Caucus

By Rupert Reed

The dominant political philosophy of our times, individualistic (neo-)liberalism, assumes a world in which inequality is justified because of the efficiencies it yields, which supposedly make life better for everyone. ‘Liberal’ political philosophy (hegemonic across the 3 main political Parties in Britain) thus allegedly ‘distributes’ ‘fairly’, in virtue of the worst off being better off than they would be without those market efficiencies and the incentives that they create. Conventional market economics moreover allocates efficiently the ‘moderately scarce’ ‘goods’ needed by everyone, within whatever distributional constraints government lays down.

But is the contemporary world a place where ‘moderate scarcity’ is actually salient?

The dangers of approaching absolute scarcity are now crystal clear : e.g. In 2008, ‘Peak Oil’ (the peak of world oil production) is imminent or already here. And yet: Absolute resource depletion is just not a feature in liberalism, nor in mainstream economics.

The dangers of approaching ‘absolute abundance’ — my term for an abundance of pollutants to a greater extent than the ecosphere can cope with, even given deliberate human mitigation-measures — are also now as crystal: the absolute abundance of CO2 in the atmosphere threatens to end human civilization across much of the world within a century. And yet: ‘Absolute abundance’ is again just not a factor considered in liberalism’s discussions, nor in mainstream economics’s calculations (which imply that ‘price signals’ etc. will work around the problem for us).

Ultimately — or rather, very soon, unless vast numbers of future beings (and indeed present beings) are to be sacrificed — there will surely be a ‘Contraction and Convergence’ scheme put in place, such that there will over time be a convergence of the amount of greenhouse gas emissions per person down to the same level for all. This principle will surely over time be extended to any resource which threatens either an ‘absolute abundance’ or which is at risk of being absolutely scarce at some point during the future of humanity. In other words, it is starkly clear that, in a world in which there are absolute limits, limits which in some cases we have already reached or breached, as to how much a given resource can be exploited or turned into a pollutant, the only conceivable just way of sharing that resource (or that ‘right to pollute’) can be an egalitarian one. And that means: strict egalitarianism.

For all resources which are not entirely renewable, then, and for all resources which threaten to generate any ‘absolute abundances’, liberalism’s advocacy of inequality for the sake of all will be inapplicable. That category will include virtually all resources, as soon as we take seriously the rights of future generations to a fair share, too. There will be nothing to spend differential quantities (i.e. quantities above the strict fair share that we have ‘contracted and converged’ to, of the absolutely scarce and ‘absolutely abundant’) of money on, once we have achieved convergence in the case of any such resources, except those things which have no component that is other than moderately scarce (which, from a sufficiently long-term perspective, is likely to mean: virtually no things at all), and on pure labour (services).

The world as we have fondly imagined it to be, until recently, is/was a world in which it seemed reasonable to place a premium on incentivising economic growth. And it was that that seemed to many to make one version or another of ‘trickle-down’ the basis of a reasonable compromise or compact with capitalism. It seemed OK to have inequalities, because society viewed dynamically (over time) was not a zero-sum-game. It seemed OK for some to have less than others partly because, over time, they would in any case come to have more, because the cake would keep expanding, due in part to rewarding the activities of those who had more.

These comfortable ideas (comfortable at least for liberals, for society’s elites, and for intellectuals) are gone. Now, there is a real sense in which society clearly is a zero sum game, because the ecological limits that we are subject to, absolute limits, are in some key cases at hand. The cake can’t keep growing, now that its ingredients are running out… The planet is past its ‘carrying capacity’, if we construe that capacity not in crude terms of sheer numbers of human beings but in terms rather of the combined ecological footprint of those human beings. Unless the poor — especially, the poor of the third world — are to remain poor forever, we will have to converge with them. ‘Making poverty history’ requires contraction and convergence.

Contraction moves us towards equality. Convergence is equality. The only question is how fast the contraction and convergence is to be. The old rationale for economic growth — that all would be made better off — and for incentivizing enterprise — such that those best-placed to maximise that growth will do so — is what is now ‘history’. The old arguments for trickle-down economics are dead — there will be no more progressive ratcheting forward of the baseline of the economy, in terms of wage levels etc. . The new society that will be built around and through the Contraction and Convergence solution will not value the furthering of economic growth, but will seek precisely to dampen any tendencies toward unsustainable resource use, tendencies built into economic growth.

To sum up, then: The poor have little purchasing power; future generations have no purchasing power. Their consumer preferences do not register in the market economy. We have to find a way of organizing our economy that includes their needs, that does not discount them. C&C provides in outline such a way. A steady-state economy, at a level safe with regard to the limits of growth, will see equal – converged – rations of carbon (and of all other materials or pollutants which threaten to breach the limits of growth). Such equality cannot and must not be put aside for the sake of maximizing market efficiency – because the ‘efficiency’ of the market is precisely what got us into this mess in the first place…

The conclusion is unavoidable: An ecological perspective, a genuinely Green perspective, must needs be in the long-term a thoroughly egalitarian perspective vis a vis material things.