Capitalist Climate Summit: Fake Radicalism Won’t Save Us here ♦ Need to Move Beyond Trade Unionism and Reform here ♦
Caption: CADIZ (Spain) — Twenty thousand striking metalworkers shut down the port area of this industrial hub, fighting police and disrupting operations also at an Airbus subsidiary and the shipbuilder Navantia. Faced with Spain’s highest employment rate and skyrocketing inflation, workers need more than the pay raise they won. They need to fight to end capitalist wage-slavery.
Capitalist Climate Summit: Fake Radicalism Won’t Save Us
The October 31st meeting in Glasgow, with anti-climate change protesters, reminds us of the “anti-nuclear” campaign in the late 20th century that was financed by oil consortia after the nuclear power plant accidents at Chernobyl and elsewhere.
Today the “anti-fossil fuels” movement says that this is “the last chance” for the rulers to take measures to curb climate change. They cry out for “radical change.” Pope Francis and the German rulers also come out for clean energy.
The supposedly “radical” has already been anticipated. Britain’s Boris Johnson “demanded commitments” from China’s Xi Jinping, and he is announcing them: reaching the ceiling in 2030 and zero CO2 in 2050. Israel says zero CO2 in 2030.
European slave-masters have few sources of fossil fuels. They import a large part of their consumption, which is why in general they promote “clean energy.”
Can clean-energy millionaires present themselves as the world’s saviors from climate change? The defenders of the other band of slave-masters ask us this. These support the continuing use of fossil fuels. They are happy for the recovery of oil prices, accepted in the recent OPEC meeting.
Within each exploiting side, they also have their differences. The Germans choose to dismantle their nuclear plants, the French to maintain them, the Spanish distance themselves from them.
Such is their “radicalism.”
There is a similar dispute in Mexico. The rulers have chosen to continue exploiting fossil fuels as a priority and to subordinate the development of “clean energy.” They have been explicit: it is false that world oil consumption is going to end soon, the great powers are still building refineries.
Their adversaries condemn them with the announcements of the electrification of cars, the rise in lithium consumption, the need to use solar, wind and other energy. Behind them are Iberdrola, a Spanish multinational electric utility based in Bilbao, and others. There are still defenders of the Laguna Verde Nuclear Power Plant in Veracruz, Mexico but they have been set back.
All of this is within the framework of the production of commodities for sale and profit.
For the working class, on the other hand, the only option is to end all commodity production and wage slavery. The abolition of these will be the real basis to end the irrational use of nature.
This requires joining and building the international association of workers, the International Communist Workers’ Party.
-Comrade in Mexico
Need to Move Beyond Trade-Unionism and Reform
Really good issue (vol. 12 #15). I particularly liked the conversation around trade unionism. It reminded me of an article I just reviewed with my students. It was about efforts to develop an international labor solidarity movement that emphasizes greater worker control over production and the reduction of class as well as gender and racial inequality and the need for social unionism. That requires a restructuring of the labor movement and reevaluating of its goals. Trade unionism too narrowly focuses on wages and working conditions but fails to confront power.
I also enjoyed the article on environmentalism. I heard Naomi Klein say that the right wing’s criticism about the environmental justice movement as a socialist movement is correct. She stated that a move towards socialism (we would argue communism) is necessary to address environmental issues in any meaningful way. Capitalism just can’t and won’t do it.
Great reads, thank you.
-Teacher friend in the US