Türkçe versiyonu için buraya tıklayınız
Welcome to our ninth dossier!
This dossier, prepared in collaboration with Polen Ecology Collective, possesses the quality of being a first in this respect and in its scope!
Following the COP26 Climate Change Conference, which serves to paint global capitalism green and distract the peoples of the world, we hope that this dossier will contribute to the discussions happening on a local, national, and global scale echoing the same question of “what is to be done” to protect our home planet and life on it.
Max Ajl takes his place in our dossier with his academic article entitled A People’s Green New Deal: Obstacles and Prospects, which evaluates the Green New Deal proposals and outlines a pro-people alternative. Additionally, Güney Işıkara wrote an introductory article on the author’s book A People’s Green New Deal, published this year. Additionally, Güney Işıkara wrote an introductory article on the author’s book A People’s Green New Deal, published this year.
Aykut Çoban, in his two-part article People’s Climate Politics Against Hegemonic Climate Politics, reveals the class nature of the hegemonic climate politics formed in the axis between state, capital, and NGO experts, and discusses the possibilities of putting forth and developing a people’s climate politics on economic, class, and political grounds.
Ali Alper Alemdar asks Is a Marxist Green New Deal Possible? (available in Turkish only) and proposes an alternative program shaped around the core of job security in order to break the ideological supremacy of the bourgeoisie in the Green New Deal discourse.
In Jason Moore’s article entitled Opiates of the Environmentalists? Anthropocene Illusions, Planetary Management & the Capitalocene Alternative, he makes a valuable and pioneering contribution from the perspective of world ecology. Discussing how the concept of the Anthropocene assumes an ideological function along with the imposition of scientism, Moore discusses the current world system and the conceptualization of the Capitalocene, which grasps power, profit and life as a capitalist world ecology, as well as its political content.
Archana Prasad, in her article Ecological Crisis, Global Capital and the Reinvention of Nature: A Perspective from the Global South, explains the commodification of nature which occurs through international agreements sponsored by the United Nations, especially in terms of emissions caused by deforestation and forest degradation, revealing the deepening colonial quality of North-South relations.
In Derek Wall’s article entitled Imperialism Is the Arsonist: Marxism’s Contribution to Ecological Literatures and Struggles, argues that Marxist thinkers, movements, and revolutions are not insensitive to the concept of ecology, but, on the contrary, defends the existence of their contributions encompassing a long period of time, and asks: at what point do all these contributions stand in the construction of a political alternative today?
Jodi Dean and Kai Heron, in their article Revolution or Ruin, emphasize the need for a stable state economy and the futility of “green growth”, small-scale initiatives, and the need to construct a new social order to replace capitalism. According to the authors, this means rather than simply avoiding the question of the state, going instead to the seizure of state power and configuration thereof, and consequently the construction of a revolutionary party.
Sinan Eden takes up the questions of social transformation and revolutionary strategies in the context of ecological collapse in his piece entitled System Change Not Climate Change as a Directive. Eden, after a thorough discussion of the relevant article, emphasizes the need for a party model with a high capacity for coordination and leans on the relationship between the mass, movement, and the revolutionary party.
In Michael Roberts’s article entitled The Environmental Crisis: There Is No Market Solution, he reveals that market-based proposals brought forth as solutions to ecological destruction are both aimed at carrying water for the mill of accumulation and are limited by structural boundaries. But, Roberts argues, a planned socialist economy has the ability to take action with the speed and scale needed.
In her article entitled Forces of Reproduction: Socialist Ecofeminism and the Global Ecological Crisis, Stefania Barca emphasizes that an ecosocialist future cannot be built without combatting the patriarchy. Barca, which reveals the founding role of the patriarch in terms of capitalist modernity, discusses what the ecosocialist movement can learn from ecological and Marxist feminism.
In Cemil Aksu’s article The Transition from the New World System to the Green New Deal (available in Turkish only), he confronts with the current state of the ecological movement and the war of ideological hegemony war taking place at its heart. Aksu, who puts forth that global capitalism’s “Green New Deal” program, together with the existing green movements represent a danger for the ecological movement to be integrated into the system. He discusses the outlines of the communist movement’s program of struggle to free the ecological movement from this trap.
Güney Işıkara’s article entitled Thoughts on Degrowth (available in Turkish only) discusses this school of thought which, in the recent period, has increased its influence both theoretically and on the basis of local movements. Discussing degrowth, especially in the context of arguments about political economy, Işıkara suggests that thinkers who defend this framework avoid discussing the mode of production, so they are thrown into an eclectic radical reformism and trapped within the boundaries of capitalism.
Onur Yılmaz’s piece entitled What Kind of an Energy Politics? (available in Turkish only) takes up the question of energy poverty as part of economic planning with such concepts as energy justice and energy democracy, touching on such questions as the transition from fossil fuels and to fully renewable energy in all areas, which is seen as the most important step to reduce greenhouse gas emissions against the climate crisis, and cannot be realized within the capitalist mode of production, advances in which are only accompanied by further destruction of nature and exploitation of labor.
We hope that this dossier, under the conditions of today’s ever-deepening ecological destruction, and the political and economic space facing general reorganization by the processes set in motion by this destruction, will reach the workers in the socialist and ecological movements and make a small contribution to the struggle on both an intellectual and practical level.
Dossier editors: Güney Işıkara, Cemil Aksu, Onur Yılmaz