The Exhilaration of Revolt

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/opinion/teachers-strike-yellow-vests-extinction-rebellion-.html

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As the organizer Mariame Kaba says, “Hope is a discipline.” That discipline is what sustains organizers who often grind away unseen for years. This is, most of the time, what unions and working people’s organizations do: make connections, and hope the sparks they light will catch and burn.

On Dec. 15, an estimated 50,000 people marched in the streets of Los Angeles alongside the nation’s second-largest local teachers’ union, United Teachers Los Angeles. These teachers are fighting not just for higher wages (though as for all the teachers recently on strike, theirs are unacceptably low) but also, and unapologetically, for racial and economic justice.

They serve, according to the union’s president, Alex Caputo-Pearl, a public school district whose student body is 95 percent minority and over 85 percent low-income. They’re fighting, they say, for the schools those students deserve — with nurses and counselors, arts funding, smaller classes and ethnic studies programs. They drew parents and students beside them into the streets, and onto the stage days later when they announced they would strike on Jan. 10 if those demands were not met.

Teachers who have taken their fights to the streets have drawn the biggest share of our attention in the past years, but it has not just been them. The words “Green New Deal,” a demand that its proponents say can combine the needs of working people for decent jobs and a livable planet, are on the lips of many people — even in countries where the New Deal has little cultural resonance. But it was a sit-in in Congress, joined by a couple of insurgent new members, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, who thrust the demand onto the public stage even as the Democratic Party’s establishment continues to try to water it down.

In Britain, the new climate protesters call themselves Extinction Rebellion and clog streets through civil disobedience. The real extinction rebellion may have to look a lot more like the one going on in France, where the “Yellow Vests” have refused to accept the costs of climate adaptation being thrust onto the backs of a working class that has been hit again and again since 2008’s economic collapse. They are a potent reminder of what happens when working people see the wealthy cushioned from the results of their actions, while the resources they need are sliced away and they are exhorted to just work harder.

The strikes and sit-ins are often carefully planned, but the exhilaration of revolt can take many forms, and once learned, it’s hard to forget.

Sarah Jaffe is the author of “Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt.”

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