10th March 2023:
I recently watched the first episode of the second series of The Mandalorian on the Disney Plus channel. It's a spin off Star Wars franchise, and although I'm a big fan of Star Wars, I'm not particularly keen on the Mandalorian series, which doesn't really posses the mythological magic that made Star Wars the phenomenon that it is.
Anyway in this episode, the Mandalorian, who is a kind of galactic bounty hunter, is on the remote desert planet of Tattooine. He comes across this 'wild west' style community of colonists on the planet who are being attacked by this giant sand worm, a creature that is much like the giant sand worms that you get in the Dune stories. The worm threatens the life of the whole town, and so they recruit the Mandalorian to help them defeat it. Unfortunately, the worm is too powerful and so they are forced to join forces with the sand people, who are an indigenous people native to the planet whom the settlers have been in conflict with, and who are also suffering from the attacks of the giant worm. The sand people however have often attacked and raided the colonists town, and the sand people too have suffered from the colonists, and so there is fierce resistance in both camps against joining forces with them due to long standing hurts and grievances.
Nonetheless, the colonists realise that they will not survive if they do not defeat the giant worm, and that the only way they can do so is to join forces with their enemy, the sand people, and the sand people too come to a similar conclusion, and so the two opposing camps join forces, and to cut a long story short, the worm is killed and the two camps, though still hostile, part with a mutual understanding and new found respect for each other.
Illustrated in this short story is a key understanding of the forces that hold grassroots social movements together, something that does not seem to be well understood in the activist scene, but which is nonetheless important to understand. For a social movement to work, there must be cohesion within the group. For single issue movements, such as gay and lesbian rights, cohesion occurs because, although there are strong political and other differences within the movement, such as Marxists, anarchists, capitalists, traditional political party supporters, polyamorists, traditional couples, veggies, meat eaters, and so on, differences that can often threaten to drive a movement apart as it descends into in-fighting, the strength of oppression that gay and lesbian peoples have faced in society has traditionally been so great that these disparate forces have, like in the Mandalorian episode mentioned above, come together because they recognise a greater threat. In other words, the movement has developed a powerful social cohesion due to the threat of a common enemy, and the force of this social cohesion is much greater than the forces which, without such an external threat, would otherwise cause division and in-fighting.
This is critical to understand, and now let me turn to the present day, and illustrate this simple insight into social movements with a contemporary example.
This example occurred a few weeks ago in the USA. In order to stop the US war machine and its most recent manifestation in the US proxy-war against Russia in the Ukraine, there has been an ongoing attempt in the United States to build an anti-war movement that can challenge the seemingly all-powerful influence of the US military-industrial complex. To be successful, this coalition needs to be embraced by those on both the left and the right of the political divide. This means trying to wed together groups and parties who are otherwise very hostile to each other, such as conservative groups who see gays and lesbian as immoral and indecent and a threat to the traditional church and family model of society, and gay and lesbian groups who see right wing 'family man' patriarchs as authoritarian, living in the past, and fundamentally dismissive and abusive of their human rights.
As the broad coalition of anti-war activists in the US prepared for their major anti-war protest at the Lincoln memorial in Washington on February 19th, unsurprisingly the fragile coalition was destabilising into in-fighting, with people boycotting the venue, and some high profile speakers refusing to speak at the demo, because of the inclusion of factions whom they consider to be their enemy, and with whom they are otherwise at war with. It hit the headlines of the US activist media, though was ignored by the mainstream, with prominent pundits such as Chris Hedges posting blogs (There are no permanent Allies Only Permanent Power) calling for unity and the need to overcome in-fighting to face this greater threat, and other alternative outlets, such as broadcaster Kim Iversen, posting YouTube videos on the situation (Anti-War Activist Infighting Reaches Boiling Point).
We have here an example of an anti-war movement that needs to form a broad coalition in order to defeat a much greater enemy, a veritable fire-breathing dragon otherwise known as the US war machine, but which is unable to do so due to political in-fighting. In other words, there is a lack of social cohesion within the movement due to the force of internal differences, differences which, like the two factions in the Mandalorian episode, are very real, and have resulted in much hurt and pain and bloodshed in the past. Popular pundits such as Chris Hedges and Kim Iversen are doing their best to try and get people within the movement to understand that they need to overcome their differences to face this greater threat, and that it is in their interest to do so, but unfortunately, the US war machine is not directly threatening the lives and livelihoods of American citizens, and for this reason the cohesiveness that the threat of a common enemy might otherwise have brought is simply not there. In addition, people within the anti-war movement may use words like 'military industrial complex', but they do not really understand what that means, because if they did, they would recognise this as the greater threat. So there is also a real lack of political intelligence within the anti-war movement (i.e. a lot of it is about, as Chris Hedges says, virtue signalling and attention), and that level of awareness is foundational to achieving the kind of social cohesion that a movement capable of bringing down the military industrial complex needs.
The more socially diverse a movement is, the more difficult it is to get it to 'socially cohere'. Movements with well defined shared values cohere effectively and so are able to work together to pursue a common goal. Movements of people who hold strong and conflicting values do not socially cohere unless there is a common goal that far outweighs their personal differences. The motivational goal of a diverse movement has to significantly outweigh the inner conflicts that arise between members otherwise coherence fails and infighting takes over. It's just human dynamics.
Of course, any alliance that is made has to be made up of members that can be trusted, and whose integrity on the goal to be achieved is real. No point, for example, in building an anti-war coalition with those who stand to profit from increased militarisation. Such a coalition is doomed to fail. Similarly, there is no point building a coalition with people or groups who are going to betray that coalition or who are just using the coalition as a platform for gaining power. I have wrote in this blog before, for example, of the need to exclude certain groups from the climate movement, such as the Labour Party, because they do not have integrity on the climate, and have a history of betrayal and currying favour with movements in order to seek power. So there can be good reasons not to work with certain groups and interests, and to exclude them.
On the other hand, all too often in social and environmental movements people and groups are excluded because others do not like their views or their behaviours, and not because of any real reason that relates to the cause itself, or the achievement of the goals of that cause. It is this kind of behaviour that is harmful to movements, and this is what we need to root out and deal with. In my view, all of us activists in the UK need to mature, and not be so hysterical and reactionary, but rather seek to understand the forces within the social body and how they work. We are all subject to these kinds of social forces, and if we want to build movements of diverse groups in order to achieve radical social and environmental change, then we need to drop the moral righteousness and the virtue preaching, and start to get real. Catastrophic events like global climatic change are beyond our individual sufferings, and call for a unity response, regardless of how divergent our views are. The notion of social cohesion is one aspect of movements that are essential to understand in order to create such united movements across the political spectrum. Is it too much to ask, as Chris Hedges has done, that our social and environmental movements can do just that, and get real?