[The Climate of Capital 1] Extinction Rebellion: Neoliberal Death-Cult.
["The Climate of Capital" is a loose series on climate change, capitalism and revolutionary perspectives of climate movements.]
"Not only was the postmodern marked by an increase in religious belief, from institutionalised religions to various new-age obscurantisms, but the logic of capital, too, successfully imposes its religious component that Marx envisaged through the notion of fetishism." (Samo Tomšič, The Capitalist Unconscious, p.48)
The end is nigh.
The apocalypse seems quite common these days: Strolling through London's very own Climate Strike, the curious spectator was able to examine all kinds of crazy and of course postmodern-ironical millenialism. Cardbords, held by small Hipster hands, declaring the hard truth "Twitter doesn't work underwater", banners describing all forms of mass death scenarios (Heat, Hunger, Floods, and a variety of the new neoliberal 7 plagues) and even little toddlers, holding cardbord-similies of a globe in flame. Symbols of a society in love with the end and with death, a society that has unlearned hope, a society that desires fear.
While there is much to be said about this millenialism, I want to concentrate on one particular movement that has gained much popularity amongst climate strikers and (liberal) leftists alike: Extinction Rebellion (XR).
Yet, as there is so much to be said about this movement and what it represents - I will split this critique into two. In a subsuquent article, I will discuss XR's tactics, its strategy and how they are related to neoliberalism. Meanwhile, in this article I will focus on their ideological considerations, as presented in their manifesto-like anthology This is not a Drill. An Extinction Rebellion Handbook. As it is my intention, to perform more of a critical inventory of the reactionary rotteness of XR than an extensive critique (which would anyways involve a deeper critique and discussion of certain traits of a postmodern religios obsucrantism in defense of capitalism), this article will cover a number of quotations from XR's handbooks which will be commented. In this way, I hope not only to provide a necesseray critique of XR but also material for other activists who do not have time to study this movement intensively.
One has not to be endowed with the divine gift of prophecy to forsee that this method will engender critique by the defenders of XR, as they will claim that these quotations are not representative of XR.XR poses as a grassroot movement where nobody can speak for the whole movement - therefore it was a rather clever move of the heads and brains of XR to publish their manifesto in form of an anthology, a collection of different articles by various authors. Thus, XR will never be responsible: Any critique of XR's policies, actions or visions, at least in the eyes of their supporters, will always remain a critique of the actions or texts of a certain group, section or individual person within the XR context, never XR itself. The 'whateverism', characteristic of any non-organized, basic-democratic movement informs here the form of their manifesto.
We can read this as an expression of a common trait of capitalist realist movements: People do not want to take up a position, they avoid to stay true to any idea or uphold anything as truth, thus, they cannot act without at the same moment distancing themselves from their acts (through irony for instance or through all forms of arbitariness). Thus, even before we begin our reading, we find ourselfes confronted with the haunting spirits of our contemporary predicament: XR writes a manifesto that tries not to be a manifesto but just a collection of voices.
A general critique of such a formation has already been written long ago by our great comrade Alain Badiou, so I will not go deeper into these depths, but renounce any stupid voices that stick to the idea that this text is just a polyphonic expression of activists. Even if there are many authors and articles, there was an editing agency at work, that thought itself fit to publish an "Extinction Rebellion Handbook", and present the article according to an immanent logic, therefore I ignore the individual authorship and read the text as a whole - a whole expression of the ideological ideality of XR.
So, let us dive into this abyss and start with the most basic question, any political movement should be confronted with in the first place. What are their demands?
We find at the first pages a Declaration of rebellion that seemingly answers this question. It states:
"We demand to be heard, to apply informed solutions to these ecological crises and to create a national assemble by which to initate those solutions needed to change our present cataclysmic course.
We refuse to bequeath a dying planet to future generations by failing to act now.
We act in peace, with ferocious love of these lands in our hearts.
We act on behalf of life" (2)
These few lines represent what XR is in a nutshell. Let us explore them step by step.
The first demand is to be heard, a demand that is later in the book taken up again and again and more elaborated on: XR thinks that democracy (British democracy that is -in the very first sentences XR refers to the concrete British situation, later wants to fight with ferocious love for these lands and adopts throughout the book a perspective on indigenous people that portrits them as benevolent beings in harmony with mother Earth, just like in a Karl May tome; in one word: this is a eurocentric movement that has no international perspective whatsoever, inspite of all universalism-posing they enact) is exhausted and has lost its credibility. So, instead they demand a new social contract (in fact, you find a social contract (literally a contract form between you and the state, this is no joke) on the last pages of the book, ready to be signed by you) and national assemblies where citizens can freely and souvereignly express their ´views and find solutions. This is of course an expression of a democracy fetish which is interesting (and disturbing in itself), but before all it is not a real demand. To appeal to the state to be heard is nothing unheared of in a representative democracy, it is the very basic idea of the liberal, representative state.It is, even more, not a challenge to the power of the state (like a slogan like "All power to the Soviets" would be): The demand to be heard avoids exactly to ask, who is in power and how power is structured. Indeed, later in the book, they become very clear that they do not conceive the police (the state as a whole even) as an enemy (cf. p.41-42), and this means: they do neither understand the state as a power structure ruled by the capitalist class, nor do they want power to change the status quo - they are quite content with liberal democracy as they demand to be well represented, they are just underwhelmed by the performance of the actual status quo and form of representative democracy. Thus the first demand -to have national assemblies- is a non-demand, it is just an affirmation of the status quo.
As is the second demand - the demand of informed descission making, which is expressed by the (at least in London) very often read and heard slogan: Say the truth. Even more than the demand to be heared, this appeal to the state reminds of an angry child, demanding the father to be true about the whereabouts of some hidden goodies. Yet, beyond such an infantile regression, this demand is also just void, as the state does indeed state the truth, when it comes to climate change - nobody, except for some fringe politicians, is lying about it, especially when it comes to the state itself, that is: to its agencies, institutes etc, which produce all the data used in the climate discourse . So we might assume that XR confuses the state with politicians and politics on the one side, and on the other simply ignores the debate. Thirdly of course this demand is driven by a Chomskyian imaginary: There must be some hidden truth and if everybody knew this truth, they would act on our side.
There is no secret truth and knowing the truth does not make you act anyways. We all know that capitalism is rubbish, for instance, but nonetheless, London City is still there and not called Karl Marx City, crowned with red flags.
The thrid demand - to end the cataclysmic sourse- is repeated time and again in the same vague form: The Father---forgive me: the state is asked to end all carbondioxide emissions asap. But it is not explained how and what this could mean for society etc., if this would involve expropriations for example, etc. Thus, also this demand is in reality void.
We must conclude: XR has no real demands - they do not envision desires or even clearly name points of critique that could be overcome (if by revolution or reform), they want and are a rebellion, an uprising for the sake of uprising. Instead of demands we find a general vagueness and whateverism that is caricatured by the pathetic: "We act on behalf of life".
The pathos in this anoucement is related to a structure that is to be found throughout the book and that informs the whole ideology of XR: Death
The very simple idea oXR is built upon is that death is certain if we act not immediately. That means exactly this: The catastrophe is on its way but it is not there yet, it can still be prevented, if we act now, in a way to preserve and protect life itself.
Death and life are void categories. They cannot be thought - in a strict theoretical sense: Nobody would for instance compare the life functions of a vermin underground with those of a human being, but both, vermin and human being are alive. And nobody would compare the death of said vermin to the death of a human child (maybe with the notable exceptions of the disgusting creeps of PETA, the acolytes of Peter Singer and the lot). In other words, there is no life without qualities, without certain ties to being and there is no death without reason. A true humanism of practice (that is an anti-humanism in theory) knows this.
Meanwhile XR uses life as a complete void and (more on this later) mystical catgeory, as an obscurantism that allows to say and do anything: This is the consequence of somebody acting in the name of life itself. If life is under thread, everything is allowed, immediate political question fall silent because it is done for life. To rebel for life is to be and act - and this is XR's very own slogan- beyond politis.
"We need everybody to unite, from the left to the right, and every shade in between." (p.22)
What this means can be uncovered throughout the book. While there are time and again some lip services to antiracism etc., XR follows a stratgy called in German "Querfront". Querfront was an idea by the Strasser brothers, infamous subleaders of the National Socialists and rivals to Hitler, who, in a nutshell, proposed to unite with some members of the Left to organize a common front against Capital and the West. Today, we can see many forms of Querfront movements throughout Europe and recurring discussions especially by members of certain alternate lefties (read: anti-semitic conspirancy theorists) if we should not include people from the other side.
For XR this has been already answered by the supposed leathal thread of humankind: As life is under threat, we have to whipe away there tiny differences. They make it very clear: EVERYBODY should unite, from left and right (which serve as points of extremes) to all those in between. Seemingly, the communist should stand sie by side with a fascist, if both are about to die. Or differently put: The tiny differences and small ideological issues that divide us (like, say, antisemitism, racism, fascism or nationalism) should be put aside for the sake of saving life.
This means in consequence again: There is no political idea of XR. As they want to be beyond any division, they are (again) beyond politics. They do not have a real position or a real program with real demands and ideas. Yet, if you take away politics, what remains is death- death as the iminent future event that informs the urgent actions of XR.
Therefore, we are arriving, pun intended, at a dead end, if we ask after the demands of XR. Seemingly, at the place of such we encounter a dark mysticism that whispers about death and the upcoming apocalypse but does not name any political ideas; the mysticism of extinction seemingly is beyond politics. In this sense, it does not make sense to ask directly for the political idea of XR, as the answer will again and again be the death-cultish focusation on mass extinction. Thus, it is wiser to examine concrete measurements they propose and explantions they givem to explain the existing order; in this way, we might find a more politicized view that may help us to pinpoint the political position of XR.
"We are living through the sixth mass extinction driven by the limitless greed of the 1 per cent, their blindness to the limits the Earth sets and the limits set by social justice and human rights. We forget that we are one humanity on one planet. There is no planet B. This is where we will live or go extinct as a species, with the millions that have been driven to extinction by the violence and carlesness misleadingly called economy.
'Economy' like 'ecology' is derived from oikos - our home, the Earth. An economy that destroys our home is no longer an economy. It is a war against this planet, the people and our future." (p5)
In this passage we find again many obscurantist extinction kitsch. But let us concentrate on the political - in this case- socieo-economic side of what is presented here. The structural argument here is rather rabulistic and has to be understood structurally.
I start with the second passage: Obviously, XR understands economy (in a absolutly misunderstanding of Aristotle) as care for the earth (with capital letter E, probably an expression of veneration for our holy mother - see below). In other words: The imagined status quo of economy is a good one, a form of economy that sustains itself in harmony with earth and social values (what ever that is again). Capitalism is not even mentioned here, as is not mentioned, what this former economy was like: Was it a nicer capitalism? Do they want a primitive communist society, like in the stone age? But it is made explicit that the status quo has nothing to do with this true economy, it is a war against the planet.
If we revisit in a second step the first paragraph, we find an explanation for this deviation of the good economy: The greed of an obscure 1% (we wonder who they might be). There is no structural analysis of capitalism, as provided by Marx and Engels, there is not even a notion that there is something like capitalism, like production, appropriation, labourpower, accumulation of capital, commodity fetishism etc, there is only, straight and simply the greed of 1% which is the only named reason, XR gives us for today's predicament.Not capitalism, not abstract structures are ruining our lives but the bad habit of a few baddies - at least in the eyes of XR.
There is a good reason why Marx and Engels denounced such a personalized anti-capitalism: If one would restrict a critique of capitalism to a critique of capitalists and their moral vices, we end up (at maximum) by replacing one capitalist with the other. But the question is not Gates or Soros, but the question is: commodity production or communism; yet as long as we (even for left populist reasons) stick to personalizing capital's abstract structures, we proof unable to attack and replace them.
Yet, there is a more troublesome underline to this: To speak of the greed of 1% as the original cause of our misery reminds of certain antisemitic, Nazi-discourses that argued (and argue) the very same way: A small percentage of people - in the Nazi discourse of course: the Jews- greedily destroy or endanger an original harmony that should be preserved by ending the greed and the greedy alike (if you are interested into the Nazi thinking, google Gottfried Feder, the economic thinker of Nazism - I will not link him or his writings here). To understand capitalism as the result of greed and relate misery to the vices of some mighty and conveniantly unidentified 1% is but an expression of structural anti-semitism and a regressive anti-capitalism. A form of anti-capitalism that does not wish to abolish private property in order to progress to a better society, (and may even ignore the existence and relevance of private property in itself), but instead only wishes to adress symptoms of capitalism which it understands as deviations from a good original state.
It becomes clear what these symptoms are, XR wishes to overcome, if we look at the two following quotations.
"[...] We need to explore the restoration of attitudes and approaches to life and organization that our hypercarbon fuelled civilization eroded. Examples include rewilding the landscapes so they provide more ecological benefits and require less management, changing diets back to match the seasons, rediscovering non-electronically powered forms of play and increasing community-level productivity and support." (p79)
"We are not equally implicated, for sure, but we know that it is our way of living that must be surrendered, and not only the lifestyles of Macron and his friends in the Davos set." (p.86/7)
We should take here XR by the word: The first quotation speaks of a restoration of an order "eroded" by civilization, a return to a lost order.
Well indeed: Our 'civilization' - again, they do not use 'capitalism'- has eroded certain attitudes and approaches to life: For example the lovely attitude to burn witches on the stake, the attitude to give the tenth of you income to your lord or the attitude to die with 40 of the Plague. Some people might foolishly think, that it is good that we have left the dark ages, that capitalism has reliefed us not only from the burden of feudal aristocracy but significantly improved our lives, extendended our livespans and even made certain joys, like travelling, accesible for at least a priviledged middle class.
In former hapercarbon fuelled /fooled (pun seen during the climate strike demonstration) ages, communists did not negate these improvements but demanded that they should be enjoyed by all: Communism was (and is) not advocating the destruction of technology, it does not want people to live in miserable conditions. Instead the reason why we are communists, is that we believe that capitalism is not fit, because of its immanent contradictions, to provide joy for all, that it looses its potency to revolutionize production and technology and that we in consequence have to replace it with a system that guarantees the constant improvement of technology and the uttermost joy for everybody: communism.
Not so much XR.
While communism is a movement that wants to progress into a new future, XR wants -explicitly wants- a regession to a past, where we live in small, organic communities, organize our work within the clan and live of roots and peas if we not die of starvation during the winter time. This is the future XR wants: A kind of romanticized version of the middle ages or even a return to the times of primitive tribes, where we enjoy ourselves in playing in the mud or hunting some mamoths for the tribe.
Thus, we can name XR an anti-modernist movement. They negate not only the accomplishments of modernity but they negate the very idea of progress. They want regress: At the place of the big anonymous collective (that grants us, never forget, all the liberties to be what we want to be), they desire the small organic community where family and clan reign supreme, at the place of international trade and industrialized production (granting us fresh and standartized food) they desire the return of famines and premodern agriculture (which is unable to feed 8 billion people, by the way), at the place of modern communication, they want the seclusiveness of dark ages where we were ignorant of the world.
This antimodernism is combined with an individualist outlook: This is implicated already in the very idea of a restoration of former forms of production, as this implies a negation of the idea of big collectives; but it becomes clear if we take the second quotation in regard: Here it is clearly said that the economic adaptions undertaken are not structural. We have to change, the individual that is. And this is the responsibility of all of us. Of Macron as well as of the small worker who gets beaten to death by the police. We all should sacrifice our way of living to preser dear Mother Earth - and this means exactly: The capitalist system is not attacked, it is not even mentioned, but the responsibility for change is directed towards the individual. The individual should learn to adapt and relinquish his want for modernity in order to regress to organic Volksgemeinschaften.
"This is the self-sacrifical idea of arrest at the core of Extinction Rebellion's strategy, and it gives you strength from within. Ancient values are overtly resurrected in this Easter Rebellion in London: The values of chivalry and honour,faith in life and being in service to Our Lady, Notre Dame, Mother Eart, the mother on whom everything else depends." (p.96)
"[...] As we contemplate endings, our thoughts turn towards reconciliation: with our mistakes, with death and some would add, with God." (p.79)
The idea of self-sacrifice is predominant within XR. The idea (and this will be discussed in a follow-up article more deeply) is to try to organize impressive spectacles and get arredted in the way to agitate people and raise awareness.
This is not only stupid, but XR connects this idea again to a troublesome anti-modernism: They want the resurrection of ancient values which they even name: Chivalry, honor, faith, service.
Indeed, values worthy of a knight of yore.
Yet, one could raise certain questions, connected to these values: A value never comes unaccompaniedbut is always an expression of a social situation. Take chivalry: Chivalry describes a way of conduct of a knight, that is: a priviliged person in a feudal situation. It is, just like honour, an expression of this privileged situation and serves the main reason to distinguish one self from the lower classes of the social order.
This is not far away from what XR is doing.
You have to be able to afford to get arrested: A father who works at the assembly line and has to feed a family can not be arrested and taken into custody so easily: He has to sustain his beloved ones. A refugee who is illegal in this contry may be deported after arrest - to be arrested may be no option in any case for her.
Thus, what XR wants, its ancient values, are but an expression of their social status to be able to get arrested without serious social or economical consequences. This is something, they even say: They impose the notion that they are doing something for those who cannot, for what reason ever. This may sound very honourable and fulfill some stupid knight codex, but at the end of the day it is an expression of superioirity: XR activists pose themselves as superior over those that cannot do what they are capable of.
Indeed, a very anti-modern idea again.
Yet they connect this with something even more disturbing: It seems no coincidence that XR used Easter for their small resurrection event. They openly allued to religion: They see themselves in service of Mother Earth, glorifying the rock we are living on as a deity.
This is funny in itself as Mother Earth is a horrible mother that gives a shit about harmony: Nature is full of parasites, of destructive events, catastrophies, masskillings, etc. But we should not ridicule this position, it is far to serious.
There is something deep religious about these people: They show all signs of a religious community. They believe in the virtue of selfsacrifice, view themselves as a superior caste of people that got things right and do this in the name of some mystical concepts or even entities.
"But rather than suggest that we can sacrifice our values for a chance to survive, instead we can make universal love our compass as we enter an entirely new physical and psychological terrain.
I cannot honestly hope for a better future, so instead I'm hoping for a better present. I am earning less money and instead I'm eating better and feeling better." (p.79)
To come to a conclusion: XR seems to be a political movement. But it is a-political in its core. It negates politics, has a regressive view on capitalism and harbours a dangerous anti-modernism that at least in some regards has religious undertones. What is more: It focuses on the individual in a double sense: The individual is held responsible for the state of things and the individual is the agent who solves it, namely through selfsacrifice as performed by XR, rendering their activists sacred in comparison to the others. The selfsacrifice, which is only the shadow and the unconscious of neoliberal Ego-Cult and self-care, is driven by the fear of imminent death (btw.: also dying is individual; we die literally alone and for ourselves) whic should be fought. Thus, there is no future perspective, no hope XR wants to provide, only the fear of Death and selfsacrifice in the name of Gaia. In this sense, XR should be regarded as a neoliberal death cult.
As such, it poses a double ideological threat to a true progressive (if not revolutionary) take on climate change: First, it diverts the attention away from structural problems and contradicion of capitalism, by re-affirming an obscurantist individualism, placing all responsibility on the shoulders of the individual. But it does so, secondly, via a strange religiosity that is entirely immanent to capitalism itself. Fetishizing the action of the individual as well as of Mother Earth, XR appears as a departure from enlightenment, or better: a regression. Instead of trying to improve and develop the status quo, instead of progress, XR wants regression into a supposed organic unity: with my particular community and with nature. Thus, it does not attack capitalism, but instead serves as a defense of the status quo.
Therefore, we should not harbour illusions: It is not possible to work together with XR, neither should we try to form a united front with them. They are litereally the enemy, the enemy who knows that preserving the status quo signifies today the most radical -regressive- action.
"Not only was the postmodern marked by an increase in religious belief, from institutionalised religions to various new-age obscurantisms, but the logic of capital, too, successfully imposes its religious component that Marx envisaged through the notion of fetishism." (Samo Tomšič, The Capitalist Unconscious, p.48)
The end is nigh.
The apocalypse seems quite common these days: Strolling through London's very own Climate Strike, the curious spectator was able to examine all kinds of crazy and of course postmodern-ironical millenialism. Cardbords, held by small Hipster hands, declaring the hard truth "Twitter doesn't work underwater", banners describing all forms of mass death scenarios (Heat, Hunger, Floods, and a variety of the new neoliberal 7 plagues) and even little toddlers, holding cardbord-similies of a globe in flame. Symbols of a society in love with the end and with death, a society that has unlearned hope, a society that desires fear.
While there is much to be said about this millenialism, I want to concentrate on one particular movement that has gained much popularity amongst climate strikers and (liberal) leftists alike: Extinction Rebellion (XR).
Yet, as there is so much to be said about this movement and what it represents - I will split this critique into two. In a subsuquent article, I will discuss XR's tactics, its strategy and how they are related to neoliberalism. Meanwhile, in this article I will focus on their ideological considerations, as presented in their manifesto-like anthology This is not a Drill. An Extinction Rebellion Handbook. As it is my intention, to perform more of a critical inventory of the reactionary rotteness of XR than an extensive critique (which would anyways involve a deeper critique and discussion of certain traits of a postmodern religios obsucrantism in defense of capitalism), this article will cover a number of quotations from XR's handbooks which will be commented. In this way, I hope not only to provide a necesseray critique of XR but also material for other activists who do not have time to study this movement intensively.
One has not to be endowed with the divine gift of prophecy to forsee that this method will engender critique by the defenders of XR, as they will claim that these quotations are not representative of XR.XR poses as a grassroot movement where nobody can speak for the whole movement - therefore it was a rather clever move of the heads and brains of XR to publish their manifesto in form of an anthology, a collection of different articles by various authors. Thus, XR will never be responsible: Any critique of XR's policies, actions or visions, at least in the eyes of their supporters, will always remain a critique of the actions or texts of a certain group, section or individual person within the XR context, never XR itself. The 'whateverism', characteristic of any non-organized, basic-democratic movement informs here the form of their manifesto.
We can read this as an expression of a common trait of capitalist realist movements: People do not want to take up a position, they avoid to stay true to any idea or uphold anything as truth, thus, they cannot act without at the same moment distancing themselves from their acts (through irony for instance or through all forms of arbitariness). Thus, even before we begin our reading, we find ourselfes confronted with the haunting spirits of our contemporary predicament: XR writes a manifesto that tries not to be a manifesto but just a collection of voices.
A general critique of such a formation has already been written long ago by our great comrade Alain Badiou, so I will not go deeper into these depths, but renounce any stupid voices that stick to the idea that this text is just a polyphonic expression of activists. Even if there are many authors and articles, there was an editing agency at work, that thought itself fit to publish an "Extinction Rebellion Handbook", and present the article according to an immanent logic, therefore I ignore the individual authorship and read the text as a whole - a whole expression of the ideological ideality of XR.
So, let us dive into this abyss and start with the most basic question, any political movement should be confronted with in the first place. What are their demands?
We find at the first pages a Declaration of rebellion that seemingly answers this question. It states:
"We demand to be heard, to apply informed solutions to these ecological crises and to create a national assemble by which to initate those solutions needed to change our present cataclysmic course.
We refuse to bequeath a dying planet to future generations by failing to act now.
We act in peace, with ferocious love of these lands in our hearts.
We act on behalf of life" (2)
These few lines represent what XR is in a nutshell. Let us explore them step by step.
The first demand is to be heard, a demand that is later in the book taken up again and again and more elaborated on: XR thinks that democracy (British democracy that is -in the very first sentences XR refers to the concrete British situation, later wants to fight with ferocious love for these lands and adopts throughout the book a perspective on indigenous people that portrits them as benevolent beings in harmony with mother Earth, just like in a Karl May tome; in one word: this is a eurocentric movement that has no international perspective whatsoever, inspite of all universalism-posing they enact) is exhausted and has lost its credibility. So, instead they demand a new social contract (in fact, you find a social contract (literally a contract form between you and the state, this is no joke) on the last pages of the book, ready to be signed by you) and national assemblies where citizens can freely and souvereignly express their ´views and find solutions. This is of course an expression of a democracy fetish which is interesting (and disturbing in itself), but before all it is not a real demand. To appeal to the state to be heard is nothing unheared of in a representative democracy, it is the very basic idea of the liberal, representative state.It is, even more, not a challenge to the power of the state (like a slogan like "All power to the Soviets" would be): The demand to be heard avoids exactly to ask, who is in power and how power is structured. Indeed, later in the book, they become very clear that they do not conceive the police (the state as a whole even) as an enemy (cf. p.41-42), and this means: they do neither understand the state as a power structure ruled by the capitalist class, nor do they want power to change the status quo - they are quite content with liberal democracy as they demand to be well represented, they are just underwhelmed by the performance of the actual status quo and form of representative democracy. Thus the first demand -to have national assemblies- is a non-demand, it is just an affirmation of the status quo.
As is the second demand - the demand of informed descission making, which is expressed by the (at least in London) very often read and heard slogan: Say the truth. Even more than the demand to be heared, this appeal to the state reminds of an angry child, demanding the father to be true about the whereabouts of some hidden goodies. Yet, beyond such an infantile regression, this demand is also just void, as the state does indeed state the truth, when it comes to climate change - nobody, except for some fringe politicians, is lying about it, especially when it comes to the state itself, that is: to its agencies, institutes etc, which produce all the data used in the climate discourse . So we might assume that XR confuses the state with politicians and politics on the one side, and on the other simply ignores the debate. Thirdly of course this demand is driven by a Chomskyian imaginary: There must be some hidden truth and if everybody knew this truth, they would act on our side.
There is no secret truth and knowing the truth does not make you act anyways. We all know that capitalism is rubbish, for instance, but nonetheless, London City is still there and not called Karl Marx City, crowned with red flags.
The thrid demand - to end the cataclysmic sourse- is repeated time and again in the same vague form: The Father---forgive me: the state is asked to end all carbondioxide emissions asap. But it is not explained how and what this could mean for society etc., if this would involve expropriations for example, etc. Thus, also this demand is in reality void.
We must conclude: XR has no real demands - they do not envision desires or even clearly name points of critique that could be overcome (if by revolution or reform), they want and are a rebellion, an uprising for the sake of uprising. Instead of demands we find a general vagueness and whateverism that is caricatured by the pathetic: "We act on behalf of life".
The pathos in this anoucement is related to a structure that is to be found throughout the book and that informs the whole ideology of XR: Death
The very simple idea oXR is built upon is that death is certain if we act not immediately. That means exactly this: The catastrophe is on its way but it is not there yet, it can still be prevented, if we act now, in a way to preserve and protect life itself.
Death and life are void categories. They cannot be thought - in a strict theoretical sense: Nobody would for instance compare the life functions of a vermin underground with those of a human being, but both, vermin and human being are alive. And nobody would compare the death of said vermin to the death of a human child (maybe with the notable exceptions of the disgusting creeps of PETA, the acolytes of Peter Singer and the lot). In other words, there is no life without qualities, without certain ties to being and there is no death without reason. A true humanism of practice (that is an anti-humanism in theory) knows this.
Meanwhile XR uses life as a complete void and (more on this later) mystical catgeory, as an obscurantism that allows to say and do anything: This is the consequence of somebody acting in the name of life itself. If life is under thread, everything is allowed, immediate political question fall silent because it is done for life. To rebel for life is to be and act - and this is XR's very own slogan- beyond politis.
"We need everybody to unite, from the left to the right, and every shade in between." (p.22)
What this means can be uncovered throughout the book. While there are time and again some lip services to antiracism etc., XR follows a stratgy called in German "Querfront". Querfront was an idea by the Strasser brothers, infamous subleaders of the National Socialists and rivals to Hitler, who, in a nutshell, proposed to unite with some members of the Left to organize a common front against Capital and the West. Today, we can see many forms of Querfront movements throughout Europe and recurring discussions especially by members of certain alternate lefties (read: anti-semitic conspirancy theorists) if we should not include people from the other side.
For XR this has been already answered by the supposed leathal thread of humankind: As life is under threat, we have to whipe away there tiny differences. They make it very clear: EVERYBODY should unite, from left and right (which serve as points of extremes) to all those in between. Seemingly, the communist should stand sie by side with a fascist, if both are about to die. Or differently put: The tiny differences and small ideological issues that divide us (like, say, antisemitism, racism, fascism or nationalism) should be put aside for the sake of saving life.
This means in consequence again: There is no political idea of XR. As they want to be beyond any division, they are (again) beyond politics. They do not have a real position or a real program with real demands and ideas. Yet, if you take away politics, what remains is death- death as the iminent future event that informs the urgent actions of XR.
Therefore, we are arriving, pun intended, at a dead end, if we ask after the demands of XR. Seemingly, at the place of such we encounter a dark mysticism that whispers about death and the upcoming apocalypse but does not name any political ideas; the mysticism of extinction seemingly is beyond politics. In this sense, it does not make sense to ask directly for the political idea of XR, as the answer will again and again be the death-cultish focusation on mass extinction. Thus, it is wiser to examine concrete measurements they propose and explantions they givem to explain the existing order; in this way, we might find a more politicized view that may help us to pinpoint the political position of XR.
"We are living through the sixth mass extinction driven by the limitless greed of the 1 per cent, their blindness to the limits the Earth sets and the limits set by social justice and human rights. We forget that we are one humanity on one planet. There is no planet B. This is where we will live or go extinct as a species, with the millions that have been driven to extinction by the violence and carlesness misleadingly called economy.
'Economy' like 'ecology' is derived from oikos - our home, the Earth. An economy that destroys our home is no longer an economy. It is a war against this planet, the people and our future." (p5)
In this passage we find again many obscurantist extinction kitsch. But let us concentrate on the political - in this case- socieo-economic side of what is presented here. The structural argument here is rather rabulistic and has to be understood structurally.
I start with the second passage: Obviously, XR understands economy (in a absolutly misunderstanding of Aristotle) as care for the earth (with capital letter E, probably an expression of veneration for our holy mother - see below). In other words: The imagined status quo of economy is a good one, a form of economy that sustains itself in harmony with earth and social values (what ever that is again). Capitalism is not even mentioned here, as is not mentioned, what this former economy was like: Was it a nicer capitalism? Do they want a primitive communist society, like in the stone age? But it is made explicit that the status quo has nothing to do with this true economy, it is a war against the planet.
If we revisit in a second step the first paragraph, we find an explanation for this deviation of the good economy: The greed of an obscure 1% (we wonder who they might be). There is no structural analysis of capitalism, as provided by Marx and Engels, there is not even a notion that there is something like capitalism, like production, appropriation, labourpower, accumulation of capital, commodity fetishism etc, there is only, straight and simply the greed of 1% which is the only named reason, XR gives us for today's predicament.Not capitalism, not abstract structures are ruining our lives but the bad habit of a few baddies - at least in the eyes of XR.
There is a good reason why Marx and Engels denounced such a personalized anti-capitalism: If one would restrict a critique of capitalism to a critique of capitalists and their moral vices, we end up (at maximum) by replacing one capitalist with the other. But the question is not Gates or Soros, but the question is: commodity production or communism; yet as long as we (even for left populist reasons) stick to personalizing capital's abstract structures, we proof unable to attack and replace them.
Yet, there is a more troublesome underline to this: To speak of the greed of 1% as the original cause of our misery reminds of certain antisemitic, Nazi-discourses that argued (and argue) the very same way: A small percentage of people - in the Nazi discourse of course: the Jews- greedily destroy or endanger an original harmony that should be preserved by ending the greed and the greedy alike (if you are interested into the Nazi thinking, google Gottfried Feder, the economic thinker of Nazism - I will not link him or his writings here). To understand capitalism as the result of greed and relate misery to the vices of some mighty and conveniantly unidentified 1% is but an expression of structural anti-semitism and a regressive anti-capitalism. A form of anti-capitalism that does not wish to abolish private property in order to progress to a better society, (and may even ignore the existence and relevance of private property in itself), but instead only wishes to adress symptoms of capitalism which it understands as deviations from a good original state.
It becomes clear what these symptoms are, XR wishes to overcome, if we look at the two following quotations.
"[...] We need to explore the restoration of attitudes and approaches to life and organization that our hypercarbon fuelled civilization eroded. Examples include rewilding the landscapes so they provide more ecological benefits and require less management, changing diets back to match the seasons, rediscovering non-electronically powered forms of play and increasing community-level productivity and support." (p79)
"We are not equally implicated, for sure, but we know that it is our way of living that must be surrendered, and not only the lifestyles of Macron and his friends in the Davos set." (p.86/7)
We should take here XR by the word: The first quotation speaks of a restoration of an order "eroded" by civilization, a return to a lost order.
Well indeed: Our 'civilization' - again, they do not use 'capitalism'- has eroded certain attitudes and approaches to life: For example the lovely attitude to burn witches on the stake, the attitude to give the tenth of you income to your lord or the attitude to die with 40 of the Plague. Some people might foolishly think, that it is good that we have left the dark ages, that capitalism has reliefed us not only from the burden of feudal aristocracy but significantly improved our lives, extendended our livespans and even made certain joys, like travelling, accesible for at least a priviledged middle class.
In former hapercarbon fuelled /fooled (pun seen during the climate strike demonstration) ages, communists did not negate these improvements but demanded that they should be enjoyed by all: Communism was (and is) not advocating the destruction of technology, it does not want people to live in miserable conditions. Instead the reason why we are communists, is that we believe that capitalism is not fit, because of its immanent contradictions, to provide joy for all, that it looses its potency to revolutionize production and technology and that we in consequence have to replace it with a system that guarantees the constant improvement of technology and the uttermost joy for everybody: communism.
Not so much XR.
While communism is a movement that wants to progress into a new future, XR wants -explicitly wants- a regession to a past, where we live in small, organic communities, organize our work within the clan and live of roots and peas if we not die of starvation during the winter time. This is the future XR wants: A kind of romanticized version of the middle ages or even a return to the times of primitive tribes, where we enjoy ourselves in playing in the mud or hunting some mamoths for the tribe.
Thus, we can name XR an anti-modernist movement. They negate not only the accomplishments of modernity but they negate the very idea of progress. They want regress: At the place of the big anonymous collective (that grants us, never forget, all the liberties to be what we want to be), they desire the small organic community where family and clan reign supreme, at the place of international trade and industrialized production (granting us fresh and standartized food) they desire the return of famines and premodern agriculture (which is unable to feed 8 billion people, by the way), at the place of modern communication, they want the seclusiveness of dark ages where we were ignorant of the world.
This antimodernism is combined with an individualist outlook: This is implicated already in the very idea of a restoration of former forms of production, as this implies a negation of the idea of big collectives; but it becomes clear if we take the second quotation in regard: Here it is clearly said that the economic adaptions undertaken are not structural. We have to change, the individual that is. And this is the responsibility of all of us. Of Macron as well as of the small worker who gets beaten to death by the police. We all should sacrifice our way of living to preser dear Mother Earth - and this means exactly: The capitalist system is not attacked, it is not even mentioned, but the responsibility for change is directed towards the individual. The individual should learn to adapt and relinquish his want for modernity in order to regress to organic Volksgemeinschaften.
"This is the self-sacrifical idea of arrest at the core of Extinction Rebellion's strategy, and it gives you strength from within. Ancient values are overtly resurrected in this Easter Rebellion in London: The values of chivalry and honour,faith in life and being in service to Our Lady, Notre Dame, Mother Eart, the mother on whom everything else depends." (p.96)
"[...] As we contemplate endings, our thoughts turn towards reconciliation: with our mistakes, with death and some would add, with God." (p.79)
The idea of self-sacrifice is predominant within XR. The idea (and this will be discussed in a follow-up article more deeply) is to try to organize impressive spectacles and get arredted in the way to agitate people and raise awareness.
This is not only stupid, but XR connects this idea again to a troublesome anti-modernism: They want the resurrection of ancient values which they even name: Chivalry, honor, faith, service.
Indeed, values worthy of a knight of yore.
Yet, one could raise certain questions, connected to these values: A value never comes unaccompaniedbut is always an expression of a social situation. Take chivalry: Chivalry describes a way of conduct of a knight, that is: a priviliged person in a feudal situation. It is, just like honour, an expression of this privileged situation and serves the main reason to distinguish one self from the lower classes of the social order.
This is not far away from what XR is doing.
You have to be able to afford to get arrested: A father who works at the assembly line and has to feed a family can not be arrested and taken into custody so easily: He has to sustain his beloved ones. A refugee who is illegal in this contry may be deported after arrest - to be arrested may be no option in any case for her.
Thus, what XR wants, its ancient values, are but an expression of their social status to be able to get arrested without serious social or economical consequences. This is something, they even say: They impose the notion that they are doing something for those who cannot, for what reason ever. This may sound very honourable and fulfill some stupid knight codex, but at the end of the day it is an expression of superioirity: XR activists pose themselves as superior over those that cannot do what they are capable of.
Indeed, a very anti-modern idea again.
Yet they connect this with something even more disturbing: It seems no coincidence that XR used Easter for their small resurrection event. They openly allued to religion: They see themselves in service of Mother Earth, glorifying the rock we are living on as a deity.
This is funny in itself as Mother Earth is a horrible mother that gives a shit about harmony: Nature is full of parasites, of destructive events, catastrophies, masskillings, etc. But we should not ridicule this position, it is far to serious.
There is something deep religious about these people: They show all signs of a religious community. They believe in the virtue of selfsacrifice, view themselves as a superior caste of people that got things right and do this in the name of some mystical concepts or even entities.
"But rather than suggest that we can sacrifice our values for a chance to survive, instead we can make universal love our compass as we enter an entirely new physical and psychological terrain.
I cannot honestly hope for a better future, so instead I'm hoping for a better present. I am earning less money and instead I'm eating better and feeling better." (p.79)
To come to a conclusion: XR seems to be a political movement. But it is a-political in its core. It negates politics, has a regressive view on capitalism and harbours a dangerous anti-modernism that at least in some regards has religious undertones. What is more: It focuses on the individual in a double sense: The individual is held responsible for the state of things and the individual is the agent who solves it, namely through selfsacrifice as performed by XR, rendering their activists sacred in comparison to the others. The selfsacrifice, which is only the shadow and the unconscious of neoliberal Ego-Cult and self-care, is driven by the fear of imminent death (btw.: also dying is individual; we die literally alone and for ourselves) whic should be fought. Thus, there is no future perspective, no hope XR wants to provide, only the fear of Death and selfsacrifice in the name of Gaia. In this sense, XR should be regarded as a neoliberal death cult.
As such, it poses a double ideological threat to a true progressive (if not revolutionary) take on climate change: First, it diverts the attention away from structural problems and contradicion of capitalism, by re-affirming an obscurantist individualism, placing all responsibility on the shoulders of the individual. But it does so, secondly, via a strange religiosity that is entirely immanent to capitalism itself. Fetishizing the action of the individual as well as of Mother Earth, XR appears as a departure from enlightenment, or better: a regression. Instead of trying to improve and develop the status quo, instead of progress, XR wants regression into a supposed organic unity: with my particular community and with nature. Thus, it does not attack capitalism, but instead serves as a defense of the status quo.
Therefore, we should not harbour illusions: It is not possible to work together with XR, neither should we try to form a united front with them. They are litereally the enemy, the enemy who knows that preserving the status quo signifies today the most radical -regressive- action.
Kommentare
Kommentar veröffentlichen