Climate movement — what next?

Climate Change, Social Change
September 19, 2010

Green Left Weekly’s Simon Butler asked five Australian climate activists for their thoughts on the current state of the movement.

Phillip Sutton is the convenor of Melbourne’s Climate Emergency Network and co-author of the 2008 book Climate Code Red.

Adam Lucas is coordinator of Beyond Zero Emissions Sydney and lectures in the Science and Technology Studies Program at the University of Wollongong.

Gemma Weedall is co-convener of the Adelaide branch of the Socialist Alliance and attended the April World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, held in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

Fiona Armstrong is a Melbourne-based climate policy analyst and climate action advocate.

John Rice, an Adelaide-based climate activist, was a founding member of the Climate Emergency Action Network South Australia (CLEAN).

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How has the climate action movement fared since the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks? Can you see any weaknesses in its strategy or tactics that need to be addressed?

Philip Sutton: The failure of the Copenhagen negotiations, and indeed the failure to get decisive action on climate from governments in Australia, is both devastating (given that we are heading rapidly into catastrophic climate change conditions) and yet was always highly probable (because, to solve the climate problem, we have to do nothing less than restructure the whole world economy).

Read more HERE.

The Rights of Mother Earth: A visual documentation

The Ecosocialist Information Agency has been patiently creating a visual poster for each article of the Rights of Mother Earth adopted by the World People's Conference on Climate and the Rights of Mother Earth on April 22, 2010.

The conference was held in Cochabamba, Bolivia, April 19-22. Text from PWCCC. For more coverage of the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, click HERE.

Visit the Ecosocialist Information Agency's website HERE to view these posters.

Uranium: An NFB documentary

Intercontinental Cry
Uranium is an award winning short film on the consequences of uranium mining in Canada. Narrated by Buffy Sainte-Marie, the 48-minute film explores how uranium mining can impact the environment, the health of those who are employed in the industry, and the quality of life of Indigenous peoples who live near the mines.



Seldom do we hear the fact that almost every uranium mine in Canada is on Indigenous land. Even more seldom are the occasions where Indigenous Peoples on those lands were meaningfully consulted and informed about what a uranium mine can mean for them, their community, their economy, their culture, their very existence.

The dangers are grim at best. According to "Hazards of Uranium," a briefing published earlier this year, exposure to the radioactive element can cause kidney diseases, blood diseases, leukemia, lymphoma, multiple myeloma, gastric cancer, liver cancer, cancer of the gallbladder and extrahepatic bileducts, kidney cancer, diseases of the respiratory tract, mental disorders and birth defects.

Ecosocialist Book: Woman on the Edge of Time

Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy

From Wikipedia

Woman on the Edge of Time (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976) is a novel by Marge Piercy. It is considered a classic of utopian "speculative" science fiction as well as a feminist classic.

Plot summary
Thirty-seven-year-old Hispanic woman Consuelo (Connie) Ramos, recently released from forced detention in a mental institution, begins to communicate with a figure that may or may not be her imagination—it is a woman named Luciente. She begins to realize that Luciente is from the future, which is a utopian world in which a number of goals of the political and social agenda of the late sixties and early seventies radical movements have been fulfilled. Environmental pollution, homophobia, racism, phallogocentrism, class-subordination, consumerism, imperialism, and totalitarianism no longer exist in the agrarian, communal community of Mattapoisett.

The death penalty, however, continues to exist ("We don't think it's right to kill (...). Only convenient."), as does war. Connie learns that she is living at an important time in history, and she herself is in a pivotal position; her actions and decisions will determine the course of history. Luciente's utopia is only one possible future; a dystopian alternate future is a possibility— one in which a wealthy elite live on space platforms and subdue the majority of the population with psychotropic drugs and surgical control of moods, also harvesting these earth-bound humans' organs.

Women are valued solely for their appearance and sexuality, and plastic surgery that gives women grotesquely exaggerated sexual features is commonplace. The technocrats controlling this horrific future attempt to influence the past—Connie's present—to ensure the existence of their future. Connie realizes the importance of her position, but is torn, because helping Luciente means abandoning her hopes of regaining custody of her young daughter.

The novel gives little indication as to whether or not Connie's visions are by-products of a mental disease or are meant to be taken literally, but ultimately, Connie's confrontation with the future inspires her to a violent action that will prevent the dissemination of the mind-control technology that makes the future dystopia possible, but that also ensures her indefinite detention at the Rockover Psychiatric Institution and the permanent loss of custody of her daughter.

She will undoubtedly be treated with electroconvulsive therapy and be "filed away among the living cancers of the chronic wards." Though her actions do not ensure the existence of the Mattapoisett future, Connie nevertheless sees her act as a victory: "I'm a dead woman now too. (...) But I did fight them. (...) I tried."

Ideas for the Struggle

By Marta Harnecker
PDF of pamphlet from Socialist Project

"What's happening is a renovation of left-wing thought. The ideas of revolutions that we used to defend in the 1970s and 1980s, in practice, have not materialized. So, left-wing thought has had to open itself up to new realities and search for new interpretations. It has had to develop more flexibility in order to understand that revolutionary processes, for example, can begin by simply winning administrative power.

One of the problems is reflected in the leadership of cadre, accustomed as they are to thinking: when we take office, we change. We are democratic while working in a movement, but when we take office, we become authoritarian. We don't understand that, in the society we want to build, the state has to promote protagonism of people, rather than supplant their decision making. It happens in some left-wing governments: government officials think that it's up to them to solve problems for people, rather than understand that they must solve problems together with people. If our government officials are to be wise, they must be pushed by popular initiatives so that the people can feel they are doing it themselves. The state's paternalism, in building socialism, may help at first, but we must create popular protagonism.

I insisted in 1999 that we use the term "political instrument" because "the party," in some cases, is a worn-out term. We were interested in creating an agency that is in accordance with the needs of the new society, rather than copying the schemas of already obsolete parties. The party, classically, has been a group of cadre who, at bottom, are seeking to prepare themselves for taking political office, winning elections, with methods of work that we copied from the Bolshevik Party, which were democratic, not clandestine. We mechanically translated that structure.

The results of renovation of what used to be our political parties, or rather social movements that participate in this political construction, are now instruments that belong to social movements. Therefore we think that political instruments, whether they are fronts or whatever, must be the critical consciousness of the process." — Marta Harnecker

Link to Ideas for the Struggle pamphlet PDF HERE.

EIN Wiki Launched

EIN

Ecosocialist International Network supporter Richard Greeman has created a WIKI for discussion of EIN-related issues.

All EIN supporters are encouraged to sign up and participate at http://ecosocialistprojectspad.wikispaces.com/

Requiem for a Species?

Written by Elaine Graham-Leigh
CounterFire

Clive Hamilton's pessimism about climate change activism relies on the assumption that individual consumers are to blame, but capitalism is the elephant in the room argues Elaine Graham-Leigh.(Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species. Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change, (Earthscan 2010)

We all know that we cannot fully stop climate change. Global warming is happening; the goal of climate campaigners is to limit that warming to 1.5oC, avoiding the most catastrophic consequences and crucially, the tipping points after which runaway global warming would be beyond anyone’s power to halt. Clive Hamilton’s depressing message is that we’ve failed. We are facing a four-degree world. This is only a certainty, however, if we accept Hamilton’s political assumptions.

Eco-terrorism: Green is the new red

Hugo Blanco tells U.K. Greens: End capitalism before it ends us

Socialist Resistance

Hugo Blanco, a longstanding leader of Peruvian peasant struggles and fighter for indigenous rights is currently touring Britain as a guest of Socialist Resistance and Green Left.

Last weekend he spoke at Green Party conference. Blanco started with criticising biblical Marxism, adhering to Marxist works as if they were holy scripture. Hugo talks about his long personal struggle for social justice and against oppression. In a comment he stressed also at a meeting at the Venezuelan consulate in London, he explained that we need to put an end to capitalism before it puts an end to us.

The video is online at: http://ecosocialism.blip.tv/

The hot tears of noble people

"If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people."

Marx, Letter to His Father (1837)

Growth and Consumerism: Nature or Nurture?

Climate and Capitalism

Is a desire to always have “more” a fundamental feature of human nature? In Mindful Economics, Joel Magnuson explains how consumerism was deliberately created to meet capitalism’s need for constant growth.

From Chapter 9 of Mindful Economics: How the U.S. Economy Works, Why It Matters, and How It Could Be Different, by Joel Magnuson. published by Seven Stories Press, New York. Copyright © 2007, 2008 by Joel Magnuson.

The Growth Imperative: Prosperity or Poverty

Generating a measurable rate of return for investors is the core element of any capitalist economy. Investors derive their income from percentage returns on stocks, bonds, or other business investments. If investors do not get these expected returns, they will sell their investments and seek returns elsewhere. By disinvesting, or cashing out, investors can drive down the book value of a company, which can ultimately cause the business to fail. To prevent this outcome, the prime directive of a capitalist business is to sustain robust returns and growth of financial wealth for their investors. This is the paramount goal of capitalist enterprise.

Read More HERE.

See also What do socialists say about human nature? (ISR)

Foundations and the Environmental Movement

An Interview With Daniel Faber
By Michael Barker
Counterpunch

Daniel Faber is Professor of Sociology and the Director of the Northeastern Environmental Justice Research Collaborative at Northeastern University. He completed his Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1989, and his first published book was Environment Under Fire: Imperialism and the Ecological Crisis in Central America (Monthly Review Press, 1993). Since then Faber has published Capitalizing on Environmental Injustice: The Polluter-Industrial Complex in the Age of Globalization (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), and is the editor of The Struggle for Ecological Democracy: Environmental Justice Movements in the United States (Guilford Press, 1998), and coeditor with Deborah McCarthy of Foundations for Social Change: Critical Perspectives on Philanthropy and Popular Movements (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). Faber is also an editorial board member of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Journal of Socialist Ecology (1988-present). This interview was undertaken by email in September 2010.

Michael Barker (MB): When do you first remember reading or hearing about critiques of liberal philanthropists and their foundations? What was your initial reactions to such criticisms? Here I am predominantly thinking about the former "big three" foundations, the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations.

Daniel Faber (DF): I come at the politics of philanthropy as a long time scholar-activist in a family of activists, where the need to raise money to support our various organizing efforts has always been a central issue and topic of discussion. So, I’ve been thinking about this for over 25 years, and writing about it over the last ten years. In my view, there are three fundamental sets of issues that must be confronted.

Read more HERE.