Oakland: Thousands March to Stop Climate Change
November 23, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From readers in the San Francisco Bay Area
Oakland, November 21
Under the slogan “Defend the Earth!” thousands marched and rallied in Oakland, California, on Saturday, November 21 to stop climate change and attacks on the environment that threaten the very existence of life on this planet. The march took place one week before the leaders of more than 190 countries are scheduled to meet in Paris for the U.N. conference on climate change. The leading countries involved, including the United States, are the biggest polluters on the planet and have time and time again refused to do anything meaningful to stop global climate change.
There were people of all ages and nationalities, including a large group of students from UC Berkeley and other colleges, a contingent of youths fighting to raise the minimum wage, teachers, and people from labor unions. Buses brought people to the march from as far away as San Diego.
Revolutionaries from the Revolution Club and Revolution Books store, and supporters of Revolution newspaper participated in the march with the message that capitalism is destroying the planet and we need revolution. We took out copies of Revolution and the statement on the Paris attacks (“A Terrorist Attack in Paris, a World of Horrors, and the NEED FOR ANOTHER WAY”).
An older man we talked to wanted to know what the difference was between the “revolution” that Bernie Sanders represented and the real revolution that we were talking about. We talked with him about how Bernie Sanders is not even talking about destroying capitalism but just trying to make it work a little better.
Many people thought that more radical change was needed. And many had made significant changes in their lives to address climate change. A woman told us that she had quit her job as a teacher because she couldn’t take doing nothing while the planet was destroyed and also because she saw that the educational system was part of a school-to-prison pipeline
A young Black man said that he had been thinking about a revolution and wondered if we could really ever get to a society where one group of people was not dominating another. He had thought about this pretty deeply. We encouraged him to check out the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal) to see how a state in the hands of the people and serving different interests than capitalism can be liberating and serve as a transition to a society without any relations of domination or oppression.
We are in a global environmental emergency and it must be stopped!
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