General Agreement

I have joined a DSA "working group" set up to formulate a coherent strategy for the organization as concerns climate action. The proposal is to research the history of the climate justice movement and the different players (NGO's, Blockadia, UN COP, etc..)then try to identify ways to be more effective going forward.

I just re-read an essay by Andreas Malm titled Revolution in a Warming World and noticed lots of convergence with my own thinking on strategy. So I would love to see the working group give it a read. Here are some of the main points: "Any climatic spark will always burn through relations between people on its way to an explosion."
Here Malm points to Syria as an example, a place where severe drought heightened already existing tensions and precipitated the implosion of a society. In other words a "climatic impact is articulated through a particular social formation." Malm then claims that because "it is getting hotter at work", class conflict is heating up, at least in the so-called "developing world". Which brings us to the concept of "uneven and combined development", or the way capitalism takes on different modes in the Center and the Periphery and here Malm uses the Russian Revolution to support his argument that war induced threat of famine led to the crisis and the revolution's authoritarian turn. "Climate change is likely to be the accelerator of the twenty-first century, speeding up the contradictions of late capitalism"

This, of course, was Naomi Klein's basic thesis as well, a la Shock Doctrine, that the crisis contains a kernel of opportunity, a very rare opportunity for radical transformation. Many liberal and moderates will call for "adaptation" and peaceful ways to "transition" incrementally but that isn't how it is going to go down. Humans have a remarkable capacity to only see what they want to see until the catastrophe actually grabs them by the throat and starts shaking. Even then they might turn to religion or meditation or fentenyl.