Why capitalism is not the answer

We have to go back to the basics of how the system works. Capitalism divides society into two main classes, the ruling class (for example, factory owners, bankers, employers) and the working class.

Under the rule of the employers and the state forces that back them up, capital combines its two sources of wealth: the mass “socialised” labour power of workers in the factories, farms, offices and the like, associated with the necessary machinery (the computers, trucks, etc) with the second source, the world’s natural resources, to produce goods at a level never seen before.

These goods that are produced, however, do not belong to the workers who have made them - either for their own use or even to trade for other useful items. Nor do they have a say in what is produced. Instead they are the property of the employer, who then proceeds to sell these items for more than it cost to produce them - in other words, at a profit. A money profit that is pocketed by the employer rather than shared equally with all. And because the system runs on making profit, without it the company will collapse, this sets up a highly competitive world system as companies battle it out for market share and more profits.

So the result is that what drives this system forwards is not how these goods satisfy human needs for a living - though of course it must do that to a certain extent otherwise there will be no workers - but the driver is the money profit a capitalist can make from the sale of products. So if there’s a choice between human need and profit, profit will win out.

This is when you see the obscenity of food being dumped rather than sent to feed the malnourished or starving peoples of the world, who are too poor to buy them at the price that would deliver a profit.

Money profit has another property, apart from enriching the ruling class, that is crucial in its destructive potential. Unlike natural resources which can completely run out and cannot be accumulated, the goal of money profit is quantitatively unlimited, and it can continue to accumulate for so long as there is anything left standing. Hence the quote from Paul Burkett: “We may not like it, but the fact is that capitalism can survive any ecological catastrophe short of the extinction of human life.”

And the capitalists will continue to try to “improve” their productive processes to gain ever more profit.

As Karl Marx put it, “The division of labour [a highly efficient way of organising work] is necessarily followed by greater division of labour, the application of machinery by still greater application of machinery, works on a large scale by works on a still larger scale. That is the law [driven by competition] which again and again throws bourgeois production out of its old course and which compels capital to intensify the productive forces of labour, [and] because it has intensified them … [this] law gives capital no rest continually whispering in its ear ‘Go on! Go on!’”

Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg explains in more detail how this drive for profit leads to environmental crises as the world is plundered. She writes “Capital, impelled to appropriate productive forces for the purposes of exploitation, ransacks the whole world; it procures its means of production from all corners of the earth, seizing them, if necessary by force, from all levels of civilisation and from all forms of society.”

Today we just have to look at the US in Iraq and Afghanistan - the murder of millions and the environmental trashing that comes from non-stop warfare to secure the oil and other resources to maintain US world domination - i.e. the domination of American capital.

Then there’s the competition for the riches of Africa, where the companies grow fat and the people starve and the local land is devastated; the wide-scale destruction of forests to grow corn for biofuel; or as global warming melts the ice around the Arctic, resource companies rush to lay claim to Greenland’s previously inaccessible oil, diamonds and gold. Or in Australia where we see the invasion of Aboriginal land to gouge out the uranium and other mineral resources for private profit.

Capital creates commodities that can be sold out of resources that once were free. As one commentator noted, carbon credits - part of the carbon trading process - “are a triumph of capitalism, creating a commodity from nothing - clean pockets of air - that gain value through being certified. They have created a market now worth between $10 and $30 billion.” This set The Economist - the British magazine for the bosses - to rubbing its hands with glee over such wealth creation adding its hope that, “perhaps soon, the best things in life will not be free”.