For a long time, revolutionary communists have argued that ‘’either the proletarian revolution is victorious or capitalist barbarism will destroy humanity”. It is little motive for celebration that the latest economic, social and scientific data not only confirm the profundity of the human dilemma but illustrate that degradation of the planet beyond repair can only be prevented in a matter of a couple of decades. The realisation that humanity is facing a unique turning point, a combination of factors which threaten the very existence of our species, and many others, is beginning to dawn on a worldwide-scale. Our economic model, or rather that model imposed upon us by a minority of hyper-wealthy capitalists and their supporters, threatens us with a disaster of unprecedented proportions on various fronts, not least of which is the capacity of the planet to support humanity at all.

There is a widespread recognition of the cause of the catastrophe which is looming. It is fundamentally a globalised economic system which is based on continual expansion fuelled by the exploitation of labour and global resources which is forced to place the pursuit of profit above all other considerations. What is less well recognised is that system, capitalism, has no prospect of changing its inhuman, environmentally destructive trajectory and that the only way out is the overthrow of capitalism everywhere and its replacement with a borderless, moneyless, classless society where production meets human need, kept within the limits imposed by resource availability and compatibility with environmental sustainability.

Above all it is today’s youth who are threatened by this unprecedented situation. Already they are subject to a capitalism incapable of integrating them at all in many cases and it is no surprise that those countries with the highest unemployment rates, itself a sure indicator of the real state of capitalist decadence, have seen massive street protests and uprisings which have resulted in toppled governments without any solution to the problems, which are global and defy national answers. That route often dangled before young people as the route to success, education, is increasingly proving to be a road to nowhere as capitalism is unable to integrate the product of its advanced educational establishments. Graduates in debt, lucky to get a call centre job is all too often the outcome of the pursuit of the academic escape from the working class situation. And alongside a dismal panorama of escalating debt fuelling asset bubbles palmed off as ‘’recovery’’ without tackling unemployment, or its growing manifestation in precariousness, underemployment and zero-hour contracts and the like, alongside wage erosion and an international competition to achieve the very lowest conditions for those ‘’lucky’’ enough to get work, we have the ticking time bomb of climate change.

We cannot say how long capitalism can survive, under what precise circumstances the working class will en masse reject its spiral into worsening barbarism, but we do know that the time-frame for averting the threat to the environmental basis for civilisation is limited.

We communists have a hard time sifting through the data on offer to illustrate the continuing validity of the Marxist perspective that capitalism inevitably creates an escalating crisis which can only be resolved in the final analysis by the reset mechanism of massive destruction (World War – again a threat to our very survival) or a revolutionary overthrow of the system. We know the figures are falsified and the data bent to the requirements of the ruling class, yet even so we can see that the reality of the situation is escalating working class misery. However, on the decisive question of climate change, scientific opinion is increasingly and overwhelmingly sounding the alarm, that now is the time, the only time, to resolve this most pressing problem.

Despite the naysayers who point to a short period of stabilisation of global temperatures, the science shows massive and catastrophic patterns which allow only a short time frame to turn around or face disaster.

From the Guardian;

Holthaus, who gained a large following during hurricane Sandy...has followed climate change for years, as a blogger for the Wall Street Journal and now at Quartz.

But he said he was overwhelmed by the IPCC pronouncing for the first time that humans were now only decades away from being locked into a course of dangerous climate change. He also despaired at the inertia in UN climate talks, which are unlikely to produce global action before 2020.

On his way home from San Francisco, Holthaus tweeted: "I just broke down in tears in boarding area at SFO [San Francisco airport] while on phone with my wife. I've never cried because of a science report before."

Alongside the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) UN report which states that human activity is almost certainly behind global warming, further evidence continues to mount. The vast importance of the world’s oceans surely warrants a lengthy quote from those who are warning of an extinction threat.

“The health of the world’s oceans is deteriorating even faster than had previously been thought, a report says.

A review from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO), warns that the oceans are facing multiple threats.

They are being heated by climate change, turned slowly less alkaline by absorbing CO2, and suffering from overfishing and pollution.

The report warns that dead zones formed by fertiliser run-off are a problem.

It says conditions are ripe for the sort of mass extinction event that has afflicted the oceans in the past.

It says: “We have been taking the ocean for granted. It has been shielding us from the worst effects of accelerating climate change by absorbing excess CO2 from the atmosphere.

“Whilst terrestrial temperature increases may be experiencing a pause, the ocean continues to warm regardless. For the most part, however, the public and policymakers are failing to recognise - or choosing to ignore - the severity of the situation.”

It says the cocktail of threats facing the ocean is more powerful than the individual problems themselves....The IUCN’s Prof Dan Laffoley said: "What these latest reports make absolutely clear is that deferring action will increase costs in the future and lead to even greater, perhaps irreversible, losses.

bbc.co.uk

Within the confines of a short article targeted at gaining the attention of those who are beginning to see the links between an economy that works for a few, the environment on the brink, the dismal prospects for the young in particular but for all workers in general, including the masses of unemployed, we can only begin to sketch the outline of a debate which has to be extended to an ever wider audience. How can we stop the environmental destruction, the nightmare of a lost generation, the growth in unemployment, wealth inequality, war, in short, the crisis which unfolds every day throughout the planet and for which our rulers have no solution?

These are the questions which we of the INTERNATIONALIST COMMUNIST TENDENCY seek to resolve. We call on workers, the unemployed, students, to reject those parties and unions, even Greenpeace and the like who have no perspective of resolving the problem of capitalism’s impact on the environment and our lives which cannot be reformed, but in fact can only worsen. The threat demands an increasingly urgent response, a struggle on every level to block the drive to destruction, most of all the construction of a political alternative to the apologists for the status quo. All those who recognise the importance of the task are urged to contact us and engage in the fight for a future that works – one without capitalism. The clock is ticking. Ant