MICHAEL ROBERTS

Capitalism turns the ‘free gifts of nature’ into profit. And in the incessant drive to raise profitability, it depletes and degrades natural resources. And as nature is privatised and turned into private property, the owners of ‘nature’ can also extract rent from the exploitation of labour. However, there is a continual battle by capital to control and lower rising raw material prices as natural resources are depleted and not renewed, adding another factor to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The drive for profit has led to an uncontrolled expansion of industrialisation, energy and commodity production in agriculture that emits carbon emissions and provokes natural resource depletion that is heating up the planet to levels that threaten its very existence.