Another Failure?

 COP26 has officially started today. Once again yet another climate summit is upon us all. What should we have expected from such a large gathering? Can we expect anything different from the previous ones? 

 

Much of the media and many of the attendees are hoping with a good deal of optimism for its success. But it is difficult to believe that capitalism will ever heal itself. Whatever pledges that were made at previous COPs, have been reneged on. Promises have come to nothing. As apologists for capitalism, despite being specialists and scientists the delegates continue to fail to locate global problems in a wider social and economic context, in capitalism itself.

 

 A history of failed attempts to fix a system that cannot meet needs leads to the conclusion that a new social system should be tried, a system without money and the profit motive in which the interests and needs of all are paramount.

 

The question people face is: can capitalism deliver? Or far more important question is: what could be done in a socialist society? 

 

With the advent of world socialism, we can expect a considerable reduction in carbon emissions obtained by ending the enormous wasteful economic activity and production inherent in capitalism. A major contribution to this pollution is the upkeep of the military and then all the resources devoted to the exchange economy. 

 

 The enormous budgets spent and raw materials expended on the maintenance of nations’ military machines represent an enormous drain on land, resources and personnel. Insane? No, it's logical, at least within the logic of capitalism.

 

Socialism would eliminate the need for these anti-social industries and thereby rapidly introduce a large cut in energy production and consequently CO2 emissions. This would serve to loosen the reliance on mitigating technologies discussed above but enable the provision of improved living standards to the undeveloped and developing world can be met. People, and not money, will control their lives and the direction of social progress. In the first period of socialism clearing up the structural mess left by capitalism would be a priority project.

 

Capital accumulation is in fact the biggest stumbling block. Effective climate action is against the profit-making interests of much of the capitalist class. In fighting for our civilisation, we are ultimately up against the mindless and heartless ‘growth machine’ that has come to dominate our world. Endless expansion is intrinsic to capital which n is inhuman and anti-human. Capitalism simply does not provide a framework for the rational solution for the problem of climate change. The profit motive has led to an increase in greenhouse gases and so to the real possibility of an increase in global temperature. We should all weigh up the odds of the race between a rational future society of plenty and peace which is the promise of socialism as against the prevalence of capitalist barbarism. 

 

If you think the alternative socialism or barbarism is some hypothetical aspect of the future; we wish to disillusion you for the barbarism that has already been experienced in many parts of the world. But the odds are what we make them. There is still reason for hope, for so long as the working people remain capable of revolt, so long as it is discontent, so long as it exists as a working-class, there remains the possibility of a socialist victory. What do we mean by that phrase, “so long as it exists as a working-class?” 

Like the Communist Manifesto explained, there is the full possibility of the mutual “ruination” of the “contending classes.” And to passively accept the inevitability of an environmental holocaust, as some ecological catastrophists do, is not a revolution.

 

And nothing can be more impossible than the goal of self-survival on a ruined planet. Socialists promote the synthesis of ecological balance, social harmony, personal freedom and material comfort that is humanity’s birthright. We refute the despair of mystical pie-in-the-sky New Ageism. The kind of economy we live in determines the nature of our laws, government, culture, ideas, feelings and ethics. The competitive warfare system of capitalist production produces a destructive, anti-human science and culture. Human beings can learn to understand nature, production and social relations, and change them in a rational manner. Some environmentalists see no difference between capitalism and socialism. But the two irreconcilable systems spell the difference between life and death for this planet’s people.

AWAY WITH THE GARBAGE OF CAPITALISM

 COP26  has finally arrived in Glasgow and what has the blog of the Socialist Party’s Edinburgh and Glasgow branches got to say?

Legend has it that Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Not to be outdone, the present ruling class is fiddling about while the planet almost literally burns.

While politicians, corporations, scientists and reformers endlessly argue over what to do with the impending impact of climate crises and how to decarbonise the economy as a matter of urgency, we’ve heard it all before. The only answer is to the throwaway society is to throw away the capitalist political economy, which has produced and entrenched this crisis. It is time now for a new egalitarian economy based on justice and shared prosperity. The claims that climate change is ‘unequivocally caused by human activities and ‘human-induced climate change’ are prominent media headlines but the suggestion that humanity, in general, is to blame is not a scientific claim. It is an ideological one. In this instance, it insulates the capitalist class from being culpable. It is capitalists who profit from the climate crisis while the poorest suffer. It is the capitalist system putting profit above all else. It is technically semantically correct to say that climate change is human-induced. The capitalist class are human after all. However, powerless working people have no choice over the fundamental conditions of production which are driving our climate to break down. Can the coal-miner be equated with the capitalist who exploits them by investing in corporate shares to profit? We are not all equally responsible for climate change. Those who are to blame don’t plan to do anything meaningful about it. Predictably, virtually nothing is being done. It is not the human species, but by that tiny minority element of the species that is befouling the nest of all species. There is no reason inherent in the human species that prevents us from living in harmony with our natural surroundings. Indeed, humanity is itself an integral part of the total environment and no more at odds with it by nature than dam-building beavers.

Capitalism's profit motive is the culprit. The profit motive and capitalism are bringing civilisation to the brink of disaster, and time is running out to take corrective actions where possible or to lessen the effects where the damage is already too advanced to be undone. It ought to be clear that the system primarily responsible for bringing humanity such dangers and which even now continues to ignore the warnings of scientists is not to spend the hundreds of billions of dollars to avert or mitigate the dangers. The answer is to change the system. Environmentalists, limited in their worldview and lacking understanding of the capitalist system are prone to divorce their own particular specific environmental cause from the whole socio-economic fabric. These eco-warriors of capitalist society endlessly flounder, winning, at best, only a delaying action against the disintegrating effects of capitalism on the natural world. University libraries are bulging, research establishments are filled, publishers are glutted and periodicals are saturated with data, hardly anything seems to have escaped the scrutiny of scientists and researchers yet the obvious cause, capitalism, goes unchallenged and uncontested. The scientific community have drawn innocuous conclusions, that the economic system can continue with some modifications without the essential inference that environmental degradation is inherent in capitalist development. Such an inference would, of course, have led to only one conclusion: that meaningful action to repair our world can only be taken when the competitive pressures of capitalism, indeed the capitalist system itself, is abolished and socialism established.

Upon the basis of the evidence accumulated by today's environmentalists, a world socialist administration would take swift, positive and massive efforts to restore the environment. The first step toward doing so, of course, will be to change the basic purpose of social production, from production for profit to production for use -- inherently conservationist in its orientation.  Biologists, botanists throughout society will be part of this reassessment, but we can expect the workers of every industry to evaluate the repercussions of the productive processes they are engaged in where the measure of production will be humanity and the future generations of all living things.  The possibility for a true environmental movement lies within the principles of socialism, for only it can turn the accumulated mass of environmental evidence into effective action to restore and improve the world. This class-ruled society of ours wastefully squanders and devours resources.

Capitalism and its great waste of mankind and nature continue apace. And thus it will be as long as the prime incentive to the industry is private profit, instead of social use. Only with socialism will industry for social use be possible. Then humanity will produce to live, not to waste both the means by which we live and ourselves. Then we will work, not to destroy, but to build.

Green Reformism or Sustainable Socialism?

On the eve of Glasgow’s climate summit, we should make clear the position of the Scottish branches of the Socialist Party and its affiliates in the World Socialist Movement. We've been saying that a revolutionary change is the only way to solve the problems that arise under capitalism since 1904 and movement after movement, reform campaign after reform campaign, has arisen across all these years. If the focus had been paid to the fundamentals, then maybe we'd be nearer a solution.

There's many in the environmentalist movement who challenge an ideology that embraces growth where nations and corporations are locked into this international economic system and there's no way out of it for them. Society won’t be able to control the amount and kind of production as long as productive resources are owned and controlled by a minority. Replacing this by the common ownership of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources under various forms of democratic control is an essential first step before anything lasting and constructive can be done. It is not enough to criticise capitalism but that its critics must put forward a realistic alternative. It is disappointing to find many eco-activists advocating ‘market socialism’ and putting financial capital at the service of people in the form of a universal basic income.  Both are impossible reforms to capitalism and would be meaningless in a world where the Earth’s resources had become the common heritage of all. The Earth can no longer be owned; it must be shared. Its fruits, including those produced by technology and labour, can no longer be expropriated by the few; they must be rendered available to all on the basis of need, a community where each contributes to the whole to the best of his or her ability and takes from the common fund of produce what he or she needs.

Murray Bookchin was one of those in the ecology movement who opposed a trend of anti-rationalism and anti-humanism which he called the "counter-Enlightenment". He pointed out in his book ”Remaking Society”  that human beings are both a part and a product of nature; that, despite what "deep greens" say, humans do have a unique significance in nature since they are the only life-form capable of reflective thought and so of conscious intervention to change the environment. It is absurd to regard human intervention in nature as some outside disturbing force since humans are precisely that part of nature that has evolved that consciously intervenes in the rest of nature; it is our nature to do so. It is quite true that at the present time the form human intervention in (the rest of) nature takes is upsetting natural balances and cycles, but the point is that humans, unlike other life-forms, are capable of changing their behaviour.

If humans have a "place" in nature, says Bookchin, it can only be to consciously intervene not just to meet their needs but also to ensure nature's balanced functioning; in this sense, the human species is the brain and voice of nature, nature becomes self-conscious. But to fulfil this role humans must change the social system which mediates their intervention in nature. Bookchin is explicit enough on what this change must be: a change from capitalism, in both its corporate enterprise form and its bureaucratic state-capitalist form.

The Demand is for Socialism

 

The essence of socialism is cooperation, organisation, concerted effort and united action on the part of the working class for their own advancement and their own emancipation.

The Left’s attitude toward reforms, in general, does not differ essentially from that of the out and out capitalist reformers. In its anxiety to capture political office, it seizes upon everything that agitates the mind of the people, regardless of whether it concerns the workers as a class or not. The Socialist Party does not refuse ameliorations offered by the capitalist class, but contends that the more revolutionary the workers become, the stronger they make their economic and political organizations, the more ready and more anxious, will the capitalist class be to throw sops to them in order to keep them contented

The Socialist Party holds that the working class the world over is indivisibly one; that as victims of the capitalist class their interests are common, regardless of nationality, colour or gender.

Many on the Left maintain that immigrants cause a keener struggle and lower wages for the workers already here. The fact remains that while immigration does add to the number of workers, and to that extent increases competition among the workers, it is a drop in the ocean compared to the real cause — the introduction of labour-saving machinery and concentration of capitalism. Even if every foreigner from now on were excluded, the misery of the workers would remain. Since this is so, and realising that injecting the question of racial superiority or inferiority foments racism, and to that extent prevents the organising of the workers, the Socialist Party condemns such a stand  as anti-unsocialistic

Taxes are paid by the property-holding classes out of that portion of wealth, produced, true enough, by labour, but which labour never pocketed. In other words, taxes are paid out of those values, produced over and above the wage which the worker receives and which are generally known as surplus value.

 Whether it be in the environmentalist movement or anti-war work, women’s and labour organisations, civil rights groups or what have you, socialists must look beyond the immediate situation and outline a vision of a future society. The issue is how goods are produced and distributed, who owns the means of production and how work is organised and administered,  overcoming scarcity and meeting people’s elementary material needs for food, healthcare, shelter, etc.

The planet cannot possibly sustain this wasteful, toxic capitalist consumer lifestyle on a global scale. People themselves have become commodities, reduced to little more than another expendable raw material. We must transcend the growth model of capitalism itself to adopt a model of socialism based not on ever-expanding production’ and consumption but one that establishes a new ecological relationship between human needs and the environment. In other words, a socialism that is not only democratic, non-exploitative, egalitarian, and internationalist but one that thoroughly replaces the expansionist model of capitalism. Struggles need to be linked up with a vision of a new economy, democratically structured to answer to people’s needs instead of the profit imperative. If you like that idea, then welcome to the movement for socialism. A better future will not come about automatically or simply because many people want it. It will only come about if we are able to draw enough people into the struggle to create it. But the effectiveness and success of that struggle are not predetermined. Those who are serious about socialism must be serious about the principles and programmes to achieve it.  

The Socialist Party seeks a democratic and revolutionary alternative to the reign of capital and profit. The fundamental aim of socialism is the creation of a class-free society. Socialism is about working people desiring a society free of exploitation and oppression. If socialism is not about creating a society without oppression and exploitation then it is merely another version of capitalism. And if working people do not understand or are not willing to organise for such a society then socialism is unattainable. Most of what the Socialist Party has achieved is to keep together a determined political party, committed to the goal of socialism that has not given up on the prospect that the class struggle would create conditions of anti-capitalism and anti-reformism.

 

Socialism for the People

 

Socialism also seeks to avoid the over-centralised system of some past command economies. Instead, it strives towards a system where the means of production and social services are owned and managed by communities of direct producers. Under capitalism, the economy always responds to the logic of the world capitalist market. Socialism is not Luddite worship of a romantic pre-industrial idyll. Socialism places special emphasis on the development of science and technology. Economic progress and improvement of the people’s standard of living are largely dependent upon the capacity to produce our own means of production. What is important is to identify needs that must be met and to develop appropriate technologies to realise these. A socialist society will guard against the uncritical adoption of capitalist technology. While the instruments might be neutral, these are parts of a technological system designed for the exploitation and control of workers. Furthermore, technology that leads to the wanton destruction of natural resources must be avoided. A socialist science and technology must always be conscious of the need for technology that does not alienate, but rather enhances the humanity of the worker. Such technology must therefore be in the control of the people. 

Material progress in a socialist society can be sustained only through a stable and adequate resource base. Hence the conservation of natural resources and the maintenance of ecological balance must be integral principles of socialism. Our natural resources, whether organic or inorganic, are not infinitive. They will not last unless necessary policies and measures are undertaken to preserve them. This task is both immediate and long-range. It is urgent because of the continued depletion and deterioration of our natural biosphere due mainly to the intensive, wide-scale agricultural and industrial activities of corporations and capitalists. The result has been widespread poverty among working people, especially in the countryside. Among others, this task entails a transition process involving: the phasing out of unecological capitalist production technology (i.e., pollutive, disruptive and inappropriate); the regeneration of ruined and weakened ecosystems (i.e., upland areas, inland and coastal waters, agricultural soil and air) towards a new balance, and the establishment of an optimum equilibrium between human population and nature’s limits (i.e., the capacity to provide space, food and other raw materials).

Socialism must be directed towards the ultimate fulfilment of the total potential of every individual. The subordination of citizens to a one-party powerful State, the ensuing of life, the imposition of a puritanical lifestyle and culture are not outcomes of socialism that are aimed at the fullest development of each person. Far from being neutral, above classes, the state is an instrument of class rule. It is the final guarantee of class power. Reformism starts out trying to use this state. It ends up serving its class interests.

Socialism is not spontaneous. It does not arise of itself. It has abiding principles according to which the major means of production and distribution ought to be socialised if exploitation of the many by the few is to be prevented. The liberation of the working class can only be achieved by the working class itself. A prerequisite for socialism must be the conquest of political power by the working class. There is nothing automatic about this; there are no guarantees. First and foremost it is necessary to build a movement that dedicates itself to rebuilding the socialist cause.  Every person who desires to put an end to this society of war and starvation must find a place in assembling the revolutionary socialist movement, 

Socialism is impossible without democracy, both in how we organise and in what we organise for. As socialists, we are interested in what empower people and give them the sense that they can work with others to change and manage their communities.  Our job, as socialists, is to find a way to propose ideas and democratic practices, to reinforce and build democratic commitment. Socialism is people collectively running society. Instead of being subject to anarchic capitalist competition and the mad rush for profit at any cost, it is working together for the common good. Our co-operative power would be controlled, not by a ruling class in the search for ever-greater profits, but democratically and for the fulfilment of human need.