It is now clear that, if the slump in political activity among youth of the 1990s has recently subsided somewhat, the main beneficiaries of this have been liberal campaigning groups. People and Planet is the pre-eminent example, and its annual Shared Planet festival takes place at Sheffield University on November 16-18. The bulk of the event seems to be centred around debate, which is positive, and on issues in which Marxists should be able and encouraged to intervene – the climate crisis, ‘ethical consumerism’, the question of national borders and so on.

Who are these people?

The closest thing to a programmatic statement on its website claims P&P to be “the largest student network in Britain campaigning to alleviate world poverty, defend human rights, protect the environment” (http://peopleandplanet.org/aboutus).

That’s about it. There is a further web page which explains why poverty, human rights violations, environmental degradation and war are, in point of fact, very bad things worthy of steadfast opposition. Agreed so far. What is not offered, explicitly, is any sort of strategy upon which such opposition should be based. This, first and foremost, is why P&P needs Marxism.

Take its first bullet point: global poverty. How does a student network go about fighting this? Thus far, P&P has been focused on NGO campaigns, getting fair-trade products into schools, etc … in other words, the very modest strategic perspectives offered by the left-liberal mainstream within the group.

Such campaigns have had a degree of prominence for a number of decades now (P&P itself, in one form or another, dates back to 1969) – ‘fair trade’ is the latest fad in a long-running sequence, and one particularly amenable to the venal forces of neoliberalism that the P&P activists no doubt despise. And, despite the best will in the world on the part of these campaigns’ evangelists, global poverty is still with us. Why? The liberal answer is always that this president, that government, such and such a corporation has frustrated the demands being raised. Then, the next campaign is immediately commenced; and this time it will work. The cycle begins again, and before we know it 38 years have passed with 1.2 billion still “lack[ing] safe water, enough food and basic healthcare, even though it would only cost just 0.1% of world income to provide these necessities” (http://peopleandplanet.org/aboutus/why.php).

Marxists, on the other hand, bite the bullet. We claim that there are very real forces inherent in the capitalist system, necessarily frustrating such philanthropic desires. Under capitalism, ‘trade justice’ is as oxymoronic as ‘Nazi Judeophile’, because capital’s logic of self-valorisation is constantly driving to exploit workers more, regardless of the agreeable wishes of concerned liberals. For us, the answer must lie in organising conflict – with the capitalists and the state which serves their interests. We must not beg them to do something, but make demands which we can back up with actions that genuinely threaten their power in some way. Ultimately, we must supplant them altogether, and place ourselves – the working class – as the rulers.

The climate crisis

The advantages of a Marxist approach are highlighted most sharply when we look at the developing climate change crisis. Here, we are facing not much less than the total destruction of human society – perhaps the human organism may be able to survive, but the social structures upon which the teeming billions currently rely for what food they can get will disappear if the threatened crisis becomes a reality. It would seem that all of humanity has an interest in averting such an eventuality.

<text>But this has not made a blind bit of difference to the capitalists. They have bravely soldiered on with their task of sending us all to the grave. The ‘solutions’ that have been offered – emissions trading, individualised action of the ‘if we all turn our TVs off standby’ type – do not stand up to examination. Capitalism demands the exponential expansion of production, so carbon credits will simply not bite unless there are a theoretically infinite amount available – that is, unless they are rendered entirely superfluous to the environmental question.

As for the ‘sum total of individual actions’ approach, which is typically favoured to a greater or lesser extent by honest liberals as much as David Cameron, this is not without its difficulties either. Take the typical demand – ‘You should take your car out less, and take a train instead’. This is a suggestion which has become more and more common, and indeed emissions from road vehicles are a significant part of the total. However, as it has become more common, the train and bus services we are supposed to use instead have become worse and worse. Ticket prices have gone up, provision has become less frequent and less widespread.

What does this demonstrate? That to a very large extent, climate change is a social problem. We cannot reasonably expect the mass of people to catch a train from London to Sheffield instead of driving if the train is twice the cost of a tank of petrol, and will grind to a halt at the first sign of leaves on the line. It is a fact that the social system defended (or not, at least, fundamentally opposed) by the advocates of such action on climate change is exactly what renders most of the more significant particular recommendations (no cars, no short-haul flights …) undesirable or infeasible.

Does this mean that we should stop campaigning on climate change issues and stick to directly agitating for socialism? Certainly not. The relationship between the universal aim of total social revolution and the particular aim of this or that campaign is a two-way street. If we are able to force the capitalists into making serious concessions in the name of climate change (or human rights, or alleviation of poverty), this will make our lives easier and theirs more difficult. Marxists must bring their Marxism to bear on the environmentalist movement, and the latter must come to accept that its problems are broader than it may think (bringing it closer, in turn, to Marxism).

Socialism is not guaranteed to solve all our problems, but will at least enable us to ‘seal the deal’ – on poverty, the environment, and human rights – representing the democratic self-liberation of the working class majority in the interests of humanity as a whole.

James Turley