Rising from €120M in 2021 to €700M in 2023, investments in mining in Serbia are on trajectory to surpass all other areas of foreign direct investment dominating the Serbian economy. While Rio Tinto, the British-Australian multinational mining company, is not the only corporation in the game for resources in Serbia, […]
Ecology
Revolutionary Climate Action
In June, RTÉ’s Hot Mess podcast featured an interview with Roger Hallam. In the weeks to come, Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, would have received the longest ever sentence for non-violent protest in front of a British court. The sentence was on the charges of “conspiracy […]
Palestine and the Environmental Struggle: a debate between Andreas Malm and Matan Kaminer
A recent series of blog posts on the website of Verso Books, acclaimed publisher on the left, attracted a lot of attention online. Andreas Malm, best known for his excellent analysis of the capitalist systems of climate emergency, started this series off with his long and informative essay “The Destruction […]
The New Climate Denial
As we have gained an increasingly better understanding of the mechanisms of Earth’s climate, its past and its future, it has become ever more clear that human activities are a growing disruptive influence. The only way in which a climate catastrophe can be averted is through ambitious government regulations restricting […]
Climate crisis: a product of capitalism
Liberal environmentalism is in a perpetual crisis; it is unsurprising that the crisis is a chance to escape the individualist traps with which it is riddled. A pamphlet I recently read illustrates well where boundaries of such environmentalism lie. Two points were particularly illustrative and left ample space for Marxist-Leninist […]
Lough Neagh – the eye of capitalist climate destruction
Lough Neagh, just outside Belfast, has often been described as the “eye of the bear” that is the outline shape of the island of Ireland. It is the largest fresh-water lake in Ireland or England. The lake is 20 miles long, about 10 miles wide and is about the size […]
Book Review – Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto by Kohei Saito
Kohei Saito’s book on degrowth communism was an unlikely bestseller in 2020, with half a million copies sold in Japan. This is an oft-cited line introducing Saito’s works in the West, in anticipation of the English translations. After the English translation of Marx in the Anthropocene coming out last year, […]
Climate breakdown and capitalism
In his book Biology as Ideology, famous American biologist Richard Lewontin tackles some of the ideological prejudices of science, using his dialectical lens already well-developed in his previous book, The Dialectical Biologist. Here we recall one of the examples from his writing, lessons from which are easily applied to many […]
COP28
The 28th edition of the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference (COP 28) took place in United Arab Emirates this December. Controversially presided by the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, COP 28 once again showed its modest range of action, wrapped in passive political language. On the fringe […]
Climate, Degrowth and Ardnacrusha
In a speech delivered in November 1920, Lenin exclaimed the famous line: “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” In the sentences that followed, Lenin goes on to explain how such a plan has to be long-term, lasting at least a decade, with an army of […]
Troubled Waters
Last month, I watched a crowd gather in Amsterdam for a rally in support of climate justice. With 70,000 people in attendance it was the largest of its kind in the country. Although it started peacefully, the pleasant atmosphere turned into one of conflict when Peace Prize winner Sahar Shirzad […]
They haven’t gone away, you know
Public outrage at the environmental catastrophe in Lough Neagh has led to calls for the lough to be brought back into public ownership. Lough Neagh is the largest lake in Ireland. It has a surface area of 392 square kilometres and supplies 40 per cent of the North’s drinking water. […]
Orange and Green and blue-green algae
There have been poisonous Green and Orange algae in the six north-eastern counties of Ireland for more than a hundred years. But now there are new poisonous algae making the headlines here. It’s a blue-green alga that has infected Lough Neagh. And only a few minutes ago the local Fermanagh […]
Bring Lough Neagh back into public ownership
Statement by the Communist Party of Ireland – 25 September 2023 The news and the scale of the ecological catastrophe at Lough Neagh are getting worse by the day. These issues did not come to light this month, nor indeed this year. The ecosystem collapse in the lough has long […]
Environmentalism, capitalism, and vibes
In the age of social media, the term “vibe” is often used as shorthand for aesthetic, often with the substance shifted into the background and just picking up on the visual, sensory or language aspect of an object, movement, culture, or politics. I was reminded of this term when reading […]
Confronting the climate crisis without confronting capitalism
On 13 July, An Taisce hosted Kevin Anderson’s talk “A Velvet or Violent Climate Revolution: Which Will We Choose?” in the Tailors’ Hall in Dublin. Anderson was introduced as a climate scientist “telling it as it is,” a tagline reinforced by his opening slide, in which he warned the audience […]