This post is a continuation of our commentary and "study guide" for the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp. In this series of posts, I have shortened the title of the book to From D to D. The consideration of this book is highly relevant for these times, in which Donald Trump, a would-be autocrat and oppressor who wanted to Make America Great Again by trashing all the nonwhite people and poor people on earth, has lost his attempt to have the United States Supreme Court overturn his election loss. Trump's late-game strategic goal has been the goal of the Republican Party and the Global Far Right for a very long time: namely, to create a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by exploiting everyone else. Their strategic method has been to disenfranchise as many people as possible in order to cement the control of the "chosen few." And although Trump's legal challenges have largely failed, the Republican Party is actively planning measures for further disenfranchisement of the poor and the nonwhite who live in the United States. Therefore, it is up to us who are not counted among these "chosen few" to learn to organize ourselves in order to thwart the power of the few and to ensure the emergence of a world which is shared equally by all of its peoples.
We have been considering Chapter 4 of From D to D. The title of Chapter 4 is "Dictatorships Have Weaknesses." After a brief review of the weaknesses identified by Sharp, we discussed the fact that dictatorships have learned to adjust their tactics over the years, and that this highlights the need for democratic resisters to engage in a careful strategic analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the autocratic regimes they are resisting, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the democratic resistance group. This strategic analysis is known by the terms "power analysis" and "power mapping" by students of community organizing.
The basis of this analysis is the recognition that a ruling elite depends on the subjects whom it rules, and that the power which this elite exerts over its subjects is based on the extent to which the elite can make its subjects dependent on the elite. This principle is stated in a number of Gene Sharp's writings, including his three-volume work titled, The Politics of Nonviolent Action. A variant of this insight has also been stated by Marshall Ganz, who said that systems of oppression always depend on the people they exploit. The relative degree of dependence of each side on the other side determines the relative power each side has over the other. As Ganz says in his community organizing curriculum materials, if you need my resources more than I need your resources, I have potential power over you. If I need your resources more than you need my resources, you have potential power over me. Consider the case in which a few people hold control over a large body of resources needed by the many. This is exactly the case when a rich but small elite holds power over a large mass of poor people. Each member of the rich elite holds much more power per capita than each member of the poor masses. However, if the members of the poor masses organize to withhold from the rich elite the aggregate fruits of their labor on which that rich elite depends, the poor masses can control, curtail, and even shatter the power of that rich elite.
Thus the first questions of a power analysis are these (taken from "Speaking of Power - the Gettysburg Project" by Marshall Ganz):
What change do we want?
Who has the resources to create that change?
What do they want?
What resources do we have that they want or need?
What's our theory of change? In other words, how can we organize our resources to give us enough leverage to get what we want? Or, how will what we are doing lead to the change we want to see? "Theory of change" is another term for strategy, which Gene Sharp discusses in Chapters 6 through 8 of From D to D.
Additional questions related to the existing exercises of power in a pre-existing oppressive society are these:
Who usually wins?
Who usually gets to set agendas?
Who usually benefits or loses from the decisions of the powerful?
The answer to these three questions reveal to the democratic resisters the three faces of power as seen in the oppressed society prior to the beginning of a liberation struggle. The third face of power frequently forms the psychological backdrop of an oppressive society, the understanding by the oppressed of "the way things just are." All three faces must be challenged by those who resist an oppressive system.
The relations of power and dependence can be captured visually by means of a map of actors. An example of such a map is shown below:
Map of actors.
Graphic created by me, adapted from the work of Marshall Ganz.
Click on it to make it larger.
Such a map is a great aid in tracing dependencies and beginning to identify the most promising points at which to begin a nonviolent attack against an oppressive regime. This is key to the creation of a viable strategy which has the greatest chance of success.
Veteran organizer Jane McAlevey elaborates on the concept of power analysis (which she calls power structure analysis) in her book No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power In the New Gilded Age. She makes the very important point that a key reason for power analysis is to map the power your side will need to generate in order to get the members of a rich elite to change goals that are very important to these elites. To make this point, she quotes Joseph Luders' book The Civil Rights Movement and the Logic of Social Change, in which he asserted that "the most successful organizing drives in the civil rights movement...were those that carried high economic concession costs for the racist regime, that is, those by which movement actors could inflict a high degree of economic pain." Therefore, a goal of mapping power is to determine first, how much it will cost the members of the elite to grant the demands of the resisters, and second, how much economic disruption and pain the resisters must inflict on the members of the elite in order to make the cost of that disruption greater than the cost to the elites of granting the resisters' demands. Knowing how these two costs compare to each other before beginning a resistance campaign is key to beginning to formulate an effective strategy of disruption.
Lastly, the mapping of power and dependence serves as a starting point for the democratic resisters to strategize how to reduce their dependence on the ruling elite as much as possible. This reduction of dependence further weakens the power the elite has over the oppressed society.
The next post in this series will begin to delve into Chapter 5 of From D to D. Feel free to read ahead. And feel free to read some of the books I mentioned in this post. Also, here's a link to another community organizing study guide based on the teaching of Marshall Ganz. And last, but not least, here's some homework: Study the Cochabamba Water War which took place in Bolivia in 1999 and 2000. Here and here are sources which describe the conflict. (Feel free to find other sources as well.) See if you can identify a map of actors and their interests, resources, and dependencies. How did the poor Bolivian peasants identify the Achilles' heel of their opponents? How did they reduce their dependence on their opponents?
"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:
Mineral fuels including oil (52.2 percent of total exports)
Iron, steel (4.3 percent)
Gems, precious metals (3.6 percent)
Machinery including computers (2.1 percent)
Wood (2 percent)
Fertilizers (2 percent)
Cereals (1.9 percent)
Aluminum (1.4 percent)
Electrical machinery & equipment (1.3 percent)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
