Climate Change, System Change and Making Change

Greenpeace campaigners have boarded an oil rig in the north of Scotland as it was being towed out to sea and are staging a protest on board.  The protesters are calling for BP to end the drilling for new oil wells and say they are prepared to stay onboard the rig for days.

Jo, a Greenpeace activist from Scotland who is aboard the rig, said: “Warm words flow from BP on their commitment to tackling climate change, yet this rig – and the 30m barrels it seeks to drill – are a sure sign that BP are committed to business as usual, fuelling a climate emergency that threatens millions of lives and the future of the living world. We can’t let that happen – that’s why we’re here today.The government may be bent on draining the North Sea of every last drop of oil, but this clearly contradicts their climate commitments. The perverse idea we must maximise our oil and gas reserves cannot continue.

“That means the government must seriously reform the Oil and Gas Authority and instead invest heavily in the crucial work of helping oil communities like those in Scotland move from fossil fuels to the industries that will power our low carbon future.”

The human species faces a grave threat. During the last hundred years more irreversible damage has been done to the natural environment by human action than in any previous period in recorded history. Rarely a day goes by when our attention is not drawn to the various issues of environmental degradation and how the increase in human activity is impacting on large areas of the natural environment globally. Among these are increased carbon emissions, global warming and climate change. Humans are not destroying the planet, merely hastening its change and their own demise if they destroy and poison the environment that supports human and other animal species. The planet will continue to survive in one form or another. We live in a world, run entirely on capitalist principles. Simply put, everything has to turn a profit at each stage of the line, otherwise it is worthless, expendable. Raw materials, production, packaging, transportation, marketing, point of sale, with labour at every step, all need their profit in order for a transaction to be viable. Businesses talk comfortingly about self-regulation, greening their corporate image and spending money on advertising campaigns in placing the onus squarely on the consumer’s shoulders. They are the ones initially who, in great numbers, will bear the brunt of the effects of global warming. Corporations have no interest in nil returns, only in repeat business. And loyalty is as long-lived as profit, corporate allegiance to which will trump allegiance to any flag.

The motive for production under capitalism is making a profit. In order for goods to be manufactured or services to be provided, they must result in a reasonable amount of profit, otherwise they won’t be produced. A fair conclusion which comes as no surprise to anyone who understands the basic economics of capitalism is the premise that, if capitalism continues on its present course of destroying natural resources by continuing to ignore the real “costs” of the negative effects on the natural environmental and human health, in the long-term it will lose out big time. But capitalism is not a rational system when you consider that the capitalist class have their own agenda which is totally blind to the creation of a common interest. The only interest the capitalist class have is to obtain profits through the quickest and easiest way possible so that the accumulation of capital continues. A fundamental contradiction of capitalism is that although the capitalist have a common interest — as a class — to cooperate to keep the system going, by necessity they also have to compete within the market. If they don’t compete they go under or are at best taken over by other capitalists. This built-in rivalry between the sections of the capitalist class always results in casualties in some form or another. At one end we have the everyday casualties of lay-offs and redundancies. Whilst at the other end from time to time inter-capitalist rivalry erupts into a full scale war – with extensive human casualties, refugees, communities being destroyed – and extensive damage to the environment and the destruction of wealth on a tremendous scale.

If market forces essentially cause and create environmental damage by literally encouraging an irrational human impact, how can you realistically expect those self-same forces to solve it? This conundrum will almost certainly intensify if globalisation picks up pace and the competition gets even tougher for the possession of scarce resources, especially energy and water. But the conundrum does not end there since the system of capitalism is also dependent on economic growth and the accumulation of capital on a larger and larger global scale. When confronted by barriers of environmental legislation which are designed to diminish the rate of expected profits and the accumulation of capital, the capitalists will do what they have always done in their search for short-term profits: finding or creating loopholes, moving the goalposts, corrupting officials, trying to bribe the local population with empty promises, or shifting the whole concern to an area or region where a more favourable reception is expected and profits maintained.

Socialists conclude that in a class-divided society where the means of living are used to serve the interests of the owners of private property any talk of finding a ‘common interest’, so that there is a change of course of market forces and consequently a greening of capitalism, is a fool’s errand. We have, therefore, consistently argued that, where classes exist, there are class divisions in the production and distribution of wealth with the subsequent inequality manifesting itself in a class struggle between two classes with diametrically opposed interests. Arising out of this analysis we recognise the need for a majority of the workers to actively engage in a political struggle to bring about a revolutionary change in the social relationships — from private property ownership to a system of common ownership, a society of free access where wage slavery has been abolished, money is obsolete, hierarchical structures pointless, class laws transformed into social rules, and production is geared to satisfying human needs. Only when we are living in such a society will we be in a position to minimise any environmental damage caused by human activity. Once we have reach this stage in human development and social evolution — where our interaction with the natural environment not only enhances our understanding of ourselves but also converges with a social recognition that we are as much dependent on nature as is nature dependent on us — so we will be able to start to tackle a rational clean up of the environmental damage which capitalism will have left in its wake.