How Do You Build A Movement? – Adam Ramsay

Our movement is, they say, an ecosystem. There is no central committee. There is no vanguard. There is no Politburo. There are thousands of people involved in hundreds of mutually beneficial projects, running in roughly the same direction.

At the recent Netroots gathering, former communist organiser and current Newsnight Economics Editor, Paul Mason, used another metaphor: “We used to see ourselves as a lever, trying to get the vast boulder of the trade union movement to shift… If I were involved today, I’d just become a small rock and start to roll.”

Perhaps we take this approach because so many of us belong to a generation who have known only neoliberalism: we demand choice, we expect to be atomised. Perhaps it is because we are so aware of the failures of Soviet centralisation. Maybe it’s because we have learnt so much from the movements in Latin America, Spain and Italy, whose ideology stems as much from battling dictators as it does from fighting the corporate power these oppressors served. For whatever reason, though, it seems that we do not do mass parties with orders from above. We do our own things, and hope we are collectively pulling the same way.

This model has distinct advantages. As global capitalism flails, it is hard to know where it will strike next, or where we should strike it. Hundreds of small, self-organised nodes can respond more quickly than a large bureaucracy. We can achieve more because everyone does that for which they have energy.

But it also has disadvantages. All too often, it generates cliques and lacks entry points for new people. It encourages us to think of ourselves as activists on the front line, not organisers building our power base: too often, the action we take fails to recruit others – to re-fertilise the soil on which our ecosystem depends.

Likewise, there is little space to build a shared vision and analysis (or to discuss and learn to respect our differences). Different parts of the movement rarely cross-pollinate. Occupy perhaps helped with some of those problems, but a movement is the pursuit of a lifetime. A temporary camp, no matter how glorious, is always temporary.

Ideology is forged in struggle. Atomised activism means that people too often end up believing that their campaign demand is not one of many good ideas, but rather that it is the solution. As I meet more and more people who fetishise one technocratic fix, or who idolise one particular tactic – whether direct action or standing in elections, workplace organising, media stunts or publishing research – I worry that we don’t have enough space to come together as a broad movement. With that space we could hope to gain mutual respect, to realise that these are all tools in a box, and that we must, between us, master them all.

Likewise, we are lacking true international ties. If cross-pollination is important within the UK, how much do we have to learn from movements around the world? Why aren’t there regular, open, widely publicised Skype conference calls enabling those in Britain who work against neoliberalism to join up with those in other countries who do the same?

Our emerging tradition seems to be about coming together with others who already agree with us. In a world built to tell us that we are alone, this is crucial. But the next step must surely be reaching out – learning to educate and organise those around us. How many self-defining activists have ever knocked on a stranger’s door, or organised a union meeting with their colleagues? How many have been trained in how to do so?

We seem to be afraid of engaging formal organised power. Whilst we are right to be wary of political parties and trade unions, we mustn’t be afraid of them. I can’t think of a successful movement which has achieved real change without working through these formal structures. And, with The Green Party on the rise and trade unions leading mass mobilisations, how can we not engage with them – if even with a cheeky scepticism?

The UK has hundreds of local groups working in their own ways for economic justice. If our movement is an ecosystem, we cannot pretend that we will all tackle the same targets or organise in the same ways. But successful ecosystems must cross-pollinate and must ensure their leaves continue to fertilise their roots. Get these things right, then, as the glaring iniquity of neoliberal exploitation becomes brighter, we will flourish.

Adam Ramsay ran as a Green Party candidate in the recent local elections. He has also been closely involved with UK Uncut. Adam writes at Bright Green Scotland and tweets as @AdamRamsay