George Monbiot - Dare to declare capitalism dead – before it takes us all down with it
For most of my adult
life I’ve railed against “corporate capitalism”, “consumer capitalism” and
“crony capitalism”. It took me a long time to see that the problem is not the
adjective but the noun. While some people have rejected capitalism gladly and
swiftly, I’ve done so slowly and reluctantly.
Part of the reason was that I
could see no clear alternative: unlike some anti-capitalists, I have never been
an enthusiast for state communism. I was also inhibited by its religious
status. To say “capitalism is failing” in the 21st century is like saying “God
is dead” in the 19th: it is secular blasphemy. It requires a degree of
self-confidence I did not possess. But as I’ve grown
older, I’ve come to recognise two things. First, that it is the system, rather
than any variant of the system, that drives us inexorably towards disaster.
Second, that you do not have to produce a definitive alternative to say that
capitalism is failing. The statement stands in its own right. But it also
demands another, and different, effort to develop a new system.
More posts on contemporary capitalism
Capitalism’s
failures arise from two of its defining elements. The first is perpetual growth. Economic growth is the aggregate effect of the
quest to accumulate capital and extract profit. Capitalism collapses without
growth, yet perpetual growth on a finite planet leads inexorably to
environmental calamity. Those who defend
capitalism argue that, as consumption switches from goods to services, economic
growth can be decoupled from the use of material resources.
Last week a paper in the journal New Political Economy, by Jason Hickel
and Giorgos Kallis, examined this premise.
They found that while some relative
decoupling took place in the 20th century (material resource consumption grew,
but not as quickly as economic growth), in the 21st century there has been a
recoupling: rising resource consumption has so far matched or exceeded the rate
of economic growth. The absolute decoupling needed to avert environmental
catastrophe (a reduction in material resource use) has never been achieved, and
appears impossible while economic growth continues. Green growth is an
illusion.
A system based on
perpetual growth cannot function without peripheries and externalities. There
must always be an extraction zone – from which materials are taken without full
payment – and a disposal zone, where costs are dumped in the form of waste and
pollution. As the scale of economic activity increases until capitalism affects
everything, from the atmosphere to the deep ocean floor, the entire planet
becomes a sacrifice zone: we all inhabit the periphery of the profit-making
machine.
This drives us towards
cataclysm on such a scale that most people have no means of imagining it. The
threatened collapse of our life-support systems is bigger by far than war,
famine, pestilence or economic crisis, though it is likely to incorporate all
four. Societies can recover from these apocalyptic events, but not from
the loss of soil, an abundant biosphere and a habitable climate.
The second defining
element is the bizarre assumption that a person is entitled to as great a share
of the world’s natural wealth as their money can buy. This seizure of common goods causes three
further dislocations... read more:
