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.
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