Some
environmentalists promote green capitalism which is really a
greenwash attempt to create a new model of capital accumulation for
global corporate capitalism, based on "the commodification of
the commons." Green capitalism, like the first Industrial
Revolution, is based on a large-scale process of primitive
accumulation (a technical term Marxists use that simply means massive
theft). The primitive accumulation preceding the rise of the factory
system in industrial Britain involved the enclosure of common lands.
The new green model of corporate-state capitalism partly based on
agricultural land-grab but also on enclosing digital information and
innovation, heavily reliant on patents and copyrights than the
existing version of corporate capitalism. The "green capitalist"
model is intended as a response to the primary threat facing
corporate capitalism and its model of capital accumulation: the
technological potential of abundance. If allowed to operate without
hindrance, the free adoption of technologies and freely replicable
digital information would not only destroy most existing corporate
profits but render most investment capital superfluous. It's this
threat, all the "progressive" rhetoric aside, that "green
capitalism" is intended to head off. It's a last-ditch effort to
rescue an entire system of class privilege and economic exploitation
based on artificial scarcity from the revolutionary impact of
abundance.
The
failure of the all the climate summits provides proof that the
nation-state system cannot tackle global environmental threats. They
were all about using sustainable development pieties to target
development projects create market-based "solutions".
Advancing social and environmental justice in ways that Paris and
others actually meant perpetuating poverty for people in developing
countries, and reducing living standards for people in wealthier
countries. The object of those conferences as all equalising
scarcity – except for ruling elites. The health and welfare, dreams
and aspirations of the world's poor and their pursuit of justice and
happiness were given only lip-service and then brushed aside. The
proceedings were controlled by bureaucrats who see humans primarily
as consumers and polluters, rather than the creators of the world's
wealth and the stewards of it common treasury. Instead, they blamed
the victims. The world we want must begin with actually defining what
sort of world we want. We can't rely only on the bureaucracies of
governments to address the problems facing our planet. We must start
doing it ourselves. Our liberation will only come about when we,
ourselves, for ourselves, do the hard work of organising, which needs
class-conscious workers doing the equally hard work of convincing our
fellow-workers. At the end of the day , as revolutionaries, it is not
in our interest to try and save capitalism but rather to destroy it
and to encourage current struggles to develop on an independent,
self-organised, class basis and extend across national boundaries
which may well give rise to an escalation of the social crisis and
starts to challenge capitalism as a whole from a position of some
class strength. Only the self-organisation of working people contains
the potential to defend its own interests both in the short-term,
economic and the longer term, political. A working class that can't
defend itself is also a working class that is incapable of making a
revolution.
Only
by the campaigns for socialism will people be made capable of
understanding their position as wage slaves, and the consequent
necessity for the abolition of capitalism, and not of patching it up,
as advocated with monotonous persistence by the generations of
mis-leaders. Socialists point out to our fellow workers that they
possess, as a class, all the needed energy and intelligence to erect
a new social system based upon the common ownership of the means of
life, in which system they will no longer need to sell themselves
piecemeal as articles of merchandise. They will be free to enjoy to
the full the results of their collective labour. Having arrived at
this understanding, the workers will recognise that their political
power must be put to an infinitely better use than that of providing
fat jobs for nimble-tongued tricksters and seek the achievement of
their own emancipation. The vote is not useless if backed by a
class-conscious understanding.
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