It’s no longer about victories

Cofounder of ONO affiliate the Climate Justice Charter Movement (CJCM), Dr. Vishwas Satgar* recently participated in the Great Transition Initiative, made up of critical academics, movement activists and policy makers, contributing to an international debate about what movements should be doing on a planetary scale. Satgar’s delivery calls for a deeper reflection amongst activists and a categorical push back against fossil fuel corporations:

“‘We are lost as a species, harming ourselves and the world around us.’ I placed these words into a circle of respect with indigenous leaders, climate justice activists, lawyers and conservationists deliberating the idea of harmonious co-existence in South Africa. Like that circle of respect, the Great Transition Initiative is also one of the many valuable spaces to find our way back. While the planetary clock is against us, dark times clash with hope based resistance; an inscrutable future of a rapidly heating planet becomes a bit more certain as next-world-making praxis is mapped, shared and connected on a larger canvas of emancipatory futures making. This is the inspiration I draw from the Tapestry of Alternatives and all the other initiatives shared in this exchange. Thank you for the great work, for germinating living hope and inciting us to re-imagine everything. Common to these initiatives is the remaking of human-earth relations at different scales – the everyday, the biosphere and planetary systems; many exits from harm are being opened as we learn to live on a new earth. There are no victories on this long and perilous journey, just new discoveries (in most instances of old truths pushed to the margins by shallow Euro-American universals or truths recovered after colonial erasure ) of how to sustain, care for and enhance life as we displace an eco-cidal, violent and oppressive capitalism.

Earth centric activism and movement conceptions are the new frontier for new mass politics. Some of the planetary conscious activism, shared in this exchange, has gone further than others. Transformative movements rising today have to appreciate three basic ideas about the politics of knowledge, central to socio-ecological transformation. The first is the ontological shift from human centred to human-in-earth relations politics; this is happening whether we like it or not. The earth and the life enabling biosphere it supports is no longer static wallpaper on a planet conquered by capitalism. Earth’s response, from the micro eco-system to the climate system, to the harms done is underway and will lead us; it is paradoxical because it is bringing great suffering but will also work as an ally that will prevail over the supremacy of Anthropocentric humans, imperial power structures and delusionary ecological modernisation, including contemporary forms of ruling class eco-fascism. An agentic earth, with its awesome power, is upending the short age of the Anthropocene (250 years old) and will make current distributions of global power meaningless. It has begun with eco-system collapses and several climate extremes registering: floods, droughts, cyclones, recent heatwaves in parts of the global north ( July 2023 the hottest month on record) and Latin America. It is in this context, climate and ecological determinism has to feature centrally in transformative theories of change to centre the acceleration of deep just transitions in communities, workplaces, sectors and the state to mitigate harms. Every eco/climate shock is going to be a moment of tragic loss, fierce rage and awakening for transformative change.

Second, we have to appreciate the limits of human knowledge on this journey and end the myth of human genius; let me be clear I am not anti-human but I am against human supremacy. We do not have the intellectual apparatus to understand the complexity and wonder around us at a sub atomic level, at the level of evolutionary biology and even at a cosmological level ( the infinity ♾️ of nature ). Our knowledge is epistemologically limited but yet with hubris we believe we are the apex species and can be masters of earth even through geo-engineering. In other words, and according to the wise amongst us, in the great expanse of nature our knowledge is equal to what is spotlighted when we shine a torch. The rest of the vast expanse we do not know and will not know. This is an opportunity to also escape dogmas, such as techno obsession or the growth driven state-market dyad or treating nature as an object of exploitation. It is time to be open to new truths. A great humility has to inform and guide us as we democratically aggregate grassroots power.

Third, from Leninism ( elite vanguards) to contemporary global crowd politics (mimetic) there has been a failure to appreciate national points of departure and hence there has been an emphasis on downloading political templates. Even with climate shocks being blind to borders, such shocks will register in national spaces but will be entwined with local complexities. Put differently, local political traditions, cultures, histories and modes of thought matter and will shape how societies respond. As long as nation-states exist ( and probably at 2 or 3 degree Celsius warming most nation states will become anachronistic, sadly similar to the demise of island states ) the role of planetary internationalism should be about ‘bridge building’ (not wall building), strengthening local resistance and amplifying cross border solidarities. Intra-country bridge building has to engender ‘trans politics’, beyond narrow labour issues, environmental issues, identity issues and more. Deep convergence on political projects for life making, regeneration, joy and care need to crystalise to accelerate the just transition from below and above. Local resistance has to be supported to experiment with new and deep democracy paradigms of power and not securitized as part of elite risk management. Such shifts should be complimented by work towards a post-UN earth commons peer governance architecture.

On the issue of cross border solidarities, emancipatory feminist analysis brings a crucial analytical and strategic challenge to the fore. In its understanding of contemporary crises it is not about abyssal notions of human endings or apocalyptic end of times discourse. Instead, it furnishes us with an analytic of the crisis of everything: the crises of socio-ecological reproduction central to the fourth great crisis of eco-cidal capitalism. With climate shocks intensifying grassroots women everywhere are the shock absorbers of whats unfolding and are screaming out for the planetary emergency to be front and centre so they don’t get wiped out. They refuse to be collateral damage or expendable denizens of the Trumpian declared ‘shithole’. The time has come for movements rising to converge around climate emergency demands; it is time to demand what is necessary to sustain life now and to show up the hypocrisy of the Euro-American world by highlighting how Putin is no different from fossil fuel corporations destroying our life worlds. It is not enough for the General Secretary of the United Nations to declare we are now a ‘boiling planet’ while carbon capital is left of the hook at every turn; we need to switch the planetary stove off like the feminist strikes for unpaid labour taught us. Covid 19 locked down global capitalism, it is time for the lockdown of fossil capital and the following demands need to be considered for cross border solidarities and global citizen action now:

• All fossil fuel corporation executives to face a climate ‘Nuremberg trial’ for the crime of eco-cide; the intentional creation of a global gas chamber that is causing the mass scale destruction of human and non-human life;
• Phase out all fossil fuels rapidly by 2035 or sooner, with no new investments permitted;
• Phase out all combustion engine based cars, trucks and rail systems by 2035 or sooner;
• Ban all fossil fuel based air travel, luxury yachts and container ship movements for the next 5 years to bring down carbon emissions, except for humanitarian reasons;
• Ban all processed livestock meat products, industrial scale fishing and exports for the next 5 years to bring down greenhouse gas emissions and restore bio-diversity;
• Ban the destruction of all remaining rain forests;
• Accelerate deep just transition finance through debt write off for all poor countries; $100 billion dollar per annum pledges for the climate fund to be given priority and more; loss and damage funds and mechanism to be locked in; and all national and multi-lateral financial institutions to ensure cheap finance;
• All military conflicts to be placed on a ceasefire footing and all military spending, resources and capabilities in the world to be diverted to the climate emergency.

Raising such climate emergency demands collectively after a 1.5C overshoot will be too late.”

* Dr. Vishwas Satgar is Associate Professor of International Relations and principal investigator for Emancipatory Futures Studies in the Anthropocene at Wits. He is a veteran activist and co-founder of the Cooperative and Policy Alternative Centre (COPAC), the Vukani-Sidikiwe Campaign, the Higher Education Crisis Conference process, the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign and the Climate Justice Charter process (CJCM).