In anticipation of the publication of her book The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg was interviewed by the BBC. The host, Amol Rajan, was polite and sympathetic, though he asked some penetrating questions. To one, on whether she was opposed to capitalism, she replied that like all ideologies, capitalism had failed and that history would look back on it as a mistake. Mr Rajan temporarily dropped his neutral stance and sprang to capitalism’s defence. ‘How can you say that?’ he asked. The screen flashed up some prepared charts showing recent reductions in the infant mortality figures of India and China, which he ascribed to capitalism.
This may be true, but such improvements start from a very low base. A WHO study in 2019 showed that the ten worst countries for infant mortality, which include both India and China, are all capitalist countries. Social welfare may well be an outcome of capitalism, but only within very defined limits. People are needed in the production process: to win the raw materials, to design and manufacture the goods and to distribute them. They are also needed in the marketplace: to buy the products of their own labour. The working population therefore must be just numerous enough, healthy enough, and well enough paid, housed and educated to enable the system to work. Those of less use to the system - the elderly, the sick, the homeless, the unemployed, the refugees, the poor - are much less worthy of attention. This is doubly true of all those societies throughout the world, numbering perhaps two billion people, whose lives are lived outside the capitalist system altogether.
The market
Even those who benefit from the largesse of capitalism are inevitably subject to the exigencies of the market. If the market demands switching from one product to another or moving production somewhere else, working communities will be allowed to suffer. If falling rates of profit require that production be reduced, wages driven down, or labour laid-off, this will be done. The capitalist state will co-operate by opposing or limiting the power of unions to defend their rights. The maximisation of profit will always provide a reason for exploiting the workforce as much as can practically be achieved.
Certainly since Marx and Engels, the capitalist tendency towards globalisation has been recognised. As a result, the poorly-paid working classes of east Asia, especially of China, have largely supplanted the better-paid workforces of the West. Europe now relies heavily on China for the consumer goods by which the prosperity of the West is measured. The political danger of this is becoming more obvious, as is the even more obvious danger of relying on Russia for oil and gas. By the same token, Europe’s reliance on the USA for its defence and security needs is all very well while there is a Transatlantic entente, but would be heavily compromised in the case of a more nationalistic American foreign policy.
Crisis
Added to all this, capitalism, being essentially anarchic, is subject to periodic crises. This has been recognised ever since the days of Smith and Ricardo, and has proved one of its most destructive aspects. Capitalism has no answer to crisis other than to allow large areas of capital to be destroyed. The capitalist state will try to manage the process of destruction, to ensure that certain types of capital are protected at the expense of others. The Thatcher government, for example, moved capital out of manufacturing into financial services and from the caring public sector into the private. The beneficiaries, not to put too fine a point on it, were the rich and the victims were the poor.
There is yet another problem, and this no doubt is the one Greta Thunberg is particularly concerned with: that capitalism depends on perpetual expansion and exploitation. Its reliance on fossil fuel, on dirty manufacturing processes, on polluting transport systems and uninhibited production and consumption has had a disastrous effect on the world climate. Too embedded to be easily changed, and defended with all the measures at the disposal of the corporate state, this morbid system is leading to ever-increasing death and destruction.
In Britain, none of the main political parties are capable of confronting this problem. Their answer to the current capitalist crisis, and to the self-imposed Brexit disaster, is to blame Covid and Putin and to go all out for increasing, rather than decreasing our reliance on the fossil economy. Into the bargain, the government is going further and actually penalising the environmental movement.
Even the trumpeted concept of ‘net zero’ essentially buys time for the corporate system to continue polluting. Now, not later, is the time to withdraw from carbon-based fuels and to develop renewables. Now is the time to insulate buildings to reduce energy consumption, to prefer public transport, to reduce flying, to restructure cities as localised entities, to transfer production from arms manufacture into social goods.
More than global heating
And that is not all. A dangerous level of global heating is only one of the thresholds we are approaching. The destruction of the world’s biodiversity is also dangerous in itself. So is the imminent loss of the rainforests. So is depletion of the ozone layer. Acidification of the oceans is another, together with chemical pollution of the land and waterways and, indeed, the decreasing supply of water itself.
We should be under no illusions. Addressing this huge task means the end of an economic system which has existed for centuries and will defend itself even if it means destroying the lives of millions. Unless we want to surrender to such barbarism, we are bound to oppose it. Rosa Luxemburg warned against ‘sterile opposition-ism’, that is, opposing notionally without taking action. Of course we have to accept that, at present, we live in a capitalist society and must take up positions within it. But the key proviso is that everything we do must be consistent with achieving the change that is necessary.
Three things seem to me to be needed: engaging in creative debate about both the problems and the potential solutions; taking action wherever possible to resist the growth of the corporate state; and simultaneously envisaging and practically creating the saner kind of society which will replace the present sterile system. This may be revolutionary, but it is neither negative nor unrealistic. There are many examples already of individual communities desperate to take action for the sake of themselves and their children. Discovering the common purpose of all these groups is essential to the struggle.
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