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On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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44. Michael Harrington

Michael Harrington's The Other America (1963) stirred the American nation to act against widespread poverty in the richest nation on earth. He has been for many years an executive member of the Socialist Party national executive committee and became party chairman in 1966. In 1972 he resigned as cochairman of the Socialist Party-Democratic Socialist Federation in protest over criticism voiced in the party against Senator George McGovern, then a Democratic Party candidate for the presidency of the United States.
Michael Harrington was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1928. He studied at Holy Cross, Yale University and the University of Chicago. From 1951 to 1953 he was editor of the Catholic Worker. In 1953 he joined the Socialist Party.
In 1965 he published another best-selling book called The Accidental Century, followed by Toward a Democratic Left (1968) and Socialism (1972).

You have asked yourself the question, quoting Voltaire,1 how should society be retooled to prevent the masses from destroying themselves?

 

Well, I think that the basic problem from my own point of view, which is a democratic-socialist point of view, is to democratize economic and social power. In the United States that means democratizing the power of the corporation, which under the present circumstances operates as our major planning agency for the future of the United States. That is to say, a private institution, partaking in governmental decisions, radically transforms the quality of American life.

In the communist countries it seems to me that the fundamental problem is the same although the context is completely different. There, too, I think the problem is one of democratization, much as the Czechoslovakians in 1968 argued, or as the Poles and Hungarians in 1956, or perhaps even as the Poles again argued during the strikes of 1970 and '71. There you have a totalitarian bureaucracy, which is a planning

agency, but in some ways is as private, as antisocial in many ways as the corporation.

I think that the fundamental problem is the problem of democratization. One of the great limits on this, one of the great difficulties, is that if the projections of the Club of Rome study are true, then it seems to me socialism has become an impossibility. Socialism at least in its loftiest and highest aspirations thought that it would be possible for there to be a change in the psychology of mankind. Specifically, socialists argued - and I quite agree with the analysis of the past - that it was economic scarcity which was the chief material source of competitiveness, of aggressiveness, of various forms of domination and repression. They argued further that if you had a society of abundant technology and a democratic movement controlling that technology, that under those circumstances people would be much less competitive, could be much more cooperative, much less aggressive and instead have relationships of brotherhood, sisterhood et cetera. I think the problem of the Limits to Growth hypothesis is that if it is true, then one has removed permanently the possibility of abolishing that fundamental scarcity which is at the root of so many of the basic human emotions.

Therefore, I think those people have tried to argue that a spaceship earth forced to ration all of its resources would be a socialist earth. It would obviously have to be a pliant earth, a managed earth. But I think it would be psychologically, culturally and, in the broadest sense of the word, humanly, profoundly at variance with socialist ideas of emancipation. Of course people wouldn't have enough, and therefore they would still be looking over their shoulder at their neighbor wondering if their neighbor has gotten a little more than they. The hope is democratization. I think a profound limit is if we don't have enough resources for everybody to have a decent life, I don't think we would even have a good society.

 

Because the gap between the rich and the poor seems to grow wider instead of being bridged?

 

Right. Even if you stabilize the gap, even if you narrow the gap somewhat, still, the mere existence of widespread scarcity would, for example, put black-market emotions at work. People would spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to evade the rationing system and how to get more for themselves. That has certainly happened in historical experience every time there has been a rationing system in the twentieth century.

It has been accompanied by a black market and a considerable amount of corruption. What I am saying is I think that the Limits to Growth thesis is profoundly antiutopian, is profoundly pessimistic.

 

Is it realistic?

 

Well, I have a number of areas where I don't think it's realistic. I share the criticism made by so many, many people, that Limits to Growth postulates a kind of neo-Malthusianism in which the demands of resources grow exponentially, while the technological ability to satisfy those demands only grows arithmetically.

 

But it is a first step. This was the first step to make a catalogue of the planet as a whole. When I go to Yale and talk to Professor Nordhaus,2 who made a model (as an economist) of the planet, and ask him to see Forrester3 to combine their wisdom, he says, ‘We don't deal with system-dynamics engineers.’ They evade each other, like Chomsky4 and Skinner.5

 

That's obviously enormously problematic. I find Skinner's writing strange. I think he tries to portray himself as an enemy of freedom and dignity. In fact, in his latest book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, he is basically arguing that it is possible for man by conscious intervention to change the circumstances which affect his behavior and, as Marx said, ‘to educate the educator,’ and takes an activist position. To tie Skinner into the Limits to Growth, the problem I find is that if we have this permanent condition and scarcity in the world economy, then I think a Skinnerian or any other kind of proposal for intervention to make men really decent toward one another won't work.

A second aspect of the Limits to Growth study, which, is unrealistic, is it comes out with the model of economic stability, of basically no economic growth. It does not ask the political questions as to whether that is possible. That is to say, it does not ask, Will the Third World peoples accept a permanent condition of inferiority to the peoples of the advanced capitalist and communist economies? I don't think they will. Secondly, the report does not ask, Will the peoples of the advanced capitalist and communist economies accept a stopping of their growth rate and a stabilization of their advantage at only a certain level? I don't think they will accept that.

Professor Tinbergen6 in Rotterdam is now working on a new model. The Japanese are working on several models.

 

I have felt for a long time, though, that what we need is world economic planning. What we need are world economic models. In that sense I think that the Club of Rome is a step in the good direction by recognizing the problem of quantifying economic data and trying to analyze economic trends for the globe as a system. I think the Limits to Growth has gone beyond the national limitations of so much of our thinking. I felt for a long time that some of the world economic models that people of the United Nations have been developing should be given much more emphasis. Because, for example, if we had some really good models of world economic development, then our trade and aid policies - which, thus far, particularly in the United States, adversely affect the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America - then those policies might actually be made to help them.

 

You also touch on the question, ‘If man cannot control products of his own brain, there will be no place to hide for mystics or for anyone else.’7 How will developments in biological feedback, studies of the brain, studies of behavioral control, how will these present efforts massively studied everywhere enhance chances for survival?

 

I think that the breakthroughs in biology, the behavior control, test-tube babies which they are working on in England, which Watson of DNA fame argues will soon be an experiment that can be easily done, the fact that scientists in the United States are talking about the parents being able to determine the sex of their children, the possibility of cloning, that is to say, producing identical copies - I interpret all these events in a broader context.

It seems to me that a fundamental problem certainly of Western capitalist societies for over a century has been that technological revolutions have taken place without a corresponding political and social revolution. We introduce into society, into the economy and into the environment an internal-combustion machine without asking what are its consequences. We have a profoundly social technology but there is still very much a laissez-faire attitude toward its uses. We allow private centers of power to determine the public choices really of this technology.

We have, I think, the most extreme case where it is possible for man-

kind scientifically to reverse the Darwinian process of natural selection, where you had a cool, remorseless process whereby the individual and the genetic stream adapted itself to an environment and where nature was a very bloody and vicious arbitor of human destiny. Now we are on the verge - or perhaps we have even entered the age - of human selection, of where people can make these choices, of where you can have genetic engineering, of where you can perhaps cure some genetic diseases by actually trying to change the chromosomal makeup of a human being. If we blunder into that world in the same way that we blundered into the world of the automobile, God help mankind. This is an area where if you make a mistake, the mistake can have a multiplier effect through the next thousand years. Therefore, I find it, on the one hand, exhilarating that many diseases perhaps can be controlled; on the other hand, I find it frightening that we will not politically and socially utilize this genius. That's why a statement I made is ‘There is really no place to hide for a mystic.’

One response to this, which some people have made, is to try to hold back that investigation, to outlaw experiments in this area. There have been proposals, for example, to outlaw experimentation with test-tube babies. But I think that simply postpones the problem. You cannot outlaw this technology. It's coming. The very fact that it is possible means that it will come into being. I am very disturbed about that component of the future.

 

You wrote that the Soviets discovered that totalitarianism could not keep out jazz or cool music. In other words, you are not necessarily speaking only of our part of the world, the capitalist world, as you include the socialist countries as well in your observations. How hopeful are you for the future - Limits to Growth models or not?

 

I tend to be optimistic for a reason. My feeling is that it is really impossible to know whether the future is going to be good or bad. It is quite possible that it will be quite bad. But as long as the question is open, as long as there is a very serious possibility that these technological advances can be utilized for the good, as long as there is any possibility that we can end scarcity and thereby inaugurate a new era of human moderation, then I think one is morally obliged to be optimistic. That is to say: to fight, to struggle and to see to it that the good possibility comes out. Because one of the determinants of whether the good or the bad prevails - and all of these very ambiguous situations we face

today - is going to be the decisions of individuals as to whether it is worth struggling to make the good prevail over the bad. So in that sense I really refuse to try to project the future. Because I insist that part of that projection is our willingness to try to create it, and my emphasis is on the need to create it, which will then change what it will be.


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