abstract theory but has originated overwhelmingly with people in movements who are interested in learning from past resistance.
As we confront the impending climate catastrophe, which is becoming more widely understood among different layers of the population, this broader movement desperately needs to centre feminist anti-racism in its analysis.63 As many anti-racist activists have pointed out, ignoring the fact that the climate emergency is racialised leads to very troubling conclusions, steeped in neocolonial formulations. With only 10 per cent of the world’s population responsible for 50 per cent of all global emissions,64 the class and racial hierarchies of the climate crisis are unmistakable, as well as the inequalities between the global North and South, or what feminist geographer Doreen Massey identified as the ‘power geographies’ of globalisation. From this perspective, there is urgent need to consider the interconnections of struggle and to link campaigns for environmental, economic and racial justice, rather than operate within self-constructed silos. The revolutionary feminisms explored in this volume have the potential to help us tackle the root causes of the climate crisis – how resources are used and distributed, and to what ends, within an economic system based on extractivism, militarism and the drive for profit. Taking this critical approach would necessarily include an analysis of the social sorting process codified in immigration policy, whereby those fleeing the impacts of climate change, war, poverty and gender violence are deemed a threat to be contained, while capital moves freely and so-called golden visas allow for the purchase and protection of citizenship.65
As anyone who has spent time in organising spaces knows well, collectively (re)imagining a process as all-encompassing as climate change is easier said than done, especially in such a fragmented landscape of resistance and given the hyper-atomisation of individuals within neoliberalism. From the intensely classed and racialised spaces we inhabit, to the decimation and privatisation of public services, finding the grounds to think and act collectively is challenging. Yet, from within this very material and political fragmentation there have emerged inspiring acts of resistance that we can build upon. The challenge, in part, is how to bring these often-disparate campaigns together and how to sustain them for the long term. Here, it is useful to draw from the lessons of political resistance emanating from earlier moments in time – not because they entail fully formulated programmes or answers, but because we navigate a collective repertoire of struggle; its lessons – be they positive, negative, difficult or, indeed, painful – are crucial if we are to make headway towards (re)building what sociologist Alan Sears has termed ‘infrastructures of dissent’.
An infrastructure of dissent, Sears writes, is ‘the means through which activists develop political communities capable of learning, communicating and mobilising together’. He stresses the importance of the role of theatres, bookstores, choirs, education and sports as integral to movements, rather than external elements. This view of the totality of political and cultural mobilisation is one which today’s social movements are working hard to recapture and revitalise. If they are to succeed, it will be by realising a radical political imaginary which centres the thought of anti-capitalist, feminist, anti-racist, queer liberation, Indigenous and anti-colonial movements.
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