Summer 2023 Editorial

This hottest summer on record comes in a year of continuing climate disasters as oceans heat to record temperatures and fires sweep the world. NOAA measurements show a record growth of heat-trapping methane emissions since 2019-20, While much of the rise in atmospheric methane then and since comes from fracking and from a thawing tundra, it cannot be separated from the disastrous sabotage and destruction of the Nordstream pipeline which released many thousands of tons of it into the atmosphere, exacerbating a feedback loop of increased methane, which in the past has lead to global extinction.

The Nordstream pipeline sabotage is an iconic example of the inseparability of war and climate destruction. Even the horrific flooding in Libya is a direct result, not only of climate chaos, but of the war waged on Libya by the US and NATO and the resulting lack of leadership and infrastructure maintenance that followed. Just as NATO wrought havoc on Libya, it continues to do so in Ukraine. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO Secretary General recently admitted, the Russian invasion was a direct and forewarned result of NATO expansion in the region.

The United States continues to be a juggernaut of global chaos and destruction. Why has this become so? Primarily because the rampant corporate corruption that has made a hollow joke of our representative democracy is driven by an obsession for global control of resources and economic hegemony at any expense. At this point in history, every military action and every war is a war against the planet and against the future of life on earth.

The poets in this collection understand that -- from our own country, wracked by cultivated partisan division, to the global community of nations, our only hope for survival as a species lies in peace, cooperation and unified action on the issues which threaten our survival, from climate action to health.

Poems in this issue also describe both the brutal alienation of being disposable, nameless commodities to the pride as well as identification we can take in our professions. They focus on the crushing and deadly exploitation we face, worse for immigrants and now children, and on the rising unity and fight-back which result. The class unity possible was recently demonstrated by a country music hit "Rich Men North of Richmond" which, while problematic, touches on the seething working class anger at corporate politicians who make our lives more harrowing even as they poison us and destroy the world to enrich themselves even further.

Beyond summer, this is a season of growing, militant working class struggle. The UAW is on strike against greedy corporations. This strike may well spread to other industries and to teachers under attack by the extreme-right. Climate protests against fossil feul profiteers continue as well.

Due to overt and utter corruption, we working and poor find ourselves stuck between an extreme right party looking to attack children, the elderly, the ill, women, the non-binary and minorities, and a corporate "centrist" party pushing to make war on the rest of the world. The insanity of warmongering and ecocide is the direct result of bipartisan corporate dominance.

The union struggles we are seeing must grow to a struggle against deadly corporate domination of our government -- against capitalism itself. Culture must play a major part in inspiring that necessary growth and class unity. We are grateful for the continuing efforts of our best working class poets and writers and for being able to do our part in this vital struggle for life and for authentic, working class democracy.