Tag: Environment

  • The Revolutionary Potential of Cooperatives

    The Revolutionary Potential of Cooperatives

    Too much of the political conversation is centred around distribution. For the left, this means steeper rates of progressive taxation and social spending. For the right it is the inverse, lower taxes—particularly at the high end of the wealth pyramid—and reduced social spending. The specific rates and policies have shape-shifted over the years but this dichotomy sets the parameter of political debate in the main. But it is a shallow dichotomy which provides tremendous benefit to the economic elites because it does not lay a finger to the seat of their domination. Let’s remember, how the pie gets sliced is almost irrelevant next to who owns the oven. 

    If there is one Marxist teaching that is conveniently taboo in mainstream discussion, it is that wealth and power exist first and foremost as economic relations. After Jeff Bezos’ joyride into suborbital space, the first people he thanked were his employees and customers who unwittingly “paid for all of this.” Of course, if those same people had a choice as to where their generated surplus was allocated, they probably wouldn’t sign it over to the vanity project of an eccentric billionaire.

    It is the economic relationship between Bezos and his employees that puts a material surplus squarely on his lap to play with. This relationship gives him command over market conditions and a vast army of labour, as well as a grotesquely outsized political sway. It is a Herculean task to pry this surplus from his lap with taxation because liberal governance grants enormous influence to “job creators” by way of the corporate lobby and political donations. 

    Marx said “to be radical is to grasp the matter by the root.”1 While taxation rates help to manicure the lawn, the enormity of problems posed by global capitalism demands an entire re-seeding. Progressive forces must apprehend the relations of production that first give rise to the corporate capture of government, the K-shaped economy, environmental destruction, the state of perpetual warfare. By transforming the economy from one that is authoritarian and competitive into one that is democratic and cooperative, matters of distribution and political equality resolve themselves on the new terms.

    A Catalogue of Crises

    Taking inventory of the problems that have plagued our capitalist society for decades, we see worker-owned enterprises (cooperatives) present themselves as a panacea. Waste and environmental decline, crisis-level mental health outcomes, community loss, job insecurity and high costs of living are a few that spring to the foreground. 

    On environmental outcomes, there is a structural benefit to workers owning their own workplace. The owners are not impersonal investors from gated communities afar, but members of the community in which they operate. Cooperative economic relations encourage superior environmental stewardship because worker-owners are more likely to avoid polluting their communities and the planet than impersonal investors and owners.

    Multiple studies demonstrate the pro-social tendency of cooperatives to prioritize environmental goals, reduce waste and allocate resources efficiently—especially when compared against capitalist firms. As one example, a cooperative bank in the UK was able to reduce downstream emissions of clients by 70% by providing financing for renewables, energy efficiency upgrades and carbon offsets.2

    In terms of mental health and community, the accelerated decline of both are not unrelated. It should be no surprise that a chronically-online society increasingly devoid of face-to-face interactions is manifesting symptoms of a “loneliness epidemic,” negatively affecting local communities and individual well-being. The negative mental health symptoms we observe today validate the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm’s five fundamental needs for mental well being: relatedness, rootedness and unity, transcendence, sense of identity and frame of orientation.

    Because of democratic decision making and a shared destiny amongst stakeholders, cooperatives offer the individual a community unto itself and create a vested interest in civic participation, addressing each of Fromm’s fundamental needs. The superiority of this model compared to capitalist corporations is reflected in higher rates of job satisfaction and happiness at work. At a national scale, widespread adoption of the cooperative model would enhance social cohesion, community engagement and improve productivity. 

    Artificial intelligence and automation are frequently cited as factors aggravating conditions of employment insecurity and precarious work. Productive technologies should not be feared, though. Workers that own their firms are incentivized toward technological efficiency and practical AI deployment because it saves labour time without impacting income. There is a longstanding capitalist contradiction regarding technological progression: employers covet it for the productivity gains, employees fear it over the ensuing layoffs. When employees become owners, this contradiction is resolved.

    Furthermore, worker cooperatives have demonstrated greater staff retention and job security, even in times of economic recession. Whereas capitalist firms often have an express fiduciary duty to prioritize the interests of the investment class over their workers, worker-owners are far more likely to set funds aside in periods of strong economic performance in order to stabilize incomes during periods of weakness. The structural difference between conventional corporations and cooperatives also sees workers accrue greater employment benefit coverage for their families and up to 80% above-market pay. A comfortable living wage is the demonstrated norm in mature cooperative formations.

    In one stroke, the cooperative model alleviates almost all of the civilizational problems pressing so hard on us today. Even political polarization, drug addiction and crime could be expected to crash downward with increased community building, financial security and social cohesion amongst the population. Rather than pitch socialism as a stoic alternative, cooperatives offer a visible pathway to transcending capitalism altogether; a world where wage labour is viewed as dimly as serfdom or slavery is right now.

    Laying the Soil

    But it is never so easy. For the apologists of capitalism, the usual retort is something along the lines of: “Nothing is stopping the formation of cooperatives right now. The market will decide if they are the superior model or not.” This falsely assumes some kind of fair marketplace where the best ideas, products and formations inevitably rise to the top. In reality, we live within a global system that doles out multi-trillion dollar subsidies to capitalist firms each year. Publicly funded and well-endowed schools of commerce glisten on campuses wherever a university is to be found. Banks raise low-interest debt and investment for hedge funds and publicly-listed companies, while giving relatively draconian terms to small businesses—and even worse for cooperatives, which are often denied loans. 

    Rosa Luxemburg described cooperatives as “small units of socialized production within the midst of capitalist exchange.”3 Worker owned enterprises must compete with conventional firms in the capitalist market but they do so with far less tools at their disposal. While they offer enormous pro-social and environmental benefits, this does not count toward GDP or rate of profit—the only measures of capitalist value, even in a world on fire. 

    The struggle to breathe under an avaricious economy thirsty for profit account for many of the shortcomings of the cooperative movement, including cases where wage labour and outsourcing is resorted to. But this does not mean cooperatives are a dead-end, they just have the wrong substrate. The history of capitalism, too, is pockmarked by failed attempts of merchant-run cities and bourgeois revolutions to shed their aristocratic chains, only to lose momentum and become subsumed again by dominant feudal relations.4

    Socialism will transcend capitalism in the West when a future revolution applies the lessons of China’s nation building state-owned enterprises and public planning; when the unimpeded direct democratic rule of the people has been won. Once community and environment take their place among the measures of wealth, new economic relations between associated producers and consumers can be organized. As Karl Marx said:

    If cooperative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united cooperative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production—what else would it be but communism, “possible” communism?5

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Second Ed. trans. David McClellan (Oxford University Press, 2000): 77. ↩︎

    2. Melissa Scanlan, Prosperity in the Fossil-Free Economy: Cooperatives and the Design of Sustainable Businesses (Yale University Press, 2021): 261. ↩︎

    3. Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution? ↩︎

    4. John Bellamy Foster, “Capitalism Has Failed, What Next?” Monthly ReviewVol. 70, No. 9. ↩︎

    5. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France. ↩︎
  • How Industry Created A Bird Flu Apocalypse

    How Industry Created A Bird Flu Apocalypse

    When the H5N1 strain of avian influenza was first identified in 1996, history could not dictate the path it was going to take. Highly contagious avian diseases had tended to spread like wildfire within the confines of isolated poultry operations but would burn out quickly in nature because the deaths of wild hosts inhibited spread between dispersed animal populations. But H5N1 is different. 

    As industrial agriculture and intensive livestock holdings have fanned across the world, it is apparent that disease contagion is fanning out alongside it. Maybe this isn’t entirely surprising given the multitude of other dangerous externalities that have emerged as byproducts of the industrial era: energy consumption and atmospheric recomposition leading to climate change; mass production of plastics and the clogging of waterways, whale guts and microplastic in human tissue; air coolants and a hole in the ozone layer; urban sprawl, resource extraction, crop monocultures and biodiversity collapse.

    In 1996, H5N1 struck geese farms in China and a huge number of birds were lost and that may have been the end of it. But then it struck Hong Kong. And South Korea. And Southeast Asia. And Japan. And then it struck everywhere all at once. H5N1’s body count reads like an animal apocalypse: over 300 million birds from every continent on Earth, tens of thousands of mammals including seals and dolphins, and about 500 humans struck dead. Migratory birds have spread the virus the world over but what’s astonishing about H5N1 is how it has gained strength over time, with its death rate and range of infected species becoming progressively worse.

    Bioterrorism

    When H5N1 collides with a poultry farm it’s like a missile. It infects thousands of hosts at a shot, combining and re-assorting itself in each animal body before rapidly moving to the next. These are tightly packed environments devoid of fresh air, clean water and faecal-free space—the most perfect accelerant imaginable for a rapidly mutating influenza. Thanks to the paucity of poultry operations along migration routes, the virus has continued to cycle between poultry and wild birds unabated for almost thirty years now. Wild birds pick up the bird flu from a poultry farm and, whether they survive or die, spread it to the next poultry farm along the migration route, creating a whole new strain of H5N1 to which there are no defences.  And just like that, a self-perpetuating death spiral provoking the slaughter of millions of farmed animals and mass die-offs in the wild has been unleashed.

    The havoc wreaked by H5N1 over the past three decades has made this pathogen the pioneering subject of controversial gain-of-function viral research. When questions were volleyed over the bio-terrorist potential that these new technologies raised, Anthony Fauci, former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Diseases, replied: “Nature is the real terrorist.” Absurd, yes—we will all succumb to our biology at some point. But has nature not given birth to all things living and sustained it with purified air, filtered sunlight and an abundance of glorious freshwater and botanicals that heal? Further, is it not human industry that is degrading the life-giving functions of the biosphere—polluting our atmosphere, contaminating our oceans—even summoning an unstoppable serial killing virus from the feathery cages of battery hens?

    H5N1 could not exist absent the viral reservoir provided by billions of human-farmed poultry living in putrid conditions. Although industrial activity has birthed this virus, commerce has taken an economic hit as a result. It is this threat to industry that governments have their eye on, with Vox reporting that the US Department of Agriculture “is primarily focused of protecting the poultry industry,” staring past the unfolding catastrophe in wildlife conservation and pursuant risk of another human pandemic. The latter is a very real possibility, especially in light of studies revealing that the devastating pandemic of 1918 likely sprang from an avian strain of influenza.

    Crisis Capital

    And so, H5N1 is yet another capitalist crisis whereby private actors create an existential threat that the state must contain while simultaneously sheltering the problem-causing industry. It is overwhelmingly workers that have lost their lives to H5N1, and rank-and-file consumers and taxpayers will foot the bill for additional costs imposed on the industry. Because of this, it is unlikely that holistic approaches and reforms to Big Poultry that researchers have called for will actually come to pass.

    Karl Marx, regarding the transition from the feudal to capitalist mode of production, described the changes that capitalism brought to livestock rearing in England. As food became commodified and profit-oriented, so did stable feeding become dominant: 

    In these prisons animals are born and remain there until they are killed off. The question is whether or not this system connected to the breeding that grows animals in an abnormal way by aborting bones in order to transform them to mere meat and a bulk of fat—whereas [before commodification] these animals remained active by staying under free air as much as possible—will ultimately result in serious deterioration of life force?1

    If there is a correlation between the vectors of H5N1, ocean acidification, addiction and mental health crises, plastic waste and contamination, surging global slums, an unaffordable cost of living and even right-wing populism, then it is the entire capitalist modality that needs a rethink instead of choice industries. We have the technology and resources to implement programs of regenerative farming, resilient landscapes, wildlife conservation, sustainable cities and even a cleanse of air and oceans. But such practices simply cannot operate on a for-profit basis despite the desirability of their outcomes.

    The timeline presented here gives a snapshot of H5N1 as it has moved through the media landscape since first coming onto the collective radar. Even though almost 8,000 academic articles have been published on this topic, it has only penetrated the mainstream swayingly, oscillating from intense interest when human beings and cute baby seals are effected, and near-oblivion in years when it is seemingly contained to the fetid poultry site. By giving this invisible pathogen contours in our imaginations, we can hopefully better contextualize this virus as individuals and bring light to the correct places with our torches.

    Timeline of H5N1

    1996 

    • Contagion breaks out on goose farms in mainland China kill 40% of infected birds. The pathogen is discovered to be a highly contagious influenza virus and is categorized as “H5N1.”

    1997 

    • A “mysterious ‘bird flu’ virus” erupts among poultry farms and markets in Hong Kong, causing mass die-offs of livestock. H5N1 is determined to be the culprit. Authorities order every chicken in Hong Kong slaughtered over a two day period, plus any ducks, geese, quail or pigeons held within proximity. Workers from Hong Kong’s chicken farms and market stalls are tested for H5N1. 18 total infections were discovered resulting in six deaths.

    2001 

    • H5N1 reappears in Hong Kong, killing 800 chickens within 24 hours and forcing closed poultry markets with further culls of thousands of birds.

    2002 

    • Four ducks and a swan found dead in a Hong Kong pond. Tissue samples confirm presence of H5N1.

    2003 

    • Two members of a Hong Kong family test positive for the virus. One dead.
    • Two tigers and a pair of leopards in a Thailand zoo found dead after feeding on chicken carcasses. Tests confirm presence of H5N1 in tissue samples. A further 147 tigers go on to die of influenza or culling.
    • South Korea detects avian influenza on multiple poultry farms across the country, resulting in a cull of one million chickens and ducks.

    2004 

    • H5N1 reappears in Hong Kong, killing 800 chickens within 24 hours and forcing closed poultry markets with further culls of thousands of birds.
    • Japan, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia report outbreaks of H5N1 among poultry, evidence that the disease spread along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway. The flyway, stretching from New Zealand to eastern Siberia, is utilized by millions of wild birds belonging to 600 different species.
    • The culling of two million chickens in Vietnam prompts KFC to pull chicken from their menu in favour of fish.
    • 22 people confirmed dead in Vietnam from H5N1 and 12 in Thailand. At this point in time, up to 70% of people known to have contracted avian flu have died as a result.

    2005 

    • Over 6,000 wild birds infected with avian flu are found dead at China’s Qinghai Lake.
    • Avian flu outbreaks in Siberian poultry coincide with discovery of nearby dead migratory birds. Kazakhstan reports outbreak among chickens and Mongolia discovers 89 dead birds positive with H5N1 at two lakes.
    • Nigeria and Egypt report poultry outbreaks while Finland finds H5N1 in seagulls. Later, Croatia confirms presence of H5N1 in wild birds and Romania and Turkey report outbreaks in poultry.
    • EU leaders hold emergency talks in Luxembourg to discuss possible responses by member nations. In the U.S., President Bush recommends $7.1 billion be spent in tracking avian influenza, experimental vaccine development and stocking anti-virals.
    • Tamiflu supply is squeezed as production does not ramp up to meet new demand for the anti-viral drug. The pharmaceutical giant Roche projects a windfall of profit as a result: $875 million extra for the year, on account of avian flu concerns.
    • Hackers capitalize on bird flu fears, circulating emails that promise valuable bird flu information and gaining remote control over any computer that opens them.
    • Researchers discover an H5N1 strain that is resistant to Tamiflu. David Nabarro, senior health expert with the World Health Organization, predicts a human pandemic stemming from avian flu could kill 150 million people.

    2006 

    • H5N1 confirmed in 60 countries from East Asia through the Middle East, Africa and Europe.
    • Multiple human fatalities occur in North Africa and the Middle East and 25 die of bird flu in Indonesia. Virus appears to mainly spread from bird-to-human and shows limited capability of human-to-human infection.
    • Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health tells the Associated Press: “Hopefully the epidemic [in birds] burns itself out, which epidemics do, before the virus evolves the capability of…going from human to human.”
    • Bird flu flare-up on a chicken farm in South Korea leads to a cull of 236,000 poultry, in addition to all pigs, cats and dogs within a 1,650 foot radius of the infection site.

    2007 

    • Number of human infections dwindles. The New York Times notes that as “the illness receded, the scary headlines—with warnings of a pandemic that could kill 150 million people—all but vanished.”
    • Despite fading interest, the Center for Infectious Disease Research reports the view of scientists and epidemiologists: so long as H5N1 circulates among wild birds, the risk to humans and poultry stocks remain the same.

    2009 

    • A 19 year old duck farm worker dies of avian influenza and Pakistan reports outbreak in poultry.

    2010 

    • A Hong Kong couple contracts avian influenza while travelling in mainland China, resulting in one hospitalization. Source of infection unknown as they had no contact with farmed birds. 

    2011 

    • 62 human cases of H5N1 are confirmed: 39 in Egypt, 12 in Indonesia, eight in Cambodia, two in Bangladesh and one in China. 34 deaths result.

    2012 

    • Some of the earliest ever gain-of-function research is revealed to be taking place in laboratories from North America, Europe and Asia, as scientists aim to create H5N1 strains that are highly pathogenic to people in order to better understand the potential risks. Concerns over bioterrorism and lab leaks prompt moratoriums on this type of research and academic papers to be censored. 
    • Scientists agree as little as five mutations to existing H5N1 strains could yield a catastrophic contagion among people.

    2014 

    • A 20 year old health care worker contracts H5N1 while travelling Beijing and dies in Red Deer, Alberta. North America’s first recorded fatality. Source of infection unknown.
    • World Health Organizations continues to monitor outbreaks within poultry farms and dozens of people across Africa and Asia.

    2015 

    • 100 migratory birds, including swans and pochards, found dead at a reservoir in China.

    2016 

    • India, battling H5N1 on poultry farms for two years, declares itself bird flu free in September. One month later, multiple waterfowl are found dead of H5N1 at a Delhi zoo.
    • Bangladesh, France, Niger and Nigeria report H5N1 outbreaks on farms.
    • H5N1 strains resistant to antivirals emerge in Egypt.

    2017 

    • Malaysia experiences severe H5N1 outbreak, resulting in a cull of 30,000 chickens as China bans Malaysian poultry products and a state of emergency is declared in the state of Kelantan.

    2019 

    • The digital public health publication STAT noted no new human fatalities of H5N1 in over two years. A related strain which emerged in 2014, H5N6, has killed approximately six out of 12 people infected since its detection.

    2020 

    • Amid a raging COVID-19 pandemic, China culls 18,000 chickens in Hunan province after 4,500 chickens are found dead on a farm due to H5N1.
    • Within a two week span, poultry farms in the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Croatia and Ukraine are hit with H5N1.

    2021 

    • An outbreak of H5N1 is reported on a poultry farm in Senegal. Later, rangers  discover 750 dead pelicans positive with the strain at a wild bird sanctuary.

    2022 

    • 8,000 Sandwich terns found dead at a breeding colony in the Netherlands.
    • British shorelines “smell of death” as hundreds of thousands of seabird corpses wash up dead after mating season, part of an H5N1 outbreak affecting the entire continent of Europe. Researchers estimate a death rate of 50–100% among wild birds which become infected with H5N1, depending on the species.
    • 13,000 seabirds in Peru turn up dead on beaches, mostly pelicans. H5N1 detected.
    • Deaths spike among wild birds in Canada, as outbreaks erupt in 200 commercial flocks across the country. 
    • H5N1 spreads rapidly across multiple detection sites in the continental United States, infecting one prison labourer who was involved with culling an infected flock in Colorado. Between culls and disease, over 50 million American domestic birds are killed. 
    • 330 seals along the Quebec and Maine coast are killed by H5N1, raising the spectre of the virus among mammals. Wild red foxes and farmed mink have also been infected, in addition to zoo mammals that were fed infected chickens. 
    • Conspiracy theories abound online, blaming Bill Gates and the CDC for releasing the deadly pathogen.
    • Globally, 77 million birds are culled in an attempt to contain the H5N1 pathogen.

    2023 

    • Based on all available information, Biosecurity specialist Juan Cambeiro reports that the likelihood of a human H5N1 pandemic breaking out in any given year is 4%. There is an 80% chance it would be worse than COVID in terms of fatalities.
    • Mass die-offs of gulls reported across Europe. Although wildlife detections are difficult measurements, by 2023 researchers estimate millions of wild birds have died due to the virus on a magnitude never before seen.
    • Eight dead skunks around Vancouver test positive for H5N1.
    • In Poland, 29 dead house cats tested positive for the virus of which 18 were indoor pets. Source of exposure unknown.
    • 485,000 animals, including mink and foxes, are culled in Finland after outbreaks on fur farms.
    • In a Canadian lab, predominant bird flu strain was found to “efficiently” spread between ferrets.
    • The number of known wild bird deaths from influenza in Peru swells to 63,000. Meanwhile, between January and October, a staggering 24,000 South American sea lions are found dead, suggesting mammal-to-mammal transmission.
    • Virus detected amongst migratory birds in Antarctica, the last continent to fall to contagion.
    • To date, 853 human cases of H5N1 have been reported with 53% of them fatal.

    2024 

    • Avian influenza detected in dead Alaskan polar bear to start the year. 48 different mammal species have been known to be infected to date.
    • Penguins begin dying of H5N1 in Antarctica while British conservationists report “catastrophic” decline of seabird population.
    • H5N1 virus found in cattle herds across six US states, then nine. Virus appears concentrated in milk and to circulate freely between cattle. True scale of bovine outbreak unknown as many producers resist cooperation with federal authorities.
    • H5N1 virus show up on grocery store shelves in milk, though pasteurization neutralizes the virus. 
    • Barn cats drinking raw milk succumb to bird flu deaths.
    • Wastewater samples reveal presence of the pathogen in six states: California, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan and Texas.
    • Sales of raw milk contaminated with bird flu pop as some consumers believe it will help them build immunity to the virus.

    2025 

    • $590 million contract awarded to Moderna to speed up development of a bird flu vaccine.
    • Retail prices for American eggs almost double over the previous year, as infected hens are culled en masse in the United States. Egg heists and border smugglers are reported.
    • The Moderna vaccine contract is cancelled by the Trump administration, citing “ethical concerns” over mRNA technology.
    • Robert Kennedy Jr. suggests ending containment strategies and letting bird flu spread wild.
    • Chilean scientists sequence H5N1 in Antarctic penguin populations, confirming similarities to strains decimating South American marine mammals.

    Footnote:

    1. Karl Marx quoted in “Marx as a Food Theorist?” Monthly Review, Vol. 68, No.7: monthlyreview.org/2016/12/01/marx-as-a-food-theorist ↩︎
  • Ecology

    Ecology

    This article is part of a series on classical Marxism.

    The relation of organic beings to their environment has always been one of give-and-take. While nature furnishes the conditions that organisms need to survive, it has also manufactured hazardous weather events, predators, diseases and landscapes that spell certain death. In concordance, a healthy ecosystem begins with the soil required for vegetation, which in turn supports a pyramid of animal and insect populations. All things living return, lifeless, to the soil and start the cycle anew. But this metabolism can be disturbed. Overpopulation of one species relative to others, tectonic shifts and volcanic explosions, atmospheric composition, hydrological changes and, infamously, asteroid strikes from outer space—any of these things open up a metabolic rift in the ecological cycle that result in mass extinctions and a phase transition of the environmental regime.

      Since the last ice age ended with the Younger Dryas, humanity has struggled to find metabolic concordance with its environment as new modes of production and class conflict arose. Friedrich Engels observed: 

    The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry of their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year and making possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy season. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature—but that we with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst and that all our mastery of it consist in the fact that we have the advantage of all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.1

    We can recognize that classless hunter-gatherer societies had a mode of production that could have lasted forever as it was technologically-bound to the necessity of sustainable resource consumption and replenishment. But a metabolic rift emerges at the outset of settlement, private property and class division. The soil is tilled, the population proliferates, wildlife is suppressed, waste and nutrients become dislocated by urbanization. While the ancients are forgiven for their lack of foresight toward unintended environmental consequences, the present situation reveals a unique contradiction: while capitalism affords us the science to decode nature’s laws, its momentum denies us the ability to abide them in any rational way.

    The expansionary logic of capitalist production is driven by market competition, the quest for profits and the dominance of exchange-value over use-value in economic relations. As labour and nature are the source of all values in capitalism, they are squeezed mercilessly for the surplus that sweats from their pores.2 The result is an economic system of deeply deformed priorities. Because the use-value of something is only evaluated in terms of what it can exchanged for, the capitalist economic system is unable to price a breathable atmosphere, a healthy ocean, an intact rainforest or an endangered species. On the contrary, minimizing production costs for the sake of profit dictates active harm to the ecosystems that underpin our biological existence. The reason why microplastics float free in our bloodstreams and millions of Amazonian acres disappear annually is because there is no profitable exchange that restricts the use of plastic or spares billions of trees from cattle ranches and sugarcane plantations. While the use-value of a livable biosphere is obvious, within the confines capitalist production both nature and people become venal objects, subordinate and abused.3  

    The systemic nature of environmental challenges are important here, lest one chalk them up to moral failings or inadequate education. For example, it is a consequence of capitalist production that every year 54 billion tons of annual emissions enter the atmosphere and 20 million tons of plastic flow into oceans. But this does not represent “a moral deficit of individual capitalists. They are obliged to follow such behaviour due to competition with other capitalists if they want to survive as capitalists. The decision to act in accordance with that blind drive appears rational.”4 Any attempt from the civil society to legislate better practices will likewise be met with a well-funded wall of oligarchic political resistance, rendering so much effort futile. And the emissions spewed into the atmosphere and plastic dumped into the oceans accelerates, each year more than the last, expanding in lockstep with the capitalist system itself. This is to say nothing of the emptying of aquifers, global deforestation, the hole in the ozone layer, acidifying oceans and the mass extinction of species simultaneously in motion.

    While Marx identified extreme disturbances in the Earth’s ecological metabolism due to industrial production, he did not view the metabolic rift as something unique to the capitalist mode as it is a common feature of all class societies, including the feudal and ancient slave economies. What capitalism has done is elevate the rift to the level of existential threat and, through a process of technological advance, it poses an opportunity to resolve global class conflict altogether. Classlessness, he writes, 

    is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man—the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.5

    To understand his conclusion, we can look to the long-simmering crisis of climate change as it relates to ruling class power. On the one hand, we have a faction of the ruling class which profits directly from fossil fuel combustion and has spent billions of dollars to propagandize the population into believing that there is no consequence to the 53 billion tons of nitrous oxide, methane and carbon dioxide emitted annually. This faction is seen prominently in the Koch Industries and ExxonMobils of the world.  Then there is the other faction of elites who ostensibly recognize the problem while hypocritically living lavish, emission-intensive lifestyles, pursuing egoistic conquests of outer space and contradictory public policy. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg fit into this category, with the latter repeatedly calling for action on climate change while treating himself to a 387-foot super yacht that spews 40 tons of carbon dioxide per hour at cruising speed. 

    Under the auspices of a ruling class engaged either in denialism or outright hypocrisy, what wisdom is the working public supposed to gather from any attempt to manage emissions? Emissions reduction is contextualized either as a outright conspiracy theory or an undue demand to sacrifice yet more of the economic pie—a pie which they produce and receive crumbs to eat.

    As it stands, “the emissions of the world’s millionaires alone would deplete 72 percent of the remaining carbon budget for staying with the 1.5°C [warming] limit,” but there is no talk of capping the individual emissions of the global elite.6 No action can be taken against an elite capitalist class at the helm of the political levers and in control of economic production. And still, 

    the consequences of not reducing emissions on the scale proposed by the IPCC would be calamitous. A 2°C increase could cause the Antarctic ice sheets to disintegrate resulting in up to a nine-meter rise in sea levels. A temperature increase of three degrees could raise sea levels by 25 meters, endangering world food production. This, as well as the melting of the Himalayan glaciers, could result in billions of climate refugees. An increase in carbon dioxide concentrations of 550 parts per million, a 4°C temperature increase, could raise sea levels by as much as seventy-five meters, inundating most coastal areas.7

    Imagine asking billions of working people and their progeny to risk all this disaster so that a meagre 1.5 percent of the world’s population may enjoy a plush existence, unfettered. This is the flex of ruling class power.

    It remains that a technologically advanced economy need not fly within the narrow horizon of commodified nature toward a ruthless pursuit of profit. New value forms can be discovered and asserted. The use-values of a liberated working class will include clean air and water, artistic and scientific progress, a free wild, medical discovery, creative innovation, automated production, leisure and abundance. Our 200,000-year history has shown that ecological ruin and ruling class power is not a feature of our species but an aberration to our story.

    Further reading: 

    Anita Waters, “Marx on the metabolic rift,” Monthly Review Online.

    —————


    1. Friedrich Engels quoted in John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (Monthly Review Press, 2000), 236. ↩︎

    2. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program. ↩︎

    3. Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 74. ↩︎

    4. Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (Monthly Review Press, 2017), 125. ↩︎

    5. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. ↩︎

    6. Matthias Schmelzer and Elena Hofferberth, “Democratic Planning for Degrowth,” Monthly Review, Vol. 75, No.4: 149. ↩︎

    7. Kent Klitgaard, “Planning Degrowth,” Monthly Review, Vol. 75, No. 3: 87. ↩︎