As people become more and more concerned about global warming and other environmental problems, capitalist politicians have tried to reassure us that environmental protection and capitalist business are not in
contradiction.
One version of this argument goes like this: The Kyoto treaty (or whatever environmental measure they are opposing) would restrict economic growth; but if we can grow the economy sufficiently, we'll be rich enough to deal with environmental problems.
That argument counts on an audience that knows no history and can't comprehend what it sees on its TV screen. While the total of accumulated wealth in the world is vastly greater than it was at any previous time in history, so also is the actual destruction and the pending threatened destruction of the environment.
Moreover, poverty has increased along with wealth: the number of poor in the world today is greater than the entire human population 50 or 60 years ago. So, if protection of the environment has to wait until poverty is overcome, we are further from being able to "afford" sustainability than we
were half a century ago.
These paradoxes arise because capitalist society is different in fundamental ways from all previous societies.
It should be obvious that no human society can survive without a sustainable basis in the natural world. In the course of human history, many societies have ceased to exist because they lost their natural foundation through changing climatic conditions or because of their own ignorant destruction of that foundation.
I say "ignorant" because our prehistoric ancestors (and sometimes more recent ancestors) sometimes lacked the scientific knowledge to make the right decisions about how to maintain the environment on which they depended. But hunter-gatherer societies, for example, developed elaborate rules designed to ensure the survival of their food supplies. Feudal Europe ensured that agriculture would be carried out by legally binding peasants to the soil.
No society would wilfully destroy the basis of its own existence - decide to do something that it knew could lead to its own destruction - until capitalism, that is. Among capitalism's differences from all previous societies, two closely related differences are particularly relevant here.
First, pre-class societies have no rulers in the modern sense of the term because they do not have an economic surplus that could support idlers. Pre-capitalist class societies have a ruling layer that depends on (exploits) a population by seizing a portion of its physical product (peasants' crops, for example) and consuming it. Capitalists, by contrast, depend, not on the physical product that they seize, but on its value.
Secondly, because they mainly seized physical products, pre-capitalist exploiters' exploitation was limited to an area defined by how long these products lasted and the means of transportation. On the other hand, value does not deteriorate by being transported, so capitalists can exploit workers
anywhere in the world.
From these differences follows a third and crucial difference between capitalism and earlier forms of class society.
Earlier ruling classes were diminished if their particular environment declined. The king of France could support fewer hangers-on if the agricultural productivity of his exploited peasants declined.
This is not the case with capitalism. Those who rule it don't require the survival of the whole society. They can continue being capitalists as long as there are enough workers somewhere - anywhere - to keep their capital in
business.
For the typical capitalist, unlike the typical feudal lord, it doesn't really matter if the environment is a mess, because that generally doesn't affect their profits; it may even increase them by making some products scarcer. Protecting the environment is a "cost" for capitalists - something that someone else can do while they go on making money.
Allen Myers
From Green Left Weekly, June 7, 2006.
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