A couple of years ago, as part of the state of climate emergency within the collective, Climáximo made a bold statement: the governments and the corporations declared war against the people and the planet, their weapon of mass destruction being the climate collapse. This new framework basically overthrew the communications, tactics, strategy, alliances, as well as the internal organization.
This leap was a deliberate intervention at the movement level, with the grand strategy explained here in detail. 1
Climáximo’s background and political work is substantially different than the new actors in the climate justice movement. Born in 2015, Climáximo went through the climate marches, performative direct actions, the climate jobs campaign, mass civil disobedience against fossil fuel infrastructure, ecosocialist conferences, climate strikes and city blockades, just to name a few of the strategic experiments. So the more recent public disruption combined with disruption of destruction, with increasing and repeated amounts of arrests, had novelty but also had path-dependent implications influencing previous alliances.
Two years is a long time at the climate clock. Let’s take stock.
I am writing this as part of our movement learning discipline. Some of the conclusions here are context-dependent but many are applicable to other groups in Europe. Many groups are going through innovative discussions on next steps, others are struggling with repression, yet others were basically demobilized through repression.2
This is a report back from my subjective interpretation of what happened with Climáximo’s intervention.
The observations
Long story short;
a group of 30 people in Portugal told themselves the governments and the corporations declared war against the people and the planet, climate crisis is a state of war, therefore we shall act as if we live in a state of war;
they then told this to the people around them, getting a hundred people to commit to take arrestable action roles in the upcoming months;
which resulted in some 50-60 actions in one-and-a-half years (with their corresponding court cases etc.).
This was supposed to be very straining, and everyone was aware of it. It was indeed very straining.
Throughout 2024 and as of early 2025, the general feeling is that our lives make much more sense now than in 2021 or 2022, when we felt like accomplices in the business-as-usual of the left politics and climate activism. We tried something new and daring.
How did it go?
Let me start with some observations.
By mid 2024, we had less people in meetings than in the end of 2023.
We had expected dropouts but we were having some wishful thinking about our capacity to absorb new people.
We started having less people who have jobs in meetings, which we are recovering.
As we passed one year of experimentation, more people than ever were unemployed or studying, even though still almost half of coordination roles were taken by people who have jobs. This was a serious drawback and it’s a new situation for Climáximo, which always had a structure that was compatible with work job schedules (assuming commitment).
This started to change with new arrivals, which doesn’t necessarily translate to more organizers and therefore it remains to be seen if the recovery was successful.
There was no explosion of mobilization.
In November 2024, the mass action Parar Enquanto Podemos gathered some three hundred people in the center of Lisbon. This is the biggest civil disobedience action organized by Climáximo, but cannot be classified as a mass action.
There was more media visibility.
In fact, in the beginning it was almost binary: on the days of actions, there were news on climate; on the days off action, there were no news on the climate crisis.
In time, we harvested some actual results: the framing of the wildfires in the last Summer were drastically different and much more politicized than those of 2017; and the coverage of the Valencia flooding and the Los Angeles wildfires were much better than all their precedents.
We got more support than ever. We also got more recruitment than before, but much less than expected.
The active, visible support for the climate justice movement increased. The active, visible support for Climáximo also increased. We registered many indicators (followers in social media and on the website, hot topics in social media, people launching support statement of their own initiative, immediate supportive reaction of passers-by during actions etc.) to this effect.
There is some confusion about this as middle-class columnists keep parrotting that “these actions alienate ordinary people” by which they mean they alienate the financial sponsors of the media outlets in which they work. They are for sure lying, and also probably wrong. It is true that some opposition got activated and more haters spoke out, but there is no evidence suggesting that people changed their minds negatively towards the climate crisis, or the climate justice movement, or Climáximo’s specific political position.
In terms of people joining Climáximo, we saw a visible flux. Our growth rate was much higher than the early period (2015-2019) or the last few years. However, it wasn’t like 2019 when there was international momentum with Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion setting the pace. This flux couldn’t compensate the dropouts and we couldn’t establish a turnover plan.
Exponential support accompanied with linear growth is proof that repression is working, that people got scared.
There was a geometric increase in number and kind of our events, and also in number of invitations we received.
Our internal mobilization resulted in a massive amount of talks, debates and workshops. Any organization to start off today will have a stronger basis to work up from.
While we got cold shoulders from the gatekeepers of leftist politics, we also received new contacts from artists, scientists, unions, neighborhood associations and professional associations, to the degree we have not seen even during 2019.
However, we also got pushed off from mainstream media (in contrast to experiences other parts of Europe). We had no television appearance in the last year and our opinion articles are being rejected systematically.
The left in Portugal did not step up in any meaningful way.
This was extremely sad and somehow we were not prepared for it.
The left parties actually got cold feet and stepped down, showing complete apathy: there were general elections in 2024 and virtually all parties proposed emission-increasing policies (like a new airport) and no party had plans to close down fossil fuel infrastructure.
Grassroots groups showed nominal solidarity, with no substantial internal debate on the state of war in which we live and no substantial change in their own modus operandi.
We had expected more internal debates, deeper reflections, perhaps new groups emerging. The results we got were residual.
The experimented tactics worked for their purpose.
Climáximo’s actions (public disruption and disruption of destruction) had the multiple objectives of rearranging societal priorities, disrupting the false normality, opening a society-wide debate, foreshadowing climate disruption. The underlying logic was to
push through the communication bubbles (in media as well as in social media algorithms),
politicize the social sphere and challenge the neutral/abstentionist positions on the climate crisis, and
offer availability for disruptive politics in a way that is relatable, accessible, replicable and accountable.
These goals were fulfilled and we measured them. The readings on Climáximo suggesting left deviation are for sure inconclusive and might also be serving a self-fulfilling conformism among the progressive circles.
The meanings
So why did these happen? To what extent did we achieve the goals of the grand strategy in terms of impacts in the society, in the climate movement and in the left? What does it all mean?
I’d like to offer a few propositions to make more sense of where we are at.
1) Revolutionary optimism not shared by the left
I start with the saddest of all. We lament to report that during this daring experiment, we found no organizers in Portugal who envisions system change taking place in their lifetime.
Revolutionary optimism is always a self-fulfilling prophecy. On 5 October 1910, the republican revolutionaries and the forces loyal to the monarchy were in a stalemate, the former at the roundabout (today’s Marquês de Pombal statue) and the latter down in Restauradores square. At that point, there was no reason to believe that the republicans could win. As a matter of fact, they were already giving up, starting with the tragic suicide of Almirante Reis (near today’s Avenida da Almirante Reis). At the crossfire, in today’s Avenida da Liberdade, the German ambassador was stuck in a hotel. The royal government arranged to take the ambassador to safety. With his guards, they left the hotel, raising a white flag to avoid being shot. The republican crowd up the avenue interpreted this flag as surrender by the royal army. Cheering, they rushed down the avenue to celebrate the revolution with the soldiers. The royal soldiers got confused and then overwhelmed, and threw their weapons. Hence the revolution, hence the republic.
A revolutionary movement always looks obvious and unstoppable in retrospect – almost a teleological certainty. When being done, though, it’s full of ambiguity and uncertainty.
Unfortunately, we did not find any organizations or organizers who envisioned, believed in, organized for and planned a world without capitalism. We hoped that our stepping up could unleash such a debate. It didn’t.
Now, I don’t know how to move forward.
2) Repression works (to a good extent)
Many people contacted us to join in our activities but without an arrestable position. Some of the activists also got cold feet.
People actually got scared.
This was the year when we saw suspended prison sentences, thousands of Euros in fines, many activists receiving multiple sentences, in a total of 50 active or potential court cases. It was also the year in which the United Kingdom imprisoned climate activists for having participated in a webinar.
A hundred people took action with Climáximo, and we suspect that many law firms received phone calls from their corporate clients (maybe Gucci, TAP, REN, Galp, EDP, or private jet companies?) to distance themselves from Climáximo. In sum: we are handling legal repression with our volunteer-based resources.
Repression is a strange apparatus. It’s dozens of indeciphrable letters from the police and the court. It’s hours of detentions surrounded by police officers. It’s ridiculous accusations by the prosecutors and/or by companies. It’s judges who don’t let you speak of motives. It’s police officers outright lying in court as witnesses. It’s judges that don’t treat a protest as a protest. It’s thousands of euros in fines. It’s the hanging possibility of jailtime. Repression is all of this combined and then multiplied by the number of actions we took.
Repression is part of the deal. We are insisting in telling a revolutionary truth about the climate crisis and capitalism.
3) We are tired
There was not enough turnover.
When we stepped up, we basically multiplied our regular “to do lists” four-fold. Many of us labored 40-50 hours every week, for more than a year, to catch up with our rhythm. Which meant that people with family or job commitments eventually had to make a decision: investing in their specific working groups or insisting in remaining within the more political discussions but with limited actual contribution.
The nominal solidarity from other movement allies did not alleviate our burdens. We are noticing that we are getting bitter with other organizers, something we are consciously struggling with.
We ran the hypothesis that if we showed determination and integrity, then people would eventually join. We stick with this hypothesis, but we are running out of stamina. (I would be curious to hear other groups in the movement reporting back on this subject.)
4) Task-orientation can be disengaging
With dozens of events every month and intense action waves, we prioritized task delivery over organization. This meant a few things. First, in terms of resources, we started looking inward rather than investing in building capacity in new members. Second, we simplified our structures so that anyone could easily participate, everybody knows their role and domain, and most roles are delegable. However, this “decentralization” also has the tendency to result in disengagement from the larger political discussions. As more people lose access to the big picture, only team coordinators are knowledgeable enough to reflect on strategy.
We never established a “strategy circle”, a “coordination team” or a “politburo”. Even so, functional, task-oriented organization tends to depoliticize the group dynamics.
The take-aways
With the observations and the meanings in mind, what to do? How do we fail forward now?
In our grand strategy paper, we had focused on five categories: the neutrals (the part of the general public who hasn’t yet taken side on the climate crisis or on capitalism while simultaneously residing in them), the sympathetic (the part of the general public who shares some of the analysis or values, perhaps talks in favor of them in their own circles, without active involvement in the movement), protesters (the folks who show up in protests, demonstrations and marches called by the progressive movements), climate groups (the people in the organizations working on the climate crisis – these may or may not have a justice perspective or an anti-capitalist analysis), and left groups (the people in the organizations in the left – these may or may not have the climate emergency in their agendas; they may be associations, informal groups, trade unions or political parties). We had specific diagnoses and designed specific interventions with specific desired outcomes.
The overall conclusion, it seems to me, is that
- we received contradictory signals from the first three groups,
- we are deeply disappointed by the last two groups, and
- we are ambivalent about our own capacity to pull this off.
It is too early to reach a definitive conclusion.3 Yet, with the climate clock ticking above our heads and our own stamina draining, we need conclusions.
We are simultaneously at the action stage and reflection stage, for we still live in a state of war. Here are a few things we are doing nowadays to respond to the new situation.
- We are calling for mass action on 1 June in the Lisbon Airport. It is now relatively clear that we are available for and committed to achieve climate justice in our lifetime (the only possible timeframe for it, according to climate deadlines). Yet, many of our supporters are still “supporting” us. We are not interested in support. We are ordinary people coming from working class backgrounds and living pretty precarious lives. We know that we need a popular climate resistance. We know that Climáximo is not the popular climate resistance. We need thousands on board for this to work.
We are also message testing, improving our communication to bridge the gap between who we are (ordinary people with precarious lives and a deep commitment to social justice) and who we are portrayed to be (“activists”, an undefined category insisted on by the media to reproduce an alienated and alienating image).
- Since early 2024, we didn’t skip any mass protests. Housing, anti-racism and social justice have been the main drivers of mass mobilizations (it’s also worth mentioning the march on the centenary of Amílcar Cabral). We are present. We are available. We are committed.
This year, we added another dimension to this national networking. We are reaching out to organizations and movements with intention, openness and honesty. This takes various forms (informal meetings, joint events, in-depth discussions, joint actions).
- As an emergency measure, we defined a “minimum number of participants in a regular meeting”. A meeting with less participants does not start off. Instead we are to launch an internal crisis. (So far, this measure was activated only once – phew!) We are also going through a new restructuring process.
So here are 8 observations, from which I infer 4 meanings, which lead us to 3 conclusions, about which we have established 3 sets of actions. It’s not the whole picture, but I believe it’s a good collection of screenshots of an object in motion.
It was also a major risk-taking exercise. In September 2023, at the launch of the war framework, I had given 10% probability of Climáximo disappearing in one year.
There is also an ongoing “too late / not too late” discussion to which Andreas Malm and Wim Carton’s new book Overshoot make a clarifying contribution. I already wrote on this elsewhere, basically arguing that “1.0ºC is not dead.”
But this is a tautology. It’s also too early to reach a definitive conclusion about the Republican Revolution of 1910. Definitive conclusions exist only at the end of a movie.