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?
