Some Newsletter Business + On Blockadia and Palestine

What role does "Blockadia" play in a rapidly changing global environment defined by the tension between a growing internationalist left and a new paradigm of eco-fascist violence?

Some Newsletter Business

As many of you have probably noticed, this newsletter has gone from being roughly biweekly to roughly not-at-all over the course of the last year. This is a result of a number of things: I’m writing for the public in other venues; I started a PhD program that dominates my reading time and limits what I can put into research for this newsletter; and, of course, the ongoing genocide in Palestine has meant that less writing here both because of time spent solidarity organizing in Canada and because I have felt uncomfortable publishing writing that isn’t directly tied to it.

None of that is likely to change any time soon, so I’ve been thinking about what I can do with this platform that is less time intensive but still valuable. My current idea is to use it as a venue for longer form articles that take a “thinking through” or “thinking out loud” approach to many of the topics this newsletter has already touched on – more editorial, perhaps, than the previous format, but still full of links or bibliographies for people to take deeper dives. Some of this will have to do with what I’m reading and researching in graduate school, some will not. I’ll do my best to avoid esoteric academic discussions.

All that said, I’m very open to hearing your thoughts on format, so please reach out if you have any ideas regarding how I can continue to use this platform for political education.

Below is my first stab at it. It zooms through a number of large topics, so expect a bit more depth (though ideally not more length!) on some of these in the future.

On Blockadia and Palestine

In 2014, Naomi Klein named the growing movement to stop the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure through direct action and land occupation “Blockadia.” The conflict over Keystone XL was underway, and the Standing Rock fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline was soon to come. In Canada, Unist’ot’en camp was established by Wet’suwet’en leaders in 2010 and continues fighting pipelines today (including the nearly-complete Coastal GasLink pipeline; Canada made international news in 2019-2020 when it sent in a violent militarized police force to clear Wet’suwet’en land occupations blocking the pipeline). These are some of the high profile examples of Blockadia in North America, but there are many more, and activists have taken a broader approach to it than Klein initially painted: Blockadia, from my point of view, includes all kinds of place-based movements that fight against extractivism. That means the Fairy Creek blockades against old growth logging (another instance where Canada achieved international infamy) as well as #StopCopCity in Atlanta, and possibly far more diverse movements that are not as obviously ecological. I should also mention that there is a strong tradition of land occupation against extractivism in Europe (see Ende Gelände, or example).

Klein characterized Blockadia as one of the most promising new developments of the [left] climate movement, and I’ve been inclined to see it that way, too – but why? This is one of the questions I’m seeking to explore in my dissertation research, so I’ll trace the development of my thinking here as it’s a good entry point into the questions surrounding the role Blockadia may or may not play in undermining extractivism and capitalism globally, and, in so doing, rebuilding the prospect of a livable future.

My hypothesis is that land defense movements (blockades) have a kind of unique revolutionary potential because of the dominance of non-capitalist ontologies and epistemologies, or more broadly, ways of being and knowing, on site. They combine a material challenge to the hegemony of fossil capitalism with an ideological challenge, interrupting both the physical and cultural processes of reproduction that prevent us from building a better world. This has a particular truth to it in Indigenous-led environments, but I think it tends to be true in other ones, too.

A brief aside for those of you who have never spent time “on the front lines:” under most circumstances, money isn’t a thing. Camp chores, cooking, construction, counter-surveillance and security, social media agitprop: these are all done by those who are able to and who choose to do them. It is an environment defined largely by mutual aid and free association, a way of being where exchange value not only isn’t prioritized, but doesn’t exist. It’s not to say blockades are perfect places or that there aren’t examples with more clearly defined hierarchical structures, but at a general level, it feels safe to say value is measured differently “at camp” than out in the capitalist world.

This decommodification of everyday life is something most of us don’t encounter anywhere else. Even if you return home after two weeks, it’s hard to imagine you’ll see the world the same way. I observed exactly this during the Fairy Creek blockade: many people that I knew personally returned from the blockade fully, for lack of a better term, radicalized, making the kinds of connections – between climate action and police funding, for example – that this newsletter has strived to make over the last few years. Whether that was the result of this experience of decommodified living in community, of a feeling of connection with the ancient forests they were fighting to protect, or simply of exposure to the wild, violent, and overtly racialized excesses of Canada’s police forces, I don’t know. That’s part of what I’d like to understand.

But I want to understand that not simply for academic purposes. I want to understand it because it’s important for the question of whether or not Blockadia really does have a role to play in a global revolution (a term I use in the most general sense here – I’ll save unpacking that for another time) or whether framing it that way is simply a response to decades of devastating losses and an all-encompassing feeling of disempowerment in both the North American left and the climate movement. Are we just desperately grasping for tangible victories, or even battles, so we can feel like we’ve accomplished something in the last half century?

In his new book If We Burn, Vincent Bevins traced the lineage and the aftermath of the mass movements of the 2010s. From Brazil to Ukraine to the Arab spring, these movements tended to be “horizontalist,” unorganized, and semi-spontaneous. While most of them were spawned by progressive activists, far-right repressive regimes ended up filling the void created by their revolutionary breaks. If blockades were to scale to the level of meaningfully disrupting the machine of global capitalism, would they – these anarchist-adjacent, horizontalist spaces of resistance – be prone to the same problems faced by the mass protest decade? If we commit ourselves to these diverse, disruptive projects as our dominant theory of change, do we risk creating space for the more organized, fascistic right, already waiting in the wings, to seize power?

I should be clear here that these cautionary questions are not intended to suggest we should not support and/or participate in these spaces, but rather, to interrogate whether or not they hold unique potential for catalyzing the global struggle for liberation.

This, generally, is where my thinking was when I entered graduate school last September. But on October 7th, the world changed: a subjugated and dispossessed people, held for years in an ever-shrinking concentration camp, broke through the barbed wire fence. The occupying power’s response has been horrific. As I wrote in the first few days, “It feels like 1939. A far-right regime is in the early stages of killing potentially hundreds of thousands of people or more.” The (official) death toll hasn’t yet reached the hundreds of thousands, but it’s certainly trending in that direction, particularly as starvation begins in earnest, and Netanyahu continues to make it clear that his intent is the full ethnic cleansing of Palestine (by some combination of murder and removal).

The Jewish writer Masha Gessen framed it in unequivocal terms in December: “the ghetto is being liquidated.”

The ongoing genocide in Palestine is serving, in my view, to radically accelerate existing global trends: towards multipolarity and the end of US empire; towards rising levels of international conflict and a third world war (are we already in it?); and towards a kind of eco-fascism where the countries that can afford to – predominantly, those in the global north – build higher, more securitized walls in an attempt to maintain the conditions for capital accumulation as the rest of the world boils. At COP28, the President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, spoke to that last point, calling Gaza a blueprint for the future:

​This immense exodus [of climate refugees] will have a response in the North. We are already seeing it in the anti-immigration policies of rich countries and the rise of the extreme right within them. Hitler is knocking on the European and American middle-class homes’ doors and many are letting him in. The exodus will be responded to with a lot of violence and barbarism. What we are seeing in Gaza is a rehearsal of the future.

Why have large carbon-consuming countries allowed the systematic murder of thousands of children in Gaza? Because Hitler has already entered their homes and they are getting ready to defend their high levels of carbon consumption and reject the exodus it causes.

We can then see the future: the breakdown of democracy and the barbarism unleashed against our people, the people who do not emit CO2, the poor people.

At the same time, the Palestinian solidarity movement has driven mass protests around the world at a scale not seen since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It has accelerated the development of global south cooperation and open international criticism of American empire. It has reinvigorated the Jewish left, a core constituency of virtually all of the revolutionary left-wing politics of the early 20th century, and while this may not have global significance today, it is something I’m glad to be apart of. And it seems to be creating a new, committed internationalism on the left here in the imperial metropole.

The conflict between these competing tendencies will define everything about our world over the coming decades, and perhaps for far longer – the risk of mutually assured destruction remains ever-present, even if it’s irrationally further from our minds today than it was during the Cold War. And all of this will be further accelerated by the continued escalation of the climate crisis itself.

So what does all this mean for the blockade’s significance? One answer is concrete: physical infrastructures like pipelines play critical roles in accumulation, war, and the reproduction of capitalism as a global system; they are also lynchpins in the fight against climate change. More pipelines means cheaper oil, cheaper oil means more oil. Another answer is more structural: infrastructures of control like policing, used to defend and extend pipelines, connect diverse struggles across the globe, from Wet’suwet’en territory to Palestine.

Consider, for example, the Coastal GasLink pipeline: KKR, one of the original private equity firms that pioneered the “leveraged buyout,” owns a majority share in the pipeline. David Petraeus, who led US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq and served as CIA Director, is the Chairman of the KKR Global Institute, a wing of the firm focused on, in Petraeus’s words, “help[ing] companies as they run into problems.” John Brewer, Gold Commander of the Canadian police unit formerly-known as C-IRG, the militarized police force tasked with dismantling blockades and, more recently, with policing Palestine solidarity protests, served in Afghanistan while Petraeus was in command. And Mike Farnworth, the Provincial Minister in charge of the C-IRG unit, worked for the National Democratic Institute (a subsidiary of the US empire-building front organization the National Endowment for Democracy), in Iraq. These are just the connections that come up when you scratch the surface. They are just a glimpse into the imbrication of the so-called war on terror – the license for the latest round of unbridled western imperialism in the Middle East – with Canada’s wars on Indigenous sovereignty and the left.

These are the questions I’m hoping to grapple with in our rapidly changing world: what role do land defense movements play in a necessarily internationalist struggle, and what role can they play? And, in a world where every victory against colonialism has been met with new mechanisms of control, how can intrinsically place-based anti-colonial movements work together to produce durable international victories? And perhaps most of all, how can we ensure our movements are sufficiently well organized across struggles to prevent fascism from marching into the increasingly disrupted space of global politics in a boiling world?