Welcome to our collection of articles dedicated to green politics. As our world grapples with pressing environmental and societal challenges, the green political movement emerges as a beacon of change.
These articles explore core areas of green politics such as: degrowth, demilitarization, union and worker rights, and anti-capitalism.
Discover the nuances of degrowth as we examine strategies to reshape economies, moving away from military and capitalist growth models toward a more balanced, regenerative approach. Explore the imperative of demilitarization, unraveling the environmental and social impacts of excessive military expenditures, and delving into proposals for redirecting resources towards constructive, peace-building endeavors. Anti-capitalism is a key theme, challenging the prevailing economic systems that prioritizes profit over people and the environment. Union and worker rights in politics is another key area. Our articles dissect the green political stance on restructuring economies to prioritize social justice, environmental sustainability, and community well-being.
This thought-provoking content analyzes the intersectionality of these principles, offering insights into how green politics seeks to create a world where ecological responsibility, demilitarization, and anti-capitalist values converge for the betterment of society and the planet.
We hope you enjoy these explorations of the progressive ideals of green politics, providing you with valuable perspectives, informed analyses, and potential solutions to the challenges we face. Stay engaged, informed, and inspired, and let’s pave the way toward a future guided by the principles of degrowth, demilitarization, and anti-capitalism.
The criminal legal system views pretrial detention as a necessary sacrifice that prioritizes crime prevention and court attendance over personal liberty. However, detention is demonstrably ineffective on both fronts: when compared to releasing people pretrial, jail counterintuitively worsens these outcomes on day one while making the system decidedly more unjust for those behind bars. These failures come at a steep cost, as detention also immediately disrupts a person’s ability to work and increases their risk of death.
Sonya Massey’s brutal murder at the hands of the police has resulted in anguish and anger but no difference in how state violence is protested. Instead, we see surrender to the crumbs of condolences and fake concern expressed by people who have the power to stop the killing.
In 2023, when Europe was blasted by a record-breaking heatwave named after Cerberus (the three-headed hound of Hades), workers organized to demand protection from the extreme heat. In Athens, employees at the Acropolis and other historical sites went on strike for four hours each day. In Rome, refuse collectors threatened to strike if they were forced to work during periods of peak heat. Elsewhere in Italy, public transport workers demanded air-conditioned vehicles, and workers at a battery plant in Abruzzo issued a strike threat in protest at the imposition of working in “asphyxiating heat”.
One of the defining characteristics of the current crisis is the speed at which contradictory social, political and ideological dynamics can change with contradictions shifting from primary to secondary, antagonistic to non-antagonist and conflicts of interests, as well as struggles among the capitalist oligarchy producing new intra-bourgeois class alignments.
The Guardian reports that since October 7, “olive groves and farms [in Gaza] have been reduced to packed earth; soil and groundwater have been contaminated by munitions and toxins; the sea is choked with sewage and waste; the air polluted by smoke and particulate matter.” Ecocide is part of Israel’s program of genocide.
Clearly, the major media and the American public are discounting the possibility that Joe Biden and his White House enablers could ever be prosecuted for complicity in genocide. They should think again.
The United States is a member of the Genocide Convention of 1948. Article III includes among punishable acts, “Complicity in Genocide.” Article IV makes clear that persons punished for genocide shall include “responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals
Don Fitz (fitzdon@aol.com) writes for and is on the Editorial Board of Green Social Thought where this article first appeared. He has been the St. Louis Green Party candidate for County Assessor and candidate of the Missouri Green Party for State Auditor and Governor. He is author of Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution (2020).
The wave of cop cities being constructed across the nation must be analyzed through the lens of settler colonialism and the state’s effort to maintain its dominance by expanding the police state. This week represents the first anniversary of the State’s attack and arrest of Amin Chaoui and others who were challenging its attempt to build another kop city, this time within the Atlanta, Georgia, area. It’s important to look at the creation of kop city within the larger context of State repression and the creation of an expanded police State of hyper surveillance, pushing ever greater intrusion into the private lives […]
There is a new specter haunting Europe. That specter is the far-right. But it is only a specter, an apparition, no matter how many likes, shares and even votes it gets. Behind that specter there rises a very meaty and material monster — the climate crisis — that will destroy capitalism no matter how many small Hitlers and Mussolinis it pushes as influencers, electoral candidates or even as coup d’etat dictators. The question that should now be put in every meeting of every left-wing and progressive leadership is if they will let themselves be destroyed together with capitalism.
The lack of a revolutionary program and of a revolutionary praxis, no matter how green it is, is one of the reasons why the far-right is rising. There is no political polarization, just a complete shift to the right, with the left pulled into the black hole of the center and actually presenting plans that aim at saving capitalism, when they should be pushing all the wrecking balls to take it down before it takes all of us down with it.
