資本主義已經途窮，前路通往何方？（一）_風聞

美國社會主義雜誌《每月評論》網站2月1日刊登俄勒岡大學社會學教授約翰·貝拉米·福斯特文章《資本主義失敗了，接下來呢？》，由於篇幅較長分為三部分，今天推送第一部分。

文：John Bellamy Foster

譯：由冠羣

進入21世紀還不到二十年，資本主義作為一種社會制度顯然已經失敗。整個世界深陷於經濟停滯、經濟金融化以及人類歷史上最極端的不平等，隨之而來的是大規模的失業和不充分就業、動盪、貧困、飢餓、無效生產和虛耗的生命，此情此景只能用地球生態已進入“死亡螺旋”狀態來形容。“數字革命”作為我們這個時代最偉大的技術進步，最初目標是作為實現通信自由和解放生產力的一種工具，但很快它就轉變為一種監視、控制和替換勞動人口的新手段。自由民主制度正處於崩潰的邊緣，而本是資本主義制度下腳料的法西斯主義，卻在當今時代捲土從來，和男權主義、種族主義、帝國主義以及戰爭攜手並肩、高歌猛進。

當然，説資本主義是一種失敗的制度並不意味着資本主義即將崩潰和瓦解。而是説，它從出現時原本具有歷史必要性和創造性的制度，蜕變成了本世紀一個不必要且有破壞性的制度。今天，這個世界史無前例地面臨着劃時代的選擇——“是整個社會翻天覆地的重組，還是各階級在你爭我奪後走向共同毀滅。”

資本主義業已失敗的跡象已經顯露無疑。金融泡沫膨脹後必然的破裂與緊隨而至的投資停滯反覆出現，現在這被稱作是所謂自由市場的特點。收入和財富不平等加劇造成了大多數人口物質生活條件下降。儘管生產率穩步提高，但美國大多數工人的實際工資在四十年中幾乎沒有變化。工作強度增加了，而工作和安全保障卻被有組織的拋棄了。失業數據已經變得越來越沒有意義，因為不充分就業已經以合同工的新形式制度化，在零工經濟中出現並日益普遍。隨着資本主義確立了對工作單位的極權統治，工會昔日的盛況現在只剩下了殘影。而各個蘇維埃國家消亡後，歐洲的社會民主主義已經瓦解，取而代之的是新出現的“放縱資本主義”（liberated capitalism）。

跨國公司在全球進行勞動力套利（譯註：指將已失去技術優勢與技術壁壘的產業轉移至勞動力價格低廉的地區，通過降低人力成本來提高利潤），獲取了這個世界上最貧困地區被極度剝削的人口的勞動剩餘價值，這造成了金融財富史無前例的向世界經濟核心國家聚集，而邊緣國家則變的相對貧困。目前約有21萬億美元的境外資金被存放在主要位於加勒比羣島的各個避税天堂, 它們是 “金融巨頭穩固的避難所”。全球通信革命在技術上為壟斷鋪平了道路, 靠投機暴富的華爾街金融資本趁勢崛起，它們進一步增加了“百分之一”富人的財富。42位億萬富翁現在佔有的財富與當今世界一半人口擁有的財富一樣多, 而美國最富有的三個人——傑夫·貝佐斯、比爾·蓋茨和沃倫·巴菲特佔有的財富超過了美國一半人口擁有的財富。在全世界的各個地區，收入差距都在近幾十年急速擴大。幾個世紀以來，最富裕和最貧窮國家之間的人均收入和財富差距不斷擴大一直是主要趨勢，但現在又出現加速擴大的跡象。現在全世界就業人口的60%以上，大約20億人，在僅能維持生計的非正式行業工作，他們形成了一個龐大的全球無產階級。全球勞動力儲備比正式就業的勞動力多出70%。

即使在北美和歐洲發達國家，充足的醫療、住房、教育資源、乾淨的水和空氣對很多人來説也正變得越來越遙不可及。由於不理智的過度依賴汽車和公共交通投資不足，美國和其它國家的交通狀況正變得更加糟糕。城市結構呈現出貴族化和隔離性的特點，城市變成了有錢人的遊樂場，而邊緣人口則被排除在外。在美國有大約50萬人——絕大部分是兒童——夜夜無家可歸。紐約市當前鼠患氾濫，據説是因為氣温升高所致，這反映了整個世界氣温升高的趨勢。

因貧窮和剝削引起的疾病原本只在維多利亞時代出現，現在在美國和其他高收入國家，這些疾病正在顯著回潮，人均壽命則在下降。在英國，痛風、猩紅熱、百日咳，甚至壞血病和肺結核都出現了復發的跡象。在勞動保健和安全條例執行不力的情況下，黑肺病在美國的產煤區報復性反彈。過度使用抗生素，尤其是資本主義農業公司濫用抗生素，正在造成一場抗生素耐藥性危機，超級病菌的危險性增多將會使越來越多的人死於非命，到本世紀中葉，因此而死亡的人數可能會超過每年死於癌症的人數，這種情況促使世界衞生組織宣佈出現了一種“全球健康緊急情況。”是制度的運作方式造成了這些可怕的狀況，與恩格斯在《英國工人階級的狀況》一書中所説的“社會謀殺”是一樣的。

在大型企業、慈善資本主義基金會和新自由主義政府的鼓動下，公共教育體系被改造成企業設計的考試製度，執行僵化的共同核心標準（譯註：相當於美國的學生教育大綱）。這就產生了大量的掛關於學生的數據，其中很大一部分被拿到市場上秘密地營銷和出售。教育的產業化和私有化正在使兒童的各種需要逐步讓位於商品市場的現金關係。在此，我們看到了查爾斯·狄更斯《艱難時世》中所描寫的葛擂硬和麥卻孔掐孩那種粗俗功利主義哲學是再次迴歸人間：“生活中只講事實”和“你絕不應抱有幻想”。美國很多最窮困、種族隔離最嚴重的學校，已經蜕變成了禁錮智慧的地牢，從這裏走出來的學生不是參軍當炮灰或是成為罪犯蹲監獄。

美國有200多萬人被關在監獄裏，監禁率比世界上任何國家都高，這構成了新版的種族隔離。監獄中關押的犯人總數幾乎等於美國第四大城市得克薩斯州休斯頓市的人口總數。非洲裔和拉丁裔美國人佔被關押者總數的56%，而兩個族裔的人口總數卻只佔美國總人口數的32%。近50%的美國成年人有一個直系親屬曾經或目前正在監獄中服刑，而非洲裔美國人和美國土著人的這個比例則更高。在美國，黑人和土著美國人死於警察槍擊事件的概率幾乎是白人的三倍，拉美裔男子的幾率將近是白人的兩倍，種族隔閡正在全世界蔓延擴大。

資本主義制度下權力必然的運作方式就是暴力虐待婦女，強迫其無償勞動或者低薪卻高強度勞動，其目的不是團結人類而是分裂人類。全世界超過三分之一的婦女遭受過肉體暴力或性暴力。尤其是婦女的身體，已經被物化（objectified）、具體化（reified）和商品化（commodified），成為壟斷資本主義推向市場的一件商品。

已被商業集團所控制的大眾媒體-宣傳系統，正與一個以社交媒體為基礎的宣傳系統相融合，這個系統的漏洞更多，表面上似乎混亂無序，但實際卻比以往任何時候都更整齊劃一，更青睞於向金錢和權力獻媚。利用當代已經佔據主流的數碼互動推銷與監視技術，既得利益集團能夠做到向個人及其人際關係網精準投放他們想要發佈的信息，而這些信息絕大多數不受檢查，這引起了各方對“假新聞”的擔憂。目前全世界各國有無數的商業團體許諾可以利用技術手段來操縱大選，向競價最高的買家售賣他們的服務。在美國，網絡中立性的消失意味着壟斷網絡服務的供應商進一步加深了對整個互聯網的整合，集中和控制。

來自大公司和億萬富豪錢櫃的“黑錢”越來越放縱的操縱選舉。儘管自詡為世界第一的民主政體，美國卻如保羅·巴蘭和保羅·斯威齊1966年在《壟斷資本》中所説的那樣，是“民主其表，財閥其裏”。在特朗普政府中，遵循一貫的傳統，內閣成員中的72%來自於公司高管，剩餘的則來自軍方。

由美國和其他大國在其國力鼎盛時期策劃的戰爭，在中東等戰略產油區陰魂不散，並有升級為全球熱核大戰的危險。在奧巴馬執政時期，美國在阿富汗、伊拉克、敍利亞、利比亞、也門、索馬里和巴基斯坦等七個不同的國家捲入了戰爭或發動了空襲。華盛頓重新把酷刑和暗殺列為可接受的戰爭手段，無數的個人，團體或社羣只要被打上恐怖分子的標籤就可以被動刑或暗殺。美國和俄羅斯正在醖釀一場新的冷戰和核軍備競賽，而華盛頓則在努力為中國的持續崛起設置障礙。特朗普政府成立了一支新的太空部隊，作為美國軍隊的一個獨立分支，該部隊用以確保美國在太空軍事化後仍佔據主導地位。著名的《原子科學家公報》在2018年把它的末日時鐘調整到了距離午夜12點還剩兩分鐘，這是自1953年熱核武器出現以來最接近午夜12點的時刻，它拉響了核戰爭和氣候異常迫在眉睫的警報。

美國正在對委內瑞拉和尼加拉瓜等國實施日益嚴厲的經濟制裁，儘管它們是民選政府——或者正是因為它們是民選政府。核心國家正在積極發動貿易戰和貨幣戰，而在約有6000萬難民和本國流離失所者想要逃離惡劣的環境進行遷徙時，歐洲和美國卻相繼豎起了種族主義的圍牆將他們拒之門外。目前全世界的流動人口已高達2.5億人，其中高收入國家裏的流動人口已佔到本國人口的14%以上，而在2000年這個比例還不到10%。同時，統治階層和富裕國家想要壟斷權力和特權，將大多數普通人隔離在外，任其自生自滅。

超過七億五千萬人，佔世界人口的10%以上，長期營養不良。美國的食品壓力持續攀升，導致廉價商品店的快速增長，這些店只出售劣質和有毒食品。八分之一的美國家庭，大約4000萬美國人，其中有將近1300萬兒童沒有食品保障。在全球“去小農化”的大潮中，自耕農正被農業綜合體、私人資本和主權財富基金排擠出自己的土地，這是歷史上最大規模的人口流動。全球大部分地區的城市過度擁擠，難以謀生，以至於人們現在可以理直氣壯的稱之為“貧民窟星球”。與此同時，世界房地產市場估值高達163萬億美元（與之相比的是歷史上有記載的黃金開採量大約是7.5萬億美元）。

從氣候變化到海洋酸化，到第六次滅絕，到全球氮磷循環的崩潰，到淡水的流失，森林的消失，有毒化學品的泛濫和放射性污染，處處可見二戰後迎來經濟飛速發展的“人類世”（Anthropocene epoch）對環境安全造成了多麼巨大的破壞。據估計，自1970年以來，世界上60%的野生脊椎動物（包括哺乳動物、爬行動物、兩棲動物、鳥類和魚類）已經滅絕，而世界上無脊椎動物的種類在近幾十年裏減少了45%。氣候學家詹姆斯·漢森聲稱氣候變化加速和氣候帶的快速移動會導致物種滅絕，加速生物多樣性喪失的進程。生物學家預計，到本世紀末將有一半的物種滅絕。

如果目前的氣候變化趨勢持續下去，原計劃將全球平均氣温升高限定在2攝氏度以內的“全球碳計劃”將在16年後被突破（10年內全球平均氣温就將升高1.5攝氏度，而只有低於這個度數才能保持氣候長期穩定）。地球系統科學家警告説，地球正無比危險的接近變成“温室地球”，到時災難性的氣候變化將必然出現並不可逆轉。如果碳排放繼續像過去幾十年那樣每年上升2%（2018年全球碳排放上升2.7％，美國上升3.4％），而無法達成每年最低3%的減排目標以避免地球能量平衡被打破，則人類將要承受難以估量的生態，社會和經濟損失。

但並不奇怪的是，各大能源公司在氣候變化問題上繼續撒謊，宣揚和資助否定氣候變化的研究，可與此同時卻在其內部文件中承認了氣候變化的真相。這些公司正加緊開採和生產化石燃料，其中包括污染最嚴重、大多會產生温室氣體的燃料，並在此過程中獲得巨大利潤。北極冰蓋正因全球變暖而融化，而在資本的眼中，這是一個新的金礦敞開了大門，等着它們去開採龐大的油氣財富，而不必在意這會對全球氣候變化造成什麼影響。作為對氣候變暖調研報告的回應，埃克森美孚公司聲稱它們將任意開採並銷售其名下的所有化石資源。能源公司還將繼續參與氣候談判，以確保任何限制碳排放的協定不損害其利益。全世界的資本主義國家都將其積累的財富優先用於其它事業，而不是用來控制威脅到全人類未來的氣候變化。

對資本主義最好的理解是，它是一種競爭性的以階級為基礎的生產和交換模式，通過剝削工人的勞動力和私吞剩餘價值（超出工人的勞動力再生產成本之外的價值）來積累資本。資本主義所固有的經濟核算模式，指的是一種創造價值的商品或服務，通過市場交換而產生收入。因此，市場以外產生的大部分社會和環境成本被排除在這種估價形式之外，無論這種成本是人類生命的縮短和退化，還是自然環境受到破壞，這些成本都被視為與資本主義經濟本身無關的負“外部性”（譯註：負外部性指某個經濟行為個體的活動使他人或社會受損，而造成負外部性的人卻沒有為此承擔成本）。正如環境經濟學家K·威廉·卡普所言：“資本主義必須被看作是一種沒有支付成本的經濟。”

我們現在已經來到了21世紀的某個關鍵節點，此時這個非理性制度的外部性所造成的損失，例如戰爭的成本、自然資源的消耗、人類生命的浪費和地球環境的破壞，已遠遠超過這個資本主義制度為整個社會所提供的可能經濟收益。資本的聚集和財富的積累越來越快，其代價卻是人類賴以生存的社會和自然條件受到不可逆的破壞。

有人可能認為，經濟發展顯得勢不可擋的中國（儘管也伴隨着深刻的社會和生態矛盾）並不具有上述資本主義制度的弊病。但是，中國的發展其實源於1949年的中國革命，在以毛澤東為領袖的中國共產黨的領導下，這場革命使中國從帝國主義體系中解放出來。這使它能夠在基本不受外部力量牽制的情況下實行計劃經濟發展了幾十年，建立了強大的農業和工業經濟基礎。在後毛時代的改革中，中國的經濟體制轉變為有限的計劃經濟伴以更加依賴市場（債務與投機行為大規模出現）的市場經濟混合體制，在世界市場全球化的有利條件下，中國才開始發展趕超發達國家。現在，美國正試圖通過發動貿易戰和施加其它壓力來動搖中國在國際市場的地位，質疑中國在世界貿易中的發展模式。可以説，中國發展的成功並不代表資本主義制度的成功，而恰恰反映了資本主義固有的侷限性。中國也存在資本積累制度的毀滅性傾向。最終，中國的未來也取決於其人民能否迴歸革命性轉型。

資本主義是如何在世界範圍內引發這些悲慘狀況的？資本主義的失敗肇始於20世紀初，要想理解資本主義是怎樣失敗的，就需要從歷史的角度審視新自由主義的興起，以及新自由主義是如讓該制度更具有破壞性的。只有這樣，我們才能在21世紀把握人類的未來。

 （未完持續）

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)