The tragic consequences, for the mass of humanity, of capitalism’s brutal and cold-blooded accumulation of private wealth are now daily exposed in extreme weather events. Whole towns, provinces and districts are inundated; homes, jobs and lives swept away in storms and floods, or lost in drought and hunger, while the ecosystem faces a new mass extinction. With an unrelenting rise in temperatures, with devastating consequences for food production, the imperialist states are incapable of providing a comprehensive remedy. On the contrary, they refuse to take determined action. Imperialism is an anarchic, competitive, self-destructive system condemned to internecine warfare. It is determined to drag humanity through hell and high water to retain exclusive ownership of the world’s means of production, forcing open new fronts in the class struggle. JAMES MARTIN and SOMA KISAN report.
A stark reality
Global ocean temperatures this year are ‘off the charts’. Oceans have absorbed more atmospheric heat, generated by record carbon emissions. Warmer seas fuel stronger cyclones and extreme rainfall, wreaking havoc on land. At sea, warm surface water blocks oxygen and CO2 absorption, seriously threatening marine life.
Already, between January and May this year, floods have devastated southern Brazil, and parts of Argentina, Afghanistan, Indonesia, New Zealand, Oman, Texas, Uruguay, and Western Australia. Short intense storms are increasingly responsible for destructive flash flooding, landslides and debris flows. In Britain record-breaking rainfall and floods will continue, becoming ten times more likely at the end of the century.
Greenland is now losing 30 milliontonnesoficeanhour,which along with Arctic melt has slowed down the North Atlantic current with its warming effect in the North Atlantic. Cooler temperatures will especially affect Britain and Ireland, as well as western Europe, parts of North America and the Sahel region.
Drought is the greatest threat of all environmental disasters, mostly hitting agricultural land and so its workers. The latest example amongst dozens is severe drought across Southern Africa. More than 24 million people across Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe face hunger, malnutrition and water scarcity.
Climate change damage was already estimated to total $2.86 trillion from 2000 to 2019 ($143bn annually). As capitalist industry continues to spew carbon, these costs will increase to $1.7-$3.1 trillion per year by 2050. These consequences will be felt acutely by the working class, especially in the most vulnerable countries and will intensify pressures for migration as environments become uninhabitable.
A 2021 report (Groundswell Part 2: Acting on Internal Climate Migration), predicts that ‘slow-onset climate events’ like water scarcity, declining crop productivity and rising sea levels may force as many as 216 million people to migrate within their countries by 2050, on top of the 21.5 million already displaced by weather events between 2008 and 2016. Another report suggests that climate migrant numbers could be as high as 1.2 billion by 2050 (Climate Change: 17 Jan 2024), as rising heat, collapsing farm yields, water shortages, and storm destruction worsen. The UN World Migration Report 2024 also suggests that migration may only be an option for the better off sections of the working class. Even facing severe insecurity, migration may be impossible because the most oppressed cannot afford to arrange an escape, even in the direst situation. Absolute distress, abandonment and death haunt many millions.
Imperialism’s reluctant response
Marx identified the creation of a huge rift in the Earth’s metabolic processes created by capitalism, which he termed a ‘metabolic rift’, the blocking of natural processes that undermines nature’s own renewal. This rift cannot be resolved by capitalism which stands in an antagonistic relation to the rest of nature. It steals from nature irrespective of the damage done. Climate collapse is but a symptom of this antagonism.
Remediation, reversing the dis- astrous effects of global pollution by cleaning up our rivers, oceans, land and atmosphere, is absolutely essential and the only long-term solution to climate change. Currently any organised effective remediation by capitalism of the damage done would require the inconceivable step of capitalism voluntarily packing its own bags. That process can only be undertaken when the working class becomes the ruling class.
Instead, convinced that they can protect their current interests, the bourgeoisie takes limited steps either to mitigate, reduce the severity of climate change by restricting the amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, or simply adapt, prepare for the inevitable impacts of climate change by building more resilient infrastructure. Current climate change funding focuses heavily on mitigation and very little on adaptation (5% of funding) even though adaptation is essential at this stage to protect the working class.
The limits of capitalism’s ‘miti- gation’ approach are demonstrated by the devious ‘net zero by 2050’ target. Between now and 2050 carbon emissions will continue apace, so that at ‘net zero’, greenhouse gas density, while no longer increasing, will be far higher than now and global heating far worse. Imperialism has cynically granted itself more than a quarter of a century to try to readjust its exploitative efforts, indifferent to the increased suffering that will result.
The politically reactionary nature of ‘adaptation’ is displayed in Florida. The words ‘climate change’ are being removed from the state code by Governor Ron DeSantis. Florida’s existing natural gas fossil based energy system is now to be fortified against evasively expressed ‘natural and manmade threats’. The new legislation obstructs renewable energy use in the state. While Florida’s millionaires ensure their own roads and buildings are raised above ground level, build sea defences and flood pumping schemes, one of the most rapid sea level surges on Earth, ‘abnormal and unprecedented’, is now besieging the southern US, choking septic systems, swallowing roads and drowning wetlands.
Not enough money
One Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) report last November suggested that to finance mitigation and adaptation measures globally and keep the average global temperature under 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average required $8.1 trillion per year, rising to $9 trillion in 2030. This estimate was made before the 1.5°C Paris target was breached in January 2024 (see FRFI 299 ‘Climate crisis – the threat to capital’). From 2031 to 2050, over $10.4 trillion will be needed each year. This compares to the average annual climate finance flows overall of only $1.3 trillion in 2021/2022. Now overtaken by events, the CPI projected a conservative 2.5°C warming by the end of the century, yet lethal heat and humidity will kill millions before 2°C is reached.
Adaptation finance totalled $63bn in 2021/2022. Developing countries need $212bn per year for this from now until 2030, and $239bn per year from 2031 to 2050, 3.5 times more than currently available. Unlike imperialist states the oppressed nations have no choice but simply to adjust to the circumstances to survive. This includes building and reinforcing flood defences and safe buildings, and restoring natural ecosystems like mangrove forests to act as natural buffers against storms and rising sea levels. The 50 least- developed countries, with one billion people, but contributing less than 4% of the world’s GHG emissions, received only $11bn (18%) of total adaptation finance. The ten countries most affected by climate change between 2000 and 2019 received only $23bn, less than 2% of total climate finance. The most oppressed sections of the international working class are the first to be sacrificed to climate change.
The working class movement
Faced with climate collapse, the working class has risen up in its millions in thousands of movements and actions. These movements are diverse and many spontaneous as environmental crises both global and local drive oppressed people to organise and demand a better world. Student-led movements like Fridays for Future, originally spearheaded by Greta Thunberg, have spread beyond their developed country origins and sparked hundreds of student strikes and marches in developing countries like India, Brazil and South Africa. In India alone, an estimated six million students participated in climate-related strikes in 2019.
Indigenous communities fight to protect their homes and environments daily, using protests, legal challenges and international campaigns to halt the destructive forces of multinational companies. They recognise the direct ties between imperialism and climate change, having consistently been the first peoples sacrificed to capitalism’s drive for profit. In Brazil, over 500 indigenous groups defend the Amazon rainforest from deforestation and mining; in Ecuador, the Waorani people resist the sacrifice of their ancestral lands in the Yasuni National Park to oil profiteers. In Canada and the US, Native American tribes have been integral to the struggle against massive oil pipelines. In India, Adivasi (indigenous) communities fight against mining corporations and coal mining expansion that destroy their way of life. In Indonesia, the Dayak people resist deforestation and extractive palm oil production. In Nigeria, the Ogoni people have fought for decades against degradation caused by the oil industry in the Niger Delta.
As the climate crisis deepens, the working class and oppressed people will organise more and more to fight against the forces of imperialism.
Already links between climate and other struggles against imperialism are being recognised as climate protesters increasingly incorporate the fight for a free Palestine, a free Congo, a free Sudan into their demands. As consciousness grows so also do the ruling class’s deep fears of revolution.
Assault on protests
The workers’ long struggle against environmental destruction has seen at least 1,910 leading activists murdered worldwide between 2012 and 2022. Agents of land and mine owners supplying global corporations are the provocateurs. Latin America witnessed 90% of these killings. More than 1,000 human rights defenders and social leaders have been killed in Colombia alone since 2016.
In Britain this year the Arts Council was forced to reverse its threat to penalise artists who make political statements, aimed at criticism of the Zionist slaughter in Gaza and the West Bank. If maintained this would have affected those 600 artists who in January protested against the deportation order on Marcus Decker for his October 2022 Just Stop Oil protest on Queen Elizabeth bridge near London. A separate appeal was also made by hundreds of scientists. Decker was condemned to serve one of the longest prison sentences for peaceful protest in modern British history (two years seven months), along with co-protester Morgan Towland (three years). Their appeal was rejected, Lady Chief Justice Carr saying the sentences met a ‘legitimate’ aim of deterring others. An appeal against this decision to the Supreme Court was blocked. These sentences and severe bail conditions (including curfews, tagging and political speaking bans) were criticised by the UN special rapporteur on environmental defenders, Michel Forst. He also expressed concern about bans on political defence statements by environmental protesters on trial under the repressive ‘public nuisance’ section of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and Public Order Act 2023. In court a judge banned the accused from referring to the climate crisis, fuel poverty or civil rights movements, reflecting the ruling class’s fear that jurors will sympathise with the cause of the defendants. In 2023, the new Public Order Act saw its first victim, Stephen Gingell, imprisoned for six months for a peaceful march on a road.
Tasks of the working class
The urgent necessity of transforming, through a political revolution, the model of capitalism into a planned cooperative system of international alliances between the previously excluded, is obvious. The political development of the working classes in order to take control over every decision currently imposed upon us by the large corporations and their state machinery, is the only way to stop the plunge into environmental catastrophe. Socialist Cuba stands as a shining example of what is possible when the working class is in power: its plan, Tarea Vida (Life Task), prepares Cuba for the effects of climate change 100 years into the future, incorporating not just climate science but also the nuanced impacts and inputs of local communities across the whole island.
Capitalism is extinction! Socialism is survival!
