There is now no doubt that the ecological crisis of the planet has reached a new stage, one which demands urgent solutions without which the lives of millions of people along with many plant and animal species, will be endangered. While the environmentalists and the Green Party have placed these issues at the top of the public agenda, their solutions, set within a capitalist framework, utopian. Jane Kelly and Phil Ward argue that socialists have to engage with these issues and show how only socialist answers can overcome the crisis of ecology faced by the planet.

The main elements of the crisis have been well rehearsed and are most noticeable in climate change and global warming. First the 1980s and then the 1990s were reported to have been the warmest decades on record. In Britain it is likely that 2003 will turn out to have been the warmest year ever recorded. The Greenland ice cap is thinning, leading to rising sea levels and the imperilling of specific islands and coastal regions. Vast quantities of carbon dioxide will be released as sea convection patterns are changed, in turn adding to the greenhouse effect. Glaciers are retreating, much of the world is heating up, leading to desertification, while other areas are experiencing excessive rainfall. Food production is threatened, especially with the present agricultural practices. Within general global warming, some areas may become much colder: for example, if the Gulf Stream changes course owing to the melting of the Polar ice, Britain and the rest of northern Europe will experience a tundra climate. Most think that greenhouse gases are the cause of all these changes. [1]

The use of fossil fuels for electricity generation, the heating and cooling of domestic and commercial buildings and in transport releases a variety of toxic substances into the air, especially noticeable in cities. This has led to an alarming increase of respiratory illnesses such as asthma, bronchitis and lung cancer. Other industrial pollutants include asbestos in building materials [2] and mercury in batteries.

There is also both water and soil pollution and deterioration. Industrial and household waste is carried off in the waters of the world, reducing them to sewers. Rivers, lakes and now seas are affected by the twin disasters of toxic accumulation and fertiliser build-up. The combination of toxins and the proliferation of algae and water plants is exhausting the oxygen in the water, resulting in a massive loss of aquatic life. Oil spills and the seeping of petroleum from underwater drilling are adding to the pollution alongside chemical and radioactive waste.

Capitalist market pressures have led to the misuse of fertilisers, pesticides, and animal feeds; the practice of monoculture and the replacement only of those minerals needed for particular crops to grow. This is leading to poisonous and depleted soils, which in turn produce mineral-deficient food. Many argue that this is an element in the rise of degenerative diseases. Intensive farming methods have also led to the spread of animal diseases like BSE. Overfishing has led to the near-disappearance of many fish species.

Among the most dramatic manifestations of the ecological crisis is the destruction of the world’s forests. In the last fifty years one third of the world’s woodland has disappeared. While in the industrialised countries, where many forests disappeared centuries ago, trees are dying from air and soil pollution, in neo-colonial countries deforestation is at the heart of the ecological crisis. Brazil’s tropical rain forests are disappearing at an alarming rate, cut down or burnt to create short-term grazing land for cattle to produce quick profits for big landowners. Other areas of tropical forest are cut down for use as timber. Either way this process, exacerbated by huge fires such as those in Indonesia in 1997, is an additional factor in the greenhouse effect and in the destruction of animal and plant species, fifty per cent of which live in tropical forests.

While much of this misuse can be laid at the door of capitalism and imperialism, the primary motive of which is profit, the rulers of the ex-USSR and Eastern Europe were also complicit in ecological pillage. The bureaucratic nature of their central planning meant that their system was as neglectful of the environment as the imperialist countries. Huge projects, such as changing the course of Siberian rivers, are being replicated in China with the Three Rivers Scheme.

Marx and Engels

The workers’ movements have been slow to take these issues up, even though in the nineteenth century Engels wrote of the appalling conditions of working class slums. He describes a stream in Bolton thus: ‘ a dark-coloured body of water, which leaves the beholder in doubt whether it is a brook or a long stream of stagnant puddles, flows through the town and contributes its share to the total pollution of the air, by no means pure without it.’ [3] He notes that above Dulcie Bridge in Manchester ‘are tanneries, bonemills, and gasworks, from which all drains and refuse find their way into the Irk, which receives further the contents of all the neighbouring sewers and privies. It may be easily imagined, therefore, what sort of residue the stream deposits.’ [4]

Engels goes on to discuss the houses and cottages, the filth, the pig pens amidst it all – all the result of ‘the industrial epoch’ and the motivating force of profit,

…the value of the land rose with the blossoming out of manufacture, and the more it rose, the more madly was the work of building up carried on, without reference to the health or comfort of the inhabitants, with sole responsibility to the highest possible profit on the principle that no hole is so bad but that some poor creature must take it who can pay for nothing better. [5]

The environmental crisis we now face is qualitatively greater than when Marx and Engels were writing. But it is not true that their work ignored these questions: like the accusation of gender blindness in their work, this charge is refuted by reference to their actual writing. Moreover, they located capitalism’s central motivating principle of profit – before and beyond any attention to the usefulness of the objects produced or the effects of the process on the environment and on the human producers. This is a key understanding: while capitalism can choose whether to take into account the environmental impact of its production processes, depending on a variety of factors including the opposition of environmental activists and the rate of profit, it will not be able to change its central tenet, the law of value.

It is to their great credit that environmental activists have placed the issue of the unsustainability of capitalism’s destructive processes at the centre of the political agenda. This has forced even New Labour to make gestures towards renewable power such as their introduction of off-shore wind turbines. They are interested in the market for wind turbines and the UK also has the largest wind resources in Europe, which means the costs are lower here than anywhere else. Furthermore, we are paying the wind power premium through our electricity bills and the government has set itself quite a high target for electricity to be generated by renewables under the renewables obligation.

The Green Party

While campaigns and movements for the environment have put these issues onto the agenda, in Britain it is the Green Party which has systematically taken up the challenge at an electoral level. The importance of the issue is reflected in the two and a quarter million votes they received in the European Election in 1989, and although they have not gained anything like that since, they have a number of local council seats and three seats on the Greater London Assembly. They regularly come fourth in elections after the three main parties. In raising the right issues, they attract many concerned with the crisis including young people. In several cases, Socialist Alliance candidates have come close to the votes of the Green Party, even ahead of them occasionally, but there has been a division of labour, for the Socialist Alliance tends not to take up green issues adequately, and the Green Party does not provide socialist solutions.

The Green Party itself is criss-crossed by many different types of politics from socialist to right wing ideas. Many of their spokespeople have very good positions on a variety of issues beyond the environment. For example Caroline Lucas, one of their MEPs, speaks on Stop the War platforms, works with the anti-globalisation protesters, is involved in the European Social Forums and is opposed to the current asylum legislation. But a quick reference to the Green Party’s positions on the alternative to unfettered capitalism reveals a politics that is nothing short of pathetic.

In their anti-globalisation document, they fail to recognise the interrelationship of the bourgeois state and the capitalist system, calling for ‘regional blocs, such as the EU and North America’ to play a role in countering globalisation. They continue, ‘Indeed these two blocs are the only ones politically and economically powerful enough to be a counter-weight to overcome the forces which are the major beneficiaries from globalisation – transnational companies and international capital.’ And since the Bush regime is unlikely to comply with this proposal, ‘The EU must therefore take on the mantle as the major engine for change.’ [6]

Ignoring the weight of the imperialist drive to maintain and increase profits, which is the motor of economic globalisation and its military might, they plaintively call for the re-localisation and democratisation of sustainable economies worldwide. ‘The EU should therefore move away from its present emphasis on ruthless internal and external competition leading to unsustainable growth.’ [7]

At the heart of their politics is a developed analysis of the environmental crisis combined with an under-theorized and mistaken interpretation of the role of the state. Like bourgeois liberals and social democrats, they see the state as essentially neutral. It may be captured by reactionary elements and so pass bad laws, but conversely it could be taken over by progressive forces and be a power for good. These views rule out any socialist solutions as unnecessary. Recognising the misrule and environmental damage caused in the ex-USSR and beyond, and identifying it as ‘socialist’ the Greens do not differ fundamentally from social democracy in the belief that capitalism can be reformed.

The left and ecology today

While revolutionary Marxists understand that capitalism cannot be reformed but has to be overthrown, our programme for environmental change is not so well thought through. But as in other matters we recognise that it is necessary to fight now for reforms to ameliorate the situation. To do so, it will be necessary to stand very firmly within a Marxist framework in order to analyse the situation and put forward the necessary demands. Some recent events clearly show the problems we face.

Congestion charging, introduced by Ken Livingstone in central London in 2003, immediately provoked a heated exchange between people who all considered themselves Marxists. On the one side were those who supported the charge as a way of reducing pollution and making travellers use public transport. Some, abandoning a class analysis, argued that the poorest people do not own cars anyhow, so it would only hit the better off. While it may be true that the poorest sections cannot afford their own car, this does not cover the whole working class. Working class people own and need to use cars – for example mothers dropping their children off at nursery and school on their way to work. And as public transport is both badly organised and expensive, it may be cheaper for some people to use their car. Unless public transport fares were at the same time abolished or reduced to a minimum, they argued, we should oppose the charge. The debate on what at first sight seemed a simple matter (to both sides) revealed how little green issues have been discussed except at a very general level amongst socialists.

Taxing our way out of the problem?

Behind the congestion charge issue is a fundamental debate, with the Greens and New Labour on one side and socialists on the other. This is the issue of the use of taxation and other pricing mechanisms to compensate for the ‘failure of the market’ to reduce or eliminate environmentally damaging practices. Both New Labour (tentatively) and the Greens (with some vigour) advocate this central mechanism. Lying behind it is a reactionary, behaviourist view of ‘human nature’: that we will inevitably act selfishly and against the ‘common good’, unless coerced to do otherwise. Taxes and prices then become part of that coercion. The most explicit expression of that view, still quoted nowadays by people who should know better is The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin (1968). [8]

Hardin’s reactionary views on human nature are also seen in the work of many Greens, who seem to have a particularly pessimistic and despairing disposition. They view individuals and their ‘consumptionist’ behaviour as the cause of environmental problems and at the same time have no understanding of agency in achieving political change. They are thus wedded to their electoralist strategy. [9]

Green socialism

It is, of course, useful to state the principles which should frame the specifics of an environmentalist programme, and also the ways in which socialist and green demands are linked. So the demand that production be for use rather than exchange value immediately throws into question the way in which agricultural goods in the neo-colonial world are tied to export demands, rather than being used to feed the local population. This then highlights indebtedness. In order to change agricultural practices some countries will not only need their debt to be cancelled, but economic support while they transform their agriculture from the production of a single export commodity to as near self-sufficiency as can be achieved.

All this is impossible within a capitalist economy. The drive for profit contradicts the motive of production for need. In addition neo-colonial countries whose systems are often barely democratic, are characterised by what is called combined and uneven development: that is combining developed industrial processes alongside techniques of production and social relations - including the position of women and children - from another mode, even semi-feudal. Trotsky argued that it was impossible for such regimes to achieve even basic bourgeois rights without recourse to a process leading to socialism. The fight for democratic rights would spill over into socialist demands. Thus environmental demands cannot be achieved outside of socialist change.

This should not lead us to put off such demands until after socialism is achieved. Reforms can be fought for now, such as changing from the use of fossil fuels and nuclear power to renewable energy; a huge energy conservation programme and freely available home insulation and new designs for buildings so they need minimal heating and cooling, a transport policy that would genuinely reduce our need to use cars. We need to develop international plans on the use of water, to deal with interstate conflicts over water such as between Iraq, Syria and Turkey; we need to develop a series of measures to deal with the likely increase of areas of both drought and floods.

None of the above can be successfully achieved without the control of ordinary working people; issues of workers’ control, workers’ democracy and socialist solutions are paramount. But we also have to argue that a democratic socialist society can provide for everyone’s needs without destroying the environment. When we talk of abundance this has nothing to do with the waste resulting from commodity production. There are five hundred million cars in the world, each of them stationary for ninety-five per cent of its life; many will be destroyed because of what used to be called ‘built-in obsolescence’. [10] These can be replaced by free public transport, shared ownership and changes in the way we organise our lives.

Moreover, the inefficiency of the bourgeois nuclear family, with each household having to do its own washing, cooking, child care, etc. could be overcome by changed living patterns. Domestic labour could be collectivised – there could be neighbourhood restaurants, laundries, local child care facilities – all of which would help to liberate women at the same time as saving on resources. While many ecologists propose beneficial measures like home-based energy saving such as the generation of methane from sewage, or growing your own vegetables, unless these are combined with promoting collective living, women, children and men will become more not less dependent on the nuclear family.

As Hans Magnus Enzenberger wrote in 1974, it is essential for the workers’ movement to take action in defence of the environment, for it is also in defence of democracy and the future of humanity:

In reality, capitalism’s policy on the environment, raw materials, energy and population, will put an end to the last liberal illusions. That policy cannot even be conceived without increasing repression and regimentation. Fascism has already demonstrated its capabilities as a saviour in extreme crisis situations and as the administrator of poverty. In an atmosphere of panic and uncontrollable emotions – that is to say, in the event of an ecological catastrophe which is directly perceptible on a mass scale – the ruling class will not hesitate to have recourse to such solutions. The ability of the masses to see the connection between the mode of production and the crisis in such a situation and to react offensively cannot be assumed. It depends on the degree of politicisation and organisation achieved by then. [11]