Heroes, villains and opportunists at Dubai climate summit

For small countries, these meetings are the only way to confront the major global powers face to face and have their opinions considered

Last December, COP28 concluded in Dubai, yet another summit in which the meagre progress is still far from addressing the real climate emergency we are experiencing. Although the need to get rid of fossil fuels has finally been recognised after 28 years of negotiations, the result is still bitter, especially because of the inclusion of false solutions such as nuclear energy, carbon capture, or gas as an alternative fuel, all of which are too expensive and dangerous technologies.

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Research and analysis to provoke public awareness and critical thinking

We contribute to the liberalisation of the democratic instituions of society, for they have been captured by the owners of the market. They work in tandem with their market agents, who, posing as public servants, are entrenched in the halls of government. The political class has betrayed its public mandate and instead operates to impose a marketocratic state to maximise the shareholder value of the institutional investors of international financial markets. They own the global corporations and think they own the world on behalf of their very private interest.

Our spheres of action: true democracy – true sustainability – living wage – basic income – inequality – ecological footprint – degrowth – global warming –human development – corporate accountability – civil, political, economic, social, cultural and environmental rights, responsible consumption, sustainable autonomous citizen cells...

Parting from an ethos of true democracy and true sustainability, We, the citizenry, work to advance the paradigm whose only purpose is to go in pursuit of the welfare of People and Planet and NOT the market.

• TJSGA is member of:

• © The Jus Semper Global Alliance

Corporate Media, Political and Perpetual War

Long recognised as one of this country’s most incisive journalists and media critics, Norman Solomon has written a new book that deserves to be widely read. In less than three hundred pages, he marshals a remarkable amount of information to document the contours of the so-called war on terror waged by the United States since 9/11, the terrible human costs incurred abroad and at home, and the ways in which corporate media and political elites strive to make this perpetual war and its catastrophic consequences almost entirely invisible to the public. The book is replete with important insights into how the media establishment and government officials from both major political parties promote the interests of the military-industrial complex. In War Made Invisible, readers will also find an eloquent moral call to end this state of affairs. All things considered, this volume is a valuable contribution to the literature on the role of corporate media and political elites in sustaining the war on terror.

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A New Environmental History of Socialist States

For a long time, discussion of the environmental legacy of the Soviet Union on the left was characterised by hasty dismissals of the irrelevance of the experience for contemporary struggles or suspicion of anyone raising the question as a mouthpiece for capitalism. The recent openness to rethinking non-capitalist environmental efforts of the past has been a welcome development. In a spirited 2015 article on Soviet ecology, John Bellamy Foster argues that “the USSR can be seen as a society that generated some of the worst ecological catastrophes in history but that also gave birth to some of the most profound ecological ideas and practices, based on materialist, dialectical, and socialist intellectual foundations.” He focuses primarily on ecological thinking in the late Soviet era to highlight the fresh, innovative, and under-appreciated contributions of Marxist scientists and philosophers, who were grappling intellectually with environmental problems. While seeing positive trends in environmental performance at the very end of the Soviet period, he also echoes a claim of historians that the ecological revolution in environmental consciousness came to an abrupt and tragic end with the collapse of the country in 1991.

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro advances this interpretative thread even further in his revelatory new book, Socialist States and the Environment: Lessons for Ecosocialist Futures. By expanding the study to all known efforts to establish socialism in modern states, he comes to an even more recuperative conclusion. Not only “were some disastrous environmental impacts of state socialism…neither pervasive nor intrinsic,” but the net effects of socialist states were “environmentally constructive.” The “accomplishments within state-socialist countries” are “practicable examples from which ecosocialist futures can be built.”

An additional lesson from the environmental history of state socialism for ecosocialist efforts today concerns the imperative for economic growth. Where socialist states mirrored the logic of unending economic expansion in the capitalist world (following a fair, or at least widespread, reading of Marxism that views history as unfolding in a series of stages), they tended to dramatically despoil the environment. Where socialist states followed more sustainable practices, such as nature conservation, recycling, ecological monitoring, strict regulations, and aiming for sufficient conditions for living well (instead of ever-increasing and evermore intensive consumption of material resources), they offered possible environmental paths for the future. The fraught struggles within the left in Ecuador over extractivism in the twenty-first century portend the continued salience of the problem of growth economies for ecosocialist efforts. While ecosocialists and current advocates of degrowth have not always seen eye-to-eye, Engel-Di Mauro has played a significant role in helping bridge these divides by hosting two discussion forums on degrowth ideas in Capitalism Nature Socialism in 2012 and 2019. Judging from his editorials, he became more open to the possibility for a unification of these two approaches over the interim. Though degrowth perspectives barely feature in the analysis of Socialist States

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From Imperialism to Green Imperialism: Tools of World-Systems Analysis in the Face of the Great Ecosocial Crisis

Humanity is at the most challenging crossroads in its history. Anthropogenic productive activity, framed within the capitalist mode of production, has caused most planetary boundaries to be exceeded and others to be strained. This has caused, among other things, temperatures to reach maximums never before experienced by our civilisation, species to become extinct at an unprecedented rate, the loss of soil fertility to become the norm, and the oceans to boil to the point of leaving the poles on the brink of their disappearance while acidifying and suffocating life in them. At the same time, civilisation does not lose sight of an increasingly threatening war horizon in which a nuclear outbreak cannot be entirely ruled out. And against this backdrop, a galloping decline of materials and energy sources is unfolding, putting pressure on every vector of the eco-social apparatus to the point of casting a shadow over the future accessibility of our societies' livelihoods and their very survival as we know them.

Amid this panorama of ecological devastation and military escalation, there is a growing impression, both justified and worrying, that mainstream geopolitical analyses are often too lazy to address the role of the planet's biophysical limits in shaping the global hierarchy between states and their regimes of dependency. On the flip side of this impression, but equally justified and worrying, there is also a growing sense that modern environmentalism suffers from excessive naïveté (and often ambiguity) in understanding the global political-economic dynamics that condition eco-social conflicts.

This combination of "oversights" has allowed capitalist elites, among many other things, to adopt many expressions of a supposedly environmentalist character to protect and perpetuate their domination. Thus, by means of the "green" label, global capitalism has managed to actualise its planetary and human plunder in a highly efficient manner. Greenwashing camouflages the interests of exploitation and appropriation of life and natural goods on which capitalism itself is based to adapt them to a terminology that paves the way for its expansion. It is the continuation of business as usual by other means: a new mode of accumulation that tunes business to the fashion of the times of ecological emergency. The "creative destruction" of capitalism sees business everywhere, even in disaster.

The dangerousness of this handling of reality, even more so in an era marked by a combination of eco-social crises, makes it essential to identify and unmask those central aspects of the green narratives of global capitalism in order to understand its conjuncture and the projections it allows us to glimpse. This paper aims to contribute to studying the relationship between imperialism and political ecology, the characteristics that identify the historical development of ecological imperialism and the eco-social implications of its cosmetic adaptation in a context of growing threat and biophysical concern. In order to do so, it is essential, first of all, to offer an updated, if succinct, definition of the notion of imperialism.

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On the United States Policy to destroy the WTO because it could no longer control it

What the Joe Biden administration has called the “rules-based international order” stands for those institutions of world governance that were created under the control of the United States during its period of undisputed economic hegemony after the Second World War and during the subsequent unipolar order following the demise of the USSR in 1991. The rapid decline of U.S. power in the twenty-first century, associated both with the economic stagnation of the core capitalist countries and the rise of China and other emerging economies, is now calling into question the entire U.S.-dominated rules-based international order. Seeing the writing on the wall, Washington launched its New Cold War on China in 2018, aimed at regaining undisputed U.S.hegemony and unipolarity.

At the center of the New Cold War is the World Trade Organization (WTO), often seen as the crown jewel of the liberal international order.

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The Spectre of ‘Knowledge as Commons’

On October 3, 2023, in an egregious violation of press freedom, the founder of the progressive Indian media company NewsClick, Prabir Purkayastha, was arrested on trumped up charges of accepting foreign donations in exchange for spreading Chinese propaganda. Purkayastha is a Monthly Review author, political commentator, analyst, proponent of open science and technology, and, perhaps most significantly, critic of the Indian government.1 Purkayastha’s arrest must be understood in the broader context of a crackdown on press freedom in India as a means of shoring up the hegemony of Narendra Modi and the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), an issue that Purkayastha himself has analysed in both his book on Indian politics, science, and technology, Knowledge as Commons, as well as in his fascinating new memoir, Keeping Up the Good Fight (both published by LeftWord Press, 2023).2 Knowledge as Commons in particular lays out a vision of an inclusive, secular nation based on the open sharing of knowledge that is directly at odds with the political reality in India today.

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Conceptual approaches to the crisis, extractivism and its alternatives

This article discusses in depth the conceptual and reflective elements shared by the various works that form part of this dossier of Ecuador Debate. We introduce our reflection by critiquing capitalist modernity and its relentless pursuit of unlimited economic growth. This allows us to analyse the extractivist drift produced in Latin America as part of the global capitalist reconfiguration. We conclude by discussing various alternative approaches - post-growth, Sumak Kawsay and food sovereignty - that are capable of guiding and inspiring transformative options for Ecuador, such as those presented here.

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A New Earth Culture

Decrease the material and energetic scales and fight against the unfair accumulation of wealth to build a fairer reality for all living species and the planet

Summers with historic temperatures, droughts and torrential storms; escalating armed conflicts in different parts of the planet; the Mar Menor is dying, hundreds of people arrive in cayuco boats to the Canary Islands while others die on the way; the Sixth Mass Extinction... How we can tackle or even manage to understand the ecosocial crisis in which we find ourselves is not a simple political task.

The environmental movement has long been explaining the scientific causes of the decline processes and ecological alarm in which we find ourselves today, but also proposing initiatives and alternatives that allow us to think that there is a way out. However, the multiplicity of processes and symptoms in which we find ourselves today can generate a feeling of overwhelm and despair. It is, therefore, vital to understand but also summarise and order the events currently causing our lives to be traversed in different ways by the multisystemic crisis in which we find ourselves. To dismantle and rethink the cultural assumptions that sustain them. Putting ideas in order is also necessary for building alternatives, exits, and solutions.

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Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future

We report three major and confronting environmental issues that have received little attention and require urgent action. First, we review the evidence that future environmental conditions will be far more dangerous than currently believed. The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms—including humanity—is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts. Second, we ask what political or economic system, or leadership, is prepared to handle the predicted disasters, or even capable of such action. Third, this dire situation places an extraordinary responsibility on scientists to speak out candidly and accurately when engaging with government, business, and the public. We especially draw attention to the lack of appreciation of the enormous challenges to creating a sustainable future. The added stresses to human health, wealth, and well-being will perversely diminish our politicalcapacity to mitigate the erosion of ecosystem services on which society depends. The science underlying these issues is strong, but awareness is weak. Without fully appreciating and broadcasting the scale of the problems and the enormity of the solutions required, society will fail to achieve even modest sustainability goals.

I.A.