Category: Social Movements

Categories
Smugosphere Social Movements

“Like a Keystone around our necks…” On the responsibilities of large organisations within social movements

Ten days ago I went to the latest in a long long line of excruciating activist events (1).  I wrote a cathartic blogpost which was liked by about half the people who read it (i.e. it was liked by two people). 

Catharsis is fine, but then the question comes up – what should we expect of big organisations that act (whether they understand that or not) as a Keystone Species (2)?  

Before you say, yes, I know that it is dodgy af to import ideas from biology/ecology into discussions of human activities, but hey, a) we all do it and b) life is short – so here goes.

Keystone species have a ‘disproportionate’ role in the shape/size/day-to-day actions of the ecosystem they function within. Not ‘deliberately’, because (most) creatures don’t (most of the time) have intention beyond eating/avoiding being eaten/fucking.  But if you have enough of the keystone members, then they create a kind of dynamic stability (3).

So, there used to be a phrase (perhaps still is?) “check your privilege” , which sought to remind people that they often walked around with advantages that shaped the social interactions they took part in (4). Anyway, privilege applies not just to us white able-bodied middle-class hetero men but also to organisations.  If you are a big outfit, that has been around a long time, and has got a media profile you have a kind of  ‘heft’, a kind of – well, privilege. Crucially, you may not feel this, because there are always budget worries, always policybattles you are losing because you are outnumbered and outgunned by the lobbyists for the EFTAs (Evil Fuckers Trade Association). You are always being smeared by stenographers to power in the right-wing press. It doesn’t FEEL like privilege, but then that’s the point – it never does.

So, after a decade and a half  of having seen these Big Outfits put together various events and claim to be “building a movement” while absolutely failing to do so, I’ve grown a little cynical (see also “smugosphere”, the smugotariat, “emotacycle”, “ego-fodder”, “potemkinclusivity”, Sophisticated Hopium Ignoring Trajectories, etc).

The purpose of this blog post is to outline five things Big Outfits could do to be better keystone species.  I am not expecting any of this to happen (see below). If two of the five happened, that would be quite amazing. I reckon if four of these happened, it would be transformative within that Big Outfit’s wider ecosystem (while still, obvs, merely being deckchairs-on-the-Titanic of a global ecosystem being apocalypsed by hairless murder apes with opposable thumbs).

So, drum-roll please.

  1. Set a good example

Obvious, huh? In practice this means –  

  • Start meetings on time. Nothing screams “unserious hippy” like unexplained delays to start-times, especially if you then cry off the advertised activities because of “lack of time.”
  • Don’t waste time with endless blandishments and self-promotions. If you have specific information to impart then a) the internet and b) some dead-tree format leaflets for those who don’t use the internet.
  • Keep your promises (so, to choose an example entirely at random, if you advertise something as a Q&A, then do a Q&A. This is not rocket-science
  • Avoid cringe displays of emotional virtue-signalling.  Especially in situations where first nations peoples are being shat on from a great height. 
  • I could go on. But the apocalypse is at hand.
  1. Convene (for weak ties)

“The less I say, the more my work gets done” Philadelphia Freedom.

Make sure that when you create an event, you are making it easy for new relationships to form, for new “weak ties” (as per Granovetter) to form.

That is to say, make it possible for various individuals to find each other on the basis of their shared interests, age, geography.

Obviously there are dangers here which need managing.  Women, especially, will worry about being compelled to engage with strangers (esp male) who may then get the wrong idea.  If you open a space for these relationships to form, you also run the risk of various political sects and groupuscules to try to recruit during your events. These are not, however, insurmountable difficulties. 

 Big Outfits could lead by example (see above) by designing events so that they are not (always) the goddam centre of attention, sucking up all the oxygen and attention. They could keep comments by their staff and guests to a reasonable length and then then implement the design effectively (there’s no point designing an event and then – because of the lack of skill/awareness of the facilitator/compere – you revert to the bullshit).

So, for example, between the end of speeches at a Q&A and opening the floor to questions you could give people two minutes to compare notes/hone questions etc and then ‘accidentally’ select some – gasp – women to ask two of the first three questions.

“Meetings are institutionally sexist”; discuss. (White-knighting by #Manchester #climate bloke)

There is also a crying need for structured skill-audits and skillshare events, so that people who have skills can share them with people who want them, and organisations that realise they have either a single-point-of-failure or an absolute gap can get help to plug those gaps.

Social Movement Learning: Partisan Collective and “Activist Skills and Knowledge”
  1. Innovate

Big organisations could investigate/invent/borrow/steal ideas for better events (marches, rallies, meetings etc) and test them out. Big organisations are more likely to be able to take people a little bit outside their comfort zones.

This would require some courage (not selected for within most formal organisations, obviously)  but would set the tone – that responsible innovation is essential.

  1. Remember the past

We live in a perpetual present, where the lessons of yesterday are forgotten, and ancient victories (the fucking Franklin Dam? Really? Invoking that in 2026? WTAF) are stripped of their context and turned into myths.

Part of the problem for social movements is that so much of what happens is never recorded, or recorded and then lost.  Memories shift, fade, and useful tactics and tools have to be endlessly re-invented.  Big Organisations could at least try to be a repository for broader memory work.


There are costs (not-insurmountable) and dangers, but without memory we are living in Punxsutawney without remembering the day before. That ain’t no comedy, it’s a tragedy.

Practically – this could mean digitising old posters and content, doing periodic oral history interviews. These may not hit the dizzying heights of ‘academic’ practice, but srsly, who gives a damn – is it USEFUL?

  1. Help people and small organisations think about the future(s)

Big Organisations could do better “horizon scanning” for the current trends, so that smaller groups/individuals get the opportunity to think strategically.

Periodic workshops involving scenarios, role-plays etc.  Yes, most of the people who come will be the usual suspects, but not all of them, and in any case, skills and knowledge can percolate.

See here – 

https://peacenews.info/node/8767/2019-how-we-blew-it-again

CEM says – What’s going on, what’s going wrong (and why), and what is to be done?

These – and it isn’t an exhaustive list – all these amount to “services to the movement.” 

They are things that individuals and small organisations struggle with (or don’t even try to do). 

What “we” – as social movements/civil society/a species killing itself –  require is a) the repeal of some laws (mostly laws of physics) and

b) Big Outfits within the “movement” to do things that the smaller organisations – and individuals – can’t do.  If they don’t do them, then these things won’t get done and you don’t have a movement, just a bunch of Brownian motion billiard balls, going nowhere fast. 

The problem is – well, imma just quote myself:

It comes down to what your definition of “movement” is.  

If you believe, as Adam Bandt and his colleagues seem to, that a movement is a bunch of people from a Big Organisation, jetting in from their HQ and standing on a stage, offering “hope,” authenticity and validation to ranks of people who are sat mutely in rows, wanting their (begging) bowls filled up, then Friday was another success in a long line of successes.

If you believe, as I and a few (many?) other people do, that a movement is made up of individuals, small groups, large groups, pulling mostly in the same direction, as frenemies, helping each other out, learning from each other, sharing ideas and resources, then Friday night was another catastrophic shit-show/missed opportunity in a world that can’t afford any more missed opportunities.

What is to be done?

They (the Big Outfits) are not going to do any of this themselves. There is no money in it, it’s not in their direct short-term interest, and those running the show have built careers on being on the stage doing the right talking and public displays of emoting.  


There’s a hole in my movement, dear Liza.

So, if we want these big organisations to act as decent keystone species, then sorry, but it has to be persistently and insistently EXPECTED of them.  Publicly.  (I know, I know,  “activism about activism” – as if we have time for this shit… But also, as if we can get anywhere useful without this shit. We truly are caught in a trap…)

Apply what pressure you can. Explain that you will not be participating in ego-fodder events. Privately – and publicly – call out exploitative and extractive behaviour by Big Outfits. Offer practical suggestions – training, etc etc – for how to do things better.

But dammit, this is so hard. Knowing that everything is falling about. That no matter what we do, Punxusatawney is getting warmer. 

None of this will happen.  It is a stupid fantasy. We are all going to die horrible premature deaths. Oh well.

Footnotes

  1. Living where I normally do, I don’t have many opportunities for “hate attending” (a variation on hate-following).

(2) As per wikipedia –

A keystone species is a species that has a disproportionately large effect on its natural environment relative to its abundance. The concept was introduced in 1969 by the zoologist Robert T. Paine. Keystone species play a critical role in maintaining the structure of an ecological community, affecting many other organisms in an ecosystem and helping to determine the types and numbers of various other species in the community. Without keystone species, the ecosystem would be dramatically different or cease to exist altogether. Some keystone species, such as the wolf and lion, are also apex predators.

The role that a keystone species plays in its ecosystem is analogous to the role of a keystone in an arch. While the keystone is under the least pressure of any of the stones in an arch, the arch still collapses without it. Similarly, an ecosystem may experience a dramatic shift if a keystone species is removed, even though that species was a small part of the ecosystem by measures of biomass or productivity. It became a popular concept in conservation biology, alongside flagship and umbrella species. Although the concept is valued as a descriptor for particularly strong inter-species interactions, and has allowed easier communication between ecologists and conservation policy-makers, it has been criticized for oversimplifying complex ecological systems.

NB These should NOT be confused with foundation species. Thanks to HS for the distinction, which I will try to follow-up in a different post.

(3) If we’re abusing ecology (and clearly I am) we could argue that civil society organisations have become “functionally extinct” after 45 years of neoliberalism.  That is, there are still isolated shell-shocked individuals staggering around, but they don’t “do” the things they used to. But that’s another blog post.

(4) At which point, as a white hetero able-bodied man I can say “I did, it’s still there, and it’s fabulous!”). 

(5) Very non-complete list of blog posts about this here – 

Categories
Australia Social Movements

June 16, 1971 – “Ecology Action” formed in Sydney.

On this day (ish) in 1971, “Ecology Action” was formed in Sydney. There had been a series of campaigns about specific patches of nature that were about to be bulldozed or mined etc, and well, people decided to get together to take action on Ecology.

________________________________________

Ecology body is formed

SYDNEY : Ecology Action has been formed recently here by people wanting to “take action to prevent irreversible destruction of life on earth.”

It is working closely with the Society for Social Responsibility in Science (SRS) and other conservationist and anti-pollution groups. Ecology Action is calling a meeting tonight (Wednesday June 16) at 7.30 pm, at the Stephen Roberts Theatre, Sydney University, to hear Dr. Stephen Boyden of the ANU speak and to discuss action proposed by Ecology Action. Ecology Action, with SRS and the National Trust is holding a meeting on June 28, at the Sydney Town Hall at 8 pm to discuss and protest the proposed Clutha development on NSW South Coast. Ecology Action’s address is Box K404, P.O., Haymarket, NSW, 2000.

Tribune, Wednesday 16 June 1971, page 12

Except, well, it was about a month earlier – see this from The Bulletin, near the other end of the political spectrum (Tribune was communist).

Why this matters. 

We’ve been here before! Repeatedly. And see below…

What happened next?

Ecology Action lasted until about 1980.  I’ve looked at the material in the National Library – newsletters and so on.  Climate is not mentioned (and understandably so – still too abstract) but it seems there was the usual pattern of a few committed folks begging others to get involved… And then, well, it just fizzled out, I think.  I don’t know for sure. That is NOT a criticism of those involved. I am sure they spent countless hours trying to slow down the apocalypse. And here we are.

Categories
Australia Social Movements Unsolicited advice

Feb 3, 2009 –  Physical encirclement of parliament easier than ideological or political. #auspol

On this day, in 2009, at the climax of their three day Climate Action Summit, protesters linked arms around Parliament House in Canberra. Climate activism had exploded in 2006 in Australia, with everything from marches to, in the following years, direct action attempts to prevent the export of coal from Newcastle. Activist group Rising Tide had held climate camps and with the new Rudd Government talking about climate action, the time seemed ripe with promise. 

However, by the end of 2008, it was obvious that the Labour government which had promised so much was going to deliver at best, very, very little. Activists had interrupted Rudd’s National Press Club presentation at the end of 2008. And economist Ross Garneau had denounced Rudd’s “carbon pollution reduction scheme” with the words “Never in the history of Australian public finance has so much been given without public policy purpose, by so many, to so few,”

So 2009 looked like it was going to be the year when citizens said enough. However, it was not to be. Protest movements struggle, once an issue is on the agenda, because many who would otherwise support it, say, “you’ve got to give the process time, you’ve got to see what emerges.” This, of course, plays into the hands of incumbents who know very well how to slow things down, how to sideline proposals, how to water down commitments, how to demand extensions, and special treatment.  If the insurgents don’t have a class interest that binds them together, they are even more vulnerable…

And of course, this was all happening in the middle of the global financial crisis. (But there is always some reason not to act on a long term problem, like climate change.) 

Why this matters? 

We need to understand that you can physically, symbolically encircle a parliament but actually restricting the ability of elected politicians to weasel out and to water down is a much tougher proposition requiring different skills, different capacities. 

What happened next?

Rudd’s CPRS failed to get through Parliament early in 2000. And in mid 2009, and failed again, in December of that year, when the Liberals revolted, the Greens refused to support it. And the rest of the story is horrible. But we know that.

See also

Greenpeace summary

Categories
Environmental Racism, Guest post Social Movements

Environmental Racism – then and now… Guest post by @SakshiAravind

Sakshi Aravind is a PhD student at University of Cambridge. (see her review of Andreas Malm’s book “How to blow up a pipeline” here, and see an interview here) reflects on the 32 years since this-

1990 Shabecoff, P. 1990. Environmental Groups Told They Are Racists in Hiring. New York Times, 1 February. WASHINGTON, Jan. 31— Several members of civil rights and minority groups have written to eight major national environmental organizations charging them with racism in their hiring practices

After thirty-two years, it is a small relief that we do not have to write letters about discriminatory hiring practices in environmental organisations. We have traversed some distance. Let us make past this momentary sense of satisfaction. We can sit down for a hard-headed debriefing about whether this ‘distance’ was noticeably significant in any particular direction or just self-congratulatory posturing about having made it past our front yards. Since I am writing about a small but exceedingly significant letter written in the year I was born, I cannot dismiss all that peoples’ persistence has achieved in these years. The concept of ‘environmental justice’ has found a strong foothold and bided its time in the social, political, and juridical spheres. Social movements for environmental justice, fair and equitable environmental policies, and opportunities for democratic participation are very vibrant. The environmental organisations do not have visible and impenetrable walls obstructing BIPOC members. The phrases ‘diversity’ and ‘equality’ seem boundlessly desired even by vampiric corporations. While it is easy to pin down ‘what changed’, ‘what did not’ is worrying. What have we done with the achievements, transformations, and progresses of the last 32 years as the nature of planetary collapse worsens?

When the racist hiring practices were seemingly remedied, how did the people responsible for those changes define the problem? What did they imagine they were solving when they hired a more representative workforce and opened their membership for all? It is important to document and assess the changes we have witnessed in the last three decades to classify what problems are fully addressed and what others have shapeshifted into another version of themselves. Whilst environmental movements and groups appear to be more representative, ‘representation’ does not fill the shoes of ‘recognition’. Even ‘recognition’ can be a lopsided concept if it is not constructive and does not allow for a plurality of voices across race, class, gender, etc. The big question of what changed between then and now should be: whether the change of heart in environmentalism confronted the entrenched whiteness (and consequently coloniality) that underlies the collective understanding of environmental injustices, policy choices, and the general direction of environmental movements. The problem of racism and coloniality in environmental movements is also structural. Hence, cosmetic changes in representation can only have incremental benefits and not the epistemic shift we need to counter the rapid destruction of the planet. Mercifully, we did not regress. However, environmental organisations also did not build on their knowledge on a required scale. There are no visible and invisible forms of environmental racism and environmental colonialism. There are either visible aspects that are hard to deny or the aspects that are wilfully ignored and diminished without any accountability—through entrenched knowledge and epistemologies that are vital to the sustenance and reproduction of colonial, white supremacist, capitalist nations.      

If environmental movements and organisations had understood how ‘spaces’ (emphasis on structures as opposed to a handful of institutions) exclude BIPOC workers, activists, members, and environmentalisms, our responsibilities at the moment would have been lighter despite the number of challenges regarding environmental destruction and climate change. Something as simple as how wilderness is defined, what opportunities are available to benefit from the environment—even simple pleasures such as birdwatching—and what autonomy does BIPOC have on controlling and governing land, natural resources are steeped in relationships of expropriation and elimination. Therefore, it is still easy to please many people with Don’t Look Up as if it were the pinnacle of artistic expression. At the same time, Global South prepares for the worst of climate crises that have been building up due to imperialist plunder. In 1990, they were concerned about the absence of People of Colour in key organisations. Now, we are concerned about the absence of constructive voices that would define climate change as anything but a specific event; dismantle structures of accumulation, theft, and exploitation; demand reparations and imagine world-making practices in terms of kinship, care, cooperation, and justice.

If we think long and hard, a lot changed for the good. Nevertheless, the ways in which environmental injustices have been defined are still largely in the clutches of those who command the resources—social, political, capital et al. Effectively, the epistemic resources need redistribution along with material redistribution. Moreover, epistemic justice must follow environmental justice close at hand. Meanwhile, we keep writing and conversing in the hope that we might have done a little more towards the things we care for than what we inherited thirty years later.