The environment

Reclaim The Power, a group in the tradition of the “climate camp” of 2006-09, is planning a protest camp at Drax power station, near Selby in North Yorkshire, on 8 to 13 August. Workers Liberty students and others will be part of it. If you want to join our contingent, email awl@workersliberty.org . There is a planning meeting in York on 24-25 February. Drax bosses claim that the power station is a pioneer in renewable energy, but it is not. The power station has been converted from coal to burning wood. The theory is that the wood can be taken from sustainable forests, which as new trees grow...

Disagreements within Workers’ Liberty on ecology are relatively slight. The key idea we bring to most interventions on ecology is the centrality of the working class. Capital’s insatiable drive for accumulation is both short-termist and tunnel-visioned. Longer term and wider considerations are secondary for corporations, the ruling class, and their states. That includes climate change and environmental consideration. The search for ever-greater profit brings capitalists in conflict with any restrictions or limits to profit, human and environmental. The transition away from fossil fuels, and to...

French Trotskyists used to talk of “miserabilism” as a fault to be avoid. The then-mass French Communist Party, into the 1960s, had insisted that workers’ living standards in Western Europe were always going down, down, down. One sub-section of the French Trotskyists, even, long held it as dogma that “the productive forces” were continuously declining. Such sob-stuff is not true. And it amounts to telling workers both that all their organising, strikes, and protests could not avail, and that the old Marxist idea of capitalist development creating the basis for socialism is losing grip. Our...

The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance by Dan Egan documents the history of humanity’s relationship with one of the essential building blocks of life and one of our most important natural resources. Phosphorus in its pure form is extremely reactive and combusts at around room temperature. It was first discovered by German alchemist Hennig Brandt in 1669, who stumbled upon it after conducting elaborate experiments involving boiling gallons of his own urine. Egan charts its use in war and detergent through to the irreplaceable role it now plays in feeding the world’s eight...

Paul Burkett, the prolific author on Marxist ecology, sadly died on 7 January 2024. He was aged 67 and had sudden complications from acute myeloid leukaemia. He began teaching at Syracuse University, then worked at the University of Miami and at Indiana State University for more than twenty years. He retired in 2020. At the turn of the century Burkett made several seminal contributions to the revival of Marxist ecology. His book Marx and Nature: A Red And Green Perspective (1999) re-examined Marx’s works in light of ecological questions. He made good use of the Marx and Engels Collected Works...

Stuart Jordan’s “Nativism, species, and ecology” seems to me far too strong in its critique of the IPBES report, in playing down the risks that the report raises

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

A growing number of ecologists are raising doubts about the whole framing of "invasion biology”

John Bellamy Foster's latest book, Capitalism in the Anthropocene (2022) continues a trajectory that risks spoiling his contribution to understanding ecological questions from a Marxist perspective

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...