"Industry" has a bad name among environmentalists. The mental
picture that most of us form when we hear the word is a chimney belching
poisonous gases or a pipe pouring toxic wastes into a river. That's hardly
surprising. Since the time of the "dark Satanic mills" that blighted
the English environment in the early 19th century, industry - all forms of
large-scale, cooperative mass production - has probably brought about more
environmental destruction than all previous human activity.
In the last two centuries, human industry has poisoned vast areas with its
by-products, destroying irreplaceable ecosystems and driving countless species
of plants and animals to extinction.
It has turned vast rivers into little more than open sewers for chemical
wastes on their way to the oceans, many of whose creatures are already being
wiped out by mechanical "harvesting" of the seas without regard for
the next year, let alone the next generation. In large areas of Australia and
North America, its agriculture has destroyed topsoil that took millennia to
accumulate.
It has saturated our surroundings with chemicals mostly unknown in nature,
whose harmful effects on ourselves and other living creatures we are only now
becoming aware of.
And through its direct and indirect consumption of fossil fuels, it has
already altered the climate of our planet in a manner which conceivably could
become a self-sustaining chain reaction.
The increase in productivity which comes from large-scale production has also
made it possible for human numbers to increase at unprecedented rates. The
earth's population has now passed 5½ billion - around six times what it was in
1800.
Given these realities, it's not surprising that a common response to the mess
is to say: Let's get rid of industrialism, of big factories and mass production.
Ted Trainer is perhaps the environmentalist best known for advocating a change
to smaller-scale production.
But we face some real dilemmas here. First, small-scale production is not
inherently less polluting, if we compare the amount of pollution to the amount
of the product.
Of course, there are some things which could be done on a smaller and less
polluting scale: it's estimated, for example, that 70% of electrical energy is
lost in transmission, which suggests that there could be considerable reduction
in pollution through more localised production of electricity (especially if it
relied on methods such as solar energy).
But it can just as well be the case that small-scale production is more
polluting than large-scale. For instance, if BHP's steel production were to
switch from a few large steel mills to small backyard blast furnaces like the
Chinese government promoted during the 1960s, the total amount of polluting
gases and other wastes and the total of energy consumed would probably be much
greater than they now are, for the same amount of steel production.
And the environmental destructiveness of organochlorine products has no
relationship with the size of the factories in which they are produced, nor with
whether pesticides are applied by a single operator from a truck or plane, or by
individual farmers on small plots.
So those who are serious about rolling back industrial production also
usually advocate a reduction in the overall amount of goods produced. That's at
least consistent, but it doesn't offer a way of solving our problems.
There's a reason why human numbers have risen to 5½ billion in the modern
era rather than in some earlier period. Industrial methods of production both
lowered death rates through medical advances and made it possible to support
such a large and increasing population.
Of course, on a world scale, the majority of people don't live very well.
Things would be better if the wealth were shared more evenly, but average
consumption is not very extravagant.
If you reduce production before you establish a system of equitable
distribution, you're condemning large numbers of people to permanent
impoverishment, and you may be condemning many to death. That is not a feasible
path to solving the world's environmental problems.
For better or for worse, we are stuck with mass production. There is simply
no other way of providing even the most minimal requirements of food, clothing,
housing, education and health care for 5½ billion people.
If we can't do away with large-scale production, can we change its character?
We'd better hope we can, because the present course is taking us toward
disaster.
We tend to think of industry as material objects: factory buildings, machines
and so on. But industry, after all, is something that people do; people make the
machines and the factories.
Industry is a particular form of collective human activity, so why is it so
difficult to change? Why does nothing happen when someone points out that toxic
wastes shouldn't be dumped into streams, or that organochlorine products may
destroy the ability of many species to reproduce - possibly including human
beings?
The problem is that we have lost control of production. It's something we do,
but, somehow, we no longer control it.
In fact, it seems rather pointless to argue whether industry should be
conducted on a smaller scale. Suppose that we reached agreement on the ideal
size for establishments engaged in production: how would we implement that
agreement?
There are no real social mechanisms available that give us direct control
over how industry is conducted. If you notice a factory pouring waste into a
river, you can't knock at the door and tell whoever answers, "Look what
you're doing - you'd better stop".
It's a long and difficult process to get that waste pipe plugged (even if
Greenpeace comes and plugs it, the factory owners will unplug it and bring in
the police to protect their pipe).
You can get good people into parliament and ensure that they pass appropriate
legislation, but several years may follow during which lawyers will fight in
court about whether the waste pipe is really covered by the legislation. Or
perhaps you could organise a consumer boycott of this factory's products to
persuade it to stop - provided you can avoid being prosecuted under the Howard
government's new Industrial Relations Act.
These indirect ways of trying to change industry will be of varying
effectiveness depending on all sorts of circumstances. But in general, when a
factory is doing something harmful, something antisocial, there's no direct way
for society to say, "Hey, stop that!" and have it stopped.
Now any economics lecturer can tell you that "of course" we don't
control production directly; we leave it up to the market because this is the
most efficient way, and it's always been done this way, or if it hasn't, that's
only because it took a while for people to wise up. But in fact, this lack of
social control of production is a recent development in historical terms.
Through most of human history, most societies have exercised a fairly high
degree of direct control over how production is carried out. The medieval
artisan who wanted to change the way in which something was produced couldn't do
so without the permission of the guild, which was the social body that regulated
production. In peasant economies, where land is held in common or periodically
redistributed, there are set procedures for planting and harvesting particular
crops at particular times. In a hunter- gatherer society, who hunts or gathers
what, and when they do it, is a matter both of tradition and decision by the
group or its elders - not the decision of each individual.
The decisions themselves may have been good or bad, and they may have been
made in good ways or bad ways, but the point is that our present social
arrangements, in which individuals can make decisions about production that
affect the whole of society and can do so without any direct social input, is
not at all "the way things have always been".
In capitalism, society hasn't ceased to exist - even if Margaret Thatcher
couldn't recognise it. We are a collectivity which jointly produces all the
things we consume, and we have all sorts of mutual connections which stem from
that fact.
We form ourselves into countries, and we have parliaments or kings or
dictators to tell us what we can and can't steal and which side of the road to
drive on and whose moral principles we have to follow and who serves in the
military and how many years' schooling everyone is allowed or required to have.
But except in very rare circumstances, we don't let the parliament or dictator
tell people or companies what they should produce or how they should produce it.
We leave all that to "the market". That is, we try to get other
people to do what we want them to do by giving or withholding money. Individuals
and governments are both expected to operate that way.
If the government wants less of something produced, it's supposed to put a
tax on it, or raise or lower interest rates. Then it's up to the individual
person or corporation to decide what to do. Individualism - " individual
choice" - is supreme.
In a market economy, you don't knock on the factory door and ask the owner to
stop polluting the river; you knock on the factory door and offer the owner
money to stop it. Of course, if the factory owners are making lots of money by
dumping their wastes that way, you might not have enough money to persuade them
to stop.
The key thing about industrial production in a capitalist system is that it
is controlled by those who own it. What is produced and how it is produced is
their decision, and the rest of us can only try to influence their decision
indirectly, through the way we spend our money.
Why should such an arrangement lead to unsustainable methods of production?
After all, capitalists have to live on this planet just like the rest of us.
There's certainly no law against it - except for the laws of the market. The
market rules the capitalists just as much as - perhaps even more than - the rest
of us. And in the market, the only motive is money. Environmental protection is
irrelevant to the market, except in so far as it affects the price of something.
The problem is that most measures needed to bring about environmentally
sustainable production add to the cost of products: they are
"inefficient" in terms of the market. If it costs nothing to dump your
wastes into the river, it's inefficient to dispose of them in some other way; it
adds to your costs and puts you at a disadvantage with your competitors.
Capitalists who remain in a competitively disadvantageous position tend to
cease to be capitalists, so there's a process of "natural selection"
operating here that produces capitalists who put the environment, and everything
else, at a lower priority than keeping their profits up.
Is a polluting, non-sustainable way of doing things always the cheapest, the
most efficient in economic terms? Of course not. There are people - e.g., Amory
Lovins - who specialise in developing ways of doing things that are both cheaper
and greener. A good example is better methods of insulating buildings, which are
more environmentally friendly and cheaper to use because they use less energy.
But it's not very realistic to expect that there are very many new,
undiscovered ways of producing things which are both cheaper for the capitalists
concerned and less damaging to the environment. The capitalists are pretty good
at finding cheaper ways to produce. So if cheaper methods exist, the capitalists
will be using them already, regardless of whether those methods are also
environmentally sustainable.
Occasionally, a greener way of doing things is cheaper. But in general,
environmental sustainability and economic costs are determined by quite
different, even antagonistic, factors, so there's no reason to expect cheapness
and sustainability to coincide.
It's also important to ask, "Cheaper for whom?" There is such a
thing as market power. In the market, lots of money is more powerful than less
money.
What this means is that even if something green is cheaper for the consumer,
it may not be made by capitalists. A house with better insulation might be
cheaper for you to heat or cool - but if it's more expensive for builders to
produce, it may not be possible for you to find one.
Even if environmentally sustainable production of something can be shown to
be cheaper for society as a whole, that's not enough to cause the market to
bring about a change in production methods. It has to be cheaper for the
capitalist concerned, or it doesn't happen. This is why market methods are
generally not very good at protecting the environment.
Politicians and governments have proposed, and begun to implement, so- called
"tradeable pollution rights": if you want to destroy the environment,
you have to pay to do it.
But how much should we charge for the "right" to wipe out a species
of plant or animal? Presumably we should charge a very high price if the species
is Homo sapiens, but what exactly should the figure be if the extinction doesn't
happen immediately, but over several decades or centuries, through the gradual
elimination of other species on which we depend?
All such schemes continue within the market framework of using money to alter
behaviour. That's not appropriate, because the behaviour that needs to be
altered is allowing money to determine what we do. What we have to do is end
control by the market. To alter industry in the direction of environmental
sustainability, we have to regain direct social control over it.
We have to be able to decide, collectively, what we produce and how we
produce it. That means that society becomes the owner of industry - of the
factories and machines and materials that we use to produce what we consume.
Some will object: "That's been tried in the Soviet Union and it didn't
work".
It is true that that experience was horrific for the environment. But
production in the Soviet Union was not under social control. There was control
of production, and just about everything else, by a layer of privileged
bureaucrats. You can't talk about social control - control by the members of the
society, acting collectively - when it's not legal even to form a model airplane
club independently of the bureaucracy.
Some environmentalists also object to the idea of a democratic socialism out
of concern that it implies a multiplication of existing forms of industry, in
order to supply a higher standard of living to those who now have too little.
This objection is based on a caricature of what the socialist project is
about. It's not about producing more, or distributing more fairly what is
currently produced, although such changes may be a result. It's about regaining
human control of our human productive activities. Once we achieve that, a lot of
other things will change as well. It will change what is produced, as well as
how.
A society whose production is regulated by conscious human decisions will get
rid of another major cause of environmental destruction: consumerism -
the drive to buy and consume things that we don't really need.
Capitalism deliberately fosters consumerism through advertising and its
attempts to make us buy, buy, buy. The death of advertising, once there are no
competing capitalists to keep it alive, will dramatically reduce non-rational
demand for the products of industry.
But there's an even more fundamental aspect of what we call consumerism that
will change. Because our drive to buy this, that or whatever we can isn't only a
product of advertising. It's created by the way in which capitalist production
operates.
What is distinctive about our species, what makes us what we are, is that we
produce our means of subsistence. What we are is what we do in the process of
production. (The differences between nations and "races" aren't
genetic: they are just results of different ways of producing what we consume.)
The act of producing collectively is the very essence of our humanness. But
in capitalist economies, what we produce also belongs to someone else, the
capitalist who employs us.
This production of ourselves not only belongs to another, but is also the
means by which the capitalist further exploits us: what we create becomes
additional capital that forces us to go on working for the capitalist. This is
the essence of "alienation" - our human activity becomes the hostile
property of another.
Our human activity belongs to the capitalist, and all we have in
"return" is money. In capitalism, there is no way to regain our
humanness except by trying to buy back our human activity, by buying its
representation or result, that is, consumer items.
Social control of industry will abolish that source of alienation, and with it the illusion that living a more human life means consuming more.
