Socialism vs Extinction - The choice we face in this age of capitalism-driven climate change

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Hello comrades, this is Siegfried.  Welcome to Back in the USSR.  I’d like to devote this week’s show, my second show of 2019, to the issue of climate change for a number of very immediate reasons that I’ll get to.  But first I’d like to give a salute to the Syrian Arab Army, which has just liberated the key city of Khan Shaykoun from Turkish-backed rebel groups.  Some of you might recognize the name, because Khan Shaykoun is the same city where that unconfirmed and dubiously reported “chemical attack” took place a few years back, which Donald Trump then proceeded to blame on the Syrian Government even though the Syrian Government had destroyed its stockpiles of chemical weapons in 2014 under UN supervision, and then used the supposed “attack” as a pretext for bombing Syria.  Now the Syrian flag flies proudly over Khan Shaykoun and the rebel groups, backed by imperialist powers, are running for their lives.  This is a real victory for the forces fighting against imperialism in the name of self-determination around the world. 

But this episode of the show is dedicated to the issue of climate change, an issue that is intimately tied in with the forces of capitalism and empire.  I’d like to start out with a quote from the Cuban revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro that appeared in Granma, the Cuban national newspaper, back in 2009.  In that year, Fidel wrote an article discussing the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, and this is one of the things that he said.

“The youth is more interested than anyone else in the future. Until very recently, the discussion revolved around the kind of society we would have. Today, the discussion centers on whether human society will survive. These are not dramatic phrases. We must get used to the true facts. Hope is the last thing human beings can relinquish.”

Comrades, I believe that this passage accurately captures the essence of the present global situation that we face today.  As if in confirmation of Fidel’s words, in 2016 the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report that stated that we only have twelve years to seriously curb carbon emissions if we want to avoid a climate catastrophe.

According to the report, the world is currently one degree celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels. In 2018, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued another report that noted that things were much worse than previously thought. The predictions are very bleak: Worsening of environmental disasters across the globe such as: forest fires, tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, and droughts. At two degrees warming, we are heading towards a future where the population of insects is predicted to halve, 99% of the coral reefs are predicted to die, and extreme weather events have been very prevalent in the past few years, with heatwaves such as the 2019 Indo-Pakistani heat wave, which killed 184 people. With that said, since 2004, India and Pakistan have experienced eleven of fifteen of it’s warmest recorded days on record.  Climate change is happening.  It’s real.  There is NO turning back, only delaying the inevitable.

That’s WHY we need Communism, or more precisely, why we need Communist theories as espoused by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, and why we need to build the struggle for Socialism.  Putting people before profits is no longer an empty catch-phrase to be thrown around by any two-bit activist on the block.  It’s a matter of survival.  Those who struggle for socialism, for working class-centered democratic control over the economy and society, have to realize that they are no longer fighting solely for human progress, but also so that human beings may have a future at all.  If profits remain in command of society, humanity dies, plain and simple.

In 1876, Friedrich Engels, Marx’s collaborator, said the following: “Let us not...flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature.  For each such conquest takes its revenge on us...At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside of nature - but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst.”

He could not have said better.  As Michael Parenti pointed out in his book “Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Otherthrow of Communism”: “With its never-ending emphasis on exploitation and expansion, and its indifference to environmental costs, capitalism appears determined to stand outside nature,” even as individual capitalists advertise themselves and claim to be “green”.  Capitalism’s commodification and exploitation of the planet, its resources and people (including such life-sustaining resources as arable land, groundwater, wetlands, forests, fisheries, ocean beds, rivers, air quality etc.) has caused the very life support systems of Earth to degrade and threaten the survival of the human species.

One of the things that I wanted to bring up tonight was the fires currently raging in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil.  There’s been an 84% increase in fires from last year, and there’s ample evidence that illegal loggers, cattle ranchers and mining companies have been literally putting the rainforest to the torch in order to enhance their profits – destroying the very lungs of the planet, along with the lands of dozens of indigenous nations, so that they can make more money.  And all the while that would-be fascist dictator Jair Bolsonaro does all he can to facilitate this bonanza of plunder and destruction.  The same Bolsonaro who was hailed by the CBC last year upon his election for his commitment to free-markets and for providing opportunities for Canadian businesses, particularly in the mining industry.  And this is how he’s delivering those “opportunities” y’all: burning up the Amazon and clearing the way for those extractive industries that rule Bay Street.  Here’s an August 22 clip from the Real News Network that gets further into the situation in the Amazon.

(The Amazon is Burning at a Record Rate)

Capitalism is the problem, comrades, not the solution.  The introduction of solar panels or any other form of green technology cannot change the underlying logic of a system built upon the limitless exploitation of finite resources.  In order for us to do anything about climate change we need to take control over the means of production and put it into the hands of working class people. When I say that, I mean that in order to combat climate change, we need to put industry and commerce under the democratic control of working class and oppressed people, and indigenous people in particular, so that they may choose their own destiny.

Right now, we are heading towards “Climate Apartheid”.  According to a recent United Nations report, by 2030, one hundred and twenty million people will be forced into poverty and hunger.  The rich will be able to pay their way out of facing the consequences of the Earth’s climate change while the vast majority of people suffer.  This June 2019 report by the UN’s Human Rights Council describes how the world’s 3.5 billion poorest people are responsible for only 10% of the world’s carbon emissions while the richest 10% of the global population are responsible for more than half.

To quote directly: “Perversely, the richest, who have the greatest capacity to adapt and are responsible for and have benefitted from the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions, will be the best placed to cope with climate change…while the poorest, who have contributed the least to emissions and have the least capacity to react, will be the most harmed…An over-reliance on the private sector could lead to a climate apartheid scenario in which the wealthy pay to escape overheating, hunger, and conflict, while the rest of the world is left to suffer.”

Comrades, we need to fight for Socialism in the world right now because we need to ensure that there is a future for humanity, and not just a future for the richest of humanity with the funds to hide out in luxury underground bunkers or go to Mars. We need Socialism because our world is changing, and just like Fidel Castro said back in 2009, today, the discussion centers on whether human society will survive. Socialism isn’t a trend, but a tool in the hands of working class people that they can use to secure their own liberation and survival.  Right now these two things go hand in hand all over the world.

We need to understand how socialism can, and is, effectively working to combat climate change today.  Despite western propaganda against Communism striving to mislead public opinion, the truth is that socialist states run by Communist Parties, both historically and presently, have shown the successes of Socialist economics & politics and the role they can play in managing disasters, in fighting fascism, and in safeguarding the interests of the vast majority.

We can take inspiration from countries such as Cuba, that have begun to embark on a one hundred year plan to fight climate change. Tarea Vida, or Project Life, is a comprehensive plan to combat climate change in Cuba which was adopted in the spring of 2017 by Cuba’s Council of Ministers. It involves eleven projects ranging from identifying and implementing actions and projects to adapt to climate change of a comprehensive, ongoing nature, to Ensuring The availability and efficient use of water as part of confronting drought  to the management and use available international financial resources, both those from global and regional climate funds, and those from bilateral sources, to make investments, carry out actions, and implement projects related to the tasks outlined in the state plan.

As the United States continues to show that it is not willing to take global leadership in combating climate change, countries such as China are showing the world their willingness to deal with the problem. In 2017 the United States withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord.  China stayed in it, and according to recent data China is nine years ahead of schedule in their plan to reach their carbon emission goals set by the Paris Climate Accord. Considering China accounts for 1/3rd of the worlds pollution, that’s massive!

In recent years, China has done things like assigning 60,000 soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army to plant trees in an effort to fight climate change, building the world's largest humidifier, standing at a staggering 328 feet, which was built  in an effort to fight pollution, dramatically reducing its consumption of coal, and constructing the largest wind and solar power stations in the world.  China is also  creating experimental cities like Liuzhou Forest City which will be open in 2020 and is set to include a million plants and 40,000 trees, can house a total of 30,000 people and will absorb 57 tonnes of carbon dioxide every year while producing 900 tonnes of oxygen.  This is what Ian Goodrum, the journalist for China Daily who I interviewed for the Communist Current Podcast last month had to say about China’s environmental efforts.

(China and the Trade War)

Remember the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report I mentioned earlier in the show? It also stated that to successfully combat climate change, we need “far-reaching transitions in energy, land … and industrial systems” for which there is “no documented historic precedent.”

I disagree. There is a very well documented historic precedent, and that precedent is Socialism.  As the progressive environmentalist John Bellamy Foster points out, the Soviet Union in the 1980s possessed what was at the time the largest and most active environmental movement in the world.  Over the course of that single decade, the USSR’s carbon emissions dropped by a factor of 25% thanks to effective centralized planning, the introduction of new technology and the shutting down and/or retrofitting of older factories and power plants.  This was years before the issue of global warming was even being considered at an international level.  Almost twenty years before the Kyoto Protocol was signed, Soviet scientists and ordinary citizens had already identified the problem and put pressure on their socialist government to take concrete steps to solve it.  As early as 1976 at the 25th CPSU Congress, the Soviet government had decided to push for the development of new energy sources and green technology: including wind, solar, tidal, geothermal and nuclear fusion.  Lenin himself had been considering the development of wind energy as early as the 1920s.  Soviet tidal power stations had been in operation in Siberia and on the coast of the White Sea as early as the 1960s.  By 1985 solar power was being used to heat homes, children’s summer camps and recreational centers in many parts of the country.  Geothermal electric stations of up to 1,000,000 KW were being built in the regions of Kamchatka, Daghestan and Stavropol, while entire cities, such as Grozny and Tbilisi, were getting their heat from geothermal sources.  Soviet scientists had even worked out the theoretical principles of how to tap enough heat energy from inside the earth to “power the world for three or four millennia” according to Dr Kamil Mangushev, who headed the Sector of Economics of the Fuel-and-Energy Industry at the USSR Academy of Sciences.  The impressive example of the Soviet Union’s achievements with regard to the environment and clean energy demonstrates why we need the means of production to be put under the democratic control of working class people. Because today the question isn’t Socialism or Barbarism. Today the question is Socialism or Extinction.