2.

  When the state means business

“The world nowadays teems with people who have fits of enthusiasm whenever they hear of
state intervention, planned economy, five-year plans, and the end of laissez-faire.
“They do not care to ask who are the social groups in whose interests the state, ie.
bureaucracy and the party in power, is to intervene and plan.

“Yet the first question which should be asked when invoking the end of laissez-faire is
precisely this: in the interests of whom should such abolition take place?” (1)

Gaetano Salvemini
When Gaetano Salvemini wrote these words, he wasn’t referring to the 2020s, but he might
as well have been.

There are plenty of anti-capitalist comrades out there, who, even when they oppose the
limited content of a Green New Deal or a New Deal for Nature, are tempted to give such
schemes the benefit of the doubt in that they appear to be a step in the right direction, away
from the unchecked market forces of “laissez-faire” capitalism.

But, as Salvemini points out, we need to look carefully at who exactly is pushing these
ecnomic plans and whose interests they are designed to serve.

Here, the hard work has already been done for us by investigative journalist Cory
Morningstar and other writers featured on our Climate Capitalists page of links.
The briefest dip beneath the fake green surface of this contemporary political pond reveals it
to be less a source of environmental and social hope than a rancid cesspit of private interests
(see also article below).
We find ourselves deep within a massive global network of organisations and initiatives with
names like the World Resources Institute, The B-Team, We Mean Business, Tomorrow’s
Capitalism, The Natural Capital Coalition and Corporate Impact X.

Here we can have the pleasure of meeting a former CEO of Unilever, the daughter of a
CIA-backed Latin American president, the powerful founder and executive chairman of
the World Economic Forum or a Silicon Valley billionaire hoping to get even richer
through a “Fourth Industrial Revolution”.

In this strange upside-down world, in which Big Business is going to “save the planet”, we
come across brave “solo” campaigners supported and promoted every inch of the way by
international PR professionals, youth movements described as “grassroots” which are in fact
funded and steered from above, high-profile activist “rebellions” cheered on by venture
capitalists.
We hear talk of “exponential opportunities“, “the investment of trillions of dollars“, and a
“transformation unlike anything humankind has experienced before... a fusion of
technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres”.
In short, as Morningstar explains, the so-called Green New Deal is being promoted “as the
catalyst to unlock the 100 trillion dollars required to unleash the ‘fourth industrial revolution’.
This project, of unparalleled magnitude, is the vehicle to save the failing global capitalist
economic system and bring in the financialization of nature”.

Having found the answer to the question recommended by

Salvemini, we might reflect that it is not exactly surprising to find
capitalism manoeuvring to incite state support for its money-
making activities.

It was in 1469 that the banker Lorenzo Medici observed: “Things

can go badly for the rich if they don’t run the state”.

It is a big mistake to fall for the capitalist lie that their world of
“market forces” somehow operates independently of the
existence of states.

We perhaps might expect that naivety from advocates of the oxymoronic absurdity known as
“anarcho-capitalism”, but it is strange to witness anti-capitalists likewise imagining that the
involvement of state machineries in capitalist activities will inevitably act as some kind of
brake on profiteering.

Capitalism has always depended on the existence of a state in order to impose and enforce
its domination. Indeed, we would argue that the state only exists in the first place as a tool of
the wealthy elite.

Its role has always been to rubber-stamp, with its self-proclaimed “authority”, the theft from
the majority carried out by a greedy and self-interested minority.
It is the state that announces that “property” is sacred and lawful and that any attempt to
take it back amounts to “crime”.

It is the state that physically protects the property and wealth of the rich by employing gangs
of thugs to intimidate, attack or imprison anyone who threatens to confiscate it, by whatever
means.

It is the state that legitimises and enforces the expulsion of people from their land, that cuts
them off from subsistence, from communal autonomy, and forces them into the waiting jaws
of capitalist wage slavery.
 The Highland Clearances

It is the state that raises armies and navies to conquer foreign lands so that its capitalists can
plunder , cheat and exploit still further afield.

It is the state that taxes the population, ostensibly in “our” interest, only to divert vast
amounts of collective wealth into the pockets of capitalists, whether via their highly lucrative
construction schemes (needed for “our” infrastructure), via their profitable arms dealing
(needed for “our” defence) or, today, via their pseudo-green technologies (needed to save
“our” planet).
When state and capital work together in a more visible way, as with the planned “Green New
Deal” and “New Deal for Nature”, this does not mean that capitalism is on the retreat.

It just means that, in order to get through a period of crisis, capitalists are, once again,
pretending that their interests are “our” interests, that we are all facing an “emergency
situation”, that “our” future is at risk and that, therefore, trillions of dollars of public money
should be stuffed, by the state, into the pockets of our capitalist saviours.

Those who persist in seeing a state-intervention version of

capitalism as necessarily a step in the right direction, would
do well to heed Salvemini’s study of one particular “limited
planned economy deferential to capitalism”, (2) which just
happened to be the Fascist regime in Italy.

He wrote: “Italy has never seen anything similar to the type of

planning exhibited by the government of Soviet Russia. When
an important branch of the banking system, or a large-scale
industry which could be confused with ‘the higher interests of
the nation’, has threatened to collapse, the government has
stepped into the breach and prevented the breakdown by
emergency measures.

“The policies of the Italian dictatorship during these years of world crisis have been no
different in their aims, methods, and results from the policies of all the governments of the
capitalistic countries. The Charter of Labour says that private enterprise is responsible to the
state. In actual fact, it is the state, i.e. the taxpayer, who has become responsible to private
enterprise. When the depression came, the government added the loss to the taxpayer’s
burden. Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social”.

Salvemini summed up the overall impact of Fascist state intervention in the dealings of
“laissez-faire” capitalism, by concluding: “The intervention of government has invariably
favoured big business”. (3)

Why would we expect things to be any different today?

“All hail to the Green New Deal!”

1. Gaetano Salvemini, Under the Axe of Fascism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1969), p. 379,
cit. Ishay Landa, The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism (Chicago:
Haymarket Books, 2012), p. 73.
2. Landa, p. 73.

3. Salvemini, pp. 379-80, cit. Landa, p. 73.

See also: Neoliberalism is the new fascism

3. New Deal for Profits
Following our report in Acorn 54 on the launch of the No Deal for Nature campaign (which
has websites here and here), some people have asked us to explain what exactly the New
Deal for Nature is and what is bad about it.

In response, we suggest that these readers take part in a little experiment.

Search for “New Deal for Nature” on the internet as a whole, Twitter or
wherever you fancy.

When you find a website promoting the idea, note who is behind it, what
language they use in describing the plan, what other sites they link to,
where they get their funding from, who they list as their “partners”.

Follow their links and perform the same exercise with every organisation you come across.

It won’t be long before you have found out – for yourself! – that the New Deal for Nature is
an entirely corporate phenomenon, which uses the language of “sustainablity” to promote a
21st century version of the state-backed capitalism historically favoured by the Fascist and
Nazi regimes.

We’ll show you what we mean. We found the “New Deal for Nature and People” Twitter
account and discovered that this links directly to the WWF website.
This, in itself, should be enough to turn you against the New Deal for Nature, if you have
been paying sufficient attention.

As Brussels-based academic Frédéric Leroy has explained: “Geneva-based WWF Intl has

received millions of dollars from its links with governments & business. Global corporations
such as Coca-Cola, Shell, Monsanto, HSBC, Cargill, BP, Alcoa & Marine Harvest have all
benefited from the group’s green image”.

We reported in Acorn 54: “The WWF is an extremely dubious organisation, as the excellent
documentary video Silence of the Pandas reveals.
“Alongside their sterling work throwing indigenous people off their land on behalf of their
big business friends – under the false green flag of ‘conservation’ of course! – the WWF are
very prominent in the climate capitalist lobby calling for a New Deal for Nature.

“The WWF was one of the founders of the Business for Nature lobby, as Cory Morningstar
has set out.
“One of the many big corporations to which the WWF is close is Unilever, the massive
transnational consumer goods company.
“Paul Polman, former Unilever CEO, was one of the ‘XR business leaders’ who signed their
support for Extinction Rebellion last year“.

For more information on WWF, we recommend the Boycott WWF Twitter account and the
excellent work of Survival International.

But let’s not stop there. Let’s follow the links down to one particular area of The New Deal for
Nature – food.

We learn that the New Deal will “enable us to provide enough food and water for a global
population that will grow to nine billion people in coming decades”.
Adds the WWF, on behalf of the New Deal for Nature lobby: “In particular, we support
consumption of independently verified (credibly certified) sustainably produced food”.

To this end it says is working “with a variety of stakeholders”. Stakeholders, eh? Now who
could that possibly be?
The link below this statement reveals all, taking us to the “Future 50 Foods” report, jointly
produced by the WWF and Knorr, the dehydrated food brand owned by WWF’s bestest friend,
Unilever.
Game over? Point proved? No, let’s dig little further yet by having a look at the list of
acknowledgements at the end of this charming brochure.

Entirely Knatural

This says that “the creation of this report” was led by Dorothy Shaver of Unilever and that it
“ultimately reflects the views of Knorr, WWF and Adam Drewnowski”.

Drewnowski is a trustee of the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) which, according

to a study reported in The Guardian in June 2019, is “an industry lobby group that
masquerades as a scientific health charity” and is “used by corporate backers to counter
public health policies”. Surely not?
Others involved include:

* Crops for The Future, which researches “Biotechnology and Crop Genetics”.

* EAT Foundation, the “science-based global platform for food system transformation”
which, Gaetano Salvemini would have been interested to hear (see above), aims to
“influence and align political and business action”.
* Edelman, the giant US PR and marketing consultancy firm which boasts: “We develop
powerful ideas and tell magnetic stories that move at the speed of news, make an immediate
impact, transform culture and spark movements”. One of these “powerful ideas”, is that “the
way forward is for government to revitalize its role as an essential partner to business”. Of
course – what else are governments for?
* The Food and Land Use Coalition (FOLU), whose aim is “growing better
business” and declares: “We believe business has a critical role to play in
achieving the outcomes for climate, biodiversity, public health and
prosperous livelihoods that the world needs”. Prosperous livelihoods,
eh?
* FReSH (Food Reform for Sustainability and Health) which is “one of the key initiatives of
World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s effort to create a set of business
solutions to drive the transformation of the food system”. Not just any old “solutions”,
note, but business  solutions!
* The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), which was created by the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation and also gets funding from the likes of the Rockefeller
Foundation, US Aid, BASF (the chemicals firm which produced Zyklon B for the Nazi gas
chambers), and… oh! Unilever again!

M
mmm… Nutritious!

* Gro Intelligence, a data-orientated business interested in how “the next agricultural

revolution might work with artificial intelligence”.
* The Global Crop Diversity Trust, aka The Crop Trust, which is “extremely grateful” to
donors such as pharmaceutical corporation Bayer, agrochemical giant Syngenta, the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and… wait for it! … Unilever.
We’ll stop there and let you while away happy hours carrying out your own research into the
New Deal for Nature and People.

One thing that is totally clear to us is that this scam is corporate to its core.

It has nothing to do with either “nature” or “people” and everything to with racking up state-
facilitated big business profiteering, exploitation and control.