OVER the course of this weekend, communists of Britain will be attending the 2024 Harry Pollitt School in Manchester, named after the legendary Communist Party leader. The weekend school for communists, trade union militants, students, and workers is an opportunity to learn, socialise, exchange views, and help build the struggle for socialism in Britain.
 
For environmentalists, this comes at a crucial time when capitalism’s insatiable drive for profit allows oil and gas companies to make record-breaking returns and where the Tory government, in conjunction with further elements of the ruling class, in the interests of its big business donors and in an attempt to gain a perceived electoral advantage, abandons any pretence that it gives the environmental crisis sufficient political weight.
 
At the same time, so-called Green Parties from around the world continue to propose ineffective, reformist, and purely electoral strategies which merely promote individual restructuring as the base for tackling climate change. Communists stand resolutely determined in the challenge to call out the careerist opportunism of these pseudo-environmentalists.
 
Effective climate and environmental action is incompatible with capitalist “business as usual” and linking the fight against climate change with the ongoing campaign to collectively liberate the international working class is vital.
 
The class antagonisms that are so visibly exposed in the attempt to preserve the capitalist mode of production by reformist and neoliberal advocates must be ruthlessly challenged and expropriated, creating space not only for socialism to blossom but also the shoots of natural life that will save the planet from total destruction.
 
The relationship between the current mode of production and climate change is of great importance and is a key factor in the destruction of our environment. Marxist ecology has a growing place in environmental discourse as the realisation that the world cannot go on as it is increases — but there must be the political will to make change.
 
However, if recent months have given us anything to go by, it is that Westminster, Holyrood, and the Senedd do not have that will. As green as they attempt to look, their policies are littered with half-measures and false promises.

This is no great surprise of course, the Conservative, SNP, and Labour parties’ interests lie not with the workers of Britain, nor the rest of the world, instead, they lie in the bank accounts of big energy companies, destructive housing associations, private water companies, and arms manufacturers.
 
Just as they have waged wars which have decimated towns, cities, and nations, for the sake of fossil fuels, our parliaments are more than willing to destroy our entire planet, in the search for further riches.

After all, these politicians and the bourgeoisie will not be the ones to bear the brunt of a global climate catastrophe, it will be the working class, particularly in the global South, who will be left to pick up what pieces remain as the water banks burst, our sea levels rise, our forests are set ablaze, and our planet dies from within.
 
We cannot wait for capitalism to founder as the world burns — capitalism will always find new ways to make a profit. Already we see a nascent “green economy” with markets in carbon credits, “clean” fossil fuels and unproven carbon capture and storage; there has to be radical change. As the late Paul Burkett said in his work Marx and Nature:
 
“A communist restructuring of the productive metabolism is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of ecologically sustainable human development. It all depends on the explicit integration of ecological and other concerns into the anti-capitalist revolutionary process itself.”
 
The Young Communist League and Communist Party of Britain will have to channel the raw emotions and social instability and agitate workers to centre it towards the governments of Scotland, England and Wales so that we can build a revolution.
 
We must show the working masses who the class criminals that are destroying our planet are — showing that our enemies have names and faces.
 
The emergence of revolutions, especially across the global South, in response to ecological breakdown is inevitable. It is our duty to ensure that an equal and just communist society blossoms from the destruction of the old state machinery. Only communism can save our planet.
 
The Harry Pollitt School is a chance for communists, trade union militants, students, and workers to learn the vital theory necessary for recognising that we need a class-conscious green movement, soaked in the deepest shade of red.
 
Richard Hebbert is the environment commission convener for the Communist Party of Britain.

Nathan Hennebry is environmental officer for the Young Communist League.