Kai Heron
@KaiHeron
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Climate and land struggles, political economy, political theory and post-capitalist futures. Lecturer in Political Ecology.
Lancaster, England
Joined March 2011
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The De Guyter Handbook of Degrowth is out now with incredible contributions from 41 scholars, authors, and activists. Thank you to everyone involved! Here's a thread about what we hope the handbook delivers and what I've learned from editing it. 🧵1/12
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Literally "give us more weapons and we'll accelerate our genocide" followed by a standing ovation.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
@Netanyahu
: "Give us the tools faster and we'll finish the job faster."
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I’ve said this before, but ecological politics today isn’t about ‘saving the planet’ or ‘solving the climate crisis’ as we used to be told. It isn’t even about staying within 1.5C of planetary heating. That’s over. It's gone. 1/4
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Ecological politics is about limiting how many people die, how many are displaced, how many experience insufferable heat, floods, wildfires, and droughts. And it’s about how many species and habitats will be lost forever. 2/4
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This shift in our understanding is important for a couple of reasons. First, it defeats the ‘it’s already too late’ doomer crowd. Yes, it is too late. That’s why we should act. Second, it moves beyond narratives about how we have 12 years, 10 years, or three years, to act. 3/4
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Every decision made today that takes us further away from decarbonization, like the UK’s decision to pursue fracking, or the US and Europe's subsidization of fossil fuels and refusal to grant reparations to the periphery, tips the scales towards greater death and destruction. 4/4
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Students have occupied and are occupying several campuses in the UK alone: Leeds, Goldsmiths, Manchester, Bristol, UCL and others. They've made similar demands to the US movement. The key difference, I'd say, is the reaction from university management and media. 1/6
There are student demonstrations in the US, but none in Europe. How does one explain this?
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This is an incredible statement from Yemen's President Mahdi Al-Mashat:
"We say to our brothers in Palestine and our people in Gaza that our blood is not more precious than your blood, and we are clear of conscience that we are actually participating with you..." 1/2
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that Palestine is not being bombed alone, and we affirm that Palestine after today will not be in the battle alone.”
The same statement reiterates that the Red Sea is safe for everyone except Israeli ships or those heading for ports in occupied Palestine. 2/2
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I seem to have lost followers for supporting BDS. Presumably this means some people care about the environment but think Palestine’s struggle is either peripheral or irrelevant to the cause. Here's why they're wrong. 1/6
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It's political violence when it happens to politicians in the imperial core. It's geopolitics when imperial powers assassinate leaders in the periphery. It's self-defence when Israel massacres civilians in occupied Palestine. It's all very clear and morally unambiguous.
I am appalled by the shocking scenes at President Trump's rally and we send him and his family our best wishes.
Political violence in any form has no place in our societies and my thoughts are with all the victims of this attack.
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"The Nakba has also a lesser-known environmental dimension, the complete transformation of the environment, the weather, the soil, the loss of indigenous climate, the vegetation, the skies. The Nakba is a process of colonially imposed climate change."
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What examples of international solidarity do you find most inspiring?
Three from me.
1) Choctaw sending aid to Ireland during the potato famine, 1847.
2) Lancashire mill workers refusing to work cotton picked by slaves, 1862.
3) Cuba's medical internationalism, ongoing.
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Here's a sentence one could only read in the capitalocene:
"This implies that microplastics may have become an essential component of clouds, contaminating nearly everything we eat and drink via ‘plastic rainfall’”
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Two related stories this month show capitalism’s incompatibility with human and non-human flourishing. First, a study found all rainwater on earth is unsafe to drink because it’s contaminated with the 'forever chemicals' Per- and poly-fluoroalkyl (PFAS). 🧵
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I’ve been vegan for 15 years now and I have to say I’m tired of seeing the same meat vs veganism debates. What I think people don’t realize is that this debate usually plays out as one abstraction fighting another. Here’s why:
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Campus Support and Security are in attendance. The wellbeing of staff and students is our priority, and we will continue to monitor the situation carefully. The Roscoe Building is open and operating as normally as possible.” 3/6
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But it's also worth repeating this point. Students here are participating in a diversity of tactics to tear down the intellectual and material apparatus of Britain's participation in genocide.
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British students have been blockading weapons manufacturing sites, occupying campuses, organizing teach-ins and teach-outs, planning local rallies, and attending national demonstrations since the genocide began.
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Fraser’s latest is a good one for the syllabus. Each self-contained chapter introduces a feature of global capitalism that she says is a condition of capital accumulation and yet undermined by it: racialized expropriation, social reproduction, ecology, and politics. 1/ 4
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Here's how Manchester University responded to the request for a statement:
“We are aware of a student occupation in the Roscoe Building which began on Monday evening. 2/6
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Private jet are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions in the past three years than Uganda, a country with a population of 46 million. But tell us again how it's "humanity" as a whole who has caused global heating.
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Only the Daily Mail has written a diatribe against these occupations, largely blaming the influence of socialist parties and student societies. The paper can't pass up an opportunity to red bait when it sees one. 4/6
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I've just learned that in 2022 21% of American adults were functionally illiterate. Just over one in five. No other "developed" country has a literacy rate anywhere near this low and many "developing" countries far exceed it.
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All this suggests the ideological
state apparatus functions very differently here and requires different tactics in response. 5/6
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Hi new followers. Some climate basics:
1) Civilizational collapse isn’t inevitable. This way of thinking serves only to absolve us from action.
2) The cause of the ecological crisis is racial capitalism, not overpopulation.
3) Given no.2, there are no market-based solutions.
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This is the most dismal start to a new year I can remember. Genocide conducted with impunity, climatic overshoot, biodiversity collapse, a globally resurgent far right, and systemic poverty. None of this gets better without mass mobilization. We've got a fight on our hands.
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This week’s IPCC report concluded that even if every single decarbonization policy governments had put in place by 2020 were fully implemented, the world would still warm by 3.2C this century. In other words, business as usual is killing us.
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This is beautiful: "Marx's ideological passions became crystallized in a sharply defined, vivid hatred which runs throughout his work: his hatred of Malthus and Malthusianism. This hatred was not motivated by moral principle, and even less by any populationist policy...
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This is getting a lot of negative attention, but I think the banana is a well-chosen example on many fronts. Here's a thread sketching why limited access to bananas in temperate regions in the future might be unavoidable and might not be so bad. 🧵
There need not be any moralism here ("When you eat a banana, you are bad") there just... won't be bananas. Because it doesn't make any other-than-capitalist sense to create a world-spanning daily banana infrastructure for people in Columbus, Ohio.
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Marx had it in for Malthus because, implicitly or explicitly, he denied the proletariat the right to love. Authenic Marxist thought has a style: the style of the intensification and broadening of life." — Lefebvre
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There's so much more to be said but the point should be clear. Israel is presiding over a regime of eco-apartheid. This makes resisting it a climate issue. It makes BDS a climate issue. And it makes Palestinian liberation a climate issue. 6/6
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I’m excited to see cost-of-living campaigns like Don’t Pay and Enough is Enough. Now's the time to incorporate green politics into these campaigns because a green transition can't wait and it's fully compatible with fighting the cost-of-living crisis. Some near-term examples: 🧵
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That sense of powerlessness you feel as yet another climate disaster flicks across your screen is the product of a political system that works tirelessly to shut down meaningful paths of collective action and channel our activity down "acceptable" (read useless) paths instead.1/2
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Israel’s regime has devastated native trees and crops: oaks, carobs, hawthorns, olives, figs, and almonds. In their place pine trees are grown to make occupied territories look 'more European.' Pines are water intensive, reduce biodiversity, and are susceptible to fire. 2/6
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Decolonization means nothing if it doesn’t mean supporting Palestine’s fight for liberation. The persistent silence from some ‘decolonial’ scholars on this issue is deafening.
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A reminder that climate mourning is normal. An aching awareness of all that we have lost and will lose to global heating has become part of the human condition. We should talk about it more.
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Shell has made the "strategic choice" to maintain or increase oil and gas production until 2030. It has also shut down several renewable energy projects in recent months. Tell us again how the market is the best mechanism to deliver a green transition.
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Climate chaos rarely strikes directly. Its effects are elliptical. They ripple across capital's tentacular global relations, inflecting and exacerbating non-climatic social and ecological crises and insecurities. Here's an example:
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CNN calling them anarchists. Anarchists don't wave American flags. Fascists do.
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British students have been blockading weapons manufacturing sites, occupying campuses, organizing teach-ins and teach-outs, planning local rallies, and attending national demonstrations since the genocide began.
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On Monday Myanmar had its hottest day on record, an unbelievable 48.2C (118.8F). Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, China, and parts of India have also been struck by record breaking temperatures above 40C. These temperatures will kill thousands. 1/2
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The latter matters because Israel limits Palestine’s access to water for drinking and irrigation, which increases the threat of wildfires in an area due to experience 2.5C average temperature increases and a 40% decrease in precipitation by the end of the century. 3/6
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Since the 1970’s the region has seen a 25% reduction in woodland and a precipitous decline in Palestinian mountain gazelle. They're now an endangered species. Decreases in amphibians have contributed to increased numbers of disease carrying insects such as mosquitos. 5/6
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Israel’s illegal settlements, walls, fences, and military checkpoints have also destroyed, cut through, or interrupted, important habitats and ecosystems. 4/6
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Hobsbawm wrote that solidarity is a habit that it takes time to learn. I think that's beautiful. In part because if solidarity is a habit then it's not an act. Acts are singular. Habits are...habitual. Once learned, a habit becomes a piece of who we are. That's solidarity.
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Make no mistake, the Times piece accusing academics of "defending Hamas" is a witch hunt organized to suppress academic freedom and integrity. Truly chilling.
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Bill Gates gave a speech yesterday in which he said that the world is likely to experience 2.5C global heating and that “it will be much better to be born in 20, 40, 60 years from now than any time in the past.” Here are a few reasons why these statements can't both be true. 1/13
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Debates about whether we should be vegan or not are uninteresting and unhelpful if they overlook these material relations. They become about personal choice instead of about making the sweeping systemic transformations needed to the framework in which those choices are made.
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“If more people understood how much Indigenous blood, how much Black blood, how much blood from Brazilians living on the land is spilt just for them to have a cheeseburger, I think there would be much more outrage.” -
@nickwestes
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The soya grown in deforested ecological deserts in the Amazon rainforest or US monocultures under unjust labor conditions and on settler land is not preferable to milk produced by dairies that tend their cattle and restore the surrounding environment with silvopasture.
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This feels like a significant development. Hamas met with Fatah in Beijing and agreed to several important points.
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So it’s not about going vegan or not. It’s about producing our food in as ecologically benign way as possible. Meat (sustainably sourced, and in dramatically reduced quantities for some) is likely to play a role in that for the foreseeable future.
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What an amazing visual representation of inequalities in food, feed, and fuel production.
"The conclusion is clear: big farms don’t feed the world."
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@Gargi_at_home
😂 There is also this. The replies to Branko show that mentality very clearly. Immensely frustrating.
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"Strengthen Indigenous land rights because they're good stewards of nature" has become a refrain among Western environmentalists. Land Back is vital for Indigenous self-determination and liberation, not because Indigenous peoples do the West a service by conserving nature.
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But as with most things, ‘meat’ and ‘veganism’ should be thought within the determinate social relations that produce them. The meat raised by a pastoralist or agroecological farming system is not the same thing as the meat produced by an agribusiness.
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Up to 20,000 are now believed dead in Libya. This tragedy hasn't just been caused by floods, but by NATO's 2011 military aggression and ongoing sanctions that have decimated the country and undermined its ability to prepare for extreme weather events. 1/2
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It's not terribly surprising to see the Guardian and Lucas trafficking in Neo-Malthusian nonsense. Populationism is how capital's destruction of human and non-human life presents itself to bourgeois consciousness.
It should not be controversial to say a population of 8 billion will have a grave impact on the climate | John Vidal
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This means a technology that could prevent misery and save lives will be privatized and, in all likelihood, come at a cost. It's a cost that poorer nations or those dependent on rainwater collection for drinking will be least able to afford.
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The second story: earlier this month EcoWatch reported that a team of researchers had created a new process that could clean up PFAS. A plant-based material absorbs the chemicals, then a fungus consumes the absorbent material. It’s a genius solution.
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I’ve responded to
@Matthuber78
's Climate Change as Class War for
@NewLeftReview
's Sidecar. Huber's book is a striking, polemical, contribution to the degrowth vs left eco-modernism debate. I’ve tried to sketch an anti-imperialist eco-communist alternative.
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To mitigate ecological collapse and adapt to a planet that has been ravaged, ruined, toxified, plundered, and polluted by capitalism and colonialism, we need a system that's guided not by profit but by a desire to maximize human and non-human flourishing.
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Again, this might remind you of the capitalist core’s refusal to remove patents on COVID-19 vaccinations while people suffered and died unnecessarily from COVID in the Global South. Because capitalism is a system that puts private profit before basic social and ecological needs.
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The more you learn about the destructiveness of green capitalist extractivism the more convinced you'll be that degrowth eco-socialism is essential.
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It’s exhausting that we must make the same point over and over but “humanity” is not responsible. This false universalism gives ideological cover to fossil capital's gendered and racialized regime of accumulation at a global scale. We must name the problem to defeat the problem.
PCC report’s verdict on climate crimes of humanity: guilty as hell
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Here’s a quick example of how escalating ecological crises and the everyday ordinary disaster of capitalist production intersect and amplify each other. 🧵
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A revolutionary transformation at a world scale would be driven by a coalition of the oppressed including social movements, trade unions, small commodity producers, Indigenous peoples, semi-proletarians, 'surplus populations', peasants, national liberation movements, and more.1/9
I respect Malm's work a lot (he's a friend & comrade).
But here he characterizes my climate strategy as "extremely class-reductionist" &"hyper workerist."
I think this sheds some light on our different approaches to climate strategy. Quick 🧵1/n
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And yes, it will require an end to capitalist production. It is capital—not meat or soya per se—that impels the wasteful, anti-ecological, carbon intensive overproduction of food and that drives producers towards grossly unjust and inefficient land uses.
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If we can get beyond the abstractions of ‘meat is bad’ or ‘veganism is equally unethical’ we might be able to have the granular conversations we need about social and ecological justice, decolonizing food supplies, agroecology and proper land stewardship. Wishful thinking?
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I'm afraid to say that these "maybe now that climate chaos is hitting the core governments and people will act" takes are desperately naive. 30,000 Europeans died in a heatwave in 2003. Nothing changed because that's not how change happens.
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Effective immediately my employer has revoked all research travel and support allowances for Senior Lecturers, Readers, and Professors. They’ll have to pay for their research from salaries that have suffered a 20% reduction in real terms since 2009. This is why we strike.
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This study finds it's technically possible to provide a decent standard of living for 10.4 billion people without surpassing important ecological boundaries. The problem, as the paper says explicitly, is transition. 1/2
It's long been a question: could all of humanity actually live within the Doughnut? Thanks to Hauke Schlesier et al it's just been quantified for the 1st time. And the answer is probably yes - if we transform to economies of sufficiency. Read more here:
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For almost seventy years chemical companies like 3M and DuPont have known PFAS are highly dangerous. They hid this information from regulators until the late 1990s because there was money to be made slowly killing people.
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So contrary to what many are saying, it's not eco-communists or degrowthers that are abolishing bananas, it’s capitalist production, which super-exploits workers in the periphery, degrades ecosystems, and kills our genetic commons.
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Something I learned doing ethnographies of pipeline struggles:
The most pressing ecological issues of the poor and oppressed aren't expressed as concerns about "the climate". They're expressed as concerns about food, work, land, identity, and racialized and gendered subjugation.
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Yeah. It's not like the island of Ireland has experience within living memory of violent colonial oppression. Nor is the island of Ireland still an occupied territory.
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Britain is exceptionally good at hiding its colonial past. Agent Orange, for example, is synonymous in most people’s minds with the US war on Vietnam, but Britain had already used it to cruel effect in the 1950s to crush Malaya's liberation struggle. 1/9
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I didn't post about this when I read it. I'm returning to it now for something I'm writing. It's as good as everyone says it is! The best introduction to degrowth available, including the tradition's internal disputs and lacunae. Thank you
@a_vansi
@MGSchmelzer
and Andrea Vetter.
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"Protest is for two purposes: first for its effect upon your political enemies, and secondly, for its effect upon yourself." - Du Bois
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This week in the capitalocene:
A study finds global emissions are at an all time high.
An El Niño cycle is confirmed which could push global average temperatures beyond 1.5C next year.
Scientists conclude iceless summers in the Arctic are now unavoidable.1/4
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The UN chief, Guterres, claims climate collapse is an act of 'collective suicide'. This wrongly suggests we are all equally responsible. It's much more accurate to describe climate collapse as an instance of what Engels called social murder.
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"An occupying colonial power cannot claim the right to self-defence against the people under it's brutal occupation. There is no moral equivalence between the colonizer and the colonized"
“We in occupied Palestine — and all Palestinians — have no illusions in the poetic dreams of the triumph of the pen over the sword, because the sword has cut too deeply into our flesh…”
Devastating, powerful statement from the Teachers and Employees Union at Birzeit University.
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Whether or not tomorrow's IPCC report is overshadowed by the war in Ukraine, the idea that governments would act if only they listened to the science is laughable. They *are* acting. We're living what a capitalist response to climate breakdown looks like.
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The polycrisis and concepts like it are too quick to accept the world as it appears to us — as an impossibly complex web of ramifying crises — instead of asking, as critical thought should, what lies behind appearances. 1/3
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Capitalism’s endless pursuit of profits (or growth) is an effect of historically specific social relations. Capital is *compelled* to pursue its expansion. Workers are *compelled* to increase their productivity.
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How can we wrest control over our collective reproduction from capital? How can we guarantee radical abundance for all on a wrecked and wounded world? It's a privilege to be working on these questions with
@KeirMilburn
and
@alterurbanist
. Forthcoming in May 2025.
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Whatever his flaws, Sanders served as a poll of attraction around which a mass socialist movement could cohere. The fact that this movement has surpassed Sanders in their clear-sightedness about, and opposition to, US imperialism is actually a very good thing.
It’s so tragic that Bernie is vaporizing his reputation and legacy among so many young people who were first politicized and radicalized by his presidential campaigns.
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This might remind you of oil and gas companies like Shell and Exxon, who hid research concluding that fossil fuels would cause devastating global heating for decades. Because, once again, there’s money to be made destroying the conditions for life on earth.
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A lot of social transition talk on the Left still assumes we're acting into a climactically stable world. The climate crisis is mentioned, of course, but often only instrumentally as a justification for why we need a transition or revolution in the first place. 1/3
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Oh, and if sharing technology and resources for the common good sounds like it’s against our self-interested and competitive ‘human nature’ consider Cuba’s history of medical internationalism and its south-south solidarity during the pandemic.
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Two things I like about this book so far. 1) It doesn't spend time arguing Marx was already attuned to this ecological predicament or already had the concepts for X ecologically minded critique. It begins with a Marxist feminist outlook and aims to build working class power. 1/5
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"Evidence shows that indigenous peoples and local communities with secure land rights vastly outperform both governments and private landholders in preventing deforestation, conserving biodiversity, and producing food sustainably."
"Countries are turning to land-based solutions instead of doing the hard work of steeply reducing emissions from fossil fuels, decarbonising food systems & stopping the destruction of forests and other ecosystems.”
The full
#landgap
report is now online @
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Some personal news: I’m pleased to say that from April I’ll be employed as a Lecturer in Political Ecology at Lancaster University’s Environment Centre. I’m beyond excited to move back North and can’t wait to join my amazing new colleagues. 1/2
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"The idea that imperial land grabbers have the right to terrorise, brutalise, torture and murder those whose land they steal under the rubric of “self-defence” flies in the face of UN General Assembly Resolution 37/43 of 1982 which recognised..." 1/3
I utterly condemn the ongoing attacks on Israel and her citizens.
There is no justification for this act of terror which is being perpetrated by those who seek to undermine any chance for future peace in the region.
Israel has a right to defend herself.
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No one on the left, or frankly any part of the political spectrum, should be able to vote in good conscience for men who sanction war crimes and genocide. If life means this little to them, what can be expected of them as leaders? 1/3
Keir Starmer is asked about his "red lines" - use of white phosphorus, collective punishment, bombing safe routes?
He doesn't list any and refers to Israel's "right to self defence", emphasising the need for humanitarian aid.
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"In countries like Kenya and Nigeria, both of which have embraced industrial agriculture policies, the number of undernourished people has grown by 44 percent and 247 percent, respectively."
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Here’s an English language version of my article Forget Eco-Modernism. I argue eco-modernism’s denial of value transfers, vulgarized interpretation of Marx, and ecological illiteracy converge in support of a reactionary form of class politics.
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We all know that left twitter’s excessive libidinal investment in debates about ‘the right line’ on the Ukraine crisis is a symptom of organizational impotence, right?
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The cost of living crisis is no such thing, it's a cost of capitalism crisis. 1/4
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