Productivism is the elegant way of saying “manufacturing more commodities” and Marxism has historically been committed to using the productive forces of advanced capitalism to offer everyone a comfortable standard of living. There is an anecdote in Jonathan Neale’s book Stop Global Warming Change The World in which a Canadian woman at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2001 finished her contribution by saying “we have to stop going after growth and value the quality of life instead.” Jonathan says that this antagonised many of the Latin Americans present, in particular the Argentineans who had just been through an IMF austerity blitz. He goes on to make the point that in the rich world working people feel that they don’t have enough and in the developing world we know that billions of people are not having many of their basic needs satisfied. Sacrifice is not the solution.
This line of argument is Marxist orthodoxy, or more precisely post-Marx orthodoxy and the science of climate change is making it increasingly difficult to sustain. Following the farce at Copenhagen Klimaforum proposed “a complete abandonment of fossil fuels within the next 30 years” and if the planet is to warm by only 2°C the rich economies have to reduce their energy consumption by at least 50%. This can’t be done by efficiency savings or by using new technology. Industrial history shows that more efficient technology is used to produce more and in a capitalist economy this must mean intensified commodity production. The rationality of this production has to be measured against its impact on the climate. Precisely how many types of mobile phones, trainers or televisions does the human race need and how quickly should we be encouraged to think of them as obsolete? The capitalist would answer that we need as many as the market can sustain and we should be thinking about upgrading at least once a year. In this view of the world natural resources are the planet’s gift to capitalist industry and around 75% of what it produces ends up as landfill with one year.
When posed in these terms some conclusions become obvious.
The first is that useless and wasteful production has to be rapidly phased out. We can have an interesting debate about what might fall into these categories but the consumer electronics sector is an obvious candidate for pruning; celebrity magazines could be chopped and luxury car production plants could be converted to manufacturing public transport. It goes without saying that this would be in tandem with reductions in working hours without pay cuts for the people working in these sectors. As both the current cold snap (or winter) in Europe and the earthquake in Haiti show there is huge job creation potential in providing homes and services which are comfortable and safe.
It is the countries which are most affected by climate change who are now demanding that the rise in global temperature does not exceed 1.5°C by the end of this century. This is almost certainly an impossible target in a capitalist economy. No capitalist will willingly give up the right to produce commodities or make profits. Yet while many of his successors have neglected the link between capitalism and the environment Marx was very sharp on what the described as the “metabolic interaction” between it and our species concluding that it was ultimately unsustainable. He was right but not quite in the way that he thought, assuming that soil exhaustion would eventually reach a crisis point.
The Canadian woman at Porto Alegre may have been a little crude but she had glimpsed an important truth. An economy which ravages the environment and is actively changing the climate is not a thing than humanity can afford to suffer indefinitely. Jonathan is right to when he observes that appeals for personal sacrifice will not mobilise a mass movement against climate change. Nevertheless any such movement will need to have an understanding that providing everyone on the planet with a comfortable standard of living which satisfies their material and cultural needs means that we have to get used to thinking in terms of “enough” rather than “more”.
Liam redux 
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