Around the country, the Revolutionary Communist Group is working with groups that understand only an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist perspective can build a movement capable of saving the planet and its people. These organisations include the Green Anti-Capitalist Front and Earth Strike. On 18 January, local Earth Strike groups from across London held a rolling picket of Oxford Street, targeting some of the banks, institutions and corporations complicit in the climate crisis. We reprint the speech given by Raimy Skye on behalf of Earth Strike South London.
As much as high-end retailers don’t want you to know it; as fervently as our media pours money into distracting you from it and as much as our government is terrified of you realising it: the crux of this climate crisis is born of the very system that swaddles us as we walk these affluent London streets – capitalism. It is capitalism that has forced us to unlearn our natural understanding of what is valuable to human life and what is necessary to our own survival. Simultaneously it has stifled that which we need to thrive, unless that too can be commodified and profited from. It has convinced us that value is the diamond itself, and not the 126 gallons of water needed to mine just one carat of it, when it is water that nourishes us whilst the diamond holds no use value to the human body. The diamond only fills the ache that capitalism created for something beautifully distracting. We don’t value the hands that mined for the diamond, but we value ours as we slip on the ring.
It is capitalism that has indoctrinated within us a visceral reaction to our favourite brands by transferring their products from being mere commodities to a lifestyle we never feel stylish enough for. Yet it has divorced our minds completely from the underpaid human labour and overworked bodies that crafted the garment we slip onto our own body.
It is capitalism that has worked tirelessly to tear us apart so that we are no longer communities but individuals consumed by an addiction to consumerism. As individuals it has tried to enrapture us with technology that is so constant in its evolution, we are too enthralled by its leaps and bounds to stop to consider the true cost that money cannot measure. It’s never just the cash that trades hands between the consumer and the retail worker that constitutes the true price of any commodity. The smartphones that end up in our hands offer us a different kind of world on our screen, which we delight in the novelty of so much so we needn’t look up and see that the real world around us is being used as a down payment, or the colonised workers in developing nations whose bodies are used as tools to fulfil our material wants.
Capitalism has isolated us from one another so completely; indoctrinated us so deeply that who could truly blame any of us for seeking refuge in an interactive world where we can feel connected again? That is entirely the purpose. That is entirely the irony of it. This crude replica of community and connection is a ploy. A ploy that makes itself indispensable to our contentment and containment so we never think of the blood, sweat and labour of the international and colonised worker who mines tirelessly for the lithium and cobalt that is imperative for those phones in our pockets to function. Their batteries come at an incalculable cost that is deliberately obscured from us. Capitalism is so deviously clever at distracting and smoke-screening the true costs of our commodities that you’d be forgiven for not realising that to mine just one tonne of lithium costs countries like Bolivia, Chile and Argentina – which are rich in natural resources and exploited because of it – 500,000 gallons of water. In fact, 65% of the water in Chile’s Salar de Atacama region has been expropriated by this very mining. This pillaging of their land for these resources is not just immoral and unsustainable; it has become suicidal in its greed and worst of all, it is becoming irreversible.
We have been hoodwinked time and time again by the rich, who benefit most from our ignorance because it makes us pliable and that makes us very lucrative consumers. An ignorant person does not know who their enemy is and if they do not know then they cannot fight that enemy. We have been manipulated and lied to so comprehensively that we have become complicit in the most heinous of all crimes: the destruction of this one earth we all share as stewards. The work so studiously and reverently carried out for thousands of years by indigenous communities has been undone by capitalism and the imperialism it has birthed.
Yet, despite the forever surmounting crimes capitalism has committed against us and our planet, in all other major climate crisis ‘movements’ you will not see capitalism being confronted as the many-headed monster it is. You will not be told that capitalism must be dismantled if we truly want to stave off further ecological disaster. You will not see a call for the fashion industry, the diamond industry, the beef industry, the oil industry or any other spawn of capitalism being named for what it truly is; exploitative, reckless and entirely unsustainable. You will not see reference to the crimes of imperialism against Latin America, Asia and Africa and their natural resources. They will not tell you that most uncomfortable of truths; that capitalism is not just unsustainable but is completely beyond reform. They will not tell you these truths and the reason why is the same reason the phrase ‘do not bite the hand that feeds you’ exists. The petit-bourgeois nature of their movements rely on deep pockets and reactionary pandering to keep themselves relevant and noticeable. As they will not hold the true criminals accountable, such movements are completely ineffective.
Earth Strike however has no such qualms with telling the truth as it plainly is. The truth as is evidenced by the bushfires ravaging Australia; the floods that are displacing thousands in Kerala or the oil industry which at this very moment is pumping carbon emissions into our atmosphere in the process of its extraction, refinement, transport AND consumption phases. We don’t have those qualms because rather than remain as isolated consumers we have been brought together by our common cause for no other reason than to act in the best interests of our planet and its most affected and disempowered occupants. In doing so we have found for ourselves through discussion and researching those lies told by the culpable corporations and, worse still, those omissions made by the climate activists and movements in the pockets of the very corporations they should be protesting.
Money is waging war on nature. Whether human beings get to see the end of that war is up to every single one of us. But Earth Strike chooses to be on the right side of this chapter of history. Earth Strike will not shy away from confronting those biggest criminals of our current climate crisis and demanding accountability and radical change. Earth Strike will centre you and I as well as those most exploited, manipulated and oppressed workers first so that we can take down the goliath that is capitalism and make sure there is a tomorrow worth fighting for. If any of this encompasses your beliefs and passion for our planet, then join Earth Strike today and help us make the noise we need to affect true, radical change for our collective home.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 274, February/March 2020
