FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
	International Communist Workers Party
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Can capitalism rescue us from the environmental crisis that capitalism itself created?  Can “climate resilient growth” end world poverty?  Are our only options reducing our personal “carbon footprints” and pleading with world leaders to do the rest? 

The United Nations and organizers of the September 20-21 People’s Climate March (PCM) answer “yes” but the truth is a resounding “NO!”

This month, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is hosting a summit for world leaders to make plans to dramatically reduce carbon pollution, which drives global warming.

The PCM coincides with this summit in order to “push our world leaders” so that “solutions to the climate crisis [will] no longer be determined by multinational corporations.”  It wants to “shift the balance of power back to the people and to the planet.”

As we go to press, tens or hundreds of thousands are preparing to march in New York City and elsewhere around the world.  While previous environmental movements were often elitist and even racist, this one is trying to mobilize masses, linking climate change and poverty as a single “social justice issue” that hits poor people of color the hardest. The Democrats hope to use this issue to get out the vote in November.

Many participants correctly identify capitalism as the problem.  But leading capitalists themselves see global warming as a growing threat to their profit system.  The UN summit website declares, “Improving economic performance and pursuing low-carbon, climate resilient growth is … one and the same objective.” 

The Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change (2006), commissioned by the British government, predicted that “ignoring climate change will eventually damage economic growth.” It warned of “risks of major disruption to economic and social activity… on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century.” 

Those “major disruptions” included communist-led revolutions in Russia and China.  That’s what the rulers most fear today, and that’s why “activist” leaders and pundits are deliberately steering the masses into an all-class alliance around reforms like a carbon fee (tax).  

Reformism:  Path to a Really Dead End

Naomi Klein’s new book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (9/16/2014) admits that markets cannot fix the climate crisis.  But, she says, reducing carbon emissions would reduce inequality, “re-imagine our [sic] broken democracies, and rebuild our [sic] gutted local economies.”  Klein wants to “fix” the economic system, not to overthrow it and build communism instead. 

The movie “Disruption,” released on September 7 to promote the march, insists that “power never concedes anything without a demand” and urges us to build a movement strong enough to scare “our leaders” into taking action at the 2015 UN-sponsored meeting in Paris. 

What we should be building is a communist movement for the working class to take power, not a reformist one that makes demands on capitalist rulers.

“Disruption” puts forward the rulers’ estimate that dependence on fossil fuels is a “classic

 market failure” because the fossil-fuel industry doesn’t pay the true cost of production.  Instead it “exports them to the public” which pays for the impacts (like expensive wildfires), for military costs involved in marketing Mideast oil, and for tax breaks.  It says the problem is a malfunction of capitalism, not the capitalist system itself.

But capitalism’s market system, however it’s managed, always passes costs to the working-class masses and benefits to the capitalist ruling class.  Globally, it leads to imperialist world wars, regardless of “international conferences.”  Only communism can eliminate this viciously exploiting and war-making commodity system and replace it with a society without profits, money, or exploitation. 

When the needs of the masses and our planet are the first and only consideration, we can quickly transition away from carbon.  We, the masses – led by industrial workers and soldiers — will really be able to change everything. 

Throw the capitalists overboard

The so-called “People’s Climate March” says that “to change everything, we need everyone on board.”  Los Angeles flyers feature the slogan, “There’s no business on a dead planet.” 

The history of the 20th century is jam-packed with examples of how movements calling for all-class unity end up serving only the capitalist exploiters.  Just look at how the ruling African National Congress is attacking black workers in South Africa today. 

And see, in the pages of Red Flag, how those South African workers are responding by joining and building the International Communist Workers’ Party. 

Climate activists call this “the fight of our lives…a tipping-point for the social movement… a chance to bend the course of history…”

The present moment is all that, and more – but only if we throw the bosses and their system overboard and steer the course of mobilizing the masses for communism.

Scientific American (2008) listed twelve diseases that were likely to worsen due to climate change.  Ebola was one.  “Outbreaks tend to follow unusual downpours or droughts in central Africa—a likely result of climate change.”  More evidence is accumulating for this hypothesis.  Meanwhile, tropical diseases are spreading to Italy and elsewhere as mosquito habitats expand.

The long-term drought in Darfur, which led to murderous competition between farmers and herders, was caused by the warming of tropical southern oceans and the cooling of the north Atlantic, which disrupted African monsoon patterns.

Pacific island nations like the Maldives and Kiribati are already planning to evacuate as rising ocean levels will soon leave them under water.  One quarter of the land of intensively populated Bangladesh may also be submerged. 

The melting of Arctic sea ice has intensified conflict among Russia, Norway, the U.S., Canada and Denmark for control of the shorter, easier Northwest Passage route between Europe and Asia that is now open for military or commercial naval operations.

As the rulers of rich and poor nations fight over the costs of climate change, the working masses everywhere pay the heaviest price.  We must reject nationalist and reformist ways of thinking, and mobilize for communism.  

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