statement:

Unlike many green economists, we will never say that capitalism can offer the solutions to climate change. We do not believe capitalism has the answers, but too many environmentalists suggest simply another form of capitalism’s economics. 

They do not usually dispute that the drive for profit underlies the move towards the planet’s degradation. What they want instead is a “fairer” system of in which environmental and social needs are taken into account and, as in the USA, Green New Deal which will look towards sanctions to ensure compliance with regulations, funding for their enforcement, taxes and duties on environmentally damaging practices and so on.

In other words, they unreasonably expect that the goal of increasing profits and expanding the market can be countered under the profit system. But it can’t. The profit system demands a system that allows profits to be maximised. The Green New Deal is setting out to impose on capitalism something that is incompatible with it. 

To protect the environment it is the whole global profit system itself that must go. Transforming the capitalist economy so that it works for the common good cannot be done. No State is going to implement legislation which would penalise the competitiveness of its national enterprises in the face of foreign competition. States only take into account environmental questions if they can find an agreement at international level which will disadvantage none of them. But that’s the snag because competition for the appropriation of world profits is one of the basis of the present system. Capitalism cannot go green because it simply cannot change its spots.

The market economy demands that businesses only take into account their own narrow financial interests. Pleasing shareholders takes far more priority than ecological considerations. The upshot is that productive processes are distorted by this drive to make and accumulate profits.

When we blame the capitalist system, we are promoting the idea that all social problems derive from the fact that a few individuals or countries own the means of producing the things we require to live. 

We are no different from XR and others in desiring an environment in which the conservation of all animal and plant species is ensured, in a society in which each production process takes into consideration not only human need but any likely effect upon the environment. Where we differ is in recognising that their demands have to be set against a well-entrenched economic and social system, based on class privilege and property and governed by the overriding law of profits first.

We seek a radical transformation of the world where a sustainable society is achieved in which all the Earth’s resources, natural and industrial, have become the common heritage, under democratic control at local, regional and world level, of all humanity.

ANZACGF