En Passant

We need to recognize the need to replace capitalism with a more rational, cooperative, democratic and humanistic system in sync with our “species being” and nature. If we don’t, we will lose our only home, writes Chris Williams, the author of Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis and a participant in the ecosocialist coalition System Change Not Climate Change, in Socialist Worker US.

International Socialist Review columnist Phil Gasper in Socialist Worker US challenges the myth that Marxism has nothing useful to say about the environment – with help from the old man himself.

I don’t think there are too many people on the planet, but I do agree there are too many of “some” people. I think there are too many coal barons. There are too many oil tycoons. I think there are too many Clive Palmers – there’s just one of him, but one is still more than we need in my opinion. In truth, the biggest factor in ecological decay is how a society uses its resources, not how many people live in that society. “Pollution begins not in the family bedroom, but in the corporate boardroom.”

If we are to find solutions to the climate emergency, the food crisis and other environmental ills, we have to explore and act upon the causes, not the symptoms. These causes lie in the unequal power held by between different groups in society and an economic system geared for infinite growth on a finite planet.

The blame for unemployment lies with the 1 percent–and certainly not with environmentalists opposing pipelines that will carry tar sands oil, any more than with immigrants or al-Qaeda, or any other scapegoat the media or the right wing offer as a distraction.

Faced with twin economic and environmental crises, both caused by the free market, working people have to stand together to confront both. Instead, union leaders are siding with those who have spread the misery of unemployment, and who view the health and well-being of living things as an obstacle to higher returns on their investments.

THERE IS little doubt that freakish and unnaturally assembled storms are a taste of what the future holds under an economic system that has “interfered with the tranquility of domestic affections” and galvanized the forces of nature into a fury of clashing dislocations as we pump ever-more heat-trapping gases into our atmosphere and industrial filth into our lungs.

If we want to stop environmental destruction and live in a truly sustainable society, we have to abolish capitalism. The choice, to put it bluntly, is between capitalism and a habitable planet.

Imagine the car plants in Australia being geared up for production to address climate change. They could produce buses for mass public transport, light rail vehicles, high speed rail and trains, electric cars, solar and wind farms…

Capitalism’s manic drive for profit and its frenzied competition deny the possibility of addressing climate change in any real and concerted way. Only the democratic organisation of society and production to satisfy human need – socialism – can do that.

The fundamental obstacle to a sustainable energy policy goes to the core of how our global economy is organized. Chris Williams is a long-time environmental activist and author of Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis. He talked to Jon Hochschartner for the US magazine Socialist Worker about the prospects for saving the earth before it’s too late.

The carbon price scheme the Greens and Labor are pushing is really one great big exercise in passing the buck. Most importantly, this is an attempt to pass the costs of restructuring the Australian economy onto the working class in the long term. But it’s also about reassuring polluting Australian businesses that they can keep polluting for a long time to come.