In last month’s Rio +20 (UN Conference for Sustainable Development) declaration, “The Economy We Need,” RIPESS (French acronym for Intercontinental Network for the Promotion of Social and Solidarity Economy) dismisses the “so-called green economy” model promulgated “by governments and corporations” with the contempt it deserves.
There are at least two problems with the green economy movement. The first is highlighted in the RIPESS declaration: It is really a greenwashed attempt to create a new, greenwashed model of capital accumulation for global corporate capitalism, based on “the commodification of the commons.”
Green (or Progressive, or Cognitive) Capitalism, like the first Industrial Revolution, is based on a large-scale process of primitive accumulation (a technical term Marxists use that means “massive robbery”).
The primitive accumulation preceding the rise of the factory system in industrial Britain involved the enclosure of common lands: First of a major portion of the Open Fields for sheep pasturage over several centuries in late medieval and early modern times, then the Parliamentary Enclosures of common pasture, woodland and waste in the 18th century.
The new greenwashed model of corporate-state capitalism, as the RIPESS declaration suggests, achieves primitive accumulation through the enclosure of the information commons. Economist Paul Romer calls it the “new growth theory.” It’s based on enclosing digital information and innovation — things which are naturally free — as a source of rents. This “progressive” model of capitalism, promoted by Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Bono, is even more heavily reliant on patents and copyrights than the existing version of corporate capitalism.
The “green capitalist” model is intended as a response to the primary threat facing corporate capitalism and its model of capital accumulation: Technologies of abundance. If allowed to operate without hindrance, the free adoption of low-cost, ephemeral production technologies and the radical deflationary effect of freely replicable digital information would not only destroy most existing corporate profits but render most investment capital superfluous.
It’s this threat, all the “progressive” rhetoric aside, that “green capitalism” is intended to head off. It’s a last-ditch effort to rescue an entire system of class privilege and economic exploitation based on artificial scarcity from the revolutionary impact of abundance.
The Solidarity Economy model promoted by RIPESS — and by my free market anticapitalist comrades at the Center for a Stateless Society — is just the opposite. What we seek is a self-organized, decentralized economy, in which ordinary people take advantage of new technologies of abundance (like low-cost production technologies and free information) to build an economy of our own in which the rentier classes’ huge accumulations of land and capital are worthless.
This was foreshadowed by the Owenite cooperatives of the 1830s, in which unemployed tradesmen undertook production in cooperative shops, marketing their wares to their fellow workers for Labor Notes in barter exchanges. The problem was that this model only worked for craft trades in which the tools of production were still individually affordable. It didn’t work in forms of industrial production which relied on large, specialized, and extremely expensive machinery. The Knights of Labor learned this the hard way four decades later when their efforts at creating worker cooperatives ran head-on against the capitalization costs of the factory system.
The beauty of the age we live in is that new production technology is reversing this process. A growing share of manufacturing takes place in job shops using cheap, general-purpose CNC machine tools. A garage shop equipped with open-source lathe, router, 3-D printer, etc., costing $10-20,000 can produce goods that once required a million dollar factory. And a much larger share is amenable to such production methods. In food production, soil-intensive raised-bed horticulture was already far more productive than industrial agriculture. New techniques, like those of John Jeavons, are making it more productive still.
It’s technologically feasible for workers and consumers to bootstrap almost an entire economy on the Owenite model, with very little in the way of land and capital assets.
So the question is, which model do we want to follow? Do we knuckle under to the greenwashed Hamiltonian model of “progressives” like Gates and Buffett, aimed at protecting their profits against the radical deflationary effects of abundance? Or do harness these deflationary effects for people like ourselves, replacing the domination of bosses, toil and debt with a society of self-governance, leisure and mutual cooperation.
You shouldn’t have to think about it long.
Translations for this article:
- Portuguese, “Economia Verde?” Não Somos Verdes o Bastante para Comprá-la.
- Spanish, “‘Economía verde’: demasiado verde para ser buena”.
Citations to this article:
- Kevin Carson, “Green Economy?” We’re Not Green Enough to Buy It, Baltic Review, 07/21/12
- Kevin Carson, “Green Economy?” We’re Not Green Enough to Buy It, Hernando [Florida] Today, 07/14/12
well said, Kevin! Let's work for a free knowledge society, where everyone has the four freedoms of free software, applied to all aspects of the knowledge society. That is the input we need for commons-based industrial production.
My recent post The European Parliament kills ACTA
I second that motion.
It's funny, really. I am an anarchist. In the Linux world, there are two camps: Raymond's 'open source' approach and Stallman's 'libre/free' approach. Eric S. Raymond is the the 'libertarian' (though I have grown much in my moral conscience and outlook to not be satisfied. Heinleinien libertarianism has its virtues, but many crippling vices.). Stallman is a progressive of the Green Party variety.
I've come to like Richard Stallman a hell of a lot more than Raymond. Whatever my disagreements with Stallman on the State, his libre/free software philosophy blows 'open source' out of the water. It aims at the freedom of all: casual users & experienced hackers alike.
Raymond was mainly pissed off that he couldn't use code wherever he wanted to. He was completely blind to the political issues surrounding copyrighted software, thinking he could persuade corporations to give up proprietary code on grounds of economic efficiency.
In the long run, however, Richard Stallman has been proven right. Open source is just a development model. Sources can be openned, and they can be closed. It lacks an overall moral vision. Freedom is a moral issue. It is also quite pracitical. But it must be moral, first and foremost. The media got into an uproar over Stallman dancing on Steve Jobs's grave. Stallman just spoke the goddamn truth about Jobs and what he did to computing.
Jobs & Gates have been hailed as heroes of the computer age.
That honor must go to Richard Stallman.
Before I leave, I will say one more thing about Eric S. Raymond. I do not hate him. I am merely disappointed in the guy. There is much I admire about him, especially of the man he used to be when he was younger. Like Stallman, I hope one day he realizes the mistake he has made…and comes home.
Ah… no. Primitive accumulation is just that, the initial accumulation (of capital) under primitive conditions, i.e. without the aid of previously accumulated capital. Expropriating that is conceptually a distinct activity. It is just that significant concentrations of capital accumulated that way only formed when they were expropriated too, provided the expropriators didn’t consume it all themselves, since the productive classes only collected enough for their own needs and had to work harder if they had some taken (think what happens when honey is taken from bees). So expropriation generally went along with primitive accumulation, but it isn’t actually the same thing. Conversely, what is happening now is expropriation without primitive accumulation, since the “stuff” involved was actually generated with the aid of previously accumulated capital.
Actually, although the enclosure of common lands technically did begin in the Middle Ages, that wasn’t particularly material and typically was not for the purpose of creating sheep walks, though it was significant in generating legal precedents. The mass phase driven by raising sheep actually began in early Tudor times, as part of the peace dividend following the end of the Wars of the Roses; there was less need for a pool of recruits (and war also changed, so professional mercenaries and cannon which needed money became relatively more important), and the export trade in wool to the continent became more practical without war’s interruptions.
That’s not soil-intensive; that means something that needs to use a lot of soil, but this is labour and/or capital intensive, precisely in order to get the most out of less soil.
Regarding the enclosure of the commons: the discussion should extend far beyond Western Europe. Commons appropriation, and appropriation or transformation of 'traditional' land holding and land use patterns, occurred, and are occurring right now, across the planet, beginning in early modernity in some places, and accelerating, first, with the spread of European conquest, and second, with the spread and penetration of the industrial revolution and modern capitalism, from the nineteenth century forward. This commons appropriation- and related phenomenon- have varied a great deal in their exact dynamics and process; the despoiling of Latin American campesinos and their eventual integration into global capitalism was not the same as that of Egyptian peasants, for instance. But it's not that hard to locate a broad, global (though, I think, polycentric in origins if not ultimate destination) process or trend towards the enclosure and appropriation of key common resources, and the destruction or transformation of 'traditional'* property-holding and land-use patterns in favor of capitalistic or capitalist appropriators and economies.
These processes, not quite universally but nearly so, went hand-in-hand with the introduction of massive imbalances of political power; they were conterminous and interconnected with the processes of state-building from early-modernity into the modern age. Capitalism and the system of relations that make up modern states and modern political economies did not simply 'arise' out of 'market forces'; they were slowly and deliberately forged through, among other things, the introduction and maintenance of massive injections of coercive power and violence.
And they continue: land appropriation and commons enclosure is still being carried out, sometimes on a truly massive scale, in Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Asia, usually through the old intertwining of state and big capital. The result is similar to the older such processes: the forceful integration of non-capitalist (and often pretty non-statist) economies and societies (or at least ones only partially integrated into those relations of power and economy) into the global 'order' of states and capital.
*-I mark off 'traditional' because the term tends to imply static situations. Pre-capitalist, pre-statist economies and societies were and are not static or moribund.
Before we scrap the word "green" altogether, let's keep in mind that an abundance-based economy would be far more ecologically sustainable than what we have now. An economy that was small-scale, local, and distributed would use both materials and energy sources that are small-scale, local, and distributed. What could be more abundant that something that's renewable? Solar energy, in particular, is so abundant we have to protect ourselves against it.
I don't know how you'll take this, but that article is going to be too complicated for many people to understand.
Please enlighten.