The world as a war zone

War is associated with not only large loss of life but also the breakdown of all normal daily activities. When war comes to a region, large populations often must be on the move, trying to escape devastation that has made it impossible to find shelter, go to work or school, or even get food and water. Transportation and power systems break down, as does public health. The civilian casualties caused by disease, starvation and exposure can exceed those of actual combat.

Available resources are commandeered by the military, which has its own parallel mechanisms to ensure that even when civilian life is in chaos, the troops are fed and sheltered and can move freely.

Human misery is compounded by profiteering. In a capitalist society, everything is for sale and the hardships of war just drive up prices. They also shine a blinding light on the great social rifts that lead the rich to get even richer while the majority are going through sheer hell.

As we move into an era of more and more natural disasters caused by the unnatural phenomenon of global warming, the areas affected are coming to look more and more like war zones.

There has been no war on U.S. soil since the 1860s. But the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, followed by the collapse of the levees in New Orleans, exposed the weaknesses and contradictions of 21st century capitalism on a grand scale. Where Black people were once sold on the auction block to slave owners who needed field laborers, their descendants found out in the cruelest way that they had become expendable in this market-driven system. Local police and then National Guard rode shotgun, tasked with protecting stores and buildings that were being inundated anyway, while the rising floodwaters claimed the most vulnerable people.

The world experienced the warmest year on record in 2005. After a balmy period this month, cold air came roaring back into the Midwest with baseball-sized hailstones and twisters whose winds reached 206 miles an hour. Even the lovely islands of Hawaii, which enjoy a temperate climate year round, have had record-breaking rains that just caused a dam in Kauai to burst and wash away several houses and their sleeping people.

The ice is rapidly melting at both poles. Fresh water flowing into the north Atlantic has pushed the Gulf Stream farther away from the British Isles. This, paradoxically, may mean colder winters for Western Europe, which has already seen unusually severe storms for several decades.

Central America, the Caribbean and parts of South America are being repeatedly battered by powerful hurricanes generated in the warmer ocean off West Africa. High winds, flooding and landslides have done immense damage and caused extensive loss of life. In the Caribbean, only socialist Cuba has been able to keep deaths at a minimum with its comprehensive evacuation system that uses all available resources.

The question is no longer if or when global warming will seriously affect life on the planet. It is an established fact, and each new study shows more rapid change. It is not just future generations but today’s generation that will see rising sea levels that can inundate low-lying countries. Some predictions are apocalyptic.

The question is, what must be done?

There is no individual way to overcome this growing disaster. Riding a bike instead of driving or turning down the heat in your home may be good for you, but it’s a drop in the bucket. This is a vast problem caused by the effect of human activity on the environment, and it can only be meaningfully addressed through profound social change.

Everyone knows that the U.S. government was the world’s worst when it came to denying climate change. Even a cautious public figure like James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute, recently charged the Bush administration with trying to censor him for speaking out on global warming. For years, the U.S. has refused to join international pacts like the Kyoto Accords, meant to slow down climate change.

This has nothing to do with ignorance. This country has a massive scientific-technological establishment. This intransigence flows rather from the powerful political position of monopoly capitalism in the U.S., which refuses to allow anything to slow down its pursuit of superprofits on a world scale. Its determination to use the most ruthless methods to build an empire based on control of the world’s oil shows how short-sighted this ruling group is.

Capitalist corporations are driven by the bottom line: profits. Long-term planning that would interfere with immediate profits falls by the wayside. When large social projects like dams, roads and railroads have been absolutely indispensable for the expansion of capitalist production but couldn’t turn an immediate profit, they have been built with public funds.

Today, however, the publicly finan ced infrastructure is in terrible shape as the cost of empire balloons with each new military adventure. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz estimates that the true cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will be $2 trillion.

With government debt rising shar ply, what will be left for the kind of total reorganization of society needed to deal with global warming?

The mainstream environmental organizations in this country are in crisis. They have been focusing on how to persuade the corporations and capitalist politicians to think “green.” It is a hopeless task.

For a century and a half, militant movements based in the working class and, more recently, in countries oppres sed by colonialism and imperialism, have been trying to break the grip of capital and establish socialist economies. Some have succeeded—often in the aftermath of devastating capitalist wars for markets. Now we are facing a new kind of war, which can strike anywhere as natural systems break down under global warming.

Only socialist planning on a global scale offers a way out. The struggle to take control of our economic life and create a sustainable environment is an integral part of the struggle of the work ers and the oppressed peoples to end capitalism and build a socialist world.