Why the planet cannot live with global capitalism
It is becoming more and more apparent that ecological struggles are central to creating socialism.
The protests against the IMF, World Bank and WTO at Seattle, Washington and Prague have shown how important environmental questions are to building a movement against globalisation.
At the same time the rising price of oil, the impact of global warming, increases in atmospheric pollution and a host of other developments have placed 'green' issues at the centre of political debate.
But what do Marxists have to offer in this area? Does the rise of the ecological movement mean that Marxism has become less relevant - or does that movement need Marxist ideas to fulfil its radical potential?
ANDY KILMISTER reports.
A great deal of the thought of Marx and Engels was centred on issues that we would now recognise as ecological. Engels' book The Condition of the Working Class in England, written as long ago as 1844, discusses not just the situation in workplaces and trade unions, but also the environment in which workers lived in Manchester.
He outlines the effect of industrialisation on the air they breathed and the water they drank and devotes many pages to the dramatic effect of industrialisation on the landscape of the North East. In a similar way, Marx's great work Capital looks at questions like food adulteration, and links this to the low wages of workers which force them to eat bread mixed with alum, dust and chalk, as well as to the intensification of work in the baking trade.
Recent works like John Bellamy Foster's Marx's Ecology (Monthly Review Press) have shown how central ecological ideas have been to the Marxist tradition since its birth.
For Marx, capitalism has two central characteristics which make it incompatible with preserving the earth's ecology. Firstly, capitalism has an inherent drive towards commodification. Throughout its history things previously held in common have been taken into private ownership in the pursuit of profit.
The first example of this, which provided the basis for the foundation of capitalism, was the enclosure of common land, from the sixteenth century onwards. But since then capitalism has depended on transforming freely held objects into private commodities.
Today, plant remedies used for generations in Latin America and South East Asia are being patented by US and European multinationals. Indian rice growers have seen the recipe for Basmati rice, which they have grown for centuries appropriated by foreign companies.
Even the genetic structure of individuals who have undergone particular medical treatments is now being patented by pharmaceutical firms.
This means that the environment has increasingly become fragmented into private commodities. The complex links between different parts of this interrelated whole are ignored as commodity-owners concentrate on maximising the returns from their particular spoils.
What might, from their individual perspective as capitalists, appear rational for them, is disastrous for the world as a whole. The classic examples of this are world-wide phenomena like global warming and the destruction of the ozone layer, where capitalist production actually threatens the survival of the planet.
The second characteristic of capitalism which is incompatible with environmental security is its drive towards expansionism.
Capitalism is unique among the various economic systems ("modes of production" in Marx's terms) which have existed up until now, in the way it depends upon continuous expansion for its economic viability.
Profits for capitalists depend upon exploiting living labour in the process of production. As capitalism develops, such labour works with an ever-increasing amount of machinery and fixed capital - which does not generate new profits.
If production remained at the same level, this would tend to drive down the rate of profits, and threaten future production.
So, to maintain profits, productivity has to increase, generating more and more commodities. These commodities in turn have to be sold to realise the new profits, either by the creation of new geographical markets or by generating new "needs" for products among either capitalists or workers.
This movement towards expansion is a characteristic of capitalism (though it is a deeply unstable process characterised by alternating booms and slumps). But it is in constant conflict with the fragile linkages binding together the earth's ecology.
Capitalism's expansionary drive has shaped the environment for centuries, for example in its discovery and exploitation of new sources of energy. But it has done so in a deeply distorted way, governed not by any long-term plan of developing the world's resources, but by the immediate pressure of the market.
These two characteristics of capitalism make it fundamentally opposed to ecological sustainability, as Marx and Engels recognised.
However, this opposition takes dramatically different forms in different historical periods. The ecological crises generated by capitalism are in many ways similar to economic crises.
At each point capitalist production generates ecological contradictions which in turn threaten the stability of the system. Such crises are resolved, but in a way which in turn sets up future contradictions and tensions.
However, until such contradictions become apparent it can appear that the market can generate the basis for preserving the environment - in the way that, for example in Eastern Europe today, capitalist firms like Asea Brown Boveri are making environmental reclamation a central part of their foreign investment strategy.
Tracing the links between capitalism and environmental destruction cannot just be done by looking at the abstract nature of capitalism as a system, but requires concrete analysis of particular historical periods.
What then are the particular contradictions between the current phase of capitalist production, globalisation backed up by an international neo-liberal offensive, and ecological sustainability?
There are a whole range of examples which could be pointed to here. The following three seem particularly appropriate, given the direction of current political struggles.
The first example is that of the exploitation of primary commodities. The recent agitation over high fuel prices and the worry of capitalists about the price of oil only underlines the extent to which growth in the imperialist countries over the last two decades has depended on low commodity prices.
Apart from oil, these remain at record low levels, and even oil is still only half its 1980 price in real terms. The ability of the US economy in particular to grow for the last nine years without inflation rising has depended crucially on these low prices.
How has this been achieved? In the long boom following World War 2 commodity prices were kept low by the systematic application of science to the production of synthetic substitutes.
But by the 1970s this potential was largely exhausted, leading to a dramatic rise in commodity prices and inflation.
This has been reversed since 1980 by a massive offensive in the developing world, promoting expansion of food and commodity production for export and largely reversing the development towards manufacturing of the previous decades.
A key element in allowing this has been the growth of international debt, forcing countries into expanding export revenues to pay off their debts. Latin America was first in this process, followed by sub-Saharan Africa and, after 1991, the Eastern European countries and the former USSR.
The ecological consequences of this dramatic shift to export-oriented agriculture and raw materials production are obvious. The destruction of the rainforests of Latin America and South East Asia to provide timber and clear land for crops is only the clearest example.
In retrospect, the most surprising thing about the recent rise in oil prices is that is has taken so long to arrive and that it is still so limited. This is a testimony to the integration of the rulers of the Middle East into an imperialist framework.
However, the limited rise in the price of oil, partly stimulated by the slightly more independent regime of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, is enough to scare signficantly Western employers and policy makers. As the Economist recently observed, the rise in oil prices is not enough on its own to cause a recession.
But if it reduces confidence in the increasingly shaky US stock market, then its impact would be dramatic. Given this it is clear how deep a change would be required if global commodity use were to approach ecological sustainability.
The second example of the impact of globalisation on the environment, also apparent in the recent fuel crisis, is the rise of 'just-in-time production' - originally in the car industry, but now across large parts of the economy in the USA, Europe and Japan.
The move towards carrying low stocks necessitates regular deliveries of goods to factories and shops. Originally in Japan, Toyota managed this by grouping suppliers around the assembling factory, in the so-called 'Toyota City'.
But gradually this raised costs, both wages and rental values, in the surrounding area. Increasingly, then, firms have started to organise just-in-time production on a widely dispersed geographical basis.
This can only be done effectively through a massive amount of transportation, and it is no accident that the rise of such production techniques over the 1980s and 90s went hand in hand with a major programme of road building, particularly across Europe, and a dramatic growth of lorry transport.
This both encouraged and was encouraged by the deregulation of road haulage. Again, the ecological consequences of this change in the nature of production have been severe, leading to congestion, air pollution and the loss of countryside to tarmac.
Such costs have not been borne by the companies using these techniques, but have been passed on to society as a whole (particularly the working class, who are least able to move to areas with low transport densities) and to future generations.
The third example of the impact of globalisation on the environment comes through the massive expansion of foreign investment over the last two decades.
Not only has this increased the pace of the extraction of primary commodities des-cribed above, it has also led to the export of ecologically damaging production to countries where it has been thought that resistance will be less.
"The massive expansion of foreign investment over the last two decades has led to the export of ecologically damaging production to countries where it has been thought that resistance will be less."
A famous example in the 1980s was the Bhopal disaster in India as a result of toxic leakages from a Union Carbide plant. To take just one case in recent years, it is worth looking at the country which is the single largest recipient of direct investment in the developing world, China.
In 1997 Richard Smith published a detailed account of the impact of economic conditions in China on the environment, in New Left Review, largely using official Chinese government figures. His findings are devastating.
Each year China discharges some 36 billion tons of untreated industrial waste water and raw sewage into the country's rivers, lakes and coastal seas. This is equivalent to the entire annual flow of the Yellow River.
Four-fifths of China's rivers and lakes are seriously polluted, with their water unfit for drinking and their fish unfit to eat. Since the 1980s some 10 million hectares of farmland have been polluted by rural industrialisation, causing losses of crops and animals worth some $2.7 bn.
During 1992 and 1993 more than 100,000 Chinese were poisoned by pesticides and fertilisers. More than 14,000 of them died. Polluted air and respiratory disease is now the leading cause of death in urban areas of China.
In China's ten biggest cities some 3,000 tons of plastic wastes are produced every day. The government estimates that environmental losses total some $12 billion annually.
The import of cheap commodities, the rise of just-in-time production and the expansion of foreign investment are not marginal aspects of contemporary capitalism. They are central to the whole process of globalisation and to the neo-liberal offensive. And ecological questions are central to them.
These strategies depend on the process of commodification outlined earlier, where the environment is taken into private ownership and the costs of ecological destruction are not borne by those who receive profits but are transferred to workers and to future generations.
Any struggle against globalisation has to make ecological considerations equally central to its theory and its practice, and to build on the insights of Marx and Engels in a contemporary setting.
We need to build a movement which makes the analysis of the impact of capitalism on the environment a crucial part of the struggle against the system.
The massive expansion of foreign investment over the last two decades has led to the export of ecologically damaging production to countries where it has been thought that resistance will be less."