The New Limits of Capital
A system that undermines itself
Capitalism became a global system in the 20th century in a way it had not been before. Not only were there global markets and global finance but capitalist industry and capitalist structures of consumption arose in every region of the globe, although unevenly. As that happened a tendency noted in its embryonic form by only the most far sighted thinkers of the 19th century, including Marx and Engels, developed until by the end of the century it was visible to everyone who cared to look. This was the tendency for the system to undermine the very process of interaction with nature on which it, like every other form of human society, depended.
The most dramatic expression of this has been the way the accumulation of certain gases in the atmosphere are raising the global temperature and producing climate change.
Capitalist industry and its products always had devastating environmental efects. Observers of all sorts bemoaned the pollution of the water and atmosphere in the industrial areas of Britain in the mid-1 9th century. Charles Dickens wrote in 1854 of his fictional (but all too real) Coketown, "where Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing airs and gases were bricked in";' Engels told of how, "Bradford lies upon the banks of a small, coal black, foulsmelling stream. On weekdays the town is enveloped in a grey cloud of coal smoke" .2 Epidemics of cholera and typhoid would sweep through cities; tuberculosis was a curse that most working class families were acquainted with.
But the disastrous environmental effects of capitals' blind selfexpansion were local effects. It was possible to escape from the smog filled cites, the rivers so polluted that fish could not survive in them, the slag heaps and the open sewers. The bigger scale of capitalist production and accumulation in the 20th century meant bigger environmental destruction-the transformation of agricultural land into a dust bowl in parts of the US in the 1930s, the horrendous escape of gases that killed thousands in Bhopal in India in 1984, the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and Chernobyl in Ukraine, the devastation of the lives of the people who lived around the Aerial Sea as they lost two thirds of their water to cotton production and salination set in, the collapse of cities built on earthquake fault lines. These were, however, still local disasters, despite the scale of the human toll. Supporters of capitalism-and of the state capitalism usually called "socialism"-ould dismiss their relevance as passing accidents. Critics of capitalism would denounce their horrors, but not see them as having a systemic impact.
CHAPTER TWELVE
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