Groucho Marxism

The consequences of climate change are hitting us squarely in the face. Temperatures are soaring, drought conditions are spreading, and wildfires are raging across the UK and other countries around the globe. The world is quite literally burning. Meanwhile millions of workers are forced to live and work in sweltering heat, in the knowledge that extreme heat events are the new normal. Yet those with their hands on the levers of power are doing little to help the situation. Politicians have demonstrated time and again that they serve the interests of the super-rich and will not act to save our futures, despite the fact that green technology that would alleviate the crisis is now readily available and is becoming cheaper all the time.

In a previous blog post I explained how the United Nations Climate Change Conferences, or COPs, have made no meaningful progress in tackling climate change. Despite the consistent failures of these meetings, capitalist politicians claim they are doing what they can to prevent global warming. So what’s going on here? One issue is that the methods put forward to solve climate change and other environmental problems by capitalists and their academic lackeys, neoclassical economists, are often based on the so-called ‘property rights’ approach. This relies on direct negotiations between parties who own property and results in an efficient solution for these property owners, but not for society as a whole.

An alternative approach put forward by capitalists is to control emissions through the price system, by introducing eco-taxes. The idea is that increasing the price of polluting resources will create an incentive to use them less and seek substitutes. The task then is to put a monetary value on the cost of global warming. The problem is that it is very difficult to meaningfully measure this cost in monetary terms. It must be estimated by a roundabout route which involves establishing a so-called ‘shadow’ market value, which is related to how much a consumer is willingness to pay to avoid environmental ‘bads’. This can only be properly assessed by considering future generations, whose willingness to pay could vary dramatically. Of course it is impossible to do that in practice.

Another approach that has been put forward by capitalists involves trading pollution permits. These permits are issued by governments to corporations who can then freely trade them on the market. This is often seen by capitalists as preferable to eco-taxes, which they regard as a dangerously ‘socialist’ idea. But in truth, all the methods put forward by neoliberals to solve the climate crisis – the property rights approach, eco-taxes, and permit trading – suffer from the same fundamental drawback: namely, they don’t work. This is despite the fact that the long-term costs of global warming are generally agreed to far exceed the immediate costs of mitigation. So why do capitalists find it so difficult to come up with a workable solution?

In the past it was much easier for governments to tackle environmental issues as they were largely restricted within national boundaries. That is manifestly not the case with global warming. Moreover, antagonisms between countries now are greater than they were 100 years ago when there were just a handful of dominant world powers. A useful concept to understand the factors preventing meaningful agreement being reached on global warming is imperialism, as defined by Vladimir Lenin in his 1917 work Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Lenin identified five features that characterise the imperialist era: concentration of capital, merging of finance and industrial capital, export of capital over and above commodities, development of international cartels, and territorial re-division of the world.

The first four of these features are clearly still relevant today. The concentration of capital has reached levels way beyond what Lenin would have experienced in the early 20th century. The merging of finance and industrial capital has continued apace, with finance capital becoming more and more dominant. We increasingly see the export of capital over and above commodities, with multinational corporations establishing operations throughout the globe. We have also seen the development of international cartels, particularly the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). On the other hand, the territorial re-division of the world was forestalled after WWII. This was largely due to the existence of the Soviet Union, which led to greater cooperation between capitalist states in the post-war period.

This cooperation broke down after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Today, the multinational companies dominating the world economy fiercely resist anything that will threaten their short-term profits, and look to their ‘home’ countries for assistance in doing this. These home countries are often all too willing to oblige. The fundamental problem is that under capitalism, politicians are effectively installed by these multinational corporations, and are then constrained to act in a such a way so as to not affect these corporations’ bottom line. This inevitably leads to a lack of action when it comes to mitigating the effects of climate change. We will never solve the climate crisis until we get rid of capitalism and replace it with a system based on international cooperation.