The Root Grows Deeper than Capitalism- My Goddamn Sociology Essay

Ecology and capitalism are antithetical. Ecology deals with natural systems dependent on equilibrium, and capitalism is a process driven by the motor of growth and accumulation. These fundamental differences preclude any reconciliation between the two; ecological problems cannot even begin to be seriously addressed within the framework of capital. But the ultimate ecological question has to do with the root causes of environmental problems, and the root grows even deeper than capitalism—possibly as deep as civilization itself. This is why ecological problems are so difficult to effectively address.

This is not to suggest that capitalism is not the greatest obstacle to effective ecological solutions; it surely is. Since it is dependent on growth as its number one priority, it must be argued that capitalism is in fact the most ecologically destructive system realizable. This is because capital expansion recognizes no material limits until it is too late, and limits cannot be imposed on it without extreme economic drawbacks. Institutional forces and economic concerns necessitate capital accumulation, which is an important reason why agreements such as the Kyoto protocol (rejected by the US) are bound to be ineffective[i], and why oil production protocols are not even a serious topic of debate.

When leaders in the seats of power do take environmental concerns seriously, the proposed solutions often are ones that further the interests of capital. The question is rarely how to make society more sustainable, but how to make capitalism sustainable. The interest is in sustaining development as opposed to sustainable development—which basically means that the emphasis lies on development, not sustainability. For example, protecting patches of forestland in the short term leaves more resources to be exploited over the long term; to better manage resources is to more efficiently manage inputs for the treadmill of production. Such foresight cannot be accomplished with market mechanisms alone, but depends upon regulations devised by the collusion between state and industry; state planning smoothes over the cyclical crises of capital, mitigates the falling rate of profit, and leads to more rational capitalist exploitation. But even the rationality of the state capitalism that has prevailed today (assuming it even is more rational than a free market) cannot do any more than hold back impending ecological catastrophe for a while longer. This is because the system is still dependent on growth, even if regulation exists to slow the process down (at the expense of individual firms in order to strengthen the long-term prospects for capital’s overall domination.)

Capitalism can therefore be classified as an inherently decadent system.[ii] Natural limits to growth will eventually be the cause of a final crisis of accumulation and perhaps the downfall of capitalism as we know it, and when this point is reached the environment will have been pillaged and abused beyond human use. The fact is that ecological systems cannot simply reproduce at ever increasing rates to fulfill the needs of capital expansion. As resources grow scarce, the supply of the products created with the resource drops, prices rise accordingly, and therefore more incentive to produce is created. So the crisis of reproduction is worsened by capitalist mechanisms that inflict this vicious cycle whereby, just when society most needs to curb production, the incentive kicks in to increase it and wipe out natural life-support systems even sooner.[iii]

But of course, capitalism is not the sole cause of ecological degradation. The abolition of the capitalist commodity system, whether it is the state capitalist form or the free market, is indeed a prerequisite for the establishment of a more sustainable, livable society, but other issues must also be addressed, issues that extend beyond the impact of capitalism. For instance, most technologies are not neutral. The automobile, for example, is necessarily ecologically destructive in any context. Cars are responsible for two thirds of the carbon emissions in the US, they burn one third of all the energy, and produce fifty percent of the methane and forty percent of the nitrogen oxides. Even assuming a car could be created with zero emissions, it would still pollute at least a third as much as it currently does, because about a third of the environmental impact of automobiles occurs during production. Automobiles also demand complex road systems, which bisect natural corridors and human communities as well as covering 38.4 acres of potential wild space/farmland. These roads must often be salted, too, which contributes to desertification and salinization.[iv] So the automobile is a good example of a technology that is ecologically undesirable in any socio-political context.

Along with technology, domination and hierarchy should be recognized as relating directly to ecological issues as well. Murray Bookchin argues that humankind’s domination of nature arose in parallel with the institutional domination of humans, and the two are therefore fundamentally connected. Indeed, hierarchically ordered societies go hand in hand with ecological destruction because the values of domination cross over between social spheres and natural relations.[v] A conception of a social ecology is consequently necessary to connect environmental and social issues, and Bookchin provides his own view that

What renders social ecology so important in comparing ecosystems to societies is that it decisively challenges the very function of hierarchy as a way of ordering reality, of dealing with differentiation and variation- with "otherness" as such. Social ecology ruptures the association of order with hierarchy. It poses the question of whether we can experience the "other," not hierarchically on a "scale of one to ten" with a continual emphasis on "inferior" and "superior," but ecologically, as variety that enhances the unity of phenomena, enriches wholeness, and more closely resembles a food-web than a pyramid.[vi]

In other words, more horizontally organized societies exist in a more harmonious state with nature. Also, in hierarchic societies, the powerful and privileged can live in exclusive abundance while the less empowered are forced to accept and bear the environmental consequences of the overabundance produced; environmental inequalities are not limited to capitalism, but will arise in any system of power. Only in a society free from domination will it be impossible for groups to trash the environment and force others to bear the burden.

Given the huge ecological downsides of technology and domination, the sustainability of civilization itself must even be questioned. Certainly, the history of civilization has been the history of (resistance to) the state (i.e. hierarchy and domination) and technology, because civilization is the agent of domestication that historically has brought together technology and hierarchy as a means of control. So until examples of libertarian civilizations can be more or less established, there must be a degree of skepticism about the liberatory potentialities of civilization itself. Such an attitude need not lead one to conclude that primitivism is desirable, but just to recognize the possibility that civilization itself may not be sustainable.[vii] Arnold Toynbee may very well be correct when he says that every civilization is bound to collapse from the contradictions it creates. We can therefore speak not only of the decadence of capitalism, but of civilization itself.

So capitalism is not the root of environmental problems today, and this must be conceded so that we may recognize that the abolition of capitalism is not an automatic reprieve from ecological concerns. Domination, technology, and civilization (which is the matrix of domestication which unites the former two principles) must be seen as the root problems and critiqued accordingly. But capitalist mechanisms and institutions together power the motor that pushes civilization’s contradictions with nature to the extreme, and therefore they must be fully transcended before a sustainable society can begin to emerge. The deeper question may be whether civilization is sustainable, and options here must be weighed appropriately, but the anti-ecological drive of capitalism cannot be denied. A revolution against capital is not the end, but the beginning of a push towards an ecological society.

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[i] Most of the arguments here relating to the contradictions between the necessity of capitalist growth and the finiteness of natural resources can be found in John Bellamy Foster’s Ecology Against Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review, 2002.

[ii] Numerous economists including Marx have commented upon the decadence of capitalism, but it is usually equated with the strictly economic crisis of over-accumulation. It seems that the real threats to capitalism, which adds new meaning to the slogan Socialism or Barbarism, are the very natural limitations which economists tend to ignore.

[iii] The crisis of reproduction is an idea borrowed from Andre Gorz’s Ecology as Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1980. 20-28.

[iv] All the statistics on the environmental impact of the automobile shown here are taken from Jane Holtz Kay’s Asphalt Nation. University of California Press: Los Angeles, 1997. 80-99.

[v] Murray Bookchin develops his theory of the origins of domination in The Ecology of Freedom. Oakland: AK Press, 2005. He elaborates on themes relating to hierarchy, society, and nature in Post-Scarcity Anarchism. Berkely: Ramparts Press, 1971. and The Modern Crisis. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986.
[vi] The Modern Crisis. 66-67.
[vii] It certainly is not necessary to adopt the absolutist views of primitivists such as John Zerzan that civilization must be rejected in its entirety. I believe it has yet to be adequately shown that civilization is inherently unsustainable, while capitalism has proven itself so almost by definition. Additionally, primitivism is not desirable to me, and the material preconditions for primitivism do not exist unless 95 percent of the global population dies off.