Strategies for an ecological and popular defeat (Gelderloos review)

The latest book by the anarchist theorist and activist Peter Gelderloos contains numerous highly relevant analyses of the nuisance that state-owned corporations represent. In Strategies for an ecological and popular revolution (2022), he rightly criticizes green energies, nuclear energy, false solutions such as the Green New Deal and the eco-leninism of Andreas Malm (similar to the ideas of the Jancovici Shift Project), the racist concept of Anthropocene or even the lies of Jared Diamond about “good” government. Gelderloos also shows that state corporations have always destroyed the environment, which is not the case with tribal societies, which today maintain 80% of the biodiversity on their land.^[1]. However, despite its undeniable qualities, the book contains superficial remarks on technology, industry, and the dynamics of international relationships, and even downright mediocre when it comes to strategy. In reality, Gelderloos did not write a book of “strategies” but a book of critical thinking that lists some effective tactics to stop an industrial project. At the same time.

As a reminder, strategy is a general, evolving, flexible and adaptable plan that guides an organization's actions in order to achieve a goal. There is nothing like it in Gelderloos' book. After finishing it, we still don't know how to bring down industrial capitalism. On the contrary, Gelderloos seems to reject any form of theoretical homogeneity quite dogmatically and irrationally. For example, he explicitly says that an eco-anarchist movement must refuse uniformity of viewpoint, which is tantamount to rejecting the adoption of a specific objective and a road map to achieve it. Because of these kinds of inept theories, decentralized environmental movements are notoriously ineffective in stopping the system that is devastating the planet. It is quite hopeless to see experienced activists fall back into the same pitfalls that were already criticized by Nestor Makhno and other anarchist theorists over a century ago (more on this later in the article).

Strategy of wear and tear vs strategy of cascading failure

At the beginning of Chapter 3, entitled “The Solutions Are Already Here,” a reader who is lucid about the state of the world can only be surprised to learn that “the victories are adding up” and that “we are stopping pipelines, airports, airports, highways, and mines.” Even if industrial projects are stopped from time to time, the vast majority continue to be completed. Globally, we continue to lose. Global CO2 emissions continued to increase in 2022^[2]. In 2020, the industrial system passed the milestone of more than 100 billion tons of materials torn from the Earth's crust.^[3]. The system covers more than 20 million hectares of concrete and bitumen per year, equivalent to twice the size of Portugal.^[4].

The tactics listed by Gelderloos — blocking, sabotage, ZAD, etc. — that target one project at a time are employed as part of a strategy of war of usury. However, this strategy is best used if you have abundant resources at your disposal. This is not the case for the camp of Outsiders in an asymmetric conflict. As explained very well in an article by Stop Fossil Fuels translated on the blog Green Resistance, “we adopt a defensive strategy against attacks from the industrial system”. The problem is that “we are opposed to one destructive project at a time”, and clearly “this strategy is failing.^[5] ”. You have to study the industrial system, find its weak points and Knock where it hurts. If we take the example of ZADs, they will never be viable in the long term without first having considerably reduced the ability of industrialized states to project their power within and outside their borders.

The intersectional impasse

In the “multi-purpose strategies” chapter, Gelderloos lists the “common characteristics” of the movements that make up the global environmental resistance (South and North). In particular, he notes a great heterogeneity in these movements. Gelderloos therefore advocates heterogeneity. We could be happy about that. A diverse movement, made up of people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, each bringing their skills and experiences, tends to be more resilient and more effective than a homogenous movement. Gelderloos also rightly opposes the heterogeneity of the revolutionary movement to the aboveground technocratic vision that seeks to impose a homogeneous solution on a territory composed of protean communities. Except that Gelderloos goes even further by rejecting any form of theoretical unity within the revolutionary movement. As an example, he cites the Zapatistas who would have formed an “extremely heterogeneous” movement. But the Zapatistas had a minimum of theoretical unity. Their main demands were the reappropriation of land and political and cultural autonomy for the indigenous populations of Chiapas and the rest of Mexico.^[6]. And even in effective so-called “decentralized” movements, there are leaders, organizers and a certain unity of point of view, which Western idealists tend to overlook when they talk about Chiapas or Rojava. It is impossible to organize and work together — and therefore to carry out a revolution — without unity of point of view.

In his list of “characteristics,” Gelderloos claims that all of the groups making up the global environmental uprising are intersectional.

“The movements that participate in this uprising tend to go beyond limited visions, focused on a single issue. Instead, they recognize the interconnectedness of different forms of oppression and, therefore, respect a principle of solidarity.”

In short, for Gelderloos, indigenous peoples around the world, fighting against industry and the state, would apply the principles of the deconstructed Western left (identitarianism, hummingism, endless multiplication of goals, horizontal hostility, etc.). Revolutionary groups such as the EZLN, MEND, the YPG, the YPG, the BRA, the FARC, the Nagas, the Zomia tribes or the indigenous resistance in North America^[7] would have been or would be intersectional. Each individual participating in these movements would define their own oppressions and lead their own struggles, “any ambition to impose uniform solutions is thus neutralized.” This approach would even be one of the main reasons for the success of some of these movements... One could laugh at it if the issue was not the future of life on Earth.

That Gelderloos is unable to understand the limits of dogmatic intersectionality is symptomatic of his lack of strategic vision.^[8]. Everywhere, anarchists^[9] And Marxists^[10] denounce the reformist recovery of intersectionality as a horizontal hostility diverting attention away from the physical infrastructure of the system.

But Gelderloos is confused in other ways. He thus affirms that

“Anarchism does not involve converting everyone to my way of thinking. It is a methodology for building a world in which a thousand worlds can find their place.”

Not converting? However, that is what the priests of the intersectional Church are trying to do. Everyone wants to impose their morals on everyone, causing recurring conflicts. Dividing it and conquering benefits the techno-industrial system and some figures inintelligentsia on the left who bear a heavy responsibility for the rise of fascism.

Another problem. Without a radical rejection of industrialism, of the entire industrial system, of its factories and its machines, these “thousand worlds” wanted by Gelderloos have no chance of emerging. You cannot claim anarchism and at the same time defend industrialism, It makes no sense. In fact, maybe Gelderloos should reread the testimonies he collected for his book, especially the one where two Guarani women say that “the advance of technology is driving many young people away from their culture.” The links between cultural standardization of the world and technical progress were observed very early on by Stefan Zweig.^[11], then by Claude Lévi-Strauss^[12], Jacques Ellul^[13] and more recently by sociologists such as Joseph Tonda^[14]. NGOs warn of the extinction of “biocultural” diversity^[15] ”. Low and Harmon even published a study in 2014 that blamed “technological progress” in transport and communication infrastructures for accelerating the process of “linguistic transfer”.^[16] ”.

Irrational rejection of unity of point of view

As a good idealist, Gelderloos prefers to dream of the next world rather than think about material ways to destroy the world of today. His rare “strategic” reflections already make it possible to anticipate crushing defeats for all the movements that apply them. In a sub-part of Chapter 4, entitled “The Ecological Revolution: The Best Strategy to Win or Fail,” Gelderloos cites an anarchist essay entitled 23 Theses Concerning Revolt which rejects in its entirety objective reality, rationality, the division of society into classes, and unsurprisingly, all forms of strategy. Reading between the lines, we understand that the author refuses the very idea of constituting a revolutionary movement. (The passage in bold does not appear in Guelderloos' book.)

“Any military strategy consists in imposing an ideal plan on the map that represents reality. Anarchy, not as a revolutionary movement, but as a multifaceted reality of rebellion and permanent creation, is based on the free initiative of each member of society; in the idea that we look at all social problems with our own eyes, and not from above. Many of the divisions that have affected anarchists over the decades have proven to be completely inconsistent with the ideal of anarchy, because they are based on the pretense of creating a mandatory unit. I am referring to critics complaining that you are not following the plan, that you are not using your resources in order to do what you should do.

If we do not intend to wage a military campaign, we must refuse to think of the revolution as something organized according to a single, monolithic plan, as if it were a game of Risk. We are not looking from above, giving orders. Here we are, in the middle of a magnificent chaos that our enemies have always tried to organize. We will be stronger than ever if we learn to triumph in this chaos, to move through the web of our own relationships, to communicate horizontally or circularly, to understand that not everyone will act like us; that is the beauty of rebellion. Our effectiveness is not about making the whole world uniform, but about designing the best way to connect with those who are not like us, who follow different paths.”

When Gelderloos cites a text that celebrates disorganization and “chaos” as a reference, we better understand the strategic and organizational void of his work. He outbid:

“we need to perceive an “ecosystem of revolt” in which, rather than trying to control what others do, promote good ideas, and suppress bad ones, we understand our place and create reciprocal relationships with those around us. That makes us all stronger and healthier, not the same.”

It's better to let people keep applying bad ideas. It is better for them to waste their time, money and energy pedaling through mud rather than carrying out effective revolutionary action. It is true that militant exhaustion is not a plague that is plaguing our camp and diverting revolutionaries from the struggle. The words of people like Gelderloos are wildly irresponsible in the face of the innumerable dangers that threaten us.

Does debilitating individualism make us collectively stronger? Obviously not, because in the West we are losing the overwhelming majority of our struggles. Moreover, it is not excess but the lack of theoretical unity that plagues revolutionary movements. It's the lack of theoretical unity who killed the Yellow Vests, and this is what is preventing the environmental movement from growing in power.

In Individual autonomy and collective strength: anarchists and the organization from Proudhon to the present day (1987), the historian Alexandre Skirda recalls, quoting Makhno and Archinov, that the childhood individualism of some anarchists already posed problems in building a solid revolutionary force.

“The publication of Platform continues in the following issues of the review. What is its content? The arguments put forward in the first articles of Diélo Trouda are taken up and developed. The main cause of the failure of the anarchist movement is the “absence of firm principles and consistent organizational practice.” Anarchism must “combine its forces into an active general organization, as required by the reality and strategy of the social class struggle”, in line with the Bakuninist tradition and the wishes of Kropotkin. This organization would establish a general tactical and political line for anarchism, leading to “organized collective practice.”

Also in the same book, Skirda quotes Nestor Makhno who is outraged by the irresponsibility of lovers of “chaos” like Gelderloos.

“We expected that the idea of organized anarchism would meet with obstinate resistance among the supporters of chaos, so numerous in the anarchist community, because this idea obliges any anarchist who participates in the movement to take responsibility and to establish the concepts of duty and consistency. While the favorite principle in which most anarchists have been educated up to now can be expressed by the following axiom:”I do what I want, I don't care about anything.” It is only natural that anarchists of this kind, steeped in such principles, should be violently hostile to any idea of organized anarchism and collective responsibility.”

Makhno further specifies that the anarchists are not intended to build the societies that will emerge after the dismantling of the State. Their mission is to guide the revolutionary movement to free populations from the yoke of the state, nothing more and nothing less.

” Anarchists will lead the masses and events theoretically.. Under no circumstances should and cannot be conceived of the action of conducting revolutionary events and the revolutionary movement of the masses as an aspiration of the anarchists to take the construction of the new society into their own hands. This edification can only be carried out by the whole working society; this task belongs only to them, and any attempt to take this right from it must be considered anti-anarchist. The question of ideation is not a question of socialist construction, but that of theoretical and political influence exerted on the revolutionary course of political events. We would not be revolutionaries or fighters if we were not interested in the character and trend of the revolutionary struggle of the masses. And, since the character and tendency of this struggle are determined not only by objective factors, but also by subjective factors, that is, by the influence of various political groups, our duty is to do everything possible to ensure that the ideological influence of anarchism on the course of the revolution is maximized.

The current “era of wars and revolutions” poses the main dilemma with exceptional acuteness: revolutionary events will evolve either under the influence of statist (be they socialist) ideas, or under the influence of non-statist (anarchist) ideas.”

Techno-confusionism

Many passages in the book are also indicative of Gelderloos's lack of technocritical culture. A great deal of confusion emerged. For example, he mentions “horizontal technologies” without clearly defining their differences with technologies that would be “vertical”. Clearly, Gelderloos seems to believe that technology is neutral politically and socially. Not every technology would in itself contain perverse political and social effects. It would then be enough to expropriate the wicked capitalists, and with a wave of a magic wand the technology would instantly become virtuous.

“Every technology that is not entirely under our control, entirely extirpated from the capitalist market and colonial institutions, is a weapon aimed at us and on the planet.”

A giant self-managed excavator is therefore no longer a “weapon aimed at us and on the planet”. It would therefore be possible and even desirable to reappropriate chemical factories (to produce drugs), power plants, cargo ships or even the Internet. Gelderloos recycle with green and decreasing sauce The self-management fable of the industrial system. For him, capitalism and not industrialism is the problem.

“Industrialism is an obvious candidate [of global ecological collapses], but blaming chimneys and fossil fuels is the same as confusing cause and effect.”

From a materialist perspective, it should be obvious that it was the technical progress of the industrial revolution that allowed capitalism to become thermo-industrial, to increase its destructive power exponentially. The buildings and infrastructures of industrial civilization have a mass that exceeds that of all living beings on Earth.^[17]. And to maintain them, keep them in working condition, billions of tons of material must be pulled from the Earth's crust every year.^[18], whether the economy is capitalist or communist. It's a matter of physics, as Janco would say.

For Gelderloos, “the cause of the global ecological crisis is colonialism.” Again, we are perplexed by such absurdities. Colonialism is not a cause but a consequence — or rather a condition of existence — of urban societies that are always the product of state, hierarchical, unequal and authoritarian societies. Demographic concentration has always been a technique used by state elites aimed at dispossessing rural populations of their autonomy.^[19]. But Gelderloos naively believes that it is possible and desirable to self-manage a large modern city like New York whose material existence is based entirely on the industrial system that is destroying the planet and indigenous peoples.

In passing, we recall the figures of the geographer Guillaume Faburel:

“On a global scale, cities, which represent only 2% of the land surface, are already responsible for 70% of waste, 75% of greenhouse gas emissions, 78% of the energy consumed or even 90% of pollutants emitted into the air.^[20].”

Preventing genocides without dismantling the system that makes them possible

Later in the book, Gelderloos also wants to “make sure that mass murder doesn't pay.” This is a laudable objective, but as long as the techno-industrial system is not dismantled, increasingly powerful technologies will continue to be produced and disseminated (AI, nanotechnology and biotechnologies for example). Thus, mass killing is becoming more accessible to states, businesses, terrorist or paramilitary groups, political parties, religious sects, or isolated individuals. Let's add that Sebastián Cortés believes that fascism is a germ in industrial society.^[21]. As for the historian Zygmunt Bauman, he noted structural links between the increasing power of technology, the development of modern states and genocides.^[22].

Idealism leads to immobility

Gelderloos' obvious idealism reached its peak when he tried to imagine Catalan territories once “global capitalism” had been dismantled. As the state weakens, it wants to use the remaining fuel reserves to move cargo ships from rich regions to vulnerable poor regions. Objective: to send food and machine parts so that “the poorest regions can achieve self-sufficiency in the production of food, medicine and other vital goods.” This “global transfer of resources” will be carried out “through trade union organizing in ports and factories.”

“All the drugs, all the scientific research, all the machine designs, all the codes were immediately made universally accessible.”

Basically, Gelderloos wants to do what the big neocolonialist humanitarian NGOs already do. International solidarity is the best alibi for maintaining the global techno-industrial system, and therefore for the domination of the North over the South.

In Gelderloos's fable, territories achieve self-sufficiency in just one decade. From the point of view of the leaders, “it was an apocalyptic collapse.” But “for the rest of us, even though it was not without significant challenges, it was the greatest victory we have ever experienced.” Gelderloos seems to believe that his revolution would have the capacity to solve most of the problems that have plagued the world for centuries in just a few years.

Gelderloos continues his stroll in the land of the teddy bears. According to him, “a tacit consensus within this growing network of autonomous territories led them to plug all oil and gas wells as quickly as technically possible, except when this risked causing famines.” If this is likely to cause famines, we continue to kill the climate! In such a situation, “the entire network was committed to helping the territory in question adapt its food infrastructure to free it from its dependence on fossil fuels.” Because obviously, after the fall of capitalism, there will magically happen an immediate convergence of the interests of all humans living on the planet. Humanity will become one, mutual aid will become universal, etc. Like many anti-globalists, Gelderloos refuses to accept the material reality of this world. For example, the fact that the neurological capacities of the human brain are limited. Indeed, we are unable to empathize with millions of people at the same time.^[23].

Gelderloos wants to restore wetlands, forgetting to mention that this will encourage the establishment of mosquitoes that are potentially vectors of deadly epidemics.^[24]. Rural and urban people live in peace and harmony, because the problem boiled down to the state and not to the city itself, as a material structure and social organization:

“Suddenly, the city became a happy meeting place for its own residents. With the abolition of the police, land titles were burned and everyone had access to adequate housing overnight.”

For Gelderloos, only the “police” and the “fascist paramilitaries” should be abolished. He probably imagines that drug traffickers and religious extremists are reasonable people who will naturally embrace the revolutionary eco-anarchist ideal. In agriculture, “harvesting is done using tractors running on biofuels”, or manually but only when people are “very motivated”. He hopes to avoid shortages in supermarkets by self-managing the entire food chain, from fields to factories to distribution.

“Extirpated from the global production network for profit, factories have either been abandoned or taken over by their workers.”

Most factories are “reallocated to meet social needs” and “only operate a few days a week.” As if we could self-manage freely a factory. And who works in the factories? It's simple, “those who have an affinity with big machines” (i.e. engineers, technicians, managers) and “volunteers who put up with noise and the artificial environment” (i.e. workers). Note how Gelderloos always relies on volunteering to carry out the most thankless tasks, wiping away everything that technocracy has put in place to make the industrial system sustainable (generalized dispossession of means of subsistence, scientific organization of work, scientific organization of work, corruption of the masses through material abundance, entertainment, etc.). Of course, there will always be hierarchy in the factory, when workers work on big, complex machines designed by engineers. No industry without technocracy.

The passage on the left-wing Internet is also worth its weight in peanuts (self-managed).

“There is still a strong shared desire for global communication. Such a communication network is vital for adapting to global problems as well as for ensuring solidarity and resolving conflicts.”

Radio and telephone are regaining ground while the gigantic infrastructure of the global Internet is maintained. But be careful, Gelderloos advocates degrowth. The volume of data exchanged will be considerably reduced and limited to “international friendships”, to the “sharing of scientific articles and news”.

A large part of scientific research focuses on “the development of synthetic materials that are neither toxic nor derived from petroleum.” As if it were possible to control scientific research and control its consequences^[25].

Same spirit for the energy system. Some power plants are marginally disposed of when they are considered harmful to ecosystems, but they are preserved when their dismantling can harm the human communities that depend on them. At this rate, we still have 1,000 for industrial capitalism.

Everything Gelderloos proposes in his grotesque utopia requires global cooperation that only states, multinationals and large NGOs can organize and coordinate. This utopia is based on industries, heavy machinery, huge energy transport and communication infrastructures, and therefore on a class society dominated by an elite of technicians. Moreover, maintaining trade routes between the North and the Global South for humanitarian purposes is like endlessly reproducing the system that Gelderloos hates.

The best thing you can do to stop the carnage and at the same time free people in the global South from the yoke of the West and the BRICS^[26], is to turn off the energy tap and to cut off all transport and communication routes between the two zones. We must do this without worrying about the short-term consequences and rather rejoice in the long-term consequences — the saving of life on Earth and of the human species, the rewilding of huge territories, an explosion of cultural and biological diversity, the great return of wildlife, the great return of wildlife, the opportunity for indigenous peoples and for our descendants to live with dignity, to experience beauty, to experience freedom.