资本主义已经途穷，前路通往何方？（一）_风闻

美国社会主义杂志《每月评论》网站2月1日刊登俄勒冈大学社会学教授约翰·贝拉米·福斯特文章《资本主义失败了，接下来呢？》，由于篇幅较长分为三部分，今天推送第一部分。

文：John Bellamy Foster

译：由冠群

进入21世纪还不到二十年，资本主义作为一种社会制度显然已经失败。整个世界深陷于经济停滞、经济金融化以及人类历史上最极端的不平等，随之而来的是大规模的失业和不充分就业、动荡、贫困、饥饿、无效生产和虚耗的生命，此情此景只能用地球生态已进入“死亡螺旋”状态来形容。“数字革命”作为我们这个时代最伟大的技术进步，最初目标是作为实现通信自由和解放生产力的一种工具，但很快它就转变为一种监视、控制和替换劳动人口的新手段。自由民主制度正处于崩溃的边缘，而本是资本主义制度下脚料的法西斯主义，却在当今时代卷土从来，和男权主义、种族主义、帝国主义以及战争携手并肩、高歌猛进。

当然，说资本主义是一种失败的制度并不意味着资本主义即将崩溃和瓦解。而是说，它从出现时原本具有历史必要性和创造性的制度，蜕变成了本世纪一个不必要且有破坏性的制度。今天，这个世界史无前例地面临着划时代的选择——“是整个社会翻天覆地的重组，还是各阶级在你争我夺后走向共同毁灭。”

资本主义业已失败的迹象已经显露无疑。金融泡沫膨胀后必然的破裂与紧随而至的投资停滞反复出现，现在这被称作是所谓自由市场的特点。收入和财富不平等加剧造成了大多数人口物质生活条件下降。尽管生产率稳步提高，但美国大多数工人的实际工资在四十年中几乎没有变化。工作强度增加了，而工作和安全保障却被有组织的抛弃了。失业数据已经变得越来越没有意义，因为不充分就业已经以合同工的新形式制度化，在零工经济中出现并日益普遍。随着资本主义确立了对工作单位的极权统治，工会昔日的盛况现在只剩下了残影。而各个苏维埃国家消亡后，欧洲的社会民主主义已经瓦解，取而代之的是新出现的“放纵资本主义”（liberated capitalism）。

跨国公司在全球进行劳动力套利（译注：指将已失去技术优势与技术壁垒的产业转移至劳动力价格低廉的地区，通过降低人力成本来提高利润），获取了这个世界上最贫困地区被极度剥削的人口的劳动剩余价值，这造成了金融财富史无前例的向世界经济核心国家聚集，而边缘国家则变的相对贫困。目前约有21万亿美元的境外资金被存放在主要位于加勒比群岛的各个避税天堂, 它们是 “金融巨头稳固的避难所”。全球通信革命在技术上为垄断铺平了道路, 靠投机暴富的华尔街金融资本趁势崛起，它们进一步增加了“百分之一”富人的财富。42位亿万富翁现在占有的财富与当今世界一半人口拥有的财富一样多, 而美国最富有的三个人——杰夫·贝佐斯、比尔·盖茨和沃伦·巴菲特占有的财富超过了美国一半人口拥有的财富。在全世界的各个地区，收入差距都在近几十年急速扩大。几个世纪以来，最富裕和最贫穷国家之间的人均收入和财富差距不断扩大一直是主要趋势，但现在又出现加速扩大的迹象。现在全世界就业人口的60%以上，大约20亿人，在仅能维持生计的非正式行业工作，他们形成了一个庞大的全球无产阶级。全球劳动力储备比正式就业的劳动力多出70%。

即使在北美和欧洲发达国家，充足的医疗、住房、教育资源、干净的水和空气对很多人来说也正变得越来越遥不可及。由于不理智的过度依赖汽车和公共交通投资不足，美国和其它国家的交通状况正变得更加糟糕。城市结构呈现出贵族化和隔离性的特点，城市变成了有钱人的游乐场，而边缘人口则被排除在外。在美国有大约50万人——绝大部分是儿童——夜夜无家可归。纽约市当前鼠患泛滥，据说是因为气温升高所致，这反映了整个世界气温升高的趋势。

因贫穷和剥削引起的疾病原本只在维多利亚时代出现，现在在美国和其他高收入国家，这些疾病正在显著回潮，人均寿命则在下降。在英国，痛风、猩红热、百日咳，甚至坏血病和肺结核都出现了复发的迹象。在劳动保健和安全条例执行不力的情况下，黑肺病在美国的产煤区报复性反弹。过度使用抗生素，尤其是资本主义农业公司滥用抗生素，正在造成一场抗生素耐药性危机，超级病菌的危险性增多将会使越来越多的人死于非命，到本世纪中叶，因此而死亡的人数可能会超过每年死于癌症的人数，这种情况促使世界卫生组织宣布出现了一种“全球健康紧急情况。”是制度的运作方式造成了这些可怕的状况，与恩格斯在《英国工人阶级的状况》一书中所说的“社会谋杀”是一样的。

在大型企业、慈善资本主义基金会和新自由主义政府的鼓动下，公共教育体系被改造成企业设计的考试制度，执行僵化的共同核心标准（译注：相当于美国的学生教育大纲）。这就产生了大量的挂关于学生的数据，其中很大一部分被拿到市场上秘密地营销和出售。教育的产业化和私有化正在使儿童的各种需要逐步让位于商品市场的现金关系。在此，我们看到了查尔斯·狄更斯《艰难时世》中所描写的葛擂硬和麦却孔掐孩那种粗俗功利主义哲学是再次回归人间：“生活中只讲事实”和“你绝不应抱有幻想”。美国很多最穷困、种族隔离最严重的学校，已经蜕变成了禁锢智慧的地牢，从这里走出来的学生不是参军当炮灰或是成为罪犯蹲监狱。

美国有200多万人被关在监狱里，监禁率比世界上任何国家都高，这构成了新版的种族隔离。监狱中关押的犯人总数几乎等于美国第四大城市得克萨斯州休斯顿市的人口总数。非洲裔和拉丁裔美国人占被关押者总数的56%，而两个族裔的人口总数却只占美国总人口数的32%。近50%的美国成年人有一个直系亲属曾经或目前正在监狱中服刑，而非洲裔美国人和美国土著人的这个比例则更高。在美国，黑人和土著美国人死于警察枪击事件的概率几乎是白人的三倍，拉美裔男子的几率将近是白人的两倍，种族隔阂正在全世界蔓延扩大。

资本主义制度下权力必然的运作方式就是暴力虐待妇女，强迫其无偿劳动或者低薪却高强度劳动，其目的不是团结人类而是分裂人类。全世界超过三分之一的妇女遭受过肉体暴力或性暴力。尤其是妇女的身体，已经被物化（objectified）、具体化（reified）和商品化（commodified），成为垄断资本主义推向市场的一件商品。

已被商业集团所控制的大众媒体-宣传系统，正与一个以社交媒体为基础的宣传系统相融合，这个系统的漏洞更多，表面上似乎混乱无序，但实际却比以往任何时候都更整齐划一，更青睐于向金钱和权力献媚。利用当代已经占据主流的数码互动推销与监视技术，既得利益集团能够做到向个人及其人际关系网精准投放他们想要发布的信息，而这些信息绝大多数不受检查，这引起了各方对“假新闻”的担忧。目前全世界各国有无数的商业团体许诺可以利用技术手段来操纵大选，向竞价最高的买家售卖他们的服务。在美国，网络中立性的消失意味着垄断网络服务的供应商进一步加深了对整个互联网的整合，集中和控制。

来自大公司和亿万富豪钱柜的“黑钱”越来越放纵的操纵选举。尽管自诩为世界第一的民主政体，美国却如保罗·巴兰和保罗·斯威齐1966年在《垄断资本》中所说的那样，是“民主其表，财阀其里”。在特朗普政府中，遵循一贯的传统，内阁成员中的72%来自于公司高管，剩余的则来自军方。

由美国和其他大国在其国力鼎盛时期策划的战争，在中东等战略产油区阴魂不散，并有升级为全球热核大战的危险。在奥巴马执政时期，美国在阿富汗、伊拉克、叙利亚、利比亚、也门、索马里和巴基斯坦等七个不同的国家卷入了战争或发动了空袭。华盛顿重新把酷刑和暗杀列为可接受的战争手段，无数的个人，团体或社群只要被打上恐怖分子的标签就可以被动刑或暗杀。美国和俄罗斯正在酝酿一场新的冷战和核军备竞赛，而华盛顿则在努力为中国的持续崛起设置障碍。特朗普政府成立了一支新的太空部队，作为美国军队的一个独立分支，该部队用以确保美国在太空军事化后仍占据主导地位。著名的《原子科学家公报》在2018年把它的末日时钟调整到了距离午夜12点还剩两分钟，这是自1953年热核武器出现以来最接近午夜12点的时刻，它拉响了核战争和气候异常迫在眉睫的警报。

美国正在对委内瑞拉和尼加拉瓜等国实施日益严厉的经济制裁，尽管它们是民选政府——或者正是因为它们是民选政府。核心国家正在积极发动贸易战和货币战，而在约有6000万难民和本国流离失所者想要逃离恶劣的环境进行迁徙时，欧洲和美国却相继竖起了种族主义的围墙将他们拒之门外。目前全世界的流动人口已高达2.5亿人，其中高收入国家里的流动人口已占到本国人口的14%以上，而在2000年这个比例还不到10%。同时，统治阶层和富裕国家想要垄断权力和特权，将大多数普通人隔离在外，任其自生自灭。

超过七亿五千万人，占世界人口的10%以上，长期营养不良。美国的食品压力持续攀升，导致廉价商品店的快速增长，这些店只出售劣质和有毒食品。八分之一的美国家庭，大约4000万美国人，其中有将近1300万儿童没有食品保障。在全球“去小农化”的大潮中，自耕农正被农业综合体、私人资本和主权财富基金排挤出自己的土地，这是历史上最大规模的人口流动。全球大部分地区的城市过度拥挤，难以谋生，以至于人们现在可以理直气壮的称之为“贫民窟星球”。与此同时，世界房地产市场估值高达163万亿美元（与之相比的是历史上有记载的黄金开采量大约是7.5万亿美元）。

从气候变化到海洋酸化，到第六次灭绝，到全球氮磷循环的崩溃，到淡水的流失，森林的消失，有毒化学品的泛滥和放射性污染，处处可见二战后迎来经济飞速发展的“人类世”（Anthropocene epoch）对环境安全造成了多么巨大的破坏。据估计，自1970年以来，世界上60%的野生脊椎动物（包括哺乳动物、爬行动物、两栖动物、鸟类和鱼类）已经灭绝，而世界上无脊椎动物的种类在近几十年里减少了45%。气候学家詹姆斯·汉森声称气候变化加速和气候带的快速移动会导致物种灭绝，加速生物多样性丧失的进程。生物学家预计，到本世纪末将有一半的物种灭绝。

如果目前的气候变化趋势持续下去，原计划将全球平均气温升高限定在2摄氏度以内的“全球碳计划”将在16年后被突破（10年内全球平均气温就将升高1.5摄氏度，而只有低于这个度数才能保持气候长期稳定）。地球系统科学家警告说，地球正无比危险的接近变成“温室地球”，到时灾难性的气候变化将必然出现并不可逆转。如果碳排放继续像过去几十年那样每年上升2%（2018年全球碳排放上升2.7％，美国上升3.4％），而无法达成每年最低3%的减排目标以避免地球能量平衡被打破，则人类将要承受难以估量的生态，社会和经济损失。

但并不奇怪的是，各大能源公司在气候变化问题上继续撒谎，宣扬和资助否定气候变化的研究，可与此同时却在其内部文件中承认了气候变化的真相。这些公司正加紧开采和生产化石燃料，其中包括污染最严重、大多会产生温室气体的燃料，并在此过程中获得巨大利润。北极冰盖正因全球变暖而融化，而在资本的眼中，这是一个新的金矿敞开了大门，等着它们去开采庞大的油气财富，而不必在意这会对全球气候变化造成什么影响。作为对气候变暖调研报告的回应，埃克森美孚公司声称它们将任意开采并销售其名下的所有化石资源。能源公司还将继续参与气候谈判，以确保任何限制碳排放的协定不损害其利益。全世界的资本主义国家都将其积累的财富优先用于其它事业，而不是用来控制威胁到全人类未来的气候变化。

对资本主义最好的理解是，它是一种竞争性的以阶级为基础的生产和交换模式，通过剥削工人的劳动力和私吞剩余价值（超出工人的劳动力再生产成本之外的价值）来积累资本。资本主义所固有的经济核算模式，指的是一种创造价值的商品或服务，通过市场交换而产生收入。因此，市场以外产生的大部分社会和环境成本被排除在这种估价形式之外，无论这种成本是人类生命的缩短和退化，还是自然环境受到破坏，这些成本都被视为与资本主义经济本身无关的负“外部性”（译注：负外部性指某个经济行为个体的活动使他人或社会受损，而造成负外部性的人却没有为此承担成本）。正如环境经济学家K·威廉·卡普所言：“资本主义必须被看作是一种没有支付成本的经济。”

我们现在已经来到了21世纪的某个关键节点，此时这个非理性制度的外部性所造成的损失，例如战争的成本、自然资源的消耗、人类生命的浪费和地球环境的破坏，已远远超过这个资本主义制度为整个社会所提供的可能经济收益。资本的聚集和财富的积累越来越快，其代价却是人类赖以生存的社会和自然条件受到不可逆的破坏。

有人可能认为，经济发展显得势不可挡的中国（尽管也伴随着深刻的社会和生态矛盾）并不具有上述资本主义制度的弊病。但是，中国的发展其实源于1949年的中国革命，在以毛泽东为领袖的中国共产党的领导下，这场革命使中国从帝国主义体系中解放出来。这使它能够在基本不受外部力量牵制的情况下实行计划经济发展了几十年，建立了强大的农业和工业经济基础。在后毛时代的改革中，中国的经济体制转变为有限的计划经济伴以更加依赖市场（债务与投机行为大规模出现）的市场经济混合体制，在世界市场全球化的有利条件下，中国才开始发展赶超发达国家。现在，美国正试图通过发动贸易战和施加其它压力来动摇中国在国际市场的地位，质疑中国在世界贸易中的发展模式。可以说，中国发展的成功并不代表资本主义制度的成功，而恰恰反映了资本主义固有的局限性。中国也存在资本积累制度的毁灭性倾向。最终，中国的未来也取决于其人民能否回归革命性转型。

资本主义是如何在世界范围内引发这些悲惨状况的？资本主义的失败肇始于20世纪初，要想理解资本主义是怎样失败的，就需要从历史的角度审视新自由主义的兴起，以及新自由主义是如让该制度更具有破坏性的。只有这样，我们才能在21世纪把握人类的未来。

 （未完持续）

Capitalism Has Failed—What Next?

Less than two decades into the twenty-first century, it is evident that capitalism has failed as a social system. The world is mired in economic stagnation, financialization, and the most extreme inequality in human history, accompanied by mass unemployment and underemployment, precariousness, poverty, hunger, wasted output and lives, and what at this point can only be called a planetary ecological “death spiral.”1 The digital revolution, the greatest technological advance of our time, has rapidly mutated from a promise of free communication and liberated production into new means of surveillance, control, and displacement of the working population. The institutions of liberal democracy are at the point of collapse, while fascism, the rear guard of the capitalist system, is again on the march, along with patriarchy, racism, imperialism, and war.

To say that capitalism is a failed system is not, of course, to suggest that its breakdown and disintegration is imminent.2 It does, however, mean that it has passed from being a historically necessary and creative system at its inception to being a historically unnecessary and destructive one in the present century. Today, more than ever, the world is faced with the epochal choice between “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large and the common ruin of the contending classes.”3

Indications of this failure of capitalism are everywhere. Stagnation of investment punctuated by bubbles of financial expansion, which then inevitably burst, now characterizes the so-called free market.4 Soaring inequality in income and wealth has its counterpart in the declining material circumstances of a majority of the population. Real wages for most workers in the United States have barely budged in forty years despite steadily rising productivity.5 Work intensity has increased, while work and safety protections on the job have been systematically jettisoned. Unemployment data has become more and more meaningless due to a new institutionalized underemployment in the form of contract labor in the gig economy.6 Unions have been reduced to mere shadows of their former glory as capitalism has asserted totalitarian control over workplaces. With the demise of Soviet-type societies, social democracy in Europe has perished in the new atmosphere of “liberated capitalism.”7

The capture of the surplus value produced by overexploited populations in the poorest regions of the world, via the global labor arbitrage instituted by multinational corporations, is leading to an unprecedented amassing of financial wealth at the center of the world economy and relative poverty in the periphery.8 Around $21 trillion of offshore funds are currently lodged in tax havens on islands mostly in the Caribbean, constituting “the fortified refuge of Big Finance.”9 Technologically driven monopolies resulting from the global-communications revolution, together with the rise to dominance of Wall Street-based financial capital geared to speculative asset creation, have further contributed to the riches of today’s “1 percent.” Forty-two billionaires now enjoy as much wealth as half the world’s population, while the three richest men in the United States—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett—have more wealth than half the U.S. population.10 In every region of the world, inequality has increased sharply in recent decades.11 The gap in per capita income and wealth between the richest and poorest nations, which has been the dominant trend for centuries, is rapidly widening once again.12 More than 60 percent of the world’s employed population, some two billion people, now work in the impoverished informal sector, forming a massive global proletariat. The global reserve army of labor is some 70 percent larger than the active labor army of formally employed workers.13

Adequate health care, housing, education, and clean water and air are increasingly out of reach for large sections of the population, even in wealthy countries in North America and Europe, while transportation is becoming more difficult in the United States and many other countries due to irrationally high levels of dependency on the automobile and disinvestment in public transportation. Urban structures are more and more characterized by gentrification and segregation, with cities becoming the playthings of the well-to-do while marginalized populations are shunted aside. About half a million people, most of them children, are homeless on any given night in the United States.14 New York City is experiencing a major rat infestation, attributed to warming temperatures, mirroring trends around the world.15

In the United States and other high-income countries, life expectancy is in decline, with a remarkable resurgence of Victorian illnesses related to poverty and exploitation. In Britain, gout, scarlet fever, whooping cough, and even scurvy are now resurgent, along with tuberculosis. With inadequate enforcement of work health and safety regulations, black lung disease has returned with a vengeance in U.S. coal country.16 Overuse of antibiotics, particularly by capitalist agribusiness, is leading to an antibiotic-resistance crisis, with the dangerous growth of superbugs generating increasing numbers of deaths, which by mid–century could surpass annual cancer deaths, prompting the World Health Organization to declare a “global health emergency.”17 These dire conditions, arising from the workings of the system, are consistent with what Frederick Engels, in the Condition of the Working Class in England, called “social murder.”18

At the instigation of giant corporations, philanthrocapitalist foundations, and neoliberal governments, public education has been restructured around corporate-designed testing based on the implementation of robotic common-core standards. This is generating massive databases on the student population, much of which are now being surreptitiously marketed and sold.19 The corporatization and privatization of education is feeding the progressive subordination of children’s needs to the cash nexus of the commodity market. We are thus seeing a dramatic return of Thomas Gradgrind’s and Mr. M’Choakumchild’s crass utilitarian philosophy dramatized in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times: “Facts are alone wanted in life” and “You are never to fancy.”20 Having been reduced to intellectual dungeons, many of the poorest, most racially segregated schools in the United States are mere pipelines for prisons or the military.21

More than two million people in the United States are behind bars, a higher rate of incarceration than any other country in the world, constituting a new Jim Crow. The total population in prison is nearly equal to the number of people in Houston, Texas, the fourth largest U.S. city. African Americans and Latinos make up 56 percent of those incarcerated, while constituting only about 32 percent of the U.S. population. Nearly 50 percent of American adults, and a much higher percentage among African Americans and Native Americans, have an immediate family member who has spent or is currently spending time behind bars. Both black men and Native American men in the United States are nearly three times, Hispanic men nearly two times, more likely to die of police shootings than white men.22 Racial divides are now widening across the entire planet.

Violence against women and the expropriation of their unpaid labor, as well as the higher level of exploitation of their paid labor, are integral to the way in which power is organized in capitalist society—and how it seeks to divide rather than unify the population. More than a third of women worldwide have experienced physical/sexual violence. Women’s bodies, in particular, are objectified, reified, and commodified as part of the normal workings of monopoly-capitalist marketing.23

The mass media-propaganda system, part of the larger corporate matrix, is now merging into a social media-based propaganda system that is more porous and seemingly anarchic, but more universal and more than ever favoring money and power. Utilizing modern marketing and surveillance techniques, which now dominate all digital interactions, vested interests are able to tailor their messages, largely unchecked, to individuals and their social networks, creating concerns about “fake news” on all sides.24 Numerous business entities promising technological manipulation of voters in countries across the world have now surfaced, auctioning off their services to the highest bidders.25 The elimination of net neutrality in the United States means further concentration, centralization, and control over the entire Internet by monopolistic service providers.

Elections are increasingly prey to unregulated “dark money” emanating from the coffers of corporations and the billionaire class. Although presenting itself as the world’s leading democracy, the United States, as Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy stated in Monopoly Capital in 1966, “is democratic in form and plutocratic in content.”26 In the Trump administration, following a long-established tradition, 72 percent of those appointed to the cabinet have come from the higher corporate echelons, while others have been drawn from the military.27

War, engineered by the United States and other major powers at the apex of the system, has become perpetual in strategic oil regions such as the Middle East, and threatens to escalate into a global thermonuclear exchange. During the Obama administration, the United States was engaged in wars/bombings in seven different countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan.28 Torture and assassinations have been reinstituted by Washington as acceptable instruments of war against those now innumerable individuals, group networks, and whole societies that are branded as terrorist. A new Cold War and nuclear arms race is in the making between the United States and Russia, while Washington is seeking to place road blocks to the continued rise of China. The Trump administration has created a new space force as a separate branch of the military in an attempt to ensure U.S. dominance in the militarization of space. Sounding the alarm on the increasing dangers of a nuclear war and of climate destabilization, the distinguished Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its doomsday clock in 2018 to two minutes to midnight, the closest since 1953, when it marked the advent of thermonuclear weapons.29

Increasingly severe economic sanctions are being imposed by the United States on countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua, despite their democratic elections—or because of them. Trade and currency wars are being actively promoted by core states, while racist barriers against immigration continue to be erected in Europe and the United States as some 60 million refugees and internally displaced peoples flee devastated environments. Migrant populations worldwide have risen to 250 million, with those residing in high-income countries constituting more than 14 percent of the populations of those countries, up from less than 10 percent in 2000. Meanwhile, ruling circles and wealthy countries seek to wall off islands of power and privilege from the mass of humanity, who are to be left to their fate.30

More than three-quarters of a billion people, over 10 percent of the world population, are chronically malnourished.31 Food stress in the United States keeps climbing, leading to the rapid growth of cheap dollar stores selling poor quality and toxic food. Around forty million Americans, representing one out of eight households, including nearly thirteen million children, are food insecure.32 Subsistence farmers are being pushed off their lands by agribusiness, private capital, and sovereign wealth funds in a global depeasantization process that constitutes the greatest movement of people in history.33 Urban overcrowding and poverty across much of the globe is so severe that one can now reasonably refer to a “planet of slums.”34 Meanwhile, the world housing market is estimated to be worth up to $163 trillion (as compared to the value of gold mined over all recorded history, estimated at $7.5 trillion).35

The Anthropocene epoch, first ushered in by the Great Acceleration of the world economy immediately after the Second World War, has generated enormous rifts in planetary boundaries, extending from climate change to ocean acidification, to the sixth extinction, to disruption of the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, to the loss of freshwater, to the disappearance of forests, to widespread toxic-chemical and radioactive pollution.36 It is now estimated that 60 percent of the world’s wildlife vertebrate population (including mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and fish) have been wiped out since 1970, while the worldwide abundance of invertebrates has declined by 45 percent in recent decades.37 What climatologist James Hansen calls the “species exterminations” resulting from accelerating climate change and rapidly shifting climate zones are only compounding this general process of biodiversity loss. Biologists expect that half of all species will be facing extinction by the end of the century.38

If present climate-change trends continue, the “global carbon budget” associated with a 2°C increase in average global temperature will be broken in sixteen years (while a 1.5°C increase in global average temperature—staying beneath which is the key to long-term stabilization of the climate—will be reached in a decade). Earth System scientists warn that the world is now perilously close to a Hothouse Earth, in which catastrophic climate change will be locked in and irreversible.39 The ecological, social, and economic costs to humanity of continuing to increase carbon emissions by 2.0 percent a year as in recent decades (rising in 2018 by 2.7 percent—3.4 percent in the United States), and failing to meet the minimal 3.0 percent annual reductions in emissions currently needed to avoid a catastrophic destabilization of the earth’s energy balance, are simply incalculable.40

Nevertheless, major energy corporations continue to lie about climate change, promoting and bankrolling climate denialism—while admitting the truth in their internal documents. These corporations are working to accelerate the extraction and production of fossil fuels, including the dirtiest, most greenhouse gas-generating varieties, reaping enormous profits in the process. The melting of the Arctic ice from global warming is seen by capital as a new El Dorado, opening up massive additional oil and gas reserves to be exploited without regard to the consequences for the earth’s climate. In response to scientific reports on climate change, Exxon Mobil declared that it intends to extract and sell all of the fossil-fuel reserves at its disposal.41 Energy corporations continue to intervene in climate negotiations to ensure that any agreements to limit carbon emissions are defanged. Capitalist countries across the board are putting the accumulation of wealth for a few above combatting climate destabilization, threatening the very future of humanity.

Capitalism is best understood as a competitive class-based mode of production and exchange geared to the accumulation of capital through the exploitation of workers’ labor power and the private appropriation of surplus value (value generated beyond the costs of the workers’ own reproduction). The mode of economic accounting intrinsic to capitalism designates as a value-generating good or service anything that passes through the market and therefore produces income. It follows that the greater part of the social and environmental costs of production outside the market are excluded in this form of valuation and are treated as mere negative “externalities,” unrelated to the capitalist economy itself—whether in terms of the shortening and degradation of human life or the destruction of the natural environment. As environmental economist K. William Kapp stated, “capitalism must be regarded as an economy of unpaid costs.”42

We have now reached a point in the twenty-first century in which the externalities of this irrational system, such as the costs of war, the depletion of natural resources, the waste of human lives, and the disruption of the planetary environment, now far exceed any future economic benefits that capitalism offers to society as a whole. The accumulation of capital and the amassing of wealth are increasingly occurring at the expense of an irrevocable rift in the social and environmental conditions governing human life on earth.43

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Some would argue that China stands as an exception to much of the above, characterized as it is by a seemingly unstoppable rate of economic advance (though carrying with it deep social and ecological contradictions). Yet Chinese development has its roots in the 1949 Chinese Revolution, carried out by the Chinese Communist Party headed by Mao Zedong, whereby it liberated itself from the imperialist system. This allowed it to develop for decades under a planned economy largely free of constraints from outside forces, establishing a strong agricultural and industrial economic base. This was followed by a shift in the post-Maoist reform period to a hybrid system of more limited state planning along with a much greater reliance on market relations (and a vast expansion of debt and speculation) under conditions—the globalization of the world market—that were particularly fortuitous to its “catching up.” Through trade wars and other pressures aimed at destabilizing China’s position in the world market, the United States is already seeking to challenge the bases of China’s growth in world trade. China, therefore, stands not so much for the successes of late capitalism but rather for its inherent limitations. The current Chinese model, moreover, carries within it many of the destructive tendencies of the system of capital accumulation. Ultimately, China’s future too depends on a return to the process of revolutionary transition, spurred by its own population.44

How did these disastrous conditions characterizing capitalism worldwide develop? An understanding of the failure of capitalism, beginning in the twentieth century, requires a historical examination of the rise of neoliberalism, and how this has only served to increase the destructiveness of the system. Only then can we address the future of humanity in the twenty-first century.

(To be continued)