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Students and youth around Australia are taking part in rallies March 25–28 as part of a global strike to demand action to halt climate change. Previous school strikes have involved tens or even hundreds of thousands of students in cities, towns and regional centres across the country, indicating young people’s anger at government inaction and a willingness to take up a fight for their future.
International Youth and Students for Social Equality welcomes all participation in the strikes against climate changes.
School Strike 4 Climate, the organizer of the events in Australia, believes that the event is politically dead. The announcement of Friday’s rallies declares: “We will be sending a clear message to voters as [sic] this election, we are asking people to stand up to our politicians and #VoteForOurFutures.”
The School Strike 4 Climate organisers say that young people need to “send our politicians a clear message demanding Climate Action.” In line with this perspective, the Sydney rally was relocated at the last minute to the prime minister’s residence in one of the most affluent areas of the city.
The IYSSE insists you can’t pressure capitalist governments and politicians to address climate change. They are the ruling class and profit system that is responsible for the climate crisis.
The striking this month is in stark contrast to the dangers that climate changes pose for Australia and the rest of the world.
In the last few weeks, unprecedented flooding has decimated the east coast of Queensland (NSW) and New South Wales (Qld). The subordination of society to the needs of the capitalist class is the root cause of the flood crisis. For decades, the Liberal-National Coalition and Labor federal as well as state governments have overseen a complete eradication of flood mitigation and social service provision.
Like the 2019–20 bushfire catastrophe and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the floods have laid bare the inability of capitalism to protect the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people. 23 people have already died as a result of the flood crisis.
What has been the government’s response?
Premier Scott Morrison visited Lismore, a northern NSW town that is home to working-class people earlier this month. He stated that the government would not do anything for residents of Lismore or other areas affected by flooding. Morrison contemptuously declared: “In any natural disaster… the suggestion that it is only the governments that are involved in an emergency response, I don’t think the community agrees with that.”
Morrison’s statement only sums up the line of the entire political establishment. Whether it is mounting poverty and social inequality, the surge of COVID resulting from the pro-business “let it rip” policies, or the climate catastrophe, Labor, the Liberals and the whole parliamentary set-up insist that working people are on their own.
Flood victims in Lismore had to help one another and were only given a small amount in government aid. Tens of thousands are now homeless and in poverty in the flood-affected areas.
Despite not having any money, the government and Labor are putting almost unlimited funds towards the military and its war preparations.
An additional $38 billion is earmarked for the Australian Defence Force (ADF), which will be able to increase its strength by 20,000 to 80.000 over the next 20-years, on top of the more than $500 billion in funding for the decade.
The same capitalist system which is destroying the environment is now threatening humanity by a nuclear world-war.
The dangers highlighted by the outbreak of war in Ukraine. The conflict is a proxy war between the US–NATO and Russia, both of which possess nuclear weapons.
The IYSSE unequivocally opposes the reactionary invasion by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government. The war was provoked deliberately by the US and its allies. They are using it to further their long-standing plans for conflict against Russia. The US is trying to reverse the decline in its military might that has marked its history. China and Russia are the main targets.
Australia is on the frontlines. The weaponry being sent by the Australian government to Ukraine will be handed to that country’s fascistic militias, for use against Russian soldiers. The Australian media and political establishment are creating a wartime atmosphere based on anti Russian chauvinism.
All the official parties, including Greens, have aligned Australia to a massive US military build-up in the Asia-Pacific region, aimed at preparing war with China.
There isn’t a single difference between Morrison, Albanese and Greens leader Adam Bandt. Albanese is insisting that Labor would be better placed to oversee Australia’s frontline role in the US war drive. Bandt has campaigned for expanded sanctions against Russia, while saying nothing about the US–NATO aggression that has provoked the war.
The political establishment is equally united in blocking any measures to address the climate crisis.
It is important to not forget that the Greens-backed Labor Government of Julia Gillard did little to reduce carbon emissions between 2010 and 2013. Australia’s emissions actually increased under its carbon tax policy. That government’s own modelling showed annual emissions would have grown from 582 to 621 million tonnes from 2012 to 2020 had the tax remained in place.
In this, like every other election campaign, Labor and the Greens’ “climate policies” will all centre on cash subsidies to big business, and “market-based” solutions, which have failed to reduce emissions wherever they have been implemented, while enriching the financial elite.
The Greens signal that they will again work with Labor following the elections. A Greens-backed Labor government would intensify Australia’s involvement in US-led wars, force the working class to pay for the deepening economic crisis and would respond to the climate catastrophe with only window dressing, while serving the interests of the banks and corporations driving emissions.
The various international agreements and conferences, like last year’s COP26 summit in Glasgow, provide only false promises and posturing over national commitments, which even if met, would not end climate change. Each of the participating governments represents their national-based capitalist interests and determined that no action that impacts on profit-making operations can be taken.
Furthermore, decades of scientific research have shown that climate change cannot simply be addressed country-by-country. It can’t be stopped within a system that is dominated primarily by corporate and financial interests. Only a rational, international program that harnesses the scientific and productive capabilities of humanity can prevent environmental destruction.
This is also evident in the COVID pandemic.
Once held up as COVID “success stories,” governments in Australia and New Zealand have adopted the murderous “live with the virus” policy of capitalist governments around the world. All scientifically-determined public health measures to stem the spread of COVID-19 have been junked because they cut across the profit-making ability of the capitalist class. Students are being herded back into dangerous schools and universities as part of the “return to normal” where they are at risk of contracting COVID and spreading it to family and friends.
Climate change, like other existential threats facing humanity, is more than a science-based question. It is fundamentally a political issue.
We insist that climate changes and the severe weather and misery that they bring can only be stopped by eliminating capitalist systems that place the interests and profits of the wealthy and small-minded financial and corporate elites above those of the working class and youth.
War and social counterrevolution are the ruling elite’s response to the fundamental contradictions of capitalism. These are between private ownership of society’s resources by a tiny minority of capitalists, and the socialised nature of a production process that involves billions of people around the world. There is also a conflict between the global economy, and the outdated division of the world into antagonistic nation-states capitalists.
The IYSSE calls on students and youth to link the struggle against climate change with the broader struggles against all the existential threats confronting humanity, above all imperialism’s relentless march toward a catastrophic nuclear war.
Young people must look to the international working classes as the only social force capable opprobrium capitalism and replacing it by a world socialist system that is based on social needs, not private profit.
The working class produces all of society’s wealth. The only international class, the working class is interested in the end of the nation state system and the unification humanity. And the objective logic of the struggles of the working class are directed against the private ownership of society’s resources and the dominance of the corporate-financial elite.
Workers will struggle due to the deepening global crisis. This can be seen in the pandemic, threat of war and huge social inequality.
Students and young people must fight for a socialist outlook within these struggles and in working class. The main political issues of the day cannot be solved through inane appeals to capitalist politicians. Instead, they must be resolved by the development of an international revolutionary movement aimed at reorganizing global society to meet human and non-profit needs. Join the IYSSE to take up this fight
