For anyone who's interested & wants to know about the Green Party of the United States, we've been doing workshop videos to fill in the gap of many others questions.
The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth
The last six months of genocide in Gaza have ushered in a new phase in a long history of colonization and extraction that reaches back to the nineteenth century. To truly understand the present crisis, Andreas Malm argues, requires a longue durée analysis of Palestine's subjugation to fossil empire.
I'm Layne, resident late 20s transmasc goth / metalhead hybrid from Germany, queer as heck, disabled and ND in various ways. Library assistant by day, utter nerd ... actually not by night but 24/7. I love ttrpgs, video games, space, science and bunnies.
SESSION CLIPS: We are working on getting our 101 sessions broken into clips that are more easily digestible & referenceable. Accompanied by Chris Blankenhorn & @thegreengarret.
Left critics denounce COP28, but offer no alternative
I disagree with Allan Thornett's assessment of the potential impact of COP28, his downplaying of the significant lack of enforcement mechanisms, and his failure to put climate reparations front and center. I also feel that he constructs a straw-man by asserting that the left eschews making demands of the COPs. I think his emphasis on demand-side policies to cut emissions and his full-throated support for Hansen's support for individual and individualistic carbon dividends are misplaced. However, I do feel that he is on solid ground in insisting that the left must be involved in the struggle for reforms by the climate movement, while promoting a social justice perspective, as the only path to an ecosocialist future. I also feel that he is correct in saying that total disengagement from the COPs is a no-win strategy, in the same way that total disengagement from other bourgeois institutions, including the state, is a no-win.
I have a proposal for a Europe-wide* experiment, that aims to bring together the movements around solidarity and ecology in order to build up the material infrastructure.
I'm looking for collaborators, please DM me!
Here it is briefly:
We try to raise 50 000 000€ over about 5-10 years and give that money as 1000 gifts of 50k€ each to new collectives for setting up housing cooperatives and land communes. The main vehicle for the fundraiser would be crowdfunding with focus on a high volume of small, recurring donations.
For example, this could be achieved with 200 000 donors, donating 5€/month on average for 50 months, or 4,17 years. That's 250€/person over four years.
Each recipient collective would make a legal pact with us or a trusted third party to ensure that the property will not be sold back to the market for financial gain. Additionally collectives would go through screening to ensure alignment with a shared vision.
*Even though internationalism on a global scale is important, I believe it makes sense to focus this effort geographically, to be able to have location-connected synergies between collectives.
In the end we would have boosted the 'ecosystem' with a network of maybe 10-30k members and created 1000 foci for social and ecological organizing. Additionally, we would have built up a network of Commons, that can help us gain a better understanding of this new, old, paradigm.
The leftist space is full of ideas and people with motivation to work and organize together, to try new forms of living and care, to grow food and to steward the land. I want to see this potential realized, but I'm afraid most of it will not happen unless we cooperate on a broader, international scale to push things forward.
This #videogame#simulation is freely available in the #Steam store and I found out today there’s a web version. 👍🏻 Haven’t played it at all yet but will now after hearing about it on a #ecosocialism video I watched this morning.
“Try your hand as a global planner of a future society. Play with a wide range of technologies and policies spanning different fields and ideologies. Will you lead the world to ecological utopia or planetary ruin?”
It is time for the public to take back control of the #Internet, a #technology that was created with public dollars, so it serves the people’s interests.
"If the #GreenParty is going to become a major party, it will have to enlist voters who don’t vote now because they are alienated from the process. The Green platform speaks to their needs. Greens have to learn how to organize in these communities."
#Socialism#Romanticism#Ecosocialism#WilliamMorris: "DANIEL FINN: Morris might well be seen in today’s political terminology as a pioneer of ecosocialism. How did his understanding of the processes of urbanization and industrialization that were transforming Britain and the wider world in the late nineteenth century differ from the view that was held by many of his Marxist contemporaries?
MATTHEW BEAUMONT: I think the key thing in this regard is Morris’s Romanticism. He was very much a Romantic, and he remained one. There’s a sense in which Marx himself was a Romantic, having grown up in an earlier generation in Germany that was influenced by the Romantics and written Romantic poetry in his youth. Unlike Marx, however, Morris had very little handle on economics.
He was rather baffled and intimidated by economic language and analysis, and he cleaved very closely to his Romantic affiliations, which came down from the Romantic poets through Carlyle, Ruskin, and others. This formed a kind of anti-capitalist critique that in some cases, such as that of Carlyle, took a reactionary form, though not in the case of Morris. In that entire tradition, there is an identification of nature with the precapitalist past and with some kind of alternative to capitalism." https://jacobin.com/2023/10/william-morris-ecosocialism-romanticism-labor-news-from-nowhere
I'm Layne, resident late 20s transmasc goth / metalhead hybrid from Germany, queer as heck, disabled and ND in various ways. Library assistant by day, utter nerd 24/7. I love ttrpgs, space, science and bunnies.
"Nonetheless, the capitalist system’s industrialists and financiers, and the governments that cater to them and bend to their will, would like nothing more than to continue business as usual. That will soon be impossible. Once again, our descendants — living in a world of flooded cities, food shortages, resource depletion, mass species die-offs, unprecedented human migration and large numbers of people dying should business as usual continue — are not likely to believe that their ruined world would be a fair tradeoff for a handful of industrialists and financiers of the past getting obscenely rich. We live in a global economic system under which it is profitable for a handful of powerful people to profit from the destruction of the environment, and this behavior is richly rewarded. The end of capitalism is precisely what must be envisioned. Organize like your life depends on it, because it does."
"What the fuck is the point of "the economy"? Why do we make all this crap if we don't like it? And if we don't like this economy even when it's "good," what would an actually good economy look like?"
A revealing article on the headwinds facing the transition to #sustainable#green-energy.
From the article:
#Wind and #solar stocks are declining due to higher costs of raw materials and slow supply response.
#EV chargers and copper mining, critical for the energy transition, face demand uncertainties and reluctance in investment, and
Despite government subsidies, #renewable energy sectors struggle with high costs and interest rates, indicating a slower and more expensive transition than anticipated.
This is the problem with entrusting matters of such dire importance to #capitalism -- especially in an age of resource scarcity. As I say in my pinned toot:
Capitalism is little more than an ideological hangover produced from a time long past when low hanging fruit was everywhere for the taking and people thought it would never disappear.
That quote has deeper context than most suspect. I penned it years ago shortly out of law school after taking a Wildlife Law class from the, now deceased, Professor Dale Goble. He literally wrote the book on the #EndangeredSpecies Act. There he introduced me to the reason species have, historically, been driven to #extinction -- new technology + capitalist opportunism:
Gun powder killed the mega-predators. Whales? Spear gun. Passenger pigeon? Net guns. I could go on. But then we invented the petroleum economy, and in the opportunistic race for economic growth the decline has quickened by means of the collateral damage caused by #habitat degradation. Which, brings me to my point ---
The ideology that is capitalism was built around gluts. It cannot exist without low hanging fruit to fuel the #consumption#orgy necessary to get past the bottleneck of widespread consumer adoption. We are seeing the problem in stark outline today. Without #monopoly in the resource extraction sector, generating the necessary momentum to survive the capitalist "valley of death" is nearly impossible.
I conclude, there must first be an ideological transition away from the hangover that is capitalism, if we ever want to transition sustainable green-energy. The fruit is gone, folks. If we ever want it back, capitalism won’t take us there #ClimateCrisis#climate#environment#ecosocialism#economy#SteadyStateEconomy
"According to the article: “But what all these efforts have in common is that to their many detractors, the very idea of sucking all this carbon out of the air is a diversion from the far more urgent task of radically cutting carbon dioxide emissions to begin with… More than 500 environmental groups, for instance, have signed a petition urging U.S. and Canadian leaders to ‘abandon the dirty, dangerous might of CCS,’ or carbon capture and storage, a major form of carbon removal. The petition blasts the concept as ‘a dangerous distraction driven by the same big polluters who created the climate emergency.” This criticism is directed at ExxonMobil, Chevron, and others claiming they will clean up the carbon problem. It is believed this same ruse will be front and center at COP28, the UN climate conference, to be held in Dubai, the heartbeat of fossil fuels, in a few weeks."
Boundless economic growth, constrained within a bounded system, is one such obvious logical impossibility.
Herb Stein -- Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute -- DEFINED IRONY when he coined the phrase "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."
One of the most important ways YOU can contribute to the end of rapacious capitalist consumption for profit is to make this clear to everyone you know -- at every opportunity you get.