Fwd: [westtown1962] Guardian Unlimited: Jump on our bandwagon

[Pepi Plowman]

FYI

Note: forwarded message attached.

To see this story with its related links on the
Guardian Unlimited site, go to
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Jump on our bandwagon
The left must see that only environmentalism has the
power to restrain global corporations
George Monbiot
Tuesday April 06 2004
The Guardian


Beside the disaster in Iraq, the new Islamist terror
campaign and the battle over immigration policy, the
survival of the black-browed albatross may not look
like the most pressing political issue. For many of
those on the left, environmentalism is at a best a
distraction, at worst a regression. As Christopher
Hitchens said in a debate last week: "Environmentalism
and ecology... are conservative positions. They may be
honourable ones, they may be defensible ones, they are
not radical ones." 

This was once true. The modern European green movement
began as a response by landowners to the rise of the
middle class and the industries which empowered it.
Industrialism threatened both the landscapes which
reflected an unchanging social order and the
aristocracy's economic control.  

Today, it would be foolish to claim that this tendency
has entirely disappeared. Much of the movement's
funding in this country is provided by people with
inherited wealth, the most prominent of whom, Teddy
Goldsmith, happily describes himself as a reactionary.
By reasserting the traditional Tory policy of trade
protectionism, the British Green party, which in other
respects is a radical force, finds itself allied to
such ultra-conservative bodies as America First.  

But while some of the policies of its adherents
haven't changed, the political meaning of
environmentalism has. Corporations have become the new
aristocracy: an enthroned power which shows no sign of
being usurped from within. Far from becoming a
catalyst for revolutionary change, they have ensured
that all that once melted into air becomes solid, as
intangible assets - the genome, the internet, even the
weather - are bound up by a new generation of property
rights. Financial speculators establish the limits of
political action: if a government steps over the
political line and "loses the confidence of the
markets", the economy collapses, and the government
soon follows.  

Their world order is as dangerous to social welfare as
feudalism. While industrialisation still has
liberating potential for poorer nations, its global
impact on the climate means that it could now destroy
more lives than it saves. Environmentalism and social
justice have become indivisible. To ignore the
environmental impacts of economic decisions, as some
on the left still do, is to ignore one of the major
sources of oppression.  

This is not to say that the classic leftist analysis
of power relations has become redundant. At the global
level we can discern a dialectic of precisely the kind
Marx foresaw. As the same corporations seek to enforce
the same conditions everywhere, they create a
universal class interest in confronting them. No one
needs to persuade the people fighting Monsanto in
Britain that they have common cause with the people
fighting Monsanto in Bangladesh or Bolivia. But
because the corporations have so effectively crushed
the global workforce, much of the pressure for change
now comes from outside the factory gates.  

Partly as a result of the changes they have
engineered, partly as a result of the depletion of
natural resources, the corporations now appear to be
more vulnerable to environmental protest than they are
to industrial action. Having exhausted the most
accessible reserves of oil, minerals, timber, fish and
freshwater, they are now forced into ever wider
conflicts with the local people whose land and water
they must seize to maintain production. As a result,
the theft of resources and the ensuing pollution have
become major political issues almost everywhere.  

At the same time, the drive to cut labour costs and
find new markets requires constant technological
innovation. Science in countries like Britain has been
subordinated to the corporate demand for profitable
new technologies. To deploy these technologies,
companies must also demand ever-lower regulatory
standards. These are the reasons why science policy
has become such a battleground, and why so many of
those who claim to be defending science instead appear
to be defending corporate power.  

The limiting factor for corporations, in other words,
is no longer labour, but the ecosystem and the
regulations which protect it. This is why battles over
the environment are among the few that the world's
dissident movements are winning.  

This might seem an odd thing to say, at a time when
climate change seems to be accelerating, the US
government insists on raising the production of an
ozone-destroying chemical, and a new UN report
suggests that vast "dead zones" caused by sewage and
farm pollution are spreading across the oceans. But
over the past week in Britain alone we've won four
resounding victories.  

Last Tuesday, Bayer, the company which just a month
ago received permission to start growing GM maize
commercially in Britain, pulled out. This means that
no GM crops can be grown in Britain until at least
2008, and perhaps never. On Thursday, the European
commission, having prevaricated for 14 years, ordered
the nuclear power station at Sellafield to clear up
the plutonium it has been dumping. Since the 1950s
Sellafield is believed to have thrown 1.3 tonnes of
plutonium - enough to make 162 atom bombs - into an
open pond.

On Friday executives from the Lafarge conglomerate
visited the Hebridean island of Harris to announce
that they had abandoned their plans to turn Mount
Roineabhal, part of a protected landscape, into
roadstone. The mountain, according to one of the
quarry's backers, would have become the biggest hole
in the world.  

On Saturday, the British Foreign Office, after
threatening to sink it, finally dropped its objections
to a new treaty, enforceable in British territorial
waters in the south Atlantic, protecting albatrosses
from longline fishermen. So many albatrosses were
being caught on baited hooks that all 21 species are
now threatened with extinction.  

In all these cases, victory against some of the
world's biggest corporations was achieved by small
groups of local people and roving campaigners, armed
with a tiny fraction of their opponents' budgets. They
haven't liberated the working class from oppression,
but they have restrained the power of the oppressors.
These are victories for the common people against the
new aristocracy.  

Nothing so undermines a cause as repeated failure. By
showing that we can win against great odds, we
revitalise the campaign not only against environmental
destruction, but against other forms of oppression.
Those leftists who still see environmentalism as
someone else's mobilisation are missing a massive
opportunity.  

But if these victories are to spread,   then both
sides need to be more consistent. The Green party, for
example, claims to support the doctrine of
"contraction and convergence", in which the use of
resources by the different nations converges to
equality. Yet it seeks, through protectionism, to
prevent the transfer of manufacturing and service jobs
from rich nations to poor which would assist this
process. Similarly, if the traditional left is to take
a truly internationalist position, it must cease to
press for the kind of development at home which,
through climate change, destroys the lives of other
people. If the greens junk their past and the reds
grasp their future, the new aristocracy will find
itself in serious trouble.

· George Monbiot's book The Age of Consent: a
Manifesto for a New World Order, is published, with
new material, in paperback today.  

monbiot.com



Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited



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