a climate movement built on rock, not sand

In the last few months the climate movement in Sydney has been awash with rallies. Week after week the public, tired of climate inaction, have made their way to central Sydney and marched together for climate justice. The crowds have grown, dwindled, grown again and dwindled again. How many more times will we have to march? How many more people need to be on the streets until the demands are met? Perhaps these are the wrong questions to ask. Fundamentally, rallies are limited to what demands they can win for a movement. If we are to win climate justice, we are going to need more than a series of large rallies. Rallies certainly demonstrate power in numbers, provide an opportunity to expand the politics of masses of people around a certain topic, and coalesce the community under central and uniting demands. However, they do little to shift the balance of power But using power without building it, is to assemble the climate movement on a bed of sand: one storm and everything will wash away.

movement. But using power without building it, is to assemble the climate movement on a bed of sand: one storm and everything will wash away.

How do we organise our communities so that power lies with working people and all those who will be affected by the climate crisis? I can offer a few suggestions: hold mass meetings, build unions in your workplace and strike for climate, go out of your way to find new people for the movement and invite them in warmly, eject the fossil fuel industry from every community using blockades, protests pickets, and the erosion of their social support. All of this with an eye to overthrow the capitalist class that will continue to exploit the land and people so long as they can make a few extra dollars along the way. How do we string all of these actions together so that we really can build a world run for the needs of working people? We will only find the answer when we struggle to work it out together. I hope you will join us.

Words by Toby Walmsley State ASEN Convenor 2020

between those who have much to gain from coal, oil, and gas extraction (fossil fuel companies, the political class, financiers) to those who have much to lose from climate change (working class, poor people whose experience of climate change is magnified by sources of oppression already in their lives: e.g. sexism, racism, homophobia). We need something more than mobilising people to do that – we need to organise.

I do not suggest that one ought to be prioritised over the other. Clearly, in order for our organised power to make an impact, we have to mobilise it; in fact, mobilising presents many opportunities to organise communities and pushes groups and movements to grow. However, in the current climate movement, mobilising is prioritised over organising. To suggest reasons why this may be the case, mobilising is easy, exciting, and immediately gratifying, whereas organising tends to come with less glory and with less opportunity to direct the short-term direction of the