To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
October 2, 2019
RE: The environmental movement is not a dead-end
Millions of people around the world demonstrated again on Sept. 27, the second major day of Climate Strike. As on Sept. 20, events took place at thousands of sites around the world. Though events in the U.S. were generally much smaller than Sept. 20, in some countries they were larger. In Italy, for example, a million people took part in demonstrations around the country, including mammoth demos in Rome. Large protests also took place in Germany, Spain, and New Zealand. In Canada, huge demonstrations took place in major and smaller cities, including the one in Montreal, where half a million people – one in four residents! – participated! In London, Ontario, hundreds of people marched through the streets for hours, at various points taking over the streets and blocking traffic. Some of the participants were in town for an international conference on water in the Great Lakes region.
By Pete Brown, Detroit Workers' Voice <>
In an article in the latest issue of their theoretical journal Class Struggle (Aug-Sep 2019, Issue No. 101) the Trotskyist organization SPARK denounces the Green New Deal as “a dead end for activists.” The Green New Deal is a set of promises without specifics about how to achieve them. But this isn’t what SPARK objects to. It objects to the idea of raising environmental demands at all. It says that these are “sensible measures”, but there’s no point fighting for them in present society. This is because everything is and has been controlled by the big capitalists, who will not do anything for the masses or anything that’s reasonable for the environment. The article concludes: “Many of the points the Resolution makes might appear simple and reasonable. … But as long as society is controlled by the capitalists, … these are impossible. … Only when the working class takes the power away from the capitalist class will humanity finally have a way to plan the running of society in a rational way, …” (p. 5, pars. 2-5)
And that’s it. This article supposedly about the environment makes no mention of actual struggles going on. No mention of UN summits on the environment and what attitude to take towards the demonstrations critical of them. No mention of the worldwide Climate Strike. No mention of Trump’s gutting of environmental regulations except to say “as long as society is controlled by the capitalists”, etc. No mention of the people in Flint demanding lead-free water except to say, “What do you expect under capitalism?” No mention of the struggles to stop oil exploration in the Arctic. No mention of the struggles against oil pipelines crossing Native American reservations. The whole point of the article is to pour cold water on the hot, burning struggles in defense of the environment and to tell activists “This is a dead end. Instead you should be asking yourselves, why?”
But activists do not become enthused for socialism because of hopelessness. You do not build a militant movement for socialism out of people convinced that nothing can be done. In fact many smaller struggles can be waged, and waged successfully. It’s possible for workers to wage strikes and win some gains in wages and working conditions. And it’s possible for environmental activists to wage and win some partial struggles. In the midst of these struggles it’s possible for activists to advocate a working class approach – to emphasize going to the masses and to demand working class control of the environment. By emphasizing positive demands activists can mobilize the masses and actually win some victories under capitalism. This will encourage the masses to go further and build a militant movement for socialism.
(SPARK’s article can be found at https://the-spark.net/csart1011.html.)
By Pete Brown, Detroit Workers' Voice <>
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Posted on October 4, 2019
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