OVO

Camp for Climate is “a place for anyone who wants to take action on climate change.”

The Climate Camp is too self-regarding to be effective: Its critics have levelled many charges whenever it has appeared over the last few years [...] And while some criticisms have a kernel of truth, it remains hard to argue that a movement fighting climate change and promoting social equality is a bad thing. But that is not the question. Rather, Climate Camp should be judged on its own ambitions. How effective is the camp in inspiring change?

It is confronting this issue that lies at the heart of one of the key works on grass-roots organising: Rules for Radicals written by Saul Alinsky who inspired US radicals in the 1960s and 1970s. A revolutionary in outlook who began agitating for social change in the Chicago stockyards in the 1930s, Alinsky’s methodology has proved to have had a greater relevance and longer shelf-life than perhaps he ever expected. In recent history, it not only informed Barack Obama’s early political organising, but its tactics have been adopted by the US Republican right to disrupt Obama’s health policies. So how does the Climate Camp fare judged by his rules?

In some respects, Alinsky, who died in 1972, would have admired the Climate Campers’ dedication. “Liberals protest; radicals rebel,” he wrote. “Liberals become indignant; radicals become fighting mad and go into action.” Alinsky, however, is unlikely to have approved of much of the Climate Campers’ methodology. The problem with the Climate Campers is not a lack of conviction (as some commentators try to argue); it stems, rather, from an obsession with its own structures and its relationship with media and the police.

More seriously, seen from Alinsky’s point of view (he believed in “not rhetoric, but realism”), the Climate Camp suffers from a preoccupation with measuring its achievements in terms of the protests it has undertaken rather than a series of achievable goals that those outside the camp movement can easily identify with.

Alinsky insisted the radical must be able to make a persuasive case for why change is necessary and urgent, a task to which the theatrics of protesting are subsidiary. He taught another crucial lesson, one that has been highly visible in the right’s campaign against Obama’s health reforms, that campaigners should avoid targeting abstracts such as phenomena and institutions; instead, they should single out individual figures to act as the “personification… of a particular evil”. To lever their positions through ridicule and criticism.

Climate change and social equality aside, what appealed to me about this article is the rare mass media mention of the fluid lines between political camps. The goals and tactics of one camp become the goals and tactics of another camp in the next generation. Sometimes the shift happens because the other camp rejects or revises their goals, sometimes because they see tactical success in the other camp. But goals and tactics shift as often as not due to powerful individuals with personal preferences, or as solicitation for mass approval by politicians willing to pinch their noses and roll in all sorts of filth if it maintains and expands their power.

History is not goal-oriented. History does not inevitably build toward a better world based on past successes. Things just happen. The eugenics movement of one generation becomes the family planning movement of the next. The inherently atheist left goes all woo-woo. The children of yesterday’s conservatives can’t have a government too gigantic today. One generation says “the war on want is the war we want” and advocates Europe a Nation, the next fights a “war on want” and lives in an European Union. Advocates of freedom for their sex team up with their opponents to fight sexual freedom. Universal suffrage turns out to not be so universal after all. Temperance becomes the war on drugs. Rarefied French philosophy is later sold as a lowest common denominator consumer product.

Political camps do learn from each other. But they also ape each other because it seems exciting or popular. Political parties and most political groups are package deals. You hopefully get some of what you want among plenty of what you don’t want. But politics itself is not a package deal. The shifting goals and tactics found in history is evidence, but your own complex views are the proof. Politics are maddening but keep on advocating for what is right and true. Political correctness, left and right, be damned.