Why capitalism is not the answer

But crazy as this system may seem, a system that can never stand still, is forever expanding, what underpins the capitalist dilemma is that because of the constant innovation and improvement, as more and more workers are replaced by machinery, the system’s rate of profit actually declines. This leads the world’s capitalists to ever greater frenzies of production - especially arms production as occurred in the aftermath of World War II - as they try to counteract the system’s downward spiral.

So we get the economic crises that capitalism cannot escape.

A drive for money profit that forces ever greater production until there are market gluts and then falling prices, plummeting profits and financial collapse of the system. While every other human society faced crises of scarcity, capitalism is the only one that has crises of over-production. And as well, crises that can only be resolved by mass destruction of productive forces (the factories, farms, etc) and immiseration of millions of people either through wars or economic depressions.

With immediate profit as the driver of the system, not the real needs of humanity or a sustainable planet, capitalism is, in fact, indifferent to the fate of humanity and the world we live in. Marx wrote that Capital is “moved as much and as little by the sight of the coming degradation and final depopulation of the human race, as by the probable fall of the earth into the sun.”

So, for example, former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright, when asked whether the death of an estimated half million children in Iraq as result of the sanctions imposed in the 1990s, was a price worth paying, she replied “… the price - we think the price is worth it.”

To sum up: capitalism, a system whose driver is profit rather than human needs, must plunder and degrade the planet to feed its continuous expansion as it tries to counteract its inbuilt fault line - the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Consequently, we argue, capitalism is directly responsible for the scale of destruction and if left to continue, will drive us ever closer to annihilation.

In the next article I'll discuss what the solutions are and basically argue only working class revolution, with production organised democratically to satisfy human need, can save the planet.