The Hamilton Institute

Another Spectacle and Broken Solidarity: Why we’re staying home July 5th

This weekend, a protest initiated by an international Big Green NGO, 350.org, is being held in the lead up to the Pan-Am climate summit in Toronto. This Jobs Justice Climate march is yet another attempt by Big Green NGOs and labour unions to draw on the strength of the grassroots environmental movement in this area to serve their own interests, channeling our energy into appeals to powerful people who we know aren’t part of the solution. They are hijacking local resources to build their own fundraising opportunity, while turning us towards the most pacified forms of opposition.

In this case though, this hijacking is being done in the middle of a massive security deployment – the Pan-Am games come with the largest policing operation in this area since the G20. It is in fact the same policing structure – a Joint Intelligence Group, or JIG. Organizers from 350.org are explicitly breaking solidarity by insisting participants reject ‘harm to property’, and they have no plan in place to support anyone who might become a target of police violence. 350.org is going to use our movements as a pretext to raise yet more money for themselves, asking us to step into the jaws of the Pan-Am JIG while making it clear we’re on our own should we come under attack. This arrogant and parasitic behaviour is totally out of step with how grassroots campaigns in Ontario understand diversity of tactics and solidarity. We’ve built our collective strength over years and decades – why should we accept an outside group coming in to undermine it?

This letter is written by a small group of people who have been active in the campaign against Line 9 and who believe our local movements don’t stand to benefit from this climate summit march. This letter is an attempt to explain our opposition to this event in more detail.

The Pan-Am Climate Summit is a symbolic public relations stunt for the Province of Ontario and industry. We question the choice to protest this summit. Why are we amplifying its existence? Why are we lending it any legitimacy? There has been a tactical move away from confronting climate summits amongst the ‘climate movement’ for good reasons. We don’t have any demands for the world ‘leaders.’ We don’t believe they hold the solutions to the climate crisis.

The Jobs Justice Climate march, planned for a few days before, is an equally symbolic spectacle. This march is not shrinking the systems that we are fighting or challenging the power of illegitimate power-holders. On the contrary, NGO events dilute our power, misinterpret and misappropriate the meaning of peaceful resistance and direct action, pull resources away from radical local projects, pacify people and are an ongoing force pulling the conversation and people towards a weaker understanding of rebellion.

350.org has framed their march by saying:

-“This July, Toronto will host a Pan American Climate Summit and an Economic Summit, where politicians will face a choice: listen to corporate leaders from across the Americas gathering to advance an economic austerity agenda that is increasing inequality and cooking the planet – or listen to the people.” and;

-“On the eve of those summits, let’s make sure they hear our demands: a justice-based transition to a new energy economy, in which corporate polluters pay and ordinary people benefit.”

Their framing is positioning political and economic leaders as actors who might make a choice in favour of people as a result of a large demonstration. We know this isn’t true.

Funding Model

Big Green organizations and other non-profit organizations, including 350.org sustain their existence by hosting events and actions. It doesn’t matter what, when or where the action is so long as the organization can make a meme out of it and send an email to their sustainers saying “we won,” now please donate again.

This funding model impedes radical, transformative change by privileging the spectacular while concealing less glamorous day-to-day organizing. The Big Green organizations in fact parasitize local organizing to support their one-off fundraising opportunities.

Branding

Among Big Green NGOs, 350.org in particular positions itself as building and working in this “movement.” They want to appear edgy and grassroots, but their goal is to create change from the top and any real grassroots power is a threat to this. They use radical language to channel everyone into a safe, fundable action that does nothing more than invite the powerful to make token gestures. They talk about including diverse groups and viewpoints, but they set the terms and limits of the discussion.

Pacifying Resistance, Quelling Dissent

kat yang stevens, an educator based on the occupied territories belonging to the Onondaga & Cayuga Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in so-called New York explains:

“One of the most insidious tactics in the arsenal of the Big Greens are their constant calls to “actions” and marches. Flashy ad campaigns and promotional events billed as meaningful resistance are an easy way to quell would-be radicals capable of making critical connections that would render such organizations targets for destruction, or at least obsolete. These corporate-backed Big Greens put a lot of funding into fooling and exploiting impressionable students and other well-meaning people to spend vast amounts of time, energy, and resources to mobilize for these ultimately counterproductive and completely contrived events.

“Many people in settler colonial societies of Canada and the United States, as well as other parts of the ‘developed world,’ who consider themselves ‘well-meaning,’ ‘left-leaning,’ ‘liberal,’ ‘earth-friendly,’ ‘sustainable,’ ‘green,’ etc., recognize that there is something deeply warped and malicious embedded within our societies and get sad, upset, and restless. If not sufficiently pacified, their energies could be harnessed in such a way that they would become a major threat to the status quo.”

Local Resources Sucked Up

When Big Greens organize their funding campaigns masquerading as direct actions, they often demand time and support from the local community. Having local support gives their work the legitimacy and “grassroots” cred needed to spin it into a successful funding campaign. This process does not strengthen local organizing, but is rather a burden on it.

For the Jobs, Justice, Climate March, 350.org reached out to local groups to join the organizing committee. In Toronto this has meant that a lot of organizational and individual energy has gone into deciding whether to engage with it or to participate in the organizing. Many groups decided to engage in order to do damage control when 350.org made decisions that may harm local communities. Other local groups wanted to make the event messaging less problematic or include more radical messaging -for example to complicate the Green Jobs discourse which never talks about prison labour, domestic work, sex work or the walls and borders that uphold the economy.

Breaking Solidarity

In order to sign on to participate, groups needed to fill out a google form checkbox agreeing to “focus on our shared goals, and thus commit to avoid harm to individuals, property, or the land.” Reading this it can sound innocuous, or reasonable even, but this plays into a long history of NGOs denouncing militant forms of resistance taken up by frontline and impacted communities and of NGOs not supporting diversity of tactics.

For example, the Line 9 campaign in Southern Ontario has had a focus on direct action and has repeatedly targeted the property of Enbridge and its contractors. These actions have broad support and build on many years of discussion in this area about how to respect a diversity of tactics in campaign organizing. 350.org is explicitly breaking solidarity with these actions and are encouraging others to stand with them in doing so.

350.org has decided to move in and plan an event in Toronto during a time when there is a massive security budget and excuse for ‘security measures.’ We already know environmental groups are a target of the Joint Intelligence Group formed for the Pan-Am games – the same policing structure used at the G20. While this march is perhaps an innocuous Sunday afternoon event, it is important to consider how communities in Toronto will be impacted — people who live locally and are already criminalized, local organizers & activists, young or less experienced folks with righteous rage who most likely to be entrapped by the state, etc. Whatever impacts are felt, how will this Big Green (probably not) be accountable to the consequences? By failing to have a plan to support those impacted by repression, in effect 350.org is also demanding local groups to deal with any fall-out.

Weakening Our Movement

By breaking solidarity with the most combative parts of the movement, by provoking the security apparatus with a symbolic march during a huge police deployment, and by refusing to meaningfully support those likely to experience repression, 350.org is weakening our movements and putting us at greater risk of repression and disruption. This reckless and selfish behaviour, combined with the pacifying impact of NGO-style activism and burden on local organizing, make us reject the Jobs Justice Climate March.

Please consider what we have put forward and consider:

If you share our concerns, we ask you to confront 350.org and the other organizers with these issues, especially about the choice to break solidarity with the most combative parts of the movement. We ask that you and your groups make a commitment to support a diversity of tactics in confronting climate change and the industries that drive them and commit to support anyone targeted with repression for their defense of the earth. Although we will be staying home on the 5^th, we know many of our friends and allies will participate in the march – we simply ask that you think about how Big Green NGOs like this actually impact our local movements and whether it’s wise to organize around symbolic summits like this.

Please carry on these conversations on the buses, in the demonstration, in your own meetings, among your friends and within yourself. We will all be confronting ecological destruction for many years to come and thinking critically about how we organize to do so now will serve us well in the future.