The Poverty of Pivenism

This post is a continuation of my "study guide" and commentary on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D.)  Recent posts in this series have dealt with the important subject of the strategy of nonviolent struggle.  As I said in a recent post, strategic nonviolent resistance does not rely on the weapons and resources of the holders of oppressive power, and one big reason why is that those who are oppressed do not have access to the weapons and resources of the powerful.  This is why strategy and strategic thinking is so important.  If the strategy of a struggle group is solid, the struggle group can achieve great shifts in the balance of power between the powerful and those without power.  If the strategy of a struggle group is weak, foolish or nonexistent, then that group will lose.

The success rate of nonviolent liberation struggles from 1900 to 2006 was over 50 percent, according to the book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan.  Indeed, during this period, "campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as successful as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals," according to the book's website.  Yet from 2010 onward the success rate of nonviolent struggle movements began to decline, as documented by articles such as "The Future of Nonviolent Resistance" by Erica Chenoweth, and "Nonviolent protest defined the decade. But is civil resistance losing its impact?" by Rupa Shenoy.  I would like to suggest that the decline continues to this day, in which the success rate has dropped to less than 34 percent - a distressing decline of 16 to 18 percent.  (Violent liberation struggles have shown an even worse decline in effectiveness, by the way.  Don't take out a loan to buy an assault rifle!)  The question then becomes, Why? What is causing the decline in the success rate of nonviolent resistance campaigns?

In her article "The Future of Nonviolent Resistance," Chenoweth posits a number of reasons for the decline in effectiveness of nonviolent resistance, including the following:

• Savvier responses by governments and other wealthy power-holders
• More entrenched oppressive power-holders who have proven to be resilient in the face of grassroots challenges to their power
• Increased use of brutal repression by these entrenched power-holders
• A change in the structure and capabilities of grassroots movements themselves (Emphasis added)

It is this last factor which I want to bring into sharper focus today, as I believe that it is the decisive factor in the decline of the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance movements.  What changes have taken place in grassroots movements over the last ten years?  According to Chenoweth, the first change is that these movements at their peaks tend actually to be smaller than the successful movements of decades past, both in total numbers and in percentage of the population which participates in them.  This is because the organizers of present-day movements tend to neglect the long-term relationship-building and building of organizational capacity required for a movement to achieve real staying power.  Instead, they do what comes easiest to them: putting together large mass demonstrations and protest marches which can easily be organized by digital social media and which throw a large number of total strangers together in the same place on short notice.  Because these total strangers have not had time to develop a shared story, much less a shared strategy, it is easy for governments and other wealthy power-holders to throw a few violent agents provocateurs into the mix.  And when protest organizers tolerate violent actors or at least are not willing to exercise the discipline needed to separate their movements from the violent actors, the likelihood of increased mass participation in the protests decreases.  (As I have said in recent posts, this comes down to the lack of education and training of the would-be leaders of protest movements.  They need to read some books!)

These weaknesses are characteristic of all the recent "leaderless", "structureless", supposedly "cutting-edge" protest movements of the last decade.  This is why I tend to gag and retch every time I read some article or opinion piece put forth by a media outlet which praises these "leaderless", "structureless" movements as some smart wave of the future.  They're not!  Their weaknesses have not only been abundantly documented by Erica Chenoweth, but also by Zeynep Tufekci, both in her book Twitter and Tear Gas and in a TED talk she gave a few years after the rise and fall of the Occupy protests.  Yet these sorts of leaderless, hastily thrown-together movements which focus almost exclusively on mass protest seem to be the darlings of many a wanna-be movement leader today - especially if that "leader" or those "leaders" identify as "Millennials" or younger who supposedly "don't like structure."

One thing to note is that almost all widely-held popular ideas have a history, a lineage of development.  That includes widely-held bad ideas.  So what is the history of this particularly bad idea, and of the ineffective and incompetent "movements" which have resulted from it?  To answer that question, I want to refer to a book that came out in 2016, and whose paperback edition came out in 2017.  (2017 seems to have been a good year to write books on resistance.  I wonder why...)  The book is This Is An Uprising by Mark Engler and Paul Engler.  And in case the Englers are reading this post, let me warn you in advance that I'm going to throw a few (metaphorical) rocks at your book.  To quote Jimmy Wong, "Please do not find offensive!"

Chapter Two of their book is titled, "Structure and Movement," and its opening sentences read thus: "Two schools stand at opposite poles of thinking about how grassroots forces can promote social change.  Each has a champion."  The chapter then sets forth these two champions, namely Saul Alinsky versus Frances Fox Piven.  The chapter begins to describe Alinsky thus: "Alinsky was a guru in the art of the slow, incremental building of community groups.  Like organizers in the labor movement, his approach focused on person-by-person recruitment, careful leadership development, and the creation of stable institutional bodies that could leverage the power of their members over time...this approach can be described as one based on 'structure.'"  The chapter begins to describe Piven thus: "Piven, in contrast, has become a leading defender of unruly broad-based disobedience, undertaken outside the confines of any formal organization.  She emphasizes the disruptive power of mass mobilizations that coalesce quickly...In contrast to the structure-based approach of labor unions and Alinskyite groups, her tradition can be dubbed 'mass protest.'"

While Chapter Two does try to present a balanced comparison of the two approaches, it is guilty of a bit of distortion of the concept of a movement and of the role of a social movement organization as a catalyst for social movement.  (The social movement organization is a topic which I covered in this post.)  For it seems to paint those who follow the Alinskyite tradition as people who value organization over movement, and thus fails to recognize that it is organizations which give birth to movements.  Chapter Two quotes an Alinskyite organizer who accurately saw Martin Luther King as a "one-trick pony" who relied too much on dramatic mass marches and not on slow, patient capacity-building via sustained organization.

Chapter Two seems to treat Frances Fox Piven more favorably than Saul Alinsky, citing, for instance, a book titled Poor People's Movements by Piven and by Richard Cloward which analyzed some of the disruptive social movements of the 1930's, 1950's, and 1960's.  These movements are cited as proof that poor people who are willing to be disruptive can achieve far more in a short time than those who seek to build organizational structures among the poor.  It's time for a full disclosure statement: I must admit that I haven't yet read Piven's book.  However, what the Englers say about her matches what other sources have said about her teachings and writings.  And if she really holds such a position, I would like to gently suggest that she is glossing over the role that social movement organizations such as the CIO or SNCC had in the movements she cited.  

The "Pivenist" approach (at least, as I understand it) certainly has led to some impressive mobilizations, from the Gezi Park protests in Turkey to the Occupy protests and occupations in the United States to the mass protests of the Arab Spring.  Yet the failures of these mobilizations have also been impressive - perhaps even breathtaking.  One particularly poignant and tragic failure is the failure of the Egyptian revolution to bring about a democratic government, and the loss of all which that mobilization initially achieved.  A sign both ironic and hopeful is the fact that in the aftermath, movement organizers have begun to return to the need for sustained organizing as the means of building power for lasting change.  The Englers note that leaders of the original April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt have begun to focus on building alternative institutions, and that "the 2011 uprising has unleashed a spirit of communal self-determination that cannot easily be subdued."  A further irony is that in connection with the ultimate failure of the Egyptian revolution, the Englers first mention the term "alternative institutions" in their book.  Alternative institutions are one of the most disruptive long-term tools of an oppressed people in a nonviolent liberation struggle - yet the Englers mention them only once.  And their book never defines or discusses them further.  Alternative - or "parallel" institutions - are a pillar of the Gandhian strategy of swaraj, which is why they are a prominent part of his constructive program.  The fact that the Englers mention them only once without explaining their significance is a real shame.  

And so we come back to what I consider to be an accurate and viable roadmap of nonviolent revolution, namely the achievement of shifts in the power balance between the oppressor and the oppressed which come about by the oppressed building the sort of righteous society of self-government, communal self-determination and of communal self-reliance that displaces the society ruled by the oppressor.  To quote Gene Sharp, "Combined with political defiance during the phase of selective resistance, the growth of autonomous social, economic, cultural and political institutions progressively expands the 'democratic space' of the society and shrinks the control of the dictatorship.  As the civil institutions of the society become stronger vis-a-vis the dictatorship, then, whatever the dictators may wish, the population is incrementally building an independent society outside of their control..." - From D to D, Chapter 9.  Sounds a lot better than Pivenism to me - especially when I see the successful track record of the approach outlined by Sharp.  The approach of Sharp was the approach used by Gandhi and his associates in organizing a successful liberation struggle among dirt-poor Indians.  If they could liberate themselves, none of the rest of us have any excuses for our continued oppression.  This includes those of us in the African-American community!

Yet there are those who know the weaknesses and failures of Pivenism, but who still promote her approach as a valid strategy of collective nonviolent resistance.  I will examine who some of these people are and what I believe to be some of their motives in the next post in this series.