Commerciality Always Wins

In the second instalment of his column, Adam Durrant argues that true sustainable change cannot come from within our existing economic system.

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For almost two years now, I have been involved in climate activism against banks, including their funding of fossil fuels and the arms trade. Working against the deeply entrenched system that plays some part in practically every aspect of the climate crisis has certainly been an enlightening experience. It has become clear to me that our economic system, and its problems, represents a key difficulty in the ongoing fight for a just and livable future. It was best summarised in a meeting I was in a few days ago by a member of a Cambridge institution: commerciality always wins. I doubt this is new to most of you. The tone of this conversation was honest and, at the same time, damning as we reckoned with the countless instances of failed engagement with companies to persuade them to ‘go green’. The fact is, the sustainability movement has been co-opted for some years now by the commercial sector, redirecting anger and resources into the impossible task of ‘changing from the inside’. This is not a true path to a livable future, leading us to ask whether the corporate world could ever bring about a just, new world.

The unfortunate reality is that our system blocks the most profound improvements we can make. Profit is the sole goal of every large company. Right from the off, any discussion of sustainable improvements must be made with profit as its primary consideration if you are to convince the companies to make changes. This extends to the shareholders, too, who push back against any measures that will cut the cash flow to their pockets. They have proved, so far, to be a consistent obstacle to change. Even if your heart is in the right place, the system binds people to the pursuit of ever greater riches, because that is what it was created to do. If profit, then, is the priority, the sustainability of those changes are compromised.

The problem lies in the fact that big profit is extractive. It relies upon the bare minimum of work sold at the highest price. This means decent wages, high safety standards for people and the environment, and fair prices will always be in direct conflict with a company's goal. This problem is compounded by the fact that profit requires the sale of as many products as possible. Society is then manipulated into creating, buying and using more than we need. As products become ever more disposable they need to be replaced more often, thus creating more opportunities for companies to extract profit from customers. On the other hand, technologies like renewable energy (which doesn’t require the constant purchase of fuels), repair shops, the second-hand industry and public transport are dangerous to large corporations because they limit the opportunities to extract profit. If something is dangerous to the profit motive, the result is fierce resistance to these ideas. Sustainability is the antithesis of this system: we need to use less, use for longer, and build a fair and equitable circular economy.

If corporations do engage in key sustainable areas like the national grid, the public transport network, the waste disposal systems, the agricultural industry and so on, as has happened and as is often promised as a possibility, they will extract from these industries by burdening them with another motive: profit. To be successful, the essential infrastructure of the community should focus on serving the needs of that community. That doesn’t mean no transactions occur - people deserve to be reimbursed for their labour, materials must be paid for, and future changes must have capital put forward - but those resources should not leave the system. Unfortunately, when constrained by an extractive model, the resources that should be there for a community's use are lost and used in destructive ways by others. It is for this reason that we must escape the corporate viewpoint.

In short, to ask corporations to be truly sustainable, you are inevitably asking them to sacrifice profit at some point, and thus their very purpose. The only way to make change under this model is punitive measures such as regulation. Don’t get me wrong, I think the people who are working very hard on engagement are genuine, good people, and having spent some time in dialogue with them personally, I think they too share this frustration. The trouble is that most of us are still tied up in this rather hopeless way of thinking that change can only come through the economy rather than changing the economy; this is simply not the case. What do we do to solve it? It’s a difficult question to answer, but certainly here at Cambridge we have an incredible array of resources. By assisting in organisation and providing the physical and intellectual materials necessary, we can create resilient systems for communities, rather than simply hoping to change the institutions currently destroying life on earth.