Australia Social Movements Contemporary Social Essay

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The will of external powers and multinational commercial interests would come to alter the political landscape, significantly diminishing the impact which those outside the evolving system could levy. It is thus that, Green points out, the modern anti-nuclear movement, has come to adopt certain grassroots devices for protest that denote a far greater willingness to stake a compromise. As Green reports of the anti-nuclear effort from the mid-1990s onward, "building and broadening mass campaigns gave way to reformism and individualism, in which supporters were called on to do no more than write letters to politicians, sign petitions and raise money to fund professional activists' behind-closed-doors lobbying of parliaments and business." (Green, 1)

It must be acknowledge that the nature of the current social activism movement is not thusly without its inherent risks. Most particularly, the tone on compromise which has necessarily entered into the discourse on certain subjects actually threatens to blunt the expectations of those movements most intended to protect our interests. For instance, the text by Jensen-Lee (2004) warns that there is a fundamental risk of accepting too readily the institutional claims of willingness to engage in progressive agendas such as that attached to the environmental movement. Attributing this to the disparate forces of influence over the Australian government as created by the globalization, Jensen-Lee warns that "the current period of institutionalisation or routinisation of environmental concerns is a danger time in which the public may simply assume that governments are acting to protect the environment while allowing the corporate sector to use greenwashing, green consumerism and appeals to sustainable development (ecological modernisation) to render the movement innocuous to the interests of global capital.

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" (p. 1)

This denotes the considerable challenge which rises before members of the environmental movement, who must attempt to find a balance between a realistic participation in the mainstream political system and a fundamental definition of themselves as existing in resistance to the tyranny of institutionalism. In other words, the contemporary social movement diverges from the more radical class-based social action of the past to the extent that its ambitions may be co-opted, distorted and exploited in the interests of only furthering institutional power.

Still, with this balance in mind, it seems appropriate to predict that the compromise and measured participation in the political process approached by modern social movements is more likely to effect positive change in Australia over the next fifty years. During a time of radical action across the globe, radical action was appropriate in Australia during its time. Today, with industry, commerce and the current form of governance so deeply entrenched, change may only come about gradually, organically and through a sustained commitment to always taking steps, even if only modest ones, toward progress.

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