How we live and how we might live (2)
(Continued from last month)
It is November, 1884. William Morris, designer, author and revolutionary socialist, stands before an audience assembled at his London home delivering a talk: “How we live and How we might live”. Six hundred miles away across the North Sea in Berlin, representatives of the European powers are gathered, negotiating, bargaining, manoeuvring, carving up the African continent into agreed spheres of influence and exploitation. The British are becoming anxious and a bullish jingoism is percolating through society. The United Kingdom has recently lost its world lead in manufacturing to the rapidly growing capitalist powers of continental Europe. Rivalry among them is heating up.
Morris assesses the situation shrewdly. He observes:
‘it is now a desperate competition between the great nations of civilisation for the world-market, and tomorrow it may be a desperate war for that end.’
That ‘desperate war’ among the ‘great nations of civilisation’ would come eventually in the cataclysm of 1914-18. War, of course, was nothing new, and the ‘great nations’ were no strangers to it. Even as their representatives in Berlin haggled over African territories, the French and Dutch were fighting separate colonial wars in China. Industrial capitalism, birthed in the early decades of the nineteenth century, had shown no capacity for limiting mass violence. Quite the contrary. The nineteenth century had exploded across the European landmass with the muskets and cannons of the Napoleonic and Coalition armies. Throughout the century the long destructive arc of capitalist violence ripped through a multitude of colonial and European territories and states. It began the new century on the southern tip of Africa with Brits and Boers fighting it out in a hail of machine gun fire and rifle bullets.
The slaughter continued in a multitude of conflicts. It failed miserably to end with ‘The War to End All Wars’, rose to new heights of violence between 1939 and 1945, and by the millennium, had left behind it vast material devastation, 230 million dead, and an untold number of broken lives. The arrival of the twenty-first century didn’t disappoint. It opened with a flood of civil wars and insurgencies, and with a cynical and drawn out conflict in Iraq.
Today, some twenty years later our TV screens and news media are filled with narratives of the current slaughter in Ukraine and the Middle East. Elsewhere, less newsworthy but no less deadly conflicts rage around the globe: in Cameroon and Haiti; in Yemen and Mexico; in the deserts of northern Africa, and in the mountains and plains of South America. Warfare appears to be a fixture in human affairs. It changes its colours and pretexts with each new conflict, but never disappears – despite the fact that few sane people actually want it. Once again, this raises the question that Morris asked of another seeming fixture of human life, poverty: why? Why poverty? Why war? Why do we see no end to it, no relief?
Why war?
It would be easy to settle on a simple answer to his question, one we see everywhere online, in the media and sometimes even in academic texts – ‘human nature’. We hear those words pronounced sagely at home and in the pub. It’s just the way we humans are, we say. The truth however, is that we humans like simple explanations, something that we can pin down in a weighty phrase or with a shake of the head, and then tuck away in the back of our minds before returning to the immediate problems of daily life. But is war so simple? It takes vast organisation and resources to conduct a modern war. It takes a great deal of thought and preparation. Human nature, geared to quick instinctive responses does not seem to fit the bill.
In his talk, Morris addressed the questions of war and poverty as they affected British society in his own time, yet he might just as well have been speaking for us today. Poverty and the drive to war persist even though a lot has changed in the scope and impact they have on our lives. Under the competitive pressures of a capitalist market, the advance of science and technology has led to the increased mechanisation and destructive power of war. It has led to the growth of a huge and lucrative armament industry, and to growing stockpiles of weaponry. It has vastly increased the possibility of widespread, even global destruction.
Disarmament agreements that offered some reassurance over past decades have now fallen by the wayside. Competition has once again grown fierce and borders have closed. Poverty, too, continues to scar communities in the capitalist West, and in the countries of the ‘developing world’ subject to capitalism’s long reach and market imperatives. With the capitalist advance and the destruction of traditional economies, however, poverty arises less often these days from a result of natural scarcity, and more frequently from lack of ability to pay.
Escalating crises
Time moves on. This is 2024, not 1884, and in addition to the historical blights of poverty and war, we are now facing potential catastrophes of a kind that Morris never had to deal with. After decades of evasion and denial, few now are unaware of the escalating crises of climate change, loss of species diversity and of pollution. Climate change has made itself felt around the world in the large scale destruction of lives and property brought on by extreme weather systems. In David Attenborough’s well publicised words to the United Nations, climate change has now become ‘widespread, rapid, and intensifying’. It poses threats to food security, access to fresh water and to natural resources. It is altering the migration patterns of human beings, creating social division and disruption. And of course, as always, it is the poor that suffer most.
Since 1950, that is, within the lifetime of many people, over half of all the world’s species have become extinct, and much of this is driven by capitalist imperatives and human action. From what we now understand of the interdependency of all life on the planet, this loss is not just a matter for sentimental regret. The excessive rate at which species are being lost or diminished is putting severe pressure on the ability of ecological systems to adapt. Ecologists warn that beyond a certain limit these natural systems are likely to become unstable or collapse. Seventy-five percent of the genetic variation in crops has disappeared in the last 125 years through selective breeding for commercial purposes. It is irretrievable. A lack of genetic diversity leaves crops more vulnerable to disease, pests and invasive species but also to the effects of climate change. Not only does this threaten global food security but it can have disastrous consequences for local populations who are tied into the capitalist system and are dependent upon revenue from the sale of crops.
Pollution too, is reaching new levels, and creating new threats. Here in the UK, the media keeps us aware of local problems like our polluted waterways. But this is only scratching the surface. Air, land and water pollution has a significant global impact on ecosystems and on human health. According to the World Health Organisation, almost 99 percent of the global population is now breathing air that exceeds quality limits, creating cardiovascular problems, strokes and respiratory diseases. Today, eight million deaths annually are attributed to air pollution. The land, too, is rapidly deteriorating from an onslaught of pollutants from landfill sites, from agricultural pesticides and fertilisers. These pollutants, along with untreated sewage, leak into the water supply contaminating seas, lakes and rivers. Oil spillages and accumulations of plastic waste kill animals and destroy habitats.
In the face of all these current crises, it seems we have become paralysed, unable to act effectively. And that requires an explanation. Looking around at our advances in science, in engineering, in medicine, and in so many other fields, it’s clear that we are a practical and problem-solving species. The capitalist system which currently dominates our lives and directs our activity is so often credited with a capacity to innovate, and yet when it comes to collective problem-solving in areas such as these, it seems impotent.
It is not that these problems have lacked attention or proposed solutions. A vast amount of human energy has been expended on them. The outcomes, however, have been inadequate, and the solutions proposed have been superficial and ineffective. Globally, we are still pumping huge quantities of climate-altering carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The long string of international gatherings since the first 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm has achieved little. The internationally agreed Kyoto protocols have been established but their targets have remained largely unmet. The annual COP meetings have been attended by heads of state, politicians, and thousands of business representatives, lobbyists, journalists, negotiators and scientists. Weeks have been spent in intense exchanges and negotiations, yet with very little positive result.
A single origin
So what is going on? Why have we made so little progress? In recent years there has been a growing recognition that these crises: climate change; loss of species diversity; and pollution are not separate problems. They influence and magnify one other. They cannot be separately addressed. Fashionable terms like ‘the polycrisis’ or ‘the metacrisis’ have been popping up to describe this new understanding like bubbles on the surface of a rapidly flowing river. There is an acknowledgment that these crises have a single origin. This is an advance of sorts.
Some, at least, have come to the realisation that it is no longer sufficient to blame superficial features of our society like particular industries, businesses or political ideologies. And there is little to be gained by blaming vague abstractions like ‘human nature’. It is becoming acceptable, even in the conventional media, to acknowledge that the problem lies in something much more fundamental, in the way we organise ourselves as a global society to produce the things we need (or think we need) in order to live. It lies, in other words, in the structure of the capitalist economy.
Despite this advance, we soon hit a problem. There is disagreement on what capitalism fundamentally is. It gets defined in terms of its surface features. But superficial definitions give rise only to superficial and ineffective solutions. Economic textbooks and business sites tell us, for example, that capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production (factories, machines, raw materials, etc). ‘Libertarians’ tell us that capitalism is no more than voluntary exchange. These abstract definitions are both highly ideological and highly reductive. They tell us very little about the complex nature of the world we actually inhabit. Worse still, they are inaccurate.
Capitalism is an impersonal system. It matters very little how the means of production are owned, or who owns them. The central feature of capitalism, the accumulation of capital by means of wage labour, remains the same whether businesses are owned by individuals, partnerships, families, cooperatives, groups of shareholders or by the state. So what is this thing we call capitalism, and how is it responsible for so much that appears wrong with our world?
In next month’s Socialist Standard we will dive down into its workings and start to look at the ways in which all these features are generated in our own time by what lies at the heart of capitalism itself.
HUD