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| Capital accumulation |
The bottom line is that the major capitalist countries are
unable to deal seriously with the problem of global warming. World capitalism
is locked into the use of cheap fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. The
problem of global warming can only be solved at a world-wide level. Humanity
faces a huge problem and a real dilemma. To reduce the emissions of greenhouse
gases we need to cut down on burning fossil fuels. Meaningful action would
require fundamental changes in the way the economy and society works.
What is required — the rapid, far-reaching re-organisation
of industry, energy, transport is simply not possible under capitalism. Huge
amounts of human resources must be devoted into developing and improving the
efficiency of renewables: solar, wind and sea power. It is also necessary to
rid the system of all the duplication in production processes with its
competition between similar companies and nation states. The way goods are
distributed globally, the food industry being a prime example, is in need of radical
deep re-organisation. But how is it possible to plan sustainably the world’s
resources, production and distribution of goods and services when they are
owned and controlled by an unaccountable minority elite? How is it possible to
have a plan when the vast majority of the world’s people – who do all the
producing, servicing and distributing – have no say in how the economy is run?
Government whose task is to defend the capitalist economic system simply cannot
put people or the planet before profits. To quote Noam Chomsky: “The chair of
the board will always tell you that they spend every waking hour labouring so
that people will get the best possible products at the cheapest possible price
and work in the best possible conditions. But it is an institutional fact,
independent of who the chairperson of the board is, that they had better be
trying to maximise profit and market share, and if they aren’t doing that, they
are not going to be chair of the board anymore.”
For the moment, most people
cannot see beyond the capitalist system. However, the fight to halt
profit-driven global warming is the fight to replace capitalism with a world
socialist system based on human solidarity and respect for the planet on which
we live. Most are likely to dismiss this out of hand as utopian or mere
socialist twaddle. In the end, though, facts speak for themselves. However well-intentioned, appeals to people to change their individual personal consumer
habits - “Don’t drive a car” - bring trivial results when measured against the
problem. If there’s no adequate public transportation, if there’s no adequate
city planning that lets workers live close to jobs, schools, hospitals and
recreation, how can they stop driving cars? Public transport systems, such as
trams and trains, have been around since the late 1800s (the first underground
railway, London’s Tube system, began operation in 1863). Yet, huge private
vested interests have ensured that, for example, the vastly more wasteful,
inefficient and polluting private motor vehicle has come to dominate the
industrialised capitalist countries. Capitalism’s dependence on the private car
could be replaced with the rapid proliferation of mass, free public transport
systems. In time, cities will be no longer be designed around the private car,
but around residential, community and work hubs linked by fast, efficient
public transport.
Capitalism is a system driven by the single-minded need on
the part of business for ever-greater accumulation of capital. This is why all
schemes based on the hope of a no-growth, slow-growth or sustainable-growth
form of capitalism are pipe dreams. As too are strategies based on a critical
mass of individual consumers deciding to go “green” in order to reform the
system. A “steady-state” capitalism is an impossibility. Investors and managers
are driven by the need to accumulate wealth and to expand the scale of their
operations in order to prosper within a globally competitive milieu. For the
vast majority, the commitment to the treadmill is more limited and indirect:
they simply need to obtain jobs at livable wages. But to retain those jobs and
to maintain a given standard of living it is necessary to run faster and faster
in order to stay in the same place.
Many in the environmental movement argue that with the right
mix of taxes, incentives and regulations, everybody would be winners. Big
business will have cheaper, more efficient production, and therefore be more
profitable, and consumers will have more environment-friendly products and
energy sources. In a rational society, such innovations would lower the overall
environmental impact in terms of materials and energy used per unit of output,
when substituted for more harmful technology. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a
rational society. Capitalism approaches technology in the same way as it does
everything else. What will generate the most profits? Whether it is efficient,
clean, safe, environmentally benign or rational has little to do with it.
A plethora of “blueprints” for an ecologically sustainable
world have been produced by the Greens containing logical and commonsense
solutions to global warming and the general environmental crisis. They fail not
because their proposals for a rapid conversion to renewable energy and the
rational re-organisation of production and consumption are far-fetched. They
fail because they do not accept that capitalism is incapable of bringing them
into being. Only a society that places the “associated producers” at its head
and at its heart can open the way for the building of a genuinely feasible
sustainable society. Engels in Dialectics of Nature wrote to “regulate” our
relationship with nature “requires something more than mere knowledge. It
requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and
simultaneously a revolution in our whole contemporary social order.” Marx urged
a social revolution that would abolish private ownership. Marx wrote in Capital
that only “the associated producers [can] govern the human metabolism with
nature in a rational way, bring it under their collective control instead of
being dominated by it as a blind power”. Contrary to the assertions by some in
the environmental movement, Marx and Engels were well aware of humanity’s
interconnectedness with the environment, and they recognised that it was
essential for socialism to be ecologically sustainable. Marx referred to
capitalist farming as “an art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing
the soil” that sapped the everlasting sources of wealth — the soil and the
worker. He argued in effect for the return to ecological sustainability, which
had been destroyed by, and was not possible under, capitalism.
A society run by and for the “associated producers” — a
socialist society — would allow people to think about, discuss and rationally
plan the best way forward for both the planet and all its inhabitants. Profit
will no longer dictate what is produced. Almost immediately, huge material and
human resources would be released to begin to rapidly reverse problems like
global warming as well making a start on ending the poverty, hunger and disease
that affect billions.
Right now, the technology is available to theoretically
generate all the clean electricity we need. Combined with energy-efficiency
targets throughout the economy, from the industrial level to house designs and
household appliances, and socially organised recycling, greenhouse gas
emissions could be not only slashed but reversed.
The marketing-driven over-packaging of products could end,
saving entire forests, and banishing billions of tonnes of “disposable” but
environmentally indigestible plastic fast-food containers and beverage bottles
from the rubbish dumps. Inbuilt obsolescence could end, and the corporate
creation of fads and fashions would become a thing of the past. No more “this
year’s new model”. Products would be built to last for a very long time, and
when they were due for replacement they would be as totally recyclable as
possible. And as the “associated producers” build the new society, wants and
needs will inevitable alter, and so too will consumption habits. Capitalism as
a system thrives on the cultivation and celebration of the worst aspects of
human behaviour; selfishness and self-interest; greed and hoarding; the
dog-eat-dog mentality. Capitalism’s warped view of normal human interaction is
summed by the Orwellian-titled unreality show, Survivor. In this twisted vision
of the workings of society, the last person standing is the victor! But all
societies survive — even capitalist societies — not by bumping each other off
to get the cash, but by cooperating.
In a society that is organised first and foremost to work
together to produce enough to comfortably ensure people’s physical and mental
well-being and social security — abundant food, clothing, housing, furniture and
appliances, cultural pursuits, and lifelong education and training, and
healthcare — and in which technological advances benefit everybody without
costing the environment, a new social definition of wealth will evolve. It
won’t be measured by personal wealth, or by how much “stuff” you’ve got.
Social wealth — human development — will be not be measured
by an ever-increasing consumption of goods and services, or expanding indices
of “economic growth”, but in the shortening of the work day. In the words of
Marx, “free time, disposable time, is wealth itself … free time … for the free
development , intellectual and social, of the individual”.
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