DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST PERSPECTIVE

In addition to the permanent threat to humanity's survival posed by the existence of huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons, late monopoly capitalism is destroying the global balance of bio-chemical processes that human life depends on for its very physical survival.

As a result of the unchecked emission of greenhouse gases (particularly carbon dioxide via the burning of fossil fuels and the burning of felled forests) it is now predicted that over the next 50 years the Earth's average surface temperature will increase sufficiently to cause dramatic climatic changes, causing catastrophic effects to the world's agriculture. Moreover, predictions based on current trends indicate that these climatic changes will be combined with an increase in deadly ultraviolet rays reaching the Earth's surface — due to the depletion of the planet's upper atmosphere ozone layer caused by the accumulation of a number of pollutants. In addition to these problems, the devastation of tropical forests, the slow dying of temperate forests (due to a lethal combination of air, water and soil pollution), the poisoning of oceans, rivers and reservoirs with domestic and industrial/agricultural by-products, the poisoning of the air over urban areas due to emissions from automobiles, the massive elimination of plant and animal species at a rate 1000 times greater than would occur naturally, the accumulation of toxic substances in and progressive loss of topsoil threaten to make increasing areas of the planet uninhabitable.

These problems — and the main obstacle to their resolution — are not due to lack of scientific knowledge, but to the fact that pollution is more profitable to capitalist companies than ecologically sound alternatives. Capitalism is incapable of utilising natural resources in a way that meets not only the current needs of all members of society but those of future generations as well:

• If resources in capitalism are ``freely'' available, like water, air and soil, then they are treated as ``external factors'' whose cost of reproduction is ignored. If, however, they are incorporated into the costs of production of capitalist firms (for example through government taxes and charges on the use of these resources) the burden of these extra costs is simply passed on to the consumer.
• The compartmentalisation of production under capitalism (in which each particular natural resource is the independent object of profit-making) and the self-centered rationality of each individual capitalist firm make it ``cheaper'' to throw away or incinerate industrial by-products than to recycle them. Thus mountains of waste and toxic waste are the inevitable result of the capitalist version of the ``affluent society.''
• Rather than spending money on ways to prevent pollution, capitalists prefer anti-pollution programs that aim to repair some of the damage after it has been done. Such programs can be carried out at the ordinary taxpayers' expense and even become yet another source of profits for the polluters.
• Capitalism's need to maximise short-term profits also leads it to impose irrational patterns of consumption on the mass of consumers through the commodification of rational needs (for example, substitution of private automotive transport for mass public transport systems) and through manipulative advertising. To this extent, the behavior of individual consumers is a factor contributing to the ecological crisis. Capitalist ideology plays directly on this factor with its credo that ``people are responsible for the crisis'' or with the claim that it is caused by ``excessive consumption'' on the part of ordinary working people in the imperialist countries. Such arguments are a convenient means of diverting attention from the fundamentally anti-environmental nature of the capitalist mode of production — and the patterns of consumption it forces working people to adopt.

In the 19th century, Marx and Engels pointed out that the quest for short-term private enrichment by competing entrepreneurs — the driving force of the capitalist mode of production — inevitably led to the utilisation of natural resources without regard for their long-term consequences, and therefore without regard to their consequences for the natural environment. The current ecological crisis, however, is not simply a linear result of the process of capitalist industrialisation since the 19th century. It is the product of a qualitative leap in the pollution of the planet's air, water and land which came about within the framework of the long economic upswing of the 1950s and '60s in the imperialist countries — through a massive increase in the use of fossil fuels, particularly oil, and the accompanying enormous expansion of the automotive industry, and through the development of synthetic chemicals which have penetrated every sector of human activity. This qualitative leap has been reinforced since the early 1970s by the global capitalist economic crisis, which has also led to intensified imperialist exploitation of the Third World.

For more than half of humanity, the ecological crisis is not a long-term struggle for survival of the human species or to save coming generations, but a daily struggle for personal survival. In the Third World today, 500 million people are hungry and 40 million die of hunger and related diseases each year; 1.3 billion have no reliable source of clean drinking water and 23 million die each year from a lack of drinkable water; 2.3 billion live without proper sanitation and 40 million die each year from preventable diseases; 1.7 billion live without a regular supply of electricity; 1.5 billion suffer from a serious lack of wood fuel, which is practically their only source of fuel for cooking; 825 million are illiterate and over a third of those able to work are unemployed or permanently underemployed.

By keeping the great majority of the peoples of the Third World in abject misery and in need of immediate solutions to basic problems of personal survival, and therefore unable to take the needs of future generations into account, imperialist exploitation is the fundamental driving force behind the destruction of tropical forests, agricultural/horticultural practices which contribute to desertification, and the employment of hazardous industrial processes in the Third World. Imperialist exploitation of the semi-colonial countries, and the consequent poverty it creates, is also the root cause of the demographic explosion in the Third World. Denied access to a suitable infrastructure for social protection during illness and old age, the poor are forced by necessity to rely on large families, even though this places an increasing long-term strain on these countries' natural environment. Imperialist exploitation thus forces billions of people into environmentally destructive forms of behaviour which, nevertheless, represent their only chance of personal survival under the socio-economic conditions imposed by the world capitalist system.

An effective struggle against pollution and the degradation of the world's ecology will necessitate a radical restructuring of the world's economy, including:

• The cancellation of the crushing debt owed by the Third World to imperialist governments and banks.
• Replacement of the present system of international trade based on unequal exchange between the highly industrialised countries and the Third World, with a system that promotes rather than retards the economic development of the Third World.
• A thorough-going land reform in the Third World and a massive and long-term program of ecologically sound industrialisation, funded by the industrialised countries, to eradicate poverty, hunger and mass unemployment.
• Large-scale public programs to convert military production to the production of goods for civilian use; to replace the use of fossil fuels with renewable energy sources; to develop public rather than private transport systems; and to carry out a mass conversion of industry to production processes that eliminate pollution and waste right from the start.

Implementation of such measures will require that decisions about investment and choices about production techniques be subject to overall social regulation and planning and therefore that ownership of the decisive means of production be taken out of the hands of private corporations and transferred to society as a whole.

Creation of such a system of world-wide democratic planning will not be possible as long as the capitalist class can defend its anarchic private profit system through its control of powerful national military apparatuses, armed with weapons of mass destruction. The struggle to disarm imperialism is therefore intimately connected with the struggle to defend the environment. Both threats to humanity's survival — the ever present danger of nuclear self-destruction and capitalism's on going destruction of the Earth's ecology — point to the urgent need to educate and organise working people for a revolutionary struggle to abolish capitalist rule and replace it with a world-wide federation of socialist republics.