En Passant

The fact that capitalism in Australia and elsewhere is built on fossil fuel use means it will take a revolution to achieve a totally renewable energy society. Why? Because only a democratic working class revolution can put people before profit.

This is a government which, like its Labor and Coalition predecessors over the last 3 decades, is engaged in shifting more of the wealth we workers create from us to capital. The very logic of the repeal of the Carbon Tax is to see business, not working class consumers, reap the benefits.

It looks to me as if profit and competition are the barriers to addressing climate change. If that is the case then only a democratic revolution of workers to run society to satisfy human need can address climate change. As the banners at some environmental demonstrations and eco-socialist conferences say ‘System Change, not Climate Change.’

Let’s move to a totally renewable energy Australia by 2025. In my opinion that won’t happen without a social revolution, a mass upsurge of working people to move away from concepts of profitability to satisfying human need democratically. As a slogan of the left says ‘System change, not climate change.’

We need a democratic revolution and workers’ state based on production to satisfy human need, not to make a profit, to move as soon as possible to a renewable energy economy.

Clearly that is not on the agenda in Australia at the moment. But with the failure of the Greens’ nicely nicely let’s not upset the parliamentary applecart, maybe the time has come for the Greens to abandon respectability and lead a campaign of demonstrations and civil disobedience to force governments to address climate change.

This is a draft of a paper I wrote in 2011 on the then prospective carbon tax. It has since been published by IBFD. I argued that the compensation package for workers to ameliorate the impact of the carbon tax would prove illusory over time and would make the working class pay for the environmental […]

The abandonment of the proposed floor price from the Australian ETS scheduled to start in 2015 is a political, not an environmental, decision. It means the Gillard government can say we are on track to be part of a global market in permits, although that market will do little or nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions if the price remains low. The neoliberal Greens have sold us yet another market dud.

Perhaps, just perhaps, it is Labor’s anti-worker policies that sees workers deserting it and some (though not that many) swinging to the Greens? Perhaps, just perhaps, it is Labor’s anti-worker policies that sees or will see many workers holding their noses and voting for the Liberal or National Parties or even Bob Katter’s Australian Party?

Far better to blame a bogey man party like the Greens than to actually analyse why Labor is on the nose with workers.

No matter how much of a song and dance Labor make over the joys of the carbon tax, they are doomed. The carbon tax is the specific focus for general working class dissatisfaction and anger with long hours, inadequate pay, poor social services and Gina and Clive on TV every night flaunting their wealth.

The aim of the carbon tax is over time to increase the burden of pricing pollution on to workers, not the bosses and their system which creates and profits from greenhouse gas emissions. I do not believe capitalism can and will plan for the future survival of the planet. We workers can. But to do that we have to democratically organise production to satisfy human need, not to make a polluting profit. That’s a revolution.

Capitalism can’t and won’t plan for the future survival of the planet. We workers can. But to do that we have to democratically organise production to satisfy human need, not to make a polluting profit. That’s a revolution.