Contribution of Communist Party of Sweden

Dear comrades

The destruction of our environment through global warming, rampant pollution and depletion of valuable resources is a fact. In the last decade we have witnessed huge wildfires each summer on several continents, with loss of lives and the destruction of large tracts of forest, we have suffered devastating floods and droughts that have led to bad harvests – and in many cases no harvests at all – and as a consequence countless people have died. As if that were not enough, we eat, drink and breathe plastic micro-particles and toxic substances every day – in fact our children are swimming in poison already in the womb. I could go on, there is no limit to the capitalist degradation of the environment and the harm to the human beings that live in it.

At the same time, capitalists and the bourgeois authorities that represent them are talking about a “green deal”, and sustainable development. What this means is partly that the working people should condone a new industrial drive with so-called green technology, and that we should choose to buy new products labelled environmentally friendly. We should simply accept the capitalist agenda and adapt ourselves to new products and new consumption patterns, sometimes expensive and sometimes socially unnecessary but profitable for capital. The environmental movement in many ways accepts this agenda already, and so people are left with impossible individual choices within a capitalist framework.

Today, the fossil fuel industry is responsible for a large part of the ongoing global warming. That is a fact. But it is not a fact that we will be in a better place if we let capitalism perform their greenwashing. Capital needs to be constantly reinvested  in order to grow –this leads to a more intense competition between monopolies and capitalist nations, opening up new markets, or destroying and remaking old ones. This can lead to war between imperialist constellations, as we see in  in the Ukraine. This war also illustrates a basic tendency of capitalism - to destroy in order to reeinvest. 

However, the need for new investments can also lead to a less obvious destruction of infrastructure. Big parts of the fossil fuel infrastructure may simply be left to rust and rot, while the new “green” sector opens up, the decay filling the same function as an imperialist war. 

This sector is of course not as green as it makes itself out to be, but new it certainly is. Here we find the wind turbines and the solar cells, the nuclear energy plants and the battery driven cars – each with their own environmental and social problems. The wind turbines already generate heaps of broken parts that are disposed of in less than efficient ways, they aggravate soil erosion when they are too many and in the wrong place, and the batteries for the electric cars are dependent on children in the third world, scraping for minerals in mud fields that are leaking toxic waste over large areas of land, destroying both the lives of the children and the livelihood of their parents farming the land. 

To say this is not to be against technical innovation and green solutions. It is stating what capitalism is and does: capitalism is a profit driven mode of production that cannot transition into a socially and ecologically responsible system.  It will use every technique it can for maximizing profit, and driving production to its outer limits, and this will mean that eventually each and every technique is used in a way that destroys the environment.  

It is also a mode of production that, as I said, seeks new technology to invest in, and leaves the old to rust. This applies to everything, not only the “green” solutions. A prime example is the relatively new fossil fuel technology of fracking, where soil is poisoned and oil is pressed out of it, destroying enormous areas – here old technology is left to rot for newer technology, and no green vocabulary is needed. It also means pumping money into technical solutions to make the traditional oil industry viable for another stretch of time – like storing carbon dioxide underground in facilities already being built, even though the long term consequences of that are unknown. Lastly, it labels dangerous nuclear energy as green, and sets about to build nuclear power plants in a world where both the waste and the raw material may be used for a war that ends all wars.

So, phasing out the fossil fuel will not save us. Capitalism will continue to produce ever more for profit, and to look for new investment possibilities and new markets. Our energy may in a capitalist future come from the wind and the sun in larger measure than before, and to compensate for this, the oil industry is already turning to massively increasing the production of petroleum products, such as plastics, and which poisons us from within. 

The change to “green” capitalism will destroy the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in a socially completely unacceptable way in in its hunt for cheap raw materials for the electrical industry. Capitalism will continue to produce ever more for profit, and we are supposed to be consumer cattle, buying products that are flimsy, unrepairable, cheap and toxic – while at the same time being urged to individual responsible and expensive choices. Old clothes, electronic gadgets that lost their function, plastic  garbage of different kinds, packing materials and just simply waste will drown our planet, further aggravating the process that has led the global south to become a rubbish dump, where the poor pick through toxic debris to find raw materials to sell back to capitalism. No “green deal” will alter that.

Lastly, no green deal will alter the clash between the imperialist blocs for  markets, raw materials and transport routes. Therefore armament and war, military training and operations will continue to consume huge amounts of fuel, energy and raw materials, to spew out death and pollution in more ways than one, to destroy both the people and the very ground beneath our feet. 

So – if we want a sustainable future, if we want to survive as a civilized species, and maybe as a species at all, we will have to rely on something else than the profit mongers’ empty promises. We will have to trust the working class of the world to build a future where war comes to an end, where production is planned to meet the demands of the people. We will have to trust our parties and our organizations to lead the peoples in building a society that uses the resources of our planet fairly and as nondestructively as possible, and that halts both production and consumption of all the things capitalism forces down our throats in favor of what we really need.

A truly green future has to be a red future as well.