Global Protest Against Global Warming

The Socialist Party has a position that it is capitalism which is the main danger to our planet and that a socialist society would be in a better position to look after it. The immediate well-being, safety and survival of the human species is of paramount concern. If socialism were to be established in the near future our first priority would be to rapidly increase the production and free distribution of food, clothing, shelter and essential medical supplies to those human beings in need and to end the miserable poverty caused by capitalism. It is clear, even for many non-socialists, that there is tremendous waste in modern society. So, if certain things e.g. food, shelter, medicine need to be made more available via increased production then it is beyond our capabilities as a species to do so while at the same time curbing needless production in other areas.

Climate change from global warming is the single most important issue we as a species are faced with immediately. We could see vast areas of this planet becoming uninhabitable very rapidly, with huge numbers of people unable to cope with severe climate change and simply dying. If we get this one wrong it could threaten most of our species with destruction. What is obvious to those of us in the Socialist Party, is that capitalism with its short-sighted inept politicians, will not address this issue with any degree of seriousness. Same old story, profits first everything else last. 

Capitalism could happily lead our species into extinction which is another pressing reason why we need socialism. The Socialist Party views the ending of poverty and trying to avert environmental disaster as being achievable at the same time. Marx predicted that the productive forces would transform themselves more and more into destructive forces if they were not liberated from the fetters of private property and profit.  The ever-increasing meaningless commodities of dubious quality has led not only to the pollution of the atmosphere, land and water but created global warming.

Socialism of recent years has lost in actuality by the fact of being postponed to a far-off future. When we talk about the inevitability of socialism, we assume that the workers will continue to struggle for their rights. Were they, on the other hand, to accept the word in a fatalist sense, and think that they could sit down tamely and wait till socialism came to them, they would soon lose all the rights that they have now and become mere slaves. Socialism can only come when the willingness of the workers to allow themselves to be exploited ends. When workers, both politically and economically, are so class conscious and so well organised as to make their exploitation impossible then capitalism ends. That is what we understand by social revolution, and our ideal – that of human brotherhood – is revolutionary, because it is only to be realised by the social revolution. Capitalism has produced a vast number of social ills, and it is very tempting for the politician, to deal with each of them separately and by itself. The more, political parties go on trying to remove theses evils by palliative measures, the more does it become clear that they can only be abolished by the abolition of capitalism itself. Socialism is the first social system in the history of mankind to be introduced by the conscious action of its creators. Capitalism is a structure which can absorb and integrate many reforms and which automatically rejects all those reforms which run counter to the logic of the system (such as completely free public services which completely cover social needs). You can abolish the structure only by overthrowing it, not by reforming it out of existence.

The workers can achieve the understanding that what the overthrow of capitalism is all about in the last analysis is for the associated producers to take over the factories and the whole industrial system and run it for the common benefit of mankind, instead of having it run for accumulating profit and capital for a few giant financial groupings locked in deadly competition with each other. The workers can build the actual organisation through which they can, tomorrow, themselves take over the administration of the economy and the state: freely elected community workers’ committees which will federate themselves afterwards locally, regionally, and internationally. That’s what the conquest of power by the working class really means. There is no other way to develop anti-capitalist consciousness among hundreds of thousands and millions of workers than along this road.

A global day of action is planned for Friday, 15th  March. There will be events in more than 30 cities and towns across the UK including Glasgow. 

In Scotland, many school students intend to walk out in protest at the lack of urgency shown by governments over the looming catastrophe of climate change.