Flooding Wall Street: Echoes from the Future of Resistance around Climate Change

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe global capitalist system is ravaging ecosystems at a staggering and accelerating scale as it transgresses multiple ecological planetary boundaries, from massive species extinction to climate change, radically threatening life on this planet. Through analyzing power as a network of intersecting sets of relations, we can start to appreciate capitalism and the state not as entities, but as comprised by social relationships and local operations of power. This perspective reveals how effective resistance can be conceived in the form of destituent power – not as a direct clash with constituted power but instead as the withdrawal of our energies from and obedience to the political order. This destituent approach proceeds by deactivating the subjugating relationships constituting the system, thereby opening spaces to undertake constantly evolving experiments of developing new harmonious social and ecological relationships. Actions to disrupt and delegitimize the operations of capital, like Flood Wall Street, serve as tentative glimpses of ascendant destituent forces assembling against ecological collapse. The further challenge becomes how to connect the multiplicity of resistances, thought not in terms of a unity as a homogenous movement, but through actively cultivating their transversal relations across the rhizomatic network of experiments in practices of destituent power striving to realize new worlds.