Why greens should be redsWhy greens should be reds
By Peter Boyle
n this relatively wealthy country, too many of those who are concerned about ecological issues forget the first half of the popular environmentalist slogan: "Think globally, act locally". They then use an amputated "wisdom" to justify a narrow and futile obsession with trying to build ecologically sustainable utopias in their own backyards.
Any real solution to the environmental crisis must tackle three global problems:
- <~>The impoverishment of the Third World. Desperately poor people and debt-yoked nations will not be persuaded to stop cutting down their forests and over-exploiting their land and other resources if their immediate survival depends on such activities. Global population growth won't slow down without global equity.
- <~>War, which results in both unprecedented human suffering and an enormous waste of resources. This problem cannot be solved without addressing the division of the world into rich exploiter nations and poor exploited nations.
- <~>The lack of democratic social control over economic production. It is necessary for humanity to plan carefully if our diminishing resources are to be rationally used and a start is to be made on repairing the environmental damage to our planet.
The future of humanity depends on our ability to assert social control over the productive forces, which hold so much potential for ecologically sustainable human development if used rationally and with social responsibility, but which also hold the seeds of our destruction if their present irrational use continues.
The capitalist system is hooked on senseless economic growth because competition drives capitalists to maximise profits through the unsustainable production and sale of an ever-growing mass of commodities, much of which is socially useless if not destructive.
On the other hand, for socialism, economic growth is not an end in itself. Just as rational individual consumption does not require an unlimited supply of food, clothing or housing, the satisfaction of social needs does not require unlimited economic expansion.
A lot of the desperate social need in the world can be met by redirecting resources away from war and socially destructive production. For example, with less than 1% of what the world currently spends on weapons, every child in the world could be guaranteed schooling by the year 2000.
But there will have to be economic development in the Third World to redress decades of imposed underdevelopment. This development will not be the wasteful and socially inappropriate development that we see in the so-called "Asian miracle economies", which are touted as the way forward for the Third World under capitalism.
The objective is not to have the world's population living like people do in the industrialised countries. That would neither be ecologically sustainable nor would it satisfy the great majority of people.
In a democratically planned global economy possessing a stock of automatic machinery that is adequate to cover all current needs (including a reserve for emergencies) and able to ensure a plentiful supply of goods and services to all its people, there will cease to be any necessity for economic growth.
No-one would suggest that building a socialist future is an easy job, but that is what it will take to achieve global ecological sustainability. If we don't start now, the challenges will only become greater.
[Peter Boyle is a national executive member of the Democratic Socialist Party.]