§0. This article comes paired with its counterpart on climate-informed class politics. It can be read as a prequel to it or sequel to it or independent of it.

§1. The politicization pipeline starts off from lived experience (experiencing, sharing and observing suffering, injustice, inequality), goes through value-orientations as it reaches root causes (the original meaning of “radicalization”). Our value-orientations may make us reach different conclusions about what the root causes are, and we may also have various, parallel experiences that provoke us to think about politics.

We start off with these trivialities, because there is a somewhat non-trivial aspect that frequently goes unnoticed among movement organizers.

§2. Different topics reveal different information in different ways. 

The animal rights movement provides more depth into questioning class society, broadening our vision of emancipation.

The housing movement in Lisbon provides a variety of experiences: touristification of the city center emptying historical popular neighborhoods, gentrification making rents impossible for middle-income people, evictions in the peripheral neighborhoods revealing structural racism… A shared movement allows for united but differentiated struggles.

The climate crisis, arguably more than any other movement, provides a concrete, tight and existential deadline for dismantling the fossil fuel industry. As such, the climate justice movement has provided a radicalization pipeline that has been quick as well as sustained.

Your authors come mainly from the climate justice movement, so we’ll stick to it for now.

§3. Different angles of looking at the same topic also reveal new information.

For instance, looking at climate politics with colonialism in mind gives completely new meanings to words like urgency, collapse and crisis.

We argue that any group or organization seriously taking up the task of keeping global heating below 2ºC (a threshold won through Global South militancy in UN negotiations) will confront fossil capitalism as the main real-life barrier to achieve its goals. In this short essay, our argument is not that capitalism intrinsically ignores, causes and intensifies the climate crisis (which it does). Our argument is that all climate justice activists know that capitalism intrinsically ignores, causes and intensifies the climate crisis.

In a way, climate justice activists arrive at the class information through the movement and in movement. Understanding the basic structural reasons of continued increase in emissions as well as the intensifying repression towards them are our daily-life teachers.

§4. Now, this is a problem. For the most part, it’s a cognitive problem and an emotional problem. The climate emergency is already information that is extremely hard to carry. On top of that, putting the class information (that the actual task is not CO2 nor “just transition”, but actually a socioeconomic transformation at unprecedented scale and speed) makes it unbearable.

As we briefly recount in the opening sections of our recent book “All In: a revolutionary theory to stop climate collapse”, 

In a way, it is safe to say that there is no climate justice movement in the materialist sense of the word: There is possibly a four-point-four-degrees-warming-is-better-than-four-point-five-degrees-warming movement. The each-small-reduction-of-emissions-matters movement. On the one hand, BP, Shell, Macron and company are all in this movement, so it really isn’t a movement but more like the current neoliberal consensus. On the other hand, each-small-reduction-of-emissions-matters is the most unaccountable position possible: This movement would never really fail, and therefore would never enter into a deep reflective state to question its ideological and strategic assumptions. [Section §1.2]

What would, then, class-informed climate politics look like?

In a way, Matthew Huber is exploring directly this question from a strategy viewpoint, for the US context, in his book “Climate Change as Class War” published by Verso in 2022. Among other things, he analyzes how a majority-supported movement and a majority-mobilizing movement implies looking at the working class positions (both in terms of objective needs as well as strategic leverages). He goes over public policy proposals like Green New Deal but also proposes specific grassroots organizing efforts in the electricity sector.

§5. If we agree that class-informed climate politics is difficult to face and hold emotionally, it is then consequential that, when one tries to implement it strategically we will tend to deviate for an easier and nonrealistic analysis.

We (your authors) caught ourselves in such distractions, broadly, in two directions.

§5.1. One way to distract ourselves is to take the class information to its logical finality. If we agree that dismantling capitalism will be a necessary condition to stop climate collapse, then strategies directed at specific targets (be them multinational companies like Total and BlackRock, specific sectors like private jets and LNG terminals, infrastructures like coal mines and mega-basins) would be perceived as futile. These strategies, if not fully framed as anti-capitalist projects, would be prone to cooptation. 

This distraction, in its nature, is somewhat similar to a “left deviation”, in the sense that it confuses strategy and ideological considerations. In the case of climate politics, this is one of the consequences of being paralysed. Trapping ourselves in these anti-strategic thoughts gives us a refuge from the overwhelmed feeling we have given the task at hand. It’s more like a “freeze” response to the threat we conceive through the climate emergency.

The way out, in these cases, is to look at “logical finality” not in the Aristotelian sense but in the dialectic sense: finding specific strategic interventions that can activate a class movement and designing them in terms of (in case of success) how much they could shift the power balance in our favor.

§5.2. Another way to distract ourselves is to deny the climate deadlines. Concrete, winnable demands like “end fossil subsidies” or “stop private jets” are building on demands that confront the ruling class interests and can count on popular support. Here, we find ourselves on the other side of the coin. We agree that a class-oriented politics is needed but we jump over the timeline. As Mariana recounts in All In,

In the last years I have talked with several organizations that are serious and are in panic with the climate crisis. When we talk about their action plans and campaign strategies, eventually we arrive at the terrifying conclusion that even if they succeeded fully, they wouldn’t lead to changing the system within the climate deadlines. [Section §3.6.]

So we write up “ambitious” activity plans that aim for ending fossil fuels in our country in four years, while the climate politics we pretend to defend tells us that that is in fact the entire time-frame to stop all CO2 emissions by that time.

In a way, reducing the class-information into class-orientation makes us jump over the actual task at hand and downgrades it to climate emergency denying positions dressed as realpolitik. 

§5.3. Your authors are not sharing these examples lightly. Just last week we caught ourselves reproducing some of them. The cognitive and emotional weight is non-trivial, nor do we consider it resolvable. It is omnipresent, and therefore probably without dissonance one wouldn’t be able to fall asleep at night. 

We are aware that we are cheating. We are not answering the question “what does class-informed climate politics look like?” and instead describing how not to avoid the question. We are avoiding the question we posed, because it can only be answered in a context-dependent way. 

Our deviance from the question is intentional, because these topics are what are blocking the strategizers many times more intelligent and more experienced than we are. 

§6. So the question is, most of the time, not “what does class-informed climate politics look like?” and instead “how can we continue thinking in class-informed climate terms and keeping a reasonable amount of honesty with ourselves?”. This is the question we ask and answer in All In. 

The underlying intuition is relatively simple. We can pose questions to ourselves only if we have adequate tools to answer them; otherwise the question will be a mere mental exercise and our engagement will be performative. If we want to actually solve a problem, then we need a framework that allows us to be playful and curious about it in a sustained way and collectively. In short: if we want to plan for dismantling capitalism within climate deadlines, then we need a theory of change and an organizational model in which this task can look plausible. 

Informed by the social movement experience and literature and using the ecology of social movements framework, All In gives a complex yet concise pathway to build such an overarching movement-level strategy.

Sinan Eden and Mariana Rodrigues are climate justice activists based in Portugal and co-authors of the recently published book “All In: a revolutionary theory to stop climate collapse” on movement-level strategy and organization. More information on the book can be found at https://www.all-in.now

Mariana Rodrigues is a Gen Z born in Portugal. She is an organizer and a trainer for social movements, with experience in international networks, with a strong taste for team building and for revolutionary intersectional approaches. She is optimistic and frustrated with the state of the world, a master in improvisation, and much more of a doer than a writer.

Sinan Eden is a millenial born in Turkey. He lives in Portugal since 2011 and has a PhD in Mathematics. He is an organizer and trainer, with a strong taste for theory and for dialectics. He is not reading as much as he’d like to, and he has probably been to too many meetings.

---