Stewardship of nature falls to working class

March 4, 2019

The excerpt below is from “The Stewardship of Nature Also Falls to the Working Class,” a resolution adopted by the Socialist Workers Party and published in New International no. 14. The Militant is printing it as part of addressing the anti-working-class course presented by liberal and “socialist” Democrats in their “Green New Deal.”

Science and technology — which are developed and used  by social labor — have established the knowledge and the means to lessen the burdens and dangers of work, to advance the quality of life, and to conserve and improve the earth’s patrimony. …

Since the rise of the world capitalist order, humanity has faced — and increasingly continues to face — questions of life or death in stemming capital’s accelerated destruction of labor and nature and its effects on hundreds of millions of toilers. The stakes for the world’s working people are enormous. Grave and growing dangers to life on earth are posed by the existence of massive conventional and strategic weapons arsenals, and by the inevitability of nuclear arms proliferation on a scale completely new since Washington’s heinous 1945 incineration of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. …

But “green-red” politics, as a number of middle-class currents in the workers movement describe their program and activity today, is not a proletarian course. “Green” politics and “environmentalism” like “peace” politics and “pacifism” are expressions of bourgeois politics. They lead towards class-collaborationism. They lead away from the fight for independent working-class political action and the conquest of power by workers and farmers — the only road to peace and to the effective defense of labor and the earth’s land, waters and atmosphere. Concrete gains for working people can and will be won as by-products along that road of revolutionary struggle. …

Capital’s debasing of the means of production into simultaneous means of destruction is not the product of technology, synthetic chemicals or bioengineering. It is the product of the drive by the exploiting classes and their armies, cops, and courts to defend, extend, and increase their accumulation of capital and reproduction of capitalist social relations to maintain their own class rule. It is only by resolving the “modern conflict” between capital and labor — leading the toilers to the conquest of power and the establishment of workers and farmers governments — that the creative and productive potential of humanity’s transformation of nature will be set free, enabling us to control the avoidable dangers that such transformation entails.