«The Campaign of UPML and the Friends of ICOR around the International Environmental Struggle Day with ICOR» in France

Already in summer, the UPML had made the decision to make a real small campaign in autumn, which we prepared since the beginning of September through an internal training on this topic.

We appealed to the ICOR's call with its international and coordinated character and presented this call in our environment, at a stand at the university and in a workers' neighbourhood, at a rally on 6 November and in front of a railway company where we have been performing for a long time. In addition, a 4-page article deepened the ecological question for France, the positions of the government and the different parties, to show the need to create a new revolutionary party. The topic interested and we had many debates!

A collage with ICOR posters "Save the environment from the profit economy - revolutionary solutions are necessary!" invited a public debate on the topic, in the series of our "Café militant", which sees itself as collective and popular education.

We met with great interest at the stands. Many debates on the street revolved around the question: Who is responsible for the appalling environmental destruction? We go into this in detail in our small contribution for the ICOR website.

The ecological and the social question have to go hand in hand to be convincing! To this end, we have intervened in the proletariat with Karl Marx's sentence: "Capital exhausts both - the worker and nature."

COP 26 was a dismal failure! No decisions to match the existential urgency of the situation! No real help for the dependent countries for which the disaster has already happened! A comrade from Cameroon reported on the scorched earth left by the imperialists in Africa, where the catastrophe has already begun in many places !

Why are the COPs failing?

In the "Café Militant" we got to the bottom of this question. Is it mainly the fault of the much-maligned countries of India or China, which are indeed brutally and capitalistically building hundreds of new coal-fired power plants in the coming years? NO! The imperialist world system today forces every multinational corporation to wantonly destroy the environment in order to prevail in the greed for profit and increased competition among many new powers.

An example of this is Total, one of the powerful international oil companies of French origin with its mega-project "Tilenga". Total is currently building the world's longest oil pipeline with a length of 1500 km from Uganda to Tanzania, for which so far more than 100,000 people have been displaced from their land and nature reserves destroyed, provoking the anger of broad sections of the population. Yet the Macron government - despite being elected "Champion of the Earth" by the United Nations three years ago - formally supports the project, and the state of Uganda has had environmental activists who opposed the project arrested and charged. High officials of the state and big corporations are interchangeable, like Patrick Pouyanné, head of Total, formerly a technical advisor or cabinet director under various French governments. The international super-monopolies have established their power over the whole of society and their organs and those of the states and international institutions have merged.

The COPS are useful ... for the marketing of the polluters like Total, Shell, Chevron, etc., who are invited to the negotiating table to promote themselves and make deals; for their greenwashing! This also applies to nuclear energy, which the French government in Glasgow touted as the clean energy of the future.

Numerous examples from all areas of production and life during our discussion showed the disaster that capitalism is leading us into: The whole system of production and consumption must be changed in a revolutionary way - but where to start today?

The environmental question must be brought into all struggles, because it affects everything: the struggle for jobs and wages, the struggle of women, the future of youth, the struggle against imperialist war, and so on. In order to promote revolutionary socialism as a perspective, the revolutionary forces and the ideological struggle against anti-communism must be strengthened. The Marxist-Leninist literature equips us for this struggle: 4 books "Catastrophe Alarm" and 1 on "The Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology" by Stefan Engel were sold.

 We have suggested to the contacts to organise themselves in the Friends of the ICOR and in the UPML. And we will stay on that! In France we lack a revolutionary party! The voice of the communists must become stronger. In this sense we were pleased that on the occasion of the Environment Day the cooperation between the member organisations of the ICOR also continued in Paris and proved itself in the long run!