Tiny Tips (2026)

The Tiny Tips column from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

In almost all regions of the world, the top 1% of the population is richer than the combined 90%. Wealth inequality increases further with each passing day, mostly due to the lack of political will to stop it.

[Popular Resistance]

In China, inequality remains high… The top 10% of earners capture about 43% of national income, while the bottom 50% receive just 14%. Wealth disparities are particularly large, with the richest 10% holding nearly 68% of total wealth and the top 1% about 30%. 

[World Inequality Report]

Nearly half of Kenyans live in extreme poverty, i.e., on less than KES 130 [£0.75] per day. Yet a few have amassed enormous wealth. The richest 125 Kenyans have more wealth than more than three-quarters of Kenyans, about 43 million people. 

[Oxfam]

We celebrate the ‘recovery’ of fish populations that are stabilized at 5% or 10% of their historical population, mistaking the management of ruins for conservation. To understand the magnitude of what has been stolen, we must look back before the industrial age. In the 17th century, the ocean was a different planet. When Christopher Columbus sailed through the Caribbean in the late 15th century, he described the seas near Cuba as being ‘thick with turtles’, so numerous that it seemed his ships would run aground on them… in numbers estimated between 33 and 39 million adults in the Caribbean alone. They were a biological dominance that defined the seascape. Today, those populations are a shadow of the ‘mother sea’ that once existed. This report is an autopsy of the decline. It is an investigation into the specific species that the fishing industry has sacrificed on the altar of commerce. 

[Sea Piracy]

As both the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) monitor and Reuters noted, Poland is among multiple state parties in the process of ditching the Mine Ban Treaty. Citing the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the news agency reported that “antipersonnel mine production could begin once the treaty’s six month withdrawal period is completed on February 20, 2026”. 

[Common Dreams]

Greenpeace is a strong example, having emerged from ecological protest movements in the 1970s and 1980s, but having eased into largely cooperating with capitalist corporations and governments over time and giving legitimacy to their propaganda about individual lifestyle choices being the way to solve climate change.

[Counterfire]

The Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid, which has previously slammed vaccine skeptic Kennedy as a ‘paranoid kook’ whose ‘tinfoil hat is blocking out all sense’, tore into the Trump Cabinet member for his war on what it called ‘one of the biggest public health wins of the last century: the widespread use of disease-eradicating vaccines’. 

[HuffPost]

Therefore, we do not offer any support to wars waged by any capitalist state or any faction aimed at creating or strengthening a new state, whether aggressor or aggressed, whether or not they describe themselves as ‘socialist’ or ‘democratic’. 

[Internationalist Perspective]

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

The White Death (2002)

From the January 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Common salt is composed of sodium and chlorine of which, it seems, there was plenty locked up in compounds within the basalt rock that formed most of the Earth’s crust as our world cooled from a chemical soup over 3.5 billion years ago. Years of weathering, erosion and corrosion then produced the salt that readily dissolved into masses of water that flowed over and settled, as oceans, in the low-lying areas.

Tiny salt particles have, ever since, been blown from the sea directly onto coastal and adjacent regions of land or have been lifted into the upper atmosphere where they then fall everywhere with rain. Over aeons of time, in dry areas unflushed by regular rainfall, the soil has become sprinkled with minute salt particles extending to a considerable depth.

Unique vegetation has evolved in Western Australia which created a natural “equilibrium” or balance that maintains the ground-water level (water-table) at a depth beyond the salt zone. Native deep-rooted, perennial plants are highly efficient absorbers of moisture, allowing very little rainfall to seep down into the water-table. Native trees have two root systems which absorb both surface and deep groundwater. These are just part of an undisturbed eco-system that produced stability for millions of years.

The clearing of native vegetation and trees for farming and grazing has produced vast areas of shallow-rooted annual crops and pasture which use far less water. Most rainfall now percolates down into the groundwater which raises the level of the water-table. Similarly, in irrigation areas the applied water mostly filters down and lifts the level. As the water-table climbs it dissolves increasing amounts of salt within the soil profile until maximum salinity is concentrated at, or near, the soil surface. Capitalism’s profit-motivated “economic efficiencies” in the timber industry has introduced the disaster of “clearfelling”. Bulldozers uprooting trees, wrecking the understorey, wildlife habitat, soil structure and complete eco-system of vast areas of forest, simply magnifies the problem still further.

The impact of a rising water-table and dryland salinity has far-reaching effects long before the ultimate “White Death” of a lifeless, shining white desert studded with dead trees, is created. Saline water with four feet of the soil surface reduces plant growth. From this point there is a loss of agriculture production, destruction of bush vegetation and native habitat leading to loss of wildlife and biodiversity. Drainage from the soil causes salinity of waterways which affect streams, rivers and water resources in dams and reservoirs . . . eventually making the water unusable. Water plants, aquatic life (frogs, fish, water birds, turtles etc), algae, microbes and invertebrates are destroyed. Rising concentrations of salt damages the soil structure and will corrode the foundations of all infrastructure causing buildings, roads, footpaths, railways, bridges and sewage pipes etc to crumble. Rising water-table also makes land more prone to waterlogging and flooding. The social impact is enormous.

The worst-affected Australian state is Western Australia with 70 percent of total salinity problems. In 1902 the clearing of native vegetation was suspected of causing salinity. This was proved in 1909 and verified in 1924. Despite this knowledge land-clearing increased. The echoes of past capitalist politicians here are heard today when President Bush states, “I am more concerned with the economy than with ecology”, when referring to global warming . . . itself another major factor in the salinity equation.

Seventy-five percent of natural bush in the south-west has been cleared for agriculture of which 10 percent is now salt-affected, which has reduced crops by 50 percent. Over 80 percent of resource water there is salty to some degree and groundwater rises 20-150 cms annually. If allowed to continue 30 percent of farmland will be wiped out, 30,000 kms of road and railway and 27 towns will be ruined by shallow water-table by the year 2050. Many mammals, reptiles, insects, aquatic life and 450 endemic plant species will be lost from one of the most biodiverse areas of the world.

In 1985 a new State government department, CALM (Conservation And Land Management), was created. Syd Shea was appointed executive director. CALM pursued a simple policy of managing the forests for the benefit of the timber industry. Clearfelling was adopted on a grand scale and still continues today. In November 1999 Syd Shea accepted a new post created in the Premier’s office—”Head of Combating Salinity”. This is tantamount to putting a serial arsonist in charge of the Fire Service. Shea is now involved organising “carbon credits” and uses his “ecological expertise” in cracking deals for big corporations.

High technology is being used to acquire facts and statistics on salinity but the shocking details are not being publicised. The information written here was extracted from various official sources. The remedy to salinity is basically simple, groundwater levels need to be reduced (discharged) and rainfall needs to be used more efficiently to prevent recharge. Large areas of farmland need to be revegetated and forest should be allowed to regenerate. Additional proposed engineering and horticultural remedies should be applied immediately.

Capitalism, based upon cost/profit/jobs, which causes these problems, is not equipped to respond to simple need. Balance-sheet profit has always ignored the cost of environmental destruction, which never appeared on the debit pages of the ledger. Landowners are reluctant to lose portions of their land to non-income-producing native vegetation, despite their chance of losing the lot if their unsustainable farming methods do not change. So billions of dollars will be spent over many years on a strategy of compromise. The hunt is on for salt-tolerant fish and plants to farm, alternative deep-rooted crops and pasture and long-term cash-crops of plantation trees to supply the timber industry. It is hoped many areas can be contained and eventually some areas of salinity reversed, other regions are already doomed. But only a socialist society based upon unrestricted need has any chance of lasting success. Speed the day when such political awareness amongst the vast majority of the population will exist.

Ron Stone,

Australia

Interview with Drew Pendergrass (2023)

From the July 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Drew Pendergrass, the co-author, with Troy Vettese, of a striking new book entitled Half-Earth Socialism: a Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics (reviewed in the March 2023 edition of this journal) talks to the Socialist Standard to discuss why he thinks both human society and the natural environment can only survive through a new model of social and economic organisation, a moneyless, wageless one of democratic planning, voluntary cooperation and free access to all goods and services.

In the book you co-wrote with Troy Vettese, you put forward the idea of a world non-market society and outline how you see it as operating in practical terms. What brought you to this idea in the first place?

By day, I am a climate scientist — in my work, I see how incompatible our current economic order is with an ecologically and climatologically stable planet. Even more radicalizing than this, I am a scientist at Harvard University, a place unafraid to take the status quo to its logical conclusion. People at Harvard don’t believe in the possibility of social change, at least not beyond marginal adjustments. However, the scientists there are just as aware as I am about the incompatibility of capitalism and the climate, though they would not use those terms. This is why solar geoengineering, the idea that we could spray particles into the stratosphere to dim the sun and cool the planet, has become a central part of the environmental research and curriculum at this university. Rather than change our society to meet the demands of our planet, it is more realistic to them to change the planet to meet the demands of capitalism. And I think they are right — to keep the status quo, you need geoengineering, even though the risks are profound. I have been a socialist since I was in high school and have no interest in preserving capitalism, so Troy and I wanted to offer an alternative.

There are others who advocate the kind of society you do, but, following Marx, they usually say that you can’t write ‘recipes for the cookshops of the future’. Why do think it’s feasible and useful to try to do this?

During and immediately after Marx and Engels were writing, utopia was in the air. Utopian fiction peaked in the 1880s and 90s with books like Bellamy’s Looking Backward and Morris’s News from Nowhere. At that time, even the mainstream thought capitalism really could be supplanted by something new. Although Marx himself does not lay out in one place his vision of a socialist or communist society, this does not mean he didn’t have ideas about what that society would entail: scholars like Bertell Ollman have reconstructed in some detail the outlines of Marx’s utopia. More importantly, workers had clear ideas about what alternatives to capitalism might entail — many had memories of non-capitalist lifeways to draw on, such as the peasantry, and a wide-open sense of possibility catalysed by revolutionary moments like 1848 or the Paris Commune.

Now, alternatives are not self-evident. With the failed utopias in the twentieth century and the rise of the world market in the twenty-first, there is not a sense that an alternative to capitalism lies in wait — many doubt that an alternative exists at all. With this recent history, the nineteenth century advice to avoid ‘recipes for the cookshops of the future’ seems outdated. Certainly, when coming up with proposals for how a socialist society might work, one must remain humble. But the concreteness of this exercise is a necessary corrective to a world that has lost its utopian spark. As Robin D. G. Kelley reminds us, no social movement exists without a concrete vision for a better future as its north star.

You describe the common idea that the earth is over-populated as ‘dangerously exaggerated’. But wouldn’t some say that there too many people for the resources that the Earth, even in a non-market society, could make available to give everyone a decent, comfortable life? Wouldn’t some also say that this is especially the case for the system that you advocate, one that would see half the Earth (‘Half-Earth Socialism’) being occupied by rewilded ecosystems in order for it to recover and prosper?

One of the exercises we follow in the book is to imagine what it would take to provide the material basis for human flourishing to ten billion people, a fair bit more than live today, while staying within planetary boundaries. We make the point that both sides of this equation — what a ‘comfortable’ life means, and where exactly planetary boundaries lie — are political questions that can only be answered by reference to values. Science cannot tell us what we should or should not do; it can merely advise on the consequences of certain material pressures on the Earth system.

We argue in the book that it is certainly possible with present technology to provide a comfortable life for ten billion people, rewild much of the biosphere, decarbonize the economy, and begin to repair the damage of centuries of capitalism. The trick is what you mean by the ‘comfortable’. If you mean US levels of energy and material use, then you will be dissatisfied by our proposal. Instead, we propose energy quotas and a change in diet towards veganism for most people.

Deep decarbonization is very hard. Fossil fuels are energy dense (lots of energy per unit mass) and can be burned anytime, day or night. Decarbonizing electricity is the easy part, though load management with intermittent renewable sources presents an engineering challenge. Replacing fuels in industrial and transport processes is much harder. Planes, for example, need energy-dense power sources like kerosene so they are light enough to fly. However, replacing fossil fuels with renewable fuels require vast amounts of electricity to transform carbon from the atmosphere into fuels for planes. For example, decarbonizing flights in the UK alone would require more electricity than the entire country generates today. The other option would be biofuels, but these require vast swaths of land to grow; in the UK, for flights alone, this would be two thirds of its croplands. Quotas are the only way to make a world without fossil fuels work for everyone.

Similarly, animal husbandry eats up 77 percent of agricultural land while providing only a fraction of the nutrients people need. The industry emits gobs of greenhouse gases, including vast amounts of the potent short-lived methane; cutting methane rapidly is a useful way to ‘bend the curve’ on climate change, limiting near-term warming as we build up our capacity to replace carbon dioxide emitting infrastructure. Abolishing the meat industry and eating mainly plants instead would clean up the atmosphere and free up lots of land for rewilding. Remember that habitat loss is one of the main drivers of mass extinction, and one of the main drivers of habitat loss is animal agriculture — both fodder (soy and corn) and grazing land.

A life with no meat, fewer flights, smaller homes, limited cars, and reduced consumption may seem intolerable for some. But that does not mean such a life isn’t comfortable. Guaranteed housing, health care, and education in a built environment that prioritizes sharing and community sounds luxurious to me.

You seem very lukewarm about ‘green’ solutions to the environmental crisis. But wouldn’t some people argue that the policies proposed by mainstream advocates of environmentalism at least contribute to offering some partial remedy to the degradation and despoliation of the Earth that you describe in your book?

Certainly we encourage the development of policies and technologies that can repair the damage to the Earth system. For example, in the book we are bullish on hydrogen for electrifying the industrial sector and management in grid load; lots of capitalists like this investment too. I spend much of my day as an environmental activist in Boston, pushing for reforms like strict building energy use codes and decarbonizing municipal buildings. None of these reforms are incompatible with capitalism, although we hope that our movement will grow in strength and demand more. The argument we make in the book is that the unconscious force of capital will always be dominant in a capitalist society, and that this force is incompatible with the flourishing of the biosphere because of its metabolic need to ingest ever-increasing swaths of nature. Reforms and technologies that limit the damage are welcome, but we need to do all we can to align these forces towards a larger social transformation.

How close do you think the biosphere is to the ‘extinction’ you refer to in the title of your book?

Human beings and the biosphere are not in danger of extinction. The extinction in the title of the book refers to the ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction event in the nearly four-billion-year history of life on this planet. Life is robust; it will continue, however damaged. Still, we have a responsibility to maintain biodiversity both as an end-in-itself, but also out of self-interest. Healthy ecosystems are robust to disease, maintain productive agriculture, and sequester carbon.

You talk about how we can run things rationally and sustainably without money and the market and instead by democratic planning ‘in kind’. But how do you see this planning taking place? How would you argue against those who might say that a society without monetary accounting would quickly degenerate into shortage and social chaos?

This is a hard question, and certainly I will not be able to answer it to your readers’ satisfaction here. I’ll also note that Troy and I are continuing to think about moneyless planning and are planning a follow-up book on the topic.

In the book, we present a thought experiment about how moneyless planning in a world socialist society might work. A global parliament would create a few coarsely-resolved global plans, reflecting different coalitions in power; these plans might offer proposals about energy quotas, the energy generation system, food production, and material throughput needs. After debate, a plan would be adopted for a period, subject to constant revisions. The implementation of these economic plans would take place at more local levels of government, which would have wide leeway to decide how to govern themselves so long as they fit within the parameters of the global plan. Although there should be considerable flexibility, we think that a global plan is necessary. Because humanity has become a planetary species, able to unintentionally alter the climate and biosphere, we argue that we need a form of government that is commensurate with the scale of our power. We want to consciously debate and control our society, rather than let capital blindly trash the biosphere.

We argue that the algorithms and technologies necessary to plan on this scale already exist; in the book we outline the history of linear programming and other algorithms in the fields of optimization and control theory. The challenge is (1) gathering the necessary information to plan effectively, (2) foregrounding democracy, and (3) ensuring that plans are actually implemented. There were experiments in the Eastern Bloc with algorithmic planning as a reform measure, but they failed in these three challenges. Our argument is that these challenges are intertwined and fundamentally emerge from the need for democracy. If planning is carried out by a richly democratic society, with participatory institutions at every level from the workplace to national and global parliaments, then planning will have a legitimacy that technocracy could never hope to achieve. That legitimacy helps with information gathering, at least with enough quality to create passable plans, and with successful plan implementation. No one will work for a socialism they don’t believe in.

Although there is a lot to say about this topic, I think that there is no reason to believe well-formed institutions cannot operate a complex society without the mediating power of money. However, more utopias and thought experiments would be useful in working out some first principles in designing such a society. Here, again, there is a need for more ‘recipes for the cookshops of the future!’

How would you respond to the argument put forward by some that a society based on voluntary work and cooperation to produce everything humanity needs could not work owing to the frailties of ‘human nature’?

I don’t believe in human nature as some timeless, unchanging category. One of the useful lessons of history is that people in the past are wildly different from people today. Even the Ancient Greeks, who we in the West see as our ancestors, lived by practices and beliefs and motivations that are incomprehensible to us today. However, I do take your point that human nature as it exists today has been imprinted with capitalism. While Margaret Thatcher’s line that “there is no such thing as society” is obviously ridiculous, capitalist social relations make it more and more true each day. Hostility towards strangers, paranoia, and loneliness all are outcomes of capitalism that, while not part of human nature, nevertheless make building solidarity hard. That said, I’ve seen people transform when they are brought into genuinely solidaristic institutions like trade unions or activist groups. Being part of a union myself will always make me hopeful about the possibility of socialism.

For socialism to work, you don’t need to believe human beings are angels. Instead, you need to believe that people are shaped by the institutions and social situation around them, and that those infrastructures can be changed by humans because they were constructed by humans.

As an additional note, socialism need not be entirely voluntary. Abolishing alienation in labor and establishing social control of the economy will both involve vast new democratic institutions, but vaccine mandates, for example, will remain necessary to protect public health. Coercive measures like these are obviously a risk for any society, but I am confident that robust participatory institutions can prevent necessary coercion from expanding beyond its remit into tyranny.

How do you think it’s possible to convince enough people that a world socialist society is possible and feasible? And if that does happen, what practical steps do you think will be necessary to bring that society into being?

I think a great way to convince people that alternatives are possible is to use utopias as a method. Real utopias, in the form of democratic rank-and-file trade unions, show people that participatory democracy can transform lives. Fictional utopias and thought experiments like ours demonstrate that even knotty crises like environmental collapse can be remedied. We even made a video game, available at play.half.earth, that allows people to experience what planning a world economy might feel like. All these things together might convince enough people to form the seeds of a movement, which could grow into a revolutionary moment. Our chances are better if we can unite different splinters on the left into a fighting movement. Of course, the odds are against us, but I think that if we can assemble a large base with a radical imagination, design institutions that prefigure the world we want, and build enough power to achieve real intermediate victories, we will be on our way towards a winning socialist movement.

You seem to see some regimes within capitalism (e.g. Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cuba, Allende’s Chile) as genuine but failed attempts to establish socialism. But do these regimes really have any relationship with the socialism that you describe and advocate in your book?

You are absolutely right that these regimes are not socialist. I am sympathetic to interpretations of the USSR and other similar regimes as ‘state capitalist.’ In particular, I like Moishe Postone’s argument that because these societies are still governed by the law of value they have not overcome capitalism, no matter what the party claimed. However, I think it is also important to remember that the people who built these regimes (here I’m thinking primarily of China and the USSR) really were socialists and really did want to build an alternative to capitalism. It is on us to learn from their failures. We may not have the same youthful optimism as socialists from a century ago, but we do have many examples of how not to do socialism — that’s useful data as we shape our demands and imagined alternatives today. This is why in the book we engage deeply with attempts to reform the Soviet economy, even as we are strongly critical of the USSR.

You favour veganism as a way of feeding everyone while having the smallest environmental impact. But do you think that humanity as a whole, having been omnivorous throughout their existence, will ever accept the total exclusion of animal foodstuffs from their diet? And, more generally, isn’t it hard enough to persuade people to work for socialism without also telling them they may have to give up things they like?

I already detailed why veganism makes sense as an environmental policy, so here I’ll focus on the critiques. First, the amount of meat we in the Global North eat today is historically unprecedented. Our ancestors did eat meat, but only a small fraction of what we do today. As a result, there are cultural resources to draw on in most areas to create meatless dishes. For example, I’m from the South in the US, home of barbeque and fried chicken. But my hometown also hosts a large Seventh Day Adventist community, who do not eat meat for religious reasons; my great-grandfather, who was a farmer, lived basically as a vegetarian because he didn’t like to kill animals. As a vegan myself, my main practice is to show people that meatless food can be delicious and joyful. In Spain of all places, the minister for consumer affairs Alberto Garzon is working to reduce meat consumption with some success. There are ways to build campaigns around this issue, even though I agree it is a hard sell.

If I may, I’d like to expand your question further. Even if your readers disagree with me on the animal question, there are other aspects of socialism which are unpopular on their face. For example, fighting neo-colonial exploitation may not poll well in places like the UK. I like this quote from the first pages of the feminist writer Sophie Lewis’s Abolish the Family: ‘All of us—even those of us who own no property, who receive no guaranteed care, and who subsist at the blunt end of empire, whiteness, cis-hetero-patriarchy, and class— will have to let go of something as the process of our collective liberation unfolds. If the world is to be remade utterly, then a person must be willing to be remade also.’ One need not agree with Lewis’s position on family abolition to recognize the truth of her argument. Even if the world we will build is far better than the one that exists, things will be lost in the process. All socialists will need to confront this challenge, even if self-consciously they only demand what is ‘popular.’

Our afterword

Readers will appreciate that many of the ideas expressed in the interview are very much in line with the views the Socialist Party has long been spreading. We would give as examples the fallacy of ‘human nature’, the myth of over-population, and in particular the need for a global, ‘richly democrat’, wageless, moneyless, non-market society using advanced technologies already available. We must, however, also say that we do not see entirely eye to eye with Drew Pendergrass on certain elements of the analysis he puts forwards. In this regard we would highlight in particular: his vision of a future global socialist society as one still to be run by governments, if globally as well as nationally; his view that the Russian and Chinese revolutions of the 20th century constituted, at least in their early stages, an attempt to establish socialism in our terms; and his insistence that, from the point of view of practical resource usage, we can only have socialism if everyone is vegan.

In our view socialism can only be a society without leaders and led and without national boundaries. It follows from this that it must also be free of governments, whether national or global. Its watchword must be administration of things rather than government over people. Of course we accept that the interviewee may be using the word ‘government’ in a wider sense than normal and ‘national’ more in the sense of ‘regional’. If so, then his view may equate closely to ours.

Our less than positive view of his seeing the Russian and Chinese revolutions as attempts at socialism arises from the fact that neither country was anywhere close to the advanced form of capitalism needed for socialism to emerge from them. Lenin famously said that, if the Bolsheviks had to wait for the masses to understand socialism, it would take 500 years (meaning never), while China under Mao was little more than the personal possession of a tyrannical ruler who was prepared to unleash and oversee the most profound atrocities to affirm and consolidate his power.

Pendergrass is open about the need he sees to propose a highly detailed picture of a future non-market society, which he conceives as arising gradually and imperfectly from tendencies within capitalism and being ‘ironed out’ into complete ‘socialism’ with time. We, on the other hand, insist on the need for a majority of workers to first win control of political power, probably via the ballot box, at which point detailed plans for running the new society will have already been made and the passage to it can be relatively seamless. As it will be up to those around when socialism starts to be seriously on the agenda to decide on specific details, we see it as arguably undemocratic and even maybe dogmatic to start proposing detailed plans now (speculative ideas perhaps, but not detailed plans), since we do not know at what point society will then be, in particular technologically.

Blogger's Note:

There is another expanded review of 'Half-Earth Socialism', which goes to into greater detail, at the following link: A plan to save the future (2023).

What the market does to Agriculture (1995)

From the April 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Agriculture today is increasingly production for cash — and
 that means that the lifestyles and needs of both producers
 and consumers are afflicted by the blight of profit, like in any
 other sphere of capitalism, with poor working environments,
 ecological destruction and second-rate products. In socialism, 
human “intervention ” in the form of agriculture would no
 longer be dominated by the impersonal forces of the market, 
but would be under conscious human control. Socialism 
could use the technology developed by capitalism in frame-
works best suited to the requirements of farmers and consumers alike, and would substitute production for the sake of
 capital accumulation with production solely for the satisfaction of needs and desires.

Ecology is about the relationships of living organisms to one another and their physical environment. This complex of relationships is arranged into a number of relatively well-defined ecosystems.

Left to itself, an ecosystem will tend to evolve in a process of “ecological succession", from a simple pioneer stage, through intermediate stages, towards a natural “climax". This is when the diversity of life forms that a particular area can support (under prevailing physical and climatic conditions) has reached its full potential, when there are no more ecological niches or unutilised food resources left for new arrivals to exploit. A climax community will tend to be a relatively stable one — that is, the populations of its constituent species fluctuate very little over time — because of the checks and balances they exert upon each other through the food chain.

Human intervention in nature has the potential to profoundly alter this picture. In a sense, though, to talk of intervention is a misnomer. Strictly speaking, we are part of nature—albeit, a uniquely self-conscious part—and act upon other parts of it to meet our material needs. However, because everything is connected in nature, such actions cannot fail to have ecological repercussions for us and other species. A relatively early example of human intervention is agriculture.

Agriculture entails some reduction in the complexity of plant and animal species inhabiting a particular area; it represents a shift backwards along the line of ecological succession. The climax community is replaced by a “successional community” in which nutrients are made available to a relatively smaller and less diverse number of domesticated species selected for human consumption, with potentially destabilising consequences for the ecosystem in question.

This need not necessarily give cause for concern. In any case, we have little choice in this regard, the existing population could not support itself by reverting to hunting and gathering. What should really concern us now is the sustainability of our agricultural practices. This behoves us to take into account the ecological consequences of such practices, to devise some workable compromise between the pressure of human needs and the ecological integrity of nature.

Typically, this is what traditional systems of fanning tended to do. Indeed, the sustainability of such systems is evidenced by the fact that many small farmers, largely concentrated in the so-called Third World, still substantially rely on a repertoire of time-honoured techniques. These help to reinforce, and in turn are rooted in, the social relations of production of traditional societies, characterised by a strong sense of communality and co-operation. Two closely related aspects of this ecological approach to fanning are diversity and self-sufficiency.

The precise package of techniques adopted will tend to subtlely differ from one locality to the next. This is indicative of a highly sophisticated understanding on the part of traditional farmers of the specific environmental constraints they face, and to which they must adapt, with little or no assistance from outside.

Transition to the market economy

Nevertheless, the outside world has increasingly intruded into the realm of traditional farming. With the historical expansion of the market economy, the relationship between human groups and their environment has undergone a profound transformation. Despite the persistence of a large non-market sector—mainly in the Third World, where much of the output of peasants is destined for household consumption or localised gift exchanges—the market has become the dominant economic system in the world today; it connects every part of it in a complex pattern of physical and informational flows.

How has this affected people’s relationship with the land? In small-scale, autarkic pre-capitalist societies, direct dependence on local resources meant that wanton exploitation of these resources would spell ecological (and thus economic) ruin and the disintegration of the community—unless it could migrate or develop new resources.

With the coming of the market economy, the purpose of farming changed radically—from production for local need to production for the market. This has brought about a corresponding change in the nature of farming. An ecological mode of farming, emphasising risk avoidance and long-term stability of output, has gradually given way to a more ecologically exploitative, “industrial” mode of farming.

This mode of fanning is driven by the need to maximise output, to produce agricultural surpluses, to feed a growing urban population resulting from the development of capitalism, This physical separation of the producers and consumers of food, highlighted by the largely one-way flow of organic material (food products) between them, has entailed not only an increasing problem of waste disposal in the urban centres but also a discontinuation of the traditional practice of recycling such material.

When nutrients removed from the soil as harvested crops are not returned to the soil, agricultural productivity will steadily fall—unless this loss can be made good in some other way. That is precisely what industrial fanning has endeavoured to do through increasing applications of industrially produced artificial fertilisers (and other) inputs to boost yields. Thus, by replacing a cyclical flow of nutrients with a linear one it has reduced the dependence of farmers on local resources but only by increasing their dependence on resources originating outside their locality.

It is important to realise that it is not global economic integration as such that is the cause of the abandoning of “conservationist” agricultural practices. What has caused this is the form economic integration has taken historically until now—the profit-driven market economy.

The dynamic of capitalism, regulated by the law of market competition, is to accumulate capital through the maximisation of profit. This puts pressure on economic actors to cut their unit costs in order to undersell their rivals, not to do so would be to risk being priced out of the market. This, in turn, disposes them to adopt both a short-term and narrow view of production.

Commercial farming

From this perspective, the return of off-farm organic wastes to the land, for example, while technically feasible, will be seen as economically undesirable. Firstly, though the benefits it could bring cannot be doubted, these need time to take effect and in the world of business competition “time is money”. Hence, it will tend to be bypassed in favour of techniques which produce more immediate results.

even where these deplete the natural productivity of the soil in the long run.

Secondly, there are costs considerations which make such a proposition problematic. Thus, domestic sewage and industrial wastes tend to be mixed because it is cheaper to dispose of them in this way, rather than separately. This means, however, that the resulting mixture cannot be applied to the land because of the high levels of toxic chemicals and heavy metals it contains. But while it might thus make “economic sense” to apply artificial fertilisers to the land, rather than separate out domestic sewage for recycling, there are other hidden costs involved in such a course of action; these are not reflected in the narrow definition of“cost” employed by a market-based methodology of cost accounting. An example is the leaching of nitrates into rivers which then have to be removed through expensive technology to make drinking water safe. Such incidental costs are treated as “externalities” insofar as they are not shouldered by the enterprise—the commercial farmer—responsible for them, which would make such an enterprise less competitive were it to take such costs into account.

This is not to suggest that production for the market must completely rule out ecological or organic methods of farming. Nevertheless, such methods go against the grain of capitalism. Organic products are usually more expensive than those produced by industrial farming. Farmers hooked on industrial farming often find it very difficult to convert to organic agriculture; in the transition they will usually have to contend with a significant drop in output and probably profit too. Above all, organic agriculture faces formidable and well-organised opposition from multinational corporations supplying industrial inputs to farmers. It is thus hardly surprising that only a tiny fraction of agricultural land in the developed capitalist countries— less than 3 percent in Europe—is devoted to organic agriculture.

In contrast to capitalism, socialism, as a society freed from the profit motive and competitive pressures “to produce as much cash as possible, as cheaply as possible, and as quickly as possible”, will be able to adopt agricultural methods which will achieve a working compromise with nature respecting the long-term considerations which ecological science teaches are vitally important.

Robin Cox

Pathfinders: Shut up and take the pill (2023)

The Pathfinders Column from the March 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sometimes, instead of trying to chase down the causes of a particular medical problem through extensive (and expensive) lab research, it’s easier to change the environment the problem flourishes in. This is especially true of environments like the human gut biome, in which very little of the bacterial load has been studied or is even known to science. Nobody really knows what’s in there or what any of it does. Following the much-publicised success of faecal microbiome transplants (FMTs), which have proved to be often stunningly effective against sometimes fatal Clostridium difficile and other conditions previously thought untreatable, vaginal microbiome transplants are now being proposed as a holistic approach to certain poorly understood but common vaginal disorders, by effecting a wholesale change to the vaginal environment (New Scientist, 13 February – bit.ly/3XEapCo).

From a socialist perspective there is a certain irresistible analogy to be drawn here, human society as a macrobiome, containing a complex ecosystem of unique and discrete agents whose interactions work in concert to make the whole thing function. In common parlance we talk about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bacteria, although we understand that this is not some moral verdict on the bacterium itself, which is neither good nor bad, but merely a handy way to describe individual bacterial behaviours that are either helpful or at least neutral, or deleterious for the whole macro-organism. Thus, in a healthy and balanced macrobiome, one would expect a preponderance of good bacteria, displaying socially advantageous behaviours that help the various functions work in harmony to create a stable and disease-free environment for the whole community.

Most people would probably agree that what we see in capitalist society is not healthy and balanced, by any stretch of the imagination. Instead we see a toxic load of bad bacteria that result in a dysfunctional, polluting environment, a sick and convulsive macrobiome that is frequently at war with itself and therefore has a poor general survival prognosis. No surprise that such a hostile environment generates a wide array of severe clinical symptoms that are dangerous and even deadly for the individuals who experience them.

The prevailing medical model, darling of the profit-driven pharmaceutical industry, usually treats these symptoms in isolation via some form of targeted medical therapy or intervention. It may be added that the capitalist state, the darling and administrative apparatus of wealthy elites, actively promotes certain bad behaviours it likes, ie, ones that made the elite rich, while weaponising the medical model into its dark twin, the criminal model, to target extreme antisocial individual behaviours it doesn’t like, using a range of ‘interventions’ including sequestration (and in some countries, execution) to try to curb them.

Whether any of these therapies or controls actually work depends on a large number of factors, but in no case is anything done about the environment which, in all likelihood, produced this symptom or behaviour in the first place. Of course not. The ruling elites owe their position to the prevailing social ecosystem. They would be mad to consider any social model of change that threatened their power base.

A good illustration of all this is in the treatment of mental illness. Ongoing clinical research into depression has tended to raise as many questions as it solves, for instance debunking long-standing generalist assumptions about neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin to explain why, in studies, Prozac-like drugs only seem to work for some people and not others, yet this only succeeds in adding further layers of mystery to the picture (New Scientist, 18 January – bit.ly/3Z22BeP). Meanwhile a seeming epidemic in the popularity of conspiracy theories is prompting new research into paranoia, once thought to have been the sole province of people with schizophrenia-like conditions but now seen as more of a gradient affecting up to 1 in 6 people (New Scientist, 6 February – bit.ly/3SkvjWc).

There will certainly be some genetic factors at work, perhaps even some remote evolutionary legacies, so this type of coal-face research is always worthwhile, but only up to a point. Given that around 1 in 4 adults over 18 suffer from some diagnosable form of mental disorder in any given year (bit.ly/3IEpWho), it’s tempting to say: let’s cut the techno-crap and look at the real common denominator, which is not chemicals but your class position. Being in the working class, and thus poor, powerless and oppressed, is more likely to make you ill than any genetic or evolutionary influence.

The link between financial and mental health is so strong as to be axiomatic. 44 percent of respondents in US surveys report that money is the main stressor in their lives. 70 percent have ‘cried about money at some point’ while 56 percent have done so in the past year (bit.ly/3Z6DQOn). Not surprisingly, clinical psychologists say ‘money is a top cause of stress for many Americans’ (bit.ly/3xGciDO). Meanwhile the Mind UK charity (bit.ly/3kc3HWt) has a helpful page of advice on money troubles that lists ways that lack of money can impact your mental health, like for example not being able to afford housing, food, water, heating or medication. To which it’s tempting to respond, Oh really, no shit?

This is not to draw some simplistic conclusion that the more money you’ve got, the happier you’ll be. A study published in Nature suggests that there is a sweet spot at around $95,000 a year (£79,000), at which point your general happiness hits a plateau, and above which new stressors enter the picture which adversely affect your life satisfaction and sense of wellbeing (bit.ly/2CR8Asx). But the vast majority of those having mental health problems are unlikely to be earning anywhere near that golden plateau. Instead they experience life as a perpetual fight for survival in the face of debts, deprivation, damaged relationships, bullying bosses and institutions, and feelings of futility and personal inadequacy.

There isn’t a pill for any of that. Instead, capitalist society performs its own bowdlerised version of FMTs, by supplanting one shit government by another, one set of micro-policies by another, in the pretence that these might achieve something for a change, but very likely in the full knowledge that nothing but a wholesale system change would ever really work.

Paddy Shannon

A plan to save the future (2023)

Book Review from the March 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

An increasing flow of books is being published on the necessity of establishing a real socialist society, moneyless, wageless, leaderless and planetary. This would be a society with free access to all goods and services based on voluntary cooperation and the principle of from each according to ability and to each according to need. Many of these books have been reviewed and evaluated in the Socialist Standard. But now going qualitatively further than all the others, we have a new one proposing a detailed plan of how a world non-market society could operate in practical and organisational terms. Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass, Verso, 2022 (see a shorter review in this issue) is founded on profound knowledge of and reflection on the scientific and technological problems that such a society would need to deal with and overcome. As such, it constitutes a thrillingly imaginative leap into the fundamentals of a world organised for the common good of humanity and the natural environment.

What if?

It adopts a novel structure framed by two ‘what if?’ chapters. The first of these is entitled ‘Looking Backwards: 2047’ (à la Edward Bellamy) and describes the ‘dystopian future’ with ‘environmental collapse and feudal levels of inequality’ seen as inevitable if the present system of society, based on the market and ‘price signals’, is allowed to continue. The second of these chapters, entitled ‘News from 2047’ (à la William Morris’), offers a kind of -day-to-day outline of what a future society ‘without money or a market’ could be like and how it could operate once humanity collectively decides to take steps to reverse the decline of the biosphere, to ‘simultaneously create a just society’, and ‘to provide the basis for socialism in our lifetime’. In this the authors consciously eschew Marx’s warning against writing ‘recipes for the cookshops of the future’. In fact they attempt to do just that, to describe what they call ‘a total alternative to capitalism’, i.e, how ‘economic co-ordination’ would function in socialism, ‘a society where the economy is consciously and democratically controlled’ – a definition of socialism that we would fully accept. The book offers, as the authors put it, ‘everything from a plan for resource allocation to an outline of what life will feel like’.

Controlling capitalism?

In between these two chapters the authors do a number of other key things. Firstly, they examine some of the major ideas and schemes put forward over the centuries in which capitalism has existed and grown to understand that system and bring it under control. They look at a range of ‘competing philosophies of nature and social and economic developments’: for example Malthus, with his dread of the still commonly held idea of ‘overpopulation’, described here as ‘dangerously exaggerated’; Hegel, with his ‘humanization of nature’ theory; Mises and Hayek who saw the market as the only feasible way to organise an advanced society and as a self-organising system which humans interfere with at their peril; and Marx and Neurath, both of whom see capital as ‘blindly steering the ship of fools towards ecological disaster’ and destroying ‘the world it cannot see’. This part of their analysis leads to the conclusion that what is needed is an end to what they call ‘the capitalization of nature’ and ‘a new relationship between humanity and nature’. Failing this, they see humanity facing a future of ‘ever greater inequality, disease, climatic disaster, and ecological impoverishment’.

They then go on to examine various current solutions on offer, mainly those ‘green’ ones that are presented as ways of stemming the degradation of the environment (eg, geoengineering, carbon capture and storage, nuclear power, biofuels). They reject these as feasible remedies in their own right, since their advocates tend to envision their use only within the context of the market and its production and distribution of goods and services as commodities. As the authors put it: ‘Mainstream environmentalists approach the environment crisis as a set of discrete technical problems, addressable through piecemeal reform, while leaving the capitalist foundation of society untouched’. The authors are particularly hostile to animal husbandry, referred to as ‘the Earth-eating livestock industry’, taking up as it does ’40 per cent of earth’s inhabitable land’ and creating ‘massive mammalian extinction’. Their solution, which they start to outline here, is to practise ‘natural geo-engineering’, drawing down carbon and allowing rewilded ecosystems to occupy half the earth’ (hence the book’s title), and so restore biodiversity and create ‘a fully renewable energy system’. They are also advocates of veganism, considering it capable of satisfying ‘the requirement of feeding everyone with the smallest environmental impact’. All of this, however, they see as impossible under the capitalist system, which by its nature produces goods and services for profit.

Is socialist planning possible?

It is in the following chapter, entitled ‘Planning Half-Earth’, that the proposed solution they have already outlined is fleshed out. Details are given concerning how the earth’s resources can be used in a rational and sustainable way under world-wide arrangements that eschew money, the market and exchange and instead use ‘another kind of global model’ based on ‘integrated assessment models’ (IAMs) and ‘linear programming’. These methods, they tell us, already exist but their real potential can come nowhere near to being properly realised within the market system. Referring to their proposals as ‘scientific utopianism’, after the term coined by early 20th century theorist, Otto Neurath, they claim that such a model needs no universal equivalent such as money but can function effectively via in natura’ (ie, ‘in kind’) world-wide planning. This, they contend, can consistently and in an ongoing way ‘combine multiple goals’, pulling together all the necessary information regarding resources, skills and needs to ensure that production and distribution meet all the reasonable democratically agreed requirements of a cooperative planetary population. In this way humanity can ‘provide a good life for our abundant species and still protect the environment’. This is eminently possible, they go on, given that ‘the data density of the contemporary world, paired with the algorithms climate scientists have designed to handle it, greatly expands planning capacities’. Having explained all this in impressive detail, they do then advise that the precise set-up they advocate for a socialist society should at this stage be considered ‘a thought experiment’, but nevertheless one which will ‘allow us to imagine what socialism might look like in practice’.

There is no doubt, however, that this recipe they dare to write for the cookshop of their future is a highly encouraging one, providing much in the way of effective counter-argument to objections that a society without monetary accounting could not be organised efficiently or that it would quickly degenerate into shortage and social chaos. The insights they provide in the ‘Limits of Planning’ section of their ‘Planning Half-Earth’ chapter, and in the day-in-a-life type ‘News from 2047’ chapter, also give helpful and fascinating food for thought about how ongoing democratic choice could take place within a socialist society among a population free to express that choice.

Setting up socialism

All this adds up to a meticulously researched and documented work, which will, in its broad lines at least, convince any fair-minded reader both of the urgent need for a different kind of society and also of a viable way in which it could be organised if workers throughout the world were to take action to establish it. This would be a kind of society organised without money and without the ‘embedded form of coercion’ that is forced employment. Yet, while the book is also effective in debunking, as the authors put it, ‘the delusions of the political centre and Left’, what it is somewhat short on is much to do with the mechanism of precisely how the society they advocate can come about. Yes, socialism will have to be planned in advance, as the authors make clear, but, as the Socialist Party argues, that can only seriously begin once the majority have begun to espouse the concept and can only work if the plans are fully developed before the change takes place. The authors seem to think that it can be sort of half-planned in advance, but that it will take some time after it has been established for it to be fully operative. Yet, once the necessary spreading of consciousness of the need for socialism has been achieved and plans for it have been made, there seems no reason why a democratic, moneyless, marketless society will not be able to be voted in via democratic political action (ie, the ballot box), and then be set up and be operative virtually immediately. The political control needed to coordinate the change will already be there. Yes, some tweaks, some forms of trial and error, some ongoing revisions are bound to be necessary, but none of this will prevent the basic structures of socialism from operating fully both for the benefit of humanity and of the environment. And, who knows, perhaps it will even be along the lines of the ‘integrated assessment models’ and ‘linear assessment’ envisioned by the authors?

Their main objection to socialism being established in this way via the ballot box seems to be that the capitalist class will not allow it. To support this they paraphrase (rather than quote directly) Engels’ 1886 introduction to the first English translation of Volume I of Marx’s Capital as ‘if a dedicated socialist party were to ever win [elections], the ruling class would unleash a “pro-slavery rebellion” against a “peaceful and legal revolution”’. Yet the main evidence they adduce that this would happen, ie, the toppling of the Allende government in Chile in 1973, is hardly relevant, since that regime was in no way socialist in the sense that they (or) we advocate the idea. And, in fact, Marx’s views on this were far more nuanced than the authors suggest and do not exclude a peaceful, democratic takeover by a majority via the ballot box. In addition, they also seem to show a certain naivety in being prepared to recognise recent or current oppressive state-capitalist regimes (eg, Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cuba) as somehow being attempts at socialism or on the way to it, when any connection of these regimes to socialism is purely rhetorical. Their unfortunate blind spot in this area even leads to them referring to Trotsky and Stalin as ‘20th century socialists’ and the ANC in South Africa as a party of ‘modern, internationalist socialism’.

Humanity and nature

But these are relatively minor points of contention for us in an important book that packs an enormous amount of knowledge and reflection into little more than 200 pages. It advocates basically what the Socialist Party advocates: a wholly democratic society of meaningful work which frees all humans from the threat of poverty and where the government of people is replaced by the administration of things. It also deals convincingly with the ‘motivation’ argument (part of the frequently heard ‘human nature’ objection), characterising socialism as a society in which ‘motivation’ will be provided by ‘positive incentives’ such as ‘social obligation, personal satisfaction, pride’. And, finally, with its strong focus on the ongoing degradation and possible collapse of the natural environment, it emphasises the need for what it calls ‘a new relationship between humanity and nature’ and looks forward, as we do, to ‘the prospect of a unified humanity … with an economy built around, care, health and unalienated labour’.

Howard Moss

Humans and Nature (2023)

Book Review from the February 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Life As We Made It. How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined – and Redefined – Nature. By Beth Shapiro. Oneworld, 2021. 341pp.

The author of this book is an evolutionary biologist with a special interest in the uses of ancient DNA and genetic engineering. She attempts to trace – and to characterise – the ways in which homo sapiens has used and manipulated nature over its history and, with modern biotechnology, can continue, for good or for bad, to do so more than ever. Profound understanding of how humanity has fashioned the natural environment since earliest times coupled with dazzling technical knowledge and experience in a variety of scientific fields allows her to paint a picture of human social evolution that is as extraordinary at it is often horrifying and to project into the future ways in which the careful use of what she calls synthetic biology can help to fashion what she sees as positive social developments for humanity.

One part of the history of humanity in its relationship with other species is dramatically summed up by the author when she writes: ‘Within the last 50,000 years, our ancestors hunted, polluted, and outcompeted hundreds of species into extinction’. A reasonable qualification to this, however, should be that they did most of this in the last 10,000 years or so, that is once settled agriculture took over from nomadic hunter gathering. And whether this move to farming was meant, as she says, ‘to improve the reliability of their next meal’ is also a matter of debate. A number of recent studies suggest that this transition, very gradual as it was, happened more by serendipity than by deliberate decision, especially as the effect of it was to make the majority of people actually worse off in very many ways than they had been as hunter gatherers. This was then made even worse when the new agricultural societies led to fixed hierarchies and then states with a small number of wealthy and powerful at the top and the vast majority forced to work at their behest and under conditions not of their choosing. This kind of set up remained as agricultural living was transcended by competitive industrial societies leading to colonial rule for millions in the less economically developed parts of the world and the factory system and wage labour as a means of survival for the vast majority elsewhere.

But, if we return to the time, 10,000 years ago, when settled agriculture in its various forms took over, the process of mass extinctions of both people and flora and fauna accelerated to a massive extent. Beth Shapiro, in a highly compelling and readable style, documents much of this history, striking examples of which in recent times are the demise of the bison in North America (from 60 million in the mid 18th century to fewer than 1,000 in 1884), the complete destruction by the end of the 19th century of the billions of passenger pigeons whose ancestors went back 10 million years, and the virtual elimination from the whole of the Americas by the mid 20th century of the pumas and panthers which had once been widespread throughout the continent.

But the author’s main purpose in writing this book is not so much to lament the loss of species or human carelessness in conserving the environment in the past as to propose ways in which humanity can make a better fist of things going forward. As she puts it: ‘We must use our increasingly advanced technologies to shape the future into one in which people can thrive alongside other species.’ She talks about the need to ‘restore ecosystem health and save species from extinction’. These are obviously laudable objectives, but the way she sees them being most effectively advanced is via massive changes – often laid out in enthralling scientific detail – she sees as possible by the use of genetic engineering and synthetic biology. She recognises that many people question this but is not sympathetic to their objections, brushing them aside as either ill-informed or based on conspiracy theories (‘cacophony of lies and distorted half-truths’).

While she may be right about this, what she does however fail to recognise (or at least nowhere mentions) is that, in the society we live in, neither the massive impact human activity is having on ecosystems nor the inability to decently feed, clothe and house many millions of people is caused by a failure to use the most up-to-date well-researched techniques of production to their best potential but is much more to do with production needing to take place with a view to cost-saving and profit rather than human welfare. This means that all attempts to ‘green’ the environment and benefit flora and fauna in any form face the formidable obstacle of a profit needing to be turned and that feeding people the world over is not a question of our inability to produce sufficient food but rather of people not having sufficient money to buy that food.

So, in referring to the need to develop biotechnologies such as artificial insemination and embryo transfer of animals to increase food production and deal with what she calls ‘global food shortages’, she surprisingly fails to take account of the wealth of information available showing that enough food is already produced to feed the world but that, in a world system based on the market and buying and selling, food is not available to the millions who need it. She shows no signs of being aware that, even in the USA, the most economically advanced country in the world and the one she lives in, the top 0.1 percent of the population hold as much wealth as the bottom 90 per cent put together and some 47 million people live in poverty. She refers to ‘United Nations estimates that farming production will need to increase by 50 percent to feed the projected 9 billion people that will inhabit the planet in 2050’, yet this flies in the face of a large swathe of studies estimating that, using current knowledge and techniques, the world can be fed many times over, up to 23 according to one estimate. So it’s not more advanced biotechnology that’s needed, nor more industrial agriculture, nor the continuous and increasing use of animal experimentation to improve biotechnology (something the author clearly sees as essential), but rather, and quite simply, a more advanced social system that does away with the market and buying and selling and produces for human need not economic profit.

Howard Moss

After the Revolution: Managing the Environment (2021)

From the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

By the time socialism is established climate change and degradation of resources will have had an even greater impact than currently. So, how might a socialist society adapt to be in harmony with the environment? Depending on how long the wait is, the many factors to be seriously considered include climate insecurity, energy insecurity and food insecurity. These, together, reveal the absolute necessity of going beyond the limits of industrial mono-agriculture.

Inclusive global socialism is a world without a monetary profit system, unlike today where capital rules every facet and dimension of our lives. There are many wasteful jobs in capitalism, non-productive in the sense of being solely related to money, when what we sorely need is to be productive in ways that satisfy our needs and that work in harmony with nature, with our bio-system. It is imperative that the balance which has been gradually destroyed from the industrial revolution onwards is restored.

Mono-culture versus diversity

All life on this planet has three basic needs, air, water and food. Harsh as it sounds everything else could be viewed as a bonus. Whilst addressing the numerous challenges which lie ahead we must also recognise that these problems cannot be dealt with from a purely UK perspective – or European, North American, or any other single territorial focus. All areas of the globe are in this together and unless we are prepared to take that into account there is no chance of successfully remedying the problems created by our single common problem – the capitalist system.

It is common knowledge globally now that these basic essentials (air, water, food) are consistently and continuously contaminated as a result of the way the current system works, for profit, not for public or planetary good. Socialism can focus on more localised food production built on the experience of local knowledge of the vast variety of seeds and plants available. Control will be out of the hands of present-day multinational corporations which have consistently degraded soil, water and air in the name of profit. The aim will be healthy, uncontaminated food.

The need to emphasise local and regional farming is in contrast to all the various problems globalised agriculture has caused around the world. One example out of many reveals how the monetary system in India has led to greater discrepancies between ‘rich world/poor world’ access to food. Multinationals have taken over great swathes of agricultural land to grow fresh fruit and vegetables for export which has necessitated the import of wheat and rice (previously locally grown) from North America. Before this theft of land farmers on their own smaller plots provided more than was necessary of a variety of crops. But now millions are either landless farmers working for large corporations or have moved to cities in search of whatever work is available. Two negative results are increased air pollution from fresh crops being flown by air and increased pollution from the shipping of grain crops; and the vast amounts of water needed for irrigating such crops is stealing much needed water from many local communities. Whilst aggravating climate change, fossil-fuel-dependent industrialised global agriculture is unable to change within the current system. This globalised capitalist trade is severely damaging the planet and all its various life forms, and continuing on such a path in socialism is neither desirable nor viable.

When considered rationally there is absolutely no contest between capitalism and socialism in the field of agriculture. The industrial food system is based on oil; bio-diverse, organic and local food systems are based on living soil. The industrial system creates waste and massive harmful pollution; living agriculture is based on no waste.

‘Green capitalism’?

What is currently considered waste in farming is allied to the profit system. Any avoidable costs are passed on to third parties or simply to nature. These externalities come in many forms. Massive cesspools from raising cattle, pigs and poultry in huge numbers in confinement are well known for the contamination and despoliation of local water systems. Mono-crop production based on chemicals (pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers) regularly poison the air, the water, the soil and the crop, negatively affecting both farm workers, local people and customers who are buying chemically contaminated food.

Organic farming has little if any waste. Green crops are recycled into the soil in order to add or fix nitrogen. Animal ‘waste’ is returned as enrichment to the soil, not released into the water system. Animals are fed on natural diets not chemical concoctions given to increase milk, egg or meat yields. There is much evidence showing the dangers of the many chemicals imposed on industrially raised animals, birds and fish including increased illnesses, deaths and allergies for some of which mega-corporations are having to pay record amounts of compensation after long-running court cases.

A proper, natural food cycle, not this chemical circus which has been forced upon us, and a more localised system of production radically reducing transport miles, together will give us fresher, healthier food, air and water.

A wide interpretation of what socialism will look like in practice will be vital if we are to continue to survive on this planet. Many different and varied cultures exist around the globe with hugely varying customs and proven methods for sustainability, low energy use and a more relaxed way of life than many in our so-called ‘developed’ world. Within this context and regarding the ‘neoliberal’ driving force of ‘globalisation’ – negatively impacting the planet by reaping riches without hesitation or concern for the disintegration of eco-systems – what will be the relationship between these different cultures? Are electric cars, from production through their useful working years, or wind energy as an alternative to current energy supply actually the real answer to some of our problems? Or are they just ‘green’ ideas of the business community still out to make profits?

There are multiple green groups around the world calling for governments to meet various standards or protocols, but if we invested any hope in the progress gained from meetings and protests we would surely be disappointed. Since the first Conference of the Parties (COP) in 1995, carbon emissions by 2018 had risen by 40 percent. The measures currently proposed by COP participants are expected to result in a 3°C warming since the mid-18th century, with some leading scientists forecasting at least 4°C. Some members of the Socialist Party are planning to be in Glasgow for the COP26 in order to present our view of what needs to be done. According to Neil Faulkner of Anti-Capitalist Resistance, ‘Industrial pollution destroys our eco-system and agribusiness generates wave after wave of killer pathogens… globalised, financialised monopoly capitalism has become an existential threat to life on Earth.’

How many individuals even noticed that 5 June was World Environment Day? Established by the UN General Assembly in 1972, 49 years ago, this year’s theme was ‘Ecosystem Restoration’ – also declared to be the decade for ecosystem restoration. Put it in your diary and check it in 2030.

In April, the Nobel Prize Summit ’Our Planet, Our Future’ announced a threat to ‘the enormous gains we have made in human progress’ and that ‘The ‘next decade is crucial: Global greenhouse gas emissions need to be cut by half and destruction of nature halted and reversed’. Unfortunately, participants are clearly and firmly enmeshed in capitalism’s mind-set. How else should we interpret this nonsense from their agreed statement? ‘Economic, environmental, and social externalities should be fairly priced’ (our emphasis) and ‘Complement GDP as a metric of economic success with measures of true well-being of people and nature.’ Meanwhile, recent UN Food Systems Summit meetings (Rome, New York) flew in delegates from all over the planet to stay in some luxury hotels. We wonder how much they contributed to the health of the environment.

Janet Surman

World View: In the name of profit (1997)

From the May 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism seems to induce in people a "problem fatigue", a condition in which the myriad problems facing humanity result in an indifference born of an overexposure to shock reports and nightmare scenarios — a condition which leaves the sufferer with the opinion that nothing he or she can do can help matters and that sooner or later all will turn out right.

In a society in which most of us are taught self-contempt and distrust our own intelligence, this is hardly surprising. After all, capitalism depends for its continued survival on suppressing ideas that conflict with those that sustain it. So naturally the master class would rather we turned a blind eye to their excesses, even at the risk of some future calamity.

The publication of three recent environmental reports — reports that suggest global catastrophe is on the horizon — would appear to confirm this. Remember the Worldwatch Institute back in 1990 giving us just 40 years. 12,000 days, to make the transition to “an environmentally stable society" or else? Exactly.

In January of this year the Worldwatch Institute produced another report entitled State of the World. The statistics they quote are alarming: western governments spend $500 billion each year subsidising the destruction of oceans, the atmosphere and land. $100 billion of this goes to power stations that worsen global warming, $300 billion goes to the encouragement of destructive farming and overgrazing and $50 billion to overfishing.

A following report by the Panel on Sustainable Development, a government advisory body set up by John Major five years ago. attacks the British government for spending £20 billion on environmentally damaging industry, energy and agricultural grants, and over in Nairobi the UN Environmental Agency reported that almost three billion people will face water shortages within 50 years.

The latter also reported that if present policies remain unchecked, within the same time period some 36 countries will face flooding with the displacement of 100 million people; that in Africa, land twelve times the size of Britain is moderately to severely degraded; that 86 percent of Europe's coastal ecosystems are at risk.

The industrial North, which contains only 20 percent of the world's population, uses 85 percent of the world's natural resources, 75 percent of the world’s energy, consumes 85 percent of the world's food and in return produces 65 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases and 95 percent of the world’s toxic waste.

These figures not only suggest a growing disparity between the North and poorer South, but also help lay the blame for the environmental crisis on the doorstep of capitalism.

If you waiver on this point then contemplate a few facts gleaned from other sources:

• An average US citizen consumes 12,000 tons of coal a year — an Ethiopian 551 lb.
• Fuel used by the US army alone produces more toxic waste than the entire UK.
• An inspector could visit a piece of industrially contaminated land in Holland every day for 1,640 years.
• Supplying solar-powered electricity to one billion people in poorer developed countries could be carried out with six percent of annual military expenditure in one year.
• Non-biodegradable plastic used in Western Europe in one year would outweigh a line of Eiffel Towers 32 km long.

At every turn we find that the drive for profit impoverishes the lives of countless millions and threatens to turn the world into a ginormous cess pit. Even the smallest chance to spread their festering tentacles forces the multinationals —who control 40 percent of world trade — to seek shorter returns on capital and to ignore long-term investment for the future, always to the detriment of the environment they operate in where production costs are cut to an absolute minimum.

Everywhere, from the melting icepacks of Antarctica to the oil-choked rivers of Nigeria, from the radiated no-go areas of the Nevada desert to the smog that hovers above Athens, we find evidence of a world facing catastrophe in the name of profit.

Governments may well introduce laws and implement plans to curb the assault on the environment — for instance introducing legislation on CFC emissions — and organisations may well campaign against the likes of Shell and Texaco. None is really addressing the problem the world faces at present. At best they can only palliate some aspect of the problem on a precarious and temporary basis. They most certainly cannot turn capitalism into some environmentally friendly society.

We are faced, on the one hand, with the reality that capitalism is incapable of solving one single social problem facing humanity, never mind the environmental one. while on the other confronted with the sad and terrible irony that the only problems we face are those we are already capable of solving.

We are more than capable of running our world on solar power, of feeding a world population twice the present size and housing and clothing every person on the planet, providing them with health care and education.

It is not enough to leave environmental control to governments or to hope that big business will sooner or later see sense and turn to environmentally friendlier production methods. To do so is to misunderstand what the capitalist mode of production is all about. If we care at all about the world we live in, if we are to meet our needs in an environmentally acceptable way, then we must be in a position to control production — to consciously control our interaction with the rest of nature — and the only basis on which this can be done is the common ownership of the means of production, by and in the interests of all people and the world they live in.

John Bissett

Ecology and Politics (1985)

From the December 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Strictly speaking, ecology is a science and not a party-political point of view. But as the science of the relationship between organisms and their environment it has clear social implications when the organisms in question are human beings. Whatever we might like to think, we are not the species that has “conquered” nature and freed itself from its laws; we are a part of nature and cannot, without serious consequences, permanently infringe the laws governing our relationship as an animal species to the rest of nature as our environment.

Basically, ecological science teaches that an ecosystem, as a pattern of relationships between various different plant and animal organisms and their common physical environment, can only survive over time if a certain equilibrium is established and maintained –what has been called “the balance of nature”. If this balance is not respected, then the ecosystem begins to break down with serious consequences for all the organisms involved.

Although there are still some completely self-sufficient tribes and communities in various parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America—which, incidentally, have only survived, apart from their isolation, through being perfectly integrated into their ecosystems—the ecosystem of which humanity is part now embraces, and has done for about a hundred years, the whole globe. A moment’s reflection on what goes into making the articles we use every day is sufficient to demonstrate this: they are made of materials—of metals like steel, tin and aluminium or of plastics derived from oil—that come from all parts of the world. The same applies to much of the food we eat. The environment on which we depend, then, is the whole world, its atmosphere, its natural and industrial resources—in short, all that is in and on the Earth. The equilibrium which ought to exist between us and our environment is thus an equilibrium between us, as a species, and the whole of the rest of nature, an equilibrium which would allow us to use nature to satisfy our needs without upsetting the ecosystem to which we belong.

Yet, if we look around us, it can clearly be seen that no such equilibrium exists or is being respected. The Earth is being plundered and polluted: non-renewable resources are being used up in a reckless manner while other parts of nature are being rendered unusable through pollution by non-biodegradable and toxic wastes. What makes this worse is that this does not even ensure the survival of the human race in adequate, decent conditions: millions of members of our species suffer from hunger, lack of shelter, disease and ignorance. Even those of us in the so-called developed parts of the world, though not suffering from problems of material survival to this degree, still do not consume proper food, nor have adequate housing, education or health care, and generally lead unsatisfying, stressful lives. Clearly something is radically wrong with the way we relate as a species to our environment.

The way humans are organised to obtain their material means of survival both as individuals and as a society is in fact the basis of any form of human society. All other aspects of human social life—decision-making procedures, art, religion, morality and ideas generally—are ultimately determined by this basic social relationship of how human beings get their Irving. So, if we are to understand why present-day society is so anti-ecological we need to begin by examining its basis.

The first point is that natural resources, the ultimate source of our means of material survival, are not owned in common, but are the property of individuals or groups of individuals. This seems to be quite normal, even natural, but in fact it is a quite irrational and abnormal way for human beings to organise their access to the fruits of nature and their own labour. For it means that a section of society monopolise the means whereby the rest of society live. It means that this minority can hold the rest to ransom and exact a tribute from them in the form of a privileged non-work consumption. It thus rules out co-operation to produce what is needed and makes exploitation and conflict the basic social relation of production.

So abnormal did this seem that a whole series of thinkers since ancient times have seen common ownership (the absence of property, or no-ownership) as being “natural” and property as being “unnatural”. This was expressed in such popular sayings as “the Sun shines for everyone”, or, in religious terms, as God having given the Earth and its fruits to all humanity to be enjoyed by them on an equal basis. And every time that the excluded, non-owning class has revolted against its exploitation by the propertied class the demand for a return to common ownership, regarded as the natural state of humanity, has been raised. In fact the whole of political philosophy, as still taught in schools and universities to this day, can be seen as a permanent attempt to justify property and refute the more reasonable common ownership.

In any event, natural or unnatural, property in the means of production is the basis of present-day society as of many past societies and this has certain serious implications for human relations with nature. For where there is property nature cannot be regarded as the common heritage of all, to be respected and looked after in the common interest. There is no common interest and the sectional interest of the property-owners is to utilise the part of nature they monopolise for their own personal benefit, without concern for the rest of society and future generations. So, already, an anti-ecological bias is built-in to any property society.

Another, even stranger, feature of present-day society is the fact that items of wealth are produced, not to satisfy human needs, but to be sold on a market with a view to obtaining a monetary profit. Not even previous property societies had this feature since, although they were based on exploitation, the aim of production was still use even if that of the ruling class. Generalised production for sale too seems normal today, but is really quite odd for it means that the main reason food is produced is not to be eaten, nor houses to be lived in, nor clothes to be worn; everything, literally everything, is produced for its exchange-value, not its use-value. The aim of production today, far from being the natural one of producing useful things to satisfy human needs, is to accumulate more and more capital in the form of exchange value. In fact production today is governed by an economic mechanism—the accumulation of capital—that is beyond human control and forces humans to obey and apply it even though this clearly does not serve human interests.

The combination of property and production for sale means that each property owner, or rather these days each property-owning establishment or capital-accumulating enterprise, whether private or state owned, is seeking to maximise its own monetary profit. Each enterprise is a separate profit-and-loss accounting unit seeking to maximise its relatively short-term economic gain, once again without concern; either for the common interest or for longer term ecological considerations.

In other words, present-day capitalist society is constitutionally incapable of regarding nature as anything other than a resource to be plundered for short-term, sectional economic gain. It is true that from time to time the state does step in to prevent excesses but this does not alter the basic mechanism of capitalism. Indeed, as William Morris pointed out with regard to food adulteration, laws against this are only necessary in a society where the economic tendency is to do this, since in a rationally-organised society it just would not occur to anyone involved in producing food to deliberately adulterate it. Similarly, laws against plundering and polluting the environment are only necessary where the tendency to do this is built-in to the economic system. It also means that such laws, besides being frequently broken, can only be palliatives, attempts to deal with effects while leaving the cause intact.

Politically-oriented ecologists thus have a tactical choice to make. Either they go for more laws and restrictions to try to protect the environment or they go for a radical social change to bring about a society in which the environment wouldn’t need protecting. It’s the same dilemma that the early socialist movement faced: reform or revolution? Trying to patch up and change the spots of present-day society or working to establish a new society as a preliminary to being able to do anything lasting and constructive? Experience has shown reformism, in whatever field, to be basically a futile exercise: at best it is only running fast to stay still, at worst it is only solving one problem at the expense of creating others.

The nature of the only social framework within which human beings could live in harmony with, not at the expense of, the rest of nature is easy enough to discern: it would have to be a society based on common ownership not property and a society in which the aim of production was to satisfy human needs, not to make and accumulate profits. In short, communism in its original sense, what the Socialist Party today calls “socialism” (and which of course has nothing to do with the various states and regimes throughout the world which are falsely labelled socialist today).

Respecting ecological principles does not involve a “return to nature” in the form of a return to primitive agricultural and artisan techniques. Agriculture, even in its primitive forms, has always presented an interference with nature and upset the pre-existing balance. Humans have to do this in order to obtain their material means of survival. But the point is to establish a sustainable balance between our use of nature as a source, of wealth and nature’s ability to keep on supplying us on a self-regulating basis because we allow it to recreate what we take from ft.

What respecting ecological principles involves is, first of all, a recognition that there is a balance of nature which can be upset by the choice of techniques of food, energy and industrial production. It involves choosing techniques in the light of this knowledge, including developed industrial techniques since nothing prevents these from being in principle integrated into a sustainable ecosystem. Change, involving upsetting a particular balance, is not at all ruled out nor is it necessarily undesirable in itself but, once again, it must be realised that change can upset the existing balance of nature and that steps must therefore be consciously taken to help a new, different balance to be found. Having said this, however, it is likely that, after an initial increase in food, energy and industrial production to help overcome the problems of world hunger, destitution and disease which socialism is bound to inherit from capitalism, production levels will become stabilised in socialism and be tied to population levels (which will also be stabilised). In other words, socialism will eventually become a society with a stable level of production, integrated into a stable relationship with the rest of nature; a particular balance with nature will be achieved and sustained.

In this sense, and even though our choice of words would be different, socialism will achieve the first of the principles on which the Ecology Party says in its leaflet Politics for Life that its policies are based:

to ensure basic material security for all, putting people before profit within a stable economy, based on sustainable alternatives to the Insane rat race of economic growth.

We would in fact go further and say that this aim can be achieved only in a society based on the common ownership of natural and industrial resources in which production could therefore be oriented solely towards satisfying human needs. In any event, it is quite incompatible with the existing capitalist system which, because of its very nature, will never “ensure basic material security for all”, cannot put “people before profit” and is in fact “the insane rat race of economic growth”—the blind mechanism of capital accumulation out of profits realised from sales on a market.

Some ecologists would seem to be on the way to realising that the achievement of an “ecological society” Involves a complete change of economic and social system. Thus, one ecologist in a recent letter to the Guardian (21 September 1985) expressed herself as follows:

Green politics is concerned with a materially realisable future, not with a mythical past, and is actively working towards a more equal and more humane society. A non-exploitative and non-hierarchical society is a practical goal not an ideal, one which necessitates a social order based on the common ownership of natural resources. This is not a matter of sprigged muslins, spinning-wheels and wholemeal porridge but of uses of science and technology (“soft” rather than “hard”) which will enable us to realise our full human potential.

A non-exploitative and non-hierarchical society based on the common ownership of natural (and, to be absolutely clear, industrial) resources enabling us to realise our full human potential is not a bad description of socialism as we understand it.

It would, however, be going too far to say that any more than a tiny handful of the Ecology Party think along these lines. In practice, the Party concentrates on pushing its programme of reforms to be realised within the money-wages-profit system that is capitalism and published elsewhere in its leaflet under the heading A Ten Point Action Programme. These include such measures as “a National Income scheme to remove the poverty trap”, “phase out National Insurance, introduce a Natural Resources Tax”, “abandon all plans for more nuclear power stations”, “set up an Environmental Protection Agency”, “ban lead in petrol, the asbestos industry and cigarette advertising”, etc, etc, etc.

In other words, the Ecology Party seems to be unaware of the tactical dilemma faced by all those advocating something that is incompatible with capitalism and are becoming bogged down in “green” reformism. Already at their last Conference in May there were complaints that parts of their programme were being stolen by the established reformist parties. But this is only possible because the party’s list of reform demands can be accommodated within capitalism — and it was of course these demands that the other parties have stolen and not the idea of “a stable economy, based on sustainable alternatives to the insane rat race of economic growth” and certainly not that of “a non-exploitative and non-hierarchical society . . . based on the common ownership of natural resources”.

Adam Buick