Greening Auto Jobs by Goods Caleb;

Author:Goods, Caleb; [Goods, Caleb]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

Crisis in the Global Automotive Industry and the Green Shift

The automotive industry is a global and powerful industry that has left its tire tracks all over the world. This chapter demonstrates that this seemingly unstoppable expansion is being confronted with both economic and environmental crises. Within this context the ‘greening’ of the automotive industry has been broadly touted as the panacea for both economic and environmental crises. Indeed, an important aspect of the discussion developed in this chapter is to outline how the global automotive industry has shifted from being the ‘enemy of nature’ to supporting a vision of ecological modernization. While the notion of crisis is often freely applied to an array of circumstances, the range of environmental and economic problems simultaneously confronting the global automotive industry suggest that the industry is indeed in a state of crisis.

Before describing the multiple sites of crisis faced by the global automobile industry it is important to provide a theoretical framework for the notion of crisis. Crisis can be understood in the context of Marxism’s explanation of economic and environmental crisis. As demonstrated in the discussion of the first contradiction of capitalism, the Marxist theory of economic crisis suggests that within the system of capitalism there is a contradiction between the forces and relations of production. That is, “[i]n the capitalist mode of production every producer seeks to reduce the labor time necessary for production by developing the forces of production and correspondingly increasing the scale of production” (Clarke 2001:94). This leads to a tendency for overproduction and declining profitability generated by capitalist competition, which then drives “capitalists to increase production without regard to the limits of the market” (Clarke 2001:94). While the limits of the market are effectively people’s needs and ability to pay, this view fails to appreciate the materiality of use values, and thus markets are also limited by ecological boundaries. Capital’s disregard for these ecological boundaries also leads to crisis in the form of ecological crises. Indeed, Ronald Wright observes that “in the early 1960s, humans were using about 70 percent of nature’s yearly output; by the early 1980s, we’d reached 100 percent; and in 1999, we were at 125 percent” (2005:129). The basic competitive nature of capitalist production is ecologically unsustainable, given that the self-reinforcing growth logic of capitalism requires a continuing increase in the appropriation of finite natural resources. Capitalism’s constant drive for growth also creates ecological rifts, impairing the environmental conditions necessary for capitalist production. Consequently there is an internal contradiction within capitalism between the production and realization of value, and the surplus value that leaves capitalism prone to economic and ecological crises. The global automotive industry is at present entangled in a number of these economic and ecological crisis points.

The Global Financial Crisis and the Automotive Industry

The global financial crisis, which reached its deepest point toward the end of 2008, has had a substantial impact on the global automotive industry, an industry that was already under significant economic pressure from saturated markets, increasing production costs and declining profitability (Wells 2010:1–26).

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