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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mark Engler
Read between
May 12 - May 31, 2020
“There is no tactical theory so neat that a revolutionary struggle for a share of power can be won merely by pressing a row of buttons,”
King wrote in a perceptive reflection after Albany. “Human beings with all their faults and strengths constitute the mechanism of a social movement. They must make mistakes and learn from them, make more mistakes and learn anew.”
nonviolence must be wedded to strategic mass action if it is to have true force in the world.
nonviolent action could be “a technique of struggle involving the use of psychological, social, economic, and political power”
nonviolent conflict involves the “waging of ‘battles,’ requires wise strategy and tactics, and demands of its ‘soldiers’ courage, discipline, and sacrifice.”
“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.”
insistence on converting the enemy could be counterproductive, Sharp believed. He argued that “the demand for ‘love’ for people who have done cruel things may turn people who are justifiably bitter and unable to love their opponents towards violence.”
civil rights leader James Farmer: “Where we cannot influence the heart of the evil-doer, we can force an end to the evil practice.”
Sociologist Aldon Morris explains, “SCLC strategists decided that the Birmingham movement should be a drama. That is, it would start out slow and low-keyed and then continue to build up, step by step, until it reached a crisis point, where the opposition would be forced to yield.”
Sharp consistently argues that movements must always devise their own strategies. “An outsider like me can’t tell you what to do,” he advised one group, “and if I did, you shouldn’t believe me. Trust yourselves.”
veteran labor movement strategist Stephen Lerner has argued, major organizations have just enough at stake—relationships with mainstream politicians, financial obligations to members, collective bargaining contracts—to make them fear the lawsuits and political backlash that come with sustained civil disobedience. What Lerner says of unions applies equally to large environmental organizations, human rights groups, and other nonprofits: they “are just big enough—and just connected enough to the political and economic power structure—to be constrained from leading the kinds of activities that are
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A gulf has emerged that separates established organizations dedicated to slowly winning social change over the long haul from explosive mass mobilizations that use disruptive power to shake the status quo.
“ridicule is man’s most potent weapon”
“power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.”
“Don’t talk ideology, just issues.… Build organizations, not movements.… Focus on neighborhoods and on concrete, winnable goals.”
The Alinskyite tradition held that community organizations should be pragmatic, nonpartisan, and ideologically diverse—that they should put pressure on all politicians, not express loyalty to any.
Movements go in and out of existence. As good as they are, you can’t sustain them. Everyday people need incremental success over months and sometimes years.”
Alinsky, too, saw a danger in expecting quick upheavals. He argued, “Effective organization is thwarted by the desire for instant and dramatic change.… To build a powerful organization takes time. It is tedious, but that’s the way the game is played—if you want to play and not just yell, ‘Kill the umpire.’”
Alinsky advocated action around narrow local demands.
The idea is that small victories build local capabilities, give participants a sense of their power, and spur more ambitious action.
“Movement activists appeal to youth, frustrated idealists, and cynical ideologues, ignoring the 80 percent of moderates who comprise the world as it is.… Organizing is generational, not here today, gone tomorrow.”
Protest movements, they explained, gain real leverage only by causing “commotion among bureaucrats, excitement in the media, dismay among influential segments of the community, and strain for political leaders.”
Roots to Power: A Manual for Grassroots Organizing
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 under way, and the foresight to make sure that short-term cycles of disruption contribute to furthering longer-term goals.
the challenge of how to combine explosive short-term uprisings with long-term organizing that can make movements more sustainable is an exciting one.
resistance efforts have long attracted recruits by projecting a sense of coolness; satire has been a perennial tool of dissidents; and all social movements are, by nature, social—dependent on interpersonal relationships as much as abstract ideology.
The Otpor founders were savvy in their ability to steal ideas from corporate marketing campaigns to allow their message to reach people who were indifferent to the typical political advertisements and sloganeering of the opposition parties.
the group constantly rotated its official spokespeople, and it was careful to avoid developing a cult of personality around any individual.
“It’s better to show up in a different way than to always give [authorities] the same thing so they know how to deal with you.”
activists have the revelation: They need both protest and organization.”
The military, the media, the business community, the churches, labor groups, the civil service, the educational establishment, and the courts, among others, are pillars that lend structural stability to a political system. These are all bodies that, in one way or another, provide a regime with the backing it needs to survive.
people do not merely interact with a regime as individuals. Instead, their decisions about when and how they might cooperate are channeled through their various social and professional roles. The pillars allow for better strategic thinking on the part of those trying to force change.
Activists can more clearly predict what it will take for a regime to fall. They can scheme about how they might undermine one or more of the various sources of social support for the system—removing
Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1967, “Sound effort in a single city such as Birmingham or Selma produced situations that symbolized the evil everywhere and inflamed public opinion against it.”
“no campaigns failed once they’d achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population—and lots of them succeeded with far less than that.”
it could be more obtainable for unarmed social movements than for groups pursuing military strategies. “Civil resistance allows people of all different levels of physical ability to participate—including the elderly, people with disabilities, women, children, and virtually anyone else who wants to,”
active supporters are the type of people who are moved to act independently to advance an issue within their social and professional spheres of influence. This might mean lawyers taking on pro bono work for a cause they believe in, musicians writing songs that celebrate protesters in the streets, teachers bringing lessons on the cause into the classroom,
active supporters help move the pillars to which they are most closely tied.
naysayers, however, overlook an important point: without impracticality, underdogs would never win.
Movements at their most transformative produce tectonic shifts that make the ground tremble.
once an issue has won, its righteousness becomes common sense.
they regularly fail to appreciate when the pillars holding up the status quo have grown dangerously weak, they often overlook the types of challenges most likely to begin wearing away at these fortifications.
Alinsky established a long-standing norm that “Organizing should target winning immediate, concrete changes,” taking on issues that speak to the self-interest of the group of people that is organizing. Ideally, the demands should be neither divisive nor ideologically loaded.
Most critical are its symbolic properties—how well a demand serves to dramatize for the public the urgent need to remedy an injustice.
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-based sympathy for a cause. In other words, the symbolic trumps the instrumental.
Gandhi “grasped intuitively that civil resistance was in many ways an exercise in political theater, where the audience was as important as the actors.”
the principles of satyagraha, one of Gandhi’s political tenets was the “reduction of demands to a minimum consistent with the truth.”
What looks like a defeat in the short run may be judged a triumph by history, or vice versa. Often, victory is in the eye of the beholder.
“When you lose, everything you do is wrong. When you win, everything you do is right.” Mass mobilizations gain momentum when they are perceived as being winners and doing things right. To build their movement’s capacity and continue winning over public opinion, organizers within this tradition must be able to communicate, both to the movement’s own members and to the public at large, that they are successfully moving toward their goals.
“Everything you do should be capitalized,”
