In world capitalism, goods and services take the form of commodities, i.e., goods produced primarily for profit. They must be sold to realise dividends for private shareholders, interest for owners of government bonds and an income for members of the capitalist class generally. The unearned wealth that accrues to the owners and controllers of capital, whether private or state, comes in the form of unpaid or stolen labor. Wages only supply workers with the cost of maintenance and renewal of the abilities they sell. Wages are far less than the monetary value of the things workers produce. Investment only occurs when the workers can be fleeced in this manner. No profit, no production. To compete successfully for markets industries must minimize costs. They must produce cheaply to get buyers. One of the ways of doing this is to produce without concern for the environment and to avoid neutralizing the wastes even if they are dangerous to humanity.
Pollution and class-divided social systems co-exist, they form two sides of an equation. Exploitation by a dominant class of a subject class leads to despoiliation of the natural environment. No social interest exists, because of the absence of social cohesion in the interests of all individuals who make up the organised group.
On the other hand, in the classless phase of social evolution known as tribal or primitive society, humans were in harmony with the nature that they so urgently depended upon. With a sparse knowledge of the world, mankind was compelled to utilize every bit of vegetable and mineral substance he could apprehend. It was a food-gathering, not a money-gathering culture. Man lived in reverence of the material-elemental source of survival. And co-operation for the individual-common good was mandatory.
Environmental destruction began when this social unity for the good of all broke up into antagonistic classes of masters and slaves around 7 to 10 thousand years ago. With a ruling class, responsible only to itself in its quest for riches out of the surplus labor of its slaves, there was little concern for making resources sustainable or extensible.
The two pre-capitalist property systems, chattel slavery and feudalism, brought about deforestation, erosion, soil exhaustion, flooding, air pollution, wild-life extinction and disease. (Hughs, Ecology in Ancient Civilizations). With the coming of industrial production, in the form of capital and wage-labor, in the 18th and 19th centuries and the expansion of production this brought about, the defilement of nature increased proportionately. Vast areas of England and Europe were blackened by soot. Millions of wage slaves there and in the US suffered lung diseases, cancers, and died from industrial pollution and degraded tainted food.
Pollution control: legalizing levels of pollution
Since the wages-prices-profit system is perceived as being unchangeable, so despoilment of nature is viewed as being physically necessary or inevitable. The system's reaction is to deal with the symptoms. For instance, as birth defects double every 20 years (Toronto Star, 19/5/84), governments pay for special homes, and educational facilities for the growing number of mentally retarded, handicapped children. As the North American cancer rate rises to 18 per cent of deaths (Epstein, Politics of Cancer), which according to the World Health Organization (WHO) is 75 to 80 per cent environmentally caused, governments and industry finance medical research and care to fight the disease. Obviously, after divesting workers of the fruits of their labor and polluting their bodies, profits are healthy enough for the employing class to transfer a portion toward band-aids for social sores and propaganda about governments being oriented around the interests of all.
Pollution controls have been enacted by governments in various countries, but these are the minimum levels thought to be necessary to protect the profits of the owning class, not the health of the population. Pollution control has nothing more to do with health than war has to do with saving lives.
The Ecologist, (Nov/Dec 1979) points out that acceptable levels of potentially dangerous chemicals released ". . . are simply the minimum levels that can be achieved without compromising economic priorities". (Their emphasis, "economic" being a popular euphemism to downplay profits). It also showed that WHO's minimum standard of mercury poison in food of 0.2 to 0.5 ppm catered to the average cost of profitable production of most countries. Costs in Swedish fisheries during the 1960's for example, were higher than WHO's average. Sweden had to allow 1.00 ppm of mercury poison or else 45 per cent of its fisheries would have had to shut down. Another example from the Ecologist: "When WHO recently raised (the acceptable level of lead in drinking water) from 50 micrograms to 100 micrograms per litre, this was not the result of the sudden discovery that man was less sensitive to lead poisoning than previously thought, but to the fact that few water authorities could provide water to this standard" (their italics).
A legalized level of pollution, to make working class exploitation possible, while being biologically harmful to the useful class, is not a rigid boundary line which cannot be transgressed. The anarchy of market competition makes control merely a goal. Laws against gross desecration are about as effective as laws against bank robbery.
A small percentage of violators are caught, and fined lightly. Much of the contamination is unknown to regulatory authorities. Some businesses do not even know if their wastes are toxic. Others refuse to reveal the nature of their disposal matter for fear of imparting information to their competitors. In the US state of New Jersey, crime kings have moved into the disposal of hazardous waste business (Times/ Colonist, 17/12/80). It is very lucrative, surreptitiously dumping the stuff without neutralizing it. Up to 1979 there were thousands of dangerous dumps in the US, with no laws or funds to deal with them (New Scientist, 21/6/79). Many more were unknown, with businesses sneaking truckloads of toxic effluvium, at high speed, nocturnally, to secret destinations. Oil spills are generally uncontrollable as they are incurred between national boundaries.
There are more unknown factors. Several million pollutants have been introduced into the global environment. How many break down or decay into new compounds, and what they are, is unknown. The synergic effects, where destructive chemicals, acting upon one another, combining to increase the sum of their individual potency hundreds of times more than when in isolation, is mostly unknown. The US Environmental Protection Agency studied that country's drinking water and discovered that "there may be a myriad of organic chemicals, not yet isolated and identified" (Ecologist, November/December 1979). There is the so-called safe level of poisoning for the average person* but most people are not average. And so on.
Pollution control means governments issuing permits to industries to sell "safe" pesticides, food additives and to dump toxic chemical wastes harmlessly, then, after 10 or so years of public exposure to them, banning them after discovering through further research, that they are harmful after all. Control also means governments issuing permits to pollute. Amax of Canada, Ltd, for example, sat down with the federal government and helped to write its own permit to dump toxic mine tailings into a northern British Columbia ocean inlet, which the local Nishga Indians depended on for their fish supplies (Times/Colonist, 1/3/ 83).
Control also means a Canadian government without enough money to conduct its own tests on new pesticides and additives coming on the market. Instead it accepts the reports on tests done by the manufacturers themselves. This is like sending the fox to guard the chicken coop. Consequently, one testing firm, Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories, Inc. of Northbrook, 111., falsified health tests on pesticides and drugs for 7 years, to save money (Times/Colonist, 23/6/81). Control means the Canadian government health department knowingly allowing Canada Housing, a mortgage corporation, to use carcinogenic urea formaldehyde foam insulation for government subsidized home insulation for workers (Times/Colonist, 5/9/81).
Under state capitalism too
The words "Communist," "Socialist" or "Marxist," are pseudonyms which conceal the state capitalism which exists in all "iron curtain" countries. It should come as no surprise therefore, that production for sale-profit social conditions under rigid, one-party police states degrade the environment as they do in the rest of the world.
Poland, for example, is likely the most polluted country in the world (New Scientist, 22/10/81). In Russia, the massive surface coal mining complexes ". . . are witness to the environmental devastation that has been caused. Vast tracts of forest and agricultural land have been torn up, and the pollution of local streams and rivers has been drastic." Deforestation has resulted in serious land erosion (Ecologist, June/78). The 5-year plan, rapid capital expansion (high profits) development of the USSR has left little regard for ecological conservation.
China has been desecrating its own land surface by deforesting 24 per cent of its treed area for pulp and paper profits during the 1940's (Toronto Star, 19/5/84). At this time, only 12 per cent of China has trees. The scenery along the Yellow River is a bald moonscape, and a brown smog chokes Peking, to the extent of eating the wood and stone ballustrades of the ancient imperial palace (Toronto Star, 24/5/84). That country's capitalist political dictators fear that "ultimate . . . ecological disaster" could threaten their "modernization (= more efficient exploitation of the workers) plans." China too, has begun to tinker with effects, by choking the political atmosphere with bureaucratic institutions, such as the Municipal Bureau for Preserving Cultural Relics, and laws, in a vain attempt to curb pollution.
Ecology movements trapped by the economic system
The average crusader against ecological degradation sees the private and state property system, with its money, wages and profits, as basically a static arrangement which can be improved for the masses through a gradual process of reform for the common good. Ecologists are generally unaware of the class-divided world social structure, and of their own existence as workers as part of the lower, exploited one of two antagonistic classes.
Environmentalists could be included as members of "his majesty's loyal opposition". Some of their groups receive grants from governments who are funded through taxes from some industries which are extreme polluters. The movements function, in part, as watchdogs to try to see that the system's masochistic excesses don't get out of hand and threaten, in some areas, the exploitive apple cart. Many of their victories undoubtedly meet with the approval of the polluting industries' shareholders, who may not quite make the connection between the earth's degradation and their dividends. These manipulated successes are enough to motivate the tinkerers onward. It is encouraging that they protest the debauchery of the planet, but not so happy that they are failing to stop it.
Ecologists are ill-equipped, have no answer for such defenses from the spokesmen of the owning class that more pollution should be allowed during a depression, to help to "create" jobs; or to cut costs so that "our" industries can compete on foreign markets.
If they ever came to power the ecologists would be trapped by the economics of the system. There are not as many ecological organizations as there are toxic elements and other threats to the natural surroundings, but it is likely that many reformers would favor such a state, to hopefully make their efforts effective. Advice on scrubbing unwashed vegetables and fruits to reduce pesticide residues, and ingest vitamin and mineral supplements to neutralize environmental poisons, are within the band-aid sphere of the ecology movements.
Being generally and unconsciously mired in capitalist ideology, ecology groups embrace the political "spectrum" parties, from extreme "left" to the "right" with most tending toward liberal left. Some, such as the Green Party of West Germany, Canada and the US and the Ecology Party of Britain, have organised separate parties. They too aim for a clean earth, in contradiction to the conventional thinking which they share with the rest of the working class.
A world free of pollution
Once the realities of the present sick society are perceived, putting a stop to environmental degradation and regenerating the planet becomes a matter of the conscious majority, the world's workers, taking political action to replace it with common ownership and democratic control of the means of life. Which means voluntarily co-operative production and distribution for the free consumption of all according to each individual's requirements.
There is no technological barrier to a pollution-free earth, but there is a political one, at present. Some scientists are aware that no such technological barrier exists, including chemistry Nobel prize winner Sir Derek Barton of London's Imperial College. In a lecture to the Vancouver Institute, University of B.C., he said: "The problem of pollution does not exist. We already have the knowledge to correct pollution when we find it. World problems of energy, pollution, hunger . . . and the economy are all artificial. . . crises" (Vancouver Sun, 31/10/77). He is supported by Dr Lee A. Dubridge of CalTech: "We now have enough technical knowledge to solve most of mankind's problems .. . The air of all cities would be free of all forms of man-made pollution'." (New York Herald Tribune, 25/10/ 61). (If the restrictions of the financial yardstick were out of the way). And from another source; during the observation of environment day, Environment Canada said: "We can have development without pollution. We have the technology — all we need is the will." (CFMS Radio, 5/6/80).
When mankind is in control of its social forces, the circumstances point to the human species identifying its interests with the earth on which it depends for its well-being. The ending of military competition between blocks of capital in nations, vying for markets and materials, will eliminate a large proportion of global contamination. Probably the first anti-pollution goal of the classless world democracy will be: (1) finding and neutralizing the deadly dumps of the past, and cleaning the poisonous air, water and soil; (2) modifying, as well as expanding productive and distributive processes, so that all can be provided for, with no pollution.
Free society will use scientific and technical potential that is possible today for these purposes, but which the present divided, competitive system has no call for. A few instances. Agriculture can be revolutionized to maintain fertile soil, health and strength of plants and their natural immunization against insects and disease. Insects have been used to control harmful insects; bacteria to control other bacteria and harmful insects; bacteria to break down sewage for natural fertilizer; some plants can protect other plants from insect pests; some useful plants can repel weeds, chemically, some pesticides have been developed which are harmful only to the insects which need to be controlled, and to no other biological species.
There are some small farmers in Canada's prairie provinces, who make a living with large yields of high quality grain, preserving fertile soil, using no artificial fertilizers or pesticides. Some small beef producers are raising cattle at low cost, with no feed supplements, no artificial vitamins, or drugs, even under the handicaps of present-day society. And this is only scratching the surface, in the area of agriculture alone.
The fractions of people, which is what wage-slaves are, will be transformed into enlightened somebodies. Socialist society will have something that capitalism forbids, the creative and productive potential that every human is born with. People will participate in a society of their choosing, free to express the natural urge to solve problems, express self-interest in co-operative harmony with all others, for maximum enjoyment of life.
Humanity in control of its affairs will never do what capitalism does—defecate on its doorstep.
George Jenkins
(Canada)
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