The Poverty of Pivenism

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 a recent post, 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.

The success rate of nonviolent liberation struggles from 1900 to 2006 was over 50 percent, according to the book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan.  Indeed, during this period, "campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as successful as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals," according to the book's website.  Yet from 2010 onward the success rate of nonviolent struggle movements began to decline, as documented by articles such as "The Future of Nonviolent Resistance" by Erica Chenoweth, and "Nonviolent protest defined the decade. But is civil resistance losing its impact?" by Rupa Shenoy.  I would like to suggest that the decline continues to this day, in which the success rate has dropped to less than 34 percent - a distressing decline of 16 to 18 percent.  (Violent liberation struggles have shown an even worse decline in effectiveness, by the way.  Don't take out a loan to buy an assault rifle!)  The question then becomes, Why? What is causing the decline in the success rate of nonviolent resistance campaigns?

In her article "The Future of Nonviolent Resistance," Chenoweth posits a number of reasons for the decline in effectiveness of nonviolent resistance, including the following:

• Savvier responses by governments and other wealthy power-holders
• More entrenched oppressive power-holders who have proven to be resilient in the face of grassroots challenges to their power
• Increased use of brutal repression by these entrenched power-holders
• A change in the structure and capabilities of grassroots movements themselves (Emphasis added)

It is this last factor which I want to bring into sharper focus today, as I believe that it is the decisive factor in the decline of the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance movements.  What changes have taken place in grassroots movements over the last ten years?  According to Chenoweth, the first change is that these movements at their peaks tend actually to be smaller than the successful movements of decades past, both in total numbers and in percentage of the population which participates in them.  This is because the organizers of present-day movements tend to neglect the long-term relationship-building and building of organizational capacity required for a movement to achieve real staying power.  Instead, they do what comes easiest to them: putting together large mass demonstrations and protest marches which can easily be organized by digital social media and which throw a large number of total strangers together in the same place on short notice.  Because these total strangers have not had time to develop a shared story, much less a shared strategy, it is easy for governments and other wealthy power-holders to throw a few violent agents provocateurs into the mix.  And when protest organizers tolerate violent actors or at least are not willing to exercise the discipline needed to separate their movements from the violent actors, the likelihood of increased mass participation in the protests decreases.  (As I have said in recent posts, this comes down to the lack of education and training of the would-be leaders of protest movements.  They need to read some books!)

These weaknesses are characteristic of all the recent "leaderless", "structureless", supposedly "cutting-edge" protest movements of the last decade.  This is why I tend to gag and retch every time I read some article or opinion piece put forth by a media outlet which praises these "leaderless", "structureless" movements as some smart wave of the future.  They're not!  Their weaknesses have not only been abundantly documented by Erica Chenoweth, but also by Zeynep Tufekci, both in her book Twitter and Tear Gas and in a TED talk she gave a few years after the rise and fall of the Occupy protests.  Yet these sorts of leaderless, hastily thrown-together movements which focus almost exclusively on mass protest seem to be the darlings of many a wanna-be movement leader today - especially if that "leader" or those "leaders" identify as "Millennials" or younger who supposedly "don't like structure."

One thing to note is that almost all widely-held popular ideas have a history, a lineage of development.  That includes widely-held bad ideas.  So what is the history of this particularly bad idea, and of the ineffective and incompetent "movements" which have resulted from it?  To answer that question, I want to refer to a book that came out in 2016, and whose paperback edition came out in 2017.  (2017 seems to have been a good year to write books on resistance.  I wonder why...)  The book is This Is An Uprising by Mark Engler and Paul Engler.  And in case the Englers are reading this post, let me warn you in advance that I'm going to throw a few (metaphorical) rocks at your book.  To quote Jimmy Wong, "Please do not find offensive!"

Chapter Two of their book is titled, "Structure and Movement," and its opening sentences read thus: "Two schools stand at opposite poles of thinking about how grassroots forces can promote social change.  Each has a champion."  The chapter then sets forth these two champions, namely Saul Alinsky versus Frances Fox Piven.  The chapter begins to describe Alinsky thus: "Alinsky was a guru in the art of the slow, incremental building of community groups.  Like organizers in the labor movement, his approach focused on person-by-person recruitment, careful leadership development, and the creation of stable institutional bodies that could leverage the power of their members over time...this approach can be described as one based on 'structure.'"  The chapter begins to describe Piven thus: "Piven, in contrast, has become a leading defender of unruly broad-based disobedience, undertaken outside the confines of any formal organization.  She emphasizes the disruptive power of mass mobilizations that coalesce quickly...In contrast to the structure-based approach of labor unions and Alinskyite groups, her tradition can be dubbed 'mass protest.'"

While Chapter Two does try to present a balanced comparison of the two approaches, it is guilty of a bit of distortion of the concept of a movement and of the role of a social movement organization as a catalyst for social movement.  (The social movement organization is a topic which I covered in this post.)  For it seems to paint those who follow the Alinskyite tradition as people who value organization over movement, and thus fails to recognize that it is organizations which give birth to movements.  Chapter Two quotes an Alinskyite organizer who accurately saw Martin Luther King as a "one-trick pony" who relied too much on dramatic mass marches and not on slow, patient capacity-building via sustained organization.

Chapter Two seems to treat Frances Fox Piven more favorably than Saul Alinsky, citing, for instance, a book titled Poor People's Movements by Piven and by Richard Cloward which analyzed some of the disruptive social movements of the 1930's, 1950's, and 1960's.  These movements are cited as proof that poor people who are willing to be disruptive can achieve far more in a short time than those who seek to build organizational structures among the poor.  It's time for a full disclosure statement: I must admit that I haven't yet read Piven's book.  However, what the Englers say about her matches what other sources have said about her teachings and writings.  And if she really holds such a position, I would like to gently suggest that she is glossing over the role that social movement organizations such as the CIO or SNCC had in the movements she cited.  

The "Pivenist" approach (at least, as I understand it) certainly has led to some impressive mobilizations, from the Gezi Park protests in Turkey to the Occupy protests and occupations in the United States to the mass protests of the Arab Spring.  Yet the failures of these mobilizations have also been impressive - perhaps even breathtaking.  One particularly poignant and tragic failure is the failure of the Egyptian revolution to bring about a democratic government, and the loss of all which that mobilization initially achieved.  A sign both ironic and hopeful is the fact that in the aftermath, movement organizers have begun to return to the need for sustained organizing as the means of building power for lasting change.  The Englers note that leaders of the original April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt have begun to focus on building alternative institutions, and that "the 2011 uprising has unleashed a spirit of communal self-determination that cannot easily be subdued."  A further irony is that in connection with the ultimate failure of the Egyptian revolution, the Englers first mention the term "alternative institutions" in their book.  Alternative institutions are one of the most disruptive long-term tools of an oppressed people in a nonviolent liberation struggle - yet the Englers mention them only once.  And their book never defines or discusses them further.  Alternative - or "parallel" institutions - are a pillar of the Gandhian strategy of swaraj, which is why they are a prominent part of his constructive program.  The fact that the Englers mention them only once without explaining their significance is a real shame.  

And so we come back to what I consider to be an accurate and viable roadmap of nonviolent revolution, namely 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 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.  Sounds a lot better than Pivenism to me - especially when I see the successful track record of the approach outlined by Sharp.  The approach of Sharp was the approach used by Gandhi and his associates in organizing a successful liberation struggle among dirt-poor Indians.  If they could liberate themselves, none of the rest of us have any excuses for our continued oppression.  This includes those of us in the African-American community!

Yet there are those who know the weaknesses and failures of Pivenism, but who still promote her approach as a valid strategy of collective nonviolent resistance.  I will examine who some of these people are and what I believe to be some of their motives in the next post in this series.

From D to D, Chapters 6 & 7: What You Do With What You Have

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. The poor of the earth experience this exploitation as enslavement, discrimination, harassment, dispossession, and the threat of genocide. Many live as refugees. Theirs is an experience of apparent utter powerlessness in the face of an all-consuming, murderously abusive power. Yet the poor of the earth do have at their disposal a "weapons system" and a strategic method which holds the promise to liberate them from their oppression if they dare to use it. That means of liberation is strategic nonviolent resistance.

The previous post in this series explored the role of grand strategy in the exercise of strategic nonviolent resistance.  We noted that the concept of grand strategy is part of the strategic framework which nations use in order to achieve their highest and most important goals.  Specifically, grand strategy is the art of arranging all the resources of a state or polity to achieve its goals.  We also noted that national governments have the ability to compel their citizens or subjects to give their resources for the support of the nation's grand strategy.  This compulsion can come in the form of taxes or compulsory national service such as being drafted into the military.  However, this ability to compel is not available to those who live under oppression and who seek to liberate their people from that oppression through strategic nonviolent resistance.  You may be part of an oppressed group of people and you may be moved to try to organize a nonviolent liberation struggle.  Yet you cannot force your brothers and sisters to join your movement or to give their resources to support your grand strategy.  What you can do, however, is to craft a compelling "vision of tomorrow" to set in front of your people - a vision that concretely describes where we should all want to go and how we will try to get there.

And there is a second thing you can do.  Let's repeat Gene Sharp's definition of grand strategy here:

Grand strategy is the conception that serves to coordinate and direct the use of all appropriate and available resources (economic, human, moral, political, organizational, etc.) of a group seeking to attain its objectives in a conflict. Grand strategy, by focusing primary attention on the group’s objectives and resources in the conflict, determines the most appropriate technique of action (such as conventional military warfare or nonviolent struggle) to be employed in the conflict. In planning a grand strategy resistance leaders must evaluate and plan which pressures and influences are to be brought to bear upon the opponents. Further, grand strategy will include decisions on the appropriate conditions and timing under which initial and subsequent resistance campaigns will be launched. (Emphasis added.)

Here's the thing.  As Gene Sharp pointed out in Part 3 of his work The Politics of Nonviolent Action, "Rarely, if ever, does either the nonviolent or the opponent group include the whole 'population,' or group of people, whom they purport to represent or serve.  In a given nonviolent campaign the active participants are usually a relatively small percentage of the whole population in whose interests the nonviolent group claims to be acting." (Emphasis added.)  This "relatively small percentage" needs to develop its own grand strategy, its own plan that serves to coordinate and direct the use of all the resources at its own disposal in order to attain its objectives in its struggle.  In other words, the struggle group itself needs to develop a plan for how it will coordinate and use its own resources in building a successful long-range liberation struggle.

There are two things to note in considering the grand strategy of a struggle group.  First, it is a well-known historical fact that many successful movements have been created by small groups of people with few resources.  The fact that these movements were successful in bringing about large changes in societies shows the skill of these small groups in developing a wise grand strategy for the use of their own resources in bringing about these large changes.  One example of this is the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), whose members went into Mississippi to desegregate centers of white power and to win the right of African-Americans to vote and participate in electoral politics without fear of violence.  The story of SNCC is told in books such as I've Got The Light Of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle by Charles M. Payne, PhD.  The story of SNCC also partly refutes Doug McAdam's assertion that political movements emerge only where the dominant power structures allow "political opportunities."  For the white supremacists who controlled Mississippi at that time fought very hard (and violently!) to thwart the efforts of the SNCC organizers.  Yet SNCC won.

From this observation comes the corollary observation that the long-range outcomes produced by a social movement organization are a reflection and embodiment of its grand strategy.  Some groups have access to many resources, yet they produce meager or worthless results.  Other groups are small and have few resources, and they work under extremely threatening circumstances - yet they change their societies.  And sometimes they change the world.  I argue that the difference in outcomes comes down to a difference in grand strategy.

What then is this difference?  I would argue that it may just be possible that the difference comes down to a basic difference in motivation, a difference in desire.  And I'd like to suggest that in so-called social movement organizations that have existed for a long time, we can see in many cases a certain corruption of desire.  The reasons for this are found in the third chapter of Doug McAdam's book Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency 1930 - 1970, in which he lists three dangers which are faced by a social movement organization: oligarchization, co-optation, and dissolution of indigenous support.  

Oligarchization refers to the way in which the leaders of social movement organizations can tend to forget over time that the reason why their organization exists in the first place is to make a needed change.  They then start to think that the only reason why their organization exists is to exist, and that the leaders' job is simply to make sure that the organization keeps existing.  Co-optation is what happens when a social movement organization forgets that a key to the liberation of an oppressed people is the building of self-reliance among the oppressed.  Once the organization's leaders forget this, they start begging for funding (or applying for nonprofit status) from resource-rich members of the members of the dominant culture.  But they forget (or willfully blind themselves to the fact) that he who pays the piper gets to call the tune.  Therefore in receiving or asking for funding, the leaders of an indigenous social movement organization tend quickly to abandon the disruptive original goals of the social movement.  By being bought off, they cease to be a threat to an unjust status quo.  Dissolution of indigenous support is what then happens when a social movement organization has allowed itself to be oligarchized and co-opted.  For the people most affected by injustice - the people on whose behalf the social movement organization originally came into existence - will now look at that organization and correctly conclude that it has become a bunch of worthless Uncle Toms (and Auntie Tammys).

This is why I'm not terribly impressed with the NAACP anymore or with many other historic Black social movement organizations which have survived to this day.  For when Aiyana Stanley Jones was shot in her own bedroom - and when Trayvon Martin's murderer was acquitted - and when the long spate of publicly witnessed and recorded police and vigilante murders of unarmed African-Americans ensued - and when the Trump presidency was busy committing its own atrocities - I would have expected that these organizations should have been able to mount a nonviolent, yet extremely coercive response that could have stopped this garbage in its tracks.  Instead, I was reading news articles that described the NAACP as "moribund".  (This is not a new criticism, by the way!)  At the same time, it was revealed that a White woman had risen to the leadership of a chapter of an organization that existed supposedly to solve problems faced by the Black community, namely, the NAACP!

I would suggest therefore that many historically Black social movement organizations have become moribund, and thus worthless.  In this, they mirror a broader phenomenon which has taken place in the American labor movement, in which certain unions which had come into existence decades ago as extremely scrappy and coercively powerful organizations were transformed over time into toothless "business unions."  But I would also like to suggest that social movement organizations that become worthless in this way face a danger.  This danger comes because their "grand strategy" has degenerated into a strategy of merely trying to continue existing and to keep obtaining funding in order to pretend to fight for the people they claim to represent.  This is then their way of "making the best of a bad situation" by profiting from that situation.  But what if the bad situation suddenly disappears?

I am thinking now of the Cold War and of the thriving and wealthy American defense industry which resulted from it.  If you talked with many employees of defense plants of that era, they would have told you that "war is good for the economy."  Clearly their career plans had been built on a strategy of "making the best" of a long-term bad situation.  Yet there were people in the Soviet Empire who were tired of this bad situation.  Among these were the Solidarnosc organizers in Poland, and the organizers of pro-democracy and liberation movements in other satellite countries.  They did not want to "make the best" of a bad situation.  Instead, they wanted to end that situation.  

And they succeeded.  This caused a massive disruption of the American defense industry.  I suggest that it was a contributing cause of the recession of the early 1990's which took place in the United States.  One of the casualties of the collapse of the Cold War was the Hughes Aircraft Company plant in Fullerton, California.  That plant (called the "Huge Aircrash Company" by some employees) occupied several acres of land in the Sunny Hills part of Fullerton, and employed thousands of people.  In 1990, it lost its raison d'etre.  It is now a bunch of supermarkets and big box stores.

From D to D, Chapter 5: Dealing With Infiltrators

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.