Pale red dot?

The Left Party is a small Trotskyist group in the United States, led by Carlos Petroni. It´s part of an international network called International Left. For those who find such things interesting, the Left Party´s roots are in the "Morenoite" current of Trotskyism (they don´t deny this). 

The link below goes to an article at the Left Party´s website, "Socialism or Extinction!", subtitled "Manifesto for the Construction of a New International, Revolutionary Marxist and Anti-Extinctionist". The document is apparently intended to be adopted at an international conference in Mexico in May later this year. 

The manifesto is interesting, since it very explicitly says that the climate crisis is already underway, and is so severe that not even workers power and a centralized planned economy are sufficient to stop it (although they are still necessary as a precondition). It simply isn´t possible to continue like before, with heavy industry emitting carbon dioxide, somehow hoping that "workers control of production" will miraculously save the planet. Anyone who holds such a position is a "labor aristocrat". (I´m not sure if any revolutionary leftist group is acually arguing this, however.) 

But what should be done instead? Here, the manifesto is less clear. On the one hand, the Left Party raises the radical demand to simply expropriate and shut down the entire fossil fuel industry. The owners should be charged with crimes against humanity! Internal combustion engines should be banned, and so should plastics (which are made of oil). Massive reforestation is another "transitional demand". Unsurprisingly, all nuclear power plants should be closed. The manifesto even calls for "socialist frugality" and the decentralization of large cities into smaller self-sustaining units. Humans should live in "harmony with nature". 

While this sounds radically Green, the manifesto also contains a number of red flags (pun intended). Thus, it explicitly denies that the Earth is overpopulated, criticizing those who want to return to a pre-industrial society as muddled romantics, reactionaries or simply genocidal fascists. But if fossil fuels and nuclear power are dispensed with, society will become pre-industrial. Here, the Left Party sounds like everyone else, singing the same old tunes about "alternative energy sources", "wind" and "solar". They also call for alternative, non-polluting modes of transportation. Unless they mean horse carriages, what could this possibly be apart from electric cars? The equation doesn´t add up. An important demand for the Left Party is open borders, justified by explicitly climate-related concerns. People have the right to move to "stable areas", and to keep their language and culture intact in the host nation.

Unless there is a world socialist revolution, the capitalist-caused climate crisis will destroy modern civilization. The working class might then disappear. Instead, various fascist and feudal regimes will come to power in a world fast descending into a new dark age. Slavery and serfdom will be reintroduced on a massive scale. The objective material conditions for a socialist revolution will disappear...forever. The tone of the Left Party´s manifesto is very strident, confrontational and sectarian. Its "Stalinist" or "centrist" competitors must be destroyed! As usual with Trotskyists, you never know whether they *actually* believe all this, or whether they are simply striking a radical pose to recruit the most angry youth, in this case from the environmentalist and climate activist movements. For a moment, I thought I had found something as original as Deep Ecology Trotskyists, but I´m not sure if that´s what they are. Perhaps the Left Party is simply another pale red dot...  

Socialism or Extinction!