Why sustainability means anti-capitalism and anti-statism

This afternoon, I went to a place where I like to sit and think and just be outside. It happened to be somewhat near where the annual Sustainability Fair was being set up for this weekend. While I watched vehicles come and go and listened to the hum of a generator, I thought about sustainability and it's relation to capitalism and the state. So, here are some thoughts:

Capitalism is a system that demands ever-growing markets, profits, access to “resources”, and “sacrifice colonies”—areas where the exploitation of the earth and its communities (whether mineral, non-human animals, humans, labor, land, etc.) is carried out to consolidate capital and enrich the ruling class, corporations, and imperialist nations.

The system of capitalism is always hierarchical in its very nature; capital flows up a rigid hierarchy through exploitation, oppression, class structure, war, and other tools, to be consolidated by the elite and ruling class (whether that is kings, corporations, the wealthy, or whatever terms are appropriate).

The state is a system of social control and domination that serves as capitalism’s protector. Through the state, wars, occupation, subsidization of corporations, and other means to capital accumulation are utilized to normalize, maintain, and expand power. It is the state that codifies the status quo, ensuring that those with power and capital wealth become increasingly more rich and more powerful. The state makes certain that the overwhelming focus of violence is directed down the hierarchy, while punishing through prison, poverty, and death those who find themselves at the bottom of the class system.

Capitalism will always be ecologically devastating, just as it is always socially devastating. At times, this devastation is apparent, even in the centers of accumulation and affluence, although more often it is conveniently obscured and hidden through physical distance (as with sweatshops operated overseas and in the global south by western corporations), insulated class differentiation, and cultural distractions (drugs, jobs, television, and all the other ways in which so many of us are able to ignore the reality of this system). Regardless, the results are the same—isolated people bereft of authentic community, shattered indigenous ways of living and being, ecological devastation, and loss of personal and communal autonomy.

Capitalism is a system that allows only one story, one in which everything—the earth, its communities, human lives—are all a means to profit, control, and power. A truly sustainable world is a world with many stories. It’s a world in which individuals and communities have the power to create their own stories and their own meanings. Those who benefit from capitalism’s hierarchy of exploitation and the system that supports it will continue to grasp onto their single version of “life,” their story that says there is one way to live, one way to exist. But those of us who dream and fight for a richer world, full of the beauty and complexities of life, are struggling for the many stories, the endless ways of being, that are a part of being human and living with this earth and all its communities.

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"Industrial capitalism, based as it is on the looting of nature and humanity for capital accumulation and power, can only take place where human autonomy itself has been looted."
--David Watson in Against the Megamachine: Essays on Empire and Its Enemies