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Sally Rooney: When are we going to have the courage to stop the climate crisis?
(www.irishtimes.com)
Multinational corporations are...destroying Earth for profit. If we want real change, we have to be willing to threaten those profits – and to learn from the people who have. Here in Co Mayo, activists with the organisation Shell to Sea worked for more than a decade to oppose the construction of a local gas pipeline and refinery by the fossil-fuel giant Shell. Starting in 2005, the campaign picketed the construction sites, prevented workers from entering, and even sabotaged infrastructure...By 2012 it was estimated that the delays caused by community action had tripled the cost of the project overall. Yes, the pipeline was ultimately built.
Protests and picket signs aren't going to work. Even in this very example given by the author, it didn't work! The damn pipeline still got built.
People have been trying to abolish capitalism for well over a century now. Most have failed, and even the few who didn't outright fail have succeeded only in controlling or managing capitalism, through a powerful, central state. There's a reason why it's so much easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.
Capitalism is an unstoppable force, and nature is an immovable object. What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?...