Rethink, Renew, Rebuild: Building People’s Power in an Era of Crisis

What is it about?

In the late 1990s and early 2000s the AIDS treatment access movement mobilised globally, demanding political commitment from governments to save lives and affordable pricing of medicines by multinational pharmaceutical companies. They did so arguing that access to medicines and health care services was a legally enforceable human right. The campaign saved millions of lives. The author was one of the recognised leaders of this movement and a leader of the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa. In this essay, he reflects on the strategies and methods that were used successfully and analyses whether the same methods can be adapted and improved in the 2020s to address growing inequality and injustice globally. He adopts a critical analysis of civil society's current approach to organising, warning that the 'polycrisis' presents social justice organising with unique threats that need to be better understood and integrated into organising strategies. The essay examines how the political environment has changed, how democracy and civic space has receded and the implications for protest and organising. It ends by proposing a set of strategies that the author believes would enable civil society to rebuild people's power to address the existential threats to peace, human rights and planetary stability of the era we are in.

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