Alex Bainbridge, Toronto
Two-hundred people, mainly academics and graduate students, participated in the first international anniversary conference of the California-based red-green journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism over the July 22-24 weekend.
Held at Toronto's York University, the conference began with a tribute to James O'Connor, who founded the journal 17 years ago but was unable to attend the conference due to illness.
The conference theme was "Ecology, imperialism and the contradictions of capitalism", and this was reflected in sessions grouped around themes of Marxism and ecology, imperialism, eco-socialism and feminism and the urban environment.
Highlights of the conference included the final plenary. This began with a presentation, "International capitalism, ecological injustice and unsustainable production", given by Daniel Faber from the sociology department at Boston's Northeastern University. Faber pointed out that capitalist globalisation is increasingly unsustainable.
Another session, "Food, agriculture and urban conflicts", featured the presentation of a case-study of revolutionary Cuba's move towards organic agriculture on a nation-wide scale in order to achieve food security in the 1990s. Presenter Evan Weissman of the University of Tennessee argued that there were lessons that could be drawn worldwide from this experience given that Western agribusiness is heavily reliant on fossil fuels yet global peak oil production is imminent.
One example of Cuba's success that he pointed to is the fact that in 2004, Havana produced enough food within its city limits to feed its entire population of 2.2 million.
The conference opened with a panel on the topic "Capitalism: dynamic or doomed?". The panel continued a discussion that has been taking place in the pages of the annual Socialist Register magazine. It featured Patrick Bond (Kwazulu-Natal University, South Africa), Sam Ginden (York University) and Elmar Altvater (Free University, Berlin), among others.
Bond was representative of some academics at the conference who directly link their academic work with progressive social struggles. The evening before the conference began, for instance, Bond spoke at a Socialist Project forum dealing with campaigns against water privatisation. By contrast, many of the conference presentations were not even tangentially connected to any environmental protection or other social struggles.
From Green Left Weekly, August 3, 2005.
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