Greening Capitalism

Traducido por League of Internationalist Communists

Naturally, the bourgeoisie is also concerned about global warming. After all, the political, propagandistic, administrative, and management problems that can be caused by the constant influx of climate refugees are no small matter. Nor can we underestimate the market disruptions that extreme climate phenomena such as droughts, torrential rains, fires or earthquakes can cause by affecting infrastructures such as power lines or the condition of a given country’s motorways. Just as the imbalance in the balance of trade is worrying when importing food from other countries by the bucketload, because our crops can’t cope with the shortage of water due to the latest drought, or a cold wave that has come to us from the Arctic, or because torrential rains have washed away half the plantations. There is no denying that the bourgeoisie is worried about all this.

But in the end, the whole theatre of the United Nations and its numerous COPs (Conference of Parties) are not only about that. We will not be so original here, because the capitalists are not very original either: what do they care about? The rate of profit. And it has been falling for at least fifty years, and every solution they come up with only aggravates the problem. That’s not very original either. Capitalism does not escape its contradictions; it overcomes them momentarily only to find them redoubled soon afterwards. But the fact is that the rate of profit is falling, because the automation of production expels labour as if there were no tomorrow and there is less and less blood and sweat to exploit. As machines are more productive, prices fall, so there is no choice but to produce many more commodities to earn even what was earned before. This being the case, fewer human lives are exploited—at least in the factory, where those poor people dislocated from work will have to find some other means of earning their living—but raw materials and electricity will be used up aplenty. Moreover, as there are more goods, there are also more markets to be found, so trucks, ships and planes must be sent out, with the consequent fossil fuel consumption, because it’s a necessity to cross half the world in order to conveniently place the commodities.

So, if oil runs out, this will be a great problem; a great problem that, however, will not lead to a collapse, but to an ever more brutal capitalist catastrophe. Not only are production and transport costs of goods rising—in a context of ever-shrinking profits, a rise in operating costs for businesses is fatal—but in order to lower costs it is even more important to reduce the oil revenue that Saudi Arabia and Venezuela are taking and to clear the field of possible competitors, such that imperialist tensions are inevitable. Hence the United States is blowing up its own soil with fracking and the bourgeoisies of the major economic powers feel a sense of contradiction with the issue of climate change, because they reason that “every cloud has a silver lining”, and when the Arctic melts there is a whole world to be discovered: a quarter of the world’s undiscovered oil reserves, to be precise.

Faced with this problem, the idea of the “energy transition” has been gaining momentum in recent years. This transition has less to do with the bourgeoisie’s fear of climate change and more to do with the realisation that the rise in the price of fossil fuels is unstoppable and that those capitalist powers who manage to gain a foothold within the productive structure best suited to the new conditions will win the game. And this is not only because they will cut costs, gaining them a major competitive advantage and greater geopolitical autonomy from the oil, gas and coal producing countries, but also because whoever manages to develop technologically to be compatible with the new systems for the production and distribution of energy will be able to be the vanguard of a new niche in the world market and obtain the corresponding profits. This is what is driving Germany, for example, to invest ample sums of money in hydrogen energy production.

However, to make the energy transition it will be necessary to do away with transport based on fossil fuels, and pity to whomever tells the proletariat that not only their daily transport—which they rely upon to move around these monstrous cities that capital has created—but that all basic goods are going to increase in price because the government raises taxes or withdraws subsidies for diesel and petrol. At first, of course, the State tries to impose it in a crude way, but the protests soon become incessant. We can think of the struggles against the ‘gasolinazo’ in Mexico in 2017, the ‘gilets jaunes’ in France in 2018 or the revolts in Ecuador, Haiti or Lebanon throughout 2019. These tax hikes and withdrawal of subsidies, strongly recommended by the head of the IMF during COP25, are not so much aimed at getting everyone to stop using fossil fuels, but restricting their use to what really matters: once again, the rate of profit. In a context where diesel prices have possibly peaked, it is essential to redirect fossil fuel use to freight transport, and if the proletariat has to cycle to work, then so be it, because, of course, the electric car is a luxury for the rich.

As we said, at the beginning, States tried to impose this in a crude way, but with the wave of protests in which we find ourselves, it’s better not to stir up the hornet’s nest too much. This is how the idea of an energy transition with social-democratic leanings came about. The last great leap in capitalist valorisation, identified with Roosevelt’s New Deal, is taken as a reference point and painted green.

Perhaps, it is worth recalling that the post-war economic boom was due to an unprecedented leap in production encouraged by post-World War II reconstruction, i.e., capital’s economic exploitation of that veritable slaughter to which it gave rise in the name of democracy. This leap in production was “happily” accompanied by a much greater demand for labour, as well as policies which, by redistributing a few crumbs of the copious capitalist profits, made it possible to create mass consumption and thus to expand the market for ever-greater commodity production. These three factors did not coincide anymore. The next leap in production with the third industrial revolution not only did not increase the need for labour but drove it out of the central places of capitalist valorisation. That is why nobody, apart from a couple of politicians eager to swallow their own slogans for the next election contest, really believes that the energy transition will yield more jobs.

In fact, when the president of the European Commission repeats the vacuous mantra of “leaving no one behind”, she is not considering in the slighter how smart cities, with the degree of automation of traffic and energy distribution that they will necessarily entail, could possibly create more jobs than they eliminate, but rather about how much (money) it will cost to convince countries like Poland to abandon coal and not to compete unfairly with Germany with its lower production costs.

And so, the whole proposal of the European Green Pact and its American sibling, the Green New Deal, are both revealed to be exercises of political marketing in terms of their social and environmental aspects, and as an attempt to reform the productive structure of the United States and Europe with a view to adapting them to the new conditions imposed by the depletion of fossil fuels. If the former is pure ideological bait to attract banner-waving supporters wearing environmentalist caps, the latter is simply a futile effort to square the circle: to make the most resource hungry social system, the most wasteful of energy and resources in which human beings have ever lived, build a circular economy in which all energy comes from renewables, transport is fully electrified, industry works by making the most of recycling materials and reusing its own waste, and cities cease to be the monsters that devour energy, resources and human lives that they are today.

Of course, none of these tall promises made by the bourgeoisie are possible. There are a number of concrete facts that demonstrate this, such as the material impossibility of electrifying all transport, the EU’s own acknowledged dependence on natural gas and nuclear power for the energy transition itself, the economic unattractiveness of investing in renewables for capital—given the fall in the rate of profit. This explains the background to the wind power crisis in the United States and Germany, and the fact that in order to improve their greenhouse gas emission rates, the major economic powers can only outsource the most polluting industries to other, poorer countries.

But the facts are as far-reaching as they are. More important than giving a few examples is to understand how capitalism is structurally unable to do away with its ravenous nature. And this is not, as the degrowth crowd would have it, a problem of social complexity in the abstract. When the degrowth crowd argue that the only sustainable society would be one organised into autarkic, self-managed communes, what is asserted is that human community in a global sense is impossible, that internationalism was just a joke, and that everyone is on their own in a context of climate catastrophe, in which those who are lucky enough to live on safer territories had better be armed to the teeth to defend them. When one sees the scenario favoured by the pro-degrowth crowd, the “good” world order of US imperialism defended by some seems almost attractive by comparison.

What degrowth-ism affirms in reality is that the commodity is the only way for human beings to relate to one another as such. Therefore, the alternative is either commodity exchange or autarky—a false alternative, since autarky is impossible and leads logically to commodity exchange and war as inseparable phenomena. However, the crisis of capital is the most palpable demonstration that the commodity is incapable of managing the degree of social complexity that we have reached.

If the capitalist system is resource hungry, it is because producers work for an anonymous market that only knows or cares for social needs after the fact, which necessarily means producing more than is consumed and producing only for solvent consumers. Since the capitalist system, therefore, does not produce to satisfy needs but to feed its unstoppable machine of production for production’s sake, it can only waste material and human resources at ever increasing speed and destruction, as its exhaustion as a social system translates into a permanent flight forward.

Only an organic human community can relate organically to nature. Only a complex, globally organised society can rise to the challenges posed by the climate catastrophe. For this, it is not enough to combat the political slogans of the bourgeoisie that hide the same old exploitation, but also those visions that propose to wait for the fall of a system that, if it dies, will die by killing us. We are not very original, it is true: the only real alternative is revolution or the extinction of the species.