Defense of nature falls to working class

In this week’s issue, articles about the United Nations “climate” conference in Paris, floods in England and the industrial waste mudslide in Shenzhen, China, lead to the same political conclusion — capitalism is a deadly threat to both land and labor. The stewardship of nature depends on the power and organization of the working class and its successful fight to end the dictatorship of capital.

The U.N. conference was a fraud. It had nothing to do with protecting labor or nature. At its heart was imperialist rivalries and efforts to suppress economic competition from “emerging” and semicolonial nations. It was most noteworthy in what it refused to discuss — the urgent need for electrification in the countries held in underdevelopment by imperialism.

It was accompanied by ecological panic-mongering by liberal and radical “environmentalists,” claiming the end of the world is nigh. This feeds the clamor against billions of people — like the 620 million in Africa who have no access to electricity — who need energy, light, economic advancement and the openings they provide to advance culture, construction of a working-class movement and class struggle.

President Barack Obama said the parley could be “the best chance we have to save the one planet that we’ve got.” But there is no “we” in the United States or the world. There are workers and small farmers on one side, and the capitalist exploiters and their handmaidens on the other. The climate conference was an offensive spectacle of representatives of U.S. capital proclaiming themselves saviors of the earth, when their system’s very existence rests on contempt for the safety of workers, farmers and the land, air and water. They lecture others while under their class rule the U.S. has the highest per capita carbon dioxide emissions of any imperialist country.

So-called natural disasters or work “accidents” don’t stand above class relations. In a 1993 talk called “Capitalism’s Deadly World Disorder,” Jack Barnes, Socialist Workers Party national secretary, said, “If we translate everything commonly thought of as an environmental issue into how to advance the protection of the working class, and how the working class can extend that protection to all, then we can hardly ever go wrong. With that approach, we will increase the possibilities for concrete solidarity in fighting against ecological abuses and outrages.”

“[Karl] Marx explains how human creativity is turned into its opposite under capitalism, how advances in the forces of production simultaneously increase the forces of destruction of nature itself,” Barnes said. “How the sources of all wealth — land and labor — are increasingly the victims of the domination of capital. And, most importantly, why the working-class-led struggle for a socialist revolution opens a way forward on this front as well.”

Related articles:
‘Climate’ summit: Imperialist rivalry and attacks on semicolonial peoples
Gov’t policies in UK turn flooding into social disaster
China: Construction boom causes deadly mudslide

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