An Anarchist Solution to Global Warming

By Peter Gelderloos

If the Green Capitalist response to climate change will only add more fuel to the fire, and if government at a global scale is incapable of solving the problem, as I argue in previous articles, how would anarchists suggest we reorganize society in order to decrease the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and to survive an already changed world?

There is no single anarchist position, and many anarchists refuse to offer any proposal at all, arguing that if society liberates itself from State and capitalism, it will change organically, not on the lines of any blueprint. Besides, the attitude of policy, seeing the world from above and imposing changes, is inextricable from the culture that is responsible for destroying the planet and oppressing its inhabitants.

Nonetheless, I want to outline one possible way we could organize our lives, not to make a concrete proposal, but because visions make us stronger, and we all need the courage to break once and for all with the existing institutions and the false solutions they offer. For the purposes of this text I’m not going to enter into any of the important debates regarding ideals—appropriate levels of technology, scale, organization, coordination, and formalization. I’m going to describe how an ecological, anti-authoritarian society could manifest itself, as it flows from the un-ideal complexity of the present moment. Also for simplicity’s sake, I won’t enter into the scientific debate around what is and isn’t sustainable. Those debates and the information they present are widely available, for those who want to do their own research.

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Earthquake in Chile: Turning the Class Society into Ruins and Rubble

Translated text by anonymous author, Hommodolars

Greetings international comrades. We are facing difficult times in Chile after the recent earthquake. In the most impacted areas of the country, people are taking to the streets and looting. We support these actions. We only hope to see this practice generalized. The natural disaster is nothing compared to the violence that capital brings to us day by day. Today, we loot capital to meet our basic needs after a natural disaster. Tomorrow, we must loot capital to destroy a larger disaster: capital and its guardian, the state.

After accumulating tension for 25 years, the tectonic plates where the territory called Chile is located released an enormous amount of energy, which for humans amounts to an earthquake, a natural disaster.

We do not live in just any society, but instead capitalism, the most extreme and concentrated form of class society. Disasters may very well come from natural forces. Their effects are not natural, but instead social.