On Abstraction and Social Movements

Dave Roberts of Grist recently wrote a column decrying the manner which climate activists have tackled global warming, criticizing the movement as "extremely intellectualized, top-down sort of undertaking." Roberts' piece inspired a response from Ezra Klein, who inquires whether there exists

[A] good example of the sort of social movement Roberts is talking about on an issue like climate change? Have we ever gotten people into the streets in order to reduce future risks that would fall hardest on poorer countries? Or even anything more abstract than a better life, right now?

Klein seems somewhat skeptical that one can mobilize a mass social movement of non-elites around such abstract issues. However, several historical episodes exist in which movements emerged that targeted problems that did not directly (or at least viscerally) impact the lives of those demonstrating. The most successful of such episodes have seen alliances (albeit often somewhat tenuous ones) emerge between elites and non-elites. Here are a few examples:

1. The Abolitionists: Both in England and the United States, significant numbers of whites organized and fought for emancipation, despite not being slaves themselves or even living with the possibility they might become slaves. Furthermore, for these activists, slavery existed as a rather abstract issue. Consider the English anti-slavery movement, which mobilized hundreds of thousands of people to sign petitions, organize boycotts, and work to elect anti-slavery politicians. Almost all English people had no actual contact with the “peculiar institution”: the vast majority of the thousands upon thousands of English people who signed petitions or otherwise never went to the English colonies in the Caribbean or even saw a slave ship docked in an English harbor. However, activists still mobilized, based on abstract moral concerns (closely tied with religion) that saw slavery as wrong. Furthermore, through the creation of all manner of art and mass advertising, the English anti-slavery activists managed to make slavery a more “real” issue and bring ever more people into their fold. English abolitionism had its many faults, and emancipation did not usher an era of total social justice for Africans. Still, one must give credit to the movement for playing a huge role in ending slavery throughout the English empire, a proposition that incidentally, did not come without its financial and strategic harms to the English empire.

One must be careful however in describing English anti-slavery to avoid making it seem only the work of white elites. Revolts in Haiti, Jamaica, and elsewhere, as well as less dramatic examples of slave resistance, put great pressure on the system and helped move towards emancipation. In England itself, a number of former slaves became activists who moved the problem from abstraction to reality. Most notable among these individuals was a man named Olaudah Equiano, whose autobiography became a bestseller in England and whose multi-year book tours served as a crucial venue for grassroots organizing.

2. Environmentalism: It can be hard to forget that, particularly in the early 1970s, environmentalism was a mass social movement in the United States. An estimated twenty-two million U.S. citizens participated in one way or the other on the first Earth Day in 1970. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw an explosion in activism on the environment, with the creation of all manner of new organizations, ranging from D.C. based public interest law groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council to all manner of local, grassroots community organizations. Such groups waged successful efforts to help create the EPA and win the passage and enforcement of all manner of environmental legislation. While sometimes they targeted direct environmental issues whose impacts were quite immediate (smog for example), other campaigns, such as that aimed at halting the use of chlorofluorocarbons, represented an effort to tackle future problems or at least ones whose worst effects lay in the future.

3. The Global Justice Movement: Klein's specific question about whether activists have "gone into the streets in order to reduce future risks that would fall hardest on poorer countries" is perhaps the most easily answerable. After all, that perfectly describes the intense period of street protests, including those in the U.S., from the Seattle march in 1999 to Genoa in 2001 that took aim at institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) or negotiations over specific agreements, such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

Now, you might disagree with the activists' analysis, but those protests focused not only on current problems faced in the Global South, but the threat those issues would worsen if global institutions and policies continued as they had. The goal of the Seattle demonstrations, for example, was to disrupt the WTO negotiations because activists viewed those talks as leading to new agreements which would further constrain Global South nations' to retain some ability to choose from a range of policies and development models. While the U.S. press obviously gave marches in this country the most attention, marches in Seattle, Quebec, and elsewhere represented only one part of a global movement, which included affected citizens in nations ranging from Bolivia to South Africa to Thailand. One could argue that the global justice movement’s brief moment of mass street demonstrations indicates weakness; however it is a hard case to make considering the impacts of the September 11^th attacks. Remember that right before 9/11, activists were mobilizing to protest the annual IMF-World Bank meetings, with police predicting that over 100,000 people would attend.

Now, for all these movements, I have not particularly addressed Klein’s point that climate change activism seeks to prevent future problems, not solve current ones. After all, while English activists were not themselves slaves, slavery certainly existed at that moment. The sad answer to this challenge for activists however would seem to be time; as scientists and activists continue to point out, climate change is here. Many people in this world, particularly in the Global South, are already experiencing as sea levels rise, weather patterns are becoming more severe, etc.

One need not travel to Tuvalu to find visceral examples of the damages of climate change or resistance to it, as West Virginia will suffice. Just as the abolitionists needed an Oladuh Equiano to make slavery’s horrors visceral, climate activists are increasingly targeting concrete pieces of the climate change monster to tackle. Most notable is the growing anti-coal activism in the U.S., whether seen in the growing movement to stop mountaintop removal mining, Mayor Bloomberg’s fifty million dollar donation to the Sierra Club or the current mass protests against the Keystone pipeline are only but a few of the most recent examples. Climate change might be abstract, but the damage done to mountains and to the air by the burning of coal is no more abstract than smog was for 1970s environmentalists or IMF structural adjustment programs for the demonstrators in 2001. In these cases, activists who live far from the coal fields have still become involved, working in coordination with locals who both recognize the larger dangers of climate change and the more immediate problems the industry causes. We cannot say for certain a mass and sustained social movement will arise to stop climate change, but there certainly exists historical examples offering hope for those seeking to challenge global warming.