This is part three of a three-part series¹ discussing the state of modern climate activism and what it tells us about political amnesia and the ways in which “direct action” has become distorted. Click here to begin at the introduction and also find the table of contents.

If you were to take anything away from the previous parts, it should be that the #1 thing that defines our modern political landscape is the blind trust in bureaucratic mediators to solve all our problems.

Climate is only one example, we can see it elsewhere in how we tackle social problems. Hunger in our communities? Cancer? Donate to a charity and just trust that they will allocate the money responsibly. (Hint: they often don’t.) Poor work conditions? Pay your dues and trust union leadership to work something out.

How to provide for your family, how to educate your children? Now there’s a long list of officials and agendas that have to be answered to. And even then, despite all the reforms and funding we have passed, whether it be through No Child Left Behind or Common Core, consistent public education still remains a largely unsolved issue.

In recent decades, it’s gone a step further. Volunteering and individual donations have been replaced with companies “pledging part of their proceeds to charity”, and laundering their reputation through those means. NGOs have shifted their focus from direct involvement in communities towards lobbying governments and “raising awareness”. In the private sector, labor unions are on the decline, as once again workers are encouraged to fight for their pay increases in the realm of minimum wages and government policy.

I’m about to say something you won’t often hear from a leftist on the environment: forget the planet for a second, there’s a much bigger problem we have to address first. And this really gets at the overarching theme of this essay series. It’s the problem that’s present with your charities, your Green New Deals, your “ethical companies”, and even with your soup fanatics.

We are currently in a political environment where the idea of people and communities fixing their own problems has become increasingly inconceivable. Everything requires a policy agenda, everything has to be micromanaged administratively, either by the state and its appendages or by the market and its appendages.

Political activity in the modern age exclusively consists of expressing “support”, whether that be through canvassing, donating, or mouthpiecing. What do these have in common? For one, they take away responsibility from those impacted by a given issue, and by the same measure they take away agency. All of these rest on the implicit assumption that whatever is good for the mediating organization is good for the cause.

But why should we assume that’s the case? After all, at what point in time does a mediator get the most attention and power? When they’re in that position of mediating. If the problem is solved, they stop being relevant. So why not indefinitely extend their tenure by keeping things in an uneasy equilibrium?

Since they’re the ones with all the knowledge and agency relative to these issues, if they fail to provide results, chances are the public will either respond with apathy or confusion.

Whenever you do see people instinctually pushed to their limit, we see it manifest negatively: the classic example is riots. Faceless, spontaneous, destructive. An undirected expression of rage which serves as the planner’s foil. They’ll say “oh these concerns are legitimate, but this is no way to solve them”. And from there use the opportunity to cement both their social reforms and their iron grip.

But why does it manifest negatively? Because all of the above has rendered the public politically impotent. The same way sheltering a child stunts his development, taking away the ability for people to affect their own change creates collective amnesia. The rioter vaguely recognizes something isn’t wrong, but he’s often unsure about what it is, much less how to fix it.

And we see this position reflect among the Left, long torchbearers of radical politics. What is revolution, when all the prophets of old have embedded themselves into the very institutions they were supposed to destroy? Where is the vanguard when the precursor to institutional legitimacy precludes any radical content?

Mark Fisher has been constantly quoted as alleging that “we can no longer imagine a future outside of capitalism”, but I’d take it a step further. We cannot imagine, period. Politics is no longer about actually affecting change, but simply demanding that things must change. That’s why you see leftists rally behind slogans: Free Palestine, Eat the Rich, what have you. That’s all that’s left when you have lost sight of an actual vision.

Returning to those vandals, we can finally understand what has become of them. They see the issue of climate, they experience the discontent with which it is being handled, and it creates a general sense of frustration. But when we look at how that frustration is expressed, they do it in the same way a toddler cries for help. They create a scene and get attention, but then what? They appeal to the same exact authorities they were protesting against to solve the problem.

This isn’t direct action, this is the political equivalent of venting. There’s a psychological release in “being heard”, but what has actually changed?

I think it’s good here to talk about the meaning of the term “direct action” because it’s been misused a lot, especially by groups like these. Direct action is seeing a problem in your community and taking matter into your own hands to directly solve it. There’s no need to win approval, raise awareness, what have you, it’s just a matter of doing.

Back in the 70s, in response to widespread police brutality against the black residents of Oakland, the Black Panther Party was formed. They were faced with this problem, namely that the police were making their life hell, and they responded to it by creating an armed community guard to essentially “police the police”.

This proved effective, as officers were less likely to get confrontational. This represented not just a victory and an expression of power for some abstract bureaucratic organization the community allied with, but the community themselves. The founders’ goal was to show that the state wasn’t bulletproof, and that success brought with it a sense of increased agency. They’d go on to expand their activities, such as providing free breakfasts for children, dealing with the issue of malnutrition in a fashion much more effectively than LBJ’s supposed “Great Society” was.

This is direct action. The focus is on activity, activity which can directly and commonly be understood as addressing the issue at hand. And it’s here where someone can see the way in which one’s own capacity to act directly informs their own sense of autonomy and sense of self.

Just Stop Oil! claims to employ direct action tactics, but let us actually think about whether or not that is the case. We talk so much about the throwing soup here, or throwing potatoes there, but what is actually at the core of the action? Raising awareness. In that respect, they’re not so different from Greta Thunberg giving a speech or a Democratic operative hosting a canvassing event.

The psychic impact of their situation is obvious, they’re helpless. They cry, plead about the urgency, the deadline of 2050, repeat all sorts of moralisms regarding their futures, but what does it actually signify? What does it signify when a terminally ill man lashes out, crying to God for his life? Surrender, either to a higher authority or to the futility of their situation. In this case, the higher authority, the God so-to-speak, is the State.

This very exchange reinforces their smallness, and confronted with this terrifying fact, they have no recourse but to double down. And I think it’s this, even moreso than the impending climate situation, which really fills them with dread. “I am not small, I am not helpless”, they protest, thinking that if they shout louder then maybe that will cause others to recognize them as autonomous. But paradoxically, the louder they shout, the deeper they dig themselves in, because they look foraffirmation in what others do as opposed to what they themselves are doing.

In the 1844 Manuscripts, Karl Marx lays out his theory of human nature. In here, he states that it is through their life-activity that humans experience consciousness and distinguish themselves from animals. This is why Marx is so focused on labor, on activity. When one’s very activity is alien, separated from oneself, that is a separation from their humanity.

Activity is not just a means to an end, our actions affect not just the outer world but our inner selves too. Action is the link between will and reality, and without that the world begins to become unreal to us. It’s easy enough to think that all this mental stuff is of lesser importance, but it could not be further from the truth. A link goes both ways: without it, you lose the capacity to not just think but also affect that change.

For the bulk of this series, I have drawn this distinction between the “experts” and the “public”, but this is no class-hierarchy. The experts, while seeking the agency, have not somehow managed to hoard all the agency for themselves. Rather instead, they drink their own Kool-Aid, just as lost as everyone else.

Any one activist, advisor, or politician sees themselves as just one cog in the machine, trusting that someone else is driving the train. Nobody is driving the train. Everyone’s lost the plot, this is not just an issue that affects “the masses”, but humanity as a whole.

It’s when confronted with this totally passive existence, that we begin to see a society whose social attitude is defined by consumption as opposed to productivity. Belief no longer stands as a guideline for action, but as a statement of identity. Under capitalism, images become the medium by which all our social relations become market-mediated. No longer is just our activity alien to us, but also our friendships, our situation, our very identity.

And this is where a great irony comes to light: because this impact is mechanical and totalizing, it does not discriminate. Radicalism is just as prone as anything else to this total emptying of content, with the invocation of imagery becoming our way of expressing discontent, as opposed to you know, addressing the problems.

In the whole performance, whether it be the show of throwing food on the painting, whether it be gluing one’s hand to the wall, whether it be the speaking out against “high art” and the condemnation of the (presumably elite) audience of the gallery, this all invokes imagery. It recalls the avant-garde, the idea of youthful rebellion, the very same fashions we have come to associate with the revolutionaries of the 60s and 70s.

This performance was not just on for the public, but also themselves I suspect. It gives them a sense of security in following another’s script, that even as they’re taking the action of committing a crime, they do not have to bear the responsibility of deciding this themselves. For, in their participation in this whole theater, they are indulging themselves in that image, having become an image themselves. They now get to be one of the same stars they once looked up to, this time to a new batch of discontented youth.

Of course, the more this charade repeats throughout history, the less luster it has. I remember finding it quite funny that this occurred a second time. What about a third time? A fourth? At what point does it become obvious that these stunts are mass-produced, just like everything else under capitalism?

Action begets more action: a wildcat strike grows as more and more workers identify with the faceless mass and join in. It is the same for reflection, perpetual in nature. One can never be satisfied with the fruits of spectacle, as it lacks authenticity. There is no end to consumption then, which works out rather well for an economic system predicated on infinite growth.

It’s a rather bleak picture, but one must remember that activity stems from within. As long as free will continues to exist, therein lies the seeds of hope. Remember this: people, as an aggregate, act according to trends and structural factors. But individual persons, once you get down to that micro-level, are much more complex. Therein the psychological, the spiritual, the existential what-have-you, all becomes much more relevant. The influence of these unpredictable factors among people and upon history is what we call spontanaeity.

Then what is to be done? I’m faced with the climate crisis: what does it mean to actively respond? How can I, a single person out of billions, not just assert agency but actually save myself?

Well, first thing to remember is this: you are not a Policy, you never purported to save the world singlehandedly, neither is the whole weight placed on your shoulders. When you realize this, you realize the next thing: you are not the only person on this planet. There exist others, others faced with the same crisis as you, others with wills of their own. You can put your trust in these invisible bonds which connect us as humans.

What separates this trust from the bureaucratic trust is that humanity is a “we”. It includes everyone else AND I. This collective subject is not foreign, but instead common with me.

To give a historical example, we can analyze these patterns in spiking. Trees capture carbon, and deforestation is a major contributor to climate change. Back in the 90s, one of the ways environmentalists mitigated this was by jamming metal spikes into trees. This tended to wreak havoc on saws, often causing damage on a large enough scale that deforestation projects have to be either abandoned or reconsidered.

The ways in which this tactic were employed are pretty interesting: it was typically done anonymously, individually, and with relatively low-cost materials. A spiker wouldn’t need many connections and resources to employ this tactic, just a general understanding of the strategy. Because of that the benefits of a mediating organization to conduct this are pretty non-existent. If anything, the drawbacks make it so it could only feasibly be done on an individual level.

Obviously, this is illegal, due to the risk it carries to both property and human life. Any organization openly carrying out these activities would instantly be shut down. Organizations have carried out these plots in secret, but have often been done in by either witnesses or a paper trail. You’re left with a situation in which the raw game theory works infavor of all the factors we’d normally consider disadvantages in politics. You didn’t need much money, connections, or education to do it. And in turn, there was no “critical mass” of people who needed to support it before anything could be done. Either someone chose to do it or they didn’t, simple as.

Now am I saying everyone should go out and spike trees? Of course not, that’d be ridiculous. But I still think it is important to revisit history, because even knowing of a case study such as this can help to, one, remind us that direct action is possible, and two, help give it concrete shape.

It’s worth repeating, climate change is a complex issue, and no single tactic or organization will be able to deal with it on its own. So instead, that leaves us with a bunch of new questions. For one, what does this environmental issue actually mean to you personally?

A lot of the most active environmentalists in the 20th century weren’t just motivated by this purely pragmatic fear of global warming. A lot of them were naturalists, having gotten their foothold in their hobbies and communities: this could be hiking, entomology, gardening, what have you. In their interactions, a lot of them came to appreciate the symbiotic relationship between people and their environment, and saw beauty in natural spontanaeity as opposed to industrial conformity.

A lot of these reasons were regarded by the wider public as rather sentimental, but the fact is they acted during a time in which others weren’t willing to, a window our modern pragmatists regretfully look back on as “the missed window to combat climate change”.

All those hobbies weren’t just an entry-point though. It directly answered the “why”, as despite the constraints on their community and activity placed by a capitalist context, the relations had not been fully subsumed. That importance in turn gave rise to new understandings of how systems rhythmically function and how people relate to both each other and their environment. These system theories in turn lend to prefiguration, and in turn organization as people look to experiment with the ideas and form organic communities around their findings.

The psychological impact of this is pretty clear: human beings are connecting in authentic ways and finding ways to express themselves authentically. Just as a muscle has to be constantly exercised to avoid atrophy, one must engage and develop themselves in such a way to become an autonomous political actor. Through this process, people begin to better understand themselves and the world around them, which is a necessary step towards breaking from our dependence on commodity fetishism.

And when moments of crisis do unexpectedly come, moments where action can make a difference, what kind of people do you think can capitalize on it? It’s going to be those who are active, those who have stupidly, almost paradoxically held onto hope before. Windows of opportunity come quick, often faster than we can recognize it, but laying the groundwork for effectively responding to them often takes a long time.

In that sense, the social impact is prefiguration. We have a history we can draw on for inspiration, but we don’t have the answers. Experimentation can often give us an understanding of what is or isn’t possible, and give us an understanding of concretely how we can meet our social needs with the new constraints that come from abandoning a previous mode of production. Let’s say in the indefinite future, climate catastrophe renders global supply chains and modern levels of production unsustainable.

Then what? The planet’s not going to just instantly melt, we will still have to answer the question of how to best grow and distribute food, this time with different constraints. The agricultural damage caused by rising temperatures will mean we have less room to waste food and a larger necessity for finding ways to grow food in different environments.

Permaculture and adjacent agroecology projects, while flawed in certain ways, still at least provide a forum by which the various compounding problems of cultivating a sustainable ecosystem can be solved.

Of course I realize how overly optimistic a lot of this can sound², but returning back to the subject of our analysis, place yourself in the shoes of these protestors for a second. I know, seems ridiculous, but as I established earlier, you have to realize that this is how people in general have come to actually respond to and vocalize the problems they are facing. What are they to do?

This is a very relevant question, one which answering in my view, allows us to deal with the much more foundational issue of activity. What are they to do? If we take their claims at face value, which why not, given that this anxiety is expressed by a lot of young people, then are we just going to tell them to wait? Cast a ballot and shut up? Ignore the problem? All of these only pacify though, neither gets at the issue of either tackling what is causing the anxiety or the anxiety itself.

What we should be saying is, seriously take a second to consider if this is an issue that’s truly important to you personally³, and if it is, then don’t wait. Begin looking at what you yourself can actually, concretely do on your own, not petitioning any other entity: because that in turn will help you grasp the nature of your relationship to this world.

These kids are so scared of having their lives cut short at 40 or 50, but what lives? A life spent complaining about how evil these neoliberals are and how everything is out of your control? What’s the point of any of this then, when you never had a life to begin with?

The uncomfortable truth a lot of leftists don’t want to admit is no matter your situation, you are still responsible for your own life and what you do with it. Yes, there’s all these structural factors which can make things worse and shape behavior, what have you, but when push comes to shove, nobody else is going to be there, telling you what to make of it. Even revolution, a response to the ultimate social injustice, is still a matter of people taking personal initiative on some fundamental level.

That existential responsibility is a lot to bear, and for a lot of these activists, it’s easier to just use the material situation as an excuse to not deal with it. Perhaps more cynically, one could see that as the case with these protestors, that their angst is just a way to compensate for an identity crisis typical for young people. Regardless, it doesn’t matter: one can tackle the issue constructively.

Even the most apocalyptic, most urgent of problems, still doesn’t change two facts about this world. One, you still have a life to live, and two, you still have the capacity to do something about it independent of a mediator. And often times, these two facts intertwine more than you’d normally think.