Editor’s note: “The strategies and tactics we choose must be part of a grander strategy. This is not the same as movement-building; taking down civilization does not require a majority or a single coherent movement. A grand strategy is necessarily diverse and decentralized, and will include many kinds of actionists. If those in power seek Full-Spectrum Dominance, then we need Full-Spectrum Resistance.”
McBay/Keith/Jensen (2011): Deep Green Resistance, p. 240
This article originally appeared in Waging Nonviolence.
Featured image: Serbians hit a barrel with Milosevic’s face on it. (Actipedia)
A study of 44 dilemma actions over the last 90 years examines the many benefits of creative protests for social movements.
By James L. VanHise
At 7:30 p.m. on Feb. 5, 1982, the streets of Swidnik, a small town in southeast Poland, suddenly became crowded. People strolled and chatted. Some carted their TV sets around in wheelbarrows or baby strollers.
The residents of Swidnik had not gone insane.
They were protesting the lies and propaganda they were hearing on the government’s TV news, which aired at that time every night. Two months earlier, in an attempt to suppress unrest and crush the Solidarity trade union, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski had declared martial law in Poland.
As the protests began to spread to other towns, the communist government faced two unattractive choices: arrest people for simply walking around, or let the symbolic resistance continue to propagate. Because the Polish authorities were put in a situation where they had no good options, the Swidnik walkabout could be considered a dilemma action.
This is one example cited in a recent publication called “Pranksters vs Autocrats: Why Dilemma Actions Advance Nonviolent Activism,” written by Srdja Popovic and Sophia McClennen.
“Dilemma actions are strategically framed to put your opponent between a rock and a hard place,” Popovic told me in an interview. “If your opponent reacts, there will be a cost. If your opponent doesn’t react, there will be a cost.”
Popovic is executive director of the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, or CANVAS, an organization that trains activists around the world in civil resistance strategies and tactics. From real-world experience, he knew that using creative tactics like dilemma demonstrations and humor — what the authors call “laughtivism” — could be powerful tools for resisting authoritarian regimes or struggling for human rights.
It was his friend McClennen, a professor at Penn State University, who suggested they do a pilot study to quantify the value of such methods and include the results in the book. The research examined 44 dilemma actions between 1930 and 2019.
The case studies included the well-known barrel stunt concocted by Otpor, the Serbian youth group that was instrumental in ousting dictator Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. Otpor pranksters found an old barrel and painted Milosevic’s face on it. After alerting the press, they placed the barrel, along with a heavy stick, in a busy upscale shopping district. A sign instructed passersby to “smash his face for a dinar. ” Soon people were lining up to deposit a coin and take a whack at their leader’s image.
Eventually the police arrived and, with the Otpor perpetrators laughing safely from a nearby coffee shop, the police vacillated. Do they arrest the mostly middle-class families who were standing in line, and risk provoking more opposition to the government? Or do they let the protest continue and potentially spread to other parts of the country? The police chose a third option. They arrested the barrel, and the next day the nation laughed when the opposition press ran pictures of the cops wrangling the barrel into their squad car.
Another case included in the study occurred in Russia. When the residents of a Siberian city were denied a permit to hold a street protest in 2012, they found a humorous workaround — have their toys demonstrate instead.
Activists staged a group of teddy bears, Lego people, toy soldiers and the like, all holding signs denouncing electoral corruption. Photos of the rebellious figurines spread across Russia, and soon others were reproducing the action.
Putin’s government was faced with two distasteful options: allow the dissent to flourish by ignoring the protests, or crack down on the tiny toy tableaus and look silly. The government chose to outlaw the action. Toys are not Russian citizens and therefore can’t take part in meetings, explained a government official in issuing the toy protest ban.
Like most tactics, dilemma actions rarely lead to the immediate granting of demands by the adversary. But generating a dilemma can sometimes dramatize injustices or contradictions in an opponent’s policies, making the invisible visible and changing the narrative around an issue. In fact, initial results of McClennen’s study suggest dilemma actions have the potential to provide a number of benefits that can help activists build successful civil resistance campaigns.
For example, protests that create dilemmas for an opponent are extremely successful at garnering media attention, attracting more supporters, and reducing fear among activists. The study also showed that incorporating a humorous element is an effective way of reframing the image of an authoritarian leader — from powerful or scary to weak and vulnerable.
McClennen, who stresses the research is very preliminary, is working with CANVAS to do a more rigorous study. “I do think … we will be able to show that a group can have outsized impact … if they use dilemma actions,” she said. “We think it, but we want to prove it.”
“It’s very important to calculate the costs and risks affiliated with a tactic, and involve your opponent’s reaction in the original planning process.”
There have been a few other academic efforts to analyze dilemma actions. “Pranksters vs Autocrats” incorporates ideas from a 2014 paper by Majken Jul Sørensen and Brian Martin that attempted to define some core characteristics of dilemma actions, and identify factors that can complicate an opponent’s response options. Sørensen is associate professor of sociology at Karlstad University in Sweden, and Martin is emeritus professor at the University of Wollongong in Australia.
Martin says that many activists focus solely on what they are going to do — how can they express their anguish about a particular issue. But when they think in terms of planning a dilemma action, they are forced to consider how the other side is likely to respond.
“And as soon as you do that, then you’re thinking strategically instead of just reactively or emotionally,” Martin said. “And I think that’s one of the great values of dilemma actions. They make you realize it’s an interaction, and you need to think about what the opponent might do, and what their choices are, and select your own options in that light.”
The more you think the process through, the more likely you will succeed, says Popovic. “It’s very important to calculate the costs and risks affiliated with a tactic, and involve your opponent’s reaction in the original planning process,” he added.
All acts of resistance operate within preexisting situations. The objective of any such action should be to change the situation so that it is more favorable to the resisters, or less favorable to their adversary. And, in fact, there is no bright line between dilemma actions and other types of nonviolent protest.
“At the simplest level, a dilemma action is an action that poses a dilemma for whoever’s responding to it,” Martin said. “But distinguishing it from a non-dilemma action is not so easy.”
Conventional nonviolent protests and dilemma actions share similar dynamics, because simply refusing to use violence can sometimes create a quandary for the opponent. Imagine human rights activists in an authoritarian country organizing a traditional nonviolent protest march. The dictator may be forced into something of a dilemma.
Ignoring the demonstrators or acceding to their demands may make the ruler appear weak, increasing the prestige and power of the human rights group. On the other hand, beating or arresting nonviolent protesters can seem heavy handed, bringing sympathy and additional support to the group.
So in principle, says Sørensen, who co-wrote the paper on dilemma actions with Martin, any nonviolent action might be considered a dilemma action. “It’s a continuum of different types of actions — some of them obviously involve a dilemma while for others the dilemma is not very clear,” she explained. “The circumstances will play a big role, and whether it is a dilemma will depend on what context are we talking about.”
“Some targets tend to be more vulnerable or more susceptible to dilemma actions. People with big egos, for example.”
Deliberately creating dilemmas for an opponent is not always possible or appropriate. But thinking about how an adversary might react can help inspire creativity when planning any resistance action. Taking into consideration the characteristics of your opponent — their vulnerabilities, motivations, goals, tendencies and so on — is always useful, but essential when designing a dilemma action. That’s because there needs to be a target that will experience the dilemma, and some anticipation of what choices that entity will make.
Getting the target to overreact can be an effective strategy in certain situations. “Some targets tend to be more vulnerable or more susceptible to dilemma actions,” Popovic said. “People with big egos, for example, are very often good targets.”
But cornering an opponent can also risk a violent crackdown. “It’s a very thin line,” Popovic added. “You really don’t want a lot of people to get hurt because of any tactics … because that causes fear.”
While many dilemma actions target a group, like the police or a government, Popovic thinks that singling out an individual is better because it puts the onus of decision on that person. “When you target an institution, you want to figure out who are the people in this institution,” he explained. “When you are personalizing your tactics, it always works better than if you are generalizing.”
A well-known example of a personalized dilemma action unfolded during the height of the Iraq War. Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier who had been killed in action, set up camp outside George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas while he was vacationing there. She vowed not to leave until the president met with her and explained the purpose of the war, and why so many young Americans continued to die.
A photo of Casey Sheehan is held by his friends and family of at an anti-war demonstration in Arlington, Virginia on October 2, 2004. Cindy Sheehan herself is partly visible behind a cameraperson at left. Ben Schumin, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons
Over the next three weeks, hundreds of supporters — politicians, celebrities and other bereaved parents — visited the encampment. Almost daily international press coverage of the standoff increased the pressure on Bush, leaving him no good options.
While sitting down with a grieving mother posed risks for the president by spotlighting the human costs of the conflict, every day he refused to meet brought more publicity for the growing antiwar movement. In the end Bush chose not to have the meeting, but the action was instrumental in shaping public opinion against the war.
Dilemma demonstrations have long been used, albeit sometimes accidentally or unconsciously, to leverage gains in resistance campaigns, but only recently have they become the subject of serious study. Works like “Pranksters vs Autocrats” offer insights into the dynamics of dilemma actions, as well as provide some hard evidence on the advantages of this technique.
The main value in thinking about dilemmas may be that it requires activists to plan actions that take into account how the other side is likely to react, and design tactics in ways that make the opponent’s response less effective. This approach can lead to protests that are proactive, strategic and ultimately more compelling.
James L. VanHise is a writer who lives in Raleigh, NC. He has written about Gene Sharp and civil resistance in The Progressive, Peace Magazine, Waging Nonviolence and elsewhere. James blogs about nonviolent strategy and tactics at nonviolence3.com. Follow him on Twitter at @Nonviolence30.
Over the past three weeks Line 3 resistance has continued in Minnesota and around the country.
Since our last weekly recap…
The harm Line 3 has already caused Minnesota’s land and waters became more clear…
The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) announced that it had ordered Enbridge Energy to pay $3.32 million for breaching an aquifer during construction last winter. Their failure to follow environmental laws on that occasion resulted in millions of gallons of groundwater flowing out of the aquifer, posing a risk to rare wetlands nearby. Watch a statement from Winona LaDuke about the incident here.
The extent of damage at the Headwaters of the Mississippi River from spills of drilling mud during construction, often called “frac outs” is still being uncovered. Recent photos and videos by an independent media maker show significant devastation across the sensitive wetland ecosystem.
Financial institutions faced mounting pressure to defund Line 3 and similar projects
The world’s largest industrial insurance company, Chubb, announced that it would no longer insure tar sands infrastructure projects like Line 3. Chubb is the latest in a series of insurance companies that have revoked their funding in response to climate justice activism against the Trans Mountain Pipeline. As a result of the shrinking pool of companies willing to insure these projects, Enbridge has reported concerns about their ability to acquire the requisite coverage for Line 3 in the future.
Taysha Martineau, an Anishinaabe two-spirit leader with the movement to stop Line 3 declined the 30 Under 30 Climate Activist Award from NYC Climate Week, calling out the event’s sponsorship by Wells Fargo and Bank of America. In a statement she said, “I must humbly decline any award as both these banks fund the very pipeline that is harming my people.” Watch an interview with Taysha about her decision here.
Resistance continued on the frontlines
Water protectors with Camp Migizi have been using boats to halt work at Line 3 hydrostatic testing facilities. Watch footage of this tactic in action earlier this month.
In response to the news that Enbridge breached an aquifer, causing significant harm to surrounding wetland ecosystems, Winona LaDuke led the 8th annual Horse “Ride Against the Current of Oil” to the site of that incident to pray for the water. (Photos here)
Local and national elected officials continued to call on President Biden to Stop Line 3
Established in 1990, The Indigenous Environmental Network is an international environmental justice nonprofit that works with tribal grassroots organizations to build the capacity of Indigenous communities. I EN’s activities include empowering Indigenous communities and tribal governments to develop mechanisms to protect our sacred sites, land, water, air, natural resources, the health of both our people and all living things, and to build economically sustainable communities.
Editor’s note: Premise One: Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization. Premise Two: Traditional communities do not often voluntarily give up or sell the resources on which their communities are based until their communities have been destroyed. They also do not willingly allow their landbases to be damaged so that other resources—gold, oil, and so on—can be extracted. It follows that those who want the resources will do what they can to destroy traditional communities. Premise Three: Our way of living—industrial civilization—is based on, requires, and would collapse very quickly without persistent and widespread violence.
Derrick Jensen (2006): Endgame vol. 1, p. IX
SMITHERS, BC: On the morning of September 25, 2021, the access road to Coastal GasLink’s (CGL’s) drill site at the Wedzin Kwa river was destroyed. Blockades have been set up and sites have been occupied, to stop the drilling under the sacred headwaters that nourish the Wet’suwet’en Yintah and all those within its catchment area. Cas Yikh and supporters have gained control of the area and refuse to allow this destruction to continue.
Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs were denied access to their own lands, and there has been one arrest confirmed. The Hereditary Chiefs were read the injunction and threatened with arrest, but they held their ground. Despite heavy machinery and heavy RCMP presence, our relatives and supporters are standing strong holding the line, and so far no more arrests have been confirmed. As of Sunday, September 26, the individual arrested has been released and the chiefs and supporters continue to hold the line and successfully hold off any work by CGL.
Days ago, CGL destroyed our ancient village site, Ts’elkay Kwe. When Gidimt’en Checkpoint spokesperson Sleydo’ attempted to monitor the CGL archaeological team and contest the destruction of Wet’suwet’en cultural heritage, she was aggressively intimidated by CGL security guards. Tensions have continued to rise on the Yintah as CGL pushes a reckless and destructive construction schedule with the support of private security and the RCMP.
Now, CGL is ready to begin drilling beneath our sacred headwaters, Wedzin Kwa. We know that this would be disastrous, not only for Wet’suwet’en people, but for all living beings supported by the Wedzin Kwa, and for the communities living downstream. Wedzin Kwa is a spawning ground for salmon and a critical source of pristine drinking water. States Sleydo’, Gidimt’en Checkpoint Spokesperson:
“Our way of life is at risk. […] Wedzin Kwa [is the] the river that feeds all of Wet’suwet’en territory and gives life to our nation.”
Coastal Gaslink has been evicted from our territories by the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs who have full jurisdiction over Wet’suwet’en lands. Coastal GasLink is pushing through a 670-kilometer fracked gas pipeline, but under ‘Anuc niwh’it’en (Wet’suwet’en law) all five clans of the Wet’suwet’en have unanimously opposed all pipeline proposals and have not provided free, prior, and informed consent to Coastal Gaslink to do work on Wet’suwet’en lands.
As Coastal GasLink continues to trespass, we will do everything in our power to protect our waters and to uphold our laws. Gidimt’en Checkpoint has issued a call for support, asking people to travel to Cas Yikh territory to stand with them.
For further information please go to: yintahaccess.com
Media backgrounder here
Photo Credit: Michael Toledano
Media contact:
Jennifer Wickham, Gidimt’en Checkpoint Media Coordinator
Email: Yintahaccess@gmail.com
Phone number: 778-210-0067
“Fighting the climate crisis carries an unbearably heavy burden for some, who risk their lives to save the forests, rivers, and biospheres that are essential to counteract unsustainable global warming.”
A record 227 environmental defenders were murdered last year—with over half of these killings perpetrated in Colombia, Mexico, and the Philippines—according to a report published Monday by Global Witness.
“As the climate crisis intensifies, violence against those protecting their land and our planet also increases.”
—Global Witness
The international human rights group, which has been tracking and reporting lethal attacks on environmental activists since 2012, said it recorded an average of more than four such killings per week in 2020, “making it once again the most dangerous year on record for people defending their homes, land and livelihoods, and ecosystems vital for biodiversity and the climate.”
“A grim picture has come into focus—with the evidence suggesting that as the climate crisis intensifies, violence against those protecting their land and our planet also increases,” Global Witness said in an introduction to the report (pdf). “It has become clear that the unaccountable exploitation and greed driving the climate crisis is also driving violence against land and environmental defenders.”
The 227 lethal attacks represent a 7% increase over the 212 deaths recorded by Global Witness in last year’s report. As in 2019, Colombia witnessed the highest number of slain land defenders, with 65 murders reported, followed by Mexico with 30 killings—a 67% increase from 2019—and the Philippines, where 29 activists were murdered.
Brazil, with 20 slain land defenders, and Honduras, which saw 17 such killings, rounded out the top five deadliest countries for environmental activists. On a per capita basis, Nicaragua, Honduras, Colombia, Guatemala, and the Philippines were the five deadliest nations for land defenders last year.
According to the report, “over a third of the attacks were reportedly linked to resource exploitation—logging, mining, and large-scale agribusiness—and hydroelectric dams and other infrastructure,” although “this figure is likely to be higher as the reasons behind these attacks are often not properly investigated nor reported on.”
Once again, native land defenders were disproportionately targeted, “with over a third of all fatal attacks targeting Indigenous people, despite only making up 5% of the world’s population.”
“Indigenous peoples were the target of five of the seven mass killings recorded in 2020,” the publication added. “In the most shocking of these, nine Tumandok Indigenous people were killed and a further 17 arrested in raids by the military and police on the 30th of December on the island of Panay in the Philippines. Numerous reports state that these communities were targeted for their opposition to a mega-dam project on the Jalaur river.”
Additionally, “28 of the victims killed in 2020 were state officials or park rangers, attacked whilst working to protect the environment.” Such attacks were documented in eight countries: Brazil, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Uganda.
Global Witness partially blames rapacious corporations, which are “operating with almost complete impunity,” for lethal attacks on land defenders.
“Because the balance of power is stacked in the favor of corporations, and against communities and individuals, these companies are seldom held to account for the consequences of their commercial activities,” the report states. “It’s rare that anyone is arrested or brought to court for killing defenders. When they are it’s usually the trigger-men—the ones holding the guns, not those who might be otherwise implicated, directly or indirectly, in the crime.”
The report recommends that governments pass laws to “hold corporations accountable for their actions and profits.” It also urges the United Nations, through its member states, to “formally recognize the human right to a safe, healthy, and sustainable environment.”
Additionally, countries should “protect land and environmental defenders in the context of business by ensuring effective and robust regulatory protection of the environment, labor rights, land rights, Indigenous peoples’ rights, livelihoods, and cultures,” while “any legislation used to criminalize defenders should be declared null and void.”
The report also calls on businesses “to ensure they are not contributing to or profiting from human rights and land rights harms across their supply chains and operations.”
Global Witness senior campaigner Chris Madden said in a statement that governments must “get serious about protecting defenders,” and that companies must start “putting people and planet before profit.”
Madden called the new report “another stark reminder that fighting the climate crisis carries an unbearably heavy burden for some, who risk their lives to save the forests, rivers, and biospheres that are essential to counteract unsustainable global warming.”
Meanwhile, land defenders fight on—and instead of deterring activism, the attacks often motivate even greater action.
“People sometimes ask me what I’m going to do, whether I’m going to stay here and keep my mother’s fight alive,” said Malungelo Xhakaza, the daughter of South African activist Fikile Ntshangase, who was shot dead in her home in front of her family last October after helping lead the campaign against the Tendele Coal Mine.
“I’m too proud of her to let it die,” Xhakaza added. “I know the dangers—we all know the dangers. But I’ve decided to stay. I’m going to join the fight.”
Editor’s note: In order for the planet to survive, we must act in its defense. We can not rely on governments or corporations to do it. This is why Deep Green Resistance is organizing actions to confront the power structures—patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, and civilization—largely responsible for the plunder of land and people.
This is a story of victory for the earth and of the end of the Keystone XL pipeline. It also involves the Dakota Access pipeline and the Standing Rock Lakota reservation, indeed the entire world, all of which is threatened by our desperate last burst of fossil fuel exploitation. It is a story of what the dogged persistence and creativity of indigenous people and their allies can do against the kind of power we’ve been told is impossible to resist. But it’s a story without a guaranteed ending. The ending depends on us.
In 2004, small indigenous nations living near the Alberta Tar Sands project, the largest unconventional oil extraction effort in the world, began reaching out for help. Not only was the project interfering with their water, fishing, and hunting infrastructure, but rare and unusual cancers were appearing. They contacted policy experts at the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) in Washington, D.C., who met with them in 2005 and saw photographic documentation of the devastation. These experts began to gather data and to raise awareness in the United States, on whose special refineries the project relied. Experts focused on the unique risks posed by tar sands at every stage of production, including extraction, transportation, and refinement. It wasn’t enough, but without the testimony and photographs supplied by indigenous people, experts would not have noticed for some time.
In 2008, approximately two dozen people from indigenous nations and environmental activist groups met to develop an overall strategy. The groups decided that the most promising activist target was the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline, proposed by the giant TransCanada (now TC Energy) corporation to move the tar sands to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast. Stopping the pipeline would rob the Tar Sands project of financial justification. The unusually expensive techniques required for extracting, transporting, and refining tar sands made them unusable when the global barrel price was low, and any increases in the cost of production would make investors flee.
This small group of people had almost no support. Going up against the Keystone XL pipeline meant taking on the Republican Party, half the Democratic Party, the U.S. government, the Canadian government, and the entire oil industry. But with the presence of indigenous organizers in this group, they soon discovered they had something far more important.
Attendees at the meeting began spreading the word. Clayton Thomas-Muller, a climate activist belonging to the Columb Cree Nation of Manitoba and an attendee, noticed that the pipeline would be running through the Oglala aquifer, a route that, in addition to being an environmental scourge, also threatened indigenous sovereignty. He began using his existing connections from previous anti-pipeline campaigns in indigenous nations to persuade tribal councils to pass resolutions opposing KXL, which they took directly to President Obama in 2011. He continued to work on tribal organizing throughout the effort to stop KXL. By 2010, Jane Kleeb of Bold Nebraska became aware of the Keystone XL threat. She attended the first State Department hearing on the pipeline in York, Nebraska in May out of curiosity without even knowing what tar sands were. At the hearing, she noticed that over 100 farmers and ranchers spoke out individually against the pipeline project and the only person speaking for it represented a union of construction workers on the pipeline. Kleeb thought the pipeline could be stopped if she could persuade Nebraska’s increasingly resistant farmers and ranchers to join indigenous people and environmentalists. To do this, she relied on indigenous support, including Muller’s. As a result, 150 tribes from the United States and Canada met in her state to sign an agreement opposing pipeline construction. The indigenous people she worked with also gave her good organizing and spiritual advice. First, stay rooted in real, concrete stories, not abstract principles. Second, never give up. The latter was remarkable guidance, especially coming from people who have endured what indigenous people in North America have endured.
The pipeline rose to national awareness in 2011, when former NASA climate scientist James Hansen wrote an essay arguing that it would be “game over for the climate” if the Alberta tar sands were fully developed. After this, 350.org got involved. They arranged for scores of celebrities to engage in civil disobedience in front of the White House. Here in Texas, Cindy Spoon, a graduate student at the University of North Texas, co-founded the Tar Sands Blockade after the White House protests and, following Kleeb’s lead, began organizing local pipeline resistance in communities along the Texas portion of the planned route. The Tar Sands Blockade, and the Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance that grew out of it, used bold, theatrical, and courageous tactics to block construction of the pipeline. Cindy also followed the guidance Kleeb had received from indigenous people in Nebraska, to stay rooted in stories and never give up. Tar Sands Blockade kept the issue in the news in Texas and Oklahoma, and occasionally in the national news, long after President Obama had already approved construction of the southern half. And we cost TC Energy a lot of money.
Cindy Spoon personally recruited a friend of mine and fellow activist for an arrest-risking direct action effort. I attended a training camp she organized and eventually got myself arrested at a KXL pumping station under construction in Seminole County, Oklahoma. Indigenous people were crucial agents in this experience. I and my colleague were thrown into what turned out to be the “Indian tank” at the county jail. The local Seminole men in jail with us that day were neither surprised to hear about the utterly unprincipled way power works in the United States, nor surprised to find us to be relatively naïve about it. But the men who spoke most freely with us also insisted on another kind of power. One guy wanted to form a circle and have each of us read something from the Bible that meant something to us and explain what it meant. During one of his turns, he quoted a verse from Matthew 19 about all things being possible with God. He looked at us and said, “this means you keep going, no matter what.” Stay rooted in real stories, and never give up.
For years after the intense efforts of 2011 and 2012, the fight against the KXL remained precarious. President Obama temporarily delayed it, but Trump attempted to accelerate it. Indigenous groups continued to resist, leading efforts against the northern half of the pipeline. And then indigenous people broadened the fight, linking it to the Dakota Pipeline resistance on the Standing Rock reservation, where the effort took on a more explicit indigenous spiritual context. In the morning, Lakota women walked to Cannonball River for a water ceremony. At dawn, local people chanted in the Lakota language. At night, Lakota elders tended a sacred fire, saying “Water is life. Defend the sacred.” In December 2016, Chief Arvol Looking Horse, 19th keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe and Bundle, visited the camp where his son was a leader. Reminding those present of the millions of attacks on the integrity of the earth community, he insisted that power lies in the common indigenous commitment to the sacredness of the physical world. He gave the same guidance Jane Kleeb had received from indigenous activists. Our struggle, he said, must be tireless and “prayer-filled,” rooted in stories drawn from experience, and we must never give up. He reassured them they would be victorious because, though people may believe this isn’t their fight, “Standing Rock is everywhere.” This sentence was, I have heard from friends who were present, the missing piece of the puzzle, exposing the unreality of indifference. Yes. It is everywhere. Nowhere on earth is safe from this threat, and we are all in the midst of it.
In January 2021, President Biden signed an executive order revoking the permit for the last phase of the KXL pipeline. By this time, investors had already been fleeing. The efforts of Clayton Thomas-Muller, Jane Kleeb, Cindy Spoon and indigenous activists across the pipeline route were bearing fruit. On June 9, TC Energy (TransCanada) abandoned the project. With the Keystone XL dead, the Alberta Tar Sands is likely to follow.
The Dakota Access pipeline, however, remains active. The sacred water on which the people of Standing Rock depend remains threatened. We can celebrate a genuine victory with the end of the KXL and it is appropriate to be grateful for the indigenous guidance responsible for this victory. Nevertheless, the struggle continues and it is our struggle, not just someone else’s. We may be afraid to feel ourselves in the midst of it, but we are. The guidance remains true:
Stay rooted in real stories. Never give up. Standing Rock is everywhere.
Editor’s note: “this quote of James Connolly who was an Irish Republican around the early 1900s, active around the 1900s in the independence movement in Ireland, and James Conolly said revolution is never practical until the hour the revolution strikes, then it alone is practical and all the efforts of the conservatives and compromisers become the most futile, unvisionary of human imaginings,” – Max Wilbert
The post describes the different understandings of what reform means: positive meaning of reform; radical or revolutionary critique of reform; revolutionary reforms or non-reform reforms; right-wing counter-reforms; and religious reform.
The most common understanding is that reforms result in changes in society to make it better for ordinary people. Not for the capitalists, the rich, business and property owners.
In Key Concepts in Politics and International Relations, Andrew Heywood describes reform as:
“to create a new form of something, to make it anew. The term ‘reform’ nevertheless always carries positive overtones, implying betterment or improvement. Strictly speaking, therefore, it is contradictory to condemn or criticize what is acknowledged to be a reform. However, reform denotes improvement of a particular kind, in at least two senses. First, reform indicates changes within a person, institution or system that may remove their undesirable qualities, but do not alter their fundamental character: in essence, they remain the same person, institution and system. Reform thus endorses change while maintaining continuity. Second, the change that reform stands for tends to have piecemeal character: it advances bit by bit, rather than through a sudden or dramatic upheaval. As a longer-term and gradual process of change, reform differs markedly from revolution.” [1]
Radical or revolutionary critique of reform
Some on the radical left argue that reforms are used to protect or maintain capitalism by making it more stable or profitable by defeating and limiting working-class struggle. [2]
There are also those on the Vanguard left (Trotskyist, Marxist-Leninist, Stalinist) that argue against reformism because capitalism can’t be reformed and so is a distraction from organising a vanguard party to lead the working class to victory over the capitalists [3]: “reformist methods and revolutionary methods are not different paths to the same goal, but paths to different goals” [4]
Revolutionary reforms or non-reform reforms
These are reforms to make the conditions in society more open to revolution or to move society in a revolutionary direction: “challenge existing power relations and pave the way for more revolutionary changes in the larger society necessary for a more socially just and environmentally sustainable world.” [5] Their aim is not to reform capitalism – reformism. The idea likely originated from Leon Trotsky’s ‘Transition Program’ [6]. This is also known as a ‘transitional demand‘ to link the current situation to moving towards a socialist society. The Trotskyist Committee for a Workers’ International describe transition demands as “Socialists fight for immediate reforms (minimal demands) but the day-to-day problems, unemployment, low pay etc. are linked to the socialist transformation of society by a series of intermediate demands (transitional demands).” They give recent examples of transition demands including reducing public spending cuts or increasing funding for the NHS [7].
André Gorz in his 1964 book Strategy for Labor compares ‘revolutionary reforms’ or ‘non-reformist reforms’ to ‘reformist reforms’ [8]. Ralph Miliband called revolutionary reforms ‘structural reforms’ and understood that radically motivated socialist reforms would bump up against limits. Also that reforms would not take us on a path from capitalism today to socialism in the future without a rupture or revolutionary moment that was in no way a reform. [9]
Kier Milburn describes a similar concept, calling it ‘Directional Demands’:
“Directional demands aim to provide a direction of travel rather than simply describe the wish for ‘full communism.’ They need to make sense within existing conditions while pointing beyond them. Indeed they need to make better sense of the current situation and the potential it holds than conventional politics does. They need to play a compositional role, I.E. link different sectors or interests together or indeed produce a new subject of their own. And their fulfillment, or indeed movement towards their fulfillment needs to leave us, the working class, the multitude or whatever, in a stronger position, able to better articulate what we want and better able to exercise the power to get there. The Universal Basic Income (if framed correctly) could provide one example, a Debt Jubilee or Universal Expropriation (a residency restriction on housing), could provide others.” [10]
Right-wing counter-reforms
These are the neoliberal free-market policies of the Tory party and the right-wing of the Labour Party. The capitalists argue that the system can no longer afford progressive reforms because economic growth as declined compared to the post-war boom [11]. The hard-right solution is to remove all employment protections so ‘Britain can compete globally’ [12]. Also the continuation of the Tory privatisation project, specifically the NHS and drug prices at the moment.
The right (capitalists, elite, Tory party) commonly use the word reform when they are rolling back gains from the past. They know they can’t openly replace Britain’s health care system from the government-funded NHS to a private system like in the US without a huge public backlash. So they ‘reform’ (counter-reform) it with legislation such as the Health and Social Care Act 2012, which has introduced ‘competition and choice’. Brexit will likely mean an increase in drug prices. If we look at the history of the NHS, when the NHS was created in 1948, prescriptions and dentist visits were free. The Tories introduced dentist charges and prescription charges in 1952. This is just one example of the many ways that the Tories roll back, dismantle and privatise the gains that ordinary people have won through struggle.
Religious reform
Religious reforms take place when a religious community decides that it has deviated from the ‘true faith’. Religious reforms will start in one part of a religious community and then spread, meeting resistance from other parts of the same religious community. Religious reforms result in a reformulation of the religious teachings viewed as ‘true’ and a rejection of the teaching seen as ‘wrong’. [13]
Endnotes
Key Concepts in Politics and International Relations, Andrew Heywood, 2015 page 190
