If capital’s dynamism is the necessary starting point for understanding the nature and the consequences of its growth in decadence, then the post-war economic boom, with its historically unprecedented growth rates – must be one of the most important periods of capitalism to demonstrate this.
It is no accident that scientists have proposed the 1950s as a start date for the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch, ie. the geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on the Earth’s ecosystems.
The key indicators of this new epoch include:
- a rapidly rising world population
- accelerated industrial production and carbon dioxide emissions
- massive use of agricultural chemicals
- the release of radioactive debris from the first atomic bomb detonations, and
- man-made climate change.
Even more significantly, some scientists have designated the first age of this new epoch as ‘The Great Acceleration’; changes in socio-economic and earth systems [1] point to a “synchronous acceleration of trends from the 1950s to the present day – over a single human lifetime – with little sign of abatement.”[2]
Fig. 1 Socioeconomic Trends category of the Great Acceleration of the Anthropocene from 1750 to 2010
(Data displayed is scaled for each subcategory's 2010 value. Source data from the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, www.igbp.net)
Science tends to pose this as a problem of the impact of 'human activities' on the planet. But it is no coincidence the empirical evidence tends to show problems developing from around 1750, with the birth of industrial capitalism, and accelerating from the start of the 20th century when capitalism begins its phase of descent.
The fundamental problem is that capitalism is the first mode of production in history to be based on unlimited growth of the productive forces; the only purpose of capital is its own self-expansion, which drives it to continually expand production without any regard for the satisfaction of human needs.
The longer that capitalism continues, even after it has created the conditions for a new, classless society based on human needs not profit, the more destructive it becomes, as it struggles to continue to expand despite all the consequences for both human beings and the Earth.
The post-war economic boom was a product of militarism and war in capital's descent or decline - not of capital’s youthful expansion across the world, and its consequences for human beings and the Earth cannot be seen as the inevitable product of ‘human activities’. Specifically, capital’s unprecedented growth rates were the product of state capitalist measures and the development of a war economy that demanded an expansion of industrial production and of the consumption of the working class, in order to compensate for the closing off of a large part of the world’s population from the world market and prevent social instability that could be exploited by the rival bloc.
Based on our own analysis of the post-war boom, we can therefore point in particular to:
The effects of militarism and wars
- nuclear arms race and testing of atomic weapons
The inevitable consequences of expanded industrial production
- pillaging of natural resources
- burning of fossil fuels
- carbon dioxide emissions
- pollution
- waste (‘planned obsolescence’ of consumer goods, etc.)
The effects of the industrialisation of agriculture and food processing
- massive use of fertilisers and pesticides
- accelerated separation of human beings from the land [3]
- overfishing, etc.
- further destruction of the relationship between human beings and nature.
Thus, the period of capital’s highest economic growth rates also appears to be a clear ‘tipping point’ or qualitative development of all its inherent contradictions in its downward curve of development.
Notes
1] Earth systems = geosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere and cryosphere: ie. the interior and surface of Earth; the limited part of the planet that can support living things; the areas of Earth covered with water; the envelope of gas that keeps the planet warm and provides oxygen for breathing and carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, and the ice at the poles and elsewhere.
[2] Future Earth website, https://futureearth.org/2015/01/16/the-great-acceleration/. This contains the full set of indicators used.
[3] The post-war boom depended among other things on the mass migration of agricultural labour to the new labour-intensive industries in the north and west of Europe. In 1945 large parts of Europe were still pre-industrial; in 1950, one working person in two was employed in agriculture in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Hungary and Poland; in Italy, two people in every five. Even in West Germany, 23 percent of the working population was in agriculture; by the 1970s this had dropped to 6.8 percent; only 16 percent of Italians worked on the land, in Spain only 20 percent (Tony Judt, Postwar. A history of Europe since 1945, Penguin, 2005, p.327).