Tilting at Windmills: The Future of the Climate Change Movement
Pablo Picasso | 04.08.2008 18:23 | Climate Camp 2008 | Analysis | Climate Chaos
This essay, to be discussed at climate camp, elucidates some current problems with the Climate Camp, as demonstrated by the repression on the Kingsnorth, and demonstrate that a future trajectory can overcome them: just as the anti-roads movement transformed into the anti-globalisation movement in the UK by moving to the focus to the city and capitalism, moving the camps from the countryside to the city would make victory again possible.
Tilting at Windmills: The Future of the Climate Change Movement
That the world is headed to disaster is agreed upon by all except the most delusional, yet the question of the hour is precisely “What is to be done?” From Drax to Heathrow to Kingsnorth, the climate camps, while effective at raising awareness of different forms of life that may survive climate change, have proven themselves to be monumentally ineffective at direct action aimed at actually “shutting down” carbon-intensive infrastructure. Luckily, even our dismal failures have a silver lining, for a truly successful direct action on this infrastructure would just imply that hippies don't want people to fly, or perhaps worse, that hippies don't want people to have electricity. As the most recent police raid upon the Kingsnorth camp proves, the territory of the climate camps almost always puts us at a disadvantage. It is just difficult to mount a successful mass-action in a field, isolated in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by police and cameras, with only a few rather obvious targets nearby.
Terrains of struggle come in cycles, and while never the same, the territory is always strangely familiar. The resemblance between the current upswing in momentum and the classical round of anti-globalisation struggles is stunning. The classical anti-globalisation cycle began a decade ago as encampments against a UK-wide road-building programme, a practical goal that had much popular sympathy. These encampments were for the most part semi-permanent and did manage to de-rail the road-building programme. Yet the true enemy was not the roads we ride upon, but the forces of capitalism that ride upon us. By moving the primary focus of the movement into the city of London itself at the “Carnival Against Capitalism” on June 18th 1999, a huge victory was achieved, and a host of global days of action took off – Seattle, Prague, Quebec, Genoa – that in parallel with rising global social movements, managed to help completely derail the “free trade” programme – as the total failure of the Doha round of the WTO put the nail in the coffin of Empire. Victory is possible, as long as tactics and strategy evolves with the changing times.
The climate camps currently suffer from “picture-thinking”: being unable to grasp the totality of climate change, the camps resort to targets that are “obviously” emitting carbon, such as coal-burning factories with large smoke stacks and airplanes with huge engines. However, climate change is itself located in the very flows of global capital itself, and the infrastructure of the state that maintains capital. These can be blockaded, stopped, and shut down. All we have to do is to choose a date and a target where the situation is to our advantage.
It's time to take it back to the streets. A tactical victory is possible in the city, which would both be impossible to ignore and perhaps more difficult for the police to control. A single victory would invigorate a whole generation to escape the sense of depressive gloom of passivity. Once a concrete victory is scored, all manner of actions will no doubt spread like wildfire. Calling for a European wide mobilization in a city could cause an exponential growth...and coming up next year, we have the chance to strike at Copenhagen: the Seattle of Climate Change. Also, a re-run of the G8, likely focused climate change, is coming to Italy. Let us move focus to globalize and intensify our struggle next year! Back to the cities! Internationally mobilize against the capitalist response to climate change! Time is running out, so now is the time to strike.
That the world is headed to disaster is agreed upon by all except the most delusional, yet the question of the hour is precisely “What is to be done?” From Drax to Heathrow to Kingsnorth, the climate camps, while effective at raising awareness of different forms of life that may survive climate change, have proven themselves to be monumentally ineffective at direct action aimed at actually “shutting down” carbon-intensive infrastructure. Luckily, even our dismal failures have a silver lining, for a truly successful direct action on this infrastructure would just imply that hippies don't want people to fly, or perhaps worse, that hippies don't want people to have electricity. As the most recent police raid upon the Kingsnorth camp proves, the territory of the climate camps almost always puts us at a disadvantage. It is just difficult to mount a successful mass-action in a field, isolated in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by police and cameras, with only a few rather obvious targets nearby.
Terrains of struggle come in cycles, and while never the same, the territory is always strangely familiar. The resemblance between the current upswing in momentum and the classical round of anti-globalisation struggles is stunning. The classical anti-globalisation cycle began a decade ago as encampments against a UK-wide road-building programme, a practical goal that had much popular sympathy. These encampments were for the most part semi-permanent and did manage to de-rail the road-building programme. Yet the true enemy was not the roads we ride upon, but the forces of capitalism that ride upon us. By moving the primary focus of the movement into the city of London itself at the “Carnival Against Capitalism” on June 18th 1999, a huge victory was achieved, and a host of global days of action took off – Seattle, Prague, Quebec, Genoa – that in parallel with rising global social movements, managed to help completely derail the “free trade” programme – as the total failure of the Doha round of the WTO put the nail in the coffin of Empire. Victory is possible, as long as tactics and strategy evolves with the changing times.
The climate camps currently suffer from “picture-thinking”: being unable to grasp the totality of climate change, the camps resort to targets that are “obviously” emitting carbon, such as coal-burning factories with large smoke stacks and airplanes with huge engines. However, climate change is itself located in the very flows of global capital itself, and the infrastructure of the state that maintains capital. These can be blockaded, stopped, and shut down. All we have to do is to choose a date and a target where the situation is to our advantage.
It's time to take it back to the streets. A tactical victory is possible in the city, which would both be impossible to ignore and perhaps more difficult for the police to control. A single victory would invigorate a whole generation to escape the sense of depressive gloom of passivity. Once a concrete victory is scored, all manner of actions will no doubt spread like wildfire. Calling for a European wide mobilization in a city could cause an exponential growth...and coming up next year, we have the chance to strike at Copenhagen: the Seattle of Climate Change. Also, a re-run of the G8, likely focused climate change, is coming to Italy. Let us move focus to globalize and intensify our struggle next year! Back to the cities! Internationally mobilize against the capitalist response to climate change! Time is running out, so now is the time to strike.
Pablo Picasso
Comments
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Neither the field nor the 'streets', but everyday life
04.08.2008 21:14
First things first - on the analysis of the UK anti-roads movement. The camps didn't begin a "decade ago", that is when the most significant of them ended. They begun in 1991/92 at Jesmond Dene and Twyford Down. Furthermore, while the move from the 'land struggles' camps to Reclaim the Streets was spectacular, it pretty much marked the end of the movement's concrete effectiveness. The movement defeated the Tory roads programme. RTS, despite being quite cool in a number of ways, failed to achieve very much in the way of concrete wins and therefore ran out of steam - though the work with the locked out dockers was admirable. Just like the anti-summit protests: in the absence of concrete victories, and through falsely focussing attention on administrative meetings of the international political class, they too ran out of steam. What was the "huge victory" of the J18 Carnival Against Capitalism? A few broken windows, a few more arrests, a media spectacle, and a fire-hydrant spewing a fountain into a main road? Please. The various riots and demonstrations had very little impact on "the free trade programme" or the Doha round, and its absurd to claim otherwise - it has come to a halt because of a disagreement over agricultural subsidies, not concern about molotov cocktails!
Neither the fields of southern England, nor the streets of European capitals are the best battlefields. Neither particular power stations nor summits are the real enemy. Neither tents nor half-bricks are the most effective weapons.
The author says she or he wants to intervene in the "very flows of global capital itself." Does capital "flow" down the streets on Saturdays (unless they are blocked by rioters)? Does it "flow" through summit boardrooms? No! No more than it flows through fields in the home counties. Capital flows through wage labour, and through the mechanics of every-day life: work, transport, housing, play, leisure time, family, school, etc. Capitalism is a social relationship.
The author has a grand idea! To attack "the infrastructure of the state"! It can be "blockaded, stopped, and shut down"! Is this all? What about strikes? What about the hundreds of thousands of public sector employees who have been on strike in the last few months? Aren't they worthy of a mention, alongside riots and road-protest camps? Apparently not.
A movement for serious social change (e.g. social revolution), must be based upon:
- fighting to win (and that means picking fights that can be won)
- making a difference to the terrain of everyday life (where capital and class reproduces)
- spreading the political case for revolutionary anti-capitalist politics: a society without class, based on self-management and human need (not only in broad slogans, but in consistent argument).
I'm not saying camps or demonstrations (even riots) are useless in constituting movements which are based on these things. But they are useless when the movements are not so based. People need to recognise where we are. The stock of radicalism among the vast majority of the British population has not been lower for a long time. That will not change unless we can show how collective, direct action can work for everyone.
The Camp for Climate Action risks being the CND of the 21st century - a movement which defines the thinking of generation, but which, through not relating to every day life, fails to make even a single tiny dent in its objectives.
Analista
We ourselves don't know our own history!
05.08.2008 01:43
Regarding 'a decade ago' on the anti-roads movement, I too was thinking was that all, but 'a decade or so' serves for discussion, and the author of the post is just getting older :-)
There is an irritating saying that really clever people spout out about how people that don't know there history only end up repeating trite sayings. I can't quite remember what the saying is, but there is a certain level of truth in it, unavoidable because we all get older and new people come along.
I personally see a lot of the climate-camp activities as well meaning displacement activity in a world that does not know it's own history. It sounds cruel, but had everyone stayed at home and watched the box like the good people then there would be no media and police army at the gates, consuming lots of dinosaur-juice. Heaven forbid that the green participants drove there too, however, had everyone stayed at home the environment would have been spared some of the dreaded CO2.
Of course you have to break an egg to make an omelette (some prefer two eggs), however, will the omelette be any good? Will the art of cooking the perfect free-range omelette be learned by people new to the movement? Not necessarily. As the poster comments, the omelette may be burned, with people identifying climate-camp with windmill-tilting. If that reputation sticks then the climate camp will set the cause back.
As the 1st commenter mentions, the actions in the city were perhaps not best thought out. The police have controlled crowd situations in Trafalgar Square hundreds of times and out-witting them on their own turf is not going to happen, particularly when they have robocop outfits, CCTV and command and control. Even worse, there is the dreaded media, hell bent on 'media misrepresentation'. This was all realised shortly before Mayday 2000, however, newbies to the movement did insist on a street party and the old guard with the climbing skills put up the banners one more time and the samba band did the samba thing. The unrecognised heroes of that particularly unfortunate blotch on the history of the movement were probably the cyclists. The Critical Mass riders closed the road, nobody else did.
Mayday 2000 was really bad for media-misrepresentation, in the aftermath the movement had to be wound up. No more red, green and black, hello pink and silver. The media were not engaged at all and there was no way for outsiders to know what pink and silver was all about. Banners became deliberately spectacle denouncing, e.g. 'Hello Mum!'. Very funny, very situationist, but the G8/WTO/GATT/IMF/Whatever meetings just moved further afield, the walls grew higher and the minor disruptions provided by the 'Anarchist Travelling Circus' probably added to climate change with all those flights to far off places.
The pre-9/11 anti-globalisation movement had leadership although this was not formalised and the movement was actively 'sold' as a dis-organisation. There were tactical advantages to this, not least because it made it that bit harder for the police to round up the ring leaders.
Out of this disorganisation some 'ring leaders' took a back seat, hid away from Special Branch and plotted 'A Fiesta for Life Against Death'. Allegedly a few activists turned up for this event - a protest against the arms-trade - but none of them read the accompanying literature that closely. There were a few other actions planned for the day. These were a response to media misepresentation, and the organisers - in part due to the fate they had chosen - read the road ahead. They anticipated that their actions just might not be understood, they also realised the mujahadeen might get blamed for whatever it was that happened. This would not matter too much if it resulted in the Muslim world having to fight the war on capitalism. Their natural support base - soap-dodging abo types could sit at home and watch it all on the box. Sure enough, on the day of the arms fair when the 'other actions' appeared on the box, a PR guy from the company organising the arms-fair posted a little story to the AP newswire blaming some Arab dude and failing to mention that some people in the movement had promised 'other actions' for the day. Every news outlet in the world picked up this one posting to the AP newswire instead of the one on the Indymedia newswire and the rest was history. The coalition of the willing were given their Afghanistan, kicked ass and got there poppy fields back. The women and children soon got their jobs back cultivating the 93% of the world's supply of opiates that the Muslim evil-wrong-doers had denied the world.
Clearly the bloke in the cave could not really be responsible for the televised 'other actions' so lots of grey propaganda had to be pushed out to keep the doubters busy. Allegedy there was an inside job, but that was even crazier than the bloke in the cave story. Meanwhile the movement moved on to sitting in fields for worthy chats about direct action.
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