Erland’s Ranting

Last night I went to the Global Climate Wake-Up Call event here in Rennes. That’s most of the people that showed up there in the shot.

First, you might not know what the hell I’m talking about. Avaaz organised a global action for September 21st by emailing their 3.5 million+ supporters and asking them to host local events all over the world where people met up in a public place for a flashmob and all put in calls to their national representatives (or leaders, in the case of countries without representative democracy) to urge them “to travel to Copenhagen for the climate talks in December and sign a fair, ambitious, and binding climate treaty!” Read more about it here, and if your not already on their list, sign up for Avaaz – the least you can do for the planet is get a few emails and sign some petitions every now and then.

As for the event, I hate to say it was really uninspiring. If the global climate movement is to have any hope of doing the impossible and achieving a safe climate, or even just limiting the impacts to the catastrophic, we have to be honest with ourselves… I don’t blame Avaaz for my experience of the action – I think the idea of a quick lunch-time action that brings people together and creates political pressure in the lead up to Copenhagen was actually a great first move for mobilising their online supporter base into offline action. I felt the main problems in Rennes were down to the local organisers:

• Timing: the action was scheduled for 9:21pm – not good for photos (as you can see), not good for media, not good for families & younger kids, not good for putting in phone calls to government offices and on top of all that, it was cold.
• Outreach: even though we clearly rode our bikes right into the area where everyone was gathered and then hung around as well as getting my big camera out, no one came up to speak to us, no contact list was passed around, no proposal for a drink or a coffee afterward was forthcoming – in fact, a little after the planned yell (what’s with that anyway?) at 9:21 we approached someone who’s first words were “c’est fini” – it’s finished. Wow, inviting.
• Approachability: it appeared that most or all of the people present knew each other before-hand (except us) and the body-language was definitely cliquey – a handful of groups standing in circles, excluding outsiders, with no-one really keeping an eye on new people turning up who might want to chat, find out more or get involved.
• Aesthetics: to be fair, the action was billed to only take a few minutes for participants and be a snap for local organisers, but nevertheless, it would have made a difference to have some nice signs, creative placards, a funny chant or song instead of just a yell. Instead, there were just the printed-off Avaaz sheets you can see in the photo above and even these were only really displayed for the photo. See for yourself what good aesthetics did for some of the actions elsewhere.

On that positive note, I thought this would be a good time to talk about French activism. I should throw some massive disclaimers out there:

1. I can’t speak French beyond ordering a coffee, which places me squarely in the worst group of people to evaluate – and especially critique – their activism.
2. I haven’t travelled the length of the country by any means (well, literally, I’ve been to the top and bottom, but let’s not get stuck on semantics…), so perhaps I’m more talking about activism in Brittany.
3. I’ve shown my face at a few events that are progressive, activist or alternative over the past nine months but I certainly haven’t made a valiant attempt at throwing myself into the French activist scene (learning French would have been the first step for that), so consider this an outsider’s (and therefore necessarily limited) perspective.

Now for the mud slinging. I came to France with an idealised view of French activism – they fight, literally, to win here when the government pushes them too hard. You can go all the way back to the revolution, May 1968, or more recently, stories of the successful protests over worker’s rights in 2006 which were inspiring, especially lined up against the agonising apathy I’m used to experiencing in Australia. 2.5 million people protesting around the country and six days later 3 million, 68 of France’s 89 universities on strike or physically occupied, 4,500 people arrested – how do you even begin to stack up against that? Especially in Brittany, with it’s particular flair for independence and anti-nationalism. Add to that one’s tendency to reinforce stereotypes, and nevertheless I find the rosy tint fading from my view of French activism.

The two key observations I’ve made are:

• Activist circles seem to be cliquey (ok, they are everywhere, but I mean more than in Australia); and
• Outreach and engagement seems to be non-existent.

A friend recently suggested a reason for these two things – in fact, French activism is so good that they have no need to ‘recruit’ people to their causes (I wince at using the crapbook terminology). They know that if they call a general strike, protest march or occupation they’ll have the support they need without the leg-work of signing up people to email lists, running street stalls on the weekend, fostering a network of local groups or creating engaging promotional material. I’m not sure it’s likely this really is the attitude that’s underlying my observations, but if it is: FAIL. If lefties, progressives and environmentalists in France think they’re on top of things with current actions, they’re joking. Don’t get me wrong – France has a lot to envy compared to Australia in terms of social welfare policy, low-emissions transport infrastructure (oh for TGV’s in Australia) and many other areas – but look at Sarkozy, the spread of nuclear power or recent education and public health issues (I was at the protests against these earlier this year and went to the university here while it was being occupied). There’s no way to dress those as acceptable.

General Strike - Education & Health - Rennes - 29 Jan 2009

My feeling is that outreach, public engagement, conversations and active and sustained participation in the process of change are the most important elements of activism and social change. It’s here that hearts and minds are won, here that observers become participants and participants become activists. If all that we do is – albeit powerfully – agitate against the state for single changes in policy or legislation, I don’t believe we are working toward changing, or even laying proper groundwork for changing, the systemic problems in capitalism, current systems of representative democracy, power inequalities, over-consumption of resources or anything else.

In fact, perhaps more importantly, we are not articulating, fostering or inspiring visions of a better world.

What do you think? What are your preconceptions about French activism? Have you been involved in action for social change in France? What do you think the most important elements of activism are and what place does a vision have in building a movement? Should activists be concerned about being defined only in the negative – by what they are against? Did you attend a Global Climate Wake Up Call event somewhere else around the world? Leave a comment!