The CEOs of two of the largest US funds, BlackRock and Oaktree, have issued open letters to their shareholders on the occasion of the war in Ukraine in which they pronounced the end of “globalization” and set out broad guidelines for the world’s corporate giants. These encyclicals have enormous prescriptive power among the corporate bourgeoisie. The global turn to the War Economy is happening too fast and the “Gospel of post-globalization” can hardly wait.
The European summit and its declaration of Spain and Portugal as an “energy island”, clearly expresses the kind of contradictions stirred up among the imperialist interests of its members by the development of the EU. Contradictions that are fueled both by the growing role of Brussels in the booming war economy, and by the ever greater and more explicit weight of the U.S. in defining its policies. For the bourgeoisies of the European South, a stage of vindication of their “exceptionalities” and the hope of an insularization which will multiply rather than palliate their attack on the basic conditions of the workers is opening up.
After a year of intense inter-country political battles and between industrial lobbyists and environmentalists, leaked documents from the European Commission now reveal that the proposed “taxonomy of sustainable investments” will include gas and nuclear power as “green energies”. At once Germany, Austria and Spain take a stand against nuclear power – while dodging the gas issue – while France and the 10 countries of the “nuclear bloc” rejoice. What is the real battle underneath all this? What is at stake and how will the outcome affect workers all over Europe?
Environmentalism is beginning to be refined and distilled as a state ideology beyond the pressing need to impose the Green Deal. This trend goes beyond propaganda. It constrains scientific development and paves the way for a brutal acceleration of poverty imposed on the working class.
COP26 kicked off on Sunday in Glasgow with downcast royal speeches, war metaphors and tons of doomsday hypocrisy, but also with the significant absences of the Brazilian, Mexican, South African, Russian and Chinese leaders. The media is reporting in dribs and drabs on the content of the meetings and discussions and prefers to play at feeding the “climate anxiety” of the youth. But the issues on the table at COP26 go far beyond emissions pledges and even climate change. At issue is actually each country’s place in the Green Deal’s new international division of labor.
Industrial shortages are not just a British problem. In Spain they cut industrial output and weigh down the “recovery” despite rising demand. In Germany, the entire industrial production is being disrupted. Chaos reaches such a point that US industrialists call for a truce in the trade war against China and China is unblocking Australian coal imports. But make no mistake, all of these are part of what the EU calls “a war-like effort”. The world’s supply chains are on the verge of collapse.
The 2021 German elections tested Merkel’s strategy to revamp the political apparatus, to contain the revolt of the angry petty bourgeoisie which had uplifted the far-right (AfD) but also to prepare the apparatus to promote the Green Deal and a strengthened EU centralized around the interests of German capital.
Yesterday the European Parliament held the State of the Union 2021 debate. In her speech, Ursula von der Leyen skipped central issues and tensions between countries in order to emphasize the constituent tone with which the Commission tries to curtail the memory of the many social disasters it drives and coordinates: from its infamous border and migration policy to the vaccination campaign via the impact of the Green Deal on the electricity bill.
Right now there are over 7.4 billion tons of plastic on the planet and it is estimated that by 2050 there will be 40 billion tons. In 2010 alone between 5 and 13 million tons of plastic wound up in the seas and oceans. The EU insists on selling us a “circular solution” and the press reassures us with miraculous technologies and bacteria. But the problem of plastic and its pollution is cumulative… and it is accelerating further with the Green Deal. The causes are not to be sought in the technology or processes themselves, but in the very heart of the capitalist system.
The IPCC released yesterday the first part of its sixth report: 3949 pages of accurate and detailed scientific information showing that the origin of climate change is “human activity” and associating with varying degrees of probability the relationship between the global phenomenon and its most worrying manifestations. However, a good part of the global media do not seem to have read the IPCC report but rather something else.
It is well known, and this is stated in all official scientific reports, that climate change increases the risk of extreme weather events. However, this is something very different from such events necessarily translating into death and destruction of entire villages as we have seen in Europe or massive fires as we are seeing in the USA. If this has been the case, it is because states are not fighting against climate change and its impacts on populations, but for the Green Deal, that is, for subordinating this goal to the recovery of capital’s profits by extracting income en masse from the workers.
The European Commission presented this week “Fit for 55”, a package of measures aimed at developing the European Climate Law. The stated aim is to reduce by 2030 emissions in the EU countries as a whole to 55% of what they were in 1990. The media linger on the end of cheap flights and the ban on the sale of cars with combustion engines by 2035. But first and foremost it is a way to inflate the speculative emissions market at the cost of higher fuel, heating, transport, food and construction prices.
The increase in the minimum wage in both Amazon and Target was accompanied by the reduction of working hours as well as the elimination of both health insurance and bonuses…which meant that workers’ real hourly earnings were actually reduced despite the wage hike. And it’s even worse. In the U.S. economy as a whole, inflation has already eaten into wage growth. And what is coming with the Green Deal is more of the same.
Climate change exists and has been caused by capitalism’s inability to generate real human development. The Green Deal, on the other hand, is a direct and immediate attack on living and working conditions whose goal is not to solve climate change but rather to revive an ailing global capital.
Spain now has the most expensive electricity in Europe. The labor income-sucking mechanism called Green Deal is now running at full speed… and with a bonus: Spanish imperialism is recouping its European failures through the electric power bill
Biden in Europe: G7 and NATO summit, a summit with the EU, and then meeting with Putin in Geneva… Biden’s agenda in Europe could not be denser. And after so many meetings and negotiations, one idea stands out: the US is no longer what it used to be in the world imperialist game.
With the moratorium on evictions set to expire at the end of June, the Biden administration has unveiled an affordable housing plan. It further pledges to eliminate racial discrimination in housing on the basis of removing the barriers to “wealth creation” suffered by the black petty bourgeoisie. But marrying housing and Green New Deal produces higher prices, and fattening up black petty bourgeoisie businesses will never eliminate discrimination in access to a home.
The impact of the Green Deal on European cities has begun. In Germany, the development of new terraced housing estates is halted in the midst of a general price hike. In Spain, a new ideological campaign charges against urban upgrading projects (“PAU” in Spanish). The EU speaks of a “New European Bauhaus”, but in reality this is the need to accompany the Green Deal in the cities with measures to ensure the profitability of new logistics and energy macro-investments.
The Green Deal, the rising cost of household electricity bills and the lack of profitable applications for capital are concentrating investment back into housing speculation and construction, transforming homes, neighborhoods and urban structures.
Last night [in Spain -TN], the new electricity bill came into force. Although the Green Deal is already being felt in the general price increase, this is the first direct move that ties the energy transition to the loss of workers’ purchasing power. It is sold to us as a price drop made possible by renewables. In reality it is quite the opposite.
There exist advertisements which condense an era with far greater economy than any novel or film. The ad for Ford’s F-150 Lightning, Ford’s iconic vehicle for the Biden’s Green Deal is, by the same token, a promotional ad for precarious living rather than a celebration of green comfort, a Nomadland to insert into big-league matches and Superbowls rather than a sales pitch. But Biden has gone a step further: the Green Deal’s pick-up is also the symbol of a looming new war economy.
Vegetarianism, veganism or soylent are not only supermarket choices, they are ideologies fueling a dietary policy. This is not a historical novelty: the ideological apparatuses of antiquity and feudalism already used dietary politics as a tool of power and political domination.
The Italian superminister for climate change began his mandate by going against meat and dairy consumption; the Spanish government in its 2050 plan, presented yesterday, endorses Greenpeace’s doctrine and proposes to halve consumption by raising prices; in Germany ending cheap meat is one of the main proposals of the Green party, which is likely to head the next government. Meat, dairy and other high-quality protein foods are well on their way to becoming luxury products. With the Green Deal, the diet of the working class is once again the terrain of class struggle.
The German Green Deal has a new rallying cry: end cheap flights to Majorca. At the same time, the Biden government’s new shoe tariffs threaten the Spanish consumer goods export flagship. And if that were not enough, the increased tension with Morocco is pushing towards the closure of companies and factories relocated there by Spanish capital over the last few decades. The Spanish imperialist model is in a state of crisis and is dragging down the industry. Spanish imperialism looks again to Argentina and Mexico looking for the first time not only for markets, but also for capitals to which it offers a beachhead in the EU.
The green transition is already paving the way for new wars. Current mineral production plus that in the pipeline is incapable of supplying the raw material demand of the energy transition. According to the International Energy Agency, by 2030 the production capacity calculated by then will only be able to supply 80% of the critical minerals and 50% of the copper demanded by the Green Deal. By 2040, the strain will be even worse: the demand for critical minerals will have quadrupled. What will large national capitals do along the way to secure the sources needed to supply their most valuable industries?
Germany is raising its climate targets. It changes its Climate Law by committing to a 65% reduction in emissions by 2030. The formal cause, a Constitutional Court ruling. The real cause: competition with the US. The important thing: each push of the Green Deal increases economic contradictions, weighs down production and imposes an increasingly dark horizon on living and working conditions. In the increased competition, the state centralizes and looks for new ways to turn broken private companies into state-owned enterprises. There is nothing progressive about this. We are not closer to socialism, but to a war economy.
Yesterday, the EU reached a provisional agreement on the European Climate Law. In case there were any doubts, the objectives are explicit: To provide predictability to investors and to ensure that the transformations generated by the Green Deal in industries and capital markets are irreversible. Moreover, in concrete terms, the European Climate Law represents an acceleration in the speed of change. No one is unaware of the reason behind the rush: U.S. and China at odds for virtually everything else, are about to turn the Biden summit into the staging of a two-way split of the capital markets they hope to revive.
The Green Deal claims to be a solution to unemployment. This is not true. The figures say the opposite: it is a solution for capital, the big energy and automobile companies, large landowners and even for small farmers. From the very first moment, however, it leaves a trail of layoffs, unemployment and loss of wage purchasing power.
Last Thursday was the closing ceremony of the two sessions 2021, the most important Chinese political event/ceremonial of the year. At its center lay the global crisis of capitalism. In its outlook was militarism, war and the green deal. The good news: Chinese strategists do not expect an armed confrontation with the US before 2027. The bad news: the burden on the Chinese working class has already begun.
The more contradictory the national interests within the EU, the more incentive Brussels has to try to counter them with more outward protectionism – which inevitably triggers its trade rivals – and new moves forward – such as vaccine centralization – that put the Commission and the interests it represents in a weaker position in the face of interference from those same rival states.
New protests of farmers and livestock breeders. Two new issues at the forefront: the consequences for the countryside of the Green Deal and the alleged colonial status of Spain’s southern regions.
When we read the business press, capital seems happy. According to Oxfam, the global bourgeoisie has already made up for its wealth losses. The Swiss bank has doubled its profits. And listed companies are heading for a dividend recovery.
The large snowfall has done more to stop the Covid massacre than the intentionally limited measures of the regions and the government. However, the council of ministers is sucking up as if a country paralized by a non-exceptionally dramatic snowfall for days was the most normal thing in the world. Under the ice lies the sad truth of Spanish capital normalizing the unacceptable.
While the government renounce stopping the third wave of Covid sells a law of euthanasia whose social context is really obscene, capital is centralizing, concentrating and assaulting our incomes, which are falling sharply. While the ideological noise covers the changes in the background, the unions “reserve” themselves. For what?
The big industrial companies have been relieved of paying their share and the electricity oligopoly gets some competitive advantage. Both are winners. Among those of us who will bear the cost in our household bills, the workers, especially precarious ones, and large families, will feel it more in our total budgets. Welcome to the first act of the Green Deal and what it is going to mean for us.
Biden’s “Green New Deal” is presented as the most important change that the new U.S. government will implement. Its consequences for workers will be enormous… and not good.
In many books, in educational institutions and in the media we are told that technology created the industrial revolution and other great social changes. But it is not true, it is not enough to suggest or invent new technologies to solve our needs, which are universal, it is necessary to change social relations. And that starts here and now, it is not a task for a hypothetical tomorrow.
Germany is getting ready toend off, via taxes, cheap meat. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Under the “green deal” comes an accelerated transformation towards “bio” livestock and agriculture that, at least temporarily, would entail non-tariff barriers to imports from outside the EU and a way to attract capital to the countryside. A trend is beginning that will end the era of cheap meat.
Oil companies are starting to go bankrupt serially to the point of threatening to turn the fall in oil prices into a financial crisis. Meanwhile, Europe makes its “green bet” trying to win the competition for capital from the US. And the workers?
Can anyone still think that the “Ecological transition” and the “Green New Deal” they want to impose on us is a progressive “way out of the crisis”?
Capitalism is not going to be less destructive, but more so, by changing its technological base and painting itself green.
