The Language of Money

 Newspeak

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.

This is how George Orwell described the new language that Big Brother was creating in 1984,  a language that would make it impossible for the citizens of Oceania to ever again discuss the old freedoms that they had once enjoyed.

In the world of 'Brexit means Brexit' and 'alternative facts' it certainly seems to be coming true. However in another realm of human existence it already has come true, and most of us never even noticed.

Monetarised

When Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister she ushered in a radical new economic doctrine,
monetarism. From now on the only interactions that mattered were financial ones. Profits were more important than people and money was to be set free to invade very part of our lives.

It was new theory, that had been gestating since just after the Second World War, and which had recently been trialed in Chile. That had required tanks and torture chambers, but the revolution in the UK, and in America the next year, was more peaceful.

So why didn't we resist? I think because we were lost for words.

"Money doesn't talk, it swears"*

Think about these words; value, wealth, debt. Do they have clear meanings?

Do you 'value' a friendship in the same way you 'value' your shares? Clearly not, but how do you tell which meaning is which? Do you 'value' your record collection like your friends, or your shares? How about your house, or your lover? Would you sell, or buy, either? Perhaps I'd better not ask.

Then what do we mean by 'wealth'? Is it just the collective monetary value of things, or does it have a broader meaning? When Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, he did not the mean the same thing as John Ruskin, when he wrote 'There is no wealth but life'? But that was then, what about now?

Finally there's 'debt'. We have a national debt, prisoners pay their debt to society, and we owe a debt to our parents. The national debt usually means what we owe the banks, not what we owe those who died fighting fascism. However it's not just in Monopoly that you can buy your way out of jail, and you can certainly end up in jail if you don't pay your debts, although we do generally try to pretend this isn't the case. But what about the debt to our parents, assuming they were good parents that is. If they were bad parents we'd be talking about their debt to you. Either way, can this ever be turned into money?

The parents of nature writer Ernest Thompson Seton appeared to think so. On his twentifirst birthday his father presented him with a bill for all the costs incurred in bringing him up, including the fee to the Doctor who delivered him. Seton paid up, and never spoke to his dad again. No birthday cards, Sunday visits or worrying about which care home to put him in, he had paid his debt and that was that.

Seton may well be the exception that proves the rule, but it still appears that, like those citizens of Oceania, we have completely lost the vocabulary to talk about interactions in anything other than monetary terms.

Oldspeak

This becomes a major problem when we talk about resources we hold in common, particularly Nature.  

When we value Nature, what do we mean? We may say you can't put a price on a beautiful view, or clean air, but it can certainly increase the value of your house. Both a Thatcherite and an environmentalist would no doubt consider The Lake District to be part of the wealth of the nation, although only one would consider selling it off. 

Our current model of economics considers natural resources a free gift from Nature. The only argument is whether their value should be measured by what it takes to get them out of the ground, or what someone is prepared to pay for them. That's like valuing your lover by how much you spent wooing her, or how much you can pimp her for after dark. 

But then if we lack words that allow us to distinguish the bonds that bind us through love and affection, from those of work and commerce, this debate become difficult, to say the least.

That's why when I write these blogs, I sometimes end up sounding like a mystical old hippy. If I say the land is not just valuable, but sacred, you know quite clearly that I will not exchange it for money. If I say my connection with nature is spiritual, you know it is different to my relationship with my bank balance.

Perhaps we need a new language, one that can't be mistaken for the language of money. Let's recognise this Newspeak for what it is, and talk about Nature in words our ancestors would recognise. 

Let's not speak the language of money, but of the trees.

* Bob Dylan It's All Right Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) 

Further Reading

David Graeber Debt The First 5000 Years 
J B Foster, B Clark, R York The Ecogical Rift: Capitalism's War on the Earth

So Where Did It All Go Wrong?

This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

Douglas Adams’ The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, Pan Books, London, 1979

So where did it all start to go wrong?

With the exception of the most wildly optimistic Bright Green, most environmentalists believe what passes for Western Civilisation made a disastrous wrong turn some time in the past. This has resulted in us facing, at the very least, a Sixth Great Extinction, and at the very worst our own extinction.

But when did we go wrong? Perhaps not as far back as Douglas Adams, writing at the end of the 'Decade of the Environment' suggests, but perhaps not.

So when exactly did we go wrong? When did we have alternatives?

The combination of Trump and Brexit looks set to see a bonfire of environmental legislation, but we were hardly heading for paradise in 2015. The War on Terror has provided a huge distraction from more pressing issues, whilst Dubya's decision to ditch the Kyoto Treaty set progress on climate change back by fifteen years. However for my first junction I will choose:

1989 The Fall of the Berlin Wall

The end of communism in Eastern Europe was a moment of optimism. A system that had promised paradise on earth, but which had delivered only poverty and oppression, had fallen. Democracy had triumphed, and with it capitalism, although rather fewer celebrated that.

The subsequent closure of polluting communist factories led to the only significant drop in European carbon dioxide emissions since industrialisation has begun. Things looked good, but it wasn't to be all good news.

Capitalism in the third quarter of the twentieth century had been different to the rest of its history. Now it wasn't enough to just make the rich richer, the poor had to also be kept happy enough not to want to vote in the dreaded communists. In the UK we got a National Health Service and in the US factor workers got complementary health insurance. Trade unions were tolerated, a labour policy tried to keep full employment, and when Rachel Carson and others revealed the extent of the damage to Nature caused by industrial pollution, a raft of government bodies were created to try to deal with the problem.

But with the red threat gone, capitalism had no need to compromise with anyone any more.

When George Bush Senior went to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 he basically said no to any steps to deal with any of the problems discussed.

At the same time intelligence agencies, with time on their hands now, turned their well honed skills on Green campaigners. So effective was this that when the War on Terror gave them a new threat to worry about, plenty of time was still found to deal with the 'terrorists' who targeted fossil fuels.

The men and women who broke the Berlin Wall in November 1989 had not wanted this. They had wanted the best of both worlds, socialism and democracy. However those brave pioneers were naive about what they were letting in. The world on the other side of the wall was not what they were expecting, and it has become increasingly clear that without communism to keep it honest, capitalism itself became the monlithic ideology prepared to do anything to defend itself.

The difference is that the 1%, unlike the geriatric rulers of communist eastern europe, look unlikely to go quietly.

1971 The Rise of Neoliberalism

On 15 August 1971 President Nixon broke the financial system that had run the capitalist world since the end of the Second World War.

France had sent a destroyer to New York to claim its share of the US Federal gold reserve. In response Nixon took the US dollar off the Gold Standard.

Nixon was responding to a growing crisis in the US economy, caused by the state living beyond its means whilst trying to keep the cost of the Vietnam War off the books. However the move was the first victory for a group that had been plotting the downfall of the western model of capitalism since 1945.

This group were radicals, but not left wing ones. The Mont Pelerin society, named after Swiss hotel they met in, were followers of the economic theories of Freidrich von Hayek. Hayek told them exactly what he thought of the sort of mixed economy, introduced by Roosevelt to deal with the Great Depression, with the title of his book The Road To Serfdom.

The doctrine he espoused was neoliberalism. At its simplest it said that the only transactions that matter are those involving money. Industry was not important, unless it was a way to make money. Family, society and the environment certainly didn't matter. The only role for the state was to maintain law and order, meaning to maintain the laws that allowed corporations to do what they want, and the order where the rich were protected from anyone who might object.
When the US launched a military coup in Chile to remove a democratically elected communist, it gave neoliberalism exactly the conditions it needed to thrive - total chaos. Whilst the army rounded up the leftists to be tortured or killed, the military regime imported Chicago school economists to rewrite the rules.

The election of Thatcher in the UK in 1979 and Reagan in the US the next year saw neoliberalsim rolled out across the western world. Trade unions were crushed, taxes were cut, and environmental laws slashed. The result was that when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and the USSR fell apart in 1991, the chaos that followed was ruthlessly exploited by the neoliberals.

Flooding in New Orleans, the invasion of Iraq, the Credit Crunch. All these provided opportunities for the neoliberals to extend their grip. Green capitalists belive that government regulation, smart taxation and a controlled market can make us sustainable. Neoliberals believe regulations, taxes and controllign the market are all morally wrong.

We cannot save the world whilst the neoliberals run it.

1945 The Triumph of Consumerism

Having lived my entire adult life in the chaos of the post-Cold War neoliberal world, it's easy to be nostalgic about the world my parents inherited after the Second World War ended.

Unlike the other eras in this blog, this one was carefully planned in advance. In 1945, with the world in ruins, the memory of the Great Depression still fresh, and Stalin's tanks in Berlin, Prague and Budapest, the free world met at Mount Washington Hotel in Breton Woods, New Hampshire, to work out how the capitalist world's economy should work. The genius behind it all was Britain's Maynard Keynes, although he wouldn't get things entirely his own way.

Compared to wht followed, the Bretton Woods was very sensible, It provided the engine for social democracy which made the West somewhere that most people were actually happy to live.

But something had to power the machine, and that thing was consumerism. This was not a new idea, but one that accelerated after 1945. Things were no longer manufactured to meet needs, but desires. Unlike need desire, if the ad men did their job properly, was unlimited. From cars to washing machines industry produced a house full of new gadgets for people to want, and new forms of credit allowed them to buy it. 

The result is that we entered the exponential age, when everything, except the earth's capacity to sustain us, increased by a little more each year.

Since 1945 we have been always buying, but never happy, whilst the planet has been always dying, but we never noticed.

1771 The Industrial Revolution

In 1771 the modern world was created in Cromford, Derbyshire.

Visiting Arkwright's first mill now it's easy to be beguiled it. Resting in a picturesque valley, and powered only by the water, it seems a far cry from the Dark Satanic Mills of Blake. But that is to miss what the Industrial Revolution was. Later there would be a coal revolution, and a financial revolution, but the first revolution was a social one.

Previously human life had revolved around the family and the village. It had been human scale. Work had ended with the setting of the sun and followed the rhythms of the seasons. Life could be nasty, brutish and short, and the main source of wealth - land - was not evenly shared. But the system was sustainable, both in balance with the earth and relatively unchanging over time.

Cromford Mill changed all that. Women and children were dragooned into the factories. The worked, not at a pace set by themselves, but by a brutal overseer. The speed of the machines was set by the power they drew from the water. The people kept up, or perished.

Welcome to the modern world.

1620 The Scientific Revolution

In 1620 Sir Francis Bacon published his great work Novum Organum, which aimed tofinally move western science on from where Aristotle had left it two thousand years earlier.

To many Bacon was the man who demystified nature, who removed the wonder from the natural world and severed the sacred bond with the organic world that was carried over from pagan times.

This is going too far. Science has given us ecology as well as ecocide, the Gaia Hypothesis as well as the China Syndrome. It is a tool to be used wisely, and it is not the fault of Bacon that we have chosen to use this tool otherwise.

But the fact remains that if, like China in Bacon's time, we had chosen stability over enquiry, we would not be where we are now. The rulers of the world in the seventeenth century had the power to make human life hell on earth, but without the revolution Bacon started the earth itself would have been safe.

c. 10,000 BC The First Agricultural Revolution

But if Bacon started the process that would eventually lead us to be able to win a war on Nature, he was not the one who started the fight. Anyone who puts a plough into the earth knows that they are starting a battle. As soon as you clear and till an area of land you are in conflict with weeds, pests and
disease. You don't have to resort to chemical warfare, but fight you must.

But it wasn't always this way.

12,000 years ago we were all hunter-gatherers. This may not be
everyone's cup of tea, but the evidence is that the agricultural revolution actually made things worse. Early agriculturalists worker harder, died younger and lived in more socially fragmented societies.

What's more, it is probably only in the last century or so that average human health improved over what it was farming, and we still work harder than our 'caveman' ancestors.

What farming did though was allow a small elite of kings, priests, warriors and so on to be supported by everyone else. You can see what was in it for them, by why did the rest of us go along with it? They probably didn't, voluntarily.

Agriculture also allowed more people to live on the land, and in a fight 100 half starved farmers will usually beat a dozen well fed hunter-gatherers. The agricultural revolution did eventually allow what we call civilisation. Everything from art to science, dentistry to Doctor Who followed on eventually to make our lives more pleasant followed on.

But twelve millennia on not still everyone enjoys these things, whilst the earth has less than a hundred harvest left in her. Was it really worth it?

Conclusion

We can't turn back the clock even if we want to. We can no more rewrite Breton Woods than we can unthink the scientific revolution. We wouldn't want to rebuild the Berlin Wall even if we could, and we couldn't return to being hunter-gatherers even if we wanted to.

We must continue the fight from where we are, not where we'd like to be. However by looking back at our history, and seeing how how many times what looked right at the time has turned out wrong, should at least make us more modest about our achievements as a species.

As Douglas Adams also wrote:

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

How Capitalism defeated the Left and then itself

Paul Mason and Kondratiev Long Cycles

Marx was wrong.

Not about everything. In fact, all told, not about very much. But he was wrong about something that has been at the very heart of Marxism for a century and a half: the prediction that capitalism will face a crisis which will see it destroyed, and then replaced by something better.

It hasn't happened, despite plenty of people wishing it. Why it hasn't happened is a very important question right now, as capitalism is undoubtedly in a very deep crisis yet is signally failing to die let alone be replaced by something better.

This essay isn't about how to make that happen. Instead it is about why this has not already happened.

Crisis, what crisis?

The first half of Marx's prediction was undoubtedly correct: capitalism always faces a crisis. Or rather crises, because there have been rather a lot of them. This is perhaps Marx's greatest insight, that capitalism is not stable and these problems come round regular as clockwork. What's more, every now and again they are not ordinary run-of-the-mill crises but huge, industrial strength crises that threaten its very existence.

Marx lived through only one of these, so he missed the pattern, but in 1922 the Russian academic Nikolai Dimitrievich Kondratiev spotted it.

Kondratiev was the son of a peasant who had never-the-less managed to get into St Petersberg University. In 1917 he served for a few days in the social democratic administration that followed the fall of the Csar. With the Bolshevik revolution he returned to academia.

What Kondratiev spotted in his numbers was a 50-60 year cycle in interest rates. Marx had shown how overproduction caused regular recessions, but those cycles were over a much shorter time scale than these cycles. This was something much bigger and more fundamental. When he looked at other economic indicators the cycle appeared to be repeated. He traced two of these since the dawn of industrialisation.

This suggested that Marx's theory was wrong, or at least incomplete. If capitalism had survived two major catastrophe's already, why should the next one prove fatal?

Spotting the existence of the cycle though didn't explain it. Academics who followed Kondratiev thought changes in technology explained the cycles. These theories were plausible, but also contradictory. It's rare to find two that agree.

However of ex-journalist and fellow Lancastrian Paul Mason, looking at the problem anew from the present day, thinks there is more to it than this. Having witnesses recent events in Greece first hand, he knows a thing or two about crises. He also knows a thing or two about Marx, which is rare for a journalist.

This is his view of K Cycles and what they mean.

On your cycle

Capitalism requires growth. This is created by the capitalists using their unequal power over workers

to generate profits from the surplus value of their labour. In order to increase productivity they mechanise the workplace. That is Marx in a nutshell.

However, there are limits to this, and it is these limits that cause the periodic crises in capitalism. There is only so much work you can get out of a human being and, at any given level of technology, there is only so much labour you can save by investing in machines. There are other ways out of the conundrum too, such as new markets, new commodities and even new workers, but these have their limits too. At some point there is nowhere else for capitalism to go and capitalism faces an existential crisis.

According to the economists who explain it all with technology, the new machines then appear like magic to solve the problem. However according to Mason, the reality is a lot more messy.

But before we come to that, let's just sort out the time frames we're actually talking about.

The First Wave: 1780 to 1848

The first Kondratiev cycle started when capitalism started at the end of the eighteenth century. A lot of things happen one after the other, the first factories, the canals, better steam engines, railways, steel and so on. This is capitalism raw and primitive. Men, women and children exploited in Dark Satanic Mills. Labour was is unskilled, hours long and management is scary rather than skilful.

This cycle begins quietly but it's trajectory is evident from British, French and US data - the rest of the world is not yet affected much by capitalism - and that data points to it all coming to crashing end in about 1848, the Year of Revolutions and the year that Marx, along with his drinking buddy Engels, publishes The Communist Party Manifesto.

The Second Wave: 1848 to 1898

The second cycle follows on. This is capitalism as we know it. The bourgeoisie in their top hats and the workers in the flat caps. But this is different to what we had before. Labour is not monolithic. There are skilled and semi-skilled workers, there are trades, there are guilds and there is a financial system keeping the wheels turning. There are also Imperialists, seeking out new markets and new resources for exploitation.

But by the 1890s though the wheels are starting to come off the wagon. Economic crises are more frequent, labour unrest is more common and by Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee there is no part of the earth left which had not been brought into the global market. We are at the second crisis.

The Third Wave: 1898 to 1948

What rescues capitalism is the Second Industrial Revolution. New technologies arrive by the score.

The chemical industry produces artificial fertiliser, artificial dyes and petrol, which in turn powers cars, planes and motorbikes. Electricity lights us up and the telephone wires us up.

But perhaps more profound is the change in the nature of capitalism itself. The main actors are now no longer the rich capitalists, but the big corporations. These entities themselves appeared to fly in the face of everything Marx had written. Huge in scale, they ware protected by tariff barriers and operate state sponsored monopolies. Internally their organisation is based on function rather than competition. Writers as diverse as Rosa Luxembourg and James Burnham would eventually look at these big companies and wonder whether there really is much of a difference between capitalism and communism now.

The start of the downward curve of this wave is very easy to spot: the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which heralded the Great Depression. The final end came with the Second World War, a global crisis which, despite killing tens of million of people, never-the-less ushered in the next wave of global capitalism.

The Fourth Wave: 1948 to ?

The exact year this begins is a bit arbitrary, but 1948 is a good one, as it is the year of the Marshal Plan and the invention of the transistor. New technologies abound once again, but perhaps more significant is the change in the nature of society. This is the era of social democracy and the welfare state. 

No longer are the workers exposed to raw capitalism with no protection, they have health care, trade unions, unemployment benefits and representation in the political process. Over the next twenty five years almost everything the Left has fought for since the time of Marx comes to pass, and in return for these gifts from the capitalists the workers embraced consumerism, which in turn makes the wheels of the economy turn faster than ever before.

And then it all goes wrong.

Twenty five years into the cycle is 1973, and there, sure enough, is a huge crisis - the oil shock of 1973. Actually we could have picked other dates in that decade: the Nixon Shock in 1971 when the USA dropping off the Gold Standard or the second oil shock in 1979. Which ever one we go for though, it is clear that by 1980 the good times are over.

No Fifth Wave

If history had followed the deterministic course it appeared to be set on, the next cycle should have

started in 1998. Looking back to that year you can see some evidence for this. Bill Gates launched the second incarnation of his Windows software, and in the next few years Google, Youtube and all the architecture of the information revolution would be up and running.  At the same time we have the Kyoto Agreement of the previous year, potentially ushering in a new green industrial revolution.

But if this was the start of a brand new cycle, then we should not have had the biggest financial crash since the 1920s just ten years later. Instead of recovery the problems of the 1970s just carry on getting worse. Instead of a 25 year downward curve we have a forty year one, with no end in sight.

So what went wrong?

How Cycles End

To answer this question we need to look back at how each of the previous cycles ended.

But first a recap on what is going on here. After twenty five years of growth fuelled by increasing productivity from mechanisation, the economy starts to stagnate. Capital needs to look elsewhere for profits. With all the known markets all full there is only one source left, more exploitation of the workers.

Winding back to the 1810s, here we first see the staggering growth rates of the early industrial revolution start to falter. Capital has to call in the army to deal with the Luddites in 1812, and again in 1819 when 80,000 people gathered at Peterloo to demand reform. By 1832 though the Establishment is getting rattled, and agreed modest reforms. By the 1840s the Chartists are marching and, although an army of Special Constables is drafted in to meet them (including future Liberal PM Gladstone) the government effectively gives in.

Fast forward fifty years and the workers are marching again. Anarchists, communists, socialists and most of all trade union are fighting back. In organised labour capitalism appears to have finally met its match. Many of the bourgeoisie really think the end is nigh.

So here we have it. The new cycles of capitalism are not created by the fortuitous arrival of new technology, nor by the enlightened insight of the capitalists. Capitalisms natural instinct is more repression, and only when that is stopped by the workers fighting back against does it try a different direction. It was not quite how Marx predicted, but not that far off.

Now let's look at the end of the third cycle in the 1930s. Once again the workers are mobilising, here and around the world. But lets ignore for a moment this country. Here we have austerity, but after the Royal Navy mutinies over pay cuts we dropped off the Gold Standard, listen to Keynes and start on the road to recovery. It is bad, but it could have been worse.

And in Europe it is.

The Death of Labour

When Hitler came to power in 1933 his first target is organised labour. When Dachau opens the first people to be enslaved there are 5000 communists and social democrats. Between 1933 and 1946 3.5 million Germans are interned for political reasons and 77,000 judicially executed.

The Left lost a civil war in Austria in 1934, resulting in the Social Democratic Party being outlawed, whilst between 1936 and 1939 Franco kills 350,000 anarchists, communists and republicans during the Spanish Civil War, and more in the repression that follows.

In Greece the dictator Metaxas bans all political parties (including his own, which was a somewhat unique move), arrests the communists and embarked on a war on Greek culture which sees even Plato put on a list of banned authors.There are other crackdowns in Poland, Hungary and the Baltic states.

In Russia the gulags have even more inmates than the German concentration camps, and a similarly terrifying death rate. For good measure the NKVD sends a team over to Mexico to put an ice axe through Trotsky's head.

What Orwell called "the flower of the European working class" is dying. Had Hitler stuck to exterminating his own people, and not had a go at the Poles as well, it may well have died completely. In the First World War many socialists became conscientious objectors, refusing to fight a war for capitalism. That does not happen in the Second World War. The survival of the Left depends on an allied victory.

Capital Wins

Fortunately the allies do win. Organised labour survives, but it is a close run thing.

For a while it prosperes too, but with the fourth cycle starting on its downward spiral this isn't going to last forever. The USA had thought it had been fighting communists since 1950, but really it was fighting nationalists. In 1973 though they have a real working class enemy in Salvador Allende of Chile.

Allende is deposed in a military coup and commits suicide. 3000 of his followers are killed and 27,000 are locked up, many being raped or tortured. Chile, meanwhile, is subject to a radical experiment to try to save capitalism. Now we call it free market reforms, or neo-liberalism, or austerity, but then it was known as the Chicago School model, as that is where its architects came from.

Taxes are be lowered, the state is shrunk, corporations are be given free reign, money is set free and organised labour is crushed. The capitalists ledgers are back in the black again, with the hit being taken by the working poor or the work-less even poorer. 

It works, sort of. Actually the free markets bits aren't that great a success, and Chile has capital controls in place for longer than Milton Friedman's fans like to admit, but crushing the trade unions proves to be a tremendous success. The model works, now it just needs to be rolled out.

The election of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the USA allows this to happen. Reagan has striking air traffic controllers led away in chains whilst Maggie crushes the miners. Environmentalism, which for a while in the seventies had seems almost as big a problem as the oil price, is brushed aside, as Reagan tells us that most pollution is caused by trees.

Capitalism is back in business.

By the 1990s it appears that even the Left agrees. Clinton is elected to balance the budget and New Labour sweeps into power boasting that it doesn't mind if people get "stinking rich". The EU, which has been a bastion of social democracy for so long, goes with the flow.  

Then comes the credit crunch.

New exploitation, new technology and new financial products, it turns out, can't keep creating new money out of nowhere forever. The Left has been defeated, but still the problems of capitalism have not gone away.

Marx is suddenly being disinterred.

The Future

Kondratiev himself had paid a high price for his insight. His theory that capitalism wasn't inevitably doomed, but could reinvent itself with enough of a push, did not play well in Stalin's Russia. He was imprisoned in 1932 and then, on a cold September day in 1938, he is led out to the firing squad. He is the age I am now, 46.

 

His theory's status in economics is mixed. The Right had no interest in capitalism having a crisis, whilst the Left had no interest in capitalism surving a crisis. A handful of futurologists read him, but it took a journalist of the credit crunch to bring him into the twentifirst century.

Mason's view of what happens next is clear. We need to start the delayed fifth cycle. We need a new version of capitalism that will be based on information technology and a green industrial revolution. What's more, just like in the previous four cycles, we also need to redefine the nature of work. Mason believes that a new vision of intellectual property will set information free and a universal income will set people free.

He may be wrong on the details, but I do not believe he is wrong on the fundamental problem. The left's defeat was ultimately capitalism's defeat as well. The sooner we all, left and right, see this and move on, the better.  

Paul Mason Postcapitalism: A Guide To Our Future (2015) Allen Lain

COP21: When Optimism Is Dangerous

So it begins, COP21 in Paris. And there is reason to be optimistic.

We might get a deal, it might ward off the worst of Climate Change. We might be able to build on it to keep global warming to acceptable levels. Well, it's possible, but it's not certain, and in no small part this is because the great and the good appear to have contracted the dangerous disease of optimism.

Is optimism a failing? Not usually. On the contrary it's a great trait to have in an employee. However when the people at the top leave uncertain reality behind for rose tinted certainties, you've got problems.

If you want an example of the perils of optimism look no further than the Iraq War. Why an oil funded ignoramus like George W Bush blundered into Iraq is not that much of a mystery. However why the US army, whose Top Brass boast almost as many M.A.s as medals, continued to believe it could rescue his failed venture when all the evidence was they couldn't can only be explained by the Army's institutional 'can do' optimism. The result is a failed state, the rise of Daesh and the atrocities in Paris and elsewhere.

The Iraq disaster though pails into insignificance compared to the dangers of getting Climate Change wrong.

Many of my fellow environmental campaigners though fail to understand the way business leaders think about the problem. The perception is that they are all fossil fools, believing climate change denial conspiracy theories and desperately trying to avoid the problem. There are certainly a few like that - far too many in fact - but for most business leaders if you ask them about Climate Change they will say it's a problem and here's how we're going to solve it: we do this, this and this. Easy

The problem is that their beliefs are usually wildly optimistic at best, and actually delusional at worst.

During my brief career as a gatecrasher to corporate shindigs I've heard C-Suite optimists from construction companies tell me in all seriousness how sustainable their companies will be even as they are covering the countryside with tarmac and I've had smiley faced board members from BP tell me how they will move into solar power and make a killing in Renewables. Instead they moved into tar sands and they did their killing in the Gulf of Mexico.

However the deluded optimist-in-chief of this army of faux climate warriors is bearded wonder Richard Branson. In 2006, after Al Gore converted him to the cause, he pledged $3 billion to the fight against Climate Change. In 2009 he launched the Carbon War Room to teach business how to make money by cutting emissions and in 2010 he announced the Virgin Earth Challenge.

All of which sounds wonderful until you realise that Virgin airlines now emits 40% more Greenhouse gases than it did when Al Gore gave Branson that personal PowerPoint, whilst the $25 million prize for inventing something to suck them out of the atmosphere again has still not been awarded. Only 10% of his promised money has appeared, although as Branson's personal wealth increase by over $2 billion, the Carbon War Room has achieved 50% success.

It's an inconvenient truth that straight after meeting Gore, Branson launched a new air route to Dubai and before Carbon War Room opened its doors Virgin America took to the air. He's also bought a Formula One team, tried to launch an exploding space plane and increased his own personal carbon footprint to the size of a small island by relocating to a tax haven in the Caribbean.

So like the War on Terror, Branson's pre-emptive strike on Climate Change only seems to have made the problem worse.

But back to Paris, and those business leaders hoping to lead the way to a low carbon future. As I blogged the other week, even the IPCCs own plans have been hijacked by the optimists, with the scenarios in its Synthesis Report being based on either time travel or imaginary technologies. However it isn't just the IPCC that has problems with reality.

Most industries have a plan of sorts on how to move to a low carbon economy and, as I said, most
CEOs you meet are wildly optimistic about theirs. Unfortunately, taken together, they are a disaster.

The shipping industry, for example, is going to run on biofuels. So is the car industry, and the aviation industry. The US Navy has already tried biomass. Do you see the problem here?

A back-of-a-postcard calculation suggests that for everyone to do this would require 50% of the world's agricultural land to be converted to biofuels. Even if half the world would agree to stop eating in order to allow the other half to carry on consuming, there is no way we could build the infrastructure required in realistic time frame.

It's a similar story with nuclear power, which Bill Gates is gambling on despite the eye watering costs, or Carbon Capture and Storage, which has never been tried on an industrial scale but which features in almost everyone's plans, and so on.

So am I advocating pessimism then? No, I'm certainly not. Climate Change is not an insoluble problem. We can beat it, but we need to change. Forget flying. A Virgin train produces 90% less emissions than a Virgin plane. Forget biofuels. One wind turbine incidentally creates as much power as 2000 hectares of biomass. Above all forget endless economic growth. Lets redistribute what we have and all live happier lives. There are people in Paris advocating just that, but they are mostly on the other side of the barricades to the optimists, if they are not under house arrest. Meanwhile inside the security cordon the lobbyists are telling the politicians that we can beat Climate Change and make money.

Maybe pessimism from world's business would be infinitely worse, but then people tend to ignore sourpusses. The deluded optimist though has the power, like the Pied Piper of Hamlin, to lead us all to our doom.

Climate Change: 'Outside Context Problem'

Protests in Paris are now officially banned, so the world's corporate leaders are now free to meet the world's political leaders without any pesky protesters getting in the way.

There may well be the odd scientist wandering around looking lost, and a few representatives from the world's better behaved NGOs, but mostly this will be an occasion for those who run the world to meet those who own the world.

It will no doubt be a jolly occasion.  After all pretty much everyone present will agree on three things at least: that taxes on wealth should be low, that markets should be lightly regulated, and that economic growth must continue forever.

It will also, for the most part, be completely pointless. As George Monbiot put it earlier this year the entire twenty five year process that has brought us to COP21 has mostly involved "hundreds of intelligent, educated, well-paid and elegantly-dressed people wasting their lives".

The reason is not that global warming is an insoluble problem, but for those meeting in Paris Climate Change will be an outside context problem. Let em explain.

Outside Context Problem


The term Outside Context Problem was coined by the late, great Scottish science fiction writer Iain M Banks for his 1996 novel  Excession. This is how he defined one:

The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.

For the high priests of Neoliberalism, whose response to problems is to cut taxes, sign free trade deals and, when the worst comes to the worst, invent some new money in the form of Quantative Easing,  Climate Change is a problem about as welcome as Cortez was for the Aztecs.

When faced with an Outside Context Problems cultures usually try two strategies in relatively quick succession; first pretend it doesn't exist and secondly try to placate the gods with a bit of magic.

We've been engaged in the first activity for a while now. Many of the key players have retired from the game, but a few with nothing better to do with their lives still soldier on. No doubt some will show up in Paris, but I suspect it will be their last, forlorn stand, because now we are well into the second phase.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, having spent a quarter of a century explaining very patiently to its backers that the scientists were in fact right about Global Warming in 1988, produced in December last year its Synthesis Report, which attempted to square the science with the economics.

The report contains 400 scenarios that show how to give a 50/50 chance of limiting Climate Change to 2 degrees by 2100 whilst still being "economically feasible". That means, no excessive taxation, no excessive regulation and economic growth continuing forever. This where the magic comes in.

In 344 of those scenarios emissions will drop at some point to less than zero. In 56 scenarios, emissions will peak in 2010. I shouldn't need to point out that at the present time it is impossible to emit less than zero CO2, and that by the time the report was published 2010 was nearly five years in the past, and emissions most definitely did not peak then.

So, without non-existent technologies or time travel, how many scenarios did the IPCC come up with that were "economically feasible"? Precisely none.

The ideas that increasingly individual wealth is not a reliable measure of personal wellbeing, that we'd all be better off corporations worked for our benefit and not the other way round or that the way the global economy has been run for the last thirty years is the only way it could ever be run, are apparently as alien to the people who run the world as the steam engine and the Maxim gun were the occupants of Mr Bank's metaphorical island.

All of which suggests we need to make an urgent choice as to whether we follow the rules of physics, or of economics. We need to get Climate Change in context because otherwise, as Iain M Banks said, an Outside Context Problems is one "most civilizations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encounters a full stop."

Sources

Duality in Climate Science by Professor Kevin Anderson 
IPCC AR5 Synthesis Report
Excession by Iain M Banks

One Million Climate Jobs

I am an anti-fracking campaigner.

Now fracking is a nightmare that we will be well rid of, but the problem with nightmares is that they are very limited in their power to get people to change. Much more powerful are dreams. This report of part of my dream for a better world.

It's subject is political economy, which the Victorian Radical John Ruskin defined as "the production, preservation and distribution, at the fittest time and place, of useful and pleasurable things". If an economy does not do that it's not working, and our economy is not working. The poor are going to the wall, the Middle Class is disappearing, richest 1% have more wealth than they can possibly need and the richest 0.1% make the 1% look like paupers. What's more if we continue to overshoot the carrying capacity of Planet Earth it will get worse. The current situation is environmentally and socially unsustainable.

This pamphlet starts with the assumption that living within our ecological limits should be the first consideration of an economy not the last, but also that along with environmental prudence must come social justice. Because although we are all on the same sinking ship, some people are nearer the hole than others.

As I've said, I am opposed to shale gas. But let me say something that may surprise you. There are two things about fracking I really like.

Firstly, it makes people think about where their energy comes from. We all know about the wars we fight and the people we torture to get our oil, we know about the dangers of Arctic oil and the devastation that is tar sands, we know about Fukushima and the Gulf of Mexico. But these are things that happen far away. Even if you are an aware person they can seem unreal. But when a fracking rig arrives in your backyard, the choice about how we make our energy becomes very real indeed.

Secondly fracking, or rather the opposition to fracking, has brought a wide range of people together; anarchists, socialists, Trade Unionists, environmentalists, anarchist socialist Trade Unionist environmentalists - but that could be just me. And when we get together we find we have more in common than not.

When Old Skool left wingers talk about nationalising the power supply, and when Greens call for community energy we are talking about the same thing. Whether your community is Barton Moss or Hamburg or England, it’s the same thing. Now if people own their own power it’s up to them how they generate it, but I don’t see many communities clubbing together to buy a fracking rig, or a tar sands operation or an open cast coal mine.

Thinking about how we generate our energy is just one of the areas this report looks at. It also looks at how were we live and work, how we travel and how we farm and dispose of our waste. It's about embracing new technologies, but also old values. It's about solar panels and tidal power, but also about bikes, trains and warm houses.

Lets look at the figures; 400,000 Climate Jobs in Energy, 180,000 in building, 310,000 in transport and with more in training, education, farming and recycling it makes One Million Climate jobs. Those are the numbers. The details are in the report, but you probably already know them. We know what needs to be done, we just need to it. What this report shows is why we will want to do it.
 

Nysted Offshore Wind Farm (Danish Energy Authority)

And those One Million Climate jobs will create at least another 500,000 jobs supplying the nuts and bolts and gaffer tape and everything else needed by those one million climate workers. Then there will also be at least another 250,000 non-climate jobs as the workers in the new jobs spend their money on beer and football and fish and chips, or Chianti and tennis and sun-dried tomatoes, depending on which social class I choose to stereotype. But either way they will have money to spend as these will be real jobs. Not social engineering via zero hours contracts, not financial engineering via the City of London, but real engineering, just like how we used to do it.

How do we pay for all this? Well, we have already paid for the alternative. Each of us has paid £6000 towards bailing out the banks, which is probably more than most of us will give to Greenpeace, or the Green Party or paid in union subs. When the money was needed, governments found it. They need to find it again because finance serves industry, not the other way round, and because the Earth is too big to fail too.

We can stop the richest tax payers paying a tax rate that is half what it was when Winston Churchill was last Prime Minister. We can stop the richest people paying no tax at all. We can have a Robin Hood tax on the silly money that flies around the ether and we can have a mansion tax on the silly celebrities who think £2 million will only buy you a garage in London.

How do you get people to change to a low carbon way of living? There are four levers that will push people in the right direction and I expect we'll use a combination of them all.

Firstly there's Peak Oil. Not much sign of that right now I'll admit, but just wait. It will return. Oil will not be this cheap forever.

Secondly governments can subsidise the good. Make Public Transport so cheap only Jeremy Clarkson would drive.

Thirdly we can tax the bad. Every high-carbon industry in the world has modelled the effect of a minimum carbon price on its business. They are expecting it. We just need to do it.

Finally, because we believe in fairness above all else, we can use carbon rationing. The Fleming Policy Centre, a handful of people existing on almost no money, have developed a system of Tradable Energy Quotas and even managed to get Parliament to produce a report on it. Rather more amazingly the New Economic Foundation managed to get the head of the World Trade Organisation to admit that if the EU introduced a system of carbon rationing it would be perfectly entitled to put up tariff barriers to make it work. It won't be easy, but it's possible.

So here it is, a report that shows how the solution to our ecological crisis is also the solution to our social crisis. But on its own this pamphlet is just so many words and numbers. On its own it does nothing. Only if all of us use it as a tool to campaign for change we need will it have the power to make a difference. We need to campaign for the National Climate Agency and if we can't get that we must campaign for local action. We must show people how for every ten fracking jobs we prevent we potentially create a 100 climate jobs.

And we must do this together.

The Climate Change deniers, funded by those who benefit most from our current system of austerity for the poor and socialism for the rich, tell people that Climate Change is a conspiracy between the Greens and the socialists to take their wealth and turn our economic system upside down.

Let's make their worst nightmares come true.

One Million Climate Jobs report