CATASTROPHE ALERT! What Is To Be Done Against the Willful Destruction of the Unity of Humanity and Nature?

By Stefan Engel

An ever increasing number of local and regional ecological catastrophes plague humanity. They are symptoms of an environmental crisis which is in the process of transforming at an accelerated pace into a global environmental catastrophe.

As their chief causes are to be found in the capitalist profit system, the environmental question today calls for a society-changing struggle. This is why we need a new environmental movement which draws a clear dividing line to imperialist environmentalism and organizes its ranks. Militantly, purposefully and on a global scale it must confront the willful destruction of the natural foundations of life by those in power.

The book's polemics are intentional. Taking an unequivocal position it intervenes in the debate over the strategy how to resolve the environmental issue.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verlag Neuer Weg
• Release date: Mar 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9783880214156

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Bibliography

Preface

The environmental question undoubtedly has arrived in the public consciousness. The world over, concern for the state of the natural environment is growing. No serious politician, media professional, entrepreneur or trade-unionist can afford to ignore this question anymore. Too many local and regional ecological disasters meanwhile plague humanity.

The impression is created in the public eye that the problem of the environment is in good hands with the ruling powers and their governments. But in reality, since the environmental crisis arose in the early 1970s they have been neither willing nor able to undertake any effective action against it. Instead, humanity is drifting at an unabated – and even accelerated – pace towards a global environmental catastrophe which has the potential for destroying the foundations of all human existence. The responsibility for this development lies mainly with the international supermonopolies, which today control the entirety of world production and world trade as well as politics, economics and science in all countries.

A new environmental consciousness has awakened. But its level far from suffices to comprehend the threat to the existence of humankind in all its consequences. Public opinion one-sidedly focuses attention on individual factors of the environmental crisis – for example the threatening climate catastrophe. At the same time, other problems no less dramatic, such as the growing ozone hole and the destruction of the oceans’ ecosystems or the forests, are put out of mind or played down. Above all, the interconnections and interactions are largely ignored.

Is it at all conceivable that convincing arguments alone can get those in charge of the capitalist profit economy to stop this development? Is it conceivable that the ruling international monopolies suddenly will give up their dictatorship or their exorbitant profits just to save the environment?

This is not going to happen! Fully aware of the deadly risks they take the Earth to the brink of an environmental catastrophe! The circumstances of capitalist competition today demand of the international monopolies, under penalty of their ruin, that they carry the overexploitation of humans and nature to extremes.

The so-called environmental issue has long since become a highly political issue. What is the justification for a social order whose entire existence is based on a foundation which threatens humans and nature?

Instead of doing anything of significance to counter this threat, those in power have instituted a whole system of imperialist and petty-bourgeois environmentalism in order to manipulate the whole of humanity. With appeasement, lies, cover-ups and specious solutions they attempt to prevent active resistance by the masses or undermine it.

This book leaves no room for doubt that humanity must not leave the environmental issue up to the ruling social system. If it does, it will sink into capitalist barbarism!

On the basis of diverse concrete studies the book comes to the conclusion that humanity meanwhile finds itself in the middle of a progressing transition to a global environmental catastrophe. Resolving the environmental issue today calls for a society-changing struggle. Only an international socialist revolution can solve the social and ecological question. Only in a socialist society without exploitation of man by man do humans and nature form a fruitful unity. Only in a classless communist society will the humanization of nature and the naturalization of humans come to their relative completion, as Karl Marx formulated.

To accomplish this great goal, the environmental movement and the working-class movement must change. The revolutionaries all over the world must change, too; they must enlarge their political strategy and tactics and raise them to a higher level to reflect the new facts.

This will not be possible without serious discussions, without critical and self-critical assessment, and without advances in knowledge on the issue itself. This book is intended to provide help for this and contribute to the discussion. It is explicitly a polemic which intervenes in the strategy debate on the solution of the environmental question and takes an unequivocal position. It is a book that seeks to destroy illusions, but above all a book that wants to mobilize people and creatively outline the vision of a future society in which the environmental question indeed can been solved.

The book upholds a high scientific standard and is based on thorough investigation, on facts gained from bourgeois science, in order to critically wrest from them the essential findings and reveal the dialectical connections existing in the universal interaction between humans and nature.

The guiding principles of this book are the dialectical-materialist method and the theory of the fundamental unity of humanity and nature, developed 170 years ago by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. With the emergence of reformism in the working-class movement at the end of the nineteenth century, these fundamentals were rejected, disregarded, even systematically cast aside. This negatively influences the working-class and people’s movements to this day.

Along with the acknowledgment of the brilliant discoveries of Marx and Engels regarding the dialectics of humanity and nature, a hallmark of this book is the militant debate with modern anticommunism on the issue of the environment. Also, various forms of resignation, minimization, simplification or panic, which can be encountered in the environmental movement, are subjected to a philosophical critique.

The editorial collective thanks the more than 100 collaborators who made well-informed contributions to this book. They include Klaus Arnecke, architect; Günther Bittel, MD, anesthesiologist and general practitioner; Herbert Buchta, biologist and practical veterinarian; Werner Engelhardt, political scientist; Adelheid Erbslöh, biologist; Oskar Finkbohner, collaborator of the Society for the Promotion of Scientific Studies on the Working-Class Movement (GSA); Monika Gärtner-Engel, professional educator; Rainer Jäger, editor; Prof. Dr. Christian Jooss, physicist; Dr. Hans-Ulrich Jüttner, physicist; Christoph Klug, certified psychologist and science journalist; Prof. Dr. Josef Lutz, physicist; Willi Mast, MD, general practitioner; Roland Meister, lawyer; Dieter Stein, MD, general practitioner; Peter Weispfenning, lawyer; Gerd Zitzner, agricultural engineer.

Last, but not least, the book is a result of critical and self-critical discussions and cooperation with activists of the environmental movement and with revolutionaries from all over the world.

The title of the book edition – Catastrophe Alert! What Is to Be Done Against the Willful Destruction of the Unity of Humanity and Nature? – is intended to create awareness of the seriousness of the problems as well as of the urgent need for solving them.

This book is not the first occasion on which the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany has concerned itself with the environmental issue. It carries on the Revolutionärer Weg series, which has dealt with the environmental crisis fundamentally and systematically from the standpoint of Marxism-Leninism since 1984. But it raises knowledge to a new level, reflecting the developments which meanwhile have materialized. Above all, the book is intended to help put the environmental issue firmly back on the agenda in the international revolutionary and working-class movement.

Stefan Engel, March 2014

I. On the Fundamental Unity of Humanity and Nature

1. Dialectics of Nature

Scientific concept of nature

In everyday use the term nature usually is restricted to individual phenomena in the human environment: the landscape, flora and fauna, or the weather. From the point of view of dialectical materialism, however, the concept of nature encompasses the entire universal reality.

Nature consists of an infinite multitude of forms of material motion and constantly changing material states of matter in motion. The best known forms of motion are change of place, friction, heat, light, electricity, magnetism, radioactive radiation, chemical reactions, biochemical metabolism, photosynthesis, etc. As to the material states we can distinguish between gases, solids and liquids or between organic and inorganic matter. These elements of nature mutually determine one another and simultaneously are in continual conflict with one another.

All the different forms of existence of matter are nothing but different natural processes. According to current knowledge these forms range from continuous matter through tiny subatomic particles in the microcosm to gigantic clusters of galaxies and even bigger superstructures in the macrocosm.

With the help of spectrum analysis it could be proved that galaxies and cosmic nebulae, stars and planets like our Earth consist of identical components: the atoms of the chemical elements and subatomic particles. All manifestations and stages of development of matter make up a system of universal coming into being and passing away.

Dialectical materialism takes as starting point that all nature is material – that is to say, exists objectively, independent of the consciousness and will of humans. The motion of matter is governed by dialectical laws of motion. The dialectics of nature can be understood to subsume material motion in its most general form.

At every stage of development of matter, qualitatively new forms and also new laws of motion arise, which humans can investigate, cognize and use. The progress of human knowledge becomes manifest in the degree to which humanity understands the dialectics of nature, as well as in its ability to consciously apply the dialectical method to nature, society, and human thinking, feeling and acting.

Bourgeois cosmology denies the infinity of matter. It considers only matter’s concrete forms and treats them as absolute. It has always searched tirelessly, but in vain, for a beginning and end of the universe. According to the prevailing doctrine, the expansion of the cosmos is supposed to have begun about 13 to 20 billion years ago out of nothing, with a big bang. Marxist-Leninists criticized this creation story of bourgeois cosmology from the very beginning; meanwhile it is a subject of very great controversy even among bourgeois scientists.

The concrete natural phenomena are finite, while the universal motion of matter is infinite. The infiniteness of matter in motion is what constitutes its universal identity in the macrocosm and the microcosm.

The origination of matter and motion out of nothing is incompatible with the laws of nature. Matter in motion, or material motion, is uncreatable and indestructible. Frederick Engels wrote:

The whole of nature accessible to us forms a system, an interconnected totality of bodies, and by bodies we understand here all material existences extending from stars to atoms, indeed right to ether particles, in so far as one grants the existence of the last named. In the fact that these bodies are interconnected is already included that they react on one another, and it is precisely this mutual reaction that constitutes motion. It already becomes evident here that matter is unthinkable without motion. And if, in addition, matter confronts us as something given, equally uncreatable as indestructible, it follows that motion also is as uncreatable as indestructible. (Dialectics of Nature, in: Marx/Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 363)

The qualitative changes in nature proceed in leaps. What distinguishes the dialectical transition from the undialectical transition? Lenin asks and replies: The leap. The contradiction. The interruption of gradualness. ("Conspectus of Hegel’s Book Lectures on the History of Philosophy," in: Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 38, p. 284)

It is absurd and wishful thinking when bourgeois scientists, philosophers or politicians favor gradual, evolutionary processes in nature, in society, or in human thinking, feeling and acting over the leaps of revolutionary processes. Both forms of motion, evolution and revolution, mutually determine one another in nature, proceed one from the other, and transform into one another in an infinitely continuing process. The gradual motion prepares the manifest change, the qualitative leap, and in turn is set in motion again by the leap, on an increasingly higher level.

These qualitative leaps can take place in just a fraction of a second, as they do in biological, chemical and electrical processes or in human thinking, feeling and acting. But they also may require billions of years as in the emergence and passing away of stars. These tremendous differences mislead vulgar materialists or empiricists to accept only perceptible changes. For them the world process consists of isolated phenomena, of eternally recurring cycles, or of processes which go through quantitative changes at most.

Qualitative leaps indicate their approach through accelerated quantitative changes and through intensification of the internal contradictions in things or processes. Based on scientific analyses of the speedup of global warming, the increase in extremely contradictory weather patterns, the accelerated extinction of species, the conspicuous acidification of the oceans, the destruction of the forests, the thinning of the ozone layer and the increase in regional environmental catastrophes since the 1990s, the MLPD came to the trenchant conclusion that in the process of the global environmental crisis a qualitative leap, the transformation into a global environmental catastrophe, already has been initiated. Further scientific observations meanwhile confirm that this process has broadened and accelerated. It is only the metaphysical methods of the bourgeois world outlook that prevent a realistic prediction of how the unity of humankind and nature will develop.

To study and generalize the infinite forms of motion of matter, the infinite processes of transformation from one form of matter to another, and to wrest from nature the concrete laws of motion effective here, and then to apply these laws – therein lies the foundation in world outlook for comprehending the unity of humanity and nature better and better and for the ever greater ability to shape this unity. Ultimately, only a social order which is guided by such a scientific proletarian, socialist and communist mode of thinking can ensure a sustainable and continually advancing unity of humanity and nature.

Dialectics of the macrocosm

Owing to the development of radio astronomy, human perception in the macrocosm today extends into the depths of the universe, to a distance of about 13.8 billion light years¹. But this still is only a minute section of the endless expanses of the universe. Billions of star systems (galaxies) can be observed. They form clusters and superclusters, each containing up to a million galaxies. As with all forms of matter, there is struggle and unity, interaction and collision also between galaxies. They pass through different stages of development and can be absorbed by larger galaxies, can give rise to new galaxies, or disintegrate into lower forms of matter.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, belongs to a cluster of about 30 galaxies. It contains 200 to 300 billion stars rotating in the form of a huge spiral around a center and partly forming globular clusters.

Our Sun moves in an area near the Milky Way’s rim, some 30,000 light years from the galactic center. It takes the Sun roughly 220 million years for one orbit around the galactic center.

Our solar system consists of the Sun, eight planets with their moons, planetoids², comets and meteorites, gas and dust. 99.87 percent of the mass of the solar system is concentrated in the Sun, which is the reason why the other celestial objects rotate around the Sun in its gravitational field.

The Sun is a star, a luminous gas sphere of great mass and high temperatures. Inside the Sun, plasma, consisting of hydrogen and helium nuclei, free electrons and two percent heavier elements, glows with a temperature of more than 15 million degrees Celsius.

The Sun’s energy originates mainly from the fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium nuclei. In this fusion, part of the nuclei’s mass is transformed into energy and released in the form of radiation.

The Sun is surrounded by the photosphere – an outer layer no more than 300 kilometers wide. The temperature there is only about 5,700 degrees. From there, the greatest part of the solar energy is radiated outward. Moreover, every second around one million tons of solar material gush from the Sun’s corona into space at supersonic speed. The end of our Sun as the energy source of our solar system can be calculated to come in roughly five billion years.

The Sun’s radiation consists of electromagnetic waves and charged particles. Only a small part of them reach the Earth and are absorbed by the Earth’s atmosphere in different ways or reflected.

With its mass of six sextillion tons and a diameter of 12,756 kilometers at the equator, from a macrocosmic viewpoint the Earth is a tiny celestial object. It rotates around its own axis, which gives rise to alternating day and night and influences air movements and ocean currents.

The almost circular course of the Earth around the Sun guarantees an approximately even supply of energy. The inclination of the Earth’s axis by an angle of 66.5 degrees relative to the plane of its solar orbit produces the differences in the seasons. The Moon’s gravity acts upon the oceans and gives rise to the tides.

Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago from gaseous and dustlike particles of matter. They repeatedly collided, whereby they became hot and fused. The internal pressure and high temperature and the heat caused by the decay processes of radioactive materials made the Earth molten at first.

The Earth’s crust, the solid mantle, formed only gradually. Underneath the crust is the Earth’s core, which mainly consists of red-hot iron. The Earth’s crust and the upper mantle to a depth of 250 kilometers contain liquid magma. The movement of this magma is the reason why the tectonic plates of the Earth’s crust constantly remain in motion, giving rise to repeated earthquakes or volcano eruptions. The Earth’s core begins at a depth of 2,900 kilometers; a temperature between 4,000 and 6,000 degrees Celsius prevails there.

Since the Earth formed, gases issued from its interior. The Earth was heavy enough to partly attract these gases, retain them and so develop an atmosphere. Because of this the Earth cooled down considerably slower than otherwise was to be expected. This was an important condition for the origination of life.

In the primordial atmosphere of Earth, with the help of solar energy and volcanic activity, larger amounts of organic materials were able to form. From this organic matter, first living organisms developed in the primeval oceans in approximately a billion years. The biosphere emerged. As culmination point of an evolutionary process lasting roughly 3.5 billion years, the first humans began to develop there, along with the natural environment suitable for their existence.

Dialectics of the laws of nature

The law of gravity is a fundamental law of nature. It describes the forces acting between masses in nature. Gravitation influences matter in diverse ways. For example, it changes the path and frequency of light as well as the speed of microscopic movements in atoms and molecules. In the mechanical world view, gravitation is treated as an attractive force between celestial bodies. From the standpoint of his dialectical-materialist conception of nature, Frederick Engels criticized the absolutization of this aspect of gravitation:

All natural processes are two-sided, they are based on the relation of at least two operative parts, action and reaction.… But attraction and repulsion are as inseparable as positive and negative, and hence from dialectics itself it can already be predicted that the true theory of matter must assign as important a place to repulsion as to attraction, and that a theory of matter based on mere attraction is false, inadequate, and one-sided.… The whole theory of gravitation rests on saying that attraction is the essence of matter. This is necessarily false. Where there is attraction, it must be complemented by repulsion. (Dialectics of Nature, op. cit., pp. 373 and 523)

The idealist-metaphysical conception of nature absolutizes the validity of individual laws of nature or individual aspects thereof. It regards natural laws as eternal, as placed in nature from outside and therefore as standing above nature. In reality, the various laws of motion are merely expressions of the qualitatively different processes at the different stages of development of matter.

The construction of atoms is excellent proof of the two-sided character of nature. The mass of an atom is concentrated in the atomic nucleus, whose positive electric charge exerts an attractive force on the negatively charged electrons of the atomic shell. The kinetic energy of the electrons prevents them falling into the positively charged atomic nucleus and neutralizing it. The electron shell therefore results in relative shielding of the electrical field of the positively charged atomic nucleus. More energy-efficient shells can be achieved through combination with the electron shells of other elements or the same element. This is why most elements in nature almost exclusively are found bound up in molecules or in crystals.

Notwithstanding all dialectically-materialistically obtained individual pieces of knowledge, bourgeois science remains dominated by the metaphysical-idealist world outlook. The metaphysical method breaks up the universal interconnection of the processes of metabolic interchange between humans and nature into a flood of isolated individual findings. The result is wrong interpretations and practical mistakes usually at the expense of humans and the natural environment.

The determinative driving force behind bourgeois science is to translate the knowledge of nature as quickly and directly as possible into a maximum profit yielding production of commodities. This is dictated by the fierce capitalist competition at the stage of internationalized production. This narrow-minded motivation increasingly limits the horizon of science and has led to a crisis in the development of the modern natural sciences.

Only in conformity with the laws of nature can the unity of humanity and nature be consciously shaped and developed to higher levels. Frederick Engels writes:

Dialectics, so-called objective dialectics, prevails throughout nature, and so-called subjective dialectics, dialectical thought, is only the reflection of the motion through opposites which asserts itself everywhere in nature, and which by the continual conflict of the opposites and their final passage into one another, or into higher forms, determines the life of nature. (Dialectics of Nature, op. cit., p. 492)

The materialist-dialectical mode of thinking is essential for the development of modern science. It is the only method which elucidates the processes of development, interconnections and transitions in nature between one field of study and another.

¹ A light year is 9.5 trillion kilometers.

² Planetoid: small planet

2. The Biosphere – Foundation of Human Life

All life is intimately and indissolubly connected in a complex manner with the inanimate environment. In natural science, the part of the Earth that makes life possible and contains life forms is called the biosphere³.

Some science textbooks define the biosphere one-sidedly as the totality of all living beings on Earth or as the sum of all ecosystems on Earth. For ecology professor Hartmut Bick, for example, the biosphere is the region on planet Earth inhabitable by organisms (Ökologie, p. 8).

But such a view is one-sided, simplifies matters and is misleading. It sees animate and inanimate worlds as rigid opposites and mutually isolated phenomena. The essence of life, however, reveals itself precisely in its incessant active interchange of matter with inanimate nature. Frederick Engels criticized the metaphysical way of looking at nature:

In nature nothing takes place in isolation. Everything affects and is affected by every other thing, and it is mostly because this manifold motion and interaction is forgotten that our natural scientists are prevented from gaining a clear insight into the simplest things. (Dialectics of Nature, op. cit., p. 459)

In agreement with this dialectical-materialist view of nature, the Russian geoscientist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863–1945) developed an appropriate definition of the biosphere: the totality of earthly organisms including the inanimate matter which surrounds them, with which they are involved in an unending exchange of matter, and which they help to shape and determine.

Vernadsky emphasized the active role of life in the system of the biosphere, in particular the role of humans endowed with consciousness. Humans can lastingly and deeply reshape their animate and inanimate environment and are influenced by this environment; they are a part of the biosphere. That includes the possibility of changing the natural environment in such a negative way that the natural conditions of human existence are very extensively deformed or even destroyed.

In this respect it is scientifically entirely correct to speak today of the destruction of the natural environment of human beings. In contrast, the generalizing notion of the destruction of nature, sometimes used colloquially in the environmental movement, must be rejected as unscientific from the dialectical-materialist viewpoint, and appears to be a product of panic. Nature and the universe can be neither created nor destroyed, but only changed.

The system of the biosphere

Except for the Earth, to date no other celestial body has been discovered that shows evidence of life or adequate conditions for life. Because of the universal validity of the laws of nature, extraterrestrial life is basically possible – wherever in the infinite universe the necessary natural conditions for it exist.

The biosphere is a rather thin envelope compared with the overall volume of the Earth. It extends from approximately 60 kilometers above the Earth’s surface to five kilometers beneath it. It comprises the uppermost layer of the Earth’s crust, including the system of water-covered areas and the lower layers of the atmosphere.

The emergence of life 3.5 billion years ago is the result of the infinite changeability of the forms of motion of inanimate and animate matter. In his book, Der Geist fiel nicht vom Himmel (The Mind Did Not Fall from the Sky), Hoimar von Ditfurth described the process by which the first primitive life originated:

The first step in life thus was an act of gaining independence, of breaking away from the surroundings, which then objectively became the external world.… This almost self-evident demand now is confronted in a seemingly paradoxical