[Cja] [climate09-int] CJA: the great fix-it-or-nix-it-debate

Wed Aug 25 20:57:21 UTC 2010

Hi,

I don't like nostalgia, nostalgia is good for when you're retired and want
to tell stories to your grand children. Nostalgia is worthless as a base to
organize necessary action to avoid a grim future. So let's not approach the
CJA concept out of that perspective.

CJA is getting defined, based upon what I read, as an ad hoc network towards
COP15. It worked well for the Reclaim Power action, since all organizations
and activists were there in Copenhagen and there was a clear, common goal. 

Since then the birds have flown home, with the aspiration of continuing that
ability to create a joint action agenda and being able to mobilize for it on
a broader scale. To export those dynamics at work in Copenhagen to the
world.

The experience was so great that local groups are organizing actions
referring to CJA, clinging on to that feeling of unity, solidarity and
having a common goal. In that context everybody wants CJA to be something
else then these comments I've read about it on the net: ". is a loosely
connected grassroots network",  ". was described to SolveClimate by one
activist [.] as 'people printing pamphlets in their bedrooms.'"

But we're faced with the fact that CJA is becoming a mailing list exchanging
info and viewpoints (what is not bad on itself), and with the unavoidable
reality check about the broader perspective and its future as an action
network.

On the transnational level, now, there's the call for solidarity actions for
the accused COP15 activists and the idea of a global day of action in
October to revive the network.

I remember the solidarity action we held at the Danish embassy in March. On
a very short notice I collected signatures from 18 organizations and a dozen
more from parties and individual politicians for the letter to hand over.
The call out for action, as CJA in Belgium, then managed only to mobilize 12
people for the action itself. There were as much cops as activists. We just
lacked a ball for a soccer game. :-) Funny was that somebody from the
Belgian Social Forum thought of CJA as those people who had something to do
with Climate Action Camp 2009 in Antwerp, not Copenhagen. Since then we did
organize a CAC 2010 which we explicitly affiliated with CJA, and with the
last action at the embassy, last week, we managed to mobilize 35 people in a
week's time as CJA.

This tells me in a way that the idea of a CJA network, and the necessity
thereof, over here at least, exists and is growing. People do want to take
(direct) action for a system change on a broader than just local scale, with
global, common goals. And to be honest, to accomplish a system change, I
think, that's necessary.

But, although a CJA network is a great concept it's hardly fair to put the
burden of organizational tasks of a network with global (or continental)
ambitions upon the shoulders of the few who can travel across Europe to
attend it's meetings. Or to push them to keep doing so. So we'll have to
come up with a way to cope with that, if we want CJA to be something else
than a reference to the awareness of the necessity for global action.

The planned global day of action, 7 weeks from now, might reenergize and
result into CJA to become less unnoted - maybe even more so if it could be
aimed at one specific target - add weight to the network and invite people
to become involved. But then afterwards, how avoiding the evolution of CJA
as it did after COP15?

Maybe if we could overcome the barrier of distance to debate all necessary
issues concerning CJA, we might get closer to a solution. Also, maybe then
it could become more then a European network, as it is right now, and easier
to get people into it. But that's all easier said than done. 

Also, I have the impression that organizations, except a few, involved with
CJA at COP15, now have their agenda's trump a possible joint action agenda
in the context of CJA. But that's just my impression, which can be totally
wrong.

As for now, my means don't allow me anything more than getting involved in
things, CJA related and other, in Belgium. But it give's me a nice excuse to
rant about capitalist pigs from time to time. :-)

Greetings,
Dietrich

  _____  

From: Bert [mailto:antistrata at riseup.net] 
Sent: woensdag 25 augustus 2010 11:30
To: cja at lists.aktivix.org
Subject: Re: [Cja] [climate09-int] CJA: the great fix-it-or-nix-it-debate

Hey,

To point out to those who have a fear of 'disbanding CJA' - it means little
more than not having a meeting every 3 months! There has been very very
little work done specifically by CJA over the past six months or so, even by
those who have attended the meetings (and I include myself as a slacker).
It's hardly like we will be winding down huge projects after months of work.

The simple question is - can people can think of a European-wide project
that requires a network form to implement it? And just saying 'stopping
climate change!' doesn't cut the mustard I'm afraid. Unless there is an
answer to that question, in the form of a concrete project or a broad
political trajectory (ie. inciting communism), then there is no purpose in
our traveling across Europe to sit in wet fields or cold squats.

Bert

On 25/08/2010 09:38, n i c o l a s wrote: 

Hi all,

as someone involved in the attempt to set up a specific local climate
justice campaign in London (through climate camp east London, when it still
existed), Tadzio's suggestion makes perfect sense to me. We need to ground
climate justice as a concept and to find out what it means in practice where
we live. In Europe, this is not necessarily that clear - in our group, we
decided to try to focus on the issue of fuel poverty and were trying to
think of ways to build a grassroots 'campaign' around fuel poverty as a
climate justice issue.

But until we have a series of projects and campaigns such as this, climate
justice will remain ephemeral - a theory that we put on banners and make
into slogans, but without substance. I think that while the email list
should remain, dissolving CJA for now so as to focus on finding out what
climate justice looks like from 'below' is possibly the most useful thing we
can do. It may be that through the CJA list we can have an ongoing
discussion on what climate justice looks like, and how we go about achieving
it. And at some point perhaps we can use the old network to establish
connections between these local projects. But as Tadzio says, unless there
are those specific moments of resistance, we risk turning into little more
than a band of activists who come together at other peoples meetings to
cause a little trouble and not much else besides.

ciao
nic

On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 7:43 AM, Tadzio Mueller <tadziom at yahoo.com> wrote:

dear friends (and dare i say comrades ;-)), 

it's great, and somewhat ironic, to see that there's finally some discussion
regarding anything CJA-related at all. maybe it's like when my mum wanted to
throw away that dusty teddybear in the corner that i never, ever played with
anymore. realising that it was going to go the way of all things, i put up a
big fight, and won. it stayed. unfortunately, it also stayed in its corner,
gathering dust, until at some point, she threw it out in a nightly
commando-raid... wow. very religious: speaking in parables - apologies for
that, it's early, and coffee isn't ready yet...

my point, though, should be obvious: it's inspiring that people obviously
feel so strongly about CJA. it is even more inspiring that there are
regional/national networks that somewhat draw on a CJA(-like) identity in
their work, and that are growing and getting stronger. but: the work done at
regional/national levels has in principle almost nothing to do with what
happens with CJA at the largely European level (ref. back to long debates
whether CJA is global or european - de facto, it is european). at that
level, the network has been largely disfunctional since before (!)
copenhagen. in copenhagen itself, the only functioning CJA structures were
the media group, and the reclaim power action group (though in both cases,
they were also strongly constituted by our amazing danish friends, organised
in the climate collective). neither of these structures exist anymore.
meetings have been getting smaller and smaller, and more and more like
gatherings of friends. for those who haven't been to these meetings: there's
a very strong sense of drift, of a lack of purpose. we're not playing with
the teddybear, as it were. it's gathering dust. it doesn't have a purpose
right now.

to be sure: this lack of purpose is not because the problem has gone away -
but because, i suggest, right now is not really the time for global network
building around climate justice. really, we need to engage in
sub-global/continental capacity/power-building. global networks are only as
good as their social base. in fact, strengthening global networks  the
expense of local bases leads to the latter becoming subject to the whims of
the former.

anyway: if people want to make the de facto european CJA network come alive
again, by all means, get involved. make the structures work. create
structures. do stuff. put in management-speak: CJA can only function if
there's a significant 'buy-in' from people all around the continent. if not,
all the inspiring words written on email lists won't change the fact that
CJA is pretty much non-existent. and if that is the case, then the few of us
who actually have been investing time and resources and affect into trying
to make things work, traveling to distant meetings, can maybe spend that
energy elsewhere.

solidarische gruesse

tadzio

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