Q: What’s the difference between cheap, clean, plentiful energy from nuclear fusion and the final and utter collapse of capitalism?

A: None. Both are always ten to twenty years in the future.

If we know anything about the Left it’s that it has always seen the failures and brutalities of capitalism clearly, and has always failed to appreciate its adaptability and powers of survival.

Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond

Now here comes Jared Diamond, the brilliant eco-historian (of Guns, Germs and Steel) whose last message to us was about how civilizations collapse, telling us in today’s NYTimes that big corporations may save us all. What gives? After all, Collapse was a book that nourished the imminent-end-of-capitalism theme in many a lefty’s heart.

You could dismiss this as what happens when a professor who has been immersed for decades in studying birds in New Guinea, and then in thinking big thoughts about how geography does (and does not) determine history, gets lionized in high society and bedazzled by the smooth talkers of the corporate elite with whom he now serves on various high level boards. They do their greenwash talk and hope rises in his chest. After all, the entire title of that book was Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and which of us does not want ours to succeed?

Be my guest if that mode of dismissing Diamond works for you. But it doesn’t for me. I am a huge Diamond fan, but that isn’t even the main reason I am taking his corporate saviors article seriously: I am highly skeptical of it, but not at all dismissive. I think it has within it some significant clues about how the next fifty years may unfold. I think that as climate change produces profound effects over the coming years, the capitalist system will once again surprise its critics as it throws most everything it has into solving the problem. What was greenwash will turn genuine.

My skepticism is not just about whether that will be enough. I don’t know if it will. But half enough may be sufficient to keep this civilization creaking along, long enough for further rounds of the reformation of business to take place. The civilization that could emerge out of this evolution would not be capitalism but something else, some kind of humanistic, ecophilic, regulated market system. The ideologues of the free market will be defeated, but so will the utopian prophets of the Left, as usual.

Two major factors make me prone to accept this argument. The first is that I have no idea how fast or slow global weirding will impact us. If it happens with catastrophic swiftness, Katrina multiplied, with huge crop failures, refugees in their tens of millions, I think the precariously fine tuning of our present financial system could easily get blown and a downward Depression spiral could become unstoppable. But if climate change happens at a more measured pace, I think it could energize the system to respond in the same way that previous threats of collapse and revolution have energized it, with similar results.

So the second reason is the one I started this post with: the Left’s consistent inability to appreciate why capitalism is so resilient.

It was once thought that capitalism’s downfall would be the impoverishment of the workers. But then the system’s productivity proved so astonishing that it became possible to provide the workers with homes, cars, TVs, social security, education and massively elongated lifespans while still increasing the incomes of the capitalists faster. It was this win-win (even if the bosses and shareholders’ wins were much fatter than the majority’s) that undermined socialist dreams as much as anything else.

Peter Drucker argues that Hitler fell into this trap of underestimating capitalism as well. He wrote that Hitler was apparently not that concerned when America entered the war, because he thought American arms manufacturers would take years to ramp up. For example, America had barely any lens-making industry, lenses being needed for every gunsight, and it was well known in Germany that a long apprenticeship was needed for skilled lensmakers. But the Americans, whose capitalist system had freed them from medieval guild regulations, turned farm boys into lensmakers in a few weeks and produced arms at a stunning rate.

Back on the Left, the Ehrlichs, who in the late 1960s predicted major world famines before 2000, and the Club of Rome who predicted major resource shortages in the same timeframe, underestimated the ingenuity and technical inventiveness of the system, and its ability to ramp that process up and deliver new solutions when presented with the financial incentives to do so. Yes, a lot of small farmers got destroyed and driven to suicide by the Green Revolution, but famine on the predicted scale was averted. And mineral resources all got cheaper, as price incentives worked to find new sources of supply and replace items that were getting too expensive with functional alternatives. (See here for a piece about Julian Simon, the saint of sustainable capitalism: if you can stomach the hagiography, please read it, as the argument is still one that has to be understood).

Radical feminists and gay liberationists, like the most radical dreamers of the civil right movement before them, also had their moments of seeing their own revolutions as the ones that would change the whole capitalist system. And there is little doubt that they would if taken to their logical conclusion that every person must be treated as a sacred being (or in atheist terms as someone equally worthy of respect). But the system was astonishingly adaptable, and despite the continued presence of glass ceilings, it embraced identity politics enough that the more radical energy of those movements has been dissipated or channeled into more reformist goals (what 1970s gay liberationist would have thunk that gay marriage would be the rallying cry?).

Capitalism is above all pragmatic. It runs on the traditional beliefs of its own adherents, be they anti-woman, racist, homophobic, contemptuous towards the working stiff, militaristic, pro-monopoly, free market, anti-regulation, or anti-ecological, right up until such time as the system understands that the bottom line is being harmed by these neolithic attitudes. Then it throws over as many as necessary to continue on. And this is assisted by the education of the capitalist class themselves, whose gay children confront them, whose women become feminists, and whose leading lights see the light in one way or another.

Diamond, the prophet of collapse, is seeing and telling us that in the greatest challenge of our time, for the sustainability of civilization, capitalism will again be, and indeed is already becoming, more radical and progressive than we expect. We only do ourselves a disservice as progressives if we imagine otherwise.

Something I find attractive about Diamond in this piece is that he doesn’t demonize the corporate executives themselves. He has met and worked with individuals he knows to be decent people with a desire to sustain civilization, people who are not entirely taken over by the Dark Side as in some kind of left myth about what a corporate bigwig must be like. One of the attractive aspects of the Christian socialists who founded the British Labour Party was that, unlike their Marxist comrades, they tended to see members of the British ruling classes and employers as misguided co-religionists whose Christian compassion could be appealed to, which proved an effective strategy for working with the few who were able to respond.

So let’s imagine that the big corporations turn towards sustainability and build hope and energy towards that goal. Progressives will push them harder. As we replace GDP with measures of true welfare and sustainability, we will find ourselves able to pass legislation close to, if not matching, the dreams of a Social Responsibility Amendment (SRA) to the U.S. Constitution that the Network of Spiritual Progressives has been promoting (see point 3 in the Spiritual Covenant with America).It is not hard to imagine, if we have time enough for an orderly evolution to take place, that some kind of some kind of humanistic, ecophilic regulated market system, will emerge.

And as I wrote above, “The ideologues of the free market will be defeated, but so will the utopian prophets of the Left, as usual.” The sheer pragmatism of capitalism, its bottom line readiness to ditch the conservative ideologies of its own proponents, will enable it to preserve its greatest assets, which are its innovativeness, productivity and adaptability.

Some century or so down the line, money will still be hugely important as an incentive, even though it will share the pool with social goals built into the system. Selfishness will still be hugely important as a motivation for human actions, even though it will be channeled by cultural expectations into different outcomes. We will get status less from material display and more from social and spiritual display: that is, playing the best tunes, growing the best veggies, being the best node in the community, radiating the best warmth, for these are the nourishments we will be looking to, selfishly and cooperatively. It won’t be the republic of heaven on earth, the dreamed-of Caring Society. The prophets will be still be as disappointed as they are today. But it will not be Collapse either. That’s the possibility I see in Diamond’s article.


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