Over at Alternet, I have a new piece about Obama’s schizophrenic relationship to protest. Over the years, he has repeatedly pointed to Gandhi as an inspiration. And during Obama’s presidential campaign, he used the perhaps apocryphal story of FDR’s constructive relationship with the grassroots, to urge his supporters who wanted their progressive goals met to go out there and “make me do it.”
Nevertheless, on the eve of the G-20 summit last week, President Barack Obama told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that even during his days as a community organizer in Chicago he was never a big fan of mass protests.
With the clear intention of discouraging those who might join the looming demonstrations against the G-20, Obama explained that he was always a believer that “focusing on concrete, local, immediate issues that have an impact on people’s lives is what really makes a difference; and that having protests about abstractions [such] as global capitalism or something, generally is not really going to make much of a difference.”
I go on to argue that these comments were really disingenuous on Obama’s part for many reasons.
It would not have taken an incredible investigative feat to discover that the protesters descending upon Pittsburgh were doing so for very “concrete” reasons that touch their daily lives in very real ways.
They came to advocate for greater assistance for everyday people during these tough economic times, for more serious government action on global warming ahead of the U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark, and for an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have already taken such a staggering human and financial toll.
In fact, as a general rule of thumb, most people — whether they are diehard activists or not — don’t normally travel great distances to face ominous riot police firing rubber bullets, pepper spray and deafening sound cannons, unless they have been deeply, personally affected by the issues being protested.
Also, given the surge of right wing protests in recent months, Obama unfortunately missed an important opportunity to encourgage pressure from the left to help forward a more progressive legislative agenda.
Raj Patel recently posted about the concrete and abstract sides of certain activism –
“Protests About Abstractions”
http://stuffedandstarved.org/drupal/node/498
Like you, I share a commitment to nonviolent struggle. Like you, I agree that global capitalism, patriarchy, productivism, racism, etc. are structures / systems that cause very real concrete, immediate, and local suffering.
Reading this statement by Obama, I came to a conclusion different from yours. Informed by my experience as a trainer and organizer of nonviolent campaigns that were part of building the global justice movement, I think that that statement by Obama can be read as being relevant.
I invite you to read my position on this page: http://bit.ly/14J6uY
My concern lies mostly with strategy, and the implications of choosing the “Diversity of Tactics” framework for protests that lack concrete, local, and immediate goals that can achieve concrete, local, and immediate wins, on concrete, local, and immediate issues.
Global capitalism will remain an “abstraction” for the purpose of waging effective struggle against it, in the context of such magnets for repression and police provocation as the G-20 protests. You can’t bring capitalism down, or any other structural injustice for that matter, by simply holding some sort of “come one, come all” spectacle of collective ineffectiveness. And that ineffectiveness lies, I believe, in the lack of any clear strategy, and the hurtful naïveté that is inherent in the choice of the “do your own thing” modus operandi that has become the hallmark of protest events such as this recent one in Pittsburg.
En toute solidarité,
Philippe Duhamel
“focusing on concrete, local, immediate issues that have an impact on people’s lives is what really makes a difference; and that having protests about abstractions [such] as global capitalism or something, generally is not really going to make much of a difference.”
My worry is that the “abstractions” such as global capitalism would not even be recognized as such, as forces in people’s minds, if there were not people in opposition to them, forcing the issue to be addressed. We might be losing the battle, but we shouldn’t let them write the whole controversy out of existence.
Only focusing on things that are concrete, local and immediate means that the population is alienated from each other, in the sense that it is hard to see the global in the local, or vice versa.
If we were to take his statement literally, one might think that illegal immigrants are a drain, a social problem, etc. and not consider the relationship between the U.S. and the sending countries; that we have a neocolonial economic relationship that evolved through direct foreign investment, war, and industrialization of rural areas, thereby creating the impetus for migration in the first place…