Clifton D’Rozario is visiting visit Australia to address the Ecosocialism 2023 conference over July 1–2 in Naarm/Melbourne. He is a central leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation (CPI-ML) — one of India’s three mass communist parties — and a labour lawyer with extensive experience representing workers in the fight for their rights, often against fierce repression.
D’Rozario will report on the heroic battle to win union representation and greater rights for Dalit sanitation workers, who carry out the extremely hazardous job of manually unblocking sewer pipes in Bangalore. Previously known as “untouchables”, or Scheduled Castes in the Indian constitution, Dalits are at the bottom of the caste system.
D’Rozario will also be speaking about the fight to save democracy in response to the increasingly autocratic right-wing Hindu BJP government, which many believe threatens to overturn India’s foundation as a secular republic.
Featuring Japanese Marxist academic Kohei Saito, the author of Capital in the Anthropocene as a keynote speaker. Saito is an associate professor at Tokyo University, building on the pioneering work on Karl Marx’s early ecological insights by other Marxist scholars, such as John Bellamy Foster.
Other exciting guest speakers at the Ecosocialism 2023 conference in Naarm / Melbourne July 1-2 have been announced. They include: independent First Nations Senator Lidia Thorpe; leading Indian socialist Clifton D’Rozario, veteran Pakistani socialist and global South climate activist Farooq Tariq, Malaysian
socialist Cheong Huei, Ting Kurdish feminist leader Nilüfer Koç; Kurdish writer, journalist and refugee Behrouz Boochani; veteran Filipino socialist activist Sonny Melencio; Greens Senator Jordon Steele-John; Burmese human rights activist Maung Zarni; Sapna South Asian Climate Solidarity co-founder
Ruchira Talukdar; Aorearoa/New Zealand Unite Union founder Mike Treen; West Papuan activists Paula and Cindy Makabory; Liam Flenady, campaign manager for Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather’s successful Griffith campaign; and Aishik Saha, an activist with All India Students’ Association and a researcher on labour and the digital economy.
Guest speakers will be joined on various panels by a number of leading Socialist Alliance activists including Green Left co-editors Susan Price and Pip Hinman, Sam Wainwright, Sue Bull and Peter Boyle.
There will be rich discussions about ideas and visions for a post-capitalist society and about the intersecting struggles for liberation and ecological sustainability that have the potential to take us there. Those interested in an ecosocialist future should read the Links insert on page 21 of Green Left 1381 for an insightful article by Gareth Dale. Dale said Japanese Marxist academic Kohei Saito has a “compelling case”. Because “the growth imperative is innate to capitalism” we need to struggle for a post-capitalist, ecosocialist alternative based on “democratically planned resource allocation, common ownership
and solidarity ethic, appears uniquely able to manage the downscaling of rich-world material and energy use”.
Ecosocialism 2023 will be held at the Victorian Trades Hall, 54 Victoria St, Carlton — walking distance from the CBD – on Saturday 1 and Sunday 2 July, 2023 from 10am to 5pm each day.
Ecosocialism 2023 is organised by Green Left and co-sponsored by Community Radio 3CR, Links journal, Resistance Books and the Socialist Alliance. For more information please visit – https://ecosocialism.org.au/
Purchase tickets at – https://www.trybooking.com/events/landing/1031971?eid=1031971&
