Only replacing profit will do it

A key danger for small Marxist organisations, beleaguered by many decades of working class defeat, is that we can slip into a mode of abstract thinking and ready made formulae and we neglect to orient to our changing reality. Workers Liberty has long rejected “one solution, revolution” as empty posturing on most social questions. Luke Hardy (Solidarity 767) uncritically applies the same formula to the climate and ecological emergency. But we should start with reality and tell the truth: short of another catatrophe like nuclear war, global temperatures will continue to rise so long as the capitalist class remains in power.

Luke thinks that social control of the means of production is unnecessary to halt the escalation of environmental catastrophe. He argues that raising this demand will “breed paralysing fear”. Instead he suggests that “tomorrow the EU...UK, Canada, Australia, and the ruling oligarchy of China” (not USA?!) could choose “a crash course of decarbonisation”. On the basis of this slim hope, Luke argues we should avoid the question of property relations.

The implication of his argument is that capitalist governments have just made some bad choices and with a bit of pressure from below they could make better choices.

Demands

Luke wants us to organise around demands on government to “take action”. But does not specify what action we should demand. How would government organise a “crash course of decarbonisation” without taking social control of capitalist property? The main barrier to such action is private ownership and control.

Luke claims to be standing in the tradition of Lenin, Trotsky and Gramsci but all the great transitional programmes of our movement from the Communist Manifesto onwards call for social control of the means of production. As Marx writes in the Manifesto: “the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political movement order of things. In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.” If we do not argue for common ownership and social control, noone else will.

Luke’s letter falls into the trap Lenin warns against in the April Theses. Instead of exposing capitalist governments for their inability to resolve the crisis, he raises the “demand” that capitalist governments cease to be capitalist.

There is no capitalist way out of escalating climate change because capital accumulation is a physical process of rising material throughput and energy demand; because the international order of competing capitalist states cannot coordinate the necessary action; because the capitalist class will not voluntarily abandon its assets; because the capitalist class will always try to privatise the gains and socialise the losses.

The idea that Luke propagates, that capitalist governments could choose to stop climate change, is a capitalist idea. It is the dominant idea of bourgeois Earth scientists like Johan Rockstrom and prominent environmentalists like David Attenborough. It is an idea that breeds passivity.

There are critical adaptations that could be won short of social revolution. For example, unbearable workplace heat impacts billions of workers each summer. Struggle to win adaptations for reasonable workplace temperatures could lead to very large mobilisations. We should be alive to the possibility of such struggles and do what we can to foment them. But global temperatures will continue to rise until a social force emerges to replace the rule of profit with ecologically conscious economic planning. Moreover, to maximise the resources available for largescale adaptation (up to and including various forms of geoengineering) will require social control of the means of production and a level of international cooperation that only the international workers’ movement can provide.

We should not sow illusions that capitalist governments will suddenly cease to be capitalist. Our bosses are not coming to save us. We must rely on our own resources and our own power.

Stuart Jordan, London