Earth Day to May Day: Targeting Exploitation and Ecocide
Posted by onehundredflowers on April 22, 2011
Kasama is publishing a series of articles this week on the destruction of the environment and socialist solutions. This statement was originally on the site for One Struggle an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist initiative in South Florida.
“Clearly, a global economic system based on perpetual expansion is unsustainable.
“A system characterized by oppression and coercion is pure misery for the majority. The obvious conclusion is that we need to get rid of it, and change to a way of life that doesn’t involve exploitation and ecocide.
“But first we must face one hard fact: this system won’t stop unless it’s stopped. It can not be escaped, reformed, redeemed, cajoled, abandoned, or rejected.”
“Let’s unite and organize to destroy global capitalism, before it destroys us.”
* * * * * * *
Unite Our Struggles Against Exploitation and Ecocide
Our Planet, Our People, Are Not Expendable
Our Common Enemy Is Global Capitalism
Capitalism is the economic system that dominates the planet. It runs on the exploitation of human labor to turn the living world into dead commodities, for the profit of a few. The small, powerful minority who own the means of production enforce their dominance through their control over political and cultural institutions, and their monopoly on force. They create a situation of dependency—forcing us to work for them to obtain basic needs like food and shelter. They annihilate those who resist or refuse to assimilate.
This system values profit over life itself. It has been built on land theft and destruction, genocide, slavery, deforestation and imperialist wars. It commits numberless atrocities as a matter of routine daily functioning. It kills nearly 10 million children worldwide under age 5 each year, because it’s not profitable to save them.* It kills 100,000 people annually in the US by denying decent health care. More than 54% of the US discretionary budget is spent on imperialist aggression. Recent casualties include more than a million civilians in Iraq, and more than 46,000 American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. The economic and psychological violence wrought upon the world’s inhabitants is so extensive and comprehensive that it’s effectively all-encompassing.
The system is killing the entire planet, the basis for all life. It’s converted 98% of old growth forests into lumber. 80% of rivers worldwide no longer support life. 94% of the large fish in the oceans are gone. Phytoplankton, the tiny plants that produce half of the oxygen we breathe, have declined by 40% since 1950. 120 species per day become extinct.
Industries produce 400 million tons of hazardous waste every year. Recently, the water in 89% of US cities tested has been found to contain the carcinogen hexavalent chromium. To feed capitalism’s insatiable need for economic expansion, increasingly dangerous methods of energy extraction are being perpetrated: deep sea drilling, oil extraction from tar sands, mountaintop removal, fracking. No matter the consequences, no matter what the majority of people may want, those in power insist on (and enforce) their non-negotiable right to poison the land, water and air in pursuit of maximum profit.
The threat to our common existence on Earth is accelerating and intensifying. This is a situation of extreme urgency.
Clearly, a global economic system based on perpetual expansion is unsustainable. A system characterized by oppression and coercion is pure misery for the majority. The obvious conclusion is that we need to get rid of it, and change to a way of life that doesn’t involve exploitation and ecocide. But first we must face one hard fact: this system won’t stop unless it’s stopped. It can not be escaped, reformed, redeemed, cajoled, abandoned, or rejected. The system must be fought, defeated and dismantled.
The global economy is currently falling deeper into a convergence of deep crises. This presents us with a rare opportunity to build resistance. More than an opportunity, this is also a necessity, and our responsibility. This situation is crying out for action.
Yet inside the U.S., the most aggressive and destructive imperialist nation to ever exist, our movement is weak and fragmented, unable to adequately respond. Our habitual modes of opposition (like protests and demonstrations) no longer seem to work in the ways they once did, and we are unsure how to best proceed. Currently there is no organizational formation that is capable of engaging this situation on the scale that is required. Yet there are countless individuals and small groups who, though we may disagree on much, share the desire for a sustainable, classless alternative to this omnicidal system.
If we are to survive, we must develop ways to work together to combat global capitalism and its crimes, and ultimately bring it down. Individually we are weak and ineffective; together we are strong. We must build a movement that embraces our political and ideological diversity, and our independent autonomy, while creating mechanisms for common and complementary action. The struggles to end all forms of domination, oppression and ecocide are intertwined. If we can unite our energies, we will increase our chances for success.
Let’s unite and organize to destroy global capitalism, before it destroys us.
***
* Most of these children die from easily preventable and treatable causes such as birth complications, diarrhea, pneumonia, measles and malnutrition. State of the World’s Mothers 2008: Closing the Survival Gap for Children Under 5, Save the Children.
Roxanne Amico said
Thanks for posting this. The author is not named. Didn’t Stephanie McMillan write it?
Michael Valentine said
Capitalism is nothing more or nothing less then anti-Christ in nature. It values the material over the human. Jesus taught us that there is only one master for us and gives us a choice in the matter. It is either God or money.
I am a liberal Christian, we feed and clothe the poor and treat our neighbors as we would like to be treated.
onehundredflowers said
@Roxanne Amico, if you go to their website, you’ll see that this statement is not attributed to an individual author.
Roxanne Amico said
At One Hundred Flowers–Oh, Sorry! Thanks for that clarification!
Stephanie McMillan said
Hi Roxanne,
I did write the original version, and then we (I’m a member of One Struggle) worked on it collectively, made some revisions until we united on the content, and issued it as a group statement.
Keith said
I know it has become holy scripture that environmentalists and the Left should unite but, and I know it is not a popular opinion, I think that environmentalism is an unbearable burden on the revolutionary left and it creates a tremendous amount of confusion in our analysis, our understanding of history, and our understanding of our goal.
here are three brief problems: globalization, large scale production, and communism and material abundance.
The creation of the world market is a good and necessary thing, it is one of the progressive features of capitalism and it is the foundation of international working class solidarity. It gives production and consumption the cosmopolitan character that Marx and Engels describe in the Manifesto and it allows us to overcome “rural idiocy.”
Environmentalists are usually suspicious not only of globalization but large scale production in general, and they advocate for local production and consumption. In addition to requiring a police apparatus that would make Stalin blush (how else can you enforce “local production” which is really a ban on trade and movement), the demand for local production and consumption is backwards (as opposed to progressive) romanticizing the small scale production of a bygone era.
The attack on economic growth reveals a failure to understand that socialism is the outcome of capitalist development. Capitalism is a historical necessity because we need material abundance to undermine the material foundations of class difference.
jp said
material abundance for all is now concretely possible; however, some aspects of deformed civilizations (transportation systems of individual vehicles, as an example) will not be possible.
i’d also strongly take issue with malthusian environmentalists who think population control is the way forward. there’s nothing more human than procreation…
brendan DPM said
Keith: If capitalism is ecologically insupportable, e.i. if the actual scientific facts about the ability of the physical systems that are the basis of biological life contradict the social and economic relations of capitalism, then any socialism that simply translates those aspects of capitalism which are ecologically insupportable will also be so. And that simply means that it will lead to disaster. You cannot destroy the basis of your own existence and ignore ecological facts because their is a valid Marxist argument for doiing so.
We may have disagreements with the environmentalist movements, but we have no right to bracket the science of ecology as simply part of their po. If we dont like how. And that includes delimiting the forms of a revolutionary alternative that both accords with ecological reality about the finitude of nature and refuses the authoritarian utopias of various localisms and primitivisms.
There is a materialist way of doing just this. For instance, we can make the case that the massive waste of resources created by the transport costs in the global commodity is at least partly the result of capitalism’s serach for the cheapest possible labour, and that a rational plan would reduce and ‘localise’ alot of that wasteful movement. We can make the case that the greatest part of the pollutants in out ecosystem and in our bodies which lead to extinction, disruption and sky-spiralling incidences of cancer, are the result of cheapest bottom-line production and the the entire scientific system of capitalism is geared to produce profitable ends, not socially desirable ends. We could make very good arguments for the turning over of such massive resources to democratic and social control.
There is an overwhelming body of evidence that the earth is heading towards a massive extinction event the equal of any in its past, and that is direct anthropegenic. Even if humanity survives, we will survive in a wasteland, robbed of all the ‘free’ services of the ecosystem provides the economy and our psychology, where scarcity will utterly abound. Not presenting an alternative to such an outcome, which is a direct result of the theory and practice of capitalism and its boosters, would be criminal for a revolutionary movement with any pretensions to relevance. Why should we present ourselves as the bold inheritors of the ant-nature, no-limits, instrumentalist, autistic, ruthless, bash-nature-into-the-mould-of-desire philosophies that have dominated from the dawn of capitalism, when there is such a massive call for something else? When not only ecologists, but feminists, indigenous peoples, the peasant movements, the movements of the landless and a significant sections of our own socialist and communist movements demand recognition of the need for something else?
Ecology is already in the mix of left politics. In Bolivia. In South Africa. In the US. Everywhere.
Besides, your view of deterministic progress from capitalism to socialism is not only superficial and mechanical, it results in an idea of socialism so fundamentally equivocal on the issue of how many horrors, ecological, sociological, psychological, aesthetic, socialism can be allowed to carry over from capitalism as to be useless.
brendan DPM said
Capitalism leads to socialism because it produces the contradictions that make the latter necessary and feasible. Ecological crisis and enlightened environmentalism are amongst those contradictions.
That is the zero-level absolute of debate.
Reginald said
I’m of the opinion that only using capitalism’s great potential to motivate can we possibly tackle the environmental issues that face us. The time is too short to foment the kind of alterations you guys are talking about, we have to just act through the capitalist system to get this done.
feudeprairie said
That’s it. Capitalism is deeply opposed to biosphere. The only political way which preserve the planet by economical planification is socialism.
Roxanne Amico said
Keith wrote…:
>The creation of the world market is a good and necessary thing, it is one of the progressive features of capitalism and it is the foundation of international working class solidarity. It gives production and consumption the cosmopolitan character that Marx and Engels describe in the Manifesto and it allows us to overcome “rural idiocy.”Environmentalists are usually suspicious not only of globalization but large scale production in general, and they advocate for local production and consumption.<
Environmentalists, as part of the revolution, understand several CRUCIAL points from this article, which is this: "…This system values profit over life itself. It has been built on land theft and destruction, genocide, slavery, deforestation and imperialist wars. It commits numberless atrocities as a matter of routine daily functioning. It kills nearly 10 million children worldwide under age 5 each year, because it’s not profitable to save them.* It kills 100,000 people annually in the US by denying decent health care. More than 54% of the US discretionary budget is spent on imperialist aggression. Recent casualties include more than a million civilians in Iraq, and more than 46,000 American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. The economic and psychological violence wrought upon the world’s inhabitants is so extensive and comprehensive that it’s effectively all-encompassing….The system is killing the entire planet, the basis for all life. It’s converted 98% of old growth forests into lumber. 80% of rivers worldwide no longer support life. 94% of the large fish in the oceans are gone. Phytoplankton, the tiny plants that produce half of the oxygen we breathe, have declined by 40% since 1950. 120 species per day become extinct….Industries produce 400 million tons of hazardous waste every year…"
If the revolution is to happen at all, one point of unification that will be necessary is to respect that those identified as environmentalists *Have Critical Information* needed for making decisions about the material, physical world upon which all our lives depend.
Keith said
I am not proposing that we disrespect environmentalist.
I just want to make two points.
First, many basic assumptions of environmentalists are not compatible with the kind of social, economic, and political development that is a prerequisite for socialism. The neo-primitivists are just the most extreme end of the spectrum of incompatibility — they are reactionary by definition.
Second, the environment is not in revolutionary contradiction with capitalist development. There is nothing inherent in capitalist development that makes it incompatible with environmental protection. Quite the opposite, it will likely provide many capitals a whole new arena for new rounds of capital accumulation. There are plenty of capitalists who are as passionate about the environment as your run-of-the-mill Earth Firster. In other words, environmentalism is necessarily reformist movement.
If you read Marx his theory of revolution is straight forward. He argues that the only limit to capitalist development is the capitalist social relationship, in other words: “the only limit to capital is capital.”
The idea, which he states simply in the, much maligned, “Preface, To a Contribution to Political Economy” is that the development of human power — our ability to produce material wealth, the productive power of human labor, in a word: the productive forces — is radically advanced by capitalist social relations for a period of time and at a certain point the further development of human power is blocked (or “fettered”) by those capitalist social relations. That is the revolutionary contradiction that compels us to discard capitalism and adopt a new social organization.
Marx develops this idea at great length in the three volumes of Das Kapital. The germ of the idea is in the opening analysis of the commodity, in volume one, and the full blown revolutionary contradiction is analysed in Marx’s theory of the falling rate of profit, in volume 3.
Here is the famous passage from the “Preface:”
“At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.”
zerohour said
Keith said: ” He [Marx] argues that the only limit to capitalist development is the capitalist social relationship, in other words: “the only limit to capital is capital.” ”
I’ve heard the argument that if one looks at the environmental crisis as a question of technology, then capitalism can solve it but only at such a great social cost that people would find it intolerable. If this is so, wouldn’t this still provide grounds for revolution?
I admit, I haven’t seen this type of argument deeply elaborated so if anyone is familiar with it as well as a critique of it, I’d be interested in knowing more.
Keith said
Zerohour, I am not sure if there is a specific argument out there but I think we can think it through.
There are two possible solutions to the environmental crisis (lets assume it is a crisis).
First, We could scale back production and consumption as a way to protect the environment –this is a popular proposition among environmentalists. This idea should be dismissed out of hand because it requires the entire global population to make a self sacrificing choice. Good luck with that. Jesus had a good idea too: “love your neighbour like yourself.” If everyone did that the world would be dandy too.
The only real possibility is a technological solution. But I am not sure what would be intolerable about new technology that is clean and that can clean the environment. And if it is intolerable, like people have to give up automobiles for some system of public transportation and they get pissed off, what would revolutionaries propose instead? The only thing that I can imagine being intolerable is some scaling back of consumption. But I think that a technological solution avoids that unhappy outcome and if it were indeed a necessary feature of environmental protection revolutionaries would have to accept it too.
History can teach us two things here.
First, throughout history people had apocalyptic visions (the book of revelations is old and it is not unique). The world is always about to end for some reason or other. This is especially the case around the turn of the century and double at the turn of the millennia. I think that a good argument can be made that environmentalism is just a part of a long line of apocalyptic thinking (What ever happened to Y2K? Everyone running around talking about the end is nigh and nothing happens and they dont even get a slice of humble pie!). There is something in our nature, probably having to do with self awareness of our own mortality, that causes us to project an end to all of existence.
Second, since the beginning of political economy people thought that capitalism would be undermined by some environmental cause outside of the system. Marx always argued against them.
David Ricardo, whom Marx admired and studied with care, believed that the profit rate would fall because as capital expanded it would require more workers and eventually it would be impossible to feed the growing population. Ricardo believed that there were agricultural limits to capital. Marx rejected this view. He said, Ricardo had abandoned the science of political economy and had taken up organic chemistry.
When burning wood was the primary source energy “peak wood” theories were everywhere.
As the price of oil rises alternatives to fossil fuels will come to market, it is certainly worthwhile to insist that these be clean but that is simply a matter of social democratic regulation of the market. A reform.
Stephanie McMillan said
Keith, yes, capitalist productive relations are in fact in contradiction with the natural world. You are leaving out resources as one of the three elements of the productive forces (tools, human labor, and materials). Resources are not infinite. They weren’t emphasized in earlier eras because there was still fresh land to conquer — their depletion wasn’t yet acute, so the question could be kicked forward into the future (which is now).
I think resources may be surpassing, or may have already surpassed the development of tools as the driving force of history. There is no level of technology that can bring back what is gone. When natural resources were plentiful, then we lived in abundance. We used it all up and traded it for industrially produced stuff, and called that wealth. This isn’t just an ethical argument (though it is one) — it’s also just a fact. We depend on the natural world for our material existence.
Scaling back production is not inherently reactionary. What’s going to drive history backwards (but to a much worse place than we started) is the lack of ability of industry to expand because of the decline of resources. Capital is being driven toward ever more desperate measures to keep production up in the face of resource depletion, evidenced by its increasing willingness to bring the consequences home from the periphery and poison its own workforce.
It’s too bad we’ve destroyed the abundance we once had, which is why most of the world is suffering scarcity already. It will get worse if capital is allowed to use up the last natural resources. No magical new technology can replace water, soil or air.
Keith said
Stephanie, if you reconsider what I wrote in #15 you will see that I included resources. David Ricardo, the bourgeois political economist who Marx considered in the highest regard, believed that capitalist development would end because of limited resources.
Marx proved him wrong, in theory, and subsequent development proved him wrong in practice.
Not all resources as finite. For example, the sun is infinite (for all intents and purposes– if you want to worry about the demise of the sun then I would leave the discussion there), the wind is infinite, geothermal energy is infinite.
I already mentioned that when wood was a primary fuel source there was a lot of worry about the finite nature of wood, but lo and behold new technology allowed for the use of new resources.
In other words, this is an old argument and technology always wins in practice.
====================
On a different point, Stephanie, when you say we had “abundance” and “material wealth” I think were are using the term in a different way. Material wealth is a relative term. I had blueberries with my breakfast this morning as I often do. I never had them with breakfast in April as a kid because it wasn’t even possible. The richest and most powerful people in history couldn’t have blueberries with breakfast everyday of the year until quiet recently. That is material wealth. I can buy spices at the supermarket for a few dollars. Spices that were previously only available in certain locales or to the very wealthiest. That is material wealth.
Indoor plumbing, electric light, the ability to travel great distances, ipods, lap top computers, etc. that is material wealth.
You may want to say that a clean beach or an old redwood tree is material wealth. I would agree but that doesn’t take away from the fact that a strawberry in feburary in the northeast is wealth too.
Abundance means that these things are available to everyone. Can everyone on the planet have a car? Probably not (that does not take away from the fact that cars are very very cool machines) so we will have to come up with something else. That doesn’t mean we have to live in caves and warm ourselves by fire.
What the Left should do is unite with the futurists. There are a lot of people who are seriously considering the social consequences of Moore’s law and technological development in general.
I think we should get away from the backwards looking environmentalist and look to the future.’
here is a good talk by Ray Kurzweil:
RW Harvey said
Sadly, Keith, you and Kurzweil are preaching the age-old religious immortality fantasy. My god, RK’s “Singularity” imagines nanotechnology blending with humans to make us immortal machines with our personalities somewhere intact. There is an entire industry dedicated to immortality striving, heaven now on earth. Folks are looking to download their personalities; the cryogenic chambers are still pumping freon. Hell, people are seeing immortality online as people wonder about their virtual legacy (Facebook, Utube, etc.) after they die.
It is completely one-sidied to say that technology always wins, especially if you leave out the cost of said winning its really easy to make the claim. What is the cost of so-called wealth of blueberries in wintry northeast in terms of the footprint? In terms of the ideological reinforcement that all is possible, that there is no end. Is it not a fact that since WW2 the vast majority of our so-called technological progress has been inventing things to clean up the previous technology that has gone awry and that other uses have been near afterthoughts? What a world!
If you want to turn Marxism into another immortality fantasy, with the teleogical narrative of endless technological progress leading to our immersion in endless abundance, then go ahead. At that level it becomes another way of promising the masses that there will never be any sacrifice, any limits to pay heed to. You have just joined a long line of theories promising heaven and you have apparently jettisioned any concern for the ecosystem by oyur belief in the deus ex machina of technological progress pulling us from the brink.
I have no intention of rasing the red flag over some dystopia.
Tell me how this outlook is any different than that of the capitalists? And please leave off the preface that “the people will be in control” –let’s go a bit deeper than that.
Roxanne Amico said
Keith wrote:
Actually, Keith, it’s a *privilege* based on theft, a theft from the generations of the future who will be denied the redwood tree and the clean beach, because, as this article calling for unity against further such theft-based destruction reads, this kind of [what you call] “wealth” is only possible “…To feed capitalism’s insatiable need for economic expansion, increasingly dangerous methods of energy extraction are being perpetrated: deep sea drilling, oil extraction from tar sands, mountaintop removal, fracking…”
You are fond of Marx and theoretical frameworks to make your points. You *Say* you [are] “not proposing that we disrespect environmentalist.”, but your lack of acknowledgement of what radcial environmentalists know and bring to the fore IS by definition a sheer dismissal. Even your first sentence is a blithe dismissal of the need to unite, when you write, “I know it has become holy scripture that environmentalists and the Left should unite but, and I know it is not a popular opinion, I think that environmentalism is an unbearable burden on the revolutionary left”
Then, you really ought to educate yourself beyond what you think you already know, while there is time, and get more acquainted with the living physical world, the material reality that Marx revered, too… As for trees being renewable with technology, to what planet and what trees are you referring? What sources?
And finally, you wrote “I think that a good argument can be made that environmentalism is just a part of a long line of apocalyptic thinking”
You haven’t and cannot make that case.
Roxanne Amico said
Thanks for fixing my comment, moderator. I’ll happily welcome some lessons on “tagging” and coding properly! :)
Keith said
RW Harvey, you only argue that Kurweil’s claims are fantastic. But that doesn’t refute them.
I wasn’t arguing that we should accept his more extravagant claims (although they have a logic that apocalyptic claims do not). What Kurzweil shows convincingly, because it is evidenced based, is that technological change is exponential, and so when you are looking at a problem you won’t understand it if you assume static or linear technological progression.
In other words, exponential technological progression is an empirical fact. And it is a fact that we must account for when we make an analysis.
In the talk Kurzweil mentions concerns about “deflation” as a result of rapid technological change. What he is talking about without realizing it is the tendency for the profit rate to fall that Marx explained. The falling rate of profit is an effect caused by technological innovation.
I am not turning “Marxism into another immortality fantasy, with the teleogical narrative of endless technological progress leading to our immersion in endless abundance” because first, that is basically what Marx described. In other words, if you bothered to read Marx you would know that Marx provides a teleological narrative about technological progress leading to communist utopia. I am being crude and simplistic but all our nuance is not adding clarity.
RW Harvey, asks how will it be different than capitalism. This gets to the crux of the issue.
Socialism, in my view and I am following Marx here, is about abolishing the exploitation of human labor. The abolitionists wanted to abolish chattel slavery. Socialists want to abolish wage slavery. Abolishing exploitation is the central thing everything else is window dressing. If you dont deal with the exploitation of labor you will not transcend capitalism — by definition. Revolution is not revolution if it does not abolish capitalism and you can’t abolish capitalism without abolishing exploitation.
Exploitation occurs when the person doing the work does not control the labor process, the product of the labor and its distribution.
Capitalism is the most advanced form of labor exploitation. Previous forms were slavery and feudalism. And yes, by and by, one form of exploitation follows another in a historical sequence based on new technologies. Oh my, the postmodernist are wrong, it is telological….
The central question of socialism is the elimination of labor exploitation. But exploitation can ONLY be eliminated if there is the technological capacity to produce a material abundance (not an abundance of Redwood trees –as nice as they are– but an abundance of the things human beings need and want).
If you oppose the development the technology that makes material abundance possible then you are opposing, unwittingly or not, the end of human exploitation.
Korzweil is showing that we are approaching the capacity for abundance. And if we actually read Marx we would know that as we approach the point where abundance is possible we will be in revolutionary waters.
The continued development of the forces of production coming into conflict with the existing relations of production and people becoming conscious of the contradiction and fighting it out. Communist are supposed to have the advantage because we know it is coming. But we have traded our inheritance for a mess of locally produced sea shell necklaces.
Keith said
Roxanne, I think I wasn’t being clear. I am not against protecting the environment.
I just think it can be done within a capitalistic framework.
And I don’t think that the solutions proposed by most environmentalists are compatible with ending the exploitation of labor.
On a different note, I didnt argue that technology creates trees. I argued that because of technological development we dont need trees for fuel anymore (like wood burning stoves to heat houses).
Miss Pixie said
Keith said:
Marx acknowledged that the planet is finite and was opposed to capitalism’s degradation of the planet as this would mean it could no longer support workers. I believe this was written in either grundrisse or german ideology.
Keith said:
The means by which those energy sources are harnessed however are finite. Geothermal causes massive ecological degradation ranging from subsidence to carcinogens and is only possible within certain geological areas. Wind power is harnessed through use of turbines which require neodynium magnets. Neodynium is a rare earth metal which is difficult to isolate from other metals, and the mining, smelting and refinement of it is causing cancers and other severe ailments, including children being born with osteoparosis. Whilst new non-rare-earth metal solar technology is developing, this currently has a low energy capture rate, and the EROEI makes it an unviable means of capturing energy. Besides which, all these depend upon an industrial infrastructure, meanwhile copper and other metals and materials used for that infrastructure are both peaking and/or causing ecological and human devestation (yes i am aware of carbon nano-fibres, fruit based plastics and other electrical conductive materials – i include these in the ecological and human devastation however, finally the process from start to finish in aquiring these materials would need to not use any non-renewable materials, nor hyper-exploit renewable materials, otherwise they cannot be considered sustainable).
Any socialist/communist revolution can’t ignore the limitations of the earth – either in terms of ecological damage or in terms of resource depletion.
Finally, to everyone on this thread, the word “primitive”/”primitivism”/”primitivist” is racist towards traditional living peoples and has been used as a means/excuse of perpetrating genocide, i would prefer if it wasn’t used (and i say that to self-identified “primitivists” also, unless what they aspire to attain is the way of living witnessed 2 MA BP).
Pixie.
RW Harvey said
Wow Keith:
You read Marx and got the capitalist Cliffnotes: endless progress, technological utopia, things more valued than the environment and people, on and on.
The fact that you view communism as providing all the thngs that people “want and need” opens up an entire analysis of a worldview about what are wants and needs, what creates these needs (as in capitalist advertising and commodification of every freakin’ thing). So, tell me, comrade, how will we be spending our time? By fulfilling every twitch of the masses for the latest gadget?
The fact that you have already predicted (oh, yes, you did it by reading Marx’s tea leaves, I forgot) how it all comes out with the inevitable, teleological (and technological) ascension of communism, is so stunning as to make wonder why we even need leadership, need to aid in the transformation of consciousness, etc.
Why aren’t we there now; we have the outer shell of technology? Oh, right, I forgot, we haven’t substituted ourselves for the bourgeoisie yet.
I have no problem critiquing Marx wherever his theories bespeak a linear progression to socialism and communism. And, you, of all people critique me for not seeing the qualitative leaps within technology, yet you have somehow come to see Marxism as the linear blueprint for achieving workers’ paradise on earth instead of heaven.
You still haven’t explained “at what cost” this technological world you envision.
Finally, you write: “If you oppose the development the technology that makes material abundance possible then you are opposing, unwittingly or not, the end of human exploitation.” This is so one-sidedly whacked and misses completely the entire truth that ending exploitation is about changing social relations, not necessarily providing abundance. Of course, technology may assist in this process, and our current track record with technology (yes, we have flush toilets and electricity) is heinous and criminal in actually increasing exploitation. If folks haven’t seen the documentary “Darwin’s Nightmare,” get thee to the video store for a real look at the exploitation of human lives and the environment all under the rubric of progess, globalization, and helping people. Exploitation can also be transformed by eliminating the profit motive from production, from economies of scale, from really understanding human need as distinguished from untethered want.
Brother, Keith, stop and pause for a minute: using Marx as a rigid map regardless of analysing the terrain, is simply putting a red veneer on the globalization already taking place.
Jan Steinman said
Keith, you seem to have read Marx, but have you read Lovelock? How about Abbey? How about Carson?
You seem to be pitting “environmentalism” against people. Do you really think that human needs can be address if the environment is doing poorly? Where do you think we get our sustenance?
You write: “When burning wood was the primary source energy “peak wood” theories were everywhere,” and I’m sure you’re one of those who think Malthus was a fool.
Do you realize how many civilizations have been destroyed by their destruction of their forests? Let’s start with the Sumerians, who invented modern agriculture and who destroyed the forests of the “fertile crescent” of the Tigris and Euphrates. Then move on to the Greeks, who denuded their land to make warships. Let’s not forget the Easter Islanders, who consumed their forests in order to carve huge statues. Europe was clear-cut in the iron age to provide charcoal to all their forges.
And then there’s North America, the eastern half of which stood denuded by the mid 19th century. North American civilization stood on the brink of disaster then.
And then something Malthus could not have foreseen happened: having destroyed current forests, humans discovered how to tap into past forests from the Carboniferous Age, some 300 million years ago. The widespread adoption of fossil sunlight stopped (or at least, slowed) the slaughter of forests throughout the world.
Now we stand at the edge of an “energy cliff” once again. Will cold fusion allow us to continue our profligate ways? Will aliens from a distant galaxy descend with the gift of perpetual energy? I don’t think so — and the evidence is building up that we will not change. Already, we are pitting hungry people against SUVs, turning corn into fuel, causing “tortilla riots” in Mexico and elsewhere.
I hope you can come to understand that defending the Earth is defending her people. One will not go on without the other. Please drop this facile pitting of environment against human rights — they are one and the same.
Jan Steinman said
Keith wrote,
A man fell out of a 30th floor window. As he passed the 15th floor, someone shouted out a window at him:
“How’s it going?” the person queried.
“So far, so good!” the falling man exclaimed.
From his point of view, falling as a harmless activity was “an empirical fact.” Even financial firms, run by your beloved Capitalists, tell you that “past performance is no guarantee of future returns.”
Would you investigate the writings of HT Odum and David Holmgren? And look for CS Holling while you’re at it.
Technology is a function of energy. When you have a lot of energy, you’ll have a lot of technology. When you don’t have much energy, you won’t have much technology.
Keith also wrote
And yet, it is trees from millions of years ago that is the energy behind today’s technology.
Radical-Eyes said
I think that Keith’s initial response, which has drawn teh focus of much of the discussion since, contains two aspects, one positive and one negative. The negative aspect is by far the dominant one, but still that should not keep us from appreciating the positive.
The negative (and dominant) aspect here is that Keith seems to be almost totally either unfamiliar with and/or dismissive of the incredible amount of scientific evidence rolling in (more and more all the time it seems) establishing the acute and systemic nature of the environmental crisis on this planet.
This science, in my view, and in those of many eco-socialists, distinguishes contemporary anti-systemic environmentalism from Malthusianism and other such theories. There is evidence here that demands our attention.
This evidence regards not only resource deplation issues (peak oil, peak minerals, etc), but especially issues related to the waste produced and externalized by industrial capitalist production: carbon dioxide emmissions causing global warming and climate change, being perhaps the most obvious example.
While it is true most mainstream environmental scientists and groups don’t (yet) advocate for socialism, let alone communism, I am of the belief that these scientists own evidence suggests the necessity of moving beyond 1) perpetual economic growth and 2) the anarchy of inter-capitalist competition. It will however take a great political and ideological struggle to allow many of these scientists, as well as those who read and respect their work, to draw socialist conclusions from the evidence. So lowered are the political horizons characterizing contemporary thought in the US.
To reduce contemporary ecological science and ecosocialist critiques of capitalism, as Keith does, to just the latest form or age-old “end of days” apocalypse-think, seems to me to betray a woeful contempt for this evidence.
Of course it is possible that Keith–or others–*has* engaged the evidence, arguments, and conclusions of contemporary ecological science (and of ecosocialists) and has an immanent critique of this science that can in fact adequately support his faith in a technological and reformist approach to this impending crisis. If so, I would like to see or hear it.
[A great place to start would be with this article by Victor Wallis' "Beyond Green Capitalism" which can be found here on Kasama http://kasamaproject.org/2011/04/23/earth-day-to-may-day-beyond-%e2%80%9cgreen-capitalism%e2%80%9d/ . I would also point towards the work of Minqi Li, or other green-red writings in Monthly Review.]
As for the positive, subordinate aspect of Keith’s point: I agree with him, in a sense, that it *is* important to bear in mind that the environmentalist movement, and contemporary American culture, *is* in fact a field that includes the kind of “end of days” millenial discourse he mentions. And I think it is important for us, as communists and as materialists, not to simply turn a blind eye, or to take an opportunist line with respect to this discourse. It too needs to be compared and squared with the science and the evidence that we have available. At the same time, this “fear of the end” sentiment, should be engaged dialectally, not called out in a dogmatic scientistic tone. The point here with respect to Keith however–and others who take a similar line–is that just because their are irrational elements in a discursive field (environmentalism), doesn’t mean that entire field is reducible to irrationality. There is evidence here, and materialists need to be rigorously and critically engaging it.
Marx would, I think, demand that of we do so, even if it means qualifying, revising, or replacing any number of his cherished hypotheses and conclusions from Capital.
Keith said
I love trees too.
Let me put the problem a different way.
What ended slavery?
Slavery existed as an essential aspect of economic activity from antiquity until the 19th century.
I just heard Dinesh D’Souza advance the argument that Christianity and its idea of brotherly love rallied people to oppose slavery.
That is an idealist explanation. Slavery existed for over 2000 years and suddenly people get the idea that it is wrong– Jesus told them.
The Marxist explanation is a materialist explanation. Slavery ends at the point in history when the forces of production are developed enough to end that form of labor exploitation– the industrial revolution is the material foundation for the abolition of slavery. And it provides the basis for a new form of labor exploitation– wage slavery.
When the forces of production are developed enough people become conscious of the problem and the solution and act. Slavery didn’t “just end” people had to fight it out. Understanding that the development of productive power drives history does not mean it happens without humans acting. Quite the opposite, Marx argues we (the working class) will be compelled to act by the material reality in certain ways.
Wage-slavery will end in the same way that chattel slavery ended. When the productive forces are developed enough to make it possible it will become an irrepressible idea that moves people to act.
The environment, in my view, is a separate issue for two reasons.
One, capitalism will address the problem and the solution is perfectly available within capitalist social arrangements. It is not a revolutionary problem.
Two, environmentalists view of the good life and the best society for human beings is not one that I share. First, because imposing a no-growth economy means that we will not be able to abolish the exploitation of human labor for the reasons I laid out above and which are elementary ideas of historical materialism. In addition, a no growth economy is just an idiotic idea, it would only be possible if half of the population worked as police agents enforcing the no growth rule.
Second, I don’t romanticize pre capitalist forms of social organization. While I can appreciate the egalitarian nature of some hunter gathers I dont want to go backwards. I want to go forwards.
Jan Steinman said
Keith wrote:
The answer is much simpler than Keith’s explanation that “forces of production are developed enough.”
The answer is, slavery hasn’t ended!
Rather, we are today enslaving future generations through our energy gluttony. When we go out to our car, turn the key, and 500 “energy slaves” haul our lazy a** around town, its exactly like how ancient emperors used their slaves to get around. And the “slaves” that we burn up today will not only not be available for future generations to use, but they will be in the atmosphere, making the planet much less hospitable, by most accounts.
As Keith continues:
he shows a profound lack of understanding — or perhaps willing self-deception — as to the roots underlying economic growth.
How can an economy keep growing on a finite planet? What happens as resources dwindle? Does Keith seriously believe that the “economy” somehow exists independent of resources?
Petroleum depletion is the cause of the current, ongoing, never-to-end “Great Recession.” But if petroleum were unlimited, something else would rear its ugly head — perhaps phosphorous, which is essential to agriculture, but which is nearing the peak of extraction. Or perhaps it would be copper — by all accounts, about one-third of all existing copper is in use, one-third is still in the ground, and one-third is in dumps. Or lithium, the backbone of the next generation of electric cars, 90% of which comes from one country, whose rich deposits may get tapped out in as little as a decade.
As the Club of Rome predicted in 1970, we are in a “least limit” situation now. Humanity is in overshoot. If “capitalism” solves a resource problem through Adam Smith’s “substitution,” the next limit will be upon us very quickly.
It’s very simple, Keith: you can’t have an economy without an environment, no matter what economic system you use.
I agree with Keith that there will not be a “no-growth economy” in the future. It will be a negative-growth economy, until humans learn to live within their resource budget: the amount of current sunlight harvested by plants. There’s a reason why biologists call this “basic productivity.” Economist should adopt that definition of “productivity,” and we’d understand things a whole lot better.
chegitz guevara said
History is full of examples of humanity exceeding the capacity of their environment to support them. I don’t mean simply as the result of a natural disaster. Much of the old world’s soils are depleted from being intensively farmed for several thousand years. While technology was eventually able to overcome those problems in the 19th century with the introduction of nitrogen fertilizers, these created a new set of problems. We can feed the world, but the food isn’t as nutritious.
There are two points to draw from that example: one, there may be a considerable time lag between the time when the problem becomes serious and the time when we create a solution for it. The second point is that solutions can create new problems.
I would argue that while capitalism might be able to find the answers to their problems, the nature of competition will prevent them from actually proceeding with the solutions. Consider how much resistance there is from the capitalist class to the mere idea of climate change, let alone that the source of that change is from human activity. That tells you how much resistance there will be to actually doing something about it (assuming that it’s still possible to avert the worst).
Capitalism is devouring its own economic base right now, rather than expanding production. This is economic suicide, yet they won’t stop.You think they’re gonna worry about an environmental catastrophe that they think will never come (or at least not in their life times) or that they can survive?
What isn’t to say I support any Jenkins-ish shutting down of civilization. Billions of human lives depend on industrial society. Getting rid of it is simply not an option we can consider. If it happens, it will be in spite of our best efforts to do everything to save it.
But, socialism allows us to start directing that in a much more rational fashion. End industrial agriculture (i.e., corn and soy everywhere, and flying veggies in from other continents). More public transportation, less personal car use, more sustainable energy, less fossil energy.
These of course, won’t solve the looming crisis, but they’ll buy us time. Time is what we need. Time is what capitalism won’t allow us.
Jan Steinman said
Amid a lot of good stuff in your posting, I would like to gently disagree with this statement.
Our salvation is in getting rid of industrial civilization. Ivan Illich asserts that it isn’t capitalism nor communism that is dehumanizing us, it’s industrialization. This includes not only manufacturing and agriculture, but other things that we tend to not associate with industrial processes, such as medicine, education, entertainment, and even (especially!) religion.
I agree that human civilization is going to part with industrialization when it is pried by nature from our cold, dead fingers. But I’d rather hope that there is another way, the path of “de-consumption” or voluntary power-down.
Perhaps we can arrange a “soft landing.” Perhaps Socialism is the way to manage such a thing. I tend to think that no “grand plan” is going to do the trick. It’s going to have to come from the bottom up.
The bad news is that excess energy is going away, and life will never be the same. The good news is, excess energy is going away, and life will never be the same!
The biggest impact of the coming energy decline (well, besides war, pestilence, and famine) will be the end of globalization and the beginning of re-localization. This is vital, because neither a large Communist nor a large Capitalist system is going to change things.
CS Holling writes of “panarchy theory,” that all things must go through cycles of birth, growth, coalescence, senescence, dissolution, and re-birth. It’s certainly true of living things, but also of civilizations, countries, and economic systems. This cycle is driven by energy and connectedness. As energy declines, so must connectedness and complexity, and so big solutions are simply not in the cards.
“Think globally; act locally,” if you want to change things. There’s no point in saving a dying system — start up a new one!
Keith said
Jan,
I hate to even respond to this.
you write,
“Rather, we are today enslaving future generations through our energy gluttony. When we go out to our car, turn the key, and 500 “energy slaves” haul our lazy a** around town, its exactly like how ancient emperors used their slaves to get around. And the “slaves” that we burn up today will not only not be available for future generations to use, but they will be in the atmosphere, making the planet much less hospitable, by most accounts.”
Really? This is your view? slavery hasn’t ended because we use cars?
You do your cause no favour when you make frivolous argument.
Jan Steinman said
Want to know how to protect the environment, pull people up from poverty, and improve the quality of essentially everyone’s life?
It’s really quite simple!
Jan Steinman said
Keith wrote: “Really? This is your view? slavery hasn’t ended because we use cars?”
I don’t think you actually read what I wrote. Or perhaps you only read what you wanted to see.
It was not intended as a “frivolous argument.” We are using “temporal slaves.” We are squandering a one-shot resource and stealing it from the future. We are forcing future generations into an impoverished, shortened lifetime of physical toil — in part, so we can drive cars.
If that were contemporaneous, it would be called “slavery.” So why not call it what it is: slavery of future generations?
Keith said
Jan Steinman thank you for enlightening me. My crystal ball stopped working last week. That might be why I didn’t understand that your argument was based on events that will transpire in the future. Not frivolous at all.
Anyway, I began in comment #6 by saying I didn’t think it was a good idea for socialists to unite with environmentalists. 28 comments later I am certain that the socialists should not unite with environmentalists.
Roxanne Amico said
Keith, there are many who don’t agree with you, and hopefully in time, you will join us!
Jan Steinman said
Keith wrote: “28 comments later I am certain that the socialists should not unite with environmentalists.”
Ouch. So much for a unified front!
The left always eat their young. That’s why the right always wins.
It’s quite the irony that the right is paradoxically much better at cooperating with each other than those who include “social” in their name. The right are much more willing to put aside petty differences so they can win the bigger prize, whereas it seems the left is always squabbling about the speck in the other person’s eye.
Catflap said
The prospects for effective red green alliance.
The left has just began to emerge out of a period of strong reaction that has effected the left and the environmental movement in a variety of ways. There was enormous political and social pressure in many circles to accept the market as the best provider of goods, services and employment and in environmental circles the belief that market mechanisms could be used to solve environmental concerns became commonplace. The backdrop for this was the relative stability of capitalism. The post war boom created a relatively prosperous middle class in most western countries that acted as powerful layer of political support for capitalism and markets. The rest of the world’s industrial and rural workers remained mired in poverty but reformist political movements were always able to direct the antagonism of the poorer sections behind the middle class layers thereby short-circuiting the potential for revolution. The numbers inside left political parties went into sharp decline and there were many splits with some parties resorting to trying to maintain some semblance of a mass basis through watering down a class based program in an alliance with anyone who could loosely be described as ”left wing”.In order to show why this situation can now be reversed and socialists reorganized into a new mass movement I will briefly sketch out the underlying reasons for the resurgent class struggle.
The last upswing of revolutionary politics on a world scale was in the 1970s. This coincided with the crisis of that period which had just seen the collapse of Bretton Woods and “stagflation” in economies managed (loosely speaking) through “Keynesian” policies. The move to “neoliberalism” by the bourgeoisie and it’s governments was the attempted solution to this crisis both in the sense of trying to boost declining profitability and to forestall further working class revolt. Many of the results of this political shift are too numerous and best left to another more comprehensive discussion. However, a boost to profitability could only come from increasing exploitation of the working class through a variety of mechanisms. Globalization of production meant that lower wages (if they were needed) could be secured through moving production to countries that could supply it. Meanwhile the surplus value derived from the super exploitation in places such as China could often be funneled back to the bourgeoisie wherever they happened to be through increasingly opaque and complex financial “derivatives”.1 Drains on profit were also limited as state social expenditures such as health, education and welfare were slashed or at least curtailed. Cheap labor lead to some recovery in rates of profit in the early 1980s followed by another decline and then another partial recovery in the late 1990s.2 Now there is the biggest economic crisis since the 1930s brought on by by the failure of surplus value creation to keep pace with rising asset prices and credit growth in the lead up to the GFC. Moreover, the GFC has opened up a new period of worsening wars and revolutions. The working class in the middle east and beyond (including stirrings in China) are directly intervening but not (yet?) consciously fighting for socialism and the United states is desperately trying to shore up its strategic power through war and violence which is likely to create and even larger backlash. In short the process of exploiting the working class has lead to a new revolutionary crisis that deepens by the day.
The revolutions in the middle east are full of potential for socialism provided the revolutionaries avoid a resurrection of the old regime by stealth and develop conscious socialist leadership. The potential lies in the fact that in Egypt, Tunisia and, in general, the remainder of the middle east and North Africa, the bourgeoisie is weak and unable to carry out a bourgeois revolution. If the tasks of the bourgeois revolution are to be completely fulfilled (such as election, civil rights, judicial independence, proper separation of religion and state for example) they will have to be carried out by the working class themselves through the political organs formed informally in the revolution (Something the likes of the Egyptian army will likely do everything they can to crush).3 Forming a caricature of bourgeois “democracy” that is propped up by military violence will not diffuse the underlying causes of the revolution such as higher food prices, lack of decent employment, and poverty. These problems are the product of repressive international relations and capitalist “economics” that withdraws capital as soon as money is diverted to unprofitable social expenditure. Development would address the concerns of the masses but that means throwing off the system that keeps the country undeveloped, namely capitalism. A socialist leadership that curtails the commanding heights of capitalism in those places would hold up the very real promise of socialism but it would also require the working class to replace the organs of bourgeois “democracy” with its own in the developed world before it could carry out fully socialist reorganization of their economy. This means that a real concrete debate at this time must center around the formation of an international socialist leadership that draws in the most conscious elements in the revolutions now unfolding and spreads the revolution into the west.
Unlike the post war years the stability of capitalism and the middle class is under constant pressure in the west and there is a real opportunity to rebuild a socialist movement and also a way to involve greens who support a revolution but conceive of it differently to Marxists. There is often a well meaning attempt to iron out differences between “factions” of the left and between the left and radical environmentalists. However, I argue that unity is not likely to be achieved by an attempt to directly amalgamate a socialist program and a radical environmental program under a single banner but there is an opportunity to encourage revolutionary groups and individuals into new forums (such as ad-hoc shop floor committees, committees fighting against homelessness and foreclosure and protest action committees) which become the focal point for all anti government and anti corporate activity. It is within forums like this that a mass base of people opposed to the corporate criminality now governing through its sclerotic organs of power can be formed and it is also where environmental groups can argue their case against proponents of environmentally destructive policies.
The absence of a mass revolutionary movement means that debates between greens and socialists often amount to nothing more than abstract conceptualizing about the ideal post capitalist society. For example the exchange posted here between Keith and Brendan DPM is illustrative.
(Keith) In addition to requiring a police apparatus that would make Stalin blush (how else can you enforce “local production” which is really a ban on trade and movement), the demand for local production and consumption is backwards (as opposed to progressive) romanticizing the small scale production of a bygone era.
(Brendan DPM) Keith: If capitalism is ecologically insupportable, e.i. if the actual scientific facts about the ability of the physical systems that are the basis of biological life contradict the social and economic relations of capitalism, then any socialism that simply translates those aspects of capitalism which are ecologically insupportable will also be so. And that simply means that it will lead to disaster. You cannot destroy the basis of your own existence and ignore ecological facts because their is a valid Marxist argument for doiing so.
We may have disagreements with the environmentalist movements, but we have no right to bracket the science of ecology as simply part of their po. If we dont like how. And that includes delimiting the forms of a revolutionary alternative that both accords with ecological reality about the finitude of nature and refuses the authoritarian utopias of various localisms and primitivisms.
With all due respect to these two comrades this discussion is a huge leap from actual concrete class struggle now being undertaken by the working class. I can just imagine the response you would engender by addressing these concerns to the workers in Egypt as they battle the threat of mass murder and torture by the Egyptian army!
The discussions quoted above relate to how a centrally planned economy should respond to environmental concerns and to how some might choose to live given the absence of a coercive apparatus. In other words it is the politics that would likely emerge after a revolution! The working class are not now in a position to manage economic growth sustainably because “market forces” are basically the bourgeoisie blindly chasing its class interests through a profit system that works under its own dynamic free of any particular person’s, or even group’s, will. The only way to push for policies in the interest of workers, including ones to avoid environmental catastrophe, is to topple the bourgeoisie as the dominant class. Even if there is a revolution tomorrow the economy will still be organized in a way that is “ecologically insupportable” for some considerable length of time until it can be consciously and scientifically redesigned by the working class . If there is an environmental collapse as a result then that is what the working class will be forced to deal with through its organs of power, like it or not! In the worst case scenario (which none of the major scientific bodies are predicting) no organization of socialism or any other type of society would be possible and this debate would become superfluous.
Historical Materialism is first and foremost a rejection of idealism and the belief that:
neither legal relations nor political forms…[can] be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life4
There is little point trying to pre-plan a revolution nor is there any way of “delimiting the forms of a revolutionary alternative” in advance because the forms will originate in response to the material conditions that caused the revolution and the new material conditions that unfold as a result of the revolution . Environmental concerns will be central to a new democracy because dangerous environmental change will continue to be a “material condition of life”. No amount of abstract speculation about what Marxism does or does not say about ecology will change this!
Having a revolution in the first place depends on coming to grips with the material conditions existing now as capitalism increasingly goes into sharp decline. As stated above the current global crisis of capitalism has lead directly to revolutions. In the case of Egypt the initial phase of the revolution was the relatively rapid formation of the April 6th Movement using Facebook.5 This became a forum for the most wide ranging grass roots debates among its seventy thousand members. The formation of this and similar groups is the contemporary equivalent of the formation of a Soviet (workers council). These groups were the forum where all the actual issues of the day related to the material situation faced by working class Egyptians (from low wages and poor working conditions, to high food prices and police repression ) were discussed and action to tackle them organized. The clash with the Mubarak regime did not develop out of an initial ideological campaign to ouster Mubarak it flowed from the organizational development centered around the issues of the day which could not possibly have been addressed by the Mubarak regime (or that of his military). It is within such forums that socialists have typically agitated for their program but they are entirely independent from any particular party and united only by a basic desire to tackle the social problems generated by decaying capitalism. Discussions with the most progressive elements of the revolutionary movements coupled with the development of organizational solidarity and replication of their methods in the west where possible should be a priority.
In the west, the handouts given to the tiny cabal of billionaires that had gambled away the money they extracted from workers has left social programs gutted and wages and conditions under constant attack. Facing these real concrete issues in separate and new organizations (from official forums supported by the state) would be the formation of the new workers state in embryo and greens can form groups opposed to the programs of socialists should they wish to do so without becoming an element in the state’s “reform” program that states typically embark on to diffuse the situation. In places where the economic crisis has hit worst it may already be possible to form these committees or they may be forming already and interested parties should look for them and seek to steer then further onto the course of revolution and away from becoming mere pressure groups.
In other cases it may be premature and groups like this may attract little support but there can be no return to the relative stability of the post war years and market based environmental programs will yield no real results for the environment because the level of real surplus value being created (as opposed to speculative fictitious capital) is now strongly fettered and the consequent demand for “fiscal austerity” will see previous environmental “reforms” wound back in order to raise the income of the super-rich again. As the material situation worsens this will open up new vistas for action but attracting members for socialists means being able to defend the material interests of the working class through actions such as refusing pay reductions and funding cuts even when the rationale for doing so is protecting the viability of a particular corporation or paying back a loan. This is not likely to be popular for those looking for immediate overall reductions in consumption and a total focus on green issues before all else. For socialists only a minimal program attacking the details of capitalist exploitation will attract members and eventually allow the development of a maximum program as revolutionary consciousness develops in response to the increased extraction of “profit” through more rapacious and unproductive methods .6 This crucial phase of the class struggle is where a mass movement is likely to develop successfully if it addresses the material plight of the working class as a class. Environmental issues can only be dealt with effectively from within a fully functioning socialist democracy because it will be free of the bourgeoisie’s blind drive to profit through commodity production driven by profit considerations rather than real human need.
N Beams, The World Economic Crisis: A Marxist Analysis, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/dec2008/nbe1-d19.shtml (accessed April 27th 2011).
The rate of profit and the world today, http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=340#115harprof_28 (accessed April 27th 2011)
L Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects , http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/index.htm (accessed April 27th 2011)
K Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (preface), http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm (accessed April 27th 2011)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_6_Youth_Movement
L Trotsky, The Transitional Program, 1938, http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/index.htm (accessed April 27th 2011)
Jan Steinman said
“The last upswing of revolutionary politics on a world scale was in the 1970s. This coincided with the crisis of that period which had just seen the collapse of Bretton Woods and ‘stagflation’ in economies managed (loosely speaking) through “Keynesian” policies.”
This seems to imply that economic policy had anything to do with stagflation. A number of analysts believe the stagflation was as a result of energy scarcity, as the US hit its peak production in 1970, followed by the mideast war and the OPEC oil embargo.
Reagan then did whatever it took to get OPEC to loosen the taps, oil flowed like water, and it was “Morning In America” — that is, until the entire world reached the peak of petroleum production in the middle of the past decade, and oil went to the historic high of $147/barrel, which caused already stretched consumers to default on ill-qualified mortgages, and precipitated the global financial meltdown.
Now we are re-entering a period of stagflation, again driven by catabolic collapse of our primary energy source. Only this time, there is no “deus ex machina” to turn on the taps.
So I don’t see any of this as having anything to do with political systems, ownership of capital, nor economic systems. Either a capitalist yeast cell or a communist yeast cell is going to multiply and consume all its resources and die in its own excrement.
There can be no economy — no matter the ideology — without an environment. Nature bats last.