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Literary review
CRITIQUE OF OLIGARCHY
By Darryl D'Monte
** A book that highlights the elite’s hunger for profit through exploitation of natural resources **
Hindu (India)
February 1, 2009 (posted Jan. 31)
http://www.hindu.com/lr/2009/02/01/stories/2009020150060200.htm
[Review of How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth by Hervé Kempf (Devon, UK: Green Books, 2008). £7.95.]
This is a startling title for the mild-mannered environment editor of Le Monde, published originally in French in 2007, much before the current meltdown has turned Kempf into a latter-day Cassandra. It has all the virtues of a slim book written by a journalist -- it is not encumbered by footnotes, copious references, and yet makes its point cogently and briefly.
The title may be slightly misleading, in that the bulk of this 124-page book is taken up with a critique of “oligarchs,” the ruling élite, and their insatiable hunger for profit through the exploitation of natural resources. Old-fashioned Marxists would have called these oligopolists, but Kempf is disenchanted with the Left because it has ignored the green alternative. As he writes: “It is significant that socialism, the left’s center of gravity, is based on materialism, and the 19th-century ideology of progress; it has been incapable of integrating the ecological critique.” He dismisses Messrs Al Gore, Lester Brown, and others who are appealing to “humanity” to mend their ways because this won’t deter the oligarchs.
UNSETTLING
Although we are familiar with the enormous disparities in wealth in the globe -- particularly after the UNDP’s Human Development Report on Consumption in 1998 -- his analysis, using more comparative and realistic indices, is unsettling. Switzerland, by any standards, is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but the Caritas organization put the percentage of its poor at 14 per cent in relative terms in 2005. In Germany, it was almost as much in 2003; in the U.K., 22 per cent in 2002. In the U.S., the richest country on earth in most conventional ways, 23 per cent of Americans earn less than half the median income, which is poor by the French definition. In Japan, the number of households with no savings doubled in five years to reach a quarter of the population.
Indeed, the author cites how it is more important to measure “precariousness” as distinct from “poverty.” By that yardstick, his native country has one in every four in this vulnerable position. Is it any wonder, then, that the suburbs of Paris have erupted with the insensate rage of poor immigrants who are far worse off than those on the dole? And, for all the self-congratulation on the part of neo-liberals in India who used to believe that globalization would pull the poorest out of poverty, we have to remind ourselves that the global measure itself -- the World Bank’s $1 a day -- is hardly sufficient to meet minimal subsistence needs.
Kempf concludes that there are obstacles in the path to ridding the oligarchs of their power. The first is the conviction that economic growth is the sole means of resolving social problems. The second, that technological progress will take care of the environment. The third is the inevitability of unemployment. However, he is on less firm ground in posing alternatives to these paradigms.
RARE OPPORTUNITY
He could have cited his countrymen like Serge Latouche who have called for décroissance or “degrowth” and how growth and well-being can be decoupled. The current crisis, in fact, presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to distinguish between “goods” and “bads.” The U.S. government is contemplating bailing out the auto industry: there is no question that by any reckoning, this falls into the latter category, as much detrimental to the environment as it is to society. Couldn’t the same industry be persuaded -- or forced -- to manufacture something which will be useful to a much larger majority?
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