Environment Day’ and the hollow concerns of NGO-brand politics
Kavita Krishnapallavi
Every year, there are numerous programmes all over the world on 5th June lamenting the dire straits of our environment. Quite a number of such big events are sponsored by the very corporations that are busy destroying the planet every day. Similar events are organized with a lot of fanfare on 22nd April in the name of ‘Earth Day.’ It was started in 1970 in the US and the date chosen does not seem a mere coincidence as it is also Lenin’s birthday. It is far better for capitalism to make people engage in a lot of empty talk and blame the people themselves for the destruction of environment, rather than let them remember Lenin and talk about revolution! It is the people who are to be chastened and cautioned to change their habits, and start worrying for the environment otherwise the earth is doomed. Don’t think about social change, think about the impending doom! Hollywood has now developed this doomsday theme into a trillion-dollar business.
Most of the programmes on earth day and environment day are organized by various bourgeois governments, international agencies parroting the imperialist powers and NGOs funded by domestic and foreign capitalists. People are advised to plant trees, avoid wasteful consumer culture, clean rivers, save water bodies and forests, not to use plastics, etc. It seems as if the masses and their bad habits, or mechanisation, or modernity are to be blamed for the destruction of environment. Thus, the real criminals are concealed and the onus of protecting the environment is thrust upon the people.
It is not the common people and their ‘bad habits’ which are destroying the environment and ecology of this planet. The real culprits are the blind greed for profits and the cut-throat competition among the capitalists. It is the capitalists who pollute the rivers, oceans, the sky and the air with the unchecked pollutants from their factories and dump all the waste materials into the environment to save their money despite the availability of highly effective waste-treatment technologies. It is the capitalists who are carpet bombing the agricultural lands with untested genetic seeds, pesticides and chemicals for their own profit. It is the capitalists who are responsible for the melting of polar ice caps, the receding glaciers, the gaping hole in the Ozone layer and global warming by the increasing use of fossil fuels and CFC gasses despite the availability of clean and renewable energy sources and alternative technology. It is the capitalists who are recklessly destroying the forests in their hunger for the forest resources and minerals. It is the capitalists who wage destructive wars for the division of markets and profits and build the largest and most polluting industry of the world – the armaments industry.
Anarchy is an inevitable inherent element of the capitalist mode of production. The capitalists engaged in the cut-throat competition for profits are capable to think only about their own profits, they cannot think about the future of humanity or even their own future. The task of thinking about the long-term future of capitalist system comes to the managing committee of capitalists, the government. But even the government is unable to think far-enough to take effective steps to protect the earth and the environment. The capitalist system has a built-in duality which ensures that the sales and advertisement of tobacco and alcohol products goes on along with the propaganda against smoking and drinking. Every solution to a problem in capitalism becomes a problem in itself. ‘Organic foods’ are publicised as a safe alternative to the pesticides and chemical laden foods and within no time a huge organic foods industry comes up, a new area to seek profits arises with all the adjunct evils. There is a clamour for ‘clean energy’ and giant monopoly corporations emerge in the solar energy, wind energy sectors. Old problems continue to exist and grow and new profit-making sectors and new problems appear in the name of finding a solution to the old problems. Companies producing equipment for solar energy and wind energy also destroy nature to harvest minerals and pollute air and water resources.
Some ‘simple living and high thinking’-type people seek the solution in slogans like “back to nature” and cutting down the consumption levels. Their advice is to get rid of modernity, technology and consumer-culture. Firstly, modernity and technology in themselves are not the culprits. The powers of science and technology, if used with a focus on social well-being, instead of focusing on profits, will continue to work for the advancement of human life. Secondly, if the capitalist social order continues, all efforts, all spiritual-type movements to convince each citizen to break away from consumer culture will remain an exercise in futility. Our consciousness and culture are products of the social milieu and the effects of consumer culture cannot be eliminated without changing the social order based on greed and profits at any cost. Thirdly, “bad habits” of people account for only 1-2 percent of the total destruction wrought upon the environment (and even these “bad habits” are instilled by the capitalists’ to sell their goods and also the ignorance into which the system pushes millions of working masses). Almost 98-99 percent of the devastation of the environment is caused by the capitalist production, uncontrolled extraction of minerals, excessive use of fossil fuels, disastrous wars resulting from the race for profits and giant global industries for the production of war-materials.
When capitalism decides to do something to stop the destruction of environment and to protect people from its effects, it turns the same into a profit-making endeavour too. The markets are flooded with appliances to purify air and water, huge machines are produced to clean the rivers, contractors and government officials start milking money in the name of planting new forests. Then, the gullibility of some naïve or unwise people is used by the capitalist system. These ‘saintly’ people mobilise the masses to clean the rivers, ponds etc. As much as they clean, it is soon offset by the huge amount of waste generated by capitalist production. Thus, they only tend to use the free-labour of the masses to mop-up the filth produced by capitalism and there is no benefit accrued to the people or the nature. These well-intentioned simpletons don’t understand that if the whole system is responsible for the pollution, then if they are able to reduce some pollution by awakening and mobilising a section of the masses within this system, it will do no good; instead, their efforts will serve as a speed-breaker, as a safety-valve and a smoke-screen for the ruling classes and the system. If they used this strength to expose the production system based on profits as the real cause of the devastation of environment, and to convince people that capitalism must be abolished to save the earth, then their endeavours would have been fruitful to some extent.
NGOs funded by the various agencies and trusts of domestic and foreign capitalists, celebrate events like Earth Day and Environment Day with great fanfare to divert attention from the misdeeds of capitalism and imperialism. They talk a lot about deforestation, unchecked exploitation of nature, use of chemicals in agriculture, use of fossil fuels, wasteful consumer culture etc., but they never tell us that the capitalist greed for profits and the capitalist system is responsible for it. These organisations of elite beggars running on the capitalists’ largesse cannot even think of doing such a thing. These peddlers of “environmental-reformism” are, in fact, selling bourgeois fallacies as their goods. They work as a line of defense, a smoke-screen and speed-breaker for the capitalist system. This NGO brand progressivism makes the common people clean the filth produced by capitalism, and that too with unpaid labour.
The environmental question is linked to the socio-economic system. The blind lust and race for capitalist profits is squeezing the nature as well as the human kind. Capitalism has to be abolished if the earth is to be saved. If the masses are made aware of the environment without being aware of the system, it will result in a situation in which the masses, concerned about the environment, will keep on cleaning the filth filled all-around by capitalism, so that capitalism can make it dirty again. That is to say, people motivated by “environmental-reformism” do nothing except providing some breeding space and breathing space to capitalism. This is the real reason why the NGO network shows so much concern on Earth Day, Environment Day and other such days.
The question of environment has assumed an unprecedented importance for the revolutions of the Twenty-first century. However, to see environmental destruction as an independent factor and not seeing its link with capitalist profit-mongering, is to fall into the pit of bourgeois environmentalism. Therefore, while addressing the question of environment, the revolutionaries must put capitalism in the dock.
“As individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into account. As long as the individual manufacturer or merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with the usual coveted profit, he is satisfied and does not concern himself with what afterwards becomes of the commodity and its purchasers.
“…The same thing applies to the natural effects of the same actions. What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees–what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock!
“…In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite the opposite in character.”
– Engels, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
