http://monthlyreview.org/100301magdoff-foster.php
Monthly Review March 2010
What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism
For those concerned with the fate of the earth, the time has come to face
facts: not simply the dire reality of climate change but also the pressing
need for social-system change. The failure to arrive at a world climate
agreement in Copenhagen in December 2009 was not simply an abdication of
world leadership, as is often suggested, but had deeper roots in the
inability of the capitalist system to address the accelerating threat to
life on the planet. Knowledge of the nature and limits of capitalism, and
the means of transcending it, has therefore become a matter of survival. In
the words of Fidel Castro in December 2009: “Until very recently, the
discussion [on the future of world society] revolved around the kind of
society we would have. Today, the discussion centers on whether human
society will survive.”1
I. The Planetary Ecological Crisis
There is abundant evidence that humans have caused environmental damage for
millennia. Problems with deforestation, soil erosion, and salinization of
irrigated soils go back to antiquity. Plato wrote in Critias: