The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 79/No. 8      March 9, 2015

 
(Reply to Readers column)
Toilers worldwide need electrification
 
BY MAGGIE TROWE
In his Feb. 9 letter, J. Harkness takes issue with the article I wrote titled “Pipeline Debate Ignores Energy Needs of World’s Toilers,” saying “it dismisses concerns about what is arguably the greatest threat to workers and to the rest of us, Global Warming.”

Harkness also says he thinks the article was incoherent and full of blunders, asserting that oil is rarely used to produce electricity. This is true in the United States, where only about 1 percent of electrical generation comes from petroleum.

But if we start with the world, it’s a different story. Diesel generators are widely used in the semicolonial world, like in India, where an estimated 4 million diesel generators run irrigation pumps. Developing modern agriculture requires tractors and petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides.

Construction of large-scale power generation across a national electrical grid in rural Malaysia or Sierra Leone demands petroleum products to fuel backhoes and trucks to build roads, towns, dams, modern housing, schools and hospitals equipped with electrical lights and appliances. Toilers of both city and countryside from the U.S. to India need light after dark to advance education, culture and political struggle.

Harkness says global warming is the greatest threat to workers. My article asserts that the greatest threat to the working class is the dictatorship of capital on a world scale.

Protection of nature — which includes but is far from limited to reducing carbon dioxide emissions that tend to raise the average temperature — can’t be divorced from the class struggle. It’s part of it. The capitalists operate for profit and have contempt for the health and safety of the workers and farmers they exploit and the land, air and water they foul.

The toiling majority of humanity worldwide, by contrast, has a deep interest in making industrial and agricultural production safe for ourselves and our communities.

Working-class politics start with the world. The needs, interests and fighting capacity of the toilers in the semicolonial world, who make up the vast majority of its inhabitants, are critical.

When many who call themselves environmentalists talk about what “we” should do, they mean everyone in the U.S. But there are two classes with diametrically opposed interests in this country. Revolutionary-minded working people in the U.S. should fight for the expansion of nuclear power in Africa, Asia and Latin America, which produces the greatest amount of energy with the least use of resources and the smallest output of atmospheric pollution. Unfortunately, many who claim to speak in defense of the earth oppose nuclear power, saying they fear inevitable catastrophes.

The working-class movement must reject a hysterical sky-is-falling mentality, crass not-in-my-backyard chauvinism and anti-working-class prejudice of petty-bourgeois catastrophists, who predict disaster if “they” in the semicolonial countries don’t accept a lower standard of living. Their discredited 1950s counterparts predicted multiplying population growth in Africa and Asia would mean we all starve to death.

The fight for more electrification under capitalism must be coupled with a class-struggle battle for workers control of conditions on the job to protect both land and labor. All significant reforms are by-products of revolutionary proletarian struggle, and many concessions will be wrested from the bosses and their governments as we fight for a workers and farmers government based on human solidarity and the stewardship of the land on a worldwide scale.

I urge Harkness and others concerned about these questions to read New International, especially issues no. 13 and 14, which contain “Our Politics Start With the World” by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party; “Farming, Science, and the Working Classes” by Steve Clark; and “The Stewardship of Nature Also Falls to the Working Class: In Defense of Land and Labor,” a statement adopted by the SWP’s 2007 convention.
 
 
Related article:
Letters
 
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home