On Staying Woke in Polycrisis Futurism

..and Avoiding the Basic Lib PMC Siren Song of Rupert Read

By Murray Blockchain. Murray is a model, motivational speaker, and personal ruggedization life coach based in an off-grid seasteading community.

Last week’s reading in the Collapsology group was an essay by UK climate activist and notable Extinction Rebellion (XR) spokesperson Rupert Read. While Read’s piece is primarily focused on climate politics in the UK, the social movement dynamics he describes and trajectory he proposes have broader implications, particularly for how the Western world responds to climate breakdown in the coming years. The question Read ultimately addresses is a central concern of collapsology: the form-taking of collective agency in response to the failure of systems that support life and ways of life. There is a real danger in calling for a mass movement that explicitly rejects the scope, complexity, and systemic drivers of the crisis (or crises) it aims to mitigate and manage. Which is what Read does in his essay. 

Within the history of social movements, a recurrent pattern is the formation of a broader “moderate flank” and a further left “radical flank.” A classic example is the US Civil Rights movement, with Martin Luther King Jr. leading the moderate flank and Malcolm X leading the radical flank. Roughly, the strategic function of the radical flank is to shift the Overton window and nudge the center towards positions (further left or right) that can be captured by the moderate flank. 

The UK-specific formulation Read presents is essentially this: Extinction Rebellion started with the intention of being a more moderate mass movement, but shifted further to the left, thus becoming a radical flank, leaving a vacuum in the center.¹ He now calls for the emergence of a moderate flank to the climate movement. For Read, what this means is explicitly disengaging with approaches that frame climate in relation to forms of oppression, all of which he diminutively lumps under the rubric of “wokeness.” 

Read writes, “The ‘woke’ (‘intersectional’ identity-politics-based) approach to inclusiveness involves a certain jargon that is itself not inclusive to most of the population. It is of course fine, good, for intersectional approaches to be part of the movement. Likewise decolonial approaches. It is not fine for them to demand that the entire movement take their form. For that is ex-clusive of the majority.” 

The problem with this is that we inhabit what geographer Kathryn Yusoff has described as a “colonial Earth” - or, as Jairus Grove articulates, the “Eurocene” - a planet where historical processes of colonization and intersectional oppression are deeply, ecologically entangled with Earth systems and foundational to contemporary geopolitics. These processes are systemic drivers of climate change as a global and historical problem. How states and corporations exercise power over bodies is fundamentally, materially linked to how energy and resources are mobilized and deployed. The polycrisis² is not a question of parts per million CO2; it is a question of how power puts nature to work. There is no way to reasonably separate anthropogenic climate change from how energy and resources are metabolized by civilization at a planetary scale.   

Read writes, “The climate/ecology struggle is very different from the struggles that typically get invoked, by XR and Malm alike, as would-be precedents. Because it is not a struggle for self-liberation on the part of an oppressed group.” How power puts nature to work is through intersectional oppression; climate systems breakdown is an effect of that configuration; and, atmospheric carbon is one (albeit very important) valence of that unwell hyperobject. 

By shadowbanning complexity as “wokeness,” what emerges for Read is a position that: climate change is an issue of singular and unprecedented importance; it is too late for mitigation at scale, and we must focus increasingly on adaptation; we must work within existing institutions and infrastructure towards the goal of “net zero”; to gain traction the climate movement needs to build solidarity across the political spectrum, even at the expense of marginalized groups. 

Read’s vision is politically salient. But to what end? At what scale? To which “majority of people” is his moderate flank ultimately crafted for? “The primary audience for the present essay is English-speaking countries across the world…” he writes. One can perhaps surmise that this is likewise the primary operating space of the green politics he envisions - extending maybe into other parts of Europe or even more broadly throughout the “developed world.”

Were climate change a singular issue of atmospheric carbon, and were mitigation/adaptation merely a question of reducing emissions, Read’s call to action for mass movement solidarity via workplace net-zero-oriented organizing³ and “think of the children” politics might make more sense. But, a climate movement that disengages with social justice as what Read calls “narrow-minded purism” in order to appeal to a broader base ultimately reveals a deeply black-pilled strategic parochialism. 

Perhaps the unspoken reasoning is a view that sees a technocratic managerial “green capital” approach backed by Western hegemonic institutions as the best or only viable form of agency capable of addressing climate at scale; even if the form it takes implicitly means the ongoing prioritization of life - and lifestyle - in the “Global North” at the expense of the “Global South.” Read’s stance on immigration suggests a certain level of comfort with this arrangement. And, the reason it is worth engaging with Read at all is the very real possibility that this trajectory (or one like it) will gain traction, if not majority support, amongst the audience he is addressing… relatively capitalized libs in the Global North. 

Collapsology is ultimately a form of futurism. Here, the object of concern is what futures might emerge from mass movements that attempt to decouple climate breakdown from the power relations that drive it, particularly in the context of resurgent nationalism and escalating volatility. There is a real risk that they may trend inevitably towards “lifeboat ethics,” leveraging the urgency of crisis to justify triage. Reducing the complexity of a systemic problem can be an effective tactic to orient action for the purposes of organizing. But as a strategy, obscuring the problem will not solve it. Although, it can certainly make it worse.

1. Given the explicitly non-violent stance adopted by XR, and the political diversity contained within the movement, one can reasonably question Read’s characterization of XR as “radical.” The emphasis of this piece is a more general critique concerning the intersection of social justice and climate in relation to collective agency. Here, Read’s treatment of UK climate politics serves as a lens through which to explore a broader set of dynamics that may (and likely will) find other iterations elsewhere.

2. Multiple converging and interacting systemic risks with the potential to produce cascading effects. (We’ll be writing more about this concept in the future.)

3. The point here is not to devalue workplace organizing. The power of labor is real, effective, and important (and, perhaps inconveniently for Read’s vision, radicalizing.) Again, the issue is one of form-taking and trajectory, which in this case is compressed under the singular and nebulous goal of “net-zero.”