Fairtrade farmers suffer because they have to meet all the rules and produce lower yield organic products yet can only sell a small unpredictable percentage of their product for (not actually good) fair trade prices.
Brands that claim to make sweatshop-free clothing are constantly discovered in sweatshops.
To produce ‘green energy’ forests are cut down and shipped from the US to Europe on coal-powered ships.
When we say there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, we mean every single product. As long as profit rules, humans, animals and nature will suffer.
pink-sne: how can we be sure that ethical consumption (as far as environmentally speaking) would happen under socialism/communism? wouldn’t it come down to the infrastructure of that socialist/communist country? sorry if this is a stupid question but I don’t see how a communist or socialist system would eliminate our current ecological problems because renewable energy is costly no matter a country’s economic model
This is a big question.
So here’s a very simplified version of my answer. Please note that I can’t answer for the kind of socialists/communists who envision a future with countries and governments.
As an anarchist, I envision a future without states, without parliaments, where workers run their own factories and neighborhoods are run by people living in it and cities are run by the neighborhoods and so forth.
Within that anarchist future, work and resources are divided on the principle of ‘work according to your ability, receive according to your needs’. Which means that we build and make and clean and do the things that need to be done, because we can do them, and we receive the food, and clothes, and housing, and care we need, because we need them. That’s all.
This is fundamentally different from a society run by profit incentives. In an anarchist society you can not get a collection of limousines by exploiting others. You have nothing to gain from hoarding property while others need housing. You have nothing to gain from destroying food while others go hungry. And if you for some twisted reason would try to do either of these things, the community would have the power to stop you.
And importantly: there is no inherent incentive towards endless economic growth. Once we are able to provide the needs of everyone (which is something which humanity can easily achieve by now), we don’t look for more plastic stuff to make and sell. Once we have enough for everyone, we just work less and create more free time to do what life is really for: living, creativity, being together.
In such a society, we would still have to come together and make plans to limit our impact on the earth, like how we handle our trash, how we restore the forests that capitalism has destroyed, how we help restore the insect population, etc. Switching completely to green energy would still be a lot of work. But when society isn’t driven by profit, we can actually prioritize those things, because anyone can see that they are important.
Now I know you probably have questions about this sort of society. To learn more, I suggest reading Anarchy Works by Peter Gelderloos. But to get the full picture, let’s also talk about capitalism:
The profit incentive vs. the community incentive changes everything. The ‘green energy’ in the post above is a good example: EU states agreed to limit their CO2 output by switching to ‘green energy’. The intention was to create less CO2 and stop global warming. Neat, right?
But green energy is expensive. So everyone motivated by profit immediately started looking for cheaper options. Lucky for them, ‘green energy’ included the possibility of using ‘bio energy’, which is basically plants. In theory, this means recycling bio waste from households into energy. Not a bad idea.
But countries eager to make money decided to switch to ‘green energy’ by having forests cut down in the US and shipped from the US to Europe on coal-powered ships.
Which is massively massively bad for the environment. But on paper it fits the rules of ‘green energy’ and it is cheaper than meeting the actual intentions of the green energy deals. Profit is prioritized over our actual need to stop global warming.
Countries also pulled other tricks like making ‘units of green energy’ a trade-able good. As a result, countries that are polluting the earth can basically buy ‘I used green energy’ permits from countries that are making better choices, and the polluting countries can still claim they met the agreement because they outsourced their obligations.
The take away? Profit incentive ruins everything. The best climate deals aren’t worth the paper they are written on if the societies that act on them are driven by a profit incentive.
On top of that, stock-market based capitalism is designed in such a way that it becomes impossible for big companies to make ‘the right choice’. If a company announces to their shareholders “we could make 2 billion dollars of profit in 2019 but we’re going to go for 1 billion because we want to prioritize the environment”, it’s shareholders have the power to overturn that decision or to simply sell all their shares and switch to a more profitable company. The ‘right choice’ company would go bankrupt and the companies choosing profit would flourish.
By design, the dirtiest, most profit driven companies always end up on top. The ones that grow, expand, exploit more workers and create more useless shit, are the ones the shareholders support. The rest die.
There is no way individual people can change that. We can blame individual CEO’s and politicians (and they are certainly willing collaborators with blood on their hands) but in the end capitalism itself is the puppet master and individuals making ‘the right choice’ can’t change that.
Will alternative societies be perfect? Probably not. But by breaking out of these loops, at least they create the chance of making better choices and saving what’s left of the earth. Under capitalism, there is nothing left except an inevitable drive towards mass extinction.
QueerAnarchism 