Editor's note: PoliticalAffairs.net contributing editor Wadi'h Halabi, the interviewee here, recently attended a conference titled Marxism and Scientific Sustainable Development held in Beijing, China. The conference was sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Science and the journal Nature, Society and Thought. PA contributing editor Erwin Marquit, who is editor of Nature, Society and Thought, helped organize the conference.
PA: In your view, what is the relationship between Marxism and sustainable development? What special claim might Marxists have to talking about sustainable development?
WADI'H HALABI: Part it has to do with placing the discussion in its historical context, namely in the period of humanity’s transition from capitalism to socialism, and recognizing that the working class has the leadership role in taking humanity through this transition, and that Marxism is the one philosophy that is consistent with the interests of the working class and can face the truth. Marxism is consistent with science – remarkably, extraordinarily so – in that the most advanced developments in science are consistent with Marxism and its fundamentals, including those of dialectical materialism. Marxism is a way to assess reality, one which is consistent with the interests of the one class that can lead this great transition – so there is something extraordinarily profound in terms of tying together Marxism and scientific development. This was reflected at the conference in quite a few papers from both Chinese and non-Chinese contributors.
PA: Like the US, China has a mixed record on environmental issues. What do you see as some their greatest successes, and what do you see as some of the ongoing challenges?
HALABI: Immediately after the Chinese Revolution, when China still had illusions (as was the case in the early days of the Russian Revolution), that it could proceed very rapidly in terms of economic and social development to overcome the tremendous negative legacy of capitalism, including extreme poverty, it did manage to achieve some very significant initial accomplishments, especially in terms of environmentally sustainable agriculture. The problem was that it was unable to match its achievements in agriculture in the industrial area. It was unable to maintain a balance between industrial development and agricultural production, and this caused enormous dislocations throughout Chinese society.
Added to this was the fact that there were historic tensions between the Soviet and Chinese leaderships. It took me a while to actually realize that this really dates to the terrible defeat the Chinese Party suffered in 1927, in part by following advice coming from the Soviet leadership, which was exacerbated after the Japanese army invaded China in August, 1931. Soviet support for the Chinese Communist Party was really minimal during this period of tremendous attacks, which caused millions and millions of casualties, and led, in turn, to what I call the creation of the Great Anti-Wall, a system of well over 10,000 miles of tunnels that were dug in defense against the Japanese aggression.
As the Chinese leadership tried to address the problems following the success of the revolution – and the problems become much more complex in some ways after the victory of a revolution than they were before, in that before the revolution there is one fundamental goal, which is to win state power. Afterwards, it becomes a question of the workers having to learn to govern, and there are also the questions of running an economy and addressing the myriad conflicts that arise as the economy changes and grows.
Looking back today, it is clear that China’s attempt to simply follow the Soviet model in terms of organizing the economy did not achieve the balance that was needed, and it is also clear that the collectivization of agriculture was premature and therefore unable to develop agricultural production fast enough to match the potential of industrial development.
After some prolonged suffering, including famines and the disruptions of the Cultural Revolution, efforts were made to bring in market mechanisms, to try to bring some balance into the economy and open it up to investment and technology from the West. In some ways, this was consistent with debates that occurred while Lenin was alive about organizing the economy and the use of market mechanisms, which went far beyond the discussions around the NEP (New Economic Policy). Lenin once said that what the Soviet economy needed was to go to capitalist school.
I don’t think that China implemented either its opening up to the West or the implementation of market mechanisms in the way Lenin would have wanted, which was to maintain pretty tight control by the working class – democratically – over the market mechanisms and the opening up. But the fact is that the opening up and market mechanisms have resulted in tremendous economic development. But at the same time this has come with a horrible tuition fee, which could yet bankrupt China.
Part of the cost has been the abandonment of collectivization in agriculture, which I think was premature, and a return to individual farming by and large. With the opening of the economy came the abandonment of ecologically-sound farming methods which were used in the early period, for example in regard to insect control, as well as fertilization, etc. With it also came the adoption of capitalist methods of treating the environment as an external cost, along with accounting methods that did not assess social or environmental costs.
The most important development is that, according to all indications, productivity in China is now higher than anywhere in the capitalist world in a wide range of manufactured goods, high-tech to low-tech. However, productivity is not high in agriculture, which leaves China very vulnerable, nor is it higher in industries such as steel, coal, or rail, although that could change quickly in the next four to five years.
There has been extraordinary development in China, and at the same time there has been an extraordinary discussion within China’s leadership about what to do about capitalism, both domestically and internationally, and about how to assess developments like the seeming stability of the US GDP, which seems to contradict Marxism, and the fall of the Soviet Union and those 11 other states. A tremendous discussion is now also rapidly unfolding (which the conference I attended was part of), that is engaging in an assessment of the environmental as well as social costs of the market changes that have been implemented since 1978 during the opening up of China.
In the process China has suffered dramatically in a number of ways – because it has withstood a tremendous amount of environmental damage in order to meet the demands of production for export, which is estimated to account for as much as 30 percent of all environmental destruction in China.
China also has some very significant recent achievements to its credit. One is that after the Great Floods in 1998, it was clear that the accelerating deforestation across China had contributed to the enormous damage that accompanied the rain and floods. Following the floods of 1998 – as evidence of what a society can do after a socialist revolution – China moved quite rapidly from a significant net deforestation to what appears, from the latest information, to be significant net reforestation. Today China is certainly the only poor country in the world that is undergoing a significant net reforestation.
There are other significant examples of this turn toward sustainable development, for instance in expanded production of the least damaging forms of transport, such as mass transit, subways, and rail, all of which are happening at an extremely rapid rate now. There has also been a tremendous increase in ecological housing. Something like 100 million new homes are being planned for development in the next decade or so, housing which will leave less than 10 percent of the environmental footprint of the housing it will replace, both in terms of construction and upkeep as well as in the consumption of energy.
There has also been a remarkable clean-up of some of the dirtiest cities in the world, notably Linfen, which formerly was at the top of everyone’s list of cities with the dirtiest air. Linfen is in a coal-producing region of China, but in a matter of one year, the state environmental agency converted this city from coal heating and cooking to centralized gas heating and cooking, shut down a number of coal mines and the dirtiest factories around the city, and stopped coal trucks from cutting through the city, which was a significant source of pollution.
As a result, in a single year the number of days that met air quality standards set by the state environmental protection agency jumped from a dozen in the all of 2005 to over 180 in 2006, and by mid-2007 the city already was already approaching what it had achieved in 2006. This was an extraordinary achievement.
To move quickly to the problems, however, for one thing, with the reforestation in China, world demand for forest products did not decrease, and when China halted deforestation and moved to reforestation, deforestation quickly accelerated in nearby states such as Indonesia and Papua, New Guinea, but also as far away as Western Africa, so that environmental damage continues on a global scale in other parts of the world, as a direct result of China’s reforestation.
In addition (the exact reasons are still unclear, but they obviously have to do with massive global pollution), there has been a surprising slowdown in tree-growth rates in practically all tree species around the world, including China. China’s reforestation efforts have been significantly affected by this problem. Scientists had initially believed that higher carbon dioxide levels would result in faster tree growth, but the latest studies consistently point to a 20-40 percent decline in tree-growth rates around the world. So that’s a problem that China faces, the fact that the environmental equations are global.
With the extraordinary cleanup in Linfen, another very real problem is the extent to which the workers, peasants, and self-employed in the region had a real say in, for example, the rapid shutting down of those dirty factories. If they do not have any control over these things, over the loss of their jobs and livelihood because of bans on coal or deforestation – without that control from below, there is a danger that even very good state policies will turn the key classes on which the state depends against environmental measures, and possibly endanger the state itself.
The environmental problems are still very significant and major environmental damage is ongoing in China, in good part due to accelerated production to meet the demands of export to capitalist countries. In my opinion, there is not sufficient control from below over the necessary measures that now need to be taken. The other thing is that all these social and environmental equations are global, so that even when the necessary domestic measures are taken, as in China, they are not sufficient, as the figures on global tree growth rates show.
PA: On the issue of the global nature of these problems, how do you think environmentalists in the United States might benefit from closer engagement with the environmental movement in China?
HALABI: That is a good question. And some good answers are developing. Let me start with something that might seem to be totally unrelated. In 2006 the All-China Federation of Trade Unions moved to unionize Wal-Mart stores in China. For the first 12 stores that organizing was done by the union leadership – but it was done from below. There were midnight meetings with workers in the stores, along with all kinds of efforts basically to engage workers without management retaliating. This is the first time Wal-Mart stores have been organized successfully anywhere. The single exception was one store in Quebec, which Wal-Mart management promptly shut down.
The successful organizing of Wal-Mart in China has caused some key people in the labor movement in capitalist countries to rethink their attitude toward the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, which most unions in the capitalist world have largely shunned – a reflection of anti-communist propaganda working its way into the labor movement, including both Europe and the United States.
A second area of cooperation that has far-reaching environmental implications is a possible East-West common struggle – a labor struggle, against high commodity prices, the monopoly pricing of oil and energy, as well as food. Many commodity prices, such as oil, natural gas, and many basic foods, such as rice, wheat and corn, have more than doubled in the past year. This monopoly pricing and all the speculation in food and in oil is having a devastating impact on the environment.
Therefore, a common struggle against the high cost of oil and food can lead to greater labor unity between East and West, and also help prevent the clearly accelerating destruction of the environment because of the deepening poverty that has resulted from high oil prices. As an example, deforestation has clearly accelerated in the past year in part because people are simply too poor to afford fuel, and impoverished people are cutting down trees for both heating and cooking. Because food prices have become so high, farmers are speeding up deforestation in an attempt to increase agricultural production. There has also been a tremendous increase in the use of coal for producing electricity, because natural gas as well as oil have become so expensive.
I think there is a potential for significant cooperation, East and West, on what is a critical issue for humanity both in terms of having enough to eat as well as environmentally. So the areas of possible cooperation are huge, and I found that the leadership in China is quite receptive to these proposals, both in terms of trade union collaboration and the struggle against high commodity prices and speculation in necessities like food and oil.
PA: Finally, your trip came at a time of tremendous challenge for China, with the massive earthquake and the controversy around Tibet. Did you have conversations with your hosts and the people you met there about those issues. What were some of the things that they were saying?
HALABI: Let me start with the earthquake. To put it mildly, it was Katrina many-fold. About 1000 people died directly as a result of Katrina and the failure of the levees in around the Gulf of Mexico. Probably at least 70,000 people have died as a result of the earthquake in Szechuan Province. Katrina resulted in certainly not more than half a million people being made homeless. The earthquake in China has created more than 5 million homeless. I started my presentations with an expression of solidarity with China and the Chinese people around the earthquake, and I pointed to the difference between the response in China and the response in the US to Katrina.
For example, in the United States, poor people, mainly African American who were trying to escape their flooded neighborhoods by going over a bridge into wealthier neighborhoods were met by armed force, by the police or National Guard who shot at them. In China, the army, entirely unarmed, is doing an amazing job in terms of helping with rescue and in terms of helping to reconstruct neighborhoods. That alone is a night-and-day difference.
The Chinese state responded immediately to the earthquake by forbidding the raising of prices as a result of the earthquake, while in the United States, with global consequences, the price of oil and gas immediately shot up, even though oil and gas facilities were not significantly damaged by Katrina. So after Katrina speculation was another stark example. It went on and on. In fact, I brought an article from the Wall Street Journal to the conference in China that justified the jump in oil prices to just over $130 a barrel at the time I left for China, in part because China had had an earthquake, and would require more fuel oil, which is absolutely criminal!
Capitalism’s contradictions are deepening rapidly, which is in part reflected by the crisis in finance capital that began in August of 2007, and also is reflected by the tremendous jump in oil and fuel prices since finance capital suffered the first of what have been several heart attacks, with more to come. And while oil has gone up from $58 a barrel to $138 since August, 2007, rice, a staple for nearly half of humanity, has gone from under $300 a metric ton to over a $1000 earlier this year.
Capital’s response to its crisis is, in large part, an attempt to weaken and cheapen labor. This is reflected in the devastation wrought in Michigan on the United Auto Workers, and in Ohio and other unionized areas on airline workers, but also in intensified attacks on China, one of which is the up-pricing of commodities.
One of the things that I mentioned at the conference is a revealing study called Victory by Peter Schweizer on the special measures that were used to bring down the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a significant net energy exporter. Some of the measures used were to significantly bring down energy prices, as well as to prevent the Soviet Union from exporting energy. China is now a significant net energy importer, and part of the strategy now is to try and raise prices and destabilize China.
Part of the strategy in the late 1970s and 1980s, as capitalist contradictions were deepening, was to mount all kinds of political challenges to the Soviet Union and allied states, such as the rise of Solidarnosc in Poland. And in some ways the challenges today, whether around Tibet or various other weaknesses of China, reflect an attempt by capitalism to utilize real weaknesses to try to bring about a capitalist counter-revolution in China.
Without significant strengthening of all China’s mass organizations, whether the trade unions, environmental organizations, or equality organizations – whether for women’s equality or that of national minorities, or the youth organizations, capitalism could move to destabilize China and try to engineer a counter-revolution there.
Basically, whether it it’s the jump in oil prices, the jump in food prices, or the jump in the price of iron ore, or copper or nickel, in anything that China needs, even the cost of shipping those products to China, which in some cases has jumped 20-fold in less than 10 years, China faces a real danger of counter-revolution. The main thing I was trying to emphasize in China was – and I was certainly speaking to an audience that was very sympathetic – the importance of developing confidence in the working class, both nationally and internationally, confidence in Marxism, confidence in socialism, confidence in the Communist Party, and in trying to expose the bankruptcy of capitalism, its economic, social, moral and environmental bankruptcy. China needs to develop the unity of the working class, both at the political and trade union level, to meet this tremendous challenge, because the high price of oil, corn and wheat, and the challenges around Tibet, reflect capitalism’s deepening contradictions and its increasing desperation. This means that without greater strengthening of our own ranks, humanity will be in serious trouble.
