Who said this?

“…we, with flesh, blood and brain belong to nature and exist in its midst, and … all of our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage of all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.”

Karl Marx: Collected Works, vol 25, 499-501

The Science

Stern said 2° temperature rise above pre-industrial levels…

0.7-4.4 billion people face growing water shortages.

Falling crop yields. 15-40% of species disappearing. 7m sea level rise.

CO2 and other greenhouse gases

Need to stabilise at 450 parts for every million parts of atmosphere

550ppm CO2 e gives 77-99% chance of 2° global temperature rise or worse.

Stern recommends this because it would cost 1% of global GNP.

Antarctica and CO2

Ice cores show more CO2 and methane than in last 650 000 years.

Levels rising faster in last century than in previous 20 000 years.

Human action is only means. Clearing forests, burning oil, coal and

gas.

China, citizens and emissions

China - 2.7 tonnes CO2

UK - 9.5 tonnes CO2

USA - 20 tonnes CO2

Questions for sceptics

Does the atmosphere contain CO2? Does it raise the average global

temperature? Will more CO2 raise the temperature? Does our activity emit CO2?

Scientific organisations accept this

Royal Society Science Academies in USA, Australia,

Brazil, China, Germany, India, Italy, Sweden

What’s happening now?

Alaska and Siberia permafrost melting.

WHO says 150 000 people a year dying from climate related diseases.

Parts of Amazon becoming savannah. IPPC estimate 1.8-4.0° rise this

century

Consequences

Melting glaciers in Andes and Himalayas = water shortages in Pakistan, western China, Central Asia, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia.

Droughts in Africa, Australia and Mediterranean.

Crop production losses. Gulf Stream flips.

Marxism and ecology

In 20th century Marxism productivism trumped ecology.

Analysis focussed on logic of capitalism.

Environmental catastrophe was distant nightmare.

Marx, Engels and ecology

Geography and geology part of the conditions of production.

Humans are natural and social beings. Humans transform nature through

labour.

Metabolism in Capital

Labour is a process through which we mediate, regulate and control between ourselves and nature.

Large scale agriculture destroys the soil and requires industry to replace nutrients.

Capitalist agriculture is not self sustaining.

Marx, Engels and sustainability

“In London alone a great quantity of manure…is poured away into the sea”. Engels.

Marx said human waste should be returned to the soil. Capital vol. 3.

In capitalism nature has no value. For Marx real wealth is use value.

Labour and nature

Creation of value is transformation of labour-power into labour.

Labour-power is nature’s material in human form.

Humans transform nature through labour.

Utilisation of the refuse of production (Capital vol. 3)

Stressed need for planning. Integration of industry and

agriculture. Restore soil and recycle nutrients.

The worker and nature

Dispossession of peasantry. Capitalism dissolves the link between

the worker and the earth. Primitive accumulation of capital

requires it.

Petit-bourgeois?

“The need to tackle climate change must not become an excuse for central planning.”

George Monbiot – Heat p.xxv

Service industries employ 80% in USA The social life of information: John Seely

Brown, Harvard Business school. between 1995 and 2006 employee

productivity exceeded the growth of real wages by 340%

Between 2001 and 2006 this has increased to 779%

Intensive use of information technology, punitive work regimes that keep wages at poverty levels

Wal Mart and doctors 41% more productive than competitors but get $4 an

hour less. In the US health industry case managers without

medical training decide whether or not to pay for treatment using “enterprise software”.

Doctors see up to 70 patients per day Doctors feel that 25-30 is the outer limit. Patients treated in this way have worse outcomes. The firms turn higher profits.

Savage capitalism A counter-revolution against the gains of

the workers’ movement in the post-war world.

It wrecks the health and lives of millions of the working class and the middle class.

It consigns them to the treadmill of insecurity and endless work, and increasingly to a poverty-stricken old age.

Capitalism is about…

Generating ever larger amounts of profits.

Requires ever larger numbers of commodities and ever larger inputs of labour to exploit.

Capitalist productivism

Much production under capitalism is socially useless, and either redundant or directly harmful.

Some products – like cars - harm the environment directly.

Others are useless and just use up huge amounts of the planet’s resources.

Morbid phase of capitalism

Increasing amounts of surveillance, violence, war and torture.

the threat of environmental catastrophe

Class and gender

The poor will pay the price for environmental disaster. Particularly women and children. Children because they are more vulnerable to disease,

and less able to defend themselves from violence. Women because they have the main responsibility for

childcare and child raising in nearly all poor societies – urban and rural, third world and first world.

In the third world, it will be overwhelmingly women who have to try to find water, firewood and food for families.

Our conclusions

Inequality, power and wealth cannot be addressed in the advanced countries without a revolution in the nature of what is produced and how it is produced.

A human society which defends the environment is incompatible with capitalism.

Strategy and the fightback Environmentalism without class, without

anti-capitalism, has massive limitations which invalidate it as a long-term strategy.

We aim to elaborate a new Marxism for the 21st century which builds on Marx’s understanding of a materialist approach to the environment in order to meet the challenge of climate change

Workers’ movement It is the decisive force on a world scale for

anti-capitalist struggle. A central fight for Marxists is to win the

workers’ movement to an environmentalist (eco-socialist) perspective.

A massive aid to this is the example of environmentally friendly mobilisations and policies of Cuba, and to some extent, Venezuela

Our orientation We maintain our orientation towards the

creation of a broad anti-capitalist, ecosocialist party to the left of Labour.

This is a first step towards resolving the crisis of leadership of the working class.

We need to develop an action programme of immediate and transitional demands which incorporate the centrality of the fight to save the environment.

Conclusions for Socialist Resistance

We will need to examine: The overall priority we accord to Respect The profile of Socialist Resistance, including

for example perhaps the name of the paper.

The milieus in which we attempt to find and develop recruits.

Our relations with other trends on the left.