Capitalism Is Not Sustainable

The Conservatives state the obvious, that Canada has not met its Kyoto targets. They then dismiss the targets as impossible to meet so why bother trying. But the fact is that the world has also missed its Kyoto targets.

Greenhouse emissions grow more rapidly

Greenhouse gas emissions have been increasing four times as fast as in the 1990s, giving added urgency to international talks on climate change. Research carried out for Unesco found on Friday that the rate of increase in emissions from burning fossil fuels between 2000 and 2005 was four times that between 1990 and 2000.

The reason? Globalization and the spread of fordist production models of capitalism.

The accelerated rise is a result of rapid growth in developing economies such as China, India and Brazil, as well as the failure of developed countries such as the US to mitigate their greenhouse gas output. Even in countries such as the UK, which is on target to meet its Kyoto commitment to cut emissions by 2012 by 12.5 per cent compared with 1990 levels, emissions have been rising in recent years.

Ironically theConservatives are partially right, the solution is not more Kyoto but the elimination of capitalism. Since the 'scientific' evidence shows captialism is not sustainable, but the very cause of global warming, either in its monopoly corporate model or it's state capitalist model.

Paul Crutzen, professor of chemistry at the Max Plank Institute for Chemistry in Germany and a Nobel Prize winner, said: “The jump in emissions is remarkable. One would expect a smoother transition but it seems there has been a tremendous shift in the past five years.

The lower rate in the 1990s was most likely due to the collapse of the communist regime. Unfortunately, once emissions go up it’s very hard to bring them down
again.”

Capitalism is a system that is unique, it is not merely an economic system but a system that requires production of value, not use value; that is material goods, but exchange value. In order to continue to make 'profits', interest, credit, exchange rates,etc. it must conitually expand and grow. Capitalism is rapacious growth for its own sake.

No reform of capitalism, no exchange of carbon credits, no green technology can save the planet from captials dominion.

Only we can. The Internationale, speaks of the Working Class, the proletariat, becoming the human race.

Arise, the damned of the earth,
Arise, prisoners of hunger,
For reason thunders in its crater,
It is the eruption of the end!
Let us make a blank slate of the past,
Army of slaves, arise, arise!
The world is changing at the base,
We who have been nothing, let's be everything!
|: This is the final struggle
Let us gather, and tomorrow
The Internationale
Will be mankind! :|

As long as the class system exists, as long as we work as cogs in the global capitalist machine, we are doomed to planetary ecological destruction. When we recognize our interests as a species, as the human race and abolish the class society and capitalism only then will we be able to save the planet. Otherwise we will continue to be trapped in the no sum game of jobs or the environment, short term gain for long term pain.

Real class conciousness is planetary conciousness, species conciousness, which is why Marx declared that for the destruction of capialism to occur we need to abolish the proletariat, thus we need to abolish class relations, the very social structure of capitalism; producer, worker, consumer, owner, employee, all of these relations reduce our human-ness, and thus our species being.

And as such these social relations of capitalism are poisioning the planet. Not bad corporations or negligent nation sates, but the very social relationships we share under and through capitalism.

The German Social Democrats hoped that capitalism would evolve into socialism, the revolutionary social democrats of the Third International thought a revolution in production would change capitalism into socialism.

But that has not occured. Because the socialism they envisioned was not socialism but a better reformed capitalism. A friendlier nicer capitalism. We need to abolish capitalism, and create a society based on our common humanity, of production for use not exchange. That is real socialism,the abolition of the wage system and that is the only solution to the environmental crisis that faces our species and all other species on the planet. Anything less will reduce us in the next century to barbarism.

The choice is clear Socialism or Barbarism.

Also See

Kyoto

A Critique of Kyoto Capitalism Is NOT Sustainable

Socialism

industrial ecology

Social Ecology.

Green Capitalism



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