The Environment and Socialism

EVERY SHADE of the political spec­trum is frantically trying to colour itself green. As long as humanity has laboured to provide itself with the means to live it has disturbed, altered and in some ways destroyed its natural environment. Every new discovery has had unforeseen consequences as well as those which were intended. From the discovery of fire to the discovery of nuclear fission develop­ments in technique have improved humanity's ability to meet its needs. At the same time they have enhanced its ability to damage itself and its environment.

All forms of class society have strangled the potential of scientific and technological advances to benefit humanity as a whole. Society, organ­ised to generate surplus wealth for a few, has been unable to prevent the destruction of natural resources in the pursuit of that wealth

The imperialist epoch has qualita­tively intensified this feature of class society. It has unleashed new pro­ductive forces on a vast scale. With the creation of a world economy and global division of labour it has pro­duced environmental problems on an international scale.

During the post-war economic boom new techniques of production were introduced and new demands made on agriculture and raw materi­als. As a result humanity now faces environmental danger on three fronts.

* The environment's ability to regenerate itself is threatened, no longer just locally but regionally and even globally.

* The environment is being de­stroyed and poisoned by the uncon­trolled use of various materials and production processes.

* Human society suffers from all sorts of social ills due to the effects of the first two dangers.

Species

The threat to the regenerative capacity of the environment is nothing new. Long before the twentieth century human progress led to the destruction of entire species through intensive hunting or the destruction of vital aspects of their environment. In every epoch there are examples of the destruction of forest to make way for agriculture resulting in the destruction of regional eco-systems. All forms of capitalist agriculture have intensively farmed the soil. Increas­ing its fertility in the pursuit of higher short-term yields has robbed the land of its lasting fertility. The intensification of farming in the American mid-west, first by impover­ished share-croppers and later by large scale agricultural capital, cre­ated the infamous "dust bowl". Capitalism achieves within decades the destructive results which took ancient societies centuries.

Imperialism, however created the potential to destroy the whole global environment.

There is now firm evidence that the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil and the destruction of forests have led to an increase in the proportion of carbon dioxide in the air. Scientists claim it is rising by 0.4% each year, giving rise to the "greenhouse effect". Carbon dioxide acts like the glass in a green­house by trapping heat from the sun. The more carbon dioxide in the air, the greater the increase in the earth's average temperature.

The current rate of increase could be enough to raise average global temperatures by up to 4.5°C over the next hundred years. One side effect would be the partial melting of the polar ice cap, raising the sea level. Estimates vary, but scientists gener­ally agree that a rise of one to three feet is the likely prospect in the course of the next century. Around the globe millions would starve and face homelessness in the wake of widespread flooding.

Threat

The temperature increase is ex­pected to be higher in the temperate zones. Here temperatures could soar by as much 10°C In North America this would drive the corn-growing belt further north where the soil is too acidic to sustain efficient production of the crop.

Another threat to the global eco­logical balance comes with the thin­ning of the ozone layer. This is the portion of the upper atmosphere which shields the earth's surface from ultra-violet radiation coming from the sun. Again there is firm evidence showing that this protective layer is being destroyed. Between 1977 and 1984, ozone levels fell by 40% over Antarctica. A fall of 2.5% over the whole earth's surface was recorded by the Nimbus 7 satellite between 1978 and 1985.

Scientists have pointed the finger of blame for this at chloro-fluorocar­bons (CFCs). These gases have been widely used as propellants in aero­sol sprays and coolants in refrigera­tors. It has been shown that CFCs when released into the atmosphere, do destroy ozone.

Yet another threat lies in imperial­ism's potential to unleash a nuclear holocaust and, in its wake, a "nu­clear winter" which could reduce those humans who survived to the level of primitive civilisation.

The second major threat to the environment comes from the various forms of pollution. In addition to any long term effect on the global eco­system these cause immediate and disastrous damage to human beings and their surroundings. The most notorious of these is radioactive emissions from nuclear power sta­tions and waste reprocessing plants. The spectacular disasters at Three Mile Island (USA) and Chernobyl (USSR) are just the tip of the iceberg. Not only have power and waste dis­posal workers in the nuclear industry been repeatedly exposed to radia­tion, but "clusters" of cancer cases around these sites suggest long term damage to the surrounding commu­nities.

Pollute

But it is not only nuclear power which can fatally pollute. The acci­dent at Bhopal chemical works caused 3,300 deaths and 200,00 injuries. In 1952, the four day Lon­don smog, caused by pollution from fossil fuel burning, claimed 3,700 lives.

In addition to these disasters there are the countless cases of water and food contamination which result from unsafe or inadequately controlled production processes.

Really, there are the immeasur­able social consequences of envi­ronmental damage. The destruction of forests in Bangladesh has led to the silting up of rivers and greatly worsened the effects of periodic floods, killing thousands and making millions homeless. This is not a "natural" but a social disaster. De­forestation occurred because of the intense land hunger of the Ban­gladeshi peasantry. In Africa capital­ism's inability to develop environ­mentally safe forms of agriculture has led to droughts and famines and the obscene sight of millions starv­ing to death amid a world of surplus food mountains.

These are just some the environ­mental depredations which have given rise to the so called "green agenda". In fact there is no separate "environmental question" which stands above and outside class' politics. The environmental crisis is above all else a class question.

The capitalist class which owns the means of production is inca­pable of defending the environment and protecting humanity from the effects of environmental damage. This is because of capitalism's commitment to production for the sake of profit. Individual capitalists decide what to produce and how to produce it, not with the good of humanity in mind, but the good of their own balance sheets. The result of this is what Marx aptly 'described as "the anarchy of production". The social mechanism under capitalism which decides the relationship be­tween production and human need is the much vaunted "market". In the market need is measured not in terms of hunger, sickness, and pol­lution but in term of money individual capitalists have no reason what­ever to avoid the pollution of the en­vironment if this impedes the pro­duction of profit.

Of course, the state exists in capitalist society in order to regulate the dealings of individual capitalists and make sure that the system as a whole can reproduce itself, even at the expense of individual capitalists.

Thus throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the state has acted to limit the length of the working day and impose minimum health and safety standards for employers in order to protect the source of its profits-human labour power-from total exhaustion. At the same time it was able to legislate for various environmental reforms ­sewage systems, public health laws for food and housing. Like all re­forms these were carried out par­tially under the pressure of the work­ing class but also in line with the interests of the capitalist class as a whole.

The capitalist politicians who have taken up the green cause in the past twelve months claim that all the questions on the "green agenda" can be settled in the same way. It may involve a struggle with individual bosses but it is entirely possible, they believe, for the environmental crisis to be resolved on the terrain of capitalism. They point to the evi­dence of individual capitalists begin­ning to compete with each other for the "green market" as consumer goods producers spend millions to promote their petrol, hairsprays, and foodstuffs, as "eco-friendly".

But a capitalist solution to the environmental crisis is not possible. In the first place, there are large multinationals whose very existence relies on the continuation of danger­ous processes and unchecked pollu­tion: among them, the petro-chemi­cal giants, major electricity genera­tors and the food and drink conglomerates often decisive say in the running of the capitalist state itself.

Link

The salmonella-in-eggs crisis in 1988 gives a perfect illustration of this. Once the proven link between the salmonella outbreak and unhy­gienic egg production led to a mas­sive fall in egg sales and producers profits it was Edwina Currie, the Tory minister who started the scare, who lost her job. The power of the farming lobby defeated the attempts of the Health Ministry and civil servants to regulate egg production.

The international nature of the crisis also makes a capitalist solu­tion impossible. The same capitalist state which can regulate the activi­ties of individual capitalists at home is fiercely competitive on a world scale.

Imperialism has created a world economy, divided up and strangled by national capitalist states. Through­out the imperialist epoch, but espe­cially in periods of economic crisis and recession these competing na­tional capitalist states have pro­gressed from economic rivalry to open warfare.

Even where agreements exist between imperialist countries they are flouted. Britain's power stations produce acid rain that falls in Ger­many and Switzerland. The cost of setting this right has to be weighed against making electricity genera­tion as profitable as possible for British capitalists. There are no prizes for guessing which their priority is.

Between the advanced imperialist countries and the developing semi-colonial world few such agreements exist. Imperialism has exploited the natural resources of the third world regardless of the environmental cost. It dumps not only massive amounts of toxic waste in the semi-colonies, but palms off their populations with inadequate or dangerous medicines and foodstuffs rejected under the environmental laws of Europe and North America. Not only is imperialism unwilling to solve the environmental crisis of the third world. Its very existence relies on the continued exploitation of the semi-colonies, as rapaciously and profitably as possible.

Finally capitalism is incapable, either politically or economically, of deploying the vast resources to address problems like the green­house effect and the hole in the ozone layer. This would need mas­sive amounts of government cash, money which the capitalists regard as so much wasted profit. It would need planning and international co­operation on a scale impossible for capitalism.

The Green Party alternative is no less utopian than the capitalist answer to the environmental crisis. The Greens start out from the prem­ise that "productivist" and "indus­trial" societies inevitably produce forces of destruction they cannot control. In fact they mistake the so­cial causes of environmental dam­age for purely technical ones. They cannot envisage industry without grime and pollution, developed agri­culture without soil erosion and famine. In short they cannot envis­age society without capitalism.

As a consequence, however radi­cally they attack capitalism, their programme is one for reforming the existing social system. Because productive and technological prog­ress goes hand in hand with environmental destruction they aim to turn back the clock of productivity and technology. The zero growth economy, depopulation, small scale pro­duction is the environmentalist’s goals.

These goals represent the volun­tary retreat of humanity from its conquests over nature. But a retreat to where? There never was, at any stage in history, a society without poverty, starvation, war and environ­mental degradation. The "zero growth" economy could only exist if humanity were to give up its funda­mental impulse to alter the world to its own will and rationality. Every technological advance springs from the desire to increase the productiv­ity of labour. Every advance in pro­ductivity brings economic growth.

Utopia

The Greens' utopia is a very clear ideological reflection of the class it position of the petit bourgeoisie under modem capitalism. Small scale commodity production without capital accumulation, the unchanging rural life of the small community: this was the lot of the peasants and artisans before capitalism, lost as whole sections were proletarianised by the development of industry. Idyl­lic as it seems, it was not for nothing that Marx called this "rural idiocy". Disease, ignorance and grinding poverty were its natural by-products. The low level of productivity, of divi­sion of labour, of mechanisation etc, kept humanity in thrall to natural forces it could not control.

The working class solution to the environmental crisis is to go forward, not backward. It is to apply all the scientific and technological con­quests of humankind to the task of eradicating disease, ignorance and poverty altogether. It is to raise indi­vidual human beings' ability to ra­tionally alter their environment to the level of society, to make it a social task. In the process human society will be able to remove many of the causes of ecological damage, miti­gate others and discover the means to set previous damage right.

Planning

There is one essential precondi­tion for this: the eradication of the profit motive and its replacement by planning. Only the working class has the material interest and the social strength to achieve this by smashing the capitalists' state and replacing it with workers power.

The trade union and labour lead­ers have pointed out that the work­ers' movement was the first to fight for clean air, proper sewage sys­tems, health and safety at work. But the struggle to eradicate the causes of environmental damage is not a simple extension of the workers' health and safety struggle. That struggle, whether pursued in national and local government or in the workplace, has remained a struggle within the limits of capitalism. Like every aspect of the day to day struggle the health and safety struggle has to be transformed into a fight against capitalism itself. The working class programme for the defence of the environment ranges far beyond the individual factory, town or country. It is an international programme. Its core is workers' control, state owner­ship and democratic planning.

To prevent the further destruction of the tropical rainforests, with the resulting threat not just to wildlife but to the world's climate, we de­mand land to those who till it. The land hunger of the poor peasantry from Brazil to Bangladesh is the immediate social cause of the slash­ing and burning of a key natural resource.

Against dangerous processes and practices in industry and agriculture we fight for factory committees and the trade unions to impose a work­ers' veto. Safer technology and conditions should be introduced under workers' inspection and at the bosses' expense with no loss of pay to workers during shutdowns etc.

Impose

Where danger extends beyond the plant socialists should fight for direct action and mobilisation by the mass of workers, where possible in conjunction with the production workers themselves. Governments must impose safer methods and materials. Wher­ever the bosses or their state deny danger or cite economic grounds for refusing to act against dangerous plants we demand a workers' in­quiry, with the companies books, as well as its technology, open to in­spection by workers and their ap­pointed experts.

We demand workers and community inspection for nuclear power stations. Where a workers and community inquiry or labour movement commis­sion demands immediate closure of such plants, or where there is imme­diate and acute danger, we rely on the mobilisation of the working class to enforce closure.

Damage

Many dangers cannot be counter­acted at the level of plant modification or closure. Atmospheric and marine pollution, destruction of entire eco­systems such as deforestation or by mono-culture, or the complete ex­haustion of natural resources are often international phenomena even if their effects are more noticeable in some countries than others.

As at the national level so at the international level we are in favour of establishing legal safeguards for the environment-but we fight for them by the methods of class struggle of the proletariat and we place no trust in the imperialists' international agencies to police such standards even when established. Ultimately, only a world wide, democratically or­ganised, planned economy can rec­oncile human production with na­ture.

The environmental question for the working class is not only a pre­ventative struggle. Much damage has already been done and must be repaired. We demand that within programmes of public works restora­tion of the environment be given a high priority. Whether it be the provi­sion of adequate sanitation and, therefore, reliable drinking water in shanty towns, integrated regional rehabilitation programmes in areas of desertification or the construction of river and sea defences in the monsoon regions, capitalism should not pay the price for these necessary repairs.

By fighting for this programme through direct action workers can begin to effectively defend the envi­ronment now, in a way that lays the basis for turning that struggle in to one against capitalism and for inter­national planning.

Fri 07, September 2007 @ 17:59