Bertie Russell

In the wake of the failed COP-15 in Copenhagen last December, Bolivia’s first indigenous president called for a World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (CMPCC). Was this the necessary space for social movements to respond where governments and the UN have failed? Was it an attempt to co-opt radical demands? Following the CMPCC in Cochabamba, April 2010, this booklet reflects on the lessons from Bolivia and the role of movements in the fight for climate justice.

"In the late-summer of 2014, around 180 people from a variety of political backgrounds attended a weekend long residential gathering in the UK entitled Fast Forward 2014: Demanding the Future? (FFW2014). Described as ‘a weekend of discussions, plenaries, workshops, walking, climbing and socialising’ based in the Peak District, the event was aimed at ’building new relationships, new ideas, new energies and new strategies that help equip us to enact the future’. Coordinated by the UK-based organization Plan C (2), this represented the organisation’s most ambitious undertaking to date, part of a broader process of ‘recomposition’ of the Left in the UK.

What follows is my own contribution to one of the plenaries, which featured alongside talks by members of Critisticuffs and Feminist Fightback. It must be clarified that what is offered is a personal contribution, and does not reflect an agreed position within the organization. It is published here with the hope that it will resonate and connect with others experiences, and help push forward a discussion of how the hell we ‘do communist politics’ in a world in which the future is currently foreclosed".

Between mid-2006 and late-2010 the UK experienced a parabola of spectacular protests relating to climate change, ranging from the occupation of airport taxiways through to the blockade of coal power stations. Mobilizing thousands of people, this ‘radical climate movement’ was distinguished from a popular concern with climate change by its general commitment to direct action, widely-held anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian beliefs, and a stated focus of tackling the ‘root causes’ of climate change. Written from within this ‘radical climate movement’, this thesis is an investigation into the praxis of the movement, exploring the extent to which participants contributed to the emergence of a ‘radical’ knowledge of climate change, and thus assessing the appropriateness (and effectiveness) of the movement’s methodologies.

Driven by an internal debate regarding the movement’s tendency to depart from its radical political roots, the theoretical core of this thesis draws upon the concept of the ‘post-political condition’, a condition of the liberal consciousness that forecloses the very possibility of a political praxis on the climate. It is contended that a specific post-political discourse of ‘dangerous climate change’ emerged in the late-1980s which, defined by an apocalyptic discourse that placed a ‘carbon fetishism’ at the core of its rationale, evacuated the space for political discourse in favour of a general humanitarian effort to forestall “the greatest danger we’ve ever faced”.

It is suggested that despite the efforts of many to confront the problem, the UK’s ‘radical climate movement’ broadly failed to escape this liberal discourse. The research thus turns to the international mobilizations around the COP15 in 2009, concluding that the emergence of a discourse of ‘climate justice’ was a partial attempt to overcome this post-political discourse. From the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (CMPCC) in Bolivia, to the continued organization of the Climate Justice Action (CJA) network, it is suggested that ‘climate justice’ diverged according to two separate discourses - one around ‘climate debt’ and another around anti-capitalist critique. It is finally concluded that a true politicization necessitates celebrating the death of the environmental movement, instead placing our social-reproduction at the core of any claim to an ecological politics.

To link ‘anti-capitalism’ to mental health is to suggest that there is a direct link between the way capitalist relations organize our life-space, and our psychological well-being. Framed antagonistically, it is to imply that capitalism has negative implications for psychological well-being, and thus coordinated forms of socio-political ‘anti-capitalist’ action are necessary in the name of improving our psychological experience of life. This politicized understanding responds quite clearly to the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz’s demand that ‘mental illnesses’ be removed form the category of ‘illness’, and instead be reconsidered as ‘the expressions of man’s struggle with the problem of how he should live’.

It is perhaps an exaggeration to suggest, as Paul Mason has, that those blockading either Tahrir or Parliament square are well versed in their Hardt & Negri, much less their Deleuze, Guattari or Foucault. Yet it doesn’t take a bookworm to realise that the forms of struggle witnessed over the past six months surpass any simplistic “us and them” binary, and that a more nuanced understanding of power is required if we are to come to terms with the battles we are fighting.

The threat of an impending climate crisis has rightly dominated the headlines over recent years – unabated carbon emissions, alongside peak oil, are leading us to a bleak, even apocalyptic scenario. In addition to this we are experiencing a crisis of neoliberalism, where the restructuring of capital is finding ways to exploit (and hence worsen) the ecological collapse it has fermented. Both in the UK and worldwide, we have seen the emergence of movements aiming to tackle climate change. These movements embody a politics that appears to cross the political spectrum, but in fact all gravitate around a single apolitical space, or as Steven has termed it a ‘post-political space’.

As the UN prepared to meet for the COP15 in Copenhagen, we found our movements in a state of political crisis. Dominated by methodologies that rely on an emerging carbon consensus as the basis of their (a)politics, movements such as the Camp for Climate Action find themselves powerless to engage with the decentred problem of climate change. There is an urgent need to reassess climate change in terms of power & productive relations, and to move beyond the single-issue environmentalism that has isolated climate change as the preserve of a specialist eco-activist vanguard.

This paper understands the COP15 and its aftermath as a potential for the revealing & overcoming of the schizophrenic tension of environmental movements. We point towards the emerging climate justice movements as an opportunity to move beyond the postpolitical towards an antagonistic politics of the commons.

The University’s future is uncertain; uncertain because we - editors, contributors, readers - intend to change its structure, practices and relationship to society. Left to the government, market, bureaucracy and hopeless academics, its future is certain: fueling the free market - a slave shoveling coal aboard a Titanic no government can steer. Our call to re-imagine the university was not an invitation to rearrange the deck furniture or write the score for the string-quartet as the ship sinks. Rather, it was a call to loot the vessel and abandon ship to whichever destinations contributors thought best or, for now, reachable.

There is a thematic narrative to the structure of this journal: Situation - where we are, Source - why we are here, Strategy - where we could go. Contributions were diverse: from personal anecdotes to poetry to practicable plans for parallel institutions and practices. Reassuringly some of these projects are already being implemented.