The Tory UK government has announced a massive increase in the number of Trident nuclear warheads to be held in Scotland at the Faslane submarine base just along the Clyde river from Glasgow.

The integrated review of security, defence, development and foreign policy published on March 16th included a 40% increase in the nuclear weapons stockpile. The UK currently has around 200 warheads, but had previously announced a cap of 180 by the mid-2020s. It will now increase this cap to 260 warheads.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament immediately called an emergency online protest rally addressed by speakers such as Green MP Caroline Lucas and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn – the rally can be watched here.

Scottish CND was already planning a campaign against Trident and other nuclear weapons for the forthcoming Scottish Parliament elections on Thursday 6th May.  An online public meeting of Scottish CND discussed this campaign on 17 March and was well attended by activists from across Scotland.

Candidates contesting the Scottish Election are to be asked: 1) to commit to supporting the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and to outlawing nuclear weapons; and 2) to commit to disarming the UK’s nuclear arsenal in Scotland by the most direct route possible; and 3) to speak out publicly, and commit to sign the International Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) Parliamentarians’ Pledge if they are elected.

With the entire UK arsenal of nuclear weapons based in Scotland, how the parties line up on 6th May will be an important aspect of the Scottish Parliament elections.  The Tories will be supporting nuclear weapons and their government at Westminster will be pursuing the replacement of the Trident system at an estimated eventual cost of 200 billion pounds.  The leadership of Keir Starmer means that the UK Labour Party will also line up with the Tories and support nuclear weapons and Trident replacement. The Scottish Labour Party conference voted in 2015 to oppose Trident and its renewal.  However in its manifesto for the UK General Election in December 2019, Scottish Labour declared that as defence was a matter ‘reserved’ for the Westminster parliament Scottish Labour candidates would back the UK Party policy of supporting Trident.  The new Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, has made noises that the Scottish party will maintain opposition to Trident but it remains to be seen whether they will back Starmer’s leadership or risk a row within the party.  The SNP say they are against Trident and want to scrap Britain’s nuclear weapons.  However in 2012, the SNP changed their policy on NATO from opposition to one of support.  Under SNP leadership, an independent Scotland would join NATO.  But NATO is a first and foremost a nuclear alliance and members face considerable pressure to accept nuclear weapons – no NATO member has yet signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and would face possible expulsion were they to do so.  At a recent online seminar on whether an independent Scotland could rejoin the EU, a leading expert argued that it would have to show commitment to “EU values” by joining NATO first (EU-NATO coordination is expanding rapidly and all EU member states are encouraged to support NATO).  The Scottish Green Party are the only one of the existing parties in the Holyrood parliament who support CND’s policies of opposition to both nuclear weapons and NATO.

JOIN CND! STOP TRIDENT! NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN SCOTTISH WATERS!

Mike Picken, ecosocialist.scot 19 March 2021

Preparations are ramping up for another edition of From the Ground Up, organised by the COP26 Coalition writes Iain Bruce of ecosocialist.scot.

This event will be shorter and more focussed than its hugely successful predecessor last November. There should be two days of online sessions, on the Friday and Saturday of 23-24 April. They will concentrate on discussing strategies and planning action for climate justice over the coming months, up to and including the UN’s COP26 climate talks in Glasgow in November.

The event will begin with some kind of action or panel the day before, 22 April, which is Earth Day and the date chosen by President Joe Biden for his own Climate Ambition Summit. It will end on the Sunday with an action plenary, something like the Assembly of Social Movements that used to close the old World Social Forums.

The eighteen or so sessions are aiming for a more participatory format, to discuss strategies and forms of action in key areas around climate justice and its related struggles. These will include action within the framework of the COP26 talks themselves, for example to kick out polluting companies that seek to sponsor the summit in Glasgow, or to wring the best possible results out of the talks. But most of the sessions will concentrate on action outside, to build up the pressure for radical action now, on emissions cuts, finance for the Global South and system change. So there will be discussions devoted to organising at the intersections between anti-racism, disability rights and climate justice, on legal action, organising in the workplace, different forms of direct action and the possibilities of calling various kinds of strike action for the climate around the world in November. There will also be sessions on struggles to defend Indigenous rights and the Amazon region, on the fights over food, land and transport. Importantly, since many activists in the Coalition are based in Scotland and the event takes place less than two weeks before elections to the devolved parliaments in Scotland and Wales, there will also be a session talking about Independence and a move by climate activists to draw up a climate justice charter for Scottish Independence.

Of course no one knows exactly what will happen with the pandemic between now and November, and therefore what kind of action will be possible when world leaders are due to descend on Glasgow. The Coalition’s main plans at the moment foresee a hybrid process. More online editions of From the Ground Up are expected to coincide with the G7 meeting in Cornwall in June, and with Climate Week at the end of September. Then, in November, there could be a combination. Saturday, 6 November, in the middle of the COP26, is slated for a Global Day of Action, which might include a significant central demonstration in Glasgow, alongside decentralised protests elsewhere in England and Wales, as well as other actions around the world. The day before, Friday, 5 November, could see a call for an international climate strike, building on the experience in 2019 of the school climate strikes, but also the feminist strikes in Argentina, Spain and other countries, as well as student rent strikes, Indigenous movement “paros” and so on. Those would be followed by a 3-4 day online people’s summit, along the lines of the previous From the Ground Up events.

There is however, another possibility looming. This is that the UK government or the UNFCCC may seek to move the entire COP26 online, with no in-person event in Glasgow at all. This has caused alarm among a number of “less developed countries”, including small island states that have been so vocal at past COPs, and who won the inclusion of a “below 1.5 Centigrade” target in the Paris agreement. They see an online event as a severe disadvantage to themselves, limiting their ability to negotiate and win concessions. Their position is shared by a number of the radical NGOs that have been at the forefront of lobbying and protesting around the COP process for many years, who also fear the pressure from civil society would be removed. Some of these are therefore arguing that in such a situation, it would be better to demand the COP be postponed again. There is not a consensus on this, however. Either way, if the COP26 were to happen partly or entirely online, the hybrid, decentralised form of protest already being planned would become even more important.

ecosocialist.scot welcomes the building of links between migrant rights campaigns and the climate justice movement and encourages our readers to support the following series of workshops in the run up to COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021, reposted from MORE Facebook event page.

Reposted from the ScotE3 website.

Jonathan Neale spoke about his new book “Fight the Fire: Green New Deals and Global Climate Jobs” at a Scot.E3 online public meeting on 12th March 2021.  The book is a tremendous resource for climate activists and trade unionists.

You can watch the full video of Jonathan’s talk below.  But do read the book – it’s available in hard copy from Resistance Books – make sure your local bookshop stocks it.

“The most compelling and concise guide to averting climate breakdown.”

Brendan Montague, editor, The Ecologist.

The Ecologist has published the digital version of Fight the Fire for free so that it is accessible to all. Click on this link to download a PDF or ebook from the Ecologist website.

Susan Pashkoff discusses the origins of International Women’s Day. This article was originally published by International Viewpoint.

The purpose of this piece to highlight the first wave of feminism and to provide some historical context to the creation of International Working Women’s Day in the the period of the first and second decades of the 20th century. While International Women’s Day is still celebrated around the world, it is only recently that its socialist roots are being reinvigorated due to a new wave of women’s strikes and struggles over violence against women, the struggle for reproductive justice and women’s bodily autonomy and the issues surrounding both the economic exploitation of women and the specific conjunction of oppressions that women face daily due to racism, disablism, sexism (and misogyny) and class.

One would think that in this day and age the struggle over women’s reproductive rights would have stopped being a struggle; alas that is not true. While both Ireland and North Ireland now allow for legal (and hence safe) abortion, that is not the case throughout Europe as abortion is illegal in Malta, Andorra, Vatican City, San Marino and Lichtenstein. In Latin America, abortion is legal in Uruguay, Cuba, Guyana and now Argentina. Many countries around the world still ban abortion, some only allow it if the mother’s life or physical or mental health is endangered by the pregnancy.

The victory in Argentina for the right to abortion was a hard fought struggle over more than a decade and the struggle itself was part of a broader struggle for women’s rights across many issues such as violence against women, femicide, LGBT+ struggles, and women workers’ rights.

Understanding and celebrating both the victories and bitter losses in the history of our struggles can provide not only pride at what was done, but also clarification of how to move forward the struggles for the elimination of racism, sexism and misogyny and economic exploitation that had divided and oppressed the vast majority of people living on this planet.

As Terry Conway states in “Solidarity Across Continents for Women’s Reproductive Justice”

The National Campaign for Safe and Free Legal Abortion (Campaña Nacional por el Aborto Legal Seguro y Gratuito) was set up in 2005 to campaign on these issues and has seeded a whole number of supporting groups. The network of teachers for the right to abortion (Red de Docentes por el Derecho al Aborto -RDDA) campaign for every child to have access to comprehensive sex education while the Network of Health Professionals for the Right to Decide (Red de Profesionales de la Salud por el Derecho a Decidir ) argue that access to legal abortion is a matter of public health. Perhaps the most important network is the socorristas, feminist ‘lifeguards’ who provided practical and emotional support to women needing abortions. And the campaign itself is the child of a wider feminist movement – a Green Tide as it is known – of which Ni Una Menos (Not One Less)- the movement against femicide- is by far the best known outside the country.

The bill which passed in the Argentine upper house on the 29th of December 2020 legalised abortion until the 14th week of pregnancy. The first Argentine President to support the legalisation of abortion, President Alberto Fernandez introduced the bill to the Congress in November 2020. On Friday morning, 10th of December 2020, the bill passed the Lower House by a vote of 131-117.

Martina Rodriguez ends her article “The Green Tide in Argentina Fighting for Abortion Rights” by saying:

Countries in Latin America are fighting for reproductive rights and feminist movements have their own agency (so ditch the white saviour complex, please). Nevertheless, the demand must be as an international force. We need to put on pressure, not only in our countries where there’s a lack of substantial rights, but we must also defend them in every corner of the world and ensure that the laws meet our demands and are implemented justly. After all, it really is about our autonomies, our sexual freedom and our rights to choose something other than the destiny they want to box us in as human vessels. We won’t stop until we have the law and a cultural change. It will be legal #SeraLey.

The History of International Women’s Day

International Women’s Day (8 March, IWD) was originally called International Working Women’s Day. It was a socialist holiday established in 1911 by the Socialist International and is celebrated by women’s groups around the world. In many countries, it is a national holiday and has recently been officially recognized by the United Nations. However, up until the 1970’s, with the advent of a new women’s movement, the radical working class roots of IWD had been practically forgotten. Due to its socialist leaning, it was excised from the United States memory, much as Labor Day replaced May Day, except in small immigrant enclaves or radical union groups. In Europe and the rest of the world, it continued to be widely celebrated, but tended to honour women in name only, mostly with flowers or by simply putting a woman’s face on a male agenda. IWD, in fact, was the culmination of a century of women working in the labour, feminist, socialist, and anti-slavery and segregation movements to bring together the common interests of the working class and women’s rights advocates.

There were several major trends that led to the establishment of IWD:

The first was a revolutionary fervour in Europe and the United States toward socialism, democratization and the vote. In Europe it was exemplified by a movement for working class men without property seeking the vote to further a socialist government, paralleled by a movement for middle class women to get the vote. This situation was mirrored in the United States by the struggle to gain the vote for black men and white women. The contradictions between these two types of suffrage movements were evident (should we fight for the non-propertied or black men to get the vote, even if women were excluded?). The solution, of course, was to get the vote for both groups.

Clara Zetkin was among the early socialists to see working class women as the driving force towards universal suffrage (everyone gets the vote independent of property qualifications to which it had been historically tied) since they bridged the divide, yet retain the principle of a revolutionary socialist agenda. It was Clara Zetkin who advocated for the merging of the working class socialist movement and the women’s movement through the establishment of International Women’s Day as a way to forward the goals of both labour and women. Zetkin opposed the stagist approach by the mainstream Women’s Movement in Britain which advocated first getting women over a certain age with property the vote (the centenary of the Representation of the People Act of 1918 which gave all British men over 21 the vote and women of property and over 30 getting the vote in Britain) and then later that women without property be granted suffrage. It took another decade, 1928, for women without property to gain the franchise.

In 1906, Zetkin addresses why socialists should support Women’s suffrage and Universal suffrage:

We must always press on the question of Woman Suffrage when we are agitating about the Suffrage. We have always argued in the Suffrage agitation that it was a question of equal rights for men and women, and we must continue to do so till we succeed. We must be united. We know that we shall not attain the victory of Woman Suffrage in a short time, but we know; too, that in our struggles for this measure we shall revolutionise hundreds of thousands of minds. We carry on our war, not as a fight between the sexes, but as a battle against the political might of the possessing classes; as a fight which we carry on with all our might and main, without hatred of the other sex; a fight whose final aim and whose glory will be that in the broadest masses of the proletariat the knowledge shall arise that when the day of the historical development shall have made sufficient progress then the proletariat, in its entirety, without distinction of sex, shall be able to call out to the capitalist order of society: “You rest on us, you oppress us, and, see, now the building which you have erected is tottering to the ground (Social Democracy and Women’s Suffrage, 1906).

The first clear victory in which the leadership of working class women following the establishment of IWD was the organization of the textile workers and women’s suffrage in the United States and the second victory was Russian Revolution in 1917 which began with a massive strike by women textile workers in Petrograde (St. Petersburg) on International Women’s Day. This strike was called against the orders of the Unions and left-wing political parties. The strikes lit the match of a country on the verge; they doubled in size to 200,000 workers and over the next few days, 66,000 men of the local army garrison joined forces with the strikers. The February Russian revolution began and the Tsar was forced to abdicate.

The second important factor was the increased numbers of women in the labour movement, particularly in the textile industry, as more and more women were pulled into factories and out of homes with the rise of industrial capitalism. Their struggle to free themselves from the patriarchal home and obtain decent work conditions in the marketplace instead of being viewed as cheap labour is exemplified in the call for both “bread and roses.” The textile strikes beginning in 1857 and the massive strikes between 1908 and 1915 were the activist expression of women’s struggle for power. This was especially true after the horror of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory strike where mostly women workers, but also children and a few men were killed in a horrific sweatshop fire soon after a strike of textile workers (The Uprising of the 20,000) in New York city demanding trade union recognition, better wages, working conditions and health and safety measures.

While initially the feminist movement focused on human rights issues for women such as suffrage, many of the women felt allied to working class struggles for decent wages and rights and took up the call that freedom and equality for one group meant freedom and equality for all. While the anti-slavery movement seems distinct, the end of slavery pushed all workers, black and white into the same labour struggle as wage labourers. Once this occurred, it was up to anti-racist groups to fight for equality within the labour movement. This, of course, always raised the question of equality for the other major group excluded from equality in the labour force — women.

These movements, occurring in a short period between the end of the civil war and the end of WW1, provided the activist and theoretical base to try to unite diverse groups into the revolutionary struggle. The formation of IWD was an explicit effort to unite the interests and theories of women and male labour (including workers of colour that was implied in the socialist agenda) under a Revolutionary Socialist agenda in support of universal suffrage and economic equality. The following excerpts (which we hope you will read, view, sing-along- with, explore and enjoy) are just a sampling of some of the actions and words of some prominent working women and movements.

We need to go back to the rise of the post-Civil War labour movement and the first wave of feminism to see the inevitable class contradictions that arose between women of the bourgeoisie and women of the working class. The differences in approach are obvious when we look at the issues. Bourgeois women advocating women’s suffrage linked it to property qualifications and argued that women as a group should be enfranchised without looking at how this left blacks and many non-propertied workers without the vote. The birth control movement also wound up linking to eugenics groups that were aligned to repugnant issues targeting the poor, the disabled and people of colour.

To win equality for all people, women of the left argued that the economic and social exploitation endemic to the capitalist system be eliminated by the triumph of socialism. While suffrage and access to birth control were clearly important reform issues, they would not in and of itself enable all women’s, or for that matter, all people’s equality. However when reformist men chose to limit their call for the vote to blacks and non-propertied working men – forgetting that this still excluded women – the dynamics shifted and the call for socialists to specifically include women in their demand for the vote was born.

This is an extract from an article on the Daily Kos “ACM: In Honour of International Women’s Day – In the Words of our Founding Mothers”. The authors said: “What we decided we wanted to do was to allow women to speak for themselves, so we reproduced some quotes from these women. We wanted to discuss not only women that were known as leaders or that were heralded during their times; we also want to remind people of the voices of those who fought on the shop-floors, those that became “leaders” due to circumstance. Their actions and speeches inspired and moved others and they are still relevant.” For those quotes please go to the original article.

The coronavirus pandemic must be seen as a part of the overall ecological crisis and not a separate issue, argues Alan Thornett, in an article originally published on the Red-Green Labour website.

The link often made between COP 26 (in Glasgow at the end of the year) and Covid-19, is that the Covid lockdown caused COP 26 to be postponed and now it is threatening to restrict what can be done around it when it takes place. Other than that they are routinely treated as separate subjects.

This, in my view, is a fundamental mistake. Such zoonotic pandemics are not separate issues but first and foremost an ecological issue. In other word Covid 19 is an integral part of the global ecological crisis itself not just something occurring at the same time, or existing in parallel with it. Such pandemics are (more precisely) a direct result of rapidly increasing anthropological pressure on the natural world and is on a par with the other such existential threats such as global warming, the pollution and acidification of the oceans, the mass extinction of species, and fresh water depletion.

We are now in the epoch of increasing numbers pandemics of dangerous pathogens, and if there is to be a long term solution to them it will not be in the form of endless vaccines chasing endless mutations until we are eventually hit by one for which there is no vaccine, but via a fundamental change in our relationship with nature and a much higher commitment to the struggle against climate change and environmental pollution.

Corona viruses exist in the wild in host species – often fruit bats or various rodent species – that have immune systems powerful enough to tolerate them. These viruses then spillover ‘zoonotically’ into other species when their hosts are thrown into close proximity with them under highly stressed conditions.

The danger of such spillovers is greater today than at any time in human history. This is because human impact on the rest of nature is also greater today than at any time in human history. Today’s model of human society, with its densely packed mega city populations and globalised trade and transport systems create not only the best conditions for such spillovers to take place but the best conditions for such pathogens to spread rapidly amongst the human population globally afterwards.

This puts COP 26 – and indeed the of whole the UN operation for the reduction of GHGs since the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 – in the front line on this issue. We have to demand that this is recognised by the UN and a new level of urgency injected into the process. The COP 26 coalition needs to integrate needs to integrate Covid-19 more strongly into its activity around the Glasgow COP and the From the Ground Up event need to pay more attention to it.

It also means placing fundamental change at the level of the viability of the planet as a sustainable living space for ourselves and the other species that live on it. The pandemic itself has already pointed the way in this. Since Covid-19 struck, air pollution and carbon emissions are falling at an unprecedented rate with aviation, one of the planet’s biggest polluters, still at a global standstill. Nature is re-colonising habitats that were dead prior to the lockdown.

It would be a disaster if all this was lost with the return of some kind of ‘normality’. The most salient point about Sunak’s recent budget – which covered spending commitments over the next few years, is that it had nothing to say about the environment at all. It is another massive lost opportunity.

We have to insist that there is no return to past levels of pollution and that the investment that will come as an attempt to recover from the economic consequences of C-19 should be used to build for a zero-carbon sustainable future. The ‘old normal’, it is often said, no longer exists. What is to be determined is whether any ‘new normal’ will be capable of creating a safe living space on this planet.

It follows from this that campaigning on these issues should not be separate either. Climate campaigners need to take the virus into account and Covid-19 campaigners have to campaign on the directly environmental issues as well. Nothing else makes sense.

Our demands must therefore include:

• A comprehensive changeover to renewable energy – wind, solar, tidal, and geothermal, with no nuclear component. It means the electrification of the transport system: road, rail, and maritime – including electric cars but with a big reduction in car usage. It means the abolition of the diesel engine forthwith and the internal combustion engine by 2030. It means the upgrading and decarbonisation of the national grid.
• No return to mass air travel. Reduction not expansion of airport capacity.
• A halt to habitat destruction. The extinction of species continues to run a 1,000 times faster than the ‘natural’ or ‘background’ rate that has occurred naturally over millennia. This is now recognised as the ‘sixth mass extinction’ – the biggest extinction event the planet has faced since the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
• An end to industrialised agriculture. Sixty per cent of global biodiversity loss is directly due to agriculture. The cattle sector of Brazilian Amazon agriculture, driven by the international beef and leather trades, has been responsible for about 80% of all deforestation in the region, or roughly 14% of the world’s total annual deforestation.
• An end to wet markets trading in wild animals and endangered species. (Recognising that not all markets known as wet markets fall into this category).
• There must be a big reduction in meat consumption. Today, 70 billion animals are slaughtered every year for human consumption. This is set to double again by 2050. These animals consume vast quantities of corn, maize, and soy that could otherwise be eaten, far more effectively, by the human population.

Meat eating and air travel in particular simply cannot continue at the old levels. Not everyone can be a vegan or even a vegetarian, of course, or indeed stop using air travel. But there is a lot the individual person can do short of that. If you can’t stop eating meat you can eat less of it – limit it to once a day or once a week or have a meat free day each week. The issue is to be conscious of your own action and take the planet into account. Not everyone can stop using air travel, or even long-haul flights, but everyone can think carefully about it first.

The starting point must be a completely new relationship between human beings and nature. This means both major structural changes in the way human society is organised alongside big changes in the way we all live our individual lives and manage our personal impact on the planet.