Greens economics (1): Venturing inside the black box of capitalism

I will refrain from dredging through the detail of Greens economic policies in order to highlight some of the key philosophical issues, including those touted by party leaders but not embodied in their policy documents (which can be found here, under “sustainable economy”). In part I take this approach because these documents are often messy compromises taken at past National Policy Conferences, and therefore lack the coherence that a single-author policy statement might have. If there’s a strength about the Greens’ internal culture it is that there has been genuine space for disagreement within their consensus decision-making structures.

But messiness and contradictory statements also reflect real internal divisions on economics—ones that cannot be explained by simple recourse to electoral pragmatism (such as Bob Brown’s recent populist calls for a cut in the corporate tax rate to 28 percent “to help small business” when the party’s policy is actually to increase that rate to 33 percent).

The best way to summarise the contradictions is with these two statements:

1. The Greens are united in wanting to subordinate economic processes and policies to the needs of the environment
2. The Greens are divided about how much they want the logic of markets (and capitalism) overridden by democratic social control in the interests of the environment and social justice

As I argued in Overland Journal, at the centre of Australian Greens political philosophy is a scathing critique of the degradation of the ecology by human actions, sitting alongside a much less convincing analysis of why human society is like this. It is the limitations of this explanatory framework that create the tension between different approaches to economic questions, under a shared commitment to putting nature first.

For the Greens, social critique is often posed in ethical rather than structural terms, and this resort to “values” underpins much of the way that Greens thinkers see political change. It is also a critique that appeals to a universally shared interest—that the whole of humankind has a direct stake in saving the ecology—rather than what it sees as outdated Leftist notions of differential class interest. In essence, the Greens have a clear analysis of society’s poisoned relationship with nature, but society itself tends to be something of a black box. There is little sense of a systemic understanding of society, except when it is framed in the negative: a rejection of traditional Marxist or social democratic approaches.

This is not to say that Greens views aren’t animated by outrage at social injustice, inequality and concentration of economic power. Bob Brown, hardly on the Left of the party, gave his staffers copies of Hervé Kempf’s How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth to read, which includes a withering critique of the privileged classes and which clearly links social and environmental problems. But Kempf’s book, which draws on Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class, is essentially about how the consumption habits of the rich are the main driver of environmental catastrophe, and that these consumption habits are created by a human nature which also drives ordinary people to attempt to emulate them. It is only a small step from Kempf’s argument that the rich should subordinate their behaviour to the needs of nature, to the apparently more radical calls for a new Greens ethics. Both are essentially liberal approaches, focusing on the choices of atomised individuals as the basis for economic processes. In both cases, the cry is for the rich to reform themselves (something Al Gore has been trying to do, quite unsuccessfully, with members of his own elite). At least for the Greens this goes beyond moral persuasion and is focused on effecting political change to make it happen, but the logic is the same.

Even for Greens who have a more traditional Left approach to social analysis, the key remains the prioritisation of ecological concerns. It is argued that whatever we think of any social system, like capitalism, it cannot survive environmental Armageddon, and so the key is to put the natural world at the heart of economics. As the slogan goes, “There are no jobs on a dead planet”. 

At an abstract level it is hard to argue against this notion. Yet the problem of social change in the here-and-now doesn’t always conform to such a worst-case scenario, even if many Greens are driven by a view that the final catastrophe is so close that the task is to bring people to their senses before it’s too late. This telescoping of the ecological crisis, most apparent when climate change is discussed, leads to impatient dismissal of social analysis in favour of the moral case for doing something right now (perhaps best exemplified by one-time candidate Clive Hamilton‘s latest book).

The question then becomes focused on what it is about the black box of the economy that upsets the ecology. The answer is that it is the growth of consumption of natural resources that is the problem. In other words, the modern drive towards maximising economic growth is what must be tackled head on to repair the balance.

Next: The problem with the problem with growth