One of the many.
As Cop-26 draws ever nearer and Glasgow becomes a city under siege what will be the outcome of this jamboree? It will be a media frenzy as the bosses of capital, political ballerinas and members of the financial Mafia jockey for their position in front of the camera, where they can spout their platitudes, empty promises, blatant lies and wait for the applause. I'll stick with the label that attached to this high carbon footprint affair some time ago, Cop-Out-26 Carnival.
Though at the moment it is not getting much publicity, the ordinary people of this city and around the world are fully aware of the sham and hypocrisy inherent in this Carnival of illusions and are organising in their hundreds of thousands to show their anger and frustration at this expensive hypocritical illusion. They will take to the streets, they will make sure their voices are heard, they will make their messages clear, capitalism can't solve the problems we face, capitalism is the cause of the problems.
The following from Act for Freedom Now:
Who are we?
We are a group of friends, comrades and accomplices who are organising in various capacities in Glasgow, Scotland. On COP26
Between the 31st of October and the 12th of November, representatives of state and capital are going to descend upon Glasgow in the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference(COP26). If we look at previous and historical UN attempts to “tackle” climate change, all we can find is three decades of inaction and greenwashing. There is no evidence that COP26 will be any different; in fact, this conference seems to be reaching new heights of hypocrisy, smugness and arrogance.
While pushing the myth of “green energy” throughout messaging around COP26, the UK state is attempting to open a massive new oil field in the sea north of Scotland. While maintaining a thin facade of inclusivity, the conference is excluding, through COVID restrictions which prevent them from ever reaching negotiations, the voices of those most impacted by the ecocidal policies of state and capital. While those most responsible for the climate catastrophe sit cosily in their conference centres, the people of Glasgow will have to put up with the militarisation of our streets and neighbourhoods at an unprecedented scale, as police from all over the UK infest our city. These are only some of the thousands of hypocrisies we will no doubt see around COP26. How can we expect such a conference to change anything when its largest monetary sponsors are Scotland’s largest polluters?
COP26, for us, is nothing but another attempt by international capitalism to defang and appropriate the climate struggle, greenwash its greatest ecocidal excesses and ensure its proliferation, by turning yet another crisis into a profit source – with the rest of us bearing the cost.
We are, therefore, highly doubtful of its ability to yield any positive climate action, never mind to “save the world”.
Radical resistance in Glasgow
Unfortunately, gone are the days of the Red Clydeside, of the tens of thousands amassed at the Battle of George Square (although we wouldn’t be surprised if the British state pulled out the tanks for COP). Gone, also, are the days where we could establish rolling blockades against G8 summits in Scotland, at the peak of the anti-globalisation movement in 2005 . At the moment, radical forces in Glasgow are few and far between, with the milieu rendered weak by repression and burnout. Every now and then, however, one sees glimmers of hope, most recently the resistance to an anti-immigrant raid in the Pollokshields area in May 2021, which saw a spontaneous reaction from a few neighbours become a successful anti-eviction action by hundreds.
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