En Passant

At first I thought all the hallelujahs were for the risen Christ. Not so. I mistook the relief people felt for the election campaigns going quiet for the joy of Christians celebrating the resurrection of their Lord and Saviour. In the secular but not really secular society that is Australia it is an easy mistake […]

Resource companies, rapaciousness, destruction of the environment and of jobs, and tax minimisers are words that all come to mind.

Why doesn’t this Labor/Greens government in the A.C.T. buy more buses and phase in free bus travel over the next few years? That is a subsidy I could support and one that benefits all Canberrans and our environment.

The ecological crisis in the end cannot be solved under capitalism. It will require socialism, the social ownership of the means of production under rational democratic planning, replacing anti-social capitalist calculations to maximise private profit.

Socialists today have a key role to play in the fight for immediate reforms, since real reforms will have to target the guilty capitalist enterprises and any in government who cover for them, which has an anti-capitalist dynamic.

They will also oppose fake “market” reforms, one of which is “carbon trading”, which boils down to paying for the right to pollute. At the same time, socialists should step up their efforts to win environmentalists to the understanding that the ecological problem is at root capitalism.

WOULD YOU drink the water coming out of West Virginia’s Elk River? THE BIGGEST lesson of this entirely unnatural disaster should be evident by now: Don’t trust the polluters to police themselves or clean up their messes.

As UN climate talks began in Warsaw, writes Kate Jeffreys in Red Flag, Philippines chief delegate Naderev Sano addressed the conference on Typhoon Haiyan. “I speak for the countless people who will no longer be able to speak for themselves after perishing from the storm”, he said. “We can take drastic action now to ensure […]

We need to recognize the need to replace capitalism with a more rational, cooperative, democratic and humanistic system in sync with our “species being” and nature. If we don’t, we will lose our only home, writes Chris Williams, the author of Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis and a participant in the ecosocialist coalition System Change Not Climate Change, in Socialist Worker US.

International Socialist Review columnist Phil Gasper in Socialist Worker US challenges the myth that Marxism has nothing useful to say about the environment – with help from the old man himself.

I don’t think there are too many people on the planet, but I do agree there are too many of “some” people. I think there are too many coal barons. There are too many oil tycoons. I think there are too many Clive Palmers – there’s just one of him, but one is still more than we need in my opinion. In truth, the biggest factor in ecological decay is how a society uses its resources, not how many people live in that society. “Pollution begins not in the family bedroom, but in the corporate boardroom.”

If we are to find solutions to the climate emergency, the food crisis and other environmental ills, we have to explore and act upon the causes, not the symptoms. These causes lie in the unequal power held by between different groups in society and an economic system geared for infinite growth on a finite planet.

The blame for unemployment lies with the 1 percent–and certainly not with environmentalists opposing pipelines that will carry tar sands oil, any more than with immigrants or al-Qaeda, or any other scapegoat the media or the right wing offer as a distraction.

Faced with twin economic and environmental crises, both caused by the free market, working people have to stand together to confront both. Instead, union leaders are siding with those who have spread the misery of unemployment, and who view the health and well-being of living things as an obstacle to higher returns on their investments.