Let Technology Liberate Us

 Socialists can bring many important insights to the questions and concerns raised by the environment issue of climate change and global warming. Only in a socialist society democratically controlled by workers will it be possible to rationally assess how energy can be safely produced and harnessed. The primary problem with any technology under capitalism—even nuclear technology, which admittedly poses special problems—is not that it is inherently safe or unsafe, but rather that it is controlled by a ruling-class minority which manipulates technology to serve its narrow economic interests. The task of socialists is to consistently emphasise the need to free all technology from the fetters of capitalist productive relations. Socialists seek to transform society into one based on new social relationships that will allow the majority to become the master of technology, rather than vice versa. Socialist revolution will clearly sound the death knell of the profit-motive and militarism. To socialism falls the task of turning technology from the horror it currently is, into the benefactor of an emancipated working class. In a socialist society, workers could enjoy a material abundance without in any way compromising their health and safety or the well-being of the planet.

In industrialising the world to accumulate profit, the capitalist system carries in its wake environmental degradation and destruction. Scientists explain that the world will need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions but change will require restructuring the world’s energy and transportation systems. Such changes require massive investment and represent a threat to existing capitalist industries, their growth and profits. Capitalism requires profit and economic growth to survive. Capitalists want their profits now. The future has little meaning in a profit-driven society. Environmental reforms are not the answer. Capitalism has eroded even those feeble efforts of the past. The capitalist class and its government will never be able to solve the environmental crisis. They and their system are the problems. Capitalist-class rule over the economy explains why government regulation is so ineffective: under capitalism, the government itself is essentially a tool of the capitalist class. Politicians may be elected “democratically,” but because they are financed, supported and decisively influenced by the economic power of the capitalist class.

Reformists expect the outmoded, profit-motivated, competitive and class-divided capitalist system that has created the mess it has got us into, to get us out of it. If there are to be any changes they expect them to be made within the framework of the existing capitalist system. Of course, none of these intended cures ever contain a word about the great disparity between the tremendous quantities of wealth enjoyed by the idle exploiters, the tiny capitalist class that owns the means of life, and the hand-to-mouth existence of tens of millions of workers. Not a word will ever be said about the waste and destruction of raw materials and natural resources by the anarchy of capitalist production—its planless, senseless duplication of effort in a mad, competitive drive by each capitalist to “capture” the market—or the bulk of it—for himself. Never a word mentioned about the manner in which every corporation is trying to exploit the existing circumstances to destroy its competition and entrench itself more solidly as one of the few that control the overwhelming proportion of the nation’s resources and wealth. Silence is maintained about the incredible waste and destruction, not only of finite resources but of human life itself, through capitalist wars and continuous preparations for ever more destructive wars.

The issue confronting the workers is not the environmental crisis that threatens to grow worse. The real issue is, shall we continue to tinker with those effects or shall we get rid of their cause—the capitalist system and replace it with socialism—a system of social ownership, democratic management and planned production for use. The issue, literally, is survival. The harm and damage already done to all of us and to our environment by capitalism’s existence long past its progressive evolutionary stage are beyond exact calculation. If it is not abolished and replaced with a viable socialist cooperative commonwealth by the politically and industrially organised working class, it will destroy itself. And there is the distinct possibility that it may destroy humanity and the world in the process. It need not happen if all who understand the need for a socialist reconstruction of society were to join with us to appeal to our brothers and sisters, to organise their latent political and industrial might as a class to accomplish the revolutionary change to socialism and thus guarantee the future safety and well-being of the human race. As the many social problems of capitalism increasingly threaten the lives of workers, it becomes more and more imperative that they recognise the need to organise politically and economically to take control of the economy, abolish class-divided capitalism and administer production through their own democratic bodies.

The Socialist Party urges our fellow workers to organise to abolish capitalism and institute socialist production for use. Workers must use their political power and integrate into one movement with the goal of building a new society with completely different motives for production—human needs and wants instead of profit—and to organise their own political party to challenge the capitalists, express their mandate for change at the ballot box and dismantle the state altogether.

The new society must be one in which society itself, not a wealthy few, would commonly own the industries and transportation, and the workers themselves would control them democratically through their own organisations based in the workplaces. In such a society, the workers themselves would make decisions governing the economy, electing representatives to industrial councils and to a workers’ congress representing all the industries that would administer the economy. Such a society—an industrial democracy and cooperative commonwealth —is what is needed to solve the environmental crisis. By placing the economic decision-making power in the hands of the workers, by eliminating capitalist control and the profit motive in favour of a system in which workers produce to meet their own needs and wants, the necessary resources and labour could be devoted to halting global warming, employing the renewable resources we now have available and develop new ones, and clean up the damage already done. It is up to the majority of people who actually produce society’s goods and services and daily operate its industries, to end this crisis.