On this Earth Day, leaders of the Green Party of Colorado (GPCO) express support for and dedication to the principles of ecosocialism, to counter the climate crisis and metabolic rift between people and nature created by world capitalism, and to end oppressive systems stemming from white supremacist heteropatriarchy. GPCO calls for the free association and self-determination of individuals and peoples, in ecological equilibrium.
“Ecosocialism helps us to understand how we ought to live in balance with others and with the earth,” said Mesa County Green Party chair Andy Hamilton. “Ecosocialists start with the premise that environmental degradation and social injustice stem from the same source: a world where profit is the highest goal.”
“GPCO recognizes that the 10 key values of the Green Party cannot be realized under capitalism,” said Denver Green Party Secretary Stephen Molyneux. “Our work must be to help create the material conditions for system change, for ecosocialist revolution.”
The objective of capitalism is to extract wealth by exploiting and commodifying our natural systems. This is demonstrated most clearly by recent efforts to privatize water systems, such as in the fight against Constellation Brand beers in Mexicali and in the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality approving Nestlé’s petition to siphon even more clean water from the state’s water supply while Flint’s water supply is still lead poisoned.
Colorado faces many ecologically and socially disastrous policies and projects. With the dawn of peak oil and gas extraction, the industry pushes even into our neighborhoods and at the doorsteps of our national parks. Colorado is undergoing the construction of more dams, reservoirs and river diversions, deforestation, the narrow-minded policy of exterminating wild predators, the depletion of soil and aquifers, and the expansion of the I-70 project – hiking childhood asthma rates in the predominantly-Latinx Elyria-Swansea and Globeville neighborhoods of Denver – all for the benefit of “growth.”
Green nominee for Boulder County Commissioner, Cliff Willmeng, states, “While living on the shale of Colorado and fighting the reality of oil and gas hydrofracking, we have learned real lessons. Working-class people are faced with the most bleak ramifications of this reality on the environment. It’s time to ease this environmental and economic desperation for working class people by creating full, unionized employment to transition our country from fossil fuels and onto renewables. This renaissance will not take place through profit-driven ambitions of the so called, free market, because the economy under capitalism isn’t designed to solve problems. It is designed to make money for a few rich people and corporations. We can build a new world from the disastrous policies of this one, but it must come through the collective discussion of planetary and human needs and not involve dividends or CEO compensation. It will be lead by the working class and it will finally remove us from both environmental disaster and permanent poverty and economic insecurity. That is what eco-socialism looks like.”
The fight against ecocide is essential to the fight against capitalism. As poignantly phrased by John Bellamy Foster in The Ecological Rift, “there can be no true ecological revolution that is not socialist, and no true socialist revolution that is not ecological.” But, ecosocialism isn’t inevitable. To grow the movement, it is imperative that the working class and oppressed are engaged. As Karl Marx said, “the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the workers themselves.” We have to build majority support, and not just support, but mass participation, solidarity and struggle. The Green Party of Colorado is committed to building political power with the working class people of Colorado, toward mutual liberation.
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