Capitalism is predicated on profit and production ensuring climate cannot be solved through the economy and progress through redistribution fails absent revolution – technological advances never solve through Jevon’s paradox

The bottom line: capitalism is antithetical to sustainability A fundamental part in developing critical sustainability is judiciously assessing the drivers of modern ecological concerns. The Earth system has distinct planetary boundaries—such as those associated with climate change, biodiversity, ocean acidification, and nitrogen and phosphorus cycles (Lenton et al. 2008; Rockström et al. 2009; Steffen et al. 2015). These boundaries suggest specific material limits that should not be transgressed to ensure long-term sustainability. Furthermore, these conditions represent cycles and processes that act as the foundation for life as we know it, preceding any social system (Malm 2018). It is commonly understood that the economy is a subset operating within the larger biophysical world, which involves all productive activities. Often, it is assumed that the existing economy can be tweaked, directed, and organized to protect the conditions that support life, promote equity, enhance well-being, and operate within planetary boundaries (Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015; Mol 1995, 2001; Spaargaren 1997). Under such scenarios, technological innovation is often presented as a central means toward “decoupling” economic growth from environmental degradation, allowing capital to thrive while depending on fewer ecological inputs (Huber 2009; Mol 2002). Popular media figures, such as social commentator and journalist Thomas Friedman, propose mobilizing market mechanisms as the primary method to develop a more sustainable economy. Friedman (2009: 291) notes “there is only one thing bigger than Mother Nature, and that is Father Profit.” He explains that the creation of the “green economy” greaxztly expands opportunities for profit-making activity. In fact, quoting a director at an investment company, he argues it is “the mother of all markets, the economic investment opportunity of a lifetime…. The challenge of global warming presents us all with the greatest opportunity for return on investment and growth that any of us will ever see” (Friedman 2009: 212). This position is deeply entrenched within mainstream economics, as sustainability is defined in terms of economic growth, monetary wealth, and consumption, without any serious consideration of ecological conditions (Pearce 1993). These approaches to sustainability assume that the capitalist mode of production is synonymous with the economic leg of the sustainability stool. Doing so ignores alternative ways of organizing productive society that are bound by different structural determinants and eliminates the critical assessment of capitalist development as an important social driver of environmental degradation. Thus, the socioecological dynamics of capital are naturalized—or taken for granted—conflating its growth as an inevitable part of human society, instead of as a historically emergent set of social relationships. Political economists Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy (1996: C3), distressed by such ahistorical conceptualizations and myopic arguments, maintained, “All this talk about growth as good and faster growth as better, leaves out the truly important questions: Do we need growth? If so, what kind of growth? And…how about at least beginning to talk about an economy/society that rejects permanent growth as the oxymoron it obviously is and focuses on the really important issues of human and planetary existence?” The capital system is predicated on the constant expansion of profits. This is its bottom line. It is well known that, for any capitalist enterprise to remain viable over time, the value on the bottom line of the financial balance sheet must be greater than the previous period’s accounting. Economist Joseph Schumpeter (1962: 81-86, 418-19) explained that due to the growth imperative of capital, this system can never be stationary. In order to continually encourage the accumulation of capital, it must operate on an ever-increasing scale. Its “creative destruction,” which involves competitive innovation, obsolescence, renewal, and expansion, provides unparalleled productive power, dynamism, and growth. Commodity production serves as a basis to expand exchange value and to capture surplus value (gross profits) (Heilbroner 1985: 36; Marx 1976: 247-57). Heterodox economist E. F. Schumacher (1973: 255) explains that “the strength of the idea of private enterprise lies in its terrifying simplicity. It suggests that the totality of life can be reduced to one aspect—profits.” Thus, capitalist accounting reduces the world merely to a narrow, unidimensional quantitative measure, whereby success is determined by its exponential increase of profit. Qualitative social relations, including concerns regarding justice and well-being, are not part of this accounting (Burkett 1999). As far as capital is concerned, Sweezy (2004: 86-93) explained, the environment serves largely “as a means to the paramount ends of profit-making and still more capital accumulation.” Thus, in interrogating the capital system, we can better reveal the central drivers of socioecological dynamics. The historical development of capitalism is rooted in generating an array of social inequalities, increasingly on a global scale. Karl Marx (1973, 1976) detailed how the primary accumulation associated with the historical rise of the capital system involved the separation and expropriation of people from the land. Expropriation involves the dissolution of earlier customary rights and productive relations. It is a system of robbery and domination whereby the majority of the population’s means of livelihood are privatized, and thus dispossessed (Foster and Clark 2018a). Land was seized through legal actions, such as the English enclosure movement, and physical force, as in case of European colonialism. Dispossessed peoples, such as peasants, were impelled into a social position that required them to sell their labor power. That is, the new laboring class needed to earn wages to purchase their means of subsistence. Wage labor, a social relation that is very common today, was making its way onto the social scene, and this process was filled with resistance, conflict, and casualties (Polanyi 1957). This system of global expropriation is intimately bound to a racialized system of accumulation (Dawson 2016; Du Bois 1992; Fraser 2018: Johnson 2017). Historian Roxanne Dubar-Ortiz (2014) explains that the “Doctrine of Discovery” was used throughout the long sixteenth century to the mid-twentieth century to justify robbing the lands of indigenous peoples in the Americas (see also Tigar 2000). It was claimed that these populations simply occupied land, but did not own it since they had not “improved” it. In the USA, this step was the first in a series of wars, treaties, and settler-colonial policies that created the reservation system and tried to exterminate these peoples (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014; Horne 2018; Whyte 2016, 2017). Additionally, the expropriation of land and peoples, via the enslavement of Africans and the creation of plantation systems throughout colonies, created an empire of cotton that provided raw materials and wealth that helped spur the development of industrial capitalism (Baptist 2016; Beckert 2014; Williams 1994). Historian Walter Johnson (2017) indicates that slavery was a central component of the development of capitalism, giving rise to a distinct racial system that dehumanized non-white peoples, which served to shape and justify inequalities and continues to affect present-day questions regarding social and environmental justice. Through these imperialist relationships and conditions, a global hierarchy of nations—with distinct divisions between the global North and South—was founded in the then emerging global capitalist economy. Within capitalist development, profits and inequality become inseparable. Marx (1975) provided a systematic analysis of capital accumulation, illuminating how surplus value was produced through the exploitation of labor. Due to processes of expropriation, workers must sell their labor power, whereby wages are paid for a specific number of hours of toil. The working day consists of necessary labor and surplus labor. The former entails the portion of day when workers reproduce the value of labor, which is equivalent to the total wages to be paid. The latter is the portion of the day when workers produce surplus value. Profits are the residual, consisting of the money remaining after wages and other expenses are paid. Once commodities are sold, capitalists recover the money spent on wages, plus the surplus. These profits are reinvested, expanding production and surplus generation (Burkett 1999). Workers spend wages to support themselves. Capitalists invest in methods of production, including new technologies, to expand operations and to lower labor costs, just as they pursue manufacturing in low-wage countries to increase profits (Braverman 1998; Foster et al. 2011; Marx 1976; Smith 2016). The owning class controls the social surplus produced by society as a whole, and determines how it will be distributed (Resnick and Wolff 1981). Under this division of labor and structure of the productive economy, vast class differences within and between nations emerge, as capitalists accumulate evermore wealth, through the exploitation of workers, advancing multiple aspects of social discord. In addition to capturing the value produced through commodity production, following the system’s own logic of accounting, capital expropriates unpaid social reproductive work as a “free gift” to itself (Marx and Engels 1975, vol. 37: 732-33). This work is a necessary background condition that sustains life. Within a capital system, social reproduction and economic production became constituted as separate spheres. While the former also creates use values, it does this outside of the paid labor process and remains in the hidden abodes of capitalism (Fraser 2014, 2016). Social reproduction includes a broad range of productive and sustenance activities that help maintain people, including tending to such things as health and well-being, child care, general education, and food production (Bhattacharya 2017). This work becomes appended to the capital system, as it helps reproduce labor, decreasing the costs of labor. But it is not seen as productive under capitalist accounting because it does not directly produce profit (Waring 1999). While women have always participated in the paid work force, and they were the majority of the laborers in the central industries associated with the Industrial Revolution, where they received much lower wages than men, they have been disproportionately responsible for social reproductive work (Berg 1991, 1993; Foster and Clark 2018b; Fraser 2017). Social reproduction scholars, such as Nancy Fraser, present how expropriation and exploitation operate in tandem, tracing the different historical configurations and interactions between these spheres, in the modern capitalist system, which creates distinct layers of inequalities. For example, Fraser notes that there is a care gap in modern society. As relatively privileged women pursue professional careers, migrant women are hired to provide familial care, resulting in the latter needing others to cover such reproductive work with regard to their own families (Brenner 2000; Folbre 2001; Fraser 2017). The ripple effect of these relationships often crosses borders in the hierarchy of nations. Clearly, capitalism is not the only contributing factor to social inequalities. However, its basic operations actively create and intensify inequities. The accumulation of capital fundamentally relies upon producing social disparities. The specific conditions, patterns, scale, and scope of these inequalities have varied depending on the historical development of capital, social movements, legislation, and geopolitics, just to name a few considerations. What remains clear is that complex systems of oppression related to race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality have become woven into the very fabric of the global capital system (Clark et al. 2018; Davis 1998; Pellow 2007, 2016). As a result, a broad array of environmental inequalities and injustice is ever present within and between countries (Bell 2013; Downey and Hawkins 2008; Edwards and Driscoll 2009; Faber 2008; Frey 2003; Gedicks 1993; Harrison 2008; Hormel and Norgaard 2009; Mohai et al. 2009; Pellow 2007; Peluso 1992; Peña 1998; Pulido 1996). The basic operations of capital also undermine any meaningful conception of sustainability, as far as the environment is concerned. As a growth-dependent economic system, the ceaseless pursuit of profit and expansion has “direct implications for natural resource extraction,” pollution generation, and overall environmental conditions (Gould et al. 2004: 297). Each expansion in commodity production increases the amount of resources (i.e., matter and energy) required to support production (Foster 2000, 2002; Schnaiberg 1980). Capitalists reinvest profits to enlarge the scale of production and to intensify operations, further escalating the overall demands placed on the Earth System (Burkett 1999; Foster 1994; Gould et al. 2008; Schnaiberg and Gould 1994). This never-ending dictate results in capital expropriating environmental inputs throughout the world, creating degradation on a scale and category never seen in human history (Foster et al. 2010; Sweezy 2004). Additionally, energy-intensive materials, such as plastics and chemicals, have been widely incorporated into manufacturing, expanding the range of waste and pollution that producers externalize to the broader society, generating qualitatively distinct forms of environmental problems. While technological innovation often makes energy and raw material usage more efficient, it does not necessarily dematerialize society or contribute to an absolute decoupling of economic growth from environmental degradation. For example, in capitalist enterprises, efficient operations produce savings that often expand investment in production—either internally or within the larger economic system—which contribute to an aggregate increase in total energy consumed and materials used. As a result, increases in overall consumption of energy and resources outstrips gains made in efficiency—a phenomenon known as the Jevons paradox (Clark and Foster 2001; Jevons 1906; Jorgenson 2009; Polimeni et al. 2008). The growth imperative of capital is geared to maximize throughput of energy and matter, preventing conservation at the macro scale of the economy. Thus, purely technological means cannot solve ecological problems (York and Clark 2010a, b). The expropriation of nature by capital has resulted in the squandering of the earth and its systems. Excessive demands—whether in the form of extraction or as pollution—placed on ecosystems are linked to capital’s ceaseless growth requirements. These actions disrupt, or rupture, natural cycles and flows, as well as exceed the regenerative capacity of ecosystems (Burkett 1999; Foster 1999; Foster et al. 2010; Schnaiberg 1980). For example, modern agriculture is organized in a way that results in the depletion of soil nutrients from the land as food and fiber are transferred to distant markets, without recirculating the nutrients back to the fields (Clausen et al. 2015; Foster 2000; Mancus 2007). As a result, energy-intensive synthetic fertilizers are used to maintain food production, causing additional environmental problems such as nutrient overloading in riparian systems, without actually addressing the cause of the ecological rift in the soil nutrient cycle. A similar situation is evident in the collapse of global fisheries, as fish are captured at a faster rate than they can reproduce (Longo 2011, 2012; Longo and Clausen 2011; Longo et al. 2015). Accumulation takes precedence over maintaining the conditions of reproduction. Capital does not have an internal mechanism or brake to check its environmentally destructive tendencies. Price, which is the primary determinant of value within capitalism, does not account for the multidimensionality and irreversible character of natural processes and the limits associated with natural systems and cycles (Burkett 1999). Market mechanisms, such as a rise in the price of a resource, do not necessarily deter increased extraction and consumption. In fact, in some instances, “higher resource prices may actually accelerate a resource’s depletion by spurring technological advances that reduce extraction costs and/or lower the amount of the resource needed per unit of final goods, thereby encouraging its further use to increase total output” (Burkett 2009: 124). By focusing primarily on price, the conditions necessary for the operation of natural cycles and processes are easily marginalized, leading to the deterioration of ecological conditions. In fact, degradation can serve as another realm of profit-making, such as in regard to waste management and efforts to create carbon markets. Given that the capital system is global, the scale and intensity of this operations takes place at all levels, including transgressing against the planetary boundaries. If we take the three-legged stool model of sustainability seriously, and actually consider the structural imperatives of capital, it becomes clear that—in its current form—one of the legs fundamentally undermines the other two. Capital, with its growth requirements, depends upon expropriation and exploitation. As a historically distinct political-economic system, it continually incorporates greater parts of the world, producing social inequality and ecological degradation on a global scale. The need for critical sustainability Economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi explained that the historical development of capital involved the creation of a “market society” that subordinated all aspects of social life to economic growth and capital accumulation. He stressed that this “was perhaps the weirdest of all the undertakings of our ancestors” (Polanyi 1957: 187). The economic system came to be conceived of as an autonomous self-governing force, divorced from socioecological relationships and concerns. In time, economic development, often measured in terms of increasing gross domestic product (even though it does not account for inequality, well-being, or ecological conditions), was seen as synonymous with social progress. Economic growth was determined to be the primary basis for improving quality and quantity, expanding goods and services, and improving lives. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith (2004) pointed out that this uncritical conception of the economy has been fraudulent. He explains that capitalism was renamed as “the market system,” which is a “meaningless designation,” as it is depicted as if its operations are impersonal and there are no classes. In other words, it lacks history. This fraud is widespread. In an assessment of the field, critical economists Joan Robinson (1962) and Robert Heilbroner (1996) explain that the word capitalism rarely appears in economic articles and textbooks. Instead, the market economy is presented without any historical perspective, void of political-economic power. Critiques of capital are dismissed as merely ideological arguments, rather than systematic analyses of its actual operations. Unfortunately, these tendencies are present within mainstream sustainability—the economy, which is only conceived of as the capitalist market system, is sacrosanct. It is simply taken as a given, removed from serious evaluation of how its actual logic and operations produce social inequalities and environmental degradation. We maintain that critical sustainability requires that we take nothing for granted, and are willing to engage in “a ruthless criticism of everything existing” (Marx 1978: 13). Critical sustainability includes careful attention to the various drivers of social inequality and environmental degradation, as these are linked through socioecological historical processes. Further, critical sustainability enters into multiple social and scientific debates regarding social and environmental justice. The interconnected exploitation of workers in general, women, and marginalized ethnic and racialized groups is part and parcel a historical system that has provided the stage for a theater of ecological tragedy. Historically, social inequalities have been reduced through redistribution programs, and forms of environmental degradation have been diminished through legislation, when the public mobilizes forcing political actions to constrain capital. Neoliberal capitalism threatens to undo even these modest accomplishments. What is dramatically clear is that serious consideration of sustainability, especially in regard to advancing social equity and maintaining the conditions of life, requires revolutionary transformations in the socioeconomic relationships that govern our productive lives. This means that new socioeconomic relations must be created, and they must be embedded within sociopolitical relations that direct them toward democratic ends, equality of opportunities, fulfillment of human needs, and the mending of ecological rifts in order to better maintain the conditions of life. Critical sustainability entails supplanting the very systems of expropriation and exploitation that produce and thrive on social inequalities. The purpose and meaning of work must be reorganized, directing it toward meeting human needs, enhancing the quality of life, eradicating injustices, creating substantive equality, and operating within the planetary boundaries. This is the work and promise of critical sustainability.