What is it were missing? And how can we fit more pieces together to find out what to do?
I am shocked by how little eco-terrorism I hear about. Are people doing it? It seems like the only way at this point
I imagine it has something to do with the disproportionate sentencing, at least in the US. Disable a tractor but hurt no one? Any other scenario, you get a fine. In the name of climate activism? Prison for 8 years.
Not quite the same, but the FBI gets recruited to go after people who free animals from slaughter houses, since they consider it ‘tampering with the nation’s food supply’. There are just certain industries that are much more dangerous to do activism against.
The word “terrorism” is clumsy imo.
From a Marxist perspective, what the mainstream politicians call terrorism is called adventurism , ie, random acts of violence against random people. That’s the worst method of change ever it doesn’t work you can never get mass support like that.
But when we talk “eco terrorism” we don’t literally mean suicide bombing on random people, it’s more in the form of radical direct action including violent tactics in opposition to pacifist direct action right?
But if you’re gonna use “terror” I mean, you’re already on the path of Marxist revolution (“we’ll make no excuses for the terror”) as revolutionary violence consists in terrorising the reactionaries. The cool thing when you have a dictatorship of the proletariat is that your “terror” doesn’t have to randomly kill people in cruel ways, you can dismantle reactionary networks using intelligence and rely on imprisonment rather than murder.
So I’d argue that the meaningful terminology is the following: either pacifist direct action, or radical direct action (more anarchist leaning) or revolutionary action (more Marxist leaning)
Yeah I don’t like that term, bad choice of words.
I meant destructive stuff like cutting open factory farm fences but also violence against the rich who profit directly from various polluting industries. Not even necessarily organized action, just anxiety-ridden individuals who have hadn’t enough doom-scrolling and want to make a change.
It reflects how little discomfort those who could take action feel today, which is also why, generally, nothing has been done. Terrorism is fundamentally a desperation tactic, that of people without hope. Climate change is as of now still too abstract for basically everyone.
I feel in America atleast its becoming less abstract and people are becoming more radicalized. I had communities get destroyed from the effects of climate change near me and to half the people around me. Where i am it already seems dire but i guess it is not like that everywhere? I think the main climate discourse is whats mostly slowing things down since climate anxiety has been on the rise heavily amongst young people but people have not looked into more radical means because of the extinction rebellion and their petty bourgeois catering bullshit. I think we must radicalize people from the climate movement into marxism first, mostly curious young liberals but with open minds we can teach this education to. This will make sure they re evaluate the climate struggle through a marxist dialectical materialist framework and would be willing to join more radical fronts. And i would also argue simplifying works or creating more simpler modern works or forms of propaganda be distributed by pro workers parties that can be easier to get a grasp on for the masses or hell even publishing videos in ways that can gain a more popular attention while getting more people interested in socialism.
The Bush-era Green Scare did a lot to defang the environmentalist movement. There are still some great resources that they made, like A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, and some good lessons learned, such as the above-ground/underground group dichotomy.
above-ground/underground group dichotomy.
Where would you recommend to look into this more?
I honestly don’t remember where I read it. It was either some insurrectionary anarchist thing or an ELF/ALF thing. The gist of it is:
You have two organizations that legally never meet. One stages protests, does community outreach, fundraising, and all of your standard environmentalist org stuff. The other does illegal direct action activities, divided into independent cells and/or affinity groups. The above-ground network serves to raise funds and recruit for the underground network, but the key is that the leadership of the above ground group can never be connected to the actions of the underground group. This gives a lot more wiggle room to both groups than if they were to go it alone.
That’s an interesting idea, thanks!
I remember George Jackson detailing something like this in Blood in my Eye, but it was mostly theoretical
Thanks, I’ve been meaning to read that!
Adventurism is not a solution. The feds, the fossil fuel industry in fact invite it. It makes it easier for them to paint the whole movement as violent, dangerous, to crack down on even peaceful types, to surveil them, to get overtime bonuses, to arrest, infiltrate, subvert, etc. To slap the whole thing with a domestic terrorism label and charge anyone near a protest. Send in fed agitators who commit violent acts, charge anyone present near them as accomplices, throw them away for a long time, repeat until it’s broken up.
The problem is the widespread apathy and resignation of people. The capitalist system is not going to change it yet the people refuse to change the capitalist system. It’s not an immediate danger, it’s hard to understand, hypothetical. It feels hotter but by the time it becomes truly unbearable for the comfortable middle class even militant action won’t reverse it and there will be a feeling of defeat and hopelessness.
Sabotage might slow them down a little but honestly the types of prison sentences people who do it face and the drop in the bucket impact it really has means even just advocating and getting an increase of taxes or costs passed onto people for use of fossil fuel is likely to be more effective in decreasing consumption and carbon emissions than sabotage. Because sabotage drives up prices too and they’re happy to pass costs onto the average proletarian. It’s like how refineries in California all mysteriously have problems around the same times together and prices go up.
Fundamentally it’s a problem of living under a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie who themselves don’t care about climate change or may even welcome it for darker plans they have for humanity. Government is the one that can resolve this problem. What could actually change it would be militant labor organizing. If we could somehow organize strikes on big industries and shut the economy down, you could force the politicians to pass laws to ameliorate the worst aspects of climate change and carbon emissions, you couldn’t fix the problem or address it systemically like with proletarian rule but it would be something.
Yeah, strikes seem like the best way to get shit done
While some limited ecotage does happen, non-permanent disruption is more popular than permanent damage. And the more public, less relevant showboating stuff is what gets the public eye. Just Stop Oil got a lot more attention when they started sitting in traffic and throwing stuff at paintings and whatever than when they were focusing more on things like blocking oil terminals.
I’d recommend Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline for more discussion about more radical approaches to protest, but bear in mind that there is a distinction between strategic sabotage which can get public on-side and the sort of adventurism that ecoterrorism implies. As /u/lil_tank@lemmygrad.ml mentions below this has the risk of driving more people away anyway.
I’d really recommend Marxism Today’s youtube video about the film pseudo-adaptation of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, discussing both the risks and bad examples in that film itself but also the broader context of trying to encourage this.
Disruption and sabotage of fossil fuel machinery might be effective from a public optics perspective, as well as on a large enough scale hopefully impacting capitalist profits/making polluting ventures seem riskier to investors. However, ecotage is distinct from eco-terrorism and the latter should be avoided.
However, not the question of subjective motives but that of objective expediency has for us the decisive significance. Are the given means really capable of leading to the goal? In relation to individual terror, both theory and experience bear witness that such is not the case. To the terrorist we say: it is impossible to replace the masses; only in the mass movement can you find expedient expression for your heroism.
- Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours
The [Earth Liberation Front] realises that the profit motive, caused and reinforced by the capitalist society, is destroying all life on this planet. The ELF therefore feels that the only way to stop the destruction of life is to take the profit motive out of killing.
A YouTube link was detected in your comment. Here are links to the same video on Invidious, which is a YouTube frontend that protects your privacy:
If you are interested in joining the radical side of online environmentalist discourse with a less anarchist approach i got a community i run called “Radical Left Environmentalists” which has grown affiliation to the community “ecomaoism”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but afaik mainstream climate activism boils down to pointing at the iceberg and saying “there’s an iceberg ahead” without any plan on how to avoid death. It is usually very toothless and unthreatening to the ruling classes, which is I think is why they’re allowed to exist and even platformed through greenwashing. I don’t see what success they’ve actually had that we could stand to gain from mimicry.
Their best analyses boil down to understanding quite a bit of the physical science of it, but they hardly get anything actually going in practice. Ozone layer was their last big win, but it was just because it was rather cheap for the corporations to fix that one.
Instead I think the way is to do what communists already do the best, which is to study the history of it (climate change) and better explain the hidden class aspect of it. If stories like the BP creating “carbon footprint” to shift the blame on consumers or Obama approving the Keystone XL pipeline on native land (and the subsequent attack on protests) stop becoming loose facts on somebody’s head and become part of a large narrative of the ruling class complete disregard for climate change, regardless of whose campaign they sponsor. You can already see lost libs in the thread parroting PR firm victim blaming talking points.
And if the interest is the USA, indigenous people are both usually the most interested in combating climate change and the ecological catastrophe, and also the first victims of the repression (and it’s usually not televised). The Red Deal is an alright read if you want to get the perspective of some of them who have been fighting this fight for a while. They also have a podcast, which is alright too.
TLDR: you can’t properly fight climate change without class consciousness and understanding the history of settler disregard for the environment. This is why lib movements tend to fail at anything but making them feel good about themselves, IMO.
Matt Huber does a good job with what can be done with Climate Change as Class War.
Good book.
climate change is literally a planet-sized problem. solving it will require nothing short of epic public investment in infrastructure, technology, and changing patterns of production and consumption. That’s not going to happen fast or fairly enough under a neoliberal, unipolar world order. Changing that will be a slow grind over the next 10-30 years, carried out by countries outside the imperial core. Building a mass movement to rally behind that change in the global order is probably a good path forward, like a radical anti-war movement in any NATO+ country.
Another idea specifically for america would be to radicalize urbanism and transit nerds to build a movement for dense public housing and transit to replace suburban sprawl. that idea could be extended to other things like veganism, biodiversity conservation, etc. where you help radicalize a left-ish movement that moves in the right direction for planetary longevity.
We have to appeal to people’s material interests. At least in the imperial core, there’s nothing to offer people right now but dusty theory. Basically, we need to build living situations that are resilient. So that could mean creating communities with like-minded people that can produce their own energy, mitigate heatwaves, resist wildfires and flooding, things like that. Their very valid fear of collapse will drive them to us if we can put material benefits on display.
It’s not a mass movement builder overnight, but it would mitigate a lot of the problems for the people involved and draw a lot of people to our side, especially if we can provide disaster relief.
Basically instead of telling people to eat less meat, which they will never do, we need to change the way we think about it. The better question is what will the world look like if people walk off the cliff and eat every last animal and burn every last drop of oil, because they will do just that. So if that’s true then how do we mitigate the worst outcomes for the most people?
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Why are you still a liberal if you know that climate change solutions/mitigations are impossible under capitalism?
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Don’t make it left or right. It doesn’t matter how right you are, a lot of people are going to have other ideas.
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Focus on immediate benefits of mitigation, and don’t make it just about climate. E.g. ending car dependent design benefits drivers due to less traffic and less bad or impaired drivers.
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Use their own rhetoric. E.g. right wingers claim to be about small government. Cars involve a lot of government interaction with licensing, registration, taxes for roads, getting stopped by LEOs. Other transportation methods require less government.
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Because the sad truth is that to get ahead of climate change we must comsume less. And that is one heck of a hard sell. Drive less, eat less meat, local vacations etc. So far been seen as a manic arguing for reduction in consumption. Along with a non healthy does of “why should we do when them over there wont?”
The last point is just chauvinistic crap. Ask those people to get a few random objects in their house to see where it is made. ‘Them over there’ don’t do it because they need to make our products for dirt cheap wages in horrific conditions.
Also, individual reduction of consumerism is going to do jack shit when the top 100 companies produce 70% of all global emissions. And I say this as a person who DOES reduce as much as possible.
I agree with you. Except that if enough individuals cut their consumption it will make an impact. Less demand so less would be produced and less corporate emissions. But individuals in general aren’t inclined to do that. Exactly because each individual’s contribution is so small. So it has to be done on a large scale.
But then I’ve given up hope that climate change will be stopped with manageable impact and all efforts to that goal is pretty meaningless. Instead we must work to handle the impact of climate change. Making sure that for example water will still be available where it is needed, that water wars won’t happen. Change of crops for new climate, better drought/flooding resistance for example. And peoples’ habitation and lively hood when sea levels rise. How to handle periodic flooding of river deltas and their increased salination.
That discussion I feel often is overlooked.
Don’t give the capitalists money for crap you don’t need, it only inflates their profits. Sure, that is fine for you if you are not so poor that you can afford the more ethical option.
To whatever extent you can make a choice to do something good on a small scale, is that good, probably. However an even greater good would be to seize power from the capitalist forces of planetary destruction to build an ecologically sustainable economy.
Let Mother earth speak to us in the howl of the hurricanes, the dry heats of the summers and the strange destabilization of the polar vortex. Use what she says as a point to build an ecological economy or she might not let our species survive.
Sure, that is fine for you if you are not so poor that you can afford the more ethical option.
ethical costing more than unethical is simply not always true. A bicycle is cheaper than a small car. A small car is cheaper than a canyonero. I’m in the US, I know bicycles aren’t feasible in most parts due to car dependent design, but nobody is forced to commute to an office in the suburbs in a monster truck.
Poultry is cheaper than beef. Rice+beans+lentils is cheaper than meat.
A reasonable house is cheaper than a mcmansion.
It’s not wrong to do any of those things, however systemic change would have a larger impact. I’d rather have stricter laws making it illegal to have factory farms and all beef be grass fed to better use the land to produce food rather than growing crops to feed them. That would be an efficient means of turning grasslands into food without exhausting the water supply. Yes there would be less beef, but this would be a net positive for the world if we did this.
Its not wrong to try do do these little things yourself.
It’s honestly rather silly that you think the solution for it is “consuming less” when some 30 million people on the richest country in the world rely on food stamps, and some 60% live paycheck to paycheck. Do you honestly think there’s any more “fat” to cut for those?
It’s seen as disconnected from reality because it actually is. The problem is not that all (or majority of) people consume too much, but that the production itself (and the waste disposal aftwards) is the most climate-inneficient it could ever be. How is one to “drive less” or “eat less meat” when those are the only ways they could afford to live?
“Local vacations” lmao
You can’t even seem to buy anything in the USA that doesn’t come with a pound of plastic packaging. It’s not on the individual, it’s the system.
What’s wrong with taking time off and not going anywhere?
What’s wrong is assuming people even have the means to travel in the first place. Next time you take the bus to work, ask yourself how many of the people in that bus could afford to travel on their vacations, both financially and time-wise. You act as if the bottom 75% of the population of whichever country you’re talking about (I assume USA) live luxurious lives of overabundance, when in fact a majority of people in capitalist countries have basically no choice on what they consume, let alone what they could abstain from.
Waste isn’t high because of individual lifestyle choices or “carbon footprint” or whatever else, it’s because the ruling classes have engineered highly profitable societies with complete disregard for their wage slave wellbeing or the environment that sustain those same wage slaves.
As two other exercises, how would somebody in a city with no public transport be able to drive less? And how would people with no time to cook and no access to affordable organic food be able to eat less meat from those cheap industrial foodstuffs? If you wish to prescribe actions to people, you should first learn about their material conditions.
First, I don’t completely disagree with some of your points about problems in the US. I think you are infantilizing people to an extent by ignoring the agency they do have and what they can control.
I never made any of the claims you are arguing against. Please check usernames.
What’s wrong is assuming people even have the means to travel in the first place.
I never made that assumption.
All I did was ask what is the problem with not traveling when taking time off work. The person I responded to sounded like not traveling was somehow problematic. I just wanted clarification.
As two other exercises, how would somebody in a city with no public transport be able to drive less?
I couldn’t agree more. Car dependency is the cause of sooo many of our problems in the US.
Waste isn’t high because of individual lifestyle
Yes and no. E.g. A large segment of the US have CHOSEN to drive around in monster trucks and canyoneros instead of more reasonable vehicles. A large portion vote for politicians (GOP) who refuse to even acknowledge it is a problem.
I think the paycheck to paycheck claims are somewhat exaggerated. There are a lot of people with good incomes that this applies to because of bad choices like the aforementioned vehicle choices, buying larger houses than they need, hiring out every simple job that 99% of people could easily do with a 2 minute video (like replacing the flap in a running toilet), annual extravagant vacations, etc. I think the paycheck to paycheck claims need to be calculated by household size, local cost of living, and income. These people would both reduce their contribution to GHG emissions AND be in a financially better position if they made better choices.
As far as food choices, non beef options are available pretty much everywhere food is available. Beef is generally more expensive than other meats. Beef is the biggest contributor to GHG emissions. A person of limited means could easily choose the cheaper AND environmentally better options.
basically no choice on what they consume
Not entirely true. I can choose to buy a monster truck to commute to work or a small car. Ideally that choice would include transit, bike, etc. I can choose beef, pork, chicken, or lentils for my protein. Even at corner stores, fast food, etc, it is pretty easy to avoid beef. Sure, there are problems like car dependency and the ideal choice would include transit, bike, etc. To claim no choice isn’t really true. The kicker is, the greener option is often the cheaper option.
Its not that people have to make new choices it’s that the general patterns of how goods flow under capitalism require the resource consumption we see now. Food in general is a huge one, but also disposable items, the length of work, cars, housing patterns, etc.
Everyone (will say in the us for simplicity, but most industrialized places) is going to have to live differently if you stop those 100 companies from polluting. It takes effort to upkeep non disposable items, to live in a world where objects have purpose. Change must take place in how people live if you remove capitalism to remove pollution.
