Climate change, increasing CO2, plastic everywhere, pesticides and herbicides, air and water pollution, deforestation and desertification of increasingly vast areas, the melting glaciers, widespread cementification and mineralization, cities blocked by traffic, additives and poisons of all sorts in the food we eat… Quite right to take action, organize and come out onto the streets to contrast the growing destruction of our environment. And it is quite right for young people, worried about the future, to be in the frontline. But are the methods and objectives appropriate? Above all: is the origin of this increasing destruction really clear to those who take action because they are distressed and above all enraged at the catastrophic prospects so widely presented?
If we fail to understand that at the root of all this stands the capitalist mode of production, dominated by the laws of profit and competition, production for production’s sake, the need to accumulate capital to reinvest it in the production of more capital and so on endlessly, if we fail to grasp the infernal mechanism that has dominated us for at least two hundred and fifty years now, we end up by giving in to impotent desperation. Capitalism played a progressive role in freeing humanity from the previous mode of production, feudalism, which, faced with a market that was already more and more worldwide, and by epoch-making technological innovations, was merely a hindrance to human development. But now capitalism, which has made the whole world bow to its laws, has itself become a hindrance, multiplying the destructive elements implicit in the very laws by which it functions (not to speak of the hundreds of wars and armed conflicts in the course of the 1900s, as well as the two world bloodbaths that massacred entire populations and devastated whole areas of the planet, continuing to do so today with increasingly sophisticated means of destruction).
So what is the sense of addressing States, governments and governors, institutions and international organisms, asking them to intervene, when they are the tools of this mode of production, the representatives and executives of it (and are only too happy for young people to come out onto the streets, as long as they do not question their régime and their power!)? What is the sense of imagining large or small reforms that nonetheless leave the foundations and mechanisms upholding this mode of production intact? This is not how to save the planet! The capitalist mode of production will continue, regardless, to try and grind out profits, provoke alarming economic and social crises, spark off increasingly bloody and destructive wars and destroy the planet’s resources – not because of Tom, Dick or Harry’s wickedness but because this is what its own laws and operational mechanisms oblige it to do.
An activist like Chico Mendes, whom all ecologists regard with admiration, wrote (and how many people have forgotten this today!): “Environmentalism without the class struggle is just gardening!” Couldn’t be clearer!
To the young people coming out on climate strikes and demonstrating against environmental disaster, we communists say: Let the gardening be! Steer towards the class struggle! Locate your real enemies! Fight with us, not to patch up a system that’s decaying, poisoned and poisoning, but to get rid of it and finally set up a classless society that will at last take the earth to heart!
Only a revolutionary prospective and preparation, through practice and the political work that our party has developed over decade after decade of open battle against all illusions and disappointments, deceit and betrayal (including the false communism of Stalinist Russia and Maoist China), always side by side with the world proletariat and in support of their fights, despite our scarce resources – only this can save the planet and the human species! Not an easy task but a far more urgent and necessary one – as well as, yes, passionately involving!
27 September 2019
International Communist Party