Climate Change: The Workers Revolutionary Socialist Solution or a Class Peace Planetary Suicide Pact?

In 1965 the Science Advisory Committee to President Lyndon Johnson warned him that the continued use of fossil fuels “…will modify the heat balance of the atmosphere to such an extent that marked changes in climate, not controllable through local or even national efforts, could occur.[i]   Forty nine years later, after years of fabricated science by the oil companies and a long-term propaganda campaign ranging from full page advertisements and web pages to novels and the “know nothing” climate change deniers in the Senate, on talk radio and corporate financed “news” programs, meta studies today show that 97% of scientists who study climate change have been convinced by examination of the data that anthropogenic climate change is advancing rapidly.[ii] The ruling class has had 50 years forewarning and has done nothing except accelerate the crisis. Today the ruling class sees no way out except to buffalo the masses with a new spin on bourgeois consciousness.

An escalating awareness of being lied to by the bourgeois authorities is driving a new generation of activists into the streets to demand action from world leaders. A massive coalition including hundreds of organizations has been assembled by and around Bill McKibben and 350.org, the NGO that he is a director of; and this coalition has planned the massive demonstration taking place in NYC on September 21st, 2014 and in many cities around the country and the world. Guy McPherson, author and Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, denounces McKibben as the wrong kind of green and says that he refuses to acknowledge the correct conclusions from the scientific fact that that the planet has long since passed the 350 part per million CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and that we are heading for human extinction.[iii] Revolutionary socialists tell the workers the truth without decoration. We are staring at the question of species survival squarely and tell workers the solution to the climate change problem and consequences of global warming must involve the worker masses organized as a class and the solution can only be achieved via the socialist revolution. McKibben never mentions revolution. He tells the masses to just make more noise, hold larger demos, get arrested in larger numbers and we can make the bosses solve the climate change problem. Nowhere does McKibben say that the capitalists are the arch-criminals who have brought humanity to this impasse.

Long term advocates of mass action aimed at abating climate change are doing everything they can to turn out the foot-soldiers in hopes of creating a pivot moment akin to the 1983 anti-nuclear weapons demonstration led by Dr. Helen Caldicott, which the media today lauds for bringing Reagan and Gorbachev to Reykjavik. The result of which was the turning of the nuclear doomsday clock back from 3 minutes to midnight then, to 5 minutes before midnight today.[iv] Despite the massive–and yet to be repeated–outpouring of a million plus people in NYC in 1983, the nuclear threat today, Caldicott warns, “…is much greater than before.[v]   Likewise, regardless of how many millions take to the street behind the bourgeois approved leadership of 350.org, the World Meteorological Association today warns that “…the global annual average CO2 concentration is set to cross the symbolic 400 parts per million threshold in 2015 or 2016.[vi] We have learned that the world’s oceans are already losing their ability to absorb increasing levels of CO2 and consequently the oceans are becoming acidified, threatening all manner of ocean-borne species.[vii]

Socialists know that mass action can change the course of history. Mass and direct actions can be used by the working class, the oppressed and their allies to advance progressive solutions and assert the historic program of the working class, which today means overthrow capitalism and institute a rational, democratically planned economy to combat climate change and remediate environmental devastation.  We also know that mass actions can and have been used by ruling class representatives of capitalism to corral and restrain the masses and limit their efforts to ineffectual pleadings to the bosses’ politicians for them to regulate aspects of industry and the economy. neither of which they will do in any effectual fashion under the dictatorship of capital; nor is there any political will for such change. The open secret is that 350.org et. al. have no real plan and have no political program to counterpose to the workers’ revolutionary socialist program, and this is why there are no demands and there will be no platform and no speakers at the September 21st event.

The massive actions planned for September 21st have the potential to go one way or the other. The masses can break the confines of liberalism and launch the workers revolutionary struggle to salvage the environment or they can be snookered back into ineffective bourgeois electoral delusions, part and parcel of the false bill of goods peddled by the NGO servants of big Capital.

McKibben and NGOs: Serving the Interests of Capital

The ruling class can no longer rely on the fake science fabricated by Exxon, Chevron, and BP or their loudmouths of hate radio like Rush Limbaugh to keep the cork in the bottle and the people in their slumbers. So they have a new tack, following the “green washing” of industry they have found it necessary to “green wash” capitalism and have employed numerous NGOs to assure that the masses, their organizations and labor in particular do not get the wrong idea and try to overthrow the system in order to reign in global warming.   350.org/1Sky the NGO led by McKibben is tasked with this flimflam project by Warren Buffet, George Soros, Bill and Melinda Gates, the Clintons, Bloomberg, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, et. al.[viii] The link to and funding from the biggest capitalists in the world has been traced through funding, personal, the goals and projects and the non-existent demands of the mass demonstration.[ix] The lack of demands uniting the action leaves the program in the hands of 350.org/1Sky, and their advocacy is dependent on the triad of patriotic pride (American ingenuity), responsibility and accountability. All this is couched in an overriding faith in the ability of capitalist businesses to create and implement clean energy solutions.

McKibben states it very well himself in explicitly advocating “organizing” Wall Street as a vehicle for social (non) change (emphasis ours):[x]

The financial community has begun to question the long-term value of fossil fuel stocks. Institutions with large endowments, such as Stanford University, have begun the process of divesting some of their holdings in coal companies; as analysts have pointed out, should the world ever do something about climate change, many of the reserves on which those companies base their worth would have to be left below ground. “This is one of the fastest-moving debates I think I’ve seen in my thirty years in markets,” Kevin Bourne, a managing director of the Financial Times Stock Exchange, told the Financial Times this spring, on the day that Blackrock, the world’s largest asset manager, launched a fossil-free index fund. Clearly, however, it will take a stronger and noisier movement than we’ve seen heretofore—and a global one—to push the players toward actions at all commensurate with the danger.

Pacifists in the environmental movement refuse to raise, and class peace salesmen refuse to acknowledge, the contradictory interests of the two antagonistic social classes, Labor and Capital, and they also refuse to raise any demands. So we have before us the prospect of Ban Ki Moon’s climate summit where imperialists and other bourgeois leaders express their wishes for climate change remedies and where two miles and 48 hours away the class peace rally expresses the same wishes as the bankers and corporate executives of the Climate Group by misdirection or default.[xi]

Popular Resistance writes:

A lack of clear justice-based and ecologically sound demands in this march will leave a vacuum. And no vacuum remains empty for long. It’s simple physics. The Climate Group has already set up shop in that space. The problem is not just these really creepy bedfellows: The media will not cover a march with no demands. They will find a message, and if it’s not The Climate Group’s ‘business will save the planet’ message, what will it be?[xii]

This week you had the Senators voting on Citizens United. They were talking about a constitutional amendment that if the Supreme Court would let pass would eliminate the equivalency of money and speech. You would think that in the wake of Occupy that we would hear some echo of this in the Peoples Climate March, but there is nothing coming from the Peoples Climate March that is hostile to corporations.   McKibben has taken environmental activists for a ride.

The great anti-corporatist upsurge that was Occupy finds no expression in this march. Occupy may be there but Occupy will be towing McKibben’s class peace line. You would think that in this synchronicity Occupy would go after corporatism but you don’t see any of it on the 21st. The non-leadership of Occupy apparently sensed this default and on September 12th announced an “anti-capitalist” civil disobedience on the steps of the New York Stock Exchange for September 22nd. For us, the only real political difference between McKibben’s strategy and that of Occupy is that McKibben organizes celebrities for catch-and-release arrests, whereas the NYPD arranges for Occupy arrestees to languish on Ryker’s Island. And the late announcement of the Occupy action virtually guarantees that the arrests will be confined to petty-bourgeois, habitual civil disobedience arrestees. Consequently what workers see is a left that has been bamboozled into a monomania about a Keystone pipeline which Wall Street does not give a damn about and for which Buffet (McKibben’s financial backer and puppet master) has made other transportation plans via his Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railroads.[xiii]

Left and “Socialists” Jump on Popular Front Bandwagon: Playing their Reformist Role in Paving the Way to Environmental Destruction

A popular front is a political coalition that requires agreement on a common program between the working-class and non-working-class parties. However the non-working class parties cannot agree to the revolutionary workers program to solve the crisis without ceasing to be what they are. So the workers, through their parties and organizations, give up their independent political program, their class aims and their class independence in the interest of preserving “unity” with the enemy class forces.   The popular front is revealed thus as irrevocably non-working class and anti-working class.

As Leon Trotsky, leader of the Russian Revolution, wrote in 1936 during capitalism’s last Great Depression:

“The question of questions at present is the People’s Front. The left centrists seek to present this question as a tactical or even as a technical maneuver, so as to be able to peddle their wares in the shadow of the People’s Front. In reality, the People’s Front is the main question of proletarian class strategy for this epoch. It also offers the best criterion for the difference between Bolshevism and Menshevism. For it is often forgotten that the greatest historical example of the People’s Front is the February 1917 revolution. From February to October, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, who represent a very good parallel to the ‘Communists’ and Social Democrats, were in the closest alliance and in a permanent coalition with the bourgeois party of the Cadets, together with whom they formed a series of coalition governments. Under the sign of this People’s Front stood the whole mass of the people, including the workers’, peasants’, and soldiers’ councils. To be sure, the Bolsheviks participated in the councils. But they did not make the slightest concession to the People’s Front. Their demand was to break this People’s Front, to destroy the alliance with the Cadets, and to create a genuine workers’ and peasants’ government. ” —Leon Trotsky, “The Dutch Section and the International” (15-16 July 1936), Writings of Leon Trotsky

These NGOs have created a massive popular front called the “Peoples Climate March” in which no social class, only “people” and their various organizations are purportedly united for a common cause, a cause which has yet to be established with demands or points of unity.[xiv]  This united action gathers Democratic politicians and Democratic Party outfits like Move-On.org with dozens of NGOs, dozens more ethical and religious organizations, various pro-capitalist State Green Parties and even the Green Zionist Alliance. These forces are joined by most of the major “socialist” organizations including the Social Democrats in the Socialist Party USA and the Democratic Socialists of America, the neo-Stalinist Committees of Correspondence, the actual Stalinists of the Communist Party USA, the Pan Africanists of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, the third camp International Socialist Organization, the fake Trotskyists of Socialist Action, Solidarity (the two U.Sec. organizations), Socialist Alternative, Socialist Viewpoint, World Can’t Wait Coalition and Radical Women.

All have endorsed the popular front along with a dozen or so self-proclaimed anarchist collectives. This includes the IWW Environmental Caucus, who actively promote and stand in solidarity with the NYC Rally, yet who leave a door open to slither out of taking political responsibility for it by not officially endorsing the NYC rally, instead endorsing the West Coast People’s Climate Rally. The West Coast rally is in Oakland, gathering at Lake Merritt in solidarity with the NYC action where a smattering of union locals have signed on and are expected to turn out contingents of workers.[xv]

The IWW Environmental Caucus is raising the following classless (which means bourgeois reformist) demands for the West Coast rally:[xvi]

  • For a world with an economy that works for people and the planet
  • For a world safe from the ravages of climate change
  • For a world with good jobs, clean air, water and healthy communities

Great! Close your eyes, click your heels together and make a wish! This is idealism, far divorced from a working class program based on struggle that abolishes capitalism which is desperately needed. Politically, the West Coast rally is also a popular front, with the IWW and other leftist organizations acting as the radical wing who provide political cover for the popular front politics of an (ain’t never gonna happen) kinder, greener capitalism. So workers are presented with either no program (actually a hidden one of bourgeois politics) in NYC or a fake program on the West Coast.

For their part, the Bay Area Transport Workers Solidarity Committee (TWSC) has yet to take an official position on the NYC or West Coast popular front rallies. Climate change is very much an issue for transport workers. The ruling class has two options to transport the Tar Sands oil to refineries: one is the Keystone Pipeline and the other is via rail car.  Both of these means involve workers and effect ironworkers, pipeline and transportation and refinery workers. Abstention on key political issues is at best just confusing workers who look to the TWSC for leadership and guidance. At worst, by their silence, they are the shadow of the popular front.

Railroad workers who are members of Doro-Chiba (National Railway Chiba Motive Power Union-Japan) have been resisting orders to go into Fukushima-contaminated areas and the restarting of the 50 remaining nuclear plants in Japan.[xvii] This is important to understand when getting involved in the environmental movement: McKibben is in favor of nuclear plants to solve the climate problem, and this is his position even after Fukushima and the lessons from that.

Doro-Chiba workers have taken a stand for international labor solidarity, against nuclear power and in defense of the environment, denouncing those who would promote nuclear power and serve capitalist interests:[xviii]

We call on all the friends around the world not to let “them” repeat the same disaster. We pledge to fight to live and confront squarely whatever danger assaults us. Let’s rise up together with us to abolish nuclear plants and nuke once and for all. We urge you to fight to overthrow those who are promoting nuclear plant construction and seeking only capitalist interest at the sacrifice of working people.

The Communist Workers Group (CWG) will not endorse, but we will not stand by idly either. What is there to endorse in a parade that unites capitalists and workers, a parade that ultimately endorses the continuation of capitalism, specifically because it does not provide a transitional program to take workers to power and end the anarchy of capitalist production responsible for the climate crisis? We will join workers on the streets and invite you to join us in building a workers united front against the class collaborationist popular front leadership paid for by the biggest capitalists, the corporations and their foundations. McKibben’s popular front of NGOs is a plan to arrange media stunts featuring mass arrests of the gullible and diverting the anger of the masses away from independent working class action and into moralist witnessing and civil disobedience. This is the political stock-in-trade and modus operandi of the petit bourgeoisie. Workers should be asking ourselves why is this political constellation a bureaucratic top down setup with the secret bosses’ program for a “low carbon future” that includes nuclear power, fracking and the export of the tar sands? Nowhere does McKibben acknowledge the historical necessity of mass struggle organized by the unions to stop industrial pollution with direct action including hot cargoing, strikes and occupations in the work place. On the contrary he works to keep labor demobilized, side by side with the labor bureaucracy and liberal Democrats who depend on the campaign funding from the same class who corrupt “democracy” everywhere.

Only the Organized, Class-Political-Conscious Working Class Has the Power to Stop Climate Change

Wherever McKibben’s popular front controls the environmental movement, spokespersons for the anti-capitalist view and the program of the nationalization of the polluting industries under workers control are excluded from the platform. There is not one atom of coincidence in these exclusions. It is not “over the top” to recognize the collision of class interests each time they occur; each time a workers revolutionary representative is excluded from the speakers’ platform. This is petty bourgeois politics in action and we see the popular front mobilizing you in order to finish the movement off and to cement in your consciousness the idea that you have done your part, where in fact the working class has yet to enter the struggle in its own name and has yet to address the contradiction of capitalist ‘environmentalism.’ Against the popular front we call for a workers united front that launches actions at the point of production to stop fracking and shut down the shipment of tar sands.

McKibben is trying to stop you from taking labor action to seize the energy industry! Otherwise he would say do it! Instead, he wants to convince you to take stunt actions for media hype for his plan to pressure Wall Street players to divest from high carbon fuel production. This is a fantasy that takes no account of the anarchy of the stock market. He says a stronger and noisier protest movement will push the Wall Street players to do the moral thing, as if examples could be found in history of Wall Street turning its back on profit for any social good.[xix]

McKibben wants a capitalist solution to the climate crisis exclusively. He does not call for worker and community control of the energy industry which would require a direct challenge to the Democrats and Republicans and is necessary to squarely confront this environmental crisis. We all know that as long as the capitalists are in charge of the energy industry they will want to make greater profits by selling more oil and electricity even if it destroys the world. His organization, in alliance with others, has also excluded socialists such as members of the Peace and Freedom Party from rallies that 350.org held, such as the one in Richmond in 2013 where they prevented Cindy Sheehan from speaking, exactly because her party program calls for the expropriation and nationalization of the energy industry. Thus, the role of the “non-profit” industry is absolutely important to understand, since the bosses use these organizations to politically mold the agenda for the community and for labor.

The working class can change the course of history by seizing control of the environmental movement and rewriting its agenda. Massive labor-led actions are required to push the McKibben ilk and class collaboration program off center stage and elevate the workers program to the forefront of the environmental movement. We note with interest the example of the Doro-Chiba railway workers in Japan who marched to the Tepco HQ demanding that the nuclear plants remain shut down and to make clear that they will not be human sacrifices for the company in the contaminated Fukushima zone. Clearly they see this environmental question as a transport workers issue and so do we.

Planetary survival will not be achieved by getting arrested for blocking the street in the moralist civil disobedience scheme. In many places the oppressed have self-organized to fight environmental racism since it is in their neighborhoods that capitalism leaves its contaminants. The example of First Nations Peoples facing down the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to stop Tar Sand transportation is a good one, but without the mobilization of labor defense for the oppressed fighters, such exemplary actions are engaged at a great personal cost. The NGOs may have arrest and release photo ops at the White House, but they never organize workers to defend the oppressed, not in Fergusson and not in Alberta or in Richmond California. The workers answer to environmental racism should be workers’ mass participation, with rail workers leading thousands of other workers and their organizations to support the self-defense actions of the oppressed, and wherever bureaucratic resistance to workers’ self-defense is encountered the old union leaderships should immediately be replaced by rank and file activists committed to class struggle methods.

For Socialist Revolution To Save Humanity!

We are here today to put a workers revolutionary solution before our social class and to denounce class collaborators and denounce agents of capital who are engaged in a massive fraud designed to deny you your say and to exclude your class from independent participation in decision making about our species future and how to have one.

We come to warn the workers that only by taking control of the means of production can we halt the march of the lemmings, and we propose the following Transitional Program for workers organizations to form their own working class party that organizes the working class to smash the capitalist system that is driving the planetary ecosystem to destruction.

Against dangerous processes and practices in industry and agriculture, we fight for factory committees and the trade unions to impose workers’ control and veto power. Safer technology and conditions should be introduced under workers’ inspection and at the bosses’ expense with no loss of pay to workers during shutdowns, retooling and retraining.

Where danger extends beyond the plant, we fight for direct action and mobilization by the mass of workers, where possible in conjunction with the production workers themselves. We demand that the government impose safer methods and materials. Wherever the bosses or their state deny danger or cite economic grounds for refusing to act against dangerous plants, we demand a workers’ inquiry, with the company’s books, as well as its technology, open to inspection by workers and their appointed experts.

The demand for workers’ inquiry is applicable generally in the nuclear, oil and chemical industries, and specifically when new plants and new dump sites are proposed, or when an accident occurs. The main purpose of the workers’ inquiry is to unite the plant workers with the communities affected, around the struggle for safety. No illusions in the independence of the findings of government investigative panels. These are no more independent than the bosses’ courts. Labor must employ its own scientists and engineers to conduct independent inquiries and transparent hearings.

We must fight for workers’ control and veto power over the proposed plants, the disposal of waste and the process of construction. When the workers’ inquiry finds types of plants or dumping unsafe, then the struggle becomes one to shut them down. Most of the time, isolated local struggles cannot win. The battle needs to expand. Mass strike actions and occupations (sit-down strikes and work-ins!) are the key to victory.

By fighting for this program through direct action, workers can begin to effectively defend the environment now, in a way that lays the basis for turning that struggle into one against capitalism and for international planning. In this context we fight for:

  • A massive public works program to clean the environment, funded by the state and operated under workers’ control. Jobs for all.
  • Workers’ control over health and safety standards in the factories, plants and shops and in the surrounding communities. Where bosses cry poverty and resist, we say nationalize the offending firms under workers control without compensation.
  • Workers’ inspection of nuclear, chemical and other industrial plants to determine their levels of safety; for working class mobilization to enforce closure where threats to safety are determined.
  • Full lay-off pay when there are plant closures or temporary shutdowns. For alternative jobs with no cut in pay if the workers decide to close a dangerous plant. Implement the 30 hour workweek at 40 hours pay.
  • Down with the “secrets” of commerce and technology. “Business secrets” are not compatible with workers’ health and safety! Open the company and research books!
  • The workers must determine what are safe levels of exposure to radiation, toxins, and emissions. Health and safety inspectors must be accountable to the working class.
  • Workers’ control over the construction of new energy plants, and over plants which will utilize toxic chemicals. An end to the system of contract and temporary toxic and nuclear cleaning squads, and their transformation into permanent employees. Their work can only be made safe under workers’ control.
  • For power and construction workers to fight for the implementation of acceptable levels of safety precautions and building specifications at all stages of planning and in the supervision of construction.
  • Structural improvements in the housing of reactors until they can be decommissioned and dismantled.   For workers and community democratic control over the means of transportation to ensure safe disposal of nuclear waste and other toxic materials; establish a workers plan for abating the increase in CO2, Methane and Nitrous Oxide into the atmosphere and radioactive contamination from nuclear power plants, uranium mining and the use of tactical radioactive weaponry.
  • Representation of all sections of the workforce in factory committees as plant-based democratic organs of struggle.
  • For massive strike actions and/or occupations of plants to enforce the above.
  • For workers’ councils with the involvement of and delegated representation from the communities to defend workers’ lives and the environment.
  • For workers’ militias to defend occupations and all strikes.
  • Nationalize without compensation to the major shareholders the commanding heights of the economy and run these under sane and rational workers control for social need: the energy industry and all other major industries, the railroads, the banking and finance sectors, agriculture, healthcare and education.
  • For a workers party that fights for a workers government to establish a rational centrally-planned, green economy.
  • For a new revolutionary workers’ international based on the method and program of Trotsky’s “Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International”.[xx] For world socialism!

We postulate that capitalism must be overthrown by workers revolution in order to establish a planned economy capable of ending the dependence on the burning of fossil fuel and mobilizing science, engineering and the international work force for the enormous task of transitioning the energy systems to arrest anthropogenic climate change.

[i] http://books.google.com/books?id=ymc1L_ZcDuQC&lpg=PA253&dq=%22modify%20the%20heat%20balance%20of%20the%20atmosphere%20to%20such%20an%20extent%20that%20marked%20changes%20in%20climate%22&pg=PA253#v=onepage&q=%22modify%20the%20heat%20balance%20of%20the%20atmosphere%20to%20such%20an%20extent%20that%20marked%20changes%20in%20climate%22&f=false

[ii] http://bcove.me/c1li8rcl

[iii] http://wrongkindofgreen.org/2013/11/06/guy-mcpherson-james-hansen-bill-mckibben-are-guilty-of-malpractice-video/

[iv] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock#mediaviewer/File:Doomsday_Clock_graph.svg

[v] http://www.shareguide.com/Caldicott.html

[vi] https://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/press_releases/pr_1002_en.html

[vii] http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/indicators/oceans/acidity.html

[viii] http://350.org/about/us-ad-council/

[ix] http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/28/keystone-xl-the-art-of-ngo-discourse-2/

http://breakthroughstrategiesandsolutions.com/About_Us.html

http://breakthroughstrategiesandsolutions.com/uploads/A_Guide_For_Engaging_and_Winning_on_Climate.pdf

http://www.popularresistance.org/clear-demands-needed-at-peoples-climate-march/

[x] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jul/10/climate-will-we-lose-endgame/

[xi] http://www.theclimategroup.org/who-we-are/our-members/

[xii] http://www.popularresistance.org/clear-demands-needed-at-peoples-climate-march/

[xiii] http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/28/keystone-xl-the-art-of-ngo-discourse-2/

[xiv] http://peoplesclimate.org/partners/

[xv] http://ecology.iww.org/node/613

[xvi] http://ecology.iww.org/node/613

[xvii] http://www.doro-chiba.org/english/english2.htm

[xviii] http://www.doro-chiba.org/english/dc_en_11/dc_en_3_25.htm

[xix] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jul/10/climate-will-we-lose-endgame/

[xx] http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/

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