The Green New Deal and Beyond. Stan Cox

of organic fertilizers was limited.

      While restricting the production and sale of some products, the War Production Board issued standardized and simplified manufacturing specifications for a whole host of others, explaining that “[s]implification, as it is applied in the war program, is a procedure for eliminating unessentials from an item or a line of items. It reduces the number of items in a line and the variety of style, size, color, or ornamentation not actually necessary to the efficiency or usefulness of the product.”⁴⁰ The quantity of metal allowed in light fixtures was cut by 60 to 80 percent. A limited range of sizes was specified for glass jars used for preserving vegetables and fruits, and to save metal, glass-top seals and thinner rings were prescribed. The standardization and simplification program covered a wide range of other products, including women’s dresses, work uniforms, shoes, socks, stockings, blankets, wooden furniture, and farm machinery parts.⁴¹

      The mandatory channeling of a large share of the nation’s resources into the war effort, along with the extensive regulation of civilian production, constricted the supply of some consumer goods. At the same time, price controls kept demand high, raising the specter of shortages, rushes on essential goods, hoarding, and under-the-table selling at high prices to more affluent customers. The nation had gotten its fill of bread lines during the Depression and would tolerate no more of that. But simply lifting price controls would have left lower-income households without adequate access to basic necessities. There remained open only one efficient and just course of action: fair-shares rationing.

      In the simpler of the two types of rationing systems, households were issued a monthly set of stamps, each of which specified the physical quantity of a rationed product (e.g., pounds of sugar) that could be purchased. Some classes of goods—most famously, meats, cheese, and butter—were covered by a different system called “points rationing,” under which each product in a class was assigned a point “price.” For example, for meats, it might mean three points per pound for hamburger and twelve for steak. Ration stamps for these products were denominated in units of points rather than physical quantity.

      During 1942–43, a broad range of goods were brought into the rationing system: fuel oil, kerosene, gasoline, tires, cars, bicycles, stoves, typewriters, shoes, coffee, sugar, meats, canned fish, canned milk, cheese, fats, and processed foods. People seemed to complain most about the systems for rationing gasoline and rubber. Those living in Eastern states were even hit with a ban on “pleasure driving.” Drivers were told they could obtain additional gasoline for commuting to work, but only after they formed a “car club” with at least three other passengers. For food products, price controls and rationing had some salutary effects, not only prompting families across the country to plant 22 million “victory gardens,” but also improving nutrition in all economic classes. Civilian consumption of protein rose 11 percent during the rationing period. Increases for calcium and vitamin A were 12 percent, for vitamin C, 8 percent, and for vitamin B1, 41 percent.⁴²

      Washington moved very cautiously early in the war. War planners imposed price controls and rationing only when they were unavoidable, and made ration limits as generous as possible. The government was perhaps too cautious. In August 1942, when there were only a few products under ration, 70 percent of consumers told pollsters they felt that more extensive rationing was needed in order to eliminate shortages and other problems. Six months later, with controls starting to broaden and tighten, 60 percent of people polled by Gallup still believed that the government should have acted more quickly in rationing scarce goods. Later, when rationing was at its zenith, approval outweighed disapproval by two to one.⁴³ The wartime experience of the 1940s suggests that rationing is well tolerated or even popular when it is a response to a clearly perceived national crisis.

      THE AGE OF LIMITS

      In the 1930s and ’40s, the U.S. and world economies were far smaller than they are today, and greenhouse emissions were far lower. Earthlings, all but a tiny handful, were blissfully unaware that continuing fossil-fuel-enabled growth would one day become a mortal threat to civilization. The original New Deal was free to aim strictly at restoration of financial stability and prosperity. There were plenty of fuels and raw materials sitting there waiting to be put to work, and the biggest environmental problem, the Dust Bowl, could be fixed in the course of restoring the economy of the Plains.

      During the war mobilization that followed, the government spent funds at eight times the rate it had spent fighting the Depression. As far as I know, no one complained at the time about the 65 percent increase in fossil energy consumption that occurred between 1935 and 1945, thanks to the growing economy.⁴⁴ Even if there had been prophetic scientists within the growing federal bureaucracy of the 1930s sounding the alarm on future global warming, few, if any, planners would have considered holding back on carbon release before the fight against fascism could be won.

      The New Deal legacy, World War II, and a free-flowing bonanza of fossil fuels propelled the postwar U.S. economy into a long, high-glide trajectory. But they also masked an underlying drag on economic growth, according to a landmark book by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital,⁴⁵ published in 1966. The two Marxian economists saw the United States becoming increasingly dominated by shrinking numbers of giant corporations, thereby developing a long-term tendency toward stagnation. A decade in the writing, the book applied and extended Marx’s analysis of capitalism to this mid-twentieth-century phenomenon, one that Baran and Sweezy dubbed “monopoly capital.”

      The New Dealers had weakened antitrust regulation, and the concentration of economic power had continued to deepen during and after World War II. Monopoly Capital’s central idea was that in the postwar period, companies and conglomerates had become so large that they were able to transcend the meat grinder of competition. But in doing so, they were undermining the very engine of economic growth. In such oligopolies, Baran and Sweezy argue, big corporations can set prices with little concern for what their competitors charge, thereby avoiding destructive “price wars.” The big firms can also afford the kinds of technologies that allow economic output per worker—productivity—to rise faster than wages. Largely immune to competitive forces and able to churn out more of their products with a smaller payroll while charging higher prices, corporations accumulate vast surpluses of wealth that far exceed the amount that can be absorbed through investment in new capital. The force behind the growth of capitalist economies—the cycle of production, sales, wealth accumulation, reinvestment, and expanded production—gets bogged down, and stagnation results.⁴⁶

      In a world dominated by monopoly capital, therefore, economists no longer need inquire into the causes of stagnations or depressions; the question, rather, is how do mature capitalist economies manage to grow at all? After all, Monopoly Capital’s argument that there exists a long-term tendency toward stagnation was published twenty years into an unprecedented economic boom. How to explain that? Noting that opportunities for absorbing excess surplus still existed, but that powerful ones were exceedingly rare, Baran and Sweezy point to a small handful of phenomena that had created major capital-investment incentives. Most obviously, there was the war economy, which had ended the stagnation of the 1930s and, thanks to the Cold War and U.S. militarism around the globe, was still pumping adrenaline into the economy of the 1960s. Then there were the massive economies surrounding the private automobile: its manufacture and care, and the related industries that were directly enriched from it, including gasoline, insurance, and tourism. In addition to these were what Baran and Sweezy call the “sales effort,” an entire meta-economy led by the advertising and public relations industries. They warned that although these financial engines were capable of driving the U.S. economy further, they all had their own limits. Furthermore, the business cycles inherent in all capitalist economies ensured that growth would never be constant and linear. (Later, from the 1980s onward, militarism, the vehicle industry, hyper-commercialism, and mass advertising would prove to be insufficient forces for boosting mass consumption sufficiently to keep up with ballooning surplus production, so a fourth economic adjustment mechanism, the seemingly limitless growth of financial markets, emerged. The “financialization” wave, as well as those older investment mechanisms, has remained in play and, crucially, together they continue to be some of the dominant contributors to greenhouse warming. Now the nascent renewable-energy industry is being billed as yet another means of