Two Faces of Apocalypse: A Letter from Copenhagen

In December I travelled to Copenhagen for the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP). I did not attend any of the ocial meetings in the Bella Center, where the conference was based, but rather participated outside the conference in a range of protest activities directed against the actions (and more importantly the inactions) of the ocial parties. ere is much to be said about the protest tactics employed in Copenhagen as well as the strategy of summit protests more generally, but the events led me primarily toward theoretical reections about the relationship between the two predominant components of the protests: anticapitalist social movements and social movements to address climate change. ese two groups of movements share a profound link, it seems to me, in that they are focused on the management of the common, which is quickly becoming the central terrain of political struggle across a wide variety of political contexts. And yet these movements stand in dierent relation to the common and even focus on dierent forms of the common , posing a series of conceptual antinomies and political challenges. e interactions among the activist movements surrounding the Copenhagen Summit was for me a rst opportunity to see clearly and work through some of these an-tinomies and challenges. e primary political dierences among the movements, in my view, as well as the antinomies that to some degree stand behind them, ow from the fact that they focus on distinct forms of the common, which have dissimilar qualities. On the one hand, for climate change movements and ecological movements more generally, the common refers primarily to the earth and its ecosystems, including the atmosphere, the oceans and rivers, and the forests, as well as all the forms of life that interact with them. Anticapitalist social movements, on the other hand, generally understand the common in terms of