Copenhagen and the climate justice movement

Really interesting analysis from the youth climate movement blog "It's getting hot in here" about the outcome of the Copenhagen conference for the broader international climate justice movement and how to proceed:

Despite the 0 that our leaders handed over, Copenhagen was a triumph for our movement. It provided a focal moment, a frame through which we could explain to each other and to the global public the clear moral argument for taking action on climate change. Most polling data shows that we were incredibly successful in doing so, but a better measure of how large and powerful the movement has become is how much we shaped the narrative of the negotiations.
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2010 must be a year of deepening commitment, honest reassessment and continued collaborative action. This is no time to be distracted by internal politics, organizational ego or incrementalism. We must find out what works, leave behind what doesn’t, and provide resources and support to each other to get the job done.

Finally, 2010 must be the year when mutual trust and love ensure that moral voices from across the climate movement — from the most vulnerable countries to faith leaders, from youth activists to senior citizens — resound worldwide. Only by forming truly loving relationships with each other, across boundaries of race, sex, class, language and religion will we build a movement strong enough to usher in a new era of clean energy prosperity.

Learning from social movements of the past

Great article called "The Commons Wasn't Born Yesterday" about the Farmer-Labor social movement in Minnesota during the Great Depression (which I knew little about) and how their struggle for a Cooperative Commonwealth applies to the present:

Social movements develop in the space between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. Movements are rooted in the present and stretch out to fashion an alternative future. But the present itself is deeply influenced by the past. In the 1930’s capitalism had failed. The Cooperative Commonwealth vision offered a view—though hardly a road map—to one version of that alternative future. The New Deal welfare state became that alternative future. In promoting the common wealth, Farmer-Laborites helped create something more modest; a state political culture which featured (in U.S. terms at least) an unusually strong emphasis on the common good.

Today we are facing another crises in the system. The neo-conservative drive to “enclose” just about everything has radically weakened public institutions, threatened our common natural resources and damaged our economy. The crisis is both structural and ideological. We need to think and act anew. The Farmer-Labor movement engaged thousands in re-thinking their social world and acting to create a new world. How did they do it? What can reflection on this—and many other social movements—teach us about the dynamics and patterns of movement building.

I think the author makes a great point that what we can learn from this social movement and other previous movements is how they visualized a better world and a coherent alternative to the current grim reality. But more importantly with such lofty visions, how do we put them into action through politics and institution building on the local level. I believe this must be part of any activism responding to the current terrible economy we are suffering through. We can't just settle for band-aid solutions and regulations for the problems that can be revoked and manipulated later. This terrible downturn is the product of 30 years of right wing ideological ascendancy in politics and culture that has warped our collective sense of common good to serve corporate and upper class interests while causing a decline in standards of living for many others in the US.

To challenge and change this, we need a coherent alternative that only a strong, grassroots social movement can bring about. Alternatives not only in terms of policy proposals, but also in terms of how we visualize a better world that can capture the collective imagination. This was true of the vision of a "cooperative commonwealth" that animated and drove the farmer-labor movement as the author put it:

The cooperative commonwealth was a powerfully evocative phrase. Like the commons itself, it was suggestive, but not definitive. The worldview it conjured was roomy—a big tent that could hold working class socialists, urban progressives, rural populists.

It is up to us to do that:

As a writer for the Farmer-Labor Leader put it back in 1936, “Don’t envy the old timers who got their experience in building the foundations of the movement. Get in yourself for the building that is ahead.”