“We’re living through a climate emergency, so really our
politicians should be debating this every week.” - Mel Evans, Greenpeace UK.
In a week’s time, on March 15th, school students around the
world will be holding another series of strikes and protests highlighting the failure of
governments to deal with climate change and the damage to the environment and they have come to realise that if left unchecked the massive effects of global
warming may well result in the collapse of society as they currently know it
within few generations. The school students should, indeed, be absolutely
outraged that capitalists’ lack of concern for their future which is very likely to
condemn them to a nightmare of extreme weather events, migration chaos,
food and water shortages, widespread infrastructure faiklures and possible
warfare. Already this apocalyptic future is beginning to play out in many parts
of the world today but as yet outside the currently comfortably secure
developed nations. Too many complacent people still think that it won’t happen to
them but is a problem of those elsewhere.
15th of March offers an opportunity for the youth to
ask questions on why the world operates in the way that it does. It presents
ourselves in the Socialist Party with a chance to explain with the
voice of reason and sanity that there is nothing stopping us all from making the world
a better place in the future for everyone.
The destruction of the environment has now reached
calamitous proportions. There has been a politicalisation of whole sections of
the population who are coming to conclusions that the system can’t stop global
warming. Yet many of the same people look to capitalism for a solution and hope
that our rulers will listen to reason. Despite leading members of the ruling
class being aware and even alarmed at the consequences of global warming there
is little progress being made with numerous politicians still failing to treat
the climate threat seriously. Many are placing their hope that some scheme
might be developed that could make profits for some corporation and investment
returns will spur action. Capitalism may well switch to other forms of energy
as long as the driving force of such shifts were profits. Capitalism is driven
by ‘short termism’ in its hunger for profits. Investment decisions are made on
the basis on what will make a return in the quickest time. Such a system cannot
deal with the scale of the climate crisis or make rational planned decisions
about what to produce that is separate from the bottom line of profits.
The endless accumulation process of the capitalist economy
is based on the pillage of nature. The exploitation of fossil fuels remains
intrinsic to the operation of capitalism. The Green reformers approach to individualise
environmental problems as lifestyle choices and personal habits thwarts any
meaningful way of dealing with them. The need is for a clear democratic,
qualitative transformation of society. The cause of rising carbon emissions is
neither population numbers nor human nature but capitalism and its mode of
production which runs counter to nature. Capitalism without growth is a
contradiction in terms. The explanation is simple: capitalism is based on
competition for profit, each private/state owner of the means of production is
forced to continuously seek to reduce their costs. This constraint is
absolutely imperative: whoever would seek to evade it would immediately be
condemned to commercial bankruptcy. Capitalism produces ever more commodities,
which means appropriating and pillaging ever more natural resources.
‘We have no time to wait for the Revolution to arrive’ is
the common refrain from the Green reformers who counterpoise a policy of campaigning
to force governments to act so to produce speedier results than a struggle to
overthrow capitalism. But socialists are equally entitled to answer, ‘There is
no time to wait for the capitalists and their governments to listen to reason’.
Whether capitalism could solve the problem of climate change is irrelevant
because it is clearly not doing so and there is no reason to expect it will.
The Socialist Party is intent to show that the struggle for socialism and the
environmentalists aim to avoid climate catastrophe is one inseparable whole. It
requires replacing capitalist profit with production for real human need, the transformation
of how we live and work, a fundamentally different democratic and participatory
society. Saving the environment must also go hand in hand with ending capitalism.
The struggle that we must wage for the environment is a class struggle, an anti-capitalist
struggle that encompasses all other struggles and that has the potential to
bring them all together. A struggle that looks to harmony between
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