by DGR News Service | Aug 3, 2021 | Education, Repression at Home, Worker Exploitation
This article is from the blog buildingarevolutionarymovement.
This post will cover the key ideas of the philosopher Karl Marx. In part 2, I will list the Marxist traditions after Marx.
David Harvey, who has written many books on Marxism, describes Marxism as a mode of analysis and a critical way of thinking. He explains that when you want to understand what is happening in a situation, then if you use a Marxist approach you will not be deceived by surface appearances and ‘ideological bluster’. You can use it to do an analysis for yourself and come up with an understanding of what is really going on in a situation. If you really understand what is going on, then you can act against what is really happening in a deeper way rather than deal with surface symptoms.[1]
Marxism is also important because Karl Marx was the first great critic of capitalism. This critique was continued in the many Marxist traditions. Capitalism is the problem, and we need a new system for organising society. [2]
Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary [3]. He lived from 1818 to 1883 and spent most of his life in London. He collaborated with his friend and supporter, Frederic Engels on much of this work. There is much written about Karl Marx so I don’t plan to repeat it all here except to list his key contributions and some resources to find out more.
I’m going to use the framework from Sociological Theory by George Ritzer and N. Stepnisky Jeffrey as I’ve found it the best summary of Marx’s work [3]. There are several summaries of Marx’s work [4]. Marx was heavily influenced by G.W.F. Hegal, a German philosopher who lived from 1770 to 1831.
The Dialectic
Dialectical philosophy accepts that contradictions are part of reality and the best way to understand the real world is to study the development of contradictions. Hegal understood historical change through the concept of contradictions. Marx also believed that contradictions drove historical change. Where Hegal thought that contradictions could be worked out in our minds, Marx thought that contradictions were resolved by the “life-and-death struggle that changes the social world.” For Marx this meant the study of social relations based on the material world. “The dialectic leads to an interest in the conflicts and contradictions between various levels of social reality.”
An example of a contradiction is between workers and capitalists, who own the factories or buildings where work is done. The capitalists exploit workers to make a profit and workers want to keep as much of the profits for themselves as possible. Both are not possible and Marx believed that the contradictions would grow worse and more people would be workers as small businesses would be forced out of business and competition between capitalists would force them to exploit workers more. This could only be resolved by social change when the levels of exploitation reach a point where workers resist their exploitation. This resistance would result in more exploitation and oppression and escalate the class conflict. [5]
Dialectical Method
The dialectical method came from Marx’s focus on contradictions in the real world.
Fact and Value
In dialectical thinking, social values and social facts are inseparable. Social values are our judgments about society. The dialectical thinker believes it is impossible and undesirable to keep them separate because it would result in a disconnected study of society.
Reciprocal Relations
A dialectical thinker does not see social processes flowing in one direction, such as cause-and-effect. They see one activity or actor having an effect on another, but that second activity or actor will likely affect the first.
Pass, Present, Future
Dialectical analysts are interested in the relationship between social processes in the present, past and future. They, therefore, study the “historical roots of the contemporary world.” They also study social trends to help understand the potential directions of society.
No Inevitabilities
Marx did not view the future to be determined by the present. Marx believed the direction the future went in is dependent on individual choices and struggles. Marx was interested in the dynamics of real relationships so he rejected Hegel’s approach of ‘grand abstractions’.
Actors and Structures
Marx was focused on the relationship between people and the large-scale structures they produce, such as community organisations, institutions, governments, states. For Marx, these structures help people meet the needs of their lives and also present a serious threat to general well being if controlled by the ruling class that are only interested in the well being of their class. [6]
Human Potential
Before considering Marx’s analysis of the macrostructures of capitalism, it’s important to describe his thoughts on the micro-sociological area of social reality. Marx “built his critical analysis of the contradictions of capitalist society on his premises about human potential, its relation to labor, and its potential for alienation under capitalism. He believed that there was a real contradiction between our human potential and the way we must work in capitalist society.”
Marx argued that human potential is directly influenced by our specific “social relations and our institutional context. Therefore, human nature is not a static thing but varies historically and socially. To understand human potential, we need to understand social history, because human nature is shaped by the same dialectical contradictions that Marx believed shapes this history of society.” He also argued that there is a general human potential, which is called ‘species being’. This is made up of the potentials and powers that only human share.
Labour
The relationship between labour and human nature was important to Marx. Human labour creates something in reality that was only is people’s imaginations. What we produce reflects our purpose. For Marx this process of creating external objects in the real world from our internal thoughts is called objectification. It is also a material process of using nature to provide items to meet our material needs. As well as changing the material world, this labour also “transforms us, our needs, our consciousness, and our human nature.”
The term ‘labour’ for Marx was not only related to economic activities, it includes the act of transforming materials in the natural world into items we need or want. Capitalism has changed the process of labour so it is generally only associated with economic activities.
Marx believed that labour is a response to a need. The labour process results in a transformation that creates new needs, which for Marx was the “engine of human history”. It transforms the individual and society. [7]
Alienation
Marx believed that the relationship between labour and human nature was perverted by capitalism. He called this alienation. Under capitalism, we no longer labour under our own purpose but under the purpose of the capitalist who hires and pays us. Labour is just about earning money. This labour no longer transforms us as we are not doing it for ourselves so we are alienated from our labour and human nature. Marx described how the structures of capitalism cause alienation through the division of labour. The capitalists own the workers’ time, the means of production, and the products.
Marx’s concept of alienation works in four ways:
- workers under capitalism are alienated from their productive activity. The labour they do is not to produce objects based on their own ideas.
- Workers are alienated from the products they produce. The products they produce are owned by the capitalist and not the workers.
- Workers are alienated from their fellow workers. The production process isolated workers from one another. Workers are also forced to compete with other workers in workplaces and to obtain jobs.
- Workers under capitalism are alienated from their human potential. Instead of labour being transformational and satisfying our human nature, people feel least human in workplaces, and more like machines.
Alienation is an example of the contradictions that Marx’s dialectical approach uncovered. “There is a real contradiction between human nature, which is defined and transformed by labor, and the actual social conditions of labor under capitalism.” Identifying with our place of employment, or the things we buy with our wages, are symptoms of our alienation. Marx believed that alienation can only be resolved by real social change. [8]
The Structures of Capitalist Society
Marx witnessed in the 19th century rapid capitalist industrialisation across Europe with the significant changes it cause – “poverty, dislocation, and alienation”. Marx identified that capitalism was the main cause of alienation. He focused on critiquing capitalist society and developed a political program to go beyond capitalism.
Marx saw capitalism as an economic system where a large number of workers that own nothing, work to produce commodities so a small number capitalists can profit and who own: “the commodities, the means of producing the commodities, and the labor time of the workers, which they purchase through wages.” Marx understood capitalism to be an economic system and a system of power. Capitalism has transformed political powers into economic relations. Instead of using violence, capitalists are generally able to control workers by sacking them or closing workplaces. So capitalism is an economic and political system, a way of exercising power and a process for exploiting workers.
The capitalist system presents the economy as natural. People lose their jobs, wages are cut and workplaces are closed as part of the normal functioning of the economy. In fact, these outcomes happen because of social and political decisions. Attempts to connect human suffering and the economic structures are ignored or seen as irrelevant. Marx attempted to clarify the social and political structures of the economy by exposing ‘the economic law of motion of modern society’ and capitalisms’ internal contradictions.
Commodities
For Marx, commodities are “products of labor intended primarily for exchange.” Marx identified a commodities ‘use value’ – “objects produced for personal use or for use by others in the immediate environment.” When workers produce something for the capitalist that is then exchanged in the market for money, this is called the ‘exchange value’.
Fetishism of Commodities
Exchange values in capitalism become separate from the actual commodity so that the objects and the market for them become independent existences. Marx called this the ‘fetishism of commodities’. This separation is the second source of alienation listed above.
The economy takes on the function of producing value. “For Marx, the true value of a thing comes from the fact that labor produces it and someone needs it. A commodity’s true value represents human social relations.” Any object or commodity that we buy has hidden behind it several social relations.
The fetishism of commodities presents the economy as a natural reality. This relates to the concept of ‘reification’ – “the process of coming to believe that humanly created social forms are natural, universal, and absolute things.” This idea results in people believing that “social structures are beyond their control and unchangeable.” Marx viewed the economy as a form of domination, where political decisions related to the economy benefit the capitalists. People ‘reify’ (naturalise) social relationships, social structures, commodities, economic phenomena such as the division of labour, religion, political and organisational structures and the state.
Capital, Capitalists, and the Proletariat
Marx identified several categories of people in capitalist societies. He identified two broad categories in opposition with each other – the proletariat and the capitalist.
The proletariat are workers that do not own any means of production so sell their labour. Marx believed workers would become less skilled as more machines were introduced. The proletariat are also consumers because they use their wages to buy what they need. They are therefore dependent on their wages to survive and those that pay their wages.
Capitalists own the means of production and aim to produce more capital. “Capital is money that produces more money, capital is money that is invested rather than being used to satisfy human needs or desires.” A capitalist uses his money to buy commodities to then sell to make more money or profit. Non-capitalists obtain a commodity that they sell for money to then buy a commodity that they need to survive.
Marx describes capital as more than money that produces more money. It is also a social relation between “the proletariat, which does the work and must purchase the produce, and…those that have invested the money.” Marx sees capital as a relation of power. To increase it, capitalists must exploit the workers through a system that is produced by the workers’ own labour. “The capitalist system is the social structure that emerges from that exploitative relationship.” Capitalists live off the profit of their capital from the exploitation of the proletariat.
Exploitation
Workers are exploited by the “impersonal and ‘objective’ economic system.” Workers are controlled by capitalists because they need to engage in wage labour to meet their basic needs to survive, so the capitalists do not need to use force. It may appear that workers are free to choose what work they do but to survive, workers have to accept the work they are offered by capitalists. Marx describes the ‘reserve army of the unemployed’ – workers know that if they do not take the job someone from the reserve army of the unemployed will.
Capitalists pay the workers less than the value of what the worker produces and keep the rest as profits. Marx called this “surplus value’ – this is defined as, “the difference between the value of the produce when it is sold and the value of the elements consumed in the formation of the product (including the worker’s labor).” Capitalists then use this profit to grow their businesses to generate more surplus value. Marx saw surplus value as an economic concept, and like capital, as a social relation and form of domination, because labour is the real source of surplus value.
Marx also describes capital as being driven by non-stop competition. Although capitalists may seem in control, they are in fact driven by constant competition between themselves. Capitalists are driven to generate more profit to invest their capital in expanding their enterprise. Those that do not are outcompeted. Marx called this the ‘general law of capitalist accumulation’. “The structure and the ethos of capitalism push capitalists in the direction of the accumulation of more and more capital”. As Marx saw labour as the source of value, then the exploitation by capitalists of the proletariat led to class conflict.
Class Conflict
Marx used the term ‘class’ in his work but did not clearly define it. It is generally understood to mean “a group of people in similar situations concerning their control of the means of production.” Marx also viewed class in terms of its potential for conflict – “individuals form a class insofar as they are in a common conflict with others over the surplus value.” Capitalism contains a conflict of interest between workers and the capitalists who turn their labour into surplus value. It is this conflict that produces classes. This means that class is a theoretically and historically variable concept. To identify a class, first, you need to understand the potential conflicts that exist in a society.
Marx argued that a class only really exists when “people become aware of their conflicting relation to other classes. Without this awareness, they only constitute what Marx called a class ‘in itself’. When they become aware of the conflict, they become a true class, a class ‘for itself’.
Marx identified two classes in capitalism, the bourgeoisie and proletariat. Marx called the capitalists in the modern economy, the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie owns the means of production and employs the workers. Marx saw the conflict between the proletariat and bourgeoisie as a real material contradiction, that would only get worse until society is changed. Until that change, society would continue to be polarised between these two classes. Some capitalists will lose out and be forced into the ranks of the proletariat. Marx called this ‘proletarianization’.
Marx saw the increase in mechanisation as decreasing the skills of the proletariat and putting many out of work. The capitalists will create the masses that will organise and overthrow the system. He saw that the international linking of factories and markets are raising the awareness of workers, which will lead to revolution.
The capitalists look to avoid revolution by exploiting workers abroad through colonisation and imperialism, to reduce exploitation of workers in the home countries. Marx only saw this as delaying the inevitable end of capitalism, as the laws of the capitalist economy required the reduction of labour costs by increasing exploitation and therefore class conflict. “Marx did not blame individual members of the bourgeoisie for their actions, he saw these actions as largely determined by the logic of the capitalist system.”
Marx predicted at the economic level, “a series of booms and depressions, as capitalists overproduced or laid-off workers in their attempts to increase their profits.” In the political arena, he predicted the inability of civil society to discuss and fix social problems. Marx believed instead the state will increasingly protect the capitalists’ private property, and, when needed, to step in with force when the capitalists’ economic control of workers fails. [9]
Class Consciousness and False Consciousness
Marx described ‘class consciousness’ as an awareness of your social and economic position in society and in relation to others. Class consciousness is also an understanding of the social and economic aspects of your class, and its collective interests within the structures of capitalist society.
For Marx, workers lived with ‘false consciousness’ before they could develop class consciousness. Marx did not use the term ‘false consciousness,’ but developed the ideas. The term was first used by Engels. False consciousness and class consciousness are opposites. False consciousness is individualistic rather than collective. Individuals compete with each other in society, instead of working to collectivise their needs, struggles and interests. Marx saw that false consciousness was caused by the inequality of capitalist society, controlled by the ruling class. It stops workers from seeing their collective power and interests. It relates to Marx’s ideas around ideology, described below.
“Marx cited the phenomenon of commodity fetishism—the way capitalist production frames relationships between people (workers and owners) as relationships between things (money and products)—with playing a key role in producing false consciousness among workers. He believed that commodity fetishism served to obscure the fact that relations concerning production within a capitalist system are relationships between people, and that as such, they are changeable.” [10]
Capitalism as a Good Thing
Although Marx was critical of capitalism in terms of the dynamic of domination and exploitation, and its regular crises, he believed capitalism to be a good thing. He did not want to return to feudalism, before capitalism. In comparison, capitalism offered new possibilities and more freedom for workers. The workers are not free yet, but it gives hope and a path to great freedom. Also, as capitalism is the most powerful economic system ever created, there is the potential to end hunger and material deprivation.
Marx believed that capitalism was the primary cause of the significant characteristics of the modern age – constant change and the trend of challenging all accepted traditions. These came from the innate competitive nature of capitalism, which drives capitalists to constantly transform the means of production to change society. He believed capitalism to be a truly revolutionary force – it created a global society, constant technological change, and overthrew the traditional feudal society. Marx also believed it needed to be overthrown, as its role in the world was over and the next stage of communism needs to begin. [9]
Materialist Conceptions of History
Marx critiqued capitalism and its future because he believed that history would follow a predictable course. He has a materialist conception of history, also known as ‘historical materialism’. For Marx, this meant that how people provide for their material need determines or influences the relationships people have between each other, their social institutions, and their common ideas.
Marx called the way people provide for their material needs and the following economic relations, the ‘base’. Non-economic relations, such as social institutions and the important ideas in society, are referred to as the ‘superstructure’. Marx did not view the superstructure as simply “coming in line with the base.” He argued that human history was driven by trying to satisfy needs that are constantly changing. The satisfaction of needs resulted in more needs so that “human needs are both the motivating foundation and the result of the economic base.”
Marx describes the ‘material forces of production’ as the tools, machinery, and factories to meet human needs. The ‘relations of production’ are the relationships between people to satisfy their needs.
Marx had a dynamic view of history, so he thought that the forces of production (tools, machinery etc) will constantly change to produce for people’s material needs. Capitalism caused technological changes that resulted in factories. But for capitalism to happen, society changed due to a change in the relations of production (relationships between people to satisfy their needs). “Factories, capitalists, and wage labourers were not compatible with feudal relations.” Feudal lords obtained their wealth from their land and felt responsible for their serfs. Capitalists get their wealth from capital and feel no obligation to workers. Serfs felt loyal to the lords, whereas the proletariat must sell their labour where they can get work. “The old relations of production were in conflict with the new forces of production.” [11]
Cultural Aspects of Capitalist Society
Marx had several theories about the culture of capitalist society.
Ideology
Marx called the prevalent ideas of society that held back progressive change, ‘ideology’. Marx used the term ideology to refer to two related ideas.
Marx’s first understanding of ideology, “refers to ideas that naturally emerge out of everyday life in capitalism but, because of the nature of capitalism, reflect reality in an inverted manner.” An example is money. We know that money is only pieces of paper, but in daily life, we treat it as having an inherent value. Instead of believing that we give money its value, money is seen to give us our value. This understanding of ideology is open to disruption due to its unseen material contradictions. People come to understand that the economy is not objective and is politically controlled, resulting in workers alienation.
Marx’s second understanding of ideology refers to, “systems of ruling ideas that attempt once again to hide the contradictions that are at the heart of the capitalist system. In most cases, they do this in one of three ways: (1) they lead to the creation of subsystems of ideas – a religion, a philosophy, a literature, a legal system – that makes the contradictions appear to be coherent; (2) they explain away those experiences that reveal the contradictions, usually as personal problems or individual idiosyncrasies; or (3) they present the capitalist contradiction as really being a contradiction in human nature and, there, one that cannot be fixed by social change.”
Marx described how anyone can create this second type of ideology, whether they are from the ruling class, bourgeois economics, philosophers or even the proletariat if they have given up hope of changing society. Regardless of who constructs these ideologies, the ruling class always benefits.
Freedom, Equality, and Ideology
Marx argued that under capitalism, it appears that people are free and equal. In fact, it is capital that is free and the workers that are enslaved. For Marx, “freedom is the ability to have control over your own labor and its products.” Under capitalism, “people are dominated by capitalist relations that seem objective and natural and therefore are not perceived as a form of domination.”
The ideas of freedom and equality are the most dangerous to capitalism. Therefore, it needs to use the two forms of ideology to reduce freedom and equality.
Religion
Marx believed that religion was an ideology that was used to distract people who could not see their “distress and oppression” as produced by the capitalist system. He was not against all religion but when it “requires the illusions of religion”, meaning not real, and used to hide things in society. Religion is open to disruption and can result in religious movements opposing capitalism. Religion is also open to the second form of ideology by “portraying the injustice of capitalism as a test for the faithful and pushing any revolutionary change off into the afterlife.” [12]
Marx’s Economics: A Case Study
Marx understood ‘use value’ as items produced for personal use or use by others and ‘exchange value’ as something produced for capitalists for exchange in the market. Use values related to natural human expression and exchange values result in a distortion of humanity. Capitalism is based on exchange values.
Marx developed the ‘labor theory of value’ – “the basic source of any value was the amount of socially necessary labor time needed to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity of the time.” The capitalist “pays the workers less than the value the workers produce and keeps the rest for themselves. The workers are not aware of this exploitation, and often, neither are the capitalists. The capitalists believe that this extra value is derived from their own cleverness, their capital investment, their manipulation of the market, and so on.”
This led Marx concept of ‘surplus value’ – “the difference between the value of the product when it is sold and value of the elements consumed in the formation of that product. Although means of production (raw materials and tools, the value of which comes from the labor involved in extracting or producing them) are consumed in the production process, it is labor that is the real source of surplus value.”
Capitalists use the surplus value to pay for land or building rent, bank interest, private consumption, and to expand their enterprise. Marx calls the capitalist desire to increase profit and surplus value the ‘general law of capitalist accumulation’. Capitalists are driven to constantly exploit workers. As this continues, exploitation achieves less and less gains, until an upper limit is reached. At this point, the working class will put pressure on governments to protect them from the capitalists, through limits to the working day or week. Capitalists respond by developing labour saving machines so they need less workers. “This shift to capital-intensive production is, paradoxically, a cause of the declining rate of profit since it is labor (not machines) that is the ultimate source of profit.”
The increase is the use of machines results in more and more unemployment. Increased competition results in less capitalists. This leads to a very small number of capitalists and a huge number of proletariat. At this point, capitalism is vulnerable to revolution. Capitalists look to avoid this by moving production and exploitation abroad to colonies. Marx believed this would only delay the inevitable failure of capitalism.
For Marx, the general law of capitalist accumulation meant that both the capitalists and proletariat had a fixed role to play set by the logic of the capitalist system. He did not blame individual capitalists. (Sociological Theory, p68-70)
Economic Crisis
In Marx’s time, there were two schools of thought about what caused an economic crisis. Some thought that crises were caused by a “lack of proportion between output of some sectors” – production not meeting the demand of items in some sectors and too many items in other sectors. This was known as ‘disproportionality theory’. Others thought that crises were caused by an “excess of total output” – overproduction. This is known as ‘underconsumptionist theory’ Marx and Engels were in the first school of thought.
Marx and Engels described individual economic crisis and also the recurring pattern of economic crises over the years. They predicted that crises would expand across sectors in society as capitalism spread around the world, rather than deepen in severity. They described a regularity in the time between crises but did not decide on a fixed period. [13]
Communism
For Marx, historical materialism helped “identify some predictable trends and to use these trends to discover the points where political action could be more effective.” Rather than focus on historical predictions, Marx believed that the way we meet our material needs was the best way to identify the “opportunities for effective political interventions.”
Marx thought that “capitalism had developed its productive powers so that it was ready to enter a new mode of production, which he called ‘communism’.” Marx wrote little about what a communist society would look like. He was against “recipes for the kitchens of the future.” Marx focused on critically analysing capitalist society and believed that “there would be time to construct communist society once capitalism was overcome.” In general, he wanted decision making taken away from the capitalists and economy, and replaced by “social decision making that would allow the needs of the many to be taken into account.” [14]
Endnotes
- 12m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL7zEVhPHQU
- https://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/what-is-marxism-faq.htm
- Sociological Theory, George Ritzer and N. Stepnisky Jeffrey, 2017, CH2
- The Thought Of Karl Marx: An Introduction by David McLellan 1995. The Marx-Engels Reader By Robert C. Tucker; Karl Marx; Friedrich Engels, 1978. Marx and Marxism, Gregory Claeys, 2018. Marxism and Social Theory, Jonathan Joseph, 2006.
- Sociological Theory, page 45
- Sociological Theory, page 46-48
- Sociological Theory, page 46-48
- Sociological Theory, page 53-55
- Sociological Theory, page 55-63
- https://www.thoughtco.com/class-consciousness-3026135
- Sociological Theory, page 63-65
- Sociological Theory, page 65-68
- Marxism: Philosophy and Economics, Thomas Sowell, 2012, page 96
- Sociological Theory, page 70-41
by DGR News Service | Jul 29, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change, Lobbying, Movement Building & Support
Editor’s note: We agree that “This is a landmark victory for the local communities who have stood up and held firm for over a decade to protect the climate, the Salish Sea, and their own health and safety.” We don’t put much hope into the Paris Agreement or all the UN climate summits. The best hope we have is us, so communities that develop and nurture a culture of resistance are the way to go.
This article originally appeared in Common Dreams.
Featured image: The Whatcom County Council on Tuesday night approved landmark policies regulating fossil fuel expansion at Cherry Point, home to two oil refineries. (Photo: RE Sources/Twitter)
By Jessica Corbett
In a move that comes as wildfires ravage the Western United States and could serve as a model for communities nationwide, the Whatcom County Council in Washington voted unanimously on Tuesday night to approve new policies aimed at halting local fossil fuel expansion.
“Whatcom County’s policy is a blueprint that any community, including refinery communities, can use to take action to stop fossil fuel expansion.”
—Matt Krogh, Stand.earth
“For too long, the fossil fuel industry has been allowed to cloak its infrastructure and expansion projects in an air of inevitability,” said Matt Krogh, director of Stand.earth’s SAFE Cities Campaign. “It has used this to diminish local communities’ concerns and then dismiss or ignore their voices. Whatcom County’s new, permanent policy is a clear signal that those days are over.”
“Local communities and their elected officials do have the power to decide what gets built near their homes, schools, and businesses,” Krogh continued. “Whatcom County’s policy is a blueprint that any community, including refinery communities, can use to take action to stop fossil fuel expansion.”
The county’s new land-use rules (pdf), approved in a 7-0 vote, apply to industrial land at Cherry Point, located north of the city of Bellingham. As KNKX reports:
The area has a deep-water port and two oil refineries. It’s zoned for industrial use. It sits adjacent to waterways that connect the Northwest to lucrative markets across the Pacific Rim. It’s also where what would have been the nation’s largest coal export facility—the proposed Gateway Pacific Terminal—was canceled five years ago.
…Five years ago, the Army Corps of Engineers pulled the plug on Gateway Pacific proposal after the Lummi Tribe argued it would violate treaty fishing rights. The land at Cherry Point is adjacent to waters that are at the heart of the tribe’s usual and accustomed fishing area. And the state has designated that area an aquatic reserve.
Since that project’s demise, the council has enacted 11 six-month moratoriums. Tuesday’s vote permanently banned new refineries, shipping terminals, or coal-fired power plants at Cherry Point and imposed tougher regulations on any expansion of the area’s existing facilities.
The Bellingham Herald notes that while the five-year battle pitted the oil industry against environmentalists, “talks took a key step forward after the appointed county Planning Commission approved the Cherry Point amendments and a ‘stakeholder group’ of business and environmental interests began meeting to build a consensus over its final wording.”
“From the onset of the process five years ago, the County Council had set forth clear aims for new rules that would allow improvements of existing refineries while restricting facilities’ use for transshipment of fossil fuels,” Eddy Ury, a council candidate who led the stakeholders group for months while he was with the environmental group RE Sources for Sustainable Communities, told the newspaper.
“These dual purposes proved to be challenging to balance in lawmaking without overstepping authority,” Ury said. “The stakeholder group came together at the point where our respective interests were best served by cooperating.”
In a statement Wednesday, RE Sources executive director Shannon Wright welcomed the vote.
“This is a landmark victory for the local communities who have stood up and held firm for over a decade to protect the climate, the Salish Sea, and their own health and safety from risky and reckless fossil fuel expansion projects,” said Wright.
“There’s more to be done,” Wright added, “including addressing the pollution burden borne by local communities, in particular Lummi Nation, who live in close proximity to existing heavy industry and fossil fuel operations, and continuing to counter the threat of increased vessel traffic across the region.”
“When people ask local leaders to address their concerns, this is how it should be done.”
—Whatcom County Councillor Todd Donovan
Still, Whatcom County Councillor Todd Donovan celebrated that local residents “are now safer from threats like increased oil train traffic or more polluting projects at existing refineries.”
“When people ask local leaders to address their concerns, this is how it should be done—with input from all affected communities and industries, but without watering down the solutions that are most protective of public safety, the climate, and our waterways,” he said.
Stand.earth’s statement pointed out that the development comes as residents and activists in Tacoma, Washington are pushing for similar protections.
In a tweet about the vote in Whatcom County, the Tacoma arm of the environmental group 350.org said that it is “still waiting for Tacoma City Council to find courage to do the same here.”
The fights for local regulations on fossil fuels come as communities across the West endure the impacts of the human-created climate emergency—from deadly, record-breaking heat to ferocious fires. In Washington state alone, there are currently eight large active fires that have collectively burned 136,758 acres.
Conditions in the U.S. West, along with fires in Siberia and flooding across China and Europe, have fueled demands for bolder climate policy on a global scale. Parties to the Paris agreement—which aims to keep global temperature rise this century below 2°C, and preferably limit it to 1.5°C—are set to attend a two-week United Nations climate summit in Glasgow beginning October 31.
by DGR News Service | Jul 28, 2021 | Lobbying, Protests & Symbolic Acts
Editor’s note: The plan to protect the world’s wildlife (as well as the Paris Agreement) falls short because 1) Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization (Premise one), 2) The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life (Premise ten), and, if you dig to the heart of it—if there were any heart left—you would find that social decisions are determined primarily on the basis of how well these decisions serve the ends of controlling or destroying wild nature (Premise 20). The only way to protect the world’s wildlife and the climate is to bring down the global economy.
This article originally appeared in The Conversation.
By Michelle Lim
It’s no secret the world’s wildlife is in dire straits. New data shows a heatwave in the Pacific Northwest killed more than 1 billion sea creatures in June, while Australia’s devastating bushfires of 2019-2020 killed or displaced 3 billion animals. Indeed, 1 million species face extinction worldwide.
These numbers are overwhelming, but a serious global commitment can help reverse current tragic rates of biodiversity loss.
This week the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity released a draft of its newest ten-year global plan. Often considered to be the Paris Agreement of biodiversity, the new plan aims to galvanise planetary scale action to achieve a world “living in harmony with nature” by 2050.
But if the plan goes ahead in its current form, it will fall short in safeguarding the wonder of our natural world. This is primarily because it doesn’t legally bind nations to it, risking the same mistakes made by the last ten-year plan, which didn’t stop biodiversity decline.
A lack of binding obligations
The Convention on Biological Diversity is a significant global agreement and almost all countries are parties to it. This includes Australia, which holds the unwanted record for the greatest number of mammal extinctions since European colonisation.
However, the convention is plagued by the lack of binding obligations. Self-reporting to the convention secretariat is the only thing the convention makes countries do under international law.
All other, otherwise sensible, provisions of the convention are limited by a series of get-out-of-jail clauses. Countries are only required to implement provisions “subject to national legislation” or “as far as possible and as appropriate”.
The convention has used non-binding targets since 2000 in its attempt to address global biodiversity loss. But this has not worked.
The ten-year term of the previous targets, the Aichi Targets, came to an end in 2020, and included halving habitat loss and preventing extinction. But these, alongside most other Aichi targets, were not met.
In the new draft targets, extinction is no longer specifically named — perhaps relegated to the too hard basket. Pollution appears again in the new targets, and now includes a specific mention of eliminating plastic pollution.
Is this really a Paris-style agreement?
I wish. Calling the plan a Paris-style agreement suggests it has legal weight, when it doesn’t.
The fundamental difference between the biodiversity plan and the Paris Agreement is that binding commitments are a key component of the Paris Agreement. This is because the Paris Agreement is the successor of the legally binding Kyoto Protocol.
The final Paris Agreement legally compels countries to state how much they will reduce their emissions by. Nations are then expected to commit to increasingly ambitious reductions every five years.
If they don’t fulfill these commitments, countries could be in breach of international law. This risks damage to countries’ reputation and international standing.
The door remains open for some form of binding commitment to emerge from the biodiversity convention. But negotiations to date have included almost no mention of this being a potential outcome.
So what else needs to change?
Alongside binding agreements, there are many other aspects of the convention’s plan that must change. Here are three:
First, we need truly transformative measures to tackle the underlying economic and social causes of biodiversity loss.
The plan’s first eight targets are directed at minimising the threats to biodiversity, such as the harvesting and trade of wild species, area-based conservation, climate change and pollution.
While this is important, the plan also needs to call out and tackle dominant worldviews which equate continuous economic growth with human well-being. The first eight targets cannot realistically be met unless we address the economic causes driving these threats: materialism, unsustainable production and over-consumption.
Second, the plan needs to put Indigenous peoples’ knowledge, science, governance, rights and voices front and centre.
An abundance of evidence shows lands managed by Indigenous and local communities have significantly better biodiversity outcomes. But biodiversity on Indigenous lands is decreasing and with it the knowledge for continued sustainable management of these ecosystems.
Indigenous peoples and local communities have “observer status” within the convention’s discussions, but references to Indigenous “knowledges” and “participation” in the draft plan don’t go much further than in the Aichi Targets.
Third, there must be cross-scale collaborations as global economic, social and environmental systems are connected like never before.
The unprecedented movement of people and goods and the exchange of money, information and resources means actions in one part of the globe can have significant biodiversity impacts in faraway lands. The draft framework does not sufficiently appreciate this.
For example, global demand for palm oil contributes to deforestation of orangutan habitat in Borneo. At the same time, consumer awareness and social media campaigns in countries far from palm plantations enable distant people to help make a positive difference.
The road to Kunming
The next round of preliminary negotiations of the draft framework will take place virtually from August 23 to September 3 2021. And it’s likely final in-person negotiations in Kunming, China will be postponed until 2022.
It’s not all bad news, there is still much to commend in the convention’s current draft plan.
For example, the plan facilitates connections with other global processes, such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. It recognises the contributions of biodiversity to, for instance, nutrition and food security, echoing Sustainable Development Goal 2 of “zero hunger”.
The plan also embraces more inclusive language, such as a shift from saying “ecosystem services” to “Nature’s Contribution to People” when discussing nature’s multiple values.
But if non-binding targets didn’t work in the past, then why does the convention think this time will be any different?
A further set of unmet biodiversity goals and targets in 2030 is an unacceptable scenario. At the same time, there’s no point aiming at targets that merely maintain the status quo.
We can change the current path of mass extinction. This requires urgent, concerted and transformative action towards a thriving planet for people and nature.
by DGR News Service | Jul 27, 2021 | Education, Movement Building & Support, Strategy & Analysis
This article is from the blog buildingarevolutionarymovement.
This post lists 9 Revolutionary moments and periods in Britain since 1381. This is a broad overview so I will look at the details and patterns of these moments and periods in future posts.
Following on from the previous post about learning from history, there has been a long tradition of the working class struggling to transform society. Several things are now different such as 40 years of neoliberalism, the atomisation of workforces with the large scale de-industrialisation of Britain, a heavily weakened labour movement, and a general lack of class consciousness for most of the working class. Class struggle in the 21st century is clearly going to be different as so much has changed. But there is much to learn from this history that I will go into in future posts. There are clear patterns through history in how different groups of actors operate during class struggles: the ruling class and state, the leadership of the trade unions, and the working class. Understanding these patterns is essential when thinking about class struggle going forwards.
In The Road Not Taken: How Britain Narrowly Missed a Revolution 1381-1926, Frank McLynn identifies seven occasions when Britain came close to revolution. These are the Peasants Revolt 1381, Jack Cade’s Rebellion 1450, the Pilgrimage of Grace 1536, the English Civil Wars 1642-51, the Jacobite Rising of 1745-6, the Chartist Movement of 1838-48, and the General Strike of 1926. McLynn includes the Great Unrest of 1910-1914 and near revolution in 1919, as leading up to the General Strike of 1926.
Rob Sewell has written an excellent radical history of the British labour movement called In Cause of Labour: History of British Trade Unionism. Sewell writes from a Lenin, Trotsky, and Russian Revolution tradition. He identifies 4 Revolutionary moments and periods of the labour movement: early radical labour movement in the late 1820s and 1830s; The Chartist Movement; The Great Unrest 1910-14, near revolution between 1919-26; and class struggle from the late 1960s to mid-1980s.
I have also added the Long 1968 – from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s.
The Peasants Revolt 1381
This was triggered by tax collection in Essex in May 1381. This resulted in rioting and protests that spread across the country. The rebels’ demands were tax reduction, the ending of serfdom and the removal of the King’s senior officials and law courts. The revolt was repressed by the end of June, including a battle in Norfolk.
Jack Cade’s Rebellion 1450
This revolt took place between April and July 1450. The grievances included corruption, abuse of power by the king’s advisers and military loses in France during the Hundred Years’ War. It was a southeastern uprising led by Jack Cade. The rebels looted London and were forced out of the city. The rebels were issues pardons by the King and told to return home.
The Pilgrimage of Grace 1536-7
This uprising began in Yorkshire and spread to other parts of northern England, in protest against Henry VIII’s break with the Roman Catholic Church, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the policies of the King’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell. The King said he would consider their demands so they returned home. Another uprising took place in January 1537 and Henry VIII considered this a breach of the amnesty so rounded up all the original leaders and had then hung.
The English Civil Wars 1642-51
Here is a great summary from Wikipedia:
“The English Civil War (1642–1651) was a series of civil wars and political machinations between Parliamentarians (“Roundheads”) and Royalists (“Cavaliers”) principally over the manner of England’s governance. The first (1642–1646) and second (1648–1649) wars pitted the supporters of King Charles I against the supporters of the Long Parliament, while the third (1649–1651) saw fighting between supporters of King Charles II and supporters of the Rump Parliament. The war ended with Parliamentarian victory at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651.
The outcome of the war was threefold: the trial and execution of Charles I (1649); the exile of his son, Charles II (1651); and the replacement of English monarchy with, at first, the Commonwealth of England (1649–1653) and then the Protectorate under the personal rule of Oliver Cromwell (1653–1658) and briefly his son Richard (1658–1659). In England, the monopoly of the Church of England on Christian worship was ended, while in Ireland the victors consolidated the established Protestant Ascendancy. Constitutionally, the wars established the precedent that an English monarch cannot govern without Parliament’s consent, although the idea of Parliamentary sovereignty was only legally established as part of the Glorious Revolution in 1688.”
The Jacobite Rising of 1745-6
This was an attempt by Charles Stuart to regain the British throne for his father James Stuart, from George II. Most of the British army were fighting in Europe. This was the last in a series of uprisings between 1689 and 1746. Charles landed in Scotland in August 1745, gaining Scottish support and won the Battle of Prestonpans. They reached as far south as Manchester before turned back in December. Battles were won on the retreat to Scotland and Charles escaped to Europe.
Early radical labour movement late 1820’s and 1830’s
Trade unions were legalised in 1824 resulting in the huge growth in the number of trade unions and their memberships. There was open class struggle between the workers against the government and employers. Strikes took place all over the country. In 1830-1 rural agricultural uprising took place led by the fictional ‘Captain Swing’.
The Merthry Rising took place in 1831 in Wales, where coal and steelworkers protested about wages and unemployment. This spread to nearby towns and villages. In June 1831 the red flag was raised in Merthyr Tydfil.
The Grand National Consolidated Trades Union was set up in 1834 to abolish capitalist rule and the revolutionary transformation of society. This had explosive growth with 500,000 members. Strikes across the country increased with demands over wages, recognition, and the eight-hour day. Repression increased with an example made of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, who were sent to Australia for attempting to set up an agriculture labours union. Repression resulted in many trade unions ceasing to function.
The Chartist Movement of 1837-48
Chartism was a national working-class protest movement for political reform with strong support in the North, Midlands and South Wales. Support was greatest in 1839, 42, 48. It presented petitions with millions of signatures to parliament, combined with mass meetings with the aim of putting pressure on politicians.
The People’s Charter called for six reforms to make the political system more democratic:
- A vote for every man twenty-one years of age, of sound mind, and not undergoing punishment for a crime.
- The secret ballot to protect the elector in the exercise of his vote.
- No property qualification for Members of Parliament in order to allow the constituencies to return the man of their choice.
- Payment of Members, enabling tradesmen, working men, or other persons of modest means to leave or interrupt their livelihood to attend to the interests of the nation.
- Equal constituencies, securing the same amount of representation for the same number of electors, instead of allowing less populous constituencies to have as much or more weight than larger ones.
- Annual Parliamentary elections, thus presenting the most effectual check to bribery and intimidation, since no purse could buy a constituency under a system of universal manhood suffrage in each twelve-month period.
Chartism did not directly achieve any reforms but put huge pressure on the ruling class and generated significant working class solidarity and class consciousness. In 1867 urban working men were given the vote, but it was not until 1918 that full manhood suffrage was achieved.
The Great Unrest 1910-1914 to the General Strike 1926
The Great Unrest from 1910-14 saw a massive national increase in union membership and strikes in response to employers’ attempts to reduce wages and intensify the exploitation of workers. The main sectors included miners, transport workers, and dockers. The government responded with warships, troops and police using violence to intimidate workers. Syndicalism was an important part of the struggle in this period.
This period also saw the Suffragette movement use militant tactics in their struggles for the vote for women.
The start of World War One resulted in the official suspension of party politics and labour movement struggle, although strikes continued through the war. Following the end of the war in 1918, 1919 saw a large increase in strikes, police uprisings, several armed forces’ mutinies and mass resistance among the working class.
There were mass strikes again in 1921 in response to wage decreases and increasing unemployment. The Minority Movement was launched in 1924 with 200,000 trade union members in the major sectors. Its aim was to overthrow capitalism, the emancipation of workers from oppression and exploitation and to set up a socialist commonwealth. Miners strikes continued in 1925 and the government backed down because it was not ready for a confrontation with the labour movement.
The General Strike of 1926 lasted for nine days in May. It was called by the Trade Union Congress to force the government to prevent wage reduction and worsening conditions for 1.2 million coal miners. 1.7 million workers went on strike: miners, transport and dockers, printers, ironworkers and steelworkers. The strike was defeated.
Long 1968
During the Culture Power Politics session on 1968, Jeremy Gilbert describes the ‘short 68’ and ‘long 68’. The short 68 is the events that happen in the year 1968. Gilbert describes the long 68 as a global revolt against colonialism and its legacies, against various forms of oppression that are typical of advanced industrial capitalism. He describes how the long 68 starts in the 1950s and ends with the global defeat of the left in the mid-1980s.
The social movements from this period include the women’s liberation movement, the gay liberation movement, green movement, disabled people’s movement, anti-racism and anti-fascism, and the peace/anti-war and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
The period from 1970 to 1984 saw an open class struggle between the state and the labour movement. There were a large number of strikes during this period. The 1972 miners’ strike over pay spread to sectors so the Tory government had to back down and the miners got increased pay and benefits. In 1973 oil prices quadrupled due to war in the Middle East and the miners introduced an overtime ban. The Heath government introduced the three day week in early 1974 and then called a general election in February 1974 but failed to get a majority of MPs so the Labour Party formed a minority government. The Grunwick dispute was a strike between 1976-78 for trade union recognition at Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories in London. It was not successful. The Winter of Discontent 1978-9 saw widespread strikes by public sector trade unions demanding larger pay rises, following the ongoing pay caps of the Labour Party. The government gave in to the demands.
The election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 saw a new aggressive approach to break the strength of the labour movement. There was a national miners strike in 1984 against the planned closure of 20 pits, resulting in the loss of 20,000 jobs. The Battle of Orgreave was a significant defeat for the miners following intense police violence. The miners’ strike ended in March 1985 with defeat. The Thatcher government closed over 100 pits and 100,000 miners lost their jobs. The 1980s also saw a number of radical socialist councils challenging Thatcher – the Great London Council, Liverpool City Council, Sheffield City Council and others – in what is known as the rate-capping rebellion.
by DGR News Service | Jul 26, 2021 | Climate Change, Colonialism & Conquest, Education, Strategy & Analysis
Editor’s note: The mainstream media is not only minimizing climate change but all the horrors of corporate capitalism.
This article originally appeared in Climate&Capitalism.
By Tyler Poisson
Q: What is mainstream media?
A: Mainstream media is the set of media companies that dominate mass mediums. Also known as corporate/mass/monopoly media, mainstream media consists of cable news channels, major periodicals, film studios, and the like. The corporate press is the subset of mainstream media companies that deal in news. Mainstream media has a monopoly on the information and symbols that get disseminated widely to the public, as alternative media only reaches small audiences of niche consumers. Five companies control 90 percent of US media.
Q: What’s the problem with mainstream media?
A: Mainstream media outlets are (subsidiaries of) for-profit corporations acting in the system of capitalism. Therefore, their central objective is to maximize quarterly gain for their shareholders, the majority of which are multibillion-dollar financial institutions. Because corporations are responsible to stockowners first, capitalist accumulation comes at the expense of workers and the environment, as businesses exploit cheap labor and extract resources in the most efficient manner, no matter how ecologically devastating that may be, in an effort to increase surplus value for the owning class.
Mainstream news sources rely on advertising to generate revenue, meaning they need to sell marketing opportunities to other corporations. Because of this arrangement, mainstream media cannot sincerely critique corporate capitalism, as it would be self-sabotage to challenge the very system on which their business model depends.
Q: Mainstream sources don’t criticize capitalism, so what?
A: They propagandize it. Mainstream media’s most consequential accomplishment is the widespread inculcation of unquestioned consumer capitalism. First of all, the corporate press runs ads that instill consumer culture. Far worse, since mainstream broadcasts and publications are the only sources of information that effortlessly reach the masses, and because they perpetually contest, if not ignore, critical analysis of the system of capitalism, they end up prescribing it. The bulk of this propagandization is carried out unconsciously. Mass entertainment media inculcates the images and icons of capitalism.
Corporate newspeople, often having graduated from elite private schools, are hired at major media companies precisely for their uncriticalness towards existing power structures. Thus, mainstream commentators naturally and genuinely downplay, when they don’t ignore, news that reflects unfavorably on the economic status-quo. They do this actively (e.g., by playing “both sides”) and passively (e.g., by reporting systemic consequences as independent events). A serious critic of capitalism would never achieve a position of influence in mainstream media, indeed none have.
Sometimes unorthodox takes are published in unnoticed places, but never enough to gain much attention. Furthermore, news industry editors reserve the right to unilaterally redraft stories before they reach the public. As a result, journalists self-censor, whereby they come to exclude facts and suppress sentiments that they know their editor would disfavor or delete. Editors report to CEOs on boards of directors.
Q: Sure, but I’m free to read and watch what I want right? Why don’t people just find better sources?
A: In theory individuals can engage with whatever news sources they find to be the best. The reality is that quality, alternative publications, although numerous, are for all intents and purposes undiscoverable. Some of the richest and most powerful (media) companies in the world, such as Google, Facebook, household publishers and broadcast networks, broadly control the distribution of information. Anyone can produce anything they want, the challenge lies in finding an audience.
For-profit companies determine what you get, and even more importantly what you don’t get, when you search the web, turn on the television, and so on. This state of affairs is problematic seeing as it would be against the best interest of multibillion-dollar corporations to surface information that calls into question the system of capital growth from which they derive their power.
Furthermore, monopoly media sets the boundaries of acceptable politics in virtue of its ubiquity. Dissenting perspectives are considered “radical”, “unrealistic”, or just plain whacky in popular discourse, however rational or evidenced they might be.
Q: So everything I read in the corporate press is propaganda?
A: No! In fact, on issues that can be covered honestly in the absence of systemic analysis, mainstream news sources can be excellent. Although weak language and out of touch presuppositions abound, that which gets published is not usually problematic. What really matters are the events and opinions that are omitted and marginalized, rather than headlined.
Major news media companies appease their shareholders and advertisers every time they ignore a case of corporate exploitation. When problems brought about by capitalism become too big for mainstream sources to ignore, it’s better for business that they scapegoat foreign countries and domestic minorities. Major media corporations also wield algorithms that facilitate endless entertainment.
Q: What’s the most important thing that mainstream media mistreats?
A: Climate change, taking for granted the understanding that it is the biggest story of our time, if not the most important event in human history. The corporate press has virtually ignored climate change, at best relegating crucial reports to back pages. Examples of incommensurate climate coverage are inexhaustible. Infamously, ABC News spent more time on the Royal Baby in one week than on climate change in all of 2018, the fourth hottest year on record.
In 2019, when atmospheric CO2 levels surpassed 415 parts per million for the first time since the Pliocene Epoch 3 million years ago, no major publications reported the measure, even though Exxon Mobil predicted it decades in advance. Instead, the morning after the climacteric was recorded the front page of the New York Times worried about the economics of “Trump’s Trade War”, the plight of the jobless in “Coal Country”, and the impending “5G Apocalypse”.
Mainstream media hasn’t brought attention to the fact that land surface temperatures in Siberia now exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit annually, threatening the stability of permafrost that stores significantly more carbon than is in the atmosphere. These are not facts that people should have to seek out, given what’s at stake. Twenty percent of all human deaths are caused by fossil fuel emissions. A press that serves the public would track corporate pollution in an effort to safeguard global health. The corporate press, which serves tycoons, tracks the stock market as a measure of “economic health”.
Citizens are also uninformed about inspiring environmental developments, such as the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. Increasingly severe extreme weather events continue to be treated as shocking anomalies in mainstream news, which blames “Humanity” for the overt climate crimes that mass media is an accessory to.Ecocide is not in “Human Nature”. Humans have lived on Earth for hundreds of millennia. Most of us have not fatally robbed or contaminated the planet. Corporations have. Anthropogenic climate change coincides with the ascent of industrial capitalism, which major media protects by maligning Humanity.
Q: But that’s because most people don’t care about climate change and capitalism. Mass media produces content that people want to consume.
A: Vice versa. Corporate media manufactures interests. Things that are marketed and attended to the most in mass media become culturally significant in virtue of the attention they receive. In other words, popular concern is socialized via media coverage. Nevertheless, most people are concerned with climate change, in one way or another, because they experience it.
In fact, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication has found that more than 3/4 of US citizens are expressly interested in news stories pertaining to climate change. No matter, a minimally decent media would inform the masses about the state of the climate.
Q: Why does mainstream media ignore climate change if it really poses such a big risk?
A: Never mind the fact that climate change is the greatest known threat to civilization, even if corporate media in theory stood to profit from frequent and honest climate coverage, they couldn’t in reality for one simple reason. Climate change is caused by the very system of capital accumulation that sustains mainstream media companies.
Corporations disharmonize nature when they plunder ecosystems for nonrenewable resources, manufacture unnecessary products, ship them across the world unsustainably, and poison the biosphere with waste. This rapacious activity is executed at incomprehensible speeds and on devastating scales. Corporate capitalism thus affects climate change more than anything else.
Worthwhile analyses of climate change cannot ignore the history of capitalism, and workable solutions must advocate for the end of corporate capitalism as we know it. Therefore, major media companies need to dodge the issue by definition. They aren’t just choosing more lucrative stories to tell. There is no choice for them to make.
Mainstream news sources genuinely could not sustain serious reporting on the issue of climate change, because if they were honest they would connect climate change to capitalism and thereby alienate major advertisers and investors, which would risk revenue, hence the ability to disseminate information to the masses In other words, any news outlet that commits itself to adequate climate coverage consequently forfeits the resources it would need to be mainstream. Under present conditions, if climate change really threatened civilization – as a matter of fact it does – mass media could not inform us. Whether or not they would is a worthless question.
Q: If climate change threatens civilization, it poses a risk to the system of capitalism. Why would the corporate press underplay climate change if it endangered future accumulation?
Due to the principle that returns on investment are better made sooner rather than later, the owning class continues to discount the changing climate to the end of ensuring short-term profit. Crucially, corporations do not merely maximize shareholder wealth. They function explicitly to make stockholders as wealthy as possible, as fast as possible, ad infinitum.
According to the impossible logic of capitalism, corporations can go on making next-quarter profits forever, even if they come at the expense of deadly future losses. Business as usual presumes infinite growth on a finite planet. As already set forth, it is not the case that mainstream media downplays climate change by way of focusing on more engaging, and therefore more profitable, subject matter. To the contrary, the climate crisis presents a unique opportunity for awesome and sensational, thus bankable, story telling.
Instead, because capitalist accumulation causes climate change, by downplaying the issue mainstream sources avoid having to call into question the process that generates profit in the first place. In a word, mass media companies do not minimize climate change because they are too busy making short-term profit, but, much more fundamentally, they do so to protect from mass disapproval the whole enterprise of short-term profit making.
Q: What do we do?
A: Consume critically. Read. Study climate science. Explore social science (start with Native American history and graduate to Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift). Peruse not-for-profit publications at their intersect like Climate and Capitalism. Make a list of independent and alternative sources that consistently apply decent moral standards, maintain respectable historical records, and publish global perspectives, especially those that confront tyranny and champion the oppressed. Watch Koyaanisqatsi. Unlearn everything.
Then act. Mostly listen, but talk too. Spreading the word goes much further than people appreciate. Also ride a bike. Garden, share, resist, do what feels right. Another world is possible. Good luck.
Tyler Poisson is a public school teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts. He wrote this pamphlet for distribution in his community. We think other activists may find it useful: Click here to download a printable version (pdf) of the pamphlet.
by DGR News Service | Jul 20, 2021 | Building Alternatives, Education, Strategy & Analysis
This article is from the blog buildingarevolutionarymovement.
George Lawson writes in Anatomies of Revolution about two common but unhelpful ways that revolutions are viewed. Either as everywhere – on the streets in the Middle East, to describe new technology, in films and also to describe political leaders. The second is that they are minor disturbances and “irrelevant to a world in which the big issues of governance and economic development have been settled.” [1]
In Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction, Jack Goldstone describes two perspectives of revolutions. One is heroic, where the downtrodden masses follow their leaders to rise up and overthrow unjust rulers resulting in gaining freedom and dignity. The second is that they are “eruptions of popular anger that produce chaos” and result in the mob using violence with destructive results. He describes how varied the history of revolutions is: “some are nonviolent, whereas others produce bloody civil wars; some have produced democracies and greater liberty whereas others have produced brutal dictatorships.” [2]
I see revolutions as a radical system change or transformation of society to improve the lives of the majority of people. I think Goldstone’s definition of revolutions is useful “both observed mass mobilization and institutional change, and a driving ideology carrying a vision of social justice. Revolution is the forcible overthrow of a government through mass mobilization (whether military or civilian or both) in the name of social justice, to create new political institutions.” [3]
Revolutions also need to be understood in relation to other forms of social change such as rebellions, coups, and civil war. Rebellions are not strong enough to overthrow the state, coups are but replace one elite figurehead with another. Civil war is a situation where the central authority that is managing two or more competing factions demands fails resulting in the factions fighting it out. [4] Hannah Arendt describes in On Revolution the close relationship in history between war and revolution. [5]
Types of revolution
There are three broad categories of revolutions: political revolutions, social revolutions, a broad category including any instance of relatively rapid and significant change. Political revolutions can be described as “any and all instances in which a state or political regime is overthrown and thereby transformed by a popular movement in an irregular, extraconstitutional, and/or violent fashion.” Social or ‘great’ revolutions can be defined as including “not only mass mobilization and regime change, but also more or less rapid and fundamental social, economic, and/or cultural change during or soon after the struggle for state power.” The third broad definition including any instance of relatively rapid and significant change including the industrial revolution, agricultural revolution, academic revolution, cultural revolution, feminist revolution, technology revolution, etc. [6]
The social or great revolutions include the English, French, Mexican, Russian, Chinese and maybe the Cuban. The rest are political revolutions of one form or another. Marxist or working-class revolution will be covered in a future post.
The history of revolutions
The Revolutions podcast (also on iTunes) describes the major revolutions in good detail.
George Lawson’s framework to describe the global history of revolutions (or The historical experience of revolution see IR206 – Revolutions and world politics course guide 2016) includes:
- The Atlantic ‘age of revolutions’ – including the English, Haiti, French and American revolutions.
- Socialist revolutions – starting with the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and all the revolutions this inspired
- ‘Third World’ revolutions – starting with the Cuban Revolution of 1959, resulting in several revolutions ‘against the odds’ which were led by a rural peasantry rather than an urban proletariat. Cuban provided assistance for revolution in Angola, Bolivia, etc
- The ‘last great revolution’ – Iran Revolution in 1978/9
- ‘Colour’ revolutions – between 1989 and 1991, several revolutions removed Soviet control of Eastern and East-Central Europe, culminating in the end of the Cold War itself.
- Arab Spring – uprisings and revolutions in 2011 in North Africa and the Middle East
Jack Goldstone in Revolutions: a very short introduction offers another framework:
- Revolutions in the ancient world
- Revolutions of the Renaissance and Reformation – including revolutions in renaissance Italy in the 13th and 14th centuries, and the English Revolution.
- Constitutional revolutions: America, France, Europe (1830 and 1848), and Meiji Japan
- Communist revolutions: Russia, China, Cuba
- Revolutions against dictators: Mexico, Nicaragua, and Iran
- Color revolutions: The Philippines, Eastern Europe and USSR, and Ukraine
- The Arab Revolutions of 2011: Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria
Revolutionary waves are important historical events. There are a series of revolutions that occur in various locations within a similar period. A revolution or large scale rebellion in one country inspires uprisings and revolutions with similar aims in other counties. See here for a list.
Academic theory
There have been four generations of academic revolutionary theory. The first generation was in the first half of the 20th century and is based on Crane Brinton, who compared the stages of a social or great revolution to the symptoms of a fever. The second generation followed the Second World War and attempted to explain the relationship between modernization and uprisings in the Third World. Modernization led to rising expectations but economic downturns would result in frustration and potentially aggression leading to revolution. In the second half of the 20th century, the third generation developed in critical response to the second generation. This ‘structuralist’ approach argued that revolutions were caused by specific structural developments such as the commercialisation of agriculture, state crisis from international conflict and elite conflict, demographic changes destabilising social order by putting pressure on state finance’s, weakening government legitimacy, resulting in intra-elite competition. The fourth generation developed in the early 21st century and focuses on the factors that challenges state stability including: “how international factors such as dependent trade relations, the transmission of ideas across borders, and the withdrawal of support by a patron, along with elite disunity, insecure standards of living, and ‘unjust’ leadership”. [7]
Revolutionary theory can be broadly divided up into three phases related to how revolutions unfold: the study of the origins or causes of revolution, the process of the revolutionary event, and the outcomes [8]. For now, thinking about what causes revolutions is of most interest to me. Goldstone describes five conditions that can lead to instability in a society: “economic or fiscal strain, alienation and opposition among elites, widespread popular anger at injustice, a persuasive shared narrative of resistance, and favorable international relations.” [9]
Endnotes
- Anatomies of Revolution, George Lawson, 2019, page 1
- Revolution: A Very Short Introduction, Jack Goldstone, 2014, page 1/2
- Revolution: A Very Short Introduction page 4
- The Road Not Taken: How Britain Narrowly Missed a Revolution 1381-1926, Frank McLynn, 2013, page 516
- On Revolution, Hannah Arendt, 1963, introduction
- No Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements 1945-1991, Jeff Goodwin, 2001, page 9
-
Within and Beyond the ‘Fourth Generation’ of Revolutionary Theory, George Lawson, 2015, page 2-6, download here
- Revolution: A Very Short Introduction, chapter 3
- Revolution: A Very Short Introduction, page 17-19
