Report from the El Cumbre Rights of Mother Earth Conference: 1) context and conclusions

Conference: People’s World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth

We will be serializing an extraordinarly stimulating report by Massimo de Angelis:

Today, the context and conclusions of this climate change conference:

“Fifteen years ago, I attended the First Encuentro for Humanity against Neoliberalism, called by the Zapatistas and held in the Lacandonian jungle, Chiapas, Mexico. The Encuentro has been an inspirational event for many of us who participated, for so many reasons. Overall, it started to crack open the claustrophobic feeling we had in the middle of the so called “end of history”, giving us a perspective that perhaps history was once again just beginning, as many activists started to draw their attention to the modes and cultures of struggles against capitalism advanced by indigenous people. Retrospectively, if there was one thing that the Encuentro definitively achieved, was to inject the seed of indigenous democratic method and consensus seeking among a quite diverse set of people, it brought a different set of sensibilities and measures to decision making among political animals. In other word, it planted the seed of the commons into political processes, which, especially in the West, at the time where dominated by the self-imposed ghettos of identity politics and “identity-ideologies”. In fifteen years, this seed has grown through encuentros, nurtured by collectives, flourished in social fora and social movement assemblies, and became the subject of controversy in the dichotomising battles among “verticals” and “horizontals”, socialists and anarcho-autonomists, as in the preparatory period of the European Social Forum held in London in 2004. It was the job of an indigenous president — the first in the history of Bolivia — to embrace the dichotomy, overcome the sterile aspects of this opposition and give it instead productive contents. To the point that on the last day of the People’s World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, shortly El Cumbre (April 19-22), I even found myself – old “horizontalist” as I am – on the front row of a hectic crowd on the football pitch of the Cochabamba Stadium cheering with chants and flag weaving at Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez (well, I was still cautiously cheering, OK?).

Indeed, one of the things that most impressed me of this conference is the political genius of this president and his team in bringing together a diverse global social movement and finding a way to articulate its energies, expertise and powers to a political process dominated by state politics, i.e. the UN decision making on climate change. And we definitively needed something like this, because unlike the successful struggles against WTO or neoliberal globalisation in the past years, here the social movements do not simply want to wreck negotiations and to say “no” to a model of capitalism (neoliberalism). Here the social movements wants concrete actions that not only are up to the task of drastically and rapidly reducing greenhouse gasses emissions, but also and at the same time that are socially just. Therefore, a wide and diverse spectrum of social movements want the end of capitalism (without which no drastic reduction of greenhouse emission is possible) and the constitution of something new (without which no social justice is possible). Never as in this moment the “shadow of the future” cast by global warming has been giving urgency to the need of an emancipatory project: “Socialism o barbarie”, as Hugo Chavez endless repeated Rosa Luxemburg classic warning, but also, “Madre Tierra o Muerte”, or, which is the same thing, the “rights of Mother Earth” or the “rights of capitalism”.

You may call it co-optation, but I am not sure about it, not yet at least. Co-optation is when a social movement and its aspirations are diverted or used for different purposes than the original one, as when wage struggles against capital are for example turned into means for its development (and wage cuts somewhere else). Surely, there is no doubt that this conference has allowed Evo Morales to score so many political points, both internally and externally, as many activists have kept repeating me. However, both the broad goals and, to a very large extent, the means of this conference — the decision making process giving rise to the documents — are aligned and shared among a wide spectrum of participants, social movements activists, state officials and NGOs.

The success of the conference is unquestionable, at least from the perspective of participation. People from more than 140 countries attended (although definitively less Africans and Asians), more that 40 different official government delegations (at different level), more than 30000 participants.

Four main ideas provided the co-ordinates of the conferences, which where then discussed and provided fine details. First, a universal declaration of “Mother Earth”, i.e. that Mother Earth should be granted rights to preserve the integrity of its processes; second, a “Climate Justice Tribunal”, making those countries, companies and individuals who violate those rights facing legal consequences; third, the acknowledgement of “climate debt”, i.e. that poor countries should receive various forms of reparation not tied to aid for a crisis they are facing but had little role in creating; fourth, the idea of a “World People’s Referendum on Climate Change”, as a way for people around the world to express their views on these issues.

Within these areas, particular demands are that the countries of the global North should respect the Kyoto protocol, which means to put into practice 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, and limiting the global temperature increase to a maximum of one-degree Centigrade, as opposed to the devastating 2% target agreed in Copenhagen last November. Demands are also for shifting the resources now spent on military and death (about $1.7 trillion) for life and nature; to set up substantial reparations for countries of the South, to share knowledge and technology with relevance to climate. The final document reporting on these results is here (www.cmpcc.org.bo/PEOPLES-AGREEMENT).

Now, to put it simply, it is clear that if we apply the results of the Cochabamba cumbre, there is some hope to save the world. However, one thing that the conference has not debated sufficiently, are the consequences of its demands, especially for the Global North. The document requires the North to take responsibility and a) Pay up climate debt; b) substantially reduce carbon emission and c) do this without the help of technologies such as geoengineering, biotechnology and nuclear, i.e. reduce emissions without breaking the social movements’ imposed taboo on the use of technology that mess with the earth dynamic equilibria and processes by bringing in irreversible risks. Personally, I feel all these demands are legitimate, and should be complied. However, it is also true that if these demands need to be met, it is not only the governments of the global North that need to be “convinced”, but also, and especially, its people. And at present, there is no grand narrative that can convince anybody that substantial reduction of greenhouse gasses (i.e. GDP) and massive debt repayment are something that is compatible with maintenance not so much of “life-styles,” but of “livelihoods”.

These demands, if met within current social relations of production, will have a drastic adverse social impact in the livelihoods of millions in the developed countries, simply because they de-facto imply a reduction in economic growth, and in the North, our livelihoods heavily depends on economic growth. What need to be spelled out clearly and worked upon by our movements, especially in the global North, is that we also know that economic growth and people livelihoods do not have to be the same thing, and people will pay the price only if the existing dominant modes of production and distribution driven by profit and articulated by capitalist markets is maintained. Therefore, unless we want to face our demands for climate justice with green fascism and austerity, we must accompany the struggles for these demands with the massive promotion of commons, that is with the construction of radically different practices to reproduce our livelihoods, at all scales of social action, including at the level of the state. Because this is the only way we can seek bien vivir at the same times as we promote a massive de-linking of our reproduction to market circuits, especially those markets that fuel global competition and that reproduce dependency on agro-industrial circuits. And in this way, we can also link up with the socio-ecological struggles in Bolivia, not only by creating the condition for reducing climate change and limiting the destruction of water sources and ice caps that is already happening there, but also by drastically reducing the demand for minerals and hydrocarbon and develop other forms of solidarity and grand commoning.

El Cumbre has definitively provided legitimacy for countries such as Bolivia and Venezuela (and other Alba countries) to talk tough at the next round of UN negotiation on climate change. Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez among others, will be arguing that people have spoken, and it is now time to “feed a strategy” (alimentar una strategia) (Chavez) on the basis of what they said and what they want so as we start implementing what has been decided. But in the midst of all flag weaving and enthusiasm for el cumbre, and even in anticipation that the governments money promised by Chavez will bring thousands from the global south to put pressure on empire to comply, I cannot avoid to think that the turning point will happen only when we, in the Global North, decide it is time to face up the true conundrum of our time and do the right thing: shall we go on with our dependence on capitals’ circuits or reinvent new commoning practices outside capital in order to reproduce our livelihoods?”

1 Comment Report from the El Cumbre Rights of Mother Earth Conference: 1) context and conclusions

  1. AvatarRoy Daniels

    Hi Michel,
    You Said: “one of the things that most impressed me of this conference is the political genius of this president and his team in bringing together a diverse global social movement and finding a way to articulate its energies, expertise and powers to a political process dominated by state politics, i.e. the UN decision making on climate change”.
    I really need to address this. IMHO, the UN is a stagnate organization that does nothing buy passes “decision after decision” but has no real power to change things. Even unbelievably shameful things like the situation in Libya or Sudan got no real action from the UN, but from actual countries that decided to do something about the situation (at least in Libya, Sudan is still a mess).
    Just my 2 cents…

    Roy Daniels,
    Webmaster at http://www.increaseyourbenchpress.org
    increase
    your bench press

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