This month, the People’s Republic of China released the details for its new Five Year Plan, which aims to reduce Chinese industry’s contribution to climate change and to minimize climate change’s impact on communities. The blueprint, while a step in the right direction, is hardly enough by itself to stop the global problem of climate change.
The problem is severe: according to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, climate change is becoming less and less reversible. Already, if all climate change-producing pollution (greenhouse gas emissions) stopped tomorrow, global temperatures would continue to rise, although more slowly, for several decades or even centuries. In other words, even in such ideal circumstances, climate change has grown to a point where it is no longer a question of reducing our contribution to climate change; the time has come where aggressive measures to reverse climate change are necessary.
Unless those measures are taken, the fate of life as we know it hangs in the balance: the world is already nearly 1°C warmer than it was 300 years ago, before the industrial revolution vastly increased greenhouse gas emissions. The world is warming about 0.3° C per decade, which, combined with the pollution already raising global temperatures, locks global warming to 2°C or more before 2100.
Such an increase in temperature would be disastrous: 2°C is widely acknowledged as the tipping point for climate change, a point where reversing climate change is nearly impossible. At 2°C, changes in rainfall patterns would lead to desertification in large parts of Europe, Australia, North America, and Africa, particularly in areas where land is presently being used for farming. Such a temperature increase would also rapidly accelerate glacial melting, which would further increase the rate of warming, since water absorbs more heat than ice. This is one of several climate feedback loops that would spin out of control given 2°C warming, which also include ocean acidification and the release of methane (a greenhouse gas) from tundra loss.
All told, the current course of climate change practically guarantees the loss of 15-40 percent of plant and animal species. This is a tremendous danger: the loss of any species, let alone 15-40 percent of them, can disrupt food chains, leading to a cascading effect and even threatening the collapse of whole ecosystems. Because climate change occurs through feedback loops, like the release of carbon dioxide from the rise in ocean temperatures, it has become possible that global temperatures could increase by up to 6°C. In that event, sea levels would rise by over 25 meters, 90 percent of plant and animal species would become extinct, and 80 percent of the world’s population could die off.
Revolutionary socialism: there is no alternative
What is behind climate change?
When we read about climate change, what often comes to mind are images of dirty factories spewing out clouds of black smoke. While blaming industry itself would be simplistic, it strikes at the essence of the problem: economics.
In order to reverse climate change, in other words, there needs to be a dramatic change in the global economy. Capitalism must go.
Capitalism places profit first. Capitalists only take into account climate change or other needs, human or otherwise, if they can see a way to link them to a higher rate of profit. Consequently, capitalism is an inherently conservative system, since change requires risky investment in a competitive economy where a slightly greener but less profitable business risks going out of business. This is especially true given the power of oil lobbies and the relatively high cost of environmentally safer sources of energy.
The only radical economic transformations in modern history—transformations to make economies meet real needs—have been socialist transformations. From the breakneck industrialization of the Soviet Union that allowed it to defeat Nazism in World War Two to the drastic rise in Chinese standards of living from 1949 to1976, socialist economies have shown themselves to be the only way forward out of the callous brutality of capitalism. Socialism offers the possibility of a planned economy, an impossible task under capitalism, a system driven by the logic of pursuit of profits.
Socialist Cuba is the only country recognized by the World Wildlife Fund and the United Nations as sustainable. Although the People’s Republic of China’s socialist foundations are under attack, China is the world’s largest investor into renewable energy, and pollutes significantly less per capita than the United States, Canada, or the European Union. While China remains the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the world, the historical responsibility to reverse climate change falls not on China, but on Europea and North America. China and Cuba are only able to take such strong initiatives against climate change because of the power of people over profit.
It is this revolutionary leadership, however diminished in China, which marks the difference between the measures taken in Cuba and China and, for example, the United Nations’ Warsaw Conference of Parties. The Warsaw COP urged countries to sign onto the Kyoto Protocol and the Durban Platform, which seek mostly to limit greenhouse gas emissions,
While reducing emissions is a step in the right direction, it is a small step on a long journey—the difference between change as advocated by the Durban Platform and revolutionary socialist change is that revolutionary socialist change recognizes the urgent need for far-reaching change, as soon as possible.
When Margaret Thatcher said, “There is no alternative,” she meant there is no escaping capitalism or capitalist “democracy.” History is proving the opposite: without immediately abandoning the capitalist organization of production—which places profit first, before people and the environment—the ugly predictions of extinctions and massive suffering may become reality. Socialism is the only system capable of meeting the challenge, and is consequently the only system that, when it becomes the dominant world system, can avoid the imminent climate catastrophe.
In other words, there is no alternative to socialism.
Smash capitalism as soon as possible
The need to reverse climate change is urgent. Unless immediate and drastic action is taken, suffering of catastrophic proportions is inevitable. It has become a question of life and death. The only way to avoid this crisis is to smash capitalism as soon as possible, and the only way to do that is to have a revolution.
Revolutionary socialists can only call themselves such if they understand the pressing need for socialism in the context of the looming ecological disaster. This understanding must be followed by an urgency in our work to build an organization capable of producing revolutionary struggle—in our work to build a revolutionary party.
The masses of people understand in some way or another that capitalist industry is to blame for climate change, but it is not up to revolutionary socialists to begin a revolution—revolution comes when there is a revolutionary crisis. Revolutionary socialists, on the other hand, have a critical role to play in turning spontaneous and non-revolutionary struggle into revolutionary struggle. This task can only be accomplished by a revolutionary party.
History is clear that socialism is the only way to produce groundbreaking economic change in the current economic era. It also shows that no socialist revolution has taken place without the leadership of a revolutionary party: only with the combination of socialist leadership and popular support for that leadership did the Cuban Revolution take on a socialist character in the 1960s; the same holds true of the October Revolution changing the character of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Never in history has a so-called “leaderless” revolution succeeded in smashing the old oppressors, let alone in creating the basis for a socialist economy.
A revolutionary party representing the wants and needs of the many versus the few capitalists behind climate change is a historical necessity in order to win socialism, which is the only way out of the climate crisis. Life as we know it depends on revolutionary socialism, and a revolution requires a revolutionary party.
The situation is bleak, one of try or die. Building a revolutionary party is the first step to trying.
