Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Answering pressing questions about Palestine

“ From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like  boni patres familias,  they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition. [E]xploitation  and squandering of the vitality of the soil (apart from making exploitation dependent upon the accidental and unequal circumstances of individual producers rather than the attained level of social development) takes the place of conscious rational cultivation of the soil as eternal communal property, an inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of a chain of successive generations of the human race.” — Capital Vol. III Part VI

"Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and like boni patres familias [good fathers of families] they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition... The rational cultivation of the soil as eternal communal property", is "an inalienable condition of the existence and reproduction of a chain of successive generations of the human race." — Marx, Capital , vol. 3 "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 . . . is and will for the foreseeable future remain the greatest threat to world peace." Capitalism "may be able to accommodate some degree of ecological care, especially when the technology of environmental prote...

" A major problem is that global warming, as with the associated environmental problems, can’t be solved within the capitalism that has caused, and is accelerating, the problem. All incentives under capitalism are for more growth and thus more greenhouse-gas emissions, and there is no provision to provide new jobs for the many people who would be displaced should the heavily polluting industries in which they work were to be shut down in the interest of the environment. The private capital that profits from environmental devastation is allowed to externalize the costs onto society, an inequality built into the system. The concept of  “green capitalism” is a dangerous chimera ." Systemic Disorder