No Is Not Enough

by Naomi Klein

  Yes, We Can Afford to Save Ourselves

  We knew that the greatest obstacle our platform would face was the force of austerity logic—the message we have all received, over decades, that governments are perpetually broke, so why even bother dreaming of a genuinely equitable society? With this in mind, we worked closely with a team of economists to cost out how we could raise the revenues to pay for our plan.

  The key tools included: ending fossil fuel subsidies (worth about $775 billion globally); getting a fairer share of the financial sector’s massive earnings by imposing a transaction tax (which could raise $650 billion globally, according to the European Parliament); increasing royalties on fossil fuel extraction; raising income taxes on corporations and the wealthiest people (lots of room there—a one-percent billionaire’s tax alone could raise $45 billion globally, according to the United Nations); a progressive carbon tax (a $50 tax per metric ton of CO2 emitted in developed countries would raise an estimated $450 billion annually); and making cuts to military spending (if the military budgets of the top ten military spenders globally were cut by 25 percent, that would free up $325 billion, according to numbers reported by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute). To our chagrin, we neglected to include a call to shut down tax havens, perhaps the greatest potential revenue source of all.

  The math is clear: the money for this great transition is out there—we just need governments with the guts to go after it.

  So that, in summary, was our vision—to invest in those sectors that tangibly improve our quality of life and create more caring societies, rather than hacking away at them in the name of that manufactured crisis called “austerity.” And we were committed to embedding justice in every aspect of the transition.

  The Opposite of The Art of the Deal

  As I look back on the drafting process, it strikes me that it is about as far away from Trump’s “how can I screw you” art of the deal as you can get. No one got everything they wanted, or even sought to. There were serious disagreements, but to arrive at the final document, everyone made concessions; nobody went to the wall. This give-and-take reflected the principles and values that emerged from our discussions: if the goal is to move from a society based on endless taking and depletion to one based on caretaking and renewal, then all of our relationships have to be grounded in those same principles of reciprocity and care—because our relationships with one another are our most valuable resource of all. And that’s the antithesis of bullying one another into submission.

  Yes to the “Yes”

  After a few weeks of back-and-forth over wording, we had a final draft of the platform, acceptable to almost everyone at the original gathering. (The full text appears at the end of the book.) We also agreed on a name: The Leap Manifesto—A Call for a Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and One Another. We chose leap because it raises a defiant middle finger to centrist incrementalism—the kind that calls itself “cautious” but is in fact exquisitely dangerous at this late stage in the climate crisis. The gap between where we are and where we need to go is so great, and the time left is so short, that small steps are not going to cut it—we need to leap.

  My partner, Avi Lewis, who is one of the document’s coauthors, puts it like this:

  With The Leap, the scale of the plan matches the scale of the crisis. And for many of us, this comes as a cosmic relief—at last, a set of demands that actually acknowledges how much and how fast we need to change. The Leap rings true because it sees the climate crisis not as a technical problem to be solved by engineers, but as a crisis of a system and an economic philosophy. The Leap identifies the root cause of the climate crisis—and it’s the dominant economic logic of our time: extractivism to feed perpetual growth rooted in ever-increasing consumption…. That’s a scary level of change, but it’s honest. And people know in their bones that it’s the kind of change we need.

  Before releasing it to the public, we asked many organizations and trusted public figures to become initiating signatories. Again and again, we heard: Yes. This is who we want to be. Let’s push our politicians. Cautious centrism be damned. National icons stood with us without hesitation: Neil Young. Leonard Cohen (then still with us). The novelist Yann Martel wrote back that it should “be shouted in every square by every town crier this country has.”

  This was a rare document that could be signed by large organizations such as Greenpeace and Oxfam, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (the largest in the country), the head of the Canadian Labour Congress (the union of unions), as well as truly grassroots groups such as Black Lives Matter–Toronto and No One Is Illegal–Coast Salish Territories and the country’s largest membership-based advocacy organization, the Council of Canadians. Original endorsers included supporters of all parties, and some who support none. All shared the belief that if the major political parties weren’t offering voters a plan commensurate with the multiple crises we face, then it would have to come from outside electoral politics.

  Within days of The Leap’s launch, thousands of people had added their names, soon tens of thousands, and well over two hundred endorsing organizations. We were stunned. It was clear that a whole lot of people, after decades of fighting against what they don’t want—tar sands pipelines, money in politics, corporate trade deals, draconian security bills—were ready to rally around the world they do want. The outpouring reminded me of a slogan I first heard in Argentina, during a raucous election campaign: “Our dreams don’t fit on your ballot.” That’s what people were saying by signing The Leap: Yes, I am going to cast a ballot in this deeply flawed and constricted electoral system, but do not mistake that vote as an expression of the world I want. The Leap was creating a space in which to register that electoral politics at this point in history so often fails to reflect both the dreams and the very urgent needs of huge numbers of people. (But the real trick, in Canada, the United States, and everywhere else, is going to be to get those dreams on the ballot with a winning strategy as quickly as possible….)

  Exploding the Box

  The reaction from the corporate press ranged from confusion (how can there be a platform without a party? why drop it in the middle of an election campaign?) to rage. One of Canada’s national newspapers declared The Leap’s call for a country based on caring for each other and the planet “madness”; another one deemed it “national suicide.”

  We weren’t surprised. We knew that what we were proposing did not fit inside the box of what is considered politically possible in mainstream political discussions. But what we are trying to do with The Leap—quite explicitly—is explode the box. Because if the box doesn’t leave room for the safety and possibly the survival of our species, then there is something very, very wrong with that box. If what is considered politically possible today consigns us to a future of climate chaos the day after tomorrow, then we have to change what’s politically possible.

  And many clearly agreed. Despite some mystified mainstream reporting, people kept signing, kept asking us for Leap lawn signs, kept self-organizing local Leap chapters in their cities, towns, schools, and unions. And they kept sending us photos of their Leap teach-ins, sit-ins, and rallies—even audio of the songs it was inspiring. A national poll found that a clear majority of supporters of all three center and center-left parties—the Liberals, the NDP, and the Green Party—were in agreement with The Leap’s key demands. Even 20 percent of Conservatives said they were on board.

  In the end, Canadians did vote out Stephen Harper, but the biggest loser in the election was the NDP, our center-left party. It had run an extremely cautious campaign and been outflanked on the left by Justin Trudeau’s Liberals (who made up for what they lacked in specifics with dazzling progressive PR). At the NDP convention a few months later, young delegates led an internal revolt: convinced that the party could have won if it had gone bold, they called on delegates to officially endorse the spirit of The Leap Manifesto. The resolution passed—a rare example of a major political party even cons
idering a platform offered by outside social movements.

  The Living Leap

  In the months since its launch, The Leap has become a living, evolving project, with an ever-growing community of supporters constantly enriching and revising the work. Our team is also working closely with organizers around the world who are kicking off similar experiments—from the Australian group I met with on the eve of Trump’s election win, to a coalition of green parties in Europe who have written their own Leap-inspired manifesto, to communities from Nunavut in the Arctic to the US Gulf South and the Bronx that are exploring how to adapt the document’s framework to their local needs and most pressing crises. There is even a community of “Leapers” in prison: at a Connecticut detention facility for teenaged boys tried as adults, a group of incarcerated students has been exploring ways that a justice-based transition off fossil fuels could be part of a process that keeps young people like them out of prison.

  My favorite example of what our team now calls “the Living Leap” involves the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. Like postal employees around the world, these workers have been coping with a push to shut down their workplaces, restrict mail delivery, and maybe even sell off the public postal service to FedEx. In other words, austerity and privatization as usual. But instead of fighting for the best deal they can get under this failed logic, they worked with The Leap team and a group called Friends of Public Services to put together a visionary plan for every post office in the country to become a local hub for the green transition. Combined with the union’s long-standing demand for postal banking, the proposal, called “Delivering Community Power,” reimagines the post office as a twenty-first-century network where residents can recharge electric vehicles; individuals and businesses can do an end run around the big banks and get a loan to start an energy co-op; and postal workers do more than deliver the mail—they also deliver locally grown produce and check in on the elderly. In other words, they become care workers, and climate workers—and they do it all in vehicles that are electric and made in Canada.

  At first there was a lot of pressure on The Leap team to start our own party, or run candidates in existing ones, using the manifesto as its platform. We resisted those calls, wanting to protect The Leap’s movement roots, and not wanting it to be owned by any one party. The vitality of The Leap today, especially since Trump’s election, lies in the people, inside Canada and out, who are using it more and more as the basis for their own local work and electoral platforms. For instance, in Thunder Bay, a northern Canadian city with a long reliance on logging, a local Leap group has decided to run a slate of candidates for city council, writing their own version of the manifesto and using it to lay out how their city could be a hub for green manufacturing while battling homelessness and defending Indigenous land rights. And in March 2017, in a hard-fought campaign for state representative in Pennsylvania, legendary housing and anti-poverty activist Cheri Honkala ran on a pledge to create “a platform derived from the Leap Manifesto,” citing the need to address the “crises of climate change, inequality, and racism together.”

  Utopia—Back by Popular Demand

  The Leap is part of a shift in the political zeitgeist, as many are realizing that the future depends on our ability to come together across painful divides, and to take leadership from those who traditionally have been most excluded. We have reached the limits of siloed politics, where everyone fights in their own corner without mapping the connections between our various struggles, and without a clear idea of the concepts and values that must form the moral foundation of the future we need.

  That recognition doesn’t mean that resisting the very specific attacks—on families, on people’s bodies, on communities, on individual rights—is suddenly optional. There is no choice but to resist, just as there is no choice but to run insurgent progressive candidates at every level of government, from federal down to the local school board. In the months and years to come, the various resistance tactics described in this book are going to be needed more than ever: the street protests, the strikes, the court challenges, the sanctuaries, the solidarity across divisions of race, gender, and sexual identity—all are going to be essential. And we will need to continue pushing institutions to divest from the industries that profit off various forms of dispossession, from fossil fuels to prisons to war and occupation. And yet even if every one of these resistance fights is victorious—and we know that’s not going to be possible—we would still be standing in the same place we were before the Far Right started surging, with no better chance of addressing the root causes of the systemic crises of which Trump is but one virulent symptom.

  A great many of today’s movement leaders and key organizers understand this well, and are planning and acting accordingly. Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, said on the eve of Trump’s inauguration that after five years of swelling social movements,

  whether it be Occupy Wall Street, whether it be the DREAMers movement or Black Lives Matter…there’s a particular hope that I have that all of those movements will join together to become the powerful force that we can be, that will actually govern this country. So that’s what I’m focused on, and I hope that everybody else is thinking about that too.

  Many people are, and as they do, we’re seeing a rekindling of the kind of utopian dreaming that has been sorely missing from social movements in recent decades. More and more frequently, immediate, pressing demands—a $15-an-hour living wage, an end to police killings and deportations, a tax on carbon—are being paired with calls for a future that is not just better than a violent, untenable present, but…wonderful.

  In the United States, the boldest and most inspiring example of this new utopianism is the Vision for Black Lives, a sweeping policy platform released in the summer of 2016 by the Movement for Black Lives. Born of a coalition of over fifty Black-led organizations, the platform states, “We reject false solutions and believe we can achieve a complete transformation of the current systems, which place profit over people and make it impossible for many of us to breathe.” It goes on to place police shootings and mass incarceration in the context of an economic system that has waged war on Black and brown communities, putting them first in line for lost jobs, hacked-back social services, and environmental pollution. The result has been huge numbers of people exiled from the formal economy, preyed upon by increasingly militarized police, and warehoused in overcrowded prisons. And the platform makes a series of concrete proposals, including defunding prisons, removing police from schools, and demilitarizing police. It also lays out a program for reparations for slavery and systemic discrimination, one that includes free college education and forgiveness of student loans. There is much more—nearly forty policy demands in all, spanning changes to the tax code to breaking up the banks. The Atlantic magazine remarked that the platform—which was dropped smack in the middle of the US presidential campaign—“rivals even political-party platforms in thoroughness.”

  In the months after Trump’s inauguration, the Movement for Black Lives played a central role in deepening connections with other movements, convening dozens of groups under the banner “The Majority.” The new formation kicked off with a thrilling month-long slate of actions between April 4 (the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination) and May Day. Nationwide “Fight Racism, Raise Pay” protests linked racial justice to the fast-growing workers’ campaign for a $15 minimum wage and the mounting attacks on immigrants. “In the context of Trump’s presidency,” the new coalition argues, “it is imperative that we put forth a true, collective vision of economic justice and worker justice, for all people.”

  And in June 2017, thousands of activists from diverse constituencies are descending on Chicago for the second annual People’s Summit, organized by National Nurses United, to continue hashing out a broad-based “People’s Agenda.” Several similar state-level convergences are also under way, in Michigan as well as North Carolina, where “Moral Mondays” have been bringing mo
vements together for several years. As one of its founders, Reverend William Barber, has said, “You have to build a movement, not a moment…I believe all these movements—Moral Mondays, Fight for $15, Black Lives Matter—are signs of hope that people are going to stand up and not stand down.”

  As it has in Canada, the climate crisis is pushing us to put plans for political transformation on a tight and unyielding deadline. A powerful and broad coalition called New York Renews is pushing hard for the state to transition entirely to renewable energy by 2050. If more US states adopt these kinds of ambitious targets, and other countries do the same (Sweden, for instance, has a target of carbon neutrality by 2045), then Trump and Tillerson’s most nefarious efforts may be insufficient to tip the planet into climate chaos.

  It’s becoming possible to see a genuine path forward—new political formations that, from their inception, will marry the fight for economic fairness with a deep analysis of how racism and misogyny are used as potent tools to enforce a system that further enriches the already obscenely wealthy on the backs of both people and the planet. Formations that could become home to the millions of people who are engaging in activism and organizing for the first time, knitting together a multiracial and intergenerational coalition bound by a common transformational project.

  The plans that are taking shape for defeating Trumpism wherever we live go well beyond finding a progressive savior to run for office and then offering that person our blind support. Instead, communities and movements are uniting to lay out the core policies that politicians who want their support must endorse.