‘Capitalism is extinction, socialism is survival: the climate crisis – no solution under capitalism’, Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!, Larkin Publications, 2022, 104p, £3.95.
Record temperatures were recorded in heatwaves across Europe this summer: thousands of people were killed and wildfires burned through tens of thousands of hectares of land. Global warming is melting glaciers and forcing sea levels to rise: as we go to press one third of Pakistan remains underwater, over 750,000 livestock are dead across the country and millions of people remain homeless and at risk of disease. Climate change, fuelled by the burning of fossil fuels and to a lesser extent deforestation for agriculture, urbanisation and industry, is accelerating. In July the British oil multinational Shell plc broke its own profit record for the second consecutive quarter. Banks are continuing to funnel billions of dollars into the fossil fuel industry – the big five British banks (Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, NatWest and Standard Chartered) invested $190bn between 2018 and 2020 alone.
It has never been more evident that capitalism is not only incapable of resolving the climate crisis, but that in its inherent drive to accumulate it can only exacerbate the crisis. Existing environmental literature has addressed capitalism as the root of global warming and environmental degradation. But this has been done by blaming the climate crisis on one particular form of capitalism, such as neoliberalism, or without looking for the complete explanation: that it is capitalism in its monopoly stage – that is, in its imperialist stage, having expanded to every corner of the earth – that is driving the planet towards destruction. The result is an argument that capitalism can be reformed. Moreover, from Naomi Klein to George Monbiot, what you will not find in mainstream anti-capitalist environmental literature is a solid argument as to why the solution to the climate crisis is socialism.
In this context, the publication of Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!’s pamphlet Capitalism is extinction, socialism is survival is crucial. It sets out to prove, not just how capitalist production – and imperialist exploitation – necessitates the destruction of the environment, but also how the only way to fight back against the extinction facing our planet is to build socialism.
The science of climate change
Scientists across the world are clear that human activity is driving global warming and environmental destruction. The burning of fossil fuels, deforestation for agriculture and industry have increased the concentration of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. These greenhouse gases trap and absorb radiation from the sun, causing the earth’s surface to warm. ‘Economic activities that the imperialist system depends upon have raised atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from 280 parts per million (ppm) to 410 ppm over the last 150 years’ (p11).
Chapter one shows how this is the case; the section on deforestation (pp11-12) is a useful example. Forests absorb carbon dioxide and so deforestation – which is accelerating at an alarming rate, with 80 million hectares of forest destroyed since 1990 – increases CO2 emissions. In 2019, human activity is estimated to have released 43 gigatonnes of emissions in total and land use changes, including deforestation and forest fires, are estimated to account for 15% of this figure.
Agribusiness is responsible for around 80% of deforestation. It is the unsustainable demand within the imperialist countries – for beef, soybean, palm oil – that is driving deforestation (p16). In just 50 years, 17% of the Amazon rainforest, home to millions of people, plants, animals and insects, has been destroyed. This has increased rapidly under Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, backed by British and US imperialism whose corporations stand to benefit from the selling off of Brazil’s land and resources.
Successive climate change conferences attended by world leaders have failed to achieve anything of substance. Chapter two takes us through the succession of failures, from the UN climate conference in Rio in 1992 to COP26 in Glasgow in 2021. The chapter demonstrates how the point of such conferences is to maintain the interests of the imperialist powers by putting up the appearance of taking action while in reality making empty promises that include no mechanisms for being held to account. At conferences from Rio to Glasgow, ‘the strongest lobby [is] that of capital – the giant monopolies and the imperialist governments that represent them’ (p27).
Imperialism means climate destruction
How these giant monopolies and imperialist governments operate, and where they came from, is explored in chapter three. With concision but illustrated with reference to literature and poetry, the pamphlet takes us through the history of capitalism. It shows how capitalist production necessarily developed into a global system of imperialism in which a handful of advanced capitalist countries maintain their wealth through the looting and plunder of the rest of the world.
While now almost all formally independent, the underdeveloped countries are still controlled by the imperialist countries through forms of financial control:
- Via monopoly companies and banks hosted in the imperialist countries. World production is dominated by mining, and other extractive industries, as well as agribusiness. The City of London plays a central role in managing the flows of capital for some of the largest oil and mining multinationals. Their activities emit ‘vast quantities of greenhouse gases, pollute water, air and land and displace whole communities, turning some into wage workers on minimal wage and driving others to become stateless migrants’ (p43). These companies include the British-owned company Anglo-American, the Anglo-Swiss company Glencore, Anglo-Australian company BHP Billiton and the British-owned Shell. Examples of their exploitation of people and the planet in their drive for profit are found on pp43-45.
- Via international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. For centuries, underdeveloped countries have had their wealth, land and resources stolen. Many are financially impoverished and dependent on loans from the institutions like the IMF, controlled by the imperialist countries. Such loans come with structural reform agreements that require privatisation of resources, allowing imperialist multinationals to swoop in and buy the control of the resources for well under their value. In the Sahel region in West Africa, famines have been linked to the agriculturally destructive character of the reform programmes forced through by the IMF (p20).
- Via the imposition of unpayable debt on the developing world. The interest rates on the loans from the likes of the IMF and World Bank lock countries into paying back their loans again and again, keeping them impoverished and dependent on the imperialist countries.
No solution under capitalism
Under capitalist production, corporations have no choice but to continue expanding in the insatiable drive for profit. In doing so, oil and gas corporations will burn more fossil fuels and release more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Agribusiness corporations will have to clear more land, destroying biodiversity and forests in the process. Seeking ever greater returns, the technologies employed by the multinationals to increase yields are wreaking havoc on the environment. Monoculture, genetically modified production and artificial selection are causing a loss of genetic diversity and ecosystem dysfunction. Intensive agriculture is bringing humans into contact with greater numbers of pathogens, thereby increasing the likelihood of pandemics.
This link between economic growth and environmental degradation is acknowledged by climate activist groups. However, in defence of their own class interests, many advocate for a reformed capitalism, some advancing fantasies of ‘degrowth’. Under capitalism, degrowth means recession, ‘in reality this means poverty, austerity and war’ (p64). As the former chief of green investment at the investment multinational BlackRock, Tariq Fancy, admitted: ‘business does not have this capacity [to grow sustainably]. It’s not because they are evil, it’s because the system is built to extract profits.’
Other arguments for environmental reform under capitalism include various types of Green New Deals (GND) that advocate investment in ‘clean energy’ technologies. The rare minerals and metals necessary for the electric cars and wind turbines to power the GND would need to be ripped out of the ground with destructive methods, and the resources looted from the underdeveloped countries to which they belong. Moreover, for Britain alone to make all vehicle sales battery-electric by 2035, and to replace all cars and vans (excluding HGVs) with electric vehicles by 2050, it would need almost twice the total annual world cobalt production, three quarters of the world’s lithium production and almost 10% of the world’s copper production (p65).
Socialism or extinction
Having proven monopoly capitalism is incapable of resolving the climate crisis and indeed can only accelerate it, the final parts of the pamphlet look at resistance in Britain and then at socialism as the only viable alternative. In Britain there is a history of direct action to halt environmentally destructive projects, such as through trespasses and occupations, and a need for this trend to develop into a broad-based sustained movement. In 2019 we saw the emergence of various climate action groups such as Youth Strike for Climate. Chapter five looks at how these groups brought the struggle forward, as well as assessing their limitations that resulted in their gradual decline and lessons to learn for going forward.
The chapter also looks at some of the actions Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! helped to organise through involvement in a distinctly anti-imperialist trend within the climate struggle. Working with Earth Strike Merseyside, there were regular rolling pickets of high street multinationals and banks and occupation of a branch of HSBC; participation in Earth Strike North of the River resulted in demonstrations outside the head offices of Glencore, Rio Tinto, Unilever, BlackRock and Anglo-American.
The final chapter of the pamphlet shows that ‘only under a socialist system is there any hope that humanity can avoid a planetary catastrophe’ (p49). The environmental achievements of the Soviet Union are documented before looking to the example of socialist Cuba. In rejecting the need for socialist production, centrally planned production for use over profit, as the only alternative to capitalist environmental destruction, mainstream anti-capitalist writers refuse to acknowledge Cuba.
Today one of the only countries in the world to be developing sustainably, and with environmental protection enshrined in its constitution, Cuba stands to show what is possible under a socialist system. It has not always been a world leader in sustainability. While under imperialist domination, the environment was degraded by chronic deforestation and soil erosion (p92). But after the 1959 revolution, ‘the people came to realise the totality of production relations meant that an environmental agenda could not be separated from the rest of the political-economic framework’ (p93).
While contributing very little towards global emissions, as a small island nation in the Caribbean, Cuba is disproportionately feeling the effects of climate change. Socialist Cuba is responding by putting humanity first. It has a 100-year plan to protect the island and its population from the effects of global warming, including rising sea levels threatening coastal communities. The Cuban state is working with those communities to look for alternative locations, taking into consideration the jobs and customs of the inhabitants (p95). Orlando Rey, Cuba’s lead negotiator at COP26, is unequivocal that the extinction facing humanity can only be resolved through structural changes, ‘a change in the way of life, in our aspirations… it requires a vision not directed towards profit or self-interest. It must be premised on social equity and rejecting inequity. A plan of this nature requires a different social system, and that is socialism’ (p100).
The fight against global warming and climate change can seem an impossible task without a framework to understand and direct the struggle that has to take place. Capitalism is extinction, socialism is survival is clear on that direction: ‘rationalising production to replace capitalist consumerism will provide the socialist solution to an equitable future where the Earth’s natural resources are respected as part of the equation of production and nurtured for future generations’ (p99). Such a future has to be fought for and it is fitting that the pamphlet ends with a call to action to join Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! on the streets to fight for the environment and to fight for the future.
Ria Aibhilin
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 290 October/November 2022
