No, Capitalism Doesn’t Threaten Humanity
13th October 2019
Presumably bolstered by the fiery claims of Greta Thunberg and the general theme of Climate Week, people on Twitter have been declaring that capitalism threatens humanity. This angst rekindled interest in a Guardian article that ran a few months ago, in which author George Monbiot argued that the very nature of capitalism is “incompatible with the survival of life on Earth.” Not only do such claims ignore the obvious progress of humanity staring us in the face—and the environmental activists are supposed to be the empirical ones in this debate—but even if Monbiot’s worries about the climate were correct, capitalism would still be the best social system to deal with the crisis.
Monbiot is one of the most muddle-headed writers that the Guardian employs, and that’s a high bar.
To begin with, there is no necessary connection between ‘capitalism’ (and I doubt that Monbiot actually understands the meaning of the term) and a need for growth. The fact that they often occur together is Yet Another Instance of the Correlation Implies Causation fallacy. ‘Capitalism’ (i.e. the use of machines to leverage labor by automating production processes, more accurately ‘industrialism’) is a means of production, not a way of structuring economic activity. One can use machines to produce goods from recycled inputs if one desires to do so; not many do because that’s more effort than using fresh raw materials, but it can be done. So Monbiot has his head up his butt in this respect.
His other complaint is that private property (not capitalism, although I’m sure his muddled understanding of ‘capitalism’ includes private property as a feature) somehow constitutes a ‘seizure of common goods’, thereby leading to all sorts of Bad Things. Well, the assumption that all goods somehow belong to everybody in common is certainly an axiom of socialist thought (of which I assume that Monbiot is a practicioner), but still represents an assumption for which neither evidence nor argument is presented. Interestingly enough, two of the Bad Things on his list of the sins of capitalism, ‘immiseration of other people by an economy based on looting’ and ‘translation of economic power into political power’ are both essential characteristics of socialism, the first arising from the necessity of comprehensive theft in order to set up the socialist system to begin with and the consequent dependence on the socialist administrators of the ‘collective means of production’ which historically all socialist governments use to shackle the political activity of their clients — Venezuela being only the most recent example. So Monbiot has his head up his butt in this regard as well.