What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism by Fred Magdoff & John Bellamy Foster

Author:Fred Magdoff & John Bellamy Foster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monthly Review Press New York
Published: 2011-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

The Inversion of the Real

The capitalist system, since it worships what Rachel Carson called “the gods of profit and production” rather than real needs, is unable to supply all people with the essential requirements of a decent life, or, in some cases, life itself.14 This derives from the fact that capitalism is inherently an alienated system, in which those on the receiving end of the system measure themselves by their distance not only from the rest of the world’s population but also from nature itself, glorying in the “conquest of nature.” It is a world turned upside down: one that places abstract value above human beings, making it, and not the living, creative forces of nature and humanity, the measure of what is material and productive.

It follows that the various ways of “reforming” capitalism that are promoted by often well-meaning, practical people, who are trying to change things within the parameters of what is allowed by the system, are little more than intellectual contortions: people trying to get around or smooth over basic features of the system because in their eyes a real alternative is unthinkable. In what Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay call the “inversion of what is real,” capitalism is seen as more real than the environment; and hence it is capitalism that needs to be saved in the context of the environmental crisis, as opposed to the earth’s environment itself.15

Not surprisingly, then, the dominant strategies with respect to global warming to be found in environmental circles are concerned not with preserving the planet but with preserving capitalism, the very system that is destroying the earth as we know it. In a speech calling for “urgent action to fight global warming,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said: “We must be actively engaged in confronting the global challenge of climate change, which is a serious threat to development everywhere.”16 In this view, it is not capitalist development, that, by promoting global warming, constitutes a threat to the earth’s environment and its inhabitants, but rather global warming that constitutes a threat to capitalist development. What nearly all mainstream solutions to the global environmental problem have in common, as Jensen and McBay write, is that

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