From D to D, Chapters 6 & 7: What You Do With What You Have

This post is a continuation of my "study guide" and commentary on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp. In this series of posts, I have shortened the title of the book to From D to D. As I have said in previous posts, the consideration of this book is highly relevant for these times, in which those who support the supremacy of the world's dominant peoples have created a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by exploiting everyone else. The poor of the earth experience this exploitation as enslavement, discrimination, harassment, dispossession, and the threat of genocide. Many live as refugees. Theirs is an experience of apparent utter powerlessness in the face of an all-consuming, murderously abusive power. Yet the poor of the earth do have at their disposal a "weapons system" and a strategic method which holds the promise to liberate them from their oppression if they dare to use it. That means of liberation is strategic nonviolent resistance.

The previous post in this series explored the role of grand strategy in the exercise of strategic nonviolent resistance.  We noted that the concept of grand strategy is part of the strategic framework which nations use in order to achieve their highest and most important goals.  Specifically, grand strategy is the art of arranging all the resources of a state or polity to achieve its goals.  We also noted that national governments have the ability to compel their citizens or subjects to give their resources for the support of the nation's grand strategy.  This compulsion can come in the form of taxes or compulsory national service such as being drafted into the military.  However, this ability to compel is not available to those who live under oppression and who seek to liberate their people from that oppression through strategic nonviolent resistance.  You may be part of an oppressed group of people and you may be moved to try to organize a nonviolent liberation struggle.  Yet you cannot force your brothers and sisters to join your movement or to give their resources to support your grand strategy.  What you can do, however, is to craft a compelling "vision of tomorrow" to set in front of your people - a vision that concretely describes where we should all want to go and how we will try to get there.

And there is a second thing you can do.  Let's repeat Gene Sharp's definition of grand strategy here:

Grand strategy is the conception that serves to coordinate and direct the use of all appropriate and available resources (economic, human, moral, political, organizational, etc.) of a group seeking to attain its objectives in a conflict. Grand strategy, by focusing primary attention on the group’s objectives and resources in the conflict, determines the most appropriate technique of action (such as conventional military warfare or nonviolent struggle) to be employed in the conflict. In planning a grand strategy resistance leaders must evaluate and plan which pressures and influences are to be brought to bear upon the opponents. Further, grand strategy will include decisions on the appropriate conditions and timing under which initial and subsequent resistance campaigns will be launched. (Emphasis added.)

Here's the thing.  As Gene Sharp pointed out in Part 3 of his work The Politics of Nonviolent Action, "Rarely, if ever, does either the nonviolent or the opponent group include the whole 'population,' or group of people, whom they purport to represent or serve.  In a given nonviolent campaign the active participants are usually a relatively small percentage of the whole population in whose interests the nonviolent group claims to be acting." (Emphasis added.)  This "relatively small percentage" needs to develop its own grand strategy, its own plan that serves to coordinate and direct the use of all the resources at its own disposal in order to attain its objectives in its struggle.  In other words, the struggle group itself needs to develop a plan for how it will coordinate and use its own resources in building a successful long-range liberation struggle.

There are two things to note in considering the grand strategy of a struggle group.  First, it is a well-known historical fact that many successful movements have been created by small groups of people with few resources.  The fact that these movements were successful in bringing about large changes in societies shows the skill of these small groups in developing a wise grand strategy for the use of their own resources in bringing about these large changes.  One example of this is the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), whose members went into Mississippi to desegregate centers of white power and to win the right of African-Americans to vote and participate in electoral politics without fear of violence.  The story of SNCC is told in books such as I've Got The Light Of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle by Charles M. Payne, PhD.  The story of SNCC also partly refutes Doug McAdam's assertion that political movements emerge only where the dominant power structures allow "political opportunities."  For the white supremacists who controlled Mississippi at that time fought very hard (and violently!) to thwart the efforts of the SNCC organizers.  Yet SNCC won.

From this observation comes the corollary observation that the long-range outcomes produced by a social movement organization are a reflection and embodiment of its grand strategy.  Some groups have access to many resources, yet they produce meager or worthless results.  Other groups are small and have few resources, and they work under extremely threatening circumstances - yet they change their societies.  And sometimes they change the world.  I argue that the difference in outcomes comes down to a difference in grand strategy.

What then is this difference?  I would argue that it may just be possible that the difference comes down to a basic difference in motivation, a difference in desire.  And I'd like to suggest that in so-called social movement organizations that have existed for a long time, we can see in many cases a certain corruption of desire.  The reasons for this are found in the third chapter of Doug McAdam's book Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency 1930 - 1970, in which he lists three dangers which are faced by a social movement organization: oligarchization, co-optation, and dissolution of indigenous support.  

Oligarchization refers to the way in which the leaders of social movement organizations can tend to forget over time that the reason why their organization exists in the first place is to make a needed change.  They then start to think that the only reason why their organization exists is to exist, and that the leaders' job is simply to make sure that the organization keeps existing.  Co-optation is what happens when a social movement organization forgets that a key to the liberation of an oppressed people is the building of self-reliance among the oppressed.  Once the organization's leaders forget this, they start begging for funding (or applying for nonprofit status) from resource-rich members of the members of the dominant culture.  But they forget (or willfully blind themselves to the fact) that he who pays the piper gets to call the tune.  Therefore in receiving or asking for funding, the leaders of an indigenous social movement organization tend quickly to abandon the disruptive original goals of the social movement.  By being bought off, they cease to be a threat to an unjust status quo.  Dissolution of indigenous support is what then happens when a social movement organization has allowed itself to be oligarchized and co-opted.  For the people most affected by injustice - the people on whose behalf the social movement organization originally came into existence - will now look at that organization and correctly conclude that it has become a bunch of worthless Uncle Toms (and Auntie Tammys).

This is why I'm not terribly impressed with the NAACP anymore or with many other historic Black social movement organizations which have survived to this day.  For when Aiyana Stanley Jones was shot in her own bedroom - and when Trayvon Martin's murderer was acquitted - and when the long spate of publicly witnessed and recorded police and vigilante murders of unarmed African-Americans ensued - and when the Trump presidency was busy committing its own atrocities - I would have expected that these organizations should have been able to mount a nonviolent, yet extremely coercive response that could have stopped this garbage in its tracks.  Instead, I was reading news articles that described the NAACP as "moribund".  (This is not a new criticism, by the way!)  At the same time, it was revealed that a White woman had risen to the leadership of a chapter of an organization that existed supposedly to solve problems faced by the Black community, namely, the NAACP!

I would suggest therefore that many historically Black social movement organizations have become moribund, and thus worthless.  In this, they mirror a broader phenomenon which has taken place in the American labor movement, in which certain unions which had come into existence decades ago as extremely scrappy and coercively powerful organizations were transformed over time into toothless "business unions."  But I would also like to suggest that social movement organizations that become worthless in this way face a danger.  This danger comes because their "grand strategy" has degenerated into a strategy of merely trying to continue existing and to keep obtaining funding in order to pretend to fight for the people they claim to represent.  This is then their way of "making the best of a bad situation" by profiting from that situation.  But what if the bad situation suddenly disappears?

I am thinking now of the Cold War and of the thriving and wealthy American defense industry which resulted from it.  If you talked with many employees of defense plants of that era, they would have told you that "war is good for the economy."  Clearly their career plans had been built on a strategy of "making the best" of a long-term bad situation.  Yet there were people in the Soviet Empire who were tired of this bad situation.  Among these were the Solidarnosc organizers in Poland, and the organizers of pro-democracy and liberation movements in other satellite countries.  They did not want to "make the best" of a bad situation.  Instead, they wanted to end that situation.  

And they succeeded.  This caused a massive disruption of the American defense industry.  I suggest that it was a contributing cause of the recession of the early 1990's which took place in the United States.  One of the casualties of the collapse of the Cold War was the Hughes Aircraft Company plant in Fullerton, California.  That plant (called the "Huge Aircrash Company" by some employees) occupied several acres of land in the Sunny Hills part of Fullerton, and employed thousands of people.  In 1990, it lost its raison d'etre.  It is now a bunch of supermarkets and big box stores.