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The Geopolitics of Green Colonialism

Colonial relations underpin now-ubiquitous claims around transition, net zero and the green economy

Edited by Miriam LangMary Ann Manahan and Breno Bringel

The time for denial is over. Across the Global North, the question of how we should respond to the climate crisis has been answered: with a shift to renewables, electric cars, carbon trading and hydrogen. Green New Deals across Europe and North America promise to reduce emissions while creating new jobs.

But beneath the sustainability branding, these climate ‘solutions’ are leading to new environmental injustices and green colonialism. The green growth and clean energy plans of the Global North require the large-scale extraction of strategic minerals from the Global South. The geopolitics of transition imply sacrificing not only territories, but truly sustainable ways of inhabiting this world. A new subordination in the global energy economy prevents societies in the South from developing sovereign strategies to foster a dignified life.

This book provides a platform for the voices that have been conspicuously absent in debates around energy and climate in the Global North. Drawing on case studies from across the Global South, the authors offer incisive critiques of green colonialism in its material, political and symbolic dimensions, discuss the multiple entanglements that forcefully connect the transitions of different world regions in a globalised economy, and explore alternative pathways toward a liveable and globally just future for all.

Find more and order the book here

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Voices from the ground

Grassroots democracy and peoples’ alternative practices in Southeast Asia

Introduction1)

Discourses on practices of grassroots democracy often focus on modes of popular participation centered on institutional avenues such as elections and local governance issues dealing with decentralization, devolution, and local autonomy (Mohanty 2007, 15–32). At the local level, consequent interests are on “restraining arbitrary and corrupt official behaviour and enhancing the accountability of grassroots authorities” (Perry and Goldman 2007, 1).

In the political arena where countervailing forces operate, grassroots democracy is often related to social movements and peoples’ organizations intervening in the political process through advocacies and campaigns on regime and systems change and/or devising strategies and practices that engage with the state. For instance, farmers and rural poor in Northeast Thailand “assert their rights and demand state compensations” and engage in “direct actions towards the state (and) press their demands for corrective action” (Prasartset 2004, 140).

Even when a less state-dependent perspective is raised in terms of “participatory governance through the empowerment of communities and grassroots, the process is ultimately depicted in terms of achieving “an increased ability of the poor to effect or influence state policy” and bring about “institutional reforms” (Angeles 2004, 184). Among “civil society” groups advocating “social transformation” in the Philippines, Franco (2004, 100–1) points to “a still unrealized institutional setting where effective access to democratic governance is available to the entire citizenry . . . (and) . . . aiming to promote change by exercising citizenship power in state policy-making and implementation.”

The exercise of grassroots democracy, however, need not focus on the state and its formal institutions. The role of the state is not intrinsic to the practice of grassroots democracy. Kaufman (1997, 1) describes grassroots democracy as that which “allow people in their communities and workplaces to control their lives and livelihoods (entailing) . . . grassroots mobilization and the development of community forms of popular democracy.” In its generic sense, grassroots democracy is often equated with “popular participation” and is seen as both a goal and a method of change.

Popular participation, moreover, has an economic character. Parameswaran (2008, 127), notes that participation can be strengthened by “(a) giving primacy to the primary sector and, fragmentation of ownership, and collectivization of operations; (b) relying on small-scale, but efficient industries, rather than on mega enterprises; (c) making small not only beautiful but also powerful and thus (d) making local economies strong enough to withstand the onslaught of global economies.” This dimension of grassroots democracy where the state and state-related matters recede in importance and focus remains relatively unexplored and have not been given the proper attention they deserve.

This alternative framework looks at how the poor and their communities have (through the ages) been able to manage their own lives through mechanisms that lie outside the formal systems of governance and economics. This sector encompasses political, economic, social, and cultural aspects. The list of alternative practices could be enormous and include, among others, (1) age-old but tried and tested production and distribution systems, (2) local decision-making processes, (3) informal land market mechanisms, (4) local credit systems (not usury), (5) concepts of common and individual property rights, (6) notions of justice and entitlement, (7) non-formal and folk education, (8) indigenous health care systems, (9) local cultural norms and belief systems, (10) everyday forms of resistance, etc. In contemporary times, there are efforts by poor and marginalized peoples sidestepping and even violating established legal processes and institutions, e.g., unilaterally taking control of land and other resources to create self-sustaining and viable socio-political and economic communities.

The Program on Alternative Development of the University of the Philippines Center for Integrative and Development Studies (UP CIDS AltDev) recognizes the value of grassroots democracy as depicted in the alternative practices on the ground. For the past three years, UP CIDS AltDev has been researching case studies of practices in Southeast Asia and have documented and published around sixty of such cases.2)

More than simple documentation and publication, UP CIDS AltDev has brought practitioners together in three annual Southeast Asian regional conferences where experiences from the ground are shared, exchanges undertaken, challenges identified and lessons learned. The ultimate goal is to establish a new network based on regionalism and transnationalism from below that would challenge the dominant elite-centered and oligarchical-controlled regionalism as exemplified by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Southeast Asian Alternative Practices3)

The following three cases of alternative practices illustrate grassroots democracy at work in Thailand, Indonesia, and Timor Leste. They represent efforts by rural communities to practice grassroots democracy in all its dimensions and iterations while asserting their autonomy in building sustainable lives for the peoples.

Southern Peasants’ Federation of Thailand (SPFT).

Inequitable land distribution in Thailand has endured over the years because of the concentrated land management of the Thai state. In addition, capitalist development has commodified land to serve a market economy. The Thai state facilitated the private sector cultivation of cash crops such as oil palm on state-owned lands to respond to the global demand for industrial crops. In Surat Thani Province, Southern Thailand, landless and small-scale peasants have employed alternative economic, political, social, and cultural practices to counter state-centric land management.

In 2003, Thai farmers discovered that around 11,200 hectares of land concessions for oil palm plantations had already expired. Established in 2008, the SPFT has led landless peasants and workers in Surat Thani province, southern Thailand, to unilaterally occupy portions of these lands, establish new community settlements, and to demand equitable land distribution. Their community members, however, have been subjected to intimidation, illegal detention, eviction, death threats, and killings believed to be perpetrated by a real estate mafia and agribusiness interests.

Despite these challenges, they continue to apply their idea of a community land title deed underpinned by the concept of community rights to land and natural resources management. Alternative practices of land management including diversified farming employed by SPFT community members call for participatory development and governance. In alliance with the People’s Movement for a Just Society (P-Move), the SPFT continues to struggle for land rights and advocate redistributing land equitably among landless peasants in Thailand.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic tested SPFT’s self-reliance even as they were deprived of sufficient government relief measures and protective equipment due to the lack of household registration records. Their grassroots-level practices of alternative land management and sustainable food production consisting of collective farming of food crops, goat raising, dairy production, and establishing a rice bank enabled them to build a social safety net and remain food sufficient and resilient against the pandemic.

Serikat Petani Pasundan (Pasundan Peasant Union, SPP), Indonesia.

Officially established in 2000, the history of agrarian struggles by SPP actually goes back to the 1980s, when student movements in Garut, Indonesia were at the forefront of promoting the rights of the farmers on agrarian reform and environmental conservation. This eventually led to the formation of SPP, whose membership spread to Pangandaran, Tasikmalaya, and Ciamis in West Java (Pasundan is the historical name). The Union’s expansion enabled it to take on other issues, such as democratization and the promotion of people’s well-being in the community.

SPP’s vision is to “develop or build structures of economic social politics based on values and principles of humanity, infinity, and justice” (Kartini 2019). To attain this vision, SPP has adopted goals, strategies, and activities that promote grassroots democracy in the community and in the whole of society and, in particular, support the control and management by local communities over their common resources.

SPP staged land occupations and reclamation of publicly-owned rubber plantations in West Java and managed to undertake various economic and social projects including diversified farming, managing alternative schools (primary and secondary levels) that offer learning sessions on agriculture and on agrarian law, fair trade exchanges, a community-managed eco-tourism in Pasundan, as well as a local coffee shop in Jakarta that sources its coffee from its many coffee farming communities across the country.

During the COVID 19 pandemic, SPP co-organized the food solidarity movement called Gerakan Solidaritas Lumbung Agraria (Gesla) or Agrarian Food Barn Solidarity Movement. They distributed free food to members of fraternal organizations in Bandung and Jakarta and other parts of Indonesia. This is amplifying their local wisdom of cooperation based on the most common system called beras perelek, in which a farmer saves a cup of rice a week in a bamboo tube that is later collected by the community to help others or sell the accumulated rice savings to purchase communal facilities.

Uniaun Agrikultores Munisipiu Ermera (UNAER), Ermera District, Timor Leste

Under both Portuguese colonialism from the 16th century to November 1975 and Indonesian occupation from 1975 to 1999, the Timorese local communities were prevented from performing their own conservation management efforts and maintaining social cohesion. The Indonesian occupation not only depleted resources but also weakened traditional social structures that prioritize the communities’ capacity to manage and protect their land and natural resources. Bombings and forced resettlement also contributed to adverse environmental and social changes.

UNAER is an agricultural organization based in the Ermera municipality of Timor Leste. Founded in 2010, UNAER organizes farmers in the district for mobilizations and dialogues with government officials to defend their rights over the land as mixed-race (mestizo) families continue their claims over huge coffee farms in the area. They justify their unilateral land occupations due to the absence of a national agrarian reform policy and the fact that the occupied areas are part of their ancestral domain. The occupied lands were distributed among the community members.

In post-conflict Timor Leste, the customary practice known as the tara bandu, achieved strong resurgence for local decision making, collective action, enforcement system, and agrarian reform implementation. It was observed that community-based actions using the tara bandu were more effective in undertaking alternative development. The practice consists of organized rituals, building of altars, and the use of natural objects in implementing agroecology principles and enforcing local laws such as prohibition of harvesting of natural resources in protected areas. Ermera, the country’s largest area for coffee production, has become a model for tara bandu implementation at the district level.

Conclusion

The Thai, Indonesian and Timor Leste cases presented here are but a fraction of countless grassroots initiatives in Southeast Asia that demonstrate the capacities of empowered and organized communities to assert their rights to land, livelihood, and political decision-making that are exercised outside of the state framework. Utilizing principles of solidarity, sharing, cooperation, the commons, collectivity, and the judicious use of traditional customs, the communities are able to remain resilient even in pandemic times. Challenges from the state, rural elite, and corporate interests continually hound them but they have remained steadfast in their advocacies and campaigns.

References

Angeles, L.C. 2004. Grassroots democracy and community empowerment. In Democracy and civil society in Asia, Vol. 1, Globalization, democracy and civil society in Asia. F. Quadir, and J. Lele (eds). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 182–212.

Franco, J.C. 2004. “The Philippines: Fractious civil society and competing visions of democracy.” In Civil society and political change in Asia: Expanding and contracting democratic space, M. Alagappa (ed). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 97–137.

Kaufman, M. 1997. Community power, grassroots democracy, and the transformation of social life. In Community power and grassroots democracy: The transformation of social life. M. Kaufman, and H.D. Alfonso (eds) London & New Jersey: Zed Books, 1–26.

Kartini, Erni. 2019. “Serikat Petani for Humanity, Infinity, and Justice.” Presentation at the 2nd International Conference on Alternatives: Building Peoples’ Movements in Southeast Asia, Quezon City, Philippines, October 22–24, 2019.

Mohanty, M. 2007. Introduction: Local governance, local democracy and the right to participate. In Grassroots democracy in India and China: The right to participate, ed. M. Mohanty, R. Baum, M. Rong, and G. Mathew. New Delhi: Sage, 15–32.

Parameswaran, M.P. 2008. Democracy by the people: The elusive Kerala experience. Bhopal: Alternatives Asia.

Perry, E.J., and M. Goldman, eds. 2007. Grassroots political reform in contemporary China. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.

Prasartset, S. 2004. “From victimized communities to movement powers and grassroots democracy: The case of the Assembly of the Poor.” In Democracy and civil society in Asia. Vol. 1, Globalization, democracy and civil society in Asia, ed. F. Quadir, and J. Lele. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 140–181.

Tadem, Eduardo C. 2012. “Grassroots Democracy, Non-State Approaches, and Popular Empowerment in Rural Philippines.” Philippine Political Science Journal. (Vol 33 No 2)

Tadem, Eduardo C., Karl Arvin F. Hapal, Venarica B. Papa, Ananeza P. Aban, Nathaniel P. Candelaria, Honey B. Tabiola, Jose Monfred C. Sy, and Angeli Fleur G. Nuque. 2020a. “Deepening Solidarities beyond Borders among Southeast Asian Peoples: A Vision for a Peoples’ Alternative Regional Integration.” UP CIDS Discussion Paper 2020-04. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Center for Integrative and Development Studies.

Tadem, Eduardo C., Ananeza P. Aban, Karl Arvin F. Hapal, Venarica B. Papa, Nathaniel P. Candelaria, Honey B. Tabiola, and Jose Monfred C. Sy. May 2020b. “A Preliminary Report on Southeast Asian Community and Grassroots Responses in Covid-19 Times.” Quezon City: University of the Philippines Center for Integrative and Development Studies.

UP Center for Integrative and Development Studies Program on Alternative Development (UP CIDS AltDev). 2020. “Alternative Practices of Peoples in Southeast Asia Towards Alternative Regionalism.” UP CIDS Workshop Proceedings. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Center for Integrative and Development Studies.

Tadem, Eduardo C., Benjamin B. Velasco, Ananeza P. Aban, Rafael Vicente V. Dimalanta, Jose Monfred C. Sy, Micah Hanah S. Orlino, Ryan Joseph C. Martinez, and Honey B. Tabiola. 2022. “Southeast Asian Peoples in Pandemic Times: Challenges and Responses COVID-19 Grassroots Report Volume 2.” Public Policy Monograph Series 2022-03. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Center for Integrative and Development Studies. Quezon City.


The article was first published by Global Taperstry of Alternatives at https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/newsletters:09:rivers


About Author(s)

Eduardo C. Tadem, Ph.D. is the convenor of the University of the Philippines Center for Integrative and Development Studies, Program on Alternative Development (UP CIDS AltDev), and Professorial Lecturer at the UP Asian Center.


1) Excerpted with revisions from Tadem 2012.

2) The cases are published in UP CIDS AltDev’s Monographs on Alternatives (https://cids.up.edu.ph/program-on-alternative-development/).

3) Excerpted with revisions and updates from Tadem et al 2020a, Tadem et al 2020b, UP CIDS AltDev 2020, and Tadem et al 2022.

Categories
Voices from the ground

Nation-states are destroying the world. Could ‘bioregions’ be the answer?

From the border regions of South Asia to the Amazon rainforest, people are seeking new ways to organise societies that respect humans and nature

By Shrishtee Bajpai, Juan Manuel Crespo & Ashish Kothari


Panchi nadiya pawan ke jhonke

Koi sarhad na inhe roke

Sarhadein insaano ke liye hai

Socho tumne aur maine kya paaya insaan hoke”

(Translation)

“Birds, rivers and the gusts of wind

No borders can stop them

The borders are for humans

Just think, what have we got by being human?Javed Akhtar, Indian lyricist

It is becoming increasingly obvious that we need to think about the problems of the climate crisis and borders together. Environmental breakdown displaces millions of people every year, while states respond by militarising their borders, causing further suffering and death.

It is no accident that climate breakdown and state borders are linked. Historically, the nation-state was born out of a logic that also saw nature – and colonised peoples – as things to be conquered and dominated. Now, from the war-torn border regions of South Asia to the Amazon rainforest, people are questioning whether sustainability can ever be achieved through the framework of nation-states. They are turning to other ways of organising society based on Indigenous worldviews and practices that respect all humans and the rest of nature.

Colonialism, capitalism and the nation-state

In the last 500 years, colonial conquests of vast regions of the earth by European and North American powers, based on the capitalist profit drive and rapid technological development, resulted in the decimation of countless cultures and communities. This includes the death of over 50 million natives in what subsequently came to be known as Latin America, devastating famines in Asia and Africa caused by policies imposed by colonisers, and the conversion of millions of hectares of natural ecosystems into commercial plantations, logging estates, or livestock ranches to feed the consumer demands of Europe and North America.

In the same period, there emerged the idea and practice of the nation-state. Though its origins and nature are diverse and complex, the centralisation of power in the hands of the nation-state was one of the bases of capitalism: in practice, capitalism is carried out through the political, legal and military institutions of nation-states. Nation-state building was supported by an ideology asserting that capitalist modernity is the only way to organise lives, and that this justifies taking over territories of Indigenous peoples and local communities for national goals like development and security. Nation-state symbols such as one flag, one language and a single identity submerge and often disrespect diverse biocultures – combined biological and cultural human environments. We must see the nation-state, capitalism and colonialism as going hand in hand.

The ideology of the colonial-industrial age stated, deludedly, that humans were separate from nature and that human progress was contingent on conquering it. After the Second World War, old forms of colonialism were defeated in most parts of the world. In their place a new ideology was needed to continue the domination of the West. This was the ideology of development, or ‘developmentality’. We might assume that the idea of ‘development’ is progressive, but we would be mistakenDevelopmentality convinced the world that human progress was linked to ever-expanding material and energy growth. The ecological crises the world is facing today are largely a result of these five centuries of colonialism and developmentality.

It is in this context that there is now an intense search for radical alternatives which can meet the needs and aspirations of all peoples while living in harmony with the rest of nature.

Bioregionalism and radical democracy

In central India, 90 villages formed a mahagram sabha (federation of village assemblies) in 2017 and are asserting their decision-making over the entire region, brought together by a traditional sense of biocultural identity rather than current administrative or political boundaries. In 1999, 65 villages that were part of a river basin in the Indian state of Rajasthan, formed a people’s parliament that governed it for a decade, ignoring the administrative division of the basin. These and other examples are pointers to a radically different approach to governance: bioregionalism.

Bioregionalism is based on the understanding that the geographic, climatic, hydrological and ecological attributes of nature support all life, and their flows need to be respected. Bioregions, also known as biocultural regions, are areas with their own ecologies and cultures, in which humans and other species are rooted, actively participating at various scales beyond the immediate locale. While many current human-made boundaries disregard nature’s flows and territories – such as a mountain range or a river – many local communities and Indigenous peoples have long lived with deep understanding and respect for these. They understand the interdependence of all living beings across a landscape or seascape.

There are many examples of bioregional governance, both old and new. For thousands of years Nomadic pastoralists in Iran used large territories encompassing a diversity of ecosystems, their practices tuned to an acute understanding of which ecosystems could take how much and what kind of use. In more recent times, the Indigenous nation of Monkox of Lomerio, Bolivia, won territorial self-determination rights in 2006, and is attempting transformations in its economic, political, social and cultural life based on a life plan for the whole region. The Great Eastern Ranges project aims to protect, connect and restore habitats across a 3,600 km swathe of eastern Australia, by creating regional coordination channels among various actors. In many other parts of the world, Indigenous Peoples or other local communities are sustaining traditional landscape governance mechanisms, or creating new ones, as part of a global phenomenon now known as Territories of Life. Many of these projects cross political and administrative borders, respecting instead ecological and cultural flows and boundaries.

At their best, these bioregional projects are based in radical, direct democracy. Decision-making power is ultimately held at a local level, by which everyone is able to participate. For decisions affecting larger territories, delegates are sent to decision-making assemblies appropriate to that scale. There are close affinities between these movements and what Mahatma Gandhi called swaraj, a worldview that asserts autonomy, freedom and sovereignty, but in nonviolent ways that are responsible to the autonomy and well-being of all others.

Reimagining South Asia from a bioregional perspective

For various historical reasons including colonisation, South Asia is currently divided into several nation-states, with political borders that cut through ecosystems and cultures. For instance, the world’s largest mangrove forest, the Sundarbans, is divided by the India-Bangladesh border. The high mountains of the Himalaya and the vast desert areas in the west are divided between India and Pakistan. The great high-altitude plateau north of the Himalaya is fenced off with Ladakh on one side and Tibet (governed by China) on the other. The waters of the Indian Ocean are partly partitioned amongst India, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives.

Here is a vision for South Asia that is very different from the current reality, adapted from an essay one of us co-authored. It is part of an imaginary address to inhabitants of South Asia by one Meera Gond-Vankar, in the year 2100:

“While India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and China still retain their ‘national’ identities, boundaries have become porous, needing no visas to cross. Local communities have taken over most of the governance in these boundary areas, having declared peace in previous conflict zones like Siachen, the Kachchh and Thar deserts, and the Sundarbans. The same applies to the Palk Strait, with fishing communities from both India and Sri Lanka empowered to ensure sustainable, peaceful use of marine areas. Greater Tibet has become a reality, self-governed, with both India and China relinquishing their political and economic domination over it. Both nomadic communities and wildlife are now able to move freely back and forth.

In all these initiatives, narrow nationalism is being replaced by civilisational identities, pride, and exchange, a kind of self-fashioned ethnicity that encourages respect and mutual learning between different civilisations and cultures. South Asia learnt from the mistakes of blocks like the European Union, with its strange mix of centralisation and decentralisation and continued reliance on the nation-state, and worked out its own recipe for respecting diversity within a unity of purpose.”

While this is a futuristic vision, some tentative pathways towards this are already being forged. In addition to the examples given above of villages coming together to democratically govern bioregions, peace-centred people-to-people dialogues are underway, such as the Pakistan-India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy. The idea of a Siachen Peace Park in the intense conflict area between India and Pakistan has been proposed for many years, and even endorsed by former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Transboundary conservation cooperation exists between Manas Tiger Reserve in India and Royal Manas in Bhutan, aligning with several dozen such initiatives already established around the world. But of course, given the continuing atmosphere of distrust and conflict in the region, accompanied by periodically rising hypernationalistic discourses (currently, promoted by the party in power in New Delhi), there is a long way to go for these pathways to be trod.

Shaping a bioregional approach to the Amazon Sacred Headwaters

The Sacred Headwaters region in the Upper Amazon is one of the birthplaces of the Amazon river. It spans 35 million hectares (86 million acres) in Ecuador and Peru, and is home to nearly 600,000 indigenous people from 30 nationalities, including peoples living in voluntary isolation. It is the most biodiverse terrestrial ecosystem on the planet, and represents both the hope and the peril of our times. Indigenous peoples’ struggles have kept this region largely free of industrial extraction. Studies by international organisations such as the UN, Rainforest Alliance and Hivos have demonstrated how Indigenous peoples are the best guardians of nature, especially in the Amazon bioregion.

In response to new threats from the Ecuadorian and Peruvian states to expand oil, mining and intensive agro-industrial projects, Indigenous confederations from both countries banded together to form the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative (ASHI). In 2019, Sacred Headwaters made a public declaration:

“We call for the global recognition of the Amazon Rainforest as a vital organ of the Biosphere. We call on the governments of Ecuador and Peru, on the corporations and financial institutions to respect indigenous rights and territories and stop the expansion of new oil, gas, mining, industrial agriculture, cattle ranching, mega-infrastructure projects and roads in the Sacred Headwaters. The destructive legacy of this model of “development” has been major deforestation, forest degradation, contamination, and biodiversity loss, decimating Indigenous populations and causing human rights abuses. We challenge the mistaken worldview that sees the Amazon as a resource-rich region where raw materials are extracted in pursuit of economic growth and industrial development…”

Instead of a view of development that sees human progress as the conquest of nature, Sacred Headwaters understands the interdependence of all life across national borders. ASHI’s Bioregional Plan proposes Indigenous self-determination with effective participation of women; a highly diverse economy combining new with ancestral farming methods and food and energy sovereignty; intercultural health systems that respect gender and generational diversity; educational systems that combine formal with non-formal learning; and a thorough conservation and restoration program for the Amazon.

Making bioregionalism a reality

Bioregional approaches, encompassing radical democracy, offer communities the chance to rebuild and enhance their lives and livelihoods, free of the constant fear of conflict and violent extractive industries. In the Amazon they could help secure the ecological, economic and cultural sustenance of Indigenous nations and other local communities, at the same time providing all the local-to-global ecological benefits of the world’s largest rainforest. In South Asia, the withdrawal of armed forces and other police and paramilitary forces from land and sea would mean that the suffering such personnel go through could be eliminated, especially in the treacherous and freezing conditions of the Himalayan border areas between India, Pakistan and China. It would also mean that a substantial part of India’s US$72 billion defence expenditure could be reallocated.

This approach would also entail undoing past damages to bioregions, as far as feasible. The impacts of climate change in forms of droughts and floods are going to become worse. It is crucial to re-imagine how we govern wetlands, and entire bioregions. Some existing dams on trans-boundary rivers may need to be decommissioned, to re-establish water, ecological and biological flows. Any further damning and major diversions must be avoided. A healthy river is often a first line of defence against climate crises for communities, including its functions as it merges into the sea. A bioregional approach may also help cope with some of the worst impacts of climate change, such as the displacement of coastal communities – including a likely attempt by Bangladeshi climate refugees to enter India, which could become a huge humanitarian crisis without adequate foreplanning – or the movement of wildlife to higher altitudes.

Bioregional approaches face significant challenges, not least of which are nationalist notions that continue to support hard nation-state boundaries. And yet, the peace dialogues, transboundary conservation projects and Indigenous bioregional initiatives discussed above are sources of hope.

Another important stepping stone is the recognition of the rights of nature. In 2017, the New Zealand Parliament passed into law the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act, which gives the Whanganui river and ecosystem legal personhood and standing in its own right, guaranteeing its “health and wellbeing”, recognising the Iwi cosmology “we are the river and the river is us”, and acknowledging that rights extend to the entire bioregion, from mountain to sea.

Close on its heels, the Uttarakhand high court in India ruled in 2017 that the north Indian rivers Ganga and Yamuna, their tributaries, and the glaciers and catchment feeding these rivers in the state of Uttarakhand, have rights as a “juristic/legal person/living entity”.

Recognising such rights could enable management and governance based on the ecological realities of the region. This also opens up the opportunity for us to alter currently dominant anthropocentric and colonial law, towards a new legal framework that respects the ‘pluriverse’ – the beautiful diversity of the world. Taken beyond the law, recognising the rights of nature opens up the possibility of articulating Indigenous worldviews of nature as a living being, even within formal institutions; and of creating a mutually flourishing future for humans and more-than-humans, where people’s lives are rooted in territories that do not have arbitrary militarised borders but are ecologically and culturally defined, open and connected.


The article was first published by Open Democracy: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/nation-states-are-destroying-the-world-could-bioregions-be-the-answer/

Categories
Gatherings

[2022] Just transitions (Dakar)

Between the ecological modernization of capitalism and the multi-crisis: how to build the eco-social transformation the world needs?

The Global Working Group Beyond Development[1] met in a moment of increasing visibility of the climate emergency, the ongoing disruption of our societies by the COVID-19 pandemic, a growing trade war between China and the United States and increasing impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. At the same time, the world´s richest keep growing richer, the legitimacy of political elites and institutions is fading around the world, and frontiers for resource extraction are expanding to maintain the imperial mode of living. The last few years brought further inequality and impoverishment, increased hunger due to disrupted food chains, growing influence of “fake news” and right-wing conspiracy theories, and deepened authoritarianism and militarization around the globe. The zoo genetic origins of the pandemic are the result of our predatory relationship with nature, whilst the speed and depth of the spread of the virus, as well as its consequences for economies around the world, were determined largely by the globalized character of our economies based on transnational production and distribution chains.

The pandemic had a highly unequal health and social impact in, for example, the United States, India or in Latin America, where racialized and impoverished people were affected far worse than the elites and middle classes, exacerbating inequality in our societies. This was further highlighted by governments of rich countries and corporations prioritized trade rules on patents, which favour transnational pharmaceutical corporations, instead of saving lives resulting in a vaccine apartheid affecting particularly people in Africa and other poor countries).

All these phenomena confirm our hypothesis of a civilizational crisis at the core of our societies, economies and (geo)politics rooted in colonial, patriarchal and extractivist capitalism. The world seems to be entering a phase of multidimensional collapse, whilst political institutions seem unable or unwilling to stop it. Radical democratic and systemic ecosocial transformation is urgent and imperative, but the political conditions to achieve it are adverse. Although, the pandemic initially led to provoking debates about the need to revise our mode of living and was even categorized by Arundhati Roy as a potential “portal to another world”[2], economic recovery strategies after the period of lockdowns largely opted for well-known recipes of “disaster capitalism” using crisis as moments to push through structural adjustment and amplifying the frontiers of capital.

To face the climate crisis, particularly related to energy, the notion of transition has been embraced by a variety of powerful political and corporate actors, as inevitable change, but also as an opportunity for that change to be shaped along their interests. They seek to build a transition rooted in their geopolitical, corporate, and technocratic interests and approaches as an “ecological modernization of capitalism”, by reducing the use of fossil fuels, expanding renewable energies and generating profits from so-called “green economies”. Within this debate, the notion of “just transition” has emerged in response to the challenge to reconcile social-economic issues with the need of ecological transformation of our economies. Consequently, transition is happening, but its direction is under dispute. So far, nothing guarantees the current roll out of transition policies will be just, assure a dignified life for all, and reinstate the necessary balance with nature.

Therefore, the fourth meeting of the Global Working Group interrogated existing projects, strategies and understandings of transition and the impacts and consequences of the transition politics being implemented. We also explored the resistances and horizons that can redirect transition towards the type of radical eco-social transformation capable of ensuring democracy, dignity and the sustainability of life for current and coming generations the group has proposed before.

 Some of our guiding questions were:

  • What is the hegemonic debate about transition in the US, EU and China, what forces and interests are behind it and what are its main goals?
  • How can potential impacts of the green transition programs in the EU, US and China on regions of the global South be assessed in the context of persisting asymmetries in the world economy?
  • What are existing counter-hegemonic proposals and actions within the global North and South which are aiming at a just transition/transitions? What chances do they have to prosper, and what are the dimensions of justice which are addressed in them?
  • What kind of policies or practices in the global North could contribute to dismantle/challenge this asymmetric relation and free space of manoeuvre for the global Souths to build their own just transitions democratically?
  • What changes in global rules of trade, finance, climate finance, debt, foreign investments, dispute settlements, corporate accountability, and what changes in the architecture and internal governance of international institutions, are needed for a just transition?
  • How are movements around the globe shaping the politics of transition? With what successes, challenges and difficulties?
  • What kind of policies or practices in the global South could open space for more sovereignty and who are potential allies for this in the different world regions? What on-the-ground experiences and theories can fuel this debate?

As in earlier occasions, we decided to produce a collective text that reflects our conversation, and we have therefore not included references to and citations of the individual members of our group in the text, nor have we included extensive bibliographical references. We are very aware there are many differences between our perspectives and thoughts, both theoretical and political, as well as regarding the concrete necessities which emerge from the contexts in which we are living. However, we feel the dialogue between our differences enriched all of us and produced new knowledge and thinking that goes beyond our individual positions. In a sense, this final document is like a tapestry in which all our words and feelings have been woven together. We have tried to represent our discrepancies faithfully to open debates and new questions to allow our strategic debates and actions move forward.

I. MEETING IN SENEGAL, IN THE MIDST OF WAR, PANDEMIC AND COLLAPSE

Our first meeting in three years was deeply informed by the historical moment, as well as by the dialogue with the African continent, its problems, struggles, and dreams. Our visit to Bargny in the outskirts of Dakar and to the Saloum Delta, a UNESCO world heritage site with beautiful protected marine areas and mangrove ecosystems, gave a very real context to our discussions on a just transition. We learned about the customary bio-cultural connections between these communities and the sea, the mangroves, and coastal habitats here, sustaining the lives, economies and communities of hundreds of thousands of people on the Senegalese coast.

On both sites, we were informed by local communities about the acute impacts on the local economies based on small-scale fisheries and the transformation of fish products, caused by the climate emergency, coastal erosion, rising sea levels, water pollution, and overfishing by transnational trawlers. Local economies which provide a livelihood to hundreds of local communities in this area, including and especially women, are already deeply affected and threatened to be further destroyed.

We heard about the discovery of significant offshore deposits of oil and gas off the coasts of Senegal, also in proximity to the Saloum Delta. The exploitation of these deposits enabled by the European countries´ technical and financial support is promoted by the Senegalese government as a major opportunity to get a cash injection for its grand projects scheme and is welcomed by mainstream media and a significant part of the population as an opportunity for the country to “develop”.

The foreseeable consequences are the extreme degradation of the coastal eco-systems and the further impoverishment of thousands of people depending on them for their livelihoods. Based on our experiences and expertise, we see these “development” plans for Senegal as the creation of new sacrifice zones, where peoples, bodies, and cultures are sacrificed in the name of the illusion of extractivist development, despite widespread evidence of its negative impacts in other parts of the global South.

The promotion of extractivism as a catalyst of positive accelerated development is not new. Africa has witnessed a long history of rapacious extractivism and ecocidal large-scale commercial farms that were always sold as ‘good for development’. The hegemonic imperialist agenda of the 18-20th centuries transformed Africa into the world’s plantation and mine, i.e., purveyor-in-chief of raw materials. The neocolonial project of the 1970s and 80s further entrenched Africa’s extroverted models and today, as the world seeks to transition to low-carbon energy sources, there is a clear trend toward green colonialism that replicates the unjust economic models of the past.

Contemporary African societies are the product of colonialism, racism and extractivism that created societies and economies based on dispossession, slavery, apartheid, and widespread violence. Colonial power keeps being reproduced daily through military presence and intervention, transnational corporations, as well as the continuous political, economic and financial interventions of the former colonial powers. Africa is the region in the world where the continuities of colonial power are most evident and most violent. It is also a region where the dramatic impacts of the climate emergency are clearly visible in the forms of desertification, wildfires, coastal erosion, extreme weather, sea rise levels, and the expulsion of thousands and thousands of forced migrants, as we directly witnessed in Senegal.

We also witnessed resilience and resistance in Senegal, giving continuity to a history of struggle, Pan-African projects of liberation, and of peoples seeking self-determination throughout the African continent for decades and centuries. In Bargny, a coal power plant was stopped by local organizing. Citizen’s mobilization has demanded a deeper democracy and social justice in Senegal. And local communities organize to sustain their lives through fishing and agricultural economies despite the impacts we have described.      

That said, high-level government action is determined to push through extractivist projects in the country and around the continent under the guise of development, a move that is applauded by segments of the country’s poor.  As was said in our meeting, although “the colonial master was replaced by local masters” they maintained the same ontology of power, violence, and domination, and consolidated a political economy based on extractivism and ecocide.

Meeting in times of collapse and war

Whilst our dialogues were embedded in these African realities and perspectives, they were also situated in a specific historical context. We met after two years in which the COVID-19 pandemic had struck the world as a truly global health, social, economic, and political crisis.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has deepened these crises even more, adding additional layers of food and energy crisis due to the widespread dependence on Ukraine and Russia for the production of grain, fertilizers and gas, disrupted by the impacts of the war and the sanctions on Russia. The combination of the pandemic, the war, the American-Chinese trade war and speculation with food and commodities disrupted supply chains around the world, causing further impoverishment, hunger and social exclusion for hundreds of millions of people. It also made visible to several industrialized countries how vulnerable and risky the current organization of global trade and the excessive dependence on production in China are. As a consequence, securing global supply chains, especially for critical raw materials, has become a priority agenda.

Furthermore, the concrete impacts of the climate emergency, in the form of floods, droughts, heatwaves and a more general disturbance of the cycles of nature are intensifying rapidly, with their strongest consequences for the same groups of marginalized -and often racialized- peoples, as well as for women. However, the global energy crisis is expected to affect even richer countries, with more long-term negative effects cascading down continuously to those most affected already. Against this background, the emergence of popular protests against rising food and energy prices, but also against inequality, corruption, and political mismanagement, is no surprise. Massive mobilizations in countries such as Sri Lanka, Belarus, Kazakhstan, India, Colombia, Chile, Peru, and Ecuador have denounced the consequences of the current economic model over the last years.

At the same time, (extreme)-right-wing movements have gained terrain in elections and on the streets around the world. Despite their familiar anti-elitist discourses, when in power -as in the US, Brazil and India- these movements have implemented policies in favour of big capital, while simultaneously attacking previous human rights victories of women, indigenous, peasant, and LGTBIQ+ movements. The new authoritarian right and neo-fascist movements are directly seeking to channel the discomfort of the popular classes with the current system. They are also increasingly using political violence (in the US, Brazil and India, for example), and encouraging mistrust in any kind of institutions, including science and politics.

Despite the symptoms of ecological collapse in many places of the world, the expansion of capital and extractivism keeps accelerating, including the expansion of offshore extractive projects, plans for extraction in the North- and South pole, or even in Space. We see a consolidation of the imperial mode of living, which implies that people’s everyday practices, societal logics, individual and collective identities in the Global North (but also in the Global South’s elites and growing middle classes), rely heavily on the unlimited appropriation of resources; a disproportionate claim on global and local ecosystems; and cheap labour from elsewhere.

In short, we met in a moment of perfect storm and deep shifts in our socio-political landscapes, where nothing less than the sustainability and dignity of life themselves are at stake. This reality makes transition inevitable, as ample political and corporate sectors are now acknowledging. However, socio-political struggles will determine if transitions will be orderly or disruptive, market-led or shaped by the people from below, and if they will focus mainly on energy transition, or will achieve a complete reorganization of our societies.

II.  BETWEEN ECO-SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION AND JUST TRANSITION

From its origins, the Global Working Group has been very aware that language is never neutral, and that the concepts we use are loaded with history and power and should therefore be carefully analysed. This is particularly the case for buzz words that appear in challenging political contexts to indicate the direction of travel for social, political, and economical programs. How do these concepts emerge? Who promotes them? What interests are inscribed in a term? are some of the questions proposed.

Therefore, our collective discussion started with a critical interrogation of the notion of transition itself, to assess if a term being used in so many different spaces and ways is useful for our engagement with multidimensional transformation, or if it sends us in an opposite direction. At least, four different, sometimes overlapping perspectives were present in our internal debate:

  1. Some members of the group state that the term transition itself encapsulates us in the frameworks of the status quo and could lead us to theories of social change we do not believe in, as it is a language inherited from western, modern and capitalist thinking.

For example, the dominant notions of energy are the product of the industrial revolution, aimed at building an equivalent that helps organize labour and inputs for capital. In daily life in many world regions, people do not refer to ‘energy’ in this sense, but to daily life communitarian practices like cooking or collectively maintaining water canals that go against the frameworks and measurements of capital’s ‘energy’ and are harder to commodify. The technocratic and economic conception of energy shapes transition in terms of the specific modern temporalities and measurements of capital, instead of the temporalities of indigenous cultures, of ecosystems and of the planet itself, which require a holistic understanding of energy. Another example for the problematic legacy of the term is how transition was used to describe the trajectory of eastern European countries from the soviet block to the capitalist semi-periphery.

  • Another critical perspective would state that the contents of a just transition are the same demands movements have been fighting for over a long time. This perspective therefore asks: is transition simply the continuity of our existing struggles? If so, to what extent do we need to reframe them as just transition, or should we just persist in the discourses and concepts we have been using so far?

Both critical stances, provoke the question: what are the counternarratives to the hegemonic language of transition? What languages of valuation are social movements and resisting communities using to counter economic discourses? What should the temporalities of transition look like, to break with modern, capitalist technocratic temporalities? How can we talk about transition from the vantage point of non-western ontologies, around the notion of Pachamama, for instance?

  • Other members stated that the notion of transition has a long history in social movements, left wing organizing and radical thinking, as well as in anti-colonial struggles in various parts of the world. They identify the risk of conservative and capitalist forces capturing the notion of transition and mobilizing it for their interests, now that it has won terrain due to grassroots organizing and mobilizing, and to the necessity to respond to the climate emergency. Additionally, progressive liberal discourse can reframe radical community-based perspectives through funding strategies, campaigning, and media access to build “acceptable” and moderate notions of transition, which do not question the root causes of the crisis we are facing.
  • A fourth, but related perspective states that regardless of its origins, the acknowledgement of the need of societal change by a variety of significant political and economic actors contained in the concept of transition represents a political opportunity to influence policies on a far broader scale and provoke a broader public debate with bigger influence in politics and society. The idea here is that having Europe, the UK or other powerful political actors implementing a more transformational transition politics than foreseen, would be positive in terms of the changes the world needs. This position says that to influence these debates, we do need to engage with the languages, logics, and temporalities of the status quo in a dialectical way.

The tension between perspectives more critical of the use of the term ‘just transition’ itself and others, insisting more on disputing its contents and directions, was present throughout the meeting, both in conceptual and strategic terms. Unresolved questions include: do we need other concepts then transition to talk about the transformations we want to see, or can we shape transition politics by pushing more radical notions and contents into them?  Another shared concern in the group is: to what extent can the language of transition connect with and be useful to the grassroots level and to our own commitment to radical ecosocial transformation? The grassroots produce languages of their own which are often not integrated in the concepts ending up in the centre of political and strategic debates.

In any case, in earlier meetings, the Global Working Group Beyond Development has built the idea of multi-dimensional democratic eco-social transformation as its main horizon[3], integrating five key processes of social change as required to strengthen justice, dignity, democracy, and the sustainability of life: i) decolonization; ii) dismantling capitalism; and iii) patriarchy; iv) ending racism and casteism; and v) turning predatory relations with Nature into effectively sustainable ones.

Therefore, in our meeting we engaged with the notion of “just transitions” on the grounds of this commitment to a radical “eco-social transformation” based on programs and strategies to leave our present mode of living, as it is leading us to the collapse of eco-systems and societies as we know them. Any “just transition” should therefore allow us to reorganize our economies, politics, daily life, and ways of relating to nature in a radically different way, to assure justice, dignity, democracy and the sustainability of life and nature for our and future generations.

III. HEGEMONIC POLITICS AND VISIONS OF TRANSITION

The global context of geopolitical dispute, increasing impacts of the climate emergency and the COVID-19 pandemic have accelerated commitments to the necessity of transition towards a more sustainable economy and society, as even the most powerful governments and corporate sectors acknowledge it is inevitable. However, the policies and economies implemented under the mainstream label of transition will not foster justice and dignity for all, nor restore balance and harmony with nature. The current reality of energy transition, for example, shows that although sources of renewable energy are expanding, this has not led to a substantial reduction in the use of traditional energy sources, so far.

Part of the corporate elites have entered the debate on transition in recent years through a paradigmatic strategy that seeks to define the contents and understandings of transition, so that they can control its policies. For now, hegemonic discourses propose a corporation-led and technocratic ecological modernization of capitalism to meet the climate crisis. The notion of a “just transition” can easily fit in such discourses, as the comprehension of the International Labour Organization shows: “A just transition means greening the economy in a way that is as fair and inclusive as possible to everyone concerned, creating decent work opportunities and leaving no one behind. A just transition involves maximizing the social and economic opportunities of climate action, while minimizing and carefully managing any challenges”.[4]

The sustainable development and green economy discourses that insist only on technological solutions to the climate crisis or put market-based solutions at the centre of transition, still uphold the idea of unlimited economic growth, thereby failing to acknowledge the depth and root causes of the civilizational crisis and ecological collapse we are facing. An absolute reduction of the global social metabolism is inevitable today, and this cannot be achieved with economic growth. But instead, such visions lead to the employment of “false solutions” that promise to address the climate crisis, but do not actually tackle its root causes, while many times even deepening impacts on those most affected territories and peoples, as we will see later. Some well-known false solutions are carbon trade or the promotion of alternative energy sources that in fact require dirty energy to be generated.[5]

However, this paradigm of ecological modernization is spread and sustained by ample sectors of political and mediatic power, who set the tone and frame the global debate on the type of transition that is needed. Mainstream media use national governments, business sectors and related think tanks as their main sources and marginalize more radical perspectives. The UN system, increasingly prone to collaborations with transnational corporations, is one source of those false solutions in spite of increasingly critical reports of the IPCC, which themselves are, too, moderated by political negotiation. 

At the same time, a kind of global Constitution of Capital which severely prevents systemic change has been shaped through the logics of Free Trade and its institutions. It prioritizes the rights of corporations over those of people or nature and forces States, especially in the Global South, into further opening their economies and territories to the appropriation by transnational capital, often against the general interest of their own citizenship. Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) may include sets of standards regarding sustainable development, intellectual property rights, environmental and human rights. But even if they do so, it is to favour European and American control over Global South economies, and at the same time to limit eco-social transformation through the privatization of international law in favour of capital.

On the ground, we can see how corporate sectors are shaping transition politics, enabled by “multi-stakeholder” approaches promoted by governments, multilateral and even development aid agencies, following the logic that corporations are “subjects of rights” just the same as people(s). These actors seek to give private businesses a seat at tables where they do not really belong, for example, in local decision-making processes about the future of specific eco-systems or indigenous or peasant territories, or in the design of conservation policies. Private actors of various kinds, like Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are now shaping real transition strategies on the ground, by acquiring control over land and natural goods, and conditioning local policies.

At the same time, the direction transition policies my take is deeply conditioned by the geopolitical disputes between, particularly, the United States, China and the European Union. The geopolitics of transition, includes disputes over:

  1. the leadership in technological innovation and the control of intellectual property needed for transition, to be able to lead a growing multi-billion-dollar market, as the green economy has become a new space for capital accumulation.
  2. the access to, and control over critical natural goods needed either for transition itself (rare earth minerals, pharmaceuticals, etc.), or to ensure resilience against environmental collapse (water, food, etc.). Critical raw materials and products are needed for the green and digital transition, especially for strategic sectors such as digital technologies, renewable energy, electric mobility, defence, and aerospace.
  3. the leadership in and capacity to shape the international frameworks that will guide transition.

The geopolitics of transition also imply a re-actualization of the international division of labour and nature between the global Norths and Souths: the Souths being compelled to provide raw materials for renewable technologies, but also forest land for carbon compensation projects, to receive the new waste resulting from renewable technologies and digitalization, and to buy the new technologies from where they are developed in the Norths. As such, these disputes also imply the expansion of political influence and territorial control to other parts of the world, constituting new forms of colonisation in the name of transition.

US, EU and China´s transition politics

In their internal politics, China, the US, and the EU are opting for different strategies, as was analysed in the preparatory papers to the meeting.[6] Although environmental justice and the climate crisis are becoming a more important political issue in the USA, particularly for the younger generations, at the same time, the hegemony of the “American way of life” based on consumption is still unbroken. Thus, proposals for transition in the US were intentionally designed in more general terms, strongly relying on technocratic solutions, and eluding a more global vision, for example, regarding the role of the US Army. They rather sought internal legitimacy stating that the US should be a global leader for innovation. At the same time, Joe Biden´s initial initiatives to regain some global leadership on the issue of climate justice have been compromised by domestic politics and recent supreme court decisions.

A more radical perspective on transition started in the USA in the radical left (Trotskyist, Green Party and Black, Latinx and Indigenous liberation movements) years ago, but gained political momentum through the growing influence of the Democratic socialists within the Democratic party. Alexandra Ocasio Cortez positioned the proposal of a Green New Deal, which was criticized by parts of the radical left, insofar as it left unquestioned the racist legacy of the New Deal that excluded farm workers and domestic workers, mostly Latinx, Black and migrant men and Black women. Moreover, the political momentum for the Green New Deal to move forward has already faded, as it was too easily associated with socialism by conservatives, and liberals did not want to appear as too radical.

In the case of China, the transition toward a “socialist eco-civilization” is a serious goal for its internal development policies and goals. Their strategy is based on learning through action, by the upscaling and mainstreaming of pilot experiments carried out on a local level, directed by 5-year development plans. Under Xi Jinping the current aim is socialist modernization, which clearly includes a transition directed towards the “decarbonization of development”, and in theory a more modern and democratic leadership. At the same time, the foreign policies, and geopolitics of China, for example around the Belt and Road Initiative, clearly create environmental costs outside China, and undermine already fragile ecological and social regulations around the world. On a structural level, the Chinese excess of capital and its need for natural resources imply the need for growth and global expansion. Within the Chinese leadership, there are more ample political debates on ecosocial transition than we might see from the outside.

The EU Green Deal as well as the Fit for 55 European transition plans possibly constitute the most ambitious and serious process, which goes beyond simple greenwashing. It aims at an ecological, digital and socio-economic transition, and has assigned substantial budgets for its implementation. At the same time, it also remains rooted in a technocratic vision and in a domestic approach, which limits the depth of transformation and increases the risks of false solutions which will impact negatively in the Global South. Movements are therefore still engaging and trying to influence its contents. Movements in the global South criticize it for lack of recognition of historical and continuing struggles that confront both climate change and imperialism simultaneously. It also needs to genuinely incorporate southern demands like debt cancellation and climate reparations, which are at the heart of the global climate justice movement discourse.

At the same time, EU FTA strategies aim at consolidating its global leadership for technological innovation for transition, as well as assuring access to critical raw materials in Asia, Africa and Latin America. More comprehensive FTAs, especially the Energy Charter Treaty, deter climate actions as they empower corporations to sue governments that are takin on climate action like phasing out fossil fuels use or banning mining and fracking.

Our quick review of the hegemonic transition proposals shows how they are shaped by corporate and technocratic narratives and trapped in the capitalist growth imperative, while relying on (neo-)colonial power-structures. The “solutions” they propose will only bring relief to a small part of the globalized world and harm others in environmental, social, and cultural terms, thus exposing themselves as false solutions.  Even on the side of progressive elites, we see an exaggerated trust in institutional processes and technocratic solutions, and a distrust toward anti-capitalist proposals and grassroots radical organizing. Within our movements, NGOization or eurocentrism, and more widely progressive liberal engagement can lead to moderating logics.

At the same time, it is within multilateral institutional spaces and in national policies that decisions are being made with huge implications for the protection of critical eco-systems, the expansion of extractives, the protection of indigenous and peasant territories, the distribution of climate funds, the support to renewable and alternative energy sources and the implementation of transition politics, among many other things that either limit or enable socio-ecological destruction in our contemporary world system. A central discussion within the working group therefore focused on how to engage with these institutional processes, which, at least in the short term, cannot simply be ignored.

Simultaneously, forces of the far right even call into question the need for any transition at all, denying the very existence of global warming and ecological crisis, and pointing out that transition policies could have negative impacts on the living standards of popular classes in the global North. All of this constitutes a complex political scenario, with evident consequences for the Global South.

IV. IMPACTS ON THE GLOBAL SOUTH

As we have seen, the currently existing and hegemonic programs for transition are determined by geopolitical disputes for its leadership, and by corporate, technocratic, and financialized approaches. As such, they not only fail to provide real solutions for the climate emergency, but at the same time consolidate a colonial and instrumental way of relating to the Global South (and to marginalized territories and populations within the three main world powers): 1) as the warehouse of the world (particularly so for specific raw materials like balsa and lithium that are required for the transition), 2) as a dumpsite for waste to externalize negative impacts of their “green”, grey or brown economies, 3) as an area of opportunity for carbon emission compensation, and as 4) a market to sell ‘clean’ technologies.

Our discussion included several analyses of how hegemonic projects of “green” transition are false solutions that end up impacting territories in the Global South. Despite aiming at contributing to the supposed decarbonization of the Global North economies, they intensify the global climate emergency:

  • China’s energy transition requires balsa wood for wind turbine blades, coming from the Ecuadorian Amazon, which leads to social conflict and affects indigenous territories, generating human and nature rights violations. Seen from the vantage point of Ecuadorian grassroots and indigenous communities, China´s decarbonization and transition strategy becomes a driver for deforestation and dispossession of indigenous territories, in the name of transition.
  • In the case of lithium, the rare mineral is a strategic element for high capacity and fast charging batteries required to the energy transition. Its extraction from the arid salt flats in Chile, Bolivia, Argentina and Peru requires unsustainable amounts of water, competing with the water use of indigenous communities.
  • In Northern Africa, the push for renewable energy for export to Europe is leading to the loss of food production, livelihood sovereignty as well as national sovereignty, as mining, oil and gas tend to be controlled by States, whilst renewable energy projects are being promoted by transnational companies with financial guarantees of national governments (e.g. the Ouarzazate Solar Plant).[7] For example, the second generation Desertec proposal: a European energy system based on 50% renewable electricity and 50% green hydrogen by 2050, which would include large scale green hydrogen imported from the Sahara, which has been framed as “empty land” and a new energy El Dorado, to be put in value for the energy transition.
  • The trend toward fortress conservation: militarized nature reserves and protected areas are being installed around the globe, expelling native indigenous and peasant peoples from these areas and from their traditional livelihoods for the sake of “conservation” of biodiversity and as carbon sinks”. Although it is known that indigenous self-government of their territories on the basis of recognized collective territorial rights is the most effective strategy to preserve biodiversity, fortress conservation remains the principal approach to nature and biodiversity preservation in the hegemonic transition approaches.[8]
  • Plantations carried out to meet nationally determined decarbonization commitments as carbon sink are often on community commons and in violation of their customary rights including of forest-based food systems. Green energy projects are exempt from environmental and social impacts in most countries, consequently, are allowed on large stretches of lands which are community commons as well as culturally conserved areas by violating local rights and access to these lands and resources.
  • To meet national decarbonization commitments, monoculture plantations are often imposed on common community lands, in violation of customary rights and jeopardizing livelihoods based on forests. Similarly, green energy projects are often allowed to be built on community land or culturally conserved areas, violating local rights, as their environmental and social impacts are not taken into account.

All these examples show ways in which the sources of energy might change, but the system of unlimited growth, accumulation through dispossession, and overexploitation of nature remains intact. They show how hegemonic transition is leading to a green and renewed colonialism, which disarms national sovereignty and territorial self-determination of indigenous or peasant peoples to bring new territories and natural goods under corporate control or into market relations under western dominion. These logics of green land grabbing and green capitalist accumulation use the same narratives that historically have justified the commodification of nature, the expansion of sacrifice zones for “development” and the accumulation through dispossession, as the example of the Sahara as an El Dorado for renewable energy shows.

These historical logics now find a new legitimation in the narrative of (just) transition. It is a huge political challenge to reveal their negative impacts and to propose a convincing alternative. The revision of the impacts of transition in the global south therefore imposes the following questions: can transitions be carried out without plunder and colonialism of the south? What adjustments need to be made to the hegemonic transition proposals to make this possible? Or what elements should be used to build a genuinely different proposal for transition, which is globally just and ample enough to respond to the ecological and civilizational crisis we have described?

V. ALTERNATIVE CONCEPTIONS OF TRANSITION AND ECO-SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

In our dialogue we mapped out the resistances and alternatives to hegemonic transitions, including some presented in this publication. Water dams and mining projects are being stopped through mobilization around the globe. Strategic litigation is forcing governments to adopt bolder transition strategies. And people are organizing transition from below, going far beyond the hegemonic models, by implementing community based renewable energy projects, or by assuring food, nutrition and seed-sovereignty through biodiversity-based ecological agriculture, as in Bangladesh and in India.

These practices of resistance and of alternatives for radical eco-social transformation, have inspired other proposals for radical eco-social transformation. Three examples of platforms who promote such different narratives are the Latin American Pacto Ecosocial and Intercultural del Sur (Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South) and the Climate Justice Platform in Africa, or the Latin American and Caribbean Platform for Climate Justice (PLACJC).

Through the Latin American Pacto Ecosocial e Intercultural del Sur, its promotors wanted to present a Global South based horizon for transition, which should critique the (neo-)colonial and racist dimensions of existing transition platforms born in the Global North. The Pacto rebuilds a regional vision on the future, based on different movement proposals, strongly inspired by indigenous, environmentalist and feminist movements, of which the activist thinkers that formulated the proposal are direct participants or close collaborators. The Pacto consists of a narrative of nine proposals that connect social and environmental justice, and directly denounce patriarchy, coloniality of power and racism as drivers of the civilizational crisis.[9] The text is presented as a work in progress, which can be discussed, complemented, and localized, but also can translate to concrete proposals and campaigns on local, national or regional levels.

In Africa, the Climate Justice Platform for Africa has built a narrative that frames climate justice in anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-extractivist terms. By rejecting these patterns of power that have affected Africa so much, at the same time it proposes a horizon for justice in the region. The Alliance aspires to be an inclusive space, which by now is uniting a variety of movements and peoples, from peasant, fisherman and even hunters to urban activists. It is an extremely holistic campaign that poses the need to transform our societies completely. In Latin America, the PLACJC promotes similar actions that criticizes the hegemonic language guiding policies in the face of the climate crisis, as well also the false solutions framed in the energy transition.

These and many other manifestos have been under construction for a very long time in feminist, environmentalist, indigenous, anti-racist, black, anti-capitalist, peasant, and other movements. Their common understanding is that our current economic system and political processes do not allow the type of eco-social transformation the world needs. A systemic, multidimensional and holistic transition needs to radically transform our political and economic system, our modes of production and consumption, our relations with nature and our visions of a good and dignified life. According to our conversations, based on the discussions in our movements, we identified some of the central transformations which are needed for a genuine just transition:

  1. A radical transformation of hegemonic culture, rooted in colonialism, patriarchy, systemic racism and capitalism, cantered around individual advancement, competition, consumption, profit and unlimited economic growth, towards a culture that centres society on notions of interdependence, mutual care, and solidarity between all humans and with nature. This would anchor society in other notions of dignity and a good life based on communitarian wellbeing and balance with other life forms and nature as such. Among other things, this would require mass media, social networks, arts, and education to commit to creating narratives and subjectivities directed towards an eco-social transformation.
  • To allow interdependence, care and life to constitute the centre of society, our economies need to be brought back under democratic control, and at the service of our collective wellbeing. This requires:
  • the redistribution of wealth between countries and regions, as well as within our countries, transforming the current imperial mode of living, built upon patterns and aspirations of unlimited accumulation.
  • dismantling the corporate capture of the State and of international institutions, as well as the privatization of international law. A binding treaty for businesses to comply with human rights would be a crucial step to regulate and discipline capital, demanding respect for human rights, the rights of nature and of future generations.
  • the democratization and socialization of property rights away from private and individual towards cooperative and collective, communitarian, and even municipal, like user-owned and associative water systems.
  • Building, preserving and strengthening resilient and independent local and regional economies cantered on self-sufficiency, short value chains and food, health and energy sovereignty.
  • All this would have to be enabled by alternative financing mechanisms, which democratize and diversify finance, and create space for a diversity of forms of exchange and provision of the goods which are needed to live well in each context.
  • It also requires the recognition and valuing of care work in general, and of the role women, and particularly racialized women, play in the reproduction of life in our societies.
  • An alternative economic language and values directed at collective wellbeing, will have to replace the hegemonic narratives of benefits and unlimited economic growth, at the centre of decision making.
  • Transforming the imperial mode of living in a culture and society directed to the reproduction of dignified life for all and the care for nature requires an economy that limits overconsumption and recycles what has been extracted and produced instead of new extractions. The current overproduction of goods, culture of waste and the externalization of the destructive impact of our economy on human life and nature, should be replaced by production processes guided by social justice and equity, the rights of nature and the limits imposed by the balances in our eco-systems.

A just transition requires breaking away from current globalized and industrialized food systems that foster monocultural agriculture, industrial cattle production and industrial fishing that destroy biodiversity and eco-systems. Instead, family and community-based, diverse, peasant agricultural production, fishery and pastoral food production, and agroecological practices connected to shorter distribution chains and localized markets should be the basis of a more sustainable global food system.

  • Although transition is not a question of technology primarily, but of the transformation of our modes of living, this does require technology and innovation to be put at the service of this way of life based on an ethics of care and interdependence, breaking away also from the current colonial, patriarchal and capitalist intellectual property regime, which has proven to be criminal in the context of the Pandemic. This requires recuperating democratic control over the choice, production, goals, use and distribution of technology, integrating people affected by the material needs for technology, to be included in the decision and discussion process of its production.
  • The need to meet the civilizational crisis to allow a just transition requires the radical transformation of politics and public institutions as we know them. The depth of the multi-crisis we are facing does require global coordination and decision making, but the current UN structures seems unfit for this purpose. We see the need to strengthen the democratic self-determination of communities, embedded in frameworks of interdependence between all humans, justice in all its dimensions, and limited by the rights of nature and future generations. This could allow the socialization of power and recuperation of genuine democracy, rooted in reconciling customary and locally embedded decision-making processes with public institutions that guard for interdependence, reciprocity and collective interests. In earlier conversations our group has reflected in far more detail on the challenges of dealing with the State and public institutions.[10]
  • New global relations and institutions based on solidarity, reciprocity and interdependence need to be shaped, following the examples of global justice and solidarity movements like the Via Campesina. Such processes need to transform the current global political architecture, which remains rooted in colonial and imperial domination, extractive capitalism and patriarchy. No just transition is feasible globally or in the Global South, without degrowth and radical eco-social transformation in the Global North. To assure the feasibility of an eco-social transformation it needs to happen at least at a regional level, which would allow for delinking and selective deglobalization, strengthening localized and regionalized food systems and economies.
  • At the core of these transformations stands the need to transform current predatory relations between human society and nature. This requires recuperating the understanding that humanity is a part of nature and of the earth, as, among others, the notion of Pachamama shows. The recognition of rights of nature, as well as the rights of future generations as constitutive for all other rights, is fundamental. As is the community-based protection of biodiversity and free seeds, and of local eco-systems, breaking away from conservationist or corporate-led biodiversity strategies. Traditional and diverse knowledges need to be protected, not commodified, and be a guiding element in dialogical decision making and technological processes. Indigenous, peasant and other traditional people’s rights, especially of their land, territories and knowledges are crucial to any eco-social transformation able to meet the climate emergency and multi-crisis, and should therefore be as central to politics, economics and technology.
  • A just and democratic transition will not be possible without an ambitious plan for the payment of the historical colonial, social and ecological debt, in the form of reparations rooted in global justice. This should imply the effective implementation of a system of compensation from the North to the South, in the face of unequal historical responsibility for the climate crisis and ecological collapse. This system must include a considerable economic and technological transfer, as well as a debt jubilee, but also the restitution of previously grabbed land and water, among some of the elements necessary to mitigate the ravages of the climate crisis and advance in the just and popular ecosocial transformation. These climate reparations should, among other things, be part of a process that includes maintaining fossil fuels in the ground.

VI. MOVING FORWARD BETWEEN THE COLLAPSE AND ECO-SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: CHALLENGES AND PERSPECTIVES

Our assessment of current transition strategies shows that colonial capitalism and environmental racism are at their base, entrenching the same systems and relations of oppression we have talked about before, and amplifying already existing environmental and colonial debt.

What is new is that now this happens in the name of a “green” transition and the fight against climate change, constituting a narrative which is far harder to challenge from a transformational perspective.

We understand that a genuine eco-social transformation needs to be guided by love, care and justice, and will affect our societies from the grassroots and our daily lives to political institutions and economies. Our discussion made us reaffirm our commitment to the systemic and democratic eco-social transformation we had been proposing so far. Simultaneously we are sceptical about most of the notions of just transition that are being used by a wide variety of actors in the political spectrum responding to a similarly wide spectrum of interests. In our opinion a genuinely just transition implies breaking away from patriarchy, coloniality, systemic racism and extractive capitalism, which are at the roots of the problems we have identified. Many of the proposals for a just transition remain far away from such a radical horizon.

At the same time, clearly it will be the balance of forces that determines if the notions and concrete policies of transition will bring us closer to collapse, or if they will open up possibilities for an egalitarian world organized around ethics of care and balance, in favour of dignity for all, the sustainability of life and the rights of nature. In the Global North geopolitical interests and the imperial mode of living block radical transformations and make that hegemonic transition politics reaffirm the status quo.

In the Global South the narrative of “the right to development” and raising of living standards pose a complex debate in the face of persistent hunger, impoverishment and misery resulting from neocolonial geopolitics and economic status quo on the one side, but also huge inequalities in the global South itself. Without a doubt, radical redistribution of wealth, not only in terms of money, is needed to assure a dignified life for all. At the same time, the western development path has led to the ecological collapse underway and to multiple injustices, and thus should not guide the aspirations for a good life in our times. Whilst Degrowth is a necessary perspective for the Global North, what type of narrative captures the type of process needed in the Global South?

For now, the adverse political conditions in the world, oblige us to be mindful of two different temporalities and strategies that were mentioned in earlier meetings of the group. Eco-social destruction needs to be stopped as soon as possible, in as many places around the world as we can, through short term actions, campaigns, advocacy and mobilization. At the same time, long term strategies for building deep-rooted alternatives to the status quo, which allow the dignified, continuous, democratic and harmonic reproduction of life, are crucial to shape our collective future. We could also state this in terms of the defensive struggles that protect rights, institutions, bodies, and territories from predatory patriarchal and colonial capitalism, and the offensive struggles that create the new worlds we want to see, as a prefigurative politics of the future.

It is clear to us that in the face of limited and captured global and national political processes, eco-social transformation will have to be shaped from below, through processes of strengthening existing and facilitating newer deep democracy resistance against eco-social destruction and against the false solutions of hegemonic transitions, but also by building communities of care and concrete alternatives to the status quo through prefigurative politics. A lot of this is happening already. For example, mechanisms like mobilization and protest, strategic litigation, naming and shaming polluters, activist shareholding, boycotts, etc. are strategically trying to discipline capital and limit its impacts.

Local protection against commodification or extractivism is shaped by guarding and building sustainable economies and food systems, through agro-ecological production as in Bangladesh and many places in the world, or by building cooperativist economies that control land, properties and offer economic opportunities to historically marginalized communities as in Jackson, Mississippi or as in Venezuela by Cecososola. Local citizen-led energy transitions processes can show the ways ahead. One of our main challenges is strengthening solidarities and intersections between these movements and territories, to weave global resistances and mobilization to act together and stop the impacts from patriarchal, colonial and extractivist capitalism.

But we, at least part of us, will also have to navigate existing institutions to move forward in small steps towards a just transition or at least limit socio-ecological destruction around the global. But also have to radically transform them, building new institutions that can truly assure global justice and solidarity for a just transition. This will include building new legal frameworks, to protect the rights of nature and of future generations, or to protect human rights in the face of corporate activities. But probably it will also require political imagination and power to recreate the current order in a very different way.

As such, one of the central debates in our group remains on the different strategies for eco-social transformation, and the role the State and other institutional spaces play within them. Positions range from claims to “inhabit” the state institutions in order to “use” them for change, to much more sceptical perspectives which state that before they can be transformative and not affirmative of the current unjust order, state institutions themselves must undergo a thorough transformation of decolonization and depatriarchalisation. There are also voices which propose that societies be transformed completely from outside the state, which has no possible role in this process.

A crucial challenge therefore is the relation between the more radical, confrontational and prefigurative strategies that break away from the transition led by international institutions and state policies to build a bottom up and autonomous just transition, and those strategies that advocate bold international and national transition policies, considering them necessary frameworks and enablers for the global eco-social transformation needed. Our discussions seem to suggest that both perspectives and strategies are necessary, at least in the short term.

However, the relationship between them is contentious, and the more moderate strategies and discourses are used to marginalize the more radical perspectives. Can this be different? Can radical and reformist strategies enable and strengthen each other? The strategic question for these perspectives would be: how to simultaneously maintain radical contents and perspectives on just transition, and influence the mainstream debate? Can potentially more reformist discourses and strategies be combined with more disruptive strategies and radical perspectives? How to resist the strategies for watering down our proposals and co-opt our struggles, either coming from corporate sectors, but also from liberal elites?

In any case, it is clear that many fights will have to be fought in many different places and ways around the globe, according to the proper conditions they face. Although transformations will share principles and horizons, at the same time they will be diverse, and heterogeneous, as they are being adapted to diverse cultures, eco-systems and otherwise diverse situations by the communities and movements building just transitions in practice. As such, they will necessarily be far more contradictory, heterogeneous and contingent processes, then the horizon for radical change we have presented so far.

A crucial element to consider here is that the pressures for more radical transitions will increase, as the impacts of the climate emergency become increasingly visible and dramatic. On the one hand, this will lead to wider eco-social conflict, and potentially more violent repression by the global elites, who will seek to assure their own future in the face of collapse. But on the other, it might open the opportunity to amplify the social base for just transitions, resistances, and alternatives, exponentially, as already seems to be happening in the younger generations. In many places in the world, we are in a moment of building power and strengthening our organizations, to move forward with greater strength in the future. The horizon of eco-social transformation is a necessary perspective to do so.


[1] The present text is the result of a collective process of analysis, dialogue, and editing, based on the fourth meeting of the Global Working Group Beyond Development in the Senegalese Saloum delta, in May 2022. The text has been edited by Raphael Hoetmer with the support of Miriam Lang, Dorothy Guerrero, Mary Ann Manahan, Madhuresh Kumar, Neema Pathak Boome, Roland Nkwain, Aissatou Keita, Larry Lohman, Ivon Yanez, and Karin Gabbert.

[2] See: https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca

[3] See here: https://beyonddevelopment.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Alternatives-in-a-world-of-crisis-2019-2nd-ed1.pdf

[4] https://www.ilo.org/empent/areas/social-finance/WCMS_825124/lang–en/index.htm

[5] An archive of false solutions can be found here: https://foe.org/projects/false-solutions/

[6] A critical analysis of the notions and proposals of Green New Deals can be found here: https://www.rosalux.eu/en/article/1948.green-new-deals.html

[7] See for a more extensive analysis: Hamza Hamouchene, The struggle for energy democracy in the Maghreb (2016) Accessible here: https://www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/pdfs/sonst_publikationen/Struggle_for_Energy_Democracy_in_Maghreb_ENG.pdf

[8] See for example, the critique by the Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples of the United Nations in the report: Cornered by protected areas available here: https://www.corneredbypas.com/. The Science Panel on the Amazon insists on the centrality of indigenous peoples, practices and knowledges as crucial to the protection of the Amazon: https://www.theamazonwewant.org/.

[9] See: https://pactoecosocialdelsur.com/

[10] See:  Global Working Group Beyond Development, Alternatives in a World of Crisis (Brussels 2018), 274-286

Categories
Debates Democracy

Commenting on “Revolutionary Immanence?”

by Aram Ziai

The article is a highly interesting piece which demonstrates the author‘s familiarity with the theoretical debate about anti-capitalist revolutions as well as with current oppositional social movements. However, coming from a different theoretical tradition than the author I found its argument sometimes hard to follow and was not quite convinced by a number of theoretical claims – also in the light of its own analysis of social movements.

If the „state has to be seen as it is, a political and institutional expression of capital and totalitarian economic control“ (2), does this hold true for all states equally, including Burkina Faso under Sankara and Bolivia under Morales?

To me, a conception of state as condensation of relations of power (going back to Nicos Poulantzas) allows for more nuances – all the while bearing in mind the strategic selectivity (Jessop) of the state, which can be easier used for some purposes than for others.

In my view, the author‘s analysis shows the inadequacy of some of the more apodictic statements such as that movements either “support the politics of the State-Capital” or not: “There can be no middle ground here.” (3) I think in particular the Gilets Jaunes example demonstrates that the reality of social movements often is more complicated or contradictory than that and that non-revolutionary movements can evolve over time from demanding improvements within the status quo to demanding a new conception of politics beyond representative democracy based on capitalism.

I have to admit the main claim about revolutionary immanence has not become clear to me, as have some others. What does it mean if „movements of perpetual oppositionality have to transcend themselves“ (11)? Or even „transcend space-time“ (11)? What does „learning to see beyond the capitalist real“ (11) entail? Or even the „empirical real“ (1)? Does it presuppose that there is another, more profound, objective reality, only accessible to those versed in Marxism? Why should it be – given that the Occupy movement was heavily relying on indebted students and the Zapatista rebellion even more on indigenous peasants – that „only the proletariat can keep the rebellion going” (11)? And if “whosoever revolts against the State-Capital tyranny and for a non-state non-capital world is part of the proletariat” (11), does it not render the analysis of classes and their position within a capitalist system superfluous?

I think very interesting and important conclusions could be drawn from the empirical analysis of the text regarding revolutionary theory-building: concerning the necessity of organised movements but not of parties (and of organising vs. organisations), concerning the necessity of long-term and horizontal processes, and not least concerning the vastly different contexts in which oppositional movements arise and act. In discussing the Gilets Jaunes, Occupy and the Zapatistas, it can be demonstrated what a „belief in horizontality“ and a „disbelief in vanguardism“ (1) can mean for movements. These beliefs – an important feature of „new internationalism“ – were the result of a critical reflection of Marxist internationalism in the 20th century. Another equally important feature was the proposition that different relations of oppression are equally to be taken seriously, e.g. patriarchy and racism, which led to an abandonment of the belief that Marxism is a sufficient theoretical basis for emancipation. In my view, the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham may provide inspiration how to rethink notions of revolution in a way which is able to deal with the complexities and contradictions of questions of class and identity in the 21st century of which Marx simply could not have been aware.

Categories
Debates Democracy

Revolutionary immanence? Exploring the political idea of social movements

by Soumitra Ghoshs

Introduction: theories of movements, but where is the praxis?

Murray Bookchin once commented that the tragedy of Marxism was that it had become a subject of cloistered academic seminars and not living movements (Bookchin 2015). Today’s anti-capitalist mobilisations do not call themselves Marxists, he observed. The recorded experiences of the various square movements, insurrections and revolutions of recent years tend to bear this out. Precious few important theoretical works have been written on these movements by grounded practitioners with Marxist backgrounds, with the notable exception of the movements in Bolivia and Venezuela. Conversely, a corpus of new, largely academic, Marxist literature has sprung up within the last decade. The overwhelming majority of today’s more revered, more widely read Marxist thinkers are academics. Though their writings offer many new insights into thepolitics, history and philosophy of old and new struggles and constitute a collective effort to reinvent and resituate Marxist theory in today’s context, they do not, in our view, work as instances of theory in practice or as something that would or could be put into practice anytime soon. It is only to be expected that any discussions of revolutionary immanence or political strategies of movements in general will be informed by readings of specific movements. This is crucial because despite a lot of commonality, no two struggles are intrinsically alike. This is not enough to say that social movements today believe in horizontality and disbelieve in vanguardism and parties or that the multitude is the new revolutionary agency in the world of biopolitical capital. Unless every facet of each specific movement process is examined in detail, such generalisations become meaningless; as a result, Marxist theories lose their uniqueness and do not really help in changing the world. If on a certain day in 2011, the New York Times front page happens to carry news of various revolutions, insurrections, movements and assemblies happening across the globe, should this lead us to infer that a global social movement is raging (Buck-Morss 2013)? Since the events making up this “global” movement are various and end equally variously, it all leads to another inference that revolutions are no longer possible but things change nonetheless through non-class popular mobilizations and non-violent resistance (Hardt 2010; Negri 2010). But what has changed precisely? Has the reign of capital been brought to an end? Has the state disappeared or stopped protecting capitalist plunder? Our uncritical belief in the empirical real —largely sensed through the audiovisual media these days — and our obsessive generalisation of the evental blind us to the very idea of immanence: we cannot see beyond the visible present.

Though this paper does not focus on the inadequacy of today’s Marxist theories, one interesting fact merits mention. While Marxist analyses and critiques of specific contemporary movements are almost entirely lacking, several not avowedly Marxist accounts do exist, written by sympathetic researchers, journalists, academics and activists alike. We refer to many of these, in addition to old and new Marxist readings, while framing our problematic about the ‘anti-capitalist’ social movements in today’s world.

Trying to frame the problematic

In order to act as agents of social and political transformation, movements of anti-capital resistance need to find the right problematic. A movement needs to situate its more immediate tasks within the wider political context (Barker 2013). For the purposes of our discussion here, this wider political context has to be understood through dialectical reasoning encompassing the follies/achievements/lessons of the past and the challenges/probabilities of the future (Marx 1869, 1891, 1895; Holloway 2002, 2005, 2010; Mészáros1995,2015; Zibechi 2010, 2015; Sotiris 2015; Barker et al. 2013; Krinsky 2013).

Our hypothesis is that movements need to distance themselves from the lure of operating within a “known” present that contains capital, state and immediate resistance (Holloway 2002, 2005, 2010, 2015; Sotiris 2015; Jay 2016). The problematic must include the state in its entirety, taking in both parliamentary democracy and its known post-capitalist revolutionary variants, which have largely been rejected by history. The state has to be seen as it is: a political and institutional expression of capital and totalitarian economic control (Marx 1869, 1891, 1895; Holloway 2002, 2005, 2010, 2015; Zibechi 2010; Marcos 2018; Sotiris 2015; Barker et al. 2013; Lenin (1917):2016).

We propose that if movements are to shift away from statism and the State-Capital hegemony, this may only be done positionally.

In other words, an all-pervading oppositional must inform every step of the process.

This oppositional is the oppositional knowledge that makes movements both necessary and possible; movements as social collectives have to know that they cease to exist as movements if they do not perpetually confront the State-Capital in its entirety. We have consciously decided to say State-Capital rather than the state and capital, because the state can no longer be viewed separately from capital nowadays (Holloway 2002, 2005, 2010; Bookchin 2015; Balso 2010; Negri 2010). The oppositional in the movement is an expression of its intrinsic oppositionality, the sum of the oppositional knowledge that transforms an event or singularity fixed in time and space into a political continuity. We argue that the knowledge of how this is being done, or would or should be done in a particular time and space — in other words, the political strategy of movements — also includes the knowledge of what was done, not only in the immediate past but also long ago. However, let us first briefly examine the generic question of “social movements” to see how oppositionality has always permeated the notion of movements.

State and society: deconstructing the “social” in social movements

In trying to elucidate the concept of “social movements”, we will follow Marx, who repeatedly expounded the duality of state and society. Society must be understood as distinctly separate from the state, which is parasitic and thus external to the former. Talking about the relationship between the state and society in late 19th-century France in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx said that the state “enmeshes, controls, regulates, superintends and tutors civil society […] through” a “most extraordinary centralisation” and that “this parasitic body acquires […] an omniscience”, finding a “counterpart in the […] actual body politic”. Marx further said that because the “excessive state machine” and “the material interests of the French bourgeoisie” are closely interwoven, the state has to “wage an uninterrupted war against public opinion”, mutilating, crippling and if possible, “amputating […] the independent organs of the social movement”.

According to Marx, society, public opinion and social movements occupy spaces that not only exist naturally outside the state and the body politic, but are also opposed to them. While discussing the momentous events of the Paris Commune, he once again said that as the “class antagonism between capital and labour” (emphasis added) intensified, the “state power” became conterminous with “national power of capital over labour” and became “a public force organised for social enslavement” and “an engine of class despotism”. Marx went on to comment that the Paris Commune reorganised “the unity of the nation” through the “Communal Constitution” and the destruction of the “state power” that claimed to be “independent of, and superior to, the nation itself”.

We can say that social movements imply oppositional reorganisation of the order enforced by power: power represented by the state in league with capital, which comes at the culmination of a process of accumulation. Wherever this process took place, it remade the actuality of society and reconstructed the very idea of social. Young Marx called it alienation: humans becoming estranged from their collective species-being as human labour was first forcibly, and then through a curious “voluntary” process no less forcible at the end, torn away from humans (Marx 1844). This caused a break, a rupture in the universality of being. As the species-being was forcibly made to lose its sense of collective subjectivity, the society that was primarily an expression of the universality of the species-being became something else (Marx 1844; Marx/Engels 1976; Mészáros 1970). However, there has always been a dialectical process of going back and forward, from the private to the collective, the self to the other, a battle against capital and the fetish its rule creates. A journey of collective assertion and anti-power, as John Holloway (Holloway 2002, 2005, 2010) says, and which we call oppositionality. The oppositional movement reinvents, reconstructs and reclaims the social by creating a new collective identity.

In Poverty of Philosophy, Marx commented that social movements do not exclude political movements and political movements cannot but be social. This means class and class struggle, because societies cannot be conceived outside the class framework as long as that framework exists. Therefore, all social movements, even those with economic demands, are also political. When we say this, we expand what Marx said (Marx 1871). To Marx, economic demands seeking resolution within the intrinsic limits of the capitalist production system are not political; the economic becomes political only when it transgresses the system. We say both are political. The first kind of politics is that of capital, hence the state. The second kind of politics is anti-capital, therefore non-state. Dialectically, the state holds the non-state within it, one kind of politics the other, which goes on to negate it (Mészáros 2015; Holloway 2002, 2005, 2010). There is no point in theorising social movements as autonomous extra-political entities that are free from enormous burdens of histories and carve emancipatory futures out of perfect emptiness. No such emptiness ever existed. All movements are the products of histories, and all human histories are of class struggles. Movements can, knowingly and also often unknowingly, support the politics of the State-Capital. Movements can also support the politics of the non-state and anti-capital; they can express and embody the non-state within the state, the anti-capital within the capital. There can be no middle ground here.

A movement, however, finds its expression through a degree of organisation. While our construct of social movements, after Marx and Holloway, as collective assertions of anti-state, anti-capital social outpouring is unlikely to meet with many challenges, the concept of organisation has always been a controversial one. What, precisely, do we mean by an organisation of the “bottom”? How does it differ, both structurally and functionally, from organisations at the “top”? When we refer generically to the “grassroots”, are we talking about structurally similar processes? What does an Adivasi (tribal) movement focused on forest and land tenure rights in an Indian forest have in common with the indigenous Aymara movement in El Alto, Bolivia or the gilets jaunes in contemporary France? Do they all represent the same social constituencies and have same demands (Krinsky 2013)? How do these movement processes function as organisations? More importantly, do they see themselves as organisations, as institutional entities? This needs to be examined in greater detail.

Social movements: the questions of organising and organisation

The representational of the Leninist party and social democracy

How to approach the questions of organisation and organising? Here, we understand organisation to refer to institutional bodies such as various communist/leftist parties, the mass processes affiliated with these, non-party social movements, and movement alliances. By organising, we mean the primary social process of the oppositional mobilising and building up various social collectives including movements, in clear distinction from organisation. This question should not be seen as a purely context-specific, strategic question or as a question that leads to inflexible political positions. The last century saw a surfeit of organisations. The revolution that embraces the complex fabric of society and emerges from its embryo (Marx 1869) became epitomised in the concept of the vanguard party, making what was merely representational and transitory (Luxemburg 1904, 1918) a political truth, or rather the only political truth. Though we are not discussing the question of parties at length here, a few words might not go amiss given that social movements have never really been far from parties, vanguard or otherwise. Moreover, of late there has been a renewed plea for the revival of Leninist parties (Dean 2012,2013, 2016; Žižek 2010), ostensibly to plug the gap between the chaos of the crowd in the streets (represented by social movements) and the immanence of emancipatory politics.

Movements, be it entire movements or just parts thereof, are constantly being transformed into parties. Inversely, parties have been known to initiate movements: the vanguard party was conceived not only to direct movements, but to ensure that movements were revolutionary enough to seize state power (Lenin 1917). As Jodi Dean (Dean 2012, 2013, 2016a, 2016b) keeps on reiterating, there can be no discussion of the left without a discussion of the party—the left is the party.

It is beyond dispute that more than social movements or even unions, parties have so far dominated the discourse of transformatory politics. We need only look at Latin America and Europe to see this confirmed: social upsurges and resistance to capital are often co-optated, resulting in a new flurry of social democracy led by the so-called new left or progresismo (Zibechi 2010, 2014, 2015; Dangl 2010; Petras/Veltmeyer 2005; Webber 2011, 2015; Modonesi 2015). Influential mobilisations tend towards party formation as a way of dealing with the political realities more effectively, which means engaging with the state. Following the footsteps of the revolutionaries of the 19thcentury, John Holloway (Holloway 2002, 2005, 2010, 2015) Raúl Zibechi (Zibechi 2010, 2014, 2015) István Mészáros (Mészáros 1995, 2015) and Alain Badiou (Badiou2010a, 2010b), among others, posit that anti-capital must be anti-state by default and that a good state is not possible. Despite this, parties flourish, and movements get tamed through involvement in statist exercises. Why does social democracy reappear, forcing us to listen to the same old litany of societies in transition, the impossibility of immediate revolutions and the pressing need for experiments with parliamentary democracy (García Linera 2006, quoted in Bosteels 2014; Webber 2015; Iglesias 2015)? Though we are no longer in the period of the Second International and communists are no longer challenging revisionists, the pattern is very familiar.

The problem is not the parties per se, but rather their emergence. Why do successful mass movements result in parties? How did the oppositional essence of the indigenous Aymara movement in Bolivia get diluted into the populism of MAS (Movement for Socialism, the party led by Evo Morales and Álvaro García Linera)? What caused the Greek people to support Syriza again, even after its betrayal in 2015(Sotiris 2015; Kouvelakis 2016)? Do people need states? Do they need to be governed, told what to do? Do we not need a better understanding of the enigma of the state? Holloway’s and Badiou’s anti-state texts do not indicate how our screams against injustices and tyranny can coalesce in ways that are strong and sustainable enough to take on the state — in other words, in conscious processes of slow organising to achieve not cosmetic, but metabolic change (Mészáros 1995, 2015). Because such processes do not just automatically emerge: the question here is whether we can transform our servile, oppressed and increasingly market-opiated subjectivities into collective revolutionary subjectivity, will or desire (the last a Lacanian derivative used by both Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, as well as Jodi Dean) solely through screams, flashes of resistance and occasional inspirations? Do we not need something more coherent, relentless, vertical and yet horizontal?

Do social movements have a generic tendency to resolve opposition to the state, and new parties offer promises of this resolution? Yet movements have been known to persist outside typical party spaces, even after parties emerge and become dominant. A good example is Brazil’s Movimento Sem Terra or Landless Movement, popularly known as MST: throughout and in spite of its long-standing relationship with the PT, the Brazilian Workers’ Party, it lost none of its organisational independence, influence and relevance (Dangl 2010; Stedile 2002). Despite its earlier co-optation, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) — as the October 2019 movement and its many predecessors showed — does not seem to have lost its insurrectionary potency (Zorilla 2015; Becker 2015; Zibechi2014, 2015). The movements in Argentina seem to have recovered sufficiently (Aranda 2016; Sitrin 2012; Fiorentini 2012) from the rut of the Kirchner era (Petras/Veltmeyer 2005;Dangl 2010) in 2001-2002.

Coming back to the Leninist party, it appears that the party began to replace the society and the working class as the primary site of oppositional politics (Holloway 2002, 2005; Lebowitz 2012; Luxemburg 1918; Levi 2011). Social polarities, such as a range of different classes, occupied and colonised the party that was originally supposed to act as the vanguard of a particular class, namely the proletariat. Domination of the party by class/classes became domination of society, especially in situations where the party could control the state (Lebowitz 2012; Zurbrugg 2016; Hui 2016a, 2016b). The party controlled not by the proletariat but by the ruling classes persistently pre-empted any revolutionary struggles, responding ever more efficiently and ruthlessly (Lebowitz2012; Mao 1973; Hui 2009; Chaohua 2015). The representational of the Leninist party ultimately came to signify usurpation of the social dialectic of class struggles, thus destroying the oppositionality in the oppositional.

Replacing the oppositional social with the representational of the Leninist party and social democracy also meant replacing organising with the organisation. Because the leftist practices of the last 150 years or so have thus far largely followed the “representational” and statist politics of the organisation, they have failed to critically explore the all-important question of the politics of organising. We will come back to this later.

Organisationlessness: the politics of anarchy and the apolitical of the event

If the dominant mode of leftist organising in the last century was expressed through the party, the dominant mode of revolutionary organising today appears to be under-organising and un-organisationality. Beginning with the anti-globalisation and anti-war movements of the turn of the century and continuing on through the anti-austerity movements in Europe and Latin America and finally the Occupy-type movements in the US and Europe, there has been a marked and often deliberate display of distrust in organisations, particularly structured ones such as the party (Sitrin/Azzellini 2014; Taylor et al. 2011; Clover 2016; Dean 2012, 2016). Anarchist opposition to all forms of organisations and organised processes has reappeared, particularly among the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Indignados in Spain, the street protesters in Greece and the Horizontalidad in Argentina (Sitrin/Azzellini 2014; Dean 2016). Mobilisations have become carnivals of the faceless multitude, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Hardt/Negri 2005) said. Without delving too far into whether movemental mobilisations are indeed carnivalesque in nature, we can say that today’s mobilising does have something of an “evental” and casual character (Dean 2016; Jameson 2015; Jay 2016), which is quite disturbing. Distrust in organisation is not just a historical response to the tyranny of the representational and the repressive history of party-states, it also masks a deeper absence of oppositionality. This has also been termed post-ideological and post-modern (Petras/Veltmeyer 2005; Dean 2016). The oppositional core of anti-capital seems to be holding from one movement to the next, but for how long? Movements that eschew organisational processes altogether are likely to fail in their primary task of organising the social opposition to enable it to continue beyond events. Furthermore, they tend to either become more representational than parties through their charismatic leaders (the rise of Evo Morales from Bolivia’s Aymara movement is a case in point: see Zibechi 2010, 2014) or be co-optated by big NGOs and the state (Petras/Veltmeyer 2005; Zibechi 2010).

Framing the politics of organising and organisation today

As happened in the international working-class movement in the second half of the 19thcentury and the beginning of the 20th century, organisingorganisation has become one of the most crucial political questions. While we cannot prescribe an ideal form of organising that will become the new norm, we can and must discuss the possibilities strand by strand and context by context.

It is clear that the fallacies of organising and organisation will not sort themselves out overnight: each new process of organising might inexorably result in a new organisation with new leaders and a fresh hierarchy. Movements-as-organisations, whether party or not, will be more vulnerable to co-optation by the state, as is borne out by many recent experiences from across the world: India, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Greece and, probably, Spain. Inversely, organisations and even states have been known to initiate and foster movements by organising from below: examples include the Zapatista agricultural communes in Chiapas (Hesketh 2013; Oikonomakis 2016, 2019; Khasnabish 2010; Gahman 2016); the Rojava communes in Kurd-occupied Syria, which were inspired by the writings of social ecologist Murray Bookchin (Dirik 2016; Leverink 2015); and the “communal” Chavista state of Venezuela(Mills 2015; Foster 2015; Ciccariello-Maher 2016a, 2016b). Outside the orbits of structured organisations and any form of institutionalisation, movements have been known to remain as purely organising processes, both fluid and temporal (Zibechi 2010). The 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, the Indignados in Spain, and the Nuit Debout movement and gilets jaunes in France all rejected verticality of organisation, though the latter showed signs of more intense organising in the form of regular general assemblies (Sitrin 2016; Gerbaudo 2016; Sourice 2016; Kouvelakis 2019; Goanec 2019). Movements can also overlap or even take the form of riots (Badiou 2012; Clover 2016; Dean 2016).

The increasingly dominant role of the new digital media in street protests and the emergence of movements-as-spectacles form another key aspect of the organising/organisation discourse. Because the advent of the new media as an oppositional proposition raises serious questions about all previous notions of organising and disrupts the process of oppositional cognition, we need to address it separately.

The new media and social movements: emancipatory digitality or disruption of oppositional cognition?

Online networks have been hailed as potentially revolutionary (Dean 2013) and described as the revolutionary “common” where the gravediggers of capital congregate (Hardt 2010; Negri 2010). The scenario of angry and disgruntled people pouring onto the streets in response to online campaigns, “viral” Facebook/Twitter posts garnering millions of hits, and social media “events” is by now familiar (Tufekci 2017; Herrera 2014). If the events are colourful, well attended and violent, the mainstream media starts paying attention and new spectacles are born. But does this scenario, which segues from one spectacle to another, across geographies, politics and culture, raise new hopes for oppositionality? Events and spectacles are usually short-lived—once crowds shrink and the state steps in with its weaponry of repression, soft containment and co-optation, the media loses interest.

Hardt claims that capitalism is producing the common and that since the autonomy of the common is the essence of communism, the “conditions and weapons of a communist project” are now more available than ever (Hardt 2010). Both Hardt and Negri (Negri 2010) further posit that capitalist production nowadays has moved from industries to the “biopolitical” and that capital is now producing new forms of life. Hardt forgets that capital has always produced new forms of life by constantly revolutionising the means of production at its disposal as well as producing and reproducing its own social relations, and that in a fully capitalised world, commons cannot survive without being oppositional. In other words, the society of commons survives in spite of and in constant opposition to the State-Capital (Caffentzis/Federici 2014). Made-to-order revolutions are not real, for all their insurrectionary flash mobs and spectacular events. They generate images, collect millions of new social media users and boost corporate profit, but do not foster oppositionality. Facebook and Twitter revolutions are real only as instances of capitalist appropriation of the process of oppositional knowledge and/or as counter-revolutions brought into being by state agencies and their imperialist backers, such as the US State Department (Herrera 2014). A revolution as a new workspace for generating corporate profit is an impossible aberration: it cannot exist.

We must be wary of spectacles. Not all insurrections are oppositional: movements without revolutionary content either lapse into stasis, reinforce the status quo or devolve into simulacra, things that are not really there. Events and their impressive visuals represent such simulacra. The illusion of revolution displaces actual oppositional action; the real is taken over by the capitalist real, thus effectively pre-empting, or acting against, the potential revolutions that take shape more gradually.

Flashmob insurrections by themselves prove nothing. Each of them must be examined critically in order to identify the social meanings behind the images and words. Because, as the Soviet linguist Voloshinov pointed out, histories of class struggles lend meanings to words and images (Voloshinov 1973). Layers of mass-produced knowledge, along with lies and fictions, must be stripped away to get at the oppositional meanings.

Below, we analyse three contemporary movements in greater detail to better understand the reality of their oppositionality.

Movements as political continuities

Gilets jaunes: from movement-as-spectacle to Revolutionary Anarchy?

The gilets jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement in France shows how a present-day social movement defies easy categorisation. It apparently started, like many such movements in the recent past, with an online petition and a couple of viral Facebook posts denouncing the tax burden on motorists and calling for a mass blockade of the roads. Before long, the leaderless movement had evolved into a full-blown and often violent revolt against President Macron and his government. The issue at stake was no longer simply the price of fuel (Harding 2019).

The thing to note here is that although they carried out a succession of “Acts” (spectacular demonstrations)[i] and managed to retain a high profile as a spectacle for an astonishingly long time (at the time of writing, the movement is 12 months old), the gilets jaunes cannot simply be understood in terms of their signature yellow vests and the sequence of violent incidents they came to represent, at least in the eyes of the Western media. Beyond the spectacle, slow day-to-day organising went on in occupied roundabouts and neighbourhood assemblies throughout France, where the gilets jaunes debated the future of the movement and interacted with citizens who might not be gilets jaunes, but were nonetheless angry and sceptical about what the Macron government was doing (Kouvelakis 2019). Local neighbourhood assemblies fed into a bigger Assembly of Assemblies, where representatives from several hundred gilets jaunes groups debated, framed and issued political demands and statements. At the time of writing, three Assemblies of Assemblies have taken place, with the third one at Montceau-les-Mines being attended by650 delegates representing 250 local groups from all over France (Goanec 2019). As the movement progressed, it gradually acquired more political clarity. No longer a Facebook-driven group that lacked a clear political agenda and counted among its members anti-immigrant right-wing sympathisers (Harding 2019) and perhaps a multitude of angry protesters and rioters (Harding 2018; Fassin/Defossez 2019), it decided to challenge not only the state, but also capital:

We are putting into action new forms of direct democracy. […] The Assembly of Assemblies reaffirms its complete independence from all political parties, trade unions […] We are inviting all people who want to put an end to the appropriation of the living […]to assume a conflictual stance against the actual system […] aware that we have to fight a global system, we believe that we must get out of capitalism. (TheYellow Vests’ Call after the Second Assembly of Assemblies in Saint-Nazaire, 5-7 April 2019—emphasis added)[ii]

The second Assembly of Assemblies, from which this exhortation emanated, was relatively poorly attended (according to the preamble to the text, only 200 delegates were present, due perhaps to systematic repression by the Macron administration and also the government’s so-called participatory democracy exercise in form of the Great Debate; see Harding 2019) and the third Assembly of Assemblies had to revisit many of the points contained in the document. Despite heated debates, there emerged a consensus on “exiting capitalism” (Goanec 2019). Moreover, some of the participants referred to themselves as revolutionaries and there was a great degree of emphasis on practising a variant of libertarian municipalism originally theorised by Murray Bookchin, though engagement with the state had not been ruled out (Goanec 2019).

It appears that while the number of gilets jaunes in the street was dwindling, the movement was consciously trying to develop itself as a better-organised process with long-term political objectives. Though some organising is still done over social media, many organisers seem to prefer direct personal interaction to Facebook, which is seen as both a “site of manipulation ‘from below’ and state surveillance ‘from above’” (Kouvelakis2019). Organising is key in determining whether the gilets jaunes will survive state repression and the cycle of media indifference and attacks. No libertarian municipalism and no revolution without a disciplined, politically informed organisation, said Bookchin (Bookchin 2015), marking a clear departure from classical notions of libertarianism or communist anarchy. From the little we know of the gilets jaunes, the evident presence of many anarchist organisers in their midst could have one of two results: the movement may remain limited to local assemblies, shunning a more organised form; alternately, desperation may push it (if not the entire movement, then some parts) towards more violent street actions.

Would we call the gilets jaunes a revolutionary movement with the oppositional knowledge of its potency? It is difficult to predict how the movement, devoid ofany regular organisation, could function as a political continuity and whether its intensely oppositional character could be maintained for long in the face of repression. This issue merits further discussion.

Occupy Wall Street and Democratic Socialism

The experiences of the Occupy Wall Street(OWS) movement show that contemporary oppositional collective processes are often structurally and politically fluid. Participants and sympathisers have written extensively about the movement/events (Dean 2016; Sitrin/Azzellini 2014; Bray 2013; Chomsky 2012; Taylor et al. 2011) that took place in 2011 and we will not linger over them here. However, a few observations might be relevant. First of all, for many of the participants, Occupy was a call for a world revolution.[iii] Though the model of the “revolution” was “imported” from the Arab Spring Revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt(White 2016) and action was initiated through social media(White 2016), from its very outset OWS targeted the global rule of capital and the economic, social and political inequality inherent in it. “We are the 99 percent” was an anti-capital slogan that directly targeted class rule (Dean 2016; Sitrin/Azzellini 2014), and the young and not-so-young people who took part in the Occupy movement in New York and elsewhere shared the common conviction that capital’s rule had to be challenged (Sitrin/Azzellini 2014; Taylor et al. 2011). OWS also re-emphasised that not only were anarchists, rather than the traditional left, emerging as the dominant voice of the left in the new movements of the 21stcentury — from the neighbourhood councils and factory takeovers in Argentina to the popular assemblies in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and the anti-austerity movements in Greece and Spain — but also that the anarchist idea of direct neighbourhood democracy and horizontalism was the preferred organisational form in each case(Sitrin/Azzellini 2014).

Given this context of anarchist un-organisationality, is it not somewhat surprising that a large majority of the active occupiers gravitated towards the party form in their future organising, and that they primarily came out in support of self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders? Going by what some of the organisers of the newly launched party Democratic Socialists of America(DSA) are currently thinking (a collection of insider takes on the resurgence of leftist politics in contemporary America appeared in New Left Review; see Gong 2019; Mason 2019; Alcázar 2019; Sallai 2019; Moya 2019), it seems that either the anarchist strand within OWS has knowingly decided to embrace Marxism or the non-anarchist left was always present within the movement. Though there are many disagreements over supporting the mainstream Democratic Party and taking part in electoral politics, it appears that all the DSA organisers believe there is a need for more intense organising in the future, including unionisation and even methodical recruitment of potential organisers. There is much talk about class, class struggle and working-class organisation: “[w]e should be an organization of the working class”, argues Arielle Sallai, a DSA organiser. She says there is a lot of talk inside DSA about whether “the group itself can organize the working class towards revolution” and thinks that “DSA can and should be a revolutionary organization” which needs a “deliberate process of base building, something which is “about politics” as well as “structure”. In a similar vein, René Christian Moya, another DSA organiser, remarks that the fate of DSA depends on its willingness “to struggle with the working class” and that “the prospects of organized labour are vital to our chances of building hegemony around socialist demands”. Moya says further that “it is a task of the organized left, in DSA and beyond, to work towards the construction of sites of power independent of the political system, and of the existing infrastructure of progressivism—including the unions. He calls for “direct and intentional engagement with worker and community struggles”, which is “arduous, time-consuming work” (emphasis added).

Though the DSA is “a collection of fairly autonomous chapters spread across much of the United States, with wildly different leadership structures and priorities”, this does not prevent its members from asking political questions about the “form or mode of politics [that] is best suited to develop and equip the working class with the power it needs to challenge the rule of capital”. It seems that at least some of its members view the DSA as a working-class party of the future, a party whose members keep on debating about horizontality and centrality, but feel the urgent necessity of involving new people in extra-parliamentary politics through the party, while ensuring the party itself does not simply become a “move-on.org for the Twitter generation”.

In the gilets jaunes, we saw a typical street protest, a movement-as-spectacle striving to reinvent itself as a more consistent political formation of anarchists that opposes capital and state and tentatively supports libertarian municipalism. In Occupy-DSA, we find another political continuity where a predominantly anarchist movement-as-spectacle with an anti-capital political worldview is slowly morphing into what its members see as a revolutionary working-class party of the future. Our known repertoire of movement categories and oppositional politics is constantly being unmade and remade by actual movement processes that embody the historical and subjective processes of oppositional cognition. A brief look at the political-organisational history of the Zapatista movement lends weight to this statement.

Zapatismo: oppositional politics of listening

There is a growing body of literature on the Zapatistas; consequently, we need not dwell on the chronology or narratives of the succession of events and silences-without-events that raised new hopes for oppositional politics not only in Mexico and Latin America, but worldwide. Instead, let us turn our attention to how Zapatismo, as a form of oppositional politics, has evolved over the years, both historically and philosophically. This is important because the Zapatistas seem reticent about tracing the history of their movement beyond the 1994 insurrection in Chiapas. Subcommander Marcos-Galeano[iv], the main spokesperson of the movement, likes to talk about how a “small group of urbanites” that originally arrived in the Mexican jungles to start an armed insurrection in the time-honoured Latin American tradition of Guerrilla Foco stopped in their tracks, ceased talking and started listening to the “other” —here, the indigenous people of Chiapas. “Something happened that saved us. Saved us and defeated us in those first years”, says Marcos, going on to explain how from “a movement that proposed putting the masses at its service, making use of proletarians”, peasants and others “to take power”, the Zapatistas were “turning into an army that ‘serves’ the indigenous communities.[v]

This “turning into an army that had to serve” instead of “putting the masses at its service” signals not only a renunciation of the Guerrilla Foco, but also a total epistemological reversal of the theory of revolutionary vanguardism that gained currency since the 1917 Russian Revolution and became somewhat synonymous with the left, especially the more orthodox kind of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist practice. Marcos elucidates further:

...our entire previous proposal, and the orthodox Left’s previous proposal up to then, was the opposite, it was: from above things are solved for below [...] this below-for-above change meant not organizing ourselves [...or...] other people to go vote, nor to go to a march […] to shout [...] but to survive and turn resistance into a school (emphasis added).

Zapatismo, born out of turning resistance into a school, transforms the entire process of oppositional learning and knowledge-making into a site for practising a new kind of revolutionary pedagogy, where the teachers themselves are taught. The actual process on the ground, however, followed a different path. The first indigenous members of the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation) were recruited way back in 1978-80 by the “urbanite” guerrillas who had succeeded in setting up a safe house in San Cristóbal de las Casas with the help of the indigenous people (Oikonomakis 2019). The EZLN safe houses were also schools where young indigenous recruits were taught how to read and write as well as being educated in Marxism, other typical subjects, weapon use and survival skills (Cedillo 2010; DeLa Grange/Rico 1999, quoted in Oikomomakis 2019). Once their training was complete, the students would return to their villages to become “instructors” for the next batch of newly recruited students. The EZLN still uses the same system of self-instruction in its own autonomous territories (Oikonomakis 2019). Looking at the history of the EZLN and the Zapatista revolution, we wonder how much of the new oppositional knowledge of “commanding by obeying” can be traced back to older, orthodox forms of leftist pedagogy and organising, whereby students had to be recruited and taught to prepare them for roles as militants/soldiers of the impending revolution. Though the Lacandon jungle in Mexico has witnessed many revolts, uprisings and organised denials of the Mexican state(Oikonomakis 2019; Khasnabish 2010), it cannot be considered a pre-determined, historical given that Zapatismo, with its essential philosophical otherness based on a process of learning to listen, obey and serve(Dussel 1998, quoted in Paradiso-Michau 2008), would have evolved as it did without the long and heroic efforts of the members of the hierarchical and vanguardist Marxist-Leninist party Fuerzas de Liberación  Nacional(FLN, Forces of National Liberation). The Zapatistas and the EZLN no longer talk about their FLN past (apart from remembering the martyrs), but it is a fact that the EZLN was first conceived as the rural wing of FLN in 1980(FLN 2003, quoted in Oikonomakis 2019). FLN, most likely an offshoot of a still-earlier revolutionary process called Ejército Insurgente Mexicano (EIM, Mexican Insurgent Army), was formed in 1969, and its attempts to penetrate the Lacandon jungle probably began in 1972. When, in 1993, the indigenous leaders in the Comité Clandestino Revolucionario Indígena (CCRI, Indigenous Clandestine Revolutionary Committee) and the EZLN had already decided to go to war, FLN’s leadership had to be persuaded of the desirability of the proposed course of action (Cedillo 2010; DeLa Grange/Rico 1999, quoted in Oikonomakis 2019). After a discussion that continued for several days, it was decided that from then onwards, the CCRI — in other words the EZLN’s indigenous leaders —and not the “politico-military organisation” of FLN would assume leadership of the Zapatista revolution (Le Bot/Marcos 1997, quoted in Oikonomakis 2019).

The above account proves that in the terrain of oppositional politics, neither organisational forms nor “political beliefs” are static and nothing is sacrosanct besides oppositionality. This is because both the organisational form of a movement and the convictions of its militants respond to the movement’s actuality: they have to remain fluid; otherwise, no revolutionary praxis is possible. Fluidity ensures that the learnt is constantly unlearnt and re-learnt: ideas appear, disappear and reappear. The vanguardist hierarchy of a Marxist-Leninist party can take an informed decision to dissolve itself in a from-the-below indigenous-led revolution that aims not to seize state power but to establish autonomous municipalities and territories in opposition to the capitalist nation-state and its from-the-above “geographies” (Marcos 2018). Once again, the Zapatista call for autonomy and horizontality does not stem from any anarchist concept relying on spontaneity rather than organisation. Instead, it is backed up and put into practice by a well-structured organisational network and a revolutionary army that came into being through the arduous work of generations of political workers belonging to a traditional leftist party. It is surely not a coincidence that the municipalist revolution in Rojava by the stateless Kurds, led predominantly by women, was also initiated by what was originally an orthodox Marxist-Leninist formation and is also supported by an armed militia. It is doubtful how long the autonomous cantons at Rojava and the Zapatistas’ territories could survive systematic military aggression by the capitalist nation-states that surround them were full-blown conflicts to break out, but that is a different question altogether. Besides, it is possible that all processes of oppositional politics have to face similar challenges, because the state can respond in devious ways. The art of engaging, dealing with and resisting the state forms part of the oppositional knowledge that makes revolutionary praxis possible. Movements and their militants do not acquire this knowledge through mere participation in organisations, events and un-organisational horizontality. Rather, the knowledge is born of, and is part of, the political continuities formed by the past, present and future in equal proportions: the past because revolutionary processes and ideas from the past, more than the historical evolution of production systems, inform all present oppositional processes; the present because that is where praxis unfolds, erupts and create ruptures; and the future because the emancipation of the working class and the human species, e.g. communism, is part of that future. All social movements with a political dimension must consciously and collectively situate —as well as discover — themselves in those continuities.

Conclusion: understanding and deepening oppositionality

To situate and discover themselves within fluid political continuities, movements must internationalise opposition. Without internationalisation, the horizontal grassroots of the local and the autonomy they profess to represent would probably shrivel in double quick time. Revolutions would appear and disappear, insurrections would be suppressed or co-optated, riots would succeed riots, and yet the immanence would remain unrealised: the perennial spring of freedom would never be ours.

When we talk about internationalising, we do not mean building a new revolutionary International. Internationalisation, as we see it, would require each association, assembly, union, organisation or party to acquire collective criticality. That is, each movement practice must learn to see beyond the hegemony of the capitalist real and revisit its theories, strategies and actions with relentless criticality, which cannot be compromised for the sake of organisational and other compulsions, such as state repression and the necessity of “positive” engagements with the state. Suspending criticality might help in immediate mobilising, but seriously harm the collective’s cognitive ability to grasp the oppositional not only within the society but also within the apparently autonomous spaces created by the movement collectives. As long as movement collectives are forced to exist in spatially and organisationally separate enclaves within a dominant capitalist real, any victories can only be ephemeral.

The movements of perpetual oppositionality have to transcend themselves. This transcendence is both social and political: social because the movements remake the social relations of power firstly by remaining alive and secondly through conscious oppositionality; political because the process is neither conceivable nor actualised without constant analysis, critique and confrontation of the state. Thus the transition from the particularity of an insurrection to the philosophy of a revolution, from the tumultuous moment of the evental to the eternity of the revolutionary horizon and the reclaiming of the individual, “free-active” subject: movements that organise for the present and not a future that is and isn’t part of that present fail to posit emancipatory politics. Since the working class constitutes itself as an oppositional force only through its collective political will to oppose (Gramsci 2001, quoted in Galastri 2018; Galastri 2018; Thompson 2013), whosoever revolts against the State-Capital tyranny and fights for a non-state, non-capital world is part of the proletariat (Balibar 1977, 1994). And only the proletariat can keep the rebellion going (Marx/Engels 1976; Dean 2016).

All movements and movement organisations, if they are oppositional, are part of greater political continuities that transcend space-time. We can even re-imagine a new kind of party that acts purely as a facilitator, an organiser entity, that senses the immanence but does not usurp its vanguardist agency as a higher body (Beaudet 2016; Dean 2012). It remains true to the idea of communism and communist revolution, but does not lead it by commanding. Conversely, it learns to command by obeying, as the Zapatistas do. Like the Chinese Communist Party in the pre-revolutionary China, it practises a mass line and learns from the mass, which it helps to come into being by spatially and politically linking various strands of non-state oppositionality, insurrectionary and otherwise (Hui 2016a, 2016b), existing within the capitalist real. It ensures that the oppositional knowledge of the non-state, non-capital informs the movements that unfold and erupt within the present enclosed by the State-Capital; even if the insurrections end not in a bang but pathetic whimper of social democracy, it sees the rupture latent in the event and champions the transcendence that is no longer visible. Anything is possible as long as oppositionality does not die.

Soumitra Ghosh, a social activist and independent researcher, has been working with forest communities in sub-Himalayan West Bengal in India for several decades. He has written extensively on issues related to the politics of struggles for forest Commons as well as climate justice and climate change, particularly its political economy.



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Endnotes

[i]The gilets jaunes staged their 49th Act on 22 October 2019, roughly two weeks before the movement’s first anniversary. See https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/Giletss-jaunes-Acte-49-protest-marches-honour-France-s-striking-firefighters

[ii]https://resistance71.wordpress.com/2019/04/10/english-translation-of-the-yellow-vests-call-after-the-second-assembly-of-assemblies-in-st-nazaire-april-5-7-2019/

[iii]See the homepage of Occupy: http://occupywallst.org/.

[iv] In a Zapatista programme in 2014, Marcos died as Marcos and was reborn as Galeano, another of the martyrs of the revolution. See Nick Henck(2018): Introduction to The  Zapatistas’ Dignified Rage.

[v]Subcommander Marcos’s Words for the National and International Caravan for Observation and Solidarity with Zapatista Communities, La GarruchaCaracol, 2 August 2008. Emphasis added)

Categories
Voices from the ground

Ecofeminism and a ‘Just Transition’

This interview follows a 2020 workshop on approaches to a ‘just transition’, held at the Institute for Global Development (IGD), University of New South Wales, Australia. Somali Cerise, IGD Research to Practice Associate asks Ariel Salleh to share ecofeminist ideas on redefining the relationship between humans and the environment and what a different system of power and economic relationships might look like[1].

IGD: At our workshop on Gender and Just Transitions you emphasised that a just transition requires fundamentally rethinking the relationship between human beings and nature. This means we stop seeing the environment as there simply to serve human interests, and instead, view humans as just one part of the ecosystem. Can you elaborate on why we must move from the West’s anthropocentric dualism of ‘Humanity over Nature’ to achieve a gender just transition?

AS: A broad public understanding that the global economy is ‘anthropocentric’ is critical to the survival of Life on Earth. Crises like climate change, biodiversity loss, and the 2020 pandemic, are each outcome of the dominant Eurocentric imaginary that positions Humanity over Nature. This dualist H/N assumption, derived from ancient Abrahamic religious cultures, was secularised by the European Enlightenment and scientific revolution. Modern science shifted from seeing nature as a living organism to a view of nature as a ‘machine’ that could be designed and improved by men. The dualist logic of Humanity over Nature also implied Subject over Object, Mental over Manual, Production over Reproduction, Man over Woman, White over Black. This life-alienated patriarchal ideology is closely tied into Eurocentric masculinist identities and indispensable to capitalism. It is not only women who are conventionally treated as ‘closer to nature than men’, but indigenous peoples, and children. This subconscious hierarchy of capability, entitlement, and power infuse everyday talk and political decision-making.

Most governments and multilateral agencies are now taking the global environment crisis seriously – the Anthropocene conversation is a marker of that. Yet the very term Anthropocene is part of the problem since like the mainstream international discourse, it too is anthropocentric. Academic disciplines say economics or Western legal constructs, are premised on the super-ordination of Humanity over Nature. But the anthropocentric lens blurs the fact that the choices, decisions, and actions of subjected populations – most women and colonised peoples around the world – have not been responsible for damaging the planetary system.

As an empirical fact, all humans are Nature; simply ‘nature-in-embodied form’. People involved in the labour of nurturing young bodies or growing their own food, know this very well. So it was, that 5 decades ago, women opposing polluted urban neighbourhoods in the global North or local deforestation in the global South, came to recognise the destructive arrogance of the dualist logic and its instrumental rationality. Working with natural processes means facilitating living metabolic transfers, so discovering complex skills and the need for a precautionary ethic[2]. From this vantage point, social and ecological crises clearly reflect competitive attitudes, embedded in the sex-gendered political economy of international institutions.

The politics and theoretical literature of Ecological Feminism developed from this insight. Ecofeminists also noted how in capitalist patriarchal societies, the resourcing and commodification of nature, occurred in parallel to the resourcing and commodification of their own generative reproductive bodies. The latter exploitation can be seen today in the existence of two parallel paradigms Public over Private: an individualistic monetised economy (ME), and a non-monetised relational economy (WE). The domestic WE economy materially maintains the ME economy but is generally treated as a ‘natural’ activity.

IGD: What does ecofeminism propose as an alternative to the dualism of ‘Humanity over Nature’? What would be some positive examples that we can learn from?

AS: Ecofeminist activism for Life on Earth responds to the interconnected injustices of neoliberalism, militarism, corporate capture of science, worker alienation, reproductive technologies, sex tourism, child molestation, neo-colonialism, extractivism, nuclear weapons, land and water grabs, deforestation, animal cruelty, genetic engineering, climate change, and the Eurocentric mythology of progress.

At its deepest level, ecofeminist thinking is an alternative epistemology, a way of knowing quite distinct from the capitalist patriarchal manipulation of people and nature.

Yet it would be masculinist ideological nonsense to attribute women’s political insights to some inborn ‘feminine essence’. The source of ecofeminist judgments is neither biological embodiment nor cultural mores, although these will influence what is perceived. Rather, the source of an ecofeminist epistemology is labour, as people discover understandings and skills through intentional interactions with the material world. People like care givers, farmers, gatherers, are in touch with all their sensory capacities, so able to construct accurate and resonant models of how one-thing-joins-to- another.

Most women as caregivers have been historically positioned as labour right at the ontological margin where so-called Humanity and Nature meet. Unlike factory or clerical workers, culturally diverse groupings of women oversee biological flows and sustain matter/energy exchanges in nature. In fact, the entire thermodynamic base of capitalism rests on material transactions mediated by the labour of this unspoken ‘meta-industrial class’. Day by day, the global economic system is accruing a vast unacknowledged debt to these workers. In recent decades, women caregivers in the global North and colonised communities in the South have come together in a political ‘movement of movements’ charged by the knowledge that emancipation and sustainability are interlocking goals. The unique rationality of their meta-industrial labour is a capacity for economic provisioning without externalities – that is to say, without passing on a social debt to others or forcing natural processes into degradation and entropy.

– In Ecuador, women of Accion Ecologica www.accionecologica.org invented a concept of ‘ecological debt’ to describe the 500-year colonial theft of natural resources from their land; the ongoing modern theft of World Bank interest on development loans.

– In the USA, Code Pink activists work tirelessly for world peace; others focus on ending cruelty to animals.

– In Africa, women whose livelihoods are threatened by mining near their village homes have established WoMin www.womin.org.za a continental anti-extractivist network with its own ecofeminist manifesto on climate change presented to COP25 in Paris.

– In China, village women are refusing to use industrial fertilisers and pesticides, choosing to restore soil fertility by reviving centuries-old organic technologies, then modelling communal food sovereignty.

– In India, the Navdanya www.navdanya.org network organises schools for eco- sufficiency and ‘banks’ traditional seeds to save them from bio-piracy and corporate patenting by Big Pharma.

– In Australia, suburban housewives known as MADGE actively oppose genetically engineered foods.

– In France, young women and men are pioneering economic degrowth and rebuilding vibrant communities around permaculture.

IGD: What are the roles of different actors, for example, governments and social movements, in achieving this shift?

AS: At Rio+20 the business sector, politicians, World Bank, and UNEP stepped up with a Green New Deal proposition. This was later exposed as a public relations exercise for an emerging nanotech-based bio-economy. The capitalist patriarchal method of protecting Nature is to commodify ‘ecosystem services’, subsuming the living metabolic flows of forests, sunlight, or ground bacteria, under a pricing mechanism. Similarly, the International Monetary Fund and others advance a Green Economy built on free-market ideology. But intellectually, decision making by world leaders relies on a thoroughly confusing vocabulary of ‘financial capital’, ‘human capital’, ‘natural capital’, and ‘physical capital’.

Many well-meaning citizens in both global North and South believe technology transfer and digitisation is necessary to achieve ‘a just transition’ to sustainability. The preferred and tacitly masculinist response to the crises of globalisation is innovation. It is claimed that new technological efficiencies can de-materialise the number of resources used by industry. However, automated production does not avoid displacing self-sufficient rural communities for mineral extraction, nor does it avoid heavy energy drawdowns for manufacture. The said engineering ‘optimisation’ of material throughput rarely factors in all the relevant operational aspects of mining, smelting, manufacture, communications, transport, and waste disposal. When fully researched, ‘ecological modernist’ expectations of progress do not hold up.

UN agencies operating under the Eurocentric liberal political discourse tacitly sanitise environmental, decolonial, or sex-gender matters by departmentalising them as separate ‘single issues’. This piecemeal problem-solving policy inadvertently disguises existing, often intersectional, power relations because it stops people ‘joining the dots’. For sure, microloans are offered to poor Bangladeshi women, but this is hardly liberating. If thinkers at the UN are guided by liberalism, and people are processed through an anthropocentric divide and rule as ‘stakeholders’, progress towards ‘a gender just transition’ will be very slow. To paraphrase veteran Caribbean feminist Peggy Antrobus as she contrasted the Women’s Beijing Plan of Action with the UN Millennium Development Goals: MDGs = Most Distracting Gimmicks[3]!

IGD: What would a different system of power and economic relationships look like?

AS: The global economy already overshoots planetary capacities by 50% every year and the UN Sustainable Development Goals do not remedy that. Additionally, it is estimated by an anthropologist at the London School of Economics that it will take 207 years to eliminate poverty using the SDGs[4]. Again, the World Bank and UN SDGs promote privatised management of water supply. But since markets can only increase the value of a commodity by making it scarce, this method of water protection is a contradiction in terms. Similarly, environmental solutions like carbon trading, geo-engineering or climate-smart agriculture will not restore nature’s life-support systems once these are broken.

For the small producers, landless rural women, indigenes, youth, and farmworkers of the international peasant union Via Campesina, the Green Economy is just another structural adjustment program realigning national markets.

In response to imposts such as these, a global ‘movement of movements’ began to form after the 1999 Battle for Seattle against the World Trade Organization. This broad people’s alliance held its first World Social Forum in 2001 – and two decades later, WSF now remodelling itself, still believes Another Future is Possible! On the streets of Davos outside the World Economic Forum and at UN COP negotiations, activists are pursuing a tapestry of alternatives based on political subsidiarity and eco-sufficient bioregional commoning.

More recently, academics have met in Barcelona, Leipzig, and Budapest to discuss degrowth. The Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung is also working on Socio-Ecological Transformation. Yet in both North and South, among elites and movement cadres alike, there is a need for ‘capacity building’ to include sex-gender consciousness-raising.  It is time to hear women’s critique of the anthropocentric imaginary and its anti-Nature institutions. Ecofeminists are well qualified here since they are not ambitious for an equal piece of the toxic pie. Earlier feminisms, liberal and socialist, had anthropocentric framing, whereas ecofeminism, born in the environmental struggle was oriented to oikos from the start. As such, it was immediately transnational, cross-cultural, and decolonial in focus. The ecofeminist subsistence model complements and deepens European moves towards degrowth, South America’s buen vivir, India’s swaraj communities, the South African ethic of ubuntu, Oceania’s Kastom Ekonomi, and the goals of Via Campesina[5].

A deep sociological divide exists between the anthropocentric culture of business, governments, multilateral agencies, and transnational technocrats versus those whose livelihoods are destroyed by industrialising development models, inconsistent climate policy, militarised resource grabs; and closer to home, by domestic violence. If Life on Earth has a future, it inheres in disarmament and degrowth – a regenerative ethic.


[1] An early version of ‘A Regenerative Ethic for a Gender Just Transition’, Institute for Global Development Magazine, 28 January 2021 <https://www.igd.unsw.edu.au/ourinitiatives/equity- social-justice/gender-and-just-transitions>. Ariel Salleh is a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Humanities, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa, a former Senior Fellow in Post-Growth Societies, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany and Honorary Associate Professor in Political Economy, University of Sydney. She taught in Social Ecology at the University of Western Sydney for several years; and has lectured widely, including New York, Toronto, and Beijing. A long-time activist, she co-founded the Movement Against Uranium Mining; The Greens (reg. party); served on the Federal Government’s Gene Technology Ethics Committee, and was a governor of the International Sociological Association Research Committee for Environment & Society. She writes in the field of political ecology, extending the remit of political economy by focusing on the role of reproductive or meta-industrial labour in sustaining relations between humans and nature. She has three books – Ecofeminism as Politics; the anthology Eco Sufficiency and Global Justice; and Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary edited with Kothari et al. as well as some 200 chapters and articles. Her work can be found at www.arielsalleh.info.

[2] Ariel Salleh, ‘Ecofeminism’ in Clive Spash (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Ecological Economics. Oxford & New York: Routledge, 2017, pp. 48-56.

[3] Gigi Francisco and Peggy Antrobus, ‘Mainstreaming Trade and Development Goals’ in Ariel Salleh

(ed.), Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology. London: Pluto Press,

2009, pp. 157-164.

[4] Jason Hickel, ‘The problem with saving the world’, Jacobin Magazine, 8 August 2015.

[5] Ashish Kothari, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria, Alberto Acosta (eds.), Pluriverse: A Post-Development  Dictionary. New York: Columbia University Press & New Delhi: Tulika/AuthordsUpFront, 2019.

Categories
Voices from the ground

Ecuador: A victory against mining, and a dispute around meaningful policies of the left

by Miriam Lang

On Sunday 7 February 2021, not only presidential elections took place in Ecuador. Cuenca, the third-largest city in the South American country, voted against a series of mega-mining projects in the headwaters of five rivers that supply the urban area with water. In the area, which is directly adjacent to a national park that has been declared a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO, there are over 4,000 large and small bodies of water in the sensitive Páramo ecosystem, which acts as a reservoir in the Andes. Nevertheless, corporations from Canada, Australia, Peru, Chile, etc. had already been granted a total of 43 concessions for the mining of various metals. Fourteen grassroots organizations had launched the referendum, approved by the Constitutional Court in September 2020, via the Cuenca City Council. On Sunday, over 80% of the electorate voted in favor of a ban for industrial mining in this part of the Andean highlands. A clear democratic mandate in line with the 2008 constitution, which stipulates the rights of nature.


Since the result of the referendum is legally binding under the constitution, the next president will have to implement it. Many of the 16 presidential candidates had clearly opted for an expansion of mining in the election campaign in order to lead the country out of the economic crisis. Only one of them has spoken out clearly against mining and an expansion of the oil frontier in the Amazon region: Yaku Perez Guartambel, the candidate of the indigenous movement and its political organization Pachakutik.
The presidential election will not be finally decided until a final ballot on April 11th. The political heir to ex-president Rafael Correa, Andrés Arauz, who received 32.2% of the votes in the first round, will certainly take part in April. But who will be his opponent is still fought over: after 99,31 % of the votes had been counted, Perez Guartambel (20,10%) was just ahead of the neoliberal banker Guillermo Lasso (19,50%) with 0,6 % of the votes – a tight scenario which still can bring surprises.

Yaku Perez Guartambel. Source: Wikipedia

For the first time in the country’s history, an indigenous candidate who comes from grassroots organizations has a chance of winning the election. This is already an enormous symbolic success for the indigenous movement of Ecuador, which last made headlines in October 2019 with an uprising against the liberalization of gasoline and diesel prices and the current Moreno government’s neoliberal policies. If Perez actually makes it to the final ballot, the election campaign will confront two different interpretations of what is defined as left in Latin America: one, a populist and authoritarian left in the wake of Rafael Correa who was in power from 2007 to 2017 and relied on an expansion of extractivism to finance infrastructure modernization and social programs. These programs promised more equality, but at the price of the destruction of nature and a de facto restriction of democratic rights. And two, an intercultural, plural, and ecological left that primarily appeals to the younger generations, puts issues such as climate change and the preservation of the rainforests at the forefront and refers to the great indigenous movement of the 90s and their communitarian form of politics. In this sense, the surge of Perez, ex-prefect of Cuenca, brings a breath of fresh air into the stale polarization between the old progressive left (represented by Arauz) and the most reactionary right (represented by Lasso) in a region in much need of political innovation.


But a broad international defamation campaign against Yaku Perez has started right away on election night, using media and international structures installed in previous years around the vision of a ‘socialism of the 21st century’. Especially Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador hat officially proclaimed to engage in a renewed socialist path during progressive governments in the first one and a half decades of the 21st century. This new variant of socialism, unfortunately, showed to have inherited some of the less desirable features of the 20th-century socialism, like a top-down and a rather authoritarian approach to transformation with a central role for the governing party, a centralization of state power overriding necessary checks and balances, and intolerance toward dissent which was often criminalized and judicially persecuted. This led to a climate of polarization which suffocated all the transformative energy which had grown in organized society during the plural anti-neoliberal struggles of the 90s and early 2000s and allowed for a silent return to free trade agreements and elite-friendly economic politics. Especially the expansion of extractivist and mega-project oriented modernization politics met increasing resistance from indigenous and peasant organizations, as well as affected communities. But also students, workers, and feminist organizations opposed them for manifold reasons. As some Ecuadorian organizations of this other, plural left express it in a recent open letter:


“The left is not a subject, a party, a movement, a government; It is a permanent human mobilization that reinvents and transforms society in search of the defense of life, affirming and expanding human dignity, justice and freedom without attacking other species and damaging the planet. (…) Ecuadorian progressivism was left when back in 2006, it expressed a social mobilization that sought to build a destiny different from that marked by the patriarchal and colonial capitalism prevailing in Ecuador and Latin America. However, at the moment that, contrary to expressing this social mobilization, it sabotaged it, suffocated it, persecuted it, silenced it, it ceased to be left. When the left is conservative, it ceases to be mobilization and social desire and becomes a party (Alianza País) with an ideological letterhead (Citizen Revolution) and a caudillo (Rafael Correa) that contains and destroys resistance and social mobilization, and stops history in its reinvention of more pleasant human worlds.”

Andean Highlands around Cuenca. Source: Wikipedia

Lately, former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, correista presidential candidate Andres Arauz and former Bolivian vice-president Alvaro García Linera played a role in the creation of a Progressive International, a plural global coordination space thriving toward systemic transformation, which unfortunately has taken sides in the ongoing harsh dispute about the definition of what is left in Latin America. Now, adding a new chapter to this same dispute on all sort of platforms, a wide range of arguments is deployed against Yaku Perez describing him as a coup-supporting, CIA-backed, imperialistic, oligarchic, and right-wing ecofascist or, alternatively, a greenwasher, if they do not dive into plainly racist arguments to delegitimize him. The campaign clearly triggers all the classical topoi which had helped the traditional left to construct a black and white, simplistic worldview during the Cold War. This strategy of aggressive polarization not only makes it impossible to engage seriously with Perez’s proposals for a future government, leaving Arauz with the monopoly of being “the leftist candidate” for the second electoral round by all means. It also avoids any critical engagement with or learning from the failure of progressive politics during its hegemony in recent Latin American history. But most importantly, it distracts from the really important themes that are at stake today, regarding new political strategies to face a multidimensional crisis (which includes political representation and liberal electoral democracy). It curtails any impulse to collectively co-create new societies in an open political space that allows trial and error and plural deliberation. The sterile you-are-either-with-me-or-against-me rhetoric closes the political space of creativity and spreads fear instead. It totally avoids engaging in a profound discussion about what meaningful leftist politics means today. The future we need will not be built on one candidate, anyway, regardless of his or her political orientation, but in a fertile interaction between strong social organizations and governments who learn to listen to their bases. In this sense, the open letter from Ecuador states:

The vote for Yaku Perez and the result of the Cuenca referendum shows that a significant share of Ecuadorian society shares these concerns. A new politics of the left both in Ecuador and Latin America must reconnect with the social effervescence of the 90s and early 2000s. It cannot be based on a triumphalist return of Socialism of the 21st Century but must acknowledge and learn from what has gone wrong during these years – a necessary auto-critical discussion that could also inspire many other transformative processes in the world. It must refocus on the rights of nature, which the policies of this ‘conservative progressive’ left have undermined when they were in government. Ecuador is one of the countries with the greatest biodiversity in the world. In times of massive species extinction, an economic policy course that relies on more mining and oil production could have incalculable consequences far beyond the small country. The pandemic has led to an expansion and acceleration of nature-destroying activities in a legal gray area throughout Latin America, as environmental controls have been largely suspended. At the same time, Covid-19 has made it very clear that the advance of capitalist overexploitation into fragile ecosystems harbors great dangers for humanity. In Cuenca, an entire urban population, and not just a rural community directly affected, has spoken out against mining. This popular decision paves the way to finally discuss the urgently needed fundamental change in economic policy, which puts life-sustaining aspects such as food sovereignty and clean water above the imperatives of the world market.

Miriam Lang is a Professor of Environmental and Sustainability Studies at the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar, Quito

Categories
Voices from the ground

Covid in India : A Humanitarian Crisis, A Planned Disaster

by Madhuresh Kumar

India, a country with a population of 1.3 billion, has a terrible health infrastructure with an estimated 0.55 beds per 1,000 people in public hospitals and approximately 50,000 ventilator facilities. A global human development index rating of 129, the country has an infant mortality rate of 31 deaths per 1000 people and ranked 102 on the global hunger index despite having the most billionaires in the world. India is one of the most unequal countries in the world, ranking 122 in the global inequality index.

According to data released by the Ministry of Health and Family Affairs, as on 22 November 2020, the number of active Coronavirus cases is 4,40,962 and so far 85,21,617 people have been reported to have recovered from the disease. Overall, 1,33,227 deaths have been recorded so far in the hospitals, though many non-hospital deaths remain unrecorded. The government further claimed a recovery rate of 93.69 percent and a low fatality rate of 1.46 percent, taking credit for its effective handling of the crisis. These numbers have been challenged by health experts and non-government agencies largely due to non-reporting, faulty data collection mechanisms and an attempt at hiding the corona related deaths. For the first two months of the outbreak in India, the number of counted corona related deaths were extremely low because there were barely any testing facilities in the country, although today 1.2 million tests are done daily. The capacity has seen progressive rise from about 10,000 tests until 8 April, 1 million by 3 May; 5 million by 10 June; 10 million by 7 July; and now about 60.4 million tests, as per the government data. 

Government Response, Planned Chaos and Confusion 

With the prevention quarantine and lockdown measures in different parts of the world, India imposed strict lockdown measures on March 23rd, which was extended on April 14, May 3 and then on May 17. From June 1st the specifics of unlock and lockdown measures have been left to individual state governments. The lockdown measures completely failed to curb the spread of the virus. The unplanned manner in which it was imposed, with sheer brute force of police and security forces, that it resulted in massive violation of rights and numerous instances of police excesses. Added to this was the multiple notifications and rules, often contradicting each other causing confusion and chaos. As per reports, in first four months more than 4,000 instructions were issued by the Central and State governments. 

The whole country was put under severe lockdown at a short notice of 4 hours on March 24, causing massive difficulty to people, and millions stranded away from their place of residence or work. It also meant that a large section of the people living precariously on daily or very low monthly wages soon ran out of money and food and became desperate to return to their villages or towns. Leading to a massive humanitarian crisis and millions walking, cycling or hiding in storage or construction trucks in the peak of the summer heat, only to be met with hardship and police brutality on the way home, for being in violation of lockdown guidelines. Only after massive outrage and intervention in judicial courts, special shramik (workers) trains and buses were allowed to be run by the Central government. This was marred by a lack of information, amenities, water, basic health and sanitation and led to significant delays of trains, earning the tag of death traps. 

Hunger, Death, Unemployment 

As per the data compiled by Ministry of Labour and Employment and reported in the Parliament, more than 10.6 million migrant workers, including those who travelled on foot during the lockdown, returned to their home states. The Minister further added that 81,385 accidents occurred on the roads (including national highways) during the period March-June 2020 with 29,415 fatalities. This included the infamous incident of a speeding train mauling over 16 workers sleeping on the railway tracks, as they walked back to their homes. However, government also claimed that they had no data on loss of jobs, loss of deaths due to hunger and starvation of the migrant workers due to lockdown measures and ensuing unemployment. As on 4 July, as per a citizen tracker of a group of independent researchers, 971 non-virus deaths had occurred as against 7,135 Covid-19 related deaths.

India’s growth rate has been sliding for a while and lockdown due to the virus further exacerbated the crisis. The economic crisis has started unfolding with massive job losses in small, medium sector enterprises and big industries as well. The Consumer Pyramids Household Surveys carried out by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy show a sharp rise in unemployment rates in the range of 8.35% to 23.52% during April-August 2020. This was also reflected in the fact that  India’s GDP contracted by 23.9% on a yearly basis in the first quarter (April-June 2020) of the financial year ’21.

Source: https://pixabay.com/de/photos/corona-lockdown-patna-bihar-indien-5111911/

The virus has hit the poor and those with already a weaker immune system and pre-existing diseases the most. As new cases are emerging we are witnessing significant increase in infections amongst those engaged in anti-Covid operation, health care workers, police personnel, media, and health workers. One of the key reasons is lack of good number of the protective equipment and safety measures in place. Despite the mobilization of public and private health infrastructure, it is failing to meet the challenges, as a result the basic and regular healthcare is also affected.

Destroying Federalism, Dangerous Turn to Centralisation 

The  lockdown was announced by the central government without consulting with the federal states of India. Only after the crisis deepened, the Centre passed on the responsibility to the federal State governments, without providing adequate monetary resources, although the state’s revenue collection remains centralized. Although the federal states governments have pleaded the Centre for monetary support, not much has come through. As a result, State governments have resorted to relaxing the strict lockdown, leading to the further spread of the virus.    

An economic package of 2.7 billion USD announced by the government in May 2020, but was criticized by the opposition parties as farce, an exercise in economic jugglery and a play of numbers. Not every state government got their share from the Centre and even there BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) ruled states were treated favourably and opposition ruled states have suffered. 

In this time, BJP has also been active in toppling opposition governments in the federal state of Madhya Pradesh; creating defection within opposition ranks in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra; arresting political dissenters and specifically targeting rights activists, student leaders and Muslims engaged in protests around citizenship laws. They are kept in jail on terrorism charges, when the effort is to release prisoners for decongesting overcrowded jails. 

In addition, the Union government passed important legislation on issues related to agriculture and labour which has faced massive opposition from workers, farmers and opposition parties. These laws were passed bypassing pre-legislative processes, debates and discussions within the Parliament and without adequate presence of the legislators in the Parliament. 

Abdication of Responsibility by Judiciary and Media

The role of media and judiciary has come under extreme scrutiny from various sections of society and have faced criticism precisely because they have aided the government in their misdeeds. Judiciary failed to protect the rights of the citizens and stood on most occasions with the State arbitrariness and excesses rather than standing with the citizens in protecting their constitutional rights and holding the State accountable and remain independent. Even when they did stand up for providing relief and succour to the masses in important public interest litigation, it was already too late as the workers had already faced enough problems. 

Media, especially visual, which are to a large extent financed by the government, have not only led a complete disinformation campaign. But have also constantly deflected the debates from the real issues and shielded those responsible for  the mismanagement and poor handling of the corona crisis, distress of the migrant workers, the economic crisis and unemployment. Rather than reporting on citizens´ protest against the government’s excesses, human rights violations, arrests of the activists and political opposition and muzzling of dissent, they continued to talk on non-issues, have polarized the society in the name of the religion and built a narrative based on the nationalism. Furthermore they were maligning the opposition parties and those who have been raising questions to the government. Clearly, the media have shown no independence and submitted to the dictates of the government and often even gone a step ahead in defending the government. 

Weaving Solidarity Amidst Adversity

While the State has abandoned its responsibility in these dire times, civil society, people’s movements, trade unions, resident welfare associations and ordinary citizens rose up to the occasion and in the immediate aftermath of the lockdown. Tremendous efforts were made in terms of mobilising resources, food, rations, transport, medicines, shelter and so on for millions of migrant workers and the other poor and marginalised communities. A relief operation at an unprecedent scale was undertaken in a completely decentralised way, coordinated by various groups. Overnight community kitchens were set up, helplines for migrant workers in distress were organised, resting places for the migrants walking back to their homes were set up. Online fundraising campaigns set up inside and outside of the country. And until now thousands are volunteering at the health centres in several states.

While the government took its time to set up aid mechanisms, collective citizens’ mobilisation was at its best. Numerous human stories of help and solidarity emerged from different parts of the country and so did the stories of courage and grit shown by the poor and those on the margins who survived these harsh measures. Now that the unlock phase has started, even though the cases of new infections have been on the rise, the efforts of civil society are now focused on undertaking livelihood opportunities, regenerating rural economies etc. 

The government on the other side, in a completely undemocratic fashion, passed an amendment to the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act, which governs the organisations which receive funds from foreign organizations for their work, and has now penalised any collaborative work between organisations in the country. The amendments are not only going to hamper the work of the civil society but will stifle collaboration, innovation and increase their administrative workload.

Way ahead 

What the pandemic has taught everyone is that the current mode of development and consumption patterns are unsustainable and we need to rethink the priorities and also remodel the economy. A survey carried out by some civil society groups in rural areas amongst the migrant workers showed that if there was work within the villages, then a lot of them would prefer not to migrate. A huge part of India´s population is still dependent on agriculture and agriculture related activities. It would be prudent to build public infrastructure and invest in those, provide easy credit facilities and support to the small and marginal farmers, constituting 86% of India’s peasantry. However, in end September government without sufficient consultation with the farmers and other bodies, and debate within the Parliament rushed through three key legislations which will integrate the rural economy further into the market framework, promote contract and corporate farming, facilitate exploitation of their labour making them susceptible to the global market fluctuations. Even though the government has been claiming that it will boost investment, increase farmers income and so on, however, there have been massive protests across the country for months now.

However, the promotion of the agroecology projects, artisanal activity, revival of the rural economy and agro-processing, incentivisation of innovation, introduction of new technology which will save the farm input and so on, is what actually is required. Rural manufacturing, regenerating degraded land, commons, reviving the ponds, other water bodies and so on will lead to the diversification of activities within the traditional agriculture and a mix of associated agriculture related activities like dairy, poultry, fishery, etc will boost the rural economy and provide the necessary cash within the rural economy.

A fundamental reason for migration is the self-sufficient and seasonal nature of farming in the Indian context where the average land holding is small due to fragmentation and population rise over the years. Furthermore there is lack of cash in rural economy because of absence of other economic activities there, as the cash flow mainly relies on remittances. There are efforts being made by civil society actors but in the absence of the government support, it is going to be difficult to rebuild and reimagine the post-crisis economy and society. However, this is the opportunity for the government to institute welfare measures and not further destroy it. Social security measures, welfare schemes and stronger public and accountable institutions and enterprises are needed more than ever, and that’s a challenge we have in these market dominated world as a civil society as we move ahead in post-Covid times.


Madhuresh Kumar is National Convener of National Alliance of People’s Movements India and Resistance Studies Fellow at University of Massachusetts, Amherst USA

This article was written as part of a collective project on Covid situation in different countries for Heinrich-Boell-Foundation and was published in German here. 

Categories
Voices from the ground

Participa en nuestra proxima presentacion de libro and dialogo

Ciudades Dignas— transformación urbana alrededor del mundo

Registro: https://bit.ly/38S1lnJ

La urbanización global mantiene relaciones constituyentes mutuas con los principales patrones de dominación en nuestras sociedades, dando forma a su desarrollo. Sin embargo, las ciudades son lugares de intensas disputas políticas a medida que las poblaciones urbanas se han organizado para hacer frente a los desafíos de la vida cotidiana, resistir el despojo y defender sus derechos. ¿Qué condiciones y estrategias permiten una transformación radical en contextos urbanos? ¿Qué tipo de procesos económicos y políticos pueden sustentar transformaciones urbanas radicales? 

En esta presentación de libro y sesión de diálogo, abordaremos estas y más preguntas, además de explorar el gran potencial transformador de las ciudades a través de casos concretos de diversas partes del mundo.

Moderación: Mabrouka M’barek (co-editora), Túnez / Estados Unidos Miriam Lang, Ecuador

Idiomas: inglés, traducción simultánea al español

Intervienen:

Mary Ann Manahan y Maria Khristine Alvarez, Filipinas: Transformaciones urbanas alrededor del mundo

Asume Osuoka, Nigeria / Canadá: solidaridad, luchas y visiones de cambio social en los barrios marginales de Lagos

Aseem Mishra y Sandeep Virmani, India: Construyendo la democracia desde abajo en la ciudad de Bhuj

Bryce Detroit, Estados Unidos: El papel del arte en la lucha de las comunidades negras contra la gentrificación 

Comentario: Juliana Goes Morais, Brasil 

Fecha y Hora

Jueves, Diciembre 3, 2020

8h30 AM Quito, 13h30 UTC, 14h30 Bruselas, 19h00 Delhi, 21h30 Manila

Convocan:

Global Working
Group Beyond Development
Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung
oficina Bruselas
Tejido Global
de Alternativas 
Categories
Voices from the ground

Join our upcoming book presentation dialogue

Cities of Dignity— Urban Transformations Around the World 

To join Please register here: https://bit.ly/38S1lnJ

Global urbanization maintains mutual constituent relationships with the main patterns of domination in our societies, shaping their development. However, cities are sites of intense political disputes as urban populations have organized to meet the challenges of everyday life, resist dispossession, and defend their rights. What conditions and strategies enable radical transformation in urban contexts? What kind of economic and political processes can sustain radical urban transformations? In this book presentation and dialogue session, we will deal with these questions and more, as well as explore the tremendous transformative potential of cities through concrete cases from around the world.

Moderators:  Mabrouka M’barek (co-editor), Tunisia/USA and Miriam Lang, Ecuador

Languages: English and simultaneous translation to Spanish in zoom

Interventions:

Mary Ann Manahan and Maria Khristine Alvarez, Philippines: Urban transformations around the world

Asume Osuoka, Nigeria/Canada: Solidarity, struggles and visions of social change in the slums of Lagos 

Aseem Mishra and Sandeep Virmani, India: Building democracy from the bottom up in the City of Bhuj 

Bryce Detroit, USA: The role of art in the struggle of black communities against gentrification 

Commentator: Juliana Goes Morais, Brazil

Date & Time: Thursday, December 3, 2020 

8h30 AM Quito | 13h30 UTC | 14h30 Brussels | 19h00 New Delhi | 21h30 Manila

Organizers: 

Global Working
Group Beyond Development
Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung
Brussels Office
Global
Tapestry of Alternatives 

Categories
Debates Democracy

Can social movements democratise democracy?

“Extraordinary events are beyond the scope of ordinary explanations”

Edgard Morin

Lessons from the Yellow Vests movement in France

by Maxime Combes

“Democracy is not about Saturday afternoons”, French president Emmanuel Macron said, speaking about the Yellow Vests movement (YVM) that have been protesting every Saturday afternoon since November 17, 2018. Such a statement aimed to close the door to any new political, economic or social measures in response to the Yellow Vests mobilisation, just a few days before the European elections on May 26th 2019. While two electoral lists claiming to come from the YVM entered the European Union (EU) election race, Macron invited commentators to assess the political weight of the Yellow Vests: “Now everyone must go to the elections, and, when they have ideas, to stand in the elections. It is much more difficult to propose a project than to be against everything else.”

To this respect, the results of the EU elections are pretty clear: these two lists received just over 260,000 votes, or barely 1% of the votes casted, not enough to get any seat in the EU parliament. The YVM had saturated the political and media agenda, and the streets, for six months, highly supported by most of the population. It has seriously worried Macron himself and the parliamentary majority, to which the government responded with heavy police repression. But the content and results of the EU election campaign could be read as if this movement had no political weight and/or no electoral impacts: many commentators then stated that Macron had provided an adequate political response to the political crisis initiated by the YVM. But, there is no evidence that the social and democratic crisis highlighted by the YVM has been resolved.

The YVM is an unprecedented movement, both in terms of its social composition, its methods and practices, its determination and its duration, and its ability to build a partly favourable initial balance of power opposing Macron and the government. The YVM has been described as a spontaneous mobilisation, not taking root in traditional political parties and social organisations. For many participants, demonstrating or occupying a roundabout was one of the very first political actions of their whole lives. Most of them live in peripheral, peri-urban and rural areas, including a high proportion of women.

“Mouvement des gilets jaunes, Argiésans, 09 Dec 2018” by ComputerHotline is licensed under CC BY 2.0

They have made roundabouts, these rather bare and dehumanised traffic junctions, the key places of political socialisation and debate as the number and the dynamism of public spaces have greatly shrunk. Those who we were not used to seeing in social movements, and in the political field, made a double demonstration. Not only did they created their own political space, but they also extended their demands far beyond sectoral concerns, galvanizing their movement around the imperative of systemic economic, social and political transformations. This is one of the major achievements of this movement: from a sectoral demand – being in the streets against the increase in carbon taxes and fuel prices – to fully articulate the economic, social and political issues people are facing.

That is why president Macron and his government tried to shut down these debates reducing the issue to a narrow democratic practice: voting at the EU elections. However, the movement had widely deeply renewed the debate on the future of our (supposedly) democratic political regime: how it should work? How decisions should be taken? How to hold politicians accountable? What should be the role of the elites? How people can take control over policy decision making and over the economy? How to democratise democracy? How to make democracy work better between two elections? Through a short radiography of the YVM, this article aims to see how this movement has profoundly questioned the French democratic regime, but also the social movements and the political left through their modes of action and proposals aimed, in particular, at deeply democratising democracy.

Early days: roundabouts and yellow vests make invisible people politically visible

The YVM began on November 17th, 2018 with an occupation of roundabouts and street demonstrations involving more than 280,000 people over a large part of the country. One year later, the Yellow Vests have been demonstrating in the country for 53 consecutive Saturdays. This is unheard of: never before has a citizens’ movement have sustained weekly demonstrations for an entire year, often decentralised in dozens of cities. According to Ministry of Interior figures, the number of people in the streets has decreased to just over 30,000 by the end of 2018. Many commentators thought that the movement would have packed up and not come back after the winter holidays. In January 2019, everything should have been over. This has not been the case. Nearly 90,000 people were in the streets and some of them never stopped: over the weeks, they were representing between one-tenth and one-twentieth of the inaugural mobilisation, according to ministerial figures.

The roundabouts were at the same time a back base, a decentralised HQ and a meeting place where everyone can find something to do. From the beginning of the movement, they have not only blocked roundabouts, slow traffic flows or prevent access to commercial areas. On or near these roundabouts, on private land made available to them, they settled up huts, tents, fences, barbecues, braziers, and in some cases rudiment installations for cooking, hosting people, organising movie screening, public debates etc. They have transformed roundabouts, those soulless non-places, where cars only pass through, into public squares, allowing people to fraternise and to take decisions and to engage in a collective political process.

The urban planner Eugène Hénard (1849-1923) who made the first roundabout in history, around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, would never have thought that people wearing a yellow vest would have used hundreds of the country’s 30,000 roundabouts – a world record – to transform them into political gatherings for the mass. Nor would the legislator thought that the fluorescent yellow roadside emergency vests, which is mandatory to have in cars, could become the symbol and the colour of the country’s most important popular insurrection in recent years.

“gilets jaunes soir 2018 12-47 lr mr nb hd” by Marc Frant is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Displayed initially on the dashboards of the vehicles, the yellow vest was a sign of rallying and solidarity. On roundabouts and in demonstrations, worn on the shoulders, the yellow vest has become a banner where a slogan, a demand or a political message is written. The vest wasn’t just making people visible on side roads in case of emergency, it was making them politically visible every day and everywhere: the invisibles of daily life were now visible on TV. The yellow vests allow both unity and distinction: people all wear the same clothing, a cheap and easy to find, but everyone can stand out and be original with a specific message written on it.

The roundabouts and yellow vests were surely a material condition for the rapid expansion of the movement: everyone has a yellow vests in the car and on a roundabout near home. In almost a year, more than 50,000 demonstrations and rallies have been counted by state institutions across the country. If the images of the riots in Paris have struck people’s minds, the YVM is before all a deeply decentralised movement rooted in the territories. If the Arc de Triomphe has become the epicentre of a revolt taking place in the bourgeois districts of Paris, the experience of many Yellow Vests was first and foremost the collective and local initiatives on the roundabouts next to their homes.

Looking at the forms of mobilisation in the heart of Paris, and more broadly in French big cities is also a way to take into account how the YVM is changing the way to organise citizens mobilisations. From December 1, 2018, these were the symbols of national power that were targeted: the Elysee, where the president’s office is located, and the ministries in the capital, and the prefectures in the rest of France. Even smaller provinces, like Le Puy (Haute-Loire), demonstration took place around the local prefecture. To take up the sociologist Charles Tilly’s categories of mobilisation, the YVM is a kind of national and autonomous movement, using a repertoire of action typical of the social and political mobilisations of modernity (Tilly, 1986).

The YVM is not a “jacquerie” – peasants revolt in the Medium Age – as some commentators have said to most often undermine their credibility. At the same time, the Yellow Vests modalities of action differed from traditional leftist political or trade union mobilisations. The first demonstrations were not declared in the prefecture and organisers had no legal representatives. Moreover, these demonstrations took unusual forms: people walked without being attached to a clearly identified block, there were no banners or leaflets distributed during the marches, and, there was no group of activists in charge of ensuring collective security. From this point of view, the YVM therefore embodies both continuity (targeting the State and the government) and a break with traditional social mobilisations.

Out of the conventional pathways

In December 2018, more than one in five French people declared themselves to be “yellow jackets”, expressing massive support for a decentralised citizens’ movement: this is not a convergence of existing struggles, but the convergence of invisible people who were not already mobilised. The sociological surveys carried out at that time indicated that the participants are mainly people who have a job but are struggling to make ends meet: they are impoverished salaried workers or self-employed people whose living conditions are deteriorating (insufficient income to cope with constrained expenses, poor quality housing, etc.). They hunt down the lowest prices to buy food, and even more so to get dressed. Seven out of ten yellow jackets even admit to having postponed or given up medical care! Craftsmen and shopkeepers are over-represented, while managers are under-represented. The proportion of women (almost one in two) is significant: all observers noted their very strong presence, especially single women with children.

Most of the people thought that this movement would last only a few days. The media had few journalists on the ground and it is more or less the same for most of leftist organizations. Those ready to mobilise against the increase in carbon taxes on fuels did not belong to the traditional political organisation, trade union or or non-profit organizations. When the invisible and inaudible can no longer cope with their social situation and are preparing to engage in a social movement, they remain politically invisible. It was only when their calls to demonstrate on November 17th brought together hundreds of thousands of “interested” people on social media and, above all, when thousands of them gathered on roundabouts that day, that their became visible. But most of the political and media elites did not have all the intellectual and social tools to understand what was going on.

The YVM is one of the very first social movements of this magnitude in France in recent history, which makes visible and supports the interests of social groups who no longer felt represented in traditional political or trade union organisations. As in many other countries, political and social disintermediation is at its height: traditional mediations such as unions, political parties, and even citizen associations are bypassed by emerging movements. These latter even destabilise them by using social networks and ad hoc platforms to organise themselves outside of traditional frameworks. The YVM clearly reflects the loss of influence of traditional organisations and the weakening of their social roots. Those who are invisible or denied, no longer accept to be organised and mobilised by those who are already (even a bit) visible or who have a social and political status.

The YVM has spread beyond the usual suspects: social networks were key factors to informally structured their movement. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons for its quick and impressive expansion: people were joining a citizen movement, not an organisation. Participants were invited by their friends, their peers, through Facebook pages, not by a union or political leaders through a leaflet and/or the media. People were invited to reach an accessible place, close to home, with a piece of clothing they had already in the car. It was not about joining a political meeting or a union demonstration for which they don’t have the codes. The YVM is iconic in the sense of what sociologist Albert Ogien calls the “autonomous political practices” that develop away from the traditional institutions of representative democracy (Ogien, 2019).

From roundabouts to the challenging collective organisation

The roundabouts become real small agoras where people come to meet, discuss, confront, live and act together, among fellow citizens, isolated workers and lonely individuals looking for some solidarity in action, not just words. Trust is thus built on the basis of shared experience and is not given to distant and uncontrollable media figures, much less to a charismatic personality who would lead the movement. In the YVM, there is no single leader, no decision-making headquarters. Internet and social networks increase the mobilisation capacities of the Yellow Vests tenfold and serve as a technical device to allow the organisation and coordination of the movement. Social networks have broadened their audience before media attention and they were used as a sounding board once the media began to follow the movement. They tend to function as powerful vectors of protest diffusion, allowing people who don’t know each other to connect in a form of immediacy and as a way to aggregate slogans / claims without having to eliminate some of theirs.

The YVM is a hybrid form of a nation-wide movement rejecting any kind of representation and delegation to retain decision-making power on roundabouts. But the Yellow Vests participants also accept that mobilisation calls could be widespread on social networks, without being, for most of them, included in the decision-making process. Since November 17th, 2018, despite several attempts to “coordinate” the YVM, none have been fully successful and no stabilised organisational rules were set up. Following media invitation and/or the increase of influence on social media for some of them, a dozen of Yellow Vests were seen, at some moment, as spokespersons for the movement. But most of them decided not to play this role, distancing themselves from the label of “Yellow Vests leader”. Media, public authorities and social organisations never found spokespersons in capacity to represent the whole movement.

“gilets jaunes soir 2018 12-13 lr mr nb hd” by Marc Frant is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

However, the survey among Yellow Vests participants in the North-West Seine-Maritime region shows that 91% of respondents want to structure themselves into an organised and sustainable movement, and that 80% think that spokespersons are needed to represent them (Dormagen/Pion 2018). But the practical question of how to do this has not been resolved. The most advanced coordination process is precisely based on the rejection of representation and the rejection of hierarchy and delegation. “We don’t want representatives who would inevitably end up speaking for us!” stated[1] the Yellow Vests group of Commercy, calling for popular assemblies all over the country. The first Assembly of Assemblies took place in Commercy in January 2019 and the democratic question of the movement’s representation stayed as a main issue in the movement. This assembly of assemblies will then meet twice (Saint-Nazaire in April, Montceau-les-Mines in June) until the meeting in Montpellier in early November 2019, which brought together nearly 500 delegates chosen by the 200 local groups.

The YVM have come up against the constraint of political representation in the current representative democratic framework. They were successful in imposing their own issues in the public debate, but also their unique and unprecedented rallying points and symbols. At the same time, the YVM showed how traditional action repertoires and traditional political channels are maybe inappropriate. But the movement has not been able to overcome this powerful and rigid framework. The “Roundabout Democracy” has come up against traditional representative democracy. The poor results of the two Yellow Vests lists to the EU elections is only a small part of a much bigger challenge. At a time of individualisation of social despair, the mediation taking place on roundabouts and the Saturday afternoon marches are undoubtedly an incredible political experience but they might still be a little short to revolutionise the French political regime. In the short-term at least.

Behind the carbon tax, a deep sense of injustice and a yearning for a better democracy

For years, social movements have unsuccessfully been trying to put the social issues back at the heart of public debate. The Yellow Vests did. Better still, while they were initially presented as anti-ecological people who don’t care to burn the planet because they were saying “No” to carbon tax increases, they instead turned the question upside down pointing out the necessary link between social justice and ecological justice which necessarily relates to democracy. It wasn’t easy: one of the very first and consensual demand was clearly to urge the government to abandon the planned increase in the carbon tax. Many environmentalists feared that this movement would be nothing more than a mobilisation against ecological policies. In short, the movement was depicted as yearning for the right to pollute in peace without paying any taxes. Some conservatives and libertarian forces supported the very first days of mobilisation for this reason: to strengthen a “no tax” movement in France. But they quickly disillusioned and stopped supporting the movement in contrast to the left-wing social, ecologist, trade union and political organisations which, after much hesitation, tried to support and interact with the YVM.[2] It was never easy, but it probably contributed to this programmatic work that led the YVM to broaden their demands and ultimately focus on democracy..

The government has done everything it could to defend the carbon tax and explain how it was needed regarding the climate crisis. It is in the name of “ecological transition” and the need to “liberate households from dependence on petrol” that French Prime Minister justified the French carbon tax and the increase in its amount over the years. Their discourse is intended to be simple and accessible: by increasing the prices of fuels, consumers can modify their behaviour, reducing their use of vehicles and/or buying more fuel-efficient vehicles. The same applies to boilers that use oil, in which case people are supposed to replace them in favour of wood-burning or gas boilers. The case of tobacco is often used as an example: hasn’t its increase in price, done in the name of public health, reduced its consumption?

But people didn’t believe in this promise. First, the poorest do not have the money and the capacity to change their own behaviour since they carry too many “pre-committed” expenditures. Secondly, they know the richest pollute the most and big corporations can pollute in total impunity, without paying the level of taxes they should (Combes 2018). Thirdly, the carbon tax reinforces social and economic inequalities. And finally, the carbon tax increase was not intended to finance an ecological transition but rather, to pay for the tax cuts (wealth tax, capital tax, dividend tax, corporate tax, etc.) that president Macron granted to the richest and big corporations. Since the carbon tax was not matched with policies to reduce transportation and heating needs, focusing on individual changes, the government policies prevent to address the root causes of the gargantuan dependence on fossil fuels.

Even at the beginning of the YVM, it was not a “no-tax” slogan that was waved, but a deep sense of injustice that was being expressed. How can a policy of raising fuel prices for households be justified when companies are either exempted from these increases – in particular in air and maritime transport – or hardly affected by the very weak increase in the price of carbon in the European carbon market such as the French oil company Total, cement and steel plants?

Dignity for the invisibles …

Looking at the different lists of claims the Yellow Vests have published[3], whether they were established locally or through virtual processes, can lead to very different analysis. It is the very conception of a democratic model and democratic debate that is at stake: which people should decide and on whose principles . There is one that consists in analyzing them under the prism of what is already agreed in social movements or in the left. Leftist activists will focus on the texts and studies showing that a set of demands is almost unanimously supported : increase in the minimum wage, reinstate of a wealth tax, increase in pensions are for example supported by 90% of the respondents of a research (Dormagen / Pion 2018). That’s not wrong, but not enough accurate. These lists include much more claims than social ones. If you widen the scope, you can only see a “magma of heterogeneous demands.”[4] For example, some measures to improve the living conditions of the poorest people go hand in hand with proposals to restrict migrants rights. While demanding an end to the closure of small train lines, post offices, schools and maternity wards, more resources are asked to fund the police and the army, which are not at all what the political and social left agrees on.

“gilets jaunes soir 2018 12-18 lr mr nb hd” by Marc Frant is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Another option is to look at the Yellow Vests demands for what they are and to try to identify which are the remarkable features, if they have. Historian Samuel Hayat tried to carry out this work (Hayat 2018). Hayat stated that these lists of revendications “are deeply coherent, and that what gives coherence is also what has enabled the mobilisation of Yellow Vests to happen and to last: it is anchored in what can be called the moral economy of the working classes.” For him, a Yellow Vests slogan perfectly sums up this coherence: “Let the BIG ones (McDonalds, Google, Amazon, Carrefour…) pay BIG and the small ones (craftsmen, very small SMEs) pay small”. In other words, the most vulnerable must be protected, those who work must be properly paid, public services must work, tax evaders and those who take advantage of their status must be punished.

Hayat borrows the well-known concept of “moral economy” from historian E. P. Thompson to designate widely shared conceptions of what a moral functioning of the economy should be (Thompson 1976). Therefore, claims about foreigners or non-nationals should no longer be seen as “slag that could easily be discarded.” For Hayat, [these demands] “they are at the heart of the movement (…) because it is the logical consequence of the implementation of a moral economy that is first and foremost communitarian.”“The moral economy is the proclamation of a community’s standards,” he continues, and “the logic of equal rights is not extended to foreigners”, nor does such an approach recognise ideological conflict. Hayat explains that “the partisan nature of democracy, the opposition between political projects” is rejected, in favour of seeking a unity of position that indeed excludes those who are not already part of the community. Not because it makes economic sense, but because it is morally right.

By requiring that the economy be based on moral principles, the YVM gains massive support among the population: it sets out as intangible principles demands for dignity that the government, and president Macron in particular, have denied and mocked for months. The government has never ceased to attack explicitly these moral economy principles. To counteract the movement, President Macron has organized his very own National Debates Dialogues, a two-month consultation across the country but the initiative quickly backfired at the executive. A citizen speaking during one of these debates summarized the mood: “I live on 900 euros a month, but that’s not what made me be part of the Yellow Vests… One night, when I was washing dishes, I heard President Macron talking about “people who are nothing”. Such words were so outrageous! When you don’t have much, you still have your dignity. And Macron took away our dignity. Why such a violence!”

… and democracy for all

Setting up a short genealogy of the Yellow Vests evolution of demands might help us to better understand why yearning for a better democracy quickly took up much more space in the movement. This movement was fundamentally not fuelled by the simple rejection of taxes and it was not compartmentalising demands: social demands on the one hand, ecological demands on the other, and, besides them, demands for democratising democracy. Macron’s contempt for “people who are nothing” is undoubtedly one of the real catalyst of the movement. Given that it comes at a time of great mistrust towards politicians, on whatever political side, but also at a time where the feeling of ineffectiveness of trade unions and associations is widely widespread, the YVM is looking for an autonomous strategy that could overcome these challenges all together. The claims the Yellow Vests presented as consistent with each other, seek both to restore dignity and give them back real control and decision-making power over their own lives, politics and the economy.

In a way, the YVM may be seen in the direct continuity of what the Occupy movements have expressed for the last eight years: together, or rather one after the other, “they took note of the bankruptcy of representative politics” and aspire to “self-representation” (Balibar 2019). Self-representation is “the presence of citizens in person in the public square.” “You don’t represent us” shouted the Indignados and Occupy Wall Street (2011 to 2013), or even the French uprising Nuit Debout (2015) to take away any legitimacy from all political representatives. In the case of YVM, this is particularly true: there are no more members of parliament belonging to the worker’s class in the French National Assembly and less than 5% of the deputies were employees.The Yellow Vests are coming from a deep rejection of representative governments and are searching for radical democratic alternatives.

The Yellow Vests demands related to democracy can be divided into three main groups:

  • a better representation (proportionality to elections, etc.);
  • a better control and accountability of elected representatives, their activity, the resources they are given (lower wages, strict control of their expenditures, regulations against lobbying, right to recall elected officials, etc.);
  • a radical transformation of democracy with, among others, referendum on citizens’ initiatives, citizens’ assemblies, etc.)

In a way, these requests are a twofold movement: making sure that those who “benefit” from this system of representation be forcibly brought back into the “collective community” and “live like everyone else.” In other words, that would mean the end of privileges for the 1%, the elites. And on the other hand, to ensure that those who are deprived of access to decision-making spaces can take back control over them. To the deep mistrust towards representation that has led to the fact that the 1% are governing for themselves, the YVM responds with a set of demands that aim to make sure that those at the bottom will have the right to decide their common future.

The mistrust towards the elites and the demands to be heard and to be considered as a citizen are not new. What is new is that they are no longer only carried by the usual suspects: these are the working classes who make this request, and who do so directly, without the mediation of a party or a trade union. During the Nuit Debout movement, the radical demand for participation, which was expressed in the form of direct democracy, was coming from another category of the population, rather the urban and educated middle class. In France, such a massive demand from invisible and marginalized population has probably never been expressed so forcefully since the revolutions of 1789 or 1848. In a sense, we find here Lenin’s famous phrase that pre-revolutionary situations arise when those at the top can no longer govern as before, and those at the bottom no longer want to be governed as before. This is clearly the situation expressed by the YVM. Concluding that a democratic revolution is about to happen would be to take one of the options on the table as the only one possible.

The RIC: a dead end or the beginning of the end of democracy captured by elites?

Having a closer look at the debate around the Citizens’ Initiative Referendum (RIC), one of the main Yellow Vests demand, may provide a better understanding of the challenges faced by traditional social and political movements. The RIC is a direct-democratic system that allows citizens to convene a referendum without the consent of the parliament or the head of state being required. Several of these types of referendums are used at the national level in about 40 countries including Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia or Uruguay, as well as at the regional or local level in some countries (United States or Germany). Such a proposal is deeply contradictory to the French political system which is a very presidential and a vertical one. The Yellow Vests proposal generally includes four modalities: voting on a bill (legislative referendum); repealing a law passed by Parliament or a treaty (repeal referendum); amending the Constitution (constitutional referendum); revoking an elected representative (repeal referendum). This demand embodies the deep crisis of representative democracy observed in many countries.

In France, surveys indicate very strong people support for the RIC. The Yellow Vests are promoting the RIC as a way to pass on all their demands directly, without the mediation of political representatives in whom they do not trust anymore. Macron and the French government has understood this well and, without ever taking a frontal stance against this proposal, they have done everything possible to gradually remove it from the public debate: first by saying that they were in favour of improving existing mechanisms, then by multiplying the questions and options on this subject in the “Great Debate” that the executive has organised, to precisely drown out the answers and do everything possible to ensure that the RIC would no longer be perceived as the central element of the Yellow Vests demands.

“Paris, Gilets Jaunes – Acte IX” by O.Ortelpa is licensed under CC BY 2.0

For some left-wing groups and leaders, moving away from social demands towards demands for improving democratic institutions is an illusion and a dead end. The fact that the government did not dismiss this claim from the outset would be proof of this, and the way to avoid a debate on the distribution of wealth. An aggravating circumstance, the RIC is supported by a part of the extreme right and the conservative right. Hijacked, the RIC could indeed very well be used to serve xenophobic impulses or a plebiscite for a “strong man.” The referendum, if it remains in the French tradition of plebiscite, can perfectly serve as a strategy based on the mobilisation of the people around leaders.

For RIC advocates, these fears overlook the fact that this demand reflects the democratic and anti-authoritarian nature of the YVM. For this reason, it should be supported. They add that the RIC, if properly used, could serve as a very valuable emancipatory tool for a policy of redistribution of power and wealth. They insist on the fact that the RIC must be relatively frequent in order to avoid the plebiscitary logic, and therefore that it should be fairly easy to organise with relatively low signature thresholds. In addition to strong regulations on campaigns’ funding, tRIC promoters indicate that the democratic quality of referendums depends first and foremost on the processes that precede them, allowing, possibly via other tools (citizen assemblies, etc.), intense debates and collective deliberation processes.

This is a clash between two conceptions of politics. On the one hand, there is a classic partisan approach that bases political debate on disagreement and proposes to settle it in the ballot box or on the street. In opposition, the second concept defends direct participation by citizens: the objective is to gather their will through a referendum system organised around one or more questions. This approach often consists in relying on the common sense of citizens rather than entrusting decisions to political representatives who are considered as very far from people interests. The latter reproaches the former for refusing to take into account the interests of the highest number of people and to defend particular interests. The former reproaches the latter for believing that people could unite beyond all partisan divisions and ideologies, through a policy of consensus building.

The purpose here is not to settle this debate, but to clearly identify one of the major difficulties raised by the YVM from the point of view of democratic renewal. Moreover, although strongly present in the background, the debate is not so caricatural. Especially when we look at the experiences of participation and/or direct democracy. On the one hand, the aspiration for a more successful democratic life cannot be confined to a few procedural solutions. On the other hand, the most conflictual political forms are often a condition for the success of participation or direct democracy mechanisms. Would not the whole issue be to save what, in partisan politics, is useful for democratic debate, in particular the expression of political antagonisms and disagreements, while ensuring that it is not a caste, even a leftist caste, that defines the rules, questions, and answers of this same democratic game?

Conclusion

One year after the start of the mobilisation, the YVM remains supported by 55% of respondents: 69% on the side of the working classes and 41% on the side of executives. The questions raised by the incredible mobilization of the Yellow Vests are therefore not only questions for historians: trying to find some answers is a key issue for the future of left-wing political parties, trade unions and associations. This is despite surveys showing that 60% of Yellow Vests do not position themselves on the left right axis and 8% say they are neither on the left nor on the right: the level of political de-affiliation is even higher among Yellow Vests than in the population (Guerra / Gonthier / Anexandre / Gougou / Persico 2019).

Whatever its future, the YVM has highlighted one of the major challenges for the left: which kind of mediation could be rebuilt when the discredit of leftist organizations is so huge? In the short term, the Yellow Vests are a booster and have opened the doors and windows on the left that should lead to a redefinition of what an individual and collective emancipation project must look like in a context of systemic social and ecological transformations. In one way, the YVM has paved the way: reuniting with all those who share common interests against the elites and privileged, building a strong agreement around social demands, explaining that the ecological crisis is a systemic crisis that can’t addressed without a social justice perspective, and moving towards radical democratic transformation requirements. As if, from now on, the question of democratization of institutions was the prerequisite for resolving this social crisis.

Each one of these steps raises many difficult questions. But wouldn’t be absurd if the left-wing and ecologist political parties, trade unions and associations did not try to follow this path and try to answer the questions raised? Unless we can imagine rebuilding the left-wing without relying on the most extraordinary citizen revolt of recent decades in France. If in the short term, the come back to traditional politics has undoubtedly regained its rights, there is no doubt that the YVM has generated impacts in terms of politicisation and socialisation that will have medium- and long-term effects. It would be a pity if the social and ecological left missed them.


Maxime Combes : Trained as an economist, Maxime Combes has been involved since the late 1990s in the anti-globalization movement, notably through Attac France. He has worked on trade and investment policies (WTO, Tafta, CETA, etc.) and on major ecological and energy issues (COP climate, shale hydrocarbons, extractivism, energy transition). He is the author of Sortons de l’âge des fossiles! Manifesto for the transition (2015, Seuil) and the co-author of numerous collective books: La nature n’a pas de prix (Attac, Paris, LLL, 2012) – Les naufragés du libre-échange, de l’OMC à Tafta (Attac, Paris, LLL, 2015) – Crime climatique stop! (Seuil, ” Anthropocène “, August 2015). – Climate is our business (Attac, Paris, LLL, 2015). It contributes irregularly to the information site Basta! (bastamag.net) and runs a blog on Médiapart.


[1]    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfLIYpJHir4

[2]    One of the very first collective op-eds released in this sense was the following : Justice sociale, justice climatique : c’est un changement de cap qu’il faut imposer, Libération, 6 décembre 2018, https://www.liberation.fr/debats/2018/12/06/justice-sociale-justice-climatique-c-est-un-changement-de-cap-qu-il-faut-imposer_1696384

[3]    Here’s one list : https://blogs.mediapart.fr/jeremiechayet/blog/021218/liste-des-42-revendications-des-gilets-jaunes

[4]    According to the formula of this article of Liberation : https://www.liberation.fr/france/2018/12/04/les-gilets-jaunes-un-magma-de-revendications-heteroclite_1695802


Bibliography

Books

Tilly, C. (1986). La France conteste, de 1600 à nos jours, Paris, Fayard.

Articles

Thompson, E. (1971). The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century, in: Past & Present 50, 76-136

Internet sources

Balibar, E. (2018). Gilets jaunes: le sens du face à face, available at: https://blogs.mediapart.fr/ebalibar/blog/131218/gilets-jaunes-le-sens-du-face-face

Combes, M. (2018). Gilets Jaunes vs Macron : la transition écologique dans l’impasse, Available at : https://aoc.media/analyse/2018/11/23/gilets-jaunes-vs-macron-transition-ecologique-limpasse/
Translated into English : Yellow Vests: Macron’s fuel tax was no solution to climate chaos, https://www.rs21.org.uk/2018/12/04/the-yellow-vests-why-macrons-fuel-tax-was-no-solution-to-climate-chaos/

Dormagen J-Y, Pion G (2018), Le mouvement des “gilets jaunes” n’est pas un rassemblement aux revendications hétéroclites, available at: https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2018/12/27/le-mouvement-des-gilets-jaunes-n-est-pas-un-rassemblement-aux-revendications-heteroclites_5402547_3232.html

Hayat, S. (2018). Les Gilets Jaunes, l’économie morale et le pouvoir, available at https://samuelhayat.wordpress.com/2018/12/05/les-gilets-jaunes-leconomie-morale-et-le-pouvoir/

Guerra, T. / Gonthier, F. / Anexandre, C. / Gougou, F. / Persico, S. (2019). Qui sont vraiment les « gilets jaunes » ? Les résultats d’une étude sociologique, Available at: https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2019/01/26/qui-sont-vraiment-les-gilets-jaunes-les-resultats-d-une-etude-sociologique_5414831_3232.html

Ogien, A. (2019). La métamorphose de l’ordre politique : de la société civile aux pratiques politiques autonomes, Available at: https://aoc.media/analyse/2019/04/23/metamorphose-de-lordre-politique-de-societe-civile-aux-pratiques-politiques-autonomes/


Categories
Voices from the ground

Enfrentando las deudas eternas desde el Sur

La historia de la Modernidad tiene dos caras: por un lado, es una historia de revoluciones y luchas por los derechos. Pero, por orto lado, a la vez está plagada de violencias, de injusticias y de abusos. Muchos de los filósofos políticos ilustrados e incluso héroes de la Independencia eran esclavistas en su época. Las declaraciones de derechos -en linea liberal de derechos- excluían a mujeres y hombres no-blancos, pueblos indígenas y pueblos afros La misma noción de la Europa conquistadora potenció la masacre, el saqueo y la explotación de trabajo gratuito. En tanto que se fue expandiendo la voracidad por acumular valores abstractos, se fueron marginando otros horizontes civilizatorios en las comunidades humanas y también las relaciones de armonía con la Madre Tierra. Las Diversas relaciones de dominación subyugaron a las mujeres, a la Naturaleza, a los pueblos en cuyos territorios habían “recursos” acumulables.

por Alberto Acosta , Esperanza Martinez , Miriam Lang

Deudas diversas comenzaron a forjarse a lo largo del tiempo. Deudas que, de una u otra manera, reflejan estas estructuras de dominación. Las desigualdades e inequidades se plasmaron de formas múltiples. Todo ese entramado de poder desembocó en la apropiación y subordinación de trabajadores y trabajadoras, de campesinos y campesinas, en la separación entre trabajo considerado “productivo” y otro considerado “reproductivo”, normalmente no remunerado. Así se establecieron violentamente esferas de lo femenino y lo masculino, y una separación entre sociedades humanas y la Naturaleza en la que éstas están insertas. La idea de “raza” sirvió para justificar “científicamente” la explotación diferenciada al trabajo de personas negras, indígenas o de color, expandiendo así el poder imperial por el mundo y estableciendo formas de control de los cuerpos y subjetividades diferentes para cada grupo y género humano.

Hubo épocas en las cuales las mujeres, los indígenas y los negros no tenían alma… al menos para el discurso del poder. Desde entonces hasta hoy, patriarcado, clasismo y racismo han sido de las más arraigadas y eficaces formas de dominación social, material, psicológica y por cierto política. Y con esas formas de dominación se consolidó la expropiación de tierras y el saqueo de la Naturaleza, a costa del exterminio de millares de pueblos, con sus conocimientos, lenguas, culturas. La apropiación de trabajo esclavo, forzado, además del despojo de materiales que nutrieron la industrialización de las potencias coloniales, devino en una gran deuda histórica de los países centrales del sistema mundo capitalista con estas periferias desangradas; para mencionar un ejemplo, se estima que Gran Bretaña habría obtenido unos 36 millones de millones de libras esterlinas en todo el período colonial. Ese saqueo dio vida al capitalismo que, desde entonces, se sostiene con la explotación laboral, con la precarización del trabajo, con la invisibilización del trabajo del cuidado y sostenimiento de la vida, con la ocupación y destrucción de los bienes comunes, y con el desprecio de todo aquello que no pueda volverse mercancía.

En la actualidad, como resultado de tanta explotación y violencia, el planeta está en crisis, con desastres vinculados a un colapso climático cuyo origen no es natural. Lo que configura otra deuda eterna. No se trata de una simple deuda climática. La deuda ecológica encuentra sus orígenes en la expoliación colonial –la extracción de recursos minerales, las plantaciones o la tala masiva de los bosques naturales, por ejemplo–, se manifiesta tanto en el “intercambio ecológicamente desigual”, es decir los siglos de transferencia de bienes naturales del Sur al Norte global para alimentar los procesos industriales con “materia prima”, como en el “aprovechamiento gratuito del espacio ambiental” de los países empobrecidos por efecto del estilo de vida depredador de los países industrializados. Con el tiempo, las industrias más contaminantes, los monocultivos más invasivos y la basura tóxica se han trasladado a los países periféricos y dependientes. A lo anterior cabe añadir la biopiratería, impulsada por transnacionales que patentan en sus países de origen múltiples plantas y conocimientos indígenas: ya no solo se saquean metales preciosos, se saquea hasta el alma de los pueblos expresada en su conocimiento ancestral. En esta línea de reflexión también caben los daños provocados a la Naturaleza y a las comunidades sobre todo campesinas, con las semillas genéticamente modificadas, para citar un caso. Por eso bien podemos afirmar que no solo hay un intercambio comercial y financieramente desigual, como plantean las teorías de la dependencia, sino que también existe un intercambio ecológicamente desequilibrado y desequilibrador (incluso en términos de los flujos de materiales que transitan de unas partes del planeta a otras).

En suma, hay una deuda ecológica de la Humanidad al conjunto planeta, pero hay que destacar que son las élites los mayores causantes de esos destrozos. Como referencia cabe notar que solo el 10% más rico de la Humanidad causa la mitad de las emisiones de CO2 que están a raíz del calentamiento global; mientras que la mitad de los habitantes del planeta -los pobres- son responsables de un 10% de dicha emisiones.

En la actualidad, de lo que se trata es de recuperar las posibilidades de que la especie humana se mantenga en el planeta, ya no como una plaga o una pandemia, sino como parte de las relaciones de armonía y cuidado de la casa común y de todas las formas de vida que aquí nos acompañan. Eso implica proteger selvas, territorios, mares, pero además transformar nuestros modos de vida, nuestras relaciones y nuestras formas de producción y consumo.

Para mantener el modelo dominante, se desarrolló un sistema económico sostenido en la expansión del capital financiero, que no solo se difundió con el comercio, sino con inversiones y créditos. Bajo el mandato de buscar el “desarrollo”, en el mundo se expandió un modo de vida, con sus formas de producción y de consumo, que apunta a sostener a cualquier costo las ruedas de acumulación del capital. Un modo de vida irrepetible a escala planetaria, ya que solo se puede sostener para una minoría destruyendo los hábitats y modos de vida otros en los sures del planeta. Pese a ello, cada vez más, se quiere fortalecer la vorágine consumista empujándonos masivamente hacia crecientes endeudamientos tanto individuales como a nivel de gobiernos que generan dependencia, destruyen la autonomía personal y las soberanías, destrozan los lazos comunitarios y de convivencia humana y con el resto de formas de vida; las élites que construyen fortunas vertiginosas en base a este sistema quieren que les sigamos suministrando recursos naturales, sin importar la destrucción que provocan los extractivismos; quieren que seamos mercado para sus productos, sin permitir que encontremos nuestras propias formas de organización productiva.

Esas mismas élites hasta quieren que recibamos sus inversiones, sus créditos e incluso su “ayuda al desarrollo” para que sigamos condenados a suministrarles Naturaleza, trabajo e incluso capitales. Así quieren mantener su bienestar a costa de nuestras miserias. Y todo esto teniendo como potente palanca de dominación la entrega de financiamiento vía inversiones extranjeras y vía endeudamiento financiero; en total fluyen como inversiones, créditos y “ayuda al desarrollo” cerca de 2 millones de millones de dólares al año del Norte Global al Sur Global, pero regresan al norte en forma de diversas transferencias vinculadas a los flujos mencionados o por fuga de capital o evasión tributaria por unos 5 millones de millones (trillions en inglés).

De lo anterior se desprende que la deuda externa -financiera- es parte de la dominación económica y política de nuestras repúblicas. Una y otra vez la subordinación se consolida en el marco de la estructura internacional de control imperial, ahora con el FMI y el Banco Mundial, apuntalada con los mal llamados tratados de libre comercio (nunca libres ni solo comerciales). Este sistema consolida permanentemente nuestra posición como países suministradores de materias primas baratas y de mano de obra de bajo costo y hasta desechable. Y en el marco de estas relaciones económicas, como parte de un sistema de explotación comercial y financiero desequilibrado y desequilibrador, se perpetúan las dominaciones. Por ejemplo, para atender los compromisos impuestos por estas deudas financieras, se amplían y profundizan los extractivismos minero, petrolero, agroindustrial o pesquero, ahondando aún más la deuda ecológica de la que nuestros países son los acreedores; en forma paralela, para conseguir mejorar los niveles de competitividad, como reza el mensaje dominante, se flexibilizan más y más las relaciones laborales, precarizando sobre todo el trabajo femenino y agudizando la crisis de cuidados, lo que directa o indirectamente termina por ahondar tanto la deuda patriarcal así como otras deudas históricas. Y para pagar estas deudas financieras se sacrifican inversiones sociales vitales, configurándose así otra deuda eterna, la deuda social, reflejada en la pobreza y en las desigualdades.

Es preciso, entonces, impug­nar la deuda externa, la financiera, para establecer la justicia como referente básico, desde la doctrina de las deudas odiosas, usurarias y corruptas. Se requieren acciones para declarar injusta, ilegítima e impagable a la deuda existente, frenando simultáneamente los nuevos créditos que se están negociando para aumentar las inversiones en minería, petróleo, energía, agroindustria e incluso para activar modelos de privatización que cumplen con los condicionamientos y ajustes requeridos por la banca y los organismos internacionales. Tras todos estos procesos la corrupción manda. Por eso urge desmontar las tramas de corrupción inherentes a estas deudas. El coronavirus puso en la agenda internacional la urgencia de suspender los pagos de la deuda externa de los países del Sur, para atender la crisis sanitaria y alimentaria. Es decir, la deuda no se paga para poder salvar más vidas. Pero eso no es suficiente.

Esta realidad acumulada por siglos de explotación es un telón de fondo de la historia y de la realidad presente de nuestras sociedades, plagadas por DEUDAS ETERNAS: financieras, ecológicas, históricas, patriarcales, sociales. Estableciendo las correspondientes interconexiones entre estas deudas eternas, junto con la deuda financiera deben procesarse la deuda ecológica e incluso la deuda colonial, donde los países empobrecidos son los acreedores. Es el momento de poner todas las deudas sobre la mesa y redefinir a partir de ahí nuestro entendimiento de lo justo, en lugar de contentarnos con alivios temporales de mero carácter financiero.

El PACTO ECOSOCIAL DEL SUR propone abordar estas DEUDAS ETERNAS en su interconexión, en todas las discusiones sobre las transiciones para salir de la crisis actual, de otra manera, las inequidades se mantendrán y los problemas se acumularán… No basta hablar de la transición y la sustentabilidad, si se seguirá dependiendo del petróleo, la mineria o del trabajo precarizado de los sures del mundo, sosteniendo el patriarcado y la colonialidad. Proponemos discutir estas deudas en agendas post-pandemia, con claros horizontes postcapitalistas y postantropocéntricos, desde esquemas sustentados en la reciprocidad, el don y el intercambio, rescatando lo comunitario de la vida humana y no humana. Como se dice con claridad en el RAP que sintetiza esta lucha, es hora de gritar: deudas eternas… ¡basta!

Categories
Voices from the ground

White climate, white energy: a time for movement reflection?

by Larry Lohmann

One impressive thing about the new climate movements Fridays for Future (FFF) and Extinction Rebellion (XR) is that they do try to take the warnings of climatology seriously. Not only more seriously than ruling elites, but also, arguably, more seriously than the older generation of climate activists associated with the likes of Environmental Defense Fund, WWF, Greenpeace and the Climate Action Network.

Such organizations wasted two decades pushing climate policies that they imagined capitalist elites might accept (carbon pricing, energy “transition” schemes involving accelerated extractivism, and so on). From early on, it was evident that these policies could have no climate benefits whatever. Equally, they tended to alienate many of the grassroots movements most needed for a more powerful global climate alliance. Trapped by orthodox economic thinking, mainstream environmental organizations from the global North had failed to develop either their analysis or their organizing.

So campaigns like FFF and XR look to be embarking on a welcome return toward fundamentals. Nevertheless, they continue to be constrained – in a quite understandable way – by certain misunderstandings of what the climate crisis is and what is needed to mobilize politically around it. Ironically, this has come about partly as a result of the unexamined relationships that such movements maintain with the very climate and energy sciences that they rightly take so seriously.

There may be no way of putting this gently. The issue is not that movements like XR and FFF, like their more mainstream predecessors, tend to be largely white in their constitution, history and culture. That is something that they are obviously aware of and already struggling within their efforts to reach out and join themselves to broader-based climate movements.

The bigger challenge is what such movements plan to do about the fact that the main concepts that they work with at present – climate and energy, for example – are also white. And not only white, but also gendered and class-biased.

Here it may be necessary to pause for a moment. Decades of scholarly work notwithstanding (e.g., Smith and Wise 1989, Caffentzis 2013, Edwards 2013, Taylor 2015, Lohmann forthcoming), the idea that such concepts might be white still shocks many Western intellectuals.

Faces might be white; cultures might be white – but what could it mean, many white climate activists wonder, to say that today’s dominant concepts of climate and energy are also white? Surely those greenhouse gas molecules migrating across the border of a “climate system” computed by Global Circulation Models are colourless, no? And how could energy be anything but a universal, nonracial, genderless substance craved by generic humans from time immemorial – even if it did happen to originate in the ways 19th-century patriarchies and empires organized the mass interconvertibility of motion, heat and electricity, together with the resulting waste, across broad peasant, Indigenous and urban territories in the service of industrial exploitation (Hildyard and Lohmann 2014, Daggett 2019)?

Yet as the news about structural racism filters slowly toward the mainstream amid daily bulletins about algorithmic bias, worldwide George Floyd uprisings, and Covid-19 mortality patterns transparently shaped by centuries of white supremacy, now may be a good time to put in a bit of work to try to understand better the racial, patriarachal constitution of the climate and energy concepts that climate movements have inherited.

The Jamaican analytic philosopher Charles W. Mills (1998) writes of the “wonder and complaint” that his field provokes among minorities: not so much because so many academic philosophers have white faces, but because the subject matter itself is white. And more importantly, because so many white philosophers have a hard time even “seeing” the biases that their theoretical canon perpetuates (Eze 1994, Oyewumi 1997), or perceiving the prejudices implicit in the field’s habitual “reliance on
idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual” (Mills 2005: 168). Feminists know this as the “just add women and stir” approach. Because the philosophical canon is imagined to be unraced and ungendered, any concerns about patriarchy – or white supremacy – are supposed to be addressable just by getting more women – or Blacks – to recognize and contribute to it.

Is it too provocative to apply these lessons to climatology as well? Last April, a spokesman for XR America told his colleagues that we “don’t have time to argue about social justice … If we don’t solve climate change, Black lives don’t matter” (Dembicki 2020). Other leftist white activists and academics from both the US and Europe chimed in that Black Lives Matter, #metoo and other movements, important as they were, were in the end just playing around with “identity politics,” whereas the climate crisis required a more “universalizing” stance to organize a “unified, powerful, effective and sustained” movement capable of “getting past our differences” and “transforming the socio-ecological relations in which we live.” In the background, Bill McKibben continued to insist that in understanding the need for climate action, “350 is the most important number in the world” – apparently more important than, say, the number of humans and nonhumans sacrificed over the years for fossil fuel extraction and pollution or the number of nations subjected to imperial rule for the sake of cheaplymechanized labour (Malm 2016).

Not every climate activist in the global North may be aware of the extent to which such discourses are the object of lampoon and ridicule among climate movements in the global South. Which is why it might be worth spending some time exploring the deeper, climatological roots of what they often find problematic.

In 2014, Sir John Houghton, founding member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, gave an interview explaining that UN climatologists were not permitted to mention the carbon locked up in fossil fuels in their analysis of climate change, but only carbon that had become more mobile in the form of CO2 (Marshall 2014). To follow what happens when carbon atoms cross one of the internal borders of the earth’s geophysical system into the atmosphere is “science,” Houghton said. But to analyze their movements toward that border “is not a science question.” In other words, climatology is not allowed to ask why the climate is changing any more than a Donald Trump appointee is allowed to ask why Guatemalan slum dwellers might be compelled to jump on the train known as La Bestia in an attempt to reach the US border.

The consequence of this scientific methodology is to treat the climate crisis in more or less the same way that the far right treats immigration. If the problem is too many immigrant molecules of a certain kind, then any solution must naturally start with controlling immigrant numbers at the border.

This might help suggest why a Guatemalan climate activist, say, might find herself somewhat bemused by a white US climate activist’s earnest advocacy of carbon prices, carbon-neutral development, carbon-zero renewables, carbon-restrictive Green New Deals, carbon-centred Natural Climate Solutions or any other approach that hierarchically identifies the primary problem as immigrant carbon dioxide molecules rather than historically-rooted patterns of capital accumulation, white supremacy, unrelenting imperialism and ruthless patriarchy. Or that sees climate justice as a matter of starting with carbon controls (never mind what authority might be appointed to do the controlling) and then “stirring in” some green jobs or a bit of equitable energy distribution, without considering what that energy actually consists in.

Does that mean that Northern climate activists should reject, refuse or try to flee from their concepts of climate and energy? Not at all. That would be as fruitless as white anti-racist activists trying to reject, refuse or flee from their own whiteness (Sullivan 2014, Alcoff 2015). It would be to disrespect that very climatology and 19th-century energy science that networks like XR and FFF have justifiably committed themselves to taking so seriously. Because it would be to airbrush out the troubled histories of those sciences as well as to dismiss their capacity to change and become more scientific.

Instead of climate activists rejecting outright the white climate and white energy bestowed on them by their tradition, then, the point is to decide in a more self-aware fashion what kind of relationship they need to have with them, as objects in the making.

Like any relationship, that relationship is not given for all time. It is something that will always need work. As any social anthropologist knows who has ever joined discussions of climate change in places like Sierra Norte de Puebla (Smith 2007), Molo in West Timor, or the highlands of Scotland, there will always be other climates and other energies in dynamic relations with the capitalist climate and energy that up to now have dominated the world view of most Northern climate agitators. Helping to bring these practices into a less hierarchical dialogue with one another might be a first step toward building global climate movements that are stronger than those the past twenty years have witnessed.


Larry Lohmann The Corner House, Sturminster Newton UK.


References

Alcoff, L. R. 2015. The future of whiteness. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Caffentzis, G. 2013. In letters of blood and fire: work, machines and the crisis of capitalism. Oakland: PM Press.

Daggett, C. N. 2019. The birth of energy: fossil fuels, thermodynamics and the politics of work. Durham: Duke University Press.

Dembicki, G. 2020. ‘A debate over racism has split one of the world’s most famous climate groups’, Vice, 28 April, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgey8k/a-debate-over-racism-has-split-one-of-the-worlds-most-famous-climate-groups.

Edwards, P. 2013. A vast machine: computer models, climate data, and the politics of global warming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Eze, E. 1994. The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology, in K. M. Faull (ed.), Anthropology and the German Enlightenment: perspectives on humanity, 200-241. London: Bucknell and Associated University Press.

Lohmann, L. forthcoming. Bioenergy, Thermodynamics and Inequalities, in M. Backhouse and C. Rodriguez (eds.), Bioeconomy and global inequalities: knowledge, land, labor, biomass, energy, and politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resource/bioenergy thermodynamics-and-inequalities.

Lohmann, L. and N. Hildyard. 2014. Energy, work and finance. Sturminster Newton: The Corner House, http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resource/energy-work-and-finance.

Malm, A. 2016, Fossil capital: the rise of steam power and the roots of global warming. London: Verso.

Marshall, G. 2014. Don’t even think about it: why our brains are wired to ignore climate change. New York: Bloomsbury.

Mills, C. W. 1998. Blackness visible: essays on philosophy and race. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

————– 2005. ‘“Ideal Theory” as Ideology’. Hypatia 20 (3): 165-184.

Oyewumi. O. 1998. The invention of women: making an African sense of Western gender discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.


Smith, A. D. 2007. Presence of Mind as Working Climate Change Knowledge: a Totonac Cosmopolitics, in M. Pettenger (ed.), The social construction of climate change: power, knowledge, norms, discourses. Aldershot: Ashgate, 217-34.

Smith, C. and M. N. Wise 1989. Energy and empire: a biographical study of Lord Kelvin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sullivan, S. 2014. Good white people: the problem with middle-class white anti-racism. Albany: State University of New York Press.


Taylor, M. 2015. The political ecology of climate change adaptation: livelihoods, agrarian change and the conflicts of development. New York: Routledge.