To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
December 29, 2021
by Joseph Green, Detroit Workers’ Voice
The following are rough notes based on the discussion on March
25 in a study group which was reading Smith’s book. They are intended
to foster more discussion and investigation about the subjects covered.
For notes on Chapters 1 and 2, see http://communistvoice.org/DSWV-211215.html.
Chapter 3 points out that "in less than four decades of reckless growth China has managed to severely pollute most of its freshwater resources while rendering extensive areas of farmland too polluted to grow food crops." The Chinese have been farming and, of course, drinking water for thousands of years, but it's in the last four decades, from the 1980s on, that the great bulk of this pollution has taken place. These are the years of rapid industrialization. One might have thought that given the problem of limited land and water resources in China, the government would be far more careful than are many other countries. But no, Chinese land and water are being ruined at an astonishing pace.
There was some discussion of what happened under Mao in the earlier years after the revolution. At that time, they weren't industrializing as fast as later, but was the environment being abused as badly? We didn't know, but they did make some serious blunders, such as the campaign to eliminate sparrows: Mao was worried that sparrows ate grain, but sparrows also eat insects and are part of an ecological system.
Smith makes the point that it is hard to clean up soil and rivers; one can just stop putting things into the air, and the atmosphere clears up. But if one puts chemicals into the soil, how does one get rid of them? One also has to clean up the bottom of rivers and lakes, and not just stop throwing new stuff into them, but how do you do this cleanup? There are polluted sites here in the US, where they dig up the bottom and truck it out somewhere, but what do they do with it afterwards? Mix it with better soil?
Its supporters argue that the Chinese regime is trying to catch up to the Western industrial countries, and there are certain unpleasant things that have to be done to accomplish this. But when one sees the horrible extent of the poisoning of China, the argument becomes absurd, and impossible to justify. And then there is what is said in the section "Cadmium for the Masses, Organics for the Cadres" (p. 66). The better-off cadres of the ruling party buy food from organic farms, where food is grown without the horrors of pollution, but as for the masses, who cares? This shows the class issue in China. But the existence of better farms also shows that it would be possible to farm and produce in a better way.
Now, one might think that, for all its problems, there would also be a certain advantage in a country being a later industrializer. The experience of the errors of other countries could have been taken into account, thus allowing China to leapfrog over some of the problems of the past. One might think the regime would have taken seriously the massive poisoning that accompanied earlier industrialization, and at least tried to moderate this. But the Chinese regime didn’t just industrialize, it also copied the capitalist and state-capitalist systems; so it ignored the earlier experience. London had terrible air pollution in the nineteenth century, so that the white moth population evolved to become black in order to fit in with the surrounding, and Beijing has incredible air pollution today.
Other countries, too, had let the environment be ruined for the workers, while the rich preserved better conditions for themselves. In Detroit, from the beginning of the non-native settlement of the Detroit area, the wealthier and more elite sections of the population settled upstream in Grosse Pointe and the east side of Detroit, because the water flows towards the South; downtown and downriver areas were more polluted even before industry developed.
One might also have thought that it would have occurred to the regime to consider what would happen when everyone in China had a car. It's one thing that cars shouldn't be a Western monopoly, but if pollution wasn’t going to spread all over China, there should have been consideration over how to avoid China being overwhelmed by a vast and rapid proliferation of cars and the support system for cars.
A schocking subhead is "Eighty Percent of Groundwater is Undrinkable" (p. 53). Indeed, polluted water is a major cause of increasing birth defects in both urban and rural areas in China. People don't want to drink from the public water supply, so, if they can, they buy bottled water. But the bottled water isn't necessarily better; it isn’t regulated any better than the pubic water; and there have been many scandals. There is a similar problem in the US with bottled water.
The book also has a picture of the massive garbage in Chinese rivers. See Figure 3.1 (p. 51) about the Yangtze River next to the Three Gorges Dam. It turns out that one doesn’t have to be divine to walk on water: the surface of the Yangtze River has such a thick covering of garbage that at various places you can stand on its surface.
As to how to solve the environmental problem, Smith seems fixated on the need for "the rule of law", and he equates this with regulation of the economy. For example, on page 59, at the very bottom, he talks about the need for rigorous controls on production, and says that “at the end of the day, the solution to toxics is to stop making the ones we don’t absolutely need, and rigorously control those we do need to protect people and planet…” But he doesn't refer to economic planning and mass involvement as the way to achieve this. Instead, the sentence continues by saying that this "would require at the minimum, a society based on rule of law". And on page 64, at the beginning of the section that talks about “The Deliberate Adulteration of Food on a Massive Scale”, he refers to "the lawless crony-capitalist Wild West that is China today". So the way to environmental control is supposedly ending this Wild West by having an independent judiciary and the rule of law. But for that matter, in the US, there was the rule of law even in the period with the most polluted rivers and air and food.
Indeed, in the US in the 1970s, in the Cleveland area where one of our comrades grew up, the water was foul, and you couldn't swim at all in Lake Erie, to say nothing of the Cuyahoga being seen as the “burning river”, where garbage or oil slicks on top of it caught fire repeatedly. But the mass movements of the time brought about the Clean Water Acts, and the river was cleaned up considerably, although it still has many contaminants.
It’s one thing whether there are environmental laws and agencies, but it is another whether these laws are followed; one has to consider what has to be done to ensure that laws and agencies are not mere facades. Smith points out that China does have environmental laws, but they aren’t followed. They have something like the US Environmental Protection Agency, and they issue lots of regulations. Thus a key issue is why this horrible pollution continues in China despite the laws and regulations, and even when, to some extent, the laws might be seriously meant.
Smith’s answer is that it’s because China has crony capitalism, and the crony capitalists don’t pay attention to the laws. A good deal of discussion went on about how this was manifested, with attention paid to the conflict between local and national authorities, between national environmental directives and what was profitable under the system set by other national laws, and the conflicts between different national government agencies. This is not the picture most people have of state-capitalist economies, but it’s what exists in China and under revisionist state-capitalism more generally.
Smith gave vivid examples of how the interests of the local authorities clashed with national directives. When he talks of “the lawless crony-capitalist Wild West that is China today” (p. 64), it seems to mean that there is no way in which the national law gets enforced. In the American Wild West, there was the local sheriff who was the law in those parts, and he didn’t care about what the far-off authority thought in Washington, D.C. So in China, the local forces, whether private capitalists, criminal gangs, or government officials, were the real force.
Another comrade said yes, sometimes he makes it sound like the issue is local vs national, but other times he shows how different forces exist nationally, and Chinese officials are fighting against each other. There are different agencies with different ideas about what should be prioritized.
Another comrade said that Smith’s idea seems to be that these agencies don’t obey any overall law. He talks about the lack of “an independent judiciary, independent police, due process, and guaranteed punishment for violators” (p. 66, 8 lines above the subhead “Cadmium for the Masses, Organics for the Cadres”). There are “endless useless crackdowns but no rule of law.” There is a certain point to what Smith says. The ruling party has made all the national institutions into its simple handmaidens, who don’t pay attention to what their are supposed to be for, but simply do what they are ordered to do.
But Smith ignores that this political arrangement occurs because of the social nature of the society. The emphasis on the “rule of law” is a very narrow way of thinking. He doesn’t say, at this point, that the masses don’t have a say in what’s going on. He doesn’t look at the fact that the legal institutions which he wants are quite capable, as in the West, of being corrupt, and the masses have to put great pressure on them to achieve the most basic things. In this chapter, Smith just puts in a few phrases here and there about what would be better; it is in the last chapter of his book that he deals with his overall view of what should be done. (At the very end of the book, in the one-page section ”Capitalism or Ecosocialism?”, he talks about how capitalism is the problem, and “no amount of tinkering with the market can brake the drive to global environmental and ecological collapse.” He calls for “national and international economic planning to reorganize the economy”. This part of his book would be discussed in a later study group meeting. But it is quite short, doesn’t put much content into his description of ecosocialism, and seems to differ from the way he contrasts China and the Western countries elsewhere in the book.)
Another comrade said that there are legal institutions in the US with various of the features Smith talks about, but they all failed in Flint, Michigan, resulting in the massive lead poisoning of the population, a lead poisoning that exists in other places all over the US as well. All of the agencies, the town, state, and federal agencies, and the courts, all failed. The agencies provided a lot of jobs for officials, but they did not inspect things and ensure that the city had clean water.
The discussion moved on to Smith’s description of what should be done to deal with “China’s Toxics Emergency”. He points out that the situation poses an “existential threat”, and “the only solution … is to cease production of most toxic chemicals and rigorously control the few toxic chemicals we can’t do without in a moderately industrialized society.” (p. 68) This is true as far as it goes, but he doesn’t say further as to what type of system could accomplish these things.
Another comrade said that Smith sees the problem as growth; he is a
degrowther. Any economy that maximizes growth, capitalist or Stalinist,
is the problem. He says the filthy
industries are impossible to clean up in any real sense, and besides
they produce a lot of things that nobody needs. So the answer is to
stop producing. “We can do without
toxic pesticides, most petrochemicals, and most plastics. We can do
without disposable products, the endless waste stream of electronic
gadgets, and so on. We can institute the ‘precautionary principle’
developed by scientists, doctors, and anti-toxics organizations (like
Safer Chemicals Healthy Families), that would prohibit the mass
production of chemicals until they are proven safe, …” (pp.
68-69) This is correct as far as it goes. It was pointed out that every
year the world’s industries put more new chemicals into the atmosphere,
almost none of which get tested. Unrestrained growth in this manner is
a problem, but Smith says little about what is needed to replace this
system.
We thought this was another important chapter, as China is often praised for having so much solar energy and producing so many solar panels, but it is also increasing coal production. The generation of electricity with dirty fuel still continues, and the amount of new dirty energy is greater than the increase in sustainable energy. It is said that China has such and such a percentage increase of renewable energy each year, but this is a percentage on top of a small quantity, whereas the percentage increase of the use of fossil fuel is measured against the large existing mass of fossil fuel use. The percentages only look impressive until you look at them closely.
The difference between the growth rate and the mass of existing production has to be taken seriously. For example, suppoe one is comparing what's hppening to two things being measured, A and B. Say A goes up from 40 to 60, that’s an impressive 50% increase, but only involves 20 units. B might go up from 600 to 630. That’s only 5%, but it involves 30 units, which is substantially larger increase in B’s absolute value, compared to the 20 unit increase in A’s absolute value.
Smith points out that there is substantial power capacity from solar and wind farms that is underutilized. He describes how local jurisdictions have refused to buy solar power because it is more expensive than their local power produced from coal and also would involve squeezing out the local coal-fired power plants. There are also problems with having a sufficient electrical grid to guarantee the delivery of the power from wind and solar energy plants. The existing electrical grids aren’t large enough or well enough developed to cut down on the need for dirty power to serve as backup for the solar and wind power plants. Smith says, the bigger the grid, the better.
But Smith says that good management of the electrical grids would be by way of markets. He writes that “In Europe and North America, utilities companies address the problem of intermittency and balance between supply and demand ‘horizontally’ by means of markets. They build power plants to meet market demand and trade electricity across regions and even countries. Electricity prices are adjusted hourly.” (p. 77) It seems Smith has overlooked the examples of the California and Texas energy crises, where the free market, and the consequent rapid adjustments of price, caused intense misery. Moreover, one comrade pointed out, Smith had just given the example of how the energy market in China was a major factor in underutilization of sustainable energy.
But the electrical grids in China are set up differently than in the US, and Smith is arguing that the Chinese market is set up by central planners. Apparently, from that point of view, market adjustments are not responsible for the result of price pressure in China. He complains about “vertical” planning in China, as opposed to the “horizontal” planning which he thinks would come from the market. But how do you set up a nation-wide grid without a central plan? A lot of the environmental measures in the US are vertical planning, which exist alongside the market arrangements: the national EPA says you can’t do this, and that’s that. The problem isn’t vertical planning per se, the problem in China is the way it is set up. Indeed, as there is competition among the national ministries, naturally the result is vertical planning is a mess.
Smith himself talks about the competition between different government agencies in China, and this is one of the valuable features of his description of the Chinese economy: "'Ownership' of power plants is divided between the central government, provincial governments, municipalities, and so on ...". (p. 78) And he also refers to the differences between central government ministries. The US also has a mix of authority over power plants, although it is done somewhat differently than in China: there are municipal power stations, market-owned power stations, and a variety of different forms of ownership, and this is done to make profit.
Now, Smith wants to have a different system from China, but he can't get beyond what he regards as the better parts of the Western system, such as the “horizontal” energy market, and he misses the similarities between the Chinese and American systems that are shown by his own study of China. He shows how in China, competition works in a bad way, but he doesn’t seem to see this as a real market. Competition, market forces, and different agencies clashing have somewhat different forms in China and the US, but competition and the market exist in both. One comrade pointed out that Smith refers to the erection of "'market blockades' to monopolize production and trade [of power] within their own bureaucratic bailiwicks". Well, what about COVID vaccines, and how they are monopolized within the drug markets, with each company insisting it has a blockade on the technology, and each country hoarding its vaccines?
One comrade said, overall Smith gives an informative description of how things go wrong in China, and what the economy actually looks like, but he is not very good about what to do about it. He also gives a good exposure of those Western sources who are excited about China's environmental measures.
From here on the discussion turned to the issue of how close to disaster the world was with respect to global warming, whether only immediate revolutionary change in both China and the West could prevent disaster, whether the world had already passed various tipping points relative to global warming, and if so, what changes should be made in environmental demands to deal with this. <>
Picture: a worker clears floating garbage on the Yangtze River, from “Garbage islands threaten Three Gorges Dam”, Reuters, Aug. 2, 2010.
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