CPC(M-L)'s Position on Environmental QuestionsThe Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) often receives requests to know its thinking on how problems of the natural environment can be sorted out. Questions on the environment have to be answered with what is called objectivity of consideration. The way humans live and acquire their living have an effect on the environment. The question is how the people can humanize their relation with the environment and nature generally. What is blocking them from doing so?
The aim of private ownership is to make maximum profit from the parts of the economy the owners control and force the state to do their bidding and pay the rich. This leads to dysfunction in the economy and recurring crises as the competing parts conflict with each other and the actual producers who have no say. The narrow aim of the oligarchs for their private gain clashes with the need of the modern economy and its various sectors and enterprises to function in harmony for the common good. The competition among the cartels and monopolies at home and abroad often end in war involving state-controlled and private armies and the ensuing despoiling of nature. The global struggle of the private cartels and monopolies for dominance and their control of the states in which they have influence have led to public and private expenditures on militaries far exceeding all other spending. The ensuing military clashes over control of markets, raw material, cheap labour and to bring entire regions under control have led in recent years to the human, productive and environmental destruction of entire countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen and continuing devastation throughout Asia, Africa, South and Central America and the Caribbean and constant escalation of expenditures on militaries. The objective conditions pose the issue of how to deal with environmental problems and the despoiling of nature. The people lack control over their economies, official politics, states and militaries. The aim and outlook of the ruling global oligarchy are fixated on defending and enlarging their private wealth and power. The oligarchs control the work of the people to acquire a living and the various states, economies and militaries where they are dominant.
The relations of production of private ownership and control of competing parts of the economy are out of whack with the objective conditions of the socialized economy, which should operate with all its parts recognizing the importance and necessity of one another for the mutual benefit of all and the development of the whole. The contradiction between how the economy is owned and controlled with its socialized essence must be recognized when dealing with environmental and all other problems facing the people and nature. Of course, the issues and problems can be raised on their own such as making Canada a zone for peace, dealing with industrial and other pollution, climate change, fracking for oil and gas, overfishing such as what happened with Atlantic cod and other marine problems, forest management etc. Suggestions, campaigns and remedies can be fought out to a temporary resolution such as the moratorium on cod fishing. However, to turn any success into lasting victory, the problem of the relations of production and the oligarchs' domination of all aspects of life must be raised and confronted in a serious way and efforts put into overcoming this domination and building the New. Note1. The economic value of social product is measured by the average or standard work-time the working class requires to produce and deliver a good or service. The economic value includes both the old value from means of production consumed and transferred into the social product during production at any particular stage plus the new value from the standard work-time workers require during a current stage to produce and deliver new means of production or services and articles of consumption.
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Global cartels
and monopolies privately own and control the contemporary economy and
dominate official politics. This private ownership of the economy
exists in contradiction with the modern economy's socialized nature,
its interlocking reality and the billions of actual producers who
create the social product necessary for the existence of the people and
society but have no say over the economy's direction.[
Without taking
into consideration the domination of the global oligarchy over the
people, economies, politics, militaries and nature, and the oligarchs'
aim for private profit, most efforts to deal with environmental
problems become manipulated and fractured by those same powerful forces
that are causing the problems and turned into programs to pay the rich.