NOTES FOR A LECTURE

I. INTRODUCTION

(a) The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as developed by the UN Open Working Group on Sustainable Development in 2014, represent nothing less than a depiction of the Good Society.

The 17 goals and 109 targets are just about what you and I would come up with if we sat around a table to discuss the kind of world we want. We’d like a world without poverty, an economy that is growing and creating good jobs yet is ecologically sustainable, a world of increasing equality, flourishing justice, peace among nations and an absence of political violence.

(b) Although the SDGs would be more effective if they were more tightly focused, they nonetheless have two major merits.

1. The report brings the important questions of ecological sustainability and equality into the discussion of poverty eradication and economic growth. At a time when signs of eco-system collapse are all around us, the inclusion of sustainability in the new set of goals is a welcome departure. Also, anti-poverty measures will be far more effective if they are combined with measures to enhance equality of income. But one proviso must be added: the report assumes that economic growth, including industrial growth, is compatible with ecological sustainability. Whether unending growth can occur without the world succumbing to catastrophic climate change, however, is a questionable proposition.
2. The goals and targets are to apply to ALL countries, not just to developing countries. Universality is important because some of the developed countries are laggards on the issues of ecological sustainability and equality.

(c) But the real question concerns the political feasibility of the SDGs. We can all imagine ideal worlds, but how useful is the exercise if we are merely depicting unrealizable Utopias? The UN Working Group, not surprisingly, engaged in a technocratic or apolitical exercise. What I will probe is the politics of taking sustainability seriously. I will do this by briefly responding to 3 linked questions. Each response aims only to open up a topic for discussion.

(d) A final preliminary point: in addition to a national politics of building a sustainable world, there has to be a global politics. Obviously, national efforts in the West are insufficient if China, now accounting for 29% of emissions, or India and Russia, which account for a growing % of emissions, do not cooperate. We desperately need to negotiate a global agreement, optimally next year at the Paris Conference. But the goal of achieving a global treaty is promoted if national governments emerge in the Global North and South that are ready to make firm pledges to a sustainable level of emissions. There can be a synergistic relationship between progressive national governments and progressive global social movements pressing an agenda of sustainability. Change at the national and global levels is closely related. What is needed, above all, is a creative politics to attain our goal of a sustainable, less poor and more just world.

II. CAN WE ACHIEVE THE SDGs WITHIN THE EXISTING ORDER, OR WILL SYSTEMIC CHANGE BE NEEDED?

(a) I contend that the SDGs are not feasible within the existing neoliberal order. The required policies are just too fundamentally at loggerheads with the existing power structures and neoliberal policy paradigm. What is needed, in other words, is systemic change. Techno-optimists, to avoid this conclusion, put their faith in a relatively painless technological fix for the climate challenge. But I think we would be ill advised to wait for such a solution. There is, in all likelihood, no painless way to achieve a sustainable world.

(b) If we limit our gaze to just 2 of the SDGs – reversing vast inequalities both intra-nationally and globally, and preventing catastrophic climate change – we see the enormous challenge these goals pose both to the interests of powerful groups and the assumptions of the prevailing neoliberal paradigm.

1. inequalities of wealth and income are growing within many countries, including Canada, and globally. Just one statistic to make the latter point: a 2014 Oxfam report claims that 1% of the world’s population controlled $110 trillion in wealth in 2013, which was 65 times the total wealth controlled by the bottom half of the world’s population (3.5 billion). Reversing these #inequalities means that the most powerful classes, especially the politically ascendant financial elites, would have to surrender a great deal of their wealth and, consequently, political influence as well.
2. Preventing irreversible climate change demands vast changes in production, consumption and energy use, as we know from the successive reports of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. These reports represent the consensus of 100s of climate scientists world-wide. The message is loud and clear: the globe is warming, human activity is mainly responsible, and we must act quickly to avoid catastrophic climate change. We have only a decade or two to drastically reduce GHG emissions in order to hold the increase in global temperatures to 2 degrees C, which is widely accepted as the manageable degree of global warming. Yet we are still moving in the wrong direction. Not only do GHG emissions continue to rise, but the rate of increase is also growing.

(c) What needs to be done? According to the conservative estimate of the IG Panel on Climate Change, limiting the temperature increase to 2 degrees will require a world-wide reduction of 40-70% of GHG emissions over current levels by 2050. Between 60- 80% of existing reserves of fossil fuels would need to stay in the ground, according to authoritative estimates.

(d) Does anyone believe that the magnitude of change required to reduce inequality and stem climate change can happen within the existing neoliberal order?

1. Some of the world’s largest and most profitable corporations would be threatened with bankruptcy, unless they quickly adapted to the new realities.
2. Dealing with the problems of inequality and ecological decline will involve, in whatever form, a directive, proactive state to set standards that curtail markets. This approach contradicts the basic neoliberal tenet that the common good is best served if markets are as self-regulating as possible.

(e) Hence, there would be – there is – powerful, politically entrenched, opposition to overcome. Just consider the deadlock in the US between the Democrats and the Republicans, for example.

III. WHAT SORT OF SYSTEM CHANGE IS NEEDED? How can we shift the prevailing power structures and governance doctrine in order to carry through the far-reaching policy and institutional changes needed to deal with the major challenges we face? Here, we enter the terrain evoked by the slogan emerging from the World Social Forums: “Another World is Possible.” But what kind of world? An alternative to capitalism or an alternative within capitalism? This is the key strategic issue. To simplify matters, let’s discuss this question only in relation to climate change, the major threat to a sustainable future.

(a) Eco-socialists And Marxists are absolutely clear in their position: capitalism is incompatible with sustainability. In the words of one book’s evocative title: the end of capitalism or the end of the world!

(b) Their general argument is that an “inner logic” of capitalism drives a process of unending commodification and accumulation, which eventually leads to ecological disaster. What is this inner logic? There are 5 versions, somewhat overlapping, of this inner dynamic. They are all complex, so all I can do today is refer to each in passing.

1. “Wants” are insatiable in cap ism owing not only to slick advertising, but also to the association in popular culture between wealth and consumption, on the one hand, and wellbeing and happiness, on the other.
2. Competition among firms is based on the logic of “grow or die”. Firms that do not grow cannot pay their debts, lose shareholder value and are subject to take-overs and bankruptcy. Thus, firms seek to grow, no matter what.
3. The short time horizon of corporate and political leaders drives them to avoid supposedly costly reforms aimed at preserving the environment.
4. Capitalism Involves the commodification of nature, which transforms forests, geological features, animals, Lakes, landscapes, etc into “natural capital”, which justifies the exploitation of nature for profit, which ultimately leads to the degradation of nature.
5. Many companies are profitable only because they can externalize the environmental costs of production and distribution to society or the world at large, while internalizing the financial benefits. If the companies concerned had to internalize all these costs, they could not survive. (Firms exploiting the Alberta oil sands are an obvious case in point.)

(c) This adds up to a powerful critique of capitalism. But, if we conclude that sustainability requires socialism, we are in trouble. WHY?

1. People, with good reason, are skeptical of socialism, in light of the experience of the 20th century. It will therefore be difficult to mobilize them for what many will see as a leap in the dark.
2. We don’t have any clear idea of how to create a socialist society. Whatever path is chosen, whether a form of market socialism or participatory planning, we will face an extended period of chaos and conflict – and we don’t have the time to spare, given ecological limits.

(d) But our choices are not really this limited. Eco-socialists identify real and dangerous tendencies within capitalism, but their assumption that these contradictions are not only inherent to capitalism but also irremediable within capitalism is probably incorrect. Capitalism, judging by its history, is far more adaptable than Marxist or eco-socialist analysts allow. Who, at the end of the 19thcentury, would ever have thought that the social-democratic welfare state of the post WW2 would emerge? Marx wrote in terms of growing immiseration. True, capitalism, left to itself, would very probably destroy the environment. But it will not be left to itself. It has been saved from itself before (through Keynesian interventions in the 1930s and later, and the bailouts of 2008-2009, for example), and we will have to do so again because we really have no alternative. Capitalists will be pushed, kicking and screaming, Into the new era – into a more progressive form of capitalism that is compatible with severe ecological limits.

IV. WHAT MIGHT WORK AS AN ALTERNATIVE WITHIN CAPITALISM? Let’s call it GREEN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

(a) What is this? I have defined social democracy in an earlier post  It will have to suffice now to simply state that, historically, social democrats have believed in the primacy of politics over markets, a deepening of democracy and equality, and a proactive democratic state acting to advance the common interest, partly by taming disruptive market forces. The common interest, in the case of green social democracy, includes sustainability among other goals. Why might it work? 2 reasons:

1. Currently, the most progressive social democracies (in the Global South as well as the North) have the best record on the environment. Governments adhering to a neoliberal paradigm have the worst record. (For proof of this statement, refer to the Yale University index of governmental environmental rectitude.)
2. Social democracy, with its commitments to the primacy of politics over markets and deep democracy, provides a way of countering the economic power of corporations, which underpins the present neoliberal regime.

(b) How might it come about? The struggle for sustainability is a struggle for power (not just the adoption of high sounding resolutions by governments or others). But merely voting in elections for the most progressive alternative will be insufficient. Movement-politics will be needed. In this struggle, environmentalists cannot win unless they link up with other social movements – those committed to the other goals of the SDGs (poverty elimination, greater equality, peace, etc). Organized labour will be an important element. The old Red-Green clash is a thing of the past. In previous decades, working class organizations (the Reds) saw their economic interests as in conflict with environmental conservation (the Greens), but not now. Trade unions are on the defensive in most countries today. The main problems, for workers, are declining real incomes and the precarious nature of employment, which is associated with the neoliberal regime. The movement toward a green economy will create more jobs than it destroys, an idea that is gaining ground.

(c) Can this option succeed? It will be difficult. During the 2008-9 deep recession, there were widespread calls for a “green new deal”, “global social democracy”, a “green Marshall Plan” for the global south, but these promising ideas soon dropped off the radar screen. In fact, very little has changed despite the dramatic failure of the neoliberal model. Certainly, a green social democracy cannot be won without a strong, grassroots movement to demand such change occurs. This movement will have to be as strong as the campaign for nuclear disarmament was in the 1950s and 60s. We can only hope that the recent, worldwide Occupy Movement and People’s Climate Marches are harbingers of such a movement.

V. CONCLUSIONS

Many of us want a new policy paradigm that regards the democratized state as the defender of the common good, that has a broader notion of human wellbeing than the current focus on individual material gain, and that enshrines ecological sustainability as a fundamental value.
But we know it is very difficult to break with “business as usual”. Two things are needed:

1. the formulation of a coherent alternative policy paradigm to neoliberalism that places the environment at its centre,
2. And grassroots mobilization to build support for this paradigm and drive change at the national, and ultimately global Levels.

In short, if we take the Sustainable Development Goals seriously, we face a formidable political agenda.

by