There are four main areas of activism, and some might not be recognizable as activism.
- Protest
- Direct Action
- Lobbying
- Public Education
Protest
The historical register
One person protesting a law is better than no one protesting. At a minimum, the reasons for opposing something are entered into the historical register and no one may thereafter claim that the consequences were impossible to predict.
Demonstrations: A Gamble
A protest of a hundred thousand people results in some kind of societal debate. However, a protest of three thousand people has the opposite effect: it signals to the defenders of the status quo
that the opposition to their policy is small. They may continue with complete disregard. A small protest is actually encouragement. Protests are a gamble. One may win, and one may lose.
Strikes and Boycotts
When a campaign interferes with profitability, protesters might well receive the backing of unlikely allies: business people, who will cynically do anything to return to profitability.
Passivity
Contrary to intuition, protests are a form of passivity. There is some problem, and the demand is that
someone else deal with it. The details of the solution are left unspecified. Lobbyists specify the technical details of what they want; protesters do not.
The recipients of protesters’ demands are the defenders of the status quo. These are protesters’ least likely allies. They have other priorities. That is how they got their jobs. For this reason, demanded legislation rarely pleases; it is usually some
compromise, if it is not the cynical attempt to trim back the protesters’ support base to some manageable level.
Direct Action
The expression “Direct Action” is often used to mean illegal activity. If you dislike something, you knock something else over. However, this cannot work as a definition. Annoying a power-holder is a way to coerce the power-holder to enact desired changes. It is
indirect.
In 1955,
Rosa Parks was told to give up her bus seat to white passengers. She refused and was subsequently arrested. Her crime, sitting on a bus seat, was not only a protest, it was exactly the desired outcome. She wanted to remain seated during the bus ride. That is direct action. In contrast, blocking a bridge in order to sit on a bus seat would be indirect action.
Lobbying for affordable health care in the inner city is indirect action. Operating an illegal clinic out of the back of a van is direct action. The activists are, of course, taunting the government, but they are simultaneously achieving their goal. If a health care access point in the city is the desired outcome, then creating a health care access point is direct action.
The history of organic food is in fact a case in point. When supermarkets refused to carry organic food in the late 1960s, activists did not protest. They grew their own organic food, and sold it through farmers’ markets and food clubs. When supermarkets saw that a viable market existed, they attempted to take over and expand that market.
Lobbying
Lobbying is the attempt to influence the writing or amending of specific legislation. It is very difficult for ordinary citizens to lobby. A lobbyist is usually a representative of either deep-pocketed business interests or a disciplined political movement. Government officials need a reason to listen to a lobbyist.
Public education
There are periods of history in which the stakes of a particular problem are unknown and perhaps even unknowable.
For example, the financial system has license to ruin entire economies. Financial mismanagement and irresponsibility in the early 2000s led to a financial crisis in 2008, which precipitated a recession. The bankers who caused the crisis did not go to jail (except
Icelandic bankers). Why? Bankers claimed that only they were smart enough to end the crisis. Their solution? Tax-payer bail-outs which led to record level of profitability for the guilty. Why and how could such a thing happen? Arguably, because few people understand how the financial system works, and those who understand best are profiting from it. Lesson: public education matters.
What does it mean for a solution to be unknowable? Consider that in the 19th century, married women were legally wards of their husbands. They could not own property independently. They did not have a right to any wages they earned. They could not legally sign contracts. It was impossible to imagine why such a being would need a separate vote. For many years, the debate about women’s suffrage was about single and widowed women. In such a cultural context, it is impossible to convince anyone that one side of a debate is right when people do not understand why the debate should exist in the first place.
Every period in history holds some regressive awkward, or even false ideas. It is the task of one generation of activists to educate, and it is then the task of the next to reform.
