COP26 has officially started. What should we expect from such a large gathering? Much of the media and many of the attendees are hoping with a good deal of optimism for its success. But it is difficult to believe that capitalism will ever heal itself. Whatever pledges that were made at previous COPs, have been reneged on. Promises have come to nothing. As apologists for capitalism, despite being specialists and scientists the delegates continue to fail to locate global problems in a wider social and economic context, in capitalism itself.

Nature is being damaged today because the productive activity is oriented towards the accumulation of profits rather than towards the direct satisfaction of human needs. The economic mechanism of the profit system, i.e., the capitalist mode of production and distribution can function in no other way. Profits always take priority both over meeting needs and over protecting the environment.

This is why the Earth's resources have been plundered throughout the history of capitalism without a thought for the future, why chemical fertilisers and pesticides are over-used in farming, why power stations and factories release all sorts of dangerous and noxious substances into the air and water, why road transport has replaced rail transport, why human waste is not recycled back to the land, why animals are injected with growth hormones, why goods are made not to last but with built-in obsolescence. The list of anti-ecological practices indulged under capitalism is long.

The ecological concern is not just about protecting the environment. It is about human beings too — the way we live and the quality of our life. With appropriate modification, modern techniques of production are quite capable of providing enough quality food, comfortable housing and decent health for every person on Earth and of doing this without damaging the environment. But the people of the world are up against a well-entrenched economic and social system based on private property, class privilege and coercive economic laws. Reforms under capitalism, however well-meaning or determined, can never solve the environmental crisis — the most they can do is to palliate some aspect of it on a precarious temporary basis. They can certainly never turn capitalism into an ecological society.

The conclusion is clear: if the present environmental crisis is to be solved and the threat to — indeed the actual degradation of — the environment removed, then capitalism must go. It must be replaced by a socialist society. The only social framework within which human beings could live in harmony with, not at the expense of, the rest of nature is easy enough to discern: it would have to be a society which has the aim of production to satisfy human needs, not to make and accumulate profits. In short, socialism.

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