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Sure, Biden’s climate policy could be better, but consider what a second Trump term would be like
(www.motherjones.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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Incrementalist policies could have worked if we started decades ago. We're now at the point where it's become a catastrophe in progress. The best we're hoping for at this point is mitigating the disaster if we were to make big changes starting now. It's kind of all or nothing at this point. Either we do what's necessary or we don't.
The article acknowledges the administrations failures and says that activists need to "hold his feet to the fire" ... by voting for him unconditionally? People who take this stance have no concept of power. They think that they can get the government to do what they want simply by writing strongly worded letters and going to the occasional conflict-free protest to hold up signs and then go home.
If you're not serious enough about the problem to break away from civil politics and lesser evilism,then we're doomed. At some point people need to start breaking things.
If you want to break the system, you have to built an organization strong enough to do that. Right now that just does not exist in the US. However Biden does some good work and even more importantly he is much less likely to actually fight the build up of such an organization. So in a swing state he is worth voting for. However in none swing states that is a different matter. There voting for say the Green Party is an option.
One thing is also extremely important. Climate change does not have a single tipping point. Reducing emissions is always a good idea, even if the policy is too slow. It does hurt the fossil fuel industry, which makes it easier to fight them. It also reduces the harm.
However this idea of everything but a revolution is not worth doing is just plain and simply ignorant of history. Revolutions do not create something new, the change the balance of power. So you need the bones of the next system to be ready and the strength to have a revolution. Both of those are much much much easier to do under Biden.
I agree we need to get organized to make this happen, but I’d push back on the idea that Biden/Democrats would be somehow more amenable to the development of movements that have genuine power to change things.
Just some of the concerning things to have happened with Democratic support in recent history:
They’ve continued to expand the military, which aside from being one of the major sources of pollutants is also a tool to secure more oil/resources and when needed, push back against the protests of the masses and any of the other consequences of climate change like mass migration.
They’ve continued to expand the surveillance state, both in capabilities and by eroding legal protections to privacy/security such as attempts to get companies to give them back door access to people’s secure devices, attacks on encryption, etc.
When faced with a choice about how to respond to police violence, they decided to support the police.
They’ve labeled left wing activists, including climate activists, as potential domestic terrorists.
People talk about how electing someone like Trump would slide us into fascism as if they can’t see the infrastructure of fascism being built before our eyes. It’s not really a matter of revolution being easier or harder under democrats or republicans. The establishment will push back against challenges to the system with violence regardless.
Admittedly I’m less familiar with the specifics on the gradual climate change argument, but to my understanding, it seems like there are some things that would make it very difficult to go back from once we let them happen. Various positive feedback loops. Major shortages of water, arable land, and food causing mass displacement. More frequent and intense disasters like storms and wild fires will present major disruptions to organized human life that will make it more difficult for us to build the infrastructure we need to solve our problems. Etc.
If we do a few small things, but ultimately fail to stop the world from getting to that point in time, are we not still doomed? Scientists have been sounding the alarm bells about this my whole lifetime. Through 2 republican and democratic administrations. And the problem has only gotten worse. It’s borderline suicidal to put any faith in the system that has continued to fail to address the greatest crisis of our time for that long.
Even if want to pretend that things get better under democrats and worse under republicans, the very fact that our system is built in such a way that allows for such frequent and profound losses of progress is a critical failure of it. To consider this another way: What would you do if Trump wins? Let him do what he wants for 2-4 years and hope you’ll be able to do something next election? Adhering to the rules of the system is killing us. You can’t play nice when the stakes are this high.
Sure it does. What do you think Republicans are actively doing right fucking now?
Oh, you meant break the system for a positive outcome...?
Yes. You can't seriously say that "Biden is the genocide candidate but that's better than the uber genocide candidate" and then say that you're happy with the system. A system that offers you those choices is already broken, the only thing that remains is to build the best successor you can.
The problem with this 'break the system' accelerationist idea is that none of y'all have ever seen what really happens when the system breaks. I've known someone that lived through the genocide in Bosnia; that's what happens when a system has a total breakdown. It's not people suddenly joining hands and singing Kumbaya around a camp fire.
Rojava.
EZLN.
Cheran, Mexico.
I could go on.
The project of building the new in the shell of the old is not accelerationist, it is decelerationist.
Edit: also bold to try to scare me with the prospect of a genocide. Our functioning society would never do a genocide am I right? Or maybe the scary prospect is a genocide at home, but Foucault's boomerang means that's coming anyway. My interest is in making structures that will keep society functioning whilst the empire crumbles.
Good job naming small cities.
Now try naming any country of more than 10M people where this idea of burning it all down and starting over has worked without also creating 50+ years of deep civil unrest and violence.
Bosnia and Herzegovina's population is about 3.2 million, Rojava is estimated at around 2 million and the EZLN's region has over 5 million, but now according to you I need a single contiguous example bigger than 10 million, which is more than most countries.
Why? I assume because you're so scared of change that you'd rather content yourself with voting for slightly less genocide than consider the alternatives, and the best way to do that is to grab the goalposts and walk off with them.
And again, I'm not talking about burning things down, I'm talking about building alternatives. Let me know if you're at all curious to understand what I mean by that.
Also, please keep downvoting all my comments. It makes your argument look so superior, it's devastating.
By brother in Satan, the way you change things is by starting at the bottom and building platforms and candidates that are able to create consensus. You don't start at the top, where your vote only matters in the aggregate. You do things like running for the local school board (which is far, far more important than people seem to understand, since that's where the christian nationalists are focusing). You work with your local LGBTQ+ groups to train them in self-defense. You help protestors with opsec.
Work locally, vote strategically, That's how you fix shit. This is known, and it works, but people keep focusing on ¡la revoluccion!
Uh... those are exactly my politics. I think this is just a misunderstanding about a few word definitions. EDIT: Actually, based on your talk of "candidates", maybe we don't have the same politics. I don't know, read what I have to say and judge for yourself.
I just happen to consider building prefigurative movements to be "breaking the system" and "revolution". They just aren't necessarily one big moment of rupture. Meeting people's needs, doing mutual aid, community self defence etc, is weaning them off of dependence on capital and the state, and it is a revolution in the sense that it is a transfer of power away from the dominant system, even if it is slow, even if it is only about giving people food at first.
A sledgehammer breaks the pavement, but so does a root.
We can expect that when we do these projects, if they become successful enough, they will threaten to displace the enemy system entirely, and that will involve a violent reaction. That may entail a moment of rupture, but that's one step in the middle of it all. Whether something better comes out of it depends on whether the things we've built beforehand are strong enough to survive that moment. But don't kid yourself, we can't avoid violence entirely, even if it's only defensive.
Now, the EZLN and Rojava and a bunch of other projects had their moment of rupture, and they were liberatory. Not perfect, certainly, but they are doing incredible things and they don't have centralised leadership. The way you talk about them being "small cities" when they are large contiguous regions makes you sound ignorant of existing projects and demanding to see something "bigger than 10 million" makes you sound dismissive, like you're a liberal defending capitalism.
I'm glad you're not, I'm glad you're on board with prefiguration, but it is as destructive to the enemy system as it is constructive of the new. When you build the new in the shell of the old, the shell breaks.