WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, AG Galatea: Warming Up: Interview with Peter Gelderloos on climate change and the fight to change it (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

Translation from the original "Heating Up: An Interview with Peter

Gelderloos on Climate Change and the Fight to Change Everything" ---The

summer just ended brought us another record heat wave, while the
disasters caused and fueled Climate change has affected countries around
the world, leaving entire human communities devastated by floods, fires
and storms. While this "new normal" has brought climate change to the
fore in popular consciousness, on the other we have seen the launch of
new far-right conspiracies and the push from the neoliberal center for
the same tired and fallacious solutions to climate change. of
consumerist lifestyles.

We caught up with longtime anarchist author and organizer Peter
Gelderloos to talk about the current moment, the path ahead for
autonomous movements, and the harsh realities we face.

It's Going Down (IGD): You address the topic of climate change in your
book " The Solutions Are Already Here ". What do you think of the
historical period we are living in?

Peter Gelderloos: I think we are at a very critical moment where the
mainstream is identifying a turning point in reporting regarding recent
and recurring extreme weather events such as: the Northern Hemisphere's
hottest summer in historical memory, the worst flooding in the Greek
history after a rare tropical storm in the Mediterranean - with heavy
rains arriving every few weeks after the largest wild fires ever
recorded in Europe -, the first tropical storm warning in California -
caused by a rare hurricane in the Pacific -, the largest wild fires in
history recorded in the so-called Canada...
I think this is a critical moment because the way we are being
influenced by the media, NGOs, academics and governments about the
current crisis is a huge lie and, at the same time, an enormous truth.
Truth first: The way Earth's atmosphere has been altered is visible in
our daily lives; It's killing people and getting worse. This truth is
important because it is an urgent matter of our survival - and therefore
a legitimate matter of self-defense - and it reiterates that we can
trust our experiences and observations as long as we are effectively
grounded and attentive to the world around us. We can insert our daily
life and our experience in a corner of the world, precisely within a
global, supportive and cohesive narrative.
The lie is this: these deaths are unprecedented, climate change is
needed to understand these deaths, and we can trust current scientific
models based on tipping points, "when it's too late" predictions, and
emissions compensation and reduction programs.

IGD: Was there a turning point - whatever that means - this summer? We
seem to have reached a peak in popular consciousness after this record
heatwave. Does all this mean anything?

Peter Gelderloos: There was no turning point and the apparent peak of
consciousness was the triumph of false consciousness. Because the truth
is, it was already too late. Depending on how you look at the world and
what life forms you evaluate, it was too late a thousand years ago, 531
years ago, 101 years ago and 50 years ago. The truth is that for decades
entire ecosystems and many species that composed them have been
completely destroyed. Tens of millions of human beings die every year
due to this enormous ecological crisis. For centuries, extractivist
corporate forms (responsible for the ecological crisis) have been
colonizing and eradicating those corporate forms that resist human
oppression and take care of their ecosystems.
Although the scientific method[serves]to produce knowledge - the value
of which is demonstrable - models for predicting ecosystem breaking
points and the rate of climate change have proven to be largely
unreliable and generally conservative. As a result, this specific branch
of science has proven to be too flawed in having strategic weight -
especially when we are faced with life-or-death choices.
The "climate crisis" is a framework belonging to those who seek to kill
us and profit from it. Climate is just one part of a larger,
interconnected crisis. And if we focus only on climate, we will never
see the root causes and worst forms of suffering that are occurring.
This crisis is not man-made. It is not "anthropogenic". It is caused by
those human beings who have surrendered their lives to deeply
extractivist and oppressive institutions. Such institutions have the
power to force all of us to align and participate in
their[deadly]society - regardless of whether we decide to resist and/or
turn the other way. This framework, fundamentally, is the State.
As I demonstrated in " Worshiping Power ," all states are extractivist
and all states, historically, have been ecocidal states. A common trait
of those who want to reform the Leviathan (XR activists, climate
researchers, paid NGO activists, authoritarian Marxists or
crypto-authoritarians), is to hide or decentralize the role of the state
in this crisis. Previously, states limited themselves to causing
regional ecological collapses - actions that served the purpose of
colonial expansion.
The extractivist systems that states represent must expand, otherwise
they die. Revolutions, over the millennia, have overthrown states but
have failed to cultivate a sufficiently global and systemic
consciousness. The only alternative[remaining at that point]was for
states to create a world system. And that meant inventing the
possibility of a global ecological crisis.
The modern state has found a suitable engine in capitalism and in white
supremacy a devouring vision of the world capable of organizing
intercontinental colonization. On planet Earth there is no capitalism
that is not colonial and, therefore, racial; there is no capitalism
without a State and there is no State that is not extractivist and
patriarchal - and therefore ecocidal and oppressive -, the enemy of
every form of life.

IGD: This summer we have seen a series of neoliberal articles based on "
life hacks " and how to adapt your body to extreme temperatures and, in
Greece, a wave of anti- migrant sentiment as fires and conspiracy
theories. How can we react to all this?

Peter Gelderloos: It is inevitable that when there is false
consciousness around a crisis like this, hegemonic responses will be
individualistic: consumers with money to spend ethically and citizens
with the right to vote for the best candidates will be privileged. Both
will revitalize the institutions that caused this crisis. Or they will
promote a pseudo-community like the nation-state - with its artificial
and bloody borders. Their cast will be made up of scapegoats and
villains who are almost always pure inventions or groups of oppressed
people (too far away to understand and close enough to pose a threat).
Fortunately, there is a synthesis between strategies and objectives,
especially when we are honest with ourselves and[know]what we are
facing. Patriarchal society and colonial capitalism, organized by the
state, are enemies of life. They have proven that we cannot share this
planet together and, above all, we do not need them because they are not
living beings. They represent a hard limit. Only by overcoming that
limit is it possible to have a world in which many worlds fit together.
The main strategic obstacles regarding the destruction of the State are
the two[political institutional]arms: the Left and the Right (meaning
the Left in its historical sense and not in its Anglophone and amnesiac
nonsense, in which vague things are aired, not specified, good and
inconsistent). To generalize, the left renews, updates, and revitalizes
oppressive structures, giving us black cops, millionaire women, and
recycled toilet paper, while the right punishes resistance through
eradication. Going into detail, the left also carries out policing
activities and the right seeks to renew oppressive structures (such as
the nation-state). But the point is that both serve the state. In
moments of social peace they are more coordinated while in moments of
social upheaval, like the current one, they are unable to see beyond
their mythologies, providing alibis and suspecting each other of being a
threat to Leviathan.

IGD: We are seeing ecosystems affected by phenomena such as melting ice
and other signs of impacts on life support systems. W hat will happen in
the next few years? And when we are ready , what impact will all this
have on so-called North America?

Peter Gelderloos: To answer this question it is necessary to know each
specific bio-region (its specific human and ecological histories). The
consumerist movement models that are prevalent in North America,
especially in middle-class environments, cannot answer this question.
The inability to listen does not allow[answers]. White men and people
are all socialized into not listening; therefore we must emphasize the
need to learn to listen. Those who have accepted Western civilization
and treat, for example, their smartphones with reverence[while
mocking]the people around them, will never be able to give adequate and
specific answers to the question of collective survival. Those who scoff
at those people who listen to migratory birds, forests, mountains, have
no clue and will not even be able to find the real conversation that
provides these answers.
Here's an analytical tool that might help. How do you define a person?
We should consider that a person is any being where dialogue is possible
and meaningful. So a policeman or a millionaire, although human, are not
people. The blue jay outside my window is a person. We give our
attention and care to people, because if they are people then we can
share a world with them. We aim our anger and destructive capabilities
at institutions and their loyal robots - for they will never share a
world with us.

IGD: The great climate movement has taken to the streets at a time when
things are going badly . As anarchists and participants in autonomous
movements , what is the way forward?

Peter Gelderloos: This is a conversation that I think needs to happen in
every corner of the world. Although I suspect fewer patterns will emerge
than discussions about any particular ecosystem (i.e.: what it needs to
do to survive and adapt).
Over the past twenty years, on every continent, we have toppled
long-standing regimes, we have defeated the police, we have pushed for
anti-racist, anti-colonial and ecological consciousness to temporarily
become the norm, and we have helped marginalized groups gain space for
survival - for healing, for joy. (Not "an us who helps them", but "an us
who helps ourselves and another us who is in solidarity with other us
who help themselves"). We have achieved things that, in the previous two
decades, seemed unimaginable.
And our wave of powerful rebellions clearly preceded the economic crisis
of 2007/2008. It is vital to remember and pass this on, especially as
the priests of materialism are emerging from their well-deserved graves
and trying to tell us that we are secondary objects in the calculations
of global monetary systems - despite having been proven, last time we
heard, to be fatally wrong. We are not these objects. We are living
beings affected by numerous oppressive systems - all of which intersect
and operate in quantifiable and unquantifiable ways. We make choices and
these choices are important. We are neither individuals nor identical
objects.
Since that wave of rebellions, however, we have lost ground in most of
the world. We must ask ourselves why, deeply and without fear of what we
might learn. And we must share these lessons because our survival
depends on them.
I believe that in many places we will discover how we succumbed to
repression, did not learn the lessons from previous generations -
particularly about how to survive -, and why we did not value the roles
of care, healing and survival - despite valuing attack. And I say this
as someone who, during his lifetime, tried to build our capacity to
attack and to validate those attacks - given how we were statu
pacificatu in the 1990s and 2000s. But no oppressive society can be
destroyed by violence alone. denial; and those who attack must also know
how to survive the reactions of those attacks.
In other places, we have succumbed to authoritarian currents; they have
taken over social movements and spaces of rebellion. (In reality,
repression and recovery always occur together, but one of the two may be
predominant, one may fail, and the other succeed.) The repressive forces
of the state are immense and when we cannot resist, the most we can do
is lick our wounds and recognize what we could have done. However, when
movements and spaces of resistance leave us behind, it means that there
are internal and inevitable failures.
We have defended those norms of participation that support people with
more resources (college graduates, the middle class, the neurotypical,
people without trauma or chronic health problems, those without children
or others to care for, individuals who have citizenship, white people)?
Have we reproduced patriarchal value systems in communication styles, in
the forms of struggle in which these are celebrated and rewarded,
ignored and/or exploited?
Have we forgotten our history and formed non-critical alliances with
NGOs and political parties, or have we stood aside and appropriately
accepted a single-issue approach, a reformist framework? Have we
repeated the great mistake of anti-fascism and seen only the right as a
danger, letting democracy or authoritarian socialists pass by?
Have we created a new, flawed form of nihilism where the historically
valid critiques offered by insurrectionism have been drowned in a
renewed fetishism towards armed groups? (ironic, given the
insurrectionary criticism of these fetishistic forms).
Have we allowed ourselves to be influenced by dogmatism or the
architecture of social networks and created spaces of resistance so
toxic that only bullies and sycophants could thrive?
Have we failed to develop practices of survival, of healing, of
transformation, of mutual growth, so that all we had was a hammer and
all we could see were nails?
Have we failed to unite the struggles in a decentralized way, to spread
a logic of solidarity that would allow everyone to support each other
and learn from each other, without allowing anyone to take over?
Have we forgotten to develop strategies for the next day, such as
spreading a joyful and meaningful life after destroying everything?
Have we lost the ability to imagine being something else, to create
something else, to live in another way?

IGD: Tell us how you're coping - did you recently organize a fundraiser
for your health and how can people support you?

Peter Gelderloos: I'm doing terribly and wonderfully. Which is normal
since I'm bipolar. My cancer is considered incurable but treatable. So,
from the doctors' point of view, it's about extending life expectancy
and improving statistics. However, this is not how I will face my life
and death. I will receive the support I need from myself and those
closest to me. To anyone who reads these lines - and not just because I
have a platform[where I share]books or other -, I would like to ask you
to reflect on some things. Many people get cancer and other
life-threatening or chronic health problems. Illness is not an
individual problem. Our world is sick. People deserve all the space they
need as they heal or die. But the disease itself cannot remain private.
We must take our tumors, our inflammations, our collapses, our tears,
our deaths, carry them with bloody hands and place them[in front of]the
doors of capitalism. Not to ask for compensation or reparation: these
things serve us as the only explanation, the only possible word of
truth, before burning everything - the Leviathan and all those who
choose to defend it (at the expense of their lives).
Suffering cannot continue behind these metaphorically closed doors.
Those who take care of us when we are suffering are our truest
companions. Learn from them and take fucking care of them.
Don't support me, support all of us. This is a collective problem.
Perhaps we could promote struggles where it is worth living and dying.
Perhaps we could imagine worlds where we could actually live, in which
we would be free to lay down our bodies once our time has come.
Thank you for running this site and for all the work you do.

https://gruppoanarchicogalatea.noblogs.org/post/2023/10/18/riscaldamento-intervista-a-peter-gelderloos-sul-cambiamento-climatico-e-la-lotta-per-cambiare-tutto-questo/
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