From D to D, Chapters 8 & 9: Where Are The Carpenters?

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

A key to the winning strategies of successful nonviolent liberation struggles of the past has been the achievement of shifts in the power balance between the oppressor and the oppressed which come about by the oppressed building the sort of righteous parallel society of self-government, communal self-determination and of communal self-reliance that displaces the society ruled by the oppressor. To quote Gene Sharp, "Combined with political defiance during the phase of selective resistance, the growth of autonomous social, economic, cultural and political institutions progressively expands the 'democratic space' of the society and shrinks the control of the dictatorship. As the civil institutions of the society become stronger vis-a-vis the dictatorship, then, whatever the dictators may wish, the population is incrementally building an independent society outside of their control..." - From D to D, Chapter 9.  This was, for instance, a key element of the strategy of swaraj employed by Mohandas Gandhi in the struggle to liberate India from the British empire.

As I mentioned in the most recent post in this series, this building of a righteous parallel society with parallel institutions that meet the needs of the oppressed was conspicuously absent from the so-called "resistance" against the Trump administration from 2017 to 2020.  And it seems to have been painfully absent from the resistance by the African-American community to renewed racist oppression over the last decade.  This absence has not escaped the notice of honest and trustworthy scholars of nonviolent civil resistance.  For instance, Erica Chenoweth commented repeatedly in YouTube interviews from 2018 onward that the "resistance" against Trump seemed to be too one-dimensional, too much of a one-trick pony whose participants spent too much time shouting loudly in the streets against the world they saw coming into being and too little time articulating - in word and action - the vision of the world they actually wanted to see.  The articulation of this vision - a "vision of tomorrow" as described by Srdja Popovic - is much easier for bystanders to see and to embrace when it is embodied in deep, strong organizing of righteous parallel institutions for meeting social needs.  (See "Protests in Perspective: Civil Disobedience & Activism Today, with Erica Chenoweth & Deva Woodly", and "Social Movements in the Age of Fake News with Erica Chenoweth."  Note especially that second citation.  In it, Chenoweth discusses the pivotal role played those who built parallel institutions in the Polish struggle against the Russian-backed Jaruselski regime.)  As I have also mentioned repeatedly in this series, the combination of over-reliance on hasty mass mobilization and hastily thrown-together mass protest, combined with the lack of deep, long-term organizing, has allowed the holders of concentrated wealth and economic and political power to frequently inject violent agents provocateurs into many of the mass protests and mobilizations that have taken place in the U.S. over the last five years.

It may well therefore be asked why this parallel institution-building, this parallel society-building, has been so frequently neglected over the last decade or so by those who call themselves activists and who consider themselves to be leaders of struggles for liberation.  The answer lies in part in the endemic laziness of us humans who tend to "demand" change rather than creating that change ourselves - both as individuals and as self-conscious, self-organized collectives.  (Organizing is hard work, lemme tell ya!  I speak from experience.)  But I would argue that part of the answer lies in the bad advice many of us have received in answer to our questions about how to create liberating change.  

Some of that bad advice was discussed in my post titled, "The Poverty of Pivenism."  In particular, I took aim at the teachings and intellectual legacy of Frances Fox Piven and highlighted the spectacular failures of many of the mobilizations of recent years which embodied a Pivenist strategy.  I also took aim at a book by Mark Engler and Paul Engler titled, This Is An Uprising, a book which claims to teach the principles of successful strategic nonviolent resistance.  The Englers' praise of Pivenism combined with their disdain for long-term deep organizing leads me to believe that they are, at best, rank amateurs.  And yet not all bad advice is given by the ignorant rank amateur.  Some bad advice is given by those who deliberately seek to mislead.

I am thinking just now of June of 2020, in which there were massive protests over the police murder of George Floyd, and in which agents provocateurs had already begun to make sizable inroads into these protests for the purpose of looting and vandalism.  During that month an article was published in a weekly magazine called the Nation, and the title of the article was "In Defense of Destroying Property."  The article was written by R. H. Lossin, a white woman with blond hair and blue eyes.    (At the beginning of this year, she also taught a course with an even more provocative title, namely, "Sabotage: Violence, Theory, and Protest.")  Her White privilege insulates her almost completely from the consequences of saying such things, as well as the consequences that people of color would surely have suffered for following her advice last year.  Yet from her position of privileged safety she was advocating that we who belong to communities of the oppressed should engage in violence.  And yes, my definition of violence includes sabotage and property destruction, for these activities have the same effect of weakening movements for liberation that would occur if movement activists physically attacked their opponents.

But I am also thinking of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), and the difference between my first discovery of this group and my attitude at the final parting of our ways.  I go back now to the horrible and frightening days of the close of 2016, when many Americans discovered that our democracy had been broken and that we were getting a genocidal tyrant as the 45th President.  The discovery of the fact that Trump would be our next President combined with my anger and my commitment to Christian ethics moved me to seriously research what strategic nonviolent resistance had to offer.  So I discovered Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution, and I eagerly read How Nonviolent Struggle Works.  I watched a ton of YouTube videos which featured Gene Sharp.  I downloaded the audio of From Dictatorship to Democracy and listened to it over and over again while washing dishes, mowing the lawn, and doing whatever other mindless work was conducive to listening to audiobooks.  I discovered Jamila Raqib and her special emphasis on parallel institution-building and the constructive program as part of a successful nonviolent liberation struggle.

And I discovered the ICNC and the many YouTube videos produced by them.  These videos, produced between 2010 and 2016, were a source of fascinating information, deep insight, and hope.  I am thinking especially of the videos from the yearly Fletcher Summer Institutes which were hosted by the ICNC, particularly the videos from the 2013 Fletcher Summer Institute.  That summer seminar featured seasoned veteran activists and leaders of liberation struggles from South Africa to Bolivia and beyond.  In watching those videos I got to (virtually) know such people as Oscar Olivera of Bolivia, who led the successful struggle of the citizens of Cochabamba against the Bechtel corporation in the Cochabamba water war.  And Mkhuseli Jack of South Africa, who played an integral role in the initial victorious anti-apartheid struggle there.  And the Reverend James Lawson, who played an integral role in some of the more coercive nonviolent boycotts which ended de facto segregation in the American South.  And Shaazka Beyerle, who has done extensive research into the use of civil resistance against state corruption.

Unfortunately, the ICNC stopped hosting its Fletcher Summer Institutes from 2017 onward.  (A rather interesting coincidence, given the start of the Trump presidency in 2017, no?)  But I was pleasantly surprised (or so I thought) when in 2018, I read on their website that they were hosting a free online course on civil resistance during the fall of that year.  I eagerly signed up, and was glad to be accepted.  What I thought I was getting into (even though at this time I had never heard of Zoom and did not know the role that videoconferencing would play in online instruction especially in the present moment) was an engaging, instructive, live series of videoconferences with renowned experts and practitioners.  In other words, I thought I had signed up for a chance to converse with and ask questions of people such as James Lawson, Mary Elizabeth King, Hardy Merriman, Jack DuVall, Peter Ackerman, Erica Chenoweth, Maciej Bartkowski, Shaazka Beyerle, and others who had become something of a constellation of guiding lights to me from 2017 onward.

Instead, I merely got to participate in a series of online forums which were moderated by people I had never heard of, so-called "activists" and academics who, it seems, had never led a successful movement in their lives.  One of the main moderators was a guy named Steve Chase, and another was a guy named Daniel Dixon.  Mr. Dixon is the gentleman I mentioned in an earlier post who suggested that sometimes violent and nonviolent movements can combine in ways which increase the synergistic effects of both.  As I mentioned in that post, all the available research strongly suggests otherwise!  When I mentioned that I disagreed, and that I wanted to learn how parallel institution-building works to strengthen a nonviolent movement, both Dixon and others kept mentioning the Zapatistas as an example of a struggle group which combined violence with parallel institution-building, and they suggested that I had much to learn from the Zapatistas.  They were right.  I learned that the Zapatistas lost to the Mexican army and had chosen to renounce violence.  End of discussion.

But the ICNC staffers kept throwing up the suggestion that there was some sort of room for violent actors in a successful strategic nonviolent liberation struggle.  An academic named Veronique Dudouet kept citing an article by some guy named Ben Case which suggested that "'...ignoring civilian violence or assuming that it is always and necessarily harmful to movements limits the analytical reach of civil resistance research'. He then uses the case of the Egyptian revolution to prove that sometimes the use of limited 'protestor violence' might prove beneficial to civil resistance..."  Not only this, but the focus of much of the discussion on these online forums was solely on protest as a resistance tactic.  (This was not surprising, since many of the forum participants who were Americans identified themselves with "Antifa.")  I expressed frustration at this, noting that relying solely on protests was leading to incidents of violence occurring every time people came together, and asking why this online "course" wasn't exploring some of the other 197 of Gene Sharp's 198 methods.  Steve Chase responded by suggesting that other tactics were not as "disruptive" as mass protest.  (I guess he never heard of the Montgomery bus boycott!)  And he held up himself as a good example of movement organizing in that he organized an anti-fascist rally which included some organizations that use violent protest tactics, but which were persuaded by him to not engage in violence during his rally.  As I wrote to him later, that move of his was like playing with matches in a paper house, since if the government had instituted a crackdown on protest groups, they could have arrested him because of his association with the violent group he worked with.

To make a long story short, I dropped out of this online "course" after about six weeks or so.  They had nothing to offer.  And later, in 2020, when I saw that ICNC staffers were teaching that there were situations in which property destruction could actually help a civil resistance movement, I was completely turned off to them (though not surprised).  (See also, "Civil Resistance Tactics In The 21st Century", pages 66-67.)  In short, if the ICNC staffers are genuine and sincere, they have to me become like a minor league baseball team run by toddlers.  Where are the heavy hitters of successful movement building whose faces I saw in those Fletcher Summer Institute videos?  Why is the advice of the ICNC so lame now?  Why does much of their most recent advice contradict the research, scholarship and guidance of successful practitioners of nonviolent liberation struggles over the years - including the advice which the ICNC used to give back when I regarded them with respect?

But perhaps the ICNC contains people who are not sincere.  Erica Chenoweth hugely popularized the application of scholarship to the study of civil resistance.  I still have great respect for her because her advice is most definitely not lame.  But in her wake, I am afraid that there are "scholars" who have arisen to study civil resistance not for the sake of helping the oppressed to liberate themselves, but rather to derail the liberation of the oppressed by misleading them.  In this, they are like many people nowadays who go to school in order to obtain advanced degrees in psychology and behavioral sciences - not to help those who are hurting, but to land lucrative jobs with tobacco companies, the Republican Party and other outfits whose success depends on misleading people and turning them into addicts.  Meanwhile, where are the builders who will construct a righteous parallel society in today's oppressive world?

From D to D, Chapter 5: Dealing With Infiltrators

This post is a continuation of my "study guide" and commentary on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp. In this series of posts, I have shortened the title of the book to From D to D. As I have said in previous posts, the consideration of this book is highly relevant for these times, in which those who support the supremacy of the world's dominant peoples have created a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by exploiting everyone else. Among the crimes committed by this select few was the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on the 6th of this month in an attempt to prevent Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris from being certified by the U.S. Congress as the legitimate winners of the U.S. Presidential election held in November of 2020.  Though that attempt failed, these who lust for their own supremacy are continuing to organize and to plot how they can maintain their own supremacy by disenfranchising, dispossessing and oppressing everyone else.  Therefore, it is up to us who are not counted among the "chosen few" to learn to organize ourselves in order to thwart the power of the few and to ensure the emergence of a world which is shared equally by all of its peoples.

A previous post in this series stated that a group of oppressed people who organize to nonviolently liberate themselves from oppression can exercise great power if they organize themselves and their struggle according to high moral and ethical principles combined with wise strategy. For these principles and this strategy can amplify the contrast between the oppressed struggle group and the members of the corrupt oppressor group. This combination of high principles and wise strategy is also the most effective means of shifting the balance of social power away from the oppressors. For this reason, oppressors who understand the power and potential of strategic nonviolent resistance are very interested in doing all they can to render that resistance ineffective.  The most recent post in this series explored the use of the agent provocateur as the tool of choice used by oppressors in order to render a nonviolent struggle ineffective.  

The power of a nonviolent movement derives from the high moral and ethical principles of the movement participants and from the resulting contrast between these participants and the members of the oppressive regime.  The greater this contrast is, the stronger the nonviolent movement and its actionists are.  Therefore the role of the agent provocateur is to infiltrate a nonviolent movement in order to tempt the members of that organization to commit violent or otherwise illegal activities (in order to discredit the organization and legitimize the use of State violence against its members), or to cause the organization to fall apart by making false accusations about certain of its members to the rest of the membership.  Some cases of the use of these agents were cited in the most recent post in this series.  There are certainly other cases as well.  (For further reading, you can start with "Thoughts on a Neglected Category of Social Movement Participant: The Agent Provocateur and the Informant," or, "Agents Provocateurs as a Type of Faux Activist," both by Gary T. Marx.  There are also the posts I have written about violent white infiltrators at Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.)  As a result of the activities of these agents over the last several months, broad American support for the right to engage in mass protest has been declining (although most of that decline has occurred among people who identify as Republican).

So then the natural question is, how can organizers of a movement or of a movement campaign guard against the threat of infiltrators?  I'd like to suggest that the answer to that question depends on the attitude which movement participants have toward the likely costs of living in truth.  For I believe, based on my reading of the Bible and of various books on the dehumanizing nature of oppression, that it is the duty of people everywhere to resist oppression, and therefore to resist the oppressor.  This is true even when such resistance is undertaken against one's own oppressors.  The Biblical command to love one's enemies does not negate the Biblical requirement for the oppressed to speak truth to power, including the power of their oppressors.  As Paulo Freire states in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the resistance against the oppressor by the oppressed is an act of love, in that this resistance provides the oppressor with an opportunity to recover his own humanity - a humanity which he damaged when he chose to become an oppressor.  This is why Harriet Beecher Stowe's depiction of the so-called "Christianity" of Uncle Tom is in fact not Christian.

But since this resistance is to be nonviolent, it takes on a certain character which requires certain  characteristics in and among the resisters. The nature of this resistance is captured in the Greek word hypomone (ὑπομονή, meaning "an act of remaining behind", "an act of holding out," "enduring to do"), and is illustrated by such New Testament passages as Revelation 3:7-13.  Resisters remain behind and hold out by holding forth the truth in the face of hostile and violent opposition.  Part of the resistance of these resisters consists of remaining nonviolent even as they resist.  (As it says in the Good Book, "Here is the hypomone and the faith of the saints.")  Because the nature of this resistance requires resisters to live in truth even though they will be punished for it, and to refuse to retaliate against the punishment, this kind of resistance requires a special courage - a willingness to abandon fear (even the fear of death), or at least to control fear so that it is not the overriding force controlling a resister.  This is pointed out by Gene Sharp in From D to D (pages 33-34), How Nonviolent Struggle Works (HNVSW) (pages 53-54, 62-64), and Part 3 of The Politics of Nonviolent Action (pages 456-458, 481-492).

Those who have not achieved this fearlessness and willingness to openly bear the cost of living in truth will be tempted to try to use secrecy and internal conspiracy to guard their movement against infiltration.  Such people may attempt to create movements that have a "healthy security culture" as described in an essay which appeared on the website of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict titled "Insider Threats: A Closer Look at Infiltrators and Movement Security Culture."  Such a "security culture" will inevitably limit the ability of potential participants to contribute as much as they are capable of contributing to the movement.  Such a culture will also hinder the democratic nature of what is supposed to be a movement for liberation, and will introduce a potentially authoritarian element into the movement, as in leaders telling subordinates to "Do x and y.  Don't ask why; just do it!  Because I said so!"  And there is the problem of what to do once an infiltrator is outed within a movement organization.  Will the infiltrator have gained access to sensitive information?  Will the information be of such a nature that "If I told ya, I'd have to kill ya"?  (Killing informers is not very non-violent, is it?!)  Note that there is a very, very high likelihood that the oppressor will be able to infiltrate your organization and obtain just such information, no matter how hard you try to prevent it.  It happened frequently during the anti-Tsarist uprisings in Russia in 1905, during some of the labor strikes in Britain and the United States in the 1800's and 1900's, and among the resisters against Nazi rule in World War Two.  Total secrecy is wickedly hard to achieve.  Lastly, how will movement secrecy limit the ability of movement organizers to build a truly strong, durable and intelligent mass movement?  Gene Sharp notes that during the history of the Indian liberation struggle against the British, campaigns that relied on secrets and conspiracies tended to collapse before they ever became powerful.

On the other hand, movement organizers can choose to build a movement that can survive, thrive and prevail even though the oppressor knows everything about it.  Building such a movement involves the following steps:

• Choose an ultimate strategic goal that is utterly good and utterly blameless.  For instance, if an ultimate goal of your movement is the creation of a society in which everyone has an equal share of the rights and resources needed to fulfill his or her own human potential, no one can legitimately object to that.  If on the other hand, your ultimate strategic goal is the creation of a society in which you get to indulge evil and harmful pleasures at the expense of others, try to be as secret in your intentions as possible, since if you are open about them, your intended victims will sooner or later begin to organize against you.  If your organization exists to harm others, beware also of infiltrators, since they will at the least tip off your intended victims!  
• Create a movement strategy that does not depend on secrecy for its success.  This will be easy if your movement goal is utterly blameless.  If on the other hand, you have formed an organization whose goals can be summarized by slogans such as "Child Molesters Of The World, Unite!" or "People for the Torture of Animals," creating a strategy that does not depend on secrecy will be much harder.
• Your movement goals and strategy should not involve physical harm, sabotage, or property destruction.  Then if informers or other agents discover it, they will not be able to accuse you of any intentions of wrongdoing.
• Your movement goals and strategy should include a road map for building up your oppressed brothers and sisters through your own self-reliance.  This will show that you are actively managing your own affairs for good, and will neutralize the oppressor's claims that you need to be oppressed because you are disorderly or shiftless or lazy.
• Once you have created your movement goals and strategy, make them known to as many people as possible.  This will put informers and other agents out of work, as there will be nothing left for them to inform on.  And if a provocateur comes to cause trouble, you can point to him and say, "Remember the strategy we publicized.  This man does not represent our brand!"  You will be believed if you have made your strategy open and have conducted yourself honorably and with high moral and ethical standards.  To quote Jawaharlal Nehru (a contemporary of Gandhi), "Above all, we had a sense of freedom and a pride in that freedom. The old feeling of oppression and frustration was completely gone.  There was no more whispering, no round-about legal phraseology to avoid getting into trouble with the authorities. We said what we felt and shouted it out from the house tops. What did we care for the consequences?  Prison? We looked forward to it; that would help our cause still further. The innumerable spies and secret-service men who used to surround us and follow us about became rather pitiable individuals as there was nothing secret for them to discover. All our cards were always on the table."  (Quote taken from HNVSW, pages 63-64.)  
• Do not seek to grow too quickly.  Quality is much more important than quantity at the beginning, and high quality is the most durable way to obtain high quantities of powerful participants.  This is yet another reason why the sort of hastily thrown-together mass protests that have characterized the second decade of the 21st century do not represent real power.  When one man teaches a small group, and that group learns its lessons well enough that each of its members can in turn skillfully teach others, you have the beginnings of real power.

Such openness will aid the creation of a movement that is extremely durable and powerful.  On the other hand, a climate of secrecy not only promotes fear and dampens the movement, but it also makes the movement vulnerable to the second kind of agent provocateur: the infiltrator who sabotages a movement by spreading false accusations against movement leaders in order to foster distrust between the members of a movement organization.  This is why when Cesar Chavez began organizing what would become the United Farm Workers Union, he rejected secrecy and made his organization open.  

P.S. For an example of the hypomone mentioned above, consider the case of Clarence Jordan and Koinonia Farm during the 1950's and 1960's.  Jordan was a white evangelical preacher - yet when you consider what he did and what he stood for, you can see that he really "got" Christianity, because he was a real Christian.  Too bad that the modern white American evangelical church no longer has such people as Clarence and his wife Florence.

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.