JOHANNESBURG JUNCTION

JOHANNESBURG JUNCTION

Walden Bello*

(This article also appears in Red Pepper, September 2002)

Ten years after the Rio de Janeiro Conference on Environment and
Development, the global environmental situation is unarguably worse.
The main culprit: an unchecked capitalist mode of production that
unceasingly transforms nature's bounty into commodities and
incessantly creates new demands. Capitalism constantly erodes man and
woman's being-in-nature (creature) and being-in-society (citizen)
and, even as it drains them of life energy as workers, it moulds
their consciousness around one role: that of consumer. Capitalism has
many "laws of motion," but one of the most destructive as far as the
environment goes is Say's law, which is that supply creates its own
demand. Capitalism is a demand-creating machine that transforms
living nature into dead commodities, natural wealth into dead capital.

Capitalism has expanded unevenly, being now overdeveloped in its
heartland in the North and underdeveloped in the periphery. Thus its
environmental impact has likewise been differentially distributed.
Nothing captures this better than the difference in per capita
greenhouse gas emissions: one American emits as much as 17
Maldiveans, 19 Indians, 30 Pakistanis, 49 Sri Lankans, 107
Bangladeshis, 134 Bhutanese, and 269 Nepalis.

The global impact of the superdeveloped capitalist North may, in
fact, be greater than the comparative statistics reveal. For in
response to the rise of the environmental movement, the North has
displaced ecological disequilibrium to the South. Perhaps
paradigmatic in this regard is the way Japanese capital has lived up
to environmental standards in the homeland by accelerating its
consumption of nature and creation of waste to East and Southeast
Asia. Japanese consumption, for instance, was responsible for up to
70 per cent of timber logged--most of it illegally--in the
Philippines from the fifties to the nineties. Japanese consumption of
commodities produced from a safe distance drove the uncontrolled
toxification that accompanied the massive transfer of Japan's
pollution-intensive and labor-intensive manufacturing facilities to
that region beginning in the late 1960s.

Today, European and US capital have joined Japanese capital in making
cheap-labor, pollution-friendly China both the workshop and the
wastebasket of the world. What is happening to China and East Asia
today is, however, only the latest phase of capitalist
globalization's 150-year-old process of displacing the environmental
costs of global capitalist production and consumption from the center
to the subordinate parts of the world economy.

Ten years ago, George Bush Senior torpedoed the Rio Summit by saying
"America's lifestyle is not up for negotiation." The Europeans and
the Japanese feigned horror, but the next ten years showed that
consumption was king for them too, and that ever escalating
consumption was the common recipe for keeping the global capitalist
economy going. The Group of Seven has essentially served as a forum
to negotiate which capitalist center would serve at which period as
the consumption-engine of the global economy. The so-called
management of the international economy is essentially a process of
determining which center would accelerate its conversion of nature
into commodity and commodity into waste.

Today, the Johannesburg Summit is stillborn, killed over a year
before it was held by George W. Bush's decision to withdraw the
world's prime capitalist power from being party to the Kyoto Climate
Change protocol. This is capitalism stripped of its liberal face,
capitalism that reveals its essential nature as an enemy of nature.
The Japanese and European elites pretend to be upset, but what they
are most upset about is the Americans' frank acknowledgment of the
basic dynamic of the system of production they all share: that its
continuing expansion must be achieved via an accelerated consumption
and toxification of nature.

Johannesburg will be a mixture of corporate greenwashing, American
bullying, European holier-than-thou posturing, third world leaders
begging for aid in return for more pro-corporate liberalization, and
the World Trade Organization hijacking the environment in the service
of free trade. It is one more UN conference bound for ignominious
failure.

This failure comes at a time when Latin America is exploding in
rebellion against neo-liberal economics and lack of accountability
and systemic corporate criminality has eroded the credibility of
corporate capitalism in the United States, with 72 per cent of
Americans feeling that corporations have too much power over their
lives.

It comes at a time when, owing to the crisis of overproduction or
overcapacity, global capitalism's ability to consume its way out of
crisis is stymied. The US, Japan, Europe, and East Asia---the engines
of consumption-driven growth--now face the spectre of a synchronized
downspin. What analysts from Marx to Schumpeter have discerned as
self-destructive dynamics of the capitalist system is developing as
nature's revolt becomes more and more evident each day and as
consumers throughout the world are turning into citizens determined
to regain community, to recreate a social solidarity that has been
undermined by capitalism.

Johannesburg may well be remembered a significant signpost in the
struggle between capitalism and the environment, capitalism and
community. Which side will prevail remains to be seen.

*Executive Director of Focus on the Global South.

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