New South African Review 1. Anthony Butler
the USA and Europe are reluctant to take decisive action against them, regarding them as ‘too big to fail’. Indeed, executives of these institutions continue to pay themselves enormous salaries and bonuses, with much talk but little action against them. This is unsurprising, given the fact that core government elites are themselves part of what David Rothkopf (2009) calls the ‘superclass’ – six thousand people in a planet of six billion who, in addition to powerful governments and international finance, also run transnational corporations and global media houses (Rothkopf also includes world religions and underground criminal and terrorist empires).
Fossil capitalism is a system of accumulation based on mass consumerism (the creation of everlasting wants), but because of rising global inequality and stagnant or declining real wages, these new wants cannot be satisfied because potential consumers do not have the means to purchase the commodities produced. The only way out is increased indebtedness – household debt in the USA has increased from 62 per cent of GDP in 1997 to 92 per cent of GDP in 2005 (Foster and Magdoff 2009: 47). Consumer debt as a percentage of disposable income increased from 62 per cent in 1975 to 127 per cent in 2005 (Foster and Magdoff 2009: 29). This mirrors the increased indebtedness of the US economy as a whole, as it borrows on the financial markets to maintain its position as global hegemon – by fuelling its war machine (a form of military Keynesianism), preserving its legitimacy through social and internal security spending, continuing to provide subsidies to threatened industries (particularly agriculture) and, of course, bailing out the banking system.
ACCUMULATION, ‘AFFLUENZA’ AND THE RISE OF THE ‘AMERICUM’
The end result of over two centuries of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ is a system of uneven development, with rising inequality at both the national level, in general, and at the global level. According to noted African economist Samir Amin (2008), the proportion of ‘precarious and pauperised’ members of the working classes (broadly defined to include formal and informal workers and the unemployed) has over the past fifty years risen from less than one quarter to more than one half of the global urban population.
Economic globalisation has, since the 1980s, simultaneously enlarged the periphery within the core countries (within increased informalisation of work and unemployment, and a declining social wage), as well as enlarged the core within the periphery and particularly within the semi-periphery (countries such as Brazil, South Africa and India, and increasingly China), as capital moves around globally. However, with a few exceptions such as the now ‘developed’ status of east Asian countries like South Korea, the overall global picture of uneven, enclave development remains intact, at least for the foreseeable future. This is despite ostentatious claims by national elites, such as in India, that their country will be ‘fully developed’ within the next thirty to fifty years – conveniently ignoring that 95 per cent of its workforce is informalised labour (Bieler et al 2008), while in the rural areas ‘development’ has deepened immiseration, causing a massive increase in farm suicides and the rapid rise of Maoist groups championing the cause of the rural poor (Perry 2010).
These islands of privilege are, of course, modelled on western patterns of consumption – particularly that of the USA. Thomas Friedman (2008) warns about ‘too many Americans’ in the world today – meaning too many hyper-consumers, influenced over the past decades by American mass media (particularly films, advertising, television shows and magazines) that celebrate the ‘American dream’ of unsustainable consumption based on the creation of incessant wants (as opposed to real needs). Friedman, a short while ago a celebrant of economic globalisation based on spreading growth everywhere (see Friedman 1999 and 2005) now warns against ‘America’s affluenza’, ‘an unsustainable addiction to growth’ (2008:54, my emphasis).
Friedman (2008: 56) quotes Tom Burke of the NGO 3GE (Third Generation Environmentalism), who coined the term ‘Americum’ – a unit of 350 million people with an income above US$15 000 and a ‘growing penchant for consumerism’, particularly American-style energy-sapping living spaces, cars, fast foods and levels of unrecycled garbage. According to Burke, current growth and consumption trends suggest that by 2030 the number of Americums will have increased from two to eight or nine – at least a fourfold increase within the space of between thirty and forty years: in other words, from 700 million people to over 3 billion – half the current world population. Of course the total population will also have grown (some say to about 7–8 billion by 2030).
If the crisis of accumulation is temporarily arrested, and global growth and ‘prosperity’ increases as suggested, these carbon copies of American consumerism will threaten the very foundations of that prosperity. It will inevitably run into the natural limits of growth – what Jeff Wacker of the Electronic Data Systems (quoted in Friedman, p 57) calls the ‘eco-logic of capitalism’ which, says Friedman, has become ‘an important, if not the most important, restraint on growth’. The expansion of Americum production and consumption will require the colonisation of three more planets, because, argues Friedman (2008: 55), ‘we are going to make planet earth so hot, and strip it so bare of resources, that nobody … will be able to live like Americans one day’.
Friedman concedes that it would be arrogant for Americans like himself to urge developing countries not to grow, implying that they should remain poor. He quotes an Egyptian cabinet member:
It is like the developed world ate all the hors d’oeuvre, all the entrees, and all the desserts and then invited the developing world for a little coffee ‘and asked us to fit the bill’. That is not going to happen. The developing world will not be denied (Friedman 2008:55).
The solution, he argues, is partly for the rest of the world to leapfrog unsustainable technologies and develop on a green basis (which China is beginning to do, albeit inconsistently, given its rising addiction to private cars and carbon-intensive power plants). Ultimately, he suggests, this will only happen if America itself undergoes a green revolution, and radically re-orients its patterns of production and consumption – so that when others copy America, they will not be carbon copies, but green copies.
GREEN CAPITALISM OR ECO-SOCIALISM?
The above analysis from within the very heart of the US establishment – the eco-logic of capitalism – resonates to some extent with the emerging eco-Marxist or eco-socialist school of thought (Foster 2009; Burkett 2005; Altvater 2006; Albo 2006; Lowy 2006; Kovel 2002). The ecological consequences of hyper-accumulation include, in the words of John Bellamy Foster (2002: 12):
... global warming, the destruction of the ozone layer, removal of tropical forests, elimination of coral reefs, overfishing, extinction of species, loss of genetic diversity, the increasing toxicity of our environment and our food, desertification, shrinking water supplies, lack of clean air, and radioactive contamination – to name a few. The list is very long and rapidly getting longer, and the spatial scale on which these problems manifest themselves are increasing.
If