On November 8, 2023 Chester County Liberation Center volunteers hosted an event around Tina Landis’s recent book Climate Solutions Beyond Capitalism. An organizer in the environmental and social justice movements, Landis works in air quality regulation and climate protection. She holds a certificate in Sustainable Management for the University of California Berkeley. Landis is a founding member of the PSL and writes for Liberation News.
Members of the community gathered at the Phoenixville Recreation Center to learn about the irreversible damage capitalism has caused our environment. From deadly climate feedback loops, destructive agricultural practices and the over extraction of limited fossil fuels, capitalism’s never ending pursuit of profit, its greed and its disregard for life have made our world less inhabitable.
Offering attendees a good dose of revolutionary optimism Landis stressed that despite these irreversible changes, we can still normalize and even legislate sustainable practices that can preserve and even restore much of what has been damaged through the extractive practices of capitalist accumulation.
Landis’ was clear though that there are no climate solutions within capitalism. Rejecting the position of the liberal wing of the capitalist class political establishment, Landis asked how the system responsible for climate change could possibly offer a solution? That is, how could the capitalist system based on perpetual, compounding growth fueled by an insatiable drive to accumulate value on an expanding scale, offer a solution to climate change without undermining its own internal logic?
In other words, the only way capitalism could solve climate change is by no longer being capitalism. The beneficiaries of capitalism, the capitalist class, could never end capitalism. This is the task of the working class. The solution to climate change, like the solution to poverty and never-ending war, for example, is for working people to pool our collective power through organization and fight for socialism. Only through organization and struggle will the working class defeat the capitalist class and lay the foundation for a socialist future. It is therefore not surprising that he PSL’s current ticket for the 2024 Presidential race is gaining traction at record speed.
Landis made it clear that more and more working people are joining progressive organizations like the PSL because the time for radical change is NOW.