Capitalism and everything else: existence and extermination 1/4

A problem as big as the planet itself

By all appearances, global warming is nowadays the more complex, urgent and threatening problem to mankind. Every person, organism, country and ecosystem is in peril. It is a credible and substantiated threat to humanity with its 200 thousand years and life itself with its 4 billion. A puzzling combination of economy, politics, culture but also biology, chemistry, climatology and almost everything else, global warming shocks and frightens. Given the systemic origin of its causes and its planetary character, global warming exceeds by far the competence of any institution, State or multilateral organization. This is a problem as big as the planet itself.

Starting the car, shopping, having a barbecue, browsing Facebook, watching a movie, bearing offspring, working, every second, billions of individual and social actions performed by billions of humans contribute one way or another to warm up the planet. Any given day, any person gets lots of news about global warming. Another fancy gathering of heads of state and multilateral organizations has failed to seriously commit to cut greenhouse gas emissions, for instance. Another virtuous billionaire has given up a tiny fraction of his insulting fortune to “help the planet”. A new geoengineering madness to block the sun, stuff clouds, ocean and atmosphere with chemicals, produce highly profitable oxygen or induce a nuclear winter.

Any given day, we all get bombarded with multimillion advertising campaigns about how you too can help the planet by separating waste, recycling, reducing the use of plastic bags, and actually not, no more of that, that is actually useless, now it is this other thing, reducing your meat consumption, turning off the tap as you brush your teeth, turning off the lights as you fuck, everything in the comfort of your home and without having to stop buying anything. Buying more actually, because now every trinket available is planet friendly. Amidst all the noise, one hears green harmonies and coddling invitations to think about our role and responsibilities.

Much less attention deserve the UN warnings and predictions from the scientific community about how none of that is working to curb temperatures but quite the opposite. Occasionally, we hear about desperate ecological actions, protests and outbursts such as Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future. Meanwhile, we have been getting used for long to the extreme consequences of global warming. The masters of the world tell us we must adapt, get used to the smoke.

Burning things made us human. One or two million years ago, mastery over combustion pulled our ancestors from a highly intelligent animality and made them homo sapiens. Our brains, faces, habits and culture are carved by fire. We are literally beings of fire.

But global warming did not begin one million years ago with the first African fire. It did not 10 thousand years ago with the Neolithic revolution. It didn’t start 500 years ago with modernity and globalization. Conditions converged exactly 200 years ago in England with the Industrial Revolution. From birth, capitalism bears the mark of planetary annihilation.

The fire of infinite profit

History is a succession of releasing forces, a continuous conception of ways of doing things, ways that duplicate, transform and reproduce. Right now as for thousands of years, we appropriate and transform the world through language, religion, arts, commerce, agriculture, the State, science, and ideologies. Capitalism is one more system of appropriation and transformation of what exists.

The forces of nature, its elements and living organisms as well as human potentialities, creations and the individuals themselves, in short, everything that exists is appropriated, transformed into financial wealth and thrown in an unceasing, growing and accelerating cycle of profit reproduction. That is capital. It is a cyclical, dynamic and monetized mode of behavior of existing things which achieves fulfillment in reproduction. It cannot slow down, much less stop. To reproduce, it needs to be fed on gold, land, coal, human labor, oil, personal data. Whatever enters the cycle, transforms into money and commodities, commodities sold for money, money reinvested in commodities. The nature of capital reproduction is exponential, the more it grows, the bigger its needs, the more it gets nourished, the more voracious it becomes. Growing, multiplying, and accumulating, such is the nature of capital, the hard core of its existence. And where capital arises as the dominant force of any given society, we speak of capitalism.

As far as we know, from the first moments of the universe, matter has been governed by four fundamental forces or interactions: gravity, electromagnetic force, and the two nuclear forces, the strong and the weak. The same way, our capitalist universe exists as the interaction between four forces: the drive for infinite profit, competition and conditions of exchange and exploitation. Some 600 or 700 years ago, the interaction between them started to evolve in such a way that four or five centuries later in Western Europe capitalism was born.

The drive for infinite profit is the most important of the four. It is a transformation of all time human drives for power, transcendence and domination. It is stimulated by competition as capitalism is struggle between actors: individuals, families, companies, free Italian cities, countries. To be born, capitalism needed specific conditions of exchange. Commerce, currency, banks and the gold Europe stole from the American peoples had to exist. Last but not the least, to be born, capitalism needed specific conditions of exploitation such as hungry multitudes ready to be exploited for miserable wages and the immense world that unfolded before the European eyes from the 15th to the 19th century and the technology to conquer it. Regulated, incited and limited by competition and conditions of exchange and exploitation, the powerful drive for infinite profit restlessly appropriates and subdues everything that exists transforming it into capital.

Interactions between these forces and conditions explain the capitalist orientation towards exorbitant profits, its capacity to create economic conditions of extreme dynamism and extreme competition, its promotion of technological innovation, a profusion of products, services and markets as never seen before, and the acceleration of everything that is touched by capital and its processes.

Capital is the most powerful force ever released by humanity. And the most harmful. Not because of an unexpected element which for dramatic pretensions we have been reserving for later but exactly and precisely because of its existential means and nature.

Contra naturam

Capitalism needs land. There is an antique and efficient method for land appropriation. It’s called theft. Capital depends on theft as lice on blood. There would be no history of capitalism without the enclosure of communal lands from the 16th to the 18th century as Marx described in Capital. There would not be such a history without the theft of indigenous and Mexican lands by the white American man in the 19th century.

Land can be put to many highly profitable activities. Forests can be razed to obtain wood and fields can become huge monoculture plantations that yield only thanks to government pampering and regular petrochemical poisoning. Lands can also be made into gargantuan air-polluting, soil-depleting cattle ranches.

Capital is always driving for exponential growth; it works better in big numbers. That is why small businesses hardly prosper and the fishing industry employs gigantic nets that catch monstrous amounts of fish. As monstrous as indiscriminate since they unintendedly catch all sorts of organisms and raze as many forms of life as get in their way.

Capital also needs fresh water. Whereas the ecologically aware consumer is looking for creative ways to save and reutilize water in his bathroom, big agribusiness, mining and oil industries waste it by millions of gallons per hour in all kinds of highly polluting processes of extraction and purification. For every pound of gold, lithium, meat, or oil barrel, thousands of gallons of water have been wasted. The water they use doesn’t disappear, of course. It becomes toxic.

That is how capitalism works. It kills a thousand to consume only one, it demolishes entire mountains for a handful of precious metal, it wastes the scarce water of Arabian and Californian deserts in useless unnatural lawns, it throws more than one billion plastic bottles to the planet every day and introduces planned obsolescence in all goods even though the technology available allows to produce things that could last almost forever.

That’s how it works. Cars are better for the economy than bikes because they create more jobs. It’s completely normal to drive a Hummer and then take the escalator to get to the gym. Drinking water from the creek or the tap or taking apples from your grandma’s tree does not help the economy. Drink from tiny plastic bottles and buy peeled sliced vacuum packed apples from halfway around the world and you will be helping. It makes sense that millions starve to death while food production exceeds global needs by millions of tons that go to waste. Profitable, infinitely and for the few, is the measure of all goodness.

Everyone knows the world goes fast and faster. It is trying to keep up with capitalism. Eucalypts proliferate everywhere because they grow and yield fast, overweight broiler chickens abound because they get ready for slaughter in only four weeks. Super highways, bullet trains, broadband internet, stress, cocaine, and road rage; our world is in a rush to keep up with capitalism and so are we, accelerating in the fall.

Capitalist production results in two types of material outcomes. On one hand, the sacred commodity that is put on sale, which is the purpose of the process itself. On the other hand, what we don’t see, don’t want to see and is cautiously hidden from us but is much bigger than all commodities together: trash, depleted soil, groundwater overdrafting, microplastics disseminated even in our most intimate body orifices, colossal landfills nobody would mention on a date, toxic waste that pollutes soil, water and air. Only this last point is what is normally understood as global warming.

That is why global warming is a figure of speech, more specifically a cruel synecdoche. Like when a cancer has spread by metastasis through the body and the patient writhes in agony but we say that might be just a little fever.

Rising temperatures are just the fever of a global multidimensional disease composed of frequent industrial and petrochemical disasters, extensive pollution of air, soil, water and living organisms, annihilation of ecosystems, desertification, death of oceans and the life they harbor, water scarcity, extreme meteorological mutations and events, uninhabitable toxic zones, food chain collapse, mass extinction, and a long and apocalyptic etcetera, which constitutes an extermination of everything we call life and nature.