immanence

Writing in The Independent, “Left accelerationists” Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek make the case that we need not bother protesting the Paris climate summit. There are better things to do than that.

They argue, first, that the negotiators won’t change anything under pressure, and probably won’t even notice that pressure coming from the streets. (Especially when street demonstrations are banned.) And second, they argue that the tactics, whether it is marches or gamified street actions, are ineffective — they may be fun photo-ops that make sense during earlier phases of a movement, but they are too little, too late, for climate change.

The first point could be disputed with a few counter-examples; the 1999 Seattle WTO protests come to mind.

The second is also easily debated. The media filter for how the climate summit is interpreted around the world — and, indeed, whether it even makes much news or not — will be highly colored by the images that news comes clothed in. The shoes and brandalism were not just intended to generate nice photos, or even to directly impact the negotiators (though one might hope for that as well). Actions like that are intended to affect the moral and aesthetic tenor of the whole debate, so as to speak to and engage a much larger audience. The point is that climate change is a moral issue that affects all humanity (and not just humanity).

But the alternatives Williams and Srnicek propose are, mostly, sensible. The include “resisting the construction of new oil wells, new pipelines, and new fracking projects” — or, as they call it, “targeted resistance” — which would require training not only in artistic guerrilla tactics, but in making and maintaining blockades. Arguably, what mobilizations like the Climate Games and ZAC are trying to do is to build participants’ capacity to act in all these ways: in the service of disrupting the status quo when and where that is most effective, but also in the service of spreading messages, building and broadening coalitions, and the rest.

Their second alternative — that we should transform infrastructure “towards more environmentally-friendly ends” — is not a new idea either, and is what many of the larger environmental organizations have been pushing for on a number of fronts, energy being the most obvious.

Their third alternative, however — that we “must contest the dominance of the work ethic and the economic imperative for rapid accumulation” — is altogether too abstract. (But it happens to be the theme of their latest book, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, which makes it less abstract if you’re willing to read it. I intend to.)

Part of the problem lies in calling what the activists are up to in Paris “protest.” This leaves in place a simple but effective dichotomy: there are the “negotiators,” whose work is legitimate and sanctioned by governments (and corporations) around the world, and then there are the “protestors,” whose work is not work at all, but a kind of thoughtless action for the sake of being seen and heard to protest. Resistance for the sake of resistance.

The point should not be just to “protest” or “resist” — though there is much to protest and resist against, no doubt (and those words carry potency that is still needed in the right circumstances). The point must be to work creatively to generate new patterns of thought and imagination, and new capacities for action.

We all know the negotiations are important, but also that they will not result in what’s believed to be necessary to keep the world’s climate within the 2 degree Celsius target. (And it’s past the time to quibble over uncertainties.)

We aren’t sure what we do need. But it isn’t simple protest. It’s something entirely new — a new system of relations that can hardly be brought into being without either a thousand lines of flight — mutations of how we live, on every level — and a new sense of what humanity can accomplish together, globally and in the many places in which we live. What we need, really, is a vision for a future that is very difficult to imagine. We can’t even name it.

But there may be images that scramble our sense of this world enough to render us open to that future.

For updates on Paris and the mobilizations (a term I prefer over “protests”), see this page, which I’ll be updating as things unfold.