Youth mobilizations against climate change. End capitalism to save the planet
The success of the European general student strike on March 15th against climate change opened a deep debate on what kind of environmental movement we need. From Sindicato de Estudiantes we want to get involved in building a combative and anticapitalist movement that will bring the question of how to stop the ecological catastrophe our planet is suffering from to the table.
Since the last UN’s environment report was published, which estimated that “humanity has twelve years to prevent an ecological catastrophe”, new studies have been published that indicate the alarming speed at which the climate problem is worsening.
Who is responsible for environmental barbarism?
The massive youth mobilizations and recently published studies forced politicians and ruling class representatives to show “concern” about the state our planet is in. The reason why they tried to get on the “ecologal trend” was to push themselves away from the question of who is really responsible for this situation: big corporations, capitalists and their governments.
Corporations show a huge hypocrisy when they come up with new campaigns to “raise awareness about the importance of respecting the environment”. Two great examples are Coca-Cola, that bandies around their production of “ecologic” drinks while generating 110 billion one-use bottles each day- which are a big part of the total plastic waste worldwide-; and Volkswagen, whose diesel motors, which were advertised as the cleanest on the market, had a dispositive installed that manipulated the polluting emissions data.
Same thing happens with the Big Five oil companies that control the energy market: ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP and Total invested around 200 million dollars on 2018, and over 1000 million dollars since the 2015 Paris Agreement, to delay and hinder any initiative designed to fight climate change in order to continue exploiting fossil fuels.
What adds up and what doesn’t on the struggle against climate change?
Facing this reality, capitalist governments across the world tried to make environmental protocols and climate summits look like steps forward and ways to control corporations’ activities. But in reality they are a farce used by the culprits of climate change to come across as “green”, part of a very conscious campaign to take over the environmental movement and take away its power and revolutionary content.
It’s no coincidence that the system’s media are now trying to make this great youth movement harmless, giving relevance to its “apolitical” character. It’s no coincidence either how Angela Merkel supported the strike on March 15th or how the prince of Spain, Felipe VI, warned about the “importance of enacting green politics”.
From Sindicato de Estudiantes, we argue that the fact that the European right or the monarchy call themselves “environmentalists”, or say they have a place on our struggle, does not contribute anything positive to the fight against climate change.
The supposed possibility of building a “green capitalism” is an absolute utopia that reduces the debate to responsible consumption. The importance of “individual awareness” has been exploited by the international bourgeoisie, green parties, NGO’s…, who also turned the image of the well known activist Greta Thunberg into a premeditated montage to enhance this idea.
The amount of media attention Thunberg is receiving is not a small detail. In an interview for The Guardian she declared: “Climate change requires we all make small sacrifices and efforts. One single person can make a difference”. These arguments open up a path for our enemies to make this movement theirs. Us, revolutionaries, refuse to turn this struggle into an individual question. What this movement reflects is the collective and generalized feeling of rage against the capitalist system, the strength of the youth and our determination to change our reality.
For that we consider that it’s a mistake to present our struggle as an action for politics to “think about”. To think that the representatives or this system will confront big corporations is simply ridiculous.
Against green parties and the Green New Deal, we need to build a revolutionary and anticapitalist ecologism!
In a large number of European countries, the green parties have tried to present themselves as a solution to stop the ecological catastrophe. But the truth is that accepting the capitalist logic makes it impossible to reverse the environmental destruction. We’ve seen it clearly with the Swedish green party voting in favor of refugee quotas, as well as with the Irish green party applying the troika’s austerity plans.
Many of these organizations have supported the proposal of different political parties, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s DSA in the US, which proposes a Green New Deal* to manage corporations from an “ecological” point of view to try to stop climate change. But the reality is that this kind of measurements won’t change a thing, as trying to stop the ecological disaster by the hand of its immediate culprits is absolute nonsense. Arguing that a Green New Deal will improve the climate situation means accepting that it is possible to reform and improve capitalism as well, it means leaving the fight for the planet’s and humanity’s survival in the hands of capitalist goodwill.
It is essential that we build a revolutionary ecologist movement that demands the immediate nationalization the main forces of the economy, of the big electric companies, that ends of nuclear energy, a free, public and ecological transportation, for the prohibition of capitalist exploitation of our oceans and forests, for the democratic planning the economy.
The socialist transformation of society was never more urgent.
*Podemos in the Spanish state proposed this same measurement under the name of “Green Horizon”.
