“This summer’s extremes have left a lot of people frightened and angry. That feeling needs somewhere to go.
Hope the coming months bring a new wave of #Climate mobilisation, so politicians finally feel the heat over their inaction! “
My reply
“We need actual movement building, not just constant mobilisations”
So what IS “Actual Movement Building” (AMB) and how is it helped and how is it hindered by “constant mobilisations”? There’s other work I should be doing (should have been doing for ages), so this will necessarily be brief.
What is a social movement?
For me, it is a network (thick multiple links) made up of individuals and groups all trying to move society (inc culture, politics, economics) in a certain direction. These individuals and groups have got knowledge (that they need – who has the power, what events/decisions are coming up etc) and skills (group maintenance etc) that matter, and know how to share their skills etc.
N.B. A “movement” is NOT a single organisation, no matter how big and gaudy its brand might be at a given time. (Yes, looking at you, “Extinction Rebellion” and all the people who glugged the Kool-Aid, who really ought to know better but were drunk on a momentary sense of relevance.)
What is “actual movement building”?
AMB is about strengthening yourself (more skills, more knowledge, more relationships), the groups you are part of (skills audit and plugging gaps [HOLDING DECENT MEETINGS, for example. Sorry for shouting, [not sorry]), minimising your group’s pathologies around recruitment and retention) and ALSO undertaking “services for the movement” – offering practical help, advice, constructive critique, encouragement, introducing individuals and groups to each other, etc etc.
Crucially, this takes willingness to face up to past and present failures. It can’t happen if you can’t or won’t see what is missing (as per James Baldwin – “not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced”).
All of this requires us to take the harder road, away from (only doing) the big symbolic spectacular stuff that gives a sugar rush and cooks your pancreas.
What does AMB require?
Time (which we don’t have, won’t have)
Expertise (which we don’t have, won’t have)
Space (“third spaces” where people can get together and think. NGOs sometimes have these, but in my experience expect the best part of the meeting to be taken up bending the knee to them).
Intellectual courage (which we seem to have as individuals, but not in collectives, not once we start policing each other.)
People willing to step beyond their “guard rails”, and with the understanding that there are bad ways to organise/act.
Other actors not deliberately getting in the way to fuck shit up. (they will always be there, always determined to stop progressive movements by any means necessary, from smears and demoralisation through harassment to all forms of violence.)
What are the barriers to AMB?
There are many barriers, but time and attention are short, so I will stick to three.
- There are easier ways to feel “impactful”
We have an easier way of meeting our psychological needs – by doing the things that we know how to do – marches, petitions, camps, getting arrested – because we know how to do them (smugosphere).
Keeping on doing the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.
The problem with constant mobilisations is that it’s like being on a fucking hamster wheel. Round and round, never actually getting anywhere, but jacking up on short-term hopium.
- We don’t want to look into past failures. We just don’t. ESPECIALLY when we both should and COULD have acted differently back when it might have mattered..
“It’s a sad story, hard to tell —
Which one of us likes to talk about his failures?
I’ll tell the truth and nothing but the truth,
For if one does fail, there’s a touch of glory
In having tried at all.”
Book 9 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses “Achelous and Hercules”
Yes, but there’s not any touch of glory in doing the same thing over and over again when you know it is not going to work. And there is no glory at all in chiding people who point this out as “doomers” (looking at you, Julia).
- The field is “stable” and the costs of new entrants – both organisations and repertoire of behaviour are prohibitively high.
See what happened to XR, when it tried to contest the Greenpeace-FoE duopoly!
More Fundamental Attribution Error-ly, the people “in charge” don’t have the willingness (ability?) or incentive to take a look at themselves and their organisations (see my blog post Cher, incentive structures and our inevitable doom, especially for the Carl Rogers at the end.)
To those who think we can break these chains, I ask who is the Agent of Change, the Modern Prince who are supposed to do this movement building?
“Established” activists, who know how the game is played and are winning at it. They can’t even see the need for innovation.
Burnout out/super-annuated activists who got out/were pushed out? Why? Where is their energy coming from, their credibility?
The utter newbies who don’t know what’s been tried, are new to everything and have no hinterland, who is taking their cue from the established activists?
The Alien “Activist Adjudicators” from Sigma IX? They don’t exist.
What is to be done?
Fucked if I know.
I have some various answers to the “little” stuff (how to hold meetings, how to hold film showings etc), but in terms of building and sustaining mass movements that avoid being co-opted, repressed, exhausted as we stare down both barrels of a loaded shotgun when Mother Nature has an understandably itchy trigger finger? Nah, that one is beyond me. But, you know, pay me some money for food and books, and I might come up with something.
UPDATE – this doggerel.
We have a stable “greenie” system
With grooves and habits: we can’t resist ’em
These repertoires are then repeated
The acts of those again defeated
But who will break these ancient chains?
It won’t be those receiving gains
Not those aware of rules of t’game
With jobs, or niche, or minor fame.
Nor those who fled the field of battle
With wounds and runes and grim death rattle
Nor those who fear we cannot change
Those regarded old or wrong or strange
Nor those who landed just last week
With vim, and on a winning streak
And rightly leery of gramp’s advices
When gramps’s failures brought us crises
We never learn: the State keeps tabs
The future once was up for grabs
It’s crumbling, broiling; the owl will hoot
And on our face – here comes the boot
Further Reading
“2019: How we blew it, again | Peace News “ (written in 2017)
“Dear new Climate Activist.” (written in 2018)
The costs of collusion with activist bullshit and hype cycles (written in 2017)
Mobilisation “versus” Movement Building | (written in 2011)
Movement-building: Insulin and unlocking energy (written in 2012)
