Rivers of life and rivers of death

RIVERS OF LIFE AND RIVERS OF DEATH

by Len Parker

Water is life. The right to water versus water rights has a long and ancient history. Its use and abuse is at the heart of civilization.

From the time of Moses fracturing (fracking?) the rock to bring forth water for the patched tribe of Israel; to the bad irrigation methods of the ancients covering the land with salt so crops no longer grew; to the range wars in old cowboy movies where the poor farmers and townspeople fought the greedy rancher barons over right of access; water has always been in dispute.

New Zealand's Prime Minister John Key opened a Pandora's box with the proposed partial sale of state owned assets; including the publicly funded and constructed hydro-dams and the rights to water in the rivers behind them.

It raised once again the ire of Maori as to the actual ownership of water. Their concern is to what it will mean if the water behind the dams and in the rivers becomes integral to a part public-privately owned asset under new company law.

Under the Treaty of Waitangi, Maori are the guardians (kaitiaki) of New Zealand/Aotearoa rivers, lakes. streams and springs. Maori have, over many years, pointed out the ecological degradation of waterways and fisheries caused by pollution, run-off of nitrates and human waste.

The Crown authorities, on the other hand, have been reluctant to acknowledge or release information on the extent of this damage, take responsibility for it, or charge the polluters. Rather, in the interest of trade, tourism and profit, New Zealand has been sold to the world as clean and green.

Behind the curtain in this Wizard of Oz fantasy journey on their 'Yellow Brick Road' is a hidden reality the right to pollute waterways and control their flow, in the interests of energy, growth and maximizing profit.

Increasing public ecological awareness, however, is challenging this licence.

The Crown, in the need for energy to drive industrialized society, constructed large dams at public expense to ensure electricity supply. Now, with the proposed partial sale of these revenue generating assets, the Government has raised the question of ownership of the very water itself.

Not only has the question become: Who owns the water? But who is ecologically responsible for its quality?

If there is one natural law that overrides any that human ingenuity has constructed, it is surely the right to self-preservation. This includes access to clean, uncontaminated water; not as a commodity but as a right, something owned in common.

Maori elders have eloquently defended their customary rights and claims under the Treaty of Waitangi, and have challenged the Government' s plan to sell power generating entities to private investors. Maori concerns for future access to this traditional taonga acknowledge that it will benefit us all.

Contrary to the deliberate misinformation and propaganda spread in regard to Maori claims to “ownership” of water, Maori Council co-chairman and retired High Court judge Sir Eddie Durie said that it was untrue that his group was trying to assert that Maori owned the water in rivers and lakes:

But they [Maori] are saying there are particular streams, rivers, aquifers and springs that they have used, and as a result of that use have acquired a customary law interest [right] in those things.

Some argue that because we - as the public and rate-payers - are required to pay for water, including the waste water, it means it can be owned. This reminds me of a religious minister's answer when asked, if religion was free, why was he charging? - “It is free, he said; but you have to pay for laying it on.”

Te Arawa's Tony Wihapi said:

Te Arawa accepted that no one owned the water – until the Crown said it was going to give 49 percent of it away. That meant Maori had to act, while acknowledging. [this] ...Arawa accepted the right of the Crown to use that water for the good of the nation.

With this right of use must come the responsibility to keep these facilities in pristine condition. Customary rights can be respected and honoured while its fishing, traditional use, navigation and spiritual values and mana are preserved. Private profit driven interests will not guarantee this.

What is at stake with any privatization is the enclosure of the commons and disrespect for historic Maori generosity and rights under the Treaty. Few will accept that private shareholder ownership and exploitation for profit will be in the interest of or for the public good.

The idea of owning a resource such as water, on which all life depends – the birds, the trees, the animals, the fish of the sea including ourselves - would seem the height of arrogance. That water can be commodified or privately owned, is truly a notion that only those obsessed with private property could think up.

In the United States, the home of “free enterprise”, Texas oil billionaire T. Bone Pickens acquired 200,000 acres (about 80,000 hectares) of groundwater rights in Roberts County, “from which he expects to make more than US$1 billion on a US$75 million investment.” He is also seeking the right to pump Ogallala aquifer water and sell it to El Paso, Lubbock, San Antonio and Dallas.

In her book Blue Covenant, Maude Barlow also describes how Dorothy Timian-Palmer, former water manager for Carson City and now president of Vidlers, also lays claim to vast water reserves. Timian-Palmer's company has acquired more than 135,000 acre-feet of water rights in Nevada and Arizona. In 2007 it was estimated to be worth US$500 million. “The company is holding on to most of the water and planning to buy up more because the price of water is steadily going up in the American Midwest.”

“No one owns the water!” says John Key. Yeah right!

Water naturally flows if unimpeded, is heated by the sun, evaporates as clouds and is distributed around the world where it is deposited as rain. It is then recycled through respiration of plants or further evaporation from lakes, rivers and the great oceans, and in time may reach the aquifers, in the hydrological cycle.

Greek philosopher Heraclitus may have rightly said “We cannot step in the same river twice”, but someone, somewhere, on this planet will drink of this water or be showered by its rain. Or, increasingly nowadays, they may swept away by torrential deluge or hurricane, buried under a landslide or frozen to death in extreme weather conditions.

Over eons of climate change, the advance and retreat of glaciers have carved out the paths of rivers, and ground up and deposited the rocks, pebbles and fertile soil on the river beds.

By building large dams on these rivers, however, human ingenuity has created great lakes that have changed the environment both behind the dams and below them, as decaying vegetation within the lakes has produced methane and the release of CO₂. They also restrict navigation, and there is even evidence that large dams can cause earthquakes.

As the stilled water behind the dam heats up there is loss from evaporation. When flood-gates are opened this potential energy (as kinetic energy) flows out and erodes the river bed below the dam. Cold water salmon can no longer successfully lay their eggs or breed above or below the dam.

Globally, this practice has led us to the brink of disaster. While we have been able to construct large dams and generate much needed energy, we have also created a serious dilemma. This is compounded by the delay in building wave, wind and solar alternative renewable forms.

Fortunately in Aoteroa, as a country in the South Pacific we border no other country. Elsewhere in the world, wars can and will be fought between states over access to water. Where rivers flow between nations and there is scarcity or where dams impede their flow disputes arise. There is conflict between Sudan, Ethiopia and Egypt over the Nile; between Syria and Israel over the river Jordan and Palestinian aquifers; between China, Burma, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia over the Lancang Jiang where it becomes the mighty Mekong; between Pakistan and India over the Indus.

China ...is building a cascade of eight huge dams on the main stem of the Mekong … The first two are already operating and generating concern downstream all the way to the sea. As the turbines are switched on and off to meet demand for power...water levels in the river fluctuate by up to a meter a day for hundreds of kilometers downstream... Even big boats find it difficult because of the surges from the dams. Local fishers are losing their livelihoods as a result. (Pearce, When Rivers Run Dry)

Some rivers like the Yellow River in China and the Colorado in the U.S., the Rio Grande that borders Mexico and even the Indus on many occasions never reach the sea. Egypt. which has for thousands of years relied on the floods from the Nile to enrich the fertile plains, has to import wheat as the silt backs up behind the Aswan Dam.

How does this effect us? We are part of a global village, and what effects one effects all – eventually. It is not generally appreciated that the vast quantities of water used in agriculture and farming are exported as virtual water in our products.

Fred Pearce records that:

...It takes 1,000 litres [of water] to grow a kilo of wheat, 500 litres for a kilo of potatoes and 11,000 litres to grow the feed for enough cow to make a quarter-pound hamburger' and between 2,000 and 4,000 litres for that cow to fill its udders with a litre of milk. (When Rivers Run Dry)

The battle over the rights to the foreshore and seabed in New Zealand/Aoteraroa was waged against the deception of both Labour and National. These parties claimed that no one owned these natural resources (a self-evident truth), while effectively dishonoring the treaty signed with Maori in 1840 as to their customary rights.

Yet the Crown reserves the 'legal' right to issue permits for exploration and exploitation of oil deep beneath the ocean floor to private corporate interests. They ignore the possibility of accidents, as in the Gulf of Mexico, and consequent pollution of the ocean and damage to the fisheries. And who pays?

Does Crown ownership mean the right to allocate public assets to whoemver they choose? Under globalization and the “free-market”, to subservient governments such as Key's National Party, it means privatization of state owned assets for profit – water included.

Therefore the question is, as Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke point out in their book 'Blue Gold':

If water is essential to life itself, then is it simply a basic human need or is it a fundamental human right?

That was the debate on the floor of the Second World Water Forum in The Hague in the Netherlands, in March 2000.

What role if any did New Zealand play at that Forum?

The title of the conference sounded like an official United Nations meeting about conserving world water resources, but it wasn't ...It was convened by big business lobby organizations like Global Water Partnership, the World Bank and the leading for-profit corporations on the planet ...the discussions focused on how companies could benefit from selling water to markets around the world.

While United Nations officials were in attendance, along with a Ministerial Conference attached to the event... they didn't organize it.

The main players and instigators were some of the largest corporate water giants like Vivendi (now Viola); and Suez; Lyonaise des Eaux; and Severn Trent Plc, as well as food giants like Nestle and Unilever.

What happened at the World Water Conference is the story of the separation of water from the land and from 'the commons' which it is.. The debate over whether water should be designated a 'need' or a 'right' was not simply a semantic one, but went to the heart of the matter.

Under the banner of the “Blue Planet Project” representatives of environmental, labour, and public interest groups from both industrialized and non-industrialized nations insisted that water be recognized as a universal right.... The World Water Forum [Big Business] wanted water to be officially designated as a “need” so that the private sector, through the market, would have the right and responsibility to provide this vital resource on a for-profit-basis.

A statement, signed by government representatives (the Ministerial Declaration) deferred to the corporate interests declaring water a basic need. It said nothing about water being a universal right.

Cash-starved governments have been rapidly turning to privatizing water or entering into Public-Private Partnerships. But experience shows the price of water supplied under private corporations or Public-Private Partnership models is consistently higher than under municipal governments.

Having given substantial tax cuts to corporate interests, governments no longer have sufficient revenues to balance their budgets. Although they still receive large tax returns on state-owned public assets such as power generation, their sale is demanded by international creditors, the World Bank and institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the secretive TPPA to repay debt. This is why Prime Minister Key is determined to privatize the final part of power generation here.

Under deregulated privatized power distribution in Aotearoa, we have experienced constantly rising prices. The reason is simple: Private shareholders expect maximum returns on investment and CEOs are obliged under law to deliver, so they cut back on maintenance, staffing and wages and out-source maintenance contracts and raise prices.

Efficiency it isn't! To add to profits, capitalism encourages waste. The more electricity the directors and management can sell, the greater the profit they hope to achieve. This much-hyped competition doesn't last as corporate raiders take-over their competitors through mergers and acquisitions. If the owners are off-shore the profits will follow. Even local shareholders can find ways to stash their accumulated dividends in tax-havens, reducing internal revenue even further.

In 1998 the first modern “water war' came to international attention when:

the indigenous people of Chochabamba, Bolivia, led by Oscar Olivera, rose up against the privatization of their water services. [U]nder World bank supervision, the Bolivian government passed a law privatizing Chochabamba's water system and gave the contract to U.S. giant Bechtel, which immediately tripled the price of water, cutting off those who could not pay...The company even charged them for rainwater they collected in cisterns.

As a result...the 'Coalition in Defence of Water and Life'.. was formed and organised a successful referendum demanding the government cancel its contract with Bechtel. When the government refused to listen, many thousands took to the streets in non-violent protest and were met with army violence that wounded dozens and killed a seventeen-year-old boy. On April 10 2000 the Bolivian government backed down and told Bechtel to leave. (Barlow)

More recently, after being bailed out by the taxpayers during the crisis on Wall Street, insurance giant AIG went down to the poor mining towns of Middlesboro and Clinton in Kentucky (average income US$13,189 with 30% unemployed). There, they bought up the water rights and upped the water charges by 50%. After a dispute with the local people, the charge was reduced to 30%, still beyond reach of many.

To make it harder for Clinton residents to file complaints (about billing). AIG closed the utility's local office as soon as it took over the company. Pleas made by phone were rejected.

Similarly:

In 2000, furious farmers in [India's] Andhra Pradesh chased the then World Bank head James Wolfensohn away from a privatization public event sponsored by politicians friendly to the World Bank agenda. The ministry ...admitted that consumers would bear the burden of this change with tenfold increases in water rates. (Barlow).

Even at this midnight hour, resistance to the sale of New Zealand's remaining State owned assets must be supported. Yes, “There Must be Another Way” but it isn't under capitalism.

So who will pay the Ferryman? Who will bear the real long-term cost and consequences of the sale of these assets? Surrendering them up to private interests would seem to be their death knell and our vulnerable Achilles' heel hidden behind a statement of perfidious and dishonest intent by John Key.

The value of nothing, and the fire next time

The Value of Nothing and the Fire next Time

by Len Parker 

Twenty years after the first Rio Conference, the Rio+20 Earth Climate Conference 2012 is at an end. As predicted, it proved another talkfest and insult to our intelligence - with no real resolution for effective action.

I recall a previous occasion on which the optimistic hopes of a young girl - determined to address the “world leaders” to remind them of their responsibility to address environmental concern with urgency - were destined to be dashed.

A decade ago, a 12 year old Canadian, Severn Cullus-Suzuki, the founder of the Environmental Children's Organisation, addressed the suits at the United Nations and received a standing ovation. Her speech went viral on the internet.

She told the delegates: “If all the money spent on war was spent on ending poverty and finding environmental answers what a wonderful place this would be.

“In school,” she said, “you teach us not to fight with others, to clean up our mess, not to hurt other creatures, to share, not to be greedy. Then why do you go out and do things you tell us not to do?”

Later, in an article in Time magazine under the heading  "The Young Can't Wait”, a more mature and experienced young woman, disillusioned with the suits, said: “I thought I had reached some of them, that my speech might actual spur some action.”

“A decade later - after I sat through many more conferences - I'm not sure what has been accomplished … I have learned that addressing our leaders is not enough.”

She quotes Gandhi: “We must become the change we want to see.”

At the 2012 Rio+20 Summit the suits again heard from another teenager, this time from New Zealand. Brittany Trilford, a 17-year-old Queen Margaret College student, won the 'Date with History' youth video speech contest, and the opportunity to address the Summit.

In conclusion, she said; “You have 72 hours to decide the fate of your children – my children – my children's children – and I start the clock now.”

Sorry Brittany, looks like they were looking at their Blackberries to check their shares or see if it was time for lunch.

There is a saying: “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” I thought this was a wise remark of my grandmother. Only recently I found it was a quote from Oscar Wilde in his book The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The story of Dorian Gray, as with that of Dr Faustus, is about a man who sells himself to the devil for eternal youth - at least until the day of settlement. Before that time, however, he is reminded of his bargain by a portrait of himself that not only records his real age but his sins of commission, debauchery and self-indulgent riotous living.

It would appear that the day of reckoning for the Wall Street banksters, the neocons, capitalist free-marketeers, and those raping the earth – though not far off - has not yet come. The parasitical derivative dealers, reckless currency and futures traders – with their extortionate bonuses still paid - are bailed out by the global working class and the poor by attacks on our wages, health, education and welfare. But, according to the rich, it is our own excesses that are responsible for our predicament.

On this finite planet we inhabit, constant capital development demands ever-expanding growth that is irresponsible and unsustainable.

“As long as these resources remain, the demands of the rich can be met [or so they believe]– which may explain why so many of the rich see no problem. The poor experience a very different reality, but in a market economy their experience doesn't count.”

(from the introduction to The Case Against the Global Economy edited by: Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith)

Our strange new virtual world of financializatio was born out of market deregulation, a revolution in electronic communication, the invention of derivatives and puzzling complexity. The rich still get richer, while we may all drown - not only in the toxic debt the speculators and merchants of death have created, but in a rising tide of global warming. This does not “raise all boats” as promised, but threatens system collapse and perhaps billions of our lives.

This toxic debt, so vast it can never be repaid, accumulates, while the global crisis deepens. We, and Mother Earth become breathless with toxic gases while our future existence and possibly all life on the planet is threatened.

As an eco-socialist it will seem strange to quote from a speech that Senator Robert Kennedy gave at the University of Kansas in 1968 shortly before his assassination, but it is instructive - and may even have contributed to his death:

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, … is over $800 billion a year [now in the trillions] but that Gross National Product – if we judge the United States of America by that – that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public officials. It measures neither our wit or nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

When have we heard a speech of such eloquence and substance from any of our politicians here?

New Zealand's Marilyn Waring, when she became a politician, also discovered the things she valued most about New Zealand counted for nothing: “its pollution-free environment; its mountain streams with safe drinking water; the accessibility of national parks, walkways, beaches, lakes, kauri and beech forests; and absence of nuclear power and energy.” Unfortunately for Marilyn, all these are now under attack from miners, loggers, and farmers' cattle polluting our streams.

The dirty secret of capitalism is not simply profit but accumulation, acquired through the exploitation of human labour power and the earth's resources in unsustainable endless growth.. Paradoxically, everything is measured but that which really matters.

This new virtual world of debt is 'measured' at many times the total global GDP - between $685 trillion and more than a thousand trillion. Don't try and imagine it, it is impossible. Raj Patel in his book The Value of Nothing writes:

... to borrow a trick from the brilliant essayist John Lancester, if you were to count a dollar per second, it would take twelve days to count a million, thirty-one years to count a billion, and for a trillion a thousand more fold, it'd take six times all recorded history.

Mind-boggling if you are on the minimum wage.

The deregulation of the global financial system opened up a casino economy. According to a US Federal Reserve report in the late 1990s:

...about 85 percent of dollar transactions were in cash at banks, supermarkets, gas stations, restaurants and the like... the trillions sloshing back and forth between countries, within and between corporations, and between large investors and entrepreneurs are transferred from one account to another through an electronic network.

(Richard Barnet and John Cavanagh “Electronic Money and the Casino Economy” in The Case Against the Global Economy)

Barnet and Cavanagh add that while “the number of electronic transfers amounts to only 2 percent of the total transfers”, yet they “involve five out of every six dollars that move in the world economy.” That was then. Now? Wow! Who knows?

The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the Gross National Product (GNP) are inventions: a construct by accountants and economists that “does not take account of the extraction of natural resources which it treats as income, rather than the depletion of an asset, which it is, and ignores transactions that are not conducted through money.”

It also ignores “much of the most important work in society...that which we do for ourselves within our homes, extended families, communities: childcare, cooking, cleaning, home repairs and similar.”. But it counts family breakdown and disease as economic booms - “divorce lawyer bills, moving costs, and two households where one existed before...”

It doesn't record the damage we do to the environment and other species, “over which we have dominion” according to biblical literalists and very materialistic Christian religious fundamentalists awaiting the rapture. We can do as we like unto the day of reckoning.

Human myth and literature, however, is full of many legends dealing with the consequences of greed and selfishness. The Israelites worshiping the golden calf; Jesus throwing the money changers out of the temple; King Midas turning everything he touched into gold, including his beloved daughter; Odysseus being tempted by the Greek Sirens' song to his potential doom and having to be restrained; Shylock in The Merchant of Venice wanting his pound of flesh; crooked lawyers in Dicken's Bleak House.

Then there is the simple honesty of children, unaware of the consequences of their actions who see things as they are in “The Emperor's New Clothes”. It is the innocent child who announces to the cowardly crowd of servile toadies that in fact the King had no clothes. Thank you Severn and Brittany for speaking out!

What is missing is how we got here - the origin and consequences of the mode and relations of production and ideologies that arise from them. In other words, the class nature of society. While fundamentalists might deny evolution and Darwin, they surely are the greatest proponents of social-Darwinism. The term “the survival of the fittest” was never actually used by Darwin in his Origin of Species, but adopted to justify the privilege, power and property of the owners of the means of production.

“The survival of the fittest”, like “nature red in tooth and claw”, is a concept that belongs to parasitic, competitive and individualistic capitalist society. They are insufficient to describe the natural world of coexistence and interdependence (symbiosis), that represents our future if we choose to make one.

Brilliant young people like Severn and Brittainy are right to be angry. Time is short for us to learn what is of real value and to act. They are right also to believe that “another world is possible”, one not based on profit driven endless production for production's sake and consumption in a finite world, but on sharing, cooperation, and real needs.

While the God of the Bible, after the flood, may have promised the 'fire next time', let us make sure it isn't the consequence of human produced global warming. Above all, we must not let the capitalist suits and their spin doctors. with their all consuming obsession with market forces, extinguish the fire in Brittany's heart.

And it's a big socialist HELLO...

... to our new friends at the Hobgoblin Network.

Thanks for the link, comrades. You might be interested in participating in Ecosocialist Aotearoa FB or email groups. The links are on the side of this blog. Please stay in touch.

Madmen, methane, and me

Madmen, methane and me

by Len Parker

There is an obvious irony and even hypocrisy in the fact that, while I worry about the impact of peak oil, climate change and global warming – and contemplate a possible 'perfect storm' with the eventual collapse of capitalism - I still drive a car on which I have a sticker: “Stop deep sea oil drilling.”

However, most people will agree, getting around a city the size of Auckland, picking people up and carrying materials without a car is a bit of a bummer with our present public transport system.

While it would seem the debate amongst most scientists is over regarding the human influence on global warming, there are still those who are yet to be convinced or are in denial. They will revolt only when we can no longer afford fuel to get to work (if they still have jobs). Equally as cynical, the little known Bolivian accords are more likely to take climate change more seriously and deliver more action than the current talk-fest Rio conference will.

Nevertheless, in this energy drive economy, the common understanding among most geophysicists and geologists is that the arrival of peak oil - oil that is easily accessible - is here and an undeniable reality, while the discovery of new sources has fallen behind demand. There are, however, vast quantities of less accessible hydrocarbons in rocks deep in the earth, and in the oil shales in Canada and elsewhere.

Very angry grizzly bears in Canada will tell you about the damage being done to their habitat as trucks fifty feet high and forty feet wide - the biggest in the world - deliver the mined shale to conveyor belts for processing, using vast amounts of energy to do so.

There are also enormous quantities of frozen methane (a potential alternative hydro-carbon fuel) buried in the permafrost in Siberia, and now bubbling up from the melting tundra. There is an even greater quantity (thousands of gigatonnes, as much as all the rest of the traditional fossil fuel deposits) in frozen water molecules deep in the rocks and sediment beneath the world's ocean floor, locked-up in the form of clathrates or gas-hydrates.

Methane is known to be a powerful greenhouse gas. If just 10% of the methane hydrates were to reach the atmosphere in a few years, it would be equivalent to raising the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere by a factor of 10. These reservoirs are extremely unstable - a slight increase in temperature and pressure can cause them to destabilize.

While David Archer, in his book The Long Thaw, thinks this is unlikely to happen any time soon, Mark Maslin points out in The Coming Storm: 

These reservoirs … pose a major risk as warming will heat up both the oceans and the permafrost and could cause ice surrounding the methane to melt, pumping hugh amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Methane is 21 [Archer says 30] times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. If enough is released into the atmosphere it would raise temperatures even more rapidly, releasing still more gas-hydrates in a runaway greenhouse effect.

In fact, it could even trigger massive explosions with unknown consequences.

There have of course been numerous recorded "ice ages" known to geological science, and subsequent periods of warming with little ice ages. These have been attributed to various interactive causes, earth wobbles etc.

While scientists tend to be very conservative in their pronouncements, Archer concedes that:

The hothouse climate of 40 million years ago probably did not have much methane hydrate in it... The hydrates we have today probably grew in the cooler times more recently than that. If the earth returns to a hothouse climate, it seems inevitable that it would eventually lose most of that methane. It is an open question... Hydrate stability calculations suggest that hydrates could ultimately release as much carbon as the CO2 released from fossil fuels, doubling the long-term climate impact of global warming,

With most of these frozen hydrate deposits found deep beneath the sediment on the continental shelves, including that of New Zealand, why are we risking releasing methane into the atmosphere by such cavalier methods as drilling deep sea oil wells into the ocean floor?

Did methane play any part in the explosion in the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico?

Surprise, surprise! According to Maslin's map, there just happens to be a large deposit of frozen gas-hydrates off the East Coast of the North Island, in the area where a South American oil exploration company has contracted rights to drill an exploratory deep sea oil well.

This seems is to be in total disregard of the lessons learnt from the disastrous oil well explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, the existence of the fault-line off our coast and the historic record of the 1931 Napier earthquake. This is also magnified by new irrefutable evidence of ocean warming from our own scientists and oceanographers, here in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Of course, there are those who only see dollar signs and have myopic short term vision - or perhaps see economic collapse from an energy crisis as a more immediate concern.

I mentioned this 'frozen fire' deposit to James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) when he was here recently to warn and hopefully convince us of the urgent need for action on climate change. He expresses this cogently and with great authority in his book Storms of My Grandchildren.

Subsequently, by chance, I picked up some throw-out books from the local library. One of these was a novel with the title Frozen Fire. One of the coauthors, Marianna Jameson, is a senior technical writer and editor in the aerospace, defense software and the environmental engineering industries. Interesting!

It is a horrendous novel of intrigue, greed, and national security. A maniacal privateer has an insane plan to mine and monopolise the frozen gas-hydrate from the ocean floor in the Caribbean, to out-flank and ruin the oil companies. Equally insane are the greenies out to destroy his plan, who - like the right-to-lifers who blow up abortion clinics - are responsible for a massive explosion that subsequently kills all the animal life in the sea and many of the people in the immediate region of the Caribbean and Florida coast. The world is saved eventually by methane-eating bacteria cultivated by a brilliant biologist.

I found this interesting, as the first patent on a living organism, leading to the controversial patenting of the human genome itself, was that given in the USA to Chakrabaty for a similar organism that eats oil.

Marianna Jameson's historic connections suggested to me that this madness and rivalry in the search for other sources of energy with a fossil fuel origin - rather than wind, wave and solar power – by mining the frozen methane from the ocean floor for profit and private gain may not be so far from the truth as to what is being planned. Paranoia, maybe?

With all the damage being done to our planet and environment, this seems to me even more reason why we need take all this seriously. We must act with speed and determination to prevent deep sea mining and fracking and challenge the profit driven ideology behind it. We must also challenge an economic system dependent on limitless growth, eternal frontiers and manifest destiny, before we are hit with the coming perfect storm.

The TPPA and Big Pharmaceuticals

The TPPA and Big Pharmaceuticals

by Len Parker

It is secret and we won't know for four years what the government has signed us up to under the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) - a potential trade agreement between New Zealand, Singapore, Brunei and Chile which, by extension, the US could soon be a party to.

But we can get an idea!

In May this year, 28 US senators lobbied President Obama with their concerns about the perceived threat to the powerful US pharmaceutical industry's “intellectual property” interests - and no doubt the senators' own future campaign funds. Their gripe was that drug company interests were not being sufficiently protected by the TPPA.

The US pharmaceutical industry has the largest lobby in Washington. According to Marcia Angell in The Truth About the Drug Companies, in 2002 it employed 675 lobbyists (more than one for each member of Congress) at a cost of $91 million. Their job is to prowl the corridors of power in Washington to promote drug company interests.

The senators' (read: drug companies') concern was with New Zealand's publicly funded drug purchaser Pharmac. Pharmac's role is to shop around as a public purchaser of medicines, and to get the best value for money it can for the taxpayer. The safety and efficacy oversight review is handled by the NZ Medsafe division, composed of chemists, pharmacists and other medical professionals.

Prime Minister John Key, under pressure of public questioning, said he would take “a fair bit of convincing” before concessions would be made regarding Pharmac. Now we hear that some concession may have been made, but we the people will not know about it for four years.

Were concessions made for changes to Pharmac and what were they? To our public hospital system? To medical insurance? Protection from liability for private insurance companies? An attack on ACC? We won't know!

Where are the legitimacy, transparency, accountability and democracy in such agreements? The giant US pharmaceutical corporations insist on transparency and openness with Pharmac, but hide their own business interests behind a veil of commercial secrecy, intellectual property, patents and expensive "me too" drugs.

In the battle for healthcare reform in the US under President Obama, health insurers, the pharmaceutical industry and other special interest groups “opened their pocket-books to frustrate reform legislation and protect their huge profit streams," says Angell. "Members of Congress were showered with political contributions – and overwhelmed with thousands of lobbyists.”

For us in New Zealand, this agreement could be a disaster waiting to happen. Even in the midst of the global financial meltdown, private capital has been flowing into the giant private US hospital business. Share prices in Universal Health Services Inc. (UHS), one of the largest US health and management companies, have rocketed. Income flow increased in the September 2011 quarter by 40% compared to the previous year, and for the the previous nine months to $5.66 billion. In addition to the United States, UHS has operations in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, which suggests tax havens and transfer pricing.

In the US, medicine is quite simply big business. Conglomerates like Tenant Health Care own and operate 64 acute care hospitals in 12 states. Hospital Corporation of America (HCA, Inc) includes approximately 191 hospitals and 82 outpatient surgery centres in 23 states. This is a "Managed Care” for-profit system, and the Wall Street shareholders' sole concern is for their dividends and maximum returns on speculative investment.

Private medical insurance premiums are so expensive - sometimes greater than a home owner's mortgage - that industry providers have been dropping out, leaving many people without any cover. One schoolteacher, who had a school based policy, dropped her family from her policy. The cheapest family plan the school offered was $858 monthly and an $11,000 deductible (excess), which meant that nothing was covered until their claims exceeded that amount. Some excesses can reach $30,000 per annum.

Many insurers in the US will not re-insure policy holders after they have had major surgery, even if they develop chronic conditions. Some will even deny family cover if one member develops a condition such as asthma.

Medical insurance premiums here in New Zealand have been rising dramatically also, so any agreement to further privatize hospitals and promote for-profit health care should have been strenuously resisted in any TPPA agreement. But we do not know what our capitalist, market orientated, government has signed us up to with this TPPA agreement.

Why would we want to follow US corporate feudalism, and why would we believe the free market healthcare system is more "efficient"? We don't, really - it is simply the commodification of healthcare for profit.

The 8,000 members of the US “Physicians for a National Health Project” support a single-payer national health insurance scheme, and envy countries such as New Zealand. They say: 

The US spends twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care per capita ($8,160). yet performs poorly in comparison and still leaves 50 million without health coverage and millions more inadequately covered... This is because private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume one third (31 percent) of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a single non-profit payer would save more than $400 million per year, enough to provide comprehensive, high quality coverage for all of America.

This will be little altered by the compromised Obama health reforms.

There has been a great deal of mythology spun around the pharmaceutical companies' investment in research and development, when most of the successful research has been done in the universities at taxpayers' expense, as Marcia Angell points out.

Take the case of Taxol (the brand name for paclitaxel), the bestselling cancer drug in history. ... All of the research on the drug was conducted at, or supported by, the National Cancer Institute over nearly thirty years, at a cost to taxpayers of $183 million. In 1991, Bristol-Myers Squibb signed a cooperative research and development agreement with NCI. … The company's part of the bargain was mainly to supply the NCL with seventeen kilograms of paclitaxel (which it obtained from a chemical company). No ingenuity there...

In 1992, after Taxol was approved by the FDA or treatment of cancer of the ovary, entirely on the basis of NIH-supported research, Bristol-Myers Squibb was given five years of exclusive marketing rights... The worldwide use of Taxol (for cancer of the ovary, breast and lung) generated between $1 and $2 billion a year for Bristol-Myers Squibb and only tens of millions in annual royalties for Florida State University, who did the work to synthesize paclitaxel. 

Pharmac sponsored Taxol here for $500 per patient year ($12.5 million over five years), compared to the costly in-patent breast cancer drug Herceptin, that cost about $60,000 a year for each patient. (NZ Herald 27.08.08)

There is nothing in Pharmac's role that offends against any principle of “free trade.” Pharmac does not decide what medicines may be traded in New Zealand, only which ones will be bought at public expense.

 

Are the in-patent brand drugs safer or more effective than generic drugs?

In August 2007 the New Zealand Government's medicines watchdog Medsafe warned “that short-term users of Prexige (a Cox 2 inhibitor) would be wise to stop taking it and take something else,” after two people in Australia died. It has also been linked to liver damage. The drug was used for short term dental, menstrual and post-surgical pain, and long term by a small number of people with osteoarthritis. While over 60,000 people in Australia took the medicine, only 2,000 New Zealanders used it - Prexige was not a subsidised medicine here.

Vioxx, also a Cox 2 inhibitor, was voluntarily recalled worldwide by its manufacturer Merck in 2004 because of adverse effects on patients. Bextra, from the same class, was withdrawn a few months later because of concerns about an increased risk of serious skin reactions. (NZ Herald 13.08.07)

In a speech to the 25^th annual scientific conference of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine in Wellington in November 2010, George Jelinek, Professor of Emergency Medicine at Perth's Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, Australia, said:

Marketing of drugs was often disguised as education, and doctors attending pharmaceutical sponsored events were more likely to use the product, even without scientific evidence.

Widespread conflict of interest results in over-prescribing many medicines of dubious benefit, and that conflict of interest leads us to neglect health in favour of pharmaceuticals.

Some large, heavily promoted drugs have subsequently caused great damage to an unsuspecting public.

The pharmaceutical industry was awash with profits... In fact, the combined profits of the top 10 drug companies in Fortune 500 has been greater than the other 490 companies' profits combined.

Dr John Read, of the psychology department at the University of Auckland, wrote in the NZ Herald on 4.4.2008, congratulating the Australian Government for being the first in the world to force drug companies to disclose how much they spent wining and dining doctors. The first report revealed a staggering $31 million was spent in this way in just six months.

He goes on to say: 

Will the New Zealand …Research Medicines Association be lobbying our Government to introduce similar legislation?... It was only after other legislation leading to forced disclosure of previously secret drug company studies that we now know that anti-depressants are no more effective than placebos.

One of the largest trials in medical history was with antihypertensive drugs involving forty thousand older Americans. Generic diuretics which cost less than ten cents a day proved slightly more effective than the still-on-patent calcium channel blockers and ACE inhibitors, which cost between $0.75-1.75 per day. A fourth in-patent drug was dropped from the trial when it did substantially worse than the rest. Goozner writes: “The elderly and near-elderly people who took the diuretics suffered slightly fewer heart attacks and strokes than comparable groups on the costly medication.”

A smaller Australian trial showed that the ACE inhibiters were slightly better than the diuretics. However, the Australian trial involved almost all white Australians, while the American trial included many black Americans (35%), and mirrored the US population. The Australian trial contained fewer smokers or patients with diabetes or coronary heart disease, conditions that made it more likely high blood pressure would lead to heart attacks and stroke.

References

Angell, Marcia. The Truth About the Drug Companies. (Angell is a former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine and now a member of Harvard Medical School's Department of Social Medicine.)

Barlow, Maude. Profit is Not the Cure. Maude Barlow. (Barlow is National Chairperson of The Council of Canadians, and strong in opposition to the privatisation of water.)

Goozner, Merrill. The $800 Million Pill – The Truth Behind the Cost of New Drugs. Goozner is former chief economics correspondent at the Chicago Tribune and winner of six Peter Lisagor Awards.

Kelsey, Jane (ed.) No Ordinary Deal - Unmasking the Trans-Pacific Partnership Free Trade Agreement. Although it is rather academic, it is a must have for anyone concerned about the dangers to Pharmac.

Potter, Wendell. Deadly Spin: An insurance company insider speaks out on how corporate PR is killing health care and deceiving Americans.

Goodbye Lenin? (June 2012 edition)

Goodbye Lenin?

by Daphne Lawless

[An edited version of a contribution to Socialist Worker - New Zealand's Pre-Conference Bulletin, January 2012. At that conference, Socialist Worker dissolved itself. We are reprinting this article in the hope that some of the material in it is fruitful for discussions of what eco-socialist organising should look like.]

“... we are each given the experiences we need and I do not regret the craziness of those initial years, even though I know now that much of my energy and actions was misplaced.”

- Llewellyn Vaughan Lee

This paper is an exploration of ten years experience as a member of a revolutionary socialist organisation, and a question about what happens next.

Since 2005 at least I have been attempting to reconcile the Leninist political tradition I was trained in with my personal experience of alienation and oppression (as a queer woman with extensive academic training, a medium-sized income in the publishing field and a long-undiagnosed cognitive abnormality) ; with my humanities training with its insight into mass psychology, ideology and “memetics”; and with my own, highly idiosyncratic vision of what a world which worked properly for human beings would be like. And this is where I have come to, so far.

The political is personal...

I have often talked to people about why I cannot simply do the kinds of things that I could do in my first years as a political activist. I used to be able to sell a socialist newspaper to my workmates, or at least try to; man a political stall and hold discussions with passers-by; participate in demonstrations; even recruit to the organisation. I castigated myself for a long time, blaming myself for “cowardice”, “lack of will”, etc. Any Marxist or feminist would recognize the effects of internalised oppression if this were in the capitalist workplace; it seems very wrong that we tend to resort to blaming of individuals for feelings that arise from our own movement.

But finally, and most simply, the thought struck me: I no longer believe. I no longer see, in other words, the essential relationship between these kinds of actions and bringing about the kind of social revolution that we need to preserve human civilisation and the integrity of the biosphere.

And let me be more precise. I still believe in “revolutionary politics”. Marxian political economy still seems to me to be the only intelligent way to describe the off-the-cliff trajectory of today's financial capitalism, and the effects of alienated labour and oppression on the collective social and mental health of working people are clearly obvious. It's also clearly obvious that the only way out is a social revolution which expropriates the ruling classes and their media/ideological enablers and puts real decision-making power and cultural capital into the hands of the working masses.

What don't I believe? Well, I don't believe in “Leninism” as it is usually understood today – or what Louis Proyect more accurately refers to as “Zinovievism”, after the 1920s leader of the Communist International who obliged foreign communist parties to adhere to a particularly narrow interpretation of how the Russian Bolsheviks worked. This doesn't mean that I am rejecting the intellectual heritage of the Russian Revolution altogether, although I think we should be more critical of Lenin and Trotsky's belief that a socialist state would be like a gigantic corporation or “central bank”. Efficiency under socialism will have to mean something other than the assembly-line mass-production model of a large capitalist bureacratic firm.

But the more important point is that I certainly don't think that the “small group Leninist” model which remains with us from the post-war era until today – in Trotskyoid or Mao-oid flavours – is the way forward to social revolution. The two points behind this I see are one of strategy, and one of organisation.

As far as strategy goes, re-examining my Marxist ideas, it seems obvious to me that real change in the world can only be brought about by social revolution – a change in the real relations of power in society. This is of course intimately tied in with economic revolution – a change in the way that goods and services are produced, distributed and received. The question of political revolution – a question of who controls the organs of power – is, as any thinking Marxist knows, of less important than the first two.

The state is an outgrowth of social power relations – if society is not transformed, the state cannot be, not by the most enlightened of governments. And the question of state power is really the question of who owns the state – as, in our political tradition, we've fought for ages against the proposition that “state dominance of the economy = workers' power or socialism”. If the state expropriates the bourgeoisie (as in Cuba), then unless the social relations of alienated, waged labour and production for profit change, the actually existing real functionaries of the state (the bureaucracy) become the new, collective bourgoisie. The socialist government of Venezuela have tried an alternative – attempting to create a new “balance of power” between a revolutionised state and the bourgeoisie, in the hope that mass self-organisation will have the space to flourish. The jury is still out on whether this is working. But the point is that gaining political power is not the decisive question in which class is going to rule.

An effective revolutionary socialist movement has to be a movement for social revolution. I'm no ultra-leftist – inserting ecosocialist ideas into mainstream “political debate” via activism in everyday campaigns, and participating in bourgeois elections, is an undisputed part of that. But building a party and providing leadership will never, ever be enough, if the masses inside and outside the party are not concretely challenging the relations of production, on the ground, right now. In the modern era, I would say this would involve not only wages and conditions struggles of organised labour, but the growth of “non-market” ways of producing the necessities of life – community gardens, open source / no-patent software, local systems of barter and exchange, co-operatives producing for need and not for sale. It's happening right now, and are socialists taking it seriously or are we looking somewhere else for “real” revolutionary change? Any serious ecosocialist organisation, I feel, has to be up at the front of that as well as of the demonstrations and the election hustings.

The other question is organisational. The clear record of success shows that a small sect of ideologues, outside of the most intimate association with the class struggle (including any “full-time revolutionaries”) only has success in becoming a bigger sect, and then crumbling later on. The question of whether it propagates its ideas is a different one. A small intellectual group can function as a “think tank”, and perform valuable ideological work. But unless intimately linked to the class struggle as it is happening here and now, it will decompose into sectarianism in the way Duncan Hallas would have understood it – the important thing becomes “defending the ideas”, rather than making the ideas useful to change social reality. In the jargon of science, that's called a “degenerating research programme”, and the path to becoming a religious rather than a political group.

… and the personal is political

To be concrete, I no longer believe in the central concept of “democratic centralism” as it has evolved in the small-group Bolshevik tradition (that is, the “party” debates things internally and then presents a united front in word and deed), because I do not believe it works in practice. And the simple reason for this is that I have suffered under its pains and never enjoyed the promised successes. I have never been subjected to any of the cultish insanity or bureaucratic atrocities that you read of in the really scary groups. But I have experienced what it is like to be on the losing side of the argument, of feeling obliged to give the majority argument in public, to defend it... and then to watch it fail, to realise that your own instincts were correct, and then to realise that there is nothing to stop exactly the same thing happening again.

The theory behind democratic centralism is that if the leadership screws up then the leadership can be replaced, or forced to account for its failings. But this is much, much harder than it sounds in practice in a small voluntary organisation. The people with the most time, energy and self-confidence will tend to win every debate, unless they're coming up against someone else equally strong in those regards. And every “victory” won by an incumbent leadership increases the habit of going along with what that leadership says.

What is worse is when the leadership dismisses dissent on the basis that only the leadership really knows what's going on - claiming special insight on the grounds that only the leadership has the capacity to know whether the leadership's initiatives have been successful. This may combine with the suggestion that dissent is due to ignorance of things that the leadership knows but doesn't feel the need to prove, or a lack of “revolutionary optimism” or “closeness to the working class” of dissenters. This lends itself to a certain circular definition of leadership. It's altogether too close to bourgeois democracy's “cult of the expert”, the belief that only certain people are qualified to be leaders - which reminds me of the increasing professionalisation of union leadership.

You can't have democracy in which the followers are disqualified from having their opinions taken seriously. If a group gets to the point where there is simply no ready alternative to the existing leadership (in part because all the contenders get slapped down hard and end up gun-shy), then it may end up in an ever-decreasing circle where the leadership's mistakes can never be corrected except on the initiative of the leadership itself. The members of the organisation who have lost confidence in the leadership have nothing left to do but to “vote with their feet”, or else to simply shut up and plow their own furrow.

I also reject the sectarian answer that the problems of a political organisation can be traced back to its programme... if by “programme” we mean the line it takes in its publications. But if by “programme” we mean how it actually operates, internally as well as within the movement, then perhaps we begin to make some progress.

Tony Cliff suggested that “you don't need a beautiful chisel to create Michelangelo's David”, by which I assume he meant “ugly means can create beautiful outcomes”. That's a supportable philosophical point. But I am increasingly also believing that, since we are a movement for the liberation of humanity into a new world where we live in harmony with each other and the rest of the natural world, change has to be prefigurative. “The master's tools will not dismantle the master's house”, as the feminist Audré Lorde put it.

Let us be more concrete. Backroom dealings, manipulations, telling “acceptable fictions” to keep people enthusiastic, winning arguments by force of personality, using psychological arguments to discredit dissenters or simply not inviting them to the meetings any more, making excuses for or outright denying the mistakes or even crimes of “leading cadre”, declaring defeats to be victories or declaring them to be all the fault of unreliable allies... these are not the way to “build cadre”.

We keep saying that working people can only become fit to be the ruling class as part of the struggle to become the ruling class. Do we really believe that the traditions of the post-war small-group Leninist left have produced a layer of people who have been positively transformed by their years in the milieu? Why are there so many casualties? Of course people get discouraged by years of failure, although perhaps they wouldn't if they weren't enticed into activism on false promises of the imminent millennium.

But my own personal, Quixotic quest has been to reconcile being an effective political activist with personal healing, a way to come to terms in one's own life with the effects of exploitation, alienation and oppression. I have always believed that the kind of political organisation that could really make a difference would make a difference for its own members as well as in the real world of the class struggle. Being a member of such an organisation would not be a comfortable escape from reality (as is the real motive behind sectarian decomposition), but would help comrades to live their lives in the world of exploitation, alienation and expression better, more healthily, as well as giving them the tools to change it in fundamental ways.

This is of course the same insight as many Marxist writers on pop psychology or pharmaceutical approaches to depression have had: that it's not the individual's fault they can't deal with reality, it's that capitalist reality is fundamentally unreasonable. But when the internal environment of a Marxist group is also fundamentally unreasonable – when it reproduces the hierarchies, dominance games and doublethink of the capitalist world – then you have to wonder what kind of a better or even different world can be produced by such a system.

Proposals

So, where does this leave me in practical terms? I completely endorse the analysis of American socialist Dan DiMaggio in his article “Road maps, dead ends and the search for fresh ground”. There is simply no point to building sect-type socialist organisations, around one particular “political line”, in the current era. That sort of behaviour will guarantee that the audience for socialist ideas remain tiny. 

I propose we throw ourselves into building a broad eco-socialist website, including both posted articles and a moderated forum, through which networking of broad-left activists for theory and practice can organically grow into existence.

We should commit ourselves to starting ecosocialist local groups, with a perspective of eventually federating into a national (and/or international) ecosocialist network. These should unite theoretical discussion and practical action around ecosocialist politics, between the existing socialist and anarchist Left, those sympathetic to such politics within Mana, the Greens or even Labour, and ordinary people who are increasingly aware that something's got to “give”. This would not just be a “climate” group, in that it would treat the ecological crisis and the financial and legitimacy crises of capitalism as part and parcel of one another. Hopefully, such a group would have the kind of flexibility and internal culture which I have discussed above.

Grant Brookes: Ecosocialism in Australasia

Ecosocialism in Australasia

notes for a talk at Socialism 2012 conference

by Grant Brookes 

Wellington, 2 June 2012

I had some reservations, when I was asked to speak in this session, about an Ecosocialist Network in Aotearoa. Above all, because such a thing does not exist, outside of some preliminary discussions between a loose group of individuals.
 
But I was told, "Present the Idea". "Take people on a journey". So I thought, OK, I can do that.
 
So here is the idea: (unfurl banner)

The journey towards this idea which I'll describe is both political and personal.
 
I have been introduced as speaking for the Ecosocialist Network Aotearoa and a member of the Workers Party.
 
I hasten to say that although I am an advocate for an Ecosocialist Network and a member of the broad Marxist group which is the Workers Party, the views that follow are my own. 
 
I'll start with the political journey.  

Ecosocialism - what's in a name?

Marxism is a living, evolving movement.
 
When Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote their famous Manifesto in 1848, there was a name for the "spectre haunting Europe". It was called "communism".
 
However two decades later, when Marx engaged in building an organisation consistent with these ideas, the name of this structure didn't have "communism" in the title. It was the International Workingmen's Association, or "First International".
 
The first political parties drawing on these ideas, which flourished in Europe from the 1880s, called themselves "social democrats". The revolutionary party led by Lenin was the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.
 
After the First World War, Marxists around the world renamed themselves "communists". 
 
When the anti-colonial movements and the New Left and injected new life into the movement in the fifties and sixties, many Marxists who connected with this wave rejected the "Communist Party" tag. There was a splintering of labels. In the global North, a few identified themselves as specifically "Trotskyist". In the South, "Maoist" was common. But a catch-all name of "socialist" took on. Hence the name of this weekend conference - "Socialism 2012".
 
The evolution of Marxism as a living movement is due in part to the fact that capitalism, as a social, political and economic phenomenon, is also an evolving global system. And it's possible to trace the transitions and stages in the development of this system which led to the changing ways that Marxist revolutionaries identify themselves. I'll say a little more about this later.
 
But for now, I want to argue that the sixties are over. Capitalism in the 21st century has entered a new phase. A terminal phase. 

Capitalism in PERIL

Capitalism, as Marx identified, is a crisis-prone system.
 
Throughout its existence, it has repeatedly suffered economic booms and slumps.  It has spiraled into war. Its operations have provoked mass social instability and political rebellions. These crises have occasionally created objective conditions for Marxists to actively intervene in mass collective actions to try and overturn the system and lay the foundations for a new socialist society.
 
But today, for the first time in capitalism's 500 year history, the system is beset by a uniquely destabilising set of intersecting crisis tendencies. The first letters of these five crises spell "P-E-R-I-L". The following analysis draws on an essay in Unity journal, written by the relatively well-known local Marxist, Grant Morgan.

Profit 

The last great economic boom of global capitalism, which delivered rising living standards and expanded production of useful things, came to an end in the early 1970s.

Attempts to revive the economic system rapidly coalesced around the policy platform known as neoliberalism. This created three major shifts in the world economy - privatisation, globalisation and financialisation.

Resistance to neoliberalism tended to focus on privatisation and globalisation. But seen in hindsight from 2012, the most significant development was the massive expansion of financial speculation, as the major source of capitalist profit.

A whole new range of financial instruments were created as assets, with a host of esoteric and exotic names, such as the "mortgage-backed securities" which vaporised in the US in 2008, or derivatives, options, credit default swaps, and so on. These grew to be so important for capitalism that trade in financial instruments was 60 times the size of global GDP by 2010.

But what all these assets have in common is that their value is based on a claim to future revenue which has not yet been generated. The archetypal form of this asset is the loan, where the creditor "owns" the right to repayments over the term of the loan.

The massive expansion of the finance sector was based on the massive growth of debt. The ending of this story can now be seen for what it is. The Great Financial Crisis, which began in 2008, rolls on and on as unpayable levels of debt are shuffled from here to there.

Its historical roots in the neoliberal turn, and the historical realities which neoliberalism has engendered, mean that the GFC represents a profitability crisis for capitalism from which there is no clear escape, without exacerbating the other crises simultaneously facing the system.

Ecology

This month marks 20 years since the Rio Earth Summit, which set up the framework to tackle climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Yet last year, greenhouse gas emissions were higher than ever.

Rio has failed, and there is no realistic alternative for preventing climate change on the horizon. According to professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, only around 10% of the planet’s population will survive if global temperatures rise by 4C. The current UK Met Office projections are that 4C could be exceeded by 2060, and 6C by century’s end.

Climate change is just one of the ecological crises threatening the survival of the world system. Others include:

• Species extinction. 
• Loss of tropical forests. 
• Destruction of ocean ecology. 
• Disappearing supplies of fresh water. 
• Despoilment of lakes and rivers. 
• Detrimental effects of large dams. 
• Desertification. 
• Toxic wastes. 
• Acid rain. 
• Urban congestion. 
• World hunger. 
• Overpopulation.
 
The ecological crises collectively threaten the survival of the world's productive population and exploitable natural resources - the twin sources of wealth on which capitalism depends. 

Resources 

Peak Oil is probably the best known resource crisis. It has been widely debated, including in the mainstream media. 
 
The idea of Peak Oil is that oil production in any given well, or region, expands up to a certain point, and then the rate of extraction tends to fall. The idea is debatable, in part because new technologies can make formerly inaccessible oil sources economically viable. 
 
An awareness of Peak Oil in Washington impelled the US to war in Iraq, in a bid to secure control of the region with the largest known oil reserves. As this turned into a less-than spectacular success, attention turned to alternative sources of fossil fuels within North America, such as tar sands and natural gas accessible through fracking. Fracking has become a huge issue, as this method of extraction poisons groundwater.
 
Fossil fuels are by far the biggest energy source for capitalist expansion. Attempts to overcome the energy resource crisis facing capitalism are therefore exacerbating the ecological crisis in the world's water systems. 

Imperialism 

The history of capitalism has also seen a succession of major powers, or hegemons, arise to play a stabilising role in the crisis-prone system. The first of these is a power largely forgotten today - the United Provinces, which is today known as the Netherlands. 
 
The British Empire is better remembered. As the system outgrew its home in Europe, the British state secured the conditions for the global expansion of capitalism.
 
Some time between World War One and World War Two, Britain's hegemonic role was eclipsed by the United States. From backing the establishment of the international financial system at Bretton Woods, to the Marshall Plan to shaping the evolution of the United Nations; from military intervention against threats to the profit system, to bankrolling the IMF and World Bank to backing the World Trade Organisation and reflating the global economic through the Federal Reserve, the United States has clearly played an essential role in stablising the global capitalist system. Without it, capitalism's in-built crisis tendencies would probably have collapsed the system already.
 
What's equally clear is the the US role as global hegemon is coming to an end. 
 
The rise of China is also widely discussed. China's military and economic power is growing, even as the US declines. But while this will ensure the end of America as the global stabiliser, intractable internal difficulties will probably prevent China from ever becoming the new hegemon. These difficulties include:

• Unkind geography. 
• Only moderate natural resources. 
• Low agricultural productivity. 
• Unbalanced economic development. 
• General lack of purchasing power.
• Relative population decline. 
• Contested political and bureaucratic structures. 
• Chaotic legal and commercial frameworks. 
• Restive ethnic minorities. 
• Volatile urban majorities. 
• Fierce North-South and East-West factionalism.
 
So what is the future? One theoretical possibility is a world government. But this would undermine the other feature of the geopolitical system necessary for capitalism - competing nation states. This feature allows capitalists to play nations and governments off against each other, to create the best conditions for profit and capital accumulation. 
 
Therefore, the crisis in the global imperial order created by America's decline is also threatening the very survival of the system. 

Legitimacy 

Finally, there is a crisis in legitimacy. Profit-making is much more efficient where there is a degree of consent from the working class. Repression is costly, destabilising and interferes with productivity. 
 
Yet as we are seeing in places as diverse as Greece and the Arab world, popular consent to being ruled as before is collapsing.
 
There have been mass crises of legitimacy in the socio-political capitalist system before - such as after the bloodbath in the trenches from 1914-1918, or in the Great Depression of the 1930s. In these cases, legitimacy was able to be re-established, through the New Deal and welfare state governments of the late 1930s. 
 
But would a massive programme of public spending and borrowing like this be possible today, without seriously exacerbating the profitability crisis of financialised neoliberal capitalism? I don't think so.

Marxist organisation today – an Ecosocialist Network 

Based on all this, it should now be clearer why I think Marxists today should consider a new name to describe our project - ecosocialism. 
 
It's possible that some people will identify with this name for entirely different reasons than those outlined above. This is to be warmly welcomed. What's not so welcome is if Marxist groups simply chuck in a few references to the environment and rebadge their existing organisational structures and practices as "ecosocialist".
 
The previous transitions in Marxism have not only involved different ways of identifying ourselves. They have also meant new ways of organising, based on social, political and economic shifts in the capitalist system, and on lessons learnt from mass struggles.
 
So the First International was based on the growth of legal trade unions in Europe, and the growing cross-border mobility of labour. Its founding conference discussed the lessons of industrial struggles where foreign workers had been imported to break strikes. 
 
The name - International Workingmen's Association - fitted an organisation formed to promote international trade union solidarity. This reflected Marxist ideas applied to organisation, under the conditions of capitalist development at the time.
 
The social democratic parties of the later 19th century, on the other hand, were formed to take advantage of new space for working class political action, opened up through trade union agitation. These parties were organised for electoral activity, and stood candidates in parliamentary elections. For a time, Marx had believed that socialism (at least in Britain) could be achieved in this way, through the ballot box. Again the name - "social democracy" - reflected living Marxism, in the given context.
 
I'll finish this brief historical journey with Lenin. The organisation he theorised and led, best known by the nick-name Bolshevik Party, was build under different conditions again. There were no mass legal trade unions in Russia a hundred years ago. In fact, most of the population were not engaged in wage labour. There were very few of the political freedoms enjoyed by Marxists in Western Europe. Russia was a dictatorial monarchy. 
 
Lenin is rightly celebrated by Marxists, as the leader of the most significant - even if short-lived - attempt to create socialism in world history.
 
But I no longer really claim to know what Lenin really thought and did all those years ago. The reason is because most of what I have learned about Leninism has come from organisations claiming to follow his model. But what I have come to realise is that these organisations have transmitted a bastardised form of Leninism.
 
How could it be otherwise, when organisations claiming to be based on the Leninist model have been built under very different conditions of capitalist development from those existing in pre-1917 Russia?
 
Leninism today broadly consists of a small core of highly trained activists, all schooled to think and act the same way in most situations. This set-up is highly conducive to the emergence of cult-like socialist grouplets around a charismatic authority figure.
 
Which brings us to a few comments on ecosocialism. 
 
Last year, the prominent Canadian ecosocialist Ian Angus was the keynote speaker at the Climate Change, System Change conference organised by the Australian Socialist Alliance. 
 
His topic was, "How to Make an Ecosocialist Revolution".
 
"A lesson we can learn from the 20th century", he said, "is that monolithic socialist grouplets do not turn into mass movements. They stagnate and decay, they argue and they split, but they don’t change the world."
 
I think many of us here have had ample experience to confirm this.
 
"Ecosocialism is not a separate organization", he continued. "It is a movement to win existing red and green groups and individuals to an ecosocialist perspective.
 
Our ecosocialist programs define who we are, they are the glue that holds us together. But within that broad framework, we need to understand that none of us has a monopoly on truth and none of us has the magical keys to the ecosocialist kingdom."
 
Given this, there is not a lot I can or should say about the precise form or programme of an Aotearoa Ecosocialist Network, which is not even in existence yet.
 
I will simply say this. The Ecosocialist Network must agitate for measures which address the impact of the five intersecting crisis tendencies of terminal capitalism on the global majority. And it must do so in a way which draws the broadest possible layer of people into collective action.
 
I don't see the ecosocialist idea as incompatible with the concept of a combat propaganda group, discussed by Mike this morning - or with belonging to the Mana Movement, of which I am a proud member.
In fact, one of the false legacies of so-called Leninism is the idea of the "vanguard party", a single monolithic organisation to monopolise political leadership and lead the working class to victory.
 
In its place, current conditions of terminal capitalist crisis require overlapping and intersecting groups and parties. An ecosocialist network is an essential part of that nexus.  

A personal journey

I'm coming up on 20 years as a Marxist activist. The group I joined as a student in Dunedin in 1993 traced its intellectual roots to the radicalisation of the 1960s, and especially to the peak of the revolutionary wave in 1968.
 
This was a kind of a sweet coincidence. They were the metaphorical children of '68, and as someone born in that year I was a child of 68 literally.
 
The group identified as "revolutionary socialist", "Leninist" and more-or-less "Trotskyist". 
 
It was part of an international grouping of like-minded organisations, based around the Socialist Workers Party in Britain.
 
The need to organise internationally had been recognised in the Marxist movement since day one. So it was initially stimulating for me to be part of the SWP's international network, having access to thoughts and experiences of socialists from around the world. The SWP was rightly credited with playing a leading role in mass opposition to the Iraq war.
 
But along with the other members of Socialist Worker New Zealand, I increasingly became aware of problems. 
 
The news we got through these channels was filtered. It wasn't obvious at first, until we started getting news from other sources, like the Australian Green Left Weekly. 
 
The filtering, and analysis, was based on dogma. In Marxist terms, dogma consists of viewing the world through past certainties, or orthodoxy, rather than observing an analysing actual events and system-level tendencies in the here and now. The truth, therefore, is decided on in advance, then the facts are marshaled to support it. And as we came to realise, the SWP truth is based the revealed word of a small group of canonical thinkers in the Trotskyist intellectual dynasty.
 
A revolution in Nepal successfully overthrew an entrenched monarch - a world historic event you would have thought. But if you blinked, you would have missed the luke warm coverage in the SWP's publications. The real problem, you see, was that the Marxists leading the revolution weren't Trotskyists like them.
 
This rigid dogma led the SWP to reject the significance of the mass radicalisation which swept Latin America over the last decade, and to denounce people like Hugo Chavez as opponents of genuine socialism. 
 
We asked for a debate inside our international tendency about Chavez. It was met with stony silence. Dogma and democratic debate, you see, are incompatible.
 
The SWP's dogma led them to pull out of the RESPECT Party, wrecking England's most successful electoral formation involving Marxist leadership in generations. They did this, essentially, because RESPECT wasn't "pure" enough for them.
 
When we pointed this out, we were attacked. And members of the SWP who agreed with us were expelled. After the death of the overwhelmingly dominant authority figure of Tony Cliff, there was a jostling of position for the role of the new Great Leader.
 
The purges rolled on and on, at all levels of the party, so that now there are just two members remaining on their central committee from when I was in Britain a decade ago.
 
This week I see that they are calling on SYRIZA, the Greek anti-capitalist party currently leading in the polls, to abstain from forming a government if they win this month's election. This would mean squandering the best chance for decisively breaking the hold of austerity in Europe and opening up new historical possibilities for the world. 
 
This frankly idiotic position is essentially based on a dogmatic view that there's only one path to socialism - theirs - and this doesn't involve winning elections. 
 
These brief sketches of major political debates around the SWP are necessarily caricatures, but they get the broad outlines right. 
 
This personal experience, shared by others in Socialist Worker New Zealand, led us to wind up the organisation with that name at our final conference in January of this year. 
 
Speaking for myself, the conclusion is that organisations born out of the sixties need to be appreciated for what they are - the children of their times. Like the First International, the social democrats and the Communist Parties before them, they have made inestimably large contributions to humanity.
 
But they are no longer capable of taking Marxism forward for the masses today, in the terminal phase of capitalist development. For that, we need an Ecosocialist Network.