Renfrey Clarke: Should socialists support a Green New Deal?

Renfrey Clarke asks, “Should socialists support a Green New Deal?”.

Meanwhile, working people are well able to see that the demands the bosses denounce and ridicule are emphatically in the public interest and essential for human survival.

If capitalists refuse to enact measures needed for humanity to survive, what does this say about capitalism?

The effect of this situation is to redirect popular thinking in ways that abstract political lectures by the left could never do. Whether or not the people leading the Green New Deal campaign have illusions in capitalism is not the point: the demands themselves have a powerful radicalising dynamic, that leads far beyond capitalism’s bounds.

Campaigning around demands such as those of the Green New Deal, contributors to the Adelaide forum explained, can act as a vital bridge allowing workers and their allies to move beyond a general anger and disillusionment, to an understanding of the need to challenge class society itself.

Socialists therefore have to be right in the thick of Green New Deal-style campaigns. They have to push the demands of these campaigns, draw people into broad protest actions, and as the opportunity presents itself, explain their own anti-capitalist perspectives.

Emphasis Mine

As Rosa Luxemburg wrote in “The Junius Pamphlet”:

Friedrich Engels once said: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” What does “regression into barbarism” mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization. At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences. Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration – a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war. This is a dilemma of world history, an either/or; the scales are wavering before the decision of the class-conscious proletariat. The future of civilization and humanity depends on whether or not the proletariat resolves manfully to throw its revolutionary broadsword into the scales. In this war imperialism has won. Its bloody sword of genocide has brutally tilted the scale toward the abyss of misery. The only compensation for all the misery and all the shame would be if we learn from the war how the proletariat can seize mastery of its own destiny and escape the role of the lackey to the ruling classes.

Emphasis Mine

Capitalists will mock us for predicting the collapse of Capitalism in the century since those words were written despite the Great Depression, another world war, several genocides, several famines, the Great Financial Crisis, and now Climate Change. There are Capitalists who say “Better dead than red!” Unfortunately, that is now a distinct possibility.

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