Apr. 01, 2009 - Issue #702: Heartless Bastards

Judy Rebick: Networking power

Activist Judy Rebick comes to town to discuss the new politics

When veteran Canadian activist Judy Rebick first became involved in pushing for progressive social change some four decades ago, the approach was relatively straightforward: organize and struggle until you manage to gain control of the government, and from there implement the changes you want to see. Easier said than done, to be sure, but at least the strategy was clear.

 

“The old notion of the left was that power is something that was located in the state and in capital,” Rebick explains over the phone from her home in Toronto, just back from a whirlwind tour of the Maritimes to promote her new book, Transforming Power: From the Personal to the Political. “And you had to take power—either by seizing state power if you’re a revolutionary or getting elected to government if you’re a social democrat—and then with the right set of policies and the right people you could change society. Well, that method has totally failed.”

 

It was this realization of futility  which prompted Rebick—who spent years in the feminist movement and labour and NDP circles before becoming the head of the then-influential National Coalition on the Status of Women (NAC) in 1990 and later a successful broadcast journalist and founder of rabble.ca—to begin to explore the new approaches of political organizing being tried everywhere from the barrios of Latin America to the crumbling inner cities of rust-belt America.

 

This exploration, which became the basis for her latest book and will be the subject of her keynote address at Public Interest Alberta’s conference in Edmonton this weekend, revealed decentralized, grassroots movements more focused on changing power than in seizing it.

“I realized that there was something common, and this is this notion that I’m calling ‘transforming power,’” Rebick says, adding that while the ideas aren’t necessarily new, they’re being implemented in novel ways. ”The women’s movement and later the anti-racist movement had the idea that power was located in relationships—in women’s relationship with men, black people with white people—there was power in those relationships, and that we had to transform those relationships if we were going to transform society. But somehow my generation never put the two things together. What all these movements are doing is putting them together and saying that change is about transformation, that taking state power is only one step in that transformation.

 

“And it’s an important step—it’s not that it’s not—but all the other steps are also much more important than we used to think,” she continues. “You have to transform society bottom-up and top-down, it’s not enough to go top-down. So creating alternatives today, treating people well, living your politics have become important to all of these movements.” 

 

Rebick says this new focus on “networked politics,” has become a key element in today’s most innovative activism, and is impacting even traditional top-down political spheres, as evidenced by Barack Obama’s staggeringly successful grassroots fundraising and mobilizing strategy, and even in the ultimately unsuccessful push last year in Canada for a coalition to replace the federal Conservatives.

 

Even in the countries of Latin America which have seen leftist governments take power, Rebick points out effort has been put into democratizing the decision-making process to more actively involve the grassroots.

 

“Even in a place like Venezuela, where you have a charismatic leader that didn’t win on the shoulders of a movement, in order for him to make the changes that he believes has to be made, he’s continuing to make experiments in democracy, engaging the masses or the poor people, engaging them in active forms of democracy and experimenting with what works and what doesn’t work in order to make the transformation that he seeks.”

 

Rebick says that North America, where more traditional models on the left were more successful for much longer than in places like Latin America, decentralized movements are increasingly becoming the norm, powered in large part by the explosion in popularity of online social media, which has made it much easier for disparate movements to connect, organize and communicate without having to count on the corporate media to get their message out.

 

“People are using things like Facebook and online organizing very effectively. I was at a seminar at Berkeley, for example, and I said to the organizers, ‘Did you get any mainstream media?’ and they said, ‘No, but so what?’ Because they have such massive alternative media now online they don’t need mainstream media attention to reach people.

 

The result, says Rebick, has been an upswing in people’s involvement in political movements.

“Where I am I haven’t seen a level of activism like I’ve seen this year in a long, long time—it’s constant. The activism has really increased and I think that part of that is the ability to mobilize through online means,” she says. “So I think it’s very important, and I think it shows that people really want to get engaged—that’s what’s most important about it to me—it shows that people want to get engaged, and you can reach a much broader group of people than you could otherwise through traditional means.” V 

Fri, Apr 3 (7 pm)
Judy Rebick
Chateau Louis Hotel and Conference
Centre (11727 Kingsway Ave), $15
Part of the Public Interest Alberta
conference “Beyond Band Aids and Bailouts: Public Solutions in Critical Times,” Fri, Apr 3 - Sun, Apr 5
Visit pialberta.org for full details

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