Social rights - what are we at?

There is always hope, it just depends where you look - but you won’t find it on Twitter or Facebook, or wandering the halls of government wearing suits and having meetings about meetings.

We’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the nature of our activism during the pandemic. As 2021 ends and 2022 begins, unprecedented constitutional, economic and ecological change is on the horizon. How we rise to meet these challenges will make all the difference.

In the ongoing battle between profits and the greater good our governments seem bound to fail us. But let’s not forget what happened at the start of the pandemic, when we grounded the planes, parked the cars and found magic money to solve all sorts of problems.

We did what was necessary for the health of the planet, and at a scale previously thought impossible.

Very powerful people who lost out during that period are hoping our collective memory is short, and they have regrouped with a fury to protect their interests. A great many more people have been left behind and forced to choose between their communities, health, or poverty.

Hardly a choice at all. And for those of us with the financial security to prioritise the greater good, the counter-pull of our individual desires is ever present.

The challenges are huge. Through a social media lens, where we’re the product in a marketing strategy that suppresses social justice messages in favour of funny cat videos, the world looks doomed. But these are just apps which we can switch off.

Yes, powerful people are using the data they harvest to shape politics and economics in their favour, but we can use other tools to build a better world.

Like the labourers of the past who built the wealth of the industrial giants, we social media consumers create the wealth of today’s tech elite.

We’ve been reflecting on how we can organise effectively in this digital environment and what we can learn from the early trade unionists. They were attacked and ridiculed for organising workers in a new way, yet went on to secure the rights and freedoms we enjoy today.

For two decades we’ve been supporting marginalised groups to assert their rights by taking action. Early on, we used human rights hooks to build pressure on duty bearers.

Over time we’ve come to focus on the intersections between our campaigns and the reactions from power, honing our tactics and applying lessons we’ve learned from other movements.

We have found hope in quiet places, where people come together to look after themselves and their neighbours: organising teachers to provide free education for asylum seekers, creating space for therapy through story telling, planting seeds in the ground to feed people or developing new technology to plan a new city – all radical activity investing in the future and divesting our time and energy from the failed politics of the present.

Across all of our campaigns the activists we support are finding new ways of working. They are tired of meeting politicians and hearing promises, doing selfies then, inevitably, having their lack of faith in political institutions confirmed.

In fairness, not all elected officials are the same and we need good ones to make change happen, but we can’t operate in an orbit around them.

We don’t need likes, we don’t need selfies, we don’t need vast wealth and resources. We need good people who hope for better and good people are everywhere. From those foundations we can build anything we want.

We’ve spent the last two years building things that work, or that don’t work but teach us something.

Our anchor remains the people who are impacted by the problems and who most need change – the real people who, still to this day, make the ministers and gatekeepers and bureaucrats squirm just by walking into the room, or zoom.

Good people. Experts on life, with highly tuned bullshit radars. In every case where we organise with a community of people to solve problems we find hope, friendship and affirmation.

We don’t need likes, we don’t need selfies, we don’t need vast wealth and resources. We need good people who hope for better and good people are everywhere. From those foundations we can build anything we want.