Instability has become a defining feature of our times. In many ways, this instability is the new landscape of social struggle. It is useful to classify the economic and ecological disruptions that make up this “new normal” of instability into two groups: shocks and slides.
Shocks present themselves as acute moments of disruption. These are, for example, market crashes, huge disasters and uprisings.
Slides, on the other hand, are incremental by nature. They can be catastrophic, but they are not experienced as acute. Sea level rise is a slide. Rising unemployment is a slide. The rising costs of food & energy are a slide.
While they share a set of root causes, the scale, pace and implications of shocks and slides differ and, therefore require different responses by social movements. One of our key roles, as social movements, must be to harness the shocks and direct the slides—all towards achieving the systemic, cultural and psychic shifts we need to navigate the changes with the greatest equity, resilience and ecological restoration possible.
We define a shift as social, political, economic and/or cultural transformation. From our perspective, we want shifts in the direction of ecological resilience and social equity, as an imperative. We believe that shifts can emerge from collective “aha” moments when social movements awaken the popular imagination to new possibilities and spark social action. And we are arguing that the coming shocks and slides—if we anticipate and prepare for them properly—can be key opportunities to spark these “aha” moments.
Shifts also result from well-organized communities creating new institutions that meet peoples’ needs as responses to the shocks and slides better than the dominant systems can, such as food sovereignty projects, collectivized housing systems, cooperative economics (time banks, worker co-ops, food shares, community-based restorative justice projects, etc.).
Movement Generation, quoted by @adriennemareebrown in Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
