CLIMATE AND CAPITALISM II
Saturday 23 October 2010
MMU John Dalton Building, opposite the BBC on Oxford Road, Manchester
Registration and plenary sessions in Room C0.14
10.30-11.00 Registration and bookstalls
11.00-12.00 Opening Plenary
Introduction, Hugo Blanco and contribution from Chilean MPT comrade
12.00-1.30 Morning parallel session workshops:
4th floor in rooms E421, E422 and E423 & E424 (turn right out of C0.14 and go down to main reception area, turn left and go through to lifts, take lift to 4th floor and rooms are off that corridor)
E421: Autonomy and the state:
Manchester Zapatista Solidarity Group (Japhy Wilson)
E422: Local and global sustainable activity:
Eco-region politics (Mark Burton)
E423: Borders, displacement, division:
No Borders (Lauren Wroe)
E424: Long term strategy and immediate steps:
Honduras Solidarity (Dominic McCann)
1.30-2.30 Lunch break
Options are: a) Cafeteria and area to eat food brought in, turn left, area is through doors on right; b) ‘On the Eighth Day’ (vegetarian) turn right and on left past flyover; c) ‘Kro’ (glassy) opposite; d) ‘Odder’ (grungy) turn left, on the left; e) ‘Greggs’ (pies) turn left, on left past Odder.
2.30-4.00 Afternoon parallel session workshops:
same room as morning workshops
E421: Autonomy and the state:
Cuba Solidarity (Derek Wall)
E422: Borders, displacement, division:
Cochabamba (Alice Cutler)
E423: Local and global sustainable activity:
Manchester Climate Forum (Marc Hudson)
E424: Long term strategy and immediate steps:
Mapuche in Chile (Eli Valencia)
4.00-5.30 Closing plenary
Discussion, concluding comments by Hugo Blanco
Monday, 11 October 2010
Friday, 27 August 2010
Monday, 23 August 2010
CC2 Leaflet now available
Here are the pages of the Climate and Capitalism II leaflets for the conference on 23 October.
Download the leaflet front page from www.discourseunit.com/cc2forwebpage1.jpg
Download the middle pages from www.discourseunit.com/cc2forwebpages2&3.jpg
Download the back age from www.discourseunit.com/cc2forwebpage4.jpg
Friday, 21 May 2010
Climate & Capitalism II date is 23 October
The Climate & Capitalism II Day Conference is now set for 23 October 2010 in Manchester. Among the guest speakers will be Peruvian ecosocialist activist Hugo Blanco. The Conference continues the debates and discussions between different activist campaigns in January, and will take them forward in the context of solidarity campaigns that are oriented to the North and South. The conference will have input from global resistance campaigns from the global south, and this is why we have one tentative subtitle flagged for the day. The day might be called 'Climate & Capitalism II: Return of the Rainforest'. A first planning meeting in Manchester on 21 September brought together activists from the Green Left and Socialist Resistance, the two organisations that planned the first Climate & Capitalism Manchester conference. We will be contacting other individuals and organisations, speakers and activist campaigns to participate in workshops and debates. The day will be oriented to action. It starts now!
Climate and Capitalism I: Reflections on January conference
The first Climate & Capitalism Day Conference in Manchester on 23rd January 2010 was a success. The Second Conference on 23 October will be taking forward the debates and stimulus to some real collective action against the twin-threat of climate change and savage capitalism. To make the Second Conference a success, we need to reflect on the lessons of the first one.
The near-on hundred participants in the took part in workshops on migration and climate change, the economic crisis, peak oil and the climate crisis, Marx and ecology, the ‘Million Green Jobs’ campaign, the Campaign for Free Public Transport, methods of struggle, direct action and mass action and on students and youth. The ‘old left’ was there, with comrades from at least seven different organisations who are starting, at least, to link anti-capitalist action with environmental questions. And the new radical movements that are organised around ecological concerns, and bringing a politics that goes well beyond the old left, were there in some force as well. Climate Camp, Plane Stupid and No Borders, to mention just three, make us rethink forms of organisation and methods of struggle.
There are a number of issues the day threw up, and let’s begin to name them here, so we don’t just treat the meeting as a clash of political traditions and breathe a sigh of relief that we won’t have to bother with each other again. Green Left and Socialist Resistance, the two groups that set up the day school, have been grappling with these issues together for some time now and we believe that there is an urgent need for us to work together and learn from each other if capitalism and climate change are to be tackled effectively.
The problem we face now goes further than the destructive, futile and self-sabotaging sectarianism that has plagued the left for so many years. The crisis of capitalism has always impacted on the left organisations, and that has led some groups to turn inwards refusing to speak to comrades from other traditions or engaging in raids to recruit members from campaigns under the guise of deceitful ‘unity’ offensives. It has also led many activists to steer clear of any organised politics, for they conclude that this is the road to authoritarianism, boredom and failure; and then this flight from organisation can lead to a fake transparency and the domination of cliques that rule through what is known in the anarchist feminist tradition as ‘the tyranny of structurelessness’. Meanwhile, while there is a reassertion of traditional power structures inside the movement, the state is organising itself very efficiently to ensure that we each tendency is set against the rest.
Marxists have a particular analysis of the role of the state as an apparatus dedicated to enabling the accumulation of surplus value for capitalism and the imperative for growth that is now destroying the planet is combined with a ruthless defence of class rule and the crushing of those forces that seek to collectivise the means of production. We saw very clearly on the day school that this particular analysis is part of a system of concepts, a language that is alien to many new radical ecological movements. We heard, for example, of ‘just transition’ and non-violent tactics that are part of a debate that is bit-by-bit working through what the role of the state is and how we find ways of comprehending the ‘intersection’ of class oppression with gender, sexuality, race and nation. The task now is not to determine which strategy is right but to work out how, in practice, we can find a way for each strategy to intersect with the others.
The connection between climate and capitalism, between the destruction of nature and the destruction of our creative abilities by this poisonous economic system, is now also forging a new politics in the Marxist tradition. The promise of ‘overabundance’ under socialism and the role of feminism in strategies that are able to grasp the nature of the capitalist state while prefiguring something better in the way we organise now were themes in some our discussions at the beginning of 2010. The urgency of this struggle, the prospect of reaching and passing a tipping point in carbon emissions in the next few years means that we really must fight on different fronts, and that will even include standing in elections, if only to get a platform for a different kind of politics and for shifting to different political agendas.
The near-on hundred participants in the took part in workshops on migration and climate change, the economic crisis, peak oil and the climate crisis, Marx and ecology, the ‘Million Green Jobs’ campaign, the Campaign for Free Public Transport, methods of struggle, direct action and mass action and on students and youth. The ‘old left’ was there, with comrades from at least seven different organisations who are starting, at least, to link anti-capitalist action with environmental questions. And the new radical movements that are organised around ecological concerns, and bringing a politics that goes well beyond the old left, were there in some force as well. Climate Camp, Plane Stupid and No Borders, to mention just three, make us rethink forms of organisation and methods of struggle.
There are a number of issues the day threw up, and let’s begin to name them here, so we don’t just treat the meeting as a clash of political traditions and breathe a sigh of relief that we won’t have to bother with each other again. Green Left and Socialist Resistance, the two groups that set up the day school, have been grappling with these issues together for some time now and we believe that there is an urgent need for us to work together and learn from each other if capitalism and climate change are to be tackled effectively.
The problem we face now goes further than the destructive, futile and self-sabotaging sectarianism that has plagued the left for so many years. The crisis of capitalism has always impacted on the left organisations, and that has led some groups to turn inwards refusing to speak to comrades from other traditions or engaging in raids to recruit members from campaigns under the guise of deceitful ‘unity’ offensives. It has also led many activists to steer clear of any organised politics, for they conclude that this is the road to authoritarianism, boredom and failure; and then this flight from organisation can lead to a fake transparency and the domination of cliques that rule through what is known in the anarchist feminist tradition as ‘the tyranny of structurelessness’. Meanwhile, while there is a reassertion of traditional power structures inside the movement, the state is organising itself very efficiently to ensure that we each tendency is set against the rest.
Marxists have a particular analysis of the role of the state as an apparatus dedicated to enabling the accumulation of surplus value for capitalism and the imperative for growth that is now destroying the planet is combined with a ruthless defence of class rule and the crushing of those forces that seek to collectivise the means of production. We saw very clearly on the day school that this particular analysis is part of a system of concepts, a language that is alien to many new radical ecological movements. We heard, for example, of ‘just transition’ and non-violent tactics that are part of a debate that is bit-by-bit working through what the role of the state is and how we find ways of comprehending the ‘intersection’ of class oppression with gender, sexuality, race and nation. The task now is not to determine which strategy is right but to work out how, in practice, we can find a way for each strategy to intersect with the others.
The connection between climate and capitalism, between the destruction of nature and the destruction of our creative abilities by this poisonous economic system, is now also forging a new politics in the Marxist tradition. The promise of ‘overabundance’ under socialism and the role of feminism in strategies that are able to grasp the nature of the capitalist state while prefiguring something better in the way we organise now were themes in some our discussions at the beginning of 2010. The urgency of this struggle, the prospect of reaching and passing a tipping point in carbon emissions in the next few years means that we really must fight on different fronts, and that will even include standing in elections, if only to get a platform for a different kind of politics and for shifting to different political agendas.
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