Are Capitalism and Ecology Compatible?

Iara Pietricovsky – Anthropologist and MSc in Political Science, Co-Chair of the Institute for Socioeconomic Studies – INESC.

It is a fact that we live in difficult and complex times. On the one hand, we perceive the important advancements of technology through electronic means, of genetic revolution and biotechnology, nanotechnology, and new access forms to information and communications, which bring more time and quality to the human lives.

On the other hand, we live amidst huge inequalities, poverty and misery. Previously eradicated diseases (tuberculosis, malaria, dengue fever) are coming back with their full force and newer diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, are spreading. Monstrous wars are fed by the immoral interests of big arms industries and by the dispute for natural resources, along with extermination wars (Darfur), and so on.

We also live in times of setbacks in the field of Human Rights, here understood by the political, civil, economic, social, cultural, environmental and sexual rights that, with hard sacrifices, have been conquered since the 18^th century. Times of resistance!

The present social model, based as it is on the inequality of opportunities, on poverty for an enormous human mass, on the predatory exploitation of natural resources and on the homogenization of behaviors, having the market as the arranger of social and economic relations, has structured capitalism at its birth and also structures its contemporary format.

Therefore, a rupture with the capitalist setting is needed, so that other models may rise up to the ecological challenge and flourish with plurality, based on sustainable and clean models, and able to decently benefit the planet’s entire population.

This challenge brings forth the search for new post-capitalist paths that break through the logic of accumulation and the production of fossil energy. This logic is viscerally linked to a market-oriented thought imposed by the globalized capitalist modernity, which must be abandoned.

The climate change is altering harvest and life cycles. It also promotes accelerated animal and human migrations, which bring about crises and political, economic and ecological tensions in several regions of the world. The human hand is advancing over biomes, causing the savannization of the Amazon and desertification at semi-arid regions, destroying forests, polluting rivers and speeding the increase of the Earth’s temperature; which, on its turn, provokes the melting of Artic and Antarctic poles, of ice caps at the Andes, kills rivers and harms the potable water of millions of beings.

Why do we allow the continuity of a model that exhausts natural resources and brings us to the brink of a real end to life? Who will survive in a system or model that has at its basis such social exclusion and the construction of such a scale of race, gender and ethnic inequalities, which allow the inclusion of a few white and generally Christian men, at the expense of so many other men and women? After all: which master does knowledge serve?

The aspiration of globalization times, amidst a systemic crisis that includes the crises of finances, food and climate, is the aspiration for another worldview, for other views that are distinct from the present one, which has shaped our lives in the last 200 years. That means other utopias and other forms of worthy lives for all men and women.

That also means new uses of the land and of natural resources, with distinct ranges; new ways of attributing value to the micro universe and to other dimensions of human relations, able to effectively place solidarity and brotherhood at the center. It means to value a vision of complementarities in the productive chain and to overcome the view of competition among markets. It means a definitive break with the patriarchal forms and structures of power.

We live in times of neoliberal and financial globalization. These times are structured on top of a method that promotes the material accumulation and ranks beings through extremely unequal opportunities. Few are included and have the chance to access the benefits of technology and dignity. And those with this access flaunt a disproportional and unnecessary – almost irrational – consumption standard. It is impossible to extend the same North-American standard to Chinese and Indian citizens: to reach such state of things, one would need many planets Earth.

The post-capitalist answer demands a mobilization that provokes counter-hegemonic, counter-culture and counter-political-model movements, along with other democratic state structures, with democratic and transparent use of public resources, and of clean energy sources; an answer that reshapes participative forms of managing public goods and that is founded on actions of social co-responsibility, control of public and private institutions by various segments of society, thereby producing new democratic models of economic, environmental and political management, among others; a model that enables the radical extension of human rights, including new behaviors and life forms both at urban and rural settings.

To think that the present systemic crisis will be balanced by a more regulated type of capitalism would be to fall back into the same error. A make-believe green revolution (as the thesis is defended by the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and the former US President Albert Arnold Gore Jr.) is pushed onto us as a panacea for ending all our ills. This crisis medicine would be more of the same: a conscious and ecological form of capitalism, which, however, doesn’t change the models of production and resource exploitation. It sounds like a deceiving trick.

I believe it is high time for us to awaken our consciousness towards the urgency of our planet’s situation, and towards the urgency with which alternative solutions to capitalism are needed. We need actions able to get ourselves beyond the Kyoto Protocol and beyond fabricated monstrosities, such as the carbon market and the green revolution, among others.