We’re now at the stage where “movement” “intellectuals” are willing to say in public what anyone with two brain cells (#NotAllMovementIntellectuals) has known for years – that the GretaXR ‘wave’ of climate concern is well and truly dead. And since we’re talking about the Last Great British Wail, let’s quote Lou Read – “Stick a fork in their ass and turn them over: they’re’ done.”
That the wave of “climate concern/attention” that began in 2018 would be a wave – with an identifiable surge, a peak and then a collapse and back-wash – was something that some people were too stupid or too hopey-changey to be able to see before it actually unfolded. It was different, this time, they insisted (primarily because they – the experts – were here now. Or something).
And now the “post-mortems” are beginning to appear. Of course, they’re not really autopsies at all. Because a proper autopsy has some criteria, not crazed myopic wish-fulfilment. A proper autopsy is conducted following protocols and checklists and all the rest of it. Things are cut into, weighed. Evidence collected and various hypotheses tested. Some are not supported by the evidence, and relegated to unlikely/impossible. Et cetera – there’s no need to test the analogy to destruction or distraction.
I won’t name names, because – well, I can’t think of a good reason besides not be bothered and not wanting to get into a slanging match with heat but no light – but you’ll figure it out if you want. Suffice to say that anyone who can write a sentence that says XR is/was a social movement has so little historical or sociological understanding as to be WASTING EVERYONE’S TIME WITH THEIR IDIOCY. It’s worse than useless, in fact, because by presenting ramblings as worthy of attention it’s allowing people to think that by reading it they’re learning something.
That clip:
And anyone who allows this to be published clearly – and ironically – doesn’t know anything about social movement ecosystems.
Let’s put it in simple sentences. I will resist the urge to put the whole thing in BLOCK CAPITALS. Just imagine that I am enunciating very. slowly. and. loudly. as. if. talking. to. a. dolt.
a) No single social movement organisation is ever, on its own, “a social movement.” There have been other precursor organisations which have left traces – obvious or largely invisible.
b) There are OTHER social movement organisations still going on. You may not like them, or rate them, but they exist and ignoring them reveals your own partisanship and ignorance.
c) Social movement organisations exist in relation with other SMOs (big, small, sexy, boring, reformist, soi-pissant – sorry, soi-disant revolutionary). There is a flow of personnel, rhetoric, ideas, imagery etc.
d) Social movements are also made up of connections to NGOs and other bodies, acting in uneasy alliance, often getting in each others’ way, occasionally amplifying each other. Those NGOs/other bodies (think tanks, trades unions, religious groups, academic outfits, alternative media), they MATTER. They may seem hopelessly uncool, but they are a vital repository for the suppository of cool kids, especially after they stop being either kids or cool.
And if you don’t understand this is an ecosystem (with all that that implies) and your “analysis” is focussed on the rise and so-damned-predictable-and-predicted fall of one outfit, then you have no business – net zero by 2025 – of “telling the truth” or whatever idiotic bullshit it is that you think you are doing.
And for all this toxic dross to be in a publication whose name could reasonably expect a casual reader to be capable of ecological thinking? There’s never an irony policeman when you need one.
But there will soon be plenty or real live policeman about, as the carceral state tries to hang on to “normal” as everything slides right out of view. Fun times.
marchudson.net 
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