This year, in Paris, 196 nations signed an
agreement to curb carbon dioxide emissions and ‘save’ the world from the brink
of complete environmental disaster. However, the intention behind the
corralling of the representatives of all the nation states under one roof is
better understood in relation to the state of class-struggle, rather than the
state of the natural environment. The fact that capitalism is broaching
the issue of global warming is a telling sign of its internal fear of the
global shift of the working-class towards the left. Capitalism does not see the
environmental crisis as a capital accumulation crisis, but fears the growing
anti-capitalism movement that has gripped the heart of the global environmental
movement. At least at the surface level, capitalism wants to appear to have the
solutions to global warming and to pacify this dangerous and burgeoning
working-class movement.
Capital has a contradictory-unity relation to
nature. Just as every commodity has a contradictory-unity relation within it
(having both use-value and market set exchange-value). Within capitalism
nature, is viewed as a large store of potential use-values (both things and
processes) that can be used in the production and realization of commodities.
Capital produces and destroys nature to fit the needs of the market all the way
to a molecular level (DNA sequencing of crops such as the soya bean). In short,
capital sees nature as a massive “gasoline station”. There is no room in this
definition of nature for humane distribution of the use-values in nature. What
is congealed in this definition is the cold process of capital circulation and
accumulation and above all, profit. By congregating 196 nation-state
representatives it does not breathe humanity into capital’s definition of
nature.
Capital accumulation is not in crisis due to global
warming, because capital profits from both destroying nature and from producing
technologies that help fix it. In fact capital has a tendency to create “needs”
in order to profit from fulfilling them. This is especially the case when you
consider the big business that has sprouted in the environmental technologies.
This includes everything from solar energy to the technologies designed to
clean the oceans of the toxic chemical and human waste. In China, air,
something which has the ultimate use-value for every human being, is bottled
and sold for profit. Carbon trading, another fictitious capital market, is
generating real profit. This fictitious capital market has done nothing to curb
carbon dioxide emissions, however the profit that is produced is real, since
money stores value, in large quantities it also has with it social power. This
social power is ultimately used in the context of global class-relations and
for the oppression of the working-class.
Further support to the argument, is to view the
environmental movement in the context of neoliberalism. For the last four
decades since Reagan and Thatcher, the welfare state, a working-class
achievement, has been dismantled and sold in the private market. Unions and
working-class associations have been repressed through globalization and trade
treaties. The working-class globally has been repressed. All the while
corporations have been granted larger and larger freedom from the state both in
taxes and in laws that control them. Today, TTIP is what NAFTA was several
decades ago. This year, for the first time, an oil company has sued the
American government for lost profits up to 22 Billion dollars. This is the
context that the Paris agreement takes place in. Neoliberalism has spent four
decades deteriorating the power of the state and creating a “free” market
playground for itself. Today corporations have power over governments like
never before. In this context it doesn’t make sense for capital to return this
power to the state.
The solution to the environmental crisis cannot be found in a market economy. Even if capitalism “cleans” the air, it will only be as far as it does not danger its profits, nothing more and nothing less. As long as nature is defined under an exchange-value relation, basic human need to breathe, eat and drink in a clean world will come secondary to profits. Capitalism has never shied away from killing scores of people for a profit motive, and it will not see the human tragedy in aftermath of large storms and rising sea levels as a reason to fix the environment. Only in a world where humanity is not plagued by the insanity of capital accumulation, and nature is defined rightly for its use-value rather than exchange-value, can real sustainable change take place.
Chia Barsen
www.chiabarsen.com
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