Material World

 

Material World – Economic meltdown in Lebanon

Lebanon, a small nation of six million, the host to Palestinian and Syrian refugees, as well as numerous migrant workers, has had an ongoing financial crisis since late 2019. According to the World Bank, Lebanon’s economic and financial condition ranks in the top ten, possibly top three, most severe crisis episodes globally since the mid-nineteenth …

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Coal Nationalism versus the Climate In China there have been well-publicised electric outages that have led to a contraction in factory output, a failure in fulfilling new orders, a slow-down in exports and rising manufacturing costs. The cuts in the electric supply have been the unintended consequence of the shift away from coal to meet …

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The Tigray Tragedy ‘Ethiopia has 110 million people. If the tensions in Ethiopia would result in a widespread civil conflict that goes beyond Tigray, Syria will look like child’s play by comparison’ – Jeffrey Feltman, US special envoy for the Horn of Africa. Seldom featuring as headlines in the media, since November 2020 there has …

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Afghanistan: another empire fails Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, fell to the Taliban last month, with every other provincial city having already capitulated in what can only be described as a rout. Now the Taliban are in full control of Afghanistan. At the time of writing, the USA and the UK were rushing troops to facilitate the …

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Stolen Children Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention defines genocide to include: ‘…e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.’ As early as Australia’s Victorian Aboriginal Protection Act of 1869, legislation allowed the removal of Aboriginal people of mixed descent to force them to assimilate into white society. Up to the 1970s, …

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Hamas High Dramas As a result of the recent conflict, many supporters of the Palestinian cause portray Hamas as gallant freedom-fighters up against Israel’s military might. While, in turn, the pro-Israel Zionist lobby depict Hamas as the super-villains. Many readers will be surprised that Hamas exists through the acquiescence and collusion of the Israeli state …

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Climate Refugees Climate change is reshaping our planet. Coastlines are encroaching further inland, deserts are expanding, the range of plant and animal species are declining. The climatic change that is making parts of the world unliveable is another example of people in poorer parts of the world paying the price for capitalism. Scientists forewarned that …

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Gender oppression in India In the past couple of months we have witnessed a massacre in Atlanta USA targeting Asian women, the New York Governor accused of being a serial harasser of his female employees, police forcibly dispersing a women’s protest against femicide in London, and large marches in Australian cities highlighting the violence against …

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The ‘Polar Silk Road’ Greenland is a self-governing territory of Denmark, and has a Gross Domestic Product of around $3 billion – similar to the Faroe Islands, another semi-autonomous Danish possession. That GDP is about to change if the multinational mining corporations have their way.   Various mining companies are vying for mining rights. Greenland’s …

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Crackdown or Backdown ? While there are many unsettling questions posed by Aung Sang Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD)’s complicity in the persecution of ethnic minorities, the World Socialist Movement expresses its solidarity with our Myanmar fellow-workers in their present struggle. Having had a taste of liberty, no matter how limited, …

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Co-operatives no way to socialism

 The International Cooperative Alliance was founded in London on 19 August 1895 by delegates from cooperatives in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, England, Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, India, Italy, Switzerland, Serbia, and the USA. Co-operatives Unleashed  is a recent report from the New Economics Foundation which calls for a co-operative development agency and a 'John Lewis law' compelling larger private companies to transfer a proportion of profits into a worker or a wider stakeholder-owned trust. In the report is a call for a 'profound transformation in business ownership'. Under this proposal:

'All shareholder or larger privately-owned businesses would transfer a small amount of profit each year in the form of equity into a worker or wider stakeholder-owned trust. Once there, these shares would not be available for further sale. 'Partnership stakes carry with them democratic control rights over the management and direction of the business. In many respects, our proposal for an Inclusive Ownership Fund can be thought of as a John Lewis law.'

 Our fellow-workers should, rather, face up to the reality that socialism is the only remedy for the poverty problem yet too many seek merely to ameliorate the misery of their lives under capitalism and one such palliative that continues to persist is cooperatives. Some have viewed the cooperative as an aim in itself, as a means of self-defence against management repression. Our job in the Socialist Party is not to tell fellow-workers the way to live, but to demonstrate that a genuine non-capitalist society is actually possible to achieve.

 We do not see socialism coming about by 'socialistic' cooperatives gradually becoming more and more self-sufficient and eventually squeezing out the entire capitalist production-for-profit system. This argument goes right back to the origins of the workers' movement in the first part of the 19th century.

 However, the our view is that political action for social change is the most effective way to achieve a co-operative commonwealth. We are not saying that people shouldn’t establish cooperatives if they want to, but that it’s not the way socialism is going to come.

We can imagine that, when socialists are in the millions rather than thousands and it is clear that socialism is imminent, people will be making plans and projects in anticipation of the coming of socialism, but we are not there yet. Cooperatives by themselves are insufficient to challenge the capitalist system.

 So at the moment, we need to concentrate on spreading socialist ideas rather than promoting experiments in lifestyles.
While many cooperatives’ administrative structures are admirable, in the marketplace they become simply another kind of small enterprise operating in their own interests, competing with other enterprises and even with other cooperatives and which are obliged to conform to marketplace dictates, regardless of the intentions of their advocates and founders.

 As long as capitalism exists, competition will always require the enterprises within it to look for lower costs, including the cost of labour. A cooperative must still buy its raw materials and other inputs and sell its products on the market, competing with every other producer of the same product, even if the members of cooperatives are nominally their own bosses. There cannot be socialism in one country, much less in a single business or a chain. Cooperatives cannot break the laws of capitalist production. The most important such law compels an enterprise, whoever owns or 'controls' it, to minimise costs in order to remain competitive. Society remains under the despotic direction of capital – even if it is the workers’ themselves rather than CEOs who serve as the new 'personifications of capital'.

 Although Marx mentioned workers’ cooperatives as possible harbingers of the new society, he cautioned that, as long as they exist within capitalism, the cooperatives 'naturally reproduce in all cases…all the defects of the existing system, and must reproduce them…the opposition between capital and labour is abolished here…only in the form that the workers in association become their own capitalist.' In other words, the workers end up exploiting themselves. When Marx turns to socialist society, he envisions a sweeping revolutionary transformation of the relations of production, from the very start. Although cooperation of some sort is a necessary part of production cooperatives by themselves are insufficient to challenge the capitalist system.

ALJO

Evo Morales - A Call for Socialism?

On 21 April, 2008, President Evo Morales of Bolivia delivered the opening address to the Seventh Session of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York. His speech included the following passage: “If we want to save the planet earth, to save life and humanity, we have a duty to put an end to the capitalist system. Unless we put an end to the capitalist system, it is impossible to imagine that there will be equality and justice on this planet earth. This is why I believe that it is important to put an end to the exploitation of human beings and to the pillage of natural resources, to put an end to destructive wars for markets and raw materials, to the plundering of energy, particularly fossil fuels, to the excessive consumption of goods and to the accumulation of waste. The capitalist system only allows us to heap up waste. I would like to propose that the trillions of money earmarked for war should be channelled to make good the damage to the environment, to make reparations to the earth.”

Despite the striking anti-capitalist content of most of this passage, the last sentence reveals that Morales does not have a clear conception of the socialist alternative. He still thinks in terms of the money system. The accurate way of posing the problem focuses not on the waste of money but on the waste of real resources of all kinds – the waste of nature and its bounty, of human life and labour, of knowledge and its potential. True, money represents or symbolizes some – far from all -- of these real resources, but in a very inadequate and distorted manner. To substitute the symbol for the reality is a mystification.

Nevertheless, I would like to argue that Morales is a good deal closer to a true understanding of socialism than most of the so-called “left” in Latin America or elsewhere. The very fact that he is addressing a world forum about the future of the species and the planet suggests that he is seeking an alternative at the global rather than national level. Although nationalization forms part of his domestic policy (the oil and gas industry in Bolivia was nationalized in 2006), he does not equate nationalization with socialism.

The model of the ayllu

In a number of interviews Morales has been asked what he and his movement – the Movement for Socialism (MAS) – understand by socialism. Thus, Heinz Dieterich of Monthly Review (July 2006) asks him what country the socioeconomic model of the MAS most closely resembles. Brazil? Cuba? Venezuela? Morales does not like the way the question is put. (“[Socialism] is something much deeper... It is to live in community and equality.”) He talks instead about the traditional peasant commune or ayllu of the indigenous peoples of the Andes, based on communal landholding and “respect for Mother Earth.” He himself grew up in an ayllu of the Aymara people in Oruro Province; in some parts of Bolivia such communities still exist.

In another interview, to journalists from Spiegel, Morales says: “There was no private property in the past. Everything was communal property. In the Indian community where I was born, everything belonged to the community. This way of life is more equitable.” As the World Socialist Review, published by our companion party in the United States, comments: “This is more than just a variation on the leftist cop-out that socialism is a goal for the distant future; it is, on some level, an acceptance of it as a real alternative to capitalism.”

Rejecting vanguardism

Another indication that Morales is closer than most of the “left” to a genuine understanding of socialism is his opposition to the Bolshevik idea of the “vanguard party.” The MAS, he tells Dieterich, “was not created by political ideologues or by a group of intellectuals, but by peasant congresses to solve the problems of the people.” It has always rejected the pretensions to “leadership” of Leninist groups of different varieties - followers of Stalin, Trotsky, or Mariategui (a Peruvian Bolshevik who has had great influence on the left in Latin America).

Of course, Morales is not only a thinker with more or less clear ideas about capitalism and socialism. He is also head of the government of an underdeveloped country that has to operate within the parameters of a capitalist world. As such he is no position to realize his more far reaching aspirations. At most, he has been able – like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela – to divert some of the proceeds from the sale of oil and gas to making some improvement to the life of the impoverished indigenous communities.

The fact remains that an internationally known figure has stood up at the United Nations and called upon the world community to bring the capitalist system to an end. Morales’ concept of socialism may be less clear than we would like, but it does at least bear some relation to the real thing. Viewed from the time when the UN and its specialized agencies are converted into the planning and coordinating centre of world socialism, this will, perhaps, be regarded as a milestone in its history.

STEFAN

China’s Wild West

Chinese authorities this year imposed restrictions on Uyghur Muslims during the month of Ramadan, banning government employees and school children from fasting They justified  the ban by saying it is meant to protect the health of students, and restrictions on religious practices by government officials are meant to ensure the state does not support any particular faith. Along with government employees, children under the age of 18 are barred from attending mosques. For centuries, parents sent their children to maktaps, part-time schools at the mosque, where they memorised the Quran – but this practice, along with most organised religious instruction, is now prohibited. Under Chinese law, only state-approved copies of Islamic literature like the Quran are allowed. Human rights groups say it is an attempt at systematically erasing the region's Islamic identity. This is not about atheism, but political control. Uyghur resentment toward Chinese rule has been reinforced by China's policies of cultural ‘genocide’ on Uyghur identity, religious beliefs and practices.

Xinjiang has a majority Muslim Uyghur population - a Turkic ethnic group with a language and culture closer to Central Asia who scholars consider to be descendants of a mix of European and East Asian. Uyghurs are classified as a ‘national minority’ rather than an indigenous group—in other words, they are considered to be no more indigenous to Xinjiang than the Han, and have no special rights to the land under the law. The region is home to some of China's largest deposits of oil, natural gas, and coal. Before the region was absorbed into the People's Republic of China in 1949, almost everyone was Uyghur, but the numbers have since declined, dropping to below half by the year 2000, as tens of millions of Han Chinese were encouraged to settle by the government, who provided jobs, housing, bank loans and economic opportunities denied to Uyghurs. The same story as in Tibet, Manchuria and Mongolia. It is sad but in these instances there are only two options: assimilation or confrontation.

On 1 March 2014, a group of Uyghurs with knives attacked people at the Kunming Railway Station killing at least 29 and injuring 130 others.

On 18 April 2014, a group of 16 Uyghur refugees engaged in a shootout with Vietnamese border guards after seizing their guns as they were being detained to be returned to China.

On 30 April 2014, two attackers stabbed people before detonating their suicide vests at an Ürümqi train station.

On 22 May 2014, twin suicide car bombings occurred after the occupants had thrown multiple explosives out of their vehicles at an Ürümqi street market. The attacks killed 31 people and injured more than 90.

Such acts provided the Chinese government with the excuse for its propaganda that it faces a Muslim terrorist threat, in order to win public opinion both in China and the world and silence criticism of its neo-colonialism.

China claims that ‘Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of China since ancient times’, Xinjiang in Chinese literally means ‘New Territory’. The use of ‘East Turkestan’ by Uyghurs is criminalised. The Chinese Red Army occupied the short-lived East Turkestan Republic in October 1949 and pacified the people through executions and massacres. Tens of thousands of Uyghurs were killed in China's conquest of East Turkestan. The promised self-rule was soon reneged on after annexation and the ‘Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region’ established in 1955. Chinese state corporations exploited the huge reserves of natural gas, oil, gold, uranium, coal and other minerals found in the region. What is more, China tested 45 nuclear devices, both under and above ground, between 1964 and 1996 in East Turkestan, polluting air, water and soil with radiation.

Chinese soldiers' have been accused of extrajudicial and indiscriminate killings of Uyghur men, women and children. This systematic repression of Uyghur people and their subsequent resistance to it, has been described as a fight against ‘Islamic terrorism’. Moderate Uyghurs such as Professor Ilham Tohti and linguist Abduweli Ayup who had tried to work within the Chinese system were denounced and arrested. Others out of desperation have committed horrific acts of political violence against not only Chinese security forces, but also against settlers. The July 2009 Ürümqi riots were a series of violent riots over several days that broke out in the capital city of Xinjiang and targeted Han Chinese. A total of 197 people died.

This oppression is all the worse for being done in the name of socialism whereas socialism ‘will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex’.

ALJO

No Peace in the Pacific

After Costa Rica’s civil war in 1948, Jose Figueres, the then president of Costa Rica, abolished the army, took a sledgehammer and began the demolition of the nation's military headquarters. That fundamental decision was enshrined in the 1949 Constitution. To this day, Costa Rica has no army, navy or air force, no heavy weapons of any kind but instead they have the Fuerza Pública (Public Force) responsible for law enforcement and border patrol.  

On September 2, 1945, a formal surrender ceremony was performed in Tokyo Bay, Japan, aboard the battleship USS Missouri. After its defeat in World War Two, Japan, as an act of remorse at its previous expansionist aggression, declared in the country’s post-war constitution’s Article 9, that the Japanese people ‘forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes’ and thus restricted the Japanese military, known as the Self-Defence Forces, to engage only in self-defence. It meant that a large and technologically advanced state could not engage in any collective alliances or coalitions aiding friendly countries under attack, principally the United States or its proxy forces such as the Philippines. In the mounting tensions of the Chinese territorial claims to much of the South China Sea and its numerous islands, the full military potential of Japan requires to be deployed to protect or acquire whatever rich resources the region possesses.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants Japan's armed forces to join in military activities abroad and actively assist allies. Abe’s right-wing nationalism has created suspicion among many that it would lead a country that has long embraced pacifism into war again. The Abe government has yet to offer a full and unconditional apology for past aggression and atrocities committed by previous Japanese militarism during its period of colonisation. Abe seeks to ‘normalise’ the Japanese armed forces’ role in foreign policy and he defends the bills creating a more muscular military by saying they ‘are not for engaging in wars’ but are a deterrent to ‘prevent war.’ He has argued that the bills will allow Japan to better defend its allies under the United Nation’s collective self-defence doctrine, which allows for ‘individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs.’  He describes this by the oxymoronic term, ‘proactive pacifism’ and hopes it will draw the Japanese people away from their anti-war sentiments.

Normally, amending the Constitution would require two-thirds approval in both houses of Parliament, followed by a national referendum. Abe has circumvented that process by having his government declare a reinterpretation of the Constitution and then following up a package of eleven security-related bills which, unlike a formal constitutional change, requires only a majority vote and there is no referendum. A recent survey by Asahi Shimbun newspaper showed only 26 percent support the legislation that will enable Japan's Self-Defense Forces to engage in wars overseas. 56 percent of those polled expressed opposition.

Many countries try to bamboozle us with Orwellian language. America’s ‘Department of War’, a more truthful name, thought it wiser to re-name itself ‘Department of Defense’. Israel describes its military as a ‘Defence Force’, and by doing so, hopes it explains away the occupation of and the offensive actions against Palestinians. Wars are now called ‘peace-keeping’ missions or ‘humanitarian’ interventions.

The Socialist Party has always held that the menace of war cannot be done away with and will always loom over us while its cause, the capitalist system, remains. Modern war is really an extension of business when the economic rivalries between the vying national sections of the capitalist class can no longer be peacefully resolved or controlled. The Japanese people are to be applauded for the stand they have taken against wars of aggression. However, the realities of diplomacy and nationalism mean that the capitalist class will protect their interests in whatever way they can … and perhaps the reason their armies are called ‘defence’ forces is that they exist to defend the ruling class. It would be encouraging if all nations could follow in the steps of Costa Rica but sadly it won’t happen.  While we have capitalism we cannot have stability. Always new crises will occur and new sources of conflict will appear over markets, the sources of raw material and geo-political strategic points. Seeing the world as it really is, we know that we shall have wars because the capitalist basis for them remains.

ALJO

‘I Feel I am a Slave’

There are now 53 million domestic workers worldwide, 1.5 million domestic workers in Saudi Arabia alone, where recruitment agencies fly in 40,000 women a month to keep up with demand.

In the Gulf, the International Trade Union Confederation says that 2.4 million domestic workers are facing conditions of slavery. Rothna Begum of Human Rights Watch says that ‘in many houses these women have absolutely no status – they have been bought’. The International Domestic Workers Federation estimates that families save $8bn (£5.1bn) a year by withholding wages from their domestic workers. ‘With kafala and other legal systems around the world that give no labour rights to migrant women, you are giving almost total impunity to employers to treat these women however they like,’ Begum says. 'It’s startling what cruelty can emerge when one person has complete control over another.’

Marina Sarno explains ‘I had no time off, no time to rest ever. Even when I was trying to eat, she would be calling me: ‘You are not here to rest. I paid a lot of money for you.’ To her, I was a slave. I was not a human.” Marina told her agency that she was being mistreated, but they said she had to stay until the end of her contract. “They said, ‘Your madam has paid good money for you’” (Guardian, 24 October).

Yet we should not consider such conditions as only applicable to the Middle East. In the UK there is the 2012 Domestic Worker’s Visa, designed for cleaners, chauffeurs, cooks and nannies from outside the European Union, who are accompanying overseas employers to the UK. It too is a system that ties overseas domestic workers to just one employer refusing them the right to change their employer in the UK. 15-16,000 Overseas Domestic Worker visas are issued to private households each year (around 200 visas are issued annually to those working for diplomats). The charity Kalayaan, which helps migrant domestic workers believes it facilitates and institutionalises the domestic servitude of workers. The old system allowed them to change employers once they were brought here, giving them a straightforward escape route if they experienced bad treatment. They could find a new job and apply to get their visa renewed. This system was praised as a model of fair play. The UN described it as ‘instrumental in facilitating the escape of migrant domestic workers from exploitative and abusive situations’.

The UK’s government position is that only a tiny proportion of those here as domestic workers are abused and exploited. However, Human Rights Watch said it had found serious abuses of migrant workers by foreign employers in the UK. ‘We have documented the forced labour of domestic workers; they have been made to work extremely long hours without breaks or days off, paid very little or not at all, psychologically abused and not provided with food,’ said Izza Leghtas.

‘Alia’ came to the UK as a maid. She said her passport was taken from her, she was made to eat scraps of food and sleep in a cupboard. ‘They promised me they were going to pay me more, but they didn't pay me. I started in morning at 06.00 until midnight. I didn't have any break and they never let me go out,’ she said. ‘I feel I am a slave, they told me you have no right to be questioning us because you are just a housemaid,’ she recalled. Alia eventually managed to escape, but by leaving her abusive employer she breached immigration rules and is now an illegal migrant. Her only option is deportation.

The Joint Committee on the Draft Modern Slavery Bill reported that ‘In the case of the domestic worker’s visa, policy changes have unintentionally strengthened the hand of the slave master against the victim of slavery’. The now 2015 Modern Slavery Act only provides for a six month period of leave for those domestic workers conclusively identified as trafficked.  For someone who has been trafficked he or she is expected to find employment within 28 days (the time limit specified by the rules) and during this time the worker has no recourse to public funds so may be destitute. They have to apply for the six-month visa having secured employment so need to search for and find employment with no clear immigration status. The worker needs to find an employer who will agree to employ them in their private household in spite of the six months limit to their visa and who will support an application to the Home Office. Last September the campaign group the Migrant Rights Network argued:

‘We are left with a provision which hasn’t taken account of the promised review and which offers so little leave it is worthless in practice. Worse there is a likelihood that these workers,  still not fully recovered from the effects of the trafficking, left with no evidence of their right to work, destitute and with the same pressures to support their families which led them to migrate in place, will be pushed into exploitative employment or even re-trafficking.’

ALJO

Rising Sea Levels

Tuvalu is one of the smallest countries in the world. It has a population of only 11,500 and has been inhabited for almost 3,000 years. In 1997 the then Tuvalu Prime Minister Koloa Talake addressed world leaders at the Kyoto conference. He petitioned countries around the world to take immediate action on global warming and make the changes needed to stop it in its tracks. He explained his low-lying country was sinking into the Pacific Ocean because of rising sea-levels. The current Prime Minister of Tuvalu, Enele Sopoaga, said climate change was the ‘Enemy Number One’ for his country. The people of Tuvalu don't require scientists to explain it to them. They can see it for themselves. Salt water is flooding the land and the people are having difficulties growing their crops because of salination of the soil. Groundwater is increasingly becoming undrinkable due to sea-water contamination. It is brackish and salty. Islanders are relying on catching rain water.

‘What we are talking about is survival,’ said Anote Tong, the President of Kiribati, another island nation in the Pacific Ocean that comprises a population just over 100,000 on a string of atolls barely 3ft (0.9m) above sea level. ‘It’s not about economic development ... it’s not politics. It’s survival.’

Following the Australian Immigration Minister Peter Dutton’s joke about the predicament of the low-lying Pacific Islands ('Time doesn’t mean anything when you’re about to have water lapping at your door'), President Tong commented ‘What kind of a person is he? As long as there is this kind of attitude, this kind of arrogance in any position of leadership, we will continue to have a lot of tension. It shows a sense of moral irresponsibility quite unbecoming of leadership in any capacity. I find that extremely sad, extremely disappointing that we are making jokes about a very serious issue’. Tong went on to warn Dutton that any future Australian immigration minister will have to deal with a wave of Pacific refugees from low-lying countries like Kiribati, if sea levels continue to rise. ‘I don't think so, I know so, because the science is quite categorical’ he said. Already two islands belonging to Kiribati have been totally submerged.

Nor will it be only vulnerable island-states like Tuvalu, or Kiribati and the thousands of islands around the world that are also just above sea level which will disappear. Vast tracts of river delta are not much higher than the ocean shore while some of the world’s biggest coastal cities are very close to sea level. Approximately 100 million people live in areas below sea level. Tens of millions of people who live in these low-lying areas near the ocean will have to migrate.

According to a 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report the sea level rise on the Bangladesh coastline could be about one meter in the next 50 years this will cause 11 percent of Bangladesh’s landmass to be covered by the water from the Bay of Bengal, forcing approximately 20 million (near enough the population of Australia) environmental refugees inland to the already densely populated and over-burdened cities. Up to 10 million could be displaced in the Philippines and millions more in the Nile River delta which lies only 2 meters above sea level. Such water level rises would affect low-lying cities around the world including: London, Shanghai, Hamburg, Bangkok, Bombay, Manila, Buenos Aires and Venice.

If places like Tuvalu and Kiribati are to survive we must act so they do survive and that can only be accomplished by establishing a socialist society. Socialism is defined as the common ownership and collective control of the means of production and distribution. It is the name given to the next stage of civilisation, if civilisation is to survive and we are not doomed to a return to the Dark Ages. As long as the instruments of production — land, machinery, raw materials, etc — remain private property, only comparatively few can be sole owners and so long as this is the case, they will use their private ownership for their private advantage, regardless of the cost to others. To protect the environment calls for the rational allocation of resources and for the widest possible development of democracy. This is a struggle for today. This is the struggle for socialism. Capitalists are not about to cut their profits for anybody. Have they ever reduced their profits to provide jobs, end disease, or avoid wars? There’s no reason to expect them to do such a thing in order to stop islands sinking into the sea from climate change. Many will simply be seen as unavoidable collateral damage in the drive for profits.

ALJO