David Attenborough, Communist

I’m glad to see that David Attenborough’s powerful speech to the United Nations Security Council ends up with a communist vision for our shared human future.  He may begin with the statement that ‘I am not a politician’, but his searching account of the dangers we face globally as a result of rising temperatures, the despoiling of the oceans and changing weather patterns, is rich with a social concern that necessarily in the end tips over into political and economic critique.

Now that we are ‘perilously close to tipping points’, he argues, we can already, in the present, see ‘the impact on the poorest and most vulnerable people’.  Though Attenborough does not use the term capitalism in his eight-minute speech, there is no doubt that his is an anti-capitalist discourse, as when he notes that we will be ‘compelled to question our economic models and where we place value’.  And his longer-term utopian vision is that, if we can come together in ‘global cooperation’ to deal with the climate crisis, ‘we may finally create a stable healthy world where resources are equally shared’.

 A ‘world where resources are equally shared’ is a trenchant definition of communism, and I’m therefore glad that Attenborough has lent his immense moral authority to this Morrisian social vision.