The climate movement took to the streets of Glasgow for a second time and did something more ambitious than try to pressure negotiations within COP26: Tomorrow’s Day was an important exercise in rebuilding a radical global left founded on ecology, so that inequality To gather all the struggles against. Climate crisis banner.
A bad rainy autumn day did not discourage joining the Global Day of Action for Climate Justice: an influx of 100 thousand people from the collection point of Kelvingrove Park through the streets of the centre, one international on the pandemic at a time. Exceptional numbers for the event. A welcoming but economically inaccessible city during the climate summit. It was a peaceful and carnival procession, which was full of cosplay Climbers dressed as newts, trees and dinosaurs, and then accompanied by dogs, elders, children, brass bands, radical activists of Extinction Rebellion – commonly used to block motorways and airports in the UK Was – surrounded by a thick police cordon.
single lead
At the head of the procession, however, were African environmentalists and leaders of indigenous communities: if we want to use the twentieth century category we can say that Glasgow had a renaissance of Third Worldism in an evolved and contemporary version. , in which the fight against climate change and oil, gas and coal is both the horizon and the glue.
“The story to this day is that the climate movement has certainly disintegrated itself, it has ceased to be a white and Western theme, it has become much more global than the COP, on which Western finance has been governed. Dominate while we are there. We are observers who cannot observe, representatives with a badge but without any power », explains Federico Cruz with rain-soaked glasses, participating in the work of the climate conference Came from Mexico with his native community to pick up.
What he described was a long journey that passed through the rise of peoples such as Ugandan Vanessa Nakate and Indian Disha Ravi, but also through aggregation with movements for land rights in South and Central America, for the Palestinian cause. Sympathy for, closeness to Indian peasant movements.
Elderly leaders of the native nations of Chile, Brazil or Panama were yesterday protected by active cords as if they were totem poles, the seal of credibility for a movement whose first task was to absolve itself of accusations—not even unfounded—sons. Being a privileged crossbreed, bourgeois and European, unaware of the real energy and social problems of the world. Jefferson Estella is a representative who hails from Manila, Philippines, watches the procession from the shore, showing photos of Typhoon Haiyan who died in 2013: “The stories of our suffering inside Cop 26 can’t be heard, climate finance fails Done, this incident is the only lead I know of”
left reborn
“What resonates in these protests is far more important than what happens in the negotiating rooms”, takes the word of Federico Cruz, for whom the rise of a new global movement is much more rounded than any plan to curtail. And there will be significant consequences. emissions. “We are dying of economic growth, there will be no ecological transition if we remain in the same economic model that has tampered with the ecosystem of the earth. There is no future if there is no change in consumption of some, which is taking away the future from all others”.
Glasgow is a protest trying to suggest the inexplicable: the climate has been tampered with by capitalism, it cannot be saved by capitalism. It is a direct response to one of the most obvious highlights in the first week of Cop26, the effort of private finance to play the most important role in the transition to a clean and sustainable economy, with the mechanism of transformation into trillions of billions developed by Mario Draghiforestry philanthropy Jeff Bezos, Promoted by Alliance on Innovation Bill Gates, a path built from research and incentives to address climate imbalances while leaving the political, economic and social unchanged. On the other hand, the people of Glasgow suggested looking ahead and finally overturning the notion that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
On his way to COP26 he found himself on the ground in Glasgow: Independence (the flag of Scotland was by far the most represented), allied himself with protests by transport workers and health workers. The Global Day of Action, which has branches in over two hundred cities around the world, has shown that there is a field of forces, ideas and consensus that goes beyond climate.
It is a movement with an uncertain future, pessimistic about democracy, full of content but poor in representation, not claimed by any political force, without a leader (it certainly cannot and Neither wants to be. Greta Thunberg, secular saint but not a political leader) and the heir to a long history of defeat. Yet something not so concrete, widespread and credible was seen in the field of radical leftism when protests at the turn of the millennium exploded in Seattle and were buried by Italian police in Genoa.
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