GLOBAL CLIMATE STRIKE: FROM PROTEST TO POWER?
"Climate justice advocates enthusiastically report that the recent Global Climate Strike involved 7.6 million people in 6,500 events that took place in 185 countries, supported by 8,500 websites, 3,000 companies, and 73 trade unions. Behind the headlines is this fact: with the exception of Morocco, no country in the world is complying with its Paris Climate Accord commitment, and the U.S. has dropped out of the international agreement.
There is undoubtedly a climate justice movement, especially among young people who will pay the highest price for failure to heed nature. Times of social movement are times of hope, great excitement at new possibilities, and times when hopes are dashed and disenchanted participants return, now more cynical than they were before, to business-as-usual lives. If this movement unfolds on what appears to be its present course, will it be sufficient to meet the task at hand?
In his new musical, The Moment Was Now, playwright/organizer Gene Bruskin has Frederick Douglass convening a meeting of four major post-Civil War Reconstruction era leaders: women’s suffrage and, less known, union organizer Susan B Anthony, African-American abolitionist and suffragette poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “Colored” national labor union organizer Isaac Myers and William Sylvis, president of the National Labor Union. Lurking in the background is robber baron Jay Gould who says, “I can hire one half of you to shoot the other half down”. Douglass gives the foursome a mandate:
So I have come to the conclusion
That I must bring together
The people who can unite our great movements
Before it is too late
To create a plan for massive foment
In the moment,
For moments come and movements pass
But moments don’t last forever
And we cannot freeze them
If we do not seize them.
The four failed. Black people and the country continue to pay a price. There are exceptions to this pattern. They deserve careful study: recall George Santayana’s admonition “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
The Protest Cycle
The international protest pattern for the past 50 or more years has more-or-less been this: large numbers of enthusiastic people amass in visible places. They may or may not nonviolently disrupt business as usual. Extensive media coverage makes their story THE STORY for a few days, weeks, or, in the best of circumstances, months. Social media buzz with exchanges among the committed, interested and curious. Concessions are won, though some are more symbolic than substantive, but the basic goals of the protestors are not accomplished.
Self-defined realists among them argue for entry into electoral politics. Some of them win elective office. But they are not majorities. In parliamentary systems, they enter into often-unusual coalitions to form a government—in exchange for control of a department whose jurisdiction addresses matters particularly of interest to them. But this body lacks authority to really solve the problem. In the U.S. and systems similar to it, they become permanent minorities in legislative bodies.
In either case, they are limited to tinkering at the edges of the problem. They are coopted.
Self-defined radicals among them argue for disruptive (or more disruptive) direct action, and sometimes include destruction of property and throwing bricks and stones at police among their tactics. Many supporters are not ready to go that far, especially because the actions may entail arrest. Resistance to change is met by escalating tactics that lead more initial supporters to drop out.
Most initial participants return to their normal lives, their initial view that “the system” doesn’t respond—temporarily held in abeyance because of some dramatic incident or extraordinarily persuasive message—is reconfirmed.
A downward cycle falls into place. The activists are marginalized.
From Protest To Power
The positive and purposeful energy of protest must be organized to avoid the twin dangers of cooptation and marginalization. What might that look like? A product-targeted boycott aimed at a specific corporation with a demand that it be withdrawn from the market according to a timeline negotiated between the boycott organization and the producing corporation can serve to illustrate. (Alternative campaigns might be political—aimed at electing a candidate or candidates, passing legislation, or tightening or implementing regulations, and would have the same specific character.). . ."
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