Monthly Archives: July 2021

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Communism, noted President Biden last week, is a failed system a universally failed system. And while more than a century of experience seems to have settled this question, there are precincts on the left in which it remains a live controversy. Amid mass protests in Cuba, socialist magazine Jacobin is defending the regime with anti-anti-communist polemics, as is whoever is running the Black Lives Matter messaging on the issue. Democratic Socialists of America is posting messages backing the regime. When the official DSA account stated that the groups ideology leaves behind authoritarian visions of socialism in the dustbin of history, the tweet generated internal backlash and subsequently got deleted even though it didnt even mention Cuba, the mere abstract condemnation of authoritarian socialism was apparently unacceptable.

As a straightforward foreign-policy question, this hardly matters. Cuba is a tiny country, and the United States has few practical tools to help dissidents topple its dictatorship. But there is a much deeper ideological schism lurking beneath the surface here. The Cuba debate is really about communism. Communism has split the American left for generations, and since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the schism has evolved into a broader schism over left-wing authoritarianism and the centrality of liberal democracy.

The important rift is not really between non-communists and communists; the latter, even at their peak in the 1930s, have never accounted for more than a small minority of progressive activists. It instead pits those on the left who frontally oppose communism against those who dont. The share of the left that is anti-anti-communist has always been larger and more potent than the tiny number of actual communists. Anti-anti-communists do not support communism, but they do regard communists as valuable allies who should be criticized only in the gentlest terms, if at all.

This divide between anti-communists and anti-anti-communists is sufficiently profound that, even 30 years after the end of the Cold War, it continues to animate bitter debates among progressive intellectuals. Cold War liberalism is now a zombie ideology, Michael Brenes and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins argued in a Dissent essay earlier this year. It offers preparedness as politics: a desire to inculcate a wartime urgency in the body politic, demanding sacrifice without solidarity and individual introspection as a path to freedom.

The ancient fault lines over anti-communism are especially visible in the lefts schism over what caused Trumps ascension and how to oppose him. The sky is not falling and no lights are flashing red, but Americans have nonetheless embraced a highly charged, counterproductive way of thinking about politics as a new Cold War between democracy and totalitarianism, argued historians Samuel Moyn and David Priestland in a 2017 New York Times op-ed.The anti-communist politics in the United States of the early 1950s were rooted in assumptions that had much in common with those of anti-Trumpism today. Last year, The Nations John Nichols published a book contending that the Democratic Party lost its way when it split off from its communist allies and suggesting that a revived popular front alliance with the far left offered its only hope to defeat Trumpism.

There is a tendency on the center-left to dismiss these sorts of critiques from the left as simply unserious to mock them as idealists with politically unrealistic demands, or perhaps they havent gotten over the 2016 Democratic primary.

But the belief system undergirding these critiques is completely serious. The left is making a profound accusation: that liberalism remains deformed by anti-communism, and only by expurgating this fear of left-wing authoritarianism can it become worthy of progressive ideals. That charge needs to be answered on its own terms.

Communism reached its peak influence in the West during the 1930s, when the Great Depression made it seem possible that capitalism might never recover. American communists gained influence within some labor unions, Hollywood, and by mobilizing an activist core that could make itself felt in New York and some other cities.

During intermittent periods specifically when it advanced Joseph Stalins foreign goals communists would work with mainstream left-of-center parties to form a popular front against Fascism in western democracies. The political logic of the popular front was summarized by a line originally attributed to Alexander Kerensky, the moderate socialist leader of the first Russian revolution: No enemies to the left. Kerenskys rivals to the left took advantage of this policy by overthrowing his government and establishing a Bolshevik dictatorship. Despite this failure, the no enemies to the left strategy retained its romantic appeal.

After World War II, when it was no longer obvious that an alliance with the anti-democratic left was needed to save democracy from Fascism, many liberals split with their former allies. Communists argued that they were merely liberals in a hurry, pursuing the same goals as other progressive Americans, just faster and more aggressively. Many leftists and some liberals believed that the left should treat communists as partners, just as they did before and during the war, and that any attacks on communism would simply redound to the benefit of the right.

Henry Wallace, once FDRs vice-president and the progressive hero of Nicholss book, was the prototypical anti-anti-communist. When the Soviet Union overthrew the democratic government in Czechoslovakia and installed a puppet regime, Wallace blamed Harry Truman for provoking Moscow and compared the coup to allegedly similar American behavior in France. After the Soviet blockade of Berlin, he attacked Truman for airlifting in supplies. Wallace did not need to articulate a positive defense of Stalins regime. He simply attacked any anti-Soviet action or statement even peaceful measures like the Marshall Plan as warlike and aggressive, changing the subject from Soviet abuses to the danger of the anti-communists.

Even though it went into remission at the end of the Cold War, the anti-anti-communist political style has never disappeared completely. It has enjoyed a mini-revival with the recent upsurge in far-left activism around the DSA and magazines such as Jacobin. The recent protests against Cubas regime have vividly displayed the anti-anti-communist lefts unwillingness to condemn a socialist regime, however authoritarian and brutal.

A piece on the Cuba protests by Jacobin staff writer Branko Marcetic expresses the party line. The protests, he argues, are overwhelmingly motivated by economic shortages, the entire responsibility for which rests with the United States due to its embargo. And just because Cubans may be unhappy with their government doesnt mean they want the capitalist feeding frenzy that inevitably follows.

Cubas people may be a little upset, he allows, and in their confusion find themselves blaming their leaders for problems caused by Washington, but theyre very happy with a one-party state and most certainly dont want anything like a free press or fair elections. (Credible polls of Cubas public find strong disapproval for the Communist Party and equally heavy approval of multiparty elections.)

Whether or not to condemn Cubas communist government is hardly a first-order question for the American left. But the persistence of anti-anti-communism, even on a smaller scale, shows the persistence of the no enemies to the left political style on the left that spawned it.

Todays left-wing intellectuals have revived the Cold Warera critique of liberals, who stand accused of glorifying existing political and economic institutions in general and the security state in particular.

The modern Cold War liberals are organized against hostile overseas forces, such as Russia and China, along with internal domestic enemies postmodernism, identity politics, populists [that] seek to undermine liberal democratic values, argued Brenes and Steinmetz-Jenkins. To ward off these dangers, todays liberals prefer the security state over any commitment to institutions of economic redistribution, and the effective training of future elites at the nations most prestigious schools over a program of expansive public education.

They do not quote anybody making these particular arguments, so it is difficult to understand exactly whom the authors have in mind. But it is simply not correct that todays liberals oppose economic redistribution. Just look at Joe Bidens campaign platform to massively ramp up taxation on the wealthy while increasing spending on health care, green energy, and child benefits or his attempt to pass a similar program through Congress. Bidens plan to expand pre-K access and make community college free seems exactly like a program of expansive public education.

They further assert that these awful liberals see not just Trump voters but massive demonstrations and movements against white supremacy and economic inequality as further signs of populism overtaking democracy. They dont name any actual liberals whom this is supposed to describe, and its difficult to believe any exist, given that the George Floyd protests brought along a coalition broad enough to include large swaths of corporate America, and even Mitt Romney (a figure well to the right of anybodys definition of liberal) was marching for Black Lives Matter. The liberal who opposes Trump but also opposes marches against racism and inequality seems to be an ideological archetype they dreamed up and then convinced themselves must be real.

The glue holding together this vague indictment is a conviction that the liberal critique of anti-democratic extremism lies at the roots of liberalisms alleged failures. The liberal emphasis on defending democracy and the Constitution, which has come to the fore in the Trump era, doubles as a cudgel against the far left.

It follows from this belief that liberal rhetoric decrying Trumps threat to democracy is itself exaggerated. The post-election narrative that Trump was both a fascist threat and a bumbling Manchurian candidate reflected the cultural legacy of Cold War liberalism, wrote Brenes and Steinmetz-Jenkins shortly before Trump sent a mob to ransack the Capitol in a bid to overturn the election. Moyn and Priestland (writing four years ago) insisted, There is no real evidence that Mr. Trump wants to seize power unconstitutionally, and there is no reason to think he could succeed.

Liberals, according to their critics, have transposed their Cold Warera belief in defending liberal democracy onto the modern era and conjured imaginary enemies. Their fantasies about defending the republic from Trump are merely a holdover reflex from their misguided fear of communism.

But the fantasy seems to work the other way: The left-wing Cold Warera habit of refusing to acknowledge threats to democracy has left a residue of instinctive skepticism. They suspect liberals suffer congenitally from what Moyn and Priestland call tyrannophobia, the belief that the overwhelmingly important political issue is the threat to our liberal freedoms and institutions, [which] has always been a powerful force in the United States. That suspicion, held over from decades of downplaying the evils of communism, has rendered them so unable to recognize a threat to the republic that they dont even see it until it comes marching down Pennsylvania Avenue.

While the critics of Cold War liberalism exaggerate its hostility to aggressive government action, and minimize the authoritarian danger against which it defines itself, they do correctly identify its definitional core. The Cold War liberals (or their heirs) place more value on democracy than on advancing the progressive agenda. Liberals respect their opponents political rights and are not willing to cast them aside in pursuit of power. As a result of this commitment, they consider it necessary to criticize political allies, especially on questions of democracy and liberal values.

Whether to denounce illiberalism on the left when it occurs or instead to aim all hostile fire rightward is, in my observation, the key divide within the progressive intelligentsia. The no enemies to the left posture makes it difficult to separate the democratic left from its undemocratic elements. If you meet any objection to abuses on your own side by changing the subject to the greater evil on the opposing side, then you never have to define what kinds of ideas or behaviors by your allies you wont accept. If they are willing to justify authoritarian abuses abroad, they would be willing to justify them domestically if given the opportunity.

It is true, of course, that such opportunities are rare. The illiberal left is politically marginal and pales in influence next to the illiberal right, a weakness that is constantly held up to justify withholding criticism. But we dont know what the future holds. The far left certainly hopes it is at the outset of a long march through the institutions (similar to the path taken by the far right to gain control of the Republican Party 60 years ago). Indeed, one reason for the Republican Partys sordid state is that it lacked a moderate faction with the confidence to stand squarely against extremism.

Not long ago, progressives were celebrating the DSAs emergence in national politics as a sign of their own growing strength. If the far left has enough influence to matter as a political force, it has enough influence to merit criticism when deserved.

In their Times op-ed scolding Cold War liberals, Moyn and Priestland warned, Excessive focus on liberal fundamentals, like basic freedoms or the rule of law, could prove self-defeating. This is an odd lesson to draw from history, which has many more examples of just the opposite: Insufficient focus on basic freedoms and the rule of law is self-defeating, and those who proudly defended those values are an example to emulate.

Analysis and commentary on the latest political news from New York columnist Jonathan Chait.

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Leftists and Liberals Are Still Fighting Over the Cold War - New York Magazine

Occupy Oakland protesters hold a sign and a flag depicting Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara during an anti-police march against the Oakland Police Department on February 4, 2012.(Beck Diefenbach/Reuters)

One of the many tricks that leftists have employed to get their way in politics is to mangle the language. That tilts the playing field to their advantage by obscuring what they intend to do. The word liberal was perhaps the first casualty in that battle.

Economics professor Dan Klein of George Mason University here advances ten reasons why we should no longer call leftists liberal.

A slice: If we are to stand up for liberal civilization, we must first appreciate the great arc of liberalismthat is, the development of liberalism, beginning, say, with the printing press in the fifteenth century and its subsequent ups and downs, and across liberal civilization, not just the American scene. Such higher appreciation is sabotaged by calling leftists liberal.

I am with him 100 percent. My only quibble is that he suggests the term progressive, which is also misleading. The authoritarian ideas those people favor do not lead to progress; they lead to regress, back to earlier systems of top-down control by powerful elites and institutions.

Lets call them statists, authoritarians, or just control freaks.

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Yes, Lets Reclaim the Word Liberal - National Review

If you think American democracy is holding on by its fingernails, you wont get an argument from the Rev. William Barber II. Yet hes quick to let you know that shining a spotlight on the overlooked and struggling among us offers our best hope for less divisive politics and a more perfect union.

Barber, a prominent pastor and civil rights activist, is a driving force behind the Poor Peoples Campaign, a movement fashioned after Martin Luther King Jr.s 1968 anti-poverty push. Its also the way Barber and his allies aim to bring poor and low-income individuals into a union whose votes, he says, would fundamentally change the economic architecture of the nation.

At the moment Barber is eyeing Texas as a place to make that point more visible when the Poor Peoples Campaign stages a 27-mile Selma-to-Montgomery-style march from Georgetown, Texas, to Austin starting on July 27.

I spent an hour with Barber on the phone recently when he came to Austin to speak at a rally in support of statehouse Democrats who had decamped to Washington, D.C., to prevent the Republican majority from passing into law a retooling of the states election rules. The legislators have gone to D.C., he told me, but Texas is the eye of the storm.

As Barber sees it, support of unfettered voting rights is intrinsically linked to five overarching issues that prevent the nation from moving forward: systemic racism; poverty; ecological devastation; the denial of health care and the war economy; and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism.

We must address these injustices simultaneously, but we can only do it with a fusion coalition that has people of every race, creed and color that can change the narrative and deal power. He calls his vision the Third Reconstruction, a nonviolent crusade that contrasts sharply with the forces that attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Barber, thoughtful and engaging, a recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, is ubiquitous. His YouTube entries include a rafters-rattling speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention calling for Americans to wield a moral defibrillator to jump-start the ailing heart of our democracy. His January 2021 National Cathedral sermon implores President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to join in closing the nations gaps in wealth and opportunity, to become repairers of the breach, which is also what Barber calls his activist outreach organization.

Admirers have likened Barbers coalition-building skills and ambitious goals to those of King. I dont know if Ill get to see the fullness of the movement, he said. But what I do know is this is a seed that is germinating.

Barber maintains that some 140 million people, 43% of the U.S. population, live in some form of economic hardship. Reasonable critics push back against conflating those living below the official poverty line with low-income earners whose incomes are considerably higher, even though experts can agree a crisis of diminishing expectations isnt good for the country.

Barber makes a habit of adopting public policy views that dont preach to the choir. As Sean Illing put it on Vox: Barber is a progressive, yet hes still hard to pin down politically. He rejects the language of left and right and instead leans on the religious values of the Gospel to push a strong anti-poverty agenda . He speaks in morally clarifying terms about the plight of low-income people while refusing to engage in diversionary culture war fights.

Barber urges people to look beyond media hot takes and their own socioeconomic bubbles to think more deeply about root causes. He is sharply critical of Donald Trump and Trump-ensorcelled political leaders who, especially in a time of COVID, are more interested in cementing political power, he said, than they are keeping people out of caskets.

Meanwhile, Democrats have focused so relentlessly on middle-class voters in recent years, he contends, theyve stopped talking at all to poor and low-wealth folks, of all races and colors and, in doing so, a lot of ... people just said, Well, were not going to participate anymore.

Its there that Barber sees an opening. Were poor and low-income individuals to organize around an agenda, he said, they would have the votes to fundamentally determine who sits in the White House, the Senate, the governors mansion.

So how do you build such a coalition, critics ask, when poor and low-income whites arent famous for siding with poor and low-income Black people? Looking at the world in dualistic terms is shortsighted, Barber said.

Americas liberal versus conservative political discourse is too puny for what were facing, he told me. Some things are not about left and right. Its about right and wrong. Its about constitutional, unconstitutional.

Our politics are volatile, he said, because some people would rather just burn the house down in the attempt to somehow hold onto their greed and power. But I still dont believe they represent the majority of this country, and thats why we are mobilizing.

Extremism is marbled throughout our history, Barber said; Trump has charismatized it, he didnt create it.

What were seeing today, he said, are pieces of what has never been fully eradicated from our body politic and our society, and all that means is, its our time now, that [in] every generation there must be truth-tellers, moral dissenters and people who will stand up and say, Its time to take a few more steps toward being a more perfect union.

The Black Lives Matter protests that rocked the nation following George Floyds murder in 2020 signified a turning point in Barbers view that is still, in some ways, in search of an agenda. Regressive public policy may not kill in the immediate, highly emotional way of a cop shooting somebody, but what often gets overlooked is how many Americans die needlessly each year from poverty and poor health care.

The problem in fixing our problems, he said, isnt a lack of resources or ideas, its a lack of consciousness, the absence of a movement that is putting a face on these problems, because thats the only way you can turn the heart of the nation.

Youve got to show the nation [to] herself before you can tell her about herself, which is why the Poor Peoples Campaigns goal is to put a face on it.

Last Sunday, from the pulpit of a neighborhood church in Georgetown, Barber said every generation has its Goliath-like problems that wont go away without action. He urged the congregants, as he often does wherever he goes, not to remain metaphorically seated, but to speak up and stand forward in the breach.

This day he was talking about the genesis of the upcoming march to the statehouse in Austin. Were not going to allow the burial of the things that are right, he vowed.

In our earlier phone conversation, Barber said, Theres never been a time in this country where you have had a fundamental change of systems whether it was slavery, denial of womens right to vote, denial of union rights without a movement to sustain the fight. Its always taken movements to put the mirror up to tell the truth.

And whether youre rejected because of your race or class, your differing abilities, your sexuality, your poverty, its up to the ignored and rejected to lead a moral revival.

They have to become the consciousness of the nation in order for the nations consciousness to be changed. Its Barbers article of faith that the time has come. Theres a hunger, he said. People are ready.

Tracy Dahlby is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.

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Americas liberal vs. conservative discourse is too puny for what we are facing - The Dallas Morning News

This weeks Liberal Media Scream features the latest anti-Trump outburst from Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein and his worst hits list.

Sunday on CNNs Reliable Sources, his main venting venue, he hyped up his prior attacks on former President Donald Trump, claiming that the Republican is a war criminal.

His over-the-top invective against Trump is nothing new, as a quick trip through the CNN archive shows. In 2017, he declared of Trumps decision to remove the FBI director, This is a potentially more dangerous situation than Watergate. In 2020, he was repeating his Watergate comparison as he charged Trump allies had now joined hands with a tyrant. Last fall, he described Trumps response to COVID as homicidal negligence before declaring we are witnessing the Mad King in the final days of his reign.

Our Liberal Media Scream partner Brent Baker, the vice president of the Media Research Center, drew up a list of Bernsteins greatest anti-Trump hits:

I think this is a potentially more dangerous situation than Watergate, and were at a very dangerous moment. And thats because we are looking at the possibility that the president of the United States and those around him during an election campaign colluded with a hostile foreign power to undermine the basis of our democracy: free elections. Reliable Sources, May 14, 2017.

Lets look at what Watergate was because it was about a criminal president who acted as a tyrant. And what we have here now is the Senate of the United States, through the Republican leadership and membership, has now joined hands with a tyrant. CNN Newsroom, Jan. 31, 2020.

His response has been homicidal negligence. He has failed to protect the American people and rather to put his own interest of reelection and holding on to the office of the presidency in front of the health and well-being of the American people. CNN Newsroom, Oct. 3, 2020.

We are witnessing the Mad King in the final days of his reign, willing to scorch the Earth of his country and bring down the whole system to undermine our whole democracy, strip it of its legitimacy, poison the confidence of our people in our institutions and the constitution for Donald Trumps own petulant, selfish, rabid ends. CNN New Day, Nov. 20, 2020.

I think we need to calmly step back and maybe look at Trump in a different context. He is Americas, our own American war criminal, of a kind weve never experienced before ... In international law, there have been, quote, 'crimes against humanity.' I think what were talking about, Trumps crimes as an American war criminal in his own country that he has perpetrated upon our people. Reliable Sources, Sunday.

Baker explains our weekly pick: Bernstein is a one-note musician, trying every week to ramp up his singularly focused anger to get some attention. With so much unhinged animus for Trump, its hard to imagine anyone considers his rants anything more than entertainment from a guy trying, but failing, to match Trumps skill at creating a negative public image for his opponents through creative terminology.

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Rating: FIVE out of FIVE screams.

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Tags: Washington Secrets, President Trump, Carl Bernstein, Media, CNN

Original Author: Paul Bedard

Original Location: Liberal Media Scream: The worst of Trump hater Carl Bernstein

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Liberal Media Scream: The worst of Trump hater Carl Bernstein - Yahoo News

Ahead of the United Nations COP26 conference on climate change this fall, climate activists are raising the alarm for the planets future. Extinction Rebellion (XR) is one group sure to have an aesthetically punchy presence bound to be followed by the usual liberal media praise and right-wing mockery of its stunts.

XR has, in times of growth, enjoyed an impressive digital presence. Dynamic and shareable content across platforms has spread its ideas and advertised its actions. But as I saw in my own former role as an admin on XRs social media pages it soon became clear from the messages coming from a minority of supporters that its politics could easily lend weight to reactionary narratives.

This was intensified by the pandemic, which brought a faster pipeline from ostensibly radical liberal tendencies that spoke of anti-politics and post-politics, to a certain comfort with nativist dogmas. In the first instance, this lack of political sharpness manifested itself in XRs call for a depoliticization of the climate issue, calling for a Citizens Assembly that would supposedly take the whole problem in hand.

But, with the reduction of travel-related pollution during lockdowns, enthusiasm that nature was healing complemented more reactionary sentiments. XR social media suggested that borders should remain closed permanently, as a measure for solving the climate crisis. Similarly, when XR came out explicitly against socialist politics, this will have surely alienated many groups working alongside it.

From buzzwords like nonviolence and horizontalism, to campaigns that appear soft on the police and take a hard line against population growth, XRs failings ultimately stem from one central problem: the absence of a strong class politics. To discover its radical energy, this green movement must become red be clear about the causes of climate chaos and back just solutions to climate chaos that can mobilize the social majority.

Extinction Rebellion has suffered a long decline. While it has always relied heavily on its social media presence, this red line on the graph below shows mentions of the groups main account on Twitter over the course of the past twelve months.

The small spike in interest in January and recent signs of life are still relatively quiet for an international movement that has repeatedly drawn mainstream media attention. But aside from those blips, XR is dead in terms of sustained relevance to political discourse not least given the political positions it has taken.

This partly owes to the effects of the pandemic on discussions of environmental problems. For the more bourgeois sections of climate activist milieu, COVID-19 transmission made it easier to explicitly support measures against immigration and population growth.

This isnt new. Both before and during the pandemic, British broadcaster David Attenborough has periodically intervened in mainstream media to claim that humans have overrun the planet. An October 2020 study by Jarrow Insights showed that the most popular online pages featuring Attenborough are articles where he is quoted as highlighting population growth as the central cause of climate catastrophe.

Attenborough is also a key patron of Population Matters, a think tank which aims to combat human population growth. In its original incarnation as the Optimum Population Trust it advocated zero migration in the UK as if migration to the UK is the issue that will determine the fate of humanity. The lack of an anti-imperialist analysis of the factors driving migration is, however, endemic to climate groups, from generally liberal movements like XR to the more obviously reactionary think tanks like Population Matters.

These population-cutting narratives are, indeed, common in XRs campaigning. Take, for example, this video posted on XRs UK Twitter account in May. It promotes a #RebellionOfOne, advocating for young women to commit to giving up plans for starting a family that is, saving the planet by not having children. Im taking up a rebellion of one because Im grieving for children that I did not conceive, the activist summarizes.

XR is fundamentally driven not by collective solidarity but by a politics of individualized sorrow and bad feeling. Instead of offering an alternative to capitalist atomization, XR reflects it back onto itself. The bourgeois climate movement is, to recycle Karl Marxs line on religion, a sigh of the oppressed creature; albeit a sense of oppression mostly worked up by middle-class liberals from core capitalist nations.

Predictably, XRs media wing has facilitated those narratives, as activists share Guardian articles parroting think tank advocates for population decline. Yet, a 2015 briefing by such a mainstream institution as Oxfam found that the poorest half of the global population are responsible for only around 10% of global emissions yet live overwhelmingly in the countries most vulnerable to climate change while the richest 10% of people in the world are responsible for around 50% of global emissions.

Groups like XR are keener to focus on anti-human myths than on the root cause of the climate problem; namely, capitalisms necessity for infinite growth, production, and exploitation on a finite planet. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk escaping to space is a clear opportunity to show where capitalist climate destruction leaves the elite, while workers toil in a burning planet.

An honest recognition of capitalisms centrality as the agent of climate destruction would lead to the understanding that we should either abolish it or expect extinction, rather than rely on pragmatic tinkering that stands above politics. Instead, XR offers a naive liberal utopianism, dismissing socialism out of hand while relying on short-termist fixes like the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill. It is in critical danger of reducing environmentalism to ineffective moral protest.

This is, ultimately, the cost of having a politics irrelevant to the most oppressed victims of the climate and class struggle, from London to the Global South. Tellingly, the graphs that depict Extinction Rebellions online traction, or lack thereof, have gathered data from a period of twelve months in which Black Lives Matter and criminal justice campaigns have been at the forefront of left-wing organizing.

In the UK, arguably the central struggle of the summer has been to Kill the Bill, i.e. stop the Tory legislation that would hand police powers to target and criminalize protests that cause annoyance. The campaign has brought together trade unions, migrant rights groups, GRT (gypsy, Roma, and traveler) activists, sex workers, and even Extinction Rebellion supporters. However, in the absence of a class-based analysis that puts the Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Bill in the wider context of neoliberal authoritarianism, fully coherent with the SpyCops Bill and anti-migrant Hostile Environment, XR has been timid once again. The group even attempted to rename the campaign to Kill the Act, in order to escape from accusations of supporting police abolition. Any such accusation would surely have rung hollow anyway, given XRs own tendency for police cooperation.

XR posters instructing activists to peacefully get arrested as a display of nonviolent resistance have led to speculation about XR being an op a covert police operation mimicking a progressive movement in order to root out activists. While one might doubt that this is literally true, the real question is whether anything would be different if it was. If XRs actions are so blatantly counterproductive, then something deeper is clearly wrong with its approach.

Activism whose strategy centers on performatively being put in handcuffs may be OK for some white middle-class people who dont have to worry too much if they get arrested. But effective campaign strategies ought to aim higher. That would mean conscious working-class mobilization that recognizes the brutality of capitalism and its destruction of the climate, rather than wasting valuable crowdfund money subsidizing activists on a conveyor belt to the court system.

In fact, discussion of XRs relationship with the police has become toxic for its image more broadly. Nolan MacGregor, director of strategy at Jarrow Insights, said that policing makes up a much larger share of XR-related discourse, and spikes pretty consistently whenever people are talking about XR, adding that the organizations relationship with the police is one of the defining features of XR discourse.

MacGregor suggests that most of the posts mentioning XR and the police are not supportive of XR, and that most of the time XR and police were mentioned together, it was to criticise XR. Their activists almost never liked to talk about it, according to the social media data specialist.

For MacGregor, the graph shows that every time people start talking about XR, they start arguing about the cops. This is part of the reason why XR has lost steam. The critique of its relationship with the police has really caught on, especially since a lot of the people XR tries to appeal to middle-class young people have been paying very close attention to Black Lives Matter.

He says their research on XR has revealed that they have not had a single moment where they escaped that criticism.

Further tweets from recent weeks now deleted have further weakened any hope of XR proving strong anti-imperialist credentials, or even being able to speak beyond its existing bubble. Migrant workers who have moved to London in response to often US-backed war and terror are hardly going to find much in common with such patronizing messaging. Dog-whistling migrants as a factor for disease and nonviolent activism as a revolutionary strategy is not just insulting, but factually incorrect.

In the preface to Frantz Fanons The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre implores the reader to get this into your head if violence were only a thing of the future, if exploitation and oppression never existed on earth, perhaps displays of nonviolence might relieve the conflict. But if the entire regime, even your nonviolent thoughts, is governed by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passiveness serves no other purpose but to put you on the side of the oppressors.

As mainstream media cover the run-up to COP26, groups like XR must get it into their heads. Our wretched Earth needs class and climate organizing, not a funnel into prison for young activists. The next popular climate movement can only avoid a slow death if its politics are as red as they are green.

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Extinction Rebellion's Liberal Moralism Can't Save the Planet - Jacobin magazine