3) Faced with the ecological crisis..... Can capitalist states change their spots?

In 1972, the Earth Summit, the first major international conference on the environment, was held in Stockholm, Sweden. Under the aegis of the United Nations, the 113 states present made a commitment to combat pollution. A declaration of 26 principles, an action plan with 109 recommendations and the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) were adopted.

In 1992, at the third Earth Summit, international measures in favour of the environment were strengthened: ‘protecting the planet’ was now officially considered essential ‘for the future of mankind’. 196 states ratified the Convention, which required them to meet every year to ‘maintain their efforts’. These major annual meetings are known as the Conferences of the Parties (COP). The first conference, known as COP 1, was held in Berlin in 1995.

At the same time, from 1988 onwards, the same 196 States, the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) formed an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Each new report made the headlines, and scientists systematically chose strong words to warn of the seriousness of the situation. The first report, published in 1990, stated: “Our calculations show with certainty that CO2 is responsible for more than half of the increase in the Earth's greenhouse effect (...). In the business-as-usual scenario, we predict an increase of +0.3° per decade in the average global temperature (...); this is an increase in average temperature that has never been seen before in the last 10,000 years”.

In reality, each year that passes will be worse than the forecasts, each IPCC report will underline this seriousness in an increasingly alarming way and each time all the states will announce new measures.

It has to be said that this is a real problem for every country in the world: the impact of global warming is causing a considerable increase in natural disasters, at an increasingly astronomical economic cost. Over the last 20 years, financial losses caused by extreme weather conditions have tripled, reaching €2,521 billion. More broadly, these disasters destabilise entire regions, destroying the economic fabric and driving entire populations into exile. Pollution peaks are paralysing a growing number of megacities, forcing travel restrictions. By 2050, some 300 million people will be threatened by rising sea levels.

So what have all these observations, measures and promises been leading to for over fifty years?

Let's take a particularly significant concrete example. The Arctic is being hit harder by global warming than the rest of the world. The consequences are obviously dramatic for the whole planet. Armed with their charters, international summits and promises, governments see this catastrophe as an opportunity to... exploit the region! In 2007, Russia planted a flag at the North Pole at a depth of 4,000 metres to mark its control over the region. Hydrocarbons in Siberia and North America, natural gas, oil, uranium in the Arctic, passage through the Canadian archipelagos, passage via the coasts of Russia and Scandinavia... all these new possibilities are attracting covetous schemes. And here, as elsewhere, they are competing with weapons at the ready: NATO military exercises, reinforcement of US armed bases in Iceland and Greenland, Russian naval manoeuvres...

The same logic applies to everything else: the widespread use of electric cars heralds clashes over cobalt, nickel, etc. These precious metal mines located in the countries of the South (Morocco, Chile, Argentina, etc.) are gobbling up all the water that remains, threatening local populations with drought and thirst. This is the stark reality. States will not stop exploiting humanity and the planet's resources; they will not stop destroying and impoverishing, because they embody the interests of each national bourgeoisie. The function of states is to concentrate the economic and military forces of each country for battle in the international arena. They are the highest authority in the world capitalist system, which lives only for profit and through competition. Whether or not they are aware of the danger to humanity that all their destruction represents, they will never stop.

The COPs (soon to be 30!) are nothing more than a gathering of brigands. The League of Nations, the UN, NATO, the WTO, the IMF... all these international organisations are nothing but places of confrontation and influence. Each COP is an opportunity for some to try to set new standards and constraints in order to put obstacles in the way of others: France against German or Chinese coal, the UK against French nuclear power, Germany against American oil, etc. The proliferation of wars, which in the long term threaten to kill all humanity, is the ultimate proof that states are not the solution, but the problem. And it doesn't matter which regime is in power, or the colour of the government. Whether it's a democrat or a dictator, whether it's the far right, the centre or the far left that rules this or that nation, capitalism leads everywhere to the same catastrophe. In every country, the ‘ecology’ parties are very often the most war-mongering. What a symbol!

Can citizen's movements change the world?

The scale of the ecological disaster is of concern to a growing proportion of the world's population, particularly young people. In the face of disaster, all kinds of citizen action are emerging.

On a daily basis, everyone is being called on to make an effort: sorting waste, reducing meat consumption, encouraging cycling... These small individual gestures are supposed to add up like small streams making big rivers. Every country in the world encourages this ‘civic-mindedness’: advertising, logos, incentives for electric cars, tax reductions for insulation... The eco-citizen gesture as a remedy for pollution. The same governments that are dropping bombs and razing forests want us to believe that the solution for the planet lies in individual action labelled ‘reasonable and sustainable’. Let's not be fooled: their real aim is to divide and fragment. These injunctions to ‘do the right thing for the planet’ are even intended to make those who are the victims of this system of exploitation feel guilty. At the same time, they try to make us believe that capitalism can be green, eco-responsible, sustainable... if everyone does their bit. These lies  distract us from the real roots, the real causes of the ecological crisis: capitalism as such.

The same applies to the ‘Climate Marches’. These giant demonstrations regularly bring together hundreds of thousands of people around the world, deeply concerned about the future that lies ahead. Their slogans sometimes a reflect a feeling that there needs to be a profound change: “system change, not climate change”. But any effort to get to the real roots of the problem is undermined by other slogans, such as “stop the talk, start the action”, and above all by their general practice. The figurehead of this movement, the young Greta Thunberg, often says: “We want politicians to talk to scientists, to listen to them at last”. In other words, these demonstrators hope to ‘put pressure’ on leaders, to encourage them to pursue policies that are more respectful of nature. Another destructive idea stems from this logic, that of classifying older generations as ‘unconscious’ or ‘selfish’, as opposed to ‘young people’ who are fighting for the planet: “You say you love your children. You say you love your children, but you're stealing their future right out from under them,” says Greta Thunberg. So there's a whole theorisation of a supposed opposition between the ‘climate generation’ and the ‘boomers’!

‘Radical ecology’ claims to go further than that: it's no longer a question of shouting ‘Look!’ or ‘Wake up!’ at the world's powerful, but of forcing them to adopt a different policy. Extinction Rebellion (XR), and now Just Stop Oil, with their days of ‘international rebellion’, are the main representatives of this movement, which vehemently denounces the ‘ongoing ecocide’. Demonstrations, occupying road junctions, climbing on top of trains, staging stunts to publicise the disastrous state of the world's ecology... the most spectacular means are used to ‘put the pressure on’. But behind this ‘radicalism’ lies exactly the same approach: to make people believe that the state can (if it is ‘forced’ to) pursue an ecological policy, that capitalism can be ‘green’.

Within this movement in favour of direct action, one of the most active currents is the ‘zadist’ movement in France. This involves occupying ‘Zones To Defend’ (ZADs) threatened by the appetites of capital and finance, such as an area earmarked for a new airport or a mega-pond. Gatherings of ‘rebels’, the ZADs, fight against big capital to promote small-scale farming, ‘local production and consumption’, the ‘community’... in other words... small capital! So the system remains fundamentally the same, with all that that implies in terms of market exchanges and social relations.

Finally, there is a more theoretical movement that claims to want to replace capitalism with a different system, in particular the ‘degrowth’ movement. This trend points to the impossibility of green capitalism and invokes the need for ‘post-capitalism’ (Jason Hickel), ‘ecosocialism’ (John Bellamy Foster), or even ‘degrowth communism’ (Kohei Saito). This current affirms that capitalism is driven by the constant need to expand, to accumulate value, and that it can only treat nature as a ‘free gift’ to be exploited to the maximum while it seeks to subject every region of the planet to the laws of the market. But how can we achieve this different society? Through what struggles? And the degrowthers answer: a social movement ‘from below’, setting up ‘common spaces’, ‘citizens’ assemblies’... But who are the ‘citizens’ in question? What specific social force can wage the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism and put itself at the head of such a movement? This is the central question which the adepts of ‘degrowth’ don’t answer, all the better to exclude the working class from the equation, to dilute it into the ‘people’, the citizens’, etc. 

To sum up: all these forms of environmental movement, from individual action to ‘radical’ protest, have in common the fact that they are doomed to impotence:

- either because they don’t attack the causes of the environmental crisis but only its consequences:

 - or because they imagine that the existing states can take charge of the only change that can put an end to the ecological catastrophe: the overthrow of the capitalist system, which these same states are entirely dedicated to defending;

 - or, when they claim to be in favour of overthrowing capitalism, because they are incapable of identifying the only force in society which can put an end to this system, the principal exploited class in this society, the proletariat

These movements want to be ‘radical’, but being ‘radical’ means attacking things at their roots. And the root of the environmental crisis is capitalism!

Green capitalism cannot exist

"It was a sunny summer day. It happened sometimes, even in Coketown. Seen from a distance in this weather, Coketown appeared to be shrouded in a haze inaccessible to the sun's rays. You only knew that the town was there, because you knew that the sullen blot on the landscape could only be a town. A fog of soot and smoke that veered confusedly from one side to the other, sometimes rising towards the vault of the sky, sometimes moving darkly along the ground, depending on whether the wind was rising or dying down or changing direction, a compact, shapeless tangle, pierced by sheets of oblique light that revealed only large black masses: - Coketown, seen from afar, evoked itself even though none of its bricks could be distinguished." Thus, in 1854, in his famous novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens evoked the sooty skies of Coketown, a fictional town that mirrors Manchester, where you can only see “the monstrous snakes of smoke” that trail over the town.

Humanity has always transformed nature. Even before Homo Sapiens, the first hominids used tools; some found in Ethiopia date back more than 3.4 million years. Over the course of its evolution, its technical progress and the expansion of its social organisation, humanity has developed an ever-greater capacity to act on its environment, to adapt nature to its needs. At 147 metres high and 4,500 years old, the Khufu Pyramid in Egypt bears witness to this power already acquired in Antiquity.

But at the same time, in particular with the division of society into classes, this capacity to act on the environment was accompanied by a growing estrangement from nature and the first ecological disasters: “Let us not flatter ourselves too much with our victories over nature. She takes revenge on us for every one of them. Every victory certainly has in the first place the consequences we expected, but in the second and third place it has quite different, unforeseen effects, which all too often destroy these first consequences. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and other places, cleared the forests to gain arable land, were far from expecting to lay the foundations for the present desolation of these countries, by destroying with the forests the centres of accumulation and conservation of humidity….” (Engels, The Role of Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man).

But prior to capitalism and its insatiable need to expand, these ecological problems were limited and local in scope. After millennia of slow evolution, capitalism increased these productive forces tenfold in just a few decades. First in Europe, then on all the other continents, it spread everywhere, transforming nature and human beings to keep its workshops, factories and plants running. However, in capitalism, the aim of production is not to satisfy human needs but to make a profit. To produce in order to sell, to sell in order to make a profit, to make a profit in order to reinvest in workers and machines... to produce more, to produce faster, to produce cheaper... to be able to continue selling in the face of fierce competition from other capitalists. This is the fundamental reason why, in 1854, Charles Dickens poetically described the cloud of black smoke that was already covering Manchester.

In those days, capitalism was in its rising, expansive phase. The drive to spread across the globe, to find new markets to overcome its regular crises of overproduction, had a progressive dimension in that it was laying the foundations for a truly global community. But the outbreak of the First World War demonstrated that this period had come to an end, and revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg were already insisting that the alternative was now “socialism or barbarism”. The international wave of revolutions which began in Russia in 1917 contained the promise of socialism. But the revolution was everywhere defeated and from the mid-1920s onwards it was barbarism that gained the upper hand – expressed not only in increasingly devastating imperialist wars but also in the accelerating destruction of nature, above all after the Second World Wear and even more so in the last few decades.

There can be no green capitalism. All the rhetoric from the bourgeoisie, from its far right to its far left, claiming to be able to ‘regulate’, ‘supervise’, ‘reform’ capitalism so that a ‘green economy’ can develop, is an outright lie. No law, no charter, no public pressure can take away capitalism's raison d'être: to exploit people and nature in order to produce, sell and make a profit. And too bad if people and nature die as a result. Written nearly 160 years ago, Karl Marx's words in the first volume of Capital seem to have been written today: “In agriculture as in manufacturing, the capitalist transformation of production seems to be nothing but the martyrdom of the producer (...). In modern agriculture, as in urban industry, the increase in productivity and the higher output of labour are bought at the price of the destruction and exhaustion of labour power. Moreover, every advance in capitalist agriculture is an advance not only in the art of robbing the worker, but also in the art of robbing the soil…”

This system of exploitation will not stop plundering natural resources and poisoning the Earth. The only solution is to overthrow capitalism. But what other system is there?