Thousands are gathering in New York and other cities around the world for the September 21 People’s Climate March to attack capitalist complicity in global warming. Two days later, government leaders will meet yet again at the United Nations in another doomed and hypocritical show of concern over climate change. Meanwhile, Barack Obama has sanctioned a huge expansion of fracking for natural gas. Fracking leaks methane, a greenhouse gas that traps 25 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
Capitalism cannot possibly solve the same climate problem it has caused. It is first and foremost a system of competition driven by profit, while the needs of the world’s workers are ignored. Indeed, virtually all the problems of the international working class are caused by vicious capitalist exploitation and imperialism, the global rivalry that has led to more than a century of massive world wars and smaller proxy wars.
The Progressive Labor Party stands for communist-led revolution by hundreds of millions of armed and determined workers around the world. Only by eliminating capitalism and organizing a world of cooperation and equality can we meet the needs of all humanity. Only by smashing the capitalist bosses can we hope to stop and reverse the harmful effects of global warming.
The impacts of global warming include the following:
While workers all over will suffer from these effects, those who will suffer the earliest and the most are the hundreds of millions of workers in Bangladesh, India, the Philippines, and Nigeria, who stand to face more frequent life-threatening conditions (http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/sep/27/climate-change-poor-countries-ipcc).
Global warming is the inevitable effect of decades of expanded burning of fossil fuels: coal, oil and natural gas. Greenhouse gases trap heat and warm the oceans and atmosphere, while the mining, drilling, and sale of fossil fuels produce the biggest profits of all. Capitalists, who are driven to maximize profits, will never leave trillions of dollars in the ground. Nor will they abandon their investment of trillions more in fossil-fuel infrastructures, including millions of oil-burning vehicles, refineries, pipelines, tankers, and power plants. The U.S. military is the single largest consumer of oil on the planet, using over 100 millions barrels of oil per year on ships, vehicles, planes, and ground operations.
Imperialist Rivalry Leads to Endless War
Every capitalist military on the planet consumes oil and control over oil is vital for imperialist rivals to control each other’s ambitions. The rivalry between the U.S., European Union, Russia, China, India, and other rising imperialist nations to control oil and gas (as well as minerals, land, and other resources) will lead to endless war. Millions of civilians are massacred by these national juggernauts in their competition for resources, underpaid labor, and export markets.
We can march by the billions and still never produce any change in this rivalry until we rid ourselves of capitalism, a system that feeds on genocidal wars, racism, sexist oppression, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, sickness and early death. This means seizing power from the capitalist class, which steals the value of our labor and funnels these profits to fund their wars for supremacy and control.
Cooperation between imperialist rivals is impossible. We are shouting in the dark unless we organize a worldwide communist movement to seize their power through revolution. The September 21 march can help build such a movement, but letting the politicians send us home with more empty promises will only delay the day we can stop the burning of fossil fuels. And further delay means greater and greater difficulty in reversing the accelerating effects of greenhouse gases.
Only Communism Can Stop Global Warming
The means to end the use of fossil fuels and stop global warming with clean, sustainable energy: wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal already exists. The only thing that stands in the way of achieving non-polluting sustainability is capitalism. For the foreseeable future, the capitalists’ greatest profits will continue to reside in fossil fuels. It is the competitive profit system that continues to kill us and to render the planet more and more unlivable.
The revolutionary elimination of capitalism by a movement of hundreds of millions of workers, led by PLP, is our goal. Join us in ending this death-dealing and planet-destroying system of capitalism and imperialism, and in building a system run by and for the world’s working class — communism.