BORIS JOHNSON’S crass, ignorant, offensive, patrician and juvenile crack, suggesting that Margaret Thatcher’s brutal destruction of coalfield communities can be viewed as a “big early start” — a prefigurative effort to combat global warming — has demonstrated the false nature of his party’s “northern strategy” as much as it shows his unfitness to hold office.

And it was big enough a jolt to jump start Keir Starmer and Lisa Nandy both into well-aimed shafts of criticism that mark a welcome rediscovery of the first reason for Labour’s existence: to represent the interests of working people in Parliament.

It is not that the maintenance of a coal mining sector, as the central component of Britain’s energy programme, was not already time limited when the Tories planned its destruction as the central element of their economic and political strategy.

The year 1830 was the last point at which Britain’s natural environment could still cope with the damage that capitalist industrialisation brought while the emergent class of workers was beginning to experience the destruction to both the material world and their humanity that capitalism entails.

In fact, far from being an environmentally conscious move to end the burning of carbon fuels the Tories’ entire strategy was based on the intensified extraction of oil and gas from the North Sea.

That this shift entailed the destruction of entire working-class communities, the vast deskilling of several generations of workers and the demobilisation of a particularly class conscious, well-organised and politically advanced section of the working class was more than the icing on the cake for the ruling class.

It was a central part of their strategy to maintain the rate of profit, the further enrichment of their class and the taming of a working-class movement that was beginning to challenge the prerogatives of power. It was also an assault on public ownership.

In this moment our memories of the historic occupation of the Upper Clyde shipyards are revived.

This transformative struggle was not an isolated incident but one that found an echo in other innovative actions by a working-class movement that was beginning to see — in the failing postwar boom — the reality that the system of private ownership was historically redundant.

This last decades of the 20th century were a moment of crisis for capitalism that it was able to temporarily overcome, and in doing so inflict on the working class decades of defeats at both the national and the global level.

These decades have seen the superexploitation of human beings intensify in tandem with the superexploitation of the environment.

And it is for both people and planet that this present crisis must be resolved. The floods and fires, intemperate summers and unseasonably cold winters, rising sea levels and the insufferable atmosphere that chokes our lungs gives us a clear choice.

We can save ourselves or we can save capitalism.

By1844 Karl Marx was writing that “the worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material on which his labour is realised, in which it is active, from which, and by means of which it produces.”

The anarchy of capitalist exploitation can only be ended with rational socialist planning unencumbered by private interest.

And it is precisely because the working class is both the human agency which transforms the natural world and is the only class that has no interest in exploiting another that the future of people and planet is so intimately linked to its historical mission to put an end to capitalism.