Arguments against criminalising protesters have often relied on the same carceral logic, a belief in the essential need for a society to have prisons and people who deserve to be put in them, to distinguish ordinary people from the implied (and often racialised) criminal people.
Similarly, many people are quick to justify protests, including climate protests, by claiming that they are peaceful – ingraining the idea that those that disrupt peace are illegitimate. This ultimately negates the liberatory violence of the oppressed against their oppressor, of those who, in the words of Palestinian activist Ghassan Kanafani, refuse “a conversation between the sword and the neck”.
Such expressions of morality rely on accountability to a white supremacist state over accountability to one another. They are framed by respectability to a nation, not a love for those beyond its borders.
The Met Police relies on this logic in order to enact violence in our communities on our behalf and to emerge intact after doing so. In expanding our solidarities, we must question the facades of ‘civil society’, ‘policing by consent’, ‘peace’ and ‘criminality’. In a capitalist state, these function to maintain a system that exploits those excluded from whiteness and to disguise the reality of the ‘perpetual warfare’ that colonised and racialised people live under.
Human vs nature
When fighting for a liveable planet, it is important to understand that capitalist relations of domination and subordination extend to the non-human world too. They conceptualise ‘nature’ as separate from ‘human’, and therefore something to be owned and fought against.
These conceptions were moulded through colonial conquest and are intertwined with ideas of carcerality and patriarchy. In ‘The Death of Nature’, historian Carolyn Merchant investigates how the prominent 16th-century English philosopher and imperialist ideologue Francis Bacon relied on metaphors of the courtroom and torture chamber to explain how, like a criminalised person, nature must be “bound in service”, put “in constraint” and made a “slave” to extract whatever is within.
Carceral logic isn’t just integral to maintaining the capitalist system – it’s deeply embedded in our dominant ontologies, in the very fabric of how we live, work and relate to each other and the non-human world. We must abolish it in every form.
These logics extend to the terrain of environmentalism itself, the history of which is deeply entwined with both eugenics and colonial expansion. Ghada Sasa argues, for example, that Israel engages in ‘green colonialism’ – using the protection of national parks, forests and nature reserves, to justify land grabs from Palestinians and greenwash its image.
Environmentalists cannot always claim the moral high ground. Climate activism isn’t necessarily opposed to racism. Some liberals have revived Malthusian population theories, while others – such as the self-proclaimed ‘eco-fascist’ who killed 51 people in mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019 – argue that racist murder is necessary for the preservation of nature.
Solidarities must be built. Climate activists must embrace anti-racism and anti-imperialism, extend solidarities beyond the family, the nation or whiteness, and “build unity within and across borders”, says Walia.
Failing to do so will leave movements primed for co-option and coercion by green-imperialist, welfare-nationalist and eco-fascist mutations of capitalism.
Chris Kaba’s death is finally being investigated by the Independent Office for Police Conduct, after much campaigning. Now we must stand in support of his family – doing so is as integral to ensuring climate justice as standing against any infamous polluter.
William Jones is a pseudonym.
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