[P2P-F] Fwd: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: [WSF-Discuss] Challenging the radical critique of the People's Climate March: a different drummer does not alone a march make

Sun Oct 5 17:17:24 CEST 2014

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: peter waterman <peterwaterman1936 at gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Oct 5, 2014 at 9:35 PM
Subject: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: [WSF-Discuss] Challenging the radical
critique of the People's Climate March: a different drummer does not alone
a march make
To: networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org, "johnholloway at prodigy.net.mx" <
johnholloway at prodigy.net.mx>, Debate is a listserve that attempts to
promote information and analyses of interest to the independent left in
South and Southern Africa <debate-list at fahamu.org>

A lesson for us all?

P

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Brian K. Murphy <brian at radicalroad.com>
Date: Sun, Oct 5, 2014 at 4:13 PM
Subject: [WSF-Discuss] Challenging the radical critique of the People's
Climate March: a different drummer does not alone a march make
To: worldsocialforum-discuss at openspaceforum.net

 http://www.thenation.com/article/181799/whats-wrong-radical-critique
-peoples-climate-march#
*What's Wrong With the Radical Critique of the People's Climate March*
*The movement to stop climate change needs both mass mobilizations and
direct action.*
 by Jonathan Smucker and Michael Premo, September 30, 2014

Last Sunday, we joined 400,000 people in the People's Climate March (PCM)
to demand action on climate change. The next day, we joined with 3,000
others to participate in Flood Wall Street (FWS), disrupting business as
usual and naming capital as the chief culprit of climate change.

In the days leading up to these mobilizations, a few critics on the left
framed a stark dichotomy between these two kinds of actions. The PCM was
cast as a depoliticized, corporate-friendly sellout, in contrast to more
militant direct action, which Flood Wall Street soon emerged to organize.
Chris Hedges, for example, called the PCM "the last gasp of climate change
liberals," and argued that the real resistance would come afterward "from
those willing to breach police barricades." Resistance, according to
Hedges, can only be effective "when we turn from a liberal agenda of reform
to embrace a radical agenda of revolt." Likewise, Arun Gupta accused PCM of
spending too much money on subway advertisements and wondered how much
political value a march can have when mainstream politicians and other
elites felt comfortable enough to march in it.

Surely there are critiques to be made of last week's mobilization-there is
always room for improvement. But last Sunday's march was an important step
toward building a popular movement for climate justice, which, in turn, is
a necessary condition for more radical actions-like the ones FWS organized.
The dichotomy between the PCM and FWS is a false one. What the world saw
last week in New York was a vibrant movement ecosystem in which a broad
mobilization and its radical edges engaged in a critical interplay.

What Hedges overlooks is how easily direct acts of revolt can be dismissed
or repressed, if they are carried out by a small number of people who are
not visibly tied to a broader social base. This is why Flood Wall Street's
mobilization in relation to the PCM was so vital. To grasp this
relationship requires us to shed the dichotomous thinking that pits this
vs. that and us vs. them-too often extended to even our closest allies-and
that limits our options to the absurdity of a multiple choice test.

Even if we are partial to the escalated tactics of Flood Wall Street, it is
clear that the efforts and resources that poured into the PCM literally set
the stage for a radical edge to then move further. Leading the radical edge
was the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), a collaborative of more than
thirty-five community-based and movement support organizations uniting
front-line communities. CJA put out a call to action that accomplished
several important things.

*First,* it inserted a deeper structural analysis into the mobilization,
both naming corporate profit and power as culprit and articulating how
different communities-indigenous peoples, people of color and working-class
whites, for example-are disproportionately impacted.* Second,* CJA called
for nonviolent tactical escalation. Indeed, Flood Wall Street was initiated
in response to this call.* Third,* the call helped build Sunday's massive
march by encouraging CJA's social bases and allies to attend the march and
organize delegations. By insisting that the people who are affected by the
climate crisis should be involved in the solutions, CJA positively altered
the composition, framing, and narrative of the march.

Rather than position itself as an outsider in relation to the broader
mobilization-which was being organized primarily by 350.org, Avaaz and the
New York City Host Committee, which included a network of labor, economic
and environmental justice organizations-CJA positioned itself as a left
pole that pulled the larger mobilization in its direction. Later, FWS
positioned itself similarly-not as "the most radical kid on the block," but
as a complementary operation that had something important to contribute to
the larger effort.

Radicals who are serious about political change-and not just engaging in
self-righteous sideline critique-would be wise to learn from CJA and FWS's
strategy here. CJA added capacity to the broader efforts and both groups
constituted a left pole that pulled a broader base toward a more visionary
direction. The Climate Justice Alliance brought perspectives, participation
and leadership from frontline communities that had been lacking in the more
mainstream climate movement. And Flood Wall Street brought tactical
innovation, cultural creativity, smart political targeting, and a
willingness to take risks.

Having the most radical-sounding solutions in the world is all for naught
if those solutions are only believed by a relatively small number of
self-identifying radicals. We have to engage broader social bases by
meeting new participants at the on-ramps by which they initially enter into
collective action. The PCM provided such an on-ramp to many thousands of
newcomers.

Those of us who identify with the left end of the progressive spectrum need
to be honest with ourselves about our current lack of capacity for building
such on-ramps on our own. If we want to move more people in a radical
direction-to fundamentally reengineer the roots of a broken system-it
behooves us to build and maintain good relationships with organizations
that have more resources and a greater reach, even if they do not share all
of our politics. The left of the left spectrum has to muster the courage
and savvy to enter into alignments that are too big for us to be able to
control.

The dead-end alternative is for radicals to work only with other
radicals-and to remain stuck in a story of the righteous few, whose
protagonists bravely fight the good fight but always lose. Part of our
trouble is that we are at the end of a decades-long period of fragmentation
and decline in the broad social justice left. Some on the left have become
so accustomed to powerlessness that they have become attached to it.
Success itself becomes suspect, and politics becomes framed only in terms
of expressing values and making righteous stands-instead of as intervention
in the terrain of power. Accustomed to the margins, we can have a hard time
recognizing how many of our ideas have actually become popular.

This is not to say that radicals should not push. But if radicals find the
plans for big marches limited and constrained, the most constructive push
we can make is to plan a complement to the action that adds the things we
see as lacking. This has to be done with strategy, principle and loving
care; with the knowledge that autonomous actions will impact the whole
mobilization, one way or another-with potentially negative outcomes. This
is why Flood Wall Street insisted upon clear action agreements to guide its
nonviolent civil disobedience on Monday. And this is why both CJA and FWS
engaged in principled open communication with all organizational partners
throughout the mobilization.

The emergent climate justice movement is stronger now because of the
People's Climate March, the Climate Justice Alliance and Flood Wall
Street-and because of the overall positive interplay between these
complementary efforts. Around the world a growing network of communities is
embracing a multi-pronged strategy to challenge the powers that are pushing
our planet to the brink. Such a strategy has to tap into a
broad-and-growing base of support, and it also has to be willing to turn up
the heat and disrupt business as usual. Such an alignment will, of course,
be full of challenges. But these are good challenges to have. Let us lean
into them together.

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