Exterminism in Palestine

Genocide is recognised as the severest of international crimes. Today there can be no doubt that, since Operation Al- Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023, Israel has carried out a genocidal war on Palestinians, targeting the entire civilian population. Israeli government officials have called for the annihilation and removal of Palestinians. Israel, at the time of this writing in mid-December 2023, has killed more than twenty thousand Palestinians, targeting hospitals, schools, mosques, and refugee camps. The population has been deprived of food, water, fuel, and electricity. According to the United Nations Genocide Convention, genocide is “a crime committed to destroy a national, ethnic, and religious group, in whole or in part.” In this case, it is crystal clear that Israel’s goal is to destroy the Palestinians not in part, but in whole. Indeed, it is not genocide, as commonly defined, but rather the logic of exterminism that is most relevant here. The Palestinian population is today being exterminated by the Israeli colonial state in the double sense of extirpation and expulsion utilising the most advanced and deadly weapons, mainly supplied by the United States (United Nations, “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide [1948],” un.org).

Israel as a nationalist ethnoreligious state exists in its present form only due to U.S. backing. In the face of such naked exterminist imperialism, the product of the whole history of capitalism and settler colonialism, the worldwide response is bound to be overwhelming in the end, marking a global historical turning point. Already as the horror unfolds before our eyes, tens of millions of people of all ethnicities, nationalities, and religions around the world are in the streets protesting, promising a resistance that will become more and more universal—a general revolt of humanity. The Palestinians today are the frontline defence in a much greater struggle against the exterminism that is threatening the population of the earth as a whole, and that has been building over the entire course of capitalist history. In this sense, we are all Palestinians today.

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Research and analysis to provoke public awareness and critical thinking

We contribute to the liberalisation of the democratic instituions of society, for they have been captured by the owners of the market. They work in tandem with their market agents, who, posing as public servants, are entrenched in the halls of government. The political class has betrayed its public mandate and instead operates to impose a marketocratic state to maximise the shareholder value of the institutional investors of international financial markets. They own the global corporations and think they own the world on behalf of their very private interest.

Our spheres of action: true democracy – true sustainability – living wage – basic income – inequality – ecological footprint – degrowth – global warming –human development – corporate accountability – civil, political, economic, social, cultural and environmental rights, responsible consumption, sustainable autonomous citizen cells...

Parting from an ethos of true democracy and true sustainability, We, the citizenry, work to advance the paradigm whose only purpose is to go in pursuit of the welfare of People and Planet and NOT the market.

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• © The Jus Semper Global Alliance

World scientists’ warning: The behavioural crisis driving ecological overshoot

Previously, anthropogenic ecological overshoot has been identified as a fundamental cause of the myriad symptoms we see around the globe today from biodiversity loss and ocean acidification to the disturbing rise in novel entities and climate change. In the present paper, we have examined this more deeply, and explore the behavioural drivers of overshoot, providing evidence that overshoot is itself a symptom of a deeper, more subversive modern crisis of human behaviour. We work to name and frame this crisis as ‘the Human Behavioural Crisis’ and propose the crisis be recognised globally as a critical intervention point for tackling ecological overshoot. We demonstrate how current interventions are largely physical, resourceintensive, slow-moving and focused on addressing the symptoms of ecological overshoot (such as climate change) rather than the distal cause (maladaptive behaviours). We argue that even in the best-case scenarios, symptom-level interventions are unlikely to avoid catastrophe or achieve more than ephemeral progress. We explore three drivers of the behavioural crisis in depth: economic growth; marketing; and pronatalism. These three drivers directly impact the three ‘levers’ of overshoot: consumption, waste and population. We demonstrate how the maladaptive behaviours of overshoot stemming from these three drivers have been catalysed and perpetuated by the intentional exploitation of previously adaptive human impulses. In the final sections of this paper, we propose an interdisciplinary emergency response to the behavioural crisis by, amongst other things, the shifting of social norms relating to reproduction, consumption and waste. We seek to highlight a critical disconnect that is an ongoing societal gulf in communication between those that know such as scientists working within limits to growth, and those members of the citizenry, largely influenced by social scientists and industry, that must act.

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Sustainability: a catalogue of ideas received

The term is often used as a collective conscience-cleansing tool for the coming climate catastrophe. Perhaps an exercise in deconstructing the most common clichés would be necessary.

Many things have not yet been named, and many others have been lost in the name. One of these is the notion of sustainability. Sustainability, by definition, is the prevention of the depletion of natural resources necessary for ecological balance. However, it is a term often used as a collective conscience-cleansing term for the looming climate catastrophe. This makes it the recipient of innumerable clichés, which only take us further from the urgency of its original meaning.

While reactionary political sectors appropriate terms historically used by left-wing movements, such as"freedom", the market acts similarly, reducingconcepts to superficial aesthetics and ending up as consumer appeals. Perhaps an exercise in deconstructing the clichés surrounding sustainability would be necessary as a plea for its recovery.

Let these brief notes serve as a small, unfinished catalogue of what sustainability is not.

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From Imperialism to Green Imperialism: Tools of World-Systems Analysis Ecosocial Crisis

Humanity is at the most challenging crossroads in its history. Anthropogenic productive activity, framed within the capitalist mode of production, has caused most planetary boundaries to be exceeded and others to be strained. This has caused, among other things, temperatures to reach maximums never before experienced by our civilisation, species to become extinct at an unprecedented rate, the loss of soil fertility to become the norm, and the oceans to boil to the point of leaving the poles on the brink of their disappearance while acidifying and suffocating life in them. At the same time, civilisation does not lose sight of an increasingly threatening war horizon in which a nuclear outbreak cannot be entirely ruled out. And against this backdrop, a galloping decline of materials and energy sources is unfolding, putting pressure on every vector of the eco-social apparatus to the point of casting a shadow over the future accessibility of our societies' livelihoods and their very survival as we know them.

Amid this panorama of ecological devastation and military escalation, there is a growing impression, both justified and worrying, that mainstream geopolitical analyses are often too lazy to address the role of the planet's biophysical limits in shaping the global hierarchy between states and their regimes of dependency. On the flip side of this impression, but equally justified and worrying, there is also a growing sense that modern environmentalism suffers from excessive naïveté (and often ambiguity) in understanding the global political-economic dynamics that condition eco-social conflicts.

This combination of "oversights" has allowed capitalist elites, among many other things, to adopt many expressions of a supposedly environmentalist character to protect and perpetuate their domination. Thus, by means of the "green" label, global capitalism has managed to actualise its planetary and human plunder in a highly efficient manner. Greenwashing camouflages the interests of exploitation and appropriation of life and natural goods on which capitalism itself is based to adapt them to a terminology that paves the way for its expansion. It is the continuation of business as usual by other means: a new mode of accumulation that tunes business to the fashion of the times of ecological emergency. The "creative destruction" of capitalism sees business everywhere, even in disaster.

The dangerousness of this handling of reality, even more so in an era marked by a combination of eco-social crises, makes it essential to identify and unmask those central aspects of the green narratives of global capitalism in order to understand its conjuncture and the projections it allows us to glimpse. This paper aims to contribute to studying the relationship between imperialism and political ecology, the characteristics that identify the historical development of ecological imperialism and the eco-social implications of its cosmetic adaptation in a context of growing threat and biophysical concern. In order to do so, it is essential, first of all, to offer an updated, if succinct, definition of the notion of imperialism.

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Marxian Ecology, East and West: Joseph Needham and a Non-Eurocentric View of the Origins of China’s Ecological Civilisation

Ecological materialism, of which ecological Marxism is the most developed version, is often seen as having its origins exclusively within Western thought. But if that is so, how do we explain the fact that ecological Marxism has been embraced as readily (or indeed, more readily) in the East as in the West, leaping over cultural, historical, and linguistic barriers and leading to the current concept of ecological civilisation in China? The answer is that there is a much more complex dialectical relation between East and West with respect to materialist dialectics and critical ecology than has been generally supposed, one that stretches back over millennia.

In Within the Four Seas: The Dialogue of East and West in 1969, Needham noted the absolute alacrity with which “dialectical materialism” was taken up in China during the Chinese Revolution and how this was treated as a great mystery in the West. Nevertheless, the sense of mystery, he contended, did not extend in the same way to the East itself. He wrote: “I can almost imagine Chinese scholars,” confronted with Marxian materialist dialectics, “saying to themselves ‘How astonishing: this is very like our own philosophia perennis integrated with modern science at last come home to us.'” The Marxian materialist dialectic, with its deep-seated ecological critique rooted in ancient Epicurean materialism, was in Needham’s view, so closely akin to Chinese Daoist and Confucian philosophies as to create a strong acceptance of Marxian philosophical views in China, particularly since China’s own perennial philosophy was in this roundabout way integrated with modern science. If Daoism was a naturalist philosophy, Confucianism was associated, Needham wrote, with “a passion for social justice.

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Frederick Engels: The First Marxist?

As activists ponder how much we can draw from the first volume of Karl Marx’s Capital, a little more than 150 years after its publication, we should reflect also on how much we owe to Marx’s comrade of forty years, Frederick Engels (1820–95). Without his mental, moral, and material support, Marx might well never have completed even that volume, which Engels revised for its third (1883) and fourth (1890) German editions. He also had to edit the second and third volumes, which Marx had been too ill to complete, guiding them to publication in 1885 and 1894. In the meantime, he oversaw an English translation of the first volume (1886–87.

From the respectful attention that Engels gave to Marx’s discoveries, no less than from his own extensions of them in tune with fresh actualities, we learn how to better interpret both evidence and concepts for guiding change toward the communist ideals that Engels had absorbed before meeting Marx in 1844.74 Furthermore, the roles that Engels filled as organiser, economist, and polemicist in the development of Western labor movements illumine how we can best honor his memory and his contributions to Capital. In the words of one biographer, Engels “wanted no monument other than the coming socialist revolution.”

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Unequal Value Transfer from Mexico to the United States

“underdeveloped countries are so because they are superexploited and not because they are backward.”



Utilising a Marxist perspective and the concept of unequal exchange, I describe here the enormous drain of wealth that Mexico has experienced as a manufacturing supplier to the U.S. market. Unlike the analyses that understand Mexico as a backward economy, low on the scale of production compared to the United States, my argument is based in the value-labor time perspective and demonstrates that the meagre wages of theworking class in Mexico do not correspond to productive backwardness, but to a vast value creation that is drained away systematically through unequal exchange mechanisms occurring in trade. The conversion of Mexico into an export platform supplying the United States has resulted in a huge theft of socially necessary labor time. As Samir Amin explained, “underdeveloped countries are so because they are superexploited and not because they are backward.”

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Why strike action is climate action

Striking pushes against the core capitalist dynamics also responsible for global warming, CUSP researcher Simon Mair writes. Reducing fossil fuel use will not happen without a major shift in the centres of power. Strike action is one way to build towards these shifts, and in this way can be a precursor to stronger climate action.

Taking strike action is difficult. Some difficulties are obvious: sacrificing my pay as a lecturer creates immediate financial difficulties. Other difficulties are more hidden, like the pervasive anxiety of a strike day as emails roll in.

Strike-breaking colleagues remind me about pressing deadlines and students ask about class, marks, supervisions. I feel guilty for letting them down. Again, there is the threat of financial instability: will Ibe punished for papers I haven’t written, the student work I haven’t marked, the grants I haven’t submitted?

This is all compounded by the sense that when I stop working I stop contributing in some small way to action on environmental issues which, for me, is the point of my academic career. My research aims to support efforts to build a different, more sustainable, economic system. Through my teaching I aim to help my students build the critical capacities and technical skills they need to support an ecological transition.

Not doing the work can leave me feeling that I’m letting down activists and others on the coalface of climate action in order to support narrower concerns around wages, working conditions and pensions. As Extinction Rebellion founder Roger Hallam recently tweeted: “Why are lecturers not going on strike to stop their outrageous flying to conferences rather than protecting their pensions?”

I share this because I think these feelings are common. Many academics, healthcare workers and others feel a sense of vocation in their work. We do it for money, but for other reasons too. Our work is a way to contribute to the societies we hope to live in.

But I don’t think these feelings should stop us from taking industrial action. Hallam is mistaken when he pits industrial action over wages against climate action. Climate change is a systemic problem and I argue that strike action goes some way to addressing core systemic drivers of climate change.

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The toxicity of the capitalist mode of living

More than ten million people die each year worldwide from air pollution, a figure equivalent to deaths caused by war, terrorism, AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and drugs.

Although over the last half-century, capitalism has achieved unparalleled success in terms of material opulence, there is growing evidence to question its real contribution to people's quality of life, particularly in terms of the more immaterial aspects of well-being, such as social cohesion, personal autonomy, physical and mental health, the good use of time, the enjoyment of rewarding interpersonal relationships, or the availability of safe and healthy natural environments.

I.A.