Vol. 72/No. 1      January 7, 2008

For the working class, protection of the environment is not a “scientific” or “technical” question. It is a social and class question. The ravaging of the environment worldwide is caused by capitalism—a system that is based on the exploitation of labor and nature by the ruling propertied classes. It goes hand in hand with the social breakdowns, economic and financial crises, spreading wars, and growth of rightist and fascist forces that mark capitalism’s growing world disorder.

The capitalists put forward myths to disguise the source of pollution, deforestation, and other ills under capitalism. In Bali their spokespeople repeated the lie that “too much consumption” and “too much development”—especially in semicolonial nations with “too many people”—are the real threat. UN “human development” official Kevin Watkins laid it out starkly: “From a climate change perspective, Asia has three critical ingredients that add up to crisis: high growth, large populations, and an energy system fuelled by large reserves of coal.” Workers, however, should reject the imperial arrogance that dictates that toilers in the semicolonial world have no right to develop industry and increase their consumption or population.

All the capitalist rulers’ “solutions” are against the interests of workers and farmers, from demands that oppressed nations forego industrial development to forcing workers to pay “carbon taxes” on fuel. These are always couched in how “we” can save the environment. But there is no such “we”—they are the exploiting classes, which in their drive for profits ruin the environment, and we, the working people of the world, pay the deadly price for it, especially those from the most oppressed sections of the toilers.

The only approach in the interests of the vast majority of humanity—a working-class program—starts from the historically demonstrated capacity of human beings to transform nature, raise the productivity of social labor, and advance the accessibility of culture and civilization to more and more of the world’s toilers. It starts with approaching every so-called environmental question as one of how to advance the defense of the working class.

We must begin with the world. We should support efforts of nations oppressed by imperialism to acquire and develop the energy sources necessary to expand electrification, a precondition for economic and social advances. That means opposing the drive by Washington and its allies to block those nations from developing nuclear power and other energy sources required to bring much of humanity out of darkness.

We must support workers’ struggles to organize trade unions and use union power on the job, including in the fight to enforce health and safety, on and off the job. Working people must wage a struggle in the political arena—we need to break from the twin parties of the capitalist rulers, the Democrats and Republicans, and build a labor party, based on the unions, that fights for the interests of working people here and abroad.

As part of a broader working-class program, we should demand that the oil and other energy companies should be nationalized and placed under workers control, to enforce job safety, combat pollution, and provide affordable energy to working people. We should demand the government enforce controls on industry and agribusiness emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases—regardless of whether other governments are doing so. The federal government should guarantee the costs of production to working farmers and halt farm foreclosures.

These struggles point to the need to build a revolutionary movement that can take political power out of the hands of the capitalists and form a workers and farmers government, as part of the worldwide struggle for socialism. That victory will make it possible to unleash the untapped power of working people to transform the environment and society in which we live.
 
 
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