Someone needs to do a bit of research and then write a book entitled,
"How to Think Independently". A copy should be given to every working
class man, woman and child.
On 5/2/17, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://themilitant.com/2017/8118/811805.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 18 May 8, 2017
(front page)
Working class must lead fight to defend
environment, labor
Thousands will join the March for Climate, Jobs and Justice in
Washington, D.C., April 29, seeking to protest the increasing perils to
life and limb, pollution of the soil, water and skies.
How the destruction of the environment is a consequence of the rule of
the capitalist class and the governments that serve them — Democratic
and Republican alike — is addressed in this excerpt from “The
Stewardship of Nature Also Falls to the Working Class: In Defense of
Land and Labor.” The statement was adopted by the July 2007 convention
of the Socialist Workers Party and printed in New International no. 14.
It explains how the fight to prevent the profit-driven rulers’
destruction of the environment is bound up with the fight by working
people for political power.
An excerpt from the book is printed below. Copyright © 2008 by New
International. Reprinted by permission.
How social labor is organized to transform nature — to whose benefit, to
what social and economic ends — depends on the class relations of
production. It depends on which class rules, which class holds state
power. A 1993 talk by Jack Barnes published in Capitalism’s World
Disorder addressed this fundamental point. “Environmental pollution is a
social question, a class question,” Barnes observed.
Workers must not fall into accepting the common view—that is, the
bourgeois view — that the environment …is a “scientific” question, a
“natural” question, that somehow hovers above classes and outside the
class struggle. That is how many middle-class opponents of nuclear
energy, and of nuclear weapons, for example, often present those
questions. Many who call themselves environmentalists say the problem is
“consumerism,” or industrial development per se. But the workers
movement has to explain the source of ecological destruction and why the
answer lies along the revolutionary line of march of the working class….
The working class must also reject all forms of fake science,
exaggerations, catastrophism, and crankism. There is a decades-long
record of such frenzied prophecies — the impending exhaustion of fossil
fuels and other natural resources, the “limits to growth,” and so on.
These originate in sections of the bourgeoisie and are then picked up
and propagated by petty-bourgeois reformers. They feed into the
conspiracy nostrums that are floated in the working class and labor
movement, taking workers’ eyes off the true source of such social ills:
the capitalists and their profit system….
[I]f 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.
The labor movement should expose the differential effects of pollution
on the working class, including the even more devastating consequences
for sections of the working class that are the poorest and most
vulnerable, as well as those that are Black, Latino, or foreign born….
The workers movement must take the lead in actively exposing the
destruction and dangers produced by capitalism and in organizing
opposition to them.
This communist course, Barnes concludes, enables us to explain 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.”
As Cuban Gen. Armando Choy concludes in Our History Is Still Being
Written, “Yes, a better world is possible. But only with a socialist
revolution.”
In the mid-nineteenth century some 85 percent of energy for human use
was produced by burning wood, charcoal, and crop residue. Today some 85
percent of energy supplies comes from fossil fuels — primarily coal,
oil, and natural gas. The production and use of these resources in
pursuit of profits has always been detrimental not only to the health of
the workers involved but simultaneously to the natural environment in
which we live and labor.
A transition to other energy sources can and will be neither smooth nor
rapid. The dog-eat-dog laws of rival capitals ensure that every “energy
policy” implemented by corporations and bourgeois governments will serve
the interests of maintaining capitalist rule — not the economic, social,
and cultural needs of the earth’s population, nor the health and safety
of the workers involved. Communists oppose anti-working-class
“solutions” promoted by big business and various bourgeois and
petty-bourgeois reformers. We expose and counter their reactionary
notion, for instance, that “too large” a population of toilers — as well
as too much consumption and too high living standards for many of them —
is a threat to a “livable” world.
The capitalist rulers warn workers and farmers throughout the
semicolonial world that they must forego the level of economic
development and living standards existing in the imperialist countries —
development achieved in no small part by superexploiting the toilers and
plundering the resources of these very same oppressed peoples. “The
ecological consequences are unsustainable!” impatient toilers are
scolded. This is another of finance capital’s smokescreens masking the
reasons for the widening gap in economic, social, and cultural
conditions between earth’s great toiling majority, on the one hand, and,
on the other, the bourgeoisie and professional middle classes in the
imperialist centers and in the more economically advanced semicolonial
countries.
In the United States and other imperialist countries, politicians and
other bourgeois voices tell working people “we” must tighten “our” belts
in order to stem environmental destruction. They tell us “we” must
accept higher prices for fuel and other necessities, including
regressive “carbon taxes” on gasoline, home heating oil, and commercial
travel. “We” must recycle, turn off the lights, lower the thermostat, go
without air conditioning, ride a bike, change our showerhead, join a
carpool, flush the toilet less, plant a tree.
But there is no “we” that embraces both working people and those who
grow wealthy off the exploitation of our labor: the ruling families and
their rentier tagalongs among the middle class and professionals. Such
“solutions” not only inaccurately place the blame on individuals and
families and promote the sale of “green” and “organic” products and
services at premium prices. Above all, they are part of the drive by the
capitalist rulers to boost their profit rates at the expense of the
working conditions, wages, living conditions, trade union solidarity,
and genuine social security of workers and farmers, all of which have
been under relentless assault since the mid-1970s.
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