The Sunrise Movement involves many young people seeking to stop catastrophic climate change. This movement sees doing this by pressuring the U.S. imperialist political system to make reforms to prevent the planet from hurtling to disaster. Many young people associated with Sunrise have engaged in righteous and defiant actions like hunger strikes and blocking traffic as protests, making sacrifices for a bigger cause. But these are then ultimately funneled by the leadership of this movement into dead ends.
We have precious little time to truly confront and act on the climate crisis as the existential crisis it is—and the program advocated by the leadership of Sunrise becomes ever more “part of the problem.”
Buying Into Toxic “Build Back Better” Illusions
In a recent nationwide conference call, the leadership of the movement analyzed the difficulties that a proposed bill by Joe Biden to respond to the climate crisis is encountering and the machinations in Congress around his legislation. In an email the next day summarizing the situation and task before Sunrise, they called for pressure from below: “We might have just one more week to make sure we get the bill we deserve… We’re fighting hard to pressure Manchin and the Biden Administration to pass the Build Better Back Agenda with federal climate action.”1
This is exactly wrong. It is wrong and harmful to continue to have faith in the capitalist system. It is wrong and harmful to stick to the path of hoping to reform that system to prioritize saving the planet. It is wrong and harmful to go all out right now to pressure Congress to pass Biden’s bills. Here is a basic "reality check."
First, Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan—touted as a bold and historic initiative to reverse climate change—is utterly inadequate. How so? It falls far short of the kinds of massive and rapid emissions cuts urgently needed according to scientists if we are going to avoid catastrophic changes to the planet. It does not offer the level of investment really required to convert the power grid to renewables (like solar and wind, etc.). And up to 75 percent of the renewable investment it is calling for is to be achieved by stimulating demand for large private corporations—that is, aiming to make this profitable for these huge units of capital, thus keeping the climate hostage to the ups and downs of the capitalist market. Further the Biden plan continues to subsidize the fossil-fuel sector by offering incentives to so-called “carbon-capture” technology, which is highly dubious and also puts off the imperative: to keep the oil in the ground!
And keep in mind these “inconvenient facts” for those who see Biden as “climate friendly”: the Biden administration has approved construction of what is called the “Line 3” pipeline that carries oil from Canada to the U.S. Midwest through lands of indigenous peoples; it has approved the massive ConocoPhillips Arctic oil drilling project; and it has resumed auctions for sales of leases for dirty and dangerous off-shore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
And on top of the complete failure of Biden’s original plan to make the changes necessary to respond to climate change, this bill was scaled down as a result of the intense infighting in the U.S. ruling class: both because of the absolute refusal of even one Republican-fascist senator to support the bill, and because of opposition within the Democratic Party.
This didn’t happen because of “lack of pressure from below” or because of not enough phone calls to Congress. It points to deeper, systemic problems in how capitalism relates to the environment,2 and, how the ruling class is sharply divided and fighting bitterly among themselves.3 Most of the Republican-fascists don’t even acknowledge global warming, and with their accumulated power in governing institutions (from the Supreme Court to state governorships and legislatures), it is even further insane to think that working within this system is going to help solve an existential problem like global warming – insanity within insanity!
What Real System Change Means and Involves
Second, The Sunrise Movement tweeted (in a video which can be found here): “The people with the most power are choosing to do nothing. We are not in this crisis because of something that cannot be changed but because of systems that were built by humans that can be changed - by us.”
Yes, systems can be changed, but only in line with and constrained by their fundamental dynamics and underlying workings. This capitalist-imperialist system has as its driving heartbeat the competitive drive for profit and accumulating more profit. It is this system that recklessly plunders nature; that is at war with nature. None of this can be reformed “away,” or “changed” within the constraints of the existing system. It is this system that has brought us to a precipice in which human civilization and life itself are in peril. The U.S. government, its ruling institutions, its politicians and its dominant media represent and enforce that, with policies in line with that.
Sunrise leadership is talking about reforms within the system, change within this system. While some reforms can be wrenched from the system through massive struggle (not by pleading with the ruling class, and the “2-Joes” from Joe Biden to Joe Manchin), the overarching reality is that destruction of the environment is built in to capitalism.
We need a complete System Change to deal with Climate Change. But system change can only be achieved through an ACTUAL revolution: overthrowing this system, seizing state power, and establishing a radically different economic, social and political system. As an emergency correspondence from Raymond Lotta said, “Yes, WE need to ACT now—but the question is whether within the constraints of the system—or working to get rid of it! Now there are people with real heart making meaningful and positive efforts to actively fight to force the system to bring more renewables like solar power onstream. But the system is not going to—and cannot—‘come to its senses.’”
What is needed is not to be burying our heads in the sand and keeping to a course of believing in the system and working within the framework of capitalism and the American political system,4 but becoming part of the revolution to bring about real system change. It is an acute contradiction that the system has no real answers to this accelerating climate crisis... and this is a factor that will compel more people to search out deeper answers.
At this time of existential crisis, revolution is not something remote and in the far distant future. It is something we have to actively work for NOW! As the RevComs have analyzed in A Declaration, A Call to Get Organized Now For a Real Revolution:
Revolutions are not possible all the time, but are generally possible only in rare times and circumstances, especially in a powerful country like this. This is one of those rare times and circumstances. This system is in real trouble, caught up in crisis and conflicts for which it has no easy or lasting solutions. Throughout this country the workings of this system have given rise to deep divisions which cannot be resolved under this system. Society is being ripped apart. Those who rule are locked in a bitter fight among themselves, and they cannot hold things together in the way they have in the past. Although there are a lot of bad things connected with this and it could lead to something really terrible, it is also possible that we could wrench something really positive out of it—revolution, to put an end to this system and bring something much better into being.
And at this moment, what is most needed, as Bob Avakian puts it in THIS IS A RARE TIME WHEN REVOLUTION BECOMES POSSIBLE—WHY THAT IS SO, AND HOW TO SEIZE ON THIS RARE OPPORTUNITY:
Instead of being a tail on the Democratic donkey—with its attempt to keep this monstrous system going, and to deal with the growing fascist danger, by relying on the “normal procedures” of this system and doomed efforts to “heal the divisions” that are deepening every day—people need to work for the revolution that is urgently needed, and deal with the fascist danger as part of doing that.
