If you live in the U.S., chances are you’ve noticed something strange in the grocery store recently: the price of eggs has skyrocketed. The simple explanation you will likely hear from any news source is that this is a direct result of an egg shortage, brought on by an outbreak of avian flu. That is an oversimplification, and one that ignores the rampant profiteering going on across all sectors: although egg production has declined about 5% year-over-year, egg prices have more than doubled.
Although price increases are far outpacing supply chain issues, the outbreak has still been a precipitating factor. What will seldom get mentioned in mainstream coverage is the reason this avian flu outbreak has been so devastating. Far from a simple case of a few chickens getting sick enough to die, the main problem has been that farms have had to slaughter their entire stock of chickens whenever cases are found, to prevent it from spreading. This precaution has been deemed necessary as a direct result of the conditions on these farms. Laying hens are packed in as tightly as they can for the sake of efficiency, meaning one infected chicken is almost certainly going to spread the disease to every other individual. Not only is this grotesque mistreatment of animals a moral outrage, it is also an example of the short-sightedness of the capitalist mode of production. The current egg shortage is only the latest strain brought on by the profit motive of the capitalists.
Until the mid-20th century, almost every banana sold on the market was of a variety called Gros Michel. It was delicious, easy to ship, and therefore the most profitable banana for plantation owners to grow. Market pressures forced individual capitalists to grow a monoculture of Gros Michel bananas; anything else — being less profitable — would mean ceding market share to more market savvy competitors. Then, in the 1950s, a fungus called Fusarium ran rampant through the plantations, destroying every Gros Michel plant in quick succession. They had no immunity to the disease, and the cultivar was quickly driven to near-extinction. Rather than learning their lesson, the capitalists began switching over to the Fusarium-resistant Cavendish variety, which has now replaced Gros Michel as the one and only profitable banana. A new strain of the fungus now threatens the Cavendish monoculture, meaning we may soon see a global shortage of bananas yet again.
Palm oil has recently been taken up as a toothless liberal “ethical consumption” cause, due to the ecological devastation wrought by the palm oil industry. Vast tracts of biodiverse rainforest are routinely razed to make room for the very profitable business of growing palm plantations for the sake of extracting oil from the trees. As is commonly pointed out, this habitat destruction has driven the charismatic orangutan of Indonesia and Malaysia into critical levels of endangerment, but its environmental impact goes far beyond one gentle ape species. Rainforests act as incredibly resilient carbon sinks, with many interwoven ecological threads and self-reinforcing cycles — all of which get bulldozed in an instant in the name of the most expedient source of profit in capitalist agriculture: cash-crop monocultures. The liberal solution is of course not to forcibly remove the capitalists from power and prevent them from ever having the means and the motive to destroy the environment; liberal governments usually won’t even consider restricting capitalist production or penalizing capitalist firms for ecological harms.Instead, liberal governments entreat the consumer to consciously avoid consuming products containing palm oil. The problem with consumer-based approaches to environmentalism, however, is that there is no individual solution to a social problem. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and attempting to consume “conscientiously,” while noble, has the effect of removing a drop from the ocean of suffering caused by the capitalists’ insatiable pursuit of profit.
This problem goes far beyond eggs, bananas, and oil. Every aspect of the economy is governed by the profit motive, which demands efficiency over resilience. Each dollar spent on redundancy, safety, and minimizing environmental impact is a dollar given up to competitors. An egg company which wants to avoid avian flu outbreaks would need to invest much more into facilities that do not force chickens into hazardous conditions, putting them at a massive market disadvantage compared to their amoral competitors. The economic advantage yielded by mass-scale cost-cutting is so great that even regulation is no match: capitalists simply make a cost-benefit calculation. If the savings are greater than the potential of receiving a fine, they will opt to risk it. If the fine would be too burdensome, they instead invest their excess profits into political lobbying activities, and pay off politicians to roll back regulations altogether.
The entire modern economy is now run around the just-in-time philosophy, where shipments are perfectly calibrated to arrive at exactly the moment where the previous shipment has been depleted. This is an excellent profit-maximizing solution in the short-term, but any perturbation to the delivery schedule for any reason leaves businesses, workers, and consumers in dire straits. And there is no way for the capitalist system to move away from this “innovation,” as long as it still offers a competitive edge for its proponents. Capitalists are locked into their pursuit of the local optimum, trapped in a vicious cycle of overproduction by the very production-maximizing mechanisms they devised to beat their competitors.
Capitalism is inherently governed by profit maximization, driven by market competition. In a process similar to evolution by natural selection, market selection drives capitalist enterprises to evolve into their most immediately-profitable forms — but not necessarily the most optimal overall. Both in terms of long-term profitability and in terms of the broader social and ecological context, Capital has no interest in sustainability. It simply can’t afford to. At every possible opportunity, a capitalist must seek out the local maximum of profitability, even if that leads them on a path toward eventual ruin, because if they don’t, someone else will. If there is more profit to be made by increasing the exploitation of workers, a capitalist will do so, even knowing that might lead to workers rebelling in the future. If those workers later attempt to unionize, Capital will absorb the cost of attempting to break up the union through outside firms, scabs, or private security. At every turn, the most profitable action is taken, leaving a trail of inefficiency, social rot, and ecological ruin in its wake.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the mounting climate catastrophe, wrought by the carbon fuel upon which our energy system relies. Departure from cheap, plentiful, easily-transported energy sources like fossil fuels is simply impossible under the capitalist regime. Decades of feeble attempts at regulation — carbon taxes, subsidies for solar and wind technology, cleanliness standards, and so forth — have only managed to alter the calculations made in the minds of profit-optimizers. Governments in capital-dominated societies are only able to meddle in the market to the extent Capital allows, which is why no capitalist government has ever been able to reign in carbon emissions, just-in-time delivery, factory farming, or other social ills to any measurable degree.
The plight of the egg gives us a glimpse into the absurdity of the capitalist system. The drive for profit blinds the capitalist and binds them to a system of accelerating self-destruction — and their myopia will drag all life on Earth down with them.
