The Gross Polluter of the North

Jalopy car in Joshua Tree National Park

Image by Jarek Tuszynski

Posted to Wikimedia Commons on 28 December 2008 under a 

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

"Jalopy": an old car in a dilapidated condition.  Definition by Oxford Languages.  Synonyms: "rust bucket", carcancha.  Rust buckets are often "gross polluters" - that is, cars that can't pass smog or DEQ tests no matter how much money you throw at them.  I know this, because many years ago, when I was still living in Southern California and I was a dirt-poor undergraduate college student, I drove one.

As we look at what are hopefully the last gasps of the Trump presidency, I think it is helpful to explore the role that the Russian government played in Trump's initial rise to power, as well as the motivations which the Russians had for playing that role.  Trump showed himself to be every bit a "blast-from-the-past" racist, bigot, big-shot Republican, friend of the rich, and anti-environmentalist.  In this, he was a mirror of the regime and mindset of Vladimir Putin.  I have previously traced on this blog the motivations for the racism and revanchism ("Let's Make Ourselves Great Again!") of both these men.  (See this, this, and this, for instance.  Also see this by Olga Doroshenko.)  Trump's friendliness toward the rich has obvious motives.  But why did the Russians see fit to help the rise of such a rabid anti-environmentalist?

As I have considered this question over the last few weeks, I have come to the conclusion that the anti-environmental motives of Trump and Putin have less to do with deep psychological causes than with a certain perverted pragmatism.  Let's look at that pragmatism from a Russian perspective, and we'll start with the current state of the Russian economy.  According to Investopedia, Russia's economy in March 2020 was smaller than any of the top ten national economies in the world.  (It is interesting to note that each of the economies of India and Brazil is larger than that of Russia.)  And according to a 2018 Forbes article, Russia's economy is smaller than that of the U.S. state of Texas.  However, the Russian economy is still very heavily dependent on the export of minerals, whereas the economy of Texas is more diversified.  (Don't let that make you complacent if you live in Texas - the U.S. economy also has certain weaknesses, which I will continue to explore in future posts.)  The Russian economy has not been able to transition to reliance on export of high-value manufactured goods, despite recent dubious Russian claims of having invented a coronavirus vaccine.  

To see how dependent Russia is on exports of raw materials, consider the top ten Russian exports according to this source:

1. Mineral fuels including oil (52.2 percent of total exports)
2. Iron, steel (4.3 percent)
3. Gems, precious metals (3.6 percent)
4. Machinery including computers (2.1 percent)
5. Wood (2 percent)
6. Fertilizers (2 percent)
7. Cereals (1.9 percent)
8. Aluminum (1.4 percent)
9. Electrical machinery & equipment (1.3 percent)
10. Copper (1.2 percent)

As can be seen, the export of finished high-value manufactured goods comprises only 3.4 percent of the total value of Russian exports.  The bulk of the export revenue earned by Russia consists of sales of mineral fuels including oil.

But there's a problem.  While it is certainly true that the global peak of production of conventional oil has certainly passed, it is also true that advances in renewable energy technology have made this peak far less relevant and far less disruptive to industrial societies overall than many of the "peakists" were predicting from 2007 onward.  In fact, the German Energy Watch Group, which correctly tracked the peaking of global conventional oil production, also correctly tracked the rise in use of renewables, particularly solar photovoltaic power production.  This rise in use is being driven by continued advances in solar PV cell manufacturing and battery storage which are driving down the cost of solar PV systems and making them affordable to ever-wider markets.

This presents a big problem for countries whose wealth is predicated so heavily on a foundation of exporting mineral fuels.  I would like to suggest the possibility that the power base of Russian elites relies heavily on the foundation of the extraction and sale of raw materials including oil, gas, and other mineral fuels, and that developments which threaten global markets for these resources or which drive down the price of these resources are a serious threat to the survival of the members of these Russian elites.  It is therefore interesting to note the connection between climate science denialism and the positions of many (but certainly not all) of the most prominent members of the Global Far Right.

Thus it is that in Russia, according to a June 2020 Moscow Times article, renewables (excluding hydropower) account for only 0.16 percent of electric energy production.  Investment in renewable energy installation is almost completely nonexistent.  On the other hand, China is one of the world's leading investors in wind and solar energy, and is a major manufacturer of solar and wind energy conversion equipment.  China is also poised to take the lead in innovative renewable energy technologies.  Thus, the future looks bright for Chinese plans to transition to a non-polluting future, according to this August 2020 Forbes article.  And China is by no means the only nation investing in renewable energy technology.  

Therefore technological advances, serious investments, and the emergence of global climate preservation movements have threatened a key source of Russian export revenue.  Let's consider one potential implication of a successful "Green New Deal": a reversal of Arctic sea ice loss that is potentially great enough to deny Russian access to hypothetical mineral deposits as far north as the North Pole.  Putin showed his own belief in climate change by laying claim to these mineral deposits as far back as 2001 - a claim which the Russian government renewed in 2015.  If the Arctic sea ice returns to anything like its normal non-climate-altered extent, that spells the end for cheap and easy Russian access to additional mineral resources.

Let's close with a snapshot of pollution in Russia, which has recently been "enjoying" record high levels of air pollution (including a city which routinely has the dirtiest air on the planet) and coastal waters that are sickening surfers and killing thousands of animals.  A small price to pay in order to keep certain elites in power, eh?  And now you can understand the helpfulness of the Trump administration toward those Russian elites in the rolling back U.S. vehicle fuel economy standards this year.

From D to D, Chapter 4: Dictatorships Have Weaknesses

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

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

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

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

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

WEAKNESSES OF DICTATORSHIPS

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

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

STRENGTHS OF DICTATORSHIPS

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

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

THE NEED FOR POWER ANALYSIS

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

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

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

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

A Journey and Its Next Few Steps

Here's a quick post.  It now appears that Donald Trump has exhausted almost all of his avenues for attempting to challenge his loss of the 2020 Presidential election.  Therefore, it appears almost certain that Joe Biden will be inaugurated as the next President of the United States on January 20, 2021.  I feel like I can begin to breathe a sigh of relief.  The last four years have at times felt to me like a movie I saw when I was a kid, a movie in which a semi truck driven by a murderous maniac tries to kill a traveling salesman just for fun.  Except that I've felt like the traveling salesman and Trump has seemed to me to be the truck driver.  At the end of the movie, the truck runs off the edge of a cliff.  Trump, too, will one day reap what he's been sowing.  In fact, the reaping has already begun...

But that grand elephant of the G.O.P. has left an elephantine mess for the rest of us to clean up.  And part of that mess consists of the continued existence of authoritarian strongmen who exploit nations.  So as I mentioned in my last post, I will continue my series on strategic nonviolent resistance, using the book From Dictatorship to Democracy as a guide.  I believe that this will be useful for people in some of the countries which have shown up in my pageview statistics.  It will also continue to be useful for historically marginalized communities of color in the United States, as we learn how to apply the principles of community organizing to build our own power and liberate ourselves by means of our own self-sufficiency.

A key component of this liberation through building self-sufficiency is the ability to think strategically, to notice and accurately trace the emergent trends in our society, and to be able to see (and prepare for) the possible futures that might emerge from these trends.  Therefore, I will also try to do some trend-tracing on this blog.  I must warn you, however, that "Making predictions is hard - especially about the future," as Yogi Berra once said.  Take what I say with a grain of salt.

Lastly, I think I will update the layout of this blog.  Its layout may have been cutting-edge when it was first rolled out, but now the edge has dulled and the current layout looks somewhat klunky to me.  I will be trying out a few new layouts over the next few weeks.  Hopefully, the final result will be more readable and user-friendly.

Maintenance Day November 2020

I have a ton of things I need to do away from a computer today.  So I won't have time to write another research-heavy post.  But I will provide readers with a plan of what I intend to cover in future posts.

First, it appears increasingly undeniable that Joe Biden will become the President of the United States on January 20 of next year.  Trump's courtroom challenges to the legal election results continue to be stricken down.  Yet Trump continues with his courtroom challenges, even though these challenges have no merit.  It can be clearly seen that Trump is trying to invalidate votes cast by people of color.  It can also be seen that there are yet many Americans who continue to align themselves with White supremacy and with Trump as their leader.  Therefore, I will continue my series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  Those of us who have been historical targets of oppression will need to continue to study the ways in which we can use strategic nonviolent resistance to neutralize the power of our oppressors.

Second, I want to continue to discuss the ways in which the outworkings of damnation move through an evil society.  I have focused almost exclusively on the United States in my previous posts, but I want to shift the focus to include Russia, which is another evil society that is now reaping what it has sown.

Lastly, I want to write posts which explore how decent people can navigate these difficult days.  Meanwhile, please read what the Reverend William Barber has to say about the United States of America.  I like this man's perspective!  "Well, I was trained in theology that whatever you call your spiritual experience, if it does not produce a quarrel with the world, then the claim to be spiritual is suspect..."  Maybe this lack of genuine spiritual experience of conversion explains why so many American evangelicals who claim nowadays that they have been "saved" and "born again" look more like Freddy Krueger than the Lord Jesus Christ.

A Bad Place To Lie

These days, I find myself battling a recurrent addiction - the addiction to reading the news.  This morning I know that I have a ton of things I need to do.  Therefore, I will most definitely stop Web surfing in a few minutes, grit my teeth, and get on with doing what I need to do.  No more binge surfing.

Yet in my semi-compulsive news browsing, I have discovered a few things.  First, it appears that Trump has finally stopped blocking the Biden transition (even though he still falsely claims that the election was stolen, which it wasn't).  Second, it appears that Biden is picking a capable and competent leadership team to assist in cleaning up the monstrous mess left by Trump.  Third, it also sadly appears that the United States remains deeply divided.

As I wrote previously, this division is the result of America's original sins combined with the engineering of a right-wing social movement over the last 45 years - a movement aided and abetted by a powerful right-wing media machine exemplified by the media empire of Rupert Murdoch.  And one of the sharpest evidences of this division is the national response to the COVID-19 pandemic.  By now, the states known as red states all have higher levels of COVID-19 infection than those states classified as blue states.  And the most conservative of the western or prairie or mountain states have the highest levels of COVID-19 infection in the nation (and in the world).  (See this also.)  These states also contain populations whose flawed notions of liberty make them the most resistant to science-based guidelines for reducing the risk of infection.  

Some of those stories of resistance to science are truly breathtaking.  We have Republican governors finally, grudgingly, mandating that people in their states start wearing masks.  Yet these mask mandates have so many loopholes that they are effectively worthless.  We also have public health officials in a town in Wyoming who were shouted down by angry residents during a recent meeting in which these officials were discussing ways to limit the explosive spread of COVID-19.  We have widespread regions of the United States in which the wearing of a mask is seen as a personal affront to "conservative" values.  We have a U.S. Supreme Court whose newest member has helped to eviscerate the ability of states to impose limits on religious gatherings in order to limit the spread of COVID.  We have an upstart right-wing "news" network (a network that is even farther out in fantasy land than Fox News) which was recently suspended from YouTube for falsely claiming a "guaranteed cure" for COVID-19.  And we have people in red states who are dying right now in hospitals, yet who refuse to believe that it is COVID-19 that is killing them.  According to a South Dakota nurse interviewed by CNN, "They tell you there must be another reason they are sick.  They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that 'stuff' [personal protective equipment, or PPE] because they don't have COVID because it's not real.  Yes.  This really happens."  There are nurses in other parts of the country who tell similar stories of being harassed (and even coughed and spit on) by Trump supporters and other right-wing types who are hospitalized.

And that last item reminds me of the power of cultic thinking.  For it appears obvious by now that the people who identify as members of the Global Far Right or who are aligned with white supremacy or whose worldview has been shaped by right-wing media have all the hallmarks of people who have been indoctrinated into a cult.  One of the hallmarks of a cult is that it convinces its members that the cult is good even while the cult is actually killing them.  It boggles the mind that there are actually patients in hospitals in the rural U.S. right now who are insulting the doctors and nurses who are taking care of them because these doctors and nurses actually dare to wear PPE.  It's almost as mind-boggling to read of patients who are dying of COVID-19, yet who refuse to acknowledge this fact.  A deathbed is a bad place to tell lies.

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)