[Cja] The Future of CJA ; dissolve or find a new course

Tue Aug 24 14:43:09 UTC 2010

fyi, people in dk are super busy right now dealing with our trial stuff, and
it would be great to hold off some of these discussions for when those who
don't have time to sit in front of the computer and type or travel to
meetings in holland can take part.  we here are by no means out of the woods
yet, and this thing is far from over in copenhagen.  It would be great to
get some more solidarity from folks who were/are involved in CJA and hear
some more international support.  thanks to those who have been supporting.

in solidarity,
noah

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 3:03 PM, Bert <antistrata at riseup.net> wrote:

>  I have felt this debate coming!
>
> So I've been churning over whether to come to Holland or not this weekend,
> precisely because of these kind of questions. Given my limited time and
> money, is traveling to this meeting the best way to see them spent?
>
> I'll put this in as proviso - these are ideas flowing somewhat haphazardly
> off the top of my head. They are certainly not conclusive thoughts!
>
> The *first* question - what is the state of climate politics?
>
> In my eyes, if we were to survey the 'movement' as it currently stands, it
> is dominated by a field of NGOs engaged at the policy level. To this extent,
> I'm hesitant to even use the (ambiguous) term of 'movement' - rather it now
> appears to be a number of policy-hacks claiming legitimacy on the back of a
> non-existent 'movement' demographic. This is sadly reflected in the
> trajectory of the Cochabamba Declaration, which is now treated solely as a
> series of policy points that 'experts' are concerned with writing into the
> UNFCCC negotiating texts, whilst Bolivian representatives proudly pronounce
> that the UN is being forced to listen to the people. A disgraceful
> bastardisation of any possible 'new politics' that could have been born from
> that Bolivian conference.
>
> My understanding is that whilst climate politics continues at the policy
> level, any 'movement' will ultimately be reduced to fulfilling the role of
> foot-soldiers, a crowd upon which policy-hacks feed so as to claim some form
> of representative capacity within negotiations – 'look here! we have the
> people behind us!'. I'm not interested in mobilising cannon fodder for
> ineffective UN negotiations, and I'm not interested in bolstering this or
> that bargaining position. The only possibility of this having any value is
> as part of a different politics and a broader strategy that exists outside
> of policy negotiations. At the moment, there isn't one - blind hope is still
> within the UNFCCC despite inevitable failure.
>
> The *second* question - what would an other climate politics look like?
>
> For all the criticism, what other trajectory could or should have been
> taken? How do we create something effective, that takes as its basis popular
> activity outside of policy spaces? I think we began to explore this in our
> discussion of creating a different strategic space, one that would put the
> emphasis on placing 'climate politics' in peoples daily lives as opposed to
> in the policy realm. In other words, we need to provide a revolutionary
> dream, the 'other worlds' that listen and speak to the daily concerns of
> peoples lives - not some abstract ethical drive based on PPM and Bangladeshi
> floods (however terrible they may be). We will not build a movement out of
> voluntarist ethical commitments to 'reduce carbon', manifesting itself
> within protests, days of action, asceticism or policy-led politics.
>
> In other words, we are concerned with generating an anti-capitalist
> response to climate change. We should know well enough that, to do this, we
> must locate the 'place' of capital not in institutions, nor corporations,
> nor banks, but at the level of control over our daily decision making. This
> means that we must begin with the issues that are the core of our lives -
> housing, food, healthcare, transport, childcare, 'education' - and begin a
> process of strategising how people can assume common control of these
> fundamental life processes. As it stands, we predominately rely on capital
> for our own survival, we are all forced to sell our labour (or to exploit
> the labour of others) so as to survive. This reliance means that, however
> much we despise this system or however much we personally fail to benefit
> from it, the bottom line in decision making is *always* the accumulation
> of capital. If we want control over 'ecological' decisions, then we must
> free ourselves from our compulsion to act in accordance with capital.
>
> The purpose of this imagined conference leans towards this - how do we base
> a climate politics in peoples self-interest? How do we begin a process of
> empowering people to create circuits of reproduction *other than and to
> the detriment of* capital? How do we ignite the sentiment of another
> world, and how does do we ensure this sentiment spread like wildfire? There
> is only one way - and that is embedding politics as a struggle over the
> conditions of everyday life.
>
> The *third* question - can CJA initiate this other politics?
>
> Well... firstly, we would have to make sense of all this. We would have to
> work out a first step for an anti-capitalist climate politics, and how it is
> based in present reality. We would have to work out if there is any
> difference between the aforementioned and anti-capitalist politics *in
> general*. We would have to resolve contradictions such as that between the
> 'green jobs'/'anti-growth' camps. We would need to find a discursive AND
> practical way of delinking human well-being from the reproduction of
> capital. We could perhaps forge 'directional demands', demands which seem
> fully plausible from the position of human wellbeing, yet completely
> untenable from the position of capital accumulation, such as that of a
> 'living wage for all'. I think the strategy conference we discussed just
> might have some play in this particular discussion, but it would have to go
> far beyond any confines of the 'climate'.
>
> Secondly - and perhaps most importantly - we would need the bodies to make
> it happen. As Tadzio and Peter have mentioned, I just can't see where they
> are going to come from. Is CJA the vehicle to make any of this happen? I
> really don't know. Is 'climate justice' a discourse which can speak to this
> concept of generalised struggle over our own reproduction, which is
> fundamentally what this is about? Or must it be abandoned as liberal
> bullshit within the realm of policy-hacks?
>
> A million questions, and I feel somewhat lost.
> I hope someone can persuade me within the next 24 hours that I should go to
> the Netherlands.
>
> Solidarity,
>
> Bert
>
>
>
>
> On 24/08/2010 11:21, Tadzio Mueller wrote:
>
>   hey all,
>
>  first of all, thanks to peter for basically clarifying something that had
> sort of been lurking at the back of my mind, and, i suspect, other people's
> too. my email yesterday kind of hinted at something like that, too.
>
>  i think the point about the 'standard recipe' of the 'day of action' is
> especially well-taken: as someone who was involved in pushing that idea at
> the february meeting in amsterdam i'll be honest, it was very much an idea
> that emerged simply in order to keep the network alive. and that's not
> enough to energise people, as we've seen from the absolutely crap work we as
> a network have done around the day of action: we've done practically no
> outreach to groups and people who don't come to CJA-meetings, something we
> were great at in the copenhagen mobilisation; the storytelling/media-work
> aspect has been pretty dead, and that was one of the things where we shone
> in and before copenhagen.
>
>  as i think i mentioned in my last email, our local group in berlin has
> now started to do active outreach to groups in eastern germany, so far very,
> very 'empty' ground from the perspective of networked climate (justice)
> struggles. in a way, that's a very boring task - nowhere near as fun as
> hanging out with y'all lovely lot :-) but it's probably what needs to get
> done. the global events, we know after 10 years of experience in organising
> them, have their role to play. but that role is limited.
>
>  anyway, i'm starting to repeat myself, so i'll stop here. like peter, it
> would be great to hear loud and practical and concrete disagreement with
> these thoughts. but whatever we do, let's be honest to ourselves.
>
>  solidarische gruesse
>
>  tadzio
>
>
> --- On *Tue, 8/24/10, Peter / GroenFront! <peter at groenfront.nl><peter at groenfront.nl>
> * wrote:
>
>
> From: Peter / GroenFront! <peter at groenfront.nl> <peter at groenfront.nl>
> Subject: [Cja] The Future of CJA ; dissolve or find a new course
> To: "climate09-int" <climate09-int at lists.riseup.net><climate09-int at lists.riseup.net>,
> cja at lists.aktivix.org
> Date: Tuesday, August 24, 2010, 5:49 AM
>
> Dear friends,
>
>  The next meeting op Climate Justice Action should, in my view , have just
> one agenda point. Dissolve the network of not.
>
>  Climate Justice Action was formed to mobilise for Copenhagen. In 2009 it
> was a lively, planet wide network that was powerfull enough to make a stand
> in the streets of Copenhagen. In all the stress and rush to prepare for that
> event, we forgot to think about the future of the network itself. As a
> result many people dropped out after the Copenhagen summit. Discussions at
> the last two meetings have focused on finding a cause to keep the network
> alive. The standard recipe of global day of actions was brought up.  But
> that's not enough to keep people motivated and keep the network alive.
> The meeting in bonn only had 30 people, the next meeting in Holland looks
> to be even smaller. Tasks taken up  in Bonn haven't been done.
>
>  Apperently the time and energy to keep the network alive isn't there any
> more. Most likely because the network is missing a concrete common goal. A
> battle to prepare for.
> I think it is time to face facts, and dissolve CJA as it is at this
> moment.
>
>  I would be good to keep the mailing list up, to make contacts easier, or
> maybey organize a conference on Climate justice in Europe. But to keep
> dragging the burden of an international network would be a mistake. It will
> drain the time and energy needed elsewhere, and give people the false hope
> that we are able to mobilise large amounts of activist for future actions.
>
>  I ofcourse hope to be mistaken, and see lot's of angry people at the next
> meeting to oppose my proposal. If not come over to have a drink at the
> campfire. I hope anyway to see you all on the barricades , somewhere,
> sometime.
>
>  Peter Polder
>
>
> --
> skype:peterpolder
> www.groenfront.nl
>
>
>
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