From D to D, Chapter 4: Power Analysis

This post is a continuation of our commentary and "study guide" for 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.  The consideration of this book is highly relevant for these times, in which Donald Trump, a would-be autocrat and oppressor who wanted to Make America Great Again by trashing all the nonwhite people and poor people on earth, has lost his attempt to have the United States Supreme Court overturn his election loss.  Trump's late-game strategic goal has been the goal of the Republican Party and the Global Far Right for a very long time: namely, to create a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by exploiting everyone else.  Their strategic method has been to disenfranchise as many people as possible in order to cement the control of the "chosen few."  And although Trump's legal challenges have largely failed, the Republican Party is actively planning measures for further disenfranchisement of the poor and the nonwhite who live in the United States.  Therefore, it is up to us who are not counted among these "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.

We have been considering Chapter 4 of From D to D.  The title of Chapter 4 is "Dictatorships Have Weaknesses."  After a brief review of the weaknesses identified by Sharp, we discussed the fact that dictatorships have learned to adjust their tactics over the years, and that this highlights the need for democratic resisters to engage in a careful strategic analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the autocratic regimes they are resisting, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the democratic resistance group.  This strategic analysis is known by the terms "power analysis" and "power mapping" by students of community organizing.  

The basis of this analysis is the recognition that a ruling elite depends on the subjects whom it rules, and that the power which this elite exerts over its subjects is based on the extent to which the elite can make its subjects dependent on the elite.  This principle is stated in a number of Gene Sharp's writings, including his three-volume work titled, The Politics of Nonviolent Action.  A variant of this insight has also been stated by Marshall Ganz, who said that systems of oppression always depend on the people they exploit.  The relative degree of dependence of each side on the other side determines the relative power each side has over the other.  As Ganz says in his community organizing curriculum materials, if you need my resources more than I need your resources, I have potential power over you.  If I need your resources more than you need my resources, you have potential power over me.  Consider the case in which a few people hold control over a large body of resources needed by the many.  This is exactly the case when a rich but small elite holds power over a large mass of poor people.  Each member of the rich elite holds much more power per capita than each member of the poor masses.  However, if the members of the poor masses organize to withhold from the rich elite the aggregate fruits of their labor on which that rich elite depends, the poor masses can control, curtail, and even shatter the power of that rich elite.

Thus the first questions of a power analysis are these (taken from "Speaking of Power - the Gettysburg Project" by Marshall Ganz):

• What change do we want?
• Who has the resources to create that change?
• What do they want?
• What resources do we have that they want or need?
• What's our theory of change?  In other words, how can we organize our resources to give us enough leverage to get what we want?  Or, how will what we are doing lead to the change we want to see?  "Theory of change" is another term for strategy, which Gene Sharp discusses in Chapters 6 through 8 of From D to D.

Additional questions related to the existing exercises of power in a pre-existing oppressive society are these:

• Who usually wins?
• Who usually gets to set agendas?
• Who usually benefits or loses from the decisions of the powerful?

The answer to these three questions reveal to the democratic resisters the three faces of power as seen in the oppressed society prior to the beginning of a liberation struggle.  The third face of power frequently forms the psychological backdrop of an oppressive society, the understanding by the oppressed of "the way things just are."  All three faces must be challenged by those who resist an oppressive system.

The relations of power and dependence can be captured visually by means of a map of actors.  An example of such a map is shown below:

Map of actors.

Graphic created by me, adapted from the work of Marshall Ganz.

Click on it to make it larger.

Such a map is a great aid in tracing dependencies and beginning to identify the most promising points at which to begin a nonviolent attack against an oppressive regime.  This is key to the creation of a viable strategy which has the greatest chance of success.

Veteran organizer Jane McAlevey elaborates on the concept of power analysis (which she calls power structure analysis) in her book No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power In the New Gilded Age.  She makes the very important point that a key reason for power analysis is to map the power your side will need to generate in order to get the members of a rich elite to change goals that are very important to these elites.  To make this point, she quotes Joseph Luders' book The Civil Rights Movement and the Logic of Social Change, in which he asserted that "the most successful organizing drives in the civil rights movement...were those that carried high economic concession costs for the racist regime, that is, those by which movement actors could inflict a high degree of economic pain."  Therefore, a goal of mapping power is to determine first, how much it will cost the members of the elite to grant the demands of the resisters, and second, how much economic disruption and pain the resisters must inflict on the members of the elite in order to make the cost of that disruption greater than the cost to the elites of granting the resisters' demands.  Knowing how these two costs compare to each other before beginning a resistance campaign is key to beginning to formulate an effective strategy of disruption.

Lastly, the mapping of power and dependence serves as a starting point for the democratic resisters to strategize how to reduce their dependence on the ruling elite as much as possible.  This reduction of dependence further weakens the power the elite has over the oppressed society.

The next post in this series will begin to delve into Chapter 5 of From D to D.  Feel free to read ahead.  And feel free to read some of the books I mentioned in this post.  Also, here's a link to another community organizing study guide based on the teaching of Marshall Ganz.  And last, but not least, here's some homework: Study the Cochabamba Water War which took place in Bolivia in 1999 and 2000.  Here and here are sources which describe the conflict.  (Feel free to find other sources as well.)  See if you can identify a map of actors and their interests, resources, and dependencies.  How did the poor Bolivian peasants identify the Achilles' heel of their opponents?  How did they reduce their dependence on their opponents?

From D to D, Chapter 4: Dictatorships Have Weaknesses

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

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

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

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

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

WEAKNESSES OF DICTATORSHIPS

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

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

STRENGTHS OF DICTATORSHIPS

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

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

THE NEED FOR POWER ANALYSIS

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

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

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

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