Capitalism’s Comforter: The Myth That The Free-Market Has Liberated Humanity.

The Choice Fruits Of Capitalism: The Right delights in claiming that the dramatic improvements in the lot of ordinary people in the quarter-century since the fall of the Soviet Union, far from being the result of clean water, mass education and mounting political pressures from below, are to be attributed to the beneficence of free-market capitalism. And yet, wherever untrammelled FMC has been installed - as in the Russian Federation under Yeltsin, or in US-occupied Iraq - the results have been catastrophic.

 

IT’S THE RIGHT’S COMFORT BLANKET. Pressed to present a moral justification for their politics, it’s what they reach for. The unquestionable progress of humanity: out of poverty, ignorance and injustice, and towards prosperity, education and more equitable social arrangements; is held up as proof that their ideology works. They are particularly struck by the global improvements that have taken place in the quarter-century since the collapse of “actually existing socialism” in Russia and Eastern Europe. Capitalism, they insist, is not just good for capitalists – it’s good for everyone.

 

It’s nonsense, of course, but the weakness of the argument is not always apparent to those lacking a strong grasp of modern history. The Right’s trick is to conflate the dramatic expansion in human knowledge and technological prowess with the rise of the capitalist economic system. Only a fool would argue that the two occurrences were not closely related, but it would be much more foolish to claim that the latter caused the former.

 

Advances in agriculture, engineering and medicine have indisputably contributed the most to human welfare. The average human-being lives longer and in much greater health than his or her ancestors, not because they had capitalism imposed upon them, but because civil engineers made possible the supply of pure drinking water, and the safe disposal of dangerous waste. The discoveries of scientists and physicians similarly extended human life-expectancy and vastly increased the productivity of just about every aspect of agricultural activity.

 

The history of capitalism is by no means the story of how these scientific and technological advances were harmoniously integrated into its constant quest for increased profits. Improvements in the quality of life of ordinary people were often made in the teeth of fierce capitalist opposition. Even today, attempts by governments around the world to regulate the worst aspects of capitalist profit-seeking are resisted at every turn.

 

Nevertheless, the steady advancement of humanity has proceeded apace. Not because the big-hearted capitalists have been demanding that their workers be given the best of everything, but because workers and peasants around the world have insisted on translating advances in science and technology into measurable social progress for themselves and their children.

 

Almost always this has been achieved by mass political movements harnessing the power of the state to institute mass public education, health and welfare programmes. If the big capitalist corporations sometimes deigned to get out of their way it was only because they realised that the processes of globalisation proceeded more smoothly (and profitably) if the peasants they were enrolling in their vast new sweatshops knew how to read and write, and if the inevitable injuries they suffered could be patched-up at the host nation’s expense.

 

Nor should the impact of international institutions such as the United Nations, the World Health Organisation, the Food and Agricultural Organisation, the Save the Children Fund, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, and the International Labour Organisation be underestimated. The humanitarian and social-democratic impulses which gave these global agencies of human progress birth, and which for more than 70 years have kept the flag of true internationalism flying, have been the targets of unrelenting right-wing hostility.

 

It was the capitalist triumphalism inspired by the fall of the Soviet Union, however, that stuck (and still sticks) in the throat of left-wingers the world around. To hear them talk, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had succumbed to a vast horde of right-wing ideologues brandishing copies of The Economist and The National Review. That the Berlin Wall was toppled by Baroness Thatcher – rather than a border guard who refused to open fire on his fellow citizens. Strange, too, how the Right has forgotten that it was Mikhail Gorbachev, not Ronald Reagan, who set the wheels of political and economic reform in motion, and Boris Yeltsin who turned back the coup-plotters’ tanks without a shot being fired.

 

What they have also forgotten, and what fundamentally undercuts all their boasts about the advances of the last quarter-century being driven by the forces of benevolent capitalist internationalism, is the fate of the Russian people after the fall of the Soviet Union. The United States was quick to offer the new Russian Federation all the advice it needed to apply what Washington insisted was absolutely necessary “shock therapy” to the moribund Russian economy. This was capitalism in its purest form: unpolluted by the slightest taint of socialism, or even social-democracy! And what was the result? What sort of society emerged from this capitalistic “Year Zero”?

 

The answer is that Russia was transformed into a vicious kleptocracy in which bribery, corruption and outright gangsterism rode roughshod over every economic principle Adam Smith ever enunciated. A system which had only just managed to work under the Communists, very quickly ceased to work at all. Unemployment, homelessness and alcoholism soared and even those fortunate enough to keep their jobs and their apartments were lucky to get paid once a month or keep the power on. Most tellingly, human life expectancy – that great reflector of the advances of the modern era – began to fall.

 

This is what happens to a country to which the principles of pure free-market capitalism are applied.

 

So, the next time a right-winger reaches for this spurious comfort blanket, remind him that while Capitalism may be correlated with the economic, social and political progress of humankind, any and all claims that it is the cause of our species’ advancement must be rejected as historically and morally unsustainable.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 15 February 2016.

The Desolation Of Mordor: Tolkien’s Fictional Wasteland Has Nothing On Baotou, The Worst Place On Earth.

"The Gasping Pits And Poisonous Mounds Grew Hideously Clear." Toxic waste from the processing of rare earths pours into Lake Baotou in China's Inner Mongolia province. This is where 97 percent of the world's rare earths come from. Without them neither our smart phones nor our much vaunted "green technology" would work.

 

IT IS ONE of the most graphic passages in the whole of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The description of the toxic desert on the outskirts of Mordor. Inspired by the polluted landscapes surrounding Britain’s great industrial cities in his youth, Tolkien employs the waste-dumps of Mordor as a metaphor for the diseased and poisoned nature of the Dark Lord’s character. Just as the ruined land is beyond all rehabilitation, so, too, is Sauron.

 

Here is Tolkien’s description of that terrible place:

 

“They had come to the desolation that lay before Mordor: the lasting monument to the dark labour of its slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void; a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing – unless the Great Sea should enter it and wash it with oblivion. ‘I feel sick,’ said Sam. Frodo did not speak. 

For a while they stood there, like men on the edge of a sleep where nightmare lurks, holding it off, though they know they can only come to morning through shadows. The light broadened and hardened. The gasping pits and poisonous mounds grew hideously clear. The sun was up, walking among clouds and long flags of smoke, but even the sunlight was defiled. The hobbits had no welcome for that light; unfriendly it seemed, revealing them in their helplessness – little squeaking ghosts that wandered among the ash-heaps of the Dark Lord.”

 

Throughout the fantasy, Tolkien takes great care to reassure his readers that the “free peoples” of Middle Earth are at great pains to stand aloof from Mordor and all its works. If, however, someone were to attempt to describe the political economy of Middle Earth (at the end of the Third Age) it would have to begin with the declining empire of Gondor and its vassal states, Rohan and The Shire. A largely self-sufficient economic entity, such trade as Gondor still engaged in was principally with the Dwarf kingdom located in the Iron Hills, many hundreds of miles to the north. Tolkien hints that Gondor might also have engaged in limited commerce with the kingdoms of the “swertings” – the black-skinned peoples of the south – but only during the period when the Dark Lord was believed to be dead.

 

There can be no doubt, however, that Mordor constituted the economic powerhouse of Middle Earth. Like the ante-bellum South, Mordor boasted vast plantations in which thousands of slaves produced the food and other materials required for its sustenance. Any surplus was traded with the southern kingdoms which had, since Sauron’s return, fallen steadily under Mordor’s sway. Moreover, the Dark Lord’s military build-up, in preparation for his attack upon Gondor, would have required the production of weapons on an industrial scale. Mordor’s hunger for iron and other minerals must have been insatiable.

 

Deconstructing Tolkien’s great tale in this cold-eyed economic fashion is, of course, anathema to LOTR aficionados. The War of the Ring is supposed to be a battle between good and evil, not an economic struggle between a rapidly industrialising, slave-owning tyranny on the one hand, and an economically weak, largely agricultural, kingdom without a king, on the other. Looked at in this fashion, it becomes very clear, very quickly, that without the magical assistance rendered by Gandalf and the Elves, Gondor would have been a gonner.

 

Cold-eyed and economically determined is, however, very definitely the nature of the world in which we are required to live. A world sadly lacking in magical beings dedicated to the protection of fading empires and bucolic farming communities like the Shire. On Planet Earth, the rising power of a tyrannical industrial powerhouse is unlikely to be checked by anything remotely resembling wizards, elves or hobbits.

 

Where Tolkien’s fantasy and twenty-first century reality do intersect, however, is in the environmental degradation attendant upon our high-tech civilisation. The hideous pollution which Tolkien encountered in his youth has, like the factories and mines that created it, largely disappeared from England’s green and pleasant land. But this does not mean that Mordor-like desolation is also a thing of the past. Mordor has merely shifted its location: from the north of England and the midlands, to the seemingly limitless horizons of Inner Mongolia and the horrors of Baotou.

 

Baotou is the global centre of rare earth production: the place from which the minerals that make our post-modern, digitally-driven world possible. Only in China is such an industrial complex possible, because the inescapable environmental degradation attendant upon the extraction of Rare Earths would never be tolerated in the democratic nations of the West.

 

Read how a team of BBC journalists and photographers described their arrival at the man-made “lake” on the outskirts of Baotou. If Mordor is anywhere in this world, then surely, it is here:

 

“We reached the shore, and looked across the lake. I’d seen some photos before I left for Inner Mongolia, but nothing prepared me for the sight. It’s a truly alien environment, dystopian and horrifying. The thought that it is man-made depressed and terrified me, as did the realisation that this was the by-product not just of the consumer electronics in my pocket, but also green technologies like wind turbines and electric cars that we get so smugly excited about in the West. Unsure of quite how to react, I take photos and shoot video on my cerium polished iPhone.”

 

Baotou's Toxic Lake: "Nothing prepared me for the sight."

 

Tolkien’s great fantasy both reveals and conceals the true nature of the world human-beings inhabit. The Ring of Power – symbol of the ruthless instrumentalism through which humankind has subdued the planet – is wonderfully conceived, but its ability to instruct the reader is fatally weakened by Tolkien’s determination to make Good triumph over Evil.

 

The bitter truth, of course, is that all of us wear the Ring of Power, all the time. And all of us are irredeemably engaged in the moral self-destruction that use of the Ring inevitably entails. We New Zealanders may be “sleepy hobbits”, dozing blissfully in our beautiful little Shire at the world’s end, but that doesn’t stop us, when we’re awake, from using the wondrous consumer goods Baotou’s rare earths make possible. Our ease, and the bounteous lifestyle of which we are so proud (and of which the rest of the world is so envious) only exists because somewhere, far, far away, in the barren wilds of Inner Mongolia, giant pipes are continuously spewing their poisonous brew into a lake so ruined, hideous and deadly, that Sauron, himself, would blanche in horror.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 16 August 2015.

Sufficient Unto The Day

Short-Term Goals: Human-beings have always suffered from its tightly constrained time horizons. We are extremely good at working out how to hunt and kill the next mammoth, but not at asking ourselves what will happen when the last mammoth is killed.

 

WHY IS IT that nothing seems to work anymore? Problems assail us at both the local and the global level but there are no solutions. Politicians talk. World leaders gather – as they did last week in Brisbane for the G20 meeting – and , still, we are no better off.

 

How is that human ingenuity can place an object on a comet travelling faster than a bullet half-a-billion kilometres from Planet Earth, but is unable to protect the helpless populations of West Africa from the Ebola virus?

 

Human-beings obviously possess the smarts to solve their problems. Why, then, do they not possess the will?

 

The anthropologists tell us that the answer lies in the human species’ tightly constrained time horizons. We’re extremely good at working out how to hunt and kill the next mammoth, but not at asking ourselves what will happen when the last mammoth is killed.

 

Despite its obvious shortcomings, humanity’s short-term thinking remains deeply imbedded. Indeed, the idea of living in the moment has been identified by humanity’s greatest religious teachers as the only sensible response to the reality of our mortality.

 

“Consider the lilies of the field,” said Jesus of Nazareth, “how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these ….. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

 

Of course, in 30AD neither Jesus, his disciples, the Mediterranean world, nor even the planet itself, was faced with the twin threats of anthropogenic global warming and imminent resource depletion. Galilee and Judea were famed for their bountiful harvests. So long as the sun rose, the rain fell and the Jordan flowed, what need had men to take thought for the things of the morrow?

 

There is much to be said for this approach, because when set against the impossibly long perspectives of geological time our lives are, indeed, ridiculously short. In the planet’s gaze, the entire span of the human species’ existence is no more than the flutter of an eyelid. Were we, through our invincible short-termism, to engineer our own extinction, Mother Earth would barely stir. (Other than to breathe a sigh of relief!)

 

And yet, even within the scope of their own brief lifespans, our forebears displayed considerably more perspicacity than the cluster of generations inhabiting the world of today.

 

The evidence of these previous generations’ future focus lies all around us. How else should we describe the parks and botanical gardens of our towns and cities which our great-grandparents bequeathed to us, if not in the felicitous phrases of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar? All these things “hath left them you, and to your heirs for ever; common pleasures, to walk abroad and recreate yourselves.”

 

And should we not, likewise, give thanks to the politicians and planners who made possible the great hydro-electric schemes of the twentieth century? Without their faith in the future of this little nation, the skies of its major cities would be as befouled with the smog of fossil-fuelled power generation as Beijing’s.

 

And all those streets of sturdy state houses? How was it possible for a country laid prostrate by the most savage economic depression in the history of Capitalism to somehow summon up the resources to build houses for its homeless citizens? And why, if it was possible for the politicians of the 1930s to make housing affordable, is it impossible for today’s politicians to do the same?

 

Something has gone out of us. Some vital quality that the human-beings who built the Parthenon, the Coliseum, Chartres Cathedral, Brooklyn Bridge, and even our own Benmore Dam, possessed in abundance.

 

Yes, their eyes were fixed upon the future; but that was only the necessary first step. To look ahead at all, the inhabitants of the present must first believe that what they value most about their society – their civilisation – will not die with them; that it will go on into the future. Believing that, who would not hasten to construct the economic and cultural infrastructure that gives their most cherished values life? Why else would anyone build the Parthenon? Or the Benmore Dam?

 

The Course Of Empire - Desolation. Painting by Thomas Cole, 1836.

 

Which can only mean that, if nothing works, and if our problems have become insoluble, then humanity’s ‘civilisation gene’ has somehow been switched off. Whatever peculiar mutation it was that rendered human-beings capable of thinking beyond the next mammoth, is fast becoming singularly maladaptive to the life-world of twenty-first century homo-sapiens.

 

Perhaps it’s our technology that’s undone us? Perhaps the emerging cyber-human has no need for pasts or futures? Perhaps, finally, we are approaching Nirvana – that concluding moment of human evolution when sufficient unto the day is the selfie thereof.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 18 November 2014.