How the WTO quislings help fuck the planet Earth

Americans are doing more than anyone to fuck the planet. In face of 
worldwide
protests at uncontrolled US carbon pollution, the Yanks have invented the 
idea of
trading ion pollution ... but 'tradable permits' is not just a corporate 
scam or a
way of getting the US off the greenhouse hook by 'selling' its pollution 
'rights'
to countries like Russia which has now experienced the 'benefits' of 
becoming a
wholly post-industrial society. There is a moral issue: creating markets 
out of
pollution, especially planet-wrecking greenhouse emissions, is intrinsically
wrong. I have the same feeling about the 'valuing natural capital' 
theoreticians.
Putting a price on nature is not going to save it.  It is just another way 
of
eternising (or anyway, giving another lease of life to) capitalism. It is
capitalism that is the problem.
There has been a very full debate on the issues, focussing on the hard 
science, on
Marxism-International, and prompted by the presence on the list of Living 
Marxism
supporters. LM are global-warming denialists, fond of quoting the likes of 
Fred
Singer and other eco-nihilists.

World capitalism is buttressed by large masses of what used to be
called the petty-bourgeoisie, and by a metropolitan proletariat which is 
both
cowed and corrupted. These are decisive facts of the era. It is simply 
useless to
suppose that some kind of educative process is going to change these 
people; it is
not. In any case, the education is all in the opposite direction. Large 
numbers of
people in these social groups actually consider themselves to be Greens, 
but they
have no conception of what the issues involved really are, and will go into 
denial
when they do begin to understand. Because it is simply useless to imagine 
that
'sustainability' is an option. What has happened to Russia must happen 
throughout
the west, ie, industrial capitalism must be destroyed. Perverse as it 
seems, only
major socio-economic collapse can save the planet now. It's that simple.
As Peter Grimes properly says, the fate of the planet has very possibly 
already
been decided by changes to the ocean conveyor, which are likely to trigger
self-amplifying feedback mechanisms so that even if we don't get runaway 
warming
(which is more possible than many suppose) we are still likely to have 
wrecked the
climate ireversibly in other ways.

When climatologists began to home in on the the fact that global warming 
will
manifest itself chiefly in the form of intensified and more exteme weather 
events,
making it necessary to construct regional as well as global climate models,
understanding of the whole issue and the dangers global warming presents 
moved on
a notch. But the downside to this more refined understanding is that it has 
taken
the focus away from the longer-term but more dangerous effects of 
anthropogenic
climate-forcing on the world climate as a whole and the biosphere as a 
whole.
In particular, this localising of focus has enabled the strategists of 
capital to
focus on the possibility of local, partial solutions (now they've tacitly 
accepted
that it will happen). And the greens, who lack a coherent politics, are 
following
in their footsteps. Greenpeace in the UK at least is now firmly in bed with 
big
corporate partners like Shell, BP, Dow, ICI etc.

The first truly GLOBAL effect of global warming is not going to show up in 
the
climate, but in the aggravated and multiform crises which are now already
deepening the chaos and disarray into which whole regions are sinking. The
population of the earth has increased by one billion since 1982, and most 
of them
live in ecologically-vulnerable regions, coastal floodplains and the like.
War or revolution? Disease, famine, or militant, disciplined socialism, 
fought for
in the form of peoples' wars and popular risings? Organising the masses and
seizing state power in the disintegrating peripheries, or succumbing to US
fascism? Those are the issues.

The metaphor of the frog boiling is a common one, and it has a social as 
well as
ecological significance. The triumphalism of hurrah-capitalism is tinged 
with
despair. Who now even remembers the optimism surrounding decolonialisation 
and
development of half a century ago?

Then the air was full of talk about the Non-aligned movement, development 
in the
ex-colonies and the like. It is hard to recall the atmosphere in the UK of
optimism (as well as pain among imperial sentimentalists), that attended
decolonisation when almost every week the queen watched the flag come down 
for the
last time over some new corner of empire.

Post-independence leaders like Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah had vast and plausible 
plans
for economic progress; they echoed the Bolshevik dreams of economic 
progress in
Russia. Everywhere and without exception those dreams have turned into
contemporary nightmares and the life-chances of the multimillioned masses 
in the
peripheries have been destroyed by the rapacity of the metropoles.

But the underlying reason is the chronic secular under-production of 
capital, and
its material consequences: the inability to transform its technical basis to
overcome the limitations of the original, hydrocarbon, non-renewal 
industrial
model, that plus the grotesque inflation of the reserve army.

The geophysiological limitations on this model are what climate-warming is 
about
and they put a final seal on any hope that western living standards are 
attainable
outside the west.  They are not, and are only sustained in the west itself 
by
savage and predatory forms of combined and unequal development.
Socialism on a world scale cannot bring with it the benefits of 
industrialism.
Depending on the scale of the next century's die-off and the particular 
legacy
left by capitalism, it will be barracks socialism for decades, perhaps 
longer than
a century, until the world population falls to a sustainable level.

That's what you get when you eat the seed-corn.

Even China is no exception to looming crisis: development is as chimerical 
as the
neon signs over Shanghai, as the next downturn will prove.
Industrialisation, affluence, consumer goods, large public health and 
education
programmes: all are fanciful dreams become cruel jokes at the expense of
two-thirds of the world's people.

Only socialist planning on a global scale, organised through the 
dictatorship of
the proletariat, can provide solutions and then only in the context of a 
massive
and fundamental redistribution of resources, and an irresistible historical 
tidal
wave pushing post-capitalism towards sustainable social systems. That, as I 
say,
seems inconceivable short of major breaches in the world system and the 
engulfing
immiseration of large tracts of the metropolitan working class, in short a
calamity worse than either world war. Yet such a calamity is not only 
likely, it
seems inevitable, as Wallerstein says.

This is where Julian Simon may not end up the clear winner in his famous 
bet. Even
the most persistent and pernicious deflationary policy, pursued on a world 
scale
without regard for the devastating consequences to peripheries, cannot 
compensate
for impending absolute energy shortages resulting in a permanent 
militarisation by
the US of the Gulf and the Caspian, with almost incalculable internal 
political
consequences in the metropoles and the mid-East, leaving aside the real 
risk of a
general war with China and its Islamic allies.  In any event enormous 
efforts
(which are highly likely to be too late, because like it or not the damage 
is
already done) will be needed to restore the radical global environmental
disequilibria - for example, attempting to correct the changes in the deep 
ocean
circulation, organising the sequestration of carbon, etc.

Perhaps we shall need exotic, heroic measures indicative of last-resort
desperation, such as spreading reflective kevlar screens in earth orbit to 
keep
the sun off and help stop the ice-caps melting and the trapped methane 
hydrates
from releasing enough methane to trigger runaway warming-these are the 
kinds of
things which only a world socialist state can mobilise the resources of a
post-national, global human society for.

Mark Jones
Moderator, Leninist-International
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