Is Capitalism Environmentally Possible?

[alanjjohnstone]

Came across an article that linked to this lengthy article. I've read Richard Smith before and he has some fine thoughts. This article concentrates on China's pledges to be environmentally sustainable. But Smith challenges the prospect of such.

http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue82/Smith82.pdf

He begins by defining the Chinese social system a bit differently from ourselves but i feel happy enough to accept his distinctions.

 

Quote:

China’s rulers are bureaucratic collectivists who run a hybrid bureaucratic-collectivist capitalist economy, a system largely – though, of course, not entirely – exempted from the laws of capitalism. It’s difficult to make generalisations about the “Chinese economy” because what’s true of the state-owned sector (about half the economy) is not necessarily true of the foreign-invested joint-venture sector (about a third of the industrial economy) or the domestic private-capitalist sector. Here I’m mainly concerned with the state-owned, state-controlled, state-planned economy because this is the main engine of the economy and because it over-determines the rest as well. China’s State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) do not live and die by the rules of the market. For all the market reforms since 1978, the government has not allowed a single major SOE to fail and go bankrupt, no matter how inefficient, no matter how indebted, because those industries serve a different purpose. They do not exist just to make money. They exist to fulfil the wishes of China’s Communist Party rulers, especially as they contribute to import substitution and national industrialisation. China’s statist economy thus abides by different laws of motion, different drivers. Capitalist economies are driven by a single maximand: profit maximisation. China’s state-led economy is driven by a different maximand: maximising the security, power, and wealth of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) bureaucracy. This driver isn’t automatic like the motor of competition in capitalism. In China’s state-owned economy, growth is driven by the conscious decisions of party authorities: if the leaders choose to develop (or not develop) an industry, it will be developed (or not). Central planning replaces market competition to shape economic development…

… China’s ruling class owns the state economy collectively, not privately like capitalists, and this gives the Chinese economy a radically different character and trajectory from “normal” capitalism elsewhere. The party-state owns the whole economy, all the land and natural resource as well as the profits of its industries, tax receipts, foreign-exchange surpluses and more. But no party member owns any of this personally. In this system, economic power is dispersed throughout the party-state bureaucracy, though concentrated in nodes of power, especially family-based and factional sections of the party bureaucracy. This collectivist power and property has major implications with respect to Beijing’s effort to control and direct the economy and to enforce its own environmental rules and regulations. ..

…I don’t doubt that Xi Jinping sincerely wishes to build an “ecological society”. But the fact remains that his options are severely limited by the imperatives of ruling-class reproduction: He can’t prioritise environmental protection over economic growth because given the pressures he faces to grow the economy, build all those new industries to “make China great again”, to produce jobs, to bring mass consumerism to a billion and a half Chinese, to sell his economy’s overproduction and employ the country’s surplus workers overseas, he has no choice but to prioritise growth over the environment….What this means that Xi Jinping has no chance of leading a global fight against global warming. It means that, instead, China’s economy is likely to continue leading the drive towards planetary ecological collapse. Short of nuclear war, China’s economic engine poses the greatest threat to life on Earth… Xi’s problem, like our problem, is that there’s just no way to grow an industrialised economy without growing resource consumption and pollution …When all is said and done, the irreducible fact is that, in the absence of some miracle deus ex machina, there’s just no way to radically suppress China’s CO2 emissions that’s compatible with continuing economic growth. Xi Jinping can create an ecological civilization or he can build a rich superpower. He can’t do both… 

..At the moment there’s certainly no hint of any revolutionary threat from below in the consumerist delirium of urban China. But appearances can be deceiving in China as in all dictatorships and radical upsurges can appear out of nowhere without warning, as the communists are very well aware from their experience in 1989. That’s why Xi Jinping finds it increasingly necessary to shut his internet off from the rest of the world, and to arrest and imprison democrats, feminists, trade unionists, book sellers, and even Hong Kong high-school students and force confessions out of them in Stalinist-revival show trials. But Xi’s intensifying repression is less a manifestation of his strength than of his fear: The relentless worsening of China’s ecological crisis and the growing tensions and contradictions in Chinese society are setting the stage of history for a radical shock: the next Chinese revolution…It’s time the Chinese people stood up again. The fate of their nation and the fate of the planet depend greatly on them.

[Ike Pettigrew]

Thank you for the link.  I enjoyed reading that article.  Very interesting.

[Author]

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