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The power to change the system
With COP26 just around the corner, a wave of industrial action in Scotland is demonstrating the huge opportunity of linking workers’ struggle with climate organising. Sara Bennett, Pete Cannell and Raymond Morrell argue that huge shifts in climate struggle are on the way, and that building these links will be essential to winning revolutionary change.
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Manufacturing ignorance: keeping the public away from power
Significant public activism and opposition to state-corporate power need to be rooted in widespread shared public knowledge.
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Will the people with guns allow our Planet to breathe: The Forty-Fourth Newsletter (2021)
It is perhaps fitting that United States President Joe Biden arrived in Glasgow for the 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) on the climate catastrophe with eighty-five cars in tow months after declaring ‘I’m a car guy’ (for details on the climate catastrophe, see our Red Alert no. 11, ‘Only One Earth’).
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Should one stand up for Western values?
What are western values? One often hears a representative of a western country praising its western values. In a 2017 statement Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau adumbrated Canadian values as “openness, compassion, equality, and inclusion.”
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Will Glasgow fix broken climate finance promises?
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR: Current climate mitigation plans will result in a catastrophic 2.7°C world temperature rise. US$1.6–3.8 trillion is needed annually to avoid global warming exceeding 1.5°C.
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Why Julian Assange’s inhumane prosecution imperils justice for us all
The damage done to the Wikileaks co-founder in his decade of incarceration and uncertainty, including more than two years in Belmarsh is beyond doubt. But so, too, is his courage beyond doubt.
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What to expect from COP26: climate action, climate justice or greenwashing?
If Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were writing the Communist Manifesto today, it is not inconceivable that they would begin with the sentence: “A spectre is haunting humanity—the spectre of extinction.”
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Dossier No. 46: Big Tech and the current challenges facing the class struggle
We cannot give ourselves the luxury of being technophobic, of negating the importance of technologies and their potential in the struggle. At the same time, we cannot believe in the idea that technology in itself will result in advances for the organised working class.
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World gathering of peoples for our Mother Earth and against the climate crisis – conclusions document
We are children of our Mother Earth, and as such we must take care of her and protect her, respecting her rights and fulfilling our duties and obligations to protect Mother Earth as a living and sacred being.
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As Chávez said, ‘let’s not change the climate, let’s change the system!’: a conversation with Max Ajl
An anti-imperialist approach to global warming in the context of COP26.
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COP26: why advanced countries must proportionately make by far the biggest cuts in carbon emissions–factual briefing
Fortunately, the scientific data produced by the IPCC makes it possible to calculate the real changes which are required to combat climate change.
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Review: ‘The Great Climate Cop Out’
The 25 page pamphlet lays out concisely and effectively why we cannot look to heads of government under a capitalist system to come to an agreement on phasing out fossils fuels, cutting emissions and creating a more sustainable economy.
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Bleak prospects for least developed countries
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR: “The outlook for LDCs is grim”. The latest United Nations (UN) assessment of prospects for the least developed countries (LDCs) notes recent setbacks without finding any silver lining on the horizon.
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Review: The Alienation of Love
More than just bear it, capitalists today demand we love our exploitation. Sara Bennett reviews a new book on the new emotional demands on workers, arguing it aid us in our understanding of modern class relations.
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The New Dangerous Class? The PMC and Virtue Hoarding
In a review of a new book about the ‘Professional Managerial Class’, James Foley says middle-class activists dress up conformity as a war on cultural backwardness.
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Who owns our data?
We need a model of ownership that recognizes the collective interest we have in how personal data is used, avoids the costs of private exploitation by individual firms, and does not slip into authoritarian forms of state control.
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Book Review: ‘A People’s Green New Deal’
In this book Ajl covers most of the big questions facing rational, ecosocialist design: nationalization vs localism, modernization vs degrowth, techno-scientific solutions vs indigenous knowledge.
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Coming Climate Summit must take due care of the woes of developing Countries
Discussions in the forthcoming COP26 should focus on democratisation of climate finance that enables procedural climate justice.
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The coral atoll and the iPhone
I think Matt Cooper takes a too narrow definition of “metabolism” as a rather dull process of material exchange that occurs within a cell. From my reading, as a non-specialist, Marx was using the term in a broader sense as the material and ultimately purposeless means by which complex order emerges from disordered matter.
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Of course they would: on Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘The Ministry for the Future’
Everything is always different, yes, fine–but everything is really different now.