Global warming and the terror of war are perhaps the two greatest issues that confront the world today.  When the workings of these disasters are examined, there are a number of chilling parallels. Both are incredibly destructive. Both operate on a worldwide scale, but the results are felt locally.

Both tend to result in the further impoverishment of the poor in the East and the West, while the rich profit.  These similarities are no accident – both are the result of the systematic looting and plundering of the Earth’s natural and human resources by corporations.

When the workings of these disasters are examined, there are a number of chilling parallels. Both are incredibly destructive.  Both operate on a worldwide scale, but the results are felt locally.   Both tend to result in the further impoverishment of the poor in the East and the West, while the rich profit.  These similarities are no accident – both are the result of the systematic looting and plundering of the Earth’s natural and human resources by corporations. Global warming can be traced back to the environmental destruction that is inherent in societies divided into a rich ruling class and poorer working classes, especially capitalism. From the very beginning, capitalism – a system where everything in society is driven by profit – has been premised on the looting and plundering of the natural environment.  When the sole goal of producing goods and services is the creation of profit, rather than the fulfilment of peoples’ needs, the concept of sustainability is one of the first ideals to be ignored.  There remains no real pressure on the owners of business to replenish the natural environment, after they have taken and profited from it.
The early theorists of socialism, Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, recognised this dynamic.  Writing in Capital, Marx wrote that ‘capitalist production develops technology and the combining together of various processes into a social whole … only by sapping the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the labourer,’ and consequentially that ‘all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art of robbing the soil’. While class-based societies have always been environmentally unsustainable, these processes began to develop with increased speed in medieval Europe.  As the Middle Ages progressed, increasing areas of forest were cleared and wetlands drained for agricultural land.  Markets became more and more central to society, and wilderness – once the habitat of humanity – came to be seen as unused wasteland, useful only in it’s potential for development, or as a dumping grounds for the market’s waste. When markets went global, so did the plunder and destruction of the earth.  A good example is the history of the British Empire in India.
Britain’s empire in India provides a classic example. It started in 1611 as a series of trading posts located at strategic points along the coast.  However, the lure of plunder pushed the British inland, and the British East India Company came into conflict with the rulers of Bengal.  After defeating the Bengali forces at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the company continued to rapidly expand its control over the subcontinent.  While plunder provide the immediate incentive, markets for British goods made empire profitable.  Cheap cotton goods manufactured in Britain were introduced to India in 1814 and Indian textile production collapsed.
Rather than producing for local consumption, Indian landowners began to produce cash crops for Europe.  In India this was achieved through a ‘putting-out’ system where crops were bought by intermediaries, then sold them to the final buyer.
The conquest of India laid the ground for further expansion.  European business desired tea and other goods produced in China.  Lacking anything to trade, they began producing a product that created its own demand – opium.  Opium poppies were grown in northern India and an addictive trade imposed on the Chinese through yet more wars.  India and China were integrated into the growing world economy – as dependencies of Britain and the West; and the sapping of their soils begun.

Fossil fuels

As profit-based production continued to expand and swallow up ever-larger markets, it began to intensify.  This intensification, based in the factories of the industrialized West, required ever richer sources of energy.  This began in the late 18th century with the invention of the steam engine and the employment of the first fossil fuel: coal.  As production grew, smokestacks belched out more and more waste product – smog, soot, carbon dioxide and toxic gasses – into the atmosphere.  In the late 19th century, an even more powerful – and more deadly – fuel was put to use: oil.
These processes are continuing today, as is their root cause – the profit motive.  Thousands of acres of virgin forest are ripped down every day, the trees transported to factories half a world away for processing.  Capitalism’s addiction to fossil fuels continues unabated, with oil and petrochemicals providing not just energy but products as diverse as agricultural fertilizers, pesticides, nylon and toothbrushes.  Wetlands – a major carbon sink – are drained and transformed, along with forests, into monocultures.  Here a single cash-crop absorbs the nutrients of the soil, and this natural wealth, and much of the profit, is exported away, permanently.  Even intended solutions, like biofuels, are turned on their head as vast swaths of rainforest are slashed and burnt to establish ‘eco-friendly’ palm oil plantations.
The result is never-before seen destruction, the extinction of thousands of species, rising temperatures and sea levels, and the complete transformation of the planet.  As capitalism develops, it not only undermines the planet’s ability to cope, but at the same time spews out an ever increasing volume of pollutants.  Global warming is nothing less than it’s ultimate expression. 

Expansion and war

But it is not only the natural environment that is plundered in the name of profit, but human societies as well.  The need of corporations for continual expansion leads them to aggressively seek out new markets.   This propels them into competition and conflict with corporations from other nations.  As each draws the resources and support of its state in behind it, nations become locked in a deadly battle for the division and re-division of the entire world.  This competition for markets has been at the root of almost every war in the previous 150 years, including both world wars and the cold war. 
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not simply about control of resources. They have more to do with the strategic domination of world markets.  The US does not source most of its oil from the Middle East – its competitors in the European Union, Russia and China use this oil.  But if it can control Middle Eastern oil, it can control the supply of energy – and the industrial development – of its rivals.  It’s also a way to flex some military muscle and scare off competitors for the position of number 1 superpower.
The result for ordinary people of the nations involved, especially in occupied nations, is devastating.  As wars become increasingly brutal and plunderous, the entire social fabric of societies is ripped apart.  In Iraq, 1.2 million people have been killed as a result of the war since 2003.  The occupation has nothing to offer local people.  Only 28 percent of Iraqi 17-year-olds sat their final school exams in 2007, and nearly a million children were unable to attend primary school.  The destruction and breakdown of infrastructure is so complete that many areas are without running water and huge open-air sewage ponds are forming in southern Baghdad.  Unemployment and underemployment are as high as 70 percent in some areas.  And all the while the US stokes sectarian tensions and civil war by equipping and arming rival religious and ethnic militias.  This is the nightmare reality of ‘freedom and democracy’ in Iraq.

Destruction of Afghanistan

The situation in Afghanistan is even worse.  Tensions between the great powers have resulted in virtually continuous war since the 1970s, and conditions under the US-led occupation have deteriorated - in some cases to be even worse than under the Taliban.  Average life expectancy has fallen from 45.5 years in 2001 to 43.5 years in 2005, and adult literacy from 31 percent to 28.7 percent over the same period.  Hunger is rife.  6.6 million Afghans – nearly a third of the population – are not able to get enough food and a full 7 percent of children under 5 die of hunger.  The situation of women – one of the justifications for the war – is again worse even than under the Taliban.  Women’s literacy is estimated at 12.6 percent, down from 15 percent in 2001.  Child marriages and forced marriages are widespread.  The puppet government has little authority outside of the capital Kabul. The occupation relies on a network of warlords and strongmen to prop it up.
Designed to advance the interests of the US elite and their Western allies, they were never intended to benefit the local people, or bring real freedom or substantial democracy.  Indeed, workers in the whole of the third world are appallingly poor for similar reasons: investment driven by profit and not human needs has lead to corporate looting of the global south, rather than its development.  The third world is poor not because it is super-exploited, but because it is under-exploited, and under-developed.

“Peace-keeping” in East Timor

This can be extended to so-called ‘peace-keeping’ operations that our own politicians are so fond of.  The operation in East Timor is a prime example.
East Timor is a tiny island country in South-East Asia.  It was invaded by Indonesia almost immediately after it had won it’s independence from Portugal.  For years the governments of the West – including Australia and New Zealand – ignored the plight of the East Timorese, as more than 200,000 were massacred or died of hunger.  Instead the murderous regime of the Indonesian dictator Suharto was praised as a bulwark of ‘stability’.  This was very convenient for Australian business elites, who negotiated an agreement with the Suharto regime to receive the rights to a lion’s share of the oil and gas deposits in the sea between Australia and Timor.
Nothing much has changed in East Timor since the arrival of Australian and New Zealand troops in 1999.  The oil wealth of Timor continues to be plundered by Australian businesses through two new agreements.  Indeed, when East Timor’s Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri tried to negotiate a better deal with the Portuguese in 2006, the Australian-led military presence there engaged in a series of manoeuvres that ensured he was ousted and replaced with the more reliable Xanana Gusmao.  The mass killings may have stopped, but East Timor continues to slip further into poverty and chaos.  Average income has fallen since 2001 to around $1 a day, and joblessness is estimated to be around 50 percent.  ‘Humanitarian intervention’ and ‘peacekeeping’ has nothing to do with encouraging development, it’s a smokescreen; the latest lie to justify the self-serving actions of business elites.

Environment and human rights

A realistic solution to global warming, the plundering of the environment, and the destruction of the world’s societies, has to address the problem at its root.  Society must be totally reorganised from the bottom up, so that the aim of economic activity is not the profit of the rich, but the fulfilment of the needs and aspirations of all humanity, and the needs of the earth.
The destruction of the environment must be stopped immediately.  Ecosystems such as forests, wetlands, grasslands and oceans must be preserved, and humanity must eventually be re-integrated with its environment.  The unsustainable use of fossil fuels should cease, and investment must be directed into developing sustainable sources of energy, such as wind, solar, and tidal power generation.  A comprehensive system of public transportation should be developed to minimise vehicle emissions.  The use of petrochemicals in agriculture must be eliminated through the employment of locally developed fertilizers and the utilization of ecological processes.
The troops must be withdrawn immediately from Iraq, Afghanistan, East Timor, the Solomons, and all other foreign ‘interventions’.  It is not the duty of Western nations to ‘clean up their mess’ to ‘fight terrorism’ or ‘build schools’ or whatever.  Armies were never constituted for such benign purposes, and talk by government officials and the media only ever serve as a smokescreen for their real interests.  They are perfectly happy to abuse the most noble, humane sentiments of ordinary people as an excuse for yet more plundering and destruction.

Looking for real solutions

Needless to say, none of these aims are going to be genuinely carried out by our current rulers – the fat cat business bosses and the politicians so anxious to please them.  Nor are they going to be carried out by ‘good’ politicians from parties like Labour, the Greens, or the Alliance; who look to parliament to bring about change.  Ultimately they look to run a capitalist economy, and so they too will end up being beholden to profit.  Real solutions will only be implemented when ordinary, working people take action on the streets.  The masses must take power into their own hands and implement the solutions themselves.
This will require a mass, worldwide movement of millions of people.  It will also require a new political party – one of the working masses, capable of giving that movement leadership and direction.  This is what socialism is all about.  Obviously, we are a long way from that movement.  We are a tiny group, and it’s been many years since there was last sustained, mass demonstrations on New Zealand’s streets.  But we have to start somewhere, and if you want to see a world where human needs are put before profit, where global warming is sanely responded to and where the horror of war is only a distant memory, I urge you to get involved.

Cory A

March 2008