Happy Valley and strategy

Recently, anarchafairy posted Happy Valley and a Divergence in Strategy over on his blog. You should ideally read that post (and if you have time the comments as well) in order to place this post in its full context. There have been some fairly angry comments in reply from others involved with the Save Happy Valley Coalition, hardly any of which could be labelled constructive in any way (unlike anarchafairy’s original post). Earlier today, I prepared to add my comments, but they went on a big long so I decided to expand it into a post here.

I find it sad (although unsurprising) that a well thought out and constructive critique has been responded to with personal attacks by some of the commenters in this post. When confronted with criticism of beliefs we hold dear, it is far too easy to respond defensively and take any criticism (no matter how constructive) of our actions as criticism of ourselves, rather than actually taking in the criticism and considering it.

Like anarchafairy, I too was not involved in the banner drop, although I am active in the SHV Wellington group (and SHVC nationally). While I had a number of reasons for not being involved (including being quite sick at the time), the relevance of the action (or more accurately the lack thereof) was definately a factor in my decision not to take part.

As has been the case a number of times when myself or anarchafairy have criticised the strategy and/or tactics chosen by SHVC, our positions have been both misunderstood and misrepresented by others. This was one of the reasons that we co-authored an Anarchist Position Piece on the Save Happy Valley campaign, a detailed document that gives a pretty damn good outline of where we are coming from, and outlines our critique of the strategy of “public support” and SHVC’s interaction with the corporate media thus far. In doing this, it provides a background and context for the discussion that has been continued with anarchafairy’s post and this response.

As anarchafairy stated, at the most recent SHVC hui, we decided that “direct action and economic costing was the best pathway” and that, as a Coalition, we had no faith in and did not wish to partake in lobbying. This has been reinforced since in countless informal discussions I have had with SHVC members from across the country. Yet, despite this, we continue to see proposals made and carried out for ideas which cannot be described as direct action or economic costing, and those few DA proposals which are made are generally dismissed out of hand or left to the side and soon forgotten about.

The recent banner drop is an excellent case in point. It was set up to be a media stunt, but ignored the fact that the media are long past the point of caring about simplistic stunts when it comes to SHVC – the lack of media coverage of the banner drop from the rooftop of Solid Energy in February should have proven this conclusively. In that action, there were 3 arrests (always a benefit for getting corporate media attention) and yet there was still little reporting, and so how SHVC people thought a banner drop with no arrests would get media bemuses me. Despite this, many caring and passionate activists (and friends of mine) put a large amount of time into this action, scouting, planning, painting and of course actually doing it. To see them get no result from this saddens me, as I care about them, but it doesn’t surprise me at all.

The banner drop, through the media coverage it was “supposed” to get, was aimed at connecting Happy Valley with climate change in the minds of “the public”. It was based on the (incredibly naive) idea that politicians have to listen to “the public” and that if only enough people out there think that Happy Valley shouldn’t be mined, that the Government will be forced to stop it.

Those in favour of this “public support” strategy point to the Native Forest Action campaign to stop native forest logging (that a number of SHVC members were involved in) as an example of how the “public support” strategy works, but they seem to ignore other campaigns such as the GE Free NZ campaign and the Foreshore & Seabed campaign which had public support at even higher levels than NFA (certainly much higher for GE Free, perhaps not for Foreshore & Seabed) but completely failed. They ignore the undeniably unique political situation that allowed NFA to capitalise on a Labour Party that needed the “environmental vote” to attain power, and they ignore the reality of the functioning of our political and economic system.

Ever since I got seriously involved in SHVC, I have posed one question which is yet to be answered. Every time we draw strategy diagrams, every time we do critical path analyses, I pose the question to those in favour of the “public support” strategy: “How does ‘public opposition to Happy Valley mine’ progress to the next step of ‘Government stops mine’?” As yet, nobody has answered this question.

Within this campaign, the only people who have written and/or proposed comprehensive strategy plans are anarchists – myself and anarchafairy have written a number between us (generally each more detailed than the last) and a handful of others have written them too – but we are yet to see a strategy plan for getting from where we are today to winning written by someone who supports the “public support” strategy. All the strategy sessions that SHVC has agrees with a direct action strategy to win. Why then, when it comes to our activity, is virtually everything we do confined to the realm of gaining “public support”?