Introduction
The aim of this text is to understand the implications of capitalism’s threat to humanity today as part of a wider project to identify the potential within the current situation for a communist alternative.
Developing arguments first set out in the book Capitalism’s Endgame,[1] its starting point is the scientific projection that if its current trajectory continues, by the end of the 21st century capitalism will threaten the habitability of the planet for humans. [Mark Hayes]
If we accept the projections of Earth-system science [2] we must conclude that if capitalism continues its current trajectory by the end of the 21st century it could push the planet past a tipping point and set it irreversibly on a course towards “Hothouse Earth”, which would prevent the climate from being stabilised even if carbon emissions are cut. This tipping point could be only decades away.[3]
The most extreme conditions of “Hothouse Earth” could take centuries or millennia to fully take effect, but if this tipping point is crossed temperatures would be higher than at any time during the past 1.2 million years, with oceans engulfing coastal cities and vast swathes of the Earth left completely uninhabitable.
Of course there are many uncertainties surrounding this projection. As Earth-system scientists themselves admit, while CO2 emissions can be projected, the effects of tipping points and feedback loops are far more difficult to predict. But the effects of catastrophic climate change are already more far-reaching and extreme than anticipated; global warming could be radically accelerated by the impact of relatively small temperature increases on processes such as thawing permafrost, Amazon dieback or loss of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which, if they pass a tipping point, may trigger a ‘tipping cascade’ that permanently accelerates others, propelling the Earth unstoppably towards a Hothouse Earth.
Nor is this the worst-case scenario. Climate change has played a role in the collapse of numerous previous societies and in each of the five mass extinction events in Earth history. By the end of the 21st century, the unprecedented disruption of the Earth’s carbon cycle due to capitalism’s burning of fossil fuels may surpass thresholds that triggered previous mass extinctions.[4]
The key point is that, as the Earth-system scientists themselves conclude, if humanity is to have any chance of averting this fate, then fundamental social change is required. In reality, only a communist revolution would enable humanity to take the necessary collective action on a global scale, possibly over hundreds of years or even millennia. Even this would not return the Earth to a preindustrial state; humanity would still face a planet warmer this century than any time in the last 800,000 years. The challenge for a future communist society would be to keep the Earth in a state with a temperature rise no greater than 2°C above preindustrial times, which would still require adaptation to the unavoidable impacts of the warming already occurring. But if the planetary tipping point is crossed, this would probably not be possible, and we must conclude that in this eventuality the conditions for a communist society would no longer exist; due to the catastrophic effects of climate change alone, the earth would be devastated beyond repair.
This is not meant as a prediction. In reality of course, capitalism could destroy human society through a generalised imperialist war, or more likely the cumulative effect of wars, economic crises, famines, the spread of infectious diseases and the decomposition of capitalist society, in which feedback and tipping elements inevitably combine with those resulting from the effects of catastrophic climate change itself. But Earth system science offers us a confirmation both of the scale of the threat that capitalism now poses to humanity’s future and an approximate timescale for successful action to avert it.
Capitalism’s ecological contradictions are now a determining factor in its regression into barbarism
Far from being a side effect or secondary factor, capitalism’s destruction of the Earth has always been at the heart of the system’s contradictions.
Capitalism is based on the exploitation of labour and on the expropriation of nature, which is the exploitation of the energy of the earth with no regard for action to ensure its renewal. As a precondition for its development, it separates human beings from the land and from the products of their own labour, and robs the soil of the conditions of its reproduction, generating what Marx calls an “irreparable rift” in the metabolism or living relationship between humanity and the Earth.
This rift can only grow until it reaches a global tipping point. Capital is driven by its nature to “conquer the whole earth for its market”, and on the other to “annihilate this space with time, ie. to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another” (Marx).[5] Even planetary boundaries for the sustainability of human life are treated by capital merely as another set of barriers to be overcome, until ultimately, like a virus that kills its host, it must outstrip nature’s ability to renew itself and destroy the material basis of its own existence.
In summary, the laws of capitalist accumulation that give rise to its historical tendency to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands, and increase the relative impoverishment of the great mass of the population, are intimately related to its tendency to increase the degradation of the environment and drive the mode of production towards the destruction of the basis for sustainable life on the planet.
These same laws undergo a qualitative transformation with industrialisation. Capitalism’s take-off in the early 19th century is only made possible by the burning of fossil fuel reserves; that is, the exploitation of energy sources – coal, oil, gas – deposited in the Earth’s crust in geological processes taking several hundred million years. The exploitation of fossil fuels and the emission of carbon dioxide become intrinsic to the accumulation process and to capitalist domination.
There is a further qualitative transformation with the entry of capitalism into its descending curve or descent. No new relations of production can develop within the obsolete mode of production; in the absence of a successful proletarian revolution, the trajectory of capitalism can only be a “regression into barbarism” (The Junius Pamphlet).
Earth-system scientists propose the mid-20th century as the ‘Great Acceleration’, in which the rapid and widespread increase in human activity has a qualitative impact on the Earth's natural systems:
The second half of the twentieth century is unique in the entire history of human existence on Earth. Many human activities reached take-off points sometime in the twentieth century and have accelerated sharply towards the end of the century. The last 50 years have without doubt seen the most rapid transformation of the human relationship with the natural world in the history of humankind.[6]
Key indicators of this transformation include the release of radioactive debris from the first atomic bomb detonations; accelerated industrial production and carbon dioxide emissions, a rapidly rising world population and man-made climate change.
Clearly this is not a problem of ‘human activity’ in the abstract. In fact we can only understand this qualitative change in the context of capitalism’s descent and the response of the system to the conditions for its survival from the turn of the 20th century.
In the first four decades of the 20th century we see the development of state capitalism and a war economy, which constitutes a fundamental change in capitalism’s functioning and permanent organisation; at the economic level, faced with chronic overproduction which can only grow worse, this development is necessary to ensure new outlets for expanding production and maintain solvent demand. Each national capital is forced to defend its interests militarily against external threats from competitors and internally from the growing threat of class struggle and social instability.
State capitalism and the permanent war economy that emerges in its fully developed form from the slaughter of World War II is also predicated on the huge and growing consumption of fossil fuels and the sustained growth of carbon dioxide emissions. This in turn drives an increase in imperialist conflicts for control of available sources of oil; in this way, imperialist warfare and militarism themselves become key drivers of capitalism’s destruction of the Earth’s natural systems.
In the first 70 years of capitalism’s descending curve, its regression into barbarism appeared to be expressed by a cycle of crisis-world war-reconstruction. Today, from our perspective in the first quarter of the 21st century we can see that, while the threat of a nuclear confrontation between the major imperialist powers has by no means disappeared, world war is only one expression of capitalism’s trajectory.
With the benefit of the work of the Earth system scientists, we can now see that the post-war economic boom, which appeared to be a temporary reprieve in capitalism's regression, was in fact a 'tipping point', corresponding to the dialectical concept of the transformation of quantity into quality; change does not occur gradually but through relatively sudden breaks. We can identify the entry of the capitalism system into its descending curve as such a tipping point, when, as the Third International announced in 1919, “The contradictions of the capitalist world system, which lay concealed within its womb, broke out with colossal force in a gigantic explosion, in the great imperialist world war…”[7] We can see the whole of capitalism's descending curve as a series of tipping points, together with feedback loops in which all of capitalism’s contradictions feed into each other and cause new effects, in a trajectory that is always towards full barbarism.
In conclusion, the prolongation of capitalism for over 100 years in its descending curve, in the absence of a proletarian revolution, means that its ecological contradictions have now become a determining factor in the historic crisis facing humanity. Only by seizing power on a global scale and directing all available human and technological resources towards stabilising the climate can the working class stand any chance of averting the trajectory towards “Hothouse Earth”; and if we take the warnings of the Earth system scientists, even this may not be enough. Time is not on the side of the proletariat.
Mark Hayes
November 2024
To be continued
Notes
[1] M. Hayes, P. Sutton & L. Torvaldsson, Capitalism's Endgame: The Catastrophe of Accumulation, Old Moles Collective, 2023.
[2] Earth System science draws on scientific data from various fields of research such as the atmosphere, oceans, land ice, etc., to form a picture of the current state of the Earth as an integrated planetary system. Importantly for a Marxist understanding, it represents an attempt by scientists to obtain a holistic view of the interactions and transactions within and between biological and ecological systems which explicitly recognises human society as both an integral element of the Earth system and an active factor in it (see for example https://climate.nasa.gov/nasa_science/science/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_system_science. See also I. Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System, Monthly Review Press, 2016, Chapter 1.)
[3] W. Steffen et al., ‘Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene.’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 115, No. 33, August 2018.
[4] L. Kemp et al., ‘Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 119, No. 34, August 2022.
[5] Grundrisse, Penguin, 1973, p.539.
[6] W. Steffen et al., Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure, Springer, 2004, p.131.
[7] Platform of the Third International, March 1919, in J. Degras (ed.), The Communist International 1919-1943: Documents (Frank Cass, 1971), pp17-19.
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