http://climateandcapitalism.blogspot.com/2007/07/uk-socialists-boost-intl-ecosocialism.html

In what promises to be a milestone event, ecosocialists are preparing to meet in Paris to launch a new international. Michael Lowy and Joel Kovel, authors of the ecosocialist manifesto, have called the meeting on October 7 in Paris to bring ecosocialists together.

The manifesto is symbolic of the way that socialists are increasingly acknowledging the green roots of Marxism. Greens, meanwhile, are realising that capitalism is the cause of climate change and other ecological ills. Climate change is an urgent concern for the political mainstream. But the economic roots of environmental problems in the short term pursuit of profit are pushed to the sidelines.

Rather the emphasis is on individual consumer action and on solutions. via carbon trading and pollution quotas. Equally Marxists in the 20th century largely treated environmental questions as of secondary importance and often were tempted to interpret Marxism in a narrowly productivist form.

However there is a growing awareness that Marx and Engels were ecologists, concerned centrally with problems of deforestation, soil erosion, food additives and air pollution.

Engels’ famous Condition of the English Working Class looked at how pollution wrecked the health of the proleteriat. Marx.s first political journalism showed how peasants were excluded from the woods where they collected fallen branches for fuel.

Today capitalism still throws peasants off the land, encloses resources and makes profit from the exploitation of the working class and the environment.

The Paris meeting will bring supporters of the ecosocialist manifesto together on a non sectarian basis to look at practical ways of building a sustainable, socialist and democratic future.

Green Left, the ecosocialist and anti-capitalist platform in the Green Party; Socialist Resistance and Green Left Weekly will be sending representatives.

Ecosocialists from Venezuela will also be involved in the project.

The socialist climate change blogger Ian Angus is one of the organisers. He notes: “This meeting is a very preliminary first step. We will get to know each other, establish a provisional organising committee, and begin discussions of projects and activities.”

The main goal, he added, would be to set a time, place and preliminary agenda for a larger meeting in 2008. There it was hoped to have broad participation from green-left activists around the world.

The aim in Paris is to allow groups and individuals from different political affiliations to network so as to deepen understanding of ecosocialist ideas and to further common projects.

This will be neither a talking shop nor a top-down monolith but a means of creating an ecosocialist politics that has real bite.

Marx summed up the objective in Capital III:

“Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations.”

The point, as always, is to make Marx’s statement real.

Derek Wall is the Green Party of England and Wales Principal Speaker.

This article was posted on Monday, July 2nd, 2007 and is filed under Climate Change, Eco-socialism, Extra! Extra!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.