Spontaneous? Or Successful?

Among the many essays and opinion pieces that have been written for major media publications during the last few months, quite a few have quite understandably focused on the mass protests that have occurred in the wake of several high-profile police and vigilante murders of unarmed African-Americans in this country.  These echo articles written within the last two years about the strength of "leaderless protests" worldwide.  Check out the short list below:

• "The George Floyd Protests Show Leaderless Movements Are The Future of Politics," Slate Magazine
• "Today’s Activism: Spontaneous, Leaderless, but Not Without Aim," New York Times
• "The Common Element Uniting Worldwide Protests," The Atlantic
• "Leaderless rebellion: how social media enables global protests," Financial Times

Note that the Slate article heralded such protests as "the future of politics."  If such protests are seen by the powerless as "the future of politics," then let me just suggest at the outset that the powerful and the dominant have nothing at all to fear from the powerless.

As long-time readers of my blog know, I have been touting the power and potential of strategic nonviolent resistance for the last three-and-a-half years.  But I find lately that I need to add a cautionary note to my praise of strategic nonviolent resistance.  For those who want to engage in resistance nowadays seem to be guilty over and over again of the same two basic mistakes repeated ad nauseam.  The first mistake is to assume that strategic nonviolent resistance consists solely of protest marches and rallies.  The second mistake is what I want to tackle in today's post.

Let me take you first to a TED talk given by Zeynep Tufekci, titled, "How The Internet Has Made Social Change Easy to Organize, Hard to Win."  Ms. Tufekci is a sociologist and associate professor at the University of North Carolina, so she's no lightweight.  In her TED talk, she examines the wealth of "leaderless," spontaneous protest "movements" which erupted throughout the world from the 1990's to the mid 2010's.  She noted that these "movements" (of which the Occupy "movement" was a prime example) scaled up very quickly from one or two people to many mass gatherings of tens of thousands of people.  However, they achieved no long-lasting gains.  I think it safe to say that the Occupy "movement," for example, did not accomplish a bloody thing.  Why is this?

Zeynep suggests that "movements" which are easily and hastily thrown together by means of a few mouse clicks are largely composed of people who have not learned to work together and to make decisions together as a collective unit.  Therefore, they are unable to form a coherent strategy or to adjust their tactics to overcome strategic challenges that arise in their struggle.  Thus they have no staying power.  In another place (I can't remember where just now), I believe Ms. Tufekci likens modern, easily thrown-together "movements" to a car that can accelerate quickly to high speed, yet has no steering wheel.  She compares the protest rallies of these modern movements with the March on Washington in which Martin Luther King gave his famous "I have a Dream" speech.  The 1963 march was not just a march, but it was a signal to dominant power-holders of the capacity of a large number of people to act collectively in a coherent, long-term, strategic manner.  It served as such a signal precisely because back before the Internet, organizing things like a march, a strike, or a boycott required people to work together for a long time and to figure out how to work together long-term without falling apart.  It required people to create formal processes for deciding on goals, for analyzing power, and for mapping and implementing strategy.  These were not spontaneous processes.  Today's protests seem at times to me to be more like a bunch of kids throwing a spontaneous open-air tantrum!

So let's talk about learning to work together and make decisions together as a collective unit.  And let's begin with a question, namely this: how are decisions made in a group of people who want to achieve something?  Or in other words, can there ever really be such a thing as a "leaderless" movement?  To answer that question, we must turn to another sharp woman, feminist scholar Jo Freeman.  Ms. Freeman wrote an essay titled, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness."  Her essay, which was written in 1970, shows that leaderless, structureless groups have long appealed to those who are trying to escape from systems of domination and oppression.  However, Ms. Freeman shows that such leaderless, structureless groups quickly become neither leaderless nor structureless.  What happens instead is that in place of formal, universally acknowledged means of making decisions, an informal network of decision-making always springs up.  And this informal structure is always created by those members of the group who are the most dominant - either in personality or in wealth of pre-existing resources.  These dominant members become the group's "elites."  Once that happens, bam!  You're right back in a structure over which you have no control unless you're one of the "elites."

In order for a social movement organization to succeed in achieving any goal, therefore, it must have structure.  For the social movement organization to achieve democratic goals, the structure must be both explicit and formal, and it must be formally ratified by each of its members.  That structure must also include a formal, explicit, democratic method of decision-making.  The creation of such democratic structures is not a spontaneous process, but is deliberate, conscious, and goal-oriented.  Movement organizers who create such structures create movements that actually accomplish things.  "Movements" which don't are like an amoeba having a seizure.

And this is why I don't hold out much hope of lasting change from many of the protests now taking place, not only against oppressive White supremacy, but against many other evils.  Nor will I have hope until the organizers of such resistance actions begin to grow up, to get over their Millennial sense of entitlement to their opinions, to stop trying to re-create Woodstock, and to start reading some books.  Because their "movements" are "leaderless" and "structureless", they can be very easily co-opted and hijacked (for instance, by agents provocateurs who cause violence at protests), and their message can be derailed by their enemies - enemies who have both leaders and formal structures and who therefore succeed.  We have already seen this happen.

Let me leave you with a quote from Srdja Popovic, former leader of the OTPOR! movement which successfully overthrew Slobodan Milosevic.  Srdja said, "There are only two kinds of political movements in history: they're either spontaneous or successful." Chew on that.

The Fall of Liberty's Libertine

Libertine: a person, especially a man, who behaves without moral principles or a sense of responsibility, especially in sexual matters.

- from Dictionary.com (Emphasis mine.)

I am trying to read a technical document just now.  It's for a proposal I'm putting together for an environmental project, and it is a very dry document.  Dry documents tend to make me sleepy, so I indulged myself in a quick bit of Web surfing to distract me from my overwhelming desire to snooze.  (Yes, I know - a better tactic would be to drop and do 25 push-ups.  I'll try that next time.)

My web surfing (when I indulge in it, which is not often) frequently takes me to a consideration of the 1980's, which were a high point for the Republican Party and for the freak show known as white American evangelicalism.  So I googled "evangelical scandals 1980's pastors" and came across a surprising bit of present-day news.  In case you didn't know it, Jerry Falwell Jr., son of the Jerry Falwell who founded and led the "Moral Majority" of the 1980's, resigned this week from Liberty University.  His resignation was not voluntary, but came as a result of the revelation of his involvement in a few sex scandals, and the revelation of a photo of himself and a woman who is not his wife posing together with their zippers down.  (Literally!)

It is no secret that the junior Falwell is racist.  It is also no secret that he has been a rabid supporter of another serial adulterer named Donald John Trump.  Falwell is like many white Evangelical mouthpieces in saying that we must support Trump because he is "a chosen vessel whom God has raised up for a glorious purpose" - and "if God could use a wicked king like Cyrus or Nebuchadnezzar for His glorious purposes, God can use Trump to carry out His mysterious plan!"  Note that in saying such things, both he and others like him are bad-mouthing not only God, but Cyrus and Nebuchadnezzar.  How ironic that in showing himself to be just as slimy as Trump, Mr. Falwell has brought consequences upon himself.  And I expect that Liberty University will not itself survive unscathed.

In my march through the reading of the Old Testament, I am now reading the book of Micah.  And what Micah says is a direct contradiction of Falwell, and of other sketchy people like him, including Franklin Graham.  But I do not write this to moralize.  Rather, I want to make a psychological observation.  Jerry Falwell Jr. seems to me to be yet another manifestation of the pathological, narcissistic raging of white supremacy against a world that is inexorably changing around those who wish to remain supreme.  Like Trump, Falwell Jr. is a symptom of a larger American disease.  He is also yet another example of the outworkings of damnation.

And now, back to work!

Repost - The Sunk Costs of Stinkin' Thinkin'

A blog is a voracious beast, and feeding it with high quality material can seem at times like hoisting 50 pound sacks of elephant feed at a zoo.  While I enjoy the workout, there are things I need to fix and clean at my house this weekend, along with two fruit trees that I need to finish harvesting ASAP before the fruit spoils.

Therefore, I'd like to present you with a post I wrote back in 2015.  This post highlights some of the dysfunctional societal results of what had been until recently a highly effective long-term campaign of lobbying and propaganda by the National Rifle Association and the American Right.  (Note also how these two entities were helped along in their efforts by a certain foreign government.)  Enjoy.

Climbing Out Onto The Skinny Branches

Those who have read my blog over the years know that at present I "own" two cats, and that the reason why these cats live with me is that a neighbor foisted them off on me.  (However, I now wouldn't trade them for the world.)  When they were kittens, they frequently got themselves stuck in some of the trees in my backyard as they indulged their impulse to climb things without having learned how to get themselves back down to the ground.  Therefore, from time to time, I had to get a ladder and fetch my cats out of some of the sticky situations they got themselves into.  Eventually they figured out that what goes up must also learn to get down, and they learned to get down out of and off of various high things.  So an evening came in which, as I was leaving my house to go to the store, I looked behind me and saw two cat heads on the roof staring down on me in the moonlight.  Rather spooky it was, but by then I was confident that they'd find their way safely back to earth.

Now a competent cat weighing a handful of kilograms can climb trees and traverse branches that a human weighing several dozen kilos would (or at least should) fear to tread.  And there's a reason why the phrase "going out on a limb" has metaphorical punch even after decades of use.  So it surprised me (and the world) to hear that Vladimir Putin had gone out on a rather skinny limb a few weeks ago with the announcement that Russia had developed the first coronavirus vaccine approved for widespread use.  In response, the Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up around 2,000 points, and other stock exchanges rose significantly.

An effective vaccine would be welcomed in many corners, and if Russia were the nation to discover such a vaccine, it would certainly boost Russian prospects of being regarded as the most awesomely cool nation on earth.  It would also help Putin's image not only as a physically robust national leader who goes hunting bare-chested in Siberia in the winter, but as a chess master, judoka, expert strategist, and totally awesome dude without equal in the world.  ("Who is like the beast?  Who is able to make war with him?")  But almost immediately, the branch onto which Putin had climbed (bringing his nation with him) began to show some signs of cracking.  For starters,

• The development of this vaccine has been horribly (and irresponsibly) rushed.  
• A number of sources state that the vaccine developers would only have been able to complete Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials within their stated timeframe of development.
• Some sources (such as this and this) state that the reality is that the Russian vaccine has not even yet passed Phase 1 trials.

Add to this the lack of transparency to date in Russian data on the trials of their vaccine, combined with the unfortunate tendency for bad things (falls from windows, poisonings by tea, etc.) to happen to Russians who provide information or criticism damaging to their country's prestige, and one can see why prudent people don't want to climb out onto the branch Putin is occupying.  And even Putin's government has slightly, ever so slightly, walked back some of its rhetoric lately, saying now that the Russian vaccine is now "ready for mass trials."  Some of those trials will take place on people who are not Russian and who don't want to climb onto any skinny branches, but who may find that they have no choice.  For instance, autocrat Philippine president (and Putin groupie) Rodrigo Duterte has stated that large-scale inoculations of his nation's people will begin in October, although Duterte himself won't volunteer for a shot until he sees how well his countrymen respond.  My, what courage!

From these events, we can see the following things:

• First, we see what world leaders and economic ecosystems Putin now has in his pocket.  With a net worth of $200 billion, Putin might have a surprising number of people in that pocket.  Some of those people might be behind the most recent stock market rallies - rallies which are by now completely divorced from the actual on-the-ground economies of the nations these markets are supposed to represent.  Watch also for national leaders who rush to volunteer their populations as guinea pigs for the Russian vaccine.
• Second, we see the harm that the damaging and toxic mix of malignant narcissism and unethical competition can produce.  I am reminded of YouTube videos of Margaret Heffernan discussing the damaging effects of competition on the creation of things of genuine economic value.  One of the reasons for the damage is the intense pressure felt by people in highly competitive environments to overstate their accomplishments, to plagiarize the work of others, and to outright fake results.

As you can tell, I am skeptical about Russian claims of awesomeness in any domain just about now.  But I am going to provide a caveat and thus position myself on the lowest possible skinny branch in case I am proven wrong.  So here it is: I am not a doctor or biologist.  But I can be persuaded by verifiable results.  Let's see how the Russian vaccine developers do when they are judged by a jury of their peers.  As for now, I am still wearing a mask.

Report on CANVAS Summer Academy

I had the opportunity to attend a recent online Summer Academy in strategic nonviolent resistance hosted by the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, or CANVAS.  This online academy featured speakers and leaders from several nonviolent liberation movements around the world, and showcased the large diversity of nonviolent tactics being employed by men and women waging struggles for liberation or democracy under difficult and hostile regimes.

The first lecture presented a troubling statistic - namely, the number of formerly democratic regimes which have slid toward authoritarianism in the last ten years.  (Yes, the United States is in that list!)  That fact motivated the following goals for the Summer Academy:

• Understanding the principles of successful nonviolent movements
• Learning lessons from those movements which fail

The first lecture's host, Srdja Popovic, made a statement that he repeated several times during the workshop:

"There are only two kinds of nonviolent movements: those that are spontaneous, and those that are successful."

This highlighted the need for careful planning and development of wise strategy as a prerequisite for success.  One of the readings that went along with that first lecture was "How Protests Become Successful Social Movements."  Here we could see how, although protest can be an important element of a social movement, it is not enough in itself to guarantee movement success.  (Read the article if you want to find the additional required ingredients!  Also, note that "leaderless movements" like the Occupy protests are not likely to achieve anything without a means of clearly deciding and stating what their goals are.)

During the first lecture, a movement leader from another country discussed how his organization was opposing his country's authoritarian leadership by highlighting the regime's corruption.  Corruption is almost always the soft underbelly of authoritarian regimes, since these regimes are created by strongmen in order that the strongmen may receive all the economic and political benefits of the societies they rule while giving nothing back in return.  The spokesman for this movement organization talked about how in many towns and villages in his country, it is hard to get clean water because of burst water delivery pipes which the government has refused to fix until recently.  This man's movement organization therefore started printing large, highly visible "burst certificates" (sort of like a "birth certificate" notifying the world of the birth of a water leak)  and posting them next to broken water mains in locations which motorists could see.  This motivated the government to start fixing their water mains!

The second lecture discussed how social movement organizers are adapting to organizing during the current COVID-19 pandemic.  One organizer from Latin America described how her movement organization has provided basic health care education and services like free masks to poor people - showing the role of parallel institutions in building a successful social movement.

The third lecture was focused on the anti-racism protests that have taken place since the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.  We heard from two Black Lives Matter organizers, and we also heard from Will Dobson, fellow of the National Endowment for Democracy and author of The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy.  Mr. Dobson spoke first, and his assessment of the Black Lives Matter protests was highly positive.  He spoke of the large shifts in public awareness and opinion over the last two months as a result of the protests, and he also spoke of how Donald Trump's response to the protests has actually hurt Trump's reelection prospects.  However, when the BLM organizers spoke, some of us (myself included) questioned them about whether they had created effective structures for weeding out violent infiltrators from their protests, whether they had a training program for participants in strategic nonviolent struggle, and whether they had explored other methods of movement struggle besides mass protest rallies.  Their answer was that they have indeed begun to explore these things, and there is a Black minister in Los Angeles who has started doing nonviolent resistance trainings in the style of the Reverend James Lawson, who conducted similar trainings in the 1960's. (Note that I called them "nonviolent resistance" trainings - not just "nonviolence trainings".  The word resistance is always an essential part of the phrase "nonviolent resistance.")

The last lecture was the most unexpectedly interesting, in my opinion.  It was titled, "Creative Activism, Dilemma Actions, And The Use of Humor - Hilariously Groundbreaking Tactics."  Sophia McLennen of Penn State University was the guest speaker.  To provide a bit of background, the OTPOR! movement (of which Srdja Popovic was one of the leaders and original organizers) depended on the use of humor as a key tactical weapon to de-legitimize Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic.  It turns out that Sophia and Srdja have done some original research that shows that the use of humor and other dilemma actions greatly boosts the success rate of resistance struggles.  Moreover, dilemma actions and "laughtivism" can be used to de-legitimize the corporate or State-owned media of the oppressor.  Laughtivism can be used successfully against Fox News, One America, and other far-Right or White supremacist media, for instance...

An example of a dilemma action: toys protest corruption in Minsk.

Did the cops arrest the toys?  How did that make them look?

Image from Radio Free Europe article dated 10 February 2012, 

retrieved from Radio Free Europe on 16 August 2020

I am planning to write a series of posts walking us through a key text on strategic nonviolent resistance.  The name of the text is From Dictatorship to Democracy, by Gene Sharp.  Those who want to read ahead can download the print copy of the book here, or they can download an audio recording of the book here.  Remember this quote from Srdja: "There are only two kinds of nonviolent movements: those that are spontaneous, and those that are successful."

The Tribes of the Agents Provocateurs

In a number of posts (here, here, and here for instance) I have asserted that the majority of violence which has taken place at Black Lives Matter protests in the United States over the last two months was caused by White infiltrators.  I have therefore argued that basing a nonviolent resistance struggle solely on the tactic of mass protest rallies and marches is a dangerously short-sighted strategic approach.

But some may wonder whether my assertion that mainly White actors have been responsible for the violence is accurate.  Therefore, I'd like to share the following news stories:

• "‘Umbrella Man’ went viral breaking windows at a protest. He was a white supremacist trying to spark violence, police say", Washington Post.  Note that the "Umbrella Man" made his appearance at one of the first Minneapolis protests against the murder of George Floyd.
• "White Women Tagging ‘Black Lives Matter’ On Starbucks Caught By Black Protestors", BET.
• "Nearly two dozen arrested in Richmond as weeks of peaceful protest turned violent over the weekend," Washington Post.  Note that the mayor of Richmond identified the violent instigators as White supremacists who were outsiders to the community.
• "Why are white supremacists protesting the deaths of black people?", The Conversation.
• "A white supremacist channel on Telegram encouraged followers to incite violence during police brutality protests by 'shooting in a crowd,' according to internal DHS memo," Business Insider.
• "Violence mars Portland protests, frustrates Black community," AP.  Note that the troublemakers are not content to limit themselves to causing trouble at protests, but are part of the White violence against minority businesses and neighborhoods in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests.
• "Finley: Violent white protesters hurt cause of racial justice," The Detroit News.
• "Meet the ‘Boogaloo boys,’ the violent extremists attracting members of the US military," Task and Purpose.
• "As Trump warns of leftist violence, a dangerous threat emerges from the right-wing boogaloo movement," Washington Post.  Note that members of the Boogaloo movement have been linked to the shootings of police and Federal security guards that took place after the murder of George Floyd.
• "Far-right groups like the “Boogaloo” and “O9A” continue to attract troops and veterans," Military Times.  Note that the senior officers of the U.S. military recognize the presence of a far-right element in the U.S. military as a serious problem.  Note also the link between these far-right elements and Satanism.
• "A woman accused of throwing Molotov cocktail at a police car suggests a protester gave her the device," CNN.  Note that although this woman claimed that Black protestors gave her the Molotov cocktail, the police who investigated her discovered that she was lying.  What gave her away was the presence of her fingerprints and the fingerprints of a friend of hers on a note about glass bottles...

A few comments.  First, I am extremely grateful for the many White people who have shown themselves to be both decent and moral in their support for communities of color during the evil reign of Donald Trump.  I am grateful not only for those White people who are sincerely standing for Black lives, but also for those White people who were sincerely revolted by the news that Donald Trump's goons were ripping Latino children from the arms of their parents at the southern border and putting these children into cages and detention centers.  I am a Christian, but I am grateful for those White people who sincerely opposed Donald Trump's attempts at a Muslim travel ban.  I am grateful for the Wall of Moms, the Wall of Dads, and the Wall of Vets.  When I think of the Wall of Vets, I am especially grateful for its founder, a White vet who allowed himself to be beaten by Trump's Homeland Security goons in order to stand against racism and fascism.  I am grateful for those members of the dominant culture who refuse to enjoy the passing pleasures of the sin of being made great at the expense of their fellow human beings on the earth.

However, it must also be noted that there is a deeply dysfunctional element in the American dominant culture.  This element consists of people who have based their entire lives and their entire identity on the power they have been able to exercise in order to dominate, bully and ruin the lives of their intended victims.  They are the forever "Cowboys" - unreconstructed, unreconstructable, and unrepentant - who demand that the rest of us play the role of the forever "Indians" or the forever "slaves".  A woman I recently heard in an online workshop said that bullies have thin skins.  I would also add that bullies are not really sure they exist in the world.  Being afraid of their own ghosthood, they can only reassure themselves of their existence by trashing someone else's life.  The Boogaloo movement, for instance, is one of those far right movements who are trying to push society into chaos so that they can build a fascist, White supremacist empire out of the ashes.  These are the Elliot Rodgers of the world, who seek to ruin in order that they may possess.  Rather like Satan, aren't they?  And if communities of color base their struggle solely on the tactic of mass protest, guess who will come in to hijack the protests!

Therefore, a key response of the historically marginalized, of the communities of color, of the communities which have not been historically dominant must be a response of collective self-organization.  By organizing ourselves to meet our collective needs, we build our social power - power which is to be used not to dominate others, but to help ourselves fulfill our own ontogeny, and to help other afflicted communities fulfill their ontogeny.  And it is collective and sustained self-organization that is the foundation of successful nonviolent resistance movements - not mere protest.  Study Gandhi for instance, and you will discover not only the acts of mass noncooperation against the British, but also his insistence on what he called the constructive program - a key part of an oppressed population liberating itself from oppression by learning to rule itself.

So this brings me to my last comment.  Given the weakness of struggles that rely solely on mass protest, and given the ease with which both State and non-State opponents can hijack such struggles, I once again urge the Black Lives Matter organizers and the organizers of the struggles of other communities of color to look beyond mass protest as your go-to tactic.  Broaden your knowledge of strategic nonviolent resistance.  Please read some good books on the subject.  (Maybe one of my future posts will be simply a list of recommended good books!)  And please learn the art of strategy!

I leave you with one comparison from military history.  World War 1 was almost lost by the British because of one man, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig.  Haig assumed command of British troops in 1914, and proceeded to launch a number of offensives against the defensive German lines.  For over three years, his go-to strategy was to try to wear the Germans down by attrition, and to try to punch a hole in German defenses so that his horse-mounted cavalry could charge to victory.  Such a strategy might have worked in the 1800's...but by World War 1, there were these inconvenient little things called barbed wire, machine guns and heavy artillery.  The Germans also used a tactic known as defense-in-depth.  Haig became highly predictable in his tactics, in the same way that having mass protests day after day for over 60 days in the U.S. in 2020 has become highly predictable.  Therefore, the Germans played rope-a-dope with him, costing him several hundred thousand men.  Britain was saved from defeat by the entrance of the United States into the war.  But did Haig learn from his mistakes?  Not at all, according to a quote of his from 1926.

Basing a strategic nonviolent resistance or liberation struggle solely on spontaneous, poorly-planned mass protest rallies in these days should therefore seem about as stupid as relying on horse-mounted cavalry in modern warfare, shouldn't it?

2nd Repost: The Libertarian Lifeboat

COVID-19 continues to march through the "Land of the Free," leaving a trail of death, joblessness and bankruptcies of small and large businesses.  The United States of America is reaping the fruits of having allowed itself to become "Murdochified."  And in case you are one of those people now suffering hard times who thought a few months ago that it could never happen to you, I've got a story for you.  The story will help you to figure out what it is that you bought when you made a deal with the Devil - that is, the devil of libertarianism, greed, hatred of social safety nets, and selfishness.  This story will also be of benefit to those of us who have had to put up with a Murdochified country for the last three and a half years.

The version of the story which I am linking here is actually its second incarnation.  If you want to read the original version, click here.  And I will have a more research-heavy original post this weekend, God willing.