 energy. Waiting for real and meaningful solutions to emerge from governments guarantees humanity a desperate future and many species a short one. The raison d’être of capitalism is profit based on continual economic expansion.
Capitalism has, in theory and in practice, alienated humanity from nature by privatizing the land and making all things into commodities—even pollution itself. On this alienation from nature, Marx explains, “As for the farmer, the industrial capitalist and the agricultural worker, they are no more bound to the land they exploit than are the employer and the worker in the factories to the cotton and wool they manufacture; they feel an attachment only for the price of their production, the monetary product” .
The mentality expressed here results in the environmental catastrophe of climate change. The capitalists think of nature not as a vital part of life which must be protected, but as nothing more than a source of profit (the same way they view workers). This, in turn, leads them to inflict horrific damage upon the environment. This damage to the planet is not just because of population growth, as many proponents of capitalism would have you believe.
The U.S., for example, has less than 1/20th of the world’s people, yet it is responsible for nearly half the world’s accumulated emissions of CO2 . The U.S. has been the world’s largest capitalist economy since World War II. Its corporations pump out the oil, extract the copper, and cut down the forests . The Pentagon has directly harmed the environment with bombs, both atomic and conventional, its napalm and white phosphorus, its vast consumption of oil (the Navy is the world’s largest consumer), its energy-consuming bases in the deserts of the Middle East . Despite this, the Navy is made up of a relatively small number of people when compared to the US population as whole. This fact proves that population growth is not the primary factor in exacerbating climate change. Capitalist production has that dubious honor.
It is clear that capitalism is an economic system profoundly and irrevocably at odds with a sustainable planet, as it requires ever-greater material and energy throughput to keep expanding. According to a 2000 study carried out by five major European and U.S. research centers: “Industrial economies are becoming more efficient in their use of materials, but waste generation continues to increase…Even as decoupling between economic growth and resource throughput occurred on a per capita and per unit of GDP basis, overall resource use and waste flows to the environment continued to grow. We found no evidence of an absolute reduction in resource throughput. One half to three quarters of annual resource inputs to industrial economies are returned to the environment as wastes within a year” . (Emphasis mine)
Capitalism simultaneously and of necessity exploits the land and the people and sacrifices the interests of both on the altar of profit. Philosophically, the approach that capitalism takes to the environment, and the attitude it forces us to adopt, is one of separation and alienation. As a species we are forcibly cut off from the land, separated from nature, and alienated from coevolving with it. It’s an attitude amply summed up by Marx in volume 1 of Capital: “Capitalist production…disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil…. The social combination and organization of the labor processes is turned into an organized mode of crushing out the workmen’s individual vitality, freedom and independence.… Moreover, all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation