DECEMBER 4—The Radical Caucus (RC) of the Modern Language Association (MLA)  opened its mini-conference Keywords: Climate/Capital with a question: “How does understanding that capitalism is the key cause of the climate crisis help us address the immediate urgency of dealing with its effects?”
At the Dec. 4 meeting Progressive Labor Party (PLP)  members argued that we urgently need a communist revolution as an answer to the impending climate crisis, not the dead-end reformism of the Green New Deal, which assumes that capitalism will and can continue only in some new green mode.
Most of our friends’ presentations were urgent, informed, provocative—but reform-oriented. Then one speaker quoted from David Walker’s 1829 abolitionist tract Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, and a heated discussion began about violent resistance and direct action in climate struggles.
The crux of the debate being: Do we need revolutionary violence to end the global capitalist climate crisis?
Capitalism is the crisis
Someone pointed out that land defenders like the Wet’suwet’en in Canada were already the targets of state violence. Another decried the pacifism embraced by some climate organizers. There was a vigorous defense of non-violence as both tactic and philosophy from other speakers. But David Walker’s fighting abolitionist spirit increasingly shaped the discussion. Even the speaker who had praised the Green New Deal was moved to say that maybe we did need “a radical edge.”  PLP members argued that capitalism and its destruction of the environment and workers’ lives could never be abolished peacefully or by elections, and that we need a communist party to organize a mass armed revolution.
Building a mass revolutionary party
For those of us in PLP who are longtime organizers in the Radical Caucus, a significant development this past year has been that a number of younger faculty and graduate students have joined and now work with the Party in the RC. This is important because many militant antiracist, antisexist, and anti-capitalist faculty, workers, and students recognize the connection between the crisis of climate collapse, racist capitalist exploitation, and the pandemic.
 But the reversals of the two major communist movements in the 20th century, in the Soviet Union and China, have made it difficult for even radical anti-capitalists to embrace communism and a communist party as anything other than utopian. They often hold their noses and vote for liberals because they see no alternative.
Our role as communists is to overcome this skepticism; share our analysis of the setbacks of past communist movements; explain why PLP views liberals as more dangerous than overt conservatives; and uphold revolutionary communism as the only realistic alternative if life on the planet is to survive and thrive.
We need to become more skilled at bringing class consciousness and building a communist movement to the fight against climate change. Our links to friends in the MLA Radical Caucus are a two-way street.  We learn from them, they learn from us and our class will win through struggle and revolution.