Ecosocialism

COVID-19 as a Lesson in Humility: Gilbert Mercier on Radio Free Sunroot

This is a partial transcript of an interview of Gilbert Mercier with Kollibri Terre Sonnenblum, host of Radio Free Sunroot, on May 5, 2020. The following excerpt was transcribed by Kollibri. Kollibri: We’re at a point now with this pandemic where capitalism is facing a crisis, perhaps an existential crisis. Gilbert: To me, this is […]

Monkey Planet: Moore Misses the Message of the Book

The chief causes of the environmental destruction that faces us today are not biological, or the product of individual human choice. They are social and historical, rooted in the productive relations, technological imperatives, and historically conditioned demographic trends that characterize the dominant social system. Hence, what is ignored or downplayed in most proposals to remedy the environmental crisis is the most critical challenge of all: the need to transform the major social bases of environmental degradation, and not simply to tinker with its minor technical bases.

Genuine Progress Index Be Damned! Grow, Displace, Submit!!

Rapacious. “They got theirs, so I better get mine. Yes, things change, and, sure this sleepy town is about to boom but that’s the way of the world…. Might as well be part of the winning team – that money making side of things. That’s all you can do.”
I just finished talking to white guy in his late forties, gassing up excavators and huge dump trucks. We’re near the Estacada High School, and he tells me the scrapping is to make room for more ball fields. The school already has fields and a football stadium. This is a town with 3,000.

There is Never a 12th Step in the Program Called Consumerism

Sixty days. A year. Five years. A week. A day. An hour. Right now.
That’s the curse of addiction, those needles, inhalants, the entire barbarity of cheap booze shilled by the chosen ones, the money changers, all amortized and bundled debts in trans-capital, sold next to the playground, the trees cut down for billboards pronouncing sexual prowess and football hero-dom with the flick of the Mike’s Hard Cider or a fucking Bud.

The Devil Fossil Fuel Industry Has Us By the Short-hairs (and what are we going to do about it?)

A simple documentary premiere, in a small town north of Vancouver, WA, on the Columbia, a town called Kalama, near Longview, where millions of stripped logs from the Pacific Northwest’s forests are stacked 20 stories high, waiting for markets (sic) in Asia to be turned into lumber and cardboard and stuffing and paper and snot sheets for the U S of A.