http://socialistaction.org/which-way-forward-for-the-climate-movement/
Which way forward for climate movement?
Published February 24, 2016. | By Socialist Action.
A woman holds up a sign during a demonstration outside the Galileo
Galilei planetarium in Buenos Aires, September 21, 2014. The
demonstration was part of the People's Climate March, held in cities
around the world such as Rio de Janeiro and New York ahead of Tuesday's
United Nations-hosted summit in New York to discuss reducing carbon
emissions that threaten the environment. REUTERS/Marcos Brindicci
(ARGENTINA - Tags: SOCIETY ENVIRONMENT CIVIL UNREST) - RTR475LP
A woman holds up a sign during a demonstration outside the Galileo
Galilei planetarium in Buenos Aires, September 21, 2014. The
demonstration was part of the People's Climate March, held in cities
around the world such as Rio de Janeiro and New York ahead of Tuesday's
United Nations-hosted summit in New York to discuss reducing carbon
emissions that threaten the environment. REUTERS/Marcos Brindicci
(ARGENTINA - Tags: SOCIETY ENVIRONMENT CIVIL UNREST) - RTR475LP
By CHRISTINE MARIE
At the Paris climate talks in December 2015, the world’s
governments—dominated by those who contribute most egregiously to global
warming—acknowledged the need to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees
centigrade above pre-industrial levels but refused to commit in a
meaningful way to the necessary reductions in the emissions of
greenhouse gases. Major U.S. climate action groups laid the groundwork
carefully in the period leading up to the talks, working hard to prepare
the ranks of the movement for the near-inevitable failure to mandate the
drastic and immediate changes in energy production and conservation that
are necessary to stave off catastrophic environmental degradation.
Back on Sept. 26, the national group 350.org, for example, launched a
campaign perspective called the “Road Through Paris” at a major Brooklyn
Academy of Music event that presented the Paris talks as just a stop on
the journey toward a major spring escalation of climate movement
activity. During this video-streamed event, Naomi Klein and Bill
McKibben projected the kind of movement that would be necessary to force
governments and corporations to keep fossil fuels in the ground and
maintain human solidarity in the face of the climate disasters that are
already unfolding.
Such a movement, it was emphasized, needed to see the fight for a
livable climate and the fight for economic and racial equality as so
deeply intertwined that in some sense, the climate movement would become
a “movement of movements.” The challenge before us, they argued, was so
immense and unprecedented that the only realistic perspective for change
lay in the creation of a movement so broad and powerful that the slogan
that rang through the canyons of New York at the September 2014 People’s
Climate March—“To Change Everything It Takes Everyone”—would become an
accurate prescription for our work.
It takes everyone
Two months out from the Paris talks, and despite all the preparation to
avoid to a slump, the U.S. movement is lacking dates for the kind of
national united action that could build on past movement successes like
the Peoples Climate March, which put nearly half a million people into
the streets. In that effort, and subsequent regional actions like the
Toronto “Jobs, Justice, Climate” march of June 2015, organizers
demonstrated that unprecedented numbers of people, including front-line
communities, unionists, immigrant workers, and mainstream faith
communities were ready to engage in protest.
These actions demonstrated that armed with the perspective that it
“takes everyone,” the day when the movement in the United States could
literally put a million people in the streets to demand an end to the
predatory and life-threatening fossil fuel economy is at hand.
Such a movement, necessarily built from the bottom up by the assembling
of local, regional, and national coalitions around demands hammered out
in meetings that can involve increasing numbers of representatives and
activists from many different milieus, is, historically, the kind of
operation that creates political spaces habitable by those taking their
first steps into climate action. They are the kind of actions that have
the most potential to bring new social layers, more powerful social
layers, into motion.
Once a date is set for a common set of mass actions six months or so in
advance, the promise of unity, and, thus, numbers that can demonstrate
majority support for emergency measures, can inspire activists in every
region of the country to go deeper and deeper into uncharted organizing
territory, feeling some urgency to appear before union meetings,
churches, neighborhood groups, school groups. A predictable multi-year
calendar of dates for united mass actions can structure and regularize
these pushes outward to broaden the movement, to unleash the power of
the newly engaged, renew the pool of activists, and accelerate the
development of new leaders. So why isn’t there a call for a big spring
mass action?
“Direct action” a substitute for mass action?
In part, the major climate action organizations in the United States
are not convinced that a regular calendar of united mass actions are
central to movement-building in the manner described above. The general
attitude seems to be “been there, done that.”
The People’s Climate March, whose organizers unfortunately eschewed the
process of struggling over demands in deference to pro-Democratic Party
institutional sponsors, is rightly but one-sidedly remembered as lacking
in political teeth. Instead of thinking about alternative ways to
organize mass demonstrations that can continue the process of broadening
the movement while at the same time insisting on its independence from
the Democratic Party and on a democratic process that guarantees the
selection of appropriate demands, many organizations are turning back to
NVDA alone for the coming period.
A united-front mass action around clear and principled demands regarding
fossil fuels and renewable energy does not have to devolve into a “big
tent” absent real politics. On the contrary, the U.S. antiwar movement
of the Vietnam and Iraq eras, the women’s liberation movement of the
1970s, and many other broad historic movements for social change
demonstrate the viability of this strategy.
Yet, 350, for example, has set it sights on mobilizing not the million
or more that one might expect after the experience of the People’s
Climate March, but only “tens of thousands of people around the world”
in actions that “disrupt” the fossil fuel industry’s power (see
BreakFree2016.org). Organizers are focusing all of their resources and
energy on direct actions in which a relatively small number of activists
would participate—several thousand each at about ten major global sites
of extraction, including several in the United States. One of the models
for the Break Free of Fossil Fuels effort is the August 2015
“occupation” of an RWE lignite coal mine in western Germany by 1500
protesters.
The strength of these actions, projected for the week of May 7-15, is
that there will be concerted, press-worthy spectacles, coordinated
internationally, that highlight some of the most important
greenhouse-gas-producing industrial sites in the world and their impact,
especially on the peoples of the global South. Organizers argue that the
civil disobedience will “reflect the scale and urgency of this crisis in
a way that governments can no longer ignore.”
Activists advocating this singular focus for the spring also are
convinced that the sight of 10,000 individuals willingly engaging in
action that makes them subject to arrest will inspire greater engagement
in the climate movement.
While it may be true that these theatrical and compelling direct actions
will create some new activism in the United States, it is not true that
witnessing the arrests of “good people” will naturally lead to growing
and broadening the movement in the places where social power is the
greatest. Neither is it necessarily seen as more threatening—and more
likely to produce concessions—by the powers that be. Why is this so?
Movements force concessions from governments when they are perceived by
the elites as potentially threatening to the stability of the social
order. The definition of social order in capitalist society is the
ability to make profits over the long term and to maintain a monopoly on
political power via mainstream political parties controlled by big
business. “Direct action” protests, in contrast, are generally aimed at
changing the minds or policies of legislators, and the capitalist
parties they serve, via displays of personal individual sacrifice,
including spending a few days in jail or paying a fine.
The very logic of appealing to legislators, rather than threatening them
with signs of a growing and mass rejection of their authority on energy
matters, is flawed. Neither do activist arrests necessarily inspire
others to get more active and committed. The manner in which the
spectacle of civil disobedience affects potential activists is very much
shaped by class and race and very specific historic experience.
Working-class struggle in history
Looking at history, civil disobedience actions have been singularly
ineffectual in mobilizing large numbers of working people, including the
ranks of organized labor, to engage in political protest. For many
rank-and-file workers, civil disobedience is associated with their union
mis-leaderships’ failure to organize genuine fightbacks against the
bosses and austerity measures. It has become commonplace for AFL-CIO
officials, who have repeatedly refused to try to mobilize labor’s
collective power against companies demanding concessions or state
governments gutting collective bargaining, to take the staff out for
civil-disobedience actions and arrest as a photo opportunity.
For working-class militants who yearn to see their potential power
unleashed, CD or NVDA, do not necessarily suggest a new political
seriousness or an escalation of the struggle. For many in the African
American community, the spectacle of mostly white, middle-class
activists acting as if a symbolic arrest is particularly meaningful is
just an irony of the racism of a system that keeps one in three young
Black men—to great impact on their standard of living—in the criminal
justice system at all times.
For immigrant workers, many of who are climate refugees without papers
and for whom arrest will likely lead to a deportation that might mean
the loss of their children or spouse, the most effective moment of
struggle was their 2006 collective action of millions in a day of action
that they called a “strike.” The question that climate activists must
grapple with today is how to build a movement that masses of working
people and the oppressed layers of society can claim as their own.
If we are to build the “movement of movements,” or a movement that links
the struggle to reduce global warming with the effort to get economic
justice for those most vulnerable to the predatory fossil-fuel-driven
capitalist economy, we must become sensitive to the history and logic of
traditionally working-class forms of struggle, forms that are rooted in
collective power, unity in action, and the avoidance of unnecessary risk
until the moment when the base seems strong enough to prevail.
Generally, in the current period, the main task naturally centers on
building huge demonstrations in the streets. Much later, after broad
layers of the working class become deeply involved in protest, they
might employ more decisive tactics, such as long-term strikes and plant
occupations—which workers used to great effectiveness in organizing the
industrial unions in the 1930s.
It is important that activists enter the spring protest season with eyes
wide open and in a consciously analytical frame of mind, so that when it
is over we can soberly evaluate the entire experience as a movement.
March for a clean energy revolution
One opportunity to make progress toward a greater understanding of the
power and necessity of broad, politically independent, mass actions will
be the July 24 March for a Clean Energy Revolution called by the
Americans Against Fracking coalition. The march will take place in
Philadelphia a day before the opening of the Democratic National
Convention. The march is expected to mobilize thousands of protesters
from East Coast communities, including Pennsylvanians whose lives have
been disrupted by the fracking of the Marcellus Shale gas fields. It
will demand a ban on fracking and other extreme fossil fuel extraction,
a halt to the expansion of fracked gas pipelines and power plants, a ban
on the export of liquefied natural gas, and a quick and just transition
to a 100% renewable energy economy.
Activists who use this call to demonstrate the importance of mass action
to broadening and growing the movement will also be making a
contribution to the strategic discussion to come.
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