Confronting Injustice, Choosing Social Activism
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- Published on Sunday, 17 April 2016 22:30
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1248 .... April 18, 2016
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Confronting Injustice, Choosing Social Activism
Umair Muhammad
Bold and imaginative activism is difficult to find precisely at a time when we need it most. However, it is not the case that activism in general is in short supply; one finds, in fact, that activist ideals and vocabulary have securely made their way into everyday life. However, this leaves society fundamentally unchanged when the messages communicated by activists are distorted and then used to reinforce the social realities that they were originally devised to change.
Perhaps the most blatant example of the co-optation of activist ideals can be seen in the supposed embrace of the concept of sustainability by the corporate world. Oil companies long ago discovered the public relations benefits of describing their operations... with the use of phrases such as "sustainable development" and "sustainable growth." Following the extraordinary rise in the consumption of plastic bottled water, the soft drink industry used the same PR technique to advertise "eco-friendly" bottled water -- or so companies like Nestlé, which eagerly promotes the fact that its bottles now contain "25 per cent less plastic," would have us believe.
The watering down, emptying out, and distortion of activist ideals has been helped along by activists themselves. For one thing, they have been willing to ignore the social dimensions of the problems that confront us, believing instead in the idea that the actions of autonomous individuals have led us to our current impasse. Confronting Injustice offers a corrective to this faulty outlook. In the book, I argue that social realities, in particular those created to meet the needs of our economic system, constrain and direct the actions of individuals. It is these social realities, therefore, that must attract most of our attention when we struggle to create change, even when the reorientation of individual behaviour happens to be our ultimate aim.