Kevin A. Young & Laura Thomas-Walters “What the climate movement’s debate about disruption gets wrong”

Young, Kevin A.; Thomas-Walters, Laura 2024. What the climate movement’s debate about disruption gets wrong. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 11, 25. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02507-y

We argue that majority support is the wrong metric. More important than whether or not a tactic wins over the majority of the public is whether it imposes disruption on elite decision-makers. Our argument consists of three theses: (1) disruption must impose direct costs on elite decision makers; (2) disruption must be sustained; and (3) disruption can encompass a range of tactics. In particular, we advocate a strategy that can impose sustained and escalating costs on those elite sectors that can force both polluters and politicians to confront the climate emergency.

Priority targets include financial institutions that fund and underwrite fossil fuel operations as well as corporations, universities, pension funds, and other institutions that consume and invest in fossil fuels, as well as state actors such as regulators, judges, and politicians. Some sectors of the climate movement are thinking in these terms (Merleaux et al., 2023; Seidman, 2023; Young, 2024).

The victory at Birmingham [1963] thus offers a larger lesson about how political power operates in capitalist societies. Because control over the economy tends to confer control over government, forcing capitalists to change is often a prerequisite for changing government policies. Workers and consumers are uniquely positioned to impose disruption on capital. Black organizers in Birmingham recognized this relationship, as history’s most successful labor organizers (Schwartz, 1976; Womack, 2023; Young, 2024).

A previous campaign for integration in Albany, Georgia, had failed to get the desired results. Usually, that failure is attributed to the lack of high-profile violence employed by city authorities in contrast with Birmingham. But Martin Luther King, Jr., of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) blamed it on the movement’s mistaken approach to disruption:

„All our marches in Albany were marches to the city hall trying to make them negotiate, where if we had centered our protests at the stores, the businesses in the city, [we could have] made the merchants negotiate … If you can pull them around, you pull the political power structure because really the political power structure listens to the economic power structure.“ (quoted in Garrow, 1986, p. 226).

Thus the movement’s power stemmed not from majority support, which it never possessed, but from the ability of a minority to impose direct costs on the elite sectors that had influence over government. Organizers recognized that public opinion was peripheral to government policymaking. Rather than trying to win over the majority, they focused on consolidating support among the Black minority whose withdrawal of patronage “could make the difference between profit and loss for many businesses” (King, 1963, p. 48).

If elites believe disruption will dissipate, they are unlikely to advocate concessions to the movement. In general, elites will only favor concessions if they become convinced that recalcitrance and repression will be counterproductive. That realization is more likely to occur if a movement is well organized, committed to continuous recruitment of new members (and to empowering and retaining those members once they’re recruited), and prepared for the long haul of struggle and escalation.

The climate movement does have the capacity to organize sustained actions—see Just Stop Oil’s slow marches, which disrupted “business-as-usual” in London for several months in 2023 (Just Stop Oil, 2023).^{Footnote 2} However, to reiterate Thesis 1, actions need to be targeted at the right people. The general public is being inconvenienced, but it has no direct power to effect change. Meanwhile, there are campaigns such as “Cut the Ties”, which target companies with links to the fossil fuel industry, but they need to exert continued pressure on specific targets rather than just conducting one-off actions (XR Southeast, 2023). Outside the UK, several major organizations and coalitions such as Stop the Money Pipeline, Insure Our Future, and Rainforest Action Network have been building sustained pressure campaigns targeting banks, insurers, asset managers, and other financial actors.

The real measure of a tactic’s disruptiveness is its contribution to eroding elite support for the industry or policy that the movement opposes.

By that measure, the level of disruptiveness is not always obvious. For instance, a team of dedicated activists leafleting outside a bank or insurance office every day may ultimately be more disruptive to the company’s profits—and indirectly, to the fossil fuel industry’s ability to obtain financing and underwriting—than an occasional act of vandalism.