Climate Justice and Socialist Strategy with Jason W. Moore

On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr., came out publicly against the Vietnam War in a speech entitled “Beyond Vietnam.” Beyond, in that title, meant everything. King not only broke with the liberal establishment, which viewed the war as a separate issue from racism and as an aberration in American foreign policy. King simultaneously presented a radical critique that linked racism and exploitation at home and abroad and began to elaborate a vision of an American socialism animated by a searing indictment of capitalism’s “triple evils” (racism, militarism, and class exploitation). Such a socialism would be grounded in a triple alliance encompassing the antiwar, civil rights, and labor movements. In this talk, Jason W. Moore addresses the missed opportunity for a program of planetary justice as the “Environmentalism of the Rich” came to the fore after 1968 and overshadowed King’s appeal for a radical turn. As King underscored in his final months, justice cannot be effectively pursued piece by piece. The “whole society” with and within the web of life must be reinvented, inasmuch as we are “all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny.” At the end of the Capitalocene and the beginning of the planetary inferno, climate justice – and socialist strategy – must proceed as if “all life were interrelated.”