How can leftists get our hold on mainstream climate activism and create an organized mass movement?
How can leftists get our hold on mainstream climate activism and create an organized mass movement?
What is it were missing? And how can we fit more pieces together to find out what to do?
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I am shocked by how little eco-terrorism I hear about. Are people doing it? It seems like the only way at this point
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The word "terrorism" is clumsy imo.
From a Marxist perspective, what the mainstream politicians call terrorism is called adventurism , ie, random acts of violence against random people. That's the worst method of change ever it doesn't work you can never get mass support like that.
But when we talk "eco terrorism" we don't literally mean suicide bombing on random people, it's more in the form of radical direct action including violent tactics in opposition to pacifist direct action right?
But if you're gonna use "terror" I mean, you're already on the path of Marxist revolution ("we'll make no excuses for the terror") as revolutionary violence consists in terrorising the reactionaries. The cool thing when you have a dictatorship of the proletariat is that your "terror" doesn't have to randomly kill people in cruel ways, you can dismantle reactionary networks using intelligence and rely on imprisonment rather than murder.
So I'd argue that the meaningful terminology is the following: either pacifist direct action, or radical direct action (more anarchist leaning) or revolutionary action (more Marxist leaning)
Yeah I don't like that term, bad choice of words.
I meant destructive stuff like cutting open factory farm fences but also violence against the rich who profit directly from various polluting industries. Not even necessarily organized action, just anxiety-ridden individuals who have hadn't enough doom-scrolling and want to make a change.
It reflects how little discomfort those who could take action feel today, which is also why, generally, nothing has been done. Terrorism is fundamentally a desperation tactic, that of people without hope. Climate change is as of now still too abstract for basically everyone.
Climate Change as Class War
I feel in America atleast its becoming less abstract and people are becoming more radicalized. I had communities get destroyed from the effects of climate change near me and to half the people around me. Where i am it already seems dire but i guess it is not like that everywhere? I think the main climate discourse is whats mostly slowing things down since climate anxiety has been on the rise heavily amongst young people but people have not looked into more radical means because of the extinction rebellion and their petty bourgeois catering bullshit. I think we must radicalize people from the climate movement into marxism first, mostly curious young liberals but with open minds we can teach this education to. This will make sure they re evaluate the climate struggle through a marxist dialectical materialist framework and would be willing to join more radical fronts. And i would also argue simplifying works or creating more simpler modern works or forms of propaganda be distributed by pro workers parties that can be easier to get a grasp on for the masses or hell even publishing videos in ways that can gain a more popular attention while getting more people interested in socialism.
The Bush-era Green Scare did a lot to defang the environmentalist movement. There are still some great resources that they made, like A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, and some good lessons learned, such as the above-ground/underground group dichotomy.
above-ground/underground group dichotomy.
Where would you recommend to look into this more?
I honestly don't remember where I read it. It was either some insurrectionary anarchist thing or an ELF/ALF thing. The gist of it is:
You have two organizations that legally never meet. One stages protests, does community outreach, fundraising, and all of your standard environmentalist org stuff. The other does illegal direct action activities, divided into independent cells and/or affinity groups. The above-ground network serves to raise funds and recruit for the underground network, but the key is that the leadership of the above ground group can never be connected to the actions of the underground group. This gives a lot more wiggle room to both groups than if they were to go it alone.
That's an interesting idea, thanks!
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Thanks, I've been meaning to read that!
Adventurism is not a solution. The feds, the fossil fuel industry in fact invite it. It makes it easier for them to paint the whole movement as violent, dangerous, to crack down on even peaceful types, to surveil them, to get overtime bonuses, to arrest, infiltrate, subvert, etc. To slap the whole thing with a domestic terrorism label and charge anyone near a protest. Send in fed agitators who commit violent acts, charge anyone present near them as accomplices, throw them away for a long time, repeat until it's broken up.
The problem is the widespread apathy and resignation of people. The capitalist system is not going to change it yet the people refuse to change the capitalist system. It's not an immediate danger, it's hard to understand, hypothetical. It feels hotter but by the time it becomes truly unbearable for the comfortable middle class even militant action won't reverse it and there will be a feeling of defeat and hopelessness.
Sabotage might slow them down a little but honestly the types of prison sentences people who do it face and the drop in the bucket impact it really has means even just advocating and getting an increase of taxes or costs passed onto people for use of fossil fuel is likely to be more effective in decreasing consumption and carbon emissions than sabotage. Because sabotage drives up prices too and they're happy to pass costs onto the average proletarian. It's like how refineries in California all mysteriously have problems around the same times together and prices go up.
Fundamentally it's a problem of living under a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie who themselves don't care about climate change or may even welcome it for darker plans they have for humanity. Government is the one that can resolve this problem. What could actually change it would be militant labor organizing. If we could somehow organize strikes on big industries and shut the economy down, you could force the politicians to pass laws to ameliorate the worst aspects of climate change and carbon emissions, you couldn't fix the problem or address it systemically like with proletarian rule but it would be something.
Yeah, strikes seem like the best way to get shit done
While some limited ecotage does happen, non-permanent disruption is more popular than permanent damage. And the more public, less relevant showboating stuff is what gets the public eye. Just Stop Oil got a lot more attention when they started sitting in traffic and throwing stuff at paintings and whatever than when they were focusing more on things like blocking oil terminals.
I'd recommend Malm's book How to Blow Up a Pipeline for more discussion about more radical approaches to protest, but bear in mind that there is a distinction between strategic sabotage which can get public on-side and the sort of adventurism that ecoterrorism implies. As /u/lil_tank@lemmygrad.ml mentions below this has the risk of driving more people away anyway.
I'd really recommend Marxism Today's youtube video about the film pseudo-adaptation of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, discussing both the risks and bad examples in that film itself but also the broader context of trying to encourage this.
Disruption and sabotage of fossil fuel machinery might be effective from a public optics perspective, as well as on a large enough scale hopefully impacting capitalist profits/making polluting ventures seem riskier to investors. However, ecotage is distinct from eco-terrorism and the latter should be avoided.
However, not the question of subjective motives but that of objective expediency has for us the decisive significance. Are the given means really capable of leading to the goal? In relation to individual terror, both theory and experience bear witness that such is not the case. To the terrorist we say: it is impossible to replace the masses; only in the mass movement can you find expedient expression for your heroism.
- Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours
The [Earth Liberation Front] realises that the profit motive, caused and reinforced by the capitalist society, is destroying all life on this planet. The ELF therefore feels that the only way to stop the destruction of life is to take the profit motive out of killing.
A YouTube link was detected in your comment. Here are links to the same video on Invidious, which is a YouTube frontend that protects your privacy:
If you are interested in joining the radical side of online environmentalist discourse with a less anarchist approach i got a community i run called "Radical Left Environmentalists" which has grown affiliation to the community "ecomaoism"