Nationalise the top 200 monopolies to save climate

Submitted by AWL on 12 May, 2015 - 5:10 Author: Paul Vernadsky

“Nationalise the top 200 monopolies” was for decades the robotic answer to every political question parroted by the Militant newspaper, which spawned the latter-day Socialist Party and Socialist Appeal.

The slogan was mechanically repeated by the “Millies”, fetishising nationalisation and sometimes juxtaposed to the equally important idea of workers’ control. It had an eerie association with the bureaucratic state ownership of the Stalinist states. And it was often coupled with a reformist conception of socialism introduced through an Enabling Act in the Westminster parliament, evading the question of socialist revolution and ruling class resistance to it. The slogan has largely disappeared from their propaganda in recent years.

With all these caveats in mind, perhaps the slogan “nationalise the top 200 monopolies” might yet breathe new life in the climate movement. New research by financial specialists has found that the top 200 publicly traded coal, oil and gas companies now hold over 500 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide in their fuel reserves, close to the total amount the world could ever emit while keeping global warming below the danger limit of 2oC.

These private firms are in the vanguard of efforts to exploit fossil fuels in the Arctic, tar sands and deep sea waters, the unconventional sources of ‘extreme energy’ that will blow the carbon budget in the coming decades. This will instigate climate change on a scale and depth that threatens millions of working-class people and ultimately will undermine the material basis for socialism (and perhaps modern society in general) on the planet.

The carbon reserves of the top 100 traded coal companies and top 100 oil and gas companies were revealed by Fossil Free Indexes (FFI), a US-based green consulting firm. Coal India has the largest reserves on the coal list, while Gazprom in the most on the oil and gas list. Other fossil fuel monsters such as ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, BHP Billiton and Anglo American all appear in the top 10. The FFI data shows that the top 10 coal companies alone own over half the carbon in the list, while the top 10 oil and gas companies own two-thirds of the carbon in those fuels.

The political conclusion is clear: these multinational firms must be brought under collective, democratic control, principally by the workers who work for them, if we are to halt dangerous climate change. Taking control of just 200 firms would make an enormous contribution to tackling climate change, providing they were converted to more sustainable and renewable forms of energy production, rationally planning the use of fossil fuels only where substitutes have so far not been developed.

This cannot simply be bureaucratic state ownership in the manner of the old Stalinist states or the old nationalised industries, both of which were massive polluters and carbon emitters. For one thing, on the global scale far more fossil fuels — about 2,650 gigatonnes — are held by state-owned companies, such as those in clerical fiefdoms of the Middle East and state capitalist economies such as China and Venezuela. Although these state-owned firms are run on a capitalist basis and integrated into global market circuits of capital (unless they are subjected to sanctions), most of all they are models of economic dictatorship where workers invariably lack even the basic right to organise their own trade unions, never mind exercise democratic control over production.

Climate scientists and economists estimate that overall, private and state capital now have four to five times more fossil fuels in existing reserves than can be safely burned. This situation indicates how the capitalist mode of production is leading towards climate barbarism: either these firms face an asset bubble and another economic crash, or they burn these reserves and fry the planet. The facts about their reserves strengthen the case for rational, planned socialist relations of production, where working people exercise democratic control over global means of production – including energy – and organise that production for socially useful and ecologically sustainable needs.

These forms of democratic collectivism are a much more expansive vision than the blandishments of ‘nationalise the top 200 monopolies’. They go much further than capitalist states taking over private industry in order to cream off huge surplus profits for revenue. But they highlight the need put ownership and control at the centre of the reviving climate movement. Small investment changes are not enough to avert climate catastrophe — system change is necessary to prevent dangerous climate change. It is workers that have the power and interest to end their own exploitation and simultaneously prevent ecological degradation.

Climate activists should work with (and indeed inside) the labour movement to develop the only force capable to replacing capitalism with a climate-compatible socialist alternative.

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