The world on the brink of environmental disaster

From 1945 to 1989, the world was divided into two massively armed imperialist blocs: the USA and the USSR. Under these conditions, the critical question facing the working class was that of the balance of forces in the class struggle: would the working class be sufficiently strong to push back the threat of war, and impose its own solution to the crisis. With the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989, the danger of imperialist world war receded, but this can offer no comfort to the working class: if it fails to overthrow capitalism and establish society on a new basis, then there is a real danger that the whole of human society will collapse into a generalised decomposition, of which the ongoing environmental catastrophe we see around us is a part.

The world on the eve of an environmental catastrophe: Who is responsible?

Submitted by International Review on

In the first part of this series on the question of the environment we looked at the current state of affairs and tried to show the nature of the threat facing the whole of humanity with the development on a planetary scale of phenomena. We continue this series with a second article in which we will try to show that the problems of the environment are not the fault of a few individuals or enterprises which don't respect the law but that it is capitalism, with its logic of maximum profit, which is really responsible.

The world on the eve of an environmental catastrophe

Submitted by International Review on

The question of the environment has been present in revolutionary propaganda since Marx and Engels denounced the unbearable conditions of London in the mid-19th century, taking in Bordiga's exposure of environmental disasters as the result of the irresponsibility of capitalism. Today this question is even more crucial and demands added effort on the part of revolutionary organisations, in order to show that the historic alternative facing humanity - socialism or barbarism - is not only a choice between socialism and the barbarism of war, local or generalised. The danger of barbarism also includes the threat of an ecological catastrophe which is appearing more and more clearly on the horizon.

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