Confronting Injustice: Social Activism in the Age of Individualism

By Umair Muhammad

“Written by an activist for activists . . . a powerful call for collective action against the social causes of poverty and climate change.” —Climate & Capitalism

A new generation of activists working for economic and environmental justice, and against war and poverty, confronts critical questions. Why is the world so unjust and crisis-prone? What kind of world should we fight for? How can we win? In this panoramic yet accessible book, Umair Muhammad engages with these and other urgent debates. He argues that individual solutions like “buying green” are dead ends and that hope for the future lies in a radical expansion of democracy and the transformation of the economy from one based on profit to one that can meet human needs.

“A highly recommended read for those who are interested in working together to transform society.” —Chelsey Rhodes, founder of DelusionsofDevelopment.com

“This book will force activists to check their intentions. I wasn’t even halfway done before I wanted to share it with everyone I knew.” —Maryama Ahmed, Toronto-based community organizer

“A wide-ranging and unflinching look at the global nature of the challenges contemporary activists seek to address. Its blend of environmental and anti-imperialist analysis, grounded in direct organizing experience, makes this a powerful and important resource.” —Dru Oja Jay, coauthor of Paved with Good Intentions

“What [Umair] provides is an opening statement in an important discussion that activists must have . . . A must-read book for today’s activists.” —Ian Angus, author of A Redder Shade of Green

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781608465712

Book preview

Confronting Injustice

Social Activism in the Age of Individualism

UMAIR MUHAMMAD

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Haymarket Books

Chicago, IL

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Age of Individualism

Chapter 2: Inequality and Activism

Chapter 3: Climate Change and Activism

Chapter 4: The Way Forward

Afterword

Notes

About the Author

© 2014 Umair Muhammad

Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 license

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Some rights reserved.

First published by Muhammad, Umair

This edition published in 2016 by

Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

773-583-7884

www.haymarketbooks.org

[e-mail]

ISBN: 978-1-60846-571-2

Book design by Alexandra Fox. Cover design by Rachel Cohen.

Trade distribution:

In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution,

www.cbsd.com

In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca

In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services,

www.turnaround-uk.com

All other countries, Publishers Group Worldwide,

www.pgw.com

This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

Waitin’ for when the last shall be first and the first shall be last

In a cardboard box ‘neath the underpass

—Bruce Springsteen

Acknowledgements

The love and support of my parents is a crucial element in all of my undertakings, including this book.

I am indebted to Connor Allaby, Cyril Francis, Pascal Genest-Richard, Patricia Hoyeck, Khalil Martin, Daniel Miller, Brayden McNeill, Filzah Nasir, Saqib Naveed, Jennifer Nowoselski, Rahat Rahman, Elmira Reisi, Vinay Sagar, and Gajan Sathananthan for reading all or parts of the original manuscript and offering helpful comments. The early drafts of the book were greatly improved because of their criticisms and advice. My thanks to Jordyn Marcellus for copy-editing and to Alexandra Fox for taking on numerous tasks required to get the original edition of the book published.

Without the encouragement given by John Riddell and Suzanne Weiss, the present edition of the book would likely not have come into existence. Also, without them, the original edition would have gotten a lot less attention.

Everyone I have had a chance to interact with at Haymarket Books is great. I especially need to thank John McDonald, who encouraged me to send in the manuscript, as well as Anthony Arnove and Dao X. Tran, both of whom did not seem to mind too much when I didn’t send things in on time or when I overlooked certain tasks. Thanks are also due to Rachel Cohen, Eric Kerl, and many others behind the scenes at Haymarket with whom I have not directly interacted.

Sadia Khan is the reason the afterword makes any sense whatsoever.

This book is dedicated to my mother’s late sister, Rukhsana—Chhana Khala, as she was known to me. Her passing served as a painful reminder that I am much too far away from home. I am grateful that I was able to visit and spend time with her a few years ago. Her deep sense of justice will remain an inspiration.

The original edition of the book was made possible by an online crowd-funding campaign to which dozens of people contributed. I would like to thank the following people in particular for their generous contributions:

Majd Al-Shihabi

Connor Allaby

Joe Chellakudam

Kyle Eckart

Chanakya Gupta

Zeeshan Haider

Tanya Herbert

Mahmoud Khattab

Angela Ko

David Lalanne

Kaitlynn Livingstone

Ewelina Luczko

Yiannis Loizides

Evan MacAdam

Patrick Miller

Navninder Mokha

Filzah Nasir

Viraj Ranjankumar

Chelsey Rhodes

George Roter

Vinay Sagar

Gajan Sathananthan

Mohamed Sidahmed

Marc-André Simard

Adam Spilka

Waterloo Public Interest Research Group

Obaidullah Younas

Aftad Zaman

Introduction

In his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut tells of an acquaintance who chided him for writing an anti-war book: "Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?"

What he meant, of course, Vonnegut writes, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers.¹

Vonnegut was wrong. Hardly anyone could have known it at the time but it turns out that glaciers are quite a bit easier to stop than wars. Not only have we become proficient at stopping glaciers, we have forced a great number of them into rapid retreat. All we had to do was release massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels at manic rates—par for the course as far as modern civilization seems to be concerned. It would be wonderful if right about now we could also come up with a way to stop wars. Otherwise, humanity will soon find itself in more than a bit of trouble.

Consider, for example, the fate connected to the rapidly melting glaciers in Tibet. These glaciers are the source of a significant number of Asia’s major rivers and support the livelihoods of 1.4 billion people.² As they continue to melt and the water supplies in the rivers they feed become progressively unreliable, the threat of conflict over the already-contested transboundary rivers in the region will be greatly heightened. Countries will be increasingly inclined to build dams to manage erratic flows and stop the water from getting downstream. It just so happens that three of the countries that share Tibetan waterways—China, India, and Pakistan—possess nuclear weapons. We can be certain that unless meaningful action is taken in advance by the concerned parties in the region to prevent conflict, countless human beings will lose their lives in possibly-nuclear water wars. So it goes.

Unfortunately for us, dire scenarios like this one are not unique to Asia. They can be found across the planet.³ But even if we disregard the threat of wars over dwindling resources, the global environmental destruction we are creating threatens to crush us under its weight. According to the United Nations, three billion additional people may be pushed into extreme poverty by 2050 unless the environmental devastation connected with global warming can be averted.⁴ If allowed to persist, before long climate change could very well mean the end of our species.

Humanity faces a crisis on a scale unlike any it has encountered in the past. Those who are alive today have the power to ensure that human beings have a desirable future on this planet. We can accomplish this historic task or we can condemn succeeding generations to utter misery and, ultimately, to nonexistence.

Of course, to present existing humanity as a homogenous collective by referring to it as those who are alive today is the wrong way to approach the environmental crisis. In no way are all of us equally responsible for having created the problem. What is more, the burdens of a ruined environment, at least in the short term, will not be borne equally. A minority of human beings—the rich—have been largely responsible for creating climate change. And those who have contributed least to the problem stand to suffer the most as a result of it. The poor, as usual, will disproportionately bear the adverse consequences of actions taken by the wealthy.

Noting that one day seven billion people will live on the planet in Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut offers the following reflection: I suppose they will all want dignity.⁵ In 2011, the world’s population did cross the seven-billion mark and, as all of these beings are human, we can indeed be sure that they want a dignified existence. Countless numbers of them are currently denied it. Climate change poses a serious threat to a desirable future for the mass of humanity, but for too many people on our planet the present happens to be undesirable. If climate change is an acute crisis, global poverty is a chronic one. Hundreds of millions continue to lack access to basic amenities like food, water, sanitation, shelter, and healthcare at a time when indescribable amounts of wealth have been amassed. The past half-century has witnessed repeated pronouncements being made in every corner of the world about the need to reduce poverty. Despite this, and despite the resources we have had at our disposal, progress in the fight against poverty has been painfully slow.

South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa in particular have had a difficult time with poverty-reduction. By contrast in East Asia, most recently especially in China, there has been noteworthy progress. China has relied on its abundance of cheap labor to attain its famed status as the workshop of the world. Becoming a manufacturing powerhouse has allowed the country to pull millions out of poverty. But all is not good news. At the same time as incredible growth rates have been realized, an environmental catastrophe has been unleashed. Outdoor air pollution led to 1.2 million premature deaths in China in 2010, accounting for about 40 percent of the global total.⁶ The country’s rivers have been ravaged by industrial waste—in 2012, the head of the ministry of water resources admitted that two-fifths of China’s rivers were seriously polluted.⁷ Perhaps most troubling of all, China has of late surpassed the U.S. to become the leading emitter of carbon dioxide in the world.⁸

Chinese government officials justifiably point out that in terms of cumulative per capita emissions their country still lags far behind the West. In the face of the gravity of the climate crisis, however, such statements are little more than pretences to avoid making the needed reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. China’s posturing is certainly more defensible than that of Western countries, which have likewise declined to make meaningful reductions. But at the end of the day, unless the largest emitters are willing to make drastic cuts, the world is doomed.

Given that poverty is still rife in China, and that making the necessary cuts in emissions would no doubt get in the way of the country’s poverty-reduction strategy, are we forced to conclude that environmental limits make it impossible to meaningfully improve the living standards of the poor? Is it the case that there are just too many people on the planet, making poverty-reduction and global environmental sustainability two mutually exclusive options?

Overpopulation often finds itself being presented as a major obstacle to global sustainability. The focus on population is, however, misplaced. Overconsumption, not overpopulation, is the problem. And only the rich are partaking in the consumption frenzy. According to Princeton University’s Stephen Pacala, the wealthiest 500 million people are responsible for 50 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.⁹ (These people are really rich by global standards. Every single one of them earns more than the average American and they also occur in all the countries of the world. There are Chinese and Americans and Europeans and Japanese and Indians all in this group.)

The poorest 3 billion people … emit essentially nothing, Pacala points out.¹⁰ Those who are impoverished could appreciably increase their consumption, as well as their emissions, and still not create a significant burden on the global environment. The rich, on the other hand, must radically reduce their consumption levels. Except, of course, the problem is that most poverty-reduction schemes involve putting the poor to work to produce goods for those with wealth. What hope would the poor have of escaping poverty if the rich were to change their lavish ways? To be sure, such a scenario would result in even the relatively well-off suffering greatly.

The fact that these are the prospects we are faced with should start to clue us into the absurdity of our current social arrangement. The health of the environment cannot allow the rich to remain engaged in hyper-consumption. But putting an end to this behavior while remaining within the bounds of the existing arrangement would result in destitution for most of humanity. Why, then, should we remain within the bounds of the existing arrangement? Any fool, the sociologist and mathematician Johan Galtung writes, can build an economic system where rich people buy expensive products.¹¹ It is time for us to stop being foolish and build something better.

The crisis of activism

Precisely at a time when we need it most, bold and imaginative activism has made itself difficult to find. It is not the case that activism in general is in short supply. One finds, in fact, that activist ideals and vocabulary have securely made their way into everyday life. But this has happened in a way that has left society fundamentally unchanged. It is the messages communicated by activists, on the other hand, that have been distorted and have regularly found themselves being used to reinforce the social realities they were originally devised to change.

Perhaps the most blatant example of the co-optation of activist ideals can be seen in the supposed embrace of the concept of sustainability by the corporate world. Oil companies long ago discovered the public relations benefits of describing their operations with the use of phrases such as sustainable development and sustainable growth.¹² More recently we have witnessed the extraordinary rise in the consumption of plastic bottled water, soon after which came bottled water for those who are environmentally conscious. Or so companies like Nestlé, which eagerly promotes the fact that its bottles now contain 25 percent less plastic, would have us believe.¹³

The watering down, emptying out, and distortion of activist ideals has been helped along by activists. For one thing, we have too often been willing to ignore the social dimensions of the problems that confront us, believing instead in the idea that the actions of autonomous individuals have led us to our current impasse. A corrective is offered for this faulty outlook in the following chapters. I argue that social realities, in particular those created to meet the needs of our economic system, constrain and direct the actions of individuals. It is these social realities, therefore, that must attract most of our attention when we struggle to create change, even when reorienting the behavior of individuals happens to be our ultimate aim.

Living within a social system dominated by the market, it is no coincidence that so many of us have adopted an individualist outlook. The routine of market exchange between individuals who are driven by self-interest has conditioned us to see human society as a collection of disconnected and primarily self-interested individuals. What is troubling is that so many activists have reconciled themselves to this vision of society, and have set about working to reinforce its presence. They have come to champion the values and features of the existing arrangement. In other words, those who have set out to change things are instead working to keep them from changing.

This is especially the case within the professionalized, bureaucratized world of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Among NGOs, one can easily find not only tacit support for the values of our age, but explicit devotion to them. In place of a commitment to meaningful social change, there exists an insistence on conducting piecemeal charity, an obedient faith in technocratic solutions, as