Twin Tragedies

Two horrifying events occurred this spring that, at first, may seem to have nothing in common. In Bangladesh, more than a thousand garment workers died in the collapse of the Rana Plaza, a building whose owners knew it was a structural peril. Seven thousand miles away, at an observatory in Hawaii, scientists reported that, for the first time in human history, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had climbed to four hundred parts per million—a symbolic marker of climate distress.

Capitalism, as the first socialists understood, has always been a revolutionary system. It has spurred the production and trade of wondrous commodities and the emergence of cosmopolitan cities. Its technologies have made some entrepreneurs and financiers obscenely rich. Yet they have also helped diminish the number of people whose lives are brutish, boring, and short.

But a profound irresponsibility has always pumped through the heart of the capitalist revolution: it cherishes no value but profitable growth. The consequence, Marx and Engels wrote back in 1848, is that capitalism becomes “like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”

Among those powers is the relentless competition that drives a clothing manufacturer outside Dhaka to pay his employees just $45 a month (“slave labor,” the new pope called it)—and to bet that cracks on the side of his building are no reason to lo...