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.

Environment


Eco-pragmatism: Making Sensible Environmental Decisions in an Uncertain World
by Daniel A. Farber
University of Chicago Press, 1999, 210 pp. Hb

reviewed by MC5, October 18, 1999

University of Minnesota Law Professor Daniel Farber has written a book reflecting some of the views of the ruling class concerning the environment and economics. Law professors at the University of Chicago, Yale and Georgetown have recommended the book. Its focuses on cost-benefit analysis and the environment are sure to make it influential and reflective of what the ruling class already thinks. For the environmentalist movement, however, Farber's book is a very dangerous Trojan Horse, because it claims to take the side of the environmentalists against the "bean-counters" mostly.

Distorted picture

The recurring question raised by the book is "Should we spend $10 million to save a single life?"(p. 133) Farber does not show that the majority of environmental struggles raise such a question; yet the "pragmatism" in "eco-pragmatism" refers to his willingness to consider the problem while supposedly "tree-huggers" are not willing to consider the problem because of their "religious" intransigence "'like the Marxists before them.'"(p. 8)

Farber would claim that he is for environmentalism when the costs are not too great, but by raising the same distorted question over and over again, he leaves a different impression of the environmentalist movement. Unfortunately, the pseudo-environmentalists have opened the environmentalist movement up to the kind of attack that Farber lays down. By failing to connect their movement to the economic theories of Karl Marx, some calling themselves environmentalist are setting the movement up for the kind of fall Farber has in mind.

His paradigm example is a legal case in which a mining company was dumping asbestos into the drinking water of Duluth, Minnesota. Although exposure to asbestos had long ago been proven very dangerous, Farber raised the typical legal nitpick that no one had proved that drinking asbestos was unhealthful.(p. 22) Studies had never been done regarding drinking asbestos. Farber's tactics are to agree with the environmentalists and then dissect the case thoroughly from the point of view of cost-benefit analysis.

Covering the ass of the ruling class

Since the 1970s, the Amerikan ruling class has been aware that the masses might connect the environmentalist movement to Marxism. This fright caused Nixon to sign environmental legislation with the hope of confusing the people politically.

Those who know MIM's politics know that it is rare that MIM will agree with the average Amerikan, but the average Amerikan agrees more with MIM than the Democrats or Republicans when it comes to the environment. This is not "false consciousness" by the petty-bourgeoisie of Amerika but a reflection of the reality that capitalist economic competition is harmful to the environment and there is nothing that can be done about it within capitalism.

MIM has yet to channel the people's sentiments behind its scientific plan for environmental protection: the false consciousness we must battle concerns the strategy and tactics that will be necessary for this battle. The sentiments and self-interest of the non-imperialist classes already dovetail with the MIM line when it comes to the environment.

Farber shows an awareness of the problem for the ruling class. A fact that really rankles Farber is "in 1989, 80 percent agreed that '[p]rotecting the environment is so important that regulations and standards cannot be too high, and continuing environmental improvements must be made regardless of cost.'"(p. 2) He notes an estimate that the Superfund environmental clean-up project of the U.S. Government saves one life per $4 billion spent.(p. 4)

The depth of this problem for the ruling class shows in that a majority of the Republican Party does not trust its own party when it comes to environmental regulation.(p. 3) Thus, when it comes to the environment, the Rocky Mountain people, cowboys and rednecks actually agree with MIM more than the Republican leaders.

The strategy of Farber is to enter this scene and concede nicely to the environmentalists by saying that the presumption in law should be on the side of environmental protection. Yet, he says that environmentalists should be required to enter into dialogue with economists, specifically neo-classically trained economists wielding cost-benefit methods. Most of his book is actually an attempt to force engagement with these "bean-counters." By raising the question of $10 million per life over and over again, Farber and others using the strangle-by-anecdote method will seek to cool out the struggle of the people for the environment.

Despite his admissions above, Farber says in his conclusion: "For better or worse, there is no sign that we are prepared to give up what American consumers now regard as the basics of the good life. Economic growth is not something we are prepared to abandon in the name of environmental protection."(p. 200) The survey he pointed to in 1989 would seem to contradict his own belief, a belief he would call "paternalist" if expressed by a Marxist.

Marxist counter-attack

Farber and his kind will succeed if we Marxists do not inject more radical economic theories into the movement. We must take what we learn from Marxist political economy and know how to apply it to these questions raised by Farber. His book has many admissions and omissions that show that neo-classical economics and law which start with narrow assumptions really should not be used to handle questions concerning $10 million per life saved. Most bourgeois economic theory is created for only a very narrow range of assumptions.

1. Ignoring production.

Any time we are faced with cost-benefit analysis, we must ask cost-benefit analysis of what and when. Most of the mistakes get made long before cost-benefit analysis gets applied.

Misled by his own neo-classical economic agenda, Farber did not actually provide any details about the production processes that required the mining in Duluth, Minnesota and whether there were any substitutes possible--largely because he assumed the existing distribution of property, techniques and reward structure. Ignoring production and stressing exchange and consumption is typical of neo-classical economic thought. The neo-classicals just are not as interested in these questions as Marxists are and prefer to assume most aspects of the existing production situation. When the people are so upset with the environmental situation it should be obvious that they might be willing to do without some of the status quo assumed by economists.

2. Commodity fetishism, poor choice of efficiency definitions.

The way that Farber wields that $10 million figure it clearly has a life of its own. According to Farber, the public is to envision that it is $10 million coming out of its pockets or maybe the public should realize it is not serious about environmental regulation or has "pragmatist" limits.

It is a typical mistake of neo-classical economics to get caught up in dollar figures and consumption. The neo-classical notion of efficiency in saving lives is highly flawed. If there were full employment in the world, it would be one matter; however, $10 million is really only a certain quantity of ability to make people work. In fact, it should be thought of as an amount of work.

We Marxists are "classical economists." We think in physical terms. Since the labor of hundreds of millions is not used every year and is thus wasted, inefficiency stems from not utilizing labor. Inefficiency does not stem from distributing green-colored paper to employ labor. As even Keynesians may admit, spending $10 million may have a multiplier effect that results in higher employment and wealth and the $10 million spent may not be felt by anyone as if it were out of their pockets.

If the people are as serious as the polls on the environment indicate, the borders should be opened and the money spent to employ more people so that more work can be done for the environment. Farber did not consider this possibility, again because the neoclassicals only consider a very narrow range of ideas when discussing U.$. policy. They assume the status quo and only tinker with the implications of the smallest changes. Since the people have said standards cannot be high enough and change for the environment should be done without respect to cost, neo-classical economics is obviously not appropriate.

3. Subjective preferences cannot be measured.

The propaganda for free markets goes that it allows a form of participation. We see people implement their "preferences" when they spend money say the bourgeois economists. "Consumer is king" is really the central dogma. Spending dollars is like voting in elections.

However, the facts are that it is increasingly well-known that people are inconsistent in their subjective desires and certainly those desires cannot be measured, especially in regard to public goods like clean air. Trying to figure out how much to tax or spend regarding pollution is impossible in the free market context. Thus, the notion that neo-classical economics is a science is a fallacy.

As MIM said in its review of "Against the Gods," we already know that the masses' subjective preferences cannot be measured. Farber is also aware of this. We just want our readers to understand that this fact is a blow against the neo-classical economics Farber uses.

Farber admits that the survey techniques called "contingent evaluation" aimed at calculating how much environmental protection the public wants don't work. He does not believe the numbers the public gives in those surveys;(pp. 49-51) although the neo-classicals are usually supposed to say "consumer is King" and accept at face-value whatever subjective desires the masses express. It is us Marxists who do not take subjective statements at face-value, because we believe subjective statements are merely a reflection of underlying violence in power relations. We are not surprised that they exist in contradiction while violent class and national conflicts have not yet been worked through successfully yet. The masses have aspirations beyond what they find and express in the status quo.

What is worse for Farber is that market research as a whole has shown that it is futile to ask the public its preferences. While his methods assume that the public is actually all-knowing or his free market will fail in its own measuring rod of efficiency, in fact, he admits that the public is not very good with probability and statistics. Moreover, he makes an admission undercutting all of neo-classical economics: speaking of consumers, "they will favor a medical option when told it has a 20 percent chance of saving their lives, but shun it when told it has an 80 percent chance of failure, though the two are equivalent."(p. 85) In other words, when the public spends its dollars, it is not really spending it in pursuit of nicely ordered and rational preferences. What it is doing with that money cannot be gainsaid. The irony in all this is that it is an even squishier pseudo-science--psychology--which revealed this to the neo-classical economists; even though the psychologists also stood to lose hope for their field with such findings.

Such are good reasons to go back to the methods of Marx and stick with physical reality.

4. Assumption of existing property distribution.

Farber himself points out that if environmentalists own the rights to whaling, then the result will be different than if the whalers own the rights to whaling. According to consumer-is-king theory, the environmentalists should somehow gather up the money to pay off all the whalers not to kill whales. (The impracticality of this and keeping new whalers from arising does not concern these dreamers.)

On the other hand, Farber recognizes that if property rested with the environmentalists first, then it is not likely that whalers would collect up the money to buy off the environmentalists. Hence no whaling would occur if the environmentalists owned the property. So when a pod of whales is swimming at sea, who owns them? That is what determines whether they will be killed by bourgeois economic theory.(pp. 99-100)

This is just another way of saying that neo-classical economics starts with the assumption of the existing property distribution and has nothing to say about results given changes in the distribution of property. It was not meant for that.

5. Changing preferences.

Contrary to the scenario that a free market functions with information flowing freely, environmental information includes many relatively recent discoveries. These discoveries then change the preferences of the public. For example, refrigerators and aerosol cans that destroyed the ozone went out of demand and we believe the public was happy to see legal bans in connection to the matter, and not just a persuasion of one consumer at a time.

The fact that it took coordinated scientific endeavor, funded by the government, to reveal many environmental truths is not accounted for in neo-classical economics. Anything affecting something like the ozone (free to all) is not accounted for. The counter-attack of the neo-classicals has been to say that the ozone and air pollution rights should be sold off by the government. They thus seek to force the environment into their dogmatic individualist straight-jacket, as if the air, land and water could be parceled off into individual pieces and polluted or not polluted accordingly.

The economic Liberals accuse us of using force instead of respecting the wishes of the consumers, but in reality, economic and political power already does shape the preferences of the public. We only believe it should be done scientifically and not based on who owns the most property and can thus afford to distort information available to the public the most.

We believe the public agrees with MIM on this and not the economic Liberals also known as libertarians opposed to regulation. The public prefers to be educated about the environment and prefers to have experts hired by the government in such matters. The public expects its preferences to change and has no difficulty in supporting research that will change those preferences. The public does not want that only for-profit sources of information exist. When Farber says that we are being "paternalist" for saying so(p. 62), the public does not agree.

6. No consideration for alternative conflict resolutions.

Farber correctly points out that if the Duluth, Minnesota mine had to close down because of economic regulations, some people would have become unemployed. It has been proved that unemployment causes death in a variety of ways including suicide from loss of "self-esteem." One estimate shows that $37 million in environmental regulation causes one death by its damage to the economy.(p. 30)

We have to say that this is true within capitalism. Under socialism, however, everyone is guaranteed a job. No one has a reason to resist environmental regulation on account of his/her job. Losing one job just means taking another with no loss of income. The fact that environmental regulation hurts the capitalist economy only proves that it is time for the capitalist economy to go. Capitalism was not meant to solve these sorts of problems, while scientific economic planning under socialism is perfectly compatible with environmentalism.

Dictatorship of the proletariat

Unlike the current situation of dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, we Marxists admit that we aim for an interim dictatorship of the proletariat. We do not prettify it by calling it "free labor" or "free market" or "democracy" or the like. There is force involved.

Farber's discussion of public goods and associated game theory should be addressed by a Marxist theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Farber admits that the masses might vote for an environmental action that they would not be willing to pay for in a free market. Economists and people like Farber are often less respectful of political democracy than the "free market."

Farber admires Cass Sunstein who does exactly what MIM has been saying our opponents do all along: s/he advocates that people negotiate away their survival rights. "No one is entitled to say: 'I have a right to a safe environment, and the burden is on anyone who seeks to infringe that right.' Nor are the regulated parties entitled to say: 'I have the right to use my property as I see fit, and the burden is on anyone who seeks to modify that property right.' There is a level playing field."(p. 103)

Our Eastern comrades will have to forgive us, but this is the closest that the Western culture gets to understanding class conflict. The persyn at risk of death by pollution has equal or maybe even lesser legal rights than the persyn making a profit. That is what dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is all about.

What is dangerous about Farber is that he seeks to persuade the proletariat to give up its survival rights in the name of cost-benefit analysis. He wants the proletariat to tire of the environmentalist struggle by telling it about its costs. In contrast, we socialist planners say to the proletariat: "look, there is work to be done cleaning up and improving the environment; yet everywhere there is unemployment in this world. People die from pollution and unemployment. That is the inefficiency of capitalism and it cannot be tolerated anymore."

Buy This Book


Farmageddon: Food and the Culture of Biotechnology
by Brewster Kneen
(Gabriola Island, British Columbia, Canada: New Society Publishers, 1999)

reviewed by MC5

Reviewed July 1999

Anti-biotechnology Luddites need Maoist analysis & dose of reality

Farmer and publisher Brewster Kneen has written an up-to-date book against the power of the multinational corporations to bring about their brand of biotechnical "advance." It attempts to unite all opposition to biotechnology for profits while putting forward the "Luddite" side.

The Luddites were an English movement of workers during the Industrial Revolution. They destroyed the tools they used at work and became synonymous with opposing technological advance.

Today, there have been a number of successful Luddite struggles with regard to biotechnology. Ranging from England to India, (e.g. p. 33, 188-9) farmers and environmentalists have teamed up to destroy or "decontaminate" fields known to have experimental crops. Even within capitalist logic, the neighboring property- owners feel a threat to their property from cross-pollination from experimental crops.

In contrast with Luddites, we Marxists favor technological progress. We believe that technology is not inherently bad; it is used toward negative ends because of the profit motive that allows the small minority to benefit at the expense of the majority. The problem is not science, but the production of science.

Science vs. the production of science

Kneen also understands that science is corrupted by capitalism, both in the pursuit of profits and the careers of the scientists kowtowing to employers who can put them on payroll. We Maoists support "science for the people" and "serving the people." As it is under capitalism, no one is guaranteed a job, and that is a corrupting influence in science. "The government employees, [who are supposed to be regulating multinational corporations--ed.] for their part, are intelligently, if immorally, considering their own future employment in an age of privatization. The revolving door between industry and government means that government and industry employees are frequently on the move from one to the other."(p. 153) There are not enough government and academic jobs for everyone, and even in academia, research grants come from corporations. We believe science should be funded and conducted by the people for the people.

An initial ban on genetic manipulation research received its impetus from within academia. Within a few years, however, scientists rejected the ban. Corporations were interested in the research, especially to make the gigantic profits of being "first" and scientists wanted jobs, so they rejected federal regulation of supposed scientific autonomy.(p. 49) We Maoists reject the notion that scientists can or should pick what questions to pursue as an apolitical process. Such autonomy is a myth. Even the most abstract and basic research serves some interests more than others. At the very least, the most abstract science creates a basis to justify class divisions when some are certified with degrees in such abstraction and paid more than others without those degrees.

On occasion involving the environment and multinational corporations, we Maoists will be on the same side as the Luddites. The reason for this is that capitalism produces pseudo-science which is then opposed by back-to-nature mystics and post- modernists. It's not much of a choice, but there will be times when the pseudo-scientists are more correct than the Luddites and post-modernists for reasons they do not understand and there will be times when the Luddites are correct relative to the pseudo- scientists of the Monsantos of the world. Because capitalism confuses class with science and only favors the minority with an attempt at a scientific education, many political leaders will feel there is no way to mobilize the public against a Monsanto without appealing to pre-scientific back-to-nature mysticism. Monsanto will accuse its opponents of opposing science, but we will accuse Monsanto of being a prop in a system preventing the masses from becoming scientists.

Reactionary petty-bourgeoisie

In the end, Kneen's position is that of the backward looking petty-bourgeoisie. However, because he aims his fire at the profit-system and he concerns himself with the environment, we must consider him and his whole political tendency a vacillating friend of the proletariat.

Short of moving to a planet with pre-industrial tribal life, Kneen will not be happy. He starts the book idolizing small milk farmers who resist introducing multinational corporate milking practices and he ends the book with the illusory claim that the whole society could be similar: "Now is the time to replace the centralized command economy of the corporate world -- which seeks to embed itself in the most fundamental structure of life -- with a variety of decentralized democratic economies."(p. 191)

He does not say how he will prevent the formation of multinational corporations in his decentralized world. Yet, as far as MIM is concerned he proves with his description of the production process why production must be absolutely centralized.

He admits that as an individual farmer, it was easier to use artificial insemination of cows than other methods which involved having bulls nearby.(pp.2-3) In other words, even from the perspective of a small "decentralized" farmer there was something advantageous about introducing a technology Kneen now claims to abhor as too risky -- a stepping stone toward cloning. He claims that small farmers did not always want to do things that were more profitable, but he admits that the incentive is there for them too.

If adding hormones to cows for milk production is dangerous, it should be banned across the board in a centralized way and not left to "decentralized democratic economies." Likewise, if introducing new genes into various grains and vegetables is dangerous, it too should be banned, not left to individual small farmers one at a time. Currently, the governments of the United $tates and Canada do not require biotechnology companies to label their products as bioengineered. Thus "much of the canola oil on the supermarket shelf"(p. 7) is bioengineered without consumers knowing.

Petty-bourgeois extremism

The petty-bourgeoisie tends to believe that forming small independent institutions like "New Society Publishers" is good enough in its own right. The petty-bourgeoisie also believes in the power of abstaining, so we can win it to our side with slogans like "U.S. out of x, y, z!"

Yet, the petty-bourgeoisie distrusts both the monopoly capitalists and the proletariat. Kneen does not trust in proletarian science and so he advocates retreating far into the past as the solution. Although humyns have been farming for thousands of years, Kneen says "I started with the deep-seated feeling that I was not really farming until I plowed a field. . . It was a profound inherited cultural attitude."(p. 36) Kneen now rejects that idea as one favoring "control" of Nature. The petty-bourgeoisie chafes at "control," because it mistakenly believes in its own independence. Likewise the petty-bourgeois environmentalist thinks it is unnatural for humyns to probe nature.

Unwilling to support a "probing" science any longer and making mandatory pc obeisance to pseudo-feminism, Kneen now says "I have grown to prefer the science of observation to the science of intervention. The science of intervention seems so much more interested in achieving control than in achieving understanding."(p. 37) However, since the production of science now is governed by profit, Kneen will be left observing the multinational corporations intervening. It will require a socialist intervention to change that.

The title of the book refers to the fact that biotechnology companies constantly work with genes connected to death -- death for weeds and insect pests for example. "On March 3, 1998, the US Patent Office awarded a patent number 5,723,765 to Delta & Pine Land Company and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) for . . . a genetic engineering technique that disables a seed's capacity to germinate when planted."(p. 61)

Obviously companies are interested in such technology to force farmers to buy seeds each year. More importantly, the continued emphasis on technologically neat solutions through death raises the title of the book "Farmageddon." Should a Terminator Technology gene manage to breed into other plants, it is possible to wipe out agriculture. Already, weed resistance strategies backfire by producing and spreading genes that make weeds tougher to control. From the point of view of the multinational corporation, having to buy new technologies to deal with the problem just created guarantees a constant flow of business.

Other companies have experimented with materials that destroy the farm worthiness of soil. In contrast with Kneen, MIM sees this and does not reject all science. It is perfectly possible to express scientifically the potential risk and damage of such genetic engineering. Kneen is correct that even a small chance to destroy the soil or plant germination has to be examined with life-and- death seriousness with the interests of the proletariat in mind, and not just a few wealthy people content to live a few luxurious years and not be bothered by the long-term consequences.

Basic needs multinational corporations and proletarian noises

The most powerful capitalists of the world have always had reason to make proletarian noises to quell their opponents. In some cases, the capitalists seek to overthrow feudal elements with a little help from the proletariat, especially when the proletariat itself seems of little threat. In other situations, the capitalists talk reform when under threat by the proletariat directly.

The quintessential capitalist irony of globalization is the way in which the capitalists speak of opening borders the way the most visionary communists do. A second one is the World Bank championing the poor of the Third World -- most recently against supporters of the Dalai Lama seeking to hold back a World Bank development project in Tibet favored by the Chinese regime. Such would be an example of the bourgeoisie mobilizing the proletariat slightly to do battle with semi-feudal elements. It happened in Marx's day and has possibilities today, because the bourgeoisie believes communism is dead, perhaps rightly so compared with semi- feudalism.

Thirdly, depending on the industry a capitalist is in, that capitalist may also make proletarian noises. Capitalists in the businesses of farming and water purification are most apt to say that their work is for the good of the international proletariat. The potential exists for any capitalist working in a basic needs industry to do the same. Why not lobby the government to buy services for customers who could not otherwise afford to pay for them, the capitalists reason.

The communists may well guffaw at these proletarian noises coming from multinational corporate giants, the epitomes of monopoly capitalism. Yet, we cannot stand by idly when the imperialist country Luddites attack the proletarian noises! As an example, the Rockefeller Foundation funded Norman Borlaug in connection to the "Green Revolution," a multinational corporate publicity campaign claiming to end world hunger through seed technology. Borlaug said recently in re-embracing biotechnology, "I am particularly alarmed by those who seek to deny smallscale farmers of the Third World -- and especially those in subSaharan Africa -- access to the improved seeds, fertilizers, and crop protection chemicals that have allowed the affluent nations the luxury of plentiful and inexpensive foodstuffs."(p. 23)

As we warned readers already, Kneen is a petty-bourgeois thinker. We did not throw that label about lightly the way our individualist critics accuse us. Our individualist critics accuse us of labeling, because they do not believe in the existence of classes. Most such individualists come from the petty-bourgeoisie, the class most likely to have the illusion of being above the conflict between the proletariat and the imperialists. However, the truth is that everyone has a label: all views belong to that of one class or another.

Kneen has a recognizable constellation of views, a predictable one. When it came to feeding the world's hungry, Kneen attacked repeatedly for "moral blackmail." That is not how a proletarian writer would respond to the Rockefeller Foundation mouthpieces. The petty-bourgeoisie and its mythical "decentralized democratic economies" do not have a good record for feeding the poor. We Maoists have a good record and don't flee from defending it, because we uphold Mao's China as far outstripping the more than a hundred countries of similar levels of poverty whenever it came to anything affecting the basic health of the people. We do not sidestep the question with nihilism and chauvinism.

We seek to hoist the bourgeois internationalists on their own petard. We do not reject their rhetoric for open borders or feeding the poor. We seek to hold them to their rhetoric and prove how free trade and feeding the poor is linked to socialism and communism. Many corporations thrive by providing government services. In the long-run the capitalists and landlords will be defeated so that the hundreds of millions of starving peasants can feed themselves, but we also favor global social spending that guarantees all the right to eat. The multinational corporations in the basic needs industries may be in a position to lobby imperialist governments for such spending.

Animal rights angle

In addition to "animal rights" propagated by the mystical petty- bourgeoisie, there are now plant rights. "Does the canola compelled to contain herbicide-tolerant 'genetics' get angry at the violation of its integrity? Is its promiscuous tendency to spread its genes around, including those for resistance, its way of rebelling? Do the potatoes forced to replicate alien Bt genes object to their forced labour? Do the cows injected with rbGH object to the distortion of their metabolism? We bear a responsibility to engage in resistance on behalf of all the organisms that do not have the means to resist initially."(p. 184)

Since Kneen hinges his most powerful arguments on the accidents of cross-pollination it is silly for him to talk about "violation" of plants. Nature violates herself all the time. MIM does not believe in holy essences attributed to plants or animals including humyns. Such religiousness is a distortion of nature.

Nature does not have a way of pleasant survival for all species. As we said in our 1999 Congress resolution on the subject of animal rights, there is nothing a humyn can do or not do that does not impact some species negatively. To believe otherwise is to fail to see scientifically the many threads connecting humyns to their environments including other species. In contrast, Kneen talks about the realities of species history as if they were mere philosophies. He thus echoes the creationist Christians who believe their views are equally as valid as Darwin's. He criticizes the idea that "there is insufficient room and resources for all life, that life is competitive 'survival of the fittest,' and that the life of some requires the death of others."(p. 12)

We might favor genetic modifications. We only oppose the process by which some who gain much more from the risks decide for the rest of us how much is an acceptable risk. Change is permanent and any course of action or inaction involves risks. We do not share the petty-bourgeoisie's dream-world.

Victories

There are many forces at work in the movement against genetically modified foods. U.$.-based corporations also face pressures from protectionist-minded countries. The whole European Union has maintained a ban on importation of artificial hormone produced meat and dairy products despite a ruling against the European Union in 1998 by the World Trade Organization.(p. 93) Thus the haves of biotechnology will be forced to bribe the have-nots within the imperialist countries with jobs and ownership. For now, the United $tates has a prohibitive lead in biotechnology. As that lead dissipates and other imperialists pick up the ball, we can expect protectionist opposition to genetically modified foods to disappear.

After a prolonged public relations battle, Canada banned bovine hormone related milk in January, 1999.(p. 91)

And as MIM already reported, Europe has stepped away from genetically modified foods generally in the first half of 1999. (pp. 185-6)

In these regards, Kneen belongs to a winning movement. MIM seeks to politicize it further with the history of the Chinese Cultural Revolution as our reference point.

Buy This Book


Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century
by Mark Dowie
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995)
317pp.

reviewed by MC5

MIM recommends this book to those readers who do not yet perceive MIM's level of frustration with the environmentalist movement as a movement in the United $tates. Although the author is a former editor of a reformist magazine, he spends most of the book criticizing what he calls "reformist" environmentalism for its sell-out and ineffectiveness as a political movement. The result is a book with the most realistic view of the Euro-Amerikan environmentalist movement as a political movement seen so far.

There are really only two movements that MIM supports in the United $tates that achieve widespread popularity. One is to cut military aid to Third World puppet governments. For chauvinist reasons, the Amerikan public supports cutting military and all other aid to the Third World.

Environmentalism is the other movement in the United $tates that MIM stands with the majority on. 7 of 10 people in the United $tates consistently describe themselves as environmentalist.

Environmental lobbying groups have a budget of nearly half a billion dollars a year as of 1994 given by the check-writing masses.(p. 4) The total for all environmental organizations was $3.12 billion in 1992. Between 1987 and 1992 what Dowie describes as "active" environmentalism saw its budget double to $2.5 billion.(p. 40)

If MIM received half a billion a year and its affiliates received another $2 billion and there was not some major revolutionary shaking happening throughout the whole world, MIM would be a failure. Mark Dowie is one of the few people of the reformist environmentalist niche to realize the movement's ineffectiveness.

Republicans in office

It was Republican President Richard Nixon who signed some of the most progressive environmental laws of the United $tates,(p. 33) including the ones most hated by rednecks such as the "Endangered Species Act." In this way, Republicans put the environment above "partisan politics" and succeeded in defusing one of the few political conflicts that neophyte environmental movement activists understood -- Democrats versus Republicans.

The legions of pseudo-environmentalists never understood the political and historical context of their movement and it became a dumping ground for various petty-bourgeois philosophies. When Earth Day first started and the environmentalist movement had success, Nixon faced a grave situation in the international class struggle. His own memoirs show an almost day-by-day knowledge of the strength of China, the throngs of anti-war protesters and the bombings conducted by the revolutionary underground here in the United $tates.

Thus, Earth Day 1970 was the first and it attracted 20 million participants and claimed to be the largest demonstration in U.$. history. Nixon worried that the movement would go socialist. He made concessions and sought to de-politicize the movement with great success.

Hence, when the Maoists no longer dominated the anti-war movement and movements generally as they did in the late 1960s and when the Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, the ruling class had an easy time of finishing off the successes of the environmentalist movement. They took apart the weak environment bureaucracy that was in place.(p. xiii)

The elite of the Washington DC environmental lobbyists was no less white, male or professional than before. Quite the contrary, they were more established and experienced than ever with greater funding, but their organizations delivered less over time, because as the Maoist revolutionary threat subsided with the demise of SDS, the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords etc., the Establishment had less to fear.

Fear is always what motivates ruling class concessions. Contrary to ignorant self-serving dogma, the "reasonableness" of the paid lobbyists plays no role. If all such reasonable pseudo-environmentalist lobbyists disappeared, the ruling class would replace them by coming up with the same drivel itself.

Democrats in office

After eviscerating environmental regulations under Reagan and Bush, the ruling class gave Clinton and Gore a chance and handed over key government posts to the lobbyists. Now there can be no doubt that the core of pseudo-environmentalism is ruling class.

The consternation that the environmentalist elite had joined the government and not accomplished very much is a joke that even Clinton and Gore make on themselves. Gore himself tells audiences he knows they think he sold out and ask him "where was Al Gore?" MIM addresses his fatuous free market "green is black" (as in profitable) ideology elsewhere.

Follow the money

From the very beginning, the contemporary environmentalist movement has had money dumped on it in order to quell it. Organizations like the Ford Foundation funded the Environmental Defense Fund, one of the key white male groups.(p. 35)

Other major players are the Rockefeller, Pew, Stern, W. Alton Jones and Kendall families. 7 percent of pseudo-environmentalist organization money comes from these foundations.(p. 49)

In fact, if the ruling class were afraid of the environmentalist movement in 1970, by 1995 when this book came out, the ruling class owned most of it. The purchase of the movement had gone to such an extent that National Audubon and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has co-signed anti-immigrant statements with FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform), which itself is partly funded by neo-Nazi money. A large fraction of the important Sierra Club is also on-board with the FAIR agenda.(p. 163)

Now it is self-evident to Earth Day organizers that every corporation is jumping on the bandwagon and trying to appear to be a sponsor of Earth Day. While corporate polluter money has split the movement at times, it has never been successfully stopped.

Dowie also understands that the corporations pay more to rent Congress than the pseudo-environmentalists do. The Sierra Club spent $680,000 supporting Congressional candidates in 1992, but extraction-based industries alone spent $21.3 million.(p. 86)

MIM counts this as another case of reformist dogma, by which we mean that a fetish is made of working through channels even when the situation is hopeless on a struggle level. Even by their own logic it would make more sense to struggle for campaign finance reform,(p. 194) but the pseudo-environmentalists are unwilling to become even that political.

Hence, movement resources are wasted. In the first place, turnover in Congress is very low, averaging 2 percent per election for decades and only slightly more now. In the second place, MIM would not fight a battle where it is outnumbered 40 to 1 or more. The goal should be nothing less than revolution, but the individual battles must be winnable, not suicidal. This is something the environmental movement has yet to grasp. That $680,000 should have gone elsewhere--toward building a revolutionary movement to put the fear of the proletariat in the ruling class again.

Progress in some areas but not overall

Some struggles did bring about progress. Under socialism, we will ban profit-making entirely. Currently, the system only occasionally musters the political strength to ban economic activities on a case-by-case basis. Bans on lead, DDT, PCBs, mercury and Strontium 90 have worked.(p. 39) Regulations for unleaded gasoline and auto environmental devices reduced sulfur and lead emissions 90 percent.(p. 112)

In all class struggles, the bourgeoisie does not win 100 percent and the proletariat 0 percent, no matter how dire the situation.

Movement politics

The pseudo-environmentalist movement has been such a failure that Dowie looks to the humyn rights movement for inspiration. It is true that the humyn-rights movement lends itself to more moralist absolutist stands. We believe there is a humyn-right to a non-toxic environment.

Whereas the bourgeoisie like Bob Dole has supported the idea that environmental regulations amount to "taking" property from the bourgeoisie without compensation,(p. 101) the truth is exactly the opposite. The corporations Bob Dole supported are "taking" the right of the public to a non-toxic environment.

We Marxists believe it is impossible to "negotiate" or "compensate" someone for their right to life. Hence, we favor the use of organized force against the property-owners and their spokespeople like Dole, who do not have basic political priorities set correctly for the species.

Currently their organized force called government stands against the right to a non-toxic environment and it is a dictatorship of the tiny minority of profit-makers. We seek a dictatorship of the proletariat, which will also benefit the middle classes on environmental questions in particular.

MIM does not agree with the fraction of the book (chapter 8) in which Dowie talks about the solutions for the movement's ills. We rather recommend this book for pointing to the state of the "mainstream" environmentalist movement we call pseudo-environmentalist.

The bottom line

While the pseudo-environmentalist movement wasted the energies of the seven percent of people who described themselves as "active" in the movement,(p. 4) the environment got worse. Even Earth Day founder-activist Denis Hayes admitted it.(p. 26)

More toxins found their way into animal flesh 20 years after the first Earth Day than on the first Earth Day.(p. 20) It is more than 5 billion pounds of 300 toxic compounds a year since the early 1990s.(p. 22) A multi-billion dollar industry has arisen to clean up toxins that should not have been released in the first place, and that is capitalism's idea of progress.

That is not to mention the global situation with rainforest destruction, 5000 species going extinct per year and the persistent shift of land into the unusable category.

Much of the public mislead by the pseudo-environmentalists is already frustrated with the state of the environment. The public has yet to sit down and study scientifically the politics, political economy and history it needs to win.

The weaknesses of our movement in the United $tates also stem from the population's having fewer life-and-death threats from capitalism than the international proletariat found mostly in the Third World. The people here are bought-off in the majority. The middle-class ideology also puts a damper on the scientific understanding of the masses, who frequently reject statistical or group-level generalizations and hence find themselves unable to understand the science of classes or the environment. Since much environmental degradation requires examining a long chain of cause-and-effect sometimes spanning continents, raising the scientific level of the masses is important to our movement's success.

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The Natural Wealth of Nations: Harnessing the Market for the Environment
by David Malin Roodman
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998
303 pp. pb.

reviewed by MC5

This is a book about government subsidies and taxes as they affect the environment. Roodman has succeeded in putting forward a book that simultaneously pleases the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and other liberal and radical sources of grant money that funded the book on the one hand and the environmentalist movement on the other hand. For the bourgeoisie, it was worth the money.

The book starts by attacking subsidies to mining and lumber companies, fisheries and highways. Canadian seal hunters garner a four dollar government subsidy for every seal they club to death.(p. 101) The attack on such subsidies amounting to $650 billion globally will please conservatives and libertarians, both of which support economic Liberalism. Nonetheless, MIM also supports the end to subsidies for mining, lumber and fisheries in the imperialist countries, because the environmental goals supported by Roodman most benefit the proletariat.

We also agree with Roodman that the $111 billion in subsidizing U.$. roads (p. 43) should go toward mass transit and subsidies for renewable energy instead. The subsidies to mining, lumber and fisheries in particular have been called "corporate welfare." The rich receiving the corporate welfare have had the most incentive to allow the degradation of the environment. The proletariat is the class of people with the least interest in the degradation of the environment. Only people making large profits from pollution would consider degrading their own environment.

The end of the book is about existing pollution taxes in the world and tax proposals for the United $tates. Roodman correctly criticizes the bogus arguments raised against environmental taxes. Their regressive nature can be overcome and taxes on other things can be dropped if pollution taxes increase.

Capitalism and the environment

Roodman makes crucial admissions throughout the book only to soften them and argue for social-democratic reforms of capitalism. "Though the market is a powerful tool for economic progress, where its edges meet the planet it is mainly as a saw, shovel, or smokestack--as an instrument of destruction rather than protection."(p. 19) Moreover, the "market system today threatens environmental, thus economic, disaster."(p. 27)

Like many other market-believing environmentalists, Roodman says there should be a market for the right to pollute. In a back assward argument, he says "that people have a right to breathe air and drink water not contaminated by other people's wastes" and then he decries moralists for upholding that argument!(p. 157) To translate what Roodman is saying: capitalism cannot be overturned; hence, second-class environmental citizenship for the poor and middle-classes is the only choice. He calls that "pragmatism" and he is right to call it that. Since Roodman knows that by his own (conservative) estimate 300,000 to 700,000 a year die from air pollution and another 50 million children cough chronically because of it,(p. 156) his market for pollution rights is nothing less than a market for murder and disease licenses.

In contrast, MIM maintains that the right to food, clothing, shelter and a non-toxic and non-militarist environment is non-negotiable. By themselves, these rights imply the use of organized force to protect them against would-be profiteers. Such organized force is called dictatorship of the proletariat, which will be necessary until that day all humyns find it unthinkable to force others to negotiate their non-negotiable rights.

Politics and blame

Like other defenders of capitalism, Roodman blames the lack of progress on the environmental front on the environmentalists or the masses. He admits that the idea of environmental taxes have been around for 80 years, but not used. The blame goes to environmentalists for preferring regulation he says.(p. 22)

Yet elsewhere he does admit that businesses affected overturned tepid environmental reform in Louisiana in 1992.(p. 182) Conventional fossil fuel businesses also shut down a measly tax proposed by Clinton to favor renewable energy sources.(p. 131) Moreover, Roodman recognizes that federal research priorities are skewed toward spending money in the most polluting energy industries, which is also where the most corporate clout lies.(p. 138)

When it comes to the famed market for sulfur emissions rights, Roodman makes further admissions about the reality of capitalist political economy. In the first place, he admits that the law written grants existing polluters the right to pollute based on their previous pollution levels. The idea is that if they cut their pollution below their quota, they can sell the right to making that pollution they cut back to someone else for a profit.

He and other die-hard marketeers do not admit it, but based on this principle, it is possible for companies to invent new sources of pollution and then go to the government to set up a pollution market and then profit from the pollution rights sold! For MIM this is the ultimate proof why patchwork policy can never reform capitalism and why scientific socialist planning has to be used throughout. Profit is an indiscriminate motivator. In the current system it encourages companies to "innovate" by creating new forms of pollution that the government has to regulate and sell rights to.

In fact, to even pass the law to begin with, some companies gained the right to pollute at 1985 levels and hence were guaranteed a profit in selling their rights to pollute from day one of the law, which came into effect in 1990 under President Bush. The five years of progress in reducing emissions between 1985 and 1990 were automatic profits for companies so exempted.(p. 238)

Another reason that socialist scientific planning needs to be used is that one result of the famed U.$. market for sulfur dioxide emissions is that production shifted toward cleaner coal that can only be obtained by more abusive coal-mining techniques!(p. 154) Environmental gains are offset by environmental losses in another area, because Anglo-Saxon individualists refuse to plan production from start to finish and instead place mystical faith in the market.

We credit Roodman for recognizing the negative influence of big money on democracy. "It is politics, not sound policy, that best explains the remarkable resilience of outmoded resource regimes in the United States, for instance. In the 1995-96 election cycle, oil and gas companies gave $11.8 million to congressional candidates to protect tax breaks worth at least $3 billion over the period. Timber lobbies donated $3.6 million, mainly to members of committees that set the Forest Service's budget and logging quotas. Mining firms handed out $1.9 million in order to fend off royalty charges on public hardrock minerals, something they have succeeded in doing for more than 120 years. Ranching interests contributed $2.2 million in order to keep federal grazing fees low, as they have been since 1906."(p. 228) Total environmental lobbyist donations to Congress members was $1.1 million in 1995-6.(p. 229)

While Roodman recognizes the influence of big money in politics, he gives in to shallow and casual anti-communism. He is of the opinion that communism failed to protect the environment,(p. 234) but he gives no detailed treatment and so we won't grant him the benefit of a rebuttal.

Labor aristocracy

Roodman informs MIM of further reasons to oppose the demands of oppressor nation "workers." Although the image of the coal-miner is central to Marxism, in Germany the subsidy to inefficient coal is over $7 billion.(p. 24) Thus coal-mining jobs are saved through a government paper-shuffle, at the cost of over $85,000 per coal-mining job per year.

Likewise, England had a source of fuel open to it--the natural gas of the North Sea--but labor aristocrats and labor bureaucrats opposed closing the coal mines despite their higher levels of pollution. MIM would point out that under socialism, everyone is guaranteed a job, so resistance to environmental progress of this sort should be lower. The way it happened in England, imperialist Thatcher rammed change down the throats of the labor aristocracy and England is one of the few countries in the world experiencing declining carbon emissions in the midst of economic growth as a result.(p. 104)

The environment is often a reason we must refocus our Marxism into Leninism, which includes a theory of imperialism as the decadent stage of capitalism. As Lenin pointed out, whole countries become parasitic and attain decadent lifestyles at the expense of the Third World masses.

Environmentalists should be Leninists of the MIM sort, because we oppose the consumption demands of the oppressor nation workers and because we recognize decadence and conservatism not just in the imperialists, but the oppressor nation workers.

MIM favors having the imperialist countries pay the Third World for the right to emit greenhouse gasses. If there is a global market for pollution rights created under global capitalism, then the Third World should receive 80 percent of the pollution rights as the UN has pointed out.(p. 195) Since the imperialist countries create 80 percent of greenhouse gas pollution, they will have to pay the Third World tremendous sums of money to emit greenhouse gasses. Roodman correctly points out that the rich countries have it in their self-interest to pay for an end to global pollution, because they cannot afford to wait until the poor are rich enough to do so themselves.(p. 196)

Unlike the Titoites or anarchists favoring "local control," MIM never favors local interests over those of the international proletariat. If a small group of workers or petty-bourgeoisie benefits from pollution at the expense of the international proletariat MIM, like Marx before it, stands with the international proletariat against the local interests of the workers backing pollution. It is the duty of the communist to apply Marxist science and support the interests of the class overall and not just any one of its sections. The unions opposing greenhouse gas emissions standards discussed at the 1997 Kyoto conference are wrong.(p. 230)

Only 1 in 300 German workers are coal-miners and 1 in 25 workers in the Pacific Northwest of North America make their living in mining or lumber.(p. 53) As Mr. Spock would say in Star Trek, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. The few will not be allowed to override the many under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

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Ozone protection: a proletarian reform

Ozone Diplomacy: New Directions in Safeguarding the Planet

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, 449 pp. p.b.

reviewed by MC5, June 7, 2000

This is an extremely informative book on how an international treaty came about to protect the ozone layer of the atmosphere. We find much factual material in the book to support a Marxist view of the environment.

Richard Elliot Benedick was U.S. Foreign Service official and negotiator for the so-called 1987 "Montreal Protocol" (followed by important meetings in 1990 "The London Amendment," the 1992 "Copenhagen Amendment" etc.) which aimed at saving the ozone. In 1988 he received an award from the president for his career. Benedick was a Reagan administration official in charge of the ozone question appointed by Secretary of State George Schultz,(p. viii) but there is none of the ideological stupidity on the environment that we would expect from a conservative in this book. Benedick fully realized that governments were going to have to do something about the ozone.

Anarchy of capitalist production and the class struggle

What MIM finds most interesting is how the environmentalists and scientists managed to convince the Reagan administration and other capitalists to support a global treaty mandating protection of the ozone. Usually bourgeois reactionaries such as Reagan administration officials would be paranoid about "world government" arising from such a global treaty mandating government control of private industry. Indeed, the ozone treaties transferred on the order of $1 billion to the Third World to aid it in replacing equipment that is dangerous to the ozone. The treaties provided a first in history whereby the rich countries admitted to a responsibility and paid special dues to an organization to subsidize the Third World to cooperate with environmental-protection. The ozone treaties are examples of reform worthy of the word "proletarian" in the 1980s, 1990s and 21st century.

It turns out that the division of the capitalist class into competing segments gave the proletariat a chance to advance the cause of the environment. In this case, the active elements of the proletarian class struggle were earth (atmosphere) scientists and other intellectuals in governments and the media. Although they are not usually thought of as proletarian, some scientists have jobs that intrinsically bring them into contact with the ozone issue. From the substance of their jobs, they knew that regulation of the ozone might be an emergency necessity. Their struggle benefited all the property-less; hence we can say that the struggle for an international ozone treaty was a proletarian one. In contrast, the hundreds of thousands of manufacturing workers in chemical industries who were to lose or change jobs in lay-offs in the banning of certain chemicals (mostly in the imperialist countries and hence the kind of workers who are really labor aristocracy and not entirely property-less) and the capitalists who were afraid of losing their ozone-depleting property(p. 1) are examples of the bourgeois side of the struggle against a livable environment.

According to Benedick, for some odd reasons including the fact that the United $tates has the most earth scientists, the ozone question was more immediate in the U.$. public's mind than in the public of any other country. U.$. public opinion and the lagging opinion of Europe created the possibility that U.$. industry would be put under regulations that European capitalists did not face. As a result, multinational corporations based in the United $tates did an about-face and started favoring international regulation of industry for ozone-depleting substances (ODS)--with the reasoning that they did not want their European competitors to have an unfair advantage. Coupled with the fear of lawsuits and irate consumers, competition from Europe drove U.$. industries to pay for the scientific studies--even done by Europeans--that proved they would have to be regulated.(p. 30) Once U.$. industry backed the idea of an ozone treaty, the struggle was downhill from there. U.$. industry actually beat back the attacks from reactionary political propagandists (e.g. anti-scientific big mouth Rush Limbaugh (p. 226)) whenever they tried to undo the treaties the United $tates signed.(p. 47) Public opinion in the rest of the world rose to the occasion and caught between U.$. industry, the Reagan administration and global public opinion, governments everywhere started falling into line for an ozone treaty. For example, the United $tates simply threatened the regime in southern Korea with a cut-off of trade to get it to sign on without asking for special favors.(p. 244) It was a combination of proletarian push and capitalist fissures that put together the world treaty.

Even when the science was done, Europeans had some skepticism typical of the problems of science produced under capitalism. The Europeans originally believed that the United $tates was raising the ozone issue in order to place Europe at a competitive trade disadvantage. That is exactly what the United $tates did when it came to the Concorde jet produced by England and France. The United $tates kept it from landing in the United $tates ever since 1974 by saying among other things that the Concorde damaged the ozone.(p.32) Thus, Boeing had protection from European competition and Europeans rightly became cynical about ozone science. That is the nature of science production under capitalism, because capitalism organizes production and the state for private gain.

CFC producers in Europe assumed that DuPont had developed an alternative to CFCs in secret and that was the real reason the United $tates favored banning CFCs. It turned out to be true that DuPont had done some research on alternatives to CFCs.(p. 33) Whatever the case may have been, the point is that under capitalism, science cannot escape the context it is produced in. We Maoists believe science should be produced for the public interest and we rebuff any who believe that science production is neutral. There are always resource choices to be made concerning what science to produce and who produces it. Science production is inherently political, but it can be produced in a situation generating less distrust than a for-profit system. The political distrust of capitalist science concerning the ozone controversy generated delays in the creation and implementation of the ozone treaty. Fortunately those delays were not fatal yet, but in another environmental catastrophe, they could have been fatal to the humyn species.

Even once the treaty was signed, the Europeans were reluctant to release private industry data on CFC production, for fear of competitive losses. It is the nature of capitalist corporations to want to keep their business doings confidential. Yet, it was not possible to enforce a treaty amongst all countries without disclosure of CFC production data. This is another reason capitalism is bad for the environment--the desire to hide for profit.

In fact, at the highest level of secrecy for profit, after a few rounds of treaty implementation, the Russians started profiting from the ODS treaties by starting a black market. Certain businesspeople specialized in making it appear that treaties were upheld and regulations followed when in fact they were not. By 1994, the import of illegal CFCs in the United $tates totaled between $150 million to $300 million a year.(p. 274)

Because black marketeers exist in a capitalist system where cash is unlimited and can purchase unlimited goods, there is a strong attraction to getting around environmental regulations in capitalism. Under socialism, people with the kind of money that black marketeers have would not be able to spend it and would be suspect for having it in the first place. After developing through a period of socialism, the world will reach communism and cash will be abolished completely. Black marketeers will no longer be a factor: that goes for drugs, weapons and polluting equipment that is banned.

Aside from public pressure and capitalist fissures, there were persynal factors involving the ruling class when it came to reform. While Ronald Reagan was president, he developed skin cancer. As he underwent operations for skin cancer(p. 67)--which is caused by ozone depletion among other things--Reagan did not sign off on the efforts of ultra-conservative and libertarian government officials who sought to keep government out of environmental affairs.

One last point to mention is that in the class warfare of the United $tates, white people with their settler history are the ones to most oppose any government activity. In the case of the ozone, there was an added incentive for white people to get on board with the people they normally spit on as socialists: "The U.S. national Cancer Institute reported that melanoma had increased more rapidly than any other form of cancer among Caucasian Americans in the years 1973-1992."(p. 225)

The point is that in any struggle for proletarian reform, there are special circumstance to take advantage of. In the case of environmental issues generally two factors will always have to be considered by activists--public opinion (not that of the polluters) and splits within the capitalist class.

Libertarianism

The free market ideology, bourgeois economics and political Liberalism known as libertarianism does not work when it comes to the environment. In the case of the ozone, the various individualists are forced into arguing that skin cancer caused by ozone depletion is the fault of the individual for not wearing adequate sun block (sun tan lotion). Movies arose satirizing this view, where people are depicted in blue sunblock from head to toe or dying for not having it on.

The libertarians sought to blame people living in the South or any sunny climate for their own poor individual choices. No doubt they also blamed them for living in cold places and sometimes freezing to death or getting insufficient exposure to the sun. Rather than take up science to eliminate dangers from something as essential as the sun, the libertarians sought to blame the individual for everything. Reagan administration Interior Secretary Hodel said in the Wall Street Journal: "'People who don't stand out in the sun--it doesn't affect them.'"(p. 60) Desperate idiots like Hodel prove the lengths to which individualists have to go to avoid socialist conclusions.

The individualists go to extremes to avoid the commonalties of the humyn race. All people require clean air to breath, drinkable water and an atmosphere that protects them. The indivisible environment is one reason why there is a real basis for cooperative economics and government.

Probability and causation

The most difficult part of the ozone treaty is that in the imperialist countries the same people inclined to individualism because of the property structure also have a hard time understanding cause and effect in science. When it comes to the ozone, "the concept is not obvious: a perfume spray in Paris helps to destroy an invisible gas in the stratosphere and thereby contributes to skin cancer deaths and species extinction half a world away and several generations in the future."(p. 3) Fortunately, it was relatively easy to attack the whole idea of an aerosol can and aerosol consumption declined once global public opinion heard of the link to a poor environment. Yet, not all atmospheric issues were as catchy as the aerosol can.

Scientific discussion as early as 1974 had already concerned itself with the ozone and CFCs (chloroflurocarbons). By the time Benedick was working on the issue in the 1980s, there was doubt whether anything needed to be done at a governmental level. In 1986 it could still be said there was no statistical evidence that the ozone was depleting,(p. 15) despite what was shown to happen in laboratories. Benedick mentions only one study from 1985 that was published too late for considerations by the UN environmental program known as UNEP, a study which showed that the ozone covering Antarctica fell by 50% since the 1960s.(p. 18) As 1986 turned into 1987, more evidence arose for a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica, as confirmed by satellites.(p. 19) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency(EPA) started predicting that 150 million new cases of skin cancer would arise by 2075 including 3 million deaths.(p. 21) Thus, in 1987, a critical moment arrived in Montreal and the tide turned in international diplomacy.

Within science as known in capitalist society where people are not educated as they should be, the fact that certain risks can only be estimated is disconcerting to many people. The individualist and conservative simpleton prefers to know something in an either/or sense. Something is either 0% true or 100% true in the minds of many people not accustomed to dealing with quantitative matters.

In the case of the most important causes of death however, they strike in small percentages but routinely. There is only a chance that a U.$. citizen would be one of the 3 million with skin cancer in the United $tates. Furthermore, there is only a chance that the scientists in 1986 were right about what would cause cancer. Hence, there was only a chance that banning CFCs would help with the ozone problem and skin cancer.

Benedick rightly condemns the "Panglossians" (a reference to Voltaire and the conservative idea that everything is fine) for neglecting dangers that are neither zero nor one hundred percent certain. Most people in the imperialist countries know to buy insurance for accidents. Yet there is no such thing as an interstellar insurance company that will help us out if we blow the Earth's environment. Once it becomes unlivable, that may be the end for the species. Under capitalism, businesspeople take risks with our environment every day for their profits. Under socialism, such risks will be minimized and only done in the interest of the people, not the wealth of individuals. The competition dynamic in which the environment is damaged while capitalists are busy fighting for market control will not exist.

Benedick quite correctly observed that "The world may not have the luxury of early warning signals before an irreversible collapse occurs in some other segment of the planet's ecosystem."(p. 307) We won't always be able to afford to know every last scientific detail before acting. That was the lesson learned in the ozone controversy. Once chemicals are released on the surface, they often take years to reach the ozone. Hence, the results in the ozone now may only reflect usage of chemical in the distant past.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is best suited for handling environmental issues. Because property is eliminated, there will be less resistance when equipment has to be scrapped or a new technology introduced.

Such resistance will exist only to the extent that some people are trying to restore capitalism and property as a whole. Under dictatorship of the proletariat, change can be implemented without particular individuals bearing the brunt of the cost. For the foreseeable future, everyone can gain from environmental improvements because there is a massive resource that the dictatorship of the proletariat can tap into globally--unemployed people by the hundreds of millions.

Environmentalism and economic efficiency

Under capitalist society, whenever someone proposes a new environmental regulation, someone has to be willing to retire, recycle, modify or throw out what is known as capital stock. In this context, capital stock is simply physical assets --tools, buildings, machinery.

The first excuse of polluting capitalists is always that the technology they use is irreplaceable. The capitalists at this stage of struggle invariably parade their experts on how it is "impossible" to do what the public and environmentalists want. Whenever change happens--implementing social security, requiring an average miles per gallon of gas in automobiles and banning ozone depleting solvents like CFC-113,(p. 231) the capitalists parade their corrupted scientists to say it is "impossible." When the class struggle pushes hard enough in the proletarian direction, however, we soon find out that it is "possible" and in much less time than anyone imagined. This is seen again and again throughout the book and we thank Benedick for recording for history the self-serving stances of industry which said it was "impossible" time and time again.

The ozone treaties made various kinds of refrigeration and air conditioning equipment illegal. However, under capitalism, the capital stock is privately owned, so private individuals end up losing money for having equipment that becomes outdated. For this reason, private individuals owning capital stock known as capitalists often oppose environmental regulation for their own short-sighted economic reasons--and nothing better can be expected in a capitalist society.

According to Benedick, the imperialist country environmentalist organizations Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace did not play much of a role in the creation of an ozone treaty and they studiously avoided discussing economic costs of regulation.(p. 204) In contrast, Reagan official Benedick has a higher consciousness going beyond that of these activists, because he already recognizes the state of bourgeois economics: "The market is essentially neutral with respect to the environment, and the current state of economics is not helpful in analyzing such situations. Relying on Adam Smith to protect the ozone layer--or to mitigate climate change--could be disastrous."(p. 308) Environmentalists who fail to learn this lesson will not be able to get society where it needs to get.

MIM agrees with Benedick that avoidance of economics is annoying. Environmentalists should be slamming bourgeois economics on a regular basis. MIM would not avoid making the argument for international pollution regulation on economic grounds. Not having studied political economy, many pseudo-environmentalists are fooled by arguments from bourgeois economists that it is a good thing for capitalists to oppose supposedly overly expensive environmental regulation. As an example, when the bulk of the ozone destroying chemicals were already cut back under international treaty, the United $tates had an argument with northern Europeans who wanted the treaties to be stricter on lesser ozone-depleting substances (ODS) known as HCFCs (hydrochlorofluorocarbons).

Under capitalism, there are times when thanks to cut-throat competition, entire manufacturing plants become obsolete the day they are built. Such is wasteful and harmful to the environment. The cause is that competition amongst capitalists is not rational from a social perspective. What may increase wealth for individuals may not be good for the society as a whole. It certainly is a business victory to advance your own business so well that your competitors' factories are all obsolete, but it may not be good for society as a whole.

In the case of HCFCs, however, the opposite is true. The problem for capitalism is pronouncing old property obsolete if it is causing environmental damage. The United $tates owned most of the $200 billion in property that needed HCFCs,(p. 292) so it opposed extending the ODS treaties to phase out HCFCs as fast as some other countries proposed. Such opposition comes in the name of efficiency; yet, exactly the opposite is the case. The unwillingness of individual capitalists or their rented governments to spend the money to get a socially desirable job done is why there has to be scientific socialist planning of the economy.

The market of consumers has little knowledge of the ozone, CFCs, HCFCs etc. The consumers want scientists serving the public interest to be delegated authority to handle these questions. That is socialism, not "consumer is king." Even experts in a market society are corrupted by their reliance on corporations for employment and consulting fees: "Industry and economists had vastly overestimated the costs of solutions."(p. 311)

The bourgeois economists given little to thinking globally with their academic models would counter that as socialists we would waste resources. This is not true, because the most wasted resource in the world is humyn labor-power. Every year hundreds of millions of people go without jobs. Hired by a socialist state, the unemployed could replace that $200 billion in capital equipment without denting global unemployment very much. True, $200 billion of capital stock should not be scrapped at the drop of a hat, but in this case, the scrapping is for the benefit of the environment. Workers as a class would benefit both from the employment and the accomplishment of a reduction of ozone depletion. Under capitalism, what happens is that the United $tates keeps its borders closed to the hundreds of millions of unemployed and then it complains that it would be wasteful to replace its polluting capital stock. Yet it would only be wasteful if we only counted U.$. labor in the matter. Because the United $tates does not appear on the surface to have hundreds of millions of unemployed people to spare for work replacing polluting equipment does not mean the world as a whole does not have the labor to spare. In this case, efficiency and the environment are not exclusive goals when efficiency is defined as the optimal use of resources, in this case unemployed labor-power on a global scale.

This scientific fact is also why there is no true environmentalism without internationalism as its foundation. The Third World unemployed are a great ally of environmental progress. They could use the jobs replacing polluting capital stock and it is not their property lost when such capital stock is replaced. The Third World workers only gain in environmental progress including cleaner air and water and atmospheric protection. However, pseudo-environmentalists who do not take the international proletariat into account and want to keep the borders of imperialist countries closed and international economic cooperation limited will likely fall for the bourgeois economists' arguments saying that scrapping pollution-creating devices is wasteful.

Under socialism, planners will still have to take care not to waste resources other than labor-power. Speeding up replacement of polluting equipment may cause more pollution through the expenditure of energy and other resources other than labor-power that are produced and consumed by polluting processes. Such a question is a scientific question and should not be left to private owners of capital. When total pollution can be cut back by scrapping equipment, no one's profits or persynal wealth should be a factor preventing progress.

Once polluting capital stock is gone, capitalism provides yet two more barriers to environmental reform. First, the least-polluting technology is privately owned through patents. The ozone treaties recognized this fact and saw to the free transfer of some technology to the Third World--a glimmering of socialism. Secondly, when it comes to compliance with treaties, information on what capitalists do is private. All the capitalist countries--especially Europe--had to concede to make public their private information. Hence, the struggle for the ozone was very educational regarding capitalism's defects.

Conclusion

Richard Benedick has performed a public service with this book. In it MIM learns of a proletarian reform won in recent years. Between 1986 and 1994, CFC production fell by 79%. Halons were off 85 percent;(p. 301) although originally it was thought halons would be more difficult to be done with(p. 204) thanks to the distortions of science and engineering production by the capitalists.

"CFC consumption had dropped by 75 percent, halon consumption by 83 percent. In the North, [industrialized countries--MC5] both production and consumption of CFCs has fallen by 90 percent, while halons had been completely eliminated. CFC consumption in the North stood at about 93,000 metric tons in 1994, while consumption was 80,000 metric tons."

"In the South, [Third World--MC5] as anticipated, production and consumption had risen from their extremely low 1986 levels, but the growth paths were leveling off."(p. 301)

Despite the success of the ozone treaty, it is the exception that proves the need for revolutionary struggle. Benedick is the first to admit that the treaty is the first and only of its kind and that similar attempts in regard to global warming failed despite some promising beginnings. Even in the case of the ozone, as with all ozone issues, capitalists are motivated to compromise by the fear of watermelons--people green on the outside but red on the inside. At least as early as Richard Nixon, the reactionaries have realized the huge risk that the environmentally minded public might go socialist on account of the environment. It is the specter of communism that makes reform possible in special isolated circumstances.

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Risk in life

Should We Risk It? Exploring Environmental, Health and Technological Problem Solving 404pp. hb
by Daniel M. Kammen & David M. Hassenzahl
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999
404pp. pb.

review by MC5, Feb., 2000

We had hoped that some statistical and epidemiological problem-solvers had turned their attention to questions like war, causes of war, nuclear proliferation and the impact of the relations of production on mortality rates. Hence, this book disappointed high hopes; however, it is still a decent attempt to meet the laypersyn half-way on questions of looking at questions of probability and statistics in every day life as seen by typical public health professionals of the United $tates.

From a book like this one, a persyn can learn that it is possible to apply scientific methods to many questions. We recommend it for graduate students with math, probability and statistics backgrounds. It is too difficult to pick up without formal training.

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Pseudo-Environmentalist Grab-Bag Pales in Contrast to Maoist Science

Sustainable America: America's Environment, Economy and Society in the 21st Century
Daniel Sitarz ed., foreword by Al Gore
Carbondale, IL: Earthpress, 1998.
312 pp. pb.

review by MC5

Government and corporate officials on the "President's Council on Sustainable Development" put together several reports that found their way into this book edited by an attorney, teacher and Director of the Global Research Institute, Daniel Sitarz. The co- leaders responsible for the effort are Jonathan Lash from the World Resources Institute and David Buzzelli, Vice-President of Dow Chemical.(p. 5)

Vice-President of the United States Al Gore introduces the book and staunch liberal ex-Senator Paul Simon has endorsed the book on the back cover. Officers from Chevron, GM, Ciba-Geigy, Dow Chemical, Georgia- Pacific and other corporations contributed and hence, this is the semi-official book of the ruling class on the environment. Its ideas are not necessarily Clinton administration policy, but the Clinton administration sought to put this group of people together and start the process of putting together a program for the environment.

We expected this book to be a consensus position with much watered-down phraseology and no substance. Instead we were shocked to read an ambitious grab-bag of various ideas that could go into an imperialist political program for the environment.

Politics and environmentalism

The study group behind this book decided that it would be best not to "confront" (p. 6) industry with environmental demands and instead to "work with" industry. In any political situation, those supporting education as if in contrast to confrontation are usually the ones saying mealy-mouthed things that add up to nothing.

Since most environmentalists are not worked out in their economic or political thinking, many ideas presented in the book are in contradiction with each other. In a sense, the book is a catalogue of existing private and government efforts on the environment with little disciplined weighing or evaluation of the varied efforts.

Some ideas are clearly socialist ideas, but the word "socialist" is never used. Among other things, the book proposes environmental guidance of production and not just in the consumption stage. Several national goals are proposed, including in relationship to planning of energy production. The use of scientific planning in production for the benefit of the environment of all people is a socialist idea. The very fact that the government sells sulfur emissions rights took an act of scientific planning, not something that spontaneously arose in the free market. The "invisible hand" did not even know what sulfur emissions were not long ago. The sort of half-measures discussed in the book to correct the free market economy are known as "social-democracy." The authors probably do not consider themselves social-democrats, but whether they know it or not, they are.

The Council put forward a number of new policy ideas for the ruling class:

1. An income tax cut to offset new "Green" taxes based on the "polluter pays" principle--e.g. higher volume or weight-based garbage disposal fees, more tolls on highways to penalize driving.

2. Abolition of pollution subsidies such as expansion of highway construction spending: "Below-cost timber sales and timber road building, below-market grazing fees, the treatment of hard-rock mining under the 1872 Mining Law, below-market charges for irrigation water, below-market charges for federal power, below- costs charges for recreational uses, agricultural commodity subsidies, many subsidies for highway construction and water projects, certain energy research and development programs, and federally underwritten flood, crop, and disaster insurance are among the programs that distort the cost of doing resource-related business from the resource-developer or user to the taxpayer."(p. 36)

3. Tighter regulations and standards for green claims in advertising and labeling.(p. 43)

4. A shorter work-week and working from home to save commuting.(p. 44)

5. Placing responsibility for packaging on manufacturers, not consumers.(p. 60) (A clearly socialist idea ruined in implementation under capitalism.)

There are two ways in which we cannot take the book seriously; although overall it is a useful book. One problem is its lack of policy coherence. The other is the impossibility of implementing ideas suggested within capitalism. Many policies will end up creating paper-shuffling bureaucracy without accomplishing anything, because capitalism is in contradiction with the environment.

Our biggest complaint is that yet again we find another advocate of slicing and dicing the environment for sale, in the name of preventing pollution. The argument goes that if the environment had a price it would not be spoiled by capitalists. Hence, to these die-hard defenders of free markets and Anglo-Saxon individualism, the right to pollute should be bought and sold.

While we agree that taxing pollution is better than doing nothing under capitalism and we support it as a reform possible within capitalism, the bottom line is there is no real Green that is not Red. Creating a free market for pollution rights only proves that some people have second-class environmental rights based on their money. The creation of this market for pollution rights which started under the Bush administration is proof that under the free market the environment is either ignored and destroyed or at best, parceled out and destroyed by a minority able to afford it. The market for pollution rights also proves the anti-people nature of the government, which does not rush forward to buy and retire all the pollution rights.

We at MIM do not believe the environment can be sliced and diced as if for packaging on the grocery store shelf. Either the air is clean and safely breathable or it is not. It is not possible to individualize the environment. Centuries of class training of the bourgeois sort will have to be thrown aside, because no one has the so-called right to create a toxic environment for someone else.

When it is possible to farm vegetables, grains and livestock on an individual parcel of land, it might be argued that individualism makes sense despite its many sickening side-effects. Such is the frontier history of Amerika for instance, in which Euro-Amerikans killed indigenous populations and rewarded themselves with land that they worked on individually.

Overall though, the environment is not something that can be treated in an individual way. Since everyone lives on the same planet, Anglo-Saxon individualism simply does not apply to the environment. Pseudo-environmentalism seeks to protect private property, the right of profit above the rights of others to be in a non-toxic environment.

An example of how individualism results in pseudo-environmentalism is the focus on the recycling movement as an individual lifestyle. Few pseudo-environmentalists are willing to admit that their efforts in convincing individuals to recycle usually end up for naught, because people individually recycle and then the city government picks up the newly sorted material to be brought to the garbage dump.

It is easier to blame individuals and their lifestyles when uncomfortable political reality is that there is usually no profit to be made in purchasing, transporting and using recycled materials. The reason there is not enough attention to where allegedly recycled material goes is that reporters and environmentalists are loath to admit that there is concentrated power in this society, not just an agglomeration of individuals. It would be impossible to avoid figuring out who the main producers and government units are in relation to the environment if reporters and environmentalists really did their jobs. Even in this rather thorough grab-bag of a book, there is a mention of the need for purchasing policies by the government ($400 billion, p. 69) and academia($120 billion in purchases a year, p. 210), but no tracing of where most allegedly recycled material ends up.

Some other political objections MIM has include the book's call to cut immigration. MIM supports opening Amerikan borders. Apparently the authors believe that the United $tates is the world's leading environmental problem and they do not believe that will end any time soon, so they call for a cutback in the number of people living the Amerikan lifestyle. To their credit, the authors do not shirk U.$. responsibility for being the number one world polluter and they also recognize that there is "gender and race-based discrimination" including in toxics distribution. (p. 8)

Useful facts

-- "The average annual rate of deforestation worldwide is equivalent to an area the size of the state of Georgia. Worldwide, the ocean's fisheries are in a state of collapse. In the United States, citizens consume 25 percent of the Earth's resources although they constitute only five percent of the planet's population. In the last 20 years, per capita consumption in the United States has increased by 45 percent."(p. 4)

-- "In the 130 years between 1850 and 1980, about 15 percent of the world's forests disappeared. During the next 10 years, another 6 percent--an area larger than California, Texas, New York, and Montana combined --was cut and not replanted."(p. 11) -- "Approximately 20 percent of the world's population in the late 1980s lived in industrialized countries. These countries consumed 85 percent of the aluminum and synthetic chemicals used in the world; 80 percent of paper, iron, and steel; 75 percent of timber and energy; 60 percent of meat, fertilizer, and cement; half the world's fish and grain; and 40 percent of the fresh water. This scale of consumption ranges from three to 19 times the consumption levels of developing countries."(p. 26)

-- "About two billion tons of materials such as pesticides and fuels are dissipated into the environment during use. After consumers use a final product, it joins the 200 million tons of post-consumer waste produced in the United States annually. Americans produce the most municipal waste per capita of any country on earth. The United States is also the leading producer of greenhouse gas emissions (contributing 19 percent of total world emissions in 1991) and is the world's largest producer of toxic wastes."(p. 27)

-- "Between 1960 and 1988, the volume of U.S. municipal solid waste more than doubled, while population multiplied 1.4 times. Today the average American produces 4.5 pounds of trash a day, by far the highest per capita production of municipal waste in the world. Americans could recycle or compost half this volume--yard waste, newspapers, corrugated cardboard, and beverage containers. Americans actually recycle or compost only 13 percent currently."(p. 62)

-- "In the last two centuries, the country has lost 90 percent of its northwestern old-growth forests, 99 percent of its tallgrass prairie, and hundreds of species of native plants and animals."(p. 117)

-- "Economic benefits from wild species make up an estimated 4.5 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. Fisheries contribute about 100 million tons of food worldwide. One-fourth of all prescriptions dispensed in the United States contain active ingredients extracted from plants, and more than 3,000 antibiotics are derived from microorganisms. Further, nature tourism generates an increasing percentage of tourism revenues worldwide. . . . Tropical forests house between 50 and 90 percent of all species on Earth, but because of forest clearing, 5 to 10 percent of the tropical forest species may be faced with extinction within the next 30 years. As with climate change, one nation cannot solve the problem alone, and the potential for economic harm is huge."(p. 264)

Conclusion

The ruling class lives in fear of a communist environmentalist movement. This book is the proof. The Clinton-organized "President's Council on Sustainable Development" is stealing our thunder by talking about the right to clear air, clean water and overall healthy environment.(p. 17) The last page of the book even mentions the right to food, shelter, education and employment.(p. 274)

The last paragraph of the book is a rebuttal of communism: "Ultimately, however, it is individuals who will determine whether the nations of the world will embark on a sustainable path. It is individuals who will decide to whether to act sustainably in their own lives. It is individuals who will influence corporate behavior."(p. 274)

As with most things, the ruling class seeks to blame individual behavior for environmental degradation. By placing the blame at the individual level, the people who make the largest decisions with concentrated economic power get let off the hook. Thanks to pseudo-environmentalists setting up government programs to sell pollution rights, the rich buy and sell the right to kill the rest of us with pollution -- all in the name of Green reform.

MIM supports many of the short-term measures mentioned in this book for reform within capitalism. However, our environmental program goes much further:

-- An end to production for profit to be replaced with fully scientifically planned production that prioritizes humyn needs including the non-negotiable rights to food, shelter, clothing, medicine and a non-toxic environment

-- U.S. reparations to Third World countries making environmentally friendly socialist development more easy

-- Opposition to industrialized country "working-class" economic demands for more consumption under capitalism.

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Understanding Forests
by John J. Berger
(San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club, 1998)
188 pp. pb.

reviewed by MC5

We recommend this book as a brief understanding of forestry and the forest-related environment in the United $tates. The author demonstrates some command of details and also less political naivete than most environmentalists.

Facts we need

Rebutting idealism

On the last page of the book, Berger talks about tree-huggers. Across the world, some people chain themselves to trees to resist lumber company exploitation of resources. The redneck reactionaries ridicule these tree-huggers and make them seem mystical.

In truth, some tree-huggers are mystical; they have the equivalent of a religion holding trees as sacred. In contrast, MIM is materialist. MIM's defense of the environment is humyn-centered. We side with the tree- huggers in general, but not always for the reasons they have.

Forests are important to humyns very concretely:

  1. Forests account for 40 percent of all pharmaceutical preparations.(p. 3) The study of substances and their uses in nature is far from complete.
  2. "Through photosynthesis, forests both contribute oxygen to the atmosphere and remove carbon dioxide from it by storing carbon in the form of plant tissue. Forests thus tend to counterbalance global warming, which is intensified by increases in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide."(p. 4)
  3. The job losses to the labor aristocracy for practicing sustainable forestry have been exaggerated, including by some calling themselves Maoist. Most job losses in the lumber industry are the result of automation, not environmentalism.(p. 103) "'Their jobs ... are no more a reason to continue deforestation than jobs in weapons plants are a reason to go to war.'"(p. 104)

Berger himself pays some attention to combating environmental idealism. In addition to recognizing that humyns too are part of the environment (p. 23) and have always had some role as in lighting forest fires, Berger goes much further. "Forest ecology teaches that nature at times brusquely disrupts and even destroys forests by hurricane, tornado, earthquake, avalanche, volcanic eruption, fire, flood, disease, insect infestations, and combinations of these events and processes."(p. 91)

People seeking to preserve a snapshot of Nature for all time are actually conservative idealists. They do not understand the process of change in Nature and they introduce unrealistic politics into our movement.

Economic theory

Environmentalists publishing in 1998 reviewed thus far by MIM have come out on the offensive against academic economists, and with good reason. Most economists either in academia or the World Bank are dogmatic and unable to incorporate new information or developments into their views. The handful able to compare theories outside a very narrow range are disdained within the field.

Both in the President's Advisory Council on the environment and in Berger's book, some of the environmentalists have come to the realization that the "free market" does not have any accurate scientific information in resource development or exploitation. The cost of cutting down a forest is not just the public's loss of wood, but also the many other species and work they do for the economy for things like production of honey or pollination of vegetable and fruit crops.

The lumber companies do not care about honey or pollination of crops. The lumber company is only in one business and makes profit only in that business. The society and the proletariat in particular has the most to lose from the loss of pollination caused by destroying bee environments for example.

The lumber companies also do not think long-term. When they replace trees, they do so without regard to many issues. Perhaps most frightening is the rush to destroy genetic variation in forests that may be useful to humyns. In addition to the species made extinct each year, the trees replanted tend to be cloned and thus less varied in their genetic stock.(p. 17) Should the climate change, the existing trees may not be able to reproduce for lack of genetic variation appropriate for the new climate.

Politics

Berger realizes that Republicans are bad for the environment. In 1995 the Republican Congress stopped anymore species from being added to the Endangered Species list created by law in 1973.(p. 9) The redneck reactionaries do not understand that most often in recent years the extinction of a species means something about the environment that also has negative consequences for humyns.

Berger also realizes that the Democrats have compromised repeatedly with the timber interests. In 1995, Clinton signed a "salvage logging" loophole into law for logging on federal lands.(p. 83)

In 1996, the Sierra Club also started to oppose any commercial logging of federal lands, because the government's Forest Service was proving itself unable to resist the logging companies' lobbying efforts in any effective way.(pp. 151-2) There are 190 million acres in National Forests that the government has set up.(p. 49)

Although Berger does not develop this point or his fight against idealism sufficiently, he does say: "Some multinationals wield financial resources comparable to those of entire states and nations.... They exert overwhelming political and economic power on local elected officials, resource agencies, rural communities, and even on national governments, especially in developing nations.

"The protection of the world's forests is likewise intertwined with the problems of inequitable distribution of wealth and with the global poverty in which a billion people exist."(p. 134) Furthermore, Berger says the "root causes are the unjust and exploitative social, political, and economic conditions that produce and perpetuate concentrated control over land and other resources by elites and multinational corporations. Forest land ownership patterns must be changed in many parts of the world to promote public-interest forest stewardship by well-trained ecologically qualified forest managers and local traditional forest users."(p. 138)

Above all, Berger seems to realize concretely that the solution of the globe's environmental problems is connected to what we Maoists call the "principal contradiction." MIM sees reparations to the Third World as essential to any environmental program. Berger gives more details phrased in the interests of the petty- bourgeoisie of the imperialist countries:

"Recognizing that economic incentives have to be altered so that it becomes more profitable for governments and people to save forests, rather than to destroy them, a steady stream of payments should be made by nations that can afford to pay--and that benefit from the forests' global services--to forest guardian nations that still have important forests. Payments to developing tropical nations certainly are appropriate in recognition of the tens of billions of dollars (or more) worth of pharmaceuticals that the developed nations have created from compounds that originated in tropical forest plants. Payments to developing nations could also be made to recognize the climate-stabilizing benefits of the forests saved and could represent a form of climate 'insurance premium.'"(p. 149)

MIM also has 100 percent agreement with the following caveat to indigenous nations: "But no group, indigenous or other, should be allowed to take actions that destroy the resource base, a common heritage of all peoples."(p. 150) Hence, if there is a massive restructuring in favor of the environment and the indigenous nations allow capitalism to arise and exploit the forests again, then the other peoples have no obligation to respect their right to destroy the environment. By the same token, no country needs to respect the imperialist countries for destroying the environment, in this case through their lumber companies and excessive and wasteful consumption of their products. Whether the imperialist countries accept an environmentalist reparations program or not the international dictatorship of the proletariat and allied oppressed nations will impose it. The "right" to a sustainable non-toxic environment is non-negotiable.

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World War III: Population and the Biosphere at the End of the Millenium
by Michael Tobias
New York: Continuum, 1998
296pp. pb.

reviewed by MC5

A long list of reviewers gave this book the thumbs up--William Shatner a.k.a. "Captain Kirk" of Star Trek fame and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)'s director and founder for example. There is no doubt that it will make a stir in the intellectual world, and MIM would like to recommend this book as well.

This is a book of many strengths and weaknesses, because it is highly opinionated in a petty-bourgeois way. MIM has some reservations about it as a political work; even though it is very progressive when compared with other works in the field of population. Our main objections to this book are its lack of understanding of politics in general and Chinese politics in particular.

MIM has been saying from its beginning in the 1980s that the current World War III is between the oppressor nations of imperialism and the oppressed nations. In contrast, Tobias sees World War III between the humyn species and the environment, other species in particular.

Malthusian crying wolf

There is more intellectual substance to this book than most written work by environmentalists. Tobias mentions Thomas Malthus, the famous Western economist who thought that population growth would outstrip food supply and lead to cyclical starvation, because Malthus is the progenitor of Tobias's own thinking.

Tobias starts the book talking about the sexual passions of the populace with some tough rhetoric. He seems to believe as MIM does that rhetoric should match the substance of reality in tone, and he believes we are in World War III and facing possible self-extinction.

The whole book is about population projections and statistics on how many children the average family has in each country, with a focus on the largest Third World countries. The heroes in the book are the family planners, often funded with imperialist money.

Tobias admits that he does not know what the limit is, but says there must be some limit to the consumption of the earth's biomass by humyns--a "biotic ceiling."(p. 20) In addition, he stands for "biodiversity," which is the notion that species should not be going extinct at the hands of humyns.

Tobias is wise not to say what the limit is. All previous such projections talking about limits to humyn population have proved wrong starting from Malthus hundreds of years ago.

"Small is beautiful"

The model for Tobias is the country of Bhutan where even ecological tourism is limited so as not to disturb the environment. It has a city of 20,000 at its largest and a total population of 1.3 million Buddhists.(p. 90) Sixty percent of Bhutan is still covered with primary forest.

Others that Tobias admires include the religion of the vegetarian Jains of India and a sect of Hindu called the Bishnoi.(p. 113) Another concrete favorite of his is a national park in Madagascar which also provides some employment and other benefits to villages.(p. 194) He also notes the ecological and non-violent sanity of the Todas of India, "the Lepcha of Sikkim, the Karen of the Thai-Myanmar border area, and the Tasaday of the Southern Philippines."(p. 246)

His experience with these cultures and pre-industrial "primitive communist" societies that dominated most of humyn history should have proved to Tobias that humyns' relationships amongst themselves is what determines their relationship to the environment. For most of humyn history, the humyn has lived without wholesale destruction of the environment. It is only the recent minority of societies that is destroying the environment on a wholesale basis.

To his credit, Tobias accepts the Marxist argument against "back-to-nature" anarchism shared by many environmentalists consciously and unconsciously. Those who have industrialized will not go back, and so we must look forward to new solutions, not backward.(p. 249)

The "Club of Rome" and a book called Small Is Beautiful have been influential amongst the petty-bourgeoisie and imperialists. Each talks about limits to growth. The "Club of Rome" study is an updated version of Malthus.

MIM's approach to "small is beautiful" divides into two. While MIM criticizes the decadent lifestyles of the imperialist countries, and supports the politics of sustainability and appropriate technology, we differ with the many who believe it is possible to live in small isolated communities.

The environment is actually the best reason for "big government" until classes are abolished. Until classes are abolished there will be those seeking to profit at the expense of others' environmental rights. Someone living in the United $tates can and does pollute the environment of people living in Mauritius, Brazil and China. Until this becomes impossible there will have to be "big government"--a dictatorship of the international proletariat allied with oppressed nations over imperialism.

Karl Marx on the environment

Karl Marx believed that the profit motive or more accurately, the appropriation of labor by a minority of capitalists results in the estrangement of the species from Nature as a by-product of the humyn's estrangement from other humyns that occurs in class society. Contrary to the bourgeois media and some ignorant environmentalists, Marx was an environmentalist and humyn-rights activist as a young man of his mid-20s before he detailed all the scientific work on classes that showed how his environmentalist and humyn liberation goals would be achieved. The result was so thorough that we now speak of Marxism and not vague ideas of humyn liberation.

In other words, what a worker would never do to his or her own environment if the matter were left to him or her happens because the worker does not control production: "It is just in the working-up of the objective world, therefore, that man first really proves himself to be a species being. This production is his active species life. . . In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species life, his real species objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him. . . Estranged labour turns thus: Man's species being both nature and his spiritual species property, into a being alien to him, into a means to his individual existence. It estranges man's own body from him, as it does external nature and his spiritual essence, his human being." (Karl Marx, "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844," Robert C. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader 2nd ed., (NY: WW Norton & Company, 1978), pp. 76-77)

MIM will accept the label of "anthrocentric" from some pseudo-environmentalist critics. Marx believed that humyns are different than other species, which is not in itself to say superior or capable of living outside the laws of Nature. Other animals have their unique characteristics. Marx believed something about production and science to be unique to humyns. The unique character of the humyn is taken away by capitalism according to Marx. Hence, Marx would object to saying that all animals are the same. In contrast with purely moral or religious ideas, Marx induces his ideas from examining animals concretely to figure out what is unique about humyns.

Biodiversity: idealism versus science

While Tobias correctly trashes Catholicism and Islam on reproductive "choice" questions, it is hard to avoid that most conceptions of "biodiversity" like Tobias's are rooted in some kind of religion. The bottom line is that catastrophic species extinctions happened in "Nature" before there were ever humyns. Hence, to say that humyn destruction of other species, even at a rapid pace is "unnatural" is a religious fib. Tobias claims there are only 300 species extinctions every million years.(p. 36) It is a dangerous fib, because it tempts the potential converts into thinking that the nature of Nature is stagnation when change and struggle are evident.

Later in the book Tobias admits that there have been at least five mass extinctions in natural history before, but he claims they were not the fault of a single species. To level "fault" like this in a moralistic way when Nature found ways to wipe out 99.9 percent of species seen on this planet thus far is an example of religious thinking. Today the humyn species is Nature's way of eliminating other species. Thus, an argument in favor of biodiversity resting on Nature's character is false. An argument for biodiversity needs to be based in the needs of the humyn species.

Many take to biodiversity religion in order to defend other species with firm principles, and not with a calculus of what is good for the humyn species. Like Amnesty International activists who don't concern themselves with the humyn right to clothing, shelter, food and non-toxic and non-militarist environments, because they are already middle-class themselves, most biodiversity activists are already well-off themselves and they scorn MIM for being humyn-centered or "anthrocentric." It's easy to be concerned about non-humyn species when you believe you yourself are going to survive.

As an example of where biodiversity religions lead, Tobias says that Kenyan elephants are endangered, but they have "only" killed 60 or 80 people in twenty years.(p. 186) Earth First! activists are the quintessence of this idea. MIM would never make a statement like that about elephants. We seek ways to keep humyns out of harm's way--whether by sharks or elephants, no matter how rare the problem.

MIM only supports biodiversity for its value to humyns. When other species are going extinct, the reason is usually that we are chopping down our forests and otherwise pillaging the land, water and air. These all have consequences for humyns including causing cancer and other public health problems.

Dialectical science in Marxism has always stressed the interconnected nature of reality. Cause and effect works in many wondrous ways. It is the ignorance of science and narrow concern for profit that has caused the imperialist country rulers to focus on those aspects of science utilization that destroy the environment, contrary to the needs of the people. It is not science or industry in themselves that are wrong.

Tobias predicts the humyns will destroy half of existing species and it will be possible to save the other half with an environmental movement.(p. 22) Of potential benefit to biodiversity is abolition of the profit motive. Just as pornography, drug-trading and arms-dealing get their impetus from the profit motive, poaching is also driven by indiscriminate motivator of profit. There are only 2,000 Indian musk deer left, but its pod of musk sells for 15,000 rupees or five years' salary for many Indians.(p. 104)

Beside the question of profit motive, MIM believes any biodiversity movement that does not rely on the spread of scientific thinking and application will fail. Tobias himself is a proven scientific thinker. He recognizes the interconnectedness of reality and has a sharp eye for cause and effect. He has a warped political sensibility common in environmental political circles, but he clearly gives credit to a variety of social causes for reducing the population growth rate. To his credit, he recognizes that in 45 countries becoming economically better off has resulted in slower population growth rates.(p. 26) He complains throughout the book that becoming well-off does not always work to reduce the birth rate. The way he complains on this score is in a sense not being satisfied with loaded dice. Over time, playing with loaded dice has certain results, but not in every instance. Likewise, the petty-bourgeois fanaticism of Tobias and most of the best non-proletarian environmentalists does not settle for playing with loaded dice. The petty-bourgeois fanatics want instant individual results, often by focussing on individual lifestyle in a counterproductive way.

Tobias also recognizes that the item that makes the public feel secure enough to cut back on the number of children planned varies from culture to culture. In Tamil Nadu province in India, the school lunch program assured parents that their children would survive, and hence they gave birth to fewer children.(p. 131) The case of Tamil Nadu would seem contrary to Malthusian logic, but Tobias wisely accepted the truth.

Aside from guaranteeing economic security for children and their parents faster than capitalism, socialism is able to spread science better than capitalism, because capitalism views science as an object of profits and the prerogative of elites. We Maoists in particular see science as carried out by the people and to be distributed as fast as possible without regard for property rights.

One area where there is now an historical problem for environmental science is the fact that the world's unproductive labor has been done in the imperialist countries. Hence, while Third World people work to support the lifestyles of the imperialist countries, only relatively small portions of Third World people could afford scientific educations commonly seen in the imperialist countries. After centuries of militarily imposing a global economic order and division of labor, ingrates from the imperialist countries now go the Third World and tell them that their environmental science is no good.

Third World trust

Although Tobias seems to be treating a different subject than MIM, actually he is not. He realizes that there is not much trust by Third World peoples of imperialist country attempts to limit population growth.

The World Bank is also criticizing environmentalists for wishing poverty on the Third World. However, we do not agree that the truth about imperialist country environmentalists is a justification for World Bank capitalism.

We believe that the sooner imperialism is eliminated, the sooner the world's people can share their scientific advances without concern for profit and thereby speed up the use of environmentally sound technologies. As long as technology is a matter of patents and profits, technology's application will be held back.

The West has tried to have it both ways. While the West robbed India into poverty it now complains that India will be adding over 70 million refrigerators by 2010 that are not state-of-the-art and use chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) just as Amerikans once did.(p. 42) CFCs are implicated in the 90 percent depletion of the ozone over Antartica and 20 percent in portions over Canada and Europe. MIM believes that environmentalists should get on board with the program of socialist dictatorship and reparations to the Third World. The health of the environment relies on the success of our establishing these reparations before the rest of the world copies the imperialist countries' mistakes.

This is how one Indonesian put it: "We are told, 'Look, Indonesia, you are a treasure for the world, maintain your forests. . .' If the tropical forest plays an important role, what do we get for not exploiting it? Everybody shouts, 'Save the forest.' But when you ask how do we meet the needs of the poor people, there is silence. 'I won't give you technology, I won't give you gene patents, you remain poor, you go to hell.' That is how your people (the Americans) look at us."(pp. 163-4) MIM agrees. It is gross hypocrisy for First Worlders to demand ecological purity of the Third World masses when those masses are not eating and have no health care. That is why the MIM program for reparations from imperialist countries to the Third World and indigenous peoples is the only true environmentalist program.

On the one hand the United $tates often funds sterilization programs. On the other hand, in the case of China, the U.$. reactionaries have managed to criticize the "one-child" policy of the state-capitalists.

Tobias criticizes the United $tates for criticizing China(p. 64) and in fact says that China did not go far enough with its one-child policy. We agree with him on its contemporary downfall caused by the return to private farming in China. With private farming and a decrease in economic security, Chinese are returning to their traditional security blanket--having kids to take care of them in old age.

On the other hand, we do not agree with Tobias that China should limit the populations of its "minority" nationalities. Likewise, it is hard to argue that Africa is truly overpopulated; although it certainly could be headed there, again thanks to the economic insecurity of parents caused by imperialist plunder.

Tobias acknowledges the dialogue with Third World people who he and other imperialist country people are asking to forgo economic development so as not to destroy the environment the way the United $tates and Europe already has. From the beginning of the book he also admits it is the Western consumer driving other countries to destroy their environments to support the Western style of life.

For that matter, when Indian government officials argue with environmentalists like Tobias, they point out that India has allowed its forests to be destroyed for energy uses. If India did not use forest wood for fuel, then India's demand for oil would push the price of oil over 100 dollars a barrel.(p. 100) Many believe such would make past oil crises look like tea-parties and global depression could result if socialism did not come into play.

Amerikkkan consumption

This book presents much information that backs MIM's opposition to economic demands of the imperialist country "working" class which is actually a bought-off petty-bourgeoisie. At the current time, our species does not know how to sustain the consumption of the Amerikan middle classes and middle classes of other imperialist countries without destroying the environment. To seek ever greater consumption is thus contrary to the interests of the international proletariat, especially via the reformist strategy Lenin derided as "economism." The success of "economism" is killing the environment and turning the imperialist country masses against the international proletariat.

By the year 2000 imperialist countries "will account for roughly 20 percent of the world's population, about 1.5 billion people, who will be responsible for some 80 percent of all global consumption, not necessarily individual consumption, but mass consumption."(p. 200)

"I'm not sure how I manage it, but in the space of about twenty-four hours I figure that I have conspicuously contributed to global greenhouse gases, to the rape of both temperate and tropical forests, to the death of countless animals (in spite of my being a vegan), to long-term ocean pollution, acid precipitation, ozone depletion, scandalously inefficient mobilization of energy, the purchase of a stealth bomber or two, yet another unneeded freeway, the government-subsidized butchering of cattle kept on public lands, and any number of other ecologically insane expenditures. By simply being an American, I have conspired with the tax collector, and the textile, computer solvents, plastics, and weapons manufacturers. My clothes, electricity, gasoline, phone calls, mail, travel, and packaged foods all contradict my deepest convictions. I seem to have lost touch with the most basic cause and effect, with the web of life's delicate connections. . . And I am told that in my own virtual backyard, five endemic California plant species are going extinct, because of people like myself."(p. 200) Tobias is having no children with his wife.

To MIM, this is the perfect testimony of the limits of petty-bourgeois thinking on the verge of revolutionary proletarian thinking. It really is enormously overwhelming and the solutions can only be at the system level, not the individual behavior level. To understand how the Amerikan child is born to do 280 times as much destruction to the environment as the child born in Nepal according to Paul and Anne Ehrlich,(p. 206) we must understand the system of imperialism.

No one has the right to make the choice to destroy everyone else's environment. Hence, the solution is not convincing individuals to change their lifestyles, because that implies those who do not change their lifestyles have the right to continue. A non-toxic environment is a non-negotiable humyn right which must be backed by force until pollution for private gain is unthinkable. Moreover, it is much easier to change production at the source before goods reach the consumer than to individually convince billions of individuals frustrated with pseudo-environmentalism's impotence.

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The World Watch Reader: On Global Environmental Issues
Lester R. Brown & Ed Ayres, eds.
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998)
358 pp., pb.

reviewed by MC5

Books on environmental subjects tend to be progressive by the nature of their topic. The collection of essays in the World Watch Reader drift somewhat more into academic agendas of the writers' fancies than some other essays and books in the field. For that reason, this book is not our favorite of books on the environment that came out in 1998.

Idealism and academic agendas

The peoples of the imperialist countries desperately need to use some of their vast quantities of leisure time to learn speed-reading. Then they need to study foreign cultures. When it comes to the environment, the typical Amerikan ends up reaching consciously and unconsciously for mystic ideas to justify a break with bourgeois economics and non-green thinking. Alan Thein Durning talks about that and unlike other authors admits that what the environmentalists want is impossible through their pseudo-environmentalist strategies.(p. 248)

It will be useful to contrast idealism in the book through two essays--"Dying Seas" by Anne Platt McGinn and "Bio-Invasions" by Chris Bright. Anne Platt describes how the Black Sea has become overloaded with humyn wastes that have contributed to algae and bacteria growth. The result is "eutrophication." Then as the algae consume all the oxygen, the sea becomes "anoxic."(pp. 96-7) The algae also block all the sunlight from reaching deep into the water. All this is supposedly the result of an unnatural "human assault."

To her credit, Platt turns around and says that the pollution of the Black Sea is a loss of fish to eat and tourism. Thus, she returns to a humyn focus. She ends the essay talking about economic losses.

The result of not taking a humyn focus is siding with one species over another for no reason. The evil species in the Black Sea according to Platt is the "Mnemiopis leidyi," which is jelly-fish like and becomes 95 percent of the biomass in the Black Sea at times. (p. 97) Without a humyn focus, there is no reason to side with oxygen breathers or non-oxygen-using species. To say the Black Sea is dead only has meaning to fishers.

In contrast, Chris Bright is clearly mired in conservative idealism. The first evil species to appear in the essay is the "melaleuca," because it manages to displace "virtually all other vegetation."(p. 115)

Can we help ourselves when we snicker at "Perhaps the most insidious form of damage occurs when exotic and native merge. Interbreeding can swamp a native gene pool in foreign genes, thereby eliminating its distinctiveness and eroding the species' genetic diversity."(p. 119) In the first place, we doubt this point factually speaking. Yet it is consistent with the whole approach of seeing the status quo and native as good.

Next we learn that ragweeds, rats and starling are all "weeds." Other invaders called "fire ants" have wiped out many other ants in the United $tates.

Along the same lines, Bright paints European diseases as "invaders" that killed millions of indigenous people in North America.

He paints a picture of ships or other humyn traveling devices as carrying new species to far off lands and then conquering. As a remedy he suggests that people who import new species should pay the price of the impact of those species.(p. 131)

Some species are more useful to humyns than others; although at this time, our scientific knowledge limited by capitalism is far from complete, so we are not able to say with certainty what the consequences of favoring one species over another will be. Bright favors some species over others, but the underlying reasons appear to be religious or unconscious religious reverence for the status quo. He resists change of all sorts, including those that would happen in Nature.

Global warning

Molly O'Meara in "The Risks of Disrupting Climate" describes the risks of global climate change caused by humyn activities. She correctly points out that even if the percentage chance that what the environmentalists are saying is true is low, the cost is simply too great to ignore. A one percent chance to lose $100 quadrillion is worth $1 quadrillion after all.

The United $tates disrupted the Kyoto summit on the question in 1997. The U.S. Senate required that the developing countries take action or it would not ratify the treaty.

The Kyoto problem was a sharp expression of the "principal contradiction." The U.S. Government essentially failed to recognize that one imperialist country citizen pollutes as much as 20 oppressed nations citizens. Furthermore, the imperialist countries are more easily able to afford cleanup efforts.

With a dictatorship of the international proletariat allied with the oppressed nations over imperialism, such problems as Kyoto will be easily resolved. Without such a dictatorship, narrow-minded imperialists will risk destroying the environment for their short-term luxury.

The article on the subject is highly informative, but contains nothing of the real political problems connected and mentioned above.

Food supply

The most famous essay in the collection is one that forced the Chinese social-fascist regime into responding. "Who Will Feed China?" by Lester Brown is about population growth and shrinking arable land in China.

In the Cultural Revolution, the Maoists stressed "grain as the key link" in agriculture. In the midst of capitalist restoration after 1976, Maoists in China continued to focus on this question and pointed out that arable land in China is decreasing. Peasants under "reform" we call capitalist counterrevolution started to build houses, cemeteries and roads on farming land. The Maoists pointed out that we cannot just bow to religious mysticism (cemeteries) and the free market if the result is starvation.

The Chinese government knew all this going back to the 1970s and 1980s, and wrote about it extensively. However, just as Christopher Colombus "discovered" North America, Lester R. Brown "discovered" the food supply problem in China. The Associated Press, Reuters and 6,000 radio and TV broadcasts picked up on the Brown article.(p. 196)

Unlike others, Brown notes with approval China's attempts to limit population both during and after Mao. We will only add that China under Mao had just seen the Soviet Union lose the most economically and politically able 10 percent of its population to the Nazi invaders as casualties. The U.$.A. dropped the A-Bomb on Japan and threatened China with it too. In the Korean War, China suffered heavy losses and U.$. generals spoke in public of invading China. Then in Vietnam, the United States killed 2 million Vietnamese at the very minimum.

If the environmentalists had iced imperialism instead of whining about being apolitical, would China have ended up with over one billion people? Ending economic insecurity and the insecurity caused by imperialist militarism are essential to environmental well-being.

Attack on bourgeois economics

Perhaps the best article is one that also attacks the nub of the problem in environmentalist thinking. Janet M. Abromovitz wrote "Nature's 'Free' Services."

"Ironically, by undervaluing natural services, economies unwittingly provide incentives to misuse and destroy the very systems that produce those services; rather than protecting their assets, they squander them. Nature, in turn becomes increasingly less able to supply the prolific range [of] services that the earth's expanding population and economy demand."(p. 153)

An example would be the following: "Eighty percent of the world's 1,330 cultivated crop species (including fruits, vegetables, beans and legumes, coffee and tea, coca, and spices) are pollinated by wild and semi-wild pollinators. One-third of U.S. agricultural output is from insect-pollinated plants (the remainder is from wind-pollinated grain plants such as wheat, rice, and corn). In dollars, honeybee pollination services are 60 to 100 times more valuable than the honey they produce. The value of wild blueberry bees is so great, with each bee pollinating 15 to 19 liters (about 40 pints) of blueberries in its life, that they are viewed by farmers as 'flying $50 bills.' . . . In Europe, the contribution of honey bee pollination to agriculture was estimated to be worth $100 billion in 1989."(p. 161)

Prices in the "free market" do not account for damage done to Nature's "free services" like pollination. Abromovitz is undertaking a scientific effort to figure out what those prices should be to reflect an environmentally sustainable economy. Her effort whether she knows it or not is part of socialist economic planning and represents a sharp criticism of bourgeois economic thought.

Recycling: admissions of a pseudo-environmentalist

Because of anti-communist individualism rooted in the extent of the middle-classes in the U$A, the U.$. environmental movement shies away from political discussion. As a result many of the actions undertaken by the movement are ineffective or outright detours created by the ruling class.

As MIM has argued for over a decade now, recycling under capitalism may be more harm than good for environmentalist goals. Recycling was a pseudo-environmentalist invention to distract attention from real environmental problems and solutions.

The pseudo-environmentalist approach lays the blame for environmental problems at the feet of the individual and recommends individual lifestyle changes instead of confronting concentrated economic and political power head-on. By blaming all individuals, the pseudo-environmentalist movement bailed out the ruling class. Now there is proof in "The Sudden New Strength of Recycling" by John Young.

The article is about the rise in prices for recycled material collected by municipalities in the mid-1990s. The rise in corporate demand in the mid-1990s finally made municipal efforts at collecting recyclable newspapers, cans and bottles a reasonable enterprise. Leading the way was a fluke increase in paper prices for non-recycled paper that also increased demand for recycled paper as a substitute.

Only now do we learn from the pseudo-environmentalists that for decades when individuals were making recycling efforts part of their daily chores their efforts were for naught. Many cities collected recycled goods separately, but ended up taking them to the same dumps with the garbage. Fortunately, other cities paid to have their goods recycled in what amounted to a subsidy to corporate Amerika paid for by taxpayers.

"The number of U.S. curbside pickup programs for recyclables grew from 1,042 in 1988 to 6,678 in 1993. This growth, and similar growth in drop-off and commercial-waste recycling programs, led to an extraordinary increase in the overall tonnage of recycled materials collected, from some 16 million tons in the United States in 1985 to 45 million tons in 1993. . . . growth created a glut of materials."(p. 260)

Young does not anywhere deal with the implications of what he is saying, but we read his work as an admission of sorts: "Cities were offering a few dollars per ton to anyone who would haul away their newsprint."(p. 262)

Young even admits that prices are likely to fall again!(p. 258) Hence, there will be no demand for recycled goods and they will end up in the dump again. In fact, by using more paper and materials more wastefully, people will boost the prices of paper and other materials and that will increase the demand for recycled materials. Also increasing the price of recycled goods under capitalism is the effort of those of us who throw away our recycled goods. That is the nature of capitalism, an irrational economic system from the proletariat's point of view.

MIM does not oppose recycling under capitalism. We do it just as we do many other things with the masses, so that the masses can see for themselves that it does not work.

In contrast, with socialist economic planning, it is in the interest of the proletariat to recycle. Formerly privately owned corporations will be required by the dictatorship of the proletariat to use recycled materials. Currently, environmentalists are only now pushing the government to require purchases of recycled paper. Some of the thoughts along those lines are inklings of scientific socialist planning.

Under socialism, recycling will be required across-the-board, not just in government agencies. The demand problem will be solved and the environment will be protected, not just when prices dictated by the "Invisible Hand" of the "free market" happen to say so, as in after 1994 in the United $tates. The "right" to a non-toxic environment is non-negotiable, so socialist industry will have to use recycled goods as extensively and efficiently as humynly possible.

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