Marx and Engels as Polyglots

Recollecting and interpreting the past for present purposes requires a language. Such a language is not naturally given but needs to be socially constructed. What is more, its vocabulary and grammar stem from linguistic legacies of past ideologies. Marx draws in this regard an analogy, comparing acquisition of a political language with mastering a natural language: “a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new.”

These lines were expressive of Marx’s theoretical investments in and intellectual sensibilities to the fabric of any ideological language. A master of political prose himself, Marx was well aware of the fact that any proper grasp of bourgeois societies requires a close attention to how social, economic, and political affairs are theoretically depicted, politically propagated, and linguistically articulated according to certain class interests.

Edward Aveling recollected that Engels’s home was frequently visited by a large number of socialists from many countries: “Engels could converse with all of them in their own language. Like [Karl] Marx, he spoke and wrote German, French, and English perfectly; nearly as perfectly in Italian, Spanish, Danish, and also read, and could get along with Russian, Polish, and Romanian, not to mention such trivialities as Latin and Greek.”

For Marx and Engels, fluency in reading, writing, listening, or speaking seems to have never been a goal for its own sake. Keen interest in various languages, yes, but always as part of a scientific purpose and political commitment. Socialist internationalism required, and, to some extent, still requires polyglottery.

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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

Collective Capabilities for Organisational Democracy: The Case of Mutual Social Enterprises

Democratic forms of enterprise and economic governance are needed to help address urgent societal challenges where hierarchical decision-making and governance approaches are clearly failing. There is insufficient understanding, however, of the capabilities needed by enterprises to implement and sustain organisational democracy in pressurised operational contexts. We focus on the role of collective capabilities, which arise from interactions between individuals to create collaboration and collective benefits. Interview evidence from 12 mutual social enterprises – organisations that trade with a social purpose – is used to explore the learning processes that underpin the generation of collective capabilities for organisational democracy. The analysis leads us to a theoretical model of collective capabilities development that responds to three fundamental areas of challenge: (i) Adaptive design of governance structures and processes, to balance ‘bottom-up’ democracy with ‘top-down’ stewardship control; (ii) Embedding, extending and revitalising democracy, by supporting the voice, capabilities and confidence of workers and users to participate in collaborative governance; and (iii) Fostering deliberative learning, to navigate tensions and conflict between plural perspectives and achieve collective aims. In concluding, we reflect on some institutional and cultural barriers to organisational democracy and the case for more concerted policy action to realise its potential as a crucial component of economic democracy.

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The Climate Movement’s Fight for Adaptation 

The climate movement has traditionally seen adaptation as the fig leaf of climate inaction. But local communities, civil society, and activist groups around the world are now pressuring governments to include adaptation alongside mitigation measures. Is this shift a positive step in the fight for climate justice?

Legal efforts to ensure states adopt environmental and climate adaptation measures are increasing globally. Neither mitigation nor adaptation alone will be sufficient to combat the challenges posed by climate chaos and the destruction of ecosystems. “There are going to be impacts from climate change that we can’t mitigate and we can’t adapt to, and there will be losses and damages. This really raises the questions of where is that money going to come from, and who should it come from, and how do we get it where it needs to go,” Kuhl says.

Climate advocates and experts are convinced climate action must include both adaptation and mitigation measures. This means recognising the challenges of both and promoting action to address them.

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Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries

The planetary boundaries framework update finds that six of the nine boundaries are transgressed, suggesting that Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity. Ocean acidification is close to being breached, while aerosol loading regionally exceeds the boundary. Stratospheric ozone levels have slightly recovered. The transgression level has increased for all boundaries earlier identified as overstepped. As primary production drives Earth system biosphere functions, human appropriation of net primary production is proposed as a control variable for functional biosphere integrity. This boundary is also transgressed. Earth system modelling of different levels of the transgression of the climate and land system change boundariesillustrates that these anthropogenic impacts on Earth system must be considered in a systemic context.

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The Land Defender's Call

Protests against extractive projects, whether ridiculed or violently quashed, are critical defences of nature and wellbeing, both under attack from global corporations, oligarchs, and complicit governments. Indigenous peoples give voice to the change in vision necessary for a stronger position in challenging times.

Our foolish, short-sighted, arrogant beliefs that we have dominion over nature got us here. It is no less foolish, shortsighted, and arrogant to believe we can solve the climate crisis we are waging from the mindset of dominion. Survival means necessary, radical repair of our relationship with nature, which can and must take numerous pathways, including personal risk for the benefit of all.

These direct acts are neither cutesy nor extreme. Neither are they a silver bullet in this fight that is both intergenerational and existential.

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The Dream of a Thing: Refounding the Economy of a Venezuelan Commune

The world has long had the dream of a thing of which it only needs to become conscious for it to possess in reality.
—Karl Marx to Arnold Ruge, 1843

Probably the most famous saying of José Carlos Mariátegui, often seen as the founder of Latin American Marxism, is that, on our continent, socialism should be “not a copy or imitation but rather a heroic creation.” Chávez gave equal weight to the latter part, which focused on the construction of new social relations as a popular, constitutive act. He was surely right to do so. For what would socialism be if not an innovative creation of the people? Beyond the refusal to copy and imitate, Chávez saw that what was needed was a difficult but necessary collective effort of the masses that would involve their engaging in iterative experimentation—investigation, participation, and action—in building socialism.

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Provoking Awareness and Action for Geocratia

Activating revolutionary movements for new ecosocial contracts for Geocratia, a vision for building the People and Planet and not the market paradigm

Contrary to the dominant narrative, we do not live in democratic but in utterly unsustainable marketocratic societies. Governments are merely agents implementing and protecting societal structures, providing the best conditions for maximising capital accumulation demanded by financial markets. This requires the unrelenting production and consumption of resources, stark labour exploitation, and sheer wealth inequality, with growth deemed the overriding indicator of progress. Such narrative addresses the ecological crisis through “green capitalism”, which deliberately makes people believe we only need to transition from fossil to renewable energy without altering the structures of capitalism and our consumeristic lifestyles. This way, unrelenting economic growth and its inherent consumerism remain the indicators of progress. This has caused a planetary rift, taking us into an unsustainable trajectory where the odds we will face planetary catastrophes and putting the existence of life at monumental risk in the next twenty years are likely unless we veer fast against it. I argue we can only achieve enjoyable and sustainable lives by drastically decreasing our ecological footprint. This requires replacing capitalism with the new paradigm of Geocratia or “government by the Earth”, where we reorganise societies to build a new ecocentric edifice centred on caring for our planet. To accomplish this, we must build a revolutionary movement from the base to circumvent the traditional political structures of party systems and legislative bodies to strike on the system to force governments to pact new geocratic ecosocial contracts. Here, I describe how it can be done.

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Navigating desires beyond growth

The critical role of fantasy in degrowth’s environmental politics and prefigurative ethics

As a critical environmental political project, the degrowth movement contests the hegemony of economic growth. Much scholarship has sought to unpack degrowth’s proposals to reduce matter and energy throughput and to promote socio-ecological justice, democracy and wellbeing. Few studies, however, examine how the movement sustains itself. In this article, therefore, we explore the role fantasy plays in the movement’s emergence and sustenance. We draw on semi-structured interviews and officially-disseminated documents to examine the discourse of degrowth through a Critical Fantasy Studies lens, arguing that fantasies structure supporters’ desires and sustain the energy lying behind their environmental politics and actions. We suggest that the fantasy of ‘mutual dependence and care’, in particular, affectively fortifies their efforts to contest economic growth’s hegemonic norms and, in doing so, bolsters degrowth’s distributed modes ofpolitical action while also allowing its members to cultivate a prefigurative ethics of engagement.

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The European Green Deal on rural agriculture, energy transition and neo-colonial collapses in the Global South

The European Green Pact aims to address the economic contradictions between agribusiness and the declining primary sector, which are causing irreparable damage and fracturing nature. We also analyse the double standard of the Deforestation-Free Supply Chain Law, one clearly evident in the EU and the other, hidden, and extra-territorial, in the Brazilian Amazon. Added to this is the unlimited demand for the extraction, production, and consumption of strategic materials of geopolitical interest. In contrast, the EU deliberately ignores the limited storage capacity of mines in peripheral countries of the Southern Cone, the Sahel Belt and the rising hegemonic power of China. The energy transition, under the Ukrainian and other ongoing wars in the planetary geography, increases the exponential demand of the periodic table of minerals for security, defence, arms purchases and endless wars. Not yet enough, investments in climate mitigation have been directed towards NATO interests. This has led to an increase in eco-environmental cascades, especially in Southern Europe, plus another continental threat of global reach, the approaching breakdown of the AMOC Current under the indifference of EU politicians and rulers.

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