africans have contributed least to global warming and yet are those who will suffer ¿rst and worst as a result. According to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change, a situation compounded by the intersection of ‘multiple stresses’ and with low adaptive capacity (due to impoverishment, powerlessness and complex governance issues). The majority of Africans have a negligible carbon footprint, and yet the prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet, estimates that the loss of healthy life years as a result of global warming will be 500 times greater in African populations than in European populations (Costello et al. 2009).

98

African studies ± a reÀection of the global political economy

The chapter will begin with some African demographics – the contemporary human backdrop to global warming. It will then outline what the climate change science projections are for the continent. Based on historical experience, the chapter will also make some projections as to what Africa can expect from the rest of the world as it faces some of the earliest and most profound impacts of global warming. Given the last 500-year history of African/rich country relations, there is little basis for Africans to expect just treatment in facing this crisis, a crisis which for many Africans will be terminal in this century. The chapter will present a number of case studies from the African continent, illustrating the related issues of food security, land grabs, de-peasantisation and the industrialisation of agriculture; the consequences for Africa of globalised capitalism and the ¿nancialisation of the global economy; as well as a couple of country-based case studies to illustrate the main arguments of the book.

Demographics Africa has a land mass of 30 million square kilometres and a population of 1.1 billion people, projected to reach 2 billion by 2050 (Population Reference Bureau 2009). Today, less than half the population of sub-Saharan Africa lives in urban areas (Toulmin 2009); however, this is rapidly changing. Between 1950 and 2005, the urban population grew from 33 million to 353 million (Boko et al. 2007); a ¿gure projected to increase to 1 billion by the early 2040s, and 1.2 billion by 2050 (UN Habitat Report 2010). Currently, 70 per cent of urban dwellers live in slum conditions, where sharing three toilets and one shower between 250 households in a community is not at all unusual (UN Habitat Report 2008; UNFPA 2010). The slum areas of African cities have seen decades of neglect and non-existent urban planning, resulting in the absence of basic sanitation, clean water, electricity, roads and public transport, houses, health facilities and other basic services. According to Parnell et al. (2010), quoting August 2008 World Bank data, the development context for the majority of Africa’s population is unlikely to improve in the short term. This is particularly disconcerting as more than half the population of sub-Saharan Africa survives on less than US$0.70 per day. Much has been written about the impacts of the global ¿nancial crisis in Western countries, but the impacts on some areas of the South have been yet more profound. A 2009 UNESCO report estimated that the global ¿nancial crisis of 2008–2009 would cost 390 million people in sub-Saharan Africa living in extreme poverty, about $46 per person or 20 per cent of the per capita per annum income of Africa’s poor – a ¿gure that dwarfs the losses sustained in the developed world (UNESCO 2009). Yet, there has been little new thinking by Western politicians, the World Bank or IMF as a result of the GFC, and certainly not in relation to African countries. The Millennium Development Goals have proven to be disappointing with only patchy success and this against a background of never having been very ambitious for what is a very rich world with quite enormous inequality. An additional factor is the failure to honour the Gleneagles 2005 commitments to

Africa 99 provide increased aid for social bene¿t. It is increasingly unlikely that the vast majority of Western governments will meet their 0.7 per cent GDP aid commitments during the current protracted period of capitalism’s ¿nancial crisis. Few did before; even fewer will now. While $380 billion of public money was injected in Western banks in the last quarter of 2008, there was no commitment to the estimated $7 billion in increased aid needed by low-income countries to meet key education goals. While Western leaders talk about all countries working together, there is no talk of globalising ¿scal stimulus, viewed by many as indispensable to limiting the contagion impact of the crisis on African and other poor countries. Parnell et al. (2010) write that, despite sustained moderate economic growth in much of sub-Saharan Africa, there is a continued rise in urban poverty, inequality and exclusion of the urban poor. Furthermore, the growth that is being achieved is often at a high cost to the environment and to the poor who tend to carry a disproportionate burden when ecological services fail. While poverty is common to both, levels of infant mortality and HIV infection are higher in slum areas than in poor rural areas of southern Africa (UNFPA 2010). Such factors are signi¿cant given the anticipated synergistic impact of global warming on already fragile and impoverished living conditions. As the UN Habitat (2010) report states, ‘the effects of urbanisation and climate change are converging in dangerous ways’. There are ¿fty-three nations on the African continent, the majority formerly colonies, and an enormous diversity of languages, cultures and ecosystems. While Africa is resource rich, most people are poor, relying heavily on natural resources and agriculture and living in countries with very high levels of inequality and often poor governance structures, all factors which will compound the impacts of global warming (IPCC 2007a).

Global warming projections There has been relatively little work published on projections of future climate change scenarios for Africa, although there is a growing body of anecdotal evidence. Predicting global warming for the varying African regions is dif¿cult because of the lack of historical and present-day data and the complexities of interpreting changes in the interactions between the vast areas of topographically complex land, sea and air over the continent. It is clear that today the African continent is warmer than it was 100 years ago, and will continue to warm at an accelerating rate, in most scenarios, so that on average it is most likely to be between at least 2° and 6° C warmer (than in pre-industrial times) by 2080 (Hulme, Doherty et al. 2001). The 2012 World Bank Turn Down the Heat Report states that in a 4° C world, sub-Saharan Africa will experience temperatures that are well above currently extreme heat waves. Models show that the drier subtropical regions are warming more than the moister tropics. Annual rainfall is likely to decrease in the northern Sahara, with the decline more marked near the Mediterranean region. There were major near continent-wide droughts in 1983–84, and more recently, increasing drying of the already very dry Sahel region. It is not conclusive but it is very probable that this is exacerbated by

100

African studies ± a reÀection of the global political economy

increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Greenhouse gas-induced global warming will also place further stresses on water resources, whether or not future rainfall is signi¿cantly altered. Rainfall in southern Africa is predicted to decrease, and in eastern Africa to increase. In Africa, while population has grown from 287 million in 1960 to over a billion today, the continent’s natural resources on a per capita basis have decreased by 67 per cent (Footprint Network 2009), due to growing global resource consumption and the increasing demands on Africa’s raw materials, population growth pressures and the negative impact of global warming on crop production and endemic Àora and fauna. With respect to the Human Development Index and Millennium Development Goals, the consequences of further increases in temperature will be devastating. According to immediately measurable data on clinical health, there is evidence that malaria, which kills about 900,000 people each year in Africa, will, as a result of global warming, move further into southern Africa and reappear in areas such as the highlands of East Africa where it had until now been largely eradicated (Boko et al. 2007: 437). The IPCC (2007c) states that, given concerns about the impact on disease of climate change, much further research is needed on the potential impact of global warming on dengue fever, meningitis and cholera. Climate change and urbanisation will interact, with unpredictable effects, but they may work synergistically to increase disease burdens and premature deaths (Confalonieri et al. 2007). The IPCC (2007a) states that: Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change and climate variability, a situation aggravated by the interaction of multiple stresses, including endemic poverty, complex governance and institutional dimensions: limited access to capital, infrastructure and technology; ecosystem degradation; complex disasters and conÀicts [such that] adaptations may be insuf¿cient to cope with future changes of climate. (IPCC 2007a: 435) Projections indicate that the impact of global warming in Africa will vary over the continent. Widespread effects may include increased aridity, sea level rises, extreme weather events, coastal erosion, reduced fresh water availability, deforestation, loss of forest quality, woodland degradation, coral bleaching, increases in the prevalence of malaria and vector-borne diseases, impacts on food security causing increasing hunger and malnutrition, and loss of income. One simple example of the current effects of global warming is the fact that women are walking longer distances each day to fetch water, not only increasing the already heavy burden on their lives, but also reducing time for other survival activities. Africa will warm more than one and a half times the global average because of its land mass and particular geophysical characteristics (IPCC 2007a), with the consequences predicted to be more severe than elsewhere. Many African countries are already suffering major levels of warming, with drought and extreme weather

Africa 101 events disrupting agricultural systems. Three-quarters of sub-Saharan agriculture is rain fed and is therefore very vulnerable to precipitation variations. As Figure 5.1 indicates, the heaviest burden of climate change expressed as a cause of death in 2000 is clearly sub-Saharan Africa, which will become even more marked as temperatures increase further. Compounding the physical stresses are the economic development models adopted by or forced on many African countries; the historical legacies of colonialism and resource plunder; the continuing plunder of the continent for resources (land, minerals, biofuels and so on); the neglect of rural and primary sectors and widespread poverty and inequality.

Mortality per million population 0–2 2–4 4 – 70 70 – 120 no data

Figure 5.1 Estimated deaths attributed to climate change in the year 2000. Source: Adapted from images produced by the Centre for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE). McMichael et al. (2004). This map shows the estimated numbers of deaths per million people that could be attributed to global climate change in the year 2000, drawing from data from the World Health Organisation.

Already population and development pressures have taken a heavy toll on ecosystems such as forests and rangelands, leading to a loss of biodiversity and land cover, and depletion of water availability through the destruction of catchments and aquifers, all factors which will be exacerbated by global warming. In some African ecosystems, an increase in temperatures beyond 1° C will cause signi¿cant changes in the distribution of species, their composition and migration patterns. The IPCC (2007a) states that numerous organisms in the deserts are already at their tolerance limits, with possibly no further capacity to adapt, particularly in vulnerable areas, which includes eastern and southern Africa (Boko et al. 2007). This information must be seen against the background of three key points. First, the African continent has contributed least to carbon emissions; in 2007

102

African studies ± a reÀection of the global political economy

just 1 tonne of carbon dioxide per capita per annum, and even for the African continent, very inequitably sourced. The world average is 4.3 tonnes, South Africa 7.9 tonnes (also very inequitably sourced), the US 20 tonnes and Australia more than 20 tonnes per capita (Toulmin 2009: 8). Second, the African countries most affected by global warming have little power in the international political arena. Third, the powerless majority such as small-scale farmers, herders and ¿shers, the urban unemployed and slum dwellers and those employed in the ‘informal’ economy, are doubly disenfranchised at the global warming negotiating table, as their interests very largely diverge from their national and continental elites. While sub-Saharan Africa constitutes a wide diversity of economies and interests, including a division in class interests, there was nonetheless broad unity amongst African nations at the Copenhagen Conference in December 2009, with the exception of South African negotiation leaders. The main concerns expressed by the African contingent were around the Copenhagen Accord’s decision to adopt a temperature increase of 2° C as the benchmark for global warming. According to IPCC analysis, such an increase threatens Africa with catastrophic harm and would mean at least 3° of warming in most regions of Africa (PACJA 2009). Anti-Apartheid leader and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu was quoted as saying that ‘a global goal of 2 degrees is to condemn Africa to incineration and no modern development’ (PACJA 2009). Other areas of focus of African disaffection with the Copenhagen meeting were around the ‘hopelessly inadequate’ (ibid.) mitigation and adaptation funding over and above current levels and the lack of any ¿rm commitment to provide such funding; the shifting of the burden of mitigation to developing countries; and the undemocratic and non-inclusive manner in which discussions were conducted. In the light of the dominance of powerful interests in deciding the future of the planet’s climate, the following quote captures some of the voices of those most affected by global warming and helps give an African human face to global warming in Africa. It is from the 2010 Pan-African Climate Justice Manifesto (PACJA 2010):1 Africa stands on the frontline of climate change. Across our continent, in villages, in towns, on coastlines and deep in the heart of Africa, people battle daily with a growing climate crisis. Our rivers run dry. Our crops turn to dust. Seasons shift and change. The effects of climate change are reÀected in the expectant eyes of hungry children. In the lengthening footsteps of women carrying water. Across Africa, a growing congregation of people suffers starvation and disease while others, after freeing themselves from the grip of grinding poverty, are shackled again by an increasingly hostile climate. It is a cruel irony indeed that a people who have lived for so long in harmony with nature, imprinting the lightest of carbon footprints on the earth, are now suffering and living in abject poverty due to the damaging effects of greenhouse gases emitted by developed countries.

Africa 103 The effects of climate change are real, we are seeing the consequences; but they are not of our making. For over two centuries the industrialized world became wealthy by drenching the atmosphere in carbon. They plundered resources from every region of the world. On mountains of coal and oil, they built cities of plenty. In great buildings they constructed while triggering the climate crisis they shelter from its effects. Those left outside are now told seek another path to prosperity, while the sun beats down, or a perfect storm – not of their making – gathers on the horizon.

Exploitation – past, present and future While there are a number of factors compounding Africa’s situation in relation to global warming including its geography – the size, location and shape of the continent’s land mass í it is Africa’s history and its political economy that determinate its adaptive capacity and much of its current and future experience of global warming. Africa is getting progressively poorer, with per capita incomes in many countries below those of the 1950s–60s era of independence (Bond 2006). In the West, there is much obfuscation about the reasons for the extent of poverty in Africa, and narratives around Western ‘aid’ for African countries form a part of the distortion of the material realities perpetuating poverty and inequality on the continent. Africa’s historical legacy, one of dispossession, pillage, exploitation and looting of resources, a legacy that I will show through a selection of vignettes later in this chapter, continues today. Africa has long been a source of wealth enabling the capital accumulation supporting the industrialisation and development of Northern nations, from the days of the slave trade which began in the mid-¿fteenth century involving the forced removal of an estimated 12 million Africans, through to the days of colonialism marked by land grabs, forced labour, punishing taxation regimes and the European carve-up of the continent in 1884–5 into territories whose borders were de¿ned by colonial interests and which continue to contribute to conÀicts today. Nigeria is one such country; it witnessed the death of perhaps three million people as a direct result of a carve-up of African lands into nations according to the conveniences of European imperial powers. The twentieth century saw African nations become the battlegrounds for the Cold War. In the late twentieth century and early twenty-¿rst centuries, Africa remains a continent of interest for its resources, its land, minerals and precious metals, and increasingly, as a stage for the West’s ‘war on terror’. As Bond (2006: 2) writes, African countries have been [the] proxies for U.S./U.S.S.R. conÀicts – ¿lled with millions of corpses; other wars catalysed by mineral searches and offshoot violence such as witnessed in blood diamonds and coltan (Colombo tantalite, a crucial component of cell phones and computer chips); poacher-stripped swathes of East, Central and Southern Africa now devoid of rhinos and elephants whose

104

African studies ± a reÀection of the global political economy ivory became ornamental material or aphrodisiacs in the Middle East and East Asia; societies used as guinea pigs in the latest corporate pharmaceutical test … and the list could continue.

Building on the 500 years of the pillaging of Africa, are signi¿cant political economy factors, including the continuing contemporary disadvantageous integration of African countries into the global economy and the related expansion and deepening of the capitalist social relations of production within Africa, of which I will write more in the chapters on South Africa. Burnett and Manji (2007) identify thirteen avenues by which Africa is robbed of its wealth including: debt servicing; difference in interest rates between North and South; unfair terms of trade; corporate control of world trade; capital account liberalisation; pro¿t repatriation by transnational corporations; privatisation of state-owned enterprises; intellectual property rights; ecological debt; brain drain; immigration law and transfer pricing – all of which haemorrhage Africa’s wealth. To protect its growing interests on the African continent, the US has been steadily increasing its military presence in Africa and spreading its forces across the continent as part of the twenty-¿rst-century scramble for Africa. The signi¿cance of the growing military presence on the African continent goes beyond the stated military objectives of defeating al-Qaeda in the Islamic North; the Boko Haram Islamist movement in Nigeria; Mali’s Islamist rebels or al-Shabaab in Somalia, etc., but can also be seen as a component in the promotion of the economic and political objectives of US capitalism. After 9/11, the US military became active in South Asia, primarily Afghanistan, the Middle East (Iraq), and also the Horn of Africa. This now is changing, and Africa presents, according to Turse (2012), the growth opportunity for the Pentagon. As Foster (2008) suggests, ‘imperialism abhors a vacuum’, but Africa is far from being a vacuum. US and Chinese interests in particular, but also Indian, are growing rapidly and there is still enormous wealth to be sucked out of the continent – whether it is oil, minerals, precious metals, land or food. As AFRICOM Commander General Carter Ham stated in discussing US operations in Africa, ‘the absolute imperative for the United States military [is] to protect America, Americans and American interests’ (US AFRICOM 2012).

Renewed plunder: land grabs On 26 October 2012, in the village of Fanaye in northern Senegal, one farmer died and twenty-one others were injured, ten of them critically, as they attempted to stop the takeover of 20,000 hectares of land surrounding their lands by an Italian businessman who wanted to grow sweet potatoes and sunÀowers to produce biofuels for European cars.2 This is just one tiny snapshot of a global land grab by rich governments, Wall Street investors and corporations, from poor people in poor countries – land grabs carried out in collusion with the complicity of weak, elitist and corrupt governments. It is a snapshot of the restructuring of

Africa 105 land ownership – the basis for small-scale farmers’ food security – in Third World countries, including those on the African continent. Sub-Saharan Africa has become increasingly vulnerable in terms of food security – in part as a result of changing weather patterns, growing aridity, wars and lack of investment and of support for small-scale farmers. As a result of the combined factors of this lack of support and global warming impacts, by 2020 food production is expected to decline by up to 50 per cent. By 2050, revenues from agriculture are forecast to fall by as much as 90 per cent (Boko et al. 2007: 435) as a result of global warming. Julian Cribb in The Coming Famine (2010: 9) writes: ‘the real imminent threat to the human race is starvation on a massive scale. Taking a 10–30 year view … famine and huge social unrest are probably the greatest threat the human race has ever faced … future food shortages are a far bigger world threat than global warming.’ To debate which is the greater threat is a diversion – one cannot separate the two, nor separate food security and global warming from the global capitalist political economy. Compounding food insecurity is water insecurity, with already about one quarter of the population (or 200 million people) in Africa currently experiencing ‘high water stress’, a ¿gure which could grow to 250 million by 2020 and to 350–600 million by 2050 (Boko et al. 2007: 435), ¿gures which are very probably conservative estimates. Cribb (2010) argues that food security has become a race. It is a race in which, in this century, the stakes will become ever more fraught with desperation as food shortages intersect with the imperatives of capitalism – competition, greed, pro¿t, so-called free and increasingly de-regulated trade, waste and growth í continue to converge with the impacts of global warming, population growth, resource extraction and other forms of land degradation. The foundations for the displacement of millions of peasants from their lands and the occurrence of long, deep and vast famines are being well and truly entrenched by the globalisation, industrialisation and corporatisation of food production. The upheaval of the ‘little people’ of Africa has deep historical roots. As Bryceson (2002) writes, there are additional historical reasons for Africa’s declining food security that can be linked to the development of industrial capitalism expressed in the processes of de-agrarianisation and urbanisation, factors that will become increasingly signi¿cant as they intersect with climate change. According to Bryceson (ibid.) the European colonial mission moulded the various agrarian, pastoralist and hunter-gatherer groups into peasant3 producers through the imposition of taxes on the one hand and forced land acquisitions on the other. This was followed by the building of an agricultural export economy based on cash crops of sugar, cotton, tobacco, coffee, cocoa and so on. The Green Revolution of the 1970s then introduced dependence on fossil fuelbased fertilisers for commercial crops but, with the oil crises in the mid 1970s, peasant commercial agriculture could not compete in global markets. Today, the pressures on rural subsistence agriculture continue with the expansion of industrial agriculture, industry and mining developments (competing for land), land grabs for biofuel and export food production. This push is part of the neoliberal

106

African studies ± a reÀection of the global political economy

development agenda and is resulting in the migration of displaced rural peasants into urban slums where they help to swell the ranks of the unemployed, who will probably never work. One part of this expansion of capitalism on the African continent which has enormous implications for Africa in a global warming world has two parallel expressions. The ¿rst can be seen in both the acquisition of some of the best agricultural land on the continent by Western, Asian, Middle Eastern and corporate bodies for the production of food and biofuels for export to their various homelands or for consumption by African elites. Friends of the Earth International released a report, Africa: up for grabs, in 2010, showing that the amount of land being taken in Africa to meet industrialised countries’ increasing demand for biofuels is underestimated and out of control. Even in Ethiopia, a country synonymous with famines and malnourishment, the food export market is burgeoning. As Macdonald (2010) writes: Ethiopia’s biggest greenhouse farming operation is kept hidden from curious, or hungry, eyes; even in Awassa, the southern city where it’s housed, few know it exists. Two kilometres down a dusty private road, past a checkpoint guarded with AK47s, hundreds of pristine, white greenhouses suddenly appear, alien to the setting. Farming in Ethiopia is still done by sickle and ox-driven plough. But inside Awassa’s cool, humidity-controlled greenhouses, vines are fed by a computerized irrigation system, the latest Dutch agricultural technology. Every day, a workforce of 1,000 locals pick, pack and load hundreds of tonnes of fresh produce onto waiting trucks, including 30 tonnes of tomatoes alone. After reaching the capital, Addis Ababa, the produce is Àown to a handful of Middle Eastern cities, entirely bypassing Ethiopia, one of the hungriest places on the planet … It’s the latest project by Saudi oil and mining billionaire, Sheikh Mohammed Al Amoudi. And it may be the future of farming. Over the past 18 months, plantations like this one have been sprouting across Africa. Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia—rich in oil, but water-poor—as well as those dependent on imports like South Korea and Japan, and rising powers like China and India, have begun leasing vast tracts of land in Africa, outsourcing food production to the continent. Agribusiness and Western hedge funds are funneling billions into the new projects, banking on future scarcity. Growing food for the international market is a trend thrust on indebted Third World countries during the structural adjustment period of the 1960s to the 1990s by the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. Heavily indebted countries were forced to give up their food stocks and turn to the international food market trade. This placed food security in the hands of export markets, ¿nancial speculators and investors who wanted to get returns of 25 per cent on their investments (Shiva 2012), a return that was only possible if food prices rose.

Africa 107 Second and inseparable from this process is the industrialisation of African agriculture leading particularly to a massive de-peasantisation of the population and growth in urban slums. The consequence of this has been the destruction of local economies and cultures, and the proletarianisation of people in a wages ‘race-to-the-bottom’ global economy. For the African continent, the ¿gures of de-peasantised, land dispossessed correlate with the burgeoning city slum populations. According to UN-Habitat, African countries have some of the world’s largest slums and largest percentages of populations living in slums. For example, 99.4 per cent of the Ethiopian and Chad urban populations are slum dwellers; Lagos, the former capital of Nigeria, has a slum population of 6–8 million (Davis 2006: 23), populations that despite their meagre existence remain fully exploited through rents which form one of the safest and most pro¿table investments for landlords. Thus, the poor’s share of the world’s wealth decreases and the levels of exploitation increase. The international non-pro¿t organisation, GRAIN, claims in ‘The Great Food Robbery’ (2012: 129), that Africa has become the new frontier for global food and biofuel production. Billions of dollars are being invested in the scramble for land by such bodies as the World Bank, USAID, and other international agencies, to create the legal and administrative infrastructure including private property rights over previously community controlled land, that will both bring more of Africa’s farmland into global markets and gain control of that farmland to produce for those markets. This commodi¿cation of Africa’s agricultural land has no place for the millions of small-scale peasant farmers and herders – the little people who are being dispossessed not only of access to land, but of any hope for future food security, and little hope for life in a globally warming world, particularly as food production drops globally as a result of rising temperatures and more erratic weather patterns. It is ironic that under one major land-grabbing programme being carried out under the banner of the US Government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a US ¿rm is Àown in to teach ‘modern’ farming to Malians participating in the MCC project – ironic given the signi¿cant problems found in agriculture in America’s own homeland, the lack of knowledge of local conditions and the legendary lack of sensitivity of American advisors to local cultures and traditions. According to GRAIN (2012), 45–75 per cent of the wealth of developing countries is made up by their land and real estate, and the push is now well and truly on to convert this wealth into a form that is accessible to global capital. There is, however, a more sinister and foreboding aspect to this privatisation and dispossession of land in Africa. As GRAIN claims, it is conceivable that the same sharks that engineered and pro¿ted from the US sub-prime crisis which resulted in the global ¿nancial crisis of 2008, could create the same scenario in Southern countries, including on the continent of Africa, through the legal systems of title insurance which are being introduced. GRAIN explains how foreign investors buying property in developing countries want title insurance to protect their investments in case of competing claims. Most often, title insurance is demanded

108

African studies ± a reÀection of the global political economy

by mortgage lenders – and it was the bundling of these mortgages together by mortgage lenders before selling them on as securities which underpinned the US sub-prime crisis. GRAIN gives the example of Benin, where Stewart International, one of the largest title insurance and mortgage service companies in the US with a direct interest in commodifying African lands, has a signi¿cant role in reworking land laws and policies, the goal being to integrate Benin’s (and other African countries’) land into the global marketplace. Another case of corporations writing the rules in situations from which they have the potential to derive enormous bene¿ts. In this legalised seizure of various commons (in the case of agricultural land, water, but also minerals, ¿sheries and forests), the particular social relations of production continue to expand and deepen the divide between both classes and between humans and the environment; between those who will survive global warming and those whose remaining hopes of survival and adaptive capacity are being taken from them. African countries remain a source of raw materials generally for industrialised economies and of minerals in particular. Many of these are mined by transnational corporations with home bases in Northern countries – and hence which transfer capital from African economies to the North. Africa has about 15 per cent of the world’s population and only 2 per cent of global trade (Wilson and Abiola 2003). What trade exists has often been disadvantageous to African countries. Christian Aid (2005), for example, reports that trade liberalisation has cost sub-Saharan Africa $272 billion over the past twenty years, with a close correlation between trade openness and worsening poverty. Overall, primary exports of natural resources accounted for nearly 80 per cent of African exports in 2000, compared to 31 per cent for all developing countries and 16 per cent for advanced capitalist economies. There is limited agricultural produce for trade, and the nature of this trade is changing dramatically, again to Africa’s disadvantage. Importantly for Africa, as Satgar (2009: 52) writes, there has been a ‘further deepening [of] Africa’s integration into the global political economy’ which is being mediated by class interests, in particular the role of a transnational faction of the African ruling class. This is expressed through the maintenance of a neoliberal economy, resulting in a growing gap in wealth and security between those who bene¿t and those who carry the burdens of capitalist development.

The ¿nancial sector in Africa The ‘resource curse’ has afÀicted African countries for centuries and no more so than today. The resource curse refers to the dispossession of communities from their land, increasing social and economic inequality, irreversible environmental destruction, corporate rent-seeking, violent conÀicts arising from resource extraction competition, government corruption and declining potential for and levels of democracy, as a result of a country having (particularly) mineral resources which are sought by industrialised and industrialising countries. Just

Africa 109 one example comes as a result of the discovery of oil in Equatorial Guinea in 1990. This led to very high growth rates in GDP (of up to 10 per cent), but as elsewhere, the connection between GDP growth and citizen wellbeing – jobs, health, education, housing, democratic institutions – has not eventuated. The accompanying inequitable distribution of economic bene¿ts, the fraud and corruption, the conÀicts of land rights between the oil industry and customary land holders, has cumulatively led to declining health and wellbeing of the majority of people. One indicator of the curse in Equatorial Guinea has been an increase in infant and under-5 mortality rates by approximately 20 per cent. Mining companies have been central to pillaging Africa’s resources for at least a century and a half, and the depletion of minerals and other non-renewable natural resources has had extremely negative consequences characterised by the dynamic of ‘enhanced pro¿t for international capital and despotism for the citizenry’ (Bond 2006: 15). This source of wealth transfer continues. What is new and additional to the resource curse is the neoliberal, ¿nancialised form of capitalism that has unleashed upon African countries new and more opaque forms of accumulation by dispossession, to which I now turn. Since the 1970s, the neoliberal era has, amongst other things, removed constraints on the ¿nancial sector resulting in a bigger portion of economic growth being driven by ¿nance rather than the material productive sector. Economic growth has been driven by consumption and debt creation rather than investment and the building of infrastructure, employment and productive capacity, thus siphoning further wealth and entrenching bene¿ts to the ¿nancial sector while increasing various countries’ economic liabilities, with consequences for the majority population and the stability of the economy. The power and wealth of corporations have been enhanced by the restructuring of the global economy through deregulation and ¿nancialisation, enabling them to move their capital and pro¿ts rapidly in and out of countries according to where the greatest pro¿ts can be made. This is a destabilising environment for any national developmental model and deeply disadvantageous to the majority of people. To place the impact of the ¿nancial sector on Africa in some perspective, we can say that Africa as a continent has a reputation of being in receipt of massive amounts of aid. Currently, it receives nearly $13 billion in aid annually (about 4 cents per day per person). Less well acknowledged is that it spends more, an estimated $15 billion annually, on foreign debt repayments (Abbas and Ndeda 2009: 80).4 Compounding such ¿nancial Àows, as a result of the ¿nancialisation of the global economy and the deregulation of the ¿nancial sector, capital Àight amounts have often exceeded what countries receive in development aid (Boyce and Ndikumana 2010).5 For example, in a 2012 report from the High-Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows from Africa, established by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), it is claimed that foreign companies operating in Africa are siphoning off US$1.5 trillion illicitly every year in the form of hard currency. This estimate is very possibly conservative and is on top of transfers of wealth that are deemed legitimate under rules established by the wealthiest and most powerful, rules which are disadvantageous to the poorest

110

African studies ± a reÀection of the global political economy

and weakest. This has profound implications for African economies – not only leading to further impoverishment, high inÀation and deepening income gaps, but representing another and new form of pillage of the continent and impoverishment of the African people. Leading international banks and ¿nancial institutions facilitate this transfer of wealth. Furthermore, historical debts and restitutions incurred by slavery, colonialism and Apartheid are not acknowledged by the major state and international institutions (Abbas and Ndeda 2009: 80); nor are the capital Àows from South to North from, for example, drug patents of $40 billion a year (Rosenberg 2002: 28), or the use of the South by the North for the disposal of toxic wastes, a service valued at billions (Ibitayo and Burns 2008). There are also the Àows of skilled labour – an estimated 15 per cent of Africa’s professionally trained workforces leave the continent each year. Many rich nations are actively recruiting skilled migrants from Third World countries. There is no compensation for the losses incurred by the country of origin. Third World debt particularly affects Africa and has become an inescapable trap for many African countries. It is also a signi¿cant mechanism for transferring wealth from the people of the South to ¿nanciers of the North according to the Third World Network.6 In sub-Saharan Africa the ratios of foreign debt to GNP rose from 51 per cent in 1982 to 100 per cent in 1992, and of foreign debt to total exports from 192 per cent in 1982 to 290 per cent in 1992, ‘a period during which the Third World debt crisis was allegedly resolved’ (Third World Network 2010). The impact of the 2008 global ¿nancial crisis on Africa – declining foreign aid, declining primary commodity trade, recession and major jobs loss (Arieff et al. 2010) is one indication of the vulnerability of Africa in a globally connected economic system over which it has little input or control.

The brain drain While there is a recognition that labour Àows from the South to the North are weighted in favour of skilled labour, there is a dearth of data on the Àow of skilled migrants from Africa to rich, industrialised countries, and an even greater lack of acknowledgement of how this drain in skilled labour is a signi¿cant robbing of a poor country’s resources. At the same time there is a Western narrative that claims African countries are poor and undeveloped because they lack skilled personnel. To illustrate the argument that I am making in this book that the rich countries are indebted to the poor, I will present one vignette which reveals the enormous cost to a poor country in having its skilled personnel recruited by a wealthy country. The vignette is centred on the health profession. Australia is a country where one in four doctors are overseas-trained (ABC 2012). Australia, like many wealthy nations, poaches doctors from sub-Saharan Africa through active recruitment programmes using glossy brochures and advertising. Sub-Saharan Africa is a part of the world plagued by medical shortages and with serious life-threatening health problems including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other profound needs arising from poverty and inequality,

Africa 111 and where each doctor lost has ‘deadly consequences in an understaffed and overworked system’ (ABC 2012). According to World Bank (2004) ¿gures which can at best be indicative of the current situation, in the 1980s, there was an average of one doctor per 10,800 people in sub-Saharan Africa (and even so, very inequitably dispersed) compared to one doctor per 300 people in highincome countries í ratios which are not projected to have changed much in the early twenty-¿rst century. Another way of expressing the issue is that 1.3 per cent of the world’s health workers care for people who experience 25 per cent of the global disease burden. It costs somewhere in the order of almost a million dollars to train a doctor in South Africa for example. The loss of each doctor is therefore a direct cost to the health system, with no international system currently in place to compensate the country of training. On the other hand, Andrew Pesce from the Australian Medical Association estimated that Australia, one of the world’s wealthiest countries, receives between $700 million and $800 million a year as a gift from developing countries as a result of the value of the recruited medical workforce trained in poor countries (ABC 2012). For the industrialised world combined, the value of recruiting medical professionals probably amounts to billions of dollars. This is a direct robbing from the poor to give to the rich – an ethical injustice with manifold life and death consequences – and occurring in a ¿eld of human endeavour characterised by compassion and caring. It is interesting to note that, by contrast, Cuba exports doctors to many Third World, including African countries, and provides training opportunities in Cuban universities for medical training.

Conclusion After 500 years of the colonial ‘civilising’ mission in Africa, followed in the post-colonial period by relatively large sums of aid, Northern economic advice, reforms which withdrew funding from rudimentary social service infrastructures through structural adjustment programmes and neoliberal models of development, 80 per cent of Africans still have no electricity, 340 million are without access to safe drinking water, 580 million people do not have access to adequate sanitation facilities (WHO/UNICEF 2008) and massive inequality and poverty are deepening. Global warming is now an additional factor that will compound the many problems facing African people. It has been estimated that already 300,000 people die each year – many in Africa – as a result of global warming (Vidal 2009). The situation for many in Africa is desperate. As Toulmin (2009: 8) writes, the ‘poor have few if any options, except risking the sea crossing in a leaky ¿shing boat from Senegal, Libya or Morocco, in the hope of a landfall in Europe’. Many do not make it. Those who do, face increasingly stringent and cruel immigration barriers, rising xenophobia and for the lucky ones, extreme forms of economic exploitation with low or no wages and very poor living conditions. Less well known is that many more will continue to make the long, dif¿cult and dangerous

112

African studies ± a reÀection of the global political economy

trek overland, in an attempt to get to South Africa, the richest but also most unequal country on the continent. For those who reach this destination, life remains fragile and harsh with rising xenophobia in the impoverished townships, hardship, insecurity and despair, as they join the competing ranks of neglected and unwanted ‘surplus labour’. This is a snapshot of Africa in a globally warming world. It is the broad continental context for the speci¿c case of South Africa that I will turn to in the next chapter.

6

South Africa

Already, various wars and crises on the African continent have had an impact on South Africa, signi¿cantly in the movement of large numbers of refugees across the country’s borders, some from as far away as Somalia. It is reasonable to project even greater and more complex impacts from the effects of global warming on African countries and this at a time when South Africa and other African countries that receive refugees are experiencing the growing stresses of global warming. In this book, I have supported the thesis put forward by Egyptian Marxist economist, Samir Amin, that South Africa represents a microcosm of the global political economy. I build on Amin’s thesis by adding global warming to the mix. In this, South Africa captures the history of globalised capitalism from a Southern perspective; it captures the consequences of the hegemony of the globalised capitalist ideology and political economy; it illustrates the dependence of such economies on fossil fuels despite the terrible consequences such dependence promises; and it captures the corruption and greed endemic in global institutions and elite leaders. South Africa also shows the imperative for the expansion of the capitalist system – in this case throughout sub-Saharan Africa, and the fact that the poor, those with the lightest of carbon footprints, will be the ¿rst to be cast aside as the effects of global warming intensify, just as they have been, and continue to be, the ¿rst to be cast aside under a system of production and consumption that has no ethic but greed and accumulation.

The South African setting South Africa has a population of 50 million people: eleven of¿cial languages and four recognised broad racial categories: black 79.5 per cent, white 9.2 per cent, coloured 8.9 per cent and Asian 2.5 per cent. It is a middle-income country with a well-established economy. The GDP annual growth rate since 2000 has been over 4.5 per cent. However, this growth has been achieved without job creation or any distribution of bene¿ts across the society. Today, South Africa’s wealth distribution is very unequal and poverty is of epidemic proportions. The poorest 20 per cent of the population receive only 1.7 per cent of the total income; the richest 20

114

African studies ± a reÀection of the global political economy

per cent, 70 per cent (Statistics South Africa 2009). South Africa is now the most unequal society on Earth (Ashman et al. 2010), the degree of economic inequality having increased since the end of Apartheid in 1994. Of¿cial unemployment now stands at 35.4 per cent (ibid.). The true ¿gure must be much higher as many in the so-called informal sector, plus many refugees, are not registered as being unemployed. Of¿cial ¿gures for unemployment in the 15–24-year age group stood at 48.1 per cent in 2009 (Statistics South Africa 2009). In July 2009, 42.9 per cent of the population lived on less than $2 a day. One indicator of the health of a country’s political and economic institutions is the health of its people. Life expectancy at birth in 2010 was 49 years compared to 64 years in 1995, the decline largely attributable to HIV/AIDS (U.S. Census Bureau 2010). As the South African Health Review 2008 states ‘extreme wealth inequalities and high unemployment play an important role in poor health’ (Bradshaw 2008). Health is strongly correlated with socio-economic position, and there is growing evidence that inequalities play a role in poor population health outcomes (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009). Bradshaw (2008: 51) states: Despite uncertainty about the exact levels of mortality, it is clear that the health of the South African population has worsened in the last decade. South Africa can be considered to have a quadruple burden of disease, including diseases and conditions related to poverty and under-development, chronic diseases, injuries and HIV and AIDS. Differentials in health status have been observed between populations, wealth and urban-rural groups and education levels. It is believed that in 2008, over 250,000 South Africans died of AIDS (Statistics South Africa 2009), with the substantial burden (41 per cent) of deaths among 25–49-year-olds (Avert 2006). There are an estimated 1.4 million AIDS orphans in South Africa (ibid.). There have been claims that the employment practices of the mining industry have contributed signi¿cantly to the spread of HIV/AIDS (Cleary 2009; Duigan 2009; Spoor 2009 – personal communications).1 Diarrhoea and gastro-enteritis have overtaken HIV/AIDS as the biggest killers of children under ¿ve years, with the deaths doubling over the previous four years (Bradshaw 2008). Moving from health to other indicators of the depth of inequality in South Africa, one that is particularly relevant in the light of the country’s history, is that 87 per cent of its land remains white owned. Since its inception in 1995, the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights2 has dealt with only 2 per cent of all restitution claims (String Communications 2009). This problem is compounded both by mining companies’ applications for mining rights under a policy framework which favours the mining company (Spoor 2009, personal communication) and by the lack of training and infrastructural support for people returning to the land after a break in land/livelihoods’ relationships of decades and generations.

South Africa 115 Twenty per cent of urban households have no electricity and a quarter have no running water. In rural households, 80 per cent have neither (Magubane 2004: 658). The response by government to these situations has been very poor. Allegations of political corruption are common3 and the corporate capture of government and government of¿cials continues (Terreblanche 2002). Within South African society, there is a growing disaffection with the persistent and deepening poverty and the lack of adequate services such as public transport, water, electricity, housing and healthcare. Reynolds (2010) claims that South Africa has more people’s protest action per head of population than anywhere in the world – a factor driven by the poor living conditions without basic services and in the context of the huge gap between constitutional promises and reality. In Khayelitsha,4 a township on the outskirts of Cape Town with a population of over two million, for example, water is a ‘shared tap, sanitation a non-existent luxury and diarrhoea, a constant reality’. Eighty per cent of Khayelitsha residents live in shacks (Thom 2006b).Visiting Khayelitsha in the company of members of the People’s Health Movement,5 I was shown into a room in a men’s accommodation compound, measuring no more than 3.5 by 2.5 metres. It accommodated four men, of very different ages and unrelated to each other, in bunk beds along with all their cooking utensils, stove and personal effects. There was no electricity or running water. All the men were from rural areas and one, a 15-year-old, said his aspiration was to go to school but he didn’t have the means. When he worked, he had to send money home to his family. He was uneducated, unskilled and faced frequent periods of unemployment. Adjacent to this room were rows and rows of the same, with narrow, muddy alley-ways in between; no recreation space, no community cooking facilities, no laundry, no place to escape the con¿nes of the room. However, this room was at least of substantial construction. There were vast seas of less substantial shacks, small, Àimsy dwellings made from corrugated iron, cardboard and bits and pieces. Fires, as a result of the crude and crowded cooking conditions, are frequent. Wires are strung from power-lines to the tin shanties making the many unsafe and illegal connections to the power grid. The poverty is crushing. Refugees are a signi¿cant part of the population of South Africa not only in terms of numbers but also as a focus for violence and frustration in the form of xenophobia, such that they must be included in any overview of South African vital statistics. Furthermore, today’s refugees are an omen of things to come. There will be increasing numbers of Africans making their way across the continent to South Africa as the impacts of global warming become more intense and widespread. The current (2012 ¿gures) population of refugees in South Africa is estimated to be in excess of six million.6 These people come from all over Africa, but particularly conÀict zones such as Ethiopia/Eritrea, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Zimbabwe. Many of these refugees have no documents which enable them to seek work7 (or become part of of¿cial statistics) and with little redress to unscrupulous employers who employ people and then fail to pay them. There are no data on this. However, anecdotal evidence from speaking with a number of refugees in different geographical areas of South

116

African studies ± a reÀection of the global political economy

Africa indicates this practice is common. The use of refugee labour without payment by businesses in the Northern Limpopo Region is particularly rife – it is the border where many refugees cross into South Africa.8 They arrive with little and with few choices for survival. Further south, in Johannesburg and Cape Town for example, refugees exist on the fringes of the poverty-stricken townships in a state of insecurity, subjected to constant harassment and the occasional Àare-up of violent xenophobic attacks. This picture would not be complete without reference to the growing black middle class.9 Statistics are dif¿cult to ¿nd.10 However, from an anecdotal perspective, a black middle class is visible in the media, politics and policy arenas, and new housing estates, but not in many of the mainstream cultural spaces. Politically, however, the signi¿cance of the black middle class cannot be underestimated because of their role in maintaining the status quo and as evidence that Apartheid no longer exists. The position today of the black middle class recalls Fanon’s (1967: 122) observation in The Wretched of the Earth: The national middle class discovers its historic mission … that of intermediary … of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouÀaged, which today puts on the mask of neo-colonialism. The national bourgeoisie will be quite content with the role of the Western bourgeoisie’s business agent, and it will play its part without any complexes in a most digni¿ed manner. In summary, South Africa remains deeply divided along class lines, in part because of its history, but also in large part, because of the particular political economy structures that are essentially a continuation of the process of capital accumulation of previous governments.

South Africa and global warming Southern Africa has an exceptionally rich endemic Àora and fauna which, in addition to its intrinsic value, play an important role in sustaining human livelihoods (Von Maltitz and Scholes 2006). South Africa’s biodiversity has been identi¿ed as being particularly vulnerable to global warming (ibid.) because of its degree of adaptation to very speci¿c climatic conditions. There are seven broad biomes:11 savannah, nama karoo,12 succulent karoo, grassland, forest, desert and fynbos13 (ibid.). Two of the biomes, the fynbos and succulent karoo, have very high levels of biodiversity and endemism and climate change according to Von Maltitz and Scholes (ibid.) are therefore likely to impact on these biomes more severely. They maintain that there is already evidence of a shift eastward with the biomes, and that by 2050, 38–55 per cent of South Africa will have a climatic envelope that does not match any current biome with completely new species groups and wide-scale species loss (ibid.). One 1999 study referred to by Von Maltitz and Scholes (ibid.) predicted that the succulent karoo biome would lose almost its

South Africa 117 entire current distribution, as hotter and drier conditions prevailed, but that each of the other biomes would be affected and would shift and lose species, and that furthermore deserti¿cation would increase. All of the biomes are important from a livelihood perspective – particularly the savannah. There are many aspects to the impact of global warming on South Africa. A few are mentioned here, based largely on the 2007 IPCC Report. The IPCC conclusions of 2007 are now considered conservative in the light of subsequent carbon emissions and actual temperatures experienced. It is predicted there that Southern Africa will on average be 2°–3°C warmer by 2050 and 3°–4°C warmer by the end of the century (relative to pre-industrial temperatures). This increase will vary between regions with, for example, a possible increase of 4.5°C in the Northern Cape (of South Africa) during summer (Joubert 2008: 153). As a result of rising temperatures, South Africa will experience greater frequency and intensity of droughts, Àoods and heat waves. It will become hotter and drier in the west and hotter and wetter in the east, but with an overall drying due to evaporation (Joubert 2008).14 Rainfall is expected to decline signi¿cantly in Southern Africa; East Africa (including the north east of South Africa) will become wetter, with rain falling in more intense storms causing greater risks of Àooding and damage (with water being largely lost due to run-off rather than sinking into the soil). Most regions of Southern Africa are expected to experience water stress by 2025 (Das et al. 2008) and most farmers in the region will continue to be dependent on ground water for their personal as well as agricultural needs (CSIR 2009). The adverse impacts of global warming on agricultural and other livelihood sources threaten efforts to improve food security and poverty reduction, thereby lessening the chances of attaining the Millennium Development Goals in the region (Nhemachena et al. 2008). In the Western Cape (the south west of South Africa), the 2007 IPCC report predicts falls of winter rain will continue to move southwards toward the pole, resulting in extreme drying in the region during winter – something which will impact greatly on the fynbos í the Western Cape’s natural scrub land í and agricultural production, 50 per cent of which comes from this region. Reports have forecast an overall 25 per cent decrease in winter rainfall by 2050. Additionally, ‘season creep’ is already occurring and will escalate, with spring rains being delayed and having potentially devastating consequences for crops and wild seeds (Joubert 2008). With respect to agriculture, crop modelling predicts that maize, which constitutes 70 per cent of total grain production in South Africa, will decrease by up to 20 per cent within ¿fty years (DEAT 2007), mostly in the drier western regions. Other crops grown in environmentally favourable areas are also at risk, as changes occur in both rainfall and temperature. Additionally, there are expected to be detrimental changes in pest diseases in the agricultural sector (Joubert 2008). The IPCC 2007 Report forecasts sea-level rises of 0.2–0.6 metres by 2100. In addition to the ocean warming, expanding and rising as a result of global warming, there is already evidence of a change in storm frequency and intensity. The interaction of all these factors can give rise to catastrophic results (Das et

118

African studies ± a reÀection of the global political economy

al. 2008). There are already many examples of events that could be attributed to changes in the biosphere as a result of global warming. For example, in March 2007, along the coast of KwaZulu-Natal, sea levels were about 8.5 metres above mean spring tide level, causing widespread damage. From this one event, direct infrastructure damages alone cost in excess of R400 million (roughly A$67 million) (ibid.). A further example is found in the evidence from preliminary analysis of ¿re data from the South African Cape region which suggests that the ‘mean return period of wild ¿res has decreased from 31.6 years in the 1970s to 13.5 years in the 1990s’ (ibid.). Toulmin (2009)15 suggests that South Africa, as with the whole of Africa, needs to focus on three key areas for adaptation to global warming: food security, water and health. She quotes sources which suggest that an essential part of global warming adaptation is building resilience into ecological, social and institutional systems (Thornton et al. 2006, quoted in Toulmin 2009: 30) and that ‘[s]trengthening local, indigenous coping strategies and building on community institutions are key ways forward’. Boko et al. (2007: 450) state that ‘[a]daptive capacity and adaptation emerge as critical areas for consideration on the continent’ and that the ‘mix of climate stresses and other factors in Africa means that for many, adaptation is not an option but a necessity’ (ibid.: 452). They also state that ‘adaptation is successful and sustainable when it is linked to effective governance systems, literacy, civil and political rights. In the context of South Africa, as will be shown in the next chapter, these criteria already pose very signi¿cant problems which will both exacerbate and be exacerbated by global warming. South Africa, compared to the rest of Africa, is a disproportionately large producer of carbon emissions í emitting more than 40 per cent of Africa’s greenhouse gases from less than 8 per cent of Africa’s population – and with the majority of its electricity produced from coal. Under the Kyoto Agreement, for the period 2008–2012, as a developing country, South Africa did not have any obligation to reduce carbon emissions. South African President Jacob Zuma was party to the brokering of The Copenhagen Climate Accord reached in December 2009 along with the US President Barack Obama, China’s Premier We Jiabao, India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. The Accord acknowledged the 2° C target as a cap on temperature increases but included no collective target for cutting emissions or a peak year for carbon emissions. Other African and non-African vulnerable countries had been holding out for deeper emission cuts, wanting restrictions on global temperature rises to 1.5° C this century. South Africa, in concert with China, India and Brazil, has argued it is a developing economy with large impoverished populations and, as such, cannot have restraints placed on its development trajectory. Such claims are a guise to allow vested interests to continue ‘business as usual’. South Africa rati¿ed the UNFCCC convention in August 1997, acceding to the Kyoto Protocol in July 2002, although it was not required to undertake any formal, legally binding, greenhouse gas emissions agreements during the Protocol’s ‘¿rst commitment period’ between 2008 and 2012.

South Africa 119 In 2004, South Africa tabled its ¿rst formal government response to climate change with the National Climate Change Response Strategy, which acknowledged that climate change was possibly the greatest environmental challenge facing the world this century, with the African continent confronting greater challenges than the developed world, both in terms of the impact of climate change and the capacity to respond to it. In October 2007, a draft Long term Mitigation Scenarios (LTMS) report prepared for the South African cabinet presented ¿ve scenarios of future growth paths for South Africa, each of which involved a different level of greenhouse gas emissions. The scenarios were developed to inform national policy and the country’s climate negotiating position in the post-2012 period (Hallowes 2008). Business as usual, or ‘growth without constraints’, provided the high-end scenario in which emissions were projected to rise dramatically. Under this scenario, projected growth would lead to an almost fourfold increase in emissions, from 446 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2003 to 1,640 million tonnes by 2050. This is the scenario that most closely approximates South Africa’s current track. This was followed in descending order of development and emissions scenarios, until the fourth low-growth path scenario which was described as that required by science, differing from the other three scenarios as it included a particular climate target: reducing emissions by 30–40 per cent from 2003 levels by 2050. The Zuma government in principle agreed to an emissions trajectory which would see emissions (theoretically) peaking between 2020 and 2025, with upper limits of 583 and 614 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent respectively, then plateau for up to ten years and decline in absolute terms between 2036 and 2050, to somewhere between 212 and 428 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent. At the ¿fteenth Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (COP15) in Copenhagen in 2009, Zuma negotiated on the basis of these ¿gures, but making them conditional on ¿nancial and technical assistance from the rich nations and arguing that South Africa needed to be given room to develop to lift the poor from poverty. A case of the rich hiding behind the poor.

South Africa’s political economy I will now return to Samir Amin’s (1997) description of South Africa as: a kind of microcosm of the world capitalist system, which brings together in a single territory a number of features peculiar to each constituent category of that system. It has a white population which, in its life style and standard of living belongs to the ‘¿rst world’, while the urban areas reserved for blacks and coloureds belong to the modern industrial ‘third world’ and the Bantustans16 (now ex-Bantustans) containing the ‘tribal’ peasantry do not differ from peasant communities in Africa’s ‘fourth world’.

120

African studies ± a reÀection of the global political economy

Building on Amin’s apt description of South Africa as a microcosm of the global system provides an opportunity to illustrate a number of key points relevant to the political economy of global warming. These key points include the history of the country since early colonisation in the seventeenth century, the seizure of land from the African people, the years of Apartheid-dominated capitalism through to the adoption of a neoliberal model of development by the African National Congress (ANC) government leading to South Africa now being the most unequal society on Earth. A recap of this history will necessarily be brief and selective. Given global warming and the potentially catastrophic effects it will have on the country, it is ironic that South Africa’s history and archaeology link the people of today to the ¿rst human societies on the planet. South Africa is known as ‘the cradle of humankind’ after Charles Darwin deemed it as such, a testament to the fact that the country had the environmental conditions suitable for the development of the ¿rst human societies. South Africa is an ecologically rich and stunningly beautiful country. From Mapungubwe in the Limpopo Region of the north, to the province of Mpumalanga and KwaZulu Natal, there is extensive evidence of human history that dates the lives of the ¿rst humans and their ancestors back many millennia, as well as evidence of more recent human activities. Evidence exists in a number of locations in South and Southern Africa of the San people (or Bushmen) who were hunter-gatherers from around 100,000 BC, and of the Khoikhoi people who came later and were agri-pastoralists. By 500 BC, Bantu (and other language) speaking peoples were migrating into the south of Africa and by the time of the ¿rst European settlement, there were many different language groups in the region. There were well-established trade routes traversing the continent by AD 1000. Mapungubwe in the Shashe-Limpopo basin in what is now the region bordering South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe, had a complex society for several hundred years, with a king, walled palace and distinct social classes and was the centre for trade in Southern Africa between AD 1200 and 1300. The ¿fteenth century saw European discoveries of South Africa by Portuguese navigators Bartholomeu Diaz and then Vasco da Gama, but it was not until the seventeenth century that Dutch farmers, Islamic leaders deported from what was Batavia, and French Huguenot refugees, along with imported slaves, began settling in Southern Africa and requisitioning land from the Indigenous peoples. The Dutch, closely associated with the Dutch East India Company, became known as the Afrikaners. From these roots emerged the Boer trekkers who moved to the interior, appropriating land and engaging in rentier exploitation of the Indigenous peoples ‘whose land they had seized’ (Marais 2001: 8). The discovery of diamonds in the Kimberley in 1867, and gold in the 1880s, led to a rapid expansion of British inÀuence, as the British, who had been content with control of the coastal regions for geopolitical reasons, now saw South Africa as a potentially huge capital asset. Bond (2003) gives an example of the long and intimate marriage between imperialism and ¿nance in South Africa’s geopolitical history, writing of how the power and vision of ¿nance were engaged in the deepening of

South Africa 121 colonialism in South Africa. Accompanying the Àows of capital to the diamond ¿elds, Britain effected the complete subjugation of African kingdoms during the 1870s, as well as the invasion of the Afrikaner Transvaal Republic in 1877. The discovery of gold and diamonds and the resulting inÀux of (mostly British and particularly Rothschild’s) capital (Bond 2003) were the beginnings of what became the central minerals energy complex (MEC) in South Africa. As Hein Marais put it in Limits to Change: The Political Economy of Transition, early developments around mining fostered the ‘integration of [the] South African economy into the world economy as a source of primary commodities’ and set the ‘pattern of labour and social relations that would become the de¿nitive feature of South African society. Capital accumulation would be based on the exploitation of a low-wage, highly controlled expendable African workforce which was to be reproduced in a system of “native reserves” at minimal cost to capital’ (Marais 2001: 9). This workforce was drawn from the whole of Africa; in fact, until the 1970s, it included more non-South African than South African workers (ibid.). The expansion of industrial capitalism into the mining and agriculture sectors in South Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resulted in serious divisions in society, including the racial division of labour and the marginalisation of black African communities who were increasingly forced to move to more marginal land and eventually into Bantustans during the Apartheid era. South Africa’s economy, even during the nineteenth century, contained early tensions between the interests of mining capital and those of agricultural and industrial capital, the former preferring ‘free trade’ policies and the latter the protectionism and subsidies of the state (Marais 2001). Each of these sectors required cheap labour and, for the agricultural sector as it became mechanised, increasing areas of land for farming. Van Onselen (1996), in The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper 1894–1985, documents the very considerable social and economic hardship this caused the black farm-labour tenants and sharecroppers. By the 1950s, a comprehensive system of labour control measures had been introduced, including pass laws, labour bureaus and singlesex living quarters í all part of a comprehensive approach to providing cheap and docile labour for Afrikaner agriculture and industry. It is of note that the gradual removal of the dispossessed black population from white farming resonates with Marx’s descriptions of the enclosures of the commons and the consolidation of landholdings in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the South African context, however, there were additionally systematised racist dimensions to the deep class divisions that became increasingly entrenched in everyday life, as well as in the political and economic structures of the society. The racist dimension to these class divisions legitimised European colonialism and the integration of the global South into the world economy as a supplier of agricultural products and raw materials that required coerced labour. Furthermore, racism allowed the expropriation of land, the spread of indentured labour, various taxes and other extractive and inhumane practices. ‘The Afrikaner Nationalists’ very public pursuit of Apartheid, of racially sanctioned avarice and greed’ and the ‘racial bigotry and double standards

122

African studies – a reÀection of the global political economy

[wherein a] black man was damned by his success if he worked hard and damned for his laziness if he failed’ (Van Onselen 1996: 311) became deeply entrenched in South African society. These racist divisions gained full expression with the victory of the white supremacist Afrikaner National Party in 1948 and thereafter the implementation of Apartheid policies. These led to a systemic hardening of the race/class divisions and of labour exploitation and land expropriation that had begun with European settlement. One far-reaching Apartheid policy was that which underpinned the creation of Bantustans, whereby 13 per cent of South African land (the most marginal) was demarcated for the majority (80 per cent) black South Africans. This policy has signi¿cance for the sustainability, food security, human development and mitigation strategies for the communities of people living in these areas today. The homelands were over-populated with the ‘resettled’ black population – the reserves of cheap labour. Much of this land has since been found to overlay various rich mineral deposits, a factor which is relevant to the accumulation strategies in South Africa in the twenty-¿rst century. According to Terreblanche (2002), the three threads to South Africa’s history over the last three centuries to 1994 are white political and economic supremacy, land dispossession and the exploitation of labour. It is clear that these themes continue to have repercussions and further expression today. To this can be added that South Africa demonstrates a system of accumulation which has been very heavily inÀuenced by the ¿nancial sector and which has laid the foundation for today’s close alliance between ¿nance, mining and energy. The particular system of accumulation that developed in South Africa occurred around the MEC (Fine and Rustomjee 1996), a system built on a core set of industrial sectors which developed very strong linkages with each other and which have dominated the course of economic history in South Africa through to today. Fine and Rustomjee (1996) argue that the MEC not only exhibits the characteristics of conglomerate behaviour within that sector, but effects control over other parts of the economy through its inÀuence over the ¿nancial sector, the political sector and through linkages to both state and private capital. South Africa clearly has exhibited and continues to exhibit the de¿nitive relationships of capitalism, that is, the exploitative division between labour and capital, compounded by the division of race. However, in looking at another de¿nitive aspect of capitalism, the competitive relations between the individual types of capital that control a society’s productive forces, the fragmentation, competition and division that normally exist in the capitalist system are not so evident in South Africa. The linkages between the MEC and other sectors were consolidated through the forces of capital, the state and the Apartheid system. One other thread common to South Africa’s geopolitical economy history since the late 1870s is the relentless degradation of the environment which accompanied the subjugation and exploitation of the de-peasantised and proletarianised population. In summary, from the perspective of accumulation and the entwined issues of equity and the environment, up to 1994 South Africa developed as a country with a heavy reliance on minerals, coal-fuelled energy and capital-intensive

South Africa 123 production; with growing surpluses of unemployed; with super-exploited black workers; with extremely uneven development; with a strong and powerful ¿nancial sector; and as a powerful sub-imperial power on the African continent.

Pre-1994 The success of the African National Congress in coming to power after the ¿rst post-Apartheid democratic elections in 1994 and the ¿rst black presidency of Nelson Mandela, brought a sense of hope for freedom from racial, political, social and economic oppression to the majority of the black population in South Africa. It also inspired not just liberation movements worldwide, but the international community. Judd (1996: 411) describes the fall of Apartheid as ‘one of the last and, arguably, one of the most dramatic and moving transfers of power within a country which had formerly been … within the British Empire and Commonwealth’. However, one has to ask whether there was a real transfer of power, other than the addition of a new black elite at the table. Certainly, the ‘face’ of political power at the top levels changed but evidence supports the argument that the economic power remained with the Afrikaner-dominated ¿nancial sector and, more speci¿cally, the MEC. As an example of the power of the MEC, Innes (1984) writes that to know how the South African economy functions, we ¿rst have to know the conditions and extent of the power (of a corporation such as Anglo American), what form it takes, how it works and what its limitations are. He reveals how Anglo American was and remains actively involved at a number of levels in inÀuencing the direction of political change in Southern Africa, and the continuing development and expansion of capitalism in South and Southern Africa. He argues that the transition to monopoly capitalism in South Africa also produced the phenomenon of South African imperialism during the 1960s and 1970s, a time when the process of monopoly transformation in South Africa reached new heights (Innes 1984: 239). This expansion of South African imperialist tendencies in Africa has continued in the post-Apartheid era, and including on the back of expansion of the electricity sector. Innes’ theme of the enormous power of one company, Anglo American, is taken further to the whole minerals/energy sector by Fine and Rustomjee (1996). In their seminal work in which they coin the concept of the minerals-energy complex (MEC), they spell out its centrality to the South African economy. In another paper, Fine (2008) describes the MEC as ‘a system of accumulation, centred on core sectors that has a character and dynamic of its own that was far from pre-determined [and] can be traced back to the emergence of mining in the 1870s through to the present day’. The MEC has played a central role in structuring electricity power relations in South Africa and the country’s policy position in relation to coal, the energy sector and, not by default, macroeconomic policies and actions in relation to global warming. It has become central to any contemporary critical analysis of the South African economy as it sits at its core, not only by virtue of its weight in economic activity but also through its politically

124

African studies – a reÀection of the global political economy

determining role for the rest of the economy. The MEC is a useful prism to ¿nd where political and economic power lie in South Africa and how it has been hugely inÀuential on the shifting role of the state. With the safeguarding of positions of large-scale private capital, as well as the Apartheid regime’s frenetic pressure and campaigning during the pre-1994election period, to those who might have feared a major shift in economic power post-1994, the status quo appeared relatively secure at the time of the transition. Additionally, the civil service and key posts in ministries by the ‘old guard’ in areas such as economic affairs, mining and energy, meant any progressive changes faced entrenched, systemic, institutional resistance. The external forces of history were also pitted against any major shift of power during South Africa’s historical transformation from Apartheid state to democratic nation. As Magubane (1979) proposes, an understanding of contemporary South African inequality and political economy requires it to be placed within a wider political economy matrix, which takes into account the inequality between, on the one hand, advanced capitalist countries and, on the other, South Africa. The former have bene¿ted from capital accumulation drawn from the colonies, enabling their industrialisation, while fostering under-development and impoverishment in the colonies. For Magubane (1979), imperialism, colonialism and the development of capitalism are the pegs on which an understanding of South African race, class and contemporary society can be hung. In arguing this, he highlights the importance to contemporary South African society of European settlement and cultural domination, the migrant labour system upon which the MEC was developed, and the appropriation and exploitation of South Africa’s (and more widely Africa’s) human and natural resources. It is of note that there has been a deliberate obfuscation of class and the class struggle in contemporary South African political analysis both by the ANC and by the dominant global institutions. As Magubane (1979) argued in the Apartheid years (but it remains true well after that time) there was a reluctance to criticise a political elite when that elite is black.17 Prior to 1994, ANC policies promised socialism and African unity. Before the 1994 election, however, the ANC had dropped some of its policy planks, such as nationalisation of large-scale industry and sweeping government redistribution of wealth from whites to blacks. In retrospect it is thus clear that neoliberal pathways to development were in the minds of at least some of the ANC leaders prior to 1994. In fact at that time, even COSATU (the Council of South African Trade Unions), then one of the world’s most militant trade union organisations, endorsed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, effectively removing trade protection and leaving small newly developing industry exposed and vulnerable. Terreblanche (2002: 101) explains this shift as being due to the extraordinary capacity [of the corporate sector] for propagandising and myth-making [which] enabled it to convince ANC leaders … that the corporate sector [was] the deus ex machina that would solve all social problems of poverty, inequality and unemployment. It said it could do so

South Africa 125 provided three preconditions were met: ¿rst, South Africa should be democratised; second, the corporate sector (and with it, also the power and property relations of the South African economy) should be left intact, and granted all the freedom … normally granted to a corporate sector in a genuinely liberalcapitalist system; and third, a neoliberal macroeconomic and export-oriented policy should be implemented in order to integrate South Africa into global capitalism. In turn, the corporate sector promised ‘that if its role in the economy was left intact, it would deliver the jobs, taxes and improvements in living standards’ desired by the ANC (ibid.: 103). While it was under public gaze and the pre-1994 political negotiations were taking place for the transition from the Apartheid regime to free and inclusive democratic elections, the ANC leaders were wined and dined, Àattered and cajoled from morning till night by the captains of mining, industry and banking (Bond 2000; Terreblanche 2002). The corporate sector and the IMF were able to pressure the ANC on the economic directions being taken. Terreblanche (2002: 102) argues that the corporate sector was a ‘major player’ in the negotiations around the transfer of power from the Apartheid regime to majority rule, ‘boxing in’ the ANC. It was in 1993 that Mandela and the ANC made a concession to the cornerstone of neoliberal economic development policy, as it was promoted by the IMF and the World Bank in middle and low income countries – the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs). These included free movement of capital, free trade, privatisation and in general a heavy reliance on the market which in turn meant low taxes and less interference by government in the market, which more deeply tied South Africa into the neoliberal development path, further impoverishing the poor majority. Importantly, there was a lack of technically competent economists within the ranks of the ANC (Terreblanche 2002). It was thus relatively easily persuaded that, if it did not follow a neoliberal road, all hell would break loose in the markets and this would place the whole transition process at risk. At stake was the future political and economic direction of the country. Given the comparative wealth and position of South Africa relative to all the other African countries, this direction, including its ideology, was crucial to the corporate sector and the international institutions of global capitalism. During the years of the Apartheid regime, the country had suffered a period of prolonged stagÀation, in part due to international trade boycotts, but also as a result of the unevenly structured economy. The corporate sector was then focused on ¿nding a ‘new accumulation strategy’ (ibid.: 95) from both the global economic arena and the African continent. According to Terreblanche (ibid.: 96), the main characteristic of this strategy was ‘that the supreme goal of economic policy should be to attain a high economic growth rate, and all other objectives should be subordinated to this’. This resulted in the ANC in 1993 abandoning its previous policies of redistribution and poverty alleviation. The Transitional Executive Council, an initiative of the ANC to

126

African studies – a reÀection of the global political economy

oversee the transition, signed a con¿dential protocol with the National Party and the corporate sector on economic policy, before accepting a secret $850-million International Monetary Fund loan to tide the economy over (Bond 2000). The protocol committed the ANC to a neoliberal, export-oriented economy with a strategy of redistribution through growth. It was trickle down capitalism. Bond concurs with this account of this critical period, writing that the power of white English-speaking business rose during the 1990–94 negotiations in a period that included South Africa’s longest depression, from 1989–93. In late 1993, the ANC put the ¿nal touches on the ‘elite transition’ to democracy. Bond continues: [the] long-standing ANC promises to nationalise banks, mines and monopoly capital were dropped [April 1992]; Mandela agreed to repay $25 billion of inherited apartheid-era foreign debt [October 1993]; the central bank was granted formal independence in an interim constitution [November 1993]; South Africa joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade on disadvantageous terms; and the International Monetary Fund provided a $850 million loan with standard Washington Consensus conditionality. (Bond 2010).

Post-1994 In January 1995, the process of privatisation began in earnest with the abolition of controls over the South African exchange rate. This was followed by the raising of interest rates to a record high. Further, between 1998 and 2001, the ANC government granted permission to South Africa’s biggest companies to move their ¿nancial headquarters and primary stock market listings to London, resulting in a large outÀow of ¿nancial capital leaving the country. Between fraudulent activities by banking and stock-broking of¿cers, false trade invoicing, debt swaps, transfer pricing to shell companies by major conglomerates with a presence in South Africa (Bond 2000) and various other nefarious activities, capital Àight from South Africa was signi¿cant throughout the 1990s. This generated unprecedented pro¿ts; at the same time robbing South Africa of much needed capital, and resulted in a ‘cataclysmic drop’ in the value of the rand (ibid.). While there is much evidence for scurrilous ¿nancial and MEC sectors’ activities during the transition period 1994–2000, the main point is that the ANC leaders failed to protect the interests of those, the majority, whom they were chieÀy elected to serve. The greed of the economic elite and, conversely, a complete lack of loyalty and commitment to the majority by the most powerful players determined the new economic directions of the country. At the time of the ANC democratic victory in 1994, the West welcomed South Africa back into the international fold of democratic nations. As Roy (2012) writes: [w]hen Nelson Mandela took over as South Africa’s ¿rst Black President, he was canonised as a living saint, not just because he was a freedom ¿ghter

South Africa 127 who spent 27 years in prison, but also because he deferred completely to the Washington Consensus. Socialism disappeared from the ANC’s agenda. South Africa’s great ‘peaceful transition’, so praised and lauded, meant no land reforms, no demands for reparation, no nationalisation of South Africa’s mines. Instead, there was Privatisation and Structural Adjustment. Mandela gave South Africa’s highest civilian award – the Order of Good Hope – to his old supporter and friend General Suharto, the killer of Communists [at least half a million] in Indonesia. Today, in South Africa, a clutch of Mercedesdriving former radicals and trade unionists rule the country. But that is more than enough to perpetuate the illusion of Black Liberation. A year after its election and under pressure from domestic business, the World Bank and the IMF, the ANC came to accept privatisation in principle and dropped talk of regulating foreign investment. The government gradually eliminated measures to protect the currency and implemented some facets of trade liberalisation even faster than required by its commitments to the WTO (Fine 2008). This again accentuated existing inequalities and poverty. The global spread of ¿nancialisation and deregulation has had a huge negative impact on South Africa since 1994, serving the growth and dominance of the ¿nancial sector and rentier interests within the country. Carnegie (2007: 7) writes that the ‘internationally hegemonic neoliberal discourse and [South Africa’s] sub-hegemonic domestic ¿nancial interests’ ensured monetary policies that favoured the expansion of the ‘¿nancial sector over the interests of South African labour and industry’. Such policies not only created short- and long-term instabilities in the economy, but increased inequalities in an already seriously divided country. Driving neoliberalisation and ¿nancialisation of the economy, in more recent years since 1994, economic growth has been driven by consumption and debt creation without suf¿cient investment and building of infrastructure and productive capacity, thus entrenching bene¿ts of the ¿nancial sector while increasing the country’s economic liabilities, with consequences for the majority population and the stability of the economy. Ndikumana and Boyce (2002) argue that there is a strong correlation between the availability of credit to the private sector, capital Àows and capital Àight, trends which have been apparent in other Southern African nations, and very probably could be shown also for South Africa. In a sense, as Terreblanche (2002) claims, the ANC got what it wanted – political control í while the corporate sector got what it wanted í continued control of the economy, the latter at least with the added advantage that South Africa was no longer the subject of international trade embargoes. All of this took place against the background of wider events: the global power shifts (including ideological shifts) between the communist block and the West, the hegemonic power of neoliberal ideas proposed by the Washington institutions and Western governments and the loss of material support for the ANC from the Soviet Union. Africa is often portrayed as an economic ‘basket case’, a continent plagued by corruption, poor governance, under-development, violence and poverty. South

128

African studies – a reÀection of the global political economy

Africa, by comparison, is held up as one of the more successful models of development in sub-Saharan Africa. It is treated by the West as a key link to other sub-Saharan African countries. It is able to project the aspirations of Southern Africa by being seen to be in concert with Western ideological imperatives. One can ask why there might have been any belief in the ANC that neoliberal policies would deliver what they had fought for in the Apartheid years. The conÀation of economic freedom (expressed through trade, private ownership, the free movement of capital, but not labour or basic economic security) with political freedom has always been a cornerstone of neoliberal ideology and a fundamental condition for pro¿table capital accumulation. As was wholly predictable, the practical policies arising from this political ideology as adopted by the ANC have given rise to growing inequality and continuing poverty in South Africa. In 2001, a policy statement from COSATU (2001) reÀected unease with this strategy and its consequences: In contrast to … political progress, in socio-economic terms the legacy of Apartheid remains entrenched and, with the massive loss of jobs in the past decade, even appears to be worsening. Wealth is still concentrated in a white minority. The nature of capital remains largely the same – concentrated in the mining–¿nance complex, which continues to dominate the commanding heights of the South African economy. Serious inequalities persist. Almost half of the population lives in poverty, including many of the employed – the ‘working poor’. Unemployment and under-employment are on the rise. The complex nature of the transition [has] emerged in deeply contradictory government policies. The people’s successful struggle against Apartheid made South Africa a potentially remarkable society, a rainbow nation of people who had fought for and seemingly won freedom from oppression and exploitation. The new post-Apartheid constitution was one of the most progressive in the world – both in terms of human rights and the environment. However, the adoption of the neoliberal capitalist model of development has turned South Africa into yet another competitor in the global marketplace with a government that increasingly lacks legitimacy. The recent history of South Africa reveals the adoption of neoliberal economic policies in the ranks of the African National Congress (ANC) immediately pre- and post-1994 when the ¿rst post-Apartheid democratic elections were held, and the acceptance by ¿rst President Mandela, then Mbeki and later Zuma, that there was no other way. The shift in macroeconomic policy away from some recognition that equity, justice and redistribution mattered, to an enthusiastic embrace of neoliberal capitalism is an extraordinary example of the power of capitalism, and further, neoliberalism and the corruptibility of the state. The policy, for example, of ‘Black Economic Empowerment’, conceived in principle as a way to promote black equity in business, in practice has served as another tool facilitating capital accumulation, as well as an opportunity for corruption amongst the new black elite facilitated by their international corporate partners, ¿nanciers and bankers.

South Africa 129 The sham that democracy in South Africa has become is summed up in the words of Tinashe Njanji (2010), a young Zimbabwean refugee and colleague who currently resides precariously in a one-room unlined tin hut in the township of Khayelitsha: So far we have had three presidents since 1994, councillors and mayors come and go but nothing changes. We only see them when they want our vote. Our unemployment rate is one of the highest in the world. We have no proper housing or water or electricity, transport or toilets; students are dropping out from tertiary institutes due to high tuition fees and rural youth don’t even get to tertiary levels. Youth are languishing on the township streets soon after completing their matric – with no possibility of a future. Most people are still residing in shacks – freezing in winter; cooking in summer. South Africa provides an important microcosm of the world for a number of other reasons. First, it has been described as a two-tier economy in which the bene¿ts and burdens of capitalist style development are clearly demarcated. The formal economy is linked into the global economy and has a share in the spoils of the market. This formal economy depends on the large reserve army of labour, labour that survives through eking out an existence in the ‘informal’ economy. In reality, South Africa represents a society with deeply entrenched class divisions that correlate closely to race divisions. These two tiers or classes represent a microcosm of both the global divisions between capital and labour or the rich and the poor and the potential adaptive capacity of populations to global warming. Those with resources clearly have greater adaptive capacity, at least some options and resilience in the face of disruptive global warming; the impoverished and marginalised have no access to adaptive resources and little or no resilience. Yet in a world facing the disruptions that will occur as a result of global warming, what options the latter have are being increasingly eroded as a consequence of the very political economic activity that has given rise to global warming. Further, South Africa provides a snapshot of the contradictions and processes of the capitalist system and capital accumulation, both historically and in the contemporary neoliberal phase, from the viewpoint of a middle-income, peripheral country that displays the considerable distresses of uneven and ecologically destructive development. Third, South Africa captures many of the contradictions of capitalism that are evidenced in global warming. On the one hand the economy is underpinned by coal as the primary source of energy and the extraction rate of South Africa’s vast reserves is being increased for domestic consumption, for the cheap, lessthan-cost processing of materials for multinational bene¿t, and for export. On the other hand, South Africa, like Africa generally, is very vulnerable to the impacts of global warming. In addition to the effects on people, South Africa’s rich and diverse biodiversity and the precariousness of this to speci¿c climate niches provide an early litmus test of the impacts of global warming.

130

African studies – a reÀection of the global political economy

Fourth, South Africa is of signi¿cance as one of the African sites recognised as the cradle of humankind. It might tragically, and ironically, be a country on the continent that is witness to the ¿rst unravellings of human civilisation as a result of global warming. South Africa was also the site for one of the twentieth century’s great liberation struggles – the internationally supported struggle against Apartheid and human oppression. It is a liberation struggle that has turned sour, ¿lled with betrayal and disappointments after so much sacri¿ce and so much promise, to become a state characterised by poverty, inequality, corruption, injustice and xenophobia. Finally, South Africa is a country with close historical and geographical ties and powerful and inÀuential political and economic links to the rest of Africa. It is now a hegemonic power on the African continent, both politically and economically, driving the same capitalist model of human development. In summary, South Africa illustrates many aspects of the history of capitalism, and why the capitalist model of human development is not only not just or sustainable, but is both contributor to the crisis of global warming and is rapidly destroying the ecological basis for adaptation both in South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. South Africa is a good site for revealing some of the implications of global warming, including through the prism of the electricity sector, and within that the coal industry. Electricity and coal are central to the country’s political economy. Electricity is one facet of the economy that binds the country to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. Coal-powered electricity and coal mining not only have an enormous impact on the country’s water, land and air environment, but also give South Africa the highest carbon emission footprint on the continent. South Africa also illustrates the inextricable entwinement of fossil fuels, global institutions, capitalism and global warming. In summary, South Africa presents a paradox of mega investments in electricity generation at the same time as continuing the enormous inequalities in electricity access – in both South Africa and throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Crucially however the focus on South Africa, in history and today, and on the energy and coal sectors tells us that the West and other institutional pillars of capitalism, ever since colonial times and continuing into current times, has exploited and continues to exploit South Africa’s material human and resources.

Key development policies post 1994 There were a number of macroeconomic development policies post-1994 that have facilitated the development of neoliberal economic policies in South Africa, cementing South Africa’s place as hegemon on the African continent. Chronologically these moved further and further down the neoliberal road. The earliest and one of the most signi¿cant policy frameworks adopted by the ANC government, and at least in part in keeping with its former progressive policies, was the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) in 1994. This was contained in the manifesto of the 1994 election coming out of COSATU and

South Africa 131 particularly the National Union of Mine Workers (NUM). It aimed at ameliorating the circumstances of the black majority and warned that ‘policies concentrating purely on promoting economic growth would accentuate existing inequalities, [and] perpetuate mass poverty’ (Terreblanche 2002: 108). It sought to address the distortions and injustices that had Àourished during the Apartheid era. However, the RDP lacked detail in its application and was underpinned or, it could be argued, was undermined by conservative economic policies. Following it, in June 1996, and undoing much of its thrust was GEAR (Growth, Employment and Redistribution), a new macroeconomic strategy and the economic plan championed by Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s successor. Its focus shifted to economic growth. Its general thrust was in accordance with the Washington Consensus,18 and in many ways amounted to a self-imposed set of IMF-style structural adjustment policies. It removed many of the social reforms included in the RDP (large-scale land reform, housing and municipal services, employment creation and youth programmes). The adoption of GEAR meant the economy was effectively divided in two: the ¿rst economy a capitalist enclave for a minority (6 per cent) of the population; the second, the informal sector, for the majority, the unemployed who live in the townships and in rural areas: in many ways, an extension and replica of the centre and periphery of the globalised capitalist system. In practice GEAR failed all three of its own key performance indicators for success: triggering growth, stimulating job creation and increasing socio-economic equality (Marais 2001: 165). The two economies of the post-Apartheid years have continued and have in fact further entrenched the systematic and systemic development of under-development and poverty. The formal economy, it is important to stress, is intimately dependent on the informal (which provides cheap labour underpinning the formal sector19) while those in the informal economy are largely dependent on their own resources for survival. Consequently, GEAR amounted to no more than a set of fantasy projections. Its failure was conceded even by the government itself. The third institution of signi¿cance post-1994 was the broad-based Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) Act of 2003 which was essentially a growth strategy targeting racial inequality. The purpose of the BEE was claimed to be both moral and economic. It set out to redress the wrongs of the Apartheid government which had systematically excluded black African, Indian and ‘coloured’ people from equal participation in the country’s economy. It also sought to assist the economy to grow. Particularly relevant to this analysis is that, as part of the BEE Act, there is a Mining Charter which aims to transform the mining sector so that mining companies have at least 26 per cent BEE (in essence black) ownership. In time this was planned to rise to 51 per cent. However, as Gumede (2007: 127) wrote of BEE, there exists ‘massive potential for corruption when privatisation is used to promote black economic empowerment’, particularly when this is closely linked to the political elite. It has been plausibly claimed that ‘[t]he white establishment use black faces to gain access to the new government and often pay the blacks in the form of shares in their

132

African studies – a reÀection of the global political economy

companies.’ The BEE Act as it was already understood by late 1996 was a ‘sham’ (Business Report, 10 October 1997: quoted in Bond 2000: 39) in terms of generating equal access in the economy. It has facilitated the structural expansion of the white elite class to include now also a small black elite, overcoming the international constraints to capital accumulation posed by Apartheid, while maintaining the basic class structure of South African society. The fourth major macroeconomic strategy adopted by the South African government post-Apartheid was the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative of South Africa (or AsgiSA) introduced in 2006 during Mbeki’s second term of of¿ce. This has resulted in an increasing amount of state investment in economic infrastructure, investment made on the basis of ¿nancial returns and economic growth (McDonald 2009) rather than of meeting the needs of an impoverished population. This also marked a move away from the large-scale expenditure by the state, as occurred in the GEAR years, for social infrastructure. Both GEAR and AsgiSA represent the tension between service delivery to the people and servicing the needs of capital accumulation, with the latter being triumphant and the principle being exported throughout the rest of Africa under the guise of development (McDonald 2009). The AsgiSA development model is supported by the African Union’s New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). Amongst its stated objectives are the eradication of poverty, the sustainable growth and development of African countries, an end to the marginalisation of African countries in the globalised world and the full integration of African countries into the global economy (NEPAD 2010). Drafted under South African President Thabo Mbeki’s direction, NEPAD is very pro-corporations, calling for a massive amount of foreign investment in privatised infrastructure. Its aims are to open up African markets and to secure increased trade, investment and aid, within the neoliberal development framework. Through NEPAD, the South African state facilitates the expansion and penetration of South African corporate, state and parastatal social relations into African economies (McDonald 2009), allowing the surplus reserves of capital to expand beyond the South African economy. The imperatives are pro¿t, growth and the further expansion of the capitalist system throughout Southern Africa. The consequences are the destruction of local economies and cultures, the de-peasantisation and proletarianisation of the people, and the seizure of various commons (land, water and minerals in particular). In other words, the particular social relations of production continue to expand and deepen the rift between both classes and between humans and the environment. Other institutions which impinge on the subject matter of this analysis are the South African Constitution and various government departments – the Department of Minerals, the Department of Energy and the Department of Environment.20 The constitution is widely acknowledged as excellent on a number of counts, including, remarkably, for its attention to the environment. The South African constitution and the environmental legislation that has Àowed from it are amongst some of the best in the world. Subsequent policies and practices have not been so remarkable.

South Africa 133 Under the Minerals Resources Development Act of 2002, the government nationalised mineral resources (Spoor 2009). Previously, landowners owned both the surface and underground mineral rights and therefore could negotiate with mining companies for compensation if land was taken for mining purposes. Now, the Department of Minerals controls mineral resources and issues prospecting and mining permits, subject to environmental impact assessments (EIAs) and in consultation with landowners and the communities affected – the last being points ‘in principle’. The EIAs are funded by the prospective mining company and it is the companies who employ the relevant consultants (Spoor 2009) so that the prospects for such EIAs being unbiased and critical of their contractors are not high. Again, the community consultations are often far removed from best practice. Mining applications are subject to appraisal by the Department of Minerals and Resources (DMR) which can authorise them even against the advice of other departments, such as the Department of the Environment (DE) (the DE cannot contest such authorisations). According to Marlefane (2012), the Minerals Resources Development Act has delivered all sorts of irregularities. She argues that permits for both prospecting and mining are being issued in locations that are very sensitive in terms of water and biodiversity. Rural communities, which are supposed to bene¿t from the new mining laws, aren’t. This is principally because the BEE partners are not bringing rural communities in as their partners. Instead, ‘[m]any government of¿cials, former of¿cials and their families have decided to seek their fortune in the mining industry through BEE deals in the coal industry’ (Groenewald 2009). Groenewald describes how Coal of Africa, an Australian company, is partnered with the Mvelaphanda group (holding 26 per cent) that was, until May 2009, headed by ‘Tokyo’ Sexwale, a very wealthy former cabinet member who later was appointed as head of the Human Settlements Ministry by President Jacob Zuma. Since the national election held in May 2009, the former Minister for Minerals and Energy, Buyelwa Sonjica, has been made Minister for the Environment. This meant she would be the minister considering appeals made against the licences issued by the former Department of Minerals and Energy (DME), her former department. Environmentalists saw this as a sign that BEE coal-mining interests would now trump environmental concerns. That such high ranking and powerful public of¿cials bene¿t from BEE brings into question the integrity not only of the programme but also of the overall governance of mining in South Africa. This is a major concern. The fossil fuel sector has a powerful lobbying voice at both the international level and, in the case of South Africa, at the national level where corruption and political inÀuence merge. This is but one vignette in the case for why national and global institutions will not tackle global warming. The documentary journalist Grobler (2010) has also indicated that the state had announced plans to start its own mining company. The government had proposed that anyone who goes into partnership with it will then be exempt from some of the legislative requirements, including requirements in relation to environmental

134

African studies – a reÀection of the global political economy

management planning and consultation with landowners. This would amount to not only a further corporatisation of the state, but a complete merging of the interests of the government and those of the mining sector, including the coal sector. A further development of the economy í signi¿cant in terms of the organisation of the social relations of production closely entwined with the MEC and of continuing and growing signi¿cance í has been the growth in the ¿nancial sector. As Ashman et al. (2010: 174) write: In the context of South African production, ¿nancialisation has produced a particular combination of short-term capital inÀows (accompanied by rising consumer debt largely spent on luxury items) and a massive long-term outÀow of capital as major ‘domestic’ corporations have chosen offshore listing and to internationalise their operations while concentrating within South Africa on core pro¿table MEC sectors. The result, even before the impact of the global ¿nancial crisis, was a jobless form of growth and the persistence of mass poverty for the majority alongside rising living standards for a small minority, including new black elites. Furthermore, what was needed in South Africa was for pro¿ts earned to be reinvested within the country in long-term value-added sectors that increased employment with decent working conditions. The economy also needed to be restructured towards more labour-intensive industries and away from the MEC and the ¿nancial sectors (the latter of which contributed signi¿cantly to the destabilisation of the South African economy); from the high unemployment, underemployment and casualisation of employment; and from bubbles in real estate and ¿nancial asset markets (Mohamed 2009). Mohamed (ibid.) asserts that various government policies have led to increased ¿nancialisation of South Africa’s largest corporations. Short-term and speculative investments have ensued. The highly concentrated South African economy is now even more concentrated and dependent on the MEC, particularly for export earnings. What is signi¿cant and central is that these macroeconomic policies of the ANC government have ensured South Africa has the highest national and one of the highest per capita carbon emission levels in the world and also one of the most inequitably sourced. The arguments used by the government that economic growth is necessary to lift the poor out of poverty and hence, that no caps should be placed on South Africa’s carbon emissions, are a smokescreen to allow a model of economic development that bene¿ts a minority at the expense of the majority and the environment. South Africa illustrates the deepening and expanding division and the intimately connected paradox of private accumulation and public impoverishment within the system of capitalism. It represents a microcosm of the global capitalist political economy in which the accumulation of capital is juxtaposed to the increasing fragility of life for the majority of humans and species, the growing alienation of humans from the environment and through the destruction of the biosphere. For

South Africa 135 the ANC to gain power, compromise was perhaps inevitable, but the adoption of a neoliberal agenda at the expense of the poor and black communities that had brought them to power is a deep betrayal and abrogation of responsibility to the ANC’s constituents – the black majority. The socio-economic structures that the ANC inherited, along with South Africa’s continued integration into the global economy as a semi-peripheral nation, have been further cemented since 1994, with the continuing dominance of the MEC in concert with the ¿nancial sector, in the South African economy and the rise of South Africa’s wealthy black elite, in part through the policies of Black Economic Empowerment. South Africa has experienced colonialism, civil (colonial) war and Apartheid. Each of these has incontestably and signi¿cantly inÀuenced the shaping of the country. It is its contemporary global political economy structures and ideology however which have most clearly determined current economic outcomes. One of South Africa’s foremost social and political commentators and activist academics, Ashwin Desai (2002: 18), writes ‘[t]he transition to democracy was underpinned by corporatism … conÀict was to be institutionalized [and] control [was to be] by the ANC or its allies in the tripartite alliance’.21 He observes that today dissent from the ANC party line is decreasingly tolerated. Real power in South Africa remains with the black political and economic elite, with the large ¿nancial and mining oligopolies and with the rich white farmers. Fine (2008) writes: ‘it was inescapable that there was an integral partnership between state and private capital, and an equally integral connection between a core set of activities around mining and energy, straddling the public/private divide.’ This partnership with state capital supporting/subsidising private capital can be seen very explicitly in the energy sector today. The media have revealed that some of the largest mining companies in South Africa continue to have subsidised electricity from Eskom in special, secret ‘sweet-heart’ deals,22 while the people of South Africa, many of whom cannot afford electricity at all, are faced with large price hikes. It is the David and Goliath of South Africa and Africa – the impoverished, disempowered people who live on the margins in the struggle for survival versus corporate capital, corporatised state interests and an economy structured to favour the latter. It is a complex struggle for survival that now has added to it the growing impacts from global warming – food shortages, water shortages and a growing inÀux of refugees í and the increasing disruption of the very biosphere upon which the people so closely depend.

Concluding comments Moving this discussion to the international arena, in terms of the ANC development trajectory and the neoliberal thrust of economic policies adopted in the post-Apartheid era, it is signi¿cant that the ANC came to power during the height of the neoliberal globalisation project. For some, the economic policies of postApartheid South Africa have been little more than a continuation of Apartheid-era economics. The question that is raised frequently in the literature (Bond 2000, 2006; Magubane 2004; Marais 2001; Terreblanche 2002) is whether the ANC

136

African studies – a reÀection of the global political economy

government deliberately betrayed its constituents, or whether it was powerless to choose differently. Saul (2001), in an article titled ‘Cry for the Beloved Country: Post-Apartheid Denouement’, maintains that there was a betrayal on the part of the ANC itself, while Connell (2009) suggests the ANC government was and remains powerless to be other than part of the globalisation project of capitalism. The implications of the neoliberal model of development now adopted by the South African political elite are rippling throughout sub-Saharan Africa, driven both on the continent by South Africa, but also globally by the hegemonic imperatives of the capitalist global economy. The privatisation of African economies is now led by signi¿cant pan-African institutions. In this, South Africa takes a lead role, such as in the African Union’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) whose neoliberal mandate is to build public/private partnerships to promote growth, investment and (so the mantra goes) jobs. Standing quietly but inseparably behind this is the growing presence of US military bases on the continent, ensuring the security of capitalism’s projects and inÀuence there. In conjunction with the political institutions, and true to the capitalist globalisation project, South African companies and the South African government are joining the rush to exploit other African countries (Bond 2006; Magubane 2004; McDonald 2010). The global context for the internal South African economic structure is its location in the global economy as a semi-peripheral economy led by a political elite. While interested in its own wealth accumulation, this elite promulgated that the neoliberal nature of contemporary globalisation leaves Pretoria with no other choice than to support the Washington Consensus. Just as South Africa belongs to the ANC in the sense that its moral authority (and ideological power) stem from its role in South Africa’s liberation history, South Africa, through its relations with international neoliberal institutions such as the World Bank, is able to spread its economic, ¿nancial and corporate interests throughout countries in sub-Saharan Africa. South Africa in the post-Apartheid era has lost the opportunity to build a united, sustainable, peaceful and secure society, a society with a sense of community and shared humanity across the country and beyond, across the African continent. It would have been dif¿cult but the time was ripe in 1994 and the period immediately following. The country was ready for that; in retrospect it was calling out for it. Mandela to some limited extent provided it but never really ‘seized the day’. Once Thabo Mbeki was in power, with his desire to build a neoliberal state, that opportunity was certainly gone. The white elite, realising that to preserve their own individual power there was no other way, welcomed the black elite to join their power base and that black elite quickly learned the ways of sel¿sh individualism and increasingly severed their links with their black brothers and sisters. The moment was missed and the neoliberal capitalist die was cast. The intolerable burdens being borne by many South Africans will eventually, however, usher in a new historical era for South Africa. In September, the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report ranked South Africa number one for adverse employeeíemployer relations (Bond 2012). South Africa continues to have the highest protest rates in the world and recent events have

South Africa 137 given birth to a new political narrative which has the potential to mobilise millions of brutally exploited South Africans to a ‘force capable of breaking sweetheart relations between state, ruling party, labour aristocrats, parasitical capital and the London/Melbourne mining houses’ (ibid.). The recent events which may be a catalyst for change began in Marikana, a mining community west of Pretoria. Their story is perhaps an omen for change and worth telling. South Africa controls more than 80 per cent of world platinum reserves. The largest buyer of platinum is the European automobile industry and because of the economic crisis in Europe, the market is relatively weak. Lonmin is a multinational company with headquarters in London and Melbourne and with Black Economic Empowerment partners including Cyril Ramaphosa, a former liberation leader, trade union of¿cial and now billionaire, oligarch, wheeler and dealer. Lonmin has platinum mines in South Africa, including at Marikana west of Pretoria. In August 2012, forty-six people were killed by police gun¿re at the Lonminowned platinum mine in Marikana, following a 6-week-long strike. There were reports that on the day of the shooting, some workers were executed far from the view of the press’s cameras; allegations have also surfaced that strikers arrested in the aftermath were tortured. This event has been compared to the infamous massacre of civilians at Sharpville during the Apartheid era. Like Sharpville, it has been claimed that this event has the potential to be a watershed event in South Africa’s history. Whether this is the case or not, it certainly represents a snapshot of power relations and ¿nancial interests within South Africa and internationally, between the elites and the poor; between those who create wealth and those who syphon off all its bene¿ts. Visually, Marikana is a picture of how the world’s poor are disposable Àotsam and jetsam, like thousands of scurrying ants amidst the wasteland of mining shafts drilled deep into the Earth. Marikana is a town dominated by thousands of workers’ shacks; squalid, leaking one- and two-room shacks, without electricity, without running water, with only rudimentary cooking facilities and outlying toilets servicing many. Some of the miners, having worked the mines for decades, and still today, have nothing to show for it but poverty, poor health and shortened life-expectancy. Some Lonmin rock drillers go to work on empty stomachs because of their poverty. On the other hand, the three top Lonmin executives together earn almost as much as the combined incomes of 4,000 rock drillers; rock drillers who additionally have numerous unexplained company deductions taken from their pay slips, before getting their subsistence R3000–R4000 a month salary (approximately US$360–US$480 per month). It takes about a decade for a miner to earn what an executive earns in a month, not including the various pensions, bene¿ts, share incentives and bonuses paid to executives. To earn this, a rock driller must work twenty-two 8-hour shifts a month and drill at least seventy holes per shift – harsh, dangerous and dif¿cult work carried out deep underground. The contrast between the pay of the striking rock-drillers and that of Lonmin’s executives is only part of the picture of the structural inequality built into mining company operations in countries such as South Africa.

138

African studies – a reÀection of the global political economy

Marikana has brought little bene¿t to the workers and their communities, and many costs – particularly land, water, environmental, health, and social costs. The level of violence exerted by the state (through its police) was excessive at Marikana, bringing to the fore the class interests and tensions at the heart of post-Apartheid South Africa and its ANC-led governing alliance. The ANC’s embrace of the market economy and the black elites’ commitment to maintaining their privileged positions are a reÀection of the fact that it was not just Apartheid that was the cause of black oppression, but the economic realities of the system of capitalism. Organisations such as the Benchmarks Foundation claim that the huge mining companies, including Lonmin, have been effectively involved in what amounts to land grabs … forcing communities off their own land with the full co-operation of the state, and ensuring an abundant and cheap supply of expendable labour. Since the August 16 Marikana massacre, there has been a series of wildcat strikes in a contagion of protest involving over 100,000 other workers across South Africa. However, Bond (2012) writes that while there has not been such a period of vibrant and explosive militancy in the last two decades, it is uncoordinated. COSATU, the trade union body, has become too corrupt and too close to power to lead the protest. In the wake of Marikana, COSATU failed to take any solidarity leadership role amongst the striking workers. Likewise, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the Communist Party in South Africa were ineffective and too closely entwined with the ANC. Then there is Julius Malema, former ANC youth leader expelled from the ANC; an opportunistic, corrupt, self-serving, wealthy businessman and loose cannon who has attracted a large following of impoverished and disenfranchised youth. While it is dif¿cult to predict the future course of events in South Africa, Bond (2012) asserts that there can no longer be any illusions that the ANC can lead the forces of liberation, or provide the leadership of a country where the forces are converging to bring about deep and transformative change, or widespread chaos and violence.

7

South African electricity: a capitalist hub

Introduction In the context of this book as a whole, South Africa provides so many lessons that are applicable to the planet as whole. That makes a focus on South Africa highly pertinent to the broad concerns of this book at both the level of global warming and in particular its impact on the poor of the planet and at the level of the suite of problems more generally that capitalism brings in its wake. In the global drive for mineral resources and energy supplies, the African continent has become of major strategic importance (Buscher 2009), both as a source of minerals, fossil fuels and energy in the global economy and also as a site of capital accumulation. As the regional and expanding hegemonic power and dominant country in the electricity sector on the continent (McDonald 2009), South Africa can be expected to have an increasingly inÀuential role in Africa vis-à-vis the international arena, including around energy, global warming and the spread of capitalism. It is thus important to acknowledge the intricate relationship between electricity developments on the African continent and South Africa’s energy sector developments. McDonald (2009: xv) maintains that ‘electricity has become an integral part of all capitalist activity’ on the continent. South Africa clearly represents the disconnect between humanitarian policy rhetoric and the harsh reality of the capitalist model of economic development. On the one hand there is the acknowledgement of poverty, inequality and the pending crisis of global warming; on the other, the reality of the policies being implemented with the clear intent of growing the capital-intensive, fossil-fuelled sector of the economy, increasing the coal-based electricity supply and expanding the capitalist relations of production throughout Southern Africa. This disconnect can also be found in the arguments used by the South African government in climate change negotiations, where it has proposed unrestrained growth on the pretext of enabling the country to lift the poor out of poverty before putting a cap on emissions. The reality is that the neoliberal development agenda has resulted in a widening gap between rich and poor and the infrastructure for increasing the already high emissions trajectory is being further consolidated.

140

African studies – a reÀection of the global political economy

The energy sector The current situation on energy policy in South Africa and the links between the electricity sector and the economy in general can better be understood if the reader has some knowledge of the various institutions that exist in South Africa to govern and inÀuence energy policy. This section therefore brieÀy outlines the key energy institutions. A remarkable 95 per cent of South Africa’s electricity and a yet more remarkable 45 per cent of Africa’s is generated and transmitted by the state-owned parastatal enterprise known as Eskom (Eskom 2008). Eskom and its owners, the South African Government, are committed to continued growth of the South African energy sector, using coal as the predominant fuel source, an ‘energy future on a coal and nuclear strategy with limited renewable energy targets … [the last amounting] to 1.5 per cent of ¿nal consumption’ (Pressend 2009). Both the expansion and partial privatisation of Eskom paralleled South Africa’s process of post-Apartheid economic neoliberalisation, with Eskom becoming a site for capital accumulation and sub-imperial expansion in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). A wholly owned subsidiary of Eskom Holdings, The Eskom Enterprises (Pty) Limited group, was created in 1999 as part of a deregulatory thrust in South Africa around the energy sector, with expansion into telecommunications, IT, engineering and other services (Greenberg 2009: 91). Of growing signi¿cance is Eskom’s thrust to play a lead role in the South African export and expansion programme in Africa generally, on the basis of the macroeconomic strategy and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) (Greenberg 2009). Through Eskom’s sub-imperial dominance of the regional market, it is expected for example that South Africa will use 60 per cent of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) output from the Inga Dams on the Congo River í dams built at enormous cost to the Congolese people, the majority of whom have no access to electricity. In 2006, more than 80 per cent of Eskom’s imported electricity came from Mozambique’s Cahora Bassa Hydro-electric scheme (which for many years has been bought at below cost under Apartheid-era agreements), with a signi¿cant percentage of this being on-sold to Zimbabwe (for a pro¿t). Such activities are driven by a desire for capital accumulation rather than for development to bene¿t the poor. Indeed, hydro electricity from such major projects has again led to dispossession of local communities of land they had owned and free access to water – and still without access to electricity. Within South Africa, Eskom has thirteen coal-¿red power stations, with two more, Medupi Power Plant, already under construction, and Kusile, which has contracts signed for construction. Upon completion, these will be the world’s third and fourth largest coal-¿red power plants respectively. They are just two of the ¿ve large-scale coal-¿red plants that Eskom is proposing to build. The decision to build Medupi and Kusile was supported by claims that clean coal technologies – carbon capture and storage í would be used. These claims are made despite the fact that South Africa does not have the right geological

South African electricity: a capitalist hub 141 conditions for such technologies. Even without this problem, it is unlikely that CCS technologies will be available for some decades – and then at huge cost1 – in ef¿ciency in energy production, in ¿nding suitable stable geological sites for storage and in the cost of retro¿tting existing power stations. Building coal-¿red power stations now is locking this form of electricity infrastructure into place for decades to come, effectively precluding moves to renewables. Eskom predicts its electricity supply will grow at 4.4 per cent per annum and that CO2 emissions from electricity generation will double in less than twenty years. Sasol (Afrikaans for South African Coal and Oil) is a coal-to-liquids (CTL) producer, established under the Apartheid regime as a means of securing South Africa’s independence from foreign oil imports. It has more recently expanded its interests into mining, energy, chemicals and synthetic fuels. It was at one time the largest private company listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and is currently the largest coal-to-liquids chemicals producer in the world. Sasol’s Secunda CTL plant in the Mpumalanga region is the biggest single emitter of carbon dioxide on the planet, producing in 2003, for example, 318 million tonnes of CO2 (Science in Africa 2006). Sasol has plans to construct a new CTL plant in the Limpopo province on the drawing board for some time, although in 2011 it was reported it had taken its ‘foot off the accelerator’ for the Limpopo Project Mafutha, the proposed 80,000 barrels per day CTL project. Sasol is now also a global petrochemical group, producing fuels and chemicals. It is important at two levels: ¿rst as a component of South Africa’s high carbon emission energy mix; and second as a political player. Its economic role also both furthers and is driven by the imperatives of capital accumulation. For example Earthlife Africa and Oxfam International (2009) have revealed attempts by Sasol to claim carbon credits inappropriately under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects by building a gas pipeline from Mozambique to Gauteng (in north-central South Africa) to fuel its Secunda plant. Such attempts are more in line with capital accumulation ambitions than with reducing carbon emissions. Factors affecting the uptake of renewable energy include the lack of political will and also, for Eskom, the fact that having a centralised grid based on coal¿red power is the most pro¿table option.

The South African economy, electricity and global warming It is enlightening to examine how electricity ¿ts into the wider dynamics of capital accumulation and crisis in Africa, particularly at a time when the rush to build electricity capacity on the continent has been likened to that of the nineteenthcentury ‘scramble for Africa’ with ‘electricity grid lines replacing the colonial railway lines of yesteryear’ (McDonald 2009: xvi). South African, American, European and Asian ¿rms are increasingly active in Africa. The neoliberal development model also serves both to justify neoliberal ideology as the only relevant governance model and to defend the spread of capitalist processes ‘in all spheres of life’ (Buscher 2009: 3956).

142

African studies – a reÀection of the global political economy

Today, more than 30 per cent of South Africans are dependent on paraf¿n, raw coal and open wood ¿res for their cooking, heating and lighting needs (McDonald 2009). Imported hydropower from Mozambique and the DRC has had detrimental social and ecological impacts on the people of these countries as a result of large-scale dam building and top down, mega project development. Despite the fact that most black South Africans have always had no electricity supplies, or supplies that are intermittent, illegal and/or unreliable (McDonald 2009), an electricity crisis in South Africa was ¿rst formally acknowledged only in 2005 when the normally electricity-secure industry and urban (mostly white) middle class faced blackouts known as ‘load-shedding’.2 That this ‘load-shedding’ constituted a crisis is something of a metaphor for the class-based inequality in South Africa. It was this ‘crisis’, however, that led South Africa not only to further cement its electricity into a coal-¿red, high-carbon emission future, but also to increase its dependence on global ¿nancial institutions such as the World Bank, giving further leverage to that bulwark of global capitalism and neoliberalism in driving macroeconomic policy on the continent – a story to which I will return shortly. The energy sector is critical to South Africa’s economy. The industrial and mining sectors consume 62.7 per cent of total electricity output (Hallowes and Munnik 2007). It is the second most energy-intensive economy in the world and the biggest greenhouse gas emitter on the African continent, with 73 per cent of African emissions (ibid.) but with less than 5 per cent of the African population. Within South Africa it is also very inequitably sourced. Statistics South Africa 2009 (2009) ¿gures reveal that while mining is of signi¿cant importance to the economy with, in 2006, the gold mining industry contributing 1.7 per cent to gross domestic product, the platinum mining industry 2.1 per cent and the coal mining industry 1.4 per cent, the contribution to the economy is signi¿cantly less than the relative amount of electricity these sectors consume. In terms of employment, the mining sector as a whole is responsible for only 6.0 per cent of the total labour force. More than 70 per cent of South Africa’s primary energy and 90 per cent of electricity generation comes from coal, of which South Africa has an abundant supply, as does a quarter of its liquid fuels. The country is by far the largest coal producer in Africa and is both a major exporter and a major consumer of coal, mainly for electricity production,3 but also has the world’s largest coal-to-liquid (CTL) plant. Five companies account for about 80 per cent of coal production in South Africa: Anglo-American, Exxaro, Sasol, BHP Billiton and Xstrata; with the exception of Sasol, all multinational conglomerates which not only bene¿t from sweetheart electricity deals, but which have their headquarters listed on stock exchanges outside South Africa. In 2009, the country produced about 224 million tonnes of coal valued around R60 billion (or €5.34) (MBendi Information Services 2010). About 51 per cent of South African coal mining is carried out underground, with the balance produced by open-cast methods. Coal is also a signi¿cant earner of foreign exchange. The industry is highly concentrated, with a handful of companies producing about 80 per cent of the saleable coal production.

South African electricity: a capitalist hub 143 The rapid growth of the economy in recent years has resulted in the government now aiming to double its electricity generation capacity from coal-¿red power stations by 2025 (EIA 2010).4 Whilst one of the supporting arguments for expanding coal mining and the building of new coal-¿red power stations is that it contributes to employment, the reality is that the industry is being increasingly mechanised and computerised. Pro¿ts and output grow but mining employment is decreasing. The total number of jobs in the coal sector has declined by nearly 50 per cent over the last twenty years (Minerals Economics Directorate 2008). The bene¿ts of the mining industry are clearly skewed to the better-off, which is exacerbated by what are effectively state subsidies to mining companies for water, roads, electricity and land, with the population in general bearing a considerable burden of the mining industry’s activities. Additionally, there is the burden carried by the state, and hence taxpayers, of workers’ compensation for mining injuries since mining companies do not pay royalties to the state (Spoor 2009). Turning to ecological health, in 2004 South African carbon dioxide emissions from coal mining were estimated to be 440 million tonnes (mt) with Eskom accounting for over 40 per cent of that (Hallowes and Munnik 2007: 12). Emissions have increased since and will go on increasing. The ¿gures in Table 7.1 ‘underestimate the emissions’ (Hallowes and Munnik 2007: 12) but they give an indication of coal consumption and carbon emissions for 2008, and the rate of increase since 2000. Table 7.1

South Africa Electricity: production, coal and carbon 2008

Production (GWh) Coal consumed (tonnes) Carbon dioxide (tonnes)

222,366 125,300,000 223,600,000

2004 206,799 109,600,000 97,700,000

2000 178,193 92,500,000 61,200,000

Source: Adapted from the 2008 Eskom Annual Report.

Creamer (quoted in Bond et al. 2009) contends that if coal consumption increases in line with capacity, Eskom will burn around 218 million tonnes when the current projects become operational and emit 390 million tonnes of CO2. However, Eskom itself is talking about ‘a possible demand of 374 million tonnes a year by 2018 if a third new coal ¿red plant is built’ (from a quote in Hallowes and Munnik 2007: 13). It has been estimated that forty new coal mines will be needed to service the demands of coal-¿red power stations, once the new Medupi and Kusile stations are operational, in addition to the sixty-four currently operating (Department of Minerals and Energy 2010). With continuing demand for coal from China and India, and soaring prices and pro¿ts, companies will remain hell-bent on coal expansion – no matter the cost to the environment and climate security. Other negative impacts of coal mining on land and water are on market gardening, farming, and tourism, with visual, noise and air pollution effects spreading over a physically much greater area than that of the mining site. The

144

African studies – a reÀection of the global political economy

history of conÀicting interests over water usage in South Africa is well documented by Hallowes and Munnik (2007) with industry having both a ‘voracious appetite’ (ibid.: 103) for water and also being responsible for high levels of contaminants in rivers, wetlands and the underground water table. Mining has also contributed to the disappearance of wetlands and the damming of rivers. In summary, the economic bene¿ts in terms of capital accumulation are considerable but the vast majority of these bene¿ts Àow only to the well-off. The ecological effects have been devastating and would cost billions to rectify; and the environmental impacts cost the poor very directly and profoundly.

The South African Government, Eskom and the World Bank Between October 2007 and February 2008 South Africa experienced major power supply interruptions and load shedding, forcing the temporary closure of mines and aluminium plants – in what became known as an electricity crisis. That a large percentage of poor households had previously had no electricity, and many more, only intermittent electricity, wasn’t considered a crisis. In response, Eskom applied to increase electricity tariffs amongst domestic users to help to fund its electricity expansion programme. At the same time, the government negotiated a loan from the World Bank. Ironically, while the World Bank is one of the leading ¿nancial institutions at the international global warming negotiating table and a key player in climate adaptation ¿nance, in 2010 it provided South Africa with a $3.75 billion loan to increase its coal-¿red power generation, speci¿cally to assist with the building of two new coal-¿red power stations, Medupi and Kusile. Meanwhile, the largest industrial users in South Africa continued to be exempted from paying an equitable share of electricity costs due to Special Pricing Agreements that were set up in the last days of the Apartheid regime just before the handover of power in 1994. Under these agreements, corporations such as Anglo American Corporation, BHP Billiton, ArcelorMittal and others were (and have continued) paying less than R0.14/kwh (6.7 Rand = A$1 approx. in November 2010) which has resulted in major inequities for domestic users. For example, McDonald (2009: 89–90) presents ¿gures which show the residents of Soweto (a major slum township just outside Johannesburg) paid 30 per cent more for electricity than nearby white suburbanites, and that there is full cost recovery in domestic use, which is 700 per cent more than what some large corporations are paying. Statistics on domestic disconnections – due in large part to inability to pay í are dif¿cult to come by, but McDonald (ibid.) suggests that there have been times since 1996 when the number of domestic disconnections has been greater than the number of connections. Eskom’s response has been to introduce pre-paid meters in poor areas. McDonald writes that this allowed for the logic of capital to apply, ensuring the consumers, who have social rights to electricity, paid for it. So in the wake of the electricity crisis and against the background of both hugely inequitable access to costs of electricity, in 2008 South Africans were informed that the World Bank was going to lend Eskom US$5 billion, the largest World Bank loan ever in Africa, for an electricity expansion programme.

South African electricity: a capitalist hub 145 A concerted effort by civil society organisations was mounted against the loan based on a number of concerns, including those related to global warming. Lack of clarity around the loan persisted until 9 April 2010 when, perhaps with a little irony just four months after the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, the World Bank announced the awarding to Eskom of a US$3.75 billion loan to co-¿nance the building of what will be the world’s fourth largest new coal¿red power plant, the Medupi Power Plant in Lephalale, Limpopo Province. Concurrent with this, Eskom applied to NERSA, the national electricity regulator, to increase electricity prices by 34 per cent to domestic consumers to help to fund a proposed R345 billion capital expansion programme over the subsequent ¿ve years (SouthAfrica.Info 2009). Eskom was granted a 25 per cent price increase for each of the following three years. The history immediately preceding the World Bank loan is revealing both because of the strength and breadth of opposition to it by civil society groups and because of the covert nature of the loan application and conditions. Arguments for the loan from business and political sectors have been that South Africa had no alternative: South Africa would be plunged into darkness and the economy would come to a standstill if new coal-powered energy wasn’t generated. It was argued the loan was needed to enable universal access to electricity in South Africa. The argument maintained that the country needed the Medupi coal-¿red plant by 2012 and Eskom indicated that technologies which reduced carbon emissions would be built into the plant. Even these technologies, however, are far from certain. Hallowes (2009) writes on this proposed deal of ‘the shocking record of World Bank oil loans to Africa [which] tells [the] story [of how] 80 per cent of projects that the World Bank invested in between 1992 and 2003 were designed to export oil to Western Europe, Canada, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and Japan’ and that, coupled with this, ‘South Africa’s energy and carbon intensive export-led economy, an economy in which 80 per cent of energy is used by industry and commerce, belies the argument that the loan has anything to do with universal access to energy by domestic consumers’. With the very explicit support of the World Bank, that economy is thus developing in a way that is completely contrary to what is needed to address the needs of the poor majority, or global warming. The Medupi power station alone will emit an extra 25–30 million tonnes of CO2 per annum (Hallowes and Munnik 2009), with additional fugitive carbon emissions from the opening up of new coal mines and additional transport upon which it depends. The argument that South Africa has carbon emission space because it has large-scale poverty to overcome is a red herring. South Africa’s per capita emissions of 9.8 tonnes of CO2 are as high as the UK’s (Hallowes and Munnik 2009), but very unequally sourced. In addition to the surge in carbon emissions, coal mining, bene¿ciation5 and power production require signi¿cant quantities of water and result in the toxi¿cation of water supplies. The building of the Medupi plant will affect future water supplies and air quality around Medupi for decades to come. The environmental and social consequences of this development will impact on the major water

146

African studies – a reÀection of the global political economy

catchments; the Limpopo, Vaal and Senque (Orange) Rivers are all going to have their water diverted for Medupi and future power stations. The South African Government acknowledges that the Waterberg area of Limpopo will exceed its air pollution-carrying capacity in future as a result of this development. Within the Limpopo Province, the Waterberg Biosphere Reserve was UNESCO-registered biosphere 2001. The area is a Ramsar Wetlands (covered by the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, an international treaty for the conservation of wetlands), extending over 400,000 hectares of the arid bush-veld that is dominated by different veld types, including tropical grasslands and savannahs, low mountains and escarpments and poor soils. About 80,000 people currently live in the biosphere reserve – raising cattle, growing crops, farming game and promoting tourism. It has been inhabited for hundreds of thousands of years and is an important San rock art area.6 This area is now a major focus of coal mining companies opening up to fuel the Medupi Power Station, near Lephalale. Coal in the Waterberg area lies beneath approximately 30 metres of overburden, which is considered shallow and therefore suitable for the relatively cheap, but environmentally more destructive, open-cast mining. Contrary to assessments of peak coal globally by Aleklett (2010), it has been claimed that the Waterberg area has enough coal for the next 150í200 years to ¿re eight power stations (CSIR 2009). The Exxaro company has the world’s largest open-cast coal mine here, a mega-mine; a 3.2 kilometrewide, 110 metre-deep swathe cut into the land. Visiting it, I was told by an Exxaro employee that it was going to be ‘driven all the way to the Botswana border, where it will meet up with another open cast mine’. The impact will be to turn this area into a vast black, smouldering and self-combusting, toxic, lifeless and unrecoverable wasteland strewn with tailings (waste or residue from mine workings). Standing in the highly computerised control room of the Exxaro mine in 2010 and looking out over the vast black smouldering scar extending far across the Earth, ¿lled me with a deep foreboding for the future of South Africa and the planet. This is the legacy being bequeathed to future generations by global capitalism, the World Bank, Exxaro and the ANC. Another dimension of concern regarding the World Bank loan is that the ANC bene¿ts ¿nancially from the construction of Medupi (through its Chancellor House investment in Hitachi Power Africa) and hence from the loan. Hitachi Africa is 25 per cent owned by the ANC’s investment arm, Chancellor House, and, as a partner in the consortium constructing the Medupi power station, was awarded a R38 billion Eskom contract (Bond 2010b). When former chairman of Eskom, Valli Moosa, made the decision to award the R38 billion Eskom contract to Hitachi for the building of Medupi, Moosa was a member of the ANC national executive committee, a very clear conÀict of interest. It has been widely claimed (Zille 2010) that the ANC will make an estimated R1 billion from the building of the power station, ‘enough to fund its election campaigns and the lifestyles of its leaders for years to come’, bringing about a situation which the leader of the Democratic Alliance party, Helen Zille, claims will be where ‘no opposition party may ever be in a position to compete fairly with the ANC again’ (Boyle

South African electricity: a capitalist hub 147 2010). The ANC will entrench its single party dominance and, in doing so, further weaken South African democracy. However, it will not be the ANC which has to pay back the World Bank loan. It will be the people of South Africa. Labour militancy was cited as the reason South Africa’s bond rating has been downgraded by the major ratings agency Standard & Poor to BBB (Bond 2012). The resulting higher interest rates will add more stresses to households and the economy. The World Bank loan will add to this. In summary, this loan is an illustration of World Bank hypocrisy and the determination to consolidate further a particular, destructive, neoliberal economic model on South Africa. The loan is an illustration of a lost opportunity to invest in more equitable, environmentally benign, socially bene¿cial, energy infrastructure directions. It also makes a complete mockery of the World Bank’s own efforts in tackling corruption and promoting good governance. Hallowes (2009: 28) concludes that the World Bank loan and Eskom’s governmentendorsed expansion programme represent a case of ‘recreating the logic of an economy that is internally subordinated to the interests of the minerals and energy complex and externally subordinated to the imperial market’. It effectively enables South Africa to export cheap electricity (or continue sweetheart deals with multinationals for below cost electricity) while suffering a shortage of affordable electricity for ordinary people at home. The building of further aluminium smelters, growing the economy through attracting an energy-intensive and highly polluting bene¿ciation industry and continuing to supply cheap/underpriced electricity to the MEC is a very short-sighted and irresponsible road to economic development, even without global warming. With global warming, it is a tragedy. It is no coincidence that South Africa has adopted inappropriate technologies, such as coal, nuclear and genetically modi¿ed crops,7 as all are technologies most suitable for capital accumulation. They all have embedded in them the sense of prestige, power and control that comes with large-scale, sophisticated and science-manipulated technologies, rather than the smaller scale, more democratic and accessible technologies that engender diversity, resilience, improvisation, innovation, self-suf¿ciency, equity and justice.

The state, corruption and democracy South Africa illustrates some core problems around the notion of the state and democracy in a global capitalist political economy, where the state (of South Africa) is dominated by particular class and economic imperatives which revolve around capital accumulation, growth and prestige. As Fine and Rustomjee (1996) argue, it is a paradox that in South Africa, the same class interests can potentially be served as much by nationalisation as by privatisation. This is very much in evidence, though not peculiar to South Africa. It is a reÀection of the merging of private and state capital, a merging of the interests of the political and economic elite both nationally and also globally. This merging of interests of political and economic elites is exacerbated in South Africa by the corruption of government by leading, mostly ANC, ministers and of¿cials.

148

African studies – a reÀection of the global political economy

Let us be clear, however, this corruption cannot survive and thrive in a global vacuum – it requires the opportunities provided by, and support and co-operation of international banks and ¿nancial institutions and other international institutions and individuals in places of power and inÀuence. The South African state and some of its most powerful of¿cials have become the mediators between global capital and the extraction of wealth from the people and the country. It is a painful and costly extraction that has cost many their lives, their health and livelihoods, and their lands. It is by its very nature, a corrupt and exploitative relationship, an expression of the growing rift between humans and the environment and the system of global capitalist political economy. Many of the ANC political elite have long been captured by the MEC and the ideology of neoliberal capitalism. They have become another layer of imperialists amongst their own peoples. These elites have been corrupted as bene¿ciaries of the corporate sector, often, but not only, through the institution of Black Economic Empowerment. At the same time, they are cut off from and indifferent to the people they represent, leaving them divided amongst themselves as we have seen in the xenophobic attacks since 2008 in South Africa – the poorest ¿ghting and killing the poorest – leaving the real causes of their poverty to continue unhindered, uncriticised, free to exploit the poor and enrich themselves. The elite are able to and do use the state and state-owned assets to promote their own material interests through networks of political and economic patronage, nepotism and corruption. Although this is recognised publicly as corruption, there is, as yet, no body with the power and political will to put an end to it. In South Africa, it is claimed (see for example Persson et al. 2010), no one can expose another’s corrupt practices in high of¿ces as everyone has something on someone else. Multinational corporations that do business in this environment are a central part of it, as was the World Bank in making its loan as reported above. It can be seen perhaps as an inevitable part of the process of capital accumulation and particularly neoliberalism that facilitates illicit capital Àows and a deregulation of the ¿nancial part of the economy. It can also be argued that corruption arises from an economic doctrine that offers no moral framework, no higher purpose other than the accumulation of wealth and pro¿ts in the market. At the centre of this accumulation of capital and wealth are the systemic linkages between the political elite, mining, energy and ¿nance which arise in two ways: ¿rst through investments, acquisitions and mergers; and second through the movement of people in top management positions through parastatal institutions such as Eskom, and private MEC/¿nancial entities. The institution of Black Economic Empowerment has facilitated these linkages and the Àow of bene¿ts into (black) private hands, a new development only in the sense of the inclusion of the black elite. Most fundamentally, however, it is the very size, wealth and power of the mega-corporations which give them their dominating and imperialistic inÀuence. If corporations don’t get the conditions that are favourable to their shareholders, cheap/subsidised electricity, low or no taxes, constrained wages and so on, they simply move elsewhere. Critical long-term examination might show this is not

South African electricity: a capitalist hub 149 such a bad thing if empowered and politically conscientised communities become engaged in creating their own histories, and shaking off the shackles of the culture and ideology of capitalism, which so effectively conspires to make us afraid of such freedom, of corporate-less, military-less and class-less futures. In South Africa, the economic and political powers of the coal and electricity sectors directly impinge on the environmental concerns about global warming í the gamut of immediately tangible environmental, governance and social issues: food and water security, health, air pollution and socio-economic issues of electricity access, poverty and inequality. They also threaten the young and already fragile democracy in South Africa. It is not just that the coal and electricity sectors are integral to the MEC, and as such at the centre of the nation’s macroeconomic policies. They are also to a considerable extent driving macroeconomic policy through the enormous power wielded by such corporations as Anglo American and BHP Billiton, amongst some of the richest and most powerful entities on Earth. The power of these corporations has been enhanced by the deregulation and ¿nancialisation of the globalised economy, a structural reality that enables them to move their capital and pro¿ts rapidly in and out of countries according to where the greatest pro¿ts can be made. This is a deeply disadvantageous environment for any national developmental model that is to bene¿t the people. It is not the corruption of the political elite that is the fundamental problem. Rather it is the construction of the state and the ¿nancialised global political economy. With regard to the former, as Harvey (2003: 91) writes, ‘the preferred condition for capitalist activity is a bourgeois state in which market institutions and rules of contract (including those of labour) are legally guaranteed, and where frameworks of regulation are constructed to contain class conÀicts and to arbitrate between the claims of different factions of capital.’ The power of the large corporations derives in part from the weight of such large-scale capital investment in the sector and the rami¿cations of that investment for the rest of the economy, but also, from the state’s commitment to the capitalist economic model.

What does this mean for global warming? South Africa is facing multiple crises as a result of its development path and the global capitalist project. Global warming will be a signi¿cant and growing factor which will interact synergistically with other crises, such as food insecurity, poverty, inequality, drought, polluted land and water, water shortages, poor governance and neglected or non-existent basic services including health, education, sewerage and water supplies. Added to this will be the pressures wrought by yet more refugees and political instability in neighbouring countries of sub-Saharan Africa as increasing numbers of people are forced to leave countries with increasingly fractured governance and deteriorating ecological conditions. South Africa needs to change course and protect its environment, its heritage and biological diversity; recover and protect its democratic institutions; protect its waterways and land; and support and regenerate its small-scale

150

African studies – a reÀection of the global political economy

agriculture and food growing sectors.8 Foremost, it must protect and support its people inclusively and equitably, pull down the barbed wire enclosing the rich enclaves and give the vast numbers of poorly paid, highly exploited security and domestic workers meaningful and productive employment. South Africa needs to democratise its institutions, de-globalise, de-commodify, nationalise and redistribute its wealth, overthrow its social relations of production and become a good neighbour on the African continent, supporting sustainable, equitable and inclusive human development for all. South Africa needs to unite with other African countries to negotiate reparations for ecological debt and for future global warming disruptions and catastrophes. This section has drawn together a number of strands from the study of South Africa to describe how that country’s coal industry and electricity sector, as parts of a complex structure straddling the ¿nancial, political, mining and energy sectors, has captured the state and is driving an agenda contributing to a catastrophic disjuncture between the interests of the majority and those of a small powerful national and global elite. What emerges in practice is that the coal and electricity sectors are part of an accumulation process that disenfranchises, impoverishes and further alienates the poor. At the same time it destroys the broad ecology with the result that there are declining natural resources for the poor to fall back on for survival. The South African development experience illustrates not only the corporate capture of the state, but also the corruption of the most powerful sectors of society. In summary, this study of South Africa illustrates a number of key points that are important to the political economy of global warming in that country, but which also reÀect much that can be found in the global political economy. First, South African institutions are deeply committed to the process of capital accumulation, expressed through continuing to grow and expand both the economy and the coal and coal-fuelled electricity energy sector, despite the costs to the people, the environment, the negative effects on global warming adaptation and the incontrovertible growth in carbon emissions. Second, the ¿nancialisation of the globalised economy and the internationalisation of South African corporate activity have exacerbated both class divisions experienced as wealth and power differences, and the rift between society and the ecology, as the rush for mining coal and other minerals continues and the pro¿ts from such activities leave the country. Third, international institutions such as the World Bank play a pivotal role in the endorsement of this political economy. The World Bank Medupi Power Plant loan is a global linking of elites and commonalities in their interests in the accumulation of capital, and in entrenching corruption and nepotism. Fourth, the South African study has illustrated how the coal and electricity sectors are integral to the sub-imperial expansion of capitalism throughout sub-Saharan Africa. It has also shown that the coal sector is central to the process of accumulation by dispossession: the dispossession of communities from their land, and the equally insidious dispossession of people from their livelihoods and health through the poisoning of the land, the water and the air. The Medupi Power Plant í with its World Bank loan, its projected emissions, its raison d’être being

South African electricity: a capitalist hub 151 cheap power for multinational conglomerates, its corrupt links to the ANC elite, its need for yet more coal mines – is a metaphor for the anti-social, anti-ecological contradictions of neoliberal capitalism in South Africa. Fifth, the market economy within South Africa and beyond, including land grabs and the industrialisation of farming, transforms increasing numbers of rural smallholders into the proletarianised unemployed without a future – again destroying people, communities, the ecology and the country’s adaptive capacity. Sixth, the model of development has not only further impoverished the poor but widened and deepened the gap between rich and poor. It is continuing to undermine the health of the broad ecology that the poor depend on, and will increasingly depend upon, for their survival. Seventh, the analysis illustrated another by-product of neoliberal capitalism where the predominant value is money and the market. It has shown how the incubators of power, greed and corruption have destroyed the integrity of the ANC and contributed to the skewing of the economy toward sectors that make money for some and where corruption greases political policies and political careers. Finally, while there are manifold demonstrations against the poor conditions under which people live, civil society and, postMarikana, more independent trade unions, represent the sectors in South African society that are leading the way in opposing this form of development. The particular signi¿cance of South Africa – a country that cannot be divorced from the wider African continent context – is that it is a microcosm of the global political economy. It shows the importance of ¿rst history to understanding global warming and to ¿nding solutions to global warming. It also highlights the capitalist development model with its inexorable dependence on fossil fuels and relentless pursuit of growth and expansion in complete contradiction to the requirements of the biosphere and humanity. South Africa exhibits the consequences of a state dominated by the interests of conglomerate capital, with all the resulting aspects of the deepening rift between humans and the environment. It exposes the commonalities of interests of global elites, the merging of corporate and state interests and the signi¿cance of power and hegemony in preventing the development of metabolically restorative and harmonious communities. It demonstrates the distinctive, hegemonic and dangerous power of corporations to society. South Africa is one country which will feel the terrible impacts of global warming very profoundly, given predictions that, with business as usual and somewhere between a 4° C and 6° C temperature increase by the end of this century, the planet will be unable to support more than one billion people, the loss being exponential, bunched toward the end of the century (Spratt 2011) and most severely and foremost impacting Africans. This will mark an unprecedented shock for African and South African societies, bringing both to the point of fracture and chaos at a time of growing global fracture. In facing such catastrophes, history shows African nations cannot look to the West or non-African nations for help. The issues here boil down to the contradictions between, on the one hand, African ecological sustainability and, on the other, the pursuit of neoliberal

152

African studies – a reÀection of the global political economy

capitalist industrialisation within South Africa and throughout Africa. The continuing spread of capitalism outwards from South Africa and throughout the African continent is both harbinger and guarantor of global warming catastrophe and ecological collapse for both South Africa and the continent. This can be clearly seen in the industrialisation of agriculture and the land grabs taking place in Africa, including by white South African farmers, the corporatisation of food production and the de-peasantisation of the African rural population who have nowhere to go but join the surplus and expendable labour in urban slums. The expanding capitalist social relations of production will not only increase the continent’s carbon emissions, but the wealth and growth created from this form of development will continue to bene¿t only the minority elite, while further locking in global warming, environmental destruction, economic insecurity and declining (global warming) adaptive capacities. Most fundamentally in the context of this book, South Africa, in history and today, has been exploited by the capitalist West. This section has a clear message with respect to the policies of the West and those of the global institutions when we seek to think ahead to how they will react to the plight of the poor of the world when global warming disruption really hits. They will continue as they have done for centuries and seek to maintain their narrow self-interests even when these are manifestly unjust. The walls, fences and military responses protecting the wealthier nations from hordes of desperate refugees will become ever more impenetrable and ever more sophisticated; the justi¿cations for this inhumanity ever more righteous. The impact and imperatives of capitalism through colonial and neo-colonial times and today are constant. It has always been driven by the imperatives of exploitation, of accumulation by dispossession for the bene¿t of a minority. In the twenty-¿rst century in Africa, all the forces are now lining up, to ensure that capitalism brings an end to human civilisation.

Part III

To have a future

This page intentionally left blank

8

Alternative futures

Introduction There are immediate and urgent steps that need to be taken to stabilise the climate and ensure humanity has a future. Following the crisis period we are currently in, we need to plan for a reduction in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, along with transitioning to new economies whereby the social relations of production are under social control and in metabolic relationship with nature. The most urgent ¿rst step must be to stop the extraction and use of fossil fuels. To kick-start this transition from fossil fuels must be the cessation of subsidies (and any forms of compensation) to the fossil fuel companies immediately, before the consequences become irreversible. The International Energy Agency maintains that eliminating fossil fuel subsidies globally could provide half of the carbon savings needed to stop dangerous levels of climate change. It would also free up billions of dollars of public money to help fund the transition to a new economy. It has been suggested that to do so we need to be on a war footing. Perhaps an unfortunate analogy given wars and war-footings in the twentieth century invariably meant the greatest burdens were carried by the poorest and least powerful and the bene¿ts accrued to the wealthiest and most powerful. In tackling global warming, the notions of equity and climate justice must be founding pillars. Governments and government ministers must start to be held accountable for their co-option by the fossil fuel lobby. In the same way, we have to hold fossil fuel corporations accountable for the central role they have played in global warming. Given the knowledge we have about anthropogenic climate change, the fossil fuel corporations are now corporate criminals who are taking the world to ecological destruction and must be challenged at every step – from their public relations inÀuence, their lobbying in climate negotiations, the destruction they continue to wreak on local communities and ecosystems from the Amazon to the Arctic, from the Niger Delta to the Mongolian Steppes. In so many of these locations we have turned our backs on how the oil, gas and coal companies have robbed people of their land, water, clean air, health and livelihoods to fuel our high consumption, privileged and unsustainable livelihoods. We must begin to address such past and continuing injustices as part of the immediate steps to address global warming.

156

To have a future

Instead of wasting time and resources in devising adaptive capacities (impossible to do so for such an unknown, unknowable, inequitably affecting, moving and complex target), we should be pouring resources into planning a transition into a new economic system that is sustainable; that is, one that is equitable, just and life-enhancing. We must restructure our economic base and in doing so be prepared for higher taxes, wealth re-distribution and lower excessive standards of living to fund the massive transition required. We must begin planning and transitioning using the tools of a real world economics to a more equitable global society which discards the fetish of growth economics and which places caps on power, wealth and consumption. We need to move beyond simply putting solar panels on roofs, introducing light rail and public transport, growing food locally and organically – all nevertheless good and essential things to do as part of the transition. They will not, however, stop the entwined juggernauts of the economic system of globalised capitalism and its Siamese twin, the fossil fuel industry with its terminal consequences. The focus of this section is on what sorts of societies will best address global warming. It has been argued throughout the book that global warming is but one of a suite of interrelated issues and that we need to address the structural causes of the whole gamut of problems that constitute a convergence of crises that have been called the ‘crises of civilisation’. What sorts of societies can we build that might resolve these crises and most urgently address global warming? What are the key principles and values, structures and institutions for such societies? We need to be clear about where we want to go as we set out on the journey, and then have some idea of how we are going to get there. This chapter will suggest some major considerations in building theories and societies for the future, developing these ideas in part from the criticisms of the capitalist system. I use the plural ‘societies’ for diversity and localisation are key principles for any resilient, just and sustainable future. Attempting to devise alternatives to neoliberalism and capitalism more broadly is a challenging task. As previously discussed, the whole orientation of contemporary capitalist society has effectively sought to de-legitimise the possibility of alternatives, or to immediately conclude that one wants to institute the state socialism of Stalinist Russia or Eastern Europe under communist regimes. There is, however, as never before, an urgent need for alternative visions, perhaps even for utopian visions, or what Chomsky (2010: 309) calls a ‘rekindling [of] the radical imagination’ for humanity. The capitalist system is ¿lled with too many contradictions, is characterised by too much injustice, and has given rise to too many crises and now only promises climate chaos, the collapse of ecological systems and human civilisation, for it to continue. Particularly in the West, there is little institutional appreciation of the non-material accumulation concepts of development or that, beyond a certain point in material wealth, more goods do not necessarily equate with better, happier or more developed lives (Hamilton 2003). As argued earlier, there is little acknowledgement of the historical processes which have given rise to the enormous disparities in wealth distribution or that the vast majority of the

Alternative futures 157 planet’s resources are owned, controlled and exploited for the narrow ends of a few; or that the issues of inequality and the exploitation of labour are key factors in ¿nding solutions to global warming. Nor is there a sense of transformative or revolutionary change. In the few pockets where (in the West) a sense of the need for change does exist, it is captured in large part by the various factions of largely marginalised socialist politics. In Central and South America and India, there are small-scale farmers’ movements, such as the Latin American Movimiento Campesino a Campesino, members of the World Social Forum, Bolivia’s Mother Earth and Indigenous groups calling for structural change to the global economy. In North America and Europe there is the movement that started as the Occupy Wall Street and the 99 per cent that has now spread to Europe. In Spain, Portugual and Greece, demonstrators have taken to the street opposing the imposition of undemocratic austerity measures, measures necessary to prop up the banks and the oligopolistic elites that are too powerful and too central to the system to fail. In Africa, there are many anti-capitalist movements and groups working for democratic change. The 2011–12 events in North Africa and the Middle East reveal the extent of the desire for radical change. The strength, pervasiveness and in a sense ‘solidarity’ of the power of the world’s rich, however, maintain the status quo globally – backed by state-controlled military and police forces and a powerful ideology. The power of global elites is dif¿cult to overthrow as it not only includes the hegemonic ideology but also (in the West) structural ties such as superannuation, pension funds and share ownership (albeit minority shareholdings) that support the capital accumulation process and capture the communities’ interests in the capitalist system, but do nothing for the redistribution of wealth or power or for laying the groundwork for sustainable futures. Conversely oppositional forces are divided – and this is nowhere more clearly evident than in unemployed right-wing thugs taking their revenge on even poorer, even more powerless refugees. Even in a wealthy, secure country such as Australia, the political elite has successfully managed to demonise refugees and remove their humanity and suffering from public sight, building a culture of ‘us’ and ‘them’ that is as cruel and dishonest as it is socially and economically vacuous. This is not fertile ground for deep and radical change. Further, we in the West too easily distance ourselves from what is happening in the South and have an almost pathological disassociation from what global warming really means in terms of the material and structural changes required. This chapter outlines the different worldviews that will be required in future and the constraints that future societies face. Acknowledgement of these constraints is important not only to avert extreme global warming but also to establish a realistic basis for what is available to meet the material needs of future societies. The question of institutions for the future is also addressed leading into the next chapter, which sets out the determination of the key principles, and values that must underpin future societies if they are to sustain a biologically diverse planet.

158

To have a future

Different worldviews To have a future, humans need to become critically conscientised regarding the hegemony of neoliberal ideology and the alienation of human lives as a result of the capitalist system and face up to the reality of the interconnected crises of civilisation. Thereafter human societies need to reconnect with the living planet through our cultures and the social relations of production. People’s behaviours are located within structural and ideological frameworks that mean that, alongside the transformation of the economic structures, new cultures and forms of human expression and satisfaction need to be developed. Future societies need to give more emphasis to the intrinsic and inalienable qualities of health, happiness and connection through community. Related to this, rather than the extrinsic material values fostered through over-production and consumption, there will need to be a re-establishment of life-enhancing values. A central tenet of the relationship between humans and the broad ecology, as prescribed by Marx, is that sustainability implies that it is the responsibility of all peoples and societies on behalf of all generations to come to care for the maintenance of the planet. The modern world under capitalism has lost its connection and sense of place in the broad ecology – to the land, water, animals and plants – and the metabolic systems supporting life on Earth. There needs to be a healing and reparation of the metabolic rift. The epistemologies and values of future societies can draw much from the wisdom and worldviews of Indigenous cultures. Many Indigenous cultures see that everything that has been created and given to us in nature is precious and is governed by divine laws. Nature has an intrinsic value. The conceptualisation of humans as custodians, caring for nature and seeing nature as sacred and central to all wellbeing, calls out to be emulated. For the Hopi Indians, for example, the Indigenous peoples of the world are the caretakers of life and, as with many Indigenous societies, believe humans ‘are to protect and use all these precious things wisely, and to share them in order to keep harmony among all people’ (Knudtson and Suzuki 1992: 190). This is not to argue that it is necessary for future societies to adopt Indigenous culture. That is not possible. It is rather simply to point to the fact that Western societies can learn from Indigenous culture the values of custodianship of the land and with that the communitarianism of that culture in respecting the value of community not only of people but of the broad ecology more generally. Future societies need to adopt new cultures only to the extent that either the acting out of their existing cultures cannot be maintained in a biosphere-constrained world or that the cultures continue to embrace the neoliberal values of individualism and acquisitiveness. Given the many crises of capitalism, there is now an imperative to develop a shared vision that embraces all humans more justly and equitably. To get from where we are now to that shared vision, however, is a great leap. In the context of spelling out the key differences between today’s economic neoliberal system and that of the future, highly relevant is the Lauderdale Paradox.

Alternative futures 159 Lauderdale revealed the contradiction of the inverse correlation between public wealth and private riches, ‘such that an increase in the latter often served to diminish the former’ (Foster and Clark 2009). This paradox starts from the fact that market economists treat nature’s contribution to wealth as zero. Hence the destruction of nature does not register. Foster and Clark (ibid.) argue that, behind this paradox, is the fact that neoclassical economics fails to recognise the distinction between the value in use and the value in exchange. As John Stuart Mill (1909) suggested, in economics ‘the word value always implies value in exchange. Hence, the use of a thing [in economics] means its capacity to satisfy a desire or serve a purpose.’ Now while one can see the logic in this, it means that certain resources which clearly have value in use (such as air) end up with zero value or at least lower values when seen in terms of their value in the market place. Something that is not a commodity, which is not exchanged in the market, has no value. This has major implications for planetary destruction as many of the resources that are not traded in the market place have intrinsic and immeasurable value (biomass for example). The paradox lies in the fact that increases in scarcity, in such necessary elements of life as air, water, and food, would, if privatised and hence have exchange values attached to them, enhance individual private riches, and indeed the riches of a country, but only at the expense of the common wealth. For example, if one could commodify water that had previously been available free by placing a fee on wells, measured riches of a nation would be increased but at the expense of the population. There is much more to the changes needed in economies and in economic thinking than is exempli¿ed in the Lauderdale Paradox. However, it exposes what is a key element. The issues here are not just about technical questions. They are much more fundamentally about what ideology and worldview one adopts. Transformational change will not be possible while people remain locked into the capitalist paradigm where their worldviews are in large part formed by the consumption-focused knowledge industry.1 It is of note however that some studies have found that critically informed citizens (and in the context in which this issue is raised here being critically informed is crucial), even those in the West who are the bene¿ciaries of the system, respond to questions around social issues and the allocation of resources in just and compassionate ways. In doing so, citizens draw on values of community solidarity and wellbeing and preferential support for the most marginalised or impoverished (Mooney 2009). Yet this is not how people vote in Western democracies.2 Much of the appeal in Western democratic elections is short term and within narrowly de¿ned personal, private, material and nationalistic interests with voters voting as relatively uninformed individuals rather than critically informed members of the community. In a global warming world, the potential through the ballot box is there to lead to the politics of survival of the most powerful and with no or little concern for the longer term or the majority or for the planet. Paulo Freire (1970) provides useful insights in building transformative social relations. For example he is critical of the ‘banking concept of education’, that is,

160

To have a future

education which is uncritical and indoctrinating, is fundamentally oppressive of people’s liberation and serves to maintain the unjust and inequitable status quo. Freire (ibid.: 85) advocates instead critical education that enables a deepened consciousness of people’s situations and a ‘historical reality susceptible to transformation’. He argues for the building of critical tools to enable the transformation of societies. Drawing on Marxist theory, Freire’s liberation theology work was developed in the context of the poor and oppressed during the 1950s and 1960s in Latin America and one could argue that it has no potential for resonance in middle-class Australia or North America. I would propose that particularly given the problems arising from global warming, growing numbers of refugees, food and water crises, and the many other problems that are going to intersect in the foreseeable future, the building of critically conscientised societies is much needed. That in itself can assist in reducing alienation. Social transformation needs to be built on the principles of critical awareness, equality, justice, compassion and community; it has the potential for creating a coming together of humanity – reducing the problems of individualism í based on community participation, engagement in decision-making processes and critical thought. Freire’s work revolves around the moral and philosophical question of what it means to be human. By actively engaging in the collective liberation of all, we are also engaged in a process of liberating ourselves and ful¿lling our potential as moral, ethical, empowered and history-making human actors, collectively working to transform our society to one that is enduring and rich in social and cultural diversity. This is the pathway to making ourselves more fully human and, at the same time, better equipped to live in a state of connection and harmony with our fellow species and the broad ecology. As part of this, leadership must be a part of the community, rooted in and subject to the same experiences as the community and dependent on the same ecological constraints as the community from which it develops. It must include critical dialogue and communion with the people it represents. This factor alone helps to de¿ne the limits to the size of community. The socialist revolutions of the twentieth century failed in part because the physical or geographical scale of revolutionary action was de¿ned by the state rather than the community. They replaced one distant state with another. Further the process of change was violent. These repressive transformational methods are both unacceptable and risky in the twenty-¿rst century. They will also fail.

Constraints on future societies To recap on the biological constraints to human activities, if we are to maintain the planet’s biosphere as being ¿t for the lives of humans and other species, we need to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 ppm CO2 as a matter of urgency, and then more gradually reduce further to 280–300 ppm CO2. Scientists argue that 350 ppm is the safe upper limit and that we need to get back to pre-industrial levels, 280 ppm, to return the planet to a state conducive to the development of human societies.

Alternative futures 161 Beyond this, there must also be recognition of the limited remaining capacity of the atmosphere to act as a sink for carbon emissions and that we have, in the most optimistic of scenarios, ten years to pull back from the brink. This then raises the really dif¿cult question of who should be allowed what share in this sink. This is a resource that should be used for only essential human activities, the most crucial being the transformation of the current relations of production. The global political and economic elite cannot continue to have such a big per capita share of the global atmospheric commons. Equity demands a transfer globally of resources from the biggest polluters, both historically and now, to the smaller ones both historically and now. This transfer however has to be on the condition that those resources are used to minimise growth in emissions as those poorer countries develop their own economies. This should form the centrepiece of relations between North and South. These issues of reduction and redistribution need to be considered and acted upon within a clearly de¿ned target of 280–300 ppm. There is a range of multi-faceted constraints that need to be considered with respect to future societies in addition to carbon emissions. I will discuss four of these constraints now. The ¿rst is in relation to the biocapacity of the planet in general. Wackernagel et al. (1995) introduced both a signi¿cant baseline for conceptualising the Earth’s biocapacity and a metric for measuring it. These authors established that the planet had a total of 13.2 billion global hectares (gha) of biocapacity. This represents its ability to produce and reproduce the biological conditions for life on the planet. For a population of 6.3 billion inhabitants, this equates to approximately 2.1 gha per capita, but clearly less as population grows. Trying to operationalise this baseline in some way or other would be highly complex, but conceptually it performs three important roles. First it graphically illustrates just how little room there is in the biosphere to provide for the entirety each person’s physical needs, while also providing space for other species. Second, it provides a clear guideline for the use of the Earth’s resources (compared to the current system which is based on continual growth of the economy irrespective of its ¿niteness), and hence use of the Earth’s bioresources. Third, if one accepts the principle of equity, it places clear limitations on what each person and community can consume of the biosphere. It follows that the main focus of future societies will involve developing economic and political systems that provide access to what will be a heavily constrained but equitable ecological footprint. This consideration will need to override all others. Every human being should have a right to their share of the Earth’s biomass, but no more. To exceed one’s footprint entitlement is both to rob another of theirs and to endanger the sustainability of the planet. The champagne glass (Figure 8.1) graphically illustrates the extremely unequal distribution of wealth currently, and hence access to the Earth’s biocapacity. The richest 20 per cent, who also have the greatest capacity for change, are those with the least desire for change and with the greatest power to resist change. They continue to suck up resources from the bottom 80 per cent, through land

162

To have a future

RICHEST

Each hori zonta1 band represents an equal fifth of the world' s people

POOREST

World population Richest 20% Second 20% Third 20% Fourth 20% Poorest 20%

World

incOftle

82.7% 11.7% 2.3" 1.9:11: 1.4"

Figure 8.1. Champagne-glass distribution of global wealth Source: Conley (2008: 392)

acquisition, mining and other resources extraction, capital Àows and the ¿nancialisation of the economy and, most importantly, through establishing the international rules for the governance of the global economy (Conley 2008: 392). The top 20 per cent represent the vision of where the development of human societies is leading to, although there is no apparent ceiling to this vision. Currently, in the international debates about global warming, the top 20 per cent want to impose restrictions on the bottom 80 per cent, while at the same time continuing their own increasing production and consumption patterns (and carbon emissions). As was illustrated in the study of South Africa, not all elites live in the North; most countries have their high consumption elites, and the model of development being imported to the South, in collusion with Southern elites, is one that perpetuates this champagne glass distribution of wealth and power. A second constraint, the peaking of fossil fuels, will have an enormous impact on the organisation of future economies and societies. According to the work of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO)3 the peaking dates for fossil fuels are oil 2010; coal 2010; and gas 2030. To illustrate the signi¿cance of this peaking, let us look more closely at ‘peak oil’. While there is some confusion surrounding the meaning of this term, most frequently it refers to the point at which oil production is at a maximum. It implies that a decline in production follows, instead of continuing to rise steadily as it has done over the past 100 years. Relevant here is the world oil depletion curve (Figure 8.2). This is based on known oil reserves plus best estimates of the

Alternative futures 163 35

Billion barrels a year (Gb/a)

30 25 20 M East 15 Other

10

Russia Europe US-48

5 0 1930

1940

1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

US-40

Europe

Russia

Other

Heavy etc

Deepwater

Polar

NGL

2000

2010

2020

2030

2040

2050

M East

Figure 8.2. World oil depletion curve. Source: http://planetforlife.com/oilcrisis/oilpeak.html. Accessed March 2012.

amounts yet-to-be-found (clearly a less than precise ¿gure). This curve indicates that world oil production reached a peak (87 million barrels per day) in 2010 and is now in decline (Aleklett 2010). The part before 2007 is historical fact. The part that comes afterward is an ASPO extrapolation. The detail of what will now happen is largely ‘uncharted territory’ (Hopkins 2008) but the ‘downward curve’ does mean that the amount of energy required to extract any ¿xed amount of oil is now rising and the extraction process increasingly environmentally risky. While the curve does not show the amount of energy being used to extract the declining amounts of oil, for example, there is a relationship known as ‘energy return on energy invested’ (EROEI) and it is changing. For example, in the US in the 1930s, the EROEI was 100:1; today globally it is somewhere between 11:1 and 18:1. Also, in considering alternatives, it is worth noting that the EROEI for wind is 11:1, for photo-voltaics between 2.5:1 and 4.3:1; for hydro 23:1; and for biodiesel about 2:1 (Hopkins 2008: 45). Trainer (2007) argues that while renewables will have a key role to play in future energy needs, the idea that consumer (capitalist) society can be powered entirely by renewables is absurd. Future societies will need to be organised to depend on much less energy. Hence the idea of energy descent which is described by Hopkins (2008: 45) as ‘[t]he continual decline in net energy supporting humanity… It also refers to a future scenario in which humanity has successfully adapted to declining net fossil fuel energy availability and has become more localised and self-reliant.’ Behind peak oil and energy descent lies a third constraint, the imperative for de-industrialisation. Heinberg (2007: 55) describes this in the context of agriculture as ‘[a] radical reduction of fossil fuel inputs to agriculture, accompanied by an increase in labour inputs and a reduction in transport, with production being devoted primarily for local consumption’. Fossil fuel depletion almost ensures that this will happen. De-industrialisation, however, will of course

164

To have a future

need to occur across all economic sectors, with production being planned and directed initially towards the transition phase (to localised, non fossil-fuelled economic activity) and thereafter only for the production of essential items. A ¿nal constraint relates to the biological needs of humans for healthy survival. One measure of this is the number of calories required by humans per capita per day. Today, the average per capita consumption of food has increased to 2,760 kilocalories per day, but that average masks signi¿cant differences, from millions of obese people to one billion humans who lack access to adequate food (Pretty 2009). Whatever, humans require a basic and measurable number of calories per day to remain healthy.

The community as an institution The key institution for the future will be the local and regional, critically conscientised4 community. This issue of community is crucial as it sits at the centre of the new economics and the new societies. Power and decision-making must be rooted in the material realities of people pursuing their livelihoods within the context of local geographical communities. This will ensure leaders are not alienated from the communities they represent because their material interests will remain the same as those of others in their communities. Their knowledge and inÀuence will depend on the strength of their connection to their community and the degree of trust in which the community holds them. There is no future for global elites and no material basis for people to become elites. Just as contemporary global power relations have led to the invisibility of most of humanity, in a transformed future, the great mass of people will be the history makers, the key actors and their stage will be local communities and regions. The concept of community has many historical homes, from Indigenous epistemology, to Indian political philosophies, to Western communitarianism. I refer to community as being geographically localised, consisting of politically, economically and socially linked groups of people who are connected through the pursuit of their livelihoods, their interdependent social relations and cultures. Such communities may be intentional, that is, where people have chosen to work together in pursuit of a common ideal or vision or have historical roots. They may be urban or rural, but in either case, they have a strong and interdependent economy and relationship to the local environment. In localised economies, people require greater autonomy on two fronts. ‘Their livelihood and lives themselves are critically dependent on the local resource base’ and ‘they must have primary control over those resources’ (Kothari and Parajuli 2004: 235). In this way, communities have a vested interest in looking after and building knowledge of their local environments as they have in pursuing their livelihoods and sustain their lives from that environment. In a fossil-fuel constrained world, communities will have to turn to their own resources not only for their sustenance, but for their culture, their identity, their education and their healthcare, and for their rest and recreation. The community will of necessity be central to people’s lives.

Alternative futures 165 The intent here is that each member ought to be able to participate meaningfully in the material matters that affect their living. For such communitarian democracy to have the chance to work, citizens need to be critically educated and informed í in the sense of Freire’s (1970) critical pedagogy í and know that their engagement is meaningful and built on principles of responsibility, reciprocity, sharing and co-operation. Regional, national and international governance bodies will need to remain rooted in local communities and based on the same principles of custodianship of the planet, of responsibility to others, co-operation and sharing. The economist Dasgupta (2010), in recognising that nature’s resources should not be treated as free gifts, also emphasises the importance of communities for the future. He sees this in the contexts of trust, sustainability and social capital. He writes that all accounts of social capital, and in turn it seems sustainability, must ‘rely on social capital occur[ring] somewhere between the individual and the State: they are conducted within communities’ (ibid.: 2). He continues: For some time now it has seemed to me that in tracking social capital, the most fruitful ¿rst step isn’t to ask what that object might be, but to ask instead a question that is faced by any group of people who have agreed on a joint course of action: under what contexts can they be sanguine that the promises they have made to one another are credible? The question suggests that the fundamental problem facing people who would like to transact with one another is one of trust. He further writes: ‘if the idea of social capital is to serve a useful purpose in economics, it should be interpreted as interpersonal networks where members develop and maintain trust in one another to keep their promises by the device of “mutual enforcement” of agreements’ (ibid.: 2). Dasgupta reÀects the centrality of community for the future. It is noteworthy that he here also signals, in his comments about ‘interpersonal networks’, ‘trust’ and ‘mutual enforcement’, the need for what amounts to some set of principles to underpin society. Building on the primacy of communities as the centres of power, participation and economic activity, future societies will be based on the principles of a localised sharing – that is, common ownership and co-operative management of the means of production and the allocation of resources valued according to their uses. There are a number of reasons for localisation. As indicated, the early part of the twenty-¿rst century is witnessing the peaking of the production of all fossil fuels which are the energy sources for, inter alia, the current powering of long-distance travel, trade and industry. The metabolically restorative practices involved in restoring local bio-systems and social systems require localised production, consumption and waste recycling. Again, the community is the social basis for the economy; for humans’ interactions with the environment to produce their livelihoods; for de-alienating society; and for involving people in the common stewardship of the land.

166

To have a future

Capitalism cannot deliver these. Only by building an alternative political economy, based around the community, will societies be able to cope with this dismantling. It follows that ‘the state versus the community’ is an important site for discussion around the nature of future societies. In Chapter 4, I presented a Marxist interpretation of the state as the institution that protected the interests of capital. The corporatisation of the state and the conjunction of interests of corporate capitalism and the nation state have called into question the value of maintaining the state as a structure in future societies. The alternative institution is the community. Kothari and Parajuli (2004: 234) write of the need to ‘re-demarcate communities in terms of ecological bio-regions, cultural boundaries and access and control over productive resources’. Urbanised people will need to relearn their dependence on the land and environment and how to nurture and care for them. Especially relevant here is Gandhi’s understanding of the relationship of humans to the environment and his idea that the ‘logic of self reliance is the logic of place, people and resources bound into locally sustaining ecological systems’ (Fattal 2006: n.p.). In this Gandhi showed great foresight not only in his non-violent opposition to colonialism but also in his support for development processes that focused on the village community and on the maintenance of technologies used by, and which were culturally appropriate for, villagers and rural people. Gandhi’s philosophy has much to offer in designing a future society faced with global warming. The Indian writer Ramchandra Guha (1990) outlined the deeply ecological and deliberately political agrarian environmentalism and prescience of Gandhi. The political programme of Gandhian agrarianism was ‘to resist the onslaught of commercialism and industrialism where they have not yet made inroads, and where they have to resolutely turn one’s back on modern society and go back to the land’ (Guha 1990: 434). Guha (ibid.: 236) in turn argues for ‘greater autonomy for each community with at the same time, linkages among communities, watersheds, bio-regions and nations’. He suggests that there is a need for ‘a framework in which each community can exercise enough autonomy to build its internal solidarity and ¿nd some common de¿nition of mutual rights, responsibilities and obligations’ (ibid.: 236). By neighbouring communities sharing different attributes – forests, water, soil for example í alliances for mutual bene¿t and local interdependence are created. It is signi¿cant that Guha’s prescription is for communities in a nation (i.e. India) that currently has in excess of one billion people. India has been dominated by village life until recently when trends toward urbanisation and industrialisation, the expansion of urban slums and the consolidation of inequality have occurred. This very sub-continent which will be most gravely affected by global warming is thus currently weakening its adaptive capacities in favour of industrialisation, corporatisation, urbanisation and growth. It is to be noted that the state and representative democracy have been developed within the narrative of capitalism. As Wright argues (2010: 281) ‘representative democracy has been one of the critical sources of social stability

Alternative futures 167 in developed capitalism’. However, critically conscientised communities have the potential ‘to lead a subterranean, potentially subversive life. Communities have eminent possibilities of being the site of resistance to capitalist re-colonization’ (Kothari and Parjuli 2004: 235). It is an important principle to recognise in the transformation of society where the seat of power for transformation rests. With the community as the centrepiece of future societies, the most marginalised social actors under capitalism come to the fore in the political arena. The community becomes the site of political decision-making, of what to produce, with whom to trade, how resources are allocated, what sort of education the community needs to provide for its members and what sort of healthcare. In societies with very limited material resources, there is no room for ecologically destructive practices, for externalising costs and pollution. The community has to absorb all of its costs of production; it has to deal with its own wastes. They cannot be shipped off to foreign shores or into ecological commons such as the atmosphere. In this world, everyone is closer to nature, for even the teacher or the doctor who exchanges their skills for food, water and housing, depends very closely on the health of the local ecology to ensure adequate sources of food, water and shelter. Development in this context is matched to and driven by local needs; it builds local solidarity and interdependence. It is measured by the health and vitality of the community. Ecological regeneration and care are integral to development, for that is recognised as the basis of the community’s wellbeing. Such ecologically grounded development does not have the aura of prestige, of success, power and modernity that large-scale industrial development projects have. It does not depend on credit or capital investment, but on a sense of community, co-operation and communal decision-making. The producers and owners of this localised development are the local community. They are also the bene¿ciaries. It is the local community which, through having the responsibility for the good use of resources for development as well as the fruits of development, can then build a sense of pride, engagement and belonging. The local community has power and control over the community and the lives of its people. Everyone is employed or engaged or has a role to play, including the children, teenagers and the elderly. There is no retirement in such communities. Rather, over the whole life cycle the principle applies of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’. The very young, the sick, the disabled and frail are taken care of by the community in the community. Again, they cannot be ‘shipped off’ to be taken care of in nursing homes or institutions elsewhere. The community makes provisions for the future, for failed harvests, Àoods, droughts and for dif¿cult times by setting aside food, water and other resources. The community is responsible for building and recovering its ecological commons, its forests, parklands, endemic wildlife species and water resources and in turn for building resilience. Living close to the land and nature, to the means of production and being intimately engaged in the social relations of production enables the development of a body of knowledge around all the basic elements of subsistence. This further contributes to the resilience and wellbeing of the community.

168

To have a future

A relevant example here is the Chipko movement in Uttarkhand in the middle Himalayas. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Chipko Indigenous women began a protest to protect their livelihoods which were closely tied to the forests being felled for use by urban commercial and industrial interests. The forests provided the rural villages with food, fodder and fuel as well as stabilising the soil and water resources. They were also central to the ecology that entwined with Chipko culture and identity. In their protest, the Chipko women employed the methods of Gandhian non-violent resistance, hugging trees and blocking treefelling machinery. They succeeded in gaining international recognition, with the UN stating that ‘in effect, the Chipko people are working a socio-economic revolution by winning control of their forest resources from the hands of a distant bureaucracy which is concerned with selling the forest for making urbanoriented products’ (UNEP in Chiptzo Movement). There is a parallel here for the future in the West in that the currently wealthy classes of Western Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Australia and Japan will not be able to live their high consumption lifestyles by drawing on the biomass of Third World countries.

Conclusion This chapter has sought to spell out the bases for a brave new world. That will consist of not just one type of society but diverse societies recognising that there are different worldviews in different cultures which need to be respected. Neoliberalism suffers in many ways but most relevant here is its hegemonic tendencies and its monocultural and universalist dimensions. Such a world will face a number of constraints but the biggest and most fundamental is the Earth’s biocapacity. It is essential that that constraint be recognised. Finally the chapter has emphasised the need to shift from the individual to the community. Again neoliberalism is too often seen as only an economic phenomenon. The book has tried to address that by drawing attention to the individualism that neoliberalism brings in its wake. That must cease. In these new societies the community must move to centre stage, not just locally but all the way up to the global level.

9

The principles underpinning future societies

Introduction In acknowledging the constraints facing future societies, this chapter sets out the key epistemological issues, the values and principles, and the material framework on which to base societies if we are to maintain a healthy and balanced biosphere. This represents a possible ‘constitutional’ basis for future societies. The key considerations have to be with overcoming the metabolic rift and the establishment of metabolically restorative social relations of production. That is, future societies will need to establish social structures and means of production that are in harmony with natural systems. To tackle the multiple ecological crises, we will have to create societies that are conducive to living simply and in harmony with the broad ecology. This will include seeing humans as part of that broad ecology. From Marx we have learnt the principles of the historical material basis of society and the importance of both social and productive relations and of ideology; from Gandhi, we learn the centrality of community and of the universal principles of peace, paci¿sm and equity in guiding the foundations of a ‘good’ society; and from social movements such as Campesino a Campesino, we can learn about the importance of community solidarity, critical political awareness and lives linked to land, democratic forms of food production and the centrality of food sovereignty; from Indigenous cultures we can learn much about humanity’s place in the cosmos. By drawing from such strong and life-af¿rming knowledges, we have some clear guidance on how to meet the challenges ahead collectively. None of this means we are returning to the past, but that we are choosing a different fork in the road in human history with the bene¿ts of learning from the pitfalls of the current development trajectory. For some, what constitutes a ‘good’ society may be problematical. The question of what constitutes a society is one that has intrigued philosophers and political scientists for centuries. In more recent times Laski (1933: 164) wrote of the impossibility of achieving a good society under capitalism. He argued that a good society could ‘no more make peace between the motives of private pro¿t and public service than it could continue to be half-slave and half-free’ (ibid.).

170

To have a future

Galbraith (1996: 2) argued that ‘[t]o identify and urge the good and achievable society may well be a minority effort but better that effort than none at all. In any case, there is no chance for the better society unless the good and achievable society is clearly de¿ned.’ However, he was not optimistic, describing ‘the modern political dialectic’ in these terms: ‘It is an unequal contest: the rich and the comfortable have inÀuence and money. And they vote. The concerned and the poor have numbers, but many of the poor, alas, do not vote. There is democracy, but in no slight measure is it the democracy of the fortunate’ (Galbraith 1996: 8). In setting out these principles, I take heart from Galbraith’s comment that identifying ‘the good society’ may well be a minority effort but better that effort than none at all (Galbraith 1996: 2). There is an imperative for radical change summed up by Lovelock (2006: 7) arguing that the planet is ‘a ¿nite and living organism which is suffering a grave illness as the result of human activity, and there exists a threshold, set by the level of carbon dioxide equivalent in the atmosphere’, which ‘once passed nothing the nations of the world do will alter the outcome and the Earth will move irreversibly to a new hot state’. There is an imperative for action. Before that there is an imperative for establishing the principles and structures that can form the basis of future sustainable societies. These are now spelt out.

The principles Metabolic restoration The Marxist concepts of the metabolic rift and metabolic restoration are my starting points for establishing the principles for future social organisation. Addressing the problems created by the metabolic rift requires radical structural change including the dismantling of capitalist social relations of production that currently dominate humans’ relationships to the environment in producing their livelihoods. The metabolic restoration means we have to localise production and consumption and limit consumption to what the local biosphere can support, with a continual cycle of replenishment of the biological basis of production. The capitalist social relations of production need to be transformed into social relations of production that are collective, co-operative and non-exploitative of either humans or nature. Of particular importance is the dis-alienation of humans in the relations of production. Thus, just as Keynesian reforms cannot address the very basic faults at the root of the capitalist economy, environmentalism that is not grounded in an understanding of the social relations of production and class analysis cannot solve the contradictions in capitalism that have given rise to global warming and the various other crises of capitalism. The need is for human societies to live within metabolic cycles – that is, production, consumption and waste – thereby forming part of a self-sustaining cycle in which the only new inputs are energy from the sun. There can be no separation between city and country – both supporting ecologically sustainable agricultures to feed the local population. If production is localised and set within

The principles underpinning future societies 171 the con¿nes of local and regional ecological imperatives, the imperatives relating to the ability of the elements of the biosphere to reproduce themselves and to absorb the wastes from production as part of a sustainable cycle of life can be addressed. Thus this principle of metabolic restoration is founded on a need for humans, in producing their livelihoods, to re-establish their relationships to the land and biosphere, to care for, to rebuild and restore the health of the land to allow it to sustain them, and to help to restore the health of the biosphere. There is a major change in perception here. The land is the font of life, integral to human survival and wellbeing. The status of food production will be elevated in accordance with its fundamental importance and sovereignty to the community. (I return to food production below under the third principle.) What this amounts to is that any new economy will treat a community’s, region’s or country’s regenerative biocapacity as a priority and as its wealth base. Bio-capacity here refers to the total amount of living matter within a given environmental area, irrespective of any de¿nable use purpose by humans. Establishing bio-capacity as the basis of wealth in turn establishes the foundation for human relationships with the environment and in turn how humans will produce their means of living. Wealth itself becomes a concept that is intrinsic and integral to human wellbeing and, while it has a material existence, it is not the alienated material riches that come with capitalist accumulation. Thus, the new economics will be a part of a holistic approach to the biosphere and social relations, underpinned by the values of conservation, futurity, equitable distribution and common property. Nature, in the new economics, will be recognised as the ultimate source of wealth. Restoration of the commons As observed earlier, Lohmann (1999: 13) writes: [j]ust as in pre-20th century England legal means had to be found or invented to allow landowners full private property rights over land and forests which would allow them to exclude commoners from sharing their pasturage, fuel, and food sources, so exclusionary legal mechanisms are now being formulated to give investors private property rights to parcels of the atmosphere or of forest or plantation carbon. Lohmann’s description of the commodi¿cation of land (it is also true of the atmosphere) breaks humans’ most fundamental relationship – between themselves and the environment í from which they produce the means of their subsistence and survival. The de-peasantisation and removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands as a result of land grabs for industrial agriculture, mining, construction of hydro electricity dams, forestry, and so on, from the eighteenth century, resonates with Marx’s descriptions of the enclosures of the commons and the consolidation of landholdings in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Hence the second principle lies in re-establishing the importance of the commons – the

172

To have a future

air, water, sea, rivers, forests and land – parts of the biosphere which are to be restored to the commons and to remain outside the realm of private property. Here the issue is both global and local. For example at the global level, Harcourt (2011: n.p.) writes of the need to think beyond aid and charity solutions, beyond disaster scenarios and climate denial and beyond the current North-South impasse to talk about the commons we are sharing. Citizens living in elite urban enclaves in the North and South need to change ways of life and values in order to stop the selling of land, forests and water which is accompanied by the destruction of communities, traditions and knowledge. The value placed on the commons in the future would be greatly enhanced with the result that they will then be cared for by local communities in custodianship for future generations. For example, the rivers, lakes and ocean shores will be returned to the commons to be farmed and managed by local communities, using appropriate, low-scale technologies and community-based institutions. As Shiva (2002: 20) writes in the speci¿c context of water as a part of the commons: Throughout history and across the world, water rights have been shaped both by the limits of ecosystems and by the needs of people. Water has traditionally been treated as a natural right – a right arising out of human nature, historic conditions, basic needs, or notions of justice. Water rights as natural rights do not originate with the state; they evolve out of a given ecological context of human existence. As Shiva (ibid.: 21) claims, for thousands of years ‘[r]iparian rights, based on concepts of usufructuary rights [i.e. legal rights to use], common property, and reasonable use, have guided human settlement all over the world’. Such rights involve notions of responsibility for and sharing and conserving of the commons so that it is not diminished. Where Indigenous communities remain intact and are able to look after their forests and lands, these forests and lands will be returned to their custodianship. Land will become common land just as the ecology will become common ecology to be taken care of by the community. Such a process both changes the social relations of production and brings people into direct contact with the land and with nature, thus also contributing to overcoming the alienation in the metabolic relationship between humans and nature under the capitalist system. Humans have to respect and understand the soil and its role in the metabolic connection between themselves and the environment. This relationship is very grounding yet to my knowledge has been little theorised about, although Karl Polanyi, in The Great Transformation (1944) and quoted in Bellamy Foster (2002: 31), captured the centrality of land when he wrote: What we call land is an element of nature inexplicably interwoven with man’s institutions. To isolate it and form a market out of it was perhaps the weirdest

The principles underpinning future societies 173 of all undertakings of our ancestors … the economic function is but one of many vital functions of land. It invests man’s life with stability; it is the site of his habitation; it is a condition of his physical safety; it is the landscape and the seasons. We might as well imagine his being born without hands and feet as carrying on his life without land. And yet to separate land from man and organize society in such a way as to satisfy the requirements of a real estate market was a vital part of the utopian concept of a market economy. One can draw parallels between the commodi¿cation and marketisation of land of yesteryear with contemporary policies that, through carbon emission trading schemes, are bringing the atmosphere into the privatised, marketised and commodi¿ed domain. For future societies the move back to a recognition of the importance of the commons provides the basis for building healthy co-operative relationships with others who are also engaged in this most essential of human activities, i.e. producing for their own subsistence. Social relationships are then built on a healthy basis and with a common aim, with no arti¿ces, no class divisions and no opportunities for exploitation. There is little point to private property if there is no capital accumulation. In The Right to the Use of the Earth, Herbert Spencer (1851: IX: 1) wrote ‘[e]quity does not permit property in land, or the rest would live on the earth by sufferance only. It is impossible to discover any mode in which land can become private property. A claim to the exclusive possession of the soil involves land-owning despotism.’ Spencer concluded that property belongs to the ‘great corporate body’, that is, the whole of society, the commons. New institutions need to be created which develop and support the values of communitarian life and communal ownership, for the cultivation of citizenship, the sense of community, of sharing and belonging. Prior to ‘development’, communities preserved their social cement and survival by curtailing personal desires and acquisitiveness, subordinating these to the interests of the common good. The values of mutuality, interdependence and reciprocity need to be fostered and become again a part of future societies. Food security Food security is a predominant concern of all human societies and for this reason food sovereignty í the ownership and control over the seeds, the planting, caring and maintenance of food growing and preparation í needs to be returned to the community. It is also inherently entwined with the maintenance of the commons and with stopping the forces driving de-peasantisation. This issue will come increasingly to the fore in a global warming world. Food security was de¿ned by the 1996 World Food Summit (in FAO 2008: 1) as ‘when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to suf¿cient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life’. The metabolic rift is today nowhere more evident than in the inextricably linked areas of global warming and food security. This is highlighted through the

174

To have a future

growing control of food by mega-corporations, the super-exploitation of labour involved in food production and the de-peasantisation and land grabs taking place for food and biofuel production to feed the excessive consumption levels of the top 20 per cent, and, as Marx saw from Liebig’s work, the destruction of soil fertility. Food security will depend on a whole range of fundamental changes in the social relations involved in food production and consumption. Global movements such as Via Campesina, for example, have been implementing food sovereignty practices, where the real producers of food have control over the food economy; that is they have sovereignty over their food production, thus enabling food security. Food security is one important site at which capitalist and post-capitalist societies diverge in relation to fossil fuels. It is also a site at which another of the contradictions of capitalism is exposed, as decreasing percentages of national incomes are attributed to the agricultural sector. Non-industrial agricultural practices have traditionally been and can again be developed to be independent of fossil fuels, through adopting metabolic cycles around humans’ production of food and their relationship to the land; through growing and consuming locally and eating seasonally; and by eliminating the industrial-scale production of animals and animal products and grain growing. Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest non-industrial farming practices, such as permaculture practices, absorb rather than emit carbon (Pretty 2009; Pimentel et al. 2009) and sustainable farming practices generally provide ‘a range of valued public goods such as clean water, wildlife, and habitats for bene¿cial organisms, carbon sequestration in the soil, Àood protection [and] groundwater recharge’ (Pretty 2009: 48). The alternatives to industrialised agriculture are captured under the loose heading of ‘sustainable agriculture’ which has numerous expressions í biodynamic, permaculture, organic, free range, localised, community based – all of which have a broadly common philosophy, that of producing food in a manner that is more harmonious with nature. Importantly, and not so often emphasised, such food production processes have at their heart particular social relations of production which are non-classist and non-hierarchical and in which the actors are directly involved in producing their means of survival. They are also directly engaged in a symbiotic relationship with the land, the soil, the local ecology, the produce they consume and the community of producers. The energy used in such productive processes can be, and often is human or animal energy, the production of and waste from which are parts of the complete metabolic cycle. For future economies, local community organic agriculture represents an important paradigm in food production. This is currently practised in 120 countries, representing 31 million hectares (ha) of certi¿ed croplands and pastures plus more dif¿cult-to-quantify, uncerti¿ed organic production systems of several million small farmers (Scialabba 2007), including Indigenous food producers who follow organic, even if inadvertently. Urban agriculture will be a centrepiece of the transformation to sustainable living. Bio-diverse, localised, ecological agriculture will reduce greenhouse gas emissions signi¿cantly. Furthermore, such practices will improve biodiversity

The principles underpinning future societies 175 and soil quality while reducing the need for water. They are conducive to a wide diversity of plants in a small area, providing its farmers/communities with a healthy and mixed diet and greater resilience, as, if disease or pests attack one plant species, there is more chance that all is not lost. Borrowing from the principles of heirloom production, seeds are collected from the best produce, further building local resilience and breeding crops suitable to the local environment.1 Organic agriculture is premised on humans as custodians of the ecology and of the importance of looking after the soil and keeping a high humus and healthy soil organism content. Evidence shows healthy soil absorbs carbon from the atmosphere (Wightman 2010) and humus-rich soil reduces water consumption. Most importantly for global warming, local and biologically diverse agriculture can reduce greenhouse gas emissions while at the same time improving the security of farmers’ livelihoods and improving the diversity, quality and nutrition of food. Such organic agriculture (Pimental et al. 2005; Scialabba 2007) will contribute to reduced consumption of fossil fuel energy, carbon dioxide emissions (48–60 per cent less, except for very intensive crops, according to Scialabba 2007), reduced nitrous dioxide, reduced soil erosion and increased carbon stocks, as well as much higher carbon absorption in comparison with conventional agriculture. Organic and labour-intensive agriculture produces a net carbon sink which, as Hallowes (2009) suggests, can transform agriculture and secure a fair exchange between the producers and consumers of food in what is a critical part of re-orienting the economy to make it more resilient in the face of global warming. Community of producers In the new sustainable and resilient economic system, the value of labour will be intrinsic in the sense that the new system will be built around new relations of production so that the most fundamental relationship í of human labour to the environment í will be transformed. Labour will be central in the sense that each human will be directly engaged in his or her own means of survival in relation to the land and the producing of goods for exchange. Excess value, or surplus value as it became in capitalist societies, when created, will become a part of the commons. No one person or community will be able to use or accumulate more than his or her share of the biomass. There is thus an overturning of the fundamental principles of neoclassical economics í private property and accumulation.2 The emphasis is on placing the environment at the centre of the value system, and so there needs to be a broader social and ecological conception of wealth and a reconsideration of extrinsic and intrinsic, exchange and use values. Marx argued, in relation to use values, that nature should not be reduced to a mere commodity. Quoting Thomas Muntzer, a revolutionary leader of the sixteenthcentury German Peasants’ War, Marx observed that it is intolerable that ‘all creatures have been made into property, the ¿sh in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth í all living things must also become free’ (Foster and Clark 2009: n.p.).

176

To have a future

Marx wanted a society of associated producers who would ‘govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature’ (in Muntzer 1988: 335). At the time of writing, he could not have envisaged that the society of associated producers, the socialist society he advocated, would spawn varieties of state socialism in a large number of states that were antithetical to Marx’s philosophy, and at huge cost to many millions of people, and the environment. The state socialism of the former Soviet Union, China, Cambodia and Eastern Europe is clearly not the alternative model being proposed for the future. It is noteworthy that the terms ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ have become problematical because of their historical baggage. The damage these state socialist regimes have done to Marxism is very great indeed. The triumphalism of the capitalist West in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall was no time for a reasoned assessment of state socialism versus Marxist ideals. A possible parallel here could be the various interpretations which have been placed on the Christian Bible and which have never been used to justify the Inquisition, the Crusades or, more recently, the activities of right-wing Phalangists3 in Lebanon, all brutal and extremist, built on what appear to be readings from the Bible which others interpret as a philosophy of peace, paci¿sm, love and understanding. Yet interestingly there has not been the same ridiculing or condemnation of the Christian church in the wake of its many sins, as there has been of Marxism in the wake of the undeniably horri¿c transgressions attributed to this philosophy during the twentieth century. Transforming to a society of associated producers from a capitalist society, in which humans have been inculcated with the behaviours and values of competitiveness, material acquisitiveness, individualism and sel¿shness, will be a high-risk venture. However, transform we must. Building social solidarity amongst people and developing utopian visions and idealised values as possibilities for the future are central. We need philosophers, dreamers and utopians as never before to sketch and legitimise visions of just and good societies. No-growth economies Under the capitalist system, nature’s resources and waste-recycling capacities have been over-exploited to the point where both are deeply negatively impacted, affecting the climate and the broad ecology. There now must be an end to global economic growth, accompanied by a redistribution of wealth and resources from the top 20 per cent to the bottom 20 per cent. Future societies will have to be built on contracted, no-growth economies. That means an end to capital accumulation, economic growth and private property; in essence, an end to capitalism. The current rate of growth of global production and consumption not only has to fall; global production must contract – and suf¿ciently to allow for any population growth in the future í and be equitably redistributed within the constraints set out above. The simplicity principle, that is, the way in which we live with less,

The principles underpinning future societies 177 will have to prevail. Under capitalism, no growth means social collapse, mass unemployment, poverty, homelessness, civil unrest, foreclosures of housing mortgages, loss of schools and other public services, and instability and chaos as the institutions of growth (the majority of our current global and national institutions) are dismantled and replaced. Transformation from the capitalist system is thus fraught with dangers if that transformation is not planned and organised. However, under the new community-based metabolically restorative economies, advocates such as Hopkins (2008) and Holmgren (2009) see the new communitybased structures as promising positive alternatives to what we have in society today. Hopkins (2008: 21) writes that this transformed future ‘offers the potential for a society which is better in many ways, more connected to nature, healthier, with more meaningful work, access to nutritious food, enhanced social capital and more cooperation’. Equity, ecological justice and redistribution It was concluded in Chapter 7 that ‘South Africa needs to democratise its institutions, de-globalise, de-commodify, nationalise and redistribute its wealth, overthrow its social relations of production and become a good neighbour on the African continent, supporting sustainable, equitable and inclusive human development for all’. Most fundamental here in terms of tangible outcomes is the question of redistribution. The sixth principle is thus one based essentially on the notion that each person is entitled to an equitable share of the Earth’s biomass, including adjustment for the historical distortion of wealth distribution. Whereas within the capitalist system, Marx saw redistribution as merely a palliative mechanism, redistribution in the new paradigm will be an adjustment for inequities caused by colonialism. In the new economies the nature and function of distribution will be clearly different from distribution in neoclassical economics which is based on the notion of pro¿t maximisation. There is no pro¿t to maximise but a surplus to be distributed and this is to be done by the community to the community. There is no individual utility to be maximised but instead community wellbeing to be achieved through, amongst other things, principles of equity and fairness of distribution. This means that contrary to what happens in neoclassical economics, where the supply side and the demand side are, in theory at least, completely separate, here the community is both producer and consumer, both collectively and in the full recognition of the ¿nite nature of the biosphere. Likewise, the problem of scarcity is turned on its head. Harvey (2001: 61) writes that the de¿nition of scarcity is ‘inextricably social and cultural in origin. Scarcity presupposes certain social ends, and it is these that de¿ne scarcity just as much as the lack of natural means to accomplish these ends.’ He continues that ‘[s]carcity is in fact necessary to the survival of the capitalist mode of production’ (ibid.: 61). In the new society the ideology around resources is different. It is based on the concept of suf¿ciency, justice and fairness and maintaining the biosphere’s health through the ethos of custodianship.

178

To have a future

Crucially here and at the heart of the new societies is the question of what is meant by just or fair. To examine this however there is a need ¿rst to acknowledge that a central tenet of capitalism is a supposed freedom of choice and the idea that the individual is able to use his or her autonomy to decide what he or she wants and does so in such a way as to maximise their utility. This is what neoclassical economics calls consumer’s sovereignty. It is the freedom at the centre of neoclassical economics, freedom of enterprise, freedom of choice, free trade and so on. As Stanlake and Grant (1995: 19) state, the ‘freedom of consumer choice is usually held to be the most important of these economic “freedoms”. The consumer is regarded as being sovereign since it is the ways in which he chooses to spend his income which determine the ways in which society uses its economic resources.’ Of course, the poorer a person is, the less freedom s/he has; in fact, for the poorest, there is no freedom at all. In the new societies individual consumer sovereignty will be severely constrained within principles established by the community. As Joan Robinson (1972: 274), one of the most eminent economists of the twentieth century, argued, ‘[n]o-one who has lived in the capitalist world is deceived by the pretence that the market system ensures consumer’s sovereignty’. Robinson (ibid.: 274) states: ‘[t]he true moral to be drawn from capitalist experience is that production will never be responsive to consumer needs as long as the initiative lies with the producer.’ Nor can there be consumer’s sovereignty when three-¿fths of the world’s population live in poverty; that is, the poor’s existential reality is that they cannot consume what they want, for many, even of the most basic, of survival necessities. Furthermore, the very concept of ‘consumer’ is a concept of capitalism which will be replaced in future sustainable societies by critically conscientised citizens whose concerns will not just be in seeking sustenance and shelter from the environment, but in nurturing and being custodians of the environment. This does not mean there will be no differences in individual preferences, but what is available and in what overall quantities will be determined by the community. Each person will contribute to the community and each will be entitled to consume only their fair and just quantity of goods, including food, clothing and shelter. What is fair and just is determined by the ecological footprint entitlement and biological needs. This is fundamentally different from current capitalist society where those with the highest incomes/wealth accumulation and thus entitled to the greatest ecological footprints are in many cases not those who contribute most to the wider society – the high-Àiers in the ¿nancial and banking sectors and the owners and CEOs of major environmentally destructive mining conglomerates. The concept of ecological debt repayment is relevant since the question of where societies begin their transition cannot ignore the past. It can be argued that the whole history of capitalism provides an account of the development of the gross inequalities that exist on the planet now – an account which must be taken into consideration in constructing just and equitable future societies. While the concept of ecological debt has yet to be operationalised, it played a signi¿cant role at the United Nations Earth Summit in 1992 in that it was

The principles underpinning future societies 179 proposed that the external debt of the South be swapped for the region’s ecological and social losses derived from colonialism and past exploitative foreign investments. It has become a guiding principle amongst climate justice movements, especially those from the South. It can be used both conceptually and eventually to assist quanti¿cation in reassessing relations between the classes, the rich and the poor, the colonised and colonisers and in ¿nding solutions to such issues as Third World debt, climate justice and access to the atmospheric commons. It can place the global warming crisis in a historical context once it is accepted that such a context is necessary in ¿nding just solutions to global warming. Most fundamentally it can be used to address the problems arising from limitations to the atmospheric commons, which is, or will be by 2020, exhausted as a carbon sink. Rights to any remainder of this sink must be shared equitably but taking due account of the way in which it has been used to date, and crucially, by whom, i.e. the industrialised countries. There is thus a strong moral compunction for the repayment of ecological debt by those who have exploited the biosphere in the past. Portions of these repayments can be used to pay for the transition to new sustainable societies. There is, however, no institution currently in existence to unravel and enforce such debt repayment. Current international institutions exacerbate the problem. That needs to change. Real participatory democracy There is a need to ensure that economies of the future will be a ‘thick’ form of democracy and not as Galbraith (1996: 8) has described current US democracy as ‘the democracy of the fortunate’. As Wright (2010: 367) suggests, the key to ‘realizing radical democratic egalitarian conceptions of social and political justice requires social empowerment over the economy’. Signi¿cantly, such social empowerment (ibid.: 368) ‘is not restricted to meaningful democratic control of the state; it also means the subordination of economic power to social power.’ This means that undemocratic ¿nancial institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank, and the large, multinational, private banking and ¿nance oligopolies, will have to be dismantled. One consequence of these new economies and communities will be that there will no longer be such inequitable purchasing powers as there are currently, and social status will not be derived from one’s material accumulations. Such shifts will result in bene¿ts not only for everyone’s health and wellbeing (see Wilkinson and Pickett 2009) but also by enabling societies and communities to reÀect more genuinely the will of the people in total. Economies of the future will be driven by ecological and social principles. Such principles require that there will be considerable decentralisation, scaling down and localisation of economic activities. This will entail a large degree of de-industrialisation and reduced energy consumption as non-essential goods and services are removed from the economy. Addressing this energy descent, de-industrialisation and the contraction in production will require a transition to

180

To have a future

more labour-intensive technologies and productive practices. While production will necessarily be labour intensive, people in future societies will also have more free time, as there will be fewer goods to produce. The vast numbers of currently unand under-employed people will all be involved in the production of food and other essentials. In the new proposed localised community-based economies, technologies will not be capital (or carbon) intensive, will be developed to meet the speci¿c needs of the local community and will remain under the control of the community. The ideology of progress, so central to capitalism and so intimately associated with technological developments, will be replaced by a more simple way of living, a sense of security and connection, of dis-alienation and metabolic restoration, a reverence for the past, an engagement with the present and a custodianship for the future. It is reasonable to anticipate that people’s sense of interconnectedness and dependence on the broad ecology and local community will have implications for population numbers as people’s security and quality of life will depend on maintaining the metabolic balance between humans and nature. People will no longer be commodities to be bought and sold as labour, but will have a direct relationship to their produce, the fruits of their productive processes being theirs to consume or exchange. Community resilience, that is, the community’s ability to respond and adapt to situations, and self-suf¿ciency, will be enhanced by the localisation of the economy. The economy will thus be based on non-exploitative practices and non-exploitation of land, labour or communities. There will be no basis for pro¿t or the commodi¿cation of goods or services.

Conclusion The new societies and economies will be built on the principles of the centrality of the local community, restoration of the commons (land, water, air – the biosphere), metabolic restoration, equity and justice. Humans and hence labour are a part of nature, but when the social relations of production are alienated and exploitative, the ruling class exploits not just the workers who work nature; they exploit nature as well, extracting pro¿t from nature. In the new post-capitalist economies, there can be no capitalists, no dominant class. Conversely, there can be no alienated labour, there will be no labour which is working without care for nature’s nurturance and health. Then labour, which is producing food from the soil, will form a restorative, metabolic relationship with the soil; will come to know the soil; will understand how it works; what it needs to be healthy, full of the life-giving microbes and part of a healthy carbon cycle; how the metabolic cycle of growing, composting, replenishing the soil for what it has produced; and that, in this process of producing humans’ livelihood and food security, will acknowledge that this underpins the relationship between humans and nature. As such this human/nature relationship will overcome the alienation found in the various levels of social relations between humans and between humans and nature in existing capitalist societies. In the new community-based systems, where property is community controlled, there will be no capacity (or motivation) for accumulation. This is compatible

The principles underpinning future societies 181 with the metabolic relationship between humans and the biosphere. Humanity’s common resources will be for the bene¿t of all. The potential to accumulate more than one’s biomass entitlement is removed and any surplus is for the bene¿t of the community. The detail and practice of how this will work remain to be addressed. It is thus proposed that these principles form the basis for the organisation of future societies so that such societies are sustainable, just and equitable. They also represent propositions to consider in showing that other ways of living are not only possible but may bring greater meaning and purpose to society and help lay the foundation for a future, and a qualitatively better one, for humankind. I have not included negative principles, such as there will be no armaments, no warfare, no space travel and so on, as the economic fundamentals of future societies will not support, nor have the motivation, for such, what will be then, anti-social activities. The world is in desperate need of utopian and radical visions without which there is little chance of redirecting the current course of human history. In proposing these principles, I have attempted to bring together the constraints facing the planet and a set of principles to underpin the social organisation of human societies around that most important relationship of all, how humans organise their social relations in meeting their physical needs from the environment, that is, the way societies support and perpetuate themselves. Bringing all of this together is the crux of any successful endeavour to address the practical and theoretical problems of global warming where humans both act upon and are part of the environment in securing their livelihoods and that of future generations. In establishing key principles for future societies, there must be acknowledgement of the enormous diversity of peoples, geographies, cultures, social and economic systems í a diversity which is currently ‘being swept away, crushed under the homogenizing heel of the circulation and accumulation of capital’ (Harvey 2001: 119), but which is not only essential for the future, but will add to the richness and wonder of humanity. For that diversity to be maintained and fostered is essential to the quality of life of future societies. The hope has to be that the human species has a suf¿ciently deep sense of connection and commitment to enable it to build on a commonality in ¿nding solutions to our universal desire for survival. The most dif¿cult task is how to move to a post-capitalist world and what that might look like. The next chapter aims to make a contribution to that discussion.

10 Getting to the future

Introduction Is there a way forward other than only in principle? Are there real life examples of socio-economic models that have been adopted by communities or nations in building more equitable or sustainable societies? Can we learn from these not only how to proceed with transformative economic and societal changes but also how to acknowledge their limitations vis-à-vis these changes? There are many sites around the globe which deserve examination for what they have achieved in establishing more democratic, equitable and sustainable lifestyles: the Amish of the United States, the Via Campesina movement in Latin America, the Navdanya movement in India – seed savers, protectors of cultural and genetic diversity and small-scale farmers; and the list goes on. The question then arises about the practicability of such future societies. At present no economy exists which embraces the sorts of principles that might be sought for the future, with the possible exception of Cuba. There are however currently some macro and micro examples of social units that have adopted some of the characteristics essential for building future societies. They are worth exploring. The examples presented in this chapter are at different levels. Abalimi Bezekhaya in South Africa is very much a micro example among the poor living in a township on the outskirts of Cape Town that illustrates how the availability of a small pocket of communally controlled land and small-scale inexpensive support can bring not only food security to people, but a sense of mutuality, community, personal empowerment and connectedness to others. Scaling up from this, Transition Towns is a social movement originating in the UK that is seeking to build from the micro to the macro. The example of Cuba is that of a state that has undergone a radical transformation process. Each of these examples provides some insights into how aspects of future economies might operate. The case of Russia’s transition is presented in essence to show perhaps how not to do it! This chapter thus encompasses the issue of how to make the transition to a new world, particularly given the time constraints science is saying we face to prevent runaway global warming. Certainly there is a vast literature on political

Getting to the future 183 economy transformation (see for example Ellman 1997). Much of this focuses on the transition from socialist economies to market economies; some on structural adjustment programmes; as well as some from the broad school of modernisation theory which examines the transition of peasant societies to modern societies (Mol and Spaargaren 2000). A much smaller literature is more immediately relevant to the sorts of transformation needed to address global warming (see Andreasson 2010). Where there is a gap in this literature however is on the transition from global industrial capitalist society to no growth, communitybased, localised economies. This is a formidable challenge. Looking at it from the converse perspective, Harvey (D. 2011) warns of the problems of ‘jumping scale’, looking at solutions for managing problems such as global warming at the local level does not necessarily translate into solutions at the global level. He writes, ‘lessons gained from the collective organisation of small-scale solidarity economies along common-property lines cannot translate into global solutions without resort to nested hierarchical forms of decision-making’ (ibid.: 102). Yet, we must urgently begin ways of exiting the capitalist system and the imperative for growth. Without a clear way forward, I believe that we must validate and support all attempts to break from the capitalist social relations of production and the imperatives of capitalism and work towards solidarity amongst alternatives. By doing so, by embracing and supporting the Transition Towns, the Abalimi Bezekhayas, the Campesino movements, we are building a solidarity across alternatives to capitalism, showing examples of how it is possible for people to become empowered and positively involved in making their own history, that it is possible to form new values in which we are comfortable and at home. As previously noted from äiåek’s observation ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’. Yet it is clear that we must. We must at every opportunity show that capitalism is not the only viable political and economic system, that there are coherent and current alternatives to it.

Abalimi Bezekhaya Abalimi Bezekhaya’s1 ‘Harvest of Hope’ programme in South Africa is an example of urban agriculture. The programme provides urban organic micro-farming support and access to outside markets to cash-poor urban micro-farmers to sell their produce. It seeks to achieve ‘poverty alleviation, food security, sustainability, income generation, job creation, environmental renewal, community based nature conservation, healthy diets, HIV/AIDS alleviation and climate change mitigation’ (Small 2010: 1). The target population is very poor people located in South Africa’s townships who are ‘trying to survive and advance, are constantly shifting and moving about, often divided and disempowered, easily distracted and always looking for greener pastures’ (ibid.). I visited one of the sites of Abalimi Bezekhaya, in the Gugelethu Township outside Cape Town, in May 2010. It is an inspiring story set in a township that in a very real sense captures many of the contradictions and problems of industrial capitalism and contemporary South African society. The project was bounded

184

To have a future

physically on one side by a state-of-the-art six-lane freeway, on the other three sides, by slums. It was unpromising land, infertile, criss-crossed with high voltage electricity lines and subject to Àoods and 40°C temperatures. It sat amidst the shack dwellings of the poor, the sick, the unemployed and marginalised black population, many of whom had no household access to water or electricity. The energy and technologies used are small scale and simple: the women are the energy and the technologies are spades, picks and knives; hemp string for tying bundles of vegetables together; an old small shed for tool storage; and some upturned tins for sitting on and washing the vegetables. Abalimi Bezekhaya had initially been a Quakers’ project amongst the urban poor of Cape Town. Today, however, it is managed as an incorporated Abalimi organisation. The project aims to ‘maintain permanent organic food growing and nature conservation projects as the basis for sustainable lifestyles, self-help job creation, poverty alleviation and environmental renewal’ (ibid.). This it achieves, and as such, is an example at a micro level of urban agriculture and a part of what a new economy, post-capitalism, might contain. Small, the Abalimi Director, claims that the Abalimi initiative proves that under-educated, unemployable South Africans can live healthy lives, with dignity, on very small pieces of land, in the worst possible climate and conditions, and earn a decent income, using their own initiative and with only a very modest amount of assistance (ibid.). For less than A$15 per month, farmers produce fresh food and develop self-help mechanisms with unlimited potential. At the same time they have transformed formerly wasted environments and re-established Indigenous conservation areas. Additionally, they are sinking 1–2 kilograms of carbon per square metre per annum. Small (ibid.) writes that such micro farms can not only transform family and community health but have powerful social bene¿ts, improve personal empowerment, community engagement and pride and contribute to grassroots democracy. At the end of 2010, Abalimi worked with over 3,000 micro-farmers, providing training, and assistance with getting microfarm projects established, supplying manure and water and providing marketing assistance. The case of Abalimi Bezekhaya illustrates graphically some of the key principles that might be sought for the future. It shows how small-scale, low input, locally, organically produced food can bring food security and more to urban, including slum, areas. At the Abalimi site that I visited, the women, many over sixty years of age and some in their eighties, were sceptical at ¿rst. Now they say they have never been happier, healthier or had more control over their lives. Their status has risen in the community; before they had been nobodies. Now they have company, other women to work with and talk to, a purpose, and they are contributing to the material basis of their own lives as well as to that of others. They say that now, even the young men in the community want to do what they are doing. It is of note too that, although this urban farm is in the middle of an impoverished, crime-ridden slum, there has been no problem with stealing or destroying produce. Yet there are no fences around the land.

Getting to the future 185

Transition Towns Rob Hopkins, founder of the transition town concept and author of The Transition Town Handbook (Hopkins 2008: 8), writes that ‘[c]limate change – an issue of great severity – is only half of the story: developing an understanding of peak oil is similarly essential. Together, these two issues have been referred to as the “hydrocarbon twins”.’ He argues that they are so entwined that, seen in isolation, a large part of the story remains untold. The Transition Towns movement is based on the premise that peak oil and climate change require that we change how we live and that this can best be done through communities coming together, examining their use of fossil fuels, and then transitioning to more sustainable lifestyles around localisation, co-operation, organic food production and energy descent into renewable and reduced energy systems. Central to the Transition Towns’ movement is the concept of community resilience. This refers ‘to their ability to not collapse at ¿rst sight of oil or food shortages and to their ability to respond with adaptability to disturbance’ (ibid.: 49). This means ‘being more prepared for a leaner future, more self-reliant, and prioritising the local over the imported’ (ibid.: 50). He maintains there are three keys to resilience. First is diversity of land use, functions, people, cultures and systems; second is modularity which means structures which can more effectively self-organise in the event of shocks such as to local food or ¿nancial systems; and ¿nally, tightness of feedbacks referring to how quickly the consequences of a change in one part of the system are contained and responded to by another, enabling timely responses to events/things, and bringing the consequences of actions closer to home. Hopkins (ibid.: 43) quotes an example from Vandana Shiva of the villages that recovered best when the 2004 Asian tsunami hit, saying: it was the villages with the greatest resilience that were up and running relatively quickly, and those that had dismantled their resilient economies in favour of an import-dependent, tourism-based model that were hit the worst. The indigenous tribes of Andaman and Nicobar, the Onger, the Jawaras, the Sentinelese, the Shompen, who live with a light ecological footprint, had the lowest casualties even though, in the Indian subcontinent, they were the closest to the epicentre of the earthquake. Hopkins’ focus is primarily on peak oil as he believes people are less familiar with this issue than with climate change. He recognises that there are many forces arrayed against action to address such issues and that to engage with neighbours in the community on these matters amounts to a considerable challenge in getting people to take the big step of reconsidering every aspect of our reliance on cheap oil. He points out that this involves local energy and water self-suf¿ciency, personal and community transport, housing, food sources, recreation and leisure, health systems, education, ¿nancial matters and how the community deals with emergencies. The changes envisaged are to develop self-reliance and resilience

186

To have a future

in the face of future oil and climate shocks. Transitioning recognises that the problem is vast and doing nothing is not an option. On the premise that the way of life in rich countries is unsustainable, Trainer (1995), author of The Conserver Society: Alternatives for Sustainability, in a similar vein, talks about transition societies and what such sustainable societies might look like. He argues that we need to be clear about where we are transitioning to and that we cannot make the transition just by technical means, such as using solar power. He also emphasises the need for a just global economy, maintaining that practical and attractive alternatives exist and that we can in fact improve the quality of life for most people not just in the South but also in the North. At the same time he stresses that the transition to an ecologically sustainable and just world must involve huge changes. Trainer’s book outlines alternatives available around the design of settlements, housing, energy, food production, the development of a new economy and the shift to new values. He emphasises that the essential principles for sustainability must be more materially simple living standards and small-scale, self-suf¿cient local economies. Trainer provides examples of alternative communities, and offers a strategy for people to begin moving their own localities in that direction. The concept of Transition Towns, however, is not without critics. James in a debate conducted over several issues of Arena Magazine, 2009, writes that: [c]limate change is no small problem that can be averted by small steps: it will take big decisions and a lot of intervention as well as the political willingness to change things. The problem with the Transition Movement is that it has a mandate that avoids any political conÀict; hence, it is allowed to proliferate and gains the support of governments and local councils, doing nothing to upset the economy or the status quo … Small steps of like-minded souls who combine vision and will and tenacity and who must choose their own goals and ways of functioning; if the magnitude of the problems were not so great I would be supportive; small steps might be good occupational therapy, alleviating a growing disenchantment, but it will not solve the world’s environmental problems. There are a number of points to consider in evaluating the transformative possibilities of Transition Towns. First is the question around whether the proletariat, the workers, are the only true and potentially effective agent of challenge to capital. Holloway (2002, quoted in Desai 2004) argues that for example in South Africa, most resistances to capital are at the point of consumption (that is – of services, water, electricity, housing and so on) rather than production, and are communitydriven rather than union driven. A similar situation exists in many Western countries, although the issues until the fallout from the GFC were not so much about such basic needs as housing, water, electricity, but about wages, conditions and the environment. The most oppressed and alienated people in industrialised societies í Indigenous people and people impoverished because of mental and physical disabilities í are so marginalised, fragmented and powerless and have

Getting to the future 187 such internalised inferiority and passivity, that the possibilities of contesting the system are remote. Very different material factors affect the possible sites of transformative change in Western industrialised countries, particularly in a country such as Australia where the material realities of the majority of the population place them in the top 20 per cent of the world’s income bracket, a historically and radically different location in the global capitalist economy than those struggling for change who are located in the periphery. Even in the face of catastrophic global warming, the historical and material position of people at the centre of the global political economy is antithetical to radical structural change. The language of global warming protest, of opposition to coal mining, is not, in the main, the language of deep and radical structural change and, furthermore, the number of people participating in opposition to the status quo is comparatively small and fragmented. We can gain a further insight into the transformational potential of Transition Towns by returning to a more explicitly Marxist analysis. As Harvey argues (2001), all social activities become absorbed into the processes of capital accumulation, whether they are environmental NGOs, educational institutions or healthcare. While Transition Towns and community gardens are operating within the framework of capitalist society, there is an inevitability about their absorption within capitalist accumulation processes. Harvey (2001: 125) writes: ‘The accumulation of market niches, of diverse preferences and the promotion of new heterogeneous lifestyles, all occur within the orbit of capital accumulation.’ In the Marxist tradition, James (2009: 18) rightly maintains that ‘[e]nvironment issues cannot be easily extricated from the system in which they exist: neoliberal capitalism’. She suggests, however, that [s]mall steps will simply divert our attention from the real crimes [and] act like a pause in the political language of environmentalism, ensuring that we interpret the discursive power plays in a more conceptual, friendly and unobtrusive way. It encourages participation on the basis that we do not engage in assertions of political blame or accountability. On the contrary, small steps act like a meditation with a mantra buried in subordination and false consciousness. The whole earth, nature based phenomenon encourages individuals to feel not think. (James 2009: 18) It is dif¿cult to argue against James’ viewpoint. Perhaps she is correct, but what are the alternatives? Transition Towns does have the potential to exacerbate the social divide unless those involved maintain a sense of international solidarity with other transformative movements and a critical perspective. I would contest James’ accusation that the discourses around Transition Towns are necessarily depoliticised and that this could accentuate the deepening conservatism that is taking hold in the UK, US, Australia and elsewhere. However, this is a risk. Of course, there are many question marks over how signi¿cant any impact the Transition Towns’ movement will be.2 It has the undoubted, even if limited,

188

To have a future

bene¿ts of providing concrete examples of the fact that other ways are possible; it brings people together in what is otherwise a very atomised individualised society; it involves people working to produce food in ways that break down some elements of alienation and which have the potential to make people more connected to the soil and the ecology, learning the principles of soil care, water conservation, the importance of bees, insects, earthworms and so on, facts of life that have been largely lost in Western industrialised societies. It also involves sharing and building community relationships. Will the Transition Towns’ movement spread suf¿ciently to make a dent in growth, capital accumulation and consumerism? It is unlikely unless the movement is linked to struggles to change the political and economic basis of society. Nevertheless, given the ideological and cultural hegemony of capitalism, if this movement helps to create even a crack in the dominant ideology and the existing social relations and consumerism, it is a start, with people making changes and becoming, in the process, more critically aware about the world around them. We need at a minimum to ¿nd spaces in which to build alternatives to global capitalism. Again to quote Harvey (2001: 411) we need to search for spaces in the hope of ¿nding ‘[o]ne in which the progressive forces of culture appropriate those of capital rather than the other way round’. We have a very short timeframe in which to act and a moral imperative which says to do nothing is not an option. The question of a socialist government through the ballot box, through revolution or armed struggle in Australia, or in any part of the rich industrialised world, is a non starter; so, if not transition towns, I would ask James (2009), where do we start? The trade union movement in the main in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and many other parts of the developed world, is deeply conservative in relation to the environment, global warming, and for some, even with respect to such issues as the mining company super-pro¿ts taxes. The left-wing leadership of the trade union movement so evident during the 1970s and early 1980s on many international, social justice and environmental issues seems to have largely disappeared, in part as a result of neoliberalism. Whatever the reason, the strength and progressiveness of the trade union movement has declined.

Cuba The changes that are going to be needed to move to the post-capitalist societies will be both radical and potentially traumatic. Cuba is a rare case which illustrates the creation of an ecologically more sustainable type of society, the critical factors being that it broke away from the capitalist social relations of production, dramatically reduced its use of fossil fuels, adopted ecological agricultural practices, localised food production, built a signi¿cantly more equitable society and adopted many ecologically regenerative practices. This is not to suggest that there are not many problems in Cuban society, several of which it could be argued arise as a result of the forced isolation of the island and its economy, for example through the half-century-old US trade embargo. It

Getting to the future 189 is however unique in that the egalitarian political economic structure is strongly embedded in both state and local community. The transition to local, low-level benign technologies, urban (and rural) agriculture, local and organic foodgrowing practices is only one (but an important) part of Cuba’s transformation. At the heart of the economy are its socialist structure and principles of production for people’s needs rather than pro¿t, and its resistance (to date) to capitalist economics. The problems faced by Cuba can be put into some better perspective if one compares Cuba with its near neighbour Haiti (Clarke 2003) which has been embraced by the neoliberal development model and the patrimony of the United States and until very recently had a very high per capita national debt (some of it now forgiven – perhaps too late – in the wake of the earthquake in early 2010), endemic and desperate poverty and ineffective institutions. The political economy of Cuba is illustrative of several relevant dimensions of future societies and economies. First I will give a brief overview to put that political economy in its historical context. Cuba underwent a radical and rapid transition from a capitalist economy, described as a vast sugar plantation (Raby 2009: 1), to one overseen by a pre-socialist democratic liberation government from 1959 to 1963, before then becoming a socialist country in the mid 1960s. The economic changes were structural and profound. The truly revolutionary changes took place during the period 1959–61 on the basis of calls for democracy, anti-imperialism and social justice. In a sense these were not unlike the anti-globalisation and anti-capitalist movements at a global level in the period from the 1990s until now. Second, Cuban democracy was embedded in local communities with neighbourhoods and workplaces engaging people in decision making that directly affects their lives and livelihoods. Third, the country has faced the longest US trade and travel embargo in history, from 1962 until now. For a number of reasons this point is relevant to the creation of new transformative economic models. It illustrates how countries, even with very severe constraints on their resources, can survive and become resilient in a way that is relevant to the new world economics that global warming and peak oil demand. Cuba did not just survive; it developed and maintained free universal healthcare and education, it subsidised rates for housing and utilities, and it increased sites for democratic consultation with the broad mass of the population, bringing them on board in facing the many dif¿culties and crises experienced since the early 1960s. In so doing, it retained the support and commitment of the population, despite the many hardships faced, particularly during the economic crisis that came about with the collapse of the Soviet Union from whom Cuba had received considerable support in aid. From the Cuban experience, we can get some sense of the importance of ideology, in the context of both social change and social cohesiveness. Cuba demonstrates the signi¿cance of the Gramscian argument that, for Marxism to be successful, the ideas need ¿rst to become hegemonic, that is, in this context to become common sense (Raby 2009). While the 1950s Cuban revolutionaries were inÀuenced by Marxism, they nonetheless remained independent of the international communist movement, thereby retaining a degree of Àexibility

190

To have a future

that ‘was crucial to their success’ (ibid.: 4). Cuba thus built institutions, particularly using the community as a central institution that were fundamentally and culturally Cuban in nature and identity. The Cuban revolution drew on its own internal experiences of national political and economic corruption, exploitation, repression and domination by the US government. So in January 1959, Fidel Castro claimed that while the war of independence had been won, the revolution was still to be carried out. Certainly there had been a popular victory by the mass of the Cuban population with Castro stating that ‘the revolution is as Cuban as the palm trees’ and ‘many people have not yet realized the scope of the change which has occurred in our country’ (quoted in Raby 2009: 4 from the Cuban periodical Revolución). There had been no reference to socialism, class struggle or Marxism and, according to Raby, what ideology there was, was seen as being in the interests of the people, for the good of all, from agrarian reform to defeating the monopolistic and powerful interests of the large land/plantation owners. Thus the basis of the Cuban revolution was not socialist per se but grew out of the strength of popular support for self-determination and social justice, backed by its consensual and inclusive character and the particular historical materialist situation in Cuba. It was not achieved on the basis of some abstract or explicit Marxist theory. As Raby (2009) maintains, it was only in the 1960s at a certain point in the transformation process that it was identi¿ed as socialist. The key points here are the importance of the motivation; the coherence between the ideology and the reality of people’s lived experience; the use of the community as a central institution built on Cuban values; and the fact that, if it is in the people’s interest and becomes the people’s will, radical transformative change is possible within a relatively short time. Cuba today is an example of a socialist society which has attained a high level of stability, equity, education, health status, grassroots democracy and economic independence and this despite the enormous pressures from its near neighbour and bastion of neoliberalism, the United States. In spite of its isolation from the global economy, Cuba’s emphasis on egalitarianism, education and health care has resulted in its human development indices being on a par with the world’s most economically powerful nation. It has a Human Development Index (HDI) of 0.863 which gives it a ranking of 51 out of 182 countries.3 In transforming its economy from a fossil fuelled industrial plantation-based economy into an ecological, diversi¿ed, organic food-producing, self-suf¿cient economy, Cuba has not only been able to improve signi¿cantly the quality of physical life of its citizens, it appears to have built a socially cohesive society. There are many lessons here for the type of transformational change that neoliberal countries will need to undergo if we are to save the planet for human occupation. Much of the trade, aid and oil for Cuba came from the Soviet Union until it collapsed in 1989–90. This meant that thereafter Cuba’s development had to be based on its own natural and population resources. For example, with the demise of the Soviet Union, imports of oil to Cuba were cut by more than half and of food by 80 per cent. The ¿lm ‘Power of Community’ (Morgan 2006) shows how Cuba went from having a highly mechanised, industrial agricultural system to one

Getting to the future 191 using organic methods of farming and local, urban gardens, building a resilient, locally based economy. The country made a fundamental change to organic agriculture and adopted ecologically sound practices throughout the economy. It developed a system of organoponkos, intensive cultivation of fruit and vegetables and an extensive urban organic agriculture system. Today, the capital, Havana produces, within the city, 60 per cent of its fruit and vegetables, a scheme that is now being adopted in a number of other South American countries (Morgan 2006). Cuba, of necessity, underwent an energy revolution with the demise of the Soviet Union, and has now a system of decentralised power generation where communities depend more on small but ef¿cient local generators. More recently Cuba has invested signi¿cantly in wind and solar power generation. Cuba is one of the few countries which has been increasing its biomass, has not been involved in depleting other countries’ biomass and has the record of being the only country which has increased its forested land area. It is the only country in the world to meet the World Wildlife Fund’s (2006) criteria for sustainable development. In making an overall assessment of the Cuban experience, perhaps the main lesson for future post-capitalist economies is that when change to local, community-based production is necessary or is forced on a country, Cuba tells us that it can be done. Cuba also provides one example of how it can be done. Leadership, resilience, a community focus, culturally relevant institutions, belief in a principle (justice) and an imperative to survive – there really was no alternative – were essential ingredients of the Cuban success. Importantly, the very basis of society was transformed from being divided, hierarchical and unequal to one where the social relations of production were socialised and large-scale land reform was carried out. Urban agriculture has played an important role in providing the population with food security and involvement in the nation’s transition. There will be many routes to the future post-capitalist world but the odds have to be high that all successful roads will involve these characteristics.

Russia – some pitfalls of transformative change While there is much to learn from positive examples of transition, we can also learn from the Russian experience of how unplanned, externally driven change can exact an enormous toll on people and country. Thus radical changes have occurred in many places but these have often been very painful. The old Soviet Union is a case in point. Close examination of the major transformation from communist state-controlled economy to free market economy in the period 1989 to the mid 1990s raises some critical issues about transformational change that are relevant to any such changes that should and could occur as a result of the political economy of global warming. The process of transformation in Russia became an opportunity for capital accumulation and dispossession on a grand scale – with formerly state-owned assets being sold at well below bargain prices to former party apparatchiks and other elite – enabling them to form the very

192

To have a future

wealthy and powerful Russian oligarchy of today. What is particularly relevant is that after Gorbachev’s departure no institutions were put in place to transform to and to protect the interests of the people. Furthermore, any sense of where society as a whole was transitioning to also went with Gorbachev. With the twin policies of glasnost (openness) in 1986 and perestroika (restructuring) in 1988, President Mikhail Gorbachev began the process of democratisation in the Soviet Union: the press were freed, Russia’s parliament, local councils, the of¿ces of the president and vice president were opened to election, and the constitutional court was made independent. Gorbachev wanted to move to a mixture of a free market and a strong safety net-based economy, with the key industries remaining under public control. He had a clear set of values to work with – essentially a Scandinavian model of social democracy í and predicted it would take ten to ¿fteen years to complete. This plan was, however, hi-jacked. The G7 in 1991 ordered him to embrace radical economic change or assistance would be withdrawn. Then Gorbachev was replaced by Boris Yeltsin who had no clear plan other than to accept the economic shock therapy, driven by the West and guided by the economics graduates from the Chicago School. The country descended into chaos. The values underpinning the Russian transformation were not Russian but imported and centred on private and corporate pro¿t. It cannot be surprising that this resulted in corruption and pro¿teering at the expense of more socially just and equitable pathways. The other characteristic of this process is that the institutions to which the economy was transforming had not been established prior to the change – leaving a values and institution vacuum which, while it ought to have been ¿lled by some socially and culturally appropriate values, permitted unbridled and imported values and an absence of social institutions. The only institution was the market. Joseph Stiglitz, then chief economist at the World Bank, argued that ‘[o]nly a blitzkrieg approach during the “window of opportunity” provided by the “fog of transition” would get the changes made before the population had a chance to organize to protect its previous vested interests’ (Klein, 224, quoted from Joseph Stiglitz, Preface, in Klein and Pomer, eds, The New Russia, p. xxii). The intent was thus to destroy old values and old institutions and not build new ones – and certainly not Russian culturally driven ones. Seventy thousand state factories closed, creating an epidemic of unemployment. The UN Development Program estimated ten million excess male deaths during the 1990s, ‘approximately the toll of Stalin’s purge sixty years earlier’ (Chomsky 2003b: 147). The crumbling of Russia’s healthcare system under market reforms has been held partly responsible for making Russia the ¿rst country to experience a sharp decline in births versus deaths for reasons other than war, famine or disease (ibid.: 147). In 1989, 2 million people in the Russian Federation were living in poverty, on less than $4 a day. Alcohol consumption has dramatically increased, the number of illicit drug users has increased 900 per cent (Klein and Pomer 2001: 238) and today, nearly a million Russians are HIV positive, up from 50,000 in 1995 (ibid.).

Getting to the future 193 There are thus lessons to be drawn from Russia’s transformational change. First, change must be based on some assessment of what citizens want – citizens needing to be critically informed about the options, having a say on what the values of any new society are. If a society wants to be peaceful, just, compassionate and equitable, the values underpinning that society will result in institutions being built that reÀect that. If a society wants to be based on survival of the ¿ttest, on competition, pro¿t and individualism, then the society will build its institutions accordingly. Relevant here is the work of Nussbaum (2001) on institutions and one particular value – social compassion – although similar arguments might be made for other social values. Nussbaum (2001: 403) asks: what would a compassionate society look like? Given that there is reason to think that compassion gives public morality essential elements of ethical vision without which any public culture is dangerously rootless and hollow, how can we make this compassion do the best work it can in connection with liberal and democratic institutions? The insights of an appropriate compassion may be embodied in the structure of just institutions, so that we will not need to rely on perfectly compassionate citizens. This idea is used both by Smith (with his idea of the compassion of the ‘judicious spectator’) and by Rawls, who creates an arti¿cial model of an appropriately constrained benevolence via the Original Position. This ideal of moral benevolence is the lens through which we see how institutions and basic political principles should be designed. There are many different ways in which compassion and other values might be developed and built into social institutions. Fundamentally however Nussbaum (2001: 405) sees the relationship between compassion and social institutions as ‘a two-way street: compassionate individuals construct institutions that embody what they imagine; and institutions, in turn, inÀuence the development of compassion in individuals’. The challenge in making transformative change of the kind that will be required with global warming and which Russia failed totally to meet is twofold: to establish in some way or other what the ‘new’ values are to be and attempt to ensure that these are grounded in the new society or are at least likely to win the support of that new society; and secondly to establish social institutions that reÀect, protect and advance these values. It is for these reasons that the book has given such emphasis in Chapter 9 to the question of the values and principles on which societies are to be based if global warming is to be tackled successfully. For the planet to go down the Russian road of transformation in terms of its failure to consider issues of social values and social institutions would be globally catastrophic.

11 Conclusion

Will Steffen, Paul Crutzen and John McNeill argued in 2007 that we are now in a post-Holocene epoch which they have called the Anthropocene, a period that they maintain began around 1800 with the onset of industrialisation. The main feature of the Anthropocene is the enormous expansion in the use of fossil fuels and the resulting rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere ranged from 270–275 ppm; today they have reached 400 ppm, with the greatest increase occurring in the last thirty years, and the rate of increase accelerating. Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill refer to this more recent rapid increase as ‘the Great Acceleration’, which is now reaching criticality. They argue that within a few decades, we will pass a tipping point in the evolution of the Anthropocene taking us on a trajectory to an unknown future. Compounding this are the other converging biophysical and social indicators that the planet is in deep crisis. It is too vague and unhelpful to say that humanity has taken us on this trajectory. Here, I have argued that it is a particular, globalised system of political economy that has driven the course of human history to this point. Over the last few centuries, capitalism has transformed the face of the Earth to the point that our planet may not much longer be able to support human life as we know it. Despite this, the capitalist system is still set to engulf the last remaining corners of the planet, guaranteeing widespread human and ecological catastrophe. This trajectory has been examined through the perspective of the political economy of global warming but as has been made clear from the very beginning, global warming is but one product of a system that has many crises and contradictions, is unjust, unstable and destructive and where the manifestations of these characteristics are many. As Harvey (2001: 121) suggests: ‘someone, somewhere has to think about what kind of social system should replace it’. Solutions to global warming require systemic transformational change. However, the momentum of capitalism is great, with considerable ability to adapt, absorb and recon¿gure and to turn obstacles into pro¿table opportunities, all the time expanding and increasing the consumption of material resources from nature, solving problems by using the same tools of capital accumulation that caused the problems in the ¿rst place. The forces of capitalism are immensely powerful, but

Conclusion

195

we are coming to a fork in the road in human history, where the system of global capitalism is forcing an end to the Holocene Epoch of the last 12,000 years, the geological period within which human civilisation has developed, where we have to decide between ‘capitalism or the planet’. We are not only faced with global warming, but the life and death crises of growing poverty in the face of growing riches, the disappearance of commons, the loss of lands and livelihoods as capitalism expands, that is resulting in increasing numbers of people having little to lose in changing the system (Narain 2011). As Foster et al. (2010: 439) write, ‘the main force for ecological revolution stems from movements in the global South, marked for example, by the growth of the Via Campesina movement, socialist organisations like Brazil’s MST, and ongoing revolutions in Latin America (the ALBA countries) and Asia (Nepal)’. The book also identi¿ed as relevant here the movements that come under the banner of the World Social Forum, a forum of particular signi¿cance to African social and environmental justice groups that lack the visibility of some of their Latin American counterparts. As Foster et al. (2010: 440) write: ‘it is conceivable that the main historic agent and initiator of a new epoch of ecological revolution is to be found in the Third World masses most directly in line to be hit ¿rst by the impending disasters.’ It is however unrealistic to conclude as Foster et al. (2010: 440) would want to do that the ‘weight of environmental disaster is such that it would cross all class lines and all nations and positions leading to a rejection of the engine of destruction in which we live’. Nearly twenty million people were affected by devastating Àoods in Pakistan in August 2010 – and the world stood by; Haiti lost more than 200,000 people in an earthquake at the beginning of 2010 and a year later people were still living without water, toilets, shelter and adequate food and dying from cholera while US business interests maintain a system which continues to impoverish and disenfranchise the people of Haiti (Field and Bell 2010); the 2011/2012 famines of East and West Africa ravage populations largely out of our sight. Solutions to global warming will have to address the gamut of related social and environmental problems arising from capitalism, at the same time as tackling global warming. The criticisms of capitalism used in the book are based primarily on the work of Marx. It is noted, however, that neither Marx, nor his friend and colleague, Friedrich Engels, provided a detailed blueprint for future society. However, their vision does allow the book to develop on the basis of the principle of sustainable human development, drawing on metabolically restorative processes and the dis-alienation of the social relations of production. It is argued that justice and equity will have to prevail as foundational principles for future global society and this will necessarily be expressed through various institutional and cultural arrangements. These principles will, among other things, mean the issue of rights to the very limited capacity for future carbon emissions and the resolution of the issue of historical ecological debt, taking into account historical emissions and involving the contraction and convergence of carbon emissions globally. Future societies will need to build their economies on equitable ecological footprints within the restorative capacities of the Earth’s biosphere.

196

Conclusion

It is reasonable to assume that the struggle for a metabolically restorative and dis-alienated sustainable world will be violently resisted by vested class interests. The struggle to bring about solidarity amongst the impoverished, fragmented, alienated and exploited class alone will be a major undertaking. Samir Amin (2011) argues for a ‘convergence in diversity’ of all oppressed and exploited people to form a new international open and Àexible organisation to co-ordinate opposition movements around the world. While strongly defending localisation and diversity, the book concludes that the struggle is against a hegemonic globalised system and that global solidarity will be important in overthrowing this system, while building sustainable communities locally. Marx and Engels’ vision of the commons, of the dis-alienation of labour, of metabolically restorative relations between humans and nature in the production of livelihoods, and of common property as bases of socially sustainable communities, foreshadows a future with the potential for hope. This vision encompasses what the biological sciences tell us is possible and the social sciences tell us about the humane part of the human nature which is healthy and convivial. There are few grounds for optimism that global society will be able to or willing to make the necessary radical political economy changes in time to avert global warming. Yet, given the enormous suffering that has begun and will continue to grow as a result of global warming, there is a moral imperative to try to divert the course of human history on to a pathway that is just and enduring. It might seem idealistic to have concluded the book with a belief that transformational change is possible. There is, however, no presentation of a blueprint for future societies. That was never the intent of this book. To propose a blueprint for future societies would be contradictory. Given the importance the analysis has ascribed to cultural and economic diversity, to human creativity and to analysis societies developing their own histories, it would also have been inappropriate and pretentious to propose such a blueprint. What this book has done, however, is to propose a set of principles as foundation stones for new sustainable societies which can lead to just, equitable, dis-alienated, culturally rich and materially simple and secure societies. What is clear from the analysis is that such epochal transformation is contingent on community and class solidarity, an agreed set of guiding principles, critical political conscientisation and trial and error experiences of struggle in building community-centred radical movements. The book makes abundantly clear that effective change will only come from the majority who through their struggles for more equitable and environmentally sustainable lives build a powerful transnational base rooted in local cultures and economies, spreading the vision that another world is possible. The Marxist vision of the dis-alienation of the social relations of production has much to contribute to a framework for this movement. However, the negative experiences of state socialism and communism in the twentieth century support the argument for local communities being the foundation of such a framework for human development. Localised food security (water and shelter) will be a predominant focus of economic activity in future communities, as the point of inextricable connection

Conclusion

197

between humans and the environment. Communal (rather than individual) needs must be centre stage, not only of present but also of future generations. The needed ecological transformation requires the distribution of bene¿ts according to community need. Indeed the institution of the community emerges very ¿rmly as central to these new societies. This means focusing ¿rst and foremost on the collective needs of food production, education, recreation and public health. The demand for more equitable and environmentally sustainable life opportunities is central to the growing worldwide rebellion against dominant economic institutions (transnational corporations, the unholy trinity of the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO). Communities built on the realisation of humans’ dependence on the environment have the potential to develop a sense of solidarity across cultures as well as to develop a political consciousness. The future holds only two possibilities. First, ecological destruction; the second, radical, systemic, transformative, epochal change. This is a provocative call but the latter is the only possibility that promises a future for humanity. During times of war and times of crisis, the best in people can be brought out and a sense of sacri¿ce and solidarity built. There has never been a time when that sense of sacri¿ce and global solidarity is more needed. Those who have contributed least to causing the crisis, the ones whose lives are already the most vulnerable, are the very ones who will suffer ¿rst and most, but in the end all people and societies will be affected. We in the West have a moral obligation to address the huge ecological debt owed to the poor and the unborn that arises from the super-exploitation and pollution of the biosphere. It is a debt that must be addressed and paid through reparations, redistribution or compensation as an integral part of international climate negotiations. Only by addressing this issue can the West hope to build the essential co-operative alliance with all countries and peoples to tackle carbon emission reductions and the myriad of other social and ecological crises that confront humanity. Hopefully, we still have a small window of opportunity in which we can use both the optimism, the will and the power to change the disastrous trajectory we are on. We can choose to ¿ddle while the globe burns, to be afraid to be called alarmists, to be secure in the knowledge that we in the West will not be so immediately and devastatingly affected by global warming. That however would leave us morally bankrupt and living in a sea of chaos on a stricken planet. The task is monumental and complex. The lives of billions of current and future generations of people who share a ¿nite planet, enveloped and interconnected through a thin layer of fragile biosphere í our global commons – are at stake. Any addressing of this task demands that we heal the deep structural chasm that has developed in the metabolic relations between humans and between humans and nature as a result of the social relations of production inherent in the capitalist system. We can do this by building new political, economic and cultural systems and societies that are metabolically restorative, equitable, resilient, just, diverse and democratic. It is a challenge that could bring the different peoples of the world together, to build something better together and make history for the bene¿t of all people. We cannot afford not to try, nor to fail.

Notes

1: Introduction 1 From the Real World Economics Review blog (2012) at http://rwer.wordpress. com/2012/10/10/775-billion-fossil-fuels-subsidies-in-2012-thats-more-than-100-perhuman/ 2 China, for example, in June 2012, was found to be under-reporting its emissions by up to 20 per cent – quite possibly not the only country unique to be under-reporting. 3 http://www.naturalcapitaldeclaration.ord/ 4 I was ¿rst alerted to the work of the Stockholm Resilience Centre by Foster et al.’s 2010 book, The Ecological Rift.

2: State of the planet, Kyoto and technical ¿xes 1 In referring to ‘the poor’, it is important to acknowledge that this concept represents multiple identities, ethnicities, cultures, forms of dispossession and marginalisation. 2 An economistic ¿gure which is largely meaningless and effectively underestimates the real numbers of poor but for the sake of argument is used here. 3 Equivalent to approximately US$0.36. 4 Greenhouse gases listed under the Kyoto Protocol included; a new greenhouse gas has been added, nitrogen triÀuoride, as well as new species of hydroÀuorocarbons. 5 In an article, ‘Tipping elements in the Earth’s climate system’, Lenton et al. (2008) describe a ‘tipping point’ as the critical threshold at which a tiny perturbation can qualitatively alter the state of development of a system. 6 About 10 billion tonnes are currently released from fossil fuels each year. 7 K. Schaefer, 2011, ‘Thawing permafrost will accelerate global warming in decades to come, says new study’, National Snow and Ice Data Centre, Boulder, Colorado. Media Release 16 February 2011. [cited 11 August 2011] Available from http://www.globalwarming-forecasts.com/underestimates.php 8 An example of one tipping point comes from the vast expanse of the western Siberian tundra where permafrost encasing the world’s largest frozen peat bog has started melting on a large scale for the ¿rst time since it originally formed 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. If this thaws, billions of tonnes of methane would be released into the atmosphere, and methane, in terms of its impact on global warming, is 20 times more potent than CO2 (Sample 2005). Other potential tipping points include the collapse of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation (THC), melting of the Greenland ice sheet, the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, disturbance of El Ni˜no Southern Oscillation, Indian Summer Monsoon, Sahara/Sahel and West Africa

Notes 199

9

10 11 12 13 14 15

Monsoon; clearing of the Amazon Rainforest and boreal forests (Lenton et al. 2008); the acidi¿cation of oceans, deserti¿cation of land (both reducing the ability for carbon absorption); and melting polar ice caps reducing reÀecting surface to deÀect the sun’s radiation. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, based in Geneva, Switzerland, was established in 1988 by two United Nations organisations í the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) í to assess scienti¿c, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. The Fifth IPCC Report will be released in 2013. Many of these ‘feedbacks’ are absent from current climate models which means that estimates tend towards the conservative. The Jevons Paradox outlines how improved ef¿ciency in the use of coal made it more cost effective as an energy source and it was therefore in greater demand – leading to increased production. For example, see Clarke 2010, Why James Hansen is wrong on nuclear power [http://links.org.au/node/1607], (Accessed January 2011); Caldicott 2006. The G8 consists of the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia. www.doingbusiness.org/rankings (Accessed June 2010).

3: Emission trading schemes, ¿nancialisation and green capitalism 1 The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change was a landmark UK report discussing the effects of global warming on the world economy, released in 2006. The Garnaut Climate Change Review, released in 2008, was commissioned by the Australian Government and looked at the impacts of climate change on the Australian economy. 2 Carbon dioxide equivalent refers to the unit of measurement that allows the effect of different greenhouse gases to be compared using carbon dioxide as a standard unit for reference. 3 Sandbag is a climate campaign group which is supportive of carbon trading http:// www.sandbag.org.uk. 4 http://corporateeurope.org/news/eu-ets-failing-third-attempt 5 Fracking, or coal seam exploration, occurs when a hole is drilled hundreds of metres into the ground and is pumped full of highly toxic chemicals mixed with water. This forces the rock base to crack and releases the natural gas contained within. 6 The Carbon Tracker Initiative looks at the carbon emissions problem. It is focused on the fossil fuel reserves held by publicly listed companies, the way they are valued and assessed by markets. Currently ¿nancial markets treat fossil fuel reserves as assets. However, as governments move to control carbon emissions, this market is becoming what is seen as a potential and growing systemic risk for institutional investors. Like the dot.com boom and the more recent credit crunch, the carbon bubble could be equally serious for institutional investors with the added dimension of having a permanent loss in value. 7 John Bellamy Foster et al. (2010) refer to the ecological rift – the deep chasm that has ‘opened up in relation in the metabolic relation between human beings and nature – a metabolism that is the basis of life itself’ (Preface to The Ecological Rift. Capitalism’s War on the Earth). 8 In a statement presented in the side events sessions of Rio+20, June 2012. http://www. uncsd2012.org/meetings_sidevents.html

200

Notes

4: The global political economy and global warming 1 The idea of ecological debt is not new, dating back at least 200 years. In modern times however its contemporary meaning is most frequently ascribed to Acción Ecologica Ecuador: ‘the debt accumulated by Northern, industrial countries toward Third World countries on account of resource plundering, environmental space to deposit wastes, such as greenhouse gases, from the industrial countries’ (Acción Ecologica 2009). 2 One Ghanaian Cedi is approximately equivalent to 33 UK pence (November 2012). 3 One of the many ¿gures illustrating the vastness as well as the casino nature of the stock market and included in Foster and Magdoff’s (2010) The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences, is the fact that daily trading on world currency markets averages about US$1.8 trillion – a ¿gure which equals the annual GDP of the whole world. 4 Including: C. Ferguson, Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption and the Hijacking of America; J. Connaughton, The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins; J. Rickards, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis. 5 The G20 is a group of major industrialised and emerging economies brought together in the wake of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. 6 Liptak (2010). It was stated that: ‘The court af¿rmed that groups of passionate individuals, like billionaires í and corporations and unions after Citizens United í have the right to spend without limit to independently advocate for or against federal candidates.’ 7 D. Ruccio, 2010, ‘Graph of the month: The wide divide.’ 8 It is projected that oil supplies peaked in 2005, that coal also peaked in 2010 and that gas will peak by 2030 (Aleklett 2010). The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (www.peakoil.net/contact-us) has a comprehensive website of peer reviewed literature which covers peak fossil fuels and provides evidence we are passing the peak production levels of oil, gas and coal. This ‘peaking’ is discussed more in Chapter 11. 9 The World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth was held in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2010. The conference was attended by about 300,000 people, many from grassroots movements from the South. 10 See Chomsky 2011 at http://www.democracynow.org/seo/2011/5/11noam-chomsky-the-us

5: Africa 1 http://www.pacja.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=36&I temid=129. np. The quote is long, but I have included it as we so rarely hear the voice of Africans in Australia. 2 GRAIN 2012: 10. 3 Bryceson (2002) de¿nes the term peasants as rural dwellers who live off the land as farmers and/or pastoralists combining subsistence and commodity production. 4 Sub-Saharan Africa’s total external debt in 2007 was $195 billion, an amount equivalent to 25 per cent of the region’s Gross National Income (GNI) (World Bank 2009a). 5 According to Boyce and Ndikumana (2010) sub-Saharan Africa is a net creditor to the rest of the world, in that the sub-continent’s private external assets exceed its public external liabilities: total capital Àight amounts per annum to $420 billion (in 2004 dollars), compared to the external debt of $227 billion. Econometric analysis indicates that for every dollar in external loans to Africa in this period, roughly 60 cents Àowed back out as capital Àight in the same year, a ¿nding that suggests the existence of widespread ‘debt-fuelled’ capital Àight. 6 Between 1980 and 1992, African countries paid three times the original amount of foreign debt owed in 1980 and yet debt still remains at over US$1.3 trillion (Third World Network 2010).

Notes 201

6: South Africa 1 Additionally, large numbers of miners from other countries in the region have contracted HIV/AIDS while working in South African mines – returning home to die untreated in their own communities (Spoor 2009, personal communication). 2 The Restitution of Land Rights Act, passed in 1994 by the South African government, was aimed at addressing the injustices of racially based land dispossession in the past as well as establishing a more equitable distribution of land ownership – land reform being a cornerstone of poverty reduction programmes. 3 Stories of high level corruption in South Africa are frequent news items in the weekly Guardian Weekly and daily, The Cape Times. 4 Khayelitsha is a black township about 10 kilometres from the outer, mostly white, suburbs of Cape Town, with a population of 2 million. By contrast, Cape Town is one of the world’s most beautiful (and rich) cities. Domestic dwellings in the white areas are very spacious, and most have gardeners and domestic ‘char’ women; guard dogs and barbed wire fences. 5 The People’s Health Movement (PHM) is a global coalition of grassroots and health activist organisations dedicated to addressing the burden of preventable disease globally but in particular that carried by developing countries. 6 Figures for refugees are unreliable – of¿cial ¿gures underestimating numbers. 7 Refugees need to obtain documents from the Home Affairs Department – an almost impossible task due to the obstructionism and ineptitude of the department (personal experience accompanying refugees). 8 At Musina, a South African border town near Zimbabwe, in 2010 we stopped to pick up a woman with her two children from the side of the road from amongst the throngs of refugees walking south after crossing from Zimbabwe (at that time over a thousand a day). As I got out of the car to help the woman, someone grabbed her small bag of belongings, including her ID papers. Her plight became impossible – she could not turn back, nor could she go forward. After giving her some money, we left her, taking instead two women each with a baby. They had been walking for several days to the border and were travelling to Johannesburg in search of work to feed themselves, their babies and families left behind. One of the women had had to decide which of her two babies she could take, as she could not work with more than one on her back. She did not know if she would ever have enough money to go home again. 9 Middle class is de¿ned by Statistics South Africa (2010) as: residing in formal housing, having a water tap in the residence, having a Àush toilet in the residence, having electricity as the main lighting source, having electricity or gas as the main cooking source, and having a landline or a household member having a cell phone. 10 The percentage of all South African households with a middle-class standard of living increased modestly from 23 per cent to 26 per cent between 1998–2000 and 2004–2006. About 85 per cent of White households and 75 per cent of Asian households had a middle-class standard of living throughout the period. Coloured households with a middle-class standard of living increased from 41 per cent in 1998–2006 to 48 per cent in 2004–2006. Almost no rural African households had a middle-class standard of living. The percentage of urban African households with a middle-class standard of living rose from 5 per cent to 22 per cent. Among middle-class households, white households were much better off than middle-class households from other population groups. In 2006, 73 per cent of white households with a middle-class standard of living reported expenditure of more than R2,500 per month, while this was true of only 56 per cent of middle-class Asian households, 53 per cent of middle-class Coloured households and 32 per cent of middle-class African households (Statistics South Africa 2010). 11 Terrestrial ecological zones. 12 Biomes of the arid plateau of South Africa.

202

Notes

13 Fynbos means ¿ne-leaved bush – a local term for the heath-like vegetation found in the southern coastal areas of South Africa that have a Mediterranean-type climate with winter rainfall. Fynbos display exceptionally high levels of endemism. The uniqueness of the Cape Floristic Region, which is largely coincident with the fynbos, has resulted in it being considered as one of the world’s six Àoristic kingdoms, the only one located entirely in one country. 14 The regional Millennium Ecosystem Assessment states that for every 1° C temperature increase, the evaporation rate rises by 5 per cent. 15 The Director of the International Institute for Environment and Development, UK. 16 Bantustans refer to the territories which were set aside under the Apartheid regime for black South Africans. 17 The death of Nelson Mandela will perhaps mark a point of departure for many from the ANC which has not delivered on its pre-1994 promises. 18 The Washington Consensus refers to the beginnings of neoliberalism and can be dated to the late 1970s. To what extent it constituted a consensus is questionable as it was one man’s assessment of ‘what would be regarded in Washington as constituting a desirable set of economic policy reforms’ (Williamson 2002). The Washington Consensus or neoliberalism constitutes a more extreme form of capitalism which saw the end of Keynesianism (ibid.). 19 Such as security and cleaning services, and providing a large pool of unemployed which helps keep wages down. 20 Prior to June 2009, there were the Department of Minerals and Energy (DME) and the Department of Environment and Tourism (DEAT). 21 The Tripartite Alliance includes the ANC, Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP). 22 BHP Billiton smelters import bauxite aluminium ore from Australia, use subsidised Eskom electricity in arc furnaces to produce the metal which is then exported (Yelland 2011).

7: South African electricity: a capitalist hub 1 It is anticipated that running CCS equipment will consume at least 20 per cent of the electricity produced by a power plant and that capturing the CO2 is the easy part – it is the subsequent storage that is proving to be one of the biggest hurdles. 2 Load-shedding is the South African term which refers to a rolling blackout to save electricity consumption. 3 China, the USA and India are much larger producers and consumers of coal; Australia, Indonesia, Russia and Colombia are larger exporters. 4 The Eskom expansion programme will require an additional 50 million tonnes of coal (Eskom 2010; EIA 2010). 5 Bene¿ciation is the process of crushing and separating ore into valuable substances and wastes. 6 The San people are the Indigenous hunter gatherers of South Africa. 7 South Africa succumbed to pressure from the biotechnology companies and is now the sixth largest producer of genetically modi¿ed (GM) crops in the world. In ‘the past ¿ve years, hundreds of thousands of hectares have been turned over to planting of GM crops … Small farmers have been supported to plant GM cotton … but are increasingly ¿nding dif¿culties with debt, low cotton prices, withdrawn extension of services and a lack of irrigation’ (Fig 2009). 8 South Africa used to grow approximately 40 per cent of its food; it now produces about 25 per cent (Small 2010).

Notes 203

8: Alternative futures 1 The knowledge industry refers to the media, including the advertising industry, but also all the institutions which are associated with education that perpetuates the status quo, that is not critical and analytical of the status quo. 2 See for example for Australia, Kitney 2004. 3 Aleklett (2010) public lecture, Perth, 16 December. 4 Conscientisation is the process of becoming a critical thinker capable of freeing oneself from dominant and oppressive ideology arising from one’s socialization. M. Ledwith (2005). Community Development (pp. 56–111), Portland: Policy Press.

9: The principles underpinning future societies 1 This gathering of seed and growing locally produced seed is one of the key principles in heirloom vegetable production. The other is maintaining plant diversity. 2 John Locke’s treatises on property effectively legitimised the theft of the commons in Europe during the enclosure movements of the seventeenth century. These treatises continue to inform theories and practices that erode the commons and destroy the Earth. (See Shiva 2002: 25.) 3 Christian fundamentalists

10: Getting to the future 1 Abalimi means ‘the Planters’ in Xhosa, the predominant local language. 2 In Australia at the moment there are few alternatives beyond voting for the Greens (a limited alternative) or Socialist minority parties in elections and voting once every few years hardly constitutes active participation in change processes. 3 Cuba has human development indicators on a par with the most developed democracies in the world – with the exception of income. It has a per capita GDP of $US6,876 PPP; a 99.8 per cent literacy rate; and a life expectancy at birth of 78.5 years. This compares with the United States which has a HDI of 0.956 and ranks thirteenth out of 182 countries; a GDP per capita of $US45,592 PPP; a 98 per cent literacy rate; and a life expectancy at birth of 79.1 years. Cuba has one of the most highly skilled workforces in the world (Ranis and Kosack 2004) and ‘exports’ thousands of doctors as a form of aid to Third World countries (19,000 physicians alone in 2008 – more than all the G8 countries combined) as well as training Third World doctors in their own countries (Direct Action 2009). http://directaction.org.au/issue8/cuban_revolution_50_years_of_ accomplishments (Accessed March 2011).

Bibliography

Abbas, H. and N. Ndeda (2009) Aid and reparations: power in the development discourse. In: Aid to Africa: Redeemer or Colonizer? (eds) H. Abbas and Y. Niyiragira. Cape Town: Pambazuka Press, pp. 76–92. ABC (2012) Australia stands accused of poaching African doctors. http://www.abc.net. au/7.30/content/2012/s3487255.htm (Accessed August 2012). Accion Ecologica (2009) http://www.accionecologica.org/ (Accessed May 2011). Aleklett, K. (2010) Oil Shock: Peak oil and Australia’s vulnerability. Public lecture. Perth: The Greens WA. Allianz group & WWF (2005) Climate Change and The Financial Sector. An Agenda for Action. http://www.wwf.org.uk/¿lelibrary/pdf/allianz_rep_0605.pdf (Accessed June 2012). Amandla (2010) Crises of Civilisation Conference. Cape Town: Amandla Publishers. http://www.amandlapublishers.co.za/crisis-of-civilisation-conference (Accessed March 2012). Amin, S. (1997) Samir Amin’s 1997 Babu Memorial Lecture. http://www.pambazuka.org/ en/issue/451 (Accessed March 2012). Amin, S. (2004) The conditions for an alternative global system based on social and international justice. Document for WSF Mumbai. http://actuelmarx.u-paris10.fr/m4aminm. htm (Accessed June 2013). Amin, S. (2006) Beyond liberal globalisation: a better or worse world? Monthly Review 58 (7), December http://monthlyreview.org/2006/12/01/beyond-liberal-globalization-abetter-or-worse-world (Accessed January 2012). Amin, S. (2011) Capitalism in crisis: An obsolete system. Pambazuka News. http://www. pambazuka.org/en/category/features/69276 (Accessed March 2012). Anderson, K. and A. Bows (2011) Beyond ‘dangerous’ climate change: emission scenarios for a new world. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 369 (1934):, 20–44. Andreasson, S. (2010) Africa’s Development Impasse. Rethinking the Political Economy of Transformation. London: Zed Books. Arieff, A., M. Weiss and V. Jones. (2010) The Global Economic Crisis: Impact on Sub-Saharan Africa and global policy responses. April 6. Congressional Research Service. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R40778.pdf (Accessed February 2012). Ashman, S., B. Fine and S. Newman (2010) The crisis in South Africa: Neoliberalism, ¿nancialization and uneven and combined development. Socialist Register 47: 174–95. Avert (2006) South Africa HIV and AIDS Statistics. http://www.avert.org/south-africahiv-aids-statistics.htm (Accessed June 2012).

Bibliography 205 Bagchi, A. K. (2005) Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital. Oxford: Rowman & Little¿eld. Ballaam, D. and M. Veseth (2005) Introduction to International Political Economy. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. BBC News (2009) Japanese man marries virtual bride from dating game. http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/8419368.stm (Accessed March 2012). Beder, S. (2006a) Suiting Themselves: How Corporations Drive the Global Agenda. London: Earthscan. Beder, S. (2006b) Environmental Principles and Policies: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Sydney: UNSW Press. Boko, M., I. Niang, C. Nyong, A. Vogel, et al. (2007) Africa. Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 433–67. Bolin, B., J. Houghton, G. Filho, R. Watson et al. (1995) IPCC Second Assessment: Climate Change 1995. A Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/climate-changes-1995/ipcc-2nd-assessment/2nd-assessment-en. pdf (Accessed March 2012). Bond, P. (2000) Elite Transition: from Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. Bond, P. (2002) Unsustainable South Africa. Environment, Development and Social Protest. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. Bond, P. (2003) Against Global Apartheid. South Africa Meets the World Bank, IMF and International Finance. Cape Town: UCT Press. Bond, P. (2006) Looting Africa. The Economics of Exploitation. London: Zed Books. Bond, P. (2007) Privatization of the air turns lethal: ‘Pay to Pollute’ principle kills South African activist Sajida Khan. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 18 (4): 6–37. Bond, P. (2010a) South Africa’s bubble meets boiling urban social protest. Monthly Review 62 (2). Bond, P. (2010b) Eye on civil society. The bank loan that could break SA’s back. 13 April. Monthly Review. mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/bond130410.html (Accessed March 2012). Bond, P. (2011) From Cairo to Dakar to Durban, another world actually is possible! Socialist Project E-Bulletin No. 464 February 16. http://www.unionbook.org/pro¿les/ blogs/patrick-bond-cairo-dakar (Accessed March 2012). Bond, P. (2012) Marikana’s momentum still moves the masses í but where? Pambazuka News. www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/84956 (Accessed June 2013). Bond, P., R. Dada and G. Erion (eds.) (2009) Climate change, carbon trading and civil society: negative returns on South African investments. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZuklu-Natal Press. Boyce, J. and L. Ndikumana (2010) New Estimates of Capital Flight from Sub-Saharan African Countries: Linkages with External Borrowing and Policy Options. Working Papers 66, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. http://ideas.repec.org/p/uma/periwp/wp166.html (Accessed March 2012). Boyer, P. (2012) Wake up call from real world. The Mercury October 23. http://www. themercury.com.au/article/2012/10/23/364447_opinion.html (Accessed October 2012). Boyle, B. (2010) Eskom loan must not bene¿t ANC. April 4. http://www.timeslive. co.za/sundaytimes/article385071.ece/Eskom-loan-must-not-bene¿t-ANC (Accessed March 2012).

206

Bibliography

Bradshaw, D. (2008) Determinants of health and their trends. South African Health Review. Primary Health Care in South Africa: A Review of 30 Years since Alma Ata. Durban: The South African Medical Research Council. Braverman, H. (1974) Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press. Brundtland, G. H. (1987) Report of the Brundtland Commission, Our Common Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bryceson, D. F. (2002) The scramble in Africa: Reorienting rural livelihoods. World Development 30 (5): 725–39. Buffett, W. (2002) Chairman’s letter to Berkshire Hathaway Inc. www.berkshirehathaway. com/letters/2002pdf.pdf (Accessed March 2012). Burkett, P. (2006) Marxism and Ecological Economics: Toward a Red and Green Political Economy. Boston, MA: Brill. Burnett, P. and Manji, F. M. 2007. From the slave trade to ‘free’ trade: how trade undermines democracy and justice in Africa. Oxford/Nairobi: Fahamu. Buscher, B. (2009) Connecting political economies of energy in South Africa. Energy Policy 37 (10): 3951–58. Caldicott, H. (2006) Nuclear Power is Not the Answer. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Campbell, H. (2012) Africa: devaluation of the US dollar: Quantitative easing. Pambazuka News. http://allafrica.com/stories/201209280956.html (Accessed October 2012). Canadell, J. G., C. Le Quéré, M. Raupach, C. Field, et al. (2007) Contributions to accelerating atmospheric CO2 growth from economic activity, carbon intensity, and ef¿ciency of natural sinks. PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – USA) 104 (47): 18866–70. Carbon Tracker Initiative (2012). Unburnable Carbon – Are the world’s ¿nancial markets carrying a carbon bubble? http://www.carbontracker.org/ (Accessed June 2012). Carnegie, D. (2007) SARB Monetary Policy and South African Financialization http://www.progressive-economics.ca/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/carnegie.pdf (Accessed May 2012). Catanzaro, J. (2008) Hunger fear for millions in biofuels push. Perth: The West Australian. 28 April: 7. Chabal, P. (2009) Africa: The Politics of Suffering and Smiling. London: Zed Books. Chachage, S. L. C. and E. Annan-Yao (2004) Conclusion í Future Agenda: Beyond Globalisation. In: Globalisation and Social Policy in Africa, (eds) A. Aina, S. L. C. Chachage and E. Annan-Yao. Oxford: Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa. Chipko Movement, India (n.d.). http:www.iisd.org/50comm/commdb/desc/d07.htm (Accessed June 2013). Chomsky, N. (2003a) For Reasons of State, New York: The New Press. Chomsky, N. (2003b) Hegemony or Survival. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Chomsky, N. (2010) The centre cannot hold: rekindling the radical imagination. In L. Panitch, G. Albo and V. Chibber, The Crisis This Time. Socialist Register 2011 Pontypool: Merlin Press. Christian Aid (2005) The economics of failure. The real cost of ‘free’ trade to poor countries. http://www.christianaid.org.uk/indepth/506liberalisation (Accessed June 2012). Clarke, M. (2003) Haiti: Enslaved by debt. Jubilee USA Network. http://www. thirdworldtraveler.com/Caribbean/Haiti_Enslaved_Debt.html (Accessed March 2012). Clarke, R. (2010) Why James Hansen is wrong on nuclear power. Links, 8 April. http:// links.org.au/node/1607 (Accessed March 2011).

Bibliography 207 Cleary, S. (2009) Health Economics Unit, University of Cape Town. Personal communication. Climate Change Social Change (2011) Global carbon trade collapsing in hot air. http://climatechangesocialchange.wordpress.com/category/carbon-trading-scheme/ (Accessed June 2012). Cogan, D. G. (2008) Corporate Governance and Climate Change: The Banking Sector. http://www.ceres.org/resources/reports/corporate-governance-banking-sector/view (Accessed June 2013). Confalonieri, U., B. Menne, R. Akhtar, K. Ebi, et al. (2007) Human Health. Climate change 2007: impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg2/ar4-wg2-chapter8.pdf (Accessed May 2011). Conley, D. (2008) You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction to Thinking Like a Sociologist. New York: Norton and Company. Connaughton, J. (2012) The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins. Westport, CT: Prospecta Press. Connell, D. (2009) The Political Economy of South Africa. Public lecture, June. Cape Town: University of Cape Town. Connell, R. (2007) Southern Theory. The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Corporate Watch (2002) Dupont. http://www.corporatewatch.org/?lid=205 (Accessed October 2012). COSATU (2001) Central Executive Committee, Discussion Paper. Central Executive Committee: Political Discussion Paper July. http://www.cosatu.org.za/docs/ discussion/2001/cecpol.htm (Accessed February 2012). Costello, I., M. Abbas et al. (2009) Managing the health effects of climate change. The Lancet 373: 1693–733. Cribb, J. (2010) The Coming Famine. Berkeley: University of California Press. CSIR (2009) The inextricable link: climate change and our water resource. CSIR ScienceScope. http://www.csir.co.za/publications/pdfs/Ch3120809.pdf (Accessed March 2012). Daily Mail Online (2010) Couple nurture their virtual child... and let their real baby daughter starve to death. 21 February. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1255455/ Couple-nurture-virtual-child--let-real-daughter-starve-death.html (Accessed June 2013). Das, S., S. Khuluse et al. (2008) A Risk-Based Approach to Assessing Climate Impacts. Cape Town: CSIR Built Environment. Dasgupta, P. (2010) A Matter of Trust: Social Capital and Economic Development. http:// www.sci.manchester.ac.uk/medialibrary/sci_discussionpaper_no1.pdf (Accessed April 2012). Davis, M. (2006) Planet of Slums. London: Verso. DEAT (2004) A National Climate Change Response Strategy for South Africa. Pretoria: Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism (South Africa). DEAT (2007) Long Term Mitigation Scenarios. Cape Town: Energy Research Centre, University of Cape Town. Department of Minerals and Energy (2010) Press Release. Johannesburg, South Africa. www.dmr.gov.za/ (Accessed March 2012). Desai, A. (2002) We Are the Poors. New York: Monthly Review Press. Desai, A. (2004) But we were thousands: Dispossession, resistance, repossession and repression in Mandela Park. Journal of Asian and African Studies, August 39: 239–69. Direct Action (2009). Cuba’s revolution: 50 years of accomplishments. Issue 8. February.

208

Bibliography

http://directaction.org.au/issue8/cuban_revolution_50_years_of_accomplishments (Accessed April 2012). Dobb, M. H. (1973) Theories of Value and Distribution since Adam Smith: Ideology and Economic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dorsey, M. and P. Bond (2012) Africa, steer clear of this Ponzi Climate scheme. Pambazuka News 5670 http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/79416 (Accessed June 2013). Duigan, S. (2009) Catholic Nun, Messina, Limpopo. Personal Communication. Earthlife Africa and Oxfam International (2009) Climate Change, Development and Energy Problems in South Africa: Another world is possible. http://www.oxfam.org/en/ policy/climate-change-and-south-africa-another-world-possible (Accessed June 2013). EIA (2010) Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. International Energy Outlook. http:// www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/emissions.html (Accessed March 2012). Ellman, M. (1997) The political economy of transformation. Oxford Review of Economic Policy 13 (2): 23–32. Energy Watch Group (2006) Uranium resources and nuclear energy. http://www. energywatchgroup.org/¿leadmin/global/pdf/EWG_Report_Uranium_3–12-2006ms.pdf (Accessed March 2012). Epstein, G. (2006) Financialisation and the World Economy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Eskom (2008) Annual Report 2008. Pretoria: Eskom. http://¿nancialresults.co.za/eskom_ ar2008/ (Accessed June 2011). Eskom (2010) Annual Report, 2010. Pretoria: Eskom. http://¿nancialresults.co.za/2010/ eskom_ar2010/ (Accessed August 2011). Fanon, F. (1967) The Wretched of the Earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin. FAO (2008) An Introduction to the Basic Concepts of Food Security. http://www.fao.org/ docrep/013/a1936e/al936e00.pdf (Accessed June 2013). Fattal, J. (2006) Was Gandhi an anarchist? PeacePower http://www.calpeacepower. org/0201/gandhi_anarchist.htm (Accessed March 2012). Ferguson, A. (2008) Economies count the cost of derivatives. The Australian http:// www.theaustralian.com.au/business/opinion/counting-cost-of-derivatives/storye6frg9j6-1111117783464 (Accessed March 2012). Ferguson, C. (2011) Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America. New York: Crown. Field, T. and B. Bell (2010) ‘Miami rice’: The business of disaster in Haiti. Grassroots Online http://www.huf¿ngtonpost.com/beverly-bell/miami-rice-the-business-o_b_794504.html (Accessed June 2013). Fig, D. (2007) Technological choices in South Africa: ecology, democracy and development. In: State of the Nation: South Africa 2007, (eds) S. Buhlungu, J. Daniel, et al. Cape Town: HSRC Press: 226–44. Fig, D. (2009) Nuclear energy rethink? The rise and demise of South Africa’s Pebble Bed Modular Reactor. Institute for Security Studies. http://www.iss.co.za/uploads/210.pdf (Accessed March 2012). Fine, B. (2008) The Minerals-Energy Complex is dead: Long live the MEC? eprints.soas. ac.uk/5617/1/MineralEnergyComplex.pdf (Accessed March 2012). Fine, B. and Z. Rustomjee (1996) The Political Economy of South Africa. From MineralsEnergy Complex to Industrialisation. London: Hurst & Company. Fiske, J. (1993) Power Plays. Power Works. New York and London: Verso. Flavin, C. (2008) Low-Carbon Energy: a Roadmap. Report 178. Washington: Worldwatch Institute. FOE (2009) Subprime carbon? Re-thinking the world’s largest new derivatives market.

Bibliography 209 http://www.foe.org.au/media-releases/2009-media-release/carbon-trading-the-next-subprime-new-report/ (Accessed March 2012). FOE (2010) Africa: up for grabs: the scale and impact of land grabbing for agrofuels. http://www.foei.org/en/resources/publications/pdfs/2010/africa-up-for-grabs (Accessed April 2012). Footprint Network (2009) Ecological trends and Africa’s future: New report examines risks, opportunities. Oakland, CA.: Global Footprint Network. www.footprintnetwork. org/en/index (Accessed March 2012). Foster, J. B. (2002) Marx’s ecology in historical perspective. International Socialism Journal. http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj96/foster.htm (Accessed March 2012). Foster, J. B. (2008) Ecology and the transition from capitalism to socialism. Monthly Review. http://monthlyreview.org/2008/11/01/ecology-and-the-transition-from-capitalismto-socialism (Accessed April 2012). Foster, J. B. and B. Clark (2009) The planetary emergency, capitalism’s ultimate crisis. http://links.org.au/node/3137 (Accessed June 2013). Foster, J. B. and F. Magdoff (2009) The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences. New York: Monthly Review Press. Foster, J. B., B. Clark and R. York (2010) The Ecological Rift. Capitalism’s War on the Earth. New York: Monthly Review Press. Foster, J. B., R.W. McChesney and R. J. Jonna (2011) The global reserve army of labor and the new imperialism. Monthly Review 63 (6): 1–31. Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum. Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. London: Penguin. Galbraith, J. K. (1996) The Good Society: The Humane Agenda. New York: Mariner Books. Gare, A. (2008) Marxism and the problem of creating an environmentally sustainable civilization in China. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 19 (1): 5–26. Garnaut, R. (2008) The Garnaut Climate Change Review. http://www.garnautreview.org. au/index.htm (Accessed June 2012). Gentle, L. (2009) Escom to Eskom: From racial Keynesian capitalism to neo-liberalism (1910–1994). In: Electric Capitalism, ed. D. A. McDonald. Cape Town: Earthscan: 50–72. Global Carbon Project (2010) Global carbon project ¿gures. International GeosphereBiosphere Programme (IGBP). www.globalcarbonproject.org/ (Accessed April 2012). Global Exchange (2008) Top ten reasons to oppose the World Trade Organisation. http:// www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/wto/toptenwto.pdf (Accessed April 2012). Global Footprint Network (2010) Living Planet Report 2010. Biodiversity, Biocapacity and Development. Oakland, CA: Global Footprint Network in collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund. Goklany, I. (2011) Could biofuel policies increase death and disease in developing countries? Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons 16 (1). Gore, A. (2006) An Inconvenient Truth. D. Guggenheim, Plantation Productions. GRAIN (2012) The Great Food Robbery http://www.grain.org/article/entries/4501-thegreat-food-robbery-a-new-book-from-grain (Accessed October 2012). Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Greenberg, S. (2009) Market liberalisation and continental expansion: The repositioning of Eskom in post-apartheid South Africa. In: Electric Capitalism, ed. D. A. McDonald. Cape Town: Earthscan: 73–108.

210

Bibliography

Grobler, J. (2010) State mining an ANC ¿gment. http://mg.co.za/article/2010-05-28-statemining-an-anc-¿gment (Accessed June 2013). Groenewald, Y. (2009) Digging for mining licences. http://mg.co.za/article/2009-06-04digging-for-mining-licences (Accessed June 2013). Groenewald, Y. (2011) Pledge to Kyoto the bottom line. The Mail and Guardian 5 August. http://mg.co.za/article/2011-08-05-pledge-to-kyoto-the-bottom-line (Accessed November 2011). Grudnoff, M. (2012) Measuring Fugitive Emissions: Is coal seam gas a viable bridging fuel? The Australia Institute Policy Brief No. 41 August 2012 ISSN 1836–9014. https:// www.tai.org.au/index.php?q=node%2F19&pubid=1032&act=display (Accessed June 2013). Guha, R. (1990) Towards a cross-cultural environmental ethics. Alternatives 15: 431–47. Gumede, W. (2007) Thabo Mbeke and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC. London: Zed Books. Hallowes, D. (2008) A critical appraisal of the LTMS. www.earthlife.org.za/wp-content/ uploads/2008/12/ltms-¿nal-web.pdf (Accessed June 2013). Hallowes, D. (2009) The World Bank and Eskom: Banking on Climate Destruction. Pietermaritzburg: GroundWork. www.groundwork.org.za/.../14Dec09EskomReport. asp. (Accessed April 2012). Hallowes, D. and V. Munnik (2007) World Bank and Eskom Report. June. Pietermaritzburg: Groundwork. http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/¿les/groundwork%20WB%20and%20Eskom.pdf (Accessed June 2013). Hamilton, C. (2003) Growth Fetish. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Hamilton, C. and C. Downie (2007) University Capture. The Australia Institute. http:// www.tai.org.au/documents/downloads/DP95.pdf (Accessed April 2012). Hansen, J., M. Sato, P. Kharecha, D. Beerling et al. (2008) Target atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim? Open Atmosphere Science Journal 2: 217–31. Hansen, J. and M. Sato (2011) Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change (draft January 2011). http://www.columbia.edu/%7Ejeh1/mailings/2011/20110118_ MilankovicPaper.pdf (Accessed June 2012). Hansen, J., M. Sato and R. Ruedy (2012) Perception of climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. 109, 14726–7, E2415–E2423, doi:10.1073/ pnas.1205276109. Harcourt, B. E. (2011). The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harcourt, G. C. and P. Kerr (2009) Joan Robinson. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Harvey, D. (2001) Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Harvey, D. (2003) The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (2011) The Future of the Commons. Radical History Review 1:101–71 do: 10.1215/01636545-2010-017. Harvey, F. (2011) Worst ever carbon emissions leave climate on the brink. Record rise, despite recession, means 2° C target almost out of reach. Guardian. UK. 29 May. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/29/carbon-emissions-nuclearpower (Accessed May 2012). Hedegaard, C. (2011) http://www.carbontradewatch.org/downloads/publications/ETS_ brie¿ng_april2011.pdf (Accessed June 2013).

Bibliography 211 Heinberg, R. (2007) Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Decline in Earth’s Resources. Gabriola Island: Clairview. Heusemann, M. H. (2003) The limits of technological solutions to sustainable development. Clean Technology and Environmental Policy 5: 21–34. Hightower, M. and S. Pierce (2008) The energy challenge. Nature 452 (7185): 285–6. Hobsbawm, E. (1996) The Age of Revolution 1789–1948. New York: Vintage. Holmgren, D. (2009) Future Scenarios. White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing Company. Hopkins, R. (2008) The Transition Town Handbook. Creating Local Sustainable Communities Beyond Oil Dependency. Sydney: Finch Publishing. Hulme, M., R. Doherty, T. Ngara, M. New and D. Lister (2001); African climate change: 1900–2100. Climate Research 17: 145–68. Ibitayo, O. and W. C. G. Burns (2008) Transboundary dumping of hazardous waste. In: Encyclopedia of Earth, ed. C. J. Cleveland. Washington, DC: Environmental Information Coalition, National Council for Science and the Environment. Illich, I. (1981) Shadow Work. Boston, MA: Marion Boyars. Innes, D. (1984) Anglo American and the Rise of Modern South Africa. London: Heinemann. IPCC (2007a) (eds) R. K. Pachauri and A. Reisinger, Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Geneva: IPCC. IPCC (2007b). (eds) S. Solomon, D. Qin, D. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K. B. Averyt, M. Tignor and H. L. Miller, Summary for Policy Makers. Climate Change 2007: the Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambrige University Press. IPCC (2007c) (eds) M. L. Parry, O. F. Canziani, J. P. Palutikof, P. J. van der Linden and C. E. Hanson, Climate Change 2007: Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. James, C. (2009) Against the current, Arena Magazine. http://www.arena.org.au/category/ against-the-current (Accessed June 2013). Jacobsen, M. (2008) Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. Energy and Environmental Science 2: 148–54. Jevons, W. S. (1866) The Coal Question. London: Macmillan. Joubert, L. (2008) ‘Boiling Point’ í the Impact of Climate Change in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Judd, D. (1996) EMPIRE: The British Imperial Experience from 1765 to the Present. London: Fontana. Kaufmann, F. (2011) The speculative scrum driving up food prices. The Guardian Weekly, December 20. Kellecioglu, D. 2012. Global economic inequality: the billionaires vs. the penniless. Real-World Economics Review Blog http://rwer.wordpress.com/2012/09/18/globaleconomic-inequality-the-billionaires-us-the-penniless (Accessed June 2013). Kenny, Z. (2007) When Pollution Means Pro¿ts. Broadway, NSW: Green Left Weekly: 13. Kirkpatrick, R. G., G. N. Katsia¿cas and M. Lou Emery (1978). ‘Critical Theory and the Limits of Sociological Positivism’, Red Feather Institute. Kitney, G. (2004) Sel¿sh Australia votes for itself. Sydney: Sydney Morning Herald.

212

Bibliography

Klein, L. and M. Pomer (eds) (2001) The New Russia: Transition Gone Awry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Klein, N. (2007) The Shock Doctrine. Camberwell: Allen Lane. Knudtson, P. and D. Suzuki (1992) Wisdom of the Elders. North Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Kothari, S. and P. Parajuli (2004) No nature without social justice: a plea for cultural and ecological pluralism in India. In: Global Ecology, ed. W. Sachs. London: Zed Books. Laski, H. (1933) Democracy in Crisis. London: George Allen and Unwin. Lenton, T., H. Held et al. (2008) Tipping elements in the Earth’s climate system. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 105 (6): 1786–93. Li, M. (2008) Climate change, limits to growth and the imperative for socialism. Monthly Review 60 (2). Lincoln, A. Letter to Col. William F. Elkins, Nov. 21, 1864 in A. Shaw. (1950) The Lincoln Encyclopedia. New York: Macmillan. Liptak, A. (2010) Courts take on campaign ¿nance decision. The New York Times. March 26. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/us/politics/27campaign.html (Accessed March 2012). Lohmann, L. (1999) The Dyson effect: carbon ‘offset’ forestry and the privatization of the atmosphere. The Corner House Brie¿ng (15). www.wrm.org.uy/actors/CCC/Dyson2. html (Accessed March 2012). Lohmann, L. (2007) Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and Power. Development Dialogue, Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, No. 48. Durban: The Durban Group for Climate Justice and the Corner House. Lohmann, L. (2008) Six arguments against carbon trading. http://climateandcapitalism. com/?p=544 (Accessed April 2012). Lovelock, J. (2006) The Revenge of Gaia. New York: Basic Books. Lynas, M. (2007) Six Degrees: Our Future On a Hotter Planet. Hammersmith: Fourth Estate. Macdonald, N. (2010) What’s the new source for fresh, shiny produce? http://www2. macleans.ca/2010/08/19/out-of-africa/ (Accessed June 2012). Magubane, B. (1979) The Political Economy of Race and Class in South Africa. New York: Monthly Review Press. Magubane, Z. (2004) Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Malefane, M. (2012) Zuma urged to probe mineral deals. http:///www.sowetanlive.co.za/ news/business/2012/02/06/zuma-urged-to-probe-mineral-deals (Accessed June 2013). Mandel, E. (1979) Late Capitalism. London: NLB. Marais, H. (2001) South Africa: Limits to Change í the Political Economy of Transition. Cape Town: UCT Press. Marcuse, H. (1964) One Dimensional Man. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Marcuse, H. (1967) The End of Utopia. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/ marcuse/works/1967/end-utopia.htm. (Accessed March 2012). Marx, K. (1847) The Nature and Growth of Capital http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1847/wage-labour/ch05.htm (Accessed May 2010. Marx, K. (1894) Capital Vol III. Part VI. Transformation of Surplus-Pro¿t into Ground-Rent. Chapter 47. Genesis of Capitalist Ground-Rent. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1894-c3/ch47.htm (Accessed June 2011). Marx, K. (1954) Capital Vol. 1. A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

Bibliography 213 Marx, K. (1963) Karl Marx: Early Writings, ed. and trans. T. B. Bottomore. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 120–34.. Marx, K. (1970) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3. New York: Vintage. Marx, K. (1971) Theories of Surplus-Value. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Mark, K. (1973) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, London: Penguin Classics. Marx, K. (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1. London: Penguin Classics. Marx, K. (1981) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 111. New York: Penguin. MBendi Information Services (2010) Mining in South Africa – Overview. 25 November. www.mbendi.com (Accessed April 2012). McClintock, N. (2010) Why farm the city? Theorizing urban agriculture through a lens of metabolic rift. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economics and Society 3 (2): 191–207. McDonald, D. A. (2009) The importance of being electric. In: Electric Capitalism. Recolonising Africa on the Power Grid, ed. D. A. McDonald. Cape Town: Earthscan: xv–xxiii. McKibben, B. (2012) Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math. Rolling Stone Politics. http:// www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719 (Accessed June 2013). McMichael, J., D. Campbell-Lendrum, R. Kovats et al. (2004) Global Climate Change. In: Comparative Quanti¿cation of Health Risks: Global and Regional Burden of Disease Due to Selected Major Risk Factors. Geneva: World Health Organisation. http://www. news.wisc.edu/11878 (Accessed June 2013). Meadows, D. H., D. L. Meadows, J. Randers and W. W. Behrens (1972) Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books. Meinshausen, M. (2012) Global warming under old and new scenarios using IPCC climate sensitivity range estimates. Nature Climate Change. 2: 248–53. Meinshausen, M., N. Meinshausen, W. Hare, S. C. B. Raper, K. Frieler, R. Knutti, D. J. Frame and M. Allen (2009) Greenhouse gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2° C. Nature 458, 1158–62. Mészáros, I. (1970) Marx’s Theory of Alienation. Bel Air: Paul & Co Pub Consortium. Middleton, N. and P. O’Keefe (2001) Rede¿ning Sustainable Development. London: Pluto Press. Mill, J. S. (1909) Principles of Political Economy. London: Longman, Green and Co. Minerals Economics Directorate (2008) Labour statistics from the Minerals Statistical Tables 1984–2005. Minerals Economics Directorate Bulletin. B1/2008. Johannesburg: MED. Mohamed, S. (2009) Financialization, the Minerals Energy Complex and South African labour. Mumbai: Global Labour University Conference, Tata Institute for Social Sciences. Mol, A. and G. Spaargaren (2000) Ecological modernisation theory in debate: a review. Environmental Politics 9 (1): 17–49. Mooney, G. (2009) Challenging Health Economics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morgan, F. (2006) The power of community. How Cuba survived peak oil. www. communitysolution.org/ciba (Accessed April 2012). Morris, D. and B. Worthington (2010) Cap or Trap. How the EU ETS risks lockingin carbon emissions. London: Sandbag. www.sandbag.org.uk/site_media/pdfs/reports/ caportrap.pdf (Accessed June 2013).

214

Bibliography

Mullard, M. (2004) The Politics of Globalisation and Polarisation. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Muller, Z. (2002) The Mind and the Market. Capitalism in Western Thought. New York: Anchor Books. Munnik, V. and D. Hallowes (2009) From dirty energy to a climate friendly economy. www.ngopulse.org/article/dirty-energy-climate-friendly-economy (Accessed April 2012). Munro, D. (2004) Method in political economy. A comment. Journal of Australian Political Economy 54: 146–7. Muntzer, T. (1988) Collected Works. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Nace, T. (2008) World’s dumbest project: Tata Ultra Mega. How a twisted de¿nition is setting up a monumental folly in India. http://www.grist.org/article/worlds-dumbestproject-tata-ultra-mega/ (Accessed April 2012). Nandy, A. (1987) Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Narain, S. (2011) Editorial: How to approach environmentalism. Centre for Science and Environment. http://www.cseindia.org (Accessed April 2012). Navarro, V. (2002) Development and quality of life: A critique of Amartya Sen’s Development As Freedom. In: The Political Economy of Social Inequalities, ed. V. Navarro. New York: Baywood Publishing Company. Navarro, V. (2007) Neoliberalism as a class ideology: or, the political causes of the growth of inequalities. In: Neoliberalism, Globalization and Inequalities: Consequences for Health and Quality of Life, ed. V. Navarro. New York: Baywood Publishing: 9–23. Ndikumana, L. and J. Boyce (2002) Africa’s debt: who woes whom? WP48 Political Economy Research Institute. Amherst: University of Massachusetts. NEPAD (2010) Revision of the AU/NEPAD African Action Plan 2010–2015. Johannesburg: NEPAD. Nhemachena, C., J. Chakwizira et al. (2008) Managing climate related stresses in southern Africa’s agricultural sector. CSIR. www.csir.co.za/Built_environment/docs/poster28_ lowres.pdf (Accessed April 2012). Njanji, T. (2010) Zimbabwean refugee, Cape Town. Personal communication. NOAA (2012) Carbon dioxide levels reach milestone at Arctic sites. http://www.esrl.noaa. gov/gmd/news (Accessed June 2013). Nussbaum, M. (2001) Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. OECD (2007) Pension news online. http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/categoryfront.php/ id/591/General.html. (Accessed April 2012). OECD (2011) An overview of growing income inequalities in OECD countries: main ¿ndings. http://www.oecd.org/els/socialpoliciesanddata/49499779.pdf (Accessed June 2012). O’Neill, B. (2011) Environmental enslavement for middle class comforts. http://www.abc. net.au/unleashed/2805686.html (Accessed June 2012). Oxfam (2008) Another inconvenient truth: How biofuel policies are deepening poverty and accelerating climate change. Oxfam Brie¿ng Paper 114. London: Oxfam. PACJA (Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance) (2009) Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance protest at COP15- UN negotiations. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM_8mIB7BSY (Accessed April 2012). PACJA (2010) The Pan-African Climate Justice Manifesto Declaration during the PanAfrican Conference on Climate Justice & Post-Copenhagen Dialogue, ACCRA, 13–17 March. www.pacja.org/index.php?option=com_content&view (Accessed March 2012).

Bibliography 215 Painceira, J. (2009) Developing Countries in the Era of Financialisation: From De¿cit Accumulation to Reserve Accumulation. London: School of Oriental and Asian Studies. Palley, T. I. (2007) Financialization: What It Is and Why It Matters. Working paper No. 525. Berlin: Levy Economics Institute. http://www.scribd.com/doc/33849533/ Financialization-What-Is (Accessed April 2012). Pamuk, O. (2001) The anger of the damned. New York Review of Books. http://www. nybooks.com/articles/archives/2001/nov/15/the-anger-of-the-damned/. (Accessed May 2012). Parnell, S., E. Pieterse et al. (2010) Urban Imperatives for Africa: Transcending Impasses. Cape Town: African Centre for Cities. Pearce, F. (2012) Beyond Rio, green economics can give us hope. Guardian 28 June 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jun/28/rio-green-economics-hope. (Accessed June 2013). Persson, A., B. Rothstein et al. (2010) The Failure of Anti-Corruption Policies. A Theoretical Mischaracterization of the Problem. QoG Working Paper Series 2010: 19. University of Gothenburg: Gothenburg. http://www.qog.pol.gu.se/working_papers/ 2010_19_Persson_Rothstein_Teorell.pdf. (Accessed April 2012). Pimentel, D., P. Hepperly, J. Hanson, R. Siedel et al. (2005) Environmental, energetic, and economic comparisons of organic and conventional farming systems. Bioscience 55 (7): 573–582. Pimentel, D., A. Marklein, M. A. Toth, M. N. Karpoff, G. S. Paul, R. McCormack, J. Kyriazis and T. Krueger (2009) Food Versus Biofuels: Environmental and Economic Costs. Human Ecology 37: 1–12 DOI 10.1007/s10745-009-9215-8. Pogge, T. (2008) Health care reform that works for the US and for the world’s poor. http:// www.ghgj.org/Pogge_Health%20Care%20Reform.pdf (Accessed June 2013). Point Carbon (2008) EU ETS Phase II – The potential and scale of windfall pro¿ts in the power sector. A report for WWF. WWF_Windfall pro¿ts_Feb08_FINAL REPORT_ V5.doc (Accessed June 2012). Polanyi, K. (1944) The Great Transformation. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Population Reference Bureau (2009) 2009 World Population Data Sheet. http://www.prb. org/Publications/Datasheets/2009/2009wpds.aspx (Accessed April 2012). Pressend, M. (2008) South Africa’s Electricity Crisis: Beyond the Price Debate. http:// sacsis.org.za/site/article/125.1 (Accessed June 2013). Pretty, J. (2009) Can ecological agriculture feed nine billion people? Monthly Review. http://www.monthlyreview.org/091123pretty.php (Accessed March 2012). PricewaterhouseCoopers (2012) Too Late for 2°? http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/ sustainability/publications/low-carbon-economy-index/index.jhtml (Accessed December 2012). Raby, D. (2009) Why Cuba still matters. Monthly Review 60 (8): 1–13. Raffer, K. and H. W. Singer (2001) The Economic North–South Divide. Six Decades of Unequal Development. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Ranis, G. and S. Kosack (2004) Growth and Human Development in Cuba’s Transition. Miami: Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, University of Miami. Redman, J. (2008a) Dirty is the new clean: A critique of the World Bank’s Strategic Framework for Development and Climate Change. Sustainable Energy and Economy Network Institute for Policy Studies. www.ips-dc.org/¿les/287/dirtyisnewcleanFINAL. pdf (Accessed June 2013). Redman, J. (2008b) World Bank: Climate Pro¿teer, Sustainable Energy and Economy Network. Washington DC: Institute for Policy Studies.

216

Bibliography

Republic of South Africa (2009) South African Government Development Indicators 2009. http://www.info.gov.za/view/DownloadFileAction?id=109313 (Accessed March 2012). Reuters (2012) at http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/05/16/energy-summit-iea-idINDEE84F 0F120120516 Reynolds, L. (2010) Climate Change and its Impact on Women’s and Children’s Health. E-Conference. 12 March. Cape Town: University of Cape Town. Rickards, J. (2011) Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis. New York: Penguin. Robinson, J. (1972) Consumers’ sovereignty in a planned economy. In: Socialist Economics, (eds) A. Nove and D. M. Nutt. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rockström, J., W. Steffen, K. Noone, A. Persson et al. (2009) Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity. Nature 461: 472–5 (24 September 2009) | doi:10.1038/461472a. Rosenberg, T. (2002) Globalization; the free trade ¿x. New York Times, 18 August. Rosewarne, S. (2002) Towards an ecological political economy. Journal of Australian Political Economy 50: 179–99. Rossman, P. (2010) What ‘¿nancialisation’ means for food workers. GRAIN http://www. grain.org/seedling/index.cfm?id=668&print=yes. (Accessed March 2012). Rossman, P. and G. Green¿eld (2006) Financialisation: new routes to pro¿t, new challenges for trade unions. Labour Education No. 142. Roy, A. (2012) Capitalism: A Ghost Story. http://www.outlookindia.com/article. aspx?280234 (Accessed November 2012). Ruccio, D. (2010) Shrinking wages, growing surplus. Real World Economics Review. Graph of the Month. http://rwer.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/shrinking-wages-growingsurplus/ (Accessed May 2012). Rutherford, J. (2008) The culture of capitalism. http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/ soundings/articles/02 per cent20s38percent20per cent20rutherford.pdf (Accessed April 2012). Sainath, P. (2006) What exactly is ‘development’? Post-autistic Economics Review (38). www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue38/Sainath38.htm (Accessed March 2012). Sample, I. (2005) Warming hits ‘tipping point’. 11 August. London: Guardian Weekly. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2005/aug/11/science.climatechange1. (Accessed March 2011). Sanderson, K. (2006) US biofuels: a ¿eld in ferment. Nature 444: 673–6. Satgar, V. (2009) Global capitalism and the neo-liberalisation of Africa. In: A New Scramble for Africa? Imperialism, Investment and Development, (eds) R. Southall and H. Melber. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: 35–55. Saul, J. S. (2001) Cry for the beloved country: the post-apartheid denouement. Review of African Political Economy 89: 429–60. Schaefer, K. (2011) Thawing permafrost will accelerate global warming in decades to come, says new study. http://nsidc.org/news/press/20110216_permafrost.html (Accessed August 2012). Scharlemann, J. P. W. and W. F. Laurance (2008) How green are biofuels? Science 319 (5867): 1238–40. Schnellhuber, H. J. (2008) Global warming: Stop worrying, start panicking? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 105 (38): 14239–40. Scialabba, N. E. (2007) Organic Agriculture and Food Security. International Conference

Bibliography 217 on Organic Agriculture and Food Security. Italy, Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. Science in Africa (2006) South Africa’s greenhouse gas emissions under focus. http:// www.scienceinafrica.co.za/2006/september/greenhouse.htm (Accessed June 2012). Searchinger, T., R. Heimlich et al. (2008) Use of U.S. croplands for biofuels increases greenhouse gases through emissions from land use change. Science 319 (5867): 1238–40. Shah, A. (2011) Consumption and consumerism. http://www.globalissues.org/issue/235/ consumption-and-consumerism (Accessed June 2012). Shiva, V. (1988) Reductionist science as epistemological violence. Science, hegemony and violence. In: A Requiem for Modernity, ed. A. Nandy. New York: Oxford India Paperbacks: 232–56. Shiva, V. (2002) Water Wars. London: Pluto Press. Shiva, V. (2012) The global food system casino. https://www.commondreams.org/ view/2012/09/14-5 (Accessed June 2012). Simms, A. and V. Johnson (2010a) The Great Transition. London: New Economics Foundation. Simms, A. and V. Johnson (2010b) Growth Isn’t Possible: Why Rich Nations Need a New Economic Direction. London: New Economics Foundation. Simon, S. and S. McBride (eds) (2007) Neo-Liberalism, State Power and Global Governance. Dordrecht: Springer. Small, R. (2010) Abalimi Bezekhaya Newsletter, No 36. January. http://abalimi.org.za/ newsletters/nl36.pdf (Accessed March 2012). Smith, A. (1976) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London: Clarendon Press. Smith, K. (2007) The Carbon Neutral Myth. Offset Indulgences for Your Climate Sins. London: Carbon Trade Watch; Transnational Institute. Smith, K. (2008) The Great Asian Carbon Swindle. New Matilda. newmatilda. com/2008/08/04/great-asian-carbon-swindle (Accessed March 2011). Soederberg, S. (2009) Corporate Power and Ownership in Contemporary Capitalism. The Politics of Resistance and Domination. New York: Routledge. Sourcewatch (2010) Carbon Capture and Storage. http://www.Sourcewatch.org/index. php?title=Carbon_Capture_and_Storage (Accessed April 2012). SouthAfrica.Info (2009) Call for comment on Eskom tariff hike. http://www.southafrica. info/news/business/968564.htm (Accessed April 2012). Spencer, H. (1851) Social Statics: the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness. New York: Forgotten Books. Spoor, R. (2009) Human Rights and Occupational Health Attorney, White River, Mpumalanga Province. Personal Communication. Spratt, D. (2011) 4 degrees hotter: an adaptation trap? 13 February 2011. http://www. climatecodered.org/2011/02/4-degrees-hotter-adaptation-trap.html (Accessed June 2013). Spratt, D. (2012) Australian coal’s expansion plans make a mockery of government’s carbon tax claims. http://www.climatecodered.org/2012/01/australian-coals-expansionplan-make.html (Accessed June 2012). Stanlake, G. F. and S. J. Grant (1995) Introductory Economics. London: Longman. Statistics South Africa (2009) Labour Force Survey and Quarterly Labour Force Survey. http://www.statssa.gov.za/cpi/index.asp (Accessed April 2012). Stern, D. (2003) Energy and Economic Growth. http://www.localenergy.org/pdfs/Document

218

Bibliography

per cent20Library/Stern per cent20Energy per cent20and per cent20Economic per cent20Growth.pdf (Accessed March 2012). Stiglitz, J. (2003) Globalization and Its Discontents. London: W. W. Norton & Company. String Communications (2009, 2010) Little hope of land claims progress. http:// www.sadelivery.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=891per cent3Alittle-hope-of-land-claims-progress&Itemid=2 (Accessed March 2012). Sturm, D. (1988) Democratic theory and corporate governance. International Journal of Value Based Management 1 (1). Taylor, C. (1991) The Malaise of Modernity. Toronto: Anansi. Terreblanche, S. (2002) A History of Inequality in South Africa 1652–2002. Scottsville: University of Natal Press. Thom, A. (2006a) Archive – Social services. http://www.health-e.org.za/social-services/ page/7/ (Accessed June 2013). Thom, A. (2006b) Widening gulf between Khayelitsha and Cape Town. http://www. health-e.org.za/2006/02/28/widening-gulf-between-khayelitsha-and-cape-town (Accessed June 2013). Toulmin, C. (2009) Climate Change in Africa. London: Zed Books. Trainer, T. (1995) The Conserver Society: Alternatives for Sustainability. London: Zed Books. Trainer, T. (2007) Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society. New York: Springer. Turse, N. (2012) The increasing US shadow wars in Africa. Pambazuka News. http:// pambazuka.org/en/category/features/83724 (Accessed June 2013). UNFPA (2010) State of World Population 2010. From ConÀict and Crisis to Renewal: Generations of Change. New York: United Nations Population Fund. http://www.unfpa. org/swp/2007/presskit/pdf/sowp2007_eng.pdf (Accessed March 2012). United Nations Habitat Report (2010) The State of African Cities: Governance, Inequalities and Urban Land Markets. Nairobi: UN Habitat. US AFRICOM (United States Africa Command) (2012) Transcript: Ham Discusses African Security Issues at ACSS Senior Leaders Seminar. http://www.africom.mil/Newsroom/ Transcript/9049/transcript-ham-discusses-african-security-issues-a (Accessed June 2013). U.S. Census Bureau (2010) http://www.census.gov/ (Accessed January 2012). van Onselen, C. (1996) The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper 1894–1985. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers. Vidal, J. (2009) Global warming causes 300,000 deaths a year, says Ko¿ Annan think-tank. London: Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/may/29/1 (Accessed March 2012). Vidal, J. (2012) Many treaties to save the earth, but where’s the will to implement them? Guardian Weekly, 7 June, p.1. Vidal, J. and D. Adam. (2007) China overtakes US as world’s biggest CO2 emitter. 19 June. Guardian Weekly. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/jun/19/china. usnews (Accessed March 2012). Von Maltitz, G. P. and R. J. Scholes (2006) Vulnerability of Southern African Fauna and Flora to Climate Change. AIACC Working Paper No. 24. Cape Town: CSIR. Wackernagel, M., W. Rees et al. (1995) Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers. Weaver, A. J., A. Zickfeld et al. (2007) Long term climate implications of 2050 emission reduction targets. Geophysical Research Letters 34 (L19703).

Bibliography 219 Weingast, B. and D. Wittman (eds) (2006) The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy. London: Oxford University Press. WHO/UNICEF (2008) A Snapshot of Drinking Water and Sanitation in Africa. A regional perspective based on new data from the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation. Washington, Prepared for AMCOM as a contribution to the 11th Summit of Heads of State and Government of the African Union With special theme: Meeting the Millennium Development Goal on Water and Sanitation. www. wssinfo.org/download?id_document=1277 (Accessed April 2012). Wightman, J. (2010) Soil and Climate Change. Soil Health Conference. http://www. njsoilhealth.org/conf/ (Accessed March 2012). Wilkinson, R. and K. Pickett (2009) The Spirit Level. Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London: Allen Lane. Williamson, J. (1993), Democracy and the “Washington Consensus”, World Development vol 21 No 8, pp. 1329–36. Williamson, J. (ed.) (2002) Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has Happened? Washington: Institute for International Economics. Wilson, J. S. and V. O. Abiola (eds) (2003) Standards and Global Trade. A Voice for Africa. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank (2004) The state of the health workforce in Sub Saharan Africa. http:// info.worldbank.org/etools/docs/library/206769/The%20State%20of%20Health%20 Workforce%20in%20SubSaharan%20Africa.pdf (Accessed June 2012). World Bank (2008) World Bank Development Indicators. Washington, DC: World Bank. WorldBank (2009) Facts and Figures from World Development Indicators. http://sitere sources.worldbank.org/DATASTATISTICS/Resources/regional-backgrounders.pdf (Accessed June 2013). World Bank (2010) World Bank Development Indicators 2010. Washington, DC: World Bank. http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/world-development-indicators/wdi-2010 (Accessed March 2012). World Bank (2012a) Press release: New Report Examines Risks of 4 Degress Hotter World by End of Century: Bangladesh among Most Vulnerable Countries to Face Sea Level Rise. http://worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2012/1/20/ new-report-examines-risks-of-4-degree-hotter-world-by-end-of-century-bangladeshamong-must-vulnerable-countries-to-face-sea-level-rise (Accessed June 2013). World Bank (2012b) 4° Turn down the heat. http://climatechange.worldbank.org/sites/default/ ¿les/Turn_Down_the_Heat_Executive_Summary_English.pdf (Accessed November 2012). World Wildlife Fund (2006) Living Planet Report 2006. http://www.cosg.org.uk/WWF_ Report.htm (Accessed March 2012). Worldwatch Institute (2007) Tar Sands Fever. http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5287 (Accessed June 2013). Worldwatch Institute (2009) China: Olympic-Sized Growth in Carbon Emissions. Washington, Worldwatch Institute. http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5842 (Accessed March 2011). Worldwatch Institute (2011) Comparing Life-Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Natural Gas and Coal. http://www.worldwatch.org/system/¿les/pdf/Natural_Gas_LCA_ Update_082511.pdf (Accessed June 2013). Worldwatch Institute (2012) Fossil Fuel and Renewable Energy Subsidies on the Rise. http://worldwatch.org/fossil-fuel-and-renewable-energy-subsidies-rise-0 (Accessed June 2013). Wright, E. O. (2010) Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso.

220

Bibliography

Xie, X. (2008) Carbon sequestration: injecting realities. Energy Tribune. www. energytribune.com/1124/carbon-sequestration-injecting-realities (Accessed June 2012). Yelland, C. (2011) Eskom, BHP Billiton and the secret commodity-linked electricity pricing deals – the relevance today. http://eepublishers.co.za/article/eskom-bhp-billitonand-the-secret-commodity-linked-electricity-pricing-deals-the-relevance-today.html (Accessed June 2013). Younge, G. (2008) America has a terrible headache, but it seems like no one wants to cure it. Guardian Weekly, 29 September http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/ sep/29/uselections2008.useconomy1 (Accessed March 2012). Zalta, E. N. (ed.) (2010) Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zille, H. (2010) Zille says ANC stands to make R1bn from Medupi. 3 April. The Mail and Guardian. http://www.mg.co.za/article/2010-04-03-zille-says-anc-stands-to-maker1bn-from-medupi (Accessed June 2013). äiåek, S. (2009) First as Tragedy, then as Farce. London: Verso.

Index

Figures and Tables are indicated by italic page numbers, notes by suf¿x ‘n’ (e.g. “200n[5]6” means “page 200, chapter 5 note 6”) Abalimi Bezekhaya 182, 183–4 Abbas, H. 109 Abiola, V. O. 108 Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative of South Africa (AsgiSA) 132 Acción Ecologica 200n[4]1 Africa: CO2 emissions per capita 101–2; debt repayments 109, 200n[5]6; demographics 98–9; exploitation of 103–4; ¿nancial sector in 108–10; food security 105; global warming projections 99–103; integration into global economy 104, 121; land grabs 104–8; population 98, 100; premature deaths due to global warming 12, 97, 101; urban population 98; US military presence in 104, 136; vulnerability to climate change effects 12, 97, 99–103; water insecurity 105 African National Congress (ANC): adoption of neoliberal policies 125, 128, 136, 148; coming to power [1994] 123, 126; and [possible] corruption 133, 147, 148; dropping of [more-radical] pre-1994 policies 124, 126, 127; ¿nancial bene¿ts from Medupi power station 146, 151; investment company 146; Transitional Executive Council 125–6 African Union: New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development 132, 136 Afrikaner National Party 122 Afrikaners 120 agriculture: effect of global warming in South Africa 117; industrialisation of 67, 69, 107, 121, 151, 152

Aleklett, K. 146, 162, 203n[8]3 alienation 73–7; of humans from nature 67, 68, 76–7; of labour 51, 68, 73–6 alienation of labour 51, 74 Allianz Group 48 alternative futures 155–68 Amin, Samir 70, 92–3, 113, 119 Amish people 182 Anderson, K. 20 Anglo American plc 123, 142, 144, 149 Annan-Yao, E. 75 Anthropocene epoch 194 anti-capitalist groups 157 Apartheid: people’s struggle against 128, 130 apartheid policies 121–2 Arab Spring [2011–2012] 94, 157 Arctic: warming of 19, 20, 27, 198n[2]8 Arieff, A. 110 Ashman, S. 134 Asian Movements: Statement on the Green Economy 54 Asian tsunami [2004] 185 Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas 200n[4]8 Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO) 162 atmospheric commons: access to 33, 161, 179 Australia: carbon tax 46; carbon trading 33, 46; CO2 emissions per capita 25, 102; coal exports 22; coal seam gas extraction 25, 47, 50; emissions reduction targets 33, 46, 47; fossil fuel extraction 22, 25, 47; fracking in 22, 47; methane emissions 25, 47, 50; overseastrained doctors 110

222

Index

Bagchi, A. K. 77–8, 82, 89 Bakunin, Michael 85 Ballaam, D. 4 Bantustans 119, 121, 122, 202n[6]16 Beckerman 77 Beder, S. 43 Benchmarks Foundation 138 Benin: land commodi¿cation in 108 BHP Billiton 142, 144, 149, 202n[6]22 billionaires: wealth compared with poorest people 15 biocapacity 161, 168, 171; as basis of wealth 171 biodiversity loss: since 1992 8 biofuels 38–9; crops grown in Africa 104, 106, 107; subsidies for 39 biological needs [of humans] for healthy survival 163 biosphere 17–24 Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) policy 128, 131–2, 135, 148 black middle class [in South Africa] 116, 201n[9], 201n[10] Boko, M. 118 Bond, P. 94, 103–4, 109, 138 Bows, A. 20 Boyce, J. 109, 127, 200n[5]5 Bradshaw, D. 114 brain drain: from Africa 110–11 Braverman, H. 75 Bretton Woods ¿nancial institutions 28; dismantling of 179; power compared with United Nations 28, 29 Brundtland Report 29 Bryceson, D. F. 105, 200n[5]3 Buffett, Warren 45 Burkett, P. 75 Burnett, P. 104 Burns, W. C. G. 110 Buscher, B. 139, 141 Campbell, H. 83, 84 ‘Campesino a Campesino’ movement 157, 169 capital: centralisation of 89; concentration of 89; ¿nancialisation of 81–5 capital accumulation 71, 77–9; biofuels and 39; carbon trading and 42; by dispossession 61, 79, 97, 109, 150, 152, 191; ending of 175, 176; results 10, 54, 66, 72, 150; in South Africa 122, 123, 125–6, 128, 132, 135, 140, 141, 147, 148, 150; see also ¿nancialisation of capital

capital Àight [from sub-Saharan Africa] 82, 126, 200n[5]5 capitalism: alternatives to 156; and economic growth 77; ending of 94, 175, 176; global warming as one of many crises caused by 3, 9, 11, 60, 65, 139, 156; viewpoint of those bene¿tting from 56 capitalist system: failure to deliver just and sustainable world 10; origins 9; see also globalised capitalist economic system carbon bubble 49 carbon budget 22 carbon capture and storage (CCS) schemes 11, 36, 140–1, 202n[7]1; costs 36; technical problems 36 carbon cycle 72–3 carbon dioxide concentration(s) in atmosphere: highest level [to date] 6–7, 194; increase [1992–2012] 8; limit 20, 160; pre-industrial levels 160, 194; target 160, 161 carbon dioxide emissions: Australia 25, 102; continuing growth in 6, 7, 22; and economic growth 24–7; and global warming 22, 23; per capita 25, 101–2, 145; South Africa 102, 118, 130, 141, 143; target 21–2, 119 carbon emission footprint: South Africa 130 carbon emissions offsetting 34, 42, 43 carbon emissions trading schemes 11, 32, 42–6, 46–7, 83 carbon intensity 26 carbon markets 7 carbon offset credits 42, 46 carbon rift 73 carbon sequestration by tree planting 33 carbon sinks 24 carbon tax 46 Carbon Tracker Initiative 49, 199n[3]6 Carbon Trade Watch 47 carbon trading 32, 42–3; critical assessment of 33, 34, 35, 43–6; ¿nancialisation of 45–6, 80 Carnegie: D. 127 Catanzaro, J. 38 centralisation of capital 89 Chachage, S. L. C. 75 China: CO2 emissions 25, 26, 198n[1]2; economic growth 25, 41 Chipko movement 167 Chomsky, N. 85, 156, 192 Christian aid: on trade liberalisation 108

Index 223 Christian Bible: interpretations 176 Citigroup: on carbon trading 44 Clark, B. 159, 175 Clarke, R. 199n[2]13 class relations 69, 74, 79–80 Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) 32; criticisms 34, 53; examples of ‘use’/ misuse 40, 141 climate change: as neo-classical economic problem 10 climate justice 179 Club of Rome: Limits to Growth report 40 coal exports: Australia 22; South Africa 142, 143 coal mining [in South Africa] 143; CO2 emissions from 143; impacts on land and water 143–4, 145–6 coal seam gas 25; extraction of 25, 47, 50, 199n[3]5 coal-produced electricity 118, 130, 140, 142, 143, 145 coal-to-liquids (CTL) plants 141, 142 colonialisation of people’s minds [by market] 76 colonialism 12, 33, 34, 71, 97, 103, 124; opposition to 165 commodi¿cation: of atmosphere 173; of forests 44; of land 107, 108, 171, 173 ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ (CBDR) principle 32 commons: legalised seizure of 69, 108, 121, 132; restoration of 171–3 community: as institution 163–7; meaning of term 164; of producers 175–6; size limits 160 community resilience 180, 185 Comte, Auguste 57 concentration of capital 89 Connaughton, J. 200n[4]4 conscientisation: meaning of term 203n[8]4 consumers 76 consumer’s sovereignty 178 consumption: global inequality of 16–17, 41, 77 Copenhagen Accord 102, 118 corporate governance 91 corporate power 88–93 corruption: factors affecting 148; in Russia 192; in South Africa 133, 147–9 Council of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) 124, 128, 131, 138, 202n[6]21 Cribb, J. 105

critical theory 56–60; compared with positivism 58–9 critically conscientised societies/ communities 160, 163 Crutzen, Paul 194 Cuba 188–91; compared with Haiti 189; compared with US 190, 203n[10]3; ‘export’ and training of doctors 111, 203n[10]3; human development indicators 190, 203n[10]3; political economy 189–90; transformation from capitalist economy 189 cultural industry 76 currency wars 83; eventual result of 84 Das, S. 117 Dasgupta, P. 164–5 deaths due to global warming 7, 12, 39, 97, 101, 111 debt repayments [from Africa] 109, 200n[5]6 de-industrialisation 163, 179 democracy 86; communitarian 164, 179–80 denialism 10, 60 de-peasantisation 68, 69, 70, 105, 106, 107, 151, 152 deregulation of ¿nancial sector 52, 82–3, 109, 127 Desai, Ashwin 135 diamonds: discovery of 120, 121 Dobb, M. H. 74 doctors: ‘poaching’ from Africa 110–11 Dodson, Mick 63 Downie, C. 92 drinking water access 111 DuPont Corporation 53 Earthlife Africa 141 ‘eco-enslavement’ 33 ecological debt 12, 71, 79, 178, 200n[4]1; reparations for 13, 79; repayment of 178–9 ecological footprint 18, 77, 161; entitlement 178 ecological rift 51, 52, 150, 158, 199n[3]7 ecological sustainability 152 ecologically grounded development 166–7 economic growth: and capitalism 77; and CO2 emissions 24–7; post-apartheid South Africa 113, 143 economic migrants 111–12 electricity: fossil-fuel-produced 84, 118, 130, 140, 142, 143, 145; renewable sources 37–8; subsidised 135, 147, 202n[6]22

224

Index

electricity supplies [to population]: South Africa 142, 144 emissions permits 34–5, 43 emissions trading schemes 11, 32, 42–6; European Union 46–7; problems with implementing 33–4 enclosure of the commons 69, 121 energy return on energy invested (EROEI) ratio 162 Engels, Friedrich 94, 195, 196 environmental agreements 8, 30 environmental impact assessments (EIAs): for prospecting and mining permits 133 epistemological diversity 62–3 Equatorial Guinea: discovery of oil 109 equity 177 Eskom 140; coal-¿red power stations 140, 144, 145–6; dominance of regional energy market by 140; electricity imports 140, 142; expansion programme 144–5, 202n[7]4; World Bank loans 144, 145 Ethiopia: greenhouse farming operations 109 European Union: emissions trading scheme (EU-ETS) 42, 46–7; per capita CO2 emissions 25 exchange value 72 extreme poverty: de¿nition 15; in sub-Saharan Africa 98 extreme weather events 19, 27; in Africa 100–1, 117; costs 48 Exxaro mining company 142, 146 ExxonMobil: CO2 emissions 25 Fankhauser, Sam 53 Fanon, F. 116 farming: see agriculture Fattal, J. 165 feedbacks in climate system 19, 21, 199n[2]11 Ferguson, A. 45 Ferguson, C. 200n[4]4 feudalism-to-capitalism transition 68–71 Fig, D. 37, 77, 202n[7]7 ¿nancial institutions: and global warming 48–50; increasing power of 82 ¿nancialisation: of capital 81–5; of carbon trading 45–6, 80; of global economy 10, 50–2, 82, 109, 150; of natural resources 10; rationale of 51, 82; of South African economy 127, 134 Fine, B. 122, 123, 135, 147 food exports [from Africa] 106

food prices: and biofuel production 38, 39; factors affecting 68, 106 food security: de¿nition 173; factors affecting 67–8, 84, 92, 173–5; in sub-Saharan Africa 18, 105 foreign aid [to Africa] 109 fossil fuel business sector: criticisms 50; market capitalisation of 49 fossil fuel corporations 88–9; as corporate criminals [on global warming] 155 fossil fuel reserves: carbon content of 49; valuation of 49–50 fossil fuels: biofuels substituted for 38; capitalist expansion and 93; CO2 emissions from 24, 26, 27; continuing dependence on 6, 7, 22, 26; energy intensity 27; peaking of production/ availability 93, 146, 162, 165; search for and extraction of 27, 50; subsidies for 7, 39, 155; World Bank ¿nancing for projects 40–1 Foster, John Bellamy 52, 69, 70, 72, 73, 104, 159, 172, 175, 195, 199n[3]7, 200n[4]3 fracking 199n[3]5; in Australia 22, 47 ‘free trade’ 31, 91, 121, 125, 178 freedom of choice [in capitalism] 178 Freire, Paulo 159, 160 Friends of the Earth (FOE) 44–5, 46, 106 future possibilities 3, 197 future societies: constraints on 160–3; examples 182–93; principles underpinning 169–81, 196 future value accounting 43 fynbos [western Cape bush] 117, 202n[6]13 G8 group of nations 29, 199n[2]14 G20 group of nations 200n[4]5 Galbraith, J. K. 169–70, 179 Gandhi, ‘Mahatma’ 62, 165–6; philosophy 166, 167, 169 Gare, A. 27 Garnaut Review 43, 199n[3]1 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 30; South Africa joining 124, 126 genetically modi¿ed crops 147, 202n[7]7 Ghana 62 Gini coef¿cient 15 Global Climate Coalition (GCC) 30 global economy: ¿nancialisation of 10, 50–2, 82, 109, 150 global elites 157 global energy consumption 25–6

Index 225 Global Exchange [environmental justice group] 29 global ¿nancial crisis (GFC): impact on Africa 98, 110; root cause(s) of 83, 107 global ¿nancial oligarchs: predatory nature of 83, 84 Global Footprint Network 18 global inequality 14–17 global surface temperatures: danger threshold rise 20, 21; projected [higher] rises 21; rise since 1800s 19 global warming: conceptualisation of 8, 57; consequences 7, 12, 27; deaths caused by 7, 12, 39, 97, 101, 111; denialism 10, 60; effect on poorest people 12; failure to agree on solution 6, 7, 27; human-induced causes 24; as ‘isolated problem’ 9, 41, 54, 57, 60, 61, 65; meaning of term 19; as one of many capitalism-caused crises 3, 9, 11, 60, 65, 77, 139, 156; responses to 27–39; and South Africa 116–19 globalised capitalist economic system: alternatives to 55, 188; dependence on economic growth 41; effect on planet Earth 6, 9, 18, 62 Goklany, I. 38–9 ‘good’ society 169; impossibility of achieving under capitalism 169 Gorbachev, Mikhail 192 GRAIN [non-pro¿t organisation] 107–8 Gramsci, A. 59 Grant, S. J. 178 green capitalism 7, 8, 10, 11, 52–4; criticisms 53–4 Green Economy 10, 52 Green Revolution 105 green technologies 7 Green¿eld, G. 51, 82 greenhouse (GHG) emissions 198n[2]4; Kyoto Protocol targets 31–2; voluntary limits 30; see also carbon dioxide; methane Greenland ice sheet: melting of 19, 198n[2]8 Grobler, J. 133, 134 Groenewald, Y. 133 Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy 131 Gugelethu township 183 Guha, Ramchandra 166 Gumede, W. 131 Haiti: compared with Cuba 189; earthquake [2010] 189, 195

Hallowes, D. 143, 144, 145, 147, 175 Ham, [General] Carter 104 Hamilton, C. 92 Hansen, J. 20, 21, 39–40 Harcourt, B. E. 172 Harvey, D. 52, 79, 81, 87, 149, 177, 181, 183, 187, 188, 194 healthcare system: Australia 110, 111; Cuba 189; Russia 192; sub-Saharan Africa 111 hegemony: Gramsci’s concept 59, 189 Heinberg, R. 163 heirloom production 175, 203n[9]1 Heusemann, M. H. 37 HIV/AIDS: in Russia 192; in South Africa 114 Hobsbawm, Eric 61 Holliday, Chad 53 Holmgren, D. 177 Hopkins, Rob 162, 177, 185 hydro electricity: effects 140, 142 Ibitayo, O. 110 Illich, Ivan 64–5 imperialism 12, 67, 71, 78, 80, 93; South African 123, 124 income inequality [workers/executives] 89, 90 India: CO2 emissions 26; economic growth 25, 41; rich compared with poor people 15–16 Indigenous societies: learning from 64 industrialisation: effect on CO2 emissions 24, 73 industrialised agriculture 67, 69, 107, 121, 151, 152; alternatives to 174 industrialised economic development: Illich’s view 65 information technologies: alienation and 76 Innes, D. 123 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 22; on Africa 97, 100, 101; Assessment Reports 11, 19, 20, 22–4, 40, 97, 100, 101, 199n[2]10; formation of 29, 199n[2]9; on South Africa 117 International Energy Agency (IEA) 20, 155 International Energy Outlook 26, 143 International Labour Organization (ILO) 51, 82 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 29, 80; loan to South Africa 126

226

Index

Jacobsen, M. 37 James, C. 186, 187, 188 Jevons Paradox 26, 199n[2]12 Johnson, V. 38 Joint Implementation (JI) mechanism 32–3 Joubert, L. 117 Judd, D. 123 ‘justice and fairness’: meaning of term 178 Kellecioglu, Denis 15 Keynes, John Maynard 28 Keynesian capitalism 93 Khayelitsha township 115, 201n[6]4 Kitney, G. 203n[8]2 Klein, L. 192 Klein, N. 91–2 knowledge industry 203n[8]1; worldviews formed by 159 Kothari, S. 164, 165, 166 Kusile power station [South Africa] 140, 143, 144 KwaZulu-Natal coast: sea-level rise 118 Kyoto Protocol 7–8, 31–5; failure of 7, 31; GHG emissions targets 31–2, 119; implementation of 32–4; South Africa and 118 labour-intensive production 180 labour theory of value 74 The Lancet [medical journal] 12, 97 land availability: and biofuel production 38, 39, 104, 106 land grabs 14–18, 67, 69, 103, 120, 138, 151, 152, 171, 174 land ownership: restitution of rights 114; restructuring of 104–5, 108 languages: extinction of 63–4 Laski, H. 169 Lauderdale Paradox 158–9 Laurence, W. F. 38 Ledwith, M. 203n[8]4 Lenton, T. H. 198n[2]5 liberation theology 160 Liebig, Justus von 67, 174 Lincoln, Abraham 88 Liptak, A. 200n[4]6 lique¿ed natural gas (LNG) 25 load-shedding 142, 144, 202n[7]2 Locke, John 86, 203n[9]2 Lohmann, L. 34, 40, 43, 44, 171 Long Term Mitigation Scenarios (LTMS) report 119 Lonmin 137; Marikana platinum mine 137–8 Lovelock, J. 170

McDonald, D. A. 84, 132, 139, 141, 144 Macdonald, N. 106 McKibben, Bill 50 McNeill, John 194 macroeconomic policies: South Africa [post-1994] 130–6 Magdoff, F. 200n[4]3 Magubane, B. 124 malaria: effect of global warming 100 Malema, Julius 138 Mandel, E. 78 Mandela, Nelson 123, 126–7, 202n[6]17 Manji, F. M. 104 Mapungubwe 120 Marais, Hein 120, 121, 131 Marcuse, H. 58 Marikana platinum mine 137–8; massacre at 137, 138 market liberalism 59, 60 Marx, Karl: on alienation of labour 74, 75; on metabolic rift 65–6; quoted 5, 68, 69, 71–2, 75 Marxist critical theory 57–8 Marxist political economy approach 6 Marxist theory: reason for use [in this book] 4–5, 9, 11–12, 55, 65, 195 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 22 Mbeki, Thabo 131, 132, 137 medical training: cost in South Africa 111 Medupi power station [South Africa] 140, 143, 144, 145–6; CO2 emissions 145; environmental impacts on land and water 145–6; World Bank loan for 144, 145, 150–1 Meinshausen, M. 20, 21, 22, 23 Mészáros, I. 74 metabolic restoration 170–1, 180 metabolic rift 12, 18, 65–73, 173–4; reparation of 158, 169; in South Africa 12 methane: global warming potential 25, 198n[2]8; release from thawing permafrost 198n[2]8; sources 24–5 micro-farms 183–4 middle class: meaning of term 201n[6]9 Middleton, N. 63 Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) 107 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 58, 98, 100, 117 Mineral Resources Development Act [2002] 133 minerals: extraction and export from Africa 108, 109

Index 227 minerals–energy complex (MEC) [in South Africa] 120, 121, 122, 123–4 mining sector [in South Africa] 142 Mohamed, S. 134 monopoly capitalism 89, 92–3; in South Africa 123 Moosa, Valli 146 Morales, Evo 94 Mullard, M. 60 Muller, Z. 81 Munnik, V. 142, 143, 144, 145 Munro, D. 4 Muntzer, Thomas 175 Nandy, Ashis 62, 64 National Climate Change Response Strategy 119 National Union of Mine Workers [South Africa] 131, 138 ‘natural capital’ 52 Natural Capital Declaration (NCD) 10 natural resources: exports from Africa 108 Navarro, V. 58, 80, 86, 87 Navdanya movement 182 Ndeda, N. 109 Ndikumana, L. 109, 127, 200n[5]5 neoliberal capitalism: by-products of 151; characteristics 52; corporate power and 91–2 neoliberal model of development 70; ANC’s adoption of 125, 128; results 111, 128, 136, 139, 150–1 neoliberalism 60, 81, 148; alternatives to 156 New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) 132, 136, 140 New Economics Foundation report(s) 38 New England Complex Systems Institute 68 Newsweek: on carbon trading 44 Nigeria 103 Njanji, Tinashe 129 Nkrumah, Kwame 62 no-growth economies 176–7 nuclear power 27, 36–7 Occupy movement 52, 94, 157 OECD countries: pensions market in 91 oil: discovery in Equatorial Guinea 109; peaking of production/availability 93, 146, 162, 165, 185; production from coal 141, 142 O’Keefe, P. 63 O’Neill, B. 33

open-cast coal mining 146 organic agriculture 174–5, 184, 191 Oxfam 38, 39, 141 Pachauri, Rajendra [ex-Chair, IPCC] 3 Palley, T. I. 81–2 palm oil biofuel industry 34 Pamuk, Orhan 78 Pan-African Climate Justic Manifesto (PACJA) 102–3 Parajuli, P. 164, 165, 166 Parnell, S. 98, 99 peak coal/gas/oil 93, 146, 162, 165, 185 peaking dates for fossil fuels 162 Pearce, Guy 47 peasants: displacement of 69, 70, 105, 106, 107, 151, 152; meaning of term 200n[5]3 pensions funds 91 People’s Health Movement 115, 201n[6]5 People’s Summit [2012] 53 permafrost: thawing of 19, 198n[2]7, 198n[2]8 Pesce, Andrew 111 platinum mines 137 Pogge, Thomas 17 Point Carbon report on carbon trading 47 Polanyi, Karl 59, 172 political economy: engagement with environmentalism 5; meaning of term 3–6; of South Africa 119–23; transformative changes needed 9–10, 156, 194–5 political economy transformation: literature on 183 Polluter Pays Principle 30 Pomer, M. 192 poorest people: ‘annual wealth’ 15; and global warming 12 positivism 57, 60; compared with critical theory 58–9 poverty: de¿nition 15; root causes 12, 41 power: sources in society 86–7 power generation: reduction of CO2 emissions from 35–8 Precautionary Principle 30 premature deaths: AIDS-caused 114; and biofuel production 39; globalwarming-caused 7, 12, 39, 97, 101, 111; poverty-caused 17, 192 Pretty, J. 174 PricewaterhouseCoopers 21 primitive accumulation 71, 78–9 private property: ending of 175, 176

228

Index

privatisation: in Africa 126, 127, 136, 140 pro¿t-maximisation 88 Przeworski, Adam 86 ‘quantitative easing’ 83 Raby, D. 189, 190 Raffer, K. 28 Ramaphosa, Cyril 137 Ramsar Wetlands reserve 146 Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) 130–1 REDD offsets 42 redistribution 177 refugees 111–12, 113, 115–16, 129, 201n[6]8; demonisation of 157 renewable energy 37–8; EROEI ratios 162; importance and limits 11; subsidies for 39 rentier class: increasing power of 82 repressive transformational methods 160 ‘revolving door’ syndrome 91 Reynolds, L. 115 Rickards, J. 200n[4]4 Rio Earth Summit [1992] 8, 29–30 Rio+20 Summit [2012] 8, 53 Riskmetrics Group 48–9 Robinson, Joan 74, 178 Roosevelt, Theodore IV 49 Rosenberg, T. 110 Rosewarne, S. 5 Rossman, P. 51, 82, 84 Ruccio, D. 89, 90, 200n[4]7 Ruedy, R. 21 rule of money 81 rules of trade 31, 80 Russia 191–3; transformation from statecontrolled economy 191–2 Rustomjee, Z. 122, 123, 147 Rutherford, J. 76 Sacsis 140 San people [Bushmen] 120 Sandbag Report 46 Sanderson, K. 38 sanitation facilities 111 Sasol Ltd 141, 142 Satgar, V. 108 Sato, M. 21 Saul, J. S. 136 scarcity 177 Schaefer, K. 198n[2]7 Scholes, R. J. 116 science and technology: role in industrialised society 64–5

sea-level rises 21, 40, 117, 118 Searchinger, T. 38 Secunda coal-to-liquids plant 141 Senegal: land grab in 104 shale gas 50 Shiva, Vandana 64, 172, 185, 203n[9]2 Siberian permafrost: thawing of 19, 198n[2]8 Simms, A. 38 simplicity principle 176–7 Singer, H. W. 28 skilled labour: outÀows from Africa 110 slave trade 78–9, 103 slum populations 70; in Africa 98, 106, 107 Small, R. 183, 184 Smith, Adam 3, 74, 86 social contract 86 social inequality 14–17 social relations of production 3, 5, 152; alienation arising from 75 socialist government(s) 188, 189, 190; see also state socialism Soederberg, S. 89, 91 soil fertility: destruction of 67, 174 Sonjica, Buyelwa 133 South Africa: biodiversity 116–17; capital Àight from 126; CO2 emissions 102, 118, 130, 141, 143; coal production and consumption 142, 143; corruption in 133, 147–9; doctor training costs 111; economic growth 113, 143; electricity ‘crisis’ 142, 144; electricity production 118, 130, 140, 142, 143, 145; energy sector 140–1, 142; European settlers 120; history 120–2; life expectancy 114; macroeconomic policies [post-1994] 130–6; as microcosm of global political economy 113, 119, 120, 129–30, 135; political economy 119–23; population 113; privatisation in 126, 127, 136, 140; protest actions 115, 137, 138, 151; refugees in or going to 112, 113, 115–16; transformation from apartheid to democracy 124; unemployment in 114 South African Communist Party 138, 202n[6]21 South African constitution [post-apartheid] 128, 132–3 Soviet Union 191; see also Russia Soweto township: electricity costs 144 Spencer, Henry 173 Spoor, R. 114 Spratt, D. 47

Index 229 Standard & Poor: downgrading of South Africa’s bond rating 147 Standard Life Investments: on carbon trading 44 Stanlake, G. F. 178 state: corporatisation of 165; role of 85–7 state socialism 176 Statistics South Africa 114, 142, 201n[6]9, 201n[6]10 Steffen, Will 194 Stern Review 43, 199n[3]1 Stewart International 108 Stiglitz, Joseph 88, 192 Stockholm Resilience Centre 11, 18 structural adjustment programmes 106, 125, 131 sub-Saharan Africa: capital Àight from 82, 200n[5]5; debt/exports ratio 110; debt/GNP ratio 110; doctors in 110–11; external debt 200n[5]4; food security 105; premature deaths due to global warming 101 subsidised electricity 135, 147, 202n[6]22 subsistence agriculture: in Africa 105 suf¿ciency concept 177 sustainable agriculture 174 sustainable communities/societies: examples 185–6; principles underpinning 169–81, 196 tar sands: CO2 emissions from 27 Taylor, C. 76 Terreblanche, S. 122, 124, 125, 127, 131 Third World Network 110 tipping points 19, 21, 198n[2]5; examples 19, 39–40, 49, 198n[2]8 title insurance 107–8 Toulmin, C. 111, 118 ‘tradable carbon’ 43 trade liberalisation 31, 91, 121, 125, 178; cost to sub-Saharan Africa 108 trade union movement 188 Trainer, T. 162, 186 Transition Towns 182, 185–8; criticisms 186, 187 ‘trickle down capitalism’ 126 ‘trickle down effect’ 78 Turse, N. 104 Tutu, [archbishop] Desmond 12, 102 UN Habitat: on African cities 98, 99, 107 undemocratic ¿nancial institutions 29; dismantling of 179 UNESCO report [on Africa’s poor] 98

United Nations: formation of 28 United Nations Conference(s): on Environment and Development [Rio Earth Summit, 1992] 8, 29–30, 31, 178; on [the] Human Environment, [Stockholm, 1972] 29; on Sustainable Development [Rio+20, 2012] 8, 53 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity 30 United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) 109 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) 29, 199n[2]9 United Nations environmental agreements 30 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 30, 118; Kyoto Protocol adopted by 7, 31; voluntary limits on GHG emissions 30, 31 United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 58, 98 universities: inÀuence of fossil fuel corporations in 92 urban agriculture 174, 183, 191 urban population: in Africa 98, 113 US: CO2 emissions per capita 25, 102; compared with Cuba 190, 203n[10]3; military presence in Africa 104 US dollar: as reserve currency 82, 83 value system: environment at centre of 175 van Onselen, C. 121, 122 Veseth, M. 4 ‘Via Campesina’ movement 174, 195 Von Maltitz, G. P. 116 Wackernagel, M. 161 Wall Street Journal: on carbon trading 44 ‘Washington Consensus’ 59, 126, 127, 131, 136, 202n[6]18 water insecurity: in Africa 105 Waterberg Biosphere Reserve 146 ‘wealth’ disparity between rich and poor 15, 59, 137–8; in South Africa 113–14, 137–8, 151 wealth transfer: from Africa 108, 109–10 Weingast, B. 3 West Antarctic ice sheet: melting of 19, 198n[2]8 Williamson, J. 202n[6]18 Wilson, J. S. 108 Wittman, D. 3

230

Index

World Bank 29; consumption inequality data 16–17; contradictory position [climate change ¿nance/fossil fuel projects] 52, 144; fossil fuel project ¿nancing 40–1, 144, 145, 150–1; Turn Down the Heat report 21, 99; wealth inequality data 14–15 World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) 29; Brundtland Report 29 World Economic Forum: Global Competitiveness Report 137 World Health Organization (WHO): on effects of biofuel production 39 World Meteorological Organization (WMO) 29, 199n[2]9 world oil depletion curve 162, 163 World People’s Conference on Climate Change [Bolivia, 2010] 94, 200n[4]9

world population 17, 161; supportable after global warming 151 World Social Forum 157, 195 World Trade Organization (WTO) 30, 31, 80; and Rio Earth Summit 31; TRIPS Agreement 88 World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) 46, 48 worldviews: differing 158–60 Worldwatch Institute 7, 39 Wright, E. O. 86, 166, 179 Yeltsin, Boris 192 Zille, Helen 146 Zimbabwean refugees 129, 201n[6]8 äiåek, Slavoj 55, 183 Zuma, Jacob 118, 119, 133