Nature's Evil

Jevons’s predictions have only partly come true – coal has not even begun to run out, and oil isn’t running out either. But Jevons’s paradox is being proved with a vengeance: the more efficient the use of any sort of raw material, the more of it is consumed. So far, the only raw material of which mankind is using less, thanks to technological progress, is paper. Forests are no longer felled for the sake of bureaucratic correspondence; now they are cut down for other purposes. Even if the dreams of the Internet of Things come to pass and every home is furnished with a 3D printer which can manufacture things on the spot, this will cut out the need for transportation but will not save as much raw material and energy as was the case with paper. At the Katowice summit of 2018, experts called for a 20 per cent reduction of oil and gas production by 2030 and a 55 per cent reduction by 2050. Their plea did not fall entirely on deaf ears. The powerful American investor Warren Buffet has invested $30 billion in ‘green’ electricity generation. Another billionaire-activist, Elon Musk, plans to fill the roads with electric vehicles. Some global funds, controlling trillions of dollars, have divested from oil investments. In the face of the pandemic, the European Union has accepted an ambitious plan for a ‘green recovery’.

The parasitic state

In 1740, a Prussian prince wrote a short book entitled Anti-Machiavel . He explained that the task of the sovereign is not to seek glory or fill the treasury but to create a common good – the flourishing of his people. But when this author became Frederick the Great, he encountered various difficulties. The sovereign wants the common good, the elite is fixated on wealth, the people aspire to survive. The forms of redistribution, however, depend on the available resources. It is easier to tax grain than potatoes, bank accounts than gold. In 1917, the revolution in Russia abolished the old currency, but there was still grain stored in barns and gold in money boxes; the new state wished to confiscate them – naturally, in the name of the common good. Requisitions of grain were made by armed units, but gold and jewellery were easier to conceal from them, and a more creative strategy was practised. The government launched the chain of state-owned pawn shops known as Torgsin and invited the citizens to exchange gold for bread. The same intelligence officers who in the 1920s had engaged in the export of hemp and furs (see chapter 3 ) switched to extracting gold from the population. During the famine, these pawn shops made handsome profits. In desperation, people in the provinces had to buy food at the unheard-of prices that were fixed by officials in Moscow. The people’s gold was used to buy factories and technology – Torgsin paid for a third of the imports which were necessary for Stalin’s industrialisation. 6 Hunger created profit for the treasury and was used for the ‘development’ of the country. This is an extreme example of the mercantile pump, in which the interest of the sovereign was directly opposite to the prosperity of the people. But states have always and everywhere spread the fiction that their interests were as one with the common good.

The world in which capitalism flourished in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was not very different from the world of Herodotus. Distant colonies supplied the imperial centres with their exotic materials, while the ruling nations created wealth from labour and knowledge. But the mass society also created something genuinely new: the enrichment of the masses was a condition for the success of the state. Neither Xerxes nor the imperial mercantilists knew such things. Although the growth of the imperial trade in sugar, cotton or opium depended on the trickling down of these former luxuries to the egalitarian masses, classical debates overlooked mass consumption as the engine of growth. The second Industrial Revolution revealed a deep paradox of the new economy: wealth rushes towards conspicuous consumption but is formed by the mass market. 7 Luxury items – for example cars – bring about economic growth only when they become cheap enough to be affordable by the majority. For the Founding Fathers, the measure of the American dream was the number of acres per household; for the Fordists, it was the number of cars on the drive.