Right is for r, Left is for K,

or

How to turn the tide and defeat the Right.

Anthony Mansueto

President and Senior Scholar, Seeking Wisdom

No, it is not a typographical error. It is, rather, a reference to what is known as the logistic equation:

where r is the Malthusian parameter (rate of maximum population growth) and K is the so-called carrying capacity (i.e., the maximum sustainable population).

This equation is used by population biologists to predict changes in the population of various organisms within an ecosystem. Generally speaking, organisms are said to pursue either an "r" strategy, focusing on maximizing their rate of reproduction, or a K strategy, maximizing the carrying capacity of the environment, generally by some characteristic which enables them to exploit that environment more effectively. Rabbits follow a classic "r" strategy, reproducing rapidly and investing relatively little in each individual, because many, even a majority, will not survive until adulthood. Tigers, by comparison, follow a "K" strategy, reproducing more slowly but investing more in each individual and exploiting their ecological niches intensively through highly developed hunting skills.

Humans, of course, follow a "K" strategy, reproducing slowly and investing intensively in the care and nurture of their young. But different human civilizations and social structures are located at different points along the K/r continuum, depending on whether they stress high rates of reproduction or intensive investment in research, development, infrastructure, and education.

What does this have to do with Right and Left in the political sense and with the current political situation (or rather the situation which has obtained for the past 30-40 years, during which the Right, despite occasional reversals, has shown itself to be strangely powerful and resilient)?

The answer is quite simple. The defining cluster of issues which the Right has used to mobilize a mass base centers around an attempt to restore patriarchal gender roles and traditional sexual morality: abortion, gay marriage, stem-cell research, etc. And the core social base of the Right --in the sense of who pays its bills-- is in the extractive sectors of the economy: energy and petroleum especially, and mineral, agricultural, and other extractive interests more generally. And what links patriarchy on the one hand and extractive Capital on the other? The answer is nothing other than the logistic equation.

Human civilization is currently facing a profound crisis. At the deepest level, this is a crisis of the modern ideal, which sought divinization by means of scientific and technological progress or by the construction of collective political subjects (the modern democratic state, the Communist Party) which were to make humanity master of its own destiny. But this fundamentally spiritual crisis is manifesting itself in some very material ways. The first is a threat to the integrity (and thus the continued high-order carrying capacity) of the ecosystem due to the impact of the very industrial technology which was to liberate humanity from the bounds of finitude. (In the terms of the logistic equation, the modern project can be seen as an attempt to drive K to infinity.) This is manifested most clearly in the changes to Earth's climate caused by greenhouse gas emissions, but extends as well to pollution, resource depletion, etc. The second is a demographic inversion, concentrated especially though not exclusively in the developed (industrial/postindustrial) world resulting from declining birthrates and an aging population, which is calling into question the capacity of the ever smaller working populations in those countries to support an ever growing number of ever more long-lived retirees. This crisis is itself also a result of social changes following on the adoption of ever more intensive K strategies, which require more intensive investment in a much smaller number of children, who must be trained as high value added workers if they are to succeed in the global market. The social changes were intensified by the development of social safety nets which rendered it unnecessary for people to have children for the sole purpose of providing for themselves in old age, encouraging instead intensive investment in one or two children and in the continued development of one's own capacities.

This twin crisis has, in turn, two very specific and "hard wired" implications which have contributed enormously to the rise of the Right. First, as industrialization has proceeded apace the demand for ecosystem resources generally and energy in particular has increased. While in the short term prices may fluctuate, in the long run, as resources are gradually depleted, prices will rise, allowing the extractive sector to capture an ever larger share of global surplus product in mineral rents, enormously increasing the economic and thus the potential political weight of a relatively backward sector of Capital. Extractive Capital is backward for two reasons. First, by their very nature, extractive activities tend to be ecologically disruptive and to use relatively low skill, low wage labor. Second, because they represent an older industrial K strategy, holders of extractive capital tend to resist the development of new technologies, and especially new energy sources, which might render their monopolies irrelevant. And we know that regions dominated by extractive activities, with relatively few exceptions, tend to generate right-wing political movements. This is true within the US, in Texas, Oklahoma, and the Mountain West. It is true in the Middle East. And it is true in Russia. Indeed, the underlying economic potential of Russia as a petroleum exporter has been underestimated as a factor in deforming the socialist experiment in the Soviet Union and in catalyzing its ultimate collapse.

Second, the demographic crisis has spawned a whole host of right-wing religious movements which have as their principal (if not always conscious) purpose the resolution of the demographic inversion either by promotion of an r strategy or by the modification of the K strategy dominant in the West by promotion of higher birth rates accompanied by continued intensive investment in the children produced. In either case, the mechanism is a restoration of patriarchal gender roles and traditional sexual moralities. The precise strategy, of course varies. The Vatican and most Protestant Evangelicals envision a moderate patriarchal restoration in which modestly higher birth rates are coupled with high levels of (female) investment in the nurture of "infinitely valuable" individual lives of the children produced. The more radical forms of fundamentalist Islam (e.g. the Taliban) are simply looking for demographic shock troops with which to overwhelm the liberal West. Between lies a whole spectrum of antifeminist political-theological tendencies.

These pronatalist religious ideologies perform a second service for the Right. For those "left behind" by globalization and the emerging information economy, pronatalist religion provides a sense of profound social worth to people who feel (and actually are) devalued by the dominant global order. Simply having children rather than aborting them or using contraception and concentrating on career and consumption, nets the "left behind" a modicum of respect from the religious Right. For those drawn into actual participation in conservative congregations the benefits are even greater. Conservative congregations discipline men to provide for their families and even participate in child-rearing, benefits which often far outweigh exclusion from leadership and full social participation for women for whom motherhood always represented the best opportunity for creative participation in the human civilizational project in the first place.

We should note, in passing at least, that this analysis supports our claim in earlier articles that the religious right, far from being neomedieval, actually represents a reassertion of early modern ideals centered on the concept of divine sovereignty and focused on development strategies which require a large supply of low skilled, low wage labor.

This said, the question is what can be done. We need, to begin with, to be clear that this problem will not be easily solved. The Right has a real social basis. It has, on the one hand, access to a rising share of social surplus product in the form of mineral rents. Second, the Right speaks to the social, if not the economic, interests of the "left behind" who form the vast majority in the global economy.

The only way to turn the tide is to discover and implement new technologies and especially new energy sources which undercut the monopolies of extractive Capital and to correct the demographic imbalance in ways that do not restore patriarchal structure or otherwise devalue the full social participation of women.

With regard to the first task, given the enduring technological and economic obstacles to a full solar/wind conversion, we need to support the judicious use of fission power as a transitional measure until solar, wind, and other fully sustainable energy forms become fully viable technologically and economically. And we need to remember that the political power of extractive Capital will not abate until the transition is well underway.

The second task looks different in still rapidly growing parts of the developing world than it does in those regions facing a imminent demographic inversion. In the former, we need to continue to support the empowerment and full social participation of women as part of an integrated effort to promote a transition to locally appropriate K strategies centered on high levels of investment in each individual and high value added production. In the latter we need to find progressive strategies for encouraging higher rates of reproduction which do not instrumentalize women or even inadvertently undercut their full social participation. Europe already has many such strategies in place, though they probably need to be expanded even as other aspects of the social welfare system (very early retirement) are scaled back. Child subsidies, paid family leave (with something like the Swedish requirement that fathers as well as mothers actually take their leave), free childcare and education, etc. all help. But we must realize that in advanced information economies children are an enormous economic net drain on individual families. What people want is for other people to have children who can pay for their retirement. So the economic incentives will have to be extremely generous. Liberal immigration policies also help correct demographic imbalances and it is due to such policies that the United States has a less serious demographic problem than Europe and that Canada is doing even better than the United States.

None of this is good news. This analysis follows, after all, on another chiding the Left for its enduring, unfounded conviction that social democratic reforms have a chance in the present political climate. They do not. So in order to turn the tide and defeat the Right we first have to generate a mass political constituency for a global K strategy. This means addressing the "left behind" directly, offering them a vision of their future which values women for something besides their wombs and men for something beyond their willingness to accept a life a hard labor in return for regular access to licit sex and the joys of fatherhood. But just how we do that is the topic for another article ...