Hate

I Hate Activists

Rationality seems to be excluded from most local debate, except from this fine, upstanding young man. Take heed, young PIRGians. He can bludgeon you intellectually.

The various underrepresented causes that somehow find themselves on the outskirts of political discourse and activity generally deserve advocates. It is a shame that what they've got is activism. Activists, and in particular, local activists, are people with good intentions and dysfunctional methods of political participation. They also tend to be marginalized hippies, which means they annoy me on a personal level. But while it is your god-given-right to annoy Gabe Bloch, it is truly unfortunate that these people get away with posing as saviors of good causes, when what they actually do is discredit their cause and disenfranchise it from the political system.

Locally, the famous example is the recent cutting of a couple of trees downtown to make way for (gasp) parking. Amidst growing local concern about "growth" in Eugene, it seems that cutting trees takes on added significance, as well as providing valuable evidence that this world is indeed going to hell in a handbasket thanks to multinational corporations. The city was good enough to hold a meeting discussing the proposed cut a few months beforehand, but this was not the chosen method of deliberation for local activists. Why chew the fat with some bureaucrat when you can show up the day of the planned cut and hide in a tree? How tragic and poetic! Unfortunately, activists tend to mistake poetic gestures for efficacious political influence. This protest had several participants, intense and extended media coverage, several pissed off police officers and absolutely no effect on what they were supposedly protesting. Is this a sign of elite oppression or activist incompetence? The likelihood of any public official going back on a decision already in progress is unlikely, particularly when he or she offered a forum for discussion earlier. And it didn't help that the chosen method of persuasion was hiding in a tree while your buddies throw bottles and heckle police.

Activists seem to think that they've got the powers-that-be between a rock and a hard place when they chain themselves to bulldozers and hide in trees. The truth is, these people are making jackasses of themselves, thereby discrediting the cause they believe in as well as anyone brave enough to go outside the political mainstream and support it. What could be better for a logging company than to have its most passionate opposition dressed like they are fresh from the bargain aisle at the Goodwill, holding cardboard signs reading "Stop _____!" I for one would certainly find this much less worrisome than a group of well-dressed, articulate, organized, educated and enfranchised detractors expressing their opposition to my business practives through traditional means of political expression and participation. Perhaps the reason activists don't look like this is because they are unable or unwilling to jump through the various hoops that are required before one is eligible to be described as having any of the fine characteristics mentioned above.

Indeed, the fundamental positions that activists take are based on simplifications of reality that betray their lack of education (or comprehension of attempted education). On campus, the Nike activists are prime examples of this. The demands of these activists have four potential outcomes: (1) The current paradigm of global capitalism is overturned, to be replaced by some reactionary form of trade, such as protectionism where countries do not exchange with one another, or at least put up extreme barriers to prevent gains from trade; (2) Nike stops hiring overseas labor and the formerly employed foreigners lose their jobs and drop back a few notches in their standard of living; (3) Nike raises its pay, becomes less competetive and loses profit, thus being forced to lay off workers; (4) Competitors, having escaped the liberal magnifying glass, may take advantage of Nike's new weakness on the balance sheet and lower their prices while utilizing the same sort of overseas exploitation, thereby robbing Nike of market share and forcing further downsizing. (I'll admit it; some but not all of this could be alleviated by reallocating executive pay.)

But the activists aren't willing to look at the whole picture because they have already made up their minds. The corporation, because it is in possession of economic power and wealth, is automatically wicked. The worker, because he is powerless (when unorganized), is automatically noble. This is one of Marx's main ideas, a warped view of human nature that assumes that if you put the worker in the capitalist's shoes he wouldn't behave in exactly the same way given the same constraints. Basic ideas about profit maximization at both the corporate and global level must be taken into consideration if you are working in a capitalist framework. The activists, working from a wishful socialist framework therefore either do not grasp or willfully ignore economics, and recklessly tarnish the reputation of companies at random. Admittedly, I have yet to shed any tears because Nike has received an undue share of bad PR, but is it fair to skewer one corporation for doing something in its best interests that is a standard practice for all of its peers? Further, why don't the activists say anything about the American demand for diversified products, which leads to competetive firms needing to produce at the lowest possible cost? Nike wouldn't exist if Americans demanded one basic tennis shoe. But we demand a variety, and in order to have as many brands to choose from as we do, we need corporations competing against each other for profitability. Our natural distrust of all things rich and powerful directs blame at companies like Nike, who are ultimately behaving rationally in service of you and I, who demand a certain lifestyle, even if we subconsciously realize that it is at the expense of some foreign worker.

Essentially, the anti-Nike activists should target what they really have a prolem with: the modern economic order at the macroeconomic level. Regrettably, this problem is a little tougher to take on than a corporation's PR department, so they choose the latter to focus on. This makes them feel like they are making genuine contributions to societal progress, or at least behaving righteously. In reality, all it does is center the debate on a tangential feature of a fundamentally complex issue. People can scold Nike for its reprehensible hiring policy, or make some convoluted argument about why it's good that the inequality exists. Other than that, the issue is forgotten. Informed and clear-sighted discussion is replaced with unenlightened liberal tear-jerking and unenlightened conservative apologism.

Thus another worthy discussion is banished to the fatuous realm of cynical, unrealistic and uneducated radicalism, forever tarnishing it by claiming to be its spokesperson. So long as the term "environmentalism" is associated with a tree-hugging anti-commerce stance, no enfranchised citizen can align himself with it. So long as global labor discussions center on individual firms and factories, systemic problems amd solutions will not be worked with. If activists truly wanted to make a genuine impact on society, they would apply themselves as students to get as educated as possible, and then attempt to position themselves within the professional world of law, science and politics. Progress would be slow, compromises would be made, but ultimately, the product would be genuine change. Activists who actually care need to save the camp-outs and histrionics for the world's flower children and apply themselves to reality and its institutions.

Gabe Bloch, a sophomore majoring in Political Science, is a staff writer for the Oregon Commentator