by Allen Myers

[Allen Myers is a former editor of  Green Left Weekly and at the time of writing was a member of the National Executive of the Democratic Socialist Party of Australia. This is an edited version of a talk given at the DSP’s January 1998 educational conference on “The 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto”. Myers was expelled from the DSP in May 2008 and is now assistant editor of the Revolutionary Socialist Party's paper Direct Action. This article first appeared in Links magazine number 10, March-July, 1998.]

Environmental problems today are larger and more threatening than they have ever been, but they are certainly not new. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the English poet William Blake contrasted the hopes of human progress with the reality that capitalism was creating:

And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark Satanic mills?

Marx in Capital referred to capitalist agriculture exhausting the soil without regard for future generations:

[A]ll progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country proceeds from large-scale industry as the background of its development, as in the case of the United States, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.¹

There is a striking paradox that capitalism increases human productivity to unprecedented levels, creating material wealth sufficient to maintain a greatly enlarged population with a higher standard of living. But it does so in a form that threatens to destroy utterly the material basis on which human life depends.

Neo-liberalism likes to counterpose environmental protection to protection of human welfare (which it identifies with the capitalist economy). It poses questions such as, “Can we afford to clean up this river, or to stop spraying pesticides, or to stop dumping toxic wastes?”

But if you don’t identify human welfare with capitalist profits, the absurdity of such a counterposition is obvious. We are not something separate and opposed to the natural environment, but a product of it. If we change that natural environment sufficiently radically, it is quite possible that we will destroy human life.

Even a few neo-liberals were capable of recognising this truth in regard to nuclear war. The danger forced itself on public attention in the 1980s, when the Reagan administration in the us massively escalated the arms race against the Soviet Union.

We should keep that experience in mind when discussing the environmental crisis. The us and other imperialist ruling classes were willing to risk the destruction of the entire human race in order to accomplish their goals. They will be no less reckless regarding the threat to human existence which is posed by the environmental crisis—a threat which is no less real than the nuclear one, and which is more difficult to deal with because it is much more pervasive.

A deepening crisis

The disastrous fires in Indonesia in the past year and the developing El Niño event dramatically focused the world’s media—for a week or two—on the world environmental crisis. Less dramatic but perhaps even more threatening is capitalism’s preparedness to allow the wholesale destruction of the soil which is needed to produce the crops that feed the human race. In the United States, that epitome of capitalist agriculture that Marx referred to, it is now estimated that the average depth of topsoil is one quarter of what it was at the time of European settlement. The net loss in 1992, the latest year for which figures are available, was more than 11 tonnes of top soil per hectare. The economic cost of topsoil erosion in the us is estimated by ecologist David Pimentel of Cornell University at $44 billion a year.

In 1984, Lester Brown, president of the Worldwatch Institute, and his colleague Edward Wolf co-authored a paper. which estimated excessive soil erosion (the amount of erosion in excess of that which is consistent with maintaining the productivity of the soil indefinitely) on a global scale to be 25. 4 billion tonnes annually. In February 1995, David Pimentel and his associates at Cornell University published a paper in Science in which they estimated global soil erosion to be 75 billion tonnes per year—three times as much as Brown and Wolf claimed.

A report issued jointly by the United Nations Environment Programmes and the Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that erosion of topsoil causes the loss of around 6 million hectares (60,000 km2) of farmable land each year.

Much of this loss is directly attributable to the backward social conditions created or maintained by capitalism, such as land ownership patterns. Of the world’s total amount of land that can be owned, almost 75 per cent is controlled by 2.5 per cent of the landowners. In the developing countries, the average size of a family-owned plot of land has been shrinking, which leads to over-farming. In 1970 in Africa and Asia, family farms averaged just under 2 hectares. By 1980, that had decreased to around 0.5 hectares.

Here in Australia, destruction of the topsoil has occurred even more rapidly than in the us. Already nearly a hundred years ago, yields in some areas were half what they were at the time of European settlement. Soil salinity now affects some 4. 4 million hectares, and you can taste the problem in Adelaide. In 40 years, at present rates of rising salt, the Murray Darling Basin will no longer sustain fruit trees. The irrigation water that is raising the salt from deep below the ground is leaving the Murray-Darling insufficient flow to cleanse itself of the phosphates and other chemical fertilisers and pesticides that wash off the land, leading to the outbreak of algal blooms.

Environmental destruction has been killing people throughout the history of capitalism. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England:

The manner in which the great multitude of the poor is treated by society today is revolting. They are drawn into the large cities where they breathe a poorer atmosphere than in the country; they are relegated to districts which…are worse ventilated than any others; they are deprived of all means of cleanliness, of water itself, since pipes are laid only when paid for, and the rivers so polluted that they are useless for such purposes; they are obliged to throw all offal and garbage, all dirty water, often all disgusting drainage and excrement into the streets, being without other means of disposing of them; they are thus compelled to infect the region of their own dwellings.²

As the destruction increases, the human deaths are increasing. In many parts of the world, pollution that will cause massive numbers of future deaths is occurring right now. us socialist and environmentalist Daniel Faber in a forthcoming book:

Over 60,000 Americans die each year from air pollution alone. Half a million people living in the most polluted areas in 151 cities across the country face a risk of death some 15–17 per cent higher than in the least polluted areas. Some 164 million Americans are now at risk for respiratory and other health problems from exposure to excessive air pollution.

Elsewhere in the same article, Faber notes:

…there are over forty-one million people who live within four miles of at least one of the nation’s some 1,500 highly dangerous…toxic waste sites. Although these dumps are the worst of the worst, the Office of Technology Assessment estimates there are as many as 439,000 other illegal hazardous waste sites in the country. For nearby residents to toxic waste sites, the National Research Council has found a disturbing pattern of elevated health problems, including heart disease, spontaneous abortions and genital malformations, and death rates; while infants and children are found to suffer greater incidences of cardiac abnormalities, leukemia, kidney-urinary tract infections, seizures, learning disabilities, hyperactivity, skin disorders, reduced weight, central nervous system damage, and Hodgkins’ disease. Exposure to industrial chemicals is also contributing to the dramatic increases since the 1950s in cancer of the testis, prostate, kidney, breast, skin and lung, as well as malignant myeloma, non-Hodgkins’ lymphoma, and numerous childhood cancers—a cancer epidemic which kills half-a-million Americans each year. And, by most reliable accounts, these and other environmentally related health problems are growing worse.

Social reproduction and environment

The contradiction between capitalism’s productivity and destructiveness can be properly understood—and hence eventually overcome by conscious human activity—only through the scientific study of human social evolution which Marx and Engels called historical materialism.

The first volume of Capital was not published until 1863, and most of the specifics of the analysis of capitalism were worked out only beginning in the latter part of the 1850s. However, Marx and Engels always regarded their economic studies as fundamental to their overall political outlook. It could hardly be otherwise, since a fundamental premise of historical materialism is that as human beings we produce our society, our selves, through our labour. Hence how we labour—the tools we use, the objects we produce, the relations we establish among ourselves in the course of labour—is the key to what we are and what we may become. Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence which determines their consciousness.³

The idea that Marx and Engels have something indispensable to say about modern environmental problems is not universally accepted—to put it mildly. Largely, of course, this is due to the terrible legacy of Stalinism: it is still widely believed that what happened in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China was all due to following recipes cooked up by Marx and Engels; and as we know, the regimes in those countries produced environmental disasters without number.

As a result, it’s not unusual for environmentalists to look at the pollution created in the developed capitalist countries, and look at the industrial and other pollution created in the name of development in the former socialist states, and look at the Third World, which usually doesn’t have much industry but what it does have is usually even more polluting—it’s perhaps understandable that environmentalists who see all this, and who lack a historical materialist understanding, conclude that the problem is industrialism—industry as such.

After all, the obvious immediate cause of most environmental destruction is industrial production in some form or another. Maybe we have to get rid of big factories and mass production. Ted Trainer is perhaps the environmentalist best known for advocating a change to smaller-scale production. The notion of “appropriate technology” in the Third World—meaning small-scale production—has also had quite a long run. But that answer raises more problems than it solves. First, small-scale production is not inherently less polluting than large-scale production, if we compare the amount of pollution to the amount of the product.

Of course, there are some things which could be done on a smaller and less polluting scale: it’s estimated that 70 per cent of electrical energy is lost in transmission, which suggests that there could be considerable reduction in pollution through more localised production of electricity (especially if it relied on methods such as solar energy).

But it can just as well be the case that small-scale production is more polluting than large-scale. For instance, the Chinese government during the “Great Leap Forward” of the 1960s encourage everyone to set up their own backyard steel furnaces and the result was one of many disasters that Stalinism has to its discredit. We will never have precise figures, but the total amount of polluting gases and other wastes and the total of energy consumed were much greater than they would otherwise have been. (Aside from that, they didn’t get a hell of a lot of useful steel from those backyard furnaces.)

Similarly, the environmental destructiveness of organochlorine products like ddt has no relationship with the size of the factories in which they are produced, nor with whether pesticides are applied by a single operator from a truck or plane, or by individual farmers on small plots.

So if we’re going to restrict industrial methods of production, the necessary consequence will be a reduction in the overall amount of goods produced. Ted Trainer and others of his persuasion acknowledge this and in fact make a lowering of the level of consumption central to their programmes.

But how reasonable a programme is it to advocate a lowering of consumption? Of course, there are all sorts of unnecessary and extravagant consumption on the part of capitalists, and a socialist society will do away with that. But if it were possible to wipe out all consumption by capitalists and leave everything else the same, that wouldn’t be enough to save the planet. So if you want to lower total consumption sufficiently to make it possible for society to do away with industrial methods of production, you’ll have to lower the consumption of ordinary working people too.

How far would you have to lower it? Too far. There’s a reason why human numbers have risen to 5-6 billion in the modern era rather than in some earlier period. It’s not because it take millennium after millennium for human beings to breed that number of offspring.

Suppose that our first human ancestors, 100,000 years ago, consisted of 1000 people in the entire world. Let’s suppose that they reproduce at a reasonable rate, doubling every generation. If we allow three generations to a century, how long does it take those 1000 people to reach the present population of the world? Less than 750 years.

So if it took us tens of thousands of years instead of 750 to reach the present world population, it’s not because of a lack of human fertility. It’s because we couldn’t produce means of subsistence for anything like those numbers without industrial methods of production.

Most people in the developed countries could reduce their living standards a bit and still survive. But that’s only a small minority of the world’s population. Indeed, something like 40 per cent of the human race already lives in extreme poverty. One billion people lack clean drinking water (so much for neo-liberal attempts to counterpose economic well-being and the environment). What this all adds up to is that a programmes of reducing consumption in order to reduce industrial production is a programmes for the death of billions of people—probably of the big majority of the human race. (Even as recently as 1800, total human population was still less than 1 billion.)

Environment, capitalism and consumption

For better or for worse, we are stuck with mass production. There is simply no other way of providing even the most minimal requirements of food, clothing, housing, education and health care for 5–6 billion people.

And even if such a horrific programmes were carried out, it would not achieve the goal of significantly reducing environmental destruction.

Capitalist production is not driven by consumption: if it were possible to have workers who consumed nothing, capitalism’s production would be no less polluting. This point needs some emphasis, because it is directly contrary to all official theory and capitalist “common sense”. We produce things in order to consume them, don’t we? Just about every economics textbook written in the last 50 or 100 years begins with that “obvious truth”.

Well, it’s a general truth that we human beings have to produce most of the things we consume. But it doesn’t at all follow from that generality that any specific act of production—or even any system of production—is motivated or determined by consumption. Workers in a factory that makes landmines aren’t interested in consuming their product. The slave produces not in order to consume but in order to avoid physical violence.

Bourgeois economics likes to deal with abstract, isolated individuals. Person A has a television or a car that s/he doesn’t want or need. Person B would like a television or car and doesn’t know how to build one for himself or herself, but luckily has a skill which A needs—the ability to be exploited, for example. So A’s television is exchanged for B’s work, and they all live happily ever after in a capitalist utopia—until the world becomes uninhabitable because B has consumed too many television sets.

The real world is quite different, which is why bourgeois economics is not a great help in understanding it. In the real world, person B, a worker, works for A, the capitalist, because he or she has no choice—no other way to produce his or her life. What workers produce isn’t their choice, but the capitalists’ choice. And the capitalists choose what will be produced on the basis of one criterion only. It’s what they think will make them a profit.

Daniel Faber quotes figures from the us National Academy of Sciences. In 1991, toxic waste production in the us amounted to 45 kg for every man, woman and child in the country—every day. If consumption were the goal of production, capitalism would be the most inefficient economic system in all of human history, requiring people, to consume for a day, to create close to their own weight in poisons.

But consumption has nothing to do with it. The fundamental cause of environmental destruction is the same as the fundamental cause of everything else in capitalism. Profit—more precisely, surplus value—is the basic cause of poverty, crime, sexism, racism, war, alienation and so on and so on and so on. Why should environmental destruction be any different?

The nineteenth century us humorist Mark Twain said that everyone talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it. He couldn’t make that joke today: capitalism is changing the weather.

If Twain had read the Communist Manifesto, he might have foreseen the impact that capitalism would have even on the weather: “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production.”

This indicates why the environmental threat today is worse than in earlier periods of capitalism. It is mainly due, not to increased population or increased consumption, but to the fact that scientific/technological progress allows human production to have a greater impact on nature. Potentially, this is a force for good (improved health care, increased food production, decreased environmental impact). But while capitalism survives, scientific and technical progress multiplies the impact of capitalism. This fact creates the illusion that technology as such is the source of the threat.

Why is the bourgeoisie driven constantly to revolutionise the instruments of production, constantly to develop new forms of productive technology without regard for how it impacts on people or their environment?

For the sake of profits, of course. Reducing costs through technological improvement is a major way to obtain extra profits (in a highly competitive environment, it might be the way to ensure any profits at all).

Now, some people might think that, after several centuries of increasing their profits by revolutionising the means of production, the capitalists as a class would decide that their profits were at last sufficient, and they didn’t need to go on trying to increase them.

Unfortunately, that’s not how capitalism works. Is two or three billion dollars enough—time to call it quits and go fishing? Rupert Murdoch doesn’t think so. What about $45 billion: is that enough to persuade Bill Gates to retire? The only difference between a good profit and a poor profit is size; of two possible profits, the bigger one is always better. Which is to say that no profit is ever so large that it doesn’t seem worthwhile increasing it.

And then there’s the fact that the constant pursuit of higher profits doesn’t automatically mean that profits really increase. The capitalists face a fairly fundamental contradiction here, namely that each individual capitalist’s success comes at the disadvantage of the capitalists as a class. The individual capitalist realises a surplus profit by introducing improved machinery, which typically means reducing the size of his/her work force. But workers are the source of the surplus value that makes up the capitalists’ profit. So in effect, individual capitalists seek a larger piece of the surplus value pie by methods that reduce the size of the pie. This is not what specialists in conflict resolution would call a win-win situation.

It’s impossible for all the capitalists to win from this procedure. But capitalists who lose out consistently for any period of time tend to stop being capitalists. Capitalists who want to remain capitalists therefore are forced into playing the competitive game that way. They have to seek to produce more efficiently in capitalist terms, which means increasing the number of commodities produced by a given amount of labour. This is why Marx describes production for profit as production for production’s sake: there are no social or natural limits.

Alienation, money and the environment

We can be even more precise here: there are no natural limits on capitalist production because there are no social limits. Human beings are social animals. We produce our own means of existence, and we do so as part of a collective, a society. That collective can be almost any size, from a dozen or so individuals to billions, but Robinson Crusoe, the isolated individual single-handedly wresting a living from nature, has never been anything but fiction. (Even in fiction, Crusoe couldn’t do the job all by himself, and Defoe had to send him a Third World indigenous person, Friday, as a slave. )

One of the things that Marx and Engels figured out—it’s a fundamental idea of the Communist Manifesto—is that the different forms of organisation of different societies have a material cause. Ancient Athens or Rome was different from fourteenth century England, which was different again from nineteenth century England, not because of the insights of some lawgiver or because of the prescriptions of religion, but because of the different ways in which those societies produced the means of existence for their members. The means of production—the tools with which the society works—require particular relations of production: relations between the members of that society which prescribe things like which people perform which types of work. And these relations of production create, and are buttressed by, a larger or smaller superstructure of customs, ideas, arts and so forth.

Among the different forms of social organisation, capitalism is a latecomer, growing up in Western Europe out of the decay of feudalism in the late Middle Ages. It has some unique characteristics which are highly relevant to the environmental crisis.

In other forms of economy, the relations of production tend to be fairly straightforward, at least in comparison to capitalism. For example, if you’re a serf in a feudal society, you know what you have to do. Custom, religion and the threat of violence from the nobility dictate that you stay on the land, spending part of each week working on the land assigned to your subsistence and part on the land which produces crops for the nobility. Everyone’s role in that society is similarly defined.

Capitalism destroys all those old forms of customary relations, as the Communist Manifesto explains:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’.⁴

Marx and Engels put that colourfully, but it is not at all exaggerated. In capitalist societies, social roles are not directly prescribed, neither by law nor custom. The fact that your parents are farmers or wharfies or school teachers doesn’t require you to be a farmer or wharfie or school teacher. Moreover, you are not stuck with any particular occupation: you can change it as often as you like.

In place of customary relations, capitalism puts, as Marx and Engels wrote, cash payment. Social connections are no longer direct and immediate, as they were in feudal society. Instead, they are mediated by commodity exchange, and therefore by money.

In a feudal society, relations between any two people are prescribed by the estate to which each belongs. In capitalist society, relations between individuals are determined by money and conducted by means of money. More importantly, the relationship of each individual to society as a whole is a monetary one.

In capitalist society, you have no automatic claim to food, shelter, health care or anything else. Your entitlements to anything exist only to the extent that you have money. This is expressed in everyday speech when someone is denied some government benefit they believe they are entitled to. They don’t normally say, “I deserve that, I’m a citizen”. They say, “I deserve that, I’m a taxpayer”.

Because it is central to capitalism’s productive relations, money tends to dominate all other aspects of society. It comes to regulate human behaviour in general, not only directly economic activity. Money, as the mediator of human behaviour, takes on human characteristics—even superhuman ones. “Money talks”, we say.

Though mothers and fathers give us life, it is money alone which preserves it. (Japanese classic)
It is pretty to see what money will do. (Samuel Pepys)
The love of money is the root of all evil. (Bible)
Lack of money is the root of all evil. (Shaw)
Ready money is Aladdin’s lamp. (Byron)
‘Tis ready money makes the man. (William Somerville)
Money alone sets all the world in motion. (Publilius Syrus)
Endless money forms the sinews of war. (Cicero)
The world is his, who has money to go over it. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. (Somerset Maugham)
A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things. (Bible)

Moreover, money is not only money. It is also capital, or value which exploits workers. Value produced by workers is surplus value for the capitalists; returned to the production process, it is new capital that exploits workers anew. The workers’ own product therefore confronts them in the workplace as alien property—both alien and hostile, because it confronts them as exploiter. Money is money capital, the title to ownership of this alienated labour.

Because labour in capitalism is alienated labour, labour whose result exploits the worker, our lives become split into two parts. There is work, an imposed drudgery for others, in order merely to survive, and then there is “real” life, which starts where work ends (but often is little more than physical recovery so that work can be resumed the next day). But “real” life as an absence of labour runs into the contradiction that the urge to productive activity is part of human nature; so there is always something missing from that part of our lives which we regard as our own property, not the property of the boss.

This division of our lives into non-work time which belongs to ourselves and alienated labour-time for the boss has environmental consequences. Because labour and living are divorced from each other in capitalism, living is also divorced from the natural environment which is the ultimate basis of all production. The separation of labour and living appears in a distorting mirror as the artificial separation of city and country: on the one hand, urban life cut off from the natural basis of life; on the other side, rural isolation and constantly dwindling opportunities for productive activity other than forms of environmental destruction. If we as urban workers try to recover a relationship to the natural environment, we have to do so on holiday, as non-workers “consuming” nature, not really living and producing in it.

Through money, capitalism establishes a universal alienation of human social activity. By concentrating our social existence in a thing, money, capitalism creates an alienated, atomised form of society in which conscious social action becomes almost impossible.

Consequently, capitalist society has no real mechanism for meeting and overcoming social dangers. In bourgeois political theory, this is the role of the state. But in reality, the state represents, not society as a whole, but one section of society, the ruling class, against the rest.

The capitalist state has mechanisms—police, judiciary, prisons—for dealing with behaviour that threatens ruling-class property. It can forbid and punish actions that are often called “antisocial” but are really infringements against individuals. But when it comes to really antisocial behaviour—that is, behaviour which harms the entire society—the capitalist state seems strangely powerless. This is not simply because rich polluters bribe governments, although that certainly happens. It’s because it’s in the very nature of capitalism to express social approval or sanctions through the mediation of money. It contradicts the nature of capitalist society to regard making money as socially wrong, because making money is the standard reward of capitalism for approved behaviour.

What all this means in a practical sense is that, if you notice a factory pouring waste into a river, you can’t knock at the door and tell whoever answers, “Look what you’re doing—you’d better stop”.

First of all, they know what they’re doing. Secondly and more importantly, if you ever actually meet them face to face, they can and probably will reply to the effect, “Society approves of what I’m doing. Here’s the proof: I’m making money by doing it.”

You can’t defeat that argument within the framework of capitalist society: within capitalism, it’s correct. Money is the symbol, in fact the substance, of social approval.

Other forms of economy, from subsistence agriculture to socialist, are capable of polluting, but environmental destruction is not an inherent feature, as it is for capitalism. In non-capitalist economies, environmental destruction is clearly a mistake in the sense that it gets in the way of the productive goal, which is concerned with use-values: if you over-fish the river, next year you won’t get as many fish. But such destruction doesn’t at all interfere with the capitalist goal of surplus value. If it becomes generally more difficult to produce crops because of soil depletion, for example, that doesn’t bother capitalist agribusiness, which can raise prices and go on making the same or even higher profits. That is an outline of the connection between what capitalism does to people and what it does to the environment, the reason that capitalism is so much more destructive of the environment than earlier forms of economic organisation—more destructive per head of population or per unit of product, not just in absolute terms. Capitalism transfers the power of social decision making to an inanimate object, to money. Nothing—not even the survival of the human race—can overrule money.

When capitalism was establishing itself by overthrowing the decaying remnants of feudalism, the power of money was a progressive force against the dead hand of outdated tradition. It set up a neutral, objective standard of social approval, against the arbitrary subjective whims of the feudal nobility. But that time is long past. The power of money has been transformed from a force for progress into a threat to human survival.

If we cannot take conscious social action to address or avoid environmental dangers, then we are done for. But conscious social action—which means the active involvement of the majority of society—is inherently contradictory with the character of capitalism.

This should help us understand why so many people who want to defend the environment or any other worthwhile cause are unsuccessful but nevertheless persist with methods that have been proven ineffectual—why, for example, the Greens persist in believing, in the face of centuries of contrary evidence, that they can accomplish their goal of saving the environment if only they can get a few more members elected to parliament.

On the one hand, capitalism positively reinforces such methods. Would-be reformers persist with parliamentarism because that is the method that capitalist society prescribes for so-called “social action”. It’s a form of pseudo-collective activity in which the participants remain atomised (the individual alone with his/her conscience in the voting booth). And it reaffirms the social mediation of money, because only candidates with money have a realistic chance of competing.

The other side of the same coin is that conscious social action requires you at least to start to go beyond the limits of capitalism. Developing such action consistently means developing consistent anti-capitalist activity—that is, an anti-capitalist programmes. As we know, that doesn’t arise spontaneously; it requires study, analysis and the testing of theory in practice. In other words, reformists remain reformists because the alternative is to build a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist party.

Green reformism’s record

Around the world and in Australia, we have had considerable experience of what green reformist politics can and can’t accomplish. Germany’s Green Party, which once held out the hope of radically transforming that country’s politics, is now thoroughly integrated into the parliamentary system; in no sense does it fundamentally challenge the _system_ of environmental destruction, rather than mere examples of such destruction.

In Australia, Green Party parliamentary politics began to get organised around the 1990-91 period. Against our attempts to put together a broad, democratic alliance of green forces around a programmes of essentially anti-capitalist demands, green reformists argued that there wasn’t time for such frills as democracy or building mass movements: we had only 10 years left in which to save the planet. Logically, they should be telling us today that we have at most three or four years left, but it’s amazing how a time scale can change once it becomes focused on parliamentary sittings.

Green reformism of course can win and has won particular victories, just as reformism in the union movement can sometimes win a wage rise. In the United States, where the movement is built more on peak body lobbying rather than on standing Green Party candidates in elections, green reformism can point to many successes. Daniel Faber in fact comments:

[O]ver the course of the last three decades environmentalists have built one of most broadly based and politically powerful social movements in this country’s history. Many important victories resulting in the protection of endangered species, wildlife habitat, parks, and wilderness; reductions in some types of air, noise, land, and water pollution; some key improvements of public/consumer/worker health and safety, including reductions in human exposure to such highly dangerous substances as lead, asbestos, ddt and other toxic chemicals; and other measures are won during this time. Furthermore, dozens of major environmental statutes costing business hundreds of billions of dollars are passed into law. As a result, us governmental policies for protecting the environment and worker/human health are now among the most stringent in the world.

But he immediately goes on to say “that despite having won many important battles, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the modern environmental movement is losing the war for a healthy ecology.” And he goes on to cite the evidence, including the statistics that I quoted earlier.

Green reformism, or what Faber calls “eco-liberalism”, is losing the war because it doesn’t have a strategy or perspective of winning the war. Indeed, it doesn’t even realise that there’s a war going on. Most of the environmental movement sees only a series of individual battles, which have little or no necessary connection with each other. These are fought on a case-by-case basis; the nearest thing to a generalised strategy is a plan to get more environmentalists into parliaments. The environmental movement’s failure to tackle the fundamental questions of capitalist power means that it can annoy big business, can make itself a nuisance to the polluters, can increase their costs, but cannot defeat them.

‘Factor Four’ and greenwashing

Here I want to take a brief look at some of the plans and proposals which green reformists or eco-liberalists put forward as solutions to the environmental crisis. What they all have in common is a failure to take account of the character of capitalist economy and the power relationships of capitalist society.

One such scheme is the effort to convince capitalist corporations that “environment protection is good for business”. So we have Greenpeace leaders meeting with corporate executives, attempting to persuade them that they will profit by doing things more greenly, either directly or through the public good will they will win through being seen to protect the environment. For many corporations, of course, this is simply an encouragement to “greenwashing”—public relations exercises which have no real impact on environmental problems, and which serve to hide the company’s real environmental pollution.

In the us, Faber writes, “The environmentalists’ line is that ecological protection and clean-up create new industries, profits and jobs, as well as reduce future costs by preventing further damage to natural resources”.

A variation on this theme is provided by Ernst von Weizsacker, Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins in their book Factor Four. The authors are members of the Rocky Mountain Institute, an environmental think-tank which specialises in devising less resource-intensive ways of doing things: better insulation of houses to reduce energy for heating and cooling, getting improved mileage and less pollution from motor vehicle engines and so on. Their book argues that such environment-protecting technologies are also more efficient in the market sense—that they will reduce costs and increase profits for the capitalist who uses them.

Both of these approaches make the mistake of assuming that the market prescribes the same behaviour for all—that what is good for one capitalist is good for all capitalists, and vice versa. That view is nonsense: capitalists have quite different, and competing, interests. Moreover, the present and future interests of the same capitalist can be quite different.

No capitalist cares at all about creating new industries, profits and jobs in general. They don’t care about new jobs at all. And they don’t care about new industries and profits unless they are their industries and profits. Somebody else’s new industries and profits are simply another competitor.

As for keeping future resource costs lower by consuming resources more slowly today, each capitalist knows that he or she is paying today for the resources used today, but it may be a quite different capitalist whose future costs are being spared.

Moreover, we should keep in mind the historic vision that characterises the ruling class. This was expressed succinctly by the economist John Maynard Keynes when he said, “In the long run, we are all dead”. Capital’s perspectives are bounded by the prevailing interest rate: the higher that is, the more future welfare is discounted and the more short-sighted capital becomes.

This puts in perspective the Rocky Mountain Institute’s attempt to find purely technical solutions to environmental destruction, solutions which will “work” because they reduce capitalists’ costs. Since capitalists have to pay for most of the natural resources they use (they get air and perhaps water for free, but they have to pay for minerals, energy and so on), it is already the case that, other things being equal, it pays the capitalists to use as little of those resources as possible. If capitalists really need an environmental think-tank to tell them that a megalitre of oil is cheaper than two megalitres of oil, then they are not very good capitalists.

Does this mean that capitalism has a built-in drive to be economical in its use of resources? Unfortunately not—and not only because the capitalists are driven to produce and sell as much as possible of their commodities, irrespective of real demand. In working out what is “economical” in terms of capitalism and the environment, the catch is that little phrase, “other things being equal”. In capitalism, things are equal only rarely and by accident.

A new technology may well have the potential to be economical for society as a whole—that is, to reduce the overall social cost of producing some good or service. But it will not be widely used unless it improves the profits of a particular capitalist—generally one with considerable market power, which provides a measure of protection against new competitors taking up the technology.

What is profitable is not determined solely by “economics”. Market power carries with it the ability to use political means to protect and increase profits, through securing monopolies, subsidies, favourable tax treatment and so on.

Australia’s ‘win’ at Kyoto

We have just had an illuminating experience of this in regard to the Kyoto greenhouse gas emission negotiations. The Coalition government’s position—which was supported in the essentials by the Labor Party—is that “Australia” can’t afford to cut back significantly on its consumption of fossil fuels. This is absurd on the face of it. Australia, far more than most countries, has the potential to use solar power in a major way, and the technology for doing so is already close to being economically competitive with coal, despite only trivial government or capitalist investment in the research. Meanwhile, climate change due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases is already having an adverse impact on Australia, including in economic terms.

But it is true, from the standpoint of capital, that it makes no sense to shift investment from coal and oil into environmentally sustainable forms of energy. Coal and oil are reliably profitable, while solar power is an unknown in terms of what it might yield. Then there is the whole huge infrastructure tied to burning coal and oil, which would have to be written off as a loss by the companies concerned.

Last but not least, the acf calculates that government financial subsidies for the production and consumption of fossil fuels have amounted to $40 billion over the past 40 years. That figure does not include “environmental subsidies” (environmental damage not paid for by those who cause it), which amount to $2½ billion a year for fossil fuel-fired electricity generation and $1.4 billion for other energy production. It would take a lot of political effort to create similar sorts of subsidies for alternative forms of energy.

So the Howard government followed a policy that appears short-sighted, almost incomprehensibly senseless, from the standpoint of the reformists and the think-tanks that imagine capitalism as a basically harmonious and rational system, whatever its particular, temporary, defects. But the Australian ruling class was virtually unanimous in its backing for that policy.

After agreement was reached at Kyoto, Robert Hill patted himself on the back by saying that when the Australian delegation went into the negotiations, “We kept something up our sleeve” (referring to claiming an inflated reduction in gas emissions from land clearing).

Think of that: there’s an international gathering of governments, supposedly to try to deal with a process of environmental destruction with truly incalculable consequences, and the Australian minister for the environment publicly boasts that his contribution was to behave like someone who cheats at cards. This obscenity is treated by all the major papers as an “Australian victory”. And why not?—the person who cheats at cards usually ends up with the money.

Commodifying pollution

The other major plank of the programmes of green reformism is the use of the market to curtail environmental destruction. One frequent proposal is the use of taxes to discourage polluting behaviour: a number of environmental groups in Australia and elsewhere advocate a carbon tax, for example. In bourgeois economic theory, such taxes alter the “price signals” to consumers and thereby cause them to change their behaviour—for instance, by buying less petrol for their private car.

In the United States, trading in “pollution rights” has been established for several years now, and this seems to be something that will be developed internationally out of the Kyoto conference. The idea is that some norm or benchmark of pollution is established, and then countries or companies which do better than the benchmark can sell their unused “pollution rights” to another company or country that can’t stay within its allotment.

We’ve already seen that money is the measure of everything in capitalist society, which is the other side of saying that capitalism tends to turn everything into a commodity. So it shouldn’t surprise us that even destruction of the environment also becomes a commodity. (There’s a us cartoon that sums up this mentality perfectly. A man discovers burglar in his home and is about to shoot him—legally—but decides instead to turn the event to a profit. He rings up “Crime Swappers” and sells his right to kill the burglar. The burglar is allowed to go, but the Mafia buys the right to kill one person legally.)

The environmentalists who put forward or support such schemes imagine that the problem is that our society puts too low a dollar value on the environment, and they think that increasing that valuation will help to save the environment. But the real problem is that money is made the measure of non-economic phenomena, such as the environment. So long as this is the case, economic activity will be allowed to damage the environment whenever the price is right. For example, the owners of a coal-fired power plant may be able to regard the air as “free” and thus to pollute it with carbon dioxide and other gases. If the government taxes the plant’s emissions, or requires the owners first to secure a tradeable emissions permit, the plant will charge more for its electricity. If the higher charge results in lower use of electricity, there may be somewhat lessened pollution until increases in the number of consumers make up the gap. That’s all, at best, and even that little is not a necessary result: higher charges may not significantly reduce electricity consumption, or the company may make up for declining consumption by finding new customers.

Schemes like carbon taxes and trading in pollution reinforce capitalism’s tendency to subordinate everything, including the environment, to money. By further legitimating the primacy of profits, they actually worsen the environmental crisis. It’s also not surprising that market-based attempts to curtail pollution end up harming the poor more than anyone else. By definition, in a market, power and money are directly proportional to each other. And indirect taxes—consumption taxes—are regressive, falling disproportionally on the poor: that’s why capitalist governments prefer them over progressive income taxes.

That markets are “supposed” to screw the poor is admitted even by bourgeois economists, although sometimes they do it a little too openly and embarrass their sponsors. Lawrence Summers was recently appointed by us President Clinton as his undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs. In 1991, when Summers was a chief economist at the World Bank, he wrote a notorious memo which said, “…the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable”. The World Bank, Summers wrote, should be “encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the ldcs [less developed countries]. Daniel Faber points out that pollution-trading arrangements are all carefully designed to allow capital to meet regulations on pollution while continuing to pollute.

The Clean Air Act of 1990 is one such example [of these schemes]. Supported by Vice-President Albert Gore as then Senator from Tennessee, a key aspect of that legislation involves the commodification of pollution (which can be bought and sold on the stock market), which has allowed enterprises such as the Tennessee Valley Authority to buy an estimated $2. 5 million worth of ‘pollution credits’ from Wisconsin Power and Light. These pollution credits allows the TVA to exceed federal limitations on sulfur dioxide and other toxic emissions in older facilities, mostly in poor working class communities of colour in the South. Thus, the Act is a powerful reminder of the manner in which neo-liberal, free-market environmentalism is likely to exacerbate, rather than resolve, the profound social and environmental injustices fostered by traditional regulatory approaches over the last thirty years.

Here is a typical example that Faber cites:

[I]n Sierra Blanca, Texas, the local economy has collapsed. Underemployment is so pervasive that 40 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line. Since 1992, New York City and a biosolids company called Merco have shipped roughly 200 tons of processed sewage a day to the small town. Once dumped into the Atlantic Ocean before Congress banned the practice in 1988, the sludge is now transported by rail to be applied (in what industry terms ‘beneficial-land application’) as fertiliser to nearly 200 square miles of land around this mostly Hispanic community. Due to concerns that the sludge is poisoned with heavy metals, petroleum, and pathogens, community residents see this practice as posing a significant health threat and therefore a form of environmental racism. There are more than 200 other such biosolid sites in Texas alone.

There are no market solutions to the environmental crisis, any more than there are market solutions to poverty or unemployment or war or sexism or racism. At most, the market can provide very temporary and limited palliatives, usually by shifting the problem to someone else.

The environmental crisis is intensifying today for two reasons. One is that nothing serious is being done to reverse environmental destruction, so the effects are accumulating.

The other is that the particular economic needs of capital at this time are driving it to step up its exploitation of the environment. The period of long-term stagnation that began nearly a quarter of a century ago is nowhere near being reversed—as witnessed, among other things, by the economic crashes now rolling through the so-called tiger economies of Asia.

In the imperialist countries, “booms” are less and less boomish. In Australia, the government thinks it has something to crow about if it can project unemployment falling below 8 per cent—always at least half a year or a year in the future, of course. The boom in the United States is the slowest one in half a century; economic growth is about two-thirds the rate of growth during typical upswings, and the increase of wages about half. In 1960–73, labour productivity grew an average 2.9 per cent a year in the us; in the 1990s, the average has been one per cent.

Inter-imperialist competition is intensifying capital’s normal drive to reduce the costs of the raw material inputs to production. It’s because old-growth forests come cheaper that they are logged in preference to plantations, not because of any “shortage” of plantation timber.

Stepped-up environmental destruction goes hand in hand with stepped-up exploitation of the working class; both phenomena are part of the same economic compulsion to reduce costs of production.

The links between worker exploitation and environmental destruction are nowhere clearer than in the growing number of cases where workers are killed on the job. In the United States, there are 55,000 work-related deaths each year. Faber cites figures that the number who die from exposure to toxins in the workplace is more than eight times the number killed by other kinds of accidents. The number of work-related deaths in Australia is at least 2900 per year, roughly per capita the same as the us.

Thus when we say that the labour movement has to take up the cause of saving the environment, it is not merely a matter of forming alliances between unions and an environmental movement that happen to have the same enemy. Capitalist destruction of the environment is part and parcel of its slaughter of the working class for the sake of greater profits.

Capitalism is a threat to the survival of us all: individually in the workplace, collectively as it destroys the environmental conditions for human life. Its overthrow is literally a matter of life or death. It is even more true today than it was in 1848 that “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”

Endnotes

1.             Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. 1, Penguin, Harmondsworth, p. x.

2.         Engels, Frederick, The Condition of the Working Class in England, p.

3.         Marx, Karl,“Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1970, pp. 20–21.

4.         Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, Communist Manifesto, International Publishers, New York, 1971, pp. 91–92.