4) Communism is the only solution to the ecological crisis

Because it is a society without classes and exploitation, without nations or wars, communism is the only real solution to the ecological crisis.

What communism is not

‘What? Communism? The USSR? That monstrosity?’ The Stalinist regime was indeed an abomination. Workers were exploited to the hilt, all opposition was ferociously repressed, and militarisation was at its height. As for nature, ‘Soviet’ productivism meant destruction, pollution and pillage. But communism has absolutely nothing to do with the Stalinist regimes! Yesterday in the USSR and Eastern Europe, today in China, North Korea and Cuba, there is not an ounce of communism there. Stalinism is not the continuation of the proletarian revolution of October 1917, it is its gravedigger.

While in every country 14-18 meant carnage in the trenches and disaster in the rear, the Russian proletariat refused to be sacrificed and threw itself into the fight for the world communist revolution. This revolutionary momentum soon spread to Europe. Faced with this threat to its domination, the bourgeoisie halted the war. But this was not enough. At the end of 1918, the German proletariat launched a revolution of its own. This uprising by a decisive battalion of the international proletariat was mercilessly crushed by the German bourgeois state (led by the Social Democrats!). Tens of thousands of insurgent workers were murdered, including Rosa Luxemburg, who was shot in the head at point-blank range and then thrown into a canal. This defeat broke the revolutionary wave. The Russian proletariat found itself isolated. In Russia, the counter-revolution took a turn that was as barbaric as it was Machiavellian: the Stalinist regime used the phrases of revolution, of Marx and Lenin, as a pretext to massacre or deport 80% of the Bolsheviks who had taken part in the revolution, in order to impose the most ferocious exploitation on the working class. The red that coloured the flag of Stalin and the USSR is not that of communism but of the blood of the workers!

Contrary to all the bourgeois lies that have been spread for over a hundred years, Stalinism is not the product of the October Revolution but the natural son of decadent capitalism and bourgeois counter-revolution.

Having made this necessary clarification, let us return to our initial question: what is the relationship between communism and nature? In what way is communism the “true resolution of the conflict between man and nature” (Karl Marx, 1844 Manuscripts)?

Communism is... the end of exploitation and pillage

Capitalism is exploitation.

Capitalism draws its wealth from two sources: the exploitation of nature and the exploitation of the labour power of the proletariat, both transformed into commodities. This why capitalism has no solution to the ecological crisis. It can only exploit both to the point of exhaustion and destruction. This is why the social question and the ecological question go hand in hand and can only be solved at the same time – solved by the proletariat, the only class which has an interest in abolishing all forms of exploitation.

Exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, of man by man. Workers are forced to sell their labour power in order to live: they no longer belong to themselves; their exploited bodies are transformed into tools.

These social relations of production leave their mark on all human relations. The domination of the boss over the workers is reflected in the family between the husband and ‘his’ wife, between the father and ‘his’ children, in society between whites and blacks, men and women, the able-bodied and the disabled... Humanity's relationship with nature is not spared. Capitalists see nothing around them but resources to be exploited: ‘human resources’, ‘natural resources’. Humankind, life, nature, the planet and even the universe are reduced to the status of things, property, commodities.

Chickens in battery cages, cattle tortured in slaughterhouses... the barbarity inflicted on the animal world stems from this relationship of exploitation between humans themselves.

Because communism is the end of the exploitation of man by man, it is also the end of these relationships of domination that run through all our social relationships, just as it is the end of this relationship of predation and plundering of nature. ...

The end of the profit motive

Capitalism is the pursuit of profit.

This is the sole purpose of production under capitalism. Human beings, life, nature... nothing has any value for capitalism other than exchange value. Science itself is treated as a mere appendage of profit.

And here again this scourge indicates what communism should be: a society in which the aim of work is not the pursuit of profit, not the sale of commodities. In communism, on the contrary, all production will be for use, for need, and not for sale on the market. The activity of the associated producers, freed from wage slavery, will seek to satisfy humanity's deepest needs and desires. And feeling linked to nature, responsible for its future, will be an integral part of these needs and desires.

The end of private property

Capitalism means private property.

The appropriation of the vast majority of social wealth by a small minority is what the bourgeoisie calls ‘private property’. This is what the revolutionary working class wants to abolish.

The Stalinist regimes based their lie of being socialist societies precisely on the belief that they had abolished individual property, by concentrating all wealth in the hands of the state. In reality, whether the bourgeoisie appropriates the labour of the working class and the whole population individually or collectively, as employers or as the state, the same relations of production remain,.

In capitalism, private property is not only the right to deprive others of their property, it is also the right to own property over others and over nature. The end of private property in communism is therefore also the end of the right to possess nature: “When society has arrived at a higher degree of economic organisation, the right of ownership of a few individuals over the lands that make up the globe will seem as absurd as the right of ownership of one man over another seems insane. Neither one nation nor all the nations covering the globe are owners of the earth; they are merely its possessors, its usufructuaries, obliged to pass it on in an improved form to future generations” (Marx, Capital, Volume 3).

The end of competition of each against all

Capitalism means competition.

Between individuals, between companies, between nations. Nothing and no-one is spared. Physical exercise and play have become commercialised and nationalised sports, in which the glory of the club or the country is at stake, even if it means doping up and destroying the athletes. Schools are driven by a race for grades, where every child is assessed, compared and sorted. Religion, skin colour, custom... everything is a pretext for pitting one against the other. The workers don’t escape from this competition. They are called upon to do more than the company in the same sector, to do more than their colleagues. By extension, nature also becomes an adversary to be dominated. Even in the face of the ecological crisis, this relationship with the world comes to the fore: for all the world's leaders, it's all about ‘winning the climate battle’.

Capitalism is the reign of competition and domination; communism will be the reign of mutual aid and sharing. This relationship between people also changes the relationship with nature: “we do not rule over nature as a conqueror rules over a foreign people, as someone who is outside nature, but we belong to it with our flesh, our blood, our brains, we are in its bosom, (...) men (...) will once again know that they are one with nature and (...), this absurd and unnatural idea of an opposition between (...) man and nature will become impossible. " (Engels, The Role of Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man). ...

The end of nation states…

As authentic communists have always insisted, communist society cannot exist in one country, still less in isolated communes, but only on a world wide-scale.  The ecological crisis is a direct product of capitalism’s insatiable drive to conquer the Earth under the flag of profit, to commodify the whole of nature. Already recognised in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, this drive has, in the final stages of capitalism’s historical decadence, poisoned the entire planet; and this, hand in hand with the threat of war, constitutes a direct menace to the survival of humanity and countless other species.  Hence the solution to this crisis can only be envisaged on a planetary scale, through the dismantling of all nation states and the elimination of national borders

….and their devastating wars

Capitalism is war.

The competition of each against all that underpins this system leads to the confrontation between nations, to war and genocide. Since the beginning of the 20th century, all wars are imperialist wars, founded on the battle between nation states to expand their spheres of influence and control at the expense of their rivals. Ferocious military competition has become permanent and increasingly destructive, posing a direct threat to humanity and the planet itself (see page one).

As with the ecological crisis, the only way out of this deadly impasse is the abolition of national economies and the states which defend them, and the creation of a global network of production and distribution, controlled by the producers themselves.

The beginning of a unified global humanity in harmony with nature

Communism will be global.

Capitalism has made it possible to create an extremely dense global economic fabric, with trade routes and complex links between factories and research centres, from country to country, in order to produce. The fragmentation of the current system into competing nations has therefore become totally obsolete: this division is an obstacle to the full realisation of the potential achieved by humanity. During the Covid 19 pandemic, the relentless race to be the first nation to find a vaccine, preventing laboratories from sharing their advances, considerably slowed down research. In the case of AIDS, scientists estimate that the war between French and American researchers, who lied to each other, spied on each other and competed with each other, cost the discovery of triple therapy more than a decade! This fragmentation of society is having the same devastating effects on research to combat the ecological crisis.

The future society, communism, will inevitably have to overcome this division; it will have to unite all humanity. Communism will therefore be the exact opposite of what Stalinism proclaimed: ‘socialism in one country’. This future society, a social and conscious organisation on a planetary scale, implies a giant leap forward. Human beings’ entire relationship with each other and with nature will be turned upside down. The separation between intellectual and manual labour will be abolished, and the opposition between town and country will no longer exist.

Communism will therefore be anything but a return to the past. It will draw on “the entire wealth of previous development” (Marx, 1844 MS), critically re-appropriating all the best achievements of past human societies, beginning with a new understanding of the more harmonious relationship between human beings and nature that prevailed in the long epoch of ‘primitive communism’. And in particular, it will be able to integrate, develop and at the same time radically transform all the scientific and technological advances made possible by capitalism.

The revolution for communism will be faced with gigantic tasks - not only reversing the ecological consequences of the capitalist mode of production, but also feeding, clothing and housing the whole world, and freeing all human beings from paralysing and dehumanising labour. But the ultimate goal of communism is not simply the negation of capitalism, it is a new synthesis, a new and higher relationship between humanity and nature, which becomes self-aware. This goal is not a distant ideal, but a guiding principle for the entire revolutionary process. Communism and nature will mean “consciously rational treatment of the earth as eternal communal property, and as an inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of the chain of successive human generations” (Marx, Capital, Volume 3).