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Greta
Thunberg's visit to the UK is over and finished with a meeting to
address British politicians. It was standing-room only, far different from the recent climate debate in parliament, which drew barely a
dozen MPs even though it was the first on the climate crisis held in
two years.
Greta berated the parliamentarians.
“This
ongoing irresponsible behaviour will no doubt be remembered in
history as one of the greatest failures of humankind. You lied to us.
You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to
look forward to.” She explained, “The
UK’s active current support of new exploitation of fossil fuels,
like for example the UK shale gas fracking industry, the expansion of
its North Sea oil and gas fields, the expansion of airports, as well
as the planning permission for a brand
new coalmine,
is beyond absurd.”
Unimpressed, Thunberg said afterwards that the politicians were missing the point. “They turn this into a question of what methods the protesters use – truancy and civil disobedience – but it’s not about that. It’s about the fact that we face an existential crisis.”
Capitalism
has been reformed many times and in many different ways and still it
continues to progressively worsen the environment and in no way are
things fundamentally changing for the better, neither for people nor
for the environment. It would be correct to say that socialists view
almost all of society’s problems as the inevitable outcome of the
capitalist system. The threats and damage caused to our environment,
become for socialists a symptom. A system based on profit and
continued growth at all costs, places unsustainable demands on the
planet's resources – and, in the end, must logically cause a
civilisation collapse. And yet, faced with irrefutable evidence of
catastrophic damage, the vast majority of people are not able, or
perhaps don't wish, to make the connection.
On
the face of it the environmentalist movement has a lot in its favour.
It is difficult to find fault in their concerns about how the planet
is being abused. But is the solution that would save the planet from
through a series of legal enactments. Prescriptions by
environmentalists for people to change their lifestyles – to
reduce their consumption of meat, to use public transport rather than
private vehicles – will not resolve the crisis. The question
of ‘how can we maximise profits?’ currently gets priority. This
short-termism has prevented progress on a whole range of
environmental issues. Which methods are sustainable?
Environmentalists rightly show how many of our current methods of
production are not ‘sustainable’ in that they damage the
environment for future generations and they have offered many
alternatives. Such methods could only be used to their full when we
remove the market forces that drive producers to the short-term,
cheap methods.
Capitalism
depends on the drive for profits, which must take priority over
everything else. Capitalists compete with each other in the market
place and have to keep their costs to a minimum, otherwise they may
lose out to their competitors and their businesses may fail. Green
measures that may increase business costs will have to be ignored.
Nation-states face the same pressures, as they compete on global
markets. Governments, which look after the interests of their
respective capitalists, seek to protect their lucrative extractive
industries. For capitalism, the natural world is an unwanted
hindrance to expansion and growth and the ravaging of ecosystems it
is of no consequence to capitalism if it means increased profit and
productivity. This concern for profits before people is perfectly
permissible under capitalism.
We,
the working people, must organise quickly to plan production in a
rational environmentally friendly way according to human need.
Capitalism’s relentless conditioning of people to believe that the
way to happiness and fulfilment is the consumerist-obsessed
acquisition of more stuff would be a forgotten malaise of the past,
the idea that everything needed to be led by an economy and profit an
outdated and arcane notion. Socialists no longer seek to conquer and
dominate nature but to live in harmony and in symbiotic relationships
with the world around us. Socialists are environmentalists who seek a
non-exploitative economic system that permits co-operation and
collaboration between people, and that recognises the mutual benefits
when we also fully understand the responsibilities of our stewardship
of the Earth. Our society and our way of life need to be in harmony
with nature, not always battling against it, because in a war against
the planet and nature there can only be one winner, and it will not
be us.
While
the non-violent direct action and civil dis-obedience tactics of
Extinction Rebellion may achieve limited success, at the end of the
day they will never be able to combat the motive of profit which is
the root cause of the problems they wish to ameliorate and are
destined to struggle endlessly against. Anyone who is concerned for
what is happening to our environment can now have no reason for
standing aside from the case for the abolition of capitalism and its
replacement by a social system where people are the priority. Our aim
is to sharpen the protesters’ anti-capitalist views to focus our
message that capitalism is the enemy, its politicians included and
that the capitalist system must be ended.
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