Statement of the European Communist Action:Reject the parties of the EU, capital and ‘green’ exploitation. The hope for saving the environment is red

The parties of the European Communist Action (ECA), after convening at a successful teleconference on 14 January 2024, state the following: 

1) The destruction of the environment is a direct consequence of the capitalist system that operates based on the profit of the exploiters.

When it comes to the destruction of the environment and the disastrous intervention in it, no greater example exists than the waging of wars: dead, wounded and uprooted people as well as incalculable consequences for the soil, the flora and fauna, the water, the climate and the natural environment as a whole.

Those who promote the imperialist war plans, massacre the people in Gaza, Ukraine, Yemen, the Red Sea, etc., and finance imperialist war, provocatively pretend to be “protectors of the environment”. 

Despite significant advances in science and technology and today’s potential to reduce their effects, the various natural phenomena, including wildfires, floods, earthquakes and droughts, systematically affect the peoples —mainly the working class and the popular strata. 

Bourgeois governments use climate change and the severity of natural phenomena as a pretext and conceal their enormous responsibility for the disturbing lack of organized prevention policies, personnel and infrastructure, which desperately require expanded funding.

2) The complexity of the dynamics associated with climate change demands the continuation of scientific studies on this matter in the direction of examining and revealing all the environmental factors that are linked to the capitalist mode of production and its huge impact on ecosystems.

3) Throughout time, communists have shown great practical interest in the research on environmental issues, long before the capitalists and their governments hypocritically treated them as a pretext to increase the degree of exploitation through the bourgeois strategy of the so-called green growth. Particularly, we would like to highlight the achievements of the Soviet Union and the Soviet environmental scientists and biologists on this matter, always aiming at making the use of natural resources and the meeting of human needs compatible; something that only socialism can advance.

The Marxist-Leninist parties participating in the ECA seek to continue the task started by Soviet scientists, in order to give the working class the tools to solve the modern-day, acute environmental problems. 

4) However, the capitalists are exploiting the peoples’ concerns to justify their measures and mechanisms that are hostile to the workers and the people in general. To this end, they attempt to promote among the working class and the popular strata various anti-popular strategies jointly formulated by the EU, the governments, and the bourgeois parties. In particular, this applies to the European Green Deal, which aims at transferring funds, derived from the heavy taxation of the people, to private companies through mechanisms such as the Recovery and Resilience Facility. These strategies are designed for the sake of monopolies and their pursuit of profits —profits made by exploiting the working class. That is why capitalism not only cannot rationally use natural resources but wastes them in a criminal way for the interests of monopoly capital, a fact for which the working class, the self-employed, the toiling farmers and young people pay dearly.

5) In this sense, the discussion on the exploitation of raw materials —like lithium, chromium or cobalt— and the use of new energies and digital technologies is to be found within the framework of competition between imperialist powers, in which the most powerful capitalist countries are involved, such as the USA, China, Germany, France, Japan and Russia, as well as their alliances, such as NATO, the EU and the Eurasian Economic Community.

This makes impossible the use of science and technology for the reduction of environmental impact, as scientific criteria are tied to the relentless capitalist pursuit of profits, which leads to imperialist wars.

6) The statements of bourgeois forces on environmental problems are made in order to spread and make use of fear. They are used to justify the liberalization of energy, the Energy Exchange and the emissions trading, which have led to skyrocketing commodity and fuel prices and an increase in energy poverty that plagues the peoples of Europe while the energy groups are getting rich. The energy efficiency retrofit subsidy and the installation of wind turbines are based on the profits of the business groups in areas where great environmental damage is being caused.

7) The bourgeois parties, liberal, social democratic, green or opportunist, together with NGOs and movements such as “Fridays for Future”, seek to brainwash and ideologically manipulate the youth in an organized manner through the bourgeois school. They attempt to exonerate capitalism from the destruction of the environment, talk about an “anthropogenic climate change” and intentionally blame the people in general and not the real culprit, i.e. the capitalist system that they all support. 

From the point of view of the development of class struggle, the working class can oppose such anti-scientific ideological constructs and the bourgeois parties promoting them. Such a perspective can only be given by the communist parties. 

Taking into consideration all of this and in the face of the ideological struggle that is bound to intensify ahead of the European elections, the parties of the European Communist Action declare their will to struggle:

- Against the “green” strategy of the business groups and the EU governments. 

- For disengagement from imperialist wars and Euro-Atlantic missions, the closure of US-NATO bases and the termination of the provision of all facilities and armaments by our governments.

- For immediate measures to relieve the working people from the high prices in food, energy and fuel. 

- For the abolition of the anti-popular “green” taxation on the people, the burden of which must fall on big capital. 

- For immediate flood, earthquake and fire protection projects, substantial relief and protection of the affected people with full state compensation.

- For the protection of forests and the water table against privatization and any entrepreneurial action, as well as the commercialization of water.

- Against the commercialization of coasts and beaches.

The ECA parties commit themselves to resolutely strengthen their struggle in every country for the construction of a centrally and scientifically planned economy for the rational use of resources and the pro-people management of the environmentand to make it absolutely clear that the issues pertaining to all environmental problems can only be solved by such an economy, within the framework of a socialist–communist society. Capitalism is causing the rapidly escalating destruction of the environment and, therefore, can offer no solution to this problem. That is why the struggle for a revolutionary change is the only way out for the people.