Socialist Action /May 2002
What do Socialists Propose? Part
Four.
Capitalism Feeds on War, Environmental
Destruction
By PAUL SIEGEL
Following is the fourth chapter of a new pamphlet by Paul Siegel,
"Socialism versus Capitalism." It is available from Socialist
Action Books for $3.
In 1987 the World Commission on Environment and Development, established
by the United Nations General Assembly, issued a report, "Our Common
Future," after a three-year study. It concluded its report with the
sober statement that the continued existence of the human race is threatened
by the interaction of poverty and environmental degradation on each other.
Rich countries contribute by far the most to pollution and toxic waste,
but poor countries suffer most from the resulting environmental effects.
Depleting their resources in order to survive, they in turn contribute to
deforestation, soil degradation, desertification, and the loss of biodiversity.
No nation, no matter how rich and powerful, can escape the resulting damage
to the planet.
The final words of the report were, "We are unanimous in our conviction
that the security, well-being, and very survival of the planet depend on
such changes [in 'attitudes and reorientation of policies and institutions']
now."1 But these solemn words were not acted upon.
Capitalism by its nature is concerned with maximum profit at any cost,
whether that cost is human misery or environmental degradation. It seeks
quick returns and is opposed to long-range social planning. Talk about international
cooperation for the benefit of all can only be unheeded exhortations in
a global economy in which competitiveness is the name of the game.
How capitalism stands in the way of the solution of the environmental
crisis can perhaps be most clearly seen in what many regard as the most
pressing environment issue, that of global warming.
The 2500 leading climate scientists of the world, brought together by
the United Nations in a body called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, announced in a series of reports beginning in 1990 that the earth
is heating up at a faster rate than at any time in the last 10,000 years.
This, it said, was primarily as a result of the "greenhouse" effect
caused by the trapping of the sun's heat by the emissions from coal and
oil burning.
The panel stated that, unless in very short order fossil fuel emissions
are reduced by from 50 percent to 70 percent from 1990 levels, there will
be "extreme high temperature events, floods [caused by melting glaciers
and ice caps], and drought, with resultant consequences for fire, pest outbreaks,
and ecosystem[s]." These would be "likely to cause widespread
economic, social, and environmental dislocation."2
In response to these warnings, governments engaged in negotiations to
reduce carbon dioxide emissions, each seeking agreements that would be advantageous
to them as against their competitors. However, despite all the palaver and
bickering, carbon dioxide emissions from 1990 to 1999 went up, not down.
Japan's emissions increased by 14 percent, the U.S. emissions increased
by 12 percent, and the European Union emissions increased by 1 percent.
The comparatively small increase of the European Union was largely due
to the North Sea discoveries that made natural gas available to Great Britain
and to the absorption of the much less industrialized East Germany into
the Federal Republic of Germany. This resulted in a sharp drop of more
than 5 percent in the early 1990s, but there was a strong rise thereafter.3
It is not that countries lack the knowledge to switch from fossil fuel
energy to other forms of energy such as solar power, wind power, and natural
gas. Such a change to renewable, clean energy, however, requires confronting
the power of the trillion-dollar-a-year global coal and oil industries that
taken together form the biggest enterprise in history.
The Bush administration rejected the Kyoto Protocol, an entirely inadequate
agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent below 1990, on
the grounds that it would have a negative impact on the U.S. economy and
that it was unfair in excluding the developing countries in the initial
stage of the reductions. The urgent threat of climate change was thus subordinated
to the interests of the dominant U.S. coal and oil industries, which block
a restructuring of the economy that would use alternate means of energy.
The plea that the exclusion of the unindustrialized and the semi-industrialized
countries from the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol was unfair is absurd.
The advanced capitalist countries have achieved their dominance by having
polluted the atmosphere for the past 200 years. They are responsible today
for 80 percent of the world's atmospheric pollution, with the United States
itself being responsible for 25 percent of it.
It is true, however, that such heavily populated countries as China and
India desperately need to grow economically and that if they follow the
European-American route in doing so they will add immensely to global emissions.
As Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter Ross Gelbspan says, "The
issue of global economic inequity is as critical as the carbon balance to
the stability of the planet's atmosphere. ... A transfer of wealth-in the
form of clean energy technologies-will be necessary to help the poor countries
leap-frog over the archaic and destructive type of industrialization that
is powered by coal and oil and use energy from the sun, the wind, and the
rivers to develop their economies."4
This would require, however, the international planning that is incompatible
with capitalism.
Capitalism not only threatens the destruction of humanity through ecological
damage but through modern weapons of mass destruction. War in our time kills
more civilians than soldiers. Eighty million people died in World War II-eight
times as many as died in World War I-if those who died of malnutrition and
illness as a direct consequence of the war are included.
Nazi genocide-the assembly-line killing of an estimated 6 million Jews
and 4 million Roma (Gypsies), Poles, homosexuals, and others-was only the
most awful manifestation of a general descent into barbarism that occurred
in World War II. Both sides disregarded on a huge scale the "rules
of war," supposed to govern civilized nations, that civilian populations
are not to be military targets.
American and British air force bombing killed over 900,000 German civilians.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed perhaps 250,000, and
the 1945 fire bombing of Tokyo, according to General Curtis LeMay, the commander
of the U.S. air force, killed even more.5
Civilian deaths were heavy in the wars in which the United States engaged
after World War II. In the Vietnam War the United States dropped twice as
many bombs as were dropped in all of World War II. An estimated three million
Vietnamese were killed.
The Iraqi war was presented to the American public as a high-tech "surgical
strike," an almost bloodless operation, but John Pilger cited American
and French intelligence reports that estimated "in excess of 200,000
civilian deaths."6
He cited also a 1995 report of the United Nations Food and Agricultural
Organization that stated that more than 560,000 Iraqi children died as a
consequence of the war and the U.S. sanctions. Today the deaths exceed 1.2
million.7
The wars against Vietnam and Iraq were wars of colonialism against underdeveloped
countries. In addition, there were wars between underdeveloped countries
and ethnic wars within underdeveloped countries. There were five times as
many of them as there had been in the same period of time before World War
II. Ninety percent of these wars were internal.
In 1994 there were almost 27 million refugees and internally displaced
persons, 11 times as many as in 1970. One of every 200 persons in the world
was either a refugee or an internally displaced person.8
The underlying reason for the enormous increase in the number and the
destructiveness of these wars was the desperate conditions within the countries.
Where there is a frantic scramble for food, water, and other necessities,
ethnic antagonisms escalate.9
With the towering dominance of American military might, there have been
no wars between major powers since World War II. However, the indefinite
continuance of this situation is by no means assured.
After all, in the 1930s crisis of capitalism it was the very fact that
Germany had no colonies and had been forcibly disarmed and that Japan was
belated in its capitalism and poor in resources that made them the most
militarily aggressive of the imperialist powers. Another worldwide depression
could have the same effect as the Depression of the 1930s.
With more than one power possessing an atomic arsenal and the atomic
bomb itself being vastly more powerful than the ones that wrought such havoc
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the next war would bring the threat of nuclear
annihilation.
The high anxiety concerning this threat that existed at the height of
the Cold War has receded. Yet not only is an atomic arsenal still retained
by the major powers; it is being acquired by more and more countries.
The danger of a nuclear disaster by accident or by war is stronger than
ever. The annihilation of humanity would be the ultimate conclusion of
the destructiveness of contemporary capitalism.
Is there, then, any hope for humanity? Can socialism be achieved? And
if so, how can it be effected?
(continued in our next issue)
1 "Our Common Future," report of World Commission
on Environment and Development (Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 343.
2 Ross Gelbspan, "The Heat Is On: The High Stakes
Battle Over Earth's Threatened Climate" (Addison Wesley, 1997), p.
5.
3 John Bellamy Foster, "Ecology Against Capitalism,"
Monthly Review, October 2001, pp. 9-10.
4 Gelbspan, pp. 11214.
5 The callous words of LeMay in defending the atomic bombing
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are worth quoting: "We scorched and boiled
and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9-10 than
went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined."-N.Y. Times,
Aug. 6, 1996. LeMay later advocated bombing Vietnam "back into the
Stone Age."
6 Observer, June 3, 1991, quoted by Pilger, p. 53.
7 Pilger, p. 53.
8 "UN Human Development Report 1996," pp. 24,
26.
9 "The United Nations Population Fund ... in its annual
report ... said two billion people [out of the 6.1 billion in the world]
... lacked sufficient food, and water use had increased six times over the
past 70 years. By 2050, it said, 4.2 billion people would be living in
countries where their basic needs cannot be met."-N. Y. Times,
Nov. 8, 2001.
Socialist Action /May 2002 |