[Dissent-fr-info] [english] Against Kamikaze Capitalism: Oil, Climate Change and the French refinery blockades

[Dissent! France Info Newsletter]

    Against Kamikaze Capitalism: Oil, Climate Change and the French
    refinery blockades

by David Graeber, published online November 2010

On Saturday, 16th October 2010, some 500 activists gathered at
convergence points across London, knowing only that they were about to
embark on a direct action called Crude Awakening, aimed against the
ecological devastation of the global oil industry, but with no clear
idea of what they were about to do. The plan was quite a clever one.
Organizers had dropped hints they were intending to hit targets in
London itself, but instead, participants---who had been told only to
bring full-charged metro cards, lunch, and outdoor clothing---were led
in brigades to a commuter train for Essex. At one stop, bags full of
white chemical jumpsuits marked with skeletons and dollars, gear, and
lock-boxes mysteriously appeared; shortly thereafter, hastily appointed
spokespeople in each carriage received word of the day's real plan: to
blockade the access road to the giant Coryton refinery near
Stanford-le-Hope -- the road over which 80% of all oil consumed in
London flows. An affinity group of about a dozen women were already
locked down to vans near the refinery's gate and had turned back several
tankers; we were going to make it impossible for the police to overwhelm
and arrest them.

It was an ingenious feint, and brilliantly effective. Before long we
were streaming across fields carrying thirteen giant bamboo tripods,
confused metropolitan police in tow. Hastily assembled squads of local
cops first seemed intent on provoking a violent confrontation---seizing
one of our tripods, attempting to break our lines when we began to set
them up on the highway---but the moment it became clear that we were not
going to yield, and batons would have to be employed, someone must have
given an order to pull back. We can only speculate about what mysterious
algorithm the higher-ups apply in such situations like that ---our
numbers, their numbers, the danger of embarrassing publicity, the larger
political climate---but the result was to hand us the field; our tripods
stood, a relief party backed up the original lockdown; and no further
tankers moved over the access road---a road that on an average day
carries some seven hundred tankers, hauling 375,000 gallons of oil---for
the next five hours. Instead, the access road became a party: with
music, clowns, footballs, local kids on bicycles, a chorus line of
Victorian zombie stilt-dancers, yarn webs, chalk poems, periodic little
spokescouncils---mainly, to decide at exactly what point we would
declare victory and leave.

It was nice to win one for a change. Facing a world where security
forces---from Minneapolis to Strasbourg---seem to have settled on an
intentional strategy of trying to ensure, as a matter of principle, that
no activist should ever leave the field of a major confrontation with a
sense of elation or accomplishment (and often, that as many as possible
should leave profoundly traumatized), a clear tactical victory is
nothing to sneeze at. But at the same time, there was a certain ominous
feel to the whole affair: one which made the overall aesthetic, with its
mad scientist frocks and animated corpses, oddly appropriate.

The Coryton blockade was inspired by a call from indigenous groups in
South America, tied to the Climate Justice Action network, a new global
network created in the lead-up to the actions in Copenhagen in December
2009---for a kind of anti-Columbus day, in honor and defense of the
earth. Yet it was carried out in the shadow of a much-anticipated
announcement, on the 20th, four days later, of savage Tory cuts to the
tattered remains of the British welfare state, from benefits to
education, threatening to throw hundreds of thousands into unemployment,
and thousands already unemployed into destitution---the largest such
cuts since before the Great Depression. The great question on everyone's
mind was, would there be a cataclysmic reaction? Even worse, was there
any possibility there might not be? In France it had already begun.
French Climate Camp had long been planning a similar blockade at the
Total refinery across the channel in Le Havre; when they arrived on the
16th, they discovered the refinery already occupied by its workers as
part of a nationwide pension dispute that had already shut down 16 of
Frances 17 oil refineries. The police reaction was revealing. As soon as
the environmental activists appeared, the police leapt into action,
forcing the strikers back into the refinery and establishing a cordon in
an effort to ensure that under no conditions should the activists be
able to break through and speak with the petroleum workers (after hours
of efforts, a few, on bicycles, did eventually manage to break through.)

"Environmental justice won't happen without social justice," remarked
one of the French Climate Campers afterwards. "Those who exploit
workers, threaten their rights, and those who are destroying the planet,
are the same people." True enough. "We need to move towards a society
and energy transition and to do it cooperatively with the workers of
this sector. The workers that are currently blockading their plants have
a crucial power into their hands; every litre of oil that is left in the
ground thanks to them helps saving human lives by preventing climate
catastrophes."

On the surface this might seem strikingly naive. Do we really expect
workers in the petroleum industry to join us in a struggle to eliminate
the petroleum industry? To strike for their right not to be petroleum
workers? But in reality, it's not naive at all. In fact that's precisely
what they were striking for. They were mobilizing against reforms aimed
to move up their retirement age from 60 to 62---that is, for their right
not to have to be petroleum workers one day longer than they had to.

Unemployment is not always a bad thing. It's something to remember when
we ponder how to avoid falling into the same old reactive trap we always
do when mobilizing around jobs and industry---and thus, find ourselves
attempting to save the very global work machine that's threatening to
destroy the planet. There's a reason the police were so determined to
prevent any conversation between environmentalists and strikers. As
French workers have shown us repeatedly in recent years, we have allies
where we might not suspect we have them.

One of the great ironies of the twentieth century is that everywhere, a
politically mobilized working class---whenever they did win a modicum of
political power---did so under the leadership of a bureaucratic class
dedicating to a productivist ethos that most of them did not share. Back
in, say, 1880, or even 1925, the chief distinction between anarchist and
socialist unions was that the latter were always demanding higher wages,
the former, less hours of work. The socialist leadership embraced the
ideal of infinite growth and consumer utopia offered by their bourgeois
enemies; they simply wished "the workers" to manage it themselves;
anarchists, in contrast, wanted time in which to live, to pursue forms
of value capitalists could not even dream of. Yet where did
anti-capitalist revolutions happen? As we all know from the great
Marx-Bakunin controversy, it was the anarchist constituencies that
actually rose up: whether in Spain, Russia, China, Nicaragua, or
Mozambique. Yet every time they did so, they ended up under the
administration of socialist bureaucrats who embraced that ethos of
productivism, that utopia of over-burdened shelves and consumer plenty,
even though this was the last thing they would ever have been able to
provide. The irony became that the social benefits the Soviet Union and
similar regimes actually were able to provide---more time, since work
discipline becomes a completely different thing when one effectively
cannot be fired from one's job---were precisely the ones they couldn't
acknowledge; it has to be referred to as "the problem of absenteeism",
standing in the way of an impossible future full of shoes and consumer
electronics. But if you think about it, even here, it's not entirely
different. Trade unionists feel obliged to adopt bourgeois terms---in
which productivity and labor discipline are absolute values---and act as
if the freedom to lounge about on a construction sites is not a hard-won
right but actually a problem. Granted, it would be much better to simply
work four hours a day than do four hours worth of work in eight (and
better still to strive to dissolve the distinction between work and play
entirely), but surely this is better than nothing. The world needs less
work.

All this is not to say that there are not plenty of working class people
who are justly proud of what they make and do, just that it is the
perversity of capitalism (state capitalism included) that this very
desire is used against us, and we know it. As a result, the great
paradox of working class life is that while working class people and
working class sensibilities are responsible for almost everything of
redeeming value in modern life---from shish kebab to rock'n'roll to
public libraries (and honestly, do the administrative, "middle" classes
ever really create anything?) they are creative precisely when they are
not working---that is, in that domain of which cultural theorists so
obnoxiously refer to as "consumption." Which of course makes it possible
for the administrative classes (amongst whom I count capitalists) to
simultaneously dismiss their creativity, steal it, and sell it back to them.

The question is how to break the assumption that engaging in hard
work---and by extension, dutifully obeying orders---is somehow an
intrinsically moral enterprise. This is an idea that, admittedly, has
even affected large sections of the working class. For anyone truly
interested in human liberation, this is the most pernicious question. In
public debate, one of the few things everyone seems to have to agree
with is that only those willing to work---or even more, only those
willing to submit themselves to well-nigh insane degrees of labor
discipline---could possibly be morally deserving of anything---that not
just work, work of the sort considered valuable by financial
markets---is the only legitimate moral justification for rewards of any
sort. This is not an economic argument. It's a moral one. It's pretty
obvious that there are many circumstances where, even from the
economists' perspective, too much work and too much labor discipline is
entirely counterproductive. Yet every time there is a crisis, the answer
on all sides is always the same: people need to work more! There's
someone out there working less than they could be---handicapped people
who are not quite as handicapped as they're making themselves out to be,
French oil workers who get to retire before their souls and bodies are
entirely destroyed, art students, lazy porters, benefit cheats---and
somehow, this must be what's ruining things for everyone.

I might add that this moralistic obsession with work is very much in
keeping with the spirit of neoliberalism itself, increasingly revealed,
in these its latter days, as very much a moral enterprise. Or I think at
this point we can even be a bit more specific. Neoliberalism has always
been a form of capitalism that places political considerations ahead of
economic ones. How else can we understand the fact that Neoliberals have
managed to convince everyone in the world that economic growth and
material prosperity are the only thing that mattered, even as, under its
aegis real global growth rates collapsed, sinking to perhaps a third of
what they had been under earlier, state-driven, social-welfare oriented
forms of development, and huge proportions of the world's population
sank into poverty. Or that financial elites were the only people capable
of measuring the value of anything, even as it propagated an economic
culture so irresponsible that it allowed those elites to bring the
entire financial architecture of the global economy tumbling on top of
them because of their utter inability to assess the value of
anything---even their own financial instruments. Once one cottons onto
it, the pattern becomes unmistakable. Whenever there is a choice between
the political goal of undercutting social movements---especially, by
convincing everyone there is no viable alternative to the capitalist
order--and actually running a viable capitalist order, neoliberalism
means always choosing the first. Precarity is not really an especially
effective way of organizing labor. It's a stunningly effective way of
demobilizing labor. Constantly increasing the total amount of time
people are working is not very economically efficient either (even if we
don't consider the long-term ecological effects); but there's no better
way to ensure people are not thinking about alternative ways to organize
society, or fighting to bring them about, than to keep them working all
the time. As a result, we are left in the bizarre situation where almost
no one believes that capitalism is really a viable system any more, but
neither can they even begin to imagine a different one. The war against
the imagination is the only one the capitalists seem to have
definitively won.

It only makes sense, then, that the first reaction to the crash of 2008,
which revealed the financiers so recently held up as the most brilliant
economic minds in history to be utterly, disastrously inept at the one
thing they were supposed to be best at--- calculating value--was not, as
most activists (myself included) had predicted, a rush towards Green
Capitalism---that is, an economic response---but a political one. This
is the real meaning of the budget cuts. Any competent economist knows
what happens when you slash the budget in the middle of downturn. It can
only make things worse. Such a policy only makes sense as a violent
attack on anything that even looks like it might possibly provide an
alternative way to think about value, from public welfare to the
contemplation of art or philosophy (or at least, the contemplation of
art or philosophy for any reason other than making money). For the
moment, at least, most capitalists are no longer even thinking about
capitalism's long-term viability.

It is terrifying, to be sure, to understand that one is facing a
potentially suicidal enemy. But at least it clarifies the situation. And
yes, it is quite possible that in time, the capitalists will pick
themselves up, gather their wits, stop bickering and begin to do what
they always do: begin pilfering the most useful ideas from the social
movements ranged against them (mutual aid, decentralization,
sustainability) so as to turn them into something exploitative and
horrible. In the long term, if there is to be a long term anyway,
they're pretty much going to have to. But in the meantime, we really are
facing a kind of kamikaze capitalism---a capitalist order that will not
hesitate to destroy itself if that's what it takes to destroy its
enemies (us). If nothing else it does help us understand what we're
fighting for: at this moment, absolutely everything.

This makes it all the more critical to figure out a way to snap the
productivist bargain, if we might call it that---that it is both an
ecological and a political imperative to bring about that meeting that
the police in Le Havre were so determined to prevent. There are a lot of
threads to be untangled here, and any number of pernicious illusions
that need to be exposed. I will end with only one. What is the real
relation between all that money that's supposedly in such short supply,
necessitating the slashing of budgets and abrogation of pension
agreements, and the ecological devastation of our petroleum-based energy
system? Aside from the obvious one: that debt is the main means of
driving the global work machine, which requires the endless escalation
of energy consumption in the first place. In fact, it's quite simple. We
are looking at a kind of conceptual back-flip. Oil, after all, is a
limited resource. There is only so much of it. Money is not. A coin or
bill is really nothing but an IOU, a promise; the only limit to how much
we can produce is how much we are willing to promise one another. Yet
under contemporary capitalism, we act as if it's just the opposite.
Money is treated as if it were oil, a limited resource, there's only so
much of it; the result is to give central bankers the power to enforce
economic policies that demand ever more work, ever increasing
production, in such a way that we end up treating oil as if it were
money: as an unlimited resource, something that can be freely spent to
power economic expansion, at roughly 3-5% a year, forever. The moment we
come to terms with the reality, that we are not dealing with absolute
constraints but merely promises, we can no longer say "but there just
isn't any money"---the real question is who owes what to whom, what sort
of promises are worth keeping, which are absolute---a government's
promise to repay its creditors at a predetermined rate of interest, or
the promise that it's workers can stop working at a certain age, or our
promise to future generations to leave them with a planet capable of
human habitation. Suddenly the morality seems very different; and, like
the French environmentalists, we discover ourselves with friends we
didn't know we had.




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