Pollution is the result of the profit-motivated system we live in. And so long as that system is allowed to continue, pollution will continue. The pollution of water, food and air is caused by the greed for profit. This could be abolished if the resources of the countries of the entire planet could be organised rationally to produce a healthy environment. It is not a technical problem as some may imagine. It is a class and political problem. While capitalism remains, the resources produced by the labour of the workers will be squandered on wasteful production methods. All the resources for a world of abundance, without pollution, disease and squalor, exist at the present time in skill, technique and science. They cannot be used for constructive purposes till the capitalist system of profit-making is overthrown. Grim reality teaches that the alternative posed by Marx of socialism or barbarism has been transformed into world socialism or annihilation. Today’s environmental problems spring from capitalism’s reckless pursuit of accumulation without regard for human welfare. The super-rich has one basic goal in life: to make more and more profits. With indifference to the quality of working class life including the environment, it might be expected that the most industrialised and profitable areas where most workers live suffer the worst pollution.
We can replace capitalism with a rational and humane system – socialism. Socialism is a social system where social wealth is genuinely controlled by society and for the benefit of society; where the common good, not profits, becomes the chief concern; where the everyday working people become the rightful masters of society. We can improve our lives and society, and we can eliminate exploitation and capitalist injustice, by overturning the capitalist system. The socialist revolution has become a historical necessity and possibility. There is no other choice today but for the working people to organise to struggle and win socialism. If the working people, and not the corporations, controlled the great resources of our society, we could improve all our lives. We could end industrial pollution and chemical dangers while still guaranteeing a decent standard of living for all. Whose is the fault that it isn’t done? The capitalist class, and all who uphold the capitalist class and their accursed social system.
The socialist revolution is the most profound of all revolutions in history. It will be perhaps the most far-reaching than any in the whole experience of mankind. The hundreds of millions of workers striking off their age-old chains of wage-slavery will construct a society of liberty and prosperity. Socialism will inaugurate a new era for the human species, the building of a new world. The overthrow of capitalism and the development of socialism will bring about the immediate or eventual solution of many great social problems. Some of these originate in capitalism, and others have plagued humanity for centuries. Among them are war, religious superstition, famine, pestilence, crime, poverty, unemployment, racism, and national chauvinism, the suppression of woman, and every form of slavery and exploitation of one class by another.
Capitalism, based upon human exploitation, stands as the great barrier to social progress. Capitalism has checked the evolution of the human race. Socialism by abolishing the capitalist system releases productive forces strong enough to provide plenty for all and it destroys the whole accompanying capitalist baggage of cultivated ignorance, strife and misery. Socialism frees humanity from the stultifying effects of the present struggle for existence and opens up before it new horizons of joys and tasks. Socialist society will carry through many profound measures such as these that will organise of the economics of the world upon a rational and planned basis, and will systematically conserve and increase of the world’s natural resources and the beautification of the world by a new and richer artistry, eliminating the crowded congested cities by the combination of the conveniences of country and urban life, and the solution of many other great problems and tasks now hardly even imagined.
The day is not so far distant when our grand-children will look back with horror upon capitalism and wonder why we tolerated it so long.
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