Bankraub: eine Initiative von Dilettanten.

See you on the barricades, sisters and brothers. This week the Climate Camp in the Gogarburn business park successfully closed down the headquarters of the planet’s most climate-trashing bank. A thousand people formed a community there and laid siege to the Oil Bank of Scotland. But (though this was not understood by many of the commentators) their ‘mass action’ materialised in an inspiring range of different ways, most of which were NOT in fact on-site but in the city, crammed as it was with Fringe festival-goers. Our announced action day (Monday) was fairly fragmented compared to the astonishing happening of the Sunday afternoon in which three or four hundred of us swarmed spontaneously across the bridge, pushing back the police, and bamboozling them entirely. These were no COP15 riot squads, it’s true. But one thing I realised again and again these past few days was quite the extent to which the RBS top dogs – and consequently the police – were frightened. The reason for fear is a very logical one. As outlined above, criticism of the movement I’m talking about is usually cosmetic. Probably because, frankly, our principles and our ideals cannot easily be mocked from a moral or even a structural point of view. This does not mean we fetishise a sense or moral superiority over our adversaries – on the contrary, Climate Camp is remarkably free of virtue-greenery and contests it where it does crop up – but it does mean we call the crap, cull the greenwash, and go simply and straightforwardly to the root of things. The root cause of climate change is undeniably the neoliberal capitalist economy’s dogmatic need for perpetual excess, colonising (as it is) an indisputably finite biosphere whose resources cannot and will not ‘cope’. Identifying the uncomfortable enemy, left libertarians cut it out wholesale, as faithfully as we can, whilst remaining (as the “don’t you own tents?!” critics point out) embroiled in a capitalist world. Some people misunderstand this as a tightrope act, balancing compromise and carbon-price. But crucially, we are not liberal ascetics. We want no ‘return’ to any primal, rural condition. We are anti-authoritarian utopianists and we demand pleasure, equality, freedom, sustainability and even luxury. We must, to remain Climate Camp, remain averse to the red herring of the increasingly popular liberal ‘austerity politics’ and its emphasis on so-called green consumerism. We take issue with the root, not the leaf, of corporate hegemony and capitalist commodification. We want the future and all its resources to be accessed and shared by all for free. That’s why it’s called radicalism.

Back to the point: RBS has blood on its hands. The tar sands extraction project in Alberta, Canada, is by all accounts (and that includes figures inside the business) the most carbon-intensive project we have ever come up with as a species. It is leaving a UK-sized hole that looks like Tolkien’s Mordor, full of poisonous tailing-ponds, in the Canadian wilderness. This heartbreaking wasteland now is visible from space. What’s more, the whole process of extracting those last few planetary drops of oil from the grit and bitumen that lies under the First Nations territories, is IN ITSELF five times more carbon intensive than conventional forms of petrol manufacture. The whole giga-project is locking us into fossil fuel addiction so irreversibly that Canada has not only withdrawn its Kyoto protocol signature, but has bowed to the lobbyists that wish – like RBS – to force more and more ecocidal measures upon ordinary people, whilst using the millions (in tax-payers’ money) that seems to be available to banks at a times of economic ‘crisis’ to further commit us collectively to a truly apocalyptic future. First Nations communities – two clan representatives were guests at Camp – are dying in their thousands (many are already dead) because of the Enridge pipeline and its multifarious toxic knock-on effects. RBS is equally violating us all by using public money to condemn the public to climate catastrophe. The banking sector as a whole is to blame. The banks are inextricable from big government. That is why we are sayiing this year in Edinburgh: Never mind the bankers. (Well … shh … Break the bank.)

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