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Thursday, October 13, 2005

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 John McGowan on 10/13 at 07:41 PM
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