What is it were missing? And how can we fit more pieces together to find out what to do?
I am shocked by how little eco-terrorism I hear about. Are people doing it? It seems like the only way at this point
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The word “terrorism” is clumsy imo.
From a Marxist perspective, what the mainstream politicians call terrorism is called adventurism , ie, random acts of violence against random people. That’s the worst method of change ever it doesn’t work you can never get mass support like that.
But when we talk “eco terrorism” we don’t literally mean suicide bombing on random people, it’s more in the form of radical direct action including violent tactics in opposition to pacifist direct action right?
But if you’re gonna use “terror” I mean, you’re already on the path of Marxist revolution (“we’ll make no excuses for the terror”) as revolutionary violence consists in terrorising the reactionaries. The cool thing when you have a dictatorship of the proletariat is that your “terror” doesn’t have to randomly kill people in cruel ways, you can dismantle reactionary networks using intelligence and rely on imprisonment rather than murder.
So I’d argue that the meaningful terminology is the following: either pacifist direct action, or radical direct action (more anarchist leaning) or revolutionary action (more Marxist leaning)
The Bush-era Green Scare did a lot to defang the environmentalist movement. There are still some great resources that they made, like A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, and some good lessons learned, such as the above-ground/underground group dichotomy.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but afaik mainstream climate activism boils down to pointing at the iceberg and saying “there’s an iceberg ahead” without any plan on how to avoid death. It is usually very toothless and unthreatening to the ruling classes, which is I think is why they’re allowed to exist and even platformed through greenwashing. I don’t see what success they’ve actually had that we could stand to gain from mimicry.
Their best analyses boil down to understanding quite a bit of the physical science of it, but they hardly get anything actually going in practice. Ozone layer was their last big win, but it was just because it was rather cheap for the corporations to fix that one.
Instead I think the way is to do what communists already do the best, which is to study the history of it (climate change) and better explain the hidden class aspect of it. If stories like the BP creating “carbon footprint” to shift the blame on consumers or Obama approving the Keystone XL pipeline on native land (and the subsequent attack on protests) stop becoming loose facts on somebody’s head and become part of a large narrative of the ruling class complete disregard for climate change, regardless of whose campaign they sponsor. You can already see lost libs in the thread parroting PR firm victim blaming talking points.
And if the interest is the USA, indigenous people are both usually the most interested in combating climate change and the ecological catastrophe, and also the first victims of the repression (and it’s usually not televised). The Red Deal is an alright read if you want to get the perspective of some of them who have been fighting this fight for a while. They also have a podcast, which is alright too.
TLDR: you can’t properly fight climate change without class consciousness and understanding the history of settler disregard for the environment. This is why lib movements tend to fail at anything but making them feel good about themselves, IMO.
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Why are you still a liberal if you know that climate change solutions/mitigations are impossible under capitalism?
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Don’t make it left or right. It doesn’t matter how right you are, a lot of people are going to have other ideas.
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Focus on immediate benefits of mitigation, and don’t make it just about climate. E.g. ending car dependent design benefits drivers due to less traffic and less bad or impaired drivers.
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Use their own rhetoric. E.g. right wingers claim to be about small government. Cars involve a lot of government interaction with licensing, registration, taxes for roads, getting stopped by LEOs. Other transportation methods require less government.
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Because the sad truth is that to get ahead of climate change we must comsume less. And that is one heck of a hard sell. Drive less, eat less meat, local vacations etc. So far been seen as a manic arguing for reduction in consumption. Along with a non healthy does of “why should we do when them over there wont?”
The last point is just chauvinistic crap. Ask those people to get a few random objects in their house to see where it is made. ‘Them over there’ don’t do it because they need to make our products for dirt cheap wages in horrific conditions.
Also, individual reduction of consumerism is going to do jack shit when the top 100 companies produce 70% of all global emissions. And I say this as a person who DOES reduce as much as possible.
I agree with you. Except that if enough individuals cut their consumption it will make an impact. Less demand so less would be produced and less corporate emissions. But individuals in general aren’t inclined to do that. Exactly because each individual’s contribution is so small. So it has to be done on a large scale.
But then I’ve given up hope that climate change will be stopped with manageable impact and all efforts to that goal is pretty meaningless. Instead we must work to handle the impact of climate change. Making sure that for example water will still be available where it is needed, that water wars won’t happen. Change of crops for new climate, better drought/flooding resistance for example. And peoples’ habitation and lively hood when sea levels rise. How to handle periodic flooding of river deltas and their increased salination.
That discussion I feel often is overlooked.
It’s honestly rather silly that you think the solution for it is “consuming less” when some 30 million people on the richest country in the world rely on food stamps, and some 60% live paycheck to paycheck. Do you honestly think there’s any more “fat” to cut for those?
It’s seen as disconnected from reality because it actually is. The problem is not that all (or majority of) people consume too much, but that the production itself (and the waste disposal aftwards) is the most climate-inneficient it could ever be. How is one to “drive less” or “eat less meat” when those are the only ways they could afford to live?
“Local vacations” lmao
You can’t even seem to buy anything in the USA that doesn’t come with a pound of plastic packaging. It’s not on the individual, it’s the system.
