THE CASE FOR RENEWABLE ENERGY
Fossil energy underwrites and saturates capitalist social organisation. The energetics of capitalist production have involved ever more aggregate matter and energy which results in ever more physical waste and dissipated, useless forms of energy, social defences against the effects of which require ever increasing costs. While the building of an ecological capitalism is being imagined, the recreation of any kind of ‘re-humanised nature’ under capitalism cannot be achieved without an increase in entropy. The physical engine of capital relentlessly destroys carbon and methane sinks releasing greenhouse gases. It wreaks havoc with ecosystems, biodiversity and human wellbeing. ‘An enormous chemical experiment’ said Adair Turner of Merrill Lynch in 2003. By early 2006, some expert climate change modellers had estimated that the global CO2 concentration level above which dangerous climate change is unstoppable had been reached. Development as a process of catch-up is now well understood to be a thermodynamic impossibility which would destroy human life. Indeed the ubiquitous and persistent petty commodity forms of capitalism associated with poverty make sense in part as one means by which capital polices its ecological limits : poor people tread with small ecological footprints.

GLOBAL FLASHPOINTS: Reactions to Imperialism and Neoliberalism

edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys

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What is in the 2008 Volume:

Preface (below)

Aijaz Ahmad - Islam, Islamisms and the West
Asef Bayat - Islamism and Empire: The Incongruous Nature of Islamist Anti-Imperialism
Gilbert Achcar - Religion and Politics Today from a Marxian Perspective
Sabah Alnasseri - Understanding Iraq

Atilio Boron (AB): The Socialist Register has long had a great appreciation of the Landless People’s Movement in Brazil and of your role as a leader of the MST. We feel it is very important for readers of the Register in particular to learn more about the MST strategies and tactics to resist neoliberalism’s encroachments, so we want to focus this interview on how the MST has re¬acted to the neoliberal policies carried out in Brazil by the Cardoso and Lula governments.

Identity politics in the widest sense is now quite the norm, and it comes to us in many guises, in the actual conduct of politics as well as in political theories and analyses, from the right, the left, the liberal centre.