Cap RC of inequality//aff LT

First, the problem threatening the global environment is the accumulation of capital under the present phase of monopoly-finance capital, and not just economic growth in the abstract. That is, issues of the qualitative nature of development as well as quantitative development are involved. This raises the question of the ecological value-form associated with capitalism in its monopoly-finance phase, geared to the promotion of economic and ecological waste as a stimulus to accumulation. Today the rich economies are well developed and capable of satisfying the material needs of their populations, and of emphasizing qualitative human development. Capitalism, however, requires continual value expansion and commodity consumption, with increasing throughputs of energy and materials. 46 This is promoted today by means of a massive sales effort, amounting to well over a trillion dollars a year in the United States, and through a vast outpouring of economic waste in the form of synthetic goods that are toxic to the environment. 47 As the Marxian economist Paul Baran wrote in the 1960s, “People steeped in the culture of monopoly capitalism do not want what they need and do not need what they want.” 48 On top of this vast waste system (including military waste), which drives accumulation, is a financialized superstructure that has enabled the system to transfer wealth and income more rapidly to the 0.01 percent at the top of society. 49 In the new financial architecture that has emerged the credit-debt system dominates over the entire global economy. It is this irrational system of artificially stimulated growth, economic waste, financialized wealth, and extreme inequality that needs to be overturned if we are to create a society of ecological sustainability and substantive equality.

If economic growth in the wealthy countries continues as at present— even by the standards of our current period of relative economic stagnation —there is very little or no chance of avoiding breaking the world climate budget with disastrous global consequences. It is the growth in the scale of the economy, and the destructive tendencies of our ecologically inefficient, technologically destructive society, geared to roundabout production— whereby plastic spoons are made in China and shipped to the United States where they have a lifetime use of a few minutes before reentering the waste stream, generating all sorts of toxic chemicals in the process—that are threatening the biogeochemical processes of the entire planet. Capital’s social metabolic processes attempt to re-create the planet in its own image, treating all planetary boundaries as mere barriers to surmount, thus generating a global metabolic rift on a rapidly warming planet. All of this points to the need to place limits on economic growth, and specifically on the expansion of today’s disaster capitalism.

Second, capitalism is suffering at present from an epochal crisis—both economic and environmental. This is manifested in overaccumulation, stagnation, and financialization on the one hand, and ecological rifts and disruptions, both within each and every ecosystem and on the level of the planet as a whole, on the other. 50 These two long-term structural crises of the system are not reducible to each other, except in the sense that they are both induced by the logic of capital accumulation. What we have called ecological crisis proper is largely invisible to the value accounting of the capitalist system, and is systematically given a lower priority in relation to economic imperatives. Society is constantly told that the solution to economic stagnation is economic growth by any means: usually involving the promotion of neoliberal disaster capitalism. Yet such an economic solution—which is beyond the power of the system to effect in a long-term, stable way, but only on a temporary, ad hoc basis—would be fatal to the planetary environment, which requires less, not more, expansion of the economic treadmill. The epochal crisis of economy and ecology within the capitalist system is thus likely to continue, with both fault lines widening, as long as the logic of capital prevails. This conflict between economic and ecological objectives is not a contradiction of analysis, but of the capitalist system itself.

Third, if accumulation or economic growth is to be halted in the rich countries, even temporarily, out of sheer ecological necessity, this would require a vast new system of redistribution. As Lewis Mumford indicated in 1944 in The Condition of Man, a stationary state or steady-state economy is only possible under conditions of “basic communism,” a term that Mumford (after Marx) used to refer to a society in which distribution is organized “according to need, not according to ability or productive contribution.” 51 There must be a vast redirection of society’s social surplus to genuine human requirements and ecological sustainability as opposed to the giant treadmill of production generated by the profit system. It is by creating a society directed to use value rather than exchange value that we can find the resources to develop a world that is sustainable because it is just, and just because it is sustainable. Society will need to be reordered, as Epicurus said, and Marx concurred, according to the principle of enough— that is, through a rich development of human needs, applicable to everyone. 52