The 21-year-old climate activist has been mobilizing people against the genocide in Gaza. Now, it’s not just the Far Right attacking her — the liberal establishment has joined in the defamation.
Nathaniel Flakin
LEFT VOICE
German politicians have been demanding that Greta Thunberg be expelled from the country. When the 21-year-old Swedish climate activist announced that she would be speaking at a protest camp at a university in the West German city of Dortmund, police banned the entire event. The camp had been going on for four months, but cops said they had to stop it because Thunberg — a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize! — was “potentially violent.”
Within just a few years, Thunberg has gone from being the darling of the liberal establishment to Public Enemy No. 1. Spiegel magazine, for example, went from praising the “Person of the Year” in 2019 to denouncing her as an “antisemite” in a cover story just four years later.
The explanation is depressingly simple: Like many young people around the world, Thunberg has been protesting against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and she has joined demonstrations in Leipzig, Berlin, and other German cities.
Hate campaigns against the climate activist originated with far-right media, but have since been taken up by supposedly liberal publications, which spread bizarre conspiracy theories about Thunberg using stuffed animals to send out coded anti-Jewish messages. (In reality, an octopus toy is fairly common for people with autism.)
Like much of the international climate movement, Thunberg has been pointing out the links between imperialism and the unfolding climate catastrophe. Israel’s war in Gaza and Lebanon, supported by the U.S. and Germany, is not just murdering tens of thousands of civilians — it is also causing “immense” carbon emissions, endangering the lives of billions more in the not-too-distant future.
As Thunberg rose to global prominence after starting her climate strike on August 20, 2018, she seemed like she would be one of the endless stream of sincere young activists who get sucked into the corrupt bureaucracies of the liberal bourgeoisie. She met with Barack Obama, was interviewed by Trevor Noah, and took up on the offer of some dumb aristocrat to cross the Atlantic by sailboat to attend a UN conference in New York.
Yet as I noted at the time, when Thunberg was invited to Davos — the top gathering of global elites — she displayed an unusual unwillingness to pander to an audience eager to applaud empty phrases by a little girl. Unlike well-paid NGO pseudo-activists, Thunberg was naming names:
Some people say that the climate crisis is something that we will have created, but that is not true, because if everyone is guilty then no one is to blame. And someone is to blame. Some people, some companies, some decision-makers in particular, have known exactly what priceless values they have been sacrificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money. And I think many of you here today belong to that group of people.
(I suspect her autism might make her a bit more direct than a neurotypical person, but that’s just speculation.)
When she was still a teenager, Thunberg made appeals to politicians, but now she says much more explicitly that capitalism is responsible for climate change. And that’s not all: Last weekend, while in Italy for a climate demonstration, Thunberg visited the occupied GKN factory in Florence. The former auto parts plant has been occupied by its employees for three years. Where they once produced car components, the workers now have a plan to build solar panels and cargo bikes.
In a post, Thunberg correctly emphasized that climate justice and workers’ rights go hand in hand: “The fight to get to the end of the month is the same fight against the end of the world.”
The example of the GKN workers shows the unstoppable power of the working class in the face of the climate crisis. It is poor working-class people in the semi-colonial countries who are already suffering the worst effects of climate change. It is also workers who produce the cars and run the oil refineries that are destroying the planet. This means it is workers who can radically transform production — something that capitalists are completely incapable of doing, since their profits depend on constantly expanding production.
The working class is made up of billions of people around the world. As Thunberg explained in Davos, climate change is being caused by a handful of capitalist parasites who profit off our labor. If we were organized, we could begin an immediate economic transformation before the day is out.
This is not just a theoretical possibility. In these pages, we have interviewed oil refinery workers in Grandpuits in France who fought to save their jobs, but did not want to keep serving fossil capital, and instead called for an environmental transition. We have reported on workers at Zanon, a ceramics factory in Argentina, who took over their factory in 2002 so they could produce to meet people’s needs, instead of generating profits for capitalists. We have told the stories of workers in a big printing plant in Buenos Aires who occupied their workplace so they could begin serving the community. All of these actions were led by revolutionary militants in the workplaces.
As Greta has been approaching revolutionary socialist positions, there is one thing she lacks: organization. In the United States, for example, the Sunrise Movement is just a lobbying arm of the Democratic Party cynically posing as an activist group. The Fridays for Future (FFF) movement that Thunberg inspired includes many committed activists, but also plenty of careerists aiming for cushy jobs in Green Parties or in NGOs. In Germany in particular, FFF firmly rejects Thunberg’s radicalism, and has aligned itself with German imperialism and its solidarity with Israel.
To struggle against capitalism, Thunberg needs an organization committed to her radical ideas: international solidarity, anti-imperialism, and workers’ control of production. That can only be a revolutionary party based on the working class and the youth, with a program to unite all struggles against oppression and exploitation into one coordinated assault against the capitalist system.
Five years ago, when many radicals believed Thunberg would become another boring liberal, I had a gut feeling she would end up moving toward socialist ideas. Now my gut is telling me that it won’t be much longer until she identifies with the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and other revolutionaries.
This isn’t just about her as an individual: Thunberg represents a generation watching as the capitalist system lurches toward inconceivable violence, in the form of ethnic cleansing, nuclear war, and climate apocalypse. They have seen politicians make nice speeches but refuse to take any meaningful action. This is because capitalism is fundamentally incapable of dealing with its own limitations. Since elites couldn’t corrupt her, they are now defaming her. She is a great example of how climate activists can resist cooptation, and organize to bring down the system.
German politicians have been demanding that Greta Thunberg be expelled from the country. When the 21-year-old Swedish climate activist announced that she would be speaking at a protest camp at a university in the West German city of Dortmund, police banned the entire event. The camp had been going on for four months, but cops said they had to stop it because Thunberg — a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize! — was “potentially violent.”
Within just a few years, Thunberg has gone from being the darling of the liberal establishment to Public Enemy No. 1. Spiegel magazine, for example, went from praising the “Person of the Year” in 2019 to denouncing her as an “antisemite” in a cover story just four years later.
The explanation is depressingly simple: Like many young people around the world, Thunberg has been protesting against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and she has joined demonstrations in Leipzig, Berlin, and other German cities.
Hate campaigns against the climate activist originated with far-right media, but have since been taken up by supposedly liberal publications, which spread bizarre conspiracy theories about Thunberg using stuffed animals to send out coded anti-Jewish messages. (In reality, an octopus toy is fairly common for people with autism.)
Like much of the international climate movement, Thunberg has been pointing out the links between imperialism and the unfolding climate catastrophe. Israel’s war in Gaza and Lebanon, supported by the U.S. and Germany, is not just murdering tens of thousands of civilians — it is also causing “immense” carbon emissions, endangering the lives of billions more in the not-too-distant future.
As Thunberg rose to global prominence after starting her climate strike on August 20, 2018, she seemed like she would be one of the endless stream of sincere young activists who get sucked into the corrupt bureaucracies of the liberal bourgeoisie. She met with Barack Obama, was interviewed by Trevor Noah, and took up on the offer of some dumb aristocrat to cross the Atlantic by sailboat to attend a UN conference in New York.
Yet as I noted at the time, when Thunberg was invited to Davos — the top gathering of global elites — she displayed an unusual unwillingness to pander to an audience eager to applaud empty phrases by a little girl. Unlike well-paid NGO pseudo-activists, Thunberg was naming names:
Some people say that the climate crisis is something that we will have created, but that is not true, because if everyone is guilty then no one is to blame. And someone is to blame. Some people, some companies, some decision-makers in particular, have known exactly what priceless values they have been sacrificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money. And I think many of you here today belong to that group of people.
(I suspect her autism might make her a bit more direct than a neurotypical person, but that’s just speculation.)
When she was still a teenager, Thunberg made appeals to politicians, but now she says much more explicitly that capitalism is responsible for climate change. And that’s not all: Last weekend, while in Italy for a climate demonstration, Thunberg visited the occupied GKN factory in Florence. The former auto parts plant has been occupied by its employees for three years. Where they once produced car components, the workers now have a plan to build solar panels and cargo bikes.
In a post, Thunberg correctly emphasized that climate justice and workers’ rights go hand in hand: “The fight to get to the end of the month is the same fight against the end of the world.”
The example of the GKN workers shows the unstoppable power of the working class in the face of the climate crisis. It is poor working-class people in the semi-colonial countries who are already suffering the worst effects of climate change. It is also workers who produce the cars and run the oil refineries that are destroying the planet. This means it is workers who can radically transform production — something that capitalists are completely incapable of doing, since their profits depend on constantly expanding production.
The working class is made up of billions of people around the world. As Thunberg explained in Davos, climate change is being caused by a handful of capitalist parasites who profit off our labor. If we were organized, we could begin an immediate economic transformation before the day is out.
This is not just a theoretical possibility. In these pages, we have interviewed oil refinery workers in Grandpuits in France who fought to save their jobs, but did not want to keep serving fossil capital, and instead called for an environmental transition. We have reported on workers at Zanon, a ceramics factory in Argentina, who took over their factory in 2002 so they could produce to meet people’s needs, instead of generating profits for capitalists. We have told the stories of workers in a big printing plant in Buenos Aires who occupied their workplace so they could begin serving the community. All of these actions were led by revolutionary militants in the workplaces.
As Greta has been approaching revolutionary socialist positions, there is one thing she lacks: organization. In the United States, for example, the Sunrise Movement is just a lobbying arm of the Democratic Party cynically posing as an activist group. The Fridays for Future (FFF) movement that Thunberg inspired includes many committed activists, but also plenty of careerists aiming for cushy jobs in Green Parties or in NGOs. In Germany in particular, FFF firmly rejects Thunberg’s radicalism, and has aligned itself with German imperialism and its solidarity with Israel.
To struggle against capitalism, Thunberg needs an organization committed to her radical ideas: international solidarity, anti-imperialism, and workers’ control of production. That can only be a revolutionary party based on the working class and the youth, with a program to unite all struggles against oppression and exploitation into one coordinated assault against the capitalist system.
Five years ago, when many radicals believed Thunberg would become another boring liberal, I had a gut feeling she would end up moving toward socialist ideas. Now my gut is telling me that it won’t be much longer until she identifies with the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and other revolutionaries.
This isn’t just about her as an individual: Thunberg represents a generation watching as the capitalist system lurches toward inconceivable violence, in the form of ethnic cleansing, nuclear war, and climate apocalypse. They have seen politicians make nice speeches but refuse to take any meaningful action. This is because capitalism is fundamentally incapable of dealing with its own limitations. Since elites couldn’t corrupt her, they are now defaming her. She is a great example of how climate activists can resist cooptation, and organize to bring down the system.
Nathaniel Flakin
Nathaniel is a freelance journalist and historian from Berlin. He is on the editorial board of Left Voice and our German sister site Klasse Gegen Klasse. Nathaniel, also known by the nickname Wladek, has written a biography of Martin Monath, a Trotskyist resistance fighter in France during World War II, which has appeared in German, in English, and in French, and in Spanish. He has also written an anticapitalist guide book called Revolutionary Berlin. He is on the autism spectrum.
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