December 11, 2020
Révolution écosocialiste (RE).
Interviewed by the magazine
Nouveaux Cahiers du Socialisme, Benoit Renaud explained that he and the other signatories felt that an earlier networking group, the Réseau écosocialiste founded in 2013, was no longer the activist organization they had originally envisaged, and instead functioned as little more than a “talk shop” (
lieu d’échange). The new organization, he said, would succeed the Réseau, which will now be dissolved. “The mass mobilizations of recent years over climate change and the emergence of more radical groups within this movement (like Extinction Rebellion) indicate to us that the future of the struggle for socialism will probably unfold to a large degree through the political development of the ecology movement.”
December 11, 2020
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Prometheus “Our Green New Deal,” read the Labour Party’s 2019 manifesto, “aims to achieve the substantial majority of our emissions reductions by 2030 in a way that is evidence-based, just and that delivers an economy that serves the interests of the many, not the few.”[1] This was a central pillar of the election platform that suffered an historic defeat last December. As the ecological crisis continues unabated, the Green New Deal has solidified its place as the programmatic response among the left. Its core ideas have reappeared in the immediate economic crisis in the guise of a ‘green recovery’ and calls to ‘build back better’. This article argues that, from the perspective of Marxist ecology, the apparent path between a Green New Deal and an ecosocialism is confronted with several contradictions and strategic problems.
December 11, 2020
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Left Voice More than a century ago, Eduard Bernstein claimed that it was time for socialists to abandon their revolutionary goal of overthrowing capitalism. He argued that the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) should adopt a reformist approach that strictly relied on legal channels, such as elections in which socialism could slowly be voted into power. To support his position, Bernstein cited the authority of Friedrich Engels, who had allegedly reached similar conclusions in one of his last works. Citing Engels’s introduction to Marx’s
Class Struggles in France, Bernstein argued, “Engels is so thoroughly convinced that tactics geared to a catastrophe have had their day that he considers a revision to abandon them to be due even in the Latin countries where tradition is much more favourable to them than in Germany.”
December 11, 2020
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Reports from the Economic Front This is the first in a series of posts that aim to describe and evaluate the World War II mobilization experience in the United States in order to illuminate some of the economic and political challenges we can expect to face as we work for a Green New Deal.
This post highlights the successful government directed wartime reorientation of the U.S. economy from civilian to military production, an achievement that both demonstrates the feasibility of a rapid Green New Deal transformation of the U.S. economy and points to the kinds of organizational capacities we will need to develop. The post also highlights some of the strategies employed by big business to successfully stamp the wartime transformation as a victory for “market freedom,” an outcome that strengthened capital’s ability to dominate the postwar U.S. political economy and suggests the kind