Voice From The Back: Carpet sales (2004)

The Voice From The Back Column from the December 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Carpet sales  

The designer and poet William Morris was a committed socialist who had to live with the irony that, although he wanted the abolition of the wages system, the only people who could afford his carpets, tapestries and furniture were the very rich. The following item in the Independent (6 October) illustrates this. “A William Morris carpet that cost £113 new in 1883 was bought for £193,760 in an auction at Sotheby’s in London yesterday. The flowered design, a synthesis of medieval and eastern motifs, was one of only two examples known with a cream and apricot background. It was made for a house in Holland Park, West London, measuring 17ft 5ins by 13ft 6ins.” £193,000 for a carpet – something to bear in mind when you are looking for a bargain at the January sales!

Embarrassed, moi?

“A giant oil company once headed by Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, used its British subsidiaries to flout American sanctions against Iran . . . Their exports – estimated to be worth more than £30m a year – have continued despite sanctions introduced by the US government nine years ago barring Americans from trading or ‘facilitating business’ with the Islamic state. The new findings will embarrass Cheney, President George W Bush’s running mate in next month’s elections. Cheney has described Iran as ‘one of the world’s most dangerous regimes’” (Times, 17 October). He “earned” $44m during his tenure at Haliburton, continues to collect deferred compensation of $150,000 a year and owns $18m in share options. The gap between political rhetoric and economic reality has never embarrassed hypocrites like Cheney.

Dying for work

A TV programme entitled ‘Britain’s Secret Shame’ (BBC, 3 November) illustrated the extent of corporate manslaughter in this country. It reported that about 250 workers die at work every year due to the negligence of their employers. Prosecutions rarely take place, convictions are even rarer, and then it is usually only smaller firms. Attempts to introduce legislation have all failed because the owning class warn the government that more stringent legislation would be too costly. Just another example of how inside capitalism profits are more important than the workers who produce them.

Dying for profit

“Britain’s largest drug company drew up a secret plan to double sales of the controversial anti-depressant Seroxat by marketing it as a cure for a raft of less serious mental conditions, the Observer can reveal today. The contents of the 250-page document have alarmed health campaigners who accuse the firm, GlaxoSmithKLine (GSK) of putting profits before therapeutic needs by attempting to broaden the market for the drug which has been linked to a series of suicides . . . Concerns about the addictive properties of Seroxat saw the government ban its prescription to people under the age of 18 last year. This followed a review which found children taking it were more likely to self-harm or commit suicide” (Observer, 7 November). It seems the company were attempting to move sales from $1 billion to $2billion by pushing it to people who were not clinically depressed. When there is money like this to be made even the “respectable” shareholders become murderous drug pushers.

Dying with poverty

Under the headline ‘Desperate plight of cancer sufferers living in poverty’ (Times, 9 November) reported as follows: “At least three quarters of the million Britons with cancer suffer from financial hardship brought on by the disease, including enforced job losses, discrimination and poor benefit allowances, according to research. A report by Macmillan Cancer Relief suggests that the disease costs patients hundreds of millions of pounds, for which they have little or no financial cover.” Needless to say this poverty only applies to the working class, as those capitalists unfortunate enough to suffer from the disease have at least the consolation that they will receive the best of care and that their families will not suffer financially.

Who cares?

Twenty years ago an explosion at the chemical factory in Bhopal in central India killed more than 15,000 people, and survivors are still trying to cope with the effects of this horrendous disaster. “Yesterday, half a million people who were in the path of the lethal cloud that spewed out of the chemical plant received a second compensation payment of £300 to £1,200” (Times, 13 November). This is in addition to a first payment of £500 per person from the company responsible Union Carbide. Dow Chemicals, who now own Union Carbide, refuse to clean up the site which still holds 25,000 tons of toxic waste. Another example of capitalism’s priorities. Make a couple of bucks, kill 15,000 and leave an area full of children who have difficulty breathing and are painfully dying, who cares? Socialists do.

The poison of development aid (1986)

From the Summer 1986 issue of the World Socialist

The following article has been translated from the Internationales Freies Wort, journal of the Bund Demokratischer Sozialisten, the section of the World Socialist Movement in Austria.

The poison gas catastrophe in Bhopal in India with its large number of dead plus many more blinded and injured shook world opinion. The American multinational chemical corporation Union Carbide, to whom the Indian poison laboratory belonged, was quick to point out in the media that its production of protection for plants (pesticides) aided India towards self-sufficiency in food and thereby saved many people from dying of hunger. So, after deducting the thousands who were poisoned Union Carbide still comes out as positive!

But the truth is that India doesn't need any poisonous material for pesticides. The poverty-stricken small farmers lack the most basic implements such as spades and hoes as well as pumps for irrigation, etc. But there's no business in this for big industry in the Western countries. So the underdeveloped countries get pushed the products which the industrialised countries want to sell, all in the name of development aid. In other words, "we are helping ourselves, not the underdeveloped countries" as no less than President Nixon openly declared when development aid was under attack in America.

So the Indians, happy with their unordered poison which of course the poverty-stricken small farmers could not buy, were forced to migrate to the towns as they couldn't make a living from agriculture, where they settled in front of the gates of the chemical factory and died "like flies" when the poison gas leak came.

World opinion, prevented from a correct insight into the problems of the underdeveloped countries by all the manoeuvres that go on over loans and exchange rates, was taken unawares by this catastrophe. But not anyone who had taken the trouble to inform themselves of the facts. Some years ago the American writer Susan George published her How The Other Half Dies in which she attacked established myths and exposed the businesses of the industrialised countries as responsible for the poverty of the underdeveloped countries.

Such statements are not approved of by the establishment of the industrialised countries — but the latter's failings make their investigation of the problem worthless. This is also the case with the "Independent Commission for Development Questions", a committee under the chairmanship of Willy Brandt (SPD), the majority of whose members are "representatives" of the underdeveloped countries themselves but they are all from the capital-benefiting elite-strata of these countries. The consequence is that the first report (1980) carefully avoids everything that could go against the capital interests of the industrialised countries and so ignores all the real problems and can show no way towards solving them.

The second report (1983) is just the same. In the foreword Brandt points out that events have regrettably confirmed the worst apprehensions of the first report. In which case the Brandt Commission was useless. Of the 94 proposals in the first report not one had been implemented. Of course something else will happen — more recommendations and more pious wishes.

Development to what?

In reality everything resolves around the preservation of the existing economic institutions of the industrialised countries. The assumption is that the underdeveloped countries should be lifted to the splendid heights of the developed countries. But people in the developing countries are less and less enchanted with this. It has been noticed that all the aid has not reduced the gap between living standards in the South and those in the North — on the contrary the backward countries have fallen even further behind. It has also been noticed that the industrialised countries are not a paradise for all their inhabitants. The introduction of industry into the underdeveloped countries has led to more disadvantages than advantages — the uprooting of traditional ways of living and working, the cut-back in home production in favour of the products of the multinational corporations, the growing impoverishment through the ever-increasing dispossession of those who are insolvent, ending in the disasters like Bhopal.

If the practice of industrial development is so unsatisfactory this is above all because its theory, the basic concept of raising the underdeveloped countries to the level of the developed countries, is nonsense from the beginning. When the whole world is "developed" and busies itself with profitable stock exchange transactions where would the raw materials and foodstuffs at present imported from the underdeveloped countries come from?

But this leads to the view that real aid for the underdeveloped countries demands fundamental changes in the developed countries — and that the establishment does not want to hear. It wants to push forward normal business to an ever greater extent, to exploit the population of the underdeveloped countries as underpaid producers of raw materials and, beyond this, also to make them low-wage industrial workers and customers for the products of the multinationals. In this effort large factories have been set up in the underdeveloped countries, to the detriment of existing industries in the developed countries. Their financing has mainly come from credit.

International debts

High finance, which likes to go on about being thrifty, once again didn't follow its own advice. The big banks queued up to lend credits to the underdeveloped countries. Now they are faced with the international debt problem, the consequences of which are borne by the underdeveloped countries. Over-burdened with debts these have growing interest payments and an increasing dollar exchange rate to worry about too. The much-ballyhooed recovery of the American economy which Reagan boasts about has taken place mainly to the detriment of other countries. Tax reductions for the rich and unlimited increasing arms spending has led to an enormous deficit in the American budget with no noticeable inflation — at home. The inflation was in fact exported through the increased interest rates which attracted international capital to the US and made it a debtor country, but pushed up the exchange rate of the dollar.

The underdeveloped countries are now faced with a mountain of debts expressed in expensive dollars, borrowed at ever-increasing rates of interest. On top of this the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which the second Brandt report still hoped would increase its support for these countries, forced devaluations on the debtors, further increasing the burden of their dollar debt. In 1985 the interest payments alone were 50 per cent of the borrowed amount for Argentina and Brazil and 40 per cent in the case of Mexico. These are the so-called "threshold countries" who stand on the threshold of industrialisation and so should be "somewhat better" than the ordinary underdeveloped countries!

The Debtors

Brazil was the first country to break the hundred billion dollar debt level. In Sao Paulo 34 per cent of those available for work are unemployed. They don't known that they each owe 14,000 Schillings (about $750) to the international bankers, and, even if they did know, it wouldn't worry them. The debts were contracted under the military regime to use on numerous large projects which were in part profitable, but which in many cases became unprofitable through mismanagement and the downturn in the economy. Home-produced cars fill the streets, but have no petrol and run on alcohol which is produced from raw sugar. The cultivation of this together with that of soya beans for export means that the cultivation of foodstuffs has fallen by 12 per cent, and this in a country of chronic undernourishment! The really pressing problem of increasing the production of home-grown foodstuffs has been forgotten in the industrialisation-illusion.

The Pinochet regime in Chile, supported by international finance capital, came to power through the murder of the democratically-elected President Allende and has since practised a murderous reign of terror. But this has not meant that there have been no business swindles under it. The five big banks which Pinochet had privatised could only be saved from bankruptcy by being renationalised. And a number of bankers and two Ministers have been found guilty of fraud by the Courts.

In this respect there is no essential change if a military government is replaced by a civilian one, as has happened in Argentina and now also in Brazil, so long as the civilian government continues to obey international capital and its bailiff, the IMF. In the rest of South America and in Africa and Asia things are similar: foreign credit is mainly used for projects which ignore the needs of the population because these only very sporadically correspond to the valorisation requirements of capital.

The spectre

There is a saying that if you owe the bank $1000 you have problems but that if you owe the bank $1,000,000 the bank has problems. And the underdeveloped countries have debts of billions of dollars! Hence the spectre of a debtor's cartel: if all the developing countries were to stop their payments at the same time then all the big banks in the industrialised countries would go bankrupt and there would be an economic earthquake. At present it hasn't happened as the governments in these backward countries are in the hands of wealthy capital-benefiting minorities and have openly gone into the (well paid) service of the foreign exploiters. But in the last analysis they have to understand that an explosion threatens them if they exact further sacrifices from the population.

The creditors can no longer seriously hope to ever recover their capital. It is now only a case for the creditor-banks of not having to cancel the uncollected debts and thereby admit their faulty credit position. The debtors are given a delay for repayment and are lent yet more money so that they can pay the interest. In theory the debtors receive the new money but they never see it; it remains in New York, London, etc in the hands of the banks who are thus enabled to achieve considerable profits.

The truth is that these countries can only settle these new debts inadequately. Among the many proposed solutions there is the tried solution which always emerges when the capitalists are in difficulty: let the much-suffering state pay! This would save the banks, before or after, from their bankruptcy - naturally at the expense of the majority of the population of the industrialised countries who thereby see established a forced solidarity with the inhabitants of the underdeveloped countries.

We can't help thanking them. Financial pressures have produced more than enough harm — they have poisoned not only the thousands in Bhopal but the whole economy of the underdeveloped countries. And the economy of the industrialised countries is in no better state: they suffer from stagnation and unemployment and so have unused resources that could be used to produce the things the underdeveloped countries really need.

But this is opposed to the basic principles of the profit economy: only what yields or at least promises a profit is produced. Here is the real problem and any attempt to find a solution must start from here. The removal of the profit system is the watchword. That the Brandt Commission and the other aid schemes are chained to the profit system is the real reason for their failure.

Capitalism versus nature (2008)

From the June 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism is bound to come into conflict with nature. It cannot go green because it cannot change its spots.

It is by no means unknown for a society to collapse for ecological reasons, which is to say, because it did not treat its environment with care. By ‘collapse’ here is meant a drastic reduction in living standards and population, not that everybody who lives in a certain place dies. One example would be Easter Island in the Pacific, where the population had fallen to just a few thousand by the time it was discovered by Europeans in the eighteenth century. Deforestation had led to soil erosion and a consequent cut in crop yields, so that the isolated island could no longer support the numbers it had previously. Another would be the Mayan civilisation of central America, which declined gradually through the ninth century, leaving great ruined temples and cities behind. Though it is more arguable in this case, the probable reason was a combination of drought and deforestation leading to a big drop in agricultural production.

The collapse of present-day society, then, might involve far fewer people surviving and at a far lower standard of living, but it would not result in the end of humanity and certainly not of the planet on which we live. Yet how likely is it that there will be a societal collapse caused by climate change or other ecological factors?

In answering this question, we need to look not mainly at technical questions such as how energy is produced and how crops are grown, important though these of course are. Rather, we need to examine the economic basis of society and see the implications of the ways in which production as a whole is organised and of how priorities are considered.

For present-day society is capitalism, which means that it is based on ownership of the earth and the mines, factories, offices and so on by a small part of the population, leaving most people to rely on selling their labour power to an employer in return for a wage. Unless you’re one of the small minority of owners, you cannot live under capitalism without working for a wage, or living with someone who does so. Moreover, production takes place because of the need of the owners to make a profit, and they have no choice but to strive to maintain and increase their position of power and wealth. Since production is guided by the profit motive, it inevitably comes into conflict with the rest of nature.

As a small example, many high-street shops leave their doors open because it looks more inviting to potential customers, even though it increases their heating bills and the amount of energy consumed. An instance on a grander scale was the recent decision by Shell to withdraw from developing an offshore wind farm in the Thames estuary. The sizeable initial investment needed and rising costs — including the impact of raw material prices on the production of the turbines themselves — mean that oil is currently more profitable than wind. Shell noted that reviewing existing projects and focussing on efficiency were simply normal business practice, and sadly that’s just what they are: ecological concerns take very much a back seat.

Perhaps the worst single occasion of capitalism’s priorities coming into conflict with the health of the planet and its people is the explosion at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, India in 1984. This saw toxic gas released on a wide scale, with up to eight thousand people dying immediately and many more in the aftermath, to say nothing of those made seriously ill. In The Enemy of Nature, Joel Kovel looks at the background to this disaster. The factory was losing money, so Union Carbide took various steps to reduce costs. Among other things, valves were not repaired, alarms were not maintained, and in general safety installations were inadequate. It may not have been ‘an accident waiting to happen’ exactly, but pursuing profit increased immeasurably the chances of an explosion taking place.

Equally, deforestation in the Amazon is caused primarily not by subsistence cultivators but by commercial interests clearing land for pasture. Cattle ranches occupy vast areas of cleared land and result in huge profits for the owners. The devaluation of its currency, the real, made Brazilian beef more competitive on the world market and increased the profits of the ranchers. The loss of animal and plant species and of renewable timber resources are simply not part of the profit-and-loss calculations.

Moreover, writers on energy constantly refer to economic considerations in discussing whether their technological proposals are viable. James Lovelock, for instance, regards renewable energy as ‘inefficient and expensive’, hence his support for nuclear power. The Severn Barrage, meanwhile, is ‘an attractive business proposition’. In discussing ways to combat global warming, George Monbiot says he is looking for ‘the cheapest way to cut carbon emissions’.

It must be admitted that there are counter-arguments to the effect that capitalism and the profit motive can after all solve ecological problems. Companies which are more efficient in terms of energy use than their competitors will have lower costs and so are likely to have higher profits. Thus simple economic arithmetic will lead to more sensible uses of energy. And more generally, there is profit to be made in industries which are ecologically-oriented, from the manufacture of reusable energy sources to biofuel companies and even the humble bicycle repair shop. It might be argued, too, that international measures have been and can be taken to solve the worst environmental problems, from the banning of the pesticide DDT in the 1970s to the more recent Montreal Protocol that reduced the use of CFCs.

However, energy production and global warming are far different, being integrated as closely as they could be in capitalist production in general. Combatting them would not be a mere matter of disrupting the manufacture of aerosols or weedkillers, but of changing something which is part and parcel of the capitalist system and on which all companies depend. No company will take action which endangers their profits, just as no government will pass legislation that puts the capitalists whose interests they represent at a disadvantage. Capitalism is about competition and profit-making, and this is something which can never be done away with as long as it lasts.

Capitalism, then, is bound to come into conflict with nature. It cannot go green because it simply cannot change its spots. Jonathan Porritt once reflected in an interesting way on what a green society would be like. Among other things, it would involve production for use and work as an end in itself. He’s not a socialist, but in speculating on the meaning of greenness he did in effect realise that a society which lived as far as possible in harmony nature would be a socialist one, and that such a possibility cannot be realised under capitalism.

Paul Bennett

The poisoning of the Rhine (1987)

From the February 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the 9th of November 1986 a fire at the enormous Sandoz chemicals factory in Basle led to 30 tons of poisonous chemicals, including about 200 kilogrammes of mercury, being washed into the river Rhine as firemen fought to bring the blaze under control. The 40-mile-long wave of poison caused by the incident flowed along the Rhine from Germany into the Netherlands affecting the drinking water of 20 million people. In the upper reaches of the Rhine most plant life, thousands offish, water birds and a quarter of a million eels are estimated to have died and although most of the fish seem to have survived in the lower Rhine they face death from starvation because many insects and crayfish upon which they feed have perished. Such is the severity of the pollution that it could take up to twenty years before the ecological balance of the river is fully restored.

Pollution of the air, soil, rivers and oceans is not a new problem: the smoke-blackened older public buildings in most of Britain's major towns and cities (where restoration has not been carried out); the descriptions of polluted cities and rivers by writers such as Blake, Engels, Kingsley, Dickens, Carpenter, Gissing and Orwell; the terrible death tolls of the early 1950s caused by smog all bear testimony to the way in which industrialisation has ruined the environment and damaged workers' health.

There always have been, and always will be, incidents leading to results that are not foreseen or intended. These accidents may be caused by human error, circumstances beyond human control (such as earthquakes) or lack of knowledge to anticipate all the consequences of an action.

But many of the incidents which occur under capitalism are not, strictly speaking, accidents. The drive to produce profits leads to methods of production designed to ensure that the maximum amount of surplus value is derived from workers' labour power. Human error is much more likely to be increased where work is repetitive, boring and alienating or where the hours of work are long and exhausting. Often workers are kept in ignorance of potentially dangerous substances that they are working with and are consequently unable to take adequate safety precautions. In some instances safety equipment may not be supplied, or removed to increase productivity. Substances are used in agriculture, the drug and chemical industries often with little knowledge of their effects on the environment, the workers using them or. in the case of medicines, the patients consuming them.

But even when hazards are well known and documented the requirement of profitability overrides human needs and dangerous substances continue to be used. There are, for example, about 2000 asbestos-induced deaths a year in Britain although the dangers of using asbestos were pointed out in a Home Office report in 1906. Thalidomide and "Opren" continued to be used after it was known that they had caused deaths and deformities.

It is not unusual for safety standards to be inadequate or ignored altogether to cut production costs. In 1976 workers at the Life Science Products factory in Hopewell. Virginia were found to be working in an environment that was laden with dust from the insecticide "Kepone". The nearby James river also had to be closed because of the severity of the contamination. The pollution of the environment and the risk to workers at the Life Science Products factory (who suffered from severe headaches, tremors and, in some cases, sterility) was not caused by lack of knowledge of the risks to health of using "Kepone" but, as an investigation showed, a pollution control system had not been installed because it would have affected profitability.

The evacuation of Seveso due to a discharge of dioxin has not led to a curtailment of products which contain the poison. And the local population were not informed of the dangers to health for at least ten days after the incident although the manufacturers. Roche, were aware within forty-eight hours that dioxin had been released.

The disaster at Bhopal, where hundreds of cases of serious poisoning in the local community resulted, due to a discharge of poisonous chemicals demonstrates how multinational companies avoid health and safety legislation by switching production to underdeveloped countries where regulations are lax and, consequently, greater profits can be made. And the ease with which production can be moved emphasises the limitations of reforms, especially if attempted on a local or national basis, when workers' organisations are taking on the power of multinational corporations.

One feature of the poisoning of the Rhine has been the comparative lack of reporting of the incident: a major European river has been poisoned, creating an ecological disaster which has affected, and will continue to affect, most of the marine life; the drinking water of 20 million people has been polluted and there could be considerable problems in providing alternative supplies, particularly in years of drought. But newspaper coverage in Britain was, in many instances, relegated to the inside pages. The trivial activities of the parasitical royal family and the ratings war between the television soap operas continued to dominate the news instead. Perhaps the public has become so immune to news of industrial "accidents" that they have ceased to shock: the pollution of our environment has come to be seen as part of the "natural order" of things.

Only a week before the fire at Basle, a chemical plant explosion near the resort of Varna on the Black Sea coast is thought to have killed 17 people. The Bulgarian authorities failed to provide details of the incident and, therefore, the extent of the damage is not known, making it more difficult to protect the public.

It was also reported that the survival of Indian tribes in Brazil is threatened because BP's mining subsidiary working in conjunction with Bruscan, a Canadian company, had set up a local network of more than 100 companies covering 54 million acres.

Both of these news items took up only a paragraph in The Independent and were probably omitted altogether by some of the tabloids. And yet both of these items illustrate two features of capitalism: social needs are always secondary to the need to make profits and commercial interests are protected by secrecy even when this is detrimental to the well-being of the community.

As yet it is far too soon to be able to say with any degree of accuracy what went wrong at the Sandoz chemicals factory at Basle. It is important, however, to try to prevent such incidents happening in the future. But whilst capitalism remains, dangerous materials will continue to be used if they are cheaper, and the competitive nature of capitalism prevents information from being shared which would reduce the risk of accidents elsewhere.

In a socialist society information could be shared: a society in which competition gives way to co-operation would have no need for secrets. Dangerous substances would not be used just because they are cheaper — where possible safer substitutes would be found.

Socialists aim to establish a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interests of the whole community. In a moneyless, socialist society in which free access to goods replaces the artificial scarcities of capitalism, production can be planned properly and the world's resources conserved instead of being wasted or damaged for the sake of making a quick profit.

The lessons of Basle, Seveso, Bhopal and Chernobyl have taught the workers that under capitalism "accidents" will continue to occur. And, although enquiries are conducted, and scapegoats found, production continues as before. Indeed, in the aftermath of Chernobyl the Russian government has stated that it intends to increase its nuclear power programme instead of reducing it.

The risk to the world posed by the threat of nuclear weapons, nuclear power, dangerous industrial processes and indiscriminate waste of resources has never been greater in spite of all the efforts of reformists and ecological pressure groups Only the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by socialism can halt the destruction. We must destroy capitalism before it destroys the earth.

Carl Pinel

Remember Bhopal ! (1999)

From the December 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Fifteen years ago this month the greatest industrial disaster of this century crept quietly over the sleeping one million population of Bhopal, capital of the Indian State of Madhya Pradesh. On the midnight of 3 December 1984, the Union Carbide chemical plant released over 40 tonnes of gases into the night air. What happened then, and what followed, clearly illustrates the anti-human concerns of the privateers of capital and their system.

The Bhopal plant contained a chemical storage tank, with 40 tonnes of methylisocyanate (CH3NCO), or MIC. It was this tank that ruptured, releasing this gas and possibly others (including hydrogen cyanide) into the air. The gas spread over an area of some 20 square kilometres, helped by the low, but changeable wind. The discharge lasted for around one hour. Lethal injuries occurred up to a distance of 2.5 kilometres from the plant, and people noticed effects as far away as 4 kilometres. MIC reacts with water, and thus is extremely irritating on tissues such as eyes, throat or lungs, and has a high acute toxicity when inhaled.

A number of factors led to the release of this toxic cloud. From 1980 onwards up till 1984 Union Carbide (UC) had been cutting the number of staff at the plant. The number of workers on the MIC tank was halved, from 12 to 6 and the maintenance crew was cut from 6 to just 2. In December 1981 a plant worker died from exposure to phosgene gas leaked at the site; in January 1982 28 workers were exposed to phosgene from another leak, and a further 4 in October of the same year. In May 1982 an internal report noted “a total of 61 hazards, 30 major and 11 in the dangerous phosgene/MIC units”. On the night of the disaster the refrigeration unit, meant to keep the MIC at near zero degrees (and thus stable), was switched off to save electricity, and the safety equipment was not functioning because it was under repair.

Lies 
The exact cause of the accident remains unknown: somehow water got into the MIC tank, and began a runaway reaction. The MIC began to heat and evaporate, and eventually the valves burst, sending the gas pluming outwards—the safety equipment (the chimney and water sprays to douse the gas out of the air) failed to prevent the escape. As the leak began UC enacted the first of its lies. The warning sirens remained silent, so as to “not unduly alarm” the population within reach of the toxic cloud. One UC doctor is on the record as saying: “A lot of patients could have been saved had they not panicked, what they did is start running, which caused them to breathe more deeply. If they just would have taken their time and sort of walked away from the scene they wouldn’t have inhaled so much of the pollutant”. Days after the event UC were maintaining that MIC was “nothing more than a potent tear gas”.

History, of course, brands such statements lies, as, also, would the Union Carbide safety handbook, which stated “MIC is poison to humans by inhalation, swallowing or skin-contact even limited exposure can be fatal”. Of course, UC did not release such data to the public and in fact withheld all the relevant data about MIC even from the emergency teams, claiming to need to protect commercial secrets and intellectual property rights. This left doctors treating the victims in the dark, proscribing treatments that “might” help, but which might have made an outright disaster even worse. The toxic cloud left 8,000 people dead, and some 300,000 injured, of whom between 50,000 and 70,000 sustained permanent damage.

The social impact of this disaster was far reaching. The sick and injured often were the main source of income for their families, and medical costs for many of the survivors were more than their means allowed. The lingering effects of the disaster included blindness for many. Up to thirteen years later:

  nearly one fourth of the exposed population is chronically ill with diseases of the respiratory, gastro-intestinal, reproductive, musculoskeletal, neurological and other systems. Corneal opacity and early age cataract are common in more than half a million exposed population. Breathlessness, loss of appetite, pain, menstrual irregularities, recurrent fever, persistent cough, neurological disorders, fatigue, weakness, anxiety and depression are the most common symptoms.

And chromosomal studies point to a future generation of victims of the leak.

Legal manoeuvres 
Union Carbide immediately blamed a rogue saboteur or a disgruntled worker for the disaster. The Indian authorities begged to differ, and began criminal and civil proceedings against Union Carbide. UC proved unwilling to have its saboteur claims tested in court, and fought every inch of the way, hiring eventually $50 million worth of legal assistance to defend themselves. As civil proceedings dragged on, the Indian High Court ordered Union Carbide to pay a sum of $90.4 million, as an interim payment to help alleviate the suffering of the victims until the full settlement was reached.

At the same time the Indian government pursued a claim for $3 billion dollars in the US courts. The case was followed with interest on Wall Street, as it would establish a precedent for the accountability of multinational corporate entities. In May 1986 the State Court of New York ruled that the case could not be heard in America, and that it must go back to the Indian courts. Effectively, they ruled that corporations were not responsible in their home countries for disasters that occur abroad. As UC pursued appeal after appeal against the interim payment, they opened up secret negotiations with the Indian government.

In 1989 the Indian High Court announced a surprise deal. Union Carbide agreed to pay a total of $470 million in compensation, as well as providing $20 million worth of funding towards local hospitals. For its part the Indian government promised to protect Union Carbide from any future independent lawsuits. This settlement meant that around 90 percent of the victims would receive $430, with the average in total being $940 per recipient. This sum represented 50c per share of Union Carbide stock. On the day it was announced, UC shares rose by 2c. The awards barely covered, for most, the costs of the medical treatment they had required, let alone the earnings lost because of not being able to work.

The Indian authorities continued criminal charges against the 10 top officials of UC. They were charged with “culpable homicide”, a charge just short of outright murder. The initial proceedings were started by the local authorities on the night of the disaster itself, and the chief executive Warren Anderson was arrested. He was bailed for $2,000 and hasn’t returned to India since. Little movement was made on the criminal charges, until the Indian Criminal Bureau of Investigation brought charges in December 1987. Anderson resolutely refused to attend the trial, ignoring a summons from Interpol, and Union Carbide de-registered its Indian holdings. In 1996 the Supreme Court downgraded the charges to death caused by negligence, which carries a sentence of around two years. Throughout, the Indian authorities showed little zeal in pursuing the case.

Market concerns 
Union Carbide liked to portray its presence in India as a beneficent act. But the fact is UC was there to make money and aggrandise itself.

It was market concerns that led UC to build a bigger plant producing hazardous chemicals than necessary at Bhopal, as Edward Munoz, a former director of Union Carbide India, revealed in an interview:

  The plant to begin with should have been for 2 million pounds not for 10 million pounds, you know. We believed our own propaganda. We were cornering the market by asking for 10,000 tons. We knew that 10,000 tons wasn’t realistic for the next five to ten years. But we knew that if we asked for 2 million pounds and then Beyer will ask for other 2 million pounds, and FMC will come and ask for—and then we have competition in the market, so we ask for 10 million pounds. You know, but the engineering department said, well, if we are supposed to build a 10 million pound plant, we are going to build a 10 million pound plant (Go to source).

MIC is a volatile substance, and expensive to store, contributing to the potential for disaster, as the company, ever desperate to increase its profits, looked to cutting costs and jobs. At every stage myopic interest stood pre-ordinate in the minds of UC policy-makers.

Union Carbide was forced by its very nature as a publicly owned company (i.e. in that any member of the public may buy shares) to behave the way it did. As one commentator notes:

 had they [UC] been genuinely forthcoming and made truly disinterested offers of help on a scale appropriate to the magnitude of the disaster, they would almost certainly have been confronted with suits from shareholders seeking to hold management to account for mishandling funds.

By the very laws on which such corporations are based, and by the very rigours and imperatives of the market, Union Carbide was categorically unable to behave in an humane way towards its victims.

Union Carbide has remained at the top of its industry, despite this disaster, and “the corporation participates in partnerships and corporate joint ventures whose combined net sales totalled approximately $4.1 billion in 1998” (http://www.unioncarbide.com/). It holds 22 percent of the paints market and 18 percent of the packaging market. This year: “On August 4th, Union Carbide and The Dow Chemical Company announced that their boards of directors have approved an $11.6 billion merger to create the world’s second largest chemical company, to be known as The Dow Chemical Company”.

This is taken from “A Brief Chronology of Union Carbide“, in which the Bhopal disaster only merits a brief mention as an act of sabotage that caused “a tragic loss of life”. Union Carbide has accepted “moral responsibility” for the accident, but it cannot let that get in the way of its profits. Like the scorpion in the oft-told story of the frog and the scorpion, the scorpion-Union Carbide put profits before people, because that’s what it does, it can’t help itself.

The story of Bhopal is not a story of a wicked cabal of corporates viciously conspiring against the people of India, but, rather, a story of the Mad-Blind Machine God of the market crushing all in its heedless path. All along the way, profits and property were put before the needs of people. Humans were subordinated to the drives of the commerce. 8,000 were slaughtered and quickly forgotten, and capitalists were given a green light to exploit the artificial divisions of national boundaries to escape any form of responsibility for their actions.

This is why it is all the more imperative that the working class organises itself, world-wide, to stand solidly against a system that can so wantonly throw away life.

Pik Smeet

Green capitalism (1990)

Book Review from the July 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Green Capitalists: How Industry Can Make Money—and Protect the Environment. By John Elkington and Tom Burke. (Victor Gollancz.)

John Elkington and Tom Burke, both involved in environmental pressure groups and public relations work for large corporations, have written a book which documents. industrial sector by industrial sector. the way in which capitalism, driven by the necessity to make profit and expand capital, has systematically despoiled and polluted the environment and harmed the health and lives of workers, either at their place of work or where they live.

The book, for example, contains a lengthy section on the accident at the Bhopal chemical plant in India in 1984 in which 2000 people were killed and tens of thousands severely gassed. We are told how the head of the company tried to place the blame on the Indian government for letting workers live in and around the plant. "It could never happen here," he told a Congressional Committee convened to look at the implications for the United States. But it did. when just a few days later a chemical cloud leaked from the company’s factory in Institute, West Virginia. injuring 135 workers. Then there is the honest and candid reply from a Corporate Executive at Fords, who, on being asked his views on environmental pollution replied that his only concern was “To make money, screw everything else. This is a profit-making system, boy, the rest is frills”. We are also given detailed reports from health organisations and other similar bodies like the US Economic Development Commission who showed that “some 2500 Californians will die from cancer each year over the next decade because of their exposure to toxic chemicals".

These facts and figures only add force to the socialist argument that the many social problems facing workers today, including pollution, stem from our subservient class position as propertyless wage-salary earners owning nothing but our ability to work, which they must sell to an employer in order to live. Capitalism is based on the exploitation of the working class in the production process and exists only to make profit and accumulate capital. Workers have no control over pollution, locally or globally, while the state exists only to further the interests of the capitalist class, taking action only when their general or particular interests warrant it. Yet nowhere in their book do Elkington and Burke discuss or come to terms with this social reality: they show little understanding of the economics of capitalism, are ignorant of how or why profit is produced, and are quiescent on the subject of class and minority property ownership, and the relationship of these factors to the problem of pollution.

Instead, the authors offer a Ten-Point Plan of environmental reforms which they believe capitalists can incorporate into their production processes in the interests of the whole of society without endangering rates of profit. It is this poverty of thought which is the most lamentable aspect of the book.

Capitalists only adopt new technologies, working methods or products when it is profitable to do so, not because the existing ones happen to be polluting the planet or killing workers. As socialists, we have always argued the need for workers to take conscious political action to create the framework of common ownership and democratic control of the means and methods of production and distribution, as the only way in which the social problems like pollution can be tackled. It is sheer folly to believe capitalists will adopt an environmental 'Ten-Point Plan' if their competitors elsewhere in the world market do not. What would shareholders say to a board of directors which introduced costly anti-pollution machinery or practices if it meant that the company lost its competitive edge and market as a result? Some American capitalists have already pointed this out, as the authors grudgingly admit:

Faced with a growing number of increasingly protracted environmental conflicts, hardline American industrialists have often called for the removal of environmental safeguards altogether, arguing that, in the final analysis, it is a question of America's Economy or America's Environment' (p.159).

And then, as if to drive this point home, the authors cite a recent survey of 4000 US chemical companies who estimated that if they adopted the latest practicable technology:

it would cost 139 million dollars, cutting profitability by about 9 per cent causing four plant closures and destroying 261 jobs. If, on the other hand, these companies were forced to go for the ultimate, in the form of the best available technology. the cost would be around 677 million dollars profits would be cut by a third, 20 plants would be forced to close and nearly 10.000 jobs would be lost (p.210).

A society which was not constrained by private property, commodity production and buying and selling would use as a matter of course the best possible technology at hand to ensure the safety of those working in the plants and the protection of the natural environment. Social cost would be the deciding factor, not commercial cost. Capitalism is unable to do this and Elkington and Burke, unlike the Corporate Executive from Fords, are themselves green to believe otherwise.

Richard Lloyd

Disasters: who's to blame? (1991)

From the September 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Events which leave one sickened seem to be everyday if not twice-a-day occurrences lately. Switch off the horror films, view reality instead.

The pace of life and the power behind that tempo are aspects of modern society to which we close our minds, except when a tragedy hits the headlines. The way we distance ourselves is by never imagining that the latest horrific accident will happen to ourselves or our loved ones. Nor do we think that we are in any way responsible. Usually the fault is laid at “their” door, “they” didn't do the job properly, “they” caused those people to drown, be burned or poisoned and “they” should do something about it. But if "we” think that a society operated by money and the wages system is the only way to be—if time is money and cutting corners a way to make more— if this is acceptable then so must be the Kings Cross fire, Hillsborough, Zeebrugge, Chernobyl, Bhopal, Seveso, Three Mile Island. Sellafield— the list could go on and on, and it is “we" who must share the responsibility.

What all these “accidents” have in common is that they are all related to the profit-making system of society that is capitalism—and its imperatives—and have all been attributed to human error. The Master of the ship the Herald of Free Enterprise (the name is a herald of foreboding) goes to sea with the bow doors open. The operators in the Three Mile Island disaster were said to have a "faulty mental model" of the system. The fire in the reactor at Sellafield/Windscale, in October 1957, was the result of certain control operations being performed too soon and too rapidly. In 1974 a DC10 plane crashed after taking off from Orly Airport near Paris killing 346 people: an overworked baggage handler had failed to secure the cargo doors, which subsequently blew out. The Torrey Canyon oil tanker ran aground when the captain who was trying to negotiate a difficult route through the Scilly Isles in order to meet an unrealistic schedule, failed to switch from auto pilot to manual control. At a critical moment, he turned the wheel hard and nothing happened.

The nature of the technology determines the scale of the disasters and human error is involved—but the error is the collective error of those who support present-day society rather than that of the individual workers. If the next terrible happening was to be in our own backyard, if our own child were to die of radiation-related leukaemia, surely we would say enough is enough, no more pain or grief over totally unnecessary events. There must be a better way of providing the necessities of our daily lives and, given collective responsibility, there is.

Janet Carter