RS21 climate pamphlet: revealing the need for debate

Submitted by martin on 11 January, 2022 - 3:12 Author: Stuart Jordan
RS21 pamphlet

Reading the new RS21 pamphlet, We Only Want the Earth by Gus Woody, is a bit like a salvage operation after a hurricane. There is the odd thing worth saving but even the good stuff is a bit tarnished and in need of loving restoration. Overwhelmingly it is a mess.

Alongside some basic factual errors (Evo Morales is not a Peruvian!) it exposes a poverty of understanding of both ecological science and Marxist theory. The pamphlet is written with a folksy familiarity, but is full of unexplained Trotskisant jargon that makes it fairly inaccessible. For example, he tells us a “communism is not a distinct mode of production. Such crude stageist thinking has been used to justify all sorts of atrocities". Even for the initiated it is very difficult to make sense of it.

Woody gets off to a promising start: “The world isn’t ending. We are facing an ongoing struggle, not a single apocalypse...there will be a society beset by a host of complex ecological and climatic changes which we must constantly adapt to and organise within, over the course of decades.” But the remaining 60 pages gives us very little to help us understand what is happening, what is likely to happen in the near future, or what we might do about it.

The pamphlet moves through pages of garbled nonsense about “Marx’s theory of metabolic rift”, advocates Lysenkoism (as far as I can see), makes some weird unsubstantiated assertions (a Green New Deal may lead to “racial and gender job segregation”?!), and ends with a call to abolish the police. “The working-class as the solution” section barely mentions workers.

In fairness to Woody he does admit that this is a work in progress and invites others to help him and RS21 work out a programme to meet the needs of the time. In that spirit I will attempt some of the salvage work and suggestions on the way forward.

The chapter on the metabolic rift is extremely confused. Instead of picking at it line by line, I want to focus on a central misunderstanding and explain the metabolic rift idea from there, how it relates to the need for working-class organisation and revolution. In part this is a further contribution to ongoing discussions within Workers’ Liberty about the usefulness of the metabolic rift concept, which is filtering through from academic Marxist circles to the activist left and workers' movement. The usefulness of this concept depends on it having explanatory power. Unfortunately, Woody’s contribution just adds to the confusion.

Woody starts his discussion of the metabolic rift with a quote from Dialectics of Nature where Engels warns about the “unforeseen effects” of meddling with nature. It is an odd starting point. Of course there are unforeseen effects of human activity, and always will be, since we will never have perfect scientific foresight. Some will cause ecological problems. But the current clusterfuck of ecological crises is not really about "unforeseen effects".

The global warming effects of fossil-fuel combustion were first foreseen by Svante Arrenhius in 1896, and by the late 1980s scientific consensus was developing that the effects were actually happening, and at an alarming rate. Much of the climate change we see now, and which is now "locked in" for some of the future, was pretty much foreseen.

Engels actually points towards a better explanation a few sentences later in Dialectics of Nature: “with every day that passes we are learning to understand these laws [of nature] more correctly...[A]fter the mighty advances of natural science in the present century, we are more and more getting to know, and hence to control, even the more remote natural consequences at least of our more ordinary productive activities and so the possibility is afforded us of mastering and controlling these effects as well…

"To carry out this control requires something more than mere knowledge. It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and with it our whole contemporary social order" (emphasis added).

For Engels the eco-destruction is driven by the inability of the capitalist mode of production to organise human labour according to our best scientific understanding.

Woody picks out the earlier quote because has a romantic idea of Nature. Woody claims that the so-called theory of the metabolic rift is an argument about how “capitalism robs from nature”, apparently “taking more from the environment than society returns”. Although this sort of notion is fairly common in environmental circles, a moment's thought shows it bears no resemblance to material reality.

The central driver of climate change is the extraction of fossilised carbon and is conversion into atmospheric CO2. A few of these carbon molecules may be lost to planet Earth (the Earth loses around 90 tonnes of air a day into space), but not lost to "nature" in general. There is no robbery of “nature” into an exclusively human realm external to nature.

Rather the problem is that carbon atoms that were once in the ground causing no problem to the Earth’s climate have been transformed by human activity into greenhouse gases, causing planetary changes which threaten the material basis of human civilisation. Human activity has not robbed nature, it has transformed and scattered the useful materials of the Earth in an eco-destructive way.

Woody’s confusion about “nature” is coupled with a confusion about the word “metabolism". According to Woody, “Within nature, there operates a series of material and energy flows (such as water, sunlight, or minerals in the soil), which can be understood as metabolisms, the exchange of resources within and across nature and society.” Woody should have paid more attention in GCSE biology. A dictionary definition of metabolism is “the chemical processes that occur within a living organism in order to maintain life”.

Metabolic processes are carbon-based engines of complexity generation in a universe where the general trend is toward disorder and heat death. As biologist Paul Nurse explains: “Lifeforms can successfully resist the overall drive of the universe towards disorder and chaos. Within their insulating membranes, cells can establish and cultivate the order they need to operate whilst at the same time creating disorder in their local surroundings outside the cell. That way life does not contravene the second law of thermodynamics.”

Metabolisms are ways in which localised ordered carbon-based complexity grows out of more disordered carboniferous matter. The Earth receives 10,000 times as much heat energy from the sun each day than is used in human consumption. This constant energy supply over billions of years has allowed complex life on Earth to evolve.

As Vladimir Vernadsky explains in The Biosphere (1926): “Activated by radiation, the matter of the biosphere collects and redistributes solar energy, and converts it ultimately into free energy capable of doing work on Earth.”

Living beings are able to sustain complex organisation for a time until the point of death. At the point of death disintegration occurs. The disintegration into simpler, more disordered form can take place at different speeds. An ancient tree that becomes coal is sustained in a low entropy state for millions of years, but the tree that is burned turns into high entropy atmospheric CO2.

Our own species evolved out of this process of complexity generation. Human beings are different from other animals in our capacity to labour. Humans hands, mouths, ears and brains evolved because there was an evolutionary advantage to being able to manipulate the materials of the Earth, to discover the properties of nature and to be able to communicate that knowledge.

The early humans who domesticated fire and crafted weapons could harness more energy from their environment and had a greater chance of survival. Like the metabolisms of living organisms, human labour is a process of complexity generation from simpler parts. We extract, process, mix and assemble the materials that we find in nature to create use-values, technologies that do useful work.

Any process of complexity generation creates waste products, both in the process of production and when the end-product is unable to do useful work. For all living organisms the waste products include excretions and eventually dead bodies.

At the point of death the complex organisation of an organism’s body can either be eaten and metabolised into the body of an(other) animal, or will be metabolised and decomposed by micro-organisms. For terrestrial carbon-based life, this process of disintegration is halted by the soil. The soil is a sea of microbiota, bacteria and fungi and the fragmented remains of bacteria and fungi. Amidst some inorganic matter (sand, clay, minerals etc) these microorganisms break down dead organic matter into simpler carboniferous chemicals which are the building blocks of new complex order in the form of plants. Photosynthesis (the recycling of excreted CO2 into more complex carbon molecules, in plants) and soil are a highly efficient recycling system of terrestrial carboniferous life, allowing carbon molecules to be reassembled into the metabolisms of new living beings.

The production of use-values from human labour similarly produces waste materials both in production and at the end of the use-values' life. However, because value only attaches to use-values, the entire world of commodity exchange operates as if waste does not exist.

Capitalists have several strategies for maximising profit: expand production, increase turnover and minimise costs (workers wages, health and safety, waste management). All of these processes tend to maximise wastefulness and on an ever greater scale.

We see capitalism’s wastefulness in the lack of standardisation, built-in obsolescence, pollution (including greenhouse gas emissions), the exhaustion of living beings (including human workers), the transformation of complex order into detritus. Just as the capitalist mode of production drives workers into an early grave, it exhausts the world’s ecosystems, creating dead zones of monoculture crops in the place of rainforest, and lifeless oxygen-starved expanses of ocean.

It is accelerating species extinction: 60% of birds, reptiles, mammals and fish have been wiped out since 1970. 40% of insect biomass has gone. A UN Food and Agriculture Organisation expert has reckoned that without radical change in agricultural practices, the world's soils contain just 60 more harvests. Other experts who dispute that prediction https://ourworldindata.org/soil-lifespans agree that soils are degrading dangerously.

Throughout capitalism's history the state has attempted to restrain the wildest excesses of capitalist eco-destruction. Yet the stench of the shit-filled Thames through London continued for decades before the Victorian parliament decided to build a modern sanitation system. Unless forced to think longer-term, the boss class will resist any curbs on their short-term profiteering. On the global scale, this is what has hobbled attempts to introduce an effective carbon tax.

Perhaps there is just one example of international effort to regulate unrestrained profit making in the absence of class struggle: the 1990 Montreal protocol which banned CFCs. These regulations halted the hole in the ozone layer. That was the exception rather than the norm.

And when capital does face curbs on its profit-making, it seeks a way round them. This is what Woody is trying to describe when he writes about “spatial” and “temporal” shifts.

A curb on eco-destruction in one capitalist state leads to the crisis being moved onto different terrain, often at expanded scale. The sweatshop conditions that once defined early industrial capitalism in Europe have been transposed to one newly-industrialising country after another. A 2019 WHO/Unicef report found that 4.2 billion people lack access to safely managed sanitation services.

The speed and scale of the current destruction, these multiple civilisation-destroying hockey sticks, means that stricter environmental action by states will not address the urgent need to halt the great accumulation of waste (although these partial measures must still be fought for).

On a planet of nearly eight billion people, there is a need for careful management of the world’s resources and our waste. Scientists are very confident that the Earth can sustain the current population, but it will require revolutionary changes in the way work is organised and a radical break from nationalist politics towards internationalism.

The solution to the climate crisis is not to leave well alone, to stop a supposed "robbery of nature”, but rather to organise human work in accordance with our scientific knowledge. We need to replace profit as the organising principle of human labour with a new organising principle that seeks to sustain complex organisation and minimise waste.

Instead of a metabolism that maximises waste, we need to organise work to maintain, repair, and recycle the products of human labour. We need to create “soils” for inorganic waste in the form of highly efficient recycling systems and organise the production of carbon-based use-values (food, wood, paper, pharmaceuticals etc) in ways that sustain ecosystems.

In the immediate crisis, we need to start the work to halt and reverse global warming and secure adequate supplies of food, freshwater and housing to sustain the world’s population in a warming world. There are a number of authoritative plans for achieving these aims, but profit-driven private capitalists have no way of organising the work. Instead they direct billions of workers to complete tasks that are accelerating us towards catastrophe.

Woody surely believes that organised workers have the potential power to overthrow capitalism and organise economic life on a democratic basis. But he does not explain why breaking workers from the rule of the capital is central to halting climate change. Nor does he explain why workers' revolution is the most likely means we have of halting climate change.

Workers are central to solving the climate crisis because human labour is currently being organised in a way that is destroying the material basis of human civilisation. If we want human labour to be organised in a less destructive way, then we need to use our collective strength as workers to resist and develop an alternative to capitalist power. Climate change is essentially a problem of too many workers following the bosses’ orders. Its solution involves building workers' organisations capable of seizing productive wealth and organising production ourselves on a rational democratic basis.

Woody's confusion on the question of basic class politics also leads to some glaring omissions. Nowhere does Woody suggest that workers need their own political party fighting for their interests. And oddly, although he uses the jargon of “rank-and-file organisation”, he does not appear to understand the class composition of the union bureaucracy or the struggle taking place within the unions.

Woody bemoans the fact that Unite and GMB have some anti-ecological policies (e.g. supporting fracking), but appears oblivious to the fact the trade unions themselves are sites of class struggle. The unions are led by well-paid bureaucrats who represent the bosses’ interests within the labour movement. There is a permanent struggle against these bureaucrats, who consolidate their power by dampening down struggle and participation of workers.

Struggle within the unions to make them fight management can lead to rapid growth of member participation in the unions’ democratic life. The union becomes stronger as the bureaucrats lose this battle of democracy and the union becomes more representative of workers' interests. The same logic applies within the mass workers' parties, even in their current addled forms, like the British Labour Party. Woody’s ignorance of these matters suggests very limited involvement or interest in mass workers’ organisations.

In my view, a serious Marxist organisation with a healthy internal democratic life and a reputation to uphold within the wider workers' movement would have gone through this text with a red biro and sorted it out before rushing to the printers.

The left in Britain would produce much better literature and be a much more attractive to workers and young people concerned about climate change if we had a united socialist organisation with healthy internal democracy. Yet since their split from the SWP, RS21 comrades have shrunk from all our offers of political discussion, even the most modest.

If this pamphlet is going to do anything much except add to the accumulation of capitalist waste, then it should serve as a wake up call for RS21 supporters to engage in some frank discussions with serious Marxists outside of their own group. You know where to find us, comrades.

This website uses cookies, you can find out more and set your preferences here.
By continuing to use this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.