In The Matrix a small band of humans have managed to escape their enslavement by the machines and are at large, resisting the machines’ efforts to recapture them. Their leader is a man called Morpheus. At one point in the film Morpheus is captured by the machines within the virtual reality of the Matrix, which appear in the human form of a character called Agent Smith. Before Agent Smith brutally interrogates Morpheus, ‘he’ explains why humans sicken ‘him’: ‘You see, every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not … There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague. And we are the cure.’
Judging from the three great monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – we humans think very highly of ourselves. We like to think that we’ve been fashioned in the image and likeness of God, of that which is perfect and unique. As the only mammal endowed with the gifts of speech and reason, we consider ourselves to be demi-gods, masters of the Earth, and to have the ability to adapt our environment to our desires instead of our having to adapt to it. That’s why we get flustered by the thought of a machine – one of our creations – turning round and speaking to us as Agent Smith speaks to Morpheus. Worst of all, deep down, we’re afraid that Agent Smith is right.
I might even go so far as to say that he’s being particularly lenient on us. After all, there are some viruses that do not destroy their host cells, whereas we seem wholly intent on destroying our host environment. We’ve driven plants and animals to mass extinction, destroyed two thirds of the planet’s forests, created acid rain that poisons its lakes, eroded the soil and dammed or drained rivers completely, pumped our atmosphere full of carbon dioxide, which is acidifying our oceans and killing its reefs, melting the ice caps, raising sea levels, destabilizing the climate and endangering entire peoples. We’ve so jeopardized the biosphere, our only refuge, that we resemble – and in a literal sense actually are – astronauts who poison their own oxygen supply. Who can doubt that Agent Smith is right?
You’ll tell me – and you’ve got every right to – that Agent Smith doesn’t exist. That he’s the figment of some screenwriters’ imagination. Just as Christopher Marlowe created Doctor Faustus and Mary Shelley created Doctor Frankenstein in order to awaken our consciences and raise the alarm, maybe the existence of Agent Smith as a fiction proves that we are not a mere cancer or virus threatening the planet, that we are a species with a conscience, one capable of self-criticism and reflection.
The question is whether we shall prove capable of making these noteworthy virtues count.
Market societies made their appearance as exchange values were triumphing over experiential values. As we have seen, it was a triumph that produced unimaginable wealth and untold misery and led to mass mechanization, exponentially increasing the quantity of products humanity could fabricate while turning workers and employers alike into the machines’ mechanized servants. It accomplished something else too: it put us, as a species, on a collision course with Earth’s capacity to maintain life.
Picture the scene. It’s summertime on the island of Aegina. Suddenly, three firefighting aeroplanes pass over our house, heading towards the Peloponnese. We look out after them, and there it is in the distance: black smoke, rising over the Parnon mountain range into the sky like a charmed snake, gradually covering the blazing midday sun and creating a strange, dystopic sunset. There’s no need to turn on the news to know that a major disaster is unfolding before our eyes. But while our hearts are sinking, in economic terms the health of market society will be rising fast. Not in spite of the forest fire but because of it.
Yes, I know it sounds absurd, but it’s true: according to a variety of measures, the economy benefits from our biosphere’s suffering. First of all, those burning pine trees had no exchange value just growing on the mountainside. Whatever their experiential value to someone taking a walk in their shade, enjoying the smell of their resin, listening to the music of the breeze in their branches – a value that is incalculable – their exchange value is zero because they are not commodities than can be bought and sold for a profit. In economic terms, no matter how many trees burn, no matter how scorched the landscape gets, no matter how many animals meet a terrible fate in the flames, no exchange value is lost.
On the other hand, the planes flying over our house burn kerosene, fuel with a high exchange value which is now added to the income of the oil company supplying it. The same goes for the diesel consumed by the firefighting trucks rushing towards the blazing forest. And when the time comes to rebuild the homes that burned down or the power lines that suffered damage, the exchange value of the constructors’ wages and the materials involved are all additional fuel for the engine of the economy. See the problem?
Humans are predatory animals and we have long had a tendency to hunt the fauna we rely on to extinction. Destruction of our environment is not new either. On Easter Island the only remnants of the island’s ancient human inhabitants are the huge statues they left behind before they were forced by famine to abandon it. Logging of the island’s trees loosened the soil, causing it to flow into the ocean when it rained, turning the island into a desert. For most of our history, however, such catastrophes were isolated occurrences. Before market societies emerged and matured – before the Great Transformation that brought about the triumph of exchange values over experiential values and led to the Industrial Revolution – Agent Smith’s accusation would have been unfounded and unfair.
Take, for example, the Aboriginal Australians, with whom this book began. It’s true they eradicated all of the Australian continent’s large mammals thousands of years before the British arrived, but they subsequently managed to attain an equilibrium with their environment, protecting the forests and moderating their consumption of fish, birds and plants in order to preserve nature’s wealth. Within a hundred years of the arrival of British colonists, however, who enclosed their land, evicted them from it and subjected it to the laws of their market society, three fifths of the forests had been destroyed. Today Australia’s land is wounded by mines and eroded by intensive agriculture, its riverbeds dried and filled with salt. The Great Barrier Reef to the continent’s north – formerly the world’s largest living structure – is now dying.
As the forest fire suggests, a society that prizes exchange value above everything is one that grossly and criminally undervalues the preservation of the environment. If a tree or a microorganism has no exchange value, our market society behaves as if its destruction is meaningless. If exchange value can be derived from its destruction, we can’t act fast enough. Why is this?
Imagine a river with trout in it. If we catch them all, the trout will disappear for good. If we catch them a few at a time, the trout will last for ever, since they’ll spawn year after year. Now let’s see what happens if fishing is no longer regulated by the customs and traditions of a community of people that understand the river’s delicate equilibrium and is regulated instead by the laws of market society.
Let’s say that the exchange value of each trout is five pounds. If each individual fisherman is motivated solely by personal profit, then each of them will continue fishing until the exchange value of the time and labour they spend doing so costs them a bit more than the exchange value they derive from the fish. How might the exchange value of that time be quantified? Suppose that each hour the fisherman spends fishing he loses the ten pounds he’d be able to make by working at a nearby factory. As long as he catches a fraction more than two fish per hour (which he can sell for five pounds each), it’s in his best interest to fish trout instead of working at the factory.
As anyone who has gone fishing knows, the number of fish you catch is inversely proportional to the number of other people fishing nearby and the intensity with which each of them fishes. To put it simply, it’s much easier to catch fish if you’re the only person fishing. You just drop your net in the water and swoop up five or six in a row. But the more you fish and the more fishermen there are, the harder it gets to catch trout because with each successful catch there is one fewer fish available because more of you are chasing after the trout that remain.
If you were to work collectively as a community of, say, a hundred fishermen, you could agree that you’d each only fish one hour per day, catching a total of two hundred trout between you and sharing them – two each, daily. Yet in market societies, each entrepreneurial fisherman is competing against the rest and such agreements go against the spirit (and sometimes even the law) of competition. Even if, over a pint of beer at the local pub, all one hundred of you agree that it is sensible in theory to limit yourselves to one hour of fishing each day, in practice you will be compelled to do so for a second hour – and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, and so on – for as long as each additional hour nets you at least two extra trout.
At first the total catch may be big, a lot more than two hundred trout. But soon, as the hundred fishermen spend many hours fishing, the trout get scarce, almost disappearing from the river. At some point, to catch two hundred trout between themselves, the fishermen would have to fish all day every day, instead of the one hour it would have taken them had they stuck to their agreement.
If this is not a prime example of orchestrated stupidity I do not know what is. But this is what befalls us when we assume that the profit motive is a natural human trait: it becomes the guiding force for all we do despite the fact that it is a relatively recent invention of market societies. Not only do we run the risk of ending up like Doctor Faustus or Doctor Frankenstein, we also run the risk of repeating the mistakes of the Easter Islanders, only this time on a planetary scale. For the example of the trout is, as you know, the mere tip of the iceberg. In just the same way, industrial conglomerates driven by corporate profit-seeking abuse the environment for as long as polluting and exploiting result in net exchange value, condemning our planet to burn – not in hell but in an oven of our own making.
In ancient Greece a person who refused to think in terms of the common good was called an idiotis – a privateer, a person who minded his own business. ‘In moderation as a poietis [poet], immoderately as an idiotis,’ the ancient Athenian saying went. In the eighteenth century British scholars with a passion for ancient Greek texts gave the word idiotis its current English meaning – a fool. In both these senses our market societies have turned us into idiots.
Most certainly! The Aborigines managed it just fine, collaborating beautifully to sustain themselves without hunting and fishing all day, allowing them to dedicate their free time to ceremony, story-telling, painting and recitals. As individuals, but also as societies that sought to live in harmony with nature, they achieved an authentic well-being that was the envy of many of the Englishmen who encountered them.
Similarly in Europe, despite it being far more densely populated than Australia people managed to give nature the space it needed to survive prior to the emergence of market societies, the commodification of everything, the privatization of common land, the triumph of exchange value over experiential value and the victory of private profit over the notion of the common good. The fact that feudal commons were also the site of insufferable cruelty and prejudice does not diminish the environmental point.
Today, if we are to have any chance of saving the planet and ourselves we must find ingenious ways to reactivate humanity’s appreciation for experiential values that no market can even recognize, let alone respect. One solution that has been tried with some success is to place limits on profit-seeking behaviour – in other words, to impose as a legal rule an agreement that, say, no fisherman catches trout for more than one hour per day. In Ecuador for example the constitution has been amended in order to recognize the rainforest’s right to protection as if this were an invaluable end in itself, regardless of its exchange value – a first in constitutional history.
Such constraints on owners’ activities and taxation of their profits are all very well, but the larger question is: how can we make collective responsibility for the planet’s resources an integral part of society when land, raw materials and machines are owned by a powerful minority that have decisive influence over the governments that script, administer and police our laws when they are resistant to such laws?
The answer you get to this question depends on the vested interests of the person you ask. If you were to ask a landless worker, they might well reply: the way to put a stop to the owners’ control over how the planet’s productive forces are used is to put an end to the ownership of land, raw materials and machines itself. Collective responsibility can only be brought about through collective ownership – being governed democratically either at the local level via a cooperative or nationally via the state.
On the other hand, if you ask one of the minority that owns a large amount of land and machines, then you will most likely get a different answer. He will say something like: ‘Let’s agree that something needs to be done to save the planet. But do you seriously believe the government is an unadulterated expression of our collective interests? No! The government serves the interests of those who run it – politicians and bureaucrats – interests that don’t represent the majority of people or the planet at all. As for your romantic idea of a cooperative, have you ever known anything important to have been accomplished democratically, with everyone sitting around, talking incessantly, paralysed by the complexity of it all? No, this is impossible. As Oscar Wilde once said, “The trouble with socialism is that it takes too many evenings.”’
If you were then to ask, ‘So how do you suggest we save the planet?’ his answer would most probably be as follows.
In order to defend their right to own land, machines and resources, defenders of the status quo would say something like: ‘Sure, you are right. The reason market society fails to manage the planet’s natural resources properly is that these resources have experiential value but no exchange value. The solution is to give them exchange value. Take the beautiful forest that is now in flames, causing you such sorrow. Since it belongs to everyone, it belongs to no one. The reason our market society does not value it as much as it should is because nobody can gain exchange value from it. The same goes for the trout in the river. They don’t belong to anyone until they are caught, and that’s why each fisherman catches as many as they please, the result being that the trout disappear and the fishermen look stupid. The same is true for the atmosphere: it doesn’t belong to anyone, and as a result each one of us exploits it until it becomes poisoned. Since cooperative control is unworkable and governmental control is inefficient, biased and authoritarian, I’d suggest the following solution: give all these precious but unpriced natural resources to someone who can make them profitable – me, for example – and then they will certainly be looked after.’
Indeed, it can be argued that if the river and all the trout swimming in it were privately owned, the owner would have every reason to protect them. Perhaps they would charge an entrance fee or an hourly rate to fish the river, ensuring that fishing was limited and thereby protecting both the trout and the fishermen’s labour. The same goes for the atmosphere or the forests. If these were privately owned, then industries would be forced to pay for the right to emit pollutants into the air and families would be forced to pay to have a picnic in the forest, ensuring that both were used in moderation while the owner ensured they were protected and sustained.
‘How exactly does this differ from feudalism?’ you may ask. Back then the land, along with the animals, plants and people that inhabited it, all belonged to some lord. Are we now being told that we need to return to a feudal system to save the planet? Defenders of market societies will answer, ‘Not at all. The beauty of a market-based solution is that, irrespective of who is given the natural resources to begin with, once those natural resources are available to be bought and sold they will inevitably end up in the hands of whoever can manage them most profitably and efficiently, for it is they who will be able to pay the most in order to own them. This is completely different from their being controlled indefinitely according to the arbitrary whims of some feudal despot.’
In fact, private ownership need not mean ownership by a single person or corporation. The rivers, forests and atmosphere could just as easily be bought and sold in small pieces by thousands of different owners in markets designed especially for that purpose. And how does one cut up a forest or the planet’s atmosphere into separate pieces? By issuing so-called shares in those resources which legally entitle the owner of each share to a proportion of the profits generated by those resources, just as you can own tiny shares in giant companies like Apple or Ford.
It may seem paradoxical to you that preventing the destruction of the environment by market society’s preference for exchange value over experiential value should require us to convert every last remaining experiential value into exchange value, but this type of thinking and proposal is currently all the rage.
In fact, this argument for commodifying nature is not a theoretical one. Though its application has so far been moderate and coy, it has been winning debates and shaping what governments and business do for a while now. Instead of privatizing the atmosphere, here is what some governments have done to tackle air pollution.
Every company is given the right to emit a certain amount of noxious gases into the atmosphere, as well as the right to sell that right to other companies. Within this newly created market, companies that manufacture cars, generate energy, fly planes and other activities that involve releasing tons of these gases into the atmosphere can buy the right to emit polluting fumes from those who do not need it – for example, from a company powered by solar panels. The merit of this system, according to its proponents, is twofold.
First, companies that can pollute less than their entitlement have the incentive to do so because the less they pollute, the more money they stand to make from selling their remaining quota. Second, the price a company pays for being allowed to pollute more than its quota is determined by supply and demand in the market, instead of being set by untrustworthy politicians. It sounds pretty smart, doesn’t it?
But pay attention to the irony: the only reason to adopt a market solution such as this is because government can’t be trusted, and yet this solution depends entirely on the government for it to work. Who decides what the original quota of pollution will be? Who monitors each farmer, fisherman, factory, train or car’s emissions? Who fines them if they exceed their quotas? The government of course. Only the state has the ability to create this artificial market because only the state has the power to regulate each and every company.
The reason the rich and powerful, along with their intellectual and ideological supporters, recommend the complete privatization of our environment is not that they are opposed to government; they’re just opposed to government interventions that undermine their property rights and threaten to democratize processes that they now control. And if, in the process, they get to own Planet Earth, that’s OK by them too!
I said that in this book I’d be talking to you about the economy, but you’ll have noticed by now that it’s impossible to talk about the economy without talking about politics.
At the end of the last chapter I said that you can take the money out of politics but you cannot take the politics out of money; that any attempt to depoliticize the regulation and management of the money supply would choke the economy and prevent recovery in the event of a crash. I concluded that the only solution was to democratize the process by which monetary decisions are made. And at the end of the chapter before that, do you remember asking what can be done in the face of the fierce opposition of the small but powerful minority who own all the machines if we are ever to escape becoming the slaves of our creations? The answer was similar: democratize technology by making all humans the robots’ part owners.
Now, in this chapter, I am taking the same line further by arguing that a decent, rational society must democratize not only the management of money and technology, but the management of the planet’s resources and ecosystems as well. Why so much emphasis on democracy? Because, to paraphrase Winston Churchill’s tongue-in-cheek remark, democracy may be a terrible, terrible form of government – as flawed, fallible, inefficient and corrupt as the people of which it is comprised – but it’s better than any of the alternatives.
Your era will be typified by the momentous clash between two opposing proposals: ‘Democratize everything!’ versus ‘Commodify everything!’ The proposal favoured by powerful and influential people and institutions is ‘Commodify everything!’ They want to convince you that the solution to our world’s problems is to accelerate and to deepen the commodification of human labour, land, machines and the environment. ‘Democratize everything!’ is the recommendation that I have been building towards throughout this book. Take your pick. The clash of these two agendas will determine your future well after I am gone. If you wish to have any say in that future, then you and your contemporaries will have to form an opinion on this matter and articulate good arguments with which to win others to your point of view.
I am not going to pretend to be neutral in this clash, so I will say this. Commodification will never work. Markets do a great job when it comes to managing the supply of coffee shops in a city and, more generally, the distribution of goods among buyers with different tastes, just as we saw in Radford’s POW camp. But as I have attempted to show over the course of this book, they are terrible at managing money, labour and robots. As for the environment, the market solution combines the worst of the market with the drawbacks of state intervention.
‘OK,’ you will say, ‘you reject the markets-everywhere solution and propose instead the democracy-everywhere alternative. But how on Earth will your democracy save the planet, put the robots to work for us and make money function sensibly and smoothly?’ What a great question! While it would take a whole other book to answer it properly, let me offer a hint that may help you write that sequel yourself one day.
In both markets and democracies we vote. In elections the more votes a party or proposition gets, the more it can influence the political outcome. Something similar happens in markets. When you buy a particular ice cream, you are sending a message to the producer of that ice cream that you consider the ice cream sufficiently desirable to spend money on. It’s as if you’re voting in favour of that particular type of ice cream. If no one buys it, the company will stop producing it. If lots of kids like you vote for it with their pounds and pence, then the company will produce more.
But there is a profound difference between these two kinds of voting. In a democracy we have one single vote each. This is a prerequisite for the Greek concept of isegoria: giving different views equal weight. In markets, however, the number of votes one has is determined by one’s wealth. The more pounds, euros, dollars or yen you have, the greater the weight of your opinion in the markets where you spend them. It’s the same with shares in a company: if you own 51 per cent of the shares in a company, you are its absolute ruler, even if the remaining 49 per cent are owned by thousands of people.
You may well say, ‘Given that we all live on the same planet, why would the wealthy want something any less than optimal for Spaceship Earth, since we’re all on board together?’ Consider this: as humans, we now face the choice of either drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions or letting the polar ice caps melt, which would cause the sea level to rise, resulting in the loss of millions of people’s homes and farms in low-lying coastal areas such as Bangladesh and the Maldives. Now suppose we’ve privatized the atmosphere, and the decision about what action to take lies in the hands of people whose wealth means they will never be affected by rising sea levels but who will face a reduction in their profits, perhaps even the loss of their jobs or businesses, if they reduce emissions. Is it right, do you think, that they as majority shareholders should make this decision while the people whose houses and farms will disappear under the rising waters should have no say? Do you see why the voting of shareholders will never protect the planet in the same way that democracy could?
The fact that our democracies are imperfect and corrupt doesn’t change the fact that democracy remains our only chance to avoid behaving, collectively, like foolish viruses. It is our only hope to prove Agent Smith wrong.