https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2023/04/omni-climate-memo-mondays-121-april-3.html
INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES
Vishwas Satgar. “End Ecocidal Capitalism or Exterminate Life on Planet Earth.”
Brazilian Popular Movements. “Measures to Defend Life on Planet Earth and Improve Living Conditions.”
Jason Hickel. “The Global South has the power to force radical climate action.”
Authoritarian Neoliberalism, Global Chaos
Vishwas Satgar. “End Ecocidal Capitalism or Exterminate Life on Planet Earth: A South African Contribution to Ecosocialist Strategy.”
Vishwas Satgar. MR (July 5, 2022). The South African climate justice movement presents a model for popular revolt against the ecofascist project. | more…
Vishwas Satgar (Jul 01, 2022).
Topics: Climate Change Democracy Ecology Marxist Ecology Movements Places: Africa Global South Africa
Vishwas Satgar is an associate professor of international relations, editor of the Democratic Marxism book series, and principal investigator of the Emancipatory Futures Studies in the Anthropocene project at Wits University, Johannesburg, South Africa. He is a veteran activist and co-founder of the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign and Climate Justice Charter Movement.
. . .Today, capitalism is facing the fourth general crisis (roughly from 2007 to the present) in its history. This is a crisis of socioeconomic and ecological production on a world scale. It is a product of the restructuring of the global political economy through the neoliberal class project (starting around 1980), its implementation and lock-ins through structural adjustment and austerity, punctuated by currency collapses, ballooning private and public debt, overheating of housing markets, economic collapses, and widespread precarity. Neoliberal logic intensified surplus value extraction through the contraction of welfare regimes, deindustrialization, precarious labor market regimes, and a global labor arbitrage based on low unit-labor cost manufacturing in China and much of the Global South, promoting universal commodification including nature itself. In this context, global rivalries have been intensifying between a declining U.S. hegemon and geopolitical contenders, with the recent proxy war in Ukraine between the United States/NATO and Russia portending the intensification of militarized geopolitical competition. Despite the ideological varieties of neoliberalism, in different national and regional contexts, the current realities we live is its world-making essence.
In the four decades of its existence, neoliberalism has also accentuated deep systemic crisis tendencies, emanating from production/reproduction, nature/society, and economy/state divides. These have propelled monopoly-finance capital into a phase of authoritarian neoliberalism: thin market democracies entrenching the power of transnationalizing propertied classes from the United States and Brazil to South Africa and India. A global ecofascist project, plunging the world into chaos and accentuating the ecocidal logic of global carbon capitalism, has arrived, threatening everything.2
In this context, democratic ecosocialist strategy has to proceed from the urgent premise that we must end ecocidal capitalism or face the end of life on Earth. This imperative is what distinguishes the fourth general crisis of capitalism from all previous crises. It is a poly-crisis, or multilevel total crisis, that cannot be managed with shallow reformism and technological fixes, at least not if human and nonhuman life are to survive. Moreover, democratic ecosocialist strategy has to come to terms with the complex global political field it has to contest, particularly the underlying conditions generating and maintaining an ecofascist class project. Along with this are the self-induced disruptions of global carbon capitalism, plus the spaces this provides for strategic advance and agential challenges, enabling a counter-hegemonic project on national and global scales.
To explicate these areas of strategic analysis, first we must situate the victory of carbon capital’s lock-in of fossil fuels, which has been deeply embedded in global climate politics, providing a crucial element of ecofascist class politics. Second, we must analyze how the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow (COP26) ensured the continuity of the ecofascist project. Third, contemporary global carbon capitalism has unraveled as a challenge and limit to the advance of the ecofascist project.3 Fourth, insights into democratic ecosocialist strategy and the climate justice project in South Africa can serve as examples of how to respond to the larger ecofascist conjuncture. The politics of defending the commons and advancing democratic systemic reforms must be highlighted to accelerate and deepen a just transition. Finally, I conclude with challenges to planetize the movement to end ecocidal capitalism and defeat the ecofascist class project.
Learning from Others: Resistance in Brazil and South Africa Brazilian popular movements. “Measures to Defend Life on Planet Earth and Improve Living Conditions.”
(July 5, 2022). Brazilian popular movements
Out of the dissatisfaction with the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Brazilian popular movements came together to propose measures to defend life on Earth. | more…
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Topics: Climate Change Ecology Movements Places: Americas Brazil
This document came out of the dissatisfaction of Brazilian popular movements with the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow.
The measures listed below are a result of collective reflection and decades of popular movements in practice. They will only be effective if we all establish affective ties with and make an ecological commitment to the earth and to nature, understanding ourselves as part of the environment and as responsible for its continuity and regeneration.
1. Forbidding deforestation and burnings for commercial purposes in all native forests and savannas.
2. Forbidding the use of pesticides and transgenic seeds in agriculture, as well as the use of antibiotics in animal husbandry.
3. Fighting against the carbon market and similar forms of financial speculation of nature.
4. An immediate moratorium on new projects related to the use of mineral coal as a source of energy, as well as government proposals for a transition out of this energy source in a maximum of ten years.
5. Forbidding mining of the lands of Indigenous people and traditional communities, as well as establishing environmental protections and conservation areas.
6. The regulation of the scale and rates of mineral extraction, seeking to tend to domestic strategic interests as long as popular sovereignty is respected and in ways that do not destroy communal goods and ways of life in these territories.
7. Rigorous control of the use of plastics, including forbidding its use in the food industry and making its recycling obligatory.
8. Forbidding the expansion of the Brazilian nuclear program.
9. Recognizing the gifts of nature (such as forests, water, and biodiversity) as universal common goods at the service of all people and exempt from privatization.
10. Ecological recovery of all areas close to springs and riverbanks, hillsides, and other ecologically sensitive areas in the process of desertification.
11. Defense of the Amazon as a large and significant ecological territory cared for by the peoples of nine countries, and denouncing and fighting all aggressions it suffers at the hands of capital.
12. Implementing agroecology as a socio-technical basis for the production of healthy food accessible to all people.
13. Constituting a global policy of water care, stopping the pollution of oceans, lakes, and rivers, and eliminating the contamination of surface and subsoil potable water sources.
14. The massive implementation of solar, wind, and biomass energy production systems under collective management.
15. Implementing a global investment plan in mass public transport, using renewable energy, and making possible the reorganization of life in cities.
16. The industrialized countries of the Global North are historically responsible for the world’s pollution and continue to promote unsustainable models of production and consumption. They must be forced to guarantee the financial resources to implement all the necessary actions to rebuild the society-nature relationship in a sustainable way.
Signatories
o ADERE (Association of Rural Employees of Minas Gerais)
o ASA (Articulation of Entities in the Semi-Arid Region of the Northeast). . . .
2022, Volume 74, Number 03 (July-August 2022)
Jason Hickel, “The Global South has the power to force radical climate action.” Al Jazeera on June 29, 2022 (more by Al Jazeera). Forwarded by mronline.org (7-8-22).
After all, Western economies–and their economic growth–depend utterly on labour and resources from the South.
By Jason Hickel (Posted Jul 07, 2022)
Climate Change, Ecology, Environment, StrategyGlobalNewswireClimate Crisis, Global South
. . .Political leaders and social movements in the Global South are aware of these facts. For years, they have been calling for more dramatic action from governments in the Global North, whose per capita emissions remain far higher than the rest of the world. But their pleas fall on deaf ears. None of the Western governments is on track to meet their fair share of the Paris agreement goals. Why? Because to achieve sufficiently rapid emissions reductions will require rich economies to dramatically reduce their energy use.
To manage such an energy descent, rich nations would need to abandon capitalist growth as an objective and shift to a post-growth, post-capitalist system, where production–and energy use–is organised around meeting human needs rather than around elite accumulation. . . .
There is another way. Southern governments have the power to force matters, and change the course of history. MORE https://mronline.org/2022/07/07/the-global-south-has-the-power-to-force-radical-climate-action/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-global-south-has-the-power-to-force-radical-climate-action&mc_cid=0792b690f2&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e
Dr. Jason Hickel is an anthropologist, author, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has taught at the London School of Economics, the University of Virginia, and Goldsmiths, University of London, where he convenes the MA in Anthropology and Cultural Politics. He serves on the Labour Party task force on international development, works as Policy Director for /The Rules collective, sits on the Executive Board of Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP) and recently joined the International Editorial Advisory Board of Third World Quarterly.
The OMNI Anthologies (formerly Newsletters) does not necessarily adhere to all of the views conveyed in articles republished in our blog, War and Warming. Our goal is to share perspectives that examine US orthodoxies and offer alternatives.. –Dick