“To change everything, we need everyone,”

[alanjjohnstone]

Started this new thread to debate how we should interact and connect with the environmentalist movement. 

Naomi Klein article

Quote:

The thing is: capitalism is kind of stupid. The big brains on Wall Street all know climate change is real. They go on about

“stranded assets” and “carbon bubbles” and climate change creating an atmosphere of “risky business.” But even knowing all these medium and long term risks to their very survival, they still can’t resist the short term profits that flow from cooking the planet.

http://www.countercurrents.org/klein170914.htm

Quote:

Don't think of climate change as a single issue, she tells readers, but rather, a frame for broader social improvements. "The environmental crisis—if conceived sufficiently broadly—neither trumps nor distracts from our most pressing political and economic causes," she writes, "it supercharges each of them with existential urgency."

http://www.countercurrents.org/queally170914.htm

[alanjjohnstone]

Quote:

'The real task for progressive movements,' says author and activist, 'is to convince people that change is possible.'

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/09/20/feeling-its-gonna-be-huge-naomi-klein-peoples-climate-eveHmmmm? So far no takers for the debate. Maybe this interview with Naomi Klein may spark discussion …or will it concentrate upon her mistakingly associating Mao and the Soviet Union with communism?Certainly i think she has pin-pointed the exact problem that we face…one of persuading people of the need of creating an immediancy and urgency in constructing an alternative society and convincing them it is indeed viable and feasible but also accomplishable if people want it. 

[alanjjohnstone]

I vaguely recall during Occupy that there was an observation that the absence of a socialist analysis permitted space for reformists and so-called radicals such as Positive Money to spread their arguments without sufficient rebuttal.I think we have to step up our influence in the environmental activist arena to counter the Malthusians with their over-population claims and solutions such as the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. http://www.alternet.org/environment/radical-environmental-solution-youve-never-heard?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmarkAlthough perhaps an extreme example, we do possess the Deep Greens of the primativists plus the "moderates" of  the NGOs who concentrate on population control in the Third World. It is not only ourselves who have produce eco-socialism literature but others too…although we may disagree upon certain aspects of the politics of how to achieve a sustainable socialism but on the wider field we accept why capitalism causes and cannot cure the destruction of the world.

[alanjjohnstone]

What we missed.Apart from smaller protest in Edinburgh, 40,000 were out on the strets in London and 300,000 in NY.http://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2014/sep/21/peoples-climate-march-in-london-emma-thompson-vivienne-westwood-peter-gabrielThese people are looking for solutions and we should we offering them the eco-socialist answer. 

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