Extinction Rebellion: “Green” capitalism versus world socialism
By
Steve James
14 March 2019
The ongoing school and college student strikes against climate change are proof of how a new generation is being politically radicalised because of their concern for the future of the Earth and of humanity.
This Friday’s Strike Global for Future protest will see thousands of young people, including striking school students, take to the streets in 92 countries and over 1,200 cities and towns, angry at how giant corporations and governments are ignoring warnings that global warming threatens catastrophic famine, forced mass migration, fires and floods. An entire generation is coming to realise that the world is being imperilled by the uncontrollable, ceaseless, and rapacious drive for profit.
Only the most extraordinary, rationally planned mobilisation of humanity’s immense productive, technical and scientific capacities can hope to overcome the challenges of rapidly rising sea levels, accelerating CO2 emissions, loss of biodiversity, collapse of food chains and desertification. But production under capitalism is directed solely to expand the private wealth of billionaires, regardless of the social or environmental cost.
Moreover, climate change by its very nature demands a global response in which production is subordinated to the needs of the world’s working population. But the world is divided into competing nation states, each dominated by the selfish interests of rival groups of super rich profiteers. Each continually seek strategic trade and military advantage over their rivals in the struggle to dominate the world’s market as resources, and each continually seek new means of extracting more from the working class. As it has twice in the 20th century, this…