Sarkar / Schriefl Eco-Socialism or "Green" Capitalism?

Collected Writings of Saral Sarkar, Volume 1
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-3-7568-5403-5
Verlag: BoD - Books on Demand
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 1, 308 Seiten

Reihe: Eco-Socialism or "Green" Capitalism? Collected Writings of Saral Sarkar

After the ignominious fall of the classical Soviet model of "socialism" in the early 1990s, socialists, communists, and all other kinds of Leftists had felt to have been left in the lurch. With his book Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism? A Critical Analysis of Humanity's Fundamental Choices (1999), Saral Sarkar presented and laid the theoretical foundation of a new conception of socialism, which convinced because it organically synthesized the newly arisen imperative of ecological sustainability and the old ideal of equality among members of humanity. On their part, all opponents of any kind of socialism have also been trying to somehow accommodate the inexorable insights and demands of true ecological sustainability in extant conceptions of capitalism. What they have achieved is not a synthesis, but merely a fake and self-contradictory phrase that does not deserve the prefix "Eco-", and should properly be called "Green"-Capitalism. But they succeeded in hoodwinking millions of worried human beings all over the world. In the last thirty years, Sarkar has been relentlessly trying through speeches and writings to counter their misconceptions of the ecological and social imperatives. In the present two volumes of his Collected Writings, readers will find some of the fruits of his endeavor

Saral Sarkar was born in 1936 in a village of West Bengal, India. After graduating from the University of Calcutta (Kolkata), he studied German language and literature for five years at the Goethe Institute in India and Germany. From 1966 to 1981, he was lecturer of German at the Goethe Institute in Hyderabad, India. Since 1982, he has been living in Cologne, Germany, where he has been active in the Green Movement, Anti-Globalization Movement, and all kinds of ecological and leftist movements. He was member of the Green Party of Germany from 1982 to 1987, but left the party in deep disappointment. Over the years, Sarkar has taken part in many discussions and debates in the above-mentioned areas and published widely in political journals in India, Europe, and the American Continent. His basal theoretical work "Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism? A Critical Analysis of Humanity's Fundamental Choices" (1999, London) has also been published in German, French (in internet), Chinese and Japanese. His other major works are: Green-Alternative Politics in West Germany, Vol. I & II (1993, 1994, Tokyo), and The Crises of Capitalism - A Different Study of Political Economy (2012, Berkeley), which was originally published in German (2010, Neu-Ulm).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sarkar, Saral

Schriefl, Ernst

Leseproben

How I Came Upon Ecology,
the Entropy Law,
and Georgescu-Roegen –
A Few Pages From My Memory
First published: 11.1.2023 A few weeks ago, I read an amusing (though saddening) correspondence between two professional economists: HF, a sustainability economist, and Dr. C, an ecological economist: HF had criticized Dr. C for not even mentioning the name of Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen in his book on a green economy. Dr. C. replied: “Naturally, Georgescu-Roegen, who had been honored with the Nobel Prize for his work on the subject, is known to us.” But, while writing a book, one cannot mention every relevant author etc. Thereupon, HF thanked Dr. C. for his kind reply, but added, inter alia: “[…] Please allow me the following comment on your knowledge about Georgescu-Roegen: The remarkable, in order not to say the grotesque, point here is that Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen, as pioneer of ecological economics, was not even regarded by the committee in charge as deserving of receiving this honor.” This triggered off the following pages from my memory:
Who is this late Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen (in the following, NGR)? Among environmental activists and ecologically interested persons, there are very few, who not only came across the name but also read his main book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process1 and some of his other writings. I guess, not all professional economists nor all who studied economics at the university level have heard a lecture on his theory and his views. They might be of interest and useful, even very important for the very frustrated young environmental and climate activists of today and those who are associated with them in groups like Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, Last Generation etc. So let me try to make a simple presentation thereof. Not being a good writer, let me try it in the style of a grandfather telling a story from his young days to his grandchildren. I am after all 86 years old and the activists of Fridays For Future etc. could be my grandchildren. I hope my readers will excuse me the inexactitudes and the paltry reference details. I was nine or ten years old when the following occurred: We were then living in a village in West Bengal (India). We were six children; I was the fifth of them. One day, I and my immediately elder brother were standing alone in front of one of the many ponds that southern West Bengal villages generally have. My brother Dilip, although barely one-and-a half years older, was much smarter than I, who was reputed in our family to be the simpleton of the lot. Now, I had a question that was troubling me for many days, and I thought Dilip might be interested. The question that troubled me was as follows: My parents were two in the beginning, and then we six children came. I asked Dilip: How can it work?: Originally my father’s salary must have sufficed for him and his wife, my mother. It was a two-member family. But then, within 12 years, it became an eight-member family. Dilip was really smart. He said: You are stupid. Look at this pond. Four months ago, in April, the pond had this little water (he showed the then water level with his fingers). And now? Look at it after five months, it is full. Millions of rain drops fell from the sky in the pond; they will vanish again. No problem. This happens every year. I understood the logic of his example. I fell quiet, but I was not really satisfied. I could not understand the similarity between the pond and the growth of our family. Decades later, I would understand it. Dilip was talking of a sustainable system, whereas I was perturbed by the exponential growth of an unsustainable one. Little did I know then that we were discussing one of the big issues of ecology and economy. The same question came up in college where I had political economy as one of my subjects. One day, the lecturer was teaching us about the Malthusian theory of population. You should know it, in the 1950s, India was a very poverty-stricken country. I could see it in the village where we lived in my childhood as well as in Calcutta, where we lived in the 1950s. I was seventeen years old, and Calcutta was in the 1950s a hotbed of leftist politics. All kinds of communist and socialist parties had a strong following there. And the social science and humanities faculties of our college were full of communist and Marxist lecturers. As expected, this particular lecturer rejected the Malthusian theory of population. I remember only one sentence of his lecture: “A man is not only born with a mouth, but also with two hands.” In those days, at the impressionable age of 17, in a poverty-stricken huge country like India, it was impossible for a young person not to be influenced by communism and Marxism, particularly in Calcutta. I absorbed much Marxist and socialist/communist ideology. But I was not satisfied with the Marxist rejection of Malthus. Much later, I thought, Marx simply was obstinate, unjust to another thinker who had expressed one part of the truth about the human condition. But the 1950s, also the 1960s, were the era of faith in eternal progress, development, and miracles that science and technology were bringing to us, also in India. That faith was shattered in the 1970s. I did not become an economist, nor a political scientist. I studied German, also in Germany, and became a lecturer in German in Hyderabad, a large city in South India. Once, in the late 1960s or early 1970s, a famous actor and dramaturge of the Bengali stage happened to be in Hyderabad. The man was also known as an intellectual. So the Bengalis of Hyderabad invited him to speak at a meeting of theirs, on whatever he wanted to speak. It was an intellectual rambling talk. But one thing that I still remember from that talk is as follows: Shambhu Mitra – that was the name of the famous actor – said in the course of his talk: he had recently read a very interesting small book, actually a lecture, by a British intellectual called C. P. Snow. In the lecture entitled The Two Cultures, Snow regretted the fact that in his country, generally, scientists had no interest in literature and humanities and littérateurs generally ignored the sciences, that there was hardly any exchange of thoughts between the two groups of intellectuals. Snow called upon the two elite groups to be more interested in the thinking of each other. He said, in the general sense, to be more effective in their role as the elite of the country, “not only should a professor of physics read some works of Shakespeare, but also a professor of any of the humanities should e.g. know what the Second Law of Thermodynamics says.” (inexact quotation – SS) I had thought I belonged to the educated elite of India, and I did not know what the Second Law of Thermodynamics was. I wanted to know something about it. In the early 1970s, there was no computer in India and also no Wikipedia. So I began asking my students, many of whom were engineers or students of engineering; among them were also some lecturers in physics. But none could give the answer. They mostly said, they had heard of it, but it was not so important for their studies, nor for their future profession. After some failed tries, I met a geophysicist who seemed to know what it was. But he was in a hurry then. He said: O, if you want to know that, you must first learn what entropy is, and he went away. And all the time I was asking myself why it should be so important for me to know what these things said. I understood it a few years later. In 1972 or 1973, I read the famous book Limits to Growth2, the first report to the Club of Rome. That was a shock for me, just as it was for many who had all along been talking of economic development, progress, scientific development, socialism, capitalism with a humane face and things like that. I thought, if what the book says is true, then nothing will help. No amount of scientific discoveries and inventions, no amount of planning will help, if the essential resources are limited and exhaustible. But was all that true? There were many who refused to be perturbed. To take just one example: Prof. Beckerman, the head of the faculty of economics at the University of Oxford, wrote that the minerals contained in the top one mile of the Earth’s crust would suffice for continuous economic growth for the next 100 million years. Others wrote about the possibilities of substituting rare resources with more abundant ones. More optimistic people thought of 100 percent recycling of exhaustible resources. In sum, the vast majority of economists and experts in relevant fields, as well as men in the street, refused to share the view that there are limits to economic growth. I also read the protocol of a meeting of relevant Soviet scientists attached to the highest political bodies of the of the state. They agreed with Meadows et al. so far as facts and analyses were concerned. They agreed it was a problem, the limits, but they criticized the authors for not considering that a socialist society approaches the problem in a different way than a capitalist one. They did not elaborate, in which different way. So far as energy was concerned, nobody disputed that the fossil fuels or fissionable materials such as uranium and thorium were exhaustible. And everybody agreed that spent energy cannot be recycled. But the main problem with nuclear power plants was more the risk of nuclear accidents and radioactive pollution than exhaustibility of the resources. The only question here was whether the risks were acceptable or not. From 1974 onwards (e.g. in Wyhl,...