"Soul of a Citizen"- individual effort and structural problems

This excerpt from "Soul of a Citizen" by Paul Loeb which attempts to reconcile individual volunteerism and collection action for social change really gets at an important issue of activism:

"Indeed, the best responses to many of our society's ills may be local and decentralized, drawing on such spiritual virtues as love, generosity, a willingness to listen, and the capacity to see a divine spark in even the most desperate and self-destructive of our fellow human beings...

[But] To rely on volunteer efforts is to duck the basic issue of common responsibility, and to ignore the fact that individual crises often result from collective forces."

But as Loeb points out, the impact of individual action and service is limited without considering the bigger picture:

I've seen too many compassionate individuals trying to stem rivers of need, while national political and economic leaders have opened the floodgates to widen them. We build five houses with Habitat for Humanity, while escalating rents and government cutbacks throw a hundred families into the street. We laboriously restore a single stream while a timber company clear-cuts a watershed or global climate change turns once-fertile agricultural land into desert. As the late Reverend William Sloane Coffin once said, "Charity must not be allowed to go bail for justice."

Whats important is understanding the root cause of societal issues and how individual actions can be maximized to address and change that. This means linking individual actions towards achieving structural solutions.

But unfortunately individual volunteerism and acts of charity is so often lionized in the media and in politics rather than citizen political engagement and collective action to achieve structural change as a solution to societal problems. The most obvious example of this is Martin Luther King jr. whose radical legacy of challenging powerful forces in American society has been thoroughly sanitized and replaced by the media as a non-confrontational "black Santa Claus" . This has been further institutionalized by our government by making the observed federal holiday of MLK Jr. Day a "Day of Service" of promoting individual volunteerism in honor of his memory.

Community radio and social change in Haiti

I found this interview with Sony Esteus, director of society for social mobilization and communication, talking about the importance of community radio as a tool for social change in Haiti really interesting. It's something activists in the US should learn from. Here's a portion of it:

"For us, community and popular radio isn't an end in itself. It's part of a global plan of social change, of transformation of the society. We're going to continue to do popular education to change the mentality and behavior of people, as well as to denounce what's being done against the people today. As we move forward, we want to help people understand how to organize themselves and also how to fight the projects now underway, which are going to reinforce their poverty."

We need more than just the failed Air America experiment. We need a grassroots, social justice oriented media that speaks to the issues and concerns of ordinary citizens as well how to combat. Instead we have the right wing media machine which peddles in fear mongering, intolerance and militarism draped in the language of populism and patriotism.

Climate Ground Zero and a recent 9 day sit-in in the Coal River Mountain

Climate Ground Zero which describes itself as "not another environmental organization" but rather "an ongoing campaign of non-violent civil disobedience in southern West Virginia to address mountaintop removal coal mining and its effects on our future" has pushed the fight for climate justice directly at the source of the problem. This a press release from their most recent direct action:

"PETTUS, WVa—After blocking Massey Energy’s operations on the Bee Tree Permit for nine days, Amber Nitchman, 19, and Eric Blevins, 28 descended from their respective trees. They had occupied the two oak trees—originally accompanied by a third tree sitter, David Aaron Smith, 23—to protest mountaintop removal and the blasting of Coal River Mountain. Upon descent, they were immediately arrested by West Virginia State Troopers. The sitters’ decision to leave the trees was made in light of the recent drop in temperature.

After a week of Massey security harassing the sitters with deafening sirens and air horns, a call-in pressure campaign was launched by Climate Ground Zero, Mountain Justice and other anti-mountaintop removal groups. The receipt of hundreds of calls from around the country led to an emergency meeting with Climate Ground Zero volunteers, the Raleigh County prosecutor and Governor Manchin. The meeting resulted in the moratorium and a call for an investigation of the abuse.

The tree sit represents Climate Ground Zero’s most sustained intervention in mountaintop removal mining operations since its campaign of nonviolent direct action began last February. Volunteers know that the fight is far from over and expect work to commence on the Bee Tree site immediately. However, they see this tree sit as a victory. “It halted blasting for nine days. I think they’ve wildly succeeded with their goals,” said Climate Ground Zero volunteer Mike Bowersox. In a final communication from her perch, Nitchman captured the group’s resolve. “Its not over until the blasting is stopped,” she said"

They are an inspirational organization that reminds me of the kind of work SNCC and the Freedom Riders of the civil rights movement engaged in in the South to defeat formal apartheid. They are building an organic movement in West Virginia to defeat the interests of the coal industry that has wreaked havoc on the region for decades and establish alternative energy sources and jobs for the people down there. This work is essential to putting pressure on our government to take the problems of coal and mountaintop removal seriously and put their weight behind pushing investment alternative, clean and sustainable energy that can help these communities in West Virginia. It is the fight of our generation!

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.
...

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.”

Personal political thought and organizing

I randomly stumbled on this blog entry "How to Think About Politics" by Ryan McCarl which I found interesting and worth posting, especially this excerpt:

Question yourself, your ideology, your vocabulary, and the beliefs behind your beliefs. And also question every overt and covert political statement, every candidate’s speech, every newspaper opinion column, every dinner-table rant, every historical narrative, and even every piece of art or literature. Politics touches everything and everything touches politics. Cultivate your awareness of the political dimension of the world, a dimension that is often hidden beneath the surface of things.

I agree with the author to a certain extent that critical thinking and self-education are important to developing one's political thought. What I believe he's missing is when political thought translate into action. It's great that you continually self-educate yourself on political issues ( I do regularly) but politics aren't simply an individual intellectual exercise. Local, state and federal politics effect our lives in numerous ways. We as citizens must be involved in shaping them towards our common good through organizing and activism or else only the big money interests will dominate our government and its policies. Thus one's political views are irrelevant if you don't do anything about them. It won't matter what you'd like to see happen, if you aren't willing to not only do something about it but reaching out to and motivating others as well to get involved. This is the essence of organizing, bringing people together around shared issues and mobilizing them, and the key to putting political thought into action.

Social movements and "reclaiming public values"

I found this article Reclaiming Public Values in the Age of Casino Capitalism by Henry Giroux really interesting. It speaks to the cultural challenges in the US facing progressive climate justice/green jobs, health care, economic justice/ financial reform activism that have sprouted in recent years in their efforts to create larger social movements. This part was especially poignant:

At this time of national crisis, we need to recognize that the current economic recession cannot be understood apart from the crisis of democracy itself. It is all the more crucial, therefore, to recognize in a post Gilded Age moment that those public spaces that traditionally have offered forums for debating norms, critically engaging ideas, making private issues public and evaluating judgments are disappearing under the juggernaut of free-market values, corporate power and intense lobbying pressure on the part of the country's most powerful financial institutions. Schools, universities, the media, and other aspects of the cultural education apparatus are being increasingly privatized or corporatized and removed from the discourse of the public good. Consequently, it becomes all the more crucial for educators, parents, social movements, and others to raise fundamental questions about what it means to revitalize a politics and ethics that takes seriously "such values as citizen participation, the public good, political obligation, social governance, and community."[2] The call for a revitalized politics grounded in an effective democracy substantively challenges the dystopian practices of the new culture of fear and neoliberalism - with their all-consuming emphasis on insecurity, market relations, commercialization, privatization and the creation of a worldwide economy of part-time workers - against their utopian promises. Such an intervention confronts Americans with the problem as well as challenge of developing those public spheres - such as the media, higher education, and other cultural institutions - that provide the conditions for creating citizens who are capable of exercising their freedoms, competent to question the basic assumptions that govern political life and skilled enough to participate in developing social movements that will enable them to shape the basic social, political and economic orders that govern their lives.