Gilet Jaunes

By Nathan Thanki - Open Democracy, April 12, 2019

In the past year, concerns of civilizational collapse and unprecedented transformations of society and the economy have gone from being fringe ideas of eco-socialists to populating the mainstream debate in the Global North. The “Green New Deal” is gaining traction both amongst US Democrats and the UK’s Labour Party. There’s a growing desire for positive and visionary ideas, and a growing recognition of the scale and time frame of the challenge.

We can see the same desire in the explosion onto the scene of “Extinction Rebellion” and the phenomenal School Strike for Climate. While these initiatives represent different and internally diverse politics, they all speak to the same tendency: a profound sense of panic among people in the Global North.

There is much to praise and be heartened by in the shifting politics of the North, but there is a danger of missteps which could roll back the modest advances climate justice movements have made in the past few decades, and even contribute to the political forces we oppose. We need to debate the strategic value of the choices being made. We cannot afford to be uncritical, nor nihilistic.

By the DSA Ecosocialist Working Group - Democratic Socialists of America - February 28, 2019

The IWW has not endorsed this document; however, individual members of the IWW EUC have helped shape it.

Humankind has reached a moment of existential crisis. Human activity is causing disastrous climate disruption and Earth’s sixth mass extinction event, triggering critical losses of biodiversity. We are already locked in for global warming that will have catastrophic effects, and we are on a slippery path to our own extinction. The 2018 Special Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns unequivocally that “without societal transformation and rapid implementation of ambitious greenhouse gas reduction measures, pathways to limiting warming to 1.5°C and achieving sustainable development will be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.”

Yet, the crisis we face exceeds ecological breakdown. Deepening inequality, suppressed democracy, precarious jobs, racial and gendered violence, border hostility, and endless wars make up the terrain on which climate destabilization will be unleashed. The most vulnerable members of society will be hit hardest, first, and suffer most.

We must solve the climate crisis and the inequality crisis together. Climate remedies in the context of austerity will produce a popular backlash, as we see in the yellow vest protests against a fuel tax. Corporations profiting from fossil extraction have long worked to turn workers against environmentalists, claiming that clean energy would be a job killer. But working class and poor people’s quality of life, gravely threatened by climate disruption, would greatly improve in a just transition. Because corporate capitalism rewards extraction to concentrate wealth, it must be replaced by a sustainable economy. A Green New Deal can begin the transition from exploitative capitalism to democratic ecological socialism.

The urgency and scale of the crisis we face demand solutions that meet the magnitude of this moment. The ineffectual gradualism and corporate obedience demonstrated by the U.S. government’s climate response has proven to be a dead-end for humanity. We need rapid, systemic transformation that heals the stratification of wealth and power while putting decarbonization and justice at the forefront.

We need a Green New Deal. We demand a Green New Deal, and we demand that it serve people and planet—not profit.

Read the report (PDF).

By staff - Fossil Free, December 14, 2018

The climate crisis is hitting unevenly- those who are least responsible for causing it and who are already affected by other forms of injustice, suffer the most.

The Gilets Jaunes movement sprung up in France, responding to a decision by the French government to increase taxes on fuel starting in 2019, officially to finance incentives for the purchase of electric vehicles. In reality, only a fraction of the money collected from the tax would have gone to finance green programs: most of this tax would’ve been used to bridge the gap in the budget that the cancellation of the tax on the highest incomes has created. Rather than holding accountable those most responsible for causing the climate crisis – for instance, French fossil fuel giant Total – the French government seemed to want to force the less privileged to pay for the consequences of climate change.

While the situation in France is still very volatile, the Gilets Jaunes movement carries the potential for a much deeper learning and change, one that truly addresses the roots of many intertwined problems. There is an urgent need to bring about a rapid transition away from the fossil fuel economy and to address the disempowerment and disenfranchisement of vast parts of the population in many democracies, as well as an economic paradigm that governments have so far been unable or unwilling to challenge. The first lesson to learn from the Gilets Jaunes is that tackling climate change cannot be a matter of simply taxing fossil fuels.

At times it is very unclear what the Gilets Jaunes movement stands for. Day after day, the demands shift, as does the composition of the movement and its relationship with established political forces. Some of the first local protests were led or facilitated by right wing extremists inciting racist, islamophobic and homophobic acts. Some sectors of the Gilets Jaunes are still turning this into an excuse to scapegoat migrants and other minorities – this needs to be forcefully rejected and denounced. There can be no place in any truly popular movement for acts and words that exclude, marginalize or discriminate people based on their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation.

At the same time, while the ultimate shape that the Gilets Jaunes are going to take is still unclear, and a risk of it being hijacked by far-right narratives is very present, we still need to investigate and understand the ultimate causes of this uprising.