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Posted by Mike E on April 23, 2011
Kasama is publishing a series of articles this week on the destruction of the environment and socialist solutions. These articles will represent sharply opposing views, and (as usual) the posting by Kasama does not imply endorsement of specific arguments. Thanks to the Kasama team that has been researching and debating these questions. We started this series with One Struggle‘s statement.
The following appeared on Monthly Review.
by Victor Wallis
A disdain for the natural environment has characterized capitalism from the beginning. As Marx noted, capital abuses the soil as much as it exploits the worker.[1] The makings of ecological breakdown are thus inherent in capitalism. No serious observer now denies the severity of the environmental crisis, but it is still not widely recognized as a capitalistcrisis, that is, as a crisis arising from and perpetuated by the rule of capital, and hence incapable of resolution within the capitalist framework.
It is useful to remind ourselves that, although Marx situated capitalism’s crisis tendencies initially in the business cycle (specifically, in its downward phase), he recognized at the same time that those tendencies could manifest themselves under other forms—the first of these being the drive to global expansion. [2] Such manifestations are not inherently cyclical; they are permanent trends. They can be sporadically offset, but for as long as capitalism prevails, they cannot be reversed.
They encompass:
(1) increased concentration of economic power;
(2) increased polarization between rich and poor, both within and across national boundaries;
(3) a permanent readiness for military engagement in support of these drives; and
(4) of special concern to us here, the uninterrupted debasement or depletion of vital natural resources.
Posted in capitalism, environment, social ecology | 9 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on October 6, 2010
Intro by mike ely
Not a person reading the reports from Hungary doubts that this same disaster could happen in a hundred places around the world.
I went and surveyed the massive 1972 disaster that came from a company dam breaking in Buffalo Creek, West Virginia. As a journalist I covered the massive chemical spill by Ciba-Geigy in 1986 — which moved like a sterilizing swathe down the Rhine River literally killing the life of the river in (giving a new meaning to “rivercide.”) There are events like this, one after another, constantly, right now — some that come to light, or others that lie covered up, still more that are waiting to happen. Chemical spills, faulty infrastructure, mass poisonings, epidemics of industrial injury, government corruption, faulty protections, cynical indifference.
It is valuable to think through, specifically and in detail, how something like this can happen. How was it allowed? What kind of short-term obsession with profit and things dominated the decisions? Who thought about the villagers and their lives–or didn’t think about them at all? What were the years of planning and construction like? What are the structures of government and decisionmaking? What kind of training and oversight allowed that small army of specialists and engineers to build that dam and release those chemicals into that man-made lake? What is defines culture of normalcy, morality and constraint?
Because once we have made these lists of conditions, decisions, motivations, and structures — we have a list of things that need urgent and radical change.
* * * * * * * *
The following first appeared in the New York Times. Gallery of photos.
PRAGUE — The Hungarian government declared a state of emergency in several towns on Tuesday, a day after a reservoir at an alumina refining plant in Ajka burst its banks, unleashing a flood of caustic red sludge that killed at least four people and injured more than 120, government officials said.
Posted in capitalism, ecology, Hungary, social ecology | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Mike E on May 6, 2010
Kasama received the following from Roxanne Amico, an artist and independent radio producer.
by Roxanne Amico
I’ve been doing a little reading today. I want to share what I found a few miles down into the nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico on this Cinco de Mayo, and Marx’s 192nd B-day… I’m about to go to sleep, and I wonder…. I just wonder …what I will dream about… Here’s a hint: Kill the industrial machine!
WA Post on potential ways to stop “leak”: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2010/04/30/GR2010043003064.html
Amount of oil could soar if “cap” doesn’t work: WASHINGTON — In a closed-door briefing for members of Congress, a senior BP executive conceded Tuesday that the ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico could conceivably spill as much as 60,000 barrels a day of oil, more than 10 times the estimate of the current flow. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/us/05spill.html?hp
Published on Sunday, May 2, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Was the Gulf Oil Spill an Act of War? You Betcha
by Randall Amster
“The cruel joke is that our willingness to continually flout nature’s laws leaves us in a perpetual state of scarcity and requires a regular doubling-down on the very same logic that made things scarce in the first place.”
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/05/02-0
Obama biggest recipient of BP cash http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64420A20100505
Posted in capitalism, ecology, social ecology | 2 Comments »
Posted by onehundredflowers on December 21, 2009
Tuvalu during an unusually high tide
This was originally posted on guardian.co.uk.
Lumumba Di-Aping, chief negotiator for the G77 group of 130 developing countries, said the deal had “the lowest level of ambition you can imagine. It’s nothing short of climate change scepticism in action. It locks countries into a cycle of poverty for ever. Obama has eliminated any difference between him and Bush.”
John Vidal, Allegra Stratton and Suzanne Goldenberg
The UN climate summit reached a weak outline of a global agreement in Copenhagen tonight, falling far short of what Britain and many poor countries were seeking and leaving months of tough negotiations to come.
After eight draft texts and all-day talks between 115 world leaders, it was left to Barack Obama and Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, to broker a political agreement. The so-called Copenhagen accord “recognises” the scientific case for keeping temperature rises to no more than 2C but does not contain commitments to emissions reductions to achieve that goal.
Posted in >> analysis of news, Copenhagen, ecology, environment, global warming, social ecology | 2 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on September 6, 2009
by Mike Ely
Many people reading these words know far more about Van Jones than I do. Many here know him personally. Some struggled with him sharply over his political direction in life — toward working for change deep within the official structures of this existing political system.
Many of us watched this gifted activist as he seemed to sky-rocket on the reformer’s career path, ending as an “green jobs” adviser to the new president. (Note: not a policy maker, or a face of policy, not an administrator, but someone allowed to speak in the ear, occasionally, from the inside.)
And now Van Jones has been brought down by a vicious witch hunt that built over the last six month– one that targeted Jones as a leftist (“Marxist,” “communist,” “Black nationalist”) figure brought close to power by this new administration. He was scoped, targeted and then picked off. And, in the process, he become a poster boy in the hysterical campaign to paint Obama as a secret communist-Muslim-furriner leading a not-so-secret socialist takeover of a once-Aryan nation. Now Van Jones’ bloody scalp is hanging from the posse’s saddle horn.
* * * * *
First of all, this witch hunt has been a cascade of distortion, lunatic paranoia, barely concealed racism, and very conscious indifference to burning issues, basic morality and truth.
And the forced resignation of Van Jones is an additional outrage — on many levels, including in the fact that the liberals are (once again) congenitally unwilling and unable to stand their own liberal ground without abandoning someone like him. (Lani Guenier, anyone?)
All this is not just aimed at Jones himself, or even just at the tepid reforms of this Obama administration (which , after all, have mainly been corporate bail-outs). This witch hunt asserts that any past association with of the socialist left is a permanent life-time taint. And any mere association with someone like Jones, who has been active in radical politics, should be a drop-dead third rail within mainstream American politics. And that the very ideas of socialism, communism, Black liberation, revolution must be driven into deep cracks and ignorable margins within American life.
Look at what just happened: It illustrates a major way this system limits the allowable politics among the people. Look at how it disciplines, chastises, threatens and therefor trains its own political and media figures. Look at how it uses the official reporting and the absurd theater of the central political arena to demand the further exclusion of radical thought — and the permanent exclusion those who once entertained radical thoughts.
Posted in >> analysis of news, African American, anti-racist action, antiwar, capitalism, Democratic Party, environment, Media, Mike Ely, organizing, politics, racism, Republican Party, social ecology | 27 Comments »
Posted by onehundredflowers on April 28, 2009
, whose 2006 book The Monster at Our Door warned of the threat of a global bird flu pandemic, explains how globalized agribusiness set the stage for a frightening outbreak of the swine flu in Mexico. This story was originally published at socialistworker.org.
By Mike Davis
THE SPRING Break hordes returned from Cancún this year with an invisible but sinister souvenir.
The Mexican swine flu, a genetic chimera probably conceived in the fecal mire of an industrial pigsty, suddenly threatens to give the whole world a fever. Initial outbreaks across North America reveal an infection rate already traveling at higher velocity than the last official pandemic strain, the 1968 Hong Kong flu.
Stealing the limelight from our officially appointed assassin–the otherwise vigorously mutating H5N1, known as bird flu–this porcine virus is a threat of unknown magnitude. Certainly, it seems far less lethal than SARS in 2003, but as an influenza, it may be more durable than SARS and less inclined to return to its secret cave.
Posted in >> analysis of news, capitalism, ecology, economics, environment, farmers, food, Mexico, Mike Davis, social ecology, USA | 5 Comments »
Posted by n3wday on October 14, 2008
Maoists say, “Only Revolution Can Save the Planet.” Mountains of evidence, like the following article, drive home the fact that we live at a historic turning point for the biosphere. It has been called “The Sixth Mass Extinction” — the one caused by humanity itself.
The questions posed most sharply is “What will we do?” How will we accelerate the movement for socialist revolution? How will we integrate a radical new sense of ecological urgency and change right into the most fundamental program of our movement? How will we mobilize the heartfelt anger and frustration of millions over bio-cide into a powerful force for real and extremely radical anti-capitalist change? And what are the practical steps we are going to take (we, here on Kasama) to create a revolution where “socialist sustainability” is not an afterthought or a matter of lipservice, but a front-rank defining concept of the future we are fighting for?
This article was posted from the Washington Post on Marxmail.
Survey Finds ‘Bleak Picture’ for World’s Mammals
By Juliet Eilperin, Oct. 6, 2008
BARCELONA — A quarter of the world’s wild mammal species are at risk of extinction, according to a comprehensive global survey released here this morning. The new assessment — which took 1,700 experts in 130 countries a total of five years to complete — paints “a bleak picture,” leaders of the project wrote in a paper being published in the journal Science. The overview, made public at the quadrennial World Conservation Congress of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), covers all 5,487 wild species identified since 1500. It is the most thorough tally of land and marine mammals since 1996.
Posted in ecology, environment, social ecology | 97 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on February 20, 2008
The following is an excerpt from the RCP’s 2001 Draft Program. It puts forward innovative ideas of socialist sustainability and Maoist urban planning that have, unfortunately, not been further developed (or acknowledged) in the RCP’s own political work. However these proposals are worth rescuing from the RCP’s indifference and debating in their own right.
Maoism approaches economic development as an interdependent whole. It strives for integrated and egalitarian development. It takes account of the immediate and pressing needs of society and of the long-term goals and long-term effects of economic-social development.
Capitalism mobilizes human and material resources according to the dictates of profit and evaluates economic performance within that narrow framework. Socialism, by contrast, insists on a kind of social balance sheet. For instance, agricultural land-use has health and environmental repercussions; what is called the ‘built environment’ of residential dwellings, public buildings and spaces, and transport systems reflects society’s values and shapes the experience of daily life. These sorts of issues are part of the framework of economic calculation and planning under socialism.
In carrying out socialist construction in the former United States, the proletarian state will pay attention to certain key economic-social interrelationships and transformations, among which are:
Posted in communism, ecology, environment, Maoism, Marxist theory, politics, RCPUSA, revolution, social ecology, theory | 45 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on January 31, 2008
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Since we published the 9 Letters to Our Comrades, some of the most intriguing responses have come from outside our expected Maoist audiences. People have written to us from other revolutionary and leftist trends and said that our criticisms, hopes and direction echoes with their own experiences and frustrations.
I say “intriguing” because there is much I don’t know about this. I am not yet sure exactly how our criticisms of the RCP and Avakian’s new synthesis get at problems that are general with a larger range of left projects. But we am eager to share more about it.
One of the interesting responses came from Chuck Morse, a well-known figure among anarchists (and someone well-known for a certain, uh, antipathy toward revolutionary communism and Maoism.) Chuck recently posted an invitation here on Kasama to read his own summation of involvement within an anarchist circle around Murry Bookchin (who recently died).
I found Chuck’s story engrossing and revealing — and not just about anarchism (obviously) but about the dynamics of groups set on changing the world
Posted in anarchism, environment, social ecology | Tagged: chuck morse | 4 Comments »
