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.
"He deployed a prolific critical analysis of environmental depredation and the poverty generated by capitalism."
With Fidel’s death Latin America’s principal revolutionary figure of the last century has left us. Amidst our great sorrow at his passing it is difficult to assess his stature. But while emotion clouds any evaluation, the Comandante’s influence[1] can be appreciated with greater clarity now that he has left.
Legendary Cuban revolutionary and former president Fidel Castro passed away on November 25 aged 90 (having survived hundreds of failed CIA assassination attempts). An internationalist dedicated to a fairer and sustainable planet, Castro long warned that capitalism was threatening to destroy human civlisation through ecological destruction, with the poor of the global South its first victims.
Ian Angus and John Riddell argue that using the Leap Manifesto as the basis for building a new socialist movement in Canada must include confronting the climate crisis and the power of Big Oil.
It is my contention that we are not facing the root cause of our problems, and until we do, there is no hope of solving the social and ecological problems confronting the world....the primary problem is the inner moving force of capitalism—its Achilles heel regarding the environment—the unending accumulation of capital, which means perpetual “creative destruction.”
Often the best way to begin to understand something is to consider what it is not. Socialism for the twenty-first century is not a society in which people sell their ability to work and are directed from above by others whose goal is profits rather than the satisfaction of human needs. It is not a society where the owners of the means of production benefit by dividing workers and communities in order to drive down wages and intensify work—i.e., gain by increasing exploitation. Socialism for the twenty-first century, in short, is not capitalism.
