The Amazon Region: “Lungs of the World” here ♦ Capitalists’ Climate Change Conference Will Produce More Hot Air here ♦
The Amazon Region: “Lungs of the World”
EL SALVADOR, November 14— Climate change and its consequences constitute the most dangerous issue facing human society. Humanity is trapped in the economic processes that characterize capitalism. Capitalist expansion, its appropriation of the world, brought with it the formation of a set of relations between capital and the natural environment, with excessive exploitation for its overflowing profits.
The capitalists produce the criminal deforestation of the Amazon. Much of the destruction comes from large-scale international meat and soy companies like JBS and Cargill, and global brands like Stop & Shop, Costco, McDonald’s, Walmart/Asda, and Sysco that buy from these companies and sell to the public. It is these companies that create the international demand that finances fires and deforestation.
Their large factories and industries annihilate nature with the construction of infrastructure and wild urbanism. They also destroy the natural environment and dispossess Indigenous people of their lands. We are losing biodiversity, quality of life and, above all, human life.
Repression and annihilation of peasants and liberal organizations that oppose deforestation.
During the Bolsonaro government, the agencies that supposedly protect Indigenous people and the environment have been led by people close to the agribusiness sector. They have long pushed for the legalization of land dispossession and opposed the creation of protected areas, such as Indigenous territories.
Many people are celebrating the election of Lula, who promises a lot, but will change little. (See letter from Brazil)
Regardless of which politicians govern, the working class always loses; and so we know that what we need is a communist society.
Under the capitalist system there is no solution to the real problem of deforestation. Reforms will not stop these attacks.
A group of family and friends gathered to discuss the importance of the Amazon jungle. We analyzed the situation in the context of the overwhelming ambition of the capitalist to win. We know full well that the Amazon jungle is a natural reserve and the home of many Indigenous people who were dispossessed of their lands without taking into consideration their living conditions.
We asked what are the negative consequences of capitalism? Roberto talked about endless wars, and environmental catastrophe at unprecedented levels which we see in the Amazon region. He mentioned wealth inequality and how increasingly repressive authoritarian and exploitative regimes bleed life more and more.
We all agreed. Ana added that capitalism has been the direct cause of the exploitation of resources that has led us to the inevitable and progressive environmental deterioration. These exploiters want the highest return on investment in the shortest time since the profit is necessarily measured in quantitative terms due to its excessive interest in obtaining unlimited profits
We are left with a big question which all of us can answer firmly and with a foot in the fight: the solution is a communist society.
Life in the Amazon depends on a communist world—communist masses fighting for a revolution to overthrow the capitalist empire.
A communist society will not only save the Amazon region but the entire world. It is fair and necessary. We are at a breaking point where system change is the solution, where the common good prevails, where nature goes hand in hand with people.
Communist society without exploitation will reverse climate change by creating ecological reserves. We will have an environment governed by reason where we all collectively work with respect and live in a world without money or self-interest.
Let’s unite friends, family and comrades in this fight and mobilize the masses for our Communist Revolution and put a stop to these crimes of exploitation.
Long live the Communist Revolution!
Capitalists’ Climate Change Conference Will Produce More Hot Air. Masses Need System Change from Capitalism to Communism
November 15—Reality and the laws of physics have no patience for the capitalist grandstanding and moralizing that go on at climate change conferences.
The 27th UN Climate Change Conference (COP27) is meeting at the “green city” of Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. It’s sponsored by such greenwashers as Coca Cola, IBM, Microsoft, Siemens, and the corruption-ridden Boston Consulting Group, along with Afreximbank, EgyptAir, Infinity-Mazdar (based in Abu Dhabi), and others. In Sharm El Sheikh, in addition to the repressive policies of Egypt’s El-Sisi government, one finds food and water shortages, traffic jams, location tracking and email monitoring through the official COP27 app.
We’ll hear angry speeches from the Prime Minister of Barbados and the usual pleas for immediate action from the UN Secretary General. But the likely final output of this conference is a lot of hot air, despite the massive sub-Arctic (and energy wasteful) air conditioning in the Lamborghini International Convention Center. The facility’s namesake is the sports car company whose climate-unfriendly luxury vehicles average around 12 mpg (5 km/liter) of gasoline.
Half of all cumulative carbon emissions have been produced just since 1990. Methane and nitrous oxide emissions are on the rise. Emissions accelerated even as Covid-19 allegedly slowed down the economy.
Eight billion of us now live on this planet. But the number of people has never been the problem. The problem has been the consumption of a tiny minority of capitalists-imperialists who exploit the masses, steal their lands, and conduct physical, socioeconomic, and political warfare against them. And their system’s inexorable drive to maximize profits no matter the human or ecological cost.
The imperialist war between US/NATO and Russia in Ukraine is taking a human toll and an ecological toll. Warfare consumes enormous amounts of fossil fuels. Armaments release unquantified amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere.
That’s why the US imperialists insisted, in the final negotiations of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, that its military emissions should be exempt from reporting. Sen. John Kerry (now the US Presidential Envoy on Climate) praised US negotiator Stuart Eizenstat for protecting “US national security interests.” Then the US never even ratified Kyoto. While the 2015 Paris accord ended military exemptions, it was left to individual nations to enforce this.
COP27 is a venue for imperialist machinations. The US softened its opposition to a loss-and-damage fund provided China is counted as a “developed nation” and pays into it. China had suspended climate co-operation with the US over Taiwan. The victims of imperialist infighting are always indigenous people and the working class, and now increasingly also the ecology of this planet.
It’s simply not possible to hold global warming to the goal of under 1.5⁰ C in a capitalist world which is increasingly driven to war. This system requires unlimited growth at the expense of the working class and the ecology. It cannot possibly stop, let alone reverse, global warming. The laws of physics do not answer to the fantasies or deceptions of capitalist, imperialist elites.
Only well-organized, communist masses, cooperating internationally, can possibly hold global warming to 1.5⁰ C by 2050 by destroying the capitalist system. And only a well-organized communist working class could mitigate the inevitable suffering that will accompany even that 1.5⁰ increase by ensuring that resources are directed to those who will need them.
Workers all over the world have the same interests. We are all attacked, to varying degrees, by imperialism and its climate crisis. We all need a society where all work as they can and will for the common good, and all receive according to need.
An internationally organized working class needs an International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP). Join ICWP and organize the masses for communism!
Front page of this issue
