The millions of young people who joined demonstrations against climate change across the world on 20 September have served notice on the bourgeois politicians who defend a system which is manifestly destroying the environment and precipitating possible uncontrollable global warming. Their elemental rage was eloquently expressed by Greta Thunberg in her address to the United Nations General Assembly on 20 September when she declared:
‘You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!’
In London, up to 100,000 joined the protests; 20,000 marched in Edinburgh and 15,000 in Glasgow, while each of the major cities in England saw the participation of thousands. The turnout confounded ruling class hopes that the climate change movement would be ephemeral and that it would be able to continue its unrestrained looting and plunder of the Earth’s resources untroubled by any opposition. The movement, made up overwhelmingly of young people, is chaotic, with ill-formed politics, and with many different trends. Yet one of the most popular chants on the demonstrations – system change not climate change – expresses a desire to reach out to an alternative form of society even if there is no real idea what it might look like or how we would get there.
This is typical of spontaneous movements: they are characterised by great outbursts of energy, but possess a political formlessness which either ends in their isolation and defeat, or in the emergence of a political consciousness which turns them into an existential threat to the ruling class. At present, the ruling class has no answers to the demands of the young activists. Beyond hollow declarations of a climate emergency, bourgeois politicians have demonstrably refused to take on the principal drivers of global warming and climate change – the giant oil multinationals, the agribusiness and mining giants. Repression is not yet an option: it would be a risky strategy which might backfire. It has not worked in Edinburgh where the Labour-SNP led council has told students they may not participate in more than one strike per academic year. Buying off the leadership always remains an option: but the problem is that Thunberg as the figurehead of the global movement has shown herself to be so far incorruptible, whatever inducements she may have been offered to moderate her language or standpoint.
In such circumstances the ruling class turns to those who are better defenders of the bourgeoisie than the bourgeoisie itself – the opportunists. And in imperialist Britain they abound: forces and organisations which have a material stake in the system and which use the language of radical change in order to isolate revolutionaries and demobilise any serious opposition to the ruling class. Their representatives will present themselves as dyed-in-the-wool opponents of the current system but are always looking for compromise, for respectability and for opportunities to impose limits on the movement. The job of communists is to expose these false friends by making conscious the new movement’s unconscious aims, by constantly clarifying what an alternative system would look like and how it can be achieved, and by fighting any attempt to divert the new force into channels which are harmless for the ruling class. Who are these false friends?
False friend No 1: the trade unions
In the lead-up to the global strike on 20 September, many on the left regaled us with stories about the TUC calling a strike in support of school students. As the day approached expectations had to be managed: the possible strike it would authorise would be a half-hour stoppage, no more. Then we were reminded that the TUC has no power to call a strike, only to recommend such action to its member unions. Decisions made at various union conferences to support strikes on 20 September quickly came up against the legality of such calls under existing anti-trade union laws.
The final decision made at the TUC Congress on 10 September was ‘to support a 30-minute workday campaign action to coincide with the global school strike on 20 September.’ This, the TUC agreed, was quite sufficient solidarity to show student strikers to ‘ensure that they don’t fight alone’. There are many on the social democratic left who argue that a real fight against climate change will depend on mobilising the trade unions, and that they should be placed in the lead of the climate change movement. However, as we show elsewhere (‘Trade unions “rich and cowardly”‘), trade unions, far from leading system change, have shown no appetite for fighting austerity with its appalling impact on the poor and working class.
False friend No 2: Extinction Rebellion
It may seem strange to identify Extinction Rebellion (XR) as a false friend given that it is credited with being the initiator of the fight against climate change in Britain. Its protests in London – the bridge blocking it organised in October 2018, the two-week occupation in April 2019 of parts of central London, its planned campaign in October 2019 – all seem to belie the notion that it is serving as an agent of the ruling class. But unpicking its language and its actions presents a very different picture to the one it seeks to present as an organisation of ‘rebels’:
It describes itself as ‘beyond politics’ when in reality its strategy is based on the political writings of two of US imperialism’s regime change operatives, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan. Stephan has actively promoted the US-funded Juan Guaido’s opposition to Venezuelan President Maduro. Guaido has now been photographed in the company of Colombian narco-traffickers. More recently, prominent Extinction Rebellion activist and Cambridge University academic Claire Wordley has launched an unfounded attack on the progressive Bolivian government of Evo Morales, falsely accusing it of a conscious policy of burning Amazonian forests. Wordley relied on another US regime change operative, Jhanisse Vaca-Daza. Their work provided the stimulus for XR-organised pickets of the Bolivian embassy at a time when the racist and US-funded Bolivian right wing is gearing up to oppose Morales in Bolivia’s October presidential elections.
XR’s instructions for its October ‘Rebellion’ state that participants must ‘show respect to everyone – to each other, the general public and to the government and police’. This is to ensure that its activities are under tight control. Recent XR street closures in Liverpool and Manchester were closely coordinated with the police – describing these protests as acts of rebellion is a ludicrous pretension.
Bourgeois respectability is key to XR’s strategy: expressions of anger are banned as confrontational. This quasi-religious opposition to the expression of a healthy emotion would exclude Thunberg herself. Companies or banks are not to be named let alone shamed – in sharp contrast to XR’s willingness to falsely name and shame Evo Morales and put him alongside open reactionaries. In the end, however, no one in Britain is held accountable for anything, and events become little more than glorified picnics and sleepovers.
XR’s purpose is to combine the illusion of rebellion with the practice of respectability. Its purpose is to politically disarm those who want to challenge a rotten system with soothing lullabies about kindness and respect. It never explains what system change would look like. Its appeal is to the middle class who want to be occasionally rebellious but who also want plenty of time to recover from the emotional distress an occasional street picnic can cause.
False friend No 3: the Labour Party
Many in the climate change movement look to the Labour Party for support. They will point to the Labour conference’s adoption of a Green New Deal as evidence that it is now committed to real action on global warming. On the face of it, Labour’s proposals sound radical: for instance, investing £83bn in wind farms and committing to meet a target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2030. However, a policy to provide interest-free loans of up to £30,000 for the purchase of electric cars is not just a bribe for those better-off workers who can afford such a loan, but one which is also an indirect subsidy of £60bn for the motor industry. Scarcely system change!
This appeal to narrow self-interest is just the beginning. Action against eco-destruction has to start with the fact that British mining and oil monopolies loot and plunder the resources of underdeveloped countries while the City of London and its linked offshore centres hold these countries in a web of unrepayable debt. Yet these are the countries which are now expected to provide the raw materials for the Green New Deal – the copper, cobalt, tungsten, platinum and lithium – and are also expected to sell their land to enable agribusiness multinationals to practice the monoculture which destroys the soil. But is there any mention of this in Labour’s policy? None whatsoever. It will be business as usual: nothing is said about ending the debt bondage which keeps the underdeveloped countries in poverty, no mention of how a regime of equal exchange will be established for their products and resources.
Labour’s Green New Deal will be made ‘affordable’ by allowing the giant multinationals and banks to continue stripping poorer countries of their wealth. It is unashamed social chauvinism: when Labour says the cost of its Green New Deal ‘would be borne by the wealthiest not the majority’ it deliberately excludes the overwhelming majority who live in the underdeveloped world from that calculation. Labour’s system change will be at the expense of the poorest of the world.
The climate change movement has to unreservedly reject Labour’s Green New Deal if it is not to be suckered into agreeing that the solution to the climate crisis lies in intensifying imperialism’s voracious exploitation of the Earth’s resources. It has to demand an end to the debt bondage of poorer nations – the cancellation of all their debts to the rich countries. And the second step would be to force the giant agribusiness, mining and carbon fuel multinationals to hand back all the assets they have stolen from the poorer countries. But such steps would involve real system change, a real challenge to the British imperialist interests which Labour was set up to defend. There will be no system change from this quarter.
What sort of movement is needed?
We need to be absolutely clear: imperialism has created the environmental and climate crisis, and imperialism in crisis will only accelerate this destruction. There can be no concession to the panaceas offered by those in thrall to capitalism. We have to reject the Green New Deal: it perpetuates the exploitative relationship that imperialist countries have with the underdeveloped world. Real system change has to start with a fight against imperialism from which a socialist consciousness can emerge. The job of false friends is to prevent such a development, and to isolate and expel those who are pushing in this direction. System change means socialism – and that can only come on the back of the destruction of imperialism.
Robert Clough
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 272 October/November 2019
