Ecosocialist contingent discusses how to stop capitalist ecocide

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Video: Panel discussion in Washington, before the February 17 mass demonstration against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

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This is a video of a panel discussion held in Washington DC, the evening prior to the February 2013 Forward on Climate Rally, a mass demonstration against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

The event was sponsored by the Ecosocialist Contingent, a coalition of socialist organizations that marched together at the demonstration to make the case for a united and independent grassroots movement that does not look toward the Democratic Party for solutions or help to the climate crisis.

For more information about the contingent, see website: http://ecologicalsocialists.com/

Speakers:

  • Jill Stein, 2012 Green Party presidential candidate
  • Chris Williams, activist and author of Ecology and Socialism
  • Nick Davenport, activist with Solidarity

1 Comment

  • oh yes, you are right, it IS killing the planet: from “simple” deforesting + cattlefeed use + monocultures (mais, palm oil, sugarcane etc.) to finally concreting all into ecocrazy housing areas
    – (with losses of 100.000 square yards of O2-producing leaf areas /PER EACH TREE/ and with replacement of 30m trees ty small 4ft tree-lings) —
    it is incredible and horrible what Human Beings do to the planet.
    .
    What I slightly disagree is the causality “capitalism destroys the planet” because “capitalism” often is used for 2 quite different concepts, i.e.
    * moneyUSE (using money or an eqivalent “money” form, for example recognition or other emotional “values”) and (on the other hand)
    * moneyREIGN (the reign by the MEANS of money), which is what actually destroys people AND the planet.
    .
    And it was shocking how violently those protesters (against moneyREIGN) in Wall Street (“Occupy”) were beaten up by armed police and other “public” army structures. (btw “the” picture of that 85 year old woman with pepper spray in her eyes has disappeared from practically all US searching engines during that past year: how can things like that happen?)
    .
    Market Economy is not “the hell” as such but moneyUSE needs some significant restrictions in order to be a benefit to Human Kind (and not to degenerate into moneyREIGN), and these restrictions mean for example
    * making USE of Market Economy for primary care and basic services
    * but not delegating power (over people, or power of money) to whatever Economists. (if a farmer has total power, only farmers and slaves will exist; if an entrepreneur has total power, only industrials and low wage workers will exist; what group do you think that YOU will belong to?)
    .
    let me give you an example from Austrian Agriculture: it worked fine from approx. 1965-85 (with some extension to 1995) on a three-layer-basis of existence security for farmers:
    1. basic existence was granted due to land and know-how of food production
    2. extended (job) existence was quite stable due to contracts with Lagerhaus (warehouse/provision store) cooperatives which held quantities & prices stable without “commodity exchange” risk/speculation casino structures.
    (a system with more stability is always better than a loosers-based system, if freedom is contained in both)
    3. entrepreneur (profit) freedom beyond that, for example in weekly markets in town or selling on-the-farm.
    (and usually every farmer could make free choice of any combination of these, within eventual neighbor relation problems, and eventually making use of the next town’s Lagerhaus cooperative)
    .
    this agricultural success concept has been toppled and overthrown more or less, by the European Union (EU)’s concept of massive State Funding (of large farming industries rather than of single family farm sizes)
    – 80% of EU funding is cashed by < 5% monster farmings, paid by small earnings' tax money —
    accompagnied by horrible corruption problems around "farmers" with tens of MILLIONS rather than Thousands of Euros of turnover:
    while Austria had only 1 major corruption scandal in the 1980ies (antiFreeze in wine of one of the regions, to sweeten wine from there), agricultural and food scandals summarize up to SEVERAL-PER-YEAR since. (almost comparable to repeatedly upcoming Chinese Melamin Milk scandals)
    .
    THESE change developments into farming INDUSTRY structures with poisoning food, destroying environments, killing climate stability and all kinds of ecoCATASTROPHIC life deterioriation is not yet at the status of Soviet Kolchoses before 1989 (having had to import a good portion of even basic food because nobody had personal interest in production and everything was forbidden except special permits) and not yet at the American farmers status (with "Agro"Fuel — not "Bio"Fuel — competing food production and with massive "crisis" destabilization of each respective stock & commodity exchange)
    but
    it came to a really bad situation during the late 1990ies up to now, and that is indeed produced by moneyREIGN (without any sense of proportion for Humans left)
    (hope that was not too long for a comment)