George Lakey: DT’s Repression is a Huge Opportunity for the Movement
Nonviolent action theorist/activist/author George Lakey published a fabulous essay, “A 10-point plan to stop T***p and make gains in justice and equality” last week*
George has been a hero and mentor of mine ever since I first heard him speak around 1977. His presence at Movement for a New Society’s Philadelphia Life Center was a big part of why I moved to that community for a nine-month training program in nonviolent action, back in 1980-81.
He argues that this is our moment to break out of reactive protests and into big sweeping social and environmental demands. He notes that the LGBT movement was one of the only progressive movements to gain traction under Reagan—because its agenda was so much bigger than just fighting cutbacks. Twenty and thirty years earlier, the Civil Rights movement accomplished sweeping social change as well.
So instead of defending the weak centrist gains of the past 30 years, we go beyond and organize for our wider goals. We refuse to play defense against DT’s shenanigans and instead take the role of pushing for a new, kinder, people- and planet-centered normal. With direct-action campaigns that link multiple issues, such as Standing Rock, and with alternative institutions like the Movement for Black Lives, we create a nonviolent invasion of deep social change (this is my metaphor, not George’s).
In short, we think bigger—and act bigger. and instead of crawling to the politicians, we force them to court us as they see us come into our true power.
I’ve been saying we need to think bigger and more systemically for years. George says it succinctly and eloquently, and with a lens I hadn’t looked through.
How does this apply in today’s world?
- The Republican attack on what George calls the “medical industrial complex-friendly Affordable Care Act” (a/k/a Obamacare) is a chance to bypass the witheringly bureaucratic and unfair insurance system and push for real single-payer, Medicare-for-All plan of the sort that’s worked so well in Scandinavia (he explores the Scandinavian social safety net in his latest book, Viking Economics)
- The Standing Rock Water Protectors have linked multiple issues into a coherent whole: clean water, the environment generally, the rights of indigenous people (among others)
- Movements around creating a meaningful safety net, such as the $15 per hour minimum wage, can reach disaffected white working class voters as well as people of color; when those who voted for DT on economic grounds realize he has betrayed them, we can win them over (I would add that this will only work if we have mechanisms in place to defuse the racism and nativism that DT used to attract them, and have meaningful ways to integrate the lesson that all colors, races, and religions can be allies to each other and are stronger together—and Lakey does point out that the United Auto Workers has been successful organizing on these unifying principles)
I could add a lot to George’s list. As one among many suggestions, let’s push to not only end all subsidies to the fossil and nuclear industries but let’s push for a complete transition to clean, renewable energy—whether or not we get any help from the government.
Read his essay. Come back the next day and read it again. Then share it with friends, social media communities, and colleagues and discuss how you personally and your group of individuals with shared positive purpose can make these changes happen.
*Why did I replace DT’s last name with stars? And why do I call him DT rather than by his name? Because I am doing my best not to give him any search engine juice. I don’t want him showing up as “trending” or driving traffic to him.
A lifelong activist, profitability and marketing specialist Shel Horowitz’s mission is to fix crises like hunger, poverty, racism, war, and catastrophic climate change—by showing the business world how fixing them can make a profit. An author, international speaker, and TEDx Talker, his award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, lays out a blueprint for creating and MARKETING those profitable change-making products and services. He is happy to help you craft your messaging and develop profit strategies. Learn more (and download excerpts from the book) at http://goingbeyondsustainability.com
I should make clear that I DO see an important role for mass protests. There’s no better way to make it clear that what is going on does not have the consent of a sizeable percentage of people. It’s also empowering for those who participate and a great way to bring new folks into the movement. And they can achieve change! Occupy brought a deep discussion of class into the 2012 election, and one result has been increases in minimum wage in many localities. Seabrook birthed the safe energy movement as a mass movement. The weekly protests over Vietnam helped convince Nixon to get out, and the mass protests over the Iraq war showed the world that the American people had more sense than GWB’s govrnment. But I think George is right that these should not become our only focus.
The good news is that we can have the best of both worlds. Seabrook was a mass event, as you say, and it was also one action in an escalating sequence with a specific demand and a specific target — in short, a direct action campaign. That campaign along with the campaign that organized the mass CD at Diablo Canyon in California were the two best-covered events by the mass media, but they were two of the many campaigns that forced the moratorium on nuclear power in the U.S. — a beautiful example of how multiple campaigns on the same issue or cluster of issues becomes a movement with national power that yields a concrete change that we can point to — a very concrete victory.
The one-off, mass events outside of a campaign context generally fail to yield major concrete changes. Occupy was a great disappointment to so many — yes, it influenced the culture in terms of framing the problem, but it yielded no concrete change. It did, though, turn off a lot of newbies to nonviolent action who were repelled not only by the failure of result but also for the internal failures within the encampments themselves, who wanted to show an “alternative” but again was aspirational rather than showing results. The increase in minimum wage was not brought about by Occupy but by actual campaigns which are living still (and still getting results), backed by SEIU and others. Campaigns deliver the goods, one-off events focus on shouting. But, again, the good news is that we can have both (the anti-Vietnam war “movement” was, in reality, one long campaign with a clear and realizable demand — bring the troops home — and a clear target — the U.S. government). The anti-war campaign delivered concrete result — it was not an occasional mass expression of opinion, but a persistent and escalating campaign with many fronts and growing force over many years.
A revealing episode from the Vietnam war: the Fifth Avenue Parade Committee in NYC organized a mass march down the street. The turn-out was gratifying. So they did it again. Even bigger. Wonderful! They did it again. About the same or larger. Wonderful! They did it again. Smaller. (No result — why do the same tired thing again?) They did it again — you get the picture. Compare with the civil rights movement which was led by people who understood campaign strategy and would never stoop to a numbers game thinking that mere numbers would win the day! Actually, repetition of numbers discourages people, as it will this spring in the Time of Trump if we do a series of reactive mass expressions of emotion for . . . what concrete result??? with what target?
The civil rights movement won actual victories — they were not about to ask Montgomery blacks to do mass expression of opinion about segregation with no hope of winning something real! Get people killed for that?
But of course the civil rights movement did plenty of mass stuff — it’s just that it made strategic sense to do so, it wasn’t about feel-good.
That’s the stepping up I’m asking for, Shel. In business people have reasons to do things besides how good they feel or how big a splash they make — they actually want to sell things, or provide a concrete service, or something like that. When making a splash and feeling good accompany business results — well, that’s worth doing.
I’m just asking for common sense, here. Happily, we can borrow from the best practices of successful movements. Just as we wouldn’t support someone who says they are going to run for Congress simply by having an occasional rally with zero strategy/game plan, so we shouldn’t be supporting progressive leaders who call us out with no plan to win anything, just an impulse or because they think that’s what protesters are supposed to do. Why is that good enough?
I agree with most of what you’d laid out here, George and certainly the key kernel that mass action makes the most sense as part of a well-thought-out and multidimensional campaign. And yet, I’m more optimistic than you about the power of a one-off mass action to build momentum for change. It has to be sustained, of course—but it can play a key role.
• My own involvement with the Movement began because I attended a mass rally about Vietnam, at age 12 (1969). One of the speakers said something that was life-changing for me. But it was not until I was in high school that I began to realize that the real work of social change happened in the meetings to plan those marches, more than the marches themselves—and to participate as other than a drone showing up to other people’s events.
• The reason all those no-nuke Alliances sprang up was because of what we did at Seabrook, a mass action.We inspired many other groups around the country to borrow our strategy, process, tactics, and even nomenclature, to organize affinity groups as we did, to educate about the issues around nuclear power and the safe-energy alternatives, and to be trained in nonviolent civil disobedience. And the reason we heard about Three Mile Island in the news two years later when we hadn’t heard about the earlier accidents at Enrico Fermi, Browns Ferry, and elsewhere was because of this national/international mass movement that started at Seabrook. It was having thousands at the site and 1414 arrested that pushed the issue into America’s consciousness. The first two Seabrook occupations almost a year earlier, much tinier, had almost no impact outside the local area.
• Occupy could have been much stronger with leadership and goals, I agree. But still the movement had a great deal of impact. Like Clam, some of its process innovations have become part of the Movement. You talk about those turned off by Occupy, but what I saw was a generation of young people who moved from inaction, maybe even apathy, to deep, personal, and highly inconvenient action. They made sacrifices for social change. And I think a lot of them moved into actual organizing after the camps closed.
• The recent Women’s March had very little strategy behind it but sparked the immediate and clear message that resistance is mainstream, that DT does not represent normal, and that oh yes, there was something we could do. And of course, it provided yet another opportunity for DT to make a fool of himself saying ridiculous things about the protests. I don’t remember another time when nonviolent protests unscrewed the legs of legitimacy from a government less than one day old. And again, a lot of folks who had never done anything political went from the march to the meetings. The thousands of hives of the resistance were enormously strengthened by that unstrategic mass event.
I’m glad you brought up the business community. This is where I have very strategically placed most of my own organizing in recent years: showing that business can create meaningful social change, not out of guilt and shame but out of enlightened self-interest: the profit motive. This is the subject of my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, as well as my “Impossible is a Dare” talks. It’s the opposite of mass organizing: small groups and even one-to-one conversations.
So yes, let’s incorporate big protests into a wider strategic view, as the Civil Rights organizers did. Let’s read Alinsky and Gene Sharp, MLK and Gandhi, Barbara Deming and Dorothy Day, and of course, George Lakey. Let’s study the successes AND weaknesses of all of these movements including Occupy, BLM, and the current resistance. And lets create strategies that keep the needle moving, both publicly and behind the scenes, toward the world we want. Outside of my social change work through my business, I’ve been focusing my own parts of the resistance on the amazing opportunity to get people who haven’t been talking to each other not just talking but supporting and acting in solidarity. I see this work—and especially the chances for Jews and Muslims to work together in solidarity—as deeply strategic based on seizing the moment where a conversation is much easier to have under the lens of both groups being under threat.
PS: George, I apologize for the late reply. WordPress only showed me your waiting comment last night. I approved it immediately but wanted to bring my much clearer early-morning thinking to my response.