Mobilising Red, Black and Green? Contouring the Place of the Riot in Contemporary Environmentalism

Kurunczi: Mobilising Red, Black and Green? 88 Mobilising Red, Black and Green? Contouring the Place of the Riot in Contemporary Environmentalism ALEXANDER KURUNCZI Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany Introduction: Fractured Reputation? Riots and the Progressive Struggle Today Riots prove elusive, their contemporary noisy ubiquity notwithstanding. One peculiar mode of protest in social movements’ diverse repertoire of strategies, they are as prone to its undulations, where certain actions are privileged as effective, while others are dis- qualified as too blunt an instrument in the struggle for justice and equality. Puzzlingly, it hardly matters that the last two decades were characterised by forms of protest that in- sisted on civil society as the privileged site of resistance – riots remain a phenomenon ostensibly positioned on the edges of the political sphere. This elusiveness has not en- hanced their reputation. Not unlike the riot itself, it remains fractured. Riots are fre- quently frowned upon, even demonised. Commonly associated with violence, devastating destruction, and the egoistic greed of looters, they become, it seems, maladies of the mob rather than (legitimate) protests of the people. Things are more complicated, of course. Riots position themselves inside and outside of a theoretical enchainment with democracy, depending on who exactly the riots’ subject is understood to be: Is it a class, as socialists have hoped? A suggestible mob, as conserva- tives have feared? A multitude, a mass, the people even? In this debate, there is a chance for rehabilitating the riot, but – mind you – this is merely a chance, far from being a fore- gone conclusion. Puzzlements abound, as the riot‘s temporality does not offer much to simplify things: its causes remain vague, its demands and aims enigmatic. Juxtaposed with the neatly organised demonstrations and marches with their intelligible banners, riots flaunt their opacity, often blissfully remaining in a state of perpetual spontaneity. At the moment they are placed between rehabilitation, renaissance, and defeat. No doubt, riots are contentious practices, but their political impact is an object of contention alike. Riots, then, fit seamlessly into a political landscape that is infinitely more complicated than any commensurate narrative of linear cause and effect suggests. Thus, they capture (and are captured by) the contemporary conjuncture, in which the progressive Left’s Coils of the Serpent 7 (2020): 88-112 Kurunczi: Mobilising Red, Black and Green? 89 struggle hinges on developing coherent, captivating, and collective imaginative land- scapes for life after capitalism. Ideally, this means coupling an unrelenting critique of the systematic failures inherent in capitalist socio-economic structure with a reimagining of the political sphere and moving beyond the unflinching reverence for well-established political institutions. This struggle for the future has ushered in an “era of uprisings” (Clo- ver 2016) in which riots occupy a pivotal place. The promise of the riot, then, is at its very best a promise of a coming and encompassing democracy, an egalitarian and just future. Here, the crowd appears as a subject ready to demand its inclusion within the empty sig- nifier of ‘the people’ – a place too often cordoned off to encompass only the privileged few. While this democratic horizon remains messy, riots – far from unethical gatherings – can help articulate the proliferating ethical convictions of their time. Hence, riots, may allow the crowd to come into existence as a political force to insist on and demand their future. The crowd articulates its right to the future, its egalitarian promise, and its determination to create a different future. In Astra Taylor’s words: “Throughout history the ideals of freedom and equality emanate intensely from the ground up, with the most authentic and expansive dreams conjured by those who were most emphatically excluded” (2019: 29). One dream proves a particularly effective catalyst: the “perhaps impossible vision of an ecologically just world” (Spivak 1999: 382), which persists in the collective (radical) imagination. While riots present a central component in the intricate texture of today’s political conflicts, they increasingly interact with questions of environmental justice. Re- cent emergences of the crowd, civil unrest, and civil disobedience are all but unthinkable without the mobilising trajectory of a fight against cascading ecological tragedy. These protests are, not least of all, a response to the urgency of the matter and the insufficiency and timidity of climate action so far. Climate catastrophe is increasingly understood as irresolvable within the current political grammar, the economic regime of the accumula- tion of capital, and the hegemony of contemporary cultural constellations of neoliberal- ism. If, as David Wallace-Wells has asserted, “the climate crisis demands political commit- ment well beyond the easy engagement of rhetorical sympathies, comfortable political tribalism, and ethical consumption” (2019: 186), the search for new, radical, and militant tactics is hardly surprising. How do riots contribute to envisioning a new, ecologically just and sustainable world? Can they, in fact, reconsolidate the relationship between radical strategies, radical tactics, and a radical imagination (cf. Haiven/Khasnabish 2014: 209-231)? In an attempt at un- earthing these complexities, this article embarks on visiting escalations of environmental and social struggles that lay bare their theoretical intersections, and that might be termed ecological riots. To that end, it questions the disavowal of the riot, and places its practice amidst the theoretical (occasionally heated) dialogue of Marxism, anarchism, and environmentalism. Focussing on the recent hegemonic staging that purges the narrative of climate catastrophe from excesses of an extractive economy, fossil capitalism, and “car- Coils of the Serpent 7 (2020): 88-112 Kurunczi: Mobilising Red, Black and Green? 90 bon democracy” (Mitchell 2013), helps to reinstate an encompassing critique of capitalism as the bedrock upon which ecologically just worlds can be built. Riots as a particular protest form are introduced as a modality enabling an articulation of such an ecologically just and sustainable world, while this article concludes by assessing the enduring role and the promise of riots in the context of configuring the crowd’s futures. Abandoning the Riot? Critical Contestations If riots have proved contested candidates as productive tactics of protest, then this critique rests upon two assertions: the notion of excessive violence and the notion of insuf- ficient institutionalisation. Riots are not seen as political and politicised events in which demands, wishes, and desires can be articulated. Much less, they are understood as affec- tive events which express the hunger and need for political agency. The image is clear: riots are discarded as militant festivals of destruction – willed into their disreputable existence by the criminal ‘underclasses’ of society. Hence, they are no cause for political con- sideration. At best, they might be a joyous rehearsal of democracy, ultimately meaningless and devoid of any substance in the world of politics proper. This narrative might border on caricature – and this text sets out to deconstruct why – but it remains a powerful perspective. At the same time, today’s riot addresses a central question with respect to the over- lapping, though structurally distinct, modes of resistant thinking of anarchism, Marxism, and environmentalism – the question of scaling, institutions, and the form of organisation. Much contention has been evoked by the discussion about whether larger scales are in- evitably preferable. A forceful argument can be made that the rhetoric of unity in sections of the global Left has resulted in the silencing of particular groups and subjectivities – and the specific oppression they face – in order to retain the ‘purity’ of the struggle. At the same time, the riot complicates the idea of revolutionary identities. Critics of the riot as- sume that collective autonomy is the product of collective emancipation, which is only possible by virtue of a collective identity. The riot does, they argue, not express any such identity. Again, we encounter a sceptical reading of its elusive presence. Without doubt, the riot ties into a larger debate on where, moving forward, the Left should go. Far be it from consensus, then, that riots prove an effective mode of resistance to fossil-fuel states and their enmeshment in neoliberal capitalism. Obviously, such objections against the riot are mobilised from different positions on the political spectrum. The lib- eral-democratic rhetoric claims that civil disobedience might be justifiable, but has to remain non-violent. The good protester and his family-friendly demonstration is favourably compared to the criminal rioter and his looting. Precisely this apodictic primacy of non- violence can be even more crassly utilised from a conservative perspective: Equipped with a “keen sense for the propagandistic power of language” (Vanderheiden 2008: 299), Coils of the Serpent 7 (2020): 88-112 Kurunczi: Mobilising Red, Black and Green? 91 this narrative establishes an accusatory and sinister semantics by framing radical environmental protest as ‘eco-terrorism.’ It conjures up the spectre of intersubjective violence, associating radical environmentalism with unlawful violence.

Load more