The Lobbyists

LobbyControl on Monday accused the European Union of doing too little to combat corporate influence. A new report by the German NGO said there are insufficient rules to limit such influence, which takes place through expert groups, meetings between civil servants and lobbyists or informal channels. The report said the recruitment of politicians as lobbyists, the dependence of the EU's civil service on corporate expertise and lobbyists' privileged access to decision makers through exclusive events were the main sources of corporate influence.

"Corporations can draw on an incredible lobbying power to push through their interests," said the report's author, Nina Katzemich. "Two-thirds of the 25,000 lobbyists who influence laws, politics and public opinion in Europe with an annual budget of 1.5 billion euros represent business interests."

The report said EU member governments were some of the main lobbyists in Brussels, with many countries pushing for EU rules and decisions that reflect the interests of their national industries.

The EU allows "corporations and the rich to move their assets to shadow financial centres and thus evade their tax responsibility," it said.

"Through tax avoidance and optimization, EU member states lost €50 to €70 billion in tax revenue every year," said LobbyControl political director Imke Dierssen.

Some 70 percent of representatives on an EU expert group set up to discuss emissions tests for cars came from the automotive industry. According to the EU Parliament, this group helped delay a more effective test for vehicle emissions by years.

https://www.dw.com/en/eu-must-curb-corporate-lobbying-power-ngo/a-48531448

The Cancer Industry Profits

Not content upon killing and harming people, the cigarette industry even tries to avoid paying their share of healthcare and treatment of their victims

British American Tobacco has been accused of depriving developing countries of hundreds of millions of dollars in tax by using “financial manoeuvring” to shift profits to a UK subsidiary.  BAT, the world’s largest tobacco company, would avoid paying $700m (£540m) between now and 2030 in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Kenya, Guyana, Brazil, and Trinidad and Tobago.

In 2016 alone BAT managed to shift $941m, roughly 12% of its group pre-tax profit that year, from overseas companies into its British subsidiary, BAT Holdings. This reduced the company’s tax bill, partly because UK corporation tax is charged at 19% – lower than many of the countries in which BAT sells cigarettes.

Tax Justice Network said BAT’s practices “fly in the face of tobacco companies’ claims to be essential tax providers to low and middle income countries where 80% of the 1.1bn smokers worldwide live”.

The campaign group’s chief executive, Alex Cobham, said: “Cigarettes not only impose massive human costs, those who profit from them are actively depriving lower-income countries of the public funding they need to provide people with health services. At a minimum, governments must require tobacco companies to publish country by country reporting to make sure profits are taxed in the communities where they were raised, not in the tax havens they were siphoned off to.”

BAT had managed to shift profits from developing countries to its UK subsidiary, which pays relatively little corporation tax using a variety of methods. They include arrangements where an overseas company pays royalties to the UK business, and charging foreign subsidiaries interest fees on loans, some routed through low-tax areas such as the Netherlands. The Tax Justice Network said the picture was incomplete because BAT had more than 100 offshore subsidiaries in 19 tax havens where financial data is opaque, while the company’s accounts also revealed hundreds of millions of dollars paid in unexplained “other operating charges”

In Bangladesh, for instance, it said BAT’s outpost there declared $21m in obligations owed to British subsidiaries between 2014 and 2016, in royalties, technical and advisory fees and IT charges. The payments meant that, rather than paying tax on those profits at local rates, the company paid a much lower “withholding tax rate” set by a bilateral treaty between the UK and Bangladesh. It said this cost Bangladesh $5.8m in lost tax in 2016, enough to cover the country’s health expenditure for more than 200,000 people for a year. The annual economic cost of tobacco consumption in Bangladesh, where 40% of men over 15 smoke daily, is $1.8bn and smoking causes more than 25% of deaths among men

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/apr/30/tobacco-firm-bat-costs-developing-countries-700m-in-tax

Big Pharma - Profits not Public Good

Once more we have a media report about the threat of the failure of anti-biotics which this blog has previously often posted about. 

Dame Sally Davies says an Extinction Rebellion-style campaign is needed to save people from antibiotics becoming ineffective in the face of overuse and a lack of regulation. The threat of antibiotic resistance is as great as that from climate change, said Dame Sally Davies, and should be given as much attention from politicians and the public. Davies said efforts to combat the problem of common illnesses becoming untreatable by antibiotic medicines should be coordinated at a worldwide level in a similar way as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body of scientists set up in 1988 to tackle global warming.

Davies said the consequences of antibiotic resistance posed at least as great a threat to humanity’s future, and in the same timescale, but few efforts have been made to deal with the issue. “There is not the appetite [among pharmaceutical companies] to develop new medicines,” she said. “There is a systemic failure..."

She listed a series of problems that the world has allowed to build up, from overuse of antibiotics and a lack of restraints on prescribing strong medications, to the rampant use of the drugs on animals, including by farmers for “growth promotion”, as the drugs can make animals put on weight faster. Such use has been banned in Europe and the US, but is common elsewhere, and even in the EU and US, the use of strong antibiotics critical to human health is still allowed on animals despite scientific advice to the contrary.  

She is concerned that antibiotics are vastly overused in farming, and that this is one of the biggest factors behind the growing problem of resistance. Globally, by far the majority of antibiotic use is for animals. Fish farming is also a major concern, said Davies, as the use of antibiotics has been largely overlooked in that industry. Few areas of farming are free from concern – she noted antibiotics are allowed to be used in spraying citrus fruit in the US, which she regards as a serious danger.

The UN’s Interagency Coordination Group on Antimicrobial Resistance (IACG) recommended stronger rules should be brought in across the world to prevent the overuse of such medicines on farms, and on people.

Haileyesus Getahun, the director of the IACG, said the threat of antimicrobial resistance was “a silent tsunami”. He said the public were still largely unaware of the problem, but that it could yet be solved if people were educated about the dangers. “We are calling for people to come together,” he said. “We don’t see the effects of it yet, but what is coming will be a catastrophe.”

The report calls for the use of antibiotics as growth promoters in farm animals to be abolished globally, and for the strongest antibiotics to be reserved for human use. Another critical issue is sanitation, because the lack of clean water and good sanitation that afflicts more than 2 billion of the world’s population is fuelling the rise of antibiotic resistance that quickly spreads around the globe, including to rich countries.

The report found that failing to take urgent action would result in 24 million people being forced into extreme poverty by 2030, and lead to 10 million deaths a year by 2050.

The authors also called for pharmaceutical companies to “prioritise public good over profit”, because of the market failure that means developing new drugs, while of enormous public benefit, does not result in companies making more money.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/apr/29/antibiotic-resistance-as-big-threat-climate-change-chief-medic-sally-davies

We, the people, have a choice and a decision to make

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has declared a "climate emergency". The SNP leader told conference delegates in Edinburgh she was inspired after meeting young climate campaigners who had gone on strike from school. Sturgeon said "they are right", and pledged to "live up to our responsibility" to halt climate change. The Labour Party is also expected to declare a national climate emergency on Wednesday. They will call for a dramatic cut in the UK's carbon emissions. Dozens of towns and cities across the UK have already declared "a climate emergency". There is no single definition of what that means.

Every day we feel the effects of climate change—a crisis we did little to create. Today, the people of the world are saying ‘enough is enough’. Governments and corporations and agencies promising modest "changes" and "goals" 10, 20, 50 years from now....and we are accepting it. The ship is sinking fast and the captain is promising to start bailing out water with ladles. Too often the Socialist Party has been accused for only opposing and not proposing. That has never been a valid criticism. Today’s need is not another centralised global institution, but the de-concentration and de-centralisation of decision-making power, and the creation of a pluralistic system of organisations interacting with one another, guided by broad and flexible agreements and understandings. We are not talking about something completely new. The Socialist Party has tried to show that workers everywhere have an underlying common interest around which to unite and it is the capitalists who cannot overcome their divisions. An enormous hatred is growing against the many horrors of capitalism. Industrial pollution and ecological damage have provoked resistance in various countries. That hatred has to be turned into dedication to overthrow the entire capitalist system.

The threat to the environment, a direct result of capital’s uncontrolled expansion, can be answered only by the collective action of humanity as a whole. Extinction Rebellion and the school strikers have done vital work in drawing attention to environmental issues.

However, they only too often offer the wrong answers to the very questions they ask about the environment. Its solution lies on the plane of rational and humane, that is to say, wise organisation, both of production itself and care for nature, not just by individuals, enterprises or countries, but by all humanity, linked with a clear awareness of our planetary responsibility for the ecological consequences of civilisation.

Politicians and corporations of all hues now declare their commitment to do something about climate change as an emergency and believe it or not but some of those who run world capitalism actually understand that the environment on which their system depends is in danger of disintegrating within a generation or two. Governments and businesses have a genuine interest in slowing down climate change, much the same as their predecessors had a genuine interest in eliminating the smog from the slums. But they cannot achieve their goal without slowing down the momentum of capital accumulation, the very basis of their system. It is precisely because this is a global problem that those who support the system find it difficult to deal with.

Capitalism is in the process of destroying all our futures. The environmental activists see climate change as the issue that overshadows all others. Everything else has to be subordinated to building a campaign such as has never been seen before in an effort to force governments and firms to take the necessary action. They are raising much-needed awareness of what is happening. But campaigns focused purely on climate change will not be the answer to the problem for deep-seated change is required. They counsel us that we can compel the governments to implement mitigating measures. But politicians end up tailoring their demands to what they think can be achieved without too great a disturbance to the present system. So they lobby for countries to sign up to various ‘practical’ agreements such as carbon taxes on the grounds that ‘at least it is a start’. But let’s be honest, corporations that are expert at cheating taxes by use of tax havens and who place pollution-measuring avoidance computer chips in their cars will easily find ways to fiddle their emissions by carbon trading. The capitalist system depends for its existence on continued expansion and accumulation, and any serious and effective solution to climate change is going to open enormous fissures within the system. Are we to imagine the ruling class will sacrifice their interests for the rest of us? There have been previous instances of civilisations collapsing due to ecological devastation as did the Maya civilisation. Capitalists and states will react to the need to do something about global warming by price and tax measures that will inevitably hit the living standards of the poor.

The only sure protection against climate change is the replacement of a society based on accumulation for profit with one based on production for need. There is but one way to reverse climate change. That is through challenging and ending capitalism as a whole.

The people of the world must organise ourselves to take action and that action has to be the creation of a society where it is not corporation bank balances that count but peoples’ needs come first. If humanity is to survive the climate change that we have created, we must start caring about everyone! The blindly pro-business attitude of the supposed ‘solutions’ seeing all environmental policies as "a burden" that needs to be "minimised" spells doom. Doom for the planet. Doom for the life-sustaining eco-systems we all depend on. Doom for the people of the Earth. Doom for a possible future human society that could truly benefit all.

There's work to do – let’s establish socialism before it is too late.

Act Today to Save Tomorrow

American foreign policy

Trump indicated that he would remain a steadfast supporter of the Saudi government, largely due to Riyadh's purchases from US companies.

"They have nothing but cash, right?" he told the crowd. "They buy a lot from us, $450 billion they bought."

"You had people wanting to cut off Saudi Arabia...I don't want to lose them," he said.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/04/trump-saudi-arabia-buys-lot-don-lose-190428094048617.html

The price of going to the polls

Ten days after Indonesia held elections, at least 272 election workers have died from illnesses caused by long hours of polls-related work,  while 1,878 others had fallen sick.

https://www.dw.com/en/indonesia-more-than-270-election-staff-died-from-overwork/a-48517308

As if we didn't know

The decline of heavy industry in Britain during the Thatcher era led to a significant increase in crime, according to the first study of its kind.

Research has found that in areas where the coal, steel, ship and railway industries were hit during the 1980s, young people were much more likely to find themselves in trouble with the police. Between 1980 and 2000, the number of young people receiving cautions was 21% higher in those areas with the highest level of job losses than in those with the lowest rise.

Professor Stephen Farrall, who carried out the research with Dr Emily Gray and Dr Phil Jones, told the British Sociological Association’s annual conference, “If you had a dad who was down the pit or in a steel mill, you were expected to follow him into that occupation, and if his pit or mill closed, that pulled the economic rug from under you,” Farrall said. “So the process of de-industrialisation took away young people’s hope and aspirations when they were young by making their parents unemployed and hitting their own job prospects. That could lead to them turning to drugs and crime.”

Farrall said that the policies, which saw overall unemployment in Britain double from just over 4% in 1979, to over 8% by 1981, hit the industrial heartlands of Britain hardest. In areas where unemployment stayed low – at 4% or under – 14% of people surveyed had police cautions. In areas where it rose to 8%, 17% had cautions, a rise of three percentage point, or 21.4%.

"...the early phase of Thatcherite economic policies created quite profound and immediate economic problems which fell disproportionately on those communities which had relied on heavy industry – mining, steel work and the associated industries such as railway yards and locomotive depots,” Farrall said.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/apr/27/margaret-thatcher-industrial-collapse-led-to-crime-rise

Our planet is not for sale

Extinction Rebellion supporters around the world have held a series of mass die-ins to highlight the risk of the human race becoming extinct as a result of climate change. Protesters in France, Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Italy, The Netherlands, the UK and other countries lay across the ground on Saturday at transport hubs, cultural centres and shopping centres to demand drastic action to avert environmental collapse. At the Kelvingrove art gallery and museum in Glasgow, about 300 activists lay down beneath Dippy, the famous copy of a diplodocus skeleton which is currently touring the UK.

The state of the planet is becoming more and more critical. Virtually no one in the world now doubts that today’s times are desperate because of the current world climate change crisis with its devastating effects on hundreds of millions of workers By accepting that capitalist production should continue many environmental activists are undermining the credibility of their best aspirations. They have made a political appointment with failure and disillusionment. Even worse than that, they are diverting concern over desperately serious problems into a political dead end which can only have the effect of delaying real solutions. The fatal error of climate justice campaigners is in thinking that a sympathetic government will enable their hopes to be fulfilled. The problem does not resolve itself solely as a question of who runs the country or even the world.

With the abolition of capitalism, in which goods take the form of commodities for sale on the market, and the abolition of the wage labour/capital relationship, socialism will establish direct co-operation between producers and goods will be produced directly for need. Production for use will consciously regulate production and this will include a choice of methods limited only by available technique and practicality. Socialism will also eliminate a vast amount of waste and at least double the number of people available for useful work. Socialism would have no difficulty in applying a principle of conservation production which would include working within existing natural systems without altering them. This would be the only safe way to proceed. Though many new technological advances in renewable energy appear non-commercial under capitalism, socialism would have no difficulty in developing and applying the technology. The point is that a socialist, democratic society would not face the corporate and government apparatus of obfuscation and plain downright lying about the realities that have cost the delay of two or three decades of “business as usual.”

In a modern society, the workers’ movement, in order to play a really meaningful role, must engage in all industrial, political, social and moral struggles affecting the working people as a whole. Already a growing number of workers are demanding a greater say, greater control over their lives, and are insisting that their work should be socially beneficial to the community as a whole. Human society, when we get it, will be a free association of social individuals. The change from capitalism to socialism will bring a change in the relationship of society to nature. Capitalism exploits anything in nature it can get its hands on. Before society can organise itself in harmony with natural systems, society must first be able to co-operate within itself. While humanity remains divided by rival capitalist states, it is be impossible to organise our use of the world in careful and sensitive ways that would be in the mutual interests of all people. Instead, we have economic exploitation, waste, war and destruction. The solution is to replace corporate or state ownership for money gain with common ownership by all people. Instead of nation states all people could be part of a world held in common. This would bring the great advantage of being able to organise the world as one productive unit. Being united around a common interest people in socialism could organise and develop their productive activity in relation to the natural advantages of the earth in whatever appropriate geographical location and with a use of production methods which safeguard the world environment. Without national barriers it would be possible to apply production in appropriate areas to make available world stocks of materials for manufacture, basic foods such as cereals and world energy supply. From this basis of world production, smaller scale diversified production could be carried on throughout regional and local communities in line with local work preferences and local needs.

Capitalism is a form of social organisation that systematically destroys nature. It is a system driven not by need, and not by the need to preserve the natural sources of its bounty, but rather by profit. Profit-making requires efficiency only within the individual business and requires that all businesses maximise profits continually, particularly over the short term, or go belly-up. Capitalism prevents the world’s working class from acting in accord with our need to preserve nature for ourselves and for future generations. Furthermore capitalism prevents us from obtaining food, water, shelter, clothing, and other needs, unless we work for the capitalists and produce more than we are paid – with the excess taking the form of surplus value, or profit. By withholding our access to the necessities of life, the capitalists force us to do their bidding. The world’s working class today is just as enslaved by capitalism’s withholding these necessities as if we were forced to live and work in collars and chains. Socialists call this form of bondage, wage slavery. Under chattel slavery, workers’ bodies and minds were consumed in backbreaking labour with death coming at an early age. Under wage slavery, dehumanising exploitation grinds down our bodies (if we survive work-related accidents and occupational illness)

Capitalists appropriate nature for their own class needs. They strip-mine and destroy entire mountains, they over-fish of the oceans in the competitive drive for profits, they clear-cut forests. Capitalists dump toxic waste into soil, rivers, oceans, and the atmosphere, with numerous deaths resulting but without our class being able to do much to stop them, since the state protects only capitalist interests. In a few local situations, through long major collective campaigns, workers have forced a few temporary concessions, but the overall destruction of lives and the environment accelerates everywhere else. The capitalists thus literally gets away with murder. In its single-minded drive for profit, world capitalism is fast exhausting the earth’s resources, and what is left is fast being ruined by waste products. Preservation of resources for industry and life itself is vital for humanity but simply not profitable in the short term for capitalism, and short term is the only level on which capital can possibly function. A lapse in profitability means the death of a business, just as a lapse in food and water means the death of a living thing. The overall effect of this single-minded capitalist focus on profits is continual economic crisis, wars, poverty and world environmental destruction.

The main way the capitalists get away with this is through their control of state power and their ever-present use of nationalism. Capitalist corporations, in order to survive competition, resist having a long-range outlook for their return on investment. So do the stockholders, or they will put their money into other corporations that do bring in quick returns. The corporations must make back their initial investment in plant and equipment quickly, so that their future profits become pure gravy. Concern for the environment, on the other hand, is a long term process that requires giving up the concept of profit in favour of satisfying human needs. Capitalism does not operate to satisfy human needs. Competition to create new markets calls for a continual stream of new products that have little to no use value to the consumer. After all, how many different products can we actually need? Up to the time of any new product’s introduction we have always gotten along fine without it. The continual introduction of useless or harmful products produces increased useless consumption of resources and increased harmful dumping of waste, with accelerating destruction of the environment at both ends of the process – natural resource inputs and waste product outputs. In order to continue to expand its profits, capitalism creates wants instead of satisfying needs. Only profit maximisation is their goal.

Only a system in which use value, rather than exchange value, is the basis of society is capable of preventing irreversible climate change.

A terrorist is a terrorist

Further to this post we have 19 year old John Earnest, who entered a San Diego synagogue with a  “AR-style” semi-automatic rifle and murdered one and wounded others.

The Guardian article describes it as a hate-crime but not as a terrorist act by an anti-Semitic even though he published a manifesto on his social media.

Police are also investigating Earnest’s possible connection to an arson attack on the Dar-ul-Arqam mosque last month.

Lest we forget - Anton Pannekoek

In Wageningen, Netherlands, on April 28, 1960 Anton Pannekoek, (affectionately known as Tony Pancakes as Pannekoek is Dutch for pancake) died at the age of 87 years.

Although mostly forgotten, Pannekoek had been Marxist scholar and activist on par with Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxenburg, but who was later marginalised and dismissed by the Leninists. Pre-WW1 he was involved in the left radical wing of social-democracy and after the war became a proponent of the council-communist movement. 

In later life, Pannekoek found it difficult to have his ideas published and the Western Socialist, the journal of the World Socialist Party of the United States printed a number of his essays. The Socialist Party of Great Britain has issued one of his early writings , Marxism and Darwinism. 

Also recommended reading is Pannekoek's Lenin As Philosopher, critique of ‘bourgeois materialism’ by which Pannekoek meant a materialism which seeks to explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. When the bourgeoisie had to fight to achieve and retain power, said Pannekoek, they believed in the power of the physical sciences to change the world, practically by developing modern industry, and theoretically by exposing the religious views of their class opponents as superstitious nonsense. That Lenin and the Bolsheviks should have adopted a similar ideology to that of the rising bourgeoisie of Western Europe at an earlier period was to be explained, said Pannekoek, by the essentially similar task that confronted them: to carry out the equivalent of a bourgeois revolution in Russia which would sweep away the obstacles, institutional and ideological, to the development of modern industry there. Pannekoek saw Leninism as the ideology of a new ruling class whose historical task was to industrialise Russia on the basis of state capitalism, with militant physical-science materialism as its ideology.

Much of his work is available on the Marxist Archive website.

Pannekoek's ideas were not too far apart from the SPGB as it might first appear. A May 1942 Socialist Standard article summarised Pannekoek's position:

“[Anton Pannekoek] Writing in an American magazine, Modern Socialism, says: 'The belief in parties is the main reason for the impotence of the working-class...Because a party is an organisation that aims to lead and control the workers'. 

Further on, however, he qualifies this statement:
'If...persons with the same fundamental conceptions (regarding Socialism) unite for the discussion of practical steps and seek clarification through discussion and propagandise their conclusions, such groups might be called parties, but they would be parties in an entirely different sense from those of to-day'.

The article went on to say that it was not parties as such that had failed, but the form all parties had taken “as groups of persons seeking power above the worker”. Pannekoek wished workers' political parties to be “organs of the self-enlightenment of the working class by means of which the workers find their way to freedom” and “means of propaganda and enlightenment”. 

Almost exactly the role and purpose many members of the Socialist Party would ascribe to it.

America's Health and Safety

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) reduced its workplace safety inspectors to the lowest level in its 48-year history, diminishing its capacity to investigate workplace deaths, illnesses and injuries. 

And it reversed a rule that would have provided more information about workplace dangers nationally. It decided to stop requiring large employers to electronically report injury and illness data.

 If OSHA collected and published the information, untold numbers of illnesses, injuries and deaths could be prevented. Corporations, labor unions and workers could study the problems and offer solutions. But they can’t solve health and safety issues they don’t know about because they are locked in corporate vaults.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/dying-on-the-job-how-workers-get-hurt-when-businesses-keep-deadly-secrets/

Don't leave the Planet in their Possession

A lesson that activists such as Extinction Rebellion have learned is that if you remain content just to talk about things and not do anything about them, then no one worries about you. But when the government and others begins to criticise you, it is because you are doing something about it. Nevertheless, it is also important that environmentalists possess a clear understanding of the climate crisis, not just only the scientific cause of global warming but the facts of the social and economic cause of climate change. XR recognises that this system cannot be stopped by force as it is ruthless beyond the capacity of any people’s resistance movement. They believe the only way of stopping It is, through massive non-cooperation. So they'll keep blocking those bridges and roads. But they'll also have to begin placing their actions in a larger context. Clearly, they must continue to protest. The struggles to halt environmental destruction and end capitalism itself must be waged simultaneously

Socialists understand that capitalist production and “the market” cannot and will not halt the rush to climate catastrophe. In a capitalist market economy, each enterprise must profit at whatever expense, or die. Honourable intentions make little to no difference.

Man well-meaning environmentalists ask each of us individually to changes our habits and life-styles so we can prevent tipping into irreversible climate change. Suggestions abound, such as switching to electric cars. But if everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little. What is required is system change. Saying that individual or small scale actions can help solve the crisis, amounts to blaming ordinary folk absolving the capitalist system for the destruction of the environment. The average person is not to blame for struggling to survive in the only ways that this system permits and it adds insult to injury by blaming those unable to control or direct the system for its consequences.

It is the capitalists, in their imperative drive to sell commodities in order to realise profits, who determine the consumption practices of the world’s peoples so why blame these consumption practices on the people themselves, especially upon those who struggle for the basics needed to sustain life. Capitalism, however, presents millions of workers with the impossible choice: Your job or your life. There can be no “solution” based on somehow lowering global living standards to some minimum level in the name of sacrifice to save the planet. There would be no way to impose it except by some authoritarian dictatorship.

When the working people are able to rationally plan the production of things we really need cooperative planning without the intervention of the profit motive, will permit us to act according to our needs. We will defeat global warming, as well as put an end to war and the other miseries of capitalist rule. Socialism is the only form of organisation in which the world will be capable of restoring a sustainable relationship between humanity and the rest of nature. As long as capitalism exists, with its expansionist tendencies, we will be incapable of solving the problems of humanity’s interaction with nature, in which nature is used up in the drive for profits and the waste products choke and starve us. Socialism means organising human societies in a manner that is compatible with the way that nature is organised. Capitalist society robs us of community with each other and community with the earth. Capitalism systematically defiles the environment. When profit is the ultimate motive for development, risks of serious danger to health and damage to the environment are secondary considerations.

One of the most mistaken ideas subscribed to unwittingly by many honest people is that overpopulation in the world is the main cause of both global warming and resource depletion. The problem is not too many people, but rather capitalist poverty. Many claim that the earth’s carrying capacity has been exceeded but just what is that maximum carrying capacity? It all depends on who you ask. The rationale for industrial farming is to “feed the world” by doubling food production by 2050. But the world has been producing more than enough food to feed every human being for half a century. People don’t go hungry because food is scarce, but because they are too poor to buy the food being produced. Producing so much food just drives prices even lower, running smaller farmers out of business. In developing countries, these farmers join the ranks of the hungry—a cruel irony behind the call to “feed the world.”

Our message to XR and anyone anywhere near to be concerned about the way the climate crisis will impact our jobs, health, children and communities is simple: join us.