“Don’t mourn, organise”
Joe Hill (of the International Workers of the World)
[Update – speech I won’t give at the bottom of this post]
The American novelist, thinker and civil rights activist James Baldwin wrote, in January 1962, that “not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Ahead of another rally on the steps of Parliament House on Friday 22nd May (5.30 to 6.30), I think we need to face a few facts (as I see them – your mileage may vary).
- (It seems to me that ) Malinauskas is in a much stronger position than he was a week ago.
First and foremost, he has completed the chopping down of the trees – there is no physical thing to defend anymore. [update – there may be some remnants, but the major job of work has been done, I think.]
Second, with the help of the Advertiser (of which more in a separate blog post) and all mass media he has painted his opponents as ‘extremists’ and smeared the lot of them (1). Sure, it won’t have worked as a smear on everyone, but it will have made some people reluctant to engage with future campaigns (the point of it is, after all, to raise the costs of ‘recruitment’ and ‘retention’). This is not new. See this below from 1970, with NSW Premier Robin Askin talking about ‘professional agitators’.
- A significant number of people will be (understandably!) demoralised, disenchanted. This will especially be the case if the rally on Friday is smaller than the 2,000 is who turned up last Wednesday.
I just read this on Facebook, and I think it is accurate (emphasis added) –
I know yesterday was disappointing, honestly, the past week has been tough. A lot of us are feeling depleted, angry, depressed.. Just tonight I even ate half a tub of ice cream trying to cope
The point is that those people who were previously engaged in “activism”, or have strong existing sympathetic networks will be better able to deal with those feelings, but those who are – for whatever reason – more isolated, will be having a really really tough time of it. Grief can easily curdle into cynicism and disengagement.
- If Malinauskas is stronger (some will dispute this) and ‘we’ are weaker (some will dispute this) then this makes the campaigns to come (MotoGP, Fracking moratorium) more difficult. Momentum counts for a lot.
Crucially, then, the same mistakes must not be committed.
For me, the rally on Wednesday May 13 was a seriously missed opportunity to get those who attended (and those who didn’t) energised, connected and inspired. There were very very few concrete and engaging actions being suggested. It was (and I was listening closely) mostly about what other people (politicians) were already doing, and a petition to sign).
I wrote a blog about this, and suggested that the number 585 could have been used. Here is the end of a ‘speech I would have given’
This is great. Thank you. But this is not enough. We need more. So a final pledge is coming up..
We need artists, poets, songs. We need tiktok videos, we need memes, slogans. We need blogs. We need letters to the Advertiser. Sorry- I was just playing with you. We need to bypass the Murdoch media. We need lawyers, we need conversations, we need networks. We need people standing outside football matches with placards and information about what is being done by this government, and in whose benefits. We need – well, we need more ideas than I have, we need all the ideas, skills and energy that YOU have.
Does each of you pledge to go home from here and – alone or with your friends – come up with a list of five things you all can do, with your knowledge, your skills, your networks, your time? Then DO those things, get better at those actions. Share those actions? Do you?
(Hopefully ‘yes’)
- Talk to five people
- Write an eight sentence letter to the Premier and your MP
- Come up with a list of five things to do.
If you pledge it, then on three, 585!
(hopefully people chant 585)
What is to be done
The American linguist Noam Chomsky once wrote
“If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that’s something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can’t live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organizations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time.”
It is not clear to me that the organisations trying, valiantly, to defend the parklands are able to do this – time will tell, she usually does (1).
We have to face facts (which doesn’t guarantee that we will ultimately change them).
The parklands are under siege. They have been before. This below is from 1984.
We have to develop skills, knowledge, relationships. We have to spot where we have absolute lacks or single-points of failures in our organisations and networks. That takes time, effort and does not come with any endorphins.
We have to give guidance, encouragement and support (emotional, intellectual etc) to people who are new, who have limited time, who are despairing
We have to acknowledge that there are risks in despair leading people into de-activation or into (more) conspiracy theories, or into smugness and dismissal of posts (like my last one and this one too presumably) that try to raise questions of efficacy.
Friday’s rally will – I presume – predominantly be attended by a subset of those who were there last Wednesday. The mood will be angry, sombre. There will probably be some recriminations, some hopelessness. I don’t think the ‘stop the chop’ chant will work in the same way.
All this is an enormous challenge for the speakers, for the strategists.
Not an insurmountable one, but enormous. A bit like the polycrisis we face – of a collapsing biosphere, hollowed-out democracy, accelerating wealth inequality, and AI-enshittification.
Happy times.
Footnotes
- I’d like to believe that nobody could be stupid enough to have tried to doxx Malinauskas, that it must have been a ‘false flag’. But I also know that – sadly – it is entirely possible that it was simply an own goal by people unable to think through the likely consequences of their actions.
- Time doesn’t always tell– see Nigel Balchin’s novel The Small Back Room.
Four minute speech I won’t give at the rally on Friday May 23
I want to take you to a bad place. Then, we come back, and we start walking, together, to a better place.
Let’s remember the last week. The trees being chopped down, the possums and birds fleeing. The naked contempt that the Premier has for democratic norms, for heritage, for Mij Tanith and the others who put their bodies in the way of his ego.
Just for a few seconds stand in your anger, your despair, your sense of hopelessness.
It’s horrible, isn’t it? Not a place to stay, not a place to return to.
We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. We have to go through it.
We have to go through it, together, helping each other as we walk.
If we want to be in better shape a year from today, we have to walk together, we have to grow, learn, organise and perhaps win.
We have to grow, as individuals and groups. We have to grow our skills. So many, but a key one is to become good at having conversations with people who don’t know what is going on, or are too busy to be involved, or have swallowed the lies and the smears.
We have to grow the size of our groups, by making it easier for busy people, unconfident people, to be meaningfully involved without coming to endless meetings, or being online 24/7.
We have to learn – the history of our state – and it didn’t begin in 1836. The politics and economics of the moment. We have to learn how social movements work. We have to learn from our past successes and mistakes. We have to learn how protest movements grow and win or lose, how they get distracted, divided, repressed.
We have to organise – along our streets, our places of work and worship, among our friends and acquaintances. And today’s stranger is tomorrow’s acquaintance may well be next year’s firm friend. By organise I do not mean everyone joins a party and takes orders from on high. I mean we share skills and knowledge, we learn from others, we strengthen the ties of those all around us to form networks, overlapping, stronger here than there, so that w.
Not everyone has to become expert at everything, but all of us can – and must – get better at something. All of us can – and must – contribute to growing, learning, organising.
Over a hundred years ago, a real labour leader – as opposed to Malinauskus – Joe Hill, was executed. Famously, he said ‘don’t mourn, organise.’
Nine days ago we stood here, chanting “stop the chop.” Today we are chanting “stop the chop – never again”.
Today I say to you, do mourn, but then organise. Grow, learn, organise, and, a year from now, we can be winning.