The Most Successful Social Movements are Started by the Rich

When I began reading the coursework for this class on social movements, I thought that the emphasis of information would be on rights movements. The rights of marginalized people, the disabled, people of colour, Aboriginals of the world, and those living on the fringes of society like queers. It was most clever for SOCI 288 to begin with the history and impact of #METOO, a social movement focusing on the sexual misconduct of men toward women in many industries. This movement set the stage for outrage but also served as an example of how information can spread like wildfire through systems that can carry the message. Social movements are all about messaging. Putting your words in the hands of the public and showing them the truth of those words is what allows social movements to mobilize resources and create true change. What I expected of this course would be examples of the most successful social movements of all time and I was not wrong on this count. What I did not expect was that the most successful social movements in our living history were social movements created by massive multi-corporate alliances.

A Century of Spin was full of information I understood implicitly but could not articulate. It was written in a way that captured and explained the dread I feel when I see advertisements and slogans. I knew that the world was run by corporations and their interests, the seat of power is money and they have it all. What I didn’t know was how that was accomplished and what the names of those people were. What A Century of Spin also does is make you feel like a conspiracy theorist. There are real tangible reasons for the way that our societies are run, for the feeling of arrested development in progressive policies and the struggle that seems to take place against capitalistic interests. To understand that the public relations arm of the UK was once called ‘national propaganda’ puts into perspective just how pervasive the manipulation of the public really was and still is. However, when corporations are just ‘corporations,’ they become an amorphous concept that cannot be visualized. This was how I viewed the various entities that orchestrated the social movements away from democracy and toward oligarchy. It is also advantageous for those political and corporate entities (which are one and the same) for people to view them as impenetrable mysteries. It is of course because it helps hide their identities and protect them from scrutiny. However, a more powerful reason is because it makes people feel hopeless against them.

Twitter launched #METOO into the stratosphere and even if many spoke negatively of the movement they still spoke of it. Tarana J. Burke’s words reached an uncountable amount of women who heard them as echoes of their own (Hillstrom). When the social movement truly picked up, I heard it spoken of in whispers on the street, in coffee shops, department stores, on the bus. Negative or positive, the information had spread and that was what counted the most for #METOO. In the years after #METOO’s height, I came to believe that it was an ineffective movement because it had failed to cause any permanent social change. In my mind, directors, CEOs, politicians, and men in all sorts of positions of power still preyed on vulnerable people.

Now I have come to understand that I was demobilized. The slander of the voices of #METOO was a part of the demobilization project that those threatened by the movement attempted. People like Uma Thurman’s mere implication that something unsavory happened was met with disdain and backlash. It’s no mistake that what I saw most online was the backlash. One reason that you hardly see the successes of social movements is that it simply is not ‘good press,’ it doesn’t give ratings or views. The reason I’m most concerned with is that when you don’t see the successes of social movements, you believe they’ve failed. When you believe that a social movement has failed, you stop believing in it altogether.

Demobilized people are possibly more useful than true believers of corporate social movements. After all, consent is not necessary when good people do nothing to stop or change the circumstances of life. This is the basis of the manufacture of compliance. When someone who seeks to change the world is met with the apathy of the demobilized, it often recruits them into their ranks as well. How many people failed to vote because they saw no real difference between the ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ political parties? The peers in my life have uttered the phrase ‘voting does nothing’ to me more times than I can count. Still, I can recall individuals like my friend Tonya who is an Aboriginal activist. She strives to protect her way of life and the people she cares about even while holding in her mind that she may not see the effects of her actions in her lifetime, she still feels trapped under the thumb of corporate interests and the USA.

What Tonya’s experience reminds me of in relation to this class is that cooperation is a powerful thing. All my life, I’ve seen the world through a lens of competition that I could not recognize because I had no idea that it was in front of me. When people use terms like ‘winner’ and ‘loser’ they place each other into hierarchies of power and accomplishment. In order to rise to the winner’s circle, you must adopt the toxic strategies of almost sociopathic disregard for your fellow people. Tonya may work against the government but she works with her people. She takes a cooperative stance and realizes that when she benefits the group it brings the most benefit for herself and the future of her people. She asks less about what she gets out of her actions and more about how it will change the world for the better. The people that she fights ‘against’ are people that she ultimately cares about in the context of humanity and her goal is not revenge. Her goal is for all people to live happy, fruitful lives in harmony with the world as a living part of it. These realizations show me that even a selfish person can be made to cooperate when they realize that the group’s happiness is also their happiness.

The rich certainly understand the benefits of cooperation and they are perhaps the most selfish individuals in the world. This class has exposed to me levels of coordination that span more than a century. What seemed like single players like ‘the tobacco industry’ and ‘the steel industry’ melded into a conglomerate network of ultra-wealthy interests that identified the problem democracy presented to them and banded together to eliminate that threat. To outsiders the ultra wealthy seem to be in a battle of wits and there is a narrative of competition in innovation and policy as to their activities. In truth, the ultra wealthy support each other in a common cooperative where they contribute financial resources and manpower to a single cause. I know people that work at companies like Amazon and Google that appear to be competitors. In reality, both companies and more have donated to the cause of Donald Trump because they know that he will protect their collective interests and that is all that matters to them.

Companies like Nike will place in front of us wholesome messaging about community, freedom, and fun while simultaneously exploiting billions of people in order to make the most money possible. They betray their outward values by employing sweatshops and taking as many resources as they can from the regions and communities that enable them to sell their product. The actions of Monsanto and other multinational corporations as described in Vandan Shiva’s “Stolen Harvest” echo the damage they do on local communities throughout the world (Shiva). The very food we eat is replaced with convenient alternatives that extract the most wealth possible from us while neglecting what those crops do to the ground they grow from. We consume cheap nutrients of low quality all because a person wants the number in their bank account to increase. The legacy of entire regions shrinks away under the thumb of powerful corporations who repurpose those people into cheap labour, taking their traditional ways of life and sustenance so that they are forced to work for them. It is not localized only to Shiva’s homeland of India. The USA brought to the world factory farms, facilities that reduce the lives of animals to tiny cages and crowded sloughs which produce disease and undue suffering in the name of an extra dollar (Eating Animals).

I feel that if the ‘lower classes’ of which I belong to cannot learn to cooperate the way that the rich do, we will forever be at the whim and mercy of authoritative entities that seek to exploit us. What this class has done is show me a path toward that cooperation. I have been familiar for years with the concept of solidarity and understand deeply what it means. In order for social movements to form and stabilize, those who wish to change the world must find common causes and link together to spread their ideas throughout the planet. Mutual understanding and cooperation is key to the effectiveness of social movements. Finding how we relate and accepting our differences can only make us stronger. As Kohn argues in his book “No Contest: The Case Against Competition,” cooperation brings all of our strengths together and our weaknesses are compensated for as we learn from each other’s mistakes (Kohn).

What I’ve learned in Soci 288 is that social change is not a hopeless exercise. Extremely effective change has occurred all around me throughout history and I simply took fail to notice. My feelings of hopelessness and fear at being persecuted for queerness, at my loved ones being hurt or killed are just another way that the powerful seek to disenfranchise me and make me compliant. The best way for me to combat what I perceive as rising fascism in North America is definitely not sulking in sadness or complaining that the end is near. The best way for me to combat authoritarian ideals and the oppression of queers, Aboriginals, people of colour, and all of those I love in life is to continue being loud and uncompromising. Nothing can change if we fail to take action. Others will notice my actions and even in this small way, as an individual, I benefit the entire group with my words and attitude. Like my friend Tonya, I want to coordinate and build networks of trust, I want to contribute to resources and funds that help make social movements possible.

In the list of possible focus questions that was given, one entry gave me pause. “What did I learn that made me feel guilty and ashamed?” I would like to outright state that I do not feel guilty or ashamed. I am a white nonbinary person with family ties to many ethnic backgrounds and ways of life. In my years of being, I have come to understand that guilt and shame do not help the advancement of change. We are all on the same level and the ultra rich look down on us from their ivory thrones. I link hands with my brothers and sisters in the understanding that together we are strong. We are not responsible for the problems that surround us but we are responsible for fixing those problems. I feel no guilt or shame. I feel only indignation to change my world in the small ways I can so that the people I love and those beyond can be safe and happy for years to come.