0.1. Something is happening in the climate justice movement, and we are not being able to talk about it. There is quite some experimentation and self-criticism, but we are also at an impasse. Let’s talk about success and victory.

0.2. Historically, as the progressive forces criticized, updated and renewed themselves, they abandoned what was considered to be “orthodox” Marxism. With that abandonment, we lost language. We disposed of useful terms and are now less articulate than before.

I want to bring back the left-deviation / right-deviation discussion, because I think it crystalizes an implicit disagreement within the movement.

0.3. I’ll tell you about Portugal and about Climáximo. This is a choice of method. I could write this article in a way that applies to many countries at once. This would make my observations less tangible and my statements vaguer. In short, I would err less because the text would be full of tautologies, trivialities and generic formulations. Instead, I prefer to give a concrete case, in order to make the text more connectable and more refutable. I hope you will still see yourself in it, and I believe that most of the argument can be extrapolated easily to other contexts and other discussions I am aware of.

1) Where am I coming from

1.1. Since last September, Climáximo reinvented itself with a declaration of state of climate emergency within the collective. Summarized by the main statement “The governments and corporations declared war against the people and the planet.”, we acknowledged that we are currently living in a state of climate war, unilaterally declared by the political and economic elites. This leap resulted in 46 actions, 80-100 arrests and 25 court cases in a period of nine months.^[1]

1.2. Climáximo confronted the social norms and the political consensus.

Climáximo supporters painted the headquarters of the main gas company REN, broke the glass of the façade of the main oil company Galp, broke the windows of a Gucci shop, filled the holes in golf courses with cement, spray-painted private jets. Questioning the legitimacy of these infraestructures and companies, Climáximo supporters violated the sanctity of private property, the foundation of capitalism. In fact, these actions received much more popular support than expected.^[2]

1.3. These actions were coupled with public disruption actions, such as road blockades, slow marches, interruption of cultural events and museum actions. (I am using the word “coupled”, because the grand strategy says that public disruption actions cannot be dissociated from the direct actions.) These were criticized as “alienating the general public”. These in fact raised a lot of public engagement (much more than anything else Climáximo did in the previous nine years, including the Global Climate Strike of 2019). The underlying logic is to make the climate crisis everyone’s problem rather than an activist niche.

1.4. There is a valid debate on how to build a climate justice movement that can actually win climate justice within climate deadlines.

We claim to be anchoring the movement in the right ambition and exploring and testing strategies that fit that anchor.

The critics are pointing out that we can fail. We already know. The point is that everything so far has failed, so we have empirical proof that we must be imaginative, innovative, creative and daring.

But then again, will it work? What if it doesn’t?

2) Some context on the terminology and its relevance

2.1. There are dozens of books on left/right deviation criticising other dozens of books on left/right deviation. I have no intention of summarizing any of it. For my aims in this text, here is the working definition:

We want a radical mass movement.

Everyone agrees on this. And everyone disagrees about what it would look like and how to build it. The words “radical” and “mass” create a tension.

When you get too much attached to the masses (focusing on representing their aspirations and thereby reproducing the existing hegemonic discourse), that’s right deviation.

When you get too radical and disconnect from the masses, that’s left deviation.

It is generally said that both deviations serve the status quo. This makes everything other than The Sweet Spot reactionary (hence the unending arguments and infighting in the left).

2.2. There is no method of identifying, a priori, what strategy will give us the radical mass movement. Reality itself is the proof (Materialism101). All movements and organizations are making proposals to the society, and history is testing them.

2.3. This is really an eternal discussion. It shadows ideological disagreements and practical disputes. In any strategy debate, there is always an angle of abstraction where the deviation issue becomes visible.

Mensheviks said Bolsheviks did left deviation (aiming at a socialism for which the society was “not ready” and for which they needed leadership of West-European workers); Bolsheviks said Mensheviks did right deviation (legitimizing the bourgeoisie at a time when the bourgeoisie did not have any perspective of solving any of the problems of the working people). Bolsheviks were right, because they won. Mensheviks were right, because the West European working class did not follow suit and thus the Soviet Union was isolated with little industrial capacity.

Rosa Luxemburg said that the German Socialdemocrat Party (SPD) did right deviation, because it created an identity between the party line and the workers’ immediate aspirations, which resulted in aligning in the nationalist agenda feeding into the World War mobilizations. It cost Rosa Luxemburg her life to hold this position. SPD was right, because it gained the confidence of the working people and came out of the World War as government party. Rosa Luxemburg was right, because SPD set up a capitalist state apparatus and became what it is now, abandoning its socialist vision.^[3]

Martin Luther King was considered left deviation by the white moderates. King himself thought he was fine but that Malcolm X did left deviation. (Malcolm X thought everyone else did right deviation.) In the end, King did lead a radical mass movement that – essentially – failed to reach out to its vision.

Every month, someone in Portugal says that “we need to unite the left”, to which the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) responds “for what purpose?”. PCP is saying that the “left unity” discourse is right deviation, because it effectively tells leftists to abandon their program and line up behind the Socialist Party.^[4]

After the initial launch of Extinction Rebellion, Roger Hallam criticized the movement for right deviation and created Insulate Britain, Just Stop Oil and similar groups, which were then criticized as left deviation by others.^[5]

2.4. To some extent, the debate is about holding on to social power versus holding on to our values, vision and ambition.

When someone says “we need to build a large movement” or “we need popular support”, these are tautologies. Of course we need them. The question “what for?” remains valid, though.^[6]

We are supposed to need those things in order to achieve a goal guided by a clear vision. In our case, it’s stopping the climate crisis – which in turn requires a massive social, political, economic and cultural transformation – and stopping the climate crisis under shrinking deadlines.

2.5. What complicates everything further is that deviation is a function of context and content.

A specific proposal can be left deviation at some point in time, can be perfect some other time, and can be right deviation at another time. In the late 19^th century and early 20^th century, there were unending debates on whether working class parties should align with the bourgeois parties against the monarchies and influence the resulting Republic.

The same proposal can be left deviation in some part of the world, while fitting perfectly well in some other part of the world, and being right deviation in another part of the world. International feminist conferences have had this issue a lot; in some countries women were fighting for the right to work and economic independence, while in other countries this right would be criticized because wage labor would simply add on top of reproductive work.

Sometimes, a small shift in the proposal or a different framing can also change its meaning. The word “patriotic” is loaded with this subtlety; it can be read as anti-imperialist and as nationalist and in fact it is being read as both in many countries at the moment.

3) Status update: are we deviating?

3.1. Nobody denies that Climáximo is testing something new. Also, nobody is attacking Climáximo from a political standpoint, in the sense that our critics do not argue that we are getting arrested for the wrong things. They criticize the strategy and the tactics.

So far, so good.

3.2. The first critique is that the actions are alienating the larger population.

3.2.1. The first thing to say about this is: Amnesty International Portugal commissioned a survey recently. They asked people “In the last 5 years, did you participate in any protests?”. Some 90% of the people answered “No”. So, if we are to believe in this study, 90% of the Portuguese population, since 2019, did not go to the 25 April rallies, any of the demonstrations on housing, feminism, workers’ rights, climate; they also did not go to extreme-right rallies or the farmers protests. One protest over five years could be a good measure of politization. This study says that 90% of the Portuguese population has been indeed alienated – long before the actions started.

3.2.2. The second and perhaps more important aspect of the “These actions alienate people.” argument is that it misses the logic of the actions.

Climáximo is doing the public disruption actions exactly because an overwhelming majority of the population does not acknowledge the state of war in which we live.

We sometimes compare this to living in Germany in 1930s. Retrospectively, we see the rise of the Nazi regime. But when you were there, it looked very much like today: people would do conferences, they would go to work, they would worry about their families, they were aware of the atrocities and the first concentration camps but they would tell themselves “It’s not that bad.”, they would complain, but they would keep on. Millions did this, like millions do now in the face of ongoing climate collapse. Those millions were accomplices of the Nazi regime, so are we today in climate collapse.

So, the starting diagnosis is that the vast majority did not yet come to terms with the state of climate emergency we live in. The public disruption actions are allowing these people to voice their already formed opinions. This is important, because this is how conflict escalation works. Tacit complicity can only be overcome with open and emphatic debate, and that debate can only happen if people voice their positions. The actions escalate an existing implicit conflict into the surface, thereby allowing people to articulate their thoughts, creating the possibility of a resolution.^[7]

3.2.3. Fine, but is alienation actually happening?

To start with, polarization is indeed happening: more people are taking sides on the issue than before, more people are voicing their opinions, the space of neutrality is diminishing.

We can ask the alienation question in at least two ways: alienation from Climáximo, alienation from the climate justice movement.

3.2.3.1. For the former, we could check recruitment rates or the number of followers in social media (with particular emphasis on newsletter and the WhatsApp channel, which measure direct demand to get updates from the collective, and therefore exlude followers who are not supporters). These are all increasing in comparison to the baseline of previous years.

However, this hides the polarization of neutrals. Quite a lot of people did not know about Climáximo (even though it existed for nine years), now they know, and perhaps now they are against it. There is a methodological difficulty here: If they knew about Climáximo before, probably they would be against Climáximo already; as Climáximo’s political stance or climate justice framing did not change recently.

So it’s not easy to soundly measure it.

3.2.3.2. For the latter, there is a total of zero empirical evidence.

How would we calculate it? We would do the following: We would choose two points in time, maybe “two years ago” and “now”. We would get a sample population. We would ask them three questions: (1) Can you describe your envolvement in the climate justice movement two years ago? (2) Can you describe your envolvement in the climate justice movement now? (3) Can you explain why your envolvement changed or remained unchanged?

Then, we would measure

• if the flux into the movement is more/less than the flux into the opposition, and
• if the reported cause of the outwards flux is the recent actions, and
• if more/less people are moving out of the movement than into the movement because of the actions.

The AND clause is essential. To prove alienation, what we want to calculate is the following:

We want to find people saying “I was doing X,Y and Z in the climate justice movement two years ago. Then I saw the actions. Therefore I stopped doing X, Y or Z.” We don’t know a priori if these people exist. But if they do, we need to compare them to other people who say “I was doing nothing/X in the climate justice movement two years ago. Then I saw the actions. Therefore, now I do X and Y.”. (These people exist. I know because some of them came to Climáximo.)

Alienation argument would apply only if the former are more than the latter.

There is no data for this, in Portugal or elsewhere. It is very easy to study it, but it would break off the white middle-class conformism (my fancy way of saying academia). The underlying elitist belief is that the majority of the people (read: the working class) is stupid, they don’t understand climate crisis, and they will not understand it even if some people push it in the agenda.^[8] The opinion-makers are parroting this narrative, but somehow nobody wants to actually measure it.

In conclusion, until now, the alienation argument has no grounds.

3.3. Another critique is fed by the implicit (and sometimes explicit) criticism of existing strategies in the climate movement. When Climáximo says “We are failing.” or “We need to take strategy risks.”, the “we” is understably read as “all organizers and organizations in the movement”, even if Climáximo did not prescribe the strategy risks other should and could be taking.

So the critique is that Climáximo is splitting the movement and feeding into infighting.

3.3.1. This could of course be said of Fidel, Lenin, Rosa, Martin Luther King, literally anyone in the Suffragettes and so on. It was of course said of them at their time. It was also said of thousands of small groups who tried to have a strategy leap, whose names nobody remembers because they failed. (I can name at least 30 such organizations in Turkey in the 1970s.) Once again, we don’t know a priori who is doing left deviation and who is doing right deviation.

3.3.2. There is, however, one kind of polarization that is happening at large scale in the Global North. The left is being pulled into the center, and the only visible anti-establishment option is the extreme-right. People are suffering, they are angry, they are fed up. The left tells them: this is bad, but extreme-right would be much worse, so please don’t vote extreme-right. The extreme-right tells them: look, I am the only alternative to your suffering, give me a chance.

The current left strategy is: “we are in the sixth level of hell, we propose the fifth level of hell, the extreme-right would push us down to the seventh level.” At best, this is a campaign to push people into depression, anxiety and anguish.

The extreme-right is saying: “these people are all talking about leaving us in hell, I will take us out of hell.” They are lying, but they are the only ones who talk about “life outside of hell” as a viable option.

Just a reminder that “we are on a highway to climate hell, with our feet still on the accelerator” (with António Guterres, the UN General Secretary).

The lack of confrontational, consequential, daring left contestation to the establishment is polarizing the society between neoliberalism and variants of fascism.

3.3.3. This was much too visible last March, during the last general elections in Portugal.

We read the electoral programs of all the parties with a chance of winning a seat. Their policies ranged between “5ºC warming lock-in” and “3.5ºC warming lock-in”. That’s it. These were the options. The leftist party militants were part of this equation. They swallowed it; we in Climáximo couldn’t. So there were direct actions denouncing all the running parties. Our friends in partisan circles came back arguing that we shouldn’t imply that all parties were the same. We know that they are not the same. In return, we asked them why their parties advocated for a new airport project in their electoral program, they didn’t answer.

3.3.4. Climáximo argues that we are polarizing the movement between “climate collapse movement” and “climate justice movement”. We claim to have a strategy that builds an ambitious, radical anchor for a mass movement in construction. Maybe it won’t work. (In any case, it doesn’t depend only on us. Remember §2.2: we are only making proposals.)

Maybe someone else is building the radical mass movement we need. But then, we would like to know the strategy. Why would we expect it to work? What empirical evidence tells us it would work today? Was it tested before? What are some metrics we can check, in case it is failing? What is our success criteria? What is the process with which we could conclude that the strategy doesn’t work?

Before coming up with the current strategy, we spent an entire year consulting tens of groups in Portugal and tens of groups outside of Portugal. We had hundreds of strategy meetings with others – some one-on-one with key organizers, some in movement conferences. I’m not even counting the internal trainings, readings and debates.

We believe that our proposal is the result of a movement-level learning process.

It is a daring proposal. Because how dare we not take risks at this stage of the climate crisis!

3.4. A variant of the critique of infighting is that we are isolating ourselves, by having seemingly strict criteria for building alliances.

3.4.1. It is a bit unfair to expect Climáximo folks to prescribe what kind of alliance we would be open to. Essentially, we are open to honest conversations, that’s the only criterion.

3.4.2. On the other hand, we launched the new Climáximo in October and by December we were already having meetings with tens of movement partners about the Disarmament Plan and the Peace Plan that we had presented. A collective reflection period resulted in a full review of these documents. So we were proactive in maintaining our channels of dialogue and learning. (Not to mention that we showed up in virtually all demonstrations called by others groups.)

3.4.3. One aspect unique to the Portuguese context is worth mentioning. This year, Climáximo effectively disputed the tutelage of political parties over social movements in Portugal.

It is not common in Portugal for a movement to survive after a couple of mobilization waves. (The general expectation is the temporary agitation to be absorbed into the political parties as votes or recruitment.)  The climate justice movement managed to renew itself.

We don’t know how exactly we did it, but we managed to create and hold a counter-hegemonic position that actually challenged the movement status quo. What we thought as anchoring the movement in honesty and victory was simultaneously read as a challenge to the party tutelage (this became particularly acute during the election campaigns, see §3.3.3.). The problem here is that we are genuinely not against political parties, we have never been. We would be so happy to see an electoral program aiming at 1.5ºC warming. We could swallow a 2ºC warming program. We could perhaps give critical support to a 2.5ºC warming program, hoping to push it into climate realism with dialogue.

Now, the political parties do have tutelage over other movement actors. So the tension on hegemony is not between Climáximo and the political parties. It takes place between the pole Climáximo is holding and the entire movement landscape controlled by political parties.

3.4.4. To sum up: We say they are doing right deviation. They say we are doing left deviation. (From where we stand, it appears like they also say that the climate crisis is “not that bad”.)

Because everyone has strong convictions, this divergence in analysis manifests itself as feeling attacked / being defensive. In other words, it looks sectarian. It looks sectarian from both perspectives, so the other side is read as irrational, ugly and unfair.

We will have to find ways of overcoming this inflamed state.

3.5. All of the above is also symptomatic of another underlying problem in the political sphere. We are trained by the patriarchal culture. So we proactively ignore that all the debates are simultaneously analytical, intellectual, political, corporal and emotional.

When Climáximo says “we failed”, this is a statement of a fact: emissions are on the rise, so is the extreme-right.

This fact is received as an attack, though. That’s because we interpret “failure” as something to avoid instead of something to achieve. Reflection and transformation only take place through acknowledged failure. We should be craving for failure. We should design strategies that have failure embedded into them. Of course, we should not repeat the same mistakes and failures, so we should somehow fail forwards. So we should have processes that integrate the lessons learned.

The opposite of this is called habit and conformism. These involve much less effort and result in much less transformative potential.

The question is if the climate crisis is existential enough to put us in a state of emergency with a potential to overthrow all our existing (emotional, personal, organizational, strategic, political, ethical, epistemological) frameworks, several times over. We in Climáximo think so. And we feel the weight of this statement in our bodies.

This matters, because the disagreement is about left/right deviation, but the debate happens within emotional frames.

3.6. Lastly, the discussion on deviation is not only happening between Climáximo and some other entity (other organizers, other organizations, other commentators). It is also happening inside Climáximo.

We had around 50 actions, half of which were public disruption and the other half were actions directed at the points of destruction. We have been paying attention to results. Sometimes, even when a specific tactic did not seem to work, we repeated it a few more times, changing some of the parameters to isolate a specific hypothesis. (For instance, a road blockade has different outcomes depending on whether it happens in the morning or in the afternoon, in a weekday or on the weekend.)

Reality is ambiguous. We have the data, we agree on the data, and we have heated debates on what the data means.

We have been criticizing each other for right deviation, for left deviation, for conformism, for depolitization, for sectarianism, for substitutionism, for whatever other sophisticated jargon. Many times, these criticisms were taken as insults. Many times, we appealed to our shared vision (although calling “liveable planet” a shared vision feels like a bit of an overstretch) to bring us back to an honest, confrontational and comradely discussion. Some of us thought that we were deviating left in some actions and communications, some of us thought we were deviating right in some other actions and communications.

4. If we don’t know a priori where the sweet spot is, then the left/right deviation discussion is bound to be eternal and omnipresent. We will have to continue discussing, disagreeing, agreeing, and learning.

The debate will be political, strategic, organizational, corporal and emotional. So we need values and mechanisms to keep our collective eyes on the ball. We need practices and structures in the society, within the movement, within each organization and for ourselves for a heated debate rooted in solidarity, justice and honesty.

The terminology of left/right deviation can help us clarify diagnoses and interpretations.

^[1]    Most of the argument below works for the End Fossil actions led by Fridays for Future Lisbon as well. In fact, the argument works equally well for Just Stop Oil in the UK, Les Soulèvements de la Terre in France, Letzte Generation in Germany, Climate Defiance in the USA and many more groups, even though they have different narratives, strategies, tactics and theories of change.

^[2]    There was some criticism of alienation here, as well. There are several groups of people that could be alienated: the workers present in that specific site, the communities that might have an economic dependence on the infrastructure, and the general public who is watching the action from a distance.

      In terms of workers and the communities, these are directly affected by the action, so their reaction is similar to what the general public gives to public disruption actions. Most of §3.2. applies here. There is just one aspect: Those infrastructures are to be shut down. Period. The continued existence factory of weapons of mass destruction cannot be justified by its economic contribution. Each day an oil refinery continues its operations, it is sending out missiles to the atmosphere that manifest themselves as unprecedented storms, hurricanes, wildfires and droughts, aimed at the most vulnerable sections of our societies.

      The complex question, then, is: given that we must dismantle the fossil fuel industry, what will we do with the workers and the communities that currently depend on it economically? This question is as interesting as “what will we do with all the administrators and employees of a concentration camp?”. It’s a valid questions, but must be asked exactly in this fashion. Maybe we will need income guarantee, maybe job guarantee, maybe trainings, maybe early retirement… This conversation will be part of the resistance to be set up.

      As for the general public, the criticism is in fact in favor of public disruption. Here’s how: When there is a massive forest fires or floods in some part of the world, that’s the symptom of the climate crisis. The root cause is fossil capitalism. Direct actions aim at building the bridge between the cause and the symptom. It’s a political intervention to connect the “war against the people and the planet” (which is felt by the millions) with “the governments and the corporations declared”. Besides its conscious raising aspect, this intervention is prefigurative: pointing to the targets for a mass movement to aim at.

      However, these actions may in fact be alienating. That’s because they allow for a spectator effect: a group of people go to some place far away from daily life and do an action, other people watch it on television or social media. Their opinion on the topic is, by definition, mild and disconnected; it’s not “their problem”. The action design allows for the general public to reproduce an existing alienation. The supporters will put a like, the opponents will write a negative comment, both groups will move on with their lives right afterwards. They watched a spectacle. They were not personally invested in the issue, and they leave without any further personal investment. The action design does not let the general public to feel emotionally affected by the action. This is alienation.

^[3]    I give these examples because they are far away and because they are still not fully settled. One hundred years later, we can still attack a specific movement for being deviation of some sort.

^[4]    PCP is right in their intuition, of course. Some people would respond to that by advocating for the unity of all the parties that are to the left of the Socialist Party, excluding the Socialist Party itself. This would imply putting PCP and Left Bloc together, to which PCP would react: “for what purpose?”.

^[5]    There is an entire talk by Roger Hallam explaining exactly this, without ever using the word deviation. Reacting to this development, Just Stop Oil was interpreted as doing good radical flank job but it needed a movement to have radical flank effect to.

^[6]    Otherwise it would be just social reproduction. By definition, we have popular support for whatever society we currently live in, the proof of which is that masses are consenting to it. This doesn’t make us stop fighting for social change. In fact, this social consensus is the reason we are fighting.

^[7]    The structural contradiction between the governments and the corporations on one side and the people and the planet on the other side will not be resolved by dialogue, of course. I am referring here to the conflict among the people. This conflict is real. Millions are being displaced, and billions are to become climate refugees. Thousands are dying, and millions are to die in climate disasters. We are at a state of war, but not all of us acknowledge it as such. Those who see that our house is on fire have a conflict with those who don’t think so. This conflict can be resolved. For that to happen, it has to be escalated.

^[8]    A similar elitist argument says that what moves people is what they feel directly in their skin (cost of living, jobs, etc.). This is to say that “we the intellectuals” have empathy for others but “they the workers” have no culture of solidarity. This is of course factually wrong. Working people have more solidarity, less racism, less sexism, less individualism than the elites. Since the working people make up 99% of the population, their individualism, racism and sexism is of course more visible because numerically it makes up most of individualism, racism and sexism that exist in our societies.

      This is not wishful thinking. Just look at the pro Palestine protests. Only in Portugal, we have more than one protest per week, each attracting hundreds; on top of which we have monthly protest that gather thousands. I am not even counting the direct actions and other forms of opposition. This is the largest and most sustained movement the country has seen for five years. We see similar stories in Europe, in the USA, in the Middle East and North Africa. Hundreds arrested in US university occupations are not all Palestinians. All across the Global North, these protests mobilized the lower-income folks and immigrants more than any other topic did lately. They are fueled with a powerful sense of solidarity and justice. It has nothing to do with personal gains. They are value-driven, not interest-driven. This is happening in front of our eyes, and the organizers don’t seem to get the point yet.

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