Seattle was shut down, I wrote that a new movement advocating a
radically different form of globalization "just had its coming-out
party." What will be the significance of Copenhagen? I put that
question to John Jordan, whose prediction of what eventually happened
in Seattle I quoted in my book No Logo. He replied: "If Seattle was
the movement of movements' coming-out party, then maybe Copenhagen
will be a celebration of our coming of age."
He cautions, however, that growing up doesn't mean playing it safe,
eschewing civil disobedience in favor of staid meetings. "I hope we have
grown up to become much more disobedient," Jordan said, "because life on
this world of ours may well be terminated because of too many acts of
obedience."<<<<
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091130/klein
Copenhagen: Seattle Grows Up
Lookout
by NAOMI KLEIN
November 11, 2009 (In the November 30, 2009 edition of The Nation)
The other day I received a pre-publication copy of The Battle of the Story
of the Battle of Seattle, by David Solnit and Rebecca Solnit. It's set to
come out ten years after a historic coalition of activists shut down the
World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, the spark that ignited a
global anticorporate movement.
The book is a fascinating account of what really happened in Seattle, but
when I spoke to David Solnit, the direct-action guru who helped engineer
the shutdown, I found him less interested in reminiscing about 1999 than
in talking about the upcoming United Nations climate change summit in
Copenhagen and the "climate justice" actions he is helping to organize
across the United States on November 30. "This is definitely a
Seattle-type moment," Solnit told me. "People are ready to throw down."
There is certainly a Seattle quality to the Copenhagen mobilization: the
huge range of groups that will be there; the diverse tactics that will be
on display; and the developing-country governments ready to bring activist
demands into the summit. But Copenhagen is not merely a Seattle do-over.
It feels, instead, as though the progressive tectonic plates are shifting,
creating a movement that builds on the strengths of an earlier era but
also learns from its mistakes.
The big criticism of the movement the media insisted on calling
"antiglobalization" was always that it had a laundry list of grievances
and few concrete alternatives. The movement converging on Copenhagen, in
contrast, is about a single issue--climate change--but it weaves a
coherent narrative about its cause, and its cures, that incorporates
virtually every issue on the planet. In this narrative, our climate is
changing not simply because of particular polluting practices but because
of the underlying logic of capitalism, which values short-term profit and
perpetual growth above all else. Our governments would have us believe
that the same logic can now be harnessed to solve the climate crisis--by
creating a tradable commodity called "carbon" and by transforming forests
and farmland into "sinks" that will supposedly offset our runaway
emissions.
Climate-justice activists in Copenhagen will argue that, far from solving
the climate crisis, carbon-trading represents an unprecedented
privatization of the atmosphere, and that offsets and sinks threaten to
become a resource grab of colonial proportions. Not only will these
"market-based solutions" fail to solve the climate crisis, but this
failure will dramatically deepen poverty and inequality, because the
poorest and most vulnerable people are the primary victims of climate
change--as well as the primary guinea pigs for these emissions-trading
schemes.
But activists in Copenhagen won't simply say no to all this. They will
aggressively advance solutions that simultaneously reduce emissions and
narrow inequality. Unlike at previous summits, where alternatives seemed
like an afterthought, in Copenhagen the alternatives will take center
stage. For instance, the direct-action coalition Climate Justice Action
has called on activists to storm the conference center on December 16.
Many will do this as part of the "bike bloc," riding together on an as yet
unrevealed "irresistible new machine of resistance" made up of hundreds of
old bicycles. The goal of the action is not to shut down the summit,
Seattle-style, but to open it up, transforming it into "a space to talk
about our agenda, an agenda from below, an agenda of climate justice, of
real solutions against their false ones.... This day will be ours."
Some of the solutions on offer from the activist camp are the same ones
the global justice movement has been championing for years: local,
sustainable agriculture; smaller, decentralized power projects; respect
for indigenous land rights; leaving fossil fuels in the ground; loosening
protections on green technology; and paying for these transformations by
taxing financial transactions and canceling foreign debts. Some solutions
are new, like the mounting demand that rich countries pay "climate debt"
reparations to the poor. These are tall orders, but we have all just seen
the kind of resources our governments can marshal when it comes to saving
the elites. As one pre-Copenhagen slogan puts it: "If the climate were a
bank, it would have been saved"--not abandoned to the brutality of the
market.
In addition to the coherent narrative and the focus on alternatives, there
are plenty of other changes too: a more thoughtful approach to direct
action, one that recognizes the urgency to do more than just talk but is
determined not to play into the tired scripts of cops-versus-protesters.
"Our action is one of civil disobedience," say the organizers of the
December 16 action. "We will overcome any physical barriers that stand in
our way--but we will not respond with violence if the police [try] to
escalate the situation." (That said, there is no way the two-week summit
will not include a few running battles between cops and kids in black;
this is Europe, after all.)
A decade ago, in an op-ed in the New York Times published after Seattle
was shut down, I wrote that a new movement advocating a radically
different form of globalization "just had its coming-out party." What will
be the significance of Copenhagen? I put that question to John Jordan,
whose prediction of what eventually happened in Seattle I quoted in my
book No Logo. He replied: "If Seattle was the movement of movements'
coming-out party, then maybe Copenhagen will be a celebration of our
coming of age."
He cautions, however, that growing up doesn't mean playing it safe,
eschewing civil disobedience in favor of staid meetings. "I hope we have
grown up to become much more disobedient," Jordan said, "because life on
this world of ours may well be terminated because of too many acts of
obedience."
***
An updated tenth-anniversary edition of Naomi Klein's No Logo: Taking Aim
at the Brand Bullies comes out in November.
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About Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and
the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock
Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (September 2007); an earlier
international best-seller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies; and
the collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the
Globalization Debate (2002). more...
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