We all know how urgent our situation is. Our capitalist system—with its fundamental racism, misogyny, imperialism and neocolonialism, war-mongering, and xenophobia—has driven Earth systems and humanity’s future to an existential brink, yet governments still behave as if capitalism had a snowball's chance in hall of providing the kind of future we need and deserve..
Ecosocialists Patrick Bond of South Africa and Sabrina Fernandes of Brazil think and write about these and related issues. In advance of COP26 in Glasgow this November, they’ll discuss, from their perspectives, how we can ensure sustainability of life beyond capitalism, for our and future generations.
For one thing, they argue, let’s stop thinking about “development” to lift millions of people out of poverty, as anathema to climate action. Fighting poverty and fighting climate change do not need to be mutually oppositional.
Instead, as Sabrina has written in “Ecosocialism from the Margins” (NACLA), “dispossessed peoples at the margins of the system have a lot to teach us in terms of values and organizing practices, [even] as the far-Right advances in Latin America.”
Patrick argues the U.S. has failed in previous international climate agreements, long before the last president and his anti-environmental doctrine. He warns that without explicit anti-capitalist pressure from all of us, “the Biden regime will naturally adopt a George H.W. Bush (Rio, 1992) yankee-consumer-imperialism negotiating standpoint, as did Kerry himself: ‘Tackling climate change did not mean a diminishment of lifestyle.’ The greatest danger here is the combination of Biden’s neoliberal market-orientation (he hails from his country’s leading bank tax-haven zone, Delaware, after all) with his neocon imperial-military tendencies (the foreign policy appointments are hot off the Military-Industrial Complex revolving door). This mix will make the Biden Administration just as wicked a UNFCCC negotiating partner as was Obama’s team . . . . That means climate activists in the U.S. should from the outset be as critical as reality demands.
Join us for an in-depth conversation with two leading activists and thinkers in the international ecosocialist movement who will share their thoughts on the state of our international struggle for revolutionary transformation as the world's rich and powerful prepare for their performances at the UN-sponsored 26th Conference of the Parties to confront climate change.
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