From Green to Blue: Our failure at Copenhagen represents a turning point for activism

Our failure at Copenhagen represents a turning point for activism. It was, after all, a nostalgic gesture–a last attempt to revive those heady days when swarms of people locked down Seattle streets in '99. But the past decade has seen the alterglobalization movement become increasingly predictable and pacified. And while we've been considering our weakness to be born of organizational deficiencies or the failure to keep on top of the newest activist technologies, we've been oblivious to the shifting ground beneath our feet. The fact is that the green movement has been appropriated by the elites. If activism wishes to maintain its edge of resistance, it must turn blue. Ever since the ex-vice president of the US became the poster child of the climate change movement, the environmental movement has lost the momentum of history. Old enemies–bureaucrats and technocrats, capitalists and industrialists–have taken our rebellion and turned it into their pet project: a managed capitalist world. The goals at the Battle in Seattle were to disrupt the flows of capital and to show the big bankers that we knew about their posh meetings and were pissed. By Copenhagen, however, we'd become some sort of cheerleading force. Everyone's talking points agreed: climate change is a major threat and we must do something about it. Hearing bigwigs mouth platitudes about the urgency of the situation, we let our movement fall into their hands. They played as if they were still scared of our signs and shouts, even arrested a few of us for fun, but the joke was on us.