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Unsustainable Capitalism - Can planet earth survive capitalism? Capital
plunders the wealth of nature in order to exploit the human labour that its
agents apply to those raw materials. Marxists recognise that only human labour
can add more value than goes into its production. However, without the wealth
of nature, there would be nothing to which human labour could add value. That key to a materialist view of our
social and physical worlds takes us to one of the irreconcilable conflict
between the necessity that capital has to expand and the twin impacts of that drive
on available resources and from pollution. No disagreement is possible. But
once more the challenge is how to make those connections part of the daily
practice of activists and working people. What do we put on placards? What do we
publish in a theoretical journal? Despite a revival of interest in
Marx’s critique of political economy since the on-going implosion of capital in
2007-8, the fact remains that many of the basics about capitalism are not as
widely or as deeply known throughout the Left as they were before the 1980s.
The situation is almost the obverse with the environment. Very little was said
about environmentalism in the Marxism-Leninism of the previous era. Of recent
times, authors assure us that Marx and Engels were among the first ecologists
and that Engels led the way. Marxists might have had
environmentalism in our heads – certainly in our sacred texts – but those
concerns were not at the forefront of our practical socialism. A distinction
arises here between Philosophical Idealism and Historical Materialism. Our
minds might recognise the importance of the natural world and yet not be
materialists in our behaviour towards it. The same gulf existed between the
writings of Engels on the emancipation of women and how women were treated around
the Left. What has changed is that women took up the struggle. They did so in
the ever-changing circumstances of capitalist production since the 1930s
Depression. In the process, they reclaimed the early comments by Engels and
Bebel. Through their activism, they are still teaching us which elements from
the classics are applicable today. There is a lesson here for Marxists.
Gaining the correct concepts is never easy.
But their correctness can never be severed from their relevance to the
changes always underway in reality. As capitalism changes, so must we learn to
adjust the concepts that we need to understand those changes and thereby oppose
the rule of capital more effectively. Attempts to explain why capitalism is incompatible
with sustainability face a number of hurdles. First, we have to get a clear
understanding of capital. To give a simple but crucial instance of common
mistake. ‘People before Profits’ is a regular call around the Left. It is sharp
and threatens a key element in capitalism. There is no reason to stop using it.
However, to focus on ‘profit’ is to leave out its purpose within capitalism.
The aim of capitalism is not ‘profit’. Profits derive from the surplus value
produced by wage-slaves. The system clogs up if at least some of the surplus
value, once it is realised as profit, does not go into expanding reproduction.
Hence, the crux is accumulation. I have yet to see ‘surplus value’ or
‘accumulation’ on a placard or turned into a chant. No one should lie awake
trying to make them rhyme. The big step is to absorb the three
reasons why capital has to accumulate in order to exist. 1. Competition from other producers
drives each capital to lower unit production costs to compete on price. As a
result, those corporates therefore produce more units and must sell more items
to chase the same absolute return; 2. At the same time, pressure from
wage-slaves for a bigger share of the surplus-value the supply is met by
replacing living labour with the dead labour embodied in machines which in turn
increase the volume of commodities that have to be sold; 3. Capital needs to realise the
surplus value embedded in those items as profits through sales. That is why we
have been subject to a century of mass marketing, including consumer credit. That
advances on earnings attempt to bridge the gap between wages and the values
that wage-slaves have added and which capital must expropriate.. The threat is not from personal greed
or ‘Affluenza’ but from the creation of demand to cope with the over-production
that is inherent in the expansion of capital. Put those three forces together and
there is no way that capital can survive in a steady state. On paper, it could
get rid of competition through a total cartel and monopoly. Or it could totally
control workers to block any rise in the costs of labour power. But then capital
would not be able to realise its surplus value by pushing up effective demand. Indeed, it seems that total/social
capital has to expand at around 3 percent per annum if the system is not to
implode. In the broadest terms, that rate of growth will mean that the
resources needed to sustain capital will double every thirty years. If the
quantum today is 100, in 2044 it will be 200; in 2074 it will be 400, and before
2114 it will be 800. Those numbers apply only if all other things are equal. In
reality, the number in 100 years from now could well be below 800. One reason for
its being less will be technological changes, for instance, the application of
previously unused resources. Plastics made last century possible. Who knows
what possibilities are in sand beyond silicon chips. More significantly, what has to expand
for capital to survive is not the quantum of physical product but the value in
them. In recent years, there has been a lot of talk about immaterial
commodities, such as on-line ‘information’ services. So far, there has been
more talk than non-physical commodities. Indeed, the Cloud turns out to be a
vast computer base in India that is using up so much energy that it might
spontaneously combust. Meanwhile, the competing suppliers of phones and pods
are up to the old game of planned obsolescence. Hence, the volume of physical
‘on-line’ commodities shows no sign of shrinking. In addition, the free info sites
such as Google are paid for out of advertising revenues to push more stuff. But
the rules outlined in 1 and 2 apply here too. The drive in capital is for more
value. Therefore, the less labour-time in each unit, the more units capital has
to have. Although we must remain skeptical
about the escape routes for capital, we should never forget that new things
happen. With all its crimes and horrors, capitalism remains the most
revolutionary system that the world has ever seen. But even if its demand for
resources does not undergo a fourfold spike by 2114, we will be up to our
eyeballs in trash. If you think that propaganda will be
hard work, the hurdles are higher for implementation. Even if capital runs out
of the resources that will let it expand at a rate compatible with its
survival, capitalism will never automatically collapse. For as long as its
agents hold state power, it can pass the costs along to working people. Capitalism
therefore sustains itself by smashing 99 percent of the population and the wealth
of nature. Salvation for the planet means smashing the capitalist state. That win for our class will not of
itself make life on earth secure. It will merely open the door to seeking
different ways to live. As materialists, we know that there is no utopian
blueprint for the future. As ever, we shall have to learn by doing, with all
the risks and failures that must follow. Future generations might stuff matters
up in new ways. The only certainty is that disaster will not be avoided if we
go on as most environmentalists have, that is, by doing very little to
challenge the rule of capital. |