Marx in
Copenhagen
by W.T.
Whitney Jr.
“Goodbye
Africa, goodbye South Asia; goodbye glaciers and sea ice, coral reefs and
rainforest; it was nice knowing you.” Such was UK Guardian writer George
Monbiot’s dismay as the recent Copenhagen Climate
Conference ended without a binding agreement.
Mexico’s
La Jornada newspaper blamed the meeting’s
failure on “a web of interests that are the main obstacle to reaching a serious
accord,” including “governments and their accomplices in the corporate and
financial world.” The profligate burning of fossil fuels has accompanied
corporations’ economic expansion, accumulation, and incessant quest for profit.
In the course of this quest, capitalism “imposes what is in effect a scorched
earth strategy,” writes Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster.
The
Copenhagen debacle may well go down in history as a turning point in capitalist
development, much as the 1914 war over empire, for example, or the Great
Depression in 1929. This time, capitalism is putting the whole of humankind on
the road to hunger, migrations, rampant disease, and die-off. Harking back to
Karl Marx, Samir Amin
asserts, “The accumulation of capital destroys the natural bases on which that
accumulation is built: man…and the earth.”
The
Copenhagen gathering followed years of scientific recommendations,
negotiations, and wrangling, beginning with the 1992 Earth Summit. With
Washington opting out, industrialized nations accepted the 1997 Kyoto Protocol
calling for modest but legally binding limits on emissions. To keep global
temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, scientists have called
for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the present 385 parts per million to
350 ppm.
Before
the Copenhagen meeting, the United Nations issued guidelines accepting a
temperature rise of 2° C. By 2020, industrialized nations were to have reduced
greenhouse gas emissions to 45 percent of 1990 levels, to 80 percent by 2050.
The European Union had promised a 20 percent cut; the United States, in effect,
a 4 percent cut. China, exempted from Kyoto requirements, offered an ambiguous
plan tying emissions cuts to units of GDP rise.
No
agreements were in sight when world leaders arrived at the meeting’s end. President
Obama met with Chinese, Indian, Brazilian, and South African representatives,
later with those of 25 industrialized nations. He then issued a
press-conference announcement of an “agreement” affecting 194 nations.
Participants learned of it via television.
Legal
commitments under the Kyoto Protocol morphed into a political agreement lacking
commitments and time tables. Reaching out to nations individually, not
collectively, it focused on monitoring and backed the 2-degree limit on global
warming.
A leaked
UN scientific report predicting a 3° C global temperature rise under
UN-recommended emissions limits was ignored. “Shock Doctrine” author Naomi
Klein saw bribery in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s $100 billion offer
from unspecified sources to help underdeveloped nations cope with climate disaster.
Meanwhile,
outside the meeting, Danish police arrested over 1,000 peaceful protesters
under a new “pre-crime law.” The protesters were demanding swift and effective
action to reduce emissions.
Speaking
for the G-77 group of 134 underdeveloped nations, Sudanese diplomat Lumumba
Stanislaus Di-Pping demanded a 1.5° C limit on global
warming and 60 percent emission reductions by 2020. “I will not accept the
total destruction of my continent, her people, in Copenhagen,” he declared.
That’s
where a Marxist approach comes in. The struggle, defined by class interests,
continues. And just as the labor theory of value sheds light on the need for
unified struggle by industrial workers, Marx’s distinction between use value
and exchange value does likewise for victims of natural resources pillage.
Use
values in the natural environment, taken together, constitute the public’s
wealth, which, in abundance, benefits all. In contrast, the sum of exchange
values — commodities produced from these resources for exchange on the market —
constitute the basis for private riches.
Capitalists
want use values to be absorbed into the exchange value category, opening them
up to engineered scarcities and accumulation. Or, according to Marx, quoted by
Bellamy Foster: “The earth is the reservoir from whose bowels the use values
are to be torn.”
Climate
change sets the stage for profiteers to look covetously at food and fuel
shortages, high technology energy fixes, and carbon trading. Working people,
inhabitants of small islands, and poor African farmers—among others—fight to
protect wealth held in common.
Samir Amin advocates waging this fight under a socialist banner:
“Socialism is designed in terms of a society founded on use value, not exchange
value,” Amin says, adding,:
“Socialism should be ecological, indeed can only be ecological.”
Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez and Bolivian President Evo
Morales came to Copenhagen with a message from the Bolivarian Alliance for the
Peoples of Our America (ALBA). “We cannot consider climate change without
thinking about changing the system,” the message said. “The capitalist
production and consumption model is taking life on the planet to a point of no
return.”
Chavez
reminded assembled leaders of “socialism, the other specter Karl Marx spoke
about, which walks here too…Socialism, this is the direction, this is the path
to save the planet.”
[For the full text of Chavez’s speech at the UN
climate conference in Copenhagen, go to: http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/23421]
[Also, for Fidel Castro’s article about the
failed conference, go to: http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/23483]