Live Earth: Climate change as spectacle

Critics say that flying rock stars in on aeroplanes and using a great deal of electricity to power several concerts sends out mixed messages about energy conservation.


"What would be great is if these pop stars - now they realise the damage we are all doing to the climate - look very carefully at their own actions and make some changes themselves," said John Buckley, managing director of the organisation Carbon Footprint.


I am a mite bit cynical about this too. Live Earth should be headlined by Benny Wenda.

This is the spectacle, long live Guy Debord.


We need to put forward the science clearly, there is a plague of lets 'look at doubt to justify filling up our 4 by 4 with fuel on the way to the Lear Jet park'.

We then need to be putting forward structural political change....more is being spent on widening the M1 than expanding our rail network, so we need cheap good public transport, better local services, insulation, proper investment in renewable, passive solar design (you build so that you get sun light and need less fuel to heat).

And we must defend the rainforests, every day the US and UK sell weapons to regimes like Indonesia who cut them down, everyday we use palm oil that comes from dead rainforests.

Concerts could be used to raise awareness but I doubt this one will really get to grips and sadly may fuel wider cyncism than mine.

The Guardian claim SUV manufactures are sponsoring the Live Earth web site!

Al Gore, take the Derek Wall challenge and like me stop flying, even if you took a week off it would help.

Grist Mill by the way has a set of arguments against climate denial under the title 'how to talk to a climate denier', so have a look and spread the word. Turn the tv off put some decent music on and sharpen up your arguments.

what a day in Bushy

What a day 'can we be bovered about climate change?' title says it all about the debate at a school with dodgy climate sceptics...all very 'yes but no but yes but' we don't think it is happening but it might be, but we don't give a toss! A little depressing even the Economist and every political party sees it is happening and wants action, we should be having a debate about what action to stop climate change is appropriate

then on to Marxism 2007 the Socialist Worker Party to hear Michael Lowy co-author of the ecosocialist manifesto (so yes he is a comrade), don't quite think the SWP get ecosocialism although had a nice chat with John Singha who I think does,

nice to see a bit of debate and disagreement amongst the swp comrades, argument is healthy, let5s keep off leaders.

Alex Callinicos is anti-car but admits air travel is a difficult one.

Still feel they haven't got there heads around why socialism isn't enough, Marx was green somewhat surprisingly but the left for the last hundred years haven't respected nature so if you say socialism is enough that really isn't enough for greens and rightly so.

lets roll a spliff and watch the Dr Who repeat, exhausting day, earning my money as Principal Speaker (well not that I am paid).

Weekly worker cpgb meeting and Doughty Street coming up next for me.

"And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing … a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods." Huxley statement on democracy 1959


Well no time for an in depth analysis but I thought I would flag up Aldous Huxley. As Greens we need to get educated to our roots and one strong root is Huxley. His Brave New World, Brave New World and the eco utopia Island all influenced me strongly.


He is strong on ecology.

Stong on how politics becomes about management, conning us with soma and feelies...drugs and very interactive cinema.

the high tech bread and circuses with collusion even by the radicals.

He is the prophet who predicted George Galloway would go on big brother.

I remember him writing that the only people fit for political office are those who don't want it. An accurate sentiment.

I guess if I looked at his life and works in detail I would find disagreements and holes, I think I read some where he was a bit class ridden hope I am not defaming his memory.

Seems a bit of a population bomb man....however lets read him and be challenged.

Huxley was most famous for taking lsd on his death bed.

GREEN LEFT SUMMER CAMP

Green left 2007 in a field in Kent, its gonna be good.

if you can't cope with camping, lets avoid the sectarian comments about Lenin, Trotsky, Sara Parkin, etc catch us

at Marxism 2007

Michael Lowy co-author of the ecosocialist manifesto 2pm SOAS details here http://www.marxismfestival.org.uk/timefri.html

or the Marxism CPGB weekly worker fringe.
Saturday July 7: Jack Conrad (CPGB) and Derek Wall (Green Party). The SWP’s ‘What we stand for’ column says that human labour is the source of all wealth under capitalism. This is a non-Marxist position.


All meetings start at 5pm in room 541, Birkbeck College, Malet Street - close to the main event.


Its like William Morris is back and he is fighting fit, ecosocialism from being lost in the 20th century, has a good claim to be everywhere...good job too temperatures rising....


AT LAST : PLEASE COME & JOIN US

INVITE TO ALL OF THE GREEN PARTY !


GREEN LEFT SUMMER CAMP FRIDAY 20TH JULY to SUNDAY 22ND JULY

At Gloversbridge Bridge Farm
Grigg lane
Headcorn
Kent
TN27 9LS


PLEASE EMAIL ME ASAP to book your place - I need to know numbers for the catering - thank you, payment is on arrival at the camp. If you are coming just for a particular day I still need to know - if you come for just a meal please give a donation that you feel is fair - thanks

Headcorn has a train station it takes just over an hour from Charing Cross Station London - a direct service runs every hour by South Eastern Trains. Penny Kemp's farm is where the camp is being held it is situated 2 miles outside the village of Headcorn where my pub The George & Dragon Inn & Restaurant is situated, the George is a short two minute walk left out of the station in the centre of the high street. We will operate a car service for those who need it to take you from the George up to Gloversbridge Farm. Headcorn is a large vibrant village of some 5,000 people it has good shops and is a friendly place, home to Headcorn Sustainability where we run a fantastic community shop (not for profit) at Una's Barn at the back of my pub in a barn.

www.headcornsustainability.co.uk



A map and full directions to find Gloversbridge Farm will be posted shortly.



COST OF FULL WEEKEND

£20 per person to include ALL meals £12 per person concessions

ALL meals will be vegetarian and will be cooked and presented by me - Sarah Farrow Catering! If you come for the weekend I hope you will enjoy my tasty and vibrant food for example listed below is the Sunday Lunch, I am happy to send you a complete list of the meals I am cooking during the weekend - please email me, sarahfarrow2000@yahoo.co.uk

Green Left Camp Sunday Lunch

Fresh Local Vegetable Fritatta With Chives & Sun blush Tomato served warm with a red onion and fragrant Thai salad, served with homemade creamy chickpea humus, mixed leaves, freshly baked bread & a pate of Vintage Cheddar and Caramelised onions.

Hope you like the sound of that! N.B if you come for the day you can pay just for the food you eat. The most important thing is that you come however short your visit! We will so pleased to see you.

ESSENTIAL ITEMS TO BRING :

1 Tent, sleeping bag, warm clothes for the evening - wellies maybe!
2.Torch (there is NO electric supply where the tents are pitched - its back to basics!)
3.Bowl, spoon, fork, knife, plate, cup

DRINKS
we will be supplying drinking water, tea, coffee, milk.

TOILETS
Penny has a compost toilet we can use (one reason why you need a torch!)

THE SUMMER CAMP WEEKEND AGENDA

Arrivals from Friday 20TH July - 8pm delicious evening meal & social


Saturday 21ST July

BREAKFAST served from 9.30 am

11 am Gender Circle Workshop or: Direct Action Workshop (you choose)

12pm Lessons For The International Eco Socialist - A Study Of Willhelm Liebknech
Talk & Debate with Tim Summers

1.15 Working Lunch - Green Party Trade Union Discussion With Pete Murry

2.30 Talk & Debate with Sean Thompson headed :

Why have all political parties become dominated by an elite and can the
Green Party Buck The Trend?

4.00PM Impressions & Observations Of European Green Parties
By Dr Joseph Healy

5.30 T.B.A



8.00PM Calling ALL Summer Camp Comrade's to the camp fire for delicious food and
friendship - can you entertain us at all?


SUNDAY 22ND JULY

Breakfast served from 9.30 am

10.30 The Big Sunday Debate - Green Left Discuss : POWER in Politics

12.30 Sunday Lunch is served

1.15 A performance of the Domestic Theatre Company

Marx In London - written by Beth Shaw and Martin Bould

A vibrant production starring members of the audience !


3.00PM Green Left Summer Camp comes to a close


ANY QUESTIONS PLEASE PHONE ME :

SARAH FARROW ON 01622 891610 07919347500

Fight the power!

There are millions of us who don’t give a damn for any authority because we have seen how little the many-edged tool of power accomplishes. We have watched throats cut to gain it. It is supposed to be as precious as the jade axe that travels from island to island in Oceania. No, power monopolised is evil...

from http://www.liveworkingordiefighting.co.uk/3_paris_commune/index.html.

I need to read about the Paris Commune, which Louisie Michel above was part of,

the quote is from 'Live Working or Die Fighting' Paul Mason's book on global class struggle, if you think class struggle is a far left cliche, think of the slums of Kenya or the factory workers in China opposing rock bottom wages or British posties trying to stop their jobs being sliced and local post offices shut.

It would be great to have a politics where the struggle between rich and poor did not need to be waged, unfortunately we are not yet there.

We get there without out a look at how monopoly power has corrupted many political organisations.

Bit torrent films from Venezuela

had this from Nigel Rolland from Manchester Green Party, please spread the word and watch the film.



Hi Derek

I spoke to you this weekend at the Climate change carnival in Manchester

Here is a link where you can download iso files which are DVD playable copies
of the following films:

Venezuela Bolivariana: People and Struggle of The Fourth World War

Another way is possible ...in Venezuela

Our oil and other tales

Bolivia is not for sale

Fahrenheit 9/11

Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre

UNCOVERED: The Whole truth about the Iraq War

Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death

These are seminal films which everyone need to watch

http://www.bissybox.com/Wiki/

Bittorrenting distribution is the next or new media distribution system to
follow on from TV. For example The Green Party of Canada has previously
filmed and distributed the 2006 Conference by bittorrent from Naom Chomsky's
website "Chomskytorrents" which has now been replaced by "Onebigtorrent"
at http://onebigtorrent.org/

We (UK Greens) could also be making use of this cheap and sustainable easily
accessible peer to peer mode of global media distribution, all you pay for is
the bandwidth from your isp which needs to be uncapped.

Ya basta

Nigel Rolland

each such conquest takes its revenge on us

Well been talking to lots of you about Marx and ecology, my contention is that while the left in the 20th century in all its varieties forgot green politics, Marx was concerned with environmental issues.

A good way in is this passage from Engels:

Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that they were laying the basis for the present devastated condition of these countries, by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture. When, on the southern slopes of the mountains, the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, with the effect that these would be able to pour still more furious flood torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that they were at the same time spreading the disease of scrofula.[11] Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature - but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other beings of being able to know and correctly apply its laws.

And, in fact, with every day that passes we are learning to understand these laws more correctly, and getting to know both the more immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature. In particular, after the mighty advances of natural science in the present century, we are more and more getting to know, and hence to control, even the more remote natural consequences at least of our more ordinary productive activities. But the more this happens, the more will men not only feel, but also know, their unity with nature, and thus the more impossible will become the senseless and antinatural idea of a contradiction between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body, such as arose in Europe after the decline of classic antiquity and which obtained its highest elaboration in Christianity.

But if it has already required the labour of thousands of years for us to learn to some extent to calculate the more remote natural consequences of our actions aiming at production, it has been still more difficult in regard to the more remote social consequences of these actions. We mentioned the potato and the resulting spread of scrofula. But what is scrofula in comparison with the effect on the living conditions of the masses of the people in whole countries resulting from the workers being reduced to a potato diet, or in comparison with the famine which overtook Ireland in 1847 in consequence of the potato disease, and which put under the earth a million Irishmen, nourished solely or almost exclusively on potatoes, and forced the emigration overseas of two million more? When the Arabs learned to distil alcohol, it never entered their heads that by so doing they were creating one of the chief weapons for the annihilation of the original inhabitants of the still undiscovered American continent. And when afterwards Columbus discovered America, he did not know that by doing so he was giving new life to slavery, which in Europe had long ago been done away with, and laying the basis for the Negro slave traffic. The men who in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries laboured to create the steam engine had no idea that they were preparing the instrument which more than any other was to revolutionise social conditions throughout the world. Especially in Europe, by concentrating wealth in the hands of a minority, the huge majority being rendered propertyless, this instrument was destined at first to give social and political domination to the bourgeoisie, and then, however, to give rise to a class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, which can end only in the otherthrow of the bourgeoisie and the abolition of all class contradictions. But even in this sphere, by long and often cruel experience and by collecting and analysing the historical material, we are gradually learning to get a clear view of the indirect, more remote, social effects of our productive activity, and so the possibility is afforded us of mastering and controlling these effects as well.

To carry out this control requires something more than mere knowledge. It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and with it of our whole contemporary social order.

All hitherto existing modes of production have aimed merely at achieving the most immediately and directly useful effect of labour. The further consequences, which only appear later on and become effective through gradual repetition and accumulation, were totally neglected. Primitive communal ownership of land corresponded, on the one hand, to a level of development of human beings in which their horizon was restricted in general to what lay immediately at hand, and presupposed, on the other hand, a certain surplus of available land, allowing a certain latitude for correcting any possible bad results of this primitive forest type of economy. When this surplus land was exhausted, communal ownership also declined. All higher forms of production, however, proceeded in their development to the division of the population into different classes and thereby to the contradiction of ruling and oppressed classes. But thanks to this, the interest of the ruling class became the driving factor of production, in so far as the latter was not restricted to the barest means of subsistence of the oppressed people. This has been carried through most completely in the capitalist mode of production prevailing to-day in Western Europe. The individual capitalists, who dominate production and exchange, are able to concern themselves only with the most immediate useful effect of their actions. Indeed, even this useful effect - in as much as it is a question of the usefulness of the commodity that is produced or exchanged - retreats right into the background, and the sole incentive becomes the profit to be gained on selling.

The social science of the bourgeoisie, classical political economy, is predominantly occupied only with the directly intended social effects of human actions connected with production and exchange. This fully corresponds to the social organisation of which it is the theoretical expression. When individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results can be taken into account in the first place. When an individual manufacturer or merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with only the usual small profit, he is satisfied, and he is not concerned as to what becomes of the commodity afterwards or who are its purchasers. The same thing applies to the natural effects of the same actions. What did the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees, care that the tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the now unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock? In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the first, tangible success; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be of quite a different, mainly even of quite an opposite, character; that the harmony of demand and supply becomes transformed into their polar opposites, as shown by the course of each ten years' industrial cycle, and of which even Germany has experienced a little preliminary in the "crash"; that private ownership based on individual labour necessarily develops into the propertylessness of the workers, while all wealth becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of non-workers; that ...[12]