It goes from green to brown to green again — Green Swans, The Capitalism Papers reviewed
Books reviewed: Green Swans by John Elkington and The Capitalism Papers by Jerry Mander
I’m old enough to remember when plastic bags were touted as an alternative to paper ones. The thinking was that using plastic “saved” trees. I’d proudly choose plastic on the way out from Giant or Shoppers as a kid, thinking I was doing my part. This was folly, but I didn’t know any better: these plastic bags became trash bags that became…trash…
Out out of sight, out of mind.
In the ecosystem forever.
In early October 2024, though, plastics were front and center at a forum featuring local entrepreneurs in St. Petersburg, Russia. They shared their experiences visiting different countries and sustainable enterprises, many of which were concerned with repurposing plastic goods. Among the locations shown were Washington, DC, site of a lively farmer’s market, and a start-up in Portugal where post-consumer plastic was reformulated into sundry goods.
In Saint Petersburg itself, one business, Sew Dept, makes bags and other accessories out of used plastic banners while another offers sustainable, vegetarian (and even vegan) meals. A speaker from 99Recycle presented a slide show that endorsed circularity, not just recyclability.
Questions from the audience were often about the logistics of these various ventures, but others voiced skepticism, too.
One attendee asked about the toxicity of the plastics that were given a second life. Did working with these materials harm workers? No, the head of the Sew Dept answered. None of the processing requires heat high enough to result in health problems for workers or consumers, and regarding daily use, there was no risk of any ill effects.
Very well, then, but what about the problem of microplastics?
During this event, more than one speaker stated explicitly that they were not running a charity. They were not simply do-gooders. They were running a business: profitability was a priority.
This idea, more than any other one, is what has stayed with me since.
While using plastic waste to make something new seemed a noble goal, the very nature of this material makes the effort rather pointless.
It’s no secret that this substance is just about impossible to get rid of. Kate Aronoff reports that recycling was more or less an industry plot to make consumers feel guilty or responsible for managing the waste Big Oil profited off of. While there are novel new ways of getting rid of or repurposing plastic, including breeding petroleum-eating microbes or vaporizing used plastics to deal with waste, new plastics are still produced.
In fact, making plastic waste into a valuable commodity, under capitalist logic, creates demand for more of said waste.
I live in the former Leningrad, so it’s appropriate that I echo Ilych and ask: what is to be done?
Plastic waste is one of five “wicked” problems John Elkington identifies in his book, Green Swans. “Wicked” problems, those whose social complexity makes it impossible to quickly solve them, are quite popular in the sustainability discourse. Such a definition neatly absolves powerful actors like the oil industry and their paid-for politicians from any responsibility for what they have done to the commons.
This text aims to reorient capitalism towards sustainable initiatives and away from the wasteful and ecologically harmful practices that have thus far defined the capitalist era:
A Green Swan is a profound market shift, generally catalyzed by some combination of Black [unexpected catastrophes] or Gray Swan [expected catastrophes] challenges and changing paradigms, values, mind-sets, politics, policies, technologies, business models, and other key factors. A Green Swan delivers exponential progress in the form of economic, social, and environmental wealth creation. At worst, it achieves this outcome in two dimensions while holding the third steady. There may be a period of adjustment where one or more dimensions underperform, but the aim is an integrated breakthrough in all three dimensions.
Innovators who tackle these problems will inherit the Earth, and savvy investors will reap the profits of financing them. Elkington’s text is optimistic in a sense; while he does acknowledge the known ecological problems on the horizon, he hopes to motivate readers to tackle them using the power of human genius and market economics.
When pressing his case for green swan capitalism, Elkington shares the graph below. Notice that where it soars, people “Experiment with new economic and political models.” And yet there are no such models offered, save for that of green-minded activist investors. This isn’t innovative — ESG investing already exists. In fact, Elkington claims to have invented the “triple bottom line” taking into account a firm’s “social, environmental, and economic impact” back in 1994.
Elkington poetically describes our transformative, transitional moment as the “Chrysalis Economy, where the imaginal cells [living blueprints] are people like innovators, business leaders, and city mayors.”
When it comes to policy, he endorses The Green New Deal and similar programs proposed around the world. However, nothing proposed in such laws fundamentally alters the relationships between citizens and corporations or between businesses and nature. After nearly a century of radicalism being defined down, Keynesianism with green characteristics is as comprehensive as it gets?
The master’s tools, after all…
Yet the fundamental problem with “green growth” texts like this one is that the contradictions in the social-economic system we live in are not technical flukes. They are baked into the very structure of profit-seeking.
Was the forum I attended actually a gathering of imaginal cells?
I think not, but one of the attendees did play a beautifully symbolic role.
There was something poetic about Sew Dept’s production process: making use of the unwanted waste from the modern world’s most unwanted product:
Advertising.
Few people know this truth as well as Jerry Mander, a former adman who became a critic of the very industry that made him a success. In The Capitalism Papers, Mander convincingly argues that capitalism, in terms of its resource use, political influence, and effects on individuals’ consciousness, is unjust and unsustainable.
Mander is careful to note that by “capitalism” he means global, rapacious, corporate capitalism. The kind that makes money for its own sake at the expense of life itself. He would be fine living in a nation of shopkeepers and small holders.
Having defined his target, Mander also tempers his critique before beginning:
For the record, I think it will be useful to get a few questions out of the way. I am not a communist, or Marxist or socialist, and never have been. You really don’t have to be any of those things to find major flaws in capitalism’s inherent design and begin to be alarmed about its downside performance. You just have to be awake.
Both here and in Green Swans, books divided by time and place, the authors insist on the unsustainable reality of business as usual but are quick to dismiss radical solutions (in Mander’s case in name, if not in principle).
It’s obvious that the road from left-liberalism to social democracy is not an especially long one, but the rhetorical conflation of such reforms by the right with political tendencies of the right is one thinkers are unnecessarily on guard against.
The capitalists will call anything that reduces their power and profit “socialism,” “communism,” or “fascism”
According to Elkington, a greener, more prosperous future and the current state of affairs are not so far apart: ecologically enlightened consumers could very well change the global economy. It’s a nice thought that would be comforting if that were how the global economy worked.
Early in Green Swans, Elkington mentions “degrowth,” actually reducing production and consumption. However, he quickly dismisses it, saying that it would only be feasible if the population were declining. It isn’t mentioned again.
Material reality demands degrowth.
Much like concerns with profitability and inflation, current economic understanding takes for granted that some people ought to consume far more than others. Furthermore, it holds that all people need to consume an ever-increasing amount of resources to live well.
Figures about needing several Earths to let everyone live like the “average” American are only partly instructive: the “average” American doesn’t need all this stuff either.
Mander makes the point explicitly, listing in 2011, several “innovations” that he thinks we could simply do without:
my list of extraneous products includes automatic hand-drying machines and toilet flushing; electric can openers, annual style changes for cars; GPS systems, iPads and cell phones; annual ‘spring’ and ‘fall’ fashions; and those ubiquitous, huge flat-screen TVs; all of which accelerate the sacrifice of nature for short-term, highly dubious pleasures. And while we’re at it, can we get rid of those drone aircraft?
Aside from the ecological destruction wrought by capitalism, Mander considers various other failings of this system. Among them are a propensity toward war (to secure resources and maintain demand for production) and a hostile homogenization of culture and individual identity (akin to what Benjamin Barber calls “McWorld”). Such a dire situation calls for bold action, doesn’t it?
Mander concludes his book with a series of recommendations.
Mander calls for corporate boards to include at least 50% workers: a radical reform in itself. Similarly, codifying the rights of indigenous people to manage land and resources as they see fit strikes at the heart of settler colonialism and its successor, global capitalism. Other suggestions include re-localizing economies, halting corporate-led globalization, true-cost accounting of resource use, a strict “polluter pays” principle when it comes to waste.
Many of these ideas have been proposed by mainstream politicians and parties (Carbon taxes, “ecosystem services” accounting, the Superfund, Brownfields cleanup) already. However, only some of them, and hardly in their most robust forms, are in presently in effect.
Mander cites scholars who describe themselves as social democrats and democratic socialists among those proposing ways forward. Despite his disclaimer at the start of the book, Mander cannot honestly stay away from these ideas after his thorough deconstruction of the world that capitalism has created. There are no solutions to these social and environmental problems through the center or right. The only way to go forward is to go left.
Not one of these measures requires armed revolution.
They are achievable at the ballot box where such an option exists, combined with economic pressure and education campaigns. Radicalism isn’t old hat and isn’t a look backward. It is today as it always has been, a look forward, to a world not limited by the imaginations of those who profit from the misery of the present.
In fact, when given the opportunity to manage the environment democratically, voters make the right choices. In Ecuador, for example, a near supermajority voted to stop oil drilling, but it hasn’t. Politicians argue that doing so would halt “the economy,” a virtual enterprise that is concerned with abstract accounting gimmicks to enrich the few at the expense of the many.
Jeff Bezos knows that he didn’t “build it”: his workers did.
Democracy can be stronger than this, if we want it to be.
Mander’s last word on the topic is in fact anything but:
Nobody yet has a final answer. We need to keep the process open. The chasm is still very wide from here to where we need to go, but we begin top see across to the other side. So let’s put aside our ideologies, stay open, and keep talking
This call to dialogue is in fact a call to action. On Earth today, there are few questions about how to use the natural environment to provide food, water, and shelter for ourselves.
What remains worth debating is what a good life is and how to achieve it. It’s obvious that the current system, which induces demand for garbage goods and garbage jobs to keep an imaginary economy humming for a handful of garbage people is no answer.
Failing to question the very premises of capitalist logic leaves all of us scrounging for scraps on Landfill Earth. Sustainability initiatives need to start with the premise of zero waste, not with perpetuating the pernicious cycle of “growth.”
The capitalists have despoiled the world.
It’s up to the rest of us to save it.
