What’s everyone’s opinion on FFF on here?
I was overseas when it first kicked off and by the time I was back Covid became the main concern, so I never really bothered with it. However, I do know some people that were heavily involved in the movement here in Germany initially, but they have long been thoroughly disillusioned by the whole thing, saying it’s been entirely coopted and rendered useless by upper-middle class libs.
I don’t have too much to say about it, except that here it really took off among the students (high school/uni). And a lot of those students then branched out to other activist work, so at the very least it served to help young people embrace the possibilities of organization and involvement in protest.
That’s a reasonably optimistic way to look at it. Unfortunately from what I can tell and what I’ve been told this entire experience and knowledge has essentially been funneled back into the bourgeois electoral system, most prominently to the neolib Green party. So not sure what good it really is.
I wasn’t involved enough to know if it was doomed to fail, but looking at the socioeconomic composition of the movement here (mainly upper-middle class white girls/young women), the age of the protestors and the existing, well-established mechanism of cooption in form of the Green party makes me doubt this ever had much of a chance. Still, a bit disheartening to see all of this just end up backing the neoliberal status quo.
We’ll see if they end up coming around to it or just become disillusioned (seems most likely) or back to conforming to the norm.
I’m really not deeply familiar with Fridays For Future organizing. so I don’t have much insight into the movement here.
Often in my area the strikes would coincide with the Palestinian Society’s rallies, so my experience is largely with young people involved in the strikes coming to join Palestinian solidarity rallies, which is where my optimism stems from.
