PU #249 - DON'T HATE THE HEAT, HATE CAPITALISM - Thinking Clearly in a Heatwave
I guess we should talk about the heat. Mainly because it was all consuming, and the idea there was anything else to think about this week melted out of me somewhere around Thursday night as I lay in bed in a pool of sweat for the third night in a row, cursing capitalism.
Yes that’s right — it’s time for another rant about capitalism. Because those of us experiencing Europe’s heatwave last week were all victims of capitalism and we need to talk more about it.
I’ll begin with the easy bit: the climate crisis. We’ve known that rapacious human production and consumption have been destroying the environment for about fifty years now and instead of doing anything meaningful about it, we have let capitalism continue to attempt to sell us small-scale, individual, solutions that maintain the most damaging structures and ideologies which perpetuate the problem and ultimately change nothing. We still have McDonalds but now we drink our milkshakes from paper straws. Meanwhile Europe burns.
The main reason last week was so unbearable, as many have said, is because the UK (where I suffered through it) was just not built for these temperatures. Well, why wasn’t it built for them when we’ve had nearly fifty years of warnings that this was coming? It wasn’t built for it because updating public buildings, private homes, transport infrastructure, schools and hospitals, etc., to accommodate global warming is costly. It is costly because we have allowed capitalist economics to continue to set the prices. It is costly because capitalist ideology has poisoned us against paying higher taxes to fund such things. It is costly because capitalist thinking has stopped us being able to invest in long term solutions when we crave only short-term gains. It is costly because capitalist individualism means we’d rather leave it to individuals to pay for their own adaptations and updates than ensure collective survival, meaning the wealthy can buy relief from the heat while the poor sweat, suffer, and even die.
As professional wrestler CM Punk might say: “tell me when I’m telling lies?”
Last week had winners and losers, as has always been capitalism’s design. Those with air conditioning in their cars, their buses, their trains, their workplaces, their homes, had a bearable time. Business news gushed about the profits being made by anyone in the air conditioning and home cooling sector. Personal fans sold out everywhere. A roaring trade in larger fans allowed those without air conditioning to at least move the hot air around the place, if they could afford it.
But many people did not have these luxuries. And those with health conditions which worsen in the heat just had to hope for the best if they couldn’t afford to keep themselves cool. As happened with Covid, essential workers had little choice but to sweat through airless work days and leave it to chance that they got home ok. Wealthy parents booked air conditioned hotel rooms so their babies could get to sleep. Poor parents hoped their babies wouldn’t die.
In my own workplace, as the heatwave soared and I sought solace in my corner classroom where I’d managed to take the safety catches off the windows so they could open wide enough to let a thin breeze in and use the fan I purchased in my first year as Head of Department to create the illusion of cooling air (all matters of individual luck or decision-making; other colleagues in other rooms were not so lucky), I spent much of the time working on a unit for a new Political Philosophy course we are running next year on the philosophy of healthcare. The main thrust of which, is to ask the question how best we organise healthcare in a society? Is the best approach to fund doctors, nurses, hospitals, etc., or is it to recognise that most of our health conditions are caused by social factors and that taking money away from those doctors, nurses, and hospitals, and making better investments in tackling poverty, our living and working conditions, our social services and public spaces, etc. might actually lead to better health outcomes?
One of the things I love about philosophy is the way philosophers probe our assumptions and intuitions about ideas we take for granted. Seeing things from different angles and asking questions others have forgotten to ask, or never even considered before.
“What should a government healthcare policy look like?” stops being about how much they will or won’t privatise hospitals and medical services, or whether medicines should be freely prescribed or come at a cost, and starts being about increasing regulation on the food and drink industries to stop filling our bodies with carcinogens, fat, and sugar; or about lifting people out of poverty.
“Why is it so hot?” must be treated similarly. Stop talking about the climate as if it is an isolated phenomenon. Stop pretending driving an electric car instead of a petrol one will make things better. Stop talking about our individual responsibilities to the environment without acknowledging the real obstacle to saving the planet: the selfish and damaging economic system which makes our self-annihilation inevitable. “Why is it so hot?” Because of capitalism. And if we want things to ever improve, we need to resist and reject this insatiable ideology of economic individualism and re-arrange the world in a way that profits us all.
Last week was hot. And it will get hot like that again. And again. And again. Air conditioning might help in the short term, if you can afford it, but so long as we think that this is a problem for which a solution can just be bought if you have enough money, the world will continue to burn.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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