Stitching Silver Linings – The Role of Activism in Crisis Recovery from The Social Change Initiative on Vimeo.

Internationalism and multilateralism are key to effecting change and creating solidarity. A recent example is the global solidarity around the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which catalysed unified action towards dismantling symbols of black people’s oppression. 

Even more important was the mapping of the impact capitalism has in producing inherent socioeconomic inequality, which is fertile ground for the devastation of pandemics. These were the running themes in the discussion that brought activists Mark Heywood and Bernadette McAliskey together.

Ireland and South Africa have a shared history of struggling for liberation and civil rights. Both countries have learnt from and expressed solidarity with each other.

Bernadette McAliskey is a veteran of politics and civil activism, particularly women’s and minority rights in Ireland, and from 1969 to 1974 served as a parliamentarian. She is now the executive director of the South Tyrone Empowerment Programme (STEP), a community advocacy project that includes migrant concerns. 

McAliskey has been a champion for civil rights for over 50 years and is currently fighting against the exclusion of migrants in the UK from things like access to healthcare, jobs, food and shelter.

Bernadette started the discussion by drawing similarities between her own organisation and that of the Treatment Action Campaign, of which Heywood is a co-founder. In doing so, she highlighted that they were both organisations built from the ground up by communities in response to social injustice.

Learning from these organisations is what the pair felt was needed in order to successfully navigate the current crisis the world faces, and civil society’s response to the pandemic. To do this, McAliskey said it was key to define what the goals were beyond Covid-19 in order to draw an effective road map. 

The discussion revealed that these goals should be about the centralisation of socioeconomic rights as human rights, and the use of tools like the Constitution to uphold this. This could only be achieved through rights literacy and people believing that they are indeed entitled to these rights.

The message that was coming through, is that society cannot defeat the disease and then continue to participate in systems of social injustice that breed such pandemics. 

In explaining the success of the TAC, they discussed how people armed with scientific knowledge had engaged the Constitution in their advocacy efforts for antiretroviral treatment. Members took it upon themselves to go out into communities to conscientise people about how to prevent transmission, care for those already infected and use the law to gain access to healthcare.

They discussed that while the impact of HIV was mostly felt in poor communities, Covid-19 impacts all communities and economies on a global scale. They established that across the world those most affected by Covid-19 are mostly poor, black and immigrants. The pandemic is threatening people’s basic human rights to dignity, equality, food and freedom – an offence similar to that of the repressive regimes of apartheid and British colonial rule.

Heywood said it was important for civil society to coalesce around their own power in order to mobilise for change, or face wading into deeper trouble. While acknowledging that this generation is at a point of power like never before, McAliskey expressed that it is also at risk of losing this power if it is not better organised. 

McAliskey said that as she looks around at the new generation of activists, she is concerned that they may not be drawing on past methods of organisation. What she saw as being on the rise is a culture of campaigning, particularly in the digital space, which she said is not the same as organising as it often lacks tangible and sustained impact. 

Responding to this, Heywood said on a critical reflection on the TAC “after winning a 10-year campaign and saving five million lives, we didn’t have a plan about re-organising health systems and society and ensuring a public health system strong enough to respond to poor people’s needs. The same needs to be taken into consideration regarding rebuilding after Covid-19”.

The message that was coming through, is that society cannot defeat the disease and then continue to participate in systems of social injustice that breed such pandemics. 

According to Heywood and McAliskey, a progressive way of looking at the pandemic would be through a human rights and constitutional framework, and not just as a health crisis. Both HIV and Covid-19 were born from a state of inequality that manifests in broken health systems that disproportionately impact on poor people.

“As community volunteers we have, to a certain extent, usurped the power from the people we want to work with,” said McAliskey. As a result of this, she asked, “to what degree have we been captured by the state unwittingly, by being part of usurping the communities’ power?” 

Human rights movements need to recognise the need for the campaign for socioeconomic rights to come to the fore, that this is the new frontier and needs to be underpinned by the fact that they are already in legal frameworks such as the Constitution, said Heywood. 

Heywood said co-option was indeed a problem because, “This beast that we call civil society has been drawn to the edges and made to feel important because they ‘speak for marginalised communities’, but we want people to have the power and the tools to speak for themselves in addressing the inequalities that have come to mark our world.”

McAliskey suggested that we as a society have more power now than previous generations – in terms of rights and access to a legitimate justice system – and asked how we coalesce around this in solidarity. 

“We have been disorganised by a variety of things, and also ourselves. We have been enticed by structures of power. Part of the urgency is that while I’m trying to figure out what to do next, those who hold power already know what to do and are organising themselves,” said McAliskey.

#BlackLivesMatter showed how established civil society organisations failed to see marginalised people before. “How did they not know?” asks McAliskey. The re-ignition of the #BlackLivesMatter movement is not unrelated to Covid-19, considering that those most impacted and reliant on the public health system are black and poor people. Its strength and impact has been a refusal ‘to play by the rules’ that would render it impotent and easy to ignore, said Heywood.

“Covid-19 teaches us that socioeconomic rights are human rights because the poor can’t live without them, the poor can’t eat without them, the poor can’t access water without them,” said McAliskey. 

Human rights movements need to recognise the need for the campaign for socioeconomic rights to come to the fore, that this is the new frontier and needs to be underpinned by the fact that they are already in legal frameworks such as the Constitution, said Heywood. 

McAliskey cited an example of an effective reproductive rights campaign in Ireland where women, whose lives had been destroyed, told their stories publicly while simultaneously creating literacy in their communities on the importance of reproductive rights.

What the discussion seemed to be emphasising is that there isn’t a shortage of tools in order to effect change and that these tools should be used to ensure that poor and marginalised communities are not last in line when it comes to socioeconomic rights. DM/MC