Image - Whose hand holds the globe? While it remains the capitalists’, the World is not safe

Capitalism fails to save the world

Self-congratulation summit

After the Johannesburg jamboree on sustainable development (officially, the World Summit on Sustainable Development, or, informally, the Earth Summit, organised by the UN), world leaders have been praising themselves on their great achievements. For example, Margaret Beckett, the British Environment Secretary, called the summit a “victory for everyone” ( The Guardian, September 4th 2002).

Held ten years after the first such summit in Rio, the Johannesburg meeting was sponsored by the South African national energy company, Eskom. In preparation for privatisation, Eskom is doing its very best for the poor of South Africa, by liberating 40 000 households per month from the curse of an electricity supply (according to Naomi Klein, “The summit that couldn’t save itself”, in The Guardian, September 4th 2002).

Apart from breaking the record for the largest international convention (costing £35mn with 65 000 delegates from 185 countries) and allowing McDonald’s, Rio Tinto, Nike, Nestlé and British American Tobacco to demonstrate their continuing concern for the environment and the poor by their presence, what did the Earth Summit achieve?

Real and realisable targets?

The summit resulted in agreements to reduce the number of people living without clean drinking water to 1bn, half the present figure, by 2015, to set up a solidarity fund to wipe out poverty, to restore fish stocks by 2012, and reduce loss of species by 2015.

But no further resources have been allocated to the water target, and, without these resources, it is not merely doomed to remain unrealised but to become more unrealisable, as more and more people fall into the category of those without adequate water supply.

Similar pious words about poverty were uttered at Rio, yet this has continued to grow apace (today, 2.8bn people “live” on $2 or less per day, according to Le Scienze - the Italian version of Scientific American - of October 2002) and the erosion of the environment goes hand-in-hand with the attacks on the people living on the margins of existence.

Several more vague announcements were also made: “good governance” was encouraged (a stick to beat the states that the major imperialist powers disapprove of), and the ratification of the Kyoto protocol was recognised as a good thing.

Sustainable plunder?

But the summit failed entirely to put any restrictions on the rights of the major imperialist powers and their international corporations to continue to exploit the world. There was no change in the £400bn subsidy regimes of these powers, which are used to prevent producers in the peripheral countries from competing with producers in the centre. On the other hand, the peripheral countries were strongly urged to use private companies from the imperialist centre in their infrastructural projects. The Earth Summit simply rubber-stamped World Trade Organisation agreements, which aim at outlawing barriers to “free trade” where this is beneficial to economic imperialism.

In a clear demonstration that “aid” from the centre to the periphery is intended to be recycled through the “donor” countries’ corporations, Tony Blair said that such aid should be used for...

the creation and structuring of infrastructure opportunities in developing countries, and the offering of those opportunities to the private sector.

Quoted by Barry Coates of the World Development Movement in “More Business as Usual”, The Guardian, September 18th 2002

And which part of the “private sector” is best able to compete for these “opportunities”? Obviously, companies from the capitalist centre.

Behind the disagreements, the imperialist divisions

But there were some disagreements, specifically on the use of renewable energy. At present, only 2% of world energy consumption is derived from clean renewables like wind, wave and solar power (New Scientist, September 3rd 2002). The summit was unable to agree to say anything on the use of these sources of power, but the EU and 15 other states pledged to increase their use. However, we should be suspicious about taking this pledge at face value. Instead, we should be clear that imperialist powers often aim at the imposition of formally common restrictions which in reality restrict their rivals more than themselves. Against a background of increasing US domination of world oil supplies, it is in the interest of the EU to ameliorate the impact of that domination. Although the EU failed to get measures reducing dependence on oil through the Johannesburg summit, their breakaway declaration is intended to step up pressure in this question.

There has also been a shift in the position of America’s strongest ally on the question of greenhouse gases, with Australia deciding to reconsider whether or not to sign up to the Kyoto protocol,

whether America has signed or not.

Australian premier, John Howard

It would be ironic if environmental issues played an important part in the construction of imperialist blocs which in turn led to war, with its consequent environmental impact, but it is not excluded for that reason.

Revolution or ruin

Capitalism, the world enterprise that has brought us the hole in the ozone layer, global warming, ubiquitous local environmental disasters like the poisoning of rivers and Union Carbide in Bophal, capitalism which cannot feed a quarter of the world’s population, capitalism whose benefits include two world imperialist slaughters and innumerable smaller conflicts, this capitalism cannot even convincingly pretend to save the planet from its own depredations.

All the indices presented to the summit indicated a marked deterioration in the earth’s environment since the Rio summit. As we have stated above this continuing deterioration is the result of the capitalist system of production and will not be ended while capitalism remains the world’s production system. Our rulers are, however, concerned about this issue which has now become part of the mainstream of bourgeois politics worldwide. The reason for this is that pollution and destruction of the environment is actually reducing profit rates, rather than increasing them as in earlier periods. Certain sectors of capital face bankruptcy because of pollution, e.g. agriculture and fisheries, and others are finding themselves saddled with the costs of dealing with pollution caused in other sectors, e.g. water supply. The drive for a cleaner environment and limitation of environmental destruction is now part of capitalism’s attempt to increase its profit rates and ensure its long term future. It is this, rather than any sudden conversion to the cause of nature, which drives our leaders to these international summits. The total failure of the summit, which reflects the divisions in the world’s capitalist classes, shows how difficult it is for capitalism to seriously address these issues. With the world’s main polluter, the US, refusing to ratify the Kyoto protocol there can be little progress. The US claims that compliance would put it at an economic disadvantage in respect to its economic competitors! What it wants is for other countries to comply while it does not so that it will have a competitive advantage. This is yet another demonstration of the historical bankruptcy of the capitalist system. While the world is divided into nations and imperialist blocs in competition with each other, international agreement and planning to deal with the environmental problems we face is virtually impossible.

According to the final political text for the summit, drafted by Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, but substantially modified in the summit itself,

... Unless we act in a manner that fundamentally changes their lives, the poor of the world may lose confidence in their representatives and the democratic systems to which we remain committed.

Quoted in “Breakaway bloc sets itself tougher targets”, The Guardian, September 5th 2002

But capitalism can only change the lives of the poor for the worse. It is the task of communists to provide the theoretical and political framework enabling the “poor”, under the leadership of the working class, to not just “lose confidence in their representatives” (i.e., the representatives of their capitalist exploiters) “and the democratic systems”, but to gain confidence in themselves and their ability to build the world anew so that human needs are no longer just accidentally satisfied, if at all, in an economic system whose only aim is profit, but are the primary aim of productive activity. Such a transformation of the entire world can only be the result of a proletarian revolution and a communist world system which can rationally deal with economic and environmental problems.