It’s an eerie feeling when you know something should be happening, and it isn’t—yet. In The Washington Post, sociologist David Meyer has an incisive essay asking why, if Americans are so angry about their political system, are they not protesting? He notes the low approval ratings of President Obama and the Congress, as well as the economic dire straits we’re in, with no end in sight. He mentions the riots in England—to say nothing of those camping out in Israel, or the patient, courageous people being beaten down in the streets of Syrian cities. Or Spain. Or Bahrain. Or China. 2011 is primed to join 1789, 1848, and 1968 as a year of historic, bottom-up transformation. But, aside from a few weeks in Madison, the United States seems to have mostly been sitting it out.
Meyer provides part of an answer: organizing—or lack thereof. The labor movement is nearly crippled. Clicktivism only sort of translates into true collectivism. The best we seem capable of is a rally for apathy.
He’s the rare mainstream voice to recognize that civil resistance movements are not simply spontaneous eruptions of popular feeling, or the covert doings of shadowy CIA operations. They take planning, and years of preparation.
What gets people out into the streets to demonstrate? It’s not general unhappiness about policy, be it on immigration or the national debt. Social movements are products of focused organization. Even the icons of activism in American history wielded influence through larger groups. Rosa Parks wasn’t just a tired seamstress in 1955, when she refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Ala. She was a longtime organizer who served as chapter secretary of the local NAACP, which organized a bus boycott and a lawsuit in response to her action. Earlier that year, she had attended a workshop on nonviolent action at a labor center, the Highlander Institute, where she read about Gandhi and the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision striking down segregation in public schools. All of the specific actions weren’t choreographed, but activists had spent years building the infrastructure and cultivating the ideas that made the bus boycott possible.
Without such organizational support, individual actions might be dramatic and heroic, but effective movement politics is a test of endurance. Organization gives individual efforts meaning and staying power.
Without organization, furthermore, you get something like what we’re seeing across England, and in Libya—you get spontaneous eruptions of popular feeling, and it’s not likely to be pretty.
But organization is also exactly what Meyer is failing to see. Americans may not be out on the streets yet, but they’re planning on it. Just wait—or get involved. People are organizing. The more they prepare, the more likely they are to carry out actions worthy of their goals.
Something is happening. Even Al Gore said, earlier this month, that we need an “American Spring.” How about an American Autumn?
For the past few weeks, we at Waging Nonviolence have been talking with individuals and groups that are involved in one way or another in a variety of powerful new protest efforts. Here are a few of them:
In most of these cases, as I’ve learned from interviewing organizers, the ideas for these actions have come about spontaneously, and simultaneously, among a range of different groups. Something is in the air. But which way is it blowing?
uk uncut wasnt the least bit organized, to start with
The defining essence of America, as has often been said, is not ethnicity, race or culture, as is true of many countries, but a certain set of ideas. At their heart has been a simple proposition: Justice and equality are more likely to flow from self-government than from control by a permanent ruler or privileged elite (the latter is reflected in the Constitution itself, which prohibits titles of nobility). Lincoln, speaking about slavery, said it best: “No man is good enough to govern another without that man’s consent.” Struggling to actuate these ideals rather than just repeat them as slogans has been the main arc of our history. At times we make progress, at other times we fall back.
As Nathan hints, there is a mounting readiness for significant change in America, even though it hasn’t translated yet into a general civic “activism”. Most polls reflect a consensus that our government is failing to solve conspicuous public problems. Although the media tell us that Americans are only concerned with material income — euphemistically called “the economy” — the Great Depression didn’t produce anything close to the level of disenchantment with government that exists today on all sides of our political and ideological divides. The discontent is also political.
Each of the examples of organizing dissent or resistance that Nathan identifies is visible because people are trying to muster support for change and propose ways to achieve it, mostly outside the normal political process. But what about that process? Is self-government working the way it should? People living in the third century of a democracy aren’t wrong to prefer working within the system, if the system works. If it doesn’t, maybe that central mechanism is what needs attention, to release new possibilities for all the other causes that Nathan’s protest examples represent.
That’s what political dissatisfaction in America actually shares with political dissatisfaction in an undemocratic country: the belief that the system isn’t working properly any longer. Witness the partisan fury that produced the debt ceiling crisis and obstructed action by Congress until the last possible moment, which in turn influenced Standard & Poor’s to downgrade their estimate of the risk inherent in buying U.S. bonds — which may aggravate government deficits at all levels and jeopardize credit for many Americans. A “dysfunctional” government, President Obama called it.
Americans might want to take note of the success that organizers pushing fundamental change in other countries have had when they chose to elevate the purposes of their struggles in order to draw broader participation from more diverse parts of their societies. Instead of opposing a war or ending a type of corruption, the cause became to create or restore basic rights, indeed to free government from the stranglehold of a ruling circle which ignored the people’s voices. Even in a constitutional democracy, if popular force only aims at changing policies without changing unresponsive structures, it may not become a vehicle for change proportionate to the sense of discontent, seen in many countries that have profoundly and even quickly been altered through civil resistance.
Jack—I love your reminder about “self-government.” Another great comment. An eloquent picture of what we should be aiming for!
In my conversations with many of these organizers, I find that they very much see what they’re doing as exactly “changing unresponsive structures.” In fact, many believe that their demands are tantamount to effecting a structural revolution in how this country is governed. It seems to me that there is some truth to that—even in just the examples of ending wars and campaign finance reform. Both of these issues go straight to the heart of the power structure in this country. If military spending were reduced, the debates about healthcare and national debt would be radically transformed. If corporations didn’t have such outsized influence on political candidates, far more measures to control corporate power would become political possible. Both of these, I’d argue, are what Buckminster Fuller called “trim-tabs”—small changes that would shift the entire structure and direction of the whole.
Also, in these conversations, I’ve noticed a tremendous sense of excitement among activists that, with the inspiration of Egypt, they’re now setting out to win concrete, specific, achievable goals—rather than simply trying to create little utopias on the streets. I suspect that what they’re doing is closer to what you’re calling for than you might think.
It’s not gonna start with “organizers.” It’s not gonna be some contrived activism pushed by “names.” It will come from the grassroots. It is in the grassroots we all should be working in. Not creating pseudoevents to grab media attention that will sink as soon as created. (Viz the campaign against Chamber of Commerce.)
Vera, thanks for your comment, but I’m not sure I follow your distinction between “grassroots” and “organizers”; these are not Glenn Becks or Jon Stewarts. By and large, the people I’m talking about are little-known and little-funded. At some level, anyway, a grassroots movement needs to be organized if it is going to take concerted action.
Nathan, I was referring to McKibben, the call to occupy Wall Street etc., Freedom Plaza… those are all old style organized events, and do not go anywhere.
New stuff will be born in the grassroots, and will be a big surprise to people like McKibben. That’s what I meant.
Like navi says below, organization from above tends to kill these things. Oh I know, it did work once. Times, they have a-changed.
You may be right about McKibben. I don’t know. But I went to a September 17th meeting tonight in New York—definitely nobody organizing from above! Unless they’re trying to hide the fact behind lots of circular arguments, tangents, and other experiments in open-air democracy.
So what exactly is the Wall Street encampment out to accomplish?
okay for example, UK uncut, which actually did get Britain to make some of the companies pay some of the taxes due, started by a couple people posting the idea on twitter, and it grew. There was no central organization. When the idea came stateside, it was well organized, and seems to have fizzled…
I think another problem is most of us are not out of work, but underemployed and can’t afford to take the time off, either…
@vera: “So what exactly is the Wall Street encampment out to accomplish?”
They’re still trying to figure that out!
And you don’t see a problem with that?
“Hey join us in NYC and illegally block Wall Street(nonviolently of course)! Why? Umm…err…we’ll get back to you”
An ‘American Autumn’ is what Americans do the first Tuesday in November.
Yes, not having clear goals is a problem. But it’s not without a solution. For one thing, these movements are still in formation. Also, dictating terms too quickly would violate the hope that decisions would be made collaboratively among those who become involved.
But, yes, the September 17th movement seems to be in relatively early stages of formation right now, especially for an effort that is supposed to take to the streets in just a month.
How I wish it were true that one can “organize” a movement into existence, but it isn’t. It takes two things: latent discontent, and a catalyzing incident that transforms the latent into the actual.
But to the reason I write: I note that conspicuously absent from your list of years in which bottom-up change occurred is 1871 and 1917. As these, it would seem to me, are more deserving of inclusion than 1848 or 1968, I’m left to wonder was this an omission, or does the author not see the first-ever workers’ government and the Bolsheviks as bottom-up?
It seems to me that your conditions are pretty well-met, and I lay them out above; there is certainly latent discontent in this country, and, as many of these activists have suggested to me, the catalyzing incident (or incidents) is the Arab Spring and all that has followed.
Regarding dates; such lists can never be quite complete. But it’s hard to imagine any year more deserving than 1848, in which uprisings occurred across Europe, with people turning against the ancien regimes. 1968 similarly swept across Europe and the US. The events of 1871 and 1917 were relatively local, taking place in single countries. The phenomenon I’m referring to is that in which revolution spreads like a fever, from country to country.
There might not be “American Autumn” because Americans don’t yet feel the pain. Food Stamps have taken the place of Breadlines, and people aren’t talking about how their country has been hijacked by Banksters -despite all the talking gizmos at their disposal. Plus they are either working two or three minimum wage jobs, or else squatting in their doubly mortgaged home. Simple. No pain, no strain, no autumn rain. Plus people believe it is futile to protest…is that because they don’t know what the problem really is?
WAPO SOCIOLOGIST DUDE: “Yo, street protests doesn’t happen overnight. It takes years, maybe decades, to build up through organizers and activists, building up slowly to direct success”
WAGING NONVIOLENCE: “Well, we do have *some* organizers and activists. It’s in its early stages, but it’s a hopeful sign that could enable more direct success later on.”
COMMENTERS: “These activists are deluded if they think there will be direct success.”
Don’t listen to ’em, man. I live like 5 blocks from Wall Street and hadn’t even heard of this thing. I will definitely be there, and thanks for the links to the coordinating discussions. I’ll tell everybody I know.
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