People’s Movements: Organizational Structure and the Big Bang of Disruption Politics, Part 1
Almost 20 years ago, I first read (and highlighted and underlined and tabbed) the book Poor People’s Movements. Eventually I put it away, finished graduate school and went on with my life. But two things always stuck with me from Cloward and Piven’s pivotal work, and I find myself re-examining them in recent weeks since Charlottesville (Part 1), as you might expect, but also in light of the al Aqsa Mosque protests (Part 2) in Jerusalem last month.
According to Cloward and Piven, first, there is never any one factor that foments a movement. Rosa Parks did not simply decide she didn’t feel like standing that particular day. Every movement has a multiplicity of factors, underlying conditions of injustice plus a catalyst or more. My second take-away from Poor People’s Movements was that organization is very different from mobilization, and while ideally they’d overlap, they have two very different sets of tactics. Historically (and even today) dismissed, disruption-based and unstructured movements can also be very effective.
Before their 1977 seminal work and the emergence of social movement theory, most viewed “movement participation… not as a form of rational political behavior but a reflection of aberrant personality types and irrational forms of ‘crowd behavior.” Indeed, in the wake of Charlottesville, and recent events in Durham, we still see the judgment of “mob mentality”, even though we know better academically. Despite an oversimplified dichotomy, for the sake of brevity here we’ll look only at structured and unstructured groups and actions in the US, and in Part 2, abroad.
Organizational Structure vs the Big Bang of Disruption Politics
Organizational structure delineates leadership, administration, funding, participation rules, and so on. Traditional wisdom insists the organization’s structure is critical to success. Cloward and Piven disagreed. While most scholars closely depicted the organizational structure of labor unions, Cloward and Piven posited this kind of structure could lead to the same types of bureaucratic constraints the movements themselves were railing against.
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement today has very flat and simple structure, without hierarchy or firm delineation of roles and responsibilities. BLM is, for my purposes here, an unstructured group. All are leaders in the BLM movement. “We’ve always made it clear that we are one of many. There’s not one person who can be a leader of the movement. We’re all leaders.” BLM has maintained that without a singular leader, they’re less susceptible to the risks associated with losing an enigmatic leader, as was the case when the Organization for Afro-American Unity collapsed after Malcolm X’s assassination. BLM is not singularly dependent on one person to be synonymous with the movement itself.
But BLM is also challenged by the same lack of leadership structure- it has no singular persona, no Martin Luther King, Jr, to unify or be the legitimate speaker for the group. It’s criticized, like many left-leaning groups, for being so diverse in aims and messaging that no message or demand comes across clearly. In being an unstructured group, BLM often relies on Big Bang or disruption politics.
Disruption politics is for those who have been excluded from politics as usual. If Cloward and Piven were correct that poor people’s movements emerge because the system failed to include them- as in the case of Jim Crow laws- then building a grassroots movement that mimics the conventional power structure may not be effective. As Audrey Lorde once said, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
When the costs of disruption politics are high, fewer people will join the movement. These costs range from arrest for civil disobedience, to obstructive assembly, destruction of property, to violence, and may include legal costs, job loss, social ostracism, etc. Many today are weighing these same concerns in light of Charlottesville, but L.A. Kaufman has also argued that although most successful movements have made the costs of participation low enough to secure widespread buy-in, that is not the mission of all disruption based tactics. “Sometimes mass support matters to protest movements a lot less than people think.” Some have no desire to include the “silent majority” or the left instead of the left of left; instead they exist for the benefit of their selfsame members, to force attention from authorities instead of from majorities. The authorities may be statesmen, police, or even leaders of specific in-groups, but not the masses.
There was an element within the white supremacist groups in Charlottesville that wanted to convince a broader audience of the righteousness of their claims, especially as it pertained to that particular statue. Yet many of the neo-Nazis identified with this type of elitism- that they were somehow the few chosen ones by way of “purity of pedigree.” Despite a very structured and rigid organizational structure, the white supremacists still suffered from mixed messaging in both wanting a wider acceptance of or acquiescence to their views, and yet they wished to remain separatists in them. If the goal was obfuscating the intent of their actions, and the populace’s reactions to it, then it was a raging success. Indeed the multi-fold symbolism of Civil War era statues has never been so hotly contested as it is now, after a couple hundred white supremacists demanded that the whole nation now have this argument. To be clear, institutional racism, in the form of statuary and otherwise, has plagued us for over a century; it’s just never been so widely debated before.
On the other hand, many leftist groups, loosely or not at all aligned, with little formal organizational structure, spontaneously gathered in Charlottesville, and later in Durham, ostensibly to oppose white supremacy. But without the organized leadership, or formal coalition, the messages were widely mixed. The benefit of course is that no matter who was arrested, the movement could continue, and in that sense, it’s a great depiction of a true people’s movement. The risk was that opinion suffered compounded fractures on what these groups were trying to achieve, who could speak for them, which tactics and methods were “approved”, and so on. The result was massive dissent not only within the leftist groups involved, but also among the “silent majority”.
In this case, structured organization allowed the white supremacists to make a strong (if intentionally obfuscating) argument that statues were synonymous with history and heritage and they focused on a single statue. Meanwhile, the unstructured left left people confused and deeply divided with their Big Bang in Durham, sudden desire to remove all statues everywhere, and in-fighting as to the acceptable methods, prioritization, and regulation thereof. Right or wrong, the objective of the white supremacists is much more narrow and achievable.
This is the same divide and conquer trap the left falls for every time. In the attempt at inclusivity, there is no hierarchical structure, no leader who speaks for the many groups of the left, and the result is a goal so broad it cannot be defined, much less agreed upon, and lesser still- methodically enacted. What the toppling of the statue in Durham did achieve was a big boost for the left-of-left, a release for its members, and an action shocking enough it forced authorities to pay attention. In the long run, that may prove to be the needed catalyst for the contemporary civil rights movement.
Which brings me back to the first lesson from Cloward and Piven- there is no singular factor that ushers in a movement. A matchstick doesn’t make a fire without something to burn, and a statue staying up, or being torn down, doesn’t foment a white nationalist movement, or unite the rest of us to end racism. But there’s already dry wood everywhere, and good bit of gas doused around; the next match could very easily ignite a decades long civil war. Whether that civil war will be stamped out by strong structured leadership, or if the unstructured Big Bang will end all that we know, is anyone’s guess. This has always been the problem with academic social science- there’s no prescription and only poor predictive modeling.
But what if there were? What if there was a way to account for the multi-faceted issues and identities, and then determine a plural outcome, a strategy for it and tactics to achieve it? What if that plan was put on paper and mapped out so people could choose where they wanted to fit and which sub-outcomes they wanted to work towards? We might still go the way of the dinosaurs, but at least we’d have better chances. I think I’ve created that framework, and I’ve been piloting it with a dozen teams for a year now. Thus far, the problem is self-sabotaging behavior in the absence of structured leadership. Go figure.
But the pilots that are allowing for pluralism within the outcome definition are working, accelerating the pace of change and bringing more volunteers in. We’re just beginning to see in the pilots, as in politics, a nascent acceptance that perhaps there isn’t a mutually exclusive or “best” path to social change. Perhaps we don’t need to choose from slow and deep organizational structure or Big Bang Disruption Politics. Maybe it’s both.
In the societal shift towards mutual exclusivity, in-groups and out-groups, we’ve forgotten simple science. There is no one case of 100% nurture over nature, or vice versa. There is no evolution versus Big Bang. It was never one or the other. They both, and everything in between, coexist. It is only our desire to oversimplify- to prevent the discomfort of uncertainty, the threat of difference and the difficulty of holding disparate ideas in our mind at once- that leads us to gloss over this very obvious truth- THERE IS NOT ONLY ONE WAY. We should tap into the symbiosis of any and all systems. That’s how the tiniest of plankton moves whales.
I disagree with Audrey Lorde about the master’s house because I believe any tool can be appropriated to another task and there is no one way to swing a hammer, but I will leave you with the rest of her words-
“I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”
And whatever way or tool you choose, I hope we can find ways to work along side one another because us plankton, we have some mighty big whales to move.
