Our future will be a bleak one unless we successfully make changes. It is not the fault of the frailties of “human nature” and our consumerism or over-consumption. It is the capitalist system itself that is the cause. The capitalists sacrifice nature for the sake of plunder.
A constant stream of politicians and businessmen have attempted to divert us from the solution to climate change with talk about “green capitalism”. They tell us that capitalism can halt its march towards destruction. None of their answers involves replacing capitalist profit with production for real human need, or a transformation of how we live and the way we work, to make our world fundamentally more democratic and fully participatory society.
The answers from socialists have been so marginalised we have been unable to enter the mainstream debate. When we suggest to even those progressives who should know better than a convincing ecological future must offer a credible vision of abundance, we are rebuffed as Utopian.
Socialists cannot afford to give secondary concern to the poverty and misery of billions around the world in destitution and despair that as unfortunate as it is, they will have to pay the price for a sustainable society by not having their living standards raised to the level of the developed nations.
The aim of the World Socialist Movement is to replace capitalism with a society in which common ownership of the means of production has replaced capitalist ownership.
We say the capitalist system’s insatiable rapacious need to increase profits cannot be reformed away. If working people do not succeed in ending this system, capitalism will adapt to the new conditions climate change will bring about. But it will impose the burden on the poor people, as capitalism always does. Millions will suffer, many will die and migrants will multiply. The most barbaric forms of brutality will intensify to “manage” the problems stoked by global warming. The capitalist solution will be catastrophic for the great majority of the world’s population. In the struggle to halt ecological destruction, a war against capitalism itself must be waged and in the view of the World Socialist Parties, that should be our primary campaign.
The task ahead is to build a vision that spreads across every sector of citizens and national borders. Our overriding aim is to overcome and overthrow capitalism, to cease growth for the sake of production for profit and to end the degradation of human lives, and instead create new bonds with the environment we all live in. Only world socialism can save the planet from ecological disasters.
There is barely time left to avert imminent catastrophes
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