Many people on the left have found themselves in the position of having to defend communism or socialism to people who are either liberals or right of liberals. This isn’t anything new, as any long time leftist could tell you. What they could also tell you is that you hear a lot of the same arguments time and time again. To hear some people tell it, these systems of government stifle individuality, kill creativity, destroy art, stop innovation, and kill millions with famine and brutal purges. I bring this up because many of the complaints leveled at communism and socialism are true of capitalism as well, it just so happens that the injustices of capitalism are (for the most part) saddled on the people who have no power to do anything about it, while they are kept safely out of the view of those with actual political influence.

Because the people who are the target of capitalism worst offenses are often those born into impoverished countries, denied education, and who die young, the status quo of capitalism can be maintained in the face of massive injustice. Today we’re going to be starting this series on the many failures of capitalism with the big one: perhaps the biggest single biggest failing of capitalism, it’s impact on the environment.

Anyone can tell you about any number of catastophic effects that capitalism has had on the environment. Whether it be the ground pollution in flint, the oil spills in the carribean, air pollution so bad in cities like Bejing that people are forced to wear masks, or any number of a million other examples. And I could list for you here a spreadsheet of dozens of statistics that prove that large corperations are completly destroying the planet, statistics like the fact that 70% of carbon emissions have come from just 100 companies or that nearly 20% of the amazon rainforest has been destroyed.

But this article, and indeed this whole enterprise, isn’t about patting leftists on the head about how smart they are, it’s about changing hearts and minds. This is about convincing those who have been conned into voting against their own self intrest. So let’s talk about it. How do we show people that the destruction of forests, the pollution of groundwater, and dying off of coral reefs isn’t just the fault of lazy governing, but of capitalism?

The main problem, in my own estimation, isn’t that people aren’t aware of the problem, but rather that people dont attribute the problem to the proper source. People don’t look at Nestlé drawing so much water from the ground in one place that the people who live by that plant can no longer access groundwater and think of it as a problem of capitalism, they think of it as a problem of Nestlé. This is a problem of scope. So what do we do to make people see the bigger picture?

The key is getting people to understand that corperate abuses of the planet and of human rights isn’t the system being dysfunctional, it’s the system working exactly as designed. Under capitalism, corperations don’t just have the ability to make ethically compromising decisions to increase profits, they have to. If a company refuses to take an advantage, then another company with fewer morals will inevitably take the oppertunity they missed and edge the more “moral” company out with these kinds of advantages.

Over time, this process works like natrual selection, weeding out companies that have any kind of real ethical framework in their leadership structures. The only company that can survive in an enviroment like this is one that is totally morally compromised, willing to take any advantage in the market, no matter the cost to the environment or human life. This is the key takeaway, and the reason that capitalism is incapable of solving climate change. Even if the companies of today decided that they would like to continue existing for the next 1,000 years, and were going to do everything in their power to stop damaging the environment, that would still not be enough. As long as there are advantages to acting in complete disregard for anything but short term profits, those companies that decide to attempt to clean up their acts will be muscled out of their respective markets by companies who are willing to destroy the earth. These old companies would eventually become completly insolvent as they could not compete with rival companies producing the same quality goods for cheaper and making more money, and the new companies would completely take their places, producing just as much environmental damage as their predacessors.

This is what people need to be shown. That it’s not the corperation that is bad per say, but that the corperation is merely a symptom of a much larger problem, and that problem is the system that encourages the corperation to act the way it did in the first place. As long as profit can be made and hoarded, cutting costs is an inevitable fact of our society.