Root Causes and Radical Solutions

The world is still far from being on track to meet the goals of the Paris agreement on climate change, which would require emissions to peak then fall rapidly to reach net-zero by mid-century. Emissions for this year will be 4% higher than those in 2015, when the Paris agreement was signed. Experts said it was much too early to take the slight slowdown in emissions growth this year as a sign the world was turning a corner in the climate emergency.

Joeri Rogeli, a lecturer in climate change at the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London, said: “The small slowdown this year is really nothing to be overly enthusiastic about. If no structural change underlies this slowdown, science tells us that emissions will simply gradually continue to increase on average.”

Corinne Le Quéré, a research professor at the University of East Anglia, said, “Current climate and energy policies are too weak to reverse trends in global emissions.” 

Glen Peters, research director at the Cicero Centre for International Climate Change Research and lead author of the Global Carbon Budget papers, said: “The weak growth in carbon dioxide emissions in 2019 was due to an unexpected decline in global coal use, but this drop was insufficient to overcome the robust growth in natural gas and oil consumption.”

Last week, a separate report found emissions would have to fall by 7.6% a year for the next 10 years to stay within the limits advised by scientists.

If the climate emergency demands radical action, what are they? Unless the core problem is addressed, things will get worse. The Socialist Party argues that many environment activists completely ignore the way capitalism operates, and must operate, and therefore their policies are hopelessly utopian. We go further and say they mis-educate people to think that an improved capitalism might still succeed to avoid ecological and economic catastrophe.

The Socialist Party does not hold any faith that capitalists, or their parliamentary servants, will act in time to mitigate climate change in a meaningful way. When say a revolution is required and we make our call for socialism, the answer we hear is that the lesser evil of piecemeal reforms will take less time to achieve than our goal of socialism. There is unlikely ever going to be a government which will pass the necessary effective legislation and instead will issue a few minor cosmetic reforms.

The present capitalist system is driven by the struggle for profit. The present system’s need for infinite growth and the finite resources of Earth stand in contradiction to each other. Successful operation of the system means growth or maximising profit, it means that nature as a resource will be exploited ruthlessly. The present destruction of the planet is rooted in the capitalist system of production and cannot be solved without a complete break with capitalism. Yet ending capitalism is something that to many environmentalists do not appear to be prepared to consider, they are only attacking the symptoms rather than the cause. They see their green capitalism as a type of capitalism worth fighting for. The Socialist Party see the need to create a different form of society before the present system destroys us all. The entire system of production based on wage labour and capital needs to be replaced with a system which produces for human needs. All the half-measures of converting aspects of capitalism to limit the damage to the environment, while the fundamentals of capitalism remain in place, are just wishful thinking, and to pretend they could solve our problems is self-deception on a grand scale.

Accumulation of capital is an imperative of the exchange economy. New products must be produced, new technology invested, existing markets must be expanded and new markets created, new ways to externalise costs (under capitalism businesses pushes costs on to others. If a firm pollutes, then it saves money on costs if the community has to deal with the consequences and so gains a competitive edge on the market. This process is called "externalities" in economics jargon) onto the working people and nature found - all in the interest of securing more profits and, as always,  working families pays the price with their health. It is an irrational system where the bottom line is profit.

The market is not a democratic people-managed economy. It runs according to its own economic laws, which it imposes on businesses though competition. To repeat: it drives the economy toward accumulation, increasing growth, greater profits, and continual expansion. Its law is grow-or-die.

This has at least three important effects.

For one, an economy built on continuous growth must be in conflict with natural ecologies which require harmony, balance and stability. Capitalism treats nature as an bottomless pit to be mined, where  resources are apparently free gifts. This is true whether the business is big or small.

A second effect is the inevitable tendency of smaller businesses to grow into larger ones. The drive to accumulate more than its competitors pushes each firm to grow as big as it can. So even if capitalism (or any other imagined competitive economy) were to magically be returned to its original state of small firms, it would once again grow into gigantic monopolistic corporations.

Third, through its drive to accumulate, capitalism produces a work force which must be exploited. If the working class got back all that it produced, then there would be no capitalist accumulation. Capitalism challenges any chance of industrial democracy. 

 Clearly, neither governments nor corporations are prepared to take the necessary steps to change course from our current catastrophic direction towards real, sustainable alternatives. We can only achieve a sustainable world if we work to build a genuinely sustainable economy, one that produces for need and not to blindly accumulate profits with terrible results for the environment. The fact is that before production can be carried out in sustainable and ecologically benign ways means capitalism has to go. Production for profit and the uncontrollable drive to accumulate more and more capital mean that capitalism is by its very nature incapable of taking ecological considerations into account properly. It is futile to try to make it do so.

The politicians tell us that "we" have to make sacrifices now to avert future catastrophe. The most obvious question in a system where power and wealth unequally distributed is what sacrifice will the corporate investor make compared to, say, someone trying to make ends meet? The reality is that the ruling class, their state and corporations are responsible for the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions.

If we allow the capitalists to continue to control the situation, as in the past, the wholly destructive path will continue. The struggle for a planet we can continue to live on is the struggle for socialism. A sustainable society that is capable of addressing climate change can only be achieved within a world where all the Earth’s resources, natural and industrial, are under the common ownership of us all, as well as being under democratic control. Capitalism should be replaced by a society which is cooperative, producing for use rather than profit, democratically self-managed in the workplace and the community, and federated together from the local level to regional and global levels. This is socialism

CAPITALISM IS UNSUSTAINABLE