The environment

Karl Marx wrote of capitalism “enforcing economy in each individual business”, while “on the other hand, [it] begets, by its anarchical system of competition, the most outrageous squandering of labour-power and of the social means of production, not to mention the creation of a vast number of employments, at present indispensable, but in themselves superfluous”. He further wrote of its “shameful squandering of human labour-power for the most despicable purposes”, notably through overdriving workers by bullying us, atomising us, and setting us to compete against each other. Capitalism promotes...

Zack Muddle ( Solidarity 653 ) is of course right that the problem is capitalist work, rather than work per se, is driving the ecological crises. But capitalist work is what three billion wage workers do at the moment, and it needs to stop. The capitalist mode of production involves a constant pressure to do more work in less time. We sense this at work through our boss’s efforts to squeeze more work out of our working day. It also manifests as the replacement of human workers with ever more powerful machines. Work is always a physical movement of matter, the creation and distribution of use...

The government’s Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, Defra, has announced a £156,000 fund aimed at protecting Britain’s sea bird population. Of the 4,400-plus islands in the British Isles, a number are particularly important for migrating sea birds. The fund is designed to improve “biosecurity” measures and prevent invasive predators, like rats and stoats from getting to these islands. Alongside direct predation, habitat destruction, climate change and the production and release of biocidal chemicals, invasive species are one of the great drivers of the current mass extinction...

The case for the West Papuan people to have the right to self-determination, including separation from Indonesia, the state power which currently rules their territory, is straightforward and unanswerable. The Netherland was the colonial power over the whole archipelago most of which is now Indonesia. It stayed in West Papua after quitting Indonesia in 1949. In the early 1960s, the US government pressured the Netherlands to accept newly-independent Indonesia as a successor to its rule rather than look to the potential for West Papuan self-determination. The territory (one half of the island of...

Stuart Jordan in “Winning the cooperation we need” ( Solidarity 652 ) makes a persuasive case that workers’ action to win democratic rational economic planning — not moral appeals to capitalist leaders — is needed to halt climate catastrophe. But one of his claims is incomplete at best. “We need to slow down, do less work and have more leisure time, resisting the bosses’ incessant drive to intensify the rate of work.” There are many important reasons to fight for a shorter working week and against intensification. Longer weeks and overworking degrade our quality of life, harming workers for...

Download a PDF of a bulletin based on this article here “We’re on the highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator”. These measured words from UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres opened COP27. He called on humanity to "cooperate or perish." But moral appeals to world leaders will not work. Cooperation is antithetical to the capitalist world order. Businesses and nation states are locked in competitive rivalry. So where could this cooperation come from? Where is the brake and reverse gear? Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre explains that we now "very, very...

In the second half of his new book Regenesis , George Monbiot explores alternatives to the Global Standard Farm. (See previous articles on the book in Solidarity 647 and 648 .) Monbiot rejects the commonplace green advocacy of low-tech, small-scale localist food production. “The systems we should favour are those that deliver high yields with low environmental impacts”. He argues for moving away from our unsustainable dependence on livestock farming and liberating grazing land for ecological restoration, while finding low-impact ways to replace the protein currently provided by domesticated...

The Global Standard Farm, as George Monbiot’s book Regenesis calls it, is extraordinarily wasteful. 71% of the world’s birds by weight are poultry; 60% of mammalian biomass is domesticated animals (36% are humans and only 4% wild animals). While providing only a small proportion of our protein, our animals take up a lot of space and resources and produce a lot of waste. Grazing animals provide just 1% of the world’s protein but occupy 28% of the land. Domesticated animal excrement leaches into our rivers, creating algal blooms that strip rivers and seas of oxygen and kill off aquatic life. Our...

Finlay Asher of Safe Landing , a climate-oriented group of aviation workers campaigning for long-term employment by challenging industry leaders to conform with climate science, spoke to Sacha Ismail. This is part one; part two, mainly about Safe Landing's idea of "workers' assemblies", is here . As well as running Safe Landing, I’m also involved in Extinction Rebellion [XR] Trade Unionists . Building the links between the trade union movement and the climate movement, and between struggles against the cost-of-living crisis and the climate crisis, is for me the most relevant thing going on at...

Stuart Jordan’s article “The case against fracking” ( Solidarity 646 ) outlines the many downsides of fracking. In particular, he reports geologists’ opinions that the amount of gas available would supply less than 5% of Britain’s domestic supply in five years’ time. It may be worse than that. Results from exploratory drilling before the moratorium were disappointing, with rock samples found to contain only small quantities of extractable gas or oil. Unlike American deposits, these were at low pressure, making it even more difficult to extract usable quantities. This low pressure is a result...