WE ARE NO DEBTORS! WE ARE CREDITORS OF A HISTORICAL, SOCIAL AND ECOLOGICAL DEBT!
|
|
Copenhagen: Seattle Grows Up - Naomi Klein |
|
|
Sunday, 10 January 2010 |
|
Copenhagen: Seattle Grows Up
By Naomi Klein, The Nation, November 12, 2009
The other day I received a pre-publication copy of The Battle of the
Story of the Battle of Seattle, by David Solnit and Rebecca Solnit. It’s
set to come out ten years after a historic coalition of activists shut
down the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, the spark that
ignited a global anticorporate movement.
The book is a fascinating account of what really happened in Seattle,
but when I spoke to David Solnit, the direct-action guru who helped
engineer the shutdown, I found him less interested in reminiscing about
1999 than in talking about the upcoming United Nations climate change
summit in Copenhagen and the "climate justice" actions he is helping to
organize across the United States on November 30. "This is definitely a
Seattle-type moment,” Solnit told me. “People are ready to throw down."
There is certainly a Seattle quality to the Copenhagen mobilization: the
huge range of groups that will be there; the diverse tactics that will
be on display; and the developing-country governments ready to bring
activist demands into the summit. But Copenhagen is not merely a Seattle
do-over. It feels, instead, as though the progressive tectonic plates
are shifting, creating a movement that builds on the strengths of an
earlier era but also learns from its mistakes.
The big criticism of the movement the media insisted on calling
"anti-globalization" was always that it had a laundry list of grievances
and few concrete alternatives. The movement converging on Copenhagen, in
contrast, is about a single issue—climate change—but it weaves a
coherent narrative about its cause, and its cures, that incorporates
virtually every issue on the planet. In this narrative, our climate is
changing not simply because of particular polluting practices but
because of the underlying logic of capitalism, which values short-term
profit and perpetual growth above all else. Our governments would have
us believe that the same logic can now be harnessed to solve the climate
crisis—by creating a tradable commodity called "carbon" and by
transforming forests and farmland into "sinks" that will supposedly
offset our runaway emissions.
Climate-justice activists in Copenhagen will argue that, far from
solving the climate crisis, carbon-trading represents an unprecedented
privatization of the atmosphere, and that offsets and sinks threaten to
become a resource grab of colonial proportions. Not only will these
"market-based solutions" fail to solve the climate crisis, but this
failure will dramatically deepen poverty and inequality, because the
poorest and most vulnerable people are the primary victims of climate
change—as well as the primary guinea pigs for these emissions-trading
schemes.
But activists in Copenhagen won’t simply say no to all this. They will
aggressively advance solutions that simultaneously reduce emissions and
narrow inequality. Unlike at previous summits, where alternatives seemed
like an afterthought, in Copenhagen the alternatives will take center
stage. For instance, the direct-action coalition Climate Justice Action
has called on activists to storm the conference center on December 16.
Many will do this as part of the "bike bloc," riding together on an as
yet unrevealed “irresistible new machine of resistance” made up of
hundreds of old bicycles. The goal of the action is not to shut down the
summit, Seattle-style, but to open it up, transforming it into "a space
to talk about our agenda, an agenda from below, an agenda of climate
justice, of real solutions against their false ones…. This day will be
ours."
Some of the solutions on offer from the activist camp are the same ones
the global justice movement has been championing for years: local,
sustainable agriculture; smaller, decentralized power projects; respect
for indigenous land rights; leaving fossil fuels in the ground;
loosening protections on green technology; and paying for these
transformations by taxing financial transactions and canceling foreign
debts. Some solutions are new, like the mounting demand that rich
countries pay “climate debt” reparations to the poor. These are tall
orders, but we have all just seen the kind of resources our governments
can marshal when it comes to saving the elites. As one pre-Copenhagen
slogan puts it: "If the climate were a bank, it would have been
saved"—not abandoned to the brutality of the market.
In addition to the coherent narrative and the focus on alternatives,
there are plenty of other changes too: a more thoughtful approach to
direct action, one that recognizes the urgency to do more than just talk
but is determined not to play into the tired scripts of
cops-versus-protesters. "Our action is one of civil disobedience," say
the organizers of the December 16 action. "We will overcome any physical
barriers that stand in our way—but we will not respond with violence if
the police to escalate the situation." (That said, there is no way the
two week summit will not include a few running battles between cops and
kids in black; this is Europe, after all.)
A decade ago, in an op-ed in the New York Times published after Seattle
was shut down, I wrote that a new movement advocating a radically
different form of globalization "just had its coming-out party." What
will be the significance of Copenhagen? I put that question to John
Jordan, whose prediction of what eventually happened in Seattle I quoted
in my book No Logo. He replied: "If Seattle was the movement of
movements’ coming-out party, then maybe Copenhagen will be a celebration
of our coming of age."
He cautions, however, that growing up doesn’t mean playing it safe,
eschewing civil disobedience in favor of staid meetings. "I hope we have
grown up to become much more disobedient," Jordan said, "because life on
this world of ours may well be terminated because of too many acts of
obedience."
|
|
|
|
|
|
