The Urgent Need for Conscientização

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I haven't stopped thinking about the depiction of the process of liberation-in-action described in Chapters 8 and 9 of Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D).  Those who have read my last few posts on his book know that I have been particularly focused on how the building of parallel institutions and a parallel society by and for communities of the oppressed is a necessary part of a successful liberation struggle by the oppressed.  As Gene Sharp says in Chapter 1 of From D to D, "A liberation struggle is a time for self-reliance and internal strengthening of the struggle group."  (Emphasis added.)  And in Chapter 9, he writes, "Combined with political defiance during the phase of selective resistance, the growth of autonomous social, economic, cultural and political institutions progressively expands the 'democratic space' of the society and shrinks the control of the dictatorship. As the civil institutions of the society become stronger vis-a-vis the dictatorship, then, whatever the dictators may wish, the population is incrementally building an independent society outside of their control..."  (Emphasis added.)

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

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

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

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

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

Parallel Institution-Building As The Answer To The Anti-Vaxx/Anti-Mask Crowd

I've been thinking over the last few days about the ongoing menace posed to American public health by the anti-vaxx/anti-mask arm of the American right wing.  This has been provoked by my encounter with staff at a couple of chain stores who informed me that their corporate offices have instructed store staff not to enforce state-imposed mask mandates.  Other things of notice have been the stories - both in the news and from other bloggers - of anti-vaxx/anti-mask agitators infiltrating churches and disrupting the opening of public schools.  This is noteworthy because the Delta variant of COVID-19 is especially damaging to young people.

So what if you actually believe in science and would like to be guided by evidence-based scientific recommendations for keeping safe from the pandemic?  What if, moreover, you are bloody sick and tired of the tantrums of the American right wing?  I have the following suggestions.

First, understand the motivation by that right-wing tantrum-throwing.  The tantrum is motivated by the frustrated desire for white supremacy and total domination.  This desire was frustrated on account of the 2020 Presidential election, which the chosen emblem and embodiment of supremacy lost by over six million votes.  Therefore, the deluded followers of this orange-haired emblem are busy throwing the most destructive tantrum they can legally (or semi-legally) get away with.  The Capitol insurrection went over the line, so they are playing it safe by merely trying to hold the health of the rest of us hostage.

Second, understand that these people are able to pose a medical threat only because we and they share many of the same physical spaces as part of our daily routine.  If you choose, you can join with like-minded citizens to change that fact.

Third, start changing that fact!  Are you concerned that the anti-vaxx/anti-mask crowd will threaten the health of your kids at school?  Then find like-minded parents and pull your kids out of school - at least for a while, and maybe permanently.  You can start homeschooling clubs.  In fact, in all 50 states, parents have a legal right to homeschool their kids.  Are you worried about going to the store?  Then organize a buyers' co-op and only invite people whom you can trust, who are willing to show proof of vaccination and are willing to wear a mask at all times when they are around you.  In other words, reduce the points of contact between you and the right-wing nutcases as much as possible.  

I must warn you, though, that if you do this, it will involve some elbow grease and some sweat equity on your part.  I must also warn you that if you do this, you can expect the agents of the American right to try to stop you - especially if you live in a red state.  For as Marshall Ganz has said, systems of oppression always depend on those whom they exploit.  But if you're not afraid of a fight (a fight which you fight by means of strategic nonviolent resistance!), then you can cause a major disruption and have a blast in the process.  For if enough people do this, we can stop this anti-vaxx/anti-mask foolishness dead in its tracks.  Because those who allow or promote anti-vaxx/anti-mask nonsense will start losing some serious folding money.

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?

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, Chapters 8 and 9: How The Straight Subverts The Crooked

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. Although these who wish to dominate suffered a serious electoral setback in the United States in 2020, they have not given up their dreams of supremacy.  Therefore we are still in a state of conflict, and those of us who are not rich and not white are still under threat.  The threat we face can be most effectively neutralized by strategic nonviolent resistance.  Because of the strategic element of strategic nonviolent resistance, the last several posts have focused on the need for struggle groups to understand and develop wise strategy.  Of those posts, the last few have discussed the consequences of bad strategy.  Today's post will attempt to explain what happens when strategy is done right.

So what should be the ultimate aim of an oppressed people?  Some would say that it is to convert oppressors so that the oppressed can live in peace within a society that is still owned by the oppressors.  But a much more radical goal is the creation of a society which is no longer under the control of oppressors at all.  This occurs through campaigns both of selective resistance and of collective self-reliance which create and progressively expand the social and political space within which oppressed people can manage their own affairs.  The staged, incremental expansion of this space shrinks the control of the oppressors.  To quote Gene Sharp, "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."

To illustrate this process and its strategy, I'm going to quote a few verses from the Good Book.  In particular, 1 Peter 2:13 says the following: "Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether to a king as the one in authority, or to governors as sent through him for the punishment of evildoers and the praise of those who do right."  Now what is interesting is the word translated "institution."  In the original Greek, that word is κτίσις ("ktisis"), which literally means, "founding", "settling", "creation", "created thing", or "created authority."  Now here's the thing.  First, we are commanded to submit to every human created authority.  That includes the structures of authority which oppressed people create to govern themselves.   

Second, note the purpose of our submission, which is to do right, as noted in the next two verses: "For such is the will of God that by doing right you may silence the ignorance of foolish men.  Act as free men, and do not use your freedom as a covering for evil, but as bondslaves of God."  This brings up an interesting question, namely, how to respond when any one or more of the manmade structures of authority to which we are to submit commands us to do wrong.  The answer to that question is given in 1 Peter 2:18-20: "Servants, be submissive to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and gentle, but also to those who are crooked.  (Note that the original Greek word here is σκολιός, or "skolios", and it means curved, bent, or crooked.)  For this finds grace, if for the sake of conscience toward God a man bears up under sorrows when suffering unjustly.  For what credit is there if, when you sin and are slapped or punched, you endure it with patience?  But if when you do what is right and suffer you patiently endure it, this finds grace with God."

Two things should be mentioned about this passage: first, that those Bible translators who translate "skolios" merely as "unreasonable" or "harsh" or "cruel" are missing the point of this passage.  For it is entirely possible for employees, subjects, or servants to get along famously with a boss whom the Bible would describe as "crooked."  All they have to do is to twist their souls, their morals, and their ethics to conform to the boss's crookedness.  Those who have worked in abusive workplaces or who have served in abusive churches or who have been part of crooked governments know this well.  Just look at the staff (especially the senior, most highly-placed staff) of Enron, of Goldman Sachs, of British Petroleum, of Hillsong Church, of Mars Hill Church, of the Assemblies of George Geftakys, of the Honor Academy, of the Republican Party, of the administration of former President Trump, of the corrupt government of Vladimir Putin.  If the devil wears Prada, then the best way to avoid suffering is to make sure that you dress likewise!

But if you're not a sycophant and you don't want to wear hellish clothing, then you will suffer - that is, you will get into trouble for doing the right thing - and you need to prepare yourself for it.  For the Good Book commands us to continue to go straight even when those in authority over us tell us to go crooked.  This means that our commitment to the straight will lead to civil disobedience.  Note that Simon Peter, the author of the passages I've been quoting in this post, was himself a jailbird on a number of occasions - as seen in Acts 4 and 5, (where he was beaten for his civil disobedience) as well as 2 Peter 1:13-14 in which Peter wrote of his impending martyrdom.  And civil disobedience for the sake of doing right becomes disruptively powerful when it is done collectively.  

The key then to creating a collective movement of civil disobedience is for the oppressed to create for themselves structures of authority, of collective self-reliance, and of collective expressions of the common good which are more righteous than those of the oppressor.  By doing so, those who are part of such collectives will be pledging themselves to go straight in ways that run completely counter to the crookedness of the oppressor's society.  And in a contest between the crookedness of the oppressor and the straightness to which the collective of the oppressed aspires, the winner of our submission will then be our collective straightness.  It is this creation and progressive expansion of these "spheres of straightness" which leads to long-term shifts in the balance of power in a society.  And when the oppressor reacts to this society-building with violent oppression, the oppressed are to deprive that oppression of its power by a response of nonviolence and non-retaliation (1 Peter 2:18-25).  It is this non-retaliation which aids the process of backfire or political jiu-jitsu.  

This sort of institution-building - this creation of a righteous parallel society - is much more effective than merely getting a bunch of people together to do a mass protest march.  And it is much harder to hijack.  Moreover, it can start very small.  A completely secular example of this is the permaculture movement, especially as articulated by David Holmgren.  I am thinking especially of an interview Holmgren granted to Scott Mann of the Permaculture Podcast in 2013, in which he stated his view that the best way to start a revolution (in a positive sense!) is to create working, replicable small-scale models of the attractiveness, viability and success of a revolutionary lifestyle.  However, he believed it is a waste of time simply to get a large group of people together to "shout more loudly" at the holders of power in order to pressure them to pull the levers of power in the ways demanded by the shouters.  In other words, it is a better use of our time to build local expressions of the world we do want than to agitate in mass protest to try to stop the world we don't want.  This mindset can also be seen in the insistence by Mohandas Gandhi on the importance of the "constructive program" and the development of swaraj (that is, "self-rule") as an essential part of strategic nonviolent resistance.  And this mindset was a prominent part of the Polish nonviolent resistance against the Russian-backed Jaruselski dictatorship in the 1980's.

Let's conclude by mentioning some possible hindrances to the creation of this kind of liberated space.  First, there is the hindrance of ignorance.  This is why it is essential for those in a struggle group to read books!  Read the history, theory and practice of strategic nonviolent resistance!  Second, there is the hindrance of passivity - a passivity of victims who refuse to acknowledge that the continuance of their victimhood is their own fault, and who therefore refuse to take it upon themselves to begin their liberation.  An outgrowth of this passivity is "Uncle Tom-ism," the motive behind the continued selling out of struggle leaders by members of oppressed groups who refuse to take responsibility for their own lives and who look to their masters for a little extra spending money.  (Do thirty pieces of silver sound about right?)  Remember that the Good Book commands us to come out of Babylon, not to sell ourselves or each other to Babylon or to "try to get ahead in an oppressive system" as someone said to me a few years back.  Those who continue to lean on Babylon for support can best be described as "shiftless", a word which Charles Payne used in his book I've Got The Light of Freedom to describe the Uncle Toms and Aunt Tammys whose actions threatened to undermine the work of SNCC in the Mississippi voter registration struggles of the late 1950's and early 1960's.

But some would say, "Well, our people have been oppressed so long that we can't create spaces of self-determination for ourselves!"  As an African-American, I am mindful of African-Americans who say this about our people.  My answer is this: the Indians prior to Gandhi were at least as bad off as many of us, and yet under Gandhi's leadership, they won the freedom to rule themselves.  Let us not be shiftless.

From D to D, Chapter 3 (Continued): The Social Movement Organization

 

Today's post continues our discussion of Chapter 3 of the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp.  This will be the last post that deals with Chapter 3.  The next post in this series will begin to cover Chapter 4.  The book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D) teaches how oppressed peoples can use strategic nonviolent resistance to shatter the power of their oppressors.  This knowledge is especially appropriate for these days, in which a number of racist, White supremacist and Global Far Right leaders have in the last decade come to power in many nations, including the United States, where Donald Trump was illegally helped into his seat of power by Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.  (The Russians helped many of the other authoritarian strongmen come to power as well.)  Mr. Trump has clearly and legally lost the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, yet he is refusing to concede his loss and he is resisting being ejected from the seat of power which he has occupied (a seat which he has been soiling) for the last four years.  Therefore, it is quite possible that oppressed people in the United States will have to use the methods of strategic nonviolent resistance in order to achieve regime change right here in the U.S.A.

Chapter 3 of From D to D explains how an oppressed population can shatter the power of a dictator or oppressor by the mass withdrawal of political and economic cooperation from the oppressor's regime.  But that noncooperation works best when it is exercised 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 listed a number of normally independent groups and institutions which are also normally apolitical, such as families, gardening clubs, sports clubs, musical groups, and the like.  As noted in an earlier post in this series, in order for such normally apolitical groups to become part of a strategic nonviolent resistance movement, they must be politicized or co-opted by movement organizers.  

But the organizers must also know how to build organizations from scratch.  And the organizers of a movement of strategic nonviolent resistance against oppression will want to build organizations whose main purpose from the outset is to contribute to the liberation struggle.  Such organizations are called social movement organizations.  To learn more about how these work, we will today consider the teachings of Saru Jayaraman (who is featured in the video above, in which she gave a lecture to the Resistance School Berkeley), Sidney Tarrow, Asef Bayat, and Marshall Ganz.  I will try to summarize below some of the key points in the video lecture which Saru gave in her lecture.

So first, what is organizing?  Many people today who talk of organizing use the term to refer to getting  a bunch of people together for a short-term, limited engagement like a protest march or rally.  However, according to those who study organizing, the correct term for such activity is actually mobilizing and not organizing.  Similarly, get-out-the-vote drives are not really organizing, but mobilizing, as are such activities as getting people to sign petitions or getting people to click on an Internet link, or to put bumper stickers on their cars.  

Another activity that is often called organizing is getting people who are well-off and who have disposable income and free time to advocate for people who are not well-off.  But again, students of organizing would not call this organizing, but activism or advocacy.  This is because the people who are active are usually people with power and resources who are active on behalf of those without power and resources, and the people with power therefore assume that the people without power have no agency over their own lives.  Advocacy and activism can also be expressed in the providing of services, in which the people without power are provided with things like clothing, food, educational programs, and the like - things which are normally denied to the people without power because of the structural imbalances between the people with power and the people without power.

Activism, services and mobilizing have their place.  But they by themselves do not fundamentally shift the imbalance of power between the powerful and the powerless that causes the deprivations suffered by the powerless in the first place.  This can only be done by organizing, which Saru defines as "collective action led by the people most affected [by the power imbalance], in which the people most affected are engaging in direct action targeting those with power."  The people most affected by institutional racism in the United States are the people who are not white.  The people most affected by U.S. immigration policies and by the immigration policies enacted by nations aligned with the Global Far Right are the people who live in countries whose economies and societies have been trashed by the United States and by the nations of the Global Far Right.  The people most affected by mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex are those people who have been locked up (either through excessive sentencing or through wrongful conviction), and their families.  The people most affected by the collapse of the power of organized labor in the United States are the people who have to work low-wage jobs in dangerous conditions - for instance, people who work for Amazon, or who work in meatpacking plants.

According to Saru, "direct action means face-to-face action that involves risk.  [It is] direct confrontation, meaning face-to-face confrontation with a target who has the power to make the decision that affects the people who are most affected...When I say risky I mean that they are doing something that actually involves them showing that they are willing to stand up physically and in a live space."  It is this kind of action that challenges and shifts an unjust power structure.  So when the British who ruled India decreed that Indians could only buy British goods for which the Indians had to pay British taxes, Gandhi and his followers engaged in the physical act of boycotting British salt by making their own.  This was a action by the people most affected, and it involved risk even though it was nonviolent.  This action also challenged the existing power structure, and was the beginning of the crumbling of that power structure.  This action also was the beginning of Indians winning concrete improvements in their lives.  A social movement organization is therefore a group composed of and led by the people most affected, "who are engaged in direct, collective action against those in power but with the goal of winning concrete improvements in people's lives and challenging the power structure."

According to Sidney Tarrow, this collective action must be sustained collective action in order to be considered the basis of a social movement.  To quote Saru again, "So, according to Tarrow, a social movement occurs when people with limited resources - in our world, we call that the people most affected - are able to sustain - that word is important - contentious actions in conflict with powerful opponents."  (Emphasis mine.)  Social movement organizations are the basis of social movements; therefore, social movement organizing is much more than just organizing a march or a petition drive or a mouse click campaign.  For a social movement organization is a collection of people who are willing to work together collectively in a sustained manner in order to shift the balance of power between themselves and powerful opponents.

Now the work of a social movement organization is not just to engage in sustained collective action as an organization, but to create an environment in which, according to Saru, "something else happens and gives way to a much broader, much wider movement in which many more people...who are not affiliated with any organization...are suddenly across a very wide swath of society engaging in contentions actions over a long period of time."  When the social movement organizations trigger this kind of sustained societal shift in behavior, that's when a social movement is born.  These movements, are, however, built on the ongoing, patient work of social movement organizations.  It is a series of patiently accumulated small steps and small victories which lead to the big breakthrough movement moments.  

The necessary initial work of a social movement organization must first be to teach the people most affected to begin to reclaim agency over their lives.  This is done by building structures of self-reliance.  As Gene Sharp says in Chapter 1 of From D to D, "A liberation struggle is a time for self-reliance and internal strengthening of the struggle group."  Therefore, the movement organization must begin to build its own means of taking care of the needs of its members.  To illustrate this, let's look at some of the demands of some of the Black Lives Matter chapters in the United States.  One of those demands is the demand for equal access to quality education for Black and Brown children.  But the people who have set up inequitable systems of education did so for a reason.  Therefore, what makes BLM think that these people will respond to the demand of the people most affected to change these systems?  Instead of demanding decency and humanity from people who don't have any, why doesn't BLM organize its own education system as a necessary prerequisite to organizing a crippling mass boycott of the system set up by the dominant culture?  When racist teachers who are part of punitive schools face empty classrooms, they learn quickly that their jobs are in danger!  Similarly, the low-wage workers who are employed by exploitative employers must begin to build the self-reliance they need in order to go without work for a while in the event of a strike.  Building self-reliance of this kind is not easy when you're being exploited, yet it has been done time after time by people who successfully liberated themselves.  The United Farm Workers did this very thing when they built the structures which enabled them to use strikes and boycotts against large California farms in the 1960's.  

The building of structures of self-reliance is also the means by which social movement organizers chip away at the legitimacy of the structures of the dominant culture.  For if the structures built by the powerless actually work better than the structures built by the powerful, people will start to notice!  Thus Asef Bayat, in his book Life as Politics, says "I envision a strategy whereby every social group generates change in society through active citizenship in their immediate domains: children at home and at schools, students in colleges, teachers in classrooms, workers in factories, the poor in their neighborhoods, athletes in stadiums, artists through their art, intellectuals through media, women at home and as public actors. Not only are they to voice their claims, broadcast violations done unto them, and make themselves heard, but also to take responsibility for excelling at what they do. An authoritarian regime should not be a reason for not producing excellent novels, brilliant handicrafts, math champions, world- class athletes, dedicated teachers, or a global film industry. Excellence is power; it is identity."  (Emphasis added.)

This concludes our study of the necessary groundwork that must be laid by the people most affected by oppression in today's world, the people most threatened by White supremacy, the Global Far Right, and the collection of strongmen who want to Make Their People Great Again by trashing all the other peoples on earth.  We will next begin a discussion of strategy.  However, I may also decide to write a post describing the Global Far Right in terms of a religious cult, and describe in that post how we might use some of the resources created by cult researchers such as Steve Hassan to reach out to those who are trapped in that cult mindset.

Being Positively Disruptive

As many readers may have noticed, I haven't spent much time in writing essays for this blog over the last three or four months.  You might also have guessed from this that I've been very, very busy.  While many people I know have been glued to their TV's, computers, and smartphones, addicted to the torrent of toxic drama, crazy-making and bad news being generated by a certain doofus with orange hair who now claims to be the President of the United States, I've been occupied with making some good news of my own.  Let me fill you in on the details.

First, the tutoring initiative in which I am involved, which I mentioned in this post and this one, is now expanding from one location to three. Our roster of teachers has both changed and grown.  I believe there are now thirteen of us, and more may be joining in the next few months.  While two of our groups are continuing to focus on basic mathematics, one group is developing a science curriculum aimed at teaching appropriate technology and self-sufficiency/sustainability in the context of developing alternative institutions.  That group is being led by a woman from an African-American/Asian background and a Native American woman, and they are writing a series of science experiments and activity packets aimed at youth from 10 to 20 years of age.  

And we have a fourth group composed of writers, who are developing and editing a math curriculum to be used by all of our groups, complete with workbooks and worksheets.  (As soon as I am done with this post, I will be working on addition and subtraction worksheets.  If idleness is the devil's workshop, I won't have to worry about getting into trouble for a long time!)

On another front, a group of us at work are planning to launch a campaign to collect donations for the Puerto Rican victims of Hurricane Irma.  I am thinking we will present the campaign as an opportunity to spend money for a good cause instead of spending money on holiday shopping.  We will also promote news sources that are providing accurate coverage of the situation in Puerto Rico, as opposed to many American news sources and the White House.  My goal is to provide a positive disruption in three ways:

• By providing concrete relief to people whom our current regime would like to starve,
• By shunting money away from the usual recipients in our consumer economy during this holiday season,
• And by providing ongoing evidence that our current regime and its President are illegitimate.

There are a lot of people where I work.  Let's see where this takes us...

Lastly, it looks like I may have a few opportunities over the next couple of months to talk about resistance and related topics in front of a few audiences.  It looks like my part in the resistance being mounted by oppressed people is likely to get quite a bit larger.

Catch-Up - September 2017

Here's a quick update on things.  I still have a few posts I need to write to finish my series on "The Revanchism of the Third Rome," but other things have lately been keeping me too busy to write.  Here's what is occupying my time:

• Tutoring and teaching math and language arts to families from marginalized populations.  Our group of tutors has expanded greatly within the last two months, and we are planning to go to at least two, and possibly three apartment complexes this fall.  We may even get to teach in people's homes, which would give a nice retro, counter-cultural feel to what we are doing - rather like this.
• Nonviolent resistance.  There are now well over fifty people with whom I have been in frequent contact over the last two or three weeks, and we are discussing the start of a boycott of holiday shopping (both for Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas/Hanukkah/whatever else), along with a general push for frugality among those now targeted by the current regime.  We want to serve up a steaming, heaping helping of economic non-cooperation this holiday season.  Stay tuned...

The Duty Of Active Citizenship

Here is another blatantly spiritual post.  But hey, it's Sunday (and I will be in church shortly), so I will indulge myself.

Lately I have been thinking rather much about the wide range of responses among the American public to the Trump presidency.  One response that has been somewhat troubling has come from certain seemingly well-meaning elements of the American church community - both home-grown and immigrant.  That response can be best summarized in the following statement: "We recognize that it is God who removes kings and sets up kings.  Therefore, we must recognize that it is God who has given Trump the presidency.  This means that we must not speak against the president whom God has given us."  Some carry this thinking even further, and say, "Just as God worked through flawed human beings in history to accomplish a greater purpose (as was the case with  Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus), even so God has raised up Trump to accomplish a greater purpose."  (See this also.)  The implication then becomes that the flaws and sins of Trump are no longer a legitimate point of criticism, since he is "the vessel whom God has chosen."  Some among this crowd even go as far as blatant appeals to Calvinist doctrine to teach that, since God is Sovereign, and since nothing happens apart from His sovereignty, we who have been the historical targets of oppression should not complain about the oppression which has been dished out to us, nor protest against the ascendancy of people who in the present day want to dish out extra helpings of the same oppression.

I say that such thinking is both flawed and dangerous, as it presents only a partial picture of the story.  One of the biggest missing pieces of that story is that God has given free will to both men and societies.  Another huge missing piece is the fact that God gives and allows things in response to the freewill choices of His creatures.  So when people fall under the grip of an oppressor, it may be that the appropriate response of the oppressed is not to absolve themselves of responsibility, nor to throw up their hands and say, "God is bringing us through trial as He did with Job, and we must not try to figure out the root causes of our suffering.  Perfecta es Tu voluntad para mi..."  Maybe what we should do instead is to ask ourselves how and where we dropped the ball and allowed this to happen.

So how then should believers look at life under oppressive political regimes? That is a huge question and it requires a huge answer.  And I don't have time to even begin to scratch the surface of that answer today, nor do I believe that I have the wisdom to provide a definitive answer all by myself.  However, I'll present a few of the thoughts that have come to me from thinking about this question over the last three months.

First, I believe that God has created us to fulfill a particular purpose, and that this purpose involves the full development of the humanity of every human being, as I wrote in a previous post.  The fulfillment of that purpose and calling involves the struggle of nonviolent conflict, because of the presence of oppressors and would-be oppressors who seek to make themselves rich by dehumanizing the rest of us.  How should we respond when the oppressors become the rulers of the land?  One clue to the answer to that question can be found in 1 Peter 2:13: "Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every human institution..."  The word translated "institution" is the Greek word κτίσις (ktisis), and it literally means, "creation (my emphasis), creature, institution..."  This is important.  For it means that we are called to submit to every created institution, not only to the institutions created by our oppressors, but to the institutions which the oppressed create in order to fulfill their ontogeny in spite of their oppressors.  For our submission to the institutions of our oppressors should extend only as far as we can obey without violating our duty to our higher calling.  Where the institutions - the creations - of our oppressors seek to violate that calling, we are responsible for creating new creations - new arrangements and parallel institutions - by which we may facilitate the fulfillment of our calling.  This is why anarchy is not a right response to oppression, for according to the Scriptures, "God is not a God of confusion but of peace."  When the oppressed create by themselves the creations - the arrangements and institutions - by which they may fulfill their calling in spite of their oppressors, this is an example of "active citizenship" as defined by Asef Bayat in his book, Life as Politics.

So then, why are "bad kings" given?  Why is it that peoples fall under the rule of oppressors?  For I have stated that the Bible teaches that God gives and allows things in response to the freewill choices of His creatures.  And it is true that God removes kings and sets up kings.  (See Daniel 2:21).  So what choices do oppressed people make that cause them to remain in victimhood to oppressors?  I submit that the answer is that the oppressed far too frequently become and stay oppressed through a failure of active citizenship.  I am thinking particularly of a quote from a book I recently got, Recovering Nonviolent History: Civil Resistance in Liberation Struggles, edited by Dr. Maciej Bartkowski.  On page 18 of the first chapter, Dr. Bartkowski quotes Syrian activist Abd al Rahman al-Kawakibi: "...people 'themselves are the cause of what has been inflicted upon them, and that they should blame neither foreigners nor fate (my emphasis) but rather ignorance (al-jahl), lack of endeavor (faqd al-humam), and apathy (al-taw kul), all of which prevail over society.'"  He also cites Polish philosopher Josef Szujski in his assertion that "...the guilt of falling into the predatory hands of foreign powers lay in the oppressed society and, thus, the solution and liberation need to come from that society transformed through its work, education, and civility. Victims and the seemingly disempowered are thus their own liberators as long as they pursue self-organization, self-attainment, and development of their communities."

This shows us where many societies, including the present United States, have gone wrong.  First, we fell victim to convenience - that is, in the words of Jack Duvall, we allowed ourselves to be rented by people who promised to relieve us of the duties of active citizenship in exchange for our support of the political aspirations of these people.  Their message was, "Let us do the dirty work of creating a healthy society.  After all, we are the experts and you are not.  (As our covfefe-in-chief once said, "I'm a genius!")  All you have to do is lend us your support by sending money to our political campaign and vote for us."  The flip side of that convenience is that we allowed ourselves to become addicted to convenience - that is, to a lifestyle which required no hard work, no thinking, no sacrifice for a larger good - but only the immediate gratification of our cravings and appetites.  In short, we became a society whose members aspired to be Ferris Bueller or a character from Happy Days when we grew up.  How fitting that Ferris Bueller's Day Off became a box office hit during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.  How perceptive also is Dr. Maciej Bartkowski's comment that the Ukraine fell back under the sway of corrupt dictatorship after the Orange Revolution because after that revolution, Ukrainians abandoned active citizenship and went back to watching TV.  

This also shows us where many "nonviolent resisters" in the United States are still going wrong.  They believe that the power of rulers over a society is a fixed, durable monolith, and they direct their efforts to arguing with the current owners of the monolith for control of the monolith, as Gene Sharp explained in his book The Politics of Nonviolent Action: Power and Struggle.  This is why their repertoire of strategy and tactics includes very little more than protest and persuasion (which might be termed a series of variations on the common tactic of loud complaining).  But movements which focus solely on complaining show a lack of confidence in their ability to take their affairs into their own hands.  These would-be resisters would do much better to stop arguing over control of an oppressive and unjust system and to devote themselves the much more effective work of active citizenship (starting with self-rule, self-control, and freeing oneself of degrading addictions), of building the parallel arrangements and institutions of a just society within the shadow of the wreckage of their present corrupt society.  Effective nonviolent resistance, whether in the United States or Russia or anywhere else, must be modeled on the spread of active citizenship and must not therefore rely on the presence of a charismatic leader who rents the support of the society by promising them that he will meet all their needs if only they will give him their support.

But I am sure that there are those who, after reading this, still think that Trump is a mysterious gift from an inscrutable Calvinist god, and not the fault and consequence of a nation guilty of wrong thinking.  Maybe among these people are those who will freeze to death this winter because even though they had money in the bank, they neglected to pay their heating bill.  Maybe their last dying sentence will be, "Perfecta es Tu voluntad para mi..."  But when they stand before the Judgment seat, they may hear, "You doofus!  Why didn't you pay your bills?"