Questionnaire for climate event
OK, so what would YOU add (or take away) from this survey. The idea is to give it to the “audience” at events. The idea would be to use the information to try to pull ourselves out of the Smugosphere, and to provide useful information/training to people…
[PS If you like it, please steal it and use it. Just let us know how you get on with it...]
QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS!
Thank you for comingtoday/ tonight. We think you have lots of information in your head, and we wish had you for longer. Please try to answer as many of the questions as you can. You can send it to us later if you have to (come down the front and get a stamped envelope from us).
This is an ANONYMOUS survey, so be brutally honest. The information will be typed up and distributed to the groups who’ve put tonight on. Those groups will then digest the information, answer your questions and try to set up some training.
What has the [insert local region] climate movement done well?
What has it not done well?
How could movement organisations do better at welcoming and keeping new people into the climate movement?
Tell us about what you know OTHER people think about the climate movement (especially in [insert name of city], if you can)
People who are not climate denialists, but have never become involved – what do they say?
About people you know who WERE involved : Why did they leave? What might bring them back?
What unanswered questions do you have about climate policy in [insert name of city]?
What unanswered questions do you have about climate science?
What websites and magazines do you rely on for your information?
What skills don’t you have that you would like to have to make you a more effective climate activist?
- dealing with denialists
- explaining climate science and the need for action to “neutral” or “vaguely-sympathetic” people
- facilitation skils for group dynamics
- blogging
- public speaking
other (please say what it is)
(We hope to be able to run workshops and skill-shares on the most sought-after skills)
Anything else you want to tell us?
Bizzzzness as usual
I’ve been all happy (proud) about the phrase “ego-fodder” “the audience at any public event (big or small) which has not been structured by the organisers to provoke the highest possible amount of participation, engagement and mingling.”
But I am beginning to get neologiser’s remorse. Is it too vehement a phrase? It ascribes cynical intentionality to ALL organisers of boring events. It’s perhaps an example of Fundamental Attribution Error – when there are other explanations for the behaviour being witnessed besides an innate trait in someone.
And, to be completely scientific and objective about this, a term is needed for describing events put on by current or potential friends/allies that doesn’t get their backs up by labelling their event as “ego-fodder” and them as manipulative chasers of adulation at the expense of building a movement.
I tried some others (see below) and the best I could come up with is Bizzzzness As Usual.
It’s kinda mildly amusing/humorous (in a better way than, say, “smugosphere”.) And the “zzzz” is supposed to capture the insomnia-cure-ness of it. And “BAU” can also stand for “Bullshit Activism Unchallenged.” Just sayin’…
So, Bizzzzzness as Usual is (drum roll please) “any event (rally, meeting, march etc) where, through lack of experience, empathy, courage or time the organisers have not created opportunities for the audience to become participants – able to share their ideas, experience, energy and systematically seek out people who would be useful in their future activities.“
Rejected titles
Sub-standard operating procedure
Path of Least Resistance
See also
Slop, in the name of love
Random quote
The Communist Party should not be boring people to death.Wilhelm Reich
Tasteless analogy to be pursued at a later date…
These boring events, with their boring speakers (usually men) are Predator drones. Droning on, hovering above, unleashing a painful and prolonged death to the innocents below.
(With apologies to all the Afghanis killed by NATO in its defense of, um, Western values?)
Empowering people at a march via a speech
Went to a Gay Marriage rally today. As the name would suggest, it was a rally. There were speakers with microphones. The ones I heard ranged from good to brilliant (the first post-organiser speaker was “Mr Chuckles” – funny, smart, passionate.) Everyone sat and listened to their wisdom. At one point between sets of speeches the organiser led everyone in a dreadful chant (one two three four… etc)
So, all of us to speak one voice, to speak one sentence as chosen by the organisers. It was embarrassing and infuriating and my cue to leave. It didn’t have to be like that.
There was nothing malicious in what the organisers had done. This is Just the Way We Do Things.
Here’s what I would have said, if invited to do so. What do folks think?
Thank you so much for coming here today. The most important thing about you being here is what you have done before coming here today, and what you do AFTER. This moment, though beautiful, is only an opportunity. It’s an opportunity for us to show our strength and build on it by creating links among you who don’t already know each other.
To the people here who are straight, I ask – are you going to challenge homophobia when you hear it at work, at home, in your church or mosque. If you do already, great –I hope you do it more, and get more effective. If you don’t, why not? It’s time to do so. Is it because you are afraid of being labelled queer? Is it because you’re afraid of having to confront bigotry in those people who pay your bills, or who you love and don’t want to think of as bigots?
To those of you who are closeted, is it possible to come out? It is difficult, it can be dangerous. It’s not my place to say that you “must”. But many have done so, and it’s made them stronger, and it’s made them great role models for other closeted people. If you need advice or someone to talk to, then go to the stall.
To those who are out and proud, congratulations – it’s not easy. What have you learnt that you want to pass on? Why does marriage matter to YOU? How can YOU become a more effective advocate for gay marriage?Because although it’s good that we are here, this rally on its own won’t do the job.
This movement is about the pressure you put on politicians – via emails, letters to them, letters to the paper, talk-radio, those conversations you have with acquaintances.
This movement is about the defense of gay rights that YOU make in arenas less welcoming than this one – in school, at work, at church.
This movement is about living as an example of tolerance, strength, compassion and wisdom.
Those steps won’t happen because the leaders of this movement are especially wise and wonderful (though they might be!)
Those moves won’t become more frequent and irresistible by listening to speeches, no matter how funny or astute they are.
And those pressures won’t be sustained indefinitely all on your own. You’ll get tired, down-hearted. We need to support each other, to challenge each other, to teach each other and to encourage each other.
We can give each other heart, we can learn and teach from others’ mis-steps and our own. There is someone within five metres of you who has something to teach you. There is someone within five metres of you who has something to learn from you. That’s the power of this moment in our movement.And so the way we build the future we want, and the movement to get us there, here, now, in the next five minutes, is that YOU talk to someone you don’t know. Talk to them about why you’re here, what you’re doing, what you want to do. And if you need a question to get you going , try this- “what can we do in the next week to advance the cause of gay marriage?” Thank you.
See also: “From Cannon Fodder to Ego Fodder“
Cannon-fodder to ego-fodder
According to Wikipedia the first person to use exact phrase “cannon fodder” was a French writer, François-René de Chateaubriand in his 1814 anti-Napoleonic pamphlet “De Buonaparte et des Bourbons” – “the contempt for the lives of men and for France herself has come to the point of calling the conscripts ‘the raw material’ and ‘the cannon fodder.”
The phrase came to be associated with World War 1 and its ‘human waves’ attacks. Millions of human beings, with their hopes and their talents, their families and their friends, were fed into the cannons as food. As the slogan used to go “a bayonet is a weapon with a worker at both ends”.
Leaving behind the fields of Flanders, what’s “ego-fodder”?
Ego-fodder is what I call the audience at any public event (big or small) which has not been structured by the organisers to provoke the highest possible amount of participation, engagement and mingling.
“Passivity” can of course be okay. Sometimes there is a “contractual” relationship that is about being entertained – by a singer, a comedian, whatever.
What is an unforgivable fraud is the organisers and the speakers claiming that they are trying to engage and/or inspire the public, (to tackle an issue or grow a movement) when they have designed and executed a meeting that is something akin to death by powerpoint.
The organisers may say they want engaged citizens, but if through idleness, ignorance or – most seriously – control-freakery, they organise another static drone-on-and-drone-on talkfest by this or that Expert, followed by ritualistic questions, then they have used all the audience, with their hopes and their ideas and their talents, their connections to families and friends and other organisations, as ego-fodder.
And it’s way past the time we can afford that.
Of course, people go to these things expecting to be ego-fodder. Sad to say, some of them seem happy enough with that. “Ooh, I didn’t come here to be asked what I think. I came to (be seen to) hear the Great Oracle. Anyone who isn’t obedient to old white men has ideas above their station…”
But I wonder – how many people go hoping they’ll meet like-minded folks, get a chance to give their ideas, and hear others’, and maybe get together with others and DO something?
Essential reading for facilitators
Chris Corrigan has just put up a great blog post called
The art of giving instructions: 7 practices for facilitators
I think one of the hardest things to do as a facilitator is master the art of giving instructions. Even for facilitators, public speaking can be a stressful experience, and there is nothing worse than trying to give instructions to a group while your knees are shaking and your mouth is dry. But for all facilitators, and and especially those of us who work with radically new ways of meeting, this is a whole art in itself. Giving instructions poorly leads to confusion and chaos and can quickly erode the trust of a group. Being too direct can shut people down and create a sterile meeting. The art is finding the space between the two.
and it continues here.
Hat-tip to Johnnie Moore for the initial re-posting.
Committees, chaos and (accusations of ) cliques: plus ca change
Committee missions were often unclear or even conflicting, meetings were numerous, and key individuals would drop out and reappear randomly. While meetings were very good at generating task proposals, they were far less effective at assigning volunteers and accountability. Key committee tasks were often not carried out due to lack of follow through or a lack of clear assignment of responsibilities.
Consequently, individuals at the mid-organizer level were often left holding the bag and were sometimes castigated by the leadership when they failed to deliver. On the other hand, informal leaders, frustrated that crucial tasks were not being accomplished in a timely manner, often ended up assuming the work and making decisions themselves. At times these two groups communicated poorly with one another.
The net result was escalating tension, with individuals in both groups ending up with huge workloads and responsibilities….
These tendencies proved quite destructive, heightening tension and conflict among the most active leaders and organizers, while generating lots of criticism but little support from the rest of the group. Many key activists became increasingly bitter and burnt out. While Mass Action’s informal leaders have managed to sustain themselves, a number of organizers and affinity groups have exited. This dynamic has likely damaged the groups’ ability to build a long-term activist base and to repeat large direct action mobilizations in the future.
Organising for the Long Haul: The View from Western Massachusetts by Frank Borgers
Page 124
The Global Activist’s Manual: Local Ways to Change the World
Pyrrhic Victories, Climate Camp and Undercover Cops
The armies separated; and, it is said, Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that one more such victory would utterly undo him. For he had lost a great part of the forces he brought with him, and almost all his particular friends and principal commanders; there were no others there to make recruits, and he found the confederates in Italy backward. On the other hand, as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city, the Roman camp was quickly and plentifully filled up with fresh men, not at all abating in courage for the loss they sustained, but even from their very anger gaining new force and resolution to go on with the war.
While it may or may not be true (fn 1) that the police were going to stop being quite so violent and intimidating after the Climate Camp at Kingsnorth power station in 2008, even before the murder of Ian Tomlinson in April 2009 forced their hand, the point is that Kingsnorth was “Mission Accomplished” for the police. By their briefings and their aggressive stop and searching and other stunts, they managed to scare off/burn out enough people, and fling enough mud at Climate Camp so that some of it stuck in the eyes of the “public” (fn 2)
Yes, the Kingsnorth camp happened, and later the campers “won” when the the relevant Minister admitted to parliament that despite the lurid and much reported claims of “70 police injured” it was all down to um, heat stroke, tooth ache and bee stings. (See also here and here). But the issue had already been successfully ‘framed’ by the police in the minds of the mass of the public.
The instruments of the State will always be able to regroup – logistically, and ideologically – from setbacks. The press is owned by people sympathetic to the status quo [that's an understatement!] and the police are also a vital source of information for stories to fill the acres of newsprint/time that have to be filled (fn3). And they have asymptotic credibility. Social movements, made up of volunteers, under-resourced and prone to peaks and troughs, cannot – in my opinion – afford such pitched battles. In a war of attrition, logistics is all.
The question around what the exposure of undercover cops in the climate movement actually means is tricky as well. Obviously it’s terrible for the dedicated and determined activists whom they hoodwinked – people are genuinely hurt and pissed off. In some sense it’s “too early to tell.” While the campers have certainly won a moral argument, and the court case around Ratcliffe has raised some interesting legal questions, it’s hard to see that the exposure of Stone and the other agents helps with the stated goal of building a movement.
What are potential “new recruits” to make of it? That once you’re involved, even an activist of many years standing, who is trusted by other activists, may in fact be a police officer (or at least an informer). Mission Accomplished? (fn 4)
In researching this, I’ve just stumbled across a recent (Jan 05) article by one of the Ratcliffe defendants, entitled “The climate movement is in desperate need of renewal“. It’s worth a read. The writer focussed more on external than internal problems, but not all dirty laundry needs to be washed in public, after all…
(fn 1) Someone with a background in these matters says “You’re mistaken that it was their killing of Ian Tomlinson (1 April 2009) which forced the cops to back off in summer 2009, they were already in hot water as the pendulum swang back against them over the Kingsnorth policing. I have had this debate with [redacted], and was able to produce the newspaper clippings from February and March 2009 to prove this point!”. Why we should take police statements to hacks as proving any point whatsoever is another question.
(fn 2) The notion that there is an undifferentiated “public” that thinks the same about what it sees, has the same attitudes and potentials for action, is, of course, ludicrous.
(fn 3) Not withstanding the Daily Mail taking many pops at ACPO, e.g.
February 2009
July 2010
Jan 18 2011(About the aftermath of Kennedy)
(fn 4) For historical perspective, see Bernard Porter’s excellent “Plots and Paranoia: A history of political espionage in Britain 1780-1988″
“Activist Wisdom” not such a short book…
Attention Conservation Notice: This is a good book, that activists should read if they want to know a bit more about movement tensions and potentials(see footnote 1)
Its two authors, academics Sarah Maddison and Sean Scalmer set out to take activism seriously.
Their book
“tries to answer some of the most important questions posed by political activists. We spoke with campaigners in a range of social movements, and listened to their preoccupations. Our chapter titles do not reflect customary debates in the academic literature. They are reflections of the problems that our interviewees raised, and the tensions that they struggled with. Finally, this book is different because it takes the knowledge produce by activists very seriously…. Rather than seeking to show what academics can teach activists, we have approached this book in the opposite spirit. Activist Wisdom aims to learn from political campaigners in a range of contemporary movements.”
What do they hope to achieve?
“Three things, we hope: redirection, communication and theorisation. First, we will redirect students of social movements away from existing theoretical problems, and towards the problems that participants regard as most important and pressing. Second, we will foster communication between activists. Our accounts will inform active readers about the ways in which other campaigners deal with tensions and negotiate problems. Third, we will use these insights to reflect on existing concepts, and to work our way towards a new kind of social movement theory: more discursive and less geometrical; more practical and less abstract.”
To this end, a website might have helped, with some on-line discussion forums. I don’t know what the copyright implications are, but surely they wouldn’t have been insurmountable?
Anyhow, Maddison and Scalmer interviewed 19 participants at some length, from a gratifyingly broad range (not just the twenty to thirty something white middle-class ones, who are often over-represented in these sorts of studies), and this forms the basis for most of the book.
The first chapter, on the history of “social movement theory” from Gustave Le Bon onwards is very well done, free of jargon and minutiae. There is a brief glossary at the back of the book with useful capsule definitions of things like “abeyance structures” and “left melancholy“ and so on (see footnotes 2 and 3 below). Maddison and Scalmer certainly know their stuff, but there is no evidence that they’ve come to the activists with a summary of what might be useful in the academic literature. This could have been useful for the activists, and the activists’ comments on it could have perhaps improved it further. Why didn’t they do this? It may not have occurred to them, or perhaps they suffered from undue humility about the usefulness of academia, and were unwilling to run the risk of being accused of colonialism/hierarchy. If I get the chance I’ll asks them.
See the reviewer’s “Contentious Cats and Repertoire Dogs” (minus some hand-drawn diagrams of repertoires getting sussed and becoming ineffective etc).
The second chapter is on the nature of “Practical Knowledge” – what it is that activists do, and how they do (or don’t) transmit that knowledge to the next generation.
They quote one shell-shocked activist
“Some of the things that I would have taken as really obvious, in terms of activist stuff you do, are shock tactics in here! You know, maybe we should do a ring-around… maybe we should have contact lists that we use to contact people… Maybe we should have social things, where we bring people to the pub and have a chat and have a drink after work… Things that I would of thought of as relatively obvious strategies for anyone who’s organising a bunch of people are not regularly done… Because there hasn’t been a culture of campaigning, that knowledge has disappeared. Page 54″
This is one of the major problems for activists – the lack of institutions that can codify and “store” knowledge in useable formats. There is a lot or wheel reinvention going on, and it would have been good if Scalmer and Maddison could have pointed to some of the efforts made to capacity build and capacity-maintain.
The second part – and majority of the book – is given over to eight chapters based on themes that the authors have winnowed out from their interviews. The authors explore what they call “movement tensions.” These are “Expressive and Instrumental,” “Organisation and Democracy,” “Unity and Difference,” “Revolution and reform,” “Local and global” and “Hope and despair.”
This is useful insofar as it goes, but there are inevitably gaps… (see below).
They can display a very dry sense of wit at times. Writing on organisation and democracy they observe.
“Some are open about the need for leadership; others are more flexible, believing that the political context should determine the style of decision-making that is most appropriate. Some continue to value organizations. Others call their organisations ‘networks’, and tend to create and dissolve them with dizzying speed. Page 105
If I were being friendly critical, I’d say they’ve not (for reasons of time? Convenience?) got a random sample of activists. They’ve talked to people who are, for the most part, still active (or in NGO land, which almost amounts to the same thing).
If you’ll pardon me quoting from a review I did of a Climate Camp reader
What would have been interesting, useful and as far as I am aware unprecedented, would have been to do “exit interviews” with people who USED to be involved in Climate Camp but left the process. You could ask
# why did you get involved
# what was the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’ for you leaving
# what were the build up factors for you, that made you uneasy
# as a sympathetic (?) outsider what do you think of Climate Camp now? What have you heard from people still involved?
# What are you doing now? Are you now in a period of recovery? Are you working on other projects- if so, what do you think they have that Climate Camp never had/lost?
# What do you think should be done?
If I were being slightly unfairly critical, I’d say occasionally they overdo the humility and don’t challenge activist formulations vigorously enough. Activism (done right) is a contact sport, and if activists feel “allowed” to try to change other people’s (political, economic) cultures, they shouldn’t expect a pass from academics. It’s tricky of course, because the academics don’t want to lose the trust and respect of their interviewees. One bad experience and the phone tree could spring to life and down would come the portcullis…
(for example, Doug McAdam admits his access to Freedom Summer participants was massively helped by a reference letter written by Howard Zinn).
If I were being really unfairly critical, I would say they didn’t focus on the issues I wanted them to focus on. There’s nothing on the frustrations for activists who don’t want to become part of the soft State/Green Confucians but are heartily sick of the “expressive” activists who simply want to have periodic spasms of self-congratulatory martyrdom that don’t actually weaken the opponent or strengthen the allies.
There’s nothing on accountability structures, or on how the pathologies of activism can reinforce the “Smugosphere”. There’s nothing on what strategy-design and implementation in the absence of a “centre” means. But no one book can deliver everything!!
Is the book perfect? No, of course not (see above). Is there heaps in it worth knowing, and useful articles and books cited in the bibliography? Yep. Am I reading Sean Scalmer’s earlier book “Dissent Event: protest, the media and the political gimmick in Australia” and learning lots from it? You bet. Do I think that the work of Sarah Maddison, now doing work on Mapping the Australian Women’s Movement, is worth busy activists’ time and mental bandwidth? Oh yes, oh yes indeed.
A final note. The library I got this from is huge. There are miles of shelves and shelves on all sorts of topics. That’s good, flourishing intellectual culture and all that. And how much shelf space is taken up by books about how groups of citizens can improve the world and challenge State and Corporate power? Well, not so much. A metre or so, and that’s a generous estimate. Perhaps it’s a sign of what our Lords and Masters (and “the system”) think is worthy of funding Maddison and Scalmer, at least, have provided some work on what democracy could look like, and doubtless will do more. That is to their credit.
Footnote 1: That it does not quite meet expectations may simply be a reflection on the cantankerous nature of the present reviewer. He’s been accused of being too tough in the past. And he has robust views on what most social movement academics do and who they serve.
Footnote 2: Abeyance structure The political organisations and networks of people who keep a political movement alive in times of relative inactivity. Abeyance structures are often hidden from the wider public, but they play a special role in ensuring the continuance of radical ideas, tactics, identities and traditions.
Footnote 3: Left melancholy A longing for an imagined time when social movement goals were clear and agreed upon without a complicating attention to difference.
Climate, Dynamite, Doomedness…
The folks over at Political Dynamite wrote a blog post recently on “Why Campaigns against Cuts and Climate Change must be as one.”
I wrote the following in the comments:
I’m glad you are trying to tackle this topic. It’s one I have been despairing of for a while now. If climate campaigners are truthful about themselves and the landscape, I think they’d say that the wind has been knocked out of their sails by a variety of factors (the all-eggs-in-one-basket approach to Copenhagen that the NGOs and CaCC were guilty of, and the tactical repetition and strategic nullity of CaCC and Climate Camp). The last year has been particularly brutal for climate campaigners, and it really does look as if the “Issue Attention Cycle” (as described by Anthony Downs) has well and truly moved on. Some climate campaigners will just keep doing what they do. Some will give up. Some will “switch” to livelier campaigns like the anti-cuts thing. These decisions will be based on a host of different factors, and my point is not to blame or praise anyone for anything they do (least of all giving up).
A few propositions
a) the climate campaigners’ ‘golden years’ – roughly book-ended by Climate Camp 2006/An Inconvenient Truth and fizzling out in Copenhagen (i.e. 2006 to 2009)- are gone, not to return.
b) even if the “the cuts are ideological in nature” meme ‘wins’, that still brings us back to a growth economy. The NEF “Green New Deal” stuff that you like (and so do I, within its obvious inadequacies and limitations) is known as “Green Keynesianism.” Keynesianism is about growth.
c) what is needed (as you allude to with the Herman Daly quote) is a steady-state economy in the developed world that still somehow manages huge transfers of wealth and low-carbon technology to the Majority World (also known as Third World).
d) the groundwork for c) has not been done. There are very very few anti-cuts campaigners who would understand the why of this needs to be the case and would be willing or able to propound the case in their consensus meeting, to their family, their MP or whatever. I don’t think ANYONE, even proponents such as myself, really has the foggiest idea of *how*.
Me, I’m just delighted I had a vasectomy 6 years ago. We are in for very bumpy times indeed.
Everything that lives must die?
Ok, stumbled on a really cool sounding project “Mapping the Australian Women’s Movement” at the Australian National Univeristy. And the section on “the Trajectories of Social Movements“
The social movement literature contains many hypotheses concerning the trajectories of social movements. The first is that there is a naturally short life span for intense social movement activism and engagement. This hypothesis received an influential form in Sidney Tarrow’s (1994) life-cycle model of social movements. Social movements become possible within certain historical conjunctures, and by their nature as non-institutionalised forms of collective action cannot be sustained for very long. Their life cycles are limited by internal factors, which may relate to the volatility of emotions that drive non-institutionalised protest, such as rage at injustice (Goodwin et al 2001); and external factors, which can include the change to a less favourable political and social context where movement activism no longer has discernible returns.
The second hypothesis is that social movements that succeed in achieving their aims change into something else—for example, through opening up new opportunities in the power structure or in professional careers for those they have mobilised. Movement from the streets into the corridors of power may be regarded ‘the long march through the institutions’ on the one hand or co-option on the other. The transformation of social movements into ‘something else’ may also create a new constellation of institutions reflecting movement values and perspectives—for example the institutionalising of women’s movement values in women’s services such as domestic violence refuges (Bagguley 2002) or the unobtrusive mobilization of women within mainstream institutions and vocational bodies (Katzenstein 1990). The ‘submerged networks’ created by social movements may sustain cultural change within communities and within daily life.
The third hypothesis is that cognitive frames shift so markedly in a post-modern era that collective action to achieve social goals no longer appears a real option, as collective identities become fragmented and social movement mobilisation is delegitimised. New cognitive frames that stress individual market choices and cultural consumption become dominant, overshadowing the values of collective action (Sawer 2006). The ability to ‘speak for’ shared identities and values is called into question as the fragmented and contingent nature of identity makes the assumption of shared values problematic. This loss of faith in collective identities removes the political base for claims-making and enables the dismantling of social movement policy gains and policy structures.
The fourth hypothesis is that the emotion cultures of social movements may sustain groups after broader mobilisation recedes—in other words, social movement organisations may be sustained by close friendships based on shared values (Taylor 1989). Within abeyance structures the meanings and identities produced by social movements may be preserved through periods when the political environment is unreceptive, and provide continuity from one stage of mobilisation to another (Rupp and Taylor 1987). This hypothesis leads to another—that activism during the downturn is the foundation for later success (Maddison and Scalmer 2006). In other words, there will be a third wave of women’s movement mobilisation and it will have some identifiable continuity with earlier waves.
