What’s the big deal with the Green New Deal?

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.” - Henry David Thoreau

Many appear to believe that the Socialist Party takes some sort of perverse pleasure about raining on other people’s parades. We don’t. We are a political party that has been around for a very long time and we have seen many movements and campaigns come and go. We have acquired an insight into why so many failed to achieve their aims and for that reason we try to give our fellow-workers the benefit of our experience so that they do not repeat old mistakes or try to re-invent the wheel.

What we have growing these days are environmentalist protest groups such as Extinction Rebellion in the UK and Sunrise in the US. We can applaud their enthusiasm and activism to try to halt climate change. However, we cannot approve of the strategies they have chosen to solve the problem. Rather than system change we witness they opt for the Green New Deal as the resolution of the crisis, not revolution.

By not understanding capitalist dynamics, they have not made capitalism their enemy. In fact, many ecologists are in denial that capitalism is the root cause and prefer to cast the blame on people and overpopulation, that institutions like governments and corporations are the focus of their protests and palliative remedies are the cure.

We witness it in practically every scientific report no matter how damning it is. There is no indictment of the system that has created and still advances climate change. Just optimistic references to “it is not too late” for sustainable carbon reducing policies to be implemented by born-again green politicians.

It has been capitalism that has fueled global warming and the rise in carbon emissions. Yet people are looking to capitalism to solve a problem created by capitalism. Instead of the socialist alternative, working towards a sustainable steady-state production system for peoples’ needs and not for capitalists’ profits, we have the Green New Deal. It’s capitalism. Bernie Sander and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez are not for socialism, but a more regulated capitalism. Only socialism can tackle what is happening in the world now

The Green New Deal is based upon Roosevelts New Deal from the 1930s which is credited of lifting America out of the Great Depression by the enactment of series of government legislation. If only that were true. FDR’s reforms failed to fix America’s economy. It was the coming of war that revived production demand and restored profits to business. Unemployment fell because America economy started to prepare for war. The national income per capita in 1938 was only 76 per cent of that in 1929. There was another economic crisis in 1937. The industrial index plunged downward. And in October of that year, FDR said “Steer toward the coming war and make all preparations accordingly.” The 1937 depression was halted and reversed, not by any normal upswing of the economic cycle, but by the speeding up of war preparations not only in this country but throughout the world. It was not until the US entered the Second World War four years later that the slump finally came to an end. That is a simple lesson from the Roosevelt New Deal experience.

Reformers refuse to see the truth: that capitalist society does not function to achieve social goals the community as a whole, regards as desirable, but rather operates to achieve the goals considered desirable by a small part of society, the ruling capitalist class, which places its profits as the paramount concern of society. Society does not exist to satisfy the requirements of the community but the profit needs of the capitalist class. The government, no matter whether conservative or liberal, remains a social organization whose purpose is to insure the rule of the capitalist class, and by its policies to assure the receipt of profits, which is considered the first claim on society. When the needs of the great majority of society come into conflict with the capitalist system and the capitalist class, the government’s role is to ascertain that the latter triumphs. Capitalist class parties may differ and sometimes do differ deeply on how to achieve the purpose of the state, but despite these differences all capitalist parties represent poorly or well the capitalist class.

As Marx put it, “The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself.” It functions for the accumulation of further capital; capitalist production is production for capital. What is necessary is the transformation of this system into one in which production becomes an ever-expanding system of creating goods for the benefit of the society of producers. This transformation requires one pre-condition: the expropriation of the capitalists who, not out of ill will but as a functioning class, bar the way to production for use. As capitalism spread across the globe, hunger and starvation spread with it. Growing food and selling it to those who have plenty has always been more profitable than sharing food with those who need it.

Many environmentalists declare the demise of class struggle as a viable force for social change. They have turned away from questions of class and especially class struggle. They reject the productivist premises of Marxists who are accused of viewing issues such as ecology as external to questions of production, distracting from the task of organizing workers at the point of production. 

It is said that Nero fiddled while Rome burned. The Trump administration, defending the commercial interests of big coal, oil and other segments of the capitalist class, is doing even worse while the crisis of global warming continues to gather intensity. Incredibly, though some scientists are reportedly wondering if our planet isn't approaching a global warming 'meltdown,' Trump is still trying to deny that the crisis even exists. Some scientists now worry that rising temperatures may cause a 'runaway greenhouse effect' that cannot be stopped. In this worst-case scenario the polar ice caps and even Arctic tundra melt, oxidizing organic matter previously frozen in the ice, and releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide and another greenhouse gas, methane. Regardless of their best efforts, a willingness to create a sustainable environment, people are constantly assailed by the effects of consumerism in the global market. For most of the world's workers, sustainability is about how to survive the gap between spending your last dollar, and the arrival of the next pay packet.

Take away the profit motive in capitalist production and replace it with socialist production for human needs and wants and such controls become not only possible, but desirable. While capitalism reigns on Earth, the chance exists that the profit mongers will simply keep on fiddling until it is too late. The Earth can no longer be owned; it must be shared. Join the Socialist Party and the fight for a future under a democratic socialist economy capable of halting and eventually reversing the damage done to the planet and all its inhabitants by the voracious capitalist system. It is obvious that today human needs are far from being met on a world scale, and that fairly rapid growth in the production of food, housing and other basic amenities would still be needed for some years even if production ceased to be governed by the economic laws of capitalism. However it should not be forgotten that a 'steady-state economy' would be a much more normal situation than an economy geared to blindly accumulating more and more means of production. After all, the only rational reason for accumulating means of production is to eventually be in a position to satisfy all reasonable consumption needs.  Once the stock of means of production has reached this level, in a society with this goal, accumulation, or the further expansion of the stock of means of production, can stop and production levels be stabilized. Logically, this point would eventually be reached, since the consumption needs of a given population are finite. So if human society is to be able to organize its production in an ecologically acceptable way, then it must abolish the capitalist economic mechanism of capital accumulation and gear production instead to the direct satisfaction of needs.