PARTISAN!

The Editorial Board of Partisan introduce Partisan 5: On Fire.

In 1875, the Social Democratic Party of Germany began their founding program by stating that “Labor is the source of all wealth”. Marx made an important correction to this claim:

“Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor”.

The communist cause is, thus, necessarily the cause of liberating the planet from capitalist exploitation as much as it is that of liberating the working class from capitalist exploitation. In Partisan 5: On Fire, the relationship between environmental degradation and the capitalist system is expounded. Brought into the cold light of day are the internal contradictions of liberal attempts at preventing climate collapse, and the impossibilities of addressing human impacts on the environment within a capitalist framework.

For as long as nature is necessary for the production of capital, there is no possible way to avoid exploitation and environmental degradation; and nature is necessary for the production of capital as long as capital itself exists. There is no commodity created that does not begin as part of our natural environment, and until the total destruction of the commodity form there will continue to be a total destruction of the planet in its place. Natural disasters will continue to grow larger in both scale and frequency, affecting most of all those in the global south. We will continue to hurtle towards climate tipping points beyond which a return to the previous state of equilibrium is no more possible than turning back time itself.

The fight against environmental collapse must become a rallying cry for workers across the planet, for their struggle is one and the same. They, combined, are the “original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker”.