Page 177 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

170 J. DEAN

release, hundreds of scientists added their names. News of the letter
appeared on the front pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, and
Los Angeles Times, and featured in scores of publications, including the
Guardian, Forbes, Salon, and the Huffington Post. Later that spring, The
Natural History Museum delivered a petition with over 400,000 signatures
to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC demanding that the
museum kick fossil fuel oligarch David Koch off its board.
The premise of Liberate Tate and Not An Alternative is that institutions
matter as combined and intensified expressions of power. More than just
the aggregation of individuals, they are individuals plus the force of their
aggregation. Because institutions remain concentrations of authority that
can be salvaged and put to use, it makes political sense to occupy rather
than ignore or abandon them. We can repurpose trusted or
taken-for-granted forms—a possibility precluded by the anthropocenic
preoccupation with an imaginary whole figured in geologic time. Just as
the museum is a site in the infrastructure of capitalist class power—with its
donors and galas and named halls—so can it be a medium in the pro-
duction of a counterpower infrastructure that challenges, shames, and
dismantles the very class and sector that would use what is common for
private benefit.
The movement to liberate museums and cultural institutions from fossil
fuel interests does not try to present climate change directly or nature as a
whole. Instead, it approaches the processes contributing to global warming
as processes in which we are already implicated. We are within the systems
and institutions the effects of which scientists measure and chart. And that
the people as the collective subject of politics are in them means that they
are not fully determined. There are gaps that we can hold open and force in
one direction rather than another. In too many contemporary discussions
of the Anthropocene, the organization of people—our institutions, systems
and arrangements of power, production, and reproduction—appears only
as a distortion. Everything is active except for us, we with no role other
than that of observers, victims or lone survivors. In contrast with emphases
on nonhumans, actants, and distributed agency, the strategic coming
together of organized opposition to the fossil fuel sector points to the
continued and indispensable role of collective power. Just as a class politics
without ecology can support extractivism, so can an ecology without class
struggle continue the assault on working people that has resulted in
deindustrialization in parts of the North and West and hyperindustrial-
ization in parts of the South and East (we might call such an ecology