1st Congress of the ISL: Resolution on Socio-Environmental Struggles

By International Socialist League

Considering:

• That the 1st World Congress of the ISL discussed this point on the basis of a contribution published in Bulletin N° 7 and that the collective debate in the Congress itself enriched it with diverse contributions that were collected and that are a point of reference for this resolution;
• That on this basis we state that the dynamics of capitalism in its period of irreversible decadence is the cause of a general civilizational crisis, and particular impacts on the socio-environmental conditions of life on the planet;
• That particularly, the dependence of energy matrix based on fossil fuels and irrational overproduction/overconsumption, together with capitalist industrial agriculture, generates an uncontrolled emission of greenhouse gases that cause the phenomenon of global warming;
• That complementarily, in Latin America and other continents, the pattern of capitalist accumulation/production is known as “extractivism” and consists of a general commodification of nature, the territorial dispossession of peasants and native communities, with the use of highly depredatory and polluting methods of appropriation of common goods and raw material, such as agribusiness, fracking, mega-mining or urban cementation for real estate speculation;
• That in South Asia, huge cities in India, Pakistan and Kashmir suffer the impact of urban pollution of smog and on waterways, affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people;
• That in Eastern Europe, entire regions are affected by capitalist industrial enclaves that affect the health of their workers and the communities living in the area;
• That in the Middle East, the impact of the infrastructure crisis in countries such as Lebanon, poses socio-health disasters as elementary for example regarding waste;
• That all these impacts on nature (including deforestation in Brazil or the huge fires in Australia) and the health of the people have as a primary cause the search for capitalist profit;
• That the hunger and misery of the workers of the world and of the majority of people that live in Asian, African, Middle Eastern and Latin American countries is deepening.
• That the working class and the poor are the most seriously and strongly affected by the ecological crisis of imperialist capitalism.
• That there exist forms of production that are superior even in efficiency and yield, non-polluting (or with socially controllable effects), and that therefore there are no technological obstacles to modify the economic model, but rather the private interest of capital;
• That all over the world resistance movements are taking place in the face of the socio-environmental consequences of the capitalist system;
• That in particular the movement led by the youth, in addition to the struggles throughout the rest of the continents against the various forms of ecocidal depredation, grow and place these issues on a growing scale of masses (although still with inequality in its development);
• That as revolutionary socialists, based on the Marxist method and the Transitional Program, we have to intervene and give a positive anti-systemic response, in action, politics and program;

This 1^st Congress of the ISL Resolves:

1. To intervene as far as possible in all the processes of struggle and socio-environmental mobilization that occur in the different countries where we act, especially focusing on those that mobilize youth vanguard. Coordinate especially, common interventions of all the ISL, in the international actions regarding the climate “summits” organized by the capitalist powers or the calendar of the movement.
2. To carry out talks, forums, conferences and agitation and propaganda activities to disseminate our positions in relation to this process in the different countries.
3. To continue debating in permanent articles against the positions of “green capitalism” and reformism in all its variants.
4. To raise a revolutionary and socialist policy on the issue that proposes a transition with an axis on the general reconversion of the economy, labor-professional of the working class, including the democratic planning of all production and consumption, with the working class as the key social subject.
5. To take to these movements our strategic proposal on the need to elevate the social movement to the political terrain, betting on winning the best vanguard elements, to build our organizations of the ISL.
6. To call for a World Meeting with this axis, to be coordinated with the leadership of the ISL elected in this 1st Congress.