Karl Marx is Back in Style

For the last few decades, and particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Karl Marx was out of fashion. You couldn’t mention him without people sneering at how out of touch you were. This was the era of triumphalism about capitalism’s victory over communism marked by the publication of The End of History.

I knew this was just temporary, because so much of the prejudice was based on a misunderstanding of what Marx had written. Now that we can’t seem to recover from the Great Recession, and more and more people are aware of increasing income inequality in the U.S., things are changing.

Robert Heilbroner, in his classic book on economics The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (1953), writes that Marx’s analysis of capitalism was superb and accurately forecast many things that have since emerged but were not obvious in his day: “But for all its shortcomings—and it is far from infallible, as we shall see—the Marxist model of how capitalism worked was extraordinarily prophetic.”

Just recently I saw an online essay called Five Surprising Ways Karl Marx was Right. It’s a short article and worth the read.

Here’s a quick summary of five of Marx’s predictions that have come true:

1. Capitalism’s chaotic nature; illustrated by the regular cycles of boom and bust. 

2. Capitalism creates imaginary appetites to artificially inflate spending.  The article illustrates this with the iPhone—do we really need a new one every year? 

3. Globalization. Obvious. 

4. Monopoly—WalMart, Google, Microsoft, Amazon… 

5. Low wages mean big profits.

Heilbroner discussed Marx’s analysis of these issues, including the last point of the value of a laborer:

 [T]he laborer, like the capitalist, sells his product for exactly what it is worth—for its value. And its value, like the value of everything else that is sold, is the amount of labor that goes into it—in this case, the amount of labor it takes to ‘make’ labor-power. In other words, a laborer’s salable energies are worth the amount of socially necessary labor it takes to keep that laborer alive. [Economists Adam] Smith and [David] Ricardo would have agreed entirely: the true value of a workman is the wage he needs in order to exist. It is his subsistence wage.

In other words, capitalism’s measure of the correct wage to pay a worker is that which is just enough to keep him/her alive.

Heilbroner concludes:

In the end the figure who must be proven wrong is Marx the Economist, Marx the finicky scholar who laboriously sought to prove, through the welter of surface distractions, that the essence of capitalism is self-destruction. The answer to Marx lies not so much in pointing out the injustices of communism as in demonstrating that in a social atmosphere of which Marx never dreamed, capitalism can continue to evolve and to adapt its institutions to the never-satisfied demands of social justice.

We could add a sixth point to the list above: unsustainability. Capitalism needs constant growth in order to work; it is not a sustainable system. This is why Marx said it would self-destruct.

As just one example, how much evidence will need to accumulate that global climate change is happening before we question the right of capitalists to keep digging up more carbon-based fuel?  Marx predicted that the system of capitalism would self-destruct; it’s getting to the point where we need to start worrying whether it will take the human race with it.

Ray Anderson, Pioneer in Sustainable Industrial Capitalism

Ray Anderson proved that industrial capitalism and environmentalism can be compatible. Mr. Anderson founded Interface, the world’s largest manufacturer of commercial carpet tile. In 1994 he was asked to give his company’s salespeople some talking points about Interface’s approach to the environment. So he started reading about environmental issues, and thinking about them. While reading Paul Hawken’s “The Ecology of Commerce,” he had what he described as a “conversion experience.”

In a subsequent book (Mid-Course Correction) Mr. Anderson wrote, “My company’s technologies and those of every other company I know of anywhere, in their present forms, are plundering the earth…I stand convicted by me, myself, alone, and not by anyone else, as a plunderer of the earth. But no, not by our civilization’s definition; by our civilization’s definition I am a captain of industry. In the eyes of many people I’m a kind of modern-day hero, an entrepreneur who founded a company that provides over 7,000 people with jobs.”

Mr. Anderson made it his mission to turn Interface into the first truly sustainable enterprise; one that takes nothing out of the earth that cannot be recycled or quickly regenerated, and one that does no harm to the biosphere through pollution or waste. He envisioned the company becoming a “restorative enterprise” that would improve the Earth as it does business.

Mr. Anderson died last week at the age of 77. The New York Times obituary credited Mr. Anderson with being “one of the nation’s most effective corporate advocates for environmental sustainability.” One of the reasons he was so effective was he proved that being environmentally responsible can be profitable:

“What started out as the right thing to do quickly became the smart thing,” he told a business group in Toronto in 2005. “Cost savings from eliminating waste alone have been $262 million.”

Efforts he began have so far reduced the so-called carbon footprint of the company’s 26 factories by about half, said the current chief executive, Dan Hendrix.

“When he first came up with this idea, I have to admit I thought he’d gone around the bend,” Mr. Hendrix said Wednesday. “But he was right.”

Ralph Nader, who became friendly with Mr. Anderson after hearing one of his speeches several years ago, called him “the greatest educator of his peers in industry, and the most knowledgeable motivator, by example and vision, for the environmental movement.”

I discussed Mr. Anderson’s work in an earlier blog post, “Imagine No Possessions”, and wrote a couple of columns about his book “Mid-Course Correction” in 2008 in the Highlands’ Newspaper: “Mid-Course Correction” and “Loops are Better than Straight Lines.”

Thank you for your contributions, Mr. Anderson.

The Vertical Farm

Reading “The Vertical Farm,” by Dr. Dickson Despommier made me feel optimistic about the future for the first time in a long time. Despommier proposes to turn cities into sustainable ecosystems where there is no waste; everything is recycled as in nature.

The vertical farm is the foundation of the sustainable city of the future: by bringing our agriculture into the city and off the soil, we can do so many things at once: cut water needs for irrigation (currently consumes 70% of our freshwater use); end the pollution of land and water with pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers; cut energy needs enormously—the transport of food is eliminated, just for starters; purify our grey/black water in the vertical farm system so there is no more sewage discharge into rivers and oceans; return agricultural land to its natural state restoring ecosystems and allowing for carbon sequestration; and eliminate many diseases caused by agriculture, worms and bacterial infections from using human feces as fertilizer, for example.

The book is filled with illustrations of what a vertical farm could look like (none exist today) along with detailed schematics to demonstrate the various functions, like purifying sewage and generating energy. You can see some designs on the Vertical Farm webpage.

I was a child of the 1960’s and loved watching the TV cartoon show “The Jetsons,” showing a typical American family living in the future with jet-cars and robots and all sorts of marvelous technologies. I find myself really wanting to live in a sustainable city of Despommier’s imagining.

Despommier argues that agriculture was always a flawed technology; it just took 10,000 years for that to become obvious. For example, one of the birth places of agriculture, the famed “Fertile Crescent,” is now a desert; centuries of intensive agriculture completely depleted the soil.

The second phase of the agricultural revolution occurred a little over one hundred years ago with the invention of internal combustion machines for plowing and harvesting and agrochemicals to artificially stimulate fertility and suppress weeds and insects. But this only made it more obvious that soil-based agriculture is unsustainable. Despommier cites scientists who believe the Central Valley of California only has another 25-50 years of productivity because the salination of the soil from decades of irrigation is about to reach critical levels.

In addition he gives positive evidence of how quickly over-farmed land can recover. The Dust Bowl is a prime example; 20 years after the land had been reduced to sand dunes it had recovered and was a flourishing tall-grass prairie again. It recovered because it had been completely abandoned. Another example is the forests of the U.S. Northeast. They were clear-cut for agriculture at least three times, Despommier says, but finally the residents realized agriculture was impossible there and the farmers moved to Ohio and westward. The forests grew back and became the basis of a flourishing furniture industry. He also recommends Aldo Leopold’s “Sand County Almanac” for a first-hand account of Wisconsin farmland returning to forest.

So how do we make this future happen? Despommier has a fantasy of a U.S. federal-government sponsored competition among the states to design and build 10 vertical farms. It makes complete sense but of course in our dysfunctional political structure it won’t happen anytime soon. The hope is that a wealthy country in the Middle East, say one of the United Arab Emirates, sees the advantages. They can’t grow their own food in the desert, and they have no fresh water. A vertical farm would solve these problems, and the hope would be that the success of the farm would spur its adoption in countries around the world.

This John Lilly quote, used on one of the book’s chapter page, is apt: “Our only security is our ability to change.”