social revolution – Page 80

If we aren’t talking about socialism, degrowth narratives are pure idealism / Morning Star

Shared via.. The People’s Voice. (marxists😦!)

Environmental destruction is driven by the fundamental contradiction in capitalism – between the forces and relations of production and its relentless drive for profit.

Capitalism depends on continued growth, without which it would collapse.Non-exploitative capitalism is a contradiction in terms.

There is not a single “human ecology” – every social system has its own ecological dynamic, and capitalism’s is a particularly destructive one.

Just as capitalism, as an economic system, depends on exploiting workers, so too does it depend on exploiting the resources – living and non- living – of our planet. That was something recognized by Marx and Engels with their concept of the “metabolic rift” between humans and nature.

Marx focused on agriculture, the depletion of soil nutrients and the pollution of waterways by run-off and human sewage. He was an early advocate of recycling. Today we recognize that the wider impacts of capitalism threaten the whole planet.

As Barry Commoner, a Marxist ecologist and one of the founders of the modern environmental movement wrote a half-century ago:

“The world is being carried to the brink of ecological disaster, not by a singular fault, which some clever scheme can correct, but by the phalanx of powerful economic, political and social forces that constitute the march of history. Anyone who proposes to cure the environmental crisis undertakes thereby to change the course of history.”

Fifty years later, that observation – both the origins of the environmental crisis and the need to “change the course of history” as part of the cure – has greater force than ever.

Why I’m NOT going to vote! – Peter Gelderloos

from Surviving Leviathan by Peter Gelderloos- a reader-supported publication. (…….)

I’m not going to vote, because the difference between these parties is not enough to save life on this planet.

Whether the Left, the Right, or the Center has been in the saddle, emissions have been rising, life-sustaining habitats and ecosystems are being destroyed, and false solutions get more free advertising.

We are now crossing irreversible tipping points.

Tens of millions of people are already dying every year because of this catastrophe. If we are not personally facing starvation, disease, and homelessness already because of so-called natural disasters, our children will, and it will get worse every generation after that.

The forces that are causing this still have all the power and resources and what they are doing now will be felt most acutely fifty or a hundred or two hundred years from now.

We need to dedicate all our imagination and all our energies to a deeply rooted social transformation, in order to urgently create a society of survival, a society of healing, and a society of mutual aid, rather than propping up the system responsible for this massive death and suffering.

No single party is responsible. They all bear responsibility.

I’m not going to vote, because I refuse to support people or institutions that are complicit in genocide