“I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I
want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.” said Greta Thunberg at the Davos billionaire gathering. “Some people, some companies, some decision-makers in particular, have known exactly what priceless values they have been sacrificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money,” she concluded her speech by urging those present at Davos to “behave like our house is on fire, because it is.”
Greta has now tweeted that the school strike for the climate will take place in 1769 places in 112 countries around the world. “Everyone is welcome. Everyone is needed. Let’s change history. And let’s never stop for as long as it takes.”
At least 212 separate strikes have been registered for 15 March in France. In Italy, school students will protest at 208 locations, while 196 schools in Germany are expected to be affected. In the UK school students will strike at around 111 locations.
It is by no means unknown for a society to collapse for
ecological reasons, which is to say, because it did not treat its environment
with care. By ‘collapse’ here is meant a drastic reduction in living standards
and population, not that everybody dies. The collapse of present-day society,
then, might involve far fewer people surviving and at a far lower standard of
living, but it would not result in the end of humanity and certainly not of the
planet on which we live.
If the metal ores were owned and controlled by the
community, which of us would truly be mad enough to squander them to make tanks
and bombs to blow up innocent children on the other side of the planet because
of the industrial need for oil? If we all owned the farms together, do you
think we would decide it reasonable to produce food packed with artificial
preservatives and colourings, or to condemn millions of children to starve?
Wars are very well planned murders by those quite prepared to squander the
planet’s population, clean air and topsoil to do the government’s bidding, and
able at least during execution of the plan to tolerate gnawing sentiments that
their behaviours may be morally reprehensible but extraordinarily rationalised
as “in the national interest”.
No State is going to implement legislation which would
penalise the competitiveness of its national enterprises in the face of foreign
competition. States only take into account environmental questions if they can
find an agreement at international level which will disadvantage none of them.
But that’s the snag because competition for the appropriation of world profits
is one of the bases of the present system. Attempts at international
cooperation have already been made but no agreement to limit the activities of
the multinationals in their relentless quest for profits is possible. Measures
in favour of the environment come up against the interests of business and
their shareholders because by increasing costs they decrease profits. Governments
do not have a free hand to do what is sensible or desirable. They can only act
within the narrow limits imposed by the profit-driven market system whose rules
are “profits first” and “you can’t buck the market”.
The preservation of the environment is a social problem
which requires humanity to establish a viable and stable relationship with the
rest of nature. In practice, this implies a society which uses, as far as
possible, renewable energy and raw material resources and which practices the
recycling of non-renewable resources; a society which, once an appropriate
balance with nature has been formed, will tend towards a stable level of
production, indeed towards “zero growth”. This does not mean that changes are
to be excluded on principle, but that any change will have to respect the
environment by taking place at a pace to which nature can adapt. But the
employment by capitalism of destructive methods of production has, over two
centuries, upset the balance of nature.
Whether it is called “the market economy”, “economic liberalism”,
“free enterprise” or any other euphemism, the social system under which we live
is capitalism. Under this system the means of the production and distribution
of social wealth – the means of society’s existence – are the exclusive
property of a dominant parasitic minority – the holders of capital, or
capitalist class – for whose benefit they are inevitably managed. Because by
definition capitalism can only function in the interest of the capitalists, no
palliative, no rearrangement, no measure, no reform can (nor ever will be able
to) subordinate capitalist private property to the general interest.
Of course, capitalism has sooner or later to face up to the
ecological problems caused by the search for profit, but only afterwards, after
the damage has been done. But the ecologists, so critical of “liberal”
capitalism, accept the economic
dictatorship of the owning minority since they don’t understand the link that
exists between the destruction of the environment and the private ownership of
the means of production.
We appeal to all people, young and old, who understand the incompatibility
of their interests with those of the capitalists, to all those who, concerned
about the ceaseless attacks of which we are the victims and of the dangers to
which the capitalists are exposing our planet, want not to patch up but to end
existing society. We can only “cure the planet” by establishing a society
without private productive property or profit where humans will be freed from
the uncontrollable economic laws of the pursuit of profit and the accumulation
of capital. In short, only a world socialist society, based on the common
ownership and democratic control of natural resources, is compatible with
production that respects the natural environment.
If social ills are always blamed on the capitalist system,
our critics complain, then there is no room for intelligent discussion about
the varied reforms, leaders, governments, nations or policies that appear to be
meeting people’s needs in quite radically distinct ways around the globe or at
different times in the same country.
However, what the socialist is attempting to demonstrate is
that the varied threads of social experience are intimately woven together in
such a manner that they constitute aspects of a vast system that operates by
particular laws and so is incapable of adequate reform. To perceive such a web
of interrelationships is not at all a bad case of oversimplification. Rather,
it represents an attempt to understand social and economic phenomena, much as
natural phenomena are comprehended, as interactive parts of a system, which may
be observed wherever the system exists, and predicted given certain defined
conditions.
To understand social experience in socialist terms is to notice
that all humans have certain requirements for food, shelter or safety, and that
the varied ways in which they meet such needs produce different systems of
relationships among them. This is often a difficult theory for many, especially
for those used to comprehending social phenomena the way they were taught
history in school, or the way events are reported in the media – in terms of
distinct leaders, competing economic theories or degrees of corruption.
When material needs were met by ownership of people by other
people (slavery), it followed necessarily that laws were required to protect
that ownership, and that the fruits of the labour of slaves would be enjoyed by
their owners. It also follows from this that with control of many slaves came
accumulations of wealth that led some to live in abundance in palaces and
others to be coerced to build and maintain these palaces at threat of death.
Customs evolved in slave or feudal systems that led most humans to accept the
legitimacy of this very unequal distribution of wealth and power. The
experience of being dispossessed also inevitably led the majority to feelings
of resentment, anger, helplessness, apathy, devotion, revolution, or ambivalent
combinations of these at the same time or throughout the course of their lives.
To say that we all live in a system, the present one being
capitalist, is in a sense to deconstruct the customs that we were all brought
up to accept as normal, and by attempting to understand them, to open up the
possibility that we may reject them. To comprehend all social appearances in
terms of a system is also to remove the temptation to support another initially
promising leader who everyone will hate a few years later, and to blame our
problems on one who was found to be lacking intellectually, or morally, or
found to be emphasising inadequate economic priorities.
When socialists seek to blame the capitalist system, they
are promoting an important hypothesis that all social problems derive from the
fact that a few individuals or states own the means of producing the things we
require to live, which implies that the majority of us do not. It is, in the
socialist’s mind, this fact of ownership that leads to war, to world poverty
and hunger, to excessive stress, to murderous wastes of planetary resources and
animal habitation destruction, or to our feelings of alienation that are often
accorded psychiatric diagnoses.
It would be wrong to play down the scope that socialism
offers for the solution of our problems. Enormous resources will be freed up
when we get rid of the waste inherent in capitalism. But the new society will
face urgent tasks that will also be daunting in their enormity. It is hard to
judge which enormity is likely to be the greater. Socialists do not assume that
socialism will solve all problems at once, and prefer to think about socialism
– and especially about its crucial early stages – in a practical and realistic
spirit.
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