Last month, we posted a bit about anarchist protests at the Copenhagen United Nations Climate Change summit (officially called UN COP15). The protests were pretty uneventful, despite a lot of hype coming from both anarchist and more traditional left sectors.
In the weeks following the summit, a really good critique of the both the COP15 actions and the so-called “climate justice” movement was published. Titled “The Dead End of Climate Justice” the critique takes to task the NGOs and environmental groups that have attempted to make the “climate justice” movement the second coming of the anti-globalization movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
However, in doing this, the authors of the critique point out that the NGOs and professional activists have missed some of the biggest components of the anti-globalization movement and are instead pursuing capitalist solutions (that prop up the state’s power and human domination over nature), are rejecting militant tactics, and are promoting a variation of North-South imperialism. Moreover, the entire process was largely akin to lobbying, relying on NGOs, and cozying up to power.
From the article:
“In Copenhagen, the movement was asked by these newly empowered managers of popular resistance to focus solely on supporting actors within the UN framework, primarily leaders of the Global South and NGOs, against others participating in the summit, mainly countries of the Global North. Nothing summarizes this orientation better than the embarrassingly disempowering Greenpeace slogans “Blah Blah Blah, Act Now!” and “Leaders Act!” Addressing politicians rather than ordinary people, the attitude embodied in these slogans is one of relegating the respectable force of almost 100,000 protesters to the role of merely nudging politicians to act in the desired direction, rather than encouraging people to act themselves. This is the logic of lobbying. No display of autonomous, revolutionary potential. Instead, the emphasis is on a mass display of obedient petitioning. One could have just filled out Greenpeace membership forms at home to the same effect.”
Much of this could have been avoided had the self-proclaimed leaders of the demonstration learned from the past:
“As we grapple with these many disturbing trends that have arisen as primary tendencies defining the climate justice movement, we have no intention of further fetishizing the antiglobalization movement and glossing over its many shortcomings. Many of the tendencies we critique here were also apparent at that time. What is important to take away from comparisons between these two historical moments is that those in leadership positions within the contemporary movement that manifested in Copenhagen have learned all the wrong lessons from the past. They have discarded the most promising elements of the antiglobalization struggles: the total rejection of all market and commodity-based solutions, the focus on building grassroots resistance to the capitalist elites of all nation-states, and an understanding that diversity of tactics is a strength of our movements that needs to be encouraged.”
Read the rest of “The Dead End of Climate Justice.”
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