Capitalism Can’t Save the Environment
Image via Pixabay
Capitalism, the dominant world-economic system employed in many countries based on private ownership, is primarily motivated by continual profit growth. This desire to maximize profits and minimize costs can hurt individuals when these “costs” end up being human and environmental wellbeing.
To “win” capitalism, i.e. to run an insanely powerful and successful enterprise, a business owner exploits his workers because he adds no personal value to the company, as it is the workers who actually do the labor required for an end result. Yet, they only get a fraction of the revenue. The myth that “the capitalist assumes the risk, and is thus entitled to the surplus” is a false justification for the theft of surplus value from the worker. Only under the capitalist system does that risk even exist. The surplus wealth never needed to be taken from the workers. Legislators doing the bidding of their corporate donors uphold a system that leaves workers with the bare minimum (often starvation wages) so that those at the top can steal this surplus wealth, both legally and illegally. With this system, capitalism ultimately relies on the stolen value of labor to justify and propel its continuous growth. As a result, the capitalist believes he is entitled to running the world, constantly fueled by the myth of himself as the creator of goods, rather than crediting the toil and sweat of the laborers that actually make production possible .
Meanwhile, the rampant consumerism that capitalism has enforced for decades - in order to drive profits, there must be a constant false need for goods - continues to ravage the planet with no concern for its effects. In fact, corporations have been preventing the fight against climate change for as long as possible. Nearly half a century ago, ExxonMobil became one of the first entities in the world to correctly identify the effects of burning fossil fuels on the environment, yet they refused to acknowledge this research or share it with the public. A decade later, Exxon was actively funding policy initiatives to undermine the growing scientific concern for climate change, knowing it would destroy the fossil fuel industry if the public took it seriously. Lucky for Exxon, it worked. Since then, just 100 companies have been responsible for over 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, with corporations like Exxon and BP at the top of the list. In order to sustain their continuous economic growth, businesses partake in ecologically destructive practices and reject the costs of climate stabilization efforts.
Image via Liam McGarry on Unsplashed
Besides just climate change, repeated catastrophes – directly caused by corporate recklessness – have resulted in cataclysmic degradation of the environment and global proletariat (working class), casting huge swaths of the population into famine-ridden destitution, like climate refugees and child miners. Since their inception, corporate behemoths of pollution have used their multinational status to exploit weak or unenforced labor laws in the Global South to pay their workers starvation wages while simultaneously spewing waste into those very same communities. The Democratic Republic of Congo, which conducts 70% of the world's cobalt mining operations, “employs” over 40,000 children, many as young as 6 years old, who are paid about $10 a week. These children are essentially bathing in particles known to cause thyroid, heart and vision problems, and even cancer. Not only do these mining practices destroy the health of these youth, but they also contaminate the soil in which their food is grown with radioactive material, wreaking environmental havoc for generations to come. Despite all this, companies such as Microsoft, Dell, and Tesla continue to buy from these productions, growing their ventures to astronomical heights while these child employees die of lung failure at the ripe old age of 12. The global proletariat will continue to be stripped of their resources, labor, and human rights while facing the most disastrous environmental catastrophes possible as a consequence of global capitalist greed.
The owning class has created a system not only based on abusing the environment, but also the middle and lower classes. The top 1% will never feel half a degree of warming from their penthouse suites. In fact, they thrive off the disaster it brings. Capitalists have been profiting off disasters for centuries, and as the climate crisis brings more destruction, they see more dollars flowing in. Since the Reagan administration, neoliberals have mounted huge deregulation campaigns in every industry imaginable, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).The EPA’s newest administrator, Anne Gorsuch, defanged the entire agency by slashing its budget by 22%, then hiring staff from the industries they were supposed to be regulating. Since then, environmental protections have been frail, perpetuating the extortion of public safety and resources in hopes to stimulate the economy. As a result, industry giants have saved billions of dollars by legally cutting corners in areas of labor rights, safety, and environmental protections. Take Texas’s winter storm in early 2021 that left 2 million people without power and 246 dead. While Governor Greg Abbott blamed the grid failure on wind turbines, Texas’s own energy department cited the grid’s lack of winterization as the key culprit. This shortsightedness can be traced back to the deregulation of Texas’s energy grid in the early 2000s, decentralizing the grid into a patchwork of multiple providers, each cutting corners like not prepping for potential harsh winters to save costs, supposedly resulting in lower prices. However, the Texas Coalition of Affordable Energy cites that the deregulation campaign actually increased prices with residents from deregulated areas paying $22 billion more in energy bills from 2002-2012. What these residents paid for was a decentralized energy grid that was no longer required to upkeep various safety, environmental, and structural protocols, resulting in the catastrophic grid failure in 2021. Even those who did keep their power were charged thousands just for keeping the lights on, bankrupting entire households. For the capitalist, a death toll is nothing more than a line on a receipt. They charge more for a system that maims and murders, and then profit off that massacre. When disaster strikes, especially one caused by their own system, all a capitalist sees are dollar signs. Like a gang of parasites, they leech off the dying bodies in America’s streets, draining blood until there is nothing left.
Attempting to deal with each calamity as an isolated incident only allows for the global aristocracy to find a different scapegoat each time to take the fall. The status quo will continue to allow corporations to exploit the worker and our secular resources in the name of an extra dollar without taking an ounce of responsibility. Growing neoliberalism will only continue to perpetuate this trend, using market deregulation as a pass for the global elite to pillage the Global South.
Abolishing the current system is crucial to dismantling the structural injustices committed on the workers of the world and our natural home. An alternative system, ecosocialism, may just be the answer. Through the appropriation of the fundamental gains of Marxism while replacing its productivist auxiliaries with the pillars of degrowth, the world may have a second chance at reversing the climate crisis while simultaneously bringing prosperity to the global proletariat in a sustainable, democratic way.