Green Capitalism: manufacturing scarcity in an age of abundance by James Heartfield

James Heartfield presented the Brighton Salon Book Launch in Conversation with Rob Clowes in March

What follows is Sean Bell's report

James Heartfield was candid about what had driven him to publish Green Capitalism. He was annoyed by what he called the sheer hypocrisy of super-rich environmentalists jetting around the world telling everybody else that that they shouldn’t go jetting around the world.

Al Gore, whose $30 million share of Microsoft is just a part of his personal wealth, justifies his jetting by pointing out that he pays for carbon offsets. James says he doesn’t: Paramount Pictures pays Al Gore’s carbon offsets – to a company chaired by Al Gore!

James briefly (and I thought clearly) introduced the ideas in his book before he was questioned and cross-examined by the chair and audience but, to skip ahead, it emerged in the bar afterwards that some of those present were confused about his stance. To summarise: James sees great advantages in capitalist mass-production and industry and the economic growth and social development that implies. However, that development and the goods it makes available to many of us are by-products of the real objective of capitalist production - to make money, not useful things. In recent times, many capitalists and companies have promoted and shaped the environmental agenda to realise big profits from making nothing at all while simultaneously convincing people that they should make do with less. So while James is critical of the system, which has always been unfair to many people, he sees what advantages it has being completely eroded for the luckier consumers with unnecessary cutbacks in production.

James’s introduction

The Seattle riots of nine years ago had an anti-capitalist character that was against big business. Now the green agenda has moved from the margins and into the mainstream to the extant that only people such as petrol-headed Jeremy Clarkson or the head of Ford buck the universal ideology of green capitalism.

Al Gore, Zac Goldsmith, Bill Gates and Prince Charles are now leading voices in environmentalism. Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall wants us to spend eight quid rather than two on our chickens. Universities and hospitals are forced to buy carbon offset rights from big energy companies such as BP (British Petroleum) and Esso.

James identifies the process that popularises these trends as the manufacture of scarcity, a cultural creation of shortage that strangely echoes the WW2 rationing advice of boiling nettles for soup. In previous generations poor people really were undernourished and suffered from complaints such as rickets that left them with bent legs for their whole lives. Poor people are now fat and there’s no shortage of food. Indeed we throw about two thirds of it away.

Capitalists are largely responsible, James says, for creating the idea that the earth’s resources are running out. Oil, for example, is increasingly being found in the largely unexplored depths of the earth’s crust. The warming atmosphere is reinvented as a shortage of atmosphere by current carbon emission regulations and land is being withdrawn from food production because agriculture is so efficient, creating the raising food prices now blamed on bio fuel production.

Buy an organic chicken if you want to, James argues, but being cruel to chickens is fine. We are not forced to buy organic. Sixty billion people (unless one advocates a cull) cannot live on the earth without mass production and being cruel to nature. There are no shortages as such, just some people withholding the means of existence from others.

Chair’s questions

Brighton Salon Chairman Robert Clowes asked James if he thought green ideas originally came from the right and if the environmental movement was an ideology that came from the top down rather than from the bottom up, as most people would say. Also, how could James say that green ideas were incoherent, employing arguments that did not match up with solutions to problems? Surely we are all affected by the ethics of the environmental movement.

Fashions come and go, said James. He used to read Soviet Weekly in the late 70s at college and it was always contrasting the evil capitalist despoliation of nature with the ‘immaculate’ conservation of the Soviet Union! Both left and right had used ecological arguments over the years. The American radicals of the 60s had taken up ecology and environmental issues as part of their competition with the organised left. The Ecology Party in Britain, in protest against mass society and modernity, was critical of both the ruling elite above and the working class organisations below its middle-class base. However, the Club of Rome, involving Fiat, had fixed natural limits firmly onto the political agenda.

The organised left was humiliated by the events of 1989 [when the Berlin Wall came down and the Communist bloc gave up] and so embraced environmentalism.

James said his book is specifically about green capitalism. Initiatives such as the Rio Summit were from above. The anti-roads protesters of the mid-90s, for example, were consciously trying to regain the initiative in green issues from the elite.

The protest against modernity is something we all feel, he asserted. The social change we experience is imposed on us as something external and we lack the social vehicles to express our anger. Visions of the future have unfortunately been problematic and the inability to control the events that bring about change can make change itself feel like disaster.

Popularly, in the endless columns and media, ‘it isn’t easy being green’. Do we save the countryside or put up wind farms? Shall we develop nuclear power? Green questions are full of complex conundrums. Nature does not know itself and any theories about it are those of humanity, imposed on nature for our own existence. As a concept nature with a big ‘N’, nature feels like a thing but you cannot put your finger on it. The unity of nature, which in physical reality is largely a vacuum with a few bits in it, is a unity we impose upon it.

Luckily for us, the ball of stuff we live on has an atmosphere. This may be heating up, but, does nature care? No. Only we care, projecting our desires upon nature with questions about wind farms, the beauty of the earth, the ozone layer or greenhouse gases.

These concerns are based on our own rejection of the mass society and are being led by a snobbish hatred of shopping and cheap chicken and nylon clothes and big cars. Four-by-fours, for example, are being attacked by the Greater London Authority despite them being safer and having been shown to run fewer people over. The problem with rejecting mass society and promoting anti-mass ideology is that one cannot explicitly advocate that everybody should hate everybody else, James concluded.

Objections points and questions from the audience

The discussion ranged around a huge number of questions but two of them were thrown back and forth particularly.

Mass production came under attack for several reasons. Climate change caused by industry, for example, makes wells run out too early in the season in Burkina Faso. The exploitation of oil reserves on the Niger Delta pollutes the water so badly that local fishermen have resorted to terrorism to defend it. In China, the rush for growth has devastated rivers and harmed the people who rely on them.

James was wrong to say that there is no scarcity. The slums of the Third World, and fast-developing countries such as India, show there is clearly a great deal of poverty and scarcity. There is a great North-South divide across the planet of caused by mass-production.

Furthermore, manufacturing scarcity could not be a coherent ideology if it relied on less production because the economic system needs growth to survive. James made it sound a bit like a conspiracy. Was it not the case that the fast-developing economies, particularly India and China, were now determining the rate of growth, not the post-industrial economies of the Group of Seven?

There were also requests for clarification on how, exactly, energy companies become rich by carbon trading. Whatever profits might be found by companies and celebrity green capitalists cynically selling environmental rights or products, did not business people really believe that environmental disaster genuinely threatened not just profits but humanity’s very survival?

‘I want to have my cake and eat it – what else is it for?’

James did not have time to answer all the issues that came up and we could have talked for another couple of hours.

James emphasised that mass-production and big industry are now essential. Six billion people must create conditions in which that many people need to exist through farming intensively and organising complex societies on a large scale. Anything else relies on the methods of Pol Pot. Shall we start with people who wear spectacles? Technological society does not just provide the tinsel of life, but life itself in the form of the simple needs of life. You might hate white vans, and white van men, but everything you need is at some stage moved by white vans.

Burkina Faso is an extreme example of a poor country and China shows that hope can come from economic development. We in the West have ‘post-material’ values that are gross when we say that machines must only be made in the West or deny fridges to Asia and elsewhere. The fishermen of Nigeria do not share the rest of that country’s desire for goods. Indians want to own cars. Not to have things is bad.

Conspiracy? Not in my book, said James. Capitalism is ‘muscular’, geared to making money. As it changes it requires guns, growth, flags and eventually a War Against Terror and organic chickens. The bottled water it sold us will change because capitalism sells us back our own ideas. That does not mean that we consume less, however. The Ecologist is full ads for fantastic goods sold on their contribution to a lifestyle. Environmentalism is the champion of consumer society because consumption of certain things is seen as a virtue.

Having sorted the waste into three bins at his Islington home, James said he knew that the council will only mix it all up again and send it by ship to Malaya to have it sorted again. Green capitalism is an insane and destructive process of not making the stuff we need like tractors and railways and schools.

The EU’s response to a problem with the atmosphere is to re-imagine it as a problem of the market. The emissions trading system creates legal restraints on activity which can breed ways to make money. The atmosphere is treated as a commodity so that greenhouse gases can be restricted. This in turn encourages speculation in the EUAs created to be sold. Bids for them were encouraged and they were sold cheaply to energy companies who are experienced in negotiating and speculating on all kinds of rights worldwide.

Universities and hospitals and other institutions then realised they had to buy these rights and where sold them at 10 times the price originally paid. The price then fell back down again meaning that the institutions could not even recoup by selling the rights they did not need. The EU did not mean for this to happen. Universities cannot strategically compete with large companies holding surplus capital specifically for speculation.

For you and I, James said, growth is having more and better stuff. For business, stuff is the means to make money. Carbon offset products can be sold through charities (where purchases can be doubled by the call to duplicate them in Africa) and the government might pay for half the costs, as with solar panels.

Industrialised agricultural production is far from perfect but it is a fantastic success. The share of household income spent on food and shoes has gradually fallen from a third to a tenth – until 2005 when the pressure of farmland retirement started prices rising again. The world park of retired land is the size of China and a tiny percentage of this land brought back into agricultural production would lower food prices again. There have been food riots and protests about onions in India and pasta in Italy, needlessly. The problem is not bio fuels that account for only 2% of farmland use.

Food production is just one example of manufactured scarcity, James said. When researching for his last book, Let’s Build, he had asked people in the house building business why they didn’t build and sell more houses. ‘Don’t be stupid, James,’ they said. ‘We build houses to make money. If we build lots of them the price will come down. We can make more money building a few very expensive houses. We’re in the house building business, James!”

Thanks, credits and further reading

The Brighton Salon would like to thank James Heartfield for a controversial and entertaining presentation. He sold some copies of his book in the bar afterwards (‘red capitalism’ he called it), but it is available through his website, www.heartfield.org, priced 7.50). Regardless of your views, it’s a well written and thought-provoking read and I recommend it. Two reviews of Green Capitalism: manufacturing scarcity in an age of abundance are available on the Culture Wars website (www.culturewars.org) and on Spiked (follow the link on the top right-hand side of the Brighton Salon Arena homepage).

Thanks again to all who participated in the event.

Coming soon: Are you happy now?

Sean Bell, Brighton Salon Secretary