How To Win Climate Justice

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“It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do.”

- Edmund Burke

We know that we need to bring about dramatic changes in order to address the climate emergency (www.wakeupfreakout.org). The question now seems to be how can we bring this change about? This is a question that many social movements face. Often we are great at getting the word out or raising awareness. But in order to actually effect change we need not only to know what the problem is, but also what to do about it. A social movement needs to be able to present the political and corporate establishment with some sort of consequences for not meeting their demands. Without consequences our demands are merely requests and we need to do more than just ask if we are going to make real social change.

"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom and yet depreciate agitation… want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters…. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

- Frederick Douglass, Slavery Abolitionist, 1857

There are two historical examples which help to illustrate the necessity of being able to present the political establishment with consequences. The first example is the 2003 Iraq War protests. In February 2003, 500 000 Australians went out into the streets to protest the pending invasion of Iraq. These were the largest demonstrations in Australia's history and were part of the largest global protests in the history of the world. Despite the over whelming support for the protests, the Australian military participated in the invasion of Iraq less than two months later.

100 000 people, almost 10% of Adelaid'es population, attended the February 2003 anti-war rally in Adelaide.

The second historical example is the 1970s US postal workers strike. It was illegal at the time for postal workers to go on strike. In spite of this 200 000 workers walked off the job. This caused major disruptions to many different industries. The strike was vigorously opposed by then US President Richard Nixon. Nixon specifically ordered the postal workers back to work and even deployed the National Guard to take over their duties. Despite facing such determined opposition the postal workers won virtually all their demands with in two weeks.

“We’ve got this great window right now where we’re in charge. But we’ve got to make the people that are supposed to represent us do this. There’s a famous story about Franklin Roosevelt, a couple years in after he got in a woman comes up to him, she goes, “Hey, where’s our social security?” It hadn’t passed yet. “You promised us social security. Where is it?” He said, “I’m not going to get you social security. You’re going to have to make me do it. Because I’ve got the banks against me, I’ve got the corporations against me, I’ve got the Republican Party against me, I can’t do this alone, so you, the American people are going to have to make, me and congress do this.” And they did.”

- Michael Moore, Film Maker.

The anti-war protests not only had a greater number of people, they also had a greater percentage of the population participating in them than the postal strike. Yet the postal workers won their demands in two weeks while the anti-war movement lost in two months. The two campaigns had very different strategies for seeing that their demands were met. The postal workers strike had a strategy of sustained mass civil disobedience (SMCD), where as the antiwar movement, where it even had a strategy, tended to be focused electorally, threatening to vote out the Howard government.

Most fundamentally what separates them is that the postal workers had no faith in the political establishment. At the same time they had enormous confidence in their own ability to win their demands. The antiwar movement was the opposite. They had very little faith in ordinary people’s ability to effect change and a huge amount of (evidently misplaced) faith in the political establishment and the idea that if the politicians realized people didn’t like what they were doing they would stop.

“The kind of mass protest that always works, protest like the kind you saw in Pakistan, the kind you saw with people power in the Philippines, the kind you saw all over the Baltic states, is illegal just about everywhere in the United States today. Why is that? Because for a protest to be effective you have to stop traffic! You have to stop traffic! What keeps you from getting a permit? Stepping a foot into the street. Now, why do you have to stop traffic? Because for protest to do anything it has to disrupt business as usual. I don’t mean violence. I mean dissent. Martin Luther King, who wrote Letter from Birmingham Jail because he marched without a permit, said sometimes it is important for the tension to rise up, for people to see that all is not well, and you do that buy stopping traffic. That’s how citizen indicate that business as usual is not acceptable.”

- Naomi Wolf, Author.

SMCD is a much more powerful strategy than an electoral strategy. Elections only happen once every four years. Political parties get to choose what we vote for in elections. Elections only allow us to shuffle between two (maybe three) parties. Elections force us to vote for an entire party; we don’t get to vote on a single issue. On the other hand SMCD doesn’t need a political party to represent it. SMCD can set its own demands and agenda. SMCD doesn’t need to wait for an election to win. SMCD empowers ordinary people, not political careerists.

However, it is important to realize the difference between tactics and strategies. Very crudely, a strategy is your overall plan for achieving a goal and your tactics are the specific tasks you perform to fulfil that plan. A movement might chose an electoral strategy deciding, for instance, that if a particular candidate was elected they would pass particular legislation which would achieve their goal. That’s their strategy. The tactics that could fulfil this strategy (in other words get their candidate elected) are varied. They could include leafleting, public meetings, film screenings etc.

Likewise, SMCD is a strategic orientation not a tactical one. The US postal workers didn’t simply wake up one morning and decide not go to work. They had been organizing outside of official union structures and fighting for their rights for a long time before they decided to pursue an SMCD strategy. There is no reason that tactics like leafleting, public meetings and even permitted rallies can’t be part of an SMCD strategy. In fact, even electing a pro-SMCD (not just climate justice) political candidate could be a successful tactic for an SMCD strategy. Furthermore, even the tactic used for the civil disobedience itself can vary. Mass blockades, industrial action, tax boycotts and rent, bill or fair strikes are just some of many different forms of civil disobedience. The particular civil disobedience tactic(s) used by an SMCD strategy can be determined in each specific situation.

What is important to remember is that it is not so much the material disruption by itself that poses the most dramatic threat to system. Institutions can survive even significant interruptions. For instance, if a cyclone hit a coal fired power plant, damaging it to the point that it was out of service for many months, this would not by itself do anything to challenge the power of the coal industry or make the implementation of renewable energy any more likely. The coal industry certainly wouldn’t welcome such a disruption but they would not be fundamentally challenged by it either.

“The law is not a holy thing. I remember Dan Berrigan broke the law and they interviewed his 80 year old mother and they asked her, “What do you think about your son? What do you think about him breaking the law?” I guess they thought an 80 year old woman would have 80 years of respect for the law behind her and she’d give them the right answer. And Dan Berrigan’s mother said, “It’s not God’s law.” And she had it there. The law is made by very mortal people, very limited people, very opinionated people and people who have very special interests. They make the law. They tell us what the law is and then they act as if it’s holy writ.”

- Howard Zinn, Historian.

What the political establishment finds so threatening about SMCD is that it combines material disruption with political consciousness on a mass scale. This combination does more than simply disrupt business as usual. It begins to alter the inequitable relationship between people and the political establishment. People who normally have to follow orders from above are now able to send them back up the hierarchy. Not only that, but they now have an effective means to enforce the implementation of these orders. This turns the entire relationship on its head.


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