Saturday, October 12, 2019

Climate Change - A Consequence of Capitalism

Justice Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez delivered the closing speech at the C40 World Mayors Summit in Copenhagen on Friday.
The climate crisis is already here," she said. "On this note I speak to you not as an elected official or public figure, but I speak to you as a human being...” AOC continued, “...Climate change is not a coincidence or a scientific anomaly. Climate change is a consequence. It is a consequence of our unsustainable way of life. Because it is unsustainable to organize our society as we have, centered on prioritizing personal gain and profit over any and all human or planetary considerations...it is unsustainable to continue to believe that our system of runaway, unaccountable, lawbreaking pursuit of profit, whose inequality is so socially destabilizing that it is giving rise to authoritarians who burn our forests and challenge the democracies that listen to basic science, and to think that that has nothing to do with this."
Later, she addressed the People's Climate March, where she urged activists to "make sure the politicians sweat a little bit" and "We have to face the oil and coal industry, the CO2-emitting industry, Wall Street, Bolsonaro, Donald Trump...We can't and won't win by staying home."
The Socialist Party can sympathise with the main sentiments of Ocasio-Cortez's message but we are very much less receptive to her chosen policy remedy – the Green New Deal – a reformist recipe to regulate capitalism rather than do away with the economic system entirely.
Many comment that the climate crisis is one caused by humans but is not less human intervention we need, but more – intervention that enables people to consciously control their interaction with nature on a world scale, instead of leaving it to the blind workings of the market. It is time for eco-activists to recognise the inevitability of human action to change nature, but then to insist upon rational planning and organisation of this, based on informed, scientific and democratic discussion of its consequences. Only too frequently do we read some ecological fundamentalist promoting an anti-human form of mysticism contend that that all that matters is the preservation of other species, even if the price of doing so is the destruction of the conditions of life for much of the rest of humanity. Nature continually undergoing changes and homo sapiens are themselves a product of natural transformations.
The Socialist Party's analysis has a great potential not only to explain the economic processes leading to environmental destruction, but to change them. A serious critique of capitalism is essential to address the environmental crisis. The environmental movement can no longer afford to adopt traditional conventional views of the market and ignore the issue altogether by claiming that understanding capitalism is irrelevant. Socialism can no longer be afforded secondary concern in ecological theory and the achievement of a socialist society left subsidiary and subordinated to the immediate campaigns for environmental reforms. There are clear limits to lifestyle solutions. In response to the global warming crises environmentalists must rethink their vision of a future society.  
Such concepts as "industrialism," "growth," and "carrying capacity" must be conceived in their capitalist economic context. Capitalist development cannot be reproduced and projected into a socialist world and generalised to include the entire population. The change in the ownership of the means of production determines the very notion of the "good life." The Socialist Party's promise has been an egalitarian distribution of all the productive wealth plus a meaningful democracy and liberation from social alienation. All this and nothing less. Our critique of capitalism offers the most useful guide to understanding and confronting environmental destruction and presents a synthesis between ecological thinking and socialist ideas. Absent from the climate campaigners views is an adequate appraisal of the inherent logic within capitalism that necessitates environmental destruction.  
Reformers assume that all that is needed is only the enlightened management by the corporations and regulation by the State to curb any excesses and to mitigate their shortcomings. Yet capitalism enforces its own logic of production. Facing competition from other producers, each business must minimise or externalise its costs while maximising profit and market share. Just as labour is, environmental protection appears as a cost in the corporate balance sheet which must be constantly cut. This fact operates independently of the personal views or ethics of any Board of Directors or CEO. If a company implement costly environmental controls, they either sacrifice profit or lose market share to the competitor who can under-sell at a cheaper price in the marketplace. Thus businesses rationalisations their environmentally destructive behavior—'if I don’t do it someone else will’ or, if they choose to act on their ecological convictions, they are quickly replaced by someone more compliant to shareholders returns. For this reason, capitalist competition inevitably impedes voluntary "green” business initiatives which can merely pander to public opinion with their “green” advertising.  
The prevalent strategy of green consumerism promotes the idea that the individual buying decisions of consumers in the marketplace can influence corporations but for the vast majority price remains the determining piece of information influencing their choices, particularly as the value of real wages continue to fall. What’s more, corporate decisions over investments limit the choices available to consumers. For instance, one cannot choose to consume mass transit if a corporate/state promoted infrastructure of automobiles, petrochemicals, and highways are all that is available. It is not surprising then that focus tends to draw attention away from corporations and place the blame for environmental destruction back on individual consumption habits—"reduce, reuse, repair, recycle." It distracts attention from the institutions most responsible.
As capitalism proceeds down this path towards the possible disintegration of civilisation, a society which will increasingly reflect vast divisions between wealth and poverty, and growing economic insecurity for the majority of working people, an alternative which serves the interests of the majority is essential. 
A convincing ecological future must put forth a credible vision of abundance. For the technology with inherently destructive features, there will be no competitive necessity propelling its continued use, so with socialism we can implement its removal. With greater democratic control over economic production, and an elimination of the iron-clad rule of profit, the potential to make redundant destructive technologies becomes a realistic possibility. It may not appease the hardened green Luddite desires, but the point is to put humans back in control of their machinery and institutions instead of being ruled by them.

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