[Dissent-fr-info] Naomi Klein : Seattle activists' coming of age in Cophenhagen will be very disobedient

[Dissent! France Info Newsletter]

The Seattle activists' coming of age in Cophenhagen will be very disobedient

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/nov/12/seattle-coming-age-disobedient-copenhagen

The climate conference will witness a new maturity for the movement that
ignited a decade ago. But that does not mean playing it safe

         Naomi Klein
         guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 November 2009 20.30 GMT

The other day I received a pre-publication copy of The Battle of the
Story of the Battle of Seattle, by David and Rebecca Solnit. It's set to
come out 10 years after a historic coalition of activists shut down the
World Trade Organisation summit in Seattle – the spark that ignited a
global anti-corporate 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
organise across the United States on 30 November. "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 mobilisation: the
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 another Seattle.
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-
globalisation" 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 causes, and its cures, that incorporates
virtually every issue on the planet.

In this narrative, the climate is changing not only 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 the same logic can 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 runaway emissions.

Activists in Copenhagen will argue that, far from solving the climate
crisis, carbon trading represents an unprecedented privatisation 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 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 just 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 centre stage.

For instance, the direct action coalition Climate Justice Action has
called on activists to storm the conference centre on 16 December. Many
will do this as part of the "bike bloc", riding together on an as yet to
be revealed "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, decentralised 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 cancelling 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 seen during the last year 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 recognises 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
organisers of the 16 December action. "We will overcome any physical
barriers that stand in our way – but we will not respond with violence
if the police [try] 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 a New York Times comment piece published after Seattle
was shut down, I wrote that a new movement advocating a radically
different form of globalisation "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 favour 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."


   * guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009


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