Category Archives: Climate change

Climate change, Elections

A tale of three by-elections

Kevin Bean looks at the state of bourgeois politics and the controversy over so-called green policies

Last week’s by-elections show that sometimes in politics events do not always follow the widely predicted course.

On the basis of the opinion polls, the expectations were that the Tories would lose all three seats up for grabs on July 20, with Labour gaining Boris Johnson’s old seat in Uxbridge and Ruislip, as well as overturning a large Tory majority in Selby and Ainsty, while the Liberal Democrats would regain their previously-held Somerton and Frome constituency. In the end it did not turn out like that: the Tories held Uxbridge (albeit with a tiny majority), allowing Rishi Sunak to claim that the long-foretold Tory defeat at the coming general election was not “a done deal” and reassuring his supporters that it was still ‘all to play for’. The weekend press headlines and the lines coming from the political shows followed up on the surprising Uxbridge result and focused on why Labour had not made the expected breakthrough.

What quickly emerged as the widely-held explanation for the Tories holding on to Uxbridge was Ulez (Ultra Low Emissions Zone) – a scheme to reduce air pollution from older vehicles by imposing a charge, which is planned to be extended from central London to outlying suburbs. The Tories had made the charge the single issue in their Uxbridge campaign and essentially turned the by-election into a referendum on the policy. The Tories claimed to be standing up for the poorest sections of society, who own the oldest vehicles, along with those like taxi drivers, small businesses and others who need to drive for work in an area with poor public transport. On polling day, the anti-Ulez campaign and the focus on the London mayor, Labour’s Sadiq Khan, paid dividends for the Tories and ensured that since the by-election Ulez and ‘green policies’ in general have been the centre of political interest.

For Sir Keir the focus on Uxbridge and Ulez seemed, at first sight, something of a setback, if not a PR disaster. While he was up in rural Yorkshire doing a photo-call with the successful candidate (a young, aspiring hack and Labour careerist, conveniently also named Keir) to celebrate overturning a huge Tory majority, all everyone back at Westminster wanted to talk about was Uxbridge. If the Tories and the media were more than keen to big up the success at Uxbridge, sections of the Labour bureaucracy and the Parliamentary Labour Party also tried to turn the situation to their advantage, shifting the blame for the reverse onto Sadiq Khan or the local conduct of the campaign. Starmer and his immediate circle also let it be known that that they were unhappy with Ulez and, in light of the Tory attacks, were considering scaling back even further on Labour’s green policy commitments.

So far, all very Westminster bubble gossip and kite-flying in the op-ed sections of the sympathetic media, which is quite easy to dismiss as mere froth. However, both the by-election results (remember, there were two other seats apart from Uxbridge!) and the reactions of the Tory and Labour leaderships to the outcome do tell us a lot about how the general election campaign might develop and the sort of result that it could throw up.

The general trend in all three by-elections was a swing against the Conservatives, which reflected the widespread anti-Tory mood that has been shown up in the opinion polls and local council elections in May this year. Following the conventional wisdom that governments lose elections rather than the opposition winning them, these results continue to point to a Labour government with probably a working majority.

With the Liberal Democrats posing a challenge in both the West Country and the formerly safe Tory seats in the so-called ‘Blue Wall’, and Labour regaining its ‘traditional’ seats in the north and the Midlands – along with possible gains in Scotland, combined with victories in marginal seats throughout Britain – the chances of the Tories staying in power appear slim. However, this anti-Tory feeling does not correspond to any great enthusiasm for Sir Keir and his Labour Party. By-election turnout remains low and the evidence suggests that the mathematical ‘swing’ was a largely notional one, with previous Tory voters staying at home rather than being sufficiently enthused by Starmer to go to the polls and actually vote Labour. On this showing the next election will be an unpopularity contest between parties and programmes for which the electorate shows no real passion or deep support.

Facing both ways

Is Sir Keir concerned by this lack of electoral momentum? Will the failure to gain Uxbridge dictate a change of course? Not at all! It is all factored into his strategy and will actually confirm an important part of his approach towards the election, which has been to dampen down expectations and warn of the dangers of complacency. Far from Starmer’s spinmeisters trying to hype up the opinion poll leads in recent months, they have been extremely cautious in their news management and, in this regard, Uxbridge suits them just fine. It keeps the troops in order and helps to silence even the mildest of criticism, on the grounds that electoral victory is not guaranteed and we all need to rally behind the leader.

Some critics from the official left – yes, a few still exist and can still be heard muttering off-stage, if you listen hard enough – say that Starmer’s lack of radical policies on energy and transport renationalisation or his mean-spirited support for Tory benefit caps will cost Labour a few leftwing votes. That may be so – Starmer’s aides, like his ‘fixer’, Morgan McSweeney, or polling and focus group guru Deborah Mattinson, would doubtless agree, but these are not the voters Starmer’s Labour Party are after nowadays. In a world of focus groups and triangulation, team Sir Keir calculates exactly what will appeal to the ‘target voters’ in the ‘centre ground’ and he duly sticks to the script at all times.

Anyway, channelling their inner Peter Mandelson of the 1990s, his supporters argue, where else do these voters critical of the benefit policy or the other underwhelming positions have to go? Starmer is determined to win the election – but on his terms. That means adopting the most openly pro-capitalist programme in Labour’s history and convincing his two audiences – the centre-ground electorate in Britain and the capitalist class in London and Washington – that he really is a safe pair of hands, who can be relied upon to steady the ship and not be diverted into ‘dangerously radical’ experiments.

Even by the historically low standards of Labour leaders, it is a pretty timid and uninspiring prospectus. Although Labour has been a bourgeois workers’ party from its very beginning and its leaders have faithfully followed the dictates of capitalism at home and imperialism abroad, for the quite mundane purposes of electoral politics the party leadership had to inspire and mobilise its supporters and voters with some kind of radical vision – think of ‘the New Jerusalem’ of Clement Attlee in 1945 or the ‘white heat of technology’ summoned up by Harold Wilson in 1964. Playing the game of bourgeois politics required more than mere competence: Labour leaders had to at least pretend to offer some form of challenge or alternative to the status quo, however token this proved to be in reality.

Not so Sir Keir! His electoral strategy is one of responding to perceived shifts in ‘public opinion’ or the clamour of the media. Instead of trying to shape politics and alter how people see the world, even within the limited options offered by the framework of capitalism, Starmer simply fits in and presents himself as a diligent and conscientious custodian of bourgeois society and the constitutional order. His whole career in the law and the service of the state at the highest level makes him perfect for the role, and it is one that he will play to perfection, when he does finally enter No10. So this will shape his electoral strategy and allow him to take minor upsets like Uxbridge in his stride; indeed, he will even turn them to his advantage to consolidate his position – as we saw at Labour’s National Policy Forum last weekend, where he saw off the rather puny criticisms of left trade union leaders. For Starmer the course is set fair for the next election and so he is determinedly continuing on his way, ignoring what remains of the disorganised and bankrupt official left in the PLP and their faint echoes in the Constituency Labour Parties.

Pause for thought

However, before we wave off Sir Keir on the road to Downing Street, we should also consider the Tories’ reaction to the by-elections and how this might shape politics in the 18 months or so before an election must be called. Rishi Sunak has tried to keep up the flagging morale of his party by suggesting that the retention of the Uxbridge seat was a sign that the tide might turn in the Tories’ favour, while some Conservative MPs argue that the success of the anti-Ulez campaign might be repeated more generally at a general election.

This approach has been broadened by some on the Tory right into a wider attack on green policies and zero targets – claiming that ‘greenery’ is mere virtue signalling, which voters might approve, but are unwilling to pay for through Ulez charges and higher taxation. This all neatly fits into a well-established culture war, based on the claim that metropolitan elites and middle-class greens are waging a war on the motorist and hard-working families. Other elements in this strategy to win back both ‘traditional’ Tory voters and the supposedly socially conservative former Red Wall voters who came over to them in 2019 are a focus on stopping illegal migration, waging a ‘war on woke’ and standing up for traditional values, whatever they are.

Sunak himself has played with some of these themes and they will probably appear in some form in the Conservative election manifesto. But will they be enough to win back disillusioned voters in a period of falling real wages, rising prices and increasing interest rates for homeowners? Uxbridge showed that in a by-election it is possible to mobilise a protest vote around a single, polarising and locally important issue. But will voters feel the same, when it comes to choosing a government in a general election? Will issues like Ulez and cutting back on green policies cut through to an electorate who have more immediate cost-of-living issues on their minds?

While at this stage it seems unlikely that such an amalgam of Tory prejudices and scare stories could offer an effective and plausible manifesto and erode the very deep anti-Tory mood that has been building up steadily since 2021, the Uxbridge result should give the party leaders and all those analysing British politics and the public mood some pause for thought. While the by-election results confirmed what the polls have been saying quite consistently for a few years now, they also show the lack of real enthusiasm for either the Tories or Labour, and certainly no firm preference for Sir Keir as an alternative prime minister.

Understanding and discussing the possibilities for the short term are important: the working class movement should obviously take a sharp interest in the high politics of bourgeois society and adopt its own distinct and independent position towards the parties and the policies of the capitalist class. However, Marxists need to go beyond these immediate issues and point the way to the real politics of transforming society. Above all in the current hiatus for the left, that means not only considering how electoral politics might develop, but also seriously thinking about and actively working to build the type of revolutionary party and programme we need to fight for.

Climate change

We need system change

Capitalism cannot be trusted with the future of the planet, says David Sherrief. But be warned: governments could go for ‘climate socialism’

The key findings of the IPCC sixth report are alarming, widely known and well worth repeating: human-induced warming is “unequivocally” the cause of rapid changes to the climate and, unless dramatic and sustained action is taken, the 1.5°C limit will be exceeded in the early 2030s.1 The aim to limit global warming to “well below” 2°C, “preferably” to 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels was, of course, agreed by the Paris 2015 Cop21 meeting and is signed off by 195 countries.2

Now, says the IPCC, it is “code red”. Human activity is changing the climate in ways “unprecedented” in thousands – or hundreds of thousands – of years. Some of the changes are likely to be “irreversible” over centuries or millennia – including the melting of polar ice, sea level rises and the acidification of the oceans.

Total warming is “dominated by past and future carbon emissions”, the report states, but cuts must also be made to the shorter-lived methane emissions – responsible for roughly 30% of post-industrial global warming and 80 times more potent when it comes to climate change. In terms of human activity, methane is released primarily through biomass/biofuel burning, gas/oil production, rotting waste in landfill sites and, of course, meat and dairy farming. Cutting methane emissions by 30% over the next decade is, reportedly, a US-EU-UK “priority” for November’s Cop26 in Glasgow.3

Tipping point

But, whatever happens with methane, not only do we seem well on course to hit the 1.5°C limit a lot sooner than first predicted, but there is the danger of reaching 2°C and going beyond. The IPCC warns that we are at or very near the tipping point. When quantity turns into quality, a “multiplier effect” kicks in and, through feedbacks and couplings, we get an entirely different climate system.4 Leave aside ocean currents, such as the Gulf Stream, slowing down or switching off entirely,5 mid-latitude land masses are hit with searing, almost impossibly high, temperatures; meanwhile, polar regions get far less cold during the winter months.6

Keeping to the Paris 1.5°C limit to prevent runaway climate change will require, says the IPCC, “immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions” in greenhouse gas emissions – of which there is no sign to date. For example, governments of all stripes leave urban sprawl, road building and the whole car economy going unquestioned. The much vaunted transition to electric vehicles is more a giant selling opportunity than any kind of a genuine solution. Not only does electricity still have to be generated – much still relying on coal, oil and gas power stations – there are also the steel, plastics, glass, computer chips, batteries, tyres, etc, that go towards making an electric vehicle. So, even if there is a 100% transition to renewable power sources, there will remain the large-scale release of greenhouse gases. The same applies to other major sources of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions: air flights, shipping, agriculture and industry. It is business as usual … and, needless to say, business is driven by the capitalist M-P-M’ imperative.

If emissions are not significantly reduced in the next decade, then reaching 3°C is all too conceivable – an apocalyptic scenario: though it would take thousands of years, the polar ice caps melt, sea levels head for a 10-metre rise, there is a further thaw of permafrost and another surge in global temperatures. There is, unavoidably, as a consequence, the mass extinction of flora and fauna. Countless cities are inundated: Alexandria, Dhaka, Jakarta, Bangkok, Kolkata, Miami, Houston, New Orleans, Rotterdam, Rio de Janeiro, Osaka and Shanghai. Along with much of Europe and western Asia, Britain eventually fragments into a series of islands. Oxford finds itself one of many new coastal towns. The North American wheat belt turns to desert. We effectively return to the conditions of the early Eocene 56-49 million years ago. As a bonus, true, the far north of America and Asia becomes habitable along with Antarctica. But what this presages is not exciting new opportunities for humanity, but rather a new dark age. Indeed there is the possibility that large parts of the planet becomes uninhabitable due to flammable air-methane concentrations.7 According to Tim Palmer, professor of climate physics at Oxford University, if we do not radically halt our emissions soon, our planet could well become “some kind of hell on Earth”.8

As the IPCC report emphasises, even if the capitalist ruling class somehow manages to get its act together by drastically reducing emissions, the climate will not return to the patterns we have been used to in the recent past. A 1.5°C warmer world will see an increase in “unprecedented” weather events. Disastrous floods, droughts, heatwaves and fires become far more frequent and far more intense.

Capitalocene

With its imperialist hierarchy, ruthless exploitation of nature and never satiated lust for profit, capitalism is the major driver of climate change – despite its different political economy, the Soviet Union and its ‘socialist’ bloc made no difference here. As for China – today the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gasses – it is, of course, fully integrated into the global capitalist economy. Some talk of the Anthropocene, as if it is an undifferentiated humanity that is responsible for climate change. But it is surely better, more accurate to talk of the Capitalocene.

For many on the left, not unreasonably, capitalism is defined, categorically, as incapable of dealing with the danger of runaway global warming. However, not even the most fabulously wealthy billionaire, or their ‘slave’ politicians and state actors, are so blind that they cannot see that something must urgently be done. Nonetheless, true, it is hard to imagine governments such as Boris Johnson’s Tories ever carrying out a programme that would actually achieve net zero emissions – after all, that would require a dramatic restructuring of power generation, industry, agriculture, transport, housing provision, etc. Therefore, so the reasoning goes, the corrupt, grasping, self-interested Tories will confine themselves to nothing more than empty gestures, cheap platform rhetoric and legislating for an electorally safe, distant future. Meantime they carry on as usual: more nuclear power, more roads, more air travel, more poor quality housing … crucially, more of everything: ie, more economic growth. Apropos the loathsome Tories: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?” If not, then “neither can they do good who are accustomed to doing evil.”9

Yet, as seen with the ongoing Covid pandemic – and two world wars before that – the ruling class is prepared to allow governments to temporarily suspend the law of value. The normal workings of capitalism are overridden, curtailed or tightly directed in order to achieve agreed state aims.

The more intelligent sections of the left have written about how the Tories, and other governments too, introduced ‘Covid socialism’, roughly equivalent to the ‘war socialism’ put into effect by the German high command in 1916 – ie, the use of concentrated state power to deal with a dire emergency. The Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine is a good example. Developed double quick, produced on a non-profit basis, it was then rolled out by the NHS according to need.

In terms of the general interest – more particularly the general capitalist interest – governments will take what are usually regarded as extreme measures. Tory chancellor Rishi Sunak talked about tearing up his economic textbooks, doing what is necessary, thinking the unthinkable and all the rest of it. Though fraught with horrendous difficulties – not least because capitalism, from the level of the firm to that of the state, is characterised by internally generated rivalries – we should not discount the possibility that this will happen with the climate emergency. After all, the capitalist class lives on the same fragile planet as the rest of us (even if Elon Musk would like to rocket off to a frigid, lifeless, almost airless Mars).

No illusions

So climate socialism, enforced by a firefighter capitalist state – maybe with green advisors, enlightened technocrats and the armed forces playing a leading role – could conceivably impose draconian restrictions on emissions, reorganise industry, transport and agriculture and thereby limit the rise in global warming to “well below” 2°C, or even to 1.5°C.

Of course, that, or something like it, would have to happen in all the major countries. Adding to that little difficulty, the global hegemon, the United States, is in visible decline. There is, therefore, no effective power that can enforce the general capitalist interest. However, even on a purely national level, we should have no illusions about any eco or climate socialism introduced, overseen and enforced by the capitalist state (or, for that matter, the Xi Jinping regime in China). As with war socialism, there will be monumental blunders, severe restrictions on democratic rights, attempts to drive down popular living standards – all accompanied by endemic corruption and corresponding opportunities for well connected insiders to enrich themselves beyond the dreams of Croesus.

Nor will such a climate socialism peacefully, smoothly, evolve into proletarian socialism. True, we would reach a partial negation of capitalist production, the outer limits of capitalist society. But, because there is a swollen, parasitic, aggressively repressive bureaucratic state, what we have is the extreme opposite of proletarian socialism. Nonetheless, there is a relationship between climate socialism – in reality capitalism attempting to save itself on the backs on the working class – and proletarian socialism.

After all, we could substitute for the ‘firefighter capitalist state’ above the working class organised as the state power. Such a state, based on extreme democracy, closely coordinating with other such states across the globe, would radically reorganise power generation, industry, agriculture, transport, the housing stock, etc; it would be a state that reduces greenhouse gas emissions to net zero and then below; a state that subordinates production to need. Then, it is clear, such a state would be able to achieve far more than capitalist climate socialism to benefit the whole of humanity: it would represent the negation of capitalism and the first step towards a classless, moneyless, stateless and ecologically sustainable communism.

  1. www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/1wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM_final.pdf.↩︎
  2. unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/the-paris-agreement.↩︎
  3. Financial Times September 15 2021.↩︎
  4. CW Arnscheidt and DH Rothman, ‘Asymmetry of extreme Cenozoic climate-carbon cycle events’ Science Advances August 11 2021.↩︎
  5. theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/05/climate-crisis-scientists-spot-warning-signs-of-gulf-stream-collapse.↩︎
  6. climate.nasa.gov/news/2865/a-degree-of-concern-why-global-temperatures-matter.↩︎
  7. globalwarming.berrens.nl/globalwarming.htm.↩︎
  8. ox.ac.uk/news/2021-08-09-oxford-climate-scientists-no-doubt-about-climate-change.↩︎
  9. Jeremiah xiii:23 – slightly rephrased.↩︎
Climate change

Nature | Climate change and system change

Amazingly neither the LAW steering committee, nor Tees, nor Dulwich have anything to say about the climate emergency. Jack Conrad shows why London LLA is right to link ending ecological degradation with ending capitalism

Runaway climate change is now an almost universally recognised danger. The global climate system probably sits on a razor’s edge. Only the self-interested, the downright ignorant or the wilfully complacent refuse to own up to this fact. If we take temperatures in the northern hemisphere from 1000 CE to the present moment in time, we see alternating ups and downs, but then, around 1880, a sudden and very steep upward curve occurs. The result resembles a hockey stick. Already average global temperatures are 1°C above pre-industrial times – given the time span, very big in climatic terms.

Two additional points.

Firstly, while the climate constantly undergoes change, that happens within a relatively stable equilibrium, within a self-adjusting system. Till recently most scientists thought that all large-scale global and regional climate changes took place over a timescale of many centuries or millennia: ie, at rates hardly noticeable during a human lifetime. Gradualism was the ruling orthodoxy. That is no longer the case.

Climate scientists now recognise that quantitative change reaches a trigger point and then flips over into qualitative change: “All the evidence indicates that most long-term climate change occurs in sudden jumps rather than incremental changes.” Such conclusions were long anticipated by Marxism. Frederick Engels in his Dialectics of nature described the jump or leap: “qualitative change … is determined by a corresponding quantitative change.” Given the right conditions, climate change can be triggered by some relatively “small perturbation”, one system then tips over into another. New, radically different weather patterns, prevailing winds, oceanic currents, etc, kick in.

Second point. Scientific opinion is overwhelmingly agreed: the temperature rises over the last 100 years or so are primarily due to “human activity”. We really are living in the Anthropocene. Industry, agriculture, transport and domestic heating release carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O) and other such greenhouse gases which have a determining climate impact.

We’ll always have Paris

A recent report by the International Panel on Climate Change projects that global warming will continue at the current rate of ~0.2°C per decade and reach 1.5°C above pre-industrial times around 2040. However, 1.5°C could easily be exceeded in half that time – around 2030 – and 2°C reached by around 2045.

Though theirs is an inexact science, climatologists fear that 1.5°C itself represents a boundary, a tipping point. If correct, after that we could see much reduced cloud cover, an end of the ice caps, soaring temperatures, rising sea levels and the inundation of low-lying cities and fertile planes. Because this might happen within a, relatively speaking, exceedingly short period of time, it could conceivably threaten the “survival of human civilisation”. Given the continuation of existing social relations, expect mass migrations, resource wars and pandemics.

True, there is the 2016 Paris climate agreement. Its 195 signatories pledge to limit emissions, so as to ensure that temperatures do not exceed a 1.5°C increase. But the Paris agreement is voluntary, vague and contains all manner of get-out clauses.

And, suffice to say, the leaders of all countries are in thrall to the mantra of economic growth. Typically this is done in the name of ensuring the wellbeing of all. But in reality outcomes are extraordinarily unequal. The mass of the world’s population barely ekes out a living. Meanwhile, the few accumulate staggering riches. Forbes reports that 1% of the world’s population own 45% of the wealth.

Then there is Donald Trump. He threatens a US withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement this year. The 45th president has already rolled back the Obama administration’s environmental measures and is on record as saying that global warming is a hoax concocted by the Chinese government in an attempt to hold back US industry. He is, of course, one of many influential climate-change ‘sceptics’ operating in high politics.

Jair Bolsonaro, Matteo Salvini, Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland come from the same mould. All view action on climate change as an imposition on national sovereignty and a barrier to growth. These counterrevolutionary revolutionaries seek to undo the ‘evils’ of the October Revolution, roll back democratic rights, stoke up blood-and-soil national chauvinism and extinguish even the possibility of socialism. That is the meaning of the so-called populist right.

So should the left rally to the defence of Paris and seek allies amongst greens, NGOs, liberals and ‘progressive’ capitalists, such as Bill Gates, George Soros, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg? Absolutely not. Two main reasons.

Firstly, we have already demonstrated the criminal inadequacy of the Paris agreement. Its maximum goal could actually represent the tipping point that brings civilisational collapse. Why uphold that? We must stand for working class political independence. That requires developing our own programme – not calling for a Jeremy Corbyn government, a general strike or the formation of soviets so as to ensure the implementation of the Paris agreement.

Secondly, it should not be assumed that protests, declarations and speechifying against the danger of runaway climate change automatically leads to progressive conclusions. Environmentalism usually comes with an ingrained acceptance of capitalism as the natural order and easily leads to demonising the urban and rural poor, especially females, in the so-called third world. This is decidedly the case when it comes to the so-called ‘population problem’.

Population

In fact, each society possesses its own population laws. Put simply, the reproduction of the human species takes place within different social formations and under different historical circumstances – something the reverend Thomas Malthus palpably ‘forgot’. His theory of population floats outside a theorised history and therefore took no account of the fundamental distinctions that exist between one society and another. Eg, 11th century feudalism had significantly different population dynamics compared to present-day capitalism.

The peasant family – indeed broadly speaking patriarchal production as a socio-economic system – has an interest in maximising the number of children. Put more accurately, maximising the number of male children – a vital distinction. Sons are treasured because they remain within the family and through marriage bring in extra wealth in the form of dowries, wives, inheritance and in due course their own children. Girls leave the family and marrying them off costs a small fortune … their birth is often the cause of mourning in pre-capitalist social formations. Female infanticide was therefore frequent.

The peasant family is a unit of production. Boys and girls alike labour in their father’s fields from the age of five or six and, of course, not in return for money wages. Food, clothing and shelter are provided – little more. After the age of 10 it is reckoned that children are fully paying for their upkeep. From then on it is gain. Male heirs are also expected to maintain parents into old age. Children are therefore unpaid labourers and a form of social insurance. Given high infant mortality rates, it can easily be appreciated why it is a case of ‘the more, the better’.

Under capitalism – apart from its more primitive, unrestrained and brutal forms – children are an enormous expense for the proletarian family, from the cradle and now well into adulthood. During the industrial revolution, it is true, parents sold their children into work from a tender age. Children of eight or nine did 12 and 14 hour days (until the factory acts). Families could only survive if all available members brought in some kind of wage package (the wife was frequently pregnant – and, lacking reliable birth control and with the peasant mentality still lingering on, she was also typically burdened with a brood of young children hanging on to her breasts and skirts).

What of the present-day proletarian family? It is a unit of consumption. With universal primary and secondary education, and around half the school population expected to go on to university, the financial outgoings are considerable. Prudential, the insurance company, estimates that on average children cost over £40,000 each. Even after graduation many mums and dads go on to help out their offspring with mortgages, etc.

Certainly nowadays the simple reproduction – not expansion – of the proletarian family requires two adult incomes. True, average individual hours have been forced down – in 1846 parliament passed the first 10-hour act (for what was a five and a half-day week). Full-time male workers in Britain now notch up an average of 39.2 hours. But the workforce has expanded significantly, not least by drawing in more and more women. The total number employed is now over 32 million. Roughly a threefold increase over the 1930s. At the beginning of the 20th century females made up 29% of the workforce. Now it is 48%. Women workers today do on average 34.3 hours. Adding those figures together, the family unit nowadays is more exploited and certainly under more psychological pressures. There has been an intensification of labour and of relative exploitation. Not least due to these extra drains and life-limiting pressures, on average women have children later and fewer in number compared with the recent past.

In 2018 the average woman in Britain had 1.7 children – down from 2.6 in 1960. What is true of Britain is also true of other so-called developed capitalist countries. Even India is down to 2.3 children per family and is clearly heading to the 2.1 replacement rate.

Techno solutions

There are many brilliant scientists, engineers and technologists who are furiously working, using their considerable talents, to bring about the so-called ‘third disruption’ (the first was agriculture and the neolithic counterrevolution, the second was the machine age, in particular the use of fossil fuels). The high tech utopians of Silicon Valley fetishistically worship artificial intelligence, quantum computers, gene editing, nanotechnology, 3-D printing, electronic aeroplanes, driverless cars, solar energy, etc. Amongst their more modest claims is that technology “can save the Earth by 2030”.

However, as shown by William Stanley Jevons back in the mid-19th century, such innovations, no matter how revolutionary, lead to a paradox. Increased efficiency results in cheaper commodities, which in turn results in increased demand, and with that comes the increased use of resources. The Jevons paradox is his one and only worthwhile contribution to human knowledge. Amazingly, early Fabians, such as Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw and Herbert Somerton Foxwell, considered Jevons and his marginal utility economics far superior to Karl Marx’s labour theory of value. Deservedly, however, Jevons is now nothing more than an obscure historic footnote.

Nonetheless, the point has been made. Capitalism treats increased efficiency merely as an opportunity to increase demand. Exchange-value rules. Not use-value. Capitalism moves according to a simple formula: M-C-M’. Money is laid out in order to secure materials and labour-power with a view to one objective and one objective alone: gaining more money. That law of political economy controls the capitalists themselves – even the greenest of greens amongst them – and makes capitalism the most uncontrollable, the most rapacious, the most polluting, the most short-termist system imaginable. Frankly, if one wanted to design a system with the intention of wrecking nature, it would be capitalism. Capitalism is a mode of destructive reproduction.

Overcoming climate change means fighting the logic of capital

Climate change, Nature

Climate change and system change

Neither mainstream politicians, nor jetting royals, nor ‘progressive’ capitalists have serious answers to the danger of runaway climate change. By contrast Jack Conrad shows how the Marxist left can base its programme on deep history, good science and urgent need

Climate change is a real and present danger. But there is nothing new about climate change.

Our planet dates back around 4.5 billion years. Earth’s first atmosphere mostly consisted of hydrogen and helium – unstable elements which gradually drifted off into outer space. And even after many millions of years of cooling, the Earth’s surface temperature is thought to have been a rather balmy 93°C.

Because of the close proximity of the moon, churning volcanic activity and countless asteroid and meteorite strikes, a second atmosphere formed: ammonia, water, methane, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. According to the Oparim-Haldane hypothesis the foaming, mineral rich, storm tossed seas acted as a primeval, or a prebiotic, soup. The first life forms appeared approximately four billion years ago.

Some half a billion years later, great blooms of single-cell, blue-green algae were converting carbon dioxide into oxygen through photosynthesis. The amount of oxygen shot up some 2.4 billion years ago, including free oxygen. Earth’s third atmosphere is the product of co-evolution. Indeed, our planet’s climate results from the interaction of atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere … and biosphere.

Still cooler

Temperatures tended downwards through the successive geological periods. Take 1960-80 as the benchmark. The Cambrian (600-500 million years ago) was 14°C hotter. The Silurian (425-405 million years ago) 4°C hotter. The Devonian (405-345 million years ago) 12°C hotter. The Permian (280-230 million years ago) 2°C colder. The Triassic 10°C hotter. The Jurassic 8°C hotter. The Cretaceous 4°C hotter. The Palaeocene (66-55 million years ago) 10°C hotter.

Doubtless, some of these temperature changes were due to volcanic activity and sun spots. There is also continental drift. Three billion years ago the vast mass of the Earth’s surface was covered with water. There were only a few outcrops of dry land. The first supercontinent, the Arctic, arose some 2.5 billion years ago. Eventually it split and drifted apart, but after many more millions of years other supercontinents appeared: Kenorland, Columbia, Rodinia, Pannotia, Gondwana.

Something like our present configuration of continents took shape around 60 million years ago. Doubtless this helped establish our contemporary climate regime. The American and Eurasian land mass more or less encircles the northern pole; that and the continental plate centred on the southern pole provide almost perfect conditions for ensuring an oscillation between cool and cold conditions. The bulk of the Earth’s fresh water lies frozen in two gigantic ice sheets.

Over the last million years there has been an interglacial-glacial 100,000-year pattern. Each cycle has had its own particular features and oddities. Understandably, though, as with any study of the past, data becomes ever more uncertain with increasing distances of time. So the best records we possess go from the interglacial, known as the Eemian, down to the present Holocene period – the last 130,000 years have in particular been revealed in some detail with deep ice cores drilled from Greenland and Antarctica.

In terms of climatic transition, the most reliable information is for what is called the Younger Dryas-to-Holocene, which ended the last ice age. At its maximum, some 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, the Arctic ice sheet extended all the way down to Chicago, New York, Moscow and London and saw much lower sea levels. What is now Britain was joined to France, the Netherlands and Denmark. And, again using the 1960-80 benchmark, we have a -10°C difference.

The qualitative transition to our present-day climatic regime occurred 11,650 years ago and saw the retreat of the great ice sheets. The tipping point seems to have taken only a decade or two. “The speed of this change is probably representative of similar but less well-studied climate transitions during the last few hundred thousand years,” conclude the environmental scientists, Jonathan Adams, Mark Maslin and Ellen Thomas.[1] These transitions include sudden cold events (Heinrich events/stadials), warm events (interstadials) and the beginning and ending of long warm phases, such as the Eemian interglacial.

There are less dramatic, but nonetheless significant, patterns of climate change on a smaller scale too. During the present (Holocene) interglacial period, there have been cold and dry phases occurring over a roughly 1,500-year cycle, and climate transitions on a decade-to-century timescale. There have been little ice ages, as well as bursts of relative warmth. Between 1100 and 1300 CE, for example, Europe experienced temperatures which allowed more productive agriculture throughout the continent and saw flourishing English vineyards.

It is also worth recalling that the Thames regularly froze solid during mid-17th century winters and that the years from 1805 to 1820 were comparatively bleak, wet and generally unpleasant. What we are experiencing at present certainly needs to be put into the context of the transition from the little ice age, which finally ended around 1880.

Incidentally, the kaleidoscopic history of the global atmosphere, temperature variations and continental drift explains why those with even a passing knowledge of the Earth sciences consider the Campaign Against Climate Change such an odd choice of name. It conjures up notions that humanity can, if there is the will, act like some almighty king Canute and command nature to stand still. We can’t and it won’t.

Natural and unnatural

‘Climate’ and ‘change’ go together like ‘weather’ and ‘change’. The two are inseparable. The weather alters from hour to hour, day to day and month to month. Climate is just big weather. Nasa gives this useful definition of climate: “average weather for a particular region and time period, usually taken over 30 years”.[2] So there is nothing unusual about climate change per se. In fact climate without change is impossible. Climate change has never ceased, is ongoing and must therefore be considered inevitable. Or, to use a loaded phrase – it is natural. Notions of fixing in place the climate as it now is, or returning it to a pre-industrial ideal, through some kind of technical wizardry or a human exodus, are half-childish, half-sinister and, crucially, are bound to fail.

Consider Britain’s climate – a solid record of it lies in the mud and rock beneath our feet. As well as periodic glaciations over the last 20 or 30 million years – in the Quaternary and Tertiary periods – as has already been noted, temperatures have in general been far higher than today. The coal seams of south Yorkshire, south Wales, Lanarkshire and Nottinghamshire were formed in steamy forests and swamps; Dover’s white cliffs were laid down under shallow, warm seas; London’s clay contains the remains of elephants, hippopotamuses and rhinoceroses.

So claims such as that the hottest 10 years “since records began” have just occurred might apply in terms of reports issued by the London Met Office, but hardly when one considers the geological timescale.[3]

Nonetheless, runaway climate change is now an almost universally recognised danger. The global climate system probably sits on a razor’s edge. Only the self-interested, the downright stupid or the wilfully blind deny it nowadays. If we take temperatures in the northern hemisphere from 1000 CE to the present moment in time, we see alternating ups and downs, but then, around 1880, a sudden and very steep upward curve occurs. The result resembles a hockey stick. Already average global temperatures are 1°C above pre-industrial times[4] – given the time span, very big in climatic terms.

Two additional points.

Firstly, while the climate constantly undergoes change, that happens within a relatively stable equilibrium, within a self-adjusting system. Till recently most scientists thought that all large-scale global and regional climate changes took place over a timescale of many centuries or millennia: ie, at rates hardly noticeable during a human lifetime. Gradualism was the ruling orthodoxy. That is no longer the case.

Climate scientists now recognise that quantitative change reaches a trigger point and then flips over into qualitative change. Adams, Maslin and Thomas vouch: “All the evidence indicates that most long-term climate change occurs in sudden jumps rather than incremental changes.”[5] Such conclusions were long anticipated by Marxism. Frederick Engels in his Dialectics of nature described the jump or leap: “qualitative change … is determined by a corresponding quantitative change.”[6] Given the right conditions, climate change can be triggered by some relatively “small perturbation”, one system then tips over into another. New, radically different weather patterns, prevailing winds, oceanic currents, etc, kick in.

Second point. Scientific opinion is overwhelmingly agreed. The temperature rises over the last 100 years or so are primarily due to “human activity”.[7] We really are living in the Anthropocene. Industry, agriculture, transport and domestic heating release carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O) and other such greenhouse gases which have a determining climate impact.

We’ll always have Paris

A recent report by the International Panel on Climate Change projects that global warming will continue at the current rate of ~0.2°C per decade and reach 1.5°C above pre-industrial times around 2040.[8] However, 1.5°C could easily be exceeded in half that time – around 2030 – and 2°C reached by around 2045.

Though theirs is an inexact science, climatologists fear that 1.5°C itself represents a boundary, a tipping point. If correct, after that we could see much reduced cloud cover, an end of the ice caps, soaring temperatures, rising sea levels and the inundation of low-lying cities and fertile planes. Because this might happen within a, relatively speaking, exceedingly short period of time, it could conceivably threaten the “survival of human civilisation”.[9] Given the continuation of existing social relations, expect mass migrations, resource wars and pandemics.

True, there is the 2016 Paris climate agreement. Its 195 signatories pledge to limit emissions, so as to ensure that temperatures do not exceed a 1.5°C increase. But the Paris agreement is voluntary, vague and contains all manner of get-out clauses.

And, suffice to say, the leaders of all countries are in thrall to the mantra of economic growth. Typically this is done in the name of ensuring the wellbeing of all. But in reality outcomes are extraordinarily unequal. The mass of the world’s population barely ekes out a living. Meanwhile, the few accumulate staggering riches. Forbes reports that 1% of the world’s population own 45% of the wealth.[10]

Then there is Donald Trump. He threatens a US withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement in 2020. The 45th president has already rolled back the Obama administration’s environmental measures and is on record as saying that global warming is a hoax concocted by the Chinese government in an attempt to hold back US industry.[11] He is, of course, one of many influential climate-change ‘sceptics’ operating in high politics.

Jair Bolsonaro, Matteo Salvini, Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland come from the same mould. All view action on climate change as an imposition on national sovereignty and a barrier to growth. These counterrevolutionary revolutionaries seek to undo the ‘evils’ of the October Revolution, roll back democratic rights, stoke up blood-and-soil national chauvinism and extinguish even the possibility of socialism. That is the meaning of the so-called populist right.

So should the left rally to the defence of Paris and seek allies amongst greens, NGOs, liberals and ‘progressive’ capitalists, such as Bill Gates, George Soros, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg? Absolutely not.

Two main reasons.

Firstly, we have already demonstrated the criminal inadequacy of the Paris agreement. Its maximum goal could actually represent the tipping point that brings civilisational collapse. Why uphold that? We must stand for working class political independence. That requires developing our own programme – not calling for a Jeremy Corbyn government, a general strike or the formation of soviets so as to ensure the implementation of the Paris agreement.

Secondly, it should not be assumed that protests, declarations and speechifying against the danger of runaway climate change automatically leads to progressive conclusions. Environmentalism usually comes with an ingrained acceptance of capitalism as the natural order and easily leads to demonising the urban and rural poor, especially females, in the so-called third world. This is decidedly the case when it comes to the so-called ‘population problem’.

Population

In class terms greenism amounts to a disenchanted petty bourgeois rebellion against capitalism’s accelerating despoliation of nature. Yet, whatever the good intentions, greenism carries a deadly barb. Its denunciations of ecological destruction are joined with talk of “overpopulation” and the limited “carrying capacity” of the planet. “[P]opulation growth … must be addressed to avoid overpopulation”, says the Green Party.[12] Alan Thornett, of Socialist Resistance and Campaign Against Climate Change, goes further: a “major contributory factor” to the ecological crisis is overpopulation.[13] In that spirit, John Andrews, a regular writer for the “radical” webzine Dissident Voice, condemns “overpopulation deniers”.[14]

Greenism has a very dark side too. The Nazis had their green wing. Hitler’s agricultural expert, and later a Reichsminister, Walther Darré, idolized nature and its uncompromising laws. Hitler himself expressed his longing for a new faith rooted in nature. He fervently believed that humanity – authentic Aryan humanity, that is – must eventually break with Christianity and fully merge with nature. His alternative religion ended, of course, in the Holocaust and the extermination of millions.

In Britain the Soil Association counted Jorian Jenks amongst it leading members. He edited its journal Mother Earth till his death in 1963. He is also considered something of a founding figure of the green movement. However, in the mid-1930s he became a much valued contributor to the Blackshirt. He stood as a candidate for the British Union of Fascists and served as a special advisor on agriculture: “fascism alone could make agriculture prosperous again”.[15] No surprise – the language Jenks used about Jews is considered “very close to genocidal”.[16] The origins of the Green Party in England and Wales lie in the feudal ideal of Oliver Goldsmith and the PEOPLE party. Aristocrat and commoner alike will once again know their place. And let’s not forget Jonathon Porret and David Icke. During their time leading the Green Party they advocated halving Britain’s population.

There are royal greens too. Speaking barefoot – wow – at a recent Google ecocamp in Sicily’s exclusive Verdura resort, Harry Windsor promised to limit his family to no more than two children – his contribution to saving the planet. The irony is unmistakable. The 300 A-list guests flew into Verdura aboard 143 private jets, landed in luxury yachts and stayed in sumptuous apartments – each with its own swimming pool. The total carbon footprint must have been hundreds of tons. More importantly – much more importantly – the royal parasite legitimised the notion that ‘people are the problem’.

A toxic idea which sees (Saint) David Attenborough backing Population Matters – a charity which opposed Syrian refugees coming to Britain because of its insistence on zero migration.18 Another Population Matters sponsor is Paul R Ehrlich, the US biologist and author of the bestseller The population bomb (1968). Back then Ehrlich apocalyptically announced: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” Instead of giving aid to the needy and feeding the hungry, responsible states should henceforth put in place hard measures designed to dispose of surplus people on a global scale.[17]

Indira Gandhi sought to implement that Malthusian programme. During her 1975 emergency six million men were forcibly sterilised. And, of course, China imposed a one-child policy. Selective abortion has robbed China of 11.9 million females. Even with the abolition of the one-child policy, today there is a 100:117 disparity between the number of girls and boys.[18]

Laws

In fact, each society possesses its own population laws. Put simply, the reproduction of the human species takes place within different social formations and under different historical circumstances – something the reverend Thomas Malthus palpably ‘forgot’. His theory of population floats outside a theorised history and therefore took no account of the fundamental distinctions that exist between one society and another. Eg, 11th century feudalism had significantly different population dynamics compared to present-day capitalism.

The peasant family – indeed broadly speaking patriarchal production as a socio-economic system – has an interest in maximising the number of children. Put more accurately, maximising the number of male children – a vital distinction. Sons are treasured because they remain within the family and through marriage bring in extra wealth in the form of dowries, wives, inheritance and in due course their own children. Girls leave the family and marrying them off costs a small fortune … their birth is often the cause of mourning in pre-capitalist social formations. Female infanticide was therefore frequent.

The family is a unit of production. Boys and girls alike labour in their father’s fields from the age of five or six and, of course, not in return for money wages. Food, clothing and shelter are provided – little more. After the age of 10 it is reckoned that children are fully paying for their upkeep. From then on it is gain. Male heirs are also expected to maintain parents into old age. Children are therefore unpaid labourers and a form of social insurance. Given high infant mortality rates, it can easily be appreciated why it is a case of ‘the more, the better’.

Apart from capitalism’s more primitive, unrestrained and brutal forms, children are an enormous expense for the proletarian family – from the cradle and now well into adulthood. During the industrial revolution, it is true, parents sold their children into work from a tender age. Children of eight or nine did 12 and 14 hour days (until factory acts limited hours). Families could only survive if all available members brought in some kind of wage package (the wife was frequently pregnant – and, lacking reliable birth control and with the peasant mentality still lingering on, she was also typically burdened with a brood of young children hanging on to her breast and skirts).

What of the present-day proletarian family? It is a unit of consumption. With universal primary and secondary education, and around half the school population expected to go on to university, the financial outgoings are considerable. Prudential, the insurance company, estimates that on average children cost over £40,000 each.[19] Even after graduation many mums and dads go on to help out their offspring with mortgages, etc.

Certainly nowadays, for simple reproduction – not expansion – the proletarian family requires two adult incomes. Average individual hours might have been forced down – in 1846 parliament passed the first 10-hour act (for what was a five and a half-day week). Full-time male workers in Britain now notch up an average of 39.2 hours.[20] But the workforce has expanded significantly; not least by drawing in more and more women. The total number employed is now over 32 million. Roughly a threefold increase over the 1930s. At the beginning of the 20th century females made up 29% of the workforce. Now it is 48%. Women workers today do on average 34.3 hours.[21] Add those figures together and what it tells you is that the family unit is more exploited nowadays and is certainly under more psychological pressures (put another way, an intensification of labour and relative exploitation). Not least due to these extra drains and life-limiting pressures, on average women have children later and fewer in number compared with the recent past.

In 2018 the average woman in Britain had 1.7 children[22] – down from 2.6 in 1960. What is true of Britain is also true of other so-called developed capitalist countries. Even India is down to 2.3 children per familiy and is clearly heading to the 2.1 replacement rate.[23]

Techno solutions

There are many brilliant scientists, engineers and technologists who are furiously working, using their considerable talents, to bring about the so-called ‘third disruption’ (the first was agriculture and the neolithic counterrevolution, the second was the machine age, in particular the use of fossil fuels). The high tech utopians of Silicon Valley fetishistically worship artificial intelligence, quantum computers, gene editing, nanotechnology, 3-D printing, electronic aeroplanes, driverless cars, solar energy, etc. Amongst their more modest claims is that technology “can save the Earth by 2030”.[24]

However, as shown by William Stanley Jevons back in the mid-19th century, such innovations, no matter how revolutionary, lead to a paradox. Increased efficiency results in cheaper commodities, which in turn results in increased demand, and with that comes the increased use of resources. The Jevons paradox is his one and only worthwhile contribution to human knowledge. Amazingly, early Fabians, such as Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw and Herbert Somerton Foxwell, considered Jevons and his marginal utility economics far superior to Karl Marx’s labour theory of value. Deservedly, however, Jevons is now nothing more than an obscure historic footnote.

Nonetheless, the point has been made. Capitalism treats increased efficiency merely as an opportunity to increase demand. Exchange-value rules. Not use-value. Capitalism moves according to a simple formula: M-C-M’. Money is laid out in order to secure materials and labour-power with a view to one objective and one objective alone: gaining more money. That law of political economy controls the capitalists themselves – even the greenest of greens amongst them – and makes capitalism the most uncontrollable, the most rapacious, the most polluting, the most short-termist system imaginable. Frankly, if one wanted to design a system with the intention of wrecking nature, it would be capitalism. Capitalism is a mode of destructive reproduction.

Then there are the advocates of geoengeneering. What is being contemplated is proudly upheld by Cambridge University’s Centre for Climate Repair.[25] Amongst the suggestions are spraying salt water over clouds, seeding the oceans with iron filings, firing dust into the upper atmosphere, stationing a giant, 2,000-kilometre-diameter eye patch in space to deflect 2% of the sun’s rays, growing huge algae beds in the oceans to absorb carbon dioxide, building massive cloud-generating machines, etc.

Given the vast lacunas in our knowledge, such techno-quackery would surely produce completely unintended results. No less to the point, techno-quackery diverts popular attention away from addressing the real problem.

Programme

Influenced by Justus von Liebig, the founder of modern organic chemistry, Marx developed his theory of a metabolic rift between capitalist production and nature. See ‘Large scale industry and agriculture’ in Capital volume 1 and ‘The genesis of capitalist ground rent’ in volume 3. Driven by its lust for profit, capitalism pollutes the water and air, fells forests, exhausts the soil and creates deserts. The natural metabolic cycle has to be restored. There has to be sustainable development. Only possible by superseding capitalism, argued Marx.

Frankly, Labour’s last general election manifesto, For the many, not the few (2017) was far from adequate. What is meant by a “clean economy” is made clear by the commitment to putting “us back on track to meet the targets of the Climate Change Act and the Paris agreement.”[26] There is a climate emergency. Emergency measures are therefore required. With that in mind, we in the Labour Party Marxists recommended these measures – an integral part of a much wider immediate programme.

  • Nationalise the land. Nationalise the banks. Nationalise water, electricity, gas, railways and other such natural monopolies.
  • Industrial, transport and agricultural polluters must be progressively taxed according to the emissions they produce. That includes shipping and air flight. Carbon, methane and other such greenhouse gases must be minimised. Set a 2025 date for banning hydrofluorocarbon and sulphur hexafluoride gases. End tax breaks for the oil and gas industry. Phase out fossil fuels.
  • Boost solar, wind and tidal power.
  • Those who produce harmful waste materials should be made to safely dispose of them. Supervision to be carried out by committees of workers, local residents and elected specialists. Recycling must be enforced. Ban the export of waste material for dumping abroad.
  • Reduce meat and dairy consumption. Encourage a vegetable-based diet.
  • Free urban transport. Cap international business flights. Facilitate conference calls. Shorten the distance between home and work. Promote cycling and walking.
  • End the housing shortage. Build good-quality, energy-efficient, well-insulated council houses.
  • Encourage urban parks, small farms and roof gardens.
  • Rewild selected areas of the countryside. Native species should be reintroduced. Restore flood plains, marshes and wetlands. Turn grouse moors and upland estates back to nature. There must be a concerted programme of reforestation.
  • Establish no-fishing zones in coastal sea areas. Create a sustainable fishing industry.

Fighting for such demands helps create the objective and subjective conditions necessary for the working class establish its own rule and break with capitalism’s destructive logic. Not that ending capitalism and going over the phyical planning is enough. Historically too much of the left has taken for granted a kind of technological Prometheanism, whereby once capitalism is overthrown we can do what we like with nature – an arrogance all too often seen in the tragic history of the Soviet Union.

In Literature and art (1924) Leon Trotsky breathlessly writes:

The present distribution of mountains and rivers, of fields, of meadows, of steppes, of forests and of seashores, cannot be considered final. Man has already made changes in the map of nature that are not few nor insignificant. But they are mere pupils’ practice in comparison with what is coming. Faith merely promises to move mountains; but technology, which takes nothing ‘on faith’, is actually able to cut down mountains and move them. Up to now this was done for industrial purposes (mines) or for railways (tunnels); in the future this will be done on an immeasurably larger scale, according to a general industrial and artistic plan. Man will occupy himself with re-registering mountains and rivers, and will earnestly and repeatedly make improvements in nature. In the end, he will have rebuilt the earth, if not in his own image, at least according to his own taste. We have not the slightest fear that this taste will be bad.[27]

And the heedless technological Prometheanism preached by Trotsky, provided Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev with unattributed inspiration. Leave aside the radioactive waste littered over Kazakhstan, the open-cast mining and the ruinous industrial practices, which caused chocking air pollution, poisoned rivers and killed lakes.

In the second half of the 1940s Stalin proposed his ‘Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature’. A response to the 1946 drought, which in 1947 left an estimated 500,000-one million dead. Vast tracts of land in the southern steppe were planted with trees to provide an elaborate network of shelterbelts. Rivers feeding into the Aral Sea were diverted – once the world’s fourth largest lake, it has now virtually disappeared. Irrigation canals, reservoirs and countless ponds would boost soil fertility. Scientific crop rotation then sees record high yields. Oversight was given over to the now thoroughly discredited agronomist, Trofim Lysenko (he considered the Mendelian theory of gene inheritance an example of “metaphysics and idealism).”[28]

Due for completion in 1965, the Grand Plan ended in disaster. The trees died. Crop yields were bitterly disappointing. Topsoil turned to dust, blown, washed away by the wind and the rain.

Khrushchev had his virgin land scheme. In the 1960s the black earth belt in the south was put under the plough. However, crop yields steadily declined. Khrushchev latched upon a Soviet version of geoengeneering. Twelve rivers “uselessly” flowing into the Arctic ocean were to be diverted. Reversing the Pechora was not only going to boost agricultural production: the shrinking Aral and Caspian seas were to be replenished. Part of the grand design envisaged creating a vast new river channel using 250 nuclear explosions. Three 15-kiloton devices were actually detonated – inevitably causing significant radioactive fallout. The harebrained scheme was finally abandoned in 1986 – who knows what the results would have been if the whole project had been implemented? A rapidly advancing Arctic ice sheet? Leningrad and Moscow permanently frozen?

Our maximum programme begins after the overthrow of the capitalist state and involves the transition to communism. However – and it needs to be emphasised – even the associated producers can make disastrous mistakes.

Nature must be treated with respect and care. The humans of one generation have to pass on the Earth to succeeding generations in an improved state. They should therefore act as responsible guardians. We are not the Earth’s owners.

[1].  J Adams, M Maslin and E Thomas, ‘Sudden climate transition during the Quaternary’ Progress in Physical Geography March 1999: www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html.

[2].  www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/noaa-n/climate/climate_weather.html.

[3].  The Daily Telegraph July 31 2019.

[4].  www.climatecentral.org/gallery/graphics/the-globe-is-already-above-1c.

[5].  www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html.

[6].  K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 25, London 1987, p358ff.

[7].  See climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus.

[8].  www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar5.

[9].  D Spratt and I Dunlop Existential climate-related security risk: a scenario approach Melbourne 2018, p6.

[10].  inequality.org/facts/global-inequality.

[11].  friendsoftheearth.uk/climate-change/what-are-donald-trumps-policies-climate-change-and-other-environmental-issues.

[12].  https://policy.greenparty.org.uk/pp.html.

[13].  A Thornett Facing the apocalypse: arguments for ecosocialism London 2019, pp161-62.

[14].  .

[15].  Quoted in PM Coupland Farming, fascism and ecology: a life of Jorian Jenks London 2017, p95.

[16].  beastrabban.wordpress.com/2018/03/21/jorian-jenks-and-the-fascist-arguments-for-a-jewish-homeland.

[17].  Open Democracy September 23 2016.

[18].  Quoted in www.overpopulation.com/faq/people/paul_ehrlich.html.

[19].  ourworldindata.org/gender-ratio.

[20].  news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4482441.stm.

[21].  www.statista.com/statistics/280749/monthly-full-time-weekly-hours-of-work-in-the-uk-by-gender-year-on-year.

[22].  www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-46118103.

[23].  worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-rate/.

[24].  www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/09/we-can-save-the-earth-heres-how/.

[25].  i May 10 2019.

[26].  Labour Party For the many, not the few London 2017, p22.

[27].  www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/ch08.htm.

[28].  TD Lysenko The situation in biological science Moscow 1951, p24.