Climate movement must tackle system that subordinates environment to private profit

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SOCIALIST ACTION MARCH 2013 3 The struggle against climate change is registering real signs of progress. The rise of indigenous struggles in Canada, including the “Idle No More” movement, and the two national mobilizations against the Keystone XL pipeline in the U.S. are particularly significant. Bipar­ tisan backing for the acceleration of the most vile extraction methods in the face of persistently growing extreme weather is birthing new activists in the climate movement.

As these new forces take their first col­ lective step onto the stage of history, their motion will bring the contradictions of this social system—and the limitations of their own movement’s prevailing orien­ tation—into bolder relief.

In an interview at the Feb. 17 march in Washington against the Keystone XL pipeline, Stan Heller (of thestruggle.org) asked 350.org founder Bill McKibben what he thought about public seizure of fossil fuel companies in the name of a global emergency. McKibben responded, “I don’t see any particular appetite in Congress at the moment for taking over and nationalizing companies.” He added graciously, “But I could be wrong. You never know.”

McKibben’s own opinions on nation­ alization appear to be irrelevant to him. The bounds of politics in Congress are what matter in his eyes.

Indeed, major organizers of the Feb. 17 march were unmistakably attempt­ ing to organize an appeal to Obama to do the right thing. Yet stopping the flow of greenhouse gas from the earth to the at­ mosphere will require going against the most powerful interests in world capi­ talism and even the motive force of their social order—the relentless drive for pri­ vate profits. Attempting to forge a coali­ tion with one capitalist party or another against the fossil fuel industry will fatally hamstring the movement.

McKibben has pointed to one key as­ pect of the problem, which alone places solutions to climate change beyond the abilities of capital and its servants. He has pointed out that proven fossil fuel reserves currently under the ground, if burned, would produce five times the amount of CO2 necessary to wreak disas­ ter beyond which all international agree­ ment considers tenable. Although these proven reserves are still underground, they nevertheless make up an estimated $27 trillion in the assets held by their respective owners. Any solution that successfully keeps four-fifths of this fuel underground would eliminate $20 tril­ lion in corporate assets. To this should be added some portion of the $10 trillion in fossil fuel infrastructure.

The fossil fuel industry is tied to nu­ merous banks, states, corporations, and other powerful bodies through stocks, insurance, loans, agreements, and many of the other relationships and financial devices that have proven their relevance in this age of economic crisis. A write-off of some $30 trillion of value in the energy sector would take with it many other sec­ tors of the economy, and would be op­ posed by nearly every major economic power on earth.

What’s more, the creation of an ecologi­ cally sound society would simultaneously require enormous projects that promise either little or no profit, and would curtail future investment opportunities. Reorga­ nizing urban life to accommodate walk­ ing, public transit, and bicycling would mean radically reducing the market for automobiles and all related industries.

Transitioning from industrial agricul­ ture to eco-agriculture would eliminate many markets for steel, petroleum, plas­ tics, petroleum, seeds, and numerous chemical compounds.

Furthermore, eco-agriculture (like sim­ ilarly sustainable approaches to produc­ tion) requires a more highly skilled work­ force whose members must constantly adapt to changes in the ecosystem, and thus must have a detailed familiarity with their plots of land, and must continuously learn about their field. Such a workforce is much harder to replace and thus far harder to maintain on starvation wages.

Big business cannot lose so much value (continued on page 4)

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... U.S. Congress makes workers pay for crisis 4 SOCIALIST ACTION MARCH 2013 (continued from page 1: “Educational Conference March 23 Philadelphia”)

compromise to end automatic spend­ ing cuts that began late Friday [March 1, 2013], Obama mentioned reforming these entitlement programs in calls with lawmakers from both parties on Saturday afternoon.

Reuters reported, “‘He’s reaching out to Democrats who understand we have to make serious progress on long-term entitlement reform and Republicans who realize that if we had that type of entitlement reform, they’d be willing to have tax reform that raises revenues to lower the deficit,’ White House se­ nior economic official Gene Sperling said on Sunday on the CNN program ‘State of the Union.”

The grotesque logic of this now open Obama administration focus on slash­ ing Social Security and Medicare in or­ der to supposedly reduce the already approved mandatory cuts on a variety of other social problems is proof posi­ tive that capitalism’s only solution to its crisis is to implement never-ending attacks on every gain that working people have made over a period of multiple decades.

And they are not embarrassed. A March 4 New York Times front-page headline read, “Recovery in U.S. Lift­ ing Profits, Not Aiding Jobs.” The Times article began, “With the Dow Jones In­ dustrial average flirting with a nominal record high, the split between Ameri­ can workers and the companies that employ them is widening and could worsen in the next few months as fed­ eral budget cuts take hold.”

The article continued, “With millions still out of work, companies face little pressure to raise salaries, while pro­ ductivity gains allow them to increase sales without adding workers.” The Times referred to a “golden age for cor­ porate profits,” especially for “multinational” corporations that have shift­ ed production to low-wage nations like China, India, Vietnam and Bangladesh.

This situation is expected to continue, noted The Times, until there is a “full recovery in the labor market.” “Full re­ covery,” in today’s economic terminol­ ogy, means the time when U.S. wages are equivalent to those of the poorest nations.

In truth, the present worldwide eco­ nomic crisis has no prospect of resolu­ tion unless the world’s working classes are reduced to near Third World stan­ dards, or until a massive challenge is mounted that shakes the foundations of the system. No nation has escaped the economic terror unleashed by the corporate state powers, as austerity is today the universal standard imposed ... Climate (continued from page 3) and in the same stroke make such trans­ formative investments with so little promise of financial return. The difficulty has nothing to do with physical limita­ tions. Humanity could make these shifts in a matter of years, if not months.

The limitations exist only in the social relations organized by private property, wage labor, the market, and the profit motive.

The alternatives to fossil fuel have ex­ isted far longer than most modes of fossil fuel consumption. The first photovoltaic cell was invented in 1839 by a 19-yearold messing around in his dad’s labora­ tory. This was decades before Edison’s lightbulb, and even before much railroad track had been laid anywhere. Whale blubber was still the big deal in energy at the time. Water electrolysis (one viable method for storing energy created by solar and wind power) had been discov­ by never-ending wars, destruction of workers’ organizations, massive en­ croachments on civil and democratic rights, and the impoverishment of workers everywhere, especially wom­ en and oppressed nationalities.

Part of the U.S. crisis can be explained by massive and unprecedented waste, including $1 trillion each year on the military. But the source of the world crisis goes much deeper, to the core of the system itself.

Faced with ever-increasing compe­ tition among ever-consolidating and merging corporate entities around the world, and with the ceaseless replace­ ment of workers by robots and other technological advances, capitalism, ap­ pearances aside, faces a crisis in the rate of profit—a critical factor that lies hidden but is at the core of the finan­ cial crisis that hit with hurricane force in late 2007.

With overall profit rates constantly ered in 1800.

Capital’s failure to promote less hazard­ ous (and more renewable) sources of en­ ergy is not due to any serious technical difficulties; the technical feats in fossil fuel extraction and nuclear power outdo wind turbines and solar power any day of the week. The centrality of fossil fuel to the world capitalist economy clearly says something about the nature of capitalism itself.

Part of the answer lies in the relative prospects for profit in the development of one resource over another. Scarcer resources are more easily monopolized. The control over production and sale al­ lowed by a monopoly allows the owner to acquire super-profits, which attract higher than average investment.

To any sensible working person, the fact that a resource cannot be replen­ ished within any meaningful amount of time means it should be used sparingly, if at all. Generally, it’s best not to base any­ thing important upon such an element if it can be helped.

But to an investor, “unreplenishable” is Tony Savino / Socialist Action on the decline, as with the bankrupt­ cy of the once most powerful world corporation, General Motors, the rul­ ing rich much prefer to invest their ever-declining profits in speculative financial instruments of myriad types. These range from home mortgages to privately owned and unregulated investment houses, to all the devices that essentially collapsed like a house of cards when it became obvious that the accrued “profits” and “assets,” like mortgages and other paper instru­ ments, proved to be ethereal—not in any manner based on the production of commodities for sale on world mar­ kets.

Indeed, in the first two years of the crisis, capitalism disappeared some $50 trillion, as its paper profits evapo­ rated almost overnight.

The lesser banks went under or were absorbed, factories lay idle, mortgag­ es were deemed near worthless, and the Promised Land. Investors who own land can prevent others from growing crops, or building things, or capturing energy on that land. But they can’t pre­ vent them from doing it elsewhere. They might grow coffee. But if everyone else grows coffee the market can be easily flooded. They might invent the best solar panel ever, but tomorrow, someone might invent a better one or the market might again be flooded with cheap knock-offs.

Land with oil is a different story. There is oil elsewhere, but only so much. The competition is inherently more limited than for other products. And expensive extraction and refining technology only further limits the field of competitors. When a small group obtains access to all of this technology, and virtually all the access to oil (as happens under market competition), they can band together and extort everyone else.

Even a corporate giant like Wal-Mart can’t beat the profit rate of Big Oil. WalMart’s revenue of $421.8 billion com­ pares favorably to Exxon-Mobile’s Reve­ nue of $354.7 billion. Yet Exxon-Mobile’s property values plummeted.

Corporate greed and corruption, ac­ counting fraud, a two-party capitalist system that aimed at defending the interests of the one percent against all others, increasing racism and im­ prisonment of the oppressed, endless wars over raw materials, the re-colo­ nization of Africa and indeed all poor nations, while important, were merely symptoms of the inherent contradic­ tions of the system itself—a social sys­ tem where the endless compulsion or need to advance the accumulation of profits of the corporate elite overrules all rational decisions.

Competition for oil and other fossil fuels increases unchecked even at the expense of humanity’s future. Wars that murder tens of millions and the starvation of billions continue because these are requirements of a system based on the accumulation and profit­ able reinvestment of capital at the ex­ pense of everything.

Capitalism’s fundamental law, “grow or die,” today takes its toll across the globe; the system’s trillionaire practi­ tioners have no alternative but to solve its burning contradictions at workers’ expense.

It is left to capitalism’s ideologues to justify or rationalize the horror. Today it is to “defend against terrorism” ev­ erywhere, or to defend the “national security interests” of the nation, or to demonize the Black and Brown masses to justify their increasing im­ prisonment, exploitation, and/or capi­ talism’s need for cheap labor—even slave labor—or to “fight crime” or pursue the “war on drugs.” The system requires scapegoats to justify its exis­ tence and perpetuate its rule.

The working class and its allies among all the oppressed, women, and youth, on the other hand, have no need to kill, maim, plunder, and exploit in order to live full and productive lives. They have only to unite in a common challenge to a social system that must be replaced by an egalitarian society in which, for the first time in human history, the vast majority will rule so­ ciety in their own name, through their own institutions, and to satisfy human needs—not corporate profit.

The name of that system is social­ ism—not the twisted distortion that existed in the now defunct former USSR—but the real socialism, a society free from all the horrors of subordi­ nating human needs to the corporate elite, a society that can reverse the monstrous damage already done to the earth and its people and provide a rich, full, and rewarding life for all. n annual profit comes in $14 billion higher, at $30.46 billion, compared with WalMart’s annual profit of $16.39 billion.

Such a higher margin of profit allows an industry to shape the rest of the economy so that other industries and consum­ ers become more dependent upon their resource, which expand the demand for their product. Thus automobile and oil companies buy up trolley-car lines and replace them with less efficient buses in order to expand the market for cars, and petroleum becomes more important to food production than soil. These resourc­ es have become central to our society in part because they are limited and nonre­ newable.

Steering away from climate disaster will require such “despotic inroads on the rights of property” as seizing some $30 trillion in corporate assets. Big busi­ ness and its parties will never develop the appetite for such a move. That appe­ tite will only grow among the masses of working and oppressed people, who are not the owners of that $30 trillion, but its slaves. And its victims. n