the air itself. This is the meaning, for instance of Kyoto and similar regional and national agreements, which create carbon markets basically advantageous to the imperialist North.
We can expect a radical switch to low carbon economies' through lucrative investment in renewables and energy efficient products. This will include nuclear and all sorts of socially and environmentally damaging technology, spun as ways to save the planet. www
As climate instability accelerates, corporate capitalism will also be faced with massive insurance bills (Hurricane Katrina is esti- § mated to have cost $140bn), a large part of which will be passed on to workers, but a significant part of which will be paid for by business itself.
So we can expect panic measures to include ever more wacky and dangerous techno-tixes, such as giant sulphur screens to block out the sun and silver iodide bombs to divert the storm clouds (to where?).
At the same time countries such as Canada and Russia will profit from a short term 'gold rush', as the melting ice-caps of the Arctic open up the last remaining fossil fuel deposits.
Measures such as the Clean Development Mechanism will colonise the South with carbon sinks and biofuel plantations, enabling the North to carry on polluting without changing lifestyles: ecological profligacy in the North will bring a consequent catastrophe in the South.
However it is necessary to be aware and critical of the role of the Southern elites in this process. Ugandan President Museveni recently called global warming "an act of aggression by the rich (of the North) against the poor (of the South)". Yet this man is currently allowing the selling off and destruction of his own country's rainforests and is brutally repressing opposition.
As precious resources are depleted and climate instability increases, so will the current wars in the South become more and more brutal (Darfur writ large). Millions will be forced to flee or submit 'for protection' and survival to ruthless warlords. We urgently need to integrate an understanding of this into campaigning work around refugees and 8. War and imperialism Savage capitalism is at its most open and overtly brutal in its profligate use of violence. The term 'imperialism' to describe the US and British relations with countries of the third world, especially in the Middle East, is now hardly challenged - indeed in the case of like Niall Ferguson and Michael Ignatieff - openly celeImperialist military intervention is justified as part of the "war against terror". But it is clear that American imperialism has gone to war in the Middle East to capture control of the world's largest known oil reserves and the oil routes, but also to occupy a crucial part of Eurasia, which it regards as central to ensure continued US economic and political dominance worldwide.
Faced with growing competition from Japan, Europe and now China, the United States has in the last 20 years unleashed the one power in which it is completely dominant inter-nationally, the military.
Today there are more than one million US service personnel stationed abroad. Eighteen years after the fall of the Berlin wall, the 'peace dividend' has not materialised, showing in its own way that US military aggression abroad was certainly not a matter of defending US interests against "Communism'.
Today US military aggression - supported by the British, giving political cover - is aimed not just at regimes that the US regards as hostile, like Iran, but also against popular movements.
In both the Philippines and Colombia US advisors and security 'consultants' from military firms like Blackwater, are part of a large scale US military intervention capability. US troops are now ensconced in the Central Asian republics and in the Horn of Africa, as well as their hundreds of bases worldwide.
The vast expense of this massive military machine -and Britain's small scale imitation of it - is itself one of the most irrational uses of resources imaginable, and itself is causing massive environmental Indeed imperialist militarism, savage capitalism and third world exploitation are at the 'cutting edge' of environmental damage.
Examples from imperialism's recent wars are legion. Israeli attacks on the Jiyye power plant in the summer of 2006 led to an oil slick
probably coastal marine threatens the whole ecosysAccording to Mark Lynas: "More than 15,000 tonnes of fuel oil has leaked from the Jiyye power plant since it was attacked by Israeli warplanes on 13 July. As if deliberately to hamper any attempts to staunch the flow of oil, Israel then bombed the power plant again two days later, preventing emergency workers from gaining access to the site.
"An indication of the scale of the disaster comes from satellite photos showing a 3,000-square- kilometre slick along two-thirds of Lebanon's coastline. The oil has now begun to wash up in Syria.
"None of this will come as
surprise the Palestinians, who have suffered the environmental consequences of Israel's scorched-earth policies for decades. The water supply to nearly a million people in Gaza was cut off by bombing last month. "Untreated sewage lies in pools on the beach, thanks to Israeli shelling of the Gaza City waste-water treatment plant in 2002. Landfill sites are overflowing and on fire, and two pilot composting plants - constructed with outside help as an alternative to landfill - lie idle, having also been damaged by Israeli bullets."
The environmental effects of direct military intervention are of course just a small part of the overall environmental crisis for the peoples of the most exploited countries.
Much of the most immediate environmental damage comes from extraction industries, notably logging, mining and the oil industry. Much of this is the result of bandit and semi-legal capitalism, which is generally in league with national governments and "respectable" transnational corporations like BP who drop their respectable mask when confronted with the 'natives.
Logging in particular is doing the most long-term damage with global implications, particularly the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and the destruction of Siberian forests to feed the demand of Chinese industry for wood, after the Chinese government banned logging in its own coun try because of a number of high profile disasters caused by logging (flooding and landslips).
The insanity of the military-imperial system is revealed by the massive expenditure and waste of two systems - the US antimissile shield which over time will cost hundreds of billions of dollars and the Blair-Brown pledge to renew the Trident submarine missile system, which is expected to finally run out at a cost of something like £70 billion.
Today, the bi-partisan policy of the US ruling class that backed the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan has crumbled in the face of the setbacks (quagmire), which the US-led coalition has suffered.
However, the debate in Washington is not questioning the strategic importance for the USA of controlling the Gulf region, but how to do it successfully.
Nonetheless, the US administration has shown its determination to continue its war effort with the policy of the 'surge', but not only in Iraq.
In Afghanistan, Palestine, the latent war in the Lebanon, its intervention in Somalia and its very public preparations for war against Iran, indicate its preparedness to broaden the scope of its interventions. (See FI resolution: Middle East in Flames, published In Resistance No 43, MarchApril 2007.)
The divisions in the imperialist ruling classes are creating favourable conditions for a renewed offensive by the anti-war movements in the imperialist centres and it is urgent that we build/rebuild the movements. We stand for:
• An end to all imperialist expeditions and the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan;
• Against any provocations or attacks on Iran;
• For the withdrawal of NATO troops from Lebanon;
• For an end to interference in Palestinian internal affairs and for the lifting of sanctions the Palestinians.
• We support all resistance movements against imperialist intervention that do not engage in sectarian killings, in particular Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, while criticising their religious fundamentalism and their political and social - programme.
• We prioritise establishing links of solidarity with the trade unions (for example, the independent Oil Workers Union in Iraq), and political forces who are constructing progressive and socialist struggles in the region (for example, the Lebanese CP). Our aim is to assist in the emergence of a socialist left in the region, which is democratic, feminist and anti-imperialist.
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9. Global injustice fights back Savage capitalism everywhere attempts to further enslave and exploit the countries of the third world. It is not surprising that some of the most advanced examples of revolt against neoliberalism and imperial1St exploitation have emerged in the poor coun tries - particularly Latin America.
As we saw negatively with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the existence of positive examples - in life and not just in theories and programmes - is vital to the development of opposition movements and an anti-capitalist perspective. On no continent is neoliberalism so widely rejected as in Latin America, and nowhere has the resurgence of the Left been so powerful. The election of Evo Morales in Bolivia and the evolution of the Hugo Chávez government in Venezuela are hugely ideologically imporLOTTE.
Whatever the direction and eventual outcome of these governments, they have already done an enormously important thing -raised the banner of socialism as a mass current with mass credibility again. This is especially important in relation to the younger generations for whom the ideology and reality of socialism has less purchase.
Even the election of moderate centre-left governments, like those of Lula in Brazil, Bachelet in Chile and Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay are the product of a long period of struggle against neoliberalism and the right.
While we solidarise with all movements fighting back against savage capitalism internationally, the central thing about the Latin American developments is that they centrally raise the question of socialism. A central part of our orientation in the next period will be:
Solidarity with the developing revolutionary processes in Bolivia and
• Defence of Cuba against the deepening reactionary offensive of imperialism, which will hit crescendo levels when Fidel Castro dies. Socialist Resistance Special PULL-OUT
Propaganda on the advances made in Cuba, especially in the fields of social welfare, health and the environment, as demonstrations of what can be achieved, even in a poor country, on an anti-capitalist basis. 10. The surveillancesecurity, lock-down state Today a new regime of security is being introduced by the major states, in the first place Britain and the United States. Savage capitalism has created a more unstable world and for the ruling class new methods of surveillance and repression as well as restrictions on civil liberties are needed to deal with it.
Terrorism is in reality a small problem and used only as the banner headline behind which the new repressive state mobilises against national and international protest movements.
The real targets are labour movements, global justice and peace movements and movements for national selfdetermination. Only a small minority of these struggles have a military dimension (Palestine, the Kurdish question), but increasingly movements which use the normal methods of mass mobilisation which may include civil disobedience) are the victims of paramilitary repression.
The worst examples are still in the third world - for example the struggle in
State Mexico in 2006, led by the school teachers, against a hugely corrupt state government. Dozens were killed and disappeared; others committed to indefinite jail with no appeal.
However mass movements in advanced capitalist democracies also find themselves increasingly hemmed in by new police powers and restrictions, and sometimes simply by brutal police.
Surveillance of the domestic population is at its highest level ever. Vast new databases and sophisticated computer equipment enables the US government especially, but also governments in other imperialist states, to monitor all email and internet traffic and to build up a detailed real-time profile of the activities of any citizen.
There is a secular trend towards the criminalisation of more and more forms of protest, or at least to make forms of protest dependent on the indulgence and toleration of the state - which can easily be withdrawn.
In the United States this has resulted in the Patriot Act, which essentially gives the state the right to illegalise anything, and hold anyone in secret detention for indefinite amounts of time.
At an international level this has led to the re-legitimisation of torture and the huge secret Gulag of US prison camps and 'special rendition, where torture is used or - in the case of special rendition, torture is outsourced to third regimes.
The security-repressive state goes hand in hand with the new imperialism. In many places (the Philippines, Colombia and Palestine) local repressive states work hand-in-hand with US special forces, private armies like Blackwater and/or the CIA. Savage capitalism has created a vast continent of repression and violence with a daily toll of the murdered, the disappeared and the tortured. This is justified and even celebrated in the ideologically most backward parts of modern society (like video games). Defending civil liberties and opposing militarism is a crucial part of the fight for socialism and human civilisation today.
The move towards mass surveillance and restrictions on civil liberties, including the para-militarisation of the policing of protest is, as we have seen in the Pentagon's plans for ecocatastrophe, laying the basis for a more total lock-down state if apocalypse happens. The catastrophic results of environmental breakdown, including an outpouring of desperate eco-migration, could only be managed on the basis of military dictatorship. 11. Strategy and the fightback Our strategic conclusion on planetary crisis should start with the following assumptions:
a) Creating a sustainable civilisation requires wholesale conversion of production and consumption, and this is incompatible with capitalism. Not only are the corporations and government unwilling to act against short-term capitalist interests, but we explained above a sustainable environment 1s contrary to the inbuilt productivist bias of the capitalist mode of production.
b) Environmentalism without class, without anticapitalism, has massive limitations which invalidate it as a long-term strategy. Indeed the kind of green politics which attempts to counterpose itself to left and right can be positively damaging to the kind of alliances necessary to confront ecocatastrophe.
c) At the same time as trying to elaborate a new Marxism for the 21st century which builds on Marx's understanding of a materialist approach to the environment in order to meet the challenge of climate change, we continue to put forward a Marxism that is feminist, anti-racist and opposed to homophobia. In Britain at least some of the programmatic gains in sections of the revolutionary left that were won as a result of the self-organisation of women and of black people particularly have to some extent been lost in a period where the working class as a whole suffered a whole range of defeats under first Thatcherism and then New Labour.
This means that we need to rediscuss some of these questions in and of themselves with comrades who were not part of the same historical experiences and bring our analysis up to date in order to attempt a new synthesis in developing an accessible Marxism for today.
We don't think there is any contradiction in doing this while at the same time developing an eco-socialist approach - rather we think that these discussions will enrich and complement each other.
This is important at two levels: giving us a chance to succeed in the synthesis that is necessary in its own right and developing the sort of profile we want through our press, web sites, educational events etc
d) As is traditional in our politics we do not counterpose reforms to anti-capitalist transition. However we do point out the extremely small gains which are likely to be made climate change without national and international planning and without a massive social and economic conversion.
e) The decisive force on a world scale for anti-capitalist struggle remains the workers movement. A central fight for Marxists is to win the workers' movement to an environmentalist and
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. the Ecosocialist Alternative hence eco-socialist) perspective. A massive aid to this is the example of environmentally friendly mobilisation and policies of Cuba, and to a lesser extent Venezuela.
Evidently the major forces willing to take to the streets today on the environmental question are in diverse protest movements (and none), and generally not from the workers' movement. Huge forces can develop on this issue outside the workers' movement. For us - as is normal in our united front politics - an alliance of the workers' movements and social movements, on a class struggle and anti-capitalist basis, is what we fight for. However, we do not consider all these forces to be equivalent in strategic terms. This is not a moral question, but one of hard headed political and social analysis which has been explained well in recent articles by Daniel Bensaid and Martha Harnecker.
Bensaid says:
"From a certain point of view, capitalism will indeed be overthrown by an alliance, or a convergence, of mass social movements. But even if these movements, because of their liberatory projects, perceive capitalism to be their enemy (which perhaps is the case for the women's movement or the environmental movement, not just the workers' movement), I don't think these movements all play an equivalent role. "And all are traversed by differences and contradictions that reflect their position, in the face of capital as a global mode of dominaton. "There is a 'naturalist' feminism and a revolutionary feminism, a profoundly anti-humanist environmentalism and a humanist and social environmentalism... if you consider these arenas are not structured in a hierarchy, but simply juxtaposed, then perhaps you could devise a tactic of putting together changing coalitions ('rainbow coalitions' on immediate questions). But there would be no solid strategic convergence in such an approach. "I think, on the contrary, that within particular mode of production (capitalism), relations of exploitation and class conflict constitute an overarching framework that cuts across and unifies the other contradictions.
"Capital itself is the great unifier that subordinates every aspect of social production and reproduction, remodeling the function of the family, determining the social division of labour and submitting humanity's conditions of social reproduction to the law of value. If that is indeed the case, a party, and not simply the sum of social movements, is the best agent of conscious unification."
Martha Harnecker says:
"...when OIC criticizes parties, people think one is betting on the emergence of movements that will lead the struggle. Social movements are sectoral movements and require an instrument for articulation, call it party, sociopolitical movement, front, or whatever.
"But what's needed are political instruments that articulate and raise national proposal, that make an ideological proposal in today's world, where the wars are fought in the plane of ideas, where the means of communication in the hands of the powerful are almost overpowering We can see what is happening with the media
Swiveling our orientation towards ecosocialism however does not alter our fundamental strategy, but it comes Its renovanon.
a) We maintain our orientation towards the creation of a broad anti-capitalist, ecosocialist party to the left of Labour, as a first step towards resolving the crisis of leadership of the working class and other popular layers. b) We need to develop an action programme of immediate and transitional demands which incorporates the centrality of the fight to save the environment. 12. Anti-capitalist positions on key environmental debates However, as well as exposing the incapacity of capitalism, especially in its present 'savage' or 'morbid' phase, dominated as it is by neoliberal economic strategies, to resolve the ecological problems it has created, we also have to develop our politics on more immediate issues raised by the crisis. But these responses have to be founded on a socialist framework - using Marxist theory and class analysis to pose solutions.
For example on the vexed issue of green taxes, all other mainstream parties, including the Greens, have a policy of taxation to try and deal with carbon emissions. The congestion charge, already in place in parts of London and being introduced in Manchester, Durham and elsewhere, has reduced the number of cars entering the centre of London. But it is clear that the reduction is based on the cars of the poor.
Traveling in central London during the week shows this clearly - only large expensive cars and taxis are on the road. Poor people have been forced, especially since the hike in the cost to £8.00 a day, to take inadequate and overcrowded public transport. It is true that some money raised has gone to improve public transport - but not to reduce fares that are the most expensive of any city in the world. The congestion charge is a flat tax (like the poll tax) that penalises the poor, and is divisive. The only form of capitalist taxation socialists can support would be steeply progressive taxation intended to drive the large Socialist Resistance Special PULL-OUT What does it mean to call Socialist Resistance 'Ecosocialist'? To define ourselves by the term 'ecosocialist' does not mean dropping our commitment to anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, feminism and the rights of the oppressed, anti-racism, and so on. Nor does it mean a radical version of the Green Party: rather it is a recognition that capitalism cannot solve the problems posed by climate change and global warming as, by its very nature, it is based on production for profit not need, regardless of the impact on the planet. The choice is therefore either 'Ecosocialism or Barbarism'.
gas-guzzlers off the road. In other words a tax on the rich. Similarly on the question of air travel emissions. The government pretends that these are not very high, but international air travel is not at present counted as part of British emissions. It is true that there is no tax on air fuel as there is on fuel for cars, buses, etc. but the proposal to raise a flat tax on air travel, either on fuel or flights will again hit the poor and we should oppose it. But we also need an answer to the problem of increasing air travel. The fairest way to reduce emissions would be to ration its use to say one or two flights a year, or to a number of air miles traveled. In addition, so that the rich cannot buy others' rations, this should be made illegal. No doubt in our present system an illegal market would come into existence, but we have to argue for what is just and fair and in the interests of the working class and the poor, not only what is possible at once.
Nor is it not simply a question of justice. We have to work out ways of uniting as many as possible to what is necessary. Ordinary people will not change their outlook if they feel they are the only ones having to pay.
This will certainly be the project of the rich - make the poor pay, both here in the developed world, and in the developing world, but we have to propose an alternative. "Contraction and Convergence" is another controversial issue on the left. Developed by Aubrey Meyer, the theory accepts that the present situation has been created by the industrialised and that we have to drastically cut back our emissions - the 'contraction' bit. The developing world, quite properly also wishes to industrialise and this should be allowed -up to a certain point. At a fixed point in the future and this must be agreed by treaty for it to work, the conSocialist Resistance Special PULL-OUT
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