WA forests: for a green-worker alliance
Western Australia's regional forest agreement (RFA) has given a glimpse of what an Achilles heel the environment continues to be for the capitalist system.
From the very start of negotiations, the threat to old-growth forests sent a web of cracks through conservative ranks. There were business-suit rallies and mobile phone-in protests, and even the state president of the National Party voiced his dissent.
After the agreement was signed, National Party deputy premier Hendy Cowan jumped on the bandwagon, accusing his Coalition partners of ignoring the facts. Then, sensing a change in the wind, Liberal energy minister Colin Barnett sounded out the electorate for a leadership stoush. This was followed early last month by the formation of a breakaway Liberals for the Forests party.
The skirmishes within conservative ranks reinforced the mistaken view of many environmental lobbyists that the ecological crisis will bring all classes together in common interest. Throughout the anti-logging campaign, these lobbyists have settled — either willingly or by default — for leadership by the pro-forest conservatives.
However, this "unity" has merely — and dangerously — shifted the antagonisms into the working class and environment movement as timber workers turn their hostility towards environmentalists and urban workers.
This has exonerated the logging bosses, who are now gleefully fast-tracking mill closures and job cuts that were already in the pipeline. In the process, they are using their loyal servants in the Australian Workers Union (AWU) to blame the "middle-class, anti-worker callousness" of the environment lobby for the cuts. Whittakers' announcement last week that it would close its Greenbushes mill caused a thunder of anti-environment attacks from the AWU, yet the mill has been in receivership since last November.
There have always been divisions of one sort or another within the capitalist class. The point for the left is to use such divisions to peel workers' support away from the ruling class and towards a consciousness of their own fundamental interests, which include ecological harmony. Undoubtedly, any ruling-class sympathy for the environment or jobs is less than half-hearted (the Liberals for Forests have been resoundingly silent about job losses).
Until the unions covering timber workers break their alliance with the timber industry bosses against environmentalists and begin to argue for a publicly owned and worker-controlled industry, they will continue to be played as suckers by the bosses. At present, each time the timber bosses want to sack workers to maximise profits, they simply have to blame environmentalists to redirect workers' anger away from the employers.
Until timber unions acknowledge that the workers have no interests in common with their employers and mobilise their members around demands for job security separately and in opposition to the employers, jobs will continue to go.
The most urgent task is for the conservation and trade union movements to jointly campaign for an immediate cessation of all old-growth logging and for the existing work force to be redeployed and expanded in publicly owned, worker-controlled timber plantations.
There is a need for a timber industry, but private enterprise, which exists in order to maximise profits, cannot be trusted to provide job security and decent working conditions, or to run the industry in an environmentally sustainable way. If the corporate owners can increase their profits by destroying the timber resource faster or sacking workers, they'll do it.
Because capitalist governments aim to run public industries like private enterprises, a publicly owned timber industry must also be run by the workers. And it must be run within a framework that recognises that the interests of the working class as a whole include environmental preservation and repair. Such a timber industry would substantially improve the working conditions of the workers and end the destruction of old-growth forests.
Already, 50 women in Pemberton met on August 4 to demand that the federal government compensate their husbands' lost timber jobs by funding new industries in WA's south-west. Environmentalists must resolutely champion these women's demand, and add that the new industries be socially useful, funded out of the logging companies' profits and placed under public ownership and democratic worker control.