Who indeed? We find out from Stefania Barca, a senior researcher at the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra (Portugal).
Labor in the Age of Climate Change
Any just transition to a green economy must take place on labor’s terms — not capital’s.Climate change must be stopped. But who will do the stopping? Who, in other words, could be the political subject of an anticapitalist climate revolution?
I am convinced this social agent could be, and indeed must be, the global working class. Yet to play this role, the working class must develop an emancipatory ecological class consciousness.
So, the class of people hurt most by the policies pushed by rich, Left leaning climate alarmists are supposed to embrace anti-capitalism to…..essentially solve nothing, because the policies pushed by the Cult of Climastrology would really have almost no effect on the problem they say Mankind has created. And you have to read that like for ecological class consciousness. It’s 5 pages of unhinged leftism, with a hatred of capitalism (which, of course, fails to note that they wouldn’t be able to produce the document and publish it on the Internet without capitalism). There’s too much to attempt to excerpt.
Yet important cleavages exist within this consensus, especially when it comes to the just transition. Some groups simply push for job creation in a greened economy. Others, refusing to abide market solutions, have adopted a radical critique of capitalism.
How this schism shakes out will decide whether labor unwittingly bolsters capital — or confronts capital and climate change.
Why does it seem that so much of what the Warmists push is about changing to some other economy, other than capitalism? Not that we’re seeing a capitalist economy at the moment, as it is driven much by cronyism and government edicts and dictates. Warmists want to utterly change, and, if you read through the rest of the article, you’ll note that the author is not particularly happy with the current methods employed and proposed, as they, shockingly, harm The Worker. He wants climate and social justice employed, and ends with
The alternative is more promising, if more challenging: an ecosocialism powered by an emancipatory, ecological class consciousness. It would demand class struggle on a higher level — the level of global political ecology. But it would offer the possibility of a truly sustainable world, forged on labor’s terms rather than capital’s.
Why does this seem like hardcore leftist dogma, with smatterings of Marxism? Why does it sound so political? Because this is what it’s all about.
Who was hurt the most with the all the “communist” revolutions around the world, after being told they’d all be a workers paradise?
Well, I’ll give Miss Garca credit for one thing: she recognized one of the inherent mistakes of Karl Marx, his assumption that the proletariat would all think alike. Trouble is, Miss Garca believes that while not everyone in the working class think alike, they can all be made to think alike if their leaders will just educate them to do so.
Trouble is, she is urging a working class consciousness that makes the working class poorer rather than richer, at least initially. For labor to force on the economy a system which puts the environment first means that the working class will have to make do with less, because the technology to provide more without using resources and emitting CO2 does not yet exist. And, in an irony that doubtlessly escapes her, it is the capitalists alone who would be able to develop the technology required.
The underlying assumptions of socialism have always been flawed, the assumptions that everyone would eventually think alike — though the left want to try to enforce such group-think, at least at the universities — and that people would not favor themselves and their families above strangers; Herr Marx was not the only socialist to fail to understand human nature.
When the Iron Curtain was lifted, the ecological horrors of socialism were revealed to all in the form of poisoned lands and waters across the entire region. In a world where no one owns property, there is no one who cares to preserve and defend it. In a world where party apparatchiks can decide to divert a river and destroy an ecosystem and livelihoods and even lives in favor of cronyism, any one who dares protest risks being destroyed. In a socialist world, there is no more Aral Sea. In a free world, it would still be on the map.
Tuesday morning links
Why I Don’t Buy Organic, And Why You Might Not Want To Either A few people develop a compulsive urge to crack jokes 24 hours a day Remember America’s first experiment with socialism? The war on standards in Twin Cities schools Activism U and the