Hope and Activism: Is it Difficult to Maintain Hope as an Activist?

Rashna Farrukh:

Involved in the establishment of ANU Ethnocultural Department and founding editor of Bossy Magazine, 2014-2017

I think I am always hopeful honestly. I don’t really find it very hard to maintain hope. It’s just because I can see there’s always change happening, positive change happening. Of course there are times when we take a really giant leap backwards, and there’s been really good examples of that this year. I can’t even start. I mean I can, but I don’t want to. I think like despite those backward leaps happening, there’s always people in our community, that are moving forward and doing really creative and engaging stuff that I’d never even considered that have really moved me. Just like people that I’d known in high school even, going out and playing amazing music or writing poetry or just like working at Ernst and Young. That’s even like a big thing for that space to have more diversity, I think anyone who is doing anything is creating a change and they don’t even realise it. It’s just important to acknowledge that it’s not just people who are picketing and running for seats as politicians that are the ones that are creating change, even though that’s important because then you get that whole representation. I think it’s just like even the smallest things that people do, like I don’t know, joining your local netball team, because they’re all white people [laughs]. It’s a giant step forward. I really like to stop and appreciate smaller things that are happening around me, and I think if you do that it’s really a lot easier to maintain hope.

Steph Cox:

Involved in environmental activism, Mining the Truth Roadtrip and anti-deregulation activism, 2012-2017

Mmmm. I think hope is a really tricky thing to maintain. Often when you’re in a group you’re all sort of invested in maintaining a sense of hope and a sense that the campaign will be successful, which makes sense. If you started saying things like this campaign has already failed before it’s even begun and what’s the point of any of us being here and the problem is too big or something like that, no one would continue in your campaign. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. That’s necessary but I think it also means that it can make it hard for people to incorporate into their narrative of what’s happening in the campaign experiences where things didn’t go to plan. It can be hard to come to terms with the way the campaign has been successful in some areas but unsuccessful in others, or the way that it’s had really unexpected outcomes or maybe its outcomes were totally imperceptible and you’re like we did all this work and we didn’t achieve the main goal and its not clear to the people involved immediately where that work has gone –  has it just dissipated? Often the effects of activist work aren’t immediately apparent. The disjuncture between talking in a really hopeful sense when the group is together but then privately entertaining doubts and confusions, or the disjuncture between during the campaign having really hopeful rhetoric and then after the campaign people being like no it didn’t work, is, can be, alarming, or can feel confusing, and I think in fact that makes it harder to trust that hopeful tone in campaigns. Sometimes I think it can come across to people as forced or unrealistic, and that takes a real toll I think.  So Dan (Perez) and I have talked a fair bit about hope and Dan has a lot of really interesting things to say. They’ve done a bit of reading of [Rebecca] Solnit’s book called Hope in the Dark and some other texts that I can’t remember right now. One quotation from Gramsci that Dan mentioned and that I am maybe drawing on in this mini three-page comic I am making is, I mean I don’t know it exactly, but it’s something like, “it’s important to have pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will”. And I think that really resonates with me how hope can’t be maintained without a sort of critical eye that’s willing to consider the worst outcomes that are possible, but also with a real sense that regardless of the worst possible outcome, you’ve still got the ability, you’ve still got some kind of capacity to take action. And I think sometimes in campaigns, the success of a campaign seems so important and so crucial that people feel like it’s a really fragile thing that they can’t disrupt that narrative of success during the campaign or maybe after the campaign they feel like they can’t talk about it with some people, as if, like they can’t talk about the problems they had with some people.

Odette Shenfield:

Involved in Fossil Free ANU, environmental activism and co-founder of Demos Journal, 2013-2017

I think it is very hard to maintain hope, particularly at university where a lot of what you’re studying challenges a lot of mainstream ideas about how far we have progressed. I think I came to university thinking that progress was linear and slow, but that it was linear. And then being at university really threw that on its head, and also made me question my own subjectivity and my own embeddedness in oppression and injustice. I’m still working through all of that. I think I am maybe a more pessimistic person than a lot of activists and I don’t know if I can answer the question if I have hope or not, in some ways. I’d say some days I do but a lot of days I don’t, especially with climate change, not just climate change but all of ecological risk. I think it’s hard, some things are hard to articulate.

I read Rebecca Solnit’s, well I read most of her book Hope in the Dark. At the time I was like this is really great, yeah this is spot on. Then I feel like I found her line of reasoning of almost like a strategic hope, you do it to keep you trying, and I think I’ve always taken this mentality of even if it’s hopeless you still try because it’s better than not and you’ve got nothing to lose by trying”. I still do things out of that, but I think it gets harder, especially as time moves on. Growing up as a kid with the knowledge of “oh we have until this time to do something about climate change”, and then seeing us reach that time now and not do it is really terrifying. So I think, yeah, I’m still working through how to have hope.

They’re quite existential questions really, like it sort of makes you question a lot of different things, what existence even really is. I guess some days I do and some days I don’t, but I’m not really sure how you maintain it. I think it is important to have people around you who you can talk to. I feel really lucky that I have such good relationships, and I feel really happy and lucky in those. I think that kind of keeps you going, but whether that’s deluded in the grand scheme of how bad things are I’m not sure.

Judy Turner:

Involved in ANU Labour Club, anti-apartheid activism, anti-Vietnam War activism, low-cost housing activism and co-founder of Agit Prop Printing Press, 1971-1975

You had to have hope, I mean you would have not been part of the radical left if you didn’t; if you weren’t optimistic. So you had to believe that change could be affected and was being affected by your actions otherwise you would have just given up I guess. So yeah, I think we maintained hope. I mean life was easier for us, you know university was free, it was easy to get a job.  I guess there was one point when we had less hope. All of our friends used to go and work on the building sites, in the holidays, all of our male friends, they’d get work really easily and they’d get well-paid. One of our friends decided to become an activist, he dropped out of uni, Dave Shaw – have you heard of him? He was a really committed member of the communist party from a very upper-middle class family in Sydney, and he dropped out of uni and went to Sydney to become a building labourer, and become part of the union. He was training to be a rigger I think, and he fell from scaffolding. It was a kind of frosty day or cold day in Sydney, and he died. That was a tremendous blow to all of us, I think that was either when we’d just left uni or it was in our final year. And it was kind of a, I don’t know why, but it was a wake-up call for a lot of people that life is actually hard, it’s not just a game, and that his joining the struggle in that way had led to his very early death, a very much admired and loved person of great integrity. He went to work in a building trade because he believed that the struggle was the most important thing, and I think things like that sort of shook us, but I wouldn’t say they destroyed our hope at all.

The thing that maybe destroyed my hope in the end was factionalism, and the fact that so many people went into Trotskyist movements and they got involved simply in fighting each other. That seemed so useless and such a waste of time that I went off into Amnesty International where I thought you could do valuable work and make people’s’ lives better and not waste your time fighting each other. But that was later, I think when we were at university we were very optimistic. We formed a new party at the end, you should talk to somebody else about this, we called it the new group or the new way or something. We thought it was a whole new politicalmovement that we were engaged in, and then of course we all left Canberra and went in different directions, and the whole thing fell apart, and everybody joined something that was pre-existing, so you know the serious activists went into the Communist Party or one of the Trotskyist groups.