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Foreword

The basic structure of capitalism is at the heart of the climate crisis. Carbon emissions, the primary source of our changing climate, are the by-product of industrial production. Capitalism is literally changing the weather. Often, industry is blamed for climate change. People frequently talk about burning oil and coal, or fault cars and factories, but this misses the underlying dynamic that ties all these things together: industry is an expression of a system. Ascending over the last four hundred years, capitalism continues to be the dominant organizing force in the world, shaping life as we know it. All attempts at slowing—much less stopping—its growth have failed. The emission of climate-changing gases is intrinsic to the capitalist logic. Every day that this continues, the climate will continue to change. The year 2010 saw the highest emission of greenhouse gases in history.

Capitalism is based on a philosophy of “grow or die” and ruthless competition; companies need to continually expand and grow, or they will not survive. It is a system that seeks to maximize profit by exploiting labor as well as treating nature as both a “resource” and garbage dump. Despite all the warning signs—such as news of drought, heat waves, and new species being threatened by changing habitat—and what scientists say, the system marches on, with absolutely no sign of letting up. That is because it cannot change its fundamental nature. It is a form of economic and social organization at odds with nature and human community that has come to shape nearly everything in life, such that we can hardly imagine the possibility of life outside capitalism. It promotes qualities like greed and selfishness, and creates us in its image. Capitalism is more than an economic system; it is a way of life. Maximizing profit at the expense of all else is its very metabolism. To stop catastrophic climate change, we must stop capitalism.

So what is capitalism? At its core, it is based on only paying a worker the worth of a portion of their work. The owner keeps the remaining worth, or value. This “surplus value” is one of the sources of profit. Thus capitalism is an organized system of theft, wherein those who actually do the work are not paid the full value of their effort. The owners keep as profit the difference between the value that is created by the worker and that which the worker is paid as a wage. Because it is a system designed by and for capitalists, workers are necessarily exploited and mistreated. It is this same focus on profit that sees nature as a place where materials are found and then converted into commodities, with an emphasis on doing this as cheaply as possible. The way in which materials are obtained from nature is guided not by any thought about the integrity of nature itself, or the delicate balance of natural processes. It is guided by making money, pure and simple. The same is true at the other end of the productive process, when toxic chemicals and by-products are dumped as cheaply as possible. Hence owners fight attempts to regulate their ability to pollute. Not polluting costs money. It costs money to buy filters and scrubbers to limit toxic emissions, or to research and develop alternative sources of energy, and all this cuts into profits. Generally the fines for polluting are so insignificant that owners calculate that it is more worthwhile to pollute and pay the fines rather than, for example, upgrading their machinery to satisfy clean air or water regulations. This is a system ruled by the bottom line.

To stop capitalism, we need a social and political movement. This past year, 2011, marked the emergence of just such a movement. The Arab Spring saw millions of people rise up in opposition to long-standing tyrannical regimes. Some of these governments fell. Millions of people occupied prominent squares and did not back down against the power of states. This inspired people in the United States to launch their own movement—an occupation movement at Wall Street, the symbolic heart of global capitalism. Occupy Wall Street (OWS), which spread around the United States, Canada, and the world, is a populist movement that challenges the economic control of what they call the 1 percent. OWS champions the 99 percent, or those without great sources of wealth. This is significant because it points to the machinations of the 1 percent, or ruling class, and suggests the possibility of creating what Antonio Gramsci calls a “counterhegemonic” movement. For Gramsci, ruling-class ideas are the dominant ones. They are so widely propagated that they become “common sense.” An example is the belief that the sign of a healthy economy is vigorous growth. Or that to be a productive member of society, you have to have a job, which basically discounts stay-at-home parents, many artists, self-sufficient farmers, and others, while valuing only those who are enmeshed in the dominant economy. It is this common sense that serves the interests of the capitalist class. The OWS protests represent the development of an ideological alternative that puts the interests of everyday, working people ahead of those of the rulers. OWS has successfully changed the nature of discussion in the United States, forcing issues of economic equality and social justice onto the agenda. It signals a good beginning.

In addition to challenging ruling-class economic ideas, or those held by the 1 percent, OWS has put ideals of direct democracy, long championed by anarchists and other antiauthoritarians, into practice. The use of general assemblies as policymaking bodies and the reliance on modified forms of consensus decision making, however problematic consensus may be in certain situations, both have long histories within antiauthoritarian leftist movements. This new movement hopes to unite the majority against the minority currently running the show.

The historic development of capitalism is intertwined with colonialism, and later, neocolonialism. The economy, in its never-ending need to expand and accumulate, resolved early crises by going to the so-called third world to seek resources for production and sources of cheap—or in the case of slavery, free—labor. By waging war and asserting its military dominance, Europe was able to control vast territory from which raw materials could be obtained. European colonialism, the North American slave trade, and later neocolonial domination such as the Algerian and Vietnam wars all represent the attempted dominance of what was once called the first world over the peoples of the so-called third world. This is a racist dynamic in which the largely white, European people of the North dominate and exploit the people of the South. And it is exactly these people, the poor of the Southern Hemisphere, who will suffer the most from the changing climate. They already are suffering, as attested to by the recent floods that devastated Pakistan and Thailand along with the droughts that ­ravaged Mexico and Africa.

It will take a sustained movement to fundamentally transform society and stop climate change. Such revolutionary change will require a democratically controlled economy that puts human needs and ecological integrity ahead of short-term profit. It will require instituting directly democratic ways of making political decisions, so that the people affected by the outcomes are the ones with the power to determine solutions.

OWS began at Zuccotti Park, once called Liberty Plaza. It was at this same Liberty Plaza twenty years earlier that an organization called the Youth Greens met in the chilly, predawn hours the day after the twentieth Earth Day anniversary to challenge what it saw as the primary cause of the ecological crisis: capitalism, as symbolized by the institution of Wall Street. In solidarity with the Wall Street Action—which was endorsed by over fifty social and political groups, and turned out two thousand people organized into affinity groups, with close to three hundred arrested—actions were held in San Francisco, Eugene (Oregon), Minneapolis, and St. Louis. In San Francisco, six hundred people marched on the Pacific Stock Exchange at 6:00 a.m., with fifty of those later arrested.

The Youth Greens was largely an ecological anarchist organization, working with the Green movement of the 1980s and 1990s. It had active chapters in five U.S. cities, with annual decision-making conferences, and infused antiauthoritarian ideas and practices into the emerging Green movement, arguing against reformists. The Youth Greens asserted that the ecological crisis was a result of social forms of domination, and that humans dominating and exploiting other humans extended into the natural world in the attempt to dominate nature. Thus, for the Youth Greens and its allies in the Left Green Network, resolving the social crisis, by addressing and overturning all forms of social hierarchy and domination, was the only way to solve the ecological crisis.

We can learn from the ideas and practices of the Youth Greens. At the Earth Day Wall Street Action, Youth Greens assembled the first black bloc in the United States—inspired by the German autonomen, or “those who are autonomous.” Dozens of young people dressed in all black and covered their faces with black bandanas as a way to avoid being identified and surveilled by police. Nine years later, this tactic would gain worldwide visibility at the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. The Youth Greens also developed political principles covering almost every aspect of contemporary life, from gay and lesbian liberation to anti­racism to the practice of direct democracy, viewing all this as interrelated and part of a larger global movement.

As new movements continue, we need to incorporate an ecological sensibility and understanding of how capitalism—which is responsible for most of the social ills being protested—is also responsible for changing the climate. We will need to fundamentally reorganize society to not only ensure social and economic justice but also preserve humanity. For humanity to thrive, capitalism must die. Climate change is racist. Whether dubbed the 1 percent or the ruling class, the people who control the countries of the Northern Hemisphere are sacrificing the lives of largely poor people of color to maintain their rule and accumulate wealth. The most privileged people on the planet are letting millions of the less fortunate suffer and die. Three hundred thousand people a year are dying, mostly the poor of the Southern Hemisphere, due to the climate catastrophe. This number will only increase every year that things do not change.

Instead of acting to stop the emission of greenhouse gases, the so-called 1 percent is reorienting its military to adapt to changing climate conditions. The military is the part of the U.S. government that actually takes climate change seriously. The Pentagon, taking climate change as a given, is planning on fighting all the wars that will be necessitated by imperialism within the emerging context of drought, famine, mass death, and millions of refugees. Whereas recent U.S. wars have been in part over the control of oil, future wars will be in response to the destabilizing effects of climate change. It is a vicious dialectic in which oil and coal continue to propel the economy, then wars are fought to maintain control over those resources, and further wars are fought to respond to the results of climate change that stem from relying on those forms of energy.

To be most profitable, capitalism seeks the cheapest sources of energy. These happen to be oil and coal. Control of these “resources” is also highly profitable. The entire capitalist apparatus is built on the exploitation of oil and coal. Despite all the warning signs and reports from scientists, the dominant economic system is pushing irrationally to exploit the remaining reserves of oil and coal through the ecologically disastrous tar sands mining operations in Canada, fracking and mountain top removal in Appalachia, and oil drilling in pristine areas of Alaska and along the ocean shores. Capitalism has become an obsessive, hungry ghost, wanting more and more, despite its inevitable doom.

My child will be born this year. If our society does not change fundamentally in his lifetime, the world will be a very different place by the time he reaches old age. In 2112, life on Earth may be unrecognizable. He and his generation will likely ask us what we did to stop this madness when we still had time. Some scientists say we need to reduce carbon output by 90 percent by 2020, and others assert we need to drastically cut emissions by 2015. What is inarguable is that the time to act is now. We know what is happening and what we must do. What stops us? If our children and our children’s children are to have a life worth living, we must act.

This book is an impassioned plea for sanity, reason, and justice. It breaks through the collective denial we indulge in to call attention to the perilous nature of life. The weather is changing—that is clear. Crucially, though, the climate is changing. This is the long-term, underlying reality behind the changes in the weather. Severe weather events are becoming common, such as floods, storms, and extremes of hot and cold. We all know something is not right. Matters will only get worse unless we act. But to act, we need to know what to do. We need to understand what is happening. Imperiled Life is a critical reflection on what is going on, and why. It contains diagnosis, prognosis, and remedies. The diagnosis is clear, the prognosis is not good, and the remedies are extreme and radical. These are the times in which we live.

Javier Sethness-Castro, like the critical theorists of the Frankfurt school in whose tradition he writes, invites the reader to come and think with him. This book is an invitation to an honest reflection on our changing climate. It is thoughtful, angry, pessimistic, but ultimately hopeful. It asks us to be bold, remake the world, overthrow capitalism, and create a directly democratic, ecological society, in which we live in harmony with nature and each other. We need a society that does not change the weather or exploit humans, and one that leaves the world a better place for future generations. Enjoy reading and, as importantly, act to change the world.

—Paul Messersmith-Glavin