From D to D, Chapter 3 (Continued): The Social Movement Organization

 

Today's post continues our discussion of Chapter 3 of the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp.  This will be the last post that deals with Chapter 3.  The next post in this series will begin to cover Chapter 4.  The book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D) teaches how oppressed peoples can use strategic nonviolent resistance to shatter the power of their oppressors.  This knowledge is especially appropriate for these days, in which a number of racist, White supremacist and Global Far Right leaders have in the last decade come to power in many nations, including the United States, where Donald Trump was illegally helped into his seat of power by Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.  (The Russians helped many of the other authoritarian strongmen come to power as well.)  Mr. Trump has clearly and legally lost the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, yet he is refusing to concede his loss and he is resisting being ejected from the seat of power which he has occupied (a seat which he has been soiling) for the last four years.  Therefore, it is quite possible that oppressed people in the United States will have to use the methods of strategic nonviolent resistance in order to achieve regime change right here in the U.S.A.

Chapter 3 of From D to D explains how an oppressed population can shatter the power of a dictator or oppressor by the mass withdrawal of political and economic cooperation from the oppressor's regime.  But that noncooperation works best when it is exercised as a coordinated effort by the independent institutions and groups of the oppressed society. Note that by "independent" we mean those groups and institutions that are not controlled by the dictator or his administration. Sharp listed a number of normally independent groups and institutions which are also normally apolitical, such as families, gardening clubs, sports clubs, musical groups, and the like.  As noted in an earlier post in this series, in order for such normally apolitical groups to become part of a strategic nonviolent resistance movement, they must be politicized or co-opted by movement organizers.  

But the organizers must also know how to build organizations from scratch.  And the organizers of a movement of strategic nonviolent resistance against oppression will want to build organizations whose main purpose from the outset is to contribute to the liberation struggle.  Such organizations are called social movement organizations.  To learn more about how these work, we will today consider the teachings of Saru Jayaraman (who is featured in the video above, in which she gave a lecture to the Resistance School Berkeley), Sidney Tarrow, Asef Bayat, and Marshall Ganz.  I will try to summarize below some of the key points in the video lecture which Saru gave in her lecture.

So first, what is organizing?  Many people today who talk of organizing use the term to refer to getting  a bunch of people together for a short-term, limited engagement like a protest march or rally.  However, according to those who study organizing, the correct term for such activity is actually mobilizing and not organizing.  Similarly, get-out-the-vote drives are not really organizing, but mobilizing, as are such activities as getting people to sign petitions or getting people to click on an Internet link, or to put bumper stickers on their cars.  

Another activity that is often called organizing is getting people who are well-off and who have disposable income and free time to advocate for people who are not well-off.  But again, students of organizing would not call this organizing, but activism or advocacy.  This is because the people who are active are usually people with power and resources who are active on behalf of those without power and resources, and the people with power therefore assume that the people without power have no agency over their own lives.  Advocacy and activism can also be expressed in the providing of services, in which the people without power are provided with things like clothing, food, educational programs, and the like - things which are normally denied to the people without power because of the structural imbalances between the people with power and the people without power.

Activism, services and mobilizing have their place.  But they by themselves do not fundamentally shift the imbalance of power between the powerful and the powerless that causes the deprivations suffered by the powerless in the first place.  This can only be done by organizing, which Saru defines as "collective action led by the people most affected [by the power imbalance], in which the people most affected are engaging in direct action targeting those with power."  The people most affected by institutional racism in the United States are the people who are not white.  The people most affected by U.S. immigration policies and by the immigration policies enacted by nations aligned with the Global Far Right are the people who live in countries whose economies and societies have been trashed by the United States and by the nations of the Global Far Right.  The people most affected by mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex are those people who have been locked up (either through excessive sentencing or through wrongful conviction), and their families.  The people most affected by the collapse of the power of organized labor in the United States are the people who have to work low-wage jobs in dangerous conditions - for instance, people who work for Amazon, or who work in meatpacking plants.

According to Saru, "direct action means face-to-face action that involves risk.  [It is] direct confrontation, meaning face-to-face confrontation with a target who has the power to make the decision that affects the people who are most affected...When I say risky I mean that they are doing something that actually involves them showing that they are willing to stand up physically and in a live space."  It is this kind of action that challenges and shifts an unjust power structure.  So when the British who ruled India decreed that Indians could only buy British goods for which the Indians had to pay British taxes, Gandhi and his followers engaged in the physical act of boycotting British salt by making their own.  This was a action by the people most affected, and it involved risk even though it was nonviolent.  This action also challenged the existing power structure, and was the beginning of the crumbling of that power structure.  This action also was the beginning of Indians winning concrete improvements in their lives.  A social movement organization is therefore a group composed of and led by the people most affected, "who are engaged in direct, collective action against those in power but with the goal of winning concrete improvements in people's lives and challenging the power structure."

According to Sidney Tarrow, this collective action must be sustained collective action in order to be considered the basis of a social movement.  To quote Saru again, "So, according to Tarrow, a social movement occurs when people with limited resources - in our world, we call that the people most affected - are able to sustain - that word is important - contentious actions in conflict with powerful opponents."  (Emphasis mine.)  Social movement organizations are the basis of social movements; therefore, social movement organizing is much more than just organizing a march or a petition drive or a mouse click campaign.  For a social movement organization is a collection of people who are willing to work together collectively in a sustained manner in order to shift the balance of power between themselves and powerful opponents.

Now the work of a social movement organization is not just to engage in sustained collective action as an organization, but to create an environment in which, according to Saru, "something else happens and gives way to a much broader, much wider movement in which many more people...who are not affiliated with any organization...are suddenly across a very wide swath of society engaging in contentions actions over a long period of time."  When the social movement organizations trigger this kind of sustained societal shift in behavior, that's when a social movement is born.  These movements, are, however, built on the ongoing, patient work of social movement organizations.  It is a series of patiently accumulated small steps and small victories which lead to the big breakthrough movement moments.  

The necessary initial work of a social movement organization must first be to teach the people most affected to begin to reclaim agency over their lives.  This is done by building structures of self-reliance.  As Gene Sharp says in Chapter 1 of From D to D, "A liberation struggle is a time for self-reliance and internal strengthening of the struggle group."  Therefore, the movement organization must begin to build its own means of taking care of the needs of its members.  To illustrate this, let's look at some of the demands of some of the Black Lives Matter chapters in the United States.  One of those demands is the demand for equal access to quality education for Black and Brown children.  But the people who have set up inequitable systems of education did so for a reason.  Therefore, what makes BLM think that these people will respond to the demand of the people most affected to change these systems?  Instead of demanding decency and humanity from people who don't have any, why doesn't BLM organize its own education system as a necessary prerequisite to organizing a crippling mass boycott of the system set up by the dominant culture?  When racist teachers who are part of punitive schools face empty classrooms, they learn quickly that their jobs are in danger!  Similarly, the low-wage workers who are employed by exploitative employers must begin to build the self-reliance they need in order to go without work for a while in the event of a strike.  Building self-reliance of this kind is not easy when you're being exploited, yet it has been done time after time by people who successfully liberated themselves.  The United Farm Workers did this very thing when they built the structures which enabled them to use strikes and boycotts against large California farms in the 1960's.  

The building of structures of self-reliance is also the means by which social movement organizers chip away at the legitimacy of the structures of the dominant culture.  For if the structures built by the powerless actually work better than the structures built by the powerful, people will start to notice!  Thus Asef Bayat, in his book Life as Politics, says "I envision a strategy whereby every social group generates change in society through active citizenship in their immediate domains: children at home and at schools, students in colleges, teachers in classrooms, workers in factories, the poor in their neighborhoods, athletes in stadiums, artists through their art, intellectuals through media, women at home and as public actors. Not only are they to voice their claims, broadcast violations done unto them, and make themselves heard, but also to take responsibility for excelling at what they do. An authoritarian regime should not be a reason for not producing excellent novels, brilliant handicrafts, math champions, world- class athletes, dedicated teachers, or a global film industry. Excellence is power; it is identity."  (Emphasis added.)

This concludes our study of the necessary groundwork that must be laid by the people most affected by oppression in today's world, the people most threatened by White supremacy, the Global Far Right, and the collection of strongmen who want to Make Their People Great Again by trashing all the other peoples on earth.  We will next begin a discussion of strategy.  However, I may also decide to write a post describing the Global Far Right in terms of a religious cult, and describe in that post how we might use some of the resources created by cult researchers such as Steve Hassan to reach out to those who are trapped in that cult mindset.