Category: Ecology of the absurd

Republished with permission from the blog of Tadzio Mueller, Peaceful Sabotage

Note: this repost continues from the last extract from Tadzio`s upcoming book published on COTW here. Tadzio is happy to receive feedback from activists all over the world. Visit his website for more details.

Capable of taking action in the face of the climate catastrophe?

…But after the frustration of the anti-war movement, I didn’t go directly into activism. Instead, I returned to university, where I had the enormous luck and privilege of writing my dissertation on anti-capitalist activism within the anti-globalization movement—essentially a critical retrospective, a strategic debrief on the movement that had so profoundly changed my life and, at least a little, the world. The research question was essentially: what means do we “anti-capitalists” in the anti-globalization and other movements actually use to fight our great enemy, the final boss, whom we hold responsible for so much of the world’s evil, and how effective are these means?

When I finally finished my dissertation in the autumn of 2006, not only was I finished with university, but the world was also finished with the anti-globalization movement: one of our last major actions in the Global North was the attempt to disrupt the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland. But while a few hundred or a few thousand radical leftists were chased through the Scottish Highlands by well-organized police, the vast majority of people who had come to Scotland to protest were not demonstrating against the G8, but rather under the banner of “Make Poverty History” for an expansion of the powers of precisely those multilateral political-economic institutions whose delegitimization had been one of the central strategies of our movement. The radical wing isolated, the moderate wing co-opted (integrated into the power project), the British government transformed from antagonist of the movement into its tamer: the movement was dead .

Long live the movement!

And what do people do for whom “movement” and “struggle” are central parts of their identity, what do “activists” do when a movement, when their movement ends? Of course, some of us then go home for good, start some well-paid or overly demanding job, have two, three, many children – but for activist self-efficacy junkies like me, it was clear that it had to continue with a new movement. Cold turkey – brrrr, absolutely not.

Fortunately, our British comrades had already shown a way out of the now irrelevant anti-neoliberal globalization movement: while the black-red wing of the movement, to which I belonged, was still preoccupied with the major global summits in 2005, having been convinced in Seattle that these were the key levers on which to apply our limited energies to achieve maximum change, and therefore mobilized for Gleneagles, the influential eco-anarchist wing in the UK had long since abandoned this idea, this illusion, and was instead planning the first “climate camp.” At the end of August 2006, precisely when I was sitting at my desk in Brighton finishing my dissertation on a movement that was by then no longer relevant, a new cycle of social struggles, a new social movement, began at the first Camp for Climate Action at the Drax coal-fired power station , the largest CO2 emitter in the UK: we would later come to know it as the “climate movement.”

2007 wasn’t just the year of my gay coming out and move to the queer-hedonistic mecca of Berlin; it was also the year of my personal climate conversion. Like many German leftists and radical leftists, I had previously held an absurdly arrogant attitude towards anything that even remotely resembled an “environmental issue.” I thought, as many leftists still do, that environmental issues were privileged, bourgeois feel-good nonsense, that environmental issues were about cute megafauna like polar bears and turtles, maybe trees, perhaps a little bit about agriculture, but that the truly important issues were the classic leftist themes: control of the means of production, class struggle, redistribution, socialization, etc. Without ever having really engaged with them, I had internalized the anti-ecological leftist prejudice that the real leftist issues were about people, about exploitation versus liberation, while environmental issues were luxury topics to be addressed sometime after the revolution.

The climate question

The mid-2000s, when the world’s first climate agreement came into force (the now justifiably largely forgotten “Kyoto Protocol”), when a climate policy slide show by a former US Vice President won the Oscar for Best Documentary, was also the time when the Global North, in the context of increasingly escalating climate catastrophe consequences, slowly began to take the climate issue seriously. Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in August 2005, played a particularly important role here: until then, the wealthy world (myself included, as a scion of the cosmopolitan upper middle class) had happily indulged in the illusion that the climate catastrophe was a “somewhere, sometime” problem. But when the richest and most powerful country in the world experienced an “environmental catastrophe” that, due to historical racial and class-based injustices, immediately manifested itself as a social catastrophe as well, when Mexican troops entered Texas to provide food for evacuees …When George W. Bush and his Republicans suffered a crushing defeat in the 2006 midterm elections, partly because they had so disastrously botched the disaster response , and especially because all of this took place in the USA, where the rest of the West can always see a bit of its own future – it began to become clear to the rich world that this “climate change” had probably received too little attention so far.

Institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund began talking about “green loans,” positioning themselves, after years of quite effective delegitimization by our movement, as the institutions that could finance and enable a global ” green transition .” And when, in 2007, during what was truly the last major anti-globalization action in Europe, at the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, the brilliant political tactician Angela Merkel actually managed to completely thwart our summit blockades by positioning the G8 not as the neoliberal governess of the world, but as a globally solidarity-based institution of savvy climate saviors, I began for the first time to recognize the world-changing relevance of the issue. Initially, not because I considered the topic important myself, but because I understood that our old adversaries – the global institutions and factions of capital that had driven the project of “neoliberal globalization” – were beginning to reorient themselves, adopting a new rhetoric in the midst of the emerging major crisis of capitalism: “Look, we are no longer evil neoliberals; we recognize that a potential catastrophe is looming, and we will not only solve it, we will use the energy it releases to unleash a new, enlightened, sustainable, green growth cycle that can pull us out of the deepest global economic crisis since the Great Depression .”

The climate movement…

So I began to engage with the climate issue both activistically and academically, and I quickly got the impression that it could be a bigger deal than I had previously understood. A number of German activists participated in the 2nd Climate Camp (Camp for Climate Action) in the summer of 2007, and we were so enthusiastic about this form of action that we decided to organize the first climate camp in Germany in 2008, which then took place in Hamburg-Moorburg as the first German “Anti-Racist and Climate Camp.” From there, we moved on to the “Copenhagen Mobilization,” when the emerging activist climate movement, along with pretty much the rest of the world, pinned its hopes on the possibility that success at the COP15 climate summit in Copenhagen could somehow influence the already rapidly escalating “climate change.” But as some of you may remember, the summit flopped, as did the large demonstrations and actions that took place around and against it , and after 2009 things became pretty quiet around the climate issue. From 2010 to 2015, the young, primarily left-wing radical climate movement plodded along rather unnoticed in the coal-mining regions, trying to pull new levers after the summit… and nobody gave a fuck.