Now that Earth Day is over and everyone has had a little time to reflect upon the event, one must ask: Is there a fundamental lesson in it? And if so, what is it?
Earth Day 1990 brought out millions of people. Compared to the first Earth Day in 1970, it was to be a time when the plans would be laid out for an epoch-making shift away from ravaging the planet to preserving it for life. But this proved to be a brazen lie.
There is no question that the event created a considerable stir and that the apprehensions of millions upon millions of people regarding the safety of the entire environment caused them to attend. This is attested to not only in the United States, but in other countries, especially the highly industrialized imperialist metropolises.
A cruel illusion
Sad to say, a great many scientists and others concerned with the environment have been naive enough to believe that the apprehension and fear created in the minds of millions would force those at the controls of industry and finance to open their purses and lead a mighty campaign to turn around pollution, even if only because of self-interest on the part of the high and the mighty. But this once again proved to be a cruel illusion.
First of all, who came to hear whom? Who spoke to whom? Was this a dialogue? Or a monologue conducted from above?
The mass of the people came to be heard. They came to speak, to tell their piece. Instead they were spoken down to. The mass was not heard.
It was the monstrous corporate fraternity who spoke down to the people. The people came to protest the vandalizing of the environment. Instead, they were addressed by the vandals themselves.
Who is going to fix the environment? The vandals said, "You people have to do it." The unending theme in the media and elsewhere was telling the masses what to do. They were to buy, sell, make, do, or undo. But it was the corporate moguls lecturing to the people. The big bosses were not lectured to. They were not asked to do anything.
Small wonder. The whole thing had been coopted from the very beginning. There was no room left over for the expression of the people. The carnival, festival character of the rallies virtually precluded any serious intervention by the masses in the form of a protest against the ecological crimes committed by big industry and high finance.
Collecting from the masses
Here was a huge, unprecedented audience, a world-class audience having the ear of millions more. We're all familiar with those charitable events where rock groups of all sorts collect money and get pledges from the masses. Oh, how well they know how to do that. It's been done and overdone so many times when it comes to collecting from the masses, instead of for them.
Wouldn't it have been proper to ask for donations, not from the masses, but from the polluters who have been abusing the planet for themselves? This is one time when pledges were really in order, even as a small token of so-called good will from those reputed to be so charitable in dispensing it.
The progressives who had been working long and hard to develop the event might have thought of it. Or some in the corporate structure themselves could on their own initiative have made it the occasion to ask for pledges from the great industrial corporations first of all, as often happens when they want to use the media as their messenger. Say, for instance, the Fortune 500 top industrial corporations could have made a pledge of 10% of their gross profits before taxes per annum, voluntarily appropriated in the interest of saving the planet. What could be more important than that?
Suppose each of the Fortune 500 pledged some of their gross profits, that the largest banks joined in, and the 100 largest insurance companies did likewise, followed by those in the military-industrial complex who might not be included in these three groupings. That would have been a sign of some good faith, a commodity in very short supply, that they truly were endeavoring to save the environment, even if only in their own self-interest.
$500 billion for savings banks, diddley for the environment
Wouldn't this demonstrate that, even if they showed no concern for the people, they at least showed concern for themselves? These very powerful multinationals, banks, industries, financial and insurance companies, have shown that they can quickly get the government to set aside a sum now calculated to be $500 billion to rescue the savings and loan banks.
Why can't they of their own volition create a mechanism for self-taxation, without so-called government interference which they hate so much, and pledge an equal sum to save the very earth they walk on?
When they need to collect from the mass of the people, they can always think of things like the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon, to name just one. Why can't something similar be done to create some true competition among the capitalists themselves, where they'd make pledges to clean up the water and the air? Isn't competition the lifeblood of their very existence? Surely they would have an appreciative audience in the tens of millions.
That would have been a way to address the issues. But that's not what happened.
There are many reasons why it didn't. But the truest of all reasons is that the very sources for the pollution, the industrial, technological and scientific means of production, are in the hands of a few who cannot see beyond their own immediate self-interest.
Social issues and the class struggle
There's a school of bourgeois sociologists that gives another answer, one calculated to turn the onus away from the ruling class. They tell us that social issues have superseded class issues. The narrow economic struggle between capital and labor is outmoded, they say, in the age of space satellites and the computer. The class struggle has been eclipsed by monumental issues like the environment, AIDS, drugs. These problems completely negate class conceptions because all classes are now faced by common phenomena: the disastrous condition of the environment, etc. Thus the self-interest of the capitalists, the middle class and the working class is the same.
But this is a self-serving fallacy to cover up the most characteristic feature of contemporary society: the continued existence of basic class antagonisms between the ruling establishment, in reality the bourgeoisie, and the working class, the proletariat. Try as one might, this fact cannot be hidden for long.
The bourgeois sociologists, especially the most radical ones, try to focus on the evils of the ruling class, or certain segments of it. But they pass over in silence the existence of the proletariat, the working class, without which the ruling class cannot exist.
They pass off the fact that high, sophisticated technology, created by the scientific-technological revolution, has not just increased the productivity of labor, has not just made it possible for a smaller portion of the working class to produce an ever larger amount of wealth, but has created a multi-million, unskilled, low-paid working class which has not yet risen to its feet.
The social issues are merely a reflection of the deep-going economic issues, which at bottom are what divide capital from labor, the exploiters from the exploited. Isn't it true that the issues of the environment, of homelessness, of drugs all reduce themselves down to monetary calculations? And isn't it true that the monetary means to solve these problems are in the hands of the state, which is nothing but the official expression of the political interests of the ruling class?
To separate sociology from political economy, to separate economics from politics, means to hide the nature of the oppression and exploitation of the great mass by the few, who are not merely at the controls but who own the means of production.