For An Ecological, Free Society

Welcome to the new Pittsburgh (PGH) Green Left blog. I am hoping to provide essays and educational material about a new kind of leftist politics: one that integrates the best ideas of socialist and anarchist thought, with the views and ideas of modern movements for environment, social justice, and peace.

As a short introduction to the ideas, let me present a recent thread I wrote about how the ecological crises we face such as climate change are deeply tied to a large number of other issues: poverty, racism, imperialism, much as Martin Luther King, Jr., originally spoke about, but also issues of healthcare, education, and democracy itself.

Only by a holistic study of how all of these issues are interrelated and connected can we develop a plan for real system change. I hope the following thread, which forms sort of a short essay, helps provide context for why we need a new political and cultural movement around green values.

Once you look at the causes and solutions to the climate crisis, you realize how intertwined everything is. We have to address capitalism, imperialism, racism, & build democracy to effectively deal with pollution & climate long-term. Climate change isn't a "single issue", that's an establishment talking point. It is the UNIFYING issue, the end result of a combination of a host of other problems. We cannot significantly tackle climate without addressing root causes -- carbon emissions alone aren't enough!

Capitalism causes the climate crisis, because the endless drive for profit means an endless consumption of greater and greater amounts of resources. You cannot have forever growth. Period. Pretending that you can results in the pollution and problems we see today.

But the wealthy aren't generating wealth all on their own -- they have to steal it from someone (they have to keep more of a worker's products than what the worker is paid in salary). So this leads to all sorts of labor abuses, child labor, forced labor (slavery), for max profit.

Naturally many people object to forced labor of other people and children, recognizing it as wrong and immoral -- so capitalism relies on classism & racism to *justify* their exploitation of workers. Capital relies on the dehumanization of other groups to justify its wealth. "The poor are on drugs or spend all their money on alcohol or whatever" -- so an excuse to not pay them too much. Similar goes for racism and sexism -- Mexicans or Black people are "lazy" or whatever and don't deserve more money, and women "can't do men's work" so get paid less.

Of course these groups look to challenge stereotypes & dehumanization, and without representation in government, turn to activism and protest. So police are used to stop those protests against the ruling class and capital, and push the narrative that those groups are "trouble". Notice who police often target: Black & Brown people, labor strikes and union activist, and protesters of all sorts no matter how non-violent: anti-war, women's rights, environmental, etc. These are all groups that challenge capitalism, whether they know it or not. For example, the Pennsylvania state police were literally founded in the late 1800s to oppose labor strikes and protect capitalist property. They brutalized peaceful labor strikers in Pittsburgh to protect the Carnegie Steel facility and get workers working again.

So that's the labor here, and resources here. But capitalism always must produce more, more products and more profits. So what happens when you run out of people to exploit at home? You start going overseas. The pursuit of profit then turns into imperialism and colonization.

Corporations use private security forces and often even government military to justify invading and seizing other countries' resources. The people there are exploited if not outright genocided. Look at Africa -- oil companies have private security forces that regularly attack and kill locals, seizing their land as government looks other way and even cooperates with them. Of course that mindset also happens here in the US, such as at Standing Rock. Despite government treaties with the indigenous, US government under Obama looked the other way as corporations seized land and built a pipeline, protected by brutal private security and even police.

So now capital has invaded other countries for resources to keep up profits, what next? Naturally, natives are not happy and resist, so that gives authoritarians in government an excuse to help corporate friends by saying "We need a strong military! Look how many people hate us!"

It turns out that destroying countries & occupying them so you can demand lots of money to "repay" costs and rebuild is super profitable! So now the military-industrial complex is "creating jobs" and profits by protecting the profits of anti-environmental corporations with war. Patriotism appeals to wealthier people to justify the war because you're "only protecting your freedom" from those people overseas that we've already demonized and dehumanized to justify the invasion in the first place.

Meanwhile, the poor who can't otherwise find work get funneled into military jobs to keep up the occupation forces and military-industrial complex profits. So many jobs now rely on war that government officials throw their hands up & scream "JOBS!" when you demand an end to war. This literally happened at a military base near Pittsburgh that was scheduled to be closed. So many people had jobs there that local representatives screamed at the Pentagon until the decision was made to keep it open. Even top generals wanted it closed but was kept for jobs.

So wow where are we? Militarism & imperialism use jobs & racism to justify occupation to justify stealing resources from people around the globe in order to keep up the insane focus profit that is chewing up resources which leads to waste, pollution, and climate change.

That pollution has side effects -- not just on climate, but our health! People that live near factories are exposed to toxins and die at young ages -- unless they pay out $$ for care. So now capital is profiting on medicine to treat the problem capital made in the first place.

As capital profits the most from war, healthcare, fossil fuel extraction, and other things, that's where the jobs go. Some of those are technical jobs, so there's a bigger push for a college education - not to be educated citizen, but to do technical work that increases profit. Of course student loan interest is profitable, so if you can convince everyone to go, you've also convinced people to give banks a constant stream of income. So now an education, which was once viewed as a public good, has become just another profitable "industry".

All of these things -- student loan interest, lack of affordable healthcare, militarized police, imperialist war and military policy, and much more -- are the result of government decisions. And specifically *top-down* government decisions, pushed on us by the ruling class. Voter suppression, gerrymandering, keeping minor parties and independent candidates off the ballot, superdelegates -- all of these things reinforce a ruling aristocracy that controls most of government, & uses police and courts to force their decisions on us without our consent. I guarantee that if we put any of these issues up for a national referendum -- give everyone a democratic vote, yes or no! -- that they'd all fail. The people don't want sky-high student loan interest or medicine costs. The people don't want wars. The people don't want pollution.

So a lack of real democracy makes these decisions possible while pretending it is done in the name of the people. It's meant to give an air of legitimacy to a decision making process that is NOT legitimate, a process that emphasizes profits over people. The two party system uses "But we're not as bad as the other color!" as a way to keep people trapped in that system, just enough people to continue to justify their system and make it "legitimate" despite a majority not trusting it or liking it. They demonize the Green Party for example precisely because it is speaking out against all of this. If we were truly democratic, there'd be no issue with letting Greens on the ballot and working to win at the polling booth, but they don't WANT fair elections.

I'm probably leaving out a lot of things, but I hope this thread got the point across. The climate crisis isn't a stand-alone thing, it is DEEPLY tied with: capitalism, poverty, racism, sexism, imperialism, militarism & militarized police, healthcare, education, democracy.

As soon as you start poking at one thing, you realize it is so intertwined with other issues that you can't successfully change that one thing without running into barriers because of other things. We can't properly deal with healthcare until we fix the environment, which means stopping all of the exploitation and capitalist need for profit. We can help a bit with programs like single payer, but that requires getting government to agree to it. Getting government to agree is unlikely because their primary concern is protecting corporations, capital, profits, not the people. To the extent that *some* representatives do care about people they're so trapped in neoliberal thinking that they think "free markets" will fix it.

Free markets of course do nothing of the sort, and totally free markets become imperialist corporate monopolies that again exploit workers both locally and abroad. Regulated markets then become state-backed imperialist monopolies. Both lead to militarism and imperialism. You could try to get people to vote for new government representatives, but if they are within the two-party system, they face immense pressure to adopt neoliberal stances to "grow jobs" and what not. Outside, the voter suppression and ballot access laws make it very hard. So now you're looking at a campaign to make better democracy in order to then get better people elected, which is sort of putting the cart before the horse when the people you oppose are the ones that have to pass the democratic reform that you need to oppose them.

This is an INCREDIBLY complicated problem that really gets at the roots of what sort of society we want to live in. It requires us to fundamentally challenge our core beliefs about what a "good" society should and must look like. I can't pretend that I know what the answer is; unfortunately, there's no checklist to follow that would just fix everything automatically. (If only we had an big "emergency" button that would reset society with a push!). So we have to seriously look at a holistic approach.

Fundamentally, the power is on the side of the people. That's fact number one to recognize. When the people are organized and united, we can make anything we want happen. So what we need is a core set of values we agree on, a detailed plan, then to work to organize. Acting without a plan can often backfire and make situations worse; we don't want to just rush in. We also need a good plan and strategy that people will agree to as we recruit and organize. So we need direct actions with a solid basis in theory. To that end, we face a lot of propaganda. Corporate media of course blasts pro-corporate, pro-market propaganda 24/7, but that has been so integrated into our culture that even many workers repeat those talking points, siding with the capitalist class more than the working class.

So I think a fundamental aspect is *education*. We can't win a social revolution without educating people. To be clear, this isn't meant to imply that people are "stupid" or can't think for themselves -- the democratic society we want to build can't fall for divides like this. Rather, in the face of widespread propaganda, many people don't recognize the widespread impacts of these issues. We've been taught that, even when we organize as activists, we need to focus on one issue at a time instead of looking at the big picture of how things interrelate. Only by all of us talking with each other can we piece together the bigger puzzle and truly understand the impacts. And only by understanding the big picture can we oppose it and create a new system that avoids these issues. Incomplete action risks propping up other parts.

Aside from knowing the specifics about what today's system does, we should also have a good sense of what values we want to promote. In other words, what does *freedom* actually mean for us? For background theory about what freedom and democracy *should* mean in the context of an ecological society built to be sustainable and manage the climate crisis, I think Bookchin is an excellent reference. "The Ecology of Freedom" and "The Next Revolution" are great reads. I also like Kropotkin's "The Conquest of Bread" as a description of how we can create self-governing communities that promote freedom and provide for the needs of all: food, shelter, clothing, medicine. I'm not saying folks like Bookchin should be treated as gospel. The global climate crisis, and extent of global capitalism, is unprecedented in human history. We're likely going to need to develop new ideas, but I think these are excellent starting points.

The solution has to be a cultural revolution, not just a political revolution. We have to radically and fundamentally rethink how we live, and what it means to live. If we don't, humanity will go down with the "ship". It's eco-socialism or barbarism and eventually death. I don't think it's impossible yet. Humans are adaptable. Technology can aid us in some respects. Large urgent mobilization can win, but we have to have a plan and believe in ourselves that it can be done. It's not going to be easy. But we have to do it. So let's get to work.