WELL, there have emerged in the last decades several political and semi-political forces with sole concern for environmental protection like Green movement in Europe and their Indian counterparts. They accuse industrialisation as such (both capitalist and socialist) and even scientific and technological development for the evil. But their crucial mix-up is in missing the essential class nature of the problem.

Now let us take a look at the problem proper. Capitalism has today gained an edge over socialism, but at the same time has produced the Grecn-House-Effect, posing a crippling threat to the whole mankind. The nuclear problem has also assumed global significance. The Chernobyl devastation in the former USSR notwithstanding, capitalism is at its mischievous helm in this front too.

Then there are regional problems, like destruction of Malayasian forest to supply raw material to US plywood industry. The world bank-sponsored 'social forestry' in India has replaced natural forests in many parts of the country by large-scale eucalyptus planting, just lo provide enough pulp to the paper industry, thus depriving the forest-dependent local folk of their livelihood. Large dam constructions like Sardar Sarovar Project have not only evicted huge number of villagers in the vicinity but have created flood-proneness and salinity in large tracts of agricultural field also. This again is a world bank design. And then there are the Bhopal gas victims who would, for years together perhaps, continue to expose what capitalism really means for us. We the third world people stand the most unfortunate prey to the profit greed of capitalism who has the audacity to treat this earth, this nature and the people even as its property

In contrast, the communists promise a different discourse, not for pragmatic reasons but as a part and parcel of their world view. Marx says : “… Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessor, its usufructuries, and like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations, in an improved condition.”

With this vision the communists march forward in the struggle for environmental protection and join hands with the petty bourgeois formations all over the world and thus strengthen their declared war against capitalism. The communists' commitment is most ardent because a more balanced and eco-friendly growth is conceivable in socialism, the only anti-thesis of capitalism. Let us see how statesmanly Engels  visualised this truth nearly one hundred and fifty years ago : “… abolition of the antithesis between town and country is not only possible. It has become a direct necessity of industrial production itself, just as it has become a necessity of agricultural production and besides, of public health. The present poisoning of air, water and land can be put an end to only by the fusion of town and country, and only such fusion will change the situation of the masses now languishing in towns, and enable their excrement to be used for the production of plants instead of the production of disease ...” (from Anti-Duhring)