I Protest!
By Phil Thornton, Liam Phelan and Bill McKeown
Pluto Press Australia, 1997
224 pp., $19.95 (pb)
Review by Jonathan Strauss
I Protest!, written by three journalists, Phil Thornton, Liam Phelan and Bill McKeown, is subtitled "Fighting for Your Rights: A Practical Guide". This hints at the book's value and its limitation.
Any activist taking on corporate and government power may find I Protest! handy. The authors have set out to show how individuals can act themselves, find allies and organise or take part in groups, in a work that is easy to read and illustrated with many campaign case studies.
I Protest! suggests that you think before you act. Ask yourself, it says, what your aim and reasoning are, who you are trying to reach, and where you may be able to get support. The book also discusses forming an action committee and making it work, has a comprehensive listing of campaigning actions and chapters on using the internet and dealing with the media.
In I Protest!, however, some of the most important controversies of the social movements are not addressed.
- The book has valuable suggestions for keeping members of an action committee informed and involved in the group's discussions. But it says little about the merits and disadvantages of decision-making processes such as achieving consensus, decisions by officials or membership votes, with only brief favourable references to consensus in Amnesty International and the "hierarchical" organisation of Greenpeace. Yet democratic organisation is an important element in developing an inclusive group.
- The authors' treatment of protest organisations — case studies of Amnesty, Greenpeace, the Victorian unions' anti-Kennett campaign, the ACTU's campaign for working women, BUGAUP, Worksafe's 1996 workplace health and safety campaign and the opposition to French nuclear testing — is exclusively favourable, apparently relying for this on their "solid reputations".
Yet these have been criticised (with the possible exception of BUGAUP) not only by their opponents but by some of their participants or supporters over various political and organisational questions. The issue here is whether groups may be compromised by aims that do not fully address a problem they claim to be tackling and/or by failure to make all possible efforts to win the group's aim.
- The authors recommend public action that is "practical" and "relevant" without discussing how to determine what is practical and relevant. But the orientation suggested by their discussion of tactics is weighted towards winning sympathy and media attention, and influencing "decision-makers".
In particular, they talk down forms of mass action. Demonstrations, we are warned, should only be "used as a last resort", and blockades must appear to be by "ordinary members of the public" because "violent scenes at a blockade or demonstration may turn many people off" and "an elderly person being dragged away is likely to generate more sympathy than an unshaven, screaming young activist". (The response to the police violence against the too-young-to-shave-but-screaming young people during last year's Resistance July 2 high school anti-racism walkout in Sydney — much media and other public support and two national demonstrations by thousands of their fellow students — suggests the "rent-a-mob" idea is a not always effective media bogey.)
Mass actions are the means by which the mass of people may start to learn from their own experience that they can and must become the decision-makers themselves.
- The book doesn't examine whether fighting for your rights is only a question of using and defending existing rights or if they need to be extended. Is the social system as it is sufficient, or does it need to be changed?
As a result, the authors do not consider political parties, which by their nature constitute some kind of overall approach to society (for an apparent exception like the Nuclear Disarmament Party, the domination of social movement politics in the early 1980s by the nuclear disarmament issue should be considered), as a means of opposition.
Overall, I Protest! doesn't tackle the big questions — the ones that can be answered only when you ask them together with other people, combining their circumstances and experiences with yours.
This is the source of theory, which together with practice is needed for effective protest, which involves building a movement that can secure the fundamental and irrevocable change in social conditions needed to enable the mass of people to be able to take part in, rather than protest at, democratic rule of society.