This eminently readable text could very easily have been titled, Common Sense for All, and could have been written by any number of well-meaning fellows of the Ed Milliband, Will Hutton, Ja Hoon Chang variety. In fact anyone who broadly ascribes to a more egalitarian, more rational, more socially responsible world, will find little to disagree with in Al Gore’s Future. Gore makes his thesis seem like good old common sense. However, and it’s a whopping big however, the problem with common sense is that it unwittingly enshrines the status quo and singularly fails to isolate the central dialectic at play. Throughout Gore’s six pronged thesis is a single underlying assumption: that of the achievability of a rational and sustainable capitalism. It’s the very same assumption underlying all the various pronouncements by Milliband, Hutton and Ha-Joon Chang. 

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the rub. Capitalism has been going for something like five hundred years and it has always and everywhere spectacularly failed to be either rational or sustainable. Yet somehow Gore and his fellow thinkers insist on claiming that with a bit of good will by all and some good old common sense, capital will come to its senses and start acting rationally, responsibly and sustainably. I don’t think so.

Gore wants a rational, regulated, democratic internet, a rational, regulated, democratic global economy and for good measure, a regulated, democratic world of science, ecology and technology. Don’t we all! But implicit in his entire narrative is the belief, sincerely held, that capitalism can deliver on all three fronts. The decent, easy going bloke in me would love to believe in this warm and comforting fairy-tale because that would make the task in front of all us a good deal more straightforward. Weed out the bad guys, pass some decent legislation, keep a check on who’s doing what, and hey presto the world’s on course for a sustainable future. Using the Global Mind ensconced in the internet, people of good will can come together and democratically regulate Earth Inc. That’s the battle ground: The Global Mind versus Earth Inc. But what Gore and his ilk refuse to even countenance is that capital has no intention of being regulated. It’s simply not in its DNA.

In Chapter 3, Power in the Balance, Gore does a half decent job in outlining the grim history of US capitalism. Admittedly it airbrushes out the inconvenient truth about the genocide of the Native Americans, and the bloody history of slavery, the two foundation stones of American capitalism, but he does adequately account for the vicious corporatism that has plagued the United States from its earliest days. Commenting on the domination of the corporates in today’s United States, Gore writes:

There have been other periods in American history when wealth and corporate power have dominated the operations of government, but there are reasons for concern that this may be more than a cyclical phenomenon. P105

Yes, there are reasons indeed. It is simply that everywhere, throughout capitalism’s five hundred year history, in every county, capital has shown the distinct tendency to concentrate itself in fewer and fewer hands. That tendency is now so pronounced that less than one hundred people across the planet have now amassed the same wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion people. And this crippling tendency shows no sign of abating. Pass any amount of regulatory legislation and capital will find ways to circumnavigate it. The usual stuff that has been well documented; off shore tax havens, money laundering, of which the City of London is the global capital, and any number of tax avoidance scams. Yes Mr Gore, this is not a cyclical phenomenon but the very essence of capital itself. Gore, contradicting his own fanciful dreams, quotes former US President Rutherford Hayes who was moved to note: this is a government of the people, by the people and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations. P106 And absolutely nothing has changed.

In Chapter 1, under the sub-heading, Sustainable Capitalism, Gore, almost inadvertently but correctly homes in on the fundamental flaw of the capitalist economic system. Gore explains:

One of the best known problems is the dominance of short term perspectives and the obsession with short term profits, often at the expense of the build-up of long term value. P35

Absolutely true, but this is not something that can be legislated against. Capital always and everywhere moves to the highest point of return and even if one or two well-meaning individuals attempts to invest ethically and for the long term, nothing will prevent this tendency of capital to play itself out. Short termism and the never-ending concentration of capital is the very essence of capitalism. Sustainability and long term investment just don’t come into the equation. If they did half of Europe’s youth would not currently be on the scrap heap.

So where does that leave us now? Gore’s projected titanic battle between corporatist Earth Inc and the democratic Global Mind is all but lost before it really gets going. The corporates already have significant control of the internet economically and culturally. And if any democratic movement gets too bolshie, they will quickly be shut down as was the case in Turkey last week. But the sad, almost pathetic aspect of Gore’s vision is that it was written pre Edward Snowden. For Gore, it is all about the nasty Chinese who have been criminally hacking into corporate America. It turns out post Snowden that in fact the biggest offender is America’s very own NASA who has been snooping on the entire world, including its so called allies.

There is a childish nativity throughout Gore’s narrative that somehow the US, despite its blips, is the best hope for world leadership and human progress. Try telling that to the two million Koreans, three million Vietnamese, half a million Indonesians, half million Iraqis, half a million Afghans and countless other millions across the globe who have prematurely lost their lives since the end of the second world War due to relentless US imperialist expansion. And today the US military industrial complex is hungry for more, pushing right up to the very borders of the Russian Federation. Try preaching about US global leadership to the marginalised minorities throughout the United States, forced as they are to live on the very edge of society; impoverished, criminalised and despised. Try telling the hundreds of thousands of Afro-Americans and Hispanics languishing in US jails about US global leadership. No, I don’t think a future Chinese leadership will be any more enlightened, and that leaves us all in a pretty grim place. But better to be brutally realistic than childishly optimistic, as I suspect Mr Gore will ultimately be found guilty of. But somewhat bizarrely, despite this rather negative and gloomy review, I would readily recommend this book. Gore’s conclusions may not always be to my liking but his tight narrative does focus the mind in a way that more explicitly revolutionary texts invariably fail to do. His factual research is formidable in places, if a little selective, and there can be no doubting Gore’s hunger for a better, more sustainable world. His discussions on the future of ecology, technology and science are cutting edge and should be compulsorily reading for every citizen pondering what comes next. And anyway, fighting for a sustainable capitalism may be an illusion but it might also be a necessary step towards creating a more radical solution. If only he’d had the foresight to at least ponder the possibility of the collective ownership of the means of production.