Climate Strikes are not enough: the clock is ticking, and there is no ‘sustainable capitalism’

Another Friday found me participating in the Climate Strike protest of the town I study in. Another gathering of younger and older people. The same chants with the familiar warm-blooded passion of young activists like myself; “What do we want?”, “Climate Justice”; “When do we want it?”, “NOW!” we kept yelling. Clever, funny and provocative slogans written on reused cardboard. Banners calling out for immediate action. Creative ways of protesting with strong messages like: “Save our Children’s Future” and “There is no Planet B”. You’ve seen the pictures; you know the story.

The Extinction Rebellion and the Fridays for Future have been going on for more than a year now. The climate crisis has become a mainstream topic in every political debate. Greta Thunberg, the famous, young, climate activist, was invited to the UN Climate Summit and gave an astonishing speech just a few months ago. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party in the US proposed bold action through the “Green New Deal”, while in the UK, Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party included a radical “Green Industrial Revolution” to tackle Climate Change in their manifesto. The European Green Party saw a rise of 20 seats in the 2019 EU elections. But, despite all this, there has been no serious action to revert the environmental catastrophe that looms over us. Only promises.

And, to my ears, those promises are just somber slogans; they rarely translate into the radical actions required. Politicians act as if they are battling climate change, but their legislation is not targeted at the real source of the problem. Instead of taxing big corporations, the ones profiting out of the depletion of the earth’s resources in the first place, middle, lower, and working-class families are the ones having to pay the burden. We saw how unsuccessful President Emmanuel Macron was in implementing a gasoline tax. French people and the ‘Yellow Vests’ reacted with massive demonstrations that have been in progress for more than thirty weeks. And rightfully so! Their argument: “Macron is trying to save life in the following ten years; we are trying to survive until next month” is a reasonable one. The tipping point for our planet, however, was reached for over thirty years now. More delay to radical change will certainly lower the chances of the Human Project surviving another millennium. So, what are politicians waiting for? Why are they not dealing with climate change aggressively?

As per usual, even the simple answer to this question has become too complicated through the media-induced confusion; the problem is basically manifested in the capitalist economy. The Climate Justice movement is still very ‘innocent’; believing that it can make capitalism sustainable, and hoping that this change will come through the political system of Representative Democracy, which is dominated by politicians who, for the most part, receive large sums of money from fossil fuels and other large international corporations. (Sources make the case of as much as 200mil annual spending by the fossil fuel corporations to block climate change action). However, let’s be honest with ourselves and let’s expose the reality for what it is; there is no such thing as ‘sustainable capitalism’.

In its nature, the system is based on the exploitation of natural resources to stay afloat. Companies in the competitive capitalist economy are required to keep expanding, keep bringing in more profit, keep investing and growing. In this endless race for market domination, anyone who opts out of the pursuit of profit is left behind and eliminated. Companies are required to always be in the mission of lowering the cost of production and maximizing their earnings. They mobilize everything available to them and they exhaust the earth’s resources in the process. That is why we see agriculture, the most polluting industry, growing endlessly and doing so at the expense of large forested areas. That is why slavery is a growing problem with about forty million slaves world-wide (2018 Global Slavery Index) working for companies so that their products are cheap and accessible to consumers. Like many other examples – that I do not have the space to cover here – slavery too produces large amounts of greenhouse emissions being in fact the third biggest producer behind the US and China.

Expecting a company to cut on expansion in order to invest on sustainable policies is, without doubt, naïve. If a company backs off from the race to profit and attempts to expand on sustainable policies, a competitor, who will remain unbothered by the environmental catastrophes, will eventually ‘outrun’ them. Is any company prepared to sacrifice itself in order to be the example for the rest? Can it trust that other companies will follow their lead instead of trying to take advantage of the situation to expand their monopolies? Are we to believe that the same companies that do not give a damn about children working twelve or more hours a day in the Brik Kiln Industry of India, the Cocoa farms of Africa and the Shrimp Industry of Thailand, to name just a few, will suddenly care for the environment? The answer is no! And individual consumer activism is not going to force them to do so either, since, like everything else, it is too easily manipulated. Charlie Chaplin once put it perfectly: “Greed has poisoned men’s souls”. And now, sooner rather than later, we are risking that greed will literary poison, not just our souls, but our bodies too.

We keep hearing economists explaining how beneficial competition is. How many initiatives it provides, how good it is for progress and ‘economic growth’. But have they ever considered that ‘economic growth’ is derived from environmental destruction?! We hear multiple people advocating for the victory of liberal capitalism over alternative systems; that this system is able to renew itself after every crisis that may hit it; a panacea to every problem! However, the solution for every recession or depression so far has been expansion; finding new markets, upgrading industry, finding more oil, more coal, more gold, more, more and more… However, what is the solution now?  Can capitalism turn its back on its exploitative nature and renew itself, not to battle an economic crisis, but the wrath of an earth that can no longer give? Can it put a stop to all expansion without collapsing under its own contradictions?

Capitalism as I see it, is like an unstoppable train, boarded by all life on earth, charging full speed ahead towards a wall; a wall that may be nearer that we thought. Scientists are now warning us that they had underestimated the severity of the issue. The climate justice movement, in my opinion, is still a movement for the ‘privileged’, middle/upper class students, like myself, who have enough time to think about the future; who wish to be called rebellious and to feel important in a system that diminishes individuality and self-love. We enjoy making the people around us proud, we enjoy being photographed, being applauded, appearing in news outlets, but in reality, we have no idea of the severity of the problem at hand or how to solve it. If we did, we would not just ask for climate justice. We would realize that climate change is simply the symptom of an exploitative system that has reached the end of its life. We would not be alright with a peaceful march every now and then, with a few clever slogans and loud chants, mostly done to fulfill our inner need for attention. If we wanted to have a true impact, we would need to get serious. We would need to get more people involved; working people who do not fear for their lives in ten years but in the upcoming, following ten days. We would need to unite beyond national barriers, in a global movement not simply for climate justice but for the true cause of the problem: the competitive capitalist economy. We can no longer wait for our well-paid politicians to decide to turn their backs to their real bosses, the international corporations. We must turn our backs against them first!

Let’s have fewer “catchy slogans” and more radical action!

Images provided by the author