From D to D, Chapter 3 (Continued): Centers of Democratic Power

In the previous post in this series, we looked briefly at the mechanism by which the power of an oppressive regime is destroyed: the mass application of defiance and noncooperation by the citizens or subjects of the regime.  This was illustrated by the 14th century Chinese fable titled, Rule By Tricks (renamed "The Monkey Master fable" by Gene Sharp in his book From Dictatorship to Democracy which I have shortened to From D to D in my posts), which described how an old man fed himself by enslaving a troop of monkeys, and how the monkeys killed the old man - not by a violent physical attack, but by escaping from him.  For in enslaving the monkeys to serve him, the old man had become dependent on them - thus granting them a certain power over him, a power which they applied in refusing to serve him any longer.

We then moved on to a discussion of the institutions and groups which comprise an oppressor's institutional base of power, as well as those institutions and groups which comprise the base of power of those who resist oppression.  Obviously, these two bases of power are in opposition to each other.  And each of these is engaged in a contest to strengthen itself and to dissolve its opponent.  In the oppressor's base of power, there are three groups of people.  The first group consists of those who are so ideologically, socially or psychically wedded to the oppressor's cause that they are unreconstructable - they will never repent of their desire to oppress and dominate, and they will never abandon the oppressor.  The second group consists of those who may side with the oppressor as long as the oppression is personally beneficial to them and their associates - yet who can be persuaded to abandon the oppressor when their allegiance to the oppressor begins to seriously cost them.  As an example of this second group, many "Red" state Republicans in the U.S. who have decided to vote for Biden did so because their allegiance to Trump began to seriously cost them - especially as a result of the trade war with China and the spread of COVID-19 into Trump country.  The third group consists of those supporters of the oppressor who are sincerely deluded, yet who can be persuaded by moral arguments to withdraw their support.

Similarly, the society ruled by an oppressor is composed of three groups of people.  The first consists of the oppressor's base of support.  The second consists of those who are neutral as far as their actions are concerned - who, regardless of how they feel about the oppressor, continue to obey him due to social inertia or unquestioned, unexamined submission to the oppressor's authority, the long-standing subconscious conditioning by psychological and ideological factors which produces that submission.  The third consists of those who have been activized to resist the oppressor and to disintegrate his regime in order to replace it with something better.  These activized people comprise what is known as the struggle group.  In order to disintegrate the oppressor's regime by nonviolent means, the struggle group must work through the society's independent institutions and groups to persuade a critical mass of people to withdraw their cooperation from the oppressor's regime.  That noncooperation can be social, political, or economic, yet when it reaches a certain critical mass (and is accompanied by a compelling "vision of the future" articulated by the struggle group), it causes members of the formerly neutral population to take notice and to begin to join the movement of noncooperation.  As the noncooperation movement begins to gather strength, it causes the pragmatists and the sincerely deluded who are members of the oppressor's pillars of support to begin to question their allegiance.  This is especially true as the support provided by members of the oppressor's base begins to get costly for the supporters.  It is by this means that the psychological and ideological factors which cause people to grant authority to the oppressor are neutralized.

Let me repeat: it is through the society's independent social groups and institutions that mass noncooperation must be applied.  (Note: the word "independent" means free from dependence on or control by the oppressor's regime or its agents.)  As Gene Sharp says in Chapter 3 of From D to D, "Isolated individuals, not members of such groups, usually are unable to make a significant impact on the rest of the society, much less a government, and certainly not a dictatorship."  So let's examine these independent institutions and groups in more detail.  In addition to such obviously political organizations as political parties, trade unions, and human rights organizations, Sharp mentions a number of other types of such groups, including those which are not obvious change agents such as families, sports clubs, religious organizations, gardening clubs, and musical groups.  Yet the existence of such groups and institutions - even when they are independent of the oppressor - does not automatically guarantee the emergence of a successful movement for liberation.  In other words, the existence of these groups is a necessary, but not sufficient condition.

To see what more is needed, we need to turn to another social movement scholar, namely, feminist scholar Jo Freeman, who wrote two essays that describe additional necessary ingredients.  The name of one of these essays is "On the Origins of Social Movements," and the other is "The Origins of the Women's Liberation Movement."  In these two essays, Freeman delves more deeply into the subject of how a movement is constructed from pre-existing conditions.  For a movement to emerge from pre-existing independent groups and institutions which are not necessarily "movement" organizations as far as their origins, three things must be present:

• A preexisting communications network or infrastructure within the social base of the organizations.  If such a network does not exist or only partially exists, then an organizer or team of organizers must create that network.  
• The network must be "co-optable to the new ideas of the incipient movement."  To co-opt a group is to turn that group from its original purpose and agenda to the agenda of the co-opters.  As Freeman says, "To be co-optable, [the network] must be compsed of like-minded people whose background, experiences, or location in the social structure make them receptive to the ideas of a specific new movement."  These like-minded people must also be able to imagine channels for social action which can realize movement goals.  Or, as Freeman says, "A co-optable network, therefore, is one whose members have had common experiences which predispose them to be receptive to the particular ideas of the incipient movement and who are not faced with [or, my note, who know how to overcome] structural or ideological barriers to action.  If the new movement as an 'innovation' can interpret these experiences and perceptions in ways that point out channels for social action, then participation in social movement becomes the logical thing to do."
  
• This network must find itself in a situation of strain in which action can be precipitated - either by a crisis or by an organizer or organizers who "begin organizing... or disseminating a new idea."  The organizers' job is easiest when they have "a fertile field in which to work".  This fertile field is characterized by emerging spontaneous groups who are acutely aware of the issue around which the organizer seeks to organize.  If these spontaneous groups do not exist, the organizer's first job is to create them by bringing together the people most affected by oppression, to begin to talk about their common experience, or, in other words, to "raise the consciousness" of the people most affected.

A few closing remarks are in order.  First, for the co-optation of a co-optable network to take place, there must obviously be one or more "co-opters."  These are the activized members of the struggle group for whom continued passive existence under oppression is an intolerable and unacceptable option, and who therefore engage in the work of co-opting preexisting organizational networks to a new purpose.  For it must be recognized that many of the sorts of independent organizations listed by Gene Sharp in Chapter 3 of From D to D do not start out as social movement organizations.  For the leaders of such organizations, the idea of working together to radically re-imagine and re-structure society is a radical new idea.  Not all independent institutions and organizations will be receptive to such an idea - especially when the implementation of that radical idea involves risk.  That is, not all of these groups will be co-optable - even when they are formed by the oppressed for the oppressed.  Jo Freeman cites the example of the Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs which refused to become a movement organization even though it shared many of the same grievances as the members of the more activist organizations in the American women's movement.  And in the biography America's Social Arsonist: Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century, author Gabriel Thompson notes how Fred Ross was suspicious of organizations composed of the middle and upper-class members of oppressed communities of color, as these were dependent on "both sides of the tracks.  They could talk a good game, but many advocated 'gradualism, patience, endless conciliation and discussion; in short, anything but direct, purposeful action.'"  Ross was talking of the Latino community, but I can say the same thing most emphatically about many of the long-standing and now moribund organizations of the African-American community.

Yet there have been social groups which have seemingly been in the hip pocket of the oppressor, but which were successfully co-opted by savvy and skillful organizers.  Two examples come to mind.  The first is case of the State-sponsored Communist trade unions in Poland during the 1970's and 1980's, several of which were actually taken over by the Solidarity (Solidarnosc) trade union movement against the wishes of the government, as cited by Gene Sharp in From D to D.  The second example is the case of the Nashi (Наши) youth movement which was created in 2005 by the government of Vladimir Putin in order to co-opt burgeoning Russian opposition movements.  The trouble for Putin is that Nashi began to take on a life of its own, and the youth who were its members began to attack the practices of the most privileged members of Russian society, as these practices caused suffering for average Russians.  Thus they began to bite the hand that was feeding them, leading to the cutting of government support for Nashi and the er, ah, "complication" of relations between Putin's government and Russian youth.

Lastly, as Jo Freeman states, "The role of the organizer in movement formation is another neglected aspect of the theoretical literature" - a statement which was true at the time she wrote her essays, but which by now is somewhat out of date.  At this time we have a somewhat larger body of knowledge about the role of the organizer in constructing a social movement.  We will explore this topic in more detail in the next post in this series, God willing.  The organizer is such an important topic because as Freeman says in her essay, "The art of 'constructing' a social movement is something that requires considerable skill and experience."  The organizer's skills can overcome structural barriers to movement formation.

Spontaneous? Or Successful?

Among the many essays and opinion pieces that have been written for major media publications during the last few months, quite a few have quite understandably focused on the mass protests that have occurred in the wake of several high-profile police and vigilante murders of unarmed African-Americans in this country.  These echo articles written within the last two years about the strength of "leaderless protests" worldwide.  Check out the short list below:

• "The George Floyd Protests Show Leaderless Movements Are The Future of Politics," Slate Magazine
• "Today’s Activism: Spontaneous, Leaderless, but Not Without Aim," New York Times
• "The Common Element Uniting Worldwide Protests," The Atlantic
• "Leaderless rebellion: how social media enables global protests," Financial Times

Note that the Slate article heralded such protests as "the future of politics."  If such protests are seen by the powerless as "the future of politics," then let me just suggest at the outset that the powerful and the dominant have nothing at all to fear from the powerless.

As long-time readers of my blog know, I have been touting the power and potential of strategic nonviolent resistance for the last three-and-a-half years.  But I find lately that I need to add a cautionary note to my praise of strategic nonviolent resistance.  For those who want to engage in resistance nowadays seem to be guilty over and over again of the same two basic mistakes repeated ad nauseam.  The first mistake is to assume that strategic nonviolent resistance consists solely of protest marches and rallies.  The second mistake is what I want to tackle in today's post.

Let me take you first to a TED talk given by Zeynep Tufekci, titled, "How The Internet Has Made Social Change Easy to Organize, Hard to Win."  Ms. Tufekci is a sociologist and associate professor at the University of North Carolina, so she's no lightweight.  In her TED talk, she examines the wealth of "leaderless," spontaneous protest "movements" which erupted throughout the world from the 1990's to the mid 2010's.  She noted that these "movements" (of which the Occupy "movement" was a prime example) scaled up very quickly from one or two people to many mass gatherings of tens of thousands of people.  However, they achieved no long-lasting gains.  I think it safe to say that the Occupy "movement," for example, did not accomplish a bloody thing.  Why is this?

Zeynep suggests that "movements" which are easily and hastily thrown together by means of a few mouse clicks are largely composed of people who have not learned to work together and to make decisions together as a collective unit.  Therefore, they are unable to form a coherent strategy or to adjust their tactics to overcome strategic challenges that arise in their struggle.  Thus they have no staying power.  In another place (I can't remember where just now), I believe Ms. Tufekci likens modern, easily thrown-together "movements" to a car that can accelerate quickly to high speed, yet has no steering wheel.  She compares the protest rallies of these modern movements with the March on Washington in which Martin Luther King gave his famous "I have a Dream" speech.  The 1963 march was not just a march, but it was a signal to dominant power-holders of the capacity of a large number of people to act collectively in a coherent, long-term, strategic manner.  It served as such a signal precisely because back before the Internet, organizing things like a march, a strike, or a boycott required people to work together for a long time and to figure out how to work together long-term without falling apart.  It required people to create formal processes for deciding on goals, for analyzing power, and for mapping and implementing strategy.  These were not spontaneous processes.  Today's protests seem at times to me to be more like a bunch of kids throwing a spontaneous open-air tantrum!

So let's talk about learning to work together and make decisions together as a collective unit.  And let's begin with a question, namely this: how are decisions made in a group of people who want to achieve something?  Or in other words, can there ever really be such a thing as a "leaderless" movement?  To answer that question, we must turn to another sharp woman, feminist scholar Jo Freeman.  Ms. Freeman wrote an essay titled, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness."  Her essay, which was written in 1970, shows that leaderless, structureless groups have long appealed to those who are trying to escape from systems of domination and oppression.  However, Ms. Freeman shows that such leaderless, structureless groups quickly become neither leaderless nor structureless.  What happens instead is that in place of formal, universally acknowledged means of making decisions, an informal network of decision-making always springs up.  And this informal structure is always created by those members of the group who are the most dominant - either in personality or in wealth of pre-existing resources.  These dominant members become the group's "elites."  Once that happens, bam!  You're right back in a structure over which you have no control unless you're one of the "elites."

In order for a social movement organization to succeed in achieving any goal, therefore, it must have structure.  For the social movement organization to achieve democratic goals, the structure must be both explicit and formal, and it must be formally ratified by each of its members.  That structure must also include a formal, explicit, democratic method of decision-making.  The creation of such democratic structures is not a spontaneous process, but is deliberate, conscious, and goal-oriented.  Movement organizers who create such structures create movements that actually accomplish things.  "Movements" which don't are like an amoeba having a seizure.

And this is why I don't hold out much hope of lasting change from many of the protests now taking place, not only against oppressive White supremacy, but against many other evils.  Nor will I have hope until the organizers of such resistance actions begin to grow up, to get over their Millennial sense of entitlement to their opinions, to stop trying to re-create Woodstock, and to start reading some books.  Because their "movements" are "leaderless" and "structureless", they can be very easily co-opted and hijacked (for instance, by agents provocateurs who cause violence at protests), and their message can be derailed by their enemies - enemies who have both leaders and formal structures and who therefore succeed.  We have already seen this happen.

Let me leave you with a quote from Srdja Popovic, former leader of the OTPOR! movement which successfully overthrew Slobodan Milosevic.  Srdja said, "There are only two kinds of political movements in history: they're either spontaneous or successful." Chew on that.