Welcome to Green Social Thought’s collection of economics articles. Take a deep dive into green economics perspectives. As advocates for environmental responsibility and social justice, we bring you insights into a transformative economic approach that challenges the status quo, particularly degrowth and union and worker rights.
In a world grappling with the consequences of excessive consumption and environmental degradation, degrowth stands as a bold alternative. Our articles explore the the green vision of reshaping our economic landscape, with a particular focus on scaling down unnecessary and detrimental aspects, such as military expenditures and empowering workers through unionization.
Explore the economic implications of embracing degrowth policies, from redefining prosperity to creating resilient and inclusive communities. Exploration of economic alternatives that prioritize people and the planet.
US Unions Must Look Beyond Themselves to Save Themselves
Kim Scipes
Argues that unions in the US–and by implications elsewhere–need to reject business unionism for social justice unionism by using their power in workplace to not only back workers there, but to back working people in work places AND in the community, at the local, national and/or global levels. Either we work for good of all, or today’s unions die a long, slow, painful death.
Hickel: Climate, Energy and Natural Resources
Jason Hickel
Relying on capital to deliver an energy transition is a dangerously bad strategy. The only way to deal with this crisis is with public planning. On the one hand, we need massive public investment in renewable energy, public transit and other decarbonization strategies. And this should not just be about derisking private capital – it should be about public production of public goods.
The Union Makes Us Strong: Understanding Trade Unionism in a Global Context
Kim Scipes
Discusses the need for labor activists to go beyond “lowest common denominator” union organizing.
Stop the Ukraine War: Refuse to Handle Military Cargo
CounterPunch News Service
The ILWU has always criticized NATO’s war moves. Since the end of World War II we’ve opposed U.S. wars and coups in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Serbia (former Yugoslavia), Cuba (Bay of Pigs Invasion), Chile (coup), El Salvador and Nicaragua. On May Day 2008, ILWU shutdown all West Coast ports to oppose the “imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan” (as the Caucus resolution read). We have taken action at the point of production against U.S. wars and the apartheid government in South Africa. We refused to load military cargo to the anti-communist military juntas in Chile and El Salvador. We are […]
Bolivia Presents Revolutionary Socialist Program To Transform World
Ben Norton
Bolivia’s President Luis Arce used his platform at the United Nationss to propose a revolutionary 14-point socialist program to transform the world. “Today we find ourselves facing a wide-ranging, systemic capitalist crisis that increasingly endangers the life of humanity and the planet,” he warned. “We should not only reflect on the economic, social, food, climate, energy, water, and trade crises, but also identify with clarity the origin, in order to change a system that reproduces domination, exploitation, and exclusion of the large majorities, that generates the concentration of wealth in a few hands, and that prioritizes the production and reproduction of […]
Chile’s Social Movements and Organized Labor Are Central to the Fight to Transform Society
René Rojas
On June 20, Gabriel Boric’s recently inaugurated reform government announced the closing of a copper smelter in the Punchuncaví-Quintero industrial corridor. The plant, which had polluted the air and riverways of the neighboring towns for decades, was frequently responsible for public health crises in the region. The most recent occurred in May when pollutants from the factory contaminated the local water and poisoned over five hundred children. The Federación de Trabajadores del Cobre, the union representing employees of Chile’s state copper industry, also a crucial constituency of the new government, immediately responded to the announcement with a national strike. Endorsed […]
Evo Morales: UK Role in Coup That Ousted Him
Matt Kennard
When the coup was looking inevitable, Morales had gone underground. Days after Morales and Linera arrived in El Trópico, Mexico’s left-wing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador sent a plane to rescue them, flying them out of Chimoré airport again. Obrador later said that the Bolivian armed forces targeted the aircraft with an RPG rocket moments after it took off. It appears the U.K.-backed coup regime wanted the deposed president – who had served for 13 years – dead. Morales then brings up the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “I feel that it is time now, seeing the problems between Russia and Ukraine … to do […]
The CIO Was One of the Most Successful Anti-Racism Movements in U.S. History
Michael Beyea Reagan
In the 1930s, a new type of union, an “industrial” union that welcomed all workers in a single workplace emerged as the cutting edge of working-class struggle. Previously, unions and employers both had a long history of racism and support for white supremacy. Certain jobs were reserved for whites, and Black workers were kept out of factories and union halls. This had catastrophic consequences. For example, in the 1919 Steel Strike, employers brought in 30,000 Black and immigrant workers to break the strike staged by white workers and their racially exclusive unions. With that, employers got production moving again, defeated the strike, and […]
Seventy Five Years Later, Toll Of Taft-Hartley Weighs Heavily On Labor
Jonathan Kissam
The Taft-Hartley Act was the centerpiece of big business’s counterattack against a labor and people’s movement that had, over the previous decade, won major improvements for working people on factory floors and in the halls of Congress. From 1936 through World War II, the new industrial unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) — UE, the United Auto Workers, the United Steelworkers, and dozens of smaller unions — had successfully organized the mass-production industries that dominated U.S. economy at the time.