Editor’s note: We believe that the UN are an elitist organization and more part of the problem than offering vital solutions. Ecological restoration however will become much more important in the near future, and learning from indigenous peoples and their ways to connect to their landbases may be our only chance of survival.
“Today let’s start a new decade, one in which we finally make peace with nature and secure a better future for all” declared António Gutteres, the UN Secretary General, on June 5 during the virtual opening event of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. With environmental degradation already affecting almost half of humanity, and with every major scientific body declaring the next 10 years are critical to confront the climate crises, the urgency to restore the health of our landscapes has never been greater. Having worked professionally as an ecological restoration planner in my home state of New Mexico for 13 years, I sat eagerly at the edge of my seat to learn from my global community of practice.
We learned about restoration efforts around the world that involved massive community efforts, such as the million-tree initiative in Pakistan and the ambitious project called Green Wall of Africa. Touted as the “largest human-made living “structure” on earth”, this ecofriendly wall, we are told, will contain the sand dunes of the Sahara and support local livelihoods. Although containing the Sahara desert with any wall seems questionable, or that building another wall, even the green kind, seems like the last thing us humans need to do, at least there is a clear mandate that restoration has to collaborate with and support the local indigenous communities.
Several weeks after the UN event, on June 21st, Dr. Robin Kimmerer, the well-known Potawatomi restoration ecologist, gave a deeper perspective on this mandate to work with indigenous communities during the opening plenary talk of the 9th World Conference of the Society of Ecological Restoration: “This idea of mutual healing, of cultures and land, is the practice under the really big idea of how do we enact land justice. Justice for the more-than-human beings, justice for the people who are so often dispossessed from their homelands, to return people and their practices to the land as part of that sacred moral responsibility to care for the land.” The most challenging and crucial aspect of my own restoration work is reviving these cultural practices and relationships with the land.
The mentioning of ‘culture’, however, was surprisingly absent from the televised UN event. This glaring omission, however, became ridiculously blinding during the finale world premier music video by Ty Dolla and Don Diablo called “Too Much to Ask” tailored to appeal to the #generation restoration. None of what I am about to explain was provided to the viewer. The music video contained high-quality panoramic footage taken by drone showing hundreds of Maasai people in Kenya, spread out over hundreds of acres of barren red land, constructing half-moon shaped structures called bunds, about 15-feet long with shovels, hoes and lots of sweat. Thanks to this earth-shaping community work, which saved water and fertile top-soil from being washed away after a storm, the barren land became covered with vegetation. Importantly, this community bund-making event is one of many old cultural practices across Africa to harvest rainwater, promote plant growth, and take care of the land. While there was hardly a peep about cultural practices on the land, it was all over the music video! There is a tendency to describe restoration work as a ‘new relationship’ to nature, as based on a ‘very young’ science, but actually, it is a very old human relationship to the land, a very old community-based science, albeit maybe a forgotten one.
Stimulated by the climate crises, examples of this old land-human relationship are popping up everywhere. Just beneath the cloud-piercing mountains surrounding Lima, Peru, about a hundred communities are removing 500-years worth of mud and rock that have filled in a network of stone ditches constructed during the Incan civilization and abandoned after the arrival of the Spanish. This network of ditches, known as amuna in Quechua, are designed to harvest and store rainwater underground so that water is available during dry periods. Just reviving 10 miles of the amuna, a small sample of the existing infrastructure, the nearby communities are already seeing more water flowing out of their domestic wells regardless of the changing climate. Since reviving these ancient cultural infrastructures, more crops are planted and more families are able to maintain good hygiene during the pandemic.
Along the northwest coast of North America, from Alaska to Washington State, various researchers, academics, and resource managers have teamed up with Canada’s First Nations communities to learn how to sustainably grow clams using an old ocean gardening technique. These clam gardens, which First Nation communities have been building and managing for longer than five thousand years, involves constructing rock terraces along the shoreline when the ocean is at low-tide. Not surprisingly, a slew of scientific studies have proven that clam gardens work, with one study showing the growth of several clam species improved by 151% to 300%. In a time of plummeting fisheries and shellfish production worldwide, these clam gardens stick out as a shining star, shedding light on the importance of knowing history and culture when it comes to cultivating food from the ocean. Another amazing example of cultivating food along the edge of the ocean comes from Hawaii, where applying old indigenous land management practices at the He‘eia National Estuarine Research Reserve has recently shown to not only increase food for both people and animals, but has also brought back endangered shorebirds that even the oldest of elders have never seen before.
Then there is the example of indigenous fire, which has rightfully received lots of press lately. Indigenous fire, sometime called cultural fire, are some of the oldest land management practices common to almost every ethnic group on every continent. Yet only when faced with the threat of megafires these last couple of years do forest-managing agencies finally want to listen and learn from indigenous people. Every forest on earth vulnerable to catastrophic fire can trace its start date to when colonization dispossessed the original peoples from the land. “We are fortunate here”, says Marianne Ignace who has been reviving cultural fire practices on their traditional territory of the Secwepemc Nation in British Columbia, “that some of that [cultural fire] knowledge still exists in the older generations although it has been undermined and outlawed for over a hundred years.” These cultural fires have brought back important plants not seen since indigenous culture was outlawed. All this is taking place not far from where the remains of 215 children were recently found buried next to the old Kamloops Indian Residential School. The horrors and pain of genocide, and the beauty and resilience of culture, remind us how connected it all is: restoring justice, healing, and the land.
Another example comes from my home state of New Mexico. As hotter temperatures melt the mountain snow much earlier than before, the nourishing waters are passing by the farmlands before the farmer has even planted. Consequently, Federal land agencies are in discussions right now with local farming organizations to build micro-dams or mini-reservoirs in order to capture this water in the mountains for when the farming is ready. In turns out, this same idea and concept was practiced by New Mexico’s Pueblo communities for millennium. They built water harvesting structures and ancient gardens out of local rock and earth almost everywhere water could be collected, “inviting the rain to stay” as one scholar put it. Through people power, the Pueblo communities created wetlands in the desert, and even grew water-loving crops like cotton in places that today’s experts emphatically say would be impossible.
When you put these examples of cultural revival, land restoration, and community healing together, it shows us that restoration is not so much about “finally making peace with nature”, as it is about finally making peace with our cultural past. As my mentor would say we are living in a time when “all the old is new again”.
The global call to heal the earth’s wounds is a powerful moment of cultural recognition for everyone. As Dr. Kimmerer explained, every person is indigenous to some place, and every place is the homeland to someone. Especially for indigenous communities across the continents of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, whom for generations have been denied their rightful place at the table of humanity, it is a time of reconciliation and of pride, where their cultural practices are recognized as a means to heal a wounded earth and a wounded people. As the young poet, Jordan Sanchez, said during the UN conference, “resilience, we stand on our own two feet, I’ll tell you, reimagining the future has never tasted so sweet…The promise of restoration lives within us”. It does indeed.
Editor’s note: We are very thankful to George Price for his wonderful review of the book Bright Green Lies.
Book Review: Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It By Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert
By George Price, originally published on his blog learningearthways.
This book, Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert, will probably be the most important book published anywhere in 2021, on the most important issue facing all Life on Earth—why we must end the prevailing human economic and industrial practices and the anthropocentric cultural worldviews. It will probably also be the most reviled, attacked, suppressed, censored, dismissed, misrepresented, and slandered book published this year, as well, for some of the same reasons that many people virulently attacked and censored the documentary film, “Planet of the Humans,” last year. Why?
The authors answer the question of why these facts are so difficult to hear, and why they are also so difficult for many of us reluctant messengers to tell, at many points throughout their book, including this passage from the chapter on green energy storage:
“We are being sold a story, and we are buying it because we like it. We want it to be true. We want to believe that our lives can go on with all the ease and comfort we accept as our due. How painless to believe that a simple switch of wind for oil and solar for coal and we can go on with our air conditioning and cell phones and suburbs. Every time we hit a trip wire of unsettling facts or basic math, we soothe ourselves with our faith in technology. If all that stands between us and the end of the world is a battery that can store 46 MJ/kg, surely someone is working on it.”
Most modern humans have been taught all of their lives, by most of the voices of their culture, that their own comfort, pleasure, purpose, social standing, legacy, avoidance of pain, and continued survival depend upon the perpetuation of, and their conformity to, western industrial technological capitalist civilization. That teaching has been reinforced within their psyches by a long series of painful and pleasurable personal experiences. Therefore, they do not want to hear convincing, factual arguments which clearly demonstrate that nearly everything that they have been taught to value and have devoted their lives to is intertwined within a path toward the imminent destruction, collapse, and extinction of not only their so-called “way of life,” but also the real, natural world upon which all biological life on Earth depends. Besides that, most humans of this culture and era do not want to hear that there is no viable and actually existing technological “fix” for this predicament—which the authors of Bright Green Lies make painfully clear—and many do not want anybody else to hear or declare that either. In addition to all of that, most modern, capitalist, technophile humans are not (yet) prepared to engage with the solutions offered in this book: ending most industrial technological activities and allowing Nature and the few humans who still have such knowledge to teach us how to live without those destructive entities, by her truly sustainable laws and systems, (like we did for 97% of the time of our species’ existence), thus enabling all that remains of natural Life to heal and continue. Bright Green Lies also asks its readers—especially those who identify themselves as “environmentalists” or “environmental activists”—to face up to the fact that they must choose whether they value and seek to protect what the authors refer to as the “real world” (the natural, life-giving, life-sustaining world), or, instead, protect the human-made civilizations that order and constrain their lives, because, with what the world has now come to, we cannot save both. Is such a potentially life-shattering choice more than most people can deal with, even when presented with an overwhelming preponderance of factual evidence persuading them that the choice is unavoidable?
Putting aside (for now) the human tendencies toward acting on faith, auto-conformity, or the herd mentality, and assuming that when making the most serious, life or death, joy-or-perpetual-misery types of decisions, most people will still place some value in actual facts and bother to do a little research, we should expect such people to proceed with such appropriate caution when determining how to answer the challenges presented in this book. Knowing that, and being acutely familiar with the reactions of many politically moderate/liberal, save-civilization-first (before the natural world) people to their previous publications and to similar publications by others, such as Ozzie Zehner’s Green Illusions, back in 2012, and to Jeff Gibbs’ Planet of the Humans documentary, the authors of Bright Green Lies obviously “did their homework,” while drawing also from their decades of expertise on these topics. Nearly every one of the 478 pages in this illuminating volume contain several footnotes citing a variety of relevant and reliable sources for the multitude of little-known, seldom-mentioned facts about the extent of toxic destruction and ecocide that are routine impacts from our commonly-engaged industrial technologies, as well as from the production of solar panels, wind turbines, lithium batteries and other products that are alleged to be “green” and even “100% renewable!” Beginning with solar power, and moving on from there to wind turbines, “green energy” storage (especially lithium), “efficiency,” recycling, “green” cities, “green” electric grids, hydropower, carbon capture, geoengineering, and several other false and misrepresented “solutions,” Jensen, Keith, and Wilbert repeatedly and clearly assist us in the difficult process of discerning and untangling truth from lies.
Here is a summary outline of some of the more potent revelations (for the not-yet-informed) brought forth in this book:
Promoters of solar, wind and other allegedly “green” technologies have repeatedly and misleadingly conflated the words “energy” and “electricity” when making their claims. The reason that is significant is that electric grid production, which is what solar, wind, hydropower and biofuels are primarily used for, makes up only about 20% (in Germany, the “green” energy technology advocates’ favorite showcase, 15% in the U.S., and ranging between 12 and 35 % elsewhere) of the actual total energy used to power the machinery of modern industrial society. So when they give a figure for how much of Germany’s “energy” is provided by “green renewables,” that figure has to be reduced by 80%–and that still might be too high, due to other falsehoods.
Of the 20% of energy use that goes to electricity (in Germany), only about 14.8% comes from “green renewables,” with wind accounting for 3.5 % and 1.6 % for solar, for a total of 5.1 % between them. (These are 2019 statistics, the most recent available when the book went to press.) Biomass (including logged forests) provides 7.6 % of Germany’s electricity; waste products incinerated along with the biomass provide another 1%; 0.5% comes from geothermal heat pumps; and 0.6% comes from hydro power. In addition to those “renewables,” Germany gets 6.4 % of its electricity from nuclear power. Those are the actual figures for the “green showcase” nation, and the renewable electricity figures are generally lower for the rest of the world. Solar and wind enthusiasts have sometimes claimed that Germany gets as much as 75% of its “energy” from renewables.
Elon Musk, multi-billionaire producer of the Tesla electric car, admitted to a broadcast journalist in July of 2020 that he supported the coup that overthrew Bolivian President Evo Morales in November of 2019. The Tesla car runs on rechargeable lithium batteries and Bolivia has one of the largest lithium deposits on the planet, which many industrialists, including Musk, hope to mine under terms favorable to their interests. Morales is a socialist whose interest is in what is best for his people and their homeland, and who led an international conference in 2010 that produced the Universal Declaration for the Rights of Mother Earth. Musk told the journalist, “We’ll coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” (TeleSUR English, July 25, 2020 https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/elon-musk-confesses-to-lithium-coup-in-bolivia-20200725-0010.html )
Lithium mining is just one of scores of very toxic industrial activities described in gory detail in this book, along with the names of the chemicals involved in these processes and the various harms and damages that they inflict upon many species of life, human and non-human. The processes involved in producing so-called “green energy” devices, including mining the raw materials, transporting them to factories, refining and forming the materials into more machines and consumable products, transporting it all over the world, clearing the land of the living beings who already live where the devices are to be installed, operation, maintenance, removal after expiration, and replacement, are all just as destructive to Life on Earth as most other modern industrial activities. None of that activity is truly “green” or beneficial to natural ecosystems or living organisms.
Biofuel, a renewable energy source that is much more widely in use than wind turbines or solar panels, depends mostly on deforestation and the creation of vast monoculture tree farms that replace biodiverse natural habitat, causing death, misery and extinction for many species of life, just to grow trees that will be burned for fuel. And what are they fueling? Very often it is energy for industrial factories that will produce more machines to make more toxic and unnecessary consumer products. All “green” energy devices will continue to contribute energy to the rest of the industrial infrastructure, by the dictates and customs of the current economic system and culture.
In their chapter questioning the value to life on Earth of “efficiency,” the authors clearly demonstrate how and why efficiency is no incentive for the reduction of CO2 and other harmful by-products of modern industrialism, when carried out within an economic system devoted to unlimited growth and competition (capitalism) and a culture devoted to maximizing convenience and consumption. Using examples based on Jevon’s paradox (basically that efficiency in manufacture and/or use tends to increase the production and consumption of that thing, rather than providing us more time to do other things besides producing and consuming) and on the facts regarding what has actually occurred with the gradual increases in renewable energy devices—not replacing, but, instead, accompanying continued increases in fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions—their point is made clear, as seen in the following chart:
(If you look for charts like this on the internet, you will have a hard time finding ones that end at 2019. Instead, you will see many charts that project beyond, usually up to 2050, showing that somehow the dismal reality portrayed above will magically explode into a dramatic increase in the use of solar and wind technology, even with industrial capitalism remaining intact. They do concede, though, that fossil fuel use—and, of course, CO2 emissions—will still be a considerable part of the picture by then, because of the energy “needs” of industrial capitalism that renewables just cannot provide. That is a difficult fact to admit, but the main reason that it must be faced is found in a combination of basic physics and the capitalist imperative for the maximization of profit. The physics can be summed up in the fact that the average energy density for fossil fuels is 46 megajoules per kilogram (MJ/kg) and “the best lithium battery can only store 1 MJ/kg.” The authors also report that “a diesel semi-tractor can haul 60,000 pounds of freight 600 miles before refueling. To get a similar range [with an imaginary, not-yet-invented electric semi-truck], that tractor would have to have about 55,000 pounds of batteries.” So, which truck would any capitalist distributor of products who wants to maximize efficiency and profit prefer to use? In addition to all that, many climate scientists now say that still using fossil fuels past 2030 means unstoppable bio-system collapse. But people have to have something they can believe in, right? And they cannot be allowed to believe in an end to capitalism or replacing that system with many local, truly democratic, community economic systems that are based in cooperation with Earth ecosystems and Nature’s laws.)
One of the grandest forms of deception, exposed repeatedly in several parts of Bright Green Lies, especially the chapter titled, “The Green City Lie,” revolves around a practice called “pollution outsourcing” or “carbon footprint outsourcing.” When measuring a country or city’s pollution or CO2 output, it is common practice to only count what is emitted locally, within the city or nation’s boundaries, omitting completely the emissions made in other countries around the world (typically in relatively poor countries outside of Europe and the U.S.) by citizens and corporations residing in the nation or city being measured. Examples include the facts that the U.S. “annually imports about $500 billion worth of products from China,” and Seattle (considered by many to be possibly the “greenest” city in the U.S.) imports “more than 60% of its food” from countries outside the U.S. After describing the horrific amount of pollution and CO2 emissions created by shipping, trucking and train transport, the authors report that when we do “account for imported products and services, cities are responsible for 60 percent higher carbon emissions than previously thought.” The failure to measure the impacts to other ecosystems of this kind of outsourcing, “allows a city to exist without its occupants coming into contact with the land they depend on, building, in essence, a ‘phantom carrying capacity’ based on the consumption of soil, forests, grasslands, water, and so on from other locations.”
The last example of “bright green lying” given in this book that I will mention here (although there are so many more!) involves the horrific potential impacts to life on Earth from attempting to implement green energy technologies at the scale required to run this ever-expanding, long-ago-overshot, capitalist industrial economic system, replacing the use of fossil fuels. The necessary infrastructure creation for that alone is not only mind-boggling and physically impossible, but also clearly ecocidal. For example, “12 percent of the continental United States would have to be covered in windfarms to meet current electricity demands. But electricity is only one-sixth of the nation’s energy consumption. To provide for the U.S.A.’s total energy consumption, fully 72 percent of the continent would have to be devoted to wind farms.” A slightly more conservative estimate is given in a recent report by a pro-green-energy team of researchers, stating that, if we combined wind farms and solar panel installations to replace all fossil fuel electricity production, we would only have to cover 10 % of the surface of the U.S. (The Race to Zero: can America reach net-zero emissions by 2050?, by Oliver Milman, Alvin Chang and Rashida Kamal, The Guardian, March 15, 2021) That figure does not take into account the amount of additional land surface (and habitat destruction) required for all of the necessary increase in transmission lines, which the authors of the Race to Zero… report estimate would be “enough new transmission lines to wrap around Earth 19 times.” (and that’s just for the U.S.!) To put that amount of Earth surface destruction into some familiar perspective, currently about 2% of the surface of the U.S. is covered with asphalt and concrete pavement. We all have some sense of what that much pavement (on roads, sidewalks, parking lots, freeways, etc.) looks like. Imagine then, 10 to 70 times that much ground covered with wind turbines and solar panels, and much more land than that converted to accommodate new power transmission lines. Do you need any more material than that for new nightmares to keep you awake at night? And I didn’t mention all of the resulting dead birds, tortoises, trees and other wildlife, which Jensen, Keith, and Wilbert also describe in painful detail. Who needs horror movies when we have these kinds of visions springing up all around us? Would such a repulsive scenario be worth submitting ourselves to just to preserve a so-called “way of life” for just a little while longer? It would not last long with most of the natural ecosystems and species of life that keep us all alive destroyed or extinct.
I cannot end this book review without mentioning the love for all inter-connected natural Life that is a continual thread throughout its pages and is clearly the supreme motivating force behind the book’s creation. Jensen, Keith, and Wilbert are what I would call “old school” environmentalists—people who put Earth and all of her interconnected Life first, and have no fondness for any human system or culture that must continually harm and even destroy our living world in order to exist. I also appreciate the authors’ acknowledgement, in their “Real Solutions” chapter, that traditional Indigenous peoples have known the answers to our predicament all along. By following the first ways and the guidance of our natural Earth relatives (of all species), we can help the living world to heal all of our interrelated beings. I will close here with a few top quotes from the book:
“So many indigenous people have said that the first and most important thing we must do is decolonize our hearts and minds. We must grow, they’ve told me, to see the dominant culture for what it is: not as the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to human beings, but instead as a way of life that provides conveniences—luxuries—to one set of humans at the expense of everyone else—human and non-human.”
“Because the earth is the source of all life, the health of the earth must be the primary consideration in our decision-making processes.”
“Often people are so shocked by the idea of their lifestyle disappearing completely that they honestly can’t imagine what could come next. They care deeply about the planet, but what they want to know is: ‘Can’t we find a solution that leaves our way of life intact?’”
“’How can we continue to harvest industrial quantities of energy without causing harm?’ is the wrong question. The correct question is: What can we do to help the earth repair the damage caused by this culture?”
“The truth is that we can debunk each and every piece of bright green technology, and ultimately it won’t make a bit of difference to bright greens or anyone else whose loyalty is not to the earth but to the economic and social system that is dismantling the earth.”
“The best way to prepare for this [systemic collapse] is also the best way to prepare to bring about just human societies after collapse: not by leaning even more into industry, but by building communities based on self-sufficiency, biological integrity, and human rights. This is work anyone can support.”
Social movements are important because when collective action spreads across an entire society it leads to a cycle of protest. When such a cycle is organised around opposed or multiple classes or interest groups then this can lead to revolutions [1]. This is simplistic as there are many causes and factors that lead to revolutions, which I’ll attempt to unpack in future posts. This post will focus on describing the characteristics of social movements to frame a future post listing the history of social movements in Britain.
Defining social movements
Many have defined social movements and their characteristics. Here is a consolidated list of those characteristics:
social movements are extremely varied: “historically and cross-culturally, and include movements campaigning for various ‘rights’ (civil, labour, women’s, gay, disability, children and so on); movements campaigning on behalf of the environment, peace, or animals; movements seeking specific political reforms or diffuse cultural and personal change; and movements contesting globalization, corporations, and capitalist social relations.” [2]
social movements are collective/organised enterprises for social change, rather than individual efforts at social change. Some have created formal organizations, others have relied on informal networks, and others have engaged in more spontaneous actions such as riots.
Social movements exist over a ‘period of time’ rather than being ‘one-off’ events- movements follow a temporal trajectory so ‘move’ or change. They might be viewed as temporary from a longer-term perspective.
Social movements challenge ‘the status quo’ – elites, authorities, and opponents. They challenge or defend the existing authority by engaging in a ‘conflictual issue’ with a ‘powerful opponent’. Social movements are typically resisted by forces that favour the status quo, which imparts fundamental contentiousness to movement actions.
Social movements use varied tactics – choose between violent and nonviolent activities, illegal and legal ones, disruption and persuasion, extremism and moderation, reform and revolution.
Social movements use protest – Social movements actively pursue change by employing protest.
Social movements are a source of creativity and create identities, ideas, and ideals – members of a social movement are not just working together, but share a ‘collective identity’.
Social movements occupy public spaces and the public sphere/debate. Social movements are unique because they are guided purposively and strategically by the people who join them.
Social movements mostly operate outside established political and institutional channels.
Social movements, big and small, move history along, sometimes in significant ways. [3]
When did social movements first appear?
Charles Tilly describes in Social Movements 1768-2012 that popular risings in one form or another have been happening for thousands of years. He argues that in the eighteenth century something changed so that social movements in the form we understand them were first created, including leadership, members and resources. For Tilly social movements emerged from an innovative combination of three elements:
a campaign “a sustained, organized public effort making collective claims on target authorities”
social movement repertoire “employment of combinations from among the following forms of political action: creation of special-purpose associations and coalitions, public meetings, solemn processions, vigils, rallies, demonstrations, petition drives, statements to and in public media, and pamphleteering”
WUNC displays “‘participants’ concerted public representations of WUNC: worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment on the part of themselves and/or their constituencies” [4]
Defining British social movement since 1945
There have been two books written about post-war social movements in Britain. They both define social movements for the recent British context so I’ve included their definitions.
In British Social Movements since 1945, Adam Lent describes a more focused concept of British social movements “by post-war social movements I am referring to those grassroots mobilisations which were initiated outside of the established structures and values of the existing polity and which formed around the politics of six key issues and/or social groups: gender and women, sexuality and homosexuals, disability and the disabled, race and the ethnic communities, the pursuit of peace, and the defence of the environment. This is a definition rooted deeply in the historical specificity of post-war British movements.” [5]
The second book is Social Movements in Britain by Paul Byrne. He notes the main characteristics of social movements to be:
Values and identity – people join social movements because they are committed to certain values and are making a statement about themselves.
Structure – social movements are not formally organisations like political parties but are instead ‘networks of interaction’ with political goals.
Outsiders – social movements challenge the existing order and way of doing things.
Tactics – social movements engage in some action outside of the institutional or legal channels of political institutions.
Protest campaigns and social movements – protests do not represent a movement if it does not seek to gain support across the whole of society or even internationally. Social movements aim for societal change, not local change. [6]
Social movements, dynamics of contention and collective action
McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly argue in Dynamics of Contention that different forms of contention result from similar mechanisms and processes in society. The different forms of contention that they list include social movements, revolutions, industrial conflict/strike waves, nationalism, democratisation, war, and interest group politics. McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly define contentious politics to be “episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects when (a) at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claim and (b) the claims would, if realized, affect the interest of at least one of the claimants.” [7]
Other important forms of contention are insurrections, rebellions, revolts, riots, and uprisings. Sometimes they are part of social movements and sometimes not. I will explore these in future posts.
Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani defines collective action as “individuals sharing resources in pursuit of collective goals – i.e., goals that cannot be privatized to any of the members of the collectivity on behalf of which collective action has taken place. Such goals may be produced within movements, but also in many contexts that normally are not associated with movements.” [8] Donatella Della Porta includes social movements, political parties, voluntary organisation, interest groups and religious sects, as collective action. [9] Herbert Blumer identified four forms of collective behaviour: crowds, the public, the mass, and social movements
The structure of social movements
In What is a Social Movement? Hank Johnston explains that there are two basic ways of thinking about how social movements are structured. First, social movements are made up of organisations and groups that integrate people in varying amounts of participation and mobilise them to act. These groups and organisations are large or small, disruptive or engage with political institutions, grassroots or centralised. Second, the complexity of social movements means they are interconnected network structures. The network binds the components (individuals, organisations, groups) together resulting in an overall cohesion. [10]
Charles Tilly makes a useful point that social movement analyists make a common mistake of confusing a movements collective action – the campaigns in which it engages – with the organisations and networks that support the action. Or even simply considering that organisations and networks are the movement. [11] I think its both, the activities (actions, protests, marches/demonstrations, and campaigns) and the structures (organisations, groups, some political parties, and movements of movements).
Writing about history is important for this project, but why is that? I took for granted how important learning from history is without really thinking about why. When I read How Change Happens by Duncan Green, he clarified things. This got me thinking about wanting to understand learning from history better to then write about it.
Successes and failure of the left
Duncan Green, who’s area of focus is international development, describes how looking at history lets us question the world we take for granted and understand the long-term trends that shape it. By understanding how our current world has been created, we can find more realistic methods to change it. He describes how the success of the abolitionist movement shows that massive, immovable objects have been changed before. Green describes how history can inspire a deep respect for the personal sacrifices and campaign skills of our predecessors. History can also provide intellectual material to challenge the current narrow window of what’s acceptable. By studying historical examples that are an alternative and different from the norm, it gives new insights and ideas. Green explains that history encourages curiosity and humility and reminds us that activists are usually less influential than political, economic or unexpected changes. [1]
Campaigning for change: lessons from history by the History & Policy Network and Friends of the Earth explain that the case studies in the book: “illustrate, documenting activism and organising for change in the past gives us greater understanding of strategic choices, communications strategies, timing and serendipity in campaigning, as well as some extraordinary examples of mobilisation on a scale that today’s campaigners can scarcely dream of.” [2] The book explores ten case studies from the last 200 years in Britain.
They reference the famous quote ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’, and describe how politicians and pundits regularly use history to try to understand the present but without thinking how to do that appropriately. [3]
The History & Policy Network and Friends of the Earth describe the three questions that academic historians focus on the most:
how you choose your questions/choosing your histories,
the truthfulness of historical explanations/choosing your historians,
the unique character of historical events/translating past into present/challenge of drawing parallels. [4]
The conclusion of Campaigning for change: lessons from history identifies four areas of learning:
Big game-plan and proxy campaigns – many modern-day campaigns do not have a bigger game plan compared to campaigns of the past.
Approaches – using economics arguments instead of moral arguments is now common; movements do reach out to elites to build coalitions as they did in the past; we now have loose networks heading in the same direction compared to broad-based cohesive movements and coalitions of the past.
Tactics – strong individual and group identities are important; people have relationships with the place they live in and the people who live there; direct action has contributed to successful campaigns in the past when used strategically; over time women have extended their sphere of influence in movements resulting in novel and successful tactics.
The backlash – prepare for and understand what possible backlashes may appear and from where, and prepare how to use them to benefit the campaign; and understanding that those in power cannot always control the narrative so aim to control or change the narrative. [5]
In Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing and Advocacy Rinku Sen describes how looking at the history of community organising shows several different models, that are based on a “specific theory of constituency building and social change”. These specific models of organising can be beneficial and limiting. Understanding the model that our tactics are based on means we can “follow that model to a logical conclusion, get help from others who have used it, avoid its pitfalls, and describe ourselves effectively in our attempts to raise money and train new leaders.” Models can also limit campaigns ability to innovate, which is key to success. Sen explains that pure models do not exist and effective organisers mix and match. Community organising and social movement history are full of examples of tactics from past campaign being applied to ongoing struggles. She argues the importance of being able to articulate the theory of social change being applied to then stick with it or adjust it as necessary. [6]
Professor Jodi Dean describes how historical accounts are meant as lessons and guideposts, ways of thinking that let us learn and do better next time. She argues that sometimes leftists forget this and get bogged down in lessons of the past as if they tell us exactly what will happen. As if history is completely determinist [7] and there is no alternative. She argues that the determinist perceptive is an academic approach and instead need to think in more political and revolutionary terms. Dean describes that we need to look at the past for guidance and the future should determine how we apply this guidance in terms of ‘strategy, tactics, practices, and slogans.’ [8]
Jodi Dean also argues that we need to learn the positive lessons from terrible historical periods. Jodi Dean wrote The Communist Horizon intending to reclaim ‘communism’, argues that when people reduce communism to the Soviet Union, they don’t want to learn from history. Instead, they want to universally criticise and condemn the Soviet Union. I’m no fan of the Soviet Union for obvious reasons (it was responsible for the mass murder of millions of people and highly repressive) but like Jodi Dean, there were experiments in self-management and collectivisation that we can learn from. It’s important to not write the whole period off. The people that undertook these experiments – scientists, doctors, farmers – do have something to teach us. [9]
Ben Reynolds who wrote The Coming Revolution: Capitalism in the 21st Century describes how we need to learn where the left has made missteps or gone wrong. Not so much about blame as being able to conduct an honest appraisal of our historical and current failures that will help us to build a strong and solid movement going forwards. He links this to how fractured the left is, with people being very ideological and not many reading or listening to opposing voices on the left. Reynolds describes how those on the left caricature those in other tendencies, so they are seen as evil and the enemy. The result is that no one learns from the historical experience and instead everyone is just regurgitating their talking points. He describes some of the lessons from the victory of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and the mistakes the left made there. [10]
Naomi Klein describes the emotional benefits of learning from this past in a talk she gave in 2011 about her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. She explains that the large amounts of terrifying information that we are bombarded with result is us being in a state of shock so we don’t make important connections or construct analysis. This keeps us in the immobile state we’re stuck in. She describes that when we gather and tell ourselves stories then the clicks of connection happen. We can’t be effective activists if we’re hysterical. We can be calm and angry at the same time. Our role models in the effective political struggles of the past weren’t hysterical. They were focused and calm. Klein describes that when we make the connections between issues – war, torture, economics – between the present and our past, then our bodies start to relax. We calm down, get more focused and we can feel some of that rage as opposed to just fear. So we can be much more effective activists and fighters. [11]
The Marxist economics Professor Richard Wolff, explains in many of his youtube videos how important learning from history is in relation to why the 2008 economic crash happened and also what happened in the US in the 1930s in response to Great Depression – labour movements forced President Roosevelt to implement the New Deal by taxing the rich. [12] He also explains that most people know a lot of what he explains in his talks but he shares his understanding of history with a narrative in the hopes that it will cause people to join with other people to make a change. [13]
Richard Wolff explains clearly in this video how since 1980 the capitalists in the US rolled back the New Deal gains for ordinary people of benefits, pensions, and full employment. He explains near the end of the video that although the rich were heavy taxed during the New Deal period and post-war boom, they were left with the resources to be able to support the neoliberal project of think tanks and academics from the middle of the twentieth century. It then became the dominant political and economic ideology from the late 1970s. I will describe the history and nature of neoliberalism in a future post.
Richard Wolff argues in the video that what we learning from the last fifty years is that: if taxes are drastically increased and regulations are put in place to stop another financial crash, the rich have the resources to undo them again and they will do this. He concludes that “you can not leave some people in control of a disproportionate amount of the wealth of society and then be surprised if they use that wealth to keep themselves at the top. If we don’t want that, then let’s not fight over redistributing the wealth. Let’s not distribute unequally in the first place. We shouldn’t have some people earning millions of dollars and other people fighting to get $15 an hour as a minimum wage. That creates inequality and the corruption of politics to keep that inequality in place.’ [14]
History from below
In All Knees and Elbows of Susceptibility and Refusal: Reading History from Below Anthony Iles and Tom Roberts describe two perspectives of ‘history from below’: “‘radical history’ – the history of more or less organised political movements which challenge and sometimes shape the order of things – and history from below as the history of unheard voices and experiences per se.” [15]
All Knees and Elbows of Susceptibility and Refusal: Reading History from Below has eight chapters. The introduction describes core figures and institutions that are used as a starting point to explore the field. Chapter two looks at class, ‘the people’ and ‘the below’, and how history from below has expanded these categories. Chapter three explores questions related to the discovery and use of historical sources. Chapter four looks at how the working class developed intellectual practices and developed distribution networks for the dissemination of dissent. Chapter five focuses on the relationship between history, literary forms and myth-making, and how people construct their own identities and experiences about the dominant culture. Chapter six looks at education – university institutions, their critique and protest against them. Chapter seven looks at history and state politics, focusing on the Coalition Government concept of the ‘Big Society’. The final chapter describes some of the disputes and controversies that ‘historians from below’ have initiated.
Reflections on Knowledge, Learning and Social Movements edited by Aziz Choudry and Salim Vally brings together “radical adult education and historical theoretical frameworks to explicitly examine the knowledge production, learning and politics involved in processes of retrieving and critically engaging with movement histories and developing activist archives, and further, in ways which put them into dialogue with contemporary activism.” [16] Its asks important questions “How do educators and activists in today’s struggles for change use historical materials from earlier periods of organizing for political education? How do they create and engage with independent and often informal archives and debates? How do they ultimately connect this historical knowledge with contemporary struggles?” [17]
The book is divided into four sections:
engagement with activist/movement archives,
learning and teaching militant histories,
lessons from liberatory and anti-imperialist struggles,
learning from student, youth and education struggles.
Six of the chapters focus on social movements in South Africa. Struggles are explored from other countries including Argentina, Iran, Britain, Palestine and the US [17]
The introduction (download here) gives an overview of the book and aspects of learning from history. It describes the importance of developing “context-specific, locally relevant ways to connect historical movement knowledge with contemporary organising.” [18] It also states that “histories from below can be fraught with contradictions, silences, omissions, distortions, and absences in similar ways to official histories, just as learning and knowledge produced in activist milieus can sometimes replicate rather than disrupt dominant power relations.” [19] Using ideas and concepts from previous struggles requires us to be aware of potential problems of “constructing imagined histories and continuities with the past”, so we need to avoid romanticising earlier struggles. We need to avoid copying past victories and applying now in different conditions and contexts. We also need to seriously consider to value of ‘old tactics’ that did not work in the past. [20]
The introduction stresses the importance of being aware of the problems of historical and social amnesia. This amnesia “risks losing the thread and texture of what it takes to bring about social change, with all of its tensions and contradictions and threatens to leave us with a version of history that glosses over or ignores the significance of behind-the-scenes organising. Such amnesia can paper over the conflicts, tensions and power dynamics that have been part of these organising efforts and from which we can also learn.” [21]
It also underlines how important it is for many movements to identify the “historical context for the conditions in which people live and struggle”, related to capitalism and colonialism. It describes the essential need to fashion “tools from forms and histories of resistance that are sometimes forgotten and buried.” It is important to appreciate struggles “at the margins or dissenting currents within larger movements, the ideas that they produce and their contributions to organising.” Finally, the introduction describes the need to be aware of revisionism “we need to also bring to light ways in which the latter struggles sometimes get overwritten by dominant accounts which focus on individual leaders and more visible or more powerful organisations.” [22]
Endnotes
How Change Happens, Duncan Green, 2016, page 76/77
Campaigning for change: lessons from history, History & Policy Network and Friends of the Earth, 2015, page 9
Campaigning for change, page 11
Campaigning for change, page 12
Campaigning for change, page 160-174
Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing and Advocacy, Rinku Sen, 2003, page lxiv
Determinism is the philosophical theory that all events, including moral choices, are completely determined by previously existing causes. Determinism is usually understood to preclude free will because it entails that humans cannot act otherwise than they do.
This article originally appeared in The Ecologist. Republished under Creative Commons 4.0.
Editor’s note: It’s very important to be clear about the destructiveness of mining and organize resistance against governments and cooperations. While this article is only very cautiously mentioning degrowth, scaling back, and recycling as “solutions”, we believe that societies have to reject and give up industrialism as a whole and immediately start ecological restoration everywhere at emergency speed and scale.
By Diego Francesco Marin
‘Green mining’ is an oxymoron that is gaining traction in the EU and pushes a risky narrative about an environmentally destructive sector.
Mining dominates, exploits and pollutes, suppressing other ways of living with the land. In low-income countries, it can be deadly. Activists, civil society and grassroots movements have been loud and clear about the dangers posed by the mining sector, yet few politicians seem to listen. In the European Union, the European Commission and mining operators are clearly aware of the issues. But unless your community has been targeted as the next mining project to supposedly meet the EU’s climate goals, you are probably not aware of how destructive mining can be.
As part of its Raw Materials Action Plan, the Commission is striving to create the conditions for more mining in Europe by convincing the public that mining can be “green.”
Foolish
Last month, the Portuguese presidency of the EU organised a European conference on so-called green mining in Lisbon. Only one civil society organisation, the EEB, was invited to what had all the appearances of an industry convention rather than a green policy forum.
However, outside the venue, over a hundred activists from grassroots movements and citizens organisations protested the conference and the government-backed lithium mining projects in northern Portugal- despite COVID restrictions.
To gain thesocial license to operate, politicians and industry are challenging previous civil society backlashes against mining projects by equating mining with renewable technologies. Even raising concerns over the toxic fallout of continuous extractivism is deemed foolish.
When communities fight for their right to decide their futures, they are labelled as suffering from a case of nimbyism. Portuguese Secretary of State for Energy, João Galamba even went so far as mentioning that “those who are against mines are against life.”
This scramble to mine is about lucrative business and actually undermines the energy transition. New low-carbon infrastructure needs to be built to enable the move away from fossil fuels, which means money.
Lithium
>Lithium, for example, is one of the most sought-after metals for low-carbon technologies and Europe is almost 100 percent dependent on battery-grade lithium from third countries, especially Chile.
An often-cited figure is that, by 2030, under ‘business as usual’, Europe will need around 18 times more lithium and up to 60 times more by 2050. Therefore, to make the switch to renewable technologies and be competitive, Europe wants to scale up supply to avoid bottlenecks, right in its own backyard.
But this strategy comes with serious concerns. The mountainous Barroso region, for example, sits on Western Europe’s largest lithium deposits but is also located 400 metres from the Covas do Barroso community, in the municipality of Boticas.
Even the Boticas mayor, Fernando Queiroga has spoken openly against the project over pollution, water and environmental worries. He also fears the negative impact it would have on the region’s agricultural, gastronomy and rural tourism sectors.
According to Savannah Resources, the mining operator behind the Minas Do Barroso, the mine would generate €1.3 billion of revenue over its 15-to-20-year lifetime.
Overconsumption
In terms of helping the EU meet its demand, the project would only provide 5 to 6 percent of Europe’s projected lithium requirement in 2030.
A study conducted by the University of Minho for Savannah Resources found that the lithium output of this mine would be “insufficient to meet the demand for lithium derivatives for the production of batteries in Europe”.
This region is one of only seven in Europe to make the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s list of Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems. Communities here use “very few surpluses where]the level of consumption of the population is relatively low compared to other regions in the country” as the FAO’s website indicates.
In the age of overconsumption driving the ecological crisis, it is ironic that low-impact communities are targeted for green growth pursuits.
If the Mina do Barroso project is allowed to proceed, the region’s proud agricultural heritage would be undermined and would surely lose its international recognition.
Frenzy
With 30 million additional electric vehicles planned to hit Europe’s roads by 2030, it should come as no surprise that communities on the ground do not want their land to become the next sacrifice zone to feed the EV frenzy.
In Europe, there are three other proposed mining projects where environmental concerns have also been raised, including in Caceres, Spain.
The Iberian Peninsula is a major target for mining companies. In Spain, there are around 2,000 potential licenses for new mining projects. In the case of Portugal, 10 percent of the country’s territory is already under mining concessions.
In the northern Portuguese regions, the situation is troubling amid concerns that open-pit mines may even be allowed near protected areas, as in the case of Serra d’Arga. The Mina do Barroso project is now undergoing public consultation for the environmental impact assessment.
Despite government and industry rhetoric that public participation will be respected, and the needs of local communities will be met, local organisations and activists are not convinced. In January 2021, an NGO submitted an environmental information request to the Portuguese environment ministry, but no access was granted.
Denial
The same request was sent in March to Savannah Resources, but the company also refused.
Although the Commission for Access to Administrative Documents (CADA) issued a report stating that the environmental information that had been requested should be made immediately available, the Portuguese authorities decided to ignore the request.
Only some documents were made available during the public consultations and nearly three weeks after the consultations started.
The lack of access to information kept civil society and local communities in the dark and they lost around 3 precious months.
For the past month, they have had to scrutinise more than 6,000 documents. A formal complaint was submitted in the context of the Aarhus Convention, which protects the right of access to environmental information, over claims of deliberate denial of access to information.
Courts
The case is already before the Portuguese courts and the public prosecutor. The end of the public consultation period for the EIA was to end on June 2nd, the same day of the launch of the Yes to Life, No to Miningjoint position statement to the European Commission, but public pressure over irregularities forced the Portuguese authorities to extend the consultation period to July 16th.
target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”Green mining relates to the belief that we can decouple economic growth from environmental impacts, however, this mindset ignores a larger issue and will ultimately have irreversible consequences on the environment.
Perhaps instead of putting such emphasis on the supply of lithium or other raw materials, we can take a look at the demand. For example, by prioritising circularity over primary resource extraction, we can greatly reduce our need to mine more resources.
Political action to limit global warming is necessary and urgent. This means that we need to find the quickest paths to decarbonisation. But we must do it in less materially intensive ways. We can build cities that are less car-dependent, increase public transport, promote walking or enhance micro e-mobility.
Cycling, for example, is ten times more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities. Other solutions include urban mining initiatives that move us toward more circular societies. In an inspiring example from Antwerp, 70 creative makers gather the waste from the city and turn them into a wide variety of products: lamps from old boilers and chairs from paper and sawdust for a whole jazz club.
Solutions
The solutions exist, we just need the political will.
By making the most of the resources we have, European cities can greatly reduce the impact that they create for European rural communities and in low-income countries where most of the mining projects are slated to take place.
However, broader policy measures are also needed. For starters, the EU should agree on creating a headline target to cut its material footprint and continue to promote measures on targeting energy efficiency, recycling, material substitution, use of innovative materials, and the promotion of sustainable lifestyles.
Another way to do this is to look at the energy transition through an environmental justice lens. Granting communities, the right to say no to mining projects by taking inspiration from already enshrined protocols in international law as in the case of Free, Prior and Informed Consent for Indigenous Peoples, the brunt of the energy transition will not have to be put on low-impact communities around the world.
This can address the current imbalance of power between mining companies, governments and communities and the future EU horizontal due diligence law can offer such opportunity. Banning mining projects from taking place within or near protected areas is a necessary step forward.
Living
So can mining ever be green? Maybe that is not the right question. We should instead ask, how do we change the way our societies operate?
I’m going to use Jane McAlevey’s definition for organising as described in a previous post: “organizing places the agency for success with a continually expanding base of ordinary people, a mass of people never previously involved, who don’t consider themselves activists at all – that’s the point of organizing.”
In this post, I’ve included activism around ‘rights’ and ‘issues’, to make this list as comprehensive as possible. I’d also add that this is a rough sketch of what to organise (and mobilise) around and this list needs more research and probably reworking.
Workplace
The first area to organise around, with a long history is the workplace and employment. This was an important area of struggle to change society in the twentieth century, but the nature of work has changed and the trade unions have been crushed in the last 40 years. There have been, and are, several union forms; those from the past will be looked at in future posts. Currently, there are large unions, known as ‘service unions’, and ‘base unions’.
The second area to organise around is the community, including: community organising, community unions, the community rights movement, and community social welfare programmes.
Community organising was developed in the mid-twentieth century in the US. It involves campaigns to change institutional policies and practices to improve the living conditions for community members. Hackney Unites has put together a good HU-community-organising. National reformist community organising organisations doing good work include Citizens UK and Community Organisers. There will be many local groups and organisations using community organising methods all over the UK.
There has been a first step in the UK to set up a community rights movement in the formation of the Community Chartering Network. This comes from a successful community charter in Falkirk, Scotland, that resulted in the Scottish Government banning fracking in Scotland. Read the story here.
Community social welfare programs are generally run by local government or NGOs (Non-government organisations). A good example of this in the UK was the British Restaurants – communal kitchens set up in 1940 to provide cheap food so everyone could eat.
Communities have been under attack since the 1970s, with many basic services and social centers no longer in operation. Community social welfare organising now involves activists running basic services in their communities to fill the gaps where the state has been rolled back. The classic example would be the Black Panthers Free Breakfast for Children in the US in the 1960s/70s.
In 2014/2015 a pay as you feel cafe called Skipchen in Bristol served over 20,000 meals. Can Cook in Garston, Liverpool provides thousands of free hot lunches for children in poverty in the Merseyside area. Foodhall is a public dining room and kitchen in Sheffield that is managed by the community, for the community, tackling social isolation and encourage integration across a diverse range of groups. Foodhall are campaigning for a National Food Service, to develop public social eating spaces around the country. There is Cooperation Town movement based on Cooperation Kentish Town that provides a community space with healthy, cheap food, childcare and more.
Combining Workplace and Non-Workplace
The third area to organise is a combination of workplace/job and struggles outside the workplace, including: Jane McAlevey’s ‘whole worker organizing’, community unionism, and social movement unionism.
Whole worker organising merges workplace and non-workplace issues based on Jane McAlevey’s extensive experience of community and union organising. This article gives a good summary of McAlevey work in Connecticut that combined housing and workplace struggles.
Janice Fine is her 2005 article, “Community Unions and the Revival of the American Labor Movement” describes community unionism as community-based organisations of low-wage workers that focus on issues of work and wages in their communities. They are based on specific ethnic and geographic communities (as opposed to workplaces), especially immigrants and African Americans. Fine describes how they have appeared from several sources including: “community and faith-based organizing networks, Central America solidarity movements and other left-wing organizations, legal services as well as other social service agencies, immigrant nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), churches, and some labor unions.” These community unions are mainly focused on work-related issues but also include other aspects of life including housing, healthcare, and education.
Social movement unionism is currently popular in the US, involving the combination of workplace unionists and social movements to tackle issues, civil and human rights and alter structures of law and political power. This article gives a history and critique of social movement unionism. This interview with a member of the UK National Union of Teachers (now the National Education Union) describes the three legs of a stool working together to make a strong union: bread and butter issues, professional issues, social justice and community campaigning.
Megan Behrent writes about a radical form of social movement unionism called ‘social justice unionism‘ here.
Social Strike
The ‘social strike’ is described by Antonio Negre and Michael Hardt in Assembly as the ‘weapon of social unionism’. [1] Keir Milburn states here that the social strike “brings out three functions that will be required from any set of practices able to play a role equivalent to the twentieth-century strike. These are making the new conditions visible, disrupting the circulation of capital and directly socialising, collectivising and communising our social relations, reproduction and struggles.” Negre and Hardt describe the social strike as “the labor movement’s interruption of industrial production and the social movements’ disruption of the social order.” [1]
Recent examples are the UK Youth Climate Strikes and the planned global Earth Strike on September 20th. Around social reproduction, there is the Women Strike Assembly, which organised strikes in 2018 and 2019 on International Women’s Day, March 8th.
Politics
Political organising takes place via a political party or independent citizens’ platforms. Political parties come in several forms: classical traditional political parties, social movement parties, single-issue parties, and digital/internet-based political parties. Some parties combine a few of these forms.
There have been recent innovations in classical traditional political parties such as Obama’s organising/movement presidential campaigns and Bernie Sanders 2016 US presidential campaign using ‘Big Organising’.
Single issue parties would be the green parties in different countries (although many have broadened their policies over time) and the Brexit Party in the UK.
Organising around politics can also be done outside political parties, as the municipalism movement (see below) is showing. For examples of independent politics at the local level in the UK, there is The Indie-town project and Take Back the City in London.
Municipalism
Municipalism is the process of self-government by cities, towns, or municipalities. There are three broad municipalism traditions: municipal socialism, libertarian municipalism, and the right to the city movement.
Municipal socialism describes the local government-led social reform. There have been several phases in the UK. The most recent is the Preston Model, where the local authority changed the procurement for the council and local large institutions (university and hospital) to buy from local businesses and cooperatives. This strengthens the local economy. It is based on the Cleveland model and is known as community wealth building.
Libertarian municipalism (also known as Communalism) is from the theorist Murray Bookchin. Bookchin proposed a twin strategy of popular or people’s assemblies to look at local issues and start to form an alternative government, combined with running municipal candidates chosen by the people’s assemblies to stand in local electoral politics. Bookchin wanted to build institutional capacity and repurpose state power to increase libertarian collective power. The societal, larger-scale vision of libertarian municipalism or Communalism is Confederalism – where self governed cities and localities are connected in a larger network. Ideas of confederalism have been put into practice in Rojava in northeast Syria/West Kurdistan and are known as Democratic Confederalism. They have also been taken up by the international Fearless Cities Movement and Cooperative Jackson in the US.
The right to the city movement started in the 1960s with geographers such as Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey analysing the city from a Marxist perspective. They argue that the transformation of the city depends upon the exercise of collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization to meet the people’s needs.
Poor people’s Movements and Solidarity
The history of poor people’s movements have been explored in detail in the book Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. This article gives a good summary of the more spontaneous and disruptive nature of these movements. They are based on mobilising rather than organising, which links to momentum driven organising discussed in this previous post.
DP Hunter has written a book Chav Solidarity and in this article he describes chav solidarity: “if just the left-leaning working class were to collectivise our resources (wages, savings, inheritance, homes, and whatever else), or we were to transform our economy into a communal one, we would be able to provide for one another. Those economically marginalised and living in poverty, as I was not that long ago, would not be in positions of such deprivation and exclusion, their short term concerns of where their next meal was coming from, where they would be sleeping in a week’s time, would abate.”
Institutions
Organising around institutions can take three forms: influencing institutions, reclaiming existing institutions for the left and supporting or creating alternative institutions.
Influencing institutions includes attempting to change state behaviour through laws in parliament or rulings in courts. It could also include influencing political parties, the media or corporations. A good resource on this is How Change Happens by Duncan Green.
Examples of reclaiming existing institutions for the left would be all three municipalism traditions described above. The Labour Party has recently been reclaimed for the left by Jeremy Corbyn. The UCU trade union membership recently elected a grassroots left candidate as General Secretary – Jo Grady. We Own It, campaign against privatisation and make the case for public ownership of public services.
For alternative institutions, the community social welfare programs described above in the community section is an example of this. Others are workers coops in the UK and Mondragon in Spain. Concerning alternative media, see here. Concerning credit unions, see here. Libertarian municipalist people’s assemblies (see above in municipalism section) are an example of an alternative government. There is the recent idea of public-commons partnerships where citizens become co-owners, co-earners and co-decision-makers of municipal cooperatives.
Rights and Issues
There is a lot of crossover between rights and issues, so for now I’ve combined them.
Rights include human rights, democratic and political rights (right to vote, citizenship, civil liberties), economic rights (right to a decent job and pay, and a social safety net such as benefits), rights to public goods/services (public healthcare, education, housing, media etc), community rights movement (see above), and rights of nature.
Issues include the rights of women, gay people, people of colour, disabled people, and others, anti-war and the peace movement, LGBTQ+ movement, inequality, environmental issues with climate change being the biggest concern, and the alter-globalisation or anti-globalisation movement.
Endnotes
1. Assembly, Antonio Negre and Michael Hardt, 2017, page 150
