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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.
