Life Under Capitalism: Infinite Growth in a Finite World
This story is the first entry in a series on the environmental degradation depicted in David Attenborough’s documentary A Life On Our Planet, caused by the expanding capitalist system.
One of the key messages in A Life On Our Planet is that we live in a finite world. The rolling plains don’t stretch to the infinite horizons, as we once thought they did. The vast, forested wilds do indeed have borders. Even the oceans, which have so long been impassable in breadth and unfathomable in depth, have shores and a seafloor. The work of naturalists like Attenborough has allowed everyday people to understand this, and he has always emphasised the shrinking limits of the natural world.
Capitalism cannot operate indefinitely within a finite world. It’s a system that requires continuous expansion to endure. Corporations that don’t accumulate resources and expand their operations are doomed to fail, either being competed into bankruptcy by more powerful rivals, or absorbed into monopolies as we so often see. Barring any controls, this system will eventually consume every available resource on the planet. In this way, capitalism is a fundamental contradiction to long-term sustainability.
The devastation of capitalist expansion is on full display in A Life On Our Planet. The documentary features Costa Rica and Borneo, which have seen their forests stripped and replaced by massive, single-crop plantations in order to fuel expanding markets overseas. The impact of this mass-deforestation is hard to overstate. As forests are levelled, biodiversity is reduced. This in turn lowers soil quality, air quality and often pushes dangerous, predatory animals into contact with people.
Borneo’s rainforests have been cleared at the highest rate of any on earth. The leading cause? Palm-oil plantations.
Unlimited Growth
But what does tropical deforestation have to do with capitalism today? The answer lies in capitalism's most fundamental principle: the endless need for growth. A key expression of this principle is the imperative to seek out new markets. Companies are constantly seeking ways to produce their goods more cheaply in order to produce more, or gain access to rare raw materials so as to make new products. In today’s world, this means that corporate investment often flocks from rich countries to places that have cheap labour, abundant resources and lax environmental regulations.
In Borneo, this international investment finances the basic infrastructure needed for palm oil production. Most often, this begins with the construction of roads, from which the overwhelming majority of deforestation takes place. As vast swaths of forest are burned or logged, endless rows of oil palms are planted in their place. This kind of basic infrastructure development is highly attractive to the governments of developing countries. So much so that, even though deforestation is mostly illegal in Indonesian Borneo, the government barely pays any attention to it. Today, thanks to the profitability of the industry, the majority of the palm oil supply chain in in the region is dominated by relatively few multinational corporations. This gives them effectively free rein to pursue their business and continue to degrade the environment.
As a result of the inundation of foreign investment, in just the last 40 years Borneo has lost 30% of its remaining rainforest. Not only has this devastated local wildlife populations, including the endangered orangutan, it has worsened the global climate crisis. Borneo, the world’s third-largest island, was covered in rainforest for millions of years, and was a major carbon sink throughout its existence. As more and more of it’s forest is destroyed for industry and lumber, atmospheric carbon will continue to increase, warming the planet and worsening extreme weather events.
The Amazon as well as many tropical African rainforests continue to be levelled for use as pasture land and access to mining sites
As dire as Borneo’s situation may be, it is just a single part of the worldwide pattern of environmental destruction, caused by the global capitalist economy. Tropical rainforests around the Global South are being wiped out at the behest of foreign investors, and replaced with monoculture plantations, pasture land and rare-earth metal mines. This is all done to ensure the relatively cheap supply of many of the world’s most valuable commodities, from coffee and cacao, to copper and cobalt.
The supporters of this economic arrangement argue that it actually benefits the world’s poor. They claim It allows people in developing countries to grow their prosperity and improve their standard of living. Through direct investment, expertise and technology from the developed world is brought to bear in the great untamed wilds, where the locals can make productive use of the untapped wealth of their lands. As productive industries emerge in these regions of the world, raw materials flow upstream to the developed countries, which in return, continue to invest and exchange high-tech, life-improving goods to their less-developed counterparts.
It is an optimistic story, and one that has immense popularity within mainstream economics. The reality is much less rosy, unfortunately. The kind of industrialisation that trade and global capitalism generates in the South most often has a narrow purpose, and even narrower capacity to meaningfully develop the countries it occurs in.
How can a cobalt mine in the Congo help the country to develop when it doesn’t have its own electronics industry? How does a multinational logging company, which might even employ and train locals, help Borneo to develop when it leaves the moment the forests are gone?
The truth is, this type of foreign-controlled industrialisation, the same that now reigns in Borneo, harms poor countries in more ways than it helps them. In its impulse to produce more for less, expansionary global capitalism locks poorer countries into one-track developmental pathways. This kind of development is rarely self-perpetuating, and offers very little genuine, long-lasting economic growth for poor countries. Worse still, this arrangement concentrates the most severe environmental and human impacts of industry in these same countries, which are the most harmed by them, and often the least able to recover.
Child labourers in the Democratic Republic of Congo are among those who mine cobalt for the global market
By Mistake or By Design?
As Attenborough rightly points out in his timely documentary, the wilderness, and the rainforest in particular, plays a vital role in the stability of the Earth and its climate. With appropriate alarm, he also points out that the wilderness is rapidly being depleted and tamed to make way for industry. Like a doomsday clock, the ominous counter between scenes shows the retreat of the wild to human expansion, as its number plummets towards zero.
Right as he is about this reality, we must not fall into the trap of thinking that this is due to our “mistakes” (like Chernobyl and the ruins of Pripyat). The wilderness is not dying simply because we humans are expanding in number. Nor is it just because we have melted down our nuclear reactors, or even cleared land to feed ourselves.
The wilderness is dying because of the global system of capitalism, which through colonisation, trade and foreign investment has grown and spread to exploit every corner of the globe. This system, not by mistake but by design, is incapable of considering the environmental and human costs of production. There is no forest too dense, ocean too vast, or mountain range so remote that the forces of global capitalism won’t slash, burn, pollute and degrade it to extract anything the market demands.
Not by mistake, but by design, capitalism continues to subjugate politics, and stands unrivalled in its power and influence. On a global scale, the pursuit of profits and growth is now the prime mover of virtually all corporate endeavour, and a great deal of international relations. The longer this singular motive has dominance in our lives and in the world, the more it will drive nature, and with it human civilisation, into decline.
