What is our collective way of life, throughout the world today? Whether you live in South Africa, Argentina, Germany, China, India, Egypt or the U.S. there is one way of life that is dominant: and that is “capitalism”. Capitalism is not just a mere way of doing business; it is not just a method or system for making money. It is a whole political, economic and cultural way of life that is able to encompass many different local forms of life (capitalism cuts across cultures and geographies: we are all the same in capitalism). But what is that way of life — what are its assumptions?
Have you ever wondered, as you order from Amazon from home, as you go out grocery shopping with your kids or your parents: where does all the plastic, the metal, the glass, the cardboard packaging come from and where will it end up? There’s such an amazing quantity of waste after you consume something — especially when you get that wonderful package from Amazon, wrapped in plastic with bubble wrapping protecting it, and the paper stuffed into the big cardboard box that finally contains your product, like a pearl in a gigantic oyster shell of wasted packaging materials. Have you ever wondered how long we can keep this kind of consumerism up? When is enough enough?
Well, this is the magic and the mystery of capitalism, isn’t it? There seems to be an endless stream of things to consume, and consumption of them is the whole point — and that, finally, is the logic of the whole thing: to produce in order to consume, to use. Capitalism makes us all into two kinds of person: a producer or maker of things (or provider of services), for which we are paid; and a consumer of the things and services made available to us at a cost. Yet, these things don’t come from nothing: raw materials (“inputs”) must be created in order to be used in the system: oil drilled or otherwise extracted; water drawn; metal ores mined; and so on and so on. Capitalism, as a system of production and consumption has no limits — there’s no definite point where it says “no, that’s enough, stop, we don’t need anymore, we’re done”. It’s in some sense unending, infinite. Yet, if that’s true, then it requires (1) infinite sources of energy and raw materials; (2) infinite or unlimited storage of its waste or garbage. Problem is that both (1) and (2) are false: all energy sources and raw materials are limited/finite, and eventually, you run out of storage for the waste you dump. But of course Capitalism, you might reply, doesn’t really need (1) and (2) to be actually unlimited, or infinite. It just needs to be practically so: there just needs to be so much of the energy or raw materials, and a slow discovery of new sources, that we can just go producing and consuming without worry. Problem is, at some point, this logic will fail. And we’ve begun to reach the precise limits to the system: the relentless extraction of raw materials and their use (mainly, by burning fossil fuels to power our Capitalist engine of economic growth and “prosperity”), which in turn produces waste materials that then pollute, cannot go on indefinitely into the future without actually beginning to destroy the whole system itself. In other words, as we pollute through the use of fossil fuels and the transformation of other raw materials into consumable goods and services, we’re destroying the very Planet on which we depend for life. This is a deadly contradiction.
I ask, then: can we go on happily producing and consuming without facing this absolute and deadly contradiction between Capitalism and the Climate? What does this contradiction mean — do we face an ultimatum: either Capitalism or planetary Life? Can we not have both? If we cannot have both our capitalist way of life and a non-deadly climate, which do you choose? If you choose planetary Life over Capitalism, what way of life must we contemplate adopting in order to live in such a way as to not be so profoundly ecologically destructive?
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