At aalis, magbabalik
At uuliting sabihin
Na mahalin ka't sambitin
Kahit muli'y masaktan
Sa pag-alis
Ako'y magbabalik
At sana naman...
- from Nobela, lyrics by Christian Blanca Renia
This post is a continuation of our discussion of Chapter 3 of Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy. I chose to dedicate a series of posts to the discussion of this important book because of the current global political climate, in which many democracies around the world (including the United States) have been hijacked by fascists, supremacists, strongmen and would-be dictators. (Yes, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are among the hijackers.) I have argued in my posts that the oppressed peoples who want to liberate themselves from these strongmen must do so through the means of strategic nonviolent resistance, as the nonviolent method has the greatest chance of success and the best social outcomes. From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in my posts to From D to D) describes what is involved in building a successful nonviolent liberation struggle.
Chapter 3 of From D to D began with what Gene Sharp called "the Monkey Master fable" (originally titled, Rule By Tricks in Chinese), an illustration of what happens to an oppressor when his oppressed victims choose to massively and collectively withdraw their cooperation from the oppressor. Sharp went on to make the important point that the noncooperation of the oppressed applies the greatest pressure when it is collective rather than being just a bunch of random, uncoordinated acts of isolated individuals. Thus, the emergence of collective, coordinated noncooperation depends on the emergence or existence of groups and institutions of the oppressed that are independent of the oppressor - that is, groups and institutions that are neither financed, supported, or controlled by the oppressor.
Note that Sharp lists among these independent groups a number of types of groups and institutions that are not overtly political, such as families, sports clubs, music groups, gardening clubs, and the like. Therefore, although the existence of such groups is a necessary precondition for a liberation struggle, it is not a sufficient condition. My most recent post in this series therefore discussed how it is necessary for such groups to be politicized (or co-opted) by movement organizers if such groups are to contribute to a nonviolent liberation struggle. In that post, we explored the writings of feminist scholar Jo Freeman in her description of the birth of the women's movement and other movements of the 1960's in the United States. One point she makes is the importance of the organizers of a social movement. For successful social movements are never spontaneous - that is, they never just "happen" out of the blue. And there are only two kinds of social movements: the spontaneous and the successful. Successful movements are organized by smart organizers. The organizers have to be smart, because their job is to co-opt existing groups and institutions so that their members begin to support the goals of the movement. Their job is also to create new movement organizations from scratch (a topic which will be explored in a future post, God willing). So what kind of person is an organizer?
To answer that question, we turn today to the writings of another movement scholar, veteran organizer Dr. Marshall Ganz of Harvard University. Ganz defines organizing as a particular kind of leadership. He defines leadership as "accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose in the face of uncertainty." And he defines organizing as "leadership that enables people to turn the resources they have into the power they need to make the change they want." Ganz makes the important point that leadership - specifically, organizing - is a calling. People are called to become organizers when life confronts them with the following questions:
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?
-Hillel (Pirkei Avot Chapter 1:14)
So if organizers are people who have experienced a calling to organize, what kind of experiences lead them to hear that call? And where do these called people come from? To answer that question, let's look at three kinds of people:
THE LIMINAL
The word "liminal" literally means "on the threshold." The word can also be defined as, "on the edge." In the context of liberation struggles, liminal people are those members of an oppressed group who live on the edges, on the boundary between the oppressed group and the oppressor group. In many cases, such people are born into such liminal spaces. Moses from the Bible is such an example. He was born into a nation of slaves, and he was born at a time in which the Pharaoh, the earthly master of the Hebrew slaves had decreed that all male Hebrew infants were to be killed by being thrown into the Nile River. His parents did not throw him into the river, but instead hid him for three months, and then they carefully placed him into the river in a floating basket, trusting that God would take care of him. (Exodus 1 and 2). In a twist of Divine irony and providence, the basket was found by the daughter of Pharaoh, who decided to adopt Moses and raise him as an Egyptian. In another twist of Divine providence, Moses' mother was hired by Pharaoh's daughter to be his nurse from day that Pharaoh's daughter found him until the day that she adopted Moses as her son.
Moses was thus raised as a member of the most privileged group of the most privileged class of people in Egypt. (To put this into perspective, imagine Ivanka Trump adopting a dark-skinned, non-English speaking child from among the groups of human beings now caged in "detention centers" by the Global Far Right and raising him as her own son with all the earthly privileges attached to the Trump name.) But he also learned of his identity as a Hebrew from his mother. Thus there were two potential identities within Moses. However, the sight of the treatment of his people by the Egyptians became an attack on his birth identity which Moses would no longer tolerate. The attack on the people of his birth became in his soul an attack on himself. So it is that "By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter; choosing rather to endure ill-treatment with the people of God, than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin..." (Hebrews 11:24-25)
That is frequently the experience of those who are liminal. This was the experience of many African-American servicemen from the American South who fought in World War Two, as for a time they inhabited a world which offered many more opportunities than the Jim Crow South. From their experiences came a set of rising expectations combined with an intolerable sense of shame and frustration at the Southern status quo that would serve as one of the motivations for the most important struggles of the Civil Rights movement. Other liminal figures include Robert Moses (one of the founding members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC), Ella Baker (of the NAACP and one of the founding organizers of SNCC), James Lawson and others who had the means and took the opportunity to attend college (something that many African-Americans could not do because of financial constraints).
And it has been my experience, for as an African-American child, I was a military brat and my dad was an officer. Therefore I got to inhabit a world in which there were not many kids who looked like me. I was "educated in all the learning of the Egyptians," to borrow a phrase from Acts 7. But I was subjected to constant attacks from children (and sometimes parents) from the "dominant culture" who treated me as if neither I nor my people had any right to inhabit the world which they enjoyed. An incident from the summer before middle school comes particularly to mind just now. The experience of possibilities combined with persecution on account of those possibilities had, shall we say, a radicalizing effect on me.
THE CONSCIOUSLY HUMILIATED
As noted above, the liminal are often very conscious of their humiliation under a system of oppression. But many who do not inhabit that liminal space often allow their sense of self to be submerged by that system to the point where they passively accept the structures of their humiliation as merely part of the background scenery, "just the way things are around here." While this happens often to members of minority groups who are oppressed by a dominant majority, it also happens when an entire society is taken over by a dominant dictator. So in his essay, The Power of the Powerless, Vaclav Havel writes about a grocery store owner in a dysfunctional country who is ordered by his government to place every day in the store window a sign which reads, "WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!" The government's purpose in ordering store owners to put up such signs is to convey the message that the government is on the side of the workers, and that the government is the sole legitimate leader of these workers, the sole legitimate treasury of their hopes and dreams.
But what if the government which makes grocers put up such signs actually treats the workers like animals? What if, in putting up such signs, workers are actually being forced to lie to themselves? Is not this act of forced lying a form of humiliation, an insult to the intelligence of these workers? And how long can someone be forced to lie to himself before his sense of shame becomes so overwhelming that he refuses to lie any longer? That is the point of Havel's essay. When that happens, people refuse to put up signs, or they start to put up signs that say "THIS ISN'T PARADISE AFTER ALL!" So Trump is trailing Biden in the polls right now because many people are beginning to realize that he hasn't made America great, and that voting for him will not "Keep America Great!" Rather, the United States is suffering from a number of wounds inflicted on the entire nation by Donald J. Trump.
THE ACTIVIZED
A sense of human possibility combined with an awareness of shame under the denial of that possibility is what produces many of the people who step up to become organizers. These organizers then go on to call others to become organizers. And they do so by opening the eyes of these others to the human possibilities that are being denied to them by oppressors. In other words, they produce in others what dwells within them - the same sense of possibility and the same refusal to tolerate ongoing humiliation. Thus it was that organizer Fred Ross found a young Latino laborer named Cesar Chavez and showed him "how poor people could build power." Thus it was that SNCC organizers persuaded poor African-Americans in Mississippi to fight for equal access to the polls.
The characteristic of organizers is that they have come to a point of "cognitive liberation". This term, "cognitive liberation", is defined in various ways by social movement scholars. But I define its beginning as a point in which an oppressed person decides that he or she will no longer tolerate the oppression and its accompanying humiliation, and that he or she will begin to live in truth from now on - even if it means suffering. (For an example of this, consider the life of Fannie Lou Hamer. "And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives even to the point of death.") This cognitive liberation spreads when the liberated organizer sets before others not only a sense of possibility and an awareness of humiliation, but a plausible road map of change that can achieve the possibilities now denied to the oppressed. This is how an organizer becomes a "social arsonist who goes around setting other people on fire," as Fred Ross said.
But this setting of other people on fire is rarely instantaneous. Often it involves long, hard work in building relationships of trust among people whose experiences of hardship have taught them not to be trusting, and who must operate in an environment in which bad things can happen to them if they "step out of line." As Ella Baker once said, it is "spade work" - like the unglamorous work of hand-digging a field before one plants vegetables. And organizers frequently find that people will disappoint them - sometimes after the organizer has spent much time trying to build a relationship. So the organizer must be patient and resilient. (At aalis, magbabalik, at uuliting sabihin, na mahalin ka't sambitin, kahit muli'y masaktan...) You have to be kind of crazy (at least as some people count craziness) to do this kind of work - or at least you need the kind of undying righteous anger combined with a sense of enduring justice that will compel you to stick it out for the long haul. But there are tools which can help make the organizer's job easier. I will discuss those tools in my next post, God willing.
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