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Capitalism is Killing the Earth

Capitalism is also destroying the natural environment. With oil, coal, gas, and forest clearing, we burn each year what nature took a million years to create. This releases greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide. As a result, between 1950 and 1990, the mean surface temperature of the planet increased from 13.9°C to 14.4°C. It threatens to rise as much as 3.5°C in the coming century. This global warming is 10-100 times as fast as anything seen in the last 700,000 years. Human civilisation has cleared 3 billion of the 8 billion hectares of forest that existed at the end of the last ice age, and 1/6 of that clearing has taken place since 1960. Deforestation, pollution, and destructive practices are threatening the planet’s ability to provide us with food. Between 1970 and 1990, 480 billion tonnes of fertile soil were lost globally, equivalent to India’s entire cropland. Inorganic fertilisers produce algal blooms that have killed off entire river systems. Pesticides kill 20,000 agricultural workers per year. If present trends continue, 1/5 of all plant and animal species will become extinct in the next 20 years, reducing global biodiversity to the lowest level since the mass extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The destruction of the environment is a result of putting profit ahead of everything else. Production remains unsustainable simply because it’s cheaper that way. The drive for profit means that the cheapest methods of energy generation are used, regardless of the consequences. This is why the burning of coal is still one of the primary sources of energy-and responsible for 2/3 of emissions of the acid-rain producing gas sulphur dioxide. Capitalism encourages consumption patterns that maximise profitability. Rather than having cheap, extensive public transport in urban centres, we now have over half a billion cars around the world, consuming 1/3 of global oil production. Air pollution from cars accounts for 1/4 of all illnesses in North American cities. US cars consume twice as much oxygen as US plant life produces. The cost of cleaning up the mess that capitalism has created is high, and growing, but it pales in comparison with what capitalist governments spend on weapons. The UN has estimated that the total cost of conserving tropical forests, reforesting the earth to an environmentally healthy level, combating desertification and protecting topsoil, developing renewable energy, implementing better energy practices and providing basic health care, primary education, food and clean drinking water to the poorest 500 million children would cost the equivalent of only a few months of global military spending. It has been estimated that converting all US industry to ecologically pure processes would cost $600 billion-equivalent to what the Pentagon spends every 1½ years. The basic development of Asia, Africa and Latin America to liberate hundreds of millions of poor farmers from the need to clear land in order to survive, would require $8 trillionone decade’s global military spending. More than 100 million people are involved in military activities worldwide, 3 times the number of teachers and doctors. Imagine if these 100 million were employed to clean rivers, research and implement sustainable technology, reforest cleared land etc. Imagine if there was free, reliable and massively expanded public transport, so that most people wouldn’t need to use cars. Imagine if wastes such as compost, sewage, exhaust gases and heavy metals, instead of being dumped into our rivers, were used as raw materials for other branches of industry. All that stands in the way is capitalism.

Why Capitalism Needs Racism

The social pyramid of capitalism is black at the base and white at the top. In South Africa, until apartheid was formally abolished in 1994, it was legally instituted that way. Elsewhere slavery has been outlawed for over a century, but still the richest are the whitest and the poorest the blackest. Racism suits capitalism because it’s an important way of justifying economic discrimination. It’s no accident that wherever you find racism, someone seems to be making money from it. In 1492 Columbus claimed the Americas for the Spanish crown. "Here", he said, "all of Christianity will do business". In the centuries that followed, the indigenous people were enslaved, or massacred if they resisted. According to Columbus, they were useful only "for ordering and putting to work, farming and doing everything necessary, building houses and learning to wear clothes and use our customs". In Australia the British did the same. Australia was declared "terra nullius" — empty land, belonging to nobody. Never mind the hundreds of Aboriginal nations: the British needed another colony to get rid of prisoners and as a source of raw materials. Now, in place of the early colonialism, we have imperialism. No one is enslaved by law, but their wages are kept to a dollar a day to make sure they don’t go anywhere. The US military freely walks into Third World countries to "save" them from their own people. Spreading racism also helps capitalism get away with super-exploiting migrants and racial and ethnic minorities. It helps Australian business to preserve myths: "Those Arabs" or "Those Asians don’t mind dirty, hard work, and they’ll be glad to get any wages at all". It’s another way of dividing worker from worker. When unemployment is on the rise, it’s always handy to blame "the Asians", or whichever ethnic group is being demonised at the time, for taking jobs away from "real Australians".

Capitalism Alienates People

Capitalism is a brutal system. It condemns people to warped, stunted and impoverished lives, not just economically, but also emotionally, intellectually and culturally. For most people, life is a process of deepening alienation from their work, and often from their families, from themselves. In selling their labour power, whether manual or intellectual, people sell their creativity. Workers become cogs in the capitalist machine. Everything produced is owned by capitalists. The workers, once separated from the products of their labour, become reduced to consumers. Capitalism aims to reduce our life purpose to the individual act of consumption. A whole multibillion dollar advertising industry is devoted to selling people their "happiness". Satisfaction is to be found in a Coke can. Capitalism not only multiplies poverty to multiply wealth, but it multiplies solitude to multiply compliance. Alone, competing against each other for jobs or for school grades, people can often become greedy, prejudiced and self-centred. Alone, alienated from everyone including themselves, people find only frustration rather than meaning. Is it any wonder that there is so much hatred and violence, not just on the street but in the home?