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Making a Difference
The youth created this play where there was an alternate world and there were two
teenagers, who were straight, who had to go home to their lesbian moms and gay dads
and tell them that they were straight. So it was fun and it was funny and it really put
a spin on that. And between the acts of that play, [the youth] did monologues about
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8 Activism That Works
their own coming out stories, which were really personal for them. They accomplished
this in a very topical, interesting way and it was fun and very personal — this play
that has so many messages in it, which means a lot more when it’s combined with
their own experience. So I think the message is stronger. The interesting thing about
the play was that it effected change quickly. Whereas my other experiences to do
things were long term that don’t really produce tangible results right away… and
then people were talking, and it didn’t take policies or manuals to get people talking
and going through the red tape and all this other stuff that we have to do. We just
did a play and reached out to people directly and it was good.
Notes
1. Because of our motivation to be supportive, if not of some assistance, to these
groups, this diversity does not extend to include groups whose objectives we find
offensive.
2. Nine activist groups/organizations participated in the project; eight groups
accepted the invitation to contribute a book chapter.
2
Building Success
in Social Activism
S ocial activism can make a difference. And activism that works can gener-
ate more activism that works. The neoliberal agenda must be credited
with engendering a strongly felt and remarkably creative set of international
responses to its impacts — not just in rejecting or resisting its policies, but also
in a ferment of activity in generating visions of alternatives. In this chapter
we discuss backgrounds to our work: neoliberal hegemony, its consequences
and contesters; emancipatory social inquiry traditions that inform us; efforts
by others to assess the effectiveness of the work of activists; and finally how
we and our activist collaborators carried out this project.
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12 Activism That Works
majority who are the losers. The processes of neoliberal globalization have
been accompanied by degradation of social, political, economic and envi-
ronmental conditions for the vast majority of the world’s population.
The Impacts
For Economic and Social Justice
The implementation of the neoliberal global agenda has been accompanied
by growing disparities between rich and poor, both within and between coun-
tries (UN 2010, ilo 2008). The United Nations Development Program has
long decried the “inequitable effects of globalization driven by markets and
profit… a grotesque and dangerous polarization between people and coun-
tries benefiting from the system and those that are merely passive recipients
of its effects” (undp 1997: 1). Unfortunately, the years since 1997 have seen
little progress (Finn 2010). In 2008, the International Labour Organization’s
World of Work Report concluded that the worldwide gap between richer and
poorer households has continued to widen, and that “financial globaliza-
tion — caused by deregulation of international capital flows — has been a
major driver of income inequality” (ilo 2008: 2).1 With 43 percent of the
global workforce earning less than $2 per day, the number of people going
hungry is increasing. In September 2008, care International reported that
“[in the past two years] another 100 million people have been pushed into
hunger and can no longer afford food” (care 2008: 1).
Recent decades, then, have been a development disaster for many of
the world’s poorest countries.2 As a consequence of neoliberal globalization,
ordinary people world-wide are dislocated and thrown out of work, needed
social programs are dismantled and a very few people become very rich.
The realities associated with the dramatic economic crash of 2008 that so
traumatized the privileged had long since been the companion of the global
majority. Yet while the 1.3 billion people living in the world’s poorest countries
lived on an average annual income of $573, following the 2008 financial crisis,
$15 trillion in public funds was used to bail out private banks. $15 trillion is
approximately one fourth of the world’s total income (Ransom 2009).
For the Environment
There is mounting evidence of the disproportionate impact of negative ef-
fects of climate change on the world’s poor (undp 2007/2008), effects that
were exacerbated by the 2008 financial crisis. “Just as the market has proved
incapable of controlling the dangerous excesses of international finance, it
is failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or to kick-start the dramatic
shift towards zero-carbon economies we so desperately need” (Worth 2009b:
11). The increasing economic and political power of businesses and inves-
tors in recent decades, strengthened immensely by globalization (Stanford
Building Success in Social Activism 13
and private ownership” (Przeworski et al. 1995: viii). In other words, around
the question of ideological hegemony.
Challenges to neoliberalism have come not just from intellectuals, but also
from within corporate and political elites. By the beginning of the twenty-first
century, as economic, social, environmental and political crises proliferated
throughout the world, increasing numbers of people at the “centre” had been
questioning the wisdom of the neoliberal “miracle” (Soros 1998). Important
corporate and political figures were calling for reform, or at least for some
kind of supervision of capital. In a May 1999 speech, then World Bank chief
economist Joseph Stiglitz criticized the single-minded preoccupation with
inflation that resulted in macroeconomic policies stifling growth. There were
“signs… of a growing fissure between the imf’s thinking and that of its sister
organization, the World Bank” (Elliot 1999: 14). The same year, Canadian
Finance Minister Paul Martin stated that, “simply put, in an institutional
and legal vacuum, private markets cannot serve social interests, nor can
they serve economic interests” (Martin 1999). The Tobin Tax, Nobel Prize-
winning economist James Tobin’s proposal for a punitive tax on short-run
speculative financial transactions, was just one of a number of initiatives
being proposed to rein in out-of-control capital.
The 2008 global market collapse brought home the critical importance
of these issues, seeming to create overnight neo-Keynesians in corporate
circles, with a recognition of the need for re-regulation in the interest of
capital accumulation (Martinez 2009).
ments, leadership from national governments has thus been little in evidence
in addressing issues of social and environmental justice.
In the face of this vacuum, citizen organizations worldwide have been moving
into the breach, confronting the threats of corporate globalization to democ-
racy, economic justice, the environment and protection of the commons.
Counterhegemonic Popular Responses
Responses to market-worshipping neoliberalism are perhaps best summed
up in the “one no, many yeses” slogan of the World Social Forum (wsf).
Meeting in various places around the world, initially as a counterpoint to the
annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the WSF represents a
broad-based civil society rejection of the neoliberal global agenda (the “no”4)
and an affirmation of the multiplicity of alternatives generated through the
creative genius of ordinary people (the “yeses”).
Since the early 1980s, movements in the global South — with conscious-
ness no doubt enhanced by hundreds of years of anti-colonial struggles —
have challenged structural adjustment programs, their externally-generated
debt burdens, privatizations of publicly owned resources and services, ex-
ternally funded megaprojects and their attendant debt, the destruction of
traditional economies and food security and environmental degradation. In
the North, by the middle of the same decade, resistance was mobilizing to
proposed free trade agreements that would make the interests of international
corporations superior those of governments, allowing corporations to sue
governments for any labour, social or environmental protections that might
interfere with commercial interests (Wilson and Whitmore 2000).
The emergence of the World Social Forum and other alliances reflects
the convergence of circumstances between the dispossessed of the North and
the South — a globalized impoverishment in terms of economic and social
justice, political power and ideological hegemony — and a resulting attempt
at organized resistance, or globalization from below. People have organized
sectorally, around specific economic, social, democracy and environment-
related issues, and in local, national or cross-national coalitions. Thus, for
example, La Via Campesina, an international movement of peasants, small-
and medium-sized producers, landless, rural women, indigenous people, rural
youth and agricultural workers, was formed to