Freire's Pedagogy: 1. On Becoming Fully Human

In this post, we begin to explore a theme which logically follows from our consideration of strategic nonviolent resistance, as outlined in the series of posts I wrote on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  Freedom from oppression is the goal of a liberation struggle based on strategic nonviolent resistance.  This liberation struggle cannot be successful if it is waged only by isolated individuals.  It must be waged by people in collective, interdependent relationship - that is, by people who have chosen to organize.  The question then becomes how to persuade people to organize.  

The answer to this question has been explored by various people from various angles.  Marshall Ganz has developed the story of self/story of us/story of now framework as a means of activizing people.  This method relies on crafting an organizing call that resonates with the values of the people one is trying to organize.  On the other hand, Jack DuVall has pointed out the necessity of appealing to the reason of the people one is trying to organize, so that they may know exactly what is the substance of the cause they are being asked to join.  According to DuVall, it is this appeal to reason which leads to passionate commitment among those who are organized for the cause of liberation, as they see a cause which reflects their deeply-held values.

These viewpoints provide valuable instruction, yet they may not adequately explain why it is so often so hard to rouse oppressed people to liberating action.  I believe that this explanation is provided in large part by Paulo Freire in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  Freire's book begins to explore why oppressed peoples so often act for a long time in ways that do not reflect a desire for freedom, but rather for its opposite, and what foundational work must be done to begin to liberate people in their minds so that they can begin to liberate themselves in actuality.  Thus today's post begins the exploration of Freire's Pedagogy, starting appropriately with Chapter 1.

So we begin with a foundational question, namely, what is the purpose of freedom.  Freire answers this by stating that "the people's vocation" is to become more fully human.  I would put it as this: that our calling is to fulfill our ontogeny (that is, the reason why we were created as human beings) to the greatest extent possible.  However, the reality of living in a fallen world is that some people don't believe they can reach their full human potential unless they steal from others the ability to fulfill their human potential.  

(A present-day case of this theft is the move by Russia to send 100,000 troops to the Russia-Ukraine border in order to invade Ukraine.  Why has Putin done this?  Because he's gotten it stuck into his evil head that he can't fulfill his ontogeny (or Russia's) unless he seizes the entire world as his possession.  Ukraine was the intended first morsel of his feast - but the brave Ukranians have not allowed themselves to be swallowed so easily, so it's taken Putin over seven years to try to swallow them.  Putin (and his familiar spirit Aleksandr Dugin) assign pretentious possessive names to the regions of the rest of the world - terms like "the near abroad" and the "far abroad," by which they really mean "our near abroad" and "our far abroad."  Putin and his fellow travelers believe that unless Russian "influence" has unrestrained reach throughout the world, his identity will suffer an intolerable insult.  Russian "influence" in this case amounts to sadism as defined by Freire.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Message to Putin: Yo, dude - the rest of the world doesn't want to be Russian!  I'd like to say a few choice words to that thieving little man in his bunker - but I must restrain myself...)

Freire states that while humanization is the people's vocation, that humanization is stolen from the people by those who oppress.  This theft constitutes dehumanization - dehumanization of those who are victims of this theft, because it is a distortion of their humanity.  This theft also dehumanizes the thieves, turning them into something less than human - for they must be less than human in order to mistreat their fellow human beings the way they do.  The oppressor becomes so dehumanized by his oppression that he cannot free himself from it.  Only the oppressed have the power to free both themselves and their oppressors.  Freire sounds a hopeful note, however, in the following statement: "Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so."  

However, at first, many members of the oppressed population do not see freedom as a new collective possibility, nor do they recognize the healthy new identity of freedom which they are being called to express.  Instead, the experience of the oppressive environment in which they live conditions them to internalize the oppressor, so that they mistakenly come to believe that becoming more fully human means to become like the oppressor.  Thus we have people among oppressed communities of color whose disease is so far beyond mere "Uncle Tom-ism" that they inhabit the land of Stockholm Syndrome - people like Larry Elder, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Clarence Thomas.    We also see those who seek to become "courtiers" to the oppressors by becoming part of the apparatus of the oppressor's "false generosity" - a generosity which actually is designed to cement the oppressor's control over the oppressed society.  As members of the oppressor's organs of false generosity, they seek to become brokers and middlemen between the oppressors and the oppressed.  In these and in other ways, some members of the oppressed look for hierarchal ladders to climb so that they can become big shots.  To quote Freire again, "But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or 'sub-oppressors'...Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors.  This is their model of humanity."  

Freire also says that "The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom."  This fear of freedom deserves further exploration, but that exploration will have to wait until the next post of this series.  However, those who want to see an example of the conditioning of the oppressed by an oppressive environment and their consequent fear of freedom can refer to a post by Cynthia Kunsman on her blog Under Much Grace.  The title of the post is "The First Step Towards Understanding Jill and Jessa Duggar’s Fox Interview: Second Generation Adults in Cultic/High Demand Religion", and it deals with the effects of high-demand, highly authoritarian religious cultic groups on children of adult parents who become involved in such groups.   

The Adlerian Organizer

In recent days, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris has been sounding a needed alarm about the state of democracy in the United States at present, as well as the continuing efforts by the Republican Party to destroy American democracy by restricting the right to vote in various states.  Therefore I want to return once again to one of the closing themes of my series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  This is 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."

In a previous post I said that building an "organic, grassroots, bottom-up society by the oppressed and for the oppressed" starts when the oppressed start organizing themselves into local, small 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.  As they grow, 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.  

I also mentioned that this kind of organizing was key to many of the successful liberation struggles of the past.  Yet we see far too little of this kind of organizing nowadays.  It is good to ask why this is so.  As I mentioned in the post I have cited, a partial answer can be found in the writings of Paulo Freire, specifically in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  In that book, Freire posits that the oppressed are conditioned by their environment and by the education imposed on them by the oppressor.  This education (which takes place in all areas of society and not just the classroom) teaches the oppressed that they are merely passive victims of a fate that is imposed on them and which they must merely accept.  On the other hand, the pedagogy which leads to liberation opens the minds of the oppressed to see their situation as a problem which can be critically examined.  Critical examination of this problem leads to the realization that the problem can be challenged, changed and overcome.  Seeing the problem as something that can be changed leads to the realization that the oppressed have the power to make that change.  The outcome of this realization is that the oppressed begin to live in freedom - that is, they begin to make the changes which they see as necessary to change their situation.

In other words, Freire treats the problem of oppression in a certain sense as a problem of cognition, a problem whose solution starts with the oppressed becoming first free in their minds.  And yet freedom can be somewhat frightening, even though it begins only in the mind first.  For a free mind begins to lead to free actions.  And those who choose to begin to live in freedom will almost always begin to bear the costs of their choice, for their oppressors will begin to make the choice of freedom costly.  Those who are frightened by the cost of freedom will often therefore reject the dawning awareness that freedom is possible in order to continue their submerged existence as oppressed people without being bothered by their consciences.  So we have two kinds of oppressed people: those who are not free because they don't realize that freedom is possible, and those who are not free because they are unwilling to pay the cost of becoming free.  What is to be done for this second group of oppressed people?

I believe I have stumbled on what is at least a partial answer.  It is found in some of the writings and teachings of a European psychiatrist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries named Dr. Alfred Adler.  

Adler was an interesting character, who made much metaphorical hay from the simple realization that people always have reasons for the things they do - even when the things being done are dysfunctional or cause self-harm.  The experience of being oppressed tends to lead to dysfunctional behavior by the oppressed.  But this dysfunctional behavior has a goal, namely, to compensate psychologically for the damage done by the oppressive situation.  I suggest that this dysfunctional behavior often consists of what looks like passivity, fatalism, and apathy, and that it is an expression of "exaggerated self-protection, self-enhancement, and self-indulgence."  According to the Adler Graduate School, the objective of Adlerian therapy is "to replace exaggerated self-protection, self-enhancement, and self-indulgence with courageous social contribution."  What the organizer is trying to bring about is the "courageous social contribution" of oppressed people coming together into groups to achieve their common liberation.

Thus one part of an organizer's work is to help his or her people begin to see their own motives and the role of these motives in their continued enslavement or oppression.  For it is these motives which motivate the continued passivity of the oppressed and their continued refusal to live in freedom.  Adler used a graphic word picture to describe the process of getting patients to see both the dysfunction and the consequences of certain motives, namely the idea of "spitting in the patient's soup" in order to make the dysfunctional behaviors less palatable.  This notion of spitting into someone else's soup conjures images of organizers going to their people and telling those people what is wrong with their ongoing passivity.  However, the best and most skillful Adlerians get the patient to spit into his or her own soup - that is, they use respectful Socratic dialogue to get their people to admit to themselves out loud what are the motives, goals and consequences of their choices.  From that admission can spring the discussion of better ways to meet the goals of their people.

So it is that Adlerian dialogue can be seen as a component of Freirian problem-posing education of the sort that turns passive, fatalistic, atomized members of the oppressed into purposeful, united, interdependent people laboring together for their common liberation.  There is more that can be said about this, but I need to do some further reading both of Freire and of Adler!  Stay tuned...

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 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 Organizer's Story of Self

One key element of building an effective liberation struggle is the ability of organizers to spread and reproduce their own cognitive liberation in the people they are trying to organize.  A key to this spread is the organizer's "Story of Self."  Learning to tell an effective story of self - the telling of that moment or choice point in a person's life which pushed them to become an organizer - is a challenging exercise.  

I just finished participating in an online practice session in which participants worked on crafting and honing their "Stories of Self."  I heard some beautiful and concise examples of people illustrating their own activizing moments, their own choice points.  As for myself, I think I illustrated my own choice point well enough, but I took too long to do it.  (We are supposed to take only two minutes!)  My story needs some more work...

From D to D, Chapter 4: Dictatorships Have Weaknesses

This post continues our discussion of how oppressed peoples can use strategic nonviolent resistance as a key component of their struggle to liberate themselves from their oppressors.  As a guide to our discussion, we are continuing our journey through Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D).  Both the book and our discussion of it continue to be relevant in these days for many people who live under exploitative, authoritarian regimes throughout the world.  This relevance also applies to the historically marginalized communities of color in the United States, even though Joe Biden has won the 2020 Presidential election.  For the most powerful members of the Democratic Party will want to define a "centrist" agenda for the United States for the next four years, and some of the most powerful members of both parties will try to legitimize the policies of the recently defeated Donald Trump as the new "center" around which that "centrist" agenda must be built.  However, under that "center", the following injustices will remain:

• A border wall that symbolizes continued U.S. hostility to dark-skinned, non-European immigrants 
• A network of over 200 immigrant detention centers holding over 500,000 people, including children
• A prison-industrial complex that feeds on communities of color starting with children in preschool 
• A cancerous growth in "law enforcement" budgets in cities throughout the United States - even though crime rates have dropped.  The bulk of this "law enforcement" goes toward hiring officers to terrorize minority neighborhoods.  This money comes at the expense of taxpayer-funded programs that could improve the quality of life of the poorest residents of these cities.  For instance, in Long Beach, California, 43 percent of the city budget is spent on police.
• The continued extreme and growing inequality in wealth and access to life resources between the richest U.S. citizens and the rest of us.

I would not count on the goodness of the most powerful people in the United States to reverse these evils.  Rather, that reversal will come only when the people most affected by these evils create a strong, effective resistance that imposes serious costs on the evildoers.

On, then, to today's discussion.  Chapter 4 acknowledges the sense of powerlessness that even activized people feel when they begin to study whether they can actually challenge structures of oppression and the power-holders who control those structures.  As Gene Sharp says, "Dictatorships often appear invulnerable.  [The structures of power] are controlled by a powerful few...In comparison, democratic opposition forces often appear extremely weak, ineffective, and powerless.  That perception of invulnerability against powerlessness makes effective opposition unlikely."

But Sharp goes on to say, "That is not the whole story, however."  And he begins to make his case that even dictatorships have weaknesses that make them vulnerable to skillful application of pressure by resisters.  The key to that skillful application consists of correctly identifying those weaknesses.  As Sharp says, "[Dictatorships], too, can be conquered, but most quickly and with least cost if their weaknesses can be identified and the attack concentrated on them."

WEAKNESSES OF DICTATORSHIPS

In Chapter 4 of From D to D, there is a list of potential weaknesses common to all dictatorships.  Note that I used the word "potential" as an adjective to describe these weaknesses, for not every dictatorship will have these weaknesses to the same degree.  As an example of a regime in which some of these weaknesses had a greater effect, we can look at the failure of the regime of Donald Trump.  In his case, his failures in 2020 were caused in large part by Weakness #1 ("The cooperation of a multitude of people, groups, and institutions needed to operate the system may be restricted or withdrawn") and Weakness #7 ("If a strong ideology is present that influences one's view of reality, firm adherence to it may cause inattention to actual conditions and needs").  Weakness #1 contributed to his inability to turn public outrage over police murders of unarmed African-Americans into a polling boost by portraying himself as a "law and order" president.  The suburbs to which he was appealing had disappeared between the time of Richard Nixon and the present, so that Trump's "Omar Wasow re-election strategy" failed.  This failure was amplified by Weakness #7, which rendered Trump incapable of responding in a coherent and effective manner to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Weakness #7 also rendered Trump incapable of realizing that most Americans cared far more about the threat of the pandemic than they cared about Trump's "law-and-order" talk.

Trump turned out to be a relatively easy autocrat to depose - at least, if the results of the 2020 election are respected and the rule of law is followed in this country.  (Biden's lead over Trump has grown to over 7 million votes, by the way.)  This was due to the fact that Trump was so blatant an oppressor, and that he made his oppressive intentions so clear throughout most of his presidency.  In fact, if I had to organize a resistance movement against an autocrat or would-be autocrat, I don't think I could ask for a much easier opponent than Trump - simply because Trump was such a polarizing figure.  Yet a troubling thing happened during the final few weeks of the 2020 campaign: Trump was able to successfully reach out to certain members of groups of people whom he had initially targeted for oppression.  Thus he gained a surprising number of Latino votes even though the beginning of his term was marked by threats of mass deportations (threats which he repeated in 2019 and 2020) and a push to build a border wall, and even though he forcibly separated Latino migrant children from their parents and threw them into cages.  He was also able to pick up a number of African-American votes even after threatening to arrest "millions" of us and even after Republican policies designed to disenfranchise and disempower the African-American community.  And he was able to pick up votes from Arab-Americans and Muslims even after his attempt in 2017 to impose a Muslim travel ban.  So perhaps I should say that Trump as he was before the final few months of the 2020 campaign would have been an easy figure to depose.  Many have called Trump stupid, but I'd like to suggest that toward the end, he had begun to travel the path of the dictator's learning curve.  So let's talk about something that Gene Sharp perhaps did not consider in Chapter 4 of his book (although he does address it somewhat in Chapter 7).

STRENGTHS OF DICTATORSHIPS

Dictatorships are weakest, ironically enough, when they are at their most hardline, their most oppressive, and their most polarizing.  For it is then that it easiest for democratic resisters to make an ideological case against the dictator to their fellow citizens, because it is then that the dictatorships are likely to be the most brittle, because they have made themselves the most hateful to their subjects.  The problem is that most successful authoritarians are not nearly so obvious anymore.  As Will Dobson says in The Dictator's Learning Curve, "We like to believe that authoritarian regimes are dinosaurs - clumsy, stupid, lumbering behemoths, reminiscent of the Soviet Union in its final days or some insecure South American banana republic."  However, the truth is that "today's dictators understand that in a globalized world the more brutal forms of intimidation...are best replaced with more subtle forms of coercion...Today's dictators pepper their speeches with references to liberty, justice, and the rule of law...[regularly invoking] democracy and claim to be the country's elected leaders.  And modern authoritarians understand the importance of appearances."  (See this, for instance.)  Skillful autocrats have the following strengths:

• They are able to skillfully deploy soft power to keep their people compliant.  Sometimes this comes through making an implicit or explicit bargain with certain sectors of the population.  Sometimes the bargain is made between the dictator and the entire population.  Often the bargain can be stated thus: "You let me bring a certain measure of material prosperity to you, and in exchange, you let me be the boss.  Don't question how I get things done - or else!"
• They are able to skillfully centralize power in ways that don't raise eyebrows.  What Trump tried to do clumsily, autocrats like Putin have done skillfully - and these autocrats have justified their centralization by pointing to the same centralizing tendencies at work in so-called democracies which have allowed radical concentrations of wealth in the hands of a rich few.  (However, that centralization of power eventually becomes a weakness of the autocratic regime.)
• They are able to skillfully divide in order to rule.  Often, they are able to do so by means of a well-developed libertarian ideology of selfishness which disconnects people from each other and causes them to deny their mutual duty to one another in order to try to get rich.
• They are able to skillfully take advantage of the sins and weaknesses of their political opponents in order to divide them.  Thus Trump has managed to take advantage of the conservative social values of many members of the groups of people he has sought to marginalize, in order to dissuade these people from supporting his opponents.  He succeeded because many leaders of the so-called American "Left" no longer speak in any meaningful way for working-class people of color - especially when those people of color hold conservative religious or cultural values (like I do).  Rather, the Democratic Party has begun to take communities of color for granted, assuming that we will always be content to be the foot soldiers of an agenda that does not reflect our concerns or our struggle.  A case in point is the way in which the largely White leaders of the Left have defined the present Civil Rights struggle as a struggle for "diversity"*.  But they have defined "diversity" in a way which elevates so-called sexual "diversity" to the most prominent place in the "diversity" agenda, even while African-American kids continue to be deprived of a quality education and get locked up by punitive and harsh public schools, while African-American families continue to suffer appalling disparities in wealth, and while African-Americans who get sick continue to be killed by a hostile medical system.  To the leaders of the gay rights movement, I have a straight-up request: get off my back.  Get off the backs of my people.  We are not better together.  Stop trying to hijack the struggle of communities of color in order to form a so-called "rainbow coalition" whose actual agenda has nothing to do with the priorities of communities of color.  Your efforts hinder us from liberating ourselves.  You know this.  And for those "corporate Democrats" who assume that communities of color have no viable choice except to vote Democrat, I have the same request: get lost.  Rahm Emmanuel has NO place in any position of government. 

THE NEED FOR POWER ANALYSIS

Many of the strengths of autocrats which I have just described exist because of the often self-inflicted weaknesses of the democratic opposition.  Those weaknesses can be moral as in the selfish embrace of libertarian ideology and the desire to get rich which separates brothers and sisters in struggle from each other.  Other examples of moral weakness include a desire for the "American Dream" middle class lifestyle that is so overpowering that it silences people when they should speak truth to oppressive power.  And there is the weakness that comes from making alliances with people with whom one should not be allied.

Therefore, the people most affected by oppression must form associations with each other in order to build their collective power for the purpose of liberation.  The organizations which claim to be on behalf of the people most affected must be built and led by the people most affected.  And in their initial building of their own internal power as well as in their preparation to take on the power of their oppressors, they will need to engage in an analysis of the relative power of each side, the relative strengths and weaknesses of each side.  This analysis, called power analysis by community organizers, is a key prerequisite for building an effective strategy of struggle.  For even though oppressors have gotten smarter and are therefore not as easy to remove, it is still possible to remove them.  Gene Sharp's closing words of Chapter 4 are still true: "Types of struggle that target the dictatorship's identifiable weaknesses have greater chance of success than those that seek to fight the dictatorship where it is clearly strongest."  Therefore, power analysis will be the subject of my next post in this series, God willing.

*Note: Over the last several years, "diversity" has been subject to ever-greater hijackings, expanding to corporate and government-backed "affinity groups" for the "neurodiverse" and author Susan Cain advocating for a place for "introverts" at the "diversity" table.  And in Oregon, people who would normally be regarded as white have successfully gotten themselves defined as "people of color" by a government agency for the sake of receiving benefits!  I am not saying that such groups should be persecuted, but rather, that including such groups in discussions about "diversity" leaves unanswered the injuries of those most affected by historical oppression in the United States.

Another note: one characteristic of "soft" authoritarian states is the presence of an opposition party that does not actually represent the grievances of the people most affected by the oppression of the authoritarian government.  This has been true not only in the United States, but in countries such as the United Kingdom.  For more on this, click here.  This is why effective nonviolent civil resistance works most often outside of established political channels and processes.

From D to D, Chapter 3: The Organizer's Toolkit

If you don't respect yourself, ain't nobody 

gonna give a good cahoot, na na na na

Respect yourself...

- Respect Yourself

lyrics by Luther Thomas Ingram and Mack Rice

This post continues our discussion of strategic nonviolent resistance, and is based in the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp.  This discussion is especially relevant for those of us who live in the United States and who have been struggling to create a nation and a world in which each of the world's people has equal access to the things they need to fulfill their human potential.  The emergence of such a world is currently being blocked by people such as Donald Trump and his supporters, who want to make themselves great by trashing everyone else on earth.  As an example, key members of the Trump administration have already clearly signaled their intention to refuse to accept the legitimate results of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election which Donald Trump clearly lost.  Therefore the study of strategic nonviolent resistance and of nonviolent liberation struggles is very timely.  

The most recent posts in this series have focused on Chapter 3 of From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D).  You can find those posts here, here, and here.  A key point of Chapter 3 was that the kind of economic and political noncooperation that destroys a dictator's regime works best when it is applied on a mass basis as a coordinated effort by the independent institutions and groups of the oppressed society.  Note that by "independent" we mean those groups and institutions that are not controlled by the dictator or his administration.  Sharp made the point that if the independent institutions of the oppressed society have largely been destroyed or taken over by the dictatorship, the democratic resisters against the dictatorship will need to rebuild these independent groups so that these groups can contribute to the liberation struggle by their mass withdrawal of cooperation from the dictator's regime.  The building, rebuilding, and redirecting of organized groups of people requires people who are willing to take on the role of community organizers, as we showed in the last post in this series.  Therefore, today we will consider some supplemental material that describes what tools organizers use in order to successfully create organizations that can wield power.  And we will be looking at some further material from a veteran community organizer and social movement scholar named Marshall Ganz.  

Dr. Ganz has created an entire curriculum designed to teach the craft of organizing.  I had the opportunity a while back to take one of his online classes in organizing, titled, Leadership, Organizing and Action.  I will not attempt to reproduce the entire class here, but rather to summarize some of its key points.  To quote Ganz, "Organizing is a form of leadership.  Organizers identify, recruit, and develop the leadership of others; build community around that leadership; and build power from the resources of that community.  Organizers do not provide services to clients or market products to customers.  They organize a community to become a constituency - people able to stand together on behalf of common concerns.  Organizers ask three questions: Who are my people?  What is their urgent problem?  How can they turn their resources into the power to solve their problem?"  (Emphasis mine.)  

From this description we see that the organizer's job is not an easy one!  This is especially true in the United States, where many oppressed peoples and communities have become so passive that they look for "saviors" or "programs" from the dominant culture instead of building their own power in order to become independent of that culture.  Because the "saviors" never quite seem to adequately "save", and the "programs" never seem to effectively eliminate the problems they are supposed to solve, these communities continue to passively suffer the effects of institutionalized oppression.  The organizer's job is to bring the members of these communities to say, "Hey - no one is coming to save us.  What therefore are WE going to do to turn our resources into the power we need to save ourselves?"  How can organizers effectively call their people out of passivity?  The organizing framework of Dr. Ganz is a way of answering that question, and it has five elements:

SHARED STORY

As I have said above, the organizer must ask "Who are my people?"  But the people whom the organizer seeks to organize will want to know, "Why are you trying to organize us?  Why do you care about our problem?"  So the organizer needs to have a clear story of why he is trying to organize.  And this story must not just be a story of factoids and statistics, but of the moments which called the organizer to be an organizer.  These are the moments when the organizer faced not the mere statistics of the challenges facing his people, but the physical incarnation - the embodiment - of those challenges.  For one particular organizer whose story I heard on a podcast, a particular series of such moments consisted of her childhood experiences of crossing a bridge from Jordan to Palestine to visit her relatives.  As part of that bridge crossing, she had to endure being forced with her mother and sisters to strip naked in front of the Israeli army soldiers at the bridge checkpoint in order to be searched.  For me, one such moment came during an afternoon in the summer between my 6th and 7th grade, when three racist bullies from my school came to my house to steal water from our water hose and I had to fight them.  

Moments like these are activizing moments - and they form the basis of the organizer's story of self.  The organizer must also have a story of us - a story of his response as a member of his people to the collective challenge faced by his people, and a story of now - the response he is asking for from his people.  But the story of us and the story of now are not just the creation of the organizer.  They are developed and enlarged as the organizer forms relationships with the members of his people and as he hears their stories of self.  This is a key to the development of shared strategy later in the organizing process.  This is why Mohandas Gandhi spent many months traveling through India listening to the stories of his people before he began his campaign of Indian liberation.  This is also why the Reverend James Lawson spent several months listening to the stories of hardships suffered by African-American mothers who had to shop in segregated stores in the Jim Crow South before he began organizing his campaigns of civil disobedience.  This listening and collaboration is key.  Without it, you may have an organizer who is activized well enough, yet who in his rage tries to shove solutions down the throats of his people.  (I've been guilty of this, I'm afraid!)

SHARED COMMITMENT

From the sharing of stories of self between the organizer and other members of his people there arises a set of shared relationships.  These relationships become relationships of commitment to a common cause.  These relationships, moreover, are based on shared values.  As Marshall Ganz says, "In organizing the 'moment of truth' is when two people have learned enough about each other's interests, resources and values not only to make an 'exchange' but also to commit to working together on behalf of a common purpose...Relationship building is thus the key to organizing because it is the association of people with each other, not simply the aggregation of individual resources, that can create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts."  That is why my previous post in this series began with a quote from a romantic song - because relationship-building requires skill!  And maintaining relationships requires ongoing work.

SHARED STRUCTURE

From a network of relationships of common purpose, the various people involved in those relationships build a shared structure for action.  As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, that structure must be explicit and mutually agreed upon by all its members.  Remember - successful social movements are always planned and never purely spontaneous.  And the organizations that produce successful social movements always have an explicit structure, including an explicit, mutually agreed method of making decisions.  The kind of structure that is adopted by a group has a great impact on the effectiveness of the group.  A group where one person does all the thinking for everyone can be easily defeated (or worse yet, decapitated).  On the other hand, a group which doesn't do anything unless all its members come to a consensus on what needs to be done never gets around to doing anything.  The "snowflake" model of leadership development proposed by Ganz is a way to strike a happy balance between the two extremes and to create leadership that is maximally effective. 

SHARED STRATEGY

Shared strategy is the outcome of shared story, shared commitment, and shared structure.  Strategy is the answer of your group to the question of how to "turn the resources you all have into the power you all need to make the change you all want."  Just as leadership is not as effective when it is done by only one person in the group, strategy is most effective when it is developed as a team effort.  Effective strategy is important for groups of oppressed people who are struggling to liberate themselves from their oppressors, because this strategy is the way such groups make up for a lack of resources by becoming more resourceful in using what they do have.  Effective strategy also is how such groups overcome the advantage of the much greater resources of their oppressors.  Ganz uses the term "strategic capacity" to describe the characteristics of teams that are most likely to develop effective strategy.  (See this also.)

SHARED ACTION

The final outcome of shared story, shared commitment, shared structure, and shared strategy is shared action - a unified campaign by the oppressed to shift the balance of power between the oppressed and the oppressors.  Organizations work through campaigns that have strategic goals or milestones.  This setting of milestones provides the necessary discipline for organizers to achieve concrete goals.  One campaign I know of organized poor villagers in the Middle East to teach themselves to read.  This campaign achieved certain milestones of success that had been developed during the strategy and planning phase of the campaign.  The phase of shared action is the time when your organizing skill and effort is put to the proof.  

WANT TO KNOW MORE?

The person of the organizer and the work of organizing is so important to successful social movements that it deserves a much fuller treatment than I can give to it in a limited space on a Sunday afternoon.  However, if you want to know more about how the powerless can build their own power for their own liberation, Dr. Ganz will have another online class through the Harvard Kennedy School next winter and spring.  You can find out more about it here.  The class is definitely not free - but maybe if you're part of a group, a number of your friends can chip in and you all can pay for one member of your group to attend.  (If you're an African-American leader in a Black Lives Matter group, you should definitely attend!)  There are also the following free online resources:

• Leadership, Organizing and Action (training guide from a 2016 workshop in Morocco)
• "Learn About Organizing from Marshall Ganz" (a series of videos is included on this page)

The Shape of Our Struggle

Things in the United States are turning out about as I expected in the aftermath of Joe Biden's election victory over Donald Trump.  Trump's response has been what he told us all along that it would be.  Indeed, even when Trump ran against Hillary Clinton in 2016, he had told us that he would not accept a legitimate election loss.  The deep existential foundations of Trump's malignant narcissism are the motive behind his refusal in 2020 to accept a loss that is becoming more painfully obvious with each passing day.

Over the last four years, Trump has managed to pack many offices of the Federal government with sycophants who have no principles other than self-seeking loyalty to Trump.  Anyone with competence and principles who was part of his administration at any time has by now left.  He has packed the Federal judiciary with unrighteous judges.  And he is now packing the Pentagon with loyalists.  

All of this leads naturally to the question of what decent people in the United States should do if Trump refuses to leave office, or if he succeeds in getting corrupt courts to void a legitimate election, or if he stages a military coup.  My answer to such a question is contained in the many posts I have written which explain strategic nonviolent resistance on this blog.  Strategic nonviolent resistance is a key component of the struggle of an oppressed people to liberate themselves from a tyrant, dictator, or oppressor.  If you're looking for what you can do to contribute to that struggle, please read these posts.

A few points must be made.  First, you must get ready to organize with your neighbors.  Second, you must organize to massively and collectively withdraw your economic and political cooperation from the system.  This will massively raise the costs borne by a Trump dictatorship and make such a dictatorship unsustainable.  (Think of such things as strikes and boycotts of large businesses (such as Fox News) that support Trump.  DO NOT base your struggle solely on mass protest marches!)  Third, you must remain nonviolent in your struggle.  This is not just for moral reasons!  It is also because the moment you allow violence, you decrease your chances that your liberation struggle will succeed.  (If you don't believe me, please read Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan.  Or watch some of the YouTube videos of Erica Chenoweth.)  

Fourth, you must begin NOW to study strategic nonviolent resistance if you haven't yet started.  Fighters who lack skill never win.  If you want to win, you must study.  But learn only from reputable sources.  Here is a short list of sources I consider trustworthy:

• The Albert Einstein Institution
• The Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS)
• Teachers and practitioners of community organizing.

One source which I would urge you to stay away from is the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC).  From their founding up to the end of 2016, their courses and publications presented valuable information and good advice.  But from 2017 onward, something began to change.  Thus in one of their online courses which took place after 2016, Daniel Dixon of the ICNC suggested that violent and nonviolent forms of resistance could be combined in a movement to make the movement stronger.  (By the way, all available evidence on social movements proves the exact opposite.)  His exact words were, "An organizing friend of mine likes to talk about 'synergy of tactics' as opposed to 'diversity of tactics'.  By this he means that violent forms of protest can work alongside nonviolent forms of protest to create something that is more powerful than either could accomplish individually."  This is complete garbage.  He is not the only one to make suggestions that are harmful to liberation struggles.  Tom Hastings of the ICNC suggested this year that there were times and cases in which a nonviolent resistance movement could help its cause by destroying property.  That too is garbage.  If you engage in violence (including property destruction) you will make it harder to shift the pillars of support of the dictator's regime.  And we want to make it as easy as possible for people who now support Trump to walk away from him.

This weekend, God willing, I will be continuing my series on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Gene Sharp.  Stay tuned.  

From D to D, Chapter 3 (Continued): Who Made Thee An Organizer?

 At aalis, magbabalik

At uuliting sabihin 

Na mahalin ka't sambitin

Kahit muli'y masaktan

Sa pag-alis

Ako'y magbabalik

At sana naman...

- from Nobela, lyrics by Christian Blanca Renia

(My title being a nod to the 7th chapter of the Book of Acts...  Note: as I've been listening lately to music from other corners of the world, you may find me including some of the lyrics in future posts if I think they are relevant to the topics being discussed in those posts.  So if you're from outside the U.S., please keep making good music!  For the rest, if you want to know what the lyrics mean, try Google Translate.  However, I must warn you that using Google Translate is sometimes like trying to ride a horse that has a couple of broken legs.)

This post is a continuation of our discussion of Chapter 3 of Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  I chose to dedicate a series of posts to the discussion of this important book because of the current global political climate, in which many democracies around the world (including the United States) have been hijacked by fascists, supremacists, strongmen and would-be dictators.  (Yes, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are among the hijackers.)  I have argued in my posts that the oppressed peoples who want to liberate themselves from these strongmen must do so through the means of strategic nonviolent resistance, as the nonviolent method has the greatest chance of success and the best social outcomes.  From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in my posts to From D to D) describes what is involved in building a successful nonviolent liberation struggle.

Chapter 3 of From D to D began with what Gene Sharp called "the Monkey Master fable" (originally titled, Rule By Tricks in Chinese), an illustration of what happens to an oppressor when his oppressed victims choose to massively and collectively withdraw their cooperation from the oppressor.  Sharp went on to make the important point that the noncooperation of the oppressed applies the greatest pressure when it is collective rather than being just a bunch of random, uncoordinated acts of isolated individuals.  Thus, the emergence of collective, coordinated noncooperation depends on the emergence or existence of groups and institutions of the oppressed that are independent of the oppressor - that is, groups and institutions that are neither financed, supported, or controlled by the oppressor.

Note that Sharp lists among these independent groups a number of types of groups and institutions that are not overtly political, such as families, sports clubs, music groups, gardening clubs, and the like.  Therefore, although the existence of such groups is a necessary precondition for a liberation struggle, it is not a sufficient condition.  My most recent post in this series therefore discussed how it is necessary for such groups to be politicized (or co-opted) by movement organizers if such groups are to contribute to a nonviolent liberation struggle.  In that post, we explored the writings of feminist scholar Jo Freeman in her description of the birth of the women's movement and other movements of the 1960's in the United States.  One point she makes is the importance of the organizers of a social movement.  For successful social movements are never spontaneous - that is, they never just "happen" out of the blue.  And there are only two kinds of social movements: the spontaneous and the successful.  Successful movements are organized by smart organizers.  The organizers have to be smart, because their job is to co-opt existing groups and institutions so that their members begin to support the goals of the movement.  Their job is also to create new movement organizations from scratch (a topic which will be explored in a future post, God willing).  So what kind of person is an organizer?

To answer that question, we turn today to the writings of another movement scholar, veteran organizer Dr. Marshall Ganz of Harvard University.  Ganz defines organizing as a particular kind of leadership.  He defines leadership as "accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose in the face of uncertainty."  And he defines organizing as "leadership that enables people to turn the resources they have into the power they need to make the change they want."  Ganz makes the important point that leadership - specifically, organizing - is a calling.  People are called to become organizers when life confronts them with the following questions:

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?  If I am only for myself, what am I?  And if not now, when?

-Hillel (Pirkei Avot Chapter 1:14)

So if organizers are people who have experienced a calling to organize, what kind of experiences lead them to hear that call?  And where do these called people come from?  To answer that question, let's look at three kinds of people:

THE LIMINAL

The word "liminal" literally means "on the threshold."  The word can also be defined as, "on the edge."  In the context of liberation struggles, liminal people are those members of an oppressed group who live on the edges, on the boundary between the oppressed group and the oppressor group.  In many cases, such people are born into such liminal spaces.  Moses from the Bible is such an example.  He was born into a nation of slaves, and he was born at a time in which the Pharaoh, the earthly master of the Hebrew slaves had decreed that all male Hebrew infants were to be killed by being thrown into the Nile River.  His parents did not throw him into the river, but instead hid him for three months, and then they carefully placed him into the river in a floating basket, trusting that God would take care of him.  (Exodus 1 and 2).  In a twist of Divine irony and providence, the basket was found by the daughter of Pharaoh, who decided to adopt Moses and raise him as an Egyptian.  In another twist of Divine providence, Moses' mother was hired by Pharaoh's daughter to be his nurse from day that Pharaoh's daughter found him until the day that she adopted Moses as her son.

Moses was thus raised as a member of the most privileged group of the most privileged class of people in Egypt.  (To put this into perspective, imagine Ivanka Trump adopting a dark-skinned, non-English speaking child from among the groups of human beings now caged in "detention centers" by the Global Far Right and raising him as her own son with all the earthly privileges attached to the Trump name.)  But he also learned of his identity as a Hebrew from his mother.  Thus there were two potential identities within Moses.  However, the sight of the treatment of his people by the Egyptians became an attack on his birth identity which Moses would no longer tolerate.  The attack on the people of his birth became in his soul an attack on himself.  So it is that "By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter; choosing rather to endure ill-treatment with the people of God, than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin..." (Hebrews 11:24-25)

That is frequently the experience of those who are liminal.  This was the experience of many African-American servicemen from the American South who fought in World War Two, as for a time they inhabited a world which offered many more opportunities than the Jim Crow South.  From their experiences came a set of rising expectations combined with an intolerable sense of shame and frustration at the Southern status quo that would serve as one of the motivations for the most important struggles of the Civil Rights movement.  Other liminal figures include Robert Moses (one of the founding members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC), Ella Baker (of the NAACP and one of the founding organizers of SNCC), James Lawson and others who had the means and took the opportunity to attend college (something that many African-Americans could not do because of financial constraints).

And it has been my experience, for as an African-American child, I was a military brat and my dad was an officer.  Therefore I got to inhabit a world in which there were not many kids who looked like me.  I was "educated in all the learning of the Egyptians," to borrow a phrase from Acts 7.  But I was subjected to constant attacks from children (and sometimes parents) from the "dominant culture" who treated me as if neither I nor my people had any right to inhabit the world which they enjoyed.  An incident from the summer before middle school comes particularly to mind just now.  The experience of possibilities combined with persecution on account of those possibilities had, shall we say, a radicalizing effect on me.

THE CONSCIOUSLY HUMILIATED

As noted above, the liminal are often very conscious of their humiliation under a system of oppression.  But many who do not inhabit that liminal space often allow their sense of self to be submerged by that system to the point where they passively accept the structures of their humiliation as merely part of the background scenery, "just the way things are around here."  While this happens often to members of minority groups who are oppressed by a dominant majority, it also happens when an entire society is taken over by a dominant dictator.  So in his essay, The Power of the Powerless, Vaclav Havel writes about a grocery store owner in a dysfunctional country who is ordered by his government to place every day in the store window a sign which reads, "WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!"  The government's purpose in ordering store owners to put up such signs is to convey the message that the government is on the side of the workers, and that the government is the sole legitimate leader of these workers, the sole legitimate treasury of their hopes and dreams.  

But what if the government which makes grocers put up such signs actually treats the workers like animals?  What if, in putting up such signs, workers are actually being forced to lie to themselves?  Is not this act of forced lying a form of humiliation, an insult to the intelligence of these workers?  And how long can someone be forced to lie to himself before his sense of shame becomes so overwhelming that he refuses to lie any longer?  That is the point of Havel's essay.  When that happens, people refuse to put up signs, or they start to put up signs that say "THIS ISN'T PARADISE AFTER ALL!"  So Trump is trailing Biden in the polls right now because many people are beginning to realize that he hasn't made America great, and that voting for him will not "Keep America Great!"  Rather, the United States is suffering from a number of wounds inflicted on the entire nation by Donald J. Trump.

THE ACTIVIZED

A sense of human possibility combined with an awareness of shame under the denial of that possibility is what produces many of the people who step up to become organizers.  These organizers then go on to call others to become organizers.  And they do so by opening the eyes of these others to the human possibilities that are being denied to them by oppressors.  In other words, they produce in others what dwells within them - the same sense of possibility and the same refusal to tolerate ongoing humiliation.  Thus it was that organizer Fred Ross found a young Latino laborer named Cesar Chavez and showed him "how poor people could build power."  Thus it was that SNCC organizers persuaded poor African-Americans in Mississippi to fight for equal access to the polls.  

The characteristic of organizers is that they have come to a point of "cognitive liberation".  This term, "cognitive liberation", is defined in various ways by social movement scholars.  But I define its beginning as a 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. (For an example of this, consider the life of Fannie Lou Hamer.  "And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives even to the point of death.")  This cognitive liberation spreads when the liberated organizer sets before others not only a sense of possibility and an awareness of humiliation, but a plausible road map of change that can achieve the possibilities now denied to the oppressed.  This is how an organizer becomes a "social arsonist who goes around setting other people on fire," as Fred Ross said.

But this setting of other people on fire is rarely instantaneous.  Often it involves long, hard work in building relationships of trust among people whose experiences of hardship have taught them not to be trusting, and who must operate in an environment in which bad things can happen to them if they "step out of line."  As Ella Baker once said, it is "spade work" - like the unglamorous work of hand-digging a field before one plants vegetables.  And organizers frequently find that people will disappoint them - sometimes after the organizer has spent much time trying to build a relationship.  So the organizer must be patient and resilient.  (At aalis, magbabalik, at uuliting sabihin, na mahalin ka't sambitin, kahit muli'y masaktan...)  You have to be kind of crazy (at least as some people count craziness) to do this kind of work - or at least you need the kind of undying righteous anger combined with a sense of enduring justice that will compel you to stick it out for the long haul.  But there are tools which can help make the organizer's job easier.  I will discuss those tools in my next post, God willing.