ecosocialism

By Claire Fauset - New Internationalist, November 17, 2015

Key organizers are pushing for the climate marches and protests to go ahead in Paris despite threats of a government clampdown (see November 16, 2015 press statements by 350.org and Climate Coalition 21). Claire Fauset, one of many climate justice activists planning to attend the talks, explains why it’s more important than ever to take action in Paris. Image "To change everything it takes everyone" by 350.org, copied under a Creative Commons Licence.

This changes everything. The title of Naomi Klein's book on the urgency of the fight to stop capitalism destroying our planet was the phrase that immediately came to mind as the horror of the Paris terror attacks settled on my brain last Friday night. I was with friends recording poems and snippets for a radio project during the climate summit, and all our thoughts were already in Paris.

My mind raced like a movie montage of paranoiac dystopianism. Remembering that day in 2001 when, while planning for a campaign against the World Trade Organization, the World Trade Center crumbled to the ground. Remembering the fear, not of terrorism, not of Islam, not of getting on a plane, but of war, xenophobia, repression, and spiralling cycles of violence. Fearing now what this attack means for a Europe already swinging to the right and restricting freedom of movement in the desperate hope of stemming the tide of people fleeing the wars and poverty for which Europe itself is partly responsible. And fearing the growth of the unthinking, poisonous prejudice that values white lives over the lives of people of colour in Beirut, Baghdad, Syria and everywhere.

And of course my fears were for our mobilizations around the climate summit. Will it even happen? Are we mobilizing people to be an easy target for terrorists in a heavily militarized state? Will climate change even be on the agenda? This changes everything.

Climate change is a greater threat than terrorism, we said, in those innocent days only a week ago. And it is. And the two are interconnected. The war in Syria is thought to be partly sparked by a drought, linked to climate change. And resource dependency – specifically oil – is what is buying the guns for the Islamic State. Climate change is a greater threat, but terrorism certainly has the ability to overshadow other issues by its immediacy and horror. Our intention was to go onto the streets of Paris when the summit fails, as it inevitably will, to reach an agreement that has a hope of keeping us within a 1.5 degree temperature rise, to take to the streets and take the last word. But how can we realistically hope to take the last word with our barricades when the first word has been so devastatingly stolen by the terrorists?

Right now social movements are trying to get their heads around what these attacks mean for resistance to the corporate agenda that hijacked the climate talks long before IS hijacked the Bataclan concert hall. We know that the summit will go ahead, but there are strong indications that marches and protests may be banned as a state of emergency is extended to cover the talks.

Paris is a traumatized city. We should not stay silent about the climate crisis, but our resistance must show empathy and solidarity, both with those affected by the attacks and those targeted by the fear, racism and paranoia that now follows. More than ever this is a time for solidarity and a rejection of false 'solutions'. The COP process over the past 20 years has led to a worsening of the climate crisis and a rise rather than reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Similarly, the war on terror has led to more terror – in Beirut and Baghdad as well as Paris – and to a refugee crisis that leaves dead bodies washing up on Europe's shores. The same logic underlies both of these failures. A logic of maintaining the status quo, of protecting our economic interests at all costs, of ignoring the historical and current ways in which the West is deeply implicated in the root causes of the problem. In this moment of fear and uncertainty, of multiple crises sweeping the globe, a movement for justice, equality, anti-oppression, for a liveable planet and for a change to the system based on greed and exploitation is ever more needed.

Now is not the time to stay silent.

By Erima Dall - Solidarity, November 7, 2015

The COP 21 summit in Paris is approaching, but while the situation is grim the planned social movement mobilizations offer hope and opportunities.

Tackling climate change through a rapid transition to renewable energy is perfectly feasible, but corporate interests are determined to frustrate action, writes Erima Dall.

The world is at a climate crossroads. For over 20 years, international meetings of world leaders have wrangled to avoid any meaningful climate action. The science is as clear as ever; the planet hotter.

In November over 190 world leaders will meet at the COP21 conference in Paris. But countries have already announced their emissions reduction targets, and they will not prevent a rise of 2°C in global temperature – a generous estimate of what is a “safe” temperature increase.

Global investment in renewable energy is growing, but nowhere near fast enough. We are operating in a battlefield. To stop a dangerous shift in our climate system we will have to challenge the economic greed of the capitalist system.

We need to build a mass radical movement capable of challenging the fossil fuel giants, and governments’ absolute commitment to the market; a movement to demand a just transition to 100 per cent renewable energy and an expansion of green jobs.

By Michael Ware and Ragina Johnson - Socialist Worker, October 27, 2015

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

THE LATEST world summit conference on climate change, due to begin in Paris on November 30, will take place against the backdrop of continuing climate disasters--including a new report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that the planet suffered its hottest summer ever recorded, and possibly the hottest in 4,000 years.

That ought to give some urgency to the two-week-long meeting--officially called the 21st Congress of the Parties for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP 21--that is supposed to finally produce a binding international treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions, with the goal of keeping the global temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Celsius.

But there's lots of reasons to doubt the resolve of world leaders--the recent failure of preparatory talks in Bonn, the lack of ambition or action by powerful governments in the past and, of course, the dismal record of previous COPs to accomplish anything meaningful. Whatever agreement is struck in Paris, it won't do nearly enough.

Climate justice activists worldwide will send a different message from the politicians' hot air--and show their determination to be heard with events and actions throughout the fall, culminating in large protests in Paris itself.

By Paul Street - Counter Punch, October 16, 2015

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Some Darkness Behind the “Sun-Washed Days”

There is a tendency among senior and middle-aged liberal and progressive United States intellectuals to sentimentalize the post-World War II “golden age” of American and Western capitalism between 1945 and the early to middle 1970s.   The inclination is understandable. During those “sun-washed days” (liberal author and former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert), economic inequality declined, significant Civil Rights victories were achieved, jobs were plentiful, the endlessly invoked middle class swelled, wages and consumption rose, the welfare state expanded, college was open and affordable for an unprecedented number of working class young adults, a new youth counterculture flourished, popular music reached new creative heights, the sexual revolution took off, and U.S. astronauts walked on the moon. American society was riding high, it seemed, underpinned by a relatively “high-functioning” and “reasonably egalitarian” (Herbert) capitalism operating at its regulated, “Fordist,” and Keynesian best, prior to the neoliberal “globalized capitalism” that has brought us over four decades to a savagely unequal and arch-plutocratic New Gilded Age – a time when the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 90% of the U.S. populace along with a wildly disproportionate share of the nation’s not-so “democratically elected” officials.

The nostalgia of many for post-WWII America is less than surprising. I share it to no small degree, thanks to my many fond grade-school memories of growing up on the streets of 1960s Chicago. Still, there’s a host of reasons to temper one’s progressive nostalgia for the “golden” post-WWII era. The downwardly redistributive trend of American and Western capitalism during the period was remarkably contingent, temporary, qualified, and – in retrospect – short lived The “reasonably egalitarian” direction of the “thirty glorious years” (the French phrase for “the golden age”) reflected an anomalous moment in the history of a rapacious profits system that was never removed from its position atop U.S. society and reverted to its default long-term inegalitarian and authoritarian tendencies once the moment passed. Between 1930s and the 1970s, it is true, a significant reduction in overall economic inequality (though not of racial inequality) and an increase in the living standards of millions of working-class Americans occurred in the U.S. This “Great Compression” occurred thanks to the rise and expansion of the industrial workers’ movement (sparked to no small extent by communists and other leftist militants); the spread of collective bargaining; the rise of a corporate-liberal New Deal (later “Fair Deal” and “Great Society”) welfare state; and the democratic domestic pressures imposed by World War II and subsequent U.S. social movements. Still, core capitalist prerogatives and assets were never dislodged, consistent with New Deal champion Franklin Roosevelt’s boast that he had “saved the profits system” from radical change. U.S. capital never lost its way or its dominant role in American society. U.S. politics remained “the shadow cast on society by big business,” as Dewey prophesized it would so long as power rested with “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents, and other means of publicity and propaganda” (Dewey, “The Need for a New Party,” New Republic, March 18, 1931).

The gains enjoyed by ordinary working Americans were made possible to no small extent by the uniquely favored and powerful position of the U.S. economy (and empire) and the historically extraordinary profit rates enjoyed by U.S. corporations after the war, when the U.S. was briefly home to more than half the world’s industrial production. When that remarkable position and those profits were inevitably challenged and rolled back by resurgent Western European and Japanese economic competition in the 1970s and 1980s, egalitarian “golden” time trends were naturally reversed by capitalist elites who had never lost their critical command of the nation’s core economic and political institutions. They undertook a Great U-Turn (Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone) from the top down – a change of direction that was really U.S. capitalism returning to its historical wealth- and power-concentrating norm. Middle and working class Americans have paid the price ever since and Democratic presidential candidates now try to outdo each other in claiming to feel, and present progressive solutions to, their pain (though overwhelmingly preferring the phrase “middle class” to “working class”).

By Daniel Tanuro - International Viewpoint, October 12, 2015

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

In April 2014, two different teams of American glaciologists, specialists in the Antarctic, reached - by different methods, based on observation - the same conclusion: because of global warming, a portion of the ice sheet has begun to dislocate, and this dislocation is irreversible.