The very nature of the coal industry is the epitome for capitalism—miners become cogs in the machine of production as their lives are expendable and the industry is dominated by wealthy elites, and the destruction of the environment for profits.

(Mike Ely, Revolutionising production itself: for humanity and for the world, , April 24, 2012 )

A horizon beyond scarcity and inequality First: Human beings have suffered, bitterly, from poverty and scarcity. Being dirt poor is awful. Watching your children go hungry and even starving before your eyes is unbearable — or watching a newborn die of dehydration from bad water. Seeing a world of goods, inventions and travel, and yet being pinned (by endless grinding poverty) in dead-end, repetitive, unrewarding labour is maddening — especially when for literally billions of people there seems no way out.¶ Second: Modern productive capacity allows (for the first time in history) a society of common abundance. Previously poverty and starvation were a result of human helplessness in the face of the natural world — our once-limited ability to triumph over rocky ground, or hurricane devastation, or infection, or drought.¶ Now, however, the continued existence of hunger and poverty is a result of the current outrageous and unjust structure of human class society — the existence of class society itself is the cause of the difficult life of the vast majority of humanity. Something else is now possible (a mutual flourishing, radically new forms of egalitarianism, a radical redirecting of social surpluses toward actually solving the vast historic problems of the people around the world).¶ Production is marked by class nature¶ Third: The form of modern production (and consumption) are themselves deeply marked by the class nature of the societies that produced them. It is not just that the surplus of production is alienated from the exploited (by the owners of capital). The whole process of production (its forms, its inputs, its purpose, its outputs, its impacts, its physical engineering, its social constructs of hierarchy and punishments) is marked by the class society within which it emerged.¶ And this is deeply important for understanding how socialist sustainability will also need to revolutionise the inherited patterns of production and consumption.¶ One of the major contributions of [China's] Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was the insight that the very form of production is itself marked with capitalist or communist directions.¶ Some examples¶ The very architecture of capitalist factories assumes a specific form of hierarchy — and obstructs different, socialist/communist relations in production. In revolutionary China, factories, docks, shipyards, agricultural villages had to be build differently (with meeting rooms, and open spaces, cafeterias, and structural redundancies to allow the workers to actually participate in their own supposed “rule” over society.)¶ The very nature of capitalist assembly lines often assumes that workers are merely cogs in the process (and will not be meeting now and then to make decisions). And it is commonly structured to assume that “work life” for the workers is repetitive, uncreative and subordinate. Just think through how a textile mill in Bangladesh would have to be built differently to better serve society’s revolutionary transformation. (Would there be day care centres? an attached college? A side industry for processing link and toxic waste? Platforms for public speaking in the production buildings?)¶ The class nature is most obvious in the social structures of capitalist production (hierarchy, enforced obedience, threat of firing, experts in command, managers trained in capitalist efficiency, “attention to the bottom line", reproduction of “the colour line”, inherent separations between plant and community, between work and education, the assumptions of “commuting”, the functioning of rotating shifts, etc. etc.)¶ But you don’t get far into a socialist revolution without realising that class nature is also embedded in how machines are designed, or the assumptions of inherited processes. The production we inherit is itself (including physically) shaped by class society. And here we have been discussing the accumulating environmental impact of capitalist production (and the parallel crime of continuing such capitalist methods and assumptions in most previously socialist societies).¶ The fact that there are high communications among managers in industry, but little cross communication among farmers in the fields says a lot about how decisions are made, by whom and for what.¶ The example of coal¶ Let me take something I know about:¶ Coal itself is classless. It is simply a mineral seam in the ground.¶ But everything about coal production and consumption is marked by class (and class struggle) — and (in our current society) terribly marked by the capitalist nature of decision making over production.¶ One extreme current US example is mountain topping — under capitalism it is “profitable” to scar the precious mountains to retrieve coal in small seams — by simply removing the whole top of the mountain. This destroys something irreplaceable (and brings to mind Marx’s use of the word usufructuaries — i.e. we should be stewards of the world around us, and use its “fruits” in a sustainable way). The ratio is simple: under current market conditions, one inch of coal can pay for removing one foot of rock. So if the coal is 30 inches high (which is impossible to mine profitably by underground techniques), these coal pirate corporate pigs can “profitably” remove a mountain top that averages 30 feet high.¶ Karl Marx wrote, ¶ Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.¶ [Usufructuraries are those that harvest the fruits of what ultimately belongs to someone else. It is a 19th century legal word that captures some of what we now mean by "sustainable".]¶ Coalmining itself is soaked in the blood of the workers. In the mine where I worked, three men died over the years I was there. And men came out injured daily. Watching the older workers prepare for work you saw them (slowly, painfully) putting on trusses, braces, false legs. You saw missing fingers, or long scars. Capitalist coalmining uses up humans as a raw material.¶ Again: This was expressed in “how the mines were run” (i.e. what the processes were, how the bosses were trained, what was considered “safe”, what specific decisions were made) — but it was also embedded in the very nature of the production process, which had developed and morphed for a century under capitalism.¶ It’s not as if socialist society will simply “take over” the production processes inherited from capitalism, and use them to produce goods and surplus that we will now direct. The production itself has a class character.¶ And further: There are whole branches of industry whose expansion and even existence reflects the decisions of capitalism. The ruling class of the Eisenhower years (emerging from WWII, with the US controlling “cheap gas [petrol]” from the Middle East) decided to build a highway system with suburban sprawl (not a rail system, not compact cities). It was not just the profit making out of that process that was capitalist — the whole structuring of society, the very products being built, reflected capitalism’s values and priorities (including racism and white flight).