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Capitalism, World Peace, the Environment

This statement was published in 1995, i.e. before the wars and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, and before the destructive legacies left behind after the American forces withdrew from the two countries, the Arab uprisings and the war in Syria, the NATO ‘intervention in Libya, and of course the ongoing invasion of Ukraine – a proxy war in fact. In addition to the exacerbated ecological degradation, rise in global inequality and social insecurity and precarity, etc.

I am convinced, for example, that capitalism cannot deliver world peace. It seems to me axiomatic that the expansionary, competitive and exploitative logic of capitalist accumulation in the context of the nation-state system must, in the longer or shorter term, be destabilizing, and that capitalism – and at the moment its most aggressive and adventurist organizing force, the government of the United States – is and will for the foreseeable future remain the greatest threat to world peace.

Nor do I think that capitalism can avoid ecological devastation. It may be able to accommodate some degree of ecological care, especially when the technology of environmental protection is itself profitably marketable. But the essential irrationality of the drive for capital accumulation, which subordinates everything to the requirements of the self-expansion of capital and so-called growth, is unavoidably hostile to ecological balance. If destruction of the environment in the Communist [sic] world resulted from gross neglect, massive inefficiency, and a reckless urge to catch up with Western industrial development in the shortest possible time, in the capitalist West a far more wide-ranging ecological vandalism is not an index of failure but a token of success, the inevitable by-product of a system whose constitutive principle is the subordination of all human values to the imperatives of accumulation and the requirements of profitability.

Excerpt From Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism by Ellen Meiksins Wood, 2016 ebook ed., pp. 422-23

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