Make socialism work

Socialism is based on the very simple idea that we should use the vast resources of society to meet people’s needs. It seems obvious that society should guarantee every person enough to eat, a roof over their heads, an education system and a health service accessible to all. In fact why shouldn’t everything be available for free, we have the capability of producing abundance and provide for all. Since Marx’s day critics have written libraries full of books about why socialism cannot work.

A socialist society will carefully plans its way of life and technology to be a harmonious part of our natural environment. This planning needs to take place on regional, national, and international levels and covers the production of energy, the use of scarce resources, land-use planning, the prevention of pollution and the preservation of wildlife. The clean-up of the contaminated world will be among the first tasks of a socialist society. It is fashionable in some quarters to locate the cause of the environmental crisis in the insatiable lust for “progress but before we condemn progress or growth, we must recognize that more is at stake in rejecting progress or growth than thwarting the undeniable rampant consumerism in the America and Europe.  Billions of the world's population lack even the basics of sustainable life, barely surviving in the midst of poverty, disease with inadequate shelter, food and water. Until the material means to rectify the sorry, inhuman plight of billions is available, progress and growth must continue. To deny them a future and make them pay the price for Western privileged waste and excess would be callous. Equality of sacrifice in the face of vast economic inequities cannot be the solution to environmental degradation.

Many environmentalists see the failure of either market-based or regulatory measures as a failure of political will. They believe that politicians have yet to recognize the dire consequences we face by ignoring the environmental crisis. While this may be true, it fails to recognize the acute limitations of market-based and regulatory solutions and the impossibility of their effectiveness in a global capitalist economy.  The political will is not absent because of ignorance, but because the political system is owned and controlled by the capitalists. Moreover, the global capitalist economy is fueled by profits and profits alone. And profits are sustained and expanded by turning everything material or immaterial into a commodity. As a commodity, nature's resources hold no value other than what can be attached to the pursuit of profit. It is the exploitation of human and natural resources-- labor and nature's bounty-- that is the grist for profit's mill. And capitalism puts profits ahead of nature as well as ahead of people. Both history and the logic of capitalist accumulation and expansion demonstrate the inevitability of waste and destruction. Only when environmental degradation impedes the process of accumulation and profit expansion will the capitalist system respond to the crisis; environmental scientists tell us that will be too late. We will have already reached the tipping point where runaway catastrophe will be irreversible.

Only a system that will replace the logic of profit-before-all with the broad interests of humanity possesses the answer. Only a system that can substitute common ownership for the short-term self-interest of private property can cope with the ecological crisis. Only a system that erases the artificial borders and boundaries of nation-states can meet our needs. The answer is quite simply: socialism. Environmental activists must embrace the socialist option. For socialists, the “ecological crisis” is not a crisis of ecology. It is not nature which is in crisis but society, and this crisis of society engenders a crisis of relations between humanity and the rest of nature. In our view, this crisis is not due to the human species as such. It is not due in particular to the fact that our species socially produces its existence by labour, which allows it to develop and gives substance to the notion of progress. It is due to the capitalist mode of development, to the capitalist mode of production (which includes a capitalist mode of consumption) and to the productivist and consumerist ideology of “always more” that flows from this. Capitalism does not produce use values for the satisfaction of human needs but exchange values for the maximisation of profit. This profit is monopolized by a minority fraction of the population: the owners of the means of production. They exploit the labour power of the social majority in exchange for a wage which is lower than the value of the labour supplied. The sole conceivable alternative to capitalism is a system which does not produce exchange values for the maximisation of the profit of capitalists but use values for the satisfaction of real human needs (that is, uncorrupted by commodification), democratically determined. A system in which collaboration replaces competition, solidarity replaces individualism and emancipation eliminates alienation. Indeed, such a new civilisation - corresponds to the definition of a socialist society.