Encouraging Political Activism and Organizational Involvement

Transition is inevitable, we’re past the point of literal climate denialism. Even the fossil fuel industry, which has known about the dangers of climate change for decades now, has a plan for transition. In fact, one could argue that when it comes to being prepared and having a plan for the inevitable transition that climate change has forced upon us, the capitalist class is much, much more organized than we are on the left. Why is this the case? 

Well, the answer is kind of implied in the original question: it’s a matter of organization. And right now, the left largely unorganized. In this episode, we’re going to explore the problem of organization in the context of climate action and ask how we on the left can begin to get seriously organized in a way that will allow us to actually have a set of concrete, scalable programs that can be put into action at a moment’s notice.  

To do this, we’ve brought on two guests. Jodi Dean is an American political theorist and professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York state, and and organizer with Party for Socialism and Liberation, or PSL. And Kai Heron, is a lecturer in Political Ecology at Lancaster University in the UK. Together Kai and Jodi authored the piece, “Climate Leninism and Revolutionary Transition: Organization and Anti-imperialism in Catastrophic Times,” published in the journal Spectre.

Further Resources:

• Climate Leninism and Revolutionary Transition: Organization and Anti-Imperialism in Catastrophic Times
• Upstream: Capitalist Realism with Carlee Gomes
• Beyond Capital Toward a Theory of Transition by István Mészáros
• Upstream: Fully Automated Luxury Communism with Zarinah Agnew and Eric Wycoff Rogers
• Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming by Andreas Malm
• Ende Gelände
• Walter Mignolo
• Frantz Fanon
• Amilcar Cabral
• Thomas Sankara
• Decolonial Marxism: Essays from the Pan-African Revolution by Walter Rodney
• Upstream – The Green Transition Part 1: The Problem with Green Capitalism
• José Carlos Mariátegui
• The Red Nation / The Red Deal
• Hugo Blanco
• Climate Strike, by Derek Wall
• Upstream: What Is To Be Done? with Breht O'Shea and Alyson Escalante
• Common Humanity Collective
• Party for Liberation and Socialism (PSL)
• Palestine Action US
• Answer Coalition
• Palestinian Youth Movement
• Shut it Down for Palestine

Thank you to the Microphones for the intermission music and to Carolyn Raider for this episode's cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert Raymond

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