Discover Top Posts Tagged with #socialist worker

The shadow Justice minister Karl Turner is “delighted” that the last speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow has defected from the Tori

I wrote a piece for the SW! Check it out! ❤️✊

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#1 May #labor day #anarchism #socialist worker

Just as there can be no doubt that a climate change disaster is already taking place, there can be no doubt about its cause: the capitalist system.

California is burning — again. Sights that were once only imaginary scenes in post-apocalyptic movies are now a regular occurrence.

On July 26, firefighter Jeremiah “Jeremy” Stoke died when he was engulfed by what the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection described as a “massive fire tornado,” about the size of three football fields at its base, with winds up to 165 miles an hour.”

“[T]he tornado was so ferocious it pulsed with 2,700 degrees of heat,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “It ripped roofs off houses and flung cars, power line towers and a steel shipping container into the air.”

Not only was this “raging cyclone of flame” the worst tornado of any kind in California history, but Stoke is the latest of six firefighters who lost their lives this year attempting to contain the most intense wildfires in California history.

One of the fires spanned a record-breaking 300,000 acres. That’s the size of Los Angeles. Another first: Since last year, the fires have increasingly swept through more populated areas — like the Napa and Sonoma County blazes last year that killed at least 41 people and destroyed parts of the city of Santa Rosa.

The disasters aren’t confined to California. Greece has been battling raging wildfires near Athens that have killed almost 100 people. The drastic austerity measures imposed on the country led to cutbacks in spending on firefighting and fire prevention.

But there is another not-at-all-natural factor that is a constant from Greece to California and beyond: global warming and the extreme weather patterns that result from it. Each day’s news seems to bring new examples and evidence:

The five warmest years in history have all come in the 2010s.

Glaciers are melting and causing sea levels to rise faster than scientists’ predictions.

Species are dying off at a pace that has led scientists to conclude that the earth’s sixth mass extinction is already underway.

An algae bloom along the Gulf Coast of the U.S. has killed 267 tons of marine life, with carcasses washing up on beaches and causing respiratory problems for residents.

Massive floods sweeping through Kerala, a state in southern India, have killed more than 350 people and displaced 800,000.

Just as there can be no doubt that a climate change disaster is already taking place, there can be no doubt about its cause: capitalism.

The source of environmental destruction, spreading pollution, immense waste and the failure to address the long-term effects of all of these is an economic and social system that prioritizes the profit and power of a few over the needs of the many.

But when you read mainstream news reports about the capitalism-made disaster in California, you’re much more likely to see blame heaped on individuals — those who might have set a fire, others who accidentally dropped a lit cigarette, or even a flat tire on a car that caused sparks in a dry area.

Even when news reports mention “climate change,” they don’t focus on any kind of thoroughgoing critique of the free-market system and its in-built dynamics that lead to environmental destruction.

On the contrary, all too many mainstream media features reduce even system-wide climate change to a problem “we all caused” through our consumption patterns.

If we are ever going to reverse course for the sake of the world’s people and the planet, we have to name the system of capitalism in order to understand what we’re struggling against. Only from here can we start to put forward real solutions to the ecological crisis we face today — and begin to envision what a different world we could live in if human and ecological needs were put ahead of profits.

The ecological crisis we face is rooted in the way the capitalist system works.

Capitalism is driven by the endless pursuit of profit. It is a system that has no consideration for the long-term health and well-being of the vast majority of people on the planet, let alone the natural world — the land we live on, the water we drink, the air we breathe.

Expropriation and exploitation of both land and labor are vital to capitalism. They are turned into commodities to be bought and sold on the market. As Chris Williams writes in his book Ecology and Socialism, Karl Marx described how capitalism’s robbery of both the worker and the soil together was the “original source of all wealth.”

The history of the U.S. demonstrates this violent truth. Capitalism in the U.S. was born out of a colonial settler state that stole, expropriated and accumulated Indigenous communal lands, and that kidnapped Africans and forced them to provide labor. The U.S. also relied on one of the world’s most exploited working classes to create the wealth needed to become the number-one economic and military power in the world.

The early history of the “world’s greatest democracy” was one of conquest, genocide, enslavement and imperial war. The exploitation and oppression continue to this day, in different forms, because they are built into the system.

Capitalism is based on a minority owning and controlling both the “means of production” (the factories and offices and land) and what the working class produces with its labor. The profits are privatized while costs are socialized. Capitalists accumulate as much wealth as possible, while taking no responsibility for the negative consequences for society, including environmental devastation.

The whole world suffers the destruction and chaos of living under extreme conditions of climate change caused by a capitalist system that chooses short-term profit over long-term sustainability.

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#politics #the left #socialist worker #capitalism #climate change #environmental justice #economics #economic inequality #ecosocialism #democratic socialism #socialism

The Marxist Center extends comradely greetings and sympathy to member cadre formerly of the International Socialist Organization. We recognize the need of the whole socialist, communist and Marxist left to confront sexual harassment, assault and rape in our organizational and movement spaces in ways that both support survivors and limit the potential for future harm by perpetrators.

The experience of betrayal by a trusted leadership, of dashed hopes for an organization refounded on a new and more democratic, feminist, anti-racist, and rank-and-file basis, and of loss of political home is one that is hardly unique to ISO members, but is always deeply painful and disorienting. We stand with those calling for accountability for perpetrators of rape and other forms of gender based violence, as well as with those investigating and calling to account organizational practices of bullying, racism, transphobia and other forms of discrimination.

We affirm the hope of many former members that what comes from the legacy of this long-standing revolutionary socialist organization can contribute in the future toward the development of a organized, working class, revolutionary marxist politics, and the need for revolutionaries to be organized toward this goal.

At the same time, we want to acknowledge and support individuals and collective efforts by ISO members, former members and close collaborators in a period of reflection and reorientation. We believe that the best chance for the emergence and development of a powerful revolutionary Marxist current in the USA will come from such reflection on our experiences as organizers and activists, and the history of our socialist organizations and working class social movements.

Without regretting the loss of a structure that was capable of condoning and hiding rape and which damaged so many committed Marxist militants, we nevertheless hold out hope for the possibility that those committed to revolution, to the liberation of all oppressed people, to the independence of the working class, to working class feminism, to black and indigenous liberation, to trans and queer liberation, to democratic forms of organization, to the end of all forms of imperialism, and to the abolition of class society itself can work practically, together, in concert for these ends.

As always, we welcome collaboration with individual organizers and groups of militants toward building working class power on the shop floor, in tenants unions and in working class organizations for self defense, and those organized for the advancement of social and civil equality and the autonomous power of the oppressed. We look forward to building with former ISO members and groupings who remain committed to working class power and an anticapitalist vision for a future society “from below.” We have a world to win, and like all thoughtful revolutionaries today, are only just beginning to think through, experiment with and develop the forms of organization most useful and necessary to that task, in a period of intensifying struggle when they will no doubt be indispensable.

#socialism #ISO #socialist worker #Marxist Centre