Trade Unionists must be the agents of human survival

By Roy Wilkes 

We now have almost universal agreement that Climate Change is happening and that it is a result of human activity. It was the IPCC’s 4^th Assessment Report, published less than a year ago, which drove the final nail into the coffin of climate skepticism. 

Up until then public opinion was seriously divided on the issue, even among sections of the left, and this was mainly due to the massive PR effort of the fossil fuel and auto industries.   

Of course, the vested interests that promoted climate skepticism for so many years still exist, and they are as rich, powerful and influential as ever. Globally, the top 10 corporations in 2006 by revenue were, in order of size: Exxon Mobil, Wal-Mart Stores, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, General Motors, Chevron, Daimler-Chrysler, Toyota, Ford and Conoco-Phillips, i.e.  4 oil companies, 5 auto manufacturers, and Wal-Mart.[1]

Royal Dutch Shell went on to post profits of £13.9 billion for 2007 (which works out at over £1.5 million per hour) – the biggest profit ever recorded for a UK company.[2]  These are very powerful forces. And although they are no longer taken seriously in promoting climate skepticism, they still exert a huge influence, particularly on US government policy. So instead of denying anthropogenic climate change, as he did until very recently, Bush now insists that, although the problem exists, it is best addressed through voluntary measures undertaken by business, and by the development of techno-fixes.    

But a recent survey of 500 top global corporations showed that climate change ranks only eighth in the concerns of big business, below increasing sales, reducing costs, developing new products and services, competing for talented staff, securing growth in emerging markets, innovation and technology. [3] 

And of course, as the recession bites deeper, climate change will fall even further down the agenda of big business, whose raison d’etre is and always has been to generate profit, and for whom everything else will always remain secondary.    

Even those governments that do claim to take climate change seriously, such as Gordon Brown’s New Labour, still rely on market mechanisms, in particular carbon trading, to ‘solve’ the problem. Unfortunately there are many within the environmental movement who harbour similar illusions in the capacity of the market to resolve this crisis.  Contraction and Convergence, the official policy of the British Green Party, is based on tradable emission rights. [4]   

But emissions trading schemes simply don’t work, as has been amply demonstrated by the EETS, although they do deliver big windfall profits, including to the biggest polluters. [5]   

And they don’t work for a very simple reason: there is a fundamental contradiction between the driving force of capital – which strives for infinite growth and accumulation – and the preservation of a delicately balanced and finite ecosystem.   

Alienation   

So why aren’t we all responding to this enormous danger, which many scientists now regard as the greatest threat ever to the survival of humanity, with a greater sense of urgency?  It seems irrational somehow.  But what this apparent irrationality illustrates very clearly is the depth of our alienation.    

Capitalism starts by alienating us from our own labour power, that is from our capacity to work, which is the most human of all our characteristics.  It therefore alienates us from our own nature, from our ‘species being’ as Marx describes it.  And by forcing us to compete, each of us against everyone else, in every sphere of our lives, it alienates us from each other.    

Of course, it serves the interests of capital for us to exist as atomised individuals.  And it serves the same interests to encourage an atomised response to climate change, one in which we are exhorted to examine our individual ‘carbon footprints’, and made to feel guilty about the way we as individuals live our lives.  This is yet another attempt to make us pay the price for a crisis that is not of our making, to divert our attention from those who are truly responsible. 

Unfortunately many environmentalists fall for this con trick, hook, line and sinker, and thereby inhibit the growth of a real mass movement.  But most workers don’t fall for it, realizing instead that reducing our individual carbon footprints will not make one iota of difference.  A different level of response is required, a collective response, a political response at the level of the state. Climate change is not nor has it ever been an issue of ethics, it is fundamentally an issue of politics, of power.    

As workers we don’t choose our conditions of life: we don’t choose where and how our electricity is generated, we merely flick switches as powerless consumers; we don’t choose to spend hours stuck in traffic jams, with the only alternative a privatized, overpriced and inadequate public transport system; nor would we choose poorly insulated, private housing if we had any real alternative. These conditions are imposed upon us.   It is only by collective action that we will we be able to develop real solutions to a threat as momentous as climate change.

And this collective action begins with collective struggle, mass struggle, and will lead, if we are successful in our struggle, to collective planning, to collective control over the resources of the planet, so that we can allocate those resources not to generating profit for the few but to the satisfaction of real human need, beginning of course with the need to repair the enormous damage done to our habitat by centuries of capitalism.     

But capitalism doesn’t just alienate us from our own labour power and from each other.  By its drive to turn everything into a commodity, including now the very air that we breathe, capitalism alienates us not only from our own nature but from all of nature.  Commodity fetishism casts a veil of mystification over the products of our labour, masking the real social relations behind their production, masking even the nature of production itself as the metabolism of humanity with nature.  An artificial rhythm of daily life is imposed upon us – we sell our labour power, within strictly enforced time frames, we buy commodities (often on credit), we consume them, we worry about debt and fractured relationships, we seek distraction from the bourgeois mass media and its deified celebrities – and all of this gives us the illusion that we are separate and apart from the natural world, that we are insulated from that world.    

But of course, we are not separate from nature at all, we are very much a part of nature, and as such we are utterly reliant on our natural habitat, on our environment.  But our social consciousness is a product of these multi-layered alienations, and this is especially true in the imperial heartlands, in the so-called ‘developed world’. And social consciousness will be transformed into ecological consciousness not through an academic process of pure reason but through a process of struggle.   

And this struggle for a sustainable environment will inevitably become a central aspect of the global class struggle.  As IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri observed, “It is the poorest of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people even in prosperous societies, who are going to be the worst hit.” [6] The poor blacks of New Orleans would certainly concur with that.  And increasingly it will be the poor in Britain, those who cannot afford houses other than in the flood plains, those who cannot afford the ever rising home insurance premiums, who will suffer first and most from the freak weather events that will undoubtedly increase in frequency and intensity over the coming years.   

So ecological consciousness will develop hand in hand with class consciousness, as it becomes increasingly clear that capitalism not only generates war, poverty and insecurity, but that it also threatens our very survival as a species.    

We are starting to see the emergence of a mass movement on this issue, a truly global movement. And although its fiercest battles will initially be in the global South, for example among the indigenous peoples of Latin America, who are fighting to defend the rainforests from the incursions of big agribusiness and the logging companies, nevertheless their repercussions will be felt globally, and will impact on social consciousness even in the imperial heartlands.   

 Eco-socialism 

 Marx and Engels were ecological thinkers who developed a profound understanding of the environmental impact of capitalism and of humanity’s alienation from nature. Of course they weren’t aware of the greenhouse effect, but they wrote extensively on those aspects of environmental science that were known at the time, Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England, and in Dialectics of Nature, and Marx in his writings on the dislocation of the soil cycle that arose with capitalist urbanisation. 

 Indeed, Marx’s studies of Epicurus and the materialist conception of nature preceded and gave rise to his materialist conception of history.[7]

Some of the most advanced ecological thinking of the twentieth century was developed by early Soviet scientists, such as Vernadsky, who published The Biosphere in 1926, several decades before western environmentalists re-discovered the concept.    

So, why have western Marxists concentrated almost exclusively on social science rather than natural science in their thinking for the past half century or more, to the extent that eco-socialism seems like something new?  This is one of the more unfortunate legacies of Stalinism, which has distorted so many of our traditions.    Stalin purged an entire generation of Soviet conservationists, including Uranovsky and Vavilov. Ecology was condemned as a bourgeois pseudo-science (and how many socialists since then have fallen for this terrible and dangerous distortion, and not just from within the Stalinist traditioin either?)  But why did it happen? 

The theory and practice of socialism in one country required the Soviet state to try and ‘outgrow’ capitalism by using economic planning to generate more output than could be attained by the market economies of the West.  Ecological ideas got in the way of this policy, which is often described as ‘productivism’, and which was of course doomed to fail, with the Soviet Union itself degenerating into ecocidal tyranny.  

 Eco-socialism is about freeing Marxism from the distortions of Stalinism, it is about reclaiming a Marxism that is both humane and ecological, and whose goal is the thoroughgoing disalienation of humanity through the agency of its only truly progressive class, the proletariat.    

One of our first priorities as eco-socialists is to encourage the growth of an ecological class consciousness within the organized labour movement. Historically there has been something of an antagonism between environmental activists on the one hand and trade unionists, or more precisely the trade union bureaucracy, on the other. Trade unionists have tended to regard environmentalism as a threat to jobs, and environmentalists distrust the unions because they defend even the most polluting industries.  Both sides are right about the other but for the wrong reasons.   The trade union bureaucracy allows capital free reign to direct production in whatever way it sees fit, as long as it provides their members with jobs; indeed we often hear trade union leaders proclaiming the need for ‘our’ industries to be ‘competitive’; in other words they explicitly accept the imperative of capitalist accumulation and rarely question what is produced or how it is produced, except from a narrow health and safety perspective (or more recently from the perspective of ‘greening the workplace’.)   

 Many environmentalists, on the other hand, have taken managerial jobs within the big corporations in a vain attempt to reform them from within, while others continue to advocate pro-capitalist solutions to the environmental crisis.  As eco-socialists we have to organize to change this situation.  We want trades unionists to be a leading part of the mass movement on climate.  And we want environmental activists to recognize that to be effective their allegiance has to lie with organized labour, not with capital.    

300 trade unionists from every region of Britain and from a wide range of unions attended the Campaign against Climate Change Trade Union Conference on 9^th February. This was a historic event in that it started the process of resolving the antagonism between the unions and the environmental movement, by drawing trade unionists into the heart of the movement on climate change.    

But of course, we want to go further than this.  And in recognizing that capital can offer no real solution to this crisis, we start to raise the question, well who does have the solutions, and what will those solutions look like?  We want trade unionists to recognize that the solutions lie with themselves, that they need to start developing alternative plans of production, or at least to start thinking along those lines, to start thinking about taking control of production. There is no law of nature that says that trade unions have to be defenders of wages and conditions within the narrow confines of capitalism. 

At certain historic junctures unions can play a more progressive, even a revolutionary role.  And in the context of climate change, we are asking trades unionists to be nothing less than the agents of human survival.    

Roy Wilkes is a member of both the International Socialist Group and Respect Renewal.  He is secretary of the organizing committee of the Campaign against Climate Change Trade Union Conference.   

[1] http://www.endgame.org/corps-ranked.html

[2] Independent 31 Jan 2008 

 [3] Independent on Sunday 27 Jan 2008

[4] http://www.gci.org.uk/

[5] European Emissions Trading Scheme. http://www.sinkswatch.org/pubs/2007%2009%20Lessons%20from%20the%20European%20Emissions%20Trading%20Scheme%20_2_.pdf

[6] http://www.america.gov  6 April 2007

[7] See Marx’s Ecology, John Bellamy Foster, New York, 2000

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