It’s all too easy to get lost in the present and attach historical significance to events which, in hindsight, are ephemeral.
For example, who remembers the fuel protests of the early naughties? I remember working on a big tabloid during the 2005 events, watching pages getting cleared for coverage and writing screeds and screeds about them.
They seemed really significant at the time – but in reality they have followed the Cod War, the mould-shattering (ahem) emergence of Change UK and the 2001 general election (honestly, the dullest ever) onto the list of events which people know have happened but can’t remember much about.
However, it does seem that right now we are in the grip of A Moment.
And I don’t mean Brexit, which will sadly also be seen to have been era-defining. I’m talking about the growing movement round about the environment, which has seen its (thus far) fullest expression in the school strikes and the Extinction Rebellion protests.
We have been here before, of course, with environmental movements. I’m boring enough to remember the brief Green Party surge in the 1989 European elections, the movement against CFCs, Swampy and acid jazz quarter-wits Galliano writing a song about the Twyford Down road protests. In fact, I’m even boring enough to remember acid jazz, but we digress.
This present movement, though, feels different in that it is truly an avenging spirit of its times – a movement with its bearings magnetised by THE event of our age – the still-unfolding crisis of world capitalism following the cataclysm of 2008.
On the left, there used to be talk about reform or revolution: basically, how much do you push for reforms to the system, and when is the point when you talk about overthrowing it. If you push for too many reforms, do you end up propping up the system, do you end up in fact sowing dangerous illusions in it, the idea – widespread still – that the system can be made more humane, somehow, well, nicer.
The Extinction Rebellion movement, and to an extent the school strikers, have, in a short period of time – framed by the economic realities of the age and the existential threat of ecocide – wrestled with this and have begun to synthesise it, fleshing out Lenin’s gag about there being decades when nothing happens then weeks where decades happen.
It’s encapsulated by the simple, and excellent, slogan: system change, not climate change.
Despite the heterogeneous nature of the movement, despite its current weaknesses in terms of its social base, it is asking the correct questions and finding we need both reform of the system AND fundamental change – a ratchet must be set towards sane economics and progressive politics which cannot be undone – and these can happen at the same moment, indeed they must, given the scale of what we’re up against.
It is here, I’d argue, the third sector has a chance to make a real impact – we must engage with this new movement, and events like the forthcoming climate summit in Glasgow (see pages 10-15) will provide splendid opportunities for that.
But we must be about more than greenwashing – or reform. We must synthesise our own ideas about what sort of society we’d like to see, and how we get there, and these must be fed into the discussions to come (and they will) about how we change society for the better.
I’ve said it before and will again – the third sector needs an ideology.
There are big battles ahead – do we have the guts to engage?
Graham Martin is editor of TFN.
