On this week’s episode of Talking Radical Radio, Roger Annis talks about the Vancouver Ecosocialist Group and their commitment to the idea that thinking deeply about how capitalism works must be central to challenging the harm it does to workers and the harm it does to the planet.
The set of people who articulate fundamental objections to capitalism and the set of people who think it is important to protect the earth certainly overlap. It might even be fair to say that most people who think of their politics as anti-capitalist in North America today would identify as being pro-environment, though how central that green-ness is to how they actually act politically varies a great deal, and the inverse is definitely not the case. Yet if you look back a few decades, that kind of connection between commitment to a differently organized social world and to protecting the environment was not nearly so obvious, and even today for lots of us whose sympathies are oriented towards both, how exactly to unify thinking and acting in response both to the exploitation of workers and to the despoiling of the planet is not necessarily clear. There are lots of attempts to work this out in practice, but one strand of thinking and acting in the world that attempts to knit green and red together to create a more useful whole has come to identify itself as “ecosocialism.” Roger Annis has spent many years thinking, writing, and acting on the left, and he is a member of the Vancouver Ecosocialist Group, a relatively new formation. He talks with me about why the group formed, its actions so far, some of its key ideas, and how it wants to contribute to the broader ecological movement in the future.
To learn more about the Vancouver Ecosocialist Group, click here.
Talking Radical Radio brings you grassroots voices from across Canada through in-depth interviews that concentrate not on current events or the crisis of the moment, but on giving people involved in a broad range of social change work a chance to take a longer view as they talk about what they do, how they do it, and why they do it. To learn more about the show in general, click here.
You can also learn more about ways to listen or go to the show’s page on rabble.ca. To learn more about suggesting grassroots groups and organizations for future shows, click here. For details on the show’s theme music, click here.
Talking Radical Radio is brought to you by Scott Neigh, a writer, media producer, and activist based in Sudbury, Ontario, and the author of two books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists.
