Things
are going to get worse from an ecological point of view as long as
capitalism is allowed to continue. Capitalism does indeed risk a
descent into barbarism, the beginnings of which can already be seen.
The Socialist Party has always argued the need for working people to
take conscious political action to create the framework of common
ownership and democratic control of the means and methods of
production and distribution, as the only way in which the social
problems like carbon emissions and global warming can be tackled.
Capitalists only adopt new technologies, working methods or products
when it is profitable to do so, not because the existing ones happen
to be polluting the planet. What would shareholders say to a board of
directors which introduced costly machinery or practices if it meant
that the company lost its competitive advantage and market share. A
society which was not constrained by private property, commodity
production and buying and selling would use as a matter of course the
best possible technology at hand to ensure the safety of those
working in the plants and the protection of the natural environment.
Social cost would be the deciding factor, not commercial cost.
Capitalism is unable to do this.
The
Socialist Party does not need to be convinced that a “green
capitalism” is nonsense. That’s been our case against the Green
Party and campaigning environmentalist groups like Friends of the
Earth and Greenpeace from when they first made their appearance on
the political scene in the 1970s and 1980s. A green capitalism is
just as much a pipedream as an ethical capitalism or, as we have been
saying for ages, a capitalism reformed to benefit the workers. The
only possible capitalism is the one we’ve got: a profit-maximising
one. Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is
predicated on infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and
bigger production in a finite planet. And yet this ideological model
remains the central organising principle of our lives, and as long as
it continues to be so it will automatically undo (with its invisible
hand) every single green initiative anybody cares to come up with.
Much discussion of energy, with never a word about power, leads to
the fallacy of a low-impact, green capitalism somehow put at the
service of environmentalism. In reality, power concentrates around
wealth. Private ownership of trade and industry means that the
decisive political force in the world is private power. The
corporation will outflank every puny law and regulation that seeks to
constrain its profitability. This has nothing to do with personal
greed on the part of individual capitalists. It’s
something that is built-in to the system which those having to take
decisions about economic matters have to abide by or risk the
business they own or manage going under.
The
Socialist Party does not preach pessimism and hold a belief that
humanity can build a better future—but only as long as it takes
steps to replace capitalism by a world socialist society
A
worker in Britain consumes a finite amount of food, clothing,
accommodation, travel and entertainment but we can see no reason why,
given the mobilisation of the world’s resources to that end,
similar amounts could not be provided for everyone anywhere in the
world. The mistake often made is to take
the total amount of resources consumed in Britain and divide it by
the population and then multiply the result by total world
population. This gives an enormous figure for resource consumption
that may well not be sustainable. However, this figure is meaningless
as it is invalid to assume that all the resources used in Britain are
consumed in producing the finite amount of goods consumed by the
working class here. Resources consumed in Britain at the moment
include the waste of capitalism, which is enormous. The waste, for a
start, of arms industry and the military forces. Then there’s the
waste of the whole system of buying and selling (the armies of
accountants, salespeople, ticket collectors, bank clerks, etc,) and
of administering the capitalist system (the armies of civil servants
devising, collecting, recording taxes and paying out subsidies and
benefits). Finally, there’s the waste of planned obsolescence, of
producing shoddy goods designed not to last too long, and of not
recycling.
How
extensive is this waste? The most conservative estimate is that it
amounts to 50 percent, i.e. that only half of the present-day
resource consumption in Britain is devoted to directly satisfying
people’s needs, the other 50 percent being costs that are incurred
solely because this is taking place in a capitalist exchange economy.
Others have put the waste figure as high as 90 percent. Whatever the
figure, socialism being a society of direct production to satisfy
people’s needs without money could economise on the resources used
up on these on costs of capitalism.
In
regard to resources some seem to think that these are fixed and that
we are near their limits but this is by no means the
case. Figures show that, for instance, food production could be
increased so as to adequately feed twice the world’s present
population of 7 billion. Existing resources could also be made to go
further by making things to last longer, by repairable standardised
spare parts, better storage facilities, recycling and by the adoption
on a wholesale scale of the ecologically-sustainable technology
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