South Africa hosted a two-week United Nations conference on climate change in early December, attended by delegates from more than 190 countries.  Called for the nominal purpose of ending greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that cause global warming, it was one of a long series of failures.   

GHGs threaten all workers

GHGs come from the burning of fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas. By trapping heat in the lower atmosphere, they have already warmed the earth by more than one degree; under capitalist business-as-usual, they threaten to warm it even more. Global warming shifts evaporation and precipitation patterns, leading to more frequent extreme weather events like hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, floods, and severe winter snows.  The melting of the big glaciers and ice caps, particularly in Greenland and Antarctica, could ultimately threaten to drown small island nations and coastal cities that contain more than 10 percent of the world’s population, including 80 percent of the people living in California.  (See the Winter 2010 issue of THE COMMUNIST magazine “Global Warming Driven by the Profit System...Only Communism Can Create a Sustainable World” at www.plp.org.)

Bosses battle each other rather than global warming

As usual, the competition inherent in capitalism has prevented any meaningful agreement among various nations’ ruling classes.  The lines are drawn most sharply between the ruling classes of the industrialized nations and those of the developing nations. The European Union recently demanded that all countries share equally in limiting GHG emissions, even though the industrialized countries have produced the lion’s share of GHGs to date. The U.S. rulers, meanwhile, are using this issue in an attempt to stem the rapid Chinese economic development that is pushing the two rivals toward war for control over fuel sources.  The ongoing U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan concern oil and natural gas.  All imperialists, whether from industrialized or developing nations, will fight to the last worker’s death to retain such control.

The conference ended with yet another worthless pledge to meet again later to come to agreement.  The world continues to warm and the poorest among us continue to suffer the major burden of climate changes.  That industrialized nations promised to throw in a few pennies to help the developing nations cope with the expenses of cutting fossil fuel emissions only serves to cover this reality, and their culpability.

The only established alternative to fossil fuels, which now provide about 85 percent of the world’s energy, is nuclear energy. Other sources are far less developed and reliable: wind, solar, hydro (dams), and geothermal (tapping underground hot magma). The extreme profitability in fossil fuels means that those corporations and their financial backers will continue to fight tooth and nail to prevent any reduction in their use.

Given the competition that is a mainstay of capitalism and imperialism, climate change conferences will inevitably disappoint the world’s working class.  Only when workers everywhere take state power will we be able to halt and perhaps reverse global warming. That will require a communist-led global revolution, which is PLP’s goal. Join us.

The U.S. bosses are determined to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Alberta, Canada, to Texas to increase their profits at the expense of workers’ lives and livelihoods.  Recent months have seen mass demonstrations, including encirclement of the White House, to protest this project.  Pipelines inevitably leak, the more so as they corrode with age, and can contaminate entire water supplies.  While the oil projected to flow through the Keystone XL will be extracted with difficulty from tar sands in northeast Alberta, the project has become relatively profitable because of the rising international price of oil. 

Regardless of when Obama decides to permit this cross-border pipeline (most likely after the November election), the working class in both Canada and the U.S. will be the loser. Unchecked, the continued burning of fossil fuels will bring the world closer to the tipping point where global temperatures could rise beyond reversible levels.  (See THE COMMUNIST, Winter 2010, “Global Warming Driven by the Profit System...Only Communism Can Create a Sustainable World” at www.plp.org).   Only after state power is seized through communist revolution will the world’s workers be able to guarantee a safe environment for themselves and their descendants.

The Keystone issue

Tar sands oil is known as “sour” crude.  It contains far more corrosive elements than the “sweet” crude derived from large underground oil lakes, like those in the Middle East and under the oceans.  Sweet crude is also more easily extracted, but it is being depleted faster than new discoveries can replace it. Sooner or later, it will likely run out. 

For the time being, Obama has put off a decision on Keystone XL because of the public outcry led by liberal environmental forces, an important constituency for his reelection bid this fall. But when leaders of the anti-pipeline demonstrations, particularly from the organization 350.org, claim victory, they also obscure the rest of the story. Two other pipelines, in operation since 2010, already cross into the U.S. from Alberta: the Keystone Phase 1 and the Alberta Clipper (see map; the dashed line is the proposed Keystone XL). Meanwhile, the oil industry’s umbrella lobbyist group, the American Petroleum Institute (API), continues to press its bought-and-paid-for politicians for approval of the Keystone XL.

Because of the delay, Canadian bosses are seeking to build an alternative Northern Gateway pipeline directly westward to the Pacific coast to ship the crude to China.  But Prime Minister Stephen Harper is meeting his own opposition from environmentalists already up in arms about the Trans Mountain pipeline ports near Vancouver (see map). They fear the potential destruction of Canadian forests and coastal areas by oil leaks from both pipelines and tankers. 

Obama, backed by the API, claims that the Keystone XL would create thousands of new jobs for workers in the U.S.  Such hyped and misleading claims are aimed to divide people concerned about the environment from unemployed workers, who are urged to believe that their joblessness is the fault of the environmental activists.  This ignores the fact that those most hurt by damage to the environment, as always, are the working class.

The Keystone XL, like the existing Keystone Phase 1 pipeline, was slated to pass through the middle of Nebraska. This is where the Ogallala Aquifer lies underground, feeding fresh water to agricultural states in the middle of the U.S. As global warming from fossil fuels shifts rain patterns, the aquifer is shrinking at an accelerating rate. This phenomenon threatens to expand drought conditions well beyond Texas and into the nation’s breadbasket.  Pipeline leaks of sour crude will only hasten its destruction.  

No simple reform, like blocking the Keystone XL, will prevent the long-term disasters posed by global warming.  All capitalists, forced by their system to continually maximize profits, ignore the future beyond the next business quarter. They will guarantee that highly profitable fossil fuels remain the world’s primary form of energy.  To save our class and our planet, the world’s workers will have to crush the capitalists’ hold on power and rid the world of the plague of capitalism forever.

WASHINGTON, DC, January 31 — After prodding from the richest man in Congress, Darrell Issa of California, who heads the colonial committee overseeing the District of Columbia, the U.S. Park Police are moving against Occupy DC at McPherson Square. Several people have been arrested, including one who was unjustifiably tasered by the cops and a PL’er who is falsely charged with assault on a police officer and resisting arrest. Occupiers have erected a giant tent over the statue of General McPherson (a Civil War hero) and are preparing for an attack by Park Police. Stay tuned!

When slavery in the U.S. was finally abolished in the mid-1800s as a result of the Civil War, the problems of formerly enslaved Africans did not end. Capitalist-inspired racist ideology helped enable the bosses to exploit black labor to a higher degree than it did white labor. Prison chain gangs were fed by arbitrary arrests and convictions, injustices cloaked by Jim Crow laws. The thirteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution that purported to end slavery contains the following loophole:  “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States….[Emphasis added — ed.]

“Crimes” used to justify imprisonment and enslavement after the formal end to slavery included vagrancy (essentially unemployment), which was so vaguely defined that any black man could be convicted of it.  Much the same happens today with arrests and convictions for drug “crimes.”  One key aspect to this sham of justice, then and now, was that state legislatures and Congress define many offenses as crimes without victims — no victims, that is, other than the person arrested. Among victimless crimes, possession of drugs is the contemporary equivalent to vagrancy.

With the skyrocketing of the U.S. prison population in recent decades, beginning with the political manipulation of “crime in the streets” by Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and escalating with the “War on Drugs” under Ronald Reagan, a huge proportion of black workers — mainly men — have been re-enslaved.  In Chicago, for example, 55 percent of adult black men have felony records.  Overall, black men in the U.S. are incarcerated more than six times the rate for white men. They have a one-in-four chance of being jailed during their lifetimes; and one in fourteen are in jail or prison at any one time (see PLP pamphlet “Prison Labor: Fascism U.S. Style”). 

The U.S. prison population, the largest in the world, is 70 percent black and Latino in a country where black and Latino people represent only 29 percent of the population. Latino workers are also imprisoned far out of proportion to their share of the population. The vast majority are behind bars for non-violent violations of drug laws, which were deliberately designed to turn a medical problem into a criminal act. Contrary to capitalist propaganda, however, the proportions of black and white workers who use or deal in drugs, is approximately the same, between 6 and 7 percent. 

Of late, the label of “drug criminal” is increasingly and falsely applied to Latino immigrants, the vast majority of whom come to the U.S. to find jobs that have been destroyed in their native countries by U.S. corporations. In the drive for maximum profit, corporate capital moves south across Latin America and dispossesses millions of rural workers of their land and livelihoods. This creates an army of unemployed workers who are available for the ever-shifting needs of global corporations.

Today’s equivalents to the slave drivers’ guns and whips are the police, courts, jails and prisons. After Congress upgraded drug charges from misdemeanors to felonies, convictions or forced plea bargains for drug possession leave people ineligible for the rest of their lives for food stamps, public housing, and — in practice — from most jobs. This in turn all but destroys the opportunity to have and love a family. No other country brands drug possessors as felons or imprisons them for victimless “crimes” at anywhere near the rate in the U.S.  

Although chain gangs were abolished in the early 1900s, the entire working class remains bound to this day to the capitalist class. Chattel slavery (enforced by chain, whip, and gun) has simply been replaced by wage, debt and prison slavery, where workers are chained to their jobs by the underlying threat of homelessness and starvation. Immediately after the Civil War, black and white sharecroppers were primarily bound by debt slavery; they incurred financial obligations to their landlords that they could never pay off. In today’s financial crisis, mortgages, rent, and credit card debt play a similar role. In place of the slave driver and bounty hunter, the banks and large property owners force us to do the capitalists’ bidding. 

The racist inequalities of capitalism injure all workers. According to a study by economist Michael Reich, the places in the U.S. where wage differentials between white and black workers are greatest are also the places where the wages for all workers are lowest. The capitalists need racism to justify the super-exploitation of certain groups of workers. Racism is also the capitalists’ main tool to divide the working class — both in the reform struggle for higher wages and better working and living conditions, and in the revolutionary movement to destroy capitalism altogether. In fighting back against racism, workers are laying the indispensable foundation for a communist revolution and a communist world.

References

Alexander, Michelle, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, The New Press, NY, 2010.

Beckett, Katherine, and Sasson, Theodore, The Politics of Injustice: Crime and Punishment in America, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2004.

Blackmon, Douglas, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, Doubleday, NY, 2008.

Massey, Douglas S., and Denton, Nancy A., American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1993.

Perkinson, Robert, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire, Metropolitan Books, NY, 2010.