121. OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #121, APRIL 3, 2023
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
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