ect of capitalist industrialisation on nature as well as on society. Both Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of the Communist Manifesto in 1848, closely studied and followed science in all fields.
Engels outlined over one hundred years ago the contradictions between an exploitative, short-term relationship of humanity to nature and the long-term problems that would inevitably engender: “Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centers 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, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, 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 of nature—but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage of all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly” .
Today, many governments are overtly committed to militarism to extend the economic reach of their own national group of capitalists. All mainstream predictions by the United Nations and the International Energy Agency point toward growing worldwide use of fossil fuel 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