Sha. Violation Notices

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blames the victims for the crisis. The real reasons for high birth rates are:

1) High infant mortality rates due to poor healthcare and sanitary conditions.

2) A lack of pensions or social security, which makes people look to their children • support them in ola age ) The oppression of women: No repro ductive rights.

4) Economic insecurity, which makes families dependent on more wages, including from children.

In contrast, we can look at the example of Cuba, where the revolution brought better nutrition, healthcare, education, employment, improved status of women, pensions, etc. In a few short years, the population stabilized at levels equivalent to advanced capitalist countries.

Population control as proposed by the advanced capitalists countries is a form of racial, national, and class oppression. It does not speak to the causes of environmental crises and can never solve them.

What do socialists propose?

The environmental crisis must be viewed within the specific economic structure of capitalism. No progress can be made in dealing with the environment in the context of an economy based on commodity production and the profit motive.

We have seen that under capitalism, the interests of short-term profits are counterposed to the long-term interests of humanity. A company using toxic chemicals finds it much more cost-effective to dump their waste in a river than to take precautions and process the waste in a way that protects the environment.

It would be as rare for a capitalist to accept extra costs to defend the environment as it is to voluntarily give wage increases. Even if a particular factory owner had a conscience that led him to act responsibly on his own, his competitors who more closely adhere to the rules of profit-making would have the economic advantage and eventually drive him out of business.

But what if every workplace were under the control of workers? The workers could ensure that production methods would be consistent with the long-term interests of bumanity and the environment. And they develop alternatives. And we would need to rethink other social models, to produce quality over consumptive quantity.

Today, there are often tensions between the labor movement's demand for jobs and the environmental movement's demands for banning a product or protecting a natural habitat.

It is not possible to fully resolve this conflict under capitalism. However, workers should be on guard against divide-and-conquer tactics that pit justifiable demands for jobs against justifiable demands for a healthy environment.

Machinists at Westinghouse in Sunnyvale set a good example recently. They sided with environmentalists in pressuring the Environmental Protection Agency to hold Westinghouse accountable in the strictest way possible for cleaning up their PCB mess. Our revolutionary socialist program calls for full employment based on public work projects, including those that would contain, reduce, and remove contamination in order to protect humans and other species from needless death and disease.

The Green parties have raised a demand that corporations be forced to meet the same environmental conditions in their foreign operations as at home. The Greens could take a step forward by extending this demand to wages and working conditions in general. Environmental activists should join ranks with international workers and trade unionists to build a movement committed to these goals.

In the short term, while we are building for a socialist future, we will continue to fight for the restoration of the environment-starting with the water, air, and soil that nourishes us. In the long run, however, we point out to the environmentalists who are leading these fights that there is only one class with both the power and the unfettered will to establish an environmentally sound world order. That is the working class.

Workers have a vested interest in a healthy environment. And unlike the capitalist class, workers have no vested interest in permitting environmental destruction. Rosa Luxemburg once said that the choice is socialism or barbarism. Today we can also say that the choice is socialism or environmental catastrophe.

The tasks of educating and leading the working class forward in the face of deep capitalist attacks are not easy. We need to arm ourselves by learning from the struggles of the past and sharpening our class perspective on all of the issues that confront us today. That is why an organization like Socialist Action is so important.