September 20 Climate Strikes: Fight for socialist change to save the planet

Patryk Krayczuk, Glasgow Young Socialists 

Socialist Students and Young Socialists are building across colleges and schools for the Climate Strike on September 20.

We are also working with trade unionists to build an even stronger movement.

Tens of thousands of young people in Britain have participated in the Climate Strikes and protests since February, with many school students walking out.

We welcome this important movement and on Sept 20 the chance to link up in joint action with the most powerful force in society, the organised working class and trade union movement is a step forward.

Glasgow City Unison, who played a key role in the successful mass Equal Pay strike in October 2018, are supporting the strike day and have passed a motion calling on council workers to support the action.

The motion says that “climate is a trade union issue, the future of our planet is at risk if we don’t organise now…we recognise the capitalist system driven by profit over human need is incapable of solving the climate crisis.

“Fundamentally the pollutant industries need to be brought into democratic public ownership and workers control with a socialist plan to transition to renewable energy and create green jobs”.

It’s now an urgent task for us to fight for a socialist future to stop the climate catastrophe that is engulfing the planet.

Socialism essential to save the planet

July 2019  was the hottest month ever recorded. That’s the word from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which tallied up global land and sea temperature recordings from July and compared them to its 140-year data set, stretching back to 1880. 

We are living through a climate catastrophe. That is the stark conclusion from the recent IPCC report, which shows how big business control of land means production for the sole goal of short-term profit.

And how this corporate control of land means the continuation of the dominance of fossil fuel industries, which are dependent on the raw materials that lead to deforestation and desertification.   

The IPCC show Agriculture, Forestry and other land use activities accounted for around 13% of CO2, 44% of methane (CH4), and 82% of nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions from human activities globally during 2007-2016. This means increased global heating is caused by endless pollution that is a consequence of the pursuit of profit of the capitalist system.

This endless pollution is destroying the local environment and ecosystem as well as increasing greenhouse gas level, destabilising both the local, and global climate.   

This destabilisation is leading to droughts, soil erosion, wildfires and the shocking images of permafrost thawing in the poles. This will directly cause outbreaks of famine and hunger as crop yields drop, increased extreme-weather and natural disasters, as well as the increased inability to respond to them.

Reduced production and profit will also hit the capitalist economy, driving economic crisis as the world burns around it.  

The increased control over the Amazon rainforest as a result of loosening regulations by the far-right Bolsonaro in Brazil has led to massive amounts of destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

The loosening of regulations has led to control of land by mining and agricultural corporations which clear-cut the forest, invade indigenous villages, murder the indigenous people, increase wildfire risk and destroy the rainforest, and then seep all the valuable resources out of the land in their pursuit of profits.   

The drama of record temperatures this summer is epitomised by the shocking NASA satellite images of an 84% increase in forest fires in the Amazon.  At the time of writing, the Amazon is ablaze as São Paulo is plunged into darkness in the middle of the day.

Bolsonaro looks on happily at our burning future – more forest burned means for him and the multi-national corporations only more land cleared for mining and agriculture, and more profits.  

The report urges drastic changes in land use and food production in order to reduce emissions but in reality you cannot control what you do not own in a capitalist system based on private ownership.   

Capitalists are rapacious in accumulating land, in effect future wealth at as low cost as possible, to create the conditions for investment,  to quickly exploit for profit.

This is the driving force behind right wing populists Bolsanaro plans to destroy large swathes of the planet’s lungs in the Amazon rainforest and even one reason behind Trump’s crazed proposal to buy Greenland from Denmark to exploit mineral wealth and drill away the natural resources of Alaska.   

The IPCC reference the climate crimes of the bosses but mainly outline individual solutions including urging a reduction in food waste in the advanced capitalist world.

But it is the working class families struggling to survive who are responsible for the cheap, mass packaging of food items in the supermarket giants?  How could we really radically change food production sustainably? Under capitalism the drive in agriculture has been to ‘get big or get out’.

This has been hugely environmentally damaging from being a net producer of greenhouse gases, soil erosion, pollution from agrichemicals and damaging biodiversity. Eco-friendly ‘cover cropping’ and ‘no-till farming’ techniques can often build soil quality while making farms a carbon sink rather than emitter.

But as long as short-term profit and the dictates of the main food processing industries and retailers reign supreme, the most eco-friendly methods will not be a priority.  

socialist plan

Socialists advocate taking the big landed estates and tracts of land owned by agribusiness into public ownership, along with the big food production companies and retail firms.

This would allow the development of sustainable agriculture. Under public ownership the supply chains could be opened up to link up a publicly owned supermarket distribution network to corner shops, etc.

This, combined with a nationalised financial sector that could supply cheap loans would massively relieve some of the pressures on small business owners in the sector and would encourage fuller integration with a socialist plan.  

Such a plan would attempt to source as much produce and goods in local areas in order to reduce ‘food miles’, meaning fresher produce and less environmental impact.  

Decisions on what to stock would be made by local elected committees representing shop workers, consumers and representatives from the wider food supply network, with data on purchasing habits, etc, used to help guide discussions.

This would eradicate much of the wasteful duplication that currently exists in the food industry and give people real, informed choices about what we eat.

Undoubtedly, our relationship to food would continue to develop once free of the shackles that capitalism places upon our lives.