Once again, environmental concerns are hitting the headlines, as the empirical evidence for global warming cuts through the swirling mists of the bourgeois ideological conviction that capitalism can do no wrong. The threat to future profit is becoming too strong to ignore.

A 100,000 Year Fever?

Professor James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia hypothesis (according to which the Earth behaves analogously to a living organism) argues that humanity has acted as a pathogen within the planetary organism:

Our planet has kept itself healthy and fit for life, just like an animal does, for most of the more than three billion years of its existence. It was ill-luck that we started polluting at a time when the sun is too hot for comfort. We [our emphasis] have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma. She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years. We are responsible [our emphasis] and will suffer the consequences: as the century progresses, the temperature will rise 8 degrees centigrade in temperate regions and 5 degrees in the tropics. ⁽¹⁾

Quite apart from the supposed joint responsibility of the whole of humanity, the ruling classes and the ruled ones, we note as a parenthesis that neither the diagnosis (the Sun wasn’t particularly hot in the period between the start of Neolithic farming and now, and human activity in the Neolithic may have actually caused enough global warming to have prevented the return of ice-sheets (2, nor the prognosis (the present global warming may cause the Gulf Stream to shut off ⁽³⁾, causing local temperatures in Western Europe to plummet, ice to form there and initiating a global feed-back by reflecting more heat into space) are particularly firmly established.

So, how have “we” caused this disease?

By failing to see that the Earth regulates its climate and composition, we have blundered into trying to do it for ourselves, acting as if we were in charge. By doing this, we condemn ourselves to the worst form of slavery. If we chose to be the stewards of the Earth, then we are responsible for keeping the atmosphere, the ocean and the land surface right for life. A task we would soon find impossible - and something before we treated Gaia so badly, she had freely done for us.

This is almost completely wrong. Our distant ancestors may have had a mystical appreciation of their debt to the surrounding world (calling it Gaia, etc.), but they didn’t have a rational understanding of it. They affected this world by the very act of living. Whatever measures they took to conserve their environment, such as avoiding overhunting prey species, were arrived at by trial and error, and even this trial and error required that the people involved in. the activity in question made the decisions regarding that activity. ⁽⁴⁾

Now, “we” (or rather, our leaders) tend to act as though “our” environment were an object entirely outside “ourselves” to be exploited, without seeing the necessity for regulation. But, since the bourgeoisie has historically treated human society in the same manner, this approach is to be expected. The exploitative attitude of the bourgeoisie is “hard-wired” into it, and this class will only make efforts to overcome it when the contradictions associated with its behaviour become all too apparent.

Even then, the attempts of the bourgeoisie to self-regulate become the theatre for competition, with the most crisis-ridden (e.g., the US) or rapidly developing countries (e.g., China) trying to offload the sacrifice necessary for regulation onto their competitors.

Professor Lovelock is aware of this, but he puts the blame on these countries themselves (in a priceless aside, he says:

On these British Isles, we are used to thinking of all humanity and not just ourselves [!]),

and not on the global economic system they act within. Indeed, this is the major cause of his pessimism:

...We [here, “we” means Britain] will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time [our emphasis], and they are the main source of emissions. The worst will happen and survivors will have to adapt to a hell of a climate. ⁽⁵⁾

So, even Lovelock thinks there is still time, although he thinks it will be wasted, because the world is divided up into particular groups with particular interests which outweigh the general interest. Human beings, even the powerful ones in this system, who determine the policy of states like the United States or India or China, are powerless, acting within this system, to alter their own activity in a way which might save the planet. This is because capitalism is a still a system in which those who do not compete, die. And this competition is also about minimising all the costs of production, including ignoring any damage to the environment. This has been true throughout capitalism’s historic course, and, despite the degree of environmental regulation on a national level, environmental problems have not gone away. Rather, they have re-appeared on a global scale, where they cannot be regulated away, because any regulatory authority will, at best, be the tool of the powers dominating it. At worst, the authority will be ignored by those who have the most to gain from doing so (e.g., Kyoto not being signed by the US).

And yet Lovelock has a vision:

...but in human civilisation the planet has a precious resource. We are not merely a disease; we are, through our intelligence and communication, the nervous system of the planet. Through us, Gaia has seen herself from space, and begins to know her place in the universe.
We should be the heart and mind of the Earth, not its malady. So let us be brave and cease thinking of human needs and rights alone, and see that we have harmed the living Earth and need to make our peace with Gaia. We must do it while we are still strong enough to negotiate, and not a broken rabble led by warlords.

Forget the mystical wrappings about Gaia seeing herself from space and us making peace with her, and the contradiction between being the mind of the planet and the earlier point about not regulating the planet: human society can become conscious of its complicated and subtle interconnection with the rest of the planet, and produce to satisfy its needs in a way which prepares for the future satisfaction of those needs, rather than cutting away the basis of tomorrow’s life.

But a social consciousness of this interconnection is something more than the individual consciousness which already exists: it implies that society as a whole acts in line with this consciousness. And this social consciousness is not to be understood mystically - it cannot exist unless humanity both gives itself the organs to determine what is to be produced and how it is to be produced, and frees itself from a system where the blind laws of economic competition overrule human intelligence.

Both of these things in their turn require a total re-organisation of society, a revolution. And such a revolution in its turn requires the action of a class whose special interest coincides with the interests of humanity as a whole: that class is the working class.

Although we are led by warlords (just look at Iraq!), the working class is not a broken rabble, and can reconstitute itself as a class for itself. It is the aim of the IBRP to be part of that reconstitution.

(1) “The Earth is about to catch a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years” (an article preceding the publication of his book, The Revenge of Gaia), James Lovelock, The Independent, 16th January 2006.

(2) “How did humans first alter global climate?”, W Ruddiman, Scientific American, March 2004.

(3) See, for example, the Guardian article, “Will global warming trigger a new ice age?”, Bill McGuire, guardian.co.uk

(4) Lovelock, op. cit.

(5) Lovelock, op. cit.