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the fuel of every social movement has suddenly become so insalubrious as to be outlawed: crowds.
To say that the signals have fallen on the deaf ears of the ruling classes of this world would be an understatement. If these classes ever had any senses, they have lost them all. They are not perturbed by the smell from the blazing trees. They do not worry at the sight of islands sinking; they do not run from the roar of the approaching hurricanes; their fingers never need to touch the stalks from withered harvests; their mouths do not become sticky and dry after a day with nothing to drink. To appeal to their reason and common sense would evidently be futile.
At what point do we escalate? When do we conclude that the time has come to also try something different? When do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands? Is there a good reason we have waited this long?
dug graves today in Dominica!’ he exclaimed. ‘We buried loved ones yesterday and I am sure that as I return home tomorrow, we shall discover additional fatalities. Our homes are flattened! Our buildings are roofless! Our crops are uprooted! Where there was green there is now only dust and dirt.’
‘We are shouldering the consequences of the actions of others. Actions that endanger our very existence … and all for the enrichment of a few elsewhere.’
They are not amenable to persuasion; the louder the sirens wail, the more material they rush to the fire, and so it is evident that change will have to be forced upon them. The movement must learn to disrupt business-as-usual. To this end, it has developed an impressive repertoire: blockades, occupations, sit-ins, divestment, school strikes, the shutdown of city centres, the signal tactic of the climate camp.
the German movement reinvented the climate camp formula and brought it to a higher level of mass defiance: Ende Gelände, meaning roughly ‘here and no further’, was born.
Thus far, the movement for averting a spiralling climate catastrophe has not only been civil: it has been gentle and mild in the extreme.
What can be questioned, however, is something else. Will absolute non-violence be the only way, forever the sole admissible tactic in the struggle to abolish fossil fuels? Can we be sure that it will suffice against this enemy?
the capitalist world-economy operated in fundamental disconnect from the sense and science of a planet on fire, not to speak of all aspirations to cool it down. And the disconnect was widening.
these capitalists do not see any wrecking balls coming their way. They think they have nothing to fear.
Indeed, the precepts of pacifism have often come across as exhortations to surrender to suffering and atrocity.
Barring aforementioned fascists, very few believe that violence and war are inherent goods; almost all consider them prima facie bad things that can be justified only in certain cases, and then they proceed to disagree over what those cases are and what features they have in common.
Moral pacifists have a way of inoculating themselves against mundane retorts such as ‘what about your own child?’ or ‘what about the Second World War?’ by retreating into a numinous place. Openly or vaguely, they valorise self-abnegation, crucifixion or some other sacrifice as held up by religious faith – or, to be precise, by a particular interpretation of some such faith.
sacralisation of unearned suffering seems, at the least, an unstable plank for this struggle. Isn’t suffering unearned by the victims precisely what is so morally repugnant about the unfolding crisis? If so, why make it a virtue?
There are two types of disruption: violent and nonviolent. Violence is a traditional method. It is brilliant at getting attention and creating chaos and disruption, but it is often disastrous when it comes to creating progressive change. Violence destroys democracy and the relationships with opponents which are vital to creating peaceful outcomes to social conflict. The social science is totally clear on this: violence does not optimize the chance of successful, progressive outcomes. In fact, it almost always leads to fascism and authoritarianism. The alternative, then, is non-violence.
‘To be militant in some form, or other, is a moral obligation’, Pankhurst lectured. ‘It is a duty which every woman will owe her own conscience and self-respect, to women who are less fortunate than she is herself, and to all who are to come after her.’
The suffragettes took great pains to avoid injuring people. But they considered the situation urgent enough to justify incendiarism – votes for women, Pankhurst explained, were of such pressing importance that ‘we had to discredit the Government and Parliament in the eyes of the world; we had to spoil English sports, hurt businesses, destroy valuable property, demoralise the world of society, shame the churches, upset the whole orderly conduct of life’.
Gandhi’s strategy for national liberation never – this is true – condoned violence against the British, but it did include violence with them.
The selection of satyagraha as the take-away from that process serves only present wishes and biases. How did Algeria get free? Angola? Guinea-Bissau? Kenya? Vietnam? Ireland?
In the Deep South, rural African American communities had developed a long tradition of staving off murderous assaults with weapons; when the movement took root and began to deliver concrete benefits, it faced the same threat to physical survival. Klansmen and other white supremacists would surround movement bases in the night, assassinate activists, ambush marches and seek to drown the budding civil rights in blood. Too much was on the line for black communities to let that happen. Hence they produced stockpiled guns, refurbished movement bases – ‘freedom houses’ – into veritable
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Non-violent civil disobedience caught on because it worked – better than the alternatives, such as guerrilla warfare against the state – and was appreciated precisely as a tactic, rather than as a creed or a doctrine.
‘From the beginning’, Cobb affirms, ‘the line between armed self-defense and the non-violent assertion of civil rights was blurred’, and it was even more blurred in the wider picture.
If the channel of non-violence remained closed, ‘millions of Negroes, out of frustration and despair, will seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies’ and then ‘the streets of the South would be flowing with floods of blood’.
The civil rights movement won the Act of 1964 because it had a radical flank that made it appear as a lesser evil in the eyes of state power.
In the words of Verity Burgmann, ‘the history of social movement activity suggests that reforms are more likely to be achieved when activists behave in extremist, even confrontational ways. Social movements rarely achieve everything they want, but they secure important partial victories’ when one wing, flanking the rising tide in the mainstream, prepares to blow the status quo sky-high.
‘the hammer of armed struggle on the anvil of mass action’.
That XR can devote an entire chapter to this struggle without mentioning this occurrence is indicative of the psychology of strategic pacifism: it is an exercise in active repression. None of the above is news or information hard to come by. The bloodletting in the slave revolts and the US civil war, the militancy of the suffragettes, Gandhi’s devotion to the imperial army, the armed protection and radical flank of the civil rights movement, the Spear of the Nation – this is all in the public domain. And yet strategic pacifism adduces these sequences of struggle to admonish the climate
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fossil fuels, like slavery, cannot be the object of compromises; no one would consider reducing slavery by 40 per cent or 60 per cent. All of it must go.
This comparison of apples and oranges from history is designed to drive home the message that as soon as activists go violent, they cut their own throats, explaining disparate outcomes – why Slovenia is a democracy and Palestine is still occupied – and effectively turning activists into omnipotent agents in causal chains.
Indeed, Ketchley and his colleague Mohammad Ali Kadivar have sifted through all democratic transitions that occurred between 1980 and 2010 and found that as a rule, dictators are unseated by people who first come in peace and then, after running into the iron-clad state, swing sticks, throw stones and hurl Molotov cocktails. They call this ‘unarmed collective violence’.
it ‘disrupts the civic order and so raises the costs of ruling for an incumbent regime’.
Strategic pacifism is sanitised history, bereft of realistic appraisals of what has happened and what hasn’t, what has worked and what has gone wrong: it is a guide of scant use for a movement with mighty obstacles.
This is the impasse in which the climate movement finds itself: the historical victory of capital and the ruination of the planet are one and the same thing. To break out of it, we have to learn how to fight all over again, in what might be the most unpropitious moment so far in the history of human habitation on this planet.
So here is what this movement of millions should do, for a start: announce and enforce the prohibition. Damage and destroy new CO2-emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep on investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed. ‘We are the investment risk’, runs a slogan from Ende Gelände, but the risk clearly needs to be higher than one or two days of interrupted production per year. ‘If we can’t get a serious carbon tax from a corrupted Congress, we can impose a de facto one with our
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Recognising the direness of the situation, it is high time for the movement to more decisively shift from protest to resistance: ‘Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too’, as one West German columnist wrote in 1968, relaying the words of a visiting Black Power activist. There will be no shortage of objections to such resistance. Would it, to begin with, be technically possible?
‘None of these attacks’, one scholar of the MK asserts, ‘came close to bringing down the state, but they provided physical evidence of a tangible potential threat to the regime – reinforcing the sense, as Nadine Gordimer put it, that “something out there” represented a shadowy threat to the long-term future of white supremacy.’ The façade of durability had been fractured.
Devices emitting CO2 have been physically disrupted for two centuries by subaltern groups indignant at the powers they have animated – automation, apartheid, occupation – but not yet as destructive forces in and of themselves.
disarmed
But an objection can be heard: why go after private consumption? Hasn’t the movement worked hard to shift attention away from consumers – the favoured subjects of liberal discourse – to the production of fossil fuels? Wouldn’t pointing to the former represent a slide backwards? But consumption is part of the problem, and most particularly the consumption of the rich. There is a very tight correlation between income and wealth on the one hand and CO2 emissions on the other.
This insight was then picked up and formalised by Henry Shue, one of the most perceptive philosophers of the climate crisis, who developed a distinction, widely accepted in the literature, between luxury and subsistence emissions. The former happen because rich people like to wallow in the pleasure of their rank, the latter because poor people try to survive.
After exploring and exhausting all avenues of process, including attending public commentary hearings, gathering signatures for valid requests for Environmental Impact Statements, participating in civil disobedience, hunger strikes, marches and rallies, boycotts and encampments, we saw the clear deficiencies of our government to hear the people’s demands.
Eventually they resolved to come out and confess. ‘We are speaking publicly to empower others to act boldly, with purity of heart, to dismantle the infrastructure which deny us our rights to water, land and liberty,’ Reznicek and Montoya announced at a press conference.
‘The oil being taken out of the ground and the machinery that does it and the infrastructure which supports it – this is violent’, Reznicek stated in an interview. ‘We never at all threatened human life. We’re acting in an effort to save human life, to save our planet, to save our resources. And nothing was ever done by Ruby or me outside of peaceful, deliberate and steady loving hands.’
In just war theory, the differentia specifica of terrorism, the particular moral transgression that blackens its name, is the failure to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants when killing people.
When the townships boiled after the Sharpeville massacre, Nelson Mandela tried to convince his fellow ANC leaders that ‘violence would begin whether we initiated it or not. Would it not be better to guide this violence ourselves, according to principles where we saved lives by attacking symbols of oppression, and not people?’
Our dreaming will, as it has begun to do already, destroy the conditions necessary for human life on Earth. Were we governed by reason, we would be on the barricades today, dragging the drivers of Range Rovers and Nissan Patrols out of their seats, occupying and shutting down the coal-burning power stations, bursting in upon the Blairs’ retreat from reality in Barbados and demanding a reversal of economic life as dramatic as the one we bore when we went to war with Hitler.
Rather, we face an ostensible paradox here, in that the US is a vastly more violent society – as measured by the diffusion of guns, the incidence of mass shootings, the civilians killed by police, the veneration of armed heroes in popular culture, the belligerence of the state and any other yardstick – than France, and yet the intolerance for violence committed by social movements is at its highest in the former. But the paradox dissolves when we consider that the US swept the slate clean for unrestrained capitalism by means of genocidal violence.
The weather is already political, but it is political from one side only, blowing off the steam built up by the enemy, who is not made to feel the heat or take the blame.
A movement that refuses to make the distinctions between classes and colliding interests will end up on the wrong side of the tracks.
