Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Capitalism touls up... Greece atlame

 |  Socialist Resistance no48  |  page 17

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

The fires during the summer months were the biggest and most devastating in the modern history of Greece.

They left behind more than 2 billion square metres of burned land, more than 100 totally destroyed villages and the loss of more than 60 human lives.

While everyone agrees on the size of the destruction, no one seems to be taking the responsibility.

So who is to blame? Climate change was the main factor both in starting the fires and making them so catastrophic.

The capitalist mode of production and the drive for economic growth do not have any respect for nature.

Unfortunately it was nature's turn to "revolt". This does not mean that the forests started burning themselves, but because of the dryness of the land, it is much easier for forests to catch fire and harder to put out the blazes.

The government had put the issue of privatising a big part of the public forests at the top of its agenda.

It was also trying to change the 24th article of the Greek constitution that protects the forests from private use.

This gave one more reason for people to start fires. This is why there seem to be more fire starters than ever - fire starters that neo-liberalism recruited!

To make matters worse the state apparatus found itself unable to react and prevent the disaster. Being a loyal Climate and capitalism lan Angus is the editor of the indispensable Climate and Capitalism blog (http://climateandcapitalism.blogspot.com).

Several times a week he posts an eclectic mix of articles giving a global ecosocialist perspective. The Toronto based blogger is especially strong on providing English language reports of events in Latin America.

These span articles describing the Paraguayan government's attempts to drive peasant smallholders off their lands to the Cuban foreign minister's address to the United Nations. In his speech Felipe Perez Roque expressed Cuba's hope that the forthcoming Bali Conference will produce a clear mandate for the developed neo-liberal servant, the government has continuously reduced public expenditure and destroying the country's intrastructure.

They have ruined the forestry fire services and the fire brigade, by cutting the money devoted to forest protection.

It is now one fifth of the amount that was decided by the bipartisan commission of 1993.

There are 4000 unfilled firefighter vacancies. Not enough money was spent on the upkeep of the fire stations.

At the root of this disaster is capitalism and its neoliberal policies.

The governments which have imposed these policies on Greece have blood on their hands. countries to reduce, by 2020, their emissions by no less than 40% as compared to their 1990 levels.

Reports like these show that in Latin America and the Global South the ideas of ecosocialism are part of the everyday discussion of socialists and anti-capitalists. Without the work that lan Angus puts in trawling the Internet for these articles there would be no easily accessible spot in which they could be tracked down.

If you want to keep up to date with the debate around carbon pricing or to get a reliable stream of information about ecological and class struggle developments right around the world Angus' site should be on your favourites list.