Deconsecrated for Coal: Interconnectivity of struggles – part 1
One of the most jolting statements I have heard in recent times was at a Climate Camp, and Summer School on Skills for System Change, in Rhineland, when someone said, ‘anyone that accepts authority is at same intellectual level as a horse.’ I know you may be saying that was an insult to horses! But let us ponder on that statement for a while. Horses accept human authority to work or to go where the driver decides it should go. Is that all we do when we accept authority? Whatever the basis for the formulation of that statement maybe, one thing is clear, whether horse or human, when we accept authority we surrender our sovereignty to such authority. This surrender can be voluntary or it could be extracted by force. It can lead to the gains of the common good or it could lead to deprivation of liberties.
We could call that a form of resistance, a registration of disgust over extractivism without boundaries. It registers that extraction defies life and notions of the sacred.
The climate camp was held literally on the lips of the insatiable jaws of a coal mine that is dislocating communities and emptying out others to make way for the gigantic teeth of metal excavators. One poignant information was about a church that was earmarked for demolition along with other building and infrastructure at Immerath. The town turned a ghost town as thousands of people were moved and the dead got relocated to a new cemetery. The church had been consecrated for use at the time that it was built. Now that it is to be put into disuse and demolished so that coal may be extracted from the rocks beneath it, the community had to hold a solemn deconsecration service to, for want of a better word, desecrate it so that a holy structure should not be torn down. If that concern for the sacred had been orchestrated by the mining company one would have decried its hypocrisy. As it were, this was the desire of the people, to make the building unholy so that an unholy act could be perpetrated. We could call that a form of resistance, a registration of disgust over extractivism without boundaries. It registers that extraction defies life and notions of the sacred.
Still at the climate camp, I attended a workshop on anarchism. The key points I came away with was that anarchism is not an absence of organisation, but rather that anarchists work with nature and take part in social movements with the aim of bringing about transformation. That is revolution. The anarchist may well be ready to take action when others are far from ready. At one level, the anarchist could be engaged in insurrectionism. A significant point in anarchists toeing the eco-communism part is to overturn the Darwinian concept of survival of the strongest. How is that? Simple: when the weak come together, the can defeat the strong. Coming away from that workshop got me wondering how many folks aren’t anarchists.
My input to the battery of conversations across the camp came in a session where I shared the platform with Sheila Menon who was part of the Plane Stupid struggle against the expansion of Heathrow airport runways. We stressed the fact that the global nature of the environmental and climate changes require a recognition that we must work to bring about the consolidation of movements across obviously interconnected struggles. We stressed the need to reframe the climate narrative, build resilience in diversity and the truth that adapting to a crisis cannot be a solution to that crisis. We also stressed that in our various struggles, although targets may differ, the overall objectives remain broadly the same. From that perspective we underscored the fact that local resistances to bads are valid starting points, as they expose injustices and focusses the analyses of traumatised citizenry facing diffused dictatorships of various kinds – corporate and political. However, these need to be connected to others in order to overturn the rapacious system of exploitation, expropriation and consumption.
Following the climate camp, I was privileged to meet with and learn from activists and friends engaged in diverse sites of struggles on climate and extractive issues – from Kenya to Mozambique and Uganda. These experiences will come up in the next couple of blogs. Stay connected.