SAVAGE CAPITALISM — Socialist Resistance newspaper

the Ecosocialist This is an edited version of the main document that will be discussed at next month's Annual General Meeting of Socialist Resistance. The document explains why Socialist Resistance is discussing changing its political programme, perspectives and public profile towards being an anticapitalist, ecosocialist organisation. This is to make explicit a change in our perspectives that has been underway for at least a year and now needs to be signaled publicly. At the core of this change is the contention of the authors of the text that free-market, privatising neoliberalism has over 20 years arrived at a new and deadly phase - what we call 'savage capitalism'. The document explains why now only a socialist response that centrally addresses the environmental crisis is adequate to the current period. Socialist Resistance Special PULL-OUT 1. Introduction: Savage capitalism - wrecking lives, wrecking the planet Hardly anyone now doubts that humanity is facing an enormous environmental crisis. The recent report by the International Panel on Climate Change, although watered down to meet the objections of the worst polluters, spells out what this means in graphic detail.

Billions will face disaster from flooding, desertification, water shortage and other environmental consequences of global warming -unless there is a radical reversal of humanity's production and consumption consequences.

The events of this year's "Typhoon Summer' in which there have been massive floods in China, India, Australia, the UK and many other European countries -combined with soaring heatwaves of 40°-plus in southern Europe - can only be explained by climate change, around which there is now a massive scientific COSCIOUS.

Climate change may be a result of the industrialisation in general, but has been given a massive boost by capitalist productivism, which has greatly intensified during the last 25 years of neoliberalism. To see how this has happened, it is worth looking at the old debate about the 'collapse' of work that was supposed to happen as computer technology became generalised.

In 1979 ASTMS General Secretary Clive Jenkins published a book with the union's chief researcher, Barrie Sherman now a Labour MP), entitled The Collapse of Work. The basic idea was that with the application of computerisation, productivity would grow massively, leading to a rapid decline in the need for human labour.

The question would be -how will we use all that leisure time? How are we going to ensure that the limited amount of work is spread around, and that everyone gets paid? These problems, it was argued, could be easily overcome with a little bit of social engineering.

A quarter of a century on, nothing like this has happened. Computerisation has not led to the collapse of work; on the contrary there are more workers on a world scale than ever before - as Paul Mason puts it in his recent book Live Working or Die Fighting (1), the working class has 'gone global'. Even in countries with high levels of employment like Britain, people are working longer and harder. Average hours worked have gone up since 1979. The paradise of short working hours combined with affluence never happened. How can we explain this paradox? Jenkins' and Sherman's idea would only have worked if labour is mainly about social reproduction and satisfying human needs. But under capitalism it isn't. The authors missed the crucial point - capitalism is about generating ever larger amounts of profits, which requires ever larger numbers of commodities and ever larger inputs of labour to exploit.

So, 28 years down the line we live in a society with 42 brands of washing powder available at most supermarkets, 93 different personal bank account options, 72 family saloon car models available, 17 celebrity magazines, 56 brands of mp3 player in the shops (not counting the internet) and 541 different types of telephone you can install for your landline.

Cheap airlines go to 423 destinations from Britain, but domestic rail transport is unaffordable by most people! In return for all this, people work longer and harder, have less secure penAlternative Sept 2007 sions and a more difficult old age, bad public services and health care, and the poorer sections of society have a much worse quality of life overall. The gap between what is possible under the Sherman/Jenkins scenario and the realities of daily life today is immense. It is this massive intensification of the production of (often useless and environmentally damaging) commodities that has given an extra twist to the environmental crisis.

All this has happened not only because of the general priorities of any form of capitalism, but because of the present phase of "savage capitalism, stalking the earth with all sense of social responsibility abandoned, increasing amounts of surveillance, violence, war and torture, and aimed at short term profits squeezed from the labour of the poor, rather than the development of social solidarity, peace and the possibility for most people to live a happy life. It is now obvious that this morbid phase of capitalism has brought upon humanity the biggest ever threat to its existence - the threat of environmental catastrophe. The overall threat to humanity and the planet we sum up here under four headings - environmental catastrophe, imperialist war and the crushing of the third world, savage capitalism in everyday life and the surveillance-security lockdown state. They are all linked; they all are part of a single system of power and exploitation.

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"Neoliberalism', with the added ingredient of USstyle neoconservatism, has degenerated into a new and more barbarous phase -"savage capitalism'.

This new phase of capitalism forces an inevitable conclusion - only by a total transformation in politics and production, in other words a transformation of our social relations, can a sustainable future for humanity be established.

We are facing the biggest -ever crisis of human civilisation. No previous crisis has ever posed the existence of human civilisation so directly. Revolutionary answers are needed, qualitative answers which go way beyond the standard no to slogans of daily campaigns, and point the way to an ecosocialist alternative.

For Socialist Resistance this means a turn in our political stance, our campaigning priorities, our forms of organisation and our self-definition. 2. Ecological materialism and revolutionary ecology Contemporary Marxism has been late in relating to the looming environmental crisis, ceding ground to the ecologists and the Green parties in the latter part of the 20th century - at least as far as the urgency of the situation is concerned.

It is now time to reassert that not only is the defence of the environment firmly located in the Marxist tradition, but that it is only through such a critique that a lasting and adequate solution to the ecological crisis will be found.

key theoretical refounder of this tradition has been John Bellamy Foster in his book Marx's Ecology. He systematically established that ecological conceptions were central to the ideas of Marx (and indeed of Darwin) in their battles to establish a materialist conception of history in the middle part of the 19th century.

That it was the idea that humankind was a part of nature, a product of it rather than divine creation, which Socialist Resistance Special PULL-OUT established the basis for the relationship between humankind and nature and an ecological as well as an historical-materialist conception of history.

Bellamy Foster consequently contends that: "Marx's world-view was deeply, and indeed systematically, ecological and that this ecological perspective derived from his materialism".

From the start Marx's notion of the alienation of human labour from what it produced was connected to an understanding of the alienation of human beings from nature. Marx pointed out that the commodification of nature under the capitalist mode of production and private ownership led to the "practical degradation of nature".

In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx points out that the large towns' workers had to endure conditions where light, air and cleanliness were no longer part of their existence but rather darkness, polluted air, and raw sewage, constituted their material environment.

It was in Capital that Marx's materialist conception of nature became fully integrated with his material1st conception of history. As Bellamy Foster points out: "Marx employed the concept of 'metabolism' to define the labour process as a process between man and nature, a process by which

thorough his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism with nature in a rational way, completely beyond the capabilities of bourgeois society".

True Marx and Engels saw the issue of ecology as mainly from the point of view of the degradation of the life of the proletariat rather than a major factor in the revolutionary process itself - which is the concept ecosocialists or revolutionary ecologists have to come to terms with today. The goal, as Bellamy Foster puts it, is to "understand and develop a revolutionary ecological view that links social transformation with the transformation of the human relation with nature in ways that we now consider ecological". The Socialist Resistance ecosocialist turn also bases itself on work done by third world activists, including those clearly identified as part of the radical left, on the question of the environment.

Vandana Shiva's 1992 critique of the Green revolution in India for example is a searing indictment of productivism in a rural agricultural context. Her activism and that of a whole section of the Indian left, particularly feminists, around water and in particular the question of dams has important lessons for us.

Our Latin America solidarity work has allowed us to discuss some of these questions, as Cuba and

have both attempted to integrate ecological dimensions into the revolutionary process. 3. Capitalist productivism Revolutionary socialists have always been in favour of the development of the economy, on a global and national basis, to meet the needs of humanity. But that doesn't mean we favour the production of an increasing number of commodities of any type whatsoever.

On the contrary, huge swathes of production under capitalism are socially useless, and either redundant or directly harmful. Some products - like cars - harm the environment directly; others are useless and just use up huge amounts of the plant's resources.

In the past Marxists have acted as though the production of commodities and the use to which they are subsequently put have no impact on the environment.

In fact they can have a huge effect. The profligate waste of the planet's resources in pursuit of an unending cascade of commodities, artificially created 'wants' generated by the advertising industry, is criminal. It only exists because that's the way that capitalism functions. The constant stream of "new commodities is vital to maintain profits and fight off rival firms.

However, our critique of the so-called commodity spectacle' does not mean we are against all further economic development, especially in the third world. Neither does it mean that decisive new inventions in the future should not be applied, and the level of technology should remain stagnant.

But it does mean that new products have to be justified on the basis of their social usefulness, and not because they are a repackaging of an established product to make more profits. We cannot abandon industrialisation and go back to the feudal village. But we can reorganise society so that the goods and services produced are socially useful and environmentally friendly.

And we can make democratic decisions about the trade off that people want to make between working time and economic development. Maximising economic growth is far from rational because it means that the central priority in the lives of most people is (increasing amounts of work.

That much production under capitalism is useless is obvious. A classic example is Margaret Thatcher's 'great car economy. No rational person could possibly think that the socially and environmentally most friendly way to organise transport was to centre it on private cars, and leave public transport to fill in the gaps. But that is just what has happened in the last 25 years with catastrophic results to the environment and neglect of public transport. Huge inputs of socially useless labour time are put into the design of competing yet near identical models, their advertising and sales, the consequences in terms of deaths and injuries on the roads, the production of oil to keep the cars going, etc.

A fraction of the inputs of labour time and energy could produce a functioning, socially useful and much more environmentally friendly integrated public transport system. But it doesn't happen because that is not the way that capitalism works.

The great car economy is a classic example of how human priorities are distorted by the priority of profits. 4. Social dimensions of the environmental crisis - Apocalypse Soon The recent UN report highlighted the likely outcomes if global warming and carbon emissions are not tackled. It is not a question of whether climate change will occur - we are already in the thick of it.

Rather the question is whether starting from today's position, how can we minimise further emissions of greenhouse gases and how we can manage the effects of global warming as they kick in. In Britain the discussion of climate change has escalated but the "solutions" proposed remain marginal. The government has come up with a draft Bill which, though proposing statutory target for emissions, falls far short of what is necessary to tackle dangerous and accelerating climate change. Its proposed 60% cuts by 2050 and an interim 26-32%

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.. the Ecosocialist Alternative by 2020 are way below what is needed to prevent reaching the 2°C tipping point, when potentially global warming could spiral out of control.

Many scientists and environmentalists now agree that reductions in the order of 90% are going to be necessary to reverse the global warming process already underway. Meanwhile airport expansion goes ahead at a great pace and the government tells us that there will be no need for people to restrict their flights.

We are told that in any case Britain only accounts for 2% of world emissions (not an accurate figure of course) and whatever we do will be massively cancelled out by the escalating rate of emissions in China and India -with China completing a new power coal-tired station every two weeks.

This ignores the fact that it is the rich countries which have polluted the world and continue to be the main polluters. It also ignores that fact that there is little chance of countries like China and India doing anything serious about their emissions whilst the rich countries carry on polluting just the same.

As the IPCC report makes clear, the effects of desertification, water shortage and drought, crop loss and food crisis, an upsurge in diseases caused by lack of clean water and other environmental effects, will hit disproportionately at "those who are worst placed to deal with it" - ie the poor.

The rural and urban poor are the least able to find the resources to quickly modify their lives - to change location, to find alternative sources of water and food, to find medicines and medical care or to get emergency help in case of disaster. It will be the poor who will be the first victims of environmental crisis as the state and the ruling elite mobilises to defend the rich. This is true both in rural and urban areas, in the poor countries and the advanced capitalist countries as well. In this context, the effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans was a highly symbolic warning. It is highly likely that it was a climate change induced event - hurricanes and tropical storms are becoming

RECEIVING HOURS 5304 NOON MON FRI 600ш/1000м SAT more frequent and fiercer as the oceans off West Africa and the Caribbean get hotter each summer.

Second, the victims were disproportionately poor. The troops rushed to the city were there to defend order (in the rich areas) and property (ditto). The poor were left to fend for themselves for days on end while hundreds died, while the rich plotted how to use the catastrophe for a class-based eviction of undesirables (ie the poor and black people).

The tourist downtown area is restored to its full glory to ensure the tourist economy ticks over, while a huge section of the indigenous population is evicted.

In the third world, the increasing frequency of events induced by climate change, particularly floods, always hits the poor worst -because they live in the flimsiest housing, often in places were are insecure and dangerous - on floodplains, next to environmental squalor, with no adequate drainage and sanitation facilities.

Capitalism always rations resources in short supply towards the rich. Its weapons are military repression and the market - both are brutal killers.

Environmental crisis will make security, health, food, water and adequate housing in extremely short supply -and the poor will go the wall unless they fight back. That's why we shall see increasingly that class strug gles in the third world and beyond will take the form of struggles to get and to defend basic resources like food, food and housing.

Privatisation will be deepened to make all resources difficult to obtain by the poor - and always available to the rich. For the rich, everything is cheap.

According to Mike Davis, of the world's 6bn people, one billion live in slums -and the number is increas ing rapidly. Subject to the vagaries of environmental damage, especially through floods, and with grave shortages of drinkable water and sanitation, the third world slums are likely to become -even more than today - massive centres for disease and the generation of pandemics.

As Mike Davis points out, the first great wave of Avian *flu is much more likely to come from Jakarta than East Anglia.

Mark Lynas in his book High Tide points out that the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has estimated that 160,000 people are dying each year from the consequences of climate change - malaria, dysentery and malnutrition. And even that excludes some of the most extreme storm disasters plausibly linked to climate change, notably the tropical cyclone 1n Bangladesh in 1991, Socialist Resistance Special PULL-OUT which killed 138,000, as well as Hurricanes Mitch and Andrew in the Caribbean, both hyper-intense category-five typhoons. In its infamous document for a 'worst case scenario, the Pentagon projects a world ecological collapse -not in 200 years but in 20 or 30 years. According to the Observer (22 Feb 2004):

"A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, megadroughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world. "The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents."

The response of the Pentagon is a highly miltarised society, "Fortress America", whose primary purpose is to keep out those fleeing from the poor coun tries, and to defend the rich internally from the wrath of the dispossessed poor. It envisages using massive amounts of violence, including nuclear weapons, against anyone who stands in the way of the US gaining the resources it needs from anywhere in the world.

If it is always the poor who will pay the price for environmental disaster, it will be particularly and children who pay the price. Children because they are more vulnerable to disease, and less able to defend themselves from violence; and women because they have the main responsibility for childcare and child raising in nearly all poor societies - urban and rural, third world and first world.

In the third world, it will be overwhelmingly women who have to try to find water, firewood and food for families. Climate catastrophe is not only a class question, it is also a gender question.

Lack of food, shelter and water will increasingly force families to sell their children to become bonded labourers, virtual slaves (as already happens on a mass scale in India) or sex slaves, as already happens in many countries of the third world.

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5. Population growth and the

empowerment of

World population is forecast to rise from a current 6 billion to 9 billion by mid century, if not before. Such levels are unsustainable under capitalism.

So the debate about population control is already with us. If Malthusian, misogynist and racist solutons are not to triumph, ecosocialist solutions based on overcoming poverty and empowering women have to be fought for.

Whilst it is true that high birth rates generally accompany poverty and ignorance, most poor women do not actually want to spend their lives in childbirth and rearing. So a central demand of women's movements in both North and South has always been for access to safe and reliable (preferably free) contraception and abortion.

Poor people often have large families as an insurance against poverty in old age. When people become richer, birth rates go down.

Collectivisation of housework has also been a demand of feminists and socialists, and we need to revisit this area, when considering an alternative to capitalist individualism. Domestic violence and violence against women always increases dramatically during any societal breakdown.

A world of environmental catastrophe opens up the danger of massively increased militarism, repression and war. Ecological collapse may be survived by the rich minority, but it will devastate the poor. The fight against it is a vital part of the class struggle for socialism. WATER 15 A HUMAN RIGHT EPARATIO Socialist Resistance Special PULL-OUT 6. Savage capitalism in the advanced countries: Treadmill Society For 25 years the Western countries have been gripped by the policies of neoliberalism. This replaced the Keynesian, mixed economy, welfare-state model of the 1950s and '60s.

The essence of this system is massive privatisation and marketisation; nationalised industries like the water and energy utilities are privatised, and privatisation to varying degrees IS even introduced in to the education and health systems.

Neoliberalism destroys social goods in favour of private goods; through privatisation of utilities and key aspects of social care like homes for the elderly, the financial surplus is squeezed out of workers' current incomes and savings - all to the benefit of finance capital to whom all the utilities have huge debts. Mass insecurity is the result: the work process is transformed and labour discipline tightened. People work harder and longer to lead less secure and healthy lives.

This has been rightly characterised by John Bellamy Foster as the "treadmill now neoliberalism, as it

degenerates into savage

capitalism, is preparing another twist of the screw.

This is called private equity capital (PEC). PEC constitutes a new and massive threat to millions of workers. Briefly summed up, private equity companies are short term arrangements for borrowing vast amounts of money for a limited time.

These huge amounts of money are then used to buy up companies which are said to be 'under-performing' (like Sainsbury's, a target of private equity spivs). Once in the hands of PEC capitalists, the companies are asset-stripped, workers fired, those retained pushed onto poverty wages without pensions or benefits, and a huge profit made on the borrowed money.

PEC evidently builds nothing, contributes nothing and makes nothing -except short-term profits. Gordon Gecko - Michael Douglas' asset stripping sociopath in Wall Street - is a model of sanity and conscience compared with today's equity capitalist robbers.

Needless to say PEC is warmly welcomed by New Labour, in particular Gordon Brown. According

day despite the scathing

attack on the sector from

trade unions concerned over

job losses.... Mr Brown is

the latest Labour politician

to address the private equity

issue amid a growing storm

around the industry.

"Trade unions and some

Labour politicians have

lambasted private equity

companies for asset stripping, job cutting and a lack of openness over recent

weeks as a potential bid for

the supermarket chain

Sainsbury's has thrown the publicity-shy industry into the spotlight...

"Mr Brown's defence of

the sector comes in the wake of Tony Blair's public support of private equity investment this week."

PEC mania comes at a time when savage capitalism is preparing for a major assault on the last-ditch redoubts of welfare capitalism - the NHS and education, where the methods of the market, artificial targets and the introduction of private capital are evident.

Neoliberalism has swiveled the priorities of production into luxury production, as more and more companies covet the luxury end of the market where profits are highest.

You can see this clearly in the space allocated to 'first' and "business' class on airlines, or on trains. Luxury goods - haute couture clothes, watches, luggage, yachts, luxury cars (including SUVs), luxury hotels, luxury mansions, highvalue tourism and cruises -all these make much higher percentage profits per unit (often in the hundreds of per cent) than mass production goods.

Luxury goods production adds insult to injury as far as the ordinary workers and the environment are concerned. Flaunting an unattainable lifestyle of comfort and 'style', these goods are literally socially useless and consume huge amounts of scare raw materials (gold and silver!) and energy. Savage capitalism is a counter-revolution against the gains of the workers movement in the post-war world. It wrecks the health and lives of millions of the working class and the

All this in the interests of

the mega-rich, who become

richer by quantum leaps as

class divisions and social

inequality are deepened.

All this is held together by

a deepening cultural dumbing down, the erosion of

social solidarity and a braindead culture of success and

'celebrity'.

In a ghastly parody of Any

Warhol's prediction that

everyone would become

famous for 15 minutes,

people now become celebrities for being famous, not

for anything they have actually done. On humiliating and idiot TV programmes like Big Brother and

Castaway, people compete to

win' - and thus become

famous and rich for being..a celebrity.

The empty and boring lifestyles of the rich are endlessly celebrated to create a new morality which fundamentally breaks with that of even welfare capitalism - to be rich is worthwhile, to be poor is worthless.

The inevitable result is a dumbing down of mass culture and the multiplication of worthless 'cultural' commodities - 85 television channels, nothing worth watching.

Our conclusion is that the fundamentals of inequality, power and wealth cannot be addressed in the advanced countries without a revolution in work, education, leisure and culture - not only in equality of reward, but in the nature of what is produced and how it is produced.

Getting off the treadmill means leading more human life with different priorities, different products, different sources of energy - and a different set of relations between people. A human society which defends the environment is incompatible with capitalism. 7. Fake procapitalist "solutions" However, before turning increasingly to authoritarian solutions, capitalism will also try to mitigate and adapt to climate change, as well as co-opt anti-capitalist opposition.