Syracuse G8 on Environment
Against the destruction of the environment — Class struggle and people’s self-management

Will our heroes, the great statesmen gathered at the G8 meeting, succeed in managing to conciliate profit and environmental protection?

Since the days of the first industrial revolution, there have been thousands of ecological disasters caused due to the thirst for profit.

True, in recent years, a greater sensitivity in citizens of the Western countries to environmental matters has forced industries to pay more attention to ecological matters. Indeed, by means of the perverse cycle of pollute/de-pollute, Capital has managed to find new ways to create profit, at everyone’s cost. New ecological businesses are started in order to clean up particular territories which other businesses have polluted, and the percentage represented by this new business of the GDPs of various countries is growing by the year. So much so, in fact, that it is almost obligatory now to pollute so as not to lose out on this particular slice of the production cake. It is like a small-scale reproduction of the great capitalist circus — build and destroy, pollute and clean up.

That is the situation here, in the rich West, where there are collective resources to direct this way. But in the South of the world, where the proletarian masses are fiercely exploited by multinationals and where the first rule of life for the world’s disinherited is not to die of hunger, Capital only pollutes. There is no money in order to complete the circle. So entire countries, entire regions are destined to become open-air dumps, with various mafias left to manage them to the detriment of the population, allowing capital, businesses, to cut their environmental costs leaving the inhabitants to pay for it with their health. Just as they do with the costs involved in ensuring workplace safety. How hypocritical, forcing us to choose between work and health, between work and safety, when the choice is work or die.

How much empty chatter will there be in Syracuse about probable “post-Kyoto” scenarios, when most of the countries who ratified the agreement have gone on to increase their emissions instead of reducing them?

How many empty words will be spoken about low-carbon technologies, in a system where wars alone produce more carbon dioxide than all the vehicles in several countries put together?

How can they talk about biodiversity, when they are not even able to guarantee a minimum for the survival of the millions of people who live on the edges of society? When they continue to think of the deaths through starvation of millions of children as a physiological but necessary and secondary anomaly of the system? A bitter smile comes to the lips when one sees that the last day of the summit is dedicated to the question of children’s health and the environment...

Once again words, only words, to make themselves look good to the great unwashed. Anyway, they know that no-one can force them to keep their promises.

And unless we take our lives back into our own hands, we the workers and the disinherited of the whole world, they will go one making fun of us!