Nineteen years ago, on this day, November 14th, 2005, 10 Downing Street was blocked with coal
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 380ppm. As of 2024 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the G7 meeting in Gleneagles that summer had made all sorts of nice, warm promises about climate change. But Blair’s government was still planning to give approval to more coal-fired power stations. And they were going to use carbon capture and storage as some sort of cover for that, a Get Out of Jail Free card. And so here we have Greenpeace, pointing to the reality rhetoric gap.
What we learn is that one of the guys driving the trucks that deposited the coal was an undercover asset for the Special Branch. Oh, the irony.
What happened next? Well, starting 2006, there were attempts to kickstart a social movement around the issue. An umbrella “Stop Climate Chaos” group had been created. And the NGOs and social movements were trying to get hold of this issue. Without success, it must be said it all died away by 2010. Everyone was exhausted and more than that, just despondent. And the emissions kept climbing. As did the atmospheric concentrations.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
Thirty years ago, on this day, November 2nd, 1994,
Greenpeace trying to attack market perceptions of energy companies
GREENPEACE has launched a strong campaign to show that market perceptions of energy companies are overblown and do not take into account the potential impact of climate change.
The environmental organisation said yesterday that climate change presented major long term risks to the carbon fuel industry which were not adequately discounted in financial analysis.
Quoting a report released in London, Greenpeace said global warming was a long term risk to investors in the carbon fuel industry.
Wilson, N. (1994) CARBON PAPER’S CLIMATE RISK WARNINGThe Australian Financial Review 3rd November [this while their Redbank case was still pending – decision came down a week later]
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 359ppm. As of 2024 it is 423.7ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Greenpeace had been banging on about the Climate Time Bomb [LINK] . The first UNFCCC Conference of the Parties was due to take place in another four months in Berlin. And Greenpeace was trying to rally the “responsible” and responsive within the capitalist sector to show up in every sense, especially the reinsurance industry. This is an entirely sensible tactic. I think it didn’t work, but that’s hardly Greenpeace’s fault.
What we learn is that capitalism is by no means a monolith. Intrasectoral and intersectoral battles are always going on. Groups like Greenpeace will try and enlist and mobilise, which you can call cowardly or you can call sensible – it depends how you’re feeling, I guess. None of it worked, many of us are gonna die messily and soon.
What happened next? COP1 happened. Insurance and reinsurance groups turned up for day one and then went home. The oil executives stuck around. Guess who won. And you can read more about this in Jeremy Leggett’s the Carbon War.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
Still here? Okay, thanks for the vote of confidence.
Now. Read this [link]. Ideally out loud. Ideally twice. Then stop and think about what that would feel like.
Want some more? From some Brits who only moved to the States a couple of years ago? The BBC can oblige. Here you go.
If you need a dose of vicarious misery pornography, and the Middle East doesn’t do it for you (wrong colour people, wrong languages etc) then Mother Nature and the 24hr news beast can provide. Endless photos, horror stories. Here comes the 21st century.
And of course, as you will also know if you’ve been following this even cursorily, there are just tons of “conspiracy theories” doing the rounds, and a lot (no, I mean a LOT) of articles, tweets about that. Which is what I am here to write about.
The articles include these three, which are both worth your time
The first two (I’ve added the Heglar upon finding it, on Oct 13) are very focussed – as journalists and pundits often are – on the recent past. Not so many of them make the obvious points (reasons of space, and focus and time and so on) that
There is a good book by Jason Rodger Fleming (2012) on all this, called Fixing the Sky. The cover art is from a 1950s magazine article, and you can see it in this All Our Yesterdays tile.
3. There have been stories about people controlling the weather for, well, since humans began telling the stories. Gods would do it and then their self-appointed ‘ambassadors’ on earth would (claim to do it). It’s a standard sci-fi trope. The two examples below are among MANY. I chose them because
a) They’re from the mid-1970s, when ALL sorts of anxieties were knocking about (the seeming end of prosperity, cheap oil, the American empire, the emergence of climate threats etc).
b) I have read them both and loved them, since watching Geostorm. My article (Hudson, 2017) on that disaster film includes LOTS of examples of weather control films, and some excellent observations from a ‘sci-fi tragic’ friend I am seeing tomorrow, for the first time in far too long.
c) The covers are mint.
And these novels were inspired by things like HAARP –
“High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, a US government-funded program that studies the ionosphere” [Wikipedia].
Not to haarp on about it…
4. People can have a hard time separating stories they have heard a lot from “reality” (like, you know, bearded sky gods who take a personal interest in whose and what type of genitals an individual is rubbing their own genitals against).
Also, have we all forgotten Donald F – sorry, ‘J’ – Trump and his sharpie? The Dorian-Alabama thing in 2019, aka Sharpiegate. Have we?
Philosophical interlude
What did we do in response to the pain we can’t imagine? And the ‘stupidity’ we are sure we are better than? We – some of the best among us – reported and commented on what was happening without offering historical, political, psychological context. Blinded by our fear of what is already here, and what it presages.
Conspiracy theories about weather manipulation are, unfortunately, the logical next step in climate denialism, and the traction they are getting shows how hard it is to get out of this absurdly terrifying loop.
I know we shouldn't expect consistency from conspiracy fantasists, but seeing people claim that "human beings can't possibly alter the climate" AND "human beings are causing hurricanes with cloud seeding/chemtrails/Jewish space lasers" suggests we really are doomed as a species.
I know we shouldn’t expect consistency from conspiracy fantasists, but seeing people claim that “human beings can’t possibly alter the climate” AND “human beings are causing hurricanes with cloud seeding/chemtrails/Jewish space lasers” suggests we really are doomed as a species.
I can hear the objections, that I am being unfair to these (good) thinkers and misunderstanding the limits of a limited social media platform. SO I say, calmly and quietly, the following.
YES I KNOW THESE ARE TWEETS BUT THERE ARE SUCH THINGS AS
Twitter threads
Blogs and columns you write and then tweet about to your tens/hundreds of thousands of followers so they are not merely confirmed in their fear/disdain, but forced to think.
And the rest of us? We do like to the mock the Jewish Space Laser people. (I understand that impulse, and give into it most of the time)
And we push the stupidity narrative.
And we framed the problem as (only) stupidity. And not our stupidity.
I will say this several times in the rest of this rant. The stupidity narrative (especially on its own) doesn’t help. You could almost say it is… what’s the word… stupid?
But it is both easy and also it makes us feel good. And ultimately, what matters more than that?
Most of the people pushing these lines probably don’t like the Conservatives very much. And if they’re old enough and British, they probably didn’t like John Major (UK Conservative Prime Minister from 1990 to 1997).
In February 1993, speaking to the entirely wonderful newspaper the Mail on Sunday, Major said – in the context of the murder of a 2-year old boy by two 10 year-olds – “ ‘Society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less,”
But we need to condemn a little less and understand a little more.
What’s the backstory?
The back story is not just “neoliberalism” (though that really hasn’t helped. It is not as if the “Keynesian” government of the Glorious 30 (1945-1973) were beloved (see Seabrook, 1978; Gross, 1980; Slater, 1972). Things weren’t great before (though in retrospect they look like, well, a Golden Age). Nearly 40 years of ‘austerity’ and widening wealth gaps has happened.
Enormous social changes (some for the ‘better’, some perhaps not). Enormous technological changes. People feel hella disorientated, aggrieved etc.
And on neoliberalism? It is part of the response to the Crisis of Democracy. What’s that? Well, here’s a short Noam Chomsky video.
But humans are also fragile, cognitively. It’s easy to plant false memories in them. [Wikipedia]. And we are so surrounded by stories, all day. We are made of dreams and bones, sang Pete Seeger. And stories.
It’s a comforting story, people believe it. And it is a very short sidestep to Smart, Qualified People acting nefariously in cahoots with the WEF, OECD, PTA, whoever.
At least somebody is in charge, at least somebody knows what is going on. “Phew, we do, ultimately, live in a rational society.”
Except, remember that Nate Bear article you didn’t go and read? Or you did and you’re about to get a repeat….
Bear talks about reading a well-meaning tweet from someone who laments ‘if only we’d been told about the brain-damage aspect of COVID in 2020, we’d have acted differently’ and observes it got a lot of likes and retweets. And Bear writes
I’m going to be honest about what this says to me.
It says that too few people who consider themselves informed, clever, rational, followers of science, have spent any time thinking about how bad things happen and why.
It suggests to me a certain amount of privilege in your circumstances and life experiences.
My brain kind of translates it as how did I, a white person in the global north, where I thought we had our shit together, end up living in such an irrational society?
Bear, N. 2024.
What about the race, class, gender and general powerlessness (stripped out civil society). And the pandemic if you haven’t spoken of it before and anyhoo, recap
So, here’s a new section I am going to put in all these sorts of rants, I mean, “considered and very publishable in respected outlets think pieces.” You can call it mechanical, abrupt, virtue-signally, whatever floats your boat. I will call it forcing myself to think about things I can – as a white, male, hetero, middle-class, able-bodied mofo – very easily pretend don’t actually matter (pro-tip, they do).
Incomplete list to consider (e.g. age, species)
Well then.
Race
Why might black people be suspicious of the medical system? Why might they have crazy crazy ideas about being neglected, or used as unconsenting guinea pigs, their diseases treatable but left untreated? BECAUSE IT HAPPENED. But that sort of thing has definitely stopped. For sure. Yes.
Class
Just go reread the quote about losing everything at the top. And also look at the people in that meme with the bandages on their ears. They are of a different class. They are part of a class that likes Trump’s tax cuts. And the permission Trump gives them to sneer at anyone Not Them.
Gender
Think about all this in interplay. And think about what it will be like for female meteorologists. Remember, when the death threats started flying at Australian climate scientists in the late 2000s, women copped more. And still are (as per Gergis, 2024).
Powerlessness
It’s all combined. The neoliberalism (destroying the democratic state), the algorithms and surveillance and carceral state. The sense of hopelessness that anything will get better, that the enormous challenges will be dealt with. There ARE evil actors out there, meaning harm. But it’s easier to punch on meteorologists than the people who wrote Project 2025, because those guys have the power to mess you up good and proper. So allow your fear, hate, despair, anger to be channelled towards punching ‘down’.
Pandemic
Unprocessed trauma. Trauma about how the whole thing has been memory-holed. See also Terror Management Theory
Synergy/intersectionality
Yeah. If you have to ask, you won’t ever understand.
Time for more Bear. Read more Bear.
“Under conditions of depoliticisation, people either reach for conspiracies or mold their understanding of events into long-standing explanations of the world. This goes as much for centrists and even some leftists as it does for the right.
“Centrists famously lack the ability to see the world through prisms of imperial capitalist power, leftists see imperial capitalist power behind every crisis, and the right see manufactured threats to a loosely defined freedom as behind every crisis.”
Bear, 2024
What it implies/what is coming next(what hand-wringing opportunities for guilty impotent liberals [most of us] lie ahead?
At times like this, one needs to quote the famous Swedish political philosophers Ulvaeus, and Andersson.
“Something bad is happening, I’m sure you do agree
People care for nothing, no respect for human rights
Evil times are coming, we are in for darker nights”
The anger and all the rest of it isn’t going away, whether Trump i) wins, ii) steals or iii) is somehow unable to steal and that nice Kamala Harris gets into the White House. The goose, like the planet, is well and truly cooked.
More death threats and shit against the impact scientists (meteorologists, disaster preparedness etc etc – see the Walzer quote below).
What is to be done? (by social movement organisations. But won’t be)
Oh, the usual.
Create and maintain functional groups that support members, extend their skills, knowledge and relationships while avoiding co-optation, cognitive capture, repression and burnout.
Work with other similarly effective groups across a range of issues (all the issues), sharing resources and working to democratise the state (good luck with that) and using the state to control private concentrations of power.
Create and defend venues for individuals and networks to figure out what is actually going on.
Easy-peasy.
It’s the only way you’ll prevent climate meltdown, and as long as you start in the early 1970s and work consistently and persistently and don’t suffer too many setbacks, by about 2026 or so you’ll be home free.
What are the academic theories I find useful for thinking about this/Concepts for you to use (in rough order of importance or alphabetical order or no order whatsoever because there were other things I had to do and anyway i) ymmv and ii) about three people are reading these
Terror Management Theory [Wikipedia] – people scared of death. And they figure ways to ignore it, blame others
Anti-reflexivity – we’re fed up with how damn COMPLICATED the world has gotten. See this by McCright and Dunlap.
It’s a bit of a miracle that an article (okay, rant) about conspiracy theories hasn’t already referenced Lewis Carrol and “Six impossible things before breakfast.”
Well, here’s three impossible things to do before breakfast. (Also, like accusations, every bit of advice is a confession).
A little humility
Maybe (we) liberals could reflect on all the patently absurd shit we either believe or find convenient to pretend in pubic to believe?
About markets, democracy, progress, the capacity of their institutions to cope with climate change.
A little fucking humility might be in order (1)
Marilyn Robinson’s 1989 book Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State and Nuclear Pollution was so incendiary that those loveable scamps at Greenpeace sued her for libel (and won). Among its many gems was one she wrote(and I can’t find the exact page number or quote, so this is a paraphrase – if you have a copy, please let me know) (2).
“Most people know a little about some things and nothing about everything else. They have little islands of knowledge in vast seas of ignorance”
And Robinson was writing thirty years ago, before the sea level rise – literal and of metaphorical ignorance was rising.
A little empathy, compassion, hermeneutical phenomenology, whatever label you want to stick on it.
Who knows, maybe some compassion and imagining what the world would look like in someone else’s shoes? (3).
Update on October 13, 2024 – See this from Heglar (2024) on the question of compassion
So why are folks running to invent new conspiracy theories when the real, undeniable conspiracy is right there? Because for them to change their mind would be to lose a very real part of their identity and, perhaps, to have to consider the possibility that some of their other beliefs may not be real either. And that might mean they need to find new communities or even new families. Changing your mind about something as colossal as the ground you live on and the air you breathe is not unlike coming out of a cult.
But we don’t treat people that way. We treat them like doofuses who fell for an obvious lie. Ultimately, who does that serve? Perhaps it’s time we start treating these people as what they are: victims of a manipulative, deliberate lie. And then turn our attention back toward the people who lied to them.
TO BE CLEAR: THIS IS DISTINCT FROM CONDONING OR TOLERATING DEATH THREATS.
Earn your ‘keep’ as intellectuals and tackle the “Warzel challenge” Remember those two articles at the beginning of this post. Well, the second was by a guy called Warzel. “We need new ways of thinking.”
The whip-smart American journalism professor Jay Rosen (you should follow him) screengrabbed this bit below of Warzel’s essay. I’ve not got access to the full Warzel, but I trust Rosen to get to the crux.
Maybe stop fucking wallowing in the fucking smugosphere and riding the emotacycle off the cliff? Eh?
And as anyone who knows the author can attest, if you’re getting humility advice from Marc Fucking Hudson, you are in far deeper shit than you actually understand
The closest a perfunctory google search (GoogleBooks not letting search of MC) was this
“How is one to understand the degradation of the sea and earth and air of the British homeland by people who use the word British the way others of us use the words good, and just, and proud, and precious, and lovely, and clement, and humane? No matter that these associations reflect and reinforce the complacency that allows the spoliation to go unchecked; still, surely they bespeak self-love, which should be some small corrective. I think ignorance must be a great part of the explanation–though ignorance so obdurate could be preserved only through an act of will.” From Granta.
This had me making some jibe about MTG (the g stands for gourd – as in Empty Gourd. Geddit?” It’s not funny (but I thought it was at the time) and it is EXACTLY the sort of shit that is going to piss people off for no benefit. I have ZERO problem pissing people off if there is a potential benefit (to them and me both, ideally). But for the yucks? Really? Isn’t that just using other people’s misery and confusion to make us feel more powerful and superior in the moment? Isn’t that morally and politically bankrupt? Oughtn’t I to grow the fuck up?
See also what else I’ve written
Oh, there is the old “Conspiracy -Apocalypse- Paranoia” booklet I should dig out and scan because it is bound to be startlingly brilliant, oh yes.
See also what other people have written
When the Conversation article goes live, I will post it here.
On October 11, 2016, five brave climate activists, determined to act commensurately with the truth of unfolding climate cataclysm, closed safety valves on the 5 pipelines carrying tar sands crude oil into the United States. This is their story.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 404ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was Canadian and US companies were extracting huge amounts of oil from tar sands; the filthiest kind of oil you can imagine. The getting of it is especially destructive. So what do we do? We try to take nonviolent direct action and throw ourselves on the mercy of the courts. But the beast, the machine, the Juggernaut continues and the emissions climb.
What do we learn that there’s a juggernaut, and it’s hungry.
What happened next? From Wikipedia
All five participants planned to use the necessity defence to draw attention to their cause and justify their actions,[6] though three were not permitted to do so.[7] The judge presiding over the Johnston & Klapstein trial, Robert Tiffany, initially ruled that they could mount the necessity defense.[8] However, he then reversed his decision, prohibiting expert testimony that would establish the argument for necessity,[9] before dismissing the case before the defendants could present its necessity defense.[10] Klapstein said she was happy the charges were dismissed, but “at the same time, we were indeed disappointed not to be able to present this to the jury. We were hoping to educate the jury and the classroom of greater public opinion on the dire issues of climate change”.[9] Foster, Higgins, and Ward were prohibited by the judges overseeing their cases from mounting the necessity defense.[11]
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
I hope your 18th birthday is a day of happiness for you (1) with your family, friends and wider community.
Birthdays are celebrations, time for reflection and thinking about the future. There was a time when that was mostly in the context of a person’s own circumstances, and that of their family. Over the last generation – since before you were born – birthdays (and of course every day) happen with the dreadful knowledge of climate change.
I am not going to explain to someone living in the South Pacific what that means.
For the people where I live, sea level rise is an abstract thing. They think – if they think of it at all – as lines on a graph. For people where I live, storms that flatten towns and islands are something they see in Hollywood disaster movies or, lately, on television news programs.
Nor am I not going to whitesplain colonialism, extractivism or the ways your life is hemmed in by rich people and their corporations who want to get richer.
I am not going to lecture you about white people who claim to have your best interests at heart, Through The Power Of The Free Markets or under some other banners. You know all about these types of people, their words and the value of those words from your own life, from the hard-won wisdom of your parents and your elders.
All I have got for you is the following.
The day you were born, Monday October 9th, 2006, Australian charities and scientists were trying to get Australian politicians to give a damn about the problems climate change was already causing for your parents, and the ever-greater threat it would pose to you as you grew from child to adult.
Australian politicians either ignored this report, or used it as a step up for their own hollow ambition.
If I could see you, I suspect I would see a raised eyebrow and a quiet smile. “You expect surprise? Shock?”
When I was turning 18, the newspapers and television (this was before the Internet, long before social media) were full of “The Greenhouse Effect,” as we called climate change back then.
So my first advice’ – let no-one tell you that somehow they didn’t know.
If you will allow a second, final piece of advice. It is natural for a young person on the cusp of adulthood to be deeply frustrated with the world they have inherited, that those older have not sorted out the big problems. On climate, please do not blame your parents. Or your grandparents. The people of the South Pacific have been raising their voices for decades, pleading with the rich countries to act, explaining that the peril facing the South Pacific would grow and grow, and devour everything.
That they were basically ignored is not the fault of the speakers, but those too greedy, arrogant and stupid to listen. The problem is not to be found in Kiribati, or Tuvalu or anywhere near you. The problem is in New York, Manchester, Canberra, Adelaide, Auckland, Berlin. And elsewhere. But I am not here, in this letter, for geopolitics.
For my part, I will continue my inadequate efforts. I will try to be an ally. I will fail repeatedly, of course. But people like me – with privilege, education, water coming out of my tap and food in my belly – have far more to do than we have been doing, if we want to be able to look you – and any children you have – in the eye.
Finally, I hope, despite the knowledge of what is coming (some of it is already here, but so much more is to come), that your celebrations are full of joy. And at some point, of course, thanks to the November 2023 agreement, welcome to Australia.
Footnote
By the way, you are both a tired rhetorical device, but at the same time, you are flesh and blood; dozens and dozens of real human beings, with names, hopes, families, endangered homes, becoming an “adult” (or turning 18 – perhaps that does not have the same cultural or legal weight where you live) across the South Pacific.
“If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that’s something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can’t live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organisations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time.”
Anon
How do we honour the Just Stop Oil soup throwers?
That’s it. That’s the blog.
This is mostly bullet points, scattered “rhetoric” (doggerel) and my usual “robustness” (1), because, for reasons (2) I am continuing to not deliver (but still gestate) that promised poetic palaver about what the JSO action “means”. You can see my 11 theses (sank without trace more on that below) here.
How do we honour the Just Stop Oil soup throwers?
We will come back to the How. Let’s skip for now to we. Who is “we”? Probably you. It’s people who “get” climate change (not as many as there should be, 35 years into the public phase of the crisis). Even if you think the soup throwers were worse than useless (and I sympathise with that view!), please read on, because by honour I do not mean celebrate.
Principally I am aiming these challenges (3) at people who want to see a better (i.e. less “being killed at ever-higher velocity and ferocity”) world.
“We” is those who try to take action, spread the word about the overlapping crises, including climate, and who think that the soup-throwers are at worst misguided or at best brave, clear Examples To Us All. If you are on that spectrum, then great (4).
Honour?
I do not mean celebrate.
I do. NOT. mean. Celebrate.
I do not mean “turn into plaster saints and martyrs.” (though that might be part of how we support them).
I mean, how do we take what they did seriously? Not the action, necessarily, but the willingness to face consequences.
And what do I mean by “soup-throwers”?
Synecdoche. There’s these non-violent symbolic actions (NVSA) and then there’s also the NVDA undertaken by people blocking oil refineries etc. And getting into arms factories. And let’s remember that in many many parts of the world environmental activists are lucky if they end up in jail. A more permanent punishment (bullet in the neck, body in a ditch, or … disappeared) is common and getting commoner.
So. Pause a second. You’ve read this far. Have you asked yourself that question before now? If yes, think on your answer. Happy? If not, go on. Jot something else down.
Never thought about it before? Jot something down.
I do not care about my answers (some are below, and more will follow but sfw). You should not care about my answers (sfw, right?).
Please care about YOUR answers. And about how you arrive at them. In discussion with who? And what you then DO about those answers. If you take anything from the rest of this rant (and it is a rant), that is it.
YOUR answers to that question – answers you do not have to arrive at on your own, alone in a box right now – are what matters. Well, to be precise, the actions you take after you come to provisional answers are what matters.
If you think you have no answers and will never have any and therefore can stop reading. PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GAIA I IMPLORE YOU TO RESIST THAT UNDERSTANDABLE IMPULSE, THAT REACHING FOR THE COMFORT OF OBLIVION.
Because
You DO have answers. You are just scared of them and their implications
Even before you have answers that satisfy you (and they may never satisfy you. Mine never have and I am an old fucker), you can help other people find their answers. That, already, is a contribution.
Still here? Well, okay, so I lied. There are four questions. I lie a lot about this sort of stuff. Bait and switch.. It doesn’t matter
How do we “honour the soup-throwers”?
As individuals? Here, now, next week.
As individuals in groups trying to slow down the acceleration of the destruction of the planet and all its beauty?
As individuals in places of work, worship, leisure, “etc”, with minimal power as individuals?
How do we help OTHER people honour the soup-throwers? How do we build platforms, venues and “norms” so that these questions – can be discussed more broadly, and then acted on?
I am going to set out in the rest of this rant (and it is still a rant) what MY answer the first question is, sorta. And have a light pass at the fourth, and beg your help.
I am going to make a commitment (it won’t last, but then again, maybe it will). That’s gonna be called MAB – Marc’s Andon Board. No, don’t click on the link. It’s repeated below.
I am going to ask you to begin to answer these four questions, and to encourage other people to answer those questions. Especially any prominent people you know, people who spend their time telling everyone about how fucked the world is and how awful the State-Corporate response to climate change has been, is being, but who rarely if ever ponder our 35 years of failure to force the State-Corporate beast to behave itself.
How do we honour the soup throwers as individuals?
The standard answer is let’s “Redouble our efforts” As per Boxer in Animal Farm, whenever confronted with failure, his answer was always – “I will work harder.
Yes, but if we’re doing the wrong things (and sometimes we are), doing them twice as much and twice as fast isn’t the win you think it is.
The promise feels good (until you don’t keep it, but hey, nobody’s holding your feet to the fire), but the reality after, not so much?
If we really want to honour the soup-throwers, we have to think hard about failure. Which is hard.
To quote Hudson’s 7th thesis on Futility
The failure is that of parties, politicians, churches, unions, industry associations, social movements, academics (ESPECIALLY academics. Court jesters without the lulz). Failure to be honest, brave, persistent, clear-sighted. Failure to resist co-optation, repression. So much pain, shame.
Because until we admit that the soup-throwing is a sign of desperation, a sign of the lack of a huge mass movement that refuses to be cowed, bought off, confused, then we are stuck.
And all the way back in 2018, that was the promise, wasn’t it? Fill the jails, force the government to declare a climate emergency, force the creation of citizen assemblies that would short-circuit the power of the vested interests/institutional inertia. The Truth, told, would set us free. Yeah, nah.
But it’s too easy to blame the 2018 “crop” of activists. This isn’t about “blame” (morality tales and other ourobososes). This is about systems (more on that another post) and about courage.
Courage on its own is not enough
The soup throwers, especially the post-sentencing-of-the-first-batch-batch have enormous courage. Nobody can dispute it.
But courage is not enough.
The sound of a splat of soup versus thick glass, is the same sound as the noise of tactics without strategy. Thatt’s the noise before defeat. Well, alongside defeat
But while we are on courage, this. The soupthrowers have it. They are willing to face severe consequences: physical, financial, mental. Deprivation of liberty for prolonged periods.
Surely “we” should honour THEIR courage by matching it with some of the other forms of courage out there that don’t get talked about. Courage to face our pasts. Courage to face confronting emotions. Courage to face beliefs we have about ourselves, our tribes and our societies that maybe were never true, or maybe are no longer true: cognitive courage.
So, how do we honour them? We honour them by being brave enough to have courage.
And courageous enough to be honest enough to know that our courage, on our own, is dreadfully and pitifully finite.
We honour them by accepting, both emotionally and intellectually, that without networks of support – networks of friends, families, neighbours, members of congregations, groups, friends we’ve had on the Internet for years whose voices we may never even have heard – we will fail. The courage will be boiled away by the firestorms of daily horror.
Without networks that we build, extend, nurture, we will be left in not just the same state we were before we decided to try to honour the soupthrowers, but WORSE, because we will have known what we needed to do, what we promised ourselves to do, and yet failed to do it.
So. Here is the unsolicited advice (come on, you always knew it was going to come).
Have a conversation with two or three different people about what honouring the soup throwers looks like FOR YOU. Is it to engage in local activism? To re-engage? To learn a new skill? To challenge, with courage and commitment, something that is not going well in a campaigning group you are in. Or something else.
Start with your dilemma, your goal, and how you really want their help, their en-courage-ment.
If you can be concrete, specific, then maybe that. If not, trust they will listen (but be ready, of course, if they don’t)
Be open to their nos, to their doubts.
Start where you are, with something small. A commitment that you will do x or y or z, and that to do that you need their support (mentorship, advice, feedback. Whatever).
And here’s the second plea. We have to be public about this. We have to try to start a conversation about “how do we honour the soupthrowers?”
It’s a lousy title, because it centres a divisive (and frankly not very clever) tactic. Soupthrowing gets people’s backs up. I’ve been using it so far as a place-holder. If I were making a Hashtag of it all I wouldn’t seriously consider any o fthese
#BlessedAreTheSoupThrowers [As per Life of Brian “It refers to any manufacturer of vegan products” ]
#SupportYourLocalSoupThrower (James Garner vibe)
#SoupThrowersOfTheWorldUnite
Canning the whole “soup-thrower” thing I tried this
#ItsNotTooLateToDieMoreClassily
#LetsFaceExtinctionWithHonour
#BetterClimateAction
#DownWithTheSmugosphere
Perhaps we just need
#CollectiveCourage
Any other suggestions?
Here’s my plea, in specifics.
Please try to get OTHER people, especially high profile people doing this. Here’s a draft letter. Modify as you see fit.
Dear X, I like and respect your work. I’ve read your books/Twitter threads. I’ve watched your documentaries/TikToks.
I know you know we’re in deep shit.
I am writing to bring to your attention a proposal from Marc Hudson, a UK-based activist of dubious morals and pleasantness.
He is trying to get a conversation going about “how do we really honour and support the soup throwers” [the activists who threw the soup at the Van Gogh sunflowers painitng (and in fact all people struggling for freedom, dignity, sanity and survival everywhere, often under conditions far far more dangerous [deadly] than them.]
He doesn’t mean a solidarity campaign for the release of those people (though of course that’s part of the support.
He is trying to get people answering four questions. I think the questions are okay, and I am posting them here. Then again maybe you have other questions).
How do we “honour the soup-throwers”?
1, As individuals? Here, now, next week.
2, As individuals in groups trying to slow down the acceleration of the destruction of the planet and all its beauty?
3, As individuals in places of work, worship, leisure, “etc”, with minimal power as individuals?
4, How do we help OTHER people honour the soup-throwers? How do we build platforms, venues and “norms” so that these questions – can be discussed more broadly, and then acted on?
He’s suggesting the hashtag #CollectiveCourage
I am going to have a go at having conversations with people whose opinion I trust. But I only have a very small platform. It would be great if YOU would try to get wider conversations going.
Okay, so I know all this is hubristic (not for the first time). I know it won’t “work.” But to allow that knowledge to paralyse me is to dishonour people who are facing (or indeed doing) serious time. Not to mention those corpses in the ditches and those bodies under the bombs.
Finally
What happens if we don’t do this?
We continue to fail. James Baldwin said “not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Well, if we don’t face past failure, and the likelihood that any courage we try to muster will vanish instantly, we will continue to fail.
We are probably going to fail anyway. It is probably too late to salvage anything from the ruins. We’ve been warned for over 50 years about trouble ahead at a planetary level. Some of us believed, acted, but not enough of us, not enough, not with enough power. And here we are.
Why won’t we do this?
Because it’s scary. It involves us getting out of our normal roles, and talking about things we don’t feel qualified to talk about. It’s safe to stay talking about the science we were trained in, or the policy systems we know intimately.
Other people will tell us they are unhappy, threatened. They will tell us we are risking ridicule, harming our reputations.
We will worry that we have nothing to say. We will wonder if it’s because we are somehow “not smart enough”, rather merely not brave enough. And for those of us who pride ourselves on our “intelligence”, that is soul-threatening.
It involves us failing at things that really matter.
How won’t we do this?
This is easy .Three ways
Ignore the call – click through, bookmark, but never come back.
Smear the call(er). “What a fuckwit. What a narcissist, telling people what they should be discussing, just to cope with his irrelevance, his unwillingness to do high-risk activism. Loser.”
“What a waste of time. He wants a pity party, he wants to see us all tearing each other down. It’s probably some sort of psyop from 77th Brigade.”
3, Do it half-assed (for reasons; a) we don’t really believe in it but feel obliged to pretend we do to look brave/responsible. . b) We believe in it but are threatened by it and are going to allow our fears and uncertainties to run the show
How will we WILL do it
This is what I will do.
I will put up my Andon Board post tonight. See here. Once I put an Andon Board up itself, I will write more over the coming days about these other questions.
I will send this post and a personal cover letter to people I know, people I respect, people I haven’t spoken to for years, people I fell out with, people I didn’t.
Ultimately, personal example doesn’t actually get anything very far. George Monbiot tried to get public figures to talk honestly about their money and where it came from. People applauded him and did not follow his lead.
If we are going to honour the soupthrowers courage – have courage, build courage, replenish courage, it will be a collective endevaour.
Thirty years ago, on this day, October 2nd, 1994, as the battle for a carbon tax heats up…
THE FRIENDS and enemies of Phillip Toyne, acquired during years of very public struggle over Aboriginal land rights and the environment, were in a stunned state at the ALP’s national conference in Hobart this week.
The news that one of the hardest nosed and most controversial among Australian activists had joined, of all things, the Commonwealth’s environment bureaucracy (at deputy secretary, level, no less), delighted and appalled in equal measure.. …..
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 359ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Phillip Toyne had been a thorn in the side of the Hawke government. He, as the chair of the Australian Conservation Foundation, had also done really useful work on Aboriginal land rights. And now he was tempted to try to change the system from within by becoming a senior bureaucrat for John Faulkner, the Federal Environment Minister, who was publicly toying with the idea of introducing a carbon tax.
What we learn is that people who try to change the system from within get sentenced to 20 months or years of boredom. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
What happened next. Toyne was unsuccessful. I don’t know when he quit, but it was pretty clear after February 10 1995, that no meaningful action was going to happen on climate change in Australia, at least not at the federal level. Toyne died in 2015. Having fought the good fight.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs
There’s a longer poetic piece I want to write, that properly honours the courage of the Just Stop Oil soup-throwers (among others), while ALSO lamenting the state of the climate “movement” for its lack of capacity, its lack of strategy, its substitution of moral calls and acts for any form of politics.
I am busy, unwell, bewildered, groggy on steroids. This is what you get instead. I hope to come back to it.
Short version, pretty much laid out as some Theses. Let’s say 11 of the blighters, to pick a number at random
As a species we are in extremely deep trouble, though most of us seem not to know it. The juggernaut we created is crashing through various “planetary boundaries”. We’re running every red light.
Those of us who do know it are stuck in various “praxis traps” and cognitive traps of our own making. We write excellent essays about our lassitude, our fatigue, and/or we throw paint at works of art in the hope of shocking “The Powers That Be” (state? Civil society?) into action – a version of what I have called elsewhere the “Scraped Knee” theory of activism.
When the soup-throwing (etc) happens, it acts as a kind of Rorschach test (the inkblots where you see what you want/need to see.”Immature alarmist narcissists blocking ambulances!” “Brave truth-tellers”.
Others use the events to have side-battles about the evils/idiocy of the State/Capitalism and its ecocidal trajectory. Arguing tossers arguing the toss. Everyone is confirmed in their own righteousness.
These events act not just as inkblot tests, but also “affordances” – they allow and disallow certain responses. The responses are along established, comforting lines. They DISALLOW/render harder OTHER responses.
The key thing they prevent (to most everyone’s relief) is a discussion of the failure of Western societies to take ecological limits seriously. 35 (well, 50) years of warnings, ignored. Fantasies of market or technological salvation instead. Failure.
The failure is that of parties, politicians, churches, unions, industry associations, social movements, academics (ESPECIALLY academics. Court jesters without the lulz). Failure to be honest, brave, persistent, clear-sighted. Failure to resist co-optation, repression. So much pain, shame.
The impossible failure humiliates us. We can’t face it, so we pick villains (and villains DO exist). This politician. That oil company. That craven professor. That astroturf group. ANYONE but OUR tribe. Hooray for our side. We are pure. We are good. We are the victim.
We are trapped tight in webs of complicity, futility, hate, anger, despair, self-loathing, narcissism (much of this encouraged, of course, by the machine, the juggernaut).
10 Conversations abt what to do differently – to have a vibrant rigorous, vigorous “civil society” response – would require us to already HAVE a vibrant rigorous vigorous civil society. If we had had that over the last 35 years (plus), we would possibly not be in such a god awful mess.
11. Final thesis – Activists have always tried to interpret and “win” (status, policy footholds, social changes) within the rules of the game. The point is to change it.
How? Who? Which herds of cats get belled by which mice doing what differently? FIIK.
Sixty years ago, on this day, October 1st, 1964, the Free Speech Movement is launched on the campus of University of California, Berkeley.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 319ppm. As of 2024 it is 4xxppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the black civil rights movement was underway. The upsurge had been going on, especially since sort of ‘57, didn’t pause: the sit ins and SNCC. And white people had gone (in relatively small numbers) to the Deep South, to help with voter registration, and education, and so forth. And then these people had come back and wanted to continue campaigning on university campuses. And those in control of university campuses, especially University of California Berkeley, weren’t having any of it. And this confronted the activists with a dilemma. They were battle-hardened. They had been arrested and brutalised in the South. So what campus cops and so forth could dish out was not as big a deal as it had been. They’ve also been battle-hardened by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and its roadshow, which by the way, had not come to California since 1960 because they’d been basically beaten out of town with their tail between their legs. But I’m digressing.
What we learn is that the histories and I think they’re right, suggest that the Free Speech Movement on Berkeley campus is that kind of bridge incident and bridge organisation between the black civil rights movement and what would come next. Of course, people involved didn’t know what would come next, but it would be anti-war, feminism, gay rights. And yes, also the environment, not to mention Indian rights, Puerto Rican rights, etc. And these bridge moments, you don’t know that you’re in them, probably.
What happened next, Mario Savio gave his “throw your body on the gears of the machine” speech.
The issue became not just free speech on campus, and black civil rights, but also the war in Vietnam, which in a few months would pick up serious momentum with Operation Rolling Thunder.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
The Australian author Tim Winton has written an essential, bound-to-be-controversial essay (1) about climate change and why the kids are so upset. And why all of us are, except we can’t really name it or see it. Winton borrows some language and ideas to help us see the world differently. It’s bold, and uses an analogy – with colonialism – that might get him in a lot of trouble (we shall see).
In this essay (blog post, article – someone please PAY ME to think) I want to explain what Winton says, why it matters, where he might be wrong or misconstrued, why that matters, what is missing from his essay (not much – it’s really good. But one crucial piece…). Finally, crucially, I try to suggest what “we” are supposed to do differently now.
I can’t match Winton’s eloquence, so I won’t even try. (2) What follows may come across as bland, boring, hectoring, irritating. It is probably all of these things and more. But this isn’t an aesthetic argument he is making, nor me. It’s an existential one. Please attack the content not the form.
What Winton says
You should read it. It’s not long, but it may take you a while. The title is clickbait (presumably not chosen by Winton – headlines rarely are)
“Our leaders are collaborators with fossil fuel colonialists. This is the source of our communal dread”
Calling people kapos tends to get their backs up (even if – especially if – they are, in fact, kapos) and lead to tedious Godwin’s Law invocations etc etc. Get past that.
In a nutshell Winton says
There are tedious attacks on young people for being “out of sorts”
It’s not an “it was ever thus” situation – the kids ARE NOT alright (mood, despair)
They are out of sorts because they know their parents and grandparents have utterly fucked the planet and that all that is left to an impossible hellscape that makes Mad Max look like the Alps in Sound of Music before the Nazis rock up (I paraphrase, but not by much)
To understand all this, says Winton – why everyone feels gutpunched, sucker-punched and helpless, we could turn to the experience of colonised people, for example in Algeria (North Africa) in the mid-20th century. Winton then uses a French-Algerian thinker, psychiatrist and resistance figure called Frantz Fanon, who wrote a famous book called “The Wretched of the Earth” and was a crucial figure in helping colonised people figure out what was being done not just to their bodies, but their heads
There’s a lot of work to be done. Hoping for technomiracles or kvetching about Labor politicians being no better (worse, in fact) than the Liberals won’t help anyone or anything.
Winton then closes out with some suggestions, but since I am going to expand on them, “problematise” (4) them etc, I will save that for later.
Why it matters
Winton is onto something (a lot, imo). The “debates” about climate change – and who is supposed to do what – are sterile, repetitive and have allowed us to DO LESS THAN NOTHING FOR THIRTY SIX YEARS. We were warned, very very clearly, by scientists. From 1988 we’ve been allowing politicians and business (and civil society figures) to blow smoke up our asses. It was easier than taking actual action, and we liked the ticklish sensation, I guess.
Other people (not white, not male, not Western) have been pointing out the horrific colonial nature of climate inaction (who is causing the problem is not who has been on the pointy end) and the implications of the “solutions” being proposed (white comfort continues, black death escalates) for all that time, louder and louder.
What Winton is doing is actually using good tools developed by people of colour to analyse (to an extent, to an extent) our impasse. It matters.
“Where Winton might be wrong,” or at least, how he will probably be misconstrued, attacked.
Winton is sticking his shaggy head above the parapet (not for the first time. The man has a track record). He won’t just be shot at from one direction.
If he’s not ignored, he will be attacked from the “right” (Australians can fill in a long roll-call of mouths–if-not-actual-brains-for-hire media commentators here) for being a woke snowflake fruitloop Luddite hysterical alarmist who wants us living in caves gnawing on bones of our neighbours [continues in this vein for several paragraphs at least] who is making excuses for slacker kids “we’ve always had it tough. Interest rates were 17% thanks to Paul Keating” etc etc
More significantly, I think he may be attacked from the position of some people of colour and their allies. (5) To paraphrase, something like this –
“FFS. Another white guy who is trying to colonise “decolonisation.” Another white guy who can’t even just keep his hands off other people’s ideas about other people’s struggles/oppression/identity. White People ALWAYS gotta play the victim card, even when they are the ones with the goddam boot on everyone else’s neck, even when they are the overseer of the Plantation(ocene), the whips, the slave ships. They will not be happy until they have eaten and destroyed everything, forever.”
This is a grotesque caricature of a solid argument that could be made against Winton’s use of Fanon. I am not saying anyone will make it. I am putting it up as the polar opposite of the right attack. The actual responses (such as they are) to Winton will probably have more hand-wringing. Sorry “nuance”. (but also, Fuck Nuance).
Why that matters if Winton is misheard, smeared
It’s an important thing Winton is grappling with – the fog, the miasma, the sense of futility and helplessness that most of the people reading his article and mine live in. Most of the time this fog is personalised and then therapised out of its political importance. Winton is, in my opinion, really on to something here.
“We” (people of good faith actually wanting to advance both action and strategy) can’t afford for voices and messages like this to be defeated. It deadens thought, and makes future efforts at drawing analogies, expanding the floor of the mental cage more difficult.
What I think is missing from what Winton is saying.
Here’s where I think Winton missed a trick, and could have forestalled the (as-yet-hypothetical) attack.
The way to do it is… drum roll please… to deploy the insights of ANOTHER black French intellectual, Aime Cesaire. To quote Wikipedia
The key insight that Winton could have added is that what is done in the colonies, to the colonised ends up ALSO being done to the colonisers back home in the “metropole”.
Techniques of surveillance and repression are tested out among people who can’t resist as easily. They are honed, perfected and… then used on domestic populations.
It’s the same for the psycho-sociological impacts of colonisation. You start brutalising others, well, you’re stepping on rakes like Sideshow Bob.
That’s it. That’s my “insight” (well, my theft of Cesaire’s). That’s all that Winton missed. Perhaps he already was way across it and the Guardian sub blue-pencilled it for reasons of space/tidiness. Tim, if you’re reading, is that what happened?
What is to be done? (by who, when)
So, as mentioned earlier, Winton had some specific suggestions. I’m going to mention those, and then close out with two of my own exhortations.
Here (spoilers) are some of the last lines of Winton’s jeremiad in italics. My comments in [square caps]
So, while we continue to scoff at each other’s generational follies and insecurities, we remain harmless colonial subjects, not potent, patriotic actors. Bitching about snowflakes and hating on old folks prevents us from becoming a united force of potent citizens.
[MH – The very idea that we will ever become a ‘united force’ of potent citizens seems misplaced. The striving for ‘unity’ (which people will assume is harmony, consensus, agreement, shared situational awareness) will be a tar pit. This is not an advocacy of ‘vanguard parties’ with an alleged privileged position’, it’s simply to say that using words ‘united force’ ignores the inevitable messiness, confusion, hybridity, whatever, and sets up impossible expectations, and allows the worst among us to have a veto role.]
What we need is the courage to liberate ourselves from these merchants of desolation.
[MH – yes, but courage comes in many flavours and needs more adjectives. Courage is also a COLLECTIVE VERB, not a personal noun. We as individuals don’t “have” more or less courage which we then sort of maybe hoard or share. It’s far more fluid, interactive than that. Situational, contingent etc.. We need to think in terms of collective emotions, collective intelligence, all that mushy mystic “emergent properties” stuff, all that “dissipative systems” metaphors and models. Anything else, sticking with courage as an object we “have”, brings us back to a Hobbesian, neoliberal failurepath.]
It’s a battle being fought on many fronts.
[MH – It’s not “a battle.” It’s war. Actually, it’s worse than that. Because it is not just any old World War. Or even a Forever War. Not even a civilisational war. It’s beyond all that – civilisations have risen and fallen, fine. Ozymandias blah blah. This, this is about at least the Sixth Extinction and whether we can haul anything back. This is possibly about going Full Venus (though, right now, who can know?) And it is not “many fronts” – EVERYTHING is a front. From the most trivial purchase to the genocides being perpetrated in far off countries and abattoirs nearby, and everything in between. There’s a scene near the end (spoilers) of the novel “Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card where the screen isn’t just discrete dots of the enemy, it’s just a glow. They are everywhere, they are everything. But that’s the end of me carping about Winton’s choices of words, because a) it’s boring and petulant b) generally Winton’s has all the excellent words in all the excellent order.]
But in joining it, and to sustain it, we must foster new alliances, more creativity and deeper empathy. That means decolonising ourselves, resetting our outlook, so we can adapt to new conditions, and hold each other up in the struggle.
[MH – Joining – you’re already in it, you just don’t know it. Sustaining – YES. Everything has been spasms. With my academic hat on I could bore for Gaia about Multiple Streams Approach/Policy Windows, or “Movement Cycles” or “Hype Cycles”. Happy to do that (too happy), but for now, this – XR says we quit – why radical environmental movements have a short shelf-life (Conversation, 2022)
Foster new alliances
[MH – yes, but watch out because to me it’s almost always the people on the pointy end who are asked to bite their tongues and get along with unashamed bigots, assholes and criminals for the sake of “unity”. Am not advocating endless stagings of the Oppression Olympics (obvs – I would keep losing), but when we talk about new alliances, rich white privileged people really need to do better. Thicker skins, and more self-education. People of colour have enough going on without doing the emotional and intellectual labour at a granular level. White people gotta be better at calling each other out/in/hokey-cokey-shake-it-all–about, while also not just rolling over in cowardice when absolute hustlers (who do exist) guilt them into silence. None of this is easy. See above hybrid/emergent blah blah_
More creativity
[MH – yep. And that doesn’t mean more colourful creche puppets for the next demo. It means making mistakes, being embarrassed, wrong, outlandish. More tolerance for failure (as long as there are plausible mechanisms for learning from it), more tolerance for ambiguity. All at, of course, exactly the time our amygdalas are shutting that down. Oh my the rest of the 21st century – however far we get – is going to be so fun. So fun.]
we can adapt to new conditions,
[MH – yes, but there will be no new stable normal. There will be a new ‘normal’ that shifts again. And then again. It will be profoundly unsettling. The systems are “flickering” and they are going to flicker more.
and hold each other up in the struggle.
[MH – yes, of course. But sometimes when you are held up it feels like you are being held back, and vice versa. And people whose amygdalas are getting the better of them (all of us most of the time, some of us all of the time) are good at claiming that any criticism, no matter how praise-sandiwched, no matter how constructive, how Vytosky-and-his-bloody-zone-of-proximal-bloody-development is an imposition. It’s the easiest thing in the world to refuse to accept feedback/support under the banner of “my feelings.” I say this with a solid half a century and counting of that.
Exhortation the First
Learn from people of colour. There is nothing “magical negro” here. It’s not that – in my opinion – African people are inherently superior/stronger/smarter. It’s Darwinism, in the sense of natural selection – thanks to what they’ve been on the receiving end of, their intellectuals have had to be that much smarter, that much tougher. Audre Lorde, June Jordan, James Baldwin, Aime Cesaire, Fanon, lots and lots and LOTS. For the most part, white people ignore them, or “at best” use them as a prop to signal their own virtue (6).
Exhortation the Second
Be brave. That means getting out of the rut of laughing/shouting at deniers, at criticising the state for being a plaything of the corporate death machine. All that is necessary but insufficient. The key thing now is what “we” – civil society (neighbourhoods, professional bodies, education groups, unions, religious outfits, social movement organisations etc) DO. We can fall back onto the scraped knee theory, that someone else is going to come save us.
We can ignore the fact that for thirty five years we have failed to build the pressure on states and corporations for non-blowing-smoke-up-our-asses action.
We can ignore the fact that social movement activism has come and gone in spasms (or waves, if you’re being super-generous) because we SUCK at holding meetings, recruiting people for more than marches and into sustained activism that is incapable of being ignored, co-opted, repressed.
If we were good at those things, we would not be in quite the funk that Winton so brilliantly describes.
We. Have. Failed. Lots of reasons for that. This stuff is really difficult. We were having kids, careers, breakdowns, breakups. Fine. We were forced to work horror jobs by kapos with whips, that left no time for anything but momentary escapes and pangs of hope for a less fucked world and now the bills are due.
Fine. All good reasons. But right now, if we don’t discuss why we failed, propose some ways to try things differently, and then DO those things, then we absolutely
Waste our own time
Destroy the last shreds of credibility in our own and anyone else’s eyes
Really nail down the extinction not just of our own species but the so-many other species on this planet.
Links below to a small fraction of the stuff I have proposed and done over the years. It’s so pathetically inadequate that I cry about it. But if we all cry and post, maybe we can float our boats, our arks, on salt tears, and something can be salvaged.
We have to take a look at civil society. We have to find, name and combat the ways it has been failing. Everything else is a waste of the few breaths (Cheynes-Stokes ones at that) that we have left.
So, finally, what do you think? What did Winton get wrong? What do I get wrong? What do “we” actually need to do
Footnotes
This essay was kindly brought to my attention by a new Twitter follower of my All Our Yesterdays twitter feed. It is a pale horrible shadow of its best, but Twitter
Further excuses – I’ve had both medical and computer ailments, neither fully resolved. And I am trying to get this up and circulated before Australia properly wakes up.
Fanon deserves a far better gloss than this, but a) time b) my various limitations, both temporary and permanent).
I know, I know. You have my permission to cyber-slap me for that. Hard as you like. Ideally you’ll provide post-slap balm and also alternative words for same.
And if/when I see it, I will have much more sympathy for this position while still, for reasons stated above not thinking it is a fatal impact on what Winton is trying to do)
Not me, obviously. Noooo, not at aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalll.
Those promised suggestions etc.
I have road-tested some of these. They “work” in the moment. But long-term? The incentive structures are all wrong. Check out the Cher blog post.
