ecology

The article which follows was written at the beginning of the month when the continuing deforestation of the Amazon led to the yet more murders of the indigenous population. Since then the crisis has deepened as the dry season burning of the Amazon to clear the way for farming has reached new heights.

It did not take the fatal consequences of recent record temperatures in Western Europe, or the recent wildfires in California, monsoon floods in Nepal, India and Bangladesh or the Mozambique cyclones, to tell us that something has radically shifted in the world’s climate. The existential threat of human-created climate change to life on the planet has been understood for decades. NASA, among others, first sounded the alarm about global carbon emissions in 1988 and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed the same year.

The Youth Climate Protest have turned to the mass strike as a weapon of protest. Unconsciously, they have grafted one of the major elements in the struggle for working class revolution onto their "utopian-reformist" demands. In doing so they distort the real meaning of such a strike.

The capitalist mode of production, characterised by exchange for profit, private property, wage labour and capital accumulation, has only existed for around 300 years. Since the late 19th century it has found its way to even the most remote corners of the Earth by the way of exploitation, dispossession and imperialist competition. It has brought immense scientific and technological progress but at great cost. Wars, poverty, hunger, inequality, and oppression have plagued this system throughout its existence.