The Free-Market Fantasy

“Conscious capitalism,” while attractive in some respects, is not a solution to the environmental and social degradation that accompanies the system of for-profit production. The “coercive laws of competition” are inescapable in capitalism, which means that conscious business philosophies will be short-lived.

More important, even sustainable production in a for-profit system will consume and destroy the planet’s resources. Sustainable business practices are designed to make global production easier and more profitable for companies in an increasingly competitive global environment. While they make consumers feel good and improve efficiency and waste at the unit level, eco-practices don’t slow down production and consumption at the systemic level. They speed up these processes, devouring resources at an ever-expanding rate.

The widespread popularity of ethical consumption and lifestyle politics is a clear indication that people care about the environment and don’t want to destroy the planet. But the firm can’t be the driver of a radical project to reduce humanity’s ecological footprint. Firms are not democratic institutions, and they cannot escape the imperatives of capitalism.

When consumers and environmental NGOs channel their desire for environmental justice through the firm, their desires get absorbed into business strategies for growth and expansion. By focusing on the firm, we legitimate its centrality and the entire for-profit production architecture.

Society must decide what kind of world it wants to live in, and these decisions must be made through democratic structures and processes. Buying better things is not a substitute for the hard political choices that societies need to make about limiting consumption and resource use, and finding a replacement for the psychological crutch of consumerism.

States seem toothless in the face of environmental degradation, but they are not inherently weak. They simply represent the existing balance of class forces. If we don’t want to live in an environmental wasteland, we must build up democratic institutions to organize production and consumption around the needs of humans, not the needs of capital..................................................................



https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/04/free-market-conscious-capitalism-government/