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The Social Bases of Political Activism

Guest Post by John McGowan

When we left off last time (I’m feeling a bit like Rocky and Bullwinkle), I was spouting something about sources of renewal in our perishing republic.  I spent forty minutes that could easily have become four hours in the World Bank bookstore in DC a few weeks ago.  It’s full of amazing things on rural development projects, and on grass-roots resistance to globalization; it has books full of graphs and statistics abut trade, taxes, income and wealth distribution.  I wrote down scores of titles, but the only thing I actually bought was a pamphlet put out by the Fabian Society (yeah, I didn’t know they still existed either) called Just World (Zed Books, 2005). 

The pamphlet contains position papers on various current problems/issues, ranging from immigration to the environment to global financial flows.  Each writer got six to eight pages to outline the issues, and then three to four pages to suggest solutions.  I loved the format: quick, schematic, and geared toward making proposals for action.  I hate to have to report that I found little in the book that I found very inspiring.  This group had their fingers on what is wrong in our world, but not as much as I had hoped in the way of solutions to offer.

In the final chapter, “The Politics of Global Change,” Adam Lent (identified as the co-ordinator of the Fabian Society project on globalization) writes:

“[P]oliticians are only pressured into or can only demand significant change when they are backed by a popular movement with a considerable degree of power to disrupt the normal run of politics, social relations, and the economy.”

So the big question becomes: how to create such a popular movement?

Lent continues:  “Any movement that has ever achieved any degree of significant and long-term popular backing has done so by recruiting members and supporters through pre-existing non-political networks. . . . Such pre-existing networks are vital because they allow movements to target their appeal to a group with shared interests and/or values who are already meeting together as a collective.  Effective movements will tailor their vision to suit the network they are addressing.  In particular, the most effective and long-lasting movements will develop a message that combines the self-interest of their target network with a more idealistic vision of a better world for which the fulfillment of that self-interest in central.”

Let me begin by saying this is way too Leninist for me.  The talk of “targeting” and “tailoring” suggests people from the outside who infiltrate or otherwise occupy the pre-existing group and wrench it to a more political purpose.  But if we get past the hint of vanguard thinking here, there’s much worth considering.

So here’s some thoughts stirred by Lent’s comment.  They are exploratory and certainly not fully worked out.  But I’m interested in how you will respond to them.

1) In the United States, the churches have often been that site of political activism, from abolitionism through the temperance and civil rights movements down to today’s right-wing evangelicals.  The key is that people who belong to churches are going to meet anyway—and meet regularly.  And they are devoted to those meetings; they are not just a regular, but also a pleasant, part of their lives.  Recall Oscar Wilde’s quip about democracy requiring too many meetings.  No political movement can survive unless people meet a lot, and do a lot of talking.  So those meetings have to be something people enjoy, feel energized and transformed by, not a burden. 

2) Meetings are not experienced as a burden if there is an immediate pay-off in stimulating contact with people one admires, respects, and likes.  But there also has to be a sense that the meeting is leading to something, that progress is being made toward some goal.  And, finally, there has to be a sense that I, as an individual, will not only be heard by this group, but that my input will actually influence its decisions.  Malcolm Gladwell had a great piece in the New Yorker (September 12, 2005) about how the preacher Rick Warren created his mega-church in Orange County, California.  The central device was small groups—of about eight participants—which met once a week at each other’s houses for prayer and discussion.  (It’s the old cell structure so beloved by radical parties of the 20s and 30s of the last century.) People feel adrift and disconnected in our society.  A big organization has to find ways to not feel like all the other big organizations in which our society abounds—remote, untouchable, and indifferent to the fate or views of individuals.

3) Everyone loves to say all politics is local.  But what local issues does the left have?  Because leftist analysis tends to identify systematic and structural causes for our ills, leftists tend to believe the real action is on the national level.  Spyder (in the comments to my last post) did point toward the “grow and sell locally” movement –and I think it does provide a great model for what I am groping toward here.  The key to the local is that it gives people some real influence, an arena in which they can actually have an impact, in which they can begin to enact the very solutions that they want to propose to the society as a whole.  Living wage campaigns in various locales have a similar strength.  The right, of course, has specialized in school boards, and can always agitate for lowering taxes at every level of government, no matter how small.

4) The best issues, then, are those that can be addressed locally, but which have national resonance.  Groups work on improving or transforming certain conditions in their own locales, but also agitate for larger scale changes because they keep running into those larger roadblocks to their success on the local level.  Classic examples are the women’s movement and the gay movement.  Women held consciousness-raising meetings (much like the prayer group meetings Gladwell describes) that were experienced as life-transforming, set up women’s health clinics and shelters for abused women, and worked to change various laws about domestic relations, sexual harassment, etc.  Gays mobilized to combat the scourge of AIDS.  They didn’t have the luxury of waiting around for large-scale responses from states or the federal government, but they fought for those changes as well. 

5) Churches are not necessarily leftist or rightist, as our history shows.  But labor unions, which obviously combine the local fight with a particular employer to a national politics (and which also provided in many cases the kinds of comraderie that churches offer), are just about inevitably leftist.  No wonder the right in this country has been single-minded in its campaign to destroy the labor movement.  I don’t know if we can resurrect the unions.  It is certainly worth trying, but we need to develop and nurture other movements as well.

6) So we should not understand the “self-interest” of which Lent speaks in a narrow or an economic way.  People get involved in social activities, are “interested” in and by them, because of the quality of the interactions those activities enable, and because of a sense that those activities provide ways of changing and developing.  Politics needs to be interesting—and the most likely basis of that interest will be a commitment to and vital engagement with the other people involved.

7) To some extent, the interest and the passion will come, I suspect, from a sense that one—and one’s group—is at odds with the mainstream.  Either one will be defending a way of life that seems threatened by the way things are going, or one will be advocating a fairly radical change in the ways things are currently done.  Just the relief of finding some like-minded souls goes a long way to leading one to want to hang out with them.  (I find this blog seductive in exactly that way.) Those who are comfortable in the world as currently constituted are not likely to become politically active in the ways being considered here.  The sense of urgency comes from the embattled sense that most people think or live otherwise.  But the sense of futility is overcome by at least having found a group that thinks like you.  And that group might then move on to more fleshed-out experiments in living those alternatives.

8) There’s nothing like a formula for political success here.  I don’t think you can simply “target” or “take-over” a pre-existing network, while the formation of a network from scratch is close to impossible.  Rather, a network will become political and grow when circumstances demand, when a way of life is threatened, or a way of life has become too dysfunctional for some people to tolerate it any longer.  Certainly, a lot of people on the left have been politicized by how much wrong has been done in this country over the past six years by the right.  What we have been less good at is finding local ways not just to express our frustration, but to make progress toward a better way of doing things.

9) And there’s also no call to romanticize what “popular movements” can do.  Yes, they are crucial for progressive—and for retrogressive—politics.  But it would be foolish not to recognize that they are just one of the “pushes” in a complex political landscape—and that the “money power” of big business is getting stronger and stronger all the time in this country.  Why take all the trouble to form a grassroots movement when you can just buy the politicians?  At the national level, the hill a popular movement has to climb to be effective gets steeper all the time.  Many of the thoughts offered here stem from my sense that the mass march, the demonstration, has played itself out.  In the current context, getting 100,000 people or even 500,000 to assemble in DC to protest this or that has no impact.  So renewal is not going to come through that route.

I’ve got more thoughts on this subject—and apologize for ending on such a down note.  But what’s here is more than enough to get the discussion rolling.  And I’ll be back in a few weeks with some further thoughts.

Posted by on 10/13 at 07:41 PM

  1. As a practical thought, while getting 100 or 500K people to march may not do much for Washington these days, if a million+ people stopped eating meat, stopped driving their SUVs, or did something that would get the attention of money driven power brokers (not just once, but perhaps as a lifestyle change), then I think that a message could be sent to Washington that Americans want a different kind of world. But this is truly to embody in one’s own life the political change that one seeks to work toward. Indeed, the personal is political.

    While I’m not a fan of meetings at work, I think that “meetups” are probably a good idea for creating grassroots political change. Who’s next?

    Posted by Urban Theorist  on  10/13  at  11:49 PM

  2. My sense is that what Lent is taling about is what we in the US generally call “coalition-building"--getting a batch of groups to endorse a common program and work collaboratively to realize it. My experience as a lefty in the labor movement (I ws a railroad worker for 25 years) is that, at least in the contemporary US, this model has two major weaknesses: (1) the constituent groups don’t really involve more than a fraction--often an unreresentative fraction--of their members. By way of illustration, I was able to get my craft union local to pass resolutions condemning the coup in Chile, mostly because only a handful of people turned out for membership meetings and nobody believed it mattered anyway--they were being nice to me, because I was a conscientious local union stalwart but a bit of a crank. And (2) collaboration typically amounts to little more than formal “endorsement"--i.e. the familiar letterhead coalition which is ineffective because everyone knows it’s an empty shell, politically as well as organizationally--it doesn’t express a widely held popular conviction and it can’t put feet on the street or voters in the polling booth.

    In contradistinction to Lent’s claim, in fact, I would argue (and cf. Klinkner, “The Unsteady March") that hopeless, going-through-the-motions, marginal movements for change produce major social effects when the people in charge (say “ruling class” or “elite” or “hegemons,” I don’t much care) find that their interests can be served by adopting, and co-opting, those movements’ goals. The New Deal fits this model, so does the Civil Rights movement, so does feminism. Of course the results are always a bitter disappointment to the movement veterans: labor gets *gleichgeschaltet*, racism unaccountably survives the Cicil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, feminism runs smack into the 80’s backlash. Is there another strategic choice? I sure can’t see it. Bernstein, dammit, was right.

    Posted by  on  10/13  at  11:52 PM

  3. Nice to see you picked up on the Gladwell piece on the cellular church. I thought it was terrific, so did my anarchist and musical activist buddy Charlie Keil. Those who haven’t read it, should. Pay particular attention to the first column on p. 66, wherein we learn that evangelicals aren’t the troglodytes they’re made out to be.

    Also worth reading, William Robert Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism. Fogel picks up on scholarship arguing that American public life is a periodic ebb and flow of revivalist activity, that this dynamic seems built into the basic mechanism of our society. The first flow threw up the Revolution, the next one the Abolitionist movement and the Civil War.  And so forth.

    Posted by  on  10/14  at  01:07 AM

  4. John - thank you for another thoughtful post.

    In this discussion of organizing and political activism, I’d like to direct everyone to last week’s very important cover article in The Black Commentator (see Michael’s blogroll), entitled, “Where the Left Lives: Black America is the Core”, by Bruce Dixon. It’s not that long, so I hope y’all will take a gander:

    http://www.blackcommentator.com/153/153_cover_dixon_left.html

    I feel it’s timely to bring this up because of what I saw happen on the “left” after Hurricane Katrina, when so many white “progressives” poo-poo’d black assertions of flagrant racism, insisting that it was a colorblind class issue instead. If we can’t even get the left/ progressive white people to engage in an honest discussion addressing the persistent racial inequalities holding us all back, we’re really screwed. 

    Snippet from Dixon:
    “For the white left, the situation is more complex. African Americans have overwhelmingly opposed the war in Iraq from its outset, but the black presence at last month’s large antiwar demonstrations in Washington, in San Francisco and elsewhere lagged far behind the actual percentages of black vs. white opposition to the war. By failing to find ways to effectively unite with the broad leftward current that flows through the heart of black America white leftists also doom themselves to the margins of America’s political life.”

    Posted by  on  10/14  at  04:03 AM

  5. Nice post.  Some of the work my colleagues, students, and I have done here in Northwest Ohio (you know, that smoking crater to the West and North) leans towards this issue.  Service Learning begins to adress this, but almost inevitably gets reinscribed by the very notion of “service” (free labor).  We see the same thing with how government work being shunted off to “charity.” One of the successful things we have done is to create the kinds of associations that last by integrating them in socializing and ritually rewarding activities.  While groups on either coast have been doing things like “Sushigig” and other “elite” stuff, we have had more luck working with things like Farmer’s Markets (and not the Ann Arbor-style ones) and local businesses.  We meet over burgers and cokes or bacon, eggs, and coffee weekly and discuss how to improve our situations immediately and over the long term.  Things like “open government” and “cutting red-tape” for local businesses seems to be an emerging ground for common interests.  It requires a lot of legwork, but if you look at the genres that “turned” American politics (the Bible Study that reinforces the megachurch sermon, the tupperware party that reifies the notion that you are alone in your economic wellbeing), these are things that plug into ritualized activity that Americans think worthwhile.  While academics focus on the television newscast or the essay as our primary interface, we need to look how these things translate in the indigenous genres of suburbia (and it will take more than Lakoff metaphor theory).

    Great, great thing to write about (and hopefully act upon).

    Posted by DocMara  on  10/14  at  09:56 AM

  6. ”. . . and it will take more than Lakoff metaphor theory.”

    Amen to that!

    Posted by  on  10/14  at  10:11 AM

  7. But what local issues does the left have?

    Environment.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  10/14  at  10:28 AM

  8. I’ve been sermonizing, blogging, plogging, cclogging, flogging since April for some very simple propositions about a love of Nature and love of Constitution that can unite 60 to 90% of the voters in any congressional district in the USA circa Fall 2006. We can certainly Clean House if we stop polarizing and start thinking about we truly have and want to hold in common. 

    We’re beggining to see signs that getting together one by one, two by two, and 3 x 3, is a way to conserve consensus and find good candidates for the House in 2006.

    Is anyone urging Bill Bradley, Al Gore, Mario Cuomo, Rosalyn Carter, Meryl Streep, Opra Winfrey, Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, Robert Redford, Bill Clinton, Ralph Nader, Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, Marion Edelman, etc. etc. to either come out of retirement or take exactly two years off from whatever they are doing to run for the House of Representatives in 2006 and turn this country around?

    Posted by Charlie Keil  on  10/14  at  10:58 AM

  9. Oaktown girl:  Andrew Sullivan reports yesterday that Bush’s approval rating among Arican-Americans is 2%.  The left certainly ignores black America at its own peril.

    Chris:  I thought about the environment, but it’s tough because corporations seem so untouchable precisely because they are not local; and they relocate polluting practices away from places that have the political and economic resources to contest them; and because so many of these battles have to be fought in court--which is a long process and one open only to professionals.  Etc., etc.  I think in many ways environmental issues show how things are stacked against the effectiveness of popular movements.  The sites of decisions and the pressures on those who participate in making those decisions are distanced from the local, from a level on which a popular movement can have some impact. 

    Please tell me how wrong I am about this.

    Posted by mcgowan  on  10/14  at  11:39 AM

  10. Another thoughtful post. It seems to me that the Left’s main problem is trying to convince middle class and lower middle class, mainly white, voters from voting against their own interest. Just about everything the current Administration and GOP Congress has done has screwed these folks, yet they continue to vote for them. Why? I think race plays a major factor, though probably not the sole factor, in this.

    I live in the reddest county of Maryland (which is a usually reliable blue state). Yet, in echoing Chris Clarke, I’ve seen the public energized several times over environmental issues, including mass attendance at public meetings. Yet, when the issue is resolved to their satisfaction, the voters seem to revert to a default position of voting Republican, until the next outrage is perputrated by the very people they elect.

    Posted by  on  10/14  at  11:47 AM

  11. John, sorry for being telegraphic. I suppose I was trying to make amends for my very long comment a couple posts down.

    There are certainly intertwined global aspects attached to most environmental issues that resist a local granularity. But every place is part of the environment. Walmart may be a faceless - well, OK, it’s got that yellow smiley guy - an anonymous corporation, but the piece of land they want to build the new store on is very local. In the Bay Area, global trade and resource extraction capitalism manifest in intensely localized ways, from ships dumping ballast water and invasive organisms in the Bay to developers pushing expansion of Urban Limit Lines. Putting freeways through parks, siting polluting power plants in African-American neighborhoods, etc. are all local issues at their base.

    Salient specific example: Richard Pombo is a local representative out here. Locals are mobilizing to find a moderate GOP-er to challenge him in the next Republican primary.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  10/14  at  11:57 AM

  12. There is a profound link between environment and minority populations.  Chris is more than aware of efforts in the East Bay region by non-white activists to clean up this sort of abuse. Wasn’t it today that a new study in Mass, that showed how significant a problem that is there now? 

    As for a local issue that will pull strands from all strata of communities into the fore, i recommend focussing your local attention on water issues.  I work with a group of activists who are lobbying various water district boards to clean up their water, not just the drinking water but the agricultural and other irrigation ditch waters.  Everyone needs healthy local water as much as they need local food.  Encouraging candidates who are interested in upgrading the quality of water sources to run for local and regional boards is not difficult.  And if you don’t think progressive oriented water policies are effective and essential talking point, we recently experienced a great example.

    Yesterday, here in our city, the sheriffs took down a crew of folks running an illegal wrecking yard, cannibalizing stolen cars and such.  What did the sheriffs say was their most important consideration?  That this crew was seriously damaging the environment, releasing toxic engine and other auto fluids into the local aquifers.  The news focussed on those quotes more than any other aspect.  Seeing a bunch of very conservative law enforcement personnel become irate at local water pollution is quite refreshing as well as just a tad bit motivating to pat our own backs.  Encouraging locals to care about their water--reminding the public about wiser use of lawn care products and home pesticides, supporting water districts and regional/local park departments/districts that reducing the use of petro-chemical products in parks, cityscapes, country clubs etc., and other similar measures--reminds them that they are communities of common interest separate and distinct from politics and partisanship. 

    And Charilie: Joan Baez was lobbied to do that while she was attending Burning Man this year; we shall see what that will bring.

    Posted by  on  10/14  at  05:40 PM

  13. Actually,
    There is a fantastic book that addresses many of these questions, especially the ones about how activists themselves frame things as “local” or “national”.

    Everyone should read “Avoiding Politics”, by Nina Eliasoph! (Even though it has a very creepy and unexplained picture on the cover)

    Posted by  on  10/14  at  05:57 PM

  14. Check out the Industrial Areas Foundation (http://www.industrialareasfoundation.org), especially the “about” page and the member groups, like the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (http://www.gbio.org). They are doing with churches and other local groups the kind of movement-building your pamphleteer talks about. They are the people behind things like living wage ordinances in cities, state affordable housing trusts, expansions of free medical care, etc.

    Posted by  on  10/15  at  02:47 PM

  15. One possible way to organize this winter is around energy issues through consumer education on energy conservation, efficiency, and simple renewable alternatives.

    You can use the same posters as were used in WWII (see http://www.library.northwestern.edu/govpub/collections/wwii-posters/ and search on “fuel").  Still the best I’ve seen on the basics, even including the informational pamphlets and posters developed during the 1970s energy crises.

    In the 1970s, we also used to do solar barn-raisings, educating interested people by building solar attics and sunrooms, air heaters, and water heaters as demonstration projects in different neighborhoods with volunteer labor.  To maximize the economic impact, start an energy buying club to purchase materials in bulk and pass on the cheaper prices to your members.  There are still a couple of groups formed back then that continue to do just that, Boston Building Materials Coop and Cape and Islands Energy Coop.

    The advantage of focusing on energy is that everybody needs it, costs are going to rise perhaps precipitously this winter, you can have an immediate effect on people’s daily lives, by working cooperatively you can develop the habits of community, and successful efforts will shame the government into doing a better job.

    Then we can talk about farmers markets and community gardens and rebuilding a local agricultural infrastructure.

    Posted by gmoke  on  10/15  at  04:34 PM

  16. I always thought the left’s problem was that it cared too much, causing two effects.

    1. We (I use we, for I am a left) want to change the world but mostly we don’t want to actually destroy people to do it. We like to include everyone and be all cuddly and nice to them - including our idealogical and political nemeses. We are open minded, questioning and often timidly uncertain about TRUTHS. By definition the Right have a broad and unsubtle black and white, right and wrong, them and us view of the world and they are much more ruthless in their certainty. So they win, because they fight dirty and justify it on grounds of RIGHTNESS.

    2. Because we care so much about our principles lefts often get bogged down in dogma and infighting over the finer points of an issue. We divide and conquer ourselves.

    Like many people I am stumped what to do. For a start couldn’t left leaning Americans get out and mobilise the black vote in the same way that Rove et al mobilised the Bible Belt vote?

    I also agree with many of the posters that the environment (along with health in general) is perhaps a key issue. I mean , it’s all very well running an SUV to travel 50 yards to the store, but who wouldn’t support a group that was called, for example ‘Parents against Asthma’?

    Posted by  on  10/16  at  07:53 PM

  17. In response to saltydog: One additional factor is the lack of a Vast Leftwing Conspiracy.  We simply don’t have the institutional and communication infrastructure that the right does, but I understand people are working on that.

    In reference to John’s post: Point 8: “a network will become political and grow when circumstances demand, when a way of life is threatened, or a way of life has become too dysfunctional for some people to tolerate it any longer.”

    Not to get grammatical, but there’s too much passive voice in that sentence to suit me.  What, specifically, might we say about our own agency in this situation--and might that have to do with the rhetorical skills we’ve honed in academia or on blogs?  In other words, is one form of intervention in an existing network not “taking it over” in a Leninist sense, but rather persuading the members that their way of life is, in fact, threatened? 

    There’s a separate question also about the netroots that relates to this, but I have to dash.

    Posted by salvador_dalai_llama  on  10/17  at  12:00 PM

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