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

Full read here: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/neaz3d/airpods-are-a-tragedy

AirPods are a product of the past.

They’re plastic, made of some combination of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, chlorine, and sulfur. They’re tungsten, tin, tantalum, lithium, and cobalt.

The particles that make up these elements were created 13.8 billion years ago, during the Big Bang. Humans extract these elements from the earth, heat them, refine them. As they work, humans breathe in airborne particles, which deposit in their lungs. The materials are shipped from places like Vietnam, South Africa, Kazakhstan, Peru, Mexico, Indonesia, and India, to factories in China. A literal city of workers creates four tiny computing chips and assembles them into a logic board. Sensors, microphones, grilles, and an antenna are glued together and packaged into a white, strange-looking plastic exoskeleton.

These are AirPods. They’re a collection of atoms born at the dawn of the universe, churned beneath the surface of the earth, and condensed in an anthropogenic parallel to the Big Crunch—a proposed version of the death of the universe where all matter shrinks and condenses together. Workers are paid unlivable wages in more than a dozen countries to make this product possible. Then it’s sold by Apple, the world’s first trillion-dollar company, for $159 USD.

For roughly 18 months, AirPods play music, or podcasts, or make phone calls. Then the lithium-ion batteries will stop holding much of a charge, and the AirPods will slowly become unusable. They can’t be repaired because they’re glued together. They can’t be thrown out, or else the lithium-ion battery may start a fire in the garbage compactor. They can’t be easily recycled, because there’s no safe way to separate the lithium-ion battery from the plastic shell. Instead, the AirPods sit in your drawer forever.

Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, which does electronics teardowns and sells repair tools and parts, told Motherboard that AirPods are “evil.” According to the headphones review team at Rtings.com, AirPods are “below-average” in terms of sound quality. According to people on every social media platform, AirPods are a display of wealth.

But more than a pair of headphones, AirPods are an un-erasable product of culture and class. People in working or impoverished economic classes are responsible for the life-threatening, exhaustive, violent work of removing their parts from the ground and assembling them. Meanwhile, people in the global upper class design and purchase AirPods.

Even if you only own AirPods for a few years, the earth owns them forever. When you die, your bones will decompose in less than a century, but the plastic shell of AirPods won’t decompose for at least a millennium. Thousands of years in the future, if human life or sentient beings exist on earth, maybe archaeologists will find AirPods in the forgotten corners of homes. They’ll probably wonder why they were ever made, and why so many people bought them. But we can also ask ourselves those same questions right now.

……

The disposability of AirPods mirrors the fact that they were built upon disposable labor.

Disposable labor refers to the workers who are subject to the whims of what capitalists call the “invisible hand of the market.” When there’s demand for a product or service, these people have work. When there isn’t, these people don’t. These could be contractors, part-time workers, or low-wage blue collar workers who are treated like a “replaceable part of the production process,” as explained by socialist writers Fred and Harry Magdoff in an article for the Monthly Review.

Every electronic product is the culmination of international labor from mines, refinery facilities, and assembly facilities, usually from underpaid workers. Thousands and thousands of people work in dozens of countries around the world—including, but not limited to, Brazil, Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand, China, Malaysia, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, India, the Philippines, Mexico, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, Russia, Japan, Germany, Belgium, Estonia, Macedonia, Korea, Canada, and Netherlands—in order to extract and refine the materials used to make modern electronics.

There’s a human cost to all of this. Consider Foxconn—the Chinese company that assembles an estimated half of all iPhones, according to Business Insider, as well as other Apple products. (Luxshare and Investec assemble AirPods.) Foxconn has a factory in Zhengzhou that’s sometimes referred to as “iPhone City.” According to reporting by Business Insider from May 2018, about 350,000 people work in these facilities. Salaries start at $300 per month. 

……

Of course, AirPods aren’t unique. Many of the products that we use daily were built to become trash, and eventually fossils. Single-use plastics—like water bottles, coffee cups, plastic packaging—are cheap for companies and convenient for consumers. They also, largely, end up floating in the ocean and littering ocean floors. Some scientists have even started to refer to the present as the Plasticine. Electronics are no different. For companies like Apple, product repairability hurts the bottom line, so the company has lobbied against right-to-repair efforts and collaborated with Amazon to boot iPhone and Macbook refurbishers off the Amazon marketplace.

On a global scale, our economic system is predicated on a disregard for longevity, because it’s more profitable for companies to make products that die than it is to make products that last.

So sure, AirPods aren’t the most expensive earbuds on the market, and the jokes that the product is a display of wealth are largely tongue-in-cheek. But in truth, AirPods are a symbol of wealth. They’re physical manifestations of a global economic system that allows some people to buy and easily lose $160 headphones, and leaves other people at risk of death to produce those products. If AirPods are anything, they’re future fossils of capitalism.