Communist Workers' Organisation

It did not take the fatal consequences of recent record temperatures in Western Europe, or the recent wildfires in California, monsoon floods in Nepal, India and Bangladesh or the Mozambique cyclones, to tell us that something has radically shifted in the world’s climate. The existential threat of human-created climate change to life on the planet has been understood for decades. NASA, among others, first sounded the alarm about global carbon emissions in 1988 and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed the same year.

Part four of this article was written before the biggest financial crash was followed by the biggest banking bail-out in capitalism's history, yet it is interesting to see that essentially the same economic profile presents itself today.

The rising tensions in the Persian Gulf in the past weeks can be easily attributed to a sharp crisis of overproduction in the international oil market, ongoing since 2014. One relevant theater for understanding recent developments therefore lies in the largely under-reported and often overlooked Libyan Civil War, and in particular in its wide-ranging implications for OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries).

The article which follows is taken from the new edition of Revolutionary Perspectives (#14) which is just out. It was obviously written before the events which followed the British Navy’s seizure of the Iranian tanker, the Grace 1, off the coast of Gibraltar, but the substance of the analysis has not changed.