Victory
Heather Hax
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “victory” as “an act of defeating an enemy or opponent in a battle, game, or other competition.” The etymological root of the word—“vincere”—means “to conquer.” Through its common association with the word “win,” “victory” also invokes the Old English “winnan,” which means to “strive, contend.” Meanwhile, the term’s Germanic roots suggest that winning a victory requires that one “subdue and take possession of, acquire.”
A recent Waging Nonviolence article asked how more social movements can “win victories like same sex marriage.” According to Mark Engler and Paul Engler (2014b), the fight for same-sex marriage in America was victorious because activists organized tirelessly on multiple fronts, won the war of public opinion, and secured incremental gains that led to “victories [that] started coming in furious succession.” In this view, shifting the tide of public opinion can lead to sweeping changes in public policy. As a result, declaring victory becomes a question of strategy. Occupy Wall Street claimed victory simply for having existed as long as it did (Meyerson 2011). Many contemporary social movements declare victory when they meet the goals of a campaign. A victory can also be proclaimed when a movement successfully draws attention to a social problem that had previously gone unnoticed. But while such developments should be celebrated, do they really constitute “victory” in the sense implied by the term’s definition?
After the revolutions of 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1850) addressed the Communist League and spoke of victory. “It goes without saying,” they said, “that in the bloody conflicts to come . . . it will be the workers, with their courage, resolution and self-sacrifice, who will be chiefly responsible for achieving victory.” The challenge, they argued, was to keep the bourgeois democrats with whom the workers stood in coalition from usurping that victory in the final instance. In order to achieve this aim, the proletariat needed to temper “the victory euphoria and enthusiasm for the new situation which follow every successful street battle, with a cool and cold-blooded analysis of the situation and with undisguised mistrust of the new government.” Concretely, this meant that, “from the very moment of victory the workers’ suspicion must be directed no longer against the defeated reactionary party but against their former ally, against the party which intends to exploit the common victory for itself.” In this view, accomplishing revolutionary victory involves shrewd, long-term, and flexible strategizing. This means that those who were once allies might at some later point become adversaries. In other words, incremental victories change the field and create a new array of antagonists in a dialectical procession of ever-evolving strategy—that is, until the game has been played through until its end.
In an exchange with Joseph Stalin, Young Communist League staff propagandist Ivan Philipovich observed that the “final victory of Socialism implies the solution of the external contradictions,” which meant that the Soviet Union needed to be “fully guaranteed against intervention and, consequently, against the restoration of capitalism” (1938). Similarly, when reflecting on the dynamics of the Sino-Japanese war, Mao Zedong warned against the self-defeating tendencies that arose from premature declarations of victory. In particular, he condemned the temptation to declare victory on the basis of objectively improved social conditions that did not yet amount to complete revolutionary transformation. For Mao (1992), “final victory” required both “protracted war” and internal cooperation and organization among the people. When modifications of the system yielded important gains, it was necessary to confront both complacency and the defeatist belief that no further gains could be made. He also specifically warned against the defeatist assertion that “final victory” was impossible and that China’s subjugation to Japanese armies was inevitable.48
Similarly, in a set of Party directives penned in 1965 during the early stages of the Guinea-Bissau War of Independence against Portuguese colonial rule, Amilcar Cabral (1974) urged his followers to “tell no lies” and “claim no easy victories.” Significantly, his comments began by delimiting the field upon which victories could be won to the material realm. “Always bear in mind,” he wrote, “that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting for material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children.”
In these examples, “victory” means correctly identifying one’s adversaries and eradicating them so as to ensure that they do not threaten the society one is struggling to create. Although “victory” is still announced when a discrete battle is won, it is understood that such battles are ultimately in the service of a larger, revolutionary war. However, even though victories were declared in several communist revolutions during the twentieth century, eliminating external threats and achieving total social transformation—the “final victory”—remained elusive.
By the mid-twentieth century and with the rise of new social movements, “victories” came to be conceived very differently. New social movements arose in response to a labor movement that had failed to include (and at times actively excluded) women and people of color from their efforts (Leary 2005). Additionally, organized labor had forged an increasingly cozy relationship with management and shifted its focus away from fundamentally challenging the economic order. In response, new social movements created a model of organizing that began from the varied experiences of oppressed people and located deeply embedded hierarchies in the fabric of everyday life. Some aimed to prefigure the world they wanted by adopting practices that challenged the entrenched hierarchical relations that seemed to make victory so elusive (Day 2005). In practice, however, many of these movements restricted themselves to single-issue campaigns demanding greater inclusion in mainstream institutions (Melucci 1996). Subsequently, much of this organizing was criticized for failing to fundamentally uproot systems of domination. From a revolutionary standpoint, their victories seemed partial and their politics complacent.
It is in this political landscape that “victory” has come overwhelmingly to mean winning a campaign or securing a concrete change of some sort. In her contribution to Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution, Janice Fine defines a campaign as “a series of tactics deployed over a specified period of time, each of which builds the strength of the organization and puts increasing pressure on the target until it gives in on your specific demands. . . . A campaign is not endless; it has a beginning, middle and end. It ends, ideally, in a specific victory” (2014, 52).
Often, these campaigns claim victory through legislative change or reform in mainstream social institutions. The most lauded victories of this kind in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first century have involved substantial human rights gains for marginalized groups—including, but not limited to, the Civil Rights, Women’s Liberation, and LGBTIQ movements. The Environmental Justice movement has also laid claim to important victories over the past thirty years, including the establishment of stricter oversight and regulation on pollution and conservation by environmental regulation agencies. Many of these advances have been secured through the work of social movement organizations and the growth of a huge nonprofit and nongovernmental organization sector. Taken together, these victories have had a profound impact on people’s lives. However, each has amounted to a limited “victory” rather than to “victory” per se.
It has been argued that however much reforms and direct services relieve the suffering caused by an injustice, they do little to change the system that caused the problem in the first place. In fact, such reforms may even bolster the very systems they are meant to change—making final “victory” ever more elusive. For example, in the Turbulence Collective’s anthology What Would It Mean to Win?, Paul Sumburm warns,
After years of drawing attention to the facts of climate change, suddenly the issue is everywhere, and everyone, it seems, is calling for action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In some senses this is a rare victory, a response both to the pressure of activists and the scientific consensus channeled powerfully by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But, of course, some see the potential to expand the sphere of capital’s influence: most mainstream talk is of market-friendly technological solutions, “carbon trading” and oil companies dabbling in renewable energy. (2010, 27)
For the most part, the victories that newer social movements have secured have been far from revolutionary. Even in the wake of profound victories such as those won by the Civil Rights, Women’s, LGBTIQ, and Environmental movements, underlying mechanisms of domination have remained intact. As a result (and echoing the position advanced earlier by Cabral), radicals have been reluctant to claim victories since doing so might draw attention away from revolutionary aspirations. According to Getting Past Capitalism author Cynthia Kaufman, “There is a cultural norm on the left of being afraid to declare victory, which is related to the binary of reform/revolution.” Specifically, “whereas reformists are winning small gains, revolutionaries don’t want people to be satisfied with those small victories because they worry this will lead to acceptance of the bigger picture of capitalist domination so they find a way to turn every victory into a defeat” (Jensen 2014). Movement-based author Rebecca Solnit (2012) echoed Kaufman’s concern when, in a letter addressed to her “dismal allies on the US left,” she lamented how she “constantly encounter[s] a response that presumes the job at hand is to figure out what’s wrong, even when dealing with an actual victory, or a constructive development.”
As Mueller and Sol (2007) note, “It is nice to have our victories once in a while.” However, this can result in a related but inverse tendency in which radicals become self-congratulatory by declaring victory prematurely (Dixon 2014). This dynamic arises in part from the tendency to prioritize tactics over strategy. For example, as a result of the fetishization of tactics like blockades or consensus-based decision-making, their very use is taken to be a measure of victory.
In the wake of the victorious blockade disruption of the 1999 WTO meetings in Seattle, global justice activists sought to reproduce these blockades all over the globe. Writing about the anti-G8 protests in Heiligendamm, Germany in 2007, summit protesters noted that their blockades were “indeed a victory” (Mueller and Sol 2007). Yet this victory was measured in terms of two criteria: first, for their disruptive nature, and second, as “a ‘reconstitutive moment’ of the conflictive potential of global movements.” Upon reflection, however, what seemed like a victory for the protesters turned out to be a victory for the G8 as well. Although the blockades were victorious, they failed to fundamentally delegitimize the G8. That is, the G8 was still able to establish itself as the victor—the force that could solve the problems of neoliberal globalization the protesters had highlighted (Mueller and Sol 2007).
In a more recent example, several social movement theorists and movement participants have noted that Occupy Wall Street’s primary power was to prefigure participatory democracy on the ground instead of engaging with the powers that be to demand reform (Graeber 2011; Barber 2012). Tracing “the anarchist DNA of Occupy,” Dana Williams argued that, in its prefigurative practices of consensus and the (temporary) occupation of space, “Occupy has already enjoyed many victories, convincing countless people of the potential for radical social change” (2012, 20). In light of this, it is wise to ask what the strategic implications of claiming victory can be.
According to social movement scholars like Devashree Gupta (2009), declaring victory can yield mixed results for movements. On the one hand, a victory (or series of victories) can help to drum up support. This can expand the capacity of the social movement, which in turn can help to build its power and effectiveness. According to James Jasper, “Movement groups often expand their goals if they are victorious, and trim them if they meet unexpected resistance” (2004, 8). Likewise, declaring victory can carry tremendous psychological value by energizing a movement and its participants or keeping them from burning out (Solnit 2012). On the other hand, declaring victory can lead to what Gupta has called the “satiety” effect (2009). If movements declare a series of victories, supporters may conclude that they’ve got matters under control. As a result, a strategically misguided declaration of victory may decrease the support a movement might otherwise receive.
Like a litmus test, the evolving use of “victory” seems indicative of social-movement aims and accomplishments. In this way, it restages the historic debate about the tension between revolution and reform. However, since the Revolution seems a long way off, contemporary declarations of “victory” are significant primarily on account of their strategic value for morale and for creating openings for further strategic intervention. In “The Shock of Victory,” David Graeber asks radicals to appreciate when they are victorious—even if the victories are solely tactical—and to understand that their interventions are part of a long historical arc. “The question is how to break the cycle of exaltation and despair and come up with some strategic visions (the more the merrier) about how these victories build on each other, to create a cumulative movement towards a new society” (2007, 12). In this view, victories themselves can serve to resolve the tension between revolution and reform—providing that movement participants are willing and able to use them to stimulate a grander vision.
See also: Ideology; Revolution; Sovereignty; Vanguard; War
48. Indeed, the Chinese revolutionary forces were able to defeat the Japanese imperialists. Nevertheless, the Chinese system could best be described as “state-capitalist” rather than as socialist or communist.