The time for apathy is over

Brian Larkin, a Coordinator of Edinburgh Peace & Justice Center and Media Coordinator for XR Peace, the coalition of peace groups that aims to address the links between war, militarism and the climate crisis, wrote an article on Extinction Rebellion. 

Did he bring anything new to the table? Disappointingly, no.

“...Personal change has to be part of the solution. We need to drastically reduce consumption. Less meat, fewer new clothes, fewer cars, fewer flights. But, with the ice caps melting, with permanent drought in the southern hemisphere, with coral reefs dying personal change will not turn this around fast enough. Governments must act quickly. But they’re not going to do that unless we force them…At COP 2020 in Glasgow governments must make commitments to cut emissions  by 7.6% emissions every year we CAN limit global warming to 1.5°C. As the host nation the UK government has the opportunity to lead on this. We need to push the government to do that this year.”

The debate on whether climate change is man-made or not has well and truly ended. The debate on what to do about it, is not. Despite his good intentions and being well-meaning, Brian Larkin takes us no further than lobbying the government to do something about the environmental emergency as if it is a neutral body.

In order to replace capitalism with an ecological benign society we need a socialist revolution. Capitalism is the reason our civilisation is on the verge of collapse and the only way humanity and the rest of planet’s species can thrive is by ending capitalism. The insolubility of the climate crisis through capitalism is very evident. Those who profit most from the capitalist system have proven time and time again that not only are they unwilling to give up the rapacious economy that is destroying Earth, but that they even refuse to admit that it is that system which is the cause. We can no longer continue the pretense that the cure for capitalism’s deadly excesses can be found in capitalism itself. The reforms undertaken are not sufficient to help us to continue a world that remains liveable. The Socialist Party message is that civilisation as we know it now cannot survive if we allow the pursuit of profit to determine our future. To assume that any corporationhas an interest in acting according to an ethical standard higher than what is obliged or enforced by law is problematic. The very nature of corporations as profit-accumulating mechanisms contradicts and undermines their ability to regulate themselves. Relentless cost-cutting and aggressive expansion of market share in order to maintain its rate of profit form the core dogma of any business.

A willingness to pose the revolutionary challenge to capitalism is often the best way to win changes from the system but only if the revolutionary challenge succeeds, will it stave off climate disaster. Only in a socialist society can the ecological problems capitalism creates be solved. The climate movement has put forth some demands which can perhaps be possible within capitalism, but the Socialist Party continually emphasise the necessity of transcending capitalism and creating a new society based on democratic control of resources and production as a permanent solution. Capitalism’s drive to expand, private ownership of natural resources, production for profit rather than social good, the inability to plan, and alienating of humanity from nature makes it inherently ecologically destructive. 

The progressive role of the industrial and scientific revolutions of the 18th through 20th centuries, brought many benefits to all humanity but in the process it also brought massive damage wreaked upon the environment by its blind industrial expansion and capital accumulation. Now the progress of human civilization is about to go into reverse and face us with the real possibility of collapse. The good news is that the alternative is increasingly understood.

The climate crises offers socialists an unprecedented opportunity for discussing profound fundamental change to our society. Global warming is becoming an issue of struggles and protests. The inability of capitalism to manage the economy sustainably or in the general interest has grown clearer to many, and the relevance and necessity of socialism is now becoming prominent in the debate. It is unrealistic to expect capitalism to take it upon itself to become a kinder and gentler . If we truly wish to see real change for the better in our lives we must stand up for our own interests. It is up to all of us. We have the bleak prospect now that world socialism, a new society not dominated by the needs of capitalist accumulation, must now be accomplished under conditions of strict time limits for humanity to restore conditions that will secure the long term survival of our own species.

Capitalism created the crises, it won’t solve them.

Many progressives and leftists appear to to have overlooked that capitalism is actually bad. That the reason the planet suffers from poverty, pollution and militarism is because of capitalism. Nothing that works within the capitalist system is going to save anyone and will only reinforce the existing problems and further the suffering of the poor.

We are led to believe that the ruling class, the CEOs and financiers – all those that have destroyed the planet in pursuit of relentless profit have learned their lesson. They tell us they have they have changed. Those that destroyed eco-systems will now protect them and save the planet. And save you. Forget that capitalism devours everything in its path. They do not mention this inconvenient truth.  Instead we are told that we are all in this “together” and that there are no class divisions.  Yesterday’s exploiters and oppressors are today’s liberators and climate activists.

 The rich are not there to help anyone but themselves. Capitalism shapes how we perceive our place in the world. Modern-day capitalism, with its unshakable faith in deregulated markets, privatization of the public sphere, and austerity budgets, has contributed to our financial misery, leading to mass hopelessness and anxiety. For the vulnerable in distress, Margaret Thatcher’s mantra, “There is no such thing as society,” sends the message: You’re on your own.

Most land overall is owned by billionaires. Sixty-one percent of the surface land of America is privately owned. And most of that is empty. The government owns around thirty percent. The working class owns practically nothing, essentially. African-Americans (13% of the population) own under 1% as of 2016. Average land ownership for black farmers peaked in 1910, according to the Agriculture Census, with about 16 to 19 acres. In contrast, black farmers owned just 1.5 million acres of arable land in 1997. In many cases, the land African Americans lost over the 20th century was expropriated in one form or another and not sold freely. In the 2007 documentary, Banished, filmmaker Marco Williams describes numerous examples of white mobs forcing out African-American farmers and taking their land.

Over the past decade, the nation’s wealthiest private landowners have been laying claim to ever-larger tracts of the countryside, according to data compiled by the Land Report, a magazine about land ownership in America. In 2007, according to the Land Report, the nation’s 100 largest private landowners owned a combined 27 million acres of land — equivalent to the area of Maine and New Hampshire combined.

A decade later, the 100 largest landowners have holdings of 40.2 million acres, an increase of nearly 50 percent. Their holdings are equivalent in area to the entirety of New England, minus Vermont. Ted Turner owns over 2 million acres. John Malone over 2 million. Stan Kroenke owns over a million-and-a-half acres. The Hadley family, the Galt family, the Lee family…these are the owners of America’s land. Or Anne Marion who owns the 260,000 acre Four Sixes ranch in Texas. Or the Collier family, or the Barta family in Nebraska. All own close to a million acres of land. There are essentially 75 families, maybe a few more, that own the vast majority of land in the U.S. Jeff Bezos owns half a million acres in Texas. The Irving family owns a huge percentage of Maine, or the Reeds, who own vast swaths of northern California and Oregon.

80% of the people live on 3% of the land.

This is a problem of the capitalist system the world over—the system in which the working class is made to produce surplus value—wealth over and above what they can expect to receive in wages, however computed—is a system which takes the motivation and joy out of labour. Whatever the name, the underlying reality for workers is everywhere the same: selling their labour power for wages which are less than the value of what they produce, they remain forever poor and exploited. This condition can never be changed in its essence as long as the wages system lasts.

Fight for the Future

We live in unhappy times and the solutions appear not to be evident to many of us. Few offer a vision of an alternative future, let alone a path towards it. The Socialist Party’s goal is clear: a socialist world in which sharing, not competitive struggle, prevails. Capitalist growth leads to the depletion and degradation of natural resources. The technical fixes, government legislation and regulation and market incentives are unlikely to significantly mitigate the environmental emergency. The prognosis for a healthy planet is not at all promising.

First, the Socialist Party maintains that our society is divided into classes based on groups of people standing in the same relationship to the means of production.

Secondly, the Socialist Party holds that the interests of these classes are antagonistic and irreconcilable and that a constant struggle goes on between them over the division of the wealth that society produces.

Thirdly, the Socialist Party agrees that the owning class is the ruling class because it controls the government. The government protects the capitalist class by protecting the source of its economic strength private property. It is the will of the capitalist class that the rights of private property be protected. It uses its control of government to write down its will and call it law. It uses its control of government to enforce its will, the law. The law is the voice of the ruling class.

For a capitalist, the right to private property means first and foremost the free and untrammelled ability to own and use in any way he may see fit the instruments of production. It means that he shall have at all times free access to these instruments, and that he on his own decision shall be able to grant or refuse such access to others: that he himself shall decide whether or not to employ the instruments to turn out goods; that the entire product of the instruments shall belong to him. He and his fellow-capitalists have constructed their state to defend this right by all necessary means. However, in the course of the development of capitalism, the original right to private property suffers some modification and limitation. These limitations are roughly of two sorts: one type is a concession forced on the state by the strength of the workers (for example, the workers’ right to strike and picket, both of which are limitations on the capitalist’s right to private property); the other and more frequent type is imposed by the bourgeois state itself, acting as representative of the entire capitalist class, in order to protect the system of private property against being undermined by the too anarchic practices of individual capitalists. Capitalists, as individuals, usually resent both of these types of limitation, but it is only against the first that they carry on and must carry on a bitter and decisive struggle. The second type is in the final analysis a mode of self-preservation for capitalism. If they are ever to achieve their own emancipation, working people must throw off the shackles of bourgeois law. Socialism is transforming the means of production from individual into common property;

At present the processes of government by which the capitalists of this country rules are called the democratic form of government. Democracy literally means “Rule of the people”. We live in a class society in which one class maintains its favorable economic position because it controls the rule by the people, since the capitalist class is a small minority, of the emulation. The majority of people support the present system and therefore the capitalist class controls the government only as long as the majority of the voters permit them to.

Mankind’s progress cannot resume its upward climb until civilisation is rescued from capitalist barbarism.