Liberal environmentalism suffers from a consistent refusal to see that a capitalistic society based on competition and growth for its own sake must ultimately devour the natural world, just like an untreated cancer must ultimately devour its host…An economy that is structured around the maxim, “Grow or Die,” must necessarily pit itself against the natural world and leave ecological ruin in its wake as it works its way through the biosphere.

A 2010 report from the UK-based New Economics Foundation offers this succinct summary of the environmental crisis:

Globally we are consuming nature’s services—using resources and creating carbon emissions—44 percent faster than nature can regenerate and reabsorb what we consume and the waste we produce. In other words, it takes the Earth almost 18 months to produce the ecological services that humanity uses in one year…

Growth forever, as conventionally defined, within fixed, though flexible, limits isn’t possible. Sooner or later we will hit the biosphere’s buffers. This happens for one of two reasons. Either a natural resource becomes over-exploited to the point of exhaustion, or more waste is dumped into an ecosystem than can be safely absorbed, leading to dysfunction or collapse. Science now seems to be telling us that both are happening, and sooner, rather than later.²

Despite near-unanimity among scientists that urgent action is needed to reduce and reverse the activities that are destabilizing the global environment, the corporations that cause most environmental damage are blithely continuing with business as usual.

The obvious question is why? But as Curtis White writes, environmentalists tend to steer away from that question.

There is a fundamental question that environmentalists are not very good at asking, let alone answering: “Why is this, the destruction of the natural world, happening?” We ordinarily think of environmentalists as people who care about something called nature or (if they’re feeling a little technocratic, and they usually are) the “environment.” They are concerned, as well they should be, that the lifestyle and economic practices of the industrialized West are not sustainable, and that nature itself may experience a “system collapse.” But as scientifically sophisticated as environmentalism’s thinking about natural systems can be (especially its ability to measure change and make predictions about the future based on those measurements), its conclusions about human involvement in environmental degradation tend to be very reductive and causal. Environmentalism’s analyses tend to be about “sources.” Industrial sources. Nonpoint sources. Urban sources. Smokestack sources. Tailpipe sources. Even natural sources (like the soon-to-be-released methane from thawing Arctic tundra). But environmentalism is not very good at asking, “Okay, but why do we have all of these polluting sources?”³

The top managers and shareholders who control corporations have to live on the same planet as the rest of humanity. If you ask any of them individually, they would undoubtedly say that they want their children and grandchildren to live in a stable and sustainable world. So why do their actions contradict their words? Why do they seem determined, in practice, to leave their children and grandchildren a world of poisoned air and water, a world of floods and droughts and escalating climate disasters? Why do they create ever more polluting sources?

Why do the politicians whose campaigns are financed by corporate donations support economic policies that lead to destructive growth and waste? Why have they repeatedly sabotaged international efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Why do they always support “solutions” that do not work, that cannot possibly work?

Many in the environmental movement attribute the antiecolog-ical actions of the rich and powerful to mistaken ideas. Clive Hamilton, for example, says that politicians are “in the thrall of the growth fetish . . . The parties may differ on social policy, but there is unchallengeable consensus that the overriding objective of government must be growth of the economy.”⁴

Other writers blame economic theory: mainstream economists have failed to include environmental costs in their formulas, so those costs are ignored. Adopting new environmental economic theories would fix things. Robert Nadeau writes:

We must use scientifically valid measures of the damage done to the global environment by our economic activities as a basis for assessing the costs of this damage in economic terms and develop means and methods for including these costs in the economic system.

If this could be accomplished within the framework of neo-classical economics, we could quickly begin to posit viable economic solutions to environmental problems.⁵

Many writers blame such commonly used measures of prosperity as gross domestic product or gross national product, because they treat all economic activity as positive, which leads to ludicrous results.

Economic accounting counts many costs of economic growth as economic gains, even though they clearly reduce rather than increase our well-being . . . For example, the costs of cleaning up the Exxon Valdez oil spill on the Alaska coast and the costs of repairing damage from the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in New York both counted as net contributions to economic output. According to this distorted logic, disasters that are tragic for the people and the environment are beneficial to society.⁶

Some environmentalists argue that the environmental crisis could have been avoided if governments had only replaced GDP and GNP with an alternative economic measure that incorporates the costs of environmental damage, such as the Happy Planet Index or the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare.

Such proposals are well-meaning, but they confuse cause and effect. Mainstream economic theory and measures such as GDP don’t determine policy—they reflect the reality of the capitalist system. GDP and GNP are measures of economic activity in capitalist society, from the viewpoint of capitalists. In essence, GDP is the sum of corporate balance sheets, and from that perspective, the $2.15 trillion in annual environmental damage that Trucost attributes to the three thousand largest corporations simply doesn’t count.

The growth imperative

What Hamilton calls a “fetish” is actually an economic imperative for a system in which capital is king. Capital has no conscience and no children. Capital has only one imperative: it must grow.

The extraction of profit from labour and nature isn’t some accidental part of what capitalism is. It’s what makes the thing go. Similarly, growth and GDP aren’t just bells and whistles that can be removed from some stripped-down, enviro-friendly version of the beast. Growth is why people invest. Without profit or growth, there would be no capitalists.⁷

In the box on pages 181–82, Richard Smith explains why “the growth imperative is virtually a law of nature built into any conceivable capitalism. Corporations have no choice but to seek to grow. It is not ‘subjective.’ It is not just an ‘obsession’ or a ‘spell.’ And it cannot be exorcised.”⁸

Economist Samuel Bowles offers a concise explanation of capitalism’s growth imperative:

If a firm is not making a profit, it cannot grow: zero profit means zero growth. And if a firm does not grow, others that do grow will soon outpace it. In a capitalist economy, survival requires growth, and growth requires profits. This is capitalism’s law of the survival of the fittest . . .

Capitalism is differentiated from other economic systems by its drive to accumulate, its predisposition toward change, and its built-in tendency to expand.⁹

Capitalism’s imperative: grow or die

“1. Producers are dependent upon the market: Capitalism is a mode of production in which specialized producers (corporations, companies, manufacturers, individual producers) produce some commodity for market but do not produce their own means of subsistence. Workers own no means of production, or insufficient means to enter into production on their own, and so have no choice but to sell their labor to the capitalists. Capitalists as a class possess a monopoly ownership of most of society’s means of production but do not directly produce their own means of subsistence. So capitalists have to sell their commodities on the market to obtain money to obtain their own means of subsistence and to purchase new means of production and hire more labor, to re-enter production and carry on from year to year. So in a capitalist economy, everyone is dependent upon the market, compelled to sell in order to buy, to buy in order to sell to re-enter production and carry on.

“2. Competition is the motor of economic development: When producers come to market they’re not free to sell their particular commodity at whatever price they wish because they find other producers selling the same commodity. They therefore have to ‘meet or beat’ the competition to sell their product and stay in business. Competition thus forces producers to reinvest much of their profit back into productivity-enhancing technologies and processes (instead of spending it on conspicuous consumption or warfare without developing the forces of production as ruling classes did for example under feudalism): Producers must constantly strive to increase the efficiency of their units of production by cutting the cost of inputs, seeking cheaper sources of raw materials and labor, by bringing in more advanced labor-saving machinery and technology to boost productivity, or by increasing their scale of production to take advantage of economies of scale, and in other ways, to develop the forces of production.

“3. ‘Grow or die’ is a law of survival in the marketplace: In the capitalist mode of production, most producers . . . have no choice but to live by the capitalist maxim “grow or die.’ First, as Adam Smith noted, the ever increasing division of labor raises productivity and output, compelling producers to find more markets for this growing output. Secondly, competition compels producers to seek to expand their market share, to defend their position against competitors. Bigger is safer because, ceteris paribus, bigger producers can take advantage of economies of scale and can use their greater resources to invest in technological development, so can more effectively dominate markets. Marginal competitors tend to be crushed or bought out by larger firms (Chrysler, Volvo, etc.). Thirdly, the modern corporate form of ownership adds irresistible and unrelenting pressures to grow from owners (shareholders). Corporate CEOs do not have the freedom to choose not to grow or to subordinate profit-making to ecological concerns because they don’t own their firms even if they own substantial shares. Corporations are owned by masses of shareholders. And the shareholders are not looking for ‘stasis’; they are looking to maximize portfolio gains, so they drive their CEOs forward.” (italics in the original)

—Richard Smith, “Beyond Growth or Beyond Capitalism”

The result of this “built-in tendency to expand,” write Marxist environmentalists John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, is a system that is increasingly at war with the world around it.

Capitalism has remained essentially (if not more so) what it was from the beginning: an enormous engine for the ceaseless accumulation of capital, propelled by the competitive drive of individuals and groups seeking their own self-interest in the form of private gain. Such a system recognizes no absolute limits to its own advance. The race to accumulate, the real meaning of economic growth under the system, is endless . . .

Ecologically, the system draws ever more destructively on the limited resources and absorptive capacity of nature, as the economy continually grows in scale in relation to the planetary system. The result is emerging and expanding ecological rifts that are turning into planetary chasms.

The essential nature of the problem resides in the fact that there is no way out of this dilemma within the laws of motion of a capitalist system, in which capital accumulation is the primary goal of society.¹⁰

The only reason capitalists spend money to buy stock, launch a corporation, build a factory, or drill an oil well is to get more money back than they invested. That doesn’t always happen, of course—some investments fail to produce profits, and as we have seen since 2008, periodically the entire system goes into freefall, wiping out jobs and livelihoods and destroying capital. But that doesn’t contradict the fact that the drive for profit, the drive to make capital grow, is a fundamental feature of capitalism. Without it, the system would rapidly collapse.

Under capitalism, the only measure of success is how much profit is made every day, every week, every year. It doesn’t matter if the profit comes from selling products that are directly harmful to both humans and nature, or that many commodities cannot be produced without spreading disease, destroying the forests that produce the oxygen we breathe, demolishing ecosystems, and treating our water, air, and soil as sewers for the disposal of industrial waste. All of that contributes to profits, and thus to the growth of capital—and that’s what counts.

As the Belem Ecosocialist Declaration says, “The insatiable need to increase profits cannot be reformed away. Capitalism can no more survive limits on growth than a person can live without breathing.”¹¹

A system based on waste

In Capital, Marx wrote that from a capitalist’s perspective, raw materials such as metals, minerals, coal, and stone are “furnished by Nature gratis.” The wealth of nature doesn’t have to be paid for or replaced when it is used—it is there for the taking. That’s true not only of raw materials but also of what are sometimes called “environmental services”—the water and air that have been absorbing capitalism’s waste products for centuries. They have been treated as free sewers and free garbage dumps, “furnished by Nature gratis.”

Capitalism versus nature

“Capitalism, like any other mode of production, relies upon the beneficence of nature. The depletion and degradation of the land and of so-called natural resources makes no more sense in the long run than the destruction of the collective powers of labor since both lie at the root of the production of all wealth. But individual capitalists, working in their own short-term interests and impelled by the coercive laws of competition, are perpetually tempted to take the position of après moi le déluge with respect to both the laborer and the soil. Even without this, the track of perpetual accumulation puts enormous pressures on the supply of natural resources, while the inevitable increase in the quantity of waste products is bound to test the capacity of ecological systems to absorb them without turning toxic.”

—David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital

If capitalists had to pay the real cost of replacing or restoring that natural wealth, their profits would fall, and in many cases would be completely wiped out.

The pressure of competition from other capitalists and the demands from investors for higher profits constantly force corporations to seek new ways to “externalize” ever more costs onto others. A major part of this involves dumping the waste products of production into the environment.

In 2000, the World Resources Institute (WRI) published a major study of “the materials that flow from the human economy back into the environment at every stage of economic activity, from commodity extraction or harvest, through processing and manufacturing, product use, and final disposal,”¹² in five industrialized countries. Rather than study cash flows as most economic studies do, the WRI examined material flows—what happens to actual materials in the course of production and distribution of goods.

It found that “one half to three quarters of annual resource inputs to industrial economies are returned to the environment as wastes within a year.”

Material outputs to the environment from economic activity in the five study countries range from 11 metric tons per person per year in Japan to 25 metric tons per person per year in the United States.

When “hidden flows” are included—flows which do not enter the economy, such as soil erosion, mining overburden, and earth moved during construction—total annual material outputs to the environment range from 21 metric tons per person in Japan to 86 metric tons per person in the United States.¹³

Those figures understate the actual volume of waste, because the study did not include the use and disposal of water, which the authors say is so great that it would “completely dominate all other material flows.”¹⁴

The WRI study confirms the judgment of pioneering environmental economist William Kapp, who wrote that “capitalism must be regarded as an economy of unpaid costs,” because “a substantial portion of the actual costs of production remain unaccounted for in entrepreneurial outlays; instead they are shifted to, and ultimately borne by, third persons or by the community as a whole.”¹⁵

Capitalism’s claims of efficiency and productivity are based on what Kapp called “the omitted truth of social costs.” Such claims are “nothing more than an institutionalized cover under which it is possible for private enterprise to shift part of the costs to the shoulders of others and to practice a form of large-scale spoliation which transcends everything the early socialists had in mind when they spoke of the exploitation of man by man.”¹⁶

In short, pollution and waste are not accidents and are not market failures. They are the way the system works.

Capitalism combines an irresistible drive to grow with an irresistible drive to create waste and pollution. If nothing stops it, capitalism will try to extend both processes infinitely. But the earth is not infinite. The atmosphere and oceans and forests are very large, but ultimately they are finite, limited resources—and capitalism is now pressing against those limits.

The Logic of Cancer

“System-change, not climate-change! More and more, this demand has emerged in response to the overwhelming signs of environmental destruction around us. It reflects a growing understanding of the incompatibility of capitalism and life. However, many do not understand this. Many people concerned about what is happening to the planet think that what is necessary are regulations which can check the destructiveness of current patterns. Measures which try to limit carbon emissions by offering big carrots and small sticks, which propose taxes to encourage rational economic actors to choose less harmful options, which offer subsidies for forms of power generation deemed less harmful to the environment—all these efforts to patch up the problems which have emerged remain the first choice of those who look upon themselves as realists in the real world.

“The idea that we can regulate abuses within capitalism is not unique to environmental issues. We see the same pattern when it comes to the current financial crisis of capitalism. New regulations, new limits, new forms of oversight are seen as a solution to abuse and excess. They are proposed as ways to encourage good behavior on the part of the actors who have created the situation. Bad capitalists rather than capitalism itself are identified as the evil. And the problem of the newly homeless, the unemployed? Everywhere the same approach: protect those who are being evicted, protect the victims of the system, repair the excesses and all will go (more or less) well.

“The common element is the failure to understand the system, the failure to grasp the very nature of capital and capitalism. It is the failure to recognize that the logic of capital is the logic of cancer—the tendency to expand without limits.”

—Michael Lebowitz, “Change the System, Not Its Barriers”

In the face of capital’s growth imperative, the idea that reducing birth rates will protect the environment seems even more absurd.

Radical ecologist Murray Bookchin once posed a simple question: if the population of the United States were halved today, would US corporations reduce their output and their ecological destruction by the same amount?¹⁷ The answer, of course, is no. The problem isn’t people, it’s profit, and no population control program will change that.