Political Ecology as the ground for "new" antisystemic politics? The case of Extinction Rebellion and catastrophic imaginaries
Abstract
One of the most powerful issues of contemporary global politics seems to be the Climate Change and possible ecological and social catastrophe. For some activists and scientists, it has been the most powerful issue for a quite long time and they put a lot of effort to politicize the climate issue through the process of securitization.
However, with the new wave of the Climate Justice Movement, and with considerable help of Fridays for Future representing "future generations" (it is thus for the first time in a history of ecological movement(s), when one of the main referent objects of environmental security have risen up and spoken for itself), it seems that at least the process of securitization has been successful. The main question is no longer whether the problem is constructed or real, but rather which of the constructed realities is more dangerous.
The climate change itself or the possible reaction to its various articulations? This paper follows the attempts for politicization by asking the question that is neither about the extent to which the threat is real and how (or if) it is solvable, nor in which way it can be dangerous. It rather asks a question about its positive political content: How it can be integrated into imaginations and struggles for a better future? Is there a possibility for utopian politics, that have seemed to be lost for good (if not after the 1968, then for sure after the 1989, marking "the end of history")? And is there some emancipatory tradition within the antisystemic movements of the Left that could cultivate emerging dystopian imaginaries of global catastrophe? By rephrasing the famous aphorism: Is it still easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism? Following the sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson (2018) and his application of Greimas semiotic square on the concept of utopia, this paper constructs four ideal types of social movements' (anti)politics.
It does so by a combination of Robinson's interpretative scheme with Immanuel Wallerstein's (2003) examination of antisystemic movements' strategies and with Carl Schmitt's (2007) conceptualization of "the political". By historically contextualizing Schmitt, it takes "political politics" (democratization of state's politics through competition of ideological political parties) as a starting point and then examines four types of (anti)politics, each representing (1) different strategy to challenge or neutralize conventional politics; (2) different central sphere of "the political"; (3) different utopian imaginary.
The scheme implicates that "old" and "new" and "transactional" social movements represents variations of attempts to defeat ("meta-political politics"), counter-balance ("non-political politics"), or restrict ("post-political politics") the friend-foe political logic. On the contrary, the project of Libertarian Municipalism, developed by Murray Bookchin while acknowledging the ecological crisis and need for social ecology already in early 1960s, is affirmative towards radical logic of "the political" and challenges rather conventional institutional politics through democratic confederalism of communal assemblies ("political meta-politics").
Bookchin represents the first attempt to politicize ecology through linking it with revolutionary political theory and therefore he could be perceived as founder of Political Ecology, a broad ideological tradition that has strategy of Libertarian Municipalism in its core. In the final part, the paper shows that possible bearer of "political meta-politics" could be seen around one of the newcomers to the scene of Climate Justice Movement(s), Extinction Rebellion established in the UK in 2018.
Moreover, it is argued that the interconnection of Libertarian Municipal ideal of popular assemblies with a growing conviction about the inevitability of social collapse (Bendell 2018, Read 2018), can potentially open up utopian imaginary and try to make the best out of a possible variety of dangerous scenarios - to transform "political politics" into Political Ecology. Despite some strong statements that are being made in this article, it should be underlined that proposed framework, based on Greimas square, is just a very simplified filter which originated out of scholar dissatisfaction with conceptual tools of Social Movements Studies and with chaos around concepts of intellectual history (meta-/non-/post-)political on the one hand, and out of normative need to identify contemporary emancipatory politics that has "power to destroy, power to create" on the other hand.
The application of this framework to the climate movement, and particularly to Extinction rebellion, is just an example of such exploration. Furthermore, this example should be latter deepened by its contextualization in specific political cultures.