TAMPERING WITH REALITY

Dick Pountain /The Political Quarterly/ 15 Mar 2024 03:34

The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence by Matteo Pasquinelli; Verso 2023; pp264; £16.99

It feels as though a storm is gathering around Artificial Intelligence (AI), since just about everyone believes that it’s set to change our world but in what direction is a matter of great controversy: will it be a mob of peasants storming Frankenstein’s castle with pitchforks and burning brands, or eager prospectors with mules, spades and pans scurrying to make their fortune in the California hills. 

Matteo Pasquinelli, an Associate Professor in Philosophy of Science in Venice, has written an excellent social history of AI in which he treats these technologies as the most recent stage in the historical process of the Division of Labour: “In the industrial age, the supervision of the division of labour used to be the task of the factory’s master” and AI is just another, more powerful technology for measuring, organising, spying-on and controlling workplace and workers, the latest phase in the exploitation of Labour by Capital. Pasquinelli is no techno-utopian.

Pasquinelli’s book covers an ambitious span of historical time, which he found necessary to identify the origins of what he calls ‘algorithmic thinking’ ie. the creation of rules for solving problems via a sequence of discrete steps. His introductory chapter, ‘The Material Tools Of Algorithmic Thinking’, locates the earliest recorded examples of such thinking in the Vedic mythology of India around 800 BCE. Those rituals involved building ‘Fire Altars’ whose design was prescribed by stepwise methods intended to reassemble the fragmented body of the god Prajapati (but they also served to teach a system of geometry useful in building). From that beginning a path winds through the Babylonian creation of counting, and hence accounting, on clay tablets, through the Greek geometers, the Arabic algebraicists and finally to the Europe of Pascal, Leibniz, Newton and Descartes.    

Pasquinelli’s book is organised into four sections, the second of which, ‘The Industrial Age’, contains four chapters beginning with one devoted to Charles Babbage, to whom he attributes the mechanisation of mental labour. In 1822 during the UK’s industrial revolution Babbage designed his Difference Engine, a machine to automate numeric calculation. It would employ then state-of-the-art technologies like metal cogs and steam power to generate tables of logarithms – needed by astronomers and the military – more quickly and cheaply than hand calculation. Babbage only ever produced a single prototype but his efforts in effect inaugurated modern computer science, as well as influencing Karl Marx toward a labour theory of the machine. Babbage saw that all machines imitate and replace some previous division of labour, and that a calculating machine in particular automates the derivation of labour costs. In three following chapters Pasquinelli traces the effect of Babbage’s Principle in Marx’s idea of the ‘general intellect’ and a labour theory of knowledge, at a depth which may prove a slog for all but professional scholars of Marxism. 

A third section, ‘The Information Age’, arrives at what we’d now recognise as Artificial Intelligence where Pasquinelli excels in his choice of crucial technological pivot-points and personalities, as well as in explaining the complex ideas involved. He zips through Alan Turing, the invention of the digital electronic computer during WWII, the rise of cybernetics and interest in ‘self-organising’ systems after the war, and the work of John von Neumann and Donald Hebb aimed at emulating the human nervous system via electronics. An early practical goal was pattern recognition, needed both for reading text and for industrial control, and its pursuit created a split between those who sought to use symbolic mathematics and those who pursued solutions by statistical induction from large amounts of sample data. 

The most intriguing chapter is ‘Hayek and the Epistemology of Connectionism’ which reveals that Friedrich Hayek, co-founder of neoliberal economics, put forward a theory of human cognition which depicted our nervous system as an ‘instrument of classification’ in accordance with the ideas of Hebb’s new ‘connectionist’ school of AI. This is seldom remembered because Hayek didn’t wish for it to be implemented in hardware, believing that it already existed in the operation of markets, as aggregators of knowledge about prices. Here Pasquinelli touches upon the late-1940s debate about ‘socialist calculation’, initiated by Ludwig von Mises who argued that economic planning would prove impossible under a socialist bureaucracy due to lack of commodity prices as units of account. He was opposed by the Marxist economist Oskar Lange who later in the 1960s proposed the use of increasingly powerful computers in socialist planning. 

Pasquinelli follows the split between the ‘symbolic’ and ‘connectionist’ AI schools into a final chapter on Frank Rosenblatt’s 1957 construction of his Perceptron, the first proper artificial neural network of a kind that points toward today’s ‘deep learning’ machines. Using a camera with a 20x20 pixel grid, the Perceptron could recognise simple patterns like alphabetic characters, and the thrust of Pasquinelli’s  argument is completed by its arrival as the route to today’s functioning AI becomes visible: emulated human neurons connected into ever-wider and deeper networks and trained on huge amounts of real world data. That route spanned another 50-year ‘AI winter’ of tepid results, hampered by lack of computer processing power and training data – AI research only started sprinting again in the late 1990s with the advent of LSI (Large Scale Integration) silicon microprocessors and the Internet. 

Google LLC was founded in 1998 and quickly monopolised internet search and advertising, in the process amassing huge quantities of users’ data for free which it deployed in AI research to automate natural language translation. Pasquinelli has of necessity to skim lightly (but accurately) over this period as it would require a whole second volume to describe in detail the way these developments lead to ‘deep learning’ algorithms, pre-trained generative transformers (GPTs) and a sudden blossoming of AI power after 2020 which surprised even its own inventors, and to some extent still does. 

In his concluding chapter ‘The Automation of General Intelligence’ Pasquinelli confronts the politics of AI directly: its monopolistic ownership, and also its extractive nature which ‘scrapes’ (ie. steals) a whole corpus of human culture from the internet for training data, without payment, along with racial and other biases that creep in as a result. His own position appears broadly aligned with the Italian ‘operaismo’ movement of the Hardt and Negri strain and he never deviates from a hostile view of AI as the ultimate tool of control and surveillance over labour: “The first step of technopolitics is not technological but political. It is about emancipating and decolonising, when not abolishing as a whole, the organisation of labour and social relations on which complex technical systems, industrial robots, and social algorithms are based”.

My own inclination is more ‘culturalist’ than Pasquellini’s, forcing me to wonder whether the positive powers of AI couldn’t be tamed and harnessed to help implement schemes of participatory socialism of the sort imagined by Eduard Bernstein, Thomas Piketty and many others. Then I reflect further on the threat that deepfaked images pose to truth, privacy, democracy and even to personal identity, and wonder whether perhaps pitchforks and burning brands might not be such a bad thing after all…

 

DEATH AND/OR TAXES

Dick Pountain /The Political Quarterly/ 22 Jul 2022 11:12

The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas, by Gal Beckerman; Bantam Press Feb 2022, pp352, £9.34

A Brief History Of Equality, by Thomas Piketty; Belknap Press April 2022, pp272, £16.9


When I first sat down to write this review the runners and riders had just been announced for the race within the UK Conservative Party to find a replacement for disgraced PM Boris Johnson. Out of 11 starters, 10 immediately declared their intention to reduce taxes and shrink the size of the British state, despite advice from the whole economic profession that doing so would worsen inflation and inequality. After a week the process spat out two final contenders: foreign secretary Liz Truss and the recently-ex chancellor, Rishi Sunak (whose resignation undid Johnson). Sunak had orchestrated three years of pragmatic, Keynesian emergency measures to save the British economy from Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns – measures that included cash loans to firms and a furlough scheme to help them avoid laying off employees. This needed massive government borrowing and contributed to inflation approaching 9% and a ‘cost-of-living crisis’ that the popular financial journalist Martin Lewis has warned will lead to rioting in the streets. Liz Truss berated Sunak for not promising immediate tax cuts, and since these are the catnip the Tory flock demands to vote for a winner, he had to promise some too, albeit slightly later. As we all now know, Truss won.

This depressing tax-cutting obsession among the contenders is merely the latest manifestation of the fact that neoliberalism retains a solid hold, indeed a Gramscian hegemony, over politics in most of the world, despite the massive shocks of the 2008 financial crash and a Covid pandemic that might have been expected to improve the fortunes of the Left, or at least generate some doubt about the wisdom of allowing markets to rule everything. The two books reviewed here address two different aspects of this toxic political/economic landscape.

Gal Beckerman, senior books editor at The Atlantic magazine and formerly of the New York Times, wrote The Quiet Before about the factors that have sometimes brought people out to riot in the streets throughout modern history, and about why they almost always fail in their objectives. Thomas Piketty’s latest, A Brief History Of Equality, is the work I was hoping for when I reviewed his previous book, Time For Socialism, in this journal last year. It contains a concise distillation of the findings of his two great research projects Capital In The 20th Century and Capital And Ideology, applied to political economy rather than statistical economics. It contains little new material, though it does have a penetrating analysis of the nature of Chinese ‘socialism’: its intention rather is to reach readers who would be deterred by his previous huge tomes, and among them, with luck, might be those political activists whose lack of any credible economic program is the implicit subject of Beckerman’s book.

Beckerman’s book recounts, in an engaging narrative style, 10 historic events that occurred between the 17th and 21st centuries, in places from Aix-en-Provence to Minneapolis. Not all are riots or demonstrations though several are, but all of them do involve radical and oppositional ideas, and each illustrates the effect of some recent innovation in the means of communication that made them possible. The first describes how a Provençal scholar called Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc in 1635 organised a group of volunteers from all over Europe, North Africa and even Canada, to jointly observe an eclipse of the sun so that he could measure longitude, and he used letters to communicate his detailed instructions to them all.

The second concerns a three-mile-long, million-signature petition delivered to Parliament by British Chartists in 1839, largely organised through the pages of Feargus O’Connor’s Northern Star newspaper. The third (my favourite) describes the attendance of Mina Loy at a Futurist manifestation in Florence in 1913; the fourth recounts the career of Nnamdi Azikiwe (popularly known as ‘Zik’) who rose from editor of The African Morning Post newspaper in The Gold Coast to be the first president of an independent Ghana. Later chapters cover events and media from Roneo-copied fanzines and samizdat novels to emails and WhatsApp videos, US vaccine information during Covid to neo-Nazis in Charlottesville and BLM riots in Minneapolis. Each chapter is written like a short story in readable and gripping prose, so that several are as moving as they are informative.

Particularly so is Chapter 7 on the Arab Spring and occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo, an early example of mass mobilisation via the internet. The tragic failure of this movement crystallises a thought that permeates most of his later chapters, namely that the people so mobilised and their leaders (when they had any) were woefully lacking in any programme for what success would entail, any coherent plan for changing laws and institutions. This is in stark contrast to those Chartists of Chapter 2 who clearly aimed at gaining the vote and won it after repeated arduous struggles.

Among the user reviews of Thomas Piketty’s new book, A Brief History of Equality on Amazon you’ll find quite a few hostile critics saying it contains nothing new, which isn’t true but in any case misses the point that in it Piketty presents his complex suggestions for achieving participatory socialism in a compact fashion more likely to be widely read – had it been compulsory to read all four volumes of Das Kapital there would have been no Russian Revolution.

Piketty rehearses again the facts, that economic inequality has declined overall since the middle ages, did so fastest between the 20th century’s two world wars, and is now rising again thanks to neoliberal reaction against post-WW2 social-democratic reforms. He explains more accessibly his proposed raft of solutions, which include restoring steeply progressive taxes on income, wealth and carbon emissions; redistribution of wealth and ownership in addition to income through worker share holdings, universal benefits and capital endowments, and time-expiring shareholdings designed to obstruct the emergence of dynastic ownership through inheritance. A Brief History does also contain new matter to deepen his accounts of gender politics, racism and colonialism, which goes so far as to recommend payment of a permanent ‘reparation share’ from the developed North to the South in place of international aid. This expands considerably on his conviction that the worst failure of Western social democracy was its lack of international reach, its lack of weapons for taming global capital like a worldwide financial register to regulate capital flight, tax-havens and outsourcing.

Perhaps the most interesting addition is Chapter 10's section on ‘Chinese Socialism: The Weak Points of a Perfect Digital Dictatorship’, in which Piketty analyses the nature of the Chinese regime – a crucial political question as it concerns Taiwan, support for Putin’s war in Ukraine, trade relations with the USA and much more. As expected he supports his opinion with statistics about ownership patterns:

“Barring an unexpected collapse, over the coming decades the People’s Republic of China is likely to become the greatest economic power on the planet, even if no one can predict how soon and for how long ...[ ]... The share of public capital (all levels of governments and collectivities taken together) was about 70 percent in China in 1978, at the time when reforms were begun. It declined sharply during the years 1980–1990 and until the middle of the 2000s, and has been stable at around 30 percent of the national capital since then ...[ ]... If the Western powers persist in an outdated hypercapitalist ideology, it is not at all certain that they will succeed in limiting the growing influence of the Chinese regime”.

China’s authoritarianism is anathema to his own desired participatory democratic socialism, but it might bestow the ability to enforce counter-measures to the climate crisis that democracy will prevent the West from achieving.

I suggested earlier that these two books between them offer hints as to why the Left is languishing rather than flourishing since the 2008 crisis, which demands some further explanation. Piketty offered these terse explanations in Capital And Ideology, namely that “a dis­illusionment, a pervasive doubt about the very possibility of a just economy, which encourages identitarian disengagement” followed from the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that “the less educationally advantaged classes came to believe that the parties of the Left now favour the newly advantaged educated classes and their children over people of more modest backgrounds”. Both of these observations suggest that Marxist ideas of class and class-struggle no longer retain much political traction among Western working populations, who were relatively happy with the compromises won by social-democracy after WWII and whose anger at having them removed by neoliberalist reaction is easily deflected onto immigrants and college-educated Leftists who tell them off for not struggling hard enough.

The legacy of Marxism to Western leftists, faint as it is, has been mostly a hindrance: a vote-losing moralism and a contempt for social-democracy as a partial solution that falls short of full state socialism. This situation has generated an important debate among contemporary Marxists about the precise nature of late, technological capitalist states and their huge increase in inequality: are capitalists losing faith in investment and innovation altogether and becoming pure rentiers; have they become less reliant upon extracting surplus value through the wage mechanism and now expropriate value directly (for example when Google and Facebook ‘steal’ users’ data for free); is colonialism really over or does it persist in disguised forms?

A few, Piketty included, synthesise these doubts into a more realistic picture which abandons dogmatic adherence to Marx. From its inception during the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution, ‘capitalism’ has never been purely dependent on surplus value extraction but has always plundered too – South American silver and gold, slavery, unpaid housework, cheap eastern labour – and reinvested the proceeds into ‘pure’ European capitalist production. Jason Moore, another unorthodox critic puts it thus: “capitalism thrives when islands of commodity production and exchange can appropriate oceans of potentially Cheap Natures – outside the circuit of capital but essential to its operation.” In A Brief History Piketty moves further in this direction, extending his earliest concerns of property, borders and education into greater emphasis on gender politics, racial and colonial matters, as well as by frankly describing his recommendations as both democratic and participatory socialism.

A largely technophobic Left is prone to exaggerating the malignancy of the giant US tech corporations. Their global communications system of unprecedented power is currently being abused for surveillance, high-speed speculation, tax evasion and the operation of 'gig' companies like Uber and AirBnB to undermine regulation and organised labour. However it could with sufficient political will be made to serve progress, as several of Beckerman’s stories suggest and as Piketty acknowledges in a closing section called ‘Will Money Creation Save Us?’ Experience of the Covid pandemic has shown what can be achieved by printing money, and if that causes inflation then the proper cure is not austerity but more robust collection of corporate taxes: “In theory, nothing forbids us to go further. Today, no currency is defined in relationship to gold or to a material referent: currency is above all an electronic sign on computers, which the central banks can create without limits. There are even plans to set up central bank digital currencies in the near future. Individuals would have digital accounts at their country’s central bank, which would permit banks to directly credit individuals’ accounts, rather than routing through private banks and enterprises…”

What a fine irony if Engels’ ‘withering away of the state’ were to be finally achieved by the banks working together with severely-chastened tech giants like Amazon, Google, Facebook. Piketty concludes that “Economic questions are too important to be left to others. Citizens’ reappropriation of this knowledge is an essential stage in the battle for equality. If this book has given readers new weapons for this battle, my goal will have been fully realized” – to which I would merely add that reading Gal Beckerman's book as well will prepare them better for the travails they face before achieving it.

IN PURSUIT OF THE JUST ECONOMY

Dick Pountain/ Political Quarterly/ 18 Jul 2020

Book Review: ‘Capital and Ideology’ by Thomas Piketty, Belknap Press Harvard, 2019, pp1091

Thomas Piketty's place as the current scholar of inequality would be hard to dispute. His first huge project, 'Capital In The Twentieth Century' assembled and analysed statistical evidence for economic inequality throughout recorded history, demonstrating that it had remained roughly constant until exponential growth began after the British Industrial Revolution. This growth was interrupted by a pronounced dip between the 20th-century's two World Wars, but has now resumed to a point where 1% of the world population owns 50% of its wealth. 

In this new volume ‘Capital and Ideology’, Piketty applies the same meticulous research methodology to the related question of the different ways that people have justified economic inequality throughout history, and to what was responsible for that dip, which takes him into the realm of political economy. Comparison of his work to Karl Marx's Capital feels inescapable – the significance of his focus on ‘inequality’ versus Marx's focus on ‘exploitation’; the choice of ideology for his second volume, when Marx famously didn't live long enough to fully tackle the subject. However Piketty ends the book with a set of radical and concrete proposals that perhaps demand more attention given the current worldwide crisis. 

Piketty diverges from Marx right from the start, since for him ideology isn’t entirely determined by the mode of production but is conditioned by multiple factors and thus can play out differently at different places and times. In this he is closer to Weber, Veblen, Bourdieu and Boltanski. The gap widens since he treats ‘class’ not as the foundational category it was for Marx but as a secondary effect of factors that include income, wealth and education. He starts the book with a definition of ideology so commonsensical as to be an affront to post-Althusserian, post-modern orthodoxy: 

I use “ideology” in a positive and constructive sense to refer to a set of a priori plausible ideas and discourses describing how society should be struc­tured. An ideology has social, economic, and political dimensions. It is an attempt to respond to a broad set of questions concerning the desirable or ideal organization of society. Given the complexity of the issues, it should be obvious that no ideology can ever command full and total assent: ideological conflict and disagreement are inherent in the very notion of ideology.

For Piketty all ideologies exist to answer two categories of question – about borders (who is us and who is them?) and about property (who’s allowed to own who or what?). The bulk of ‘Capital and Ideology’ consists of detailed examinations of statistics about various ‘inequality regimes’ that have arisen throughout history and across the world – this is not a wholly Eurocentric work even if he does apologise for speaking only French and English. 

Like Marx he periodises history, but not into the same eras. For Piketty premodern societies have a ternary or ‘trifunctional’ structure divided between three classes, the military (warriors, kings, nobles), the clerical (priests, lawyers, scholars), and a ‘third estate’ of merchants, artisans, peasants and workers. The French Revolution marked the first overturning of such an order, to inaugurate the era of ownership or ‘proprietarian’ regimes which separate possession of power from property and create the modern state (though for a long time political rights remain confined to property owners). Proprietarian regimes diminish the influence of the clergy and instead ‘sacralise’ private property itself to render it unquestionable by any political agent. 

The first three parts of the book deal with premodern trifunctional and slave societies, proprietarian and colonial societies, and culminate with the more egalitarian communist and social­-democratic regimes that arose in the 20th century after periodic crises of proprietarian regimes generated resistance from the lower, ‘disadvantaged’ classes. It was these regimes which created that mid-century dip in inequality. In a review of this length I can barely sketch the breadth and complexity of Piketty’s analysis so I’ll cut straight to the chase: he regards communism and social democracy as both having failed, causing a return to extreme inequality in the ‘hypercapitalist’ and ‘postcommunist’ societies we are living through in the 21st century.

For Piketty communism failed because dogmatic application of Marxist theory merely sacralised state property instead of private property: the authoritarianism and economic stagnation this engendered undid those regimes so deeply that post-communist regimes in Russia, China, and Eastern Europe have become staunch supporters of 21st-century neo-liberal ‘hypercapitalism’. It also instilled in the Western democracies a “dis­illusionment, a pervasive doubt about the very possibility of a just economy, which encourages identitarian disengagement”.

He concedes that the social-democratic alternative was the more successful, but began to unravel with the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (a process completed by the elections of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson). Social­-democratic parties had lost the ability and ambition to redistribute wealth, which allowed the living standards of middle and working classes to stagnate and then erode. Competition between states to lower taxes, encouraged for example by EU membership, compounded this situation. Post-war educational reforms gradually lead to those with higher education voting Left while those without voted Right, an ironic role-reversal that anti-i­mmigrant parties (and factions within older parties) were quick to exploit. Also, while for 50 years the mere existence of a communist counter-model had inhibited capitalist elites and par­ties hostile to redistribution, that inhibition was lifted with the fall of the Soviet Union. But for Piketty the most significant flaw of social-democratic politics lay in confining itself within the nation state, and thus failing to construct the international structures needed to combat capitalist tax evasion and outsourcing. 

For me the crux of his argument, and the most engrossing part of the book, is Part 4 entitled ‘Rethinking The Dimensions Of Political Conflict’. In three chapters on ‘Borders and Property’, ‘Brahmin Left’ and ‘Social Nativism’ Piketty applies his schemas to the current politics of the UK, USA, Europe, India and Brazil. By analysing statistics on voting patterns, wealth and education he demolishes perceptions of the balance of electoral forces on both Left and Right. His thesis will be controversial and likely to evoke furious condemnation from the Left. He contends that the Left-Right cleavage (which he labels as ideologically ‘classist’) is being displaced by a more complex set of contests:

Briefly put, the social hypothesis is this: that the less educationally advantaged classes came to believe that the parties of the left now favor the newly advantaged educated classes and their children over people of more modest backgrounds [...]  the classist left­ right party systems of the postwar era have given way to a system of dual elites consisting of a “Brahmin left” attractive to the highly educated and a “merchant right” attractive to the wealthy and highly paid.

The political struggle is no longer two- but four-sided: inegalitarian internationalists (pro-immigrant, pro-rich); inegalitarian nativists (anti-immigrant, pro­-rich); egalitarian internationalists (pro­-immigrant, pro-poor); and egalitarian nativists (anti-­immigrant, pro­-poor). Older ruling parties, like both Labour and Conservative in the UK and Republican/Democrat in the USA, are often internally split along such lines, and egalitarian nativists may of course merely adopt an egalitarian pose as an electoral tactic – a whole three-page section is devoted to his critique of the term ‘populist’. 

Piketty is certainly a reformist, but not a liberal reformist. In the final chapter 17 of Part 4 he proposes fiscal and legal measures sufficiently radical that if implemented they would, he claims, transcend capitalism: he regards them as a minimum requirement to bring the egalitarian portions of the electorate back together. These measures include a return to steeply progressive taxation, with confiscatory wealth, property, inheritance and carbon taxes. Rather than a universal basic income he demands a universal capital endowment to be paid to everyone on their 25th birthday. Industry is to be co-managed through compulsory representation of workers on all company boards, and fiscal transparency to be imposed through a world-wide financial register. And to top it all off, Piketty recommends constitutional amendments to protect these measures against future diminution. 

He refrains from putting exact figures on tax rates and board numbers on the grounds that these are matters for public, political debate and negotiation, hence his own preferred label of ‘participatory socialism’. Such policies could equally be described as radical, ‘Bernsteinian’ social democracy. Whatever we call them, they’re precisely the concrete political-economic policies so badly needed by, but so conspicuously absent from, recent radical movements like Occupy Wall Street. 

Marx’s ‘Capital’ was the foundational document of 20th-century labour movements and thus changed history, but his insights became ossified into a quasi-religious dogma that still hinders even the democratic Left via an unspoken teleological belief that history leads us inevitably toward success: “would be revolutionaries who argue that nothing can be done until the conditions for revolution are ripe” in Piketty’s words. The 21st-century world he analyses is one already altered by Marx, and his multi-factorial approach can help us understand why the Left/Right demarcation became so confused. 

Capitalists will certainly mobilise colossal resources to oppose these measures, and when I first proposed this review to our esteemed Literary Editor on 19th February 2020 I might well have joined a chorus accusing Piketty of naivety. What neither of us knew was that 9 cases of Covid-19 had been reported in the UK that day. Two weeks later there were 85, a month after that 43,282. That's what 'exponential' looks like, those are the sorts of fact in which Piketty deals. We face economic meltdown of a depth yet to be plumbed, and maybe a moment of historic bifurcation where the only alternatives are something like Piketty’s participatory socialism or descent into a neo-feudal regime with most people jobless and poor, and the insulated, corona-vaccinated 1% as a new ‘nobility’. 

THE PEOPLE’S FLAG IS DEEPEST GREEN

TITLE: The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth

AUTHORS: John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, Richard York.

PUBLISHER: Monthly Review Press

PUBLISHED: January 2011, soft cover, pp544, £14.95

It may come as a surprise to modern readers to be told that Karl Marx was an ecologist, largely because of the conspicuous environmental devastation committed in his name in the former Soviet Union and the Chinese People's Republic. Yet that is precisely the message of this important collection of essays by three US Marxist sociology professors. Making their case involves the authors in a deep examination of what is meant by Marxism, by "in the name of" and even by ecology itself. Bellamy Foster, Clark and York are all affiliated to the independent socialist magazine Monthly Review  (founded in New York at the start of the Cold War in 1949 by Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, and broadly anti-imperialist in outlook, without sectarian entanglements). They make their case most convincingly in certain crucial respects, though are perhaps inevitably less convincing with practical recommendations.

The main thesis of The Ecological Rift is derived from original research by Bellamy Foster which demonstrated that Marx, an admirer of the great German biological chemist Justus von Liebig, formulated early in his career a theory of the "metabolic" relationship between human beings and their natural environment. The development of this theory spans the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, through the Grundrisse and right up into Volume 1 of Capital. In essence the argument runs roughly thus: in pre-capitalist societies people consume the produce of the land where they live and their waste products are returned directly to that land, but the division of labour under capitalism moves most of the population into towns and cities, to where most produce (food, clothing fibres, building materials) gets transported and consumed. The waste is no longer returned to the land which results in depletion of the soils together with pollution of the cities. 

This is a structural characteristic not only of capitalism but of any urbanised industrial economy, so it's not altogether surprising that gross environmental despoilment accompanied the industrialising drives of the Chinese and Soviet states. What is however characteristic of capitalism is an imperative toward continual growth. The pursuit of profit requires companies to continually expand production, seek greater productivity to reduce the share of labour, and seek new geographically remote markets. This imperative to perpetual growth combines with the metabolic "ecological rift" to guarantee that capitalist economics must eventually use up all the resources of the planet, which are limited by its finite size. Reconnecting the metabolic cycle by returning all waste to the land is not feasible, for the economic reason that it can never be made profitable, and for technological reasons, such as plastic not making good fertiliser. This argument is propounded and analysed in great detail, for example in chapter 15, Imperialism and Ecological Metabolism, which traces the depletion of European soils during the Industrial Revolution; the discovery of Chilean guano fertiliser deposits in the early 1800s and the imperial wars they triggered; and Fritz Haber's discovery, just before WW1, of an industrial process to fix atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia for fertilisers and explosives. That discovery linked the fertility of the land to the energy sources required by the Haber process, which meant oil, so triggering another set of imperial wars that continue to this day. During this historic sequence not only was the metabolic rift not closed, but the ecological cycles being disrupted spread out from solely the nitrogen cycle to the carbon and water cycles too, digging up fossil fuels and burning them into atmospheric carbon dioxide. 

Foster and co. are making a radical political point, that there can be no stable solution to our environmental crisis based on capitalist relations of production. With the rise of the BRIC economies we're currently living through a climactic phase of the spread of capitalist production methods across the whole planet. There are no farther geographical markets left so growth can only be via greater intensity, with environmental consequences that – according to reputable scientific opinion, and notwithstanding orchestrated campaigns of scepticism – will very likely render the planet uninhabitable. 

In earlier chapters the authors argue that neo-classical economists inadvertently conceal the urgency of our plight by treating the environment as being without market value, distorting our metabolic relationship to nature by treating raw materials only as inputs and products as outputs (which tempts a false belief in their inexhaustibility). A complete analysis regards raw materials also as outputs from nature and products as inputs back into nature. Other chapters make detailed criticisms of various reform proposals such as the UK's Stern report, of various strains of environmental sociology, and of various "holistic" ecological theories like James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis and the racist ecology of Jan Christian Smuts. 

In their analysis no remedy that involves market forces – such as carbon trading – can ever succeed, because it does not and cannot inhibit the inexorable growth of the market. In support of this position they draw on two famous paradoxes of classical economics. "Lauderdale's Paradox" was the observation that private wealth can be created by destroying public wealth (eg. the enclosure of common land; charging for water supply; speculative restriction of supply of, for example, foodstuffs, diamonds or metals to increase their price), while "Jevon's Paradox" is the observation that under capitalism increasing the efficiency of utilisation of some resource almost invariably leads to more of it being consumed rather than less, thanks to expansion of the market.  

Such a brief summary may suggest a return to strict Marxist orthodoxy, but that would be misleading: in their criticisms of opposing ecological positions, the authors deploy various revisions that set them apart from most current Marxism. In two central and rather difficult chapters they discuss materialist ontologies, suggesting that previous strands in Marxism can be divided between "naive realists" – Leninists and Maoists – and those social constructionist "Western Marxists", including most French post-structuralist and post-modernist schools, whom they see as verging on idealism. (They quote with approval Kate Soper’s aperçu that “it is not language that has a hole in its ozone layer”).

Proper understanding of the metabolic rift demands a more rigorous materialism that transcends realism and idealism, something close to the "critical realism" of Roy Bhaskar or late Santayana (we do perceive real external objects, but filtered, perhaps imperfectly, through our mental apparatus). The authors embrace the nuanced Darwinism of Stephen Jay Gould, the sociology of science of Robert K. Merton and Imré Lakatos, and Thorstein Veblen's idea that capitalist marketing "produces customers" rather than goods. In this reviewer's opinion they might profitably have gone further still in this direction. Veblen, in The Socialist Economics of Karl Marx and His Followers (1907), criticised the Marxists of his time for indulging in romantic Hegelian teleology, namely the "historic inevitability of socialism" with all its quasi-religious millenarian implications – the rejection of all teleology is a constant theme of this book. Perhaps replacing more still of Marx's Hegelian terminology – say "dialectic" and "quantity versus quality" – with more scientific causal descriptions drawn (cautiously) from evolutionary biology and systems/information/complexity theory might diminish the opacity and vagueness displayed by so much of today's radical writing. To be fair, Foster et al are positively readable compared to many current theorists, and in the introduction they apologise for any excessive repetition in this book due to its being a compilation of edited and extended papers and magazine articles.

Bellamy Foster, Clark and York make an entirely convincing case that the crises we face over climate change and resource depletion cannot be tackled by any reforms that fall short of breaking the capitalist market's mindless dependency on uncontrolled growth, but they’re less successful in delineating plausible routes to achieve such an enormous transformation of human organisation. While quoting from Keynes with approval in several places, they’re more approving of István Mészáros’ theory of transition to socialism and the political achievements of his follower Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela. In particular they quote Chavez's three-part "triangle of socialism" as the precondition for any effective solution to the ecological rift:

1) social use, not ownership, of nature.

2) rational regulation by the associated producers of the metabolism between humans and nature.

3) the satisfaction of communal needs of both present and future generations.

Worthy as these aims are, terms like "rational regulation", "associated producers" and "communal needs" are worryingly vague and result in a formula sufficiently ambiguous, in the wrong hands, to justify a Pol Pot. Notable by its absence is the equally problematic term "democracy", toward which they display a rather unwise old-Marxist reticence that grates particularly since this review is being written in the midst of March 2011's "Arab Spring" and Libyan uprising. It would have been good to see Lula's Brazil considered alongside Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, and some discussion about the extent to which the muscular, radical-Keynesian social democracy advocated by James K. Galbraith could fulfill these conditions. This book is nevertheless a very important contribution to environmental politics, and a powerful antidote to the illusions of moralistic green activists and opportunistic green capitalists alike.

Dick Pountain, March 2011