Great book. Highly recommend for anyone doing any kind of social justice work. Especially people trying to build up a movement.
1/4/17
- Uprising can be a craft, and that this craft can change our world. Those who practice it tell us that outbreaks of widespread disruption, although commonly misunderstood, are neither flukes nor fleeting failures. Rather, they are forces that can be guided with the exercise of conscious and careful effort. Indeed, if the growing legion of these practitioners is right, few forces will have as significant a role in shaping the contours of public life in the years to come.
- nonviolence
- nonviolence must be wedded to strategic mass action if it is to have true force in the world.
- he [Gene Sharp] began arguing to his pacifist colleagues that people turn to war and violence not because they are wicked or hateful. they resort to violence because they do not see any other option for resolving intractable conflicts.
- Just like armed struggle, Sharp argued, nonviolent conflict involves the “waging of ‘battles,’ requires wise strategy and tactics, and demands of its ‘soldiers’ courage, discipline, and sacrifice.”
- Sharp: “Feeling good, not engaging in violence, or being willing to die, when you have not achieved the goals of your struggle, does not change the fact that you have failed.”
- Mass action
- Sharp: “hierarchical systems can be modified or destroyed by a withdrawal of submission, cooperation, and obedience.”
- Piven: these revolts “showed that poor people could achieve little through the routines of conventional electoral and interest group politics.” Therefore, what remind as their key tool “was what we called disruption, the breakdowns that resulted when people defied the rules and institutional routines that ordinarily governed life.”
- Sharp’s idea was straightforward: if people refuse to cooperate with a regime – if civil servants stop carrying out the functions of the state, if mercahants suspend economic activity, if soldiers stop obeying orders, – even an an entrenched dictator will find himself handicapped. and if popular disobedience is sufficiently widespread and prolonged, no regime can survive.
- the administration responded to pressure, King reasoned, not proposals.
- Piven: “great moments of equalizing reform in American political history” have been responses to periods when disruptive power as most widely deployed.
- Gandi: “No country has ever risen without being purified through the fire of suffering.”
- limits of existing institutions
- Lerner: “[large nonprofits] are just big enough – and just connected enough to the political and economic power structure – to be constrained from leading the kinds of actives that are needed” for bold campaigns of nonviolent conflict to be successful.
- Ad hoc groups can risk daring campaigns because they have nothing to lose, but they commonly lack the resources to escalate or to sustain multiple waves of protest over a period of years.
- “Organizers not only failed to seize the opportunity presented by the rise of unrest, they typically acted in ways that blunted or curbed the disruptive force which lower-class people were sometimes able to mobilize.” Most centrally, the organizers in their case studies opted against escalating the mass protests “because they [were] preoccupied with trying to build and sustain embryonic formal organizations in the sure conviction that these organizations [would] enlarge and become powerful.”
- Because organizations have to worry about self-preservation, they become averse to risk taking. Because they enjoy some access to formal avenues of power, they tend to overestimate what they can accomplish from inside the system. As a result, they forget the disruptive energy that propelled them to power to begin with, and so they often end up playing a counterproductive role. As Piven says of the labor movement, “Mass strikes lead to unions. But unions are not the big generators of mass strikes.”
- Piven: “Organizations are not movements. But organizations can institutionalize and legalize the gains won through disruptive mobilizations. “
- This reality only makes it more important that activists refine their skills for addressing the aspects of mobilization that they an influence. These skills include the ability to recognize when the terrain for protest is fertile, the talent for staging creative and provocative acts of civil disobedience, the capacity for intelligently escalating once a mobilization is underway, and the foresight to make sure that short-term cycles of disruption contribute to furthering longer-term goals.
- major groups, precisely because they are firmly established, can be slow to recognized opportunities for disruptive revolt. Sometimes they must be prodded into action by scrappy upstarts.
- rather than being based on calculating realism – a shrewd assessment of what was attainable in the current political climate – the drive for marriage equality drew on a transformational vision.
- in the monolithic model, if people without privileged political access want to affect the behavior of government in a democracy, the best they can do is try to elect a candidate more sympathetic to their view, with hopes that he is person, once in office, will deliver on the issues they care about. Needless to say, this process often ends in disappointment for voters: countless promising new candidates have been quick to distance themselves from grassroots supporter and perpetuate the status quo after they finally breach the corridors of power.
- Needless to say, the past century’s major gains around women’s suffrage, economic justice, and civil rights did not emerge from a strategy of triangulation.
- In their drive to “build organizations, not movements,” they limit the scope of their confrontations. They do not seek to escalate to the point of creating a public crisis and spurring activity outside their institutional framework.
- Otpor
- Forging a middle path, it would use provocative, creative actions to produce a series of crises for the Milosevic regime and eventually accomplish what previous efforts could not.
- rotated official spokes people
- Otpor created a structure that could allow for local teams of activists to act independently. As it grew, write Nenadic and Belcevic, “Otpor created branches throughout the country and made national calls for coordinated action. Every branch, however, was autonomous and could plan how to carry its own actions to fit local circumstances.”
- The Parties did not reach the great majority of the serbian population, people who were turned off by the political system as a whole. Their rallies and marches had a predictable flavor, with top operatives taking the podium and loyalists each turning out a small number of followers in order to produce the necessary audience. No one outside of the party would ever show up.
- By placing local grievances – whether they involved a lack of electricity or problems with a corrupt local official – in the context of a broader fight, Otpor won the commitment of small-town activists, who were acting outside of any formal organization. “The beauty of having a resistance movement involved in all this,” Marovic explains, “was that everyone started connecting these local problems with the overall problem, which was the Milosevic regime.”
- Without any internal bureaucracy or centralized authority, Otpor succeeded in created a cohesive movement identity among tens of thousands of Serbians. Two key tools it used to achieve this were front loading and mass training.
- “Frontloading” was a means of creating well-defined norms and practices for the movement without the direct, heavy-handed oversight typical of the hierarchical political parties.
- the group established an extensive series of mass trainings, a program of initiation that allowed them to quickly engaged new supporters, to turn casual participants into committed members of tthe movement, and to continually upgrade the skills of their activists.
- they were courses of ten hours or more, designed to empower participants to operate in their own autonomous, local chapters. the movement was a big tent, indolically speaking. Yet, by the time new partiicaptns made it through the initiation, they had internalized the movement’s DNA.
- A typical training stretched over the course of a week, in monday-through-friday evening sessions.
- momentum based movements
- Marovic: “In classical politics, you’re interested in the direct route to victor. But in building a movement, you’re interested in the more fundamental change that happens through the activation of citizens. It’s indirect. And a lot of the things that are going to come from this, you’re not going to see in advance.”
- Missing was an overarching framework through which acts of personal sacrifice could be channeled into a concerted effort to increase tension and break the back of segregation at it’s weakest point.
- Merriman: “Agency and skills make a difference, and in some cases have enabled movements to overcome, circumvent, or transform adverse conditions.”
- Chance offers up possibilities for revolt; movements make whirlwinds
- Rinku Sen: “While organizations of all sorts produce incremental victories that help prevent backsliding, shifts in core values that shape policy take place through social movements that involve large numbers of people.”
- [SNCC] build an interracial group that, in the words of historian Cheryl Greenberg, “based itself on radical egalitarianism, mutual respect, and unconditional support for every person’s unique gifts and contributions. Meetings lasted until everyone had their say, in the belief that every voice counted.” The strong ties fostered by this prefigurative community encouraged participants to undertake bold and dangerous acts of civil disobedience — such as SNCC’s famous lunch-counter sit-ins. In this case, the aspirations to a beloved community both facilitated strategic action and had a signification impact on mainstream politics.
- It requires deliberate effort for movements to champion the story of what their struggle has made possible. But this effort it vital, because without it figure victories are harder to achieve. In societies where history is a dale of presidents and senators, generals and CEOs, the social view of power too ofter remains in the shadows. The potential for what can happen when people refuse to obey must constantly be learned anew. Hayden contends, “Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery, Woodrow Wilson passed the suffrage amendment… and Lyndon Johnson declared that we would overcome.”
- demands
- In the early phases, as mass movements gain steam, the key measure of a demand is its capacity to resonate with the public and arouse broad-basses sympathy for a cause.
- It was brilliant because defiance of the salt law was loaded with symbolic significance. “Next to air and water,” Gandi argued,” salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life.” It was a simple commodity that everyone was compelled to buy and which the government taxed. Since the time of the Mughal Empire, the state’s control over salt was a hated reality. The fact that Indians were not permitted to freely collect salt from natural deposits or to pan for salt from the sea was a clear illustration of how a foreign power was unjustly profiting from the subcontinent’s people and its resources.
- Because the tax affected everyone, the grievance was university felt. The fact that it most heavily burdened the poor added to its outrage.
- declaring victory
- Otpor came up with a novel approach: campaigners themselves publicly laid out their standards for what would constitute a win, and then they loudly trumpeted it when they met these objectives, using the publicity to generate momentum.
- For the public, the movement must create dramas in which resistance efforts can emerge triumphant at times when instrumental results have not yet been clearly established. second, within the movement, participants must understand the theory of change so that they are resilient in the face of fickle press coverage.
- action design
- They were willing to craft protests that were significantly disruptive; they put on display a high level of sacrifice among participants; and they escalated their protests, building to greater levels of activity and involvement.
- three elements: Disruption, sacrifice, and escalation
- The idea here is that demonstrations are especially effective when they create a dilemma for those in power, producing situations in which any response the authors choose helps the movement.
- Thinking in terms of creating dilemmas for their adversaries can be a useful way for activists to devise more effective interventions. At the same time, perfect dilemmas are very difficult to construct. In truth, any individual action can only do so much. More important than coming up with a single, brilliantly conceived act of nonviolent resistance is a willingness to string together multiple protests in a way that creates a sense of heightened drama.
- Crisis / whirlwind
- King’s intent was to “create a situation so crisis-packed” that the too-often-ignored boil of segregation would be opened and all of its “puss-flowing ugliness” exposed “to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion.”
- It is possible, as organizers in Birmingham insisted, to create situations so crisis-packed that long-ignored injustices are forced into the public spotlight. It is possible, as Aldon Morris asserted, to create planned exercises in mass disruption.
- Shirdharani: “Underlying… both violence and non-violence is the basic assumption that certain radical social changes cannot be brought about save by mass action capable of precipitation an emotional crisis, and that the humdrum everyday existence of human life needs shaking up in order the man my arrive at fateful decisions.”
Issues of grave injustice, he continues, “must be successfully and sufficiently dramatized in order to arouse mass interest and mass enthusiasm preparatory to reaching a crucial decision. This requires not merely an intense consciousness of the issues involve, but also an emotional crisis in the life of the community.”
- Major trigger events, ranging from the start of the Iraq War to the flooding of New Orleans, “inevitably disrupt the dominant culture’s mental maps and can trigger mass psychic breaks: moments when status quo stories no longer hold true.” These time are crucial for reorienting public opinion. “Psychic breaks,” Reinsborough and Canning write, “open new political space and can provide powerful opportunities for new stories to take root in popular consciousness.”
- After a whirlwind spike in activity subsides, movement participants commonly feel dejected – even though it is a precisely this time that they are poised to secure their most significant gains.
- “The longterm impact of social movements, “Moyer contents, is more important than their immediate material success.”
- This strategy did not always make them popular. But it did allow them to stay in the public eye, to expose the injustice of official neglect and disregard, and finally to win broad support for their cause.
- In many cases, creating a galvanizing crisis around an issues involves inconveniencing members of the general public, potentially alienating the very people that advocates want to win over.
- disruption
- By taking an issue that is hidden from common view and putting it at the center of public debate, disruptive protest forces observers to decide which side they are on. This has three effects: First, it builds the base of a movement by creating an opportunity for large numbers of latent sympathizer to become dedicated activists. Second, even as it turns passive supporters into active ones, it engages members of the public who were previous uninformed, creating greater awareness even among those who do not care for the activists’ confrontational approach. And third, it agitates the most extreme elements of the opposition, fueling a short-term backlash but isolating reactionaries from the public in the long run.
- The major social movements of the past two centuries have consistently proven wrong the advice that activists do better to appear civil and minimize confrontation.
- Piven contents, “conflict is the very heartbeat of social movements.” Even if protest are seen as distasteful, protesters can win.
- culture of resistance
- When mass mobilizations, established organizations, and alternative communities seem themselves as complementary, they can create a movement ecosystem that allows diverse approaches to promoting change to flourish.
- subcultures
- Instead of looking for ways to effectively communicate their vision to the outside world, they are prone to adopt slogans and tactics that appeal to hardcore activists but alienate the majority. These tendencies become self-defeating.