half of all humans on the planet. And against all odds, he succeeds!
Capitalism is not made up of a homogeneous set of interests either. Needless to say, most corporations are interested in peace, and many are heavily invested in green technologies. It is obvious that the vast majority of businesses will be direly affected by climate change, even in Western countries. But in the same way that COVID-19 heavily affected small independent shops while spelling increased profits for Amazon, the ecological crisis will see money move from one set of owners to another. Capitalism is not (only) the business of ‘always more’. ‘Trees don’t grow to the sky’ was a banker’s proverb before becoming the motto of the Club of Rome. As Joseph Schumpeter said, capitalism is ‘a perennial gale of creative destruction’, where the destruction plays a role just as important as the creation. Not only does it make it possible to take advantage of the upturn that will follow the fall, but it allows a purging of the system. For capitalism is essentially a production of fictitious wealth via indebtedness. In the growth phase, the capitalist ‘takes risks’, which justifies their drawing dividends. But there comes a moment when the risk goes beyond what the investor can take on, because debt grows geometrically whereas the dividend grows arithmetically. There must come a moment of destruction which, in reality, is the moment of the transfer of risk. In a crash or a war, the capitalist passes off risk on to the minority shareholder or the taxpayer. Profits are privatized but losses are nationalized, as the saying goes. This is the very moment we are living through today. Debt has reached horrendous proportions. Rates of return are capped. The question now is who is going to foot the bill, or more exactly how we are going to get rid of this massive bad debt, through what kind of disaster. Ecological crisis fits the bill perfectly.
So, basically, a morally agnostic capitalist is faced with a very rational cost/benefit alternative: on the one hand, he can choose to fight global warming, which means finding substitutes for all the petroleum derivatives now used in the plastic, chemical and pharmaceutical industries, at cost and without any guarantee of success, only to save a few animal species, keep sea levels stable and avoid unnecessary famines in Africa – in other words, to maintain the status quo. Or he can choose to leave his beloved ‘invisible hand’ to do the job of finding a new market equilibrium, and make a profit both on the way up and on the way down, by withdrawing investments from those regions at risk of climate breakdown at the most opportune moment while investing, on the contrary, in seeds, water and even weapons in anticipation of the chaos to come; let the pressure build until it can no longer hold, and at that moment, short the world. Then, once the new equilibrium is found, he can invest anew as if nothing had happened. Is it so difficult to see which way the scales are tilting in this calculation? Is it even difficult to see how such a ‘calculation’, however ‘evil’, can be deemed more ‘rational’ than Greta Thunberg’s ethical stance?
Notes
1 1. Address given 23 September 2019, https://www.fri daysforfuture.org.
2 2. N. Klein, The Shock Doctrine (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2007).
3 3. Some of them can be heard admitting this quite openly in Jérôme Fritel’s documentary Main Basse sur l’eau (Arte, 2018).
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