Activism is where your friends are, say veterans of struggle

 

School of Community and Public Affairs professor Eric Shragge provided an insider’s history of the Quebec community movement, including a blunt assessment of its recent travails, at a panel discussion on Sept. 17.

The 1960s saw the emergence of a grass roots community movement in Quebec, including a vital English-speaking anti-poverty movement, which Shragge joined as a young social worker.

“That was when poor people began to take and demand control of their own lives, and mobilize and organize, occupy welfare offices and struggle for social justice.”

By the late 1970s and early ’80s, however, countervailing forces began to erode and strain this community-level social safety net.

“A combination of massive inflation and unemployment, a redefinition of economic production away from blue-collar towns and neighborhoods, closing of factories in Montreal.

“Instead of the state saying, ‘This is a crisis, we really have to do something about it,’ they created an enemy out of the poor and the working class, engaging in union-bashing, wage freezes and cutbacks.”

The response of the community sector was surprisingly passive. “You would think that people would get really pissed off and mobilize. No, they became junior service providers. There was a shift from a highly politicized sector to an innovative, creative, service sector.”

Shragge allows that community groups had little choice for this defensive posture.

“They were stuck; the state was withdrawing services. They saw increasing poverty. In acts of solidarity, they created new services like food banks, so that people could survive. And with some exceptions, the organizing and mobilizing agenda of the community sector started to disappear.”

Shragge is been encouraged by signs of a return to more activism, and he called for an increasingly oppositional approach to complement the service model “if we do political education, if we mobilize and try to touch people’s lives, and not give up the idea of making demands on the system.

“We shouldn’t say, ‘We’re in a neo-liberal system and a globalized world and the market is all we’ve got.’ If we say that, it will be realized for sure. If we make demands, then maybe we’ll win some victories along the way.”

The next speaker, New York-based social activist and author Rinku Sen, said that a similar disengagement of the state from social services occurred in the U.S. in the 1990s.

“The right wing ran a tremendous 30-year campaign to undo welfare, and they won. In 1996, with the Welfare Reform Act, we essentially lost our welfare system.

“You can no longer get income support because you are poor and you need it; now you can only get that kind of support if you work for it. There are a lot of inequities; if you’re working 30 hours a week for your $200 welfare cheque, that’s less than minimum wage.”

Sen said the key to battling such setbacks is an “inside-outside” strategy in which a sympathetic insider within an institution provides key support and information to activists.

“The outsider’s job is to apply pressure that escapes the established channels of change and complaint — of due process — when they’re not working. The insider’s job is to open a space for the voice of the constituency [making demands] and to defend that constituency. The insider provides information to the outsiders.”

Concordia Communication Studies professor Yasmin Jiwani agreed. “Institutions are not monolithic, but they are full of individuals with different alliances. How did feminism ever get off the ground with so little power? It was through alliances with ‘femocrats’ in institutions.”

One institution that activists need to cultivate is the media. In Canada, according to Jiwani, subtle censorship due to media concentration means that views outside the mainstream are often left out.

She proposes that outsider activists to write for the alternative media.

“The mainstream media often look to the alternative media for something new. It’s a way of galvanizing mainstream interest in a subject.”

During question-and-answer period, the speakers were asked how to deal with fear.

Jiwani responded that even in a democracy, where there is no fear of a secret police breaking down your door, “society does cultivate an internalized, paralyzing fear which says that if you do certain things, then you won’t belong, but we can find belonging within our own communities.”

As an activist acquaintance of Shragge’s succinctly put it, “I guess do this because this is where my friends are.”

The panel was the first event in this year’s Peace and Conflict Resolution Public Lecture Series.