Printed in Return Fire vol.6 chap.6 (spring 2024).
To read the articles referenced throughout this text in [square brackets], PDFs of Return Fire and related publications can be read, downloaded and printed by visiting returnfire.noblogs.org or emailing returnfire@riseup.net
[ed. – Taken from the German-language website SwitchOff.noblogs.org, this translation continues our interventions in the new climate movements. There are two fronts on which we would like to extend the thrust of the author/s further, in terms of its response to the text reproduced above in this chapter of Return Fire, Targets That Do Not Exist Anywhere Else. Firstly, the proposal below (to focus anarchist attack and critique on the new “green” infrastructure and propaganda) corresponds not only to the proclivities of the author/s, as one worthy cause among many jostling for anarchists’ attention when fighting a domination which can never truly be compartmentalised. Rather, (social acceptance of) the industrial re-structuring underway under the guise of ‘solving’ ecological collapse forms a strategic choke-point in the pivot of capitalism’s latest world-system – “a system that understands itself as global and that mediates political conflict and the flow of resources and information in accordance with a certain logic [ed. – see Return Fire vol.5 pg11],” following Peter Gelderloos’ ‘Geopolitics for 2024’ – as different forms of power are suggested by various elites vying to become the next’s architects and win global agreement. His ‘Diagnostic of the Future’ posited that the discourse around ‘climate change’ will (or has) become “a linchpin that conditions the governmental and economic crises and also suggests – or even requires – a synthesis in the responses” (namely a “bioeconomic expansion”; see that subsection of the essay), now that eco-catastrophe – especially in the middle latitudes home to several rising powers – is the backdrop:
Currently, the only viable platform from which to launch a new project of interstate cooperation capable of deploying and managing the changes that a bioeconomic expansion of capitalism would require can be found in the response to climate change. Climate change provides a narrative of unified global interests. Any political power that acts in the name of addressing climate change can act in the name of all humanity: this offers the possibility to establish a hegemonic project, the same way that the narrative of democracy and human rights undergirded a hegemonic project after the horrors of World War II [ed. – see Return Fire vol.5 pg61]. Political structures for interstate coordination and global intervention would be justified as holistic measures necessary to save the entire biosphere, and they could also have a justifiably technocratic character, given that the media have successfully framed climate change as a scientific rather than economic or spiritual issue [ed. – see ‘The Principle of Reciprocity’]. […] As long as climate change is treated as a purely scientific issue, any responses will have to be compatible with the preexisting social relations, funding sources, and regulatory mechanisms through which they are to be carried out. In other words, a technocratic approach to climate change would not threaten capitalism.
Since the above was written in 2017, the self-described “climate movement” revived in the wake of Greta Thunberg’s youthful activism and Extinction Rebellion (see Rebellion Extinction) etc.: yet in a form as often as not clamouring for precisely this kind of technocratic approach, often divorced from previous radical ecological critique of the structures of this society at their base. They can even include some forms of the sabotage called for in the following article, such as the Tyre Extinguishers mentioned below, an open platform – having taken inspiration from Andreas Malm (see the supplement to Return Fire vol.6 chap.3; Green Desperation Fuels Red Fascism), among others – where participants deflate tyres of Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs) in their city, framing their actions directly as pressure to appeal to government policy; even though they do list electric SUVs as legitimate targets. Attacking the structures of industrial society, “green” or otherwise, is necessary, and so is making sure that in the process we don’t end up supporting – inadvertently or not – the very escape route conjoining austerity and a kind of techno-socialism (see ‘A New Relation with Social Conflicts’) that certain elites project for themselves at our expense.
This would be both tragedy and farce; not least because the system very much needs an impetus from society at large to back a State-level shift, rather than relying on the market to deliver. Returning to Diagnostic of the Future:
[C]apitalists themselves are incapable [of building] the kind of systemic change they need. […] The volatility of the market will never produce the resources necessary for a phase shift in energy technologies. Liberal capitalism would leave us festering – or rather, boiling – in a fossil fuel economy. A rapid shift to a climate change economy will not be possible without most major governments introducing huge policy shifts and legally mandating investment in alternative energies and environmental protection measures as a significant part of their total budgets, on par with health care or military spending.
Capitalism faces a great need for strategic change, for a governmental mandate capable of redirecting social resources on a coordinated, massive scale. This is where the question of different governmental models becomes extremely important, as certain types of government are better suited to make such a shift than others, and some political tendencies are well positioned to seize the platform of climate change, whereas others are incapable.
Already we can see in concrete terms ways that this appears in the context of ongoing struggles; to take one example, the effort to prevent the United States latest ‘Cop City’ being build in Weelaunee Forest, so-called Georgia (see ‘We Laugh Harder Than Them’). In late 2022, an interviewee participating in that fight commented on the Millenials Are Killing Capitalism podcast that “very big industrial factions are relocating their entire industry to Georgia because of the low wages and cheap land, and climate pressures on the West Coast are actually expediting that process: because wildfires and droughts are making it very difficult to continue operating at scale on the West Coast.”
Furthermore, SoftBank (the big Japanese investment firm) has recently pulled lots of their money out of like a gig economy industries, such as like Uber and Airbnb and all this [ed. – see A New Luddite Rebellion]. And these already were the jobs that were designed for the surplus labor potential, the surplus workers of the metro area and of the country. But a lot of those companies are collapsing and ostensibly some of those workers are going to be forced into the Rivian plants, Hyundai plants and Kia plants, all of which are being built around Georgia to build electric vehicles. In the coming years, actually, Georgia will be the number–one place for electric vehicle manufacturing, definitely in the country, I think possibly on Earth [ed. – see also the new nuclear reactor and more power still needed for further water-hungry data centres also now courted by the state of Georgia with tax breaks]. This is a part of the green capitalist plan to continue to racket public funds, because also Georgia and Metro Atlanta is being pitted as somewhat like a refuge city. So literally their bigger plan of this until 2035, 2040, 2050, is to accept huge amounts (millions) of people [ed. – i.e. climate refugees, among others; see the supplement to this chapter of Return Fire, The Swell] from Houston, New Orleans, Mobile, Miami. And of course, these are very Black communities and definitely working class communities. And we can imagine with the kind of pan-urban gentrification, the collapse of remote mobile jobs, reemergence of manufacturing for a few, all of these things… You’re just going to have a huge amount of people who don’t have a job, have basically nothing to do [ed. – see ‘Something Different Than the Reflection of This World’]. I really think the Cop City idea cannot really be strictly separated from this idea. Because basically, when you have millions of people with no way to survive, you either have to kill or incarcerate them. I mean, you don’t actually; you can actually just take care of them. But that’s not how our society works.