Call for the Anti-imperialist Camp 2001, Italy, July 28th – August 5th
Will this world survive until 2100?
“Within a hundred years from today the planet Earth will be half dead, and so will the human beings.”
It is not us who are saying this, but the scientists who observe the ongoing processes in the biosphere. The greenhouse effect…—the overheating of the Earth–will provoke irreversible climatic changes. As a consequence, there will be lack of water almost everywhere within only 50 years. Already today more than a fifth of the world`s population is suffering the lack of drinking water while five million people die every year due to drinking of polluted water.
The desertification and destruction of the top soil are progressing and seem to be unstoppable. More than two billion hectares of cultivable land appear to be irreversibly deteriorated which means that famine will reach catastrophic extents within a few decades. Following this rhythm, Africa will lose half of its cultivated land. The destruction of forests is continuing without any break, already affecting four fifths of the existing forests. Half of the remaining fifth is in danger, thus accelerating the destruction of the top soil and putting at risk big parts of the water resources.
The destruction of the ecosystem, which is threatening life on earth and thus the future of mankind, is not the effect of a divine curse, neither, as it is being claimed, of the demographic explosion. The overpopulation is, just like the pollution, a result of the mode of production, i.e. of the capitalist system, of the insane mechanism of subordinating everything under profit, under opulence and under an unsustainable level of consumption possible only for very few people.
Thus, what capitalists call progress or development is the first cause of the fatal danger hanging over mankind. We would have to produce what is indispensable and consume what is necessary to live, while the market has become a huge waste disposal site for goods whose purpose is not to satisfy the real needs but to make people become drug addicts of consumption.
While the West has still one century left before falling into the abyss, four fifths of mankind already live under conditions of pure barbarism. More than one and a half billion people have to live on less than one dollar per day. In 2025, they will be two billion. More than a hundred countries, with a population of one billion (a sixth of the world`s population) are living in pure misery, while the world`s first 258 billionaires possess more than the total earnings of the poorest half of the world`s inhabitants. Generally speaking, 20% of the world population, those who benefit from the highest incomes, consume 86% of all private consumptions, while the poorest 20% consume only 1.3% of the world product. Considering only Africa, today an average family consumes 20% less than it did 25 years ago. More than 89 countries are facing worse economic conditions today than ten years ago. More than 600 million men and women do not have a place to live. In 2010, more than 1.4 million of people will live in accommodations without drinkable water and sanitary facilities.
65% of the world population has never made a phone call while only in Manhattan there are more telephone lines than in whole of Africa. 40% of the world population does not have access to electricity. The total expenses for pet food in the USA and in Europe are higher than what is being spent to fight famine in the “third world”. The North Americans spend 8 billion dollars every year on cosmetics, the Europeans 11 billion dollars on ice-cream. That is more than would be necessary in order to offer basic education, drinking water and sanitary facilities to two billion people.
Thus, the capitalist system is destroying the very basis of life on two levels: on the one hand destroying the natural resources and on the other condemning the majority of human beings to live under miserable conditions. Also in the West injustice is growing. Neo-liberalism is aggravating social marginalisation and exploitation, while richness and power is being concentrated in the hands of small oligarchies.
Instead of retreating, capitalism is aggravating its despotic and imperialistic characteristics. The so called “new world order”, with NATO as its main armed instrument, is based on violence, on terrorism, on embargos, on genocide of those peoples who dare to challenge the Empire.
That is what the real globalisation is all about. In fact, it does not look like the one the mass media are presenting to us. However, rebellion against this barbarism is steadily and unstoppably growing all over the world. From Palestine to Seattle, from Colombia to Prague new movements are coming up stating the urgent need of an alternative to the current state of things.
It is the Anti-imperialist Camp`s purpose to encourage whatever form of struggle against injustice, to create the conditions for a united anti-imperialist front and to set the bases for a new uprising of a global revolutionary alternative.
Rebellion is not only fair, it is also necessary!
Anti-imperialist Camp
2nd January 2001
https://www.antiimperialista.org
camp@antiimpieralista.org
