Not only capitalism has to be reined in. We have to also rein in the treadmill of the nation-state’s obsession with growth. All nation-states measure national success by GDP growth and yet this increases environmental degradation. That means reining in political elites who believe that they can only retain power by promoting short-term growth within the period of a single electoral cycle. A low-emissions regime would certainly reduce growth in the short run, while hopefully increasing it more in the long run, given that in the long run the do-nothing “business as usual” scenario will prove disastrous for the planet and its inhabitants. But who lives in the long run? Politicians certainly do not and nor do electorates. Moreover politicians and voters still live in the era of nation-state sovereignty where there is great resistance to any curtailment of that sovereignty by foreigners. Yet regulation would have to be international, with intergovernmental agreements severely limiting the autonomy of any nation-state to do its own thing.
Maybe the environmental movement will eventually persuade capitalists, political elites, and voters to begin serious reduction of emissions. Maybe the European Union can lead the way over the sovereignty barrier, since it has already done so in other spheres. But for any of this to happen, we have thirdly to rein in the treadmill of “consumption citizenship” according to which the people demand more and more economic growth in order to consume more, as a citizen right. Ordinary citizens will have to change their lifestyles to avert disaster, but disaster appears abstract and faraway—until it actually happens.
The three great triumphs of the modern period—capitalism, the nationstate, and citizen rights—are responsible for the environmental crisis. These causal chains emanate principally from the economy, though as mediated by political power relations, and the problem is bigger than simply capitalism. All three triumphs would have to be challenged for the sake of a rather abstract future, which is a very tall order, perhaps not achievable. If success were attained, this would reinforce capitalist tendencies toward lower growth. The restrictions would involve much more political regulation, though through international agreements by states acting collectively. It would be a new type of swing away from markets to states, not exactly socialist but a new form of market-regulating suprastate collectivism. The present chances of any of this happening seem slight. America is not only unwilling to begin any of these three struggles but it will not sign up to even minor emissions programs. China does embrace emissions programs and its party rulers have the power to press ahead with them, but all their efforts are overwhelmed by the sheer pace of Chinese industrialization—as is also the case in India and other successfully industrializing countries. I would predict that little emissions mitigation will be undertaken until tangible climate impacts begin to strike hard on the world at some point in the mid-21st century.
Things look torrid on the climate front. Perhaps a technological breakthrough might occur. Neither solar nor wind power are at present offering this, but current experiments with cold fusion, or a radically different solar battery, or concentrated solar power using molten salt, might eventually yield significant results—but not “clean coal,” which is just a smokescreen set up by the coal industry. Perhaps the global masses will be stirred up by green movements into persuading politicians into more green policies; perhaps capitalists in low-emissions industries will provide a powerful counterweight to the high-emitters; perhaps entrepreneurs and scientists can jointly pioneer another phase of creative destruction centering on new green technologies. At the moment any of these possibilities is not on the horizon. Of course, if there is an enduring global crisis of capitalism, and world production heads downward, then (after a delay during which already “baked in” emissions will continue upwards) emissions will stop growing and even begin to decline. Conversely, if capitalism, nation-states, and consuming citizens are reined in, then GDP growth will decline through global consensus and everyone will be content with almost zero growth. Every cloud has a silver lining!
But if action is not timely, and climate disaster begins to strike hard, the optimistic scenario would be that at that point the world’s states would take coordinated action to impose severe restrictions on capitalism, states and citizens. Alternatively, if this did not occur, various disaster scenarios can be envisioned: of relatively favored states, richer ones in the North of the world, erecting great barriers of “fortress capitalism,” “fortress socialism,” or “ecofascism” against the rest of the world; of mass refugee starvation; of resource wars (though perhaps not war between nuclear powers). Whether our successors might call these regimes “capitalist,” “socialist,” “fascist,” or whatever, malice would be their ultimately defining character trait. It is of course impossible to predict what human beings will do when confronted by such a threat.
CONCLUSION: THE END MAY OR MAY NOT BE NIGH
I have presented a model of alternative possible scenarios which I believe is the closest we can get to predicting the future. I hope firstly that I have shown that modern society and modern capitalism are not systems. They are influenced by multiple overlapping networks of power, each with their own distinctive causal chains. The most important of these are ideological, economic, military and political. In their possible future interactions some things are clearer than others. First, the United States is losing its hegemonic position in the world—even its enormous military power does not seem able to achieve national interest goals. This seems almost inevitable: the end of hegemony is nigh. Indeed, American power might sink further if its multiple current weaknesses cascading across all four sources of social power are not remedied. Second, the European Union is in a comparably threatened position, though its present economic difficulties are exacerbated mainly by a single political weakness, the unsupported euro. For Europe almost everything depends on solving this problem, which is primarily one of political and ideological rather than economic power. Third, power in the global economy will continue to shift from the West toward the more successful parts of the Rest and on balance this will involve more political regulation of capitalism. All this is fairly clear.
Further scenarios are murkier. If we follow Schumpeter in seeing capitalism as “creative destruction,” creation might become the province of the developing Rest, destruction the province of the West. Yet this seems less likely than a return to the multiple power networks of previous eras, this time organized globally. But forces emanating from within the economy will probably not lead to a global crisis of capitalism. More probable is that global economic growth will slow once a more equal distribution of power in the world is reached—a move perhaps toward a stable, prosperous, but low-growth capitalist economy. This would be a rather happy prospect for the world except that it might involve a minority “excluded” class of somewhere between 10% and 20% of the population.