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The Missing Agreement among Organizers

The Missing Agreement among Organizers – What does the climate emergency change in our strategies and organizations?

 

In the last few years, the climate justice movement made several sharp turns in strategy as well as tactics.

Many social movements organizers did not show enough curiosity to these experiments, partly because they felt that their analysis and historical experience gives them better insight on what works (rather than ill-informed experimentation by newcomers), and partly because climate justice activists themselves did not write up their own strategies beyond training materials (trainings give exact instructions whereas an article would explore more contingencies and uncertainties). This is a problem. Climate justice organizers are rifting apart from other organizers.1 This rift is organizational, strategic and also emotional. And none of it is imperative. However, it is imperative to make sense of it. What’s the disagreement, really?

 

A Disclaimer on Emotions

We are in no condition to lecture you on emotional intelligence, but we will make disclaimer on the use of emotions in this text. Emotions are action-requiring neurological programs. Emotions are not irrelevant, they are at the center of everything humans do. Emotions are not to be avoided or valenced, they are all useful for an essential purpose. Our actions stem from our emotions and no action is possible without emotions.2

If we think of our political activism as attempts at changing the world (a series of acts and actions), then a political strategy is also an emotional framework. While we seem to disagree on how urgent is the urgent of climate emergency, our intuition is that some of the over-the-surface disagreements are resulting from an emotional mismatch. Therefore, we will be referring to emotions a lot in this text.

 

Agreements

When we start talking about the climate emergency in a strategy meeting with other organizers, the emotional part is glossed over. It is because there is an implicit assumption that there is no new information there useful for a strategy meeting.

Now that we are not in a (yet another) meeting environment, we propose to stop and reflect on this assumption.

We seem to agree that the climate crisis is causing unprecedented suffering for the majority of the world and that the devastation will grow exponentially. So we have some agreement at the political/programmatic level: we need public policies to cut emissions, and those cuts need to take into account social justice.

We seem to agree that the climate crisis is caused, sustained and fed by capitalism. So this is an agreement at the ideological level: climate crisis cannot be solved without dismantling capitalism

We seem to agree that the values we shall most refer to are justice, equality and freedom. A sense of violation of any of these values produces indignation and anger, which are the main emotional motors for mobilization.

We seem to agree that the information on climate crisis produces anxiety and grief in individuals, due to the sense of deadlines/urgency, the fear of a future in collapse and the magnitude of the problem to be solved. We also seem to agree that these emotions are not useful for politics. We may need to take climate anxiety and climate grief into consideration, but we are not going to activate these emotions as part of our strategy.

Summing up, we want to activate in the majorities emotions of the anger category, in the framework of justice, in order to mobilize them against the socioeconomic system within climate deadlines.

These are loads of agreements. So, aren’t we on the same page? What’s the catch? Why do climate justice organizers look so impermeable in strategy conversations, and what are they insisting on?

 

New Agreements

The climate emergency, once comprehended in its entirety, contains meaning for organizers that changes everything.

Every month we see climate scientists becoming horrified by the speed at which the climate crisis is escalating. We are risking the true possibility of having entire countries becoming inhabitable within our lifetime. Stopping this requires cutting half of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and for Portugal this means cuts of 80-90% by 2030. In a five years period, if we fail to dismantle capitalism while cutting global emissions to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis, we risk losing everything.

The meaning for organizers is that this changes everything, because we have very tight deadlines. Those deadlines don’t apply only for the climate justice movement, those deadlines apply to everything social movements are fighting for.

If we are talking about major structural change, if we think it requires mobilizing thousands of people, if we agree that all of this has to happen within shrinking deadlines, then we the organizers must have some sleepless nights: What’s the plan to achieve this in time? Why do we think our current plan is the best? Why do we think our current plan is working, how can we notice when it’s not working and prove it?

In a nutshell, we need emotions from the anxiety category. This emotion, among organizers, is imperative. Climate emergency changes everything. It is not one more issue. It is a framework for all the issues – a framework that introduces a tiny timeframe and a massive task. So, the anxiety we need is not about impacts of the climate crisis; it is about our strategies.

This anxiety, once acknowledged and processed, will – hopefully – provoke a recognition of our failures and impose an unprecedented learning discipline. This means that, when we face this anxiety we need to learn to neither avoid it or be swallowed by it but to embrace it and navigate on it, allowing you to focus on what really needs to be done and what is possible to be done in each moment.

We need to plan for victory in the short-term (something no other social movement was objectively forced to do), we need to change our plans abruptly (an adaptive and responsive organizational culture most of our groups don’t have), and we need to work at the speed of trust (an environment most of our groups lack desperately). This is a disruption to our business-as-usual as organizations and as organizers. Nobody will cause this disruption, we will cause it to ourselves.

A strong sense of anxiety will result in a deep, continued, honest reflection process. This reflection will be organizational as well as personal. It will then lead to another set of emotions.

We will notice (at least) two things. First, we will understand the need to break with our habits of the past. These habits are organizational, tactical, communicational, personal and emotional. To be clear, this is a violent realization. Second, we will have to come to terms with many called the crisis of the left. The scope of this crisis will change qualitatively once we start off from the anxiety standpoint. We will feel overwhelmed with and frustrated by the prevalent and normalized ambition deficit.

Both of these realizations (and many more) might then result in a sense of confusion and disorientation. As these recede, they will be followed by heavier emotions. These emotions will be grief and anguish. Once again, we are not talking about grieving the loss of biodiversity or the tens of millions of people who lost their livelihoods forever; we are not talking about climate grief.3 We are talking about grieving our own political culture: our strategies, organizational cultures, theories of change, narratives, and tactics. Most of them are empirically proven to be ineffective and inadequate at this point. To unblock the learning discipline our times require of us, we will have to let go of them. Grief in this sense, is necessary for moving forwards. It is an experience we will have to refer to in a regular basis. We will have to become fluid in grief’s language, open to introduce it, embracing it and allow the grief to support you in letting it go what is not working and moving on to honesty with ourselves. With this radical honesty at hand, we can then freely activate the extremely useful anxiety agreement and explore, experiment, risk, and fail forwards.

 

Taking Stock and Moving Forwards

We already know that we already agree on anger and on system change. But that’s the old game. Climate crisis puts a completely different meaning to politics. We, among organizers, have to agree on shared and prevalent anxiety about what are we doing.

This is not to insist on specific strategies or tactics. This is an insistence on an agreement of emotions. The emotional commongrounds (and the lack thereof) condition what is possible, what is acceptable and what is expected. We have to close the gap quickly, because we still have a lot of work to do.

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1 Throughout this text, we have a simple definition of organizer in mind. If we think that people should do certain things for the world to be a better place, then an organizer is anyone who plans, proposes, organizes and acts for people to do those certain things.

2 The link from emotion to action is, most of the times, not direct and immediate. It is socially constructed and also conditioned by personal histories and hormones.

3 This is also an emotion that can emerge, and should therefore be taken into account. Nevertheless the action that follow it although can influence how you connect with people and living beings around you, will not directly change the tactics or strategies being used.

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