What Future?

 We live in a society of misconceived priorities. The profit system puts all at risk because the treatment of all issues must be made at the priority cost of profit. Capitalism is turning the land into a giant toxic waste-dump. Oceans are being polluted the air is being poisoned. The media has provided many of striking images of ecological destruction which have fuelled debate on the environment in recent years. Few people have been left unmoved by the devastating deforestation of the Amazon or the mercury-contaminated cratered moonscapes left by gold miners still searching for the legendary El Dorado.

The deforestation in the Amazon is caused primarily not by subsistence cultivators but by commercial interests clearing land for pasture. Cattle ranches occupy vast areas of cleared land and result in huge profits for the owners. The loss of animal and plant species and renewable timber resources are simply not part of the profit-and-loss calculations. Capitalism, then, is bound to come into conflict with nature. It cannot go green because it simply cannot change its economic essence.  Given the nature of capitalist production for profit, it is therefore simply idealistic for the Green movement to express the hope that the government will make a substantial and unequivocal commitment to climate change. So long as profit is the purpose of production even the most well-intentioned, ecologically-minded government will encounter serious resistance to ecologically sound but expensive production methods.

Many pessimistic environment activists retreat into defeatism, predicting an approaching Apocalypse. Equally as many keep the faith that ecological problems can be solved with a little more legislation, a few more laws and a change in regulations. The Socialist Party rejects both reformism and defeatism, recognizing that the roots of the climate crisis lie in the capitalist system and its uncontrollable production for profit, a system incapable of incorporating the rational and democratic decision-making process which will be necessary to ensure an ecologically-sustainable future.  It is the uncontrollable nature and ecological unaccountability of capitalist production which must be abolished to rid the world of environmental destruction. The Socialists Party works to replace a divided world governed by capital with a state-free and money-free commonwealth.

As could have been anticipated, the repeated reports and studies from the climate think-tanks all suggest remedies to redress the issue fall only within what socialists term reformism, amounting to the same battle cries of the well-meaning, though less well-informed, without visible results for decades. It is perhaps a forgone conclusion that their recommendations will not fair any better in the years ahead as past research and we may well wonder how long before the academics and activists conclude capitalism can’t be tinkered with in our interests. Instead of producing volumes of papers each year, which on the face of it are only of any use in the armoury of the socialist, wouldn’t it be wiser if the “experts” decided to work out how much better the world would be if we freed production from the artificial constraints of profit, and organised production in a rational and sustainable manner and to the benefit of all? Or would these same experts fear they would be labelled socialist and their research studies have taken less seriously?

 

A collapse of present-day civilisation might indeed occur and would involve far fewer people surviving and at a far lower standard of living, but it would not result at the end of humanity and certainly not of the planet on which we live. Yet how likely is it that there will be a societal collapse caused by climate change or other ecological factors? In answering this question, we need to look not mainly at technical questions such as how energy is produced and how crops are grown, important though these of course are. Rather, we need to examine the economic basis of society and see the implications of the ways in which production as a whole is organised and of how priorities are considered. Only by replacing the profit system with a truly democratic organisation can we give the environment the priority it deserves. Capitalism can do no more than tinker with the problem.  Capitalism is the worst possible social system for the kind of rational, integrated action which is needed. Socialism, in contrast, will provide the kind of framework within which global warming and other ecological problems can be tackled and solved by that marvellous resource—human ingenuity.