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‘People’s Climate March’ Backed By Communist, Socialist Parties

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Michael Bastasch DCNF Managing Editor
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The upcoming “People’s Climate March” intended to show massive support for a global warming treaty to world leaders at the United Nations climate summit later this month is not only being supported by environmentalists, but also communist and socialist groups.

Among the literally hundreds of groups participating in the march are environmentalists and labor unions, as well as social justice groups, Islamic groups and other religious organizations.

But supporters of the “People’s Climate March” also include Communist Party USA, Socialist Party USA and a hodgepodge of other socialist organizations.

Socialist organizations supporting the climate march include the Democratic Socialists of America, Ecosocialist Horizons, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, the Freedom Socialist Party, the International Socialist Organization, Socialist Action and the Socialist Alternative.

The People’s Climate March is scheduled for September 21, the same day as the UN climate summit kicks off. Groups participating in the march hope to show strong support for a global agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions — despite the lack of global warming for the last 215 months.

The climate march is an “open-source” model, meaning that any group can join up and support it, but details about the march, such as the date, location and distance are being sent out by major environmental groups.

Environmentalists, however, argue that global warming affects everyone regardless of their political beliefs. To green groups, the march is about pressing political leaders to agree on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

A spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council told The Daily Caller News Foundation that “the march is being organized in a participatory, open-source model; thus any group can join — Republicans, Democrats, independents, libertarians, vegetarians.”

“Climate change is a global problem and everyone must join the fight,” the NRDC spokesman added.

Representatives from Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, 350.org did not immediately respond to TheDCNF’s request for comment.

Communist Party USA was founded as a radical Marxist-Leninist organization 1919 to push a communist agenda in U.S. politics. The group unapologetically supported the Soviet Union, and was even subsidized by the Soviets well into the 1980s. The group once boasted tens of thousands of members, but currently says it has a membership of 3,000 to 4,000.

“Until we win enough support to change the system, communists call for radical reforms under capitalism,” the Communist Party’s website reads. “We call for nationalization of the banks, railroads, and industries like steel and auto… We say put the unemployed to work at union wages on massive public works programs to rebuild our cities, provide affordable housing for the homeless, build mass transit, and clean up the environment!”

“Our outlook is based on the social science of Marxism-Leninism. We study history, politics and economics in order to change the world,” the website adds.

Leninists follow the teachings and examples of Vladimir Lenin, who wrested control of Russia from the czars in a bloody civil war in the early 1900s. The Bolsheviks, as they were called, were responsible for murdering the Russian royal family and launching a campaign of terror to subjugate dissenters.

Lenin also began a campaign of “mass terror” and demanded that “unreliable elements” of Russia be sent to gulags, or forced labor camps, throughout the country, according to Anne Applebaum, columnist and director of the Global Transitions Program at London’s Legatum Institute. “By 1921, there were already 84 camps in 43 provinces, mostly designed to ‘rehabilitate’ these first enemies of the people,” Applebaum wrote.

The use of gulags to silence Soviet political enemies expanded under Stalin to the point that prisoners “worked in almost every industry imaginable – logging, mining, construction, factory work, farming, the designing of airplanes and artillery – and lived, in effect, in a country within a country, almost a separate civilization,” Applebaum noted. Gulags continued even into the 1980s.

The Soviet Union is also responsible for the deaths of at least 20 million people in the 20th Century. Communism as a whole is responsible for killing as many as 65 million people during the last century — more than nearly five times as many people killed by the Nazi regime.

Socialist Party USA has roots going back to 1901 and champions “radical democracy,” which they say is a “non-racist, classless, feminist, socialist society in which people cooperate at work, at home, and in the community.”

Since its inception, Socialist Party USA sought to work to bring the U.S. closer to a social democracy, bringing big companies under government ownership and eliminating personal property.

“In contrast to the Democratic and Republican parties, the Socialist Party has an underlying philosophy that is both coherent and radical,” the group’s website reads. “Socialists believe that the problems facing America and the world, such as environmental despoliation, the systematic waste of public resources for private profit, persistent unemployment concentrated among women and racial minorities, and the maldistribution of wealth, power, and income, are not mere aberrations of the capitalist system — they are the capitalist system.”

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