What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism Quotes

“Today, rather than a democracy we have a plutocracy (rule by moneyed interests) in which some of the formal elements of democracy nonetheless remain. Needless to say a real democracy ... is impossible where income, wealth, and power are concentrated and where inequality is growing, that is, in the normal ways of things under capitalism”
― Fred Magdoff, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism

“A system that has only one goal, the maximization of profits in an endless quest for the accumulation of capital on an ever-ending scale, and which thus seeks to transform every single thing on earth into a community with a price, is a system that is soulless; it can never have a soul, never be green. It can never stand still, but is driven to manipulate and fabricate whims and wants in order to grow and sell more... forever. Nothing is allowed to stand in its path.”
― Fred Magdoff, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism

“Gus Speth tells us in the environmental journal Solutions: Economic growth may be the world’s secular religion, but for much of the world it is a god that is failing—underperforming for most of the world’s people and, for those in affluent societies, now creating more problems than it is solving. The never-ending drive to grow the overall U.S. economy undermines communities and the environment. It fuels a ruthless international search for energy and other resources; it fails at generating the needed jobs; and it rests on a manufactured consumerism that is not meeting the deepest human needs. Americans are substituting growth and consumption for dealing with the real issues—for doing things that would truly make the country better off. Psychologists have pointed out, for example, that while economic output per person in the United States has risen sharply in recent decades, there has been no increase in life satisfaction, and levels of distrust and depression have increased substantially.”
― Fred Magdoff, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism: A Citizen's Guide to Capitalism and the Environment

“The reality is that the major environmental problems we face today - of which climate change is only one - cannot be solved by means of technological or market-based solutions while keeping existing social relations intact. Rather, what is needed most is a transformation in social relations: in community, culture, and economy, in how we relate to each other as human beings, and how we relate to the planet. What is needed, in other words, is an ecological revolution.”
― Fred Magdoff, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism

“Green Capitalism", even if products are produced using the utmost environmental care and designed for easy reuse, offers not way out of a system that must expand exponentially and thus, continue to ratchet up its use of natural resources, its chemical pollution, its contaminated sewage sludge, its garbage, and its many other toxic substances. Some of these "fixes" will probably slow down the rate of environmental destruction, but the magnitude of the needed changes dwarfs these approaches.”
― Fred Magdoff, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism

“The transition to an ecological and democratic economy will be difficult and will not occur overnight. This is not a question of storming the Winter Palace. Rather, it will be a dynamic, multifaceted struggle for a new cultural compact and a new productive system. The struggle is ultimately against *the system of capital*. It must begin, however, by opposing the *logic of capital*, endeavoring in the here and now to create in the interstices of the system a new social metabolism rooted in egalitarianism, community, and a sustainable relation to the earth. The basis for the creation of sustainable human development must arise *from within* the system dominated by capital *without being part of it*, just as the bourgeoisie itself arose in the "pores" of feudal society. Eventually, these initiatives can become powerful enough to constitute the basis of a new revolutionary movement and society.”
― Fred Magdoff; John Bellamy Foster, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism

“The transition to an ecological and democratic economy will be difficult and will not occur overnight. This is not a question of storming the Winter Palace. Rather, it will be a dynamic, multifaceted struggle for a new cultural compact and a new productive system. The struggle is ultimately against *the system of capital*. It must begin, however, by opposing the *logic of capital*, endeavoring in the here and now to create in the interstices of the system a new social metabolism rooted in egalitarianism, community, and a sustainable relation to the earth. The basis for the creation of sustainable human development must arise *from within* the system dominated by capital *without being part of it*, just as the bourgeoisie itself arose in the "pores" of feudal society. Eventually, these initiatives can become powerful enough to constitute the basis of a new revolutionary movement and society.”
― Magdoff, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism