Republished with permission from the blog of Tadzio Mueller, Peaceful Sabotage
Note: continuing from the last extract from Tadzio`s upcoming book published on COTW here, this is the second part of the latest introduction. Tadzio is happy to receive feedback from activists all over the world. Visit his website for more details.
Incapable of action in war: no movement without leverage
Seattle changed me: before, I saw my likely career path in some more or less progressive UN institution—perhaps in some environmental department of the World Bank, or in one of those small, left-leaning UN research institutes like UNRISD—but afterward, I knew that my political future lay in activism, in social movements. Everything else seemed like utter nonsense. What could be better than the experience I had in Seattle? What better response to major political anxieties than to build a social movement around and against them, within which we could then collectively and powerfully address the fear and the problem that triggered it?
The next political problem was not long in coming: during 2002, when I was living in England to write my dissertation on anti-capitalist activism at Sussex University, it became clear that the US empire, led by Dick Cheney and his glorified sock puppet George W. Bush, would attack Iraq without any legal or moral basis, and would be supported in this by the British poodle Tony Blair. I know that it has now become completely normal again to constantly see fighter jets and other military aircraft overhead, even in the privileged countries of the world, but at the beginning of the 2000s, after a good ten years of the “peace dividend”—the rather silly and hyper-privileged assumption in retrospect that after the end of the Cold War a kind of permanent global peace would prevail, that the Pax Americana would extend forever across the entire world—it was deeply frightening to live in a country that, together with the global bully hegemon, was planning an illegal war of aggression that would result in bombers taking off from British Air Force bases ” to murder Iraqi children ,” as we somewhat polemically put it at the time. But the protests were of course not only about humanitarian concern for people in Iraq, however present that was: many of us in the British anti-war movement were driven by the fear of a world in which wars would once again become a perfectly normal form of enforcing imperial or even “national” interests – a world that we had been promised was over since 1989.
Anti-War Movement 2002-2003
Since Seattle, I had become an “activist” and experienced “limitless agency” through shared radical (disobedient, rule-breaking, even confrontational) street activism, so the reaction to the looming war, which was simultaneously a kind of moral bankruptcy for the victorious side in the Cold War – the “new world order” apparently wasn’t so different from the old one, in which the rich, late-imperial societies of the global North simply take what they want and provide some kind of bullshit justification (just like in Iraq back then, and in Venezuela today) – was almost predetermined: let’s build an anti-war movement .
And so we did . But not all activism is successful, not every movement conveys heroic agency—on average, unfortunately, quite the opposite is true. “Activism” is a very particular kind of magic that can only unfold its full effect under very specific, and in most cases not truly predictable, conditions, and these conditions are usually not met. A key condition for success that was lacking in the British anti-war movement is the existence of leverage .
Sure, a collective mass of people on the streets is important and encouraging, and organizing a huge demonstration, or an action that successfully achieves its goal and (for example) blocks or peacefully sabotages something, is definitely a great feeling. But if these demonstrations or actions repeatedly come to nothing, if they don’t generate any expanding momentum in the sense of a constantly growing wave of mobilization, especially if what is being fought against eventually becomes irrevocably real: then the movement produces the exact opposite of the empowering experience that motivates people to become active as “activists” (or “organizers,” if the term “activist” has acquired too many negative connotations these days), to get involved in social movements. Then the movement feels just as lame as sitting around in the shrinking local grassroots organization of some political party, waiting at just after 10 p.m. for the secretary to correctly present the minutes from last week’s meeting. Even worse, since the promise of activism is precisely that of an almost explosive capacity for action, regardless of how long it actually takes to achieve political success, this very promise then becomes a problem, because while party work is deliberately designed for the long term, it is a major challenge for movements to survive the rigors of the political level and to secure their internal stability and resilience between peak mobilization phases: if movement work falters, the movement is often immediately threatened with extinction.
That’s exactly what happened to the British anti-war movement. While we achieved incredible mobilization successes in 2002, the year of war preparations, with local anti-war groups organizing themselves practically across the entire country and very, very clear majorities positioning themselves against an illegal war of aggression, we as a movement seemed to think that would be enough. Sure, there was a radical wing, to which our Sussex Action for Peace group also belonged, which repeatedly attracted attention with acts of civil disobedience, street blockades, and other forms of protest, but at its core, the strategy was the same one that the German climate movement would later rely on: large demonstrations and attention-grabbing actions were supposed to generate clear societal majorities for or against something, then the government would cave in, because alienating societal majorities should be a problem for a democratically elected government.
Leverage
But is it ? The statement sounds plausible at first, but consider the (then) British two-party system: if, realistically, the only choice is between Labour and the Tories, and the Tories are generally in favor of war, and Labour is pushing for this specific war, then “shifting public opinion” isn’t a viable tool because there were no effective electoral sanctions if Labour went to war. “Whatcha gonna do – vote for the effin’ Tories, ey?”
The whole sorry spectacle of a huge, well-organized movement without any real power reached its climax on February 15, 2003, when 1.5 million people, in the largest political demonstration in British history, laboriously and relentlessly wound their way through the streets of London: the outbreak of war was just weeks away, and the movement’s stated goal was to prevent it. At the same time, the Blair government had loudly and clearly signaled that it didn’t care about public opinion; it would definitely support the USA in this war, so crucial for human rights and democracy. This, in turn, meant that there was actually no reason at all for 1.5 million people to be in the streets, except for mutual reassurance. If we had used this boring demonstration, which never decided to, for example, sit down in the street and block London, or perhaps have a small party in front of 10 Downing Street, during which, and I’m just spitballing here , one could indeed have beautified the facade of the house in which an illegal imperialist war of aggression was being planned, then something could have been achieved.
But nobody sat down, nobody celebrated exuberantly with pyrotechnics in Downing Street, nobody decided to resort to any means other than friendly persuasion. And so it happened as it had to: we went to London, the demonstration was huge (and terribly quiet: England doesn’t really have a strong slogan-chanting culture, but to see 1.5 million people marching through the city virtually silently was quite oppressive), then we went back home, and nothing, absolutely nothing, had changed regarding the war plans. February 15, 2003, was the day I lost my last bit of respect for what we radical leftists disparagingly call “walking demonstrations,” and finally and completely dedicated myself to mass civil disobedience, to breaking the rules together for a good cause. ( A side note on the history of the movement : Roger Hallam, later co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil/Last Generation, was also at this demonstration, and his entirely correct insight that a government and/or society that will not listen may have to feel was formed there.)
A few weeks later, on Thursday, March 20, 2003, the war actually began. I remember it very clearly: we, a group of radical left-wing activists, drove to a ” last ditch” action at the Fairford Air Force Base, how we, along with others from the radical wing, tried to storm the base ( crazy idea : in retrospect, I’ve often wondered what would have happened if we had succeeded) to prevent bombers and the like from taking off. But what I remember most vividly is the feeling of utter powerlessness as I lay in a small ditch in front of a fence after a police officer pushed me back, and I saw the bombers taking off overhead, flying towards Baghdad, Kirkuk, and Mosul: I howled, screamed, and trembled with frustration and helplessness. That moment is seared into my memory, much like its opposite in Seattle: never again such powerless activism, I swore to myself back then…
Centre of the Web 