Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton has gone into overdrive selling his plan for nuclear energy. Australia’s longstanding bans on nuclear power are a legacy of working-class movements against uranium mining and weapons proliferation. Dutton’s Liberals want to overturn these bans and have proposed sites for seven nuclear power plants.
Anyone naive enough to believe that Peter Dutton has had an environmental epiphany and genuinely wants a transition away from fossil fuels will be disappointed. For one, Dutton’s proposal involves increasing the use of fossil fuels—boosting the role of gas in particular—during the long wait for nuclear power generation to become viable. 
But nuclear itself is not an environmentally friendly alternative to fossil fuels. Atom-splitting is an inherently volatile process that cannot be safely entrusted to the cost-cutting capitalist economy. The relatively short history of nuclear power has proven this, delivering monumental human and environmental tragedies in the cases of Chernobyl and Fukushima. Going into an era of more frequent and extreme weather events, covering the land with nuclear reactors is a terrifying prospect. 
Furthermore, nuclear is not a renewable resource. It relies on uranium mining, as well as constant and excessive water use. The question of how and where to store high-level nuclear waste, which must be isolated for millennia, multiplies the environmental problems of this supposedly “green” alternative.
While the Labor Party can dismiss the more insane proposals from Dutton, they themselves have paved the way for this. Over decades, both major parties have taken steps to try to normalise the nuclear fuel cycle in Australia, pushing back against the gains of anti-nuclear protests in the 1970s. 
Crucially, the Labor Party under Bob Hawke overturned its “no new mines” policy to permit the mining of uranium at Olympic Dam, one of the world’s largest uranium reserves. Under Kevin Rudd, Labor abandoned the party’s stated opposition to the expansion of uranium mining. At the state and federal levels, Labor has consistently pushed for the establishment of a nuclear waste dump in South Australia—a measure that, if successful, would increase the feasibility of nuclear power generation.
Today, the Albanese government’s commitment to Aukus has set the stage for Dutton’s nuclear turn. The development of nuclear submarines is Labor’s own version of a crazy and expensive nuclear program, and one holding a more realistic danger. With the steady rise in global tensions, ruling classes the world over are striving to bolster the nuclear fuel cycle as a prerequisite to potential nuclear arms development. On the importance of nuclear to warfare, Albanese and Dutton are in agreement, even while they bicker over energy policy. 
It’s also not as though Labor is offering an alternative path away from fossil fuels. While Dutton’s nuclear fantasies have stolen most of the headlines, the Albanese government’s recent gas plan is equally horrendous, offering no way forward on climate change.
A few years ago, Labor criticised Scott Morrison’s plan for a post-Covid gas-led recovery. “It’s a slogan, it’s not a policy. It’s simply a fraud”, Chris Bowen said at the time. Today, Labor’s Future Gas Strategy doubles down on Morrison’s efforts, committing not only to burn all the gas currently at our disposal, but to seek out and exploit new reserves.
The government has repeated verbatim the propaganda of the gas industry, presenting gas as somehow a “clean” alternative to coal. But this is not part of a green energy transition. Gas is a climate-wrecking fossil fuel, and the current plan will lock it in as a staple export and domestic energy source for decades to come. As Resources Minister Madeleine King said:
“Natural gas is needed through to 2050 and beyond ... We cannot rely on past investments in gas to get us through the next decades. We need continued investment in, and development of, gas supply and transport infrastructure to get us through the energy transition.”
Labor justifies the continued burning of fossil fuels with vague references to “offsets” that might still achieve net zero. But there is no existing carbon capture and storage technology capable of offsetting the scale of greenhouse gas emissions that the government is planning. This is even more of a fantasy than Dutton’s seven nuclear plants.
It is worth noting that Labor’s plans will have devastating global consequences for fossil fuel usage. Australia’s increasing supply of gas to world markets will shape the trajectory of the world economy, promoting the burning of gas wherever it can be sold.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There is no shortage of wealth and technology that could drive transition to renewable power sources. Labor has more than $350 billion to spend on nuclear submarines—money that could fund a complete transformation of our energy system. Instead Labor is committing us to the worst of both worlds: uninterrupted fossil fuel extraction for the profit of a few, and the wasteful construction of nuclear-powered war machines.

Jack Crawford

Labor and Liberals offer no way forward on the environment

Having allowed COVID to spread out of control, and with testing facilities overwhelmed, you might have thought that making rapid antigen testing free is the least the authorities could do. 
But the government is against it. Scott Morrison explained that this “means that the private market, whether it’s in the big warehouse pharmacies or the other pharmacies or the supermarkets, they can now go and stock their shelves with confidence that they won’t be undercut by the government”.
To put it another way: free rapid tests would mean less money for Morrison’s friends in business. The health crisis is a great opportunity for Woolworths, Chemist Warehouse, Dick Smith and Harvey Norman to boost their profits by selling health products at the highest price they can get away with. 
In early January, reports of extortionate prices flooded the internet. The cost of a single test increased from $10 to as much as $50 a unit. Those lucky enough to spot one on the shelves found themselves either ripped off or excluded. Price gouging retailers have since been somewhat restrained—allowed to sell at no more than 20 percent above the supply price.
According to Health Minister Greg Hunt, providing RATs for free would go against “common sense”. This common sense may be lost on the tens of thousands lining up for tests every day, or the people sitting at home or going to work anxious about whether they have COVID—let alone the millions living below the poverty line. 
But there is some truth to Hunt’s “common sense”. Profiteering during a pandemic may seem cruel and inhumane to most of us. But it is quite sensible from the point of view of the capitalists, on whose behalf Morrison and Hunt govern.
Capitalism is a system based on the production of commodities, things produced only to be sold. Almost every object within your reach is a commodity: your phone, your shoes, your chair. All were produced not primarily to satisfy social needs, but to be bought and sold on the market to generate profits for a private business.
For the free-market fundamentalists in the Liberal government, this is the ideal way to organise the economy and society. Supply and demand purportedly form a neat harmony. The companies that step in to meet a demand (such as testing kits during a pandemic) are rewarded with a profit. 
In reality, the profit motive sidelines human need and rewards predatory behaviour. The current pandemic has proven this repeatedly. Parasitic retailers have profiteered not only from tests, but from steeply priced masks and hand sanitiser. The pharmaceutical giants’ mission to make record profits has stunted the global distribution of vaccines—only 9 percent of people in Africa have received two doses.
Aside from the pandemic, the commodification of all things causes human suffering on an unbearable scale. Take food. We now produce enough food to keep the world’s human population fed (with plenty left over). We have the logistical capacity to get that food to all who need it—think of the expansive distribution networks of a single company like McDonald’s, selling millions of Big Macs across the planet every day. And yet almost a billion people finish each day pained and tired, if not dying, from hunger. 
The solution is in plain view: feed the hungry. But this would topple the logic of the capitalist market. If we establish the precedent that humans can eat for free, why would anyone pay for food? To borrow Scott Morrison’s phrase, feeding the hungry would “undercut” business. Instead, excess food is dumped and left to rot.
There are endless examples of the disaster that is for-profit production. Millions are homeless in the world’s richest countries despite empty dwellings outnumbering the homeless. Pharmaceutical companies prioritise products that will make money, not those which will save lives—they prefer more expensive long-term treatments to preventions or cures. Nature’s fresh water is captured, placed in plastic bottles bearing corporate logos, withheld from the poor, and sold to the benefit of the ultra-rich. This is the calculated madness, the “common sense”, at the heart of the system. 
There is nothing natural about capitalism and its mass commodity production. For most of human history we worked primarily to fulfil our needs, rather than to sell things for a profit. Modern society’s vast productive resources should be organised to benefit humanity and our environment. Food should be made for people to eat, houses made for people to live in, clothes made for people to wear, rather than to generate immense riches for a tiny minority. 
And yes, medicines should be distributed and medical testing should be carried out freely for the common good. It’s common sense.

RATs should be free (and so should lots of other things)

At the outbreak of World War I, the French army was mobilised in the fashion of Napoleonic times. On horseback and equipped with swords, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuirassier">cuirassiers</a> wore bright tricolour uniforms topped with feathers—the same get-up as when they swept through Europe a hundred years earlier. The remainder of 1914 would humble tradition-minded militarists. Vast fields were filled with trenches, barbed wire, poison gas and machine gun fire—plunging the ill-equipped soldiers into a violent hellscape of industrial-scale slaughter.
Capitalism excels at revolutionising war. Only three decades after the first World War I bayonet charge across no man’s land, the US was able to incinerate entire cities with a single (nuclear) bomb blast. And since the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, our rulers’ methods of war have been made yet more deadly and “efficient”.
Today imperialist competition is driving a renewed arms race, as rival global powers invent new and technically more complex ways to kill. Increasingly, governments and military authorities are focusing their attention not on new weapons per se, but on computer technologies that can enhance existing military arsenals and capabilities. Above all is the race to master so-called artificial intelligence (AI).
From its earliest days, military priorities have guided AI research. The event widely considered as marking the foundation of AI as a discipline—<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_workshop#:~:text=The%20Dartmouth%20Summer%20Research%20Project,essentially%20an%20extended%20brainstorming%20session.">a workshop at Dartmouth College in 1956</a>—was funded partly by the US military’s Office of Naval Research. The close military ties continued in the following decades. As the historian of computer science Paul Edwards explained in his book The Closed World: “As the project with the least immediate utility and the farthest-reaching ambitions, AI came to rely unusually heavily on ARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] funding. As a result, ARPA became the primary patron for the first twenty years of AI research”.
AI is a slippery concept. None of the achievements in the field in the 20th century actually involved independently “intelligent” machines. Scientists simply found ways to computerise decision-making using mathematics. For many decades AI remained either stuck in the realm of theory or limited to the performance of narrow algorithmic tasks. While a machine could <a href="https://theconversation.com/twenty-years-on-from-deep-blue-vs-kasparov-how-a-chess-match-started-the-big-data-revolution-76882">beat a chess world champion in 1997</a>, it took until 2015 before a machine <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-computer-beat-the-go-master/">could defeat a human champion</a> in the Chinese strategy game Go. AI systems have long struggled to perform more complex, intuitive tasks irreducible to abstract logic.
Nonetheless, the 21st century has seen an explosion of interest and investment in AI. The term AI remains a catchall for anything that impressively uses algorithms. But <a href="https://www.expert.ai/blog/machine-learning-definition/">machine learning</a> has definitely become more advanced, and the data sets from which they learn vaster. Universities around the world are experimenting in <a href="https://searchenterpriseai.techtarget.com/definition/deep-learning-deep-neural-network">“deep learning”</a>—the process where machines, designed to replicate <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network">neural networks</a> in the human brain, embark on intelligent self-driven learning. The field appears to have entered a golden age, which may still be in its infancy.
The AI “boom” is centred, as before, on the military. <a href="https://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/5240710/global-artificial-intelligence-and-robotics-for?utm_source=BW&amp;utm_medium=PressRelease&amp;utm_code=mvgw7w&amp;utm_campaign=1511701+-+AI+%26+Robotics+in+the+Global+Defense+Industry+to+Reach+%2461+Billion+by+2027+-+Robotics+Anticipated+to+Account+for+the+Largest+Share+of+Expenditure&amp;utm_exec=joca220prd">A recent report from Research and Markets</a> forecast that the global defence industry market for AI and robotics will grow to a value of US$61 billion in 2027, up from US$39 billion in 2018 (a cumulative expenditure of US$487 billion in ten years). This market growth is being driven by massive spending from major nation states, above all the US but including countries like China, Israel, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, Japan and South Korea.
The big sellers in this market include the usual suspects—defence contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Saab and Thales—as well as major technology and computing companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Alphabet (Google’s parent company). Indeed, the new AI arms race has seen increasingly close links forged between the California tech giants and the Pentagon. Amazon’s new CEO Andy Jassy <a href="https://onezero.medium.com/amazons-new-ceo-is-shaping-how-the-military-uses-killer-robots-9a783d05b7f4">sits on the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence</a> (NSCAI), which is advising on the rollout of AI in the US armed forces. Jassy’s fellow NSCAI commissioners include Microsoft executives, and the former Alphabet CEO Eric Schmidt.
What, then, do militaries plan to do with the AI they’re spending billions on developing? There are three main areas of interest: lethal autonomous weapons (also known as “killer robots”), cyber-attacking software, and surveillance and tracking systems.
The first category is what it sounds like: take existing weapons and make them autonomous. This is a military strategist’s dream—to have machines engage targets with minimal human direction or supervision. The guiding principle is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_multiplication">“force multiplication”</a>—that is, helping a smaller number of people achieve a greater level of destruction.
Under the Obama administration, unmanned (albeit remotely controlled) drones became a key tool of US force and intimidation in the Middle East and South Asia. Edward Snowden’s leaks in 2013 revealed how global metadata surveillance allowed drones to geolocate the SIM card of a suspect, then track and strike whoever held the device. <a href="https://www.justsecurity.org/10311/michael-hayden-kill-people-based-metadata/">“We kill people based on metadata,”</a> admitted US General Michael Hayden. Or as one National Security Agency unit’s motto put it: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-growth-fueled-by-need-to-target-terrorists/2013/07/21/24c93cf4-f0b1-11e2-bed3-b9b6fe264871_story.html">“we track ‘em, you whack ‘em”</a>.
But even this technology seems crude compared to the newer US drones. Frank Kendall, Secretary of the US Air Force, announced in September 2021 that the Air Force had recently “deployed AI algorithms for the first time to a live operational kill chain”. While the details of the operation remain secret, Kendall has boasted that AI’s provision of “automated target recognition” would “significantly reduce the manpower-intensive tasks of manually identifying targets—shortening the kill chain and accelerating the speed of decision-making”. A complex algorithm, which learns from other drones’ “experiences”, could allow a drone to independently perform all stages of the “kill chain”—identifying the target, dispatching force to the target, deciding to kill the target, and finally physically destroying the target.
A new age of weaponry was also signalled by Mossad’s use of a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-fakhrizadeh-assassination-israel.html">semi-autonomous satellite-operated machine gun</a> to assassinate Iran’s top nuclear physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh last year. The software used in the assassination was able, reportedly, to recognise the Fakhrizadeh’s face, with none of the bullets hitting his wife seated inches away.
The main global militaries are now trying to introduce autonomous elements to almost all equipment—tanks, submarines, fighter jets and more. The new AUKUS pact, for example, involves more than just nuclear submarines. There is also talk of AI, quantum technology, hypersonic missiles, cyber weapons, undersea drones and “smart” naval mines. Marcus Hellyer of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute <a href="https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/will-human-machine-teaming-save-defences-investment-plan/">envisions a set up</a> where a “mother ship” with a human crew can deploy fleets of smaller, autonomous drones to launch attacks on rival vessels.
Recently, one weapon in particular has climbed to the top of every military’s wish list: <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2021/03/01/what-are-drone-swarms-and-why-does-everyone-suddenly-want-one/?sh=7bcf85de2f5c">drone swarms</a>. In this case, a large number of small drones act in unison, replicating the swarming patterns of birds and bees. It is frighteningly easy to program each participating drone to follow simple guidelines (towards motion coherence but against collision), allowing the swarm to act as a swift and unpredictable whole. These swarms, the subject of the 2017 short film <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA">Slaughterbots</a>, are rapidly becoming a reality. Aside from the <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2021/04/30/us-navy-destroys-target-with-drone-swarm---and-sends-a-message-to-china/?sh=534c6e8a2df1">US</a> and <a href="https://www.thedefensepost.com/2021/04/09/china-aircraft-carrier-launches-drone-swarm/">China’s</a> swarm programs, 2021 has seen testing and development in Spain’s <a href="https://www.janes.com/defence-news/news-detail/spains-escribano-readies-uav-swarm-system-for-demonstration">RAPAZ program</a>, Britain’s <a href="https://www.thedefensepost.com/2021/02/02/20-drone-swarm-uk/">Blue Bear</a>, France’s <a href="https://dronelife.com/2021/01/14/french-drone-maker-unleashes-autonomous-swarm-concept-at-ces-2021/">Icarus Swarms</a>, Russia’s <a href="https://tass.com/defense/1265961">Lightning swarms</a>, and Indian Air Force <a href="https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/defence/story/20210920-day-of-the-swarm-drones-1851585-2021-09-10#:~:text=more%20lethal%20power.-,Indian%20Army,a%20distance%20of%2025%20km.">projects</a>.
The first deployment of a drone swarm <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/06/01/1002196245/a-u-n-report-suggests-libya-saw-the-first-battlefield-killing-by-an-autonomous-d">in combat</a> was in Libya in March 2020, when Turkish attack drones were able to autonomously hunt and kill rebels in Tripoli. In May this year, Israel <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2282656-israel-used-worlds-first-ai-guided-combat-drone-swarm-in-gaza-attacks/">used a drone swarm in Gaza</a> to find and attack Hamas fighters.
Aside from its use in lethal autonomous weapons, AI is central to the emergent frontiers of cyber conflict. In 2009, a computer worm called <a href="https://www.wired.com/2014/11/countdown-to-zero-day-stuxnet/">Stuxnet</a> (of joint US-Israeli origin) was able to find its way into software controlling Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities. Hiding its own tracks, the worm searched for and attacked a specific piece of code, causing uranium centrifuges to spin out of control and destroy themselves.
Stuxnet sparked a cyber arms race. As Michael Webb, director of Adelaide University’s Defence Institute, <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/quantum-sensors-sea-drones-and-hypersonic-missiles-what-are-the-new-frontiers-of-war-20210923-p58ubz.html">told the Sydney Morning Herald</a>, the world’s militaries are now “fighting for supremacy in cyber”. The first acts of the next major war might involve the paralysis of satellites, radar systems or electricity grids. Nations are placing their cyber defences in the control of AI systems, which can react and retaliate to cyber threats faster than any human can. As Webb explains, “Many of the cyber attacks that are the hardest to combat use AI already”.
Imperialist military rivalry has always involved dangerous guessing games. The <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Cuban-missile-crisis">Cuban Missile Crisis</a> is a classic example, where neither side could confidently know the intentions of its rival. The Soviet submarine B-59—too deep underwater to pick up radio broadcasts—<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/27/vasili-arkhipov-soviet-submarine-captain-who-averted-nuclear-war-awarded-future-of-life-prize">almost launched its nuclear torpedo</a> as the captain believed war had broken out. The possibilities of cyber warfare intensify such dangers—as belligerents are forced to guess what an AI-guided virus might target. If a nuclear-armed state feels vulnerable in cyberspace, and fears the targeting of its nuclear weapons systems, it may choose to deploy such weapons sooner rather than later.
The final AI capacity that militaries are interested in is mass surveillance. This is probably the most developed area to date. Already, AI is being used to scan and analyse footage from millions of drones and CCTV cameras around the world—searching for patterns and tracking particular faces at a scale and speed that no human can. Particularly when combined with the potential use of autonomous weapons, drone swarms and so on, AI-enhanced surveillance has a worrying potential to assist military attacks—whether on those deemed “enemy combatants” on an international or domestic level.
Many scientists have warned against AI’s use by militaries, and particularly autonomous weapons. Thousands of AI and robotics researchers have signed an <a href="https://futureoflife.org/open-letter-autonomous-weapons">open letter</a>, initiated in 2015, demanding a UN ban on killer robots to avoid a global AI arms race.
Unfortunately, this arms race is already well underway. The Pentagon is in a self-described “sprint” to catch up with China’s AI capabilities. In July, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin<a href="https://www.fedscoop.com/lloyd-austin-dod-jaic-funding/"> announced a new US$1.5 billion investment</a> to accelerate the military adoption of AI over the next five years. A new sense of urgency was added in September, when the Pentagon’s chief software engineer Nicolas Chaillan resigned in protest, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/f939db9a-40af-4bd1-b67d-10492535f8e0">arguing</a> that the US was losing the AI arms race.
Despite the rapid development of AI technology in the past decade, it’s important to note that it still has major limits. Robots are still far from rivalling the abilities of human brains. They often fail to understand new problems or circumstances foreign to their coding or prior “experience”. Autonomous systems used by militaries today almost always involve humans in decisions to target and kill. There are big question marks about how much trust authorities are prepared to place in autonomous systems.
Nobody knows exactly how AI could shape a future war. But we shouldn’t expect the fully-automated conflict imagined in some science fiction. There is a good reason why China has built the world’s largest standing army, and why fully-staffed US submarines and aircraft carriers surround China’s coast.
Nor does new technology make military hierarchies all-powerful or immune to insubordination. It can introduce new instabilities, as well as avenues for resistance. We got a small glimpse of this in 2018, when thousands of Google workers protested against the company’s participation in the Pentagon’s Project Maven, which used AI to interpret drone footage and assist air strikes. Their rebellion forced Google to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/technology/google-pentagon-project-maven.html">drop the project</a>.
AI enthusiasts point to the immense potential of this technology to help create a more productive economy and a healthier society. But the promise of AI will be limited so long as its development occurs in the context of the violent and destructive dynamics of capitalism. Today, a large part of AI research and development is bound-up with the projects of competing military regimes. It is used above all for its destructive—not progressive—potential. Its development in the hands of imperialists should be opposed by socialists, just like the nuclear arms race of the 1950s and ‘60s.

Algorithms of war: The military plan for artificial intelligence

It’s difficult to overstate the ecological and social significance of the Murray-Darling Basin, the region containing six of Australia’s seven longest rivers. For tens of thousands of years, this river system has supported unique, complex ecosystems and human life in what—excepting Antarctica—is Earth’s driest continent. The basin spans about one-seventh of the continent’s landmass (just over 1 million square kilometres), and supplies a third of Australia's food.
The basin, however, is in a deep crisis. Parts of the Darling and other major rivers are running completely dry with increasing frequency, indicating an alarming trajectory: the Murray-Darling Basin is dying. Or more accurately, it is being killed. Capitalism is killing the rivers, in more ways than one.
Australia's water crisis is connected to capitalism’s broader environmental crisis of climate change. For the Murray-Darling Basin, climate change means reduced rainfall and intensified drought. Recent data from the CSIRO shows the overwhelming scale of this problem. Its modelling indicates that, during the 20th century, the basin’s water inflow averaged 9,407 gigalitres per annum. For the last 20 years, however, annual inflows have averaged 4,820 gigalitres. “It is going to get worse”, reported research leader Francis Chiew. “There will still be wet years, but you will get more and more dry years and more and more drought.”
<div class="column_width_image article_inline_image"><img alt="A map of the Murray-Darling Basin" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/ANAO-Report_2010-2011_27_figure-0S-01.png" /></div>
This should be seen for the environmental crime that it is. Successive Australian governments—whether the Coalition or Labor—have not only failed to reduce significantly Australia’s emissions, but they’ve actively supported the continued expansion of the fossil fuel industry. Australia’s per capita emissions rank second out of 37 OECD member states, and the emissions from our massive fossil fuel exports are third in the world, behind only Russia and Saudi Arabia. Our government might as well have been robbing the inland sky of rain clouds.
A drier climate isn’t the only thing draining the once powerful Murray and Darling rivers. The basin is also subject to direct environmental pillage and vandalism at the hands of major agribusinesses.
Water theft is rife under capitalism. An international <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-0589-3">study</a>—“Grand theft water and the calculus of compliance”—published last year in Nature Sustainability, found that “uncertain supply and growing demand are driving higher water theft, particularly by agricultural users who account for approximately 70 percent of global use”. The study estimates that a whopping 30 to 50 percent of the global water supply is stolen each year, largely by agribusiness and farmers. Authorities rarely even register, let alone punish, this crime.
The agricultural corporations that dominate the Murray-Darling Basin are among the world’s worst water thieves. Since 2012, more than 2 trillion litres of water have gone missing. According to an <a href="https://wentworthgroup.org/2020/09/mdb-flows-2020/2020/">investigation</a> published in 2020 by the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, which measured water flow at sites across the basin, the rivers are missing 20 percent of the water expected under the federal government's <a href="https://www.mdba.gov.au/basin-plan/plan-murray-darling-basin">Murray-Darling Basin Plan</a>.
How does four and a half Sydney Harbours’ worth of water simply disappear? The answer can be found in the megafarms irrigated by the rivers. Irrigators—producing rice, citrus, nuts and above all cotton—have mastered the disappearing act.
Travelling along the Barwon, it doesn’t take long to encounter large pumps connecting the river to vast agricultural properties. These are the machines pulling billions of litres of water from the river. Their suction can be powerful enough that, reportedly, the river has been seen to flow in the wrong direction.
Over-extraction is rife. Irrigators’ crudest method is simply pumping during bans, while river flow is dangerously low, and hoping that no-one notices. Even in normal periods, upstream irrigators are notorious for pumping more water than they are legally entitled to, building vast private dams to store their loot. Meanwhile Broken Hill and other downstream areas face the risk of severe water shortage.
This sort of theft can be hidden by another common practice, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/4corners/pumped/8727826">revealed by Four Corners</a> in 2017: irrigators tampering with water meters. This was exemplified when investigators visited the Miralwyn cotton farm in 2015, finding a discrepancy between the count on the water meters and the volume of water stored at the property. Upon looking inside the meters, they found cables unplugged.
In some parts of the basin tampering is hardly necessary, as there is no adequate metering in the first place. Many big irrigators have been getting by with old or broken technology, ignoring directives to install tamper-proof meters and, in the case of faulty meters, neglecting to keep logs of the volume of water pumped.
Recent data has confirmed that not much has changed since the Four Corners investigation sparked outrage four years ago. In fact, the majority of New South Wales irrigators are defying water law. Of 1,100 licences surveyed by the Natural Resources Access Regulator, more than<a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2021-04-22/irrigator-compliance-concerns/100086068"> 700 had refused to install approved, accurate meters</a>.
Irrigators and graziers have another murky method of stealing water: the harvesting of water. not directly from rivers, but from floodplains. Decent rains cause the Macquarie River to spill over into the vast Macquarie Marshes, an internationally significant breeding ground for waterbirds. The overflow into these wetlands is eventually supposed to drain back into the river system. But businesses can manipulate the water’s movement, and in ways more insidious than pumping. The flat landscape allows relatively slight structures—roads, inclines, channels and levee banks—to redirect much of the water onto farmland for absorption or damming.
Authorities have shown little interest in measuring floodplain harvesting. As river ecologist Richard Kingsford told the ABC, “There are very few places where we have an accurate estimate of how much water is being taken from the floodplain”.
Water theft occasionally results in penalties for irrigators, but the government and water authorities have in effect been complicit. The Murray-Darling Basin Plan, initiated in 2012 and overseen by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority (MDBA), has been a colossal sham. Fundamentally business-focussed, its disinterest in genuine environmental outcomes was evident from the start with the MDBA’s refusal to factor climate change impacts into its planning. For a decade, the MDBA regime has enriched a few major cotton growers while allowing the rivers to dwindle.
A striking example is the cooperation between the government and the agribusiness Webster Limited, chaired by the well-connected Chris Corrigan of <a href="https://www.sa.org.au/node/1575">waterfront union-busting fame</a>. Webster was handed $41 million by the government under the water infrastructure scheme, helping the company pay for a $78 million expansion of its nut and cotton empire in the Murrumbidgee Valley.
More than $4 billion in such funds has been granted to irrigators under the scheme, which constitutes a major part of the $13 billion Basin Plan. The MDBA’s pretence is that farms, in return for their water rights, will build water-saving infrastructure to the benefit of the environment. In reality, the funds only help boost irrigation. Webster has built several new monster dams, trapping water that would previously have flowed past its farms and through the basin. Webster’s investors, meanwhile, have reaped millions in profit.
Cronyism, corruption and outright theft are draining the rivers dry. Mild reforms or personnel changes won’t be enough to halt the basin’s decline.
Perhaps the main, underlying, factor driving water crimes in the basin is a structural one: the growing of extremely water-intensive crops like cotton, rice and almonds, in areas that are too dry for them. Companies producing cotton are extending their huge plantations outwards from the rivers—ever further into more arid parts of northern New South Wales and southern Queensland—and pumping more water to make it possible.
Anyone taking a medium to long-term view will recognise that these commodities simply shouldn’t be grown in these regions. But capitalists take a short-term view. The most important thing to them is to grow whatever crop is most lucrative, take unused land however arid, seize whatever water still exists and deliver maximum dividends to shareholders.
Rivers and soils have their own laws and limits as to what they can sustain. But when an economic system’s defining goal is the endless accumulation of profits, the bounds of nature will never be respected. Capitalism is a juggernaut which knows no law apart from its drive to exponential self-expansion. That rice crops are naturally more suitable to certain Asian climates is not of concern to a firm’s balance sheets—if it can be sold for a sufficient profit, rice will be farmed along the Murray.
Capitalism’s thirst cannot be quenched. If we don't fight for a different system, the rivers that sustain life on this continent could one day run dry for good.

How capitalism is killing the Murray-Darling Basin

With the emissions reduction targets pledged in Kyoto, Japan, in the 1990s fading into distant memory, 2050—safely distant in time—has become the new favoured target date for the people making money from fossil fuels. As the Arctic permafrost melts and biodiversity collapses, “net zero by 2050” promises are an attempt to bullshit the public while allowing business as usual to continue undisturbed. 
The “net zero by 2050” goals now espoused by the US, Canada, the EU, the UK and South Korea (and China’s similar 2060 pledge) are premised on the assumption that forthcoming technologies will facilitate the removal of greenhouse gasses already in the atmosphere. Such geoengineering schemes, they hope, will allow economies to keep churning through oil reserves while still achieving net neutrality. 
The authors of the IPCC’s 2018 report advocate these carbon-capture pathways while admitting that “no proposed technology is close to deployment at scale” and that “there is substantial uncertainty about the adverse effects of large-scale CDR [carbon dioxide removal] deployment on the environment”. As Ben Ehrenreich <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/161575/climate-change-effects-hurtling-toward-global-suicide">noted</a> in the New Republic, they are “more willing to gamble on potentially destructive technologies that do not currently exist than to even run the math on a more substantive economic transformation”. 
The case of Australia makes obvious the truth that 2050 goals are not worth the paper they’re written on. In early February, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that Australia would reach net-zero emissions “as soon as possible”, preferably by 2050. “We welcome this move”, <a href="https://theconversation.com/scott-morrison-has-embraced-net-zero-emissions-now-its-time-to-walk-the-talk-154478">wrote</a> representatives of ClimateWorks Australia in the Conversation. “A net-zero goal will provide clarity, lift ambition and create focus.”
That Morrison’s vague “goal” could be considered ambitious speaks to the dire situation in Australia. It deserves mockery from climate activists. This is the same government promoting a gas-fired economic recovery that will guarantee high emissions for decades to come, especially when you consider the emissions resulting from Australia’s export of gas to the rest of the world.
Guardian Australia’s environment editor, Adam Morton, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/30/breathtaking-what-joe-bidens-sweeping-climate-plan-means-for-scott-morrison">argues</a> that US President Joe Biden is leading a “breathtaking” global charge that will force even Morrison to act. “How Biden intends to wield his influence internationally will become clearer in the lead up to a major economies climate summit he plans to host on Earth Day, 22 April”, Morton explains. “He has set the summit as a deadline to announce a new emissions reduction target for 2030 to put the US on the path to net zero by 2050.”
In reality, the “Biden Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice” does not hold up to serious scrutiny. No firm targets have been set to reduce emissions over the next four years—that is, while Biden is in power.
Much has been made of Biden’s order to “pause” new permits and leases for oil and gas drilling. But a pause is not a ban. In fact, within a week of coming to office, the new administration quietly issued 31 new permits for drilling projects. 
He has been celebrated for shutting down the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which, his executive order proclaims, “disserves the US national interest” by threatening “a dangerous, potentially catastrophic, climate trajectory”. If Biden were genuinely concerned about this “dangerous trajectory”, he would shut down other oil and gas pipelines. But he knows that the real “national interest” is to keep exploiting the natural resources at the country’s disposal to enrich its energy companies and maintain its dominance over global rivals.
Governments are not the only ones clambering aboard the “net zero by 2050” train. Many companies have declared their commitment to carbon neutrality. Last September, the UN celebrated a doubling, in less than a year, of “the number of commitments to reach net-zero emissions from local governments and businesses”. The press release congratulated everybody from Ford to Facebook.
But when you read the fine print of the corporate pledges, their plan for “net zero” quickly collapses into the absurd. They all intend to keep emitting greenhouse gases but to balance their “footprint” by building immense carbon-sinking tree plantations. Shell, for example, plans to offset its emissions via “major reforestation—some 700 million hectares of land would be acquired over the century, an area approaching that of Brazil”.
If a single company needs to take over a Brazil-sized area to offset its carbon emissions, there is no hope of offsetting global output. Consider the similar “net-zero” announcements from BP, General Motors, Volkswagen and Qantas. When you do the maths, as ActionAid points out, “there is simply not enough available land on the planet to accommodate all of the combined corporate and government ‘net-zero’ plans”.
The unfortunate truth is that 2050 goals are an easy way for companies to appear eco-friendly while doing absolutely nothing to change their business models and reduce emissions in the short term.
2050 is not good enough. It has become the preferred talking point of the capitalist establishment because its distance in time allows them to burn through as much coal, oil and gas as they fancy in the here and now. They much prefer commitments measured in time to those measured in gigatonnes of carbon dioxide.

'Net zero by 2050' means disaster

Our ecosystem, and the very possibility of much life, depend on the stability of the ocean. Half or more of the atmosphere’s breathable oxygen comes from phytoplankton and other marine plants. For that reason alone, if the ocean’s natural systems were to be seriously destabilised, it would be catastrophic both for the planet and for human civilisation. The most known aspect of the oceanic crisis is the melting of the polar ice caps and the corresponding rise in global sea levels. New estimates by British scientists suggest that, between 1994 and 2017, the Earth lost 28 trillion tonnes of ice. The rate of ice loss is accelerating, having climbed by 57 percent since the 1990s. And this acceleration is set to continue, as the Arctic is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world.
For now, the greatest contributor to rising sea levels is the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. Recent research published in Communications Earth &amp; Environment, a scientific journal, suggests that the ice sheet has entered “a new dynamic state of sustained mass loss”. With snowfall insufficient to replenish melted ice, a regional feedback loop has begun. Even a reversal of global temperature rises will not stop the ice’s disappearance. If the ice sheet were to melt entirely, global sea levels would rise by 7.2 metres. In coming decades, rising sea levels will radically reshape the world’s coastlines. Major coastal cities will face catastrophic flooding. Greater Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia and home to almost 36 million people, provides a glimpse of where we could be heading. While bushfires were ravaging Australia on 1 January 2020, Jakarta was lashed by storms that brought 400 millimetres of rain in just a few hours. In the resulting flooding, made worse by 40 percent of the city’s land area lying below sea level, 66 people were reported dead from drowning, hypothermia, landslides and electrocution.
In disasters like these, it’s inevitably the poorest areas that suffer most. The rich have the means to protect themselves from the elements. In the case of Indonesia, the inequality is illustrated by the government’s proposal to build a new capital in Kalimantan (Borneo). From there, the government presumably would continue to promote the fossil fuel industry and other environmentally destructive practices while Jakarta is further swamped by the ocean.
Unfortunately, rising sea levels are just one problem among many. The ocean is also undergoing a disturbing chemical transformation caused by and reinforcing climate change. Nicholas Gruber, ETH (Federal Institute of Technology) Zurich professor of environmental physics and an authority in the field of ocean chemistry, has long called attention to three factors—what he calls “the triple whammy”—driving long-term change: acidification, warming and deoxygenation. These processes, as Gruber warned in 2011, “are essentially irreversible on centennial time scales”.
Ocean acidification is a direct consequence of human-caused carbon emissions. A relatively balanced transfer of carbon dioxide molecules between the ocean and the atmosphere has been disrupted by the excessive amounts of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, forcing the ocean to absorb both a larger proportion of the gas as well as trapped solar heat. The ocean’s absorptive role has temporarily and partially stabilised the atmosphere and spared us from more extreme temperatures in the short term. But the ocean can take only so much. Carbon dioxide, when dissolved in water, makes carbonic acid. The more carbon dioxide is absorbed, the more acidic the ocean becomes.
This reaction, already sapping the life from coral reefs, threatens to undermine the very basis of marine ecosystems. Organisms at the bottom of the food chain, like phytoplankton, will struggle to grow their cell walls, increasing their mortality. Dependent species, everything from whales to anchovies, will begin dying from starvation. Ian Angus, editor of the journal Climate and Capitalism, explains that increasing acidity “has already significantly changed the habitats that marine plants and animals depend on: a further reduction could be deadly for many of them”. The threat of acidification is now widely recognised by scientists, with the generally conservative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reporting in 2019 that “it is very likely that over 95 percent of the near surface open ocean has already been affected”.
Today, ocean temperatures are also rising rapidly, a result of absorbing 90 percent of excess heat created by the greenhouse effect. A study by a team of fourteen scientists from around the world, published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences in January, found that in 2019 the ocean’s heat content was 228 sextillion joules above the 1981-2010 average. “That’s a lot of zeros indeed”, the study’s lead author, Lijing Cheng of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Beijing, explained. “The amount of heat we have put in the world’s oceans in the past 25 years equals 3.6 billion Hiroshima atom-bomb explosions.”
Marine biodiversity in tropical regions is collapsing under the pressure of this warming as fish migrate to the poles and immobile organisms die—like the coral in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Extreme heatwaves over the Pacific Ocean are now a regular fixture. Warmer water also encourages the formation of cyclones, which scientists predict will become more frequent and intense.
Rising temperatures have also helped trigger the most terrifying aspect of the marine crisis: ocean deoxygenation. Warmer waters hold less oxygen. The living part of the ocean is being slowly suffocated. We can never build a ventilator to support it. Since the Second World War, the ocean’s oxygen content has declined by around 2 percent. This may seem like a small number. But in the same way that a global temperature rise of two degrees Celsius threatens climate catastrophe, a 2 percent oxygen loss has thrown the ocean dramatically out of balance. Deoxygenation does not spread evenly. Instead, it manifests in the formation of “dead zones”—territories of seawater with such low oxygen content that very few organisms can survive there. These dead zones tend to develop near coastlines, the areas where most marine habitats are located.
The other major contributor to deoxygenation is the nutrient discharge from industrial agriculture. The profits of agribusiness rely on the widespread use of synthetic chemical fertilisers. The nitrogen waste from megafarms is carried by rivers into the sea, promoting algal blooms. These consume surface oxygen, reducing how much oxygen sinks downwards. As the International Union for Conservation of Nature explained in 2019, “fertilizer run-off, sewage, animal waste, aquaculture and deposition of nitrogen from the burning of fossil fuels are promoting excessive growth of plant life—a process known as eutrophication which mostly affects coastal areas”.
Dead zones, which now are often seasonal or semi-permanent, are bound to grow. Oxygen levels in ocean water are projected to fall 5 to 6 percent below mid-twentieth-century levels by 2100. This will wreck marine biodiversity and eliminate a key protein source relied on by billions of people.
On top of these long-term processes, the ocean suffers direct daily exploitation by the world’s capitalists. Corporations, hungry for profit, view the ocean not as a natural system on which life depends but as a pool of resources to be plundered. Instead of living sustainably with respect for the ocean’s basic support systems, they vandalise it for money and power. A prime example is overfishing—the capture of fish at such extreme rates that a species cannot possibly replenish its numbers. Fishing industry giants now dominate vast swathes of what amounts to privatised ocean, dedicated to entirely unnecessary overfishing.
According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 35 percent of harvested fish are wasted. Unwanted excess fish are tossed overboard dead. To fish more precisely with smaller instruments would be inefficient from a capitalist perspective. A considerable amount of the flesh that does stay on board will rot before being eaten, a symptom of unplanned supply chains that frequently overshoot demand.
The ocean is also a giant dump for capitalism’s waste. Take plastic. Around 8 billion kilograms of plastic flow into the world’s water systems annually. If plastic production continues to grow at its current pace, annual plastic pollution will double by 2030, and a significant portion of this ends up in the ocean. A 2016 report commissioned by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a UK charity, predicted that, by 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean, by weight, than fish. The pollution is already probably having lasting effects on both marine ecosystems and human health.
The ocean was once thought of as a system so large and complex that humans could not affect it. In ancient literature, it acts as a god. But the past half century has revealed the truth. Its resources are finite. There are thresholds beyond which its natural support systems cannot recover.

Dead zone: the crisis of the ocean

West End Brewery workers in Adelaide are on strike to secure a fair redundancy payout when the brewery closes in June.
The four main gates are being picketed by striking workers, union officials, socialists, university students and other supporters. “Nothing in, nothing out” is the motto. In the lead-up to the busiest and most profitable time of the year, the brewers and packers have set up a hard picket to block all trucks.
Since the morning of Wednesday, 2 December, every truck that has tried to unload or pick up supplies has been met by picketers linking arms and chanting, “Union power!” Around midday on Wednesday, managers came out to try to get a truck through. One condescendingly tells the picketers, “I don’t mind a picket, but you just shouldn’t block the gate”. He is duly heckled. Cheers erupt as the truck drives off. 
Many drivers leave in solidarity as soon as they see there’s a strike. One with a load of toilet paper agrees not to scab, joking through the window as he leaves, “You guys should use the toilet paper to throw at management”.
At the main gate, passing cars, buses and trucks honk in solidarity. When there are no trucks around, we discuss the strike, past union actions, politics and brewery work.
This brewery has operated for 160 years. The giant facility produces beers and ciders such as West End, Hahn, James Squire, 5 Seeds and Guinness. In October, the company, which is owned by the multinational Kirin, announced the closure of the site and the lay-off of 90 staff. Workers told Red Flag that management decorated the place with “R U OK?” material on the day of the announcement, adding insult to injury.
The strikers are demanding 52 weeks’ redundancy pay. The company has guaranteed only some long-term workers a payout. For casuals and workers who have been around only a few years, the company is offering nothing. Workers say they are fighting for the new people as well as the long-termers.
“They’ve made huge profits year in, year out”, one worker says. Indeed, Kirin made a profit of more than $540 million last year, with the boss taking a salary of $2.8 million. “They’re a company that’s just all about profits over people”, another says. “We’re on strike to try and get a better deal for all of the workers here at West End.”
The bosses have become more anti-union in recent years. A young worker says, “They actually said that as a company they’ve gone from being a people-focused company to a KPI-focused company”. (KPI stands for “key performance indicator”—capitalist jargon for what matters most, i.e. profits.) Management heavyweights have been flown in from Sydney to undermine the strike while getting all-expenses-paid hotel stays. They try to intimidate strikers by filming them and threatening legal action. 
The imported scabs are predictably hopeless. Every time the workers hear the machinery malfunctioning, strikers honk an air horn to embarrass them. When we hear bottles smashing, laughter crosses the picket line.
For many, this is not their first strike. Older workers share stories from a time of union strength. Back when the site was a closed shop, if a worker was arrested on the weekend, the company was expected to bail them out. Workers won perks, including a shared company-maintained holiday house. 
A story circulates about a manager twenty years ago who tried installing a camera in the workshop, suspecting workers of stealing tools. Hundreds of workers stopped work and chanted for this individual’s head, after which he was promptly dismissed.
But a lot has changed since then. For one, the size of the workforce has dwindled. The bosses have also attempted to drive wedges between workers through subcontracting and other means. Union organisation hasn’t kept up with these trends. In past strikes, all workers operated as one, but this time it’s a struggle to get sparkies, fitters and some truckies on side. 
But the strikers are determined to see this through. On 3 December, they voted to continue the action. “It’s unreal”, one says. “The response has been fantastic. People power works.”

Emma Dynes

‘Nothing in, nothing out!’: Adelaide brewery workers on strike

Many scientists today agree we are living through a new geological epoch—the Anthropocene. It is an age defined by human activity, characterised by a reduction in biodiversity, an increase in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the use of nuclear weapons, the impact of industrial processes and changes to the Earth’s surface as a result of mining, construction and erosion. One of the most disastrous features of this activity is the massive and increasing production of plastic, a material once synonymous with progress and innovation but which is now threatening the viability of the planet on which we all depend. 
A glimpse at the world’s oceans reveals the dimensions of the problem. A 2017 study from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation found that by 2050, Earth’s oceans will contain more plastic than fish. Already, there are huge, submerged, moving concentrations of waste in every one of the planet’s oceans, known as garbage patches. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which lies between Japan and California, for example, is twice the size of Texas and continually growing. It acts like a vortex, pulling ever more rubbish into its centre.
Plastic does not readily biodegrade. The best the oceans can do is break plastics down into microplastics, and microplastics into smaller nanoplastics. These invisible particles remain in the water, creating the effect of a permanent petrochemical spill. They are ingested by marine life and birds. They enter the food chain, embedding themselves in flesh, and are increasingly being consumed by humans. 
Plastic also pollutes land and the air. A huge amount of plastic waste ends up in landfill, but a paper from Water Research has demonstrated that “landfill isn’t the final sink of plastics, but a potential source of microplastics”. Plastics are ground down in landfill, and these smaller microplastic particles can be carried by the wind and breathed in by people and animals. 
Little is known about how microplastics interact with human health. What we do know is that we are all ingesting nearly 2,000 particles—or, a credit card’s worth—of plastic each week.
Yet despite the known damaging effects of this material, worldwide plastic production is growing. Much of the responsibility for this lies with just a handful of powerful corporations.
Drinks companies are among the worst offenders. It was revealed in 2019 that Coca-Cola alone produces about 108 billion plastic bottles, or 3 million tonnes of plastic, every year. This waste is entirely unnecessary. Drinks like Coke used to be sold in reusable glass bottles, with customers receiving a small refund for returning bottles. But this arrangement, considered inefficient by the beverage giants, was overturned in the 1950s. Cheap, disposable plastic containers became key to ensuring market dominance over rivals. 
Beyond Coke and Pepsi, unnecessary plastic packaging of consumer items has become ubiquitous. Browse the shelves of any department store or supermarket, and you will find thousands of new plastics, ready to start their long lives polluting the world’s ecosystems. It could be considered psychopathic, if it wasn’t also good for business.
“Packaging is important to capitalism”, Chris Williams argues in Ecology and Socialism. “It is part of convincing us that we have choices in the products we buy, as if each different brand were not in many cases identical aside from the packaging and the brand loyalty that packaging seeks to secure.”
The economy is organised through constant, unplanned competition between firms producing similar commodities. Excessive packaging is the result. As Williams explains, “Corporations resist reductions in packaging even when it might save them money (packaging costs can often be greater than the cost of the item itself)—because packaging persuades consumers to buy their product rather than someone else’s”. At the end of the day, the extra cost of packaging is passed on to those who buy the products. We pay: first through higher prices placed on packaged items, then through the degradation of the Earth systems upon which our lives depend.
Invested in the predominance of plastic material in capitalist production are some of the most powerful entities on the planet, the fossil fuel giants. Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Sinopec, and other oil and gas superpowers have an interest in plastic coating as many products as possible. Inside giant petrochemical hubs, petroleum is manufactured into plastic material, providing the world’s companies a relatively cheap, versatile and light material used for everything from engine parts to toys. This strengthens demand for the oil drillers to keep drilling, from the Canadian taiga to the Arabian desert.
Facing volatility in the oil sector, energy companies are pivoting towards accelerated plastic production as a source of future stability. The International Energy Agency’s 2018 report The Future of Petrochemicals heralded the growing strategic importance of plastic. The agency’s modelling suggested that “oil demand related to plastic consumption” will overtake “that for road passenger transport by 2050”.
More immediately, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to plunging oil profits. One method for weathering the storm has been a race to make more plastic. This has created new challenges for plastic makers: an emergent glut of plastics in major markets, and a shortage of places to dump plastic waste. China’s 2018 ban on plastic waste imports is still a source of pain for many Western capitalists.
But with crisis comes opportunity. A recent New York Times piece revealed the plastic producers’ plan to solve their problems: “flood Africa with plastic”. The American Chemistry Council, representing some of the largest fossil fuel and chemical corporations, has been lobbying to influence the renegotiation of the US-Kenya trade agreement. In return for Kenya’s right to export goods to the US duty free, Big Oil is demanding that Kenya reverse its strict ban on plastic goods (such as bags) to create new markets for plastic. Additionally, Kenya is expected to remain open to the import of US plastic waste, turning itself into one of the world’s plastic dumps. An American Chemistry Council representative explained their continent-wide ambitions to the US government: “We anticipate that Kenya could serve in the future as a hub for supplying US-made chemicals and plastics to other markets in Africa through this trade agreement”.
The rise of plastic over the last 70 years has been accompanied by one of the biggest lies of modern history, the lie of plastic recycling. When Coca-Cola introduced plastic bottles, it launched a propaganda campaign aimed at shifting responsibility for re-use from the company to individuals. Such recycling campaigns pioneered corporate greenwashing. 
Keep America Beautiful, an anti-littering organisation funded by Coke and other producers of plastic containers, exemplified this with its famous 1970 TV commercial in which a Native American man sheds a tear as he watches trash being thrown out of car windows. “People start pollution, people can stop it”, says the narrator. In one fell swoop, responsibility for plastic pollution moves from the corporations producing vast quantities of it to the careless masses, too lazy to pick up after themselves. Recycling, we were told then, was the solution. Many people wanting to do right by the environment heard and heeded this unsubtle message. Still today, millions carefully separate their recyclables, including plastics, from the rest of their rubbish in order to do their bit for the planet.
But recycling does more to promote the continued production of plastic than it does to mitigate its harmful environmental effects. Plastic is not suitable for recycling. Unlike other recyclable materials, the quality of plastic degrades in reprocessing. It is rarely recycled twice. Laura Sullivan, writing for National Public Radio in the US, has documented industry officials’ knowledge, as early as the 1970s, that recycling plastic “was unlikely to happen on a broad scale”.
The physical difficulties involved in recycling plastic are only part of the scandal. Most plastic is not recycled even once. The same plastic makers who have poured millions into pro-recycling advertisements show little to no interest in purchasing recycled plastic. The reason? A cold, economic fact. In Sullivan’s words, “Making new plastic out of oil is cheaper and easier than making it out of plastic trash”. It is simply too expensive to collect it, sort it, melt it and redesign it. In an economy based on maximising profit margins, investing in a real recycling operation would offer miserable returns, so it doesn’t happen.
For anyone who has spent their life putting plastics in recycling bins, it is chilling to learn what becomes of it. Science Advances published an important study in 2017, estimating the scale of the lie. Between 1950 and 2015, 6.3 trillion kilograms of plastic waste has been produced. Of this waste, only 9 percent has ever been recycled. The bulk, 79 percent or 4.98 trillion kilograms, has been buried in landfill or otherwise found its way into natural environments, such as the oceans. The other 12 percent has been burnt.
Incineration is the relatively easy alternative to both reprocessing and burial. In the incinerators, plastic is converted into pollutants such as dioxins and greenhouse gases. This option will become more appealing to authorities as their dumping grounds overflow.
Governments are under considerable pressure to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. But plastic production continues apace. The World Economic Forum estimates that plastic production will triple by 2050. Those currently profiting from this destructive substance won’t change their ways through polite persuasion. They have to be fought, and their system brought down, before it’s too late.

Plastic capitalism is killing the planet

Shigeko Matsumoto emerged from a bomb shelter in Nagasaki, 800 metres from ground zero, on 12 August 1945, three days after the US dropped its “Fat Man” atomic bomb over the city, and six days after “Little Boy” had decimated Hiroshima. “I will never forget the hellscape that awaited us”, she recounted in 2017 in testimony republished in Time magazine. “Half burnt bodies lay stiff on the ground, eyeballs gleaming from their sockets. Cattle lay dead along the side of the road, their abdomens grotesquely large and swollen. Thousands of bodies bopped up and down the river, bloated and purplish from soaking up the water. ‘Wait! Wait!’, I pleaded, as my grandfather treaded a couple paces ahead of me. I was terrified of being left behind.”
Scenes like this gripped the popular imagination for much of the remainder of the twentieth century, as the Soviet Union and the US raced to build ever deadlier nuclear arsenals. The modern imperialist system had created the reasonable possibility that human civilisation as we know it might end in a sudden burst of light.
Schoolchildren today aren’t trained to “duck and cover”, as they were in the 1950s and ’60s. Those willing to contemplate apocalyptic scenarios are, perhaps with good reason, more likely to imagine the continued deepening of the climate crisis. Nonetheless, we are now in the midst of an escalating nuclear arms race. We ignore it at our peril. 
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 for its work on the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. ICAN’s Australian director, Gem Romuld, spoke to Red Flag about the current build-up. “In 2019, nuclear-armed states spent [US]$73 billion on nuclear weapons, resources sorely needed for health care”, Romuld says. “Several are investing in new kinds of nuclear weapons, including ones with a smaller yield for use in a wider range of scenarios. Longstanding nuclear arms control agreements are collapsing, with the only forward progress represented in the treaty.”
This new arms race is driven by the return of great power rivalry. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US emerged as the unchallenged master of the globe. Its unipolar world order still featured wars, but only asymmetrical ones in which the US antagonised vastly weaker powers such as Afghanistan and Iraq.
In recent years, however, the US has been forced to face down more serious threats to its global hegemony. This includes more aggressive posturing from its old rival, Russia. But more important is China, where rapid economic growth has laid the basis for military expansion and ambitions of superpower status. 
The release of the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy in 2018 signalled the arrival of a new era: “The central challenge to US prosperity is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition ... As China continues its economic and military ascendance ... it will continue to pursue a military modernization program that seeks Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global preeminence in the future”.
Cracks have emerged in the post-Cold War frameworks designed to restrain the proliferation, testing and use of nuclear weapons. Last year, US President Donald Trump withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a statement of US readiness to threaten the annihilation of its rivals. Nikolai Sokov, a negotiator of the START I and START II disarmament treaties, recently explained the new logic to German publication Der Spiegel. “We are returning to the days of the 1950s and 1960s, when each country decided for itself how many and what kind of weapons to deploy”, he said.
It’s difficult to visualise weapons more destructive than those detonated in Japan 75 years ago. But modern devices are capable of much worse. The Hiroshima bomb’s 15 kiloton yield (equivalent to 15,000 tonnes of TNT) is dwarfed by the B-83’s 1.2 megatons (or 1,200,000 tonnes of TNT). If the Hiroshima bomb were detonated over central Sydney, NUKEMAP (an online app that simulates nuclear detonations) estimates 39,520 fatalities. The B-83, by comparison, would produce 411,930 fatalities and 831,880 injuries, with damage stretching from the Harbour Bridge to Parramatta.
The US today has enough warheads to obliterate the world’s major cities several times over and usher in a global nuclear winter, but this destructive arsenal isn’t enough to satisfy the heads of empire in the new arms race. The US is currently undertaking an expensive “nuclear modernisation program”, which started under the Obama administration. One element of the program is the development of smaller or “tactical” bombs, the destructive force of which can be targeted more precisely. A 2016 study by the Lowy Institute found that these more sophisticated arsenals raise “the possibility that these weapons will also become more usable”.
The US Government Accountability Office has warned that the Pentagon’s spending on nuclear modernisation will surpass the planned US$1.2 trillion over coming decades. The threat of nuclear warfare aside, this spending is a criminal economic waste, directing money towards weapons of mass destruction while underfunded healthcare systems strain under the weight of the pandemic. 
This story is the same on the other side of the geopolitical divide. China too is pouring resources into nurturing its small but growing nuclear arsenal. Last year, Beijing added 30 warheads, bringing its total to 320, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
There is a popular assumption that nuclear arsenals are entirely defensive and will never be used. The logic of mutually assured destruction, so the theory goes, will keep Trump, Putin or Xi from pressing their doomsday buttons. This assumption underestimates the irrationality at the core of capitalism and the imperialist rivalry it breeds.
First, the original Cold War featured several flashpoints when nuclear weapons were nearly used. These included US threats against China during the Korean War, the 1961 military stand-off in Berlin and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Second, as Romuld explains: “The possession and maintenance of nuclear weapons for the supposed purpose of ‘deterrence’ rests on a readiness to actually use them, thereby inflicting massive radioactive violence. This is why hundreds of nuclear weapons are deployed, and ready to use within minutes”.
There are an estimated 13,400 nuclear arms in the world’s militaries today. Of these, 3,720 are currently deployed and ready for use, whether placed on missiles or otherwise in bases. And unlike in the early years of the arms race, when only a narrow range of countries possessed nuclear weapons, there are today nine nuclear-armed states. This means that regional conflicts—for example, between Pakistan and India—have the potential to lead to unprecedented devastation.
Capitalism is a world system requiring endless military competition, as states compete over spheres of influence and profits. Ultimately, no empire will peacefully allow itself to be displaced by a rival. The Soviet Union never truly reached the strength to challenge the US as the number one global power. Will China? Certainly not if the US can help it. Ruling classes will use anything at their disposal to secure and maintain their dominance.
 Seventy-five years on from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, mass annihilation remains only a button away.

The nuclear arms race is back on

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who has a personal fortune of US$144 billion, makes about $1,240 per second, $74,500 per minute, or $4.5 million per hour, give or take $20,000. The median annual wage for one of his employees in 2017 was $28,446. It would take one of them more than five million years to reach their boss’s current net worth.
Bezos has become the world’s richest person not through some superhuman ability for hard work and innovation, but through building a business empire based on extreme exploitation. Every day around the world, hundreds of thousands of people wake up to alarm clocks and go to work for Jeff Bezos. They turn the gears of global distribution; they make Bezos rich and they come home exhausted.
Amazon’s warehouses are called “fulfilment centres”. William Blake might have called them “dark satanic mills”. Workers are put under robotic surveillance for performance time as they hurry around the giant facilities. They are expected to work unceasingly at “Amazon pace”, a sort of almost jog. Unable to access the toilet while on shift, workers have in some cases urinated in plastic bottles while continuing to race the clock and avoid the sack. On the other hand, if they are too efficient, they are also punished. The ABC reported last year that workers at the Dandenong, Melbourne, facility could be sent home early without pay when orders are completed.
Friedrich Engels once recounted a conversation with a Manchester businessman: “I spoke to him of the bad, unwholesome method of building, the frightful condition of the working-people’s quarters, and asserted that I had never seen so ill-built a city. The man listened quietly to the end, and said at the corner where we parted: ‘And yet there is a great deal of money made here; good morning, sir.’” 
This same moral universe guides Amazon through the COVID-19 pandemic. With money to be made, management has tried to charge through the unprecedented health crisis at minimal cost or inconvenience. The result is workers’ health and lives put at risk.
Compelled to work in facilities threatened with infection, some workers have begun protesting to protect their safety. Dozens of workers walked out of Amazon’s Staten Island, New York, facility in late March, demanding the workplace’s closure and cleaning after a co-worker tested positive. With the coronavirus rapidly spreading in the city, they also demanded paid time off for anyone experiencing symptoms or otherwise needing to self-isolate. Amazon’s response? To fire the strike leader, Chris Smalls. “I don’t know how they sleep at night”, Smalls told the New York Post. 
Such events give us a clue as to what the most powerful entities in the world think of us plebs. And since March, they have been repeated, over and over. In April, “user experience designers” Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa circulated a petition to co-workers about health risks in the company warehouses. They were sacked. Taking time off to recover from respiratory symptoms, medical technician Enesha Yurchak raised concerns about the health threats in her warehouse. She was sacked. In May, delivery worker Andre Kirk asked in a workers’ discussion forum whether anyone had tested positive. He was sacked. 
At the time of writing, eight US Amazon warehouse workers have been announced dead from COVID-19. The company refuses to disclose exactly how many have been infected.
Bezos epitomises ageing capitalism. But corporations like Amazon also show the technical possibility of an alternative economic system based on production for human need and coordinated internationally.
Capitalism is both planned and unplanned. Production is governed by chaotic competition in world markets; the endless mission to accumulate more wealth leads to unpredictability, crisis and war. But alongside anarchic competition between businesses, extensive planning and coordination takes place within firms. Amazon, with its huge global distribution network, epitomises this.
Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, in his pamphlet Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism, documented the rise of large-scale monopoly capitalism. At the opening of the 20th century, monopoly capitalism was eliminating smaller scale competition, concentrating vast productive forces and centralising the planning of global supply chains. This stage of capitalism led, in Lenin’s words: 
“... directly to the most comprehensive socialisation of production; it, so to speak, drags the capitalists, against their will and consciousness, into some sort of a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialisation. Production becomes social, but appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few. The general framework of formally recognised free competition remains, and the yoke of a few monopolists on the rest of the population becomes a hundred times heavier, more burdensome and intolerable.”
Bezos is a monopolist with unprecedented influence. Amazon boasts 175 “fulfilment centres” around the world, occupying over 14 million square metres of space and commanding more than half a million workers. Its logistical reach is extraordinary. Its workers can organise the delivery of almost anything across the globe within days – proof that there is no technological or logistical barrier to fulfilling human need on a mass scale. 
This is not to suggest that the surveillance technocracy of Bezos represents anything progressive. His planning is driven by only one concern: how best to exploit workers and maximise profits. As Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argue in their recent book The People’s Republic of Walmart, “Planning works, just not yet for us”.
Only a struggle for working-class power could achieve socialism. It is not difficult to imagine how much better things would be if major companies such as Amazon were controlled by workers, making democratic decisions about how best to distribute goods worldwide to those who need them.
We have already seen a small glimpse of this in Amazon workers’ resistance during the pandemic. Naturally, they know which measures are necessary to combat health and safety risks in the warehouses. In a more fundamental sense, collective control would introduce dignity to the world of work. Not needing to satiate the profit-hungry Bezos, workers would not need to work themselves to the brink of collapse to meet quotas.
Under socialism, workers’ immense resources (and the money in Bezos’ bank account) could be put to work to improve society. It would be possible to raise the living standards of the world’s poor, and to minimise and deal with the climate catastrophe.
There is no point in billionaires like Bezos existing. They play no useful role in the real economy. Like the kings and slave-owners of the past, all they do is amass obscene fortunes based on other people’s labour. Like those past rulers, they should be overthrown. We’d be better off without them.

Labor and Liberals offer no way forward on the environment

RATs should be free (and so should lots of other things)

Algorithms of war: The military plan for artificial intelligence

How capitalism is killing the Murray-Darling Basin

'Net zero by 2050' means disaster

Dead zone: the crisis of the ocean

‘Nothing in, nothing out!’: Adelaide brewery workers on strike

Plastic capitalism is killing the planet

The nuclear arms race is back on

We'd be better off without Jeff Bezos

Other Media

Shop

Conferences

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us