Contribution of Communist Party of the Workers of Spain

The sensitivity to the environment has been gaining a growing relevance in Spain in the last decades. The devastating effects of global change —including climate change, the extinction of species, and the pollution of air, soils, and waters— are increasingly more evident. Phenomena like wildfires and “cold drops” are increasingly more serious. At the same time, our country is enduring one of the longest droughts ever recorded. Against the prospect of a terrifying future, the society is raising the need to solve the environmental problems.

The capitalists have seen in such need a market space. This is why they have been lobbying the Spanish Government and the European Parliament to promote “eco-friendly policies”. They pretend to use them as a means to turn the European Union, and particularly Spain, into a pole for the investment in “green” technologies. The “Spanish Green Growth Group” includes the major Spanish monopolies — financial, energy, and construction companies, above all. Their goal is promoting a low carbon economy, connected to its digitalization, and also based on the so-called “public-private partnership” and the use of Next Generation EU funds.

Under these slogans they are concealing their objective interests: the modernization of Spanish capitalism via the transfer of public funds to private companies. They want to use the money collected mainly among workers to make the investments required for the ensuring of profits, regardless of the ruthless results endured by the working-class majority then and now. We would like to highlight the role of the Spanish State in such process, particularly the special brutality displayed against coal miners when they did not accept the fate of unemployment and misery designed by our capitalists.

This “ecological” transition needs to be reinforced in the ideological sphere through programs of environmental education. Many resources are allocated to this task, which is further enhanced with every new reform in our educational system. We are constantly told that we are guilty for the destruction of the planet, that only the small changes made by each individual in their consumption habits would enable the saving of the world from the environmental collapse. In this sphere, some ecologist NGO's play a key role. Their main task in Spain has been the demonization of big energy production workplaces based on fossil fuels, but their inability to offer a feasible alternative has been exploited by energy monopolies: they have relocated their production to other countries and promoted the building of hundreds of renewable macro-projects with no control of their environmental impact — being built even in protected natural areas.

In the Spanish political sphere, the “ecologist” parties have historically been irrelevant, and now subsumed by the new social democracy. The two Spanish full members of the European Green Party (Esquerra Verda and Verdes Equo) are respectively part of the Unidas Podemos and SUMAR coalitions. In our country, this new social democracy has taken the place of green parties in many EU countries — whether they are in the opposition or a partner of the Government, they promote the hope for “environmentally sustainable” reforms within capitalism.

Nothing is further from reality. The different environmental impacts that now simplify ecosystems, alter the quality of our environment, and affect human beings are due to the impact of the current capitalist mode of production. The exploitation of raw materials and the control of transport routes are two of the main reasons why the States —in the era of imperialism— foster interventions and wage wars in third countries. Under this logic, not only the interests of the EU in Ukraine are explained, but also the EU policies towards Latin American countries, where the Spanish monopolies are still making huge investments. Under this same logic it is also explained why the bourgeois Governments are focused just on greenhouse effect gas emissions and the “struggle against climate change”. They cannot conduct a struggle against all the environmental impacts, and this is the only one they could take profit from. There is no hope for saving the planet in the “green exploitation” we are  being proposed by both the imperialists and the supporters of the European Green Deal who manage their system.

But hope has other color — red. Only an economy based on meeting social needs can include environmental criteria while making decisions. Only the central planning of economy  can make the use of natural resources and a truly sustainable environmental management compatible. Only the scientific worldview can comprehensively tackle all the environmental problems from our activity. All of it is part of the communist proposal to the working class.

This is why the PCTE have started to approach the environmental issue in our Manifest- Program, approved in 2021. We recognize however that we have still much to learn and work on this topic.