Australian Social Forum

Climate change is not anarchy’s football Aug 22 2008:

George Monbiot: In seeking to put politics ahead of action, Ewa Jasiewicz is engaging in magical thinking of the most desperate kind

Time for a revolution

Aug 21 2008:

Ewa Jasiewicz: There can be no state solutions to climate change: governments won’t give up the powers that leads to environmental ruin

One of the many advantages of writing a column for a major corporate newspaper, is having a headline editor. George Monbiot’s latest blog is a kick in the head for those for whom anarchist ideas, as expressed in events such as Climate Camp, are an animating vision. Insulting, inaccurate and hypocritical. Headline, teaser and body. 

Anarchists

Emma Goldman, the anarchist wrote “Nietzsche was not a social theorist, but a poet, a rebel, and innovator. His aristocracy was neither of birth nor of purse; it was the spirit. In that respect Nietzsche was an anarchist, and all true anarchists were aristocrats.”

Aristocrats 

George Monbiot is the mainstream media go-to guy for the voice of radicalism in the UK. He has global brand name recognition and celebrity. His essays are powerful and timely. Arguments are informed, cohesive and articulate. Polemics are eloquent and convincing. Prose is poetic. His rebellion against his own genetic and cultural Conservative, Tory and French ancien regime capital A aristocracy, is repeatedly and forcefully exorcised, in an impressive body and stream of work. Essays, talks, activism, books, TV shows, blogs. But unlike Nietzche or Chomsky, where is the innovation ? Sure Monbiot is a good journalist. But he has no big ideas of his own. He is a communicator and not really a thinker. 

Scientific and Social Revolutions 

Unlike the anarchist (more correctly anarcho-syndicalist or libertarian socialist self-described fellow-traveller) Noam Chomsky, who has made significant original contributions to science in the areas of linguistics, cognitive science and computing theory, George has published little on science despite his higher training as a zoologist.

If only politicians had science training he huffs in television interviews.

Chomsky’s combination of innovation and political activism, through writings on US Foreign policy, and long-time interest in libertarian socialism or anarcho-syndicalism gives his science and politics a cohesiveness that Monbiot lacks.

One could ask, if only scientists (or journalists with science degrees) had a politics degree then science could be more pragmatic. Hogwash.

Hacks 

George’s best seller; Age of Consent, advocates a global democratic system, where globalised formal systems of democracy catch-up to the globalisation of the economy (and by default politics) by financial capital and corporations.

In that almost evangelical book, Monbiot once again dismisses anarchists as unrealistic and therefore dangerous

Ernest Hemmingway during the Spanish Civil War admired the Communists and their discipline and wished it applied to the anarchists (or more correctly the anarcho-syndicalists) but for himself his attitude and style was anything but the smart uniforms and pyramid command structure of Stalin’s commisars.

Ernest wanted anarchism for himself, but communism (or more correctly authoritarian state-socialism) for everyone else.

Anarcho-Syndicalism Works 

New research from the Spanish Civil War, suggests that anarchist run industry was more efficient than under Franco OR the Communists. The anarcho-syndicalist system of government through a federation of worker cooperative controlled democratic industry.

Interestingly the 7th largest corporation in Spain today is the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, started by a Catholic priest in the Basque country, just after WW2.

In Sweden today, the largest union in the country and also the largest union in the government itself, is an anarcho-syndicalist union, the Central Organisation of the Workers of Sweden

Why is Anarchism Vital ? 

“In seeking to put politics ahead of action, Ewa Jasiewicz is engaging in magical thinking of the most desperate kind”

 Perhaps that should read 

“Anarcho-Syndicalism Sustainability vs Corporate-State Sustainment: in seeking to put politics ahead of action, George Monbiot is engaging in magical thinking of the most dangerous kind.”

Events like Climate Camp are successful precisely because of these anarchist systems of organisation.

So does Spain and the Basque country which is supported by the Mondradon worker cooperative, the Swedish government and its infiltration by an anarcho syndicalist union.

One also could argue that online communities like Wikipedia are essentially workers cooperatives operating within a anarcho-syndicalist paradigm.

Futures for Climate Change

 In the Corporate Climate Coup, by social historian David F Noble; 

Over the last decade and a half we have been subjected to two competing
corporate campaigns, echoing different time-honored corporate
strategies and reflecting a split within elite circles.

The issue of climate change has been framed from both sides of this elite divide,
giving the appearance that there are only these two sides. The first
campaign, which took shape in the late 1980's as part of the
triumphalist "globalization" offensive, sought to confront speculation
about climate change head-on by denying, doubting, deriding, and
dismissing distressing scientific claims which might put a damper on
enthusiasm for expansive capitalist enterprise.

It was modelled after and to some extent built upon the earlier campaign by the tobacco
industry to sow skepticism about mounting evidence of the deleterious
health-effects of smoking.

In the wake of this "negative" propaganda effort, any and all critics of climate change and global warming have
been immediately identified with this side of the debate.

The second positive campaign, which emerged a decade later, in the wake of Kyoto
and at the height of the anti-globalization movement, sought to get out
ahead of the environmental issue by affirming it only to hijack it and
turn it to corporate advantage.

Modelled on a century of corporate liberal cooptation of popular reform movements and regulatory regimes,
it aimed to appropriate the issue in order to moderate its political
implications, thereby rendering it compatible with corporate economic,
geopolitical, and ideological interests.

The corporate climate campaign thus emphasized the primacy of "market-based" solutions while insisting
upon uniformity and predictability in mandated rules and regulations.
At the same time it hyped the global climate issue into an obsession, a
totalistic preoccupation with which to divert attention from the
radical challenges of the global justice movement. In the wake of this
campaign, any and all opponents of the "deniers" have been identified -
and, most importantly, have wittingly or unwittingly identified
themselves - with the corporate climate crusaders.

David F Noble, formerly of MIT, is a controversial but sometimes brilliant scholar. What I think he is explaining are 3 options for the future.

Apocalypse 

This is the business-as-usual scenario. I wont repeat the litany of doom.

Needless to say, despite the greenwash this is where we are heading now. The future looks very, very grim. Apocalyptic. 

I can understand Monbiots paniced urgency.

In Noami Klein’s Shock Doctrines she describes the rise of the disaster capitalism complex. The logical organic growth for the military-industrial-entertainment complex. 

Sustainment

Susatinment is the military term for maintenance. It is the military-industrial equivalent to sustainability. Indeed, the latest US Counter-Insurgency Manual leads with Sustainment. By the supply of the logistics of life, after a disaster, like war hell-disaster, you win the peace by building bridges, schools, sewers. That is after you destroyed it. The disaster capitalists win bothe ways. They win destroying. They win by rebuilding and maintining. What they build, is a corporate-state system. It is Haliburton, Pizza Hut, Subway, Blackwater, Subway, the World Bank & IMF, Disney and Fox News. 

Obviously, climate change  - and its effects - have the potential to create such panic, that solutions like nuclear power, bio-fuels, synthetic biology and genetically modified organisms, corporatisation & privatisation, new oil exploration - will become very, very easy to sell.

 My hope, is that activists like Monbiot, who are spooked by the Apocalypse scenario do not become Sustainment Commissars where everything is justified by the danger of climate change. As Tim Flannery - who David F Noble also critiques as politically naive - writes, the future Carbon Dicatorship might diktat that people’s numbers are the problem, and that they simply must be eliminated. 

Even if all the greenwash where true, and the high-tech, corporate state solution to sustainability, sustainment where possible and at all stable, at what cost ?

It would be a freakish world, far-removed from nature and humanity. Walmart organics and News Corp climate camps.  

Liberation 

The third option, the one that Monbiot considers unworkeable “anarchy”,  what Naomi Klein calls “people’s (re)construction” and what Chomsky calls “indepenent and integrated development” many people call A Revolution of Liberation. A revolution that leads to freedom.

 You sense Liberation at Climate Camp, or a grass-roots organisation, the democratic revolutions of South America, the radical direct action of Sea Shepard. the independent democratic media projects online such as Wikipedia. You can also find it in the global justice movement.  

World Social Forum

 In reality the corporate-state solution of Kyoto was driven by global, grass-roots action. 

Meanwhile, following an indigenous uprising in Chiapas
in January, 1994, set for the first day of the implementation of the
North American Free Trade Agreement. the anti-globalization movement
erupted in world-wide protest against market capitalism and corporate
depredation, including the despoiling of the environment.

Within five years the movement had grown in cohesion, numbers, momentum and
militancy and coalesced in designated "global days of action" around
the world, particularly in direct actions at G8 summits and meetings of
the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the new World Trade
Organization, reaching its peak in shutting down the WTO meetings in
Seattle in November, 1999.

The movement, which consisted of a wide range of diverse grass-roots organizations united in opposition to the
global "corporate agenda," shook the elite globalization campaign to
its roots. It was in this charged context that the signatories of the
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. which had been formulated by
representatives from 155 nations at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, met
at the end of 1997 In Kyoto and established the so-called Kyoto
Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through carbon targets and
trading. The Kyoto treaty, belatedly ratified only in late 2004, was the sole
international agreement on climate change and immediately became the
mibellwether of political debate about global warming. 

­

Revolution from the bottom-up: the only thing that ever has worked

 Â­Let me end by quoting that great anarchist aristocrat

• The question is whether privileged elites should dominate mass communication, and should use this power as they tell us they must – namely to impose necessary illusions, to manipulate and deceive the stupid majority and remove them from the public arena. The question in brief is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved, or threats to be avoided. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured, they may well be essential to survival.
  — Noam Chomsky 2:41:40

• At this stage of history, either one of two things is possible: either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests, guided by values of solidarity, and sympathy and concern for others; or alternatively, there will be no destiny for anyone to control.
  — Noam Chomsky 2:40:53

Perhaps George should talk less and read more, or he might find himself, like his ancestors, having to flee from a revolution that he doesn’t understand or approve of.