This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
Maoist Internationalist Movement

Environmentalist ineptitude:

Green rakes in the green

"Money talks" unless an Amerikan environmentalist is spending it. Such is the unavoidable conclusion of looking at the money spent in politics of recent years.

As of April 24, 2006, business has contributed just over half a billion dollars ($527,152,323) to candidates and parties involved in the 2006 race for Congress seats. Other sources of money including environmentalists and unions are vastly lower, considerably less than $200 million.(1)

Politically aware people and even many average Amerikans have the notion that special interests provide the campaign contributions to our two major bourgeois political parties. This perception is accurate.

What most people do not know is that there is a huge, hulking and clumsy monster-dork vastly overshadowing the 800-pound-gorillas-of-politics like Karl Rove currently running the campaign business. According to Mark Dowie, the environmental movement organizations received $3.12 billion in contributions in 1992.(2) Since that time, environmental organizations have increased their take.

That's right: in 1992 environmentalists were already spending more money on their organizations than all the combined politicos of the executive branch of government managed in the record year of 2004. In 1992, total contributions to presidential candidates for their campaigns were a mere $331.1 million,(3) which means environmentalists coughed up almost 10 times that amount that year.

So the question arises, why environmentalism is not in charge of u.$. politics. Each year, the environmentalists spend huge sums of money; yet it does not add up to political power and influence. For example, the national headquarters of the Sierra Club had a budget of $84 million in 2002.(4) The Democratic and Republican Parties received a total of $1.15 billion in two years, 2001-2002 for their races for the imperialist government.(5) In other words, just the budget from Sierra Club headquarters is sufficient, that if there were 10 of the equivalent of the Sierra Club (and there are), they would have raked in $840 million in 2002, while the Democrats and Republicans would have had to have split $1.15 billion between themselves for two years. In other words, 10 Sierra Clubs would have a sizable edge over the combined bourgeois parties in any given year.

The reason that environmentalism does not rule is that often the money does not go into what environmentalists consider "politics" or it does, but the movement uses it ineffectively. For example, if someone pays to put a piece of forest land into a trust, this does and does not have political impact. Yet, when all is said and done, the united $tates spends vast money on environmentalism, but it is the sole country holding up the Kyoto Treaty on global warming.

"Think globally act locally" also seems to translate into both diverse life and ineffectiveness for the environmental groups. At first glance, the $92 million of the Sierra Club at the headquarters level makes it a player in politics. Once we consider the membership chapters, it is a monster: "The financial statements do not include the locally generated revenues of the Sierra Club's various self- directed chapter and group organizations." (6)

For example, to take just the Los Angeles area chapter of the Sierra Club, which is the largest chapter, 72% of the budget goes to "conservation work" and only 7% to what it considers politics and communications.(7)

The Audubon Society had $80,717,000 in revenues in 2003 at the national level.(8) Again though, the chapters are a different story. In the 2004-2005 fiscal year, New York Audubon chapter had $3.2 million in revenue,(9) with $164,543 from the national level organization. The Audubon's biggest expense at 44% in the New York chapter is maintaining its centers.

The Environmental Defense Fund is another organization in the big leagues. 2005 figures show a budget of $68.6 million.(10) Our favorite of the lot for its occasionally more radical forays into politics is Friends of the Earth. For the year ending June 30, 2005, FoE reported $3.6 million in revenue,(11) but it has 1 million members in 70 countries.

The ineffectiveness of the environmentalist movement stems from its less-than serious membership and its lack of focussed approach. The lack of focus generates initiative at the local level, including local level budgets, but the lack of focus also results in cross-cancellation of work.

Cape Cod, Massachusetts has a proposal for a windmill farm of 130 turbines to generate 75% of the region's electricity, but opponents said it would damage the ocean view's natural beauty. Liberal Senator Ted Kennedy agrees.(12)

Such views have good standing in the environmentalist movement. The Sierra Club includes the following quote from John Muir on its web page:

"Everyone needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike."(13)
Kennedy actually argued the windmills would hurt tourism in the Nantucket Sound.

The Cape Code windmill farm unavoidably brings up dialectics. It has to do with how people see the world as connected together. Some argue that preserving beauty is a contribution to the environment and paramount. Others will argue dialectically that failure to put up the Cape Cod windmill farm would mean more destruction of beauty in the long-run as other sources of energy and wars come to the fore. The bottom line is that one must have an accurate view of how the world works, an argument about interconnected causations. There is no escaping such arguments, but environmentalists often like to avoid politics and struggle, because of their petty-bourgeois social background which causes a prejudice against politics as being either proletarian or capitalist, while the petty-bourgeoisie manages to float above politics.

On his side of the argument, Senator Kennedy is able to point out the profits of the private developer who will benefit from the windmill farm. For MIM, this again is proof that we need to eradicate capitalism, so that such decisions can be made without concern over ulterior motives. We need a scientific argument over what will do the best for the environment given humyn aspirations, not an argument over whose pockets will be lined.

Another factor in the ineffectiveness of the environmentalist movement is the individualist approach. Countless hours, weeks and people-years go into recycling. Yet the focus of recycling is to blame the individual's consumption habits instead of the organization of production in a profit-run society.

Few people realize how much environmentalist time is wasted to sort out goods that end up in the dump anyway. A paper business enthusiast's website explained the problem this way:

It seems logical that paper made from waste paper would cost less than paper made from trees.

The manufacturing process to make recycled paper uses less energy, water, and oil, in addition to saving trees. Why then, does recycled paper sometimes cost more than virgin paper?

The answer has to do with economies of scale and mill design. Most modern paper mills in North America are heirs to billions of dollars of industry investment in using trees and are designed to make high quality, low cost virgin paper.(14)

When it comes to the politics of resisting recycled products, environmentalists often do not have the dialectical know-how (seriousness about politics) to compare apples with apples and are happy to let financial assumptions stand unchallenged except in the most unconvincing way. For example, Senator Kennedy and his backers challenge the beauty of Cape Cod windmills in an absolutist way. In that sense, pseudo-environmentalists are willing to forego finances, but when it comes to looking at how virgin paper costs are computed, environmentalists are apt to leave finance capital's assumptions unchallenged.

The typical paper business does not have to pay for the blood spilled in Iraq as a cost of manufacturing virgin paper instead of recycled paper. Yet, environmentalists already do know that producing recycled paper should use less energy. Capitalists will never assess such interconnections accurately, because they only assess the financial variables handed to them. With the Iraq War boondoggle, environmentalists should be leaping into politics and hammering the bean-counters opposing alternative energy sources. Instead, the environmentalists do not even unite against letting oil and arms contractors bribe the federal government for the war in Iraq.

In actual fact, borrowing money and paying interest on a paper plant is how the capitalist sees a certain problem. Anything that disrupts the running of that plant decreases the efficient use of capital.

Yet it is Marx that taught us that capital is just accumulated (dead) labor and a social relationship. What the capitalists are concerned about in their bottom lines is just the accumulated dead labor, so we have to talk about that for comparison purposes.

While the world is going to war over oil and using polluting forms of energy it also has a massive unemployment problem. That means that the actual and rational cost of using capital is zero or negative. Wasting some capital now may bear dividends in the future, in learning new environmental solutions to old economic problems. Wasting capital now for the proper goal (and not in a war and not in just guarding borders or prisoners for example) can improve the surplus-delivering capacity of future economies.

Strictly-speaking, not using capital today to solve environmental problems could result in problems in the future of a full-employment world. That is true, even if that future full-employment world is capitalist again thanks to capitalist-roaders of the future following the footsteps of Deng Xiaoping and the like. An excellent example is the criticism in Germany of windmill plants, because they necessitate the building of new power lines to reach the windmills. The BBC wrote a whole article on this topic(15) and it's a great example of how imperialism is in its decadent stages. People are dying daily in Iraq, but some Germans and British journalists have doubts that Germany needs to take some unemployed people and build some more powerlines to reach sustainable energy sources.

Right now the paper executive sees that he has to pay interest on capital to build a new plant and he loses money if the plant slows down for any environmental reason. What he does not see because it is not in his bottom line is that wars like those in Iraq can bring the species to an end, and even if they do not, they bring environmental destruction resulting from energy wars and polluting forms of technology that have a cost somewhere along the line.

The environmentalist movement wastes its resources in several ways. It is does not have ideological unity and so its efforts cross-cancel. That is why communists have democratic centralism. To achieve the benefits of unity, we must struggle for windmill and solar energy. That means we must concretely agree among ourselves that they benefit the environment; otherwise, pluralism of views and the existing bourgeoisie will snuff out new alternative energy sources. Pluralism is not good for outstanding new prospects that are underdogs such as solar energy. Solar energy needs united support to make it in a world where oil and other interests already run huge businesses and dominate politics. No one is making the mega-bucks in the solar energy to bribe Congress on behalf of solar energy the way oil and arms contractors can to bring about an Iraq War.

What needs to happen for wind and solar energy is a paradigm example for proletarian struggle. Only by concretely agreeing on the goal of wind and solar energy can the proletariat unite itself and overcome the advantages of the existing energy capitalist class. The proletariat always faces the disadvantage of having to unite on a concrete goal to move in to the future, while the bourgeoisie is happy to believe that windmill farms for Cape Cod could be good or they could be bad. Cross-cancelling views always benefit the most powerful individuals, the capitalist class--crucially as it exists already and not how it would need to change to serve needs.

The environmental movement breaks into local versus national branches, while the scientific communist movement subordinates all interests to the overall interest. Kennedy's "not in my backyard" is a backward bourgeois ideology.

Finally, the environmentalist movement in the united $tates is lost in a haze of individualism and incorrect assumptions about the cost of capital. We scientific followers of Marx do not introduce financial considerations against new production techniques until after we have achieved full global employment. There will have to be balance in the growth of the economy, so that new employment is not all in one area that exhausts the resources of all other areas of the economy, but sustainable energy is a bedrock principle of socialism. Closely related to that is sustainable use of raw materials. It's silly to be talking about the inefficiencies of recycled paper against techniques of production that assume a positive cost of using capital. The desire for profit is holding back employment, when what we need is a government that understands that not using capital to solve our sustainable energy and raw materials problems means less-than-optimum results. After we achieve full employment in the world, we can go back to arguing over the costs associated with creating new capital goods for sustainable energy, raw materials and agriculture.

Notes:
1. http://www.crp.org/overview/blio.asp?cycle=2006
2. http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/bookstore/books/enviro/dowie.html
3. http://www.crp.org/presidential/index.asp
4. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1525/is_5_88/ai_109027797/pg_4 ; It was almost $92 million in 2004: www.ct.gov/dcp/lib/dcp/charities/ public_notices/public_notice_jan._19_26_2006.doc
5. http://www.crp.org/parties/index.asp?type=R&cycle=2002
6. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1525/is_5_86/ai_77279569/pg_5
7. http://angeleschapter.org/joingive/Money.asp
8. http://www.audubon.org/nas/ar04/financial_summary.pdf
9. http://ny.audubon.org/annual_report_2005.pdf
10. http://www.environmentaldefense.org/documents/2978_FactSheet_aboutus.pdf
11. http://www.foe.org/annualreport2005/images/FoEAnnualReport05.pdf
12. http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/04/27/kennedy_faces_f ight_on_cape_wind/
13. John Muir Sierra Club, http://angeles.sierraclub.org/index.asp
14. http://www.paperspecs.com/resources/tips/20056115925.htm
15. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4944046.stm