System Change Not Climate Change!

CAPITALISM OR SOCIALISM

Climate change is possibly the greatest existential crisis facing humanity today. Capitalism has led us to the edge of the precipice, and avoiding the end of civilization means direct opposition to capitalism. Today’s planetary ecological crisis is due to the increasing scale of the capitalist world economy. It is connected to the nature and logic of capitalism, understood as a system directed at the accumulation of capital. Capitalism is a grow-or-die system. If accumulation declines, the result is economic crisis.  For capitalism, accumulation of capital is everything, the Earth and its inhabitants nothing. If value is created by the exploitation of labour, this nonetheless requires constant expropriation from nature which is considered a free gift to capital. In its narrow pursuit of profits, the capitalist system points inexorably to environmental destruction on a planetary scale. We need a massive shift to solar and wind and other alternatives, but the fossil-fuel economy and the goal of capital accumulation stand in the way. 

The answer of the system is to boost accumulation and expand markets. To speak of the need for a steady-state economy as a solution, immediately raises the doubts in people’s minds of the end of progress. However, we should be careful not to identify capitalist economic growth with human advancement as a whole. New technology is indispensable in addressing global problems when not aimed almost exclusively at promoting profits. Rational development and application of technology necessitates a transformation of our social relations. The big mistake is to fall for crude techno-fix solutions such as geo-engineering, viewing it as a magic solution to all problems yet continuing unchanged our social relations. The fact is that a simple technological fix would make it possible for capitalist business-as-usual, to carry on into the abyss. What is required is the creation of a massive global movement toward socialism that goes against the logic of the system: igniting a revolution. The biggest challenge humanity has ever faced is to carry out the socialist reconstitution of society at large.

There is a strong belief that changes in consumer habits can bring about good things for the environment and result in social and economic change. However, individuals in our society do not possess sovereignty as consumers and do not direct or dictate what happens in the economy and within society. There exists a sense that all the problems of the environment are due to consumers themselves but buying green and behaving green does not mean the market will turn green. The capitalist economy rests upon ownership and control of the means of production by a minority of capitalists, not with the consumer.  What is consumed depends largely on what is produced. Over a trillion dollars are spent per year in the US alone on marketing with the object of getting people to buy things they neither need nor want. Gaining control over production is essential if we are to avoid the tendency toward environmental devastation. Anyways, individual’s contribution to the environmental damage is minimal. If all the household waste in the United States going into municipal landfills were eliminated this would only take care of about a small portion, maybe as little as 3 percent, of the total solid waste generated in the economy, the rest is commercial wastage.