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Ecological Sustainability, Productivity, and Employment

1 Production, Growth, and Distribution: The Environmental Challenge

In the fifties Seymour M. Lipset (Lipset 1959: 75) referred to the substantial preconditions of formal democracy in a frequently quoted statement: ”The more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy”. With regard to empirical findings Adam Przeworski points out that a democratic order never failed after World War II in a country with a per capita income of more than US$ 4335 (Przeworski 1994). Under the assumption of equal distribution, a per capita income of ca. US$ 4400 for a world population of ca. 6 Bn requires a global GNP of ca. Bn US$ 26,500. This is less than the present gross global product and only half of the stock of financial derivatives on global financial markets. This comparison demonstrates that the substantial democratic question (including the welfare state and employment) is rather about distribution than about production and productivity (at the given level of ressource consumption and emission production). This is one reason why Eric Hobsbawm (1995) regarded distribution - and not production - as the decisive question of the 21st century to be resolved. Therefore poverty alleviation, is objectively possible. But social institutions and forms of regulation are in a global scale obviously not apt to realize the objectively possible.

Inequality of wealth and income (in each national society as well as in the whole world) is not a good precondition for the development of democratic institutions. In a substantially unequal world, where 20% of humanity has access to 80% of the resources and 80% of humanity can only use 20% for themselves (UNDP 1994; 1998), no formal democratic procedure can exert a compensatory effect. Therefore, even the establishment of global structures of governance is a difficult undertaking. Dankwart Rustows distinction between “factors that keep a democracy stable... (and) the ones that brought it into existence (Rustow 1970: 346) is a key concept for the understanding of periods of transition from an authoritarian to a politically free order. In the transition process a formal democratic order may perform excellently, but it is questionable whether the factors of democratic stability during the transition process also work under conditions of systemic normality, especially in the case that substantial claims concerning resource consumption are “democratized” on a global level.

This statement might be considered within another theoretical discourse. The substantial ingredients of wealth and income (a rich bundle of goods and services) become “oligarchic” (Harrod 1958) or “positional goods” (F. Hirsch 1980) since the supply and availability of natural resource (energy, raw materail, space...) are not growing as much as monetary income does. Thus, positional or oligarchic goods cannot be increased at the same pace as the economy is expanding. The “Western” standard of life cannot be generalized on earth without destroying the planets nature to an extent that human life on earth is jeopardized. Western formal (procedural) democracy could only be globalized, if the ”western way of life” (substantially and not only as an abstract model) could be globalized (for a discussion of this subject with regard to consumption see UNDP 1998). Or, in categories of thermodynamic economics (Georgescu-Roegen 1971): far from the entropic equilibrium, the horizon of development, economic policy and democratic participation is extremely wide. At the limits of environmental space, however, the environmental goods needed for production and consumption become ”oligarchic goods”, i.e. reserved for a money oligarchy which secures its access to resources with monetary measures. Those who do not dispose on monetary wealth are excluded from the consumption of goods and services produced. Therefore, economic and financial globalization is a mighty tendency; but it is impossible that the situation of globality, i.e. a world society based on equality, reciprocity if not on solidarity, can be achieved in the process of capitalist globalization (more detailed in: Altvater/ Mahnkopf 1996).

David Harvey (1996: 139passim) however rejects this argument because of its “Malthusian” bias. He is correct in interpreting Malthus as deriving from the assumption of scarce ecological resources the necessity and god-giveness of social unequality:

“Thus is the Enlightenment project reserved for a small elite while everyone else is condemned to live by natural law. This is an appalling instance of that awful habit of denying one section of our species the right to be considered human” (Harvey 1996: 145).

He is also correct in alluding to “even the short history of capitalism” which shows “that resources are not fixed... What exists in nature is in a constant state of transformation” (Harvey 1996: 147). But does this trivial statement lead us to the assumption that mankind has no problems with ecologial sustainability? Of course not, because since the industrial revolution capitalism is relying on fossil (i.e. not renewable) and not on renewable (solar) energy. The capitalist mode of production is based on energetic stocks (respectively on flows which need some millions of years to be reserved in the crust of the Earth) and not on energetic flows coming from outside the terrestrial eco-system. Stocks can only be used once, unless the time and space frame can be extended to a dimension which transforms stocks into flows. This is the kernel of the thermodynamic argument which Harvey, however, harshly criticizes:

“...It is one thing to argue that the second law and the laws of ecological dynamics are necessary conditions within which all human societies have their being, but quite another to treat them as sufficient conditions for the understanding of human history...” (Harvey 1996: 140).

Of course, it is not sufficient to explain human history and the societal relation of human beings to nature by referring only or predominantly to the second law of thermodynamics. But it makes a difference whether we make this statement far away from the limits of the “environmental space” or of the “carrying capacity” or by approaching them. Serious studies on the carrying capacity of global ecosystems or on the “environmental space” have demonstrated that these limits matter objectively (Wuppertal Institut 1996; Annual Worldwatch Institute Reports). Therefore they must be included into discourses on ecological sustainability as well as into those on social justice and the democratic order. Moreover, in the meanwhile (after the Rio-Conference of 1992) it is common sense that fossil resources are not only limited; its combustion is responsible for the greenhouse effect and other ecological harm committed.

This is factum brutum responsible for the “tragedy” of the democratic process: the formal “rules of the game” are not matched by the “stake in the game”. This discrepancy is decisive: here, the “rules of the game”, i.e. the rules of formal democracy, are bent for substantial reasons. In the social sciences, the dilemma has been described by Garrett Hardin as the ”tragedy of the commons” (Hardin 1968) and can also be applied to the rationality of democratic procedures. Neither the conclusion which Garrett Hardin has drawn from his statement must be accepted (he proposed the privatisation of the commons) nor his point de départ, which Harvey calls a

“fusion of contemporary Darwinian thinking, the mathematical logic of diminishing returns, and a political economy of an individualized, utility-maximizing, property-owning democracy...” (Harvey 1996: 372).

Harveys critic does not touch upon necessary transformations of the social and ecological discourse in the case that the carrying capacity of resources and sinks tend to be overloaded. Two different reactions are possible: either not all human beings can use natural resources on the level obtained by “Westerners” (the oligarchic solution) or “Westerners” have to lower their levels of consumption in order to reduce the overload of the carrying capacity of the planet (the democratic-egalitarian solution). Consequently, the rules of the “democratic game” as well as objectives and instruments of economic policy cannot be sufficiently discussed without considering historical (and therefore political) space and time and the (ecological) carrying capacity of (global) commons. Far from their boundaries, substance does not matter for formal rules of decision-making and policy implementation; near the “limits of growth” (or to the boundaries of the “environmental space”) they are of decisive importance and must be taken into account. The question of ecological sustainability comes in and is reshaping the discourse of social sciences. This substantial change leads to a number of consequences:

(1) Boundaries to endless productivity growth

Substantial wealth and high real income levels in the last instance depend on the level and growth rate of productivity. Productivity increase is one of the main features of industrial capitalism in general and of the fordist system especially. Therefore the increase of productivity is the starting point at the beginning of Adam Smiths analysis of the “origins of the wealth of nations”: specialization and a deepening of the division of labour help to increase the output per man/hour. Consequently income and wealth rise. David Ricardo extended the argument to the international division of labour, based on free trade. His theorem of “comparative cost advantages" is still one of the most important theoretical foundations of modern economics. An increase of productivity is nothing else than a reduction of labour input per unit of output. This means that living labour is set out of function so long as the growth of output does not equalize the increase of productivity. This is a well-known trivial relation. Temporarily however and with regard to a given place of production in the (global) economic space it can work the other way round: Increase of productivity in order to increase international competitiveness. This may result in growing demand and production so that also employment at the given place is increasing. But so long as growth of global production is concerned an increase of productivity above the growth rate of output is diminishing global labour input, i.e. global employment of manpower although the effect is extremely uneven in “interplace competititon” due to the impact of rising productivity on local competitiveness and global competition.

The increase of productivity is only possible by using more fixed capital and by consuming growing quantities of matter and energy - efficiency increases taken for granted. Therefore we have to deal with a substitution effect: Living labour is substituted by fossil energy. As Marx has convincingly shown this substitution follows a “capitalist logic”. This logic makes capital more and more independent from living labour although labour is necessary for the production of value (and surplus value). This is a contradiction which has not been resolved since the very beginnings of the capitalist mode of production. Nowadays it finds its expression in the contradictory development of employment and stock market curves: In an environment of inflationary expectations declining rates of unemployment have a negative effect on stock market quotations. Obviously labour and monied capital have contradictory interests (Altvater/ Mahnkopf 1996).

The “spatial fix”, e.g. material infrastructure, is a prerequisite of productivity increase. It has to be produced in order to eliminate all spatial barriers for the acceleration of the circulation of capital (Harvey 1996: 295; 412). Increase of productivity therefore is not only the substitution of labour by (fossil) energy. It means also the compression of concrete time and space as much as physically possible. Thus an artificial, i.e. not natural, sometimes even anti-natural and inhuman time-space-regime emerges. Under these assumptions, it is hardly sensible to determine the central political concept of ”power”, as Franz Neumann and others did half a century ago:

”The concept of power comprises two constituent facts: domination of nature and domination of human beings. Domination of nature is intellectual domination which results from the recognition of the lawfulness of the external nature. This knowledge is the foundation of the productivity of society. This domination has no power. As such, it does not include domination of other human beings” (Neumann 1950/1978: 385).

This quotation shows that a paradigmatic discourse can lose its validity in a very short time (in less than half a century). The assumption that domination of nature is powerless and thus practically unpolitical cannot be maintained if the ecological and feminist discourse (and the discourse of critical marxism) are considered. The domination of knowledge over nature only helps to increase productivity as long as the consequences of energy and material throughput within the environmental space can benignly be neglected. Limits to increasing productivity are inevitable as resources are exhausted and the spheres of planet earth are being polluted and contaminated. It could even be that the productivity of labour has to be reduced for ecological reasons (radical reduction in the use of fossil energy - apart from an ”efficiency revolution” in energy which so many hope for). This means that a fundamental principle of capitalist market economy and mordern society since Adam Smith has to be changed.

In a seminal article James OConnor (OConnor 1988 and the subsequent debate in “Capitalism, Nature, Socialism”) has drawn the conclusion that ecological limits are responsible for a “second contradition” in modern capitalism (see also the critic of Altvater 1993: 218passim). David Harvey however rejects this approach (Harvey 1996: 139passim) because of its “Malthusian” bias. He understands limits only as discursively construed social limits, never as “objective” natural limits. But this is not the argument, neither of thermodynamic economics nor of ecological marxism. Discourses are not free and ideal imiginations but bound to a transforming environment. The environment matters, e.g. as additional costs in micro-economic calculations or with regard to the validity of GNP-figures or as an influential factor for the emergence of new social movements. So the objective factor of ecological scarcity is integrated into the inter-subjective, social discourses on the societal relation to nature, social justice and economic policy, especially employment policy.

(2) The political discourse of ecological borders: The question of sustainability comes in

Whereas in the globalizing and deregulated economy tendencies of dissolving (political) borders prevail, new (environmental) borders are emerging at the same time. The natural carrying capacity or the “environmental space” (Opschoor 1992; Wuppertal Institut 1996; Altvater/ Mahnkopf 1996) exhibit new borders of social action and of economic policy. They are discursively constructed after the limits of the state territory and the economic policy competence of governments in the course of deregulation have been deconstructed. “Sustainability” has become part of modern economic concepts. It appears in the report of the “Brundtland-commission”, in the CEPAL formula of “productividad con equidad y sustentabilidad”. Since the UNCED-conference of Rio de Janeiro in 1992 sustainability has become part of the economic policy discourse in nearly all countries. Sustainability is the leitmotif of the last chapter of the “White Book”, delivered 1993 by the Commission of the EU, on “competitiveness, growth, employment”, of an “alternative development path” to the competitive modernization model. Consequently, the question of participation and of employment is radicalized from two antagonistic sides. On the one hand globalization of the economy and the information media perforate traditional political borders. On the other hand, ecological crisis creates new borders which cannot be ignored in the long-term. This leads to the traditional question of how to reconcile a boundless (in the global space) expanding and deregulated market with the limited place of politics. The new question is directed to the effects of the limits of the environmental space on the possibilities of participation, the legitimation of institutions, the representation of interests, and finally, on the governability of the limited environmental space under the auspices of the politically borderless, “disembedded”, and deregulated economic processes.

(3) Political, social, environmental citizenship

Ecological limits are not congruent with national borders. Employment policy which has to take into account criteria of ecological sustainability cannot be exclusively linked to the nation state. Citizens are “citizens as ecological trustees” (Christoff 1996: 158). Traditional citizens wear a ”national uniform” which equips them with rights and duties within the state territory. The dissolution of territorial state borders, however, exerts a substantial impact on the concept of citizenship and citizenry, which UNEP considers an expression of the transition to “environmental citizenship:

“The value of popular participation by both individuals and interest groups in the development of environmental policy is increasingly being recognized by formerly centralized governments; thus opening the way for greater environmental citizenship in the future” (UNEP 1997: 141).

This is a rather euphemistic statement and wishful thinking instead of thinkful wishing. Nevertheless it opens space for considerations concerning the relationship between political, social and envirnomental citizenship. Christoff explains:

“Ecological citizenship is centrally defined by its attempt to extend social welfare discourse to recognise universal principles relating to environmental rights and centrally incorporate these in law, culture and politics. In part, it seeks to do so by pressing for recognition of the need actively to include human non-citizens (in a territorial and legal sense) in decision making” (Christoff 1996: 161)

Moreover, there is an additional factor influencing the development of political identities of citizens. As actors in the environmental space (e.g. in environmentalist movements), citizens face ecological borders: the restrictions on the use of natural resources in production and consumption. This is neither a question of the political citizenship bound to national, territorial borders, nor a question of different political party-affiliations, but of life-style, mode of production, and last not least of the position in the employment system, i.e. a question of social nd environmental citizenship. Politics in the nation state and politics in the environmental space thus differ in principle, especially under the aspect of economic globalization. On the one hand, there is a strong and even over-powering tendency of deregulation, and on the other hand, there is the unconditional necessity of regulating the societys relation to nature.

2 Possible Answers to the Environmental Challenge

The question is how regulation should be performed. It can be answered by approaches concerning the reconciliation of economic tendencies and ecological necessities in future. At this point four conclusions are possible: (1) a disconnection between substantial decisions and formal procedures, particularly with regard to democratic participation in economic policy; (2) the reliance on the ingenious capacity of humanity to find solution to the limitations of globalization; (3) the expectation of an “ecologically” sustainable reorganization of the mode of production; (4) the expectations for a process of global redistribution of ressources. Let us briefly discuss these four possible conclusions of which the third and fourth, of course, are the most radical ones.

(1) Disconnecting formal procedures and substantial participation in democrativ decisions

The first conclusion suggests to disconnect the conceptual links between substantial and formal decision making. Then it is possible to apply the rules of rational decision making in a democratic order without any reference to substantial preconditions or constraints. The quoted statements about substantial minimum standards of a formal democratic order are perhaps of a practical relevance, but they are theoretically not decisive. Democracy and the discourse on the democratic order are reduced to a minimal version without any reference to substantial standards of employment and of welfare state institutions and standards. This is also the case with regard to human rights. They do not contain social and environmental rights (human rights of the “second” and “third” generation).

(2) Neoliberal optimism about ingenious problem solutions

The second conclusion follows the optimistic position that humanity will find solutions to any shortage or scarcity of resources in the long run (for the distinction between scarcity and shortage see Altvater 1993: 70passim) Therefore it will always be able to provide a better standard of life to ever more people in the world (Simon 1995; critics of this position include Buell/ DeLuca 1996: 11). The limits of the environmental space do not matter. Productivity and welfare increases are not only desirable but persistently possible. Humanity is not approaching the “limits of growth” or of the “environmental space”, since each border is regarded as a challenge to overcome. This Napoleonic view is very common in neoliberal reasoning. It is based on the assumption of the objective limitlessness of the environmental space. This position is partly shared by Harvey (1996) with the decisive difference that he sees limits which discursively are constructed. They can be overcome by political reasoning and action. Therefore employment policy is the outcome of a social discourse which contains elements of the sustainability discourse, too.

(3) The limits of productivity increases: substitution of fossil energy for living labour

For decades in Western capitalist industrial democracies the increase of income has been normal. Even if the incomes have not been increased for several years (for example in the US for a majority of workers during the Reagan era and as in most Western European countries in the 1990s) they are still considered as a rule and real wage cuts are considered as an exception. Income increases are easier to achieve if the monetary (and physical) surplus, i.e. if productivity, increases. Increases in labour productivity has a positive effect on capital productivity, i.e. the rate of profit and economic growth. International comparison shows that unit labour costs can be reduced by an increase in labour productivity. The competitive position on the world market is, ceteris paribus, improved Therefore the competition state is pushing attempts to promote productivity growth. The increase in productivity is more than just a ”historical mission” of the capitalist mode of production, as Marx an Engels have thought. It forms the common reformist ”production interest” of all actors in the capitalist society: trade unions, entrepreneurs, and governments (Sinzheimer 1976). The increase of productivity is starting and finishing point of the social democratic reform policy. The “pact for productivity” is the basis of the common “production interest” between wage-labour and capital, between trade unions and entrepreneurs - and governments, parties, and parliaments. This is the hard core of reformist projects which - albeit in very different forms - have been carrying social democracies in industrial (“fordist”) countries since the 1920s, especially in the second half of this century. Dependent workers have been able to participate in the enterprise to some extent, and have gained influence on the economic development through their trade unions. These possibilities vary from country to country; they are a subject of comparative policy analysis. But, irrespective of the exact settlement it has been shown that workers and their organizations are able to exercise rights. Thus they are political legal subjects and not just objects (“factors of production” subdued to the entrepreneurial management and disposition power). The welfare state is practically the substantial materialization of formal democracy. This is rightly and emphatically pointed out by Eric Hobsbawm (1995).

Therefore “Fordism” is not only a technical and social innovation. It also includes a new relation to the external nature which is different from “pre-fordist” modes of production and regulation. The major difference is that the system of production and consumption as well as the mode of social regulation are heavily based on the use of fossil energy (Altvater 1992). This “fossilist” aspect is mostly ignored in studies on fordism which concentrate either on the organization of wage and labour-relations or focus on macro-economic conditions of market supply and demand, of money and economic policy (this neglect is a critical failure of the regulation school approach to the analysis of social development). A crucial variable in these deliberations are unit labour costs and the relationship between increases in wage and productivity. The relationship between increases in productivity and nature, however, is nothing else than a black box in this approach.

The high input of energy, of mineral and agrarian resources, as well as the technical and social system of transforming energy and material, are vehicles for a considerable increase in labour productivity - and thus wealth. The better “well-to-do”, as Lipset said, forms the material foundation of formal democratic procedures, of social compromise in industrialized countries. Even critical authors of the Left, e.g. André Gorz, underline individual and social wealth as a secure basis of further emancipation without taking into account that there are natural and social limits to this strategy of emancipation.

Like labour in industry nature is “really subsumed” to capital. Nature is subjugated to the logic of accumulation to a greater extent and more efficiently than ever before in human history. This leads to the paradoxical result that the meaning of (industrial) labour for social, economic and political institutions increases considerably. At the same time the biological energy of labour is more and more substituted by machines which operate with fossil energy resources and correspondingly complex systems of energy transformation. Thus accumulation of capital goes hand in hand with the release of living labour. Discharges can only be compensated by new jobs in ”golden times” of high economic activity. But the ecological costs are very high; even if they are externalized they “come back” and exert pressure on the profitability of capital. In the long run, a stable “post-fordist” order can only rely on non-fossil (and non-nuclear) renewable energy, i.e. solar energy.

At the limits of the environmental space the link between productivity growth (i.e. increasing material and energy output per labour input) and rising wages (i.e. increasing consumtion of energy and material per capita) cannot be preserved without an increase in the consumption of natural resources. Even the ”efficiency revolution” advanced by ecological technocrats cannot change this. The combustion of fossil energy is mainly responsible for the greenhouse effect, the modern transport systems (roads, airports, etc.) for the destruction of livelihoods, the waste from industrial production for the contamination of solid soils and water reserves, the destruction of ecosystems for the extinction of species etc.. All these effects of fossil fordism are well known and documented by UNEP, the OECD, the EU and independent research institutions in all parts of the world. And not only this: in the course of globalization the externalization of environmental “costs” is taking place on a global scale. Although in economically highly developed countries political institutions and the administration are competent in the implementation of environmental standards, the “hard budget constraint” of financial liabilities exerts in many countries a brutal pressure against the environment. The devastation of tropical rain forests in the Amazon and in South East Asia is not an isolated event, but results from the extraction of ressources as an input for the production in fordist economies.

(4) Global redistribution and the divide between extraction and production

With regard to the proved limits of the environmental space it seems clear that the substantial preconditions of welfare cannot be established in all societies on earth at the level of a “Western life style” (UNDP 1998). In addition formal, parliamentarian democracy is a fragile order in most parts of the world because of its naturally conditioned substantial deficiencies. The unequal distribution of resources and the unequal location of industrial sites for transforming resources into goods and services, which define the “fordist” model of production and consumption, have an impact on the democratic order. The use of fossil energies needs a world-wide logistic system which requires high technological and organizational competence, finances, economic know-how, transport facilities, and political relationships. These factors can only be procured by highly developed industrial countries for the foreseeable time. The tendency to unequal globalization not only is a consequence of the functioning of the financial system. It also results from the logic of the energy system. The possibilities for applying democratic procedures are better in complex production economies than in simple extraction economies.

The economic and political trajectory of production and extraction economies is different. The Ricardian theorem of comparative cost advantages promises trade gains for all participants in the trading system so long as they concentrate their production and trade on products for which they have comparative cost advantages. Although this principle has been elevated above all economic principles and laws it has been harshly critizised because of its conservative character. Countries which are endowed with raw agricultural, mineral and energetical materials remain extraction economies in most cases. Countries which are already industrialized with an abundance of capital and high endowment of human capital are supposed to specialize on industrial products. These countries are capable of acquiring competitive advantages and can follow the development trajectory of production economies. The traditional reading of trade advantages would not find any problem with such a specialization in the world economy. But the debate on the “Dutch Disease”, or on the underdevelopment of rich extraction economies, has shown that this kind of specialisation has a negative impact on the extraction economies. The reliance on the extraction of primary goods is not only economically unsound. It exerts a negative impact on social development, political stability, participation, and ecological integrity in such regions. In case of the Amazon, of Ecuador, Afghanistan, and rich raw material successor states of the former Soviet Union, even of Australia the abundance of mineral or agrarian raw materials does not lead to an increase of employment, income and wealth for any countrys population. The majority of natural wealth is transferred to the industrialized countries where it is processed into industrial wealth, and appropriated by those who have the necessary purchasing power, i.e. access to hard currency on the world market. This is the reason why employment policies are quite different in developed industrial and less developed raw material countries.

In modern economics the question of distribution in time (among different generations) and in space (among peoples in the contemporary world) is formally resolved by applying a rate of discount. So it seems to be possible to weigh costs and benefits over time and space in a common monetary unit. The premises of a positive discount rate are of course comparable benefits and costs in monetary terms. But if costs (and benefits) do not have monetary value, how is it then possible to construct a discount rate? And what happens when costs and benefits over time and over space are not commensurable? In this case a rational and clear answer to the question of the distribution of costs and benefits of environmental degradation is excluded. This problem is well known in ecological enconomics. It has already been discussed by Otto Neurath, as Juan Martinez Alier and Ramachandra Guha (1997) pointed out. The answer to the question whether an economy should use more coal and less human labour or vice versa depends in the words of Otto Neurath

“...on whether one thinks that hydro-electric power may be sufficiently developed or that solar heat might come to be better used etc. If one believes the latter, one may spend coal more freely and will hardly waste human effort where coal can be used. If however one is afraid that when one generation uses too much coal thousands will freeze to death in the future, one might use more human power and save coal. Such and many other non-technical matters determine the choice of a technically calculable plan... we can see no possibility of reducing the production plan to some kind of unit and then to compare the various plans in terms of such units” (quoted by: Guha/ Martinez-Alier: 43).

The market mechanism offers no rational method for reconciling individual rational choices with social targets of ecological healthiness, social eveness, and full employment, especially in case that the reach of time and space is far beyond the planning horizons of individual market actors. Here the neoliberal optimism in human ingenuity comes in as a sort of “joker”. In the “Social Costs of Private Enterprise” K. William Kapp states:

“Social costs and social benefits have to be considered as extra-market phenomena; they are borne and accrue to society as a whole; they are heterogeneous and cannot be compared quantitatively among themselves and with each other, not even in principle” (Kapp 1950).

In contrast to the mainstream of neoliberal thinking the market mechanism is not capable of offering any solution for dealing rationally with the problem of extra market phenomena and with consequences of effects in time and space which go beyond the horizon of individual market agents. The neoclassical attempts to overcome these problems show poor results in reconciling extramarket- and market processes, for example. by “internalising” social costs into private, microeconomic cost calculation. Social (ecological) movements of civil society - with all their exaggerations and “irrationalities” - contribute more to the identification of costs and benefits of industrial production. They find better and more convincing answers to the challenges of ecological degradation and industrial hazards than scientific counsel based on mainstream economics.

With regard to distribution there is a second problem which has to be taken into consideration. Present rational choicesprerequisite estimations of future incomes and knowledge of the present discount rate. Having this information, alternatives to the rational decision making process can be compared. But the rationality of rational choices obviously depends on the assumption of future incomes. Of course, they are not known and therefore for reasons of relief they might be calculated under the assumption that present incomes will be based on normal remunerations in future times. Obviously present incomes vary between classes and strata within a country and even more between countries especially when calculating North-South income differentials. The income levels reach from less than hundred US Dollars per capita and year in some states to more than 20.000 US Dollars per capita and year in highly industrialized countries (Data on per capita incomes: The World Bank/ UNDP). Taking comparatively low incomes in third world countries for calculating environmental costs in the future at a given discount rate, it is quite rational to give the advice to translocate polluting industries and waste disposals in those countries with the lowest incomes. It could even be possible to draw the conclusion that low per capita incomes are an indicator for countries of being “underpolluted”. Therefore, it would make sense for “underpolluted countries” to accept pollution in return for monetary compensation. It was Lawrence Summers, a World Bank official who argued: “I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.” (quoted in: Buell/ De Luca 1996, p. 44; for a good discussion of this argument see Harvey 1996: 366passim). Since compensation for environmental disasters depends on income levels, hazards are “less expensive” and in monetary terms “less damaging” to people in poor than in rich countries. The consequence of the justification of inequality

“is facilitated through the fragmentation exacerbated by ... global processes and assists in the construction of the others... the construction of the poor as different from us underpinned the lack of concern for their condition...” (Sjolander 196: 614).

These considerations bring us back to the question of financial globalization. On the one hand financial markets function as a powerful device of inequality production. This outcome is unavoidable in a market constellation of positive real interest rates above average growth rates of global GNP. Since the beginning of the 80s this perverse situation is characterizing the financial markets so that monetary claims on real surplus also are growing. On the other hand the abstract technical mechanism of financial markets is hiding the working of inequality production, so long as it is not affected by a financial crisis. In that case inequality production is tightened up to poverty production which obviously exerts a decisive impact on employment as well as on the environment. Ecological sustainability and full employment therefore cannot be discussed without reference to money and capital.

3 The Ecology of Growth

There are however many (even ecological) economists promoting the idea that environmental protection is impossible or at least more difficult in the case of diminishing growth rates of productivity and GNP (Blazejszak 1998). But the increase of productivity is ecologically not neutral:

(1) For firstly Strategies of productivity increase, i.e. aimed at time reductions of the production and circulation processes of capital have an important impact on natural space. In modern production economies, however, this impact is different from that in extraction economies. In an extraction economy extracted resources have a clearly defined location which cannot be moved from here to there. The location of production sites, however, can be influenced. It depends on many factors. All of them are examined with regard to how much they contribute to the improvement of the economy of time. Strategies of increasing competitiveness are aimed at reducing production and transport (circulation) times of goods and services and of money and capital. Therefore strategies which follow the rule of “just in time” are so important. Time reduction counts as an increase of productivity and helps - ceteris paribus - to increase the profit rate on invested capital. For this aim natural space is substituted for an artificial, man-made social, political and economic space, well adapted to the functioning mode of global space and allowing necessary improvements of the economy of time forced by the factors of global competition. The artificial place in the global space is constituted by demand factors, such as: proximity to markets; supply side factors such as human capital, the availability of scientific results and technology; agglomeration factors, such as the intensity of the formation of industrial clusters, i.e. the production of (positive) external economies; meta-economic factors, such as the existence of an “achievement culture” and of the committedness of social actors to social and economic compromise (“civicness” as Putnam 1993 calls this); political factors, such as the competence of public administration in regulating the “competition state” (Cerny 1990). The ensemble of these factors (or of some of them) has been labelled as “social capital” (see Putnam 1993; Perulli 1998). Its availability and quality exerts a decisive impact on appropriation and accumulation strategies of private capital. The natural endowment of a place is therefore much less significant compared to the artificial restructuring of the place with the objective of improving the economy of time.

(2) Secondly a production economy only flourishes in so far as it is competitive (at a local place) in world market competition (in global space). It has to fulfill standards which take on the character of external constraints, such as the price of “like products” on world markets, technical and design standards of products and services, the conditionality of loans, and the exchange rate of the currency. These external constraints form the system of economic data (of global space) at which a production economy (the place) has to adjust by controlling those economic variables which can still be influenced by economic, social and political actors at the place. Therefore, in the case of production economies the management of the “interface” between the local (or regional, i.e. territorial) place and the global space (the geo-economy) is much more important than in economies based on extraction. The monetary “interface”, however, is not at the autonomous disposal of concerned places, in that it is “operated” by economic (above all financial) forces of the global space. The exchange rate in a flexible exchange rate regime and under conditions of full convertibility of currencies cannot be fixed by decisions of national authorities, and even powerful central banks cannot repulse speculation against the national currency.

Although the “interface” between the national (local and regional) economy and the world market, the interest rate and the exchange rate, is decisive, the objective of monetary stability cannot be accomplished in all cases. Therefore, private corporations as well as public economic policy institutions follow the guideline (a) to increase the velocity of politically mediated adjustment to world market signals by means of liberalization, deregulation, flexibilization and (b) to guarantee the continuity of the process by avoiding costly interruptions in production or the transportation and circulation of commodities and capital. Whereas in extraction economies the natural resource originates from a natural place (as a moment of the global space, and therefore its “nature” is transformed into a “capitalist nature”), place and space play a fairly different role in production economies: In these economies space is an impediment to the reduction of production time, and the continuity and acceleration of production and circulation to the increase of productivity and profits. Strategies of increasing “systemic competitiveness” can thus be summarised as measures aimed at the improvement of the economy of time by removing obstacles of natural space and by creating a new and “artificial” economic space supported by a network of social and cultural institutions. Thus increasing productivity is nothing else than an acceleration of all processes, an substitution of natural time and space patterns for artificial ones

(3) Yet it is thirdly not possible to annihilate concrete natural and social place completely for the sake of an abstract economy of time and its beneficial effects on profitability of capital. Firstly, it is not only the physical, “infrastructural” reshaping of space which matters. The substitution of the natural space (which is decisive in an extraction economy) for an “artificially” constructed social, economic and political space cannot be realised by means of a simple exchange of existing “maps” of place and space. There already exists a social, economic and political map inherited from the past, and this map has to be erased in the course of designing a new map. Its creation is not an intellectual undertaking alone, but is highly conflict prone around questions of distribution and social justice. Therefore, normatively the conditions of an increase of competitiveness can be identified, not at least by applying the findings of studies on the conditions of “systemic” or “structural” competitiveness performed in OECD-countries or in Latin America (Porter 1990; Messner 1995). But analytical studies discover a series of obstacles to the realisation of the normative spatio-temporal setting necessary for an improvement of the economy of time.

These arguments demonstrate that economic growth based on an improvement of competitiveness and an increase of productivity exerts a considerable impact on space and time, i.e. on nature. This is the reason why it is more than doubtful to follow the assumption of an “ecological growth”, of a reconciliation of sustainability and full employment so long as employment depends on quantitative growth. The doubts concerning “ecological growth” become even more serious when taking the modality of financing economic growth into account. Global financial markets display a high degree of instability which on its part negatively influences the local and global natural environment. The performance of the ecology of growth consequently is a poor one.

 

4 The Financial Crisis of 1997/1998 and its Impact on Sustainability and Employment

The financial crises of Mexico (1994/95), Asian countries (1997/98), and Russia or Latin America (summer 1998) and its repercussions on global financial markets from Tokio to Moscow and from London to New York clearly show that the globalized economy is still crisis-ridden. These crises have also proved that economic openess and integration into the world market are no remedy for an increase of economic growth, welfare and social equity. On the contrary, inequality is increasing as figures provided by UNDP are demonstrating. Economic and financial instabilities are more pronounced than ever before. One of the main reasons for these unpleasant results of globalization is political deregulation the dismantling of any control over financial processes. During the last two decades financial deregulation, which has been cheered by financial institutions and agencies enthusiasticly, triggered financial innovations and new financial instruments which helped to inflate credit stocks by means of so called financial derivatives. Consequently, financial flows are more and more de-linked from real (productive) economic processes. As Marx has already shown (fifth chapter of 3rd volume of ”The Capital”) financial flows tendentially transform into ficticious capital”. One indicator of the ficticious character of modern financial capital can be provided by the relation of daily currency turnover on international currency markets to currency needed for the circulation of world trade and the finance of foreign direct investment (FDI). Whereas in the middle of the 90s the daily currency turnover reaches more than US$ bn 1300, world trade ciculation plus FDI need less than a monetary amount of US$ bn 100 per day. More than 95% of currency exchange (mostly in a few world currencies, such as US$, Yen, DM, Franc and from 1999 onwards in EURO) have nothing to do with real development of the economy directly but with financial speculation.

According to the traditional Keynesian paradigm the accumulation of capital is financed by loans provided by ”monetary wealth owners”, i.e. by banking institutions and institutional investors. The interest covered by them is like a ”hard budget constraint” stimulating productive capitalists to produce a profit big enough as to service loans and to fullfil their own necessities as industrial capitalists. In this understanding the interest rate is linked to the production of profit and real capital accumulation, i.e. to the social organization of the accumulation regime and its political regulation. The interest rate itself is object of regulation by (national) monetary authorities, above all by the central bank. But due to globalization it lost its sovereignty on the formation of interest rates a premise crucial to the Keynesian theory. Nowadays the interest rates are formed on global financial markets. On the one hand arbitrage between different market places is equalizing interest rate (and exchange rate) differentials; on the other hand the differentials (calculated in ”basic point”, i.e. in less than pro mille) are created and thus triggering an always new round of speculation.

Those who hold monetary wealth (e.g. shares of firms or funds) are also claim holders. There must be mechanisms of servicing the claims in the last instance out of the surplus which is produced in the real world by labour in production anywhere in the globalized economy. The international financial system works as a very potent device of channelling really produced surplus to financial claim holders. Therefore it is working as a global mechanism of redistribution of surplus value produced to the ”patria financiera” as it has been labelled in Argentina: to the financial fatherland of the off-shore banking centers or of the big stock markets. No wonder that inequality is growing extremely in the contemporary world. But there are so many links in the chain between monetary claims, debt service and surplus transfer in real terms that they are beyond the horizon of knowledge of people under normal conditions. They become only open and recognizable in times of crisis, as in 1997/98.

Due to its fictitious character the working of the financial system seems to be a virtual undertaking without any influence on production and reproduction, i.e. on the living conditions of people and the natural environment. If not a virtual exercise it is regarded by others as a kind of a ”zero sum game” among stock market jobbers in a virtual world: the ones loose what the others gain and vice versa. This ”postmodern” understanding of the fictitious financial system as de-linked from real production is completely inadaquate for grasping the contradictions and crisis tendencies of the global finance system. Some of these tendencies shall be briefly mentioned.

The pre-dominance of market relations over community and family relations of indivuduals strongly fosters the process of individualization in the world of industrialized countries. A lot has been written about individualization as an expression of modernization and ”post-modernization”. I will not join the debate on positive and negative aspects of individualization and only touch upon one feature which is of utmost importance for the development of the world financial system and the processes of re-distribution mentioned above: individuals must take care for themselves since the family has lost the property of being the place of intra- and intergenerational solidarity. The community itself is hit by the crisis of the welfare state. Consequently, individuals rely on their financial savings which are collected in big mutual and pension funds. These funds collect a tremendous monetary wealth. The claims of these funds must been serviced on a global scale. Fund manager apply the funds capital on those places in the world where interest rates are comparably favourable and they retire capital from those places where the risk becomes uncalculably high. This was the reason why fund managers followed the recommendations of the IMF to apply their capital in ”emerging markets” of Asia and Latin America. But in 1997 they did not hesitate a second to retire more than US$ bn 300 from Asia within a few days. The same happened in Russia and Latin Amerian countries in summer 1998 and in Mexico in December 1994. Via this mechanism the private life insurance of individuals in rich countries is a time bomb for the development perspectives of ”emerging markets” and for the functioning of the global financial system. Therefore, it is better for countries not to be classified as an ”emerging market” by the IMF and by the OECD or by private rating agencies such as Moody's or Standard & Poor.

Although the global markets principally rely on private initiative, the role of the state is indispensable for the system. Of course, the state the nation states as well as the international institutions - povide the framework for the political, social and economic (world)order. With regard to the subject of global finance however the role of the state is more decisive as an official debtor vis-à-vis private monetary wealth owners. The private financial system is basically flawed because wealth owners (and claim holders) are private agents whereas debtors are only partly private. In most cases they are official ones. The Keynesian (and also Marxian) idea of private (industrial) capitalists as debtors, who serve the debt by producing a surplus value, does not hold in modern times of global financial speculation. Since monetary wealth is private whereas monetary debt is not private, the state or other official institutions are more and more socialising debt service for private monetary claims. This is the reason why the official debt has increased remarkably in nearly all countries during the last 20 years. For the same reason it is so difficult for European countries to fulfill the Maastricht criteria. In those cases where neither private debtors nor national states are in a position of servicing private debt international institutions like the IMF come in with a policy package of structural adjustment. These institutions have always two objectives: In order to service the debts these states (rather than private institutions which originally in many cases are responsible for the debt) are firstly forced to accept structural adjustment plans. Secondly these countries are endowed with shrot term liquidity in order to enable their debt service. This is a necessary measure in order to save loans of claim holders from industrialized countries. In the medium and long run they channel resources from the indebted country to claim holders in other countries. The redistribution process of real wealth (surplus value) between creditors and debtors is organized by official institutions, not by the market. This is one reason why the ideology of the ”free market” does not hold: it is more and more contrasting with the experiences of people - in all parts of the world.

The global extension of financial claims therefore is a much more efficient device of real value tranfer and of exploitation, than the plundering activities under colonial rule since the 16th century. In his famous ”wealth of nations” (1776) Adam Smith has identified the market as the neutral mechanism which is creating and reproducing society without reliance on social contracts. This approach opposed to the social contract theory by John Locke and other authors of the ”scottish enlightenment”-school. According to Adam Smith, however, the market and its results are ”just”; the procedure gives equal chances to all market agents. Of course, Adam Smith had ordinary commodity-markets in mind, not financial markets. Even David Ricardo who built heavily on Adam Smith and elaborated the idea of a deepening of the division of labour decidedly argued against international capital tansfers, i.e. against financial globalization. Today, however, the ”neutral market” is a financial market - and this market is not neutral at all. Aristotle has already described money as a device of splitting societies into those who hold claims and others who have to service them. There is a mechanism working in this social relation which prevents wealth owners to become debtors and debtors to become wealth owners under normal conditions. In the ”development report” of 1985 the World Bank promoted the wonderful idea of a ”debt cycle”: debtors become creditors without creditors becoming debtors. The debt crisis, that was the message, has an exit. But today we know firstly, that this thesis is nonsense and that the debt crisis is secondly even more globalized than in the 80s due to the further development of the world financial system. The unilateral indebtedness is responsible for huge value transfers in the world and for the contradiction between growing richness in one part and growing poverty, even misery in many other parts of the world. The mechanism of inequality production is lubrificated by the perverse market constellation of positive real interest rates above the average growth rate of GNP and of productivity, so that a global process of redustribution to financial claim holders sets in.

The redistribution of wealth has many aspects which confuse the simple bipolar picture of exploiters and exploited. The first contradiction is between those who haven an appropriate income because they work and those who have an approriate income because they receive interests on monetary wealth. This contradiction is so extreme that the wealth of money (Stock market value) increases when unemployment grows and decreases when employment is improving. The split between a society based on labour and one based on monetary wealth in the developed world is widening reflecting the Marxian theory that under capitalism socialization is performed through labour and through money alike (Altvater/ Mahnkopf 1996). The second contradiction is that between creditor nations (mostly developed countries) and debtor nations (mostly less developed nations). The transfer of surplus is directed from debtors to creditors. This unilateral mechanism results in the impoverishment of nations instead of the greater wealth for all thanks to the advantages stemming from global trade. The functioning mode of the global credit system annihilates the (expected) comparative cost advantages of global trade and produces an ever sharper contradiction between those who dispose on monetary wealth (capital) and those who do not (workers). It is the repetition of the traditional class conflict, but in new forms and on a global level.

In times of a financial crisis debt service becomes a growing and sometimes untolerable burden. Indebted countries have to devalue their currency. Market forces are responsible for this: Firstly, capital which has originally been applied in ”emerging markets” is suddenly and massively withdrawn. Secondly interest payments have to be financed by new credits in the short run and by a surplus of the current account in the long run. These tendencies, either realized by market forces or by the conditionality of international institutions (IMF, World Bank etc.), increase global competition and therefore exert an efficient pressure on prices of commodities. The financial crisis is triggering deflationary instead of inflationary pressures in the global economy. Or, a paradoxical situation is emerging which Paul Mattick called the ”inflationary deflation”more than 20 years ago (Mattick 1976: 146-176). The format of global institutions has been tailored after the second world war for a world of constant and moderate inflation rates, explicitly against a world of deflationary pressures which was so destructive and ruinous after the great crisis in 1929. The consequence of deflation in the 30s was a nearly complete collapse of the world market and the retreat of nation states to protectionist and even aggressive autarchy policy concepts.

Financial globalization is creating a political geography of its own. Firstly, financial off-shore-centers in the Carribean or in Europe are more important than big countries with regard to the application of short term capital and direct investment. German banks and other financial agents on the Caiman Islands hold more assets than on the whole African continent, South Africa and Egypt included. But like other Off-shore-centers the Caiman Islands only function as a hub for global monetary flows. They facilitate the transfers of monied capital from one place to the other in the global space. Therefore, these hubs are important factors in the global interplace competition and in arbitrage activities. Due to this function a second aspect is important: The huge monetary wealth follows interest differentials, exchange rate expectations, risk-considerations etc., i.e. signals produced by official International Institututions, by private rating agencies, by leading market participants etc.. Capital is transferred to ”emerging markets” so lang as it is opportune and capital is opportunistically withdrawn in the case that rating agencies warn for higher risks which are not covered by interest rate differentials. This is the mechanism why capital massively left Mexico in 1994, the Asian ”tiger-economies” in 1997, Russia and Latin America in 1998. Most parts of the world have become regions ”out of bounds” for capital. But in the apparently secure industrialized world valuation of capital is much lower than in less secure parts of the world. Low interest rates make stock market quotations increase but in connection with deflationary tendencies of product prices they demonstrate lower profitability of worth. A situation characterized by these tendencies is extremely instable and can provoke even the breakdown of single firms which are suddenly deeply involved in debt. Consequently, the world is really globalized: the financial crises of Latin America, East and Southeast Asia and of Russia and Eastern European countries is a global financial crisis, a crisis of global capitalism. The consequences are also felt in Western Europe and in North America.

Instead of traditional productive capitalists monetary wealth owners are determining the process of global accumulation. The (real) profit rate (rate of return on capital) is less important than (monetary) interest rates for decisions on the application of capital. This is an expression of ”disembedding”, of the dissolution of the financial world from real economic processes. But disembedding and de-linking are not going so far as to completely autonomize the financal sphere. That the global financial system matters is the sad experiences of people in those countries hit by recent financial crises; in Indonesia the government speaks of at least 30 million people under the poverty line. In Russia misery and even hunger and malnutrition on a broad scale are coming back. Although the empirical figures are different, the tendency in other countries hit by the crisis is the same. The financial system therefore remains bound to real accumulation, to labour and profit production, to natural time and place and its political regulation on the one hand and it affects it on the other hand.

5 Some brief concluding remarks on ”post-neoliberal” economic policy

The financial crisis is only one item in a series of challenges arising in the globalized world for democratic regulation of social, economic, ecological issues on a national, global and regional level. Globalization has demonstrated for many countries how destructive financial dependency on the world credit market can be and how negative the consequences of the dismantling of regulative control capacity of the nation state are. There is a strong tendency in the world to form supra-national regional trading blocks and to establish new institutions and procedures of regulation. This is part of a new "post-neoliberal" economic policy concept: supranational, global regulation in order to create room of manouvre for economic policy measures on a national and regional level. Are there possibilities of reconciling policies following the objective of sustainability and full employment without a recourse to as high as possible growth rates of GNP and productivity?

At the margins of the global “environmental space” growth of GNP of a given country is only ecologically neutral if GNP decreases in other countries or regions. Thus, distribution is again more decisive than production although the relations of production influence those of distribution. Productivity increases are the effect of the substitution of living labour by fossil energy. Thus the increase of productivity (or better: the fordist-fossilist mode of productivity increase) is responsible for increasing the combustion of fossil fuel and the consumption of natural ressources. These resources are transformed in material goods for consumtion and investment (increasing output) as well as for reducing employment (diminishing labour input). Thermodyanmically it is unavoidable that in the course of this process also “throuput” of waste in all forms is produced. This has been underlined also by Paul Kennedy:

“Granting that global productivity, and therefore wealth, and therefore consumption have been increasing from decade to decade, what are the long-term implications for our global envorinment? How much more pollution can we pour into the atmosphere? Even if capitalism could raise the standards of living of the massive populations of China, India, Brazil to those enjoyed by Austrians and Americans, would it not destroy our planet? Is it possible instead to create sustainable capitalism, which increases wealth wiout destroying natural resources....?” (Kennedy 1994: 23ff).

The other way round the substitution of fossil energy consumtion by living labour and the increase of employment would reduce the consumtion of resources and emissions and reconcile policies of full employment and of ecological sustainability. Calculations by the EU and other research institutes have convincingly demonstrated that a reduction of CO2-emissions (and other emissions) and the increase of employment are compatible political objectives. The price is, however, stagnant or even decreasing productivity, measured by traditional methods (labour input per product unit). This measure is not arbitrary, it is an outcome of comparing competitiveness on highly integrated world markets in monetary terms. Yet, another measure would make sense: labour input over the whole life cycle of a product including services of repair, of tuning, updating the product etc.. A procedure of this kind could extend the rules of “least cost planning” on energy markets to the markets of other products. But this measure would not voluntarily be accepted by “the markets” and the requests stemming from well defined property rigts, unless market regulation is adapted to environmental criteria. Markets and competition are enforcing acceleration, whereas environmental sustainability requires a policy of deceleration.

Therefore many senseful, innovative intiatives already exist with regard to creating more jobs in an ecologically sound economy. But the substitution of fossil energies for living labour and input of resources for services (e.g. instead of a new r fitting the old one) prerequisites institutional changes, from the system of industrial democracy (which heavily is relying on regular and continuing productivity-increases) up to the rules of global markets (which does not consider social and ecological clauses); from the system of environmental education in schools and universities to individual consumption patterns, from neoliberal economic policy (which fosters financial globalization and speculation) to regional blocks (which could promote a common policy for the environment).

(These are problems which cannot be resolved in this contribution; in the future further work on the relationship between full employment (“social sustainability”) and “natural sustainability” has to be undertaken)

 

 

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Department of Political Science, Free University of Berlin
Ihnestrasse 22, 14195 Berlin, Germany
+49-30-8384965; Fax: +49-30-8384066
e-mail: altvater@zedat.fu-berlin.de
The “Factor 4”-assumption of Lovins and von Weisäcker have already been described by Marx in the 3rd volume of “Capital” under the heading of “economizing constant capital”. He writes that this strategy follows the interest of capitalists. Therefore it can hardly be reclaimed by ecologists as an ecological strategy.

Elmar Altvater*
(A first version of the paper has been presented at the 4th Workshop, Vienna, Oct. 2-4 1998)
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