Social Ecology London

Copenhagen: Flooding the Market

This article was written by an SEL member for Black Flag magazine (issue 228, 2008/9). Although written a year ago it seemed relevant to the current round of discussions on global warming in Copenhagen.

Copenhagen: Flooding the Market

Something strange has happened over the last few years. Ecological concerns , formerly the preserve of a few bearded hippies and annoying lefty types, have entered the mainstream. Climate change due to human activity has been accepted as fact by government and business alike. Something has to be done.

Unfortunately this something is up for grabs. At the moment unfortunately the solutions fighting it out for prominence come up pretty poorly. None of them fully engage with the wider context of our class based, hierarchical society. All seek to work within capitalism without questioning whether this is desirable or even feasible.

Capitalism to the rescue?

Can capitalism ‘solve’ the climate change problem? Well, a few years ago my instant reaction would have been no. My answer now is that it’s highly unlikely to. It depends whether you’re talking abut a pure market system or the more complex capitalist world that we actually live in.

Capitalism by its nature is based on the need to continuously expand or die. New markets must constantly be sought, new or more efficient ways of generating and realising profit created. There is no moral dimension to capitalism. In itself it does not take into account anything other than the accumulation of wealth.

There are some free market advocates that believe that the solution to environmental problems is private ownership. According to Fred Smith, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, “Rather than the silly slogan of some environmentalists, that ‘trees should have standing,’ our argument is that behind every tree should stand an owner who can act as its protector” (1). It’s unclear what would stop the owner from chopping the tree down if it were more profitable to do so. In this argument pollution would be fought by owners of land/property suffering pollution bringing legal claims – though proving that a particular factory is responsible for acid rain seems a little difficult.

Bar these visions of a bosses’ utopia in which everything is owned for the good of all (not to mention the profit of the few) – and one in which it is hard to see how climate change could be tackled – we’re left with a free market that without outside intervention would quickly lead to ecological disaster, not just through an amoral approach to growth by any means, but also through a consequence of market exchange – externalities.

An ‘externality’ is something that occurs as a result of a market exchange, that affects people or things other than the buyer and seller. It’s in the interests of both buyer and seller for some costs resulting from the transaction to be shifted on to others (‘externalised’). Robin Hahnel gives the example of someone buying a car from a car maker. The costs of the pollution caused through production, and the pollution, congestion, and carbon emissions caused through consumption – use – of the vehicle are not included in the price struck. The costs are borne by others. Put simply, if it’s cheaper to pollute than it is to avoid or clean up pollution, market logic says pollute (2).

So the logic of capitalism points to – if I may lapse into rock-speak – a one way ticket to hell.

The thing to bear in mind however is that we do not live in a pure free market system. The state and other bodies and mechanisms represent another part of the ruling elite alongside the people who fill boardrooms and senior management positions. In a sense they are the semi conscious bourgeoisie, who often act to save their business brethren (I use the gendered term deliberately) from themselves. It is this part of the ruling elite that often grants reforms, as it can see that in the long run reforms are in their class interest, as they head off too much disruption from dissatisfied workers/women/black people/youth/LGBT people etc. The potential effects of global warming – rising sea levels, food shortages, famine, death and population displacement – would present a huge risk to both profit making and the legitimacy of state and capitalist institutions.

I believe that on this level there has been recognition that we are staring a global crisis in the face. The noises coming from government bodies, quangos, media outlets and so on reveal that climate change is a genuine concern. They know that steps have to be taken.

Having said that, this will always be tempered by the immediate needs of the business class. The recent double dealing by the Government offers a great example. To avoid EU commitments to renewable energy it has been seeking to have overseas renewable projects it has funded count towards its target, as well as so called ‘clean coal’ carbon capture. Allegedly the real aim is to support nuclear energy over renewables, as funding both not to mention infrastructure support for both) is not really an option.(3)

As an aside on clean coal, the government is to fund a demonstration project to assess the technology. The anticipated period for the project is 15 years. That is, it will take 15 years before they can even assess whether or not the technology is both sound and financially viable(4). These are 15 years we do not have if we are to avoid the more serious consequences of global warming.

There may be a time where concrete actions are taken. The thing to remember however is that these changes will not be at the expense of class power. Those at the top will not let a trivial matter such as climate change upset their position of dominance. By the time this happens, I fear that remedial actions will be quite drastic, presumably some form of carbon rationing where the more money you have the more carbon emitting activities you can enjoy. This would also necessitate a strong authoritarian state, to ensure there is no cheating the system (at least amongst the proles), and to quell any social unrest the situation causes.

International agreements

The most well known example of elite action to tackle climate change is the Kyoto Protocol. As part of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change it is an international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5.2% (from their 1990 levels) by 2012.

According to George Monbiot’s recent book Heat, we actually need to reduce carbon emissions in the ‘developed’ world by 90% by 2030 to have a good chance of avoiding the worst effects of climate change. This means keeping warming below 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels (1.4 degrees above the warming already caused). Note that this is not a ‘safe’ level – millions could still be at risk from water or food shortages below this level. (5)

This should not be taken as a call for us to run back to the caves, but it does mean that we cannot be too complacent. Some technological solutions will help us, but we cannot rely on techno-fixes alone. There have to be fundamental changes to the way we organise society. Yet this doesn’t really figure into the current international agreements or even discussions.

Carbon Trading

A favoured market based solution to global warming is carbon trading. Companies are allocated carbon emission allowances. If their CO2 emissions are lower than their allowance they can sell the unused portion, or similarly buy more if they are going to exceed their limit.

This approach is littered with problems. It actively encourages CO2 emissions to be increased up to the already inadequate limits, as ‘unused’ allowances are sold to someone who will use them. In the EU scheme governments have handed out huge allowances to the biggest polluting industries, leading to the price of carbon dropping by 60% (hardly encouraging anyone to cut emissions) and UK companies alone making collective profits of ￡940m in the first year of the scheme.(6)

Some trading schemes (eg, under Kyoto and the EU’s scheme) allow polluters to buy credits from overseas offsetting projects, generally in the developing world. Offsetting is a dubious practice at the best of times, (see below), and this approach does nothing to lower emissions, especially given the dubious nature of many of these projects.(7)

Carbon Trading also has an ideological effect – and probably motive – of yet again expanding free market rhetoric into another area of life. Once more capitalism rides to the rescue, with the magic of the market’s ‘invisible hand’ holding back the waters and saving the poor polar bears. I used the phrase rhetoric deliberately as, like in many other cases, the reality is not that of a truly free market – the massive handouts of allowances was hardly an example of muscular capitalism.

If anyone were in any doubt about the nature of carbon trading, the Financial Times again highlighted the class war credentials of such schemes:

“Both carbon taxes and markets put undue burden on the poor. Governments should counter such regressive carbon taxes by lowering taxes on labour. Yet most of the political appeal of markets is that they hide the true costs to consumers. That is why carbon markets exist in the first place. For this reason it is unlikely that governments would offset the invisible burden of markets by changing visible taxes.” (8)

Offsets

Most of us are aware of carbon offsetting. The idea is that you ‘neutralise’ the carbon emissions from a particular activity (air travel is a common example) by paying a company to remove an equivalent amount of CO2 from the atmosphere, generally by planting trees. Sounds like a great solution, except for one thing – it doesn’t really work.

It’s hard to accurately calculate how much CO2 a tree will absorb – and for how long. Unless the tree undergoes the same processes that led to the creation of fossil fuels that carbon isn’t going to stay locked away for ever – it will be released if the tree burns or rots.
As a scientist from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research said to The Guardian, “Even if the trees do survive, if we have climate change and a 2C or 3C temperature rise, then how do we know those trees are not going to die early and break down into methane and actually make the situation worse?” (9)

Other offsets are based on projected savings caused by other schemes such as windfarms or promoting more efficient lightbulbs. But here too calculation is an issue, not to mention a high degree of double counting, where projects that were going to go ahead anyway are counted within the offset framework. Carbon Trade Watch have produced a fine report that exposes the offsetting problem

Even if offsetting was a plausible system on its own terms, it diverts attention away from the real solution – leaving fossil fuels in the ground in the first place – and works on the basis that a clear conscience is available to those who can afford it. It’s no wonder that groups such as Carbon Trade Watch have compared this system to medieval indulgences, where wealthy sinners could pay to have their heavenly slate wiped clean.

Capitalism as if profit mattered

“We need more people like Porritt … prepared to … find the best ways to save both the environment and the capitalist system”
Quote from the back of Capitalism as if the world mattered

Jonathan Porritt was a childhood hero of mine. Growing up in the days of John Craven’s Newsround I remember him running Friends of the Earth at a time when I was getting interested in environmental issues. Then I grow up to find him running a pro-business green group called Forum for the Future and writing a book called ‘Capitalism as if the World Mattered’.

The book is based on the perspective that capitalism can be made a bit nicer. This would be achieved by identifying “those characteristics of today’s dominant capitalist paradigm that most damagingly impede progress towards sustainability and set out to change them through the usual levers – government intervention, consumer preference, international diplomacy, education and so on”.

Despite having read the whole book, it’s hard to give a clear picture of what Porritt actually envisages beyond a few examples of case studies or possible reforms. These include environmental taxes intended to reflect externalities, business accounting that would reflect environmental impact and Wal-Mart’s sustainability plans. He reprints Forum for a Future’s business case for embracing sustainable development – stronger brands, customer loyalty, influence with regulator/government, enhanced shareholder value. There is no real recognition that we live in a society which is divided along the lines of wealth and power. Imagining a little bit of moral pressure and reasoned argument will bring about reforms significant enough to make a real difference seems every bit as utopian as he accuses anti-capitalists of being.

Down with this sort of thing! Careful now…

The analysis from liberal greens is not particularly illuminating. It tends to be a mishmash of a generalised ‘we’re all killing the planet so change your lightbulbs’, anti-corporate finger pointing and calls for government to take strong action to make us all better green citizens.

The extent of the analysis on the ‘I count’ website’s ‘What causes climate change’ page is typical: “But who causes it?: It’s simple. We all do. At home, work and play.” (10)

The problem with NGOs is that they honestly believe that they are sitting on terrible information, and all they really need to do is make a large fuss about it and get government to take action. It’s very much along the lines of the Quaker idea of speaking truth to power. Yet as Chomsky has often pointed out, people in power generally know the truth already. It’s just that the current situation benefits them.

Furthermore, NGOs cannot or choose not to see systemic reasons for environmental destruction (or poverty or war or any other major scourge). They would jeopardise their support from well off guilty liberals. Their chief executives are after all now part of the very class they would be attacking, and would lose out on that forthcoming CBE.

I spend a lot of time looking around the internet at green sites. If I see that native American proverb about ‘when the last tree dies … blah blah blah … then they will realise that you can’t eat money’ one more time I will scream. Apart from being annoyingly cloying, I’ve never seen any evidence that it’s a genuine Cree proverb.

You could say that this at least points to an anti-capitalist sentiment, but too often the people spouting this are merely anti-corporate. In some ways this is a step on from simply blaming humans or particular levels of technology for environmental destruction, but it equally fails to get to grips with the mechanics of a hierarchical capitalist system. All it sees are bad people doing bad things.

The general outcome of this kind of anti-corporate pressure tends to be ‘greenwash’, the use of PR and image to sell the idea that the particular company is actually very very environmentally friendly indeed. This is typified by BP’s change of logo to an abstract sun/flower design and infamous ‘Beyond Petroleum’ strapline.

While the facts behind the greenwash are easy to point to, we increasingly live in the situationists’ world of spectacle, where the reality is not as important as the image. The truth is whatever gets into the public consciousness. Oppositional groups have no chance of matching the marketing budgets of the transnationals, leaving aside fighting elite consensus within the media.

In any case, the point is not that certain companies are benefiting from threatening our future. Shell do not act the way they do because they’re run by nasty people. Corporations are simply following the intrinsic logic of capitalism. No matter how fluffy your intentions might be when you start a company, you can’t escape this logic. That’s why the Body Shop under the Roddicks was anti-union, and why it ultimately sold out to L’Oreal. And of course the Body Shop never broke with the idea of top down hierarchy and wage slavery at any point.

It can make sense to point to individual acts of companies, either to stop an immediate threat, or as an example of wider structural concerns, but the futility of seeing this as an end in itself not only hides the true nature of the problem but also falls victim to PR chicanery.

Conclusion

What is needed is a thorough change in the way we generate power, produce food, transport ourselves and manufacture the goods we need. We need to leave fossil fuels in the ground rather than create voodoo business schemes to magic away our carbon emissions. This could be done by massive state control, which would leave in place the hierarchies of power and control that got us into this mess in the first place. Ironically, Jonathan Porritt has pointed out a better way:

“But if one gets to the state of mind where you say that nobody can ever trust government and politicians again, then we are stuffed. What are we meant to do? Make it all happen ourselves?”(11)

Ultimately that is the answer. If we are to achieve both a sustainable future and a free humanity, we must make it all happen ourselves. Not as consumers, not as voters. We need an economy and a society that is geared towards meeting human needs rather than accumulation for its own sake. This cannot happen within capitalism.

Notes

1. Cited in the Commons Blog introduction page http://commonsblog.org/about_freemkt.php
2 Economic Justice and Democracy Robin Hahnel, Routledge, 2005 pp.84-89
3. Guardian March 29 2008 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/mar/29/renewableenergy.climatechange
4. Competition for a Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage Demonstration Project: Project Information Memorandum, Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file42478.pdf
5. Met Office paper presented at the Stabilisation 2005 conference – http://www.stabilisation2005.com/impacts/impacts_human.pdf
6. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6132826.stm
7. See the free Cornerhouse publication Carbon Trading for a much more in depth account of this murky world http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/carbonDDlow.pdf
8. Carbon Markets create a muddle, Financial Times 26 April 2007 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4b80ee18-f393-11db-9845-000b5df10621.html
9. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/oct/07/climatechange.climatechangeenvironment
10. http://www.icount.org.uk/climate_chaos/23.asp
11. From a discussion printed in New Internationalist Dec 2007 http://www.newint.org/features/2007/12/01/debate/

Neighbourhood government

Review of Neighborhood Government: The Local Foundations of Political Life by Milton Kotler*

In September a newspaper in Southend, Essex ran a feel good story about a community project run by Christian evangelicals in the poorest ward of the town. The project’s motto, “Reaching Out, Changing Lives” “couldn’t be more apt” as hundreds of lives had been turned around, the paper said. But behind the breezy optimism and “tea and toast” alongside bible study every Friday, was a bleakness of aspiration. Local residents were given confidence training, job skills and help to overcome their addictions. But the idea that the area’s problems were rooted in a basic lack of economic and political power and the solution might be to collectively fight to gain power, rather than just adapt people to the demands of a competitive economy, was completely absent.

Four decades ago, when Milton Kotler wrote Neighborhood Government the sense of what was possible was very different. 1968 was a tumultuous year but amid the revolutionary outbreaks and anti-war protests, Kotler discovered “a movement for local control” across America. In the poorest parts of US cities, people were coming together to change their lives in a tangible, political sense. They were demanding the transfer of political authority to institutions they directly controlled, and were using that democratic power to pass their own laws and control rents, prices, banks, taxation, schools, housing and welfare programmes.

Kotler locates this movement for self-rule in the neighbourhoods of cities. The neighbourhood has a special meaning for him. It is not, as commonly assumed, just a place where people live and socialise. It is, buried deeply under the surface of central state control, a political unit. The neighbourhood is a “political settlement of small territory and familiar association, whose absolute property is its capacity for deliberative democracy,” he says.

Kotler delves into American history to show how the neighbourhoods of many US cities were once independent self-governing territories before being annexed and then subjugated by larger entities around them. Originally, many US cities were directly democratic: political decisions were made by town meetings of citizens. In these town democracies there were factions but not organised political parties. This popular democracy was gradually replaced in the nineteenth century by what he calls “aristocratic government” through elected representatives.

But this was not just an American phenomenon. Kotler says that the “fundamental character” of modern revolution has been local insurrection against the central power of the state. Like Murray Bookchin in The Third Revolution, he sees this movement for grassroots control in the Parisian sections of the French Revolution and the factory and neighbourhood soviets of the Russian Revolution; a flowering of decentralised democracy that was stamped out by centralising Girondists and Bolsheviks.

In late ‘60s America, in cities like New York, Philadelphia and New Orleans, that revolutionary tradition was being revived. Kotler describes in detail the experience of one attempt to develop neighbourhood democracy in Columbus, Ohio which began with the formation of the East Central Citizens Organization (ECCO) in 1965.

ECCO started as a local service provider in a neighbourhood of 6,500 residents with an unemployment rate far above the city’s average. The participants decided to legally incorporate the neighbourhood, creating an organisation open to all local residents. They vested legislative power in an assembly, and elected an executive council to carry on the administration of decisions between meetings of the assembly. Political clubs in each of the four districts of the neighbourhood had the task of initiating discussions and new programmes which were put before the main assembly.

Within three years, the organisation was operating a public health service programme and a veterinary clinic, purchasing houses for rehabilitation, operating a credit union and was planning to open a supermarket. But, says Kotler, ECCO does just regard itself as a provider of necessary services to local people. It wants “territorial jurisdiction over public activities”. It controls federal anti-poverty programmes in the neighbourhood and has de facto control over programmes for young people. It also has jurisdiction over the local library, appointing the librarian and selecting books. It hopes, in time, (the book was written in 1968) to be legally designated a political entity of the municipal government.

Kotler says the significance of ECCO lies in its “liberation of practical political deliberation”. “For the first time,” he writes, “residents legally decide certain matters of community life. They are steadily practising the art of political decision-making and living with and learning from the consequences of their decisions. ECCO residents are now orators and officials, and practical political wisdom is developing in a community where earlier the only expressions were frustration and escape.” This is the essence of philosopher Hannah Arendt’s definition of political freedom – the right to be a participant in government.

Despite this transformation, Kotler says that ECCO has only travelled a few steps towards genuine self-rule. He likens poor neighbourhoods to colonised countries. Everything sold inside the community is owned outside. Everything earned flows to outside ownership. To redress this, neighbourhoods need regulate their own territorial economy. They need the authority to tax businesses and citizens and to decide how that revenue is spent. Local people need to control local production and be employed in local enterprises. “It’s reasonable,” says Kotler, [for neighbourhoods] “to control prices, rents, licensing and banking.”

Kotler says that were a community to constitute itself to weld such economic and political power, it would form a neighbourhood government. It is worth dwelling on what he means. He is not referring to greater public participation in centrally planned political programmes. He is not talking about local people taking or being given, control over single institutions, such as schools – which would be in effect, if isolated from any collective democratic structure, a form of privatisation. And he does not have in mind the informal participation of ephemeral protest movements or free-floating assemblies brought together to deal with single issues. Self-rule means, to him, the transfer of the legal authority of the state, to permanent, legally-constituted, directly democratic entities, open to all citizens and possessing their own formal constitutions and rules.

“Political power has two components,” says Kotler, “prudent decision and forceful action.” This definition view of government as potentially the directly democratic exercise of self-rule by a community – entirely separate to government by a state – has also been made by Bookchin. “A government – or better still, a polity – is an ensemble designed to deal with the problems of consociational life in an orderly and hopefully fair manner,” he writes in The Communalist Project. “Every institutionalized that constitutes a system for handling public affairs – with or without the presence of a state – is necessarily a government.”

Neighbourhood government is posited by Kotler as the democratic alternative to national representative government, which purports to be the apogee of democracy but isn’t. “We have been told so often that our government is ‘democratic’ that we have failed to realise that is only representative,” he says. “Once we elect our representatives, our voice in day to day political decision is lost.” But in neighbourhood government, law-making power remains in the demos, the people.

Kotler undertakes an extensive justification of this form of government against the familiar claims of its representative opponent. When faced with any experiment in direct democracy, the advocates of representative government usually claim that it is has no legitimacy because few people will actually participate. Kotler takes as an example ECCO, where attendance fluctuates from between 10 and 25 per cent of the membership. But even attendance at the low end of this range “is quite sufficient to bring all political positions of common concern and interest to the forum for deliberation,” he says. “Even a 10 per cent quorum usually encompasses the widest existing range of political opinion and emotion.” A local councillor by contract may be elected by as little as 10 per cent of the electorate, and will have ultimate power to decide on political matters for the whole community until the election comes around again.

Neighbourhood democracy is also more likely to serve the common interest than representative government where the interests of the wealthy intercede between the voters and the council or government they elect. “Law-making by an assembly of citizens will favour the many rather than few simply because wealth and special interest have a smaller voice in the assembly than in elected council,” says Kotler. But this does not mean that there will be no stratifications of power or divisions in assemblies. Factions and internal political groups will exist – without them neighbourhood democracy – would have no motion or direction, but they won’t turn into political parties attempting to gain control of the state.

Kotler distinguishes the neighbourhood power movement from other political theories that used the local community as the springboard for political activism. Most notably, he rejected the approach of the father of community organising Saul Alinsky, whose Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation was later to train the current Commander in Chief of the United States. In Kotler’s view, Alinksy saw the neighbourhood in instrumental, rather than political terms. Alinsky wanted to organise neighbourhood power to exert a continuous pressure on central government in order to extract political concessions in areas such as housing, jobs or wages. He never saw the potential of the neighbourhood as a place of community self-rule

The neighbourhood power movement in American cities, the beginnings of which Kotler chronicled, spread to more cities during the 1970s before subsiding after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. But as the Argentinian neighbourhood assemblies and experiments such as Marsh Farm in the UK show, the impulse for face to face democracy and self-rule – or what has been called, historically, the political realm - keeps recurring.

There are limitations in Kotler’s vision. He is hazy about how citizens’ organisations in different neighbourhoods should federate together. He assumes that neighbourhoods merely need to control economic enterprises within their boundaries. There is – understandably for 1968 – no mention of ecology and he establishes an unnecessary conflict between the desire for social equality and political liberty, while summarily dismissing class struggle. But as a description of how citizens’ assemblies can constitute themselves and begin to take political power and authority, the book has valuable lessons for social ecologists and communalists.

* The book was first published in 1969 and re-published in 2004

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Social Ecology and Development

When contemplating the relevance of Murray Bookchin’s social ecology to the contemporary world, it is striking to note the degree to which this school of thought, like other radical Euro-American intellectual traditions, concerns itself largely with ‘advanced’ Western/Northern societies. Like his sometimes-comrade Herbert Marcuse, Bookchin, in fact, has conceded as much, stating that the primary responsibility of Western/Northern radicals vis-à-vis less-developed country residents is to overthrow dominative institutions in their own societies so as to allow for the emancipation of those currently oppressed by the international system. It is to be wondered, then, whether his project, as valuable as it is, can be applied to contexts outside of those on which he focused most of his efforts—that is, directly to those peoples his work largely ignores. It certainly seems that he has much to say here, and that many of the profound problems that beset the “wretched of the earth” could perhaps be helped along by the contributions of social ecology. It is the hope of the present work, then, to employ the insights of Bookchin and his social ecology to critique mainstream development theory, in an effort ultimately to present an alternative by which the dominant trends, both contemporary and historical, of the world’s course might be overturned, and a “free nature”—a reconciliation between external nature and human society that radically diminishes the pain and suffering in both —realised. As the most radical critique of conventional development thought and practice with which I am familiar, and one that in fact shares many of the analyses advanced by the aforementioned thinkers, post-developmentalism seems to represent a useful means to this end.

Though ‘post-developmentalism’ is not as an intellectual tradition as clearly demarcated as Bookchin’s social ecology, the many thinkers associated with it share a number of common theoretical views. Most post-developmentalists hold a highly critical view of the trajectory of history, especially of its most-highly lauded creation, modernity. In language reminiscent of Bookchin, Sahlins notes that contemporary society is the “era of hunger unprecedented,” a time of “the greatest technical power” in which “starvation [is] an institution.” He contrast this with what he calls “the original affluent society,” or the lived space-time experience of hunter-gathering societies, which he finds to have “easily satisf[ied] all people’s material wants” and provided a degree of leisure time unknown in most of the forms of human social organization that have followed ‘primitive’ society. Latouche similarly remarks that the promises of Renaissance humanism have devolved within modernity into the instauration of “the most inhuman society ever constructed by man,” one characterised by the dominance of “the quantitative”—a “cult of life without quality” that remains fundamentally indifferent to the fate of the individual. He sees a valuable alternative in “traditional societies,” most of which he finds to have gone without the concept of accumulating wealth or dominating external nature. Galeano, for one, sees the perpetuation of the prevailing state of affairs, which he see as “poised on the brink of an abyss,” as fundamentally necessitating the perpetuation of injustice. Indeed, there is reason to believe that the very development of the West/North has been based on the systematic underdevelopment of the South; the poorer countries of the latter, which Latouche sees as being considered within prevailing society as “good only […] for the wrecker’s yard,” thus face little prospect of realizing development, as they lack a periphery of “‘New’ Worlds” to exploit for their own benefit. The atrocious consequences of the present situation are, then, unsurprising: according to Latouche, 40,000 “radically outcast” children die every day of poverty—the equivalent, as he puts it, of the number of deaths at Auschwitz every three months —while “large majorities […] within most Southern countries” are reputed to be worse-off now than at the time of formal decolonization, with Central and Southern American societies purportedly having suffered the worst social and economic conditions since the European conquest during the ‘lost decade’ of neo-liberal restructuring in the 1980s.

Faced with the enormity of problems extant in the status quo, many writers associated with post-developmentalism have called for an “end to development.” Most such advocates reserve much of their ire for those who, cognizant of the substantial problematics characteristic in conventional development theory and practice, call for an ‘alternative development’—whether ‘participatory,’ ‘socialist,’ and so on—noting that the “opposition between ‘alternative development’ and alternative to development is radical, irreconcilable.” For such theorists, ‘development’ cannot be made “different from what it has been,” and they suggest that we give up the “comforting illusions” of working to “change the world,” develop “new types of social organisation,” and “save ‘humanity’” and instead advocate the development of “post-modern spaces,” which one group of theorists find to be the “only hope [for] a human existence” and for the “survival and flourishing [of] the ‘social majorities’” of the world. Such positions amount to a radical rejection of ‘progress,’ which, in the view of various theorists, represents a Western ideology that has enshrined the “one and only way of thinking”—that of subordinating the entirety of the life-world to the interests of transnational capital —and legitimated the “top-down, ethnocentric, and technocratic” forms that Escobar sees development theory and practice as having represented since their inception. Declaring, then, that “we are facing modern problems for which there are no modern solutions,” some post-developmentalists advocate the rejection of all the institutions they see as associated with the Western social construct of Homo oeconomicus (neo-liberal globalization, the welfare state, human rights, and the “modern self”), the “replacement of ‘global thinking’ with the ‘local thinking’ practiced at the grassroots,” and support for peoples’ local struggles as consonant with “their own cultural contexts.” Rahnema, for his part, seems to favor a devolution of power from the modern state to those whom traditional societies purportedly found the “wisest, the most virtuous, and hence the most ‘authoritative’ and experienced.” He hopes for the day when the peoples of the world will be left “free to change the rules and the contents of change, according to their own culturally defined ethics and aspiration,” noting that the coming post-development period will “distinguish itself from the preceding one” if the world’s jen—Confucius’ purported term for “the authoritative persons”—come to institute “an entirely new rationale and set of assumptions” whereby responsibility and compassion for the min—the “masses”—is actualised.

Many thinkers associated with post-developmentalism also express deep concern for what they see as the ecological predicament brought on by modernity. Sachs asserts that the global capitalist economy has “come up against its bio-physical limits” and, indeed, called into question the very survival of the earth itself, yet he expresses the concern that mainstream environmentalism tends to privilege dominant Western/Northern views of nature that, in the name of practicality or relevance, do not “plead anew against the world’s course” and hence ultimately serve the ends of capital, oligarchism, and eco-technocracy. In dominant formulations, argues Sachs, the “crisis of nature” stands at odds with the “crisis of justice”: thought and action dedicated to resolving problematics regarding humanity’s treatment of external nature are deemed mutually exclusive with attempts to ease the suffering of ‘second nature.’ Sachs asserts, however, that this false set of choices rests on conventional understandings of questions related to development and external nature, and he hopes for an eclipse of the current emphasis on endless growth, consumption, and “progress” by the emergence of a “politics of sufficiency” that would drive a search for modes of social organization that respected ecological limits and took “their inspiration from indigenous ideas of the good and proper life.” Escobar shares Sachs’s concerns about global eco-technocracy, noting that much of development discourse assumes it is the “benevolent (white) hand of the West”— the “fathers of the World Bank,” aided by “a few cosmopolitan Third Worlders”—that is to “save the Earth” by means of a set of superficial policies which follow directly from their understanding of the life-world as a “technical problem.” Escobar here remarks on the wealth of indigenous knowledges regarding external nature that largely is excluded from development theory, and he concludes that knowledge of the prospect of ecological finitude demands that humanity “reimagine the relationship between society and nature” and “reconnect life and thought at the level of myth.”

Toward a Post-Developmental Ecological Rationality

From the previous section, then, it should be clear that many of the thinkers associated with post-developmentalism share many of the concerns of Bookchin: common to all are fierce critiques of the trajectory of human history, a stress on the need to deconstruct and rethink given conceptions of ‘progress,’ opposition to capitalist modernity and most forms of constituted power, and concern for humanity’s relationship to external nature. However similar their concerns and views may be on some of these questions, there nonetheless exists a considerable degree of difference among them.
Perhaps the greatest conflict to be found between the thought of Bookchin relative to most post-developmentalists can be found in the latter’s interpretations of post-modernism and poststructuralism. Esteva and Prakash’s call to replace ‘the global’ with ‘the local’ typifies this, as does Latouche’s dismissal of the search for “new types of social organisation.” Such conclusions seem highly misguided, as asserting that humans give up concern for ‘the global’ and work to create local, post-modern spaces seems completely to overlook the decidedly significant influence that global processes—neo-liberal globalization, capitalism, colonial legacies and neo-colonial relationships, global warming, and so on—have on local realities and the very existence, let alone flourishing, of the “‘social majorities’” of the world. The very fact that these regional/global relationships exist in the current day, are socially contingent, and have dramatic and often highly negative effects on the lives of billions of people demands that they be addressed and radically overturned; to dismiss the structural bases for many of these relationships as immutable or irrelevant, as some postmodern strains of post-developmentalist thought suggest, is tantamount to a betrayal of the world’s dispossessed.

The emphasis many post-developmentalists place on outrightly rejecting ‘the Western’ also seems fundamentally problematic. Certainly, the West/North has much to atone for as regards its historical treatment of Southern peoples—for how can European colonisation, the Columbian Exchange, the Atlantic slave trade, neo-liberal structural adjustment processes, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the destruction of Vietnam and Iraq, and the global imposition of a fundamentally ecocidal economic system be forgotten, let alone forgiven? Post-developmentalists are certainly right to be suspicious and critical of Western/Northern designs for Southern peoples, but they are mistaken in seeing Enlightenment principles of social emancipation and resistance to oppression as being irrecovably tied to neoliberalism, the welfare state, and the social construct of Homo oeconomicus. Esteva and Prakash correctly point out that dominant Western/Northern notions of the self and society represent just one in a set of “diverse cultural windows” regarding these questions, but it seems doubtful whether it follows that concerned observers uncritically endorse the resolution of such problematics in the pre-modern or hybrid modes of social organization that Esteva and Prakash, Rahnema, and Escobar seem to advocate. While it may be true that the modes of governance that have been imposed on Southern peoples in the modern period dwarf “[t]he evils and injustices of traditional village governance,” it hardly seems clear that what should follow is a return to societies dominated by the “compassionate and authoritative” jen favored by Rahnema. Instead, post-developmentalists like Latouche and Esteva and Prakash should remain true to their emphasis on difference and so come to see the concept of development “as a set of conflicting discourses and practices based in positions that contradict one another” and thus one open to contribution from critical, non-hegemonic Western thought, such as that advanced by Bookchin. If the analyses of the latter are to be seen as in any way legitimate—and it is the argument heretofore advanced that they most certainly are—it seems that the task of critical inquiry should be directed not toward the valorisation of hierarchical power but rather toward an opposition to hierarchy and domination as such. Such efforts are to stress the need for the emergence of the “real ‘state of exception’” sought by Benjamin: the “abolition of domination.” The realization of emancipatory societies, freed from both capitalism and domination more generally, could allow for the instauration of Bookchin’s ‘liberatory technologies,’ ones which could help historically poorer societies conquer material scarcity in manners that avoid the torturous “process of dissolution [that] constitutes the historical evolution of the West” : its legacy of thoroughgoing self-repression, social injustice, and destruction of nature. A new, critical developmentalism, one that views development, like the Enlightenment, as “a real quest for improving the human condition” corrupted by “class power and ruling ideologies,” would disprove Latouche’s view that development cannot be made “different from what it has been” and refute the view common to Esteva, Prakash, and Rahnema that the prospect for systemic change now has passed.

Javier Sethness

Notes

1 M. Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism xvi (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004.)
2 Ibid, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy 191 (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005 [1982]), The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism 45 (Montréal: Black Rose, 1990) 45
3 M. Sahlins, “The Original Affluent Society” 18 (The Post-Development Reader. Eds. Majid Rahnema and Victoria Bawtree. London: Zed Books, 1997. 3-21.)
4 Ibid 4, 18-19
5 S. Latouche, In the Wake of the Affluent Society: An Exploration of Post-Development 224 (Trans. Martin O’Connor and Rosemary Arnoux. London: Zed, 1993. emphasis in original)
6 Ibid 204, 230
7 E. Galeano, “To Be Like Them” 215 (The Post-Development Reader. Eds. Majid Rahnema and Victoria Bawtree. London: Zed Books, 1997. 214-22.)
8 M. O’Connor and R. Arnaux, “Translators’ Introduction” 8-9 (Latouche, Serge. In the Wake of the Affluent Society: An exploration of post-development. London: Zed, 1993. 1-20.); S. Latouche, op. cit. 41
9 Ibid 36
10 W. Sachs, “Global Ecology and the Shadow of ‘Development” 5 (Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict. Ed. Wolfgang Sachs. London: Zed, 1993. 3-21.)
11 A. Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World 217. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995.)
12 Ibid vii-viii; S. Latouche op. cit. 149; M. Rahnema, “Towards Post-Development: Searching for Signposts, A New Language and New Paradigms” 392 (The Post-Development Reader. Eds. Majid Rahnema and Victoria Bawtree. London: Zed Books, 1997. 377-403.)
13 S. Latouche, op. cit. 159; Escobar, op. cit. 5
14 S. Latouche, op. cit. 160, 187; M. Rahnema, op. cit. 392
15 G. Esteva and M.S. Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures 4. (London: Zed, 1998.)
16 I. Ramonet, “The One and Only Way of Thinking” 179 (The Post-Development Reader. Eds. Majid Rahnema and Victoria Bawtree. London: Zed Books, 1997. 179-81.)
17 A. Escobar, “The Making and Unmaking of the Third World through Development” 91 (The Post-Development Reader. Eds. Majid Rahnema and Victoria Bawtree. London: Zed Books, 1997. 85-93.)
18 B. De Sousa Santos, “On Oppositional Postmodernism” 36 (Critical Development Theory: Contributions to a New Paradigm. Eds. Ronaldo Munck and Denis O’Hearn. London: Zed, 1999. 29-43.)
19 G. Esteva and M.S. Prakash 146, 121, 11, 21, 137-8
20 M. Rahnema 388-9
21 Ibid 384, 391, 394; emphasis in original
22 T.W. Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy 7 (Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.)
23 W. Sachs (1993) 6, (1999) 61, 68
24 (1997) 293
25 Ibid (1993) 17, 4, 7-8
26 (1995) 193, 91
27 (1995) 211
28 R. Bryant and S. Bailey, Third World Political Ecology 6-7 (London: Routledge, 1997); R. Peet and E. Hartwick, Theories of Development 159-61 (New York: Guilford, 1999.)
29 G. Esteva and M.S. Prakash, op. cit. 140-1
30 Ibid 137-8; M. Rahnema op. cit. 388-9
31 G. Esteva and M.S. Prakash op. cit. 114
32 M. Rahnema, op. cit. 394
33 R. Peet and E. Hartwick, op. cit. 156, emphasis in original
34 M. Löwy, Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ 59-60 (Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2005.)
35 K. Marx, The Portable Karl Marx 557 (Ed. Eugene Kamenka. New York: Penguin, 1983.)
36 R. Peet and E. Hartwick, op.

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