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.

From D to D, Chapter 3: The Organizer's Toolkit

If you don't respect yourself, ain't nobody 

gonna give a good cahoot, na na na na

Respect yourself...

- Respect Yourself

lyrics by Luther Thomas Ingram and Mack Rice

This post continues our discussion of strategic nonviolent resistance, and is based in the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp.  This discussion is especially relevant for those of us who live in the United States and who have been struggling to create a nation and a world in which each of the world's people has equal access to the things they need to fulfill their human potential.  The emergence of such a world is currently being blocked by people such as Donald Trump and his supporters, who want to make themselves great by trashing everyone else on earth.  As an example, key members of the Trump administration have already clearly signaled their intention to refuse to accept the legitimate results of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election which Donald Trump clearly lost.  Therefore the study of strategic nonviolent resistance and of nonviolent liberation struggles is very timely.  

The most recent posts in this series have focused on Chapter 3 of From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D).  You can find those posts here, here, and here.  A key point of Chapter 3 was that the kind of economic and political noncooperation that destroys a dictator's regime works best when it is applied on a mass basis 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 made the point that if the independent institutions of the oppressed society have largely been destroyed or taken over by the dictatorship, the democratic resisters against the dictatorship will need to rebuild these independent groups so that these groups can contribute to the liberation struggle by their mass withdrawal of cooperation from the dictator's regime.  The building, rebuilding, and redirecting of organized groups of people requires people who are willing to take on the role of community organizers, as we showed in the last post in this series.  Therefore, today we will consider some supplemental material that describes what tools organizers use in order to successfully create organizations that can wield power.  And we will be looking at some further material from a veteran community organizer and social movement scholar named Marshall Ganz.  

Dr. Ganz has created an entire curriculum designed to teach the craft of organizing.  I had the opportunity a while back to take one of his online classes in organizing, titled, Leadership, Organizing and Action.  I will not attempt to reproduce the entire class here, but rather to summarize some of its key points.  To quote Ganz, "Organizing is a form of leadership.  Organizers identify, recruit, and develop the leadership of others; build community around that leadership; and build power from the resources of that community.  Organizers do not provide services to clients or market products to customers.  They organize a community to become a constituency - people able to stand together on behalf of common concerns.  Organizers ask three questions: Who are my people?  What is their urgent problem?  How can they turn their resources into the power to solve their problem?"  (Emphasis mine.)  

From this description we see that the organizer's job is not an easy one!  This is especially true in the United States, where many oppressed peoples and communities have become so passive that they look for "saviors" or "programs" from the dominant culture instead of building their own power in order to become independent of that culture.  Because the "saviors" never quite seem to adequately "save", and the "programs" never seem to effectively eliminate the problems they are supposed to solve, these communities continue to passively suffer the effects of institutionalized oppression.  The organizer's job is to bring the members of these communities to say, "Hey - no one is coming to save us.  What therefore are WE going to do to turn our resources into the power we need to save ourselves?"  How can organizers effectively call their people out of passivity?  The organizing framework of Dr. Ganz is a way of answering that question, and it has five elements:

SHARED STORY

As I have said above, the organizer must ask "Who are my people?"  But the people whom the organizer seeks to organize will want to know, "Why are you trying to organize us?  Why do you care about our problem?"  So the organizer needs to have a clear story of why he is trying to organize.  And this story must not just be a story of factoids and statistics, but of the moments which called the organizer to be an organizer.  These are the moments when the organizer faced not the mere statistics of the challenges facing his people, but the physical incarnation - the embodiment - of those challenges.  For one particular organizer whose story I heard on a podcast, a particular series of such moments consisted of her childhood experiences of crossing a bridge from Jordan to Palestine to visit her relatives.  As part of that bridge crossing, she had to endure being forced with her mother and sisters to strip naked in front of the Israeli army soldiers at the bridge checkpoint in order to be searched.  For me, one such moment came during an afternoon in the summer between my 6th and 7th grade, when three racist bullies from my school came to my house to steal water from our water hose and I had to fight them.  

Moments like these are activizing moments - and they form the basis of the organizer's story of self.  The organizer must also have a story of us - a story of his response as a member of his people to the collective challenge faced by his people, and a story of now - the response he is asking for from his people.  But the story of us and the story of now are not just the creation of the organizer.  They are developed and enlarged as the organizer forms relationships with the members of his people and as he hears their stories of self.  This is a key to the development of shared strategy later in the organizing process.  This is why Mohandas Gandhi spent many months traveling through India listening to the stories of his people before he began his campaign of Indian liberation.  This is also why the Reverend James Lawson spent several months listening to the stories of hardships suffered by African-American mothers who had to shop in segregated stores in the Jim Crow South before he began organizing his campaigns of civil disobedience.  This listening and collaboration is key.  Without it, you may have an organizer who is activized well enough, yet who in his rage tries to shove solutions down the throats of his people.  (I've been guilty of this, I'm afraid!)

SHARED COMMITMENT

From the sharing of stories of self between the organizer and other members of his people there arises a set of shared relationships.  These relationships become relationships of commitment to a common cause.  These relationships, moreover, are based on shared values.  As Marshall Ganz says, "In organizing the 'moment of truth' is when two people have learned enough about each other's interests, resources and values not only to make an 'exchange' but also to commit to working together on behalf of a common purpose...Relationship building is thus the key to organizing because it is the association of people with each other, not simply the aggregation of individual resources, that can create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts."  That is why my previous post in this series began with a quote from a romantic song - because relationship-building requires skill!  And maintaining relationships requires ongoing work.

SHARED STRUCTURE

From a network of relationships of common purpose, the various people involved in those relationships build a shared structure for action.  As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, that structure must be explicit and mutually agreed upon by all its members.  Remember - successful social movements are always planned and never purely spontaneous.  And the organizations that produce successful social movements always have an explicit structure, including an explicit, mutually agreed method of making decisions.  The kind of structure that is adopted by a group has a great impact on the effectiveness of the group.  A group where one person does all the thinking for everyone can be easily defeated (or worse yet, decapitated).  On the other hand, a group which doesn't do anything unless all its members come to a consensus on what needs to be done never gets around to doing anything.  The "snowflake" model of leadership development proposed by Ganz is a way to strike a happy balance between the two extremes and to create leadership that is maximally effective. 

SHARED STRATEGY

Shared strategy is the outcome of shared story, shared commitment, and shared structure.  Strategy is the answer of your group to the question of how to "turn the resources you all have into the power you all need to make the change you all want."  Just as leadership is not as effective when it is done by only one person in the group, strategy is most effective when it is developed as a team effort.  Effective strategy is important for groups of oppressed people who are struggling to liberate themselves from their oppressors, because this strategy is the way such groups make up for a lack of resources by becoming more resourceful in using what they do have.  Effective strategy also is how such groups overcome the advantage of the much greater resources of their oppressors.  Ganz uses the term "strategic capacity" to describe the characteristics of teams that are most likely to develop effective strategy.  (See this also.)

SHARED ACTION

The final outcome of shared story, shared commitment, shared structure, and shared strategy is shared action - a unified campaign by the oppressed to shift the balance of power between the oppressed and the oppressors.  Organizations work through campaigns that have strategic goals or milestones.  This setting of milestones provides the necessary discipline for organizers to achieve concrete goals.  One campaign I know of organized poor villagers in the Middle East to teach themselves to read.  This campaign achieved certain milestones of success that had been developed during the strategy and planning phase of the campaign.  The phase of shared action is the time when your organizing skill and effort is put to the proof.  

WANT TO KNOW MORE?

The person of the organizer and the work of organizing is so important to successful social movements that it deserves a much fuller treatment than I can give to it in a limited space on a Sunday afternoon.  However, if you want to know more about how the powerless can build their own power for their own liberation, Dr. Ganz will have another online class through the Harvard Kennedy School next winter and spring.  You can find out more about it here.  The class is definitely not free - but maybe if you're part of a group, a number of your friends can chip in and you all can pay for one member of your group to attend.  (If you're an African-American leader in a Black Lives Matter group, you should definitely attend!)  There are also the following free online resources:

• Leadership, Organizing and Action (training guide from a 2016 workshop in Morocco)
• "Learn About Organizing from Marshall Ganz" (a series of videos is included on this page)

The Shape of Our Struggle

Things in the United States are turning out about as I expected in the aftermath of Joe Biden's election victory over Donald Trump.  Trump's response has been what he told us all along that it would be.  Indeed, even when Trump ran against Hillary Clinton in 2016, he had told us that he would not accept a legitimate election loss.  The deep existential foundations of Trump's malignant narcissism are the motive behind his refusal in 2020 to accept a loss that is becoming more painfully obvious with each passing day.

Over the last four years, Trump has managed to pack many offices of the Federal government with sycophants who have no principles other than self-seeking loyalty to Trump.  Anyone with competence and principles who was part of his administration at any time has by now left.  He has packed the Federal judiciary with unrighteous judges.  And he is now packing the Pentagon with loyalists.  

All of this leads naturally to the question of what decent people in the United States should do if Trump refuses to leave office, or if he succeeds in getting corrupt courts to void a legitimate election, or if he stages a military coup.  My answer to such a question is contained in the many posts I have written which explain strategic nonviolent resistance on this blog.  Strategic nonviolent resistance is a key component of the struggle of an oppressed people to liberate themselves from a tyrant, dictator, or oppressor.  If you're looking for what you can do to contribute to that struggle, please read these posts.

A few points must be made.  First, you must get ready to organize with your neighbors.  Second, you must organize to massively and collectively withdraw your economic and political cooperation from the system.  This will massively raise the costs borne by a Trump dictatorship and make such a dictatorship unsustainable.  (Think of such things as strikes and boycotts of large businesses (such as Fox News) that support Trump.  DO NOT base your struggle solely on mass protest marches!)  Third, you must remain nonviolent in your struggle.  This is not just for moral reasons!  It is also because the moment you allow violence, you decrease your chances that your liberation struggle will succeed.  (If you don't believe me, please read Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan.  Or watch some of the YouTube videos of Erica Chenoweth.)  

Fourth, you must begin NOW to study strategic nonviolent resistance if you haven't yet started.  Fighters who lack skill never win.  If you want to win, you must study.  But learn only from reputable sources.  Here is a short list of sources I consider trustworthy:

• The Albert Einstein Institution
• The Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS)
• Teachers and practitioners of community organizing.

One source which I would urge you to stay away from is the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC).  From their founding up to the end of 2016, their courses and publications presented valuable information and good advice.  But from 2017 onward, something began to change.  Thus in one of their online courses which took place after 2016, Daniel Dixon of the ICNC suggested that violent and nonviolent forms of resistance could be combined in a movement to make the movement stronger.  (By the way, all available evidence on social movements proves the exact opposite.)  His exact words were, "An organizing friend of mine likes to talk about 'synergy of tactics' as opposed to 'diversity of tactics'.  By this he means that violent forms of protest can work alongside nonviolent forms of protest to create something that is more powerful than either could accomplish individually."  This is complete garbage.  He is not the only one to make suggestions that are harmful to liberation struggles.  Tom Hastings of the ICNC suggested this year that there were times and cases in which a nonviolent resistance movement could help its cause by destroying property.  That too is garbage.  If you engage in violence (including property destruction) you will make it harder to shift the pillars of support of the dictator's regime.  And we want to make it as easy as possible for people who now support Trump to walk away from him.

This weekend, God willing, I will be continuing my series on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Gene Sharp.  Stay tuned.  

The Undermining Madness

 For everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled,
and he who humbles himself shall be exalted.

- Luke 14:11

Whenever a person quotes a Bible verse as a maxim, there is a very natural tendency among those who hear him to regard his words as mere moralizing that have no immediate bearing on physical reality.  The effect is similar to the effect on people who hear exhortations to quit smoking or to start exercising because of the bad consequences that will come someday - someday... - if they don't.  But I have argued in several places on this blog (such as here) that the "someday" consequences of moral choices begin right now, the moment the choices are made, and that they can be observed and empirically measured just as physical phenomena in the natural world can be observed and measured.  Therefore it should be possible to observe objectively the outworkings of the Divine humiliation of a person the moment that person begins to exalt himself.  

I have also argued that these outworkings (known in this blog as the outworkings of damnation) are now being seen in the United States of America, and that these outworkings can be objectively traced.  The United States is a nation that made itself great by oppressing and/or dispossessing people who were poor and nonwhite.  But the United States has gone through periods of awakening of conscience in which many of its citizens sought to right the wrongs that were done by the dominant culture against other people.  The efforts of these awakened people were, however, opposed and often thwarted by those members of the dominant culture who wanted to remain dominant at all costs.  Thus the nation endured a civil war in which Southern plantation owners were economically wiped out because they had built their wealth on the backs of slaves.  These Southerners refused to learn the moral lesson of their suffering, and went on to try to recreate as much of their old supremacy as possible.  So the United States had to go through a second struggle of conscience, namely the 1960's Civil Rights struggle.  However, the gains won during that struggle were again seen by certain members of the dominant culture as an unacceptable threat to their dreams of domination at all costs.  For the Civil Rights struggle sought to create a nation (and eventually a world) in which everyone on earth shares the earth on a basis of equality.  Those members of the dominant culture who felt threatened by such a world therefore engineered a social movement designed to undo all the progress made by the Civil Rights struggle in order to create a world in which one group of people gets to Make Itself Great Again by trashing everyone else on earth.

And so we come to the present time in which Donald Trump has lost the 2020 U.S. Presidential election by almost five million votes and counting, yet both he and his supporters refuse to concede his loss.  The reactionary social movement which put Trump into office in 2016 has been over 40 years in the making.  Some of its heavyweight architects include people like Rupert Murdoch (media mogul and owner of News Corporation and the Fox TV network), Ralph Reed (chairman of the Georgia Republican Party and former president of the "Christian Coalition"), Ronald Reagan, and the Koch family.  Some of its most influential mouthpieces include Wally George (Blast from the past! Anyone remember him?), Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Tucker Carlson.  Donald Trump, therefore, is not just a great big problem, but he is a symptom of a much larger problem.

Rupert Murdoch has famously called Donald Trump an idiot.  Note that Murdoch's exact words included an unprintable expletive before the word "idiot", thus signaling Murdoch's extreme distaste and disgust for Trump.  But Rupert Murdoch must realize that Trump is a creation of Murdoch and of his media empire.  Has Trump played fast and loose with reality and truth?  So has Murdoch, whose media outlets have lied about everything from anthropogenic climate change to the effect of bovine growth hormone on humans who drink milk to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic and on and on.  And not only has Murdoch created a head of state whose relationship with the truth is "relaxed" (to quote one of Trump's fellow Republicans), but Murdoch's media empire has created an entire population whose relationship with the truth is similarly relaxed.  In fact, it is so relaxed that the sole basis on which these people choose what they will believe is whether or not a statement of fact makes them feel good or grants them their hearts' desire.  That desire is for supremacy at all costs.  Without these people, there would have been no President Trump.

But reality does not make concessions, which is why, according to the Associated Press, in the 376 U.S. counties with the highest number of new COVID-19 cases per capita, 93 percent of registered voters voted for Trump.  Also note that although Trump tried to use his recovery from COVID-19 to assert that the pandemic is no big deal, an analysis by Business Insider reveals that the treatment he received would have cost the average American $650,000 out of pocket.  That means that a lot of diehard true believers in Trump are going to die soon.  And the attitude of Trump supporters concerning the pandemic is a symptom of their self-destructive attitude toward reality itself.

For it can be argued that malignant narcissism is a progressive disease with an ultimately terminal outcome in 100 percent of cases.  The first stage begins with callous disregard of the rights of others and of our duty toward others.  The last stage begins with flagrant, self-destructive disregard of reality itself.  This is illustrated beautifully in a paper I read a few months ago titled, "Why Tyrants Go Too Far: Malignant Narcissism and Absolute Power."  The abstract to this paper begins thus: "This article explores the puzzling behavior of tyrants who undermine themselves once in power..."  The author, Betty Glad, outlines the following progression: 

Stage 1: A narcissism which aspires for greatness, yet which is held in check by the reality of the challenges of climbing a ladder of success.  

Stage 2: The diminishing of the narcissist's ability to test reality once he reaches his desired level of supremacy.  

Stage 3: The narcissist's acting out his fantasies of greatness instead of grounding his actions in a reasonable response to reality.  

Stage 4 (the final stage): The narcissist's crashing and burning against that cold, hard reality which he refused to acknowledge.  

I would argue that Trump and his supporters are now somewhere between stages 3 and 4.  I would like therefore to use an example from my own personal history to sketch how I think the Trump presidency might end.  

As I mentioned way back in the early days of my blogging, I used to be a member of a religious cult (or if you want to be euphemistic, an "abusive church") known as the Assemblies of George Geftakys.  George Geftakys was, of course, a classic malignant narcissist.  And as such a narcissist, he soon passed into stage 3 of the progression I outlined above.  That stage for him consisted of pretending that he and his family were the picture of perfection even though he was forcing young women in his assemblies to become his personal secretaries so that he could force himself on them sexually, and even though he knew that his oldest son was a wife-beater and child abuser.  His crash-and-burn phase came when the sins of his family became widely known to the members of the cult he had built.  What is interesting is what came afterward, when many members of the cult confronted George, and eventually forced his excommunication.

These members (many of whom became ex-members like me) thought that by confronting George and his henchmen we could get them to acknowledge their wrongdoing and repent.  THAT NEVER HAPPENED.  For it would have required George to admit that his whole life as he had presented it to us had been a fraud.  Instead, he and his wife moved to an upscale retirement community in the California Inland Empire, where he continued to advertise himself as a great missionary and pastor, adding to this that he was a native of Greece even though he had told us that he was born in the U.S.A.  To the very end of his life, George continued to live in a bubble of self-aggrandizing fantasy.  Given the parallels between the demise of George Geftakys and the current state of Donald Trump and his supporters, I expect something similar to happen now.  We should prepare ourselves to deal with it.

P.S. If you want to hear more about George's final crash-and-burn phase, click here.

A Message from Me to Donald Trump

Mr. Trump,

You have lost your bid for re-election.  I know that the Bible says that we are to be subject to our leaders.  But you have two strikes against you.  First, our subjection to our leaders carries only as far as their subjection to an impartial moral standard that is larger than them.  You have refused to submit to that standard for most of your life, and you have refused to submit to that standard during every single day of your presidency.  And you refuse to submit to the laws of a nation in which you legitimately and fairly lost the November 2020 presidential election.

Therefore, I will not submit to you at all or acknowledge you as the President of the United States after January 19th, 2021.  If you are still occupying the White House on January 21st, 2021, I intend to do everything I can to build a nonviolent liberation struggle to oust you.  Your narcissism, your nihilism, and your associations with thugs such as Vladimir Putin must end.  To use a phrase of yours that has recently been much quoted, you're fired.  

From D to D, Chapter 3 (Continued): Who Made Thee An Organizer?

 At aalis, magbabalik

At uuliting sabihin 

Na mahalin ka't sambitin

Kahit muli'y masaktan

Sa pag-alis

Ako'y magbabalik

At sana naman...

- from Nobela, lyrics by Christian Blanca Renia

(My title being a nod to the 7th chapter of the Book of Acts...  Note: as I've been listening lately to music from other corners of the world, you may find me including some of the lyrics in future posts if I think they are relevant to the topics being discussed in those posts.  So if you're from outside the U.S., please keep making good music!  For the rest, if you want to know what the lyrics mean, try Google Translate.  However, I must warn you that using Google Translate is sometimes like trying to ride a horse that has a couple of broken legs.)

This post is a continuation of our discussion of Chapter 3 of Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  I chose to dedicate a series of posts to the discussion of this important book because of the current global political climate, in which many democracies around the world (including the United States) have been hijacked by fascists, supremacists, strongmen and would-be dictators.  (Yes, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are among the hijackers.)  I have argued in my posts that the oppressed peoples who want to liberate themselves from these strongmen must do so through the means of strategic nonviolent resistance, as the nonviolent method has the greatest chance of success and the best social outcomes.  From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in my posts to From D to D) describes what is involved in building a successful nonviolent liberation struggle.

Chapter 3 of From D to D began with what Gene Sharp called "the Monkey Master fable" (originally titled, Rule By Tricks in Chinese), an illustration of what happens to an oppressor when his oppressed victims choose to massively and collectively withdraw their cooperation from the oppressor.  Sharp went on to make the important point that the noncooperation of the oppressed applies the greatest pressure when it is collective rather than being just a bunch of random, uncoordinated acts of isolated individuals.  Thus, the emergence of collective, coordinated noncooperation depends on the emergence or existence of groups and institutions of the oppressed that are independent of the oppressor - that is, groups and institutions that are neither financed, supported, or controlled by the oppressor.

Note that Sharp lists among these independent groups a number of types of groups and institutions that are not overtly political, such as families, sports clubs, music groups, gardening clubs, and the like.  Therefore, although the existence of such groups is a necessary precondition for a liberation struggle, it is not a sufficient condition.  My most recent post in this series therefore discussed how it is necessary for such groups to be politicized (or co-opted) by movement organizers if such groups are to contribute to a nonviolent liberation struggle.  In that post, we explored the writings of feminist scholar Jo Freeman in her description of the birth of the women's movement and other movements of the 1960's in the United States.  One point she makes is the importance of the organizers of a social movement.  For successful social movements are never spontaneous - that is, they never just "happen" out of the blue.  And there are only two kinds of social movements: the spontaneous and the successful.  Successful movements are organized by smart organizers.  The organizers have to be smart, because their job is to co-opt existing groups and institutions so that their members begin to support the goals of the movement.  Their job is also to create new movement organizations from scratch (a topic which will be explored in a future post, God willing).  So what kind of person is an organizer?

To answer that question, we turn today to the writings of another movement scholar, veteran organizer Dr. Marshall Ganz of Harvard University.  Ganz defines organizing as a particular kind of leadership.  He defines leadership as "accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose in the face of uncertainty."  And he defines organizing as "leadership that enables people to turn the resources they have into the power they need to make the change they want."  Ganz makes the important point that leadership - specifically, organizing - is a calling.  People are called to become organizers when life confronts them with the following questions:

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?  If I am only for myself, what am I?  And if not now, when?

-Hillel (Pirkei Avot Chapter 1:14)

So if organizers are people who have experienced a calling to organize, what kind of experiences lead them to hear that call?  And where do these called people come from?  To answer that question, let's look at three kinds of people:

THE LIMINAL

The word "liminal" literally means "on the threshold."  The word can also be defined as, "on the edge."  In the context of liberation struggles, liminal people are those members of an oppressed group who live on the edges, on the boundary between the oppressed group and the oppressor group.  In many cases, such people are born into such liminal spaces.  Moses from the Bible is such an example.  He was born into a nation of slaves, and he was born at a time in which the Pharaoh, the earthly master of the Hebrew slaves had decreed that all male Hebrew infants were to be killed by being thrown into the Nile River.  His parents did not throw him into the river, but instead hid him for three months, and then they carefully placed him into the river in a floating basket, trusting that God would take care of him.  (Exodus 1 and 2).  In a twist of Divine irony and providence, the basket was found by the daughter of Pharaoh, who decided to adopt Moses and raise him as an Egyptian.  In another twist of Divine providence, Moses' mother was hired by Pharaoh's daughter to be his nurse from day that Pharaoh's daughter found him until the day that she adopted Moses as her son.

Moses was thus raised as a member of the most privileged group of the most privileged class of people in Egypt.  (To put this into perspective, imagine Ivanka Trump adopting a dark-skinned, non-English speaking child from among the groups of human beings now caged in "detention centers" by the Global Far Right and raising him as her own son with all the earthly privileges attached to the Trump name.)  But he also learned of his identity as a Hebrew from his mother.  Thus there were two potential identities within Moses.  However, the sight of the treatment of his people by the Egyptians became an attack on his birth identity which Moses would no longer tolerate.  The attack on the people of his birth became in his soul an attack on himself.  So it is that "By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter; choosing rather to endure ill-treatment with the people of God, than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin..." (Hebrews 11:24-25)

That is frequently the experience of those who are liminal.  This was the experience of many African-American servicemen from the American South who fought in World War Two, as for a time they inhabited a world which offered many more opportunities than the Jim Crow South.  From their experiences came a set of rising expectations combined with an intolerable sense of shame and frustration at the Southern status quo that would serve as one of the motivations for the most important struggles of the Civil Rights movement.  Other liminal figures include Robert Moses (one of the founding members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC), Ella Baker (of the NAACP and one of the founding organizers of SNCC), James Lawson and others who had the means and took the opportunity to attend college (something that many African-Americans could not do because of financial constraints).

And it has been my experience, for as an African-American child, I was a military brat and my dad was an officer.  Therefore I got to inhabit a world in which there were not many kids who looked like me.  I was "educated in all the learning of the Egyptians," to borrow a phrase from Acts 7.  But I was subjected to constant attacks from children (and sometimes parents) from the "dominant culture" who treated me as if neither I nor my people had any right to inhabit the world which they enjoyed.  An incident from the summer before middle school comes particularly to mind just now.  The experience of possibilities combined with persecution on account of those possibilities had, shall we say, a radicalizing effect on me.

THE CONSCIOUSLY HUMILIATED

As noted above, the liminal are often very conscious of their humiliation under a system of oppression.  But many who do not inhabit that liminal space often allow their sense of self to be submerged by that system to the point where they passively accept the structures of their humiliation as merely part of the background scenery, "just the way things are around here."  While this happens often to members of minority groups who are oppressed by a dominant majority, it also happens when an entire society is taken over by a dominant dictator.  So in his essay, The Power of the Powerless, Vaclav Havel writes about a grocery store owner in a dysfunctional country who is ordered by his government to place every day in the store window a sign which reads, "WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!"  The government's purpose in ordering store owners to put up such signs is to convey the message that the government is on the side of the workers, and that the government is the sole legitimate leader of these workers, the sole legitimate treasury of their hopes and dreams.  

But what if the government which makes grocers put up such signs actually treats the workers like animals?  What if, in putting up such signs, workers are actually being forced to lie to themselves?  Is not this act of forced lying a form of humiliation, an insult to the intelligence of these workers?  And how long can someone be forced to lie to himself before his sense of shame becomes so overwhelming that he refuses to lie any longer?  That is the point of Havel's essay.  When that happens, people refuse to put up signs, or they start to put up signs that say "THIS ISN'T PARADISE AFTER ALL!"  So Trump is trailing Biden in the polls right now because many people are beginning to realize that he hasn't made America great, and that voting for him will not "Keep America Great!"  Rather, the United States is suffering from a number of wounds inflicted on the entire nation by Donald J. Trump.

THE ACTIVIZED

A sense of human possibility combined with an awareness of shame under the denial of that possibility is what produces many of the people who step up to become organizers.  These organizers then go on to call others to become organizers.  And they do so by opening the eyes of these others to the human possibilities that are being denied to them by oppressors.  In other words, they produce in others what dwells within them - the same sense of possibility and the same refusal to tolerate ongoing humiliation.  Thus it was that organizer Fred Ross found a young Latino laborer named Cesar Chavez and showed him "how poor people could build power."  Thus it was that SNCC organizers persuaded poor African-Americans in Mississippi to fight for equal access to the polls.  

The characteristic of organizers is that they have come to a point of "cognitive liberation".  This term, "cognitive liberation", is defined in various ways by social movement scholars.  But I define its beginning as a point in which an oppressed person decides that he or she will no longer tolerate the oppression and its accompanying humiliation, and that he or she will begin to live in truth from now on - even if it means suffering. (For an example of this, consider the life of Fannie Lou Hamer.  "And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives even to the point of death.")  This cognitive liberation spreads when the liberated organizer sets before others not only a sense of possibility and an awareness of humiliation, but a plausible road map of change that can achieve the possibilities now denied to the oppressed.  This is how an organizer becomes a "social arsonist who goes around setting other people on fire," as Fred Ross said.

But this setting of other people on fire is rarely instantaneous.  Often it involves long, hard work in building relationships of trust among people whose experiences of hardship have taught them not to be trusting, and who must operate in an environment in which bad things can happen to them if they "step out of line."  As Ella Baker once said, it is "spade work" - like the unglamorous work of hand-digging a field before one plants vegetables.  And organizers frequently find that people will disappoint them - sometimes after the organizer has spent much time trying to build a relationship.  So the organizer must be patient and resilient.  (At aalis, magbabalik, at uuliting sabihin, na mahalin ka't sambitin, kahit muli'y masaktan...)  You have to be kind of crazy (at least as some people count craziness) to do this kind of work - or at least you need the kind of undying righteous anger combined with a sense of enduring justice that will compel you to stick it out for the long haul.  But there are tools which can help make the organizer's job easier.  I will discuss those tools in my next post, God willing.

A Constellation Of Alarm Lights

As we approach more closely the conclusion of election season in the United States, I thought it would be good to list four ways in which the presidency of Donald Trump has impacted the people who live in the United States in 2020.  There are, of course, many more ways in which Trump has impacted us, but I don't have time to list them all.  Here are the four that I do have time to list:

COVID-19

As of today, 29 October 2020, there have been around 9 million documented infections in the U.S., resulting in around 233,000 deaths.  The situation is constantly changing; thus I can't give exact numbers.  (Note that according to the linked source, five of the top ten nations impacted by COVID-19 are all led by men who are associated either with white supremacy or the global Far Right.)  The death rate in the United States is 2.5 percent of the total infection rate, which means that slightly more than one out of every fifty people who become infected will die.  We now know that many survivors of the initial infection must battle its long-term effects.  One of the widespread effects is cognitive damage.  Another widespread long-term effect is medical bankruptcy, due to the high cost of treatment in a nation whose ruling party does not believe in universal health care.  Note that the U.S. is still the world leader in COVID-19 infections and deaths, far exceeding most of the nations on the African continent.   And at the rate at which new infections are increasing, we may see within the next few months a situation in which one out of every ten people in the U.S. has been infected.  This will make staying free from infection very interesting for the rest of us.  Truly, Trump has made America great!

SHORTAGES

The stupid trade wars and mismanagement of the coronavirus threat by the Trump administration have led the U.S. into an era of widespread shortages.  A partial list includes the following:

• Medical supplies, including prescription medications
• Aluminum
• Coins
• Light trucks

This is in addition to the widespread shortages of grocery items we saw this past spring.

DEFLATION

Deflation can be viewed as the consequence of a sudden collapse in demand for goods in an economy.  For those who have cash, deflation can seem like a good thing, but it is actually a sign of a national economy that is going into shock as businesses can't earn enough revenue to keep their doors open.  Deflation thus frequently leads to sudden inflation or even hyperinflation once the amount of goods formerly provided by formerly operational businesses decreases beyond a certain level.  We are in a deflationary period right now, as documented here and here.

CURRENCY DECLINE

Trump's trade wars, unpredictability and belligerence have turned off many nations, and the resulting decline in America's soft power has thus weakened the U.S. dollar.  There are voices now predicting a serious decline in the U.S. dollar perhaps amounting to a crash.  (See this and this for instance.)  If that happens, the United States will no longer need to worry about cheap foreign goods displacing American products.  For those foreign goods will no longer be cheap, and the people of the United States will have to get by with learning to reuse and salvage things.  It should be quite an education.

The Cheating Elephant, Part 2

This is a follow-up to my most recent post.  Lately, reality (both personally and as a U.S. citizen) has been so stressful that I've taken to watching YouTube videos of musicians making music from countries outside the Anglo-Euro-Slavic orbit.  Seeing them make their music and seeing how happy and mentally balanced they are is therapeutic for me, especially when I don't have the time to make my own music.  One thing I don't like, however, is YouTube ads which are political in nature - especially when they promote Donald Trump or Fox News or other right-wing sewage.

Tonight there was an ad on YouTube sponsored by Facebook promoting their new "Voting Information Center."  Whenever Facebook says that they are trying to do something good, I get suspicious.  The new Facebook Voting Information Center is supposed to provide accurate fact checks on statements made during the U.S. election campaigns.  But according to Vox, in August of this year Facebook had not yet fact-checked or contradicted Donald Trump's false statements about voting by mail.  That makes me wonder what else they have not yet fact-checked.  Also, they have not blocked Trump from making Facebook posts.  To me, it still looks somewhat like Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump are still joined together in unholy union.  I'll check my own facts, thank you.

The Cheating Elephant

I don't have the availability to write a long post this weekend - especially a post that involves heavy research.  But I want to point out an item that appeared in a community newspaper in Southern California.  According to an article on the front page of the Mid-October 2020 issue of the Fullerton Observer, a regional field director of the California Republican Party was caught advertising illegal election ballot drop boxes as places for voters to drop their ballots.  The drop boxes being promoted as "Official Ballot Drop Boxes" by the California Republican Party are in fact not official, nor are they sponsored, installed, or sealed by the California Secretary of State or any County Registrar's office.  The California Secretary of State has issued cease and desist orders to the Los Angeles, Orange, and Fresno County Republican Party offices ordering them to stop telling voters to drop their ballots in boxes that have not been designated official ballot drop boxes by the California Secretary of State or registrars of any County governments.

This leads me to wonder what election fraud tactics and ploys the Republicans are trying to pull in other states.  This is the party that says it is the defender of true Christianity and that accuses everyone else of breaking the commandments of God, thus giving the Republicans the "right" to exterminate the lawbreakers (and to seize their possessions!).  Yet the Republicans have broken the commandment that says, "You shall not bear false witness."

Thoughts Upon An Emergent Occasion

(My title being a nod to the poetry and prose of a British guy who has been pushing up daisies for the last 400 years or so...)

When I shop for groceries, I sometimes pass a couple of the many homeless encampments that have sprung up in my city between 2017 and now.  This year, at each of these encampments, there has been a tent whose owner attached an American flag so that the flag has been flying over the tent.  That has struck me over the last few months.  

I don't think that most homeless people anymore are homeless because of drugs or laziness.  But I do tend to think that many members of the "dominant culture" in the United States who believed the promise made by a certain man who promised to "Make America Great Again!"  are now getting a rude awakening.  Yet they still believe in their dream and the man who hypnotized them.

I was reminded of flag-waving this evening by a man I saw on I-205 in Clackamas County, an elderly man standing in the emergency lane of the freeway next to one of those sorts of large trucks which many men like him try to substitute for actual manliness nowadays.  The man was wearing sunglasses and a cowboy hat and staring resolutely at the oncoming traffic while waving a big sign that said "TRUMP - PENCE.  KEEP AMERICA GREAT."  As I passed him, I wondered at his definition of "greatness."  What I've seen over the last ten months or so doesn't look very great to me - unless you count a pandemic in which the United States has been for several months the world leader in infections and deaths, a pandemic which continues to hobble and hollow out the American economy, a nation which contains homicidal and corrupt police, a nation whose refusal to acknowledge climate science led to horrific wildfires and air on the West Coast that was so foul that for several days there were carbon monoxide and particulate smoke warnings from the Canadian border down to Southern California, a nation which has been slammed repeatedly by hurricanes.  Certainly the dominant culture and the people now in power are capable of making great big messes and of committing great evils.

And I was thinking of the foundations of American "greatness" this evening when, during my regular Bible reading, I was reading 1 Timothy 1.  In the version I read, in verse 10, among the people whose sins Paul condemns are those who are referred to as "kidnappers."  But I looked up the original Greek and discovered that the correct term is actually "slave dealers."  So a key part of the foundation of American greatness is something that is actually condemned by the Good Book which many American patriots claim to believe.  Now the foundation is beginning to crack, the poorer members of the "dominant culture" are finding that the bill is coming due for them, and the alpha wolves whom they tried to imitate are starting to chew on them.  I hypothesize that over the next year or so, much of the "greatness" to which Americans have become accustomed will evaporate.  How many of us will be able to take it in stride?

From D to D, Chapter 3 (Continued): Centers of Democratic Power

In the previous post in this series, we looked briefly at the mechanism by which the power of an oppressive regime is destroyed: the mass application of defiance and noncooperation by the citizens or subjects of the regime.  This was illustrated by the 14th century Chinese fable titled, Rule By Tricks (renamed "The Monkey Master fable" by Gene Sharp in his book From Dictatorship to Democracy which I have shortened to From D to D in my posts), which described how an old man fed himself by enslaving a troop of monkeys, and how the monkeys killed the old man - not by a violent physical attack, but by escaping from him.  For in enslaving the monkeys to serve him, the old man had become dependent on them - thus granting them a certain power over him, a power which they applied in refusing to serve him any longer.

We then moved on to a discussion of the institutions and groups which comprise an oppressor's institutional base of power, as well as those institutions and groups which comprise the base of power of those who resist oppression.  Obviously, these two bases of power are in opposition to each other.  And each of these is engaged in a contest to strengthen itself and to dissolve its opponent.  In the oppressor's base of power, there are three groups of people.  The first group consists of those who are so ideologically, socially or psychically wedded to the oppressor's cause that they are unreconstructable - they will never repent of their desire to oppress and dominate, and they will never abandon the oppressor.  The second group consists of those who may side with the oppressor as long as the oppression is personally beneficial to them and their associates - yet who can be persuaded to abandon the oppressor when their allegiance to the oppressor begins to seriously cost them.  As an example of this second group, many "Red" state Republicans in the U.S. who have decided to vote for Biden did so because their allegiance to Trump began to seriously cost them - especially as a result of the trade war with China and the spread of COVID-19 into Trump country.  The third group consists of those supporters of the oppressor who are sincerely deluded, yet who can be persuaded by moral arguments to withdraw their support.

Similarly, the society ruled by an oppressor is composed of three groups of people.  The first consists of the oppressor's base of support.  The second consists of those who are neutral as far as their actions are concerned - who, regardless of how they feel about the oppressor, continue to obey him due to social inertia or unquestioned, unexamined submission to the oppressor's authority, the long-standing subconscious conditioning by psychological and ideological factors which produces that submission.  The third consists of those who have been activized to resist the oppressor and to disintegrate his regime in order to replace it with something better.  These activized people comprise what is known as the struggle group.  In order to disintegrate the oppressor's regime by nonviolent means, the struggle group must work through the society's independent institutions and groups to persuade a critical mass of people to withdraw their cooperation from the oppressor's regime.  That noncooperation can be social, political, or economic, yet when it reaches a certain critical mass (and is accompanied by a compelling "vision of the future" articulated by the struggle group), it causes members of the formerly neutral population to take notice and to begin to join the movement of noncooperation.  As the noncooperation movement begins to gather strength, it causes the pragmatists and the sincerely deluded who are members of the oppressor's pillars of support to begin to question their allegiance.  This is especially true as the support provided by members of the oppressor's base begins to get costly for the supporters.  It is by this means that the psychological and ideological factors which cause people to grant authority to the oppressor are neutralized.

Let me repeat: it is through the society's independent social groups and institutions that mass noncooperation must be applied.  (Note: the word "independent" means free from dependence on or control by the oppressor's regime or its agents.)  As Gene Sharp says in Chapter 3 of From D to D, "Isolated individuals, not members of such groups, usually are unable to make a significant impact on the rest of the society, much less a government, and certainly not a dictatorship."  So let's examine these independent institutions and groups in more detail.  In addition to such obviously political organizations as political parties, trade unions, and human rights organizations, Sharp mentions a number of other types of such groups, including those which are not obvious change agents such as families, sports clubs, religious organizations, gardening clubs, and musical groups.  Yet the existence of such groups and institutions - even when they are independent of the oppressor - does not automatically guarantee the emergence of a successful movement for liberation.  In other words, the existence of these groups is a necessary, but not sufficient condition.

To see what more is needed, we need to turn to another social movement scholar, namely, feminist scholar Jo Freeman, who wrote two essays that describe additional necessary ingredients.  The name of one of these essays is "On the Origins of Social Movements," and the other is "The Origins of the Women's Liberation Movement."  In these two essays, Freeman delves more deeply into the subject of how a movement is constructed from pre-existing conditions.  For a movement to emerge from pre-existing independent groups and institutions which are not necessarily "movement" organizations as far as their origins, three things must be present:

• A preexisting communications network or infrastructure within the social base of the organizations.  If such a network does not exist or only partially exists, then an organizer or team of organizers must create that network.  
• The network must be "co-optable to the new ideas of the incipient movement."  To co-opt a group is to turn that group from its original purpose and agenda to the agenda of the co-opters.  As Freeman says, "To be co-optable, [the network] must be compsed of like-minded people whose background, experiences, or location in the social structure make them receptive to the ideas of a specific new movement."  These like-minded people must also be able to imagine channels for social action which can realize movement goals.  Or, as Freeman says, "A co-optable network, therefore, is one whose members have had common experiences which predispose them to be receptive to the particular ideas of the incipient movement and who are not faced with [or, my note, who know how to overcome] structural or ideological barriers to action.  If the new movement as an 'innovation' can interpret these experiences and perceptions in ways that point out channels for social action, then participation in social movement becomes the logical thing to do."
  
• This network must find itself in a situation of strain in which action can be precipitated - either by a crisis or by an organizer or organizers who "begin organizing... or disseminating a new idea."  The organizers' job is easiest when they have "a fertile field in which to work".  This fertile field is characterized by emerging spontaneous groups who are acutely aware of the issue around which the organizer seeks to organize.  If these spontaneous groups do not exist, the organizer's first job is to create them by bringing together the people most affected by oppression, to begin to talk about their common experience, or, in other words, to "raise the consciousness" of the people most affected.

A few closing remarks are in order.  First, for the co-optation of a co-optable network to take place, there must obviously be one or more "co-opters."  These are the activized members of the struggle group for whom continued passive existence under oppression is an intolerable and unacceptable option, and who therefore engage in the work of co-opting preexisting organizational networks to a new purpose.  For it must be recognized that many of the sorts of independent organizations listed by Gene Sharp in Chapter 3 of From D to D do not start out as social movement organizations.  For the leaders of such organizations, the idea of working together to radically re-imagine and re-structure society is a radical new idea.  Not all independent institutions and organizations will be receptive to such an idea - especially when the implementation of that radical idea involves risk.  That is, not all of these groups will be co-optable - even when they are formed by the oppressed for the oppressed.  Jo Freeman cites the example of the Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs which refused to become a movement organization even though it shared many of the same grievances as the members of the more activist organizations in the American women's movement.  And in the biography America's Social Arsonist: Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century, author Gabriel Thompson notes how Fred Ross was suspicious of organizations composed of the middle and upper-class members of oppressed communities of color, as these were dependent on "both sides of the tracks.  They could talk a good game, but many advocated 'gradualism, patience, endless conciliation and discussion; in short, anything but direct, purposeful action.'"  Ross was talking of the Latino community, but I can say the same thing most emphatically about many of the long-standing and now moribund organizations of the African-American community.

Yet there have been social groups which have seemingly been in the hip pocket of the oppressor, but which were successfully co-opted by savvy and skillful organizers.  Two examples come to mind.  The first is case of the State-sponsored Communist trade unions in Poland during the 1970's and 1980's, several of which were actually taken over by the Solidarity (Solidarnosc) trade union movement against the wishes of the government, as cited by Gene Sharp in From D to D.  The second example is the case of the Nashi (Наши) youth movement which was created in 2005 by the government of Vladimir Putin in order to co-opt burgeoning Russian opposition movements.  The trouble for Putin is that Nashi began to take on a life of its own, and the youth who were its members began to attack the practices of the most privileged members of Russian society, as these practices caused suffering for average Russians.  Thus they began to bite the hand that was feeding them, leading to the cutting of government support for Nashi and the er, ah, "complication" of relations between Putin's government and Russian youth.

Lastly, as Jo Freeman states, "The role of the organizer in movement formation is another neglected aspect of the theoretical literature" - a statement which was true at the time she wrote her essays, but which by now is somewhat out of date.  At this time we have a somewhat larger body of knowledge about the role of the organizer in constructing a social movement.  We will explore this topic in more detail in the next post in this series, God willing.  The organizer is such an important topic because as Freeman says in her essay, "The art of 'constructing' a social movement is something that requires considerable skill and experience."  The organizer's skills can overcome structural barriers to movement formation.

From D to D, Chapter 3: Whence Comes The Power?

This is the third installment of my commentary and "study guide" on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Gene Sharp.  (In my series, I am shortening the title of the book to "From D to D.")  In the last post of this series I made the following statement:

The goal of the organizers of effective resistance against a dictator is to turn a large number of their fellow sufferers into a coherent, focused source of effective non-cooperation, and to focus that non-cooperation on one or more of the dictator's pillars of support until the pillars start to shatter.

The key to effective resistance against a dictator is therefore a strategy of focused, coherent non-cooperation and defiance by a large number of the citizens of a country against its ruling dictator and the dictator's institutions of power.  The question therefore that arises from this realization is how to persuade that large number of oppressed citizens to withdraw their cooperation from the dictator.  Chapter 3 of From D to D begins to answer that question.  But the chapter starts first with showing the reader what that noncooperation might look like - and the devastating effect that such noncooperation would have on the power and survival of anyone who might wish to live by oppressing others.

Sharp presents a fourteenth-century Chinese fable titled, Rule By Tricks, about an old man who made his livelihood by enslaving a group (pack? tribe? barrel?  Ah, it is a troop!) of monkeys.  Without spoiling the fable for you, let me just say that in exchange for his exploitation of the monkeys, the old man became dependent on the service they provided.  Therefore, the monkeys were able to kill the old man - not by a violent attack against him, but simply by withdrawal of their service.  This illustrates a principle stated by community organizing scholar and teacher Dr. Marshall Ganz - namely, that systems of oppression always depend on those whom they exploit.  The Monkey Master fable (as Sharp calls it), has become very popular among those who study and seek to bring about the disintegration of dictatorships, as can be seen here, here, and here, for instance.

Every state or polity has institutional bases of power which enable its leaders to foster the cooperation of the citizens or subjects of that polity.  In addition, in free societies, the citizens or subjects have  bases of power which are separate from the leaders of the polity and which can potentially act as a curb or brake on excesses committed against the subjects or citizens by the leaders of the polity.  To quote Dr. Sharp, the ruler's bases of power include the following:

• Authority, the belief among the people that the regime is legitimate, and that they have a moral duty to obey it;
• Human resources, the number and importance of the persons and groups which are obeying, cooperating, or providing assistance to the rulers.  (Not: these obedient persons and groups cannot exist at all unless there is a base of the population who believe that the regime is legitimate, and that they have a moral duty to obey it.)
• Skills and knowledge, needed by the regime to perform specific actions and supplied by the cooperating persons and groups;
• Intangible factors, psychological and ideological factors that may induce people to obey and assist the rulers.  (Note: it is vital to understand the psychological and ideological factors which underlie the loyalty of the dictator's human resources noted above.  These may vary from regime to regime.  This is why opponents of the dictator's regime must learn to study their opponent.  Or, as a character in a mildly interesting 1990's action movie once said, "Полезно знать что думает противник, не правда ли?")
• Material resources, the degree to which the rulers control or have access to property, natural resources, financial resources, the economic system, and means of communication and transportation; and
• Sanctions, punishments, threatened or applied, against the disobedient and non-cooperative to ensure the submission and cooperation that are needed for the regime to exist and carry out its policies.

Note the interdependencies of these bases of power.  Without authority, the ruler has no human resources.  Without the requisite psychological and ideological factors, the ruler has no authority.  Without skills and knowledge, the dictator's human resources are useless.  Without human resources, the dictator has no access to material resources.  Without human resources or material resources, the dictator cannot apply sanctions.  The members of the dictator's regime who are committed to him comprise his human resources and are known institutionally as his pillars of support.

On the other side of the equation are the bases of power that are independent of the government and are held by the subjects or citizens of a free society or of a group of oppressed people who seek to liberate themselves.  These consist of the groups and institutions that have been founded by citizens or subjects and that are not under government control or dependent on government support.  When these groups become weak or begin to disappear from a democratic society, that society becomes increasingly vulnerable to democratic backsliding and authoritarian takeover.  In Chapter 3 of From D to D, Sharp notes that dictatorships frequently target these independent groups for co-optation or destruction, but such groups can die by means other than deliberate destruction at the hand of a dictator.  Thus it is that in the United States, independent groups such as strong trade unions have been deliberately weakened or disintegrated by the application of State power and the power of the filthy rich.  But American social life has also been disintegrated by a culture that is addicted to electronic entertainment, excess mobility fostered by the automobile, and other factors which were not necessarily deliberate, but rather emergent properties of certain technologies.  

The first task of democratic resisters against dictatorship is therefore to re-build independent groups and institutions in the oppressed society.  Let me repeat: this is the FIRST resistance task, the prerequisite to all that follows of successful strategic nonviolent resistance, just as bread is the prerequisite before you can have a sandwich.  As Gene Sharp says, "Their continued independence and growth [that is, the independence and growth of these independent groups] is often a prerequisite for the success of the liberation struggle."  Note also that Mohandas Gandhi said much the same thing in outlining his program for nonviolent liberation of India from British rule.  Gandhi started his organizing by organizing Indians to come together to meet their needs collectively without reliance on the British.   He called this approach the "constructive program," and said that "... my handling of Civil Disobedience without the constructive programme will be like a paralyzed hand attempting to lift a spoon."  

This is why basing a liberation struggle solely around mass protest marches and rallies is such a losing idea.  It lacks the prerequisite strength for long-lasting success.  Even when it seems to succeed, as in Tahrir Square in Egypt in 2011, the "victory" is fragile and thus easily taken over by a new round of would-be dictators as the Muslim Brotherhood and later, the Egyptian military, did in the aftermath of Tahrir Square.  (For a couple of commentaries on the failure, see this and this.  Note that I do not endorse everything these authors say.  Take them with a few grains of salt.  YMMV.)  (Second note: I am a great fan of the OTPOR! nonviolent revolution that deposed Slobodan Milosevic.  However, I would say that one potential weakness of the OTPOR! strategy and of the CANVAS Core Curriculum is perhaps a failure to look at the prerequisite of building or re-building independent groups and institutions by the democratic nonviolent resisters.)

The building (or re-building as the need may be) of these independent groups and institutions is such an important topic that my next post in this series will focus on this subject.  And I will refer to some additional sources that will shed light on the subject of institution-building from multiple angles.

Apologies for a Delay

This past weekend I had fully intended to post my third installment of my commentary and "study guide" for Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  But last Friday, I allowed my computer to perform an operating system upgrade that broke more things than it fixed.  So I spent a number of sleepless hours over the weekend trying to figure out what was wrong.  Finally I gave up in disgust and loaded a fresh copy of the latest version of Linux Mint.  I like troubleshooting computers almost as much as I like working on cars - which is to say, not very much.  At least things work now.

While I was thus occupied, it seems that Donald Trump was hospitalized because of a COVID-19 infection.  I just found this out yesterday.  Although the situation is still quite fluid, I believe that the study of strategic nonviolent resistance is still relevant for those who are members of oppressed and marginalized peoples.  Regardless of what happens to Trump (and I hear that he "released" himself from the hospital yesterday and returned to the White House), we must remember that Trump himself is merely a symptom of a larger disease.  Therefore, I will publish that third post this upcoming weekend, God willing.

In the meantime, please check out the following recent posts of mine:

• Nihil Nixed
• The Go to Jail Truth