Can Power Be Compelled?

Does negotiating with our abuser only affirm their position?

Last week I interviewed Fabian Dablander about becoming ungovernable at scale—the necessity of civil disobedience to disprove government mandates to commit acts of climate treason, including the continued expansion of the fossil fuel industry around the world. Fabian and I had a very interesting and deeply nuanced discussion on different forms of action, before facing a very ugly possibility: No amount of action will compel power to act. 

Our global system—dominated mostly by Western powers, Western ideologies and Western subsidies—depends on fossil fuels for its survival. Governments are the biggest producers and consumers of fossil fuels, with the private “oil majors” like BP, Shell and Exxon, producing just 10%. Governments are fossil-fuelled, and will do anything for a dose of their lifeblood, from ignoring science to ignoring human rights abuses at the hands of the world’s largest oil producer. 

Many of the people who signed the Paris Agreement to keep global heating to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels are the same people who grant new licences for oil and gas, commit to economic growth, and manufacture a culture war against China, the one nation far exceeding its climate goals. Thanks to El Nino, July, August and September last year were the hottest months on record, with the global average temperature sitting at 1.8 degrees above pre-industrial levels in autumn. The same people who promised 1.5 are those drafting and enacting policies which will send us straight into the jaws of 3+. But they can’t stop. To stop would be to topple the US $ hegemony, crash the financial system, and ensure China’s economic growth as it became the leading supplier of energy. So, really, we all seem to be in a toxic relationship with empire who would rather see the planet destroyed than its own power: “If I can’t have it, no-one can!”

Empire is a mad old son-of-a-bitch, and we all know it’s a waste of time to negotiate with madness. We all know the best thing to do with a toxic relationship is walk away. 

It would be unwise for us all to walk away from our civic duty during the greatest emergency ever faced by humankind. However, it’s the toxic relationship that got us here, the inequitable distribution of power, resources and network. It seems an odd cognitive dissonance to believe that bargaining with power will force it to self-realise its errors and change in the name of democracy, goodness, progress or any other headline. Our system of governance is specifically designed to maintain if not widen that inequitable distribution; calling it out won’t call it in. 

I’m reminded of the Barbie movie in which the Hollywood script writers have the audacity to claim that calling out the cognitive dissonance is enough to wake women up to the realities of womanhood and thus usurp the patriarchy which has since overrun Barbieland, conveniently forgetting the patriarchy’s “undertone of violence” directly referred to earlier in the movie. Amazingly, in following the “name the thing to heal the thing”, the movie suggests that women are, in fact, the main carriers of patriarchy and that by sorting out those silly, muddled, feminine thoughts, they can undo the damage they do to each other. “Male violence”, named earlier in the movie, becomes rebranded as a reaction to female indifference; the real cognitive dissonance is a pseudo-feminist film blaming women for the patriarchy. 

Naming is not a radical act. It may be brave, but applauding it as radical shows how low our bar for taking action is. Naming is the thing we do to wake ourselves up; organising is the thing we do together to get ourselves through.

Naming abuse is not the answer to abuse; leaving is. Naming doesn’t stop the power games, the violence, the belittling. It may even worsen the abuse, as we’ve seen happen to climate protestors as the long arm of the law tightens around their throats, wrists, even legal rights. Naming is just the first step. Alone, it will accomplish next-to-nothing. And I don’t say this based on historical precedent, but on 50 years of climate denialism and continued fossil fuel expansion, a flagrant disavowal of science. We have named it. Time and time and time again. The abuse is only getting worse. 

When do we decide negotiating with our abuser only affirms their position? When do we realise our abuser is as caught as we are? When do we realise it’s time to leave? 

What would leaving look like? Zizek in his book on violence talks about the radical act of doing nothing, most often seen in general strikes. Walter Benjamin, too, in his Critique of Violence, calls for a mass general strike of the proletariat as the only way to fully disengage not just with the immediate context but the premise of inequity. It could look like creating safe-villages where people can run to. It could look like hiring a lawyer to have the abuse named in the one room such naming has consequences. It could look like cutting of the lifeblood until the abuser withers away.

It is impossible to negotiate with Empire, the mad and bloated dynamics of a tired, old system. Reform is a pipe-dream sold by those with pipelines. The only thing to do is revolt.

© Rachel Donald