Climate change

Port Talbot steel reps and supporters from Unite the Union were at Parliament on 23 January as an Opposition Day debate heard Labour call for Tata and the Government to hold back from any “irreversible decisions” and pledge to put £3 billion into saving steel production in Wales. On 19 January Tata UK announced plans to close the blast furnaces at Port Talbot and make up to 2,800 workers redundant. The knock-on effect would be up to 10,000 job losses. Ieuan Eltham, a Unite shop steward said that these plans, “will decimate Port Talbot and South Wales”. Although the steelworks has already...

Last year, 2023, was the hottest year on record, with one dataset finding temperatures 1.54ºC hotter than pre-industrial levels. 2023 also brought the harshest drought in the history of the Amazon rainforest; an early sign that we may have triggered a major climate tipping point. The Amazon is one of the world’s largest terrestrial carbon sinks. Covering an area equivalent in size to the USA, it is estimated to contain 123 billion tonnes of carbon. As the forest dies it releases this carbon further accelerating global heating. A 2021 study in Nature by Luciana Gatti and colleagues found that...

A list of many campaigns that Workers' Liberty activists are involved with and support, plus info about other organising and resources.

Marcus Decker is still imprisoned. Just Stop Oil asks everyone to sign a petition to stop Marcus’s deportation to Germany.

Updated 2 nd February 2024 John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York’s 2010 The Ecological Rift: Capitalism's War on the Earth has some interesting nuggets, but overall the book is deeply flawed, of limited political value, and tainted by Stalinism in theoretical approach as well as political conclusions. The book’s core is “the central concept of the... ‘metabolic rift,’ or a rift in the metabolic exchange between humanity and nature. … [T]he essence of a metabolic rift is the rupture or interruption of a natural system.” It’s “necessary to ‘restore’… metabolism to ensure...

Workers at the occupied GKN car parts factory at Campi Bisenzio in Italy, near Florence (Firenze), have made an international appeal to support their plan to launch a co-operative producing cargo bikes and solar panels. The struggle they have been waging since 2021 is now under threat, with workers facing the sack and eviction on 1 January 2024. Update: the campaign seems to be suggesting that they have successfully pushed back the deadline; but it is not clear. More soon. The workers' statement is below, above links to more information and to actions you can take. GKN and the asset-stripping...

Each year the COP meeting highlights a deep contradiction in capitalist society. Extraordinary efforts are made to generate climate science... Yet the talks reveal the seeming powerlessness of capitalist politicians to act on this knowledge.

Printed in the first Discusssion Bulletin on ecology, November 2023 Introduction Every political theory has to conceive of the relationship between humanity and nature, whether explicitly or not. It is unavoidable to make some assumptions about the universe and the place of humanity within it, the impact of ecosystems on human lives, as well as the consequences of human social relations for the planet. The relationship between society and nature has been contested throughout human history. 1 What is the most coherent Marxist starting point for tackling these questions? Marx used the term...

Printed in the first Discusssion Bulletin on ecology, November 2023 I think we have few programmatic differences among us on environmental issues, and none of them paralysing. I am confirmed in that by my recent time in Australia, where there is more environmental activism than here, but among our comrades there is no sense that our programmatic positions as mapped by conference resolutions are rendered inoperable by paralysing differences. I sense that many comrades feel that there are huge and paralysing disagreements which they don't understand. The recent geoengineering study group session...

Printed in the first Discusssion Bulletin on ecology, November 2023 "Everything affects and everything is affected by every other thing, and it is mostly because the manifold motion and interaction is forgotten that our natural scientists are prevented from gaining a clear insight into the simplest things" (p178, Dialectics of Nature , F. Engels) In the preface to Capital volume 1 Marx states his purpose is to "reveal the economic law of motion of modern society" and explain “the development of the economic formation of society …as a process of natural history” (p92, Capital vol 1). There is...