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

§1. For many activists and organizers whose politicization process had already taken them to an anticapitalist position before hearing about climate, the climate crisis doesn’t seem to bring in anything new. It is, in a way, a corollary of the metabolic rift and an extension of what classical economists consider “externalities”. Looking at it a bit longer, it is also a challenge to the actual capital accumulation regime (which, it seems, would fail to adapt, as Andreas Malm so rightly argues in Fossil Capital) and it is, further, a crisis of capitalism. Since capitalism reproduces itself through crises, the climate crisis would produce opportunities and threats, to which a leftist organization would need to be prepare for.

However, if your starting point was not “Oh, here is a problem, how can I apply Marx to it?” but rather “Wait, what is this problem, really?”, then the paragraph above would sound completely disconnected from climate reality.

Stopping the climate collapse will require class politics. However, to have a minimum relevance in today’s world and to be able to plan strategically, we will need climate-informed class politics.

§2. The climate information is substantially and categorically different from economic and social analyses. The climate emergency is not some “scenario” like a real-estate bubble in China exploding and cascading to the rest of the supply chain. Climate emergency is not a subset of some “ecological” crisis of drained resources and ecological cycles. Climate emergency is not about energy, transportation or “transition”.

The qualitatively unique information we gather from the climate crisis is the following: in order to remain on a livable planet, we would need to get rid of all emissions in the Global North during this decade. This is not a “policy proposal”. It’s the physical premise of any progressive movement strategy.

We open our recently published book “All In: a revolutionary theory to stop climate collapse” with

In a way, it is also safe to say that there is no anti-capitalist movement: a movement to dismantle capitalism, with a plan of action compatible with climate deadlines. There is possibly a capitalism-is-bad movement. In fact, that movement won already: a lot of people already hate capitalism. It doesn’t mean they are ready to step up to challenge it to build something completely different. As the climate crisis gives concrete shape to the barbarism-socialism dichotomy, the only possible anti-capitalist movement would be the one that starts the dismantling of capitalism in our lifetime. This is not about ambition, it’s about physics and chemistry: we are heading towards climate hell, with capital’s feet on the accelerator. [Section §1.2.]

In short, this is not about what others should do. It’s about adequately ambitious strategies. It’s about (very tight) deadlines for victory.

This is the new information climate brings to class politics and should be treated as new information.

§3. Taking this information in fully can be paralyzing. How does one set up a strategy workshop where the starting assumption is that we need to dismantle global capitalism in a matter of decades? We, your authors, don’t say this lightly. We also feel overwhelmed with the task at hand. We also catch ourselves in escapist behaviors that we dress as “realist” or “tactical” or some other fancy terminology.

§4. We identified, in ourselves and around us, four ways of escapism.

§4.1. One way is to reduce the climate information into climate policy. Building class power incrementally through some alliance building or community organizing strategy, the activity plans of which would span several years. The activities might look like genuine climate-oriented class politics; for instance a just transition alliance, a campaign against energy poverty, a movement for better public transport for all. 

Yet, the activity plan, the activity calendar and the objectives must pass the climate-reality-check. Are they compatible with the deadlines? If they won (in their own terms and time-frames), would it prevent runaway climate change?

We found that, in most of our work, our answers to these questions were negative. In some cases, we noticed it already at the analysis and strategizing stage. In many cases, we noticed it already several months into the campaign, with all the infrastructure set, teams formed and activities planned. The latter cases have been deeply frustrating as we basically caught our own denialism in them.

§4.2. Another way is what we might call “the tacticism of building large mass movements”. Engaging the masses is clearly a necessary condition for any progressive movement to have any success. Yet, we found ourselves many times lying to the general public either by not revealing how dire the situation is (cognitive mismatch) or by substituting easily acceptable demands for the actual transformation necessary (dishonest tactics). 

In all cases, we noticed two things: Firstly, that it is very difficult to deceive people, sometimes even harder than deceiving ourselves. You can downplay the climate emergency in a pamphlet, in a press conference or in a door-to-door pitch; you cannot hide it if you actually become friends and comrades. So the “tactics” don’t work. Secondly, in the rare cases of a mass movement built through people’s immediate rage, the resulting movement lacks the ambition needed to escalate. This second version was quite visible as we got involved in the housing movement in Portugal (which demands a complete shift of housing and public investment policies in the country but has no built-in leverage to go beyond demanding a change in government policies). We also heard from comrades that the mobilizations in Europe against the far-right and pro-Palestine movements have built-in “ceilings” in how transformative they saw themselves.

It is, in fact, very hard to find a sweet spot of what works now and in the most effective way. Embedding the climate information into our short-term and medium-term strategies is, at many times, a real challenge and can therefore produce the pretext for us to evade the anxiety associated with the climate emergency.

§4.3. One can also end up accepting the climate information as outside of the class struggle and conclude that an economic and social change will happen naturally without necessitating struggle. This happens because it’s very difficult for any of us to fully acknowledge that the dominant class is actively choosing to terminate a livable planet for the sole purpose of keeping its power intact. 

When one interprets climate information as alien to class politics, then the natural conclusion is to fight against “transition” narratives and policies and take these as battlefields. The practical result of this interpretation is to treat the climate crisis as if solved or in course to a solution, and to build struggles around whether a transition is just or not or whether transition is happening in a sustainable way or not. Empirically, these questions are not relevant, as the fossil industry has been in expansion (and not in decline).

In a context of accelerating climate destruction coupled with energy expansion, this reading becomes a kind of left-deviation: running away from the immediate, urgent and structural problem of fossil capital (a “forward flight”; fuga para a frente / fuir en avant as used in Latin languages) to take as battlefield a concept (“green capitalism”) that is real only in corporate press releases.

Climate information is essential to understand the entrenched relationship between maintaining capitalism and growth in fossil fuels. Without fully grasping this information, we will lose sight of the associated climate deadlines for the class struggle.

§4.4. Finally, one can take the climate information to its final logical conclusion and disconnect from power struggle altogether. This we have been seeing in the European climate activist circles who got disillusioned in the last years. These people (who, to be fair, never did class politics explicitly) do understand the climate emergency and the deadline to dismantle the socioeconomic system. Checking the emission graphs and the existing policy commitments, they conclude that the struggle is already lost. (This is also what Wim Carton and Andreas Malm study in their latest book Overshoot, though more from the perspective of power-holders.). This collapsism can sometimes be as explicit as giving up the fight for power (and perhaps starting some permaculture project); and sometimes it can take more subtle forms where strategic priorities are driven out of emission cuts in favor of adaptation as the main topic (for instance, water struggles).

This collapsist escapism is, in itself, a manifestation of middle-class privilege activation. At a position of singular cognitive dissonance, it simultaneously rejects the currently occurring climate collapse (in the Global South as well as in marginalized communities in the Global North, with surprising rapid increase in affecting the ruling class too), ignores the historical precedents (the civilizational collapse(s) “completed” during colonization) and the climate science that says it’s actually not too late yet.

There is no doubt that we have failed so far and we must reflect deeply about our theory of change. From there reaching the conclusion that “we failed, period” is to affirm that we, activists in Europe, have the entitlement to decide when our struggle can end, without consulting anyone else in the global movements. On top of that, we can only “give up” if we think that struggle was optional.

The logical conclusion of the last decades of social movement failures is not that we cannot win but that the level of abstraction in which we were evaluating our strategies has been too superficial to identify why we have been failing.

§5. In All In, we (your authors: Mariana and Sinan) try to answer exactly this question: “what is a theory of change that can hold both of these sets of information [climate and class], and what is the organizational model to deliver that theory of change?”

Throughout the book, we emphasize the anxiety and frustration underlying such bold questions and our pretense to give it a complex yet implementable answer. We strongly believe that the space for deep reflection lies at the intersection of climate-informed class politics and class-informed climate politics.

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.

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