https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2020/02/03/exxons-exploitative-oil-deal-guyana-will-deprive-country-us55-billion

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/01/31/bringing-back-archaic-and-gruesome-weapons-trump-reverses-us-restrictions-landmines

“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley”

 (trans. “The best-laid plans of mice and men / Go oft awry”)



The plans of the “greenest” of capitalists are at best confused and at worst fraudulent. The whole array of “solutions” proposed within capitalism are not working or is working far too slowly. Too often the socialist answer is more or less dismissed because of the failures of the former Soviet Union and its Eastern European bloc to address their ecological damage despite these countries being a form of state-capitalism. What every government is doing is inadequate, to say the least. It is clear that capitalism is incapable of making the necessary changes. What capitalist country has ever been able to fully meet even the basic needs of its people, let alone totally and fundamentally transform its economy? It’s not that capitalists are necessarily bad people for some do invest in green renewables and some sincerely wish to alleviate poverty but it all to no avail. The capitalist system is based on: Production for profit, not for use; and a continual impetus to expand in order to maintain the drive for profit. This requires an endless cycle of accumulation of new wealth, finding new markets, even if necessary, conquest and war. No capitalist or reformist party or environmentalist organisation is ever going to be able to change the fundamentals of the capitalist social order one little bit.



 Despite high-profile conference after conference, all concluding with optimistic statements, despite the many fine words UN conferences have made little difference to the World’s worsening environmental situation. The World’s governments remain paralysed by inertia and in hock to vested corporate interests. Summits on the climate remain ineffectual and the people on the planet are paying the price.



While Glasgow’s COP26 will gather together many campaigners and many involved will reject the false solutions of green capitalism and the Socialist Party will not be unique in understanding that this system, geared towards profits, can only lead to further environmental disasters. However, there will be a few who will be actively issuing a troubling message by arguing population growth is responsible for the environmental degradation, that the world’s population size is the primary cause of climate change as well as other social problems. Blaming our environmental problems on population pressures is all too common and has resulted in a sordid history of top-down population control programmes violating women’s reproductive right. For certain, all women should have access to contraception and safe abortion as part of overall health services. Family planning, however, is not the answer to our environmental problems. It is misguided. Babies and yet-to-be-born babies are not responsible for today’s environmental problems. Smaller family size is now the norm. Birth and fertility rates are down because of factors like improved health services, education and status of women. Reducing population numbers will not stop rising sea levels. Many environmentalists will cite carrying capacity in there argument that we have too many people on the planet but overemphasis on individual consumption distracts from industrial and military consumption. Corporations are responsible for a disproportionate share of resource depletion, carbon emissions, waste and pollution. They should be held accountable for their actions, not the innocent victims of global warming.

 What we in the Socialist Party offer is a vision of an alternative society, based on (in Marx’s words), “the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of nature.” 

For the Socialist Party, our task is to integrate an understanding of climate change and what to do about it, into a campaign to overthrow capitalism and change the world economy. Only a socialist, globally planned economy, coordinating and working at every level is capable of halting climate change. Nothing can be guaranteed if the tipping-points and loop-backs are exceeded but what else is capable of making the necessary transformation, if not the organised working people of the world, sweeping capitalism out of the way, and democratically running the world in our own interests?

Meagre wages and common hiring practices such as employing workers under short-term contracts, or underreporting income for tax purposes, help keep Mexico’s informal economy especially large, Moy says. Fifty-six percent of Mexico’s workforce is informal, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI).

In 2019, Mexico doubled the minimum wage along the northern border region, where now it is 185.56 pesos or around $9.90 per day. But in the rest of the country, even after the recent jump, Mexico’s minimum wage earners make less than their counterparts in Brazil and Colombia, countries with similar per capita income.

There is no shortage of food in the world today. Contrary to the the alarmists within the environment movement, study after study shows that global food production has consistently outstripped population growth, and that there is more than enough food to feed everyone. Despite that fact, the most commonly proposed solution to world hunger is new technology to increase food production. If there is already enough food to feed the world then that shows that the food crisis is not a technical problem — it is a social and political problem. Market economics and not technology has always been the main limiting factor to food production. We should be why, when so much food is available, are over hundreds of millions of people hungry and malnourished? We should be asking why do children die of hunger every day? Why can’t the global food industry feed the hungry?



The answer is a simple one. The global food industry is not organised to feed the hungry; it exists to make profits for agribusinesses. The enormous power exerted by the largest food corporations allows them to control the cost of their supplies purchased from farmers while at the same time keeping prices of food to the general public at high enough levels to ensure large profits. Fertile farmland that could be used to grow food for domestic consumption now grows cash-crops for export. The result has been that many countries which were once self-sufficient in food are using vital foreign currency reserves to now import much of their food.  Millions of people now must depend on food that’s grown thousands of miles away because their homeland agriculture has been transformed to meet the needs of agribusiness corporations. The shift towards more industrial agriculture such as soya and palm oil to produce ethanol for example has driven millions of people off the land and into unemployment and poverty in the immense slums that now surround many of the world’s cities. And it has also been at the cost of of poisoning water, polluting the land and exhausting the soil. Commercial farming continues not necessarily because it is more productive, but because it delivers profits and profit is what counts, not peoples hunger or the detrimental impact on the planet.



Karl Marx wrote that despite its support for technical improvements, “the capitalist system works against a rational agriculture … a rational agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system.”



Today, the capitalist system puts profit ahead of human needs and has driven millions off the land,  and condemned almost a billion people to hunger and malnutrition. To feed the world’s population we must sweep away capitalism. It is capitalism, the laws of the market, that is killing so many people in the world. Malnutrition and hunger constantly threaten the working people of our world – unless the production and distribution of food is taken out of the hands of the capitalists and politicians. The burning question of food for the people is now clearly defined: Will the people eat – or will the food barons be allowed to accumulate profits as usual because the bosses of the food industry will not produce food except for profit? There is no other way. All production decisions are made by a tiny handful of capitalists, not in the interests of humanity, but purely for profit.