Revolutionary Change to End Climate Change!

Only expropriation of the capitalist corporations opens the road towards the end of climate change

Statement by the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT), 20 September 2019, www.thecommunists.net

The youth based initiative Fridays for Future (FFF) called for a week-long “Earth Strike”, beginning with 20^th September 2019. This is a very important and highly necessary campaign which has rightly received the support of millions of workers, poor peasants and youth around the world. The Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) strongly welcomes and supports this initiative!

The Global Week for Future is supported by various forces including NGOs and even some trade unions. The goal of FFF is to convince the capitalists respectively the imperialist governments all around the world to implement environmental protection measures, which can assure that the goals of the Paris Agreement will be met. However, even the full implementation of the Paris Agreement would not stop the ongoing climate change but just postpone the turning point towards an entirely new climate that the planet is currently heading towards.

The current emissions trend will bring a new era of climate disasters by 2029 (!) in Sri Lanka, 2031 in Mexico and 2034 in India. Western imperialist countries, i.e. those which caused the climate catastrophe from its very beginning, are more likely to enter the new stage around 2050. Even with the Paris Agreement this catastrophe will be postponed for another 20 years but it will not be stopped. In any case, without a radical political and economic change, we will face the beginning of the end of human life on earth. Rulers like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro seem like the type of capitalists who destroy the nature recklessly but in reality all capitalists are the evil.

The Paris Agreement is based on the idea of conserving the capitalist system which is the reason for the upcoming catastrophe. When the earth is literally burning all ruling classes are mainly concerned to hold to the capitalist means of production. Only a total and radical change can nearly recreate nature as it was before capitalism started the countdown of extinction. Only expropriation of the capitalist classes via socialist revolutions, i.e. armed uprisings of the workers and oppressed, can enable to save nature and with it humanity!

Fridays for Future supports legal and peaceful actions which are agreed by governments and their state repression apparatus. The political stance of the FFF movement means that those who caused the climate catastrophe shall change their behavior because they are asked nicely to do so. But those who cause the climate catastrophe, i.e. the ruling classes worldwide and mainly in the imperialist countries of the US, EU, Japan, Australia, China and Russia, are responsible for super-exploitation and imperialist wars up to genocides against the workers and oppressed! It is ridiculous to appeal to these killers to stop destroying woods and end polluting our air and water.

The FFF is currently challenged by more radical forces like the Extinction Rebellion which has prominent members like Carola Rakete, the former captain of the Sea Watch saving refugees of getting drowned. Extinction Rebellion is open towards forms of protest which can lead to arrests but their radicalism is limited to non-violent, grassroots actions like blockade tactics and sit-down strikes.

There is no more time to waste for the vanguard of the working classes, supported by the oppressed worldwide to become the leading force in the environmental movement! Only we understand that those who are exploiting and oppressing us are those who are burning down the planet that is our home. Only we can organize general strikes up to armed insurrections to expropriate these beasts and to start a worldwide planned economy that is willing to do whatever necessary in order to save the planet and with it humanity! The movement of Fridays for Future and forces like Extinction Rebellion made an important start.

The RCIT proposes as the next step the organization not only of a symbolic but of a proper international general strike. Such a general strike should target in particular the capitalist corporations, i.e. those responsible for the destruction of the environment. Activists should build committees in work places, neighborhoods and schools in order to organize mass actions and to push the trade union and other mass popular organizations to take a central role in such activities. Such a general strike should be an important step in order to plan the occupation of these capitalist corporations.

However, we need a truly international mass movement. Without our brothers and sisters in the semi-colonial countries, who are the first ones to suffer from the climate catastrophe, the environmental movement can not turn into what it needs to become: An internationalist and socialist movement! Our planet got sick from the capitalist class, only socialist revolution can cure it!

International Bureau of the RCIT