Chapter 5 – The Ecological Question and the Question of the Land

In the countryside, the working class is relatively more geographically dispersed, but it is concentrated in the poles of agribusiness and industrialized farms. It is here that among the most exploited sectors of our class suffer some of capitalism’s most abusive conditions. In many nations, in particular those further on the periphery of capitalism, the countryside is also still composed of a variety of middle-classes, such as the peasants (petty-bourgeois owners, smallholders), with subdivisions ranging from the small peasant (who utilize their family workforce) to the large peasant (who permanently employ workers, being close to a capitalist).

Small peasants, who are the vast majority of this class and those who have less land, have historically been a potential ally of workers. But it is the process of political struggle that defines whether the peasants are on the side of the worker or the bourgeois, not something decided beforehand.

The Marxist program takes into account the situation of the peasant class, a class crushed and oppressed by capitalism. Agribusiness often pressures for the absorption of their land or subjects small peasants to conditions of dependence, in which they are only able to sell production at under disadvantageous prices and conditions, determined by capitalist buyers.

The objective of Marxists is the democratic collectivization of land, that is, the full control of fertile land, resources and agricultural technology by rural workers, aimed at meeting human needs of both the urban and rural masses under a dictatorship of the proletariat. Therefore, we defend the expropriation of the large landowners and agribusiness, the seizure of the land by those who live and work on it (land to the tiller), ending of production to the satisfaction of the export markets (especially the imperialist markets) and also defend the end of unproductive large property, maintained for obtaining rents. Our program on this issue parallels the program of the urban section of the proletariat, who need housing and often pay abusive rents or live in risky areas. We defend the expropriation of vacant properties in cities as an immediate measure for homeless, and housing precarious, workers. The land in rural areas is both a place to live and a means of production.

For the small peasants already established, we advocate that they keep their property and be integrated into future socialist economic planning on advantageous terms; at the same time, we will fight for their voluntary adhesion, based on political persuasion, to the construction of collective farms, with better technical conditions. We are against the forms of forced bureaucratic collectivization that took place in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, which uprooted the land even from small peasants and subjected them to work routines under which they had no decision. We support the struggle of small peasants, and peasants removed from their land, against big farmers and the violence of the thugs and henchmen of agribusiness and resource extractive capitalists. Within the rural workers’ and peasants’ movements, we defend a revolutionary policy and class independence of workers against the bourgeoisie, totally opposed to collaboration with the capitalist elites.

Closely linked to the land issue is the fight against the effects of the capitalist destruction of the planet. In the past two centuries, capitalism has taken significant steps that have brought humanity closer to a prolonged catastrophe caused by the destruction of natural resources and environmental conditions. The breaking of climate agreements which are already extremely limited and insufficient (such as the Paris Agreement) and the absence of any meaningful plan by governments and major industrialists to combat ecological devastation shows definitively that that the capitalist system is incapable of resolving the most acute question of our era regarding the survival of human society. The impact of environmental changes caused by capitalism is already inevitable, but that does not mean that it cannot be mitigated and to some degree reversed if an urgent change is made in the current course of climate change.

Only a system of planned production and distribution controlled and led by the producers themselves can resolve this issue, as opposed to a system whose basis is competition between large capitalists in the race for a higher profit margin, and which amounts to abusing and destroying both workers’ lives and ecosystems, ignoring (usually already loose) environmental protection standards. As in all other matters, capitalists seek to retain all profits in private hands, but to socialize as much as possible the costs and tragedies caused by that profit, passing them on to the working and toiling classes. This includes the loss of lives, housing and dignity for millions of human victims of socio-environmental destruction. It is the workers and the oppressed (among whom are the indigenous peoples of many nations) who suffer the effects of this the most. For this reason, they are also the ones actively interested in leading the fight against capitalist environmental destruction, and in defense of human, animal and plant life and the preservation of natural resources.

Marxists must intervene in ecological movements, as well as those of the peoples affected by the advance of capitalist means of production and the destruction caused by them. We do so with a program that, in addition to seeking reforms and concessions, also points to the necessity of socialist transition. The workers’ movement should place demands related to local and global socio-environmental destruction as a high priority in their struggles. It is an issue in which the struggle for socialism is absolutely urgent.

We fight illusions of a “green” bourgeoisie and the expectation that environmental destruction can be reversed through petty disputes within the limits of the bourgeois state, through regulations, etc. A quick and immediate reorganization of production on a global scale, including energy production now dominated by fossil fuels, is completely out of the question as long as capitalism reigns. This slow path, within the limits of what is approved by corporate boardrooms and parliaments, is killing us. The fact that some capitalists, seeing business potential in clean energy, have invested small amounts of capital in it, does not mean that they can offer a genuine solution to the climate crisis. They invest with an interest in profit, with no genuine commitment to changing the energy sources which fuel capitalism. In fact, many of the companies behind “dirty” energy sources – oil, coal, etc. – are themselves investing in clean energy sources. We argue that the profits of fossil fuel and polluting companies should be expropriated to support the populations suffering from environmental disasters and to invest in clean and renewable energy under expropriated companies controlled by workers.

We defend the preservation of the Amazon and other forest and natural territories against the predation of resource extractive companies and agribusiness, but also against the wishes of imperialist governments, which falsely pose themselves as “environmental protectors”. We fight for the demarcation and defense of the territories of indigenous peoples and for the workers’ movement to take an active part in this struggle. We reject tendencies (usually petty-bourgeois) that nourish Neo-Malthusian, anti-humanist and Primitivistic ideas, which point to humanity itself, science or population development as causes of environmental destruction.

It is the capitalist mode of production, protected by the bourgeois states, through their relentless search for raw materials for the production of surplus value, and through their desire to reduce production costs, which leads them to disregard human life and ecological stability, that is responsible for the destruction. Capitalism can and must be eliminated from humanity’s relationship with nature. Humans are animals, although very different from the others due to the depth with which labour allows their modification of the environment. Aware of this fact, a new, communist mode of production can seek, through social planning, to harmonize human relations with the natural world of which they are an integral part. Technology can and must be adapted in the interests of humanity and its natural metabolism with the Earth in the long term, without an “expiration date”; the human population can live on this planet without compromising it.

This does not mean that the experiences of socialist transition (stagnated by isolation and bureaucratic deformations) have fulfilled this role well. Throughout the 1920s, the Soviet Union led the world in environmental protection and ecological scientific concern, but that debate was buried in subsequent years by the bureaucratic reaction within the first proletarian state. Events such as the Chernobyl disaster and the destruction of the Aral Sea demonstrate that only the workers’ democratic control over the means of production and distribution, and their participation and decision in the entire production cycle, can create a society working for the prosperity of humans and other living beings as a priority.