International Week of Anti-Imperialist Struggle: The planet before profits – Only one Earth
Despite our adventures into space, we know that for now we humans have only one planet to call home. And we will only survive in alliance with the rest of living things, animals and plants.
The unrestrained extraction and exploitation of natural resources, only in search of profits by the large corporations, and the logic of the capitalist system has depleted our planet.
The destructive power in the current stage of capitalism, in the financial phase, is unprecedented. Transnational companies increase their capacity of exploitation of common goods, advancing in mining projects, deforestation, private appropriation of water, among other things. In agriculture they apply the model of agribusiness based in monocrops and use of pesticides, that destroy biodiversity and change the climate. US imperialism and other global north countries attack peripheral countries looking to privatize common goods that the people, the real owners, that care for each country.
The result is clear: we are experiencing the worst environmental crisis in the history of humanity and all of humanity will be affected if this unhealthy dynamic of capital continues. Climate change is already affecting the people of diverse parts of the world, but unfortunately this is not the only consequence of the environmental crisis. The world’s water is contaminated by plastics and pesticides, and the springs are drying up. The planet’s biodiversity is decreasing at a rapid rate, in addition to being targeted by big circuits of biopiracy???. The soil is being degraded by deforestation and monocrops, and large regions are being completely destroyed by large-scale mining.
The COVID pandemic is the clear manifestation of this environmental and systemic crisis. The origin of these super pathogens is directly related with the destruction of ecosystems historically conserved by peasant and traditional communities. Environmental devastation liberates microorganisms that are in dynamic equilibrium in their habitat and when they encounter large industrial installations, overpopulated with different animals that are confined and intensely bombarded with antibiotics and hormones, they are selected and reproduce like pathogens. Then when they encounter large human agglomerations and people with immunodeficiency due to the constant agrochemical contamination of food and the food itself which is completely industrialized. This in addition to deforestation and the elimination of the habitats of wild animals provokes the migration of pathogens to human beings. This all indicates that if this mode of production continues, we will have many new viruses, that will become into more pandemics.
All human beings are being affected, especially the poorest, the women, children, and Indigenous people from across the world. Today we also have more than 134,000 species of flora and fauna are under threat of extinction.
It is important also to highlight the terrible role that military activities play in the destruction of the planet. The Army of the US and its allies, in addition to constant attacks on the lives of the people themselves, they are one of the biggest contaminators of the world, leaving a toxic legacy through depleted uranium, oil, fuel for airplanes, pesticides, defoliants like Agent Orange and Lead, among others.
Some corporations instead of combatting the causes, focuses on green capitalism, transforming the natural resources into new commodities and sources of speculation, such as carbon credits, the environmental preservation credits, and other false solutions that will not resolve the social and ecological needs of the peoples. The empire has tried to restructure its economic base with projects based in the marked that have in their DNA the need to increase the exploitation of natural resources of the Southern countries to produce a new technological base that is supposedly “green”.
This path will inevitably lead to the destruction of humanity and of nature as we know it. It is a project of death, domination and destruction.
The solution is in the rebuilding of the relationship between human beings and nature, where life, collective well-being, and ecological rhythms guide the nations and the people, not greed, profit and private property. It is a solution focused on agroecological production of food, the democratization of the access to land through agrarian reform, caring for common goods such as water, biodiversity and land, and the transition to an energy model that responds to the real necessities of the working class with social and environmental justice, of overcoming patriarchy and racism.
Stopping capitalist barbarism is a central task of our time. We need to bury the domination of capital over life to create a world that is just, egalitarian and vibrant, so that all can live well and in peace.
