We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, March 22, 2010

The Climate Crisis or the Crisis of Climate Politics?

from Institute for Anarchist Studies. This is a particularly important paper presented by two PhD candidates at the U. of Leeds. Both have a long involvement with ecological and social struggles. I copied and pasted it onto Word, enlarged the print and printed it.
This apolitical space means groups such as the Camp for Climate Action have failed to find the antagonism they need in order to develop a fully anti-capitalist perspective, and as the UK Anarchist Federation state, “there is a very real danger of the Climate Camp being turned from a genuine movement for social change into a lobbying tool for state reform.” As capital restructures itself around so-called “green” policies, the emerging climate movement risks unwittingly bolstering this restructuring, ushering in a form of “green capitalism.”
Green capitalism may help shore up capitalism's legitimacy crisis, but as Mueller & Passadakis state, it will not “solve the antagonism of the biocrisis, it will draw energy from it to drive forward which always must be capital’s first and foremost project: the accumulation of more capital.”