How can we understand the multiplicity of phenomena that are circulating around the figure of Greta Thunberg? To begin with, one must not lose sight of something that is already making common sense in the public debate about her. Greta is a child, yes, but not just any child. The cultural space she belongs to is that of Western Europe: the Caucasian Northern Europe, English speaking and protestant that for several centuries has presented itself as the vanguard of cultural and civilizational processes governing the world. That is to say, she is a child, but she is to be found in a situation of privilege with respect to her peers in other societies, such as America and Africa, where indigenous children of the same age do not have the visibility that Greta has throughout the world.

Greta therefore has a privilege based on colonial difference. But this aspect, that is relatively obvious, has often been minimized in contrast with two other aspects of her person: she is a minor and has Asperger Syndrome, a neurobiological condition that, in its more general sense, means that someone who has it finds it difficult to socialize and to establish ties and communicative interactions with other people. The first aspect is important for the masses that seek to interpret her because they appeal to her young age as an argument of authority; that is to say, because she signifies in a way, that the future can be rescued from catastrophe (again) because they are the new generations (those who have not been lost) who are conscious of the damage caused in the world by past generations, and at the same time, those who are looking to do what their fathers and mothers and grandparents did not want to do to, to stop the deterioration of the environment.

The recognition of her autistic aspect, on the other hand, appeals to a line of argument in which it is seen as manifest that the person raising her voice is not a complete, full or normal person. She is, therefore, a person in a disadvantaged or inferior situation which she is mobilizing: it is not adults, nor those who fully enjoy their capacities of socialization and communication, nor the great scientists nor the powerful who are doing something to save the future: she is a child, with all that the term child implies in terms of structural and social disadvantage.

Both conditions, her age and her autism, of course, are not minor and have their merit within what she is mobilizing around herself and her world. The problem comes when at the level of the collectivity, they authorize, legitimize and guarantee the discourse of Greta as a discourse of truth in itself. But it is certain that not even Greta justifies her activities on these two conditions. Clearly, in each one of her interventions she appeals, from the outset, to the trauma that this signifies for her generation and those to come, that they do not have a clear idea whether as they grow up they will be able to count on the basic natural conditions to ensure their survival. But it is also true that the nucleus of her discourse, the deepest nerve centre of her critique, is supported by a certain science which offers hard data on the damage being done to the planet and natural and social life. Statistics on trends of global warming, on global processes of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, on biological and chemical dynamics that occur in ecosystems from the diverse pressures faced due to industrial activities, etcetera.

All this, in fact, explains why Greta appeals to a certain common sense about the irreversible damage to life and the environment, but not only this and not in the first instance. There is, in her critique, specialized knowledge that, in terms of her age and education, for example, goes beyond her: exactly because of the high level of specialized knowledge she appeals to in order to generate some trauma among those who hear and read her.

So, the science that permeates her discourse and her privilege of enunciation, based on a colonial difference with the rest of the world, explains, in part, the overwhelming visibility she has attained around the planet, among so many people (some media have counted more than four million people mobilized by her speeches in #Fridaysforfuture). In this respect, for example, information has filtered among certain journalistic circles about the business circuits that are behind her, supporting the pace of her global campaign, facilitating and amplifying the reach of her voice and her critique in numerous and diverse public spaces, in the hopes that, at some point, this will have sufficient resonance for them to start spinning their own agenda from this critique, around what is beginning to be called green corporatism, that is nothing more than the continuation of capitalist mercantilism, but in this case of the measures to limit and reverse or mitigate climate change.

The information relative to the lobbies and businesses or NGOs behind Greta still needs to be identified and corroborated in many points. The possibility that these articles are being published in accord with and financed by energy companies based on oil and coal extraction, or of any other interest group that Greta’s discourse is targeting, criticizing or censuring, cannot be disregarded. Nevertheless, the contrary is also not an option. In fact, something that calls much attention to the phenomenon of Greta Thunberg, is that there are a lot of business interests that are facilitating her visibility and her being heard in different latitudes. It is clear that this fact, by itself, is not a minor one. If we have learned anything about the way that capitalism orders the world it is that, when it does not repress, contain, eliminate or occult those discourses and practices that are dangerous for its amplified and systematic reproduction, it absorbs them into its own logic, commodifies and re-purposes them so that they serve its ends.

With Greta, something of this is floating like an intangible presence in the air. The dynamic that has developed around her person when she offered her speech of a little less than a quarter of an hour, at the 2019 Summit on Climatic Change in New York, reveals this: when she puts her thoughts into words (and it was among the most condemnatory, aggressive and disdainful of the political and industrial indifference in the face of the climate catastrophe), the first response received from the world leaders that she is criticizing, despising and condemning, was an ovation and euphoric applause for her courage and the relevance of her critique.

Those whom Greta points out as the culprits of the prevailing situation know what they’re doing and they still do it. But not only do they do it but today, they encourage their critics (such as Greta) to radicalize and strengthen their critique. The immediate consequence of this is that, at least in discourse, government agents (such as Macron) join their voices to the demands made of them, even though in practice they stay aligned with the demands of big capital. If this is seen only in terms of the person that is Greta, perhaps this dynamic does not represent such a problem for the system. But if it is seen from the perspective of the effects caused at the level of the masses, what attracts attention is the way there seems to be a sort of homogeneity or congruence between the subjects making the critique and the subjects criticized: there is a kind of ideological affinity in which those who possess the material capacity to modify the immediate reality (the owners of capital) are leading the ideological shaping of their opposition.

This accompaniment, this complicity between both sides of the equation, for example, doesn’t manifest itself (with respect to the colonial difference) in the relation between the capitalists and the defenders of the environment in the Americas (many of whom are also underage persons). And it is here–without the spotlights of the United Nations and the big megaphones of the business conglomerates of the international media–, for these activists: men and women, children and old people, it is not words that make up the protective barrier against capital, but their actual bodies (Colombia, Chile and Mexico, in addition to all of Central America, are archetypical examples, of the quantity of assassinated activists and devastated villages.)

In part, the success of Greta is also due to this dynamic because the openness and accessibility of her language (in spite of her scientific discourse that claims to be neutral) offers an illusion that is dangerous: the illusion that suggests that Greta represents a sort of common sense that is already present in everyone, of any age or medical condition, regarding what is needed to maintain life on this planet. But if there is one thing that the way the contemporary capitalist market operates shows us, it is that the mediation of merchandise, on a practical and material level, and that of abstractions in knowledge and intellectual apprehension of the world, have fragmented the possibility of recovering awareness of the totality: not only of an image of the world (which by itself is abstract) but of life as a single totality.

It is because of this that there is something false in pretending to see the mobilizations of the younger generations as the most radical nerve center of the critique of the planet’s devastation, because, independently of their degree of education, that global conscience that the masses claim to observe in the mobilizations of the #Fridaysforfuture does not come into play. Does all this mean that we must throw overboard the work realized by Greta and the effects that she has had at the street level among so many collectivities? The immediate and obvious answer is: no.

What Greta is doing is necessary because it has reached spaces where other activists and other people who have given their lives for the environment (Berta Cáceres, for example) have not reached. In some sense, this is equivalent to parasitizing the system from its own insides, making use of its host’s body as a necessary and unrenounceable medium or motive to dispute spaces occupied by the power of capital. Criticism rather moves by another route: towards the ideological construction, not of Greta, but of the masses that make her figure and her discourse the catalyst or representation of the alternatives to the catastrophe. Why?

In principle, because the ideological reference point against which the radical nature of her discourse is contrasted is that of the conservatism and denial of climate change (personified for example by Donald J. Trump). The radicalism of Greta, here, is lost when it is mass-produced, since here the ideological construction of the masses, in some sense, loses the autistic spectrum, it becomes nuanced. Returning to this week’s events in New York, this fact is observable when the masses that want to interpret Greta take as a reference point of her success and her radicalism, not so much the fact that she speaks to global leaders and tells them openly what she thinks and feels (even on the verge of tears), but the response that Thunberg receives from them. Here, the cynicism of world leaders that Greta is challenging and of those she criticizes so harshly and directly is willfully assimilated and reproduced by the collectivity, which itself becomes cynical.

03/10/2019

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop and Joan Remple)

Ricardo Orozco, Executive Councilor  of the Centro Mexicano de Análisis de la Política Internacional.

@r_zco