Reflections on the Climate Strike
At around 3 pm, close to the end of the strike, a young Swedish announcer jubilantly declared to a massive crowd at Kungsträdgården that nearly 60,000 people had shown up for the strike. It’s hard to visualise what 60,000 people looks like but it did feel like the whole of Stockholm was out and about. The houses that we passed by seemed empty, as they always did, but the emptiness was active for once.
I have been to a fair share of strikes and protests but this was perhaps the most diverse strike I had been to in terms of inter-generational participation. There were of course the young college and schools students, but there were also the older generations like the Grandmothers for Future and the really young kindergarteners who were too young to organise into a collective identity but held banners and flags and marched along with their parents nevertheless.
The students had a distinct aura around them. They were rowdy, loud and their anger was funnelled through humour. The banners, the placards, the signs they carried were memes - mapping digital culture into physical reality. The humour wasn’t your reader’s digest kind that marked the older generations. It was the self referential, jolly absurdist kind, distinct to modern digital humour.
Some of the memorable ones read “I like my boys hot, not my earth" and “I’d be in school if the earth was cool”. Pop culture found its subversive use in these slogans with signs like “Dumbledore would not let this happen” and “The earth is hotter than young Leonardo DiCaprio”. Yet, underlying the humour was a dark thread of anxious foreboding and nihilism, especially exemplified in signs like “You will die of old age, I’ll die of climate change”. A strange sense of time pervaded the atmosphere, as though the ghosts of the future were haunting the present and the past. Such were the machinations of a fresh generation staring anxiously at the abyss of uncertainty and budding in a burning planet.
While the inter-generational diversity was what marked the protests in most of the world, here in Stockholm it felt like a disproportionate chunk of the racial diversity on the ground came from the international students. Amongst the Swedes, the white Swedes far outnumbered those of colour. And in terms of class, amongst the working population, there were members from different occupations but in general there was a notable lack of the more productive elements of the working class such as manual labourers, sanitation workers, etc . These are also the sorts of jobs that one sees more people of colour in Stockholm occupy (a significant number of migrants work these jobs). Those that attended were largely from the middle class with certain elements of the bourgeoisie such as a group of people that marched under the banner “venture capitalists for climate” which says a lot more about the strike than I could elucidate in words.
Which brings me to my thoughts about the nature of the strike itself. The atmosphere was jubilant and electric. The young led the blaze of energy with their unwavering songs of protest. At the same time, it was hard to ignore the highly symbolic nature of the strike, especially when it culminated at the stage in Kungsträdgården and the air grew thick with self-congratulation and gratification. This was epitomised by my friend who popped his strike cherry, when he said “We have done our share. I think we can leave now".
Perhaps this is the biggest problem with these liberal strikes. And yes, the climate movements are still in their infancy. They are still grappling with their aims and methods, which largely explains the vagueness that surrounds them. But as they are right now, they fail to address the underlying rottenness of the structure and strike solely to make Power listen. It is a strike for the spectacle. It doesn’t seek to empower the individual to tackle the superstructure but rather presents the frustration of the collective conscience and in that its utility expires.
The lack of disruption lies at the heart of these strikes. This, is made stranger by the incredible strength in numbers and the global nature of the movement. How can so many people around the world participate and not disrupt everyday life? Everyone goes back to work the next day, as though nothing ever happened.
But as I stated earlier, these strikes are still in their infancy and are yet to burgeon into a more coherent movement. For this, the more experienced members of the left must lend a hand. The aims can only be made clear through collective deliberation. For this more public spaces that allow people to come together and discuss must be opened up. The greatest contribution of these strikes so far has been to dust off the layers of apathy that had coated the working generations while fertilising the soil of collective action for the emerging generations. It would appear that the next logical step is to shatter the illusion of capitalist realism.