Capitalism is Killing Us (But It
Doesn’t Have To)

CJP: We have known about the effect of greenhouse gases since the mid-19th century, and some scientists began warning us of the potential risks of a hotter planet decades ago, even while there are still some who deny that climate change is happening or that human activity is behind the phenomenon of global warming. But is it enough to point to human activity as the cause of global warming? Shouldn’t we understand this crisis as resulting from the specific economic system that has been guiding economic life for the past five hundred years? And, if so, how exactly are capitalism and the climate crisis interconnected?

NC: There was no more enthusiastic cheerleader for the achievements of capitalism than Karl Marx, who did not, of course, fail to emphasize and explore its horrifying human and material consequences, in particular the “metabolic rift,” a concept on which John Bellamy Foster has elaborated extensively: the inherent tendency of capitalism to degrade the environment that sustains life.

In considering the impact of capitalism, and the options it may make available, it is worthwhile to bear in mind the actual nature of the systems to which this rather vague term is applied. In the spectrum of major state-capitalist societies (personally, I’d be inclined to include the USSR, but put that aside), the US is at the extreme end of capitalist orthodoxy. No other country so exalts what economist Joseph Stiglitz, 25 years ago, criticized as “the ‘religion’ that markets know best” (exalts in words at least; practice is a different matter).

Consider, then, its economic system throughout its history and today—leaving aside the state role in emptying the national territory of the native scourge and stealing half of Mexico in a war of aggression, thus providing the US with historically unparalleled natural advantages.

The foundation of US economic development (and of Britain as well), was the most vicious system of slavery in human history, qualitatively different from anything that came before. It created “the empire of cotton” (Sven Beckert’s apt term): the basis for manufacturing, finance, commerce. A rather severe intervention in the holy market. The story continues. The Hamiltonian system of high tariffs enabled industry to develop domestically, as the newly liberated colonies firmly rejected Adam Smith’s recommendation to keep to sound economics, producing primary products and adopting superior British manufactures in accord with their comparative advantage.

It was also helpful to take superior British technology in ways now bitterly condemned as “robbery” when others do it. With justice, economic historian Paul Bairoch describes the US as “the mother country and bastion of protectionism,” well into the mid-20th century, when its economy had advanced so far beyond the rest that “free trade” seemed to be a good bargain—imitating what Britain had done a century earlier. From an extensive review, Bairoch concludes that “it is difficult to find another case where the facts so contradict a dominant theory [as the theory] concerning the negative impact of protectionism.”

Skipping a lot, the American system of mass production that amazed the world—quality control, interchangeable parts, Taylorism—was mostly developed in government armories and military installations. Moving on to the present, what is misleadingly called “the military-industrial complex,” more accurately today’s high-tech economy, is substantially the outcome of taxpayer-funded R&D extended through a creative, costly, and risky period, often for decades before it is handed over to private enterprise for adaptation to the market and profit.

It’s a system that might be called “public subsidy, private profit,” taking many forms, including procurement and far more. That includes technology we use now, computers and the internet, but much more.

It is not quite that simple of course, and this barely skims the surface, but the relevant point for our discussion is that so-called capitalism can readily accommodate major initiatives of industrial policy, public subsidy, state initiative, and market interference, and has done so throughout its history. The implications for today’s ecological crisis should be clear.

To return to the specific question: basic elements of capitalism, both ideological and institutional, lead directly to destruction of the basis of organized social life—if unconstrained. We see that dramatically every day.

Take the well-studied case of the huge energy conglomerate ExxonMobil. From the 1960s, its scientists were in the lead in revealing the extreme threat of global warming. In 1988, geophysicist James Hansen issued the first major public warning of the extent of the threat. ExxonMobil management reacted by initiating a program of denialism taking many forms: typically raising doubts, since outright denial is too easily refuted. That continues to the present.

Recently ExxonMobil, along with the Koch brothers, filed a formal complaint with NASA objecting to its reporting that 97 percent of climate scientists agree on human-caused global warming. The 97 percent consensus is well established by very careful studies, but a crucial element of the denialist strategy has been to sow doubt about it, with no little success: only 20 percent of Americans realize that over 90 percent of climate scientists accept the overwhelming consensus.

All of this is done with full knowledge that they are engaged in pure deceit, with severely malignant consequences.

Even more malignant than the denialism is practice. ExxonMobil is in the lead in expanding fossil fuel production. Unlike some other oil majors, it does not want to waste even small sums on sustainable energy: “In a March [2014] report on carbon risk to shareholders,” the business press reports, “ExxonMobil (XOM) argued that its laserlike focus on fossil fuels is a sound strategy, regardless of climate change, because the world needs vastly more energy and the likelihood of significant carbon reductions is ‘highly unlikely.’ ”

In extenuation, it can be argued that ExxonMobil is only being more honest than its competitors in following capitalist logic. The same article reports the decision of Chevron to close its small and profitable sustainable energy projects because destroying the environment is more profitable. Others are not all that different. Royal Dutch Shell right now is celebrating the establishment of a huge plant to produce non-biodegradable plastic, in the certain knowledge that it will destroy the oceans.

The same cynicism also prevails elsewhere in the ruling class. The CEO of JPMorgan Chase understands as much about the extreme threat of global warming as other educated people—and in private life may well be a contributor to the Sierra Club. But he has been pouring huge resources into developing fossil fuels, including the most dangerous of them, Canadian tar sands—also a favorite of the energy industries.

It’s easy to expand the list. All are following impeccable capitalist logic, knowing exactly what the consequences are, but in a certain sense having no individual choice: if the CEO chooses otherwise, he will be replaced by someone who will do the same thing. The problem is institutional, not merely individual.

To this grim list we can add the regular euphoric articles in the finest journals on how fracking has propelled the US once again to the championship in production of the fossil fuels that will destroy us, achieving “energy independence”— whatever that is supposed to be—and providing the US with leverage to pursue its (by definition benign) international objectives without concern about energy markets, like seeking to impose maximal suffering on the people of Iran and Venezuela. Occasionally there are a few words about environmental consequences: fracking in Wyoming may harm water supplies for ranchers. But one will search in vain for a comment on what this means for the future of life.

Again, in extenuation, we must recognize that to refer to such side issues as human survival would violate the canon of “objectivity” and introduce “bias”: the story assigned by the editors is fracking and its contribution to US dominance of fossil fuel production. So survival must be left to the rare opinion column. The effect of course is to instill more deeply the sense of “don’t worry.” If there’s a problem, human ingenuity will figure out how to deal with it.

It might finally be worth noting that not only the management of major corporations but also the most extreme denialists are well aware of the impending disaster to which they are contributing. The capitulation to the Koch brothers a decade ago is one illustration. Or the president, who understands enough to appeal to the government of Ireland for permission to build a wall to protect his golf course from rising sea levels. Some things matter.

We can add finally a prime candidate for the most astonishing document in human history, produced by the Trump administration in August 2018: a 500-page environmental impact statement by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which concluded that no new restrictions are needed for automotive emissions.

The authors had a sound argument: their assessment concluded that by the end of the century temperatures will have risen 4oC above preindustrial levels, about twice the level that the scientific community regards as catastrophic. Automotive emissions are only one contributor to total catastrophe. Accordingly, since we are going off the cliff anyway in the near future, why not drive freely while the world burns, far outdoing Nero?

If one can find a document of comparable malevolence in the historical record, I would be interested in knowing about it. Even the January 1942 Wannsee Conference of the Nazi leadership called only for the destruction of European Jewry, not of most human and animal life on Earth.

As usual, the study was released and circulated with virtually no comment.

The Trump administration argument, of course, assumes that the criminal insanity of the Republican Party leadership is shared universally, so that nothing will be done to avert catastrophe. But, putting aside the attitudes, for which there are no appropriate words in the language, what is relevant here is their clear recognition of what they are doing as they pull out all stops to increase the use of destructive fossil fuels and fill the overstuffed pockets of their prime constituency, wealth and private power.

In brief, capitalist logic, left unconstrained, is a recipe for destruction. However, a simple consideration of time scales reveals that the existential issues must be addressed within the framework of state-capitalist systems. These accommodate radical market interferences and major state initiatives. To develop these options is one crucial task of social movements. And another, in parallel, is to undermine this logic at its roots and to prepare the ground for a sane society.

Opportunities abound. I already mentioned Tony Mazzocchi’s initiatives. For them to have succeeded was within the bounds of realism, and remains so. And there are others. Let’s try a thought experiment. Suppose that in 2008, when the Great Recession struck, a president had been in office who was not bound by strict capitalist logic; someone like Bernie Sanders, perhaps. Suppose further that the president had congressional support and was backed by activist popular movements. There were options.

One would have been to honor the congressional legislation that provided taxpayer bailouts for the financial institutions who were responsible for the crash as well as relief for their victims who lost their homes. That possibility was dismissed: only the first commitment was considered worthy of fulfillment, a decision that infuriated Neil Barofsky, the special Treasury Department inspector general charged with overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. (Barofsky later wrote an angry book outlining the crime.) Evidently, a different choice was possible.

But let’s be more imaginative, while still not straying from the real world. When the crisis struck, Obama virtually nationalized the US auto industry. This major part of the US industrial system was in substantial measure in government hands. That step too opened up options. One, adopted reflexively, was to return the industry to the former owners and managers, perhaps under new names, who would then proceed as before to produce cars for profit. Another option would have been to turn the industry over to stakeholders, the workforce and community, effectively socializing a core part of the US industrial system.

Perhaps, considering human life instead of mere profit, they might have decided to reorient production, realizing that efficient mass transportation yields a better life than spending hours a day fuming in traffic jams—and also alleviates the impending environmental threat in no small way.

Socializing a central part of the US industrial system in the real sense—placing it under worker and community control—would be a complex enterprise, with many facets, and would likely have large-scale effects beyond revitalizing the labor movement and inspiring other developments. Is that a utopian dream, beyond imagination? It doesn’t seem so. Such opportunities arise constantly, even if on a lesser scale.

In recent years worker-ownership and cooperative initiatives have been proliferating. The Next System Project, initiated by Gar Alperovitz, is coordinating and initiating many such efforts, establishing the basis for a future free and democratic society within the present one, Mikhail Bakunin’s prescription. And considerably larger goals can be realistically contemplated.

We should also not overlook the potential of popular activism and pressures. To mention a few examples from early 2020, in a report to clients that was leaked to the environmental activist organization Extinction Rebellion, JPMorgan Chase revealed deep concerns about climate warming. The bank, reported the Guardian, “warned clients that the climate crisis threatens the survival of humanity and that the planet is on an unsustainable trajectory [with] irreversible consequences” unless the trajectory changes. It also recognized its own investment strategies must change because of the “reputational risks” of fossil fuel investment.

The phrase “reputational risks” refers to public pressures. Changing the investment strategies of “the world’s largest financier of fossil fuels” would be no slight achievement.

To mention another case, the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, announced in February that the new Bezos Earth Fund would provide $10 billion in grants to scientists and activists to fund their efforts to fight “the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share.” His announcement came, according to the Washington Post, “one day before company employees—members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice—planned to walk off the job in protest, saying the retailer and tech giant needs to do more to reduce its carbon footprint,” and on the same day that PBS’s Frontline was airing an investigation of the “Amazon Empire,” examining the company’s practices. Again, the result of public activism.

There are many opportunities to have a meaningful impact on consciousness and practice.

C.J. Polychroniou, Noam Chomsky, and Robert Pollin

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona. Author of American Power and the New Mandarins and Manufacturing Consent (with Ed Herman), among many other books, he is a linguist, historian, philosopher, and cognitive scientist who has risen to prominence in the American consciousness as a political activist and the nation’s foremost public intellectual.

Robert Pollin is Distinguished University Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He is also the founder and President of PEAR (Pollin Energy and Retrofits), an Amherst, MA-based green energy company operating throughout the United States. His books include The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy (co-authored 1998); Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity (2003); An Employment-Targeted Economic Program for South Africa (co-authored 2007); A Measure of Fairness: The Economics of Living Wages and Minimum Wages in the United States (co-authored 2008), Back to Full Employment (2012), Greening the Global Economy (2015), and Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal (co-authored 2020).

C J Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist who has has taught and worked in universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. He is the author of Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky on Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change (Haymarket Books, USA; Penguin Books, UK).