Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No. 112, April/May 1993
For several days in February, air quality in London was so poor that one in five Londoners’ health was at risk. The tons of carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and sulphur dioxide emitted by 3.2 million vehicles, power stations and factories had concentrated in a poisonous cloud above the city. Whilst health experts advised those with respiratory problems to stay indoors, the government assured the public that air quality was ‘good’. This says a great deal about similar government claims concerning the safety of water quality, nuclear power and pesticide use. EDDIE ABRAHAMS and MAXINE WILLIAMS argue that when it comes to the environmental crisis afflicting the world and Britain, there are lies, damned lies and government statements.
Why is the government so concerned to conceal the truth about damage being done to the air we breathe, the water we drink, the land upon which our food is grown and the ozone layer that protects life from the sun’s ultra-violet radiation? All of these – the essentials of life itself – are showing irrefutable signs of damage and degeneration. Yet the government’s primary concern is to prevent serious discussion and action. Why? Because the British government – like all capitalist states – is concerned not about the welfare of its citizens and the natural environment in which they live, but the profit-making activities of the massive multinational conglomerates that control the world’s economy and its natural resources. These multinationals are the engines of a system that recognises only one concern – profit. It has chewed up and spat out the remains of billions of workers in the process of profit making and will happily chew up and spit out the earth itself in its drive to accumulate capital.
Profit versus the world
Capitalism’s tendency to destroy the very foundations of life lie in the nature of the system itself. It is true that all modes of production, all applications of human social labour to nature, consume and exhaust natural resources. But under capitalism, with its massive productive powers, this process assumes a qualitatively more intense and destructive character, which is furthermore beyond social control.
Because the sole concern of capital and the capitalist class is the creation of profits it can have no long-term concern for the natural environment of human society. Indeed, its interests are systematically opposed to them. Production for profit requires cheap raw materials on a vast scale; it requires growth and expansion constrained by no social needs. To this end it has developed mass consumer markets and ‘throw-away’ production while its advertising agents specialise in generating new and wasteful needs. Capitalism requires that all expenditure not directly producing a profit be kept to a minimum and thus will seek to avoid environmental protection costs in much the same way as it seeks to ignore or minimise the costs of health and safety for its workforce.
Capitalism has been responsible for unleashing gigantic developments in science, technology and the productivity of labour which have transformed the world, both for good and ill. But today capitalist social relations threaten the world with disaster. As Marx said:
‘At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production. From forms of development of the productive relations these relations turn into their fetters.’
Capitalist relations have now become more than a fetter, they have become a death threat to humanity. Today the world economy is dominated by huge multinationals. With branches in hundreds of countries they often control every stage of production from mining raw materials through to the marketing of the end product. Planning production on vast scales, they have more power than many a government, and indeed their decisions affect the lives of billions of people. But their purpose is the enrichment of a small number of industrialists, rather than the satisfaction of the needs of people. Whilst production remains under the control of these monopoly private interests it is directly opposed to the interests of humanity and to the proper, conscious and socially planned husbandry of the earth’s resources and the harmonious development of society and its natural environment.
Today, the world’s largest 500 companies control 70% of world trade, 80% of foreign investment and 30% of world gross domestic product. Only eight nations in the world have gross domestic products greater than the assets of the world’s leading banks. In 1989. the Japanese bank, Dai-Ichi Kangyo had assets of $358.2bn whilst, for example, Canada’s GDP was $363.6bn. Their power is such that little effective control over their destructive activities is possible. Thus for example when the US introduced some limited pollution legislation, capital simply moved over the border to Mexico. There are now over 2,000 factories on the Mexican side of the border operating without any environmental control. This area, according to the American Medical Association, has become a `virtual cesspool’ with raw sewage spilling from its sewers (and ironically leaking onto Californian beaches) and rivers full of cadmium, arsenic and toxic metals.
Mexico, along with the rest of the Third World suffers the worst consequences of imperialist exploitation of its people and resources for the benefit of a tiny handful of the world’s population. The richer countries with 25% of world population use 80% of its energy and 70% of its fossil fuel. They have 86% of its industry and 90% of its cars. They are thus responsible for the overwhelming majority of poisonous chemicals and gases spewed into the earth’s waters and sunk into its land. They produce 60% of the world’s industrial waste and 90% of its most dangerous waste.
The Third World is paying a terrible social and environmental price for the pillaging activities of imperialist multinationals. Nevertheless, as the following examples from Britain will show, imperialist countries themselves are not immune to the social, political and environmental effects of monopoly capitalism. Even in its own backyard it must create filth and squalor. Whilst the rich can isolate themselves from its worst short-term consequences, the working class cannot.
Consumption without limit
The post-World War Two era was marked by an unprecedented growth in the world capitalist economy. In their relentless efforts to expand markets and amass greater and greater fortunes, multinational companies undertook the systematic development of the mass market and planned obsolescence – ‘throw-away production’. This has drastically increased the consumption of raw material and energy. Between 1945 and 1970 capitalist nations used more petroleum and non-fuel minerals than had been consumed in all previous human history.
Central to this process was the massive, uncontrolled and wasteful growth of the consumer durable industry, the lynchpin of which is the development of the motor industry. In 1989 35 million new vehicles were produced worldwide. There are currently 19 million cars in Britain. By 2025 there will be 35 million. A new advertisement for Jaguar asks `What are dreams for except to come true?’ The dream of car ownership has in fact become a nightmare of pollution, death and destruction. Cars generate more air pollution than any other activity. In Britain in 1990 they produced 90% of carbon monoxide, 51% of nitrogen oxides and 41% of all hydrocarbons. The average car produces four times its weight in carbon emissions each year.
As well as being a major source of greenhouse gases, these pollutants cause acid rain – Britain has the highest incidence of acid rain-caused tree damage in Europe. Carbon monoxide aggravates chest and heart problems, whilst hydrocarbons are suspected of causing cancer. Each year 28 million gallons of motor oil leak into the British fresh water system.
To accommodate the mighty god – car – vast areas of land are destroyed in order to build new roads. Every mile of motor way destroys 25 acres of land, much of it in areas of scientific and natural value, and uses 250,000 tonnes of sand and gravel. Rock quarrying for road material is equally damaging. New quarries in Wales, for instance, threaten the wooded valleys of Dyfed.
The uncontrolled expansion of private and individual car production and use has also had devastating social consequences. In Britain every year, 5,000 people are killed and 60,000 badly injured in car accidents with 250,000 slightly hurt. Internationally, 265,000 are killed and 10 million injured. The structure of towns themselves is altered to meet the needs, not of those who live in them, but of road traffic.
Car-parks and roads gobble space used as playgrounds and community leisure, while urban communities are being broken up by ring roads. Huge shopping centres are built on the edges of towns and can only be reached by car. Shopping areas serving the carless (38% of British adults do not drive – overwhelmingly the poor, the old and women) in towns decline. Children have become virtually housebound as parents fear allowing them to venture into heavy traffic areas. According to a government traffic model known as COBA, by which the government assesses road proposals, pedestrians, cyclists and bus passengers are classified as ‘less valuable’ than motorists.
The massive market in private cars is socially unnecessary. It is in fact an obscenity. But despite the irrefutable and documented damage done to society and the environment, the British government is committed to its expansion at the expense of public transport. Government policy in this, as in every other case, is determined by the interests of major capitalist monopolies organised into the Road Lobby: car companies, oil companies, road-building firms, motoring organisations and lorry operators. Again, the power of multinationals is clear: British Petroleum is Britain’s biggest company, operating in 70 countries. It is not merely involved in the production, refining and selling of petroleum products but also in chemicals and food and is now one of largest producers of animal feed.
It is currently exploring for new oil fields in China, Vietnam, West Africa, the Philippines, Mexico, Australia. The huge construction company Tarmac, a major contributor to Tory funds, has done extremely well from the current road building programme, quite apart from being given £55m when it took over part of the government’s Property Services Agency.
Can anyone doubt the power of such interests to alter government policy on transport? Indeed the Road Lobby’s main organisation, the British Road Federation, was formed in 1932 to ‘counter the sinister and distorted propaganda of the rail ways. Ever since then government have been in the Road Lobby’s grip. Annually the British taxpayer pay £2.8bn to subsidise company cars. Between 1985 and 1989 public expenditure on roads was up by 2% whilst expenditure on rail and buses/tubes was down 45% and 19% respectively. While slashing subsidies to and preparing to privatise and destroy railways, the government is planning to spend £20bn on road building programmes in the next 15 years. According to Private Eye ‘the map of those road ‘improvements’ bears an uncanny resemblance to the map of rail routes likely to close after privatisation.’
In recent Road Lobby victories, the Department of Transport has forced road schemes ahead in Twyford Down, Oxleas Wood and Hackney Marshes. In Twyford Down protesters have been met with beatings by the Group 4 private security force as well as surveillance and phone tapping. Oxleas Wood, the last piece of ancient woodland in London, is having a six-lane highway drive through it. As with Hackney Marshes, the Department of the Environment (a misnomer if ever there was one) is giving alternative land to replace the open spaces lost. In both cases the land offered is in no sense either adequate or of equal social of natural value.
Poisonous technology unleashed
Throughout the twentieth century but particularly since 1945, a scientific and technological revolution in the chemicals, nuclear, electronic and oil/petroleum derivatives industries has taken to new heights capital’s destruction and pollution of our natural environment. Never before have so many lethal chemical and toxic substances been dumped into the earth’s waters in such quantities.
Controlling, treating and minimising such waste is regarded as an unproductive expenditure. Thus the government legalises water pollution making it policy that ‘rivers have to be used for waste disposal by industry’. In consequence, Britain is the biggest polluter of seas in Northern Europe. A Greenpeace study of the ‘Filthy Fifty’ British industries shows them to be legally discharging 1.7bn tonnes of pollutants into British and European waters. Annually they infect these waters with 16 tonnes of mercury, 34 tonnes of cadmium, 9,660 tonnes of oil, 2,300 tonnes of organohalogens and 2,492 tonnes of zinc.
British capital systematically breaches legal limits on pollution. The same Greenpeace report cites Dow Chemicals discharging 21 chemicals into The Wash which do not even appear on its legal list of pollutants. Since 1991 British Steel has breached its limits 19 times as have Beecham Pharmaceuticals. Since 1990 EC pollution standards have been breached over 400 times for estuaries and rivers.
The social and natural consequences of this pollution are enormous and ominous. The National Rivers Authority (NRA) confirms that river pollution is getting worse. Since 1985 5,800km of English and Welsh rivers have become more polluted and over 1,400km of Britain’s best rivers have deteriorated. In many parts of the country toxic pollutants, pesticides and PCBs have been detected in fish and wildlife. Many of the chemicals and pesticides seep into groundwaters and acquifers which supply drinking water and are virtually impossible to clean up. As a result millions of people in Britain drink water contaminated with chemicals and pesticides. Radioactive waste poses particularly terrible dangers. Yet BNFL regularly discharges such waste at its Springfield Works in Lancashire. The banks of the River Ribble have been extensively contaminated as a result. Despite legal obligations to reduce radioactive discharges, BNFL argues that ‘alternative (effluent reduction systems) would lead to an incremental cost that would effectively price BNFL out of the market.’ As ever, profit before people.
Privatisation: where there’s brass there’s muck
The newly privatised water companies now have profit as their only goal. Yorkshire water was recently prosecuted for discharging raw sewage containing untreated human waste and even condoms into a stream at Driffield. In 1991 24% of Britain’s bathing beaches failed to meet EC bacteria standards. Annually 300 million gallons of raw or virtually untreated sewage is dumped into the English and Welsh seas. Notwithstanding this sordid reality, British water companies are campaigning, in the words of the Financial Times for ‘more flexible standards on drinking water’ regarding current ones to be ‘unnecessary and too stringent’ and warning that a ‘complete elimination’ of lead from water could cost £8bn.
A major culprit in air pollution, besides the car, is the privatised electricity industry. Each year the 12 UK Regional Electricity Companies pump 200m tonnes of carbon dioxide into the air, in addition to 2.6m tonnes of sulphur dioxide, 790,000 tonnes of nitrogen oxides which contribute to acid rain and global warming. The power stations are major causes of acid rain which by 1989 had left 28% of British trees significantly damaged as well as severely affecting fisheries. They also generate 38,000 cubic meters of hazardous radioactive waste.
The most efficient method of reducing this damage is to fund research on clean fuel technology and vastly improve efficiency in electricity use. But the electricity industry is opposed to such measures. It makes its profits by selling more and more electricity not from encouraging its more efficient use. in 1990, 90% of the electricity industry’s profits came from selling electricity as opposed to service retail outlets and electrical contract work. In its championing of nuclear power, the British government has repeatedly attacked pollution generated by coal-fired power stations. This is rich coming from a government which has refused to fund clean coal research. Indeed in February, the government announced that it is to end all funding of clean technology research at Cheltenham. Such work could produce not only cleaner but also cheaper ways of burning coal but is doomed because it would provide one less stick to beat the miners with.
Where there’s muck there’s brass
British land is also being systematically poisoned, becoming a dumping ground for hazardous toxic and chemical wastes. Whilst most dangerous toxic wastes are dumped into the Third World, Britain imported 160,000 tonnes worth in 1989. By 1995 its incinerating capacity is
scheduled to rise to 500,000 tonnes. Much of both domestic and industrial waste, incinerated or not, is dispersed in landfills where chemical combustion makes timebombs of them. Over 10,000 of these are distributed across Britain with little or no monitoring. With regulations less stringent than in Germany, the USA or Switzerland, Britain has become the second largest European importer of dangerous waste. In 1989 it was one of the fastest growing businesses, worth £734 million. Defending the profits from poisons, Sir Hugh Rossi, Chair of a House of Commons Select Committee on the Environment said in 1989 that the toxic waste trade ‘is an important contributor to the nation’s balance of payments.’
The government’s attitude to all this is made plain by the fact that its Controlled Waste Inspectorate to cover more than 4,000 sites licensed to deal in the disposal of toxic waste, has but five officers. More recently, the government has put aside plans for a register of contaminated land. It was deemed too expensive to survey land for contamination! This move has won the approval of the building companies and major lenders who had complained, according to the Financial Times, that a register ‘threatened to blight property values across much of the country’ and ‘could inhibit commercial development’.
The destruction of the land
Capitalist agriculture has been characterised by the intensive use of land, raising its productivity through the use of massive amounts of fertilisers, pesticides and machinery. Farms have become bigger, smaller farmers have been driven out of business and large food companies have begun farming. Government has invariably protected the wealthy landowners and the large agri-business interests which now dominate food production.
Animals are subjected to the drive for ever upward productivity even when their products are already forming food mountains. Large tax subsidies are given to farmers and companies engaged in intensive animal farming. The results have become visible as recent food scares. The use of antibiotics in factory farmed chickens, for example has not prevented salmonella becoming endemic. Hundreds of cows continue to be slaughtered each week because, to cheapen feeding costs, they have been fed the contaminated remains of sheep with scrapie. Thus Mad Cow disease has entered the human food chain with unknown consequences. The response of former Agriculture Minister John Gummer was to scorn health fears by feeding beefburgers to his unfortunate child as photographers clicked away.
The land itself has been scarred by intensive production which has enabled farmers to grow four times as much wheat on the same land as they could forty years ago. Extensive use of fertilisers, pesticides, land drainage to allow cropping of normally unsuitable land, the use of heavy machinery and the growth of winter wheat have all contributed to soil erosion.
The problem is potentially explosive. In Our Food Our Land, Richard Body writes:
‘Take the not untypical county of Bedfordshire: according to scientists at the government’s soil research station at Rothamstead, Bedfordshire is losing its soil at an average rate of one tonne’ an acre each year. If this loss is allowed to continue, some time in the twenty first century the farmland of Bedfordshire will become agriculturally useless and no longer worth cultivating.’
As the soil has been depleted, artificial fertilisers are used in even greater quantities. Between 1961 and 1981 fertiliser use trebled. By 1989 farmers were spending £757 million on these products. Many types of grain are now dependent on heavy fertiliser use. The result of heavy use of nitrogen fertilisers has been that the safety of water is seriously compromised. Nitrates are cancer-causing and British water supplies now exceed World Health Organisation guidelines.
Pesticide use has increased – in 1973 farmers spent £37 million on these, by 1989 the amount was £440 million. Paraquat and 245-T (otherwise known as Agent Orange and used to deadly effect by the US in Vietnam) are commonly used. Not only are farm workers killed and injured by these poisons but the residue in food is alarming. Many substances used in Britain are banned elsewhere but the data on their toxicity remains an Official Secret here. The Ministry of Agriculture justifies this on the grounds of ‘commercial confidentiality’. In 1989 the British chemical companies’ income from farmers was £1,197 million. It is the political and economic weight of these forces which have created a form of agriculture which is now endangering the health of the population and the long-term future of food production.
Who will oppose the polluters?
In the run up to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, John Major said ‘We have not destroyed the world out of greed but out of ignorance’. Although Major clearly suffers more than his fair share of ignorance on many issues, there have been enough voices raised about environmental dangers to make ignorance an unconvincing defence for any government. Britain’s major contribution to the Rio debate was to lead the move to drop all references to the environmental responsibilities of multinational corporations. Major is clearly not ignorant about who his paymasters are.
None of the capitalist parties, Tory, Liberal Democrat or Labour, has the slightest interest in taking the steps that would be required to begin to halt the social and natural damage wrought by imperialism.
We have shown that the polluters – the multinationals – are immensely powerful. They can buy governments and indeed, as the Iraq war for oil showed, they can hire armies. Who then can and will stand against them? Those who have no interest in the profit system – the oppressed and the working class throughout the world. Pollution does not stop at national boundaries. Nor are the activities of the multinationals concentrated in one nation. The working class internationally has a common interest in opposing the multinationals and the pollution they create.
To do so they will need to build new movements with a strong anti-imperialist and socialist outlook. Many schools of socialist thought have been guilty of disregarding the importance of the environmental question. Prime amongst the guilty have been socialists in the imperialist countries. They have persistently refused to acknowledge the fact that the capitalist drive for growth at all costs and the consequent rampant consumerism of the imperialist nations is both destructive of the poor majority and the natural environment. They have equated socialism with a standard of living produced by the imperialist exploitation of the poor and the earth’s resources. Socialists must begin to take up this issue and to recognise that socialism does not mean cars and luxuries for all but means the satisfaction of the basic requirements of human life, something that is denied to two thirds of the world’s population. Only when such needs are met can humanity begin to develop its own capacities and its harmonious relationship with the natural world.
Despite the weaknesses of the socialist movement on environmental issues, it remains the case that, as we said in FRFI 108 (July/September 1992):
‘It is only socialists who have argued for a planned use of resources, international cooperation and the liberation of the poor and oppressed. All of these which have been on our banner for 150 years, are the preconditions for the solution to the environmental catastrophe facing the world. It is time socialists started to push our message home: only socialism can save the planet.’
