The Urgent Need for Conscientização

[Note: For much of the last two years, I have been posting to this blog on a once-per-week basis.  Lately that has changed to posting once every two weeks.  For the next several months, I will remain on my current blogging schedule as much as possible, so I will continue to post once every two weeks.]

The end of a year is often a time in which people project their hopes, aspirations and fears onto the future.  Those who have become accustomed to easy, privileged lives tend to be on the hopeful side of the forward-lookers; those who have had experience of hard times tend to look forward more soberly.  Certainly the last few years have given the world an abundance of reasons to approach the future soberly and cautiously - even in the privileged nations of the Global North.  In the United States, for instance, we have seen the erosion of civility and safety for many groups of people.  We have also experienced widespread environmental catastrophes such as the wildfires of 2020, and the explosive growth of tent cities comprised of the recently disenfranchised.  We have seen the beginning of the breakdown of those supply chains which nourished the consumerism of the nations of the Global North.  We have witnessed the hyper-concentration of the world's wealth into the hands of an ever-shrinking number of so-called "owners".  We have witnessed the emergence of a pandemic whose consequences will be with us for decades into the future.  We have witnessed the undeniable  accelerating consequences of the destruction of the earth's environment, the increasing loss of safe and healthy habitats for the world's biosphere.

And we have witnessed another loss, namely the global loss of safe spaces for democracy.  Consider the following reports:

• "Freedom In The World 2021: Democracy Under Siege", Freedom House
• "'An Urgent Matter': Biden Warns Democracy Is Under Threat At Summit", The Guardian
• "Democracy Slipping Away At Record Rate, Intergovernmental Body Warns", Reuters

The series of posts I wrote on strategic nonviolent resistance and on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy have been my response to this loss of safe spaces for democracy, and especially the damage done to American democracy during the regime of Donald Trump.  Among the themes discussed in those posts, the last theme discussed was the theme of the organic, grassroots, bottom-up building of a society by the oppressed and for the oppressed in order to displace and neutralize the society constructed by an oppressive regime.  To quote Gene Sharp once again, "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...in time, this combination of resistance and institution building can lead to de facto freedom, making the collapse of the dictatorship and the formal installation of a democratic system undeniable because the power relationships within the society have been fundamentally altered."

What does it look like to build an "organic, grassroots, bottom-up society by the oppressed and for the oppressed"?  It starts when local, small groups of the oppressed organize themselves into groups to provide the things they need for themselves which the rulers and owners of their society refuse to provide, or which they will only provide by charging a price which ordinary people can't afford.  These groups which are formed by the oppressed become the parallel institutions of the parallel society by the oppressed and for the oppressed.  And organizing these groups is like organizing a potluck - not like hosting a free lunch for free riders.  Moreover, these parallel institutions become a base of strength for the oppressed which enables them to organize the sustained collective withdrawal of economic and political cooperation from the oppressor's society.  It is this sustained, collective withdrawal of cooperation which shatters the oppressor's power and control.  

History is full of examples of this process in action, from the "constructive program" of Indian self-reliance organized by Gandhi against the British empire to the preparations for strikes and boycotts by the Black majority of South Africa which helped to end the apartheid regime in that country to the parallel institutions organized by the Polish against conquerors and oppressors in the 19th and 20th centuries.  Indeed, I might suggest that one sign that oppressed people have become liberated in their minds is that they begin to organize ways of taking care of themselves without relying on their oppressors, in order that they might then withdraw their labor from the continued support of the oppressor in order to break the oppressor.

We see far too little of this kind of organizing nowadays.  (It would be good to ask why.  More on that later.  Let's just say that this kind of organizing is the hardest kind there is at present.)  What we see instead among the oppressed are either masses of people who are apathetic and fatalistic in the face of their suffering, or we see people who put their hopes entirely in elections, even though they now live in countries in which the electoral process is breaking or has been broken.  Among those who trust in elections, there are "organizers" who seek to stand for the oppressed or for the environment or for something better than unrestrained predatory capitalism.  Their ethics are indeed worthy of praise.  But their strategy and tactics revolve around trying to organize political campaigns to get the right sort of people elected.  And their story of self/story of us/story of now dialogue with the people they try to recruit focuses on the short-term transactional goal of merely getting people to vote a certain way.  Their "dialogue" thus degenerates into a manipulative, slogan-laden monologue.  So the "collective action" of the people is reduced to merely casting a ballot once every few years, and once the ballot is cast, the "collective action" goes away - and has to be rebuilt almost from scratch during the next election cycle.  And the battle between the oppressors and those who seek change by means of political action becomes merely a battle between dueling emotive slogans.

Now I do believe that one of the duties of citizenship is to participate in the electoral process.  It is partly because of decent people who did not vote in 2016 that we had to suffer four years of Trump.  But voting is not the only characteristic of good citizenship.  And to rely on voting alone as a means of positive change is a grave mistake.  In democracies whose democratic processes are being sabotaged or have become broken, election seasons have become downright nasty.  (To me as a citizen of the United States, the last several election cycles have not been a time of hope or of joy but rather like a paroxysm of coughing during a long bout with pertussis or like one of the paroxysms of fever and chills which characterize a long bout of malaria!  Except that in this case, it's the Global Far Right that is the infectious agent.  And next year, here we go again...)

The kind of organizing which liberates the oppressed in their minds so that they begin to collectively take charge of their own destiny - this is the kind of organizing which truly transforms.  To quote Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, the true organizer must labor with the oppressed to forge a pedagogy of liberation - "a pedagogy which must be forged with, not for, the oppressed (whether individuals or peoples) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity.  This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation."  (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 48).  In other words, the organizer engages with the people he or she is trying to organize, in order to collectively create a "story of us" and a "story of now" by which the people thus organized begin to change their world.  

The organizer's task is to engage his or her people in an act of what Freire calls "problem-posing education", where "...people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation.  Although the dialectical relations of women and men with the world exist independently of how these relations are perceived (or whether or not they are perceived at all), it is also true that the form of action they adopt is to a large extent a function of how they perceive themselves in the world.  Hence, the teacher-student and the students-teachers reflect simultaneously on themselves and the world without dichotomizing this reflection from action, and thus establish an authentic form of thought and action."  (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 83)  To break this down into simpler pieces, the education of the oppressed should do the following:

• It should show the oppressed that the world is not just some static thing over which they have no control and to which they have no choice but to submit.
• It should enable the oppressed to see themselves and their relation to the world more accurately - not as mere objects acted upon by forces over which they have no control, but as people who have the power to act to change their reality.
• It should move the oppressed to begin acting on their reality, both as individuals and collectively, as a logical consequence of beginning to see themselves in the world more accurately.
• As part of this movement toward activity, it should lead the oppressed to more clearly see the present intolerable reality of their oppression.  To quote Freire (who quotes Marx), "Hay que hacer al opresion real todavia mas opresiva anadiendo a aquella loa conciencia de la opresion haciendo la infamia todavia mas infamante, al pregonarla."  ("It is necessary to make real oppression even more oppressive by adding to it the awareness of the oppression...")

And this change in consciousness is not something which the organizer shoves ready-made down the throats of his or her people, but something that arises as a result of dialogue as organizer and people engage in common reflection upon the world.

It is this patient work of consciousness-raising which is lacking from the work of many organizers who seek to reverse the rise of oppressive autocracy in the world today.  And while I have enjoyed my contact with the Leading Change Network over the last year or so, it seems to me that the members and teachers in this network have a surprisingly weak knowledge of this kind of organizing.  (For that matter, so do I.  But I do want to get stronger!)  This weakness of knowledge has led the LCN increasingly to organizational efforts which focus solely on electoral politics and whose tactics seem at times to be shifting away from bona fide organizing to mere mobilizing. 

It is because I want to strengthen my ability to do this consciousness-raising work that I am thinking of writing a series of blog posts exploring Paulo Freire's book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  This may be my next series.  Those who want to read along with me will, I am sure, be able to find online versions of the book if they want.  Otherwise, the book itself is not that expensive.  The aim of my exploration of this book will be to answer the question of how to lead oppressed people from passivity to the kind of activized consciousness that causes the oppressed to collectively take charge of their own destiny.  This movement is the beginning of any true liberation struggle.

From D to D, Chapters 8 & 9: The "Sin" Of Not Needing You

This is another short post.  I wrote in my last post that I need to read a book in order to write a critique of it, and that that critique might become a post on this blog, as part of my continuing series of posts on strategic nonviolent resistance.  However, this week I have been busy fixing things at my house.  And I must say that fixing things feels really good - especially when those things have been either broken or messy for years.  The fixing is by no means done yet...

But I haven't stopped thinking about the depiction of the process of liberation-in-action described in Chapters 8 and 9 of Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D).  Those who have read my last few posts on his book know that I have been particularly focused on how the building of parallel institutions and a parallel society by and for communities of the oppressed is a necessary part of a successful liberation struggle by the oppressed.  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."  (Emphasis added.)  And in Chapter 9, he writes, "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..."  (Emphasis added.)

Groups and communities of historically oppressed people who choose to build their own internal power and self-sufficiency will therefore go a long way toward achieving their liberation from a dominant oppressive society.  However, it is also true that groups and communities of historically oppressed people have often been "trained" to look to one or more of the dominant societies of the Global North for their salvation instead of learning to rely on themselves.  This has become the basis of the "soft power" sought by some of those dominant societies in their bid to establish global rule for themselves, for the leaders of some of these dominant societies have gladly dressed themselves up as "saviors" and "benefactors" ready to supply guns and other arms, military training, investment money, trucks and heavy machinery, sketchy Russian vaccines, etc, to the poor dark-skinned unwashed masses who seemingly "can't save ourselves."  I am thinking of one Global North nation in particular whose leadership looks at the entire earth as if it were already the special possession of this nation, a world which this nation's leaders have already carved up in their minds into zones with such names as "the near abroad" and "the far abroad" and on which they have drawn the "red lines" of their national narcissism.

But what if the oppressed societies (or even those societies which are categorized as "developing countries") choose to begin to build their own structures of self-reliance?  What if, moreover, oppressed groups within the societies dominated by the Global North begin to build their own structures of self-reliance?  What if these structures begin to provide for the needs of the people of these societies in a way that is better and stronger than anything the dominant cultures can offer?  I am thinking right now of the investment of Nigeria in the mathematics education of its population, as seen in such enterprises as the Cowbellpedia math competition.  One result of this investment: this year, 2021, saw a Nigerian teen named Faith Odunsi win first place in an international mathematics competition which featured students from many nations of the Global North. 

When communities of the oppressed build their own structures of self-reliance, they achieve the following results:

• They strengthen their own self-confidence and motivation as they begin to see the successes they are able to achieve with their own hands.
• They destroy the basis for the "soft power" sought by the dominant societies of the Global North.
• They manage to cross a few "red lines" as they prove that they do not need their wanna-be-Great-Power "saviors" from the dominant culture.  This causes those supposed "saviors" to choke a little.  Now that's fun!

P.S. I mentioned vaccines in this post.  The original version of the post read "worthless vaccines," but I have altered that phrase in order to make my meaning crystal-clear.  I most definitely believe in vaccination as long as the vaccines offered have undergone a rigorous three-stage series of clinical trials to prove both their safety and efficacy.  The Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson COVID-19 vaccines have all undergone this process, which is why I chose to receive the Pfizer vaccine in March of this year.  I have received both doses of the two-dose regimen.  I also appreciate the ongoing efforts to monitor the efficacy of these vaccines over time, among various populations, and in their response to the COVID-19 variants which have arisen during the last year.  The efforts to be honest and transparent - even when the news is not always good - have gone a long way in establishing the credibility of these vaccines.  The same cannot be said of the Russian Sputnik "vaccine", whose developers have been neither honest nor transparent.  Even the article published by Russian spokespersons in the British medical journal Lancet has relied on sketchy and unverifiable data.  Moreover, the publishing of that article has revealed the emergence of problems in the Lancet's peer-review process.  Yet the government of Vladimir Putin has embarked on a massive campaign of trying to make its Sputnik "vaccine" look really, really good by tearing down the vaccines developed in the West.  Which is to me yet another proof that Putin really is a thieving little man in a bunker, a Potemkin Village head-fake of a man.  Not even a majority of his own people believe in his "vaccine."  And now, rant off - secure from red alert.  Have a good night.

From D to D, Chapters 8 & 9: The Plight of the Little Red Hen

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). As we have moved into Chapters 8 and 9, the focus of these posts has turned to way in which oppressed communities use strategic nonviolent resistance to achieve long-term shifts in the balance of power between themselves and those who oppress them.  I have argued that the key to the winning strategies of successful nonviolent liberation struggles of the past has been the achievement of those shifts which come about by the oppressed building the sort of righteous parallel society of self-government, communal self-determination and of communal self-reliance that displaces the society ruled by the oppressor. To return to a quote from Chapter 9, "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, emphasis added.

How then does the building of parallel institutions by the oppressed fit into the general schema of strategic nonviolent resistance?  I'd like to suggest the following progression:

• A group of poor or oppressed people come together to discuss their common grievances.
• These people manage to move beyond the stage of mere griping or kvetching and start asking, "Okay - so things are bad and we're being mistreated.  What do we want to do about it?"
• In pondering the answer to that question, this group begins to discover the ways in which they themselves can collectively meet needs that are being deliberately unmet by the oppressors.
• They begin to act on this knowledge to create their own structures under their own control for meeting their needs.
• This communal self-reliance produces the following effects:
• It starts to create a new shared collective identity among the participants
• It starts to show them that they do indeed have power over their own affairs
• It begins to give them experience and practice in functioning and making decisions as a collective unit
• It begins to produce a collective cause-consciousness which arises out of a new experience of citizenship
• This cause-consciousness becomes the motivator for the group to start thinking about how to strategically use collective action to oppose the power of their oppressors.

One illustrative case study of this process in action is the Montgomery bus boycott, an action of coercive strategic nonviolent resistance that took place from December 1955 to December 1956 in Montgomery, Alabama.  The boycott was initiated by the African-American community in Montgomery due to the racist policies of dehumanizing segregation which were being enforced by the white supremacist political leaders in that city.  The grievance which was specific to the public transit system was that African-Americans were forced by law to give up their seats on a bus to any white passengers who demanded the seats, and that African-Americans were forced at all times to ride in the back of the bus.  The boycott is commonly portrayed in American mainstream media as an action that just "spontaneously" happened on a day when an African-American woman named Rosa Parks was arrested while returning home from work because she refused to give up her seat to a white man.  

In truth, there was nothing spontaneous about the boycott.  The African-American community already had a pre-existing social network of communal support, namely the network of Black churches in Montgomery.  There had already been organizers who were looking for a suitable occasion to challenge the evil law which humiliated Black bus riders on a daily basis.  Rosa Parks' arrest was merely the spark that kindled a confrontation that had already been largely planned by activists within the Black community.  And the boycott itself was sustained by the simultaneous emergence of a parallel institution which consisted of a network of African-American ride-sharing that allowed boycotters to continue to go to work each day.  

Other examples of parallel institution-building within the American context include the formation of the United Farm Workers union by Cesar Chavez.  The UFW had initially been conceived, in part, as an organization dedicated to meeting the needs of its members through such things as medical clinics and a funeral/burial fund.  Note that these things were funded by member dues, which were collected from poor migrant farm workers!  These member dues also built the strike fund which enabled the UFW to take care of its members who were put out of work by participating in strikes and boycotts.  But I want to point out that within the American context, such examples as these come largely from the fertile movement-forming middle decades of the 20th century which influenced American politics to enable communities of color to win significant rights - at least, on paper.  

Fast forward to today, a day in which it often seems that the only sort of mobilizing that comes easy is mobilizing people to participate in mass marches or rallies that take no more than a few hours of time or a few dollars of expense from those who participate.  A day, moreover, in which the most well-known members of the oppressed (as well as some of their more well-to-do self-appointed "spokespersons" from the dominant culture) busily excuse the oppressed from having to do anything for themselves at a collective level, saying instead that "these people have been downtrodden for so long that they are not mentally or psychologically capable of organizing for their own liberation."  Where does such a statement come from - especially when uttered by so-called "saviors" from the dominant culture?

To answer that question, I turn to some of the lessons I learned during the 2019 "Leadership, Organizing and Action" course that I took through Harvard University.  Module 1 of that course contains a relevant reading from the book No Shortcuts: Organizing For Power In The New Gilded Age, by Jane F. McAlevey.  McAlevey describes how movement generation has degenerated from the mid 20th-century recruitment of masses of disenfranchised people for collective long-term disruptive action.  Instead, nowadays, "...Attempts to generate movements are directed by professional, highly educated staff who rely on an elite, top-down theory of power that treats the masses as audiences of, rather than active participants in, their own liberation...", and, "Aiming to speak for - and influence - masses of citizens, droves of new national advocacy groups have set up shop..."  

These "activists" - many of whom are professional "activists" - have created activities which looks like movement-building, but in fact are nothing of the sort.  Among those activities are advocacy - in which a small, well-manicured, photogenic, upper-middle-class, and usually white cadre uses its access to media to speak "on behalf of" marginalized groups of people.  So we have people who wear buttons that say "Black Lives matter to me!"  (Thanks, but I may as well be a specimen of wildlife based on the way you are advocating for me, as if you were saying something like "Save the polar bears!")  The other ersatz activity that falls under this heading of ersatz activism is mobilizing, in which a small, well-manicured, photogenic, upper-middle-class, and usually white cadre gets together to draft a "theory of change" and a "plan of action" for a movement, and afterward recruits all the rest of us to help them implement their "plan".  So we are "mobilized" to implement a plan which may not represent our interests, since we had no say in drafting the plan in the first place.  

Let me tell you straight up that organizing - genuine, pure-D, 100 percent organizing - is harder than any kind of advocacy or mobilizing.  For organizing involves at every step - both in leadership, strategy, and execution - the ordinary people who comprise communities of the oppressed.  To quote McAlevey again: "In workplace strikes, at the ballot box, or in nonviolent civil disobedience, strategically deployed masses have long been the unique weapon of ordinary people...", and, "Organizing places the agency for success with a continually expanding base of ordinary people...the primary goal [of organizing] is to transfer power from the elite to the majority..."  In my experience, the hardest organizing of all is trying to organize present-day, 21st-century communities of the oppressed to begin to pool their resources to meet their own needs themselves, apart from any false charity offered by the dominant society.  

I have wondered often why this is so.  But first a little clarification.  I took the Harvard 2019 Leadership, Organizing and Action course after I had already tried - and completely rejected as useless - the so-called online civil resistance course offered by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in 2018.  The ICNC course was free, while the Harvard course cost over $2,000 and worked me like a dog for fifteen weeks.  Yet I don't regret spending a cent of that money.  The Harvard course was like a refreshing drink of cold, clean water in a desert after the swill of the ICNC course, and it most definitely was not a waste of time.  However, I must say that many of the examples we discussed in the Harvard course focused on organizing as a tool for building electoral power in order to prevail in the American electoral political process.  To me, it has seemed far, far easier to organize people to participate in a political campaign than it is to try to organize them for their own long-term collective self-sufficiency.  

Perhaps this is because of the sense of powerlessness that is far too frequently instilled in communities of the oppressed by those dominant power-holders who wear the "third face of power" described by Steven Lukes.  This third face of power dictates to the members of a society what the members can and cannot believe to be possible.  This is why it is so easy to find activists (including "saviors") from the upper-middle-class, college-educated strata of society and why it is relatively harder - significantly harder at times - to find people with the same activist zeal among those who inhabit the lower economic strata.

But perhaps this difficulty in organizing for collective self-sufficiency comes down to the innate laziness of so many of us (a sin shared by all of humanity at large), amplified by addiction to social media and the mind-numbing entertainment we receive through our glowing screens.  This has a corollary: namely the fact that so many of us have been conditioned to be freeloaders because of the "programs" of false charity which have bought off members of our communities in the past.  For an explanation of the deleterious effect of these programs, see "Services Are Bad For People" by John McKnight.  And note that I'm not saying that the dominant culture has no reparations that they need to make.  The fact is, they do - serious reparations indeed, lest they be damned!  But unless the reparations are so sweeping that they leave the dominant culture with no more power to dominate, they will function merely as a tool of control by which an oppressed population continues to be pacified.  Study the practice of euergetism in the ancient Greco-Roman world.  That euergetism has turned too many of us into the cat, the dog, and the duck in our attitude toward the frequently frustrated Little Red Hen organizer.  

I want to close with a final observation and a request.  The observation is that perhaps the framework of the story of self/story of us/story of now which has been taught by Marshall Ganz and the Leading Change Network may need to be revisited - at least a little bit.  (By the way, the Leading Change Network rocks!)  I can see how in the organizer's initial call to others to join him, his story of self needs to be brief and evocative, highlighting that pivotal moment which called the organizer to organize.  But I think the story of us necessarily takes some time, since it is a story which must be written in collaboration with other members of communities of the oppressed.  The same applies to the story of now.  And if the cost of the commitment which the organizer is asking of people is high, the amount of time required to craft a collective story of us and story of now will also increase.  A short story of us/story of now is good for nothing more than recruiting people into an electoral political campaign.  In order to organize our own parallel institutions, I think we need something deeper.  (Or maybe I just need to go back and study my notes from the Harvard course...?)

So perhaps practitioners of community organizing need to step up and tell their stories of how they succeeded in getting people to do the hard collective work of building communal self-sufficiency.  In other words, how did you successfully organize a long-term potluck among people who could only afford the ingredients for stone soup?

The Tactical and Strategic Failures of Summer 2020

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.)  Those who have read previous posts on this subject know that the most recent posts discussed Chapters 6 and 7 of the book.  Those chapters deal with the important subject of the strategy of a nonviolent liberation struggle.  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.

So we come to the events of the late spring and summer of 2020, those events connected with the police murder of George Floyd.  As an African-American, I stand with my brothers and sisters who are involved in the Black Lives Matter organizations, yet I feel the duty to point out some of the serious ways in which they dropped the ball last summer, as well as pointing out some of the political consequences of their failure.  (One consequence of that failure: their mistakes helped re-elect a certain two-faced gentrifying mayor of a supposedly progressive city on the West Coast.)  So here goes.  And I'm going to tell the story from the point of view of an observer who was only rarely near the center of any action.  If any readers have more expert knowledge or analysis, feel free to chime in with corrections as appropriate.

First, let's begin with the immediate consequences of the murder.  The first response seen by myself and most observers was the almost immediate arising of a wave of spontaneous mass protest, both in Minnesota (where George Floyd used to live) and elsewhere.  I would like to suggest that much of that protest originated outside of the Black community and outside any other communities of color in the United States.  I would also like to suggest, based on what I saw in the Pacific Northwest, that much of that protest originated outside of any Black Lives Matter (abbreviated in this post to BLM) organization.  However, the emergence of this protest thrust BLM movement organizations into the limelight, as many protestors who were not officially part of BLM chose to identify their actions as taken in support of BLM.  Thus BLM was offered a unique moment in which to take a leadership role, and BLM organizers initiated their own protests as a result.

But at almost the same time as the emergence of spontaneous mass protest came the almost immediate emergence of "spontaneous" violence.  I know of one white blogger who characterized it as "the emergence of the worst race riots this country has seen in decades."  However, he is exaggerating greatly what actually happened, and his reasons are dishonest.  For he does not want to face the fact that the incidents of violence were perpetrated almost entirely by white people.  (See this  and this also.)  An early case in point is the "Umbrella Man."  There is also Matthew Lee Rupert, as well as members of the Boogaloo Boys and other white groups who vandalized and looted minority businesses and attacked CNN journalism crews.  Moreover, this violence spread in ways that seemed designed to provoke outrage and strengthen the societal "pillars of support" of the police and of the regime of Donald Trump.  For the vandals and the violent targeted iconic statues and other monuments to the cultural heritage of the United States.  (See this, this, and this for instance.)  And in attacking minority businesses, the vandals sought to send a clear message that this is what happens whenever there is mass protest against established authority.

Other ways in which violent infiltrators sought to convey images of dis-order included the setting up of so-called "temporary autonomous zones" in city capitals by people who did not own property or have jobs in these so-called zones.  In essence, the people who set up these zones became squatters of the same sort that emerged in city parks throughout the United States during the "Occupy" protests.  And those who occupied these zones in 2020 were mostly white, just as those who "occupied" various public spaces in 2011.  The 2020 occupations ended just as badly as those in 2011 had, for the occupiers were rightfully seen as squatters.  But these squatters, along with the looters and the vandals of businesses and statues, served a useful purpose for the right-wing fascists running the Federal Government during Trump's last year - namely, that they gave him a convenient platform to portray himself as the sole upholder and defender of "law and order" against a crazed opposition movement who simply wanted to plunge American society into "chaos" and "anarchy."  In other words, they were the convenient foil in the continued re-telling of the myth of redemptive violence - the favorite myth of fascists and oppressors, by the way, and a myth that became part of Donald Trump's re-election campaign strategy.

I would like to suggest that in the violence, vandalism and squatting that took place, people who had no sympathy for the Black struggle in America managed to hijack the protests over the murder of George Floyd and to twist the message of these protests in a direction which has nothing at all to do with the Black struggle.  (As Marshall Ganz has repeatedly said, if you don't intentionally tell your own story, someone else will tell it for you - in ways that you won't like.)  That this could happen is due to the following failures of many in the Black community:

• A failure by the Black community to appropriately define our collective identity and the strategy of our struggle.  For at least four decades, we have been unconsciously following a rather limited "strategy" of the sort first articulated by Martin Luther King, namely, the strategy of trying to build a supposedly colorblind society in which our individual or historical identities are all dissolved in a "melting pot" to produce a so-called all-American alloy.  Thus we have tried to build "beloved communities" with people who ought not to be trusted because they have no good intentions, people who refuse to give up their dreams of total domination.  It is way past time for us to come together as Black people (NOT as part of some "rainbow coalition" alloy!) to decide who we are as a people and how we will struggle as a people.  In other words, it is way past time for us to self-consciously organize ourselves.  When white people who supposedly stand for "diversity" try to bring us as individuals into their "coalition", we need to say, "Not so fast.  We will decide as a group what we choose to support.  We will NOT allow ourselves to be turned into the foot soldiers of someone else's agenda!  Maybe we're not better together!"  Of course, to say such things might provoke the sort of reaction from certain white supposed "allies" that would show their true colors.

• A failure by the Black community to understand the methods by which unarmed people shift the balance of power between the powerful and the powerless.  In short, this is a failure to understand the methods of strategic nonviolent resistance, which has also become known as people power.  We have for too long allowed ourselves stupidly to believe that strategic nonviolent resistance consists of trying to love your enemy or to "rise above" the oppression dealt to you by your enemy (that is, to smile when your enemy serves you a sandwich made of excrement!), or to show how "spiritual" you are in the face of oppression.  Therefore, too many of us have understandably written off strategic nonviolent resistance.  It's time for some of us to start reading some books.

• This ignorance played out in 2020 in a failure to understand the impact of violence on a protest movement.  When violence began to erupt during the protests, I saw it as a clear indication of a lack of organization on our part, as well as a lack of training.  I saw it moreover as a clear sign of tactical and strategic misunderstanding and failure.  But in conversations I had with BLM organizers, both during the 2020 CANVAS Summer Academy and in 2021 with BLM organizers who were part of the Leading Change Network, whenever I pointed out these failures, the BLM organizers got really defensive.  Their response to my criticism was, "We were not the violent ones!  And you can't believe everything the media tells you!  Most of the protests were peaceful!"  In making such criticisms, they missed the point altogether.  That point being this: that if you engage in mass protests, and violent things happen during your protests, your protest movement will suffer, no matter who started the violence.  Erica Chenoweth explains this beautifully as follows: When a mass protest is peaceful, everyone who is an ally or potential ally is likely to show up.  This includes young families with small children and elderly grandmas with nothing better to do.  In such circumstances, it is very hard for the government to justify using violence to shut down your protest.  But as soon as the government is able to provoke or inject violence into the protests, the vulnerable - young families with small children and elderly grandmas - start to disappear until you are left only with athletic young men facing heavily armed cops.  In those circumstances it becomes very easy for the government to justify the use of violent oppression to shut down the protest!

• Having said that, I wonder why the BLM organizers did not shift from tactics of concentration to tactics of dispersion as soon as the violence began to appear!    (Pardon me - I shouldn't wonder.  It's because these fools did not read any books!)  For instance, why didn't one or more leaders immediately issue a statement saying, "We see that evil actors have shown up to inject violence and vandalism into our protests.  Therefore, we are switching to protest tactics that don't involve large groups of people coming together in the streets.  These new tactics will be legal, and will not be able to be hijacked by those who want to cause violence or to paint us as criminals." It shows a fatal lack of brains that not one of these leaders took such a step.  I remember reading the news reports of protest after protest in which a small group of agents provocateurs broke away from a protest march to go off and vandalize while the police "declared a riot", and I was shouting in my living room, "Please, wake up and shift tactics!"  (It felt to me very much like my experience as a kid watching Saturday Night wrestling and screaming at the TV whenever the "hero" made an obvious mistake.  Lot of good that did.)  I agree with BLM that there should have been protests.  Yet there are both smart and stupid tactics of protest, and BLM failed to understand the difference.  (Oh, look!  It's happening again.)

• A failure to see the limitations of mass protest.  Protest is not a viable single strategy of liberation.  At best, it's a single tactic.  A tactic is not a strategy.  And as we have considered strategy in the context of strategic nonviolent resistance, we have learned that the best strategy is a strategy which your opponent is not ready to meet, and for which he has no defenses.  Chapters 6 and 7 of From D to D have drawn heavily from the writings of a British man named Basil Henry Liddell-Hart, who in the aftermath of World War 1 advocated heavily that armies should adopt a strategy of indirect approach as the best means of meeting one's enemy in a place where he is not prepared to meet you.  I suggest that among the tactics of nonviolent action, mass street protest is now the tactic which most governments are most prepared to meet, and that these governments can short-circuit mass protest most effectively simply by injecting violence into the protests.  Once they do that, they can justify raising the cost which ordinary people must pay to participate in protest by using tactics of violent police repression of protest.  Mass protest is therefore not an example of the strategy of indirect approach.  And mass protest carries certain unavoidable costs even when the protestors do not have to face police repression.  I think of some of the BLM websites I saw last year in which organizers vowed to protest every day until their demands were met.  I guess they never heard of "protest fatigue"!  Moreover, as pointed out by Jamila Raqib, protest by itself does not alter the balance of power between the powerful and the powerless.

In their insistence on the same tactic of mass protest day after day, the BLM protest organizers reminded me very much of a Briton who never considered the strategy of indirect approach, namely Sir Douglas Haig.  I hope the man has no partisans, fans, or groupies who are still alive - otherwise, they might come to the USA to hunt me down and slash my tires - er, I mean, "tyres" - or threaten to give me "a bunch of fives."  But Haig is a man worthy of much criticism.  I think of his insistence on costly daily frontal assaults for three months during the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, and how the Germans played rope-a-dope with him there.  I fear that here in the USA, should another outrage against African-Americans be perpetrated, and should that outrage spark mass protest, our enemies may play rope-a-dope again with us as they did in 2020.  

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.

From D to D, Chapter 6 (Continued): Grand Strategy

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery

None but ourselves can free our minds

Have no fear for atomic energy

'Cause none of them can stop the time

How long shall they kill our prophets,

while we stand aside and look?

Some say it's just a part of it, 

We've got to fulfill the book ...

Won't you help to sing

These songs of freedom?

'Cause all I ever have:

Redemption songs

Redemption songs

- Bob Marley, Redemption Song

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.

A key word in the phrase "strategic nonviolent resistance" is the word "strategic."  The success of this kind of resistance therefore depends heavily on the formulation of a wise collective strategy of liberation by the oppressed group.  What then makes for good strategy?  In Chapters 6 and 7 of From D to D, Gene Sharp seeks to answer this question.  In Chapter 6 therefore, Sharp starts by laying out the skeleton of strategic planning.  To do this, he defines the following four terms: grand strategy, strategy, tactic, and method.  Today's post will discuss what is meant by grand strategy.

What then is grand strategy?  In Chapter 6 of From D to D, Sharp defines it thus: 

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.

This definition draws heavily from the definition contained in B.H. Liddell-Hart's book The Strategy of Indirect Approach, in which Liddell-Hart says that

As tactics is an application of strategy on a lower plane, so strategy is an application on a lower plane of 'grand strategy'. If practically synonymous with the policy which governs the conduct of war, as distinct from the permanent policy which formulates its object, the term 'grand strategy' serves to bring out the sense of 'policy in execution'. For the role of grand strategy is to co-ordinate and direct all the resources of a nation towards the attainment of the political object of the war - the goal defined by national policy.

These definitions serve to describe what grand strategy does; yet they may seem to fall short of describing what it actually is.  Liddell-Hart comes closer to the mark in saying that grand strategy is simply a higher plane of strategy in general.  And he offers a very concise definition of strategy as "the art of distributing military means to fulfill the ends of policy."

Since Liddell-Hart, others within the realms of governments have tried to create a concise and stable definition of "grand strategy."  Among these are Dr. Tami Davis Biddle, who quotes John Lewis Gaddis in describing grand strategy as “the calculated relationship of means to large ends. It’s about how one uses whatever one has to get to wherever it is one wants to go.”  Timothy Andrew Sayle quotes Jeremi Suri in writing that "grand strategy is the wisdom to make power serve useful purposes."  Peter Layton says that "Grand strategy is the art of developing and applying diverse forms of power in an effective and efficient way to try to purposefully change the relationship existing between two or more intelligent and adaptive entities."  Andrew Monaghan wrote that grand strategy is the art of “using all of the nation’s resources to promote the interests of the state, including securing it against enemies perceived and real.”

From these and other sources, we can conclude therefore that grand strategy is the art of arranging all the resources of a state or polity in order to achieve its goals.  (That's the TH in SoC definition!) Therefore, the ultimate goals of a nation direct its grand strategy.  And while sometimes those goals are rationally chosen and planned, it is also true that often the goals of a nation are an emergent product of the nation's culture, and thus not always consciously obvious even to the nation's leaders, as pointed out by Sayle, who provides the following quote from Edward Luttwak:

All states have a grand strategy, whether they know it or not. That is inevitable because grand strategy is simply the level at which knowledge and persuasion, or in modern terms intelligence and diplomacy, interact with military strength to determine outcomes in a world of other states with their own “grand strategies.

Here's the thing.  The only polities that can get away without an explicit, consciously planned grand strategy are those centers of empire that are at the height of their power.  And they can get away with this only for so long before there are consequences.  Most of the world's oppressed peoples are those whose oppression is a consequence of their own lack of a grand strategy.  If you don't make good plans for yourself and your people, be sure that other people - most of whom are very powerful and not very nice - will make plans for you.  Often those plans will involve things like roasting you over a slow fire and sticking you between two pieces of bread.

Careful readers will note that I pulled most of the definitions of grand strategy quoted above from thinkers and writers who are paid by governments to think and write.  And the relationship between governments of nations and grand strategy is that these governments usually employ people whose job in life is to carefully document the state's resources, both military and otherwise.  These record-keepers include census workers, tax collectors, and paid researchers.  A second characteristic of this relationship is that strong governments are usually able during emergencies to use their authority (backed by State force) to compel their citizens to give their resources for the support of the nation's grand strategy.  How does this compare to members of an oppressed people who are planning the nonviolent liberation of their people?

The first difference to note is that often those who are activized to start organizing their people won't have access to some detailed, nicely curated database of their people's resources, capabilities and weaknesses.  Nor will they have the wherewithal to create such a database - at least, not at first.  Therefore their knowledge of their people and of their collective situation will have to be gained during a long period of observation, of meeting people, of listening to their stories, of asking questions.  In other words, developing a grand strategy may well have to start with an extensive fact-finding phase.  Nor can this fact-finding be limited solely to learning about one's own people.  One must also learn to identify the strengths, weaknesses and resources of one's allies, potential competitors, and opponents.

There is a second difference between grand strategy as applied by a national government and grand strategy as applied by the organizers of a liberation struggle among an oppressed people.  That difference is that unlike the heads of a state, the organizers of a nonviolent liberation struggle can't compel or force people to give themselves and their resources to the organizers in order to fulfill the grand strategy of the organizers.  These leaders and organizers can't create draft boards to seize young men and put them into the organizers' services.  They can't condemn real estate or use eminent domain or levy taxes to seize the assets of their brothers and sisters.  Instead, they must ask and persuade; they must accept that resources will only be given voluntarily.  The question for the organizers then becomes how to persuade this voluntary giving.  This difficulty is real, yet not often as obvious as it should be to people like Derek Sivers who talk of movement-building as if it was as easy as a shirtless dancing guy on a beach getting everyone else on the beach to start dancing.

I therefore suggest that a process of creating a grand strategy of liberation for an oppressed people begins with crafting a "vision of tomorrow" - that is, by setting before one's people a concrete description of where we should all want to go and how we will try to get there.  Some necessary aspects of this vision of tomorrow:

• First, it must be a high-level description which lays out general goals and methods, and does not descend too deeply into specifics (avoiding "getting down into the weeds", as they say).  As Guy Kawasaki says, a mission statement with a couple of dozen points is very unwieldy!
• Second, it must be open to revision at first as the organizers engage in dialogue with the people whom they seek to organize.  For instance, the organizer may discover during the listening and asking questions phase of his or her work that there are things that are very important to the people being organized which were missed by the organizer in the first conception of the vision of tomorrow.
• Third, the vision of tomorrow must serve to motivate people to give of themselves and their resources to a cause which involves their entire people and not just the wishes of the organizers.

A few weeks ago I sketched out my own tentative version of a "Vision of Tomorrow" for the African-American people.  Here it is:

The goal: To organize the African-American people into a people who are:

• Self-sufficient, both individually and collectively (1 Thessalonians 4:11-12);
• Fully equipped to fulfill our ontogeny;
• Expert in producing beautifully good work to meet necessary needs (Titus 3:14);
• A people who can no longer be oppressed.

How we will get there: 

• We will organize our own mutual aid networks.  (A potluck, NOT a free lunch!)
• We will organize our own education.
• We will organize our own training to create experts in community organizing and strategic nonviolent resistance.
• We will begin to use our collective power strategically to deny our oppressors any payoff from their oppression.

This is what I intend to work for and how I intend to spend my time when I engage in organizing.  But it's only a start.  In order to get buy-in for this sort of vision, I need to hear what my brothers and sisters think about it and how and where they think it should be changed.  It may also need to be shortened and condensed to make it more punchy and memorable.

I will close by suggesting that readers study some of the more well-known successful nonviolent liberation struggles in recent history to see how grand strategy was conceived and evolved, and who did the strategizing.  Particularly, how did Gandhi do it?  Or how about the Reverend James Lawson or OTPOR! or Solidarnosc?  How did these craft a compelling "Vision of Tomorrow"?

A SUGGESTED READING LIST

• "Defining and Teaching Grand Strategy - Foreign Policy Research Institute", Timothy Andrews Sayle
• "Defining Grand Strategy," Peter Layton
• "Grand Strategy," Wikipedia
• "It Was Grand, But Was it Strategy? Revisiting the Origins Story of Grand Strategy", David Morgan-Owen
• "Strategy and Grand Strategy: What Students and Practitioners Need to Know", Tami Davis Biddle
• "What Is Grand Strategy? Sweeping a Conceptual Minefield", Rebecca Friedman Lissner

From D to D, Chapter 6 (Continued): Spending Wisely

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.  But employing that means of liberation involves accepting the risk of further suffering by the oppressed as part of their struggle.  And here we encounter a common problem: namely, that those who are in the group which must struggle for its liberation have been conditioned by the historical experience of their suffering into patterns of compliance by which they hope to minimize their suffering as much as possible.  It's as if they are saying, "Life is already hard.  Why make it harder for ourselves by challenging our masters?  After all, they can make things really hard for us!"  This attitude might seem to make sense, but it contains the seeds of a contradiction, namely, that the oppressed will suffer regardless of whether they comply as good little victims or whether they choose to resist.  The only difference between the two choices of suffering is that suffering as good little victims is pointless and ultimately hopeless, for it does not accomplish anything.  On the other hand, the suffering that comes from struggle contains within it the seeds of liberation.

The first persons in an oppressed group who choose to struggle for liberation are those who have experienced cognitive liberation as I define it.  This is the point at 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.  These cognitively liberated individuals frequently become the "seed crystals", the organizers around whom an organized liberation struggle forms and grows.  This willingness to live in truth no matter the cost (and the accompanying willingness to accept that cost) is essential for those who begin to struggle for liberation.  Cowards and Uncle Toms don't liberate themselves.  As Gene Sharp says in How Nonviolent Struggle Works  (HNVSW), "A prerequisite of nonviolent struggle is to cast off or control fear of acting independently and fear of the sufferings which may follow."

Yet this cognitive liberation (and its resulting courage) is not the only ingredient needed for a successful liberation struggle.  A fully human being has both a feeling heart and a thinking head.  The heart guides people to where they should want to go, but the head tells people how to get there.  The head is where strategy is crafted.  Strategy is the answer to the question of how to act "in order to meet one's moral responsibility and maximize the effects of one's actions...The better the strategy, the easier you will gain the upper hand, and the less it will cost you." (HNVSW, page 66).

Concerning the crafting of strategy, it is important to note how much the practitioners of strategic nonviolent resistance can learn from the military.  For the armed forces of most nations that have been around for a while contain entire departments that are devoted to developing and teaching strategy.  (Think of the National War College of the United States, for instance.)  As with nonviolent actionists, those who become soldiers must be willing to pursue a course of action in conflict even though pursuing that course carries with it the risk of suffering and death.  Yet the soldiers and their commanders must also be willing to adapt their course of action to achieve the greatest effect with the least cost.  Those nations whose militaries do not count the cost tend to lose.  This is why a significant portion of Gene Sharp's thinking on the strategic element of strategic nonviolent resistance was drawn from military sources.  We will consider one of these sources today.

Basil Henry Liddell-Hart fought in World War 1 as a British army officer.  He was twice wounded in action, and the entire experience of the war (both personal experience and as an observer of strategy) had a profound effect on him.  In particular, he saw the wastefulness of that war, the damaging effect of the egos of the chief leaders on the conduct of the war, and the futility of two evenly-matched armies going head to head against each other in a straight-up slugfest.  This is what motivated him to write The Strategy of Indirect Approach in the 1940's.  This book contains several terms that are mentioned by Gene Sharp in his writings, particularly the concepts of grand strategy, strategy and tactics.

Among the other elements in his book are the following gems:

• The purpose of strategy is "to diminish the possibility of resistance [by your opponent]."  This is achieved by choosing a course of action which your opponent is not ready to meet.
• The perfection of strategy is to achieve a decision "without any serious fighting."
• Clausewitz said that "All military action is permeated by intelligent forces and their effects."  Liddell-Hart comments that "Nevertheless, nations at war have always striven, or been driven by their passions, to disregard the implications of such a conclusion.  Instead of applying intelligence, they have chosen to batter their heads against the nearest wall."
• Instead of "battering his own head against a wall," the strategist's aim "is not so much to seek battle as to seek a strategic situation so advantageous that if it does not of itself produce the decision, its continuation by a battle is sure to achieve this."
• Therefore, the aim of strategy is to dislocate one's opponent - whether psychologically or logistically.  This occurs as the resisters pursue the opponent's line of least resistance, which on a psychological level is the same as pursing the opponent's line of least expectation.  
• One of the best ways of dislocating your opponent is to pursue a course of action which has multiple possible objectives.  By doing so, you increase your chances of achieving at least one or more of these objectives, while at the same time you put your opponent into a dilemma, as he will not know which of your objectives to guard against.
• "The more strength you waste the more you increase the risk of the scales of war turning against you" - in other words, the more strength you waste, the greater the chance that you will lose!
• "Do not throw your weight into a stroke whilst (or, for us Americans, "while") your opponent is on guard."

If strategy is so important in military action in order to achieve goals with the minimum expenditure of strength, how much more important it is in conflicts in which one side does not use physical weapons at all in its struggle against a potentially violent opponent!  In his writings on strategic nonviolent resistance, Gene Sharp points out how the method of strategic nonviolent action can itself be a powerful indirect response to the direct organized violence of an oppressor, and how that indirect response can shatter the oppressor's ability to oppress.  As Sharp says, "It is important to 'nullify opposition by paralyzing the power to oppose' and to make 'the enemy do something wrong'..." (HNVSW, page 67.)  Nonviolent means are uniquely suited to accomplishing this task.  

But nonviolent means must be directed by a wise strategy in order to achieve this goal.  It is not enough simply to be committed to a certain moral or spiritual philosophy.  Case in point: I have suggested to some of the Black Lives Matter organizers that they need to do more in-depth study of strategic nonviolent resistance.  They might not realize this, but the reason I suggested this is that I think that last year, their opponents were able over time to run rings around them during the protests over the police murder of George Floyd and other African-Americans.  One of these organizers  responded by emailing me a link to "an amazing organization" that does training in "Kingian nonviolence".  A quick look at this "amazing organization" shows that they want to train people in what I call "nonviolence as a an expression of spirituality."  That is NOT what I'm talking about when I say the phrase "strategic nonviolent resistance."  In fact, I would say that every time someone hears me say "strategic nonviolent resistance" and thinks I'm saying "nonviolence", a kitten dies somewhere.  (Stop killing kittens!  The cat you save may be your own.)  Strategic nonviolent resistance is NOT a mere "expression of 'spirituality.'"  It is instead a means of liberation.  I want it to be used by historically oppressed people of color as a means of liberation of historically oppressed people of color.  And on a very pragmatic level, this method works better (and is much cheaper) than violence.  Please forgive my tone here, but I'm trying to correct a serious mistake.

The chief element of an effective strategy is the grand strategy of the struggle group, and this grand strategy orchestrates the development and choice of  campaign strategies, tactics and methods.  In my next post in this series, God willing, I will discuss what makes a good grand strategy, as well as discussing how campaign strategies, tactics and methods should be chosen to implement this grand strategy.  Stay tuned.

From D to D, Chapter 6 (Continued): The Role of Cognitive Liberation In Strategic Thinking

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.  (Indeed, when one considers the ways in which people in the United States end up homeless nowadays, one can see that we have created our own homegrown refugees.)  This is an experience of apparent utter powerlessness in the face of an all-consuming, murderously abusive power.  

In the last post in this series, I quoted a source which said that "Whenever people are badly treated, they always resist.  In our experience, people always resist violence and abuse in some way."  And yet for that resistance to be an effective means of liberation, it must be strategic.  Developing an effective strategy of liberating resistance can be challenging.  Often the first challenge lies within the resisters themselves, for as Gene Sharp says in Chapter 6 of From D to D, 

"It is also just possible that some democratic movements do not plan a comprehensive strategy to bring down the dictatorship, concentrating instead only on immediate issues, for another reason.  Inside themselves, they do not really believe that the dictatorship can be ended by their own efforts."

As I mentioned in that last post, if a victim of oppression is moved to resist that oppression, yet the victim does not really believe that his or her efforts will actually bring an end to that oppression, this pessimism will tend to make the resistance ineffective if not downright dysfunctional. The kind of resistance that actually liberates requires first that the oppressed be liberated in their minds, in their souls. This is the beginning and foundation of the term "cognitive liberation" as I define it. And according to my definition, the beginning of cognitive liberation is the "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 (up to and including death)."  This kind of cognitive liberation therefore must rest on a foundation of willingness to suffer and to die, a foundation of confidence even in the face of death.  For me, one foundation of my own cognitive liberation lies in this: "Since then the children [that is, human beings] share in blood and flesh, He Himself [that is, Jesus Christ] likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil; and might deliver those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives." (Hebrews 2:14-15)

One effect of this kind of cognitive liberation is that the liberated begin to say, "Where there's a will, there's a way."  In other words, they begin to actively explore their situation in order to find out what elements they can shift, and how the shifting of those elements can begin to achieve long-term goals.  But it is precisely here that those seeking to liberate themselves encounter a great debate.  It's as if one was a character in a fairy tale who escapes from a dragon's lair and begins to tread the path to freedom - only to find the path blocked by two stone towers which face each other on either side of the path, and from which soldiers in each tower lob stones and arrows at the soldiers in the opposite tower.  Atop one of the stone towers is a single white banner flying in the wind, with the word "SKILLS" emblazoned on it in in royal blue.  Atop the other tower is a single blood-red banner flying in the wind, with a skull and crossbones and a single word emblazoned on it in fire-colored letters: "CONDITIONS."  The soldiers in the "SKILLS" tower are a mix of cognitively liberated practitioners of resistance and organizing, and they are helped by a collection of friendly academics.  The soldiers in the "CONDITIONS" tower tend to all be academics and mouthpieces of large media outlets.  The "CONDITIONS" soldiers also tend at times not only to shoot at the soldiers in the "SKILLS" tower, but also at the pilgrims on the path of life who are escaping from the dragon.

For a central debate among social movement scholars is precisely the importance of skills versus conditions in the creation of transformative social movements.  And here I will cite Chapter 3 of Doug McAdam's 1982 book Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency 1930-1970.  It is in this chapter that McAdam defines what he means by "cognitive liberation."  In that chapter, McAdam mentions two theoretical models of power in a society such as that of the United States.  Both models acknowledge that "wealth and power are concentrated in America in the hands of a few groups, thus depriving most people of any real influence over the major decisions that affect their lives.  Accordingly, social movements are seen...as rational attempt by excluded groups to mobilize sufficient political leverage to advance collective interests through noninstitutionalized means."  

According to one of the two models, the disparity in power between the elite and excluded groups is so great that the power of the elites is virtually unlimited.  Thus the "CONDITIONS" scholars cite this structural imbalance of power as a determining condition of any liberation struggle.  (Or to put it another way, the message of the "CONDITIONS" soldiers is often, "Dude, it's hopeless!  Just give up!")  However, the "SKILLS" soldiers understand that every system of domination and oppression depends in some way on the people who are oppressed, and that thus "any system contains within itself the possibility of a power strong enough to alter it."  In other words, they see that the oppressed have a certain collective power which is able to fundamentally alter their situation if it is exercised collectively.  The reason why this power is not exercised is due to "shared perceptions of powerlessness."  Note that the elites "seek to keep unrepresented groups from developing solidarity and politically organizing..."  However, "the subjective transformation of consciousness is...crucial to the generation of insurgency."  In other words, when the perceptions of powerlessness in the oppressed are changed, the oppressed begin to liberate themselves.

How then does that perception of powerlessness begin to change on a mass basis?  McAdam asserts that it first begins by a change in the large-scale circumstances of the oppressed, that is, when the structure of political opportunities changes.  Thus when large-scale external events beyond the control of the elites begin to disrupt elite power structures, there is a corresponding shift in the political opportunities available to the oppressed.  One thing that McAdam may not have emphasized enough is that the oppressed themselves can, by their collective action, create those large-scale events that disrupt elite power structures.

There are other elements to the shift in the consciousness of the oppressed.  One of these elements is the relative abundance or lack of a wide range of organizations created of, by and for the oppressed.  For the oppressed to begin to awaken, there must first be "an established associational network," an "indigenous infrastructure" of community organizations created by and for the members of marginalized groups.  It is these organizations (and their leaders) who facilitate the large-scale changes in consciousness among the members of marginalized groups.  McAdam quotes Piven and Cloward in describing this shift:

"The emergence of a protest movement entails a transformation both of consciousness and of behavior. The change in consciousness has at least three distinct aspects. First, "the system" - or those aspects of the system that people experience and perceive - loses legitimacy.  Large numbers of men and women who ordinarily accept the authority of their rulers and the legitimacy of institutional arrangements come to believe in some measure that these rulers and these arrangements are unjust and wrong. Second, people who are ordinarily fatalistic, who believe that existing arrangements are inevitable, begin to assert "rights" that imply demands for change. Third, there is a new sense of efficacy; people who ordinarily consider themselves helpless come to believe that they have some capacity to alter their lot."

But it is to be noted that these changes in consciousness are much more likely to happen among people who regularly associate with each other in groups than among isolated individuals. 

And here it is good to take a look at how this process of cognitive liberation has played out in some rather recent social movements.  First, on a negative level we can see how a counterfeit of this process has played out among the members of the white American right.  Indoctrinated by right-wing, agenda-driven media mouthpieces, many members of the American right came to believe themselves to be members of an oppressed class and to interpret what should have been acknowledged as their own personal problems as something else, namely, as an attempt by poor dark-skinned people to take things away from white America.  Second, these interpreted the electoral successes of the Republican Party as an expansion of political opportunities.  Third, unscrupulous pastors and other prominent figures in the American Evangelical Right used the association of their congregations in regular Sunday services to engineer a shift in the consciousness of their members such that they began to regard as illegitimate the hopes, dreams, and rights of everyone who was not part of their "tribe."  (These, for instance, are the people who for the sake of "liberty" refused to wear masks even as their fellow community members were dying of COVID-19!)

But there are more positive contexts in which this process played out and continues to play out.  Russia comes to mind.  I want to mention a masters' thesis titled, "Corruption and Cognitive Liberation in Russian Environmentalism: A Political Process Approach To Social Movement Decline" by Anna Katherine Pride.  This thesis was written in 2009, and it described the decline of the Russian environmental movement from the mid-1990's until 2009.  She traced this decline to a decline in "cognitive liberation" as defined by Doug McAdam, and hypothesized that this decline was due to a breakdown in social cohesion and trust caused by rampant elite corruption.  According to her view, the decline could be traced thus: "Corruption" leads to "Cognitive Liberation recedes/reinstituted fatalism" which leads to "Social Movement declines" which leads to "state reasserts power" which leads to "Political Opportunity Structure closes" which leads to "movement decline continues".  

And yet...it must be noted that a strong democracy movement has emerged in Russia over the last ten years, and that its emergence was due in no small part to people who kept working, kept organizing, kept persisting, kept resisting, and kept experimenting as reflective practitioners even during the reassertion of power by the State and the supposed "closing" of the political opportunity structure.  Brown's thesis correctly posits that a breakdown in social cohesion and mutual trust hinders cognitive liberation because it disrupts the very networks along which that liberation and change of consciousness spreads.  This is why dictators strive to atomize the members of their societies.  And yet successful liberation movements have been instigated in the most atomized, repressive and unlikely of societies, by people who had experienced cognitive liberation as I define it.  In the Maldives, for instance, the initial problem of social atomization was overcome by activists who started throwing evening rice pudding parties on the beach and inviting friends, neighbors and strangers.  (See Blueprint for Revolution, pages 62-64).  To quote a martial arts story I read as a kid, "Where there is no door, make one."  If we're ready to make that door, it's time to start talking about the elements of strategy.  Stay tuned.