The Three Climate Strikes
If Fridays for the Future wants to start winning, they’ll need to reckon with the material bases of power. Drone strikes and civil insurrections in the Global South hold important lessons.
Photo by Jonas Kaiser.
On September 20th, 2019, millions of people around the world took to the streets in the youth-organized and youth-lead Global Climate Strike, protesting against political inaction around the climate crisis. It was the largest environmental protest in history. And yet, it was not even the most impactful action against fossil capital which took place that week.
Six days prior, a squadron of armed drones struck oil facilities in Saudi Arabia. These unprecedented strikes caused massive damage to the Abqaiq refinery, the world’s largest oil processing plant, and infrastructure at the Khurais oil field, the second largest in the country. The immediate consequences were spectacular: 5.7 million barrels per day – nearly 60% of Saudi Arabia’s oil production, and 5 per cent of global production –shut down; global oil prices jumped 20 per cent. Responsibility for the attack was claimed by the Houthis, a populist Shia Yemeni movement engaged in a five year-long resistance against the brutal military intervention by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and their Western allies. Negotiations were sparse prior to the Houthi attacks, even as the conflict fell into stalemate and the Saudi-UAE coalition pivoted into a bombing campaign and naval blockade pushing Yemen into a famine of genocidal proportions. The September 14th drone strikes brought the war to the Saudis’ doorstep, forcing them back into negotiations with the Houthis.
Two and a half weeks later, transportation workers in Ecuador went on strike, blockading the roads and highways in protest of scrapped fuel subsidies. The transportation strike rapidly escalated into a civil insurrection, as La Confederacion de Nacionalidades Indigenas del Ecuador (The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, CONAIE) organized tens of thousands of its indigenous constituents to travel to Ecuador’s cities and join the barricades. Government buildings were occupied and ransacked, police officers were taken hostage, and street crowds met the security forces’ tear gas canisters and rubber bullets with molotov cocktails and petrol bombs. Meanwhile, in the Amazon, indigenous militants carried out sabotage operations against oil infrastructure, forcing a near-complete shutdown of Ecuador’s oil production. After nearly two weeks of riots, occupations, and blockades, the government relented, reinstating the fuel subsidies and agreeing to discuss alternative tax and spending plans.
These three events may initially seem to have little in common. In fact, they all constitute different kinds of climate strikes: attempted ruptures in the extraction and circulation of fossil fuels. The key difference is that the movements in Yemen and Ecuador were successful, while the Global Climate Strikes were not. The former two hold a wealth of lessons for the climate movement on the realities of power, politics, and fossil fuels.
At the most basic level, the events in Yemen and Ecuador demonstrate the need for a protracted disruption of economic production and circulation at a level the Global Climate Strikes did not aspire to. Peaceful mass demonstrations limited to raising awareness serve well as political self-expression. But if these actions constrain themselves to what is acceptable to the state – actively coordinating with security forces to negotiate street access, marching paths, time limits, and simulations of civil disobedience – they are inherently manageable by those in power, and thus easily ignored. Some modest gestures toward the grievances of the activists may be made, but nothing prevents the continuation of business as usual: consider how Justin Trudeau joined the Global Climate Strikes in Montreal, effectively protesting against himself.
By contrast, the objective of the Houthis and CONAIE was not to appeal to a higher authority for reforms, but to undermine that authority itself. The Houthis knew the only way to force negotiations was to demonstrate to the Saudis they could no longer bomb Yemen from a safe distance without risking their own oil infrastructure – the source of the Saudi royal family’s wealth and power. CONAIE knew the only way to force the Moreno administration into reinstating fuel subsidies was to overpower its security forces and seize control of the streets, government buildings, and oil infrastructure, paralyzing state and economy in the process.
The climate movement has adopted some aspects of this militant perspective, as demonstrated by the saboteur tactics of Blockadia. However, power is not just about disrupting the economy until certain demands are met by capital and the state. If a movement relies on status-quo politicians, bureaucrats, or corporate executives for remediation, then this movement is essentially engaging in a more raucous form of lobbying. Real power means having the ability to impose changes, either through direct control of the state or some form of autonomous governance. For example, while it lasted, the Standing Rock encampment exerted autonomous power: it did not defer to government regulators, but rather enforced its own decision that the Dakota Access pipeline should not be built.
Autonomous power is especially critical when the goal is not just blocking a specific infrastructure project, but enacting sweeping structural changes, as is necessary for climate justice. If implementing such a demand is left to the ruling class—even if they are confronted with a disruptive and unmanageable uprising—their response will nonetheless be to water down, distort, mutate, and co-opt the demands of the movement. Even when a campaign appears to force concessions from the ruling order, the concrete details of implementation can exacerbate the very systems of power that were originally fought against.
The people of Yemen experienced this first-hand after the Arab Spring. In 2011, tens of thousands protested in major cities across the country, demanding the overthrow of the corrupt regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh. As the movement grew increasingly militant, key factions of the ruling class grew nervous and turned on Saleh, forcing him to step down and hand over power to a transitional government. The revolution seemed to have succeeded. But the average workers and peasants in the streets were not organized in such a way to shape the terms of the transitional government. As a result, regime elites who opportunistically turned on Saleh freely awarded themselves control of the state and the economy, thus keeping intact the power structures so many Yemenis had rallied to bring down.
As anger at the stagnant non-revolution simmered, the Houthis’ broad populist program and militant rhetoric against the corrupt elites in Sana’a found traction, rapidly expanding their base of support. In addition, their battle-hardened status – they had survived no less than six wars against Saleh – added to their credibility as an organization of serious social and political force. Tensions boiled over in mid-2014, when the new regime implemented an austerity-driven IMF structural adjustment program, which eliminated fuel subsidies in an eerie prelude to Ecuador. Fuel prices skyrocketed and tens of thousands took to the streets once more, with the Houthis’ disciplined and armed movement front and center. Facing a substantially more organized and muscular movement than in 2011, the regime was forced to not just reinstate fuel subsidies, but totally restructure the government around a power-sharing agreement with the Houthis.
The history of post-2011 Yemen reveals a fundamental truth about the interaction between popular movements and ruling elites: those in power do not uniformly repress threats to their rule, but rather seek to redirect mass unrest to their ends. Even when particularly unpopular segments of the ruling class are cut adrift – whether they be out-of-touch dictators or fossil-fuel executives – the underlying structures of power and exploitation can be preserved and even strengthened.
This logic holds true for the climate movement as well. Just as it happened to Yemen’s Arab Spring movement, the climate movement can be co-opted by elites. The guardians of global capitalism are well aware of threats posed by warming, but their solution, if pressed, is to expand and deepen capital accumulation – expanding investment opportunities, creating new forms of commodification, and accelerating extraction from humans and nature – while imposing associated costs onto the working class. Movements like Extinction Rebellion which demand decarbonization stripped of politics can be easily subsumed into elite projects of upwards wealth redistribution.
Furthermore, capitalist restructuring almost always triggers fierce working-class resistance. The power of such a backlash can be seen in the social eruptions in Yemen and Ecuador. Moves by IMF-backed governments to drop fuel subsidy programs created an intolerable burden on the poor, who never had any choice in whether their day-to-day life is inextricably intertwined with fossil energy. Indeed, recent years have consistently seen uprisings across the world over the issue of cheap carbon. Myanmar’s 2007 Saffron Revolution, the 2010 uprising in Bolivia, the 2012 Occupy Nigeria movement, the 2019 revolution in Sudan, the 2017 gasolinazo unrest in Mexico, the wave of upheavals in Haiti in 2018 and 2019, the explosive unrest in Iran in 2019, the 2018-9 Gilets Jaunes riots in France: all of these episodes were instigated by the price of fuel. The lesson for the climate movement is incisively summed up by Andreas Malm: “one cannot combat climate change by leaving the richest even freer to accumulate capital and then dump a tax on working people to nudge them, of all classes, in the right direction.”
Contrast the approach of certain segments of the mainstream climate movement, and the ease with which they craft deals with the ruling class, with that of the Houthis and CONAIE. Both movements spent years patiently coalescing a wide base of supporters, bringing together people from a variety of social and class backgrounds though projects that supported day-to-day life, ranging from religious ceremonies to youth summer camps to food distribution networks. Through this process, the movements became a vehicle for the self-organization of a diverse, working-class population, giving them a mass base that could sustain protracted, militant campaigns responsive to the average person’s needs and desires.
The trajectory of CONAIE is especially instructive for the climate movement. The organization’s founding in 1986 culminated a long process of networking and communication between over a dozen different indigenous communities in search of autonomous power against imperialism and extractivism. The subsequent years of organizing built a formidable movement which ousted three different presidents between 1997 and 2005 via mass mobilizations. Nonetheless, CONAIE remained a minority movement in Ecuador, and their commitment to resist oil production in the Amazon pitted them against Rafael Correa, the popular leftist president who was in office from 2007 to 2017, and his plans to use oil profits for social programs.
This position of relative marginalization was completely transformed by the uprising of October 2019. CONAIE’s ability to organize a massive and militant defense of fuel subsidies catapulted it to the vanguard of a movement of sprawling social composition, which included Amazonian tribes, lowland peasants, truckers, taxi drivers, and college students. It is all the more remarkable that this was achieved even as CONAIE affirmed its opposition to the acceleration of resource exploitation and fossil fuel production. This seemingly contradictory position stems from the movement’s organic roots in the masses. Its politics are not determined by abstract ideology, but on the concrete needs of its diverse constituency, which includes Amazonian tribes who require clean water and healthy jungles for subsistence as well as urban workers who require cheap transportation. For CONAIE, the tension is resolved by forcing the costs onto the Ecuadorian elite, whose wealth – accumulated over decades and even centuries of exploitation and violence – could be used to pay for fuel subsidies in the short-term, and a transition to a decarbonized, regenerative, and socialist economy in the medium and long-term. It is a master class in what an ecologically-rooted working-class movement should look like.
There is an important precaution to building revolutionary projects that threaten the ruling class. As noted before, elites never willingly concede to the exploited unless their rule is directly attacked – at which point they will combine concessions with attempts to co-opt the movement for their own benefit. But when a movement defies such attempts and continues working to dislodge the ruling class and liquidate their wealth and privileges, elite reaction is almost always to deploy raw violence.
This is especially evident in the history of fossil capital. The origin of coal energy in early 1800s England was wrapped up in brutal class conflict; the military was often deployed to repress workers and peasants attempting to shut down coal mines and steam plants. The most violent labor conflicts in US history, involving firefights and aerial bombardment, were triggered by union drives in the coal fields. At the international level, oil companies have been the vanguard of imperial violence. In the early 1950s, US and UK intelligence agencies overthrew Iran’s nascent democracy and reversed the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, now known as British Petroleum. In the mid-1990s, the Niger River Delta region saw a wave of violence against minority groups and environmental activists resisting the encroachment of companies like Royal Dutch Shell. In Yemen today, the exterminationist impulse of fossil capital is on full display as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the US, and the UK engage in a campaign of unrestrained savagery as they fight to secure the world’s most important oil fields.
This blood-soaked history should dispel any naiveté about how fossil capital will respond to a climate movement that has the power to not just support piecemeal regulations, but abolish the industry entirely and liquidate more than $10 trillion of wealth. We are already seeing the growth of repression in the West. Since Standing Rock, there has been a wave of legislation across the US designed to criminalize the rising tide of direct action against fossil fuel infrastructure, as well as a growing trend in energy companies using private military contractors to surveil, infiltrate, and disrupt environmentalist groups. As the climate movement grows increasingly powerful, the repressive tendencies of fossil capital will only escalate.
This is what the Houthis and CONAIE are facing off against, and why their struggles have taken on such a high level of militancy, up to and including full-scale military confrontation. Such matters tend to be deeply uncomfortable for activists in the Global North, but this is precisely why it is crucial to be in tune with popular resistance in the Global South. It is at the peripheries that the true nature of global capitalism is revealed: that it is a system that fundamentally driven by violence in defense of property. If decarbonization requires seizing the property of fossil capital, then we must be prepared to overcome this violence. This requires us to take seriously matters of self-defense, including armed self-defense. Even more importantly, it raises the stakes of cultivating a mass working-class base. The Houthis and CONAIE were able to overcome repression because of the width and depth of their roots. When they clashed with the security forces and militaries of the elites, it was not a small set of activists or professional staffers, or atomized mobs doing battle – it was an entire society, which could sustain, nourish, and defend itself even as it contested elite power.
Elements of a working-class decarbonization program have already been mainstreamed, under the banner of the Green New Deal, which in turn has inspired more radical programs like the Red Deal. However, even modest reforms, let alone revolutionary changes, require a militant mass movement. We need a movement which can cohere and coordinate existing networks (tenant associations, unions, direct-action collectives, student groups, environmental justice advocates, left-wing gun clubs) and different segments of the working class (nurses, teachers, truckers, taxi drivers, coal miners, fast food workers, IT technicians), and which dispenses with any illusions that we can peacefully and politely ask the elites to undermine their own wealth and power. The struggle for climate justice and decarbonization must ultimately be a manifestation of class struggle, and a leading front in the battle to overthrow the rule of capital.
The spectacular rebellions of the past few weeks in the US against state violence and for Black lives, beginning in Minneapolis and spiraling across the country, are dramatically redefining the limits and forms of popular movements in the US. This stems not just from the unprecedented and righteous destruction of police property by the hands of joyous crowds, but also the remarkable logistical support for the uprising, and the flood of food, water, medical aid, and bail funds pouring into the streets to keep the fires burning. In Minneapolis, Ruhel Islam, owner of an Indian-Bangladeshi restaurant located right next to the now-destroyed Third Precinct, turned his business into an ad-hoc field hospital, where hundreds of people were treated for injuries suffered at the hands of the police. Ruhel has no regrets despite the destruction of his restaurant by an out-of-control fire. His experience growing up under the brutal Ershad dictatorship in Bangladesh left him with no doubts as to whose side he is on.
The story of Ruhel is especially extraordinary because he himself is active in the climate movement – his restaurant was a hub for local interfaith organizing against the climate crisis. His immediate pivot to supporting a popular uprising against the police is a testament to his understanding that the climate crisis is not an isolated issue, but part of a wider system of injustice and oppression that must be attacked at every point. If the climate movement can emulate the solidarity exemplified by Ruhel, then victory is ours.
RK Upadhya is an engineer, writer, and on-and-off organizer currently based in Texas. He blogs at Jnana Yuddha and tweets @gonker69.
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