George Monbiot’s Damascene Near Conversion to Ecosocialism

I have written before on this blog, of George Monbiot’s political philosophy as being liberal essentially, a kind of green neo-Keynesianism, and the limits that this puts on his radicalism. I justified this by reference to his 2003 book, ‘The Age of Consent’ where this is exactly what he advocates. The marketing blurb for the book contains this quote:

“Our task is not to overthrow globalisation, but to capture it, and to use it as a vehicle for humanity’s first global democratic revolution.” 

This sounds quite radical but the book goes onto suggest a neo-Keynesian approach, and rather condescendingly dismisses socialism in a page and a half. This is a quote from my previous blog on the subject:

‘It is not a revolution Monbiot wants, he is happy enough with the current capitalist system that he wants it to continue, but be tweaked around a bit. In short, he is a liberal, so this is all to be expected. He either thinks that anything more radical is doomed to failure or he is deluding himself liberal economics can help to solve the very ecological crisis it has set going.’

If you have read the book then this is the only conclusion to draw. But he has been edging away from this type of thinking. In December last year he wrote in his column in The Guardian that Corbyn’s Labour were pursuing a Keynesian approach to policy when they need to advocate a move to ‘commons based’ solutions, that is, abandoning Keynesianism and indeed capitalism as useless in the face of the ecological crisis.

In his column on Tuesday this week he went further with his new thinking. He mentions a commons based ownership of production and stewardship of the land, and participatory democracy. The example he gives is of the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre who have pioneered this participatory democracy in local spending decisions and much else.

The commons is an extremely important concept in ecosocialism, and extends beyond the physical land based commons of old (and some that still exist), into areas like peer to peer data sharing and things like the Firefox web browser. Monbiot does say that commons are a ‘non-capitalist system’ but omits terming this as ecosocialism, which it is. Or to be exact, it is only a prefiguration of ecosocialism, and thus sadly open to abuse whilst the capitalist system survives.

Participatory budget setting and other forms of lowest level democratic decision making, what Monbiot refers to as ‘subsidiarity,’ is also close to ecosocialist theory, and we would extend this to most areas of political engagement and governance.

He advocates a land value tax and a citizen’s income, which is not strictly speaking ecosocialist, but is promoted by the English Green Party, and whilst they are good transitional policies pointing towards ecosocialism, they would be unnecessary under full blown ecosocialism. There would be no private ownership of land and there would probably be no need for money.  

Monbiot thinks this is all possible under a UK Corbyn led Labour government, who have been making moves to update their 1970’s Keynesian ideology, to some extent at least. I think this is possible, but Labour doesn’t seem to be there yet, which Monbiot does acknowledge. There is still a centralising instinct in the Labour party, and faith in things like nuclear power (which Monbiot now supports too) is a good example.

I also think beyond a transitional stage, which we need to have, that bourgeois democracy is unlikely to be the vehicle for achieving ecosocialism, because there are too many powerful vested interests in capitalism to accept full blown ecosocialism. It would mean the end for the capitalist class, and they will not allow that to happen without a fight. Too many of their class do very well out of the system, although most people get ripped off by it. Why should the elites throw away their lives of luxury on the backs of the mass of the people?

So, yes Monbiot’s change of emphasis is to be welcomed, but only as a transitional phase, and I hope Monbiot can follow through the logic of his new thinking, abandon his attachment to capitalism, and fully embrace the only system that will give us a chance of avoiding a massive ecological and social crisis. Ecosocialism, that is. 

Theresa May is the most Incompetent Prime Minister of my Lifetime

I was born in 1962 when the Tory prime minister was Harold Macmillan. He is famous for his slogan, ‘most of our people have never had it so good’, and in many ways he was right. The economy was booming, jobs easy to obtain and a welfare state. Macmillan’s government built hundreds of thousands of council houses, and relatively, times were good. He was brought down in1963 over the Profumo affair, which was no fault of his own, so overall he scores quite well.

Macmillan was removed in the infamous ‘night of the long knives’ by the ‘men in grey suits’, (the Tory party establishment) and replaced with the tweed jacketed toff, Sir Alec Douglas Home. Labour managed to capitalise on the Profumo affair and paint Home as a toff in an age when British deference to authority largely died a death. Home lost to Labour in 1964, but confounded expectations and Labour’s Harold Wilson only won a narrow majority in Parliament. Home was short lived but didn’t really do any damage.

Wilson went back to the country in 1966 and won a 100 seat majority, but unexpectedly lost the 1970 election, which he chose to call earlier than necessary. But Wilson was to make a comeback, after the Tory prime minister, Ted Heath’s reign ended in 1974. Amid a national mine workers strike, leading to power cuts, and his imposition of the ‘three day week’ to conserve energy, and the TV going off at 10pm. Heath called a who ‘runs the country’ election in 1974, and lost.

So Harold Wilson was back, with a minority Labour government. He called a second election later in the year and won a small majority. Wilson retired in 1976 after winning four general elections and James Callaghan became prime minister. Wilson was a shrewd operator and kept the competing personalities in his Cabinet united. He also was a master of prevarication when it came to keeping the UK out of the Vietnam war (which Heath continued).

Callaghan was soon running a minority government, propped up by the Lib Lab pact with the Liberal party, faced with the oil crisis, industrial unrest and high inflation he had his hands full but with skill hung on until 1979, when Margaret Thatcher won for the Tories. Although Callaghan had a difficult time as prime minister, nobody ever thought of him as incompetent.

Margaret Thatcher brought huge change to the country, got involved in an imperialist war with Argentina, broke the power of the unions and started privatising public services. I opposed everything Thatcher did, but I never thought of her as incompetent. She won three general elections in a row.

Finally brought down by her own party in 1990, Thatcher was succeeded by John Major who went on to win a surprise election victory in 1992. Major was tormented by his Eurosceptic MPs, who he termed ‘the bastards,’ called a leadership election and won, but his authority was damaged. The humiliation of having to withdraw from the European Monetary System when the pound went into free fall, and beset by sleaze, financial and sexual, lost the 1997 election by a landslide. He was prime minister for seven years though, and did have that 1992 election win to his credit.

Labour’s Tony Blair then won two further elections, but was damaged by getting involved in US led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He carried on the work of the Tories in privatising public services and reducing taxes for the rich, but his three general election triumphs in a row was a record for Labour. Gordon Brown followed when Blair stood down in 2007, and carried on in much way as Blair, but without the charisma. His finest moment was during the 2008 financial crisis, when he was the only world leader to have a plan to stabilise the world economy, which involved nationalising the banks. He lost to David Cameron’s Tories in the 2010 election.

Cameron didn’t have a majority in Parliament, so relied on a coalition with the Lib Dems, he introduced austerity measures and took an economy that was in fragile recovery and drove it into a ditch. He was forced by his Eurosceptic MPs into promising a referendum on EU membership, which he had to grant, then went onto surprise everyone, including himself no doubt, by winning a majority in 2015. He lost the referendum in 2016, and promptly resigned. A very poor prime minister, but he did at least win one and a half general elections.

So we come to the present incumbent, Theresa May. May supported remaining in the EU, but was pretty quiet about it, positioning for a future tilt at the leadership. She was lucky that all her opponents in the leadership election, one by one, dropped out, and she was left as the only candidate, so didn’t even win an internal election to become leader (and prime minister). She became a convert to Euroscepticism and took a hard line on Brexit. Miles ahead in the opinion polls, facing a deeply divided Labour opposition with an unpopular leader, she went for what she probably thought would be an easy win, and called an election in 2017, and lost her majority in Parliament. A shameful bribe to the Northern Irish DUP is the only thing keeps her in office today.

For someone who has been a politician for as long as May has, it is incredible how bad she is at politics. The disastrous speech to re-launch her premiership at last week’s Tory party conference was a metaphor for her leadership generally. An embarrassing stunt of being handed a P45, and the voice loss and continual coughing, against a backdrop of the stage falling apart, all seemed to sum up her term as prime minister.

May is surely the most hapless, incompetent prime minister we have had in the last fifty odd years. She has never won even an internal party election, let alone a general election, is beset with infighting in her party and her Cabinet, and with a run on the pound and the economy teetering on the edge of stagnation. She is too politically weak to do anything beyond survive, until her party ditches her, in the not too distant future it seems. 

Unfortunately for the country, this is the person in charge of our most critical international negotiations since the end of the second world war, and it’s a complete shambles. God help us. 

     

The Ecosocialism of Joel Kovel

Written by Paul Buhle and first published at Counterpunch

It should be a given that no memoir is inherently “strange.” Every life is lived uniquely and has its own special qualities, drawn out at length (or not) by the writer. In The Lost Traveller’s Dream, Kovel has managed to summon up a spirit that transcends as well as living within its, or his, own time. This is a life “beyond,” something possible at any time but valuable especially in an era of collapse, catastrophe, and perhaps improbable hope.

Joel Kovel, to be brief, has been a prestigious and best-selling writer on psychotherapy, a militant left activist from the middle 1960s onward, an eco-theorist and an explorer of the world just beyond our sense perceptions. He offers us the details most precious to him, the saga of his own family (or families), his shift from one intellectual emphasis to another, his growth in politics but also his political conflicts.

Memorably, more than few times in this memory book, he steals mainstream prestige away from himself. This is not exactly self-sabotage, although careerists would surely think so. He contemplates the rewards alongside the political (and personal) costs and chooses…not to be rewarded. Indeed, he sometimes chooses to be anti-rewarded, not perversely but with political purpose.

Thus we come back to the middle class secular Jewish lad  from Long Island going off to Yale in the later 1950s. His identity group is mildly leftwing, including future New Press founder Andre Schffrin. His future is in the budding psychotherapy field, and in A Complete Guide to Therapy, he is on the literary (and career) fast track. Alas, he does not like where it seems to be taking him.

The US invasion of Vietnam, as for some of his generation but more of the ones following shortly, distances him from his liberal sponsors. He enrolls in the Left, carrying him and his would-be career to far places. His second marriage, to left media activist Dee Dee Halleck, settles the matter, in a sense.

But there is that professorship later on, at Bard College, traditional home of bohemian intellectuals. He does his work and likes his job. And then the College becomes the plaything of a high powered neoconservative, with the financial connections that nearly extinguish faculty resistance around Kovel.

Add to this Kovel’s commitments to ecosocialism, his intellectual explorations and editorial energy, and you have a professor who seems, to conservatives and many liberals alike, to be the sore thumb that sticks out. He became an ecological theorist of note, shocking those academics whose inclinations are never really toward “radical” solutions to global warming or the death cry of rivers. He offered, more and more, a philosophy of struggle and transcendence. No wonder he finds himself cashiered, bounced, in time to live a retirement of militant resistance.

Some of the many details of this heavily detailed book carry us toward St. Francis on the one hand and the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua on the other. Or rather, to his own surprise, these two seemed to be the same hand after all. A militant atheist since youth, Kovel was taken with the connection of ecological visionaries from the distant past and present. St. Francis had, after all, broken with his own wealthy family and set himself for a life with the poor. This saint did not actually defect to the heretics suffering persecution or break with the Pope persecuting them. His was, finally, a sort of in-house rebellion. The Sandinistas would certainly have preferred this option, but faced a scolding Pope who desperately feared Liberation Theology and the “People’s Church” that had arisen during the Revolution.

Kovel is drawn, understandably, to the charisma of Ernesto Cardenal in particular, and through that connection, ponders a leftwing religious mysticism that still intrigues him. Given the sad fate of a Central American revolution too close to the US to win like the Vietnamese, Kovel had another paradise of sorts, far further North. That is: Vermont, also full of utopians. The Bread and Puppet Theater had and has a creative vitality that could easily be called spiritual. That Kovel never quite relocated politically to Vermont is attributed, in part, to the well-known fractious sentiments of eco-anarchist Murray Bookchin, the sage of Burlington known best, in later days, for personal attacks on Bernie Sanders. It would not have been a happy partnership.

Kovel chose instead upstate New York. This brought him into the Green Party, reaching ballot status in the state by the late 1990s. The Greens possessed wonderfully odd characters, the oddest perhaps Al Lewis (of The Munsters)—when out of disguise an ancient Red. Kovel himself ran for the US Senate against Alphonse D’Amato and Chuck Schumer, the latter an emerging Democratic centrist in the pocket of the Israel Lobby. At a high point of Green activity, Kovel dreamed of running for president on the Green ticket. This time, in 2000, Ralph Nader stood implacably in the way.

That Kovel afterward took over Capitalism, Nature, Socialism from James O’Connor (reviewer acknowledgment: I have had an intermittent column in this journal for twenty years) in 2003, seeing the journal through rocky times to another editorial team. By the end of his tenure, Kovel had done his work. Travel, socialist and ecological discussions across geographical zones, and more rumination have all followed. The Lost Traveler’s Dream ends up as close to William Blake as to Marx, a logic embedded in this book from its first pages.

Paul Buhle’s latest comic is Johnny Appleseed.

Madrid Prepares To Deploy Troops In Catalonia

Written by Alejandro López and first published at WSWS

There are numerous unconfirmed reports of troops being sent to Catalonia and nearby regions ahead of a possible unilateral declaration on independence early next week.

Spain’s political establishment is openly talking of invoking Article 116 of the Spanish constitution, laying the basis for the imposition of martial law.

According to military sources cited in the right-wing newspaper OkDiario, troops are being mobilised to Aragón and Valencia, regions adjacent to Catalonia. It explains that the Spanish government estimates that it is necessary to deploy around 30,000 security forces to take control of the region and to “establish constitutional order against the insurrection.” The newspaper says this is a “number which cannot be presently met by the 8,000 police and civil guards currently deployed in Catalonia.”

According to OkDiario, the divisions mobilized include the Division Castillejos (formerly the Rapid Action Force), consisting of three brigades totalling 3,000 troops (the airborne, the parachute and the legion brigades), along with the Armored Infantry Alcázar of Toledo, consisting of 300 troops and 44 tanks. In addition, Madrid is reported to be mobilising the Group of Special Operations of the Navy, the Spanish equivalent of the Navy Seals.

The number of troops being cited in other sources ranges between 12,000 and 16,000.

La Tribuna de Cartagena explains that the frigate Navarra, escorted by two anti-mine frigates, is going to depart to Barcelona fully equipped with troops, arriving at Barcelona’s port on October 8—a day before the previously announced declaration of independence is supposed to be made in the Catalan parliament. According to a statement of the Ministry of Defence, the frigates are participating in the Barcelona International Boat Show.

At the same time, NATO has organised a training exercise under the title “Angel Guard”, involving 600 military police from Spain and nine other NATO member countries. According to the website of the Spanish army, these exercises aim to train military police in the management of a command post during operations and raids, escort and protection of authorities, neutralization of hostile armed personnel inside a military compound and crowd control.

Article 116 involves the deployment of the military and allows the suspension of numerous democratic rights including freedom of expression and the right to strike. It also allows for preventive arrests. Suspending these rights would arm the state with vast police powers that the military could use to terrorise the entire working class, as the Franco regime did from 1939 to 1977.

The Association of the Spanish Army (AME) posted a statement defending King Felipe VI’s speech, in which the monarch denounced the Catalan independence referendum and demanded that the Spanish state seize control of the region. The statement describes the speech as “impeccable” because Felipe conveyed “clearly, concisely and emphatically what the line to follow amid these difficult and complex times.”

AME demanded Popular Party Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy move “to defend without delay the unity of Spain, its territorial integrity and its national sovereignty.”

The European Union has declared its support for the military clampdown now being prepared. During Wednesday’s debate in the European Parliament, Commission First Vice President Frans Timmermans declared that it is “a duty for any government to uphold the law, and this sometimes does require the proportionate use of force.”

He was backed by leading representatives of the Conservative, Social Democratic and Liberal parties.

The implications of such statements were made clear by German EU Commissioner Gunter Oettinger, who warned yesterday that “There is a civil war imaginable now in the middle of Europe,” before making the pious wish that “One can only hope that a thread of conversation will soon be recorded between Madrid and Barcelona.”

Spain’s media is playing its part in paving the way for the military intervention through a campaign aimed at dehumanizing the Catalan nationalists and, in some cases, the whole Catalan population. Not one day passes where the press does not describe developments in Catalonia as an “insurrection,” a “coup d’état,” “rebellion” or as “treason” which needs to be crushed.

Catalan nationalists are accused of brainwashing children and putting them at the front line of protests to be attacked by police. The national police and civil guards, who savagely injured 800 peaceful protestors last Sunday, are portrayed as defenseless and persecuted by people protesting in front of their hotels and temporary residences. The regional police, the Mossos, are presented as treacherous and disloyal. The separatist Catalan Republican Left and the pseudo-left separatist Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP) are constantly attacked, with articles describing them as “the cancer of Catalonia” ( ABC ), or calling for these parties to be “beheaded …. and put in the dustbin of history” ( El Español ).

Such fascistic language precedes a provocative demonstration called for Sunday by the Popular Party and the anti-secessionist Catalan Civil Society, an organization with ties to the far-right. Backed by Citizens and the Socialist Party, and widely promoted by the Madrid-based media, right-wing anti-Catalan nationalists from throughout Spain are being bussed into Barcelona.

The far-right character of the demonstration is acknowledged by its organisers.

In an interview to El Confidencial, Javier Megino, vice-president of From Spain and Catalonia, accepted that there will be neo-fascists and far-rightist present, as they were during a demonstration against separation in Barcelona two weeks ago. Asked if they might cause violence, Megino replied, “when you put together so many people, it is impossible to control them all.”

The demonstration clearly aims, not to represent the “silent majority” within the Catalan population who oppose separatism as asserted by the media, but rather to provoke a violent confrontation between Catalan separatist and fascist forces which the government will seek to exploit to justify a crackdown.

The grave political danger is that the working class in Spain and internationally is not being mobilized against the repressive measures being prepared by Madrid.

At this critical juncture, Catalan and Spanish workers must assess the political forces that claim to supposedly defend them.

Catalan regional premier, Carles Puigdemont, continues to call for dialogue, an option rejected by Rajoy who declares him to be a criminal. Catalan vice-premier, Oriol Junqueras, is mainly concerned at the announcements made by major banks and companies like Banco Sabadell, CaixaBank, energy giant Gas Natural, Abertis, biotech firm Oryzon and the telecommunications corporation Eurona that they are moving out of Catalonia—fearing the future of the region amid the separatist drive.

CUP parliamentarian Eulàlia Reguant told the Catalan daily Nació Digital that her party is working on a plan of how they will take control of Catalan territory, including ports and airports, by approving a law that will mean that 17,000 regional police, the Mossos, “will stop being part of Spain’s justice system.”

The pseudo-left Podemos continues its call for dialogue, while promoting illusions in a PSOE-Podemos government as an alternative to the PP, even as the PSOE is participating in Sunday’s far-right protest and working directly with Rajoy in preparing a violent intervention.

Spain’s Constitutional Court outlawed Monday’s session of the Catalan regional parliament, at which it was expected that the separatist parties would make their unilateral declaration of Independence—based on a complaint brought by the Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSC), the Catalan wing of the PSOE.

All these political forces are demonstrating their political bankruptcy in the face of a military-police state threat. They are disarming the working class, despite the broad opposition that exists to a return to police-state forms of rule.

The broadly-felt opposition to the brutal attacks on democratic rights in Catalonia and throughout Spain can only find expression on the basis of politically independent, revolutionary and socialist perspective independent of all factions of Spain’s ruling elites and their parties. 

Remainers – Have Events in Catalonia Changed Your View of the EU?

The shocking images that flashed around social media on Sunday of the Catalan referendum on independence, have been met with an almost silent response from the European Union (EU). Other than backing the Spanish government’s legitimacy to uphold Spanish law, the EU has tried to distance itself from the brutality inflicted on peaceable people, at the hands of the Spanish Civil Guard police.

The EU has been keen to stress that the issue is national one, and not one for the EU to become involved in. But the EU has threatened sanctions against Hungary and Poland for not playing by EU rules, and supported military action to establish Kosova’s independence from Serbia. So it is not as though the EU will not intervene in national matters per se, but they are clearly on the side of Spanish government in Catalonia’s case.

It has reminded me of my doubts about the EU, someone who did vote to remain in the end, brought about by the way that Greece was treated by the EU over debt repayments. I don’t seem to be the only one struggling with my conscience over my support for the EU either.

Craig Murray, former British Ambassador and now human rights activist writes on his blog that he:

…is obliged to reconsider my lifelong support for the European Union, due to the unqualified backing of the EU Commission for the Spanish Government’s dreadful repression in Catalonia.  

Murray’s post is well worth a read, where he questions the argument about the actions of the Spanish government being lawful, and opines that the EU is contravening several Articles of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights by supporting the Spanish government’s action on Sunday. These are:

Article 1: The Right to Human Dignity

Article 6: The Right to Liberty or Security of Person

Article 11: Freedom of Expression and Information

Article 12: Freedom of Assembly and Association

Article 54: Prohibition of Abuse of Rights    

Murray also says that the Charter of the United Nations is being breached by Spain and is supported by the EU in this. Article 1 (2) he says, of the Charter supports the ‘self-determination of peoples.’ This is the very thing that is being denied in Catalonia. The Catalans want to exercise this right in a democratic vote, the Spanish government will not allow it, and then sends its police thugs to beat up the Catalans to repress this legitimate desire.

It is not as though the EU is not intimately involved in this issue either, as the reward for Spain of being allowed into the EU in 1986, was of democratic legitimacy after the fascism of the Franco dictatorship.

But more than this, support for independence among Catalans was only around 10% to 15%, before the 2008 financial crash, but rose to over 40% afterwards, and this before the violence from the Spanish state this week at the referendum. There were always cultural differences and financial disagreements between Catalonia and the Spanish state, but these came to a head after the financial crash. The austerity measures forced on southern European countries in the Eurozone, like Spain, has been the catalyst for this crisis to escalate.

The EU has also made it clear that an independent Catalonia will cease to be a member of the organisation and will need to reapply for membership. Catalans, normally very pro EU, might reflect on the value of this membership given the legitimisation of their human rights abuses by this club. Not even a reminder to Spain about its obligations on human rights has been issued.

What will happen next is very worrying. If the Catalan’s declare themselves to be independent, as they say they will, the Spanish state will probably abolish the regional Catalan government, and rule directly from Madrid. This could well involve military force by the Spanish government, and what we saw last Sunday could look like a picnic by comparison to what may happen next.

News comes today that the Spanish government has suspended the Catalan parliamentary session planned for Monday in which a declaration of independence from Spain was expected to be made. Spanish troops are heading to Catalonia as well.

The EU should be taking a conciliatory role and bringing both sides together in a constructive dialogue. If things escalate, as it appears they will, the EU must act, if it is not to sustain lasting damage to its reputation for respecting human rights.  

Spain/Catalonia: Savage police violence met with resistance from Catalan people

Statement by Izquierda Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Left)

Thousands of police and civil guards carried out savage repression in Catalonia to try to prevent the right to vote in the referendum on 1 October. The state forces smashed glass doors of schools used as polling stations and stole ballot boxes. The riot police were sent by the Partido Popular (PP) government and the State against tens of thousands of citizens, families, children and old people. They were sent to occupy Catalonia but met with huge, exemplary resistance of the people.

Despite the campaign of fear that for days has tried to intimidate those who wanted to vote (arrests, massive fines, and website closures) the overwhelming response by the masses was an exemplary display of struggle. This is the way foward. The mobilizations must continue with a general strike in Catalonia on 3 October, and in the following days with massive mobilizations of the fighting left and the workers’ unions in the Spanish state. It is now time to throw out the PP government.

Franco’s repression

The images of the Franco regime have returned with all their force in the guise of Spanish Prime Minister Rajoy and his government of thieves, reactionaries and Spanish chauvinists. The heirs of the dictatorship have tried teaching a lesson to the population of Catalonia, but what they are going to harvest is a complete failure. The rage, indignation and fury of millions of young people and workers will grow into a wall against which the Francoist right and its repressive state will crash.

It is evident that as the hours pass, the number of injured and the violence due to police violence will only increase, as will the response in the streets. The political lessons of what is happening today are very important and will be recorded in the consciousness of millions of people, both from Catalonia and the rest of the state and internationally. The justification that the PP and its government that they only applying the law, cannot hide the fact that that law is unfair, undemocratic and goes directly against the aspirations of millions of Catalans who the government are trying to muzzle. These actions make even more shameful the capitulation of the leadership of the PSOE [Partido Socialista Obrero Español – a social democratic party] which has preferred to weave an alliance with the heirs of Franco rather than recognise the right to decide by the people of Catalonia.

The 1978 Constitution

In fact, what has been called into question thanks to the mobilisation of millions of young people, workers and citizens of Catalonia, is the authoritarian and oligarchical character of the capitalist regime that was enacted in 1978 [after the end of Franco rule]. To abort a revolutionary situation – in which the working class and the youth of all the territories of the State put the dictatorship and Spanish capitalism on the ropes – the Spanish bourgeoisie and the reformist leaderships of the organizations of the left (PCE [Spanish Communist Party] and PSOE) agreed the reform of the dictatorship in exchange for recognizing legally the democratic freedoms that had already been conquered in the streets through the mobilisation of the masses. In this way, the socialist transformation of society was prevented, and the bourgeoisie maintained control of the situation through a monarchical and parliamentary regime that accused included huge authoritarian aspects.

The 1978 Constitution enacted many things: a law that allowed impunity for the crimes of Francoism, the state apparatus was never purged; the judiciary, police and military remained in the hands of the same reactionaries. Of course, the “free market” economy and the unquestioned power of the capitalists were guaranteed, and the right to self-determination refused to Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia denied, inscribed in the Constitution with the language of the Franco dictatorship: ‘Spain, large and free’.

The mass movement unleashed in Catalonia in favour of national-democratic rights has placed the debate at an essential point. The denial that Catalonia is a nation has been reiterated by the centralist bourgeoisie and the right wing and enacted through repression or simple military conquest. This has been combined with widespread frustration at the terrible consequences of capitalist crisis; mass unemployment, evictions, job precariousness and low wages, and the lack of a future for the youth. The struggle against national oppression and class oppression have intertwined, as in other times in Spain (1909, 1931, 1934, 1936, 1977 …) generating a revolutionary potential that has defied the forms of political domination of the Spanish capitalist regime.

The working class and the youth of the whole State must understand that the cause of the people of Catalonia is also ours. “A people who oppress another can never be free,” said Karl Marx. That is why the labour movement throughout its history always inscribed on its flag the struggle for national liberation, for the self-determination of oppressed nations, as part of the struggle for the socialist transformation of society. Today in Catalonia we are fighting for the democratic freedoms that cost so to be won in the 1970s. If today the government act against the people of Catalonia, what will happen tomorrow? The answer is not difficult to work out. Tomorrow they will intensify the repression against all those who rise up against injustice and call into question their oppression and their rule. They will approve new gagging laws, more exceptional measures of repression, more Francoist impunity.

The people of Catalonia have courageously challenged the PP and its regime. That is why we must take advantage of this opening gap to achieve the immediate resignation of Rajoy and defeat this repressive onslaught. And to do so is only possible with the entrance of the organized working class, paralyzing production and filling the streets with the youth and the citizenship that is already massively mobilized.

The leadership of the CCOO and UGT [union federations] are maintaining a deplorable silence. Will you continue with this attitude after such brutal repression that recalls what was experienced under the dictatorship of Franco or Pinochet? Have they forgotten the verses of Bertolt Brecht: “First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Socialists and the trade unionists, and I did not speak because it was neither. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one who could speak for me ?"

The CCOO and UGT should immediately rectify its position and call a general strike in Catalonia on 3 October, and promote the mobilization of the working class in the rest of Spain. If they do not, they will be compromised once more, appearing next to those who today have trampled on the most scandalous democratic rights of all.

From Izquierda Revolucionaria we call on all formations on the left to struggle. In Catalonia we urge the Comú, ERC [Republican Left of Catalonia], CUP [Popular Unity Candidacy] and working class unions, social movements to establish a broad front of resistance against repression and to organize the 3 October general strike, and to extend the mobilization over the next days to conquer the right, to force the withdrawal of repressive forces in Catalonia and to bring down the PP government.

The youth are showing outstanding exemplary bravery and dedication in this battle: they did so in the massive student mobilisation on 28 September, and are doing so today in the streets, suffering the blows of the riot police. The Sindicat d’Estudiants has called a student general strike on 3 October and for the solidarity mobilization of student youth from the rest of the state.

We are facing a rise in the class struggle. From Izquierda Revolucionaria, we wish to express, once again, our commitment to the struggle of the Catalan people for their national-democratic rights, and we call for massive participation in the polls on 1 October, voting in favour of the Catalan republic as a way of hitting the capitalist regime Spanish and centralist state. This will encourage the class struggle for a Catalan socialist republic, against austerity policies and cuts, as a step forward towards the defeat of the PP and the immediate departure of the Catalan nationalist rightwing PDeCAT [Catalan European Democratic Party].

Now is the moment to offer a real working class alternative that is both internationalist and revolutionary, not subordinated to the nationalist bourgeoisie of Catalonia, or the PDeCAT or Puigdemont [Carles Puigdemont, the president of the Catalan Generalitat]. We cannot forget that even though they now suffer the reactionary onslaught of the PP, these political leaders have applied savage social cuts that have caused immense suffering, and defend their own privileges and very concrete class interests: those of the economic elite of Catalonia.

Izquierda Revolucionaria is committed to working to build a consistent left-wing alternative, which will seek the unity of the workers and the youth of Catalonia with their class brothers of the Spanish state, in a common struggle for socialism.

Ending the national oppression of Catalonia, Euskal Herria, Galiza, can only be realized in this epoch of imperialist decay if it is linked firmly to the overthrow of capitalism and the struggle for the socialist transformation of society, with the establishment of a Federal Socialist Republic, based on the voluntary free union of peoples and nations that make up the Spanish state.

Climate Change Brings Socialism and Science Together

A review of A Redder Shade of Green by Ian Angus

Written by Eve Ottenberg and first published at Truthout

Thanks to climate change, science and socialism have become entwined in ways previously unimaginable. Science brings the news that, unless we act swiftly to control climate change, we will inhabit a dying planet. Socialism traces the causes of this catastrophe to the destructive and chaotic growth model of capitalism and advocates for a different system. Meanwhile, sensing the source of danger to their profits, corporate and government reactionaries fuel disinformation campaigns to discredit science and confuse the public. This has been going on for years, with disastrous results.

Ian Angus' new book, A Redder Shade of Green, (red for socialist revolution, green for ecological revolution) is about the prospect of ecosocialism in the face of capitalist ecocide. Angus has written previously about the "Anthropocene," a name for our era that emphasizes the centrality of human-influenced climate change. He does not accuse humanity as a whole of environmental destruction, but only a small sliver of humanity -- the capitalist class, which has left a gigantic, planet-sized carbon footprint. Angus repeatedly stresses that billions of people have a negligible impact on climate change and that the overpopulation argument -- which blames humanity as a whole for climate change -- has been used to distract and undermine an effective, ecosocialist movement. The US military has a hugely destructive impact on the environment. So does ExxonMobil. The many citizens of Bangladesh, reeling from climate-change-exacerbated flooding, do not.

So, what about the many environmentalists who believe a primary cause of climate change is that there are too many people on earth? Angus tries to persuade them otherwise. He observes that in the 1960s and 1970s, overpopulation was used to explain environmental degradation as well as poverty in the global south, thus providing a solution to two problems at once in a way that does not question capitalism. It took the likes of Rachel Carson, Murray Bookchin and Barry Commoner to initiate an environmentalism rooted in radical social critique, he writes, adding, "Their analysis was rejected by the traditional conservationists, the wealthy organizations and individuals whose primary concern was protecting the wilderness areas for rich tourists and hunters." Indeed, it was the Sierra Club that financed Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, a book heavily promoted by "liberal Democrats who correctly saw it as an alternative to the radical views of Carson, Commoner and Bookchin." Angus adds that Ehrlich's book "became a huge best-seller, and it played a central role in derailing radical environmentalism." The population bombers faded away, but now they are back, shifting the environmental threat focus from corporations to people.

"The populationists' error," Angus writes, "is that they assume there is no alternative" to capitalism. They assume more people means more food means more modern agriculture, which is hugely ecologically destructive. But, Angus argues, there are other agricultural models; moreover, working with the food supply we already have, there are other ways to do things. "Existing food production is in fact more than enough to feed many more people." Without current waste, it could feed billions more.

Angus observes that "too many people" is in fact "code for too many poor people, too many foreigners, and too many people of color." According to Commoner: "pollution begins in corporate boardrooms, not family bedrooms."

Socialism has not always been ecologically conscious, and for much of the 20th century it wasn't, with disastrous results. "The socialism practiced by the countries of the Socialist Camp replicated the development model of capitalism," said Cuban official Oswaldo Martinez in 2009, who, Angus reports, considered this competition, a la USSR, China and East European socialist countries, a mistake. A Redder Shade of Green is a very serious attempt to bury that past once and for all, and to ground socialism in scientific environmentalism. This, fortunately, has been socialism's direction for several decades. Not so for capitalism. "Pouring crap into the environment is a fundamental feature of capitalism, and it isn't going to stop so long as capitalism survives," Angus writes.

Since the 1990s, socialism has become much greener. Cuba and Bolivia have led the way. Bolivian President Evo Morales is quoted: "Competition and the thirst for profit without limits of the capitalist system are destroying the planet. Under capitalism we are not human beings but consumers … It generates luxury, ostentation and waste for a few, while millions in the world die from hunger … 'Climate change' has placed all humankind before a great choice: to continue in the ways of capitalism and death, or to start down the path of harmony with nature and respect for life." Or as Barry Commoner is quoted: "The present course of human civilization is suicidal."

Angus writes that how we build socialism "will be profoundly shaped by the state of the planet we must build it on." This idea that, in order to create a socialist future, we must recognize how much damage capitalism will do to our planet dates back to Marx's concept of a "metabolic rift" between capitalist society and nature, writes Angus. The damage is already severe. "Without radical economic change, it's more likely that we will have a three degree [temperature] increase by the end of the century and maybe four," Angus observes. "That … would be catastrophic … substantial parts of the earth … would be very difficult, even impossible to survive in."

In his previous book, Facing the Anthropocene, Angus reported on the growing scientific consensus that capitalism's most ferocious and brutal assault on the environment really took off after 1945. This postwar period has been dubbed "The Great Acceleration" and was marked by rising global temperatures, species extinction, ocean acidification and the ubiquity of plastics, which now literally pervade every corner and crevice of the Earth, including almost all tap water. Back in the 1970s, Commoner drew attention "to dramatic increases … in materials not found in nature, synthetics that cannot degrade and so become permanent blights on Earth." The Second World War, Angus writes in his new book, accelerated "fossil fuel production and use, the automobilization of Western society, corporate concentration and the rise of monopolies, the mass introduction of synthetic petrochemical-based products, the industrialization of agriculture."

Fighting this array is daunting. Humanity's success with restoring the ozone, cited by some scientists and environmental activists as a model approach to global warming, is not really comparable to what will be needed to combat climate change. But it is worth noting that that success was achieved not by a chloroflourocarbon (CFC) cap and trade system but "by an outright ban." That's what would work: a ban on fossil fuels. But Angus says, if "CFCs had been as central to capitalism … as fossil fuels are, the ozone layer might have been gone by now."

The International Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP), launched in the 1980s by a group of scientists and sponsored by the International Council for Science "coordinated the efforts," Angus writes, "of thousands of scientists around the world from 1990 to 2015." It was prompted by environmental concerns. Perhaps this group's most disturbing discovery was that in the past, when the climate changed, whatever the cause, it did so quite rapidly. "What we experience today as extreme but rare heat waves could become … frequent occurrences," Angus writes. "If we cross such a tipping point, ecosystems won't have time to adjust, species won't have time to evolve, and human societies might not have time to adapt." It was the IGBP that agreed on the new terminology, "the Anthropocene" and "the Great Acceleration."

Regarding World War II, Angus observes that mainstream economists "typically treat wars as anomalies, as interruptions in capitalism's normally peaceful development. In fact, capitalist growth in the 20th century depended heavily on military production and spending. The most destructive war in human history triggered a radical acceleration of environmental destruction that continues to this day."

Late capitalist agriculture is a major factor in environmental degradation. The chapter "Third World Farming and Biodiversity" argues against industrial farming and for saving biodiversity by means other than nature preserves. It advocates peasant farming enhanced by technological advancements in sustainability. "Some forms of agriculture destroy life, others preserve and expand it," Angus writes. Third world sustainable farming is much friendlier to biodiversity than large-scale "production of bananas, sugar cane, tea, technified coffee and cacao, soybeans, cottons, pastures."

The struggle of peasant farmers for human rights, the struggle for sustainable agriculture and the efforts to preserve biodiversity are one. The umbrella organization, La Via Campesina, calls for "the conjoining of the rights of people to consume food to the rights of people to produce their own food." According to the book Nature's Matrix, which Angus quotes: "Joining the worldwide struggle of millions of small-scale farmers clamoring for food sovereignty is more likely to yield long-term biodiversity benefits than buying a patch of so-called 'pristine' forest."

In other words, industrial farming is the problem. "Without an agro-ecological revolution," Angus writes, "the Sixth Extinction cannot be stopped."

Angus advocates an inclusive approach. Many environmentalists, liberal politicians and scientists are not socialists, and will not share all this book's conclusions. But if more people can be persuaded of the wisdom of, say, Rachel Carson, instead of Paul Ehrlich, humanity has a better chance of attacking environmental degradation at its root. The neo-Malthusian view -- that too many people is the problem -- needs to be debated and defeated. So does the corporate-sponsored disinformation campaign promoting climate change denial. Individual scientists who speak up about climate change deserve to be defended from well-funded corporate smear assaults. And socialism's move away from its 20th century, environmentally unfriendly models needs to be encouraged.

Of course, even if all these steps are taken, the hour is still very late.

"The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized," Rachel Carson wrote. For socialists, there has always been a focus on what Marxist critic Georg Lukacs called "militant participation in the great human struggle for liberation." And a struggle for real liberation now includes the planet.