Capitalism is Killing the Planet

The history of environmental degradation is a history of greed, the institutionalised greed of business that has to expand to survive, that is always looking for new products, ways to create new needs, ways to cut costs by reducing environmental safeguards or evading the enforcement of existing ones. There is growing awareness of the need for a balance ecological society in harmony with nature but there exists the incompatibility of that goal with an economy driven by the desire for profits and capital accumulation. While environmentalists seeks sustainability, the commodified economy needs growth. This growth can be achieved by producing more. There is no special virtue in preserving a resource, only in making profit. Under capitalism it is economically rational to use up a resource totally and then move on to the next investment. Economic rationality favours going for the single most profitable product, in the greatest quantities the market-place can bear so to benefit from economies of scale.

The industries that come with promises of revenue and jobs are committed to profitability so governments of poor countries are convinced or coerced into allowing, the plundering of their soils and the rape of their lands, sacrificing their forests to further progress and development. Poverty allows environmental degradation as a lesser evil when there is the urgent need to have food or money for food. It shortens the time horizon to the immediate urgencies. It forces people to use up their capacity to produce – forests, water reserves, soil quality, rare species – even when they know the new problems they are creating. It encourages governments of developing nations or even the local governments of poor communities in rich countries, to tolerate and accept violations of ecological standards in order to gain income. Poverty is usually accompanied by a lack of control by the poor over what will happen to them. Therefore longer term planning is not a practical option. Poverty accedes to the capitalist's needs, not people's needs, dismissing long term vision as ‘unrealistic’ .

The case for socialism is in part that capitalism can not expand production either adequately or rationally — that the vast majority of humankind is desperately in need of greatly expanded production not a reduction. But it must also be an expansion which does not threaten a planetary catastrophe such as is implicit in fossil-fuel generated CO2 emissions, which causes global warming and melt the ice caps. What is to be done about global warming caused by pumping CO2 into the atmosphere when we burn fossil fuels like coal, gas and oil. The atmosphere acts like greenhouse, trapping the heat we need to survive. But when the greenhouse becomes too hot, disaster beckons. It is the developed world that causes most of the problems and it is the poor that suffers most as the number of climate refugees rises as the temperatures do. Capitalism has pillaged and plundered the planet. The capitalists dislikes legislation and regulations which hinder their basic drive for profit and attempts to commodify widening areas of life across the globe. It is now clear to anyone who cares about the desperate state of the planet, and the appalling potential of catastrophic climate change, that the greatest obstacle to reversing this course is capitalism.

The first task for the Socialist Party is to dispel notions of the environmental crisis being the result of a few aberrant corporations to the otherwise rational and efficient ordering of the world by the market and profit accumulation. The system of capitalism is at the centre of our analysis as it is its basic economic laws which guarantees the abuse and destruction of nature. Not only is climate change caused by fossil fuel use catastrophically destroying whole life systems but also agriculture under capitalism also exposes the system’s destructive relation with nature. The dilemma is what makes ecological sense becomes a threat to capital accumulation. 

Put bluntly, capitalist industrial society cannot solve its problems. A fundamental transformation of the system itself is required. Any society capable of surviving the looming ecological crisis must overcome the ceaseless drive for growth-for-the-sake-of-growth that marks capitalism. In other words, it must be socialist, although a socialism built and based upon a steady-state economy.

 This is an opportunity, driven by a growing outrage against the polluters, an anger which can readily be given a socialist content and can be drawn upon for inspiration.