Ed Kashi
Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything argues capitalism must fall in order to save the planet.
One of the beloved traditions of the season A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens celebrates the redemption of an iconic greedy capitalist — Ebenezer Scrooge. One hundred and seventy-five years after Scrooge opened his heart for Tiny Tim we are still debating the possibility of redemption for this particular economic system.
Few love capitalism but many are resigned to its reign because “there is [seemingly] no alternative” as Jim Stanford explains in Economics for Everyone: A Short Guide to the Economics of Capitalism. Though many of us own stocks and have them in our pension plan portfolios the capitalist class comprised of only about five per cent of the population own and control the lion’s share of productive assets. Through the limited liability corporation — Ford Cargill Exxon and the like — capitalists put these assets to work.
What makes capitalism such a dynamo? Its defining features are greed growth and the valuation of human beings solely on the basis of what they can produce.
Capitalism is driven by greed. It cannot comprehend the concept of “enough.” Greed is undoubtedly a part of human nature but so are compassion and co-operation. Capitalism nurtures greed and makes it a virtue celebrating the Gates Bransons and Buffets who master it.
Capitalism demands that every corner of the planet every community every ecosystem be available for exploitation. Like a vampire’s appetite for blood capitalism withers without access to cheap resources land and labour and will do whatever it takes to acquire them. Colonialism was one manifestation of this insatiable drive. Another is the constant hunt for a good deal on collectively owned assets — health care is a prime example — with the threadbare argument that private enterprise is always and everywhere more efficient than collective ownership.
Capitalism dehumanizes. Individuals are simply one factor of production whose cost is to be minimized. At the extreme as journalist Andrew Nikiforuk documents in Energy of Slaves abolition of slavery was fought to the bitter end by plantation owners who feared it would lower return on investment. Unlivable minimum wages are a contemporary manifestation of this dehumanization.
Capitalism is relentless in its subversion of democracy in pursuit of its self-interest. In The Trouble with Billionaires Linda McQuaig chronicles the endemic collusion between the Canadian political establishment and the capitalist class — for example enshrining capital gains policies so that wealthy investors pay less tax on what their money earns than working people do. In the U.S. democracy is under siege as a result of court decisions granting corporations rights of persons to spend unlimited amounts for favoured candidates.
Blind growth is the lifeblood of capitalism. Profit leads to investment leading to more profit and so it goes. A CEO who ignores the profit-investment-growth formula is likely to be devoured by competitors. What is gained in efficiency is merely plowed back into still more resource exploitation and production.
Faced with the looming satiation of needs in the ’50 and ’60s the advertising industry so adeptly portrayed by Don Draper and the “madmen” had to be created to manufacture desire and sustain the growth.
Thomas Picketty’s Capital in the 21st Century is perhaps the most celebrated contemporary critique of capitalism. He argues that left to its own devices capitalism generates staggering levels of inequality demanding an ever-increasing share of the growth it generates.
In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein stakes her position unambiguously: capitalism is the problem and no less than the survival of human civilization depends on finding a better way.
Celebrated environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert and energy expert Mark Jaccard well-known climate-change crusaders are dismissive of Klein’s argument. Climate change is the existential threat; there is no time for anti-capitalist ideological diversions; and if capitalists like the Waltons — the first family of Walmart — can pitch in to save the planet so be it.
Klein argues that we will never build a global consensus to meet the challenge of climate change guided by an economic system that breeds inequality and by definition must grow relentlessly at a compound rate or wither.
Capitalism has proven to be an amazing engine of economic growth and has brought humanity unimagined material abundance but it has come at the expense of equality and the debasing of the rest of creation. In an era of uneconomic growth and soul-destroying excesses of material consumption we need a new economic operating system one capable of confronting the existential crises of our time: inequality and ecological collapse.
So where do you stand on this chicken-and-egg question — capitalism or climate change? Klein has done a great service by putting the question on the table. No room for sacred cows in the confrontation with climate change.
God bless us one and all.
Noel Keough is co-founder of Sustainable Calgary Society and assistant professor of Sustainable Design at the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Environmental Design.
