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<h2 style="margin: 20px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 8px; border-bottom:
1px solid rgb(51, 51, 51);">Against Kamikaze Capitalism: Oil,
Climate Change and the French refinery blockades</h2>
</span><span style="font-family: Arial,Verdana,sans-serif; color:
rgb(84, 84, 84); font-size: 11px;">by David Graeber, published
online November 2010</span><span style="font-family:
Arial,Verdana,sans-serif; color: rgb(84, 84, 84); font-size:
11px;">
<div style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 28px;"><br>
<p style="margin: 15px 0px; padding: 0px;">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.</p>
<p style="margin: 15px 0px; padding: 0px;">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.</p>
<p style="margin: 15px 0px; padding: 0px;">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.</p>
<p style="margin: 15px 0px; padding: 0px;">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.)</p>
<p style="margin: 15px 0px; padding: 0px;">“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.”</p>
<p style="margin: 15px 0px; padding: 0px;">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.</p>
<p style="margin: 15px 0px; padding: 0px;">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.</p>
<p style="margin: 15px 0px; padding: 0px;">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.</p>
<p style="margin: 15px 0px; padding: 0px;">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.</p>
<p style="margin: 15px 0px; padding: 0px;">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.</p>
<p style="margin: 15px 0px; padding: 0px;">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.</p>
<p style="margin: 15px 0px; padding: 0px;">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.</p>
<p style="margin: 15px 0px; padding: 0px;">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.</p>
<p style="margin: 15px 0px; padding: 0px;">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.</p>
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