Coronavirus - UK Government Bows to the Inevitable After Civil Society Acts

The UK government has announced its latest advice for the public follow, to slow down the rate of coronavirus infection. Now, people should avoid social contact, like in restaurants, cinemas, pubs and the like, and for all those able to work from home, should do so. 

It is hoped that these actions will delay the rate of infection, and so spread the burden on the NHS into the summer, when it is less stretched. There is also evidence that the coronavirus can't survive outside of the body, at temperatures above 27C%. Hopefully a hot summer will do a lot of the work of killing off the virus. 

All of this is very sensible, but it has to be said that these measures should have been taken earlier, as has been suggested by many medical experts, both in the UK and around the world. The move became inevitable once civil society, sporting authorities, employers, religious services and with even the Green party cancelling their spring conference, made these decisions themselves.

This has only a small impact on these organisations (especially large sporting clubs), but the move to discourage attendance in pubs, restaurants etc will have a big impact on these businesses. The government has not ordered this action, which means that insurance claims from businesses cannot be paid, leaving many to go bankrupt. 

Transport for London said on Monday, that passengers on the London Underground were down 20% and 10% on buses, which is explained by many workers working from home, with the blessings of their employers. 

The rush hour London Underground is a perfect vehicle for incubating and spreading infections, and indeed the virus appears to be ahead of the rest of the country in London. Who would have thought it? 

Well, plenty of Londoners, I can tell you. The idea that you put a two meter distance between passengers is risible. If large gatherings of people are to be avoided, then the Underground is an obvious area for reducing infections. This appears to have been totally ignored by the government. 

Many are questioning why schools are still open, when many other countries have closed them. Yes, key workers with children, like those employed in the NHS will need to have some creche type facilities provided, but with other workers working at home, they can easily take care of their children. Workers who cannot work from home, will also need protections, whether that is masks or whatever is effective. How can schools stay open when everywhere else is closed? It makes no sense. 

It looks as though some kind of travel ban to the UK will need to be introduced, as many other countries have already announced. On present form it will be announced by the British government sometime next week, as we are lagging behind events, confirmed by Monday's announced measures. 

All benefit regimes should be relaxed and provision needs to be made for homeless people, as well other vulnerable groups. The social care system, already under strain because of ten years of austerity (with still no proposals for long term funding), needs a significant increase in funding, urgently.   

Last week saw supermarkets run out of stock, although why people need so much toilet paper for an infection that does not affect the digestive system, one can only wonder. But the vacuum left by the government, was filled by panic buying, which tends to happen with emergencies like this.

The assertion by the UK government that these new measures are only now needed, really doesn't wash. Other governments around the world have already taken these actions, and some with lower infection rates than the UK, and seem to have contained the spread of the virus, better than we have. The UK authorities have even stopped testing many people, so how can they really know the true number of people with the virus? 

There has been a complete abdication of responsibility by the UK government, choosing instead a kind of laissez faire approach, in an attempt to build 'herd immunity,' basically do nothing and keep your fingers crossed. This has not been good enough by a long chalk. The first duty of any government is to protect its citizens, and the UK government has failed to do this, whether by incompetence or design, it doesn't really matter. 

These are serious times, when we need a serious government, but unfortunately in the UK we do not have one, led by a prime minister who is a clown. The only mitigating factor is the UK government has handled this better than the US government, whose president's first reaction was to call it fake news then to blame it on foreigners. Thank heavens for small mercies.

Inoculating Against Globalization: Coronavirus and the Search for Alternatives

Written by Sam Gindin and first published at Socialist Project

Social developments constantly surprise. The latest anxieties over the economic contradictions of extreme globalization haven’t been triggered by a trade war, inter-imperial rivalry, a financial meltdown or riots in the streets. They’ve rather been sparked by an apparently non-economic and contingent event: the coronavirus outbreak. 

As precautionary measures send workers home in a place few of us have ever heard of and the ramifications shut workplaces in places most of us never knew were connected, a business panic has set in. Grown men (and women) stare in horror at stock market screens and the business press fretfully anticipates an imminent recession.

Yet a deeper fear lurks in business circles. Has globalization plateaued? Might the further spread of the virus “put globalization into reverse?” Some main-stream journalists have even suggested that a slowdown in hyper-globalization “may not be a bad thing, given the sometimes absurd and dangerous dimensions it took on.” Others are more cataclysmic, asking, as one headline does, whether the spread of the coronavirus could “Hasten the Great Coming Apart of Globalization.”

Preparing for ‘More of Them’

The least convincing response to the present nervousness is one that reduces the coronavirus to an unfortunate one-shot event. The EcoHealth Alliance, which tracks infectious disease events over time and globally, has found that such events “surged in the 1980s with the advent of the HIV virus and has remained elevated ever since.” This has led The Wall Street Journal to soberly warn that “[T]he public needs to prepare for more of them.” But what, especially in the context of globalization, can ‘preparation’ in fact mean?

The pressures that come with globalization have made a virtue out of restraining, if not reducing, health budgets (with the US standing out in handing out $1.5-trillion in tax cuts favoring the super-rich while still debating whether universal healthcare for all is ‘affordable’). At the same time, the profitability advantages of economies of scale and specialization, made all the more demanding by intensified international competition, have led to extended value chains – production structures, including that of medicine, that involve multiple inputs from multiple plants in multiple countries.

Add the near-universal business identification of any excess capacity with unnecessary waste (‘lean production’) thereby underplaying the significance of a degree of flexibility, and you have local medical systems left vulnerable to even minor interruptions and lacking the capacity to confront unexpected emergencies. To globalization as an economic curse is added the medical curse of undermining the domestic ability to prepare for, and respond to, potential pandemics.

These concerns are magnified when we turn attention to the most threatening and largest scale pandemic on the horizon: the environment. The ecological threat is not a distant unknown but a scientifically established presence in the here and now. The challenge it poses is not what to do after we’ve passed the ecological tipping point, nor only how to slow down the assault on the environment. It is, as Barbara-Harriss White has emphasized, the need to reconstitute what we have already damaged. This means transforming everything about how we live, work, travel, consume, and relate.

Near-consensus on the sacrifices demanded in such a focus on the environment would be difficult in the best of circumstances but near impossible if the existing degree of inequalities persist. The economic restructuring involved in ‘fixing’ the environment and the concerted actions across all sectors of society this would entail necessitates a capacity to plan. 

It is inconceivable that such a social transformation can be accomplished within an economic system based on fragmented private corporations maximizing their individual profits in the face of competition as well as compensating fragmented individuals for their lack of control over their lives with more individual consumption.

Truly addressing the environment would involve a sweeping turn to national planning, international coordination and popular support. The degree of democratization this implies re how we address our material needs would, in the most fundamental ways, challenge not only ‘hyper-globalization’ but the social relations and edifice that constitute capitalism.

Are We on the Verge of Deglobalization?

If what we mean by ‘deglobalization’ is its plateauing or even slight reversal, this may be welcome but – as with third way social democracy’s promise of ‘neoliberalism with a human face’ – we should not expect all that much from an allegedly ‘gentler globalization’. It is one thing to accept compromises in the long struggle for fundamental change but quite another to sell the promise, as Josh Biven sarcastically puts it in a book title, that with any kind of capitalist globalization Everybody Wins Except Most of Us.

Might globalization itself then collapse or rot from its abundance of contradictions? Maybe. But don’t count on it happening without a determining push from social actors. Political graveyards are full of premature predictions of the ‘inevitable’ and imminent end to this or that; better to avoid adding to that list. 

Global capitalism didn’t just happen but was made and its end will most likely only come out of an appreciation that its multitude of economic, social and political contradictions and horrors aren’t signs of some automatic end to globalization, but rather openings that can contribute to its conscious unmaking.

The discontent with globalization has been there for some time but it has recently come to the fore within both the right and left. It has however been the right which has had the greater general success in mobilizing the brewing popular frustrations. The right’s response has primarily been performative, distinguished by its nativist rather than class orientation – full of sound and fury with ugly attacks on immigration while, occasional rhetoric aside, having little concern to substantially confront the corporate power at the core of globalization.

Trump has, for example, raged against NAFTA and Mexico’s impact on the US auto industry, yet the new NAFTA (USMCA) had little or no impact on the behavior of the US auto majors and the return of American jobs. Within six weeks of signing the agreement GM could, with impunity, announce the closure of four major US plants (and one in Canada). 

Similarly, for all of Trump’s railings against China as the primary culprit in the decline of American manufacturing, his end game has been an often confused mix of geopolitical concerns (slowing down Chinese technological-military advance) and getting China to ease the conditions for the entry into China of US financial and high-tech companies (i.e. a deepening, rather than undermining, of the global economic order). 

Meanwhile, manufacturing jobs in the US Midwest have quietly disappeared from attention. The bluster about reducing the ‘unfair’ burden that the US bears in overseeing global capitalism and the mobilizing of populist sympathies as leverage in this cause has generally aided sections of American business rather than the American working-class.

The contradiction for the right lies in the fact that to deliver to its working-class base, it would have to lead a crusade against the freedoms of corporate America to invest, trade, and reallocate profits as they please. But with even mid-size businesses now firmly integrated into the global economy, right-wing politicians are not about to alienate that base. 

They may deal with this by looking to keep their base intact through upping the attacks on immigration and thundering against ‘elites’, and/or rightwing politicians may take a more authoritarian turn. But we cannot ignore the possibility that the right’s contradictory rhetoric, (which affects the legitimacy of globalization), and populist erosions of state capacities (which affect the American administration and supervision of the global order) may, inadvertently, also end up damaging, if not undermining, the advance of globalization.

What then of the left vying for government? The dilemma for the left begins with the reality that the economic, political and media establishment is less tolerant of anti-globalization rhetoric from the left. 

But in any case, trying to govern while working to disentangle the economy from the dense web of cross border linkages now so powerfully in place is an intimidatingly daunting task. And since, as this process challenges capital and private investment, it can be assumed corporations will threaten to leave or refuse to invest because of the uncertainty, significant hardships will, for a time, necessarily fall on workers. 

And so, unless the understandings and necessary commitments have already been built among workers – unless workers see the coming difficulties as investments in their future in contra-distinction to the never-ending concessions they faced before – the constraints on how far any left government could go are severe.

Why Haven’t Workers Exploited the Vulnerability of Value Chains?

The role of the coronavirus in exposing the economic fragility of global production raises the perplexing of why, if the interruption of one link in the chain can have such a devastating overall impact, workers and unions haven’t used this leverage to counter the attacks they’ve suffered? (A recent example of the resistance value of interrupting the economy at its critical nodes, albeit at a different scale, has recently been witnessed in the protests of Indigenous protestors and their allies in shutting down railroads and occasionally highways in Canada.)

The explanation for the current relative passivity of workers is that though corporations had experimented with outsourcing and value changes earlier, they were hesitant to go all in until two conditions were met. First, that the outsourcing of work would not lead to a disruptive war with workers in the home workplace. 

Second that corporations were confident that the workers receiving the work would not use it as a lever to hold the corporations ‘ransom’. That is, a key precondition for generalizing value chains was a defeated working-class: one that was demoralized, had lowered its expectations, and was largely leaderless.

The importance of leadership lies in the limits of repeated rounds of militancy in any particular workplace that disrupt overall production. The corporate response would be to close such facilities and find other sources. 

But if the interruptions were strategically coordinated and spread across numerous plants rather than isolated to particular ones, corporations could not close all the plants without a) risking a political backlash that blocked it from domestic markets, inspiring hard limits on global corporations; and b) undertaking the substantial costs of moving elsewhere only to likely find other workers soon responding similarly.

The post-70s weakness of labour has commonly been understood as the result of globalization. But that has it backwards. The acceleration of globalization from that period on was only possible because, in spite of economic militancy, labour’s class and political weakness couldn’t block the acceleration of globalization. 

(Once globalization was on stream, it did indeed weaken workers further.) The point is that as important as militancy is, it is only a beginning. If the movement isn’t also politicized – expanded across the class and extended to challenge for state power – the militancy will be exhausted, and the movement ultimately crippled or destroyed.

There is no way out of this box without a transformation of unions themselves. The catch is that while workers have at some moments and in some places demonstrated the potentials of organized working people, it’s hard to imagine a widespread and sustained worker revolt without an institution – a socialist party of some kind – that sees creating and developing a coherent working-class out of its disparate pieces as its singular pre-occupation.

Reorienting to Inward Development

What interests us here is not how to turn the delegitimation of hyper-globalization into a vague ‘easing’ of globalization. Rather it is how, as socialists, we can better position ourselves for transforming society. This necessitates radically reorienting the political agenda away from global competition to “inward development.” We are not, it’s important to emphasize, suggesting a localist retreat from technology, modern life, and connections beyond our borders. 

Nor does this direction have anything to do with a (Steve) Bannon-esque populist nationalism that places ‘us’ before the rest of humanity. And though we emphasize a nationally focussed alternative, we insist that it retain an internationalist sensibility.

The argument for a turn inward begins with the reality that all organizing is ultimately local or domestic. Second, all politics must necessarily go through the state, especially if we want to seriously constrain the power of mobile capital. Third, the building of an alternative that maximizes the democratic administration of all aspects of our lives – which includes attention to the human scale of maximizing participation – is conditional on transforming the nation state as part of in turn transforming sub-levels of the state and local workplace and community institutions.

We conclude with two examples – representing the most international of issues, the environment and immigration – that speak to the mediation of a national focus with an internationalist sensibility. 

Even though ‘environmentalism in one country’ is a contradiction in terms, it is the case that it is primarily within each country that the work of changing attitudes, values and priorities can be carried out and the conversion of eco-structures and productive capacities to take on environmental repair and sustainability can be addressed. It is on that basis that meaningful international agreements can be signed, technologies and other supports be made freely available to poorer countries and genuine international cooperation achieved.

In the case of immigration, we would not want to exaggerate the claim that the shift to inward development within the developed countries will in itself solve the immigration crises (all of whom have a capacity to take in much higher levels of migrants than they do now). 

But that shift could nevertheless bring positive internationalist implications. To the extent that the immigrant crisis is reframed in terms of why people feel compelled to leave their countries, the shift to inward development among the developed countries might legitimate support for states in the poorer countries also moving toward a degree of inward development. 

And with the pressures of competitive globalization eased and workers in the developed countries feeling more secure, the argument that the advance of poorer countries comes only at our expense would carry less weight. It might consequently be easier to imagine transferring otherwise competitive technologies to poorer countries along with solidaristic corps of young educators and trainers.

Sam Gindin was research director of the Canadian Auto Workers from 1974–2000. He is co-author (with Leo Panitch) of The Making of Global Capitalism (Verso), and co-author with Leo Panitch and Steve Maher of The Socialist Challenge Today, the expanded and updated American edition is forthcoming with Haymarket in 2020.

The Ecosocialist Solution to Ecological Catastrophe

Written by Michael Löwy and first published at Globalecosocialistnetwork.net

I.The ecological crisis is already the most important social and political question of the 21st century, and will become even more so in the coming months and years.The future of the planet, and thus of humanity, will be determined in the coming decades. Calculations by certain scientists as to scenarios for the year 2100 aren’t very useful for two reasons: A) scientific: considering all the retroactive effects impossible to calculate, it is very risky to make projections over a century. B) political: at the end of the century, all of us, our children and grandchildren will be gone, so who cares?

II.As the IPCC explains, if the average temperature exceeds the pre-industrial period’s by 1.5°, there is a risk of setting off an irreversible climate change process. The ecological crisis involves several facets, with hazardous consequences, but the climate question is doubtless the most dramatic threat. What would the consequences of this be? Just a few examples: the multiplication of megafires such as in Australia; the disappearance of rivers and the desertification of land areas, melting and dislocation of polar ice and raising the sea level, which could reach dozens of meters. 

Yet, at two meters vast regions of Bangladesh, India and Thailand, as well as the major cities of human civilisation – Hong Kong, Calcutta, Venice, Amsterdam, Shanghai, London, New York, Rio – will have disappeared beneath the sea. How high can the temperature go? From what temperature will human life on this planet be threatened? No one has an answer to these questions.

III. These are risks of a catastrophe unprecedented in human history. One would have to go back to the Pliocene, some millions of years ago, to find climate conditions similar to what could become reality in the future, due to climate change. Most geologists consider that we have entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene, when conditions on the planet have been modified by human action? What action? Climate change began with the 18th Century Industrial Revolution, but it is after 1945, with neoliberal globalisation, that it took a qualitative leap. In other words, modern capitalist industrial civilisation is responsible for the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere, thus of global heating.

IV.The capitalist system’s responsibility in the imminent catastrophe is widely recognised. Pope Francis, in his Encyclical Laudato Si, without uttering the word ‘capitalism’ spoke out against a structurally perverse system of commercial and property relations based exclusively on the ‘principle of profit maximization’ as responsible both for social injustice and destruction of our Common House, Nature. A slogan universally chanted the world over in ecological demonstrations is ‘Change the System, not the Climate!’ The attitude shown by the main representatives of this system, advocates of business as usual– billionaires, bankers, ‘experts’, oligarchs, politicians – can be summed up by the phrase attributed to Louis XIV: ‘After me, the deluge’.

V.The systemic nature of the problem is cruelly illustrated by governments’ behaviour. All, (with very rare exceptions) acting in the service of capital accumulation, multinationals, the fossil oligarchy, general commodification and free trade. Some of them – Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Scott Morrison (Australia) – are openly ecocidal and climate deniers. The other, ‘reasonable’ ones set the tone at the annual COP (Conference of the Parties or Circuses Organised Periodically?) meetings, which feature vague ‘green’ rhetoric and total inertia. 

The most successful was COP 21, in Paris, which concluded with solemn promises from all governments taking part to reduce emissions – not kept, except by a few Pacific islands. Scientists calculate that even if they had been kept, the temperature would still rise up to 3.3° higher…

VI.‘Green capitalism’, ‘carbon markets’, ‘compensation mechanisms and other manipulations of the so-called ‘sustainable market economy’ have proven perfectly useless, while ‘greening’ with a vengeance, emissions are skyrocketing, and catastrophe gets closer and closer. There is no solution to the ecological crisis within the framework of capitalism, a system entirely devoted to productivism, consumerism, the ferocious struggle for ‘market shares’, to capital accumulation and maximizing profits. Its intrinsically perverse logic inevitably leads to the disruption of ecological balance and destructions of ecosystems.

VII. The only effective alternatives, capable of avoiding catastrophe, are radical alternatives. ‘Radical’ means attacking the root of the evil. If the capitalist system is at the root, we need anti-system alternatives, i.e. anticapitalist ones, such as ecosocialism, an ecological socialism up to the challenges of the 21st century. Other radical alternatives such as ecofeminism, social ecology (Murray Bookchin), André Gorz’s political ecology, or degrowth have much in common with ecocialism: relations of reciprocal influence have developed in recent years.

VIII. What is socialism? For many Marxists, it is transformation of the relationships of production – by the collective appropriation of the means of production – to allow the free development of productive forces. Ecosocialism lays claim to Marx, but explicitly breaks with this productivist model. Of course, collective appropriation is indispensable, but the productive forces themselves must also be transformed: by changing their energy sources (renewables instead of fossil fuels); b) by reducing global energy consumption; c) by reducing production of goods (‘degrowth’), and by eliminating useless activities (advertising) and harmful ones (pesticides, weapons of war); d) by putting a stop to planned obsolescence. 

Ecosocialism also involves transformation of consumption models, transport forms, urbanism and ‘ways of life.’ In short, it is much more than a change of property forms: it is a civilizational change, based on values of solidarity, equality, and respect for nature. Ecosocialist civilisation breaks with productivism and consumerism, in favour of shorter working time, thus more free time devoted to social, political, recreational, artistic, erotic etc activities. Marx referred to this goal by the term ‘Realm of freedom’.

IX. To achieve the transition towards ecosocialism, democratic planning is required, guided by two criteria: meeting actual needs, and respect for the ecological balance of the planet. The people themselves, once the onslaught of advertising and the consumption obsession created by the capitalist market are eliminated – who will decide, democratically, what their real needs are. Ecosocialism is a wager on the democratic rationality of the popular classes.

X.This requires a real social revolution. How can such a revolution be defined? To carry out the ecosocialist project, partial reforms will not suffice. We could refer to a note by Walter Benjamin, on the margins of his theses On the concept of history(1940): ‘Marx said that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But things might work out otherwise. It is possible that revolutions are the act by which humans travelling in the train activate the emergency brakes.’ Translation in 21st century terms: we are all passengers on a suicide train, which is named Modern Industrial Capitalist Civilisation. This train is hurtling towards a catastrophic chasm: climate change. Revolutionary action aims to halt it – before it is too late.

XI. Ecosocialism is at once a project for the future and a strategy for the struggle here and now. There is no question of waiting for ‘the conditions to be ripe’. It is necessary to provoke convergence between social and ecological struggles and fight the most destructive initiatives by powers in the service of capital. This is what Naomi Klein called Blockadia. Within mobilisations of this type, an anticapitalist consciousness and interest in ecosocialism can emerge during struggles. Proposals such as the Green New Deal are part of this struggle, in their radical forms, which require effectively renouncing fossil energies – but not in those limited to recycling ‘green capitalism’.

XII. Who is the subject in this struggle? The workerist/industrialist dogmatism of the previous century is no longer current. The forces now at the forefront of the confrontation are youth, women, Indigenous people, and peasants. Women are very present in the formidable youth uprising launched by Greta Thunberg’s call – one of the great sources of hope for the future. As the ecofeminists explain to us, this massive women’s participation in the mobilisations comes from the fact that they are the first victims of the system’s damage to the environment. Unions are beginning here and there to also get involved. 

This is important, because, in the final analysis, we can’t overcome the system without the active participation of workers in cities and countryside, who make up the majority of the population. The first condition, in each movement is associating ecological goals (closing coal mines or oil wells, or thermal power stations, etc) with guaranteed employment for the workers involved.

XIII. Do we have any chance of winning this battle, before it is too late? Unlike the so-called ‘collapsologists’ who clamorously proclaim that catastrophe is inevitable and that any resistance is futile, we think the future is open. There is no guarantee that this future will be ecosocialist: this is the object of a wager in the Pascalian sense, in which we commit all our forces, in a ‘labour for uncertainty’. But as Bertolt Brecht said, with grand and simple wisdom: ‘Those who fight may lose. Those who don’t fight have already lost.’

So what did the Green Party's long march through the EU institutions achieve?

Written by Haroon Saad

Now that the debate regarding Brexit is over perhaps we need to move into a period of reflection and discussion regarding how effective was our 21 year presence in the European Parliament (EP).

The party has always had a very critical position regarding the EU and indeed any objective review of our current policy would conclude that we are essentially a party  that view the EU as a neoliberal club. However, the party also agreed that it would be important to engage and see what reforms could be undertaken from within.

We had MEP’s in the EP since 1999. From 1999-2014 we had two MEP’s, Jean Lambert and Caroline Lucas (who was replaced by Keith Taylor in 2010). From 2014-2019 we had three MEP’s with the addition of Molly Scott Cato.

It seems appropriate to take a review of what actually was achieved during these 20 years. With all respect to the additional MEP’s elected in June 2019, I am not going to include their short sojourn as it’s not really relevant.

In the twenty years we have been present in the EP it seems to me that whatever gains were made have been marginal. Just consider the following events that took place and which our then MEP’s actually supported:

·       The Lisbon treaty was ratified, despite having been voted down by French and Dutch Citizens in referendums, the EP simply ignored the votes of the citizens, cancelled all other planned referendums and simply proceeded to adopt what had been rejected, albeit with some procedural sleight of hand.

·       The Directive on renewable energy was endorsed in 2009, supported by our MEP’s. Sounds just the right kind of thing that we should be supporting but in fact as predicted by several NGO’s it unleashed a land grab which enslaved  and displaced hundreds of thousands of poor people across the globe and also destroyed multi flora sites by converting them into single crop use.

·        We had the Iraq war, which saw the green group in the EP, to which we belong supporting the German Greens in their support for the war.

·        We had the EU Carbon Trading Scheme which again was supported but simply resulted in large windfall profits for the biggest polluters.   

  

·        We had the Fiscal Compact, which again was supported by the Green Group, which brought into law austerity as a guiding principle and resulted in people in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Cyprus, Italy all being subjected to non-democratic dictate.

·        We had the Citizens Initiative which was presented by our MEP’s at conference as creating real citizens power. In fact it has been nothing of the sort, simply window dressing to create the semblance that citizens could actually force legislative change.

I could go on but my aim is to simply generate an honest reflection and discussion. This may be even more necessary if we go down the road of seeking some kind of Progressive Alliance as we need to learn, in my view, from the very marginal impact we were able to exert over 20 years. 

For those of you wanting to see more, then I encourage you to visit the EP website and there you can find what actually our MEP’s did and like me, you may wonder what was the relevance of their actions.

Haroon Saad is a member of Waltham Forest Green Party and a Green Left supporter

Eco Socialism or Social Ecology the Answer to Eco Capitalism

Written by Donald Cuccioletta and first published at Alternatives International

As we have become aware of this equilateral triangle of Climate Change, Militarization and of Democracy in Peril, the obvious question that confronts us is “What is to be done?”

It is obvious that we cannot overlook the struggle taken up by environmentalists across the world who are petitioning governments, particularly governments in advance capitalist nations, for meaningful legislation to fight climate change. There are people across our world who are involved in the struggle against militarization of the planet and the advent of neo fascism which both put our democracies in great danger.

Certainly reform is necessary and even better if it were radical reforms. Yet we know by past experience that we cannot fully rely on capitalist governments who placate to capitalist/imperialist imperatives to change the system or even to give us radical reforms. This is totally in contradiction with the ideology of profit, the structure on which capitalism is based on. So, again we ask ourselves “What is to be done?”

In many of the demonstrations on Climate Change that have circumvented the planet, numerous placards indicating the need for ‘System Change” could be seen indicating that Climate Change is important, but the ultimate culprit is the capitalist system itself.

The insistence on system change shows quite clearly that environmental consciousness has now developed into an ecological consciousness. Yes, the question of environment and ecology are very different and indicate an ideological void between the two terms.

Environmental consciousness is based on awareness, whether social or political, that demand reforms presented to petitioning elected governments to bring forward legislation to combat the ills that exist in our environment. This in itself is very laudable.

Yet this approach remains a prisoner of the traditional political party system, controlled by the servants of capitalism, who have no intention of developing the radical reforms necessary to fundamentally change our environment. We can qualify this type of struggle as simply reformist in nature and does not create in the legislative bodies a sense of urgency. This is why many are turning to direct action such as Extraction Rebellion or the Mohawk nation who are erecting barricades across railway lines.

In other words the ideological element that is necessary in this important struggle is missing. The word Ecology is much more far reaching and is more embedded in the concept that we are also part of nature.

This means that the struggle is also part of the complete understanding that every living being, as humans, animals, trees etc. (flora and fauna) are also partners in a vast understanding of the workings of our planet. This is contrary to an environmental consciousness. The struggle is one of ecological consciousness.

The challenges that humanity is facing are beyond a simplistic understanding of making sure we recycle. The profound crisis we are experiencing has had a long history that has its roots in the greed dominated by profit. Throughout human history there has always been the presence of profit. Whether it be truck and trade, exchange of services leading up to the invention of money as an instrument of trade.

However this process in systems was based on the idea that certain profit was necessary to be able to pay for services, salaries, necessities of life etc., but it had not yet been erected as the ultimate instrument of accumulation, until the development of capitalism.

With the advent of capitalism, profit gave way to private property, which over time created a capitalist class (the bourgeoisie) whose sole purpose was to accumulate profit taking vast sums of money, not under truck and trade, but based on the exploitation of workers, and peasants. The ultimate system of exploitation has come of age. Now the goal was to perfect it.

The sole existence of the bourgeoisie was based on the accumulation of capital to develop more capital. In other words capital became the goal to be attained if we wanted to have power and eventually use this power to govern the masses. A system which in its early beginnings, according to Karl Marx in Das Kapital, relied primarily on the dominance and the workings of the nation-state, created by the bourgeoisie, to serve their interests.

But this was not enough as we entered the age of capitalist industrial revolution as documented by the historical classics of Eric Hobsbaum. It was at this moment in the capitalist historical development, that to continue the capitalist profit accumulation needed to expand in order to feed the monster that is capitalism.

International expansion for natural resources became a necessity. International trade and exploitation of natural resources was always present, starting with gold and silver, cotton and tobacco, lumber and eventually with the scientific revolution of the middle the 19th century mining and oil products. From mercantilism to colonialism we were now in the new era of imperialism that is still with us today.

With the partnership of capitalism and imperialism, we can understand the devastation this system has done to our planet, our climate patterns and the sword of nuclear destruction hanging over our heads. Radical policies, as I have said earlier, are important for the immediate future but we must also understand that capitalism/imperialism has to be the ultimate target. System change is the order of the day.

System change is all well and good, but what system do we need? In the recent past many believed in some form of socialism that turned out with the experience of the Soviet Union under Stalin and Stalinism to be a false socialism. Today the People’s Republic of China, once a beacon of socialism remains for many true socialists a question mark.

We need a new socialism. We need today a new definition of socialism, adapted to the different conditions of the 21st century. We are in the age of the Internet and all its derivatives. We are experiencing the new era of a post-industrial revolution. All these changes have created new ideas, new generations, and a new political culture.

Socialism cannot exist today if we do not understand ecological consciousness. Eco-socialism is our new order of the day. Some would call it social ecology. Independent of the title we give it, we must feed this new approach with new concepts if we are to struggle and win against capitalism/imperialism.

New concepts such as citizen’s direct democracy, the Right to the City, decentralized democracy, cooperative housing, horizontal approach to governance, creation of movements of empowerment, return to citizen’s committees, neighborhood councils controlled by citizen’s, the right to recall of our elected officials are all elements that must be examined, conceptualized and constantly restructured if we are to create a new system to replace capitalism/imperialism.

We must rely on the idea of popular education of the workers, lower middleclass, progressives and even left radicals without which the idea of “power to the people” would remain just a slogan. The concept of a political party must also be re-examined, in order to not replicate the traditional (capitalist) political party structure and even the structures of the parties of false socialism.

The new conditions that have forged the new societal trends of the 21st century impose upon us a new concept of development, a new working class or a new salaried class consciousness adapted to these new conditions.

Capitalism/imperialism is still on its road to destruction, by maintaining the exploitive/oppressive model. The radical Marxist-Gramscian socialist left, the anarchist socialist left must take up the obligation to define this new system change. Eco-socialism or social ecology should be the order of the day. 

To delay in developing these new concepts, and redefine the word socialism in accordance with these new conditions would leave space for the social liberals, the social democrats who have throughout the 20th century usurped the right to speak for and defend the working class.

As Antonio Gramsci one of the greatest organic intellectuals, wrote in his seminal work (Letters from Prison) while a guest in the prisons of fascist Italy, the radical left must always put forward its positions which are contrary to capitalism and its false prophets. As Gramsci elaborates, the radical left is always in the position of a war of ideas.

This is the first hurdle that we must pass in the battle of class struggle. Similarly to define eco-socialism in our present conditions of the 21st century we must also as the radical left cross this first hurdle.

Donald Cuccioletta PhD is a historian, author and activist, Coordinator of Nouveau Cahiers du Socialisme and a member Political Analysis Collective

The Climate Crisis and the Crisis of Stranded Fossil Fuel Assets

Written by Marvin Gandall and first published at Socialist Project

The world’s oil, gas, and coal companies would incur what the Financial Times (FT) recently described as “breathtaking” losses if they’re not allowed to extract and burn their enormous reserves.

In total, fossil fuel CO2 emissions contained in untapped reserves are estimated at 2910 gigatonnes (GT) or nearly three trillion metric tons. To put that number in context, a sole GT is twice the mass of the global human population and enough to stretch 200 million elephants from the earth to the moon. The FT estimates that more than half these assets would be stranded if the 2°C global warming target set by the 2015 Paris Agreement were met.

Assets held by ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco, Total SA, Royal Dutch Shell and other corporations include rights purchased to explore in a given area as well as reserves under wells and other infrastructure already producing hydrocarbons.

In the unlikely event the rise in temperature was more drastically curtailed to 1.5°C, more than 80 per cent of these assets would be rendered worthless. This would inflict losses of nearly a trillion dollars on shareholders, or about one-third of the current valuation of the world’s major oil and gas companies.

About 33 GT of carbon emissions were released in 2019, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). If the annual rate of emissions were frozen at that level, a further 2640 GT would still be burnt by century’s end, well beyond the target of 1200 GT which the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assumes is necessary to hold the rise in global warming to 2°C.

To meet the more ambitious 1.5°C limit, only 464 GT of the estimated 2910 GT of CO2 in the remaining oil, gas and coal assets could be burnt. Producers with the highest carbon intensity in their oil and gas reserves, notably those in the Canadian tar sands, would be hit hardest.

Foot-Dragging

The massive scale of the potential losses explains the refusal or foot-dragging by governments beholden to the industry to implement the Paris Agreement. The agreement is already regarded by climate scientists as inadequate to meet the climate emergency.

Still, the threat of tougher regulation leading to some percentage of stranded assets has been enough to spook major investors, especially as the pressure to curtail emissions rises with each flood, hurricane, firestorm, and other extreme weather event associated with climate change.

The coal sector, the largest emitter, has experienced the most capital flight, but oil and gas are not far behind. “As the first target for asset owners keen to decarbonize their portfolios, coal miners have performed disastrously over the past decade. Bloomberg’s index of global coal miners, the largest of which are in China, has plunged 74 per cent from its peak in early 2011… Collectively, world oil and gas company market values have fallen about half as much as coal miners since their own decade peak in 2011.”

If the present trend continues, the shift in energy investment from fossil fuels to renewables “would be one of the biggest ever shifts in the allocation of capital,” according to the FT. But even if it occurs it’s certain to fall well short of what is urgently required to avert catastrophic climate change.

Despite all the noise emanating from governments, central banks, and investors over the past decade, the IEA says capital expenditures by the largest oil and gas companies directed to wind, solar, and other renewables still represents less than 1 per cent of their holdings.

All of which lends support to the program advanced by ecosocialists and various proponents of a Green New Deal – public ownership of the energy industry as a precondition for a rapid conversion to clean energy and a radical restructuring of the capitalist economy.

Marvin Gandall is a former journalist and union official and is currently active in Climate Justice Victoria, Canada.

Sorry we missed you – Greenpeace visits BP

Written by Allan Todd

“BP has been lying to the world about the climate crisis… and Bernard Looney (their new CEO) has been working for BP the whole time. They’re out of time, we’re out of patience - and they need to get out of the oil and gas business entirely!”

One of the Greenpeace activists involved in the action against BP’s London HQ, Weds. 5 Feb. 2020.

In the (VERY!!) early hours of Wednesday 5 February, I was one of over 100 Greenpeace activists who turned up outside BP’s London HQ in St. James Square. The aim was to send a clear message to their new CEO, Bernard Looney, who was due to start work that day.

He claims he ‘gets it’ as to why so many climate activists are frustrated about the on-going ‘dirty energy’ projects of fossil fuel companies such as BP; and has said he will soon be setting out his low carbon ambition for the company.

But BP - and all the other dirty energy companies - clearly STILL don’t get that, as has Bill McKibben pointed out, we can either have dirty energy companies with healthy balance sheets; OR we can have a relatively healthy planet. But we can’t have both! So we need to do all we can to get the message across that AT LEAST 80% of all fossil fuel reserves need to stay where they are - in the ground.

“Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989,…, I can say with some confidence that we’re losing the fight, badly and quickly - losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilisation is in.”

Bill McKibben, Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math, Rolling Stone, 2012.

The visit

Thus, in an attempt to help end that “denial about the peril” referred to by Bill McKibben, Greenpeace decided to give BP a ‘wake-up!’ call.  Despite an unusually rapid - and initially very heavy-handed - police response, we were able to achieve our main objective: to shut down the entire BP office, so that Mr. Looney would be unable to get into his office on his first day as BP’s new CEO.

This was achieved by 24 Greenpeace activists blocking all 6 doors into the building, using two main methods.

Firstly, getting one activist locked-on to a ‘lifeguards’ chair right in front of each of the doors. In order to make removal of these protesters difficult for the police, the chairs were 2m 20cms high. Ordinary police officers are not allowed to attempt to remove protesters from any structure which is more that 2m high! Instead, they have to await the arrival of the specialist Protester Removal Unit.

The other method was then manoeuvring heavy oil barrels in front of each door, and getting 3 other activists locked-on to each one:

One of the 6 groups of 4 which successfully blocked their allocated door.

Internationalism in practice.

Many of the activists involved in this action came from other European Greenpeace groups - to help underline the fact that the Climate Emergency is a global issue: in part, because companies such as BP operate right across the world. My team ‘buddy’ was a young woman from France.

The team we were in was given the task of blocking the main entrance - although we were successful in that, as were the other teams, the aggressive policing prevented us from achieving our additional goals. One of which was to placing hoardings around 2 sides of the building:

The hoardings which, in the end, we were not able to get into position

(my back is to the photographer, as my ‘buddy’ & I place the panel on the L.)

Solar panel ‘tents

The other additional task was to fill 2 of the streets with 250 used solar panel ‘tents’, under which the remaining activists would sit and attach themselves - thus effectively blocking those streets for the duration of the protest:

Police quickly removing the solar panel ‘tents

(I’m under the panel on the L.)

After having dived under - and been forcibly removed from! - 4 of these quickly-erected ‘tents’, at around 3.30am my buddy and I joined  50 or so other activists to lay down in Charles II Street, to block it using more traditional civil disobedience methods.

For an overall view of the action, there is plenty of additional information to absorb via this link:

https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=greenpeace%20uk&epa=SEARCH_BOX

The shape of things to come?

Some of the activists (but not those from France or Spain, for instance!) were somewhat taken aback by the initially very ‘robust’ police response to what was - as always with Greenpeace - an entirely peaceful action.  In addition, it has emerged that some of those protesters who were arrested for their part in this action, were not treated very well - another ‘first’ for a Greenpeace action.

However, from the beginning, I had wondered if this action - the first major nvda action of 2020 - would be a test case for future police responses to peaceful civil disobedience. Apart from anything else, Johnson now has a secure majority for his hard-right government - which even Tory Ken Clarke has described as “the most right-wing Tory government Britain has ever seen.” 

In particular, Cummings and Johnson probably suspect that, as the economic impact of Brexit - whether it be a hard Brexit or a No-Deal Brexit - begins to hit many of those Labour voters who ‘lent their vote’ to the Tories last December, there may be many protests and disputes to come in the years ahead.

The path ahead

On a personal level, since leaving the Green Party - and thus, in effect, Green Left - in December, I remain party-less. Whilst some are suggesting I re-join the Greens, and others that I join the Labour Party, I’m not convinced by either set of arguments. As alternatives, both Left Unity and Socialist Resistance have some attractions - as both are ecosocialist and both support PR.

But I suspect that party politics - and certainly electoral party politics - has probably had its day for several years ahead.  With Johnson now having such a secure majority, it’s fairly certain that his government really will implement both the new boundary changes and Voter Photo ID:

The shape of things to come - evidence suggests that Voter Photo ID ends up reducing the number of young/poor people voting in elections.

Both of those will, overall, benefit the Tories over all other parties and, at the same time, harm Labour in particular. If Scotland goes independent, the opposition to the Tories in England and Wales will also lose the important SNP votes in parliament. Such developments point to permanent Tory rule for the next decade, or more.

In such a situation, mass extra-parliamentary political activism, based on nvda, will prove much more effective than electoral politics in the years ahead.

For those who do belong to political parties opposed to the Tories and neoliberalism, the best way forward may be to focus on building community-based movements that will be strong enough - and linked-up enough - to take action not only on issues such as the Climate Emergency, but also on austerity, privatisation of our NHS, creeping authoritarianism, and racism/fascism.

However, as regards the ever-worsening Climate Emergency, the words of Mike Berners-Lee and Duncan Clark are a fitting conclusion:

“Given where we are now, it’s crucial that more people hear the simple facts loud and clear: that climate change presents huge risks; that our efforts to solve it so far haven’t worked; and that there’s a moral imperative to constrain unabated fossil fuel use on behalf of current and especially future generations.”

M. Berners-Lee & D. Clark, The Burning Question, 2013, p.170

Allan Todd is an environmental activist from Cumbria