These Foolish Things: It could be you (1995)

The Scavenger column from the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

It could be you

Mistake! This print-out from a certain charity’s head office should never have been sent out to its members—because against every name there was a cryptic comment about the person’s housing and social status—for fund-raising purposes. Here are some of them:

Low rise pensioners

       Sweatshop sharers 

Rootless renters

       Pebble dash sublopia 

Bijou homemakers

       Aged owner occupiers 

Gentrified villages

       Rejuvenated terraces 

30s Industrial speculative

      Corporate careerists 

Low rise subsistence

       Smokestack shiftwork 

Co-op club and colliery

      Depopulated terraces

Who concocts jargon like this?

Getting rid of pollution (1)

Albright and Wilson, the Oldbury chemical firm, has just set up a joint venture with Hunan Resun Industrial General Corporation in China to manufacture wetting and foaming agents for detergents and toiletries. This adds to the manufacturing plants they have already established in Singapore, Malaysia. Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand.

The night-time emissions of foul smells from their Oldbury chimneys may soon be only a fond memory. They will have moved to the other side of the world.

Getting rid of pollution (2)

GEC Alsthom of Rugby is to build £2 billions-worth of power stations in China, including a second nuclear installation at Daya Bay, association with two French companies. But this one will be 20 percent cheaper than Daya Bay I because China has forced down the price. Nuclear power stations are no longer popular around the world. The People’s Democracy of China, however, has no such misgivings.

Getting rid of pollution (3)

Resio Moses, a senior official from the Federated States of Micronesia, said pacific governments are worried about “numerous approaches that have been made to some island countries by unscrupulous foreign waste dealers.” These South Pacific nations have recently agreed a draft treaty banning the passage or dumping of all hazardous waste in the region in an attempt to halt this growing branch of capitalist enterprise.

Three in a cell

Britain’s prison population of nearly 52,000 is increasing by 250 a week. New blocks costing £55 million are being built in an attempt to house the 2,000 surplus to capacity. Six private prisons are planned for the future but none of these is likely to be ready for about two years. Meanwhile, severe overcrowding, like that of the 1980s, seems inevitable.

The Scavenger

Voice From The Back: Deep sea diving (2000)

The Voice From The Back Column from the May 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Deep sea diving 

 . . . has always been a hazardous job, but now industrial pollution of the sea bed is making it silently deadly. The Western Australian published a two-page feature last October about three experienced divers working for the Texan company Oceaneering under contract to Hyundai Heavy Industry 40 metres down in the South China Sea. As soon as they left the diving bell foul smells invaded their air supply. They were told to ignore it. They felt dizzy, the fillings fell out of their teeth. Then their teeth began to fall out. After repeated complaints, their diving bell, itself letting in the lethal volatile chemicals, was moved, still pressurised, to another site for two weeks while the toxic area was dredged, when they were taken back again, but it was little better. One man was close to death when they were finally brought up after a month. Even the laboratory technicians who tested samples of the mud became ill. HHI then hired Chinese divers who were poisoned one after another. The Australians are still fighting for adequate compensation. The Chinese will probably get nothing. The only thing that finally matters in capitalism is money.

Das Kapital Vol.III summarised 

Only a fool thinks price and value are the same. Silk Road, Chinese Fortune Cookie.

Forcing homeless people 

. . . off the streets may prove harder than the government thinks. Chris Holmes, director of Shelter, says present hostel places are 99.8 percent full the year round and Shelterline, the housing advice phone service gets 100 calls a day from single people desperate for somewhere to stay that night. There are over 600 a night sleeping on the streets of London, 2,400 people a year.

The Scottish Socialist Party

. . . is campaigning for a new bus shelter in Fort William, protesting about water rates in Inverness and complaining about the condition of a school in Easter Ross. This “socialism” has brought them “phenomenal growth” according to their Highland regional organiser, Steve Arnott. He doesn’t explain what bus shelters have got to do with socialism.

The American family farm 

. . . is almost extinct. In the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush administration 85,064 were taken over for $3.5 trillion. In the seven Clinton years, 166,310 corporate mergers, worth $9.8 trillion, have almost completed the job. Farms are no longer viable alone. They are only a small part of a vertical agricultural monolith in which the money is mostly made in processing and sales—not growing crops. Food retailers over the last ten years have returned 18 percent on investments, food manufacturers, 17.2 percent, agricultural banks 10.8 percent and farmers only 2.38 percent.

Half the population of Britain 

. . . have less than £750 in savings and investments, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. About one in ten have no savings at all.

Another Tony Blair promise 

. . . has fizzled out. The reform of company law to make “stakeholders” replace shareholders as the controllers of companies, taking into account the interests of customers, workers and environmental interests, has been thrown out by the officials responsible for reviewing the Victorian statutes. In a report which will surprise nobody who has any understanding of the capitalist system, they have reiterated the supremacy of shareholders. They do suggest, however, that directors should be aware of wider social responsibilities. So that’s all right then.

Clare Short is foolish 

. . . enough to believe that getting a ministerial job in a Labour government enables a concerned person to achieve improvements for the poor, the homeless, the starving. She told the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle last year facts like:

• A fifth of the world’s population own 86 percent of its wealth.
• If the world’s richest 200 people gave up one percent of their wealth per year, it would pay for free primary education for every child on earth.
• As it is, 1.3 billion people have to live on 60p a day.
• The tiles in Bill Gates’s kitchen cost £450 each—twice the average annual income in Africa’s poor countries.

Clare Short hasn’t realised, what the delegates to the WTO meeting know only too well—that capitalism can work in no other way. The poor are poor because the rich are rich.

Pathfinders: Whales, Scales and Fishy Tales (2021)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Big waves were caused recently by the release on Netflix of the documentary Seaspiracy, which sets out to harpoon the supposedly sustainable global fishing and aquaculture industry. A furious backlash by industry insiders immediately ensued, accusing Netflix of screening ‘vegan propaganda’. Netflix however, keen to drag an increasingly vegan-oriented millennial audience away from YouTube, won’t care about treading on a few people’s raw sushi.

First-time film-makers Ali and Lucy Tabrizi travel the world to research the documentary, showing at times considerable courage in evading arrest, or indeed much worse. What they discover is shocking and designed to shock. It takes nerve to watch a whole dolphin pod being hacked to death with cleavers, even more to see real footage of humans being shot in the sea. Former slaves in Thailand relate being press-ganged and made to work at gunpoint on trawlers for years, and executed and thrown over the side if they refuse. The filmmakers have to flee in a car chase to the airport with a criminal gang in hot pursuit. An industry spokesperson at a trade show laughs and denies any such nonsense. EU ministers offer bland assurances. Environmental charities dodge the issue. This is an industry which, the documentary makes plain, will stop at nothing to prevent the public from knowing what really goes on.

This is an unregulated and often illegal industry in which vast factory ships trailing miles of floor-scraping nets drag the ocean for everything it contains, including not just the target fish but also ‘by-catch’, variously estimated at between 10 and 50 percent, which is then thrown back dead. The impact is global and catastrophic. When the Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred in 2010, instead of marine wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico being destroyed as predicted, it actually recovered, despite all the oil, because commercial fishing had been suspended. The tragedy and the irony is that the oceans would recover easily enough if humans would just leave them alone. More whales would help us too. Marine life is a huge carbon sink. A tree absorbs up to 48 pounds of CO2 a year. Each dead whale that sinks to the ocean floor sequesters 33 tons for centuries (Link).

The scale of marine destruction is not common knowledge. Catches are supposed to be ‘dolphin-safe’, and sustainable, and there are industry-approved labels to certify it. But the documentary makes clear that none of these certifications mean anything, because there is no way to enforce them. It’s too expensive for observers to go out with every boat and check, so they only have the captain’s word that no by-catch was destroyed in the process. Issuing agencies get paid by the industry to certify catches as ‘dolphin-safe’, a clear conflict of interests. ‘Sustainable’ doesn’t mean what we think either, that fish stocks are 100 percent healthy. Some species have seen population crashes of up to 90 percent, and ‘sustainable’ may only mean that they are being fished at just above extinction level.

Then there’s the fact that marine trawling is the biggest food-related carbon emitter after beef and lamb farming, equivalent to global air travel, and dwarfing that from pigs, chickens and grain crops (Link). And while we are encouraged to obsess about plastic straws and cotton buds, a media displacement strategy that George Monbiot, a contributor in the film, describes as ‘micro-consumerist bollocks’ (Link), fishing produces up to 800,000 tons of discarded heavyweight plastic fishing gear a year, making up approximately half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and destroying untold wildlife.

Monbiot lambasts the BBC for making nature programmes that never spotlight the destructive fishing industry (Link). In fact the BBC’s own Reality Check journalists went over Seaspiracy and failed to find much to criticise (bbc.in/3tiLqGu). There were some out-of-date statistics though, which gave ammunition to the doc’s detractors. Yet data is a perennial problem. You can’t just count fish in the sea like cows in a field, so fish stocks are guesses. Catches can remain level while stocks plummet, because of greater trawling efficiency. The documentary says 50 percent by-catch, other sources say 10 percent, but with no monitoring there is no way to know. The film perhaps has a motive to paint a bleak scenario, but the industry has an equally strong motive to dismiss all concerns. Who do you believe?

Just before Seaspiracy aired in March, New Scientist also looked at the global fishing industry (13 February). This article was slightly more upbeat, pointing to some small improvements, yet came to the same broad conclusions. Since 1950 the human population has gone up by 175 percent, but fishing by 750 percent. Despite three global agreements to stop the decline in fish stocks, almost nothing has been done to reverse the trend. And fish farming is no solution, because it’s a net consumer, not a producer of fish protein. More human-edible fish are fed into the aquaculture system as fish meal than come out as product, at a ratio of anywhere between 3:1 and for tuna, 20:1. And this is quite apart from the 22 million tons of fish – nearly 30 percent of the human-edible catch – fed to domestic livestock for the meat industry, once again with back-to-front protein ratios (Link).

So if industrial fishing is so bad, and fish farming is no answer, what’s the solution? Don’t eat fish, says the documentary. It’s true that the health benefits of fish are overrated, despite the NHS advice to eat more of it. Omega 3s aren’t made by fish, but by the algae they consume, so we could just make edible foods directly out of the algae.

But telling viewers not to eat fish is meaningless unless you also tell them not to eat animals or keep pets fed on them, or use products made with them, and in any case overlooks the bigger picture. The fishing industry is just one aspect of a spectacularly destructive global production system which operates the way it does because it makes money. And where money leads, destruction follows. As the fish stocks fall and the prices go up, the plundering will if anything increase. Capitalism is a war of profit against humans, profit against wildlife, profit against the planet, all for the benefit of a few billionaires, and changing your diet isn’t going to change that. The only thing that will is to get rid of capitalism, and share the world as a democratic cooperative. If you want to save the oceans, being vegan is not enough, you also have to be a revolutionary.

Paddy Shannon

The Real Waste (2020)

From the April 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

Paul Bennett

Proper Gander: All’s Whale That Ends Well? (2020)

The Proper Gander Column from the March 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Stacey Dooley has an open-minded, grounded approach to her documentaries, with an engagingly genuine interest in the contentious subjects she covers. Her latest programme, Stacey Dooley Investigates: The Whale Hunters (BBC3), follows on from her previous investigations into women suicide bombers and sex offenders, among other topics. Stepping out of her comfort zone, she goes out on a Norwegian boat hunting minke whales, and watches as one get harpooned and dragged aboard. Most of the programme, though, is taken up by her meeting families on the Faroe Islands, where eating long-finned pilot whale meat has been part of their culture for a thousand years. Hunting pilot whales is called the ‘grind’(grindadráp) in Faroese; when a podis sighted out at sea, fishing boats herd the whales towards the beach where they are killed by hand. The recommended method claims not to cause any suffering: a sleek-looking tool called a spinal lance, the use of which is monitored and regulated. 

The Faroese live a rural life, close to nature and therefore not as distanced from where their food comes from as most of us. When we load our supermarket trolleys with meat or fruit or any food, we scarcely think about how it was produced. The Faroese see pilot whale hunting as ‘taking food from nature’, which it is their ‘duty’ to do. They emphasise that they don’t catch any endangered species and it’s more environmentally friendly than rearing cattle, which carries a significant ‘carbon footprint’. The grind is small-scale subsistence farming, with the meat just distributed among the islanders rather than being for export. Pilot whale meat remains popular among the Faroese, despite the islands’ officials recommending years ago that eating it should be avoided. This is because it contains high levels of mercury, DDT derivatives and polychlorinated biphenyls (chemicals largely banned in the 1970s), leached into the oceans and ingested by the pilot whales.

The Faroese see the grind as part of their culture, which others don’t have the right to interfere with. Whaling around the Faroe Islands isn’t covered by the International Whaling Commission’s ban on commercial whaling. For starters, the long-finned pilot whales hunted there are a kind of dolphin, despite their name. Also, as the Faroe Islands are devolved territories of Denmark, as Greenland is, their autonomy means that they don’t go along with Denmark as one of the countries which agreed to the ban. ‘Aboriginal whaling’, defined as the hunting of whales by indigenous communities is exempted from the ruling anyway. Japan always got round the ban by hunting whales for ‘scientific’ reasons, while Norway, Canada and others object to the moratorium and have continued commercial hunting. The hunting of whales was banned because many species were declining rapidly towards unsustainable levels. Another factor is that whales and dolphins are more intelligent than most other mammals, raising questions about their capacity for suffering and awareness.

Objections to the grind mostly come from the Sea Shepherds, a direct-action group, whose mission ‘is to end the destruction of habitat and slaughter of wildlife in the world’s oceans’. They used to actively protest against the grind, but since being banned from this their work has shifted largely to raising awareness by posting grisly videos of the hunt online. The group of them which Stacey meets are made up of activists from the UK and America, while none are Faroese. The Sea Shepherds emphasise their non-aggressive methods, and argue that the grind is a tradition which should be left in the past, and that it’s not as humane as its proponents make out. They point out that the spinal lance often isn’t used correctly, causing suffering to the pilot whales. Stacey shows an adviser to the Faroese government gory footage of a dolphin being killed in a clumsy, drawn-out way. Official reports claim that the methods used are humane and quick, whereas a fifth of whales take up to six minutes to die. The adviser recognises that sometimes the grind can be brutal, but that’s because it takes place in an uncontrolled environment, not in a slaughterhouse.

Objections to the grind and the risk of contamination haven’t stemmed the Faroe Islanders’ love of pilot whale meat. The grind, and whaling in general, have been traditions for hundreds of years, and could continue for hundreds more. How would the issue of whaling be handled in a socialist society? Of course, we can’t say with any certainty, as it’ll depend on whatever the situation is at the time. But the practice is still likely to divide opinion and represent bigger questions about cultural differences, animal ‘rights’ and sustainability. A socialist society would make its decisions democratically, rather than through hierarchies, commercial interests or laws, as we have to in capitalism. All sides would be able to have their say, and all relevant facts – about contaminants, whale populations, the methods used – would be freely available so that people can make an informed decision. This could be made by voting directly on whether or how to hunt whales, or by electing people into roles to resolve the issue, or some other approach we can’t imagine now. Would it be only for the whaling communities to decide? Maybe, maybe not, if hunting had a wider impact. It’s likely that a socialist society would have some decision-making structures with a global reach, more accountable and accessible than their equivalents today and not run through states (as states would be obsolete). So, it’s possible that something like the International Whaling Commission could remain in a socialist society, albeit structured differently and more democratically. Whichever way any decisions about whaling would be made in socialism, they would aim to directly meet people’s needs and wants, in balance with nature. There are no easy answers with controversial issues like whaling, but a socialist society would enable us to make decisions in the most reasonable way.

Mike Foster

Voice From the Back: Hungry kids in the USA (2015)

The Voice From The Back column from the March 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hungry kids in the USA

Poverty is usually associated with countries in Africa and Asia not the highly developed USA, but here are the facts. ‘about 16 million kids relied on the US government supplemental nutrition assistance program according to census bureau data released Wednesday, up from 15.6 million a year earlier’ (Huffington Post, 28 January). Capitalism is a world-wide system and it has world-wide problems.


Kobani carnage

‘The Kurdish forces’ unexpected victory in this north Syrian town marked a huge strategic and propaganda loss for Isis, which once seemed unstoppable in their rampage across the region’ (Observer, 1 February). There is no sense of triumph for these troops as Kobani is completely destroyed. Thousands massacred, all that remains is a bombed-out shell. In the yawning craters left by US air strikes buildings have vanished during months of heavy shelling. One side street is blocked by the bodies of Isis fighters, rotting where they fell – a pile of bones marked only by a foul smell. This is the inevitable product of capitalism’s rivalries.


A strange communism

According to the Hurun Global Rich List 2015 the world now has a record 2,089 billionaires – and for the first time, India has more of them than Britain or Russia. ‘The list charts every dollar billionaire currently living in the world. It shows an additional 222 billionaires were created last year, almost a third of whom were in China. The US still holds the crown for most mega-wealthy residents, at 537. But China conditions are not far behind with 430, having acquired 72 new billionaires in 2014’ (Daily Telegraph, 5 February). Somewhat comically the Chinese government still claims to be communist.


A fortune in stamps

Capitalism is a crazy system that can condemn working men and women and their families to starvation for the want of a few pounds while this madness occurs. ‘a few stamps which lay together in a cigar box in a dusty attic for a century are set to fetch £250,000 when next auctioned’ (Sunday Express, 8 February). Scraps of paper worth more than human existence. Crazy.


An obvious statement

It hardly needed a high-powered business survey to tell us the following. ‘Big UK firms face a ‘crisis of trust’ and the next government must prioritise better ethics, a lobby group has said. In a survey, the Forum of Private Business (FPB) found that over three-quarters of respondents think big firms put profits before ethical standards’ (BBC News, 9 February). Tax avoidance, treatment of suppliers, and late payment were all areas of concern we can easily understand that the poll of 2,000 people found, but business putting profits before ethics? Wow, what a surprise!


Crime and capitalism

TV programmes and the national press are fond of depicting the police as dealing successfully with the problem of crime, alas that is a complete fallacy. The advent of cheap heroin in Chicago has led to an increase in crime undreamt of by Al Capone and his contemporaries. ‘In the 1920s, 227 gangsters were said to have been killed in the city in the space of four years. Last year there were 424 murders in Chicago, most of them said to be gang-related’ (Times, 9 February), an increase of almost double in a quarter of the time. Some progress.


Profit and pollution

Details released at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science show that about eight million tonnes of plastic waste find their way into the world’s oceans each year. ‘The new study is said to be the best effort yet to quantify just how much of this debris is being dumped, blown or simply washed out to sea. Eight million tonnes is like covering an area 34 times the size of New York’s Manhattan Island to ankle depth’ (BBC News, 12 February). In the battle between profit and pollution there is a clear winner.


Desperate workers

According to the UN at least 300 migrants are feared to have drowned after attempting to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa this week in rough seas. ‘UNHCT official Vincent Cochetel said it was a ‘tragedy on an enormous scale’. Survivors brought to the Italian island of Lampedusa said they were forced to risk the bad weather on ill-equipped vessels by human traffickers in Libya’ (BBC News, 11 February). Desperate workers are prepared to take enormous risks just to get a job.

Pathfinders: Plastic not so fantastic (2018)

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

On 10 July 1940 war-time Britain saw the launch of the Great Aluminium Scare and a Beaverbrook campaign to ‘turn your pots and pans into Spitfires and Hurricanes, Blenheims and Wellingtons’. Patriotic citizens responded by sacrificing useful metal kitchenware and bathroom fittings which created mountains all over the country. Scrap metal mania even extended to tearing up the railings round municipal parks, though cast iron scrap had little practical value. Indeed most of these scrap mountains went into landfill or post-war scrap metal shops since, as RAF Museum curator Rob Skitmore pointed out in 2005, ‘in fact we had lots of aluminium, what we needed more of were pilots’ (see Link).

The point of course was to give the population something practical to do so they could feel like part of the war effort. In short, a propaganda exercise. After all Lord Beaverbrook, aside from being Churchill’s minister of aircraft production, was also owner of the Daily Express, the world’s largest circulation newspaper at that time.

Is something similar happening today with the Great Plastic Scare? It seems to have started with the BBC Blue Planet II documentary earlier this year, which highlighted the problem of plastic ocean waste and resurrected 2016 World Economic Forum predictions that by 2050 there will be more plastic in the oceans than fish. Now the rush is on to ditch the use of plastic cups, cotton buds, plastic straws, wet wipes, plastic bags, plastic food wrappings, in short, plastic anything. The UK government is now compiling a list of plastic items to ban and a plastic tax is being considered by the Treasury (‘Public ‘back’ taxes to tackle single-use plastic waste’, BBC, 18 August). Practically overnight, plastic has become the new demon.

The problem is, things are always more complicated than news headlines make them out to be. While there’s no doubt that global capitalism is using the planet like a giant dustbin, the solutions aren’t always so obvious. Whatever you do is going to have an environmental impact. If you swap single-use plastic bags for a cotton tote bag, you’ll have to use it 131 times before reaching impact parity, because of the high environmental cost of cotton production (New Scientist, 13 June). If you avoid food containing palm oil but drive with the latest ‘green’ biofuels, you’ll be burning palm oil instead of eating it and thus still contributing to the devastation of Madagascar. In theory one could use different vegetable oils in fuel, but they would require massively more land than oil palms need. If you decide to avoid fossil gas central heating in favour of a trendy and ‘clean’ wood burning stove, you’ll be treating your neighbours to the equivalent of eight trucks parked in the street with their engines on all night (New Scientist, 2 June).

People during the war probably didn’t need or want to know that they were making pointless sacrifices. What they craved was the feelgood factor. So today people don’t perhaps want to know that most of the contents of their recycle bins is likely to end up incinerated or in landfill, or sent abroad. According to the National Audit Office, the government doesn’t have any idea whether or what percentage of ‘recyclables’ is being recycled, has ‘turned a blind eye’ to known problems in the waste stream, has only carried out 40 percent of the recycling checks it was supposed to, and has been exporting over 50 percent of the waste it claims as ‘recycled’ (‘Recycled packaging ‘may end up in landfill’, warns watchdog’, BBC, 23 July).

You’d be excused for thinking that the whole recycling programme is a bit of a con. Most of the plastic we rinse and put in recycle bins is not actually recyclable, largely because manufacturers use cheap, low-grade and non-biodegradable industrial polymers. Well of course they do, but other reasons are more trivial. Fresh food containers are very often carbon black because food products apparently look good on black, but recycling machines can’t detect black (‘Plastic food pots and trays are often unrecyclable, say councils’, BBC, 4 August). Plastic cups don’t get recycled, not because they couldn’t be, but because there is no regional collection infrastructure for them. And if there was, would the road haulage fleet required then cancel out the carbon benefits of the recycling?

It’s not that we shouldn’t bother making any individual efforts. Of course we should, and many of us do, because a future socialist society wouldn’t last five minutes without a strong and abiding sense of personal responsibility. But too much focus on little things like cotton buds and wet wipes – which apparently cause giant ‘fatbergs’ in London’s sewage system – can become a seductive invitation to forget the big picture, to kid yourself you’re doing something when you’re really not.

Some young activists, too young even to vote, are making bold attempts to take their governments, or international corporations to court over climate change (New Scientist, 18 August). How much success these ‘climate kids’ are going to have suing capitalist institutions inside capitalist courts is something socialists can hazard a cynical guess at. But at least they’re trying to raise the climate stakes to match the rising temperature.

What really needs putting in the dock of course is capitalism itself, and the total control and squandering of Earth’s resources by less than 1 percent of its population. If the public scare about plastic is viewed as an indicator of a growing sense of communal outrage on behalf of the planet, we might be encouraged, but only if this outrage starts to take an explicit and political form. If however people are happy to settle for tokenistic efforts for the sake of a quiet life, the class war will continue indefinitely, and socialists will have to battle on alone.

Genoa Bridge Collapse

As we go to press the cause of this collapse is not yet known, but metal corrosion in the steel cables reinforcing the concrete structure is suspected. Acoustic sensors are a new technology which can ‘hear’ internal corrosion, and recently resulted in London’s Hammersmith Flyover being urgently refurbished, but most bridges don’t have them, as the cost would be huge. Globally bridges are often in a poor state. 7 percent of French bridges are at risk of collapse, 12 percent of Germany’s are in bad condition, and 54,000 US bridges are ‘structurally deficient’ (New Scientist, 17 August). No doubt a 10-year recession and government cutbacks in every country have done nothing to improve matters. Whatever the state of road bridges in socialism might be, at least we can say that saving money wouldn’t be a factor.

Paddy Shannon

Proper Gander: Out Of The Blue (2018)

The Proper Gander Column from the January 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Programmes like Blue Planet II (BBC1) make us feel a bit less begrudging if and when we cough up for our TV Licence. A follow-up to 2001’s Blue Planet, the epic documentary series is a fascinating look at life in the world’s oceans. Its production involved 125 expeditions across four years, using the latest camera technology to record more than 6,000 hours of underwater dive footage alone. The lengths which the researchers and camera crews took to get the right shots shows an impressive amount of determination, such as staking out places over months waiting for rare events, like the Marbled Grouper Fish’s annual spawning in French Polynesia. The end result is both a jaw-dropping spectacle and a valuable piece of research, which has netted over 13 million viewers for Auntie Beeb.

David Attenborough is our guide as each episode takes us somewhere different, from coastlines to the deepest depths, with their own colourful, interconnected, varied ecosystems. The more we learn about the creatures which live in and around the oceans, the more complex they turn out to be. Who knew, for example, that Clown Fish make noises and apparently communicate with each other, almost like they do in Finding Nemo? Or that Orca Whales perform backflips into shoals of herring to stun them before eating them? Both of these species are impacted upon by the ways we use and abuse the seas: noise from boats confuses Clown Fish by drowning out their own sounds, and Orca Whales have been killed by the fishing fleets they’re competing with for herring. Blue Planet II’s last instalment concentrates on these and other threats to the oceans caused by society. The programme’s tone remains optimistic, though, by highlighting people who have dedicated their lives to protecting the seas and what dwells within them.

One major threat to the oceans is plastic waste: around eight million tons of plastic a year end up in the sea, whether through shoddy disposal practices or cargo falling overboard, which happens more often than you might think; on average, four shipping containers a day fall into the drink. In 1992, a container ship 1,000 miles off Alaska lost a consignment of rubber ducks, and their journeys across the seas have usefully been tracked, with some reaching as far as Australia and Scotland. The durability which makes plastic so useful isn’t a good thing when it’s thrown away. A rubber duck–or a drinks bottle used for a few minutes one lunchtime–will take many centuries to biodegrade naturally. If it ends up floating around an ocean it will eventually break down into smaller pieces which get mistaken for food by marine life. Even plankton ingest tiny fragments of plastic, and when other creatures eat plankton and they in turn get eaten, plastic travels up the food chain. Deposits of plastic build up inside larger creatures, and these toxins contaminate their offspring. The programme includes sad footage of a Pilot Whale carrying its dead child, probably poisoned by pollution, and a collection of debris regurgitated by a declining Albatross colony. Discarded fishing nets, six pack rings and carrier bags entangle birds, fish and whales. It’s estimated that tens of millions of sharks are killed by nets every year.

Not mentioned in the programme are the ‘garbage patches’, where ocean currents have swept up plastic rubbish to form islands. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is estimated to be at least the size of Texas, and may even be over twenty times larger. Cleaning this up is just one of those problems which we’re leaving for our grandchildren to deal with, along with radioactive waste and landfill sites. It’s difficult to turn a profit out of dealing with detritus, so there’s little incentive to address this now. And it seems that the garbage patches aren’t threatening the smooth running of capitalism enough for legislation to be put in place to deal with the problem. Less than 1 percent of international waters are protected by law, because laws to safeguard the oceans require agreement across states with their own commercial interests. Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw America from the Paris Agreement about climate change was presumably made because he recognises that the treaty could limit profitable-but-polluting industries.

The effects of climate change are most apparent at the poles. In the Arctic, the amount of ice during its Summer months has reduced by 40 percent over the past 30 years. Oceanographer John Copley gathers data for international research into changing global temperatures and flies over Antarctica to see the massive splits in ice shelves caused by their melting. As ice thaws and breaks up, stored water is released, leading to a gradual rise in sea levels. It’s estimated that by the end of the century the sea could have risen one or two metres, displacing millions of people.

As well as the rise in sea levels, climate change is also leading to an increase in sea temperatures. One result of this is to damage the algae which lives in coral, leading to the coral being weakened until it dies, a process known as bleaching. In recent years, half the world’s reefs have been affected. Underwater cameraman Dr Alex Vail, who regularly films around the Great Barrier Reef saw a bank of coral ‘turn to rubble’over a period of just a few weeks. This also had a disastrous effect on the countless other creatures which lived on the reef.

Climate change and garbage patches have both come about because capitalism encourages us to produce and consume in ways which make money for the few rather than make sense for the environment. Fossil fuels remain more profitable to produce than renewable energy, and it’s doubtful if the tide will turn quickly enough to reduce climate change. And it’s in commodity manufacturers’ interests for us to use more plastic, such as with the cycle of throwing out a Coke bottle so we can then buy another one. The consequences of our wasteful, short-sighted society are being played out in the world’s oceans. How much sea ice and coral will be left by the time they start filming Blue Planet III?

Mike Foster

Pathfinders: Plastic Waste – Is There a Solution? (2011)

The Pathfinders Column from the August 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Protecting the environment is in our hands’ –  a bold statement printed on a large supermarket chain’s plastic bags. The implication is that these bags are special, better than before or better than other ones. But are they really? The implication is also that it is consumers who are responsible for the state of the environment depending on the choices they make. Much money is spent on advertising and public relations to convince us of that responsibility; buy our product and know you’re supporting a worthwhile cause; use this product and do less damage to wildlife; for every one of these you consume 10p is donated to protecting dolphins/saving coral reefs/planting trees/rescuing donkeys etc, etc, ad infinitum. The poorly informed consumer, kept in the dark and fed mostly green bullshit is neatly handed the responsibility for consequences of decision making processes in which they played no part.

Plastics are polymers which do not, cannot, biodegrade. They cannot be decomposed by bacteria or other living organisms. What they do do is photodegrade, break down in light to smaller and smaller pieces, eventually becoming minute particles of polymer dust which stay around forever. Some of the latest technology claims that plastics with certain additives will degrade safely and more quickly given the correct conditions, i.e. carefully controlled landfills or industrial composters. The biggest challenge for composters is that they can only deal with discrete types of plastic and must not be contaminated with mixed lots – and they are few and far between because of the monetary cost. 

Landfill conditions vary widely and are recognised by environmentalists as being far from the ideal method of dealing with plastics. Current estimates for worldwide recycling of plastics is in the region of less than 5 percent, one reason being that there are so many different kinds of plastic. Recycling codes on packaging and containers trick consumers into believing such waste will be recycled after collection but there are at least seven different codes, all requiring different, separate methods of treatment, the outcome being that most of it is just dumped. 

As to how much is dumped it is probably impossible to say, however one recent estimate gives a figure of 65lbs of plastic waste per capita per annum in the USA. If we were to take a per capita figure for the whole of worldwide population of just 1lb per annum, 95 percent of which would be dumped, it works out at somewhere around 2.5 million tons. (At 10lbs 25 million tons, at 65lbs 160+million tons) – just plastic. 

For many decades a number of countries around the world had a policy of dumping household and industrial waste directly into the seas and although this policy has changed in certain areas the accumulated waste of plastic and its toxic chemical components are still there and are being added to daily. One estimate is that currently 80 percent of ocean rubbish is from the land and 20 percent from shipping. A single 3,000 passenger cruise ship accumulates about eight tons of waste weekly.

It was first predicted in 1988 that rubbish would be accumulating in the North Pacific gyre, a whirlpool created and moved around by the currents. Its existence was discovered to be true in 1997 when it was happened upon by Charles Moore returning from an ocean race when he sailed through a vast expanse of floating rubbish. The extent of the rubbish is difficult to measure as the particles are mostly broken down into tiny fragments and cannot be seen from the air, but they extend both outwards and downwards over an area variously claimed to be between the size of twice that of Texas to the overall size of the USA. 

Subsequent ongoing research has determined that the plastic concentration in this gyre is 6-7 times that of zooplankton, the basic foodstuff of oceans, and is continuously ingested by wildlife along with the absorbed organic pollutants which it attracts. Decomposition leaches toxic chemicals such as bisphenol A, PCBs etc., causing hormonal disruption right through the food chain from the tiniest organisms to birds, fish, reptiles and mammals, including humans. Moore’s team’s research recently estimated this particular ocean gyre to contain in the region of 100 million tons of rubbish. In the past decade it has been confirmed that this huge ocean rubbish tip in the North Pacific is not alone; there are now known to be another four – one each in the South Pacific, North Atlantic, South Atlantic and Indian Oceans. An informative website including a ten minute video can be accessed at www.algalita.org.

A trawl of the internet shows that there is little interest from big business in using less oil-based resources in general manufacturing and packaging; that landfill sites are full to overflowing with no solution in sight and scant reference from governments; that profit-based schemes win out over environmentally sound ones; that there are limited moves towards more recycling in only a minority of countries. China now both exports plastic goods and imports waste plastics for recycling and remanufacturing in order to export more plastic goods – at what cost to the environment? And the rest of the world is complicit because it’s cheaper that way.

As consumers we can separate and recycle our rubbish diligently and have a (baseless) expectation that ‘the authorities’ will take care of the next stage but protecting the environment will only really be in our hands when the system is in our hands. 

Janet Surman