Some Thoughts on Climate Camp
As almost all of the readers here will know, this week has seen protests in London, the likes of which have not been seen for ten years (June 18, Guerilla Gardening, Mayday Monopoly.) They were impressive because of the form that they took, rather than because of their size, and because people were gathered not to promote a single issue but as a challenge to the entire modi operandi of the governments of the Western World. I travelled to the City of London after work on Wednesday, hoping to get near the protest outside the Bank of England (organised by a group of anarchists calling themselves G-20 Meltdown), but was unable to pass lines of riot police. I was, though, able to attend the Climate Camp on Bishopsgate outside the European Climate Exchange. The message of this protest was for the G20 to take note of the grave environmental damage that global capitalism has caused and is causing, and to fight for the rights of people around the world in these times of hardship.
The demonstration was broadly peaceful, and when violence happened, it was almost always caused by riot police charging forward, hitting people with batons and riot shields if they got in their way. There were, of course, a few people who were out of control, throwing bottles, and looking for a fight, but these were a tiny minority. The rest of the Campers were there to show their views, and to enjoy the protest (an idea somewhat alien to the hard left.) Food stalls and toilets were set up, hundreds of people had brought tents with them, and the road was barricaded with bicycles. Some people sang, played music, made banners, and decorated police vans and buildings with a plethora of improvised slogans.
Something that was interesting to me, though, was that this protest had a lack of artefacts. The left have their red flags, their kafias, their newspapers, and songs. Climate Camp was without any of these (bar a few copies of a wonderful spoof financial times that someone had printed.) So, what did people sing? Everything from All You Need Is Love, to a ten minute chorus of olé olé olé olé. Others had a ceilidh, and another band struck up some jazz. The point is that the qualitative content of all of this “creativity” was subverted by its form, that of showing the unity of the spontaneous collective. To me, this doesn’t seem like a way for the left to go. We have spent decades fighting with ideas, creating our own subversive cultures, and whilst we may sometimes reduce our ability to form a collective spirit in the way Climate Camp does, at least we have something salient to say. There doesn’t seem to be much point in having a collective only to be able to say “we are a collective” (I may be caricaturing here, as the people at climate camp do obviously have certain core beliefs, but it seems to me that in theoretical terms they don’t have a lot of depth.) This is echoed in the system of meetings, which is done on a consensus basis, leading to soft agreements. Ideas become the slaves of pragmatics, not being allowed to be examined fully or to speak for themselves.
That being said, the protest was a strong one, it got a whole load of media attention, and will hopefully have caught the eye of a few politicians and bankers. Maybe its effectiveness is spoken most clearly by the sheer brutality with which the demonstrators were treated by the police, who throughout the day acted like thugs. If events like Climate Camp were not dangerous to the status quo, then they would not be treated as such. This leads to a further point of disappointment with this weeks actions: the fact that we have seen how much more scared the state are of a few anarchists than they are of the unions. Maybe this is the true inheritance from Thatcher’s generation. The environmental lobby must find a way of organising more effectively over time, to keep the pressure on governments consistent, and to develop their ideology effectively, but for the moment what we are seeing from them is certainly positive, a means by which new people can become involved in old struggles, if not in orthodox ways.
Reader Comments
Just because the climate camp doesn’t present a single, united theoretical perspective doesn’t mean there isn’t a ‘theoretical depth’ to the arguments and discussions which the climate campers engage in. There is strength in the diversity of perspectives represented, welcomed and openly visible rather than hidden behind a dogmatic front.
Your comment implies that you both think that anarchism is less effective than unions, but that you observe it to be taken more seriously by the state. In my experience the anarchistic emphasis on individual responsibility is what invigorates the movement. As the saying goes, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds – and as it seems that the ‘orthodox ways’ have not been very effective, I would say that doing something new and different is exactly what is needed.
Emilia: The problem I have with an anarchistic approach to enviromental campaigns is that they are not particularly tailored to obtaining the kinds of solutions that are required.
In terms of getting people to adopt lower carbon lifestyles as a matter of conscience within current structures, they may well be effective. But what we need to actually reduce carbon emissions by the required amounts is massive changes to structures that normal individuals have very little controll over. We need state planning on scales that our current political climate would find almost inconcievable.
In a campaign for any individual proposal, building a specific wind farm / solar farm / local hot water project, I accept anarchistic campaign methods as a useful tactic along with more traditional methods. To get such campaigns to exist, we need a movement with a leadership who actually has well thought out plans for what the government should be doing.
Unfortunately, my own organisation (the SWP) does not at the moment provide this either. Martin Empson’s pamphlet against nuclear power would give a statistician a stroke*. The suggestion that living standards might have to change is also met with blanket condemnation.
The encouraging part is that the campaign around saving Vestas started talking about nationalisation. And if nationalised building of wind turbines is an area of plausible campaign, then so is nationalised running of wind turbines. But this campaign does not yet exist (this also raises the question of the effectiveness of wind turbines; Vestas claims that they offset their carbon cost within 9 months and have a lifespan of 25 years, but didn’t show thier working), and it will need an intimidatingly organised, unified and arithmatic driven movement to start it.
*I don’t know whether you’re pro or anti nuclear power, but lying with statistics is counterproductive whoever does it.