The Path to an Ecologically Sustainable Future is that of Class Struggle

Charles Posa McFadden, 29 January 2024

Human history has been paved by the stories we tell ourselves about our past and those we construct to open (or close) doors to the future. Opening doors to the future is the task of the revolutionaries among us. Closing them is today the political work of those acting on behalf of the now globally dominant class, comprised of capitalist oligarchs.

The ending of the pro-capitalist story, if it is allowed to continue in practice to realize its logical conclusion, is evidently the destruction of Earth as an inhabitable planet for our species, either by conflicts that involve use – whether accidental or intentional – of existing weapons of mass destruction, or by the continuation of the now rapid decline of our biosphere’s capacity to support human life, the inevitable consequence of continued dominance of production motivated by private rather than social aims (capitalism).

Paving the way to a future for humanity were the principal scientific advances made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in philosophy and the social sciences by those associated with the foundational work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, and in the natural sciences by those associated with the theoretical advances initiated by Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. The application of their discoveries during the twentieth century has opened the door to a viable path to a future beyond capitalism.

Foremost among the contributions of Marx and Engels to philosophy was their recognition of dialectical materialism as efficacious for engaging in science, including the application of an historical materialist approach to the study of human history. In this worldview, the unity and antagonism between opposites is the driving force for change, itself the invariable condition of all that exists.

What remains is solving the problem of transition from a now globalized system of production and exchange motivated by private gain to a more ecologically sustainable set of relationships between people and with the finite biosphere that so far sustains us. Barriers to this achievement include:

(1) continued dependence (practically and theoretically) on global trade within a capitalist dominated market system and

(2) continued adherence to the view that our choice is between capitalist competition and socialist cooperation.

Marx, Engels, and Lenin each referred to as “utopian socialism” the non-dialectical view that socialism is an unchanging system without internal contradictions (a heaven on Earth). In contrast to utopian socialism, any actual transformation from one system to another includes characteristics of each. The tipping (or nodal) point in this transition is the change from the economic dominance of capitalist market exchange to the dominance of production and distribution of use values unaccompanied by generation of private profit.

Our choice during the period of transition is not either/or, it is where and how to include both competition and cooperation. Under capitalism, particularly as a form of labor discipline and as a motive for capitalist engagement in social production for private profit, competition results in winners and losers. Alienated from decision making and an equal share in the rewards, labor is treated as the loser in its relation to the capitalist class.

Under socialism, cooperation is present in all economic activity, competition is limited to achieving the common good, without losers. Engagement in social labor is through participation in both setting and achieving social goals. Until the transition to an ecologically sustainable civilization is completed, competition with capitalist values and organizational initiatives will have to be conducted diplomatically, but with the clear aim of achieving the common good at the expense of further production for purely private gain.

While the most prominent revolutionary thinkers recognized these barriers, none were able in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to identify a viable path beyond capitalism. The explanation for this is not hard to find, nor, likewise, is it now that difficult to identify a viable path forward.

As Marx argued in his introduction to the critique of political economy, humanity only poses a problem for resolution when the answer is at hand. This too explains why Marx and Engels focussed their efforts on the critique of capital as a social relationship and only secondarily attended to the question of how to move beyond it. After all, their critique emerged during the time and in the location (19th century England) when and where industrial capitalism was first firmly established. Even their homeland (Germany) was unable to make a decisive turn from feudalism to capitalism until the very end of the 19th century, let alone throughout the world. Only in this century can we say that capitalism is now a fully global system, and only within the historical core of capitalist countries has that system reached its limits.

Particularly in the historical core of capitalist countries, the world view of the now globally ruling capitalists has completed a full cycle, from liberal critique of the divine right of inheritance of private ownership of landed property to the institutionalization of the right to acquire and inherit unlimited private wealth in any of its forms and through any of the methods permitted in practice by governments under oligarchic capitalist control.

Marx and Engels’ collaborative work on the critique of capitalist theory and practice, however, revealed the essential exploitive character and fatal flaws of the capitalist system. These include the complete dependence of the capitalist class on exploitable human labor, the historical tendency of the rate of profit to fall as the productivity of labor increases, and deadly competition among capitalists for their own survival as capitalists. The ecological consequence includes the enormous waste of energy and materials expended on control over labor (ideologically and physically), deadly competition between capitalists and competing capitalist governed nation-states (including that wasted in wars, advertising, and surveillance), extravagant personal consumption by the capitalist class, and other forms of waste uniquely characteristic of exploitative social relationships. These forms of waste likely total as much as 80% of GDP in the historical core of capitalism. (A brief elaboration of this argument with further examples of the inherent wastefulness of capitalism can be found here).

Much also has been and continues to be learned from the efforts of governments aiming to free their countries from external capitalist control, some of which have in the process declared socialism or communism to be their goal. The principal obstacle, of course, has been until now the continuing economic, military, and cultural dominance of the core capitalist governments, notably including their dominance over foreign trade.

The government that appears to have benefited most from both its own and international revolutionary experience is that of the Chinese People’s Republic, with many other countries attempting or considering following in its footsteps. Having critiqued its own early efforts to leap into communism, it subsequently sought and by the 1980s achieved agreements with the core capitalist countries on foreign capitalist investment in industrial production in China. These agreements, of course, were only achieved because they met the needs of both the investing capitalist companies and the People’s Republic of China. The caveat was agreement to share equally the profits earned from the exploitation of Chinese labor between capitalist investors (some of them Chinese) and the PRC government.

The global capitalist class benefitted in at least two ways. First, even half the rate of profit obtainable in a relatively low wage country like historically re-emergent China was much more than the rate of profit that foreign capital could make at home. Second, the goods produced could be sold within the capitalist core countries much more cheaply than similar goods produced locally. That reality arrested the efforts of the working class in the more developed capitalist countries from struggle to achieve a higher share of the results of its own increasing productivity. For its part, the PRC government was able to apply its share of the profits to the material foundation underpinning China’s emergence from high levels of poverty to a level of economic and human development that now competes with the most advanced capitalist countries. Thus, a win-win result for both the PRC and the capitalists of the more developed capitalist countries.

This seeming win-win result, however, cannot and has not resolved the internal contradictions within capitalism, as evident in two fundamental ways. First, while rapidly socializing production, including the increased employment of women in the workforce, the capitalist class has maintained its profit levels only by opposing the commensurate need for investment in social services, including education, health care, and pensions, leaving most people in the core capitalist countries in an increasingly insecure position. Second, and related to the first result, capitalist controlled governments, in as much as their main task is to maintain the health of those competing capitalist corporations which are most politically influential within their boundaries, prioritize investment in otherwise failing capitalist businesses over responsibility to make the essential investments needed in the transition to an ecologically sustainable relation with nature. The most obvious examples are the welfare administered to the major financial and fossil-fuel capitalist corporations by governments under capitalist control.

Notwithstanding sharp zigs and zags in the historical antagonism between the capitalist and working classes, the example of capitalism itself remains humanity’s main teacher. As the capitalist class and its defenders respond with violence and threats of violence to their ever-narrowing opportunities for private profit accumulation and wanton destruction of our life-sustaining natural environment, they leave us no option but to resist and replace capitalism with an alternative system, one in which they no longer dominate.

The challenge of transitioning to an ecologically sustainable civilization is now both global and urgent.

Capitalism has already socialized production and distribution across the globe. What is needed is popular democratic control over the economic units capitalism has created. The technical means of achieving an ecologically sustainable civilization have already, in the main, been created, including the radical advances which have been and continue to be made in digital technology. Educational levels have advanced accordingly across the globe. Together these make possible dramatic reductions in the cost and waste of energy and resources. All that awaits is the removal of the capitalist barriers to employing these advances.

The continuing development of resistance globally to capitalist folly is creating the organizational and cultural pre-requisites for the political and economic transformation that will be needed. It is within that resistance, foremost the peace movement, that revolutionaries belong, working to foster the levels of discussion and cooperation which are essential to the achievement of an ecologically sustainable civilization. Praxis – the linking and mutual development of theory and practice is the vital need and responsibility of the growing resistance and opposition to capitalist rule and an essential method for the achievement of an ecological civilization, one that is necessarily more just, democratic, and peaceful than the class societies of the present and past.