Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage.
Pushing Back Against Economic Crisis, Youth Unrest Ripples Around World
Michelle Chen, In These Times
Has anyone noticed that new unemployment claims just climbed by 51,000 to 454,000? Maybe we’re tired of being reminded about the jobless rate. It was politely ignored in President Obama’s State of the Union Address, even as he promised to boost opportunities for the next generation.
Yet the next generation is at the center of unemployment epidemic. And according to the International Labour Organisation’s Global Employment Trends report, they have lots of company around the world:
The number of unemployed stood at 205 million in 2010, essentially unchanged from the year earlier… with little hope for this figure to revert to pre-crisis levels in the near term.
The ranks of the jobless include some 78 million young people worldwide, a rate of 12.6 percent. That’s a slight decline from the previous year but millions more than the 2007 levels. And since the data suggests “discouragement among youth has risen sharply,” there is also the untold shadow number of youth who’ve simply fallen out of the workforce.
… The ILO reports that in the Middle East:
current estimates for 2010 show a level of unemployment at 10.3 per cent, which is the highest regional rate in the world. The youth unemployment rate is almost four times the adult rate. Gender inequalities continue to be a major concern, as the gap between male and female employment-to-population ratios, at 47.2 percentage points, is twice the global average. Economic growth in 2011 is projected at 5.1 per cent, falling short of precrisis trends, with little change expected in the region’s unemployment rate.
Although North Africa didn’t suffer as much as other regions in the recession, the data depicts a deep long-term slump:
An alarming 23.6 per cent of economically active young people were unemployed in 2010. Productivity growth continues to be sluggish and leaves little scope for increases in wages and salaries or for progress in expanding social protection systems.
(29 January 2011)
Capitalism and Degrowth—An Impossibility Theorem
John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review
… almost four decades after the Club of Rome raised the issue of “the limits to growth,” the economic growth idol of modern society is once again facing a formidable challenge.3 What is known as “degrowth economics,” associated with the work of Serge Latouche in particular, emerged as a major European intellectual movement in 2008 with the historic conference in Paris on “Economic De-Growth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity,” and has since inspired a revival of radical Green thought, as epitomized by the 2010 “Degrowth Declaration” in Barcelona.
Ironically, the meteoric rise of degrowth (décroissance in French) as a concept has coincided over the last three years with the reappearance of economic crisis and stagnation on a scale not seen since the 1930s. The degrowth concept therefore forces us to confront the questions: Is degrowth feasible in a capitalist grow-or-die society—and if not, what does this say about the transition to a new society?
According to the Web site of the European degrowth project, “degrowth carries the idea of a voluntary reduction of the size of the economic system which implies a reduction of the GDP.”4 “Voluntary” here points to the emphasis on voluntaristic solutions—though not as individualistic and unplanned in the European conception as the “voluntary simplicity” movement in the United States, where individuals (usually well-to-do) simply choose to opt out of the high-consumption market model. For Latouche, the concept of “degrowth” signifies a major social change: a radical shift from growth as the main objective of the modern economy, toward its opposite (contraction, downshifting).
An underlying premise of this movement is that, in the face of a planetary ecological emergency, the promise of green technology has proven false. This can be attributed to the Jevons Paradox, according to which greater efficiency in the use of energy and resources leads not to conservation but to greater economic growth, and hence more pressure on the environment.5 The unavoidable conclusion—associated with a wide variety of political-economic and environmental thinkers, not just those connected directly to the European degrowth project—is that there needs to be a drastic alteration in the economic trends operative since the Industrial Revolution.
(January 2011 issue)
More on this theme: Beyond growth or beyond capitalism? (Climate and Capitalism). -BA
Daniel Tanuro: The Futility of Green Capitalism
Richard Fidler , Climate and Capitalism
Daniel Tanuro’s new book, L’impossible capitalisme vert,or “The Futility of Green Capitalism”, is a major contribution to our analytical understanding of ecosocialism.
Tanuro, a Belgian Marxist and certified agriculturist, is a prolific author on environmental history and policies.
Addressed primarily to the Green milieu, as the title indicates, this book is a powerful refutation of the major proposals advanced to resolve the climate crisis that fail to challenge the profit drive and accumulation dynamic of capital. Much of the book appears to be a substantially expanded update of a report by Tanuro adopted in 2009 by the leadership of the Fourth International as a basis for international discussion. That report was translated by Ian Angus and included in his anthology The Global Fight for Climate Justice.
Tanuro’s book includes much additional material elaborating his central thesis that climate degradation cannot be dissociated from the “natural” functioning of capitalism as a system and that a valid “emancipatory project” to confront and overcome the impending crisis must recognize natural constraints and aim for a fundamental redefinition of what we mean by social wealth.
Among the topics of particular interest to readers are extended critiques of popular writers on climate crisis ranging from Jared Diamond to Hans Jonas and Hervé Kempf, as well as his critical assessment of the contributions of Marxist writers such as John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett. Tanuro makes a compelling case against many ill-conceived nostrums such as the Sierra Club’s campaign for immigration controls, or such cost-efficiency based market mechanisms as carbon trading and ecotaxes.
A major feature of the book is its cogent explanation of how Marxist value theory explains the ecological crisis and points to its solution. He also addresses what he considers a major deficiency in Marx’s ecology, an inadequate appreciation of the crucial implications of capitalism’s reliance on non-renewable fossile-fuel resources. This aspect is explored in detail in Tanuro’s article “Marxism, Energy, and Ecology: The Moment of Truth,” published in the December 2010 issue of Capitalism Nature Socialism.
We hope that this outstanding book will soon be published in English and other languages.
In the following interview, Daniel Tanuro outlines some of the major themes in the book. My translation from the French, À propos du capitalisme vert.
… A: What is “green capitalism”?
D.T.: The expression “green capitalism” may be understood in two different ways. A producer of wind turbines may boast that he is engaged in green capitalism. In this sense — in the sense that some money is invested in a “clean” sector of the economy — a form of green capitalism is obviously possible and quite profitable. But the real question is whether capitalism as a whole can turn green, that is, whether the global action of the numerous and competing capitals that constitute Capital can respect ecological cycles, their rhythms, and the speed by which natural resources are reconstituted.
That is the sense in which my book poses the question and it answers in the negative. My main argument is that competition impels each owner of capital to replace workers by more productive machines in order to achieve a superprofit greater than the average profit.
Productivism is thus at the heart of capitalism. As Schumpeter said, “a capitalism without growth is a contradiction in terms.” Capitalist accumulation is potentially unlimited, so there is an antagonism between capital and nature, as the latter’s resources are finite. It may be objected that the productivity race leads capital to be increasingly resource efficient, as expressed for example by the observed decrease in the quantity of energy necessary for the production of a percentage point of GDP. But this tendency to increased efficiency obviously cannot be prolonged indefinitely in a linear way, and empirically we find it is more than offset by the growing mass of commodities that are produced. Green capitalism is therefore an oxymoron, like social capitalism.
(17 January 2011)
Actually, The Retirement Age is Too High
James K. Galbraith, Foreign Policy
The most dangerous conventional wisdom in the world today is the idea that with an older population, people must work longer and retire with less.
This idea is being used to rationalize cuts in old-age benefits in numerous advanced countries — most recently in France, and soon in the United States. The cuts are disguised as increases in the minimum retirement age or as increases in the age at which full pensions will be paid.
Such cuts have a perversely powerful logic: “We” are living longer. There are fewer workers to support each elderly person. Therefore “we” should work longer.
But in the first place, “we” are not living longer. Wealthier elderly are; the non-wealthy not so much. Raising the retirement age cuts benefits for those who can’t wait to retire and who often won’t live long. Meanwhile, richer people with soft jobs work on: For them, it’s an easy call.
Second, many workers retire because they can’t find jobs. They’re unemployed — or expect to become so. Extending the retirement age for them just means a longer job search, a futile waste of time and effort.
Third, we don’t need the workers. Productivity gains and cheap imports mean that we can and do enjoy far more farm and factory goods than our forebears, with much less effort. Only a small fraction of today’s workers make things. Our problem is finding worthwhile work for people to do, not finding workers to produce the goods we consume.
(19 January 2011)
