“TAHRIR BROUGHT TEARS to my eyes,” says Ahmed Salah. “We had tried before. But nothing was like this.”1
Salah, a veteran youth organizer, had worked for years to drum up resistance to the autocratic thirty-year regime of Hosni Mubarak, the eighty-two-year-old president of Egypt. In 2004, Salah had helped form a movement called Kefaya, or “Enough.” More recently, he was a cofounder of the April 6 Youth Movement, which had called for protests on January 25, 2011, in Cairo and other cities throughout the country.
The time seemed opportune. Just a few months earlier, Egypt had gone through elections that human rights groups called “the most fraudulent ever.” As Salah explains, “Mubarak’s National Democratic Party swept parliamentary elections through a process so rigged that no effort was made to hide the fraud. When one member of my family went to the polls, he discovered that he had already voted—his ballot had been fraudulently cast for the ruling party.” Salah further notes, “The consensus view among Egyptians was that Mubarak was grooming his son Gamal to take his place, which would turn Egypt into a hereditary dictatorship.”2
The electoral fraud had given rise to widespread public disgust. Still, Salah had little expectation that the January demonstrations could turn into a full-fledged rebellion. “I had hopes, but I never really thought that I’d see it,” he says.3
What actually happened on the day of protest made Cairo’s Tahrir Square into a global sensation. On the heels of a revolution in neighboring Tunisia, Egyptians responded in huge numbers to the January 25 call to action, and they kept coming out in the days that followed. “We had millions on the streets on that very first day, and these numbers doubled and tripled,” says Salah. “It was incredible afterwards. You could see in Cairo alone between five and seven million protesting in the streets of just this city. Maybe in Alexandria a million or two, and all over the country hundreds of thousands in every city.”4
Just a few weeks later, Mubarak was gone. News of his resignation on February 11, 2011, marked the climax of what was quickly recognized as one of the most sudden and significant upheavals of the twenty-first century. As the New York Times reported, “The announcement, which comes after an 18-day revolt led by the young people of Egypt, shatters three decades of political stasis and overturns the established order of the Arab world.” Citizens in Egypt, along with sympathizers throughout the world, rejoiced.5
Mubarak’s ouster was one of the high moments of the Arab Spring. And yet, within a few short years, the euphoria of those times evaporated. In Egypt’s first free elections, disorganization among the secular democratic opposition resulted in the election of Mohamed Morsi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group that had only belatedly joined the uprising. Then, in the summer of 2013, Egypt’s military, under the command of General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, took power by overthrowing Morsi. Not long after, prominent political scientist Amr Hamzawy described his nation as “a country in fear” that was experiencing a “fast recovery of authoritarianism.”6
Others would concur, noting a shattering reversal of progress. “The streets are empty. The prisons are full,” reported Amnesty International in early 2015. “The fourth anniversary of Egypt’s ‘25 January Revolution’ is passing largely in silence, with many of the young activists who led it now firmly behind bars.”7
Without a doubt, the revolution in Egypt presents a troubling case. The toppling of the Mubarak regime in 2011 was initially held up as a triumph of civil resistance, a fresh and exciting example of how a nonviolent mass mobilization could prevail over a force with far greater military might. However, as the country slid back into a repressive and undemocratic state, that rosy appraisal faded. More recently, Egypt’s situation has given fuel to cynics who argue that things would have been better if the revolution had never happened, as well as those who more generally doubt the power of nonviolent movements to secure change.
In truth, the Egyptian revolution is best seen as neither an uncomplicated success nor a mere justification for pessimism. It is far more valuable when recognized as something different: a perfect case study of what can be accomplished by mass mobilizations that harness the power of disruptive protest—and of the limits of these mobilizations.
Egypt shows that widespread revolts can do amazing things, but uprising alone is not enough. From Gandhi, to US labor unions in the 1930s, to the civil rights movement, to ACT UP, organizers using nonviolent escalation have grappled with how to put in place lasting mechanisms that can sustain the progress generated by their most high-profile campaigns. This is the challenge of institutionalization. In addressing it, these activists have found that the talent for creating mass unrest must be combined with the skills and perspectives of other organizing traditions in order to formalize and protect the gains won by popular mobilizations.
Institutionalization, moreover, is part of a wider dynamic. Peak moments do not exist in isolation. Instead, social movements progress through different stages. They contain actors who can play distinct roles, the relative importance of which fluctuate based on what stage of its life span a movement is in. At different times, the skills that various organizing traditions offer come to the fore.
Not all efforts to create change prevail over the long term. But those that do tend to see themselves as part of an ecology that is made healthier when different traditions each contribute: mass mobilizations alter the terms of political debate and create new possibilities for progress; structure-based organizing helps take advantage of this potential and protects against efforts to roll back advances; and countercultural communities preserve progressive values, nurturing dissidents who go on to initiate the next waves of revolt.
Egypt’s case is helpful in illustrating what mass mobilizations do well, and what they do not. But to understand why, it is first necessary to answer a more basic question: How did a small, loosely organized group of Egyptian young people end up setting the terms for their country’s revolution?
If anyone should have spearheaded a successful revolt against Mubarak’s rule, it was the Muslim Brotherhood. Having existed for more than eighty years, the group had organized hundreds of thousands of members, despite being officially banned for decades. Moreover, the group’s influence extended beyond its membership rolls. The Muslim Brotherhood established a strong reputation as a social service provider, operating a nationwide network of schools, food banks, hospitals, and programs for orphans and widows. As public health researcher Nadine Farag reported in 2011, an Egyptian woman, regardless of politics or religion, could pay the equivalent of $175 to give birth in a well-staffed and well-equipped hospital run by the Brotherhood, or she could pay $875 in a private hospital. Salah calls the organization “by far the largest and best-organized opposition group in Egypt.”8
Yet, despite this unique strength, the Muslim Brotherhood did not take the lead in sparking revolution. The success of groups such as the April 6 Youth Movement shows how momentum-driven efforts, in launching nonviolent rebellions that capture the public imagination, often take the more well-structured organizations on a given political scene by surprise. The upstart groups have far fewer resources and much weaker institutional structures than conventional labor unions, political parties, or community-based organizations. But they use these traits to their advantage, organizing outside the confines of any established group.
Although it may seem strange, the same factors that made the Brotherhood powerful—the strengths of its structure-based organizing model—also made its leaders hesitant to risk all they had built in a mass confrontation with Mubarak. It was evident to them what they had to lose. Because the Brothers had clearly identified leadership and hierarchical membership, they were easily targeted for repression by the state. Because they had created a strong framework through which they could patiently amass power, they felt less urgency to force a public crisis around the regime. And because they were experts in person-to-person networking among their Islamist base, they were less adept at advocating for widely popular political demands that would be supported by other segments of society.
Consistent with momentum-driven campaigns, social media–savvy organizations such as April 6 and the followers of popular activist Facebook pages in Egypt operated differently. Although these recently formed groups had tens of thousands of online “members”—sometimes gathered in a matter of weeks after a high-publicity event—organizers often knew little more about a given follower than an Internet username. Rather than mastering the arts of long-term leadership development, they focused on confrontation and public spectacle. Their strength was telling stories: publicizing pictures of police abuse and rallying outrage.
The regime gave them plenty to work with. The youth organizers posted videos of Egyptian civilians being beaten by police, and they shared pictures of people who had been tortured in custody. In these images, the victims showed how electrocution had created patches of congealed blood underneath their skin, leaving blotchy pink stains.
One particularly well-trafficked hub of online activity, the “We Are All Khalid Said” Facebook page, was named after a twenty-eight-year-old man who, in June 2010, was beaten to death by authorities after posting a video of police misconduct. As journalist David Wolman recounts, two detectives confronted Said at a cybercafe and “slammed his head on a table before the owner told them to take the fighting outside.” Police then “pulled Said out to a building entryway where they kicked him and smashed his head against an iron gate until his body went limp.”9
When a picture of Said’s dead body was circulated online, it became a catalyst for indignation. “Maybe it was because he was a well-known and educated guy with many friends,” one student told Wolman. “And the picture. I mean, he was so completely disfigured. I don’t know what it was exactly, but it spread like fire.”
When it came time to mobilize citizens for a mass demonstration on January 25—the day that would become the start of the revolution—the approach of the youth organizers was more akin to concert promotion than the building of neighborhood organizations. They put forth symbolically loaded demands to engender the broadest possible sympathy, adopting a slogan that had already been made famous in Tunisia: “The people demand the fall of the regime.”
The call to action generated buzz. In another viral video, twenty-six-year-old Asmaa Mahfouz, a cofounder of the April 6 Youth Movement, positioned herself directly in front of her computer’s camera and announced that she would attend the protests. Forgoing the safety of online anonymity, she brazenly implored others to join her: “As long as you say there is no hope, then there will be no hope,” Mahfouz argued. “But if you go down and take a stance, then there will be hope.”10
The experience of January 25 proved her right. Salah describes the march that formed that day in his neighborhood to head toward Tahrir Square: “This was my neighborhood, my home, and during my 10 years as an activist I had met hundreds of people in and around the activist community. Yet the streets were filled with men and women I had never seen. And they were leading chants! As I lifted my voice to join them, I thought to myself: My God! Where have you been? We’ve been waiting for you!”11
After the initial confrontation on the twenty-fifth, the uprising advanced quickly. For a time, the Egyptian media branded all youth organizing as the work of the April 6 Youth. The group had created a mobilization that was less a concrete institution than an open movement, one with which people across the country could identify. According to Salah, the group had only a few dozen physical members as of early 2011, and yet a vast range of autonomous activity was soon associated with the organization’s efforts, ranging from neighborhood-level organizing, to online advocacy, to mobilization on the part of the country’s emergent independent labor movement. “It became the brand name,” Salah says of the April 6 Youth Movement. “We were successful in making it the icon of change.”12
Like other momentum-driven efforts, the organizers’ canny use of disruptive escalation gave them weight that could never have been justified on the basis of their true institutional size or strength. Not only did they spark early demonstrations but also they exerted lasting influence as the protests grew. When, several days in, groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the National Association for Change—led by the Nobel Laureate and former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed ElBaradei—finally decided to amplify a political eruption that had become too large to ignore, these experienced actors showed deference to the methods and the messages that the young people had established from the outset. The latecomers overwhelmingly adopted the slogans and framing of the existing revolt, making the effort resolutely nonsectarian.13
April 6 and other youth groups were able to spark a contagious uprising precisely because they were not based on rigid structures. They did not have organizational assets that could be seized by the regime. They did not have established political turf to defend or factional interests that would cast them as partisan or self-interested. They did not have well-established chapters that could be easily infiltrated. And so they could take on a broad-scale, symbolically loaded campaign, geared toward maximum support and maximum disruption.
Certainly, on February 11, 2011, when authorities announced Mubarak’s resignation and the activists cried with joy in the square, storm clouds loomed. When revolutionaries talked about the future, there were already indications that their coalition was fragile. But for the moment, they had accomplished something that few in the world could have predicted, and something that the best organized group in the country could not pull off: they unseated the tyrant who had ruled for longer than many of them were alive.
They overthrew Mubarak.
Once a moment of the whirlwind passes, activists must be attentive to how the gains they have won can be institutionalized and made durable. And here the habits of structure-based organizing become very useful.
Youth organizers had brought people onto the streets in staggering numbers by “breaking the fear barrier,” as a popular expression among Egyptian activists put it. They had rallied mass public sympathy and ousted an entrenched regime. All these were remarkable accomplishments. Yet, just as the momentum-driven organizing model of April 6 and other youth groups gave them disproportionate influence in shaping the uprising, the well-engineered structures of the Muslim Brotherhood proved critical in defining what would come next.14
Momentum-driven groups thrive on broad, transformative demands that have symbolic resonance and can inspire support from the general public. For the purposes of creating a crisis of legitimacy for Mubarak, the importation of “The people demand the fall of the regime” was perfect. But such broad-based appeals were not nearly as effective in promoting the rise of new leaders or pushing forward specific reforms to the system of governance. In contrast, the Muslim Brotherhood’s transactional demands, although not useful in instigating revolt, allowed them to leverage the institutional power they had accrued to influence the new governing bodies that were being established after the revolution.
Youth organizers took it as a point of pride that they did not sink into the muck of party politics and instead focused on broadly resonant issues such as freedom and ending police brutality. In the Oscar-nominated documentary The Square—released in January 2014 to coincide with the third anniversary of the revolution—two youth leaders discussed how this focus became a problem after the fall of Mubarak:
“Politics is not the same as a revolution. If you want to play politics, you have to compromise. And we’re not good at this . . . at all,” said Khalid Abdalla, a British-Egyptian activist and actor known for his role in The Kite Runner.
“We’re terrible at it,” agreed Ramy Essam, a musician who performed regularly before rallies in Tahrir, earning renown as the “singer of the revolution.”15
The Muslim Brotherhood was in a very different position. For its leaders, negotiating for institutional advancement in a postrevolutionary climate came naturally. With a framework for a political party already in place and an organized bloc of voters at the ready, the Brotherhood moved to the fore. Whereas the younger and more secularly minded activists generally favored allowing time for the drafting of a constitution and the formation of new parties, the Brotherhood pushed for quick elections.
Abdul-Fatah Madi, an Egyptian analyst writing for Al Jazeera, explained that prior to Mubarak’s defeat, the youth-led factions “preoccupied themselves with acquiring knowledge on how to topple tyrannical regimes as well as spreading information about human rights violations.” But as the postrevolutionary transition began, they failed to engage in “the intricacies of state-building and political projects that would serve as an alternative to the authoritarian regime.”16
In the absence of a more structured challenge by the groups who had sparked the revolution, the Muslim Brotherhood dropped any pretense of a movement coalition. Six months after Mubarak fell, it ordered its members out for mass rallies. The disciplined crowds now took up much more partisan chants: “Islamic rule, Islamic rule” and “The Qur’an is our constitution.”
The secular youth, champions of momentum, had been outmaneuvered. For all their success in targeting the former regime, a lack of structure meant that they lost control after their primary goal of removing the autocrat was realized.
Structure-based organizing and momentum-driven movements are not inherently in conflict. Ideally, the two models can complement one another. Established groups that share the goals of a mass uprising can benefit from the burst of energy and the increased interest in a cause that comes with a high-profile mobilization. In turn, the more established organizations can lend their prestige and resources to outbreaks of resistance when they arise. This happened when the Muslim Brotherhood decided to back the Tahrir revolt—bringing microphones to the square, turning out its members, arranging garbage collection—and when it joined the push for a coalition government. But when the constituencies split, putting secular revolutionaries at odds with the Islamists, the main beneficiary was the military.
The armed forces, which had refused to crack down on behalf of Mubarak during the January 2011 uprising, were regarded by the public as heroes after the revolution. Capitalizing on this good will, the military emerged as the force that controlled the structures of the old regime. With Mubarak gone, it competed with the Muslim Brotherhood for dominance. Over the next year and a half, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces attempted to delay handing over power to a civilian government. In response, reinvigorated protests—brandishing the slogan, “A new revolution all over again”—forced it to cede to popular rule. This allowed the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi to take office as the country’s first democratically elected president in the summer of 2012.
However, during his year in office, Morsi granted himself ever more-expansive powers, prompting a public backlash. Having already dethroned Mubarak and the Supreme Council, Egyptians took to the streets to rally against a third ruling power—the Muslim Brotherhood. Graffiti artists changed their stencils: those who once marked red Xs over spray-painted images of Mubarak began using cutouts of Morsi instead.
In the summer of 2013, amid a new wave of mass antigovernment protests, the military stepped in and forced the Muslim Brotherhood from power. At first, liberals were hesitant to call it a coup. But hopes for more open and pluralistic governance were once again thwarted. In following months, the army escalated repression, clamping down on both its Islamist and secular opponents. By the revolution’s third anniversary, Amnesty International warned of authorities “using every resource at their disposal to quash dissent.” Things appeared bleak.17
Today, the path ahead looks very difficult. Those who led momentum-driven mass mobilizations in Egypt recognize that, if they are to succeed in the future, they will need not only the skills to initiate widespread disruption but also the ability to hold on to their gains in the aftermath. In 2012, leaders of the April 6 Youth Movement vowed to embark on a five-year plan to develop alternative institutions. Since then, repression from the military has made progress difficult, and many leaders have been jailed.18
If there is hope for the future, it is that the 2011 uprising has unleashed a spirit of communal self-determination that cannot be easily subdued. By early 2014, Ahmed Salah was living in exile and dealing with the trauma of repression. “I feel that this is the worst time,” he said. “Most people have been brainwashed into thinking that the only way to save Egypt is through military rule.”
And yet he reported that his pessimism was balanced by another impulse. “I also feel confidence,” Salah said. “Each group that has been in the leading position in the country has tried to retain power. Yet we Egyptians were able to bring down three regimes: Mubarak, the Supreme Council, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
“What we did before,” he concluded, “we can do again.”19
When it comes to mass upheaval, momentum-based campaigns do not wait for moments of unrest to spontaneously occur. Rather, they seek to consciously generate whirlwinds, to take advantage of outside trigger events when they occur, and to sustain periods of peak activity. Hybrid organizations such as Otpor and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were successful at doing this, enabling them to endure multiple waves of revolt. By the time they finished their campaigns, they had gained enough active support that their allies were many and their enemies were fractured. As a result, they scored critical wins.
But even groups that carry out disruptive action for long periods must understand their efforts in a larger context. How can movement activists absorb the energy of revolt into lasting structures? How can they protect the gains they have secured? And how can they spark new cycles of disruption that propel further change?
The greatest practitioners of civil resistance have answered these questions by drawing on the strengths of different social change traditions. Although mobilizing unusual moments of peak unrest demands a unique methodology, this does not negate the value of skills from other approaches. Indeed, these skills become critical in various stages of social movements. When mass mobilizations, established organizations, and alternative communities see themselves as complementary, they can create a movement ecosystem that allows diverse approaches to promoting change to flourish.
Focusing on movements outside the United States, the tradition of civil resistance acknowledges that strategic nonviolent action against authoritarian regimes must function as part of a wider drive to build up the kind of healthy civil society institutions that can keep a democracy intact. “No one should believe that with the downfall of the dictatorship an ideal society will immediately appear,” Gene Sharp wrote a decade before mass protests in Tahrir Square. “The disintegration of the dictatorship simply provides the beginning point . . . for long-term efforts to improve the society and meet human needs more adequately.”20
For this reason, Sharp contended, “careful precautions must be taken to prevent the rise of a new oppressive regime out of the confusion following the collapse of the old one.”
No doubt, this is easier said than done. But the challenges of establishing a more just social order after a revolution do not apply only to nonviolent movements. Instead, they afflict all turbulent changes of state power, whether armed or unarmed.
Studies have found that, at least since the 1970s, when regimes are toppled, the posttransition states have been far more likely to become democratic if the movements that brought about the change employed tactics of strategic nonviolence—such as strikes, mass boycotts, and large-scale demonstrations. In the case of a guerilla uprising against an undemocratic state, revolutionaries still have to fill the vacuum left by the old regime. And because the armed force that carried out the overthrow is often the best-organized institution of the resistance, its hierarchical structures are primed to take over. The result, as in many postcolonial African states, is often a new dictatorship led by guerilla commanders.21
Upheavals prompted by civil resistance do not face this difficulty, and therefore they have a better likelihood of producing positive long-term results. Still, problems after the fall of an undemocratic regime are common. Although countries might not experience a reversion to autocratic rule, as Egypt did, they must nonetheless confront a host of challenges in making new political leaders live up to progressive ideals. In Serbia and in several “color revolutions” in the former Soviet bloc—such as the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia and the 2004 Orange Revolution in the Ukraine—young people played a critical role in leading quickly swelling mobilizations. But in all these cases, they were unprepared for later events. Matthew Collin, author of The Time of the Rebels, a study of these uprisings, writes that there “seemed to be no blueprint for what, if anything, these youth movements could achieve after their revolutions.22
“In all cases, most of the rank-and-file activists simply drifted away,” Collin explains. “They could help to change their countries, but they found it harder to ensure that the politicians who came to power afterwards remained true to the principles they had espoused at the moment of revolution.” In such cases, institutionalizing progress after momentum dies down has remained a persistent difficulty.
For social movements in the United States, the challenge takes a different form, but it is no less relevant. Groups attempting to create change in a democratic context do not typically have to deal with the complexities of setting up a new ruling order after a revolution. But they must still work to see that the changes they win are safeguarded after momentous upheavals subside, and they must retain the capacity to launch new mobilizations after the goals of earlier efforts are met.
It was a classic moment of the whirlwind: in late 1936, with the pain of the Great Depression still lingering, a strike hit the heart of the automobile industry. Flint, Michigan, was home to the central production facility of the powerful General Motors. Starting on December 30, workers at several GM sites sat down and occupied their factories. Ultimately, they brought production to a standstill for forty-four days, creating what the BBC would later describe as “the strike heard round the world.”23
There is debate over who deserves credit for building the disciplined organizational networks that guided the Flint strike—whether the fledgling United Auto Workers, independent rank-and-file leaders in the factories, or socialist cadre groups of various stripes. But it is clear that the strike was an impressively managed affair. Workers within the factories organized committees to handle everything from food and sanitation to rumor control and entertainment. Meanwhile, groups on the outside such as the Emergency Women’s Brigades took responsibility for walking picket lines, coordinating deliveries of provisions, and facing down police.24
The action in Flint gave rise to a rush of decentralized activity that expanded far beyond the reach of any established organizational structure. On the heels of the initial sit-down, the GM strike spread throughout the company’s factories, not only in Detroit, but also to plants in Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and even Georgia.25
On February 11, 1937, General Motors accepted defeat. In a historic victory for labor, the company announced that it would bargain with the UAW, something that ultimately resulted in major pay increases and an expanded voice for workers on the job. And over the next year, the wave of action continued to spread. Sit-down strikes became a genuine national phenomenon as employees clamored to replicate the success in Flint. Labor historian Jeremy Brecher cites data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing sit-downs involving nearly four hundred thousand workers in 1937. In one month alone, March 1937, there were 170 industrial sit-downs recorded. “In the mood of the time, any grievance could become a trigger,” Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward write. Nor was the fever limited to just factory workers: hotel employees in Michigan, students in New York and North Carolina, and even prisoners in Illinois and Pennsylvania all used the tactic to demand that their grievances be addressed.26
“After the sit-down strike,” reflected former UAW president Leonard Woodcock, “people organized themselves. They came by literally the tens of thousands, and all kinds of people. . . . It was a crusade.”27
The genius of John L. Lewis, president of the national Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), was not in sparking the strike wave. Rather, Lewis’s genius was in using recently passed federal labor law—specifically, the protections that labor had demanded and won in the 1935 Wagner Act—to give the unions a means of institutionalizing the energy of a mobilization that had spread beyond organizers’ wildest aspirations. Not only did Lewis appreciate the opportunity created by the sit-downs but also he was willing to invest heavily in seizing it—risking his union’s treasury to hire phalanxes of new organizers, including talented local radicals and Communist Party members, who signed up rank-and-file supporters en masse. Within a year of the victory in Flint, the autoworkers’ union, a CIO affiliate, grew from thirty thousand members nationwide to a quarter million, and union membership in other industries similarly skyrocketed. It was a landmark moment in the formation of the modern US labor movement.28
As this experience showed, mass mobilizations can be critical in bolstering organizations. Established groups, for their part, can help to support new waves of disruption. However, this type of mutually supportive behavior does not always happen. In fact, structure is often hostile to mass mobilization. A variety of historians argue persuasively with regard to the strike wave of the late 1930s that union leaders often worked to cool the sit-down strikes rather than to fuel them. They placed an interest in organizational preservation ahead of continued unrest. Piven and Cloward write that, especially once workers were signed up for the union, labor leadership scrambled to “curb work stoppages and maintain production,” believing that the strength of its bargaining position was based on its ability to temper disobedience in the shops.29
The tension extends far beyond the labor movement. With reference to nonprofit groups, Bill Moyer notes, “The large budgets, professional staff, board of directors . . . and reliance on foundations for funding make almost all of the large professional opposition organizations politically cautious and on the conservative side of the political spectrum of the left.” Professionalized groups tend to be averse to risking negative polarization. And, because they usually focus their work on instrumental demands that benefit their members, they might see little point in symbolic appeals to the public at large. Because of this, during moments when mass mobilizations begin taking off, the instinct of more professionalized groups is often to guard their turf and undercut the upstart efforts.30
The friction here is real. But recognition of how different approaches can contribute during various stages of movement activity can help ease tensions. A firm advocate of disruptive power, Frances Fox Piven is wary of organizational bureaucracies because of their tendency of trying to dampen or contain outbreaks of revolt. Yet she, too, acknowledges that structured institutions can play a role. “Organizations can preserve a legacy,” she says. “They can institutionalize and legalize the gains won through disruptive mobilization.” Furthermore, she and Cloward have written that “quiescent periods” and “periods of reaction” are “times when organization-building makes sense.” During these stages, established groups can be critical in fighting off the backlash that typically comes from elites.31
Piven and Cloward are critical of the labor movement for accommodating itself to America’s mainstream establishment after it rose to prominence, especially during the Cold War, and they contend that bureaucratized unions too rarely exercise the power of the strike. Nevertheless, the authors argue, “To be sure, the unions that emerged in the 1930s did become permanent; and . . . they have been useful in protecting the interests of workers.” Industrial unionization, Piven and Cloward write, was a victory worth winning, resulting in higher pay, shorter hours, greater job security, and workplace safety protections—changes that made significant differences in the lives of millions of American families.32
If adopting professionalized structures can inhibit an organization’s willingness to embrace disruptive uprising, there is an opposite danger for momentum-driven activity. Groups that are unable to institutionalize can find themselves at a dead-end when the energy of a revolt runs out or an initial demand is fulfilled.
The successful growth of industrial unions in the wake of the sit-down strikes stands in contrast to the case of US farmworkers in California and the Northwest. Over the past several decades, these workers have experienced repeated waves of wildcat strikes involving thousands of people, spread over hundreds of farms and orchards. But, given that farmers can change crops from year to year, that agricultural employees are constantly rotating, and that workers in the fields do not benefit from many of the protections of existing labor law, organizations such as the United Farm Workers have had great difficulty retaining a stable membership base and enforcing ongoing contracts. Consequently, many of the wage increases and improvements in working conditions granted as a result of strikes have proven extremely challenging to maintain. Today, the largely immigrant workforce that helps harvest America’s crops remains one of the most exploited in the country.
As uprisings swell, there is no problem with established groups seeking to capitalize on the unrest or using the new energy to advance long-term goals that are broadly consistent with the movement’s aims. The problem comes if organizations act in ways that belittle or impede rising movement efforts. To avoid this, structured-based groups can treat moments of peak activity as times for experimentation. This is what Alinsky did in the wake of the Freedom Rides, when he agreed with his protégé Nicholas von Hoffman. “I think that we should toss out everything we are doing organizationally,” von Hoffman had said, “and work on the premise that this is the moment of the whirlwind, that we are no longer organizing but guiding a social movement.”33
This perspective matches the insights of Piven and Cloward. By adopting a temporary focus on “mobilizing disruptive acts rather than organizing members,” the theorists argue, established organizations can “work with the tides of popular defiance rather than against them.”34
Although she recognizes the tension that often exists between structured organizations and decentralized movements, author and community organizer Rinku Sen argues that each is essential. Sen writes, “While organizations of all sorts produce incremental victories that help prevent backsliding, shifts in core values that shape policy take place through social movements that involve large numbers of people.”35
In the end, Sen argues, “A systematic challenge” to status quo injustices “will come from people who have been exposed to a number of organizing models, who can debate big ideas, and who can forego direct benefits to their own organization in terms of reputation and money.”36
Until his death, Martin Luther King Jr. remained a champion of the Birmingham model of civil resistance, and he sought to apply the tactics of nonviolent escalation to new contexts. However, late in his life, he also acknowledged that groups, including his own SCLC, faced limitations if they remained only “specialists in agitation and dramatic projects.”37
In 1967, King wrote of his group’s campaigns in places such as Birmingham and Selma as being akin to emergency measures. They had served as a “crisis policy and program,” advanced through “explosive events.” The campaigns helped secure critical legislative advances. But King believed that, for new stages of struggle, crisis mobilizations must be supplemented by ongoing, daily commitment. “We will have to build far-flung, workmanlike, and experienced organizations in the future,” he wrote, “if the legislation we create and the agreements we forge are to be ably and zealously superintended.”38
King had been developing this line of thinking for some time. In 1966 he wrote, “More and more, the civil rights movement will become engaged in the task of organizing people into permanent groups to protect their own interests and to produce change in their behalf.” The end goal was that people would be organized to work together in what King called “units of power.”39
These units could span a wide range of political and economic relationships. King saw the units of power including tenant associations, voters’ leagues, groups of the unemployed, and labor organizations. Even as he planned for major mobilizations such as the Poor People’s Campaign—which envisioned a multiracial brigade of three thousand people spearheading an occupation of the National Mall to advance demands for economic justice—King believed that institutionalization into these units was critical to long-term racial and economic justice.40
King’s assassination prevented the world from witnessing how his integration of nonviolent revolt and long-term institution building might take shape. But his concept of units of power is intriguing, both because it encouraged collaboration between a diversity of groups and because it envisioned permanent organization that could be mobilized in support of mass action when needed.
If disruptive mobilizations refashion the landscape of political possibility, other approaches to change become important once the new terrain of debate has been established. Over the past century, movements have found a variety of ways to institutionalize and preserve their legacies. The structures they created have not always realized King’s ideal of integration between long-term organizing and support for new campaigns of nonviolent escalation. Yet, by and large, they have contributed to creating a rich ecology in which social movements can function.
The industrial unions that gained prominence in the 1930s are a mode of long-term organization that continues to have a major impact on American life. As embattled as these unions might be, the fact that they are funded by their members not only makes them self-sustaining but also gives them a critical level of independence. Owing to this, they serve as the country’s most reliable institutional counterbalance to the influence of unchecked wealth and privilege on the nation’s politics. In cases such as the civil rights movement, unions sometimes provided pivotal funding and support for disruptive campaigns—including Project C in Birmingham.
Outside of organized labor, some movements have institutionalized by creating watchdog groups to monitor and enforce gains around an issue. The Harvard Living Wage Sit-In was part of a larger wave of student-labor activism in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Campus groups drew attention not only to the plight of low-wage service workers on US campuses but also to the sweatshop conditions in factories overseas where college sweatshirts and other branded items are typically made. These conditions could be disturbing. A prominent New York Times article from 1998 profiled one factory producing Nike goods in Vietnam. There, employees were forced to work sixty-five hours per week for a total of just ten dollars, with no overtime pay—and they were “exposed to carcinogens that exceeded local legal standards by 177 times in parts of the plant.”41
In 2001, students, workers, and labor experts came together to form the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), which student-labor groups began pushing their universities to join. Membership in the body requires true independent monitoring of factories: third-party inspectors make unannounced visits to ensure that workplaces follow proper ventilation and fire safety standards, that factories are free from child labor and forced overtime, and that employees have the freedom to form a union if they so choose.42
Since the group’s founding, the WRC has grown to include more than 180 affiliated colleges and universities. Because participating colleges are each required to pay membership dues ranging from $1,500 to $50,000, based on their licensing revenue, the advocates have created a stable, ongoing advocacy group that operates with a significant budget.43 Although the antisweatshop movement now gets less national attention than in the late 1990s, chapters of the United Students Against Sweatshops have continued to launch new campaigns, expanding the WRC and creating fresh waves of campus sit-ins in 2008 and 2011.
As another means of institutionalization, movements can influence official bodies—and sometimes take them over. ACT UP derived its power from being confrontational. But one of its main accomplishments was securing a voice for AIDS patients within the very institutions it was targeting. As public funding to address the disease dramatically increased, thanks in part to movement efforts, a variety of ACT UP members moved into new roles, helping to administer grants, hammer out state and federal policies, and run treatment programs. Although ACT UP itself became far less prominent over time, this shift in funding and administration transformed day-to-day care for more than a million patients around the country.44
A third approach to institutionalization is to make a direct bid for state power. In some places—Poland, South Africa, and Bolivia being prominent examples—mass movements have formed political parties. This has resulted in triumphant scenes of resistance leaders such as Lech Walesa and Nelson Mandela becoming the first democratically elected heads of state in their countries, and social movement icon Evo Morales emerging as the first indigenous president of Bolivia. More recently, parties such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain have worked to channel the energy of popular uprisings into parties that can attempt to directly alter the ruling policies of their countries.
However, the seizing of state power does not diminish the importance of disruptive movements. Even in the most successful cases of institutionalization through political parties, elected officials have run up against limits in their ability to challenge establishment elites. The changes they secure through governmental channels inevitably fall short of the original goals that animated grassroots resistance. And then, of course, there is the problem of politicians selling out: as the energy of mass mobilization drops off, once-fervent champions of popular democracy risk becoming complacent insiders who start defending the status quo for personal gain. For all these reasons, even if former movement leaders take office, there remains a need for further waves of uprising that create fresh pressure.
“Specialists in agitation and dramatic projects,” as King called them, can rarely find a convenient time to retire.
The need for disruptive movements to reignite on a persistent basis raises the question of how even very committed people can sustain their efforts over the course of decades and generations. One way to do this is to build communities that reach beyond the realm of traditional political struggle.
“New movements arise from prophetic minorities at the margins, culturally, economically, and politically,” writes longtime activist and prominent 1960s student leader Tom Hayden. Hayden further adds that, when movement participants come together, they “develop communities of meaning to enrich their lives during the ups and downs of the long journey.” These communities might share bonds of common music and art, or they might they have religious or spiritual ties. Often they create alternative institutions, such as squats, co-ops, community kitchens, and radical bookstores.45
Such countercultural or “prefigurative” communities are another part of the ecology that sustains social movements—and they are critical in laying the groundwork for future revolts.
Although the building of alternative communities and institutions can be a potent force in social movements, it can also present challenges. Activists have long debated the question: Should we fight the system or “be the change we wish to see”? Should we push for transformation within existing societal structures, or should we model in our own lives a different set of social and political relationships that might someday form the basis of a new society? Going back centuries, different movements have incorporated elements of each approach, sometimes in harmonious ways and other times in ways that create conflicts between groups.
Various academic and political traditions discuss the two differing approaches using overlapping concepts: these include “cultural revolution,” “dual power,” and—most controversially—“lifestyle politics.” The term “prefigurative politics,” coined by political theorist Carl Boggs and popularized by sociologist Wini Breines, emerged out of analysis of the movements of the 1960s. Rejecting both the Leninist cadre organization of the Old Left and conventional political parties, members of the decade’s “New Left” attempted to create activist communities that embodied the concept of participatory democracy, an idea famously championed in the 1962 Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society.46
Instead of waiting for revolution in the future, the New Left sought to experience it in the present, through the movements it built. Breines argued that the central imperative of prefigurative politics was to “create and sustain within the live practice of the movement, relationships and political forms that ‘prefigured’ and embodied the desired society.”47
Wini Breines defended prefigurative politics as the lifeblood of 1960s movements. But at the same time, she distinguished prefigurative action from a different type of politics—strategic politics—that attempts to “achieve power so that structural changes in the political, economic, and social orders might be achieved.” Despite their differences, both structure-based organizing and mass mobilization share this strategic orientation. They both attempt to change the dominant institutions that affect peoples’ lives, and both can sometimes clash with prefigurative politics.
The tension between waging campaigns to modify the existing political system, on the one hand, and creating alternative institutions and communities that more immediately put radical values into practice, on the other, long predates the 1960s. In the 1800s, Marx debated utopian socialists about the need for revolutionary strategy that went beyond the formation of communes and model societies. Similarly, advocates such as Gene Sharp, who worked to establish nonviolence as a strategic practice, contrasted their efforts with people whom they saw as espousing a lifestyle of pacifism, but not building effective political movements.
In the recent past, a clash between prefigurative politics and attempts to influence dominant institutions could be seen within the Occupy movement. Whereas some participants pushed for concrete political reforms—greater regulation of Wall Street, bans on corporate money in politics, a tax on millionaires, or elimination of debt for students and underwater homeowners—other Occupiers focused on the encampments themselves. They saw the liberated spaces in Zuccotti Park and beyond, with their open general assemblies and communities of mutual support, as the movement’s most important contribution to social change. These spaces, they believed, had the power to prefigure a more radical and participatory democracy.
Strain between prefigurative politics and organizing traditions that focus on changing existing societal institutions persists for a simple reason: although they are not always mutually exclusive, these approaches have very distinct emphases. They present sometimes contradictory notions of how activists should behave at any given time.
Where structure-based organizing and momentum-driven campaigns attempt to alter the direction of mainstream politics, prefigurative groups function outside of the mainstream. They lean toward the creation of liberated public spaces, community centers, and alternative institutions. Activists with a strong prefigurative orientation may be involved in mass protest or civil disobedience. However, they approach such protest in a unique way. Instead of designing their actions to sway public opinion, prefigurative activists are often indifferent, or even antagonistic, to the attitudes of the media and of mainstream society. They tend to emphasize the expressive qualities of protest—how actions express the values and beliefs of participants rather than how they might affect a target.48
Countercultural clothing and distinctive appearance—whether it involves long hair, piercings, punk stylings, keffiyehs, or any number of other variations—help prefigurative communities create a sense of group cohesion. They reinforce the idea of an alternative culture that rejects conventional norms. Meanwhile, groups engaging in what Breines calls “strategic politics” look at the issue of personal appearance very differently. Saul Alinsky, in his book Rules for Radicals, takes the strategic position when he argues, “If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair.”49
Community organizations and momentum-based drives often seek to build pragmatic coalitions as a way of more effectively pushing forward demands around a given issue. During the course of a campaign, these activists might reach out to more established unions, nonprofit organizations, or politicians to make common cause. Prefigurative politics, however, is far more wary of joining forces with those coming from outside the distinctive culture a movement has created. This is especially true if prospective allies are part of hierarchical organizations or have ties with established political parties. The extreme fear of “co-optation” among some Occupiers reflected this tendency, and it often interfered with possibilities for institutionalization in the movement. Instead of welcoming it when mainstream groups or politicians began to champion the issues of “the 99 percent,” they saw this behavior as a threat.
All this highlights a certain contradiction: new movements may arise from the margins, but if they want to make change for the majority, they should not aspire to stay there.
There are perils in prefigurative politics, but also great strengths.
In terms of pitfalls, one problem is that, if the project of building alternative community totally eclipses attempts to communicate with the wider public and win broad support, it risks a type of self-isolation that limits possibilities for creating social and political change. Exploring this danger, writer, organizer, and Occupy activist Jonathan Matthew Smucker describes what he calls the “political identity paradox.”
“Any serious social movement needs a correspondingly serious group identity that encourages a core of members to contribute an exceptional level of commitment, sacrifice, and heroics over the course of prolonged struggle,” Smucker writes. “Strong group identity, however, is a double-edged sword. The stronger the identity and cohesion of the group, the more likely people are to become alienated from other groups, and from society.”50
Experiencing this paradox, groups focused on prefiguring a new society—and preoccupied with meeting the needs of an alternative community—can become cut off from the goal of building bridges to other constituencies and winning public support. Instead of looking for ways to effectively communicate their vision to the outside world, they are prone to adopt slogans and tactics that appeal to hardcore activists but alienate the majority. These tendencies become self-defeating. As Smucker writes, “Isolated groups are hard-pressed to achieve political goals.”
In the 1960s, a divide emerged between the “movement” and the “counterculture.” While movement “politicos” organized rallies against the Vietnam War and were interested in directly challenging the system, members of the youth counterculture saw themselves as undermining establishment values and providing a vigorous, living example of an alternative.
This split is vividly illustrated in the documentary Berkeley in the Sixties. Barry Melton, lead singer for the popular psychedelic rock band Country Joe and the Fish, tells of his debates with his Marxist parents.
“We had big arguments about this stuff,” Melton explains. “I tried to convince them to sell all their furniture and go to India. And they weren’t going for it. And I realized that no matter how far out their political views were, because they were mighty unpopular—my parents were pretty left wing—that really they were [still] materialists. They were concerned about how the wealth was divided up.”51
Melton’s passion was for something different, a “politics of hip,” in which “we were setting up a new world that was going to run parallel to the old world, but have as little to do with it as possible.” He explains, “We just weren’t going to deal with straight people. To us, the politicos—a lot of the leaders of the anti-war movement—were straight people because they were still concerned with the government. They were going to march on Washington. We didn’t even want to know that Washington was there. We thought that eventually the whole world was just going to stop all this nonsense and start loving each other, as soon as they all got turned on.”
The 1960s counterculture—with its flower children, free love, and LSD trips into new dimensions of consciousness—is easy to parody. Yet prefigurative impulses did not merely produce the flights of utopian fantasy seen at the countercultural fringes. This approach to politics also made some tremendously positive contributions to social movements. Melton’s example aside, movement and counterculture were often intertwined. And the desire to live out a vibrant and participatory democracy produced groups of dedicated citizens willing to make great sacrifices for the cause of social justice.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is one example of this. In SNCC, participants spoke of the desire to create the “beloved community”—a society that rejected bigotry and prejudice in all forms and instead embraced peace and compassion. This was not merely an external goal; rather, SNCC militants saw themselves as creating the beloved community within their organization. They built an interracial group that, in the words of historian Cheryl Greenberg, “based itself on radical egalitarianism, mutual respect, and unconditional support for every person’s unique gifts and contributions. Meetings lasted until everyone had their say, in the belief that every voice counted.” The strong ties fostered by this prefigurative community encouraged participants to undertake bold and dangerous acts of civil disobedience—such as SNCC’s famous lunch-counter sit-ins. In this case, the aspiration to a beloved community both facilitated strategic action and had a significant impact on mainstream politics.52
As another example of the positive influence of prefigurative groups, alternative communities have historically been crucial in providing the first recruits for mass movements. The Quakers, a religious tradition with strong social justice and antiwar norms, are a key example. Going back to the seventeenth century, “The Quakers had little political power or influence and were a marginalized group,” write authors Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom. “But their marginalization ultimately gave the Quakers a different kind of power. Because they were outsiders, they were forced to form their own culture, business relationships, and community.”53
This community’s prefigurative values led members to take up a variety of causes at a time when they were still ignored or despised by the general public. Perhaps most notably, Quakers served as the backbone of the movement against slavery in both the United States and Great Britain. As Claudine Ferrell writes in her book The Abolitionist Movement, the early story of antislavery advocacy “is, with few exceptions, the history of Quaker arguments, publications, pronouncements, and activists.” Later on, Quakers would play important roles in the women’s suffrage, civil rights, antiwar, and antinuclear movements.54
When combined thoughtfully with methods of structure-based organizing and momentum-driven revolt, prefigurative politics can be a vital component of an integrated approach to change. More than the work of any other individual, it was Gandhi’s experiments in nonviolent escalation that laid the foundation for the modern field of civil resistance. But to sustain his work over a period of more than fifty years, Gandhi used a full range of social movement approaches, including structure, momentum-driven organizing, and the creation of prefigurative community.
In Gandhi’s method, the Salt March and other campaigns of satyagraha in India produced defining whirlwinds for the cause of independence. Meanwhile, the Indian National Congress, in which Gandhi played important leadership roles, became a critical structure-based mechanism for institutionalization; indeed, it would become the country’s ruling party after the end of the British Raj. Finally, with his prefigurative “constructive program,” Gandhi advocated for a distinctive vision of self-reliant village life, through which he believed Indians could experience true independence and communal unity. He modeled this program by residing communally with others in a succession of ashrams, or intentional communities that melded religion and politics.
All these ingredients blended with one another, and together they made up a potent recipe for transformation. Members of Gandhi’s ashrams not only prefigured new possibilities for communal life but also served as trusted nonviolent shock troops in the campaigns of satyagraha. Campaigns of mass disruption fed into both structure and intentional community: when these campaigns escalated, they increased the organizational clout and political sway of the Indian National Congress, and they also drew in new converts interested in collective models of living and working. Finally, when momentum died down, Congress and the ashrams were each strong enough to survive on their own through fallow periods, and they could therefore help to seed future moments of the whirlwind.
At different points in his life, Gandhi placed varying emphasis on these different modes of activism. But one of the most compelling aspects of his legacy is his interest in unifying all three. At the same time that Gandhi told his followers that they must change their own ways of living in the world, he also insisted that they organize and mobilize the wider community—and that they sometimes take the risk of rising up to do so.
The great movements of the past century have won by taking issues that were unpopular and changing the boundaries of the politically acceptable, so that advances which previously seemed impossible were made inevitable. But even after they have prevailed, movements have still had to battle for their contributions to be acknowledged. A healthy movement ecology preserves the memory of how past transformations in society have been achieved—and it draws sustenance from this history.
A peculiar irony arises when social movements are most successful. Even as an activist cause becomes accepted in the mainstream of society, many of its most longstanding advocates are erased from history. Bill Moyer notes that, in the late stages of a movement, once a firm majority of the population is convinced to support an issue, it creates a setting in which opportunists flourish. Mainstream politicians, centrist organizations, former critics, and once-recalcitrant powerbrokers all scramble to take credit for gains that have been won. Notwithstanding years of stonewalling, silence, and timidity, these people insist they, too, are repelled by segregation; that they are truly committed to expanding voting rights; that they strongly believe in marriage equality; and that the war they once had endorsed was actually the mistaken folly of their political opponents.
As sociologist Sidney Tarrow argues, “Cycles of contention are a season for sowing, but the reaping is often done in periods of demobilization that follow, by latecomers to the cause, by elites and authorities.”55
Activists are notoriously poor at celebrating their victories. And mainstream commentators, steeped in a monolithic view of power, are notoriously stingy in recognizing the importance of grassroots efforts, preferring to point to ripe historical conditions or enlightened politicians as the source of change. “In this version of managed memory,” Tom Hayden writes, “it is the Machiavellians who are credited for great reforms, never the radicals who created the climate making those reforms necessary.” In the conventional top-down narrative, Hayden contends, “Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery, Woodrow Wilson passed the suffrage amendment . . . and Lyndon Johnson declared that we would overcome.”56
Furthermore, social movement participants are the most likely to have a pained awareness of the work that still remains to be done—and therefore the least likely to feel celebratory about the gains that have been secured. For this reason, they are often missing from the victory parties.
It requires deliberate effort for movements to champion the story of what their struggle has made possible. But this effort is vital, because without it future victories are harder to achieve. In societies where history is a tale of presidents and senators, generals and CEOs, the social view of power too often remains in the shadows. The potential for what can happen when people refuse to obey must constantly be learned anew.