The ones who broke it aren’t going to fix it

the false solutions of the climate movement, remembering radical history, and more

The mainstream climate framework is a fraud. It allows countries to claim they are reducing carbon emissions, even as they break records year after year in oil and natural gas production. And the whole circus, from the United Nations to the IPCC to the Democrats to the Labor Party to the Green Party to First Solar to Tesla to Greenpeace to Extinction Rebellion to all the socialists who are coming out strong for “green growth” are all covering up a crucial fact: in a growth based economy, more renewable energy production actually causes an increase in fossil fuel production.

Anarchists and other radical anticolonial anticapitalists are the only ones with a hypothesis that matches the data year after year. We’re the only ones who can explain why the situation keeps getting worse, the more the big institutions (from NGOs to governments) take action, the more they invest in their bullshit solutions.

I just got an article published in In These Times that explores all these points, backed by a lot of research. We face an uphill battle spreading an accurate analysis of the ongoing apocalypse. Please give it a read and help spread it. Our networks can be stronger than all the mass media and all the pro-fascist platforms like X, if we make it so.

“Two Years and $300 Billion into Biden’s Climate Plan, Emissions Are Higher Than Ever.”

Two days ago, August 30, was the 67 year anniversary of the police murder of Josep Facerias. Face was a Catalan anarchist who joined the labor struggle as a working class teenager, fought against the fascists on the Aragó front in the anarchist Ascaso Column, was taken prisoner in 1939 and spent the next 6 years in the prisons and concentration camps of the fascist regime, threw himself into clandestine organizing, got briefly imprisoned again, and upon his release in 1947 formed an armed group that fought for the next ten years, carrying out assassinations of cops and regime figures, sabotage against state infrastructure, and bank robberies to finance clandestine workers’ organizations and support the families of prisoners and those who had died in the struggle.

Whereas the Communists negotiated with fascists and Nazis multiple times throughout history, the hundreds of thousands of anarchists active in the Spanish Civil War and the thousands of anarchists organizing this clandestine struggle during the dictatorship were the most uncompromising element in the resistance against fascism. However, they were not (simply) antifascists: they fought (and still today we fight) against capitalism and the State, whether these wear the mask of dictatorship or the mask of democracy. The difference between dictatorship and democracy affects many aspects of our lives and affects the strategies we may have to use, but the masks worn by power never change the brutality directed against the most oppressed elements of society nor against the planet itself: whether under democracy or dictatorship this is still a struggle for collective survival, even though many middle class elements choose to cut a deal when government is more democratic.

Also, the anarchist armed groups like the one Facerias participated in were not vanguardist groups. They practiced a strategy of “armed agitation,” not “armed struggle.” This strategy was every bit as dangerous and used many of the same tactics: the critical difference was in the strategy, the goals, and the vision: anarchists who took up arms did not view themselves as “the tip of the spear” nor as the military wing of a Party that all the oppressed classes had to obey or be silenced by. They saw themselves as an additional tool of a broader struggle, a way to gain resources and provide powerful methods of protection and counterattack.

Read more about this history, about the criticisms of democratic antifascism, and about anti-vanguardist armed agitation in a book compiled by an older friend (and translated by yours truly!) Salvador Puig Antich: Collected Writings on Repression and Resistance in Franco’s Spain.

This same friend, from the generation immediately after that of the anarchist guerrillas like Facerias and Quico Sabaté, also sent me a poster for an event they do every year in Nou Barris, Barcelona, where Face was assassinated in a police ambush. I love how they point to the continuity of struggles against repression with the other names and cases they highlight.

And if you want to read more about the importance of having a collective history in our movements, of how much we gain when we can build up a continuity from generation to generation so we can learn the lessons of those who came before us, check out my newest book, They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us: Forcing Nonviolence on Forgetful Movements. I hope to be giving presentations on or related to this book in the coming months, on podcasts like The Final Straw and at bookstores, social centers, and universities across the Midwest.

Now for some newsbriefs and recommended readings. Get to the bottom for a good piece about the fight for the commons, and sad but beautiful news about a gay penguin.

So… It’s probably no surprise that tech billionaires are funding think tanks that present a techno-optimist vision of the future, spreading the mistaken belief that capitalism will take care of us all (for a moment this article dips into problematic “overpopulation” discourse but after a couple worrisome sentences, it’s clear the author is not making the racist argument that “certain” peoples or countries are overpopulating the planet. On the contrary, it becomes clear they are attacking the views of people like Bill Gates that the planet has no limits and capitalism has an infinite ability to provide for society even in the face of unending growth. Which is of course batshit insane.)

We got a little piece about gentrification in our own neck of the woods, which was nice! A friend and I did talk, after the event, about how it would be nice if gentrification analysis weren’t dominated by coastals writing about what gentrification looks like in financial or tech centers like NYC and San Francisco. Likewise, in Barcelona, where gentrification was largely driven by tourism, academics who had been trained in the 1970s UK model of gentrification (where the term was coined) actually stood in the way of prompt action against displacement from our neighborhoods, because what we were experiencing didn’t fit the academic pattern.

So yeah, any good reading recommendations on defunding, decay, and gentrification in the Rust Belt?

Finally, in this short article more mainstream push back against AI and the many ways it harms us !

Here’s a short but important article from a comrade in Indonesia, about a potential rebellion stewing there influenced in part by the recent uprising in Bangladesh. Get informed, spread the word, send support! As always, our solidarity needs to be international. (And I’m happy that a Dutch site is spreading this news, given the Netherland’s role in colonizing Indonesia.)

As people around the world have been shouting from the rooftops for years, the push towards industrial-scale green energy (i.e. switching the energy source without changing the rest of our economic system) is leading to perhaps the largest mining boom in the history of humanity, and with it spikes in genocide against Indigenous peoples. For example, organized gangs in Brazil are carrying out massacres against the Yanomami to steal land and start mining operations. However, even progressive media rely on racist assumptions that these so-called gangs are just local criminals doing as they do in poor countries. They’re complicit in the violence when they fail to mention that these ecocidal and genocidal mining operations happen in coordination and with the support of major corporations as well as governments and police forces around the world.

Desertification along the Mediterranean coast and the Spanish interior continues to get worse. Because of a prolonged drought in Alacant, tap water is now too salty to drink and residents need to get water shipped in. However, this isn’t just because of a reductionist climate crisis that only has to do with atmospheric carbon. Most of Alacant’s water is being stolen by mass tourism: by upper middle class visitors seduced by a massified, pre-packaged vacation infrastructure funded and developed by Spain’s ruling class (going back to the Franco years) and by wealthy investors around the world.

Mass tourism in Europe is also predicated on resource theft on a global scale, as well as white supremacist notions of who gets to enjoy abundance. That artificial abundance is protected by the most murderous border regime in the world. Here the Spanish police get caught on camera doing something they can usually get away with in secret: intentionally ramming a small boat full of migrants, knocking at least one overboard into the open sea. Every year thousands of people are killed trying to cross Europe’s sea border, with their precarious boats often intentionally sunk by police or Frontex agents.

Here’s a short article that illustrates why we can’t trust corporate reform: it took so much organizing and lobbying to convince corporations to introduce policies for diversity and equality. In a matter of weeks or months, a right-wing activist on Twitter has been able to get major corporations to step back from those commitments.

I wish it weren’t necessary to say we didn’t need any more reminders of the hypocrisy of the Right or how laws don’t keep us safe… but we do need reminders, since we live in a society based on constant erasure of the past. A Black woman was sentenced to 11 years in prison for killing a white man who was sexually trafficking her when she was 17, despite new laws on the books that recognize sexual trafficking as a reasonable motive for self-defense. I couldn’t find a peep from right-wingers who justify transphobia with paranoid arguments about the sexual abuse of minors, nor from mainstream feminists who justify the demonization of sex work with arguments about sex trafficking. In a further cruel coincidence, she was sentenced in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where Kyle Rittenhouse, a heavily armed white supremacist, shot three people protesting police violence, killing two of them: he was acquitted on grounds of self-defense even though he had gone specifically to fight antiracists.

The United Arab Emirates are directly involved in the bloody civil war and ethnic cleansing in Sudan. “Smoking gun” evidence has emerged of their direct military involvement, supporting the genocide being waged by Arabic populations in Sudan. Given the level of involvement, the US and UK governments are probably aware and have given their tacit approval, since UAE troops trained in conflict in Sudan are also used in the war against the Iran-aligned, anti-US Houthis in Yemen.

Israel continues the ongoing genocide against Palestine, unabated. Netanyahu has clearly used ceasefire negotiations to buy more time to carry out ethnic cleansing. Every time Hamas agrees to a proposal that has been cleared by Israeli negotiators, Netanyahu either adds new demands or carries out a particularly egregious massacre against civilians. Meanwhile, multiple Israeli politicians in the government, as well as military leaders, are openly admitting that their actions are designed to permanently seize parts of Gaza and the West Bank that they have emptied out through daily bombardments and shootings. All along, the target of this war has been Palestinians as a people. From its invention, the entire purpose of the Israeli state has been the erasure of Palestine.

This is the only explanation for how frequently Israel has attacked aid convoys following routes that were approved by the IDF, or dropped bombs on areas that they have designated as places of refuge, targeting schools and hospitals, targeting children.

And in the midst of a genocide that is openly admitted, a genocide carried out by soldiers and paramilitaries who take selfies, smiling and laughing in the carnage, the strongest Israeli protest movement is coming from the Zionist rightwing, complaining that Netanyahu is not killing enough.* Even Israeli protests not coming from the far Right are mostly in support of “bringing home” the remaining prisoners being held in Gaza, with very little mention of the tens of thousands of Palestinians Israel has murdered and the millions Israel has displaced… showing how the vast majority of Israeli society approves of genocides that benefit them.

*[As I was writing this piece, the largest protest yet was gathering in Israel, in the wake of the deaths of 6 Hamas prisoners. However, everything I found in the news and in protest photos showed that all their concern was with the 6 dead Israelis, not the 50-60,000 dead Palestinians. Their criticisms were directed against Netanyahu, not for carrying out ethnic cleansing, but for sabotaging negotations for his own political reasons rather than making a deal to free the hostages.]

And this is unfortunate because even the most racist Israelis are not safe in the care of a government that they have pushed towards ever more brutal policies. That’s because of the nature of state power, the nature of colonialism, the nature of white supremacy: it puts everyone in danger. For example, after the October 7 attacks, it came out that it is the protocol of the IDF to shoot hostages rather than to allow their enemies to gain bargaining chips. As it turns out, many of the 1,200 people killed on October 7 may have been killed by the IDF mowing down Hamas militants and their captives together. As the IDF instructed one of its commands on October 7, “Not a single vehicle can return to Gaza.”

A southern command source told the paper: “Everyone knew by then that such vehicles could be carrying kidnapped civilians or soldiers … Everyone knew what it meant to not let any vehicles return to Gaza.”

Very few Israeli soldiers have refused to participate in the war, with 41 reservists signing an open letter in June refusing further service. However, their main reason was that they felt “military action alone will not bring the hostages home. Every day that passes endangers the lives of the hostages and the soldiers still in Gaza, and does not restore security to those living on the Gaza and northern borders.” In other words, even anti-war Israelis are still using racist frameworks that privilege Israeli lives and show complete apathy to the harm they are inflicting on Palestinians. This is the “loyal opposition” mentioned by Noam Chomsky and others in their critique of the racist white anti-war movement during the US war against Vietnam. In the article I pulled the quote from, Guardian journalists only mention 3 reservists actually speaking out about the violence and looting being inflicted on the Palestinians.

Check out this interview on The Final Straw about medical conditions in Gaza, from a comrade who has recently been volunteering there.

In the West Bank, Israel continues to carry out massacres and home demolitions with the typical justification of self-defense from militant attacks. About that… since October 2023, only 19 Israelis have been killed in the West Bank, whereas Israel has killed over 650 Palestinians (including 143 children), they have demolished multiple villages and not allowed their residents to return, and they have supported settlers stealing more land. The Israeli government illegally controls most of the West Bank, subjecting each individual town to isolation and police control. As for those 19 dead Israelis, all of them were invaders on stolen land. Even the progressive Guardian refers to some of them as “civilians,” but this is incorrect. Settlers in the West Bank are highly armed white supremacists with their own paramilitary structures that work hand in hand with the IDF.

Even if the Israeli government were acting in self-defense, their idea of proportionality betrays how they view the Palestinians as subhuman. Nazis trying to repress partisan resistance in Italy famously adopted a reprisal policy of murdering 10 Italians for every German killed. On the contrary, the Israelis consistently make sure to murder at least 30 Palestinians for every one of them who dies. But they won’t limit themselves at 30 to 1, either. Israel will not stop until every single Palestinian is dead or displaced.

Forty percent of graduate’s from the Israeli army’s officer training school are directly affiliated with far Right religious and settler organizations so extreme, the former IDF chief of staff referred to them as “racist, fascist” and “anti-democratic”. For example, a Brigadier General associated with this growing current referred to Palestinians as “a blasphemous enemy that defiles the God of Israel”. (Nonetheless, most media continue to portray Palestinians as religious fundamentalists and Israel as a democratic and tolerant society.)

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Conservationism the form of environmentalism that focuses on protecting specific species or habitats, can certainly be faulted for taking an historical and piecemeal approach to an interconnected system, but at least they have a few feathers in their cap, like the banning of DDT or major reductions in commercial whaling. The following story illuminates one of the many limitations of conservationism. Share this one with any liberal environmentalist family members:

Many folks might not be able to access this paywalled NYT article on Old Timer the humpback whale, but it provides some important insight into the limits of government-backed conservation. The “Save the Whales” movement deserves most of the credit for pushing governments to act in the first place, but government-enforced bans on whaling and other measures certainly played a role in allowing humpbacks and other marine mammals to rebound from near extinction caused by overhunting through the 19^th to mid-20^th centuries. However, governments can only exist by administering economic exploitation that they also take a cut of. For centuries now, anywhere in the world, that has meant some form of capitalism. And capitalism is incompatible with the needs of life on a planet.

With hunting greatly reduced, humpback whales were able to recover and their populations in the North Pacific climbed throughout the 21^st century to a high in 2012 of 33,500. That’s when climate change hit the oceans hard, raising temperatures, killing off krill and small fish lower on the food chain, and reducing humpback whale populations by 34% in just 8 years.

I try to find happy news too, but it’s hard. Most of the things I find always comes with a cynical edge, like the rare Mediterranean tornado that sank a yacht and killed several gnarly multi-millionaires.

Anyway, from the heart of this prison world, in this case the Sydney aquarium, “Sea birds mourn death of gay penguin Sphen.”

Finally, an article from In These Times about the enclosure of the commons, how around the world commons still thrive today and provide an important resource and lesson for life after capitalism. It’s also a good rebuttal against the baseless idea of “the tragedy of the commons.” However, the author mischaracterizes commoning as providing only a “marginal” benefit during medieval feudalism. In fact, commoning especially with pastoralism, forestry, fisheries, and water management was crucial to peasant existence from València and the Pyrenees to the Netherlands and Greece. Vestiges of this practice survive even today, and rural peoples who grew up with commoning, forced to move to the cities, were at the radical frontline of anticapitalist struggles in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The same may prove true with people who grow up commoning and are being forcibly urbanized today, from Africa to South Asia.

I really hope someone will finally translate that Catalan book into English, El Comú Català, by David Algarra Bascón. Don’t look at me! I’m too busy and still recovering from chemo...

And finally finally, listen to Ashanti Alston’s keynote talk at ACAB, the Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair.