Climate
change is not anarchy's football
"In
seeking to put politics ahead of action, Ewa Jasiewicz is engaging in
magical thinking of the most desperate kind"
George
Monbiot guardian.co.uk, Friday August 22 2008
17:00
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/22/climatechange.kingsnorthclimatecamp
in response to:
Time
for a revolution
"There
can be no state solutions to climate change: governments won't give
up the powers that lead to environmental ruin"
Ewa
Jasiewicz guardian.co.uk, Thursday August 21 2008 08:00 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/21/climatechange.kingsnorthclimatecamp
I've never got the dislike of George Monbiot from amongst the far left. He's not an anarchist, has never claimed to be, so what's the beef when he doesn't act like a good little anarchist? We don't go around being shocked, shocked, when other liberals, like Al Gore or Charles Kennedy or Paul Krugman or Bertrand Russell or John Maynard Keynes, say that they don't agree with anarchism. Why should we react any different to George Monbiot? The man's got interesting points to make, but he's not one of us. Get over it.
His article title is correct: climate change is not Anarchism's football, any more than feminism or national liberation or anti racism or any other worthy cause is. Anarchism should be based on class struggle issues before all else. That's anarchism's football.
Climate change could be resolved well (and, crucially, fairly and democratically) by a future anarchist society. But capitalist societies could just as easily tackle the issue, albeit less fairly (with the costs likely to fall on the poor, both at home and even more in the third world).
And it won't be pretty if and when the capitalist states do start to tackle climate change. Think:
Thousands of new nuclear power stations everywhere across the world, with greater risk of waste leakage, tens of more nuclear weapon states, and greater risk of terrorist nuclear or dirty weapon attacks, meaning increased first world militaries and tougher domestic law enforcement activity to ostensibly combat that risk.
Wars, possibly nuclear wars, being threatened or even waged against third world states which dare to burn carbon (which privilege will likely be the preserve only of the big first world corporations);
Higher fuel and food bills for the poor in all countries;
Economic slowdown, which is bad for the poor, but in many ways good for the rich.
George Monbiot, or the mainstream green movement in general, might go along with that sort of stuff, because they see saving the planet from climate change as above all other causes. That's their right. But I won't be joining them on that road.
George Monbiot's misunderstanding of anarchism later in his article may be willful - he has been in enough debates with anarchists and semi-anarchists to know better than his simplistic 'anarchism = no government' straw man. But then we do set ourselves up for that by our choice of name.