Communism or Extinction?

The phrase in the title is based on Rosa Luxemburg's phrase, "Socialism or barbarism?" [Source]. Why do we say this? Why do we have to choose communism or face extinction? We will answer these here.

The capitalist mode of production requires maximizing profit at the expense of everything else. The capitalist class must accumulate its capital as much as possible, so it invests existing capital into highly-profitable ventures until the rate of profit falls, and then it withdraws its capital from them and invests it elsewhere, causing the boom-and-bust cycles of our economy. This economic law of capitalism encourages or even forces capitalists to make decisions that would normally be considered "bad" or unnecessary.

A particular English capitalist in 1830 may not particularly like exploiting the labor of children, but because their labor is cheap and docile, he may be unable to afford not to if it means losing out to competitors. In short, in order to be a capitalist at all, he must make profits, and if exploiting children is a necessary part of this, then his choice is to exploit children or go out of business. Indeed, as Marx points out in Capital, it is precisely such reification that made it so difficult to end the exploitation of children in England. And it is such reification that always leads to the “hard choices” that always place profits ahead of other human values. “Sorry we had to shut down the only company in the company town thus destroying the town, but it was no longer profitable.” “Sorry we had to pollute the environment, but not to have done so would have increased costs too much.” A great deal of the history of capitalism is people mobilizing to deal with such fallout, fallout that stems from the indifference to use-value (everything qualitative including human beings) that results from subsuming economic life to the commodity form. [Source]

"Eco-capitalism" is a sham, too. It goes against the laws of capitalist production, so the capitalist class and the state it controls seldom implement environmentally-friendly measures; it only does so thanks to the pressures working people place on them when they protest and use force. On top of that, fossil fuels industries and "green" companies are often managed by the same finance capitalists, and oil companies are not unfamiliar to using "green" posturing to promote their sales [Source, albeit a crappy one that tries to paint this in a good light]. When all this fails, capitalists promote pessimism to make consumers accept oil use; they say, "We're fucked, so you may as well continue to buy gasoline and burn it." No capitalist system will save us from the coming climate catastrophe. Just last week in Ohio (in the US), a derailment released so much toxic gas that the town’s ecosystem is under threat of extinction, but capitalist media refuses to cover this because the capitalist class is responsible for it; while rail unions warned of a potential accident with the rail cars, capitalists refused to pay for better protections. If they won’t even help a town against chemical pollution, they won’t help us against the climate emergency.

Only proletarian dictatorship—i.e. socialism—and its end goal of communism will save humanity from the extinctions capitalism causes with climate change. When the working class takes control of production, it can use its knowledge to create genuinely helpful technologies regardless of profitability, it can end fossil fuel production and divert labor and other resources to ecologically-necessary spheres of the economy, and it can end the unsustainable overproduction that is linked to capitalism. Because it maximizes use-value and not profit, workers' economic planning will be able to implement the policies we need to stop and hopefully reverse climate change. Because it relies on actual data of resource availability, it can effectively use resources without waste. Friedrich Engels wrote about this general idea in Anti-Dühring; in Chapter 3 of Part III ("Production"):

Once more, only the abolition of the capitalist character of modern industry can bring us out of this new vicious circle, can resolve this contradiction in modern industry, which is constantly reproducing itself. Only a society which makes it possible for its productive forces to dovetail harmoniously into each other on the basis of one single vast plan can allow industry to be distributed over the whole country in the way best adapted to its own development, and to the maintenance and development of the other elements of production.

Accordingly, abolition of the antithesis between town and country is not merely possible. It has become a direct necessity of industrial production itself, just as it has become a necessity of agricultural production and, besides, of public health. The present poisoning of the air, water and land can be put an end to only by the fusion of town and country; and only such fusion will change the situation of the masses now languishing in the towns, and enable their excrement to be used for the production of plants instead of for the production of disease. [Source]

That is good for the theory of socialism, but do we have practical examples of socialist environmentalism? Contrary to capitalist misinformation, we do! The biggest socialist projects of the past, the USSR and China, had relatively successful environmental policies, and their capitalist restorations actually caused environmental damage. These socialist countries relied on scientific information from their time, so they were not perfect in their environmental policies; they did ultimately hurt the environment by using fossil fuels. This does not delegitimize their successes, though.

The USSR implemented environmental policies before any capitalist country. “Soviet Environmentalism in the Stalin Era” says this:

Soviet environmentalism wasn’t the same kind of liberal-idealist environmentalism which existed in capitalist countries. It did not put any inherent spiritual or supernatural value on nature. Nor was Soviet environmentalism merely interested in conserving natural resources, like many western theorists. Instead the USSR saw the natural environment as something which offers economic, psychological and aesthetic value to human beings. Soviet environmentalism was tied to the deep humanism of Soviet socialism. The Soviets understood that humanity is not separate from nature, but is a product of nature, and deeply connected with nature.

Stephen Brain writes:

“Environmentalism survived and—even thrived—in Stalin’s Soviet Union, establishing levels of protection unparalleled anywhere in the world” (Stephen Brain, Stalin’s Environmentalism, p. 93)

“the Soviet Union in the 1940s went about protecting from exploitation more forested land than any other country in history. Accordingly, it is accurate to say that the Soviet Union developed a real and effective environmentalist program… Stalin emerged as a peculiar kind of environmentalist… his policies withdrew millions of hectares [of forest] from economic exploitation on the grounds that this would improve the hydrology of the Soviet Union. These millions of hectares were left more or less untouched, in keeping with the supposition that complex, wild forests best regulated water flows, and thus one may conclude that Stalin’s policies were steadfastly environmentalist—and because of the way they were carried out, preservationist as well.” (Stephen Brain, Song of the Forest: Russian Forestry and Stalinist Environmentalism, 1905-1953, p. 2)

“Stalin also actively promoted forest environmentalism for the benefit of the state, establishing levels of protection unparalleled anywhere in the world… Stalin’s environmental policies codified into law an assumption that healthy land was forested land and that deforestation represented serious environmental dangers to the state’s larger project of modernization, in the form of droughts, floods, hydrological disturbances, and crop failures… Forest protection ultimately rose to such prominence during the last six years of Stalin’s rule that the Politburo took control of the Soviet forest away from the Ministry of Heavy Industry and elevated the nation’s forest conservation bureau to the dominant position in implementing policy” (Song of the forest, p. 116). [Source]

Socialist China also had measures to reduce waste and maximize use-value (not profit), and that is very much environmentalist. In “Turning the Harmful Into the Beneficial”, an article from Issue 4 of Volume 15 of Peking Review, Chi Wei writes:

Every day  large quantities of the “three wastes”—waste gas, liquid and residue—stream forth from industrial production. In capitalist countries, because the capitalists seek high profits and production is in a state of anarchy, these “wastes,” which pollute the air and poison the rivers, pose an increasingly serious menace to the people’s health. This has become an insoluble social problem in the capitalist world.

“How is pollution dealt with in China”? Some foreign friends who have seen the effects of pollution are very concerned about this question.

In our country, the “three wastes” have done little harm to the people. This is because in a socialist country like ours which is “proceeding in all cases from the interests of the people,” we can rely on the superiority of the socialist system to take various measures to prevent pollution harming the people. …

During the Great Cultural Revolution, the plant’s revolutionary committee organized all its staff members and workers to study Chairman Mao’s teachings and mercilessly criticize the revisionist line, including trash like “making great efforts to do what is most profitable, less efforts to do what is less profitable and no efforts to do what is unprofitable” and “putting profits in command,” advertised by Liu Shao-chi. They saw the question of whether or not to remove phenol as a question of “for whom?” which is a matter of principle, and one of whether or not they want to support agriculture and consolidate the worker-peasant alliance. After reaching unity in their thinking and pooling their collective wisdom and strength, they quickly made a device for removing phenol from wastewater, thus turning the harmful into the beneficial. …

There is no limit to people’s ability to know and transform the objective world. Thus there is no limit to utilizing the “three wastes.” Using cotton seeds as its material, a plant used to treat the seed shells as fuel. Later, workers produced furfural from the shells, acetone from the gas emitted in making furfural, glucose out of the residue and glycerin, butanol, alcohol and weiching (a flavoring essence) out of the glucose residue. Indeed, there are no limits. They believe everything is valuable; there are only materials which have not been utilized, and there is no absolute waste which cannot be utilized. Continued scientific experiments have yielded important material from remaining “waste.” …

The principle of multi-purpose use correctly reflects the objective law of the development of production. Under the socialist system where the laboring people are the masters, mastering and using this law not only can end pollution, but also can expand production on a wide scale, creating ever more wealth for the state. At present, China’s production technique is comparatively backward and multi-purpose use has just started. Under the guidance of Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line, multi-purpose use will surely be developed on an ever wider scale. [Source]

"Earthy Knowledge: Rethinking Chinese Terracing Campaigns", though more critical of Mao's China than the previous article, points out the nuanced reality of socialist terracing in China:

In many places, terraces constructed during the Mao era continue to be maintained today because they serve agricultural production while preventing erosion. There are even places where terracing is recognized as an aspect of “agricultural heritage,” and yet a significant portion of the existing terraces were built not during centuries past, but during the Mao era. nd, while in some areas trees were felled to convert hillsides into terraced farmland, in many others bare hillsides were terraced and planted with trees, or with grain lined by fruit trees along the weirs (terrace walls): indeed, tree-planting was an explicit part of Mao-era terracing campaigns.

Critics of Mao-era terracing also typically fail to acknowledge the Mao-era sources of their critical insights: that is, the concerns they raise are often the same as those they have read in Mao-era materials, articulated by people committed to Maoist scientific principles, especially regarding the promotion of local experimentation and resistance to inappropriate outside models. The phrase “cutting with a single stroke of the knife” appeared frequently in Mao-era criticisms of uniformity. For example, a People’s Daily article from 1972 discussed a county on Hainan island where the proximity to both ocean and mountains created diverse conditions. When county leaders allegedly attempted to “cut with a single stroke of the knife,” local cadres rebelled, saying, “We truly cannot do that here.” The article argued that the true meaning of studying Dazhai lay in investigating local conditions, listening to the perspectives of the masses, and studying Mao’s exhortation to “make work plans based on practical circumstances.” And so, instead of cutting with a single stroke of the knife, county leaders reportedly learned to find “a different key to open every lock.” [Source]

We also have the real examples of capitalist restoration's ecological consequences in the USSR and China. In the USSR under Khrushchev, for-profit policies replaced socialist ones, and this encouraged ecological destruction to promote profitable (not very useful) production:

The revisionists actually carried out projects in the 1960s, 70s and 80s which had very serious environmental effects. The Siberian oil industry, the gas industry and the drying of the Aral sea by the revisionists are usually given as examples. However, in the Stalin era the USSR had a completely opposite policy. There is no link between the environmentally destructive policies of the revisionists and the Marxist-Leninist policies of Lenin and Stalin. ...

Brain mentions numerous examples of researchers pointing out that the USSR in the 1970s was polluted, and they blamed it on Stalin. Brain says that the most sophisticated version of the consensus view—represented by Douglas Weiner—stated that there was some nature protection in the Lenin era, in the form of non-governmental nature preserve scientific stations, which debunked the claim that there was absolutely no kind of environmental protection. However, because these non-governmental preserves were abolished in the Stalin era when socialism was constructed, Weiner claimed this proves that “stalinism” is entirely hostile to environmentalism. This claim is fallacious. The nature preserves of the Lenin era prove that Lenin was not hostile to environmentalism. In the Stalin era the non-governmental nature preserves were abolished only because they were replaced by even more powerful state-enforced environmental protections and state-controlled nature preserves. ...

“After Stalin’s death, the conservation bureaus fell from their prominent position” (Song of the forest, p. 117)when Minleskhoz dominated Soviet forest management, however, was brief. On March 15, 1953, six days after Stalin’s funeral, Minleskhoz was liquidated. With the functions of Minleskhoz transferred to the Ministry of Agriculture, forest conservation fell into deep decline. The number of workers assigned to forest matters in Moscow fell from 927 to 342 in the space of six months, a drop of 62 percent, and then to 120 workers after a year.” (Stalin’s Environmentalism, pp. 117-118) [Source]

China after Mao has a more nuanced experience. "Since 1978, more than 66 billion trees have been planted in the Three-North Shelter Forest Program, the country’s largest tree-planting drive also called the Great Green Wall" [Source]. On the other hand, "the consequences of China exporting large quantities of labor-intensive products have had severe effects on China’s natural resources and it devastated China’s environment" [Source]. A lot of the environmental damage was pretty inevitable because it was the only was China could develop its economy in its capitalist economy without any aid from the imperialist countries investing their capital in it, but socialist China likely would have had more sustainable economic growth. From Victory to Defeat shows this:

High levels and high rates of investment growth have been the other important contributors for China high GDP growth rate. On November 27, 2012 the IMF published a working paper entitled, “Is China Over-Investing and Does it Matter?” The article stated that in 2012 the rate of investment in China reached 50% of GDP, and it explored the problems related to overinvestment. It asserted that China’s investment level was already high in 2007 and when the great recession hit the world in 2008-2009, the Chinese government began to implement a rescue plan of $586 billion, which was spent on a wide range of infrastructure investment projects. Thus, investment as percentage of GDP was further raised by 2012 to over 50%. In any country, imperialist or colonial/semi-colonial, a 20% of GDP investment rate is considered very high.

The government spent the rescue package by vastly expanding infrastructure. The high rates of investment resulted in overcapacities in many industries. One example was overcapacity in the solar panel industry. According to an article published by McKinsey & Company on “China’s Great Rebalancing/ Promise and Peril,” in less than a decade China’s solar panel industry went from non-existent to become dominant in the world. The ten largest Chinese manufacturers today account for more than 60% of global solar panel production and in 2010, 96% of the solar panels China produced were exported. The article continues to say the problem of this growth was almost entirely production driven.56 Solar panel production is also highly polluting.

Additionally, housing stock expanded rapidly, reaching a level far above people’s ability to buy, causing the fear of a housing bubble burst. From the government rescue package came the extensive construction of the transportation network, which included 30,000 kilometers (18,600 miles) of high-speed railway and 35,000 km (22,000 miles) of highways. The major infrastructure construction facilitated the flow of goods and people. At the same time, tremendous waste resulted from over-building. Many four-lane highways built in small towns are still deserted, while whole cities and towns with rows and rows of residential and commercial buildings, roads, hotels and exhibition centers stand empty. This overinvestment has represented an extreme imbalance in the Chinese economy and caused tremendous damage to China’s natural environment. Despite the efforts made by the government to rebalance China’s economy to correct the low level of domestic consumption, the level has stayed unchanged at around 40% of GDP. The level of consumption cannot be raised, because of the low wages of Chinese workers. The detrimental effects on China’s environment from 40 years of capitalist development will be discussed later, but over-investment has certainly been a contributor. One shocking figure can help illustrate the environmental impact of over-investment: China’s cement consumption in three years (2011-2013) was more than US cement consumption in the entire 20th century. [Source]

To conclude, the only way to fight climate change, pollution, and extinction is by overthrowing the capitalist states that oppress us, seizing the means of production from the parasitic financial oligarchy and its comprador capitalists, and enacting economic plans under proletarian dictatorship to ensure that economic growth occurs sustainably, usefully, and to benefit the working people.