Available now: A new anthology of 10 frequently downloaded articles by Ian Angus, editor of Climate and Capitalism. They were published in Climate and Capitalism, Canadian Dimension, or Socialist Voice during 2007.
Confronting the climate change crisis
The IPCC and the conservatism of consensus
Exploding the myths of ‘carbon offsets’
The war machine is addicted to oil
The ‘emissions intensity’ hoax
Ottawa’s fraudulent global warming plan
Barriers to a capitalist solution?
Five challenges for ecosocialists in 2008
Rewarding the polluters
Ecosocialism and the fight against global warming
Plus an appendix: Bolivia and Cuba call for radical action to stop global warming
Evo Morales: The disease is capitalist development
Evo Morales: Capitalism is the worst enemy of humanity
Cuban task force: The industrialized nations must pay their ecological debt
Felipe Perez Roque: Tomorrow it will be too late
Confronting the Climate Change Crisis: An Ecosocialist Perspective, by Ian Angus, is a 24-page 8.5×11 booklet. It is available free in PDF format, suitable for reading on screen or printing on any laser or inkjet printer. To download it, go to our Pamphlets and Reports page.
Hello Ian,
Congratulations on this initiative.
Hardly any publication could be more timely and needed.
The developing mass movement against capitalist depredation and environmental meltdown sorely needs a compass to find its “North” (or maybe its “South” would be here a more appropriate orientation).
I am reminded of how as a broad peace sentiment developed in the early sixties in Canada it was a mix of pacifism, idealism, fear of terror of A – and H bombs, outrage and anger over the Amchitka bomb testing, hostility to the “Ugly American”, a dose of Canadian nationalism, and a glimmering of some of the key elements of an anti-imperialist framework for understanding the modern world.
Key to taking that movement forward was the participation of Marxists and socialists who understood the potential power of mass action in the streets, of keeping protests free of entanglement with bourgeois political parties and shallow electoralism, and of keeping its visible in the streets. Equally important was to keep the movement focused on a clear and uncluttered program that could united the broadest forces in blocking the developing imperialist war against Vietnam.
Because socialists were alert and aware of this movement, and its potential among youth and oppressed layers of the population, especially Blacks and Latinos in the United States, a mass antiwar movement did develop and did take on the political will and clarity necessary to compel the US government to admit defeat in Vietnam and flee that country tail between legs. That antiwar movement became the key ally of the Vietnamese people and the worldwide antiwar and anti imperialist movement, led by Cuba and Vietnam at the time. The Vietnamese people defeated the USA, but it is unlikely they could have done so without the relentless actions of the US and international antiwar movement that finally infected and demoralized the armed forces, and created within them an antiwar, solider vanguard.
Something like that can happen in the environmental war. And it is a war, a war of a rapacious destructive, and ultimately suicidal economic and social system against Mother Nature and the exploited and oppressed majorities of the globe.
But if we are to play that role, we have to meet this movement as it is, participated in it, learn from it, welcome it, and study it.
Our role as Marxists can and will be indispensable; but no one will be able to learn from that if we take on this challenge with sectarian schemas, prejudgment of the limitations of its uneven idealism and catastrophist fatalism.
This movement, its own way and in its own idiom, represents a confluence and market place of conflicting ideologies and programmatic proposals for what is to be done, all the way from the “socialism now’ currents to the “carbon trading” hoaxers.
Congratulations, Ian Angus.
Felipe Stuart Cournoyer
Managua, Nicaragua
PS
One of the most vital and progressive things happening in Nicaragua is a movement, largely student and Christian-based, to save our turtles. Our country is home to turtles on both the Caribbean and Pacific sides, with some world famous sites where turtles, following voyages of thousands of miles from the south Pacific and south Atlantic oceans, come ashore to lay their eggs. There is over exploitation of the eggs, and on the Caribbean Coast turtle meat is a main source of protein among the Miskitu people who cannot afford to buy beef, chicken or pork.
In the Save the Turtle movement here we see a clash of ideas and cosmovisions, especially in regard to indigenous traditions and needs. But I am struck by how rapidly the young activists come to understand that unless other solutions can be found the Miskitu people have no choice but to continue to rely on turtle meat. Hence their goal of saving the turtle, a very worthy cause (that is above all a concern of indigenous people who, within their own cultures, lived for millennia in harmony with nature) can only succeed by challenging and changing the economic underpinnings of environmental destruction and gluttony — CAPITAL is the enemy not only of the turtle but all human kind and Mother Earth.