On 10 November, the Conference of the Parties (COP) — the highest decision-making body of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change — convened for its 30th session in Belém, Brazil.

The gathering arrives amid a grim backdrop of planetary crisis. In 2024, temperatures reached 1.55-1.6°C above pre-industrial levels for the first time, ocean temperatures soared to new highs, greenhouse gas concentrations reached their highest levels in 800,000 years, and cumulative ice loss from the world’s glaciers and Greenland’s ice sheets shattered all known records.

With the exception of China, whose reforestation programs have added new forests roughly equivalent to the size of South Korea between 2023 and 2024, there is a major crisis of deforestation that is threatening the very air we breathe. The host of COP30 — despite renewed efforts by President Lula da Silva — is at the top of the rankings. Brazil accounted for 42% of all primary rainforest loss in 2024, mainly from fires due to drought — by far the largest contribution to deforestation globally.

These ecological and climate crises have been bookended by a historic escalation of violence against peoples in the Global South. In Palestine, Israel’s genocide has likely claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, while destroying the land on which they lived. In Sudan and Congo, millions have died as a consequence of proxy warfare waged in the interests of national elites, their foreign backers, and ultimately the multinational corporations that profit from their cheapened resources and shortened lives.

These are not distinct issues. They are the tipping points of a world system in crisis. Climate change and the genocidal violence being imposed on the peoples of the Global South are part of the same process by which imperialism destroys the means of social reproduction — land and lives — to secure its capacity to extract and exploit. It is telling that the US military, the defender of the world’s most obscene levels of consumption, is both the world’s single largest institutional polluter and the primary sponsor of the violence that is rapidly spreading across our societies.

"Why have large carbon-consuming countries allowed the systematic murder of thousands of children in Gaza?” PI Council member and Colombian President Gustavo Petro asked. “Because Hitler has already entered their homes and they are getting ready to defend their high levels of carbon consumption and reject the exodus it causes.”

The connection between capitalism and climate change has long been clear. As Karl Marx observed, capitalism breaks the systems of social and natural “metabolism” — the cycles of production, consumption, and nature whose tight interrelation sustains all life on earth. This is particularly visible in agriculture, where rising intensity has depleted the soils of the nutrients necessary to sustain new growth, and in the peasants who, in increasing numbers, are forced from their land and into precarious labor in overcrowded cities.

Taken together, these crises point to a piercing conclusion: capitalism has reached its terminal phase. The historic increases in precarious labor, the imposition of neocolonial arrangements on the world’s nations, and the destruction of the means of social reproduction point towards a final, cascading set of tipping points that will either end capitalism, or they will end us.

The urgency is felt at this year’s climate conference. As COP30 opened, resistance erupted. Brazil’s Indigenous communities held large-scale protests both within and outside the Hangar Convention Centre, breaking down the doors of the Belém facility. As historical caretakers of the natural world, they called for an end to the commodification of nature and an end to the destruction it has brought to their communities — and our future.

It is the task of progressive forces everywhere to join that struggle by organizing to dismantle imperialism and its agents — whether in Palestine, Congo, or the vast expanses of the Amazon.

Latest from the Movement

Health under Sanction

Until recently, Cuba’s healthcare system was a paragon — universal, preventative, high-quality and free. But in recent years life expectancy has fallen and infant mortality has almost doubled. Healthcare in Cuba today is a shadow of its former self.

A powerful new documentary produced by Belly of the Beast and broadcast on Al Jazeera, Health under Sanction, reveals how the “maximum pressure” of U.S. sanctions on Cuba damages the island nation’s world famous healthcare system. One a paragon — universal, preventative, high-quality and free — Cuba’s healthcare is straining under the immense weight of sanctions.

Although medicine is technically exempt from the embargo, over-compliance is widespread. Big Pharma in the U.S. refuses to sell medicine to Cuba, citing the embargo. Asian suppliers won’t ship diagnostic equipment. And leading European banks block routine payments from Cuba’s Ministry of Public Health.

Health under Sanction tells the stories of the patients on the sharp end of the U.S. government’s economic war on Cuba — and the doctors fighting to keep them alive.

You can watch the documentary here and learn more about Belly of the Beast and watch their award-winning documentary series, The War on Cuba, on their website.

Imprisoned Pro-Palestine Activists on Hunger Strike

Members of the ‘Filton 24’ have now been imprisoned in the UK for over a year – well beyond the standard 182-day pre-trial custody limit. Some trials are scheduled as far ahead as 2027. Six of these political prisoners have now begun an open-ended hunger strike.

The Filton 24 are being prosecuted for taking direct action in August 2024 to disable weapons at a facility belonging to Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, Elbit Systems — a key supplier of the genocide in Gaza. In an unprecedented crackdown on the right to protest, the UK government has deployed counter-terror powers against the activists. All were denied bail and most face two years in prison before trial.

Heba Muraisi, held in HMP New Hall told Declassified UK why she’s gone on hunger strike: “Every time I spoke I felt like I wasn’t being heard. I was being silenced. They weren’t listening. I literally felt like this was the only option I had left”. The activists have put forward five demands: end censorship, immediate bail, fair trial, deproscribe and shut Elbit Down. The hunger strikers have received political support from the British Left, with Progressive International Council member Zarah Sultana warned in a letter to the Justice Secretary that “the prolonged and punitive use of remand in these circumstances risks amounting to political imprisonment in all but name.”

Meanwhile, fellow PI Council member Jeremy Corbyn stood with peace activists outside Westminster Magistrates Court, in solidarity with those who have been arrested for protesting against genocide.

Art of the Week

Star Gossage (born 1973) is an artist from Aotearoa New Zealand of Ngati Manuhiri/Wai, Ngati Ruanui, French, English and Portuguese descent exploring themes of emotion and memory, journeys of loss and endurance. While referencing European movements such as expressionism, impressionism and surrealism, her work incorporates Māori concepts such as whānau (family) and whakapapa (vaguely translated as genealogy but encompassing a wider perspective of what this is).

Gossage’s nostalgic abstractions merging portraiture with the landscape speak to the interconnectedness of humanity with the environment. Of her work Gossage has said the figures are not “anyone in particular; they represent something more universal.”