Learning from Cuba's Footprint

by Robyn Francis

Target ONE EARTH – Living Within Our Footprint and What we can Learn from Cuba

Robyn Francis reports on her visit to Cuba to experience 'first hand' the only nation on earth living within its ecological footprint. Cuba provides important food for thought for everyone enjoying 'western' affluence to meet the challenge of radical and rapid reduction of consumption and waste--as this is ultimately what drives climate change and resource depletion. Cuba's capacity to survive collapse gives hope and inspiration as we grapple with the need to embrace radical changes for the great transition to a low-consumption conserver society.

We can live better with less - Cuba shows us how...

Learning from Cuba's Footprint by Robyn Francis

This is an edited transcript of Robyn Francis’ Key Note presentation at the Climate Emergency Conference, Adelaide, October 2008. The article contains a selection of slides from the accompanying visual presentation.

Preamble

This presentation shares observations from a 40-day exchange visit to Cuba, Apr 28-Jun 6, 2008, visiting 40 permaculture and related projects throughout Cuba. The visit was funded by the Cuba-Australia Permaculture Exchange) CAPE, a project of Erda Institute in Australia and my Cuban host organisation was the Foundation for Nature & humanity, based in Havana.

The 2007 State of the Planet report from the World Wildlife Fund identified Cuba as the only nation on earth living within its ecological footprint and at the same time achieving a high standard in the United Nations Human Development Index. I was curious to see and experience ‘first hand’ a society living within its ecological footprint . Hence this presentation is titled Target One Earth – living within our footprint, what we can learn from Cuba.

What does an ecological footprint mean?

To explain what living within our footprint means is best demonstrated by example: If everyone—all 6.7 billion people on earth-- lived like the average Cuban we could sustain our current global population with the resources of one planet earth, whereas If everyone lived like an Australian we’d need 3.7 planets, or like an American we’d need more than 5 planets – this is clearly not sustainable.

We are living well beyond our planetary means and facing planetary bankruptcy.

Read the rest of this article at the Djanbung Gardens website

Cuba Undertakes Reforms in Midst of Economic Crisis

Cuba Undertakes Reforms in Midst of Economic Crisis

By Roger Burbach

September 20, 2009

Carlos picks me up with his dated Soviet-made Lada at the Jose Marti International Airport on a hot sweltering day in Havana. It’s been eight months since I’ve seen him, last January to be precise, when I came to the island on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. “How’s it been?” I ask him as we begin the 20 minute drive to central Havana. With a scowl, he replies: “Not so good, nothing seems to get easier.” He goes on to say that foodstuffs are as difficult as ever to come by, necessitating long waits in line for rationed commodities.

I am not surprised, as I had been reading in the international press that Cuba has been compelled to curtail its food imports. Hit by the global economic crisis, spending by tourists dropped off while the price of nickel, Cuba’s main mineral export, fell by more than half. This meant that Cuba has no choice but to cut agricultural imports from its main supplier, the United States. Credit purchases are not an option, as the U.S. legislation in 2000, opening up agricultural sales to Cuba, requires immediate payment in hard currency.

To add to its woes, devastating hurricanes hit Cuba in 2008, decimating some of the country’s sugar plantations, as well as its production of vegetables and staple foods. The only bright light in the midst of this food crisis is the implementation of reforms in the agricultural sector under Raul Castro, who became acting president in July 2006. He officially assumed the presidency from his brother Fidel after a vote by the Cuban National Assembly in February 2008.

I am particularly interested in knowing how the distribution of 690,000 hectares of idle lands to 82,000 rural families, in process when I left Cuba in January, has affected the domestic supply of fresh produce. On my second day, I go to one of the open markets in Havana where I talk to Margarita, who is selling undersized tomatoes. She says they come from her father’s new farm. “We started cultivating tomatoes, as well as other vegetables,” she says. “We even hired workers, which is now allowed. But then, as the crops began to mature, we got very little water from the state-owned irrigation system.” Fearing the worst, I ask her if the state is discriminating against the new producers. “No” she says, “the wells and the irrigation system simply didn’t have any gas for the pumps.”

Later in the day, I meet with Armando Nova, an agricultural economist at the Center for the Study of the Cuban Economy. I had also talked with him in January and he had then been optimistic about the coming year. I ask him what’s gone wrong and he says, “We’re caught between the effects of the global economic crisis and the difficulties of implementing the reforms.” He goes on to say that there has actually been an increase in fresh produce since the beginning of the year, but it is hardly noticeable in the markets because of the increased demand, a result of the drop in international imports.

As to the economic reforms, Nova says: “The top leadership around Raul is committed to a fundamental shake up of the economy, but change is slow because of bureaucratic obstacles.” The very process of distributing idle lands requires 13 steps of paper work submitted to different agencies. And while the government is committed to providing the new farmers with the inputs needed to start up production, many of them are not delivered because they are simply not available due to the economic crisis.

Nova’s view that reforms are inevitable is reinforced in a special report on the economy released by Inter Press Service (IPS), which is affiliated with the Ministry of Foreign Relations: “There is an ever broadening consensus about the necessity of a profound transformation of the Cuban economic model. … It is recognized that the future strategy should include non-state forms of property — not only in agriculture, but also in manufacturing and services.” The publication asserts, “Fifty years of socialism in Cuba have to be re-evaluated,” particularly the role of the state and the need to use market mechanisms.

To facilitate this transformation, the government is opening up a 45-day public discussion that includes union centers, schools, universities, community organizations and the base of the Cuban Communist party. According to materials sent out to orientate the discussions, the participants should “not only identify problems, but also suggest solutions…The analysis ought to be objective, sincere, valiant, creative, … carried out in absolute liberty with respect for discrepant opinions.”

According to Orlando Cruz of the Institute of Philosophy, whom I met at a conference in Havana on social movements, “socialism is to be re-founded in Cuba. We have to totally discard the Soviet model that so badly served us.” I ask whether Cuba will now move towards the Chinese model. Like others in Cuba in the party and the government I have asked the same question. He responds somewhat curtly: “We respect the Chinese model, but we have to follow our own process and history. China is a totally different country.” Cruz makes clear that there will be meaningful democratic participation in the new Cuba: “We will not allow the formation of a petit-bourgeoisie to control or distort the process. We want to construct an authentic democratic socialism. It will be deeper and more participatory than that of the social democracies of Europe.”

I first went to Cuba in 1969 and have visited the country every decade since then. There have been many challenging moments in the revolution’s history, and now we are witnessing another one, as the country embarks on an endeavor to free the economy from the shackles of its bureaucracy. The fate of this move depends on the ability of society at the grass roots to exert a greater role in the country’s economic and political institutions. If this effort succeeds, the Cuban revolution will be opening a new path for socialism in the 21st century.

*Roger Burbach is the author of “The Pinochet Affair: State Terrorism and Global Justice,” and the Director of the Center for the Study of the Americas based in Berkeley, CA. He is working on a new book with Gregory Wilpert, “The Renaissance of Socialism in Latin America.”

Video on Climate Change from 1958

Think climate change is one of them new-fangled greenie/ commie/ whacko ideas designed to destroy western "civilisation" and bring about a "new world order"?

Well, maybe you're right, and maybe you've forgotten to take your meds. Either way, climate change is not a new idea. The only thing new is that the theories are being proved correct, one after another. The dominoes are falling, the glaciers are melting, and the age of humanity appears to be drawing to a close.

And to think we knew about it 50 years ago...

The CPRS was a fatally flawed scheme

August 14, 2009

Socialist Alliance statement on the Senate rejection of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme

The Socialist Alliance welcomes the Senate’s rejection of the Rudd Government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

We commend the Greens Senators for their principled opposition, which reflects the viewpoint of the grassroots climate action movement, as well as their own goal of achieving a safe and sustainable climate.

Labor’s CPRS has never been “a good starting point to achieving real targets for reduced greenhouse emissions” as claimed by the Australian Council of Trade Unions. Neither is the CPRS the best way to create “a million clean energy jobs in six key industry sectors over the next two decades”.

It is simply a dangerous and immensely complex proposal: with its paltry 5% reduction target it would actually allow carbon pollution to increase, would pay $16.4 billion in compensation to the big polluters, allow an increase in coal production and exports, and transfer to poor developing countries the task of offsetting Australian greenhouse gas emissions.

The Coalition’s carbon policy, which has yet to be finalised, but which was foreshadowed only two days before the Senate vote, would be even more generous to corporate carbon polluters and power generators.

The ACTU’s support for Labor’s CPRS and its claim that rejection puts green jobs at risk (because “business can’t invest until they have certainty, and jobs can’t flourish until they do”) confirms the myopia of policymaking by Australia’s peak union body.

The ACTU, and its partners in the Southern Cross Climate Coalition (the Climate Institute, the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Australian Council of Social Services) that have supported the CPRS, don’t seem to understand that the transition to climate safety cannot be trusted to market forces. The market will only invest in climate-friendly technologies when there’s a profit to be made, not because it has to be done.

This stance ignores the facts of climate science. To reduce global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations to 350 parts per million at most—a target that the ACF itself now accepts as a necessary minimum—carbon emissions will have to fall by at least 5% a year. However, the best results achieved through a market-based approach (by Germany) have been a reduction of 1% a year.

The only way of cutting emissions quick enough to avoid catastrophic climate impacts is through massive publicly financed and controlled investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency, the funds sourced from cuts to subsidies to polluters and military expenditure, with the workers in polluting industries retrained on full pay for green jobs.

The Senate rejection of the CPRS also poses big challenges for the grassroots climate action movement. In three months, the CPRS bills can again be presented to the Senate. Another Senate rejection would give Kevin Rudd a basis for a double-dissolution election.

So the pressure is now on the grassroots climate movement to campaign vigorously to educate everyone about the deficiencies of the CPRS, and about the better alternatives. A majority of Australians still see the CPRS as a positive first step towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions, primarily because they have not been given the facts they need to make an informed judgment.

An equally important job is to equip the union movement with a climate policy that addresses the global warming emergency. The challenge—in individual workplaces, union meetings and conferences, Trades and Labour councils and other union peak bodies—is for the unions to fully accept that the climate crisis will not go away.

The rejection of the CPRS should encourage all of us to accept that the most important way of healing an overheating planet is not any “cap-and-trade” scheme, but to make the mass of working people aware of the issues and determined to play a role in avoiding catastrophe. That working majority will be central to identifying and eliminating waste and pollution in the workplace, closing down the old polluting industries and developing and building new sustainable ones.

It’s now important for the grassroots climate movement to help transform Australia’s unions from a cheer squad for Labor’s parody of a climate approach into a powerful force for progressive policy and campaigning against the biggest threat humanity faces.

CONTACT: David White (National Environment Coordinator) 0403 871 082

A biopsy of the local climate movement

Via Ben Courtice at [BCC: Words]
The June 13 Climate Emergency rally in Melbourne is a good opportunity for a biopsy of the local climate movement. Almost a year after the first Climate Emergency rally we can take stock of how much real progress has been made.

A positive protest
The spirited rally of maybe as many as 4000 showed the Melbourne climate movement at its best. A panel of sharp and political speakers played to a receptive and militant crowd. The march down Swanston St and the sit-in outside the Town Hall increased the public impact of the rally and the news coverage of and around the rally nationally was reasonable. The diversity of active groups was highlighted in the colourful array of banners, placards, puppets and so forth that festooned the march through the city streets.

Certainly, this rally was a positive and inspiring event for many. On the other hand, I spoke to at least two activists in the crowd who declared they were quite disappointed in the turnout. Should we be happy with 4000? Or should we be wondering what went wrong given that it was less than the May 17 climate Human Sign at St Kilda? That it was not discernibly bigger than last year’s climate emergency rally?

Just counting the numbers could miss the point. The political message, the public reception, and the way the rally was put together all say a lot too.

The first thing which is very positive is the active preparation for the rally by groups that brought banners, puppets and of course the bicycle band. It helped to turn a walk-down-the-street march into a veritable carnival of politics – as such demonstrations ought to be.

Secondly, in the lead up to the rally we distributed (an estimate) about 40-50 000 leaflets (out of the 60 000 or so we had printed). These disappeared quite easily and assuming they were actually distributed by the people who took piles, this is a pretty good effort for activists on the ground.

There were four banner drops over freeways, organised by people in Yarra Valley CAG, Moreland CAG, Families Facing Climate Change in Ashburton and WeCAN in the west. This effort may not have had a huge impact on commuters (some banners were taken down very quickly at the request of CityLink officers) but it shows a certain growth in suburban activism (relative to last year’s rally, the only real point of comparison I can think of).

The rally was incredibly visible, occupying the main street for an hour or so. One rally participant noted on Facebook that he thought as he sat outside Town Hall, "Gee, I haven't done a sit-in for years! Well, one where I actually end up getting dragged away!" We didn’t get dragged away this time, but the response from the crowd to the prospects of organising “civil disobedience” actions was positive, boding well for mass protests at Hazelwood later this year.

Weak points
The negatives are mainly related to the degree of participation in organising the event.

Firstly, the number of people at organising meetings was very small. This may make it easy to decide things bureaucratically, but that is not a strength! It was hard to make difficult decisions early on about the slogans and themes for the day because the people in the room only formally represented Friends of the Earth, Socialist Alliance and Solidarity – no-one from TWS, EV, CEN (well I sort of was from CEN); only a few local CAGs sent reps (and not all to the same meeting, necessarily!). We decided that we had to just go with what we thought the climate movement here would support, and seemed to get it right (we didn’t get complaints, anyway!), but could have easily made a wrong call that wasn’t broadly supported.

Secondly, the amount of events on may have detracted from the rally. The simultaneous organising for the Anglesea coal campaign may have taken out a few activists who could have otherwise made a difference organising the rally. The human sign at St Kilda Beach was in and of itself a great event, but LIVE and Bayside used up all their energy in organising that so we lost two groups from the rally organising (who were both key supporters in the 2008 rally). Perhaps the human sign had a greater impact, but it was not an event the whole movement had decided to prioritise at the Climate Action Summit.

Our ability to disseminate information was weak, apart from the apparent ease at distributing leaflets. We had 8000 posters printed (plus TWS did a print run of their own design with a live tree picture, as opposed to the drought-killed tree on the other posters). After doing a paste-up in the West with a friend, I ruefully remarked that we got too many posters printed. He corrected me: we just don’t have enough activists to put them up!

Trying to mass distribute the last 10-20 000 leaflets hit a similar wall. A good mobilisation of 20 people in the city in the morning could have distributed a large bundle, but we could not even mobilise the whole organising committee (who were busy and overstretched, since there were so few of us) and only got three people to the morning we had set for doing it.

Forests, desalination, bay dredging…
It was great that The Wilderness Society came on board this rally fairly seriously. Their “niche” – the forest issue – is objectively crucial to combating climate change but more than that they represent an important group of environmental activists and supporters. (It was especially pleasing to have them on board after last year they refused to have anything to do with the Climate Emergency rally!).

The Watershed anti-desalination campaign group were present, although since the rally had the national demands around climate policy and not a specific anti-desal demand, it was probably to be expected that they didn’t (as far as I could tell) bring the big crowd from Wonthaggi that they did for last year’s rally. Despite sponsoring the rally, Blue Wedges as a visible campaign seem to be pretty beaten down after not being able to stop the dredging going ahead, and I certainly met some activists but not on the scale of 2008.

To make other comparisons with the 2008 Climate Emergency Rally: Having a “hardcore political” rally was more difficult then. Many climate activists, I felt, were more comfortable with the “Climate Emergency” human sign than with the political demands on the poster (and even others were still quite skeptical about using such an extreme term as “emergency”). Remember this was before the 5% CPRS bombshell was dropped, and before the Climate Summit. Rudd still had a lot of cred; it was the projects like new freeways, coal power stations and desalination plants that provided the most obvious example of the government’s anti-ecological course, hence their prominence in the 2008 rally’s demands. I think this shows clearly that the demands of the Climate Summit have caught on with the main support base of the movement.

Now recruiting to the activist core!
It would be good to keep drawing campaigns such as those around freeways and desalination into the climate movement, and in turn drawing the climate movement into supporting their events. While climate activists and their supporters are mostly wised up about the CPRS and the Rudd government’s agenda, the broader community remains less informed. The expansion of coal mining, freeways, and Garrett’s approval of the pulp mill and desalination plants (among others) shows easily understood examples of what the government’s agenda is.

Our movement has set no firm plans beyond the Copenhagen conference and inevitable protests at that time. Yet it is almost unthinkable that we will be satisfied with the outcome of that conference. And 2010 is election year. Will the climate movement endorse, or run candidates? We need to consider these questions, but first we need to use the Hazelwood protests, the 350.org protests, and the Copenhagen protests to grow ourselves a bigger activist core. When we meet at the 2010 Climate Action Summit we must be bigger.

These three big actions/convergences in the second half of 2009 need to be organised openly in a way that we can invite new people to join in. New (and new-ish) activists need to hear (and participate in) debate about how to formulate demands for the movement, how to organise the tin tacks of a demonstration or blockade, how to get posters and leaflets and media releases out there, and so on. We need more activists who are confident to take responsibility for a group or action and run with it.

As a rule of thumb, I would say – the larger the organising meetings the better. Of course we want participants to be grounded in what is going on. A fair representation of all the existing groups is the first element to put in place. But it is entirely possible to facilitate organising meetings with large numbers of people and still get stuff done. It is possible to have new activists participate and learn.

We don’t have an army of full-time administrators and campaigners to do all the work, so it has to be divided up between all of us. Decision making has to be not just transparent and accountable but participatory. People who feel they own decisions will feel responsibility for implementing them.

What next?
Let’s refocus our various campaign groups and local CAGs. Let’s support the anti-freeway campaign and the anti-desalination campaign and the forest campaigns. Let’s get out to the ordinary people on the street with leaflets, film screenings, media stunts, letters to the editor. And make sure you send a representative to the meetings to plan the Hazelwood protest.

We have a broad concern about climate change in the community. Wong and Rudd are working to draw that concern into support for the CPRS. We have to pull every lever to shift public opinion against them.

Karl Marx the ecologist

Simon Butler

Green Left Weekly, 21 February 2009

As the world economy spirals down into its deepest crisis since the great depression, the writings of Karl Marx have made a return to the top seller lists in bookstores. In his native Germany, the sales of Marx’s works have trebled.

His theories have been treated with contempt by conservative economists and historians. Yet, in the context of the latest economic downturn, even a few mainstream economists have been compelled to ask whether Marx was right after all.

Marx argued that capitalism is inherently unstable, fraught with contradictions and prone to deep crises.

Exploitation, war, hunger and poverty were not problems that could be solved by the market system, he said. Rather, they were inescapable outcomes of the system itself. This is because capitalism is dominated by the wealthiest corporations and devoted to profit above all else.

Only a move to a democratic socialist society, where ordinary people are empowered to make the key decisions about the economy and society themselves, can open the path to genuine freedom and liberation.

Famous for their critique of capitalism and for advocating social revolution, Marx and his co-thinker Frederick Engels are far less known for their concern for the destruction of the environment and the need for sustainability.

Taken together, their views on the relationship between human society and the environment rank them among the most advanced environmentalists of their day.

According to Marx, capitalism is an economic system profoundly at odds with a sustainable planet. The exploitation of nature is as fundamental to the profit system, he argued, as the exploitation of working people.

One of the key goals of socialism is to liberate the natural world from the anti-environmental impacts of corporate greed. “From the standpoint of a higher economic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men”, Marx wrote.

He was scathing of the capitalist economic notion that the air, rivers, seas and soil can be treated as a “free gift of nature” to business.

“Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations.”

The market system is incapable of preserving the environment for future generations because it cannot take into account the long-term requirements of people and planet. The competition between individual enterprises and industries to make a profitable return on their investment tends to exclude rational and sustainable planning.

Engels explained this destructive dynamic: “As individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into account.

"As long as the individual manufacturer or merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with the usual coveted profit, he is satisfied and does not concern himself with what afterwards becomes of the commodity and its purchasers.

"The same thing applies to the natural effects of the same actions.”

In Marx and Engels’s time, this feature of capitalism was especially apparent in farming and agriculture.

“The way that the cultivation of particular crops depends on fluctuations in market prices and the constant changes in cultivation with these price fluctuations — the entire spirit of capitalist production, which is oriented towards the most immediate monetary profits — stands in contradiction to agriculture, which has to concern itself with the whole gamut of permanent conditions of life required by the chain of human generations”, Marx wrote.

Capitalist farming is unsustainable because it inevitably starves the soil of nutrients. It is nothing less than “an art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil”.

Furthermore, Marx held that “all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundations of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more rapid is this process of destruction.

"Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology … only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker.”

Marx and Engels understood the Earth’s ecosystem as dynamic and complex — an intricate, delicately balanced process of interacting components where any changes that occur feed back with new, and often unpredictable, effects.

We disrupt the natural ecosystem at our peril, Engels warned. “Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each victory nature takes its revenge on us.

"Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first.”

Many times Marx described the normal interaction between human society and the natural world as a kind of “metabolism”. Capitalist production creates a “metabolic rift” — a sharp break in the relationship — between humanity and the Earth.

The environmental results of this deepening rift have proved devastating.

“The development of civilisation and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison”, Marx pointed out.

Engels added: “At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside of nature.” On the other hand, “we have the advantage of all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.” That is, we can organise society in step with nature’s limits.

Marx and Engels held that socialism aimed to end class exploitation and also re-establish the “metabolism” between people and the Earth.

This is impossible unless the profit motive is removed from determining production in human society and a system of participatory democracy and rational planning is built in its stead.

Engels argued that only the working people organised as “associated producers” can “govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way”. This “requires something more than mere knowledge. It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and simultaneously a revolution in our whole contemporary social order.”

Today, with climate change threatening life itself, the ecological contradictions of capitalism have reached truly dire proportions. The environmental crisis will undoubtedly play a far larger role in the demise of the system than Marx and Engels realised 150 years ago.

Along with their contribution to ecology, another neglected fact about Marx and Engels is that they were not merely political theorists or philosophers — they were also dedicated activists who participated in the revolutionary movements of their day.

They insisted that theory must be made “real” — it must be enriched and developed through revolutionary practice — to have any real significance.

Marx reached this conclusion in 1845 when he was still very young. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways”, he wrote. “The point, however, is to change it.”

From: Comment & Analysis, Green Left Weekly issue #784 25 February 2009.

Keynes reloaded? - Keynes and Climate Change

International Viewpoint Online magazine : IV409 - February 2009
Thadeus Pato

According to Karl Marx historic tragedies repeat as a farce. Considering, what is nowadays labelled as “Neo-Keynesianism” concerning the official crisis management of the bourgeois state, one gets the impression, that what Keynes intended originally, in fact is re-performed as a farce….

Nobody talks about redistribution in the sense of Keynes or the US New Deal of the thirties

For more than thirty years they have been the urchins of bourgeois economics: the Keynesians. The market-radical school of the Mount-Pelerin-Society with such notorious people as Milton Friedman seemed to have triumphed over the classic Keynesians, the exponents of a governmental regulation of the (capitalist) economy, and the so-called “neo-Keynesianism”, born in 1980s, a school which combines the basic considerations of Keynes with the ideas of the so-called neoclassical school of economy [1], enjoying in the age of deregulation and almost religious belief in the mystic power of the “free market” at best a shadowy existence in the environment of desperate social democrats and trade unionists.

Now Keynes is again current throughout the land, and superficially it may look to the non-expert eye as if abruptly economic politicians of all shades, from East to West, have turned away from the market-radical course of the last 30 years, true to the motto “who cares about the nonsense I talked yesterday”, and rediscovered John Maynard Keynes. But hold on! If you take a closer look to the thought of Keynes, you will come to different conclusions.

What were the intentions of Keynes?

In his main work [2] Keynes started from the viewpoint that conjuncture cycles can be considered most suitably “as the consequence of a cyclical change in the marginal efficiency of capital”. He identified aggregate demand as the central element for the level not only of production but also of employment and therefore rejected neoclassical theory, which argued that unemployment has to be fought by the lowering of wages. He argued, effectively, that the positive effects of the lowering of wages immediately would be foiled by the reduction of purchasing power.

Keynes wrote his main work, which was published in 1935, under the impact of a special historic situation: First there was the worldwide economic crisis of 1929 with all its consequences, second the rise of state-dictatorial economies like the Soviet Union, but also fascist Germany (Keynes was a personal friend of the president of the German Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht), and third the course of the Roosevelt-government in the USA, which pragmatically integrated several Keynesian elements in its policy of restructuring, the so-called New Deal of the thirties. The theory of Keynes is undoubtedly intended on the one hand to avoid what he classifies as “authoritarian political systems”, and on the other to eliminate unemployment: “It is certain that the world will not tolerate the unemployment, which, aside from short periods of recovery – in my opinion unavoidably – is associated with the contemporary capitalist individualism, for much longer. But through a correct analysis of the problem it should be possible to heal the illness and to conserve at the same time capacity and freedom (which he denies the “authoritarian systems”, T.P.). [3]

He undoubtedly recognized the ruling social inequality, but he considered it as unavoidable: “I myself believe that significant inequalities of income and wealth are justified socially and psychologically, but not such big inequalities as exist nowadays.” [4] Consequently from his point of view the state through certain interventions should on the one hand ensure full employment and attenuation of the cycles of crisis and on the other limit inequalities of income. Therefore he proposed a series of measures, in the first place a focused and continuous intervention of the state in the steering of investment and the increase of consumption. In this point as well his argument with the protagonists of market liberalism seems very contemporary: “While therefore the extension of the tasks of government, which the equalization of the liability to consumption and the inducement to investment implies, would seem a terrible interference with personal liberty for a publicist of the 19th century or for an American broker, I defend it on the contrary as the only viable instrument to avoid the destruction of the existing forms of economy in their totality, as well as a precondition for the successful exercise of the initiative of the individual.” [5]

And on this point Keynes went very far – which nowadays is preferably concealed. From his point of view the state should put higher taxes on legacies and high incomes and he stated, that “a quite comprehensive socialisation of investment will show up as the only measure for an approximation to full employment.” [6] And because he – unlike the other protagonists of bourgeois economic science - did not consider the capitalism of the free market as the end of history, he came to quite radical conclusions: “It is not the ownership of productive goods whose acquisition is important for the state. If the state is able to decree the total amount of resources, dedicated for the increase of these goods, and also the rate of award for their owners, it will have fulfilled everything which is necessary. The necessary measures of socialisation can additionally be introduced gradually and without a break with the common traditions of society.” [7]

And the Neo-Keynesians?

Keynes` model of an economy, regulated by intervention and redistribution by the state, naturally seemed weird to the protagonists of a “free market economy”. According to them, the so-called Neo-Keynesians set the bar lower and confined themselves to asking for a so-called anti-cyclical business cycle policy – not only as the case arises, but planned and continuously: Lowering taxes, deficit financing in favour of public investments and lowering interest rates in times of crisis, to strengthen demand and to facilitate investment and – theoretically – the contrary in boom-phases. Whenever this direction was followed, it led to a continuously growing public debt. What neither Keynes, nor his miserable epigones had taken into account was that the bourgeois state is by no means a neutral body. A siphoning off of the profits of the boom-phases to an extent, which would have allowed the maintenance of the capability of intervention of the state with respect to the next crisis, simply did not happen (not to talk about the legacy tax….).

The reality

What has been done today by the leading economic powers like the USA, the EU, Japan etc, in the face of the worldwide economic crisis has almost nothing to do with the original agenda of Keynes. Superficially the so-called “consume-coupons”, conjuncture programs, lowering of interest and lowering of taxes may appear as what the neo-Keynesian economists are demanding. But the “deficit spending” of governments is by no means aimed at a gradual redistribution. On the contrary: the relationship between the financial volume which is spent for direct financial help, debt guarantees and support purchasing for financial capital and the big enterprises, and the money which is going to public investment, is extremely asymmetric. In Germany, for instance, there are 500 billion Euros in the basket for the rescue of the banks; only about 50-80 billion are spent for public investment and strengthening of purchasing power. Just to compare: In the crisis of the late 1960s a social democratic finance minister in Germany opened up an investment-program of 40 billion German Marks. In relationship to GNP this would today mean approximately 400 billion Euros.

And there is no sign of a general change of policies of the respective governments. Instead the different protagonists in recent months have rolled out single measures, as if the theory of Keynes and his epigones was something of which everybody could avail themselves according to fiscal and political opportunity. The one side calls for tax reduction, the other for consume-coupons, the third for forced loans from the rich (but with interest, naturally!). Nobody talks about redistribution in the sense of Keynes or the US New Deal of the thirties (which was, by the way, not successful at all, it was the World War which saved the US economy), they act, as if the whole thing is just a governmental rescue- and emergency measure, after which everything could go on like before. Consequently everywhere politicians assert that the state will withdraw from business immediately when the economy is running again.

But there are still straightforward Neo-Keynesians, like the chairman of the German Left Party, Oskar Lafontaine, who is demanding public investment. But the fact that he is pleading for the construction of new highways shows (among other points) clearly the Achilles` heel of the Keynesian approach.

Keynesianism and Climate Change

Keynes and his successors are focussing consistently on growth. But the problem is, that nowadays we are facing a combined crisis, to which the bourgeois economy has got no answer. On the one hand we have the deepest economic crisis of the capitalist system since 1929, a classic overproduction crisis, and on the other hand the threat of Climate Change as a result of 150 years unlimited exploitation of the natural environment through exactly this exponential quantitative economic growth. The latter proves that policies which place the emphasis on further quantitative growth are obsolete. We do not need, for example, more cars, streets and highways, but an environmentally neutral public system of transport. Individual traffic in its contemporary form has come to its end ecologically. Fighting Climate Change means putting on the agenda an economic order which assesses all mechanisms of production and distribution for their ecologic implications, instead of trying to manage the ecological consequences through market mechanisms or fiscal policies (taxes, CO2-certificates), or responding by establishing an additional “Climate Industry”.

But for what is really needed, a sustainable recycling-based economy, which sticks to Climate- and environmental neutrality, the capitalist economy provides no basis – either in its (neo) Keynesian or its market-radical variation. Therefore we need a fundamentally different mode of production and distribution, oriented towards the needs of the people on the one hand and towards the preservation of the natural environment, which is crucial for the survival of humanity.

For that, and this completely ignored by Keynes and his successors we need a state which is not in the hands of the lobbies from industry and finance capital.

Conclusion

What the governments of the industrialized countries are actually practising is neither Friedman-school, nor Neo-Keynesianism, nor Keynesianism. It is simply without any concept, short-sighted and from the point of view of Climate politics disastrous. The state and its treasury are taken to the cleaners by the ruling groups from industry and finance capital – for the broad layers of the population, who will be most affected by the consequences of the crisis in the coming years through lower wages, unemployment and old age poverty. Apart from the fact that the success of the “rescue-packages” of the governments is to be doubted, these will lead to a further expropriation of the working class: through inflation, which will be the inevitable result of the enormous expansion of debt.

The governments in fact are executing redistribution: in favour of the rich, to the disadvantage of the working people and at the expense of the environment. The label “Neo-Keynesianism”, which is put on these policies by some propagandists suggests misleadingly that there is a theoretically founded, consistent crisis management. But this is not true: it is false labelling, born from pure helplessness.

Thadeus Pato is a leading member of the German RSB (Revolutionary Socialist League) and member of the International Bureau of the Fourth International

NOTES

[1] For example: David Romer, Gregory Mankiw: „New Keynesian Economics“ (Cambridge, MA and London, MIT Press, 1991)

[2] All citations from: J.M. Keynes: Allgemeine Theorie der Beschäftigung, des Zinses und des Geldes; Duncker und Humblot, Berlin, 6. Aufl. 1983 (the article was originally written in German, so the citations are back-translations from German and may not coincide exactly with the English original. T.P.)

[3] Keynes, op. cit., S.321

[4] Keynes, op. cit., S.315

[5] Keynes, op. cit., S.321

[6] Keynes, op. cit., S.319

[7] Keynes, op. cit., ibid

Australia: Climate Summit unites new environment movement

Human chain surrounds Parliament House, Canberra, February 3, 2009. Photos by Greenpeace.

By Simon Butler, Canberra

Green Left Weekly -- February 6, 2009 -- We live in a peculiar, troubling time, where the world's climate scientists are all but screaming from the rooftops for governments to listen and take urgent action to avert climate change. Act without delay to end carbon emissions and work to draw carbon down from the atmosphere, they say, because the lives of literally billions of human beings are at risk if we fail.

But with perverse irresponsibility the governments are not listening to the scientists and the many others worried about the future. They have ignored the arguments based on scientific fact and disregarded the moral imperative of preserving an inhabitable planet for future generations.

In a time when our government refuses to take the steps to secure the health and safety of our children and grandchildren, only one option really remains. People need to reach out, organise and campaign for a safe climate future. It's because they know that the government and the market won't fix the climate crisis in time that more and more people are taking action themselves.

Australia's Climate Action Summit, held in Canberra over four days from January 31 to February 3, brought together many people from across Australia, inspired to make a difference.

More than 500 participants, representing well over 100 different Climate Action groups, peak groups and political parties, adopted of set of campaign objectives for 2009. The goals decided upon are, they concluded, ``in line with what science, and global justice, demands'‘.

The Climate Summit took place in a political context of the environmental movement having received an enormous slap in the face from the Australian government's Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in December.

Australia's emissions reduction target is a paltry 5% by 2020. Rudd's proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS), meanwhile, is engineered to provide the biggest corporate polluters with free credits and even allows the most energy-intensive industries to expand future production.

Participants came together with a shared understanding that the movement needed to take a fresh, people-centred approach in light of the new government's policies. The growth of Climate Action groups around the country has shown the willingness of people to get involved. Now a national network of climate change activists and groups was needed to coordinate and unite the various efforts.

Clive Hamilton, conference participant and author of Scorcher: the dirty politics of climate change commented on this solid grassroots dynamic of the climate movement, and its origins, in an article published on Crikey.com on February 4.

``The announcement of the [CPRS] was a king hit on the mainstream environment groups that had invested so much in working on the inside of the parliamentary process'‘, Hamilton said. ``Seduced into believing they can influence the Government, in truth they were crushed by the greenhouse mafia. Fossil fuel delegations could get an hour of quality time with the minister, while environment groups felt lucky to have 15 minutes with a bored staffer.''

``This failure underlines the importance of the ‘new environment movement', a surprisingly large network of community-based activist groups that came together in Canberra last weekend for the Climate Action Summit.

``Led by a new generation of young people whose politics have not been shaped by the old movement, they represent a return to radical activism. They are determined, angry, savvy and brave.

``They believe that baby boomers are bequeathing to them a world much worse than the one the boomers inherited. Their objective was perfectly captured in the words on a T-shirt worn by one of them: ‘Unfuck the world'.'‘

Reality check

Day one of the summit began with an honest reminder of what is at stake and discussed how the task of winning a safe climate is easier to accept than to achieve.

In an opening plenary session, Hamilton explained the appalling influence of the ``greenhouse mafia'‘ in setting Australia's climate policy. The government's CPRS was ``as if the government had announced a new tax on cigarettes, but exempted smokers from paying'‘.

``Our only hope'‘, Hamilton said, ``lies in a campaign of radical activism ... Until the public demands it, far ranging actions won't happen.'‘

David Spratt, co-author of Climate Code Red, put forward the case for the movement to adopt a long-term target of 300 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 in the atmosphere and surveyed the findings of the most recent climate science. He ridiculed the federal government's official policy that assumes life on the planet can be preserved with 3° C of warming. ``Kevin Rudd's target of 3° C warming is an end of the world target'‘, Spratt pointed out.

Greenpeace climate change campaign coordinator John Hepburn also spoke on the opening panel. He labeled the failure to tackle climate change as ``a failure of the Australian political system'‘. Hepburn briefly outlined the scale of the changes climate campaigners need to aim for. ``We need to shut down the coal industry as quickly as possible and move to achieve 100% renewable energy'‘, he said.

The final speaker, Jenny Curtis from the Balmain-Rozelle Climate Action Group, pointed out that ``despite the brilliance of what we have created, the movement so far has failed''.

``Our job is to build a new movement, a movement that leads to a whole system transformation'‘, Curtis concluded.

Hope and determination

Over the following three days summit participants contributed to a highly productive discussion and examination of the campaign options. In summary, the Climate Summit adopted three unifying objectives:

1) To prevent the Australian government's proposed CPRS from becoming law.

2) To launch a campaign for 100% renewable energy in Australia within 10 years -- drawing upon the example of Al Gore's Repowering America campaign, which is backed by research from renewable energy experts from Stanford University among others.

3) To campaign for a long-term target of stabilising atmospheric CO2 at 300ppm. This corresponds with the most recent research conducted by the world's leading climate scientist, James Hansen, and his team.

That the conference was able to unite on the goal of stopping the CPRS in 2009 is significant. This was achieved despite the differences in the movement about whether some other form of emissions trading scheme could be a part of the solution.

Ultimately, participants agreed that activists can continue to discuss alternatives without preventing the unity necessary to stop the Australian Labor government's atrocious scheme in its tracks this year.

The second objective of achieving 100% renewable energy by 2020 was thoroughly discussed and debated at the summit.

The summit emphasised that the 100% renewables campaign should be twinned with a clear call on the government to create green jobs and prioritise a ``just transition'‘, which incorporates social justice for the workers and communities who currently make their living from unsustainable industries.

This overarching campaign -- or ``meta-theme'‘ as it was described by some summit attendees -- is intended to incorporate and unite the varied climate justice campaigns around the country, without impacting on the autonomy of any of these groups or campaigns.

Discussion and action

Alternative energy expert Mark Diesendorf, from the University of New South Wales, argued against the adoption of this particular objective. In a plenary session on the third morning he said he strongly disagreed that 100% renewable energy by 2020 is a realistic aim. This goal could be achieved by 2040 at the earliest, he said.

However, the majority of the summit clearly differed with Diesendorf's arguments. A number of activists spoke from the floor to argue that the objective is the adequate emergency response required to confront a serious climate emergency. Others pointed out that the available mix of renewable technology -- solar, solar thermal, wind, tidal and geothermal power -- could do the job, provided there was the political will.

That the conference also adopted the long-term target of 300ppm of CO2 is very encouraging. This was strengthened by an explicit call for the Australian government to adopt this goal and advocate it in international forums, in particular the Copenhagen summit in December.

Importantly, the summit also endorsed a framework of future actions. It was made clear that these proposals were not intended to discourage Climate Action groups from determining their own campaigns and actions as well.

The future actions proposed by the summit were:

• Actions outside the offcies of members of parliament or corporations to coincide with the release of the CPRS White Paper in March.
• Nationally coordinated mass World Environment Day rallies on June 6, 2009, with the explicit purpose of publicly launching the campaign for 100% renewable energy in 10 years.
• Climate camp/s in September, inspired by the successful camp held in Newcastle in August 2008.
• Actions around the Copenhagen Summit in December.

The Climate Summit was not able to reach consensus on the kind of national climate network structure for the movement. The summit resolved to continue the discussion and Climate Action groups will be asked to consider new proposals in the coming weeks.

The summit concluded with a protest action at Parliament House on the morning of February 3, when 2500 people joined hands to completely encirclethe parliament with a human chain.

The symbolism of this action could hardly have been more apt. It sent an unmistakable message from the climate justice movement to the politicians hiding inside -- we are many, you are few.

[Simon Butler is an activist with the Democratic Socialist Perspective, a Marxist organisationa affiliated with the Socialist Alliance.]

Capitalism’s burning house

30 January 2009

John Bellamy Foster is editor of US socialist publication Monthly Review, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and author of a number of books including Marx’s Ecology. This is an abridged interview with him on the economic crisis republished from WIN magazine, the journal of the US-based War Resisters League (http://warresisters.org/winmag).

Are we at the beginning of an economic depression? How much longer do you foresee the economic crisis lasting?

What we have is a very severe crisis now in what economists call the “real economy”, no longer simply in speculative finance. There is no way of accurately determining where the bottom is.

Given the severity of this crisis, which is on a depression not recession scale, it will most likely continue well into 2010 and quite possibly beyond.

In fact, none other than then-president George Bush, in prepared remarks for a November 2008 summit of the central bank governors and finance ministers of the G20 economies, said if governments do not act decisively enough we could be facing “a depression greater than the Great Depression’s”.

What is absolutely clear at this point is that we are confronted with the likelihood of a long period of slow or nil growth, beyond the mere business cycle, since the main means of combating the deeply entrenched stagnation tendencies of monopoly finance capital, i.e. “financialisation” or the ballooning of debt, appears to have reached its limits at present.

The crisis of financialisation thus spells a weak economy for a long time to come. Economists have a euphemism they sometimes use for this situation; they call it an “L-shaped” recovery.

Do you think that the emphasis of the US government on neoliberal economic theory, while ignoring the class basis of the economy, is a contributor to the failure of the government to address the problem of financialisation sooner?

Neoliberal economic theory and policy was no accident, but was the way in which the system responded to growing stagnation tendencies that first began to surface with the economic slowdown of the 1970s, which were manifested in such factors as rising excess capacity and unemployment/underemployment and weakening net investment.

With the economic pie growing more slowly, capital reacted by promoting economic restructuring with the aim of increasing profit margins at the expense of workers’ wages (average real wages for non-agricultural workers in the United States peaked in 1972 and today are at the same level as in 1967), cutting back on social welfare spending, squeezing underdeveloped countries with the help of the International Monetary Fund, and more.

At the same time, capital, driven to maintain and enlarge its profits despite weak investment opportunities, turned to financial speculation. Ever-increasing inequality was a necessary part of providing the cash flow to feed the successive financial bubbles.

Eventually, however, speculation based on home mortgagees ran afoul of the worsening income and increased debt load of households. As defaults spread. the housing bubble popped and the entire financial superstructure began to deleverage, creating cascading defaults and deflation.

Since the fundamentals of the economy were extremely weak, once the financial balloon began to deflate the whole economy started to fall, with the end not yet in sight.

I think it is best to see this as a whole phase of capitalist development, which we could call monopoly finance capital, with neoliberalism as its main legitimating ideology. Of course this period generated extraordinarily bad economics: monetarism, supply side economics, rational expectations theory, new classical economics, etc.

Even the name of the system was changed from capitalism to a vague and essentially meaningless ideological designation of the “free market”. Like orthodox economics in general, it was a means of control and a way of justifying what capital found necessary.

Orthodox economics is not innocent of class analysis; rather the class position that it represents requires the ideological concealment of class relations (class does not exist as a category in neoclassical economics). This, however, does not prevent them from constructing concepts (for example the “natural rate of unemployment”) that are means of maintaining class power.

In contrast, 19th-century classical political economy was explicit about not only class but also the political nature of economics. As Marx explained in Capital, only when the capitalists had conquered the state in the 1830s and ’40s did scientific political economy turn into vulgar political economy.

Neoclassical economics (“vulgar political economy”) was based on a class-analytic perspective that could no longer be openly confessed. Its interests were no longer revolutionary, as in the early stages of capitalist economics, but had given way to the “bad conscience and evil intent of apologetics”.

It is no coincidence that this happened as soon as the working class began to become a conscious force and thus a threat to the status quo. Eventually, political economy was renamed economics.

In order to struggle effectively today, we need, for starters, to change economics back into political economy, making the economy a political/public issue once again.

Capitalism works by way of an “invisible hand”: it needs to be made visible.

You talk about the costs of the economic crisis being borne disproportionately by those at the bottom of the class system. How would you restructure the current economy to function in an equitable way?

In the US at the beginning of this decade, the top 1% of wealth holders combined owned twice the wealth of the bottom 80% of the population.

If this is viewed in terms of financial wealth (which excludes owner-occupied houses), the top 1% taken together had four times the wealth of the bottom 80% of the population. Income inequality is at extreme levels.

When productivity and economic growth goes up, we are told in economics textbooks that this pulls up real wages. Yet, real wages in the United States are the same as they were when Lyndon Johnson was president.

This situation of stagnant or declining real wages is actually a product of a long class struggle waged by those at the top against the rest of the society. And it is this growth of inequality — the highest since the 1929 stock market crash — that is at the root of the present economic problem.

Inequality is far greater still if we look at matters from a global standpoint. In 2006, Bill Gates’s wealth was equal to that of the combined GDP of Ethiopia, Niger, the Congo, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Central African Republic, Namibia, Lesotho, Malawi, and Tanzania in Africa — 226 million people.

The immediate issue right now in the US is the question of a new “New Deal” (policies implemented by then-president Franklin Roosevelt in the ’30s to combat the impact of the Depression).

Will there be a launching of work relief programs and other measures that substantially improve the conditions of the majority of the population on a level with the later 1930s? Will there be a resurrection of the Works Progress Administration, the most radical employment program the US ever witnessed?

The answer to these questions is that a genuine New2 Deal will not come about, despite the election of a Democrat administration, unless there is a revolt from below on the scale of the 1930s.

Here I recommend David Milton’s book The Politics of US Labor on the New Deal era. One of the things that Milton demonstrated was that the revolt from below in the ’30s was led by radical syndicalists and communists, who were often ahead of the mass of the workers in terms of making radical demands, but whose militant and far-seeing leadership was crucial to the threat that labor then represented.

It was this mass rise of working people, inspired by socialist and syndicalist leaders, that made some of the more radical reforms of the New Deal-era possible. There is no lack of changes to be made in the US if a class/social movement revolt from below is set in motion.

Government spending in the US is a much smaller share of GDP than in the other advanced capitalist states. This mainly has to do with what Marx called “the respective power of the combatants” in U.S. society. So the only answer is a class-based revolt.

Fred Magdoff and I have coauthored a book The Great Financial Crisis, just now published, that addresses the economic crisis and the question of a New2 Deal.

Nevertheless, a New2 Deal, even if it were to materialise, would not eliminate the deep contradictions of capitalist society or create an egalitarian order. For that a more revolutionary change in society, transcending capitalism, will be necessary.

If this seems extreme, think of the extreme conditions we are living in, both in the United States and the world at large.

World capitalism is in its worst crisis in 80 years. Billions of people in the world are suffering from hunger in the world food crisis that has emerged over the last couple of years.

Science tells us that if we continue with “business as usual” for a decade or two we will be facing irrevocable climate change. This could lead eventually to the elimination of most higher species and the destruction of civilisation — even endangering the survival of humanity itself.

Meanwhile war preparation is expanding in an age of nuclear proliferation and preemptive warfare, associated with declining US hegemony.

In these circumstances, revolutionary change simply means struggling for the sustainable development of humanity and the earth.

My own view is that the only way that humanity can save itself and move forward is a socialism for the 21st century.

Would it work? We don’t know, because it is something that we would have to create through our collective struggles. But as Brecht explained in Buddha’s Example of a Burning House, it is irrational to cling hopelessly to a burning house, as the flames lick its walls and singe our brows, in sheer terror of stepping into the world beyond.

Capitalism is such a burning house.

You have talked about how war spending contributes to an upturn in the economy. What are the benefits to the economy when the government spends on the military? How does this relate to US imperialism?

Using the figures of the Office of Management and the Budget, the US spent about $550 billion on the military in 2007, about equal to the whole rest of the world put together. Actual US military spending was $1 trillion.

Historically, one of the ways in which the US and other capitalist states have gotten out of the economic doldrums is by government spending on the military, which serves the imperial purposes of capital, and does not meet the same resistance from the ruling-class forces as does civilian government spending (which is seen as interfering with the private domain).

However, military spending has become increasingly capital-intensive and technology-intensive, employing relatively little labour for the sums expended. In addition, much of the spending is abroad.

So it is less effective dollar for dollar as a stimulus compared to many other forms of spending. Moreover, if the US were to greatly increase its military spending, it could well set off a world arms race and point to unlimited destruction.

It is worth recalling that World War II was how the US economy escaped the Great Depression. Today, the magnitude of the risk of heading in this direction is beyond all measurement.

What is needed is not more but less military spending, to be replaced by greatly expanded civilian government spending, directed at people’s most pressing needs.

The main reason for US military spending is to keep revolutions from occurring (and to defeat them when they do) throughout the world. It is a means of limiting human freedom globally. All real solutions to the world’s problems therefore require the dismantling of Washington’s military machine.

If today there seems to be an increasing trend toward war it is only because capitalism as a whole has lost its former creative role and is tending toward exterminism in every sense: economic, ecological, and military/imperial.

Our slogan today should no longer be simply Rosa Luxemburg’s “Socialism or barbarism” but “Socialism or exterminism”.

Resistance to war is resistance to an entire system of destruction.

From: International News, Green Left Weekly issue #781 4 February 2009.

The Belem Ecosocialist Declaration

Call for signatures

The following Declaration was prepared by a committee elected for this purpose at the Paris Ecosocialist Conference of 2007 (Ian Angus, Joel Kovel, Michael Löwy), with the help of Danielle Follett. It will be distributed at the World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil, in January 2009.

To add your name to the list of signatories who support the analysis and political perspectives set forth in this statement, email your name and country of residence to ecosocialism@gmail.com

---

The Belem Ecosocialist Declaration

“The world is suffering from a fever due to climate change,
and the disease is the capitalist development model.”
— Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, September 2007

Humanity’s Choice

Humanity today faces a stark choice: ecosocialism or barbarism.

We need no more proof of the barbarity of capitalism, the parasitical system that exploits humanity and nature alike. Its sole motor is the imperative toward profit and thus the need for constant growth. It wastefully creates unnecessary products, squandering the environment’s limited resources and returning to it only toxins and pollutants. Under capitalism, the only measure of success is how much more is sold every day, every week, every year – involving the creation of vast quantities of products that are directly harmful to both humans and nature, commodities that cannot be produced without spreading disease, destroying the forests that produce the oxygen we breathe, demolishing ecosystems, and treating our water, air and soil like sewers for the disposal of industrial waste.

Capitalism’s need for growth exists on every level, from the individual enterprise to the system as a whole. The insatiable hunger of corporations is facilitated by imperialist expansion in search of ever greater access to natural resources, cheap labor and new markets. Capitalism has always been ecologically destructive, but in our lifetimes these assaults on the earth have accelerated. Quantitative change is giving way to qualitative transformation, bringing the world to a tipping point, to the edge of disaster. A growing body of scientific research has identified many ways in which small temperature increases could trigger irreversible, runaway effects – such as rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet or the release of methane buried in permafrost and beneath the ocean – that would make catastrophic climate change inevitable.

Left unchecked, global warming will have devastating effects on human, animal and plant life. Crop yields will drop drastically, leading to famine on a broad scale. Hundreds of millions of people will be displaced by droughts in some areas and by rising ocean levels in others. Chaotic, unpredictable weather will become the norm. Air, water and soil will be poisoned. Epidemics of malaria, cholera and even deadlier diseases will hit the poorest and most vulnerable members of every society.

The impact of the ecological crisis is felt most severely by those whose lives have already been ravaged by imperialism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and indigenous peoples everywhere are especially vulnerable. Environmental destruction and climate change constitute an act of aggression by the rich against the poor.

Ecological devastation, resulting from the insatiable need to increase profits, is not an accidental feature of capitalism: it is built into the system’s DNA and cannot be reformed away. Profit-oriented production only considers a short-term horizon in its investment decisions, and cannot take into account the long-term health and stability of the environment. Infinite economic expansion is incompatible with finite and fragile ecosystems, but the capitalist economic system cannot tolerate limits on growth; its constant need to expand will subvert any limits that might be imposed in the name of “sustainable development.” Thus the inherently unstable capitalist system cannot regulate its own activity, much less overcome the crises caused by its chaotic and parasitical growth, because to do so would require setting limits upon accumulation – an unacceptable option for a system predicated upon the rule: Grow or Die!

If capitalism remains the dominant social order, the best we can expect is unbearable climate conditions, an intensification of social crises and the spread of the most barbaric forms of class rule, as the imperialist powers fight among themselves and with the global south for continued control of the world’s diminishing resources.

At worst, human life may not survive.

Capitalist Strategies for Change

There is no lack of proposed strategies for contending with ecological ruin, including the crisis of global warming looming as a result of the reckless increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The great majority of these strategies share one common feature: they are devised by and on behalf of the dominant global system, capitalism.

It is no surprise that the dominant global system which is responsible for the ecological crisis also sets the terms of the debate about this crisis, for capital commands the means of production of knowledge, as much as that of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Accordingly, its politicians, bureaucrats, economists and professors send forth an endless stream of proposals, all variations on the theme that the world’s ecological damage can be repaired without disruption of market mechanisms and of the system of accumulation that commands the world economy.

But a person cannot serve two masters – the integrity of the earth and the profitability of capitalism. One must be abandoned, and history leaves little question about the allegiances of the vast majority of policy-makers. There is every reason, therefore, to radically doubt the capacity of established measures to check the slide to ecological catastrophe.

And indeed, beyond a cosmetic veneer, the reforms over the past thirty-five years have been a monstrous failure. Isolated improvements do of course occur, but they are inevitably overwhelmed and swept away by the ruthless expansion of the system and the chaotic character of its production.

One example demonstrates the failure: in the first four years of the 21st Century, global carbon emissions were nearly three times as great per annum as those of the decade of the 1990s, despite the appearance of the Kyoto Protocols in 1997.

Kyoto employs two devices: the “Cap and Trade” system of trading pollution credits to achieve certain reductions in emissions, and projects in the global south – the so-called “Clean Development Mechanisms” – to offset emissions in the highly industrialized nations. These instruments all rely upon market mechanisms, which means, first of all, that atmospheric carbon dioxide becomes a commodity under the control of the same interests that created global warming. Polluters are not compelled to reduce their carbon emissions, but allowed to use their power over money to control the carbon market for their own ends, which include the devastating exploration for yet more carbon-based fuels. Nor is there a limit to the amount of emission credits which can be issued by compliant governments.

Since verification and evaluation of results are impossible, the Kyoto regime is not only incapable of controlling emissions, it also provides ample opportunities for evasion and fraud of all kinds. As even the Wall Street Journal put it in March, 2007, emissions trading "would make money for some very large corporations, but don’t believe for a minute that this charade would do much about global warming."

The Bali climate meetings in 2007 opened the way for even greater abuses in the period ahead. Bali avoided any mention of the goals for drastic carbon reduction put forth by the best climate science (90% by 2050); it abandoned the peoples of the global south to the mercy of capital by giving jurisdiction over the process to the World Bank; and made offsetting of carbon pollution even easier.

In order to affirm and sustain our human future, a revolutionary transformation is needed, where all particular struggles take part in a greater struggle against capital itself. This larger struggle cannot remain merely negative and anti-capitalist. It must announce and build a different kind of society, and this is ecosocialism.

The Ecosocialist Alternative

The ecosocialist movement aims to stop and to reverse the disastrous process of global warming in particular and of capitalist ecocide in general, and to construct a radical and practical alternative to the capitalist system. Ecosocialism is grounded in a transformed economy founded on the non-monetary values of social justice and ecological balance. It criticizes both capitalist “market ecology” and productivist socialism, which ignored the earth’s equilibrium and limits. It redefines the path and goal of socialism within an ecological and democratic framework.

Ecosocialism involves a revolutionary social transformation, which will imply the limitation of growth and the transformation of needs by a profound shift away from quantitative and toward qualitative economic criteria, an emphasis on use-value instead of exchange-value.

These aims require both democratic decision-making in the economic sphere, enabling society to collectively define its goals of investment and production, and the collectivization of the means of production. Only collective decision-making and ownership of production can offer the longer-term perspective that is necessary for the balance and sustainability of our social and natural systems.

The rejection of productivism and the shift away from quantitative and toward qualitative economic criteria involve rethinking the nature and goals of production and economic activity in general. Essential creative, non-productive and reproductive human activities, such as householding, child-rearing, care, child and adult education, and the arts, will be key values in an ecosocialist economy.

Clean air and water and fertile soil, as well as universal access to chemical-free food and renewable, non-polluting energy sources, are basic human and natural rights defended by ecosocialism. Far from being “despotic,” collective policy-making on the local, regional, national and international levels amounts to society’s exercise of communal freedom and responsibility. This freedom of decision constitutes a liberation from the alienating economic “laws” of the growth-oriented capitalist system.

To avoid global warming and other dangers threatening human and ecological survival, entire sectors of industry and agriculture must be suppressed, reduced, or restructured and others must be developed, while providing full employment for all. Such a radical transformation is impossible without collective control of the means of production and democratic planning of production and exchange. Democratic decisions on investment and technological development must replace control by capitalist enterprises, investors and banks, in order to serve the long-term horizon of society’s and nature’s common good.

The most oppressed elements of human society, the poor and indigenous peoples, must take full part in the ecosocialist revolution, in order to revitalize ecologically sustainable traditions and give voice to those whom the capitalist system cannot hear. Because the peoples of the global south and the poor in general are the first victims of capitalist destruction, their struggles and demands will help define the contours of the ecologically and economically sustainable society in creation. Similarly, gender equality is integral to ecosocialism, and women’s movements have been among the most active and vocal opponents of capitalist oppression. Other potential agents of ecosocialist revolutionary change exist in all societies.

Such a process cannot begin without a revolutionary transformation of social and political structures based on the active support, by the majority of the population, of an ecosocialist program. The struggle of labour – workers, farmers, the landless and the unemployed – for social justice is inseparable from the struggle for environmental justice. Capitalism, socially and ecologically exploitative and polluting, is the enemy of nature and of labour alike.

Ecosocialism proposes radical transformations in:

1. the energy system, by replacing carbon-based fuels and biofuels with clean sources of power under community control: wind, geothermal, wave, and above all, solar power.

2. the transportation system, by drastically reducing the use of private trucks and cars, replacing them with free and efficient public transportation;

3. present patterns of production, consumption, and building, which are based on waste, inbuilt obsolescence, competition and pollution, by producing only sustainable and recyclable goods and developing green architecture;

4. food production and distribution, by defending local food sovereignty as far as this is possible, eliminating polluting industrial agribusinesses, creating sustainable agro-ecosystems and working actively to renew soil fertility.

To theorize and to work toward realizing the goal of green socialism does not mean that we should not also fight for concrete and urgent reforms right now. Without any illusions about “clean capitalism,” we must work to impose on the powers that be – governments, corporations, international institutions – some elementary but essential immediate changes:

• drastic and enforceable reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases,

• development of clean energy sources,

• provision of an extensive free public transportation system,

• progressive replacement of trucks by trains,

• creation of pollution clean-up programs,

• elimination of nuclear energy, and war spending.

These and similar demands are at the heart of the agenda of the Global Justice movement and the World Social Forums, which have promoted, since Seattle in 1999, the convergence of social and environmental movements in a common struggle against the capitalist system.

Environmental devastation will not be stopped in conference rooms and treaty negotiations: only mass action can make a difference. Urban and rural workers, peoples of the global south and indigenous peoples everywhere are at the forefront of this struggle against environmental and social injustice, fighting exploitative and polluting multinationals, poisonous and disenfranchising agribusinesses, invasive genetically modified seeds, biofuels that only aggravate the current food crisis. We must further these social-environmental movements and build solidarity between anticapitalist ecological mobilizations in the North and the South.

This Ecosocialist Declaration is a call to action. The entrenched ruling classes are powerful, yet the capitalist system reveals itself every day more financially and ideologically bankrupt, unable to overcome the economic, ecological, social, food and other crises it engenders. And the forces of radical opposition are alive and vital. On all levels, local, regional and international, we are fighting to create an alternative system based in social and ecological justice.

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(To add your name to the list of signatories, email your name and country of residence to ecosocialism@gmail.com)

We, the undersigned, endorse the analysis and political perspectives outlined in the Belem Ecosocialist Declaration, and support the establishment and building of an Ecosocialist International Network.

• Ian Angus, Canada

• José Bazin, Canada (Québec)

• Craig Brozefsky, USA

• Joaquín Bustelo, USA

• Domhnall Ó Cobhthaigh, Ireland

• Phil Cournoyer, Canada

• Danielle Follett, France

• Cy Gonick, Canada

• Hunter Gray [Hunter Bear] U.S.A.

• Joel Kovel, USA

• Mark A. Lause, USA

• Richard Levins, USA

• Kevin Lewis, USA

• Michael Löwy, France

• Dan Murray, Canada

• Terry Townsend, Australia

• Bernadette L. Wagner, Canada

• Derek Wall, England