anarchyisfunandfree:

Recognizing that individual people aren’t to blame for climate change is important but also just saying “A handful of rich people are ruining the planet because they are bad” isn’t very insightful imo. I think its just as important to recognize the systemic roots of environmental destruction, in the same way that we recognize that police violence isn’t caused by racist authoritarian police officers but that racism and authoritarianism are inherent to policing. 

Jup. It’s not actually about the handful of rich people, despicable as they are. They may be powerful but their power is the result of a capitalist system that only keeps them in power as long as they display the kind of behavior the system rewards.

Imagine for a moment that one of the handful of super rich started becoming a little less evil, declared that he was going to pay everyone in his companies a living wage and pay a fair price for the materials his companies were buying from economically weaker nations, was going to switch to environmentally friendly production, etc.

The stock market (responding to capitalist predictions of what happens when you treat your workers like humans and do less colonialism and don’t exploit the earth) would lose all faith in the ability of his companies to result in high profits and his stocks would crash. He’d be applying for bankruptcy within days. His political friends would declare him socially dead because of his dangerous communist ideas about not being totally evil. 

His power would disappear and other, eviler rich people would be calling the shots. Because the capitalist system functions that way without needing to be directed to do it. No evil mastermind or secret conspiracy is needed for that. It just happens because that’s how the system works and it continues to happen until the capitalist system ends.