this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
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As you add more and more issues to the protests, the set of people that have the same opinion on every single issue gets smaller and smaller, until your movement falls apart.
In Germany around the same time, climate protests started to take stances on immigration and cultural approbation and also fell apart as a result.
Brother I don't even know how you plan to sit here and pretend like those are separate issues. You can't separate capitalism and climate change. You simply cannot.
That's not the point they're making.
As you add more issues, then the Venn diagram of overlap of all the issues gets smaller and smaller. It doesn't matter if you think this is an obvious objective truth. What matters is what other people think, because you won't have much of a "movement" without other people who agree and join you.
It's not more issues. It's the same issue.
It has a large overlap with the original issue. (I would say it's a superset but no capitalism wouldn't necesnecessarily completely solve the climate crisis.)
We can also do united fronts. We don't all have to agree on everything to work on aset of issues
Exactly, and you literally cannot work on that issue if you don't understand that capitalism climate change are linked. Any attempt to address climate change without addressing the problems of capitalism will always fail because capitalism is what is allowed it to get to this point and to continue to become worse. There's literally not one thing you could do to address climate change that will not be undermined by the capitalist class. Anyone paying attention should know that right now.
Chefurka's ladder of awareness moment
You have to take a step back and look at how politics actually works.
No one can do anything unless they get elected; and no one can take a strong stand on every issue and win an election.
In France the green party has always been on the left. They always talk about Muslims, the burka, feminism, or Palestine nowadays. That's why voters are very confused.
Our greens too. And they also had to force closing nuclear plants, but when the closing date came closer and people started to ask where their power would come from, the greens said they'd built natural gas plants. Nobody took them seriously after that, and the decision of closing of nuclear plants was reversed.
Call me paranoid but that sounds like leadership was compromised by counter-interests.
It's linked but Communism can also be unsustainable. Climate change is known since 1970 or such.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea
There are only a few big billionaires. They could agree on protecting nature. I believe that they have chosen to continue for the northern shipping routes.
Educate the working class, instead of making them ignorant on purpose so they won't revolt, so when they seize the means of production they think greener then?
Most people in the US right now read at a 6th grade level.
Don't waste time trying to bring them up; change your message to something they understand.
"Tax the rich! No more billionaires!"
You can try that.
Ironically you could also try protecting nature by becoming a leading Capitalist and owning all means of production yourself.
But to become a leading capitalist you must exploit hundreds of thousands of people.
This process strips you of most of your humanity and empathy, thus you will likely no longer care about "protecting nature".
For the influence to change the world, it will be millions or billions. You also have to exploit some nature to protect the rest.
This is a Stalin level of monstocity, or beyond.
Is it a price worth paying? Because even if it is something else, like a Communist approach, the efforts will be the same. E.g. if China ends up protecting nature globally, they have paid that price.
The movement is stronger than ever. The coverage has disappeared, but there are more and more people willing to seek out every right answer and give up every privilege.
Centrists and right-wingers keep pretending that solidarity and radicalism makes movements weak, when it has always made them stronger. The moment Labor parties abandoned radicalism and chose the Third Way, their voter share dropped off a cliff. The moment movements abandon their most radical left-wing contributors to appeal to the lowest common denominator they collapse from in-fighting and the hardest workers moving off.
There is no Schelling point for less-than-complete justice. Nations, religions, ethnicities, even capital is just one of countless different ways to slice the pie and pretend that the hurt you suffer is more urgent and in-scope than someone else's. If you morally accept rallying to one subgroup, then you have no defense against others you depend on from rallying to another subgroup and coming into opposition with you. There is no way around it:
None of us are free until all of us are free.
This is what happened to Occupy Wall Street in the US, and I'm convinced it was intentional movement busting.
Probably the same thing with the climate protests in Germany.
Germany elected a more left leaning government and they actually did pass some good climate legislation. That was aided by Putin cutting of fossil fuels to Germany as well, but the protests and public mood were certainly on the site of climate action. However the protests were having problems of bringing the same numbers on the street as before covid and the fossil fuel industry spend on a lot on busting the protests.
Then the far right really gained strength in Germany and that became the much more pressing issue, rather then climate change.
I think the occupy movement fell apart partly due to the fact that it never really coalesced around any sort of leadership group or figurehead. The list issues kept getting longer, the list of desired changes kept getting ever more diverse and contradictory, and there was very rarely anyone who could articulately explain to the general public what the movement was about.
@IrateAnteater @wizardbeard I think it was crushed by police repression and contrary to what you believe, I believe not having figure heads was the main strength of the movement
Not having any sort of centralized leadership is a double edged sword. Your movement gains resistance to authorities being able to knock out the movement with a couple arrests, but your movement becomes much more prone to fizzling out of you can't somehow maintain focus, which is what happened to the Occupy movement.
@IrateAnteater what are some good examples of somewhat successful movements with leaders?
Open a history book. The examples will usually be referred to as "revolutions". The French Revolution, American Revolution, Russian Revolution. For something more modern, look at the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.
Also the left only kept growing afterwards
Yeah, occam's razor, it wasn't a sinister conspiracy to 'bust the movement', what you describe is something that can and has happened, many times, to causes, diluting them into a nebulous, impotent murk.
It's not that deep.
I don’t know about occupy Wall Street but the climate protest in Germany suffer most from radicalization. Ordinary people want to peacefully protest climate change, not march against capitalism, barricade themselves in tree houses or glue themselves to roads in rushhour traffic. The movement was taken over by attention seeking radical far left ideologues and that’s kind of a turn off for most people.
@lemmylommy @wizardbeard all your examples are of peaceful protest. Is saving the climate important or is it not? If yes, then we need to become more radicalized
"Peaceful" is defined as "non-disruptive" or even "whatever authority wants" and not "doesn't kill people"
later...
How can people really be so blind to not realize how one affects the other?
New York Mayor Ed Koch put it best.
"If you agree with me 51% of the time, vote for me. If you agree with me 100% of the time, see a psychiatrist."
You don't have to like the candidate to vote for them.
Its a big difference voting for someone or actually getting out protesting.
I look at it this way. The GOP doesn't do a lot of rallies and marches, yet they have a lot of power.
They organize their ground game and get voters to the polls.
Oh yes, so few rallies.
It also helps that they have a dedicated 'news' channel vomiting up their propaganda 24 hours a day in waiting rooms.
Maybe we should start pestering politicians with asking when they'll invest billions in climate adaption to protect from flooding and drought. Except for USA where they'll pretend nothing is happening.
"Pestering" is nothing.
Find the ones who are doing something and give them full support.
You have finite resources. Don't waste time annoying people who are opposed, work full time for their enemies.
Fell apart according to who? The media? This is really what the post is trying to discuss. Why did Greta Thunberg media coverage drop once she started get involved in other protests too?