Enough with “Movements” and “Manifestos” Already (A Manifesto Against Manifestos, Perhaps)

9 min readOct 21, 2016

Right now on Twitter a self-described “movement” called “Grab Her By The Brain” is going viral, though mostly due to people aghast by the name.

I agree that the tagline and the copy (“females”?!) are dodgy as hell. My annoyance, though, is not just restricted to the messaging.

The Grab Her By The Brain website bills itself as “a movement — an initiative — that is dedicated to empowering females of all ages. Our mission is to confront gender inequality with an unparalleled positivity and enthusiasm.” And how do they aim to pursue their mission?

By selling caps.

And that’s it.

Dig around and you’ll find that 10% of proceeds from cap sales go towards Boo2Bullying, which provides speakers, mentorship, art therapy, and other outreach tools to help young people affected by bullying in schools. Which is awesome! (Not so much the 10%, which seems low for an organisation whose only overhead seems to be cap manufacturing, but the existence of Boo2Bullying.)

GHBTB claims that the eventual purpose of their “movement” is to sell merchandise to support different charities each month. So why not just call this a fundraiser for existing and active organisations rather than trying to turn it into some kind of “empowering movement”? And why hide the information about your beneficiaries on a side page with small writing, instead of making that information front and center?

This is yet another manifestation of a pet peeve of mine: the (mis)use of activism to perpetuate commercial, capitalistic goals. I’ve written before about Ello’s privacy “manifesto” obfuscating its actual privacy holes and my qualms about Amber Rose hijacking Slutwalk to further her own image while not contributing to existing Slutwalks.

There are a lot of these “corporate manifestos” around, which just seem to be a fancy word for “mission statement”.

Sometimes these “manifestos” are really just self-help statements with gussied-up typography:

Now compare these to historical manifestos for political, artistic, or other large-scale-movement purposes (shared not as endorsement of the content, but as examples):

We are not criminals of our own land that has given birth to us, we are not robbers and plunderers, but revolutionaries sworn to die for justice and freedom; we rebel against tyranny and against slavery; we are fighting and will fight against converts, against robbers, against oppressors and plunderers, against soiling our honor and faith and against those who benefit from our sweat and exploit our labor. Do not be afraid of us and of our villages — we shall not harm anyone. Not only do we consider you as our brothers, but we also feel sorry for you as our brothers, since we understand that you are slaves like ourselves, slaves of the Sultan and of his appointed rulers, masters and governors, slaves of the rich and powerful, slaves of tyrants and oppressors, who have set fire to the empire from all four sides and have made us rise up for justice, for freedom and for human life. We invite you, too, to join us in our struggle for justice, freedom and human life!

~ The Krushevo Manifest (1903) by the Republican Rebel Committee in Krushevo

The government must start trusting its citizens, show them greater respect and give them greater freedom. People met with suspicion will respond with suspicion. People met with trust will respond with trust. People met with harshness will respond with harshness. People met with humanity will respond with humanity. People treated like criminals risk becoming criminals. People met with freedom and responsibility take responsibility over their freedom.
Society must use and not misuse the fantastic tools we have received to our assistance. The right to free communication and privacy is not a threat, it is a prerequisite for humans and democracy to thrive. Free knowledge is not a threat, it is a prerequisite for innovation and progress. Shared culture should not be a crime, it is among the most beautiful things one can give, both to culture and to fellow humans.

~ Pirate Party Declaration of Principles v 4.0

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women’s movements have constructed ‘women’s experience’, as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.

~ A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway

We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.

~ The Futurist Manifesto by F. T. Marinetti

Convergence is certainly happening but the potential of these mediums is just being glimpsed. What is made for the Internet now can enlighten the forms of the future. The challenge is to create these forms now. This is not a televisual system that sits in the corner of our living rooms, but the Internet: a huge system of information storage and retrieval for individual users, with no centralised control. Seize the day and make your work available to millions of people. Be part of shaping the world’s next, great art form.

~ Plugin Manifesto by Ana Kronschnabl

Notice what’s so different about these manifestos. They are not so general as to be just a collection of feel-good statements, but they’re also not so specific to one company. They are actionable calls to arms for collectives of people aimed at creating substantial, often structural change to their world and wider society. Whether it’s revolutionizing a country in chaos, or rethinking a nascent artform, they provide very clear guidelines for the kind of change they want to inspire in the world, and call on the readers to join them in their quest.

Also, unlike these corporate manifestos and movements, the ultimate desired benefits don’t only go towards the writer, but are shared amongst as many as possible. The original writers may end up uncredited — which presents its own issues, as Flavia Dzodan notes in her post-mortem about “My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit”, which she coined and which has now become a feminist manifesto in and of itself, though often benefiting the pockets of others rather than her. But for the most part, these manifestos aren’t advertisements for the writer: if they’re advertising anything, they’re marketing a new paradigm of politics, art, governance, or some other major structure.

Commercial or corporate “movements” similarly feel emptier and more self-serving compared to genuine activist and social change movements. Often times these “movements” are solely to promote their brand or business — there’s little encouragement to explore other ways of pursuing those goals, particularly non-commercial methods.

Want to be “empowered”? “Enlightened”? “Revolutionary”? Buy our product! Sign up for our class! Never mind all the other organising for structural change, or advocating for collective rights, or anything else furthering those goals. Just be a customer. Just be our customer.

This isn’t to say that any of these companies’ purposes are less worthy: not everything has to be a social justice action for it to be worth your time. So why pretend that it is? Why not just talk about your product or idea for what it is, rather than dressing it up in We Are All Such Revolutionaries language?

Australian marketing agency brandcouncil calls for companies to write manifestos instead of mission statements because “have energy, they make a declaration, take a stance, and stand for something important”. Isn’t that the purpose of a vision statement? They claim that mission statements are “corporate and cold” — but calling your document a “manifesto” instead doesn’t suddenly make it “hotter”.

There’s been plenty of discussion about whether it is possible for companies to even partake in social justice. Some say that different forms of capitalism, such as conscious capitalism, make it possible for companies to drive social change — for instance, companies pulling their business out of North Carolina to protest the state enacting anti-trans laws. Others find this a means of co-option, distracting people from holding them accountable for enacting pro-corporate agendas and using revolutionary spirit to sell people luxury items. The way I’ve seen “movements” or “manifestos” used for more commercial ends, with only the smallest of gestures towards charity or social good (look! we donate a small percentage of profits to good causes! AREN’T WE AWESOME), makes me lean closer to the side arguing against co-option.

It is possible that many of the people making these statements — including the ones specifically called out here — are sincere in the desire to be inspirational or be helpful. But the way they’re going about it smacks of cynicism, of self-importance, of ultimately fluffing their own interests rather than prioritising the needs of the people they’re supposedly supporting. Creating social change does not start and end with inspirational “you go girl” statements printed on posterboards or a mission statement renamed a manifesto: it involves collective energy, commitment to the long haul, and working in service of goals bigger than corporate benchmarks.

But, y’know, there’s that thing about joining them instead of beating them, so in the spirit of this post (and by request of a Twitter follower), you can now get T-shirts & stickers of the Anti-Manifesto Movement. All proceeds go to me — but I often donate to charity or to people’s Kickstarters & Indiegogos, so you know that your money will go to good hands. Eventually. Some percentage of it anyway.