A ferment in the environmental movement, brewing for many years, has now bubbled up into the blogosphere. We are dipping our ladle in here to take a little taste of it, even though we are quite certain it is not done fermenting. Bill McKibben has been stirring the wort of whether social activism can save us for many years. In Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet, as in The End of Nature a quarter century earlier, he poignantly waffled, in elegant prose, between hope and despair.
My brothers and sisters, Thank you for your presence here today. This city has made glittering fortunes for the super wealthy and for the major corporations that dominate Seattle’s landscape. At the same time, the lives of working people, the unemployed and the poor grow more difficult by the day. The cost of housing skyrockets, and education and healthcare become inaccessible. This is not unique to Seattle. Shamefully, in this, the richest country in human history, fifty million of our people—one in six—live in poverty.
The results are in: No amount of "green capitalism" will be able to ensure the profound changes we must urgently make to prevent the collapse of civilization from the catastrophic impacts of global warming. The following is an updated version of an article that originally was published in the Real-World Economics Review. We consider Richard Smith's article foundational to understanding the world we live in.
For a lot of people lately, "socialism" is not a dirty word. Trying to smear incoming New York City mayor Bill De Blasio by falsely calling him a socialist seems not to have hurt his campaign at all. In fact, his support continued to grow, and he won by a landslide.
THE CORPORATE forces that are looting the Treasury and have plunged us into a depression will not be contained by the two main political parties. The Democratic and Republican parties have become little more than squalid clubs of privilege and wealth, whores to money and corporate interests, hostage to a massive arms industry, and so adept at deception and self-delusion they no longer know truth from lies.
The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor -- not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules.
Policies to counter global warming effectively “will only advance if accompanied by radical social movements”, socialist writer and activist Naomi Klein has told the Radical [greenhouse gas] Emissions Reduction conference in London.
Could you briefly summarize the ecological crises that we confront, perhaps by explaining the concept of the "metabolic rift" and the various "planetary boundaries" that capitalism threatens to surpass or has already surpassed?
A core requirement for addressing the ecological crisis will be to reverse the expansionist
thrust, which is inherent in capitalism. I explore the political conditions for achieving such a
reversal, asking specifically on what basis a vast popular movement inspired by this goal
may emerge. Because the drive to economic accumulation arises from the class interest of
capital, a coherent and effective opposition to it must reflect a class position opposed to
capital. In this sense, environmentalism is a class issue.
There is no technical solution. There is no market solution. We have to rethink what and why we produce, where we produce, how we produce, how we transport things and people. We need a new system that is based of democratic decision making for these questions.
