Exceptionally strong cyclones (250km per hour) on the Indian coast in October; flood rains in western Africa between July and October, and in Venezuela in December; drought in the Middle East and Australia; storms hitting western Europe in late December. The list of meteorological calamities in 1999 was endless and has to be added to all the others of the past few years (Hurricane Mitch in central America, floods in China and Bangla Desh, etc etc). The year 2000 has begun in the same way with cyclones and floods wreaking havoc in southern Africa. Hundreds of thousands of people have made homeless, in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and above all Mozambique.
The death toll has yet to be established, but in addition to the hundreds and perhaps thousands swept away by the floods, many more will die from the disease and malnutrition that follow. As usual it is the proletariat and the oppressed who pay the heaviest price for these ‘natural’ disasters, in deaths, injuries, and homes destroyed. The bourgeoisie limits itself to counting up the damage and pouring out crocodile tears. Just consider, for example, Britain’s contribution to the flood relief work in Mozambique. Its a drop iwork in Mozambique. Its a drop in the ocean compared to what the British government poured into the ‘humanitarian’ job of reducing Serbia to rubble.
Is all this unavoidable? The UN’s World Meteorological Organisation has for years been issuing warnings about the evolution of global climate. In France, after the December storms, the press was filled with popularised explanations about the greenhouse effect and global warming. The boldest journalists humbly begged our government’s - because we know how concerned they with the common good – to find new policies in order to reduce the build-up of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, CFCs, methane. It’s all a lot of noise for nothing: things just go on until the next catastrophe.
The total responsibility of irresponsible capitalism
We are not trying to deny the complexity of climatic phenomena: indeed, developing a better understanding and finding a clearer model for them is still one of the great scientific goals that humanity must strive for. We don’t claim to be able to offer the formal proof that there is a single connecting link between all these exceptional climatic events. Nevertheless it remainc events. Nevertheless it remains the case that:
The natural catastrophes are thus not quite so ‘natural’ after all. For the first time in the history of humanity, man has been influencing the global evolution of climate at a stupefying pace. But the bourgeoisie does not want to know and above all it doesn’t want to give itself the means to know. It cannot afford to establish an irrefutable link between the destructive activities of capitalism (such as industrial pollution, but also the irrationality of transport in the megacities or the massive deforestation of the Amazon) and the climatic irregularities. But for over twenty years now the scientific community has been ringing the alarm bells about the greenhouse effect, the risks posed by the deforestation of the Amazon, etc.
At the most, the bourgeoisie will agree to take these links into account as one hypothesis in a debate of ideas, taking refuge in the argument that the scientists, in the present state of their knowledge, cannot pronounce categorically on the subject; furthermore they are rather fond of the thesis that global w of the thesis that global warming is the result of a climatic cycle that takes place on a very long term basis, i.e. longer than human history. This ‘alternative theory’ of long climatic cycles is however less credible given that following this logic, we are more likely to be heading towards a new ice age! Here we can see the irresponsibility and arrogance of a bourgeoisie which doesn’t have any ‘scientific certainty’.
But what the bourgeoisie is also trying to hide is the total responsibility of the capitalist system as regards the consequences of natural catastrophes. Whether we’re talking about storms, cyclones, floods, droughts or earthquakes, the frightful scale of material damage and loss of life derives entirely from the laws of capitalist profit: crazy rates of urbanisation (50% of the world’s population are squeezed into urban agglomerations); jerry-building of all kinds (as in Turkey where the housing hit by the earthquake turned out to have been constructed with cement that lacked enough sand); modification or destruction of natural hydraulic networks; deforestation leading to soil erosion and floods; uncontrolled demographic growth, etc. To this can be added the deficiency of the systems of prediction and aid (1).
It’s also true that capitalism doesn’t have to call on Mother Nature to provide catastrophes: it’s quite capable of producing them itself. In the space of a month, as well as the Erika, two other oil spillages have devastated coastal regions in Turkey and Brazil. Then there are the various nuclear accidents, from Three Mile Island in the US to Tokaimura in Japan via Chernobyl, the Seveso dioxin leak, numerous rail and air accidents, air pollution (causing among other things a considerable increase in allergic and infectious diseases), massive or gradual food poisoning resulting from the uncontrolled use of pesticides, herbicides, inappropriate animal feed, etc. Even in the industrialised countries, drinking tap water is becoming increasingly risky.
You could go on and on with this criminal indictment of the system. The basic point is that capitalism is totally incapable of avoiding these catastrophic scenarios. And this is because the phenomena of pollution or the various accidents are a pure product of the logic of a system based on profit at the expense of human lives.
Ecology: a reformist illusion
Those who are convinceace="Arial">Those who are convinced of the contrary have all sorts of ideas about reforming capitalism, which they label as ‘ultra-liberal’ or ‘globalised’ in order to hide the real nature of the system. The advocates of the ecological movement never stop calling on the different states – the ones who bear the main responsibility for pollution in all its forms – to become aware of the threat to the planet and to apply the resolutions adopted at the various international conferences on the environment.
This is the old reformist fairy tale about the ogre who becomes a vegetarian out of his love for children. These conferences are invariably forums where the competing capitalist states spout a lot of fine rhetoric about their concern for the planet while making absolutely sure that their own national interests come first. The bourgeoisie has yet to apply the measures voted at the Rio Convention in 1992. The conferences in Kyoto (1997), Buenos Aires (1998) and recently in Bonn (1999) merely provided the occasion for the settling of scores between the USA and the European Union over the ‘market’ of polluting emissions, over the national ceilings of emissions. But how could it be otherwise in the epoch of imperialism, of every man for himself, exacerbated by the mortal crisis of capated by the mortal crisis of capitalism?
Old tankers regularly spill their loads into the ocean. This is not a result of statistical laws, or even of ‘globalisation’, but of the laws of capitalism, which dictate that you have to exploit men and materials at the cheapest possible cost. The French state, which is happy to denounce Malta or Panama for getting around the law by sailing under different flags, is quiet about its own use of similar devises, such as the TAAF (Terres Australes et Antarctiques Francais) which enable it to get round its own legislation and carry on using floating wrecks like the Erika. The big industrial powers all use these tricks thanks to a mafia-like network of intermediaries.
The fuel being carried by the Erika was the scrapings of the bottom of the barrel, not for consumption in France according to its own rules. According to the Canard Enchaine of 5.1.00 it was going to be sold to power stations in Somalia or Ethiopia, contributing just a little more to the global pollution of the atmosphere. The French state and Total were perfectly well aware of this. The peripheral countries are in such a terrible mess that they more and more serve as dustbins for the big powers.
This shows up the hypocrisy of the measures announced by the Jospin government, typical of this class of gangsters whose concern for ecology was demonstrated by the bombing of Serbia. The much-vaunted ‘ecotax’ is a clear expression of capitalism’s total inability to fight against pollution: when it was finally authorised, it could be set against fines! And, in line with the Kyoto and Bonn conferences, the rich states can also buy their ‘quota’ of pollution form the poor ones, who anyway continue to pollute heavily because their technology is so obsolescent.
But what else can you expect from an economic system which from its very beginnings has crushed men and destroyed nature in the name of accumulating profit?
Capitalism: a story of ‘muck and blood’
Ecology is the ideology of a desperate petty bourgeoisie when it’s not a mere cover for the ruling class itself. Either way it is quite unable to understand the real source of what it sees as the ‘abuses’ of capitalism (2).
Marxism, the revolutionary theory of the only class which has a futthe only class which has a future to offer humanity, is alone able to understand capitalism in its historic dimension and not in the light of moral imperatives which either serve to perpetuate the myth of capitalism as eternal progress, or which fall into the nostalgia for the natural economies which preceded capitalism. In comparison to the latter, capitalism, in which all production is geared towards the market and in which accumulation for accumulation is the motor of economic activity, is an extraordinarily dynamic system which has developed the productive forces as never before, making it possible for mankind to go beyond it and live in a society of abundance. In its inexorable march forwards, capitalism always saw nature as a commodity to be used at will, as it did with men from its first period of primitive accumulation – as Marx put it in Capital, it came into the world "oozing muck and blood from its very pores".
And as Rosa Luxemburg added,
"it wasn’t only at its birth that capitalism ‘oozed muck and blood from its very pores’, but throughout its march across the world" (Accumulation of Capital). Everything operates as if "at the same time that mankind masters nature, man seems to become ensature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy…All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force" (Marx, Speech at the Anniversary of the People’s Paper, April 1856).
The planet-wide domination of capitalism at the beginning of the 20th century and its entry into decadence with its procession of wars, famines, massacres and misery has only accentuated this tendency.
This has been an epoch in which
"all the capitalist nations are forced to compete with each other over a saturated world market; an epoch, therefore, of as permanent war economy, with a disproportionate growth of heavy industry; an epoch characterised by the irrational, wasteful duplication of industrial complexes in each national unit, by the desperate pillaging of national resources by each nation as it tries to survive in the pitiless rat-race of the world market. The consequences of all this for the environment are now becoming crystal clear; the intensification of ecological problems can be measured according to the different phases of capitalist decadence" (‘It’s c>" (‘It’s capitalism that’s poisoning the earth’, IR 63).
Capitalism’s further slide into its phase of decomposition in the last decade of the 20th century has only exacerbated these features.
We cannot have any illusion that capitalism and its ruling class will find any escape from the suicidal path it is now on. Only the working class, through the development of its struggles, can put forward the perspective of a society of harmony between man and his environment.
BTD
NOTES
(1) the Venezuelan president Chavez, who was warned on the eve of 16 December (the day of the catastrophe) of the critical situation in the state of Varga didn’t bother to raise a finger as he was more concerned with electoral preparations (see WR 231) .
(2) For a more developed analysis see ‘It’s capitalism that’s poisoning the earth’ in International Review 63
The Austrian Freedom Party is one of those populist parties which are emerging all over Europe in response to a general discontent. Fuelled by the crisis and social decomposition, their whole programme boils down to racist and xenophobic hysteria and the rejection of the traditional party machines. In Andalusia (against the Moroccans), in France with Le Pen, we h), in France with Le Pen, we have seen similar xenophobic mobilisations. In Austria this fear of being ‘swamped by foreigners’ has been reinforced by the projected opening up of western Europe to the eastern European countries. Similarly the rejection of the ‘establishment’ has been common to all the right wing parties in Europe, since this enables them to present themselves as a new tendency free from the sleaze and personal ambitions of the regular politicians. When you bear in mind that to be a state employee in Austria you have to hold the card of one or other of the two main parties, you can see easily why part of the population feels excluded by these big apparatuses which have shared power for over 30 years.
But none of this makes Haider, any more than Le Pen, a 'new Hitler'. What brought Hitler to power in the 1930s was not the popular pressure of the anti-semitic masses (as the bourgeoisie would like us to think) but the very real needs of German capital. Faced with a violent economic crisis, it was vital for the German bourgeoisie to organise the state in a disciplined manner around a single objective: war. Hitler had a programme for German capital. This involved the concentration of capital, the strengthening of the executive and a clear orientation towards building a war economy. This was a specr economy. This was a specific, original programme which represented a break with previous policies.
Haider’s Freedom Party doesn’t have a specific programme; you could say it doesn’t have a programme at all. Apart from the populist propaganda, once it arrived in power, it simply took up the programme of the Conservative Party, acting as a mere buttress for the latter. What’s more, this programme is no different from that of the previous coalition between the Conservatives and the Social Democrats, which governed the country up to the last elections. At the beginning of 2000 Austria unveiled its third ‘budget of rigour’. Before the last election all the parties were promising economic growth and an increase in public spending. In fact, even before the elections took place, the policies of the future government were already fixed, in continuity with that of its predecessors: it would adopt a policy of austerity, dictated by the European Union. The same European Union which has waxed so indignant about this new government and wants us to believe that its austerity programme is the result of its fascist tendencies, whereas it is only following the EU’s directives on attacking the working class.
By accepting the extreme right in its government, the Austrian stategovernment, the Austrian state knew quite well what it was doing. These populist parties, whose job is basically to rally those who are disgusted with the political process and channel their anger behind demagogic slogans, can be a certain inconvenience. The rise of their influence as opposition parties, nourished by social decomposition, can become an embarrassment for the normal operation of the bourgeois political game. This is exactly what happened with the National Front in France, or the MSI in Italy. In such situations, it becomes necessary to deflate these parties and render them a bit more reasonable.
The French bourgeoisie, having initially done everything it could to inflate the influence of the NF, then contrived to split it in two when it became too much of an encumbrance. The Austrian bourgeoisie, for its part, seems to be following the example of its Italian cousins, who chose to recycle the MSI by absorbing it into the Berlusconi government. Today the MSI has become a ‘presentable’ and better controlled right wing party. Tomorrow, having carried out policies no different from that of previous governments, the Freedom Party will also probably find its popularity has been eroded. In the meantime, Austrian social democracy will have had a rest-cure in opposition; having fought against the ‘fascistsagainst the ‘fascists’ it would have regained its lost virginity and this will help it to obscure the memory of its blows against the working class.
If the freedom party really was a fascist party, it wouldn’t be in power today. For a fascist party to come to power, the social conditions have to be in place. Fascism was the product of a particular historical situation which made it both possible and necessary. Thus, in the 1930s, it was because the world proletariat had been defeated (and not least in Germany where social democracy drowned the revolution in blood between 1918 and 1923), and because the crisis imposed the march towards a new world war, that fascism was called upon to take control. Today, the proletariat is not defeated, and thus, despite the crisis, world war is not on the agenda. Therefore the bourgeoisie has no need, and no possibility, to exert its dictatorship in the form of fascism. It has at its disposal a much more effective instrument in today’s conditions: democracy.
Chaining the proletariat to bourgeois democracy
Here lies the essential reason for all this barrage. If the bourgeoisie is working so hard to present the Freedom Party as a fascist menace, it’s because these events provide it with an ideal oppnts provide it with an ideal opportunity to stoke up it ideological campaigns about the defence of democracy, which are so necessary at a time when it is forced to hammer working class living conditions (1).
This campaign is in full continuity with all the others which, since the collapse of the eastern bloc, have called upon the workers to defend the democratic state against dictators of all kinds (the noise about Pinochet being one of the most recent examples).
In fact, while it can have different faces, capitalist rule is always a dictatorship. Today, in the countries of western Europe, it’s not fascist governments which are throwing the workers onto the dole and cutting wages. It’s not fascist states which are imposing work flexibility and making working conditions more and more dangerous and difficult.
In the present historical situation, which holds out the perspective of massive class confrontations, democracy is the best mask for the domination of capital. In the present strategy of the left in government in the central countries of capitalism, Haider is a godsend for the bourgeoisie. It uses him to increase the credit ratings of the left, which is presented as the best rampart against fascism, unlike the right which capitulates and even shaich capitulates and even shares government with it.
The workers must refuse to be caught up in the false alternative between fascism and democracy, which are only two sides of the same coin. Today the real historical alternative posed to the proletariat is more than ever socialism or barbarism, and by far the greater danger to the proletariat becoming conscious of this alternative is the mystification of democracy.
H 25.2.2000
(1) Apart from this campaign against the working class, the Haider affair is also being used as a tool of inter-imperialist rivalries, particularly by the French and American bourgeoisies. At a time when the German bourgeoisie is trying to expunge its past in order to develop its global power, its rivals can hardly fail to miss the opportunity to throw the memory of Nazism in its face again.
Contrast this slow penny-pinching response with the rush to give ‘humanitarian assistance’ to the population of Kosovo last spring. Although the repression of the Kosovans had been going on for some time under the eyes of the great powers, it was not until NATO decided to intervene in the situation that billions were spent that billions were spent - on reducing Serbia’s infrastructure to rubble. The war in Kosovo created a humanitarian disaster, forcing hundreds of thousands of refugees to flee the NATO bombing and resulting offensive and ethnic cleansing by the Serbian army. When it comes to spending money on war the bourgeoisie has no problems at all.
This was true with regards to Mozambique during its civil war which ended in 1992. The major imperialist powers backed one side or other, FRELIMO or RENAMO, in a vicious conflict that left many thousands dead. In an dark reminder of this war, the floods have churned up old minefields and scattered them across the land, creating further dangers for the flood victims when they come to rebuild their shattered lives.
During the last decade the number of wars in Africa has continued to grow. The war in the Congo is a stark example. Zimbabwe has sent 11,000 troops to prop up the Kabila regime even though its own economy faces collapse. "Inflation at over 60% hurts everybody...70% of the population are deemed to be living in dire poverty. The country is in the grip of a two-month fuel shortage [while] large quantities of Zimbabwe’s scarce fuel are going to the war in Congo..." (The Economist, 19/2/00). The country is on the verge of bankruptcy, i on the verge of bankruptcy, importing only what it can pay for in cash..
The floods that have hit Mozambique have affected its neighbour Zimbabwe as well. The Zimbabwe Air force allocated 3 helicopters to rescue flood victims while "Most of the 24 serviceable air force helicopters are on military service in the Congo" (Times, 1/3/00). The physical damage caused by the floods will inevitably further shatter the economy as well.
And let us not forget how the Blair government quietly decided to honour its agreement to supply Zimbabwe with the attack helicopters it requires to carry on with its intervention in Congo. This is no isolated breech of New Labour’s ‘ethical’ principles, because Labour’s ethics are precisely those of imperialism. Even ‘humanitarian’ and ‘development’ aid serves imperialist purposes, as shown by Clare Short, international development secretary, who invited Uganda, Rwanda, Colombia and Indonesia, among others, to a conference to review military spending: "Ms Short insists that her department will not necessarily be reducing the size of poorer nations’ armies. In the past she admits, ‘military expenditure was seen as bad ... something to be cut ruthlessly, without regard for the very real securgard for the very real security threats that countries might face.’" (The Guardian, 17.2.00).
What this boils down to is that as far as capitalism is concerned, the proper use of helicopters is not to save flood victims, but to defend your country’s ‘security’, ie, its ability to compete in the imperialist free for all.
Trevor