Tony Benn Dies Aged 88 – An Icon of the English Left

Very sad to hear the news that Tony Benn has died. He had been very ill for a little while and when last I saw him in the flesh, which was a couple of years ago, he looked very frail.

I once saw him make a speech at The Free Trade Hall of all places in Manchester in I think 1980, and he was very powerful, electric even and really inspiring, and I left the event feeling as though the revolution was about to begin in the next week or so.

Times change of course, and the revolution (a peaceful one, of course) looks further away than ever now, but Tony Benn was the only figure on the left from the 70’s and 80’s and before that managed to keep up with the new politics of the left, attending Left Field at the Glastonbury festival for example and he could engage easily with the younger generations.

I thought of trying to get a video clip for this blog of Tony Benn in his prime, but in end thought it more appropriate to feature a recent one, like the one above, because he really did adapt with the times, and could be just as inspirational in his later years.

He will be sadly missed by all those of a radical political persuasion, young and old. He constantly reminded us of our power to change things, and to never give up hope. A great man indeed. 

The Earth Cannot Wait

The Earth Cannot Wait : Part 3 from STRIKE! mag on Vimeo.

The Green Party's Derek Wall (@anothergreen) on direct action, seven generation thinking and Marxist ecology:

"Even an entire society and nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. The are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries and have to bequeath it in improved states to succeeding generations"

strikemag.org

thepeoplesparliament.me.uk/

Russell Brand Interview - We need a Revolution

There is some enjoyable sparring between Paxman, clearly channelling the sentiments of thousands of PSE teachers parrotting the vacuous suggestion that those who criticize the failings of our 'representative democracy' should stop and instead involve themselves in it, and Brand, who channels the sarcastic teenagers who know all the reasons why the teacher is wrong and are happy enough with that. But this isn't a serious political debate or any sign that revolution is on the agenda.

Brand talks generically about the way in which differences within the 'political class' are more ephemeral than they seem, and how this has made people dissillusioned with the political system. Strip out the occasional nods towards leftist terminology (like saying 'political class' instead of 'Westminster Politicians') and this is mainly the stuff of a million pub conversations about how 'they are all the bloody same'. Nigel Farage could probably agree with 80% of it.

To be scrupulously fair, he does talk about the failure of the banking system, about unequal distribution of wealth and income, and about cuts and austerity. That's a good thing, and something we don't hear discussed in these terms often on mainstream TV.

But as another famous beardie once wrote, the important thing is not to interpret the world but to change it. Here Brand was utterly helpless in the face of the Paxman steamroller. Paxman says that the only way to change the political system is to participate in it; Brand knows that this is wrong but is unable to articulate why. That would require too much engagement with detail and with structure and process. Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky can do this, but they don't get prime time with Jeremy Paxman, and not many people would watch if they did. Brand does get prime time, precisely because he can't spell out a detailed critique of how 'representative democracy' screws us all.

It's a bit unfair to blame Russell Brand for not having a detailed political program or strategy, a point that he makes rather well himself during the interview. But it is important to recognize that talking about a revolution without actually expressing any idea about what that might mean is, in some sense at least, one of the safety valves of the political system. We have seen this in other anti-politics movements led by comedians and celebrities, notably the Beppe Grillo movement in Italy, that captured the rage of an important section of the population and then led into a blind alley with a program that again, Nigel Farage would have quite liked.

Lots of people have shared the interview video, excited that someone famous was at least using the R word. That's got to be a good thing, and it would be an even better thing if our party and the movement of which it is part would be able to engage with this sentiment, which goes far beyond the usual waters in which the anti-capitalist left usually fishes. But that in turn requires a political strategy for change that goes beyond 'vote for us, we are different to the rest of them'. And a vision of a revolution that is neither a fairy tale of opting out of capitalism to create a parallel world alongside it nor a nineteenth century insurrectionist fantasy.

Written by Jeremy Green

Naomi Klein: How science is telling us all to revolt

In December 2012, a pink-haired complex systems researcher named Brad Werner made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space scientists at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held annually in San Francisco. This year’s conference had some big-name participants, from Ed Stone of Nasa’s Voyager project, explaining a new milestone on the path to interstellar space, to the film-maker James Cameron, discussing his adventures in deep-sea submersibles.

But it was Werner’s own session that was attracting much of the buzz. It was titled “Is Earth F**ked?” (full title: “Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism”).

Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego walked the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the “are we f**ked” question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”

There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture”. According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups”.

Serious scientific gatherings don’t usually feature calls for mass political resistance, much less direct action and sabotage. But then again, Werner wasn’t exactly calling for those things. He was merely observing that mass uprisings of people – along the lines of the abolition movement, the civil rights movement or Occupy Wall Street – represent the likeliest source of “friction” to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control. We know that past social movements have “had tremendous influence on . . . how the dominant culture evolved”, he pointed out. So it stands to reason that, “if we’re thinking about the future of the earth, and the future of our coupling to the environment, we have to include resistance as part of that dynamics”. And that, Werner argued, is not a matter of opinion, but “really a geophysics problem”.

Plenty of scientists have been moved by their research findings to take action in the streets. Physicists, astronomers, medical doctors and biologists have been at the forefront of movements against nuclear weapons, nuclear power, war, chemical contamination and creationism. And in November 2012, Nature published a commentary by the financier and environmental philanthropist Jeremy Grantham urging scientists to join this tradition and “be arrested if necessary”, because climate change “is not only the crisis of your lives – it is also the crisis of our species’ existence”.

Some scientists need no convincing. The godfather of modern climate science, James Hansen, is a formidable activist, having been arrested some half-dozen times for resisting mountain-top removal coal mining and tar sands pipelines (he even left his job at Nasa this year in part to have more time for campaigning). Two years ago, when I was arrested outside the White House at a mass action against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, one of the 166 people in cuffs that day was a glaciologist named Jason Box, a world-renowned expert on Greenland’s melting ice sheet.

“I couldn’t maintain my self-respect if I didn’t go,” Box said at the time, adding that “just voting doesn’t seem to be enough in this case. I need to be a citizen also.”

This is laudable, but what Werner is doing with his modelling is different. He isn’t saying that his research drove him to take action to stop a particular policy; he is saying that his research shows that our entire economic paradigm is a threat to ecological stability. And indeed that challenging this economic paradigm – through mass-movement counter-pressure – is humanity’s best shot at avoiding catastrophe.

That’s heavy stuff. But he’s not alone. Werner is part of a small but increasingly influential group of scientists whose research into the destabilisation of natural systems – particularly the climate system – is leading them to similarly transformative, even revolutionary, conclusions. And for any closet revolutionary who has ever dreamed of overthrowing the present economic order in favour of one a little less likely to cause Italian pensioners to hang themselves in their homes, this work should be of particular interest. Because it makes the ditching of that cruel system in favour of something new (and perhaps, with lots of work, better) no longer a matter of mere ideological preference but rather one of species-wide existential necessity.

Leading the pack of these new scientific revolutionaries is one of Britain’s top climate experts, Kevin Anderson, the deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, which has quickly established itself as one of the UK’s premier climate research institutions. Addressing everyone from the Department for International Development to Manchester City Council, Anderson has spent more than a decade patiently translating the implications of the latest climate science to politicians, economists and campaigners. In clear and understandable language, he lays out a rigorous road map for emissions reduction, one that provides a decent shot at keeping global temperature rise below 2° Celsius, a target that most governments have determined would stave off catastrophe.

But in recent years Anderson’s papers and slide shows have become more alarming. Under titles such as “Climate Change: Going Beyond Dangerous . . . Brutal Numbers and Tenuous Hope”, he points out that the chances of staying within anything like safe temperature levels are diminishing fast.

With his colleague Alice Bows, a climate mitigation expert at the Tyndall Centre, Anderson points out that we have lost so much time to political stalling and weak climate policies – all while global consumption (and emissions) ballooned – that we are now facing cuts so drastic that they challenge the fundamental logic of prioritising GDP growth above all else.

Anderson and Bows inform us that the often-cited long-term mitigation target – an 80 per cent emissions cut below 1990 levels by 2050 – has been selected purely for reasons of political expediency and has “no scientific basis”. That’s because climate impacts come not just from what we emit today and tomorrow, but from the cumulative emissions that build up in the atmosphere over time. And they warn that by focusing on targets three and a half decades into the future – rather than on what we can do to cut carbon sharply and immediately – there is a serious risk that we will allow our emissions to continue to soar for years to come, thereby blowing through far too much of our 2° “carbon budget” and putting ourselves in an impossible position later in the century.

Which is why Anderson and Bows argue that, if the governments of developed countries are serious about hitting the agreed upon international target of keeping warming below 2° Celsius, and if reductions are to respect any kind of equity principle (basically that the countries that have been spewing carbon for the better part of two centuries need to cut before the countries where more than a billion people still don’t have electricity), then the reductions need to be a lot deeper, and they need to come a lot sooner.

To have even a 50/50 chance of hitting the 2° target (which, they and many others warn, already involves facing an array of hugely damaging climate impacts), the industrialised countries need to start cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions by something like 10 per cent a year – and they need to start right now. But Anderson and Bows go further, pointing out that this target cannot be met with the array of modest carbon pricing or green-tech solutions usually advocated by big green groups. These measures will certainly help, to be sure, but they are simply not enough: a 10 per cent drop in emissions, year after year, is virtually unprecedented since we started powering our economies with coal. In fact, cuts above 1 per cent per year “have historically been associated only with economic recession or upheaval”, as the economist Nicholas Stern put it in his 2006 report for the British government.

 Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, reductions of this duration and depth did not happen (the former Soviet countries experienced average annual reductions of roughly 5 per cent over a period of ten years). They did not happen after Wall Street crashed in 2008 (wealthy countries experienced about a 7 per cent drop between 2008 and 2009, but their CO2 emissions rebounded with gusto in 2010 and emissions in China and India had continued to rise). Only in the immediate aftermath of the great market crash of 1929 did the United States, for instance, see emissions drop for several consecutive years by more than 10 per cent annually, according to historical data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre. But that was the worst economic crisis of modern times.

If we are to avoid that kind of carnage while meeting our science-based emissions targets, carbon reduction must be managed carefully through what Anderson and Bows describe as “radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the US, EU and other wealthy nations”. Which is fine, except that we happen to have an economic system that fetishises GDP growth above all else, regardless of the human or ecological consequences, and in which the neoliberal political class has utterly abdicated its responsibility to manage anything (since the market is the invisible genius to which everything must be entrusted).

So what Anderson and Bows are really saying is that there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which may be the best argument we have ever had for changing those rules.

In a 2012 essay that appeared in the influential scientific journal Nature Climate Change, Anderson and Bows laid down something of a gauntlet, accusing many of their fellow scientists of failing to come clean about the kind of changes that climate change demands of humanity. On this it is worth quoting the pair at length:

 . . . in developing emission scenarios scientists repeatedly and severely underplay the implications of their analyses. When it comes to avoiding a 2°C rise, “impossible” is translated into “difficult but doable”, whereas “urgent and radical” emerge as “challenging” – all to appease the god of economics (or, more precisely, finance). For example, to avoid exceeding the maximum rate of emission reduction dictated by economists, “impossibly” early peaks in emissions are assumed, together with naive notions about “big” engineering and the deployment rates of low-carbon infrastructure. More disturbingly, as emissions budgets dwindle, so geoengineering is increasingly proposed to ensure that the diktat of economists remains unquestioned.

In other words, in order to appear reasonable within neoliberal economic circles, scientists have been dramatically soft-peddling the implications of their research. By August 2013, Anderson was willing to be even more blunt, writing that the boat had sailed on gradual change. “Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of the millennium, 2°C levels of mitigation could have been achieved through significant evolutionary changes within the political and economic hegemony. But climate change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in high-emitting (post-)industrial nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony” (his emphasis).

We probably shouldn’t be surprised that some climate scientists are a little spooked by the radical implications of even their own research. Most of them were just quietly doing their work measuring ice cores, running global climate models and studying ocean acidification, only to discover, as the Australian climate expert and author Clive Hamilton puts it, that they “were unwittingly destabilising the political and social order”.

But there are many people who are well aware of the revolutionary nature of climate science. It’s why some of the governments that decided to chuck their climate commitments in favour of digging up more carbon have had to find ever more thuggish ways to silence and intimidate their nations’ scientists. In Britain, this strategy is becoming more overt, with Ian Boyd, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, writing recently that scientists should avoid “suggesting that policies are either right or wrong” and should express their views “by working with embedded advisers (such as myself), and by being the voice of reason, rather than dissent, in the public arena”.

If you want to know where this leads, check out what’s happening in Canada, where I live. The Conservative government of Stephen Harper has done such an effective job of gagging scientists and shutting down critical research projects that, in July 2012, a couple thousand scientists and supporters held a mock-funeral on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, mourning “the death of evidence”. Their placards said, “No Science, No Evidence, No Truth”.

But the truth is getting out anyway. The fact that the business-as-usual pursuit of profits and growth is destabilising life on earth is no longer something we need to read about in scientific journals. The early signs are unfolding before our eyes. And increasing numbers of us are responding accordingly: blockading fracking activity in Balcombe; interfering with Arctic drilling preparations in Russian waters (at tremendous personal cost); taking tar sands operators to court for violating indigenous sovereignty; and countless other acts of resistance large and small. In Brad Werner’s computer model, this is the “friction” needed to slow down the forces of destabilisation; the great climate campaigner Bill McKibben calls it the “antibodies” rising up to fight the planet’s “spiking fever”.

It’s not a revolution, but it’s a start. And it might just buy us enough time to figure out a way to live on this planet that is distinctly less f**ked.

Naomi Klein, the author of “The Shock Doctrine” and “No Logo”, is working on a book and a film about the revolutionary power of climate change. You call follow her on twitter @naomiaklein

David Harvey interview: The importance of postcapitalist imagination

From housing to wages, David Harvey says examining capitalism's contradictions can point the way towards an alternative world

You’re working on a new book at the moment, The Seventeen Contradictions of Capitalism. Why focus on its contradictions?

David Harvey: The analysis of capitalism suggests that there are significant and foundational contradictions. Periodically those contradictions get out of hand and they generate a crisis. We’ve just been through a crisis and I think it’s important to ask, what were the contradictions that led us into it? How can we analyse the crisis in terms of contradictions? One of Marx’s great sayings was that a crisis is always the result of the underlying contradictions. Therefore we have to deal with those themselves rather than their results.

One of the contradictions you focus on is that between the use and exchange value of a commodity. Why is this contradiction so fundamental to capitalism, and why do you use housing to illustrate it?

All commodities have to be understood as having a use value and exchange value. If I have a steak the use value is that I can eat it and the exchange value is how much I had to pay for it.

But housing is very interesting in this way because as a use value you can understand it as shelter, privacy, a world of affective relations with people, a big list of things you use a house for. But then there is the question of how you get the house. At one time houses were built by people themselves and there was no exchange value at all. Then from the 18th century onwards you got speculative house building – Georgian terraces which were built and sold later on. Then houses became exchange values for consumers in the form of saving. If I buy a house and I pay down the mortgage on it, I can end up owning the house. So I have an asset. I therefore become very concerned about the nature of the asset. This generates interesting politics – ‘not in my backyard’, ‘I don’t want people moving in next door who don’t look like me’. So you start to get segregation in housing markets because people want to protect the value of their savings.

Then about thirty years ago people began to use housing as a form of speculative gain. You could get a house and ‘flip’ it – you buy a house for £200,000, after a year you get £250,000 for it. You earned £50,000, so why not do it? The exchange value took over. And so you get this speculative boom. In 2000 after the collapse of global stock markets the surplus capital started to flow into housing. It’s an interesting kind of market. If I buy a house then housing prices go up, and you say ‘housing prices are going up, I should buy a house’, and then somebody else comes in. You get a housing bubble. People get pulled in and it explodes. Then all of a sudden a lot of people find they can’t have the use value of the housing anymore because the exchange value system has destroyed it.

Which raises the question, is it a good idea to allow use value in housing, which is crucial to people, be delivered by a crazy exchange value system? This is not only a problem with housing but with things like education and healthcare. In many of these we’ve released the exchange value dynamics in the theory that it’s going to provide the use value but frequently what it does is it screws up the use values and people don’t end up getting good healthcare, education or housing. This is why I think it’s very important to look at that distinction between use and exchange value.

Another contradiction you describe involves a process of switching over time between supply-side emphases on production and demand-side emphases on consumption in capitalism. Could you talk about how that manifested itself in the twentieth century and why it’s so important?

One of the big issues is keeping an adequate market demand, so that you can absorb whatever it is that capital is producing. The other is creating the conditions under which capital can produce profitably.

Those conditions of profitable production usually mean suppressing labour. To the degree that you engage in wage repression – paying lower and lower wages – the profit rate goes up. So, from the production side, you want to squeeze labour down as much as you possibly can. That gives you high profits. But then the question arises, who is going to buy the product? If labour is being squeezed, where is your market? If you squeeze labour too much you end up with a crisis because there’s not enough demand in the market to absorb the product.

It was broadly interpreted after a while that the problem in the crisis of the 1930s was lack of demand. There was therefore a shift to state-led investments in building new roads, the WPA [public works under the New Deal] and all that. They said ‘we will revitalise the economy by debt-financed demand’ and, in doing so, turned to Keynesian theory. So you came out of the 1930s with a very strong capacity for managing demand with a lot of state involvement in the economy. As a result of that you get very high growth rates, but the high growth rates are accompanied by an empowerment of the working-class with rising wages and stronger unions.

Strong unions and high wages mean the profit rate starts to come down. Capital is in crisis because it’s not repressing labour enough, and so you get the switch. In the 1970s they turned to Milton Friedman and the Chicago School. That became dominant in economic theory and people began paying attention to the supply-side – particularly wages. You get wage repression, which begins in the 1970s. Ronald Reagan attacks the air traffic controllers, Margaret Thatcher goes after the miners, Pinochet kills people on the left. You get an attack on labour – which raises the profit rate. By the time you get to the 1980s the profit rate has jumped up because wages are being repressed and capital is doing well. But then there comes the problem of where are you going to sell the stuff.

In the 1990s that is really covered by the debt economy. You started to encourage people to borrow a lot – you started to create a credit card economy and a high mortgage-financed economy in housing. That covered the fact that there wasn’t real demand out there. But eventually that blows up in 2007-8.

Capital has this question, ‘do you work on the supply side or the demand side?’ My view of an anticapitalist world is that you should unify that. We should return to use value. What use values do people need and how to we organise production in such a way that it matches these?

It would seem that we are in a supply-side crisis, and yet austerity is an attempt to find a supply-side resolution. How do we square that?

You have to differentiate between the interests of capitalism as a whole and what is specifically in the interests of the capitalist class, or a section of it. During this crisis, by-and-large, the capitalist class have done very well. Some of them got burned but for the most part they have done extremely well. According to recent studies of the OECD countries social inequality has increased quite significantly since the onset of the crisis, which means that the benefits of the crisis have been flowing to the upper classes. In other words, they don’t want to get out of the crisis because they are doing very well out of it.

The population as a whole is suffering, capitalism as a whole is not healthy but the capitalist class – particularly an oligarchy within it – has been doing extremely well. There are many situations where individual capitalists operating in their own class interests can actually do things which are very damaging to the capitalist system as a whole. I think we are in that kind of situation right now.

You have said often recently that one of the things we should be doing on the left is engaging our postcapitalist imagination, starting to ask the question of what a postcapitalist world would look like. Why is that so important? And, in your view, what would a postcapitalist world look like?

It is important because it has been drummed into our heads for a considerable period of time that there is no alternative. One of the first things we have to do is to think about the alternative in order to move towards its creation.

The left has become so complicitous with neoliberalism that you can’t really tell its political parties from right-wing ones except on national or social issues. In political economy there is not much difference. We’ve got to find an alternative political economy to how capitalism works, and there are some principles. That’s why contradictions are interesting. You look at each one of them like, for instance, the use and exchange value contradiction and say – ‘the alternative world would be one where we deliver use values’. So we concentrate on use values and try to diminish the role of exchange values.

Or on the monetary question – we need money to circulate commodities, no question about it. But the problem with money is that it can be appropriated by private persons. It becomes a form of personal power and then a fetish desire. People mobilise their lives around searching for this money even when nobody knows that it is. So we’ve got to change the monetary system - either tax away any surpluses people are beginning to get or come up with a monetary system which dissolves and cannot be stored, like air miles.

But in order to do that you’ve also got to overcome the private property-state dichotomy and come to a common property regime. And, at a certain point, you need to generate a basic income for people because if you have a form of money that is anti-saving then you need to guarantee people. You need to say, ‘you don’t need to save for a rainy day because you’ll always be getting this basic income no matter what’. You’ve got to give people security that way rather than private, personal savings.

By changing each one of these contradictory things you end up with a different kind of society, which is much more rational than the one we’ve got. What happens right now is that we produce things and then we try to persuade consumers to consume whatever we’ve produced, whether they really want it or need it. Whereas we should be finding out what people’s basic wants and desires are and then mobilising the production system to produce that. By eliminating the exchange value dynamic you can reorganise the whole system in a different kind of way. We can imagine the direction that a socialist alternative would move in as it breaks from this dominant form of capital accumulation, which runs everything today.

First published at Red Pepper

Ecosocialism - Joel Kovel explains the relationship between ecology and socialism

Author of the landmark book 'The Enemy of Nature' Joel Kovel speaking in 2007 about the need for a re-ordering of our economies before the current system destroys the planet.

Romayne Phoenix Speaks About Eco-socialism

"Leaving the System by the Frontdoor" Ecosocialism, the viable alternative. Front de Gauche (Londres) meeting 21/6/2013.Romayne Phoenix, Chair Coalition of Resistance & Green Left, & Lewisham Green Party member.

Feminism and ecosocialism: a necessary alliance

Eco-socialist and feminist struggles overlap and stand as the great reference for our defence of common goods in our country and our continent.
 

by Tárzia Medeiros
 
International Viewpoint

Tárzia Medeiros is active in the World March of Women and member of National Directorate of the Party of Socialist and Liberty (PSOL) in Brazil. 

For as long as capitalism and patriarchy have existed as systems linked to each other, they have made an alliance to establish a relationship of domination over nature and of appropriation and exploitation of everything that, on this basis, they stereotyped as beings of an “inferior nature”, which includes women and their bodies.

At the same time, the condition of blacks, mestizos and the indigenous, and their ethnic and cultural subordination, became something natural. Everything that comes from nature and does not match the standard of masculine and bourgeois social evolution and that does not fit the paradigm of white and Western, exists only as something of an “inferior nature”

The naturalization of motherhood as women’s function and destiny, as well as the naturalization of their bodies as territory to be conquered and controlled, should be rejected by all socialists who demand an ecosocialist, feminist world, free from the scars of capitalism.

We cannot permit that a “biological” explanation of the inequality between men and women be used to keep the latter in a an inferior social, political and economic position to that of men.

The effects of the environmental crisis ravaging whole regions of the planet, fall most harshly on the peripheral countries, on the poorest people, and especially on women and children. Desertification, the loss of water resources, environmental disasters caused by climate change (tsunamis, earthquakes, prolonged periods of drought, floods and landslides) have a huge impact on their everyday lives.

When people are forced to leave the places where they live, most refugees and homeless are again women and children. Climate change is exacerbating poverty and accentuating inequalities, making women often resort to prostitution just to get food. The increase in diseases, with the reappearance of some that were already extinct or controlled (such as cholera and tuberculosis, etc.), also puts a burden on women, because the care of the sick still falls to them.

The neo-Malthusian response to the climate crisis points to overpopulation in the world as the central cause of the climate crisis, and seeks therefore to restrict women’s right to control their bodies. This is a racist approach, because population growth is higher in the South. But it also diverts attention from the huge gulf that separates the wasteful consumption of the super-rich from the absolute poverty of the poorest sectors, and the vastly different impacts each have on Nature.

Those of us who have fought for the expansion of women’s rights to control their bodies and their fertility, reject and denounce this pseudo-solution, because it puts in question women’s right to decide and makes the mistake of ignoring the structural causes of the crisis, where capitalism is the central factor.

In the South, women are also responsible for producing 80% of food, including the gathering and preservation of native fruits and seeds. This central role in ensuring food sovereignty and the preservation of biodiversity as the heritage of humanity gives women a key role in agriculture and the supply of food.

The growing impact of large, capitalist development projects in Brazil, which are supported by the state through the CAP and the BNDES, has led to a loss of territory and autonomy for small producers, most of whom are women, indigenous communities or Afro-Brazilian maroon communities.

The main expression of such projects are agribusiness, the re-routing of the São Francisco River and the irrigated areas that adjoin it, large dams to supply new hydroelectric plants (Belo Monte, Jirau, etc.), the IIRSA, mining, the intensive use of pesticides and the production of biofuels. Women play a central role in protecting ecosystems and biomass against governments (Federal, State and Municipal) who want to sell them off to multinationals.

The actions of the women of Via Campesina, who destroyed the eucalyptus plantations of Aracruz Cellulose, like the role of indigenous and maroon communities in defending their ancestral lands, are examples of the victorious defence of the environment, based on their particular realities.

It is vital to strengthen the alliance between women in the countryside and women in the city. A feminism that incorporates the ecosocialist struggle will be closer to those struggles that are today at the forefront of the defence of common goods in our country and our continent. Ecosocialist and feminist struggles overlap and stand as the great reference for our work, because they fall, more than ever, within the framework of the struggle against capitalism and form part of our strategic vision.

Labour’s embrace of welfare reform is a victory for the right

The Labour Party leadership’s embrace of welfare reform – set out in Ed Miliband’s keynote speech on welfare to a select audience in Newham, East London – marks a victory for the right and describes another benchmark in the political degeneration of the party that created the welfare state.

From the moment the current global economic crisis hit these shores with the collapse of Northern Rock in September 2007, the singular objective of the right has been to turn what was and is a crisis of private greed into a crisis of public spending. It was a campaign given political credence with the election of the Tory-led coalition government in 2010, unleashing a political and economic assault on the poorest and most vulnerable section of society under the rubric of austerity.

In economic terms austerity is doomed to failure. The empirical and historical evidence leaves no doubt that in periods of economic downturn a government must spend more not less in order to re-inject the demand sucked out by the refusal of the private sector to invest as profits tumble

Investment strike

A story that appeared in the Express in April revealed that the government’s own Office for National Statistics had calculated that UK corporations, other than banks, were sitting on a combined surplus of £318 billion in the final quarter of last year – up from £304 billion in the previous quarter.

This is an investment strike by any other name, which the government has responded to with tax cuts for the wealthy and other inducements to invest in the shape of subsidies, grants, tax breaks, and so on. Picking up the tab for all this has been the poor and those reliant on the welfare state and public services in the form of swingeing cuts to public spending.

If we factor in the £375 billion pounds the government has thus far fed to the banks in the form of Quantitative Easing since 2009, what we have seen over the past five years of the economic crisis is the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich on a grand scale.

The fact that the government has been able to get away with this without meeting significant or effective resistance is a consequence of two processes that are interlinked. The first is the traction and persuasiveness of the simplistic analogy that the Tories and their bag carriers in the right wing press have drawn between a national economy and a household budget.

Contraction of demand

Yet as the US economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman reminds us – unlike a household budget, when it comes to a national economy one person’s spending is another person’s income. Under the aegis of austerity, if no-one is spending then no one has any income, resulting in the contraction of demand leading to the stagnation we are currently witnessing.

The second of these two interlinked processes is a government initiated campaign of demonisation against the unemployed and those claiming benefits, resulting in the creeping criminalisation of poverty. Shifting the responsibility for poverty onto its victims – away from the vicissitudes of a free market economic system that could not function without creating poverty – has been one of the most vicious and callous policies of any British government in modern history. Sadly, as stated, it has met with inordinate success, reflected most recently in Ed Miliband’s speech on welfare reform, which amounted to the Labour Party leadership’s abandonment of the principle of social solidarity that underpins the welfare state.

The specific contents of Ed Miliband’s speech set out a pledge to in building homes in order to bring down a housing benefit bill that currently sits at £95 billion annually. Set against the paltry £4.5 billion the government devoted to building affordable housing last year, it is inarguable that the current expenditure in housing benefit is unsustainable. However its size indicates an out of control private rental market on the back of a three decades long housing crisis.

Bedroom tax

While any pledge to address this housing crisis is welcome, the lack of any policy on rent control to deal with exorbitant rents charged by private landlords – the real beneficiaries of housing benefit – is instructive. Also instructive, not to mention disappointing, is the lack of a firm pledge by Labour to repeal the present government’s iniquitous Bedroom Tax if and when elected, with its disproportionate impact on the disabled.
Listening to Ed Miliband’s capitulation to the right on welfare reform, the words of US billionaire investor Warren Buffet immediately sprang to mind:

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Written by John Wright and published at Socialist Unity Blog

UKIP and the Anti-Establishment Vote

The big story of the local elections in (rural) England was the rise in the vote for UKIP, gaining 139 council seats and gaining almost a quarter of the vote, and finishing second in the South Shields by-election. Certainly, that is how the mainstream media have portrayed it, and of course it was huge stride forward for UKIP.

To place this into context though, the Green Party made on the surface of it, only a modest net gain of 5 seats, but this was in going from 17 to 22 seats, an increase of nearly a third to our representatives, which is good result for us. And even though now UKIP are now slightly ahead of the Green party in numbers of local councillors, who in the mainstream media ever made a story of us being well ahead of them before?

The media do tend to give a disproportionate amount of attention to UKIP and they have done so with the BNP in the past, although we have many more elected representatives than they have ever had. So, I think the media have played a part in the success of UKIP, almost a self-fulfilling prophesy, but I don’t think that this explains everything.

Nationalist parties are gaining ground all over Europe in this time of imposed austerity, and in some ways UKIP are more benign than other right wing nationalist parties scattered across the continent.  With the failure of the economic system in Europe (and the US) people’s living standards have been slashed and in circumstances similar to the 1930’s, simplistic, scapegoating solutions have again bubbled to the surface. 

For UKIP in Britain, there is almost the perfect storm. The UK government blames our economic woes on Europe and immigrants, the Coalition parties have failed to improve the situation and Labour is still held responsible by many for getting us into the mess, and so a desire to protest and look for politicians untainted by the present problems, becomes an attractive option. At least at local or by-elections, whether this will all carry to a general election, I have my doubts.

But we should not be complacent about the rise of UKIP, but more we should question why people vote for basically another shade of grey, rather than a truly radical party of the anti-establishment, the Green Party?

As mentioned the media and simplistic solutions play a part, and UKIP have a lot more money than we do, so the challenge for the Green party is to effectively communicate the message that the system has failed, and needs to be radically overhauled. No tinkering with immigration rules or human rights laws is going to change the fact that we have an economic system that is failing to deliver for the vast majority of people in the UK and across Europe. And all of this, with little money and not much in the way of favourable media coverage.

And this is hard message to sell anyway, even in the dire straits we find ourselves in today. To pretty much tear down the system and start again with a sustainable, socially just political agenda is a scary concept for many people, so we have our work cut out to be sure. But if we prove by our actions and deeds, where we do have democratic influence, and by campaigning hard around issues that illustrate the failures of the status quo, maybe we can ride the anti-establishment zeitgest too, which is so obviously a real feature of electoral politics today in this country.       

The Kilburn Manifesto's challenge to the neoliberal victory

The crisis in the global economic system triggered by the banking collapse of 2006-08 has precipitated a new moment in the evolution of global capitalism. But its novelty is not generally understood.

Some previous crises, most famously the great crash and depression of the 1930s, produced radical social change: the welfare state and New Deal, as well as the rise of fascism. In the past five years protest groups such as Occupy have appeared, and resistance to austerity has grown. Yet there has been no rupture in the system or its governing ideology. Indeed, elites have used the crisis in Europe and north America to advance the neoliberal project, as unrelenting attacks on living standards, the NHS and the welfare state in Britain show.

The disintegration of the British postwar settlement was the central project of one of the new right's most politically divisive figures, Margaret Thatcher. Her funeral last week was designed to install her as the emblem of a unified nation, and set the seal on three decades of work by three political regimes – Thatcherism, New Labour and the coalition – to fundamentally reshape Britain. As David Cameron told the BBC: "We are all Thatcherites now." Thatcher is dead, long live Thatcherism.

What is new about this phase of capitalism? Its global interconnectedness, driven in part by new technologies, and the dominance of a new kind of finance capitalism mean that, while a crisis of this system has effects everywhere, these effects are uneven. So far the Bric countries seem relatively unscathed, while the impact of economic devastation has spread from Asia and Africa into Europe.

The breakdown of old forms of social solidarity is accompanied by the dramatic growth of inequality and a widening gap between those who run the system or are well paid as its agents, and the working poor, unemployed, under-employed or unwell.

The crisis has revealed a new, international and ethnically diverse super-rich. The Sunday Times Rich List is topped by two Russian oligarchs and an Indian billionaire. They live a life totally divorced from and almost unimaginable by ordinary people, fuelled by an apparently unstoppable appetite for profit.

Neoliberalism's victory has depended on the boldness and ambition of global capital, on its confidence that it can now govern not just the economy but the whole of social life. On the back of a revamped liberal political and economic theory, its champions have constructed a vision and a new common sense that have permeated society. Market forces have begun to model institutional life and press deeply into our private lives, as well as dominating political discourse. They have shaped a popular culture that extols celebrity and success and promotes values of private gain and possessive individualism. They have thoroughly undermined the redistributive egalitarian consensus that underpinned the welfare state, with painful consequences for socially vulnerable groups such as women, old people, the young and ethnic minorities.

Corporate exploitation of cheap labour, natural resources and land has worsened the crisis in the developing world. Environmental degradation, poverty, disease pandemics, poor education, ethnic divisions and civil wars are paraded as inevitable postcolonial failures and provoke the old powers to intervene to safeguard the conditions for capitalist accumulation.

The neoliberal victory has reasserted the powers and position of the dominant classes. But this victory was not inevitable. No social settlement is permanent, and this one was fought for, from the coup in Chile and the defeat of the miners in Britain to current attacks on workers' rights and the benefits system. There is more than one way out of the current catastrophe. There is always an alternative.

Today – Wednesday – the founding editors of Soundings, the new left journal first published in 1995, launch a manifesto that will attempt to outline ways forward. Over the next year we and our collaborators will, in a series of monthly instalments, examine different aspects of the current crisis and try to frame a more systemic set of questions than is usually asked. We do not offer policies but alternative approaches and demands that we hope will contribute to the broader debate that is the environment in which policymakers operate.

New Labour's collusion with the neoliberal project – through an agenda of privatisation, outsourcing and the marketisation of the public sector – has left the party unable to draw a clear line with the coalition. Having driven forward many of Thatcherism's gains under Tony Blair, it is constrained by timid leadership, by a lack of clear vision and new ideas.

Outside party politics new social movements, including environmental, anti-cuts and feminist groups, have not come together sufficiently with the old, defensive organisations of the working class to produce the coalition that might make them an effective political force. Yet there are indications of how such a compromise might work, for example in the short era of Ken Livingstone's GLC and the radical experiments under way in Latin America. By contrast, turmoil in the Middle East shows us what happens when democratic demands are not met, while in Europe resistance to austerity is twinned with the revival of fascism.

This is no time for simple retreat. What is required is a renewed sense of being on the side of the future, not stuck in the dugouts of the past. We must admit that the old forms of the welfare state proved insufficient. But we must stubbornly defend the principles on which it was founded – redistribution, egalitarianism, collective provision, democratic accountability and participation, the right to education and healthcare – and find new ways in which they can be institutionalised and expressed.

All of us who oppose the current direction, whether from inside or outside party politics or other organisations, must invent. We must set about disrupting the current common sense, challenging the assumptions that organise our 21st-century political discourse. We hope our manifesto will open a dialogue with a new generation shaped by different political experiences. This is a moment for challenging, not adapting to, neoliberalism's new reality, and for making a leap.

After Neoliberalism: The Kilburn Manifesto, by Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin, is launched in London today, Wednesday 24 April, and online

First published at The Guardian

Green Party - Austerity Isn't Working

No local elections in London this year, but there are elections in other areas. A timely message from Caroline Lucas, Green Party MP for Brighton Pavillion, the ConDem austerity policies are not working, instead, they making the economic situation much worse. Even the IMF, well known lefties they are not, have told George Osborne the Chancellor of the Exchequer, he should change course.  

Margaret Thatcher – A Class Warrior For The Rich

A huge amount is being written in the mainstream media about the former Tory Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who died on Monday morning, most of it sycophantic rubbish, but worse still, there is also a concerted attempt to rewrite history, preferring instead a story which is reminiscent of a Greek myth or Kim Jong-Il’s golfing exploits (seven holes in one out of eighteen, the first time he picked up a golf club).

I do feel that I’m entitled to have my two pence worth on her time in office, as I was seventeen when she was elected as Prime Minister in 1979, and she blighted my life as a young man in the north of England, forcing me to move south in a search for some kind of future. I was young and well enough educated and could afford to up everything and move, which wasn’t the case for everyone, despite Norman Tebbit’s exhortations to the unemployed to do just that. But all the same, I felt compelled to leave my community, just to have a chance of getting a job and making a life for myself.

The story painted in the media of the late 1970’s is of a country ‘on its knees’, in need of a strong leader to make the nation great and proud (again), ‘held ransom’ by over mighty trade union ‘barons’, with runaway inflation, rising unemployment, inefficient state owned industries draining the public purse and consequently high rates of taxation. A deeply divided once great nation crippled by the evil doctrine of socialism.

Instead, we needed a fresh approach, becoming fashionable at the time through figures such Milton Friedman and others at the Chicago Business School, where unions were tamed, public industries and services privatised, income tax cut (mostly for the wealthy), and ‘red tape’ was cut, which in turn would free up entrepreneurs to create wealth which would ‘trickle down’ to the little people in due course.

That was the rhetoric, at least, in practice we had mass unemployment in the industrial heartlands of the north of England, Scotland and Wales with the closure of most of the state owned heavy industries, (this had the added advantage of reducing the membership and the power of the unions), cuts in welfare benefits, a cut in income tax (mostly for the wealthy) but a sharp increase in indirect taxes (hitting the poorest proportionately most), which led to an equally sharp increase in inflation, and a giveaway (mostly to the wealthy) of the public utilities in privatisation and share issues. The financial services sector was deregulated, the so called ‘Big Bang’, leading to many risky and questionable practices being made legal. The employment market was made ‘flexible’.

Perhaps Thatcher’s most cunning idea was the ‘Right to Buy’ policy of encouraging tenants to buy their public housing at up 50% discount, which was extremely popular with a section of these tenants (those in the best houses, in the best areas), and effectively divided the working class between the ‘aspirational’ and the ‘losers’. People with mortgages were also less likely to go on strike too, so, so much the better. Classic divide and rule.     

Some areas of the country have still not recovered from Thatcher’s neo liberal policies, which have largely been maintained and taken further, under successive governments, most shamefully, a Labour government included. But from the viewpoint of recent history, we can see that Margaret Thatcher’s legacy is that she sowed the seeds of the present recession, from the housing crisis to the financial crisis, from the large amounts being spent on benefits rather than more productive investment, to the huge increase in wealth inequality. It all started in 1979.

The period from the end of World War 2 to 1979 saw a narrowing of the gap between the rich and the rest (fairly modest, but still), whereas post 1979 this gap has increased hugely, nationally and internationally too. And this is Thatcher’s true place in history, a warrior for the outraged establishment elite. She fought a class war on behalf of a world elite that had seen their wealth decrease in the post war years, to the advantage of the rest of us. Welfare states were demolished and income taxes for the rich reduced in the most audacious thievery from the people imaginable.

Margaret Thatcher was not a national heroine; she was a sort of Robin Hood in reverse. She was a very effective hench-woman for the ruling classes worldwide, so if she is to have some fancy funeral parade, then those whose dirty work she did, should send her off in a privatised cavalcade, rather than add insult to injury for the majority of British people by making us pay for her procession.      

The above video/song is Shipbuilding by Robert Wyatt.    

Is co-operative energy the solution to climate change?

With climate change increasingly having a disastrous global impact, growing numbers of local communities are responding by launching their own renewable energy co-operatives in an effort to slash the UK's greenhouse gas emissions.

In fact green energy co-ops are now one of the fastest growing parts of the UK co-operative sector having grown by 24% in the past four years.

"The first co-operatively-owned wind farm opened in Cumbria in 1997," explains Rebecca Willis, co-author of a report into co-operative renewable energy published earlier this year.

"Since then, over 7,000 individual investors have ploughed over £16 million into community-owned wind turbines and other renewable technologies resulting in that there are now over 40 co-operatively-run renewable energy projects across the UK."

Typical of the motivation that lies behind this behind this surge in the numbers of renewable energy co-ops is that demonstrated by Mark Wells, a director of the newly-launched Sheffield Renewables co-op: "When we bring future generations to mind, ignoring the problem of climate change is not an option. So even though climate change is a very big problem, we want to do our bit, and so we chose to work as a community to build a renewable energy scheme."

The co-op aims to build a hydro-electric generator on the river Don which will be the largest community-owned hydro scheme in England providing enough electricity to power 80 homes.
The project is being funded by a share offer which aims to raise £200k and which will pay individual investors up to 3% interest.

"Investing in Sheffield Renewables is about much more than the financial return," cautions Wells. "It's about working together to bring carbon-free local energy to the city with profits going back into more green initiatives. Plus once people become involved with the project they're more likely to think about climate change and start to reduce their own carbon footprint."

Simon Gilhooly who helped launch the Green Energy Nayland project in Suffolk last year agrees that renewable energy projects are a great way to get the issue of climate change onto the agenda: "We've installed a photo-voltaic system onto the roof of local primary school and this has really helped raise awareness of climate change within the school and the wider community."
In the first year of their operation Gilhooly estimates that the school's solar panels has saved around £1,000 in energy bills. The scheme has also generated an income of over £4,000 through the government's feed in tariff resulting in that members who bought shares in the scheme are being paid a healthy level of interest on their investment.

All of the UK's renewable energy co-ops have been funded through share issues that target individual ethically-minded investors.

To help match up would-be investors with renewable energy projects a new website Microgenius has been launched as its founder Emily Mackay explains: "Microgenius is designed to simplify the process for both new renewable energy projects and investors. It has been specially developed to manage the administration of fundraising and to make it possible to reach a much wider range of people with the share offer."

Another source of financial support for new co-ops is from the Co-operative Group. "We have earmarked £1 million to support the establishment of new renewable energy co-operatives through our Co-operative Enterprise Hub," says Paul Monaghan, head of social goals and sustainability at the Co-operative Group. "This provides free business support for new and existing co-operatives."

So what are the key benefits of launching a renewable energy project as a co-op?

"One of the main advantages of co-operative structures is the strong message that the project is done by and for the community and is not imposed from the outside," answers Willis.

This is exactly what the Valley Wind co-op in West Yorkshire has found whilst planning its wind farm in the Colne Valley.

"So far we've had a pretty positive response from the community to our plans," says Chayley Collis, spokesperson for Valley Wind.

"A big part of this is because we're a co-operative and so people feel that the wind farm is going to benefit the community and that it is something that they will be able to invest in."
With opposition to wind farms growing around the country, the local paper in nearby Huddersfield ran a poll about the planned windfarm.

"Over 70% of respondents were in favour which is a fantastic vote for co-operative windfarms," says Collis.

However despite the passion and dedication of the renewable energy co-op community, the sector contributes only a minute amount of energy to the National Grid and scaling up their numbers remains an uphill task.

"If the government put the right policies in place then renewable energy co-op schemes could generate electricity equivalent to three conventional power stations," says Willis.

"Currently though with its jungle of red-tape the market is designed to favour the established large-scale developments which have specialist teams to tackle the mountain of bureaucracy involved in bringing a scheme to market."

One way that co-ops have been able to bypass this bureaucratic-nightmare is to team up with existing windfarm developers.

In Scotland four community co-ops have been launched which now have a small stake in major windfarms that have been built by Falk Renewables, one of Europe's leading renewable energy companies.

"Community groups receive a pro rata per centage of energy production from the windfarm," explains Paul Phare from Energy4All which works to develop renewable energy co-ops.

"It's an opportunity to engage everyone within the community, whether it be through a new playground paid for by the windfarm developer or as individuals who can personally benefit from investing in the wind farm scheme."

One energy co-op which is aiming for the big time is Co-operative Energy, part of the Co-op Group which launched in 2010.

"We aspire to being as big in energy as we are in banking," says Ben Reid from Co-op Energy.
"Most people feel completely disengaged about energy and mistrust their energy supplier. We aim to treat our customers fairly which is the hallmark of the co-operative brand and as with all co-operatives, members would be offered a share of profits," says Reid.

"If the original Rochdale Pioneers were starting up in business in 2011," Reid adds, "then I'm convinced that it's the energy market they would choose."

Written by Simon Birch first published at The Guardian

The Green Economy

It will stop climate change and the extinction of species and in so doing will create high growth rates and millions of jobs. It’s seen as a miraculous weapon. Through it, global capitalism will be stabilised. And then it will be sustainable as well.

But what is the green economy? In it, policy parameters are supposed to ensure the flow of capital to make markets and the economy "greener" and create "green" jobs. Enterprises are to pay an "appropriate" price for environmental damage. And not least: the state is supposed to orient its public procurements to sustainability criteria and create sustainable infrastructures. 

In 2012, the green economy is on everyone’s lips. For 20 years now people have been rhapsodising over the greening of capitalism. At the same time it is clear that somehow sustainable development is not faring so well. CO2 emissions are increasing. Biological diversity is contracting. Famine, impoverishment and social inequality are increasing in many countries. The much feted "conciliation of ecology and economy" is proving hard to construct. The green economy is not what many want to see it as: a magical formula which will offer solutions on a silver tray for many problems.

With this brochure the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation wants to demonstrate that green economy is a contested term, which can be filled with many different contents – according to different interests. And we hope to show where the proposals fall short, seek a too hasty compromise with the ruling forces and suppress alternatives rather than promote them.

It is clear that if the green economy does not break with the structures of the old economy and merely serves as a growth program for the latter, it will quickly lead to disillusionment and lose its sheen.

The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation is the research institute of Die Linke, (The Left Party, Germany)

Download Beautiful Green World HERE (PDF)

Ecology, Socialism and Capitalism

An interview between Chris Williams and David Barsamian.

Chris Williams (left) is a long-time environmental activist based in New York City. He is professor of physics and chemistry at Pace University and chair of the science department at Packer Collegiate Institute. Williams is also a frequent contributor to the International Socialist Review (ISR), and The Indypendent, an online newspaper that looks at news and culture through a critical lens, exploring how systems of power—economic, political and social—affects the lives of people locally and globally.

Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis is Williams’ first book.

David Barsamian is the founder and director of Alternative Radio, an independent award-winning weekly series based in Boulder, Colorado. He has been working in radio since 1978 where he has interviewed the likes of Angela Davis, Ralph Nader, Vandana Shiva, and Carlos Fuentes. The one-hour program is broadcast on public radio stations in the United States, Canada, Australia, and other countries. His publications include Targeting Iran, What We Say Goes with Noam Chomsky, Original Zinn: Conversations on History and Politics with Howard Zinn, Imperial Ambitions with Noam Chomsky, and Speaking of Empire & Resistance with Tariq Ali. His earlier books include The Checkbook & the Cruise Missile with Arundhati Roy, Propaganda and the Public Mind with Noam Chomsky, Eqbal Ahmad: Confronting Empire, and The Decline and Fall of Public Broadcasting.


The Institute for Alternative Journalism named him one of its “Top Ten Media Heroes.” Barsamian lectures throughout the U.S. on foreign policy, the media, propaganda, and corporate power. In 2003 he received the ACLU’s Upton Sinclair Award for independent journalism and the Democracy Media Award, and in 2006, the Rocky Mountain Peace & Justice Center Award. Barsamian interviewed Andrew Bacevich for Lannan’s Readings & Conversations in 2010.

This video first published on http://www.lannan.org/

What Environmentalists need to know about Capitalism

What Every Environmentalist Needs To Know about Capitalism: A Citizen’s Guide to Capitalism and the Environment

by Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster

Recently, President Obama rejected the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline—a 1,700-mile oil pipeline that would have run from the tar sands of Alberta to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. This is undoubtedly a huge victory for the environmental movement. However, Bill McKibben—activist and founder of 350.org—was quick to give away the credit: “This isn’t just the right call, it’s the brave call. The knock on Barack Obama from many quarters has been that he’s too conciliatory. But here, in the face of a naked political threat from Big Oil to exact ‘huge political consequences,’ he’s stood up strong.”

McKibben did go on to give credit to the thousands of grassroots activists who are the real brave ones working for environmental justice. However, they are presented as a partner to the president, working together for a common goal against an intransigent Republican, big business, and oil company based opposition. McKibben seems to have discovered, in his estimation, the form that victories can take in the battle for the environment, and it is an inside-outside strategy that is as old as the hills and has far more failures than victories. This focus on form and strategy precludes any discussion of what is at the root of the environmental catastrophe—our economic system.

As any good activist knows, the ultimate goals of the movement should guide the strategy and tactics. This is why it is so important to correctly identify the problem, else your solutions will be ineffective or actually counter-productive.

This is where the new book by John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism, shines. The book was adapted from an article originally published in Monthly Review magazine under the same title. Readers of Monthly Review or other leftwing environmental sources will be familiar with most of the issues and problems explored in this book. Despite this, the book is still very useful. For those not as familiar with the current environmental problems, things are worse than you think.

Between climate change, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, global freshwater use, loss of biodiversity, and chemical pollution our planet and all life on it is in big trouble unless things change—and change soon.

In addition to the problems, the authors discuss and ultimately discount various mainstream environmental solutions. These include both those proposed in corporate boardrooms and those proposed by well-meaning and committed activists. What all these solutions have in common, though, is that they are wholly inadequate or incapable of dealing with the problem of global climate change. The reason these solutions will not work is all a function of their inability (or in some cases, specific unwillingness) to identify and confront capitalism as the source of all environmental ills.

A real positive with this book is that while it debunks what it calls “utopian reformist” solutions (like technocratic solutions or personal consumption choices), it does so without insulting the generally well-meaning people who care deeply about the problem and truly believe those are the solutions. This is valuable because it is important not to alienate or unnecessarily antagonize those struggling for environmental justice now who can be won to an anticapitalist view later.

The main drawback with the book is that it is somewhat disorganized. There is no fault with the information, but if you are looking for a clear explanation of the specific environmental problems and/or an in-depth look at why mainstream solutions will not work then there are better books for that — some even by Foster and Magdoff.

Where this book stands out, though, is in the prescriptions for action provided at the end.
What has been lacking in some Marxist discussions of the environment are real, tangible medium-term goals or issues to work behind. Commonly, the argument for why capitalism is the problem is very compelling, but the overly simple solution of socialist revolution, while correct, can be too intangible for environmentalists new to Marxism.

Foster and Magdoff do the heavy lifting of convincing the reader that capitalism is the problem, but they don’t just stop at “organize for socialism.” They provide a veritable laundry list of things to get involved in, all with the ultimate goal of replacing capitalism—a barbaric system based on exploitation and destruction—with a socialist society based on cooperation and sustainability.

This list of issues and ideas is clear and easy to understand and could even be used as an organizing tool to launch a specifically anticapitalist environmental activism group that could work around specific local and national issues, while always keeping an eye on fighting against and ultimately replacing the capitalist system.

It could also be a valuable primer or discussion tool within the Occupy movement where environmental issues as well as anticapitalist politics have both received a positive reception.

What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know is useful for people who care about the environment but don’t know what to do or where to look for the root problems, as well as for Marxists looking to plug into environmental struggles in their own community.

Reviewed by Dan Sharber 
International Socialist Review, March-April, 2012

The English Civil War, Republicanism and Green Socialism

In these days of royal jubilee celebrations, my mind has turned towards thinking about republicanism in this country. We did have a de facto republic in England (and Scotland, Wales and Ireland) for ten years between 1649 and 1659, after the English Civil War(s) ended, and up until the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660. His father King Charles I was executed for high treason by Parliamentary forces in 1649 after years of dispute and then war with Parliamentary supporters.

These times must have been incredibly exciting politically with debates going on about the future governance of the country, the most famous of which were the Putney Debates at St Mary’s Church near Putney bridge in south west London. A group emerged who became known as The Levellers, with their support drawn mainly from rank and file soldiers in the Parliamentary army, although they had support amongst the people, particularly in the City of London where one of third of the population signed a petition supporting them.

They set out their demands in An Agreement of the People which espoused a republican and democratic agenda, calling for voting rights for most men and for Parliament to be elected every two years, for religious freedom, and for an end to imprisonment for debt. The heads of the army had other ideas though and wanted the King to approve of some improvements in social justice. In the end Leveller leaders were arrested and some executed by the ruling army elite.

One sub sect of the Leveller’s was the Diggers, or True Levellers, who not only called for an extension in the voting franchise and extended liberties, but who actually took pre figurative direct action in setting up collective communities on common land, ploughing the land to grow crops to share amongst the cooperative, hence the name Diggers. Like all thinking in those days, it was based upon the Bible, and a Quaker interpretation of the text.

The Diggers set up a small number of settlements on common land mainly in southern England, but probably numbered only a couple of thousand people in total. The most famous settlement was at St George’s Hill in Weybridge in Surrey. It was all pretty radical stuff at the time, but looking back their demands were typically English and conservative. At the time, over one third of the country was common land, and gave plenty of room for their experiment, of the other nearly two thirds of enclosed land, they were happy to leave with its ‘owners’. They also renounced all violence and petitioned Parliament to protect their communities.

Parliament didn’t pay much attention to the situation and local land owners, who must have feared that they wouldn’t be able to attract workers onto their land to work, used the local courts and armed thugs to evict the Diggers from their blossoming ecosocialist communities, and there the experiment ended.

The Restoration of Charles II saw the beginning of the wholesale enclosure of much of what was left of the common land, as the establishment could see the threat of allowing people to live communally like this would undermine their wealth and privilege.

And so it goes on today. I have met people in Tanzania who farm common land clearings in the forest illegally, and spoken to fishermen in Senegal, whose families have fished sustainably for centuries and are now threatened with starvation by factory fishing boats from Europe, Japan and Russia, over fishing their commons for profits at home and internationally.

So, whilst all this royalist rubbish is going on in the coming days, let’s instead reflect on our English radical tradition and how that interconnects with the political challenges we have today.

There is a republican protest by City Hall in London, where you can jeer the Queen as she sails up the Thames, if you should so wish. Details here.

The above video/song is ‘English Civil War’ by The Clash.

SYRIZA Offers Hope to Greek and European Peoples – No to Austerity

The graph above illustrates the spread of seats in the Greek Parliament following the recent general election in the country. Leaders of the three largest parties, New Democracy, SYRIZA and PASOK have all in turn been asked by the Greek President, Karolos Papoulias to try to form a coalition government, but to no avail. In a last ditch attempt by the President to form a government, he has now approached the leader of the Democratic Left party for his support. It looks unlikely that the Democratic Left will join any coalition that does not include Syriza, and fresh elections in June now look to be inevitable.

New Democracy with PASOK failed only narrowly to reach the 151 seats needed for a majority in the Greek Parliament, but this was largely down to the idiosyncrasies of the Greek electoral system, whereby the largest party after the election are rewarded with a 50 seat ‘bonus’. In reality New Democracy and PASOK, the two coalition partners who are responsible for accepting European Union (EU) austerity policies, only garnered about 30% of the vote, with the rest going to anti-austerity parties.

The electoral impasse is caused by SYRIZA not agreeing to be part of a government that is committed to the ‘Memorandum’ deal on austerity policies for Greece with the EU. This is a perfectly reasonable stance from a party that stood in the election as against the austerity measures and opinion polls suggest that their popularity is increasing, with three polls showing they are likely to be the largest party after a new election, with support perhaps as high as 27%.

SYRIZA is a coalition of left wing radicals and greens, covering some fifteen different political parties and groupings and has clearly been the main beneficiary of anti-austerity sentiment in Greece. An ecosocialist source inside SYRIZA, Tasos Pantazidis, predicts that after new elections SYRIZA will be able to form a government with other left forces, including the KKE (Stalinist Communist Party) who have resisted all talk of coalition so far. Other smaller parties that did not gain the required 3% of the vote to qualify for seats in Parliament, such as the Greens, ANTARSYA and the PASOK breakaway Social Agreement party may also be brought into the SYRIZA coalition. The opinion polls indicate that their voters are voting with their feet anyway and throwing their lot in with SYRIZA.

SYRIZA say that they want to remain in the Euro (opinion polls show something like 70% of Greeks want to remain inside the Euro), which is the popular view, and to renegotiate the bail-out deal with the EU and IMF. This is a game of high brinkmanship, where SYRIZA are gambling that the EU will be more worried about the effect on the Euro itself caused by a Greek default, than offering Greece a better deal. SYRIZA would be wise to have a plan B, because it looks as though Greece will need to leave the single currency, to begin to sort out their problems in the medium term.

Of course all of this electoral uncertainty has led to a fall in the value of the Euro, and the political earthquake it has unleashed in Greece has sent shock waves all through Europe, coinciding with the election of Socialist party candidate Francois Hollande to the French presidency on a largely anti-austerity platform, if it is somewhat vague about actual detail.

But what seems to be clear is that for the first time in 30 odd years the neo liberal political/economic consensus is being challenged in Europe which is likely to have an effect on attitudes in the UK, where austerity policies have been promoted with some relish by the right wing coalition government of Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. The Labour party, as is its want these days, has suggested only an ‘austerity light’ approach to the UK’s debt problems, with only the Greens and far left parties opposed to austerity full stop. Labour may now feel they have more cover for a more radical stance, with events in Greece and France (and to a lesser extent Spain and Italy) moving the debate from a dogmatic no alternative to austerity policies to a more expansive strategy for economic growth.

The shock waves have even reached Germany, where the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) have suffered big losses in regional elections in the country’s largest region, North Rhine Westphalia. The CDU vote fell by 9% with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Green party expected to form a new coalition government in the region.

Are we about to see a new epoch emerge in European politics, where the crazy casino capitalism of recent times is thrown into the rubbish bin of history? I do hope so, but let’s not get carried away just yet, there is long way to go, but at least now there is chink of light at the end of this long dark tunnel.       

Graph illustration above from the BBC.