A-Infos (en) Sweden, Malmo, From Thoughts To Action - the buletin of the The libertarian alternative to the ESF - Forget Kyoto­ shut down Copenhagen by Tadzio Müller

R.I.P., or: the death of a movement The movement's dead! More precisely: the alterglobalisation 
movement as a common place for movements and activists to meet and to connect their struggles under 
and against the common referent of neoliberal globalisation, is dead. Don't get me wrong: the 
movement didn't die the ignominious death of the defeated. In many ways, it also won. And for 
movements, their victories are also often their deaths, for they live and breathe antagonism, they 
need an enemy. So what of our enemy? Let's ask Martin Wolf of the Financial Times. ---- Talking 
about the day when the US Central Bank bailed out a huge bank to prevent the financial crisis from 
spreading, he wrote: ---- "Remember Friday March 14 2008: it was the day the dream of global 
free-market capitalism died." So neoliberalism is dead (in some ways), as is (again: in some ways) 
the movement against it. It seems to have lost precisely that which can forge a movement out of an 
irreducible multiplicity of struggles. We need a story, a hope, a hook to move: and at this point, 
the alterglobalist movement is clearly a movement without a hook, without an enemy, without a goal.

The new `big one'?

But as much as there's a movement without
a story, there's also a story without a move-
ment: climate change. Ever since being
outmanoeuvred by the G8 and especially
chancellor Merkel at Heiligendamm, the
European movements have realised that
they must develop a position and a prac-
tice around climate change or risk irre-
levance in this brave new world of green
issues. The most advanced fractions of
capital and government apparatuses have
spotted a great way to create political sup-
port for a new `green fix' to both the crisis
of overaccumulation (the problem of too
much money chasing too few profitable
investment opportunities) that has given
us the current financial chaos, and to the
legitimation crisis that global authority has
been suffering since the power of the story
of `global terrorism' began to wane. In a
way, the fact that everybody is now talking
about this issue is a massive victory for the
green movement ­ but at the same time
it's meant the final nail in that movement's
coffin: every single large green NGO is
involved up to its neck in the negotiations
about the Kyoto-follow up treaty, and thus
unlikely to articulate a political position
that would diverge significantly from the
dominant agendas in the field.

So there's a movement without a story,
and a story without a movement ­ which
means that, as it stands right now, there is
little hope that climate change will be dealt
with in ways that don't simply further the
interests of states and whatever happens
to be the dominant fraction of capital.
And since the default anticapitalist posi-
tion on climate change is that there is a
fundamental contradiction between the
requirements of the continued accumu-
lation of capital (i.e.: economic growth)
on the one hand, and the requirements of
dealing with climate change on the other,
this would seem to be a great opening for
a reenergised anticapitalist politics that
can manage to connect to people's wides-
pread worries about climate change, to the
impression that what is being done (Kyoto,
Bali, emissions trading, etc.) is far too
little, far too late. These are precisely the
situations where radical social movements
have the greatest capacity to act and `make
history', when the usual problem-solving
approaches don't seem to provide any
believable way of dealing with something
that is widely perceived as a problem. It's
precisely when it seems impossible to find
any solutions that openings exist for social
movements to expand the limits of the
possible.

The politics of pointlessness

In reality, however, things seem a lot more
difficult. Looking at it from the perspec-
tive of the global North, there are defini-
tely attempts to develop an anticapitalist
climate change politics, but each of them is
facing a mounting set of difficulties. Seen
from here, it all begins in the UK in 2006,
with a `climate action camp' that aimed to
`shut down for a day' a coal fired power
station in Northern England, but more
importantly, to provide a space for develo-
ping new ideas and practices for an antica-
pitalist climate change politics. The idea of
organising similar `climate action camps'
has since then inspired people in Germany,
Denmark, the US, Chile, Australia and
New Zealand and elsewhere.

I really don't want to talk down the
importance of these camps ­ after all,
inspiring so many people in so many diffe-
rent countries is no mean feat ­ but there is
still this nagging question of whether these
camps were in fact doing much good bey-
ond satisfying a desire to do something?
It feels good to hang out and camp with
ones mates and comrades, but what do we
want? What can we achieve? And does this
whole camping-business, trying to shut
down power plants one at a time stand in
any relation to the magnitude of the chal-
lenge of climate change? To be clear: this
is not to say that people shouldn't organise
climate camps ­ only that these camps
need to be part of a wider project that gives
them some political meaning beyond their
highly localised intervention.

So if the UK-movement's way of deal-
ing with the challenge of climate change
comes across as somewhat limited in its
political scope, at the other end of the
spectrum there's the way the issue has
been approached in Germany. There, the
radical left is so academic and steeped in
the tradition of `critical theory' and `decon-
struction' that their main response to the
challenge posed by climate change has
been to engage in a `critique' of the `domi-
nant climate change discourse' and the
`hegemonic role of scientific knowledge'
in constructing climate change as a crisis.
Sure, it's important to remember that the
reports issued by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) come
from a deeply conservative institution,
and to critically reflect on how recourses
to `scientific knowledge' are often used to
shut `non-experts' out of political deba-
tes, but Diskurskritik can't be the only
response to the climate change issue. It
feels a bit like throwing copies of Adorno
and Foucault at a coming flood and hoping
that it'll just go away.

-------------------------------------
  "Anticapitalist politics in the global North exist
in a sort of timelessness because we either can't
or don't dare to think their effects in the future.
              Ostriches come to mind."
-------------------------------------

 From timelessness to effectiveness

But then, let's be honest: the anticapitalist
left in the global North should be pretty
used to being political ineffective and mar-
ginal, small outbursts of transformative
power in particular moments of excess
notwithstanding. What does one `soci-
al centre' in Hackney, Kreuzberg or Las
Ramblas really contribute to the struggle
against gentrification? Does an anti-war-
demo in San Francisco really, as a film
made on the occasion claims, `interrupt
this Empire'? Does shoplifting, even con-
ducted en masse, significantly disrupt pro-
cesses of capitalist commodity circulation?
To be honest: I don't know, and I think
very few people who engage in these prac-
tices have a clear idea either. But, and this
is the important point, when talking about
`capitalism', anticapitalists don't really have
to have an answer to that question. One
way of dealing with that is to point to the
non-linear dynamics of change in complex
(social) systems, meaning that we can't
know what effects our actions of today will
have tomorrow (think butterfly in Bali and
hurricane in Haiti). Or, by referring to an
argument that's achieved nearly dogmatic
status in anticapitalist discussions: `look,
capitalism hasn't been around forever, it
began in some place at some point, so it'll
also end at some point' ­ much the same
could be said about the universe! I could
go on enumerating the various intellectual
tricks that exist to rationalise our relative
political irrelevance, but hope the point
is made: that anticapitalist politics in the
global North exist in a sort of timelessness
because we either can't or don't dare to
think their effects in the future. Ostriches
come to mind. As does the graffiti sprayed
on the wall of a school in Gothenburg that
had been stormed by the cops: `But in the
end, we will win!'
And this is where we get back to why it
seems so hard for the anticapitalist move-
ment to develop a politics around climate
change: whatever rationalisation makes it
possible to think that `in the end we will
win' against capital, it's pretty impossible
to think that in relation to climate change.
Against the usual timelessness of antica-
pitalist politics, climate change poses the
issue of urgency. And the problem then
becomes how to deal with that urgency.
Both the `activist' and the `critical' position
described above are attempts to do so, and
both are pretty unsatisfying. The first takes
it far too seriously, and jumps head over
heels into a political field dominated by
much stronger players. The second posi-
tion recognises that the construction of
urgency and the resulting politics of fear
are often strategies of domination ­ but
then contents itself with simply criticising
that construction.
So how do we deal with this problem
of urgency? First, by admitting that it's
unlikely, actually impossible, that the poli-
tically marginal radical left will be able
to effectively slow down the production
of greenhouse gases such as CO2, in a
world where the accumulation of capital
is inseparable from the burning of fossil
fuels (someone called this `fossilistic capi-
talism'). But we can intervene into the tem-
porality of politics, of governmental `cli-
mate change politics', the role of which is
to insulate the speed-up effected by capital
from social criticism by creating the illu-
sion that the continued accumulation of
capital is compatible with socio-ecological
stability: that, in other words, we just need
to make a few (preferably market-based)
adjustments, and can otherwise continue
more or less as we were. The result of this
insulation is that the potentially explosive
force of the increasingly widespread reali-
sation of this antagonism between capital
and a humanity that exists embedded in
complex ecological systems is contained,
even captured. Captured so as to provide
support for a new round of accumulation
(think: `green capitalism')
and the further extension
of political regulations
ever deeper into our
lives.

----------------------------------------
   "The large majority of those present
   shared the fundamental critique, that
    the Kyoto/Copenhagen-process was
  more about creating new opportunities
     for economic growth and political
legitimation than about tackling climate
                 change."
----------------------------------------


Forget Kyoto!

So again: the anticapi-
talist left in the global
North can't `stop' or even
significantly mitigate cli-
mate change. To assume
that we could would
necessarily leave us trapped in our time-
lessness, because we could only ever hope
to achieve our goal at some point far, far in
the future ­ out of real time, as pie in the
sky. But we can, with our limited strength
and resources intervene into the insula-
tion of capital's time from the `slowness' of
genuine democracy. If we once again leave
the depressed certainty of our own decom-
position and timelessness, if we remember
that as movements we have the capacity to
be faster than the state, then we can escape
from and intervene into their capture and
internalisation of antagonistic energies.

And how do we do that? How do we
keep open the political space created by
the increasingly widespread concern about
climate change, which has the potential
to produce new ideas and solutions, new
possibilities, that might in turn promise
to go beyond capitalism? How can there
be an intervention into the powerful pres-
sures towards the constitution of a new
`green capitalism', towards an `Eco-Empire',
a global authoritarian eco-Keynesianism?
If urgency forces us to think in terms of
effectiveness and, what's more, efficiency,
how can our small, resource-poor wing of
the movement effectively deploy our limi-
ted strengths to achieve a maximum out-
come with respect to the goal of creating
and/or maintaining space for the develop-
ment of multiple, bottom-up, non-capita-
list solutions to the climate crisis?

The answer to this question begins with
two further questions, and then takes us
back to the beginning of the whole argu-
ment. First question: what is the single most
important process by which governments
are trying to insulate capital from public
criticism in relation to climate change?
Answer: the Kyoto/Bali-processes, which
produce little or nothing that would actu-
ally protect the climate (just as an aside:
since the signing of the Kyoto-accords,
global CO2-emissions have exceeded even
the worst-case scenarios projected by the
IPCC), and where a tiny bit of emissions
reductions legitimate a huge pile of con-
tinued production of greenhouse gases ­
not to speak of the creation of a whole new
market in emissions credits (expected to
value about 2 trillion US-Dollars by 2020),
much to the delight of global capital. The
follow-up process to Kyoto, which began
in Bali in December 2007, is supposed to
be signed at an international summit in
Copenhagen in December 2009.

Second question: where do the strengths
of the radical global movements lie both
in comparison to our enemies and to
our more moderate allies? Answer: in
the organisation of large-scale, disruptive
summit mobilisations. It is precisely in
summit mobilisations that we have deve-
loped something that could be called `best
practice', where we have before achieved
a substantial political effect. In Seattle,
we not only managed to shut down the
conference by being on the streets, we
also exacerbated the multiple conflicts that
existed `on the inside' between the negotia-
ting governments. If we manage to do the
same thing again, and to build a political
coalition around and momentum behind
the demand to `Forget Kyoto', we would
both be able to keep open the political
space to discuss potential `solutions' to cli-
mate change that go beyond the reigning,
market-driven agenda, but also to provide
a focal point and common demand for
the emerging global climate movement to
rally around. Can Copenhagen 2009 be the
climate movement's Seattle?

Postscript: after the camps

After Kent, after Hamburg. Two clima-
te camps in two wet fields outside two
coal-fired power stations later. There were
moments when I could see it: that creature
many have tried to sing into being, the
global climate movement. It was present
in the discussions in the camps, in the
connections that were formed between
activists, between struggles, between ideas.
As much as the camps had very specific
targets, both were also explicitly spaces
where we could think through strategies
for the emerging global movement. Large
workshops discussed the mobilisation
towards Copenhagen, and most left with
a sense of inspiration and excitement.
The large majority of those present shared
the fundamental critique, that the Kyoto/
Copenhagen-process was more about
creating new opportunities for economic
growth and political legitimation than
about tackling climate change. The inte-
resting debate that followed circled around
the question of how to present this radical
critique to people who have long thought
that Kyoto was all we had to tackle climate
change. And how to organise the actions:
shut them out of the summit, or lock them
in until they have fulfilled a number of
`directional demands' they could never
hope to fulfil? The discussions have just
begun and will surely continue. But the
movement seems to be coalescing around
this simple but important position: Forget
Kyoto ­ Shut down Copenhagen 2009!
_________________________________________
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