Kimberly McIntosh finds a lot to recommend in this practical guide to protest and campaigning written by a seasoned Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and Occupy activist.
2020 is the year that politics engulfed us – all of us – and not only those whose lives have always had a political edge. For people whose economic precarity has hemmed them in, whose skin colour has marked them out, who have been disabled by their environment rather than their impairments – the sharp end of laws, policies and public attitudes have long-caused pain and injury. But this year, a pandemic came and was experienced by everyone, although it hasn’t affected everyone equally.
This is the field in which the book, How To Change It: Make a Difference by Joshua Virasami finds itself landing, as one of a series of 12 pocket-sized, practical guides published by Stormzy’s Merky books imprint. Virasami encourages readers to campaign strategically. Across three sections, he calls on us to ‘educate, organise, agitate’: to educate ourselves on the structural causes of injustice, to map our allies, targets and opposition, and then to deploy the tactics needed to win. Each section comes with a curated playlist to complement the content and contextualise the arguments they make.
Virasami was, and is, part of a number of left-wing groups including Occupy London, Black Lives Matter UK, and the London Renters’ Union. As a result, this book is unashamedly left-wing and wears its politics openly. That’s not to say it doesn’t have range. Virasami uses a diverse set of topics, tactics and places, including the campaign to end the Sun’s Page Three, Gina Miller’s Brexit legal challenge, and the 2011 revolution in Rojava, Northern Syria, to illustrate his points. The research is thorough, with footnotes and call-out boxes used generously to explain theories, ideologies and lesser-known figures. But the movements and thinkers that anchor his arguments – like Frantz Fanon, Paolo Freire, Rosa Luxemburg and Antonio Gramsci – were Marxist theorists. This could be seen as political bias. In actuality, it’s an indication and indictment of how little space competing ideologies have given to the global fight for intersectional justice.
‘There are no new ideas, just new ways of giving those ideas we cherish breath and power in our own living,’ American writer and poet Audre Lorde told an audience at Harvard University in 1982. In How to Change it, the importance of learning from the past is central to its thesis. The book is at its strongest when it links historical movements and the tactics they employed to current ones. ‘It is mass organising that won many nations’ independence from European imperialism in the first half of the twentieth century, just as it is organising that won universal suffrage and the eight-hour working day,’ Virasami writes. Lessons from the US Civil Rights movement and the Awami Workers Party in Pakistan become the underpinnings of the London Renters’ Union’s strategy.
Change on the scale of say, US civil rights can feel exceptional and thus unattainable. How to Change it looks beyond the famous speeches and mass demonstrations, takes a bird’s eye view and invites readers to ask: How did that all come together? Ordinary people made it happen. And a strategic confluence of approaches got it done – leaders organised in their communities to mobilise people en masse whilst advocates pressured the people with power. In the chapter ‘Form a Strategy’, Virasami uses practical exercises to push two key messages: that successful movements are intentional and well-planned, but we’re all capable of creating that strategy for change if we have the right tools.
Learning from failure
Without strategy, tactics fall flat. But mistakes are where learning happens and How to Change it is willing to use examples of where movements didn’t get it right. Virasami uses the follies of groups he was part of, such as Occupy London and the London Black Revolutionaries, as cautionary examples of how promising collectives can fizzle out when direct action is seen as the end instead of the means. This raises an interesting question: what does successful direct action look like? In ‘Get Protesting’, a Black Lives Matter protest at London City airport is used as an example of a successful action. In September 2016, nine white allies of BLM UK blocked the runway in protest at ‘airport expansion, climate crisis, the hostile environment and environmental racism’. The action garnered much media attention, and ‘[we] were suddenly an unavoidable topic of conversation on radio shows and TV programmes around the country,’ Virasami writes. It was well-received at the time by environmental activists and followers of BLM UK on social media, but not by racial justice campaigner Stafford Scott nor the black holidaymakers interviewed by the Guardian whose trips were disrupted. It got the issues discussed, but did it advance the aims of the movement? That depends on your aims and intended audience. This tension that exists between passive allies isn’t explored.
‘When we rage, it’s because something we love is being lost. Potential is being lost. Opportunity for joy, for happiness, is being lost. [But] we always need to remember what we love, and to celebrate that, as well as the rage.’
Nevertheless, representing your supporters and starting a high profile conversation in their name matters. Because having the inequity you face affirmed, having the language to describe it and the theory to explain it, is a key access point for organising. Throughout the book, Virasami successfully uses examples from his personal life to illustrate how politics happens to people. He’s been paid £3.77 an hour by a company where the CEO made £585,000 a year. He’s been racially profiled in school and in shops, stared at in the British countryside, and stopped and searched by the police. These all have historic, structural causes and knowing this can be empowering. How to Change it sees consciousness raising via political education as vital for movement building and societal transformation. ‘A political education … enables the majority of us to read the world for what it is, and call bullshit,’ Virasami writes in chapter 8, ‘Get Teaching’. He argues this education does not have to be formal. Film, television and music can all articulate the realities of injustice and its causes. Steve McQueen’s BBC miniseries Small Axe, love letters to black resilience and triumph and power of collective struggle, could serve as such an example.
Inequity and injustice has increased in salience. Covid-19 has made the mutuality of our lives clear: we are only as strong as the health and wellbeing of our most vulnerable neighbours. Concern for poverty and inequality in Britain has, according to Ipsos MORI, never been higher. In June, Black Lives Matter protests resurged across the United States and Europe, making the efficacy of mass movements clear. And the slapdash response of many universities to the pandemic has energised students, who are using direct action and even rent strikes to protest their living and working conditions. The time for new visions is now. How to Change it is a useful guide for those new to activism who are interested in channelling their anger and discontent into something meaningful.
‘Rage needs to be twinned with love,’ Virasami told broadcaster Dotty Charles while discussing the book. ‘When we rage, it’s because something we love is being lost. Potential is being lost. Opportunity for joy, for happiness, is being lost. [But] we always need to remember what we love, and to celebrate that, as well as the rage.’
In a year that has been bleak for many, let’s use rage to fight for a world filled with potential and joy.