In the face of climate justice movements from below, the rulers are determined to keep control in their hands. With creative new actions and thinking raising the possibility of alternative, anti-capitalist paths of development, the powers that be are working hard to reduce that to a mere “energy transition.”
Participant report of the Dec. 6, 2019, climate strike in Chicago, part of global climate strike.
Retired coalminer and Marxist-Humanist Andy Phillips relates how being a “good company man” led to misery and unfair working conditions at the Pursglove 15 mine, owned in the 1940s by Consolidation Coal Co., the largest coal company in the U.S. at that time.
Retired miner and Marxist-Humanist Andy Phillips recounts an incident from the Consolidation Coal Company whose foreman refused compensation for a worker who sustained a back injury from years of laying 10 foot steel rails that weighed 60 pounds a foot.
The lightning move by Republicans in Congress to prepare to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or Obamacare—before Donald Trump even took office, with only the vaguest idea of what is to replace it, and with full knowledge that a large majority of Americans oppose the repeal of its most important provisions—gave a sign of how far the new single-party government intends to roll the clock back, with dizzying speed.
The wildfires sweeping Alberta’s tar sands region provide a window onto the state of the environment and the multidimensional worldwide struggle against pollution and climate chaos fueled by capitalism’s drive for production for the sake of production.
Part III of the Draft Perspectives 2016: Strikes and workers’ uprisings in China have forced industrial wages up, not pausing even during the global Great Recession, as a window on capitalism and its crises.
Part I of the Draft Perspectives 2016: Discontent is seething in the U.S. among workers, youth, Blacks, women, LGBTQ, including elements of the new society. Fear of revolution is powering neo-fascism opposing the revolt.
Protesters succeed in keeping coal trains from passing through Oakland, California, on their way to unload coal at a port terminal.
Report of a lively demonstration in the San Francisco Bay Area against trains carrying tons of coal that can cause huge explosions and yet travel through highly populated areas.
Escalating bankruptcies in the nation’s coal industry paint a grim future for the industry and for coal miners and their families. The bankruptcies, sweeping the coal fields everywhere, have affected the largest and smallest mines. As a result, thousands of coal miners have been laid off.
A roundup of youth in action including the struggle by student group GU Fossil Free to force Georgetown University to divest in fossil fuels and notice of a new report in the Index on Censorship, “Fired, Threatened, Imprisoned: is academic freedom being eroded?”
The 20th “Conference of Parties” was held in Lima, Peru, and, rather than action, issued a “Call for Climate Action” without binding commitments or effective monitoring. The U.S. and other nations as good as admitted the bankruptcy of capitalism by arguing that binding commitments had no chance of being adopted.
From the July-August 2014 issue of News & Letters
UNCHAINING THE DIALECTIC
Raya Dunayevskaya’s 1953 breakthrough on Hegel’s Absolute Idea enabled her to illuminate a path not traveled by previous generations of revolutionaries. She is quite emphatic in raising the importance of “Unchaining the Revolutionary Dialectic” (May-June 2014 N&L), and capturing what [=>]
Occupations of planned fracking sites in Canada and Romania showed the intensification of struggles against the damage fossil fuel exploitation is inflicting. The urgency of stopping the headlong rush to extract and burn fossil fuel was underscored by the latest comprehensive report from the International Panel on Climate Change.
