. . . it is doubtful if many participants returned home thinking that the U.S. and world elites have heard their message and will now collaborate on a plan to slow and then stop emission of greenhouse gases in a timely fashion. Two-decades of fruitless international ‘negotiations’ have made any thinking person skeptical about the intentions of capitalist politicians and corporate leaders who are after their own narrow self-interests rather than the health of the planet and its peoples.
The world's largest ever march against climate change on Sunday (21 September) brought 400,000 people to the streets of New York, starting a lively parade at Central Park. On Tuesday, 120 of the world's political leaders – notably not including the Chinese and Indians – gathered 25 blocks away at the United Nations. The message they got from society was symbolized by the march route: instead of heading toward the UN building, the activists headed the other way, west.
Paul D'Amato, editor of the International Socialist Review, answers the objections of several left-wing writers who critiqued the People's Climate March.
HUNDREDS OF thousands of people--some estimates ranged above 300,000--gathered in New York City September 21 to protest government inaction on climate change, ahead of a United Nations climate summit held two days later.
This article has a long list of "Initiators" and "Endorsers"
We have no other recourse but to take action now. Not just any action but the right action and at the right time. When, for example, a human person has a fever, we urge them to rest their body, give them a lot of liquids, prescribe the right medicine, and if the fever goes up we bring them to the hospital and try to find the underlying cause of the fever, which can range from a simple infection to life-threatening diseases like cancer.
Late last winter at Vancouver’s Maritime Labour Centre, city councillor Geoff Meggs spoke at the launch of a regional union-backed social justice organization called the Metro Vancouver Alliance. Meggs is a long-time anchor of the British Columbia labour movement. In the 1980s, he was the editor of the fishers’ union newspaper and the personal editor for the legendary Canadian communist Ben Swankey. In the ’90s, he was a high-level adviser in the B.C. NDP government.
Do you remember when this socialism collapsed and there was all this talk about the death of socialism and the death of Marxism? At the time, Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan writer that all of you know, said that they had invited us to a funeral we did not belong at. The socialism that died was not the socialist project we had fought for. What happened in reality had little to do with the kind of society Marx and Engel envisaged would replace capitalism. For them, socialism was impossible without popular participation.
Last year in Monthly Review, I debated Eddie Yuen, an anarchist who believes it is a mistake for radicals to focus on telling the truth about the global environmental crisis, because “awareness of climate crisis does not necessarily lead to increased political engagement.” Not only can such awareness lead to apathy, he wrote, but “environmental catastrophism is very likely to be mobilized by economic and national elites to reinforce existing inequalities and expand enclosures, commodification, and militarization.”[1]
There are two points of common agreement amongst almost all sections of the Left. We are in the midst of a fundamental turning point in the earth's environment from climate change, with many catastrophic consequences unfolding, from species extinction to habitat loss to enormous obstacles and costs for human adaptation; and the Left remains, in almost all zones of the world, but especially in North America, on the margins as a social force in the face of a reconstructed and more authoritarian neoliberalism. How to respond in such a situation?
