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Have you ever wondered how many online retailers (“etailers”) there in the United States? How about the entire world? If you work for an eCommerce solution provider this is a question that is top of mind for you at all times. It’s essential to know the comprehensive number of online retailers globally or in the US to better understand your total addressable market. In summary, there are currently 9.8 Million Online Retailers in the world and 2.8 Million of them located in the United States. These etailers can be broken down into three categories (see below) commonly known as Branded etailers, Traditional etailers, and Virtual Goods etailers. The infographic below provides helpful insight into how many global and US etailers focus solely on their eCommerce site business or have an approach that is fully Marketplaces oriented or a hybrid between an eCommerce platform and Marketplaces. These are all key eCommerce metrics to understand when you are in the business of targeting these etailers with a solution you know can help improve their business.

Shifting the Burden of Detecting Counterfeits The SHOP SAFE Act’s safe harbour provisions provide some reasonable requirements of marketplaces: for example, encouraging programmes to quickly remove suspected counterfeit listings and terminating sellers who repeatedly list counterfeit products. But the overall scheme creates a new and untested landscape by shifting the burden for policing for counterfeits from brand owners onto marketplaces. There are substantial technological limitations to screening technology, and platforms are often not well positioned to know every product a brand has made and how to identify every counterfeit that might be out there. To combat counterfeiting, platforms need to implement policies for screening and terminating listings and sellers and brand owners need to provide platforms with the information to effectively do so. In its current form, the act requires that marketplaces ensure sellers use images that accurately depict the goods sold and use “identifying characteristics” of listings and sellers to determine if goods are counterfeit, but it does not require trademark owners to provide a way for marketplaces to know what authentic goods should look like. Instead, the act only requires the trademark owner to provide the notice of its mark and a point of contact. It expressly prohibits requiring that trademark owners “participate in any program specific to the electronic commerce platform” such as an information-sharing programme. Without reliable information about brands’ products and trademarks, platforms cannot possibly implement successful screening measures and may be forced to remove non-infringing listings for fear of liability. Though AI tools are being developed that may have the future ability to compare logos and trademarks used in listings to those provided by brands, those tools may yield false positives and false negatives and will lack the context and judgement to identify legitimate activity that is protected by doctrines like fair use. To avoid engaging in costly inquiries, marketplaces may simply overcorrect by removing any suspect listings, sweeping in authentic products as well. While all parties should be engaged in the fight against counterfeits, shifting the burden entirely onto marketplaces in this way will harm all parties—the marketplaces, trademark owners, sellers and consumers.

It's encouraging to see that the authors of the SHOP SAFE Act understand this core issue, but there are some obvious disadvantages to their proposed policy solution. Outsourcing IP enforcement to the private sector on such a large scale is a risky proposition, and could create a spate of new and unforeseen consequences. While there’s a case to be made that severe levels of counterfeiting pose a threat to the underlying business model of e-commerce companies, it must be noted that a certain amount of counterfeiting is actually good for their bottom line. Sales are sales, and platform owners receive a cut regardless of whether the products changing hands are authentic. It doesn’t take a particularly brilliant mind to understand why it may be unwise to deputize these corporations to solve the problem of counterfeiting when they have such a clear conflict of interest. If e-commerce companies were unable or unwilling to fully execute the Herculean task assigned to them by Congress, would the federal government really be able to force them to change course? One can envision a scenario where ambivalent e-commerce corporations pay lip service to the goals of the SHOP SAFE Act while doing little to enforce it in practice. These companies could resign themselves to paying a modest fine every so often knowing that they will easily make that money back, Congress could congratulate itself for “solving” the problem of online counterfeiting, and very little would change on the ground.

Some believe that holding marketplaces liable for harm stemming from listings on their sites is appropriate because the marketplaces are the "guardians" of their sites and are in the best position to verify and police sellers and listings.138 One of the ways that marketplaces can guard their platform against bad actors is to thoroughly verify seller identity, location, and address using more than a governmental ID.139 Parties on both sides show concern with seller identification requirements, noting that it is [*231] still relatively easy to use false or stolen identification.140 Moreover, the global participation model used by marketplaces means that platforms often have no way to physically inspect identification documents to verify legitimacy.141 Yet, despite the imperfections of current vetting processes, requiring marketplaces to increase their scrutiny of seller-provided documentation is seen by many as a step in the right direction.142 Some small, individual business owners working out of their homes fear that requiring disclosure of seller names and addresses will endanger their personal lives.143 Acknowledging privacy and personal safety concerns, the INFORM Act allows sellers who do not have a non-residential business address to display only their country or state of residence.144 Personal contact information collected for the purposes of verifying seller identification, including residential addresses, is not to be displayed to consumers on the seller's listing and is required to be protected in a secured data bank.145 Legitimate business operators support consumer disclosure requirements and the obligation to provide a business address, claiming that more transparency will deter bad actors who hide behind anonymity.146 Information disclosure can only go so far to deter sellers of counterfeit goods. Even when online marketplaces verify seller identity and audit the products before they are offered for sale on the platform, sellers still have the opportunity to deal in fake goods after the initial marketplace entry requirements. It is [*232] possible for a seller to send authentic products to the marketplace to pass audits and inspections, only to turn around and sell counterfeit products directly to the consumer.147 To ensure that product standards and contractual agreements are met, marketplaces must continually audit sellers and their products.148

Paradoxes of Racialized Solidarity Th ough environmental activists may turn to discourses of solidarity as a way of addressing the racializing and colonial practices of the environmental movement, the philosophy of solidarity is still deeply embedded in the dominant relations of racialization and colonialism. Indeed, as Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández (2012) argues, solidarity strategies oft en reinscribe colonial logics and obscure complicity in colonization. Gada Mahrouse argues that whiteness is intrinsic to solidarity activism: solidarity is “a strategy built around the notion that people in positions of power are more likely to take notice of the brutality and injustice going on in various places if white and/or First World citizens become involved” (2014: 4). For the scholars who attend to the racialized logics of solidarity, critiques circulate around the idea of solidarity as a type of “jiujitsu” (Mahony and Eguren 1997) that simultaneously recognizes asymmetrical power relations and attempts to use power to transform these very relations (Coy 1997; Koopman 2012; Weber 2006). Th ese scholars gesture toward several paradoxes embedded within this logic, tracing how solidarity frames rely on and reinscribe racial and colonial ideas. While solidarity tactics tend to be framed as antiracist, they also recenter white/settler/ privileged people. Problematically, those purporting to act in solidarity are not always aware of this centering. The logics of solidarity require the presence of a privileged person in order for the work to proceed. At the same time, paradoxically, the privileged presence is framed as peripheral and in support (Koopman 2012; Mahrouse 2014). In this way, the whole repertoire of action hinges on privileged people’s participation, making them the linchpin of such strategies. Solidarity is predicated on the fact that in a white supremacist society, white bodies and white voices matter more. While seeking to leverage this logic, activists leave it uncontested and, in fact, trade on the logic (Mahrouse 2014; Tabar 2017). Leey’qsun scholar Rachel Flowers argues that the logics of settler privilege are particularly visible in settler-Indigenous solidarity work. She argues that in deploying their privilege to support Indigenous peoples’ resistance, settlers oft en fail to recognize their ability to choose when to support decolonial struggles. Th rough this mobilization of privilege, Flowers argues, “Indigenous sites of resistance also become sites where our domination is sustained rather than interrupted” (2015: 35). Th e critiques of race, white privilege, and solidarity also point to how this makes doing whiteness—a position that many solidarity activists reject as a political stance—central to the performance of doing solidarity, because in order to reap the benefi ts of privileged people’s positions, they must be legible as white, so they must play up aspects of whiteness that are valued under white supremacy (Koopman 2012; Mahrouse 2014; Weber 2006). Th is is particularly complicated for those involved in solidarity action who are mixed or people of color. In order for them to participate in these strategies, they oft en must explicitly try to perform whiteness (Mahrouse 2014) in order to access the benefi ts of privilege and thus mobilize the strategic interventions. Th is dynamic places people of color in situations where they are unable to engage the same tactics as their white colleagues because they cannot or will not pass as white. We also see instances in which settler activists of color must position themselves as similarly responsible for settler violence as white settlers, which can erase the colonial violence that is and has been enacted on non-Indigenous racialized people (Byrd 2011; Lawrence and Dua 2005; Morgensen 2015). For solidarity strategies predicated on the idea of amplifying the voices of impacted communities, a whole other set of contradictions arises. While privileged activists claim that more people will listen to their voices based on their social locations—oft en correctly—they then speak for others, a practice that they argue against (Mahrouse 2014). And when they do receive disproportionate press coverage or attention, they then have to stress that the stories of the directly impacted are, in fact, most important. Th e very presence of privileged solidarity activists belies that point: if the stories of impacted communities are more important and are the ones that should be heeded, why are solidarity activists in front of the cameras? Other scholars have also worked to negotiate and articulate this contradiction, arguing that there is a diff erence between speaking for and speaking alongside (Shohat 2001), or that these strategies draw on problematic ideas of conquest, exploration, and objectivity (Tilley and Cokley 2008). Sara Ahmed (2007) criticizes the move, suggesting that only the privileged have access to others’ narratives in this way and that the privilege to document others’ lives reinforces rather than undermines the logic of white supremacy. Along similar lines, Mahrouse (2014) argues that the “speaking alongside” approach to solidarity is a racialized privilege that is obscured through the logics of neutrality and exceptionalism, both of which become reifi ed as white or privileged people step in and speak for. In doing so, they suggest to other similarly situated people that the political struggle matters because of the privileged person’s exposure to risk and that reports can now be trusted because the situation is being documented “objectively” by a privileged person. Th ese ideas actively reinforce supremacist notions of who is credible and valuable. Solidarity strategies that use these approaches are implicated in reinforcing deeply problematic societal structures. Unangaxˆ scholar Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) have stressed the need to recognize incommensurability in solidarity or coalition-based collaboration. They suggest that while there may be some desired common outcome that overlaps across movements, the foundational reasons for the movements’ existences are fundamentally different. Without recognizing this, attempts to collaborate closely can replicate colonial practices by subsuming Indigenous sovereignty, or the rights of other impacted communities, under a more powerful or privileged movement. Sally Scholz (2008) makes a related, though separate, argument about the significance of epistemological privilege. This points to what Geonpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2004) labels epistemologies of whiteness, where we can trace how dominant Eurowestern ways of knowing are mobilized in solidarity relationships despite the intentions of privileged activists, and that these undermine opportunities for decolonial solidarity. Dhillon argues “that without an explicit and deep anti-colonial analysis we run the risk of reinscribing the narrative of white settler benevolence . . . and a colonial subjectivity that keeps white settler power intact” (2015: 6). The scholarship in this area notes that solidarity activists are often aware of these contradictions and their complicity in reinscribing racial hierarchy, yet they continue taking up strategies that place them in these paradoxes (Mahrouse 2014; Weber 2006). Mahrouse (2014) demonstrates that the existence of privileged people wanting to work in solidarity, follow the leadership of impacted communities, and not be in a position of asymmetric power does not change the power relations but instead makes them more visible and more uncomfortable. For example, activists on the ground know that the rejection of a charity model as condescending can also contradict requests for philanthropic support. In these instances, solidarity activists are caught in a paradox of not wanting to mobilize their economic power over impacted communities while also intending to follow the direction of the community (Weber 2006). Th ey know that they are participating in struggles that are not their own, and that this is a potentially problematic position, yet they participate, arguing that the invitation of communities soothes some of the contradictions inherent to their participation. Th ese contradictions do not resolve themselves and persistently pose problems for antiracist and anticolonial allies to try to navigate.

On Solidarity Given the racialized and colonial history of the mainstream environmental movement, it is particularly interesting that academic discussions of solidarity in the environmental movement rarely engage the politics of racialization and colonialism. Nowhere in the literature do we fi nd a substantial exploration of how race and colonialism shape the context of environmental solidarity, either making solidarity all the more necessary in response, or refl ecting on the ways in which solidarity itself may remap racial and colonial logics (Gaztambide-Fernández 2012). Because this is largely overlooked in the writing on environmental coalitions, we look to other social movements that were founded explicitly to do solidarity work. We take this up with the goal of off ering participants in the mainstream environmental movement an expanded language with which to think about how we disrupt the whiteness and settler coloniality of environmentalism. Th e idea of solidarity is taken up in vastly diff erent ways across literatures, from philosophy and political theory (Bayertz 1999; Hooker 2009; Scholz 2008), to feminist theory (Dean 1996; Mohanty 2003), to curriculum studies (Swalwell 2013; Gaztambide-Fernández 2012; Lissovoy and Brown 2013), and beyond. Th e most common thread connecting these ideas is the shared belief that “solidarity” is used inconsistently and is in need of more systematic theorization (Bayertz 1999; Gaztambide-Fernández 2012; Power and Charlip 2009; Sundberg 2007; Wilde 2007). We can see that diversity across articles on solidarity rooted in movement contexts, many of which are written by scholar activists embedded in solidarity campaigns. Th ese articles explore movements including Latin America solidarity (Finley-Brook and Hoy 2009; Olesen 2004; Power 2009; Sundberg 2007), accompaniment (Coy 1997; Koopman 2012; Mahrouse 2014; Weber 2006), anti-sweatshop (Armbuster-Sandoval 2005; Cravey 2004; L. Featherstone 2002; Traub-Werner and Cravey 2002), fair trade (Hussey and Curnow 2016; Polynczuk-Alenius and Pantti 2016; Wilson and Curnow 2013), Palestine (Bakan and Abu-Laban 2009; Gale 2014; Pollock 2008; Stamatopoulou-Robbins 2008; Tabar 2017), HIV/AIDS (Klug 2005), and other movements. In this article, we focus on solidarities that bridge place and power—there is extensive writing about solidarity in the labor movement, recent histories of South-South solidarities, especially those sustaining anticolonial revolutions (Tabar 2017), as well as what Nishnaabe scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017) labels “co-resistors,” including Black-Brown solidarity (Tuck et al. 2014). While these solidarity praxes may prove quite instructive to environmentalists, they operate from distinctive sets of politics. Th ese examples foreground shared experiences of exploitation across impacted groups, whereas the ideas of solidarity we take up here are predicated on disparate social locations, as we will interrogate in subsequent sections. Works taking up solidarity rooted in movement usage rarely make their defi nition explicit. In most of these discussions, solidarity is understood to be activism in one place—geographical, socioeconomic, political—that works to defend the rights of people in a diff erent place (Passy 2001; Olesen 2005; Sundberg 2007). Various authors outline the core philosophies of solidarity work, suggesting that solidarity is defi ned by its attention to work on behalf of others (Finley Brook and Hoyt 2009; Gould 2007; Power and Charlip 2009; Sundberg 2007), though they also stress that solidarity should be diff erentiated from charitable work on behalf of others (Kraemer 2007). Sara Koopman (2012) recognizes that the diff erence is foundational to solidarity activists, though arguably diffi cult for the untrained eye to recognize. Th ese articles suggest that while charity makes no eff ort to disrupt oppressive systems or imbalances of power but rather helps people within existing systems, solidarity is constructed as a process of amplifi cation (Hechter 1988, Koopman 2012) or standing alongside (Brown and Yaff e 2014, Shohat 2001). Th ese campaigns are understood as being based in shared political vision (Finley-Brook and Hoyt 2009; Gale 2014; Gill 2009; Hussey and Curnow 2016; Mahrouse 2014; Power and Charlip 2009; Rippe 1998; Tabar 2017), though this is not without complication. Solidarity thereby avoids reinforcing power imbalances through mechanisms of empowerment or help, but instead recognizes that the work undertaken is a shared goal of all participants in the solidarity eff ort (Pickerill 2009). With this understanding, North-South solidarity work is not solely for the benefit of Southern activists: it is in service of a more just and livable planet for all, or shared liberation (Routledge 2003).

Environmentalism and Indigenous Peoples Attention to relationship between peoples and lands is one of the coordinating worldviews common to many Indigenous peoples (Little Bear 2000). Th ese worldviews are nation and place specific, and Indigenous scholars continue to document theories, teachings, and land/water-based practices (Atleo 2010; Basso 1996; Borrows 1997; Fermentez 2013; Hill 2017; LaDuke 1999; McGregor 2004; Simpson 2014; Todd 2014; Whetung 2016) in ways that center sovereignty and relationships to land and water but that are not typically considered within the environmentalist canon. Tsimshian and Nuu-chah-nulth scholar Clifford Atleo argues that environmentalist ideas of preservation and conservation are incongruous with an Indigenous worldview (2010), as the logic of needing to protect the land from humans/oneself is nonsensical within Indigenous teachings and practice. Rather than highlight the differences in worldview, however, we want to stress that these are not ideas about the land existing in parallel. Nishnaabe scholar Madeline Whetung argues that “colonial land relations have settled over top of Indigenous landbased relations, not beside them” (2016: 11). These are layered ideas, with colonial ideas about land, place, and environment emerging on top with the effect of disappearing Indigenous intelligences. Environmentalism contributes to Indigenous erasure and dispossession by perpetuating colonial relationships to land. The mainstream environmental movement has also often used Indigenous people as props rather than engaging as partners. As early as the 1970s, mainstream environmentalist organizations aired ads featuring “the crying Indian” to promote antipollution campaigns (Krech 1999), deploying racialized images of Indigenous people as noble yet powerless victims of environmental degradation. This image of the “ecological Indian,” which simultaneously creates an equivalency of Indigenous peoples with nature and asserts Indigenous nonuse of it (Harkin and Lewis 2007), has been strategically taken up by environmentalists in providing an argument against contemporary Western industrial society and a romanticized view of the past (Nadasdy 2005; Willow 2009). It is within this same trope, however, that colonialism is made invisible and settlers can become the rightful stewards of the land. The “ecological Indian” can only exist in the absence of modern Indigenous people, since it harkens back to a time before the present, implying that Indigenous people and nature are both currently disappearing/disappeared (Ray 2013). Mainstream campaigns have also clashed directly with Indigenous people’s livelihoods, most notably in Canada in the case of the campaign against the seal hunt (Arnaquq-Baril 2016; Kitossa 2000). Understandably, Indigenous peoples have not taken up the frame environmentalism offered. Instead, Indigenous environmental work in Turtle Island has often taken place within sovereignty movements, where returning the land or managing extraction fits within a larger decolonial frame (LaDuke 1999; McGregor 2004; Varese 1996; Whetung 2016). Recent examples of this work include the mobilization around Standing Rock, an ongoing blockade at Unist’ot’en against oil exploration, and opposition to fracking at Elsipogtog First Nation. Indigenous communities are claiming their rights to refuse and rejecting bids for recognition by the settler colonial state. Instead, they are drawing on arguments rooted in sovereignty.

Mainstream environmentalism has historically been a white, settler space. The term settler “denaturalizes and politicizes the presence of non-Indigenous people on Indigenous lands, but also can disrupt the comfort of non-Indigenous people by bringing ongoing colonial power relations into their consciousness” (Flowers 2015: 33). The term recognizes different people’s responsibilities and culpability/complicity in the colonial project. There is debate over the use of “settler,” as it can collapse the different histories and responsibilities that differently positioned non-Indigenous people carry (Byrd 2011; Lawrence and Dua 2005; Sharma and Wright 2008). We agree that specificity is critical to communicating about the different responsibilities and differential access to power and privilege settlers have. At the same time, like Sherene Razack (2015) and Jaskiran Dhillon (2015), we stress that any move to account for that complexity must not eclipse “what it means to live in a settler colonial state, [where] people of color and white settlers alike must confront our collective illegitimacy and determine how to live without participating in and sustaining the disappearance of Indigenous peoples” (Razack 2015: 27). In this article, we theorize the complexity of how settler environmentalists might navigate racialization and colonialism in order to do solidarity, especially in a movement that has been so thoroughly marked by (and critiqued for) whiteness. Mainstream environmentalism, which in itself encompasses work ranging from raising awareness about ocean acidification to participating in a tree sit, includes settlers of color, and they/we are implicated in the settler colonial project as well, though differently. However, the existence of diversity does not preclude the domination of white culture (Ward 2008). Our goal in using particular terminology is to stress the role that whiteness plays in the mainstream environmental movement, understood through the logics of racialization and settler colonialism simultaneously. We are not trying to erase or collapse social relations or experiences. Throughout this article, we are thinking about the ways in which racialization is enacted and resisted—and enacted through resistance—within a white, colonial movement. So how do settlers do environmentalism differently? How might we engage in decolonial, antiracist solidarity? Coming out of our long history of a racist and racializing movement and immersed in dominant social relations, how might mainstream environmentalists rethink our movement and our participation in solidarity? We arrive at this work as activists who worked in the environmental and global justice movements for more than a decade before coming to academic research. As scholars, we have been surprised at the lack of literature that acknowledges the whiteness of the mainstream environmental movement head-on, since this is a widely understood critique in the movement. As settler activists,3 our experience in movements drives our questions, as we seek to understand how activists, and environmentalists in particular, can learn to do solidarity in the context of racialized, colonial social relations. We take up this work not to be unsympathetically critical but to contribute to greater awareness of the ways in which solidarity frameworks can reinscribe racialized and colonial dynamics even as they seek to overcome them.

In readdressing my research questions, How do colonial projects function as uninterrogated centers of global environmental injustice? and, How do the climate narrations of U.S. green billionaires obscure or illuminate the conditions of coloniality and settler colonialism?, my research has led me to understand that major players in climate change discourse, such as green billionaires, obscure coloniality as they narrate their plans for the future. They obscure reality by doing what settlers do best— convincing themselves that they are detached, unbiased, rational, objective, apolitical fountains of knowledge. Settlers speak for themselves on behalf of everyone else and produce climate narratives that instruct us to forget our presence in settler world. One of the greatest things we can learn from green billionaires’ climate narratives is that popular climate discourse, such as innovation towards a sustainable end, is a language of power that reinforces the status quo. I would go one step further to call it a language of domination and colonization. While it is so necessary that climate change be discussed and that plans be made ranging from hyper-local to truly global in scope, we should be careful that this dialogue not be a way of reproducing the same power relations that shape the world today. As Klein (2014) stated, “climate change represents a historic… we once again have the chance to advance policies that dramatically improve lives, close the gap between rich and poor, create huge numbers of good jobs, and reinvigorate democracy from the ground up… It can disperse power into the hands of the many rather than consolidating it in the hands of the few, and radically expand the commons, rather than auctioning it off in pieces” (p. 10). 77 I have long thought that understanding the nuances of climate change are far more complex and difficult to grasp than what I have begun to see as the true heart of climate mitigation. By making room for and truly sharing in dialogue with those whose voices have been quieted—Third world and indigenous communities and scholars. By investing in community and building relations through place. Yet, although I would call this approach “simple”—I would not call it easy. In studying settler colonialism theoretically, through the elite language of the academy, and knowing settler colonialism intimately, through my own embodiment of it and my awareness of forces of resistance against it, I would say that settler colonialism is nefarious, deceptive, and delusion inducing. One of the most difficult things I can imagine is the constant decoupling that is required to remove one’s sense of self and one’s daily activities from the collective settler colonial mission. One of the easiest ways to see this is in dealing with the incommensurability of decolonization as referred to by Tuck and Yang (2012). One of the best ways I believe we can approach climate change from an anticolonial stance is by abandoning words like “environment,” “nature,” “natural,” and “wild.” As odd as this may seem, this research has led me to see these words as inherently colonial inventions that, even when used with the best intensions, traps us in the contradictions that the U.S. environmental movement has long been beholden to. This is not to be mistaken for reinforcing human exceptionalism or for disregarding nonhuman life, spaces, and processes. To me, abandoning these words is the ultimate reverence to the fact that humans are never at any point in time separate from non-human existence. We are of the Earth just as much as we imagine the Earth as being of us. Words like natural and wild carry an implicit bias that forces us to imagine human life as 78 separate from the rest of life on Earth. And once we are used to seeing climate action framed around the environment it because incredibly difficult to see climate change as anything but a particular set of concerns. I believe we need to find ways of pivoting from “environment” to non-human or living and non-living beings in order to talk about the spatial relations that humans share with the non-human world rather than the natural spaces we feel inclined to protect. And this is not my own idea but is based in many indigenous epistemologies which are not only positioned in resistance to settler colonialism but also towards an understanding of ecological balance that includes humans at the same status as the non-human world. But anyone who studies the climate—however formally or informally—knows that to engage climate change is to think through plurality and to question common notions of justice to mean not just inclusion and equity but also mutual respect as manifested in shared space. One of the most important things we can do is decenter settler perspectives on climate change. And this is coming from a settler studying climate change. I truly believe that people in positions of power from the local to the global need to step aside and listen more than they talk and we need to use our positions of power and resources to create space for alternative ways of being to enter public climate discourse. Rather than invest in technological innovation so that settlers can continue to settle and to live their lifestyles based on that settlement—we need to invest in spaces, both physically and digitally, that bring people together for the simple purpose of talking about the complexities of life at this particular moment. I think it is difficult for settlers to see their own settler colonial mindset because I think even settlers get sucked into collective settlement. From my own experience of 79 being a settler in the U.S., I have found that one becomes initiated into settlement twice— when you’re born or get put in a place in which you physically occupy stolen land and again when as you slowly accept and adopt settler practices that make you believe that you are removed from everyone else and exempt from collective accountability. We are instructed, again and again and again, to forget our very presence in settler world. Settlers need to start talking about being settlers and we need to continue to call settlement out as it is being activated and mobilized. Otherwise, I don’t believe we can even get to a space in which we can talk about decolonial possibilities as anything other than metaphorical because we are still actively settling.

These green billionaires participate in settler worlding as they narrate the future in relation to dominant climate change discourses. In each piece of media, it is clear that these billionaire’s vision for the future are all framed around notions that climate change is something of concern and that changes to society need to be made in order to move 52 away from an apocalyptic future and towards a utopic one. Looking at these narratives from the lens of settler colonialism, each piece of media indicated that these billionaire’s narratives were not self-contained projects but rather were all oriented around maintaining and reproducing a settler world. An essential idea that united each piece of media into an archive is expressed in the following quote by Veracini: “whether they envisage a progressive movement or identify a degenerative tendency, settler narratives structures remain powerful, reproducible, and mobilizable whether in relation to reconstructions of the past or imaginings of the future” (Veracini, p. 102). Starting with this idea that settler narratives are world building projects (physically and imagined) each of the six artifacts were analyzed for the ways in which settlers develop a sense of place that orient the individual towards and justifies the mission of the settler collective. My notion of settler colonialism is that the various mechanisms of settler worlding (from the development of media to the development of landscapes) occur via the creation of a spatiotemporal schema (a kind of mental terraforming) coupled with an inherent sense of individual sovereignty that tethers the settler to the schema.

Additionally, settler colonialism isn’t a kind of passive hegemonic force that remains central through as a flawed best practice for global society. Rather, settler colonialism is active and activated through “communicable methods” of ongoing capitalist settlement. Lechuga argues that “Patrick Wolfe suggests WSG organizes and 31 endures through material mechanisms of ideological replacement, those that eliminate native peoples from lands and then occupy those lands indefinitely: “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event … elimination is an organizing principal of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence … . Settler colonialism destroys to replace” (Lechuga, 2020, p. 380). The settler colonialism arranges power through communicable methods in which subjectivities and spatiotemporal logics are produced. Settler colonialism creates and recreates the conditions necessary for settler situations to exist by invoking capitalist innovation to materialize settler mythologies. Additionally, it is essential to recognize the ways in which settler colonialism is foundationally a mechanism of cultural production based on relations with the land. The building of capital through land as the motivational force makes “the accumulation of land is the objective of settler colonialism (unlike labor-driven objectives of other forms of colonialism)” (Rowe & Tuck, p. 6). Using climate technology as a communicable method of settler colonialism means that climate discourse is used as a means of reproducing settler colonial situations (the production of subjectifies rooted in individual sovereignty and the production of mythologies anchored in settler spacetime). As stated by Lechuga (2020), “settler colonialism leverages rhetoric to facilitate the material arrangement of ideological power on lands and bodies. This orientation illuminates the role rhetoric has had in mobilizing settler power through invoking subjectivities, devising sovereignty claims, and circulating narratives of settler logic” (p. 378). Sovereignty, typically discussed as the ultimate dominion of power within a particular space, is manifested within the individual settler through a particular 32 relationship between people and the space they occupy. Veracini argues that for the settler, individual sovereignty “is not the feudal nature of the relationships between local European settlers and a distant sovereign that should be emphasized, but, on the contrary, the specific nature of a self-governing capacity that is acquired via a voluntary movement to a separate location” (p. 58). In other words, it is a kind of entitlement necessary to claim belonging to stolen (home)lands. While authority (of knowledge) in other colonial settings is found in notions of state sovereignty, the settler situation places authority within the individual. Veracini’s development of settler consciousness is developed through Lacan’s notions of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real in which a subject orient itself through material and symbolic perceptions with the external world. For Veracini, “‘settler society’ is in itself a fantasy emanating from a painful perception of growing contradictions and social strife, where the prospect of settler migration literally operates as a displacement of tension and where the longing for a classless, stationary, and settled body politics can find expression” (Veracini, p. 75). This tension between the imaginary notion of an innocent and settled body politic and the violent reality of continued settlement produces a number of pathologies inherent to the settler, one of which is disavowal, the denial of responsibility.

If settler colonialism is understood narrowly as the occupation of stolen land decolonization must be deoccupation. The complexities of decolonization and its colloquial use within liberal education has been powerfully laid out in Tuck and Yang’s (2012) essay, “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” They argue that anything other than decolonization as deoccupation reduces decolonization to a metaphor taken up by settlers to disguise continued settlement or to avoid imagining the possibilities of actual deoccupation. This also leaves the question of whether it is possible to decolonize a 28 society that is still actively colonizing. As such, in an effort to give credence to Tuck and Yang’s argument, this essay does not claim a decolonial stance but rather attempts to take on the anti-colonial task of capturing settler colonialism in motion, in the present, and as it is disguising itself within what appears to be something else. Within this study, that something else is climate mitigation. Settler colonialism as a mode of domination premised on ongoing, rather than a legacy of, occupation foregrounds the need to first imagine the possibility of ceasing the progression and transformation of settler control before decolonization can be resuscitated from its metaphorical usage. Settler colonialism is a landed cultural politic in that settlers are always defined in relation to its genesis within a particular location as a fundamentally temporal orientation. Veracini claims that “settler colonialism is immediately premised on a foundational and historical situated movement (settlers move in from elsewhere at a particular point in time)” (p. 96). Settler narratives construct time as a palindrome within a particular locale as settler society is imagined through “a perception of a constant struggle is juxtaposed against an ideal of ‘peace’ that can never be reached, settler projects embrace and reject violence at the same time”(p. 77). Settler time is characterized by the resemblance between past and future, either as a progressive or degenerative tendency. Further, settler time is established within the settler narrative form and is leveraged in the creation of subjectivities. Based on this sense of time, settler subjectivity is defined by a sense of self characterized through an individual, rather than imperial, sovereign capacity. This sovereign capacity, the capacity to govern oneself and others, is carried by individuals who think of themselves as ‘founders of political orders’ (p. 53) establishing a truer 29 society and an “uncorrupted version of the original social body’ (p. 77). Further, because ‘settler citizenship is seen as conditioned on property of and residency on the land’ (p. 80), settlers are also characterized by anxieties over ‘the need to biopolitically manage their respective domestic domains’ (p. 16). The capacity to manage the population, or inclusion into the settler class, is a crucial marker of settler sovereignty. Finally, Veracini sees settler colonialism as a defensive project, which reproduces itself through an inherent disavowal within the settler through the “fantasy of communities devoid of disturbances or dislocations, and a situation where the transplanted settler collective would get back a jouissance that was historically taken away’ (p. 77).

3. Racialized subject formation and othering: a conceptual approach For white settlers, our stories are echoed—and hence our ‘selves’ affirmed—in ‘our’ schools, courts, parliaments, public spaces, books, films, and families. White identity and interest is shared and celebrated in the people, through a ‘state as formed by “the people”, who see their best interests reflected in its workings’ (Thobani, 2007, 53:19). Taken together under a structure of patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity, these conditions produce significant constraints to critical self-reflexivity for white settler culture (Connell, 2001, DiAngelo, 2011, Tuck and Yang, 2012). Through the national narrative, colonial and imperial violence is seen as ‘in the national interest’, in turn undergoing erasure, while being implicitly celebrated through national rites, rituals and stories.  describes the white national subject as being at the centre of a triangulated racial structure of subject formation in Canada, while the immigrant subject occupies a space of conditional inclusion,5 and the Indigenous subject remains marked by dispossession and extermination. As scholars have elucidated (Wolfe, 2001, Wolfe, 2006, Ahmed, 2000, Veracini, 2011, Lawrence and Dua, 2005), the colonial state has intervened in the lives of Indigenous peoples and racialized immigrants in different ways (consider the Immigration Act’s focus on credentials and economic exploitability versus the Indian Act’s focus on spatial and resource control), for rather different ends (the exploitation of labour versus the appropriation of land/resources). Thus, how we identify and narrativize others is not static or in direct and equal opposition to national selves, but contingent on history, proximity and relations to land and resources, as well as more specific and unstable relations (conditioned through variegated intersectionalities) between interactants. Put simply, how we see/frame an immigrant, refugee, or Indigenous other is conditioned by systemic hierarchies and is brought to life in the spaces between actants. Specifically, the strangeness of the ‘other’ is a function of their relative distance to our self (as a bundle of narratives, ideologies, and characteristics). Extending Said’s (1979) analysis of Orientalizing discourses: the other is made to exist as we know it, and our ‘knowing it’ is conditioned by intersecting forces of white supremacy and colonialism. Ideally, this framework emphasizes structures and relations beyond our own agency, while still acknowledging the capacity to resist these structures. Drawing from Thobani’s triangulation of racial subject formation within a settler colonial lens, three emergent identity relations are distinguished in the research: the white farmer self, the Indigenous other, and the migrant other. To analyze the data, the interactions between three elements are considered: socio-symbolic distance, proximity, and self-motivations,6 as these elements determine how one recognizes an ‘other’. Socio-symbolic distance involves the perceived socio-symbolic distance/difference between the self and other by reference to identity, ideologies, customs, rituals, rites, etc. As Alexander (1992) argues, such codes and symbols help supply structured categories into each member of civil society, such as ‘pure’ and ‘impure’. This socio-symbolic space provides meaning and justification for inclusion and exclusion from ‘civil society’. Of course, ‘this distinction is not “real.” Actors are not intrinsically either worthy or moral: they are determined to be so by being placed in certain positions on the grid of civil culture’, drawn from ‘a systematic, highly elaborated symbolic code’ (, 291). Identification of others is further conditioned through proximity between selves and others over space and time. Proximity underpins the materiality of social relations, extending identity beyond mere constructivism. Considering race specifically, its construction is tethered to material causes and effects, producing what Saldanha describes as a ‘viscosity’, revealed through ‘the stickiness of racial segregation’ (Saldanha, 2006, 10). Indeed, the effects of proximity are variegated, and cannot be essentialized as they depend on interacting modes of (class, gender and racial) oppression alongside the spatial dimensions of its reproduction and resistance.7 Finally, where selves fix others will depend on their own motivations and interests. Of course, othering often serves to justify the self’s privilege (whether consciously or not). Hence, identification varies depending on the self’s interests in land, capital, and employment, and how the other might impact those interests. The remaining analysis explores how, to what degree, and to what effect, white settler culture employs these strategies.

Occupy, no there there what was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there. (Stein 1993, 298) There was an occupation. (Stein 1997, 32) Settler environmentalism describes efforts to redeem the settler as ecological, often focusing on settler identity and belonging through tropes of Indigenous appropriations – returning to the wildman or demigoddess, claiming of one’s natural or ‘native’ self and thus the land, again. For example, ‘off the grid’ does not describe a place, but a set of redemptive behaviors – it is a terra nullius imaginary of a somewhere, nowhere, neverplace where one is no longer a settler. In using the term settler environmentalism, I am deliberately ambiguous about critical environmentalisms, such as movements in eco-feminism, deep ecology, and antiracist environmental justice. These are important trajectories in critical scholarship and activism around environmental justice, and ought to inform any decolonizing framework. However, antiracist, feminist, and environmental justice work are not automatically the opposite of settler colonialism. Decolonization might be incommensurable with projects more generally thought as social justice (see Tuck and Yang 2012). In the previous ethnographic example, greening the ghetto can mask a neoliberal curriculum of whitening9 the ghetto with ‘better-educated,’ ecologically ‘responsible,’ global citizens. More radical environmentalisms can also uphold the settler fantasy of sacred ‘wilderness’ – another form of unpeopled land – that must be restored or preserved. Even the progressive concept of land as Commons to be occupied, collectively shared and stewarded, may require the negation of Indigenous sovereignty. ‘The people still speak of the sacredness of places now claimed by the parks services for instance’ (Goeman 2008, 32). Occupying land for the Commons assumes that all prior, indeed current as well as future relations between people and land are null and void. ‘In other words,’ writes Sandy Grande, ‘both Marxists and capitalists view land and natural resources as commodities to be exploited, in the first instance, by capitalists for personal gain, and in the second by Marxists for the good of all’ (2004, 27). Social justice endeavors all take place on Native land. In this vein, I now turn to the Occupy movement. Environmental Education Research 121 Behind every great American city is a great crime. Oakland was founded on occupation and land theft. In 1850, a coterie of Yankee businessmen began building a port in what would become Oakland’s Jack London Square, developing and selling land unbeknownst to landlord Luis Peralta, who was granted 48,000 acres for his service to the Spanish army. Indeed, the Native Ohlone still lived in the land ‘owned’ by the Peraltas, as well as Miwok and other Indigenous people who had migrated as a result of historic relationships between tribes and efforts to escape the Mission system. The Peraltas sued, and in 1856, the US Supreme Court upheld their claim, but maintained that it was too late to reverse – as deeds and titles had exchanged hands so many times that there was no undoing – and because Oakland was now occupied. Occupy Oakland, which began in October of 2011, was an active part of the movements that began with Occupy Wall Street. Occupy itself was a diverse set of movements and dialogues not reducible to a single name or a campaign. Various queer, people of color and Indigenous groups participated in or sympathized with Occupy and recognized its importance as a meeting space, a node, for struggle. However, many of these groups had serious points of difference, most notably in the problematic name, ‘Occupy.’ On 28 October 2011, a group of Indigenous and non-Native intellectuals/activists introduced ‘The Memorandum of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples’ at the General Assembly of Occupy Oakland. WHEREAS, those participating in ‘Occupy Oakland’ acknowledge that Oakland is already occupied land; Oakland being the historical territory of the Chochenyo Ohlone people; and … RESOLVED, that those participating in ‘Occupy Oakland’ seek the genuine and respectful involvement of indigenous peoples in the rebuilding of a new society on their ancestral lands; and As a signal to the national ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement and the indigenous peoples here and there who have felt excluded by the colonialist language of occupation used to name this movement, it shall be declared that ‘Occupy Oakland’ aspires to ‘Decolonize Oakland’ – to ‘Decolonize Wall Street’ – with the guidance and participation of indigenous peoples; The memorandum points to difference as a modality of organizing, a source of strength and political possibility rather than as simply a curtailment of common struggle. Most importantly, the memorandum makes explicit the moral and political leadership of Indigenous peoples in any decolonial effort in North America. Significantly, the first signature of memorandum is by Chochenyo Ohlone educator Corrina Gould. The memorandum was passed, but not without controversy. One of the signers, Joanne Barker (Lenape) posted in her blog, Tequila Sovereign, that several people approached the group with serious anxieties about decolonization. Ultimately, what they were asking is whether or not we were asking them, as nonindigenous people, the impossible? Would their solidarity with us require them to give up their lands, their resources, their ways of life, so that we – who numbered so few, after all – could have more? Could have it all? 122 L. Paperson And this is the rub about decolonization: it forces people to confront their complicity in settler colonialism and the ongoing violence of empire. It immediately unsettles the utopian vision of wealth redistribution and collectively owned Commons. It exposes how numerical the conceptualization of social justice remains – the 99% is a ‘deserving’ supermajority that renders Indigenous peoples (a super-minority) completely illegible. Barker goes on to write, I have a dream that the people of ‘Occupy Oakland’ will not see the affirmation of indigenous peoples’ rights to self-government, territorial restoration, and cultural autonomy as a threat to their own; that they will see solidarity with indigenous peoples as an affirmation of their humanity and justice. Barker’s assertion reflects how ‘sovereignty’ as an Indigenous word is spoken with a different inflection than its cousin in the settler nation’s lexicon. It echoes the questions posed by Watson, writing from an aboriginal Australian perspective: Is aboriginal sovereignty to be feared by Australia in the same way as Aboriginal people fear white sovereignty and its patriarchal model of the state – one which is backed by power or force? Or is aboriginal sovereignty different … for there is not just one sovereign state body but hundreds of different sovereign aboriginal peoples. Aboriginal sovereignty is different from state sovereignty because it embraces diversity, and focuses on inclusivity rather than exclusivity. (Watson 2007, 20) A little over a month later, another proposal came before the General Assembly – to change the movement’s name to Decolonize Oakland. This time, the proposal did not pass. Christine Cordero (who does not identify as Native) posted on Facebook a few of her responses to the arguments made against the name change, including ‘Decolonize is divisive.’ To which she responded, ‘Occupy is divisive already and not including whole swaths of people. Decolonize and liberate are TRANSFORMATIVE. Difference, diversity, and change aren’t divisive.’ Occupy Oakland means to Occupy Ohlone. Because Ohlone is both people and land/place simultaneously, you cannot occupy Oakland without also trespassing on the bodies and spirits of those who live/d there. Land is ‘more than a site upon which humans make history or as a location that accumulates history’ (Goeman 2008, 24), more than a site to occupy.

However, they drew from their own experiences with the poor service provided to the poorer communities of color, away from downtown, by AC Transit. Some excerpted talk follows below: Zola: The bus takes hell of fucking long. You are stuck on this bus that smells like shit and … They make us pay hella money everyday and walk on, get on their bus. … Marcus: By where I live … the 64, the 64 doesn’t run on the weekend. … Zola: I don’t like County Transit. Why do they want to increase the thing to San Francisco? … We already got BART!5 As they deliberated, they grew increasingly angry about the narrowly conceived options before them, and the obvious directive to vote in favor of the host of alternative transportation reforms. They shifted their performance into a satire of how government policy meets the needs of people with privilege and in power. Amber: I’m gonna say sorry, but we all need new offices downtown so screw you guys. Ending deliberation, they re-entered the classroom/meeting hall. Marcus: By popular demand, we’re giving the money to the Freeway Development Corporation – Instructor: Really? Zola: And the rest of the money goes to buy our office supplies because – Marcus: because we all in the suburbs and – Hanifa: and we need an easy way to work and um – Marcus: So we never really cared about your situation, it’s nothing personal … Paul (a student not on the board, representing AC Transit): You’re ugly Marcus: We’re all Republicans, Paul. We don’t really care about your issues so – Hanifa: So we chose what was best for us and Freeway Corp is what’s most beneficial. Paul and other students: New board! New board! Instructor: That’s the first time that’s happened. Board: [laugh] Learning from youth resistance moves us away from individualizing the critique to the guest instructors’ teaching ability and cultural competency. Rather, youth resistance reveals key differences between what Keeling (2007) terms a ‘ghettocentric commonsense’ and commonsense environmentalism. The youth did not dispute the ecological advantages of bike lanes and public transportation. Environmental Education Research 119 However, they understood ghetto colonialism from a lived perspective, specifically how city planning has always disposed of poor communities of color. Bike lanes and buses, not to mention BART,6 falsely promised a ‘public’ transportation system because they worked differently for white7 cosmopolitans than for ghettoized peoples. Further, the youth detected the metanarrative within the lesson’s cartography of Oakland’s places and peoples. Downtown matters. Commuters count. Indeed, this urban ecology unit invited students to participate in their own disappearance: lend your voice to fixing the ghetto wasteland by paving bikeways and funding rapid commuter lines for the cosmopolitan citizen. By contrast, the students’ comments reflected everyday tales of dispossession within the very solutions of public infrastructure meant to ‘repair’ the ghetto wasteland. Youth rejected the settler environmentalist moral through a parody of power. They pulled out the meat ax, and pointed at it with glee. We never really cared about your situation. You are just people in the way. Their performance foreshadowed a future reality. A few years later, then-Mayor Jerry Brown would successfully redevelop downtown Oakland into expensive lofts and condos. When pressed on the costs of gentrification, he replied that Oakland had ‘discriminated’ far too long against middle and upper middle class people. The commuter bus would be extended to SF, and bike lanes put in place. Youth indeed began to disappear – from over 50,000 to fewer than 40,000 school-age youth in five years. Despite developments toward a greener city, urban youth and their communities would not fare any better. Urban educators have few tools for engaging settler colonialism because terra sacer often under-girds environmental education in urban schools. Environmental education offers three limited social justice frameworks: environmental racism – a framework that focuses on pain; green curriculum – a framework that focuses on rescue; and place-based curriculum – a framework that focuses on inclusion, and thus, the replacement of Native land/people with a multicultural immigrant nation. Despite their social justice intentions, and their ecological truths, when strung together, such pedagogies concerning US ghettos contain a settler colonial teleology. Pain curriculum8 highlights, legitimately, the disproportionate toxification of air, soil and water in poor, urban, communities of color. However, reducing ghettos to pain-filled sites of environmental toxicity in need of salvation, echo the settler colonial logics of terra sacer – wasteland whose inhabitants lack the liberal capitalist insights and technological know-how to properly occupy a city. Rescue curriculum follows logically from pain curriculum. It presents green solutions in the form of urban gardens, recycling, clean fuels, etc. It leans explicitly on green technologies and implicitly on the technologies of government. The hidden curriculum of rescue naturalizes city planning, urban redevelopment, and deghetto-fication as inevitable remedies for pain. It positions ghettoized communities as wards under settler colonial sovereignty. Rescue curriculum promotes green cities, a wealth of green consumption through which the multicultural cosmopolitan citizen earns his/her/our right to be the nouveau settler. Enter place-based curriculum. Place-based curriculum helps write the master narrative of future, green, metropolitan neo-colonies. Often inclusive, multicultural, and celebratory, such curriculum highlights the urban as a place of diversity, flavored by communities of color. (And wouldn’t you like to live here too?) Claiming the urban as a contact zone or multicultural home – whether by people of color, or by white 120 L. Paperson people – violently erases Indigenous understandings of that land and place. If Native people are mentioned at all, they are almost always only as a premodern population who were pleasantly ‘one with nature,’ or ecological Indians so few in number that the ecological settler becomes a ‘good neighbor’ or benevolent reinhabitant. Such a representation inscribes settler colonialism as a done deal, renders urban Native youth as inauthentic Indians, and denies contemporary Native relationships to urban land and place (Friedel 2011). The hidden curriculum of place-based pedagogy lies in its teleology. Native people used to live here. White people settled here; they fled. People of color replaced white people; they suffer. Coming up, the multicultural cosmopolitan citizen will replace people of color. When the Great American City is finally built, all the white people will be colorful, and all the colored people will be gone.

The Need For A Party: I would argue that within the base building movement, there is a move towards party organizing, but this trend has not always been explicitly theorized or forwarded within the movement. My goal in this essay is to argue that base building and dual power strategy can be best forwarded through party organizing, and that party organizing can allow this emerging movement to solidify into a powerful revolutionary socialist tendency in the United States. One of the crucial insights of the base building movement is that the current state of the left in the United States is one in which revolution is not currently possible. There exists very little popular support for socialist politics. A century of anticommunist propaganda has been extremely effective in convincing even the most oppressed and marginalized that communism has nothing to offer them. The base building emphasis on dual power responds directly to this insight. By building institutions which can meet people’s needs, we are able to concretely demonstrate that communists can offer the oppressed relief from the horrific conditions of capitalism. Base building strategy recognizes that actually doing the work to serve the people does infinitely more to create a socialist base of popular support than electing democratic socialist candidates or holding endless political education classes can ever hope to do. Dual power is about proving that we have something to offer the oppressed. The question, of course, remains: once we have built a base of popular support, what do we do next? If it turns out that establishing socialist institutions to meet people’s needs does in fact create sympathy towards the cause of communism, how can we mobilize that base? Put simply: in order to mobilize the base which base builders hope to create, we need to have already done the work of building a communist party. It is not enough to simply meet peoples needs. Rather, we must build the institutions of dual power in the name of communism. We must refuse covert front organizing and instead have a public face as a communist party. When we build tenants unions, serve the people programs, and other dual power projects, we must make it clear that we are organizing as communists, unified around a party, and are not content simply with establishing endless dual power organizations. We must be clear that our strategy is revolutionary and in order to make this clear we must adopt party organizing. By “party organizing” I mean an organizational strategy which adopts the party model. Such organizing focuses on building a party whose membership is formally unified around a party line determined by democratic centralist decision making. The party model creates internal methods for holding party members accountable, unifying party member action around democratically determined goals, and for educating party members in communist theory and praxis. A communist organization utilizing the party model works to build dual power institutions while simultaneously educating the communities they hope to serve. Organizations which adopt the party model focus on propagandizing around the need for revolutionary socialism. They function as the forefront of political organizing, empowering local communities to theorize their liberation through communist theory while organizing communities to literally fight for their liberation. A party is not simply a group of individuals doing work together, but is a formal organization unified in its fight against capitalism. Party organizing has much to offer the base building movement. By working in a unified party, base builders can ensure that local struggles are tied to and informed by a unified national and international strategy. While the most horrific manifestations of capitalism take on particular and unique form at the local level, we need to remember that our struggle is against a material base which functions not only at the national but at the international level. The formal structures provided by a democratic centralist party model allow individual locals to have a voice in open debate, but also allow for a unified strategy to emerge from democratic consensus. Furthermore, party organizing allows for local organizations and individual organizers to be held accountable for their actions. It allows criticism to function not as one independent group criticizing another independent group, but rather as comrades with a formal organizational unity working together to sharpen each others strategies and to help correct chauvinist ideas and actions. In the context of the socialist movement within the United States, such accountability is crucial. As a movement which operates within a settler colonial society, imperialist and colonial ideal frequently infect leftist organizing. Creating formal unity and party procedure for dealing with and correcting these ideas allows us to address these consistent problems within American socialist organizing. Having a formal party which unifies the various dual power projects being undertaken at the local level also allows for base builders to not simply meet peoples needs, but to pull them into the membership of the party as organizers themselves. The party model creates a means for sustained growth to occur by unifying organizers in a manner that allows for skills, strategies, and ideas to be shared with newer organizers. It also allows community members who have been served by dual power projects to take an active role in organizing by becoming party members and participating in the continued growth of base building strategy. It ensures that there are formal processes for educating communities in communist theory and praxis, and also enables them to act and organize in accordance with their own local conditions. We also must recognize that the current state of the base building movement precludes the possibility of such a national unified party in the present moment. Since base building strategy is being undertaken in a number of already established organizations, it is not likely that base builders would abandon these organizations in favor of founding a unified party. Additionally, it would not be strategic to immediately undertake such complete unification because it would mean abandoning the organizational contexts in which concrete gains are already being made and in which growth is currently occurring. What is important for base builders to focus on in the current moment is building dual power on a local level alongside building a national movement. This means aspiring towards the possibility of a unified party, while pursuing continued local growth. The movement within the Marxist Center network towards some form of unification is positive step in the right direction. The independent party emphasis within the Refoundation caucus should also be recognized as a positive approach. It is important for base builders to continue to explore the possibility of unification, and to maintain unification through a party model as a long term goal. In the meantime, individual base building organizations ought to adopt party models for their local organizing. Local organizations ought to be building dual power alongside recruitment into their organizations, education of community members in communist theory and praxis, and the establishment of armed and militant party cadres capable of defending dual power institutions from state terror. Dual power institutions must be unified openly and transparently around these organizations in order for them to operate as more than “red charities.” Serving the people means meeting their material needs while also educating and propagandizing. It means radicalizing, recruiting, and organizing. The party model remains the most useful method for achieving these ends. The use of the party model by local organizations allows base builders to gain popular support, and most importantly, to mobilize their base of popular support towards revolutionary ends, not simply towards the construction of a parallel economy which exists as an end in and of itself. It is my hope that we will see future unification of the various local base building organizations into a national party, but in the meantime we must push for party organizing at the local level. If local organizations adopt party organizing, it ought to become clear that a unified national party will have to be the long term goal of the base building movement. Many of the already existing organizations within the base building movement already operate according to these principles. I do not mean to suggest otherwise. Rather, my hope is to suggest that we ought to be explicit about the need for party organizing and emphasize the relationship between dual power and the party model. Doing so will make it clear that the base building movement is not pursuing a cooperative economy alongside capitalism, but is pursuing a revolutionary socialist strategy capable of fighting capitalism. The long term details of base building and dual power organizing will arise organically in response to the conditions the movement finds itself operating within. I hope that I have put forward a useful contribution to the discussion about base building organizing, and have demonstrated the need for party organizing in order to ensure that the base building tendency maintains a revolutionary orientation. The finer details of revolutionary strategy will be worked out over time and are not a good subject for public discussion. I strongly believe party organizing offers the best path for ensuring that such strategy will succeed. My goal here is not to dictate the only possible path forward but to open a conversation about how the base building movement will organize as it transitions from a loose network of individual organizations into a unified socialist tendency. These discussions and debates will be crucial to ensuring that this rapidly growing movement can succeed.

The world we live in today is in a dire state. Climate destruction continues at a fast pace, and every with every passing day, capitalism proves itself to be incapable of addressing this. Capitalist production and its endless drive for resources to match artificial market demands has created a climate crisis that leaves us on the brink of potential extinction. Governments around the world are turning to far right and fascist leaders to assuage their fears of an uncertain future, and the most marginalized and oppressed suffer because of it. Fascism is on the rise, and history tells us very clearly what that can result in without opposition. The decaying US empire continues to lash out in violence across the globe in a desperate attempt to re-assert its power and hegemony. Whole countries are destroyed in its desperate bids for more fossil fuels. The world burns from America’s white phosphorus weaponry. The need for a revolutionary movement capable of replacing capitalism with something better has never been so clear. The choice between socialism or barbarism has never been so stark. More and more people are starting to realize that reform cannot save us, that capitalism and imperialism themselves are the problem, and that we must unite and band together to fight for a better world. The question then is: how will we know what strategies, what tactics, and what ideas to unite around? If the skeptics and postmodernists are correct that knowledge is always relative and localized, then we cannot built a global and universal strategy to unite around. If they are correct then we are doomed to small acts of localized or individual resistance in the face of apocalypse. To embrace such a vision of the world (with its accompanying epistemological skepticism) is to embrace defeat. The masses do not want to embrace defeat, they want to know how to fight back. Marxism can provide the tools necessary to engage in that fight. Marxism, with its self criticism and its insistence on incorporating the valuable ideas of its critics has created a means for unifying workers across the globe with anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles. The Marxist belief in the possibility of true ideas, tested and verified in practice, creates the possibility for unity on a global scale. The scientific status of Marxism means that as our climate changes, as our world looks more and more grim, Marxism will adapt through struggle and practice; it will provide us with the ideas and tools we need to fight and win. There will be no victory for the workers of the world without the ability to wield a revolutionary science. What is at stake in questions of Marxist epistemology is the very possibility of creating a philosophical and scientific basis for revolution. We must defend this possibility. We must defend the scientific status of Marxism, and must insist on the possibility of victory.

The fundamental reason high-tech solutions won’t save us from climate change is simple: time. Time is by far the most important variable – and the one thing technology can’t give us more of. Climate change is a cumulative problem. The warming we see now is caused by the year-by-year, decade-by-decade build-up of greenhouse gas pollution in Earth’s atmosphere. The severe climate disruptions of 2023 – the record temperatures, storms, fires and other disasters – weren’t caused by 2023’s emissions alone. Nor were they caused by those of 2022. They were caused by our long-term, cumulative emissions, building up over many, many years. Over the past several decades we’ve been emitting a lot of greenhouse gases – tens of billions of tonnes each year, adding up to a staggering amount of pollution dumped into the atmosphere. The cumulative impact of that pollution has fundamentally changed our atmosphere and climate system. The longer we keep emitting greenhouse gases, the more this pollution builds up in the atmosphere, and the more climate heating it causes. It’s a process that effectively locks in warmer temperatures on our planet for thousands of years to come. The only solution is to stop polluting as quickly (and as safely and equitably) as possible. To avoid the worst outcomes of climate change, we need to start lowering our emissions immediately. By cutting emissions now, and continuing to cut them in each consecutive year, we can reduce the future impacts of climate change. Every tonne of greenhouse gases we don’t emit, starting today, will help reduce the amount of warming we’ll see. Every tonne matters. Every year matters. Solutions today for saving tomorrow That’s why we need to focus on the solutions we already have. Despite what some think, climate solutions are already here. In fact, today’s climate solutions are abundant, whether they’re achieving huge gains in efficiency, reducing food waste, deforestation, and other destructive processes, electrifying our homes and vehicles, plugging methane leaks in oil and gas, or switching to zero-carbon energy sources. My organisation, Drawdown, is the world’s leading resource for learning more. Better yet, we should focus more attention on the fastest ‘emergency break’ climate solutions that have an immediate impact on the atmosphere, quickly helping drive down emissions. The top such measures include stopping deforestation (which accounts for about 11 per cent of global emissions – more than the entire US economy), curbing methane emissions (which have a disproportionately fast impact on climate), and cutting energy, food and industrial waste as rapidly as possible. These fast-acting climate solutions can buy us time for other tactics – building new power-generation systems, transmission lines, energy-efficient buildings and transportation infrastructure – to kick in. The worst possible thing we can do is wait, hoping that a new, ‘better’ solution will arrive to solve the problem. Waiting means we continue to spew pollution into the atmosphere, locking in more warming. Waiting is the enemy of climate action. At the COP28 conference in November, Bill Gates once again told the world that we can’t solve the worst of the climate crisis with the technologies we have now. But that’s not really true. We can – it’s just that some of these solutions are inconvenient or expensive. For the most part, we have the tools we need. What we don’t have, is time. That’s why we shouldn’t wait for new technologies. Fusion's for the future We shouldn’t wait for fusion. Government research into fusion energy has been going on since the 1950s, with little of substance to show for it. Despite rosy hype, decades of effort and billions spent, we’re still many years away from a commercial energy source. As the wry saying goes: fusion energy is 20 years away… and it always will be. We shouldn’t wait for advanced nuclear power, either. Nuclear energy generation is stagnating across much of the world, hit by lengthy delays and cost overruns. Promises of better, cheaper, faster, safer nuclear power plants, repeated over decades, have never been met. The last hyped-up technology, the Small Modular Reactor, has recently faced embarrassing delays and failures, casting doubt on the commercial rollout of this technology. And we shouldn’t wait for industrial carbon capture techniques. After decades of work and tens of billions of dollars spent, such technology is still incredibly ineffective at removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Projects are still laughably small, wildly expensive and consume massive amounts of energy that would be better used elsewhere. It’s unlikely that these technologies will make any real dent in the atmosphere for decades to come, if ever. Their only use, so far, is as a PR fig leaf for fossil fuel companies. In the race against climate change, it’s quite simple: time is more important than tech. Wishing and waiting for solutions that may never come is exactly the wrong thing to do. So, for now, we must stop dreaming about being Captain Kirk or Doctor Who, and start deploying the tools that are available now.

. One strand of research examines who funds what. The most comprehensive research on funding suggests that the U.S. government, primarily through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), provides about one-third of total U.S. biomedical research funding, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies about 50 percent, with the medical device industry, state and local governments, and foundations accounting for the rest. 18 However, there is a rough division of labor, with the vast majority of pharmaceutical R&D focused on clinical research, and the majority of NIH funding focused on "basic" research. . Cross-industry firm surveys consistently suggest stronger linkages between public sector and private sector research activities in pharmaceuticals than in other sectors. 19 In the largest such survey, Cohen and colleagues suggest that in the drug industry 41 percent of R&D projects used research findings from the public sector, 35 percent instruments and techniques from public science, and 12 percent were based on prototypes from public sector research. 20 Overall, the surveys suggest a larger enabling role for the public sector in drugs than other industries, though only 10-15 percent of projects are based directly on public sector research, or build on public sector prototypes. . Another approach uses detailed case studies of important drugs to assess, through histories and/ or interviews, the role of the public sector. 21 Each of these studies suggests the public sector has a role in the vast majority of important drugs. However, very rarely is the public or private sector solely responsible. . Analyses of drugs' key patents suggest that the public sector did enough work to obtain a patent associated with the final product (listed on the FDA's Orange Book, see below) for about 20 percent of "important" drugs. 22 This "direct" role of the public sector in principle can be traced through government interest statements which must list any government grants or contracts directly supporting the research on the invention. 23 . Bibliometric analyses tracing publication inputs for FDA approved drugs 24 and publications cited in the patents on FDA approved drugs 25 suggest that nearly all important drugs have publication links to NIH or other government funded research. . Econometric analyses relating variation in NIH funding to drug development suggest a statistically significant increase in drugs in trials 26 and approved drugs 27 following increases in NIH funding in the relevant area.

Large pharmaceutical companies oppose legislation being considered by Congress to lower the prices of prescription drugs. Reducing their revenues, they contend, will reduce their investment in drug development and the discovery of new medicines, and thus lead to a decline in drug innovation. If that argument is credible, there should be evidence to show that the large pharmaceutical companies are responsible for discovering innovative new drugs. To test that claim, we examined the provenance of the highest-selling prescription medicines of Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, the two largest pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies in 2018. We found that these large pharmaceutical companies did not actually invent most of the drugs they sell. Indeed, it appears they have already reduced their investment in the discovery of new medicines to the point where the threat of additional reductions rings hollow and is no longer a persuasive reason for opposing legislation to lower drug prices. Pfizer’s and J&J’s annual reports identify the medications that account for most of each company’s sales of prescription drugs. We gathered information on the discovery and early development of these products from peer-reviewed publications, media reports, and company press releases. We scoured the companies’ 2017 annual reports. A total of 62 products — 44 from Pfizer and 18 from J&J — were listed in them. The discovery and early development work were conducted in house for just 10 of Pfizer’s 44 products (23%), as listed in Table 1. Only two of J&J’s 18 leading products (11%) were discovered in house, as shown in Table 2. For example, sildenafil, the phosphodiesterase inhibitor that is the active compound in the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra and the pulmonary hypertension drug Revatio, was synthesized at Pfizer in the 1980s, originally as a cardiovascular medicine. Research leading to the development of risperidone (Risperdal), one of several newer-generation atypical antipsychotic drugs, began at J&J in the 1980s. The majority (81%) of other products were discovered and initially developed by third parties. Some of them came to Pfizer and J&J from the acquisition of other pharmaceutical companies. For example, Pfizer’s highest-selling product, Prevnar 13, a vaccine for pneumococcal disease, was developed at Wyeth, which Pfizer acquired in 2009. Pfizer’s palbociclib (Ibrance), used to treat breast cancer, had its origins at Warner-Lambert and Onyx Pharmaceuticals. J&J’s rivaroxaban (Xarelto), an anticoagulant, originated at Bayer. Research leading to the discovery and development of other Pfizer and J&J drugs originated in universities and academic centers. J&J’s highest-selling product, infliximab (Remicade), is a monoclonal antibody that was synthesized by researchers at New York University in 1989 in collaboration with the biotechnology company Centocor. The original work showing its efficacy in rheumatoid arthritis was led by Marc Feldmann and Ravinder Maini at Imperial College London.