End the Israeli massacres in East Jerusalem. Free Palestine!

ANTARSYA condemns the Israeli airstrikes on Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip entailing 20 dead, including nine children.

Currently, the terrorist state of Israel has launched a new inhumane campaign against the Palestinians with violent evictions from their homes, attacks from Jewish fundamentalists and brutal repression with teargasses and plastic bullets against Palestinians resisting and Israeli left forces fighting against nationalism and racism. Moreover, the Israeli forces occupied the Al-Aqsa Mosque, a sanctuary for Palestinians.

Israel, the most important ally of the main imperialist forces (USA-UK-EU) in Middle East, sets a scene of violence seeking to expel the Palestinians from East Jerusalem and proceed to new illegal settlements.

The supposedly sensitive and civilised “international community” of the imperialist states, as well as the reactionary regimes of the Arab world, are following the events apathetically, while the UN concern is highly hypocritical. The interests of the multinationals and the aspirations for geopolitical control in Middle East lie behind the long-lasting support to Israel for its timeless crime against the Palestinian people.

The Greek government is also complicit in the criminal approach of the EU and NATO. The Greek mainstream political forces (the conservatives of Nea Dimokratia, the social democrats of SYRIZA and the far right) support the close relationship of Greece with the state of Israel, but also with the Sisi military dictatorship in Egypt, within the framework of the reactionary axes of war under US control. The Greek mainstream political forces stand against the rights and the just struggle of the Palestinian people, seeking a share of profits that a handful of capitalists expect from the exclusive economic zones.

For the people, the workers and youth, solidarity with Palestine is a historical commitment!

Join the demonstrations of solidarity to Palestine across Europe!

• Free Palestine! Solidarity to Palestinians until their victory
• End Israeli massacres in East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
• No cooperation with the terrorist state of Israel. Dissolve the reactionary axis of Greece – Cyprus – Egypt – Israel.
• No to the presence of imperialists in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. No to the involvement of Greece in the imperialist invasions in Middle East.
• End NATO membership of Greece. Shut down all the military bases of NATO in Greece.
• No war for natural resources and monopolies. Peace between people and struggle for socialism

ANTARSYA, 11.5.2021

Against racism, against the Greek Government, and against the EU! Freedom to refugees!

Against racism, against the Greek Government, and against the EU! Freedom to refugees!

ANTARSYA condemns the anti-migration and racist government policies and the violence against the refugees in the islands of the North Aegean Sea and the land borders with Turkey, that seek to sustain the anti-refugee agreement between the EU and Turkey.

The tragedy that the refugees experience in the Greek-Turkish borders with the Greek army and police mobilisation and their violence against desperate people stems from the failed racist policies of the Greek Government, the EU and the NATO in the last decade. Citing EU protocols, the Greek government is putting human lives at risk, by voting a law that suspends for one month the internationally-recognised right to claim asylum. Moreover, violent and illegal “push back” operations have occurred by Greek soldiers that have been sent to the borders who have been instructed to use violence against refugees in order to block their way to Greece. In a similar way, local far-right and fascist groups are attacking refugees with the tolerance of the Greek government, and in some instances, they capture them and hand them over to the authorities and the army.

Under these circumstances, the Greek political establishment and the media continue to disconnect the refugee flows from the war in Syria and the imperialist invasions in the wider area (Iraq, Afghanistan). They conceal the responsibilities of the current capitalist system and the competition for the energy sources that have destroyed several countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

The anti-refugee policies are the main reason for the growth of the fascist threat in the Greek border areas, with the local governments’ hate rhetoric supporting this threat. There is nothing to divide the workers and people of Greece and the victims of wars and poverty. We will resist and struggle together for a better future.

ANTARSYA demands:

• Open the borders for the refugees
• Asylum, free access to health and education and equal rights for the refugees
• Immediate release of the thousands of refugees from the islands. Immediate closure of refugee (concentration) camps-prisons
• Free and safe transfer of the refugees to mainland Greece, with decent conditions in the cities
• The refugees must be free to travel to any country they want
• Immediate abolition of the racist agreements between the EU, Greece, and Turkey
• Immediate abolition of Dublin II Regulation
• No to Fortress Europe
• Stop the war in Syria. No participation of Greece in the imperialist invasions
• We will never participate in wars for fracking and exclusive economic zones
• Internationalist solidarity between Greek and Turkish people and other countries in the area

Do not use the troops for repression against refugees!

Meet on Tuesday 10th March at 6pm outside the Holland Park tube station. The demo will then proceed to the Greek Embassy nearby.

ANTARSYA, 5.3.2020

On the stance of the Left in the upcoming elections

The general election in the UK comes in a time where the political debate is heated, thus its results will show division on actual facts and policies. The conservative party manages to maintain a high percentage of total votes, which is still critical, since an increasing number of remain voters, mainly represented by the LibDems, are prepared to vote tactically, in order to prevent a Tory government.

The Labour party comes second in the polls and their supporters have been campaigning feverishly during the pre-election period across the country. Comparing to the previous elections where Corbyn was the LP leader, in this one, there is a vast list of policies that seem to be in the radical side of the typical agenda even for a social democrat. Speaking of free movement, the green new deal, support of the NHS and the struggles in education sound all like a melody to a working class that lives the Tory realism for far too long. And rightfully poor constituencies prefer Corbyn, young voters and neighbourhoods where national minorities are highly present support strongly the LP.

It is more than clear that the Labour party’s goal is merely a system reform. But no answers will be given to the real problems of the working class through the parliamentary way. Capitalism will still be exploiting people’s labour, discrimination against women, migrants and other minorities will still exist and the bourgeois class will continue to reproduce itself. Not to mention the absence of any analysis and critique to the EU’s role on immigration policies and the country’s participation in the NATO alliance. Change in our views comes with organising from below, in the workplace, the union, the university and the community to challenge bourgeois power in its different forms. It is the working class and its oppressed allies that can deliver change, when given command of their own lives.

British politics suffer by another element that is fundamentally the same as the above; Internationalism. It is not McCluskey’s racist comments on immigration that typically run through the whole of society and it comes from a deep conservatism that is primarily fault of the LP. It is the total lack of communication with the rest of European politics that leads to this faith in social democracy with a certain delay.  With a disturbed belief in national sovereignty that supposedly other countries don’t have, British left wingers think that the LP will not be a farce as it was all over Europe in its latest version just because in their country the will of the people is taken more seriously.

Sadly, it is the market that guides politics and not the other way around, and it is the same in the UK as everywhere else. The financial crisis caused a coordinated reaction in the European population. The neoliberal parties that took the initiative to recapitalise the banks lost support and the population gradually turned to alternative parties of the new Social Democracy. This has happened in France, Spain, Portugal and Greece. In fact, the Greek example was enough for the population of the Spanish state and France to lose trust in their similar parties, Podemos and France Insoumise respectively.

The financial crisis has affected British politics, as well. Corbyn himself is not a personality that radicalises the generalised mistrust to the ruling class. He is merely giving a parliamentary battle, soaked in pragmatism. He is often depictured as the closest you can have to a politician that is also a union leader, yet this is the role of the unions that the social democracy wants; a stand-by role that fights for small demands, while the real politicians ‘’take care’’ of politics. Even more, the radical left organisations that are so keen on defending the LP policies and reforms are nowhere near to have say on them. They are silently taking the role of the observer of the LP and use their activism only as alibi for not doing so, since they cannot describe any hope outside of the LP. But, being an observer in such a struggle leads to being an observer of anything that goes on around you.

Most anticapitalist organisations in the UK left drop the typical argument about the LP and tend to push the discussion to an argument about Corbyn as a person. This tactic shows, apart from a total retreat on the issue of the LP, the lack of any kind of plan for the next day in the political spectrum. There is no intention of a political front of radical left organisations and individuals. Of course, something like that demands that these organisations work first together in movement and through that build relations, but someone would expect some frontal policy even as an empty word. Under this lack of plan the vast majority of the organisations of the Left fall in the plan of someone else, and in this case, of parliamentary, reformist, old-school social democracy.

To be clear, voting and supporting a party that pursues to have parliamentary representation, is a different thing to a party that claims to gain power and implement policies. Even more when talking about one of the strongest states in the world, which leads its own commonwealth and is the right hand of the American imperialism, with such an important place in the Middle Eastern crisis. After all, it is worth to mention that during the recent political debate, Brexit is presented as a certain framework and not a policy by itself, letting some space for discussion on individual issues like public healthcare and education.

To rephrase Dante, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. Intentions do not suffice; we need to fix the problem and capitalism can’t be fixed.

After a false hope comes a real depression; it is crucial for the forces that align themselves with the working class and the oppressed in this struggle to see the dynamic in their hands and look for political solutions that allow them to participate evenly and open the road ahead for future victories.

Kleanthis Antoniou

Marilena Papadaki

In solidarity with the UCU strike!

In solidarity with the UCU strike!

The strike in the UK universities, which started today, shows the accumulated anger of university workers against the increasing attacks of employers on industrial relations. Even though this widespread attack is officially expressed by the employers’ leadership, it is clearly supported and further deepened by the Conservative government.

After the longest strike that has been recorded in the history of higher education against the pensions system reform in 2018, the employers did not consider the strength of unity and fight. They ignored the recommendations of the independent Joint Expert Panel, formed to provide solutions for the pension system, and increased the employees’ pension contributions from 6.5% to 9.6% from October 2019. This, alongside the continuing and increasing job precarity, has led to another victorious ballot call for strike, breaking in practice the anti-union law that requires 50.1% participation to consider a ballot legal.

Apart from the pension dispute, wages and working conditions are of great importance in the current strike. In the wider context of the commercialisation of British universities, the 50 hours working week, according to figures from UCU, and the major increase in the number of teaching and research staff that works on fixed-term, casual, and zero-hours contracts with no rights and security have become a common phenomenon. The worsening of working conditions is also clearly reflected in the fact that higher education employees’ wages have dropped by 17% in real terms since 2009.

The commercialisation of universities should be seen in relation to the further privatisation and financialisation of higher education and the increasingly precarious and insecure industrial relations in universities, manifested in workers’ increasing psychological stress due to the constant requirement to increase productivity.

The early days of the strike proved not only the determination of the university workers but also the strength of student solidarity. From the beginning, employers attempted to use the consequences of the strike to the students to intimidate academics that would participate in the strike. The students’ response was clear through both the numerous motions of support to the strike by student unions and the students’ daily presence on the picket lines.

The current strike has the potential to continue the discussion that started in 2018 for the content and orientation of the university movement, to strengthen self-confidence in organising resistance against the commercialisation of education and to contribute to overcoming contradictions within the union by reinforcing radical voices and paths. It can also show the necessity for a wider alliance of workers and students which would lead to the open questioning of the neoliberal agenda of both the EU and the Conservative government here, and the limits of the class compromise that still lies at the core of the Labour’s agenda, putting at the forefront the need for radical alternatives to the increasing attacks to public education in the UK.

ANTARSYA UK expresses its solidarity with the UCU strike and its members fully support it in practice!

For a strong and successful strike!

ANTARSYA UK

The intervention of Elia Apostolopoulou in the event about climate change under capitalism

The intervention of Gareth Dale in the event about climate change under capitalism

Is global heating reversible under capitalism?

Begin with ad lib on Labour Party GND motion (conference, Sept ’19). 128 CLPs—by far the most. Backed by many unions too—FBU, CWU, etc. Very radical motion. 2030 decarb target. Accept climate refugees. Soak the rich.

There was a commitment, too, to nationalising the fossil fuel industries; a necessary first step to shutting them down.

It’s an inspiring moment; gives a glimpse of the sorts of policies that are needed.

The part of the motion that called for an end to airport expansion was nixed (by a couple of the big unions). Nonetheless, this is huge. (Ad lib)

And it was made possible by mass movements: school strikes, XR. If global heating is to be mitigated at all meaningfully under capitalism, it’ll require much more of this.

We face a conundrum. Capitalism, a system of compulsive accumulation, is impelling the planet towards the tipping points that would lead to runaway warming and a ‘hothouse earth.’ Yet the only powers that, in the short and medium term, can mobilise the resources and manpower that are necessary to launch a sharp change, a GND, are… capitalist states. And if there isn’t a radical global transformation, or at least a transformation in the Global North and the so-called BRICS, in the next decade or two, global heating will likely be impossible to reverse. Much will hang on how the Left tries to finesse this.

If global heating is to be reversed under capitalism—so, overpowering even the effects of the feedbacks—then vast quantities of carbon will have to be removed from the atmosphere and put back into the lithosphere.

Start with tech solutions. Carbon-removal solutions. So far: very little. What are the options?

• Sequestering carbon through regenerative architecture and biochar; afforestation; protecting wetlands.
  • Ad lib on limitations: land!; and the lithosphereàbiosphere/atmosphere problem; trees burning, rotting.
• CCS:
  • From power plants, steel works, cement works. The drawbacks: most of these involve fossil fuels; it’s not removing carbon, just reducing emissions, it’s v expensive; vast arrays of new pipelines required. Much of this infrastructure is likely, in capitalism, to be in the hands of the polluter industries; fox guarding henhouse.
  • Direct from ambient air, to store underground. It removes carbon, but v expensive, vast amounts of energy, chemicals (Sodium hydroxide etc.) That energy would have to be renewable—but renewables (solar, wind, geothermal) = only 1.5% of global total primary energy supply.
• BECCS
  • Ad lib on the Paris Agreement, pinned on BECCS. V expensive, plus land constraints, given huge areas of forest required. Plus the changing land use required will release so much carbon that it may well be pointless even in its own terms.[1]

Possibly, nuclear fusion will suddenly switch on, and some extraordinary catalyst will be discovered to extract carbon at low energy, enabling a massive roll-out of atmospheric carbon capture, massive negative emissions, a return of carbon to the lithosphere, and a reversal of global heating under capitalism. But don’t hold your breath.

The other type of tech: renewables, EVs, HS rail, etc.

Let’s take HS rail. Broadly, it’s an attractive and rational proposal. But, is there a catch?

If you connect up all cities over, say, the size of New Orleans, that’s 50 cities in the US. Add up the links between them. Whatever the network topology, that’s a lot of track.

The rest of the world—of course—needs and deserves prosperity at the same level as the USA. So the Salvadorian needs to rapidly get to events in Manaus and the Muscovite to Omsk and so on around the world, then you might find ….

Well, where will you extract all the materials? I’m not suggesting this colossal construction project is impossible without burning the planet to a crisp. But it might be. You could reach a stage where so much cement has been manufactured and so much iron ore dug for all of this construction that, say, the recent (1990s-2010s) breakneck expansion of materials throughput and GHG emissions in China will look, in comparison, an after-dinner burp.

Concrete facts: Among materials, only coal, oil and gas are a greater source of GHGs than concrete. For the planned 100 miles of new HST track in England, 20 million tonnes of concrete will be poured. To produce a tonne of concrete releases the same tonnage of CO2. [We would be in a different place if CO2 were bright crimson or neon yellow, so we’d see the lurid glow above cement works.]

[By one estimate, concrete already outweighs the combined carbon mass of every tree, bush and shrub on the planet. How much should we add to that?]

It’s all very well saying this’ll all be powered by renewables, but, again, look at the stats. Wind and solar and geothermal—combined—comprise 1.5% of total global final energy supply. Almost zero. And total energy demand is rising, to such an extent that each new 10 MW of renewably-generated electricity displaces at most 1 MW from fossil fuels. The other 9 MW is additional.

Perhaps union- and state-backed renewable campaigns could overcome this. Carpet the world with wind farms?

David McDermott Hughes, Who Owns the Wind? A gorgeous book, an ode to wind power, to wind turbines, it seeks to win our love for turbine-bristled landscapes, and for the people who can make those landscapes become reality. It’s an eco-modernist manifesto. “My landscape of utopia sprouts with steel.”

In southern Spain the author finds intriguing sparks of hope in picaresque traditions and individuals. The picarós: those who follow archaic traditions of survival, ducking and diving. Effective environmentalism requires getting to know poor people; they’re the ones who will carry the changes, potentially benefit the most, and will certainly suffer the most if no global green transformation occurs.

If the poor can benefit from wind energy, argues Hughes, they will gain and so will the world. But a lot hangs on ‘if.’ For who does in fact own the wind?

It’d be a digression to summarise the core argument—(It’s fascinating, highly recommended: why the air should be nationalised….)

Instead, mention an absence that struck me: The book covers wind energy from every conceivable angle. Juridical, technological, political, economic, aesthetic, literary, visual and acoustical, cultural, ethnographic, ornithological….

And yet there’s no mention of the materials and energy inputs. None. Although the machines are discussed excitedly, with lavish attention to detail, the materials and energy and human labour from which they are constructed is entirely occluded from view. It’s as if the turbines, turned by thin air, are made of it too.

Turbines aren’t made of thin air but of concrete, steel, copper, glass fibre, neodymium, etc., all of which require human labour and (at least for now, fossil) energy to mine and manufacture and transport. Some of these processes, esp. neodymium mining, are extremely pollutive, with mines surrounded by toxic lakes and workers and neighbourhoods suffering.

Other hazards are only just now coming to light. Renewables have ramped up use of—and leaks of—sulphur hexafluoride (SF₆). 24,000 times more powerful GHG than CO₂, and lasts in atmosphere thousands of years. (Alternatives to SF₆ are available. But it is nonetheless symptomatic.)

Similar applies to EVs: in many countries (Germany, US), if production and mineral extraction is included (as it must be), they emit similar levels of GHGs over their life cycle than petrol-fuelled cars.

In some GND discussion, there’s a tendency to place considerable faith in tech. E.g. some pin hopes in development of electric aircraft. But look at the small print: such aircraft will at best cover short hops, which would be more energy-efficiently covered by rail. Likewise biofuel [ad lib on coconuts][2]

The conundrum of tech. On one hand, tech applications and innovations will—obviously—play a vital role in any GND. On the other, a defining ideology of capitalist soc is tech fetishism. It arises from (i) the role of innovation in enabling capitals to steal a march on rivals and accrue super-profits, tech rents (i.e. innovation = the elixir of success for individual capitals), and (ii) the importance to capital accumulation of continual novelty, new product lines. Industries try to persuade us we need the latest gadgets or we can’t play a full part in social life. Here’s the puzzle: When is the green enthusiasm for tech simply a manifestation of tech fetishism? Is, e.g., the electric car a vital element in any green revolution or just another product line, to encourage the junking of existing models and purchase of new ones, to keep the wheels of accumulation spinning fast (and faster)?

On the political left, tech fetishism and ‘green growth’ sync with a politics of class coalition. The emphasis is on strategies that the bulk of the capitalist class can support; strategies premised on profit, accumulation, growth.

Is degrowth the alternative?

Ad lib on GND as soc dem; degrowth as Narodnik.

It’s widely supposed that GND and degrowth are antithetical projects. I suggest they are not. Or, more precisely, while the main body of each current is by definition antithetical (green growth vs degrowth), at their left flanks there is a convergence.

Degrowth isn’t a politics of ‘less,’ as some suppose. More accurate is to see it as a politics of ‘less is more.’ There’d be a smaller overall materials/energy envelope, with differentiated contents. For the rich, much much less, while for the billions who lack the basics: more good food, better housing, abundant clean water, efficient sanitation, excellent public transport, quality public amenities available freely to all. For the Global North: less energy use, less beef, fewer cars and planes, but more self-governed time, cleaner air, better public transport, less hierarchy. All this requires transformations of the infrastructures of energy, mobility and social reproduction, and with industrial technology in abundance.

Many degrowthers campaign for large-scale expansion of renewables, public transport, and ‘passive’ houses for all—both of which require colossal construction programmes. Many degrowthers are committed to union strength—crucial for the struggle for a shorter working week and improved public services.

If an anti-capitalist degrowth were to form, it should also set as forceful target: abolition of absolute and relative poverty within a few years.

Degrowthers call for a “reproductive economy of care, understood not only as caring between humans, but also between humans and the non-human environment,” and in this they bear an unmissable resemblance to those on the far left of the GND. I have in mind Alyssa Battistoni’s vision of a future climate-stable socialism “oriented toward sustaining and improving human life as well as the lives of other species,” with emphasis on green- and pink-collar labour such as “teaching, gardening, cooking, and nursing: work that makes people’s lives better without consuming vast amounts of resources, generating significant carbon emissions, or producing huge amounts of stuff.” I’m thinking, too, of Tithi Bhattacharya’s Jacobin essay, ‘Three Ways a Green New Deal Can Promote Life Over Capital.’

Marx/Engels

Resources for critique of growth.

Yes, of course, they’re for dev of “PFs,” but this refers not to material economic growth as such but how human beings develop their capacities and produce goods and services to fulfil their needs. And the ‘needs’ of which Marx/Engels speak are not reducible to material consumption. They regarded the expansion of human needs as perfectly compatible with a reduction in resource use. In Communist Manifesto they hold that the ‘productive forces’ had already (in 1848, before the invention of the car, the telephone, or even the safety pin!) reached the stage at which a transition to communism was feasible.

The purpose of production, for Marx/Engels, is not mere material goods but “the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc.”  Marx contrasts these goals with what would nowadays be called the ‘growth fetish’ that develops within capitalist society, characterised by the appearance of production “as the aim of mankind and wealth as the aim of production.”

Marx insists that the natural environment is a necessary part of wealth, which should be treated with the understanding that it is “the inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of the chain of human generations.” He was a sharp critic of deforestation, of the ecologically unsustainable organisation of agricultural production, and of the wastefulness of manufacturing industry. At the start of Capital he writes that “‘labour is not the only source of material wealth… labour is its father and the earth its mother”—though many of his disciples forgot all about the mother.

Indeed one can go further. Marx = a richly developed critique of the growth paradigm. Because the paramount purpose of capitalist production is value expansion, use values (including land, raw materials, fuels and other natural resources) are treated simply as inputs contributory to that end. Their depletion and degradation do not show up on the bottom line. The drive to value expansion makes radical reductions in the throughput of raw materials and energy extremely difficult to achieve.

Hence, it is an error to interpret Marx and Engels as exponents of a ‘promethean’ productivism.  It is to mistake Prometheus for his first cousin and goddess of the harvest, Demeter. For the cornucopia that is Marx and Engels’ goal cannot be achieved by Prometheus’ means—whether trickery, theft or the exploitation of fire (or its low-entropy hydrocarbon analogues).

It is not an impossible abundance the pursuit of which will smash nature’s limits and release Pandora’s evils into the world. Rather, it is a realisable future geared to the satisfaction of human needs, created by human social labour, with solidaristic political consciousness as precondition. From this vantage point, Marx and Engels’ aspiration towards ‘abundance’ appears neither as techno-fetishising hubris nor as arrogance towards nature’s limits, but is based rather on the recognition that natural resources are appraised and engaged with by human beings politically and sociologically; that is to say, with particular social purposes and objectives that are inherently open to change. To aspire to a state of abundance (I’m adapting David Harvey’s critique of Malthus) is to maintain that human beings have the will, wit, and capacity to develop our state of knowledge, alter our social goals and technological mixes, to modify our material economic practices in accordance with the needs of humanity and of the biosphere. And that means for the Global North: sharp degrowth of overall resource/energy throughput—at least until the 1.5% (mentioned above) is closer to 90%.     Ad lib a conclusion

[1][1]            https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-beccs-might-not-produce-negative-emissions-after-all

[2] https://www.academia.edu/28628731/Green_shift_an_analysis_of_corporate_responses_to_climate_change

Video of the recent ANTARSYA UK event about climate change under capitalism

ANTARSYA UK organised a successful event in a packed room, at SOAS, about the very topical and crucial issue of climate change, seeking to highlight the role of capitalism in the whole process and to deepen the ongoing discussion. A useful and lively debate followed the presentations of the speakers (Elia Apostolopoulou, Gareth Dale, Maria Kadoglou). You can watch the video of the entire event here.

ANTARSYA UK supports the Climate Strike, September 20, 2019

ANTARSYA UK supports the Climate Strike on Friday 20th of September and all the relevant protests that take place in the UK and globally. We welcome all the students, the workers and everyone else that will demonstrate against the climate crisis. This movement is ongoing and growing.

We encourage the presence and the unity on the streets of the anti-capitalist and radical left-wing groups and people to demonstrate seeking to progress this struggle a step further: not by requesting the Big Capital to become more sensitive or by asking a general election, but blaming the ones that are responsible for the climate crisis.

Those responsible for that situation need to pay for the consequences! The large corporations mostly from the global North whose activities all over the world are disastrous for the environment. The governments that do not take any serious measure against them but instead use state violence against the protesters, with thousand arrests.

Friday the 20^th needs to become a big day of climate action. Let’s also make it signal the beginning of a radical struggle that will not stop until we finish with the disastrous effects of capitalism and any form of exploitation.

Let’s all strike and take to the streets on September 20^th against the climate crisis and the capitalist process!

Κείμενο αντί-καλωσορίσματος Ελλήνων μεταναστών στο Ηνωμένο Βασίλειο

Discussion-event: Are Climate Change and Biodiversity Loss reversible under Capitalism? Discussing radical alternatives to the capitalist exploitation of nature

Are Climate Change and Biodiversity Loss reversible under Capitalism? Discussing radical alternatives to the capitalist exploitation of nature

Since the 2008 financial crash, nature-society relationships across the globe have been profoundly transformed by the entrenchment of neoliberal policies in the form of fiscal austerity, deregulation, re-regulation and privatization of natural resources and formerly public property. From mining, fracking, waste disposal and land grabbing in rural locations, to shrinking access and loss of public green spaces, gentrification, urban regeneration, and infrastructure megaprojects in cities, natures within and beyond cities are being expropriated, privatized, commoditized, transformed and degraded with the aim to overcome recession and boost economic growth. At the same time, green capitalism is being promoted as a solution to both the environmental and economic crisis via the creation of various market-based instruments, including carbon credits, biodiversity offsets, payments for ecosystem services, that seek to put a price tag to nature, radically transforming the politics of global biodiversity loss and climate change.

The increasing neoliberalisation of nature manifests new enclosures and reterritorializations aiming to control land and resources by creating new forms of access, claim-making and exclusion, in the process disregarding local traditions, meanings and commitments. The exclusion of community groups, the increasing role of non-elected and unaccountable institutions, and governmental suppression of environmental struggles along with the further shrinking of the welfare state has exposed that the consensus driven neoliberal rhetoric has been increasingly lapsing into undemocratic and even authoritarian environmental governance in an era of a harsh global capitalist crisis.

In response, various social-environmental movements have emerged with the purpose to oppose environmental, social and spatial injustices and the undemocratic character of social-environmental change often putting barriers to the relentless exploitation of nature by capital: the protests against pipelines in Canada and the US, the opposition against gold mining in Romania, Turkey and Greece, the anti-fracking struggle in the UK are among the many examples. Importantly, the last year has also seen a surge of discussions and actions across the globe, including the UK, about climate change. The Climate Strikes and the Extinction Rebellion actions have already had a big impact on the British society while also leading the government to declare an ambiguous climate emergency. However, we believe that the discussion on both the primary causes and the key ways to react has not yet developed at a satisfactory level. The following period is crucial on how environmental actions will evolve in the UK and globally. Political initiatives of the left need to mobilise and inspire workers, youth, and unemployed to act immediately and effectively.

Members of ANTARSYA, the Greek anticapitalist front based in the UK, organise an event to discuss the pressing environmental challenges of our times and possible responses from a radical left perspective. Our aim is to contribute and deepen the ongoing discussion on the drivers and agents of the double crisis of climate change and biodiversity loss, its relation to the capitalist mode of production and radical alternatives to the current production of nature. We invite everyone who considers these issues a relevant cause to a lively debate around the political strategies that we must develop in order to respond effectively and timely.

Speakers include:

Elia Apostolopoulou, University of Cambridge

Gareth Dale, Brunel University

Maria Kadoglou, Observatory of Mining Activity “Anti-Gold Greece”

Saturday, October 5, 17.00, SOAS University, London