In the absence of internal enemies of substance and with the unlikelihood of a series of anti-capitalist revolutions emerging in a number of countries, the rule of capitalism seems impregnable. Yet there is, as always, room for anxiety. Today, the main obstacles to the continuing expansion of capitalism is not the class struggle, or the revolutionary aspirations of the wretched of the earth, or Islamic fundamentalists. The main obstacles are the ecological limits to the development of a Western-style consumer society at the global level.
The problem for the West is that the ‘Rest’ want to be like the West: driving cars, using energy, eating meat, having holidays abroad, enjoying an endless supply of cheap clothes, cheap music, cheap food, as well as gadgetries, computers, and so on, in other words all the joys and pleasure of limitless consumption. If technical ways could be found to resolve the ecological problem, the real obstacles to limitless growth, then capitalism, as we know it today, will have acquired another lease of life.
There may be political ways: various forms of despotism and authoritarianism may put the clock back to a time where the vast majority are deprived, once again, of the pleasures of consumption. But this too would give rise to major problems of legitimacy. One cannot rule by guns alone, by prisons, and by torture. One must give the people hope for a better future.
Under conditions of democracy, the solution to the ecological problems are even more formidable, for it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which politicians and world leaders explain to their electorate, expecting to win votes, that consumption for the many has to be severely restricted while allowing the few to thrive and enjoy. This would wipe away the much recently acquired legitimacy of the system itself. Nor would it be realistic to expect the 3 billion people in China and in the Indian subcontinent, who have within their sight the lifestyle of ‘the West’, to return demurely and peacefully to the spartan consumption of yesterday, while Westerners continued to bask in the pleasures of capitalist consumption. The signs are ominous: China is already the largest car market in the world, the largest market for the internet, the second largest consumer of oil, the largest energy consumer, and the world’s biggest carbon emitter, overtaking the United States. China burns half of the world’s coal consumption. Meat consumption is increasing. In 2015 some 120 million Chinese went abroad for leisure and business (the combined population of France and Great Britain). China’s rapid industrialization and urbanization means that there is a considerable reduction in the size of agricultural land (as happened in the West). Consequently, China may not be able to produce enough food to feed its citizens and will be forced to buy on the world market, with obvious consequences for world food prices.58
None of this is surprising, since China’s population is so large. Should India’s advances match those of China, the ecological problems would multiply still further.
The irony is that it is the triumph of capitalism itself which now threatens its future, and gives rise to endless further anxieties: the originator of consumption destroyed by the triumph of consumption, ‘consum’d’ as Shakespeare put it (in a different context) ‘with that which it was nourish’d by’.
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