Olá, Esquerda, temos de falar

Temos de falar de estratégia, mas na verdade antes disso temos de falar sobre ontologia (lamento).

Desde que tirou-se a essência revolucionária da teoria anti-capitalista (lê-se: Marx sem Lenine, Lenine sem Fidel, etc.), todo o movimento progressista tornou-se uma espécie de ferramenta de comunicação, sem qualquer agência própria. A pergunta filosófica é: Qual é o objeto dum movimento?

Por exemplo, como se define sucesso ou fracasso do movimento pela habitação? E o movimento laboral? Ou movimento pela justiça climática?

A sensação que tenho é que estamos confortáveis.

O nosso auto-critério parece-me: o objetivo dum coletivo pela justiça climática é defender a justiça climática. Que confortável, não é? Sendo assim, nunca falhamos. “O que fizeste ontem?” - “Defendi uma posição.” - “Que bom. Podes dormir hoje à noite tranquilamente e nas próximas noites também.”

Isto é uma posição absolutamente idealista – e aqui uso a palavra idealista no sentido da “Família Sagrada” (Bruno Bauer e companhia).

As ideias não são o objeto da atividade política. As condições reais são.

Proponho um mandato completamente diferente:

O objeto dum coletivo pela justiça climática é atingir justiça climática.

Cada ano em que perdemos dezenas de milhares de pessoas à crise climática é um ano de fracasso desse coletivo. Cada euro de subsídio que vai à indústria fóssil é um falhanço desse coletivo. Cada ano em que as emissões em Portugal não diminuem 10% mostra a fraqueza do movimento.

O coletivo não pode estar tranquilo. Não pode não rever tudo que tentou. Não pode não estar a tentar novas formas de ação, de estratégia, de organização e de comunicação.

Isto aplica-se a todos os movimentos. Vê a diferença entre conformismo e integridade:

  • uma organização socialista cujo critério de sucesso é se cada ano estamos mais próximos do socialismo VS uma organização que faz agitação cega sobre socialismo sem qualquer reporte mensurável

  • um movimento pela habitação que ganha habitação pública e digna VS um movimento pela habitação que defende habitação

  • uma organização pela democracia que torna a socidade mais democrática VS uma organização pela democracia que fala da importância da democracia

  • uma empresa que faz tudo para aumentar o seu lucro VS uma empresa que envia comunicados a dizer que lucro é fixe

  • uma organização fascista que transforma a sociedade VS uma organização fascista que faz conferências de imprensa

As primeiras aqui são organizações materialistas.

As segundas são idealistas, mas são mais que isso: estão confortáveis e são completamente unaccountable: não prestam contas a ninguém e nunca vão prestar; nunca falham; nunca entram em crise existencial em que questionam tudo que fizeram e fazem; resumidamente: estão bem, dormem bem. De facto, estão alienadas dos seus valores.

Esta alienação é emocional e pessoal, e é também política e estratégica. Vamos então falar um pouco da estratégia.


Lembras-te do Alan Kurdi? O rapaz sírio de dois anos cujo corpo foi encontrado numa praia da Turquia em 2015, morto numa tentativa de fugir da guerra civil da Síria provocado pela seca mais forte que o país enfrentou e alimentado pelos imperialismos de costume (com o Estado Turco como o ator principal na equação).

A fotografia dele apareceu nas capas dos jornais na Europa.

Ele foi encontrado numa praia que eu ia às vezes para nadar.

Alan continua a ter dois anos.

Ele pergunta-me:

Tu que sabes da crise climática e do mundo em que vivemos. O que fazes? Estás a ganhar? Já tentaste tudo?


Eu respondo-lhe:

Eu sensibilizei, e sensibilizo. Eu fiz agitação e propaganda, e faço. Eu votei, e voto. Eu marchei e manifestei-me, e continou a marchar.

E não. Eu estou a perder.

As organizações e os movimentos em que estou inserido, nós sabemos o que se passa. Sabemos que o que te matou é simultaneamente um sistema económico complexo e um sistema social mantido por pessoas reais. Sabemos que precisamos do apoio e envolvimento popular. Precisamos de disrupção para parar a destruição (diz o António Guterres). E nós estamos a falhar.

Estamos a perder-te, estamos a perder amigos, estamos a perder cidades internas à crise climática. E isto é só o início.

E não, não tentámos tudo. Aliás, cada mês, pelo menos uma vez, apanho-me a repetir os meus hábitos de ativismo que tenho porque não sei quantas décadas atrás alguém fez aquilo dessa forma.

No fundo, sou negacionista também: é difícil compreender um colapso civilizacional – não tenho ferramentas cognitivas para conectar com isso.

Não consigo dormir uma noite inteira.

Acordo com o teu sorriso.

Hoje vou aprender dos erros meus e dos erros dos meus companheiros.

Amanhã vou fazer melhor.



Espera-se milhares de milhões de refugiados climáticos até 2050. Ou seja, vai haver centenas de Alan Kurdis.

Podemos tentar desresponsabilizar-nos: os governos e as empresas declararam guerra contra a sociedade e o planeta; não somos nós – as pessoas comuns – quem causa isso.

Mas somos nós quem dá consentimento ao genocídio e ao ecocídio.

E se dizemos que somos “politizados” ou “organizados”, jamais podemos desresponsabilizar-nos. Cada dia em que o sistema ganha é uma lembrete do nosso fracasso. Não podemos dizer que estamos a fazer “alguma coisa”, temos de fazer “a coisa”: temos de parar a crise climática. Todas as nossas estratégias devem ser ancoradas nesse ponto final e não num taticismo ou na repetição dumas atividades que alguém utilizou cem anos atrás.



Ou vivemos num estado de emergência climática, ou vivemos num business-as-usual. São os dois lados da mesma moeda, mas se estamos em estado de emergência climática, então não dá não tomar riscos sérios: riscos políticos, riscos estratégicos, riscos pessoais, riscos organizacionais, riscos emocionais…



Estamos num estado de guerra. Estão a matar-nos, num ato de violência lenta, deliberado e coordenado.

Não escolhemos estar neste sítio. Mas cada dia, fazemos escolhas sobre o que fazemos neste sítio.

Temos de parar a destruição e construir a paz. Enraizados em igualdade, justiça, democracia e liberdade, temos de travar esta aflição. Com amor e raiva, com medo e coragem, guiados por solidariedade, temos de parar a ebolição global.

Tentámos tudo?

The Operational Question


 

I wake up. I wake up, and I am in a meeting. Was I daydreaming? Was I just distracted? I am in a meeting room with people talking about the climate crisis. I look around. I recognize these faces. I know these people. They know me too. What’s at stake is everything, but the conversation is once again about everything else. There is talk of movement building, some implicit agreement on system change, there is mention of care and regeneration, and some references to intersectional this and that. We developed such an obscure way of intellectualism that even ourselves cannot see our denialism. Now that I am awake, I realize why I had gotten distracted in the first place. I look around. Are we connected? Are we serious? What’s the plan?

We. Are. Not. Serious. We are fine, actually. It’s a lovely day, today. I have been thinking about in which city I should spend my retirement – you know, thirty years from now.

I look around. There is a mirror on the other side of the room. So when I look around, I see myself too.

We are atheist Jesus-waiters. We hope that someone else, a perfect redeemer, will come and do the thing that we know needs to be done. But we also don’t believe in that someone else. We know that no one is perfect, so no one is the redeemer, but only a redeemer is allowed to dare to do the thing.

We are not thinking of ourselves as the president of the central bank (Che Guevara’s job for more than a year in post-revolution Cuba) as something we would do after one revolution but a little before moving on to prepare another revolution. We are not Ches or Fidels or Lenins or Stalins. We are shy about power because we are afraid of responsibility. Currently, we are just fine. Nobody holds us accountable and we can just pretend to exist. If someone asks, we have our convoluted answers: without a large working class movement,… ; without an anticolonial approach embedded into our organizing, … ; in order to avoid activist burnout, … ; while rejecting fossil fuels, we shouldn’t fall into the mistake supporting extractivist green capitalism, and therefore… . We know why we are not taking risks. We know why we don’t dare. We are sure. We are sure because we are fine. We are fine because we are sure. We are absolutely fucking disconnected.


 

I wake up again. I am in a different meeting now. What just happened? Is this an ongoing dream? I recognize these faces too. It’s hard to understand the topic of the discussion… has to do with what the “people” value or prioritize or something. We are being realists again. Right after this talk, there will be some smart objectives and activity plans, and a division of tasks where people will check their “availabilities” and “capacities”. I can’t bear remaining awake. What are we even talking about? I close my eyes.

I open my eyes. Now I am in a seminar which is conveniently labeled as a workshop. I occasionally try to genuinely comprehend what people are saying. This is one such moment. The speakers are long-time activists and organizers, they are nice and fine. The governments are sending us to 4 degree warming, they say, and the speakers have a complex, sophisticated and unreliable plan to send us to 3.95 degree warming. They are part of the lesser-evil spectrum. I look into their eyes. They look through me. I respond by looking through them. We are terrifyingly disconnected.

There is an operational question and we are spending most of our energies to avoid looking at it. It’s like a black hole pulling us, and we are orbiting around it with tremendous effort – in vain – to run away from it. It comes closer as we get closer to it, so it becomes harder and harder to avoid it.

There are, though, some special moments, when we are connected, and we look at it straight. It’s not about capitalism, it’s not about justice, it’s not about emissions – those are all on the event horizon, they are the visible, tangible parts of the black hole. When we look at it straight, it is an operational question that doesn’t allow for ambiguous answers. It sometimes wears a small girl’s body. Mine has Alan Kurdi’s smile, mostly. It asks: knowing everything that you know, what is your plan to keep us below 2 degrees warming? What are this week’s deliverables that are compatible with such a plan? What are in today’s to-do list according to that plan? What are your accountability procedures to keep you fucking connected to the meaning of the climate crisis?

It is hard to keep looking. So we divert our attention after a couple of minutes top. Then, we are fine again. It’s sunny today, the rains of last week were really good for agriculture, but it was such a nuisance for biking. Did you see that bananas are ten per cent cheaper in the supermarket this week? We should get some.



Top Ten Essential (and Controversial) Hints for the Climate Organizer

 

This is no clickbait.

If you have been organizing for climate (that means, going to meetings and all, beside participating in actions), then you are probably struggling not only with climate anxiety but also with a bunch of situations and people that are making your activism harder.

There are some ways of making your life easier, but speaking them out is considered politically incorrect so nobody will tell you although many people are using these tricks anyway.

I’ll keep each hint short and will give you a couple of readings when necessary. (Also, I put no images that could distract you.) My working hypothesis is: at least 50% of your organizing efforts are wasted in dealing badly with the following issues; hence these hints will double your efficiency.



1) Don’t worry about the traditional left.

Traditional left was built under the assumption that one day there would be a revolution. The Soviet Union’s tactical maneuvers taught them to organize the masses and wait patiently. One of their core slogans is “The struggle continues”.

All of this is, of course, deeply climate denialist.

If you understand climate crisis, you will probably be taking risks in your activism. The traditional left will tell you not to, and will cheer when your risk goes awry. They will be cynical all along the way, because that’s their psychological response to anything other than them. Don’t listen to them. Their organizations have neither the cognitive skills to process climate emergency nor the adequate culture to do activism under climate emergency.

Beware: Whatever you are building on, was built by them. Show them respect for their decades-long struggles. However, the responsibility is also on them that they didn’t win after decades-long of trial and error. They have to change, and they have to change quick. The chances are they won’t.

They don’t feel they have a deadline; you do. Learn to ignore them without being rude to them.



2) Don’t worry about the new left.

Even though it had a more solid theoretical foundation in the 1960s, today the “New Left” is, for all practical purposes, all the socialists, communists and anarchists that are not in the traditional left. There are a few things you have to understand about the new lefties.

They will sound very intellectual, which they are. They are also the only significantly large social movement that didn’t have any victories. Their talk is inconsequential. Therefore it cannot be true. You may learn from their mistakes, but don’t look up on them by overvaluing their talk.

As part of their intellectualism, they will be very critical about everything you say. In fact, they are extremely identity-oriented. They will have loads of in-group dynamics to judge your actions and your organizations because you are “not [blank]” / “not [blank] enough”. That’s because they had to survive the reactionary 1990s and they were very lonely. Their identity is their survival method.

As they passed through the 1990s, they are resistance-oriented. They resisted neoliberalism, privatizations, financialization, etc. for decades, without any offensive or revolution. They are created under the assumption that you shouldn’t have well-thought-of propositions for the society as a whole, because they were born when “ideology ended.” Their core slogan, “Another world is possible”, was in itself a statement of defeat.

All of this is, of course, deeply climate denialist.

You’ll need masses, and you’ll need to change the whole world. You’ll have to be very tactical and also very visionary, simultaneously.

They will tell you that you are not working class enough, you are not anti-system enough, you are not queer enough, etc. The point with having a climate deadline is that being X enough is irrelevant if we fail to stop the climate crisis. Don’t listen to their fake criticism. They just want to be comfortable.

Once you are big enough, they will join you. Continue ignoring them then, too.



3) Get on with failure.

If we won everything now (meaning: zero emissions as of today, plus global justice, plus whatever your utopia requires), temperatures will continue increasing probably up to 1.4ºC . Currently, it already is 1.1ºC warmer than pre-industrial times. You understand what that means?

It means that all the climate catastrophes you watch on television and that motivate you to act, will continue getting worse throughout your entire lifetime. Even an idealistic victory will look like failure.

You won’t get an idealistic victory. In the best-case scenario, you will fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, then win something that looks like a weird beast you have no idea how to feed.

Until victory, everything is a rehearsal. Get on with it. Learn from it and move on.

Victory won’t look like what you imagined. It will be awesome and disappointing. Get on with it.



4) Green capitalism is not a real thing to worry about.

Some people are worried that we will have a transition from fossil capitalism to green capitalism under an extractivist logic. Those people are wrong and they are distracting you.

Green capitalism exists and will grow. But it is not replacing and will not replace fossil capitalism.

Capitalism and fossil fuels grew from each other. The connection between them is not accidental, it’s structural. There is no such thing as “fossil-free capitalism”. (check Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2002-fossil-capital ) Getting rid of fossil fuels means destruction of capital worth of trillions of dollars. It won’t happen before climate collapse.

Also, it’s empirically not happening. Emissions are increasing, so is demand for all fossil fuels. (check Energy Transition or Energy Expansion, by TUED and TNI: https://www.tni.org/en/publication/energy-transition-or-energy-expansion ).

Keep your eyes on fossil fuels. If we stop fossil fuels, capitalism won’t survive. If we don’t stop fossil fuels, we are fucked. Don’t get distracted by other environmentalist issues. They are a strategic self-trap for you. (If you are dealing with such a trap, my bet is that they are led by the Traditional Left or the New Left just to tell you how you are not perfect, without any reference frame to a possible movement victory.)



5) Geoengineering is not happening. Don’t get distracted by it.

Geoengineering is a false solution.

A boring part of the movement thinks that it’s a false solution because it doesn’t bring justice or because it creates other environmental problems or something. That’s not how a “false” anything works. What they mean is that it’s a solution that they don’t like.

Geoengineering is a false solution, because it’s false: it’s not doing what it says it would do. It’s not cutting emissions nor reducing warming. In fact, it’s not happening.

Some people are doing some experiments to deal with minor issues (like a making sure it’s not too hot during a football match) and they are selling it as major breakthroughs. They are lying and they are distracting the public. Their main goal is not to implement geoengineering. Their main goal is to create confusion in public opinion and thereby keep the fossil fuel industry untouched.

Keep your eyes on the ball. Fossil fuels have to go, and emissions have to go down.



6) Don’t talk about what others in the movement should be doing.

It’s comfortable to think that a successful radical left-green political party leader should have implemented some climate justice governmental program to stop climate chaos. It’s comfortable to think that the trade unions should have been doing climate strikes. It’s comfortable to think that the “youth” should mobilize. In general, it’s comfortable to delegate your responsibility to someone else.

If it’s not about what you will do, stop talking about it.

Own it. If you propose something, be ready to execute it. Don’t waste your precious time talking about what some other organization or group should be doing. Talk about what you should be doing, and then do it.



7) Don’t listen to people who talk about what others should be doing.

Lots of people will tell you that you are not perfect (duh!). That may be because you are not vegan, you drive a car, you don’t recycle well enough or you bought a cookie with plastic packaging. This is their denial mechanism. Here is how it goes: “You defend something but you are not perfect. Therefore, you cannot be right. As a consequence, I don’t have to do activism because I am also not perfect and I don’t believe I will ever be perfect.” Beautiful tautology, right?

Some people will tell things like “What about the USA?” or “What about China?”. It’s the same denialist logic going on. If someone seriously thinks we have to get the climate policies done in the USA first, that person would already be organizing in the USA. My bet is that they are not doing that. They are just telling you that they don’t want the responsibility.

In short, people who talk about what others should be doing are people who are emotionally uninvested in the climate crisis. You cannot run an honest conversation with them. So don’t run it.

Keep the question simple for yourself and for them: Knowing what I know about the climate crisis, what will I do?

Talk only about what you will do and what they themselves will do.



8) Erase “This would take us an entire week…” from your vocabulary.

Every now and then, you or someone else will introduce a discussion or an exercise by saying “This would actually take us an entire week/day, but we will now do a quick version of that in a couple of hours. It will ideally give us a glimpse to… blah blah blah.”

I bet you: this person never actually spent an entire week playing with that exercise. If they did, they would already know how to prepare a useful 2-hour session without apologies.

What they are actually saying is: I don’t know how this tool works and I didn’t do my homework to understand it.

That means they are not in condition to present that exercise to you in an honest way. Don’t trust their words on this.

To be clear: I said this many many times in my life, then one day I was like “fuck it, I’m just gonna dive into this for once.”, and then I realized that obviously I could extract a 15-minute exercise from a one-week-long training content. So I got all angry at myself for hiding my own laziness under some false sense of complexity.

Now, when I want to present something I am not fully familiar with, I say so. I tell people “Look. There is this toy I found. I don’t know how to play with it. I just read some instructions. Let’s play with it. Maybe we discover something together.” Don’t pretend to be more complex than you are.



9) Don’t use the word “intersectional” unless you know exactly what that means.

Intersectionality was introduced in the 1980s in the context of critical race studies. At least 95% of what you do on climate is not intersectional. Do not abuse terminology.

You may mean the root cause of two problems is the same. Then just name the cause. If it’s capitalism, then you are not intersectional, you are just anti-capitalist. (e.g. gentrification and the climate crisis do not “intersect”, they are caused by financial capitalism)

Many people also use the word to refer to simple solidarity. If you want to recognize suffering in some group of people, then say so. Saying “Women are more affected by the climate crisis.” makes you a humanist, not an intersectional activist.

A depressingly overwhelming majority of activists in the movement think that intersectionality theory is equal to either of these two. It’s not.

You could, in theory, do serious intersectional work by studying the specific ways in which the climate crisis affects specific oppressed groups and how overlapping oppressions interact with each other in non-linear ways. There is a 95% chance that you are not doing that.



10) If you were raised a man, own it.

Two things are confusing people in organizations: First, the allyship discourse coming from the LGBT rights movement (and extending to other anti-oppression movements). Second, many people are questioning their gender or their gender performance.

These are both wonderful. They are also creating a new set of problems (as progress always does).

If you were assumed to be a man and raised as such, chances are that you were “overpowered” throughout your childhood. You have the confidence of a man, you are not used to being demeaned in public, etc. I suggest you own this.

I was in an international climate meeting, where half of the participants were raised as men. Half of those were questioning their manhood, so they stated their preferred pronoun as “they” or interchangeable. They also occupied a large chunk of the debate, though. I was facilitating the meeting. The statistics is that cis-men were a quarter of the room and talked for slightly more than a quarter of the time, others were three quarters of the room and talked for slightly more than three quarters of the time. Now the problem is that participants who were raised as women were half of the room but talked for less than one third of the time. This was entirely invisible to the participants and I couldn’t do anything about it as the meeting facilitator.

I suggest that you don’t blur your experience of socialization. If you are questioning or uncomfortable with your assigned/assumed gender as man, say that openly and ask for support. Do make sure that it doesn’t hide gender dynamics in the group.



End of this post:

There you have it. I know it’s a bit sharp-edged and I seem to ignore subtleties and exceptions. To be honest, I don’t care. This is not an “article”, it’s a blog post. If a tenth of what I say is useful for you, I’ll be happy. If the rest sounds like bullshit, oh well, the internet is full of that, get on with it.

Here’s my guess:

  • You spend 20% of your activist time worrying about what the traditional left said, what to do with green capitalism or geoengineering and what others should be doing.

  • You spend 33% of your meeting time worrying about the new left criticism, intersectionality stuff, how long a certain exercise would “actually” take, and men.

  • You spend 20% of your organizing time worrying about uninvested people who talk about others, the new left activists, and men.

  • You spend 35% of your life worrying about failure.

Follow my advice, and you’ll be able to focus on your work and save up to 50% of your valuable time.

 


 

I am scared.

 


I am scared.


I am scared of heatwaves. I am scared of the heatwaves of today and of the heatwaves to come. I am afraid of not being able to sleep, of mosquitoes, of melting electricity cables.

I am scared of forest fires. Beside destroying entire villages and burning trees, animals and the soil, forest fires roast human beings. Those people that are roasted are someone’s mother, someone’s nephew, someone’s friend from primary school.



I am scared of climate migration.


I am scared of climate migration. 

Look at Afghanistan’s chronic droughts. How the US occupation and their collaborator governments ignored it, and how the rural populations were abandoned during decades. Look at where that took the country, and look at how the US sanctions will take it forwards.

Look at Syria. A drought that started in 2005 reached its peak in 2007, when all the farmers lost their harvest. The drought continued intensifying. In 2008, they lost their seeds. In 2009, they lost the soil. In 2010, urban areas were flooded by domestic migrants. In 2011, the Syrian uprising started due to housing and food prices. In a couple of years, the country was filled with invited foreign armies, uninvited foreign armies, paid recruits of CIA, paid recruits of the Pentagon, paid recruits of the Turkish foreign ministry, and to top it all the Islamic State. 

Many people in Afghanistan and in Syria left their homes in search of a better life.

Such coherent stories of the climate collapse are rare. Reality is convoluted. 

In Southeast Asia, it’s mostly the floods driving the migration. In Africa, it’s the droughts combined with the violence of the private armies of colonialism protecting the fossil fuel industry. In South America, droughts are accompanied by the paramilitary structure of the extractive industries. In Yemen and Palestine, the story is one of pure evil.

In all these places, people fight. They fight for their rights and for freedom. Look at Myanmar. Look at Sudan. Look at Chile. Look at Sri Lanka. People die fighting in the streets.

In all these places, some leave – as engineers in Portugal do or as in medical doctors in Turkey do – in search of a better life elsewhere.

I am scared of climate migration. And the climate migrants are scared too. There is generally a language barrier. There is incomprehensible bureaucracy to integrate into. There are precarious conditions at work, if any.

The left has been ignoring the fear at the receiving end of climate migration. That’s a dead end. Migrants end up in a lower income stratum than their country of origin, which frustrates them. They are available to live below the socially accepted poverty line, which frustrates the poor. Many migrants are men, so they are self-entitled to women’s bodies (as are the men in the receiving country). This is not about whether migrants, “they”, are better or worse than “us”. A massive increase of the lowest strata of a society means increase in crime, conflict and unrest. That’s what poverty and inequality does to any society. This is not to say anybody should refuse or deport migrants. But we have to stop ridiculing the fear. The fear is real, well-founded and rational. We need that fear to fight the climate crisis.



I am anxious.


People ask me what my vision is. What kind of new society do I imagine. I struggle with that question.

I answer: Peace. My so-called “vision” is being able to go to the beach and calmly watch the waves. Or go to a park and watch the clouds. Having a nature walk in a weekday. Preparing lunch without worrying about the dinner. Walking on the street without being assaulted, harassed or raped.

Our current path is that these are our best days for generations to come.

My bet is that we abort that path.

People ask me about my vision. They want me talk about voluntary simplicity, about degrowth, about connecting with the Earth, about total freedom. It’s nice to have dreams. But my vision is not climate denialist. We will either do zero emissions by 2030 in the Global North, or we are fucked. Current pathways of the EU would reach net zero emissions by 2060. That’s 38 years from now, instead of the 8 years missing until 2030. That’s an error of 375%. I have no energy to dream of utopias.



I am in denial.


I have a vague understanding of what is at stake. The climate collapse is beyond the cognitive capacities of our species. 

The recent news of floods, fires and storms are all “biblical”, in the sense that they were so rare and so irrational for past generations that they would produce entire religions and corresponding prophets. The only rational explanation for such devastation was divine punishment. Now, that’s monthly news. 

We are not ready. Our minds refuse their actual meaning. Our bodies cannot handle it. Our continuation of our own business-as-usual (going to work, paying for our pension funds, or some other normal activity) is denial as cognitive adjustment. It’s natural. And it’s also natural to reject it.



Your emotions are correct.


Some tell me I shouldn’t scare people. Some tell me we should give hope.

I am here to tell you that your emotions are correct. We are afraid, we are anxious, we are angry. Those emotions tell you that you are alive. Act on those emotions, otherwise you will be consumed by them.

Your anger tells you to draw boundaries and re-institute justice. Your fear tells you to take action to protect yourself and those dear for you. Your anxiety tells you to prioritize and plan. Follow those emotions. They will take you by hand and bring you to the movement.



We need prophetic action.

The proposals of the climate movement may look ridiculous to you at first. That’s true. We are so close to irreversible civilizational collapse and our societies are so handcuffed by corporate power, that we really need to change everything. We live in biblical times that cross our cognitive limits. It’s just natural that the proposals are also prophetic.



We need an ecofeminist communism.

We need communism, in the sense that we need to end private property of the means of production. Capitalism is fine with gender equality, with green economy, with legislative elections every now and then; because it can adapt and co-opt to these. Abolishing private property of the means of production is the ultimate taboo for the system, because it actually threatens the core of it. Nothing less than this will save us.

We need an ecofeminist communism, recognizing as the revolutionary subjects all those who don’t own the means of productions and who need to work to live. These people confront the capitalist exploitation on a daily basis, at the workplace, at home, in their territories.

We need an ecofeminist communism informed by the climate deadlines. We have to learn how to understand “socialism or barbarism”, because we have never been this close to its literary meaning. 

There is a slogan that goes “The struggle continues.”, we have to fight that slogan. We have to fight against that slogan. We have to fight against the conformism implicit in that slogan, insisting on a state of climate emergency.



I propose.

Take your fear with you. Put your anxiety in your pocket. Dress up your anger.

I am not just “agitating” you.

I am offering you a way out. I am proposing a sound, coherent, complex plan to act on your emotions.

If any of this touches you, talk to me.



South Korea, Climate, Imperialism

While reading about how China's hegemony could be influential in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, I discovered that I was probably looking at the wrong spot. Then I decided to look at South Korea. Here are my notes.

The world context

First a couple of reminders from my readings on China.

Biden builds on the tension created by Trump, towards a new cold war on China. The plan is not to contain but to constrain it, and then dissolve through internal conflicts (Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang, Hong Kong). The US discourse is "rules-based international order" while China insists on the "UN-based order of sovereign states". *

For the US, two Koreas is better than a unified Korea because it can militarize one and put defense missile units (THAAD) in the region without neighboring China. For this, the US needs controlled tension between the two Koreas. *  

History of South Korea

The border between China and Korea is intact since 11th century. As Korea was under Japanese rule from 1910 until 1945, it was pulled into World War II, which then resulted in two Koreas. During the Korean war (1950-53), around 75% of all productive capacity was destroyed and around 10% of the population (2 million people) was killed. *

South Korea is one of the few countries where "catching-up development" worked. With active US support and under extremely dictatorial regimes (they count a total of 6 republics, interrupted by coups *), the state invested in education and manufacture, and then shifted to high-value technological manufacture. * This they did by direct, consistent state support to specific, family-owned conglomerates, called chaebols.

Economy of South Korea

South Korea today has a population of 50 million people (compared with 25 million in North Korea). It has the world's 10th largest GDP, ranks 3rd in automobile production and 1st in ship production. (Seoul alone has 10 million inhabitants and is the world's 4th largest metropolitan economy.)

The biggest chaebols, Samsung, Hyundai, LG and SK make up more than half of the sales. There are some 20 more chaebols, and they all together control two thirds of the economy. There are no small or medium-sized enterprises as chaebols do not leave space for such a thing.


Around 70% of university graduates apply to chaebols, which have their own entrance exams a couple of times a year, for which there are specific preparatory classes.

In courts, there is an informal "chaebol negotiation rule", which is that prison-time is commuted to probation (such as the reduction of their three-years jail-time due to massive scandals of tax evasion to five-years probation).

In short, the economy is mostly chaebols, which are - for all practical purposes - untouchable. * *

Current social situation of South Korea

After a center-left government under Moon, in March 2022 the conservative Yoon Suk-yeol won presidential elections. * This is interpreted as a shift to a hard-line position on North Korea as well as closer ties with the US. (I am following this. *) Yoon also ran a bold anti-feminist campaign.

 

Major social issues are increasing housing prices * and youth unemployment.*  

These are accompanied by a more structural issue: incredibly low birth rates. The expected babies per South Korean woman fell to 0.84 in 2020. * This puts pressure on social security and the state budget. The Moon government was experimenting with universal basic income *, while IMF suggests the usual spending cuts of public services and increased retirement age, which Yoon may follow. * 

Climate policy in South Korea

The direct impacts of climate change are heatwaves, increased rainfall and the sea level rise, together with air pollution.

The Moon administration had launched the Korea's Green New Deal which promised 650 thousand green jobs and around €50 billion in investments, in construction, renewable energy and mobility. The plan did not have emission cuts and carbon neutrality targets, so it's a green growth plan rather than a transition plan. * * And we can verify it with the news of the public energy company KEPCO's plan to build coal power plants in Indonesia. * 

In COP-26 in Glasgow, the government announced a target to reduce emissions by 40% below 2018 levels by 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2050.

It's unclear what would happen to the GND under Yoon administration.

The overall rating of South Korean climate policy is "highly insufficient", leading us to a 4ºC warming. *

In the Global Climate Strike in September 2019, around 5.000 protesters took the streets in Seoul. * In October 2021, Korean unions, led by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, staged a general strike across the country for workers’ rights and Just Transition. *

Summary of relevance

  • South Korea will remain a geopolitical hot-spot of the tensions between the US and China.
  • South Korea is crucial for the world economy, not only due to its size but also because of its strategic role in high-tech production.
  • The conservative governmental history and the corporatist economy make social movement intervention harder.