Insurrectionists are nobody in particular. They are individuals mobilized in their discontent, forced into action by the inaction of others. In that networked individuality, they are nobodies. They are not a body at all, and that radical decentralization (from here on designated as “spontaneity”) renders them the most powerful political body on earth. However, they do not realize that they exist. In order to combat the particularly destructive force of capitalist-induced climate change, “insurrectionists” should be defined as a specific kind of early-stage revolutionary, and their program sketched out. After insurrectionists come guerrilla fighters, and after guerilla fighters, freedom fighters. Then an economic and political system of communism may be built by revolutionaries.
The unique challenges posed by climate change must be met within a specifically ecologically-minded framework, catalyzed by a specifically motivated subsection of the revolution. This framework is eco-communism, and the subsection is first and foremost the insurrectionist. This article will focus on insurrectionists in particular. To truly understand the purpose of insurrectionists, some basic facts of climate change must first be understood. In broad strokes, they are, as culled from NASA’s website:
Levels of carbon dioxide (among other greenhouse gases, which have a propensity for absorbing heat) in the atmosphere have risen from three hundred to four hundred parts per million since 1950. This concentration is higher than it has been for at least half a million years.
Crucially, the rise in levels of carbon dioxide is caused directly by the exorbitant greenhouse gas emissions of a handful of corporations.
According to a 2017 CDP report, one hundred corporations are responsible for about 71 percent of carbon emissions since 1988—equaling about one trillion tonnes.
As a result, the Earth as a whole has warmed about 0.9 degrees Celsius since the end of the 19th century, resulting in, among other phenomena, extreme weather patterns and ocean hydroxa. These phenomena are collectively known as “climate change.”
Climate change has proven disastrous for entire ecosystems and human communities that are unequipped to repair infrastructure or, at a basic level, ensure the safety of their loved ones.
These communities are largely poor and, given the well-established and widely-accepted connection between poverty and systematic racism, disproportionately of color. That communities of color suffer more from climate change than white ones is a phenomenon called “environmental racism.”
Those are the basic facts as far as the eco-sciences have been able to determine. They were known before the Paris Agreement and they are known after: the only thing revealed by the studies that flurried around the 2016 political milestone is that scientists have long been desperate to get the attention of political leaders who have consistently ignored the suffering of their constituents—and these politicians continue to do so.
So much for climate change. The weaponizing of climate change—that is, the ability of the ruling class to exploit the ensuing political instability and scarcity of resources—must be faced by a total reorganization of society. Ultimately, to state the obvious, such a reorganization is a revolution. However, America is not yet capable of revolution. We are behind every other so-called “First World” country in our understanding of socialism and our ability to implement its policies. What is needed before revolution—the
reorganization itself—is the will to revolt. This will is embodied by the insurrectionist.
As said before, insurrectionists are nobody in particular. Literally, there is no single body politic that encompasses insurrectionists, and also in the colloquial sense, they are nobodies. Rather, they resemble “knights of faith,” a term employed by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard to designate those everyday heroes who are plentiful, anonymous, alone, and outside of the realm of morals. (“Morals” is also a specific term used in a particular sense; it describes systems of faith, civil or religious dogma, that informs one’s bad conscience.) That is, they do not act out of any inherited moral code, but rather out of necessity. The only element that differentiates insurrectionists from knights of faith—and it is a major difference!—is that they do not have faith.
“Faith”—another term from Kierkegaard—is a rational belief in the absurd. Revolutionaries, as distinct from insurrectionists as defined in this argument, would count themselves among the faithful: they believe in a better world, they have faith in it, precisely because the idea is absurd. However, as is typical of believers, revolutionaries are usually paralyzed by their own faith; they wait for the absurd in passivity. Insurrectionists are different. They are not motivated by ideals or a higher, all-encompassing truth. They rebel, rather, because they must.
What that motivating need is specifically is difficult to ascertain. Insofar as insurrectionists are individuals, they are motivated by myriad concerns that are impossible to systematize; however, insofar as they are members of their societies and are dependent upon others for survival, they are also driven by historical forces beyond any one person’s control. And climate change is the epitome of such a force.
However, would the institution of eco-communism destroy whatever security the working class had been able to attain?
The answer is likely both yes and no. “Security” only has meaning insofar as one is surrounded by instability. The current economic-political regime creates instability in its insatiable demand for growth. Eco-communism is not about growth—we no longer have any need for growth. Rather, we seek stability, renewability, a seamless marriage between production, consumption, and accumulation. At one point, the costs of growth exceed the benefits; this is why classical economics seeks equilibrium and stasis.
The macroeconomic system sought out by eco-communism understands the entire world as a single ecosystem (an economic interpretation of the Gaia hypothesis) that breaks down into infinite smaller ones. Everyone interacts with a number of overlapping economies/ecosystems. We should work towards an open-system “economics” of recyclability: what is produced is consumed and recycled, with enough of all three to avoid depletion. This is the core of what eco-communism means, and begins to explain why insurrectionists are the only ones who can lay the groundwork to accomplishing it. After the groundwork is laid, production and consumption would have to be regulated—but at what scale? In the initial stages of eco-communism, the state will likely play a regulatory role in the economic structure (and no other!), to the extent that it will oversee all transactions to ensure fair play. But the insurrectionist cannot be concerned with this. There is no question of what happens after, because the situation is one of life or death. However, as their insurrection develops, as resources grow scarce again, they will find themselves in need of planning. Cooperation among producers to determine what should be produced, how much, etc., can only exist at first as spontaneous. A handful—may-
be—of producers will decide to band together out of charitable generosity, or else they will feel compelled to by their circumstances. However it happens, it cannot immediately be organized by an overseeing group. The bare minimum should be sought after. Machinery has allowed for leisure for the ruling classes, but we have yet to realize a leisured society.
A leisured society is one of stability, a society in which what is produced is distributed in the most efficient manner possible, i.e., with as little surplus as possible.
In a gig economy, surplus is less tangible; surplus belongs to the leisured classes. These are the people who have been able to afford their own leisure-society bubble within a capitalist system. They range from the middle to the upper classes; they are educated; they consider themselves to be hard-working or else fundamental to society’s survival when in fact a large number of them are parasites on the economic and political systems. What they are served in cafes, bars, and concerts is an embodiment of their access to leisure; it is the surplus leisure of the servers that is accepted with every restaurant meal. While of course it is hardly restaurants that are emitting the majority of greenhouse gases, they uphold the kind of hierarchies that reward the destruction of the environment. That point of intersection is what interests the insurrectionist—every kind of worker not only deserves but needs respect and more than a living wage. The insurrectionist’s implementation of this concept takes the form of the guerilla.
Guerilla warfare is the insurrectionist’s only avenue of revolution: it is the spontaneous, necessary reaction of the oppressed against their oppressor. The oppressor, to state the obvious, is more powerful than the oppressed. One side simply has more money and guns than the other. As a result, the only means the oppressed has to fight the oppressor is with the advantages left to them: the support of the people, knowledge of local terrain, and surprise.
How can such a coordinated effort be planned by people marked by their spontaneity? An answer to consider is that the strategic effort is a necessity taken on by the more cunning of the insurrectionists after an initial few acts of sabotage. Under the guidance of the more cunning, sabotage becomes more effective, and insurrectionist movement becomes more coordinated. In the past, the more cunning have co-opted any and all revolutionary efforts until a new tyrannical regime replaces the old one. Instead of oppose the cunning in the first place, the insurrectionists should allow them to organize the revolution, and then co-opt it back. That is, once insurrectionists have no need to be insurrectionists, they can be compelled not by necessity but by their own desires.
This is the goal of eco-communism: a society in which everyone is not only free to but actually wants to pursue their own desires. In any case, once necessity is not the driving force of a revolution, it is time to move on from the guerilla squads to a more stable entity, such as an army of organized saboteurs. These are freedom fighters in the truest sense—a) they fight for their own freedom and nobody else’s and b) they are free to be driven by anything other than necessity. These fighters overpower the political, the cunning, the resentful—they are simply more free. It is these fighters who are then able to set up eco-communism as a praxis. But to achieve this state of being, they must be trained as guerilla fighters (or, rather, they must take on their own training) with this telos in mind.
What must be insisted upon in this particular revolution’s education is independence—a development of the individual’s psyche in a way most schools today certainly do not provide. Education today typically seeks to mold students in the image of the institution; obviously, this is no way to foster freedom of thought or purpose. Individuality and creativity should be nurtured as ends in and of themselves: though of course they serve the practical purpose of leading students towards the tools that will allow them to build a better world.
The better world is an equilibrium. It is not fiery and bold, but passive and restful. Innovative, creative, nurturing. It draws from a kind of strength that is not seen today, when strength is seen as inherently dominating. A true break from the ruling ideologies of today will demand a re-defining of strength and morality.
What this world looks like in reality, in its details, is impossible to say. One can only point oneself and others towards a path of betterment. What this looks like is simple: an abolishing of the existing order. My suggestions would be to abolish every corporation responsible for pollution, to seize whatever assets are liquidable and to redistribute them among a) their workers/communities as retributions, and b) their eco-friendly competition. This kind of sweeping change must then be overseen by a similarly new organization; that is, the organization must be new, but the pieces don’t have to be. I mean that the governing body would be a representative amalgamation of directly-elected local community leaders—utilizing people who are already community leaders and eco-friendly competition that is already up and running to redistribute the benefits of capitalism. That kind of redistribution of wealth would, in fact, promote the kind of even playing field and eco-friendly alternatives that liberal-leaning free-market ideologues claim to espouse. The way to get there is through guerilla sabotage, and the way to get to effective guerilla sabotage is a freedom fighter’s education.
We must set up a society that breaks from the servility of the ruling regimes. The obsequiousness of politicians, corporations, scientists, and the press to their own greed is killing us all. Only by overthrowing their rule can we save ourselves. We are faced with necessity: we must overthrow the ruling class, or else die out at the hand of an establishment that is paralyzed in the face of the climate change they continue to wreak upon the world. This manifesto did not have the time to address the complete abolishment of this establishment, which will require the abolishment of a number of its instruments of control—the state, police, gender, sex, and sexuality, among others.
A continued study of these mechanisms should be encouraged.
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