ENVIRONMENT Rio or revolution? TWO BASIC options exist for anyone today who, out of frustration or nostalgia for their radical left past, wants to hear or read the word "revolution". One is to pick up an illustrated magazine and look at the adverts for goods.
Here they may read about the revolutionary new washing powder, revolutionary new motoring concept, the revolution in trainers or even the permanent revolution underway in the field of desktop computers.
The other refuge of the actuality of the revolution is in the mass of research and multitudes of reports about the world ecological situation, recently before our eyes at the UNCED
"Earth Summit" conference in Rio. THIES GLIESS* meet the most crying problems and much prevarication. On the other side, however, environmental movements grew almost ceaselessly. Big ecological organizations, independent both of the governments and the bureaucracies of the mass labour movement, arose. Major disasters such as Seveso, Bhopal, Harrisburg and Chernobyl regularly gave renewed impulse to an ecologically based opposition to the dominant policies while spectacular actions against nuclear power stations, or the construction of new airports or dams throughout the world, gave this new movement experience, and sometimes the taste of success.
A changed awareness
This movement has succeeded in fundamentally changing awareness about environmental issues. Independently of the cyclical turns in the economy and even relatively independent of the ebbs and flows of the ecological mass movements itself, a deep mistrust of the bourgeois order has taken root in people's minds. Furthermore, in the ranks of the opposition movements who contributed to the fall of the bureaucratic regimes in Eastern Europe, the theme of environmental destruction played a central role.
The cries of triumph from the bourgeois ideologists over the "fall of socialism" provided them with about two years breathing space. Now, however, it is all the more obvious that the market economic system is not in a position to provide an environment friendly social order and that in Eastern Europe itself reshaping non-capitalist relations to make them fit for the market requires the most ruthless possible attitude to the environment. This, from the point of view of the ecological movements, is the balance sheet of the past twenty years.
Remedial measures taken
But how do things look from the point of view of the rulers, big business and the governments? In the rich countries a number of remedial measures have been taken. No state can get along today without environmental authorities and an environmental policy. Waste products and their disposal are producing big problems throughout the world. But no progress can be made in dealing with the basic issues of environmental destruction in the context of an economy based on commodity production and the profit motive.
The pressing need to externalize superfluous costs for the production of the existing concrete range of goods leads inevitably to the irrational whole of the capitalist market economy in which even products and services aimed at environmental protection - remedial measures, cleaning up, filter technologies, substitute materials and much else — are subject to the same rule: one product wins, and whether it becomes a necessity for all is decided by chance. And when, as today in the USA, Japan, Western Europe and most of the so-called "newly developed" economies, there is a cyclical crisis of capitalism, then market competition sharpens the edge of the principle "profit first".
Towards the end of the 1970s, in the * This article first appeared in the June/July 1992 issue of Inprekorr, a German revolutionary Marxist 25 periodical. This translation has been shortened somewhat for reasons of space. July 6, 1992 • # 232 International Viewpoint
ENVIRONMENT face of a rise in ecological protests, electoral successes by Green parties, and statements by many independent scientists, the ruling classes of the capitalist centres called on their agents among the entrepreneurs, governments, parties and ideologies to work together to achieve the following aims: 1. To present the environmental crisis as an overall, human crisis, not connected with the specific economic structure of capitalism, with the private ownership of the means of production, with the exploitation of wage labour or the unequal distribution of wealth. 2. The re-establishment of ideological hegemony for the argument that private property could and would deal with the ecological crisis, that the notion of "progress" was the exclusive property of the market economy — the aim being to overcome the "destructive pessimism" of the Club of Rome and other studies. 3. The development of a strategy for dealing with the most gross ecological disasters which uses market instruments and ensures that as far as possible it is the masses who pay. 4. Finally, the introduction of a policy which would counteract the tendency of criticisms of environmental destruction to challenge the system and instead tie the movement to the existing power structures. In the runup to the Rio Earth Summit it became clear that these aims have not been achieved. Whatever criticisms one may have of the Rio conference, one thing is clear; no one puts forward arguments that do not place the connection between ecological destruction and economic structures at the centre of attention. Questions of the world economic order, such as poverty and 26 hunger, are on the agenda as central to the problem of environmental destruction. A daily struggle for survival
For more than a half of humanity, the ecological crisis is not a long-term struggle for the survival of the species or to save the coming generations, but a daily struggle for personal survival. 500 million people are hungry while every year 40 million die of hunger and related diseases; 1.3 billion have no reliable source of clean drinking water and every year 23 million die from a lack of drinkable water; 2.3 billion live without proper sanitation, each year 40 million die from diseases that could easily be cured; 1.7 billion live without a regular supply of electricity; 1.5 billion suffer from a serious lack of wood fuel, which is practically their only source of fuel. 825 million people are illiterate and a good third of those able to work are unemployed or under-employed.
Every year this system means a loss of $500bn for the under-developed countries owing to unequal economic relations and shrinking access to the world market. In the period between the UN environment conference in Stockholm and that in Rio, the gulf between the poor and rich coun tries has doubled. The average income of the richest 20% of humanity is 150 times higher than that of the poorest 20%.
For the world's poor, the environmental crisis is a living example of the operations of the law of combined and unequal development. All the problems of the developed countries - over-development of space and of urbanization, collapsing public transport, air, water and land pollution, waste mountains and the threat of chemical products and resides — appear in the poor countries in magnified form.
International Viewpoint # 232 • July 6, 1992
July 6, 1992
Each year some 20 million tonnes of toxic waste is legally or illegally dumped by the rich countries in the poor countries. Toxic and radioactive waste is already an international commodity equivalent to arms and drugs. Furthermore, a glance even at the developed countries shows the unavoidable connection between environmental destruction and capitalism. Whatever the specific environmental issue, things pan out in the following way: the affected, led by environmental groups, demand immediate action. "Industry" is against and in between is the responsible minister, with his heart on the first side, but his head on the second In a radio show in Germany dedicated to current affairs, the well-known critic of transport policy Winfried Wolf outlined his ltornotiva to which tha monocor alternative, to which the manager of Volkswagen had just one answer: "You want a completely different economic system".
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The Eastern experience
The degree to which the market economy is incapable of constructing an ecologically tenable economy can be see in Eastern Europe and particularly in East Germany, where the necessary finance potentially existed. Here, given the growing awareness of recent years, there was a chance to begin again. But capitalism has only been able to do what is in its nature; plunder, exploit and concrete over - and whatever is left over is considered wilderness, which can be left to capitalist outlaws; con artists, drug dealers and speculators; social and ecological considerations have played no role.
The conjunctural difficulties of the market economy are destroying whatever remained of the veil over the roots of the environmental crisis. When US president Bush explained that in Rio he would not sign anything that would hinder the advance of the American economy, and when the German and European governments said that they could not go out ahead on the ecological front for reasons of competitiveness, they were saying in effect: an ecological future and capitalism are contradictory.
The tenor of all studies on the situation of the world is more pessimistic than twenty years ago. Furthermore, the governments have been revealed as impotent. Despite enormous efforts by environment ministries, a multitude of institutes and quangos and all the bourgeois political parties, nowhere have the political and ideological agents of capital been able to gain the
"ecological competence" they desire.
The Rio show itself takes place under constant bombardment "from its own side" ". The bourgeois media, without exception, have striven to besmirch the conference in order to guard their own flanks: if failure has already been predicted then the disappointment will be less.
The ruling class wants to see their progressive nature and their entrepreneurial capacity to deal with any problem confirmed. However the only thing they come up with are pitiful ideological talk shops where pensioned off "elder statesmen" such as Schmidt, Thatcher or Giscard can wile away their declining years prattling on about a new "ethic of responsibility" or "the principle of responsibility"
It is not possible to see how the worldwide awareness that the existing economic order is destroying the environment can be recuperated into restored faith in the capitalist system. The maintenance of the capitalist system requires a high degree of assent to its basic values. Where this is not available, ideological manipulation and fear must be used
The same principle applies as for war. The fact that capitalist competition can in principle lead to armed conflict must be accepted by the masses. The Gulf War was a small opportunity to test this out.
A permanent war
The fact, however, that capitalism conducts a permanent war on the environment is increasingly less swallowed by the masses. And until now, the ideologues have failed to repair the damage.
This is despite the fact that on no other theme have the managers of the big firms spoken so directly. Almost every firm has a policy of trying to present an ecological image and several have created posts for environmental directors. There is hardly a product which does not present itself as "light", "bio" or "eco" and many firms are into "Eco-sponsoring" in a big way, including contributions to ecological associations and "debt for nature swaps" by which Third World debt titles are exchanged for measures of environmental protection in areas within those countries. The latest offspring here is the German pharmaceuticals industry's payment for the German edition of the Worldwatch Circular.
The next Nobel Prize for Economics or, at the very latest, the one after that, will go to an economist who writes on the role of market mechanisms in the management of environmental safeguards. However, until now the capitalists' dream of finding a way to deal with the environmental crisis using their own means has not been realized. Much has been written and proposed, but two snags remain unavoidable. First of all, all the plans imply, in one form or another, a massive increase in the prices of energy and raw materials.
Secondly, there is the requirement to match up purely quantitative criteria, based in the last analysis on working time used, with qualitative, political considerations as to which things have what effect on the environment. The division of economics and politics is, however, an essential characteristic of market economics.
At the moment the dominant line of development of economic policy reflects business' wish for increasing deregulation, with the maximum possible abolition of political regulations restricting market activity and the exploitation of the workforce and nature.
New regulations will only be reluctantly accepted if there is no other choice. The idea that it is possible to arrive at a form of price fixing that reflects "real ecological values" is completely illusory; the market is inherently "unpolitical" and cannot take into account qualitative criteria.
It hardly needs to be emphasized that a massive rise in the cost of resources will not be swallowed and it is just as hard to see how a historical-moral component can be added on to constant capital (payments for machines and raw materials) with the consent of the capitalists.
Unlike the working class, nature cannot improve its value through class struggles and trade unions, in order to compensate for past, present and future depredations. Just as rarely as capitalists voluntarily give wage rises, so they will be unenthusiastic when it comes to accepting extra costs to defend nature.
The Nobel Prize for Literature may well therefore be there for the winning, but in reality, since political power is in the hands of Capital, it is not hard to predict that, if various forms of eco-tax are adopted, they will be introduced in such a way that they will change little.
A political defence of nature is needed, but it can only succeed against capitalism and with the aim of its abolition. This is the maximalist position which, nonetheless can be read between the lines of almost all the papers for the Rio conference. The only real success of the capitalist world economy in this sphere has been its ability to displace the potential for conflict that lies beneath the environmental crisis. At least in the metropolitan countries, the "Ecology movement" has been domesticated.
The very promising signs of a massive independent movement of refusal have been integrated into the existing power structures of bourgeois society via reformist political ideas, propagated first by the Green parties and then by the old Social Democrats.
This process has cost money. Illusions and promises concerning restoration pro-
ENVIRONMENT grammes, ecological capitalism and environmental protection as the industry of the future have been disseminated in millions of copies, quangos formed and events organized.
In Western Europe - less so in the USA and Japan — the rebellious youth have been brought up to be the most committed "rebuilders" of the existing society. Defence of the environment has become something of a sign of a positive attitude to "society". The widely repeated call "Join in" has successfully fostered the illusion that in this way one is "joining in" power.
Global revolution needed
This leaves us with the recognition that in fact a global revolution is needed. But this cannot be a revolution decreed from above. The appeal by Worldwatch director Brown to the world's 202 billionaires and 3 million millionaires to get involved, because riches in an unhappy world cannot make you happy, is staggeringly naive.
This will have to be a revolution by the three quarters of humanity who are poor and propertyless. This is a priority task for those of no property in the developed capitalist lands, even if they have bigger incomes than those in poorer countries. Capital must be made to pay decent wages throughout the world
The Green environment minister Fischer demands that the big firms must meet the same environmental conditions in their foreign operations as at home; this should apply all the more to wages and working conditions. An international workers' and trade union movement must be built committed to pursuing these aims. Every step in this direction is immensely ditticult but will yield results.
A broad movement of refusal, which fights for the right of veto over harmful production and defends its independence from the temptations of participation, would be one such step.
Campaigns of renunciation should have only one address: the firms must renounce their profits. Rather than the banks writing their memoranda in recycled paper, let them abolish the debts of the poor coun tries. The capitalist global economy, which controls and desecrates this planet and turns it into commodities, which draws its profits from the inequality in the distribution of property, and the exploitation of people and nature has no future.
Only a society that puts production for need at the centre of its economic considerations, rather than production for profit, has a future. Such a society could efficiently use resources and promote human solidarity. The idea of an efficient, solidaritybased and internationalist society implies the perspective of a society with new 27 values and a different life-style. * July 6, 1992 • # 232 International Viewpoint