Category: Ecology

The Amazon Burns and the Politics of Death: Resisting the Commodification of Our Future

The Bolsonaro administration is allowing the Amazon to burn as part of a project to accelerate capital accumulation, but is meeting massive resistance both at home and abroad.

“We’re All Hong Kongers Now”

Ecosocialists must stand in support of the millions of democracy protesters in Hong Kong and call on American trade unions and the left to join us. The Chinese Communist Party is on a suicide mission to destroy planet Earth in . . .

Read more ›

Climate Change is Growing the Fossil Fuel Industry

U.S. CO2 emissions are 8X the EU’s highest producer, Germany, and 15X-150X the rest. Following our lead would increase pollution. And pollution takes freedom away.

An Eco-Socialist Electoral Politics Strategy for 2020

“What Revolutionary Socialism Means to Me” by Sam Farber (on the Jacobin site) is a fine article and deserves to be studied. However, I believe it lacks a detailed strategy for left engagement in electoral politics especially for the 2020 . . .

Read more ›

Climate Change and Capitalism: A Political Marxist View

Viewed from the perspective of geological history, our current climatic and economic conditions are unusual. For most of the last 60 million years, the climate has been wildly unstable. It was only 10,000 years ago that it settled into its . . .

Read more ›

Climate Crisis – Worse Than We Think?

If you are a reader of New Politics, you almost certainly believe that the climate crisis is real, that it poses an existential threat to human society as we know it, and that the capitalist mode of production is the . . .

Read more ›

Sanders’ “Socialism” Is Old-Fashioned Liberalism

Give Bernie Sanders props for popularizing the term “socialism.” It used to be a conversation stopper. Now it is a conversation starter.
But Sanders isn’t helping the socialist cause by confusing it with the old New Deal liberalism of FDR. As . . .

Read more ›

The Green New Deal: Realistic Proposal or Fantasy?

The Green New Deal (GND), drawn up by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey, is the most ambitious and comprehensive program to deal with climate change ever made by political representatives to Congress and the U.S. public. It calls for . . .

Read more ›

Microsoft’s Plan: AI Runs on Gas

Microsoft has joined oil-imperialists James Baker and George Shultz’ Climate Leadership Council (CLC).  Their plan is to slap a $40 per ton tax on carbon emissions.  In trade, it blocks further regulation, including liability, and disempowers alternative energy research.
The plan . . .

Read more ›

An open letter to Extinction Rebellion

This letter was collaboratively written with dozens of aligned groups. As the weeks of action called by Extinction Rebellion were coming to an end, our groups came together to reflect on the narrative, strategies, tactics and demands of a reinvigorated . . .

Read more ›

Facing The Heat

Never has a generation faced a challenge of this magnitude

Unless drastic changes are made in very short order to the human social system that encompasses the planet, dire and frightening transformations that cannot be reversed will develop in the Earth’s climate, its ocean, and its biosphere.

Latest News From France: Online Discussion on Sunday

The situation here may be reaching a showdown between the Macron government, which is now considering using the Army against the Yellow Vests, and the social movement, to whose demands the regime continues to turn a deaf ear.
In the last . . .

Read more ›

Can the “Green New Deal” Save the Planet?

It is never comfortable to give up long-held beliefs and connections, but the impending climate crisis makes that a burning necessity. And the fact that, scientifically, it’s possible to avoid the worst of this climate disaster gives a positive incentive to do . . .

Read more ›

Beyond The Nation State: A Critical Look At Venezuela’s Current Crisis

Venezuela has made headlines in the last few weeks, as Venezuelan opposition leader and National Assembly head Juan Guaidó has declared himself interim President, throwing the country into turmoil. Current President, Nicolás Maduro has called the effort a coup. Meanwhile, . . .

Read more ›

review

From Marx to Ecosocialism

There is a growing body of ecomarxist and ecosocialist literature in the English-speaking world, which signals the beginning of a significant turn in radical thinking.

What Do Eco-Socialists Have to Say About the Climate Movement?

To me the role of eco-socialists is to raise transitional demands, demands that bring a broader understanding of the role of capital in creating climate change and the ways that capital-ism can be challenged by working people and people most affected by the vast inequality it has created.

Symposium on Ecosocialism

Despite the dire threat posed by our multiple ecological crises, and despite shelves of books theorizing the relationship between capitalism and our ecological crisis, even radical environmentalists find themselves lost for a strategy. How do we move forward? . . .

Read more ›

A Radical Direction for the Environmental Movement

green capitalism

Climate scientists tell us we face a “climate crisis”: Since the 1990s, scientists have been trying to convince governments to keep atmospheric CO2 concentrations below 350 ppm in order to keep the global temperature below 1.5 degrees Centigrade above pre-industrial . . .

Read more ›

Inequality and the Ecological Transition

Last month Branko Milanovic published a blog post about the Yellow Vest movement against the fuel tax in France.  He was worried – like many analysts – that the uprising proves it will be virtually impossible to roll out the policies necessary . . .

Read more ›

A Greener New Deal?

Demands for a Green New Deal (GND) are a beacon of hope in an otherwise dystopian contemporary landscape. In her platform document, for example, newly elected Representative and Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez states that “it’s time to shift course and . . .

Read more ›

New York Progressives Must Demand More

Image

I campaigned for governor with the slogan of “Demand More!” because Gov. Cuomo has governed as a social liberal but as an economic conservative. Although he touts the agenda he outlined in his January 15 State of the State and Budget presentation as “progressive,” New York progressives should not be satisfied. It is still a conservative economic program. Progressives must demand more.

Top