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Reforming capitalism

By Liz Ross - posted Thursday, 4 December 2008


In my first article I detailed the ills of the system (especially around the environment) and why it is the way it is. The pressing question facing us is: what’s the solution?

For many the most obvious answer still would be to reform capitalism itself. Make governments act, force companies to go green with legislation that has real teeth or use financial incentives to encourage sustainable production.

Now it is possible to imagine a capitalism that lived off the profits based on the production and sale of renewable energy. You can’t go anywhere these days without seeing new environmental businesses setting up, especially water tanks and solar panels.

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The car company Saab flashes its green credentials with ads boasting about “Going Grrreeen” because it uses biofuels. There are companies growing rich on renewable energy, organic farming or environmentally sound building practices. After all there’s no law that says for capitalism to survive it has to rely on fossil fuel sources; that it has to have plastic or die.

So also, it can seem to be common sense to take steps individually, to clean up your own backyard.

As well many environmental groups can point to gains that have been won. In Melbourne, for example, when the Victorian government proposed placing a toxic waste dump in the middle of working class western suburbs, and home to Melbourne’s market gardens, a coalition of workers, unions, local residents and market gardeners ran a successful state-wide campaign and forced the government to ban future land-filling of hazardous waste. In addition there was a complete overhaul of hazardous waste management, including recycling and waste reduction.

Union initiated Green Bans and the anti-nuclear movement certainly won gains earlier, both drawing in unions, resident actions and mass rallies.

It’s even conceivable that in the face of an immense global crisis brought on by climate change, where the social upheaval and instability threatened the survival of key sections of global capitalism, that some dramatic world-wide shift to sustainable production could happen.

So it may be possible that capitalism can spend its way out of a planetary meltdown, but the crucial question is: what will be the final cost to humanity of its survival?

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Restructuring the world economy to provide some level of sustainability is not going to be just a case of simply switching from one profitable enterprise to another or paying a bit more for energy and water. Because “we are where we are”, we have a world system based on massive extraction of non-renewable energy sources and other resources generating enormous profits for existing companies, alongside a world arms race leaning more and more to nuclear weaponry and ratcheting up the pressure to mine uranium.

None of these firms will give up their profitable businesses without a fight, nor will governments simply drop the push to nuclear energy and resource surety. In fact we could - and will if capitalism continues along its present trajectory - see wars fought where the new renewable energy firms challenge their rivals oil and coal for market dominance, or countries fight over access to food and water resources. In other words the market forces of capitalism running rampant.

So if the ruling class cannot provide the answers - and there’s a lot more in this pamphlet and in issues of our magazine that spell this out - who can?

Earlier I referred to capitalism as being basically a two class society - workers and bosses. Rather than being any particular attribute of the bosses or what they do, it is actually the combination of workers’ labour (or labour power as Marx called it) and the world’s natural resources that creates society’s wealth. And more specifically it’s workers’ labour power that is the source of profit that the system so relies on.

It doesn’t take much then to see that if workers are the source of the system’s wealth, then as Marx famously puts it, they can also be the system’s “gravediggers”. In other words, when workers stop, nothing moves and this points to the power the working class has to challenge capital - a power held by no other group in society.

So precisely because the global threat to the environment comes from the operation of capitalism itself, we’re going to have to take on the might of the corporations and the state that is hand in glove with them. Obviously this isn’t just something that can happen overnight. Right now this means our first step must be a collective fight for reforms, harnessing the strength of the organised working class, to shut down the polluting companies and force governments to act, rather than looking to concerned citizens individually rationing their water and electricity use, paying more for “green” alternatives or buying organic.

In other words - how we struggle and what we demand matters. If we look at how the battle against uranium mining was waged, it’s clear it was through collective action, the combined mobilisations of the anti-uranium movement, Indigenous groups and the unions, that we won what we did. Mobilising around working class demands such as “Black Ban Uranium” or “land rights, not uranium”, kept the movement focused on the need to tackle the bosses and the government, not just do deals with them or even see some of them as our allies. Again I want to refer you to our pamphlet which has more examples of the different struggles in Australia’s history.

However, this is just the beginning. Mass mobilisations and union pressure can start to shift the corporations, but to challenge capital at its very core and lay the basis for a different world we need to go further. Out of the struggle must come both the revolutionary organisations of workers to overthrow capitalism, and a class ready to build the world anew - to build a socialist society.

And to get to there we need to start in the here and now as a book by Mick Armstrong about building a socialist alternative, From Little Things Big Things Grow outlines. We need to be having the political arguments convincing people that capitalism is the cause of the world’s environment problems, why it’s the organised working class that has the power to stop capitalism in its tracks and as a consequence, why it is so crucial to build the mass mobilisations global warming rallies and the union struggles that can strengthen workers’ ability to fight.

But also, why we need to build political groups such as Socialist Alternative, to bring together the, admittedly, small numbers of active socialists around today, to start to make the arguments about the need to take the struggle past reforming capitalism on to the path of a revolutionary transformation of society. To begin to build a socialist society that can lay the basis for a sustainable world for the whole planet.

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See the Socialist Alternative pamphlet How capitalism is costing us the Earth. Also Mick Armstrong From Little things, big things grow. Order from www.sa.org.au.



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About the Author

Liz Ross is an activist and member of Socialist Alternative.

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Why capitalism is not the answer - On Line Opinion

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