We, the Left, are too ready to dismiss individual contributions to the worldwide confrontation against global heating. We need cooling; we are far too intemperate in our one-sidedness. Vivek Chibber, the globally regarded Left academic from the US, dismisses, with open contempt, not those people who use small, individual acts as a justification for not doing anything else, but rather the idea that acts such as switching off lights, closing fridge doors, recycling household garbage can change the “system”, when nothing less than system change is required to save humanity from climate change.

Chibber, like others among the Left, forgets that the climate crisis is not the only global challenge confronting humanity: resource depletion and the battering of biodiversity are part of the interconnected assaults we face. One hundred percent renewable energy without changing anything else would still leave us in deep trouble. Capitalism produces resource-intense waste as an essential condition of the profit maximising that defines the system. And consumers – us, with all our individual differences – are the captured key constituency of the cycle of waste.

Chibber knocks consciousness-raising while simultaneously advocating system change as the only effective response to climate change. However, without a different consciousness, there will be no system change, despite its desperate need. In keeping with the very long Marxian knee-jerk countering of ego-promoting individualism by devaluing the role of the individual in revolutionary change, Chibber seems to forget the diverse and multiple implications of economic systems not changing without human intervention.

Moreover, without a changed consciousness, we will just keep reproducing ourselves with the same needs and expectations of consumers, socialised by capitalism, and, thus, all too ready to throw away in order to make space for the fleetingly new.

The challenge, in other words, is to build on and greatly deepen our understanding of why recycling, switching off lights and eating less meat are important individual acts that, nonetheless, remain far from sufficient when addressing the triple challenges of the climate crisis, resource depletion and biodiversity impoverishment.

Being what is today called “cool” means, among other things, having the latest version of everything. Just think of clothes. No “cool” person would be seen in what was last year’s high fashion. People are murdered for sporting the latest shoes. Displaying the just-released correct brand of cellphone might also get one killed by those who can’t live without showing that they, too, have the latest gizmos.

The newest and trendiest, of course, means throwing away what then becomes this year’s “old”, the not-to-be-seen-with-or-in. Without such wasteful destruction there would be no production, for there would be no one to buy the stuff and without buying there would be no profit. In our current economic system, production is for profit, not social need. Accordingly, production occurs only if two basic conditions are thought to exist: that the commodities will not only be sold but be sold at a price required to maximise profit. This is why creating waste is an essential condition for commodity production.

The timing of when a company plans to create waste by the introduction of its new “goodies” can be crucial to the maximising of profit. This is well illustrated by what happened to Apple. Apple sold an astonishing 26 million iPhones in three months during 2012. This increased both its sales by 23% and its net income by 21%, as well as achieving a year-to-year gain of a whopping 48%. Yet, Apple’s market value fell by 5.5%. Why?

Because the profit was less than expected. This was because it updated its models less frequently than Samsung, its main competitor. Maximising profit, in other words, depends on when and how frequently a company introduces its planned waste.

Apple’s misfortune, however, didn’t threaten the rest of the economy. As important as cellphones are to the economy, they weren’t sufficiently important.

Cars are.

Let me give some facts and figures about cars – mainly privately-owned ones – and then ask: What it is about our collective consciousness that allows us to be so dominated by cars?

By the way, cars are probably the best example of individual recycling. Car recycling is comprehensive, moving from brand new, to ‘pre-owned’, to the unmistakably second-hand and moving on to positively hazardous coffins on wheels. The recycling ends when all that remains of what was once a car is scrap metal for further recycling. Capitalism can, after all, accommodate recycling.

And so to the facts and figures: Some of the facts are guesstimates. Others are deadly accurate.

Cars killed 1¼ million people worldwide in 2017, or 3,287 a day. An additional 20-50 million people were injured or disabled. In South Africa, cars kill 14,000 of us each year.

Carspollute. Air pollution killed 7 million people in 2015 – 16% of all deaths – or three times as many people worldwide as Aids, TB and malaria combined. Cars are a major contributor to pollution.

Cars fuel the climate crisis. Being 95% dependent on oil, cars contribute 27% of global CO₂emissions and 13% of all greenhouse gas emissions. In South Africa, 12% of greenhouse gas in 2012 came from transport, with road transport being responsible for 91.2% of these emissions.

Cars cause city centre congestion; congestion that is so bad that the privilege of congesting costs a hefty levy in London, for instance; in Paris a lottery decides.

Cars cause gridlock, congestion so bad that no one moves. Instead, everyone is trapped in their cars. A 100km traffic jam on a Beijing highway in 2010 resulted in 11 days of total gridlock immobility. Electric cars don’t touch this problem, for gridlock is caused by far too many cars on city streets, not the type of propulsion being used. The same applies to the next major gizmo-in-waiting: self-driving cars.

It won’t take much for Cape Town to have our own gridlock lasting for several hours, for Cape Town is already the 48th-most congested city in the world. With only three routes out of town, gridlocked Cape Town is a disaster waiting to happen.

Cars cost the earth. The global financial cost of road accidents in 2017 is estimated to be $518-billion or some R7.5-trillion. In South Africa, the cost of road traffic accidents in 2015 was estimated to be R142.95-billion, which equates to 3.4% of our gross domestic product (GDP). This is higher than agriculture’s total contribution to GDP, which was only 2.3% in 2015.

Cars eat finite resources. According to a just-released UN study, resource extraction now accounts for 53% of the world’s carbon emissions. More alarmingly, as Kevin Bloom notes, this number covers only the climate impact of “pulling materials out of the ground and preparing them for use” – the burning of fossil fuels isn’t included. What’s more, the UN report found that resource extraction is responsible for more than 80% of worldwide biodiversity loss. Once again, electric cars are part of the problem, not the solution.

Some more facts and figures before asking: Other than collective madness on a global scale, why do we allow cars to plague us when not actually killing us?

Aircraft accidents anywhere in the world always make the news. Accidents involving many people are guaranteed to be main news item – 346 people were recently killed in two separate crashes involving the Boeing 737 Max plane, the best-selling of the Boeing models. With the support of the US government, Boeing, a major US company, attempted to minimise these accidents. Action by other governments, along with public pressure, however, eventually forced them to ground all 737 Max planes worldwide.

Against the 1.25 million car deaths in 2017, how many people have been killed in plane accidents, not in a single year but since 1923?

The answer – 57,767 in 96 years!

There is a simple explanation for these astonishing figures. The car industry, including all those that live off it – just consider the insurance and advertising industries, for starters – are just too big to be allowed to fail. This begs the question: not allowed to fail by whom? Whose interests are being protected? Business and their political allies are the most obvious answers. But there is also – us; even if to a lesser extent. We allow our worth and self-image to be measured by the cars we drive. Just owning a car is a mark of success, in much of the world. It then becomes a matter of what brand and model we own and how new it is.

A leading German car manufacturer, by way of example, recently restyled the most luxurious of its luxury models to meet the wishes of its main global customers, Chinese plutocrats. Being rich is evidently not enough for them. They require a distinctively bolder front end of the car to make public that their status is higher than those other rich Chinese who can afford only the middle-range models of this already exclusive brand.

“This is why,” in the words of a motoring journalist, “the car’s kidney grilles are so massive, to reflect sovereign status and to ensure that it stands out in the hyper-competitive ultra-luxury segment.”

This same craving for status also explains why city-legal tanks, also known as Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs), continue to flourish in the premium segment of the car market. The just-mentioned car designed specifically for the Chinese super-rich is not an SUV; it’s not marketed for off-road use. But, then, despite their increasing popularity among the rich, few SUVs are proper off-roaders. Consider this report on a luxury-brand SUV:

“It’s hard to think of [the SUV] as a real off-roader. It’s luxuriously appointed, technologically advanced, and city-slicker handsome. But spend a little extra R59,250 [on a car costing a minimum of R1,522,646] and you can take this luxury SUV to places few of its rivals would dare to enter. Does your typical owner really want to, though?”

And then there’s speed and acceleration times, egalitarian obsessions within the entire car fraternity irrespective of wealth. The faster the car the better, regardless of speed limits, which in California – still the prime market for fast cars – is as low as 88km/h. Legal speed limits have never stopped people lusting over street-legal cars now made to reach an illegal 200km/h in just 6.7 seconds, with an even more illegal top speed of 340km/h!

Which brings us to the final contradiction. “Speed kills!”, as billboards everywhere warn. The criminal offence of “common purpose” clearly doesn’t apply to the car industry, which knowingly designs, manufactures, advertises and sells cars that move at speeds that kill.

All this is utter madness. But it’s a system-madness that is utterly dependent on us, on our eager and voluntary complicity. We make the space for the waste that allows capitalism to produce the commodities endlessly marketed as “new and improved”.

A citizens’ revolt against capitalism’s waste, in all its many forms, will not change the system. But it will encourage, promote, support, sustain and extend organisations, movements, and parties that campaign against the system politically. And it is political power that ultimately changes systems.

Moreover, a loud and collective NO! would be part of changing our own consciousness. For, without such a comprehensive change, there can be no comprehensive system change. An unchanged consciousness ends up reproducing many of the worst features of the global heating system we’re supposedly changing. DM

This is an extended version of a presentation made at the Million Climate Jobs meeting held at the Alternative Information & Development Centre on 20 June 2019.