The rupture

The people in power have now demonstrated beyond any doubt that they will do nothing to prevent climate breakdown: this is the rule of a plutocracy made rich by fossil fuels. The question that always confronts climate activists is whether we work to change the minds of those in power, whether we change who is in power or whether we change the nature of power itself.

BUY: ALL IN: A REVOLUTIONARY THEORY TO STOP CLIMATE COLLAPSE

The first option seems to have been exhausted. Donald Trump’s assault on democracy in the United States means that the world’s remaining superpower is controlled by a clique who seem detached from any reality - never mind the reality of climate breakdown. Joe Biden may have acknowledged climate science - but the Democrats nonetheless oversaw the production of more fossil fuels each year than any nation state in human history.

SIGN UP: ALL IN

The same conclusion must also be drawn from recent British history. Recent events suggest that even the possibility of changing who is in power through voting for a new government within a representative democracy seems to have been removed. The oligarchs found common cause in eliminating any possibility of Jeremey Corbyn MP becoming a Labour prime minister, precisely because he advanced a Green New Deal which would have met the challenge of climate breakdown while creating a million well paid secure jobs. 

Oligarchic

Sir Keir Starmer, who would become a Labour prime minister having promised to retain Corbyn's climate agenda, has deliberately sabotaged any possibility of our current government delivering on emissions reductions: backing CCS and nuclear, supporting the expansion of Heathrow and likely to give the Rosebank and Jackdaw oilfield projects the go-ahead. 

The only option, then, is to change the nature of power itself. “The entire way our society is organised must be radically changed through revolution”. This sentiment is shared by 47 per cent of people aged 13 to 27 - commonly described as Generation Z - according to survey results published by Channel 4 in its report Gen Z: Trends, Truth and Trust last month. The same research suggests that 62 per cent of Gen Z “believe that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor”. The impression from this research is that those among Gen Z who are politically engaged at all believe that revolution is the only way forward.

George Monbiot, the environmentalist author and activist, is one of the few mainstream reporters who reflect the concerns of this generation. He released a short video (see below) explaining how oligarchy is consolidating its power and how only mass social movements can prevent this takeover, and the continued slide into climate armageddon. “What we are seeing now is the return big time of oligarchic power,” he explained. “And this is a phenomenon that we see throughout history. And ever so often that oligarchic power is rolled back, but then it gradually begins to gather again and starts again unless you are sufficiently struggling against it”.

Monbiot turns to Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century to better understand this predicament. Here he finds that, thus far, there are only four ways that rampant political and economic inequality has been reversed: total war, total and violent revolution, state collapse and massive plague. If Scheidel is correct we are presented with a terrible paradox. There is no example yet of a non-violent social movement delivering an epochal transfer of power from the obscenely wealthy few to the many. Yet this transition is the only way to prevent runaway climate and social breakdown - which will themselves bring terrible violence.

“I don’t want to wait until there is another total war; I don’t want to see a massive violent revolution in which millions of people die; I don’t want to see state collapse; I don’t want to see a vast plague wiping out a third of the population” Monbiot states. “These are the forces that in the past have destroyed oligarchic power. We have to be clever enough to find the means of doing it without them.”

Rupture

Monbiot’s wager is we can devise an entirely new method of social transformation that does not depend on violence. The question, then, is whether the violent revolutions of the past were successful because they were violent, or whether there was some other determining factor which has perhaps been eclipsed by a fascination with violence? There have been multiple events in history that have involved a fundamental change in power, from the fall of Rome to Sheikh Hasina's resignation last year as prime minister of Bangladesh. If there is some method that has allowed these to take place, beside the brute use of violence, then surely we need to find it?

Mariana Rodrigues and Sinan Eden have been on the front line of climate activism with the organisation Climáximo in Portugal for almost a decade. They have just released their first book, All In: A Revolutionary Theory to Stop Climate Collapse, which is almost unique in addressing so directly the fact that the answer to the climate crisis necessarily includes a final reckoning with the problem of oligarchic power, and of capitalism more generally. Climáximo has been an enormously successful direct action movement. A theoretical work from two of its central organisers must be taken seriously.

All In is a short, sharp, shock of a book; and it does exactly what it says on the tin. It opens: “The capitalist system is the root cause of the climate crisis and has absolutely no perspective of solving it. The logical consequence is that the task of any movement informed by climate justice is to dismantle capitalism…” They reinforce the point: “The intertwined structure between capitalism and fossil fuels dictates that stopping the climate crisis will require, imply and accompany the end of capitalism.”

Rodrigues and Eden want to fundamentally change society, as the only means of preventing climate breakdown in time. They make the following three observations: climate is a global crisis; we need a global movement; we need a movement of the global working class. “The fact that the capital is globally organised while the working class is fragmented is our problem to solve,” they say. And from this they conclude that only a movement that aims at “rupture” can succeed. This movement must necessarily differentiate itself from activist groups that want to change society from within or create change but only outside the system.

The authors also echo Monbiot’s concerns that the threat from the extreme right will only increase unless there is a fundamental challenge to oligarchy. But, they suggest, the rise of Trump and people like Elon Musk is itself a response to the challenge to that power. They argue that “capital will fight back” and that “the rise of the extreme right (as organisations, as policies and as cultural codes) is a manifestation of this shift.”

Capabilities

The aim of the book therefore is to actually build a movement for rupture. Rupture is described as one model of transformation, as distinguished from the interstitial and the symbiotic. This division is taken from Erik Olin Wright and his book, Envisioning Real Utopias. Interstitial movements want to build alternatives outside of the state, the symbiotic within the existing state, while rupture requires a revolutionary transformation of and beyond the state itself. Ende Gelände in Germany is interstitial, they say; Just Stop Oil in the UK is symbiotic, Climáximo is ruptural. Indeed, statements by Roger Hallam, a founder of XR and later JSO, calling for non-violent revolution may signal the latter organisation has moved from the symbiotic to the ruptural. 

Rupture is a pragmatic rather than an ideological choice for Rodrigues and Eden. “We simultaneously accept and are horrified with the fact that we have to build a ruptual mass movement and that we need to build it quick,” the authors explain. The book proposes that environmental activists who are dedicated to rupture must come together and create their own movement ecosystem - locally, nationally and internationally. Every organisation or group in the rupture movement needs to have significant resources to create these global networks. 

The rupture movement will necessarily be internally differentiated and the authors identify three distinct grand strategies: spontaneous uprising, mass agitation and ideological mobilisation. The proposal is that activists pick a strategy and go hard. These activists should at the same time practice movement ecology thinking and work with apparently rival groups: this includes refraining from criticising others who choose a different grand strategy. “We will not debate each other into a single grand strategy. And we shouldn’t. We need this split, because we are looking at different places and different opportunities. We prepare for different scenarios.”

The authors further identify different “capabilities” which are common across the different grand strategies. The primary capabilities, as presented by Zeynep Tüfekçi in her book Twitter and Teargas, are ‘narrative’, ‘disruptive’ and ‘institutional’. Movements, it is suggested, “are expected to invest in all the three main capabilities”. Rodrigues and Eden also discuss support capabilities, which are presented as ‘resilience’, “the capacity of the movement to regenerate itself under pressure”; ‘prefigerative’, “showing the world we want directly in our actions” and ‘coordination’, “joint campaigns, global action days and international conferences”.

Methodologies

All In sets out a clear programme of activity that an activist group can take to make ruptural change. This programme implements all the theories about working towards rupture, grand strategies and capabilities: the stages of "planning for victory" are: 1. Movement mapping; 2. Implementation and 3. Internationalism. 

The first step is movement mapping. A new group would engage with and within the existing ruptural movements. The aim is to find where a new organisation will best complement and add value to the existing activist ecosystem. “For movement-level strategy, we ask: what capability is missing? What is no-one looking at? What grand strategies are underdeveloped? What connections are not being used well? What connections are missing.” 

The book is distinctive in calling for a “movement-as-party” which is discussed within the framework of a movement-ecology. The point being made is activists can and must form a movement, with the creative and theoretical diversity that implies. These activists need to map the movement and ensure that there are different grand strategies, different capabilities and different groups. But the movement in its totality is moving towards rupture. “Movement-level strategizing is frightening and empowering.”

The main point is that activists need to ensure that the capabilities are actioned across the movement ecology, and not limit their concerns to the success of an individual organisation or party. The book suggests that individuals, groups and even political parties might want to focus on developing and actualising a specific capability. However the movement as a system will “need all these capabilities”. It is the responsibility of everyone, therefore, to understand what capabilities may be missing from the movement, and to enter that space.

People can and will form distinct groups, with grand strategies and methodologies. The most interesting claim for the movement-as-party approach is that “your organisations don’t seem to need each other, but the movement needs both your organisations. That’s why we use the word ecology for social movements.” The authors conclude that “we need the complementarity in its entirety.”

Radical

The movement-as-party allows for both diversity and autonomy as well as coordination and central decision making. The old days of central committees and organisations of command and control have been rendered obsolete for a generation that is wildly connected. 

However, there are benefits of the traditional party that should be retained, or rebuilt. These include the formation of international institutions, movement-wide agreements and plans that are binding on members, and forums for debates and decisions. “A revolutionary movement would need to know how to write a constitution, how to build a democratic public administration and how to run a social-political transition.” There are lessons from the early soviets in Russia, the authors say. 

The next major step for the All In programme is called implementation. This explains what action should be taken based on the analysis presented earlier in the book. It requires “coming to terms” or “telling the truth” about capitalism as a driver of climate breakdown; an ambition for a global movement; centering the working class in the movement; ensuring the movement aims at rupture; the adoption of a grand strategy; the fostering of movement ecology. 

The implementation stage also suggests some practical activities. This includes calling on social movement organisations to adopt a Declaration of a State of Climate Emergency - an approach similar to that taken by XR in its early days. Activist groups should adopt such a document as its own objectives, and call on others to do the same. 

“This is not yet another document to sign. We are proposing a radical shift in organisational culture, an agreement to continually and systematically reject conformism and alienation in the movement…we must acknowledge that we live in a state of emergency and we need to restructure our organisations accordingly.”

Power

The book calls for rupture as a response to the climate crisis, in contradistinction to the movement power method which aims only for change within the system. The authors therefore present a very different history of social change: this makes the point that rupture is possible but also offers lessons on how rupture can be achieved in the real world. “We feel that not enough new generation organisers are learning from historical experience,” the authors explain.

This is history as a training exercise. “We are interested in how they won and why they won. We are interested in their theory of chance: the system of beliefs and assumptions about how change happens in society.” We are taken on a search for “an algorithm of action”.

The history presented begins the Jacobin victory in the French Revolution of 1799, and moves through the Haitian revolution of 1804, the Carbonari revolutionaries of Italy in the following decades, the utopian socialists and the Paris Commune in 1848, the split between the followers of the communist Karl Marx and the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin dated to 1872, the Russian revolution of 1917 and then the divide between Trotsky and Stalin, the rise of Mao Zedong in the Chinese revolution of 1949, the Cuban revolution, the guerilla movements that achieved decolonisation across Africa, South America and beyond.

This high speed history takes us all the way to the Arab Spring (2010s), the pro-EU protests in Ukraine (2014), the Yellow Vests protests in France (2018), and the Black Lives Matter protests in the US (2020). The book even points to successful ‘ruptures’ taking place today. “There are tens of ruptual mass movements currently active all across the world. Just a quick glance at the last couple of years would deliver examples of Bangladesh, Burkina Fosa, Kenya, Myanmar, Niger, Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka.” 

The point of all this history is to establish a successful theory of ruptural change. The commonality of all these movements was not simply the presence of violence. The authors argue that each movement involved a deliberate and conscious attempt to seize power. Sometimes this was economic power, and other times it was political power. Sometimes this was an attempt to change power relations internationally, and sometimes it remained at the scale of national liberation. 

Justice

The point of seizing power was always to end oligarchy and introduce democracy. And democracy, today, is a precondition for climate action. This telling of history is presented in opposition to recent interpretations of the US civil rights movement of the 1960s, used to support a claim that mass movements are sufficient to effect change. 

This short manifesto also carves out its intellectual space through sharp criticism of existing climate movements, balanced by a remarkable level of honest self-criticism. Rodrigues and Eden are sceptical of the movement power methodology which is currently en vogue. The criticism is aimed at mainstream NGOs, at left organisations that talk about rupture but appear to have no intention of achieving it, and to social justice campaigns that have left the ecofeminist thinking and working class praxis out of the equation. 

Paul Engler and Carlos Saavedra from the Momentum Community have advanced a movement power method that has been adopted by NGOs and campaign groups in the US, the Europe, and beyond. This and similar movement theories do not, it is suggested in this book, involve a seizure of power and revolution, but end with “social and/or political change”. “It is a theory of change that, by design, does not aim at changing the socioeconomic system”; it is “inflicted with a deep lack of imagination” and is “a first-degree cousin of the neoliberal worldview.”

This new book reckons with the fact that non-violent direct action is yet to result in a serious transfer of power away from oligarchy. “Your authors…are deeply angry about all the revolts against this system that weren’t transformed into a revolutionary potential.”

They point to a contradiction. Increasing numbers of young people all around the world believe that revolution is necessary, especially in response to the climate crisis. But today “this movement is strategizing under a framework that structurally bars a system change perspective. The theory of change of even the most radical flank of the climate justice movement doesn’t have a post-capitalistic society in its list of deliverables.” They therefore suggest that “new social movements build their own theory of change.” All In is therefore both a robust criticism of the movement power strategy and a necessary complement.

Truth

This book has some limitations, and the authors recognise this. In the introductory pages they admit that “the degree of simplification will be such that our exposition will look plain wrong because it will miss essential aspects.” They also note that this “is not an academic book” and even go so far as to say “the goal of this book is not to be right”. Specifically, this is not an attempt at a party line: “We don’t claim to have reached ‘the correct version of Marxism’”. 

The invitation from the authors is for all those who want to address the climate crisis - as a specific crisis of capitalism - to work together despite even serious theoretical differences. In short, “we need to learn to agree to disagree”. There is much in this book I don’t subscribe to. But I accept the invitation and have tried here to amplify what is useful rather than dwell on what I think is not. 

The ambition of the project is compelling, the breadth of history taken as a reference is impressive, the depth of intellectual references is persuasive. Rodrigues and Eden have developed their alternative to the movement power strategy, which has propelled the climate movement forward only up to a point, by drawing lessons from historical actors who have actually been successful in changing their societies, albeit during a period of violent transformation.

There are facts which cannot be negotiated. We have just experienced a year where surface temperatures are 1.6 degrees centigrade higher than the pre-industrial average. This heat has created extreme weather with devastating effect: the LA fires are just one high profile example. The amount of carbon dioxide being dumped into the atmosphere each year is actually increasing. Global climate policy is in crisis: the United States has just withdrawn from the Paris Agreement. In the UK, public investment that should be building renewable energy is going to be squandered on CCS and nuclear power, as vested interests trump the public interest.

What is open to negotiation is how we respond. If there is a path to preventing catastrophic climate breakdown within our current political system, within the capitalist economic system, then our political leaders need to point the way. But we are moving in the opposite direction. Neither Trump nor Starmer have any solutions. 

This is why almost half of Gen Z see revolution as the only method of significant social change, the kind of change necessary to stop climate breakdown. Rodrigues and Eden have shown enormous courage and integrity in taking this discussion seriously. “All our fights now have a delivery deadline,” they observe. “We are at the moment of truth: socialism or barbarism.”

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist.