I’m not sad to see that Greta Thunberg has failed to win this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, and I do hope she is not disappointed either. Greta has many years of noble activism ahead, and, characteristically, say’s she is not looking for accolade or stardom, just action to prevent the coming climate catastrophe. Whilst climate action includes action for Peace, it has not been her primary argument.

It is also the case that this year’s winner, Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister has done a resounding job for Peace with Eritrea after 20 years of war. The Swedish Nobel group say Ahmed spent his first 100 days as Prime Minister “…lifting the country’s state of emergency, granting amnesty to thousands of political prisoners, discontinuing media censorship, legalising outlawed opposition groups, dismissing military and civilian leaders who were suspected of corruption, and significantly increasing the influence of women in Ethiopian political and community life. He has also pledged to strengthen democracy by holding free and fair elections.”

That’s not a bad record, although it’s clear that Ahmed is no revolutionary seeking to end world Capitalism. Ethiopia is in debt to China to a tune of $12billion, and has accepted huge grants that ensure China a stake in the country’s economic governance. This is true of much of Africa now, the Atlantic island nation of Cape Verde now finding the Chinese aid has come with a price tag of handing over one entire island for a Chinese military base. Arguably a precursor to more conflict and war, not less. 

It is hard to grant the Nobel Peace Prize much credence in any case. President Obama received it whilst sending more troops to the genocidal war in Afghanistan and maintaining Guantanamo Bay. Henry Kissinger, architect of the genocide in Vietnam, won it, as did the Zionist militant, Menachem Begin. Perhaps the idea is that giving gongs to warmongers encourages them towards seeking peace. 

At best it’s a symbol of Liberalism, balancing accolades for war-mongers alongside active peaceniks, and doing nothing much for the gross inequalities that infect and distort all human life. The fact that the campaign against nuclear weapons, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), won the Peace Prize offered our side a much needed boost in this period of renewed proliferation, but has not influenced Trump’s decision to withdraw from anti-nuclear weapon treaties for a ingle moment.

Today’s announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize will be tomorrow’s forgotten news. It does, however, offer a chance for reflection over what we mean by Peace. In our day-to-day lives, we think of quiet, sitting, perhaps silence and stillness. Politically it is generally recognised as the absence of War and conflict. In truth, world peace means far more than that.

Studies and experiences of domestic abuse – an escalating epidemic in the UK at this time – recognise that the absence of violence does not represent peace. Hidden threats and messages that undermine confidence are also mechanisms of conflict. The human-on-human behaviours of coercive control evoke sensations of subjugation, fear and powerlessness that are very similar to the emotions described by those living in a war zone, if less intense. 

Thinking Big Picture can transfer these individual experiences of repression, oppression and exploitation into institutional and societal behaviours. In essence, employees in non-democratically organised workplaces experience significant coercive power-and-control from business owners and their managers every day. Bosses rule over us – we do not have any control over the means-of-production nor what is produced. This is a significant problem for we who demand fundamental changes to production in order to save the planet.

At the same time, Governments, largely everywhere, dictate limits to acceptable behaviours and attitudes of all citizens (and non-citizens) according to their desired outcomes for political and economic continuation. Threats of imprisonment or worse are laid bare in Acts of Law, many of which are made not in the interests of humanity or peace, but of the ruling class. Churches aligned with the values of the State also control thoughts and behaviours by threatening eternal damnation for being non-compliant. 

It is hard to find any individual peace if you disagree with the political or religious regime you find yourself living within. It is hard to find individual Peace if you have insufficient resources to live securely. In short, it is hard for a People to live in Peace if they feel insecure and under threat. 

And this is where the threat of climate catastrophe comes back into the discussion. The very threat of societal collapse evokes not only personal disquiet but also social conflict – the struggle for resources, self-protection, shelter and survival.

Greta Thunberg’s call for Non-Violent Direct Action is not the same as a call for Peace. It is a recognition that we have to make a noise, and more importantly use “force of numbers” to force politicians and corporations to “Act Now” to end carbon emissions. Protest is not Peace. There is a requirement to use methods of power and coercion to influence those who coerce from a position of enormous power. This is a condition of conflict. And at its heart, class conflict between those with and those without.

In parallel, the position of Extinction Rebellion to be “Beyond Politics” does not represent a condition of being non-political. The demand for zero-emissions by 2025 is deeply political. The demand for Citizen’s Assemblies to exert power within formal politics is, in Truth, a highly political demand. It changes society’s basic constitution. CA’s (as we have come to call them in this era’s horrid dissent into acronyms) will, by definition, act in tension and sometimes conflict with the Political Class and Corporate CEOs. Perhaps, even, class war.

Living in a sustainable and ecological balance with Nature, protecting the environment and reversing the current ecocide is a noble goal, one we share and believe is possible. The no-growth stasis we seek offers sensations of equilibrium and calmness, harmony and peace. But there shall be no Peace until we prevent Climate Catastrophe. Greta, as one amongst us all, cannot yet claim the Nobel Peace prize with much evidence, nor should we want her to.

Friday 11th October 2019

Yesterday’s Rebellion included the XR Peace mobilisation protesting outside the Ministry of Defence. There were four arrests. The focus was, naturally, that just as climate chaos will force millions to migrate, so it will cause wars. War for liveable land as our soils become barren, wars for water rights, and wars for food as shortages increase. And military violence to repel migrants from national borders.

The invasion of Kurdish territories inside Syria on the same day gave an heady resonance to the cry for Peace. Whilst protesters in Trafalgar Square held a period of mourning for the lives already lost through climate change and the billions yet to prematurely ended through war, drought, disease and famine, the very real theatre was being enacted across the Middle East.

Predictably, by today, there are pictures of the fearful faces of mothers and their crying children hurriedly packed onto the backs of pick-up trucks and queuing along the desert escape roads away from Turkish guns. Hundreds of bombs dropped on civilians, tanks crushing shacks, troops on the ground trampling the vulnerable crops.

These scenes have become so familiar and commonplace since the first Gulf War in 1990, that after 30 years they are all-but routine on our screens and we are at an emotional impasse. 

There is a premium on empathy these days. So many sights and sounds of suffering that a Googlemaps 360-degree spin around our conscience is enough to numb all senses for sheer self-protection. The scenes of local poverty are everywhere, with cardboard mats in doorways now part of any shopping expedition. The human degradation of drug addiction clearly mapped upon a passing  face on an urban street, and the dishevelled elderly shuffling painfully through the Pound Shop are all too familiar.

Most of us have only so much we can give, rationing and then running-out of pound coins in purses and pockets to give to the street beggar, and drying-up the emotional compassion we can offer through our warm eyes and words. In the end we are forced into a condition of self-protection, fending-off any guilty conscience through symbolic acts of individual penance. After all, we’re not responsible for the housing crisis or barbaric wars. At least we recycle and re-use. And we, too, wish to survive.

Taking-in war atrocities really does demand strength and resilience. They’re happening far away and to “other people”, however you perceive and digest that description. Similarly, putting ourselves in the shoes of migrants is a challenge the minute we have a home and an income. And then there’s climate change.

The super-typhoon about to hit Tokyo can only be the stuff of imagination or Hollywood disaster movie to those of us in calmer climes. The endless drought in California might engage emotional resonance from those days of scorching heatwaves at home or on Mediterranean vacation, but living in it, with it, for the foreseeable future? Can you imagine?

Being suddenly engulfed by flames from a forest is all but unimaginable even for those in woodland homes, but having our living-room inundated by floodwater inside one minute has become the experience of near-neighbours here in Britain. We are in receipt of so many sensations of the potential climate catastrophe heading our way that it’s becoming harder to ignore. Even the Rugby world championships have been disrupted! The premonition of becoming overwhelmed is very real. It evokes  a near-constant state of anxiety. 

It is being reported that people are visiting their doctors to complain of significant bouts of anxiety and depression the cause of which, they suggest, is the current debate over Brexit and resultant uncertainty over the future. Perhaps this is media hype, but should such a phenomenon be in any way real it would be easy to understand why people cannot address the climate emergency to the extent necessary to prevent catastrophe. It’s all too much.

Today’s Extinction Rebellion core discourse has been on the subject of Global Justice, with assemblies in St James’s Park (just before the Police forcibly cleared us out) and beyond considering the issues facing the Global South in particular. War is on that agenda. And it is unnecessary to disentangle the assault of the Turkish State upon the Kurdish people in Syria from the dislocation caused by climate breakdown. The ragged trail of fleeing refugees are the same in both cases. The cause and effect have coalesced.

There is an oil pipeline from Iran to the West runs through Turkey. China would like to have influence and partnership with this buffer state between East and West. Indeed, every State and every corporation wants to be the best of friends with Turkey. Who cares that its a Police State, threatening to free the captured religious fundamentalist soldiers of the war in Syria and send them North to destabilise and destroy. 

The Kurds will be the latest collateral damage of this endless war for Oil. Endless, that is, until we force system change for a zero carbon economy and full-on global justice for all. Destabilisation from conflict is with us and just as threatening to the future of our societies and economies as climate change. The two are, indeed, intrinsically linked. And non-violent direct action is needed against both. Stop the War – Save the Climate!

Thursday 10th October 2019

There is no hypocrisy in non-violent direct action. Nearing one-thousand protesters have now been arrested, such is the sacrifice and commitment coalesced inside the Extinction Rebellion. More of us are joining each day. And internationally the Movement is burgeoning, holding together the very powerful principles of non-violent direct action and self-sacrifice in common cause.

Every day, new reports unfold about the current impact of global heating on climate and the ecology. And every day the criticism and disparagingly clever comments increase. By fair means or foul we are called-out as hypocrites.

In our local protest this week, as we held a banner across the pelican crossing spelling out Extinction Rebellion in pretty and colourful pieces of scrap fabric, a bloke driving a van called out, “bet you used acrylic paints on that!” Hmmm…Clever. 

Across the country people comment on the images of our tents in Hyde Park or Marsham Street, decrying the protesters for leaving rubbish. It has to be said that the rules of engagement with XR are no alcohol, no drugs and no littering, the protesters being particularly obsessive-compulsive about the latter. But the opposition are keen to portray as as “dirty”, “uncouth”, and ultimately indecent. 

There are many slurs shouted from passers by and printed in the media. A favourite is the transport we use. “Ha, they’re taking a diesel coach to London – hypocrites!” 

“There you go, they’re drinking coffee – think of the world’s resources used to make that! Ha, hypocrites!”

“Bet they’ve been in an airplane…hypoc…”

“Bet you’ve got a TV!…hypo..”

“Why don’t you cycle everywhere? Hyp…”

“Your electric bike has rare-earth metals in the battery – hy…”

“Your cycling helmet is plastic so how dare you protest!”

Today’s right-wing Daily Mail reports seeing XR protesters inside a McDonalds burger bar – probably using the toilets because the police had confiscated our paid-for and provided portable toilets. But hey, why not just shout out, “hypocrites!”

In the name of Love which we espouse against Hate, the opposition is understandable. We are disturbing the equilibrium and that always evokes anxiety. The responses are defensive in the first place. Of course there are those who vehemently reject our arguments or come from a political standpoint of opposition to collective emancipation, but in the main the retorts are clever-defensive, batting-off the omni-present question posed – “why don’t you join us?”

Extinction Rebellion says no more Business as Usual, quoting Greta Thunberg, “I want you to act as if the house is on fire. Because it is!” Taken at face value, that is a very threatening statement. The less confident amongst us, and those who suffer anxiety and depression will probably find it unnerving. The best response is to push it away or make light of it.

We say the house is burning and they kick back.

We have to eat our own exasperation at the responses. The house is burning. I run into your flat and try to help you save your baby. You start to complain that I didn’t take my shoes off at the entrance. The house is still burning. The fire brigade arrives and you send them away fearing water damage.

And how easy it is to point out that we who believe the world is on fire are still in the house. The only way we could leave would be by committing mass suicide – not a recipe for preventing global catastrophe. And so we live within the existing society, yes, picking-up our litter and changing what we can of our personal polluting ways, but in the main we are obliged to manage as best we can with what is provided: public transport, electricity, communications – all based upon carbon fuels and single-use plastics.

In fact it is the scale of the enterprise that is the most threatening. Those who have faced-up to the scientific facts and observable degradation of the environment and eco-systems are living in a very Big Picture. It is very disquieting and often overwhelming. We come to realise that, as individuals, we have very little influence over the System. The size of the global economy is mind-boggling, the essential change to zero-carbon emissions by 2025 all-but inconceivable, the devastation caused by a global temperature rise of 2, 3 or 4 degrees centigrade compared to pre-industrial times quite paralysing. Even imagining the demise of the bees befuddles belief. 

So we can quite understand the put-downs. We are living above and outside the superficial aspects of day-to-day life. Ours is global vision because global heating raises demands about the base of society not just the superstructure. Everything must change. 

Using a plastic bottle, eating a burger, using carbon-generated lighting are all side-issues when the house is on fire and there is no escape. We have to focus on putting the fire out, now. Of course that means we don’t waste or pollute anymore than we can help, but such individual actions of contrition don’t add up societal change – it is the global politic, economic model and methods of production that have to change.

In a state of despair at the sticks and stones of throwaway snide comments this week, one protester wrote with sarcastic wit: “Until we see a Movement comprised of people with implacable good manners, faultless political analysis and exemplary consumption habits, I’m afraid we’ve little choice but to support the unfolding political and environmental catastrophe.” And someone else added, “…and even then we’ll probably be busy that day…”

“You can’t get people on your side by causing disruption”, is the final damnation of our side. But, clearly, the Status Quo is not benign. The Status Quo is killing the planet and its people. Disrupting such an indefensible normality is essential. In the process of protest we are undoubtedly gaining ground, more people becoming involved with the issues if not the actions themselves. 

The cry of hypocrisy does, nevertheless, identify one final and indisputable reality. There will be those who, come what may, will actively defend the System that is so palpably indefensible. We will not convince everyone, and the forces of the status quo will continue to weaponise them with everything from slurs and cries of “hypocrite” to active and organised violence against us. These are the early days.

Wednesday 9th October 2019

After 24 hours, 320 people had been arrested in London for playing their part in the October Rebellion against Extinction. The purpose of the rebellion is not to “take power” or overthrow Capitalism, or even become decision makers. The stated aim of Extinction Rebellion is to put sufficient pressure on Government and Corporations for them to take the action needed to save humanity and stop the accelerating ecocide. 

The plan is to raise consciousness of climate change and thereby force economic and political action through sheer force of numbers. Clearly, despite more than 8,000 activists putting themselves on the frontline in London yesterday (oh, and 8 million across the world just two weeks ago), the protests are not having the desired effect on our elected political leaders or their courtiers in the Press. 

Boris Johnson, the latest rabid Prime Minister of the 7th largest economy in the world has made light of the roving shut-downs of central London and his beloved Westminster. He has called us “uncooperative crusties” and gone further in demanding the protesters should abandon their “hemp-smelling bivouacs” and stop blocking roads. 

Establishment toadies lambasting the protesters include the always delightful Toby Young of the chatterarty, showing grim determination to be yet more abusive despite calling himself a classical liberal. “I was sceptical about the necessity of returning to a pre-capitalist, agrarian way of life if we want to tackle climate change, but having now been prevented from crossing Westminster Bridge by a group of protestors doing yoga I’ve completely come around, obviously”, he tweeted.

The general media response has been far smaller than the issue should command. It has also been negative. Our local “newspaper”, the Plymouth Herald, chose to headline “7 protesters in Plymouth” rather than the 50 in London, and carefully choose words and images to denigrate rather than report the facts. It is a small long-haired section of smelly middle-class hippies who are predicting extinction, the 99% of climate scientists staying unheard and unconsidered.

Channel Four News managed to find a young man in workman’s garb who believed “hotter summers and colder winters will get me more work – what’s not to like!” Clearly climate change will be a boost for self-employed plumbers everywhere, for a while.

There is a serious challenge here. Not only that, as we have always known, 50 people out of a city of 250,000, or 5,000 people out of a country of 50 million do not represent the critical mass needed for system change. Extinction Rebellion can be ridiculed and dismissed on current size alone, but also as unrepresentative of the ordinary citizen.

This is a very serious charge. In the constant quest for the divide-and-rule tactical advantage, always so effective for any ruling class of any society, the accusation of being a middle-class drop-out is particularly effective. Johnson’s script-writers (yes, it’s true, his every word is orchestrated) know that opposition by the worker who has been held-up from getting to work can be amplified and consolidated by officially labelling the offenders “middle-class”, with all the privilege that implies.  

After a lifetime of building protests and picket lines, I have grown impervious to passing insults of “get a job” as well as “get back to Russia”. After 43 years of full-time employment I am only too aware of the grinding and tedious repetition of getting to work in the morning and holding back my emotions and thoughts until the following weekend. For most workers there is a tendency to think anyone not working flat-out is a loafer or a privileged ne’er-do-well. Why is my life so shit compared with “others”?

There is a powerful emotional sensation of ire, of rising bile and anger, that accompanies thoughts of social class position and comparative disadvantage. For this reason, anyone with the modicum of consciousness required to perceive that they are, indeed, working class – that is, will be on the streets and homeless inside six months if they lose all employment and use up their scant savings – has more than a fleeting sense of support for anyone fighting the System. In this we suffer a clash of consciousness, easily manipulated and perverted by the Media.

So it requires a period of thoughtful reflection to truly understand what the accusation of “being middle-class” actually means. It was once thought that bank clerks were middle class, or that house-owners were middle class (those with fat mortgages included), or that nurses and teachers and social workers and other Council workers were middle class because they were professionals.

It simply doesn’t work like that today. The social care professionals have been thoroughly proletarianised. Whilst two-thirds of workers earn less than the average wage (that’s the law of averages – it is skewed by the fat incomes of the minority of salaries that are above average), the professional practitioners are not fat cats. The average is distorted by the high-paid manager-class above them. 

The truly middle-class in UK society – those actually owning their properties and sheltered by assured inherited wealth that will protect them through the lean times or even economic collapse – are small in number and certainly not above 20% of the population. Yes, they are the well-educated, or at least they are those who have had easy access to discover art and culture and history and travel, but they also have a sense of investment in the system as it stands, and stand to lose if the system is levelled-out and the wealth redistributed.

It then stands to reason, or fact, or the Truth, that precious few of those in Extinction Rebellion are truly of the middle-classes. Indeed, those around me are poor, not from choice but from the fragility of youth employment and erosion of well-paid work. Certainly the numbers needing help to pay for transport to London in order to protest, for donations from the XR Hardship Fund to help pay the fines, and seeking secure if shared housing, condemn the accusation of being “middle class” as a complete fabrication.   

In addition, Extinction Rebellion has a set of self-aware value statements for those wishing to associate with the Movement. A significant strand includes detailed examination of White Privilege, fully recognising the horrific scale of inequality between rich and poor, not only in terms of class but because of racism, sexism and the mix of discriminatory values ensconced in Capitalist society. 

The fact that Black people in the UK are far more likely to be arrested, imprisoned, stop-and-searched, harassed and targets of violence is beyond doubt. So accusations that XR is full of the middle-class privileged whites has that horrible kernel of Truth that upholds such a Great Lie. The reality is people of colour in the West are wary of the call to stand up, stand out and “get arrested” because they know they’ll be the first whether offering themselves up or not, and their treatment will be harsher. 

The deeper reality for the average environmentally aware activist is that Climate Change will devastate the People’s of the Global South, Africa and Asia, first and most powerfully in the short -term (an aside is the recognition that the vast majority of historic warming gases have been emitted by the predominantly White North-West). So institutional racism is an active component of the impact of Climate Change.

It doesn’t take a middle-class eduction to understand this. The majority of working class families have been, over the decades, influenced by migration. We are an hotch-potch of inter-cultural (the old so-called mixed-race) families. Irish navies and African seamen meeting-up with Eastern-European Jewish migrants and Caribbean wage-slaves to intermix with remnants of the Anglo-Saxons and Celts to produce the modern army of factory and office workers. 

It tends to be the real middle classes, the rural landowners and medium-sized business owners, who have sought to maintain the myth of racial purity and kept their heritage “White”. So the idea that it’s “middle-class” to be anti-racist or anti-sexist (or accept LGBT+ when so many working class families have at least one gay, bi- or gender-uncomfortable relative) is wholly absurd.

Just as absurd is the notion that its middle class to have an allotment (think about it – they’re provided by local Councils as an affordable social outlet for those without land). Given the history and size of the Ramblers Association, this too is a wonderful example of the widespread working class appreciation if not actual worship of Nature and the Environment. 

In truth it is the real middle-classes who are put-out by the October Rebellion and most vocal against it. Workers may make the occasional sly comment, mirroring the defensive culture of banter and sarcastic commentary that is part-and-parcel of the alienating and competitive workplaces we suffer, but underneath we care about the Planet, the Future and Survival. We love our children too.

The issue of Class is always on the Agenda. Today it is the likes of Johnson-of-Eton (grandson of one of the last interior ministers of the Ottoman Empire government who was usefully assassinated in 1922 during the Turkish War of Independence) and Young (son of Baron Young of Dartington and descendant of Admiral Sir Robert Moorsom who fought at the Battle of Trafalgar) who call upon the working classes to condemn the climate protests as Middle-Class. The irony and hypocrisy couldn’t be greater.

It is for this reason that we working class socialists are hoping to engage the organisation of the working class with XR to lay bare the lie. We know it will take the organised appearance of working class trade unions on the streets, hand-in-hand with  besmirched “tree-huggers”, to defeat the attempts at division and imposed isolation.

At the height of the struggle across the Western World for Civil Rights and Peace it was the students, mostly children of working parents, who occupied Paris in 1968 and led the cross-continent revolt for social justice. At it’s height, as the Police moved in with ferocity and armed violence to break the Sorbonne, the organised workers from trade unions across France downed-tools and marched in to join the Youth and prevent the carnage. 

That is why we are building for trade unionists to join in a day of action on Saturday, coming from across the country to join Extinction Rebellion in Trafalgar Square and march on Westminster. It is the dispossessed, the poor and we who are dependent on next month’s wages or paltry pension income to survive who will suffer first and worst from the impact of global heating. It is the working class who have the most to gain from unity with Environmentalists and complete System Change.

Tuesday 8th October 2019

The body has plenty of Adrenalin to be excreted whilst sitting down. Excitement and fear, courage and anxiety can all be evoked by the passive observance of the sacrifices of others. Armchair activists, those chained to employment routines, co-conspirators responsible for family maintenance, all collaborators in kind, those of us with reasons for not joining the front line, can and do share the emotions of the “arrestables” whilst not being amongst them.

This morning’s scenes at the start of the October Rebellion, overnight arrests in London, police hard-handling of elderly sit-downers in Sydney, children and young people joining workers and pensioners in more than 60 cities across the world, the banners, the scaffold towers, the perilous gluing and chaining of limbs and bodies to block main arteries and business openings, all, all, evoke sensations of arousal and, dare it be admitted, Hope.

Extinction Rebellion now has over 4,500 affiliate groups across the world, and the next two weeks will see more. The eight million people who joined the 20th September global strike will be added to by millions more drawn into the campaign by loud and accurate messages of scientific Truth and anger at Establishment intransigence.

Whilst the BBC chooses to all but ignore the protests, most media outlets are broadcasting fascinating and though-provoking images and interviews of human ingenuity and peaceful collaboration. The artistic expressions of environmental distress and human desire are manifold everywhere. 

Protesters risking their lives perched painfully atop flimsy stilts, others locked to hastily erected and beautifully adorned scaffold towers, people chained under vehicles, together present images of commitment, humility and sacrifice designed to provoke changed awareness and new thinking.

By the end of the first day of the next 14, more than 200 people have been arrested in London amidst the cold and wet English Autumn. Police on 12-hour shifts, bussed in from across the country and highly briefed are acting-out well-rehearsed roles to produce systematic cautions, clearances and convictions. The “arrestables” are throwing themselves at the Law to break the log jam, the impasse, the Status Quo that insists Business as Usual.

The Climate Emergency must drive immediate structural change if we are to survive. There can be no more business as usual in politics, business, behaviour, thought or emotion. The rebellion is designed to arouse. Whilst the rebels formally and earnestly apologise for the disruption caused they know this is nothing compared with the devastation we face from economic collapse.

If the drivers and commuters become upset, angry or even abusive they are to be understood, empathised with and engaged wherever possible in quiet discussion about the threats we face now, tomorrow and for the rest of our lives. If today is not the right day for forcing the change we need in order to survive, then when? 

If non-violent direct action is not the correct method to evoke change, then what is? We have tried, and will continue to attempt, the ancient “legal”, respectable, non-disruptive methods of political lobbying, propagandising, participation in elections, letter-writing campaign and all. But, in the last 30 years of trying, none of these have produced a fraction of the public education and political pressure that the past 6 months of direct action has achieved. 

We who are not, salute the arrestables. As the days progress into months and years ahead many who have not yet defied the Law will find ourselves up against it. The forces of short-termism, both the politicians limiting their horizons to the next public vote and the shareholders unable to focus beyond next year’s dividends, will have to be forced to understand that their way cannot continue.

Their Way, the established way of doing things, has to end. Profiting from the destruction of people and planet, gambling on the destruction of the Amazon, investing in Ecocide in all its myriad of forms, is all illegitimate. In very practical terms, their actions are against the Law…of Nature. 

And if the rich are expected to sacrifice much, so be it. So are we all. The poorest have suffered and survived or perished in the next-to-nothing left-over after the vanquishing Capitalist expropriators, privateers, carpet-baggers and military-industrial gangsters. The global South has been ravaged and cannot care for the weeping and wailing of the Northern privileged wealthy calling for calm and collaboration.

Today’s responses from London workers inconvenienced by the barricades has been heart-warming and encouraging. The man missing his desperately needed hospital appointment offered full support. The woman late for work compared the delay to her routine experience of cancelled trains and poor public transport and suggested that, at least this time, she was delayed with good reason. 

The postal worker said he didn’t min working an extra hour to complete his deliveries if he was helping save the planet, the baker brought free bread and cakes to those sat on the cold and wet tarmac, the ex-Police Superintendent placed himself in position to be arrested – again!

The practical scale of this week’s protests will still be far smaller than the critical mass required to force change. Government spokesmen (they are men), have been quick to condemn and to say their parties are doing enough and should be given a chance. But back in the homes, where tonights evening news flashes on-screen images and half-heard spin-lines, people everywhere will feel something. 

We are spreading the word – we face climate catastrophe and must be heard. No-one should feel guilty for not being on the front line. No-one should rush out and join the array unprepared, untrained or unclear. We are all learning and feeling our way forward. Like the build-up to inevitable war, we are preparing for huge change and disruption, the size of which will dwarf the best of any protest action we can imagine.

The sooner we end business as usual the better. I have done the training, I have felt the passion, and I’m off to protest right now. 

Monday 7th October 2019

Today begins a week of chat about mental health in the Western countries of Europe and the USA. It is Mental Health Week. It is also the beginning of the October Rebellion where environmental activists across the same set of countries will be sacrificing themselves to discomfort and arrest to protest the inaction of politicians and corporations over climate change.

The two political poles of attitude towards youth have already been voiced in the media. On the one side, the old cry of the Establishment has been offered to decry the too-fast growing-up of the young, mimicking Victorian concerns about teenage suffrage and self-determination, particularly of the poor and working classes. 

On the other, there are calls for revolt, more school strikes, and law breaking. In all this debate there is a fact that remains unstated. We live in a world dominated by the free-market economics of neoliberalism. The thinking behind neoliberalism is for unbridled capitalism. Such desired acceleration of accumulation of wealth by the super-rich continues to exaggerate the already unfathomable and illegitimate divide between rich and poor. 

The neoliberals always expected mass protest as they purloined the infrastructure, essential utilities and social services. Laws were put in place, Reagan and Thatcher being the most offensive, and early organised protests put-down by force – the US Air Traffic Controllers and UK Miners being historic examples. And then water, heating, health care, adult social care, housing and education were privatised by stealth and resolve. Profits for the rich increased whilst cuts to services (and associate jobs) ripped the notion and reality of welfare to shreds.

Mental health services, especially for children and adolescents, have been all-but destroyed. One-in-four of our children experience periods of depression and anxiety. One-in-ten need significant mental health support and face waiting lists of months or  years, in either case negating the original diagnosis. The latest reports identify the distressing fact that one-in-four adults in England and Wales are currently in receipt of psychotropic prescription drugs.

The Marxist anthropologist, Professor David Harvey, has detailed the design of neoliberalism in great detail. Amongst many plans laid by the Capitalist academics working after the Second World War, all engaged and well-paid to organise the breaking of the mixed-economy of so-called Keynsianism, was the requirement to infantilise the population.

Infantilisation – the persistence of infantile characteristics or behaviour in adult life. – would be essential to break the predictable opposition to deep inequality. The plying of social opiates, from consumer-durable games to drugs (both legal and illegal) fed the nineteen eighties social disorientation, isolating and marginalising campaigns against unemployment and privatisation. The first bosses offensive succeeded and the corporate lobbying of governments ensured the total political sign-up to the neoliberal plan. 

Individuals and families were fully privatised by policies requiring self-responsibility and hard-working family life. The reimposed division between the “deserving” and “undeserving” ensured competition between the poor for resources and legitimacy. And meanwhile, Clinton and Blair ensured the official Left promoted the free-market and the so-called Third Way amongst the middle-classes, offering a sufficiency of crumbs from their tables. The imposition of competition over social-cohesion permeated every aspect of life in the USA and UK.

Education has been the primary vehicle for building hegemony of competitive behaviour and belief systems. In both countries, firstly, the teachers unions had to be smashed by the end of the 1980s. Then national curricula (or in academy strategy, corporate sponsorship of school learning plans) ensured individualist competition in the next two generations of children. 

Universities spewed-out post-modern narratives to replace and deny fundamental truths about social organisation, mutual support and collective society, let alone the structural inequalities of social class, the enemy being any notion of socialism or tax-funded safety-nets. We could openly discuss and condemn one-to-one oppression – sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia – but exploitation and the privilege of class were all-but outlawed. 

Those wishing to take-up professions in social welfare were targeted most – the teachers, the social workers and the health workers were force-fed new notions of self-determination through personal choice that were designed to individualise and privatise access to care. 

This worldwide political push was exemplified by the Glasnost and Perestroika in Russia where individual social behaviours were released from political restraint whilst working hours and productivity were hiked to new levels of exploitation, the rights and voice of workers in the workplace dulled and channelled into collusion with the profiteers. 

The globally pervasive falsehood of individualism – The Capitalist Dream – was resisted best, although by no means effectively, in Scandinavia, France and Germany. A particularly brutal and painful model was enforced in the UK as a specific target for action against our historic development of collectivism and multiculturalism. 

The result of this test-tube experiment for fundamental social change has been a partial success. Despite all appearances, public protest, trade union organisation at least in the public sector, and the echoes of historical socialist belief-systems, have force the neoliberals to go far slower than they wished and to have still only partially completed the transformation (the word itself now a political term coined by their new paradigm). 

But there have been huge casualties. Children are now children at Law until they are 18 years old, despite having an age of criminal responsibility at 10 and being able to join the military at 16. We are told they cannot think for themselves, most are far too soft, over-emotional and inexperienced to have a vote or be taken seriously. 

The gaming machines and zero-tolerant school regimes have straight-jacketed acceptable behaviour into a passivity and conformity. At the same time the media images of sex and violence fantasies coupled with endless shows of competition from baking to beat-the-family quizzes have dominated consciousness. The responsibilities of adulthood have been taken away and displayed as unpalatable, remaining adolescent in thought and action far preferable to citizenship and participatory democracy.

The overwhelming result has been a tendency to fear and self-loathing. A sense of loss and detachment despite all the distraction and palliatives. Fear of others set against desire for acceptance and inclusion. Aspiration and desire negated by economic competition and lack of resources. The top 1% have doubled their super-wealth since 2008 while the bottom 50% of the population, some 33 million of us, have lost. 

The wealth of the richest 10% is 315 times more than the poorest. 1 in 3 children live in poverty, 14 million households are officially poor (including 5 million where at least one adult works) and more than 1 million households have to turn to food banks for charitable sustenance each year. Most work is repetitive and tedious, servile and alienating, the life-chances (not least the continually rising pension age) near-to hopeless, and the continuous all-pervading propaganda for never-to-be-attained designer-homes and flashy fast cars wholly dispiriting. 

Depression is an epidemic. The second Bosses Offensive – Neoliberal Austerity – has ensured a blank cheque for the rich and a grinding and deepening reality for most of us. And most of all, the sense of powerless, over our own lives and towards any influence over our own futures, is paralysing. Little wonder we turn, en masse, to living off-world – shutting down while at work, coming home to fantasy films, hero-gaming, drugs and alcohol, cheap white sugar and heart-warming fatty foods.

Throughout this week of spotlighting emotional health, most of the above will not be spoken of. We will hear sanitised plastic debates between the “protect childhood innocence” neocons and the “build individual emotional resilience” post-modern professionals. In practice, two-sides of the same neoliberal coin.

More darkly, we will also hear cries of “abuser” towards those encouraging the young to protest against environmental destruction and global extinction. Of course, the best way to defeat pessimism and depression is to do something to shoo away the Black Dog of enforced passivity. To talk about the anxieties and recognise their basis in reality. The only way to build hope is to break through the barriers erected to prevent emancipation and fulfilment.

We have to defy the promoters of infantilism and passivity. Children and young people have to regain engagement and co-operation with each other. Working class youth have to regain trust in each other. The best thing the commentators and professionals can do to celebrate (or is it commemorate) Mental Health Week is to join the youth on the streets. Shout out “Extinction?” and respond with “Rebellion!”. Feels better already!

Sunday 6th October 2019

Trump’s formal speech to the United National Assembly this week was a work of almost pure fiction, tho’ applauded by his far-right peers. His demand that “nations look after their own”, proselytising in favour of tight immigration controls, nationalism and protectionism to defend his racist America First manifesto had deeper echoes in the religious creed by which he was raised, and his electoral appeal to the Evangelical purists of the USA. 

A radio programme about “The Rapture” then reminded me about the Millennialists. Evangelicals around the world, and particularly in the USA, subscribe to a belief in notions of Armageddon and the Rapture. Their overtly emotional church services seek to produce sensations of elation and euphoria to emulate the sensations of everlasting rapture in the presence of Jesus Christ.

Like all religious beliefs, the Rapture was originally conceived of and written down by a mortal human being. In this case an Anglican Priest in Ireland, John Nelson Darby, developed the idea in the 19th Century. In short, it is one particular prediction of what might take place in the “End Times” of the material World, allegedly predicted in the Christian Bible should you care to be extraordinarily selective of text and verse.

In Darby’s vision, “True Believers” will be spirited away by Jesus Christ at the point of Armageddon, also known as “The Tribulation”, to enjoy The Rapture whilst those of us left on Earth will suffer seven years of pain and horror. After this, the True Believers will come back, inherit the Earth and enjoy one thousand years – “The Millenia” – of unbridled Happiness by God’s Grace.

There is a difference of opinion about exactly when Christ will return to save the Righteous. At the point of “The Tribulation” – a dramatic event from which it is obvious that the “End Times” have begun – some believe Christ will be on Earth to lead the righteous, others that he will return after the thousand years of happiness. This offers some the opportunity to proclaim themselves as the Son of God Returned, but that’s a side issue more useful in an essay on mental health.

Those who follow notions of Armageddon believe that the Bible is literal, conveys human history accurately, describes what is yet to come, and that the future is pre-determined. For the vast majority of us who feel little or no power or control over our own lives, the pre-determinist idea that “it’s meant to be” feels deeply reassuring and is easily accommodated to detract from the far more disturbing notions that our lives may be being horribly exploited, oppressed and confined.

People have always sought reassurance about The Future. In addition, the very experience of being a sentient human being demands that we rage against our own mortality. Life feeds a desire for everlasting life, even if we’re suffering the pain of subsistence. Surely, after all our travails there must be something more than this? 

In historical periods of huge social upheaval where the future appears unwritten, such as the current evidence of a coming Climate Catastrophe, predictive texts about potential salvation become particularly reassuring. The common sense of powerlessness certainly invokes notions of “what will be will be”, “it’s just how it is”, “the Universe is speaking”, and “the Earth will readjust itself irrespective of us”. It is easy to resign ourselves to Fate and the passivity of predestination.

The Book of Revelations in the New Testament relate to the prophesies of the Books of Daniel andEzekiel in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. Together they offer readers ideas about what might happen in the Future, and ultimately to humanity. 

Of course, belief systems are thoroughly impregnated and determined by the individual person’s emotional condition and consequent interpretation of the material world. We believe what feels right at the time, which is why beliefs can and do change, not least because of material changes to our circumstances. As the socialist, Karl Marx, suggested, social being determines social consciousness. 

The Millennialist, John Nelson Darby was a far-right wealthy Conservative with links to the high-Tory anti-democratic dynastic families the 1800’s. He was a strict Protestant Calvinist believing humans are born in Sin, shaped by God-given inequality, and can only achieve salvation and life everlasting through Jesus Christ. He interpreted the coming End of Times according to the turbulence of the period in which he lived – the 1820’s to 1890’s. He emigrated to the USA during the barbarous American Civil War, following the turbulence and the new technologies to where his ideas would be best admired by those opposing change and progress.

Throughout Darby’s life, Bourgeoise Democracy was beating back the privilege and autocratic rule of the old Aristocracy and land owners as the influence of the French Revolution spread. Capitalism was maturing, Feudalism decaying and Industrialisation was enhancing scientific understanding, within which the Christian churches were having to face and come to terms with deep challenges including Darwinism, the theory of evolution that contradicted the Bible in so many ways.

This very apparent destruction of the Old Order was seen by Darby and many of his ilk as the work of the Anti-Christ and a forewarning of the imminent End of Times. The world was now in the period prior to the Millennia, requiring an understanding of how believers should prepare, a creed of “pre-millennialism” as it became known.

Evangelicalism felt besieged in the second half of the Nineteenth Century. Darby formed his own pre-Millenial Movement in preparation for the Second Coming, The Plymouth Brethren (so-called because up to a thousand people took-up his Church in Plymouth, England as the largest congregation through the 1830’s). They crucially believe that there will come a period of time where God will offer a dispensation to the true believers, in line with the Book of Revelations. 

Darby’s ideas were later included in the Scofield Reference Bible published in 1909. Scofield was a Confederate Army veteran in America who became an evangelical Minister and simplified Darby’s annotated bible to a minimal populist tract. 

Scofield‘s Bible has become highly influential amongst the huge evangelical population of the USA and sold in the tens of millions. President Trump was raised in a family loyal to Scofield and in June this year Trump paid a formal visit to the McLean Evangelical Church to stand with a reading from Scofield’s Bible.  

The essence of this Fundamentalist belief system is that righteous mortals cannot truly understand God’s Will and should simply submit to it. The righteous will be scooped-up by God and find salvation. We should certainly not be swayed by material evidence of science or proponents of supposed Truth. To suggest we know the Truth is to defy the Lord.

So to Hell with the climate scientists. God is testing you when he allows us to find dinosaur bones that scientists suggest lived long before God created the Universe, so must be untrue. Likewise, God is testing you when extreme weather destroys your home and community. Should you submit yourself to living with and through such tests, your belief in the Eternal uwavering, then you will receive dispensation from God in the hour of Judgement. Innocence is Godly, every life ends in failure.

As in any religion, it gets complicated. Evangelicals believe all biblical writings are literally true. Darby suggested there are two messages in scripture and divides The Word into two tracks stemming forward from Abraham, one towards Judaism and the other Christianity. Whilst the Bible cannot contradict itself there are two messages in all scripture – one for Israel and one for the Gentiles.

For Darby, Biblical prophesy and especially the various offers of dispensation point towards the return of all Jewish People to Palestine to create a Jewish kingdom of Israel. This was well before the construction of Zionism. Lord Shaftesbury, the architect of British Imperial policy in the Middle East, was deeply influenced by Darby’s testament and this assertion of the destiny of the Jews. 

Darby’s “True Believers” were not followers of the Christian Churches which they condemned as too politicised and in fact were not supposed to have developed. God’s Will had been, according to Darby, that all humanity should embrace Jesus when he first came to Earth in which case no Christian Church would have been necessary. It’s development was a failure of humanity and not God’s intention. 

For these Christian Fundamentalists, the crucification of Christ drove a rift in time, getting in the way of the prophesies as a temporary aberration best exemplified by the development of the Christian Churches following the various Apostles as false prophets. Israel is God’s true intention, and at the time of the Rapture (Armageddon on Earth) the Apostle’s Churches will be judged whilst the true believers will sit beside God in judgement from their base in the State of Israel in Palestine. 

Sometimes, intellectual understanding is very hard, and the paragraphs above may take a moment of reflection before seeping into our emotional intelligence. The defence of Israel and in the final battle at Armageddon is a driving force in global politics today. The belief in the Rapture and indeed, emotional Hope for the End of days, may well be influencing politicians and their supporters to hurry it along.

And so we may better understand Climate Denial in this context. We are seeing global heating, extreme weather events, permanent droughts, pestilence, mass famine and mass migration because it is God’s true intention. After two thousand years of missed opportunity, now at last we are nearing the Rapture. To act against global heating is to act against the true will of God.

To shout out the word, “Hallelujah” is to almost inevitably feel a sense of elation. To truly believe in righteous and everlasting life is the most addictive of sensations. To have such an emotional high challenged or even dampened by assertions of material reality is nothing less than a call to arms. 

And so it is. The Climate Movement is, whether we want to be or otherwise, facing a civil war across all humanity. The Evangelical Movement in the United States of America, the United Kingdom, much of Africa and growing elsewhere, is a mass Movement is of reaction to earthly intervention towards our own salvation.

Following the logic of the text, perhaps the Rapture could be helped along, the Tribulation be brought forward, the horror be invoked, by the dropping of multiple nuclear warheads. Perhaps that’s God’s Will in the minds of our evangelical leaders. Perhaps not. 

Darby’s ideas came to have some basis in the real world. Every Great Lie has to include a kernel of Truth in order to be believed. After all, very few humans are truly stupid. Darby imagined, at the very height of the British Empire, that it would be defeated (almost unthinkable at the time), that the United Kingdom would break-up and Ireland become independent, that the UK would join a United States of Europe with it’s own currency, a clear sign of the Anti-Christ and portent of the lead-up to the Tribulation. 

These predictions have been used and updated time-and-again to offer proof that the Millennialist creed if factual. In the same way, various individuals have been condemned as The Anti-Christ at various points in the history of the twentieth century and beyond, usually those who publicly disagree with these fundamental truths.

But the references to the Bible  are particularly questionable. Darby and Scofield searched very many short sentences and obscure references in tiny tracts across the Bible to construct an evangelical Army of God, to prepare for and be empowered at the Rapture. To be brief, shortly after the Tribulation, in their vision, a specific individual will come down to Earth as the Anti-Christ. Jesus Christ will face the Anti-Christ in fierce battle to protect the true believers. At the same time the Anti-Christ will form an alliance with the developing Nation of Israel only to betray them, persecuting Jews, desecrating the temples, and demanding to be worshipped as God, his believers being tattooed with 666. The true believers who were taken up in the Rapture will now return to earth as the invading army of Jesus Christ to defeat the Anti-Christ. 

It was Scofield who identified and coined the exact place for the Battle of Armageddon he prophesied, the town of Megiddo in Israel, the site of biblical battles in 606BCE. The term Armageddon is used only once anywhere in the Bible and was purloined by Darby and Scofield in their construction of this super-fiction that has permeated world consciousness and infected world politics. Indeed, Apocalyptic novels and films are everywhere. 

Dispensationalist Pre-Millenialism, the technical term for Darbyism today, holds strong influence in the high churches of Christianity. It has come into the cultural and political mainstream. Howel Lindsey’s, “The Late Great Planet Earth” has more than 20 million copies, and the “Left Behind Novels” has sold 65 million copies and been made into three films. Hollywood routinely distribute top-selling movies with the underlying message of Zionism and the coming Rapture.

This cultural normalisation can explain the fervency of support for the State of Israel despite its’ occupation of the State of Palestine, and for the enormous campaign against alleged anti-semitism in the Labour Party despite it’s anti-racist Leader. 

As with Darbyism, the construction of Zionism as a political and quasi-religious tract was similarly written by a man. Theodore Herzl wrote his evocation to build a movement to ensure the return of the Jewish diaspora to Israel, or Zion, as it is referred to in the Old Testament. In terms of the quest to construct a Nation of Israel Zionism is a political movement yet for many it has become a religion, with significant and apparent overlaps between its selective references to the Old Testament, and those of Darby and Scofield. 

This, in turn, explains much of the fervent support for Israel by Fundamentalist and High Church Christians who believe in the Rapture and all its parts: Presidents Bush (both of them, obviously), Trump and his aides including Michael Pompeo (ex-CIA Director and current US Secretary of State) and Vice President Mike Pence, and ex-Prime Minister Blair amongst them. The belief that the Righteous must prepare for the final war, the Holy War, the war to end all wars, God’s war, may go some way to explain most of the wars of the past 200 years. 

There is indeed a hidden world of people in high places who follow Darby’s ideas. His complex writings and reference to historic and biblical scholarly tracts have impressed and impregnated scholars and intellectuals. In the 1990’s ,the prestigious and influential Regius Chairs of Divinity at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and comparable academics at Sheffield university and Queens’ University, Belfast, were all held by people who were either current or former members of Plymouth Brethren.

It should not be underestimated, the extent to which Christian Fundamentalism stands in the way of real progress towards minimising the very worst impacts of global heating and ecocide. The deepening crisis, decline and failure is explained away by Derby’s fundamentalism and not in a way that demands we act now. Darby was resolutely anti-democracy and anti-State, today offering a false-radicalism to populist libertarians. Dispensational pre-Millennialism is strong within the new Political Far-Right and has re-energised their movements worldwide. Darby and Scofield would be the first to cry, “know thine enemy”, and I think we need to be able to do the same.

Sunday 29th September 2019

The Prime Minister of Australia has condemned Greta Thunberg for creating “needless anxiety” amongst young people. His statement makes me feel very angry. Following Thunberg’s angry address to the United Nations, the Establishment and it’s lackeys have gone overboard to vilify and dismiss her rather than address the challenge of global warming.

“16-year old Greta Thunberg is too young to make her own mind up and has been groomed” argue exactly the same people who condemned the 15-year old British Muslim, Shamima Begum, for knowing exactly what she was doing in offering support to Islamic Fundamentalists, and ensured she was punished for her beliefs and actions.

You’re only too young when they want you to be. 

It is the same political agenda. When Scott Morrison, Australia’s Right-wing, religious conservative, coal-supporting, anti-migrant political leader, suggests the children should be given “context and perspective” he means they should adopt a specific ideological belief. Belief in Capitalism.

The United Nations has heard a raft of particularly right-wing world leaders so far this week, and Morrison will back them up, Trump, Bolsonaro et al, when he addresses this power-group tomorrow. Theirs is the creed of competition and accumulation of wealth, exploitation and oppression.

Clearly, Greta is getting in the way. And “belief systems” have always been at the heart of the struggle in any human society based upon class. Karl Marx, an early socialist, observed human history and suggested “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force..”

It stands to reason. If the majority of a society disagree strongly with the ideas generated by the ruling class and it’s outlets in the media, schools, universities and churches, then that elite can no longer rule. So long, that is, as the ideas of dissent lead to mass action.

I would suggest that ideas are born as much from our emotions as our intellect. An age old adage is that, whilst we can be told by politicians that “we’ve never had it so good”, when the final-demand bills for fuel and rent come through our letter box, our senses, heart and stomach tell us very powerfully that not all is well and we’re not in a good place. If we can’t pay the bills, all the Establishment propaganda in the world can’t convince us that the System is good and we’re fine as we are.

And so it is with the current emotional climate. Already the media of the global ruling class is shutting down and minimising the science and impacts of global heating, whilst their politicians are spouting denial at every opportunity. We’ve never had it so good!

It is those with strong vested interests in the current Capitalist System who are quickest to anger and denounce the climate protests. Their emotional response, seeping into a condition of hatred and quest for retribution, belies their condemnation of Greta and the youth Movement as over-emotional and immature.

Being “above politics” should not mean we take no notice of the statements of the Political Class, nor that we are “outside” of political debate. “Politics” being “of the People” by definition describes each and every human interaction that combines or disunites us. All our thoughts, feelings and actions are political by default, as they are only given context and validity by the response we receive from those around us. 

Those responses come from a political base. To demand System Change is to evoke feelings of support from those who have little faith in the System, and feelings of opposition from those who feel the System as it is works for them. We are not all on the same side, nor can we ever be, because System Change means those with abundance, privilege and power will have to give up too much. 

Greta should be on a roll. The Capitalist System has never worked and is certainly now not working for the overwhelming majority of people in every society across the world. And the System is very obviously destructive. Yet many, with illusions in the Capitalist Dream, choose not to believe the Climate Emergency, and are driven by hope for a better personal future to maintain trust in the current system and the status quo.

The Extinction Rebellion Movement, the School Strikes and other initiatives have not yet broken through. Despite the record size of current protests, only a tiny, a minuscule number of human beings are involved at this time. At the same time, the whole world is watching and waiting to be convinced.

This is why the leaders of nations are standing-up, one after another, and denouncing Greta. Some, like Trump, take the piss out of her. Others, like Bolsonaro of Brazil, challenge her head-on as he rushes to destroy the Amazon. And others still, like Morrison of Australia, belittle and seek to infantilise Greta and the youth strikes she has invoked. Their responses expose their anxiety.

The Climate Movement is engaged in an ideological struggle for hearts and minds, deep and divisive as it undoubtedly is. Putting forward ideas of democracy and mutuality – the Citizens Assemblies being just one manifestation – is of vital importance in our challenge to the power and domination of our current ruling classes.

The ruling class has the overwhelming control of communications worldwide – newspapers, internet servers, radio, TV, telecommunications in total. But history has proved that all the ruling class ideas in the world cannot convince us emotionally.

We can maintain beliefs contrary and independent to theirs and break their ideological stranglehold. To do so we must have our own media in order to publicly answer the likes of Morrison, Trump and Bolsonaro. We have to use all means to spread the facts, the scientific evidence and the call to action. And ultimately, to remain convinced, we must own our honest anxiety.

Wednesday 25th September 2019

I have little doubt that a dozen-million people across the world joined in tears of shared grief and anger last night. The video of Greta Thunberg shouting at the assembled United Nations, crying out “how dare you”, red-faced and tearful, her young face full of forceful admonition, has been shared and re-shared towards infinity on-line.

The machismo-charged male-supremacist right-wing commentators were quick to dismiss the over-emotionality of this girl-child. And in any case, she has, they suggest, a mental health condition. Consequently, there was little mainstream coverage of what she said, just how she said it. 

The published photos of her glaring in anger at President Trump as he walked past her without acknowledgement were designed more to portray his power than hers. Trump later tweeted, “She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!” It’s called “taking the piss”.

Trump has shown him himself so many times to shed no tears for human suffering, and sees crying as a weakness rather than a re-energising release essential for survival. He considers children to be without understanding and therefore to be told and controlled, and women to be, in any case, too emotional to make the difficult decisions. And his type rule the world.

For those of us – we, the many – who are clear about the threat of catastrophe and extinction, it is vital we act as our own media, manage our own communication, and keep getting the message out “from below”:

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”

Here, she emphasised the climate science, the incredible speed of species extinction and the loss of human habitats alongside the animals. But this was an attack on the System without calling it out. Indeed, Greta offered an olive branch:

“You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.”

Sorry Greta, I don’t. In an apparently unconnected report published yesterday, equally naive in it’s observations, it was reported that the richest 5-10% of the global population share an all-but total lack of social obligation and an ignorance of the most simple realities of human life. In short, they don’t care about the poorest 90% of the world’s population even if they have ever casually glanced our way.

I am reminded of a much earlier report from the Joseph Rowntree Trust, which used an analogy to portray the results of a discursive inquiry where children from the entire span of social classes and conditions were interviewed. They concluded that, if you perceived the richest child to stand at the North Pole and the poorest at the South Pole, and then looked at the lives of those at the two tropics – Capricorn and Cancer – the children there experience no shared social characteristics.

Even the moderately rich and moderately poor live to very separate cultural norms, speak impenetrably different languages, conceive of the world in thoroughly separate ways and, of course, share no possible life-chances and outcomes (peers will even die 20 years or more apart). 

The rich live in a wholly different World from the poor. This is a cultural apartheid maintained by income and spending power. Capitalism has not only caused a metabolic rift between humanity and the natural world, it has created an emotional rift, nay gulf, that cannot be crossed. Humanity has been torn apart.

If it were the case that Greta Thunberg was calling upon the good will and empathy of the rich and powerful to do right by the poor, she’s championing a hopeless cause. I suspect she knows. Her speech contained a veiled threat: 

“You are still not mature enough to tell it like it is. You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal.”

Thunberg and groups like Extinction Rebellion hold a position that says we are not responsible for determining exactly how to prevent the catastrophe, we are simply going to act to ensure those with the power and wealth in society stand-up and take the action required. In essence, they are not evil, just complacent. They must be convinced.

I am convinced this will never happen. The ruling class may or may not be Evil (I find the term metaphysical and undefinable). In the material world of human society, it is the system of Capitalism that causes the alienation, competition and class warfare that damns both the environment and the People.

To that extent, Greta missed the point. It is the System that needs to be called-out and replaced, not just those who manage it.

Tuesday 24th September 2019

Yesterday I was guest speaker at the Penzance Peace Festival. It was World Peace Day, although few in the media noticed. It was a drizzly, grey-weather day. Despite the clouds, people were buoyed-up following a strong Climate March through the City centre the day before, and some very excellent live music all afternoon. Energy and enthusiasm for building a fresh anti-war movement was everywhere, including renewing the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament across Cornwall. 

CND, 63-years old Peace movement with the emblematic symbol that spans the world, has built a strong alliance with Extinction Rebellion nationally. Indeed, the synthesis between global heating and nuclear proliferation is extremely obvious. Well before the widespread catastrophe at the hands of climate change, there will be widespread war. War over water access, war related to climate migration, and war once again over oil. And the military-industrial complex, both armies in peacetime and war, are extraordinarily prolific emitters of global warming gases. The arms industry is profoundly profitable so long as there are wars to be replenished. 

The current troop deployment by the USA to strengthen Saudi Arabia alongside the counter-statements of preparations for war made by Iran stands testament to the volatility in the Middle East, not withstanding the continued horror and barbarism in Yemen, Syria, Libya and Palestine. And the USA’s withdrawal from nuclear treaties, building a new generation of “tactical nuclear weapons”, shows Trump to be gagging to show to the world the “supremacy” achieved by the mass destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 74 years ago.

Today, Europe’s fortified borders condemn migrants fleeing both climate droughts and war, and small but courageous groups protest against the totalitarian torturers in Egypt. And there is little space here to mention Trump’s alliance with Colombia and Bolsonaro’s Brazil against Venezuela. Of course, this general drive to global warfare is also exemplified by the currently cold economic tensions between the USA and China. 

The general global economic outlook is downwards towards recession. Some in the environment movements welcome this as helpful to our push for a no-growth carbon-neutral economy. On the contrary, the destabilisation caused by economic crisis will not result in the Capitalist System embracing zero-growth – the system that requires competition for accumulation will ensure survival of the fittest through a process of conflict. In such a situation, we must learn lessons from history.

The first victim of any drive to war is Truth. And our protests to prevent global heating, especially the push for “System Change not Climate Change”, will be in the way of the nationalism required for warfare. War requires a unification between the ruling class and working class at home against the “common enemy” abroad. Extinction Rebellion, pin-pointing the political and corporate classes as the drivers of catastrophe will not be acceptable to those driving warfare. We will undoubtedly be condemned as traitors.

Any research into the history of the Vietnam War, the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, the late ‘60s anti-War Movement or the 1980s Blair Government’s propaganda about the invasion of Iraq proves one thing. The Capitalist Governments will conjoin to demonise, isolate and break apart protest at home. This applies right now to the student strikes and environment movement just as certainly as night follows day. If the Establishment cannot combine to coerce and incorporate the Movement, soon it will seek to destroy us.

So how do we win? By numbers. The 3.5  percent that XR originally contrived to be the critical mass needed to win real political change, as suggested by Erica Chenoweth, has been proven as way below what is actually need. 3.5% of the UK population is over 2 million protesters. We had that in 2003 but it didn’t stop the war (although it did dent the subsequent imperialist aspirations of the US and UK governments). We need at least 5 times that amount. 

In my lifetime there have been serious attempts to have far smaller numbers drive major social change through the take-up of arms. It certainly always represented a frustration with the tiny size of revolutionary opposition, and often an elitist disbelief in the ability of the masses to rise-up. For them, instead of revolution fro below, the idea of redistribution of wealth and power by armed insurrection was an answer.

In the late 1960’s, as the Vietnam War became intolerably barbaric to both the civilians of Vietnam and the army grunts of the USA, small groups took-up arms inside the USA against “The Man”. They called themselves “The Weathermen” in reference to the Bod Dylan song. Undoubtedly, seeking to overthrow the most weaponised, nationalistic as well as imperialist State in the history of human society by force of arms was infantile as a strategy. 

Their 100’s of bombings of public buildings across the USA in 1969-70 led to a splitting of the anti-war movement, not a strengthening. It offered President Nixon to warn of anarchy and mindless destruction. In May 1970 the Police shot one dead at Berkeley University’s Peace Park during mass protests. Then the National Guard shot 4 students dead and wounded 9 more at Kent State University. 

College students continued to protest, closing 448 campuses. At Jackson State, an overwhelmingly Black University campus, the militia shot 14, killing two. The racist liar, Nixon, and his Generals called the Peace Protesters “the worst type of people inside the country” and the Establishment gained in popularity. 58% of the country supported the killings, standing together against “The Enemy Within”. 

Whilst the protests continued, and gave rise to the Black Panther Movement which powerfully exposed the racial and class discrimination and oppression in Capitalist society, the State won through. Of course, Nixon was ousted, just as in the UK the Poll Tax riots played a part in the fall of Margaret Thatcher, but the System stayed intact and grew stronger, better educated and updated in how to quell revolt. 

So how do we win? In all these uprisings of mass protest, the element under-used and least mobilised, and once again so obviously missing from the 2003 anti-war movement, was a sufficiency of numbers of trade union and organised workers downing-tools and walking out of work, stopping production and the profits of the bosses responsible for waging the warfare and environmental destruction.

This has to be the lesson for today’s climate movement. That is why many of us are trying to build mass support inside the trade union movement for strike action to force the change needed to prevent climate catastrophe. When workers down-tools, leave their offices, workplaces and factories and congregate en masse all together, there are not enough tanks and guns to drive us down again. We place roses in the barrels of our fellow workers-in-uniform, and seize the forces of production to shut down the emissions and those who profit from destruction. The history of all protest proves that ultimate power lies in the workplace. But for it to work, we need huge numbers, everywhere.

Sunday 22nd September 2019

This morning I was asked on-line how I felt about yesterday. I’m pondering. Intellectually I was stimulated by more than 2,000 mostly young people marching through Plymouth and enacting a die-in near to the Council House – the source of the local political administration. Again, cognitively, I challenged the Labour Party leader of Plymouth City Council – the only speaker to be invited to use the megaphone to the assembled masses – in his claim to support the Climate Emergency whilst calling for the reopening of Plymouth Airport and so adding to the carbon emissions we were all protesting against.

Having distributed all the 1,000 leaflets I had created and printed for the Extinction Rebellion group, and helped with the People’s Assembly process of group discussions on what is to be done, I met in the later afternoon with key local activists for a debrief and short beer in the back garden, and then watched the news, exhausted.

 “We’re so worried about this, we’re even scared to have children…” was the interview with a 15 year old young woman at the London demonstration. And finally my emotions kicked back in. The views of hundreds of thousands into millions of young people demonstrating in 148 countries and seven continents across the world (yes, including Antarctica) made me cry and feel heavy of heart, not elated.

How strange. Perverse? Earlier, in the debrief, a few of us oldies had acknowledged the potential power of the mass and at the same time the scale of the challenge. We recognised, solemnly, that we each had by now undergone a sustained period of mourning for what has already been lost and what is still to go. Perhaps advancing age does indeed allow us to face mortality more honestly. And probably its just as well that the youth cannot. 

The bereavement process enacted by the physical images of climate change as well as the outrageous graphic displays of runaway emissions has informed the emotional intelligence of most activists in Extinction Rebellion. We were organising to stop the barbarism of social and environmental collapse. For most of the youth, shouting “whose streets, our streets, whose planet, our planet” and replying “Rebellion” to the call out of “Extinction”, this was a day of festival and release. A protest for the Planet, but as much an emotional release from the confines of school and college and work and good behaviour.

The Russian revolutionary socialist, Vladimir Lenin, writing in the wake of enormous social protests in 1905, called revolutions the festival of the oppressed and exploited. Yesterday’s protests are a far cry from any revolutionary upsurge, but echoed Lenin’s notion back to me. This was an outcry, the largest global protest against climate change ever, competing with the 2003 anti-War upsurge against the illegal and genocidal invasion of Iraq. The protests should offer an enormous sense of hope.

But I don’t feel that way. It may be resonant with the depression described by rock singers or football players that comes from the excitement of being adored by a stadium crowd only to now be alone in a hotel room. 

As such, I have left a sober evaluation for later. But these large manifestations I have found (and I have been on quite a few) to be a joyous experience only for the energy to evaporate into thin air by the following morning. The evaluation has to ask – what was built out of the event?

The striking students clamoured to be the ones to carry and brandish the “System Change not Climate Change” placards with their sub text of “One Solution – Revolution!”. Whether wittingly or by force of habit, the forces of the status quo – the Police, the local politicians and their cohort committed to winning parliamentary power and influence, the accompanying parents of school children and their teachers – were all there to contain and coral the energy and upset of this new generation. There was to be no question of revolt.

Greta Thunberg, struggling to avoid being the pin-up or stooge for the co-option of the Movement by the very System she has called to be dismantled, has her face across all media this morning. Her original cry that “there can be no more business as a usual” appears to be being co-opted by the Capitalist class and watered-down to a shabby set of pledges by business corporations to “go green” sometime soonish. 

Those who have studied the science know we face a minimum of 3-4 degrees warming, before which time all societal coherence will have been destroyed unless we stop extracting and using fossil fuels now. The accompanying Ecocide, already well-into the 6th Great Extinction, is fast making the world uninhabitable.

It is this “scale”, this magnitude, this all encompassing and fast-approaching Armageddon, that floods my senses and prevents me feeling the joy of yesterday. The millions on the streets did not represent the breakthrough needed for real change. The System that must be changed can easily suck-up, confuse, mitigate, divide and conquer such numbers which, in real terms, amounted to less than one percent of the population of Plymouth, and an infinitesimally smaller proportion of the world’s population. We need so much more.

Lenin, also wrote, “At no other time are the masses of the people in a position to come forward so actively as creators of a new social order as at a time of revolution. At such times the people are capable of performing miracles, if judged by the narrow, philistine scale of gradual progress.” There is a heady resonance from such an ancient observation as the pictures of the masses flood our morning TV screens. But we will need a Lenin’s “miracle”.

With every muscular sinew and clenched emotional determination, we have to build and magnify yesterday’s mass protests. We have yet to activate anything near to the critical mass of human revolt required for the scale of system change essential if we are to prevent extermination. Gramsci, the Italian Revolutionary, in an over-used posthumous quote from his prison cell, mused that revolutionaries have to operate with a combined “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the Will”. And so I will. 

Saturday 21st September 2019

It has been an emotional week. On the grand scale of things, Greta Thunberg addressed the Congress of the USA and dressed them down. At the same time, they accepted a Whitehouse paper blaming Iran for the destruction of two Saudi oil terminals, briefly limiting oil exports. Old allies quickly rallied to support their friends, with the UK Government over-quick to join the clamour for war, or what they term “retaliation”, whilst rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of more arms sales to Saudi Arabia. War is the biggest of all global warming gases.

More locally, the Labour Leader of Plymouth City Council, the viciously anti-Corbynite career politician, Tudor Evans, announced his support for the reopening of the Plymouth Airport, heralding the increase in aviation and its associated carbon emissions at the same time as speaking on platforms applauding the school students and declaring Climate Emergency. More planes. Such hypocrisy can only mean there’s a General Election in the offing, requiring those seeking personal power to face both ways at once.

Against his tide, we are all hectically building tomorrow’s Climate Strikes, holding meetings, leafleting workplaces and publishing like mad in print and SNS. This morning our focus was an old workplace of mine, full-up with the high-paid managers of health and social care in the City. Workers I had once hot-desked alongside told me the stark horrors of desperately eroded services for child protection, the threshold for services now absurdly high and the rate of referrals of adolescent self-harming sky-rocketed. There are no therapeutic services for self-harming or most other indicators of mental distress.

Two headteachers arriving for a high-class, highbrow, self-congratulatory meeting told my co-protagonist in no uncertain terms that we had all the science wrong. There is no emergency, the climate is fine and they are restricting environmental activities and learning in their schools to reducing plastic littering. Apparently, we were at liberty to believe whatever we liked but we were wrong. Plain wrong.

When I learnt at the weekend that some schools in Plymouth were establishing what they euphemistically terms “lock-downs” to prevent children leaving the premises (legally questionable it must be said), and even more threatening exclusion or even expulsion should students take part in the School Strikes, I penned a fuming screed fast and furiously to the local paper (see below). Children’s Rights appear to no longer exist.

I had previously written to Devon County Council, by way of a heads-up. They were spending £250k on a new team to manage preparations and adaptations for the Climate Emergency stated by the Councillors. There were to be special committees linking together most departments into a strategic plan of action to manage the social impacts of extreme weather, food shortages, power cuts and social unrest, but the Plan did not include direct links to those services (now outsourced and neo-privatised) responsible for safeguarding children or adults. The catastrophe will not be responded to with care, but control.

Most others who bothered to stop this morning to receive a leaflet flipped through their car window, their new cars nevertheless guzzling gas and spewing emissions, saying they had heard nothing of the student strikes and weren’t interested. More than a few said they did not have children themselves so wouldn’t know. These, for the record, were the very same people who make the policies and produce the services to all children in Plymouth. Yet, apparently, children’s concerns about future social breakdown were not on their radar, nor of interest to them.

By the end of leafleting this morning it had dawned on we precious-few leafleteers, whilst we had woken too early on too many occasions to leaflet the City, and bedded-down far too late at night after desk-top publishing and printing, that only a tiny handful of the population were aware of tomorrow’s Global Earth Strike, and few of those were ready to take part. 

We have had a few hundred school children actively engage with the previous actions, out of a City population of 48,000. Tomorrow, we hope, up to a thousand people of all ages will protest in Plymouth City Centre, and we will engage a new cohort of University under-grads and Primary School placarders into our Cause. Most importantly we will, by sheer effort, have wedged a foot in the door of the trade unions with the potential to activate five-and-a-half million workers.

The issue here is scale. The sheer magnitude of the task. The World will come to an end with a significant proportion of the human population denying its coming as they gasp their last. We can only persist in seeking to activate a sufficient number on the other side – tens of millions in every country – to produce the critical mass needed to overcome the stuffed-up anti-science prejudices and hubris of the narcissistic deniers, and save the Earth.

We have a world to win, but will have to wrench it forcibly from the rapacious cupidity of the powerful and their over-pampered bureaucratic courtiers. But right now, I’m off to mend the megaphone!

18th September 2019

The Capital of Indonesia, Jakarta, is at imminent threat of devastation from rising sea levels and extreme weather events. So much so that the nation is naming another, inland city as its capital and making plans to relocate fifteen million people away from Jakarta. It took time for me to fully appreciate this fact. This is 2019. Climate Change is with us, not some distant prediction.

Greta Thunberg spoke on USA TV last night, watched by millions, and observed that in America the issue of Climate Change is something people either choose to believe or not. In Sweden, it’s a question of science and fact. But even if you don’t read the science, the images from the Bahamas or the Amazon or Indonesia cannot fail to offer a sense of something different, something happening, something powerful.

The real problem is the failure of the politicians and their media empires to tell us the facts or anything approximating to the Truth. The IPCC offers the most conservative of estimates, excluding impacts of feedback loops and other phenomena that accelerate the warming impacts (they’re quick to note the aspects of climate that may de-escalate the process). The Committee on Climate Change, the adviser to Government in the UK, chooses to carefully downplay the IPCC report, reducing its concerns to the practical aspects of adaptation rather than prevention:

“…the UK needs to reduce food waste, promote healthy diets, use land sustainably, and improve the condition of habitats; including planting more trees and restoring degraded soils. All of these steps will help to improve people’s lives, improve resilience to climate change and reduce the harmful emissions which cause climate change.” 

And so the media focuses on reducing use of plastics (a singular bi-product of oil) and encouraging us to eat less meat. Their suggestions are fine but won’t stop the catastrophe. This is not so much a lobby group, it’s “independent status” particularly suspect from the start, but a propagandist for business almost as usual.

The CCC is quoted at the very start of the Trade Union Congress resolution this week, calling for a Just Transition to carbon neutral economy by 2050. One conservative summation of the science after another ends up being so weak and distorted as to effectively prevent any action of the scale required to prevent the catastrophe.

The question raised again and again is, exactly what does the Establishment, the Capitalist class, their governments and media propagandisers, intend to happen as cities are flooded, food shortages intensify, viruses spread as pandemics, droughts spark water wars and hundreds of millions migrate toward razor-wire fences and mass internment camps?

Many of us, having leaflets the local factory or office, attended the weekly organising meeting, smiled back at rabid abuse hosted towards our street stalls, or finished a little gardening to escape the anxiety-inducing news broadcasts, sit and ponder the global state of ruling class intransigence. They can’t possibly “believe” that they can survive where billions cannot. Can they?

The accumulation of unconscionable wealth in the hands of the very, very few has escalated unimaginably in the last few decades. Is that a symbol of some level of preparation by the rich and powerful for them to afford safe places, sheltered habitats, guarded living space behind high walls in which their families “ride-out” an almost unimaginable holocaust of most of humanity and current life on Earth? 

It is possible. Theirs is a belief in their System (from which they have profited so well). They may feel it impossible to contemplate not only their own demise but that of the world they rule, the power they sense and impose on others. Belief is fed by emotion and feeds back into our senses as a loop. It may well be that the Capitalists are no more able to honestly face the Truth and contemplate societal breakdown than the rest of us. Or maybe, just maybe, that’s what they want. A mass cull of the unprofitable poor of the world. But that’s for another Blog.

Friday 13th September 2019

I am overjoyed and angry at the same time. The Trades Union Congress of the UK agreed unanimously yesterday to support the school student strikes on Friday 20th September and to campaign for a Just Transition to Green Jobs. Oh Joy! And then, they add that the UK should become carbon neutral by 2050 – more than 20 years further on than the IPCC’s conclusion that we have less than 12 years to do so. How bloody stupid!

It’s a step forward but not the strident pace, nay the sprint, that is essential for survival. The denial of the emergency, whilst stating this is an emergency, is mind boggling. My experience of attempting to achieve policy changes in two trades unions over 25 years is one of denial: physical denial of the space requested to discuss the facts, and denial by workers in the carbon industries of the need to change.

The worst case scenario offered by scientists is the extinction of human life within the next 80 years. In Health & Safety planning, reduction of hazards begins with the consideration of worst case scenario and working back from that to determine what has to be done. Trade unions invest a great deal of their collective power into health and safety issues in order to force better working conditions, yet when it comes to the potential of human extinction, they deny this tried and tested process. 

It may be that it’s too painful to face-up to the facts. The System based upon debt also ties workers into the surety of pay today over the surety of a catastrophic collapse tomorrow. Human beings are not good at dealing with a crisis until it is upon us. Cognitive change is not the issue. You’re not going to change unless you’re emotionally engaged! The thought of voluntarily ending your well-paid job working on an oil rig, or in the highly-technical munitions industry, or even if only reasonably paid in a car plant, requires a clear vision of the future that admits the need to change.

The trade unions also defend today’s status quo rather than take risks. When, at a national policy conference, I moved a motion arguing for Unite the Union to not support the replacement programme for Trident nuclear weapons, the entire membership in the nuclear industries threatened the General Secretary that they would move on block to another union (the GMB) if the policy was passed. Needless to say, the unions income and power derived from its membership inside the military industries over-ruled any argument that £200billion could be better spent.

The same occurred inside the climate debates. The competition between different unions panders to the “Now” of workers’ consciousness rather than their future best interests. Collapsing the car industry in favour of wind turbine production isn’t a winner at the moment. This may be because the leadership is not sufficiently engaged with the scientific predictions of the near future, although heaven knows we’ve tried to tell them. They may also have more than a passing personal interest in supporting the bosses and their profits in order to show they are a safe pair of hands in co-managing the workforce. It all adds up to denial of the facts.

And those of us who have faced the catastrophe have to deny the denial.

When asked about the emotional resistance to considering the possibility of climate catastrophe, Roger Hallam of Extinction Rebellion recognises that “The World isn’t simply materialist, it is also psychological and emotional…”. He speaks of the traditionally defensive protests of the Left in which we seek to hold the political space against attack. The defensive posture has usually failed and is likely to fail. His proposed tactic is to throw ourselves at the space, get battered or arrested in huge numbers, and effectively expose the repression and invalidity of the State’s response to protest. 

The barrier to accepting the science is a social addiction problem. 50 years of fossil fuel-enabled technology has created an emotional as well as material dependency on the stuff we have now. Suffering from dependency requires, firstly, the acknowledgement of the dependency and then a discussion about what to do about it, and finally the liberation from the dependency whilst recognising the danger of slipping-back into it unless we maintain personal vigilance and internal emotional management.

Jem Bendell writes of this as Deep Adaptation. It is necessary to face the addiction head on. The analogy works: a collective withdrawal from dependency; the necessary “cold turkey” of pain of recognition of the loss; and the straight-spined determination to behave in new ways and walk the talk.

We are on the verge of inevitable social collapse and most of us will be living into this era. Accelerated heating, global dimming and feedback loops mean that even if all carbon emissions are stopped today the heating will carry-on up, certainly up-and-over over 2 degrees and probably 3. The environment will suffer the impacts of the poison for decades to come even if humans stop our emissions right now.

The trade union Unite was able to win a policy yesterday with the hopeless target of 2050 because their leadership and the politicians have denied the facts. The locked-in temperature increase is defined yet excluded from the Paris Agreement and IPCC Reports. Is this the most deadly act of denial or the addicts’ condition prior to acceptance? Do we really have to hit rock bottom before accepting our perilous state? The emotional call for action against catastrophe, to stop the apocalypse, can be motivational or disarming. Were it a personal diagnosis of cancer we would have the choice of taking the medicine or letting nature take its course. It’s unlikely that we’d just take an Aspirin and carry on. Given the probability of deterioration towards extinction, why not act now, and act to survive? The longer the wait for treatment, the worse the prognosis. 

Perhaps, yesterday, the unions at least began to accept the need for a change of diet. But the resolution was still a mañana moment. Let’s talk about abstention from fossil fuels some other time. Yes, human beings are not good at dealing with a crisis until it is upon us. And yes, cognitive change is not the issue. We’re not going to change unless we’re emotionally engaged! Mourn now for the conditions we are living through in the 6th Great Extinction. Grieve for the loss of habitats. Accept the advance of the crisis that will most certainly burst through our front doors very soon. And make the change required, now. Above all, Deny the Denial.

Wednesday 11th September 2019

The economics of complacency

Complacency is an emotional condition. Those with are always scared of being without. Such fear demotivates. And so we choose not to think about it. Someone else will deal with the threats to life, we have more than enough to cope with in getting to work each day. Until, out of the grey, they the job no longer exists and no-one comes to help. 

How many people routinely consider the state of the economy? Or properly understand it. Politicians often, and falsely, compare national economics to household budgeting. In reality there is no comparison – families can’t print money or determine wage-rates, governments can. And we live so far apart from those who govern us.

Other theorists create analogies between societal economies and the human body, yet again there is no comparison. A society has no heart, a stock exchange is a gambling casino not a liver, and a government is not a brain. The System is made and sustained by people living in an environment that sustains them, or doesn’t.

Society is comprised of millions of complex human organisms, co-operating or competing and at all times struggling to interpret and manage the sensations of the world around us. And at all times we are only semi-autonomous at best. 

We are wholly reliant upon each other, our social organisation, the collective whole, including Nature. Economists attempt to make some sense of this matrix of human interactions.

So does social psychology, recognising that all our behaviours influence the behaviour of all others. At the level of the individual, the emotion influences the intellect and the intellect the emotions. And all behaviour can be understood as the result of the interaction between intellect and emotion – at base, the dual-drive for identity and survival, as a person and as a group.

We struggle constantly with the challenge of valuing ourselves and others, and the interaction required to maintain our needs and feed our desires. Sufficiently loved, fed and housed we seek to conserve, hold on to what we’ve got, and so invest in the status quo. Change becomes a threat, comfort the bulwark to hide behind.

Human maturity can be defined as the growing acknowledgment of our own tendencies and triggers, and the effective management of both in order to function. To do so we have to be in touch with ourselves, to be honest about our faults and fears as well as our strengths and beauty. Some have labelled this as emotional intelligence.

Humans have a narcissistic capacity, especially so when encouraged in a society based upon individualism and competition. Some wallow in our own emotionality and see ourselves as the centre of our own universe, separating ourselves from others. This ego-centricity serves to not have to worry about how we’re seen by others, or how we behave towards them. 

Conversely, many espouse the dominance of the intellect and distinguish ourselves as having greater knowledge and understanding, feeling and behaving as superior to others and of being a member of an under-recognised elite. This ego-centricity imposes and seeks to dominate others.

Through both or either tendency we are alienated from others. We are also in a constant state of self-delusion. Little wonder. The illusion spun by the current individualist industry selling notions of emotional intelligence is their offer of “feelings’ as the panacea for a better life. “Listen to your gut instinct.” 

Experience will prove that the human can no more trust her or his emotions than we can trust our intellect. Knowledge changes over time, and emotions swell and dive minute by minute. A mature and independent approach is to check out our emotions through exercising knowledge, and check out our intellect by engaging our senses. Such an approach minimises complacency, for sure.

In so far as we are products of our history and environment (and we feel as well as know this to be probably true), our own behaviour is a reflection of society at large. The Capitalist System in which we all live portrays itself as rational, always seeking to be more efficient, demanding of us ever-better time-management, proscribed behaviour and objectivity over emotionality. 

In reality, Capitalism operates in exactly the opposite way – anarchic, reactive, unplanned and compulsive. It’s little wonder than many of us mirror the dysfunctional chaos of the System in our personal lives. 

Little wonder, also, that we are in a state of near-denial about the threat from global heating. For a start we have been corralled into living in our own tiny privatised worlds. And secondly we have hardly any say in our wider society. Those who have real influence over the economy – the global Capitalist class – are ploughing forward with the carbon economy and it’s emissions in complete denial of the very obvious sensations of global heating all around us.  

In response, we continue to seek employment by them to earn a wage in order to consume and derive a modicum of pleasure from life. The society in which we live appears oblivious to the coming catastrophe and therefore so do we. 

In our condition of assumed powerlessness, and despite all the scientific evidence and the nagging anxiety of an uncertain future, most choose to deny the peril of global heating.

It is self-evident, both emotionally and intellectually, that the longer we live in a condition of denial, the harder the crash when reality finally hits us. The global economy is slowing and many countries, including the UK, are sliding into a recession probably more painful than in 2008. In addition, the environment is weakening far faster than predicted, with food harvests declining rapidly due to extreme weather events, insect extinction and the changing climate. Drinkable water, the stuff of life, is already a luxury for billions of people. 

The responsibility for this is not equally shared. The global economy is run by, and has been created to benefit, a super-rich tiny elite who exert all-but total power-and-control over the vast majority of humanity. They manage us as their “subjects”, and pacify and infantilise us by distributing a heady mixture of fear and its antidote of opiates. The general complacency is the result of alienation, not choice.

Had the majority been empowered to create a society from scratch, few if any would have designed Capitalism. When we open our eyes, this dehumanised, environmentally destructive and emotionally distorting system of capitalist greed, private accumulation at the expense of others, alongside the wanton destruction of the natural world doesn’t feel right and makes no sense. 

It’s time to seek human maturity, to get back in touch with ourselves and manage our tendencies of complacency and narcissism. We must stop being economical with the Truth. We must get a grip of our emotions. We must demand true suffrage and self-determination. Crucially, if we are to prevent human extinction we have to understand the need for system change, and replace Capitalism. It’s time to come to our senses.

Sunday 8th September 2019

Carbon use has risen by 60% since 1990. This stands in sharp contrast to the majority view of climate scientists stating that we need to end global heating emissions and become carbon-neutral by 2025. How certain is this? In a recent interview with a right wing podcaster (Mallen Baker, a Corporate adviser to big business: https://Malle Baker.net/podcast), Roger Hallam of Extinction Rebellion explained he is influenced by complexity theory – a model suggesting that the construction of the future is complex and cannot be wholly predicted.

Indeed, we cannot say with a certainty that we are correct about climate change, and we don’t need to. The science is probe-able. We can do no more than delve deep into the gathered scientific facts in order to develop a probability analysis based upon current evidence. Compile the data. The context of probability offers human beings a collective assertion of emotional humility in which we don’t have to be certain to be potentially correct. There are no absolutes. 

The scientific facts detail that extinction within our lifetimes is a real possibility. Even if, as in the most conservative of estimates, only half a billion people die prematurely as a result of climate change within the next 50 years, the emotional impact upon those who remain will be socially destructive. 

The precautionary principle suggests we should act as if extinction is likely in order to stop it from happening. If the science says you’re likely to die, the debate is not over the probability but over the action required to lessen the potential. To do so, and in defiance of any scepticism, there will have to be a fundamental change in the way the System works and society manages itself, just in case.

This raises the probability of authoritarian state control in the coming period of deep crisis. How else, for example, will the majority of humans be convinced to give-up their private cars and the diesel-lorried goods filling-up supermarkets with seasonless nibbles? How do we end all notions of continuous growth and development? How do we consent to become carbon-neutral by 2025 – the probable date of no-return? 

Top-down governments have never been particularly sensitive to environmental concerns and will probably lead the descent into barbarism rather than prevent it. Absolute power in individual hands will determine who’s to live and who’s to die. Wealth and influence will dominate survival. Even Hallam admits that Right-wing politicians usually put the ideology of individualism in front of the facts.

The issue of consent is therefore important in this process of major social and economic change. How the majority of the People can be convinced remains the issue. Hallam is convinced that peers can convince their peers. So people like you convince people like you. Hence we need ordinary people randomly picked from across the political spectrum to share with those they know the understanding and information received from attendance at the Citizens Assemblies.

As an attempt to prevent totalitarianism the formulation by Extinction Rebellion of The Citizen’s Assembly process is highly appealing. It is a jury-style democratic decision-making process for deliberating on what is to be done. Lottery-picked jurors will be advised by specialists and expected to tell politicians what needs to be done. The replacement of one set of membership with a new set will ensure inclusion of our entire community.

There are no guarantees in life, suggests Hallam, but the historical record of such “deliberative democracy” offers the possibility of huge empowerment and radical solutions. It is suggested that the Jury system remains the most just method of calibrating degrees of doubt and proof. At the very least, Citizens Assemblies are a creative and inclusive solution. Probably.

Emotional Climate

06.09.2019

Global Heating, the recently revised term for what is happening to the Earth’s climate, is accelerating at an unpredicted rate. Not only had the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) failed to include acceleration in it’s 2018 forecast of a 1.5degree rise in global temperatures, but the best scientific modelling has proved to be decades out in its predictions of fires and floods.

This week alone we have seen three super-hurricanes form and develop at the same time, historically unheard of. Dorian caused storm surges, floods, widespread death and devastation across the Bahamas. At the very same time, uncontrollable fires blaze across all corners of the globe, not just the Amazon but the Arctic, Africa and Australia. 

Anyone watching must experience at least a passing surge of anxiety. Anyone directly involved will be experiencing trauma, with lasting effects. There is no peace from the recurring memory of a firefighter friend dying fighting a fire, a neighbour drowned in a building collapsing under water, a relative trapped in their car.

Now consider what it is for a child or young person perceiving these events. With the rest of their lives spanning a length difficult to perceive when young, the image of global heating excites a fear and despondency equitable to the feelings of youth in the late nineteen thirties or during the broadcasts at the time of the Bay of Pigs. 

We face a catastrophe. Many in the know suggest we face extinction. School students have taken strike action and will, once again, in 26 countries and over 1,000 cities worldwide on 20th September. This time the school refuser and environmental activist, Greta Thunberg, has called on adults for support. We can’t leave the future to the kids.

We can stop the coming Climate Catastrophe, but, as detailed by Extinction Rebellion rather than the IPCC, we have to go to a global war footing and diminish all use of carbon-based fuels towards zero emissions by 2025. This requires such a radical transformation of production and consumption that only mass mobilisations of millions of humans worldwide can ensure politicians and corporate bosses are forced to comply. 

The question of the hour shouts out; have the People the emotional resilience to take part and sustain system change? Will the repeated images of horror caused by human-made “Acts of Nature” become too awful to watch or too numerous to evoke any emotional response? Like civilians in a war zone, will we be rendered powerless? Like soldiers on a battlefield, will we become dehumanised and heartless?

There is a great need to speak the Truth about climate change. An essential ideological battle to be won, here and now, against The Deniers. But in so doing, the individual trauma faced by each of us as we perceive the coming catastrophe has to be openly acknowledged and managed.

We have to talk about global heating. We must feel we can do something, such as offering solidarity to the flooded of the Abaco Islands and those driven by flames in New South Wales. We must link arms to challenge the unnatural anti-human, anti-environment, anti-science nonsense of Trump and Bolsonaro.

We must challenge the Great Denial in all its forms. And to do all this we must acknowledge the emotional impact of our times, manage our inner pain, and offer solace and support to each other in this unprecedented tense and anxious emotional climate.

7.9.2019

Forced migration

The question is posed: how will the human world respond to the scale of forced migration caused by global heating. The rising of the seas is now inevitable, the seas already warming faster and higher than for millions of years past. Island nations and cities are already being swamped. 

Just as dramatically, migration raises emotional heat. There can be little doubt that Europe has become a fortress against those from the South seeking to escape drought, famine, war and all the ensuing poverty so produced. Symbolically at least, the White governments of the North are barricading their peoples against any possible Black insurgency.

The repeated images of drowned babies on Mediterranean beaches and imprisoned children torn from their parents grasp on the border between Mexico and the USA seer into some peoples conscience. At the same time, politicians explain away their barbarity by claiming to represent the selfishness of human nature or the primary protection of their own Nation. 

The emotional climate is an ideological battle ground. What children are taught in school, how parents explain the media images, what acceptable chat is apparent on the streets and in the playground, all congeal into the accepted truth and “common sense”. The current discourse purveys a sense of them-and-us if not dog-eat-dog. 

Thankfully, children who have not experienced the worst of early traumas develop with a strong sense of justice, fair play and feelings of what’s Right. Pubescent adolescents, their frontal lobes in a state of rewiring to cope with the rigours of independence, feel things most starkly. The human ability to empathise, a condition learnt and built upon rather than simply innate, is the kernel of all hope for the future.

The student strikes to demand action in this era of Climate Emergency are evidence of the most decent and progressive potential of human behaviour. Each young person has their own micro-motivation and at the same time share sensations of anger and outrage at the continued destruction of the environment and the impact upon human beings.

As with any emotion, anger can drive positive or negative behaviours. Anger is a survival-emotion first and foremost. In a racist atmosphere it can be turned against others, the outsiders, the threats. In a collective and inclusive environment it can be shared, arms-linked, to challenge the destructive status quo and force positive change.

The ideological battle comes from outside of ourselves. Are we encouraged to care for fellow humans or given palliatives that limit our expectations of what can be done and turn towards self-survival? Are we subject to the glib statements of silly old men (it is usually men) suggesting “it’s too late to do anything” and “you just have to let Nature take its course”, pushing innate hope into self-destructive despair? 

And to what extent does the current emotionally addictive zeitgeist of consumerism, individualistic and avaricious as it is, quash the gregarious norm of empathy? The struggle to prevent the coming climate catastrophe includes the struggle for decency over barbarism, inclusion over racism, social justice over competition, empathy over selfishness, and hope over despair. In short, the inner-strength to hold out your hand to others.

6th September 2019

Global Heating, the recently revised term for what is happening to the Earth’s climate, is accelerating at an unpredicted rate. Not only had the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) failed to include acceleration in it’s 2018 forecast of a 1.5degree rise in global temperatures, but the best scientific modelling has proved to be decades out in its predictions of fires and floods.

This week alone we have seen three super-hurricanes form and develop at the same time, historically unheard of. Dorian caused storm surges, floods, widespread death and devastation across the Bahamas. At the very same time, uncontrollable fires blaze across all corners of the globe, not just the Amazon but the Arctic, Africa and Australia. 

Anyone watching must experience at least a passing surge of anxiety. Anyone directly involved will be experiencing trauma, with lasting effects. There is no peace from the recurring memory of a firefighter friend dying fighting a fire, a neighbour drowned in a building collapsing under water, a relative trapped in their car.

Now consider what it is for a child or young person perceiving these events. With the rest of their lives spanning a length difficult to perceive when young, the image of global heating excites a fear and despondency equitable to the feelings of youth in the late nineteen thirties or during the broadcasts at the time of the Bay of Pigs. 

We face a catastrophe. Many in the know suggest we face extinction. School students have taken strike action and will, once again, in 26 countries and over 1,000 cities worldwide on 20th September. This time the school refuser and environmental activist, Greta Thunberg, has called on adults for support. We can’t leave the future to the kids.

We can stop the coming Climate Catastrophe, but, as detailed by Extinction Rebellion rather than the IPCC, we have to go to a global war footing and diminish all use of carbon-based fuels towards zero emissions by 2025. This requires such a radical transformation of production and consumption that only mass mobilisations of millions of humans worldwide can ensure politicians and corporate bosses are forced to comply. 

The question of the hour shouts out; have the People the emotional resilience to take part and sustain system change? Will the repeated images of horror caused by human-made “Acts of Nature” become too awful to watch or too numerous to evoke any emotional response? Like civilians in a war zone, will we be rendered powerless? Like soldiers on a battlefield, will we become dehumanised and heartless?

There is a great need to speak the Truth about climate change. An essential ideological battle to be won, here and now, against The Deniers. But in so doing, the individual trauma faced by each of us as we perceive the coming catastrophe has to be openly acknowledged and managed.

We have to talk about global heating. We must feel we can do something, such as offering solidarity to the flooded of the Abaco Islands and those driven by flames in New South Wales. We must link arms to challenge the unnatural anti-human, anti-environment, anti-science nonsense of Trump and Bolsonaro.

We must challenge the Great Denial in all its forms. And to do all this we must acknowledge the emotional impact of our times, manage our inner pain, and offer solace and support to each other in this unprecedented tense and anxious emotional climate.