George Monbiot risks dismissing vital currents within the green movement when he reduces some radical climate justice politics as "anarchism".
Movements advocating radical social change aren't simply "anarchist" or rooted in "identity politics": they are everywhere. Political organisation, particularly within a context of social peace, can be as much about judging boundaries and ruling out possibilities as it is about pushing the limits of debate about what is possible.
Political activism when it takes place within established structures – does tend to perpetuate those structures, and the power relationships that inhabit and reproduce them. Sometimes these structures can be positive. But it can also reproduce definitions of the "middle ground", of "balance", "realism" and thereby set limits of acceptable debate. People living different and contradictory realities will inevitably reach different conclusions. Clashes and contradictions shouldn't come as a surprise.
Many people today are living in conflict, and often paying the price of a violent life, in order to maintain our social peace. Many of them, despite living under an unbroken continuum of colonialism, engage in cooperative, participatory economies, and can reach very different conclusions about how to address climate change. They speak freely, openly and in detail about revolution and rejecting state solutions; they talk about fundamental social change as intrinsic in the fight for land, food, and cultural sovereignty, struggles that began centuries before climate change was accepted as a fact in the countries that first contributed to it, like Britain.
These political currents have inspired many grassroots campaigners in the UK to take radical action, to oppose coal-fired power stations and airport expansion by creating the conditions for a community of resistance.
The participatory politics glimpsed at the camp are already taking place all over the world, and are leading some of the most progressive initiatives – on ecological debt, on compensation for keeping fossil fuels in the ground, on creating explicitly anti-capitalist co-operative economies, and horizontal movements of farmers, peasants and the landless reclaiming land.
This current runs through and informs the climate camps. It runs through the very tents, marquees, and kitchens that became spaces for debate and discussion. This current doesn't necessarily have spokespeople, a Guardian column or a seat at the table of Newsnight, but in the south it has nonetheless succeeded in toppling governments and booting out oil and mining companies from indigenous lands.
It is also a diverse current. Here in the UK, many of those engaged in researching and lobbying, the filing of freedom of information requests, the petitioning, the parliamentary meetings and briefings with corporate and government representatives, also hold the view that fundamental, systemic changes are required. The two forms of political engagement and vision can and do co-exist. The same people who say "I think we need revolutionary change" also write advisory papers for politicians, attend cross-party meetings in Parliament and may also be stopping coal trains in their tracks.
It is essential to keep probing the power relationships behind new technologies and green "solutions". We need to openly explore the power of the structures and social relationships that constitute "the state". This means questioning the uses of the state, and whether its structures, rather than having "undemocratic tendencies", are inherently flawed.
This social justice-rooted line of enquiry and political current shouldn't be ignored. It certainly shouldn't be criticised as capable of "melting the movement". On the contrary: it is vital to keeping the movement vibrant and open and in touch with the struggles of those in the majority world.
The green movement is a melting pot, a movement of movements. The "we" includes Monbiot, but also those who reject state-based solutions and capitalism and who are walking the talk in their activism and everyday lives. It includes those at the sharp end of new enclosures, taxes, desperate fossil fuel corporations, biofuel land grabs, desertification, starvation food prices, political despotism, water theft, military occupation, and industrial zone and sweat shop misery. It is a diverse and a global "we", and we are everywhere.