Can we save the planet? (1990)

From the August 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

We live to-day within a social system which is sick to its core. Throughout the world, production is taking place not simply to satisfy human needs, but to satisfy the voracious appetite of profit. Within this system of world capitalism, the consumption of wealth is in fact merely a means to an end—the further rapid accumulation of capital for those who invest in this production, those who own and control the world's resources.

The past hundred years have seen the most rapid and uncontrolled industrial expansion. with a virtual explosion of productive methods. The driving force behind this was never simply industrialisation for its own sake. The reason for this unplanned and damaging use of natural resources lay in the market system, with its need for a constant flow of profit. The rapid and short-term accumulation of capital proceeds regardless of the cost in terms of upsetting any natural ecological balance, just as it also ignores the needs of the majority of humanity. Each profit-making unit seeks to maximise its own short-term economic gain, without concern for the common interest or longer-term ecological considerations.

We may all inhabit the same planet, but the environment of which we are a part is social as well as natural, and our daily experience of this environment depends on our social class. The working-class majority experience a poverty which is absurd when contrasted with what is technologically possible. Whether in the concrete jungle or in rural squalor we exist in a dirty, dangerous and shoddy environment. Our housing which we have a constant struggle to obtain and hang on to, is often damaged or damp and almost always cheaply built. The small minority who own and control the world's productive resources, on the other hand, are able to enjoy the open spaces and relatively fresh air of private country estates, and the comforts of secure housing, good food and reliable transport.

For millions across the world, "the environment” means lack of clean water, avoidable but fatal diseases and ultimately starvation. In this way 40,000 children under the age of 5 are dying every single day, whilst the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation reports that if properly cultivated the world could feed the total population several times over. The reason for such obscene contradictions is the continued organisation of society on the basis of the market mechanism which is blind to need, unless backed up with cash. Throughout the world the vast majority are able to survive only by selling their working abilities to the minority who own and control the farms, factories, transport and other resources. Wealth is being produced not directly to satisfy need, but to be sold in order to realise a profit for the minority.

Reform or revolution?

Faced with the existence of this system, those who are concerned with its terrible effects have two options. They can struggle in an effort to reform and regulate it. or they can aim to replace it with a different social system altogether. This debate, between reform and revolution, took place in earnest at the turn of the century within the labour movement as a whole. The emergence of the “Green" movement in recent years raises just the same issue. Those involved in both the Green Party and the ecological pressure groups are trying to avert ecological crisis through legislation and other means within the framework of capitalism. But within this social structure, any concessions to such concerns will be "too little, too late" and will only take place if and when it appears to fit in with the dictates of profit.

There are several reasons why neither a Green government nor pressure-group activity nor legislative measures will succeed in their aims, however urgent a priority the saving of the plant may be seen to be. The claim that this urgency demands that we must set aside the struggle for social transformation and apply ourselves to preventing such ecological crisis is based on quite false logic. In fact, it is only through the replacement of capitalism by socialism that such measures can ever begin to be realised themselves.

First, governments are not in control. They are controlled in their actions by the in-built laws of the market system. Social action is moulded and limited by the underlying economic system of the world, because the way in which we organise the production of wealth shapes the priorities of society in general. Laws against "excessive" pollution are needed only in a system of society which has an inherent tendency to pollute. Productive units have the constant temptation to avoid such regulation in order to improve their competitive efficiency. At the time of the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster. Captain Nic Rutherford of the International Federation of Ships' Masters Associations, was quoted as saying:

The big problem is that one owner is not going to make expensive alterations that would put him at a disadvantage compared with his competitors until he absolutely has to (Independent. 10 March 1987).

In fact, far from solving these problems, attempts at solving them within capitalism will often make things even worse. For example, attempts at legal and state enforcement of ecologically-sound policies would have an inevitable side-effeect of increasing state power over people's lives, creating an oppressive machine which could also be used in other spheres.

Second, legal reform by its very nature operates on a national level, which is meaningless in terms of pollution and environmental damage: rivers and winds never respect the artificial national boundaries that capitalism has set up.

Perhaps most importantly, though, the first step to controlling the environment is owning it. The Greens put the cart before the horse—the majority in society do not yet have control over the world's resources. to use or abuse. How can the ecological balance of the world be maintained without first bringing human society under the control of humanity? How can we plan or control the processes of production if we do not collectively possess the resources involved?

Those who do possess the world's productive resources are quite clear about their intention to continue using that possession in the interests of generating profit. through maximising sales of commodities. J.M.Roche, who was Chairman of General Motors at the time, was quoted in April 1970 as saying that "planned obsolescence in my opinion is another word for progress'. (In The Name Of Profit, Doubleday. 1972). And in Capitalism And Freedom Milton Friedman, that guru of the market mythology, was even clearer:

There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits if businessmen do have a social responsibility other than making maximum profits for stockholders. how are they to know what it is?” (1962. p.133).

We could attempt to advise these owners what they should do with their wealth, how they really "ought" to place the health of the planet or the welfare of humanity before maximising their profits. But this would be to plead from a position of weakness, and really would not stand a chance of success. The only answer is to repossess the Earth itself

Profit and Pollution

There are many examples of how unrealistic it is to expect the social order of capitalism to put ecology before profit. There was the recent fiasco in relation to the greenhouse effect. The report in May of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommended immediate reductions of over 60 percent in carbon dioxide emissions in order to stabilize the problem as it stands. In response, Thatcher said Britain was prepared to set itself the “very demanding target" of maintaining (not reducing) present UK emission levels through to the year 2005 "provided others are ready to take their full share". And yet those pushing for Green reforms say that ending capitalism must be put off indefinitely. whilst they pursue these "short-term” obtainable measures' Gerald Leach of the government's Advisory Committee on Renewable Energy stated at the time that the technology does exist to cut UK carbon dioxide emissions, but that it would cost £8 billion to implement. He suggested that domestic consumers should bear the burden by replacing old or inefficient household appliances which contribute to these emissions. It is industry, however, which in its pursuit of profit plays the major role in causing such problems and is least likely to reverse the damaging trends involved.

An even less likely reform is currently being campaigned for by Friends of the Earth. They believe that the Green Party's anti-pollution taxes on coal, oil and gas would hurt the poor most, and are therefore urging a £16 billion fifteen-year programme to insulate and heat all low-income homes. It is sometimes thought that a non-party political group like Friends of the Earth might have a more positive influence on such problems. In fact, however they are hopelessly caught up in this dangerous and time-wasting myth that capitalism can be usefully reformed. The futility of such campaigns was evident in a revealing article by Neil Verlander of Friends of the Earth in the June 1990 issue of Voyager, the magazine of British Midland Airways. In a column presented as an introduction to the work of his group, he states:

Price is still the most important factor to most people, and many green products are more expensive than damaging rivals. Less environmentally damaging modes of production often incur bigger overheads, and greener products therefore tend to be more expensive.

Having acknowledged this stumbling-block to their efforts at reform, he goes on to show an acceptance that the division between rich and poor is here to stay, and even urges the impoverished majority to cut back on the little we consume:

It is essential that the environment is not the exclusive preserve of the middle class. People on lower incomes should be able to buy less damaging goods, and the best way of doing this is to make prices more realistic.

Green consumerism is still consumerism. and we must all, in the West, learn to consume less, as well as better.

The weakness in the position taken up by such pressure groups was well explained by Raymond Williams in his booklet Socialism and Ecology:

Having no political position is a form of political position . . .  Characteristically, this non-political approach calls upon generalised public opinion or upon the world . But in the latter case, they are calling upon the leaders of the precise social orders which have created the devastation to reverse their own processes. They are calling upon them to go against the precise interests, the precise social relationships, which have produced their leadership. Moreover, at a certain point, although the actual pronouncements are honest and important, the political position can be worse than merely mistaken, because it creates and supports the notion that the leaders can solve these problems.

Only when we all own and control the Earth's resources in common can we ever hope to sustain the planet s ecosystem in balance. Only by ending rather than regulating commerce as the mechanism of production can needs be satisfied harmoniously. This is the logical conclusion and for this vast social transformation to become a practicality, majority understanding and support for this needs to be built. A decision must therefore be made by any one who cares about their own future and that of the rest of the world: do we continue on the futile roundabout of reform, with its history of desperate failure, or do we instead advocate the practical solution of production for use. not profit?

Clifford Slapper

Blogger's Note:

In the same issue of this Socialist Standard, there is an advert for a new SPGB pamphlet, Ecology and Socialism, which can accessed here.

Town and country (2023)

From the May 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

The third and final part of our series on farming under capitalism and in a post-capitalist society of common ownership.

Link to Part 2. 

The cessation of capitalism will signify, amongst other things, the elimination of the enormous structural waste associated with this system. In other words, the elimination of all those numerous, often explicitly money-based, occupations that, whilst being required by (indeed, indispensable to) capitalism, do not in themselves perform any socially useful function whatsoever. They do not contribute in any meaningful way to the enhancement of human well-being. Minimally, we are talking about at least half (though some estimates are significantly higher) of the current workforce today no longer being required to do the work they currently do. In short, the replacement of capitalism by a post-capitalist society will liberate vast amounts of labour (and material resources) for socially useful production.

The implications of this for the future of farming are obvious. There can be little doubt that some of this labour will find its way into the agricultural sector of our future-post capitalist society. With the very idea of private ownership of the means of production (in this case, of agricultural land) becoming redundant, the break-up of large farms into more manageable and human-scale farming units will become possible. Along with this, the opportunities for farm work will be greatly expanded. Farms will then be able to more flexibly adapt their methods of farming to the new circumstances they find themselves in, unencumbered by the need to realise a profit through the sale of their produce.

In particular, the influx of more labour into this sector will enable it to transition to a more organically based and environmentally friendly, but also a more knowledge-based and productive, mode of farming. That, in turn, will transform the very nature of agricultural work into something more mentally stimulating and emotionally rewarding. The point being that all of these different facets of this farming model would be closely interconnected and mutually reinforcing.

It is quite true that, to an extent, organic farming, for instance is already being practised today. Nevertheless, it will always struggle to make inroads in an industry driven and dominated by the ruthless pursuit of profit at all costs. The tendency today is for agricultural land to become increasingly concentrated in fewer hands and this is what fundamentally militates against the large-scale application of organic methods even if it does not rule it out completely.

Organic farming, on a small scale, is arguably feasible as a way of supplying some niche market by charging premium prices to mainly better-off consumers who can afford to buy quality food – unlike, for instance, the growing numbers of people now dependent on food banks. This is not to dismiss organic farming as such – if we are able to consume authentically organic food (or, better still, grow our own) then so much the better. However, we need to be aware how the concept itself has all too often been cynically harnessed to the cause of ‘greenwashing’ capitalism.

The illusion is insidiously fostered that a gentler, kinder and more environmentally benign version of capitalism is entirely within our grasp. As consumers we are encouraged to believe that we are quite capable of bringing it into existence simply by dint of exercising our will and opening up our wallets. No need to politically or collectively organise to overthrow a fundamentally rotten system; it can be induced to reform itself through the informed decisions of individual consumers.

Here, yet again, we see how the individualistic ideology that capitalism nurtures in us surreptitiously shapes the political agenda in ways that shore up the very system itself. In the meantime, the marketing of our food continues unabated and, with it, the studied manipulation of images that all too often, belie the ugly reality of food production today: foodstuffs laced with chemicals or pumped with hormones, battery hens suffering under a cruel regime of factory farming and caged Scottish salmon being consumed alive by sea lice in what are euphemistically called ‘fish farms’.

As the saying goes, we are what we eat. Changing society must involve, amongst other things, changing how we go about producing the food that we eat. This is something most of us have little or no control over at the present time. For more and more of us our links with the land have long been severed in a world of exploding megacities. Huge, powerful corporations absolutely dominate each and every stage in the food supply chain – from the field to the supermarket shelf. But, apart from this, you cannot hope to change society – the way things are done today – without having some larger vision of what you would want to put it in its place. This unfortunately is what is conspicuously lacking today.

Utopian though such a vision might seem from the vantage point today of our (apparent) collective helplessness and political impotence, it is indispensable to reaching some kind of coherent understanding of this world we live in — not to mention, deriving some sense of direction about the way forward. For the direction in which society is currently heading is clearly not one that is conducive to human happiness and well-being.

Part of that vision of an alternative future has to do with the kind of spatial reorganisation of human society that will be required to ensure the sustainable production of food at a level adequate to meet the nutritional needs of humanity in general. Concretely speaking, this hinges to some extent on overcoming or breaking down the distinction between the town and the countryside and addressing the vexed question of how to achieve some kind of suitable or healthy balance between them.

The built environment that is our towns and cities represents the embodied labour of many generations long gone – an enormous monument to human ingenuity. It is a legacy we should embrace, not abandon. Abandoning it would be as preposterous as it would be scandalously wasteful.

Healing the rift between the town and countryside has long been an aspirational goal of utopian thought. However, to be truly realisable and effective, it has to entail a two-way movement – not just some one-way ‘back to the land’ exodus from the towns precipitated by the break-up of large agricultural estates in the countryside itself or the implementation of measures to make farming more attractive and stimulating. We also need to be thinking in terms of ‘bringing the countryside into the towns’ themselves, so to speak, – through the reinvigoration and greening of urban land blighted by dereliction at the hands or urban speculators or by inappropriate and uninspiring urban ‘development’.

Robin Cox

‘Ethical Shopping’: A Luxury (2022)

From the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Count your food miles, buy organic, live without plastics, buy local products, support small businesses – we’re told this is how individual consumers can choose to help the environment.

Really? Don’t get us wrong. We’re all in favour of people taking personal responsibility – the voluntary society we want will depend on that very thing.

But these incitements to personal sacrifice are a gigantic act of misdirection. The powers-that-be love talking about your personal responsibility for the state of the planet, because it’s better than owning up to their collective responsibility for ruining it.

They are responsible for a wasteful system that creates obscene wealth and luxury for the 1 percent while many of us end up struggling just to get by. And they have the cheek to tell us to cut back on our personal consumption!

So be responsible, by all means. But just remember, capitalism never will be.

Now ask yourself these questions:

1. Why is it that most of what we ever buy – food, clothes, electricals, etc., is mass produced?

It’s because of economies of scale, which reduce production costs, so mass-produced stuff comes to dominate the market because it’s always cheaper.

2. Does this stuff have to come from so far away?

The companies that make the stuff are always trying to undercut each other to grab more market share. This has tended to push production out to wherever in the world wages are cheapest, resulting in long, complex supply chains and wasteful global transportation. These two factors have wiped out most local production over the decades, so we have little choice when we shop.

But there’s another factor that restricts our ability to choose. Our wage levels generally are determined by how much we have to spend to keep us in a condition that allows us to keep working. And it’s the prices of the global, mass-produced stuff (battery eggs, not free-range; prosecco, not champagne) that enter into that calculation.

So while some may be able to shop ‘ethically’, it’s a luxury many of us simply can’t afford.

Food: why we don’t get the best (1999)

From the November 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Food matters to everyone. People have been led to revolt if unable to obtain enough. But quality, rather than quantity, is just as important. Politicians, their profit-chasing overlords and the marketplace that unites them, are attracting unfavourable scrutiny after successive well-publicised poisonings, adulterations, scams and animal abuse cases. 

Following salmonella, E. coli, BSE and a spate of more recent food scandals, people are unsurprisingly alarmed over just what they are eating and just what can be done to ensure meals are safe. Here are just four disturbing news reports of late which emerged in less than one week: 

The [Pesticide Safety Directorate] working party on pesticide residues found that some of the largest retailers, including Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Safeway, sold produce that had levels of pesticides above the maximum residues limit, including illegal growth regulators and known carcinogens (Guardian, 17 September). 

Food hygiene inspectors from the European Commission are to start an urgent investigation into standards in French rendering plants following allegations that untreated water, blood and discharges from animal carcasses, and sewage have been used in making poultry and pig feed. The Commission and the French government have been anxious to play down the accusation for fear of sparking a new European food crisis . . . The common factor in this summer’s crises has been manufacturers’ failure to maintain hygiene standards in the highly competitive food industry (Guardian, 18 August) 

Children who eat fishfingers are being fed ‘undesirable’ levels of two of the world’s most feared poisons, reveals an official report. Dioxins and PCBs—believed to cause cancer and have ‘gender bending’ effects—were found by Government researchers in all the samples of fishfingers bought in different supermarkets. Higher levels were found in the fresh fish on sale, particularly in oily fish such as herring which the Government has been urging people to eat for health reasons . . . Despite the fears, the Government has decided against issuing any warnings when the research—the first of its kind by the Agriculture Ministry—was published quietly in August on an official website (Daily Mail, 20 September). 

Belgium yesterday warned the EU that tests carried out on meat for export . . . show that livestock reared on farms near industrial plants carries higher levels of dioxin contamination . . . Belgium’s food crisis in May caused consumer panic after the revelation that animal feed had been contaminated by potentially cancer-causing dioxins at a food plant in Flanders which allegedly mixed motor oil with fats to bind the feed . . . the Belgian crisis of confidence in food safety worsened yesterday after revelations that sewerage sludge had been mixed into fodder, as in France . . . sludge from toilets and showers, water from slaughterhouses and cleaning products had got into the food chain (Guardian, 22 September). 

The September 18 “highly competitive food industry” reference says it all, and should enlighten concerned shoppers to the total incompatibility between access to continuously high-quality comestibles and competitive production for financial gain, due to market forces always tending to value profits ahead of excellence. 

There will never be a time when most people become wealthy enough to buy only the very best, since while competitive production exists so, too, will competitive employment. And with competing employers, driven by those same market forces to hold down wages and salaries (and taxes that provide welfare benefits) so as to favour profits and stay in businesses, there will always exist a great many working and non-working people with limited incomes who nevertheless must purchase sustenance. This section will vary in size according to the needs of capital. 

Official DSS figures released in February showed that, after deducting housing costs, no fewer than 14.1 million people had below half the average income. While food producers are going to be keen to obtain this poorly-paid group’s money, competition to grab a greater market share by supplying the least expensive food means there will be an ever-present pressure to minimise quality, because superior ingredients, more thorough procedures, better trained employees, etc all cost more. Include today’s international intensification of competitiveness through deregulation and the steady removal of tariffs, trade barriers and subsidies in pursuit of a correctly functioning global market, and the seemingly endless appalling procession of scandalous headlines becomes perfectly clear. 

Uncompetitive regulations 

The Blair Government knows that inferior and dangerous food means antagonistic voters; a situation to be earnestly avoided. Labour certainly doesn’t want to end up like the former Belgium government of Jean-Luc Dehaene—booted out of office largely due to carcinogenic dioxin at up to 700 times permitted “acceptable limits” being found in eggs, chickens and then pigs, just weeks before a general election. So what’s their approach? A proposed “independent” Food Standards Agency. 

The FSA proposal emerged not long after Blair came to power. Large retail firms and manufacturing interests were soon applying pressure, insisting the agency be made less regulatory. Then businesses caused the agency to remain on the drawing board longer by complaining that the FSA should not be funded through levies on their food outlets. And despite the BSE catastrophe under Tory rule, the Ministry of Agriculture—which former minister Edwina Currie said “had long ago set itself up as a trade union for producers”-was once again siding with the food industry. Yum, yum: prole food Yum, yum: prole food. 

There is to be publication of an annual report from the Working Party on Pesticide Residues, who will have a small number of food samples tested, and name retailers selling produce with residues above the “maximum residue limit”, and identify the goods concerned. However, this can be nothing more than a show to dispel the public crisis of confidence in food. 

Can consumers turn to organic foods? Perhaps some will be able to keep paying higher prices to reduce their contamination levels (except from equally dangerous airborne chemicals). But the majority can never have high quality organic food and freedom from various other sources of pollution, because of the international competition that is an integral feature of capitalism. Britain cannot go “green” alone. The additional financial burden on capital to establish and maintain a far safer and healthier environment would result in an economic crisis in no time. Britain simply cannot impose rigorous standards on producers without increasing their costs, and in a global market, that would spell disaster for UK firms. 

Everyone concerned about avoiding dangerous and inferior produce has to ask themselves this question: “What did I vote for at election time?” Since, whenever the electorate empower yet another bunch of politicians to—unavoidably—cater to the needs of business as the priority, the very conditions that give rise to food scandals will remain in place. If different competing groups retain ownership of productive resources, they must continue exploiting those assets in the most profitable manner in order to sell and prosper from what is produced. One result? BSE and 43 people dead (that we know of), and a renewed chilling warning this September from Professor Liam Donaldson, the government’s own chief medical officer: “What is absolutely certain is that the present relatively low number of cases [of nv-CJD] should not lead anyone to conclude that the worst is over. Levels of human exposure at the height of the BSE epidemic would have been high.” 

Misuse of GM technology; pesticide-induced cancers; animal maltreatment; cover-ups; no or inadequate labelling; abysmal hygiene standards. None of these need happen. We do not have to futilely hope profit-biased governments will impose uncompetitive regulations and strict enforcement. There is another option to capitalism’s inability to deliver continuously high-quality food for all. If we all own the means of producing food, then we all own the produce, which means never buying it or having any financial restraints on its quality.

Max Hess

The Real Waste (2020)

From the April 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many people who sympathise with the socialist case do not join us because they feel that working for socialism requires a lot of time and effort, with no guarantee of success. Much better, they may say, to work for short-term gains that need less commitment and are more likely to be achieved.

I was recently reading Will McCallum’s book How to Give Up Plastic. This gives a detailed account of the problems caused by various forms of plastic, from bags and bottles to straws, nappies and takeaway coffee cups. Many of these are used just the once and then disposed of, eventually leading to the clogging up of rivers, beaches and oceans. Samples taken from the deepest place on earth, the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific, contain microplastics.

McCallum makes many recommendations for how people can massively reduce their use of plastics, such as having reusable water bottles and coffee cups. But aside from what people can do at an individual level, often without too much trouble, he gives examples of larger campaigns. Clearing litter from a park or beach requires a lot of work and preparation, from publicising the event to bringing bin bags and weighing what has been collected. He also posits a ladder of escalating approaches: writing letters, holding a meeting, writing an article for the media, organising a petition, and finally having a protest (which may just mean leaving unnecessary packaging at the till in a supermarket, rather than staging a demo).

What a lot of effort! And campaigns like this will always come up against the simple fact that capitalism is basically about profit, not about reducing pollution and conserving the oceans. Consumer pressure can bring about changes in the ways in which companies source, produce and package commodities, and there is nothing wrong with having a reusable coffee cup, but when seen against the background of all the ecological damage done by capitalism, this really is, well, a drop in the ocean. All the time and ingenuity that is spent on such campaigning would be far better put to the task of making socialists and bringing about a society based on meeting human need, which would include environmental considerations being made a priority.

Paul Bennett

Tiny Tips (2011)

The Tiny Tips column from the October 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his first speech as president of the Worldwide Wildlife Fund UK, Prince Charles has warned that he is an “endangered species” and that so is the rest of mankind:

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YOU reduce, reuse and recycle. You turn down plastic and paper. You avoid out-of-season grapes. You do all the right things. Good. Just know that it won’t save the tuna, protect the rain forest or stop global warming. The changes necessary are so large and profound that they are beyond the reach of individual action:

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He [John Bird] sums himself up: “I am a self appointed grandee of the poor. I am one of them who got out and got into a position to help, so I will mollycoddle Lord Mandleson, Cameron, Blair, and Brown, anyone if it helps.” He remains refreshingly critical about the magazine: “I don’t want to read The Big Issue and read how miserable it is living under capitalism. I want to know what you’re going to do about it, how you going to dismantle it:

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Michael Gove slackens rules on use of physical force in schools. Education secretary seeks to stem ‘erosion of adult authority’ by recruiting former male soldiers to the classroom:

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It will take another 98 years for women executives to reach equal pay with men at the current rate, the Chartered Management Institute reports. Men are paid on average an extra £10,546, although women saw pay rises of 2.8 per cent this year compared to men’s 2.3 per cent, and women are now securing equal or higher starting salaries:

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When we decided to keep Hirohito on his Japanese throne, we winnowed down the number of Japanese war criminals to be hanged. Oddly, it was Churchill who wanted the worst of the Nazis to be executed on the spot; it was Stalin who wanted a trial. It all depends, I think, on whether criminals are our friends (Stalin at the time) or our enemies (Hitler and his fellow Nazis), whether they have their future uses (the Japanese emperor) or whether we’ll get their wealth more easily if they are out of the way (Saddam and Gaddafi ). The last two were or are wanted for killing “their own people” – in itself a strange expression since it suggests that killing people other than Iraqis or Libyans might not be so bad:

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Three hundred and fifty thousand: That’s a conservative estimate for the number of offenders with mental illness confined in America’s prisons and jails. More Americans receive mental health treatment in prisons and jails than in hospitals or treatment centers.

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Ester Abeja has experienced both physical and emotional atrocities. She was captured by Uganda’s feared rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and was forced to join them. But not before the soldiers made her kill her one-year old baby girl, by smashing her skull in, and then gang raped her:

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Pathfinders: The Only Way Is Ethics (Not) (2018)

Iceland's palm oil ad

The Pathfinders Column from the December 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is there anything you do, eat, wear or travel in that isn’t bad for the environment? Palm oil, used in a zillion products, is now being demonised as the new plastic, and one frozen food company has taken the ‘ethical’ decision to stop buying in palm oil products, while astutely trying to capitalise on this strategy with a Christmas ad featuring a cutesie kid and baby orang utan who sadly shows her his forest utopia being charred and bulldozed for the sake of her hair products. The ad went viral on YouTube after it was banned from the TV by regulators because it was produced by Greenpeace, deemed a ‘political’ organisation although by our definition they’re not as they don’t stand candidates for parliament. At the time of writing there is a heart-warming online campaign to overturn the ban (‘Iceland Christmas ad: Petition to show it on TV hits 670k’, BBC Online, 13 November). No doubt the firm’s marketing director can expect a stuffed bonus in their Christmas stocking for this crafty coup.

Christmas is always the perfect time for guilt-trips which invite you to pause and reflect, during your orgiastic overspending, on your ethical profile, that thing about which you feel least certain and most guilty. But what do we understand by the word ‘ethics’ and how useful is it? Dogs, elephants and other animals are known to have a moral sense, and we humans regard the absence of a moral compass as a clinical defect. We devise moral frameworks, often hi-jacked by religions as the work of some deity, to codify our values, our social concepts and our politics. This is probably a form of evolutionary heuristic, or short-hand guide, since we don’t have smart enough brains to calculate good survival strategies on demand. Instead we feel them as right or wrong, through some obscure associative process nobody really understands.

But there are inevitable problems with allowing your moral compass to do the driving. What if you have the wrong information? Have you corrected for your internal biases? If your morality doesn’t square with other people’s, who is to say who’s right?

A group of programmers currently grappling with the complexities of moral codes are those trying to design the AI systems in self-driving cars. What has them perplexed is the nightmare no-win crash scenario known as the ‘Trolley problem’, in which you can only avoid killing one lot of people by diverting your runaway tram (‘trolley’) down a different track and killing a different bunch of people. You can tweak this problem any way you like, by varying the characteristics of your two groups of ‘victims’, to see what difference this makes to people’s ethical choices.

Being good scientists of course, they approached this scientifically and conducted a numbers exercise to see if they could derive a baseline consensus. What would most people want a self-driving car to do in such a situation? Unfortunately it depends who you ask. The Moral Machine survey collected 40 million decisions from across 233 countries, and found that while on average humans were prioritised over animals and younger people over older (unless the humans were criminals, in which case they rated lower than cats), the regional differences were strikingly hard to integrate into a viable framework. For instance, the young-over-old ethic was much less apparent in Asiatic and Islamic countries, as was the high-status-over-low. South America and French colonies were less inclined to save humans over animals, unless they were specifically women or non-disabled people.

The problem for the programmers is that computer code relies on absolutes, and with morality there are no absolutes, only relatives. No wonder one ethicist describes the task of giving morals to motor vehicles as ‘finding the right comedic parabola, or the right colour of dance, or the right frequency for spaghetti’ (New Scientist, 27 October).

As soon as you start asking ethical questions you get contradictory answers, and there is no objective yardstick, upon which all can agree, by which to judge them. So is it possible to use such a subjective approach to arrive at a consensual programme of action for the planet?

No, it isn’t. That’s why when we’re making the case for socialism we prefer to stick to the facts. If the world is going to steer its way to a sustainable future instead of destruction it’s going to need a practical and accurate roadmap more than it needs gods or cutesie ads or an impassioned polemic.

Place Your Bets Please

If you prefer gas to electric cookers it’s probably because of the zero-response time when you adjust the heat settings. Cooking with electric involves too much thinking ahead, and an adjustment that’s fractionally too high can result in milk boiling over the stove. A similar problem exists in long-latency industries like oil, where adjustments today ‘feed through’ to supply or price levels years down the line. This gives rise to a volatile futures market, which speculates on supply and price in the future. Today’s US sanctions against Iran have caused large producers to pump at full capacity, but fears of future oversupply are depressing the futures market, in turn causing rampant selling and falling stock prices today, which of course will have knock-on effects on industry including food production (‘Oil rally faces tidal wave of supply’, Reuters, 4 November). So today’s activities are not determined by today’s objective and demonstrable necessities, but by some people’s guesses at what the price of these things will be in a few years’ time. If you think that sounds like reckless fast-buck gambling instead of responsible resource management, you’ve just hit on one essential difference between capitalism and socialism.

Paddy Shannon

Sting in the Tail: 30 Wasted Years (1991)

The Sting in the Tail column from the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

30 Wasted Years

The Labour Party is often described as "the mass party of the working class" yet the national membership of its youth wing, the Young Socialists, is now only 350.

When the YS was formed 30 years ago various Trotskyist groups moved in to control it. Recently it has been dominated by Militant but in earlier days It was Keep Left, another group of Trots who were dominant

This Trotskyist influence has been such an embarrassment to the Labour Party that it will probably be glad when the YS finally dies.

So it's goodbye to those bear-garden conferences where the YS passed all those resolutions denouncing the party leaders along with just about every bit of Labour Party policy.

And what did all the rebelliousness mean? Absolutely nothing. Indeed many YS are now staid Labour Party officials, councillors and even MPs, the same kind of people they once spent so much time attacking. It would be laughable if it wasn't so tragic.

Shop Steward's Dream

Tommy is a typical shop steward we know. When he speaks about "bread and butter" issues like overtime, sick pay and holidays he makes good sense, but on most other subjects he is a fount of prejudice and ignorance.

Prejudice? Jews are his pet hate although the Arabs ran them close during the Gulf war and you should hear him on about "Darkies"! By the way, Tommy always votes Labour.

Ignorance? The other day he was on about health -

  The rich aren't any healthier than us. You're either born with good health or you aren't. Money doesn't come into it.

Of course the left-wing with their absurdly idealised view of shop stewards would see Tommy as part of the "industrial vanguard in the struggle against capitalism".

But Tommy’s ideas are little different from those of most other workers or even shop stewards. His vision of a better world goes no further than society as it is but with more job security, a few pence extra on the hourly rate and Neil Kinnock in Downing Street

You Dirty Rat

Alastair Cooke, in his "Letter from America", (Radio 4) told an interesting story about the mayor of New York who, faced with a massive deficit, announced the probable slashing of public spending (surprise, surprise).

Among the possible casualties could be the sanitation department, which could result, according to experts, in an increase in the rat population of one million.

The mayor, who is either a shrewd vote-catcher or very naive, came up with what he undoubtedly thought was a unique proposal. He invited the "ordinary" people to come and tell him the solution to the city's problems. So for one week they queued up outside his office to lay it on him.

However, since there have been no reported cries of "Eureka" or the hip equivalent emanating from the inner sanctum, we can safely assume that none of the queuing hopefuls came up with the only solution; the abolition of the buying and selling system. All of which must have come as a relief to the capitalist class, not to mention the rats.

Caring Capitalism

Nowadays when capitalism is widely regarded as the altruistic saviour of mankind it comes as a pleasant surprise when someone sees it in its true colours.

Writing in The Independent (5 September) Suzanne Moore observes that while Gerald Ratner honestly described the cheap jewellery his shops sell as "crap", Anita Roddick of the Body Shop wraps her products in a haze of mysticism, 1960’s idealism and 1980's green awareness. By using her products you can, apparently, be healthier and do some ecological good at the same time.

Suzanne Moore sees Anita Roddick's guff as part of the growing trend to portray 1990's capitalism as a marriage of material values and spiritual good. Believe that, she says, and ". . . you'll believe that capitalism really can be "caring." and warns that behind this newer, softer, gentler-on-the-skin approach "business Is still basically about buying and selling."

She is mistaken, however, In thinking that — "any idea of a genuine alternative to capitalism is collapsing."

Socialists propose that capitalism be replaced by a classless, moneyless, worldwide society of production for use. Now, Suzanne Moore that really would be a genuine alternative, wouldn’t it?

Cold Comfort

The thermal underwear company Damart in conjunction with the organisation Help the Aged recently produced a little leaflet entitled Hypothermia - The Chilling Facts.

Chilling facts indeed; the leaflet points out that compared with the number of summer time deaths an extra 40,000 elderly persons will die in a mild winter and in a harsh winter this will rise to 80,000.

In a section entitled So, Who Is At Risk? it has this to say:

  We know that two groups of older people are particularly 'at risk'. They are the very elderly — from late seventies onwards — who are more likely, because of the ageing process, to have low body temperatures.
  And they are the pensioners who receive supplementary benefits — studies show that they are more likely to be living alone, less likely to have central heating, less likely to use electric blankets and more likely to be underweight — all these factors can lead to a lower body temperature.

Among the proposed solutions to the problem the leaflet lists warm clothing, adequate domestic heating systems and a better diet. All of which isn't much consolation for those who are on supplementary benefit. The fact is that it is poor people who are dying from hypothermia.

It is not more legislation or better hand-outs the elderly poor need. What they must have if this scandalous state of affairs is to be ended is World Socialism.

That is the only society in which everyone young and elderly can have unrestricted access to all the food, clothing and heating that society can provide.

A Racist Utopia?

There Is a sunny utopia called Oranla. Scores of workers have gone there on the promise of a better life and hundreds more are expected soon.

In case any reader is tempted to follow them we should explain that Orania is a small "white homeland" in South Africa. It is owned by some rich Afrikaners who have ejected all the black people and imported unemployed white South Africans to do the menial jobs previously done by the blacks.

These white workers now complain that, besides being underpaid, their bosses, regard them as "white kaffirs"-

  "We can’t even sit down and have a smoke break or a chat. It's just work, work and more work all day long"

The Sunday Times (1 September) 

The bosses answer to this is a familiar one — there is no room for laziness in creating the new white nation. The Sunday Times says of Orania -

  It has a lot of appeal for blue-collar workers who have the most to lose from the new South Africa but what they don't realise is that they are going to have to do for the well-off, upper-class Afrikaners what the blacks used to do. A system of servitude based on race is being replaced by one based on class.

Between the Lines: MURDOVISION (1990)

The Between the Lines column from the March 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

MURDOVISION

Would you pay Rupert Murdoch to let you watch his cheap, shoddy Sky TV network? Most TV viewers in Britain have answered very clearly. They have refused to buy satellite dishes and show little sign of being prepared to give their money to Murdoch so that they can watch bad game shows and old movies. One year after the launch of Sky TV the enterprise has been a failure, reaching far less than its original target audience. Murdoch appeared on The Media Show (C4. 8pm. 3 February) to defend his TV network He appeared to be a man who not only owned The Sun but also read it, and it is clear that if the control of culture is to be left to money-worshipping billionaires like him the future looks pretty bleak. As the Australian controller of Sky TV explained, when asked whether he thought that the channel was a threat to media quality, after working on satellite TV for a year now. I don't think I know the meaning of the term quality" Quite so.

PLAYING WITH NATURE

Notes In The Margin 1980-1990 (BBC2. 8.20pm. 1 February) was presented by Rosalind Coward. Her look back to the Eighties surveyed the growth of public concern about the environment. As a feminist, whose writings have tended to expose the claims of those who suggest that Nature determines what is normal. Coward has good reason to be cautious in the face of some of the current greenish noises about the need for humans to live in harmony with nature. She is not opposed to the principle of ecological balance Far from it. she seems to agree with the view of the Socialist Party that humans will only have a future if they see themselves as part of the environment rather than as its destructive masters. 

Coward's concern is about those people who have suggested that there is some kind of Nature—normally depicted as a person (Mother Nature) and as female—which humans must obey and that failure to obey Mother Nature means that we shall be punished. Coward showed the example of the advocates of so-called alternative health therapy who tell people that illness is a result of failing to have the right mental attitude to Nature. Therefore, if you have cancer it is because you have had the wrong attitude to living; if you adopt the right lifestyle Nature will be kind to you. This sort of eco-fascism. which suggests that Mother Nature is some kind of tyrannical and punitive goddess who will hurt those who fail to fall in line with Her laws, is dangerous nonsense. Of course, it is a material fact that if you live in conflict with your environment you will harm it as well as yourself, but Rosalind Coward was quite right to point out that it is idealistic self-deception to imagine that illness and mortality are the products of bad thinking. Certain radical Greens adopt a rather smug attitude concerning proper lifestyles. They leave out of account the material pressures upon millions of workers which leave them no option to live healthily. They also fail to see that much of what they imagine to be "natural" is only the norm in a society which puts money before people Coward did a good job in warning us of the philosophical baggage carried by many well-meaning greenish folk

TV AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE

We pointed out last month how TV played a key role in spreading ideas during the recent workers' upsurge in Eastern Europe It is interesting to note, in support of this claim, that when Azeri workers tried something similar, one of the first actions the Russian army took was to disable the TV station in Baku to stop it playing the role it had in Eastern Europe The Azeris were motivated by politically unsound nationalist sentiments, but once workers have the right ideas in their heads it will be just as well for Rupert Murdoch and his gang to book themselves a room reservation on the next space shuttle.

Steve Coleman

How green can you get? (1989)

From the April 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Throw away the red paint, lads; green is the latest fashion. Red banners and class struggles are out of date. These days, if you want to look radical you have to be green. From Number Ten the Green Goddess has sounded the clarion call: "Let’s pretend we care about the environment — there are votes in this one". Where Thatcher leads the hapless promise-makers in the Neil, David and Paddy camps follow. On this year's Labour agenda, vote-losing, truncheon-battered miners are out, vote-winning baby seals are in. The Green Party is printing application forms on recycled paper for those who like the sound of its late Eighties, health-conscious. conservation-minded message. Pity that those filling them in have not checked the parliamentary record of the German Greens who, in order to make a few legislative deals with other parties, voted in favour of a huge military budget. The Left is going green too. In the Communist Party the fetishism of commodities is distinctly passé; Gramsci on the burning question of deodorant sprays and the ozone layer is big talk. The Two Royals, Phil and Charlie, are making speeches to whoever will listen about the importance of conserving this green and pleasant land. They own enough of it for the subject to be of direct interest. Meanwhile, they eagerly await the hunting and shooting season when they can pursue the noble sport of killing innocent animals. Elkington and Hailes Green Consumer Guide became a non-fiction best-seller last September, and now publishers are falling over one another to publish vegetarian recipes and shocking accounts about rain forests. It is fashionable to be green these days.

Socialists have been saying for a very long time that workers must wake up to the enormous threat of environmental damage which the profit system poses to the world around us. Nuclear weapons are just the most obvious and powerful symbol of self-destruction which capitalism has created. For decades it has been cheaper for capitalists to pollute the air workers breathe than to adopt clean techniques and practices. Methods of production which are unsafe, disease-spreading and potentially explosive have long existed. Workers' food has been adulterated for as long as there have been wage slaves; see Engels' comment about this in his book, Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. In order to make a fast buck it has long been capitalist practice to destroy the earth’s irreplaceable resources. Animals are made to suffer and die needlessly; endangered species which have no exchange value in the market are free to become extinct. There is nothing new about any of this. It is not peculiar to the late Twentieth Century, and we did not require a new fashion to hit the tabloid headlines to recognise that we inhabit an endangered planet — endangered by the dictates of profit.

The Socialist Party is hostile to the Green Party. It is a party which stands for the continuation of the capitalist system, but in a different form. We stand for the abolition of capitalism in all forms. The two positions are irreconcilable. Those who vote for the Greens are doubtlessly sincere and caring people who want something different. In their own lifestyles, perhaps some of them have made genuine adjustments which are in line with a socially more co-operative way of living. So have many socialists, but we are well aware that individual lifestyle changes, whether they involve not eating meat or using what are called “environment-friendly" products, are not going to change the fundamental nature of the social system which oppresses us. A few million workers might give up using products which destroy the environment, but what power do we have in comparison with the minority who own and control the means of wealth production? The ruling class, be they multinational companies, state-capitalist bureaucrats or small manufacturers, have an interest in keeping their costs down. If their profits come before the long-term interests of workers, who can blame them for sacrificing workers’ needs? After all, workers voted for the profit system. Only by abolishing the system which is the cause of these problems can the effects be eliminated. The Greens, both in their own party and in the major parties, put out an on appealingly radical message, but when examined it becomes clear that it is a case for the market with a green tinge.

Green reformism

Let us imagine that a Green government is elected at the next General Election. What would it do? To begin with, it would govern. The job of governments is to run the coercive state on behalf of the capitalists who monopolise the means of life. So, like all previous governments, a Green one would be compelled to ensure that the workers are producing profits. In another sense, a Green government would not really govern at all: it would be governed by the profit system. Its Ministers would be constantly coming before us, like Labour reformists in the past, saying "Look, we honestly did want to reform this and that but. you see, with the capitalist economy being what it is..." And so the old story of reformist promises coming to nothing, followed by working-class disgust and disillusion, would go on. In Green Line (November 1988) Tim Andrews reported on a list of reforms which the Green Party Conference had just voted for: “the scrapping of the Common Agricultural Policy, the replacement of price support with income support . . . the party's intention to withdraw from the EEC unless reconstituted on ecological principles . . . opposition to free trade . . . commitment to economic as well as political decentralisation." In short, a package of policies to reform capitalism, many of which have been tried and failed in the past, and others which are just pious platitudes. A Green government of British capitalism would be no freer than any government before it to carry out changes which would conserve what is worth keeping in the world around us. Let us say that a Green government abolishes nuclear weapons, as they say it would. What weapons would it introduce instead? If none, then capitalism in Britain would be undefended and ripe for take-over by profit-hungry vultures from other states. If the Greens seek to introduce new, more humane, greenish weapons of murder, then let them spell out such a defence policy here and now. Likewise, let us assume that the Green government fails to persuade the EEC to reconstitute itself on ecological principles. Who will the British capitalists trade with? And why should non-EEC trading agreements be any less concerned with profit before need than the current ones are? Or would a Green government only agree to trade with nations which are ecologically principled? The question alone demonstrates the catastrophic implications of the expected green answer.

It is simply impossible to purify or humanise this capitalist system. And some of the more aware Green politicians, such as Jonathan Porritt, probably know this. They would argue that politics is about pragmatism, that is cynical compromise. It is about “lesser evils". But why vote for Porritt and his fellow would-be governors to administer the lesser evil when capitalism, which creates the evils, can be abolished altogether? The usual reformist answer is that the lesser evil will take less time to achieve than the grand socialist aim. The Socialist Party was told this by CND nearly thirty years ago when they were going to reform the threat of nuclear annihilation out of existence; we were told it by the reformists of the Labour Party over eighty years ago — they were going to eradicate poverty. It is a foolish myth that partial objectives are more worthy of support than realisable big ones. There is unlikely ever to be a Green government, and if there is, then its greatest critics will be present Greens who will complain that it has sold them out. It is inevitable with reformism; it must sell out in order to fit in with the needs of the system.

Green anti-materialism

Socialists are materialists, but not in the sense that the term is often used: it does not mean that we want people to have more and more “material” things, such as cars or video machines. To be a materialist is to recognise that human beings are rooted in our social environments. Our consciousness is social, and through conscious action we can alter the material environment of which we are a part. The environment is not something Out There which must be protected; it is part of us and we part of it. To be a materialist is to reject antiquated, idealist nonsense about the soul or the spirit. The present writer attended a debate two years ago in which the Green speaker pointed out that being green was all a question of the spirit. Asked to identify this spirit, the Greens laughed a little and ended up proclaiming that if you don’t know what it is then you ain’t got one. Are we to conclude from this that the new Green World is to be established by those who have discovered their spirits, leaving behind us poor wretches who have only our material selves to live with? There is a good deal of arrogant self-righteousness in the Green claim to have seen a better world. What they fail to understand is that seeing visions does not transform the world. Even Tories see glorious visions.

The task facing us is not to romanticise, but to revolutionise. Of such thinkers Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto that they were “half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future: at times, by its witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history." Such will always be the condition of visionaries whose pictures of social completion are really images of a re-created past. The Green dream of a semi-rural arcadian utopia, undisturbed by the thundering force of Big Business and its needs, is really a looking backwards, a conservative ideal All this spiritual nonsense serves as a valuable diversion as far as the ruling class is concerned: while the proles are searching for the invisible spirits they will not be disturbing capitalism as a material reality.

The Times (26 December 1988) reported that "After a decade of old-fashioned pursuit of money and status. Americans and the citizens of the other rich countries will, as the planet runs low on space and resources, turn in the closing years of the century to spiritual fulfilment." The newspaper was responding to an article published in The Futurist, which is published by the World Future Society based in Washington DC. In the same city is the US Department which collects figures on official poverty. It reports that one in four citizens of the United States is living below the government poverty line. So, while bored Californians turn to the non-existent spirit for comfort in a worrying world, others cry for lack of material necessities to keep themselves warm, fed and clothed. There is no solution to be found in the so-called New Age ritualism whereby abstract idealism overcomes the need to attend to harsh material requirements. And it is precisely because there is no solution in such inaction that capitalism will quite willingly accommodate the growth of Green ideology.

Green profits

Big business is making plenty of money out of the new green consciousness. An article in The Guardian entitled “Conning of the Greens" (17 December 1988) pointed out that the supermarket chains are losing no time in cashing in on the willingness of workers to buy healthier food. This suits the capitalists who employ workers: the healthier we are the more exploitable we are. And it is increasingly suiting the retail capitalists who have created a whole new range of commodities which can be sold at extra cost — conscience money. Sainsbury's was selling organic potatoes at 64 per cent above the price of normal potatoes; organic leeks were 67 per cent dearer and organic lemons 114 per cent more. Tesco's is selling its “own-brand UK mineral water . . . that is calorie free ". John Elkington points out that “People . . .  like to feel that they are paying something extra to protect the planet." Very nice too, if you are one of the capitalists who own the planet.

Capitalism will pass a few minor reforms to win a few green votes, and also because the capitalists themselves realise that their investments are being damaged by the filth created by a lack of environmental concern. Just as they passed The Clean Air Act of 1956, so in the months to come they will attempt a few more self-regulating laws. Needless to say, these laws will be evaded by those rich and powerful enough to do so. Even when the capitalists are agreed on their common interest, there will always be one or two who will try to sneak behind the others’ backs and make an even faster buck.

The planet belongs to them. We, the workers who produce everything and run the planet from top to bottom, have given it to them. Our task is to take it away from them; to reclaim the planet. The Green Party, which does not stand for the socialist transformation of global society, cannot take the planet away from the capitalists. In the end, all they are is a rather futile reform group, pleading with the profit-taking class to do us all a favour and take less profits. Given such a pointless crusade, we need not to be surprised by the following section of the report of their 1988 conference:

Perhaps the most contentious issue at conference was the attempt by National Party Council to replace the sunflower as the party's logo with one of three designer-symbols commissioned by professionals . . . The arguments against keeping the sunflower were confused: it had become associated with healthy eating, some said, while others claimed it looked like a fried egg (hardly healthy food!). Commissioning new logos on such spurious pretexts seemed unnecessary. After all, sunflower logos only look like fried eggs when the petals have not been drawn properly . . . (Green Line, November 1988)

For further news of these exciting political dramas within the party of the future, watch this space.

Steve Coleman

Putting the rant into itinerant (2008)

From the November 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Tourism: can it be green? (2008)

From the July 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

For those ‘green consumers’ who have adopted the principles of a green lifestyle eco-tourism fits neatly with the now familiar slogan to ‘Think Globally – Act Locally’ as a counter to environmental destruction. The adoption of a green lifestyle can include: Buying only organic food; keeping a record of your carbon footprint; using bio-degradable products; ensuring your savings and pension fund is ‘ethically’ invested in bio-diversity products or sustainable projects; supporting ‘fair trading’; participating in recycling schemes; be sparing on the use of plastic bags; and even endorsing the Body Shop empire. The solution is presented as an individual act rather than the collective action of individuals struggling for social change to put a stop to environmental destruction. Of course you can do all of these, but you shouldn’t think that such activities will necessarily lessen the impact on the environment.

For instance, despite the claims of the eco-tourism operators that their priority is sustainability and biodiversity, the green consumer lifestyle facilitates the opening up of a new market where environmental concern is transformed into a commodity. When the market is presented as the saviour of the environment then green consumers, and eco-tourists in particular, need to be aware that they cannot disregard the logic of production for profit. Nevertheless, for socialists the idea of adopting a green lifestyle is not to be derided, because – despite these shortcomings - it is a tentative step towards working with nature, rather than against it.

By increasing our understanding of the interaction between the natural environment and the impact of human activity society will be in a better position to minimise the damage on natural resources, and be able to arrive at rational judgements on whether or not any interference in the natural environment is justified and warranted. But be warned that such environmental concerns are not on the capitalist agenda. For the priority under capitalism is to make a profit by exploiting the environment through market forces.

We travel for relaxation. We travel for adventure. We travel to escape the familiar and venture into the unknown. Tourism brings in money and creates employment: one in 16 jobs worldwide is directly or indirectly related to tourism. In Thailand, tourism is the leading source of foreign exchange. And although tourism can help to maintain a country's interest in its own cultural and artistic heritage and, at it its best, can foster genuine friendships between different members of the human family this all comes with a price attached.

Increasingly, 'alternative travel' as eco-tourism is known in the tourist trade, is being marketed as the only way to see the world these days. And as more and more people venture off the beaten track to experience unique cultures and unspoiled nature, ecotourism is considered the fastest growing market in the tourism industry, with an annual growth rate of 5 percent worldwide. According to the World Tourism Organisation this represents 6 percent of the world gross domestic product and 11.4 percent of all consumer spending.

Whereas, previously, you enjoyed the values of the natural environment by joining the Ramblers or Youth Hostel Association, now its considered more adventurous (and expensive) to take part in white water rafting down remote rivers, or to go native in the Australian bush, stay with the indigenous people in the Amazonian rainforest, enjoy the delights of the local wildlife and the taste of organic food at an eco-lodge in India. These eco-travellers are setting out on foot safaris in Africa, camping in the Mexican rainforest, and trekking to hill tribe villages in Thailand. You can also have a holiday in a tree-house in Costa Rica and enjoy the delights of a ropeway through the jungle canopy. And if none of these at to your taste what about some whale watching in Victoria B.C. where you can disrupt the breeding habits of the grey whale and walrus?

There are many more such holidays on offer and they are increasing by the day. At the last count taken in 2007 ten percent of the global travel market is now eco-tourism. And though the 21st century is considered an era of environmental sensitivity and climate change remains firmly on the global conscience, with remote locations becoming more and more accessible many countries are beginning to promote their natural wonders to bring in the eco-minded tourist. But in doing so the market system is faced with a conundrum of trying to preserve natural resources and also try to accommodate the vast numbers of tourists they will attract.

The ideal of eco-tourism, as defined by Martha Honey, the executive director of the International Ecotourism Society, reads like a travel agents dream:

"Travel to fragile, pristine and usually protected areas that strives to be low impact and usually small scale. It helps educate travelers; provides funds for conservation; directly benefits the economic development and political empowerment of local communities; and fosters respect for different cultures and human rights."

However, this ideal in many instances fails miserably to achieve its aim and in fact contributes to environmental destruction. For the reality is that in terms of human impact eco-tourists are no different – other than in scale – to the everyday tourist on a package holiday to the Costa Bravo. This is what an official for the World Wildlife Fund told Leo Hickman about on the impact of tourism in Thailand:

“The tsunami was nothing compared to the impact of tourism. It is a much larger, long-term problem. . . . I was born in 1972 and when I was eight or nine it was still largely virgin rainforest here on the island. By the late 1980s, though, it was mostly developed. We have now lost so much of the biodiversity and primary forest and the soil is destabilising in many places. The construction of hotels upstream is creating a lot of sediment in the water and this causes damage to the coral reefs when it washes out to sea. It also affects the mangroves on the east coast. A lot of our waste water – about 40 per cent – is still being pumped out to sea on the west coast where all the resort areas are.
Land is now so expensive here due to tourism; the cost of living is even higher than Bangkok – it has meant that many local people have been forced to sell off their ancestral home and have now lost their only real asset. There is even competition for schools here for the first time. And there is a lot of overfishing here; this is for export rather than for the tourists per se, but lobsters are now being brought in from Burma to meet the tourists’ appetite for these vulnerable creatures. The corals are also damaged by tourism. Snorkellers actually cause more damage than divers because they touch the coral more often….”

(Leo Hickman, The Final Call – In Search of the True Cost of our Holidays, 2007).

In Costa Rica, whose parks are wildly popular with the millions of people who visit the country each year, the behaviour of some wild animals has been altered - some monkeys attack and bite tourists when not fed. Along the trail to the Mount Everest base camp in Nepal, deforestation is getting worse as locals cut down trees to heat meals and to provide hot showers for foreign eco-trekkers. And Mount Everest itself is becoming infamous for the amount of discarded rubbish left on the routes towards the summit. Some estimates put it at over 2000 tons which don’t include the remains of a helicopter. And in the lower regions of the Himalayan foothills the popularity of backpacking is not only causing serious soil erosion but water pollution.

And what has happened in Nepal is only one example where eco-tourism is becoming transformed into eco-vandalism through the insanity of the profit system. Another example is what is happening in Kerala in India which is marketed either as, ‘God’s own country’, or as, the ‘Gateway to Paradise’. Kerala is a unique water region famous for its lakes, rivers and back waters and distinct wildlife and fauna and is also an attractive stopover or base for the eco-tourists who visit the nearby National Reserve. However, what is not marketed by the Kerala Tourist Board is the lack of sewerage facilities and rubbish collection for its thousands upon thousands of houseboats and hotels and so called eco-lodges. Before Kerala became invaded by tourists the indigenous population ensured their impact on the natural environment was sustainable or recyclable. Now water courses are becoming heavily polluted with sewerage and the plastic debris of a throwaway society.

Besides environmental damage there can be profound social and cultural consequences to travel as well. For example, what is occurring in Northern Thailand, home to many different 'hill tribes,' is a case in point. Uniquely individual in language, customs and dress, these semi-nomadic peoples share a history of ancestor worship and a close relationship with the land. However, with the introduction of eco-tourism they also share the experience of being in something akin to a human zoo. Hill tribe trekking operations sell 'authentic visits’ to see 'primitive peoples`. But what the eco-tourists are not told is that much of the so called culture on show has a tenuous relationship with the actual culture of the people they are visiting, for in actual fact the ‘traditional’ culture has been transformed into a commodity to meet the demands of the tourist market. In short the eco-tourist is being sold an illusion that the culture on display is ‘authentic’.

The ravages of eco-tourism and tourism in general are becoming so self-evident it raises the question what can we do to lessen the impact of human activity but nevertheless still enjoy a holiday – both at home and overseas? Firstly, it is essential to acknowledge that when market forces literally encourage an irrational human impact on the environment and natural resources, how can you also realistically expect those self-same forces to solve the environmental problems they created in the first place? Therefore, in the search for solutions it’s become vital that we look outside of the capitalist box where the social relationships of private ownership of the means of living constrain and restrict our constructive abilities to remedy environmental destruction.

In socialism where the principle of free access underpins the common ownership of the means of living our options and choices on travel and holidays would be extended and influenced by what positive contribution we can make to the country we are visiting. And with package holidays and mass tourism a thing of the past it is most likely holidays in socialism would not be restricted within a timescale of 10 to 14 days of hectic hedonism but transformed into an unique opportunity to stay in a particular location for as long as it takes to understand the history and culture of that region. In effect the transformation in the social relationships from private property ownership to common ownership will radically alter our perception of travel.

Under such conditions eco-tourism will come into its own with visits to particular regions becoming combined with studies on the wildlife, fauna and local culture. On the other hand you may wish to take part in making housing improvements by demolishing shanty towns or transforming a former holiday hotel into flats for the local population. Alternatively you could help out in a health clinic, or even give a hand to clean up polluted waterways. In effect whatever your particular choice of holiday the aim will be to combine it with an understanding that the framework of socialism will assist everybody on the globe in meeting their needs for shelter, food, clothing, education and health. Indeed it’s time to start thinking of trashing capitalism not the planet.

Brian Johnson