What is it were missing? And how can we fit more pieces together to find out what to do?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but afaik mainstream climate activism boils down to pointing at the iceberg and saying “there’s an iceberg ahead” without any plan on how to avoid death. It is usually very toothless and unthreatening to the ruling classes, which is I think is why they’re allowed to exist and even platformed through greenwashing. I don’t see what success they’ve actually had that we could stand to gain from mimicry.
Their best analyses boil down to understanding quite a bit of the physical science of it, but they hardly get anything actually going in practice. Ozone layer was their last big win, but it was just because it was rather cheap for the corporations to fix that one.
Instead I think the way is to do what communists already do the best, which is to study the history of it (climate change) and better explain the hidden class aspect of it. If stories like the BP creating “carbon footprint” to shift the blame on consumers or Obama approving the Keystone XL pipeline on native land (and the subsequent attack on protests) stop becoming loose facts on somebody’s head and become part of a large narrative of the ruling class complete disregard for climate change, regardless of whose campaign they sponsor. You can already see lost libs in the thread parroting PR firm victim blaming talking points.
And if the interest is the USA, indigenous people are both usually the most interested in combating climate change and the ecological catastrophe, and also the first victims of the repression (and it’s usually not televised). The Red Deal is an alright read if you want to get the perspective of some of them who have been fighting this fight for a while. They also have a podcast, which is alright too.
TLDR: you can’t properly fight climate change without class consciousness and understanding the history of settler disregard for the environment. This is why lib movements tend to fail at anything but making them feel good about themselves, IMO.
I am shocked by how little eco-terrorism I hear about. Are people doing it? It seems like the only way at this point
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.
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.
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)
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.
