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	Workers Vanguard No. 989	28 October 2011

Nuclear Power and Capitalism

(Letters)

Oakland, California
15 August 2011

To the Editors

Dear Comrades, 

While I agree that the working class in power must remake the world, that Green Party reformism is a dead end, and that an exclusive focus on ending nukes is also reformist, I cannot understand your drive to promote a dangerous and dying capitalist industry such as nuclear power (“Greens’ Anti-Nuclear Hysteria Amnesties Capitalism,” WV 983, 08 July 2011).  

You say that the struggle must be for the expropriation of energy concerns, and that this must be “part of the fight for a socialist revolution to establish an internationally planned economy under the control of workers councils.” Good. But then you say, “Only then, based on an international division of labor, will it be possible to consider whether it is really necessary to construct nuclear power plants in thickly settled earthquake zones like Japan.” H-m-m, that sounds like damning with faint praise. Why withhold condemnation of such capitalist crimes?

Trotskyists seek to breathe revolutionary life into the class struggle with the Transitional Program, saying: here’s what the revolutionaries want to do with the world to address the current needs of the masses. But the SL says, essentially, just put us in power, and then everything will be sorted out. Periodically, you mention some general slogans, such as “public works.” But you don’t say what sort of public works for today, and it sounds like you’re just reading an old quote.

Aside from capitalism itself, climate change is the most devastating threat humanity has ever faced. It represents the ultimate in the rift between man and nature, of which Marx and Engels spoke. The working class needs to know: how will the revolutionaries deal with this? Of course we’re for technology, but we don’t just take over capitalist industry as is: we transform the entire economy into an engine for real human needs, which now must include: saving the planet. Which technologies will serve that end best?

Many scientists now say that an economy based entirely on renewable technology is possible. Is the SL just not paying attention?

Do you support the license extensions the capitalists demand for outdated nuclear plants which are becoming increasingly dangerous, or oppose them on safety grounds? If the latter, where do revolutionaries go next? We know what the capitalists will do: more coal, oil, gas and new nuclear. You don’t promote mountain top removal, fracking, coal gas, tar sands or shale oil (all of which must be stopped immediately under workers’ government, in my opinion). Yet instead of revolutionary, transitional demands to transform the economy, you defend a capitalist-promoted technology that has already compromised humanity’s future with radioactive waste, and could easily irradiate the entire planet. Why?

Revolutionaries want to move beyond capitalism’s path of profit-driven destruction! Say clearly: only a revolutionary workers government can, with workers councils and careful planning, save the working class, humanity and the planet; and here’s how.

Comradely greetings,
Chris Kinder

WV Replies:

Peddling an “alternative energy” agenda is entirely consistent with continued capitalist rule and imperialist depredation. When the German parliament (Bundestag) voted this summer to close all of the country’s nuclear power plants by 2022, Chancellor Angela Merkel tapped renewable sources (wind, biomass, solar and hydroelectric) to pick up the slack. Renewables already account for 20 percent of Germany’s electricity generation. In the U.S., advanced biofuels are ready to be rapidly commercialized for military use. Soon drone aircraft will fly with a reduced carbon footprint while raining down death and destruction on neocolonial peoples.

We want nothing to do with advising the bourgeoisie on how best to meet its energy needs, which is tantamount to helping prop up the decaying and anarchic profit system. Not so Kinder, who also decries “climate change” as a “devastating threat” separate and apart from “capitalism itself.” In fact, shattering the capitalist order and establishing an internationally planned, socialist economy is the key to overcoming major ecological problems. Human-derived climate change is no exception, as we detailed in our two-part article “Capitalism and Global Warming” (WV Nos. 965 and 966, 24 September and 8 October 2010).

Our goal as Marxists is to eliminate material scarcity. In that pursuit, we defend the gains of science and technology, and a socialist society would build on these advances. But when the proletariat first seizes state power, it will have to “take over capitalist industry as is” and qualitatively develop the productive forces from there. No amount of wishful thinking regarding what is “possible” can make it otherwise. We are not so presumptuous as to preclude the use of fossil fuels or nuclear power in a workers state, as these energy sources could well prove crucial in modernizing and developing much of the world. At the same time, when workers are in charge of production, energy would be generated in the most rational, efficient and safe manner possible.

Judging by this letter and another in the September/October 2011 issue of the San Francisco-based Socialist Viewpoint, Kinder is quite busy proselytizing the petty-bourgeois anti-nuclear gospel. In his zeal, he even resorts to shamelessly attempting to frame us up as backhanded supporters of the nuclear reactor owners at Fukushima and elsewhere. As evidence, he offers up the following sentence from our article: “Only then, based on an international division of labor, will it be possible to consider whether it is really necessary to construct nuclear power plants in thickly settled earthquake zones like Japan.” It is a dim formulation, but not one that backs up Kinder’s spurious charges. An international federation of workers states could make available considerable resources so that there would be no need to operate fission reactors in heavily populated areas prone to earthquakes.

When sounding the catastrophist alarm on global warming, Kinder exhibits a touching faith in the stability of world imperialism, which is currently floundering in a deep and ongoing economic crisis. He argues as if it were entirely inconceivable that this decaying capitalist system could produce another major war or a resurgence of fascism. For all his invective against nuclear power, it is the enormous nuclear weapons arsenals possessed by the imperialists that “could easily irradiate the entire planet.” Even a “modest” regional nuclear exchange could entomb the globe in billowing ash, cooling the earth, destroying agriculture and killing a good portion of humanity. In the case of the U.S., the imperialist rulers, who possess the means to extinguish all human life, already intentionally unleashed nuclear holocaust on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Posturing as a “revolutionary” who is “for technology,” Kinder is at bottom a technocratic reformist. No less than the reformist groups taken up in the WV No. 983 article, he is all too eager to conflate technology with how the capitalist magnates apply (and promote) it. Never mind that most of the world runs off fossil fuels and nuclear power. To just stop accessing mountaintop coal or other fossil fuels would be catastrophic, triggering massive blackouts and otherwise devastating people’s lives and livelihoods. In enthusing over “renewable technology,” Kinder also gives a free pass to the “green” bosses of the world like Solyndra.

The simple truth is that all capitalist industries are hazardous. With thousands of workers killed annually on the job in the U.S. alone, the bosses’ murderous greed writ large creates conditions ensuring that deadly disasters happen with appalling regularity. For the bourgeoisie, the nuclear business is business as usual. When it comes to radioactive waste, which Kinder luridly claims “has already compromised humanity’s future,” the volume (and the number of lethal doses) is small compared to the total volume of poisons produced by industry as a whole, many of which do not afford the advantage of decay to a benign state.

Instead of swearing off a technology because capitalist profiteering greatly magnifies its potential dangers, the response should be to marshal union power in a fight for safety. Our article reaffirmed the demand for “union control of working conditions and, where there are specific hazards, action to shut down dangerous facilities.” Kinder’s silence on this very real matter of life and death shows that his professed interest in breathing “revolutionary life into the class struggle” is so much smoke.

Although he fraudulently invokes Trotsky’s Transitional Program, Kinder dumped revolutionary politics decades ago, when this one-time labor editor of Workers Vanguard quit our organization. As his letter amply demonstrates, he has since gone green-at-the-gills swimming in the Bay Area radical-liberal swamp. When he calls for “revolutionary, transitional demands to transform the economy,” Kinder merely is looking to overhaul the capitalist energy sector. In fact, the purpose of the Transitional Program is to mobilize the proletariat in struggle around its concrete felt needs and link such struggles to the fight for workers revolution. Singling out an industry for elimination, as Kinder does, vitiates any fundamental critique of the capitalist system. Needless to say, such a program would be greeted less than kindly by the workers who would be out of a job.