Avec Greta Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate, Helena Gualinga, Alexandra Palt et Dan McDougall, entre autres, ACTIVISM WORKS explorera non seulement l’importance vitale de l’activisme, mais aussi les différentes façons d’intégrer l’activisme dans toutes les sphères de la société et les secteurs économiques, ainsi que les formes d’activisme dont nous avons besoin pour garantir un avenir sûr et équitable.

L’événement sera rythmé par deux discussions en anglais :

16h – 16h45: ACTIVISM WORKS 

Cette conversation explorera l’évolution de la dynamique entre les activistes climatiques et les dirigeants.
Modération par Harjeet Singh. Remarques liminaires par Camille Étienne.

Avec :

  • Isabelle Ferreras (my remarks BELOW)
  • Clover Hogan
  • Dan McDougall
  • Vanessa Nakate
  • Alexandra Palt
  • Disha Ravi

16h45 – 17h30: PUTTING PEOPLE FIRST 

Une session de questions-réponses réunissant uniquement des activistes du climat.
Modération par Laurence Tubiana. Remarques liminaires par Greta Thunberg.

Avec :

  • Helena Gualinga
  • Ineza Grace
  • Mitzi Jonelle Tan
  • Greta Thunberg

For more information, visit the Activism Works website here.

Watch the recording here.

ACTIVISM WORKS                                                                                                       

Paris, Théâtre du Châtelet, June 22, 2023

Isabelle Ferreras

As you have been told, I’m an academic. I trained as a sociologist and a political scientist. So I can’t help it, I’m going to start with a definition, and a little bit of history.

‘Activism’ can be defined as coordinated action by like-minded people working in solidarity – solidarity with enslaved people, solidarity with women, with colonized communities, with workers, with animals, with a river or a mountain… with the planet, with the most affected people and areas. ‘Working in solidarity’ means caring enough to act for the expansion of rights enjoyed by some to a group of others. Activism is motion. It’s a push away from exploitation – from treating others as if they had less worth, less equality, less dignity, less aspiration to freedom – towards emancipation, which ultimately means recognizing that there are no “others.”

When we look at the history of change, we see that these struggles are the only thing that has ever changed society for the better. It’s that simple. Today’s struggle, to save the integrity of the planet, is a continuation of that motion toward true emancipation; today we are trying to recognize, one more time, that there are no “others” – that the true push is for all living beings, present, and future, to live with dignity in a safe environment on a habitable planet.

There is however a dark side to activism. You know it all too well; you’ve seen it, you recognize it immediately: the dark push in the other direction: for fewer rights for others, for more exploitation. It is the response of failed leaders who cannot offer meaningful movement to those who are crushed by the magnitude of the challenge. It comes dressed up in different language, but the darkness is always the same: fear, greed, xenophobia, authoritarianism, fascism. We are seeing it, here and now, in France with the decision of the Government yesterday to close Les Soulèvements de la terre in plain violation of fundamental rights and international covenants.

Our current struggle is one of unprecedented dimension, and so is the dark push in the other direction. To fight back will require a tremendous non-violent force – not just against the dark language of failing leaders, but against the challenges within activist movements themselves. We have all encountered this: climate activists fighting in their corner, human rights activists in theirs, labor activists on their side, and on and on. Who knew there could be so many corners on a round planet? Saving life on earth will require that we remember that there are no corners, no boundaries, nowhere to hide. It is by embracing, rather than siloing, that activism will save us.

This brings me to my own corner: academia. In academia, as you can imagine, moving beyond the scientific siloes of our distinct disciplines is especially hard. But in 2020, along with fellow colleagues scattered across disciplines and across the 5 continents, we launched #DemocratizingWork, a global network that has grown to include thousands of scientists working around 3 historical principles: democratize firms, decommodify labor, and decarbonize the planet (that’s our shorthand for respecting the 9 planetary boundaries) as these principles must be respected, all together, if we are to transform capitalism and its extractive practices currently leading humanity, the planet and our democracies to their destruction. And that’s a female led initiative 🙂 So this, gives me hope.

While siloing is destructive, specialization can be very useful, and one thing my specialization has taught me is that the dark economic vision of ourselves as atomized, self-interested individuals has been pushed so hard, and for so long, that it’s easy to forget that it is indeed nothing but a theory that serves the “business as usual.” It has become an acronym, taken from four words spoken by Margaret Thatcher, the political mother of neoliberalism: “There is no alternative.” TINA, for short – it is the belief that we are nothing more than a selfish assembly of profit-maximizing individuals and that the future cannot be different because, well… TINA. Which we should counter with our own acronym, inspired by Fannie Lou Hamer, the American civil rights leader, who would be so helpful here and now, in France. She liked to say, “There is one thing you’ve got to learn about our movement: three people is better than no people!” Which I’ll shorten to WANA. We are not alone. To belong to even the smallest community is to make activism resilient: The future can be different. To every TINA we hear, we must respond with WANA. We are not alone. The bright side of activism recognizes that there are alternatives creative enough, different enough, prefigurative enough, even joyful enough, to push back against all this darkness.

As a sociologist, I can tell you that if change may start with individual action, to endure it must become both cultural and structural.

This is our ultimate challenge: how are we turning up the heat around leaders so that we change our legal structures and outlaw the exploitation of natural and human so-called resources –and save our democracies.

This is what should be made illegal: more extractivism vis-à-vis natural and human “ressources,” not the activists, and their associations, who act in solidarity.

Let’s always remember, and our presence here today is a testament to that fact, yes, activism works! We are not alone.