by Dr. Braden Allenby, AT&T EH&S Vice President
(Reprinted with permission from the Green Business Letter)

Some people may wonder why this column, written by an industry person, refers so often to the thoughts of Marx, which at least in recent history have formed the basis for the most profound challenge to market capitalism. The answer is easy, and explains this month’s column: Marx was a brilliant thinker, and saw clearly the human costs – as well as the benefits – of the capitalist system evolving around him. We can learn a lot from where he was right or, as in this case, wrong.

It is often said that every philosophic system has a nightmare potential that turns it from good to bad – in Marx’s case, that turns his political theory, intended to enable human freedom, into a mechanism for despotism and tyranny. It was, of course, his view of the state. If the state is just an epiphenomenona of class, it goes away when the workers win.

That’s what Marx hoped. But suppose the state is more than that – an independent power on its own, a necessary creature given the complexity of Enlightenment culture and economies. Then not only is Marx wrong about it going away, but his vision of a workers paradise, where each gives according to her ability and receives according to her need, becomes a fantasy. Instead of paradise, one has the looming evil of Stalinism.

No prize for guessing which vision was right. But why? The answer to that is a powerful learning for modern environmentalism. There are many critiques of Marxism, of course, but they generally miss one fundamental mistake: he misunderstood complexity. In essence, he thought an increasingly complex economic, cultural and political system – bourgeoisie capitalism – would spontaneously revert to a simpler state (agrarian anarchism, perhaps?). Of course, it did not: absent some kind of collapse (in this case, of population, culture, or economics), such systems instead continue to evolve greater complexity. I call this the Marxist „complexity fallacy.”

And this becomes an important guide for environmental policy, especially for selecting endpoints. A vision frequently expressed, especially by deep greens, is a world where humans are gathered into small, urban islands, and the rest of the Earth is left free from human interference. Some elements of this sometimes sneak into the vision of sustainability – a world characterized by small, primarily rural and agricultural, self-sufficient communities; everyone living off grid; minimal energy and material flows.

These visions embed the same fallacy as Marx’s: they fail to recognize the fundamental dynamics of complex systems. For, absent a catastrophic collapse, this kind of much simpler future is highly unlikely. It is not a question of desirability, or even ethical preferability: many feel that way about Marx’s utopia. It is simply an observation based on history: it is highly likely that human society will continue to evolve towards greater complexity, not simplicity.

Even now we see the global governance system, through which environmental issues such as global climate change are being addressed, grow in complexity before our eyes: where once was only the dominant nation-state, now there are firms, NGOs, nation-states, and communities of all kinds. The dialog has gotten far more complicated, not simpler – and continued demands for transparency and participation by those still left out indicate that it will get yet more complicated.

That is not to say that individual elements of the system can’t become simpler, and certainly we can evolve ways of achieving quality of life without increasing consumption of material and energy – indeed, some telecom services, such as teleworking, offer that promise today. But it is to say that the system taken as a whole – the world as human artifact – will most likely continue to evolve towards greater complexity (indeed, modern cultural developments such as post-modernism, with its emphasis on cultural pastiche and the multiculturalism of modern political and social discourse, can be seen as a recognition of, and response to, the greatly increased complexity of human life just since World War II).

The Marxist „complexity fallacy” is also a warning: the image of utopia, whether based on Marxism or sustainable development, is appealing in principle. But in practice it may not be a Jeffersonian agrarianism, but a Hobbesian state of nature: beastly, brutish, and short. Attractive ideas – community, simplicity – can become ideologies, potentially highly dangerous simplifications of the real world. Easy answers are usually wrong: if we are truly to do good, we must at least have the courage to understand the challenges we face – in all their complexity.