On Apr 26, 2008, at 9:41 PM, James Heartfield quoted Trotsky:
> ...If you conceive that some cosmic catastrophe is
> going to destroy our planet in the fairly near future, then you
> must, of
> course, reject the communist perspective along with much else.
> Except for
> this as yet problematic danger, however, there is not the slightest
> scientific ground for setting any limit in advance to our technical
> productive and cultural possibilities...
But this was written more than 70 years ago. At the time, Svante Arrhenius was a paragraph in a physics textbook. Now, with the cancer- like progress of world capitalism, we face the ongoing reality of destructive, industry-generated, climate change whose possible effects range from grave (the best case) to (non-cosmic) catastrophe caused by uncontrollable feedbacks (melting polar ice--increased planetary albedo--melting of permafrost and upset of deep-ocean methane clydrate deposits--release of massive quantities of methane--intensified Arrhenius effect--melting of Antarctic icecap, and thence to utter ruin). If people today cannot become politically mobilized to carry out the (admittedly drastic) reforms probably necessary for the survival of their own great-grandchildren, let alone the survival of mankind as a civilized species, then what possibility can there be of their mobilization for the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system in order to achieve real communism a few centuries hence? I prefer the optimistic view.
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things...it consents and does not consent to be called Zeus."
Herakleitos of Ephesos