Capitalism vs. Sustainability

Garton Ash on capitalism:

Although there now seems to be no practical alternative to it, recent developments are not encouraging. Capitalism, Garton Ash wrote in 2007, is clearly not an automatically self-correcting system. That has since proved to be devastatingly true. Inequality of wealth has also reached grotesque levels. Garton Ash comments:

If a lot of middle-class people begin to feel they are personally losing out to the same process of globalization that is making those few fund managers stinking rich, while at the same time outsourcing their own middle-class jobs to India, then you may have a backlash.


The Tea Party has proved that to be an understatement. Worst of all, in the long term, this planet cannot sustain six and a half billion people living like today’s middle-class consumers in its rich North…. Sustainability may be a grey and boring word, but it is the biggest single challenge to global capitalism today…. The genius of contemporary capitalism is not simply that it gives consumers what they want but it makes them want what it has to give. It’s that core logic of ever-expanding desires that is unsustainable on a global scale.

As Garton Ash puts it, “remove the elementary staples of organized, civilized life—food, shelter, drinkable water, minimal personal security—and we go back within hours to a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all.” There are now ominous global problems, of which the increasing severity and number of natural disasters probably linked to climate change may before very long have such an effect. The resulting mass migrations alone would test the veneer of civilization as never before. Is humankind irreversibly stuck in a downward spiral? Or can it find the common sense and solidarity to fight its way back? Garton Ash is skeptical.

Garton Ash also reminds us that while serious progress has been made in the art and method of radical political change, we cannot count on the automatic survival and growth of democracy, nor indeed on the self-correcting capacity of a predominantly capitalist system. We also face urgent global problems to which we have scarcely started to look for solutions. The popular political involvement that was the lifeblood of civil resistance movements, as well as determined and courageous leadership, is now desperately needed nearer home.

From The NY Books Review