Worldwide crises need global solutions

That headline in the Scotsman immediately caught our attention and raised our hopes. Yet the very first sentence proved disappointing. “ Mobilising action to develop the planet sustainably without winners and losers will require international co-operation on a huge scale.” [Socialist Courier emphasis] While the declared aim appears to be admirable it contains a fatal flaw. It assumes  the continuation of the market system and  the continuation of the capitalist system which is the cause of the problems in the first place.  It remains firmly wedded to a belief that capitalism can be reformed so as to be compatible with achieving an environmentally sustainable society.

The article by May East, a CEO of CIFAL Scotland, a United Nations Institute for Training and Research sustainability centre based in Edinburgh,  continued “about the need to understand the convergence of multiple crises. With half the world’s growing population living in poverty, reserves of fresh water becoming increasingly scarce and climate change threatening to make large swathes of the planet unsuited for food production and habitation.”

The explanation is not complicated or complex to comprehend. The excessive consumption of both renewal and non-renewable resources and the release of waste that nature can’t absorb that currently goes on are not just accidental but an inevitable result of capitalism’s very essence. The capitalist system creates vast amounts of energy waste in the military and its socially useless jobs such as marketing, finance and banking which are part of its profit making machine. Endless growth and the growing consumption of nature-given materials this involves is built into capitalism. Capitalism differs from previous class societies in that under it production is not for direct use, not even of the ruling class, but for sale on a market. Competitive pressures to minimise costs and maximise sales, profit-seeking and blind economic growth, with all their destructive effects on the rest of nature, are built-in to capitalism. These make capitalism inherently environmentally unfriendly. The ecological contradictions of capitalism make sustainable, or "green" capitalism a confidence trick. The only way in which the article’s aims could be achieved is through socialism.

The author appears to be rather delusional on the subject of the government and international NGO summit successes, from 1992 pledges to the more recent promises. Capitalist politicians have proved incompetent to deal with the problem.

Sadly, the Scotsman article concludes with a list of reforms to be applied which are no doubt of some merit but as for them being a global solution to the world-wide environmental crisis, little better than a band-aids.

The author and her organisation is setting out to impose on capitalism something that is incompatible with its nature. The Socialist Party place ourselves unambiguously in the camp of those who argue that capitalism and a sustainable relationship with the rest of nature are not compatible. Perhaps, one day she will join us. The real powers of action are with the great majority of people. This will be when we decide to create a society in which we will be free to co-operate and to use all our great reserves of energy and ingenuity for our needs. We should construct permanent, durable means of production which you don’t constantly innovate. We would use these to produce durable equipment and machinery and durable consumer goods designed to last for a long time, designed for minimum maintenance and made from materials which if necessary can be re-cycled. In this way we would get a minimum loss of materials; once they’ve been extracted and processed they can be used over and over again. It also means that once you’ve achieved satisfactory levels of consumer goods, you don’t insist on producing more and more. Total social production could even be eventually reduced, once the needs of all have been satisfied.

If the environmental crisis is to be solved, this system must go - and that entails the capitalist class being the losers,  leaving the rest of humanity to be the winners