Human activity has transformed the Earth, accelerating climate change in just a few decades. Author Ian Angus talks to Socialist Review about facing up to the new reality.
April 22, 2016 -- A fracturing of Canada's social democratic party has opened as party members and much of its electoral base express their dissatisfaction with the conservative economic, social and environmental policies that predominate in the party's decision-making echelons.
Dissension came to a head at the New Democratic Party's national convention in Edmonton, Alberta April 8 to 10. Party leader Tom Mulcair was rebuked in a confidence vote on his continued leadership, failing to reach even fifty per cent support of the 2,800 delegates gathered.
The following discussion of strategy for social change, by Umair Muhammad, was first published under the title “An Altered Position,” as an afterword to the second edition of his book Confronting Injustice: Social Activism in the Age of Individualism.
UNLESS YOU’VE DELIBERATELY ignored the accelerating drumbeat of headlines, reports, and nonfiction books that have appeared over the past decade, you’re at least vaguely aware that we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction in the history of the planet, in which 25 to 40 percent of all species are expected to disappear by 2050. Because extinction is generally a silent, invisible process, we are rarely forced to confront its inherent tragedy and the potentially vast ecological ripples of even a single species’ eradication.
[A perspective from an international journal associated with the Montreal-base Alternatives Action and Communication Network for International Development.]
Any just transition to a green economy must take place on labor’s terms — not capital’s.
Climate change must be stopped. But who will do the stopping? Who, in other words, could be the political subject of an anticapitalist climate revolution?
