Climate Protest, India, 2019
DELHI (India), September 10—Catastrophic flooding is swamping Pakistan, home to the fifth-largest number of workers in the world. Tens of millions fled their homes, some never to return. Over 1400 died. Floodwaters have washed out half of the most fertile land, meaning famine is coming.
The immediate causes are monsoon rains, in some places five times heavier than usual, and rapidly melting Himalayan glaciers. These are consequences of the climate crisis that capitalism has caused, and that capitalism cannot solve.
The rise of industrial capitalism in 19th century Europe meant sharpening competition to maximize profits. Coal and oil fueled capitalist production and distribution of goods. They fueled the armies and navies that British, French, German, US, Japanese, and other imperialists needed to exploit the masses worldwide and to fight each other for supremacy.
The early impact of capitalism-imperialism was to increase misery for the working class. The long-term impact of its carbon-based system is the climate crisis that is drowning Pakistan, India, and Central America while creating drought in Europe, Africa, the US, and elsewhere. Ironically, Pakistan produces just 1% of global carbon emissions but is most severely affected by catastrophic change.
Capitalist ruling classes are trying to lead the angry masses away from confronting capitalism as the root of the problem. Their ideological offensive aims to persuade us that the climate crisis can be solved within the capitalist profit system or not at all. Their NGOs (“non-governmental organizations”) tell us to plant trees or donate to save endangered animals or try to become entrepreneurs. Some NGOs in India accept money from the oil industry.
What’s more, the capitalist rulers are using “Green Energy” as a new way to make maximum profits. For example, two of India’s wealthiest capitalists, Ambani and Adani, participate in a Green Energy initiative with oil-producers Total and Chevron. The “Green” label hides the fact
that some “green” technologies create a larger carbon footprint and are enormously profitable.
Over 500 attendees at last year’s “Climate Change Summit” in Glasgow were fossil-fuel lobbyists. They represented over 100 oil and gas companies and 30 trade associations and membership organisations. They outnumbered the combined delegations of the eight countries most affected by climate change: Puerto Rico, Myanmar, Haiti, Philippines, Mozambique, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Pakistan.
Our struggle is to eradicate the source of profit. Our task is to massively organize so we can transform imperialist profit wars into the revolutionary struggle for communism.
It took capitalism several centuries to cause these problems. It will take time for communism to solve them. The end of capitalism and early beginning of communism could involve desperate capitalists using nuclear weapons and further devastating the climate. How can we build communism from the ashes?
The masses, convinced and mobilized by communist philosophy, will become a material force for change. What seems impossible today can unfold when hundreds of millions of workers are involved. Communist society will be able to slow, reverse, and mitigate climate change with new technologies and, more important, new social relations of production.
The 20th century communist-led socialist revolutions in the Soviet Union and China gave hope for change to workers worldwide as the masses of workers did seemingly impossible things. Our ideas have evolved out of their past successes and the mistakes that have left these countries firmly in the grip of capitalism today.
Past communists did not have confidence that the laboring masses could be convinced to build a communist society without money, wages, or exchange. But we take from their struggles a vision that such a communist society can do better than the socialist state, which maintained money and markets and therefore exploitation.
To achieve this goal, ICWP collectives in India and elsewhere are recruiting workers and students. We are in communication with comrades in Pakistan and now amidst the sharp struggle in Sri Lanka. The communist collectives we build today, with strong and broad ties among the masses, are the nucleus of the communist world.
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