How does capitalism degrade nature?

What We Stand For

Under capitalism the natural environment is something to be exploited

Capitalism produces too much, and yet people go without

As humans we have an intrinsic relationship to the natural world around us, but this relationship is distorted by the system we live in. Workers under capitalism are separated from the natural world. It means as humans we’re not connected to the world we live in. In a less reckless system the priorities will be to protect the planet.

Under capitalism the essence of what makes us human—our ability to work collectively to shape the natural world around us—is taken from us. We are left without control of our lives, and the products of our labour are not ours to enjoy.

We become alienated from the products of our labour, the labour process, our human nature and each other—and the active role that labour plays in the transformation of nature. But it is from the natural world that our societies are based. Karl Marx used the concept of a “metabolism” between humans and nature to depict the complex interchange between human beings and nature from human labour.

“Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature,” Marx wrote. Marx’s analysis led him to believe that a genuinely sustainable agriculture couldn’t exist under capitalism. There was a “metabolic rift” between humans and nature under capitalism that prevented this.

This rupture can only be healed when society organises the relationship between people and nature differently. Capitalism required a radical break with previous methods of social organisation. Before capitalism the dominant form of society in Europe was feudalism.

The majority of the product of the peasant’s labour was overwhelmingly for the lord’s own consumption. Under capitalism workers must sell their ability to work—their labour power—to get the essentials to survive. Production is organised by separate competing companies.

Each company is driven by the need to stay ahead of its rivals, living in fear of a competitor getting ahead of them. The introduction of new machinery is only about maximising exploitation to stay ahead of the competition. The need to accumulate wealth, simply for the sake of it, means that capitalism relates to the natural world differently to previous societies.

This is something that Marx and Frederick Engels clearly identified. “For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognised as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subject it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production,” they wrote.  

How does capitalism shape the planet?

Under capitalism the natural environment is merely something to be exploited for profit, or a rubbish dump for the system’s unwanted by-products. In the rush to make profits, only short-term concerns are of importance even if they often have longer-term irrational consequences for the planet.

Any company that attempts to be more ethical or invest in more sustainable practices will be at a disadvantage compared to their competitors. Companies are in competition with each other, and there is no overall logic to production. This means that production is irrational and unplanned, creating waste at all levels—overproduction on the one hand and wasted resources on the other.

There is no reason why development needs to follow the destructive, unsustainable path that has been taken in the developed world. But what is rational for the system, and in the long term, is not rational for different parts of it that are in competition with each other.

It is only in a society where the rift between people and nature has been healed, that people will develop unrestricted by the limits of capitalism.

• This is the fifth part of a series of columns that discuss What We Stand For, the Socialist Workers Party statement of principles, printed every week in Socialist Worker (see page 12). For the full series go here