[See Below: "Despite what President Trump says, our problems are not caused by other governments or workers in other countries. Instead, they are the result of the logic of capitalism. The Trump administration, really no US administration, is going to willingly challenge that. That is up to us."]
This is how to stop demagogues and extremists: rebuild community.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 8th February 2017
Without community, politics is dead. But communities have been scattered like dust in the wind. At work, at home, both practically and imaginatively, we are atomised.
The massive women’s marches of January 21st may mark the beginning of a new wave of militant feminist struggle. But what exactly will be its focus? In our view, it is not enough to oppose Trump and his aggressively misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic and racist policies; we also need to target the ongoing neoliberal attack on social provision and labor rights.
I READ PLENTY of articles, short and long, on all sorts of topics, but — I hesitate to mention this to ATC readers — I rarely read full length nonfiction books. But those by Michael A. Lebowitz, including his recent The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now (Monthly Review Press, 2015), have been an easy exception. It is a pleasure and a relief to read theory that has such practical application to the questions socialists must address in our work to transform the world.
In each of the following areas of our lives, capitalism has been a deadly force in the past, and prospects for the future seem even worse with Donald Trump's Cabinet picks.
This administration is not just a cabal of ignoramuses. Behind the right’s climate denial is the economic reality that seriously combating capitalism’s war on the planet requires the defeat of the system.
In recent years Michael A Lebowitz, a writer associated with the Monthly Review current of socialist thought, has produced a number of books regarding practical matters involved with the building of socialism.
Republished by Climate and Capitalism with permission, from the UK magazine Socialist Review, January 2017
With Donald Trump in the White House the future for our climate looks bleak, but capitalism’s love affair with fossil energy runs much deeper than the desires and personalities of individual politicians.
Scientific researchers studying climate change have come to the conclusion that the effects are so great that the earth has entered a new geological epoch, which they have named the Anthropocene. Ian Angus, in this book, sets out to explain the reason why.
