Tracing the development of the climate movement—from its focus on environmental issues to divisions over opposing genocide in Gaza—Franklin Dmitryev argues that the climate justice movement inherently reaches for a broader understanding of the roots of the climate crisis and the need for a deep social transformation.
The protests over the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota are the latest front in a long struggle of Native Americans. It is also part of the movement to confront climate change in a way that benefits Black, Indigenous and People of Color, women, workers and youth, rather than narrowly aimed to help capital.
The fracking boom turned to bust and a wave of bankruptcies reveals the current operation of decaying capitalism in miniature: cannibalizing the economy, people and the planet, destroying our future, in order to funnel wealth to the favored few.
With disastrous consequences of climate change making themselves felt, both scientists and movements are pointing to the need for a radically different direction, but capitalism has blocked the way and even put a cult of climate denial in the White House.
Climate change, capitalism, and Trump
Presentation to the Chicago Local of News and Letters Committees
By Franklin Dmitryev, August 27, 2018
“…the spirit of the time, growing slowly and quietly ripe for the new form it is to assume, disintegrates one fragment after another of the structure of its previous world. That it is tottering to [=>]
A Marxist-Humanist analysis of the history and meaning of the rising of the right-wing neo-Nazi white supremacist movement, its relationship to President Donald Trump and his administration, and its challenge to the freedom forces arrayed against it who are fighting for a humanist world. .
Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change is an attack on labor, not, as he claims, for the good of workers. The solution is not to spread illusions about international negotiations. What is needed is to confront capitalism’s suicidal path both in immediate battles and in raising the banner of a new society of freely associated labor. .
The unprecedented Women’s March on Washington the day after Trump’s inauguration revealed the blossoming of a universal movement with many particulars, from women’s demand to control their own bodies, to Black Lives Matter, to the struggle at Standing Rock.
Trumpism’s self-perpetuating disorder is based on negation of social movements, trying to stifle the positive in their negation of this exploitative society. His deceit and power grabs express capitalism’s disintegration, exuding racism, sexism, and fascism.
The true alternative to the threat of fascism is the path to a new society based on revolution from below. Can that happen without a unity of practice with theory, without the organization of thought embodied in an actual organization?
Trump’s barbarism in power is a crisis for bourgeois democracy and revolutionary thought. Opposition from below is far deeper than bourgeois opposition to Trump. To have efficacy today, Marx’s body of ideas must be grasped and projected as a whole. The movement from theory needs to meet the challenge of history, of freedom struggles and revolution.
The fight against the Dakota Access pipeline continues despite military-style destruction of resistance camps. The movement for Native American liberation from colonialism and for stopping the fossil-fuel exploitation that drives climate change is still growing.
Official Call for national gathering of News and Letters Committees to work out Marxist-Humanist perspectives for 2017-2018
Readers’ Views on: environmental and social crises; Martin Luther King Day; healthcare crisis, Donald Trump and the election; brutal “justice”; and who reads News & Letters.
Protests against Trump’s Muslim ban, and his reorganization of the National Security Council after the model of Hitler’s Reich Main Security Office, signal a profound struggle to be waged over what kind of society the U.S. will be.
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.
Latina union activist in Detroit questions how working people lost out in the school board elections and the ballot measures in the recent election and, noting that the AFL-CIO supported the Dakota Access Pipeline, asks, “Which side are you on?”
In-person report of Oakland, California, demonstration against Donald Trump’s election win.
Readers’ Views on Election Stirs Battles in Thought and in Life; Deep Racism in the USA; Women Fight Back; Indigenous Struggles; Global (In)Humanity; Why Read N&L?
Participant reports of Chicago and Oakland actions in solidarity with the Standing Rock Lakota who are fighting to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. #NoDAPL
Trump’s electoral victory by appealing to racism and sexism menaces all freedom movements. It is the index of this system’s crisis and bankruptcy of thought, which needs to be met with a truly revolutionary vision.
The resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline has become a beacon for all opposing the ruling system—and has been assaulted with ferocious repression. It is a powerful manifestation of the vast forces putting American civilization on trial. The time is now to support this struggle in practice and in thought.
Trump’s electoral victory by appealing to racism and sexism menaces all freedom movements. It is the index of this system’s crisis and bankruptcy of thought, which needs to be met with a truly revolutionary vision.
As part of over 200 solidarity actions on Sept. 13, 150 people gathered in Chicago to support the people of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe fighting to halt construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Readers’ Views on: Racism and Revolt Put U.S. on Trial; Life and Death Under the Class Divide; Environmental Struggles; War and Atrocities; and Women’s Lives at Stake.
Citizens of the Standing Rock Lakota Nation and allies are maintaining a Camp of the Sacred Stones along the proposed route of the Dakota Access oil pipeline to defend the water, sacred and burial sites and wildlife habitat despite having their water and medical care removed as well as threats from the state government.
