-PLANet B does not exist. (Louis Casado)
[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about the costs of inaction and its implications for human and planetary rights. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text].
Can the mainstream climate movement ready itself for the agonizing dilemmas to come? (Andreas Malm, Adam Tooze)
1. In the struggle for human and planetary rights, it is less the aim of politics than the manner in which we apply politics that matters. Given the reality of the underlying current political conflicts, existing divisions at the base of dissent are not to be regretted, but embraced, i.e., an antagonistic stance is needed to commensurately respond to the too-slow-to-evolve response situation.
2. Take the example of the global climate struggle: Andreas Malm tells us in his White Skin, Black Fuel that, if nothing else, the anti-climate politics of the far right should shatter any remaining illusion that fossil fuels can be relinquished through some kind of a smooth, reasoned transition. A transition will only happen through intense polarization and confrontation, or it will not happen at all. From this point of view, the question is not whether liberal activists do or do not want to engage in sabotage. If we keep to our current course, I see sabotage coming. If it is not directed from the top, it will bubble up from below. (A. Malm)
Can the climate movement sustain its coherence and momentum in the face of crisis, violence, division and, quite likely, defeat?
3. Furthermore, is it too late for resistance to be waged within a scenario of just immediate utility? It is at this point that we have to give meaning to the passive resistance we mostly see. May it ultimately be in vain? Imagine scenarios in which we are long past a world of schoolchildren’s strikes and of futile UN conferences; imagine that, after the melting of the ice caps, the breaking off of icebergs and a dramatic civilizational collapse, a cluster of people are eking out a meagre existence in northern latitudes. What will we tell our children about the disaster? Will we say that ‘humanity brought about the end of the world in perfect harmony?
4. Imagine further that a few years down the road, the kids of the Thunberg generation and the rest of us wake up one morning and realise that business-as-usual is still the norm, regardless of all the strikes, the science, the pleas, the millions with colourful outfits and banners… What do we do then? The centrists will counsel patience. So, what ought the social democratic politics of emergency do? What is our activists’ logic of action to be in the face of disaster? What will our political options be when there is every reason to think that we have very little time left? Gradualness explains nothing without leaps. (Lenin)
5. Gradualism reflects both the ‘general deficit’ of planetary rights action and the particular form of inaction characteristic of some demagogic activists that has been hampered by hippyish pacifism and a spurious theory of political change based on a pastiche of old liberation movement slogans. Their theory is quantitative: they assume that when a sufficient number of people take action (or get arrested) or simply become aware of the crisis, government resistance will collapse into shamefaced resolution. [Malm is rightly sceptical of this as a basis for political action, arguing that it lacks any consideration of history, of power, of money or of the behaviour of individualism bent subjects].
6. To sceptical ears this may sound like a doomed attempt to square the circle, or a bit of nostalgia used by liberal activists and their political organisations. The proper planning of protest requires thought about the way governments work. Direct action always returns us to basic questions of politics.
Some conclusions here
7. Capitalism, not human beings, is changing the climate; industrialisation itself is less of a problem than the fossil fuels system that powers it; the overwhelming focus of climate activism must be on dismantling the fossil fuels infrastructure; the chief problems with technology are the exploitative conditions of manufacture and the destructive ends to which it is put, rather than any more general concern about its destructive attitude to nature. Yes, some politicians are notoriously untouched by such issues –an indifference hinting at mass death. Awareness of this terrible disjuncture produces denialism of many kinds, and through that gap the far right may find yet another entry point.
8. How best to act, and to act effectively, are issues that recur. The shape of the answer changes –sometimes emphasizing the need for direct action, sometimes for a disciplined political green party. Is enforcing change on a grand scale compatible with the preservation of liberal democracy? Whether human beings have the collective capacity to intentionally reverse this planetary problem is not clear. Will such a transition necessitate a break with the proliferation of luxury commodities and the underlying obsession with acceleration and expansion? [Malm obviously loathes apologies for quietism and inaction, usually from writers entrenched near the top of the pyramid].
9. Even as the intellectual push for a systemic condemnation of capitalism on ecological grounds grows, the political forces that may act on it are not doing so with the necessary sense of urgency. (Brings to mind the concept of kairos –the use of a proper or opportune time for action). Do not discount the fact that direct action can be a form of pedagogy, but it requires allies in the press and in political parties. (The Fridays for Action is a good example).
10. Nobody can predict what balance between intransigence and realism is needed, or even which of the traditional methods of mobilization will move governments to act at the scale required, in the time required: Actually, this is true for all human rights! Slogans of school strikers and climate and other protesters are only an initial measure of this growing ‘instinctive anti-capitalism’. For those convinced that it is impossible to circumvent politics, either by direct action or through a state of emergency, the task remains to construct, from the imperfect tools available, a viable ecological/rights of nature platform. Most pressing is the matter of organization, of reviving the atrophied organizations of the old working class, of recruiting one segment of the community for every activist. We will need many more leaders. The obstacles are formidable, but it would be foolish to dismiss such a politics as utopian. It is on utopia that we now depend.* (A. Malm)
*: Utopia (u-topia = no place). I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps, and utopia runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I never reach it. So, what’s the point of utopias? The point is this: it makes us continually advance. (F. Berri)
11. Hence, the best way to predict the future is to create it. So, take charge of your life by embarking on that what you always wanted to do. If your goal seems utopian or overwhelming, start small. I could not live without a daily victory, no matter how small.
12. Humanity and nature are now standing at a precipice. We can stand idle and continue the march into an abysmal future too dire to imagine, or we can take action and reclaim a future that we have all hoped for.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com