Markin comment:
In a long left-wing political career I have held several pet peeves of shorter or longer duration. You know things like people at parties, very respectable parties now, going on and on about how forty years ago they gave the best two years of their lives to “the revolution” before scurrying off to find the “main chance,” some professional or academic career. Well, I don’t burn over that peeve as much as I used but I do however still burn over the subject of this article-the uses or opposition to uses of nuclear energy as a power source, now or in our communist future although the axis shifts somewhat on that latter turn of events.
My problem with anti-nuclear energy types without sounding like some boorish redneck on the question is that, to a person, they do not live in tents, to a person do not live on two dollars a day, christ, they cannot go to the corner convenience store without spending a hundred dollars, and to a person have the possibilities to decide whether they want to go “back to nature,” or not. I might add, that to a person, or almost, they have followed every twist and turn of American Cold War (and now-post Cold War) reliance on a vast nuclear arsenal to deter friend or foe without a murmur. Of course, opposition to nuclear weapons would mean taking on the state power and, oh well, that might be just a little tricky. The point is that now, in the short future, and certainly in our communist future all energy options should remain open as the fossil fuels dwindle or become prohibitively expensive.
Now I know as well as anyone that nuclear power plants run on the profit motive are subject to safety concerns, rightly places concerns. I would argue that our tasks around this issue are essentially negative though. We don’t, and don’t want to, make energy policy for the bourgeoisie but we have a stake in demanding higher safety standards, and more importantly, having worker committees that can shut nuclear plants down for safety problems. That is our real axis of struggle.
For the future an international workers government would decide, for or against, uses of any particular energies, and the placement of any particular plants. While I am agnostic on the actual plans that might come up I do know one thing I would argue, argue strenuously, against putting any nuclear power plants under today’s technological conditions anywhere near earthquake-ridden Japan.
*********
Workers Vanguard No. 983
8 July 2011
Germany:Greens’ Anti-Nuclear Hysteria Amnesties Capitalism
The following excerpted article is translated from Spartakist No. 188 (May 2011), newspaper of the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). Almost four months after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan, some 2,500 workers and engineers are still struggling to stabilize three crippled reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Although the full extent of the damage remains unknown, Tokyo for the first time early last month acknowledged that fuel rods in three reactors had probably melted through their inner containment vessels. According to state officials, the amount of radiation released in the first week was more than twice the original estimate.
With the crisis still unresolved, the Japanese government has abandoned plans to expand its nuclear power industry and may forego it altogether. Several European countries are following suit. On June 30, the Bundestag (German parliament) voted to close all of the country’s nuclear power plants by 2022, making it the first major nation with a nuclear industry to completely renounce the technology in years.
As in Germany and elsewhere following the disaster in Japan, much of the reformist left in the U.S. echoed petty-bourgeois environmental groups in beating the drums of opposition to nuclear power. In a Socialist Worker article titled “The Nightmare That Could Happen Here” (31 March), the International Socialist Organization opined, “The potential exists to build a new vibrant anti-nuclear movement here in the U.S.” For their part, the fake Trotskyists of Socialist Action headlined their March 18 article on the Japan crisis “No More Nukes!” The pretensions of these organizations to socialism are once again shown to be so much hot air. Playing to the antitechnology prejudices of the “green” milieu, they hope to conjure up another “movement” premised on the continuation of the capitalist profit system, which sacrifices safety for the bottom line and blocks the rational, full development of technology.
* * *
Millions of people around the world are gazing anxiously toward Fukushima, where power plant workers are risking their lives in a struggle to prevent further explosions that would release yet more radioactive material from the nuclear facility. Many people are concerned over the safety of nuclear power plants in their own countries. Workers experience daily in their own workplaces how speedup is intensified and on-the-job safety undermined by the drive for profits. It’s not hard for them to imagine that the capitalists run their nuclear power plants much the same way. While power companies and capitalist governments claim that nuclear plants are safe, and they may even institute a few safety controls in the hope of calming people down, environmental organizations are beating the drum against nuclear technology and praising “alternative energy sources” such as wind turbines as a replacement for nuclear power.
Some of the most virulent reaction is to be found in Germany. As soon as the catastrophe in Japan became known, nationwide “warning vigils” were organized against nuclear power. On March 12, more than 50,000 people formed a 27-mile-long human chain from the Neckar-Westheim nuclear plant to Stuttgart to protest the extension of operating licenses granted last fall to the seven oldest nuclear reactors by the CDU/FDP [Christian Democrat/Free Democrat] coalition government led by Angela Merkel. A three-month moratorium on license extensions for nuclear power plants was intended to provide a little breathing space for the government and the energy bosses, until fear in Germany—which in some places had risen to hysteria—receded. In the March 27 elections to state parliaments in Baden-Württemberg and Rheinland-Pfalz, the Greens doubled their voting totals.
The petty-bourgeois anti-nuclear movement, with the reformist left in its wake, is channeling rage away from the capitalists, blaming nuclear power itself and, beyond that, modern large-scale industry. In this way, the reformists assist in solidifying capitalist rule, ultimately increasing the danger they claim to be fighting. At the same time, the nuclear weapons arsenals in the hands of the major imperialist powers could extinguish life on earth many times over—this is the main threat to the existence of mankind. Fukushima is a nuclear accident caused by the capitalists’ drive for profits, their corruption and irresponsibility. The atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the calculated mass murder of hundreds of thousands of people, carried out by “democratic” U.S. imperialism.
While the environmental movement may at times rightly protest against crimes of capitalism, nonetheless there is nothing inherently leftist or progressive about environmentalism. In Germany today, it stretches from anti-racist groups like Ökolinx through the bourgeois Greens right into the fascist National Democratic Party (NPD), which also calls for abandoning nuclear power. The Green Party itself was constructed in the late 1970s by demoralized ex-leftists who had turned away from the working class and sought their political fortunes in the petty-bourgeois environmental protests. The ideology of the ecology movement sees modern industry and technology as the root of all evil. It looks to the past and is hostile to science. The Green milieu is permeated by and overlaps with esoteric cultism, practitioners of “alternative medicine” and other such backward nonsense. An example is the Greens’ Renate Künast, who as Federal Minister [for Consumer Protection, Food and Agriculture] advocated using homeopathic sugar globules in farming.
Our Marxist perspective is diametrically opposed to this. It is capitalist property relations that are the problem. Capitalist competition means that any efforts in the direction of “sustainability” and “friendliness to the environment” that result in additional costs bring with them the threat of bankruptcy. Factories do not produce goods according to need but in quantities that can be sold at a profit. It is necessary to overthrow capitalism through socialist revolution, in which the working class seizes power and expropriates the capitalist class. Only when the productive forces are placed in the service of all humanity will it be possible to develop those forces through science and technology to the point where hunger and poverty become a thing of the past; this improved technology will of course also alleviate the destruction of the environment.
Anti-Nuclear Power: The Left Signs Up
Sections of the SPD [Social Democrats], which was originally a strong advocate of nuclear power plant construction during the chancellorships of Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, are now calling for Germany to abandon nuclear power. The Left Party [composed mainly of ex-Stalinists and former SPDers] is attempting to portray itself as the most determined opponent of atomic power. It is fishing among the rank and file of the environmental movements, many of whom are quite disillusioned with the Greens themselves, implicitly accusing the Greens of opportunism for not having pushed through the abandonment of nuclear power in 1998-2005, when they were governing the country in coalition with the SPD.
This criticism is not from the left. The supposed opportunism of the Greens is an expression of the fact that their “back to nature” program is a reactionary utopia. Without industry, the majority of mankind would simply starve to death. It is reactionary to reproach the Greens for not having actually made their program a reality. Here the Left Party casts a lustful eye at the next federal elections, offering its services to the Greens as a potential coalition partner in an SPD/Green/Left Party government after 2013.
Some 250,000 people attended the March 26 mobilizations held in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and Munich under the slogan “Shut down all nuclear power plants!” They were organized through a trans-class popular front consisting of environmental organizations and the Greens as well as the Left Party along with parts of the SPD and the DGB trade-union federation. The aim was to channel the justifiable anger away from the capitalist state and the profit-driven corporations and direct it onto a parliamentary course.
A more leftist example of spreading illusions is the Workers Power Group (Gruppe Arbeitermacht, GAM), German section of the League for a Fifth International. In the April issue of its journal Neue Internationale the GAM observes that radioactive contamination from the nuclear incident at Fukushima was a true tragedy “because it was preventable, not simply a natural catastrophe, but rather must be placed fully at the door of capitalism.” Simultaneously, the GAM capitulates to the Greens and the Left Party, asserting that the problem was technology itself: “The events surrounding Fukushima show that atomic power presents an insurmountable risk.” This is only to conclude: “Fukushima demonstrates that the modern productive forces, that development can benefit all human society only if the rule of capital and its state is broken. The alternative to nuclear power is not just wind and sun, but socialism!”
The GAM’s gyrations become much more comprehensible when you take a look at the front page of the April Neue Internationale: “Switch Off Black-Yellow!” [referring to the CDU/Christian Social Union (CSU) and the Free Democrats]. In the state elections the GAM had warned that “not voting helps Mappus” [CDU premier of Baden-Württemberg] and called to “vote for the Left Party—but organize struggle!” (Neue Internationale, March 2011). This makes clear how the GAM intends to institute “workers’ control over the energy industry”: via a “left” parliamentary, i.e., capitalist, SPD/Green government, preferably with the participation of the Left Party.
Such leftists have adapted to and deepened the massive retrogression of political consciousness stemming from the destruction of the Soviet Union. They stand opposed even to Marxism’s elementary vision of progress: the worldwide elimination of hunger and poverty through the all-sided development of the productive forces.
In the face of this farce we reaffirm what we wrote in “Nuclear Power and the Workers Movement” (Kommunistische Korrespondenz No. 18, May 1977, the predecessor to Spartakist [also printed in WV No. 146, 25 February 1977]):
“As Marxists we generally strongly support the introduction of new technology, including the development, construction and operation of nuclear fission reactors. Certainly proponents of a socialist society based on material abundance have a vastly different viewpoint on this subject than ecological crackpots who in effect seek a return to pre-industrial society. At the same time we point out that the economic advisibility of nuclear fission power can only be judged within the framework of an internationally planned socialist economy.
“There are very real problems of safety connected with nuclear reactors. As throughout industry, we demand union control of working conditions and, where there are specific hazards, action to shut down dangerous facilities. But beyond this we have no particular interest in determining how the bourgeoisie meets its energy needs. Those who assume that ‘wide public discussion’ within the framework of capitalist rule will satisfactorily resolve this question are guilty of sowing the worst utopian/reactionarypacifist illusions.”
Raw Materials and Self-Sufficiency
There was turmoil in Germany when Russia turned off the spigot of natural gas to Ukraine in the winter of 2006 after Ukraine refused to pay the higher natural gas prices imposed by Russia in retaliation for Ukraine’s tilting to the West. It was in this context that Hermann Scheer, the SPD’s spokesman on energy questions and winner of the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” articulated an encapsulation of bourgeois “alternative” energy strategies in a 9 January 2007 interview on German radio:
“In 1950 in Germany, 5 percent of our energy consumption depended on imports. Today, this figure is around 75 percent and it is much the same for other countries. This is related to the fact that there simply aren’t that many countries where petroleum, natural gas, coal or uranium can be extracted, while the need for energy is universal. The logical conclusion is that one can escape this trap of energy dependence only through a comprehensively devised mobilization of renewable energies, so as to replace fossil fuels and nuclear energy.”
This explains why the SPD/Green government decided to abandon nuclear energy in 2002 as it pursued a more independent course vis-à-vis U.S. imperialism (for example, its rejection of the 2003 Iraq war).
The capitalist great powers strive to increase their self-sufficiency so as to be less subject to blackmail and to maintain a stronger position in the world market and in the struggle for resources. The heyday of nuclear power plant construction was the 1970s, in the wake of the oil crisis of late 1973, when the capitalists aimed to decrease dependence on imported oil. In addition, domestic German coal extraction became less and less profitable and oil reserves were declining in the U.S., while Japan and France possessed hardly any domestic resources from which to generate energy.
How the Bourgeois State Serves the Capitalists
In “Corruption, Cronyism, Fukushima” (31 March), Spiegel online gives examples of how the state and businesses are intertwined. There are 20,000 instances documented by the Japanese government of a civil servant shifting over to the private sector following retirement and “then frequently working for a company that he had previously regulated as a civil servant.” TEPCO [Tokyo Electric Power Company, owner of the Fukushima Daiichi plant] knew how to make “optimal” use of such connections to maximize profit. In the ’80s and ’90s TEPCO repeatedly falsified data from inspections, including the number of cracks in reactor containment vessels. [For more information see “Japan Tsunami Disaster and Capitalist Criminality” (WV No. 978, 15 April)].
Germany (or the U.S., etc.) is no different. The nuclear incident in Block A of [utility giant] RWE’s Biblis power plant in 1987 demonstrates the same intertwining of regulatory authority and the nuclear industry in Germany. When the reactor was powered up on 16 December 1987, a cooling system ventilator, which had been opened during the three-day shutdown to discharge the remaining heat, failed to close. It took over 15 hours for the problem to be noticed. Even then the reactor was not shut down immediately, as the situation demanded, since this would have meant writing off at least a day of production at full power. In addition, there was the possibility of the authorities getting riled up. Instead, an attempt was made to shut the valve while the reactor was running, causing 300°C [572°F] radioactive water from the primary cooling system to spurt at high pressure outside the reactor containment vessel. It was extremely fortunate that a second safety valve didn’t seize up like the first one and closed after seven seconds.
The [Hessian Environmental] Ministry and government investigators kept the matter secret for nearly a year. Only thanks to research by the U.S. technical journal Nucleonics Week was the fact exposed that Biblis had risked a leak of a type that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in a 1975 study had determined would cause the system to fail, “initiating a core meltdown and the escape of radioactivity outside the containment.”
The 2007 Greenpeace report “Black Book on Obstacles to Climate Protection—The Intertwining of Politics and the Energy Industry” names ten members of the Bundestag with seats on either the advisory or the supervisory board of the five largest German energy companies, among them the SPD and CDU/CSU spokesmen for energy questions. Twenty-eight former politicians or top governmental regulators are currently working for the large energy companies.
Reformist Illusions in the Bourgeois State
The intertwining of state and business is not peculiar to Japan or Germany, nor is it limited to energy companies. Rather it is an expression of the class character of the bourgeois state. In The State and Revolution (1917) Lenin explains the teachings of Marx and Engels regarding the state:
“The ancient and feudal states were organs for the exploitation of the slaves and serfs; likewise, ‘the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage labour by capital.’…
“In a democratic republic, Engels continues, ‘wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely,’ first, by means of the ‘direct corruption of officials’ (America); secondly, by means of an ‘alliance of the government and the Stock Exchange’ (France and America).”
First, capitalist governments shifted the costs of the ongoing financial crisis caused by the banks onto the shoulders of working people. The lust for profits of concerns like TEPCO as well as state corruption then endangered the existence of millions of Japanese. Faced with such a state of affairs, the Left Party sees a “danger” that workers’ and leftists’ illusions in bourgeois democracy might suffer some “erosion.” Left Party leader Gregor Gysi opined in a speech in the Bundestag (March 17):
“In the past year, during the financial crisis, everyone could see how the speculators and heads of the banks were dominating events and politics.... Only if politics can acquire the courage and the power to breach the dominance of these speculators, bank heads, nuclear power and other industry lobbyists and secure the primacy of democratic institutions will we be acting for our population, will we save our democracy and live up to our function as representatives of the people in the Bundestag!”
Well, the state governments in which the Left Party participates, as in Berlin and Brandenburg, are no less servile to capitalism. These capitalist governments guarantee the “dominance” of the banks and industry. In Berlin, the SPD/Left Party [city] Senate bailed out the Berlin Bankgesellschaft bank, which cronyism and speculation had driven into bankruptcy, at the expense of the working people, ripping up contracts, slashing wages and eliminating public services.
And when there’s resistance, then the core of the state—the “special armed bodies,” i.e., the police, army and prisons—are employed. This is seen in attacks on picket lines, as occurred recently in France in the oil refinery strikes that were protesting the assault on pensions, or the bludgeoning of leftist demonstrators to clear the way for a Nazi mobilization, as happened repeatedly in Berlin under the SPD/Left Party Senate.
Profits at the Expense of Safety
At Fukushima Daiichi 450 workers, mostly unskilled and hired through subcontractors, are risking their lives to fight a catastrophe for which the TEPCO bosses are responsible. As of April 1, 21 workers had been subjected to excessive radiation with more to follow, since, according to the government, it will take months before the power plant is sealed off. For decades, nuclear firms have employed low-wage contract workers. This has been spurred on by privatization and, in Europe, the intensified competition deriving from the liberalization of the European Union energy market. Die Zeit (31 March) wrote that hundreds of temporary workers died of radiation sickness in the ’70s in Japan.
In Germany, there are 23,000 contract workers employed in this field. In 1985, in his well-known book Ganz unten [Rock Bottom], Günter Wallraff, who had disguised himself as a Turkish “guest worker,” described his experiences as Ali Levant Sigirioglu. As we wrote in “Turkish Workers in the German Fourth Reich” (WV No. 399, 14 March 1986):
“The final act in Wallraff’s career as Ali came when friends of his made entrepreneur Vogel [an SPD member] a fake offer to see just how far he would go. Six Turks were supposedly needed to repair equipment in a power plant poisoned by escaping radioactive fumes. To avoid a scandal only Turks who would soon be returning to Turkey could be chosen so they would not die in West Germany. Vogel had no qualms accepting this deal, demonstrating that West German capitalists would kill foreign workers in order to make a profit.”
Wallraff accused the nuclear concerns of sending mostly ethnic Turkish contract workers “into radiation” where they were “consumed like fuel.” A report by former nuclear workers in the Berliner Zeitung (8 January 1999) confirms that this is common practice.
Training specialists is costly, and the trained specialists are themselves expensive. Thus, as few specialists as possible are hired, with barely trained and unskilled laborers left to do the dangerous hands-on work. All of these are employed by subsidiaries. Even under “normal” operating conditions, this is often fatal for the workers, but it generates a fountain of profits. If, however, there is a breakdown in the highly complex nuclear plants, as now in Fukushima, it paves the way for catastrophes. There is no competent, well-rehearsed team, one that knows what has to be done, with sufficient numbers to reduce the radiation health risk by frequently rotating workers.
Far from being an “anomaly,” these conditions make evident the regular workings of capitalism. In Volume One of Capital, Karl Marx explains:
“Après moi le déluge! [After me, the deluge!] is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Hence Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society. To the outcry as to the physical and mental degradation, the premature death, the torture of overwork, it answers: Ought these to trouble us since they increase our profits? But looking at things as a whole, all this does not, indeed, depend on the good or ill will of the individual capitalist. Free competition brings out the inherent laws of capitalist production, in the shape of external coercive laws having power over every individual capitalist.”
Since this was written in 1867, free competition led to the forming of monopolies, to monopoly capitalism. As analyzed by Lenin, domestic monopolies intensify competition on the world market, i.e., they reproduce and intensify the contradictions of capitalism.
Despite not being all that numerous, energy workers possess enormous social power. The trade unions must lead a struggle for the companies to make contract workers regular employees and for their appropriate training and remuneration as well as lifelong health care. The dangerous lack of specialists and the reduction in regular fixed staff must be fought through class struggle. Such a struggle would generate strong support in the working class, which has the greatest interest in the safety of power plants, especially nuclear plants. But the trade-union tops at BCE [Mining, Chemistry, Energy Industrial Union] and ver.di [public employees union], in which nuclear workers are organized, instead pursue a policy of class collaboration. Again and again, BCE has issued statements jointly with capitalist associations calling for maintaining “competitiveness” and “Production-Site Germany.”
The union misleaders limit the workers’ demands to what is “acceptable” to declining, rotting capitalism. The fight for basic needs must be linked to the struggle for expropriation of the energy concerns without compensation. This must be part of the fight for a socialist revolution to establish an internationally planned economy under the control of workers councils. Only then, based on an international division of labor, will it be possible to consider whether it is really necessary to construct nuclear power plants in thickly settled earthquake zones like Japan.
Pacifism Disarms the Workers, Not the Capitalists
In his March 17 response in the Bundestag to Chancellor Merkel’s governmental statement on the conclusions to be drawn from the events in Japan, Gregor Gysi stated: “Anyone having at his disposal the technology for the peaceful use of atomic energy and the ability to produce electric current from nuclear plants is also potentially capable of producing nuclear weapons.... The examples of Iran and North Korea demonstrate that these dangers have not been eliminated. Consistent initial steps must be taken toward finally destroying all the nuclear weapons in the world. Only then will the international community have the right to ban the production of new nuclear weapons worldwide.”
We’ve been hearing such disarmament appeals since the “peace” movement of the 1980s. As against the appeals of the pacifists for the Soviet Union to carry out nuclear self-disarmament, we were damn glad that the Soviet Union had developed, produced and had at the ready the atom bomb. Otherwise, U.S. imperialism would certainly have made a horrific reality of its atomic first-strike scenarios—that was the message of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Hatred for the Soviet Union sprang from its class character as a workers state that continued to embody the gains of the 1917 October Revolution despite the degeneration it underwent under Stalin starting in late 1923. This is equally true of China and North Korea today, which escaped nuclear incineration in the 1950s, as called for at the time by U.S. generals, only thanks to the existence of the Soviet nuclear shield. The destruction of the Soviet Union by capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92 has made the world a much more dangerous place for the oppressed. The imperialists can now tromp around on the neocolonial oppressed peoples of the world unhindered by the Soviet military counterweight. Having starved Iraq since 1991, bombed it flat and finally bloodily occupied it in 2003, the imperialists now have Iran in their crosshairs for supposedly intending to develop nuclear weapons. The example of Iraq, which could be leveled because it possessed no weapons of mass destruction, is instructive: Iran needs nuclear weapons to ward off invasion by the imperialists.
The fundamental basis of pacifism is support to capitalism. It disarms only the working class and the oppressed, never the capitalist class. In fact, it actually contributes to the preparation for war, through spreading the illusion that capitalism can be made peaceable. This is also shown by the example of the Greens, who like to put on a show as saviors of mankind and the environment. In their coalition government with the SPD in 1999, they pushed through German participation in the NATO war against Serbia, followed in 2001 by participation in the occupation of Afghanistan. Incidentally, among the weapons raining death and destruction down on the Serbian population were shells made of depleted uranium. Today, the Greens are some of the most vehement warmongers against Libya, advocating sending in the Bundeswehr [German army].
Anti-Communist Hysteria Over Chernobyl
Even today, in the reactions to Fukushima one can discern reflections of the anti-Communist arrogance toward the [1986] Chernobyl nuclear accident, which was dismissed essentially as the result of the incapacity of the “backward Soviets” and their planned economy, which had built an unsafe type of reactor. Federal chancellor Merkel remarked in her March 17 statement that the situation had changed because “the seemingly impossible had become possible in such a highly developed country as Japan.”
Basically the imperialist powers believed their own fairy tale that Western reactors were much safer and that something of this sort was impossible in the highly developed nuclear power plants of the West. At the time of Chernobyl, they deliberately overlooked the fact that this was not the first major accident in a nuclear power plant. On 28 March 1979 there was a partial core meltdown in a “highly developed country,” the U.S., at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Whereas opponents of nuclear power let the March 28 anniversary pass by, major mobilizations are being planned for the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl reactor disaster.
After Fukushima, Iouli Andreev, who was for years responsible for the decontamination work around the stricken Chernobyl reactor, made the obvious point that nuclear plant operators have intentionally ignored the lessons from Chernobyl in their hunt for profits and that the government encouraged them. In “Ten Years of Chernobyl,” he wrote:
“Both ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ [Soviet] reactor technology demonstrate strengths and weaknesses: The strength of the Eastern technology lies in the fact that both material-intensive construction and highly trained staff were inexpensive. The result is robust technical facilities with a low degree of automation. This must be viewed positively, as highly trained people are always preferable to robots, as exemplified in air travel, where even today planes are still being flown by pilots. Lack of quality control must be seen as the weak side of Eastern technology. Compared to this, Western reactor technology has developed under the limiting framework of economic competition, with high costs for both personnel and technical components. The result is less robust facilities with a higher degree of automation and fewer skilled personnel.”
But lack of quality control was the direct expression of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet regime. Only a regime of workers democracy can ensure the necessary safety and work morale. The reaction to the catastrophe testified both to the possibilities of a planned economy and also to its bureaucratic deformation. Over 600,000 engineers, scientists and soldiers were marshaled to deal with the radioactive pollution around the sealed reactor. But Andreev is probably right that the large number of deaths could have been avoided had the other three reactor blocks at the facility not been restarted and if technically well-prepared cleanup work had been carried out after more time had passed.
One of the arguments of Western “experts” was always that reactors like Chernobyl had no secondary reactor safety vessel. But New York physicist Michio Kaku remarked in a talk on Chernobyl (reprinted in WV No. 405, 6 June 1986): “Well, the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant in Long Island has a containment structure which is weaker than the containment structure at Chernobyl. The reactor there has a containment—not the four-foot concrete dome characteristic in U.S. plants, it has a structure which can contain 57 pounds per square inch overpressure.” The Long Island reactor, he said, could withstand only 30 pounds.
So-called third-generation reactors have been in operation since the 1990s in Japan. In contrast to second-generation reactors like that in Fukushima and most other commercial nuclear power plants, they depend on so-called passive safety devices based on physical principles (gravity, convection, resistance to high temperatures), not on technological safety controls that depend on electrical power or operator intervention to avoid a catastrophe in the event of a malfunction. They possess, for example, the capability of a controlled burn-off of accumulated hydrogen, thereby averting explosions like those in Fukushima. Additionally, in the light of the rescue operations after Chernobyl, so-called core-catchers were developed that, in the event of a core meltdown, catch the hot material and cool it down. In Chernobyl, such a core-catcher was constructed beneath the devastated reactor using an underground tunnel. Fortunately, it proved unnecessary.
As of now, there exists only a single nuclear power plant equipped with such a core-catcher, and it is in China. China is now being subjected to an anti-Communist attack for having decided to massively expand its nuclear capacity in mid March as part of its five-year plan; at the same time, it is disparaged as the world’s largest producer of carbon dioxide.
In the case of China, and previously the Soviet Union and East Germany (DDR), the Greens’ and the environmentalists’ anti-Communism and hostility to large industry and centralism come together on the basis of their glorification of bourgeois democracy. Every five-year plan that expanded these countries’ industrial capacity filled these types with horror. This is why they cooperated in fueling the Chernobyl hysteria in 1986. Following German reunification, as a spearhead of the witchhunt against the Stasi [secret service], the Greens assisted in the smashing of DDR industry by the Treuhand [privatization agency]. This led to massive unemployment in East Germany and the emigration of over a million people. Now they’re in the vanguard in the anti-Communist witchhunting of China.
The Question of Final Storage
A further prevalent argument against nuclear power plants is the question of nuclear waste and its final disposal. In this question of ultimate storage, profit and irrationality distort what is basically a geological/technical question. Such distrust of capitalist governments and companies is rightly indicated by the more than 40-year-old “trial repository” in the former salt mine Asse II near Wolfenbüttel in Lower Saxony. Following a report in the Braunschweiger Zeitung (11 June 2008) of brine contaminated with radioactivity in Asse, a status report by the then-Federal environmental minister Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) revealed that it had been known, even before the first nuclear waste was deposited in the former mine, that it was not watertight. Nonetheless, from 1967 to 1978 126,000 barrels were deposited, some of them damaged in loading and others rusted through. Since at least 1988, water has been gushing into the mineshafts, and since about 1994 radioactive brine has been collecting there, which ultimately the facility’s operator secretly pumped out underground. There is a threat of collapse, and no one can say whether some of this brine might at some time reach the outside.
This has fueled ongoing protests since plans were revealed in 1977 for a new final repository in Gorleben in Lower Saxony. Since 1995 there have been regular protests against the Castor [casks of radioactive material] transports from the French spent fuel treatment plant La Hague to the temporary Gorleben repository, whose suitability as a final repository is still being investigated. As many as 30,000 police were mobilized to escort the transports and bludgeon nuclear power opponents and residents of neighboring localities who had blocked the way in protest. The workers movement must, of course, defend the protesters against state terror. But even a planned economy would in all probability require ultimate storage facilities, if only to store already existing wastes. These could, however, in the absence of corruption and the demand for profitability, be set up in a way that took into account the interests and opinions of the local population.
In Germany, compared to the 123,000 cubic meters of radioactive nuclear waste generated so far, 500,000 cubic meters of toxic chemical waste are produced per year, which has to be deposited in final repositories. In contrast to radioactive waste, the potential danger of toxic chemical waste does not decrease with time. Whether or not it’s radioactive, the capitalists don’t give a damn what happens to their waste.
Opponents of nuclear power cite Greenpeace to the effect that there’s only enough uranium for 60 years of production. But even if this were true, using fast breeder reactors it is possible to split uranium 238, the majority of which is now being discarded unused. Thorium, which exists in much larger deposits than uranium, could be employed for the production of nuclear energy. Fast breeders also produce noticeably less nuclear waste than second- and third-generation reactors. Finally, the technological realization of nuclear fusion, such as occurs in the sun, is also being researched. Fusion holds the promise of an abundant source of power whose by-product is helium, a harmless noble gas.
Nuclear energy—whether generated by fission or fusion—has, alongside its very real risks, a gigantic potential for propelling forward the development of humankind, and thereby its social liberation. But for this the rule of capitalism must be overthrown and a socialist society established. We fight for the construction of a revolutionary multiethnic workers party as part of a reforged Fourth International, the world party of socialist revolution.
Showing posts with label environmental control. Show all posts
Showing posts with label environmental control. Show all posts
Monday, July 18, 2011
Monday, October 11, 2010
*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Production for Profit: Anarchy and Plunder-Capitalism and Global Warming
Click on the headline to link to the Workers Vanguard website for an online copy of Part Two of this article
Markin comment:
Maybe one hundred years or so ago one could have rationally assumed that the Earth would survive with some kind of hodge-podge, off-handed, afterthought economic and social planning among the major imperialist capitalist powers and those actions would, more or less, lift all boats. World War I definitively put an end to that notion. And should have put an end to the notion (and the capitalist system that supports it) that the Earth could survive; survive well and fruitfully, without international centralized planning through workers democracy.
But, alas, we are almost back to square one and the current intense question of climate change is only the most pressing question of the day that requires international centralized planning. I could add about fifty other issues that require that same kind of attention from agriculture production to international labor standards. But to get anyway with those pressing issues we need parties committed to centralized planning. More importantly, we need parties that fight for workers governments who will take power and implement that planning principle. And no, it is not some Green party, spare us that, please. In any case read this article in order to see one more reason why we have to fight, and fight like hell, for our common communist future right now.
*****
Workers Vanguard No. 965
24 September 2010
Production for Profit: Anarchy and Plunder
Capitalism and Global Warming
For Socialist Revolution!
For an Internationally Planned Economy!
Part One
The Earth as a whole is without question heating up. According to figures released in July by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, global land and ocean surface temperatures in June were the highest since monitoring began in 1880—the 304th consecutive month above the 20th-century average—while Arctic sea ice melted at a record-breaking pace. Undoubtedly, the heat can be attributed in good part to periodic and natural changes in ocean temperatures and surface air pressure. But there is some other factor at work behind the overall warming trend. A vast majority of climate scientists worldwide, including not only the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) but the national scientific academies of the U.S. and most other countries, identifies that factor as anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gases.
In league with liberal environmentalists, reformist groups like the International Socialist Organization (ISO) have seized on “climate change” to beg the major capitalist powers to join hands in cutting back heat-trapping gases—a goal that significant sections of the ruling capitalist classes have laid claim to. Thus the ISO, Greenpeace et al. put great stock in the climate talks that took place last December in Copenhagen under the sponsorship of the UN, which is, simply, a den of imperialist thieves and their victims.
A new “international climate justice movement” was proclaimed after tens of thousands flocked to the Danish capital, in the main to demand that the world powers agree to curb greenhouse gas emissions and give financial support to Third World countries. The protests included a 100,000-strong demonstration in the middle of the two-week summit, during which heavily armed police squads arrested some 1,000 people. Soon after, thousands of observer delegates, including from such mainstream groups as Greenpeace, were locked out of the conference on its final days.
What some had dubbed “Hopenhagen” ended without reaching its stated goals of renewing the emissions-reduction commitments made by industrialized countries that signed on to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (which the U.S. never ratified) and setting emissions targets for all other countries. This was a predictable outcome. For one thing, the world’s capitalist classes are divided internally over this issue. More fundamentally, each capitalist government is charged with protecting its own “national interests.” The handful of imperialist countries that dominate the world market are in competition with each other for spheres of exploitation around the world, and have already carried out two devastating world wars in their insatiable drive for profit.
Significant emissions shifts would almost certainly mean substantial economic costs, which few capitalist governments want to incur, especially in the face of a global economic slowdown. The main human activity contributing to the release of heat-trapping gases is also the main activity turning the wheels of the modern economy: the combustion of fossil fuels, such as oil and coal. Given the importance of cheap energy sources, imperialist competition for fossil fuels, especially oil, has played a part in sparking numerous military conflagrations in the last century. Countries with a hand on the oil spigot or access to ample coal reserves have a vested material interest in maintaining the status quo.
The example of the United States, the world’s largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases, is illustrative. Giant American companies like ExxonMobil are central to the global oil cartel, while the core European Union (EU) powers of Germany and France cannot make the same claim. Hence an increase in the world market price of oil not only enriches a dominant sector of corporate America but also increases the energy costs of rival French and German capitalists. For years, the U.S. clashed with the EU over carrying out the Kyoto Protocol, because the nominal emissions caps included in the accord would have affected the U.S. most directly.
Whatever their differences with each other, the imperialists, led by the U.S., have joined together in recent climate talks to pressure China, a bureaucratically deformed workers state, largely in order to throttle its growing industrial strength. After winning EU backing to shift the burden of emissions-reduction agreements onto the more backward countries, the U.S. refused to support any deal at Copenhagen that did not include stringent monitoring of China’s emissions. Behind such maneuvers lies the imperialists’ strategic goal of smashing the Chinese workers state and once again subjecting the country to untrammeled capitalist exploitation. Against the environmentalists and fake socialists who join in the China-bashing, we stand for the unconditional military defense of China against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution.
For Marxists, addressing the human-derived aspect of global warming is fundamentally not a technical but a social problem. Marxism is opposed to environmentalist ideology, which accepts the inviolability of capitalist class rule, in which production is profit-driven and society’s wealth is monopolized by a tiny bourgeois ruling class. We fight for a society that will provide more, not less, for the working people and the impoverished masses of the world. Our goal is to eliminate material scarcity and qualitatively advance the living standards of all. To this end, we fight for socialist revolutions in the capitalist countries to expropriate the bourgeoisie and for proletarian political revolutions in China and the other bureaucratically deformed workers states, laying the basis for the construction of a planned, collectivized world economy. With production liberated from the profit motive, humans’ creative powers will be unleashed to build a society in which poverty, malnutrition, inequality and oppression are things of the past.
When the workers of the world rule, energy will be generated and used in the most rational, efficient and safe manner possible, including by developing new energy sources. We do not rule out in advance the use of fossil fuels or any other energy source—nuclear, hydroelectric, solar, wind, etc. Simply to promote modernization and all-round development in the Third World, where today billions are locked in desperate poverty, would almost certainly involve far greater energy production on a global scale.
It is futile to attempt to deal with climate-related problems within the boundaries of the anarchic, nationally based capitalist system. The climate is the outcome of interactions among the atmosphere, the oceans, the ice sheets, living organisms and the soils, sediments and rocks, which all affect, to a greater or lesser extent, the movement of heat around the surface of the Earth. The best prospect for positively influencing something as dynamic, large and complex as the climate system is to undertake coordinated global action based on the latest science and technology.
With the world economy reorganized on a socialist basis, a plan on a scale unimaginable under capitalism for minimizing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating the impacts of warming could be worked out and implemented. If necessary, a concerted effort could be undertaken to retool entire industries and transform their operations, whether in energy production and distribution, transportation, construction, manufacturing or agriculture.
Crucially, increasing abundance also will eliminate the material factors—and backward social values, such as those expounded by religions—that fuel population growth. As we will develop in Part Two of this article, a socialist reorganization of society would lay the basis for a prolonged, mild population shrinkage, helping to ensure that there are enough resources for the well-being of all.
Climate Science and Global Warming
The climate of the Earth naturally undergoes constant change, driven by periodic shifts in the Earth’s orbital motions and axial tilt as well as variations in sunlight intensity and volcanic activity. Analysis of ice and ocean sediment cores has shown periods of prolonged ice ages and interglacial periods over the past few million years. The interglacials include times when the world was warmer than today and cold-intolerant reptiles lived above the Arctic Circle. The geological record indicates that the transition from the last ice age, which peaked 20,000 years ago, to the warmth of today was no gentle change but rather the wildest of roller-coaster rides. The beginning and end of some climate spikes took place over mere decades.
Outside of the “climate skeptics” (including those in the pay of Big Oil), it is widely accepted that human activities are also influencing the climate. The 2007 report of the IPCC, arguably the world’s most authoritative climate body, concludes: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level.” The report adds: “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG [greenhouse gas] concentrations.” Written and reviewed by thousands of scientists worldwide, this report draws on the latest scientific and technical data and represents a broad consensus within the scientific community.
“Anthropogenic greenhouse gases” impact the climate by enhancing what is called by inaccurate analogy the atmospheric “greenhouse effect.” As mathematical physicist Jean Baptiste Fourier first described in the 1820s, energy in the form of light from the sun mostly passes through the atmosphere to reach the surface of the Earth and heats it, but heat cannot so easily escape back into space. The air absorbs a significant fraction of the total infrared radiation (what Fourier called “dark heat”) emitted by the Earth, and some of this thermal energy is radiated back down to the surface, helping it to stay warm. The surface of an Earth-like planet with no atmosphere would be on average roughly 59°F (33°C) colder than the Earth actually is, and the contrast in temperature between night and day and between summer and winter would be very large, as suggested by the case of the Moon.
However, not all gases in the atmosphere are equal in keeping the Earth warm. The most abundant atmospheric constituents, diatomic nitrogen and oxygen, are almost transparent to infrared radiation, which is strongly absorbed by molecules of water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and ozone. Outside of water vapor, carbon dioxide is the most abundant of these “greenhouse gases,” presently constituting about 390 parts per million (ppm) by volume and amounting to a total mass of roughly 3,000 metric gigatons (three trillion tons). This concentration has risen significantly in a relatively short time from a level of 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution, as determined by ice-core measurements. Carbon dioxide is presently accumulating at a rate of over two ppm per year.
Humans through a variety of activities contribute significantly to the atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases. Burning fossil fuels and wood releases carbon dioxide; livestock, oil production and coal mining add methane; agricultural processes and the production of nitric acid contribute nitrous oxide. Other practices, such as logging, also play a role because forests absorb carbon dioxide from the air and store it. But the spotlight has fallen on fossil fuel combustion, which accounts for the vast majority of carbon dioxide emitted annually through human activity. While the oceans, topsoil and land vegetation absorb about half of these emissions, the rest accumulate in the atmosphere, where they are available to strengthen the greenhouse effect.
The possible consequences of global warming evoked by a number of scientists are extremely serious. But the workings of the climate system are still only partly understood, so nobody can say that any projection is certain to happen. There is a chance that the impact of human-induced warming will not be as bad as predicted by the IPCC and others, but there also is a chance that the outcome will be worse. The range of possibilities finds its reflection in the scientific community, with a small minority criticizing the 2007 IPCC report as overstated and others disapproving of its “conservatism.”
The report predicts rising sea levels and coastal flooding as the result of melting polar ice sheets and thermal expansion of the oceans. It projects climate shifts that would cause populated areas to become arid or inundated and would bring about the extinction of many marine and terrestrial species. Already the number of “very dry areas” on the planet has more than doubled since the 1970s to about 30 percent of the total landmass. Reduction of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets similar to past interglacial reductions would cause the sea level to rise ten or more meters, enough to submerge dozens of great world cities, from New York to Shanghai.
Significant warming over decades could also trigger mechanisms that would qualitatively alter the climate. The complete thawing of the Arctic permafrost could unlock gigatons of stored carbon, most of it in the form of methane, a significantly more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. An even more remote but far-reaching possibility would be the release of the colossal amounts of methane now enclosed in water-ice crystals (structures known as clathrates) found in the depths of the Arctic and other oceans.
Paradoxically, the warming of the atmosphere might also plunge much of the Northern Hemisphere into a deep freeze. If a sufficient flow of freshwater from melting ice were dumped into the North Atlantic, the vast ocean conveyor known as the Gulf Stream would collapse. Originating in the Gulf of Mexico, this powerful current drags warm water northward and is responsible for heating West Europe, Canada and the Northeast U.S.
A raft of findings since 2007 has refined and altered the IPCC’s predictions—and shown the uncertainties involved with climate modeling. In one case, the latest research by MIT hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel, earlier one of the leading proponents of a link between global warming and much stronger and more frequent hurricanes, now calls into question that conclusion. Earlier this year, the IPCC acknowledged a series of scientific blunders and retracted the dramatic warning in its 2007 report that most Himalayan glaciers would be melted by 2035. Scientific rigor is further put at risk by climate researchers who refuse to publish the computer code for their models, a practice that came to light during the University of East Anglia “Climategate” e-mail scandal engineered by right-wingers.
Even the most sophisticated models grossly oversimplify physical processes like the complex dynamics of water vapor. More fundamentally, the accompanying projections presuppose a static social reality. The predictions in the 2007 IPCC report are based on different “storylines” of growth and development. But any number of events could radically alter the story. A Scientific American (January 2010) article titled “Local Nuclear War, Global Suffering” concludes that in a conflict between, say, India and Pakistan, 100 nuclear bombs dropped on cities and industrial areas would produce enough smoke to blot out the sun and cripple global agriculture. This scenario pales in comparison to the threat posed by the massive nuclear arsenal in the hands of the U.S. imperialists. Just one Ohio-class American submarine can launch up to 192 independently targetable thermonuclear warheads.
The Ravages of Imperialism
Whatever the timetable and actual consequences of global warming, one thing is certain: in a world dominated by imperialist capitalism, the human toll—whether measured in famine, dislocation or disease—would overwhelmingly be borne by working people and the poor. The world’s least developed countries, with woeful infrastructure and with the fewest resources available to adapt to new conditions, would be especially hard hit. The real culprit is not climate change as such but rather the world capitalist system, which imposes inhuman conditions on the semicolonial countries and deprives their population of the most elementary provisions, and not only for times of calamity.
Modern imperialism, marked by the export of capital, developed at the end of the 19th century, as the boundaries of the nation-state proved too narrow and confining to satisfy the capitalists’ demand for new markets and sources of cheap labor. With blood and iron, the advanced countries essentially carved up the world into competing spheres of exploitation, a process described by V.I. Lenin in his classic work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). The imperialist powers embarked on a series of colonial conquests and wars, culminating in World Wars I and II, as each capitalist ruling class sought to further its interests at the expense of its rivals.
Along with exploiting the working class at home, the capitalist classes of North America, Europe and Japan exploit and oppress the downtrodden masses in Asia, Africa and Latin America, arresting the all-round social and economic development of the vast majority of humanity. Environmentalists cite more than four decades of drought and erratic rainfall in sub-Saharan Africa’s Sahel region, which extends from the Atlantic Ocean to Sudan, as proof positive of the high price of climate change. Rapid desertification in the Sahel, where the population largely consists of pastoral nomads and peasant farmers, has exacerbated competition for land resources among the region’s myriad ethnic groups. But the pushing of the Sahel deeper into poverty, starvation and misery is at bottom a manmade phenomenon—a byproduct of imperialist subjugation.
Out of the total land area in Africa, only a fraction is currently arable. The irrigation projects, drainage of swamps and cleaning of disease-infested areas that would be required to develop Africa’s agricultural potential are unthinkable as long as the continent is squeezed in the vise of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Africa is caught in the blind alley, inherited from colonialism, of concentrating its agriculture on tropical cash crops for sale on the world market to pay off usurious debt—accrued in large part to pay for massive quantities of food imports. The devastation of the African continent was greatly exacerbated by the destruction in 1991-92 of the Soviet degenerated workers state, removing the main counterweight to U.S. imperialism and cutting off a key source of aid for various Third World regimes.
As long as capitalism remains, it will continue to reproduce mass hunger and other scourges, such as epidemics of preventable disease resulting from the lack of sewers, clean water and other basic social infrastructure. Even if human-induced warming were somehow arrested under capitalism, imperialist depredation would continue unabated. Among other things, this renders billions of people vulnerable to “natural” climate change, variations in local weather patterns, “extreme weather events” like hurricanes, and other natural disasters. The January earthquake in Haiti is a case in point. The death toll of some 250,000 people was a product of over a century of imperialist oppression that left the desperately poor country totally exposed to the quake’s impact, as shoddily built structures in Port-au-Prince simply collapsed. Today, some 1.5 million Haitians are still living in makeshift tents.
The struggle for the revolutionary overthrow of the decaying capitalist order is a matter of human survival. One small indication of the advantages of a collectivized economy over the capitalist system of production for profit is the success the Cuban deformed workers state has had in protecting its population from devastating hurricanes. In 2008, four hurricanes battered Haiti, killing some 800 people. Two of those storms also passed over Cuba, claiming a total of four lives. Despite the bureaucratic mismanagement of the economy and the country’s relative poverty, deepened by over four decades of U.S. economic embargo, Cuba is well known for its efficient evacuation of citizens in the face of such disasters. The government provides early forecasting, educates and mobilizes the population and has arrangements in place for shelters, transport, food and medical backup.
Profiteering and Protectionism
Although many green radicals would describe themselves as anti-capitalist, all varieties of environmentalism are an expression of bourgeois ideology, offering fixes predicated on scarcity and class-divided society. Many environmentalists back market-driven “solutions” to global warming favored by capitalist governments the world over. The centerpiece is the “cap and trade” system that now covers the EU economies. Under this scheme, a generous limit is set on the amount of greenhouse gases firms can emit (the “cap”). Those that emit more than the cap must buy credits from others that emit less than they were allocated (the “trade”). At the end of the day, it is the working class that pays for this setup, in the first instance by way of higher energy and fuel costs, as it would also if a carbon tax were levied to make its “price” reflect its “social cost.”
Alternately, companies can avoid cutting their own emissions by investing in “offsets”—projects elsewhere, often in poor countries, that purport to take greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. One such project supplies poor rural families in India with human-powered treadle pumps for irrigating farmland, while another encourages Kenyans to use dung-powered generators. Tree-planting projects in Guatemala, Ecuador and Uganda have disrupted local water supplies, resulted in the eviction of thousands of villagers from their land and cheated them out of promised payments for upkeep of the trees. Western environmentalists might “offset” their liberal guilt over their comfortable lives by pushing such programs. But in the Third World, the end result is the reinforcement of mass impoverishment.
Cap-and-trade has become a new arena of capitalist profiteering. Some chemical companies, such as DuPont, have ramped up production of a particular refrigerant in order to make a bundle of “offset” money by incinerating the waste by-product HFC-23, a highly potent greenhouse gas. Carbon trading also promises a massive new speculators’ playground for venture capitalists and investment banks, not unlike the one in mortgage-based securities that precipitated the implosion of the global economy. More than $130 billion changed hands in the global carbon market in 2009.
Environmentalism also goes hand in hand with national chauvinism, as seen, for example, in its embrace of trade protectionism. If the major players had come to terms at Copenhagen, a likely result would have been renewed protectionism. As Michael Levi noted in Foreign Affairs (September-October 2009): “The world has few useful options for enforcing commitments to slash emissions short of punitive trade sanctions or similarly unpalatable penalties.” Indeed, environmental regulations have long served as a cover for tariffs, a practice ensconced in the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Historically, protectionism has fueled retaliatory trade wars, which have a way of turning into shooting wars.
Last year, the president of the European Commission threatened to slap tariffs on goods from the U.S. and other non-Kyoto Protocol nations to protect European business. Buried within a House version of a cap-and-trade bill drawn up by the Democrats is a provision for imposing duties against imports from countries that have not limited emissions as of 2020. The U.S. steel industry is already calling for sanctions against Chinese steelmakers if Beijing doesn’t commit to carbon limits. Following suit, the chauvinist, anti-Communist United Steelworkers union bureaucracy has filed a case charging China with violating WTO rules by subsidizing exports of solar panels, wind turbines and other “clean energy” equipment. Promoting the lie that workers in each country are bound to their exploiters by common “national interests,” protectionism is poison to international working-class solidarity.
Protectionism directed against Brazilian sugar cane ethanol importers and others is also a component part of the Obama administration’s plan for U.S. “energy independence.” As Obama has made clear by describing U.S. reliance on Near Eastern oil as its Achilles heel, “energy independence” is a rallying cry for improving U.S. imperialism’s capacity to pursue its global military and economic ambitions through diversifying and strengthening control of energy sources.
It is no accident that groups like Greenpeace echo the call for “energy independence.” The main political organizations of the environmentalists, the Green parties, are small-time capitalist parties hostile to the proletariat. In the U.S., the Greens act as a liberal pressure group on the Democratic Party, home to such environmental evangelists as Al Gore, who as Bill Clinton’s vice president helped carry out starvation sanctions against Iraqis and the bombing of Serbia. In Germany, the Green Party was part of a capitalist coalition government with the Social Democratic Party from 1998 to 2005. During this time, German environmentalists commingled with the far right, whose anti-immigrant racism was echoed by the Greens in the name of combating overpopulation. Green foreign minister Joschka Fischer deployed the German military outside of its borders—for the first time since Hitler’s Third Reich—to participate in U.S.-led wars against Serbia and Afghanistan.
The Rise of Green Capitalism
Environmentalism is not in the least antagonistic to production for private profit. A New York Times (21 April) article under the headline “At 40, Earth Day Is Now Big Business” commented: “So strong was the antibusiness sentiment for the first Earth Day in 1970 that organizers took no money from corporations and held teach-ins ‘to challenge corporate and government leaders.’ Forty years later, the day has turned into a premier marketing platform for selling a variety of goods and services, like office products, Greek yogurt and eco-dentistry.”
There is more “green” rhetoric than ever emanating from corporate boardrooms. Reflecting competing interests in the American bourgeoisie, in 2009 a legion of big-name companies quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in protest over its policy of outright denial of global warming. Several major companies have opted to go “carbon neutral,” such as Internet giant Google, which prides itself on building energy-efficient data centers and investing in corporate solar installations and wind farms.
The former CEO of British Petroleum (BP), Lord Browne, helped set the fashion in the mid 1990s by restyling gains in efficiency as emissions cuts and trumpeting them in press releases. At a time when his counterparts in the U.S. were pouring millions into the coffers of the “Global Climate Coalition,” one of the most outspoken industry groups battling reductions in emissions, Browne anticipated a cornucopia of subsidies and tax breaks flowing from the emerging Western consensus to treat carbon emissions as a problem. He renamed his company “Beyond Petroleum” and adopted a new “environmentally conscious” logo as he went about transforming BP from a regional producer of petroleum into a global oil enterprise that also dabbled in “alternative” energy. All the while, BP was slashing costs by using cheap construction materials and cutting back on safety mechanisms on oil rigs, setting the stage for numerous “accidents” such as the blowout in April that took the lives of eleven workers and dumped millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico (see “Gulf Coast Disaster: Capitalist Profit Drive Kills,” WV No. 961, 2 July).
While liberal environmentalists and the ISO reformists wag their fingers at BP for “greenwashing” its fossil fuel operations, Browne has, in fact, been something of a trendsetter for the “go green” movement. Media attention surrounding an energy consumption calculator placed on BP’s Web site in 2005 helped popularize the notion of reducing individual “carbon footprints.” The following year, Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth instructed people to abandon allegedly wasteful lifestyles by consuming less, using less hot water, changing incandescent light bulbs to CFLs at home and properly inflating their car tires. The London Economist (31 May 2007), a mouthpiece of finance capital, wryly observed, “Individual economic choices are not going to make a blind bit of difference to the future of the planet. Nobody is going to save a polar bear by turning off the lights.” Gore’s lectures about cutting consumption certainly haven’t stopped him from enjoying the luxury of his Nashville mansion or his private jet.
“Doing more with less” is hardly an option for unemployed workers in the industrial wasteland of Detroit or the teeming masses housed in the enormous slums of Calcutta. Companies going “carbon neutral” will not improve conditions for workers on assembly lines, where the bosses threaten life and limb by speeding up production to extract the utmost profit. The use of “alternative” energy will not diminish the concentration of pollution in poor and working-class neighborhoods. The corporations producing energy will, however, be raking in the money.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Markin comment:
Maybe one hundred years or so ago one could have rationally assumed that the Earth would survive with some kind of hodge-podge, off-handed, afterthought economic and social planning among the major imperialist capitalist powers and those actions would, more or less, lift all boats. World War I definitively put an end to that notion. And should have put an end to the notion (and the capitalist system that supports it) that the Earth could survive; survive well and fruitfully, without international centralized planning through workers democracy.
But, alas, we are almost back to square one and the current intense question of climate change is only the most pressing question of the day that requires international centralized planning. I could add about fifty other issues that require that same kind of attention from agriculture production to international labor standards. But to get anyway with those pressing issues we need parties committed to centralized planning. More importantly, we need parties that fight for workers governments who will take power and implement that planning principle. And no, it is not some Green party, spare us that, please. In any case read this article in order to see one more reason why we have to fight, and fight like hell, for our common communist future right now.
*****
Workers Vanguard No. 965
24 September 2010
Production for Profit: Anarchy and Plunder
Capitalism and Global Warming
For Socialist Revolution!
For an Internationally Planned Economy!
Part One
The Earth as a whole is without question heating up. According to figures released in July by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, global land and ocean surface temperatures in June were the highest since monitoring began in 1880—the 304th consecutive month above the 20th-century average—while Arctic sea ice melted at a record-breaking pace. Undoubtedly, the heat can be attributed in good part to periodic and natural changes in ocean temperatures and surface air pressure. But there is some other factor at work behind the overall warming trend. A vast majority of climate scientists worldwide, including not only the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) but the national scientific academies of the U.S. and most other countries, identifies that factor as anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gases.
In league with liberal environmentalists, reformist groups like the International Socialist Organization (ISO) have seized on “climate change” to beg the major capitalist powers to join hands in cutting back heat-trapping gases—a goal that significant sections of the ruling capitalist classes have laid claim to. Thus the ISO, Greenpeace et al. put great stock in the climate talks that took place last December in Copenhagen under the sponsorship of the UN, which is, simply, a den of imperialist thieves and their victims.
A new “international climate justice movement” was proclaimed after tens of thousands flocked to the Danish capital, in the main to demand that the world powers agree to curb greenhouse gas emissions and give financial support to Third World countries. The protests included a 100,000-strong demonstration in the middle of the two-week summit, during which heavily armed police squads arrested some 1,000 people. Soon after, thousands of observer delegates, including from such mainstream groups as Greenpeace, were locked out of the conference on its final days.
What some had dubbed “Hopenhagen” ended without reaching its stated goals of renewing the emissions-reduction commitments made by industrialized countries that signed on to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (which the U.S. never ratified) and setting emissions targets for all other countries. This was a predictable outcome. For one thing, the world’s capitalist classes are divided internally over this issue. More fundamentally, each capitalist government is charged with protecting its own “national interests.” The handful of imperialist countries that dominate the world market are in competition with each other for spheres of exploitation around the world, and have already carried out two devastating world wars in their insatiable drive for profit.
Significant emissions shifts would almost certainly mean substantial economic costs, which few capitalist governments want to incur, especially in the face of a global economic slowdown. The main human activity contributing to the release of heat-trapping gases is also the main activity turning the wheels of the modern economy: the combustion of fossil fuels, such as oil and coal. Given the importance of cheap energy sources, imperialist competition for fossil fuels, especially oil, has played a part in sparking numerous military conflagrations in the last century. Countries with a hand on the oil spigot or access to ample coal reserves have a vested material interest in maintaining the status quo.
The example of the United States, the world’s largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases, is illustrative. Giant American companies like ExxonMobil are central to the global oil cartel, while the core European Union (EU) powers of Germany and France cannot make the same claim. Hence an increase in the world market price of oil not only enriches a dominant sector of corporate America but also increases the energy costs of rival French and German capitalists. For years, the U.S. clashed with the EU over carrying out the Kyoto Protocol, because the nominal emissions caps included in the accord would have affected the U.S. most directly.
Whatever their differences with each other, the imperialists, led by the U.S., have joined together in recent climate talks to pressure China, a bureaucratically deformed workers state, largely in order to throttle its growing industrial strength. After winning EU backing to shift the burden of emissions-reduction agreements onto the more backward countries, the U.S. refused to support any deal at Copenhagen that did not include stringent monitoring of China’s emissions. Behind such maneuvers lies the imperialists’ strategic goal of smashing the Chinese workers state and once again subjecting the country to untrammeled capitalist exploitation. Against the environmentalists and fake socialists who join in the China-bashing, we stand for the unconditional military defense of China against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution.
For Marxists, addressing the human-derived aspect of global warming is fundamentally not a technical but a social problem. Marxism is opposed to environmentalist ideology, which accepts the inviolability of capitalist class rule, in which production is profit-driven and society’s wealth is monopolized by a tiny bourgeois ruling class. We fight for a society that will provide more, not less, for the working people and the impoverished masses of the world. Our goal is to eliminate material scarcity and qualitatively advance the living standards of all. To this end, we fight for socialist revolutions in the capitalist countries to expropriate the bourgeoisie and for proletarian political revolutions in China and the other bureaucratically deformed workers states, laying the basis for the construction of a planned, collectivized world economy. With production liberated from the profit motive, humans’ creative powers will be unleashed to build a society in which poverty, malnutrition, inequality and oppression are things of the past.
When the workers of the world rule, energy will be generated and used in the most rational, efficient and safe manner possible, including by developing new energy sources. We do not rule out in advance the use of fossil fuels or any other energy source—nuclear, hydroelectric, solar, wind, etc. Simply to promote modernization and all-round development in the Third World, where today billions are locked in desperate poverty, would almost certainly involve far greater energy production on a global scale.
It is futile to attempt to deal with climate-related problems within the boundaries of the anarchic, nationally based capitalist system. The climate is the outcome of interactions among the atmosphere, the oceans, the ice sheets, living organisms and the soils, sediments and rocks, which all affect, to a greater or lesser extent, the movement of heat around the surface of the Earth. The best prospect for positively influencing something as dynamic, large and complex as the climate system is to undertake coordinated global action based on the latest science and technology.
With the world economy reorganized on a socialist basis, a plan on a scale unimaginable under capitalism for minimizing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating the impacts of warming could be worked out and implemented. If necessary, a concerted effort could be undertaken to retool entire industries and transform their operations, whether in energy production and distribution, transportation, construction, manufacturing or agriculture.
Crucially, increasing abundance also will eliminate the material factors—and backward social values, such as those expounded by religions—that fuel population growth. As we will develop in Part Two of this article, a socialist reorganization of society would lay the basis for a prolonged, mild population shrinkage, helping to ensure that there are enough resources for the well-being of all.
Climate Science and Global Warming
The climate of the Earth naturally undergoes constant change, driven by periodic shifts in the Earth’s orbital motions and axial tilt as well as variations in sunlight intensity and volcanic activity. Analysis of ice and ocean sediment cores has shown periods of prolonged ice ages and interglacial periods over the past few million years. The interglacials include times when the world was warmer than today and cold-intolerant reptiles lived above the Arctic Circle. The geological record indicates that the transition from the last ice age, which peaked 20,000 years ago, to the warmth of today was no gentle change but rather the wildest of roller-coaster rides. The beginning and end of some climate spikes took place over mere decades.
Outside of the “climate skeptics” (including those in the pay of Big Oil), it is widely accepted that human activities are also influencing the climate. The 2007 report of the IPCC, arguably the world’s most authoritative climate body, concludes: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level.” The report adds: “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG [greenhouse gas] concentrations.” Written and reviewed by thousands of scientists worldwide, this report draws on the latest scientific and technical data and represents a broad consensus within the scientific community.
“Anthropogenic greenhouse gases” impact the climate by enhancing what is called by inaccurate analogy the atmospheric “greenhouse effect.” As mathematical physicist Jean Baptiste Fourier first described in the 1820s, energy in the form of light from the sun mostly passes through the atmosphere to reach the surface of the Earth and heats it, but heat cannot so easily escape back into space. The air absorbs a significant fraction of the total infrared radiation (what Fourier called “dark heat”) emitted by the Earth, and some of this thermal energy is radiated back down to the surface, helping it to stay warm. The surface of an Earth-like planet with no atmosphere would be on average roughly 59°F (33°C) colder than the Earth actually is, and the contrast in temperature between night and day and between summer and winter would be very large, as suggested by the case of the Moon.
However, not all gases in the atmosphere are equal in keeping the Earth warm. The most abundant atmospheric constituents, diatomic nitrogen and oxygen, are almost transparent to infrared radiation, which is strongly absorbed by molecules of water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and ozone. Outside of water vapor, carbon dioxide is the most abundant of these “greenhouse gases,” presently constituting about 390 parts per million (ppm) by volume and amounting to a total mass of roughly 3,000 metric gigatons (three trillion tons). This concentration has risen significantly in a relatively short time from a level of 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution, as determined by ice-core measurements. Carbon dioxide is presently accumulating at a rate of over two ppm per year.
Humans through a variety of activities contribute significantly to the atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases. Burning fossil fuels and wood releases carbon dioxide; livestock, oil production and coal mining add methane; agricultural processes and the production of nitric acid contribute nitrous oxide. Other practices, such as logging, also play a role because forests absorb carbon dioxide from the air and store it. But the spotlight has fallen on fossil fuel combustion, which accounts for the vast majority of carbon dioxide emitted annually through human activity. While the oceans, topsoil and land vegetation absorb about half of these emissions, the rest accumulate in the atmosphere, where they are available to strengthen the greenhouse effect.
The possible consequences of global warming evoked by a number of scientists are extremely serious. But the workings of the climate system are still only partly understood, so nobody can say that any projection is certain to happen. There is a chance that the impact of human-induced warming will not be as bad as predicted by the IPCC and others, but there also is a chance that the outcome will be worse. The range of possibilities finds its reflection in the scientific community, with a small minority criticizing the 2007 IPCC report as overstated and others disapproving of its “conservatism.”
The report predicts rising sea levels and coastal flooding as the result of melting polar ice sheets and thermal expansion of the oceans. It projects climate shifts that would cause populated areas to become arid or inundated and would bring about the extinction of many marine and terrestrial species. Already the number of “very dry areas” on the planet has more than doubled since the 1970s to about 30 percent of the total landmass. Reduction of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets similar to past interglacial reductions would cause the sea level to rise ten or more meters, enough to submerge dozens of great world cities, from New York to Shanghai.
Significant warming over decades could also trigger mechanisms that would qualitatively alter the climate. The complete thawing of the Arctic permafrost could unlock gigatons of stored carbon, most of it in the form of methane, a significantly more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. An even more remote but far-reaching possibility would be the release of the colossal amounts of methane now enclosed in water-ice crystals (structures known as clathrates) found in the depths of the Arctic and other oceans.
Paradoxically, the warming of the atmosphere might also plunge much of the Northern Hemisphere into a deep freeze. If a sufficient flow of freshwater from melting ice were dumped into the North Atlantic, the vast ocean conveyor known as the Gulf Stream would collapse. Originating in the Gulf of Mexico, this powerful current drags warm water northward and is responsible for heating West Europe, Canada and the Northeast U.S.
A raft of findings since 2007 has refined and altered the IPCC’s predictions—and shown the uncertainties involved with climate modeling. In one case, the latest research by MIT hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel, earlier one of the leading proponents of a link between global warming and much stronger and more frequent hurricanes, now calls into question that conclusion. Earlier this year, the IPCC acknowledged a series of scientific blunders and retracted the dramatic warning in its 2007 report that most Himalayan glaciers would be melted by 2035. Scientific rigor is further put at risk by climate researchers who refuse to publish the computer code for their models, a practice that came to light during the University of East Anglia “Climategate” e-mail scandal engineered by right-wingers.
Even the most sophisticated models grossly oversimplify physical processes like the complex dynamics of water vapor. More fundamentally, the accompanying projections presuppose a static social reality. The predictions in the 2007 IPCC report are based on different “storylines” of growth and development. But any number of events could radically alter the story. A Scientific American (January 2010) article titled “Local Nuclear War, Global Suffering” concludes that in a conflict between, say, India and Pakistan, 100 nuclear bombs dropped on cities and industrial areas would produce enough smoke to blot out the sun and cripple global agriculture. This scenario pales in comparison to the threat posed by the massive nuclear arsenal in the hands of the U.S. imperialists. Just one Ohio-class American submarine can launch up to 192 independently targetable thermonuclear warheads.
The Ravages of Imperialism
Whatever the timetable and actual consequences of global warming, one thing is certain: in a world dominated by imperialist capitalism, the human toll—whether measured in famine, dislocation or disease—would overwhelmingly be borne by working people and the poor. The world’s least developed countries, with woeful infrastructure and with the fewest resources available to adapt to new conditions, would be especially hard hit. The real culprit is not climate change as such but rather the world capitalist system, which imposes inhuman conditions on the semicolonial countries and deprives their population of the most elementary provisions, and not only for times of calamity.
Modern imperialism, marked by the export of capital, developed at the end of the 19th century, as the boundaries of the nation-state proved too narrow and confining to satisfy the capitalists’ demand for new markets and sources of cheap labor. With blood and iron, the advanced countries essentially carved up the world into competing spheres of exploitation, a process described by V.I. Lenin in his classic work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). The imperialist powers embarked on a series of colonial conquests and wars, culminating in World Wars I and II, as each capitalist ruling class sought to further its interests at the expense of its rivals.
Along with exploiting the working class at home, the capitalist classes of North America, Europe and Japan exploit and oppress the downtrodden masses in Asia, Africa and Latin America, arresting the all-round social and economic development of the vast majority of humanity. Environmentalists cite more than four decades of drought and erratic rainfall in sub-Saharan Africa’s Sahel region, which extends from the Atlantic Ocean to Sudan, as proof positive of the high price of climate change. Rapid desertification in the Sahel, where the population largely consists of pastoral nomads and peasant farmers, has exacerbated competition for land resources among the region’s myriad ethnic groups. But the pushing of the Sahel deeper into poverty, starvation and misery is at bottom a manmade phenomenon—a byproduct of imperialist subjugation.
Out of the total land area in Africa, only a fraction is currently arable. The irrigation projects, drainage of swamps and cleaning of disease-infested areas that would be required to develop Africa’s agricultural potential are unthinkable as long as the continent is squeezed in the vise of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Africa is caught in the blind alley, inherited from colonialism, of concentrating its agriculture on tropical cash crops for sale on the world market to pay off usurious debt—accrued in large part to pay for massive quantities of food imports. The devastation of the African continent was greatly exacerbated by the destruction in 1991-92 of the Soviet degenerated workers state, removing the main counterweight to U.S. imperialism and cutting off a key source of aid for various Third World regimes.
As long as capitalism remains, it will continue to reproduce mass hunger and other scourges, such as epidemics of preventable disease resulting from the lack of sewers, clean water and other basic social infrastructure. Even if human-induced warming were somehow arrested under capitalism, imperialist depredation would continue unabated. Among other things, this renders billions of people vulnerable to “natural” climate change, variations in local weather patterns, “extreme weather events” like hurricanes, and other natural disasters. The January earthquake in Haiti is a case in point. The death toll of some 250,000 people was a product of over a century of imperialist oppression that left the desperately poor country totally exposed to the quake’s impact, as shoddily built structures in Port-au-Prince simply collapsed. Today, some 1.5 million Haitians are still living in makeshift tents.
The struggle for the revolutionary overthrow of the decaying capitalist order is a matter of human survival. One small indication of the advantages of a collectivized economy over the capitalist system of production for profit is the success the Cuban deformed workers state has had in protecting its population from devastating hurricanes. In 2008, four hurricanes battered Haiti, killing some 800 people. Two of those storms also passed over Cuba, claiming a total of four lives. Despite the bureaucratic mismanagement of the economy and the country’s relative poverty, deepened by over four decades of U.S. economic embargo, Cuba is well known for its efficient evacuation of citizens in the face of such disasters. The government provides early forecasting, educates and mobilizes the population and has arrangements in place for shelters, transport, food and medical backup.
Profiteering and Protectionism
Although many green radicals would describe themselves as anti-capitalist, all varieties of environmentalism are an expression of bourgeois ideology, offering fixes predicated on scarcity and class-divided society. Many environmentalists back market-driven “solutions” to global warming favored by capitalist governments the world over. The centerpiece is the “cap and trade” system that now covers the EU economies. Under this scheme, a generous limit is set on the amount of greenhouse gases firms can emit (the “cap”). Those that emit more than the cap must buy credits from others that emit less than they were allocated (the “trade”). At the end of the day, it is the working class that pays for this setup, in the first instance by way of higher energy and fuel costs, as it would also if a carbon tax were levied to make its “price” reflect its “social cost.”
Alternately, companies can avoid cutting their own emissions by investing in “offsets”—projects elsewhere, often in poor countries, that purport to take greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. One such project supplies poor rural families in India with human-powered treadle pumps for irrigating farmland, while another encourages Kenyans to use dung-powered generators. Tree-planting projects in Guatemala, Ecuador and Uganda have disrupted local water supplies, resulted in the eviction of thousands of villagers from their land and cheated them out of promised payments for upkeep of the trees. Western environmentalists might “offset” their liberal guilt over their comfortable lives by pushing such programs. But in the Third World, the end result is the reinforcement of mass impoverishment.
Cap-and-trade has become a new arena of capitalist profiteering. Some chemical companies, such as DuPont, have ramped up production of a particular refrigerant in order to make a bundle of “offset” money by incinerating the waste by-product HFC-23, a highly potent greenhouse gas. Carbon trading also promises a massive new speculators’ playground for venture capitalists and investment banks, not unlike the one in mortgage-based securities that precipitated the implosion of the global economy. More than $130 billion changed hands in the global carbon market in 2009.
Environmentalism also goes hand in hand with national chauvinism, as seen, for example, in its embrace of trade protectionism. If the major players had come to terms at Copenhagen, a likely result would have been renewed protectionism. As Michael Levi noted in Foreign Affairs (September-October 2009): “The world has few useful options for enforcing commitments to slash emissions short of punitive trade sanctions or similarly unpalatable penalties.” Indeed, environmental regulations have long served as a cover for tariffs, a practice ensconced in the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Historically, protectionism has fueled retaliatory trade wars, which have a way of turning into shooting wars.
Last year, the president of the European Commission threatened to slap tariffs on goods from the U.S. and other non-Kyoto Protocol nations to protect European business. Buried within a House version of a cap-and-trade bill drawn up by the Democrats is a provision for imposing duties against imports from countries that have not limited emissions as of 2020. The U.S. steel industry is already calling for sanctions against Chinese steelmakers if Beijing doesn’t commit to carbon limits. Following suit, the chauvinist, anti-Communist United Steelworkers union bureaucracy has filed a case charging China with violating WTO rules by subsidizing exports of solar panels, wind turbines and other “clean energy” equipment. Promoting the lie that workers in each country are bound to their exploiters by common “national interests,” protectionism is poison to international working-class solidarity.
Protectionism directed against Brazilian sugar cane ethanol importers and others is also a component part of the Obama administration’s plan for U.S. “energy independence.” As Obama has made clear by describing U.S. reliance on Near Eastern oil as its Achilles heel, “energy independence” is a rallying cry for improving U.S. imperialism’s capacity to pursue its global military and economic ambitions through diversifying and strengthening control of energy sources.
It is no accident that groups like Greenpeace echo the call for “energy independence.” The main political organizations of the environmentalists, the Green parties, are small-time capitalist parties hostile to the proletariat. In the U.S., the Greens act as a liberal pressure group on the Democratic Party, home to such environmental evangelists as Al Gore, who as Bill Clinton’s vice president helped carry out starvation sanctions against Iraqis and the bombing of Serbia. In Germany, the Green Party was part of a capitalist coalition government with the Social Democratic Party from 1998 to 2005. During this time, German environmentalists commingled with the far right, whose anti-immigrant racism was echoed by the Greens in the name of combating overpopulation. Green foreign minister Joschka Fischer deployed the German military outside of its borders—for the first time since Hitler’s Third Reich—to participate in U.S.-led wars against Serbia and Afghanistan.
The Rise of Green Capitalism
Environmentalism is not in the least antagonistic to production for private profit. A New York Times (21 April) article under the headline “At 40, Earth Day Is Now Big Business” commented: “So strong was the antibusiness sentiment for the first Earth Day in 1970 that organizers took no money from corporations and held teach-ins ‘to challenge corporate and government leaders.’ Forty years later, the day has turned into a premier marketing platform for selling a variety of goods and services, like office products, Greek yogurt and eco-dentistry.”
There is more “green” rhetoric than ever emanating from corporate boardrooms. Reflecting competing interests in the American bourgeoisie, in 2009 a legion of big-name companies quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in protest over its policy of outright denial of global warming. Several major companies have opted to go “carbon neutral,” such as Internet giant Google, which prides itself on building energy-efficient data centers and investing in corporate solar installations and wind farms.
The former CEO of British Petroleum (BP), Lord Browne, helped set the fashion in the mid 1990s by restyling gains in efficiency as emissions cuts and trumpeting them in press releases. At a time when his counterparts in the U.S. were pouring millions into the coffers of the “Global Climate Coalition,” one of the most outspoken industry groups battling reductions in emissions, Browne anticipated a cornucopia of subsidies and tax breaks flowing from the emerging Western consensus to treat carbon emissions as a problem. He renamed his company “Beyond Petroleum” and adopted a new “environmentally conscious” logo as he went about transforming BP from a regional producer of petroleum into a global oil enterprise that also dabbled in “alternative” energy. All the while, BP was slashing costs by using cheap construction materials and cutting back on safety mechanisms on oil rigs, setting the stage for numerous “accidents” such as the blowout in April that took the lives of eleven workers and dumped millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico (see “Gulf Coast Disaster: Capitalist Profit Drive Kills,” WV No. 961, 2 July).
While liberal environmentalists and the ISO reformists wag their fingers at BP for “greenwashing” its fossil fuel operations, Browne has, in fact, been something of a trendsetter for the “go green” movement. Media attention surrounding an energy consumption calculator placed on BP’s Web site in 2005 helped popularize the notion of reducing individual “carbon footprints.” The following year, Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth instructed people to abandon allegedly wasteful lifestyles by consuming less, using less hot water, changing incandescent light bulbs to CFLs at home and properly inflating their car tires. The London Economist (31 May 2007), a mouthpiece of finance capital, wryly observed, “Individual economic choices are not going to make a blind bit of difference to the future of the planet. Nobody is going to save a polar bear by turning off the lights.” Gore’s lectures about cutting consumption certainly haven’t stopped him from enjoying the luxury of his Nashville mansion or his private jet.
“Doing more with less” is hardly an option for unemployed workers in the industrial wasteland of Detroit or the teeming masses housed in the enormous slums of Calcutta. Companies going “carbon neutral” will not improve conditions for workers on assembly lines, where the bosses threaten life and limb by speeding up production to extract the utmost profit. The use of “alternative” energy will not diminish the concentration of pollution in poor and working-class neighborhoods. The corporations producing energy will, however, be raking in the money.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class- War Prisoners!- Free Daniel McGowan!
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment
In “surfing” the “National Jericho Movement” Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a “The Rag Blog” post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matter here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment
In “surfing” the “National Jericho Movement” Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a “The Rag Blog” post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matter here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class- War Prisoners!- Free Briana Waters!
Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment
In “surfing” the “National Jericho Movement” Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a “The Rag Blog” post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matter here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment
In “surfing” the “National Jericho Movement” Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a “The Rag Blog” post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matter here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Saturday, December 19, 2009
*Guest Commentary From Carnival Of Socialism- On The Copehagen Climate Conference
Click on the title to link to a "Carnival Of Socialism" article on the disastrous happenings in Copenhagen.
Markin comment:
Once more we know that the fight for the communist program is more important that ever, damn it is now a matter of life and death for those of us on the planet. And that is no hyperbole.
Markin comment:
Once more we know that the fight for the communist program is more important that ever, damn it is now a matter of life and death for those of us on the planet. And that is no hyperbole.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)