Plummeting sperm counts, polluted breast milk, autoimmune diseases: the cataclysmic legacy of capital’s exploitation of labour
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Sperm counts have reportedly fallen by about 60% since the 1970s as a result of the microplastics and toxic chemicals sourced from fossil fuels and mining that are used to make everyday products we consume. The root cause of this existential abomination is the capitalist mode of production: since capital’s exploitation of labour is the source of profit, capital accumulation is increasingly dependent on the labour intensity of extractive and fossil-fuel-based production.
In my 2019 book Socialism or Extinction, I wrote that capitalism increasingly threatens the extinction of the human race through global heating/ecological destruction; global nuclear warfare;[1] and even autonomous military drones.[2] Now another existential crisis has reportedly emerged that I was not aware of. According to a new book, Count Down by Shanna Swan and Stacey Colino, the total sperm count of men in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand fell by some 59% between 1973 and 2011. Extrapolating the trend’s trajectory, 2045 — a mere quarter of a century away — is suggested as the year when sperm counts will be close to zero.
“The quality [has] also nose-dived, with more odd-shaped sperm and fewer strong swimmers capable of fertilizing an egg,” The New York Times reports. “Perhaps most important, the DNA they carried was also more damaged… Abnormal sperm, increasingly common in men over 40, can cause miscarriages… This may be because testosterone levels have been dropping at 1% per year since 1982. The outlook for women isn’t good either. The miscarriage rate has risen by 1% per year over the past two decades.”
Although most of Swan’s analyses focus on ‘Western’ countries, she has uncovered similar trends in South America, Asia and Africa.
Swan argues that this is happening because of growing exposure to ‘endocrine disrupting chemicals’ (EDCs) that are found in everything from plastics, flame retardants, electronics, food packaging and pesticides to personal care products and cosmetics.
These substances are said to interfere with normal hormonal function, including testosterone and estrogen. Even in small doses, they may pose particular danger to unborn babies and young children whose bodies are growing rapidly. Such chemicals can enter even the placenta, and can alter the anatomical development in children, change brain function and impair the immune system.
Phthalate syndrome in human males can apparantly be caused by prenatal phthalate exposure in the first trimester of pregnancy, resulting in lifelong damage and leading to poor reproductive health.
“For men, phthalates, found in many products, from plastics to shampoos, are the worst offenders, tanking testosterone levels and sperm counts — and causing sperm to basically commit suicide. In women, these chemicals may cause early menopause or cysts in the ovaries, or they may disrupt monthly cycles.
“Bisphenol A [BPA], a ubiquitous chemical used in hard plastics, electronics and millions of other items, affects both sexes but is particularly concerning for women. It interferes with conception and causes miscarriages early in pregnancy.”
Furthermore, exposure to BPA may elevate risk of obesity, diabetes and coronary heart diseases, according to a study by Jaromir Michałowicz.
Swan, a “noted environmental and reproductive epidemiologist”, published a systematic meta-study in 2017. She says that she was “a natural-born sceptic” when the controversial 1992 Carlsen et al. study claimed there had been a worldwide decline in the quality of semen. These findings were re-examined in a study published in 1997 which concluded that “data on semen quality collected systematically from reports published worldwide indicate clearly that sperm density has declined appreciably”.
“Swan broadens her argument by documenting how these chemicals are jeopardizing the survival of many other creatures. Genital abnormalities are of great concern: distinctly smaller penises in alligators, panthers and mink, as well as fish, frogs, snapping turtles and birds that appear to have both male and female gonads, and mating difficulties in many species caused by altered behavior.”
These other findings follow research by Dr Tyrone Hayes, who studied the impact of EDCs in amphibians (especially the exposure to the herbicide Atrazine in the US) and concluded that 54% of all species and 40% of all critical habitats had been affected by EDCs.
EDCs are also linked to some cancers, including prostate and testicular cancer. Three court cases have also found that it causes cancer. “Bayer Crop Science, the company that produces Roundup, has been ordered to pay billions of dollars in damages, and thousands of other cancer cases are pending in state and federal courts,” Civil Eats reported in June 2019. “While the majority of the US’s corn, soybean, and cotton growers continue to use it, Roundup’s damage to soil health and history of producing herbicide-tolerant ‘superweeds’ are also critical concerns of farmers and consumers. While Bayer, which recently bought Monsanto, touts its mining process as ‘sustainable’, environmentalists contend that the process involves stripping away the soil off mountaintops, which destroys vegetation, contaminates water and creates noise and air pollution that is detrimental to wildlife and the environment. The impacts to humans, animals, and plants are countless.”
Polluted breast milk
Swan’s work tallies with other similarly distressing research. A new peer-reviewed study (13 May 2021) in the Environmental Science and Technology journal that checked US American women’s breast milk for PFAS contamination “detected the toxic chemical in all 50 samples tested, and at levels nearly 2,000 times higher than the level some public health advocates advise is safe for drinking water”, The Guardian reports.
“The study shows that PFAS contamination of breast milk is likely universal in the US, and that these harmful chemicals are contaminating what should be nature’s perfect food,” said Erika Schreder, a co-author and science director with Toxic Free Future.
The Guardian continues: “PFAS, or per and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 9,000 compounds that are used to make products like food packaging, clothing and carpeting water and stain resistant. They are called ‘forever chemicals’ because they do not naturally break down and have been found to accumulate in humans. They are linked to cancer, birth defects, liver disease, thyroid disease, plummeting sperm counts and a range of other serious health problems.”
Air pollution
One recent study argues that air pollution from fossil fuels is responsible for nearly one in every five deaths worldwide, killing more people each year than HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria combined.
The figure is likely higher. The recent Environmental Research study, estimated that there are 8.7 million premature deaths each year, but that does not include deaths caused by long-term exposure to ozone air pollution, or smog, which is also driven by the combustion of fossil fuels. The calculations for fatal lower-respiratory infections in children under five were also limited to higher-income countries in Europe and North and South America, where such cases tend to be much less common.
Air pollution is linked to a wide range of serious health problems, such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, tissue damage, asthma and other respiratory ailments.
Autoimmune disease
Autoimmune diseases are one of the latest modern phennomena in human illness. Douglas Kerr, M.D., Ph.D., in his foreword to The Autoimmune Epidemic by Donna Jackson Nakazawa, a faculty neurologist and neuroscientist, writes:
“The prevalence of autoimmune diseases like systemic lupus erythematosus, or lupus, multiple sclerosis, and type 1 diabetes is on the rise. In some cases, autoimmune diseases are three times more common now than they were several decades ago. These changes are not due to increased recognition of these disorders or altered diagnostic criteria. Rather, more people are getting autoimmune disorders than ever before. Something in our environment is creating this crisis.”
The US figures for Systematic Lupus Erythematosus, for example, stood in 1988–1994 at 53.6/100,000 people per year, then rose in 2004–2008 to 102.9/100,000. For Crohn’s Disease, the figure in 1991, 140/100,000, increased by almost 70% to 235.6/100,000 in 2008–09. For Guillain-Barre Syndrome, the number nearly doubled from 1.6/100,000 in 1973 to 2.9 in 2.9/100,000 people per year.
If something triggers the immune system to ‘over-react’, the immune response itself can overwhelm you, causing autoimmune disease. This is called pathogenic priming.[3] Kerr explains:
“The immune system mistakes friend for foe and begins to attack the very tissues it was designed to protect. Over the last 40 years, something has been pushing that system over the edge. Something is causing the immune system to increasingly make mistakes in which the line becomes blurred, the immune system attacks the body itself, and autoimmune disease occurs.
“There is almost universal agreement among scientists and physicians that the environmental toxins and chemicals to which we are increasingly exposed are interfering with the immune system’s ability to distinguish self from non-self. Most of the risk of autoimmunity comes from environmental exposures rather than from genetic susceptibilities. So, have those environmental exposures changed over time? The answer is clearly yes.
“The numbers are staggering: one in twelve [US] Americans — and one in nine women — will develop an autoimmune disorder. And since it is clear that not every patient with an autoimmune disease is correctly diagnosed, the prevalence is certainly higher than that. The American Heart Association estimates that by comparison, only one in twenty Americans will have coronary heart disease. Similarly, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, one in fourteen American adults will have cancer at some time in their life. This means that an American is more likely to get an autoimmune disease than either cancer or heart disease.”
Evidence is growing that even acne is caused by an autoimmune disorder, yet one of the most prescribed drugs for it, Accutane/isotretinoin, is also thought to cause (or, it seems, worsen) autoimmune diseases, such as Inflammatory Bowel Syndrome (IBS) — and many other serious side effects — and has now been taken off the market in many countries. IBS itself usually comes with chronic fatigue. One study by Interdisciplinary Toxicology in 2009 concluded that glyphosate — which is sourced from phosphate mines associated with selenium poisoning — “the active ingredient in the herbicide, Roundup, is the most important causal factor in this epidemic [of Celiac disease, and, more generally, gluten intolerance]”.
As well as acne, other common disorders increasingly common in children and increasingly thought to be autoimmune-related include eczema and asthma. Allergic reactions, which are also on the rise, from hay fever to anaphylaxis, also begin in the immune system.
Microplastics
Other recent studies have shown that synthetic clothes shed about 700,000 microplastic fibres (less than 5mm in size) that end up in the waterways after every domestic wash.[4] Of the eight million metric tonnes of plastic that end up in the ocean annually,[5] 236,000 tonnes are microplastics.[6] Microplastics pollute every lake and river in Britain.[7] The most problematic pollutants come from chemical sewage discharge, farming, and industrial chemicals. (The urban-rural divide — a manifestation of accumulation’s needs to centralise capital into fewer and fewer hands — means nutrients in food are transported from farms to cities but not back, increasing the demand for chemical treatments in both sewage and farming, and diminishing the health of the soil and the nutritional density in food.) Microplastics have been found in the stomachs of the deepest marine organisms known to exist and make their way into our food and drinking water (both tap and bottled). Every participant in a Europe-wide study was found to have nine different types of plastic in their faeces.[8] The smallest microplastic particles are capable of entering the bloodstream, lymphatic system and even the liver.
Other reports and studies that have come to similar conclusions include:
“How fossil fuel-derived pesticides and plastics harm health, biodiversity, and the climate”, The Lancet, June 2020; “Potential adverse effects of nanoparticles on the reproductive system”, Wang et. al., International Journal of Nanomedicine, 11 December 2018; “The bowls at Chipotle and Sweetgreen are supposed to be compostable. They contain cancer-linked ‘forever chemicals’”, TheCounter,org, 5 August 2019.
Proposed solutions
Swan proposes regulations that ban the use of toxic chemicals in everyday products and that require companies to prove chemicals are safe before using them commercially. According to the NYT report, “Europeans favour this precautionary principle and are currently phasing out or banning the most dangerous chemicals. (The EU has banned ‘non-essential’ use of PFAS.) Swan says this contrasts with the American approach of ‘innocent until proven guilty’, which then requires taxpayer-funded government studies to investigate health effects.
Some companies have announced that they are banning toxic chemicals in their products. McDonalds says it will have phased them out of their packaging by 2025 (is it doing the same with its food, though?). This is a start, but it will cost companies large amounts of money to find and implement safe solutions, especially since fossil fuel is such a cheap material (in April 2020, oil prices fell below zero for the first time ever). Companies with thinner profit margins than McDonalds are likely to be more resistant to making the change. Many will likely try to find ways to fool the public and regulators into thinking they have made or are making a real change. Who will enforce regulations without being bribed or blackmailed? The fossil fuel industry, of course, already mired in an existential debt crisis, will do everything it can to resist change, as they have done regarding climate change by, for instance, funding denialist myths in the media (just as the tabacco industry did to obscure the health impacts of smoking cigarettes).
Predictably, the NYT suggests a technological fix to the fertility crisis: “If these trajectories continue, in vitro fertilization (IVF) and other artificial reproductive technologies may become a widely needed tool for conceiving children.”
Under capitalism, this would be dependent, like state-mandated vaccine programmes, on ramping up public debt to subsidise private providers. Such solutions are therefore economically limited and unsustainable — the more dependent capital becomes on state (i.e. public) subsidies, the more the state becomes dependent on money printing, leading to high and then hyperinflation and systemic collapse (something that I estimate is already quite imminent). Nor does IVF begin to address the health problems caused by pollutants that will likely take generations to repair.
While IVF type treatments may be part of the solution (and arguably present libertory potential for women), Swan and the NYT cannot offer a full one because they do not get to the root cause of this diabolical problem.
Capital’s fossil fuel dependency
Chemicals are not inherently bad: humans, animals, plants — the whole world — is made up of chemicals. The question that goes unanswered is: Why has production become so dependent on chemicals and plastics sourced from fossil fuels and mines? Phthalics, for example, are sourced from coal.
The answer is not simply that fossil fuel is relatively abundant (although it is ultimately finite), versatile and portable. So are fibrous plants, especially hemp[9] and mycelium[10], from which most products, can be made, and at a higher quality (for much less money), than is presently the case. While I cannot confirm that hemp can be used like phthalates, to make products more flexible, it seems likely. The ‘waste’ or shiv — the broken woody core of the plant — from hemp processing can be turned into reusable, durable and (in forced composting conditions) biodegradable bioplastics. According to former Dell executive Bruce Dietzen, whereas a standard car possesses a carbon footprint of 10 tonnes to manufacture, his recently made a prototype cabriolet, ‘the Renew’, made from 100 pounds of woven hemp that was carbon neutral. He says the bodywork is lighter than fibreglass and 10 times more dent-resistant than steel. That fibre glass, which has to be heated to 1,371°C, no longer has to be used as a reinforcing component notably reduces emissions alone.
Hemp products, unlike those made from fossil fuel are also anti-microbial, non-toxic, flame-retardant, biodegradable, and much more durable. Indeed, hemp provided fuel, food, clothing, medicine and shelter for thousands of years before capitalism.
Fossil fuels are certainly much more energy-dense than fibrous plants. Coal’s is roughly 6,667 watt-hours (Wh) per kilogram (kg) compared to hemp’s 12 Wh/kg. But nuclear power delivers a much higher 24,000,000 kWh/kg — and nuclear has fallen out of favour much faster than fossil fuel, despite also being emissions-free and, presently, the safest form of mass energy production.[11]
The primary reason fossil fuel production is so dominant is because of the labour-intensity of its production. That’s because capital’s exploitation of commodity-producing labour is the sole source of exchange-value and profit. The worker keeps less value than they create during the working day, with the surplus that they do not keep being appropriated by the capitalist and realised as profit through commodity sales.[12]
Because humans cannot handle uranium, nuclear power is highly capital-intensive; and because it is long-lasting, there is relatively little inbuilt obscelence involved. The upfront costs are therefore too high and risky compared to potential profitable returns.
As capitalism ages, its dependence on fossil fuel increases, since the capitalist system must continue to expand to offset its own core contradiction: as production becomes more abundant, less labour and therefore profit is contained in each commodity, because of innovation introduced to raise the productivity of labour. The absolute mass of profit tends to rise, but the rate of profit tends to fall (historically towards zero). The solution is to expand production yet further and make an even greater abundance of commodities, only to intensify the contradiction yet further.
As the ratio of capital/machinery to labour rises, the rate of profit tends to fall and more and more capital becomes overaccumulated, or surplus — unprofitable to reinvest — resulting in rising debt (i.e. dependence on public subsidies) and deeper economic crises. (The historical trend towards a fully automated system of production therefore makes socialism an economic necessity.)
The more extractive and therfore labour-intensive a form of production, the higher the rate of profit. (Statistical mechanics has proven that higher labour-intensity, as compared to a higher capital:labour bias, equates to greater rates of profit.) Fossil fuel has been the most important source of extractive production for capitalism, since once it is burned it disappears into thin air and has to be dug up anew by exploited labour. Physical products made of oil-based plastic are relatively flimsy (hemp bioplastics by contrast can be made up to 10 times stronger than steel yet lighter than carbon fibre), and largely unrecyclable, too, enabling inbuilt obsolescence.
This is why it has taken so long for renewable energy, based largely on metal mining, to attract large-scale investment. It is only now that fossil fuel production has become so capital-intensive (hence its debt crisis), and the best quality oil has been exhausted, that its share in the mix of energy production is starting to diminish, even if only very slightly. Even between January 2020 and March 2021, at a time when they were pledging to “build back better” (or is that 6uild 6ack 6etter?) the G7 governments (UK, US, Canada, Italy, France, Germany and Japan) committed $189bn to support oil, coal and gas compared to $147bn on what they claim to be ‘clean’ forms of energy.
Fossil fuels (petroleum, coal, natural gas and orimulsion) would shrink to roughly half of total primary energy supply in 2050, from about 77% in 2020 — down from 81% in 2010 — if the world meets the ‘minimum’ internationally agreed target of 2 degrees Celsius (C) warming, according to S&P Global Platts Analytics.) (Evidentally, 1C has already been too much, given that 400,000 people (and counting) a year are already dying from climate-related causes and the Arctic ice sheets are melting much sooner than previously expected.
In terms of saving the habitability of the planet, renewables based on metal mining is hardly the answer: mining the earth is (fossil) fuel-intensive; poisons rivers with toxic waste (because cleaning up waste properly eats into profit margins); and, of course, releases emissions that were sequestered in the earth into the atmosphere. Even though the present methods of renewable production demand much less labour than non-renewable fossil fuel, and renewables emit next to nothing at the point of consumption, the renewables industry as it stands is still initially extractive and polluting — but therefore more profitable than investing in non-labour-intensive industries like growing hemp and mycilium.
Compound accumulation
As Jason Hickel writes in his book Less is More, the size of economic output under capitalism tends to double roughly every 20 years. There was
“a steady rise of material use in the first half of the 1900s, doubling from 7 billion tons per year to 14 billion tons per year. But then, in the decades after 1945, something truly bewildering happens… material use explodes: it reaches 35 billion tons by 1980, hits 50 billion tons by 2000, and then screams up to an eye-watering 92 billion tons by 2017… This increase in material use tracks more or less exactly with the rise of global GDP. The two have grown together in lockstep. Every additional unit of GDP means roughly an additional unit of material extraction.
“There has been a radical acceleration of fossil fuel use since 1945, rising along with the explosion in both GDP and material use. And carbon emissions have gone up right along with it. Annual emissions more than doubled from 2 billion tons per year to 5 billion tons per year during the first half of the 1900s. During the second half of the century they rose fivefold, reaching 25 billion tons by the year 2000. And they have continued to rise since then, despite a string of international climate summits, reaching 37 billion tons in 2019. Of course, there is no intrinsic relationship between energy use and CO2 emissions. It all depends on what energy source we’re using. Coal is by far the most carbon-intensive of the fossil fuels. Oil — which has grown much more quickly than coal since 1945 — emits less CO2 per unit of energy. And natural gas is less intensive still. As the global economy has come to rely more on these less polluting fuels, one might think that emissions would begin to decline. This has happened in a number of high-income nations, but not on a global scale. Why? Because GDP growth is driving total energy demand up at such a rapid pace that these new fuels aren’t replacing the older ones, they are being added on top of them. The shift to oil and gas hasn’t been an energy transition, but an energy addition. The same thing is happening right now with renewable energy.”[13]
The climate crisis and the fertility crisis stem from the exact same thing: the capitalist mode of production — i.e. capital’s exploitation of labour through the commodification of labour power (the ability to work) — and the demands of capital accumulation. The capitalist’s need to expand production must be based on expanded extraction because it must be based, in turn, on deepening the rate of exploitation, by making workers produce more surplus value in relatively less time, over a longer period of time (hence, for example, rising retirement ages, which also push back the payment of pensions, which eat into profit margins).
Socialism or extinction
Because socialism creates value based on utility instead of exploitation, the labour intensity of mining metals and fossil fuel is not an absolute economic imperative, since all labour becomes productive, rather than only commodity-producing labour (non-commodity-producing labour eats into profits without producing any surplus value). We could then transition to production predominantly based on fibrous plants and other clean alternatives. This would surely be foundational to any possibility of reversing capitalism’s negative impact on the climate and human health. Indeed, global socialism really is, in all likelihood, the elusive ‘cure for cancer’.[14]
The NYT report comments that: “If you’ve smugly enjoyed the dystopian worlds of The Handmaid’s Tale (where infertility is triggered in part by environmental pollutants) or Children of Men (where humanity is on the precipice of extinction [due widespread to infertility]) — and believed that these stories were rooted firmly in fantasy — Shanna Swan’s Count Down will serve as an awakening.”
But such an awakening, as ever, is only truly possible if the root cause of the problem becomes widely understood. Capitalism is already collapsing, right now. It may be extremely hard to contemplate and accept, but scenes like those in Children of Men will soon be our reality. In the countries recently destroyed by US/British-led NATO invasions, such as Syria, Yemen, and Libya (where chattel slavery has been re-established in what was previously the most developed African nation), they already are.
The anti-communist “we must secure the future for our children” mantra has proven to be the most diabolical lie ever told. Only a communist future has any chance of securing a future for anybody.
Ted Reese is author of Socialism or Extinction: Climate, Automation and War in the Final Capitalist Breakdown
[1] As argued in my book, the accumulation crisis is intensifying economic competition between private monopolies and the nation-states they are based in, over (often colonial) assets and resources (especially human labour), forcing them into ever-more direct confrontation. This has manifested in the intensifying trade wars the US has begun to wage against China and the European Union. In 2015–16 — before Brexit or Trump — the G20 economies introduced a record number of trade-restrictive measures, at 21 per month. “WTO warns on rise of protectionist measures by G20 economies”, FT.com, 21 June.
[2] Yahoo Finance reports that: “A military drone may have autonomously attacked humans for the first time without being instructed to do so, according to a recent report by the UN Security Council. The report, published in March, claimed that the AI drone — Kargu-2 quadcopter — produced by Turkish military tech company STM, attacked retreating soldiers loyal to Libyan General Khalifa Haftar. The 548-page report by the UN Security Council’s Panel of Experts on Libya has not delved into details on if there were any deaths due to the incident, but it raises questions on whether global efforts to ban killer autonomous robots before they are built may be futile.”
Like the rise of CCTV and new forms of advanced surveillance, such as face-recognition tech, the primary reason for the rise of ‘killer robots’ is again the demands of accumulation: wages eat into profit margins, even when paid by the state — such money could otherwise go to subsidising capital directly — and therefore must be slashed, historically towards zero. Unlike human workers, automated machines do not need wages, holiday/sick pay, toilet/lunch breaks, and so on. Automated machines are cheaper and more efficient/productive. If autonomous military machines were to turn on humans in general, the struggle for socialism would become a protracted military struggle against the new robot rulers by an already classless, lumpenised humanity; although this would, of course, happen in stages. Perhaps they could be programmed not to kill a select group of controlling human dictators, but programmers are already warning that the algorythms autonomous machines run on are already ‘out of control’ since ‘machine-learning’ means they have learned to self-write them. This ‘learning’ though is most likely based on an accumulation or extrapolation of information starting from that input by biased human programmers. Predictive policing algorithms have proven to be racist, for example.
[3] Autoimmune diseases in children, who already have highly active immune systems while they grow, have been linked to some vaccines: in 1993 the Institute of Medicine in the US released a report entitled “Adverse Events Associated With Childhood Vaccines: Evidence Bearing on Causality.” The results of this report were summarised in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA):
“The committee found that the evidence favored acceptance of a causal relation between diphtheria and tetanus toxoids [in the vaccines] and Guillain-Barré syndrome and brachial neuritis, between measles vaccine and anaphylaxis, between oral polio vaccine and Guillain-Barré syndrome, and between unconjugated Hib vaccine and susceptibility to Hib disease. The committee found that the evidence established causality between diphtheria and tetanus toxoids and anaphylaxis, between measles vaccine and death from measles vaccine-strain viral infection, between measles-mumps-rubella vaccine and thrombocytopenia and anaphylaxis, between oral polio vaccine and poliomyelitis and death from polio vaccine-strain viral infection, and between hepatitis B vaccine and anaphylaxis.”
Critics of vaccines point out that the number of vaccines pushed onto the public (especially in the US) continues to rise; and to the preservatives and other toxins used in vaccines, such as alluminium that is apparently designed to help trigger immune responses. Aluminum levels become especially problematic if it gets into the bloodstream are especially high in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s and autism. (Exley and Clarkson, nature.com)
“[M]anufacturers have added more [aluminum in vaccines as an adjuvant] in order to provoke the production of antibodies, said to prove an ‘immune response’… The newest HPV vaccines contain more than double the amount of aluminum than the original Gardasil vaccine,” write Drs Tom Cowan and Sally Morell in their 2021 book The Contagion Myth (loc. 1938). They say that immunologist Yehada Schoenfeld uses the term ‘autoimmune/inflammatory syndrome induced by adjuvants’ (ASIA) to describe immune-mediated diseases that appear after injection with aluminium-containing vaccines. A person would have to eat “one-million-fold higher aluminum to get the same level of [injected] aluminum adjuvant at the level of the immune cells”. “The amount of aluminum injected into babies [in the US] exceeds anything that can be considered safe. A baby who receives the recommended eight doses of vaccine at the two-month checkup receives 1,225mcg of alumminum at once; fully vaccinated babies receive 4,925mcg by 18 months. The maximum allowable aluminum (considered safe) per day for intravenous parenteral feeding is 25mcg.” DoD personnel who received the flu shot in the US during the 2017–18 influena season had a 36% increased risk of covid-19 illness (Wolff, G).
The new technology of ‘mRNA’ vaccines rushed out for the apparent ‘covid-19 pandemic’ had been rejected again and again before 2021. Delivered via nanoparticles made up of lipids, or fats, mRNA is a “relatively cheap and easy to make genetic technology” at scale that aims to direct protein production in cells. (The Pfizer vaccine costs 76p to manufacture and is sold for £22 a dose to the UK government.) “Several major pharmaceutical companies have tried and abandoned the idea, struggling to get mRNA into cells without triggering nasty side effects,” Damian Garde reported in 2017. “The safe dose was too weak, and repeat injections of a dose strong enough to be effective had troubling effects on the liver in animal studies… Dose too little, and you don’t get enough enzyme to affect the disease; dose too much, and the drug is too toxic for patients.”
Of a new tech that was said to make mRNA safer, a former unnamed Moderna employee told Garde: “[The technology] would have to be a miraculous, Hail Mary sort of save for them to get to where they need to be on their timelines.”
Garde says that, “Moderna has about $1.3 billion in cash on hand… But with plans to spend more than $300 million a year investing in its technology, it will need to raise more money eventually. Last year Moderna reorganised its business to prepare for an initial public offering. But at its current valuation, Moderna’s IPO would be the biggest in biotech history, leaving some investors scratching their heads as to how the company’s vaccine-heavy pipeline could justify such a number… The failure in its first and most advanced therapy casts doubt on Moderna’s other goals for the rare disease space. It calls into question Moderna’s valuation, pegged at $4.7 billion by Pitchbook. The company has raised nearly $2 billion in cash from investors and partners. But it has done so by promising a revolutionary technology safe enough to deliver repeated doses of mRNA. The drugs it is pushing along now, by contrast, are more modest, relying on single administrations of mRNA. Beyond the four vaccines, it has one early-stage clinical trial targeting cardiac disease, launched just last month by partner AstraZeneca. The treatment involves a one-time dose and doesn’t use the tricky nanoparticle casing. Vaccines are not nearly as lucrative as the rare disease space that Moderna hoped to dominate. The market is also much more crowded.” In 2016 Nature magazine criticised Moderna for excessive secrecy in an article headlined “Research not fit to print”. Stat News reports that on May 18 2020, “Moderna issued a press release trumpeting ‘positive interim clinical data’. The firm said its vaccine had generated neutralising antibodies in the first eight volunteers in the early-phase study, a tiny sample. But Moderna didn’t provide any backup data. Nonetheless, Moderna’s share price rose 20% that day. Some top Moderna executives also drew criticism for selling shares worth millions. In addition, some critics have said the US government has given Moderna a sweetheart deal by bankrolling the costs for developing the vaccine and pledging to buy at least 100 million doses, all for $2.48 billion. That works out to roughly $25 a dose, which Moderna acknowledges includes a profit.” Moderna later announced that “as of 13 April, all placebo participants have been offered the Moderna covid-19 vaccine and 98% of those have received the vaccine”, meaning that their placebo group no longer exists and as such, they have no way to accurately measure long-term safety.
Pfizer has also been accused of erecting a “wall of secrecy”. Large portions of the British government’s contracts with the company have been redacted and any arbitration proceedings will be kept secret.
According to TrialSite (28 May 2021), Freedom of Information Act FOIA documents revealed that “pre-clinical studies show the active part of the [‘covid-19' Pfizer] vaccine (mRNA-lipid nanoparticles), which produce the spike protein, spreads throughout the body andis then concentrated in various organs, including the ovaries and spleen. TrialSite has also learned via regulatory documents that apparently… Pfizer did not follow industry-standard quality management practices during preclinical toxicology studies during vaccines, as key studies did not meet good laboratory practice.”
According to Norman Fenton, Professor of Risk Information Management at Queen Mary University of London, a comparison of the all-cause mortality of the vaccinated against the unvaccinated using Office of National Statistics (UK) (ONS) data and found “no reliable evidence that the vaccines reduced all-cause mortality. In fact, if you take account of newly vaccinated people who die likely being misclassified as unvaccinated — as that’s the most likely explanation for inconsistencies in the data — then you get the conclusion that the vaccines don’t seem to be reducing all-cause mortality but rather cause a genuine spike in all-cause mortality shortly after vaccination”.
Fenton points out using the UK Government Covid dashboard that someone who dies from critical injuries in a car crash is classified as a covid case, a covid hospitalisation and a covid death if they tested positive despite being asymptomatic 13 days earlier; that someone who gets a covid vaccine and 13 days later tests positive with symptoms is classified as an unvaccinated covid case; and that someone who gets a covid vaccine and dies the next day from an adverse reaction to it is classified as an unvaccinated death.
Studies associating new ‘mRNA’ vaccines with nasty side effects reportedly show, for example, skin reactions (see also here, here and here); inflammation of the cavernous sinus; rhabdomyolysis (muscle breakdown/death); acute visual impairment; dizziness/hearing loss, liver injury; neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder (chronic disorder of the brain and spinal cord dominated by inflammation of the optic nerve (optic neuritis) and inflammation of the spinal cord (myelitis). Some reported blood clots from mRNA jabs have reportedly led to amputations (good news for capitalists investing in bionic legs and the like…).
Scores of people on their social media accounts have been warning about the serious adverse effects they experienced (see, for example, the replies and quote tweets).
Neither Pfizer or Moderna responded to the BMJ about serious covid vaccine safety concerns.
Statistics from a number of countries as of July 2021 show that the vaccines “do not reduce covid cases, hospitalisations or deaths”. A study from Israel said that vaccinated individuals had 27 times higher risk of symptomatic covid infection compared to those with natural immunity from previous infection. According to Dr. Doug Corrigan, “The chances of dying without a vaccine are 0.082%, and the vaccine reduces that risk by 0.074%. The probability that the vaccine will permanently harm me is > 0.074%. It’s a very simple risk/reward calculation.”
Hooman Noorchashm MD, PhD, has said that, “It is a rigid medical ethical principle that when a medical treatment or procedure is offered to persons who stand to gain little to no benefit, only harm can be done. The vast majority of the millions of Americans who’ve had natural covid-19 infections, and especially those with serological evidence of immunity, stand to gain little to no benefit from added vaccination. When these persons are vaccinated indiscriminately, they are only afforded the possibility of harm — not benefit… This is not a theoretical concern.”
Between December 14, 2020 and April 23, 2021 the CDC Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reported that adverse reactions to covid-19 vaccines hit 3,544 deaths and 12,619 serious injuries, an unprecedented high for any vaccination programme in the US. In comparison, there are 20 to 30 deaths reported every year to VAERS related to the flu shot. Previous studies, including one from Harvard University, estimate that only 1–10% of all vaccine-related deaths and injuries get reported to VAERS. According to Dr. Peter McCullough:
“A typical new drug at about five deaths, unexplained deaths, we get a black-box warning saying it may cause death. At about 50 deaths it’s pulled off the market. Swine flu vaccines in 1976 were pulled after 500 cases of paralysis and 25 deaths. On 8 March the CDC announced on their website with very little fanfare, that they had reviewed about 1,600 deaths with unnamed FDA doctors and they indicated not a single death was related to the vaccine. That was concerning in the academic community. I have chaired and participated in dozens of data safety monitoring boards and this type of work would have taken many months… It is impossible for unnamed regulatory doctors without any experience with covid-19 to opine that none of the deaths were related to the vaccine. I think this was effectively a scrubbing…
“There is a Trusted News Initiative, which is very important to understand. This is a coalition of all the major media and government stakeholders in vaccination, where they are not going to allow any negative information about vaccines to get into the popular media. A lot of Americans don’t understand how tight these stakeholders are. Keep in mind the NIH [National Institutes of Health] is a co-owner of the Moderna patent, so they have a vested financial interest in keeping these vaccines going.”
The Federal Food & Drug Administration (FDA) in court papers proposed it should be given 55 years to review and release vaccine-related documents. A court order that went against this and revealed information from 91 pages showed that after the first 2.5 months Pfizer knew bout 158,893 adverse reactions including 25,957 nervous system disorders and 1,233 fatalities. The document apparently shows that Pfizer concedes this is “a large increase” in adverse event reports and that even this huge volume is under-reported.
According to ProPublica, “As pharma companies underwrite three-fourths of the FDA’s budget for scientific reviews, the agency is increasingly fast-tracking expensive drugs with significant side effects and unproven health benefits. Once widely assailed for moving slowly, today the FDA reviews and approves drugs faster than any other regulatory agency in the world. Between 2011 and 2015, the FDA reviewed new drug applications more than 60 days faster on average than did the European Medicines Agency,” indicating that the US’s accumulation crisis is relatively worse than the EU’s: whereas the former has long had a trade deficit, the latter has had a trade surplus.”
Capital accumulation demands a faster turnover and circulation of capital to overcome each crisis. The pressure on workers from management to ignore health and safety regulations therefore tends to intensify. Vaccine production is not exempt from this reality. According to ProPublica, “As pharma companies underwrite three-fourths of the FDA’s budget for scientific reviews, the agency is increasingly fast-tracking expensive drugs with significant side effects and unproven health benefits. Once widely assailed for moving slowly, today the FDA reviews and approves drugs faster than any other regulatory agency in the world. Between 2011 and 2015, the FDA reviewed new drug applications more than 60 days faster on average than did the European Medicines Agency,” indicating that the US’s accumulation crisis is relatively worse than the EU’s: whereas the former has long had a trade deficit, the latter has had a trade surplus. In 2017, Scientific American reported that one in three recent FDA drug approvals were followed by major safety actions, posing “concerns about a push for less regulation”. When BBC Panorama exposed the cross-contamination of samples in a covid testing lab being ignored (thereby inflating positive test results), you had to wonder if workers on low-paid temporary contracts had been threatened with the sack if they reported cross-contamination.
The Gates Foundation (worth $51bn) has shareholdings in several pharmaceutical giants. “The foundation appears to see the Global South as both a dumping ground for drugs deemed too unsafe for the developed world and a testing ground for drugs not yet determined to be safe enough for the developed world,” according to The Grayzone. Oxford’s Clinical Infectious Diseases Periodical has contended that “the only cause of polio is likely to be the vaccine”. Many others have come to similar conclusions about the vaccines Gates promotes. Similarly, it has been claimed that vaccines were used to depopulate the Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia in the 1970s and spread AIDS in Africa. Two international studies found that “an adenovirus-5 vectored HIV-1 vaccine administered in three immunisations for efficacy against HIV-1 acquisition… increased risk of HIV-1 acquisition among vaccinated men”.
Further reading: Why capitalism now needs ‘lockdowns’ (social enclosure/segregation) and ‘medical’ tyranny
[4] Napper and Thompson, “Release of synthetic microplastic fibres from domestic washing machines: Effects of fabric type and washing conditions”, Marine Pollution Bulletin, Vol 112, Issues 1–2, sciencedirect.com, 15 November 2016.
[5] Jambeck et al. “Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean”, Science, 13 February 2015.
[6] Sebille et al, “A global inventory of small floating plastic debris”, Environmental Research Letters vol 10, no 12, IOPscience.iop.org, 8 December 2015.
[7] Bangor University, “Microplastic pollution widespread in British lakes and rivers, study shows”, phys.org, 7 March 2019.
In August 2020, Brian McHugh contacted Yorkshire Water asking about the presence and monitoring of PFOS chemicals:
“Their response was far from reassuring. Yorkshire Water, along with all other Water Companies in England and Wales, are obliged to undertake monitoring of the drinking water they supply to customers, in line with the requirements stipulated in The Water Supply (Water Quality) Regulations 2016 (as amended). This is a legal document issued by the Government and regulated by the Drinking Water Inspectorate. In this document there are no specified regulatory limits (PCVs), for PFOS or PFAS. This means that Yorkshire Water are not legally required to monitor for these compounds and subsequently are not required to report results for these compounds to the Drinking Water Inspectorate
“Clearly aware that there were harmful dangers associated with PFOS, Yorkshire Water, like all the water companies I contacted, was hiding behind a ‘regulatory shield.
“River quality is being impacted by chemical pollution, drinking water is not being regulated by water companies, and PFAS chemicals are being found in food packaging and UK supermarkets. And this is the UK, when we were supposed to be held to higher European standards on pollution — causing concern that 2021 may see environmental standards slip even lower, as a result of the UK leaving the little protection that was offered by the EU.”
Capitalist states protect capitalist interests, which is why a socialist state is needed to protect the interests of the people.
[8] “Microplastics discovered in human stools across the globe in ‘first study of its kind’”, Medical University of Vienna, October 2018.
[9] Along with other fibrous plants, such as Kenaf and bamboo, hemp can potentially largely replace the materials that we currently extract from the earth (including trees). Other examples: Banana peel can be made into high-performance sodium-ion batteries. Leaves can be turned into solar panels.
Hemp grows very quickly with little water, making it drought-resistant; heals and cleans even the most damaged and poisoned soil, reversing land degradation and desertification, thanks to its deep areating root system; and draws down CO2 from the atmosphere faster than any other plant. Since it grows tightly packed, nor does it need toxic pesticides that damage the soil and biodiversity.
Biofuel obviously releases gasses previously trapped in the plant back into the atmosphere when burned. But the unburned products made from hemp sequester the CO2 indefinitely.
A worldwide hemp/plant-based industrial revolution is therefore seems to be absolutely essential if we are to reverse desertification and stabilise the climate, and with the added bonuses of furthering technological and industrial advancement and ending pollution, whether plastic or atmospheric.
This is not a call for a hemp monoculture. In 1984 it was estimated that just 6% (90 million acres) of contiguous US land cultivating hemp could supply all current demands for oil and gas while maintaining a neutral carbon system. (‘Coincidentally’ the US government pays farmers not to grow on 6% of the farming land (to keep food prices high).)* Clearly the figure would have to be higher than 6% if hemp were also to replace steel, concrete, plastic and lithium, etc. While the economy is now much bigger than in 1984, a lot of what we produce is completely wasteful (bombs, for instance) and are only made to serve the needs of accumulation. As things like precision fermentation, cellular agriculture (lab-grown food) and 3D-printing become more diffuse and localised, and public transport improves, private forms of transport like cars will become increasingly obsolete, too. And as the means of production become smaller and move underground, there will be more overground space to revive the environment and biodiversity. So a hemp monoculture is not necessary.
Further reading: Briggs, J. (2012), ‘Hemp fuel guide’, Hemp Frontiers; Kaucic, G. (2019), ‘A sustainable alternative to fossil fuels: hemp & biofuel’, Hemp History Week; Mitlin, D., et al (2013); Interconnected Carbon Nanosheets Derived from Hemp for Ultrafast Supercapacitors with High Energy’, American Chemical Society Publications; Murray-Smith, R. (2017), ‘The hemp battery performs better than the lithium battery’, Cannabis Tech; UK Hempcrete, ‘Better-than-zero-carbon buildings’.
(There is a growing body of anecdotal evidence that hempcrete can absorb reasonable quantities of electromagnetic interference (EMI). The electromagnetic fields produced by mobile phones are classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as possibly carcinogenic to humans. For arguments linking ‘covid-19’ to the rollout of 5G, see footnote 13.)
*Mechanisation had already had a profound impact on US farming by 1900: the labour needed to produce 1 acre of wheat fell from 61 hours in 1830 to 3 hours 19 minutes in 1896. Reynolds, B., The Coming Revolution: Capitalism in the 21st Century, Zer0 Books, op cit, loc. 1757. Today, the agriculture problem is returning to the bleak days of the Great Depression, when the US government bought produce for a guaranteed profit or ordered its destruction to raise prices. From 1996 to 2006, the cost of producing corn was higher than its sale price. Rising demand as a result of droughts, crop failures and biofuel production boosted prices for a while, but corn production became unprofitable again by 2015. This “demonstrates that Marx’s remarkable prediction was right. The collapse of production for exchange-value is not just a theoretical possibility. We can already observe it happening. An agricultural system that sacrificed everything from environmental standards to food quality and safety in the search for profit can no longer sustain production for profit on an independent basis. US agriculture has to be subsidised permanently or it will be unable to operate in a capitalist market.” Reynolds, op cit, loc. 1789–1805.
[10] Mycelium, a type of fungus, can be coaxed, using temperature, CO2, humidity and airflow, to rapidly build fibrous structures for things such as “packaging, clothing, food and construction — everything from leather to plant-based steak to scaffolding for growing organs”; all with minimal (mostly compostable) waste and energy consumption.
Other options include: carbon-negative ‘sky mining’. This can be employed, for example, to make diamonds that are physically and chemically identical to those mined from the earth by drawing down carbon from the atmosphere. Producing a conventional one carat diamond requires the shifting of around 1,000 tonnes of rock and earth, consumes almost 4,000 litres of water, and generates more than 100kg of carbon emissions.
Similarly, gold that is ‘golder’ than mined gold can be grown in labs.
[11] Pound for pound, uranium provides 16,000 times more electricity than coal, promising an abundant cheap energy for the masses.
Before the era of neoliberalism, after 1973, France decarbonised 78% of its electricity in just 13 years by building 54 publicly-owned nuclear power plants. The abandonment of nuclear power has had little to do with safety concerns (which may well have been caused by sabotage) but rather its unprofitability: Nuclear is much safer than seems to be generally thought. As Leigh Phillips writes:
“Exposure to cosmic rays while taking two transatlantic flights (0.16 millisieverts (mSv) of radiation) is roughly equivalent to the annual exposure of a UK nuclear power station worker (0.18 mSv), which is far less than the annual dose of the average US citizen from all sources (2.7 mSv), or exposure to radiation as a result of one CT chest scan (6.6 mSv) or the average annual dose from radon from the ground experienced by people who live in Cornwall (7.8 mSv). We also know that the new generation of dramatically safer reactors employing passive-safety systems physically cannot melt down, and that safe methods of waste disposal are proven. The amount of waste produced is also tiny compared to that of many other industrial processes, and far less hazardous. Radioactivity also decreases with time, but the danger presented by solar panel production, such as cadmium, mercury and lead pollutants, never goes away. Instead these pollutants bioaccumulate (there is ever greater concentration of the pollutant in an organism) and biomagnify (there is ever greater concentration of the polluting as you move up the food chain). Advanced nuclear power systems can completely recycle used nuclear fuel, actually producing a net positive balance of energy in this process. In a 2014 survey of all energy sources exploring which delivered the least direct harm to biodiversity, nuclear was among the best options, due to its small land and mining footprint. Nuclear has by far the best safety record of any energy source, clocking in at 0.04 deaths per terawatt hour, compared to wind’s 0.15 deaths, solar’s 0.44 deaths, hydroelectric’s 1.4 deaths, oil’s 36 deaths and coal’s 100 death.”
In his book, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-porn Addicts (see the chapter “The Left Defence of Nuclear Power”), Phillips writes that energy poverty in Germany has risen since the country started decommissioning nuclear power:
“Where genuinely clean nuclear power until the mid-2000s represented the largest proportion of Germany’s electricity generation, this crown is now worn by brown coal (lignite), the least efficient and dirtiest kind of coal there is. Even as the country is mothballing its fleet of nuclear power plants, it is commissioning and opening brand new coal-fired power plants. The reason is due to the intermittency of wind and solar.
“The idea that the Energiewende [energy transition] is some revival of national planning, the sort of public sector build-out of new energy and transport infrastructure that we do need to solve the climate crisis, is laughable. Rather, it is neoliberal business as usual, with the feed-in tariff offering subsidies to property owners and companies to install the solar panels and wind turbines. This subsidy is expensive, with the cost passed on as a surcharge to consumers, making electricity in Germany the most expensive in Europe. The average household now pays an extra €260 a year, while 2,300 energy-intensive companies are exempt from paying the surcharge — and costs are only expected to rise. From 2008 to 2011, the proportion of German households suffering from energy poverty climbed from 13.8 to 17% (a household is considered to be energy-poor when it spends more than 10 percent of its income on energy).
Emmet Penney and Adrián Calderón write for The Bellows:
“Throughout seven decades of service, nuclear power has consistently been proven to be safer than every other mass scale form of energy production. In one year, residents who live near a nuclear power plant are exposed to less radiation than anyone who has eaten a single banana. Though it may sound counterintuitive, because elements such as uranium and plutonium have such long half-lives, the radiation they emit is low enough to safely hold in your hand. Nuclear is also far and away the most reliable form of energy generation in the US, which makes it ideal for providing baseload power for the electrical grid [whereas wind and solar are intemittant due to night time and winter]. Nuclear reactors routinely spend years in continuous operation. The current fleet of nuclear power plants have no technical limits that prevent them from being in service for 80 years, if not a century.
… most [nuclear waste] is composed of low-level waste (LLW) made up of protective clothing, cleaning materials, equipment, and tools exposed to neutron radiation. LLW accounts for 90% of nuclear waste by volume but only 1% of its total radioactivity and can be disposed of safely and permanently. After about half a decade of providing carbon-free energy in the reactor core, the uranium fuel itself must be replaced. This high-level waste (HLW) is the highly radioactive and long-living stuff that you see caricatured in popular imagination. Yet this type of waste comprises only 3% of total nuclear waste. To put this in perspective, all of the waste from the entire history of American nuclear power plants can fit within an area the size of a football field, 50 feet high — half the height of a single wind turbine.
“Meanwhile, weather-dependent renewables require 400–450 times the land to produce the same amount of electricity as nuclear. Leveling an area of land larger than almost a third of all US states for energy production might be an acceptable compromise to some, but it does not solve the weather-dependent nature of those sources. Further complicating matters is the fact renewable energy must be stored for later, which requires the use of lithium batteries. But the sheer scale of mining and land use required, and the fact that it involves the domination and exploitation of predominantly developing countries, makes the choice not only inefficient, but unethical. With the abundant uranium reserves already in the United States today, we have the capacity to cultivate an industry to domestically fuel our reactors right now.”
[12] For detailed theoretical proof of the labour theory of value, see Kliman, A., Debt, Economic Crisis, and the Tendential Fall in the Profit RateA temporal perspective.
[13] Hickel, J., Less is More, Windmill Books, 2021, pp. 103–6.
[14] We stress global, since socialism isolated and under attack by capitalist superpowers, as in the case of the Soviet Union, has to trade with capitalist companies (where it can circumvent blockades and sanctions), undermining the ability to plan production, since fluctuating foreign prices cannot be fully anticipated; incentivising the build up of foreign currency (including via black markets). The Soviet Union was also forced to build up its military defences at the expense of its civilian economy. It therefore had little choice but to use fossil fuel and metals in production, although it may have suffered from an ignorance regarding the versatility of hemp and mycelium during a time when modern methods of hemp-based manufacturing were not as advanced as they are now (and much research and development is still required).
With capitalism’s fetters (restraints) on productivity — the profit motive/surplus capital that cannot be reinvested profitably — fully removed worldwide, any technological fixes needed to help reverse the climate and fertility crises would become much more possible; especially since all labour, rather than just commodity-producing labour, becomes productive under socialism. This is even true to an extent of socialism ‘in one country’ (the Soviet Union was more like one continent).
For example, space-based solar power, overcoming the intermittency of winter, night time and overcast weather, is too expensive to develop by a capitalist system in severe decay. Chinese scientists, meanwhile, have just set a new world record of achieving a plasma temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds, a key step toward the test running of a fusion reactor, using deuterium abound in the sea to provide a steady stream of clean energy. Nuclear fusion is even safer, because it is less radioactive, than the current methods of nuclear fission, but has taken decades to develop because of the high costs. Whether China is ahead of the game on this (like most things these days) because it is genuinely ‘building socialism’ or because its overaccumulation of capital is relatively smaller than the US’s is beyond the scope of this essay.
The Soviet Union was, of course, far more innovative than it is given credit for. Inventions there included: the radio antenna; 2- and 3-D holography; the artificial satellite; the programmable computer; the nuclear power plant and nuclear-powered submarine; the AK assault rifle; the mobile phone; and Tetris. See “Russian inventions in the soviet era”, inventions-handbook.com.
Technological advances in computing power and stock coding would make socialised central planning far superior these days, but even back then socialised central planning made it possible, for example, to speedily transport factories to the other side of the Urals after the outbreak of WWII — within 12 months 2,500 major enterprises had been moved and brought into operation. Compare this to the sluggishness of capitalism’s response to climate change. Soviet armaments production was more efficiently organised than that of either the Allies or the fascists. For every million tonnes of steel the USSR produced 1.5 times more planes than the UK, 2.6 times more than Germany, and 3.2 times more than the US. The Soviet Union’s industrial output quadrupled in 1928–38, while the advanced capitalist economies broke down into the Great Depression. See: “War and the Soviet Union: The Soviet victory over fascism”, FRFI 49, May 1985. According to Sam Lilley in Automation and Social Progress (International Publishers, 1957, p. 159), the volume of production in the USSR was four times greater than in the US in 1937, five times greater by 1949, nearly seven times greater in 1952 and nearly nine times greater in 1955.
Clearly, a transition to predominantly non-subtractive/extractive production would take years, probably decades. Hard limitations on fossil fuel and metal mining production may have to be enforced during this time to save human fertility and the habitability of the planet’s climate, meaning only really essential items could be made. (Obviously certain wants are needs, but luxuries that could not be produced cleanly would have to be rationed until such a time that they could be.) On the other side of this arduous but necessary transition lies abundant material wealth for all.
The economy could still grow under socialism, but only at the same rate or higher than under capitalism if this can be done cleanly and sustainably. Output tends to doubles every 20 years under capitalism and only tends to get dirtier and more unsustainable, at least in absolute terms. Under socialism, because production is fully consciously planned, the economy could grow but at the same rate as or slower than nature replenishes itself (something that capitalism hinders, but socialism would assist). This is not presently the case: the equivalent of 1.7 Earth’s worth of resources is being consumed per year, but half of that is by the world’s 10% richest people. If every country consumed the same amount of resources as the US, the number or Earth’s consumed each year would be four.
Clearly, extraction took place before capitalism, too, but on a very limited basis. As Hickel writes:
“We humans have been on this planet for nearly 300,000 years; fully evolved, fully intelligent, exactly as we are today. For approximately 97% of that time our ancestors lived in relative harmony with the Earth’s ecosystems.
This is not to say that people didn’t extract from the land or mine the mountains. They did; but they did so with careful decorum and rituals of respect. Miners, smiths and farmers offered propitiation. They believed they were permitted to take from the earth, as one might receive a gift, but that to take too much, or too violently, would invite calamity.
[Early human societies did] change ecosystems. We know, for example, that certain societies played a role in the demise of some of the planet’s ancient megafauna, like woolly mammoths and giant sloths and sabre-toothed cats. But they never precipitated anything like the multi-front ecological collapse that we are witnessing today. It was only with the rise of capitalism over the past few hundred years, and the breathtaking acceleration of industrialisation from the 1950s, that on a planetary scale things began to tip out of balance.
“For most of our 300,000-year history, we humans have had an intimate relationship with the rest of the living world. We know that people in early human societies were likely to be able to describe the names, properties and personalities of hundreds if not thousands of plants, insects, animals, rivers, mountains and soils, in much the same way people today know the most recondite facts about actors, celebrities, politicians and product brands. Aware that their existence depended on the well-being of other living systems around them, they paid close attention to how those systems worked. They regarded humans as an inextricable part of the rest of the living community, which they saw in turn as sharing the essential traits of humanity. Indeed, the art our ancestors left hidden on stone surfaces around the world suggests that they believed in a sort of spiritual interchangeability between humans and non-human beings.
“Anthropologists refer to this way of seeing the world as animism — the idea that all living beings are interconnected, and share in the same spirit or essence. Because animists draw no fundamental distinction between humans and nature, and indeed in many cases insist on the underlying relatedness — even kinship — of all beings, they have strong moral codes that prevent them from exploiting other living systems. We know from animist cultures today that while people of course fish, hunt, gather and farm, they do so in the spirit not of extraction but of reciprocity. Just as with gifts exchanged among people, transactions with non-human beings are hedged about with rituals of respect and politeness. Just as we take care not to exploit our own relatives, so animists are careful to take no more than ecosystems can regenerate, and give back by protecting and restoring the land.
“Enlightenment thinkers once disparaged animist ideas as backwards and unscientific. They considered them to be a barrier to capitalist expansion, and sought desperately to stamp them out. But today science is beginning to catch up. Biologists are discovering that humans are not standalone individuals, but composed largely of microorganisms on which we depend for functions as basic as digestion. Psychiatrists are learning that spending time around plants is essential to people’s mental health, and indeed that certain plants can heal humans from complex psychological traumas. Ecologists are learning that trees, far from being inanimate, communicate with each other and even share food and medicine through invisible mycelial networks in the soil. Quantum physicists are teaching us that individual particles that appear to be distinct are inextricably entangled with others, even across vast distances. And Earth-systems scientists are finding evidence that the planet itself operates like a living superorganism.”
These new developments in science thanks to the latest technological innovations in late monopoly capitalism look conspicuously ‘presocialist’, i.e. systematic, holistic, and humanistic; and of Marx’s dialectical historical materialism: the method of assessing the world through the understanding that it develops not deterministacally as such but through bidirectional interactions and conflicts of social, material forces, tending towards higher modes of production; whereas capitalism has traditionally been blighted by theories that are idealistic (seeing man’s tending-to-rise rationality as the driving force of historical development); mechanistic (seeing nature, including human bodies, as (merely productive) machinery); and dualistic (sentient humans, the thinking subject, versus the lifeless objects of nature, to be possessed; or civilised versus savage, justifying colonialism, and so on.).
(For a Marxist discussion of the ‘germ vs terrain’ theories of (infectious) disease, see footnote 13 — germ theory seems like a good example of bourgeois dualism and over recent decades has had to make more concessions to terrain theory than vice-versa. (For example, it used to be thought that all bacteria was ‘bad’ but it is now widely accepted that vast majority of bacteria is ‘good’, since it is now accepted that the microbiome, made up of trillions of bacteria and viruses (weighing up to five pounds) in the human body actually regulates our immune system. Until the 1970s it was thought that viruses caused cancer). The most ardent terrain theorists such as Cowan and Morell argue that rather than ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bacteria, bacteria only becomes ‘bad’ when it is dehrated, starved of oxygen, or poisoned.)
Clearly there may always be some trade-offs to be made between rising living standards driven by technological innovation and health — human health does of course deteriorate with age and mortality cannot be ‘cured’ even if we thought this would be a good thing to strive for (we don’t!). The average human now lives to be 71, 40 years longer than at the beginning of the 20th century, so cases of disease are bound to have risen absolutely and as a greater portion of an ageing population. Far too many young and middle-aged people, though, are also being ravaged by disease caused by toxic chemicals in their consumables.
The baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater. The human body is remarkably good at expelling toxins — what we need to do first and foremost is prevent their overaccumulation in our systems by making production much cleaner (something precision fermentation and hemp/mycelium production, for example, will enable fairly rapidly). (Cowan and Morell argue that what we call viruses are actually “toxin-gobbling” ‘exosomes’. See footnote 13.) This is not something that can be done overnight, and so banning all toxins in production straight away is not feasible; and nor is it particularly deserible to prohobit products, which tends to inspire black markets that overstretch state resources. It is much better to provide better alternatives that positively incentivise take up rather than prohibitions that negatively incentivise obligation, thereby inspiring opposition.
And as we have made clear, socialism is a higher mode of production — it will be more productive in both total output and quality, although we would measure that production as much in terms of quality (and quality of life) than quantity, something that presently is not the case.
While living standards have risen under capitalism in the 20th century, that has mostly been achieved on the backs of the global working class, vast swathes of which remain poor. Between 1980 and 2015, the global economy grew by 380%, yet the number of people living in poverty (on less than $5 (£3.20) a day, adjusted for the different cost of a ‘basket of goods’ from country to country) increased by more than 1.1 billion. In 1980, $2.20 of every $100 went to the world’s poorest 20%, but in 2003 that figure had fallen to 60 cents. While the official global rate of extreme poverty decreased by around 1% a year between 1990 and 2017, the extreme poverty marker is set by the World Bank at below $1.90 per day. By this standard, the number of people living in extreme poverty declined from around 1.9 billion (36%) in 1990 to 643 million (8.4%) in 2019 (mostly in China). These figures are absurd: according to the UN, 815 million people do not have enough calories to sustain even “minimal” human activity; 1.5 billion are food insecure and do not have enough calories to sustain “normal” human activity; and 2.1 billion suffer from malnutrition. And this was before 2020, when starvation doubled. Many economists agree that a minimum of $7.40 per day is needed to achieve basic nutrition and normal human life expectancy. If a threshold of $7.40 is set, the extreme poverty figures change to 3.2 billion (71%) in 1981 and 4.2 billion (58%) in 2013.
Furthermore it has not always been the case that capitalism tends to raise living standards and life expectancy, even in the richer countries. During the rise of capitalism, achieved through the industrial revolution and enclosure (the robbing and privatisation of land owned in common by peasants) the first century was characterised by a striking deterioration in life expectancy, down to levels not seen since the Black Death in the fourteenth century. In Manchester and Liverpool, the two giants of industrialisation, life expectancy collapsed compared to non-industrialised parts of the country. In Manchester it fell to a mere twenty-five years. This happened in every European country that has been studied. The first few hundred years of capitalism generated misery to a degree unknown in the pre-capitalist era. (See Simon Szreter, “The population health approach in historical perspective,” American Journal of Public Health 93(3), 2003, pp. 421–431; Simon Szreter and Graham Mooney, “Urbanization, mortality, and the standard of living debate: new estimates of the expectation of life at birth in nineteenth-century British cities,” Economic History Review 51(1), 1998, pp. 84–112.)
