Failure Is Not an Option
On Left infighting
Left infighting is basically a cliche, and the history of the US Left is famously rife with splits and internecine spats. Personal and political conflicts become messily intertwined, and strategic disagreements turn into total war and irreconcilable beefs. We often find ourselves implicitly or explicitly operating with the idea that the people in our organization we think are wrong are the primary obstacle to us achieving our goals, and if we can just purge them or get them to quit, everything will fall into place.
But this is a dangerous mindset to have, and it leads away from de-escalation and towards fracturing. To me, anytime someone leaves my organization is a tragedy. Sometimes it is necessary and for the best for one or both parties, but it is something that we should always try to avoid if possible rather than actively seek out. We are so small already, and we need each other more than ever as our various socioecological crises escalate. Conflict is inevitable, and we should strive to reconcile rather than destroy. We should seek to create spaces and cultures where conflict can be generative, where our political disagreements and discussions produce quality outcomes because of our different perspectives rather than in spite of them.
Few people in the US really know how to be in a democratic membership organization that acts collectively. It is hard and messy, and it requires discipline and unlearning the primacy of individualism we are taught from birth. Even when we start to understand on some level the need for collective action to make structural political change, we do not instantly shed this liberal subjectivity. This manifests in a number of counterproductive ideas and toxic behaviors in Left organizations.
One of them is acting as if politics is about personal beliefs and individual posturing. Beliefs inform our actions, and delineating positions has an important place, but politics is first and foremost something we do. That requires the ability to engage in collective deliberation with a strategic orientation and win and lose internal conflicts with grace, avoiding a “my way or the highway” approach with one foot out the door. It also requires treating people with a basic level of kindness and respect. At a fundamental level, organizing is about relationships, and we cannot build durable and trusting relationships to engage in collective action by treating each other as enemies.
Perhaps the most important part of being in an organization is operating in good faith under the assumption that everyone there is trying to build a better world. We might seriously disagree on how to do that or what it would look like, but that assumption of shared values is critical for being able to move through conflict and maintain and build collective power. A big reason that seemingly minor conflicts can escalate out of control is that we care a great deal. Accusations of nefarious ulterior motives or conflations of morality with strategy prevent generative conflict resolution and are cancerous for long-term cohesion.
We all live in a capitalist, racist, patriarchal society that harms and traumatizes us—to significantly varying degrees and in different ways—and teaches us harmful behaviors and beliefs that we bring into our organizing and erode our solidarity. It teaches us to listen to and build our egos rather than subordinating ourselves to a larger purpose and prioritizing the collective. Unlearning these things is a constant process for everyone.
We need to take care of each other, treat each other with respect, set aside grudges, and swallow our pride when necessary. We have to ask ourselves if we want to spend our time and energy on fighting vicious internal battles to win Pyrrhic victories, lashing out because it feels good and righteous, making ourselves vulnerable to bad actors, and driving people away rather than persuading them and building something that people want to be involved in. Bullying comrades into submission is how we become lords of the ashes after everyone quietly disengages and walks away.
Most of all, we need to always keep perspective of what is important. The stakes are so high, we have so much work to do and so little time to act, and our actual opponents have never been more powerful. We have to align our actions with the difficulty and gravity of what we say we are trying to do: build a mass movement that can transform society and save the planet.
What I’m Reading
The sobering truth about corn ethanol (Jason Hill): Around 1/3 of US-grown corn is used for making ethanol, an allegedly eco-friendly additive to gasoline mandated by federal law entrenched due to the power of the corporate agriculture interests that profit off it. This ethanol mandate is incredibly damaging because it produces greenhouse gas emissions equal to or greater than that of relatively small amount of gasoline it replaces, and as an incentive for industrial monoculture corn production adds to all of the other problems that come with that, like water pollution and soil degradation.
Unextractable fossil fuels in a 1.5 °C world (Dan Welsby, James Price, Steve Pye, Paul Ekins): This study estimated that having a 50% chance of keeping global warming under 1.5°C requires keeping 60% of known oil and gas reserves and 90% of known coal reserves in the ground. And we should aim for better than coin flip odds, which means leaving even more fossil fuels unextracted. That is an enormous amount of profit and concentrated energy that must be left on the table. Figuring out how to do that, then making it happen, is going to be a tall order.
As Warming and Drought Increase, A New Case for Ending Big Dams (Jacques Leslie): Hydropower generated from dams is something of a gray area when it comes to the energy transition. Sometimes it is considered renewable energy, sometimes it is considered clean energy (i.e. renewables plus nuclear and hydro), and sometimes it is considered neither. Right now it is the largest source of non-fossil energy in the world, but it comes with a number of serious problems as this article lays out in detail. It is clear to me that the only new dams we allow should be built by beavers.
Ukraine War Threatens to Cause a Global Food Crisis (Jack Nicas): Ukraine and Russia produce an enormous amount of the world’s grain supplies, particularly wheat, and Russia and allied Belarus are huge exporters of artificial fertilizer. The war in Ukraine and the resulting sanctions on Russia are causing the prices of these commodities to skyrocket and supplies to dwindle in poor countries. On top of devastating hunger and famine, this will likely have serious cascading social, political, and ecological effects. Industrial commodity agriculture is a fragile and unsustainable system, and moving towards agroecological food sovereignty is vital.
The World Has One Big Chance to Fix Plastics (Rebecca Altman and Tridibesh Dey): The United Nations Environment Assembly recently approved a framework for an international treaty to deal with the plastics crisis. This article is a good rundown of the necessity and potential for this forthcoming pact to succeed. It is easy to be cynical about these sorts of agreements, but international cooperation—particularly via the UN—is absolutely critical to solving all of our ecological crises, and there are successful examples of them from the recent past like The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.
Elegant. And, while I suspect this is evergreen content, especially well-timed 💚