Whether it is same sex marriage or drones over Pakistan; what food is or art should be; selling uranium to India or the slow implosion of the United States; the fate of the countryside or the fate of Europe; the meaning of meat or the meat-axe approach of our national newspaper to its opponents, full and definite answers about why things are as they are simply donot pre-exist, to be pulled from some old kit bag.Liberalism, laborism, Marxism―it sounds like a Tom Lehrer song, but no genuflecting in any of those directions is likely to ultimately help in the present, even if their various proponents are making a play for their relevance around particular issues and crises today.

The Greens have announced they are more liberal than the Liberal party, and one version of liberalism is certainly the philosophy of choice for gay marriage proponents. It’s not long since the invasion of Iraq was justified as the spreading of the liberal idea, while the Northern Territory emergency was promoted, relatedly, as a humanitarian intervention, all the various non-sequiturs notwithstanding.

Marxism, too, has swung back into the picture, more or less articulate, and competing with serious anarchism in many places: in Greece and Spain and Britain and the United States, and Australia too. How would it not, one is inclined to say, as a chronic capitalist crisis grinds on and may at any moment throw the world into deeper crisis, whilethe owning and leisure classes only harden in their sense of entitlement, as work dries up and the welfare state continues to be neo-liberalised.

And then there’s laborism, which still has currency in this country at least. While the Labor Party struggles at times with more social democratic possibilities, much of its hardheaded neoliberalism is gunned into action by a masculinisteconomism. It’s an outlook that shapes the government’s dealings with the region, its economic policy, its climate policy and a good deal of its social policy, and leads the Labor Party  still to consider the idea that it has something like a natural constituency, if only it could pitch its message appropriately.

So much of this mixed and conflicting ideological legacy is nineteenth century in origin and flavour. Of course there were crucially insightful developments within these traditions in the twentieth century as new conditions spurred ideological conflicts and adaptations; there is no one liberalism and there is no one Marxism; even labourism has turned more than one trick.

In this issue of Arena Magazineyou will find a useful comparison of competing forms of liberalism around the question of how to argue democratically for or against same sex marriage. Marxist insights make reading and thinking about the place of mining in the Australian economy a whole lot more comprehensible. Marxist and anarchist informed protest, whether on the streets of New York or Melbourne, as reported in this issue, are a sign of an inevitable fightback against neoliberal orthodoxy and the capitalist part of its still deep-rooted hegemony.

Arena Magazine sees itself as indeed playing a role at this point of recognition of multiple conflicts of view within its broadly ‘left’ constituency,as in turn those competing standpoints project out to the sites and sources of larger powers and forces. The ‘left’ stands if nothing else as a symbolic counter to what goes unquestioned in the mainstream and is thus available as fodder for the powers. In this light we have several pieces in this issue of the magazine focused on the pressing question of how to reinvigorate democratic discourse―not the hunkering down into winner takes all positions (see Mick Leahy on liberalism), or worse, a kind of psychotic doublespeak that shuts out opposition and difference (see Justin Clemens on The Australian).

But it might be observed that this also means not only the reinvigoration of discourse in its colloquial meaning of discussion and disputation, but also in the ‘discourses’ that have shaped our commonsense, even those that in the modern period were in conflict with the norms and assumptions of the mainstream. For the arena editors, this is a pressing task that disputation alone simply cannot achieve. This is the view that the particular opacity of the present period requires radical new thinking: a decided break from our nineteenth century debt; the possibility of seeing anew the key complexes and shaping contradictions at the heart of an emerging new order andmode of life.

Of course late capitalism, or postmodernity, depending on your theorist of choice,has spawned distinctly new ideologies. But while postmodernism, poststructuralism and queer theory, as three related examples, are a critical disruption of the ideologies of that period, how far they are a critical commentary on the conditions of the present remains to be seen.

This is not to say that they are without real-world power or that they do not influence the mainstream political parties. Some representatives of, and certainly researchers feeding both the Labor Party and the Greens, will have been deeply shaped by just these frameworks of understanding. Yet it remains the old ideologies of the political sphere proper that must carry the burden of the new into action, as if the political mainstream can’t make a significant break onto the terrain of the new world that has produced them.

By way of example, the liberal Greens, and the middleclass Labor Party, claim aspects of classical liberalism to justify and do the work of their radical social policies. Same sex marriage is thus presented as a problem of liberal choice and right, or equality, rather than as a queer or postmodern demand given body by the powers of contemporary science and technology. If there are claims to marriage equality, there will certainly be claims to equality and rights to have babies. These claims could take different forms; with different justifications for gay parenthood and new configurations of familial groups; but the chances are that the loudest proponents will make abstract rights the core of their program and the new technologies and marketised ‘surrogacy’ essential elements of their demands; or they will be the creeping, flow-on effects of unthought-through attachments to populist liberal notions.

But it may be because these unspoken influences―both the new theories and the new circumstances―in fact haven’t yet been adequately interpreted. If new thinking hasn’t found a political representative in the public-political sphere, and the Greens don’t register the nature of the social groundthat has produced them and their disparate claims, it is because we don’t yet see the full implications of our postmodern condition. Can the Greens explain their commitment to the environment in liberal terms? On what basis could one be for the living earth and for same sex marriage? What is an articulate political philosophy in the present period?

The point here is not to say that the old social theories and philosophies aren’t still useful for thinking through where we are and how we should act. Of course they are. And it is not to say that the new theories, which shelter in old political philosophies, don’t point up crucial aspects of the oppressions and inequalities of modernity. They do. But it is a question of coming to grips with what constitutes the new terrain in which a new politics might properly be played out, and thus the choices that need to be made, if we are not simply to follow either outdated notions of the good (or ethical) life, or conspire with unannounced cultural-political imperatives embedded ina ‘spontaneous’ social order we have not chosen.

The Greens better than any other political party are situated on that new political terrain and perforce have broken with many of the basic tenets of the old ideologies. The threat to the earth and its human and non-human populations,of necessity, announces that cultural-political terrain. The true test for all of us, however, will be how to build new political discourses that face up to the full range of implications of post-modern culture under globalised capitalism.

MD: All those accounts contain a share of truth, except of course that no particular individual can be credited as the architect or even the main organiser of Occupy Wall Street (OWS). OWS was made possible by the intersection of four factors. First, the return of revolution as a powerful idea that has circulated across national borders through the global media sphere and the bodies of migrants who bring this imaginary into various national contexts. Second, Adbusters’ adaptation of this ‘ideoscape’ to the North American context. Even if Adbusters didn’t play any organisational role in OWS, the idea of launching a permanent occupation of Wall Street beginning 17 September and the PR campaign associated with it were brilliant. I am thinking not only of the well-known poster image of the ballerina hovering on top of the Wall Street bull sculpture, but of another, less known image of a mass of protesters brandishing shoes in front of the stock exchange building covered with Adbusters’ corporate flag. In this image the symbol of Iraqi resistance against US occupation was adapted to the US context by prefiguring a mass revolt against the corporate occupation of American democracy. The caption complements the force of this image by asking a simple question: ‘Is America Ripe for a Tahir Moment?’ This is culture jamming at its best, a strategy that doesn’t limit itself to debunking power’s narratives but sets a new narrative in motion.

Of course, the aesthetic-political adaptation of the Arab Spring to the US context would never have generated a mobilisation on the ground if activists hadn’t decided to take up the call and organise in New York City. And here the terrain was already fertile. Beginning 14 June, a few dozen New Yorkers had set up a permanent camp around City Hall to oppose city budget cuts to libraries, schools and other social services. Although it was by and large ignored by the media the experience of ‘Bloombergville’, which went on for three weeks, contained all the seeds of OWS. What Bloombergville lacked was a global dimension, or the understanding that any protest in New York has the potential to become a global mobilisation if it is framed as such. Thus, the third factor was the existence of an informal organisational structure on the ground that lent a body to the meme ‘Occupy Wall Street’. It was New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts—the main group behind Bloombergville—that called for the first general assembly at the bull statue on 2 August  to discuss Adbusters’ call.

Finally, the intellectual diaspora from the Mediterranean region also played a significant role. Since May, many Spaniards residing in New York had created DemocraciaRealYa NYC, a Facebook group and a series of meetings to discuss how to import and translate the M-15 movement to New York. Also, 16 Beaver has always been an important convergence point for artists and intellectuals from different countries. The first general assemblies at the bull and in Tompkins Square Park in August saw the participation of a number of activists from Spain, Greece, Palestine, Tunisia and Italy who knew each other, in some cases, through 16 Beaver. The core group of organisers was still relatively small (between 40 and 70), and nothing guaranteed the success of the occupation at that point. It was a mix of factors, including the luck of finding a square open to the public 24/7, and the mobilisation of several student groups from the Columbia University system and other colleges that allowed the occupation to survive the first weekend, when many expected it to be dispersed or suppressed with mass arrests.

JD: The first day of the action, 17 September, didn’t seem a harbinger of the movement it would open up. Watching the live feed, I saw some people doing yoga in the street and a schedule of events that included various discussions and crafts. It seemed like a kind of New Age-y or left alternative hippie be-in, with a bit of an anti-Wall Street political edge. The turnout for the protest was far short of the 20,000 predicted. Yet people stayed, they really occupied, and this perseverance, so remarkable in the US setting of the fast and easy, ruptured the veneer of futility and cynicism that coats many on the US Left.

There wasn’t a lot of mainstream media attention that first week, but reports, images and videos kept building, along with the occupation itself, so that by the end of the first week, several hundred people were sleeping regularly in the park. Even more were attending general assemblies and thousands were joining the marches, rappers and celebrities were stopping by to lend support, and thousands more were watching the live feed at Global Revolution or AnonOps. Mainstream media coverage was helped along by the brutality and aggression of the NYPD, especially police corralling protesters in orange net and pepper spraying them. The 22 September convergence of a march from Occupy Wall Street with the much larger march protesting Georgia’s execution of Troy Davis was also important: this convergence indicated the malleability of the movement, the openness of the OWS signifier and the array of concerns that could be linked together under its name.

The real turning point was the arrest of 700 protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge or, to be more precise, getting that extra surge of people to come out in support of the occupation in the first place, which was accomplished by spreading the rumour that Radiohead was going to play in the park. All these events, especially when combined with the support of ever growing numbers of unions, added momentum so that by the end of its third week it was clear the movement had changed the American political terrain. It was at that point that mainstream commentary started to ask: Who are these people? What do they want? What are their demands?

The first question was answered—and continues to be answered—by endless first person accounts of people who ‘lost their jobs but found an occupation’, people who had lost their houses and, with nothing else to lose, headed for Zuccotti Park; as well as stories of recent college graduates with massive debt and no prospects. Particularly powerful in this regard is the moving Tumblr photo archive, ‘We are the 99%’.

The second and third questions remain enormously fraught and controversial, going to the heart of the movement. We should recall the initial announcement from Adbusters: once the occupation of Wall Street is set up, ‘We shall incessantly repeat one demand in a plurality of voices’. Not only was there to be one demand, but Adbusters already had a suggestion for what it should be: ‘democracy not corporatocracy’. Not only has OWS not agreed on or issued a demand, but the very notion of demands is hotly contested, with some saying that we need practical demands, some urging impossible demands, some saying that it’s too early to make demands, some saying that simply being there is itself the demand, and some saying that the plurality of views and the absence of demands is a strength.

MD: Adbusters’ call to issue one demand was doomed to fail in the US situation, which is not comparable to that of Middle Eastern countries, where the single demand is ‘this regime must go’. What puzzles me the most in media accounts of OWS is that they often treat the movement’s inability to agree upon demands and no common political line as a conscious strategic choice. Anyone who is familiar with the internal dynamics of this movement knows this is not the case.

JD: Some commentators write as if the absence of demands was a choice—almost as if there had already been deliberation and consensus in the General Assembly over demands and, after thoughtful reflection, several thousand people concurred that the time was not right to issue a demand. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even as some occupations (Chicago, specifically) have come up with demands, the entire question is bitterly contested in New York. And the way it is being contested not only puts the lie to the illusion that ‘no demands’ is a tactical answer but also puts into sharp relief some of the organisational problems plaguing OWS.

We have open and transparent working groups. The benefit of these groups is that anyone can join. The burden is that anyone can join. So the composition of groups, changes, with relatively high frequency, which means it’s always unclear at any meeting or conversation whether all or most members are participating. The movement from the start has opposed a politics of representation and supported a vision of direct democracy in terms of decisions being made by whoever shows up. The problem is that it becomes very difficult for working groups’ past decisions to have any staying power. People who missed one meeting show up at another and treat previous decisions as violations, almost as usurpations of their democratic right to participate.

The openness of the movement, which many hold as a strength, means that there is no ideological core, not even a relatively loose one. The absence of demands isn’t a strength. And it is ill-informed to say that it is ‘too soon’ for demands—as if political events unfolded according to a proper timetable rather than they themselves pushing and changing the temporalities of action. We have no demands because at this point OWS does not yet name a ‘we’. It names a movement oriented around a tactic, an occupation, motivated by an anger and frustration that has been building for years. The real tactical question is whether the painful, difficult process of generating demands is an important one now, important for further growth of the movement (people know what they are joining) and for building courage, confidence, and solidarity among its members (in part because those who disagree will leave) or whether the message of occupation (we belong, this is our space) and the struggle it requires to maintain these occupations (particularly in the face of increasing political push back and police violence) is enough.

MD: There are several groups who have been trying to open up a political discussion on the general objectives of this movement. These groups have been running into two major obstacles, which concern both the current organisational form of OWS and the difficult work of mediating among the different political souls of OWS. On a first level, it’s obvious that OWS lacks a context to articulate a political discussion in general terms. At this stage, this is not necessarily a bad thing as the movement has so many chapters that its plural composition is undoubtedly a resource. Yet I am convinced that in the long run OWS’s most important political task will be to find and create a common ground. Even if we limit our analysis to the local level, it is clear that the current mode of functioning of a general assembly doesn’t lend itself to the articulation of complex political discussions. General Assemblies deliberate, by and large, on daily management issues, whereas broader questions regarding demands, objectives, alliances, the relationship between tactics and strategies, are confined to myriad working groups, committees, caucuses, listservs and so on. But these groups have no deliberative power and a very limited influence over the General Assembly. The paradox is that groups and individuals whose approach aspires to be general and strategic can exist only insofar as they accept their inability to represent anyone other than themselves.

In this respect the General Assembly seems to function as the perfect incarnation of Jacques Alain Miler’s definition of democracy—‘the master signifier that says that there is no master signifier … that every master signifier has to insert itself wisely among others’. It is argued that because it is a framework that enables anyone to speak and be heard, it can keep functioning as such only insofar as no one is able to bend its neutrality to a specific political agenda. But if this is the case, then OWS is just recreating from below institutional forms and modes of deliberation that are essentially liberal.

In your recent work you have been arguing that the Left’s insistence on democracy arises from the loss of communism as a shared vocabulary and horizon, a way of envisioning a common large-scale solution. In my understanding, your criticism is pointed at the liberal illusion that participation in the social web—and the related emphasis on conversation, collaboration and process—are in and of themselves means of achieving substantial political change. Would you extend this criticism to OWS, or do you think that the embodied and public dimension of this movement marks a discontinuity with the ideology of ‘participationism’? And do you think the current organisational structure of OWS is adequate to undertake the large-scale transformation that the radical components of OWS seem to evoke every time the word ‘revolution’ is mentioned?

JD: My sense is that the loose, horizontal, consensus approach of OWS demonstrates the impotence of participation as an ideal—and the very reason that participation has become such a banal refrain: it stands for activity for its own sake, activity that is primarily that of a single individual doing their individual thing, that is, an individual that in no way comes into contact with others with whom they have to work. So in this respect, the horizontal, consensus basis of OWS repeats the worst aspects of participationism: individuals just ‘participate’, stop by, say something, do their thing, and move on. Unfortunately, this mobility subverts the achievement of duration so central to occupation as a tactic.

This problem of mobile membership combines with the problem of unrepresentability. In the movement ideology of direct democracy no one speaks for another, no one has any more right than anyone else to participate in the deliberations of a group. In practice, this isn’t quite the case. People now speak in terms of their dedication to the movement: ‘I’ve slept in the park for a month’ or ‘I’ve been to every GA meeting’ or (differently) ‘I spoke to a lot of people about this’ or ‘I consulted with four different union groups’. Any of these ways of backing one’s claim is good. The problem comes in the dis-organisational practices that invalidate the claims, again, under the heading of ‘no one can speak for any other’.

MD: You’re right, the tensions that arise among occupiers on the basis of experience-based claims are very hard to manage. Further, the claim to radical unrepresentability is mobilised not only between individuals but also between groups. Recently, the General Assembly introduced a new body called the Spokes Council whose function is to ensure that groups can begin working together. Each working group, caucus and thematic group nominates a spokesperson who is the only one entitled to speak at a Spokes Council meeting. Spokes are mandated to rotate at every meeting and everyone can attend a council as a listener. In my opinion this is an important ‘constitutional reform’ because it recognises for the first time that the General Assembly can’t simultaneously address everybody’s concerns without holding endless sessions that wear everybody out. It also recognises that individuals have too much power within the GA as anyone, including newcomers, can block a proposal that may have been elaborated through collective work for weeks.

JD: So we’ve moved from the success of the occupation movement, its openness and adaptability, the way occupation as a form enables what it enjoins, to some of the problems this very form creates for political organisation. Perhaps it makes sense to end by attending to the physical, spatial, embodied dimensions of occupation. Some of the anarchists connected with the movement (I’m thinking of David Graeber here) present the focus on the logistical challenges of lots of people living together out of doors in urban settings, and the patience required for face-to-face deliberation among thousands of people who may not yet have much in common, as a specifically anarchist contribution. In other words, anarchist attunement to the basic elements of living together, to the ethical practice of revolution, has benefits that a communist focus on strategy not only lacks but tends to foreclose. I have to admit that I have been mightily taken up by the changes that occupation effects on those who occupy, how it reconfigures our ways of being together. One can’t rush, one can’t force. Decisions take immense time and this is crucial to the reformation of subjectivity—it remakes individuals into a collective.

MD: Yes, but at the same time we should not idealise communal forms of living, in the same way as we should not idealise the General Assembly. As OWS encampments grow into villages with their semi-permanent dwellers and structures, the occupiers tend to focus on internal dynamics and increasingly perceive non-residents as outsiders. This creates a gap and a specific division of labour between full-time occupiers and part-time activists that makes it difficult for OWS to think of itself as a movement for the general transformation of society.

And there are different political sensibilities within the movement that are objectively difficult to bridge. For instance, neo-Keynesians and socialists focus on economic demands such as higher taxes on financial rent, national jobs programs with direct government employment, and a single-payer health care system. Liberals and progressives typically demand a tighter regulation of the banking system, a ban on corporate donations to political candidates, and so on. The anarchists, as you say, direct their attention mostly to internal democracy, while the environmentalists focus on sustainable forms of living. But there is little discussion on how to link the struggle for social justice to that for real democracy and a sustainable economy. In particular, it is not clear how self-governing bodies such as the General Assembly or Spokes Council can facilitate these broad discussions. These issues keep being discussed in separate working groups as there is no strategic vision of how to link them.

Some of these demands are objectively in contradiction with one another. For instance, demanding a national jobs program with direct government employment means to demand de facto an expansion of the federal government—something anarchists and libertarians would never accept. The demand for reducing or eliminating the influence of corporate power on politics relies on the notion that that there is such a thing as a democratic capitalism. Likewise, the demand for reducing carbon emissions relies on the fantasy that there is such a thing as sustainable capitalism. In my view, all these demands can be articulated only by acknowledging that the world we live in has limited natural resources and that if we want to use them we also have to learn how to manage them in common.

So at this point, OWS faces some fundamental questions. How do we ensure that the emerging institutions of the movement take up the challenge of managing the resources they use in common? The commons is a finite resource whose mode of disposition and usage is determined by its users. In this respect, the movement is trying to develop communal ways of managing resources such as limited public space, limited time for discussion, food, shelter, donations. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that the vast majority of the resources we rely on in this society have already been privatised. Additionally, how do we expand the existing commons or create new ones when the law is designed to protect private property? And, if the movement learns to reproduce itself as a commons, what are the strategic resources it needs to secure to make this process durable and sustainable? Can, for example, the Food Committee strike a long-term agreement with community supported agriculture  and urban farms? Can the Town Planning Committee come up with ideas to expand the commons in urban and rural settings? Relatedly, how can we develop a communication infrastructure that is managed in common? If we think that education should not be treated as a commodity but as a commons, how do we link the campaign to cancel student debt to the struggle to defend public education? Is it possible to think of a system of education that is free, whose physical infrastructure is managed by the state, but whose cultural production is managed in common by students and faculty?

By Jodi Dean

Jodi Dean is Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York.
She blogs at <http://jdeanicite.typepad.com> and is currently finishing a manuscript entitled
The Communist Horizon (Verso).

Marco Deseriis is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Eugene Lang College, New School for Liberal Arts in
New York City.

Just recently, we have been experiencing growth close to trend, relatively low unemployment—about 5 per cent—and moderate inflation, about 2¼ per cent in underlying terms.

Then the first quarter figures showed us how Mother Nature had taken revenge on the Queensland coal industry, and the prospect of GFC2 grew slowly on the international horizon. As in Europe and the United States, a structural growth-through-debt problem exists in Australia. However, the mining boom has allowed the economy to keep up with its interest repayments. This places Australia in a unique position. If the current situation can persist for long enough, there will be a long-term readjustment of house prices and consumer debt, two cornerstones of the neoliberal crisis. The shock of the United States or European Union going under could still trigger the crisis, leading to unpaid debts, a writing-down of assets, and being socialised into a sovereign debt crisis. However, Asian demand mitigated our experience of GFC1, and in the meantime it has given us breathing space to think about a bigger, and in some ways deeper problem (in other ways, it is much simpler). The mining boom underscores the environmentally hazardous character of our economy, and the battle over the mining and carbon taxes has indicated the difficulty of a politics that is seen to threaten growth. Today most of the world is focused on a debt crisis: a crisis of capital accumulation, of demand deficiency, and of internal economic contradiction; of failing growth. The mining boom in Australia gives us insight into the future global crisis: of growth versus the spectre of environmental limits.

The Right adapted well to the post-GFC1 dynamic in Australia. No more talk about the ethics of capitalism, of Gillard or Rudd lamenting CEO bonuses, let alone Abbot. With the average Australian currently geared at around 150 per cent of their income, and more extreme credit expansion no longer possible, the political parties that orchestrated credit-fuelled growth in Australia have dodged a silver bullet. Politicians know that so long as growth keeps ticking over, now thanks to sectors positively exposed to the commodities price hike, the intricacies of debt-fuelled capital accumulation are unlikely to have much impact on Australian politics. The latter has been one of the preoccupations of Marxist economics for some thirty years, as explored by David Harvey in The Enigma of Capital. The problem for the Left in Australia is that the general picture of finance capitalism gone mad seems inapplicable in this peculiar outpost of the world economy, where production capital has come to the fore.

‘The miners’, even if borrowing capital from overseas, advance it in order to produce something. There are no hidden doors; no mind-bending financial calculations: commodity prices go up, the value of mining assets increase, and the physical proportions of production expand. Unlike houses built with debt traded as a security, this growth model makes sense intuitively. It may still vary with booms and busts in faraway places, but commodity prices are unlikely to fall or crash as they have previously—unless we factor in human intervention to prevent climate change (apparently not a big threat). In the twentieth century the debate over the ills of becoming a primary commodities exporter was based on real (stable) prices; the problem being that they tended to fall over time. In today’s world, even in the event of slowing global growth, or crisis, demand for energy resources and iron ore to build steel are likely to remain relatively high. The dynamic of exporting large quantities of raw materials with rigorous capital-intensity, on borrowed money, never left Australia. However, resource exports have increased from 41 to 57 per cent of total exports since 2005 (see the RBA Bulletin for digestible slabs of ABS statistics). Production capital faces a different set of challenges to finance capital abroad. With sufficient external demand, here the biggest threat to capital accumulation is not a crisis of overproduction, but the spectre of environmental limits.

In the Pilbara, iron ore output has grown by ten per cent per annum for the past five years, quadrupling total exports to some 440 million tons each year, and is set to increase another 50 per cent in the next four years. The quantity of ‘waste rock’ that has to be dug up to extract the ore, and which can become an environmental hazard in its own right, at least doubles this earth moving operation. Coal exports have been growing at around five per cent per year, and should increase by another fifth in size in three years. The uranium industry also pushes science, environmental impacts and social relations to extremes. BHP’s Olympic Dam project in South Australia sits on the world’s largest uranium deposit. According to Friends of the Earth it produces ten million tons of radioactive tailings annually, while using 35 million litres of water daily. Roxby Downs, a small town numbering around 4,500 is entirely dependent on the mine, while in the mid-nineties competing native title claims over the area of access to the Great Artesian Basin led to conflict including one death. BHP is waiting for approval, which appears likely, to now expand the mine’s operation four-fold. It will create the world’s largest open pit mine, mainly in order to sell copper and uranium to China. The company has exceptions from parliamentary acts including the SA Environmental Protection Act.

As the juggernaut roles forward, so too does the implicit logic that all this has to end somehow, for better or worse. The Greens call for a degree of sanity in environmental regulation while promising growth and jobs in green industries. This newfound hope for a political Left in parliament conjures up profitable investment in green industries. Outside parliament, the strategy seems to be the same. Before the demise of the last ETS, a range of environmental groups including Greenpeace, Environment Victoria and those to the left of the spectrum like Friends of the Earth, published a ‘Plan B’ for economic development. It also aimed mainly at regulating private capital into greener channels, creating an army of ‘green-collar workers’. In April, Paul Gilding, a former head of Greenpeace, published The Great Disruption, which draws similar conclusions. He cites steady-state economists, who take environmentalism and this type of economics to their logical conclusion, calling for a zero growth economy to be achieved largely through government regulation. Opposition to the miners has been characterised by green-politics, calling to either reinvent a green technological basis for capitalist growth, or to slow growth by regulating the portfolios of capitalists. What is missing in either case is a description of why growth is necessary in the first place, and if it is to be slowed or stopped entirely, what the necessary conditions would be.

In 1954 Sir Arthur Lewis created a dual sector model to explore the effects of investment on wages in a poor economy. In an economic development class some years ago, a modified version was used to explain why foreign investment is good for a poor, underdeveloped economy. The model can also be used, inadvertently, to explain why capitalism must grow. In the model, families own farms collectively as small-holdings, where each family member receives their ‘average product of labour’. A foreign capitalist invests by building, say, a mine, and some farmers migrate to become wage-workers, where the wage is of higher value than the average product of the farm. The capitalist hires labour up to the point that the wage is equal to the excess revenue produced by that final worker hired, which is to say where the ‘marginal benefit’ equals the ‘marginal cost’, beyond which point the capitalist will make no profit. The ‘marginal product of labour’ declines with each new worker added as the mine reaches productive capacity and as labour supply increases its price falls. Equilibrium is therefore found between the wage, the marginal product of labour in the mine, and also the average product of labour on the farms (as farmers will not migrate for lower incomes). Foreign investment has therefore ‘soaked up’ excess labour in the economy, raising productivity and living standards. In economics class, and Australian politics, that’s where the story ends; capitalist investment is good, it increases productivity and remuneration for all.

The problem is that if you then add up remuneration to farmers and workers, the total amount available for consumer demand is no longer sufficient to purchase what has been produced (at prices sufficient to pay those wages and profits). Excess demand is required, perhaps from foreign markets, perhaps from credit growth, migration, or a combination of all three. The capitalist sector charges rent, the ‘marginal product of capital’, and at least some of this return on foreign capital will not be spent inside the home economy, unless it is further investment. Repeating the model in the absence of excess demand will result in a lowering of the optimal investment level for the capitalist, leading to lower remuneration levels, and lower demand. As crisis hits, lower remuneration to workers is expressed as unemployment. Undergraduate economics and the rhetorical liberalism it underpins usually gets around this problem by pretending that the ownership of capital within any economy is completely equal. There are therefore no accumulation problems. However, the Lewis model has a class structure—the monopolised ownership of capital by the foreign capitalist (and in Lewis’ original, an ‘unlimited’ or perfectly competitive supply of labour such that the wage falls to a subsistence level; this is not carried through to the undergraduate version).

If the capitalist can be convinced that there will be an expansion of the market tomorrow, they will reinvest in expanding production today; the solution to this very basic crisis then (this is not Marx’s reasoning for the demise of capitalism) is therefore growth. Capitalist economies are in a permanent state of disequilibrium, where investment in new equipment makes up the shortfall in aggregate demand (demand to build more mines). If over-spending by governments caused the crisis in Greece for example, it is only an expression of this broader problem that the economy requires excess demand to maintain employment. Our own government and many others like it have also purposefully facilitated credit expansion over the past thirty years, replacing government debt with masses of private debt. Debt is only one, temporary, solution; but more broadly, if growth cannot occur the system will crash. At this point workers cannot simply migrate back to the family farm—as some green solutions seem to suggest—as the radical transformation of environment, capital equipment and class structures has simultaneously destroyed, and created a new way of life; the battle going on between farmers in NSW and Queensland and the Coal Seam Gas industry is just one recent example.

Australia is not an underdeveloped economy, but we are a country that is imports over thirty billion net in capital every year. Some of this is used to artificially inflate consumer demand; some is used to build mines. The ABS also says that in Australia the top 20% of households own 62% of household net worth (assets minus liabilities), while the bottom 20% own 1%. Whether viewed nationally or internationally, disequilibrium in wealth is a fundamental aspect of our economy, just as in the Lewis model. Even if the massive wealth accumulated in the system makes higher wages possible, the reality of waged employment remains just as absurd for the worker in the Pilbara on $150,000 a year as it is for the farmer-come-waged-worker in the Lewis model. Perhaps it is more absurd, because it is insufficient growth that will still lead to unemployment, where the wage falls to zero, and therefore real poverty; regardless of the absolute level of material development within the economy. Growth is more important as a distributive mechanism than in a productive sense. It provides the incentive for the super-rich to grace us with employment prospects, while also growing their own wealth. It is the money reinvested in growing capital equipment (not just in mining) that compensates an otherwise shortfall in aggregate demand, thereby preventing the downward cycle. Therefore, a failure in expected growth of the market for iron ore or coal would not only upset that balance with regard to those currently employed in production, but would lead to a complete withdrawal of funds currently invested in expanding production. Within the mining sector, how many workers are employed today not simply to produce, but in this very act of expanding the capital equipment that will be required in the future to produce iron ore and coal at the predicted, astronomical levels? Once that objective is obtained, more growth will be required to keep the same number of people employed.

In the absence of class politics, both sides of today’s debate over the mining and carbon taxes are characterised by the same radical equality at the heart of economic, neoclassical truisms. The language of utility is utilised in order to purport the myth that prices (wages, profits, or of consumer goods) are derived purely from productivity. The ideological implications are not hard to pin down. Faced with Bob Brown’s proposition that the miners should pay a higher rate of tax, mining company BC Iron’s managing director Mike Young simply responded: ‘the reason that the owner of a share gets a return is because they’ve taken a risk… go start your own mining company.’ By placing property rights outside of the equation, on which measures like the marginal product of labour or capital depend, rates of exchange (prices) become pure representations of objective conditions such as the scarcity of goods, consumer preferences, or the entrepreneurial finesse of individual capitalists. Unlike the classical economists of the nineteenth century who admitted class antagonisms, and whom Lewis in the 1950s found it necessarily to follow in order to understand developing economies, in the neoclassical worldview there is simply no structural component to wages or profits to begin with, no class antagonism; so nothing to explain.

Neoclassical economics can only thinly veil the real threat implied in neoliberal politics, which is no profits, no jobs. This is the message of the ‘Australian Trade and Industry Alliance’, which is bankrolling the anti-carbon tax campaign. Abbot is also touring coalfields, his message being that the carbon tax means you will lose your job. The miners candidly threaten their employees with unemployment if they cannot justify their existence. In this sense the miners appeal to their employees through the reality of the condition of employment; they are more pragmatists than academic economists. Whatever CEOs may believe justify their pay-packets, or the stay-at-home rich for that matter, it is secondary in the propaganda that the mining elites are funding in order to appeal to working people and prevent the spectre of environmental limits from becoming a reality.

A purer expression of utopian capitalism is the belief that a moral revolution in consumer demand can re-model supply and transform capitalism into a green economy. Gilding parodies the real economy by telling us that ‘if we all stopped shopping’ we’d be happier in a slow or zero growth economy. In reality this green-capitalist economy would collapse even faster than debt-capitalism is currently doing in Europe. In proportion with the destruction of a credible belief in future market expansion, employment in production would collapse. Consumerism is not the cause of capitalist crises and anti-consumerism is not a solution. If consumer demand really could be curtailed in this way, very quickly the social question ignored by this kind of politics will present itself—what happens when the capitalists go out on strike because they have no incentive to invest in production?

Proposals to coerce capital into green industries are more realistic. However, ‘green-collar workers’ will still need growth to maintain their numbers in employment. It is only the transition phase to green-capitalism that may average-out at zero growth as hazardous industries decline and others emerge. In the long run, a technological basis for growth would be required. Unsurprisingly, Gilding describes this future technological basis in strikingly similar terms as those of neoclassical capitalism; ‘No one can corner the market for sunshine and wind!’ Proposals that seek to encourage investment into renewable energies consistently imagine a utopian, competitive and equitable view of markets. Unfortunately, real markets may well be defined by free exchange, but it is exchange based on the real distribution of wealth, and therefore reflects the social monopoly imposed by that inequality of rights: especially in capital-intensive sectors like the energy sector. In the language of marginal utility, the price we will be asked to pay for environmentally friendly goods will reflect a rate or exchange between society’s desperate desire to survive into the twenty-second century, and a tiny minority’s control over industry, who will have houses on stilts from which they can watch the rest of us drown. Keeping this in mind we can ask more realistic questions about getting capitalism to make better investment choices. If it is necessary to grant exclusive rights to the sun in order to encourage the required level of investment in solar energy, will we refuse the market? This is precisely the logic behind intellectual property rights and investment in pharmaceuticals. Market-based approaches to environmental regulation, which leave private property rights intact, are the perfect mechanisms for transferring a monopoly of wealth from one set of technologies to another. This is what they are designed to do. We will then be asked to believe that the solar-capitalists provide the sun, just as we currently believe that the miners provide coal and iron ore, rather than the people who actually build, and work in, mines.

The environmental crisis appears as an external crisis, of the economy coming up against its physical limits. However if, as many environmentalists have pointed out, it ultimately means the end of growth, then it is also a deep, internal crisis, deeper than the one currently engulfing Europe and the United States. Unfortunately, unlike the neoliberal crisis that has at least raised the question of an internal crisis founded on gross inequality, the environmental crisis seems only to have thrown a number of confused, liberal solutions into the public domain. More often than not these ideas make ‘the system’ a layer of bureaucracy that the state imposes on private capital, rather than the system of property itself. Achieving slower growth and technological transition through secondary layers of state bureaucracy, is an extremely inefficient plan that, as the political Right correctly points out, will lead to economic stagnation and unemployment. It would retain the incentive of private capital and therefore the incessant need for the economy to grow, while denying it that right. More efficient would be simply to remove the disequilibrium in property rights in the first place, by collectivising workplaces. Proposals to divert capital into green channels contain what might be called the shadow of expropriation—to varying degrees, removing the prerogative of capitalists and using capital in the interests of the majority. As environmental conditions become increasingly harsh, and those closest to the bottom pay the highest price, expropriation of some form will be the only form of environmentalism with a hope of remaining popular. Just as the politics of growth-at-all-costs currently does, expropriation relates directly to the lived experience of most of the population, which is dispossession and consequently waged employment. The green-liberal discourse offers no such reassurance, as liberal solutions to capitalist crises past and present have used state power to reassure rather than coerce the wealthiest part of the community, and extract a higher price from those at the bottom—exactly what is happening today in Europe under austerity.

For his part, Lewis rejected the idea that ‘expropriation’ was a solution, based on the observation that in both the Soviet Union and the mixed economies nationalisation had done ‘nothing whatever to transfer this part of the surplus to the workers’. Nevertheless, the farmers in the Lewis model face a different set of costs curves, a different minimum output ‘shut down’ decision, and its members’ capacity to spend grows with their capacity to invest. Removing disequilibrium between investment and demand, and therefore forming an economy that could actually achieve something like the utopian vision of green-politics, does not necessarily imply monopolisation by the state; but it definitely implies collectivised property of some form.

By Conal Thwaite

Conal Thwaite is a member of the Melbourne Anarchist Club. Last year he completed an honours thesis in history called Anarcho-Syndicalism in Melbourne and Sydney, prior to that he studied Arts and Commerce at the University of Melbourne. He also has a day job.

You can find a fuller explanation of the Lewis model at <http://undegraduateeconomics.wordpress.com/>

Any number of media pundits, including David Marr and John Birmingham—and many others not directly in the pay of the Titan Murdoch—responded immediately to this apologia pro vitasua, by opinion piece, by letter, by blog, by Crikey! As these commentators pointed out, Bolt precisely hadn’t been gagged. Quite to the contrary, he was left free by the judgement to continue his opinionating. In other words, the HUN’s claims were simply and patently untrue. If Bolt indeed had been gagged, how was it that he couldn’t seem to shut up? Was this not an emblematic performative contradiction, a gagged man continuing to speak, volubly and at length? Moreover, wasn’t Bolt preaching hypocrisy, insofar as much of his career has been dedicated to denying the rights of free speech to others, such as to the photographer Bill Henson in 2008? Or, indeed, in demanding that Ben Naparstek, editor of The Monthly, pulp an issue in which he, Bolt, was the subject of an exposé by Anne Summers? Particular scorn was cast on Bolt’s much-repeated statement, broached on the steps of the court itself: ‘I argued then and I argue now that we should not insist on the differences between us but focus instead on what unites us as human beings’. If this is indeed true—which it might well be—then what Bolt shows we all share is a hateful narcissistic divisiveness. This divisiveness presents itself as its opposite, as courage and openness, through its dissembling routines of aggressive servility. ‘Suck up, bully down!’ is its categorical imperative. As one twitterer put it, ‘Bolt doesn’t open a space for debate, he designs a space for sympathetic opinion down to the smallest details’.

It was therefore a surprise that Julian Assange, who is, to put it mildly, also continuing to experience his own difficulties with the issue of free speech, defended Bolt in an opinion piece co-written with his lawyer Jennifer Robinson, and published in the Fairfax media, ‘Play ball, not Bolt, in free speech debate.’ Drawing on perhaps the most banal and widespread opinions about the goods of ‘free speech’—and I do not use ‘banal’ or ‘widespread’ here as dismissive terms, merely descriptors—Assange quotes Fredrick Siebert: ‘The true and sound will survive. The false and unsound will be vanquished. Government should keep out of the battle and not weigh the odds in favor of one side or the other’. Americanised spelling aside, this is horseshit.

What’s stupefying about Assange’s intervention is not simply its beigely innocuous character. One might be tempted to speculate as to the weird unconscious identifications unleashed when angry male narcissists find themselves threatened by governmental legal action. Certainly, one of these personages incarnates a very familiar type of reactionary propagandist, being a man who has invented not a single new rhetorical technique; the other is perhaps so radical that he, like anybody else, cannot yet quite recognise himself. Yet the becoming-indiscernible of the utterances of these antithetical characters is surely notable, as is the becoming-personal of all and any issue. That the pair agree—or at least pay lip service to the same ‘principles’—that is, absolute freedom of speech, open and vigorous debate, and the quest for truth, probably shows that these are now essentially theological terms from which no one is permitted publicly to demur.

Assange’s statement was possibly made to show that he’s a bigger man than Bolt (that is, he can reach out a hand, while the other cannot); that he, Assange, has real principles that overcome any ideological divisions; or it was perhaps just part of a global PR campaign to render him a good democrat like everyone else. But even taking such possibilities into account, it is still amazing that Assange’s statement ignores the problematic of the media—the technical means of transmission—which he, of all people, should surely be more attentive to. After all, both Assange and Bolt are now essentially post-convergent multimedia characters, existing simultaneously across an enormous number of media:

print, blogs, TV, radio, Twitter and so on, and they would have no meaning whatsoever outside of this media situation. For what’s at stake is not simply the content or form of ‘free speech,’ but the means of its delivery. The real questions are, as ever, the most obvious: above all, whose interests are being served? Who really stands to gain, and in which ways, from such opinions? How is the structure of the media itself instrumentalised to serve established interests?

It is possibly because of his attentiveness to every aspect of this media snarl—its personnel, its structure, its interests—that Robert Manne stands out from the swarms of commentators. Twice voted the ‘most influential public intellectual’ in Australia, Manne has become an indefatigable critic of denialists of all kinds, whether of climate change or of the evils of colonialism. He has also had a long-standing interest in the role of the media, from his editorship of the conservative journal Quadrant to his journalistic and academic studies. Part of Manne’s authority is surely due to his long-term reliability: despite the title of one of his collections of essays being Left, Right, Left, it seems to me that he has never really deviated from what’s essentially a classical liberal position, constitutively hostile to mass ideologies of all kinds. Like Malcolm Fraser, another uncompromising moral voice in the Australian 21st century, Manne remains a Burkean conservative for whom established governmental and non-governmental institutions, the division of powers, the rule of law, free debate and moral discussion remain paramount.

It is then no wonder that Manne is incensed by the practices of the Murdoch media empire which, as he conclusively demonstrates in his Quarterly Essay ‘Bad News: Murdoch’s Australian and the Shaping of the Nation’, means that ‘Australia has not one Murdoch problem but two’ (112). The first problem is that News Limited owns 70 per cent of Australia’s newspapers; the second is The Australian under Chris Mitchell’s editorship. As Manne concludes of the latter, ‘The Australian has played the role not so much of reporter or interpreter but rather of national enforcer of those values that lie at the heart of the Murdoch empire: market fundamentalism and the beneficence of American global hegemony’ (113). It is primarily this ideological capture of The Australian that Manne tracks across a number of zones: from Indigenous issues and the

Iraq invasion, through its relentless assaults on the ABC program Media Watch, the Rudd Labor government and the Greens Party, to The Australian’s fundamentally anti-scientific position on climate change.

In a sequence of clear, careful, carefully targeted vignettes—in line with his own professed schoolboy ideal of ‘clear thinking’ (37) and his well-known admiration for George Orwell—Manne argues that The Australian slewed debate on Indigenous issues in its rampant ideological support of Keith Windschuttle (and much else), promoted the Iraq invasion by shamelessly skewing the facts, consistently proposes that there is really no such thing as climate change, and went so far as to announce in a breathtaking editorial of 9 September 2010: ‘We believe [Senator Bob Brown] and his Green colleagues are hypocrites; that they are bad for the nation; and that they should be destroyed at the ballot box’. Such propagandistic militancy didn’t develop overnight, but it did develop. Thanks, according to Manne, to one man in particular: he proposes that the perverse imp hovering over this ideological morass is The Australian’s much-feared editor Chris Mitchell, accompanied by a swarm of lesser ideologues, from Janet Albrechtsen to Gerard Henderson to Greg Sheridan.

But let me underline, too, Manne’s attentiveness to the proliferation of media, their interconnectedness, their propensity for feeding on themselves, and the Murdoch drive to dominate all of the above by any means available: ‘Tweet tweet’ as one section heading reads, opens onto an account of the uses of the threat of suing for defamation against individuals who dissent from The Australian’s line, as well as the newspaper’s penchant for ferocious character assassination. Speaking of its treatment of the Indigenous activist and scholar Larissa Behrendt, Manne tracks the fate of Behrendt’s ill-advised tweet about Bess Price—which becomes the basis of a front-page Australian story—and is promulgated by what Manne incisively denominates ‘the Australian’s familiar false-inference, disguised-assumption, report-as-accusation house style’ (87). We’re back to the personalisation of every issue, along with the licensing of extreme affect-opinions that, at the very least, undermine any reasonable debate.

What perhaps couldn’t have been predicted from reading Manne’s essay is the utterly staggering nature of the response: Roget’s Thesaurus would flounder for adjectives to describe it. Although I spoke to many readers of Manne’s piece, who professed finding it a less-powerful piece of reportage than the inaugural Quarterly Essay, In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right (April 2001), it seems my sample set was unrepresentative. In The Weekend Australian 17–18 September 2011, an unheard-of battery of staff writers, including Chris Mitchell, Editor-In-Chief; Graham Lloyd, Environment Editor; Michael Stutchbury, Economics Editor; Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor; as well as Chris Kenny and Nicholas Rothwell, presided over articles with headlines such as ‘On the receiving end of some nasty and wilful misrepresentation,’ ‘In denial of his own set of rules,’ ‘A critic untroubled by facts who seeks to silence dissent’. The articles themselves were apoplectic with self-righteousness: Manne manipulates the Holocaust for his own political purposes, notably around Indigenous issues; Manne has a one-eyed view of climate change, which, despite his protestations, he seeks to impose upon everyone; Manne turns reality upside down, in accusing journalists of being, say, anti-Rudd; Manne reduces the generous range of the paper and insults the public, etc., etc., etc.. Emitting an impervious, overwhelming drone, the wasps set about swarming the intruder.

The very excessiveness of the claims made by The Australian journalists—both in terms of quantity and quality—betray their real truth. Sigmund Freud once pointed out that the proliferation of phalloi was incontrovertible evidence of castration, and the former were certainly flourishing here. Manne had, so to speak, touched on their lack—and those found lacking proved to be very touchy about it. One of the key rhetorical operations was clearly this: accuse Manne of shutting down whatever debate he was purporting to foster. In doing this, Manne would hopefully appear a narrow-minded anti-democratic hypocrite and the journalists courageous defenders of our freedoms. That such claims are absolutely fabulous should go without saying—although it is still noteworthy that what Manne and The Australian journalists share is, just as I noted above in regards to Assange and Bolt (aside from the fact they are all middle-aged middle-class metropolitan white males), is a noisy assertion of their commitment to free speech, open debate and the quest for truth.

Yet what are the ways in which politics is not—and should not—be about truth? Under despotisms of all kinds, the fundamental principle of ‘do as I tell you to do’ also means: say what I tell you to say. In such conditions, truth itself cannot be anything other than a pure function of power—including when that power is contested in the name of the truth. Whether it’s a matter of distinguishing ‘bourgeois’ and ‘proletarian’ sciences, or of Aryan and non-Aryan beliefs, or all the other obscene distinctions that have prevailed between orthodoxy and its heretics, truth itself is explicitly subordinated to power and defined by it.

What makes democracy unique in the historical catalogue of real and imagined polities is that it overturns the proper places and processes of despotism. For democracy renders every individual personage subordinate to ‘the will of the people’, however that ‘will’ and that ‘people’ are pragmatically conceived. If power resides with the people, and those people are constantly discussing what the people are and should do, then it’s not that truth isn’t at stake—it’s just that truth has changed its status. Truth retains authority, but that authority must now be divided against itself, and there are many other factors in play. A democratic people must discuss and rediscuss what it wants as an essential part of its democratic process and, in doing so, the people continually make themselves other than they are. If truth is a factor in democracy, truth must also be a casualty—and not the inevitable outcome of democratic process. This is, for a true democrat, less dire an outcome than perhaps it sounds.

Yet the essential mutability of the people and the concomitant occlusion of truth naturally has consequences for governance, apparent from the start. At the alleged beginning of so-called Western Thought, Plato spent an inordinate amount of effort analysing the vicissitudes of democracy. As everybody knows, Plato pitches the philosopher, represented by the low-born ugly Socrates, against the suave and sophisticated sophists, represented by a rattle-bag of professional politicians, lawyers and pedagogues, whose epitomes are figures such as Protagoras and Gorgias. A sophist treats debate as a kind of sporting event, in which all other concerns—truth, justice, logic—are sacrificed on the altar of victory. Everybody loves a winner, after all, and public victory has great economic and symbolic benefits, which sweep all along in their wake. Truth, by contrast, has little to recommend it, especially since those who pursue it not only gain neither prestige nor power, but risk, à la Socrates, state-sanctioned execution. So, some oppositions: Socrates versus sophistry; impersonal truth versus self-aggrandising propaganda; rigorous argument versus socio-political advancement; losers versus winners.

Although Karl Popper denominated Plato one of the primary enemies of ‘The Open Society’—that is, any society founded on freedom of association and freedom of speech—this does injustice to Plato’s insights. To see Plato as himself a totalitarian thinker whose animus still pulses through, say, the Stalinist communist state, is a falsehood promulgated by allegedly liberal technocrats. Rather, the centre of the Platonic project is to restructure life according to the idea, a true rationalism. Such rationalism is strictly speaking non-tyrannical insofar as that idea is, at least in theory, impersonal, rationally established, objectively accessible, and thus, according to these processes of equality, just. But this is clearly not democratic in the sense of permitting free speech. On the contrary, ‘free speech’ for Plato is only truly free if it is constrained by truth.

But this conclusion is anathema to democracy. Democracies are essentially opposed to tyranny qua single ruling body, on the one hand, and rationalism qua regulation by truth, on the other. More important than truth is discussion itself, and the opening of that discussion in principle to as many persons as possible. In other words, to think that politics should simply be normed according to truth is itself an anti-democratic idea. From the point of view of democracy, Plato simply inverts and doubles despotism, insofar as he simply replaces the personage of the tyrant with the abstract figure of truth itself—and isn’t truth itself a matter of contestation? Yet, for Plato, it’s precisely because democracy fails the test of truth, succumbing as if a matter of course to the most outrageous, base and self-damaging drives, that it is a deleterious system.

For Plato, democracy is servitude to the tyranny of opinion, that is, to the media. Notoriously, Plato believes that the logic of media is given by the poets. Poetry essentially works by inspiration, mysterious utterance, the swaying of the passions, and elite competition—all things that are antagonistic to the egalitarian openness of reasoned argument. Fundamentally, the threat of free speech is that an excess of speech ultimately jams (or spams) its own channels, thereby corrupting itself. This is why poets are banished from Plato’s Republic: they are media goons, who seek to dominate the means of representation at the expense of justice. Hence we come to the most pressing aspect of the matter: since democracy essentially requires ‘variety’ and ‘criticism’ as E.M. Forster puts it in his classic Two Cheers for Democracy, it—unlike other forms of political organisation—necessarily places an impassioned media war at the very centre of its political enterprise. This is precisely the problem again today: democracy relies upon media that undermine it.

Yet the new media undermine democracy today in ways that go far beyond anything Plato could have envisaged. If ancient democracy certainly had to deal with a variety of media, from public heckling to graffiti, these are small fry compared to the contemporary globalised post-convergent online media environment. Even as I write these lines, an email notification pings in, spruiking an upcoming lecture by Malcolm Turnbull at the Centre for Advanced Journalism on ‘Politics, Journalism and the 24/7 News Cycle’.The blurb promises a discussion of such questions as ‘What role do Facebook, Twitter and social media in general play in policy debates and election campaigns?’ Such an environment is clearly no longer able to be satisfactorily allegorised by Plato’s Cave.

For contemporary post-convergent media simultaneously:

1) transform all forms of interaction into ‘information’ due to their technological conditions,

2) massively proliferate the modes of dissemination of information,

3) massively proliferate the quantities of information,

4) massively accelerate the speed of transmission of information,

5)necessitate that everybody purchase or at least have access to the technological devices for interacting with such information,

6) condition an unprecedented centralisation and control of the ownership of the means of representation.

This list is meant to bring out something that, for some reason, political commentators hardly seem able to mention: the very interactivity of the new media, their uptake of user-generated content, their operational requirements for sociality, are by no means new opportunities for democratic mobilisation. On the contrary, they enable not only an unprecedented exploitation of immaterial labour, a tracking of every incontrovertible keystroke, an immutable archiving of every missive, but the corporations that run the sites are extra-territorial economic giants who are essentially immune to any form of local criticism that can be elaborated on their sites and networks. Criticise as much as you like—it’s just more fodder for the fibres. New media no longer inform, but confirm: they are global, real-time, online, high-tech filtering devices that reduce all complexity to intense polarisation (good/evil, true/false, wrong/right, etc.), and all discussion to the immediacy of enraged blog posts.

This is why one can only celebrate the heroic democratic attempts of Robert Manne to hold back the ungovernable tide of centralisation. The unhinged ferocity of The Australian’s response is prima facie evidence that Manne has described—calmly, clearly, magisterially—the topology of a fetid crevice that normally hides in plain sight. Manne has targeted precisely the right phenomena too, including the opinions of the key henchmen, their ideological tropes and commitments, and their money trail. Above all, the fact of systemic concentration of media ownership is in itself a wrong in a democracy, perhaps one of the worst of all possible wrongs. For under such conditions, even if every single person seemed to be discussing public events with enthusiasm and energy, democracy has been neutered—for control of the means of discussion themselves have now literally been taken from their hands and mouths. The media war required by democracy will have morphed into a media monopology (if you’ll pardon the neologism).1

So not the accuracy, pertinence and power of Manne’s description, nor the swarming fury of the reaction, nor the ongoing governmental investigations and civil suits, are enough to reassure me that ‘our democracies’ are still viable as democracies. On the contrary, we now live in a world that is the bastard lovechild of 1984 and Brave New World: prolefeed and doublespeak for the lumpen masses, social snobbery and psychopharmacology for the touristic Betas, absolute deterritorialised mastery for the Alphas. As I finish this essay, in Melbourne, Australia in mid-November 2011, scientists connected with the Iranian nuclear program are being mysteriously assassinated, unmanned killer drones are being deployed by the US government, Rupert Murdoch remains under pressure due to further allegations regarding spying at News of the World, the ‘Occupy’ movement is still sweeping the globe from Iceland to Idaho, and it looks more and more likely that Julian Assange will indeed be extradited to Sweden. Not a single one of these ‘security issues’ can be properly understood under traditional headings of national public discussion and critique.

It is Assange who, despite the fatuousness of his public remarks noted above, provides us with an emblem and a key. His method is not, despite appearances, one of democratic debate, of revelations of embarrassing secrets, of truth against corruption. Rather, it involves a systematic flooding of the system itself. It seems to me that Assange has understood the political conditions of the network society better than anybody: to use the torrents of classified information to exacerbate the same routines of classification to the point of breakdown. Recursive escalation, not revelation, is the key to Assange’s program, or what could be called, using a botanical metaphor, ‘dieback’.

Dieback occurs when a part of a plant is affected by disease, parasites or other environmental factors, and the branches or shoots begin to die from the tip inward. In certain cases, although the infection may only be minor, the plant expends so many resources on expunging the infection that it essentially kills itself. Accelerate the barrage of information, accelerate the resources needed to deal with it—dieback as a non-linear informational tactic in the current war of humanity against the corporate state. The odds are that Manne’s classical model of critical debate won’t prove determining for our world, but Assange’s informational practice of dieback will.

This is the post-convergent media dilemma of democracy today: caught between killer drones and information dieback.

Justin Clemens teaches at the University of Melbourne. His most recent books are Minimal Domination (Surpllus, 2011) and Me ‘n’ me trumpet (Vagabond, 2011).

1 Manne says this, if with a slightly different emphasis: ‘The issue is not the absence of alternative sources of information for politically engaged citizens. In the age of the internet there are hundreds of easily accessible sources of information. The issue is rather the capacity of News Limited to influence the opinions of the vast majority of less engaged citizens whose political understanding is shaped directly by the popular newspapers and indirectly through the commercial radio and television programs which rely on the daily papers for the content of their programs and, more deeply, for the way they interpret the world,’ p. 112.

By that time many aspects of it had been determined by the previous two books. I needed it to be in Orange County, California; I needed it to be fifty years in the future; and I needed to include the old man who had also been a character in the other two stories, so that he would have three lives, each radically different — this was the triptych’s way of illustrating the way our individual lives are greatly influenced by the history we live in.

Through the previous sixteen years I had read all kinds of utopian literature. What emerged as most important for my novel was the utopian non-fiction of the 1970s, books which I think were a manifestation of the hippie generation growing up, beginning to have kids and trying to plan how to live the ideals of the revolutionary sixties. These books made quite a bookshelf: The Integral Urban House, Progress as if Survival Mattered, Small is Beautiful, Muddling Toward Frugality, Appropriate Technology and so on. They are still worth reading, but they were all unaware of the coming Reagan/Thatcher counter-revolution, which would render them largely irrelevant in the following decade. It would be nice to have a publishing series that reprinted them all, for they would still be full of interesting ideas, even if their technologies have been sometimes superseded. They would make a portrait of the hopes of that era similar to the portrait created by the era’s science fiction; the two literatures would be complementary.

These non-fiction utopian writers, plus alternative economists like Hazel Henderson and Herman Daly, were the main influences on my third California volume, Pacific Edge. These influences were not particularly radical politically, but they did outline ideas that I thought could be realistically postulated for a US culture only fifty years off. Despite their help, I found it an extremely uneasy experience to write a utopian novel, and when I was done with it I sent it out into the world with a sigh of relief, thinking, ‘I’ll never do that again’. I couldn’t quite articulate the source of my unease, but it felt like some kind of category error.

Then my friend Terry Bisson was talking to me about the book, and he asked me, ‘How did your utopia come about, Stan? What’s the history that explains it?’ Well, I had made gestures towards an explanation in the book’s italicized sections; I had even written an italicized section in which Tom Barnard suggested ten or twelve different ways his internal utopia could come about, as a way of admitting how hard it was to imagine such a history. I had cut that section, but as I began to rehearse my various historical explanations to Terry, he shook his head. ‘But Stan,’ he said, ‘there are guns under the table’.

At that point the Mars Trilogy began in my head. I was struck by the truth of Terry’s remark, and in fact it makes for one of the better chapter titles in Red Mars. I thought: ‘OK, granted there are guns under the table. Utopia is not going to come easily. We therefore have to try the story again elsewhere, invent a utopian history, maybe give it 200 years to develop rather than fifty, and tell the whole thing explicitly’. So one of the many motivations for the Mars Trilogy was to somehow fix the previous book, which of course is not really possible. And yet I find I often write in order to explain or correct unsatisfactory things in novels I’ve finished.

The Mars novels therefore described three revolutions, because I felt that in Pacific Edge I had dodged the necessity of revolution, however broadly conceived. And yet I was not comfortable with the idea of re-invoking the violent revolutions of theeighteenth and twentieth centuries; they didn’t seem appropriate to Mars, or to our current world either. The classic revolutions had often been failures, in the sense of causing such violent backlashes that they made more problems than they solved, principally by institutionalizing violence. I also felt very uncomfortable about being a first-world person stating that revolutions were necessary in third-world countries, when first-world weapons systems would then be used against them. Revolution itself needed to be reconceptualized, I felt; and indeed in the various velvet revolutions of 1989 I had just seen different models for rapid change in the social order. These new images for revolution became one of the central preoccupations of the Mars novels. We’re still stuck with this problem, of course, because we still need a revolution or two.

While writing the Mars Trilogy, or maybe before, I began to think of science as another name for the utopian way, or what Williams called the long revolution.[i] This was partly because I was married to a scientist and watching science in action, up close, and it was partly from thinking about it. We tend to take science at its own self-evaluation, and we’re not used to thinking that utopia might already be partly here, a process that we struggle for or against. But to me the idea of science as a utopian coming-into-being has seemed both true and useful, suggestive of both further stories and action in the world.

So if science itself was to be my utopian way, and Antarctica was famously called ‘the continent for science’, then maybe that was the place on Earth that was already the most utopian space. It was worth having a look; besides I like wilderness, mountains, glaciers and so on, and Antarctica is nothing but those things. Because of my Mars books, the US National Science Foundation was willing to send me south as part of their Antarctic Artists and Writers’ Program. Thus Antarctica eventually came out as a step along my way: I wanted to show what a continent run by scientists for scientists is actually like. That book was a lot of fun to research. As far as you can tell when you’re there, the continent runs using a non-monetary economic system, where food, clothing, shelter and fuel are all provided by the community; and at the same time you get to do what you want in terms of your project. It was a limited version of utopia, but interesting as a kind of laboratory experiment, a brief experience of how it might feel to live in a different social order. It was not exactly Orwell in Barcelona, but exhilarating in a different way. And it was very useful in my attempt to combine utopian and wilderness thinking, also to bring all these things closer to home than Mars.

Then came The Years of Rice and Salt, which at first I thought of as a break from utopia. But when I was trying to imagine a world history with Europe taken out of the picture by a very fatal Black Death, I quickly discovered what I felt was a problem. I didn’t want to make that alternative world worse than the one we’re in, because that would be racist and unwarranted. I didn’t want to make it better than our world, because that would be reflexively politically correct, and also unwarranted. But I couldn’t make it equal to our world either, because that would be boring — pointless in narrative terms. So my alternative history couldn’t be worse, it couldn’t be better, and it couldn’t be equal. My options seemed kind of limited. But what came to me as my solution was simply the idea of the future, and of utopia again. In the novel, at the equivalent of our year 2002 (the book’s date of publication), my alternative world would be, I decided, roughly equivalent in its goodness to our own, reached by its different history; but it would then continue past our moment some seventy years into the future, and we would then see them finally make a good job of things. This gave the novel a utopian ending that I hoped would exist as a challenge to our world: could we, starting from roughly the same position, do as well as this fictional world without Europe? This late utopian element got me past the better/worse/same conundrum, and added a little sting to the book’s tail.

At this point it felt like I had developed a kind of habit. But it was not the time to try to break it. In the previous years I had spent a fair amount of time at the National Science Foundation in Washington DC, and it seemed to me more than ever that this institution, and science more generally, represented a kind of proto-utopian space. I felt that the scientific method, and scientific institutions in our world, were under-theorized utopian attempts to change the world, made by people who would rather not think about politics, yet would very much like to do some good. These impressions led me to the trilogy I call Science in the Capital. I wanted to imagine the first step toward utopia, starting in our world now. If we could make a bridge across the Great Trench to utopia, what would be the first footing? I wanted to think about how utopia might start from our current conditions; to describe, in effect, the start of a scientific revolution. Not the Scientific Revolution of the early modern period, but rather a new revolution, enacted by scientists in the world we live in now.

I had also come to feel that many people, and especially many of my leftist colleagues, thought of science as merely the instrument of power — as the most active and effective wing of capitalism. This now struck me as wrong. To me it seemed that we actually exist in a situation that can better be described as ‘science versus capitalism’: a world in which smaller progressive concepts such as environmentalism, environmental justice, social justice, democracy itself — all these were going to be defeated together, unless they were aligned with the one great power that might yet still successfully oppose a completely capitalist future, which was science. I was thinking with a very broad brush at this point, almost mythologically you might say, but it struck me as an interesting story to tell, a new story with some possible analytic value. So I wrote the Science in the Capital trilogy with these thoughts in mind.

Having written that book, describing science as a crucial utopian force, I began to ask myself: but what is science? And how did it start? That led me to Galileo, as some kind of ‘first scientist’, and thus eventually to my most recent novel, Galileo’s Dream (2009). It is not a utopian novel, I am relieved to say, but it is a novel about science and history, and their interaction; and it is a science fiction novel.

So that’s my account of this aspect of my career; how, despite my uneasiness concerning utopia as a literary genre, I have nevertheless been writing them for a long time. I am one of the very few serial offenders, you might say, at least in modern times. It has been a source of stress to me, I admit, for there is no doubt in my mind that a ‘utopian novel’ is a strange project, a bastard form — an amalgam of two genres which are in many respects not at all compatible. It’s like saying, ‘Let’s make a new genre — we’ll throw together architectural blueprints and soap operas’. That’s obviously a bad idea. And yet there it is: that absurd hybrid is the utopian novel.

But the problem really is even worse than that. It involves a version of David Hume’s ‘is–ought problem’: there is the world as it is, and the world as it ought to be. It is difficult to see how they connect, which is Hume’s concern; but the novel, it seems at first glance, is about the world as it is. So if you want above all to write good novels, then what is should be the subject matter; it’s a matter of fidelity to the real. So realism becomes the default preferred form for the novel. And it’s the novel that matters to me; I don’t care about utopia per se — it’s literature that I love, and the novel in particular. So for a long time I experienced the utopian imperative that I somehow put on myself as a burden, because I felt the reason we read novels, indeed the reason we love all art, is that it gives us the real. I knew this was philosophically difficult territory, but my love of literature had to do with a sense of recognition — the moment of reading when you say, ‘Yes that’s right; that’s the way the world is; this book has illuminated the real’. To hold a mirror up to nature, as Hamlet says to the players. That’s what art seems to be for.

Instead of this recognition of what is, the utopian novel hopes to create a vision of the way things ought to be. It’s a profound shift of focus, which has often created in me the feeling of working across the grain of my hopes. It has taken a lot of years of worrying about this to pull apart the notion of what realism might be — to understand that there is never a mirror — to see that the moment you start to write sentences, you’re portraying something that ought to be. All novels are utopian in this respect: they propose that life means something. And meaning itself is a utopian wish. So, if the novel is about what life means, and if it concerns itself with individuals in their society, then whether that society is portrayed as better, worse or the same as ours is not the important point. All portrayed societies are stylized and hypothetical, a projection of the writer’s wishes and ideology. Seen in that way, a utopian novel is only a tiny bit less realistic than the most naturalistic realist novel out there. Or put it in reverse: a realistic novel is a kind of utopia in disguise.

Or so I have tried to reassure myself. However, I must say that when I read the part of Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future (2005) that speaks of the impossibility of imagining utopia,[ii] I found the notion comforting. ‘Ah ha!’ I cried. ‘I was trying to do something impossible!’ It explained a lot.

Ultimately, however, I think this notion that we cannot imagine utopia is mistaken. We can imagine utopia; it’s as easy as pie. The constraints are very slack, and our imaginations strong. We are quite capable of taking the present situation, and all history too, and ringing every possible physical and logical change in our ideas to make something new; and some of these newly invented systems could be declared viable, even though radically different from the current moment. It’s not quite like imaging a new colour or a tenth dimension. It has more to do with justice, a very archaic primate concept, a concept that predates humanity itself. A better political order, even a truly good political order? No problem!

Of course there is a problem, and that’s the getting from here to there. But let me come back to that later. First let’s briefly contemplate some of the utopian descriptions and blueprints out there today. Take the work of Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, for example, their ‘Participatory Economics’, which they also call ‘parecon’ in a neologism worse than any science-fiction writer’s. Despite that tone deafness, it’s an interesting system: a non-capitalist co-operative society in which people band together in small collectives, and then, instead of buying and selling things like a company, they fill out lots of requisition forms, somewhat in the style of a Chinese work unit or even a soviet. You fill out a form for what your group is going to make that year, you fill out a form for what your group is going to need that year to make what it will make, and so on. It resembles the situation Francis Spufford describes in his novel Red Plenty (2010), in which Soviet cyberneticists in the 1950s and ’60s and ’70s desperately attempt to invent computers powerful enough to run the Soviet economy in top-down, non-market fashion, before the system collapses — something they never managed. Now, with much more computing power than it would actually take to run such a non-market society, the idea is there to be contemplated again. Possibly such a society would feel a bit like Antarctica does now under the National Science Foundation. When I tried to imagine the continuous form-filling required, I confess I began to think, ‘Well maybe money isn’t so bad after all’. Possibly it would not be a very appealing utopia to live in, but we don’t know; and in any case it’s fully worked out, an alternative system that with modern supercomputers could very possibly work. Maybe the computers could even fill out the forms. An algorithmic artificial intelligence economy; it’s worth considering.

The problem, however, with this and all other utopian alternatives, is that we can’t imagine how we might get there. We can’t imagine the bridge over the Great Trench, given the world we’re in, and the massively entrenched power of the institutions that shape our lives — and the guns that are still there under the table. Indeed right on the table. The bridge itself is what we can’t imagine — and maybe that’s what Jameson means: but then it’s not utopia we can’t imagine, but history. Future history, the history yet to come. And that makes sense. History has been so implausible that there’s no reason to suspect that we will ever be able to accurately prophesy or describe the history that will come next.

Therefore the main project of all science fiction — that of imagining future histories — is impossible. Imagining a positive history which gets us to a better state is perhaps even more impossible, but in any case very difficult, and now more than ever, now that it’s clear we are entering an era of climate change and population overshoot which will impose radical physical stresses on both human and natural systems. This aspect of things now refuses to be kept out of the picture. Climate change is inevitable — we’re already in it — and because we’re caught in technological and cultural path dependency, we can’t easily get back out of it. The example of the ocean liner that can’t be turned around in less than ten miles is actually a very simple metaphor for the kinds of path dependency we are caught in; the infrastructures we build have lifetimes that last decades, sometimes centuries, and changing them necessarily takes time. We’re probably not going to be able to cap the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at less than 450 parts per million, and 560 parts per million is quite possible. At that point we will be living on a quite different planet, in a significantly damaged biosphere, with its life-support systems so harmed that human existence will be substantially threatened. It has become a case of utopia or catastrophe, and utopia has gone from being a somewhat minor literary problem to a necessary survival strategy.

Climate Change and the Necessity of the Utopian Project

So let’s shift gears now, and consider utopia not as my literary problem but a shared social vision, with this extra burden laid on it: not just that the present is bad, but that the future will inevitably be worse in environmental terms. In fact it is worth discussing first this question: is it even possible at this point to avoid a catastrophic crash of human and natural systems? Or are we already in a kind of Wile E. Coyote moment, that moment when he’s chasing the roadrunner and goes over the cliff, and looks at the audience, legs spinning, to only then discover he’s out there in space, though gravity has not yet caught him? Are we indulging in a fantasy if we imagine that we could recover from this path we are on, if we were to do something?

Well, this is the kind of question that is worth asking the scientists who study these problems in a quantitative ecological sense, analysing it as a problem in global energy flows. The Socolow wedge diagrams out of Princeton suggest that yes, it is still possible for us to ratchet back from the edge of catastrophe by decarbonizing quite rapidly, which means applying every single method contemplated as soon and as fully as possible. We’re about at the moment where we’re leaving the cliff’s edge, but that’s better than running the numbers and finding you’re already out in space.

There are well-articulated plans to get back to solid ground coming from many places, including Lester Brown and his Worldwatch Institute; their ‘Plan B 3.0’[iii] is a fairly detailed plan of action. Indeed many government agencies and NGOs and institutions around the world are busy articulating these plans, and it’s reassuring to think that we’re not living in an utter fantasy of salvation. Practical plans have been proposed, and there really still are grounds for hope. But we have to act.

So the question of history returns. How do we act on what we know? The time has come when we have to solve this puzzle, because the future, from where we look at it now, is different than past futures. Before we just had to keep on trying to do our best, and we would be OK. Things seemed to slowly get better, for some people in some places anyway; in any case, we would keep trying things, and probably muddle through. This is no longer the case. Now the future is a kind of attenuating peninsula; as we move out on it, one side drops off to catastrophe; the other side, nowhere near as steep, moves down into various kinds of utopian futures. In other words, we have come to a moment of utopia or catastrophe; there is no middle ground, mediocrity will no longer succeed. So utopia is no longer a nice idea, but a survival necessity. This is a big change. We need to take action to start history on a path onto the side of the peninsula representing one kind of better future or another; the details of it don’t matter, survival without catastrophe is what matters. In essence the seven billion people we have, and the nine to ten billion people we’re likely to have, exist at the tip of an entire improvised complex of prostheses, which is our technology considered as one big system. We live out at the end of this towering complex, and it has to work successfully for us to survive; we are far past the natural carrying capacity of the planet in terms of our numbers. There is something amazing about the human capacity to walk this tightrope over the abyss without paralysing fear. We’re good at ignoring dangers; but now, on the attenuating peninsula, on the crazy tower of prostheses — however you envision it, it is a real historical moment of great danger, and we need to push hard for utopia as survival, because failure now is simply unacceptable to our descendants, if we have any.

When thinking about this situation, this moment that simply has to change, those of us in the developed world, the privileged world, tend very naturally to ask: even if we do survive — to accomplish that — will it be bad for us? Will we be unhappy? Will we lose our privileges? As Jameson observes at one point in his long essay on utopia, people are anti-utopian not necessarily because they’re political reactionaries, but because utopia might change them utterly.[iv] And such a profound change is a fearful thing, almost like reincarnation: if you come back as someone else you’re not really you, so in fact you haven’t come back at all. Utopia would be as pointless as heaven, if you were no longer you. And you are your habits, or so it usually feels. So what would happen to prosperous first-worlders in a utopia of survival, where everyone had an equal share of the Earth’s ‘natural capital’? For it’s very commonly said, by quite mathematically sophisticated people, that if we tried to spread human and natural wealth equally over the entire seven billion of us, then everyone would be poor.

This too is an interesting question to run the numbers on. The Swiss, being prosperous and practical, have already started to run those numbers: one result of that inquiry is the 2000 Watt Society. Their notion is that if the total amount of energy available to humans right now were equally distributed among the entire seven billion of us, each person would have the use of about 2,000 watts.[v] It isn’t a lot of energy, but it’s not negligible either. Some Swiss have decided to run an experiment living on that much, and now there are people in Basel and Zurich trying it. The Swiss have some local advantages in this experiment: they live in a small country in Europe, a continent with an amazingly rich infrastructure, built partly with the spoils of their colonialist plundering of the rest of the world. You can therefore live on 2,000 watts in Europe and be quite comfortable. There’s public transport, there are efficient small apartments, and so on. While this living experiment doesn’t give all the answers, it is nonetheless suggestive. It looks like a huge amount of our energy burn right now is pure waste in terms of improving the quality of our lives, assuming that quality is conceived in terms of health, happiness and sustainability. Much that is burned is simply wasted. Right now the average Swiss citizen uses 5,000 watts, Europe as a whole averages 6,000 watts, America 12,000, China 1,500, India 1,000 and Bangladesh about 300. You get a sense of the range. And right now we live in an extremely dirty and inefficient technology, a kind of global Stalinist Cheylabinsk-56. What has been invented and designed already to replace this crude old tech would by itself make an immense improvement in energy efficiency and carbon burn, and more could come after that. The realizable goal is a carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative civilization. This swapping out of our energy technology is part of the necessary work of the twenty-first century, but it can also mean full employment, population stabilization, and eventually more watts for everybody equally.

This vision of an overarching social project makes it possible to say more to young people in the first world than, ‘Sorry, we torched the world and now you have to live like saints and suffer’. That’s not a great message to take to the young, and also it’s not correct. We in the hyperconsuming first world are actually experiencing our extra carbon burn as more of a burden than an enhancement. It measurably degrades our physical and mental health; it cocoons us in crap — we’re not fully there in the world. So we need to burn less carbon for ourselves as well as our home; it’s not a matter of puritan renunciation, but rather becoming more clever and healthy. There is a comfortable way forward for all, in other words, if comfort is conceived of as a sense of achievement. There’s a utopian spark in that thought, a spur to action.

I wrote a bit about this notion in the Science in the Capital Trilogy — that a decarbonized life might bring us more alive than we are now in our thick, dirty technoshell. I have sometimes called this utopian vision ‘the Palaeolithic plus good dental care’, hoping to suggest that since we’re still genetically the same creatures we were 100,000 years ago, we could become again those same animals, living fulfilled and complex existences, without capitalist hyperconsumption — but with the best parts of modern technology conserved, to reduce suffering and thus increase happiness. What the human sciences are telling us now is that the closer you live to a Palaeolithic lifestyle — with good dental care — the better off you are. This is another utopian thought, coming straight out of the latest scientific findings: we are happiest when we are healthiest, and we are healthiest when we live a life that engages us in the physical world in a rather low-carbon-burn way. Walking around outdoors a lot, talking, the occasional dash or tumble, making a meal together, and so on. These low-carbon activities are often felt as the best part of the day, and that’s no coincidence.

This description can be given to young people in particular as a possible life project worth doing. Young first-world secular citizens exist in a crisis of meaning: they know life needs to be about more than hyperconsumption, but what that ‘more’ might be is not clear. Meaning has never been priced and thus it is confusing. This existential crisis is very real; we need meaning to go forward, and yet capitalist society doesn’t provide it. Now, at the beginning of the climate-change era, the start of the Anthropocene, that meaning is simply evident in the world — really it’s forced on us by the situation — we have to decarbonize, which means changing everything, which means utopia, all for survival and for our descendants. This is a life project with a sense of accomplishment in it. With the idea that you could do things smarter and thereby have more fun, capitalism as it stands now begins to look not only morally obese, but also unskilful, even a little bit stupid.

The project, for all of us alive today, then breaks down into practical reformist strategies, like supporting social democracy and the various green political movements, while keeping more radical further goals in mind. And when people bring up geo-engineering, one can say, ‘Yes, we’re doing that already by accident, and really the smartest geo-engineering we have is swift de-carbonization’. One can promote a notion Jameson has mentioned once or twice, that of full employment. Full employment would get needed work done, and it is also a paradigm buster for capitalism, which needs unemployment to get ‘wage pressure’, meaning fear in more and more workers. So we have structural unemployment; yet just by asserting that everybody deserves a job as a human right, the system is challenged. Full employment also suggests the idea of a living wage, therefore poverty reduction, which is in itself a powerful climate-change technology. This needs to be insisted on, to make sure that climate change action doesn’t somehow become a merely technological question, with the implication of some kind of silver bullet solution out there that will allow everything else to go on as it’s going now. That’s not going to happen. So changes that dismantle some of the fundamental injustice of capitalism while helping the climate situation are a stranded double good.

Always in this, supporting science is a necessary part of the project. It isn’t the same as supporting capitalism, as some critics seem to assume. We need to de-strand those two, and recognize that science is our ability to increase our ability to understand the world, and then to manipulate it for our collective good.

While I support science as the best name for our species’ life-support system, I also recognize that many scientists are like the character Beaker in The Muppets, geeking their way through life, their education deep but narrow, making them often naively unphilosophical, to the point where they think that what they do is straightforward and non-political. It’s the humanities’ job to disabuse them of that mistaken notion, by way of fully supportive lessons in history, philosophy, political theory, rhetoric and literature. The humanities need to educate the sciences rather than attack them; this education is not an option, if you want to be aware of how the human world works.

The humanities’ stereotypical attack on scientists looks like this: take the Monopoly game figure of the Capitalist, with his top hat and round belly, and imagine that he pays Beaker from The Muppets to invent a gun, and then he seizes the gun and puts it to Beaker’s head and says: ‘Make me more guns and make me more toys’. Beaker’s eyes are round as he complies. Those of us in the humanities, watching this scene and imagining we’re somehow not already implicated, say, ‘Damn it Beaker, I see you’re part of the problem. You even invented the atom bomb!’ And Beaker whispers to us, ‘There’s a gun to my head. And there’s a gun on you, too. Can’t you see it? Why are you blaming me?’

Yet we do; we go on blaming science for something that is not the scientists’ problem but rather our general problem as citizens. Scientists need both our support and our ability to give them a political education, pointing out their own potentiality, their embodiment of a utopian effort that has continued for centuries now. The various components of the scientific method, and the structure of scientific institutions, are simultaneously both a method for discovering nature and a utopian political program. But who knows this; who admits this; who works with this knowledge?

I think it helps to think of this large social project, which we must now accept as ours, in terms of the concept of scaffolding. James Griesemer of Univeristy of California Davis shared with me his notion of the human generations’ efforts as each building a scaffold for further work by descendants, who work at some kind of higher level. It has been about 400 generations since the end of the last Ice Age, so we can put ourselves in that long succession, and imagine that our generation is building a scaffold on the shoulders of the many generations that came before. A coral reef isn’t a bad analogy either: you build your level; you can’t leap to heaven — if you try you will crash back down, maybe even crash a few scaffolding levels below you. So here, facing climate change, proposing utopia as in effect the only solution that will work, we still need to think of the project as a transgenerational thing that will take generations to accomplish. We can’t panic, nor can we give up just because we can’t do it all in our lifetimes. We face an ecological emergency; but even here, all we can do is work on our present reality, and build what we can. I’m aware that I’m arguing conservatively here, but I’m arguing for reforms so numerous and systemic that ultimately they will add up to revolution — to post-capitalism, to utopia — but some generations down the line. We can’t imagine the details of how this will happen, but the general outlines of the project are clear enough from here to make a start. And the necessity is clear. Hopefully, we’ll get there as fast as we can, and meanwhile we can throw ourselves into our moment of the project.

Let me finish by quoting from Voltaire, the somewhat ominous but ultimately practical final sentence of Candide: ‘Keep a garden’.

[i] R. Williams, Towards 2000, London, Chatto and Windus, 1983, pp. 267–9.

[ii] F. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London and New York, Verso, 2005, pp. 231–3.

[iii] Plan B 3.0 is available for free as an ebook at <www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/pb3>, accessed 22 March 2011.

[iv] F. Jameson, ‘The Politics of Utopia’, New Left Review, second series, no. 25, 2004, pp. 51–2.

[v] Technical details of the actual numbers are available at <www.novatlantis.ch/en/2000-watt-society.html>, accessed 22 March 2011.

Jeremijenko, whose background includes studies in fine art, biochemistry, physics, neuroscience and precision engineering, prefers to call herself an ‘environmental art activist’. A dazzlingly prolific and articulate multi-tasker, Jeremijenko spoke by telephone with Arena Magazine while riding a bike through dense New York City traffic carrying water samples from the Bronx and Mississippi Rivers, balancing two computers in a basket, and toting a bagful of electrical cables—all the while wearing a cowboy hat to keep the sun out of her eyes. She has been known to hold office consultations on a raft constructed out of recycled plastic bottles floating on New York’s East River, yet she is also a past recipient of the prestigious Rockefeller Fellowship: Jeremijenko navigates between eccentricity and the establishment with ease and charm.

She has exhibited at several respected US museums, including the Whitney, but the primary focus of Jeremijenko’s practice is public and participatory. Past projects have included Feral Robotic Dogs (2003), for which the artist rewired off-the-shelf children’s toys, equipping them with complex toxin-detecting and communication software and ‘releasing’ them in a range of contexts including within public art museums. As is typical of what is often called ‘new media’ art, the object (the rewired robots) and the performance (their release in public) are equally integral to the work: that is, the project only becomes fully meaningful with the active involvement of a public audience. That Feral Robotic Dogs was reported in specialist science and art journals as well as in The New York Times is testament to Jeremijenko’s success in harnessing the communicative potential of art to capture public attention to a degree to which an academic experiment would never aspire.

‘There’s a lot of accounting and measuring of the negative effects’, Jeremijenko explains, but she recognises that diagnosing the problem is only the beginning. The Feral Robotic Dogs ‘sniffed out’ toxins, but the edible cocktails and amuse-bouches Jeremijenko is currently working on actually seek to make a positive contribution to the health both of the human consumers and the natural environment. The artist has been holding regular events under the moniker of the Cross(x)Species Adventure Club, intimate public gatherings that combine elements of an art performance, a science lecture and a cocktail party. This December’s instalment in Melbourne will interact with the exhibits collected in the Melbourne Museum as part of a week-long program of participatory events and activities. Jeremijenko believes that ‘the food movement is a huge movement—in the US it’s the biggest social movement by a long way. There are a lot of people interested and engaged’. Her project strives to contribute a positive and playful spirit to this movement, to seek possibilities rather than solely cataloguing problems.

‘The Cross(x)Species Adventure Club is creating a convivial context in which we can think about the extraordinary challenge of redesigning and reimagining food systems’, Jeremijenko says. Her ambition is to ‘design food systems so that they improve environmental health, so they augment biodiversity, so they actually have positive effects. This is a huge design challenge and there aren’t actually people working on that, [asking] “How the hell do we do this so that it radically improves environmental health and biodiversity?”.’ What makes the club ‘cross species’ is that the menu offers positive nutrition both for humans and other creatures: one dinner consists wholly of foods edible—and delicious—to both humans and geese, another employs preparation processes in the kitchen with a corollary process in the estuary ecosystem. Past offerings concocted by Jeremijenko in collaboration with molecular gastronomer Mihir Desai have included Lures: wishing fish well, which contain a chelating agent that binds to bio-accumulated heavy metals when ingested by either humans or fish, allowing these toxins to pass out of the body in a less harmful form. It’s like a ‘fish restaurant where you feed the fish’, the artist explains. The addition of gin, tonic (which fluoresces in UV light) and rosemary make for a tasty and titillating pre-dinner edible cocktail. The Wetkisses: the marshmallow for kissing frogs formerly known as Prince, another edible cocktail, is coloured purple to evoke a soil bacteria found in wetlands known to protect frogs from disastrous fungal infections. Jeremijenko believes this purplish bacteria may help redress the mass extinction of amphibians, which many claim rivals that of dinosaurs in its scale and devastation.

For dessert, participants (or ‘adventurers’) have been offered Nano water buffalo ice-cream. Jeremijenko is an ardent advocate of water buffalo milk as an alternative to cow milk that is more beneficial for humans—being higher in protein and nutrients and lower in fat—and also for the environment, as water buffalo require a smaller land area than cows and their cultivation necessitates the reclaiming of wetlands which in turn are havens of biodiversity, providing vital ecosystems for endangered amphibians and other creatures, and neutralising carbon dioxide.

At the Cross(x)Species Adventure Club, the buffalo milk is treated with liquid nitrogen to boost its creaminess. This kind of molecular gastronomy is hardly applicable for everyday real-world use, but Jeremijenko, with the help of her students completing an assignment she calls ‘How stuff is made and how it can change’, has been lobbying multinational ice-cream manufacturer Ben & Jerry’s to begin commercial production of buffalo ice-cream. By creating a market for water buffalo products, she hopes to pressure large-scale manufacturers like Ben & Jerry’s to increase the number of wetlands, thus enhancing biodiversity. ‘I would argue that to eat water buffalo milk ice cream because of the known environmental health benefits is much more effective than to not eat dairy ice cream’, Jeremijenko contends. ‘I don’t think that these simplistic categories—vegan, vegetarian, non-dairy—solve any problems. That’s not where our agency is powerful …. is not participating powerful? No. There are plenty of people who will keep eating dairy ice cream.’ Jeremijenko rejects the received notions of what constitutes ethical eating. ‘A moral philosophical position, like the Peter Singer way … reduces our sense of the capacity to redesign and re-imagine and actually use both our creative and analytic capacity to figure out how to make it better. To say “I’m not eating that, I have a safe moral position” is bullshit.’

This attitude is typical of the artist’s emphasis on positive possibilities rather than problems and prohibitions. It is evidenced in the lingering cuteness of the Feral Robotic Dogs that were once children’s toys, in the glowing lights of the Lures: wishing fish well and in the playful naming of the Wetkisses: the marshmallow for kissing frogs formerly known as Prince. It’s a deliberate strategy of play, Jeremijenko explains, as ‘play is enlisting. Humour enlists and is convivial whereas moral certainty need not be’. Accepting that ‘there’s no one genius that’s going to redesign the food system’, she insists that ‘play becomes important if you think it’s important to enlist and engage. If you think that the power of analysis and argument itself is not enough, that the actual participation and public experiments and the willingness of people to suspend disbelief and to change is really what creates a social force’. Cocktail parties and molecular gastronomy foams may sound like an exclusive kind of activism for the elite, but the artist’s ambition is to inspire and engage a broader public. And, if she succeeds in her negotiations with the Ben & Jerry’s corporation, she might just succeed on a grand scale.

The Ben & Jerry’s intervention grew out of a course Jeremijenko teaches at New York University that asks students to investigate how everyday commodities are made. She begins by asking her students ‘if there’s anything they have on them or that they carry every day or that they use that they can give an account of how it’s made and who made it. And of course, there’s nothing. And all these things in their bags, the pens and books and things they can see in the room:’ the students have no idea how any of it is manufactured. ‘This kind of profound ignorance is a condition of the information age. We talk about information excess and information overload … but that veil between production and consumption is radically thickened.’

One way in which Jeremijenko is seeking to lift that veil is through her AgBags, simple pouches to hang from windows or balconies and in which to grow edible plants. In a sense, the AgBags are simply well-designed hanging pots. But the research Jeremijenko is conducting into efficient plant varieties and new food production techniques reveals that ‘the charge of the AgBags is to use urban agriculture as a radically different thing from rural agriculture.’ Jeremijenko firmly believes that cities can be effective sites for food production. The AgBags, while primarily an agitational gesture, have the potential ‘to redesign agriculture —what it is and where it’s done … In a rural context you don’t have any problem with access to land, but you have a lot of problems with access to people. Here in New York City you’ve got no shortage of labour—intelligent participants—but you don’t have any access to soil’.

Perhaps it’s unlikely that cities will become major producers of food but, in proposing this, Jeremijenko is striving to repair ‘our intimate relationship with non-human organisms’, thus making city-dwellers feel a sense of connection with our eco-system. This is central to the artist’s intervention in the environmental movement. ‘Traditional environmental conservation and preservation groups ideologically are polar opposite to what I do’, Jeremijenko insists, as they are ‘not about actively constructing and reimagining and redesigning … I think this is the representational challenge of the time. We have this legacy of believing that anything we do, any kind of human, urban effect on natural systems is bad, so it’s better just to leave them alone, stay away as far as possible’.

Unlike many in the environmental movement, Jeremijenko accepts that an ever-increasing number of humans are living in urban centres. Instead of seeing cities as inherently bad, she seeks out their potential as hubs of environmental renewal. She hopes to ‘invert our cultural preconception that nature is out there and the city is not where nature is. Our cities are natural systems’. She cites a number of studies (as well as her own 1998 project, OneTrees, for which she planted a thousand cloned walnut trees in San Francisco) that suggest trees actually grow faster in urban environments. ‘Paradoxically, in the city, because there’s more pollutants, it actually catalyses the breakdown of ozones much more quickly than in the rural areas where it just lies like a blanket over the trees’, Jeremijenko explains. She imagines a future in which cities host healthy populations of fish, and in which tall buildings house hundreds of different edible plants.

Jeremijenko’s practice, in its emphasis on participation and in its celebration of the enlisting power of play, challenges the conservative elements in the environmental movement and points to opportunities for the food movement to transcend individual lifestyle choices, and to engage urban populations in collective projects of resistance and renewal. ‘Our agency is powerful’, she insists. Swept up in the excitement and sense of possibility offered by her Cross(x)Species Adventure Club, it’s hard not to agree.

*Natalie Jeremijenko, together with Mihir Desai, will be in Melbourne from 25 November to 4 December 2011 for a string of Cross(x)Species Adventure Club events produced by Carbon Arts , an organisation working to facilitate artists’ role in generating awareness and action on climate change. The week will feature a progressive edible cocktail party through the Melbourne Museum on 1 December, with plans for a supper club, an AgBag workshop and a forum on future foods. The Arena Project Space will be the base for of the Cross(x)Species Adventure Club during this period.

 The future of sustainable food lies in a complete rethink of how humans relate to the natural environment through collective engagement.

Carbon Arts and Arena Project Space invite you to join the Cross(x)Species Adventure Club and engage with New York based artist / engineer /activist Prof Natalie Jeremijenko, chef Mihir Desai and guest speakers to explore how we can use the creative potential of science , modernist cuisine and the imagination to connect food production to healthy ecologies.

Prior to Fukushima, nuclear generation of electricity had re-emerged onto the global public agenda after more than a quarter of a century of post-Chernobyl recession in the guise of a putative greenhouse gas emission mitigation strategy, heavily promoted by the nuclear industry and allies and admirers in government and academia. Even before Fukushima, the much touted ‘nuclear renaissance’ was in doubt, principally because of nuclear economics and construction times, the closing of the financial gap between nuclear and new energy sources, a decline in likely availability of government subsidies, and the wholly implausible number of nuclear power plants required in a climate change salvation scenario.

Despite Fukushima, nuclear power in Japan will not die immediately, although it is mortally wounded and will never recover. The global rise in construction costs that will follow from increased safety concerns will vitiate many of the cost-reduction benefits derived from the incremental improvement and standardisation of design and construction that have kept Japanese (and Korean) nuclear costs lower than those of other countries over the past two decades. The multiple official reviews of the causes and consequences of the Fukushima sequence of accidents will undoubtedly lead to a great deal of retrofitting and redesign of existing reactors, as well as changes in future design requirements. While the Fukushima No. 1 reactors have already been written off (with massive costs far beyond normal expensive decommissioning costs), thirty-four of the country’s remaining fifty-four commercial reactors are also offline for inspection and review. One measure of the likely complexity and duration of the reviews of some of these of apparently undamaged reactors is the experience at Japan’s largest nuclear power station at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, where the plant’s six large reactors shut down automatically in September 2007 following the M6.8 Chuetsu undersea earthquake off the coast of Niigata. Almost four years later, at the time of the Fukushima earthquake, three of the reactors were still offline, pending further investigations. More importantly, in the wake of that earthquake, authorities repeated local seismic studies conducted almost three decades ago and discovered a range of faults undetected by the seismological studies possible at the time of the plant’s construction, leading to a comprehensive rewriting of Japan’s nuclear seismic guidelines. That process, writ large, will now start again.

Nuclear power in Japan is a product of a particular version of Japan’s doken kokka, or construction state. In it the general model of a corporate–state alliance to build largely unjustifiable expensive infrastructure projects was fused with a vision of a plutonium economy that would free the resource-poor country from dependence on energy imports. At the heart of the vision of the plutonium economy were some of the largest of Japan’s impressive white elephant population―the Monju and Joyo breeder reactors, which were to generate an endless supply of fissile material to then be used as fuel for other reactors, and the $91 billion Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant, which is planned to produce more than eight tonnes of plutonium a year. A nuclear alliance made up of nuclear plant manufacturers, electricity utilities, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, and national and local politicians in the Liberal Democratic Party and Democratic Party of Japan has battled with widespread and resilient grassroots campaigns against nuclear power. Despite the massive imbalance of resources, including longstanding collusive and corrupt practices that have buttressed elements of the nuclear alliance, and intimidation and silencing of even senior conservative politicians, almost as many nuclear facilities were stopped by local campaigns as were finally constructed.

Fukushima will threaten the hold of the Japanese nuclear complex on decision-making in at least three ways. Firstly, a considerable amount of previously suppressed information is coming to light―not only from the electric power companies like TEPCO, already a byword for a corporate culture of malfeasance and impunity. The regulatory agencies attached to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, especially the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), have been shown to have been grossly delinquent, and possibly actually collusive with TEPCO, in earlier seismic safety assessments. On 3 June NISA admitted that it had suppressed the fact that it had detected radioactive Telerium (Te-132) six kilometres from the reactor site on the morning of 12 March, the day after the earthquake, an indication that meltdown was already underway.

Needless to say, public trust in nuclear power and its regulation has been shaken. More importantly, it is clear that the trust mainstream politicians had vested in the nuclear complex has been badly shaken. While his opponents in his own party and in the opposition LDP are eager to bring down Prime Minister Kan Naoto, very few would have wanted to swap places with him in the months after the earthquake as his administration was blindsided by TEPCO and NISA, and as a result he looked, as he actually was, virtually powerless to affect events significantly.

Secondly, even before Fukushima the strength of local opposition throughout the country was such that there was almost no likelihood of new nuclear facilities receiving local government planning permissions. Onsite spent nuclear fuel storage has reached capacity at most Japanese nuclear plants, and the Mutsu Interim Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage Facility will not open until at least 2012. There is no prospect of permanent spent nuclear fuel storage facility being constructed in Japan, or anywhere else. Spent fuel was stored in eight different locations at Fukushima No.1 NPP―in six reactors’ spent fuel storage ponds, an independent spent fuel pool, and an independent dry cask facility. With frequent substantial aftershocks continuing in the region, the greatest ongoing danger remains the possibility of a structural collapse of the earthquake-, blast- and fire-damaged spent fuel storage pond above Reactor No. 4, with complete loss of coolant to the large amount of spent fuel in the pond.

Thirdly, as noted, nuclear power in Japan is a product of a particular version of Japan’s construction state, and its vision of a plutonium economy. That dream, always a matter of fantasy, is shattered. The immediate alternative is for ‘once-through’ use of nuclear fuel, from which the waste is then stored forever, without reprocessing. The real question is how long this fall-back position itself will be viable in Japan.

Not surprisingly, the nuclear industry in Japan displays many of the characteristics of the wider social formation, now several decades into a state of disarray as the postwar social structure of accumulation―summarised as ‘Japan Incorporated’―continues to lose its mojo, and the outline of a new order remains elusive. While the most obvious examples of this are the lack of political and bureaucratic effectiveness and coherence in decision making, the dirty secret of Japanese labour is being played out once again at Fukushima, through the use of day-labourers. The great majority of workers recruited to work in the highly dangerous environment at Fukushima since the earthquake have been contract employees (hiseisha’in), hired for about AUD 100 a day by a subcontractor to work for TEPCO. Historically, much of Japan’s postwar construction depended on the labour of men hired by labour-bosses, often with yakuza links, from highly depressed areas of big cities, such as Tokyo’s San’ya and Osaka’s Kamigasaki, from backgrounds of unemployment, mental and physical ill-health, family breakdown and social isolation. These days an SMS message on a mobile phone replaces the early morning labour call in the yoseba.

Radiation levels inside the reactor and turbine buildings of Units 1, 2 and 3 are extremely high, and a fifteen minute exposure, even in a completely sealed suit, is equivalent to the maximum exposure for a US nuclear worker over five years. In other places on the site, while radiation levels remain high, they are probably not lethal if proper procedures are followed and repeat exposures restricted. The problem is that in recruiting day-labourers the nuclear industry is repeating its earlier history of hiring ‘nuclear gypsies’, whose exposure levels are not properly monitored as they move from job to job, and whose work situation is such that they may rapidly accumulate dangerous levels of radiation exposure. Even before Fukushima, nuclear contract workers routinely had the highest monitored levels of exposure. SMS and Twitter messages calling for Fukushima day-labourers after the earthquake were offering 10,000 yen a day. One forty-eight-year-old worker living nearby declined an offer which went: ‘We are looking for people over fifty who could intervene in the reactor; the pay is much higher than usual’. As the sociologist Paul Jobin remarked in Japan Focus, ‘The wording “over fifty” suggests that in order to come work on the site, you must be ready to die …’

Five Nuclear Questions for Japan

The answers to five questions will indicate just how long the mortally wounded Japanese nuclear industry will take to finally die.

1. Will the liberalisation of Japanese energy markets be extended to the nuclear industry, allowing the market realities of nuclear power generation without subsidy shape decision making?

2. Will the electric utilities, now so reliant upon nuclear power generation, remain committed to it? After the German electricity sector’s sudden conversion to a non-nuclear future following the lead from Chancellor Angela Merkel, questions may begin to be asked in Tokyo boardrooms.

3. Can elected politicians form a Japanese government that will take control of nuclear policy? Here the nuclear sector is a canary in the coalmine for the wider key issue of Japanese politicians wresting control of policy from unelected bureaucracies, and hence being capable of taking responsibility for policy.

4. Can an elected government admit the failure of the chimera of the plutonium economy? Minimally, this would be the reconstruction of a system-rational mode of Japanese capitalist democracy that does not waste billions of tax-payers’ dollars on white elephant infrastructure. Beyond that is the darkest side of the plutonium economy, the other chimera of nuclear power, the not-so-hidden fantasy of indigenous nuclear weapons development.

5. Can a Japanese government break through encrusted, vested interests to direct a new energy policy? Ideally, this should be based on a mix of high energy efficiency, renewable energy sources and a mix of centralised and distributed power generation. In late May, Prime Minister Kan announced a target of 20 per cent of electricity generation by 2020, a decade ahead of pre-Fukushima plans.

Five Questions for Australians

1. Will Australia resist the temptations of high-level nuclear waste disposal and uranium enrichment, the pathway to the bomb?

2. Can the push-back by the Australian nuclear power boosters in government, business and academia be resisted?

3. Will the Fukushima disaster lead to more than just another round of cost increases; will it lead to a more fundamental, informed critique?

4. Will social movements be able to generate adequate pressure to erode the hidden financial protections that sustain the nuclear state–corporate complex?

5. Contra the current trajectory for planetary disaster, will the collapse of the illusion of the nuclear option as a fallback strategy generate sufficient psychic and political pressure for potentially viable climate change action?

By Richard Tanter

Richard Tanter is Senior Research Associate at the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability.

*An extended, footnoted version of this article will be available at <www.nautilus.org/about/associates/richard-tanter/publications>.

References:

E. Fowler, San’ya Blues: Laboring Life in Contemporary Tokyo, Cornell University Press, 1998.

J. Harding, ‘Economics of Nuclear Power and Proliferation Risks in a Carbon-Constrained World’, The Electricity Journal, vol. 20, no. 10, December 2007, pp. 65–76.

D. von Hippel et al., After the Deluge: Short and Medium-term Impacts of the Reactor Damage Caused by the Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, Special Report, 17 March 2011; and The Path from Fukushima: Short and Medium-term Impacts of the Reactor Damage Caused by the Japan Earthquake and Tsunami on Japan’s Electricity System, 11 April 2011, Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability, <www.nautilus.org>.

I.N. Kessides, ‘Nuclear Power: Understanding the Economic Risks and Uncertainties’, Energy Policy, vol.38, no. 8, August 2010, pp. 3849–64;

J. Kingston, Japan’s Quiet Transformation: Social Change and Civil Society in 21st Century Japan, pp. 122–56.

G. MacKerron, ‘Nuclear Costs: Why Do they Keep Rising?’, Energy Policy, July 1992, pp. 641–52

G. McCormack, The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence, M.E. Sharpe, 2001.

‘Nuclear Power Economics’, The Future of Nuclear Power: An Interdisciplinary MIT Study, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003.

D. Schlissel, M. Mullett and R. Alvarez, ‘Nuclear Loan Guarantees―Another Taxpayer Bailout Ahead?’, Union of Concerned Scientists, March 2009.

Tadahiro Katsuta and Tatsujiro Suzuki, ‘Japan’s Spent Fuel and Plutonium Management Challenges’, Proceedings of the Carnegie Non-Proliferation Conference, 2007, p. 6.

Tanaka Yuji, ‘Nuclear Power Plant Gypsies in High-Tech Society’ in J. Moore (ed.), The Other Japan: Conflict, Compromise, and Resistance Since 1945, M.E. Sharpe, 1996.

Tatsujiro Suzuki, Global Nuclear Future: A Japanese Perspective, Nautilus Institute RMIT, Melbourne, September 2006, <www.nautilus.org>.

In one sense the moment is unique―with three reactors having suffered partial core meltdowns and hydrogen explosions rupturing or destroying their outer containment buildings, an apparent breach of the primary containment in at least one unit, a series of fires in a spent fuel storage pond, as well as radioactive plumes emitted with radiation levels sufficient to stand in reasonable but still debateable comparison to (and probably less than) those from the Chernobyl accident.

In another sense the moment has a haunting familiarity. As long ago as 1977, Arena ran a special issue with a focus on nuclear power. 1 In one of the contributed articles,

noting the increasing opposition to the industry worldwide, I commented on the rapid drop in nuclear reactor orders and the industry’s expectations over the previous few years.2 In particular, in the six years from 1972 to1978 the industry’s expectations of the amount of nuclear power to be generated in the world in 2000 dropped by 72 per cent (from 3450 GWe to 728 GWe). In the United States nuclear reactor orders plummeted from thirty-five in 1973 to three in 1976, with the US Deputy Energy Secretary worrying in 1977 that the nuclear option in the United States ‘has essentially disappeared’.3

That same year, as the Arena issue appeared, Amory Lovins, a well-known energy analyst (and for many years now, director of his successful Rocky Mountains Institute), memorably testified to a US Congressional committee that

It is my considered judgement that nuclear power is dead, in the sense of a Brontosaurs that has had its spinal cord cut but because it’s so big and has all those ganglia near the tail some place, can keep thrashing about for years not knowing it is dead yet.4

Shadows from the Past

While the industry never actually died, it certainly remained remarkably stunted against its earlier aspirations, largely living off existing new, replacement and maintenance contracts. As it turned out, compared to the 1972 expectation of 3450 GWe, actual world nuclear capacity in the year 2000 was only 350 GWe. Eleven years later, in April 2011, generating capacity was not much bigger, at 370 GWe, and the number of operating reactors was seven fewer than in 2002.5

In relation to the current moment, there is much to be learned from what has come before. We should note that the strong downturn in nuclear expectations was not caused by the accidents at Three Mile Island (1979) and the subsequent fire at Chernobyl (1986). The downturn had already begun over the previous decade, with plummeting orders and expectations. As Craig Severance put it, looking back at Three Mile Island, ‘If anything the accident simply capped off a trend which was already occurring. Utility executives and Wall Street financiers were the ones who stopped nuclear power’s expansion in the 1970s’.6 A simple explanation offered by Lovins, continuing his 1977 testimony, was that the more than tenfold decline in nuclear expectations was ‘due to straight forward market forces: as Adam Smith might have said, the Invisible Fist strikes again’.7

Powerful though the image is, the dynamics of ‘the invisible fist’ require analysis. The key underlying mechanism was clear for those who were open to seeing it in the late 1970s. As a landmark study by Bupp and Derian at Harvard Business School showed, the nuclear industry was beset by rising costs, centred on the overall cost of building nuclear reactors (capital costs).8 For nuclear reactors built between 1966 and 1977, actual realised nuclear construction costs on average overshot by 209‒380 per cent (almost four times as much) the original cost estimates offered at the start of construction.9

The central point is that these costs were associated with greatly lengthened licensing times―the time between commitment to embark on a reactor project and the moment it actually started putting electricity into the commercial grid. These extended times of

course represented increased interest payments. But they were also a proxy for much else, including delays due to changes to reactor design consequent on new emerging problems; tightening of the regulation environment; and an associated widespread pattern of local, national and global opposition to nuclear power. Opposition was particularly intense wherever reactors were contemplated; it was fuelled by the risks revealed with every successive reactor incident. This in turn led to pressures for increasing elaboration in the design, extension of construction time and the escalating costs of building reactors.10

A key to the nuclear industry has been the featherbed of subsidies on which its economics have rested since its inception.11 It is reasonable to argue that the key economic role of the global opposition to nuclear power has been to provide a boundary condition to the extent to which further subsidies could be extended to the never fully economic, but politically highly influential, nuclear industry. Historically, the opposition was assisted in this by the increasing emphasis within the broader global economy for economic rationalisation, deregulation and privatisation. Taken together, these have been an important factor in strengthening the impact of the ‘invisible fist’ upon the nuclear industry, notably in the United States and United Kingdom.

The factors shaping the increases in reactor costs are thus complex. The case of France is particularly interesting because the French program is usually considered the success story of the industry. Yet even there, with the benefits of a highly centralised and determined state-sponsored nuclear program that was prepared to run roughshod over the initially substantial opposition, costs were not contained in the long run.

In a study published in Energy Policy, Grubler reports that the ambitious French building of nuclear reactors, over the period 1980‒96, exhibited a ‘negative learning curve’ with costs rising rapidly in real terms.12 A subsequent analysis by Komanoff, using Grubler’s data, shows that over that period the program’s electricity costs grew by about 60 per cent in real terms (inflation adjusted). Most importantly, in the end the program departed from a deliberate process of producing reactors which avoided innovation. Once the design was changed (to the larger 1.5 GWe ‘N4’ reactors), the cost to build the reactors rose to twice as much per GWe as the previous fifty-four reactors already built.13

Here the causes are telling. It was the interests of the two central agencies―EDF (Électricité de France) and the CEA (le Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique)―combined that pushed the program in the direction of higher costs. As Grubler puts it,

These endogeneous non-safety drivers of design changes can be summarized simply as: ever larger scale and more output (the interest of the EDF), more French equipment and components (the interest of the nuclear equipment industry), and finally technological leadership (the interest of the CEA).

Here we see the extent to which the economics of nuclear power can be determined by extrinsic factors, which in large part derive not from the market but from the insulation of the industry from it. Where a program is bureaucratic in its nature, bureaucratic interests can profoundly shape its apparent economics.

This draws our attention to an endemic characteristic of the nuclear industry. While many renewable technologies (for example, solar cells, windmills, biofuel units) can be constructed as large numbers of small units and thus enjoy economies of scale from mass production, nuclear power shows no such tendency. Rather, the tendency has been that attempting economies of scale through building larger units has only added additional complexities that in the end rebound in more unexpected outcomes and thus greater costs and economic risk.14

The Invisible Fist Post Fukushima

Fukushima takes us forward a quarter of a century to what is in some telling ways a similar moment to that of the end of the 1970s. The nine year period prior to the Fukushima accident, from 2002, was once again a moment when the nuclear industry aspired to raise its fortunes, especially in the face of climate change. In this context there was much marketing of a supposedly already occurring ‘nuclear renaissance’. While there are reasons to doubt much of the supporting rhetoric and the marketed vision itself, Fukushima is now widely believed to represent a significant obstacle in the way of its realisation.

At the very time the industry thought it might have achieved at least a moral edge in arguing that nuclear power is an essential component of meeting greenhouse gas reduction targets, the risks of nuclear power are again featuring highly in debates about its future. Once more, despite the apparent capacity of the nuclear industry to make some contribution to a lower carbon trajectory, and much stronger rhetoric around this, this came at a time when the industry’s position was actually still quite delicate. Here the twin invisible forces―of ionising radiation and the market’s invisible hand―have combined to seriously undermine, at least potentially, the fortunes of the nuclear industry.

There are a range of reasons for this, which are very nicely summarised in a recent Worldwatch Institute report by Schneider, Frogatt and Thomas.15 Crucially, as they note, in most countries the capital costs of nuclear reactors continue to increase rapidly. Thus before 2007 estimated costs for new nuclear reactors proposed for construction in the United States were cited at USD four billion for a typical 1 GWe reactor. Now costs of USD five–six billion are being cited by Moody’s Investment Services, while the Florida Public Service Commission concluded that two new units would cost USD 5.5–8.1 billion per GWe.16

According to one report, Areva now quotes the cost of a new nuclear reactor at USD eight billion. Toshiba has raised its quote to San Antonio for a twin reactor from USD thirteen to seventeen billion, while a quote to Ontario of USD 10.8 billion per GWe. In both cases interest in building the units was killed.17

The United States continues to be a disaster story for the nuclear industry, with no new nuclear reactors actually ordered and built for more than thirty years, and with many cancelled orders. Here, the invisible fist has been more obviously at work,

strengthened by potent local citizen opposition, which has tended to inflict bruising deterrence on those who might otherwise seek to achieve further protection for the industry (whether through monetary subsidies or the externalisation of risk).

A careful 2009 study by Craig Severance uses statistical analysis of the relationship between forecasts made for costs of future reactor projects and the actual final costs

when they finally start generating electricity. On the basis of this study, taking into account full costs, but assuming the most optimistic schedule is put forward in new US nuclear plant proposals, he concludes that the most likely cost of building a nuclear reactor is USD 10.5 billion per GWe.18

Severance concludes that the business case for installing a nuclear reactor is confronted with a uniquely perilous set of business risks potentially arising from escalating costs, construction delays, changing financial circumstances over the at least ten year construction period, changes to the regulatory environment, unresolved costs of nuclear waste disposal, the ‘wildcard: organized opposition’, all in the context of the issues of nuclear proliferation, terrorist attack and the impacts of the plutonium economy; and the consequent danger of a plant never being completed or not being allowed to run its intended generating lifetime after enormous investment.

Fallout from Fukushima

While the radioactive fallout from Fukushima is still being generated, with serious consequences especially for vulnerable exposed sub-populations (such as children in ‘hot spots’), it is the economic fallout which may, in the long run, have more global implications. To the extent that electrical utilities considering a nuclear project are required to consider business risks (which are not taken over by consumers or government), these risks will shape the vulnerability and fortunes of the project. Fragile as the industry is in the face of such considerations, Fukushima adds considerably greater stress.

Reactor operating extensions under pressure

Ironically, the industry’s tendency to blame the serious situation at Fukushima on the fact that those reactors are very old creates a further economic risk.

Of course it is not necessarily the case that recent design decisions for new reactors would have precluded this particular sequence of events. The key proximate cause of the partial meltdowns was the inability to supply adequate cooling water primarily

because power failed. Power failed because the external supply was destroyed, with the backup generators flooded and thus rendered useless. The flooding occurred because the walls surrounding the generators were not high enough to prevent flooding. As has been pointed out by numerous observers, the height of the tsunami surge (fourteen metres) has precedents in the history of the area, including a thirty metre surge in Onagawa in 1993, among a history of other such surges, including the giant Jogan tsunami of 869 CE.19 It was a commercial decision not to mitigate this known risk by building higher walls.

Even taken at face value, however, the argument that old reactors are not as safe as new ones puts considerable pressure on the industry to replace old with new. But this is a big task because as there have been low order rates in the last several decades; as Schneider and colleagues note, the average age of the world’s operating reactor ‘fleet’ is old―twenty-six years―with some having operated for more than forty years. The average age of the 130 reactors already closed is twenty-two years, and this casts a dark shadow over older plants still operating and proposals by governments and industry to extend the permitted lifetimes of existing plants. As the Fukushima crisis began, the German government’s early decision to suspend the operation of reactors

over thirty years old was the first step in their decision now to phase out nuclear power and move to renewables.

A postscript to a 2011 report by MIT, ‘The Future of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle’, added hastily as it was going to press the following likely implications: ‘costs are likely to go up’ because of new safety design requirements; ‘the relicensing of forty year old nuclear plants for another twenty years of operation will face additional scrutiny’ and some licensing extensions already granted may ‘be revisited’; the entire spent fuel management system ‘is likely to be revaluated’. Finally, it notes, ‘How these and other post-Fukushima issues are resolved will have major implications for the future of nuclear power …’20

New generation reactors

It is also useful to comment on the potential role of and constraints on the so-called new generation reactors. While there has been much marketing of the claimed virtues of new designs, the safest and cheapest nuclear reactors are always those still on paper. In the same way that armies are only in danger of defeat when mobilised in battle, it is when new designs begin to be deployed in practice that the unanticipated threats can appear. Because reactors are extraordinarily complex, the room for the unexpected to undermine confident predictions is wide.

Many innovations follow an economist’s ‘bucket curve’, with early high incidents of the unexpected, a slow stabilisation as time progresses and more copies and improvements are made, followed in due course by an increase in incidents as such innovations start to approach their design lifetime. The old reactors are in this latter stage; the new ones in the former.

One example of how horribly wrong a design ‘reform’ can be was provided by Fermi I Fast Breeder reactor at Laguna Beach, Michigan, in 1963. When it was started up it rapidly went into a partial core meltdown. The cause: a blocked cooling channel obstructed by a piece of a safety device intended to reduce the likelihood of a meltdown leading to nuclear explosion.21

With any new design there is always the likelihood that events will follow sequences which have not been anticipated, however extensive the preparatory analysis. As the Generation IV reactors largely remain on the drawing board, it is sufficient to say here that there are a number of concerns about their actual safety that remain to be addressed, despite their apparent (on paper) advantages.22 One only has to focus on one issue raised by Koomey and Hultman, who have analysed past trends in reactor costs, especially as new designs lead to new complexities but without economies of scale and the consequent mass production that might make ironing out the associated problems economically possible. They note that while the ‘policy and design changes represented by Gen III+ and Gen IV reactors do represent improvements over the current fleet’,

the interlinked issues of reactor scale, customization of site-built technologies, slow electricity demand growth, intense competition from other energy sources, deregulated electricity markets, slow speed of industry learning, nuclear waste disposal, terrorism, and proliferation remain potential impediments to the cost competitiveness of next-generation nuclear power in the 21st century.23

In short, the Gen IV reactors, like the N4 reactors in the French program, may bring some interesting or even exciting improvements, but at the same time they may create significant new business risks.

The case of a new Gen III EPR (European Pressurised Reactor) being constructed by the French company Areva in Finland is suggestive. Six years after commencing construction the reactor is ‘about four years behind schedule and at least 97 percent over budget, with the loss for the provider estimated at Euro 2.7 billion ($3.9 billion)’.24

Fukushima and Renewables

The events at Fukushima thus limit the ways in which the nuclear industry can maintain momentum in a time of escalating costs. Notably, they undermine a series of industry strategies: stretching out reactor lifetimes; decreasing costs with economies of scale (which, as with Fukushima, one of the world’s largest nuclear reactor complexes, showed large vulnerability when something went wrong); the offer of investment in future technologies unproved yet by the rigours of construction and operation.

At the same time, the moment for larger scale use of renewables is upon us. Unlike nuclear power, some of these (for example, photovoltaics) can already be seen to exhibit exactly the learning curve of decreased costs with increasing production that would be expected of mass manufactured technologies.25 Already, as Schneider and colleagues report, by 2010 worldwide total installed capacity of wind turbines (193 GWe), biomass and waste-to-energy plants (65 GWe), and solar power (43 GWe), had risen to 381 GWe, exceeding the worldwide installed nuclear capacity of 375 GWe. Total investment in renewable energy technologies was estimated at USD 243 billion and the US share of renewables (with no new nuclear energy coming on line). Globally, annual additions to the world’s renewables capacity have outpaced nuclear start-ups for fifteen years.26

Fukushima highlights the value of building rapidly on these developments of renewables capability. As noted, the German government has already announced an intention to phase out reliance on nuclear power and to profit from becoming a world leader in renewables.27 The Japanese government, as it faces up to the costs of Fukushima (including establishing a publically funded compensation fund to both assist victims and save TEPCO, the company operating the Fukushima reactors), is also reviewing its energy policy. It has announced it will seek to secure electricity without depending on nuclear power too much, and in particular to front-load its target of expanding the renewable energy market to ten trillion yen by 2020. Under the revised growth strategy, it has been reported that Japan will put more emphasis on the development of renewable energy such as solar, wind and geothermal heat generated power, as well as the enhancement of electric accumulators.28

Not Just Economics

In conclusion to his comment on the nuclear industry’s economic future, Joseph Romm notes that ‘New nukes have gone from too cheap to meter to too expensive to matter for the foreseeable future’.29 Amory Lovins, consistent with his 1977 remarks, explains in a preface post Fukushima that even before events there, ‘nuclear power was dying of an incurable attack of market forces’.30 He continues,

Since new nuclear build is uneconomic and unnecessary, we needn’t debate whether it’s also proliferative and dangerous. In a world of fallible and malicious people and imperfect institutions, it’s actually both. But even after 60 years of immense subsidies and devoted effort, nuclear power still can’t clear the first two hurdles: competitiveness and need. End of story.31

Yet it is not quite the end of the story.

The nuclear industry may not be economic, but arguably it never has been. Indeed as Lovins notes, ‘every nuclear power plant under construction in the world was chosen by central planners: not one was a free-market purchase fairly competed against or compared with alternatives’.32 However, there is nothing to say that this will not continue, unless countered politically.

The nuclear industry has been developed because there was a political commitment, one way or another, from government to either build it directly or pay others to do so. In short, as noted earlier, there is an important political dimension to the implications of the economics for the industry’s future. The political dimensions of the impetus to subsidise and promote the industry are multiple: military considerations and pressures, national pride and assertions of sovereignty, the bureaucratic interests of government agencies (for example, in France), and the interests of large corporations (and energy corporations can be extremely powerful).

Further, it is important to note that I have not referred at all to the Asian markets, which have, in particular, been the hope for the nuclear industry. In a sense Fukushima is the Asian Three Mile Island/Chernobyl. For example, many of the reactors constructed or planned for Asia are on the coast and vulnerable also to storm surges or tsunamis. But the consequences will be harder to pick than in Europe and North America. We should recall that countries with strong states, firmly focused on developing long-term nuclear programs, not too fussed about local opposition from residents, and in a compliant relationship with the nuclear industry (whether because of its military role or otherwise), are in a better position to contain costs and prop up the industry’s economic base. In this sense the future of nuclear power remains, as it always has, conditioned in the end by an economics which is shaped by political forces. Therefore, in each case the outcome will be, at least in part, politically determined.

Clearly, Fukushima has implications also for the political contest. In Japan, whatever the posturing of the government and the industry, the already well-developed local capacity for opposition will be sharpened and focused by events at Fukushima.

Japan has fifty-four reactors that up until the events of Fukushima generated some 30 per cent of Japan’s electricity. Some believed it would not be long before that reached 50 per cent of electricity generation.33 Yet it is hard to believe that we will see many, if any, new reactors seriously put forward for construction in Japan given the existing strength, and likely exacerbation, of ‘nuclear allergy’ across the country. In India and China, and other parts of Asia, such as Indonesia, the situation remains more fluid. In India, opposition is intense around the proposed nuclear park in Jaitapur, but the government, while creating an independent regulation agency for nuclear power, has indicated it intends to continue with plans to increase nuclear output from 4.7GWe to 20GWe by 2020.34

China, with thirteen reactors and a further twenty-eight under construction, took some actions in response to Fukushima. Premier Wen Jiabao announced the temporary suspension of approval of nuclear projects, including those in a preliminary stage of development.35 China also initiated a comprehensive safety inspection of its nuclear facilities and updated its safety regulations; nuclear projects that do not comply will be suspended or terminated.36 Nevertheless, and even though China has ambitious renewables and energy efficiency programs, the example of France suggests that with a significant capacity to insulate a program from both its intrinsic economics and public concern, it may be some time before or until the program is seriously undermined.

In short, the implications of Fukushima are, as with other nuclear crises, to raise the stakes for opposition and industry alike. Certainly in most if not all countries, the balance of opinion will have shifted in a more critical direction by what has occurred. It would, however, be premature to say, as do some analysts, that this is the end of nuclear power. Whether it is the end, or the beginning of the end, or merely an interregnum, will depend not merely on what has happened but on how communities around the world will respond. One thing does appear certain. However the political contest over nuclear power eventually plays out, the events at Fukushima are certainly a wake-up from the industry’s more recent dreams. Others (not the least in Japan) will see this more like a reprieve (whether temporarily or, hopefully, more permanently) from a nightmare.

By Jim Falk

Jim Falk is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne, a United Nations University Visiting Professor, and a Director of the Climate Research Program of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities. His most recent book (with Joseph Camilleri) is Worlds in Transition: Evolving Governance across a Stressed Planet, Edward Elgar, UK, 2009.

Endnotes:

1 Arena, Special Double Issue, nos 47‒48, 1977.

2 J. Falk, ‘Australia, the New US Nuclear Policy and the International Contestation over Nuclear Power’, Arena, Special Double Issue, nos 47‒48, 1977, pp. 32‒3.

3 J. Falk, Global Fission: The Battle over Nuclear Power, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1982, pp. 23‒7.

4 A.B. Lovins, ‘Invited Testimony for Hearings on the Costs of Nuclear Power’, reprinted in ‘Alternative Long-Range Energy Strategies’, Joint Hearing before the Select Committee on Small Business and the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, US Senate, 94‒47,1977, p. 1463.

5 M. Schneider, A. Froggatt and S. Thomas, The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2010–2011, Nuclear Power in a Post-Fukushima World: 25 Years After the Chernobyl Accident, Worldwatch Institute, Washington DC, Paris, Berlin, April 2011, p. 7.

6 C.A. Severance, ‘Business Risks and Costs of New Nuclear Power’, 2 January 2009.

7 Lovins, ‘Invited Testimony’.

8 I.C. Bupp, J.C. Deria et al., ‘The Economics of Nuclear Power’, Technology Review, February 1975, p. 15.

9 Severance, ‘Business Risks and Costs of New Nuclear Power’, p. 11.

10 Falk, Global Fission.

11 See Falk, Global Fission, pp. 75‒85; J. Romm, ‘The High Cost of Nuclear Power’, Testimony to the Committee on Environment and Public Works, Subcommittee on

Clean Air and Nuclear Safety, US Senate, 16 July 2008; and D. Schlissel, M. Mullett and R. Alvarez, ‘Nuclear Loan Guarantees: Another Taxpayer Bailout Ahead?’, Union of Concerned Scientists, Cambridge, MA, March 2009.

12 Cited in J. Romm, ‘Does Nuclear Power have a Negative Learning Curve?’, 6 April 2011, <www.grist.org>.

13C. Komanoff, ‘Cost Escalation in France’s Nuclear Reactors: A Statistical Examination”, January 2010, <www.komanoff.net>.

14 J. Koomey and N.E. Hultman, ‘A Reactor-level Analysis of Busbar Costs for US Nuclear Plants 1970‒2005’, Energy Policy, no. 35, 2007, pp. 5638‒9.

15Schneider, Frogatt and Thomas, The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2010–2011.

16 Schneider, Frogatt and Thomas, The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2010–2011.

17 Romm, ‘The High Cost of Nuclear Power’.

18 Severance, ‘Business Risks and Costs of New Nuclear Power’, p. 18

19 C. Perrow, ‘Fukushima, Risk, and Probability: Expect the Unexpected, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1 April 2011, <www.thebulletin.org>; AAP Reuters, AP IMPACT: Asia Nuclear Reactors Face Tsunami Risk’.

20 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Study Group, The Future of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle, 2011, Postscript, p. xv.

21 See Falk, Global Fission, pp. 43, 53.

22 See, for example, H. Hirsch, O. Becker, M. Schneider and A. Froggatt, ‘Nuclear Reactor Hazards: Ongoing Dangers of Operating Nuclear Technology in the 21st Century’, Report Prepared for Greenpeace International, April 2005; see also updated material provided by Froggatt, ‘Potential Environmental Risks of the Next Generation of Nuclear Power Plants’, Briefing Note, October 2006, <www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk>.

23 Koomey and Hultman, ‘A Reactor-level Analysis of Busbar Costs for US Nuclear Plants 1970‒2005’, p. 5640.

24 Schneider, Frogatt and Thomas, The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2010–2011, p. 60.

25 See, for example, P. Hearps and D. McConnell, ‘Renewable Energy Technology Cost Review’, Melbourne Energy Institute Technical Paper Series, May 2011, available from <www.earthsci.unimelb.edu.au/~rogerd/Renew_Energy_Tech_Cost_Review.pdf>.

26 Hearps and McConnell, ‘Renewable Energy Technology Cost Review’, p. 7.

27 ‘Merkel Takes First Steps toward a Future of Renewables’, Spiegel Online, 15 April 2011, <www.spiegel.de>; P. McGroaty and J. Hromadko, ‘Update: Germany to Drop Nuclear Power by 2022’, The Wall Street Journal, 30 May 2011.

28 ‘Japan to Review Energy Policy’, MYsinchew.com, 5 May 2011, <www.mysinchew.com>.

29 Romm, ‘The High Cost of Nuclear Power’.

30 Lovins, in Schneider, Frogatt and Thomas, The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2010–2011, p. 5.

31 Lovins, in Schneider, Frogatt and Thomas, The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2010–2011, p. 6.

32 Lovins, in Schneider, Frogatt and Thomas, The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2010–2011, p. 4.

33 P. Kuznick, ‘Japan’s Nuclear History in Perspective: Eisenhower and Atoms for War and Peace’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 13 April 2011, <www.thebulletin.org>.

34 R.Devraj, ‘India: Fukushima Won’t Stop World’s Largest Nuclear Facility’, Inter Press Service, 29 April 2011, <www.theglobalrealm.com>.

35 Quoted in Schneider, Frogatt and Thomas, The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2010–2011, p. 42.

36 Yun Zhou, in ‘The Global Future of Nuclear Power after Fukhushima’, Power and Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 6 March 2011, <www.belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu>.

From the early 1990s, India’s parliamentary communist Left gained influence in national politics and consolidated its strength in three states governed for long periods by communist-led coalitions―Kerala, West Bengal, and the small north-eastern state of Tripura. In 1996, Jyotu Basu, a leading figure in the largest of the Left parties, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM), and then Chief Minister of West Bengal, was offered the prime ministership of India by the then majority coalition in New Delhi. But the CPM politburo baulked at the prospect of accepting governmental responsibility in the absence of full control, a decision subsequently regretted by Basu and many CPM supporters. Communist prestige and influence in national politics peaked at this point. The Left regained national influence between 2004 and 2008, but more recently has suffered electoral defeats including

winning only twenty-four seats (sixteen for the CPM) in the 2009 national Lok Sabha (lower house) elections, down from sixty-one seats in 2004.

The CPM’s commitment to Leninism, democratic centralism, and revolutionary transition, while de facto pursuing social democratic reforms, make for occasionally fraught relations with India’s social movements. Yet communism and Marxism remain powerful reference points for Indian intellectuals and popular movements to a greater extent than in any other parliamentary democracy. Extreme poverty, and the divide between rich and poor, made worse by India’s neo-liberal development trajectory, ensure that ideologies of resistance, including communism, will retain strong appeal. Where deprivation is worst, armed struggle against corporate predators and the state is widely seen as a justifiable response.

In elections in April–May this year, communist-dominated Left coalitions lost government in the important states of Kerala and West Bengal. In Kerala the Left fell short of a majority by 3 seats, gaining 45.13 per cent of the vote. It remains in a strong position to set the policy agenda and to return to government at the next election, in line with the Kerala pattern of Congress- and CPM-led fronts taking turn in office. In West Bengal the circumstances are much different. In this state of more than eighty million people, the Left Front, dominated by the CPM, was elected seven times in succession from 1977, a unique record in the history of parliamentary democracy. Defeat for the Left after thirty-four years, preceded by violent confrontations with populist, anti-communist forces, and hundreds of political killings, points to big changes and uncertain times in West Bengal.

India’s polity is one of incessant turmoil and colourful public squabbling, in the regions as well as in the national capital. In a federation of twenty-eight states (and seven union territories), the states have jurisdiction in many public policy areas, including agriculture and education. The financial resources and constitutional supremacy of the Centre, however, impose severe constraints on state governments. The Left consider states a kind of municipal government which can at best implement limited reforms in the interest of the poor and working people, but not build socialism. Unlike in Australia, the states in India are not constitutionally safeguarded and can be reorganised by the Union government, which has power to dismiss state governments through the imposition of so-called President’s Rule. But the line between national and state politics is blurred, with the states in some respects having gained in importance. None of the national parties can expect to form government on its own in New Delhi. The Indian National Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is each at the centre of complex and fractious multi-party coalitions. Most parties in these coalitions have a regional base, reflecting the ethnic, social, cultural and political conditions of particular states. It is the concentrated strength of the Left in Kerala and West Bengal which has enabled the CPM to momentarily exercise influence in New Delhi.

The cultural, political and economic differences between the states have become more accentuated since India in the early 1990s embarked on a neo-liberal transformation. High growth rate conceals an uneven process of development and growing inequalities. There is stagnation in much of the agricultural sector, continued weak employment generation, rapid urbanisation, with growth concentrated to the services sector rather than manufacturing. Large-scale capitalist agriculture and modern infrastructure have developed in states such as Punjab and Gujarat while extreme poverty and exploitation is in the states of central India sustain the Maoist armed struggle. Yet parliamentary democracy is well entrenched; lower castes and poorer sections of society generally participate strongly in democratic politics. But the substance and meaning of democracy differ across states and regions. Corruption, clientelism, caste and communal violence, and a weak civil society are predominant in many

states and regions. Where the Left has held state government, particularly in Kerala, democracy has gained more substance in terms of genuine local government, better education and health services, a more vibrant civil society, and generally better protection for workers and peasants than in other states. The highest electoral participation rates are also recorded in Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura, suggesting that the Left has brought the vast majority of people into the democratic process.

Since 2004, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), led by Congress―which is presided over by Sonia Gandhi and her family―has formed government in New Delhi. Congress is a ‘catch-all party’ with no distinct ideology, supported by landed and capitalist classes across much of India, but also by Muslim and other minorities fearing BJP’s ‘communal’ program of Hindutva (‘Indianness’). Until 2008, the Left supported the UPA government in parliament, without joining the government. The CPM abandoned the UPA on the issue of a US–India agreement on nuclear co-operation and an increasingly close strategic relation with the United States. Whatever one’s assessment of the CPM, the party’s anti-imperialism is indisputable, and for that reason alone remains a major irritant to the US-oriented political elites in New Delhi. The United States also does not look favourably at the CPM and the Indian parliamentary Left. Recent WikiLeaks documents showed US diplomats relishing the anticipated end of the Left Front government in West Bengal, advocating that the US government cultivate relations with the anti-communist opposition (now government) and its autocratic leader, Mamata Banerjee.

In Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura, the power of the CPM is partly explained by the party giving expression to regional cultural and social aspirations against Congress and New Delhi. In this perspective, its orthodox Marxism-Leninism appears somewhat anomalous. The party’s ideology also appears not to capture what many observers and left critics characterise as its social democratic orientation. A leading analyst argued long ago that the CPM ‘is communist in name only and is essentially social-democratic in its ideology, social programme, and policies’.

The characterisation of Indian parliamentary communism as social democracy should not necessarily be understood as pejorative. Enhanced literacy and health, democratic local government, land reform (which brought an end to feudal exploitation), and a secularist stance against communal (inter-religious) and caste violence are surely significant achievements. The Left also, at the national level at least, strongly opposes neo-liberal de-regulation. The CPM in West Bengal from 1977 instigated a major land reform program, pioneered effective and democratic local government, and brought peace and stability to a state historically racked by feudal oppression and political violence. In every election since 1977, the Left Front in West Bengal has gained no less than 40 per cent of the vote at any time. Its record is even more convincing in Kerala, which is often showcased for remarkably good social policy and educational and democratic achievements. While the Left cannot take sole credit, the CPM in Kerala, growing out of powerful social and class movements, has made a key contribution to the success of social and economic reform in this part of India.

But Kerala, and more starkly West Bengal, also demonstrate the limits of social democracy in what Sandman, Edelman et al. describe as the ‘global periphery’. In Kerala, good social policy has been implemented in the absence of a strong economic base. There is high unemployment and little industry, and millions of people from Kerala have been forced to go overseas for work, particularly to the Gulf countries. Their remittances sustain a high level of consumption (by Indian standards) by a large minority of Kerala households. Common to both Kerala and West Bengal is that support for the CPM is strongest among the peasantry,

liberated from feudal exploitation through reforms instigated by the Left. Land and local government reforms have transformed rural life and given dignity and political power to previously marginalised rural populations. But giving land to the tillers does not ultimately resolve the conundrum of low productivity and poverty, and all the social and economic distortions generated by capitalism. Socialism has a historically mixed and in part dreadful record of addressing this dilemma. In the Soviet Union agriculture was collectivised through coercion from the late 1920s; in the 1950s China unsuccessfully sought to take a Great Leap Forward through people’s communes. As emphasised, state governments in India lack the power of national states, but even so the Left in Kerala, and particularly West Bengal, has proven ineffective and lacking in imagination in addressing the deep-seated problems of agriculture and economic development. In West Bengal, growing rural prosperity in the first decades of Left Front government turned in the 1990s to an economic and social crisis, and ultimately a dead end in overall development. Progressively smaller land holdings caused a decline of agricultural growth, and the growth of population, and of educated young people in the villages, a crisis of employment. Big business had largely abandoned West Bengal after the 1977 election of the Left Front government and the state acquired a reputation as an economic backwater.

Following New Delhi’s turn to economic liberalisation from 1991, the Left Front in West Bengal abandoned the public sector as its principal focus for industrialisation. The new direction was formalised in an industrial policy in 1994, aimed at attracting capitalist investments by domestic and foreign big business, in competition with other states. But results were meagre in terms of investments and new jobs, notwithstanding claims that Kolkata was emerging as an important information technology centre. From 2006, compromises with the neo-liberal development model opened up a serious rift between the CPM and sections of its social base and many of its intellectual supporters. The Left Front had just won a big election victory in that year―the CPM alone won 234 of 294 seats in the state Assembly. But violent events in the rural areas of Singur and Nandigram triggered an anti-Left Front movement which peaked in 2011, when the CPM won only forty Assembly seats.

‘Singur’ and ‘Nandigram’ have become symbols throughout India for the failure of the CPM’s economic development strategy for West Bengal. Of course other state governments pursue similar policies on a larger scale and more viciously, but the Left is held to different standards. Singur was the site chosen by the Tata conglomerate, on the invitation of the West Bengal government, for the construction of a manufacturing plant for the new Nano car. The government endorsed this choice without consultation with affected peasants and the local government, and ferocious local opposition followed. After historically instigating land reform, the Left was now seen as taking fertile land from poor peasants without consultation and adequate compensation. The drive for industrialization took an even worse turn in 2007, after the appropriation of land at Nandigram for an Indonesian company to construct a chemical hub. In March that year, fourteen unarmed protesting villagers in Nandigram were shot dead by police. The anti-government and anti-CPM movement now escalated into open revolt by peasants supported by armed Maoists and the Trinamool Congress, the anti-communist opposition.

Until Singur and Nandigram, opposition to the Left Front had been fragmented and ineffective; now it gained powerful momentum. Trinamool, using left populist rhetoric, was able to build an anti-CPM movement which defeated the Left in both the national elections in 2009 and in the recent Assembly elections, where Trinamool alone won 184 out of 294 Assembly seats. There was massive political violence in rural areas in the years leading up to

this election―hundreds of local CPM leaders and activists were killed by Maoists and Trinamool thugs. In turn, the CPM was accused of operating armed squads at times using lethal force. In Netal village of Lalgarh district, nine villagers were killed on 7 Jan 2011 by armed CPM activists. Immediately following the election, the CPM reported ‘widespread attacks on … the Left Front in different parts of West Bengal’ and the murder of at least two local CPM leaders.

Academic analysts and leftist commentators have generally credited the CPM with providing disciplined leadership for a broad-based movement for social, economic and political reform in West Bengal from 1977. More recently, however, not only did its development strategy reach a dead end but its style of political leadership has been attacked ferociously from all quarters. By critics from the Left and the Right, the CPM was now depicted as corrupt, authoritarian Stalinists. Suggestive of the overwrought tone of the English-language media is the following: the people of West Bengal ‘for three decades lived through violence in all spheres of life. The party-state not only controlled political power but ruled through the various quasi-judicial structures of unions, political henchmen in every service sector, local clubs, citizens’ committees, institutions of local self-governments in rural areas, social ostracism, fear of dispossession, suspension of civil rights and torture by the political police’. More plausible analysts describe West Bengal under the Left Front as a ‘party-society’ in which identity and even survival in rural areas came to depend on party political affiliation.

In recent interviews undertaken in India, political scientists and Left sympathisers often expressed the view that it will be good for the CPM in West Bengal to go into opposition after thirty-four years. This will be an opportunity for review of policies and for shedding careerist and corrupt members attracted to the party when in power. Though much of the criticism of the CPM is absurdly overstated, some party activists undoubtedly engaged in corruption and undisciplined behavour. The least corrupt states in India are the ones with a powerful Left but, again, communists are held to different standards. Moreover, opposition should enable reconsideration of its overall strategy. The party’s bewilderment in terms of the basic dilemma of development is given expression by the convenor of the CPM’s Research Unit:

What can be the contours of an agrarian strategy in West Bengal, which can consolidate the gains of land reforms and increase the productivity of small peasant-based agriculture? How can non-agricultural employment be generated in a productive and sustained manner? What possible role can the public sector play in the states’ industrialisation effort, given that the resource constraint confronting the state government is real and hard? To what extent can it address the problem of unemployment? Can planning play a more important role at the state level? Should private corporate investment in capital-intensive sectors be shunned completely? If not, on what terms can private investments be invited? What policies can the state government adopt to determine or influence the choice of techniques? What should be the role of small and medium enterprises in the industrialisation strategy? What can the state government do to promote innovations? Should industrialisation be based on the home market alone or should exports also be promoted? What is the best way to promote rural industrialisation? What provisions should a progressive land-use policy as well as land acquisition and rehabilitation policy comprise of? There is a need for the debate on the left in India to move beyond polemics into these substantive domains, for a clearer left alternative on development and industrialisation to emerge in the near future.

The revolutionary communist Left, the Naxalites, do have an answer to these questions: armed struggle, as in China under Mao before 1949, to liberate territories from which to build a people’s army to surround and conquer the urban centres. This struggle has received a fillip from the success of the Maoist party in Nepal. The Naxalite movement, led by the Communist Party of India (Maoist) (CPI(Maoist)), has significant support in poor rural areas of central India with a high concentration of tribal people. Its armed squads operate in at least nine states, and state governments in Chattisgarh and elsewhere, supported by central government forces, apply vicious repression and violence in ‘Naxal-infested’ areas.

The parliamentary and revolutionary wings of Indian communism have a common history and belong within the same family, notwithstanding their deep enmity. The CPI(Maoist) was formed in 2004 through a merger between two groups which both trace their origin to the Marxist-Leninist faction which broke with the CPM in 1967 in the wake of a peasant uprising in Naxalbari in the Darjeeling district of northern West Bengal. The history of Indian Maoism is one of splits and violence and a type of left politics known from Pol Pot’s Cambodia and the Shining Path of Peru. The first general secretary of the CPI(ML), formed in 1969 and later fracturing into many groups, Charu Mazumdar, gained legendary status as proponent of the policy of ‘annihilation’:

Only by waging class struggle—the battle of annihilation—the new man will be created, the new man who will defy death and will be free from all thoughts of self interest. And with this death defying spirit he will go close to the enemy, snatch his rifle, avenge the martyrs and the peoples army will emerge’.

Violence remains central to CPI(Maoist) strategy, including violence against the parliamentary Left, particularly in West Bengal. Extreme poverty and exploitation ensure that armed struggle will have continued appeal. There is every reason to pay attention to the Maoist movement but its violence should not be romanticised. Parliamentary democracy, notwithstanding conspicuous distortions and massive corruption, since independence in 1947 has gained deep roots in this huge country. The revolutionary route taken by peasant societies in twentieth century, such as China and Vietnam, is most unlikely to be repeated in India.

The CPM has been weakened by election defeats and strategic uncertainties but retains a mass base in several states. The result in West Bengal is widely depicted as a devastating defeat from which the CPM is unlikely to recover. Yet the Left Front polled 40 per cent of the votes and retains strong roots in rural West Bengal. Communism is part of the mainstream of Indian politics and society, particularly in states with long periods of Left governments. Neo-liberalism will continue to wreak social havoc and there is no reason to expect the communist Left in India, in either its parliamentary or revolutionary form, to fade away any time soon.

By Hans Lofgren

Hans Lofgren is senior lecturer in politics and policy studies at Deakin University. His particular research interest is the political economy of pharmaceuticals and biotechnology in Australia, India and globally. He co-edited The Politics and Culture of Globalisation: India and Australia (2009) and Democratising Health: Consumer Groups in the Policy Process (forthcoming 2011).

References:

S. Basu, ‘Tryst with Destiny: For Better or Worse in Bengal, The Statesman, 2011.

D. Bhattacharyya, ‘Party Society, its Consolidation and Crisis: Understanding Political Change in West Bengal’, in A. Ghosh, T. Guha-Thakurta and J. Nair (eds), Theorizing the Present: Essays for Partha Chatterjee, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2011, pp. 226–50.

P. Bose, ‘Verdict 2009: An Appraisal of Critiques of the Left’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 44, no. 40, 2009, pp. 32–8.

Communist Party of India (Marxist), Polit Bureau Communique, 16 May 2011.

M. Desai, State Formation and Radical Democracy in India, Routledge, London, 2007.

A. Kohli, ‘From Breakdown to Order: West Bengal’, in P. Chatterjee (ed.), State and Politics in India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1997, pp. 336–6.

C. Mazumdar, ‘Hate, Stamp and Smash Centrism’, Charu Mazumdar Reference Archive, 1970.

R. Sandbook, M. Edelman et al., Social Democracy in the Global Periphery, Cambridge University Press, Leiden, 2007.