This year and last have seen the emergence of a new climate revolt, set against the backdrop of mass revolutionary movements around the world – most recently in Belarus, where working people have resisted the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko.
At the same time, across society, knowledge about the reality of the climate crisis is at an all-time high. Scientists’ warnings about the melting ice caps, rising sea levels and destruction of biodiversity have been noticed and recognised for the threat it poses by a new generation.
Already, the effects of the climate emergency are being felt. Researchers at the National Academy of Sciences estimated that by 2070, 30% of the world’s land could be rendered uninhabitable. This is a frightening prospect for many, especially when the social and economic impact of these changes are factored in. It will no doubt be the world’s indigenous and neocolonial populations who will shoulder the hardest burden of this crisis, but nobody will be free from the effects when the question of flash floods are considered.
The crisis has revealed a complete rot at the top of society. While the ruling class sits on mountains of wealth, we get told that even the mildest changes are ‘unrealistic’. This idea will be put to the test in the era of Covid-19, as seen in a poll conducted the other month, which reported that only 12% of people wanted a return to ‘business as usual’.
Environmentalism
The prevailing mood on the youth strikes is uncompromisingly radical. Emphasis has been placed on the need for urgent and unconditional action to prevent the worst runaway effects – no ifs, no buts. Many have even turned towards anticapitalist ideas. And while the Coronavirus, for a period of time, cut across the building of the movement, all signs point to activists taking steps towards regrouping the movement to renew its struggle.
The reasons why this is happening are obvious. World governments have shown next to no action, while the ugliest face of world capitalism can be seen in the likes of Trump and Brazil’s Bolsonaro. But the whole system is also guilty. Most sections of the US and world ruling class actually have some fear of the approach taken by Trump, and the possibility of mass struggle being inflamed by his overt climate denial. The most conventional approach from the ruling elites has been to pay lip service to the fight against climate change , while doing nothing to seriously confront the issues head on.
The approach of the capitalist class at every corner has been to channel the anti-system mood present on the strikes into channels it finds least threatening. This has sometimes meant companies presenting a ‘green’ image. But it can also be political. The Irish Green Party, for instance, has now jumped into bed with Fine Gael and Fianna Fail – the two parties of Irish capitalism – to form a government that acts in the interests of big business.
At the same time, those who want to ‘greenwash’ capitalism seek to guilt trip us for our individual actions as consumers, while the ruling class is let off the hook. It is the immense consumption of the ruling class that plays the biggest role in inflating carbon emissions. As the Institute for Policy Studies estimates, for example, one hour flying in a private jet burns as much fuel as an entire year of driving.
Imperialism
As of now, the world’s scientists continue to uncover new facts about the impending catastrophe. And while elites continue to hold their regular UN climate talks, the question of the profit system remains the elephant in the room.
Repeatedly, these attempts at brokering ‘deals’ between capitalist powers have either broken down, or resulted in useless targets, rarely if ever adhered to at all. Marxism is the only force that can point to reasons for this – primarily in the division of the world into rival imperialist spheres of influence, where capitalist powers are fundamentally driven by the battle for influence and control over global markets.
The upcoming COP26 talks next November in Glasgow will, no doubt, expose this yet again. While youth strikers prepare to gather a show of strength, world capitalism continues to be characterised by heightened conflict between rivaling US and Chinese imperialism. The power play between Trump and China’s ’emperor for life’ Xi Jinping reflects a wider trend towards ‘deglobalisation’, protectionism and decoupling between the big powers. This heightened level of tension between the world’s ‘big two’ makes the prospect of concrete action and international co-operation to protect the climate even less likely that it was in an earlier period.
The effects of this are already being felt. As Rob Jones of Sotsialisticheskaya Alternativa (International Socialist Alternative in Russia) put it best, “capitalist lips are drooling” over the melting of the Arctic ice caps, with the freeing up of profitable natural resources beneath the exposed rock.
Many in the climate movement have shown their ability to connect environmental destruction to capitalism’s endless thirst for profits. But some ‘greens’ incorrectly dismiss Marxism, saying it has nothing of value to offer their movements. On the flip side, the legacy of Stalinism with its poor record on the environment, played a huge role in facilitating these difficulties, which are made worse by the role of some right-wing trade union leaders defending the fossil fuel industry in the name of ‘saving jobs’.
What Marx and Engels said
It does not have to be this way. As we would say, every climate campaigner ought to be a socialist and every socialist must be an active climate campaigner.
But some left-green figures have taken to dismissing the ideas of Marx and Engels, arguing that Marxism itself is unable to seriously understand and chart a plan of action around environmental concerns. ‘Marx ignored the climate and considered it irrelevant’, they will say.
They emphasise that Marx and Engels, both people who died in the late 1800s, cannot have developed a view that we can bring in line with the scale of today’s crisis. It is true that Marx and Engels did not foresee the type of climate emergency we face today (how could they have done?). But they were immensely invested in studying the scientific developments of the time, for instance in their close following of Charles Darwin, even drawing inspiration from his theory of natural selection in informing their theory of historical materialism.
They did not live to see the type of climate crisis confronting us currently. But they laid down a method for understanding the world that is extremely valuable for climate campaigners to follow today.
How so? A starting point for Marx and Engels was to recognise that capitalism has not always existed and does not need to always exist. The system has only existed globally for the last few hundred years – i.e. for a tiny part of human history. Economic thinkers prior to Marx sought to answer the question of how capitalism can be made to work. But Marx took this a step further, looking at the system as a whole to understand the contradictions and flaws that can account for its endless destruction of people and the planet.
Marx stressed the central importance of nature. As he put it, the products sold on the market are made up of “combinations of two elements – matter and labour. If we take away the labour expended upon them, a material substratum is always left, which is furnished by nature”.
All of our products stem from the use and manipulation of the natural world for our own ends. This, of course, is obvious to many people. The smartphones we use are aided by the use of minerals mined by slave child labour in the Congo. The clothes we wear are made out of cotton grown across South and Central Asia. But capitalism tries to remove us from this, and to hide the natural roots of our lives.
Metabolic rift
Marxists use the method of ‘dialectical materialism’. Put simply, Marxism analyses the processes and changes in society and the world as a whole. The world never remains static but is constantly changing, marked by rapid leaps. Climate change is no exception to these processes . The tipping point, a rapid shift which we are currently facing, is the endpoint of a long process that Marx describes at the peak of the Industrial Revolution.
Marx famously coined the term ‘metabolic rift’ (Stoffwechse) to describe capitalism’s tendency to disregard the normal functioning of the natural world and humankind’s relationship with it – to “disturb the metabolic interaction between man and the earth”. As a system, he said, capitalism treats environmental damage as an ‘externality’ – i.e. something that the mass of people can be made to pay for, as opposed to the executives and shareholders.
This is quite obvious today, for instance, in how our products are supplied. It is common to see fruit in supermarkets, for example, grown and picked in Sub-Saharan Africa, then shipped abroad to be packaged in plastic, and shipped to another country for sale, leaving behind a tremendous amount of waste and CO2 emissions.
But it was also the work of Engels that gave some alarming predictions about the scale of an impending climate catastrophe. As Engels put it in a piece published after his death:
“Let us not flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us… We by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people”.
If this is not a clear warning about the devastating results of capitalism’s disregard for the concerns of the natural world, then what is?
Workers and the land
One of Marx’s most important conclusions was that the metabolic rift was not just bad for nature, but would also spell disaster for workers and the global poor. The exploitation of labourers in workplaces, he said, resembled the way in which “a greedy farmer snatches more produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility”.
It was this question of soil exhaustion that interested Marx the most. Capitalist agriculture, by the time of his writing, had adopted the intense farming of land in order to generate products sold in the cities. But capitalists did not see a profit to be made in returning the nutrients from those goods back to the land. The result was both mountains of waste from the cities and a mass of farmland depleted of its natural nutritional value. As he then put it:
“All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil… by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker”.
What kind of ‘system change’?
Marxists in the climate strike movement have two jobs. On the one hand, Socialist Alternative and ISA play an active role in building and developing the climate strike movement into a force that can win real gains. We need to build the widest base possible to fight on concrete demands. We need to use our positions in the trade unions and strike organising groups to make sure that youth strikers and organised workers can show real solidarity, linking with anti-racist, feminist and LGBTQ+ liberation campaigns, finding common ground on which we can fight together.
At the same time, the movement for climate justice also needs a revolutionary organisation that can argue the need for a radical break with capitalism. We can’t keep trying to patch up this putrid system. We need a wholesale transfer of power towards working class and young people in running society.
By doing this, we would be able to make use of the massive potential in society’s existing technology. It would allow for the massive shortening of the working week without loss of pay, freeing up time for workers and the mass of people to play an active role in running society. We saw this in two major revolutions: the Paris Commune of 1871, which Marx enthusiastically wrote about, and the Russian Revolution of 1917, which was led by the revolutionary Marxist Bolsheviks.
Action needed
Marxists do not take an inactive approach to the fight for change. Important movements in recent years have emerged to demand valuable reforms under the system – for instance in the campaigns at universities demanding divestment from fossil fuel companies. Demands for the public ownership of transport can and should be fought for by the climate movement in the here and now. But any reforms we win will always be vulnerable to attack for as long as they exist if they’re still encircled by a capitalist economy.
This is why the fight for reforms has to be twinned with demands for more radical changes. Doing this requires an internationalist approach. Capitalism is an international system, climate change is an international problem and so our response has to be international in focus. This does not have to be abstract either.
A position of Marxist internationalism means stressing the need for the climate strike movement to be organised on a higher and wider scale in preparation for a new round of struggle. Local youth strike groups are forming organising committees, which should not be kept simply local. Organising groups could link up nationally into real democratic organisations, and link up with the movement globally, from Britain to South Africa, from Taiwan to Brazil to coordinate the struggle with international days of action.
The phase of world history we are in now is very clear. We have two options facing us: socialist revolution or mass extinction. We are faced with a real task in fighting for our futures. But it is the Marxists that have complete belief in the ability of humanity to overcome all obstacles in its way.
The spread of Covid-19 has now hit worldwide. At the time of writing there are more than 1 million confirmed cases of people infected by coronavirus and more than 50,000 who have lost their lives. The spread could have been significantly reduced if swift and far-reaching measures such as mass testing had been taken, as well as if public health systems had not faced massive cuts, privatisation and underfunding in recent decades. But what caused the virus to emerge in the first place? Could it all have been prevented?
The outbreak of Covid-19 and the animal trade industry
Nature magazine published research showing an almost identical genome sequence between Covid-19 and the one of a coronavirus in pangolins, the most trafficked animal in the world. Pangolins are trafficked and sold for their scales that are used in traditional medicine. Their meat is considered a luxury product. They were also sold in the wet market in Wuhan, a very crowded market without any basic sanitary conditions, drainage and proper hygiene standards. All first cases of Covid-19 were found among people who visited that market. It is likely that Covid-19 was transmitted to pangolins by horseshoe bats in China, as bats are known as reservoirs of a significant number of zoonotic viruses that, as a result of spillover, can be transmitted to humans.
The spillover of SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), which is also a type of coronavirus, in 2002 happened in a similar way. Many scientists claim that it is likely the SARS virus was transmitted to humans by Civet cats that were sold for their meat in restaurants for the rich and wealthy in Guangdong province in China. Professor Yuen Kwok-Yung, a microbiologist at the University of Hong Kong, said in 2003: “If you cannot control further jumping of such viruses from animals to humans, the same epidemic can occur again – so it is very important that we have ways of controlling the rearing, the slaughtering and the selling of these wild game animals.”
Unfortunately, he was right. Despite the outbreak of SARS, in the interests of the profiteering of wild animal trade, related industries, wet markets and the trade itself has continued to operate without much regulation and restriction. A 2017 report by the Chinese Academy of Engineering found that the wild animal farming industry is estimated to make over £57 billion in profits a year. This laid the basis for an online campaign on Weibo social media opposing live animal trade under the hashtag #rejectgamemeat. Up until a few weeks ago, wild-animal farms continued to operate openly and legally. Last February, the Chinese government posed a ban for trading wild animals for food – but not when trading for fur, medicine or research.
Not a ‘Chinese phenomena’
However, unlike the xenophobic and anti-Asian propaganda that was the prompt response of Trump and Co, this is not a ‘Chinese phenomena’ or a ‘Chinese virus’. Spillover of viruses from animals can also be caused by birds or pigs as we saw with cases of Avian flu (‘bird flu’) or Swine flu. The worryingly widespread use of antibiotics in chicken and other animals in industrialized farming also allows emergence of bacteria resistant to antibiotics that can be transmitted to humans as well. The World Health Organisation says that antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health. But despite the warnings, their systematic and non-essential use in farming continues.
Despite the advancements in medicine, research and science, in the last 50 years there has been an increase in the number of emerging zoonotic diseases – pathogens that are transmitted to humans by animals. Research found 75% of emerging infectious diseases originate in wild animals, as they host a lot of viruses unknown to our immune systems that can pose a big risk. Such diseases include SARS and MERS (which are also types of coronavirus), Ebola, Zika, Nipah virus, Avian Flu and even HIV. These all had high mortality rates compared to Covid-19 and have presented a real threat to the health and wellbeing of humans. EcoHealth, an NGO, predicts that such spillovers will likely double or even triple over the next decade.
Environmental and ecological destruction – a health risk
One of the main reasons for this is the environmental impact of agriculture, farming and mining. Agriculture and farming, for example, regularly involve deforestation that results in changes to and destruction of the habitats of wildlife. This creates potential for much closer contact between wild animals, livestock and humans. The profit-driven oil and mineral mining industry often involves the incursion of population into uninhabited land which can dramatically change and destroy wildlife habitats as well.
The outbreak of Ebola in 2014, a deadly disease with a mortality rate of 50%-90%, started in a small village in Guinea’s Gueckedou Forest Region. Not long before the outbreak, the region went through an extreme deforestation carried out by the mining and lumber industries. As a result, the interaction of locals with natural carriers of the virus, such as Fruit Bats, Chimpanzees and other types of monkeys, became more frequent. Scientists found that Ebola outbreaks are most likely to happen in villages in Sub-Saharan Africa that are near areas that have experienced deforestation within the previous two years. They focused on 27 cases of Ebola outbreaks in the years 2001-2014 and found out that 25 out of these cases happened in areas that experienced massive deforestation not long before the outbreak.
The last couple of years saw massive deforestation in many places, including Australia, Brazil, Malaysia, Indonesia and Siberia. According to Global Forest Watch, more than 12 million hectares of forests were lost in 2018, which is the size of Belgium. Last year was not less deadly, with wildfires in Amazon – most of them essentially man-made by major landlords, whose interests are faithfully represented by the right-wing capitalist government of Bolsonaro. Australia’s wildfires caused the burning of over 10 million hectares of land and were heavily boosted by climate change. The rise of global temperatures in itself increases not only the frequency of wildfires but also the threat of droughts. All this is contributing to the growing threat posed by the emergence of new infectious diseases.
Urbanisation, poverty and climate change
Urbanisation and lack of infrastructure can also increase the potential of widespread outbreaks. Rats, fleas and mosquitos are potential carriers of many diseases. They tend to thrive in poor areas where there is lack of proper infrastructure, sanitation, waste removal, clean water and access to health facilities. There has been a 30-fold rise in cases of Dengue fever over the last 50 years, and with the rapid urbanisation across much of Asia, many more people are susceptible to contact with open water sources which are a breeding ground for mosquitoes – the transmitters of the virus.
The outbreak of the Zika virus in 2015, which is from the same virus group as the Dengue, was also thought to be encouraged by rising temperatures caused by global warming. The Zika virus can spread at temperatures between 18°C and 34°C . As a result, the outbreak was mostly in tropical or subtropical areas where summer temperatures reach such levels. In 2015,oBrazil had one of the warmest and driest winters and springs on record, which allowed the virus to continue to spread throughout the year. Hotter weather in both cases of Dengue and Zika provide much more fertile conditions for mosquitoes carrying the disease to breed.
Lack of infrastructure and facilities is not just a problem of ‘developing’ or ‘third-world countries’. In the US, residents of Flint, Michigan didn’t have access to clean water as it was contaminated with elevated levels of lead that could cause poisoning, resulting in many possibly lethal illnesses. Israel was recently on the brink of Rabies epidemic as a result of major cuts in the veterinary services of the Agriculture Ministry. Two years before the outbreak, the agriculture ministry decided to stop vaccinating jackals and foxes against Rabies. A decade of austerity in the UK has included council cuts in waste collections leaving refuse workers overstretched and sometimes forced to take strike action in defense of these services. Less than a quarter of the councils in England have bin collections every week. 15% of UK councils have waste collection every three or even four weeks (!).
Capitalism – a health risk!
Destruction of habitats and the environment more generally clearly poses a threat to our health. This is not done in the interests of ordinary workers and poor but instead to meet the demand of big business to make profit. Just 100 corporations have been responsible for more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. They clearly bear central responsibility for climate change.
The cases of outbreaks of infectious diseases demonstrate the need for a democratic and socialist planning of production, for need not profit. A democratic plan of food production, with the major agricultural giants and food distributors taken out of the hands of big business and into public ownership, would allow for the elimination of the grotesque waste that currently takes place, and ensure environmentally sustainable food production and distribution to meet peoples needs.
At the same time, a just transition to sustainable and renewable energy is needed in order to fight climate change, which is undoubtedly a major factor contributing to the spread of diseases, including through creating more favorable conditions for transmitters of viruses like mosquitoes and pests. But just as in agriculture, the problem is you can’t control what you don’t own. To fully move away from fossil fuels, it’s necessary to take the major energy companies out of private hands and place them under the democratic control of working-class people. Transformation to renewable energy, could rapidly reduce the demand for mining, as well as deforestation and ecological destruction which were found as related to the outbreak of Ebola and potentially other diseases originating in wild animals. Massive investment in infrastructure could also help prevent spread of diseases and breeding of pests.
Ultimately, confronting the ecological crisis our world faces requires a complete reorganisation of society. It requires us to move away from production based on profit, and towards a democratic plan based meeting the needs and desires of the majority – not lining the pockets of a wealthy few. This is why we need to build an international, socialist movement to break with capitalism.
Only a socialist society, in which working-class people democratically control what is produced and how, can we hope to point a way towards a safe and environmentally sustainable future for humanity. In this way, the needs and interests of the majority of the world’s population will be put first, and public health will be the priority, not private profit.
The United Nations’ climate talks in Madrid have ended in a ‘compromise’ agreement. Whilst deadly wildfires and temperatures of 50°C hit Australia, world leaders have been locked in a stalemate, squabbling over targets.
These talks were greeted by hundreds of thousands of protesters, including Greta Thunberg herself, when they opened at the beginning of December. For most people, including the millions of young people who have taken part in school strikes across the world, dealing with the climate crisis is of urgent importance.
The 2015 Paris Agreement laid out a target of a maximum 2°C rise in global temperatures. This is in line with the threshold set by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Since 2015 though, world leaders have failed to respond to this challenge as the reality of reductions in global emissions falls behind where climate scientists have said they need to be. At their current rate, we are on track for 3°C of warming, which would have devastating effects on agriculture and coastal populations.
International cooperation
The failure of these talks highlights capitalism’s fundamental inability to seriously coordinate on an international scale. This system – capitalism – is riven by endless conflict between different capitalists, who constantly manoeuvre to displace one another in the search for endless profits. This is especially the case with the giant imperialist powers who dominate the global economy
The Paris Agreement calls for a ‘market based mechanism’ for fighting climate change. However, the role of ‘carbon markets’ proved to be one of the main stumbling blocks during COP25. Carbon markets allow the major capitalist countries to buy permits for carbon emission from poorer ones. Not only does this disadvantage poorer, less developed nations, in effect trade in permits and ‘offsets’ enables the countries with the largest emissions to avoid cuts. Trump’s strippped down US delegation was opposed to even these token measures.
As negotiations closed, leaders did little more than recognise that more work needs to be done to meet climate targets. Any real action has been pushed back until next year’s conference in Glasgow.
Glasgow 2020
The irony of Boris Johnson’s government hosting the international climate talks next year will not be lost on the workers and youth looking for a way to fight the climate crisis.
The Tory party is funded by big oil companies and climate denial organisations. It is failing miserably to meet its already insufficient target of net-zero emissions by 2050, yet still pushes through cuts and delays that hold progress back. Boris Johnson and the Tory government will not be able to solve the climate crisis because it is, at its core, a crisis of the capitalist system they support. That is why we have to get organised against them and their system.
On recent climate strikes, there have been strong steps toward building the climate movement beyond just young people. We have seen workers in trade unions joining the struggle, and this should be built on. Trade union activists should organise climate strike assemblies through their branches to strengthen links with student strikers, and to discuss a strategy for taking on this government.
Such a strategy could involve bringing more workers and trade unions into the struggle, but also fighting on the political field. We need to fight for a government that will put people and the planet before the profits of a tiny few. That would open the door for mass investment in green energy and technology, to take the big polluters into democratic public ownership, and to plan how things are produced on a sustainable basis.
Socialist Alternative fights for a government that can live up to this task. But we can’t stop there – the COP25 talks show that a much greater level of international planning is required to make a real difference. We are part of the Committee for a Workers International (CWI), which works internationally in over 30 countries for the system change we need.
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